What Color is Your Parachute – the book

Countless friends and colleagues have praised what Color is your Parachute and I finally checked it out of the library recently.

I admit that I skimmed the first two-thirds of the  book, which was focused almost exclusively on the  job search.  While the tips seemed relevant, they were quite common sense.  Having been through a job search not too long ago, I wasn’t especially interested in tips on how to interview or what to include in your resume.

The latter third of the book is more self-help focused, which is what I was most interested in.  The book includes exercises which aim to help you identify your skills and interests.  While most of the exercises felt a bit silly (such as creating a ‘flower diagram’, writing stories, multiple grids, then getting others’ feedback on their perceptions of your grids), the concepts were interesting.

While  I didn’t follow the exercises, I did spend some time thinking about the core questions that were being posed.

For me, the book raised some basic self-awareness questions, but nothing extraordinary. I think this is a book I would have appreciated earlier in my career, or perhaps even during college.

Segmenting Visitors – without PII?

Recently, I attended a webinar where one of the discussion points was segmenting users and providing custom content to each group.  To me, this  makes perfect sense – there is a wealth of information at your (web analytics) fingertips, why not use it to understand your users and ultimately improve the customer experience?

Yet it did not make sense to everyone – during the Q&A, someone asked how it was possible to segment users without using PII (Personally Identifiable Information), such as name and account information.

Knowing who the person browsing your site is may be useful – but what he is doing on your site is also valuable.  Using the click-stream data, such as what pages he sees and what keywords he searches on, you can understand what he is doing on your site, and perhaps determine his intent.

Moving from Reporting to Web Analytics – webinar

I only recently discovered Beyond Web Analytic, but have been impressed that they have been quite regular about posting interesting podcasts. Yesterday, I listened to a recording of: “Moving from Web Reporting & Tagging to real Web Analytics-How can people learn how to do real web analysis?”.

The podcast was a conversation among James Dutton, Adam Greco, Rudi Shumpert, and guest-host Gary Angel.  The topic, as you can tell from the title, was the spectrum between reporting and analysis.

I feel they covered three major topics:

Analytics 2010 – Driving the Data webinar

Earlier this week, I attended the webinar “Analytics 2010 – Driving the Data” with Avinash Kaushik.

Although I’m not planning to do a full review of the event, I did want to call out one point that Avinash made during the talk.

He takes 5 hours per week to learn something new.

Such a simple idea, but so powerful.   I’ve been lucky in my work-life in that consulting lends itself to learning new things on the job.  But it’s the things I’ve learned on my own, outside of work, that I often find most interesting.  Just by doing some targeted reading, keeping up with blogs, and attending industry events, I learn so much every week!

The Seven Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design – webinar with Tim Ash

Recently, I attended a webinar on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design”  with Tim Ash.  I have had Ash’s book, Landing Page Optimization in my queue almost since it came out, so I jumped at the chance to attend a webinar led by him on the topic.

If you’re not familiar with landing page optimization, let’s take an easy example of paid search.  Say your company gives Google a lot of money to display paid advertisements directing users to your site for certain keywords.  A user searches on that keyword, sees your ad, and clicks into your site.  But what happens next? That first page he sees on your site (the landing page) is critical to whether he decides to stay on the site (perhaps leading to a conversion/lead/etc.) or whether he immediately presses the ‘back’ button and clicks into another search result to find what he was looking for.  Landing page optimization has the goal of improving conversion/leads/etc. by optimizing that landing page. (And, yes, LPO can apply to scenarios other than PPC, but it’s the easiest to understand if you’re new to LPO, I think).

Ash’s webinar focused on 7 common sins on that initial landing page. I have divided them into two categories:

SMBMSP #21 – Go Girl Case Study

November’s Social Media Breakfast was at the Imation campus, and consisted of two parts:

1. Putting passion back in your job(search) by @GirlMeetsGeek
2. Case Study about the use of social media at GoGirl by @cydneyw and @hjomats

I was especially interested in the GoGirl case study for a few reasons:

• the presenters were passionate about the company and clearly proud of the work they’re doing (they were a great example of the infectious passion that GirlMeetsGeek had discussed earlier in the event)
• this is a company that ‘gets’ social media in a way that few do and it was exciting to see many of the ideas I’d batted around in my head played out in real life
• I am the target demographic for this ‘unique’ item, and have had many conversations with friends over the years over whether a device like this one existed

To provide some background, GoGirl is a ‘female urination device’ (FUD) which enables graceful urination in otherwise difficult circumstances – camping, hiking, after surgery, in port-a-potties, etc.  A local Minnesota company, the device itself has been in development for many years, but the presenters indicated they were about a year into their use of social media.

A few things impressed me:

Search Basics

I like to think of myself as someone who knows search.  I’ve studied search, I’ve worked with search, and I keep up on the big news in search. So I was a little surprised when a book I’m currently reading indicated that I misunderstand the term Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Of course I immediately pulled it up on my iPhone and again when I got to a computer.  I began writing a post about SEM, but wanted to link to an easy, concise primer for those who aren’t as familiar with search.  When I couldn’t find one, I decided to write up my own.  That primer is below.

Social Media in Journalism – SMBMSP #20

Last week, I attended the latest Social Media Breakfast (SMBMSP), the 20th (my second).  Social Media Breakfast is a get-together to discuss social media and social networking. This one was a panel discussion with members of the media (magazines, radio, and tv) about social media in journalism.

The panel was facilitated by Julio Ojeda-Xapata of the St. Paul Pioneer Press (and author of the book Twitter Means Business).

The panel included:

• David Brauer, MinnPost.com
• Jason DeRusha, WCCO-TV
• Dirk DeYoung, Business Journal
• Gene Rebeck, Twin Cities Business Magazine
• Julia Schrenkler, Minnesota Public Radio

The discussion covered a range of topics, but the one I found most interesting was this – not everyone in journalism can/should use social media.

comScore Webinar – Beyond SEM

Recently, I attended “Beyond SEM: Extending the Impact of Search Data for Strategic Business Decisions”, a webinar presented by comScore and led by Eli Goodman.

The slides and video are available here.  Below is some of what I took away from the presention.

As the title suggests, the focus of the presentation was using search data in ways other than the traditional SEM model.

Don’t Get Caught Up in the Long Tail – There are a lot of search terms out there, and even if your company/site is specific to an industry or product, you’re likely still getting traffic from a large number of keywords.  Instead of looking at each of the terms individually, search terms could be bucketed into aggregate groups, for example, ‘flu symptoms’, ‘cold symptoms’, and ‘strep throat symptoms’ could all be bucketed in ‘symptoms’ for a healthcare website.

Search Isn’t Just for Acquisition – The traditional use of search is to drive customers to your site.  But you could also use search data to understand the industry or your customers.  For example, Goodman was familiar with the term ‘unlock iPhone’, but through some analysis of search terms, determined that ‘jailbreak iPhone’ was another way of saying the same thing.  Companies in that market may not be aware of the change in terminology and may want to capitalize on both  phrases.

Display Ads Impact Search – Display ads have been shown to cause a considerable increase in search for the brand in the four weeks following the ad.

Search Impacts Display Ads – Using search data, Goodman was able to isolate users who searched for a particular brand and then determine what other sites those users visited.  Those sites may be a good opportunity for display ads.

Search Can Enable Branding, Not Just Direct Response – Typically, online marketing dollars are spent on direct response (‘click here’) instead of branding (we are a quality brand).  But, some brands are creating a branding experience online – for example, Kraft, which purchases keywords from ‘Kraft’ to ‘recipes’ directs people to their site which  has recipes, product information, and coupons.

Search Doesn’t Just Mean Google/Bing/Yahoo – YouTube is the second-most searched property on the internet, yet its paid search is less ‘evolved’ than the major search engines.  PPC is cheaper, and some generic keywords have no sponsored content.

In all, an informative event made more interesting by the use of real-world examples.

Click – the book

I recently finished reading Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters by Bill Tancer.  Tancer, who works at Hitwise, has access to what about 10 million users do on the internet.    He has used this data in a variety of analyses, from when searches for ‘engagement ring’ peak (the week before Thanksgiving) to what’s the most searched ‘how to’ query (“how to tie a tie” in the US) to predicting the winner of reality tv shows based on searches.

I spent most of the time reading this book wishing that I had access to his data.  (And that may have been intended- many reviewers on Amazon felt it was a long, obvious infomercial).  But what I envied more than the data was his autonomy or his seeming ability to look into any question that interested him.  Like Tancer, I have had access to large sets of search data, but I was rarely able to do exploratory data mining.  Instead, as in many corporations, our time and data access was prioritized for business purposes and “I wonder about xxx” was not a priority.

For a more detailed review of Click, take a look at my review on Amazon.