30 ways to shock yourself by bre pettis (cc: by-NC)

I’m quite tired of Social Media. I’m rather amused by how much we tend to think it does and how little it ends up delivering.

I’ve had enough of watching the promise go in vain. I’ve seen too many examples of agencies and companies tuning Social Media into television. What do I mean? They have made novel (sort of) media into the same old waste. We’ve failed on the promise (premise?) of transparency, we’ve turned too much of it into mere entertainment.

This has pushed me to look elsewhere lately. I’m desperately looking for the next unstained piece of technology that I can help colonize before the evil greedy arrogants unavoidably take over.

Cloud computing? Too dull, too backend. Interesting, but overly niche.

Semantic Web? Well… I like it, yes, but, once again, something only nerds would find interesting.

Mobile? Not my game. By far.

So I default to what I know. And I become a critic. Maybe I will not colonize a new theoretical space but put up a good fight instead. Try to raise the values of authenticity and conversation close to the heart.

Thus I shall denounce every crappy campaign, every false premise, every piece of painted cardboard I come across.

Because Social Media might have been bastardized to near-death, but it ain’t over till its over.

The Challenge shall become darker, more sarcastic and more acid than ever before.

I’m back for good.

I look at the twittverse and it reminds me of what I know of the 60s. Too much flower power, high hopes and interest in changing the world, but little real action and tangible proposals.

Take into account the recent events that had to do with Iran’s election. I’ll grant you that technology played a pretty decent job allowing the world to find out about what was going on at Iran (to some extent).

Yet the problem is when poeple that don’t live in Iran start acting like they could actually have an impact. Like that idea of changing your twitter location to Tehran to confuse Censors.

(dramatic pause)

For intelligence sake! Do people actually think the Iranian government is moronic enough to completely ignore IP location or trace routing technologies. I can picture the Secret Service guy in some government bunker thinking: “Oh, Gee, I’m so confused this guy with a Manhattan IP says he is located in Tehran, what will we do? Lets re-count votes”.

Don’t get me wrong, I know this is all well-intentioned, but it lacks thinking.And it lacks real action.

The impression I get is that most of the twitters actually go to bed at night with the notion that by changing their Twitter Avatars to green and using the #IranElection hashtag the world has become a better place.

That is our 2009 perception of activism: type something in 140 characters, that ought to have an impact, Right? Wrong!

Then of course we get hit by news telling that the US state department asked for a maintenence reschedule so that the Twitts about IRan would keep coming.

“If the US state deparment asks for that then Twitter must be really important! I’ll sleep soundly tonight!”

Sorry, but: Holy Fucking Shit.

We have been amused to idocy. We are so bombarded by information, we have been positively reinforced so much that we actually think we are that important.

Saddest thing about it is that people could actually make a difference in a lot of aspects. But not by twitting, or using hashtags or changing avatars to green, but by actually doing stuff.

Now we also find out that despite what media and new media tries to make the crowd believe Twitter did not play an important role in Iran.

The whole “changes happen one step at a time” thing has rooted so deeply that people actually believe a 140 character message has an impact. Change happens when people take real steps. Not twitted steps or verbal steps. Things happen when people act, not when they hashtag.

I think we need to grow up and grow out of this self-inflicted deceit. We need to go back at thinking at lenght. And by length I mean longer than 140 characters.

Well, hum, I don’t think so, clearly the mountain-view gang is worried about other stuff, not twitter. Twitter does not overlap with what google does. Yet it does open the door to something somewhat novel.

One of the main differences of twitter with “chat” as we knew it is that the content is stored, indexed, and publicly available in the form of webpages. IRC, for instance (or Messenger, or Yahoo! IM) uses its own protocol to transfer, store and access information which, in most  cases is not publicly available either.

The so-called “real time web” then is actually “almost real time web”. This makes a small difference to the human interactions (things happen as fast as we can assimilate them) but has huge implications from a technological and indexing point of view.

This is where google comes into play, why they shouldn’t worry and why this rumor about big G’s plans to launch microblogging search makes perfect sense.

Let me explain.

Twitter is endogamy. It is a self-contained universe. Fair enough, its API allows all sorts of interactions with the outside world and extensibility through other services and programs, but it all orbits around the same. Google, on the other hand has always been an outside-looking company and set of services.

Google’s basic premise is to crawl what others generate in order to allow people to find that content. That premise does not have to change with the so-called real-time web. That is what makes companies such as google so interesting, the fundamentals are so simple that they can adapt to changes without having to change them. As a matter of fact what google needs is other real time content-generation sites and services to proliferate.

How so? since most people use Twitter it makes perfect sense to use Twitter’s native search when looking for the latest. But what would happen if there were another big player in the scene? You’d end up using a search engine that indexes them both. That is if such two things existed. It does not make sense for google to buy Twitter, but it makes perfect sense for google to foster and help new players to enter that market.

A lot has been said about how important(sic) Twitter is in news-spreading. I remain skeptic.

I plan to blog about the Iran-Twitter affair soon (and I know most people won’t like that post), but a quick lesson learnt from the entire thing is that Twitter is neither a good nor reliable news source. It is a good alert system, granted, but if you need in-depth information, background or analysis you better seek some place else.

In what seems to be the trend with every new wave of web technologies (scrape the term technologies, this is not technology, call it “usage”) the signal to noise radio decreases. If you watch the entire river of tweets you’ll only spot a very tiny percentage that are meaningful in any way. Yet, I think enough has been said about the amount of rubbish going on in twitter all of the time.

Bottom line is: Would I buy Twitter stock? Probably not for the long run. Do I think Real time web is here to stay? yes it is, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

That “tag” stick to me all through out my life, even in my professional life.

Question is: am I really a troublemaker? Yes and No.

I have 2 curses:

• I always speak out what is on my mind, and I don’t care if it is “good for my career” or anything of that sort
• I have a very critic point of view on most stuff that I come upon.

Do the math, I don’t like most of what I see and I’m vocal about it no matter what. This has headed me in the way of trouble more times than I dare to disclose publicly in this blog.

That being said I must admit I am quite proud of being tagged as a troublemaker. “Why would you?” you might ask. There are several reasons.

For starters it means I wont settle with what is instated or accepted as a practice. At least not if I see defects or possible improvements. This is bound to create all sorts of trouble with those who find themselves comfortable with the status quo. People who are comfortable with how things stand are, quite usually, quite boring.

Usually I not only rant about stuff I dislike but engage in the task of trying to change it. Now that is the single thing that gets me into trouble more often. A huge percentage of the people that I encounter are too comfortable living in mediocrity. I hate that. I’d rather fail a thousand times than walk down the beaten path.

I also have a bit of a problem with authority. I don’t believe in authority. at least not as Authority is usually understood. Just because someone makes more money than I do or has higher position than I do, does not mean they have any sort of authority over me. If you want me to regard you as an authority you’d better prove you are smarter, more experienced, better connected and with a broader view than me.

Bottom line is: being a troublemaker is an advantage for anyone who wants to hire me, fail to see that and you are probably not worth of my services.

That rendered me disconnected.

But it also serves as a good analogy for the disconnection I’ve been feeling with social media in the last couple of months.

I don’t like where most things are heading nor the way many agencies and companies are handling Social Media campaigns or initiatives.

There are some exceptions, but the general rule of thumb is that 90% of the SMM initiatives I see are either a. not authentic; b. not original; c. poorly executed; d. lack an objective; e. all of the above (in most cases).

Maybe it is just a sign of the times, but it does not suck less because of that.

Knowing myself this will yield 1 result: I’ll try to come up with something interesting to cut through all of this waste of time and resources.

I’ve change this site’s URL from blog.estebanglas.com.ar to plainly estebanglas.com.

I’m also moving to a new house in less than a week.

I also have many draft posts I want to polish and publish, but I might be internet challenged for some time.

Start the presses!

Yesterday we had a very interesting day at work. Let me recap how things turned out first.

A couple of weeks ago Engadget published some shots of a small Pocket PC that were snugged out of our Beijing headquarters. This was rare. We usually keep concepts strictly confidential and behind closed doors. Yet it leaked. What to do?

David Churbuck decided it was time to put our money where our mouth was and contacted the Beijing design labs team, discussed the possibility of going open on it and so it was decided. We needed to be clear on what that shots actually were. Transparency, remember?

We were to publish a blog post on Friday. After editing and prepping the post I uploaded the pictures to the flickr account, marking them as “private” so none would see them but me.

I also started a little tease on twitter, using our @lenovosocial account:

Calls to newly posted pictures at twitter

The idea was to create some expectation towards the blog post. To be honest, that didn’t work. At all.

Thus came Monday. We made the final adjustments to the post and, since I needed to insert the images into the post I marked them as “public” in flickr. Hell gates went wide open.

Within minutes the pics were picked by the main gadget / tech sites. We know they watch our flickr stream, but not that closely. While I was prepping to publish it went crazy.

We were expecting some level of visibility, but this wildly surpassed our expectations. Our aim was that the blog post should get the attention, not the pictures.

What ended up happening was a 2 wave shock. While many sites and blogs talked about the pictures and went into wild speculations about what that little pocket-fitting-thing would actually do we were publishing the official story. After pushing that live and starting to draw attention to it there were updates all over the place, letting people know that what they were looking at was a concept.

There were many lessons learnt. Most of those shall be kept private for the time being. The ones I can share with you here are:

• Content is still king (even when content is just pictures)
• “Viral” will happen in unexpected ways. And the not-so-prefabricated virals go to greater lengths than the agency stunt ones.
• Innovative design is the key for a company in the PC industry

Things didn’t play exactly as planned, but they turned out nicely nonetheless.

(Post en español!)

Entertainment.

Buying stuff should be fun. Or as close to fun as it can get. It must be a pleasurable experience. Once we understand that our abandonments will invariably go down.

Today, on my daily sweeping read of my Google reader I find out, thanks to Churb, that Craig Merrigan, VP of Consumer at Lenovo has joined the merry band of bloggers in the ranks of the company.

So I click the link and head over to this newly-found reading material. What do I see? The very first post I set my eyes on is talking about e-commerce, and from a perspective that has several contact points with what my personal opinion is.

(…) during my round trip to and from the milk, I munch a free sample, and grab a box of fudgesicles, knowing that my kids’ enthusiasm will counteract my wife’s annoyance.

When we build e-commerce sites, certainly we need to know what the customer wants, and give it to them.  But we also need to use our spiffiest analytical tools to optimize two things:  profit (dollars, not percent) and Net Promoter Score.

Yes!

One carrot for every site visitor

So, what would happen if we combine this thoughts on making the Shopping process entertaining and tempting our customers with extra treats with that other thing that has become a buzzword lately: Targeted ads.

Forget about the “ads” part for the time being. Lets just concentrate just on the Targeted part instead.

Using smart analytics, a powerful CMS and some multivariate wizardry e-commerce sites have the potential to create a unique experience for each customer that arrives to the site.

E-commerce has three main advantages over Grocery stores: 1) you don’t have to physically move products from one side to another, shifting aisles and pushing fridges,  2) you can track every single visitor and see how they behave and 3) you know where the visitors come from and, to a certain extent, in some cases even why.

With that in mind it is quite natural to imagine scenarios where visitor segmentation serves the purpose to profile each visit and build the e-commerce experience accordingly.

Granted, the approach would require massive investment in both Analytics and CMS, but the payoff should be huge. If the analytics team can profile and breakup visitors into smartly differentiated groups (natural search visitors, ad visitors, affiliate program referrals, coupon page referrals, etc.), pass along that information to the publishing / developer / user experience people and they, in turn can create experience that present stuff in ways that maximize the buying potential of each segment you’d have a winning recipe.

Multivariate tests should help determine what works for each segment.

In-site behavior should also be tracked, studied and used to present the visitors with different options according to the path they take.
This can be taken to various levels of complexity, and an investment & experimentation to revenue ratio would be determined. In other words: how much to invest, experiment and segment to obtain the highest return.

Another ingredient comes from a suggestion Mark made in the comments of my December post:

Reading what people write about your site shopping experience can fill in the gaps in analytics. Sites like Bizrate gather customer comments, and of course, blogs and forums are another great place to learn about the barriers to purchase one may have unknowingly created.

So Social Media (monitoring) can also play an active role in enhancing conversion rates and customer spending on e-commerce websites.

The final piece would be a dashboard that “adjusts” the settings under special circumstances. It is not the same to have an e-commerce site during the seasons than in Mid September when nothing happens. Since such events can be planned, they should be planned.

Stir together, cook for 90 minutes and you’ll end up with a “Fluid e-commerce experience”.

We don’t all have the same tastes, why should our shopping experience be dull and unique for all the population? The tools exist, the expertise exists, and some sites already run similar experiments.

Finally I encourage you to go ahead to his site and subscribe to the feed. It looks like we have another very eclectic blog at hand.

The event was scheduled at 9:30 AM, and it only started at 10:30… oh well.

Presentation title is: “Accountability, Analytics & You”

“I want to share with you what is possible to do through the web”

Avinash starts by presenting his book, “Web Analytics an Hour a Day”. People pay for something that is free (through his blog). He started as a blog. He is passionate about it, takes risks.

“It is astounding that a company (google) that does no Advertising has so much power”. Well, the “no advertising” is relative, IMHO, we see google everywhere, on every online add, ain’t that advertising of sorts?

“Faith Based Initiatives”: How can the success of an Ad in a magazine be measured? An ad on Yahoo’s homepage for the same product is not a faith based initiative, because it is relevant and can be measured.

Online Marketing: not faith based initiative.

“I am not telling you not to run ads on magazines, just telling you that it is not as accountable as the web”.

As with everything in life analytics can be as complicated as you want, but it is easy to start with it.

“Google holds your trust with us as the most important thing we can ever have, we realize how fragile it is. If you share your Analytics data is just used to benchmark; if you choose not to share there is a legally binding term that prevents us to share it”.

“Nothing I’m going to share with you is unique to Google Analytics, you can use any tool”

Showing Geo segmentation, content segmentation, how to break down data within Google Analytics.

“Bounce rate is one of my favorite metrics. I think it is a sexy metric, I love it because beyond pageviews and visits (which are analytics currency) it shows the user experience, it shows how much you suck”

“I came, i puked, i left, that is bounce rate”

“It is also a very actionable item.”

“Look at the top entry pages in your website and see which of those suck”.

Avinash is analyzing Clarin.com; it has 419 links, not counting buttons. They fotocopy the newspaper and make it a website. Shares http://tr.im/hmSG which is an article that tells where newspapers are going.

Measuring Success

Reports should be focused on outcomes. What you should care about (and what your boss cares about) is how much money you made.

“We improved customers satisfaction by n%” is another possible outcome, that can be shared.

“Life is not like a one night stand, people come many times to your website. You have to understand the behavior of the customers on your website” (picture of a conversion funnel).

“3 pages can account for most bounces. You can fire most of your company, fix those 3 pages and make a lot more conversions”

“It is idiotic to measure the number of members, it is not important how many sign up to your site (Using facebook as example, but when they start actioning on the site. If you are Facebook you want people to come over and over again, you need to analyze whether people spend a lot of time on the site or not”

Shows an example that shows that 66% of people return within the day to the website”

“A newspaper should measure the depth of the visits, this makes you think very differently about your business”

“See what the important segment of people need and want from your site. Take a look at people who puked and left, try to understand why they left”

“70% of the people working on a Newspaper we recently analyzed were writing content with a high bounce and no – return rate”

“The average convertion rate for the US on e-commerce sites is 1.72%. What was happening to the other 98%? It is very important that you quantify the value of that 98%. You can set different goals to see if there are other types of conversions”

“In my blog I measure hits to my about page, it makes me happy, in your company measure the ammount of people who visit the executives page, they will love it, they wont admit it, but they’ll love it.”

“All of the clicks on my blog are tagged, because the conversions happen elsewhere”

“The web is also reducing costs, there are a lot of different conversions of different types going on”

“Look at the whole company, always compute the total economic value of the site. For example, in my last company we saved $3,000 in consultants  each time someone applied jor a job through the website”

“If you do adwords don’t just measure visits and pageviews”

“Getting Visits is OK, making money is astounding”

“In my blog I had 64K visitors, 23K came from Search Engines, searching 11,5K different keywords. That is the power of the web. How do you find those keywords? You can use ‘search based keyword tool‘, what the tool does is bringing the search queries and the indexed pages back together”

“Custom reporting: every individual needs and is interesting in a different set of metrics”

“When you don’t segment your data don’t be surprised when you can’t make any important decisions”

Last part of the the talk: “Fail Faster; Experiment or ‘Die’”

“Most web sites suck because the HIPPOS (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) created them. Never let your Hippo think they are the customer of the website. You need to prove them wrong fast. I recommend you use google website optimizer. I worked with a company that reduced the number of ads in their web page by 30% and increased their ROI”

“Don’t guess, don’t impose, Partner.”

“Competitive Intelligence”

Analyze trends, Identify Audience in smarter ways. You can even look at the competitor’s trends and audience of your competition.

Q&A

“If you share your data on Google Analytics you get access to 6 different metrics as benchmarks”

“Privacy is extremely important. People will share data with you if you are clear enough about what you are collecting. Google has created a plugin that prevents google from collecting data. We believe that Yahoo! and Microsoft will follow this trust mechanisms.”

“A+B testing makes each website more unique. A good example in teh US is if you go to BestBuy and CircuitCity websites, they look alike. Circuit City filled for bankrupcy, Best Buy invests on targeting their audience and testing to optimize the site for their audience”

“There are few things that are shared by most sites. Internal searh (on top right) is one of them. Carts are usually to the right, but a site improved conversions by moving it to the left”