It is a lot easier to predict the present. So I'm not going to do that either.

Rather, I'm going to share a clump of realities/rules garnered from the present to help ready you for the predictable near future . Now here is the great part… if you follow these rules and act on these insights I believe you'll be significantly better prepared for the unpredictable future.

Awesome right?

Now here's another surprise: These rules/insights/mind shifts are not about data!

Here's important context (before we get into the rules for revolutionaries)…

The Fundamental Web Analytics Problem Is Not Data!

A huge part of the last few years for me have been about bringing more data, better strategies, more powerful tools, ever more impactful keynotes to people around the world.

One of my biggest learnings?

Most companies are astonishingly blasé about data and possibilities of measurement. Most web "analysts" remain glorified "data pukers" or glorified JavaScript taggers.

Why?

The problem, it turns out, is not data. The problem is only partly the data pukers or JavaScript taggers. The real problem is that our management teams lack imagination when it comes to the web, and our marketing executives continue to do TV on Twitter, catalogs on display ads, irrelevant shouting on search, etc.

That frustrating reality is the source of numerous problems for the company (and the web as a whole), but it also means Executives ask for unimaginative data. "Count Impressions, in real time!" "Show me Clicks and the count of Facebook Fans!" "My dashboard should have Page Views and Exit Rate!" Sad, unimaginative measurements of their sad, unimaginative campaigns.

If you are doing lame stuff, why try harder in an analytics context by asking for Economic Value or Visitor Loyalty or Conversation Rate or a thousand other super powerful and insightful metrics ?

The problem is not analytics or data (or your blood, sweat and tears). The problem is Marketing and lack of imagination in using the web/digital channels.

And here's the thing… if you are a "Web Analyst" in the broadest sense of that word, then this is your problem. Solve it or suffer the indignity of making decent money doing work that will have no impact on your organization. If you are a digital marketer then this absolutely is your problem. You're the massive, under-appreciated, hidden part.

In the last eighteen months or so, I've spent a lot of time trying to solve that problem. Get the senior-most people in the largest companies in the world to unlock their imaginations when it comes to their digital existence via impactful digital strategies. Convert them to be revolutionaries for their companies and customers.

I've discovered that if we can just get them to imagine a better existence, undertake serious risks, experiment with new better ideas, and spend money executing them… they will ask for more robust measurement! Because you need serious new good analysis to understand the impact of serious new good stuff!!

In the same spirit, if they don't do wonderful, beautiful, imaginative things, we people who play with data will continue to play a marginal, at best, role in most corporations in the world. Even if these unimaginative companies spend a ton of money on Omniture, IBM, WebTrends, Yandex Analytics and Google Analytics, we digital analysts will lead unimpactful puking tagging lives.

And no one deserves that.

In case you are reading this and you are the aforementioned Digital Marketer, then your life is sadder still. How good can it possibly feel to do unimaginative things that barely even worked on TV/radio/magazines/catalogs?

Whether you are the Marketer/CMO or the Web Analyst/Ninja, it is imperative that we unleash imagination.

Why doesn't everyone do that already?

I know that this sounds utterly simple but we, people and companies, don't always realize that the "rules" have changed. Our mental model has not shifted enough to the existing reality. This lack of internalizing the rules jeopardizes our current state to some extent, and our future to a significantly greater extent.

A lot of my work is making companies realize the implications of these rules on their company strategy and structures. You've probably seen these rules sneak into my blog posts. I want to share them below as a collection with the hope that it will motivate you to create a veritable primordial ooze from which new ideas (or indeed life) will spark for an imaginative digital existence.

7 Rules for Digital Marketing Revolutionaries!

These are my observations on changes already underway, changes that are dramatically affecting what marketing is and should be. You might have observed at least some of them in bits and pieces, but perhaps you have not considered them as a whole. Adapting to the implications will allow the creation of a more future-proof you.

#1 Customer expectations on the web are insane, will get super-insane.

We expect more.

High bounce rates show how horrible slow-loading websites are. Lack of loyalty shows simply re-publishing AP stories is useless. After 19 visits, www.bloomberg.com should create a home page around my interests, not their one-size-fits-all pimping to everyone. With an iPhone there is no friction between me being in your store or on your site (or, omg, getting a mobile geo-targeted coupon from your competitor for 5% off your price while I'm in your store!). There are 12 different alternatives to your site that provide free return shipping. Just because your site is B2B, you do not have the right to create a 1940s website and force visitors to type their name, precise GPS coordinates and underwear size to get a PDF that should have existed as a webpage in the first place (as HTML has been invented).

It is no longer acceptable to just meet past expectations. Alternatives to you are one click away, one Google search away, one tweeted recommendation away. Aim to meet super-insane customer expectations and you'll future-proof your business.

Oh and yes, I do get that this is hard. You have to rethink everything. Price of greatness, sadly.

#2 Multiplicity: Competencies, Campaigns, Systems, Everything.

This is something we are most unprepared for.

You can no longer be good at just one thing, or two. It is a 10-thing world now (and maybe a 20-thing world soon).

If you are a catalog company you have to be good at catalog marketing (as long as it continues to provide incremental revenue ), and you have to be good at NASCAR (as long as it provides incremental revenue), and you have to be good at Facebook, and you have to be good at email, and search, and YouTube and… a hundred other things. All while constantly optimizing your portfolio via controlled experiments .

You have to be good at sourcing your products and you have to be good at delivering them.

You have to be good at using clickstream and surveys and competitive intelligence and heuristic evaluations.

You have to be good on every device of every screen size in every country with a monetizable audience.

You have to be good at… many things all at the same time. For far too long we've been able to be successful by relying on our sheer strength on one thing. Catalog. Paid search. YouTube. Billboards. TV. With every passing day that strategy now ensures we are rejecting tons of revenue and tons of prospective customers.

It is hard to rewire the company's DNA to truly execute a multiplicity strategy. That's why you allocate 15% of your Marketing budget to getting good at multiplicity. All the time.

#3 One-trick ponies are going to be a liability.

This is a subset of the one above, but I wanted to call it out separately because I am madly, deeply convinced of its importance.

Increasingly, your people can't be one-trick ponies. Especially not people you consider stars.

If your Marketer is not savvy in basic finance and analytics and writing some html and creating mobile campaigns and tag clouds then you have a long term liability on your hands, and not an asset who is really, really, really, really good at writing copy for display campaigns.

The web demands immense agility and flexibility from every company. Having one-trick ponies can limit your capacity to think smart and move fast.

If you have an Analyst who is just good at Omniture and has never done an online usability study, and used Compete, and taken a whack at a rough digital P/L, then it is time to set them on a path to evolve, or get someone else.

If you have a Finance person for your web business who has never run campaigns on Facebook, and who doesn't understand the uniqueness of mobile applications, and a little bit about the insanity of ad exchanges then over time try to hire someone who does.

At one time, it was okay to be 100% good at one thing, and only one thing. But today companies with people who are 70% magnificent at one thing and have filled the remaining 30% with being good at everything in the periphery of their jobs will rule this world.

You want to change HR hiring practices now to nurture such 70/30 people inside your company, and to make that a mandatory condition for all new hires. Then you'll rule this world.

PS: Here's the raw brutal truth for you dear reader… no company is going to invest in you. The most precious Digital Folks are those who choose to invest in themselves, on their own time. Especially in the 30% area referenced above. Now you know.

#4 Attention is the most precious commodity.

We live in a hyper fragmented world with, quite literally, hundreds of TV channels, thousands of social connections and millions of websites. The single biggest gift any brand can get is attention. And not just the few seconds you get by showing 19 ads on one web page, or tweeting one relevant link in 1000, or showing the same ad for DirecTV six times while watching one 23 min program on Hulu, or showing up for a query for "flights to Sao Paulo" when you only offer flights to Europe, or… a million other ways.

Attention results from understanding the true strength of each channel and then engaging uniquely with your audience. Here's a good example. I bike ride a lot. I walk a lot. In general, I'm a big fan of exercise. I would follow Gatorade on Twitter with the exercise connection of that brand. But you know what they do on Twitter? They retweet other peoples tweets about them. The most lame thing you can imagine using Twitter for. (That is if they don't waste time with condescending tweets like "We've got your back xyz.")

How could Gatorade have my attention? With a Twitter stream about hydration. If their tweets supported their bio on Twitter: "Helping athletes get the most out of their bodies before, during and after activity." I could not find a single tweet of the 250 I reviewed that fell in that category. Why not try that? Why not go for grabbing my attention and then keeping it? Why not go from trying to have a Gatorade ad on every TV sports event in the hopes that I'm watching to doing that plus doing social media right and have a direct relationship with me?

Not one or the other. Both done exceptionally well. That's how you earn attention.

Or consider this example. Why do Priceline or Expedia mobile apps only do prices? Why do they not have a TripIt-like functionality built in? If they did, I would go having to remember which app to use to search for a hotel to having an app that is central to my life (and TripIt provides such value that it is) that I use all the time and that I will of course use when I have to think about booking any travel.

Get it? Attention. Via incredible daily utility.

One more example. With 55k RSS Subscribers and 110k Visits a month, this blog could make a few dollars with AdSense or Display ads or annoying interstitials offers. It could also make a few more dollars constantly pimping my two books in posts. Yet it does not. It simply gives you content (my goal: "incredible, relevant, of value"). You see, I don't want your AdSense clicks. I want your attention. And I know I can monetize that 100x all other things combined.

So what is your business shooting for online when it comes to digital marketing? What are you doing to earn, and keep, attention?

#5 Brand destruction is insanely efficient now. Beware!

United breaks guitars. Kenneth Cole goes too far with Egyptian protests. Gap logo. Bank of America everything. You can add 100 more examples in 100 seconds.

Those are big ones. But there are small ones too. I told 20 people that Nikon's site is slow and profoundly sub-optimal on mobile. (Guess what I had on hand when I saw their sexy ad on TV? A mobile device!) Now these 20 people will tell others. Small, silent brand destruction.

Yet so few companies have built organizational capabilities with this efficiency in mind. The distance between a story and an audience is six pixels (as my friend Mitch Joel might say). It is ever more important to live your values, walk the talk, deliver what you promise, not say stupid stuff, be real and accessible, and all those delightful things.

You see, the power that can so efficiently destroy your business, is also the power that can boost you to untold heights. And that's marketing money can't buy.

Oh, and you are right that people bought Kenneth Cole stuff even after the insensitive tweet because only a few people are on Social Media. The challenge is that everyone will be Social in ways they can't even imagine. Then we move from six pixels to two. Then what will you do?

Imagine a better future for your company.

PS: It is no longer optional for you to just create TV ads and not have the most brilliant, engaging and helpful mobile websites. In case you were wondering, the year of the mobile was two years go.

#6 Being good at the Long Tail matters just as much as the Head.

I've talked about the long tail on this blog, especially in context for Search. But the concept applies across all channels.

Here's a good example. You can spend all your money on the four standard channels on TV and get in front of 1000 people. But you can probably find 1000 people *relevant* to your brand and message by advertising on 28 *relevant* channels in the long tail (those after channel #14). Or the relevant 50. It is much harder to do, and much harder to explain to your boss who is still looking at GRPs, as GRPs for the long tail mostly don't exist. But if you do, you'll be more efficient, shout less, and deliver more value to your company and delight to your customers.

In every channel we have, Facebook or YouTube or Google or AOL or AdMob or pick your favorite, we have the capacity to shout at concentrations of irrelevant people, or show up for the dispersed hyper-relevant few. While I can't dissuade most Executives from the former, I try as hard as I can to help create strategies for the latter. I'm convinced it is the ability to do the latter that makes you future-proof.

Oh, and this is why Multiplicity matters (TV AND Catalog AND Mobile). This is why owing your own strong digital outpost (your own website) and being present in a space someone else owns (Facebook) matters. This is why having multiple trick ponies matters. They combine to get you really good at the Long Tail execution complexity and massive bottom-line benefit.

#7 Glory will come to the precious few who are willing to embarrass themselves.

We don't take risk and try things, imaginative (possibly glorious) things, because we believe the price of failure is so high. And it is in the real world. Consider creating a TV commercial or re-packaging a product or trying a new offer. First, it takes a very long time to actually try something (add longer plus infinity for risky things). Second, when you fail, you fail spectacularly. Heads roll. Companies get entrenched in what they know and end up constantly optimizing for what's always worked, meanwhile the world changes and these companies die, albeit slowly.

Now consider the web. You can have your most embarrassing idea for a redesign/new offer/product launch/whatever out there in one day. AND you can control for risk! You can only show the redesign to 1% of the site traffic. You can try the offer with just one affiliate or some Bing ads. You can launch the product to a selected group of opted-in customers (or only to people in New York). You can literally control for risk should everything blow up in your face. AND you can have analysis of your risk in almost real time to get an early read and in a few days with statistical significance!

And yet it is the rare company that is able to get over its mental model from the real (old) world and try imaginative things in the digital world where the rules are different and stacked in your favor. Yes, brand destruction is easy in our world, but we are not talking about destroying our brand. We are talking about taking controlled risks and optimization. What marketing program in the universe does not need that?

If you are an executive, encourage your company to check its old world thinking at the door. Consider rewarding people with new ideas. Allocate some of your aforementioned 15% budget to experimentation and testing. If you are a large company don't live without someone with strong Design of Experiments skills. Don't brush off Twitter or Google+ because you are B2B or A2K. Try. With 100% effort . Then do more of what works, or kill ruthlessly.

If you can't embarrass yourself, in controlled quantities, you can't become magnificent. and you can't future-proof your company.

Bonus: #8 Data is your friend.

You did not think I would miss this one did you? :)

This blog is about the joys of measurement and the transformative power of data. So I won't talk about it a lot more in this post.

Let me just say this… more of marketing is becoming algorithmically driven and a lot more decisions we make using reports today are being automated to be made faster, more efficiently, on our behalf. The ability to have a real analytical competency will mean the difference between winners and losers.

So do the 7 things above, but ensure you have a clearly articulated Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. Fill it with the best web metrics to measure success. If you partake in analysis, let that be at the intersection of custom reports and advanced segments.

Data + You = BFF = Business & Personal Success.

Eight simple rules for digital revolutionaries to follow in order to unlock the imagination of their companies and be massively successful in the future. Absorb them. Undertake the very hard task of slowly evolving your company to adapt to them. Monetize the opportunity presented, future-proof your company.

I wish you all the very best.

It's your turn now.

Do you agree with my learning that our primary problem is not web analytics/data but, rather, it is unimaginative web strategies? Have your own stories to share about brand destruction? Do you agree with the eight rules for revolutionaries above? Got your own?

Please share your feedback, ideas and awesomeness via comments.

Thank you.

The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish. is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

One thing that I never want to be.

We all have a tendency to learn up to a point, we get comfortable and keep chugging along rarely investing in our ongoing education.

I call it the slow but sure path to irrelevancy.

Let me share my prescription for avoiding irrelevancy: Try new things.

Simple right?

At any given time I have six or seven interesting tools running on this website. That's not including others I actively seek out around the web. Most of them are not even related to my current job or problems I know of. And that's on purpose.

I want to constantly be in the know of new and more clever ways of working with data, tools that are often solutions to problems we don't know we have yet or tools that are sometimes seeking problems to solve!!

Irrelevancy is not fun. Stale people are not appealing (just like, as your mom taught you, a week old bread). If there is one thing you take away from it post I hope it is the importance in investing in yourself / your education / your ongoing awesomeness.

In this blog post I want to share four analytics tools that I have been playing with for a while… tools that solve an interesting problem… tools that point to what might be in terms of our near term analytical future… and in almost all cases they don't even know!

I love doing this, I hope you'll have as much fun as I do.

First Some Context.

Remember I am the creator of the 10/90 rule of investment in web analytics.

I had created the rule many years ago, early into my job at Intuit, and quite simply it states:

When I had created the rule Google Analytics did not even exist!

The rule was borne out from my own experience having inherited a world class tool we were paying $250k a year for and produced crap. Well not crap… lots of data that no one cared about or actioned. I threw out the world class tool, purchased ClickTracks for a fraction of the cost and put money into Analysts and boom!

Ok not boom overnight… but over the course of a few months the org started to be more data driven, because analysts we hired produced analysis. That fed a virtuous cycle. More analysts. More insights. More desire to be data driven.

So as you look at the tools below remember the 10/90 rule.

In the end it does not matter who has the coolest or the biggest tool. Or for that matter how many tools.

People matter.

You matter.

Remember that, at least for the rest of this post. Ok?

Let's go look at some tools…

Measuring "Invisible Virality": Tynt.

Tynt's promise is simple. Add a piece of javascript to your web page (do a View Source on this page to see it), and it will tell you how often your content is being copied.

Copied! Say it ain't so! :)

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version, including all the other metrics.]

In the last month data was copied off one of my posts 5,616 times, with most of it being content and some of it images.

But that's not all.

If you look at the higher resolution version (click above) you'll see it also reports other data like Visits Generated etc.

The way it works is that when someone copies a piece of content Tynt adds a little bit of additional text and a trackable code with a hash (#) at the end of the url from where content was copied.

Like so… the text that was copied from my blog is the first two lines… the Read More and link was added automatically by Tynt…

When people click on that link Tynt can report visits generated, page views, where the links were posted (in case there is a referrer) etc.

There is additional data like how many of your copies created links that were posted and then clicked on…

Gold are places were the copied text was pasted with the additional "Read more: http://…" text+link were also posted AND someone clicked on it.

You'll note that Tynt's selling point is connected to SEO. The idea that your copied text creates links back to you which in turn creates visits back to you, and per Tynt, better SEO goodness. You know links and page rank and what not!

I *personally* do not see much value in all that data. Two reasons:

So I am less enamored by Tynt data that focuses on all that.

I love the data you saw in the very first screenshot, and I absolutely love this…

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version, including all the other metrics.]

The first screenshot shows how often content is being copied and the above indicates the blog post / web page where the content is being copied from.

Why is this cool?

If you are a regular reader you'll notice that at the end of every blog post (before the start of the comments section) is a Topsy widget.

It measures how often a blog post is tweeted/retweeted. Goes viral. Higher the number the better, makes sense?

I also measure the # of Comments Per Post as a measure of how "engaging" / "valuable" people found the content to be. Looking at how often it was tweeted/retweeted is one more layer of information in understanding what subject / ideas in a post / things I write are well received by people and which are not.

But.

Both the above attempts measure two minorities.

The cool thing about Tynt is that it allows me to get some sense of "engagement" / "perceived value" / "Like" with the v a s t majority of people who will neither submit a comment nor write a tweet.

People who still use email. People who like something I wrote so much (or hate it so much) that they copy the text and paste it and forward it to others. Or copy the text and post it on their blogs (without attribution of course :)).

I like that a lot.

This entire interaction that was completely invisible to me is now a bit more visible. I can measure the "invisible virality" / "spread" by this big huge non-commenting, non-tweeting audience.

In the time period above I had written 4 posts (5,616 times copies). Check this out… It turns out the post with the fewest comments, just 25, and the fewest tweets, just 100…

…was copied an astonishing 506 times, when all other posts were copied in small double digits.

See what I mean… something I would have perhaps considered to be only a small success turns out was a huge hit with the blog's audience. I just would not have known that so far.

Here's another interesting application. . . Lots of people are measuring "influence" of a blogger (/ piece of content) using data from the "minority activity" (comments, retweets etc) and selling it as the complete truth. But how can you do that without some insight from the majority?

Tynt shares one very interesting piece to the puzzle that perhaps in the future fit some place where we can use it with all other context we have.

Invisible Virality. Cool right?

.

Applying Smarter Ideas to Measuring "Sentiment": Analyze Words.

Raise you hand if you are in the "If I am any more excited about doing sentiment analysis then I'll pee in my pants".

So many raised hands!

Here's the problem: Most solutions stink. Not just stink… dinosaur's breath after a meal stink.

We are algorithmically trying something that as yet does not lend itself to algorithmic measurement… "emotion". It is darn near impossible to cleanly buckets feelings and nuance into clean Positive, Negative, Neutral buckets.

We, computer programs, are simply not there yet. [Though I am absolutely confident that we will get there at some point.]

For now you are most likely wasting time (and money). Sorry.

Here's the other problem…

Even if it works… I don't think it works. [What!]

Let's say you have a 100% perfect human read and 100% human categorized analysis on hundreds of thousands of rows of text. Clean into the three desired categories. Like in the image above.

Now pause for a second and think… what could you do with this?

You have aggregated data into three pieces and we all know aggregated data stinks at delivering insights!

That does not mean wanting to identify insights from lots and lots of text is not prudent. It is.

I like a much more nuanced approach.

Analyze Words applies one such nuanced approach to text analysis.

It uses the well established and long use LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) methodology to categorize all your delightful text (in this case your tweets).

Why the LIWC? Here's the idea behind the LIWC:

Cool right?

You go to Analyze Words and you punch in your twitter id and bam (!) your "psychological" profile, or in this case mine…

Nice eh?

No simplified over promise under deliver aggregates!

The three categories and 11 sub categories provide much much much more nuanced understanding of what your text is saying, in this case for your twitter profile.

Why is this cool?

In this case measuring "Personable": Engaged in other people's well-being and at peace with expressing your own uncertainty about the world. High Scores in personable use positive emotion words, ask questions, express their own ambivalence and reference others frequently.

Better than positive, negative, neutral right?

Or "Analytic": "If law school exams were a persona, they would rank real high in this category. Ample large words and phrases that include complex thinking styles (e.g. "if – but not …")."

Love it!

Two magnificent things about this approach (remember it's not the tool, its what you do with it :))…

Of course you can do even more.

You know how you are doing… now compare it to your "competition" and find their strengths and weaknesses…

When you do competitive analysis, like above, find contrasts with your own profile, what your brand stands for in the world and their brand stands for.

Highlight differences where you brand strength is strong. Hopefully they'll discover where they stink and for the sake of humanity fix that.

Nice eh?

Analyze Words provides a glimpse of an approach that I hope others follow.

Rather than trying to find short cuts, where none exist, and provide aggregate data, where it just gets crapified, follow a well established methodology while leveraging segmentation and nuance.

We've applied it just for Twitter in the above case but you can easily see how you could apply it to call center data, tech support websites, forums, online survey open text voc answers and so much more.

Applying Simpler Ideas to Measuring "Sentiment": StatsIt.

StatsIt started off as a differentiated web analytics tool, but has morphed into a delightful social media monitoring tool.

[Update: Oct 18: StatsIt is evolving its solution. But in this section my hope is to focus less on the tool itself and more a type of analysis that we can use in our daily life.]

It's approach is to index blogs and tweets and delicious and twitter and youtube and on and on and analyze that data to find yummy actionable insights about your social media presence / activity.

Like all tools it gives you pretty charts…

Sweet, now you know how much "activity" is happening. Give it to your boss, she'll be impressed. You on the other hand realize "activity" rarely has insights.

I want to focus on just one part of StatsIt that I adore because of how simple it is in its brilliance when it comes to finding insights from lots of text.

StatsIt has indexed a ton of content from all the social web activity. When you tell it your brand terms (or just your brand name, in my case "avinash kaushik") and it churns through that social web data to provide you with something awesome…. a tag cloud!

[Click on the image for a higher resolution version, along with a peek at other metrics.]

Why is this cool?

Mikko and his team have taken 1,000 words from the English language that are connected to emotion. Good emotion, bad emotion, ugly emotion.

They look at their social web data and in that they look at the words around your brand mention and finally identify the emotional words people are using in context of… you!

The tag cloud above shows the emotional words use around mentions of me for a month's worth of time.

Without having to read all the text I can at a glance now get a really good understanding of the tone and texture of activity around my presence. More importantly it does not take all that long to figure out what emotions should be there but aren't.

A very simple, effective and elegant solution to a complicated problem.

Oh and guess that happens when you click on one of the words in the tag cloud?

You are right… it takes you directly to the text from all the data that StatsIt has collected!

By clicking on the words you are essentially segmenting your data and drilling down to the text (tweets, blog posts) where you can learn more about what the person was saying when they express, say, "great" as an emotion. :)

Effective "sentiment analysis" baby!

Why can't we be this simple in other places?

We are always seeking complexity. Here are two ideas that popped into my head from the StatsIt's approach that might apply in other places.

We collect lots of open text from our online surveys right?

Rather than finding the perfect answer to what's expressed in the text, and of course getting it wrong, why don't the vendors show us a emotional tag cloud?

Can there be a better / easier / faster way to allow us to make sense of all that text, leverage as a segmentation tool and find insights every day?

Vendors! Come on!!

Another idea.

Reviews are important. Most ecommerce sites have them.

But why is it that we only see "quantitative" analysis of the reviews? 5 stars. 3.2 moons. 61% rotten tomatoes. Etc etc.

The richness of the review is only partly in the quantitative analysis of the rating. The real sweet nectar is in the words people write in reviews.

I recently gave a talk at eBay. So let's use that as an example.

You get quick quant rating on eBay that you typically use. But perhaps the real gold is here….

This seller, me, is 100% positively rated.

Now let's say that you want to buy a Sony digital camera that is listed by both me and Emer. We both have 100% positive ratings for our 60 or so prior eBay auctions.

How can you best decide if you should buy from me or Emer? You can't possibly read 120 reviews, or even scan them quickly.

Now would your life be much much easier if eBay choose to provide an "emotional tag cloud" for both Emer and Avinash?

Very quickly you could see that while we both have same quant ratings it turns out that my emotional cloud shows a neutral to positive feelings expressed while Emer's is outrageously positive.

Now is it easier to decide who to buy from?

As our dear friend Sarah Palin would say: You betcha!

So why does eBay not provide this simple emotional tag cloud?

Or for that matter Trip Advisor or Amazon or any site that hosts reviews and ratings?

Simplicity rocks. Especially when it's actionable.

Quick, Efficient, Effective Mobile Analytics: Percent Mobile.

It is always a really good idea in web analytics to understand how data is captured (case in point the delightful blog post on Competitive Intelligence data capture).

No where is this more true than when it comes to mobile analytics.

There are many methods of collecting data depending on the platform you are on, and if Steve Jobs gets upset he can totally shut you down with a mere update of his TOS! :)

I am not going to cover all that here today. For those of you who already have my second book Web Analytics 2.0 please jump to Page 250 to learn all about data collection options, platform limitations, challenges with campaign analysis and finally reports and KPI's you should measure for mobile.

In this blog post I want to share a lightweight wonderful mobile analytics platform called Percent Mobile.

Now most web analytics tools, like Google Analytics and WebTrends and others, will capture and report data for javascript enabled smart phones (like the iPhone, Android and some Nokia phones). Honestly that is all the traffic that is of commercial value, so even if you miss the rest it is not the hugest of deals.

But all these "big boys" have simply "added on" mobile analytics to their tools. The result is that they suffer from both a lack of imagination and, this is important, truly great databases when it comes to devices and carriers and other unique mobile information.

Not Percent Mobile.

They have two incredible benefits:

Here is what the resulting data looks like…

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version.]

No hunting and pecking to find the data, like you would in Google Analytics or Site Catalyst or CoreMetrics. A quick at a glance view of how much traffic is mobile, key stats about the devices, the devices themselves (go iPad!!), vendors and operating systems.

If you compare this to your web analytics tool you'll notice almost immediately how much better this data is compared to what the "big boys" are reporting.

Click on the image above and you'll see a bit more clearly other really sweet metrics. % of mobile devices accessing your site via WiFi. Phones with touch screens and full keyboards etc.

[Can you imagine how cool it would be to segment your mobile traffic for full keyboard phone vs none and see which convert better. Or does access via WiFi mean more content consumption than via 3G? Etc. So cool.]

That is not all… if you scroll a bit more you can get a country map view, the networks used to access your site (AT&T still #1 for me!) and countries etc.

Of course it would be hard for me to like any tool that does not allow segmentation. :) You simply drag and drop on to the box on top..

And what would an analytics tool be without the normal search, referrer and all that data we have so come to love (and hate!).

I particularly like the "Activity Types" box at the bottom left, I don't know why web analytics tools don't categorize referrers by default.

I am also surprised at the long tail of referrers. Yes Google is big but there are 91 other referrers for this segment. More mobile SEO!

Why is this cool?

It might seem odd that I would like a tool that would give me similar data that I can get out of WebTrends or Omniture or Xiti or whatever.

The first reason is that, as mentioned above, the data is actually much better because of the databases that power Percent Mobile.

The other thing is that getting this data causes less pain than pulling my two front teeth.

Finally I so do like supporting pretty tools, especially if they have good data!

The one thing Percent Mobile lacks is some way of measuring any outcomes. I can certainly dig to my "conversion pages" but it would be great if they just let me just input them into the tool and then they could measure outcomes for me (even if it is like the Goals process in GA).

But if you want a light weight easy to use free mobile analytics tool just throw Percent Mobile on your site and have fun. Go to www.percentmobile.com , click Sign Up (top right) and use the Invitation Code "Avinash" (no quotes).

Mobile rocks no?

Summary Of Our Lovely "Let's Keep Learning" Cruise.

It is important to point out that I am not affiliated in any way with any of these tools / companies. I am also not recommending overtly or covertly that you buy / use them. That is totally your call.

Of course I would not personally use them or write about them if I did not thing they had value. :)

My sincere hope is that you'll internalize:

I hope you got that, more than names of interesting tools.

I cannot tell you how much fun it is to step outside the world of Omniture and Google Analytics and other traditional web analytics tools. It stretches your mind and sometimes you look at these new techniques and data and you notice you are smiling and feel so happy.

Try it, and have fun.

[In case you were curious at the moment I am playing with these incredibly cool tools: PostRank, Next Stage Sentiment Analysis, SEO Effect, and Colligent. Each in its own way does something magical and quite unlike anyone else.]

Ok your turn now.

What do you think of the work that Tynt, Analyze Words, StatsIt & Percent Mobile do? Have you tried any of 'em? What obvious flaws did I overlook? Are there other tools you are using in the Viral, Social, Sentiment, Mobile space that you really love? If so would you please post them in comments?

Please share your feedback / critique / ideas.

Thanks.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Multiplicity: Succeed Awesomely At Web Analytics 2.0!
• Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques
• Web Analytics Tool Selection: Three Questions to ask Yourself
• Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The "Three Layers Of So What" Test
• Web Analytics Career Advice: Play In The Real World!

Viral, Social, Sentiment, Mobile: 4 Delightful Web Analytics Solutions is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik