In grad school, I took a class on the management style of Machiavelli’s The Prince vs. the management style of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.  I had always been drawn to Eastern philosophies and the words of the Tao spoke my language.  I was hooked.

Over the past couple of days, I have had numerous conversations with friends, colleagues, and industry experts, that have caused me to take pause and reevaluate the way I work, the way I interact with people, and my general principles in which I conduct business.

Yesterday, I was called out as being a “complainer” and I wondered if that was true, and if I was really adding any value to my industry or if my opinions even mattered at all.  And then I thought, I left my first job out of college because the company I worked for was full of corporate clones, they all spoke the same language, they all nodded in unison when the big guy talked.

I don’t want to be right all the time.  I don’t want to be surrounded by people who agree with everything I say or do.  I want to be challenged, if I’m always right, then how can I ever progress past the current state that I am in?

In Chapter 61 of the Tao, Lao Tzu says “The Master considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.”  If we aren’t open to feedback, to criticism, and to ideas that differ from our own, we will never grow, we will never learn.

You may be asking yourself at this point “great, so how does this relate to web analytics and site optimization?”  Glad you asked.  In our role as analysts, we often challenge and are challenged based on the facts that we present.  The great analysts know that they will never make everyone happy and it’s not about being a “complainer” or being “negative” or being a “cynic”, it’s about being critical and questioning, questioning, questioning.

So, regardless of the role you are in, marketeer, product manager, web analyst, site optimizer, or CEO, if you want to create something great, be open to feedback (both positive and negative), if you want to be mired in mediocrity, surround yourself by people who readily agree with you, people who never push you to improve, people who never challenge you to transcend your limits.

“To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.“

~James Maynard Keenan

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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For 3 days, I was unable to access my FTP server on GoDaddy and I was starting to panic.  I begrudgingly reached for the phone and dialed their support number (a toll number at that). After a 15 minute wait and a 45 minute phone call, it was determined that the problem either was on my end or with my ISP. GoDaddy’s suggestion “contact your ISP”.

My first step was to send an email, explaining the complexity of my problem, to Qwest’s email support. After several hours of not hearing back, not even an automated email saying “we received your request”, I decided I would give the Qwest call center an opportunity to resolve my issue.

“Thank you for calling Qwest. We are experiencing a large call volume at this time. You estimated wait time is MORE THAN TEN MINUTES.”

5 Minutes Later (must be said in the Sponge Bob voice over voice).

“Thank you for calling Qwest. We are experiecing a large call volume at this time. You estimated wait time is LESS  THAN TEN MINUTES.”

5 Minutes Later (must be said in the Sponge Bob voice over voice).

“Thank you for calling Qwest. We are experiecing a large call volume at this time. You estimated wait time is MORE THAN TEN MINUTES.”

After finally reaching an agent, I spent at least 15 minutes trying to explain what FTP was.

Jason: I can’t access my GoDaddy FTP account. I can access it from work but not from home on the Qwest network. GoDaddy suggested I call you.

Qwest: Ok Jason. I want to assure you we will get your issue reconfigured (I think he meant to say “resolved”) shortly.

Jason: Fantastic.

Qwest: Jason, can you see web pages?

Jason: Ahhhh, Yeah, I like web pages but my problem is with FTP.

Qwest: Ok, so you are saying you have a problem with FPP. Let me configure (I think he meant to say “confer”) with my colleagues. {hold music} Ok, Jason, we don’t support FPP, that is why you are seeing this problem.

Jason: F-T-P

Qwest: Ok, let me reconfigure with one of my colleagues.

This went back and forth for over an hour and which point I was told that if I can see web pages the Qwest DSL service is working properly and I would need to hire a local computer technician to solve my problem.

I was at my wits end and decided I would give Qwest one last chance before I canceled my service and looked for a new ISP. I have had good luck resolving Omniture issues with their world-class support via Twitter so I thought Twitter might be the answer in this case as well. I found Qwest’s Twitter account:

Through this Tweet, I was quickly introduced to a top-level engineer at Qwest, who spent 2 hours with me, reconfiguring my network setup, going above & beyond his job to ensure that my network was configured for optimal performance. Not only did he fix the issue I was having accessing my FTP account, he also increased my network speed by 40% with a few modifications.

Did this one support incident have any impact to Qwest’s bottom line? I doubt it. I’m just a small customer, but this one event had a huge impact on my view of Qwest. Not only did I decide to stay with Qwest, at least for 6 more months, I now have a very positive story about how Twitter saved Qwest a customer that I’m more than happy to share with whomever will listen.

As an analyst, I found myself thinking, how would I measure this? How could I attribute the use of Twitter as a support tool to a customer’s lifetime value? I don’t have the answers but I do know that companies who are using social media tools in innovative ways (see also: other than lame PR and marketing efforts) are getting a huge jump on their competition. Companies that are using social media to push PR or who are not using social media at all, will find themselves playing catchup for a long time to come.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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There have been times where, I wouldn’t say I have been asked to fake the numbers but, I have felt like I needed to make my analysis support a desired outcome. As analysts we serve as independent and impartial investigators, whose goal is to deliver insight and analysis to our various customers so that they in-turn can make educated decisions about the future of their products.

If we fall into the trap of sculpting the numbers to support a desired outcome, regardless of the motivation, we are doing ourselves, our customers, and the end-users of our sites, a major disservice.

For some reason, when I think about this topic, I think about how crazy the financial term EBITDA drives me. I don’t like EBITDA, in fact, I’d go as far as saying I hate EBITDA. If you aren’t familiar with the term, EBITDA is a financial measure delivered to investors, that calculates earnings by deducting a lot of expenses (interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and other “non-core expenses). To me it is too open to abuse. Companies use EBITA to make their earnings look better than they really are. Perhaps I’m over simplifying things but I believe that “honesty is the best policy”.

The same holds true in analytics. I’m sure we could find loop holes and semi-ethical ways to fudge the numbers, but in the end, it is always best to be honest and simply report on what we find.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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Hello. My name is Jason. And it’s true, I once worked at Omniture.

It was 3 years ago that I moved on from Omniture to see how things worked on the client side. The company I went to work for had zero web analytics, so I was charged with building the practice from the ground up. I got to work understanding the needs of the business and sending out RFPs. Although I had come from Omniture, I was keeping my companies best intest in mind, and I was set on choosing the vendor that would provide us the greatest long term value.

However one vendor decided that I was simply wasting everyones time, including my own, by going through the RFP process. I was so entertained by this voicemail, that I had it converted to MP3 and had filed it away.

Vendor_Call

One thing I have learned working on the client side is that there never is a single tool that answers all your questions.  If you take a peek under the covers, you’ll notice that I’m running Omniture, Google Analytics, and Yahoo Analytics on my blog, I’m an equal opporunity analyst.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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Companies use office real estate as a means of maintaining a sort of social order. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in deductive logic to observe this sacred, yet often unspoken ritual. Look around, when was the last time you saw a CEO sporting a tricked out cubical?

Now the social order goes something like this.

The Executive
The Executive is typically reserved for your upper crust of the corporate elite, your “C-Levels” and on occasions your senior vice presidents, we just call them SVPs in the industry. The Executive is typically a large and spacious office with views of nature or a sprawling city skyline.

The Mover & Shaker
The Mover & Shaker is custom made for the VP types. Slightly smaller than The Executive, the view is nice but they aren’t as sweeping as you would find in The Executive. They are typically pimped out in the finest leather furniture and a rich mahogany desk which is usually adorned with some sort of a kitschy gadget.

The Middle Manager
The Middle Manager has the same square footage as The Mover & Shaker but the view is of an alley way or parking structure. The office is usually a mess of papers and filing cabinets as the occupant engages in a vain attempt to impress the uppers.

The Team Lead
The Team Lead is an office by definition only. Its square and has walls and a door and may or may not have a window. The Team Lead is an unused closet that has been transformed into an office to keep its occupant un-disgruntled for a short period of time.

In my simple view of the world, why not just kill the office. Do we really need them? Lets transform all that worthless office space into work areas that any employee can make use of if the occasion so arises. The work area is akin to the library I made use of in college when I needed to get away from my drunken roommates who were flinging the neighbor girls panties across the room, I would pack up my books and head to the library for some focused study time.

The work area holds a similar promise. Employees when in need of some private time or just some time to be totally focused on a project can simply walk into a work area, shut the door, and get to work.

It should be clear that these work areas are not land to be conquered or claimed as part of an individuals attempt at empire building. They are, as the name so implies, an area in which one can work undisturbed for a determined period of time.

Join the revolution. Make a stand. Kill the office.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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I had an interesting marketing slick in my eMail this morning from Coremetrics asking the question ‘What’s your back-up plan for when Omniture becomes Adobe?’.

Maybe it’s part of being the top dog but I’ve seen companies like Coremetrics and Unica, rather than marketing their value, market against Omniture. It’s like high school all over again, make someone else look bad so in relation you look better.

It is also interesting that said Coremetrics will not talk to me because “i’m ex-Omniture” and I have the voicemail message to prove it

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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I recently spoke with a friend of mine about my experience using Omniture’s ClickMap product and I thought it may be beneficial to others if I recorded my findings here.

I feared the day that the executives at my company caught wind of the ClickMap tool, it was my experience when I worked at Omniture that executives would gloss over all the sweet features of SiteCatalyst and the sheer power of Discover to droll over the sexy display of ClickMap, yet the data was always questionable.

I decided rather than to shy away, I would dive into ClickMap and test, test, test, until I fully understood how it worked.

Allowing the ClickMap tool to automatically track our links was out of the question, the data was far too inaccurate to be of any value. Omniture recommended I deploy something they called “ObjectID tracking” to solve my tracking issues.

From my testing, the s_ObjectID works perfectly on all link types (simple links, links with query string parameters, exit links) if I manually assign the ID, so that gave me a sense of hope. However, without an automated delivery method, it will be unusable.

My next attempt was to use a plug-in supplied by Omniture that automatically assigns the s_ObjectID to links.

The plug-in is generating the ID based on a combination of the destination link and a sequence number that is applied to the end of the ID. I spent some time trying to get the plugin to work and it seems, after breaking it down, that it works as expected on all link types except links that contain a ‘?’ in them. Any links with a ‘?’ were failed to be overlaid by ClickMap until I added one simple line of code to the plug-in:

ID=ID.replace(“?”,”_”);

What do you know? It fixed all my problems!

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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Ever since Shaq And Ashton made Twitter a household name, it seems like every celebrity and business entity out there is trying to cash in on the popularity of this social networking tool.

I can hear the boardroom conversations now, “shit, we just got WordPress installed because they told us we needed a blog, now you are saying we need to create something called a Twitter account?”

Most companies have no clue how to Tweet and foolishly jump in head first doing the same thing they have done before, pushing PR approved marketing blurbs to an unknown universe of people. I can’t think of a better way of alienating your current and potential customer base.

So who is doing this right?

Omniture ClientCare
Ben Gaines in Omniture ClientCare is a great example of what a corporate Twitter presence should look like. He is a real person, with a real personality. He is knowledgeable and he is a constant presence on Twitter. Have a product issue or question? Send him a Tweet and he will personally follow-up to make sure you are taken care of. What I enjoy most from following Ben on Twitter is that he isn’t just some corporate clone trying to brainwash me into liking the product. He provides valuable insight and is a great escalation point when I run into problems.

JetBlue
JetBlue is another shining example of a company using Twitter the “right way”. Rather then posting an endless and mind numbing stream of Tweets about how cool JetBlue is they are providing a real service on Twitter. They are actively listening to travelers and are responding to each one individually to ensure they have a world-class experience. “I’d like to travel with my pet dog but I don’t know what I can or can’t do” Well, Tweet to JetBlue and ask them and you may get a response back like “Pet carriers can’t exceed 17″L x 12.5″W x 8″H. We’re partial to the JetPaws program: http://www.jetblue.com/jetpaws/ offering a carrier and tips!”

I believe Twitter can be an extremely powerful tool for corporations but only if its done the right way. Remember, social media tools like Twitter are grassroots, don’t go in trying to think you can apply archaic business practices because if you do you are destined for failure.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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Why does everyone with a WordPress blog and a Google Analytics account all of a sudden think they are experts in the field of web analytics? I have never been one to heavily self market or promote myself, so perhaps because of that choice I don’t have the right to complain, but this is my blog and I can do what I want.

It frustrates me to no end to see people, whom in my opinion, are given undo credit, opportunity, and financial gain because they are good at creating an image. “oh snap, this dude has a blog and he calls himself a web analytics expert, he must be good, lets listen to him and follow like blind sheep!”

Perhaps my frustration has more to do with the state of our economy then with the web analytics industry per se. I just see this mentality being a common theme that runs through our society. We have stopped buying products and services because of their value and we have started buying because of their perceived value.

I can’t say it any more beautifully than Mr. Tyler Durden:

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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Mine

Theirs

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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