When I was 6. My mom dropped me off at the base of Powder Mountain and said “have fun, I’ll see you tonight.” My ski instructor taught me some of the basics and soon enough I was snow plowing down the bunny hill like an old pro. After one exceptionally fantastic run, I made it to the bottom of the hill with a huge smile on my face, expecting to see the same matching smile on my instructor’s face. Instead of a smile, there was a worried look and a lesson. “Jason, if you want to become an amazing skier, you are going to have to start falling down.”

No one. Let me repeat. NO ONE, plays at the top of their game without first making a lot of mistakes and falling on their ass many, many times. If you aren’t falling down, you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. If you aren’t falling down, you are not stepping outside your comfort zone. If you aren’t falling down, you aren’t progressing.

Start falling on your ass. Don’t beat yourself up for it, celebrate it. If you are surrounded by friends or colleagues who like to belittle you, beat you up, or treat you as a child for your mistakes, then do what you can to remove them from your life. They are the kids who sit at the base of the mountain mocking you for falling down, yet are no where to be seen when you successfully navigate your first double black diamond.

There seems to be a popular sermon going around that if you aren’t constantly climbing your way up the corporate ladder, then you don’t have any real influence and you aren’t able to effect change. Bullshit! It is often those leaders who don’t hold the official title that are impacting the most change in organizations. If you are hyper focused on making the next leap up in leadership so you can have more money, a fancier title, and more influence, then you are bound to live a life filled with frustration and despair.

This week Eric Peterson published a blog post titled ‘Finally! Standards Come to Web Analytics.’ I am very appreciative of Eric generating much needed debate about this extremely important topic because if we don’t do something ourselves, the standards will be dictated to us, and I don’t think any of us want.

Eric says that Google Analytics has become the de facto standard for our industry simply because GA is “the world’s most popular and widely deployed web analytics solution.” If we subscribe to this argument, then the title of the post should have been ‘Finally! Standards Come to Web Analytics…..AGAIN!!!!’ as we have been here before, there is nothing new here.

What Google Analytics has done, publishing a Web Analytics Glossary, is no different than what every other vendor has already done in the past. So why isn’t the glossary that Omniture published 5 years ago, when nearly every Fortune 500 company had Omniture deployed, the de facto standard? Why isn’t the glossary that Webtrends published, before Omniture was even born, the de facto standard?

If the answer to that question is that WT or Omniture or Unica or any other vendor never had the market penetration that GA has, then I would argue that market share shouldn’t dictate who defines standards. Under this argument, all web standards should be defined by the Internet Explorer team (as it has historically been the worlds most popular and widely deployed web browser) — I don’t want that, do you?

What makes standards so valuable and meaningful, is that they are universally accepted amongst all users and vendors. If a vendor, such as Google (and to be fair to Google, they are not taking this stance as far as I am aware), attempts to unilaterally create industry standards, the question that Eric asks at the end of his post is the correct question, does the community at large, both end users and vendors, agree with the GA’s standards?

For Google, or any other vendor attempting to go this alone, this becomes a very dangerous proposition in that if the community feels that the vendor is presenting standards that will immediately benefit them, and not necessarily anyone else, they will quickly lose credibility. That is why historically standards have been created through community collaboration, and yes, it’s damn hard to do but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach.

I love Eric’s post and take it as a challenge to stop being so damn lazy and make the change we so wish to see happen and continue to work collaboratively as a community and not get distracted by every Zach Sawyer that transfers here from rich, expensive, car driving, high school.

I am very honored to present this guest post, written by Jennifer Day, on the subject of passion. This is a great read, thanks for the contribution, Jennifer.

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Some time ago Rudi Shumpert posed a question on Twitter: “How do you teach passion?” He received many responses, but most said about the same as I did, “You don’t teach passion, you inspire it.” Since then, I’ve been mulling over a post about developing passion and specifically a passion for web analytics.

I also said to Rudi, regarding passion, “kindle it. Like building a fire – passion as a burning thing is pretty apt.” Let’s extend that metaphor a bit – I do think that you have to gather the right materials to build that fire. You can get any observant person to be curious about analytics, but if you want to build passion you need to find someone who is intrigued by the idea of making a difference to a business using data. That’s your dry wood, that’s your moss, that’s your fire pit. (If you will.)

When seeking the right base material or candidate, be careful not to confuse passion with cheerleading. Not every fire is a bonfire, and no one wants a wildfire. I’ve been accused of being not passionate about analytics and was taken aback at the time. However, they were right on two counts:

1.) Analytics is a tool used for solving problems – one of many tools. I am passionate about fixing problems and solving puzzles. Just like a carpenter is passionate about building things, not about hammers.

2.) I am not single-minded about analytics – I do not think it’s a cure-all. In the specific case of the accusation, they were looking for someone single-minded.

And, really, also 3 – I’m simply not very effusive. If they wanted a talker, they had the wrong girl – period. (Twitter babble notwithstanding.)

I raise this so that you may recognize: passion is not a simple thing, and maybe a simplistic passion isn’t what you want in an analyst. If you are trying to kindle passion, you need to identify the right triggers for the individual. I’ve worked with very technical analysts who most enjoy solving problems using code and statistics. I’ve worked with very general business oriented analysts who most enjoy enabling data- informed decision and seeing results. I’ve worked with artistic analysts who most like illustrating the story data tells. One of the beauties of our field is that it can be fulfilled from many angles.

Developing a passionate analyst starts with finding their main triggers. Allow them to develop in that single dimension first. They need to get their feet under them. Once they gain confidence, they need to begin to branch out and be challenged. In a perfect world, analysts are arranged into teams where they can complement each other and learn from each other.

A discussion on the importance of understanding total cost of ownership.

Read The Cowboy Code here.

Back in April I wrote a blog post titled ‘Analytics All-Stars: Create Custom Dashboards Using APIs.’ The post described the high-level framework needed to create actionable dashboards outside of the SiteCatalyst interface. After publishing the post, I received comments from several people asking for more detailed instructions on how to create custom dashboards, so I decided to create a 3 part series detailing each step in the process.

Continue reading Part 2 on the Keystone Solutions Blog

That’s right, most of the so called “customer service” you are receiving, most likely sucks.

This weekend,  my grandparents asked me to accompany them while they purchased a new car.  My grandma insisted that they stay local,”I want to buy from one of dealers in this town because I know them and they will take care of me.”  I found myself shaking my head, grumbling under my breath that she was just being “old fashioned.” However, by the end of the day, the experience really caused me to take pause and question if all our efforts to create a global marketplace, where everything is bigger, better, and most importantly cheaper, had a dark side of killing personal relationships.

My grandparents live in a quaint old town, with a classic main street that is lined with local shops, everything from a soda fountain that still cooks greasy burgers and fries to a shoe repair shop that that has been there for 90 years.  However, with each passing year, main street is slowly dying, being pushed out by large box stores being built on the edge of town.  This same scene is being played out across the country as we demand we get our products quicker and quicker for cheaper and cheaper. But at what cost?

Compared to the local car dealership, that has been taking care of my grandparents for over 50 years, the people staffing the local box stores and chain restaurants are just temporary. The guy at the car dealership has been there 20 years and will probably be there another 40, he took the business over from his father, they are “part of the town.”  The girl working down at the Home Depot probably won’t be there next year, the guy taking  your order at Wendy’s will have moved on the next time you stop in. It’s not that they don’t care and it’s not that these businesses don’t stress the importance of good customer service, it’s that they simply aren’t part of the community.

So as businesses are expanding and main street is dying, what are you doing to ensure that you are part of the community and most importantly, you are giving your customers the same great customer service that the small shop on Main Street, Anytown USA, loyally gave their customers for 150 years?

Back in December, I wrote a blog post detailing my frustration with Omniture for charging clients to access their expanded video library called Enterprise TV.

Although I felt as if I had laid out a well thought out argument, many at Omniture felt differently. They felt personally attacked. They felt as if I was taking cheap shots at them. From friends on the inside, I heard stories of horrible things that were being said about me. There were threats of removing me from the Omniture Advisory Board. There were calls placed to my employer. So I took down my blog. That is when all hell broke loose. The community began to attack Omniture for their behavior. It got ugly, really quick, with it culminating in the creation a Hitler spoof video, from an unknown member of the community, insinuating that Omniture was trying to silence a vocal critic.

We had reached a fork in the road.  The management team at Omniture could have chosen to simply ignore this event or they could use it as a learning opportunity.  They choose the later.  A few weeks after this incident went down, I received a call from Omniture and was extended an invitation to speak to a large group of marketing managers from Adobe about the experience and my views on how corporations can use social media to better listen and respond to their communities.

Unbeknownst to me, Omniture was also using this event as an opportunity to train key employees so that if there were ever a similar event in the future, they would be better prepared to handle it.

Fast forward 8 months. Another pretty serious issue between myself and Omniture. I went to Twitter and threatened to expose them in a blog post but this time was different. They didn’t overreact, they didn’t take it as a personal attack, they didn’t throw gasoline on the fire. Several people reached out to me, asking how they could help resolve the issue. They didn’t promise they would have the answers but they did promise to get the right people involved who did.

I was amazed, the reaction and the way things unfolded were complete opposite of what happened back in December. After talking with several people, I was connected with someone who could help address my issue and we sat down and had a professional conversation to address my concerns.

A huge company like Adobe could have simply written off what happened back in December, they could have taken the stance that they are a huge multinational company and I’m just one little blogger, with about 10 people who read by blog, and continue on with the status quo. But they didn’t, they actually took the time to learn from this ugly moment in time and to train their employees to be better able to address similar issues that were sure to come up via a social channel at some point in the future.

Bravo Omniture & Adobe for actually listening and for taking the initiative to learn and grow from this experience. I am impressed.

I’m a pretty private person. One of my mom’s greatest fears is that I will move to the mountains and become a hermit. But today, I feel like I just need to share this story.

For 6 years, our family struggled with infertility issues, which resulted in at least 4 miscarriages. When I couldn’t have a biological child of my own, I got Keykers. He was my baby. He was my best friend.

He taught me about unconditional love. He taught me to be accepting of everyone, no matter the situation, you never know the personal trials that someone is going through. I haven’t learned this lesson so well yet but Keykers was perfect at it. No matter how bad I felt, no matter how scared I was, he was always by my side and loved me and made me feel safe in some of the darkest years of my life.

On the grand scale of things, the stuff we stress out about and fight about everyday, really doesn’t matter. Living life and making memories with your family is what really matters.

So remember, if only for this day, if someone cuts you off in traffic, is rude to you at the store, or whatever it is, please just give them the benefit of the doubt. They may be dealing with a very heavy heart. They may have just had to let their best friend go.

I love you Keykers. Everything is ok now.