Marketing
Measuring Blog Traffic
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/13/2010 - 11:45I recently read an email on a mailing list asking about "different ways of measuring blog readership/audience for a broad range of specific blogs". There are lots of different ways of measuring blog readership and audience, depending on what you want to measure and what sort of access you can get to the statistics.
There are various sites that gather data about websites, and the first few that were mentioned on the mailing lists were Quantcast, Compete and Google's Adplanner. They have different means of gather data and as a result different levels of accuracy.
Quantcast uses a pixel to gather data for participating sites and makes estimates for everyone else. For large sites and for participating smaller sites, I've always really liked Quantcasts reports. If you take a look at the Quantcast report for Orient Lodge you can find a lot out about my readership. They also provide very up to date data.
Compete uses panels to gather data and do not seem to be quite as reliable as Quantcast. They use tracking code to gather audience profile information. However, they are pretty expensive to get to the interesting data. Here is the Compete site analytics for Orient Lodge.
I haven't played with Google Adplanner much, but they tap into data gather from Google Ads. If you authorize it, they supplement the data with Google Analytics data. They provide information about other sites that people visit. Here is the Google AdPlanner data for Orient Lodge. I hope to explore the affinity calculations in a later blog post.
What was not mentioned in the list was Alexa. They've always seemed a bit random and while some people claim they are getting better, many people don't trust their data.
If you can get more direct access to a sites traffic data, either through Google Analytics or server statistics, you can get much more interesting information. What percentage of the traffic bounces, or visits one page and leaves without visiting other pages? For those that do stick around, how long do they stick around? Where are the readers coming from? What are they using for browsers? How did they find the site? Direct links? From where? Keyword searches? What keywords?
This leads to the next question about what you are trying to measure anyway. I've often suggested that for my site, I'm not concerned with bounces. I want people to find what they are looking for on the first page they visit. If I were running an online store, I would be more concerned about bounces. I hope that people spend time reading and thinking about what I write, so for people that don't bounce, I hope to have a high time on site.
Related to this, people on the mailing list suggested that other metrics, such as the amount of engagement is what really matters. How often do people comment, link to the site, retweet messages about an article, save a page in a shared bookmarking service?
RSS feed subscriptions were also mentioned as well as Feedburner and their email option. Personally, I haven't used my RSS reader accounts in ages, although I'm still subscribed to hundreds of blogs. Messages on Facebook and Twitter get a much higher priority for me.
So, why are we concerned about these metrics anyway? The biggest issue is probably advertising. Much of the focus has been on getting an increase in page views or impressions, so you can sell more impressions. This has raised a concern about journalists trying to write article that will get the most impressions. However, not all impressions are created equal. Writing more esoteric articles may result in fewer impressions that reach a much more desirable advertising demographic. Journalists writing simply to get the most impressions may end up doing themselves a disservice as more and more advertising inventory goes unbought or sold at remnant prices while high quality impressions from specific audiences become more valuable.
There are a lot of different tools for measuring readership, and the best answer to which is best is that it depends on what you're trying to measure, why you're trying to measure and what sort of access to data you can get.
#IWNY - A #QRCODE Moment in Time Square
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/11/2010 - 12:09In the never ending contest to be digitally hip, we have come to expect announcements out of San Francisco and sometimes Boston or Austin. This is where the innovators and early adopters reside. Yet it is foolish to overlook New York. New York might not be the hotbed of innovation that San Francisco is. Instead, it is a city that excels in promotion and commercialization of the great ideas that come out of San Francisco and beyond.
Thursday morning provided another great example of this. New York City Media launched The City at Your Fingertips. At 11:15, the large Reuters Screen in Time Square began showing a series of QR Codes.
“Quick Response” or QR Codes are nothing new. They are two dimensional barcodes introduced in Japan in 1994. They have been used to share data, send text messages and access websites. One of my favorite examples of the wise use of a QR code is taxi stands in Japan where a passenger can scan a QR code with her cellphone which will automatically send a text message to the dispatcher requesting a pickup. They provide great opportunities for people to create hyperlinks in the real world. Just put a QR Code up at your business to make it easier for customers to follow your company on Twitter or like your business on Facebook.
Unfortunately, we’ve had a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with QR codes. Not many people have downloaded QR Code Readers for their cellphones; there just aren’t enough QR codes to scan. Companies have been reluctant to start using QR codes because there just aren’t enough people with QR Code Readers on their smartphones.
New York City Media, by placing QR Codes in a prominent place in Times Square has the potential to jumpstart the adoption of QR Codes. It is the sort of thing that New York always does well, helping ideas cross the chasm from the innovators to the early majority.
Various city officials were on hand for the QR Moment in Time Square. Commissioner of The New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting Katherine Oliver, who announced the moment at the Internet Week New York, #IWNY, kick off press conference was there as was Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Carole Post. The QR Moment at Time Square illustrated how New York’s focus on film, theatre and broadcasting is leading the way into the digital world. It also provided a new way for people to find out about important information about what is happening in the city.
I scanned the QR codes with my Nokia N900 and it worked very nicely. As I looked around, I saw a couple New York City Police Officers holding up their smartphones to also scan the QR codes. Will the QR Code Moment in Time Square be what it takes to get wider adoption of QR Codes in the United States? We will have to wait and see. Whether or not it does, it clearly illustrates the leadership that New York City is seeking to establish as being the city that can take great ideas and make them successful in the broader world.
#FF #IWNY
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/11/2010 - 09:52@jack_benoff @LizatHP @joemull @DenisHurley @TheRecruiterGuy @geekychic @ckieff @Rasiej @rushkoff @carbonOutreach @jaymesgrace
It used to be that people would judge the success of a conference based on how many good contacts they made, in terms of qualified leads, business cards gathered, or other metrics. My office is littered with business cards from various conferences, people whom I’ve forgotten why they are interesting and am unlikely to ever contact again. Twitter changes things. Instead of exchanging cards, you can follow someone on Twitter. You get frequent reminders of who they are, and hopefully, why you found them interesting. With that, I let me highlight some of the interesting people that I am following in regards to Internet Week New York.
Monday at Internet Week, there was a tweet about Augmented Reality from @jack_benoff. After a few twitter messages back and forth and a little searching, I found his booth and had a great talk about his company. It was a good example of using Twitter to drive traffic to your booth.
Later in the day, I had a good chat with @LizatHP. She was, of course, at the HP Media Center and I met her face to face before I met her on Twitter. We have since retweeted various messages and she is doing a good job of getting information about HP out on Twitter.
At the Future of Location Based Marketing @joemull or @DenisHurley did a pitch for Mobile Meteor. They suggested checking a website that didn’t work properly with my Nokia N900. To make things worse the non Mobile version of the site played obnoxious music and I wrote a #fail message about it on Twitter. @DenisHurley and I exchanged messages over Twitter and soon they had modified their code to recognize the N900. It is a great example of proactive customer service using Twitter that helps build up goodwill for the company.
@TheRecruiterGuy sent out some interesting Tweets during Internet Week, and I’ve started following him, even though, to the best of my knowledge, I did not meet him face to face. In his case, the message was simple, send good content with a hash tag, you are likely to get new followers.
@geekychic extensively tweeted the Digiday:Target conference, which I also tried to do, as did @ckieff. This was as Twitter started having Fail Whales, so I suspect none of us tweeted as much as we would like. I’ve met @ckieff at other events. He’s a bright guy, well worth the follow and it was great to get to know @geekychic at Digiday, both on Twitter and during cocktails afterwards.
@Rasiej @rushkoff were two good speakers at #thepromise that are also well worth following. Also, during the long lunch line, I had a great discussion with @carbonOutreach. We ended up connecting the old fashioned way of exchanging business cards, but I later followed her with the information from her card.
Finally, I need to shout out to @jaymesgrace. I’ve know @jaymesgrace from New Haven social media activities and it was great to connect at Internet Week as well.
I still have a deck of business cards that will probably get lost or trashed before I know it, but at least I’ve found some interesting people to stay in touch with via Twitter. I hope others have as much luck with Internet Week.
#IWNY – If You Can't Afford Acid, Watch TV
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/10/2010 - 12:12“If you can't afford acid, watch TV”. It was a mantra of some of my college buddies, but back in college, I couldn't afford acid, and had already developed a dislike of television. We had gotten our first television when I was in elementary school. It was a small black and white TV with two mechanical dials, one for VHF and the other for UHF. The VHF dial gave the choice of twelve channels, from 2 to 13. I never figured out what happened to channel 1. UHF added around 70 more channel options. However, where I lived, we only had three VHF stations.
Acid, I was told, was like sitting down to watch a nine hour show, which you were the star of and which you couldn't turn off or change the channel. It was liked being trapped inside a your own bizarre movie. For years, I had been trapped inside my own little world. I was socially inept and had a speech impediment. Sure, I was mobile and verbal, but I had problems establishing friendships.
Yet for those trapped in a more socially responsible world, acid was an opportunity to look at things from a very different angle. Perhaps that is some of what makes Hunter S. Thompson so interesting. His acid crazed mind looked at Los Vegas, political campaigns, and so many other aspects of American culture from a drastically different viewpoint. This viewpoint resonated with many, thanks to his masterful wordsmanship.
I've been reading Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas on the trains to and from New York during Internet Week this year. Even without the acid, it seems to be helping me look at all of this from a much different viewpoint. It would be too easy to either fall into Internet Fanboydom on the one hand, or some sort of cynicism about the same forces that brought so much crap to the airwaves of my childhood now bringing it to the Internet.
Yet there is an interesting middle ground. The Internet can be a tool that enables people to authentically and creatively connect with other people. Yes, I realize I scored several buzzword bingo points with that sentence, but there is some truth to it.
The first hint of this interesting middle ground was my discussion with the guy from the Not Impossible Foundation who was showing the Eyewriter. This is a cheap do-it-yourself project where you can take parts of a standard pair of sunglasses, a webcam and a few other components and create a pair of glasses that track a persons eye movements. For a person who has lost all ability to move, and perhaps even speak, this is an incredibly enabling project. By moving ones eyes, a person can control a computer and connect with the people around the world. I talked about how this could be used in virtual worlds, like Second Life, and about the acessibilty projects friends of mine who are mobility challenged have done there.
Another toy that caught my eye was the makerbot project. This is essentially a three dimensional printer. If I recall properly, for about a thousand dollars, you can build a printer that will 'print' three dimensional objects. There are a group of people sharing things they have created.
Moving back closer to the field of television, there were a couple people pushing their Augmented Reality wares. Zugara had a couple great demos up. They have built their Augmented Reality code into Flash. The Flash code connects with the webcam and you can have games or shopping experiences on any Flash enabled computer with a webcam. Unfortunately, it seems to use Flash 10, and my Nokia N900 phone only supports Flash 9, so I haven't been able to test it on my phone. Total Immersion was another augmented reality player at Internet Week which apparently had a great Iron Man augmented reality game. Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone at the booth when I sstopped by, so I haven't had a chance to check it out.
The other vendor that particularly caught my eye there was Innovid. They provide interactive preroll for people creating advertisements for online videos. Their authoring language is very 'flash like' and it seems like an inspired video artist could do something very interesting by adding Zugara's Augmented Reality to Innovid's interactive preroll. This could be used for more than just the crass commercialism of online advertising, it could be part of a toolkit for a highly interactive video art form.
This weekend, many of my old college buddies will be gathering for a college reunion. They might trot out their old mantra about acid and television. On the other hand, if they've been following Internet Week, they just might come up with ideas even more creative.
#iwny - Bar codes and Location: Foursquare, Stickybits, Yellow Arrow and the Nokia #N900
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/08/2010 - 15:07An important theme at Internet Week New York seems to be bar codes and location. As participants arrived for Internet Week, many checked in on Foursquare, and some have received a special InternetWeek Foursquare badge.
At the press conference kicking off events, Commissioner of The New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting Katherine Oliver spoke about QR Codes in Time Square on Thursday. PepsiCo announced an agreement with StickyBits about UPC code scanning and there was a discussion the future of location based marketing Monday at AOL Headquarters.
I have been observing much of this through the lens of my Nokia N900 as well as my background interest in many of these topics. I am a big fan of QR Codes and look forward to finding out what New York City has planned for QR code activities on Thursday.
Stickybits seems like an interesting effort to get people scanning barcodes with their mobile devices and might be the application that crosses the chasm from early adopters like myself to the early majority. They have made various choices which I, as a geek, would not have done. As an example, they are focusing on one dimensional UPC style codes instead of the two dimensional QR barcodes. They suggest that people are used to scanning UPC style barcodes, but most people have no idea what to make of a QR code. They may be right, but I do hope that people will learn the value of moving to two dimensional barcodes. It is worth noting that they do support QR codes.
They have released an application for the iPhone and for the Android, which will capture more smartphone users, and they’ve made their API open. Perhaps the mbarcode application for the Nokia N900 can be modified to support Stickybits API. As an aside, the mBarcode application was one of the first Nokia N900 applications I downloaded and it is great. I’ve used it to scan books, product codes, shipping labels in addition to QR codes. There are a lot of nice things that could be done as plugins; for example, an Amazon plugin so when you scan a book you would be taken to a page to review the book on Amazon.
What Stickybits does is that it allows users to leave comments on various barcodes. This seems similar to the Informed Individual that mBarcode is currently interfacing with. It also seems very similar to the Yellow Arrow project, although Yellow Arrow is simply SMS based. That said, you can set up QR codes to send an SMS message to Yellow Arrow, so I could imagine some mashup of Yellow Arrow and QR Codes down the road.
Then, of course, there is the issue of how all this relates to Foursquare. Currently, I use BarrioSquare on my N900. For some reason, it just has not worked reliably for me, but friends have been saying they’ve been having problems with other Foursquare applications, so it may be a problem with Foursquare and not BarrioSquare. I often get around this by going to the Foursquare mobile website. As a side comment, I never got the Internet Week badge, nor have I gotten the crunked badge, even though it seems like I should have received both.
It would seem that a good idea for various companies trying to promote their venues on Foursquare might want to put up a QR Code at their store for people to scan. At the Future of Location Based Marketing panel last night, there was the story of a company that had bought a cheap Netbook that they kept on the counter with a note asking people to login to Facebook and like the store on Facebook. It has help build up their fan base and has gotten many more customers talking about the store on Facebook. A QR Code for Facebook might likewise be a good idea.
Another interesting mobile play is what Mobile Meteor is doing. They did a quick pitch at the Future of Location Based Marketing yesterday. What they are doing seems pretty simple, straight forward, and of value to folks interested in location based marketing. They run an overlay on a website that checks to see if the person is visiting from a computer or a cellphone. If the person is coming from a cellphone, they get much location based information. They suggested visiting a website from a smartphone during the pitch. I did and the website played a really annoying tune.
Afterwards, I found that I had gone to the main website and Mobile Meteor had not recognized that the N900 was a smartphone instead of a computer. It is a common mistake, and to some people, it is no mistake at all. The N900 is a great Linux based computer that I use more and more for various computing tasks. However, in this case, I want it recognized as a smartphone. The folks at Mobile Meteor addressed this quickly over night and by the morning I could see what they were doing with their mobile overlay.
Will this be the year that a location and bar code enabled Internet really takes off in the United States? It seems like there are a lot of great possibilities. The iPhone and the Android will continue to fight for a role in this, but I’m going to stay with my Nokia N900 as a tool for innovators to experiment and push the envelope.
