Attention

Considerable effort is going into quantifying the degree of which people paying attention to a medium.

This is a big deal.

Consider how many screens your average Gen Y'er is engaged with, simultaneously, on a Monday night. They could be watching videos on YouTube while watching MTV while tweeting their friends on their iPhone.

There are reinforcing mechanisms here. For instance, getting hit with Stella Artois The Life Legere commercials both on the Comedy Network during a commercial break while getting hit with it on a pre-roll from the Onion News Network. Lately those commercials have been appearing on the fourth screen - the movie theater - during the pre-roll.

Seniors are up to it too: reading the newspaper while listening to the radio while having Wolf Blitzer turned out loudly in the other room. No, seriously, it happens.

Attention is precious. In any given minute, there's only 30 million minutes worth of attention to be had in Canada: and only 4/5th to 3/4 of the time too (we do sleep). There's only 290 million or so minutes worth in North America. (I'm discounting infants here...)

What was special during the the 1890's, before mass live media, was that people could rip out a coupon take action on an offer at a later point. I think something strange happened with measurement during the era of the movie (post 1914?), the radio, and ultimately the TV. For awhile there, during the era of 3 TV networks, advertisers could get the attention of 80% of the people for a full minute. Attribution may have been easier when attention was so concentrated.

Attention is more fragmented not only because of the Internet, but because the more places the Internet is at. At the same time, the Internet medium is more instant than a newspaper or a TV.

It's the 1890's on meth.

It's harder than ever for advertisers to get your attention. And it's more important than ever to measure whether or not you're even breaking through the noise in the first place.

Attention is a useful as a predictor for the only dependent variable that really only ever matters: profit.

It's well worth the effort in trying to quantify and optimize against it.

The Common Data Set

If you've been attending the Web Analytics Association Research Committee calls, you'll know that I've been troubled by this question of a 'common data set'.

As it is right now, data that is common, clean, and relevant to web analytics is rare. To be sure, there are heaps of open source log files (I believe the Wiki Foundation made 5 terabytes available for download awhile back), but in terms of there being some manageable CSV file out there - it's pretty rare.

Such a dataset is pretty useful from a few perspectives.

For one, it would enable researchers within our community to use a verifiable data source when making assertions about the importance of different metrics. I'm dissatisfied with what I can demonstrate here: only 'theory and definitions'. I'm certain that several other people are too. A common data set which people could go at and demonstrate their ideas would be invaluable from a community perspective.

I think it would also reduce the bullshit quotient quite a bit too.

For two, it would give directors and managers of analytics talent a great way to evaluate prospective talent using real data. Practitioners can't share a lot of their work. Almost always it is subject to a number of NDA's. (And with good reason).

For three, it would offer a verifiable way to test general claims. That's the root of real community science. Verifying results and allowing other people to confirm those claims.

What's the problem? Why isn't there such a data source now?

First, no company would want to publish current, relevant data. It would allow enterprising competition to take advantage of them. Secondly, the question of format comes to mind: most analytics is hosted on third party systems, and free logfile readers that are 'good' are vanishingly rare.

There are solution spaces I can think of.

Somebody might want to buy the books and databases of a bankrupt company. Somebody might want to leave the site hosted and make all the (non-personally identifiable) information freely available so the community of web analysts could conduct an autopsy on it. We'd have to make the web analytics vendor logins all available (which would be a stretch, but not insurmountable). Though, truth be told, the thought of it being my bankrupt company - out there all exposed - makes my blood go cold. But you never know. Somebody might be into that.

There's also the great guys at Quantcast. While they don't have clickstream data, they do make available an awful lot of data on their website for free. Problem is, of course, that it's not all nicely ETL'd into a format that is convenient and distributable within the community.

I wouldn't blog about it if I didn't think that it's an opportunity for us all to do some good and advance the practice. And it's a practice that is worth advancing.

IMC Vancouver: Social Media for Business

I'm looking forward to paneling at IMC Vancouver on September 18th. The topic is social media for business. Naturally, I'll be talking about social media analytics.

The intersection of business strategy, quantitative methods, and online word of mouth (social media) has the capacity to be really powerful in the hands of somebody who understands that it's actually a medium. There's message, there response, there's measurement of that response, there's an opportunity to improve upon the next message. It's also like any other medium too. You got to pay to play. It isn't free.

It isn't free for your customers either. Social media still takes time and attention time: and that's still a cost. But the difference is that it's never been more convenient for customers to rave or to rant about your company and your brand.

In 1995, a customer needed to know HTML or BBS software if they wanted to rant and rave online. It didn't keep them from using good old fashioned open-your-yap and tell your friends word of mouth marketing. It wasn't convenient to do so online is all. In 2009, you can tell your friends on Twitter in a scant 140 characters. You can get your Twitter hooked up to your Facebook and annoy hundreds of more people with those updates. It's becoming almost too convinient.

Every marketing medium is somewhat measurable in some way. I'll talk aboout practical ways of measuring this 'new' medium.