Google makes its bucks by tracking every aspect of your life online. For the benefit of FREE we allow Google into every intimate aspect of our lives: our communication (Gmail), our interests (Search), where we’re going (Maps), and what we see (YouTube). Tracking our “data stream” (everywhere we go and everything we do) online is big business. By correlating our behavior and interests with other people’s, Google can figure out with a high degree of accuracy what we want and when we want it. It monetizes this information by placing highly relevant advertising in front of us at those times.
Amazon is successful for the same reasons. When I go to Amazon with the intention of buying one book, I usually leave having bought about five. That’s because Amazon has tracked the behavior of every single person that has ever visited the site. They’ve taken every purchase anyone has made and correlated it to your behavior and your purchasing decisions. That’s powerful data.
Apple’s GPS enabled 3G iPhone promises to bring life recording to a whole new level by taking it offline. Location aware cell phone apps will bring the power of the data stream to our everyday lives in much the same way Amazon brings it to retail. Think about your daily activities. You have a routine. You shop at many of the same stores regularly. Almost everything you do has a pattern that you’ve spent your whole life developing. When you overlap that pattern with other people’s lives you’ll discover new products and services that people with similar interests use that you don’t know about. That’s the power of tracking user behavior.
The economic implications are enormous. Besides the obvious dating (“notify me when someone with similar interests is nearby”) and social (“notify me when my friends are nearby”) applications, location based services will fundamentally change the way we interact with the offline world. People will discover new products and services based on automatic recommendations derived from behavior they have in common with other people. The broker of these recommendations will make a lot of money.
But why stop there? We already let Google read our email in exchange for a free account. Why not let a service listen to our phone conversations? Companies like PhoneTag already listen to your voicemail and transcribe that to SMS text for your convenience. It’s not much of a leap to combine that with advertising and make it free or offer free cell phone service that targets advertising based on what you say and where you go. (Maybe this is the strategy behind Grand Central and Android).
Moreover, location based apps will fundamentally change the way we interact with the world and the people in it. It’s like carrying your Facebook profile on your head. I can learn everything about you before you say “hello.” When I’m walking in the mall, I can find out where other people with similar interests shopped. When I drive down the street, I can get offers for stores I drive by. Think of it as Google Adsense for the real world. Instead of contextualizing advertising to the content of the web page you’re on, the advertising becomes contextual to the content of where you are and what you’re doing.
“There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.” - Laurence J. Peter
Today, I failed. After running the Honolulu Marathon in December I challenged myself by running the 8 mile Great Aloha Run in under an hour. After all, if I can run twenty-six 10 minute miles in a row, I should be able to run eight 7 minute miles in a row.
I didn’t even come close. I did, however, learn a lot from the experience.
To train for speed, I started running timed miles on the treadmill at the gym. Every minute running on the treadmill was excruciatingly boring. My eyes were glued to clock in front of me. Watching the seconds tick by killed all my passion and love for the sport. Running a 7 minute mile was really hard for me. I could barely do two in a row without feeling like my lungs were going to explode. Without passion, I simply couldn’t devote the energy needed to succeed.
I didn’t fail because I didn’t enjoy running fast. Being good at something often requires that you endure some sort of overwhelming hardship to get to where you want to be. I’ve never been a fast runner, but I want to be - and that desire is enough to get me there. I failed because I didn’t change my approach when it was clear that what I was doing wasn’t working.
I find this particularly relevant when I communicate with people. It’s like vigorously trying to change someone’s mind by repeatedly telling them they’re wrong. Sometimes an approach just won’t work no matter how many times your try it. That doesn’t mean your goal is unattainable. It just means you need to be smarter. Take a step back and get a fresh perspective. Better yet, get someone else’s opinion.
The irony is that had I just trained normally by running outside like I did for the marathon, I would have done far better than I did. I would have run at least twice a week for 8 miles at a time, greatly increasing my cardiovascular endurance and speed in the process. What I did instead was half heartedly run a couple miles a week on the treadmill.
I like to think that if you don’t fail, you’re not trying hard enough. Some people venture to say that you should fail as often as 50% of the time, just to make sure that you’re trying hard enough. I don’t know if you need to fail any set amount of times, but I do know that the ultimate failure is not learning from your mistakes.
Check out this video of the Singapore government trying to encourage more tech companies to set up shop over there. Maybe we should try something like this in Hawaii!
Thanks to TechCrunch for finding this video.
Today I noticed that Yahoo abruptly changed color themes on their beta Yahoo Mail interface. They also rolled out some pretty interesting contextual advertising technology that I’ve never seen in an email client before. They actually detect the names of cities and places in your incoming emails and underline them. If you hold your mouse over the word, it displays a little contextual menu with options to view travel information, maps, and search results.
I could see this being pretty useful if it was integrated with the right services. For example, if I could click on an address and automatically have cheap hotels, airfare, and rental cars suggested to me, I would be be pretty thrilled. Looking forward to seeing where this is going. It’s interesting to see Yahoo’s “Peanut Butter Manifesto” strategy play out.
There’s an awesome post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog about financial projections. Glenn Kelman, founder of online Real Estate pioneer Redfin.com, shares real life numbers from his business and projections. Really good info for anyone running a start up.
AT&T just came up with a fantastic way of keeping customer satisfaction levels at an all time high: fire the customers that complain about your service. This is hilarious stuff. I’m sure it’s “corporate policy” and all that jazz, but funny nonetheless.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be a better leader. Time and time again I come across examples of leadership that involve just getting out of the way and getting everyone involved. Empowering people you work with to lead themselves. The Starfish and the Spider is a great example of that philosophy. So is Sam Walton’s “Made In America,” which is one of the best books I’ve read on leadership.
Many of the people I know that I admire are fantastic communicators. They’re always sharing all the details of what they’re doing with everyone they work with to build a sense of teamwork and participation. It’s completely natural as opposed to forced.
It’s taken me a long time to get used to communicating more. Even this blog is an exercise in communication. Just sharing my thoughts so that the people I know, know what’s on my mind. It doesn’t come naturally to me. But I do really care about the people around me, especially the people I work with, and books like The Starfish and the Spider remind me how important it is to continue communicating as much as I can.
I just finished reading a great book called The Starfish and the Spider. The book does a really good job of illustrating how decentralized organizations trump centralized companies time and time again. Examples cited include the Apache web server, Napster, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Skype.
I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about some of their examples. The issue I have is how they group different types of decentralization. The authors associate decentralized organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, Apache, and Linux with distributed platforms like Skype and Napster. There’s a big difference between an organization and a technology platform and it doesn’t make sense to group the examples together.
That aside, I was most interested in how this theory applies to the problem of spam. I think spam is a classic example of an “evil” starfish organization like Al Queda. The more you fight it, the more virulent it becomes.
The authors cite three primary examples of fighting decentralized organizations: challenge their ideology, centralize them, or decentralize yourself. I don’t think spammer have much of an ideology. They’re just trying to make a buck. There’s really no “cause” here. I don’t see much to centralize either. However taking a decentralized approach to filtering spam seems to make a lot of sense.
Every major webmail provider has a spam box that allows you to mark spam. Surely the vast majority of spam hits most of the major webmail providers’ systems. If a person marks a particular address or piece of content as spam it should get blacklisted in a shared database accessible to all email providers. This approach would basically created a distributed human computing engine to combat spam. Of course some people would occasionally mark non-spam messages (such as opt-in retail mailers) as spam, but statistically the wisdom of crowds would prevail and the system should be 99.9% accurate.
Most of the spam I get in my mailbox is highly repetitive. Almost all the messages have similar subject lines and content. I use Yahoo Mail to manage all my emails from multiple accounts. Why can’t the power of all Yahoo users be harnessed to filter my spam intelligently? Why can’t the power of all email users across all email providers be harnessed to filter spam intelligently?
You have companies like Symantec that keep a central database of all viruses. Why not a company that keeps a central database of all emails marked as spam across all email providers, which could, in turn, be licensed to each email provider. It seems like a win/win venture to me. Each new email company that signs up provides additional user generated spam data, and the analysis of that data provides dramatically improved real time filtering data to all webmail providers. As soon as an email gets marked as spam in one mailbox, it gets filtered as spam in all mailboxes. If Google can index and offer instant search results on all the content in the world, surely a company can index and offer instant filtering on all the spam in the world?
This is ridiculous. Whole Foods is being restricted from acquiring Wild Oats on the grounds that Whole Foods is an organic food store and that such consolidation would give it an uncompetitive advantage in the organic food sector.
The problem is that Whole Foods is no longer just a specialty food store. They now compete with all the other big super market chains that are also beefing up their organic food offerings. Whole Foods has also diversified its products to offer more than just your regular tree hugger fare. They are literally a one-stop (albeit expensive) shop for a lot of people. How can Whole Foods be equipped to compete with giants like Safe Way and Star Market, if its status as a specialty grocer inhibits it from acquiring companies and growing?
I recently turned my attention to website tracking. I realized that we’re doing a terrible job of figuring out what the hell our users are actually doing once they get to the site. Right now we use Google Analytics. As simple as most Google products are, I found this one wasn’t. So I spent the last few days diving deep into GA and researching competitive products.
My first conclusion was that I needed to better define which questions I was trying to answer. What exactly does tracking a user on a website mean? Here’s what I came up with:
1) Where is the traffic coming from (i.e. the source)?
There are basically three categories of traffic: direct, referring (a website that links to you), and search engine. Google does a great job of detailing all three. Also, when it comes to search engine traffic, it’ll even show you which key words resulted in visits to your site. Some of the results are very interesting.
2) How is it getting to us (i.e. the medium: natural search, paid search, flyer, newspaper, etc…)
This can be a much harder question to answer using just tracking software. If it’s a web-based medium such as paid search, then you have no trouble. GA can tell you exactly where the traffic came from. If it’s offline, you have to prepare your website to track the results effectively. The best way to do that is to set up a custom URL. For example, we recently powered photo broadcasting for the KCCN FM 100 Birthday Bash. At the event we handed out flyers with the URL, “bbash.kindfish.com”. Since we weren’t driving any other traffic to that sub-domain we could be reasonably sure that any direct hits were a result of our flyer.
3) What is driving the traffic (i.e. the campaign: a concert, a new promotion, etc…)
This is important in the context of knowing exactly what you’re tracking. For example: ok, the traffic came in from text ads I paid for on Google, but what was the promotion? If you’re using Google AdSense to drive traffic, GA fully integrates to give you detailed results. If you’re doing an offline promotion (newspaper promo for example), the same points from the previous question apply.
4) Which page is it coming to?
GA tells you exactly how many hits come to every page where you have the tracker code embedded. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to tell you where they go right after that. I want to know what path users are most commonly taking through our site. It seems this would be an obvious feature. Maybe I’m missing something.
5) What is the call to action on that page and is it being taken?
Hopefully each page on your site has some sort of purpose. As an early stage start up, our purpose is usually to get the user to sign up to use our service. Most of our pages are geared towards that action and Google has an interesting way of letting you track just how successful you are at getting users to take a particular action. It’s called a conversion goal and it’s basically a funnel.
6) What is the conversion funnel for a new user and is it being taken?
The one thing we weren’t clearly articulating every time we drove users to the site was the conversion funnel. This is probably the most important aspect of any campaign or traffic driver. Once your users get to your site, what are they supposed to do, and are they doing it? GA lets you set up specific goals in the shape of URL steps. For example, if your goal is to get user registrations, it might look like this:
Step 1: landing page URL
Step 2: registration page URL
Step 3: thank you page URL
If GA detects that a user hit all three URLs in succession, that’s defined as a conversion (successful completion of the goal).
7) If they are not taking the conversion funnel, where are they clicking?
This is something I really wanted to see but couldn’t really find. This ties in with my point earlier about user navigation. I want to know what path our users are taking through the site, especially if they are not taking a pre-defined path as defined by a GA Goal.
8 ) How many of the website visitors are unique and how many are returning?
GA is actually very good at this. It gives you full breakdowns of the returning visitors vs. unique visitors as well as returning vs. unique pageviews. If you click on the Visitors tab you can see a full breakdown of the data under the new vs. returning section. The Visitors section also provides excellent information broken down by days and even hours, geography, and browsers. Also, one of the coolest data points is average number of pageviews per visitor.
9) What is the average length of a visit?
This is also tracked by GA under the visitors area.
10) What path are they taking through the site?
As I’ve mentioned this is really the biggest missing feature. I want to have a view of the average path users take through Kindfish.com. Without knowing where they are clicking, it’s very hard to optimize the site’s navigation.
One of my favorite features is the GA site overlay. It tells you how many people clicked where. In some ways it address my concern about being able to tell what a users average path through the site is. The site overlay is basically a version of your live site that is loaded in a GA controlled browser frame where they overlay little numbers over each link on your site. You can actually click through and see the number of people that clicked where as you go deeper.
On the site overlay front, GA actually has some very interesting competitors. One of my favorites (I think we’ll actually try these guys out in conjunction with GA) was CrazyEgg. They offer you a fantastically well-visualized view of your users’ click streams as well as heat maps of where they are clicking. If you’re trying to optimize your site’s layout and figure out where a user’s eyes are going, there’s nothing better to help you understand this than a heat map of your site. ClickTale takes it one step further and actually _records_ your users using the site. You can then go to ClickTale’s website and watch video of your users using the site. Pretty impressive.
