Mention the words “Six Sigma” around marketing folks and you will likely receive blank stares in response. The few that recognize the terminology will probably attempt to steer the conversation elsewhere, perhaps to a less intimidating topic like the latest logo proposals sent by the branding agency. I don’t think I would be exaggerating to say that most marketers would prefer having their wisdom teeth removed than going through a Six Sigma project.

For those of you still wondering what the fuss is about, Six Sigma is way to improve quality and reduce the number of defects in a process. It is highly analytical, makes use of complicated statistical methods, and follows controlled experiments to improve processes. In other words, its the ultimate nightmare of numbers-adverse marketers who trust their intuition more than any spreadsheet. Clearly, Six Sigma did not come from the mind of some branding guru, but was born in the hell-fires of some engineering lab.

I am sure that someone out there has run or will run a Six Sigma project to figure out why there are so few Six Sigma projects in the marketing department, but, in the meantime, let me offer a few less-than-scientific thoughts on why (many) marketers are allergic to Six Sigma:

1. Its analytical. As mentioned earlier, Six Sigma is a numbers endeavor. Most marketers entered the field on the premise that their inability to master calculus back in college would not be a stumbling block to future career success and those who did survive the odd non-elective statistics course haven’t touched an Excel spreadsheet in ages. When suddenly confronted with long-forgotten terms like “regression analysis” and “control limits”, these math-impaired marketers run for the hills.

2. Its accountable. Most marketers know the quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A department store magnate named John Wanamaker supposedly spoke these words as he lamented the difficulties with calculating a return on marketing spend. Marketers like to share this lament, but the dirty little secret is these same marketers are all too happy with this situation. That oh-so-regretable intransparency also happens to keep the finance people from prying too deeply into coveted marketing budgets. With numbers comes accountability, and suddenly, through Six Sigma, you are able to speak the same language as the CFO.

3. Its actionable. Forgive the consultant-speak for a moment, but Actionable fits exceedingly well with the other two A’s in my list. Actionable, in the management consultant sense, means you can make decisions that will impact your business based on the results of your analyses. Six Sigma is above all actionable, in that a well-conceived Six Sigma project should be short on theories and long on experimentation. Now actionable may not seem such a bad thing, but when pet projects — such as the marketing director’s creative epiphany from last month — start getting closed down in the name of process optimization and Kaizen, that certainly has the potential to bruise a few marketing egos.

To be fair and balanced, not all marketers despise numbers as much as I have suggested here, but there is reason why you rarely see marketers crossing over into financial or accounting positions. Over time, I expect the math-literacy of marketers to increase dramatically, as a new generation of practitioners schooled in search engine marketing, web analytics, CRM, and database marketing start to fill senior management ranks. For the moment though, Six Sigma is definitely a hard sell in traditional marketing circles.

Now comes the interesting part…at least for me and, hopefully, for you as the reader of this blog. I will be embarking on my first Six Sigma project. My opinion is that Six Sigma most definitely belongs in the toolset of any serious marketer, however, I reserve the right to change my mind about Six Sigma down the road. I intend to write more on my experiences with Six Sigma, with the hope of helping fellow marketers who may be considering or already undertaking Six Sigma projects of their own. I won’t be mentioning too many specifics of my project — that is proprietary corporate stuff, you know — but anything else related to Six Sigma in a marketing context is going to be fair game. And, if you are a marketer with a Six Sigma belt to your name, by all means join the conversation…

HR departments dispair! I’ve always thought of LinkedIn as a great place to run competitive intelligence. With a little effort, you can put together a decent org chart of any given company, complete with names, departments, and job responsibilities. Now the folks at LinkedIn are rolling out Company Profiles and, essentially, mining their vast social network database to reveal intra-company networks for you. Particularly interesting for a bit of corporate spying are the lists of “New Hires” and “Recent Promotions and Changes”.

The other day my Google Analytics account made an offer along the lines of “give us your data and we’ll give you industry benchmarks”. Of course, Google already has my data, but this takes it a step further, as my data would presumably become part of the data pool that produces the benchmarks. I can also opt in to share data with Google products and, in exchange, get access to future, unspecified new features.

I unceremoniously rejected this offer and will keep my data for myself, thank you very much. Its not so much that I buy into the whole Google is evil and eats babies myth. I just don’t see the value in benchmarking. Of course, benchmarks can work wonders with management: “we are here and the rest of the industry is way up/down there…” and that might be reason to peak at Google’s benchmarks. However, I don’t build websites for some industry, I build them with for specific customer segments and with specific marketing purposes in mind. The raison d’état for each site is so varied that any comparison with some aggregated and averaged number of visitors or time spent on site is totally meaningless. What value have I achieved if my site attracts twice the number of visitors or half the bounce rate of the industry average, but I have failed to meet my own marketing objectives? For that reason, I prefer to define KPIs on a site-specific basis, to track the trends over time, and to compare with external benchmarks only when absoluted needed (and, even then, with a huge grain of salt).

Web analysts rejoice. I just spotted this promising application which intends to bring Google Analytics reporting to your desktop. The project is still in beta, but the benefits for those of us managing extensive portfolios of websites should be already evident: speed, convenience, and usability.  Less evident, but certainly enticing, are the future possibilities for this application.  It would only be short leap to integrate additional plugins and data sources into the desktop program and we suddenly have the makings of an ultimate marketing tool.  You’ll need the Adobe AIR runtime to use the beta applications.

Its become fashionable to run AB and multivariate tests for just about anything on the internet. Of course, direct marketers have been practicing tests vs. control groups for a long time before the rise of the world wide web. It would be a shame to spend so much time testing and yet not know when you’ve found something meaningful. Knowing when and how to check for statistical significant belongs in every marketer’s toolbox (or at least, you better get know a friendly web analyst who will run the numbers for you). Here are two of my all-time favorite posts on this subject:

RKG on finding statistical significance in two Adwords tests Interesting commentary on the value (or lack-of-value) in copy testing in PPC
Avinash Kaushik on separating signal from noise with statistical significance

What I have been running

WT Detector. An excellent companion script to the indispensible WT Debugger, which I mentioned in a previous post. I confess to occassionally checking out the source code of favorite websites in an attempt to figure out which Web Analytics software is running behind the scenes. WT Detector greatly simplifies this task, scrounging the source code of any given website for the tell-tale javascript code of the major analytics vendors. On a side note, an amazing number of otherwise professional websites seem completely devoid of web analytics software — a baffling phenomenon given the availability of completely free, easy-to-install software such as Google Analytics.

10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers.
I was considering putting together a list of the best Firefox extensions for web developers, but the job has already been done. Ajax Ninja has captured the best of the best in his list. I hadn’t known about Seoquake, to my eternal shame. Now I just need to find a list of the best Firefox extensions for Web Analysts.

What I have been running

WT Debugger, from Mike Keyes over at On the Trail. WT Debugger is an itsy-bitsy script that displays all the parameters sent by a web page tracked by WebTrends back to the data server. Obviously that last sentence only makes sense to the small minority of people who deal with web analytics and, in all likelihood, there are probably three people in the universe who actually might be excited by this insight. Let me assure you, WT Debugger is very cool, especially if you happen to manage a very large website and work for a management team that likes to have superior data on their internet business. You see, gathering web analytics data requires that your website is properly tagged — a trifling matter for the typical neighborhood blog, but one giant headache for large commercial websites with multiple technical providers and content suppliers. Enter WT Debugger, which is a wonderful way to spend a Friday evening. Who says web analytics isn’t interesting?