Every other time I sit down with the intention of writing a new blog entry, I find myself diverted by someone else’s witty, insightful, entertaining blog.  Hours of reading pass in the blick of an eye and I find myself left with no time my own blog. This evening the culprit was Joi Ito’s blog at joi.ito.com.  I have no recollection of how I got there, but perusing through his writings consumed my entire evening.  Joi Ito has been blogging for a long time, so I only managed to scrape the surface of his.  At least I found something relevent for this blog’s marketing slant: Lockers lower churn for Japanese love hotels.

Not too long ago, measuring return on advertising spending was a fool’s errand. Then came the internet and the rise of digital media and, suddenly, the impracticalities of tracking advertising spending gave way to a wealth of clickthrough and conversion data. Until now, most of that data has been confined to the online world and advertising campaigns which are in some way linked to online channels.

Before we write off the “bricks-and-mortar” channels as hopeless relics of a bygone mass marketing age, consider that technology may soon re-invent the offline advertising world. Take billboards. In the past, measuring the usage of a billboard required having someone stand near the board and record the number and type of people viewing the advertisement. Now, what if the billboard could recognize who was looking at it? The implications for advertisers are profound, but so are the challenges to privacy.

…and punts.

Excerpt from Dr. Haig’s article When the Patient is a Googler on TIME.com:

Yes, she was simply researching important aspects of her own health care. Yes, who your surgeon is certainly affects what your surgeon does. But I was unnerved by how she brandished her information, too personal and just too rude on our first meeting.

…

I knew Susan was a Googler — queen, perhaps, of all Googlers. But I couldn’t dance with this one. I couldn’t even get a word in edgewise. So, I cut her off. I punted. I told her there was nothing I could do differently than her last three orthopedists, but I could refer her to another who might be able to help.

I’ve often wondered what goes on in the minds of doctors when the encounter an “expert” patient, someone who knows how to use the search engines to research medical conditions and treatment options. Surely, not all doctors react in the same way as Dr. Haig, but I suspect this outcome is still the rule more than the exception. The informed consumer has already been recongized and adopted into the strategies of most industries, from retailing to banking, but the health care sector and its constituents, especially doctors, are still coming to terms with the impact of the internet on their customers.

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”.

Sometime ago Steve Rubel wrote about the rise of the geek marketer, a new breed of specialist who bridges the great divide between marketing and IT. It sounds like a glorious career path for those of us who fall in this category, until you realize how far away most companies are from recognizing the value of their geeks. Clearly there is a market for this profile in interactive agencies, so why hasn’t big business caught on? Kevin Hillstrom explains where the problem lies in this insightful post on career opportunities and perceived value.

What I am reading

URL’s are totally out In Japan, someone has taken the time to study how people really use search. Instead of listing URL addresses, innovative advertisers have started showing images of a search box with recommended search terms. A commenter mentions that this idea is reminiscent of AOL Keywords back in the 90s. Regardless of the origins, the idea is brilliant, assuming you’ve done the SEO footwork to ensure you rank first for your brand keywords.

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 reading

A Remodel Opens Door For Yahoo on Investors Business Daily. It has been a long time since I saw the words “growth” and “portal” in the same article. Yet, here we have Yahoo’s real estate portal showing massive growth and moving into second place in the US market behind realtor.com. Let’s look beyond the the irony of Yahoo scoring a winner in a market which is currently in the throes of a meltdown and consider the implications for internet marketing in general. I’m fascinated by the apparent comeback of the web portal - a business model which has been overshadowed by the trendy world of blogs and search engines. Portals have seen their highs and lows over the last decade and, on occassion, have been declared as past their expiration date. A few years ago, I even came across a harsh critic of the content-laden MyYahoo compared to Google’s plain-vanilla search box page (unfortunately, I can’t find that article anymore). The success of Yahoo Real Estate should remind us that portals are not quite dead.

So, what has given portals a new lease of life in the age of Web2.0? Let’s dissect the article for a clue: By Yahoo’s own account, the new home valuation feature drives the majority of traffic on the Real Estates pages. Interestingly, home valuation is not a home-grown service, but an integrated third party content delivered through partners such as Zillow, Reply, and eAppraisal. Apparently, the combination of Yahoo’s search engine with broker property listings and partner company’ valuation databases is a hit with consumers. Web geeks call this mixture of multiple sources and features, often from very different web applications, a “mash-up”. Could it be that the mash-up will rescue the good ol’ portal from a premature death? Portal managers take note. Your next move might be to step outside the confines of your company and your industry to find original features, data, and services that can bring new life to your website’s existing content.

What I have been reading

Devil Take the Hindmost. A brilliant exposé on the nature of speculation and the human tendency to occassionally go mad. Edward Chancellor’s book is about the financial markets, but I’ve always believed that studying other realms of knowledge brings greater understanding of one’s own area of expertise — often better insight than reading blogs and books published within your field.

So, what insight does Devil Take the Hindmost offer the marketer? We’ve been told that markets are efficient and that crowds are wise. If you haven’t heard these concepts, then consider the following: why else would we place so much value in websites that encourage community tagging of content, search engines that rank sites based on the number of links from related websites, and markets that try to predict future events based on user voting? The Efficient Market Hypothesis (to borrow the term from economists) and the wisdom of crowds are two fundamental assumptions underlying Web2.0 and all those budding social networks, predictive markets, pageranking systems, peer-to-peer sharing communities, and user-produced content on the internet. We can debate about how these ideas from the economics and financial world came to be the premises of today’s internet, but suffice it to say that Web2.0 is not the only realm affected. Modern business, with its emphasis on shareholder value, its reliance on the capital asset pricing model, and its focus on stock-option compensation, is also predicated on efficient markets.

But, are markets really efficient or do markets move according some other, less well understood factors? Are crowds really wise or do they exhibit the same failings and irrational choices of individuals? Devil Take the Hindmost, not unlike Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, takes a hard-hitting swing at the ideas of efficient markets and the wisdom of crowds. Chancellor provides us with a wealth of historical examples from ancient history to modern times (but pre-dotcom era) where the markets have bubbled and crowds have gone a bit ga-ga, throwing out all rationality in the blind pursuit of profits. Such things clearly shouldn’t occur in a truly efficient market, a fact that has not been lost on a few speculators who make their living exploiting the herd reactions of the crowd and the betting on uncertainty. Apply this same experience to the internet sector, where the wisdom of the crowd (usually referred to as the “user community”) is an article of faith, and you being to wonder if certain business models are built on a house of cards.

What I have been reading

Web Rankings Shakeup: It’s About Time. A fascinating article from Business Week concerning the latest fad in website metrics. In short: pageviews are out, time spent on site is in. Strangely absent from the heated conversation about web rankings is the utter futility of trying to capture a website’s value in one metric. It is part of our nature to oversimplify things, especially coming up with a more realistic view of website relevance would require grappling with so many complicated factors. Nicholas Taleb would cite the whole rankings shamble as an example of Platonicity. Of course, big bucks are riding on this game, this battle for the ultimate metric. The winners can expect a lion’s share of advertising revenues; the losers will see their perceived importance and their market share wither. Of course, a few insightful marketers will recognize that value is highly relative and ignore the lure of a single metric view of the world. They may find that advertising on “out of favor” websites will actually bring them better results at a lower price tag than the top-of-the-charts websites.

The Black Swan. Nicholas Taleb’s book on the impact of the highly improbable is an essential read for anyone in the analytics industry. Web analysts live in a world of numbers and many practitioners are trained in statistics, econometrics, or mathematics. Taleb challenges the conventional wisdom and many of the basic assumptions which underlie the modern science of analysis. If your universe revolves around concepts like variance, standard deviation, correlation, R square, Bell curves, and forecasting than prepare for a disconcerting revelation: “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you.” I’ve always been extremely suspicious of forecasting and those who purport to predict the future. The Black Swan has finally provided me with a plausible explanation for this personal bias. Opps, was that just an example of Confirmation Error?