The Net Takeaway

Tabled

2010-06-05T20:19:06Z

Sometimes, in this world of magical analytics and open source software, the most basic stuff doesn’t get done. Today, we’ll talk about Tables. Yes, the simple process of making a nice looking table for a presentation is still a manual process of pasting into Excel and manually fiddling. When I can cluster gigs of data but I can’t get a good looking table of the results, something seems wrong.

Why is this so hard? Well, easy tables are easy but it can get more complex than you think.

1) Univariate or Bivariate

You can think of these as the classic list or the “2×2” crosstabs we see. These are very popular in that they are easy to create, pretty easy to understand, and have been presented in every Stats 101 class. The most common thing to see inside these tables are counts, but you could also have means of some measures, %age of row/col/table, running total, etc. Your table could be made of 2 Independent Variables, or 1 IV and 1 Dependent Variable. The stats for 2×2 tables are very well known; almost everyone can rattle off “Chi-Square Expected and Observed” though there are others that are used as well.

This can also be extended to more than 2×2: you can have 3×6, etc, but these are just more complex extension of the 2×2 case. In each one, we only have 2 variables we are examining, though each may have many levels.

Most every tool can do this, including Excel (Pivot Tables rock!).

2) More than 2 variables

Now, this gets more tricky. Let’s take Gender, Purchased vs. Not-Purchased, and Presence of Children (Y/N). If we run tables in most packages, we’d get something like this:

Children = Y

GenderXPurch	Purchased	Not-Purchased
M	10	12
F	15	8

Children = N

GenderXPurch	Purchased	Not-Purchased
M	12	10
F	18	5

That is, the tool just prints a 2×2 (or 3×3 or whatever) table filtered for each level of the 3rd variable. If you have a 4th variable, you can usually get the tool to run a bunch of 2×2s for each level of the 3rd and 4th variable combined. The tools can, of course, give all the usual stats for the 2×2 so you can figure out which are useful, and you can change the order of variables in the tables command to see different things in the 2×2… but this isn’t really what you wanted.

In fact, what you may have wanted might have been something like this…

Children	Y	Y	N	N
GenderXPurch	Purchased	Not-Purchased	Purchased	Not-Purchased
M	10	12	12	10
F	15	8	18	5

In fact, you probably wanted the Y cell merged across, and the N cell merged across to make things look nicer, but my HTML isn’t so great. I don’t feel bad, however, because neither can most tools.

These types of tables, where you put additional splits layered on top of bivariates, are often called stub and banner tables or just banner tables or tabs in the market research world. And you’ve seen them in tons of reports, market research output, and even hand made them in Excel.

So, it seems like it should be easy, right? Well, I’ll run down the tools in a moment, but it’s really sad. Pretty much none of the open source options work, and even the commercial ones aren’t much better.

Ok, but it could be fixed, right? Well, there is one other rub…

3) Sample Weighting and Stratification
I mentioned that one of the most popular uses of these tables, these “tabs” or “banner reports”, is in market research. And most folks just assume that their survey sample represents the population and just do their counts. But more advanced researchers know that they have to weight the statistics to account for response bias. If you know that Females make up 50.7% of the US Popl (see http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html) and you only have 30% in your sample, you have to weight up their responses. This is easy in some cases, but some stats become very complex, especially if you have stratified sampling (Wikipedia explains it pretty well at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling).

So, not only would your tool need to display the tables better, but it should also handle the necessary statistics to display properly weighted counts, percentages, and analyses. In R, Thomas Lumley’s survey package does the stats, but even this package doesn’t display banners or tables very well.

So, just how bad is it? Well, let’s see.

R:
Here are just 13 of the many ways to make tables in R: table, xtabs, ftable, ctab, summary (from hmisc), contingency.tables (from Deducer), VCD’s structable, aggregate, epi’s stat.table, rreport (but exports only Latex), xtable, gmodel’s CrossTable, ecodist’s crosstab.

Here are all the ways to make a true banner table: (cricket chirp, cricket chirp)

So, that’s painful. Another problem is the lack of graphical output. Since all of R’s table commands spit out text formatted tables, you can’t just copy and paste them into Excel (or other spreadsheet tools) to reformat them. This is a huge stopper to productivity. Instead, what you really want is either a) formatting control in the program to create a graphically appealing, copy and pastable table, or b) direct output to a system which facilitates this, like Openoffice, Excel, or HTML. Some R commands output to Latex (via sweave), but for the average analyst, this is unusable (I love academics, but come on, asking analysts to use Latex is just wrong! If sweave is the best we can do, then we are all in deep trouble.).

I’ll talk more about this below. Ok, we love R, but what about other options?

SPSS: If you can afford it, the wonderful CTABLEs aka Custom Tables module is really nice. Besides a great gui:

they also have the ability to treat a variable as a measure or a dimension as you wish. You can build the table WYSIWYG with as many layers as make sense, and put multiple measures in each cell with various constraints and conditions. You can combine levels on the fly and recalc the counts, which is fantastic. Gold star to SPSS for this one. If you use SPSS, you really should be using Custom Tables

Systat: Can only do 2×2 with the filter header. No banners at all.
Minitab: Usual 2×2 with filter header, no banners at all.
Statistica: Does offer stub and banner tables, but not much control over them… While it’s not SPSS, it’s also cheaper
Stata: Stata’s table commands are all text output based, and don’t really offer a banner table.
SAS: SAS has proc tabulate and proc report, and these start to get you to stub and banner… but require some coding, and are still text output. That being said, they are pretty far along, and so are 3rd after SPSS and Statistica.
Spotfire S-Plus: Same as R, just the 2×2 with filter header.

So, what do real market research folks do? Most use SPSS and SAS, or settle for the small number of overpriced “tabulation” programs still on the market which just make tables. Programs like Wincross, Quantum (the classic solution for many large survey houses, now owned by SPSS as SPSS-MR Quantum), Uncle Tabulation, and Marketsight [SAAS] are sort of helpful, but not cheap. For example, Wincross costs $2500 per user!

Are there any open source solutions? cCount is a DOS program which requires a compiler to run Quantum scripts. And that’s it.

Solutions
I’m disappointed by what I’ve learned. If you want to make banner tables, you literally have to use Excel and hand construct them, or buy SPSS. There has to be another way.

I think R will be the solution. It’s current myriad of table commands stink, tis true, but I’ve started to put together an approach that combines the best of those table-oriented commands, the amazing magic of reshape, and some HTML/word/excel output to create good looking tables. It’s not there yet, but I’ll keep plugging away. In addition, the useR!2010 R Conference has some good posters and talks about similar problems of needing higher quality output, so we’ll see what comes about.

The Nagging Question: Internal Attribution [1]

2009-11-17T02:26:22Z

Looking over my “Questions to Answer” list, one kept coming back to haunt me. I was attacking pieces of it, but I realized that it’s a huge gap in the web analytics world, and I want to get people thinking about it.

So much attention has been focused on Marketing Attribution: users see my marketing across multiple channels and so I have to combine them in a weighted fashion to “divvy out credit”, to decide what combination of marketing is most effective for me. Simple versions are the “Last Click” attribution we all know and love (well, put up with). More advanced models look a combination of metrics (a mix of First Click, Average, and Last Click attribution) or trying advanced models to weigh it out. Some just give tools (the Atlas Engagement Mapping model, for example) to let you choose your weights, but do not actually optimize the weights for you. And some folks out there say that the actual weights don’t matter, let a model optimize on your behalf and don’t worry about it (media mix companies come to mind).

Now, those are all interesting, but now that I am client-side, I realize that e-commerce sites have the exact same problem on the site. That is, I have a search function, I have product pages, I have a home page, and other functions and pages. How do I attribute an eventual conversion to these features? How do I decide where I need more investment, and what features/pages are doing fine?

In fact, I do want to give credit to marketing sources and provide ROI. But I also want to understand what on my site is contributing effectively to driving conversion, and what is merely assisting.

For all the attention to the marketing attribution problem, there appears to be little attention shown to the problem of Internal Site Attribution.

How do most tools address this? The classic “Multiple Whole Attribution” approach, which sucks. They simply give total basket/sales credit to every page which was in the session leading to the sale. No weighting, no adjustment, and when added all up, it sums to huge multiples of the actual money generated due to double (and quadruple and quintuple etc.) counting.

How might we solve this? One way is to simply take all the techniques tried for marketing attribution and apply them to your internal site experience (see lists above). Categorizing your pages helps. So, you could say that a user is exposed to the home page, some product category pages, a search results page or two, some product detail pages, and then some cross-sells via the cart on the way out. Just like a user is exposed to display and search ads, you can try to tease out the interactive impact of these various impressions.

I call to the various web analytic companies out there working so hard on the external marketing attribution problem: lots of competition in that space; lots of vacuum in internal site attribution. Marketing, esp. search marketing, is indeed important. After all, you spend money on that stuff, so you need to see it’s ROI. But if you are in e-commerce, I’d say you spend a pretty good amount of resources on the site itself in time and money, including content acquisition and editing, product merchandising and management. Shouldn’t you get some sense of the ROI for this? Should you invest in better on-site search, or simply lower your prices? Does that cool flash configurator help, or is it really the combination of users who use it AND visit your support forums?

Web analytic guys, time to help clear this one up.

And yes, for those following, this is indeed part of my What Web Analytics is Missing complaints, bridging “Understand my Site” and “Understand my Business”. This is an area ripe for the picking, one that any site manager who has to “defend the site” will be ecstatic to see solved. If you are looking to differentiate your analytic tool, this would be a good way to do it.

Coremetrics and Asterdata

2009-11-12T15:43:31Z

It’s old news to some, but new to others. Coremetrics licensed Asterdata’s high speed analytic processing database systems a few months ago, and I was lucky enough to see some coming attractions based on the tech changes.

I am not able to say details on what I saw, but I can say that having Asterdata on the back end is really starting to open up possibilities for them. Like many of these systems, you stop thinking in terms of what is possible given the constraints of the database, and instead say “what if I just open up the flexibility to the user, and assume the database can scale up to meet it?”.

Folks who come from ROLAP and MOLAP backgrounds on the big 3 (Oracle, MS’s SQL Server, IBM’s DB2) all seem stuck in a mindset of “what queries can we handle given that we need tons of indexes, temp space, and denormalized fact tables?”. Asterdata, Greenplum, Netezza, etc. all change this mindset into “just write the SQL and we’ll make the query work”. (Yes, it’s not your eyes, all 3 of these sites look almost identical). The rise of parallelization and columnar data stores, and the recent addition of map/reduce frameworks and cloud capability into these systems, can provide massive speedups for ongoing flexible reporting, but more importantly, provides the the ability to drive a wide variety of ad-hoc analytic queries at speed.

What was Coremetrics using before? Well, I can point you to this Coremetrics press release from 2000 where they licensed EMC, Oracle and Sun Microsystems and one could assume that some of that tech has stayed around all these years, upgraded faithfully over time, just like every other enterprise.

If you are interested in keeping up with this new world of analytically enhanced databases, the Monash Research DBMS2 site is, without question, the best source for information about these companies. Every post is full of interesting database goodies, technical enough to go below the marketing, but business savvy enough to understand what market needs each company is meeting and missing. Highly recommended.

As Coremetrics allows me to speak publicly about what I am seeing, I’ll point out some of what I like and some of what is still missing. My hope for them is that they manage to embrace the flexibility this new platform offers instead of staying constrained to point fixes on current capability. What I’ve seen so far is very promising… but only when it’s in our hands will we know if it truly opens new doors for us.

WASP Acquired [1]

2009-10-19T19:05:01Z

I think I was way behind on the news, but I’m pleased to give congrats to Stéphane Hamel on the acquisition of his wonderful WASP tool by iPerceptions, announced on October 14, 2009.

I’ve been a big fan and proponent of the WASP tool since it was released, and I’ve mentioned it here before.

I continue to recommend the tool, and I’m very pleased for Stéphane Hamel. Now, even more reason to give it a shot, as we watch what iPerceptions does with it.

Aggregating Tags

2009-10-15T13:37:40Z

One of the funnest parts of any web analytics role is instrumentation: the tagging of the various parts of the site (Whee.). While what I mention below may not have happened to me, every one of them has happened to someone I’ve worked with:

Having to tell one person that no, you can’t tag every AJAX event and URL link on the page, so pick the most important ones… while having someone tell you in the next meeting that “no, we don’t need any tracking on that page, no one goes there anyway”

Discovering a major ad campaign is breaking in 24 hours and not only are the ads not tagged, but the landing pages aren’t either

Discovering that your tagging and cookie setup was designed for a different domain name, so all your stats have been beefing up the wrong section in your reports… and your cookies all appear to be 3rd party instead of 1st

Etc… you probably have some horror stories not fit for this kind and proper audience

Yes, QA can catch some of this, but with new pages and new capabilities (AJAX pages, iPhone apps, widgets and in-page apps, etc.) and a gazillion new tags (ad networks, ad validators, 3rd party trackers like ComScore, social tracking, buzz tracking, etc.) coming to the market, it’s harder and harder to keep track of it all.

There are a couple of ways people are attacking it. One is the “piggybacking” approach, where one of your tags is “1st call” and it cascades the call down to other tags. So, your page really has only that one tag, and you plop the other tags on a management page at that vendor’s site. Not bad, but each vendor likes to say “Oh, we can have other tags piggyback on us, but our tag has to be first call”. This, of course, is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, and so gets us nowhere.

Another are 3rd parties which try to help out with the problem. Maxamine, now part of Accenture, is one company which can help you validate, organize, and manage your instrumentation and tagging. On the other end of the “company size” spectrum, smaller players like TagMan act as neutral tag aggregators, letting you load all your tags with them and then controlling which fire when. And tools like WASP can help you go through your site to verify that the tags are at least present; your vendor may also have similar tools.

But I wanted to point your attention to an interesting new idea, one that the amazing John Graham-Cummings is working with. If his name rings a bell, it’s because he wrote one of the early and best antispam filters called POPFile that really leveraged Bayesian approaches to spamfighting. So, anything he chooses to spend time with is probably worth looking at.

One of his latest projects is working with the JSHub open source tag consolidator approach. The site is fine, but his blog explains it much better: What is JSHub?. Basically, since so much of the tagging experience is the same (use JS to create an image call with data in the query string), he proposes consolidating all that duplicative stuff and use a standard approach to defining what data you need. After all the data is somewhat consistent from tag to tag; it’s what each vendor can do with it which is their real story.

I look forward to more vendors joining up into this fully open approach to allow more tag consolidation. This will make it easier on both the sites and the users: Sites will have more control and management over the tag forests sprouting up, and users will have better experiences controlling what’s tracking them and having faster page load times.

Liam Clancy and Fiann O’Hagan have a good idea with JSHub, and I encourage all of us who have to deal with tags on sites to take a look at it. It won’t solve everything, sure, but it’s a good step in the right direction.

Analyze people, not sites

2009-10-06T17:48:44Z

I am continually amazed at how ignorant current tools are of the people actually driving the behaviors we are looking at.

Recently, a quiet buzz rose around an analysis of Twitter usage by a fellow running a pretty cool company called RJMetrics (yes, the name sucks. Yes, the initials of the founders are R and J). At Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective at TechCrunch, Robert J Moore examines Twitter usage in a couple of different ways. I wasn’t all that impressed with most of the analysis; it was pretty basic stuff.

But one of the ways I was most excited to see him highlight is the Cohort analysis. This is one of the most simple segmentations you can do: just take everyone who, say, did their first purchase in July 2009 (we’ll call this Time 0), and see what else they did over time (each month, say Time 1, Time 2, etc.). Do the same for everyone who did their first purchase in, say, Oct 2009. Then line everyone up on a graph so that everyone’s Time 0 is at the left, and then Time 1, etc. This lets you compare behaviors of clumps of people to see if their “lifecycle” is consistent.

There is more detail at A VC’s blog The Cohort Analysis as well as more detail at RJMetric’s blog post Cohort Analysis in RJMetrics which is a recommended read.

But at the end of the day, beyond the value of this specific analysis, I admire that they are examining “people who” and then looking at “what they did”. So many analytic tools are stuck on “what they did” and forget the people part. So, you can get lists of most popular pages, but not who visited them. You can get lists of most often sold products… but can’t do anything to understand who bought them. And I don’t mean just getting a list of cookies; I mean actually having a group of people and comparing their behaviors to a different group of people.

Here are a couple of simple analyses; see if your web analytic tool can do them:

Of people who bought “loss leader” product, what else did they buy from you in the next 3 months from that purchase? Per person, how many different categories were the products in? Were any purchases done with promotions?

Of people who have bought “highly profitable” product, what was their original source? What kinds of things did they buy before the purchase in mind? What else did they buy after it?

Of people who have bought 3 or more times from you, what source drove them in originally? What is their purchase cadence? How many purchases had a promotion; how many were full price?

Here’s an easy one, one that most of the top tools in the market can’t do without bending over backwards: Have a running report that says how many times each person visited your site as a distribution: 80% of people visited once, 10% visited twice, 10% visited 3+. I allow any window you want to measure this: Month on month, all time, your choice. You won’t believe what I had to do to get this report out of one of my current tools.

As you can see, almost every question starts with a segment. (BTW, this is kind of unfair; even if I dropped the “people who” part, most tools can’t answer the questions above. That, too, is sad.) But the current tools have all sorts of limitations that prevent us from looking at “people who”:

Some only let you measure behaviors over the time of the segment. So, if I say “give me people who bought in June”, I can literally only analyze behaviors in June.

Some can’t merge segments. They can’t manipulate them at all, actually; you can’t get counts or overlaps

Some can’t keep updating segments; they exist only during the static time frame and you have to manually re-create them each month

Some let you make segments, but they can’t be applied to multiple reports; you just get whatever they give you.

Some use segments, but they are just filters; you can’t compare the segments vs. each other

This is really sad. I’ve had the luck over the past few weeks to use a bunch of different tools, and I am shocked at how poorly they let me examine my business. And yes, if you read What Web Analytics is Missing which I wrote over a year ago, you’d see that there has been 0 progress.

So, try doing a Cohort analysis of your business. Try looking at how groups differ, or are similar. And try to put people first in your analyses.

At the end of the day, I am trying to get people to buy things. The things don’t sell themselves… but looking at most web analytic offerings, that’s what they want me to think. After all, that’s all they are measuring.

Change is here. Goodbye to Yahoo!, and Hello to Barnes and Noble [6]

2009-08-12T03:24:29Z

Things sure have been quiet on the blog. Turns out, I was spending many of my spare cycles on some changes culminating in the news I’m delivering here.

Sure, I could have put the obvious reference to Bowie’s song, but this one is more fun:

and

Like so many companies these days, Yahoo! has been going through many changes, and some of those changes are great. But some, well, aren’t, at least for what I like to do.

The good stuff, like the people, the tech, the new analytics tools (you think you’ve seen Yahoo! analytics? You haven’t seen half of it yet!), these will continue to be great reasons to keep an eye on Yahoo! and the cool stuff in the pipeline. But after about 3 1/2 great years there, the massive changes (3 CEOs, groups created and destroyed, MS almost acquired, almost Google partnership, search outsourced, etc., etc.) mean that the company I joined back then is not the company I was with these days. And so I started looking.

And, even in these terrible times, there are actually quite a few different opportunities out there for folks with analytics experience. Over the past few months, I saw openings in e-commerce sites, agencies of all sizes, data services companies, media companies, and even some clients. (If you are looking, don’t give up hope, and work your network!)

But one of the most interesting opportunities was from a sleeping giant. Barnes and Noble is the largest bookstore in the US, and one of the top e-commerce sites. And get this: it wasn’t tagged. That’s right, no 3rd party web analytic tracking system was being used to measure this top online store.

And now, things there are changing. New leadership (from HSN and eBay among others) is really starting to shake up the Barnes and Noble of old. You might have heard some of the stirrings:

Barnes and Noble has released e-books and readers on PC, Mac, iPhone and BlackBerry, including both paid and free books
Barnes and Noble now has free wireless in all the stores… the better to go online and read a book, if you prefer the online to the physical, and

Barnes and Noble recently announced that it would be the online bookstore for a hotly anticipated new e-book reader, the Plastic Logic reader.

So, when they basically said, “You can work on measuring and optimizing our sites the way you want to, almost from scratch. And help measure the next big e-reader. And change the way books and media are sold online. And drive how data innovation should permeate our org.”, I was pretty pleased.

By the time you read this, I will have resigned from my role at Yahoo!. We left on great terms; the folks there are all top notch and I’ll miss seeing the Sunnyvale teams; the NYC folks I know I’ll see again and soon.

And, in September, I’ll be starting up as VP of Analytics (Web Analytics and BI) focusing on the online side of the house. Barnes and Noble Online is based here in NYC, so I’ll be focused on just one time zone instead of dealing with the neverending day of NYC gliding into Sunnyvale. In fact, in a strange twist of fate, BN is located in the Port Authority Post Office building, across from Chelsea Market… a few floors down from Google (and a slew of other fun companies).

Now, it’s not to say my work isn’t cut out for me. Some folks who heard about this change sent me nice notes about “Amazon will crush you!” and “Books? People still read books?” and “BN destroys local bookstores”. Some of that might be true, but I also had a great conversation with a writer, a poet, who said that BN really respects the writer, the artist behind the books, while Amazon and Wal-Mart and Target all just “ship product”. If a bookstore can convince a poet that it’s more than just a store, well, that’s saying something.

But at the end of the day, every business has challenges. The difference here is that we are on the cusp of a huge change. E-Books are moving into every type of readable material, from newspapers and magazines to novels to textbooks. And no one has gotten it right yet… So there’s lots of room to make the experience better. And for all of it’s acceptance today, e-Commerce is also pretty young (the first e-commerce site was only in 1987) and so there are lots of ways to make it better as well.

So, like Remo Williams, the adventure begins.

Plaxo now charging... [7]

2009-07-08T02:08:39Z

I’ve come to rely on Plaxo (plaxo.com) for 2 main features:

1) Address book sync with Outlook: When other Plaxo users update their info, I can accept those changes and they replicate down to Outlook.

2) Web access to my data: Similarly, my personal changes to contacts are replicated up and are available on plaxo.com, as is my Outlook calendar.

Plaxo has a bunch of other useless features for the “free” version including trying to be yet another social network and social aggregator.

Wellp, I guess Comcast decided that Plaxo was a money pit. They are now charging $60 a year for access to the Outlook sync capability.

Congrats to Plaxo: they will be gone within a year. Unlike LinkedIn, they have no redeeming feature beyond the sync… and if you scare people away from updating their info by charging them for the privilege, well, each person leaving the network devalues the experience for the rest, who then wonder why they are paying.

The comments are open. What other sync and cloud offerings have you tried? What is a Plaxo replacement?

Some mention Soocial.com, some mention trying Google’s outlook sync (which is only for the Premier apps bundle, not the free Docs.g.c, btw), some have mentioned LinkedIn which handles address book OK, but a) has no calendar and b) has poor privacy and contacts management.

My list of Plaxo Replacements

As Arnoud below mentions, Yahoo! has an Autosync offering that hasn’t been updated in a while… but a birdie told me that updates are rolling out soon, along with other Calendar improvements. Keep your eyes out for updates from these guys…

From Maskil’s Blog, I found mention that MSN has an Outlook-Hotmail Sync called “Microsoft Office Outlook Connector”. I haven’t tried it yet, so could be great… but I haven’t really spent much time with Hotmail or the MSN calendar. Maskil’s comments provide some alternatives as well, so worth swinging by his blog after you finish my list.

Google has a Google Calendar Sync which appears to be free, but the contacts sync, as mentioned previously, has costs.

Mac users all swear at, sorry, I meant by, swear by MobileMe which, while not free, appears to do most of the good stuff that Plaxo used to.

Soocial.com, as mentioned above, appears to have a nice address book integration, but is relatively new. LifeHacker was pretty positive on it, but pointed out (in the comments) that they will be contacts only, probably no calendars.

Keepm.com was mentioned as an online “all in one” contacts syncer. Don’t know a thing about them. Appears to link to lots of sites ala Plaxo, but has no Outlook sync.

Zimbra has an open source option which can basically replace Exchange, so you can run your own web-accessible contacts and calendar… but I don’t know how it would sync with other systems. That is, you can have your own personal server with contacts and email and calendars… but if you also have to use a corporate Exchange server that your IT group set up, well, Zimbra won’t help.

Funambol talks mostly of syncing mobile devices, but somewhere in there it appears to sync with Outlook as well. This is an open source project that you would install on your own server, preferably one supporting Java and Tomcat 5.5 (or later) (Linux or Windows). The web client is pretty weak, but functional.

Glynx is an interesting idea. Instead of a site, it uses P2P to share your updates with others. Could be cool if it catches on. No calendar, however.

The amazing Zoho.com demonstrates just how much office app can be in the cloud. It’s actually kind of amazing. And their have a “CRM” offering which is free for 3 users (!) with an Outlook plugin to sync calendar and contacts. Google has a bit to learn from all that Zoho is doing.

HannsKK asks on Twitter if anyone had used UNYK... I hadn’t heard of it before. They have the “UNYK Syncro” (yes, that’s how they spell it) which is a plugin for Outlook. No calendar, but contacts integration and update.

NuevaSync appears to sync various Activesync phones with Google Cal, contacts, and Plaxo. Not quite the same, but interesting to know it’s there.

Calgoo.com Connect supposedly links Outlook calendar with Google Calendar and a few others. No contacts sync, but many of the others I list can handle that.

You can handle some syncing yourself. For example, you can store all your contacts in a PST on a shared drive ala Live Mesh or DropBox… but you run some risks if you leave Outlook open all the time. I would avoid this route other than to take periodic snapshots for backups.

So, we are looking for cheap or free ways to a) sync contacts, b) allow corrections, potentially via a social network, and c) allow web access to contacts and calendar.

Suggestions welcome!

(BTW, the head of marketing for Plaxo twitters at http://twitter.com/johnmccrea and blogs at http://therealmccrea.com/. Feel free to let him know what you think of Plaxo’s strategy.)

PS: I didn’t focus on other Outlook features like Notes or Tasks; perhaps some of these can sync those as well.

Yahoo Web Analytics 9.5 launched!

2009-04-29T10:59:41Z

I’ve worked on this project for months now, consulting on pieces from feature inclusion to wording on the confidence interval boxes.

And it’s finally here.

I could write a ton on how we put in stuff that will change how people measure their sites forever-more, but Dennis Mortensen did that and I encourage you to see the details at his post. He was one of the original Indextools leaders, and has continued to keep the product moving inside Yahoo!, an amazing feat.

We did a rockin’ good job on this one, if I say so myself.

Still here? Ok, look at this, then go to Dennis’s blog. I’ll wait til you get back to continue.

That’s right. We are providing demo and psychographic (interest) profiles of your user-base using Yahoo!‘s data. Cool stuff.

Hey, one more thing. If you think about what we added, the fact that we put in this amazing profile data and confidence levels, as confusing as they may be, reflects movement on putting in What Web Analytics is Missing. Specifically, More Who, Less Do and Too much Web, not enough Analysis... we are helping you understand your audience, and using statistics (kind of basic ones here) to start helping you understand what data to use and what it means.

Yes, it’s still closed to the general public… BUT if you currently advertise with Yahoo! via managed Search Marketing (meaning a relatively large account) or run your store through Y! Stores, you may be able to get access. Check with your account manager. If you don’t yet use Yahoo Search Marketing, well, why not? Look at the tools you can get access to!

PS: Yes, we did get rid of lots of the “pseudo-3d” junk and the use of grey in drop down options boxes. It’s minor but it just makes the tool look so much cleaner… long time users will see the difference

Who Runs the Show? [1]

2009-04-17T14:29:30Z

I was reading an article in the WSJ about how Starwoods is suing Hilton and one snippet piqued my interest:

Hotel companies like Starwood and Hilton often don’t own hotel buildings. Instead, they rely on investment groups that pay hotel-management companies to brand and operate the hotels. The details of those contracts, including the fee structures and terms, are different for every hotel company and are highly guarded. A hotel company’s ability to develop and sell owners on a brand can be worth hundreds of millions a year in contract fees.

I kind of knew this, but hadn’t really thought about it. I stay at the, say, Hilton, and their name is all over every inch of the hotel, but they don’t own it, nor are they responsible for it. In fact, a holding company “owns” it, and yet another company “manages” it.

I started thinking about all the ways that I’ve heard about brands not being really responsible for the service and experience they are attached to…

—

A story on NPR talked recently about John Madden retiring from football broadcasting, and discussed how he got heavily involved with the Electronic Arts games bearing his name: “Not content to simply endorse the product, Madden would meet with programmers each offseason to make the game as realistic as possible. “

“Simply endorse”? What does that mean? It implies that someone would sell their name to something, but have no cares as to the quality of the product? Why put your name and brand on it if you don’t care about how it meets your brand attributes for quality, style, substance, whatever? I applaud Madden (I don’t like football and even I like the Madden series) but have we gotten to a world where endorsing really means labeling?

We do know that endorse, as a word, implies more about putting personal reputation behind quality, veracity of claims, etc. If you aren’t really doing that, you are merely a spokesperson… or shill… or just figurehead. Perhaps we need new words instead of celebrity endorser?

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I was in Miami and saw a soaring tower being built, with the name Trump all over it. I asked some locals if Trump ever came and visited the area, and they said that Trump just licensed his name and has nothing actually to do with the building.

It appears the developers licensed the name, appearance, and some design elements of the Trump empire (gaudy gold furnishings, etc.) But Trump doesn’t control or have any say in the building, how it’s priced or it’s quality, etc.

Maybe Trump should to talk to Mr. Madden.

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Dolce and Gabbana are famous designers whose handbags can be over a thousand dollars but their watches are just a few hundred bucks, not much more expensive than a Swatch. Why? Because they license their name to a 3rd party manufacturer, while they actually make the purses themselves.

Now, I am not debating the merit of a purse costing more than a watch, but merely the relative price disparity. The D&G name makes a purse cost 5x more than a similar but still good bag from say Coach or Cole Haan, which hit $200. So, why don’t we see that for the watches? That is, most good watches from mid-tier brands (say, Tag Heuer) come in at $900 to $1200. So, why aren’t the higher end D&G watches at $5K or more?

One could say that the watch market is different than the accessories / fashion market, but jewelry works like any other accessory. Brand raises price, and people still buy $7000 quartz watches. D&G has the brand to get away with something like this… but of course, they don’t because they license.

By the way, who makes watches for high end fashion house Versace? Timex.

—

Across these examples, we start to see 2 issues:
1) A brand is getting watered down and tarnished by being licensed to other products with no care as to brand planks. If you are luxury, known for quality and high price points, why would you plop your name on a cheap product at a lower price point?

and

2) When you have multiple parties all operating under the auspices of one brand, diffusion of responsibility sets in. When I stay at Hilton and have a complaint, who can address it? Hilton corporate doesn’t actually run the hotel; they just license the name and do some “francisee checks” on a periodic basis. The management company is paid by the property owner to be profitable. The owner doesn’t even set foot in the hotel; they pay the management company. Who has the ultimate responsibility to meet the expectations of the brand? Well, Hilton does, and they’ve kneecapped themselves from being able to actually do anything about it by licensing.

Now, I won’t argue that franchising is a huge financial and business industry that works in many cases. The reason you see so many fast food places, one nearby every time you are hungry, is franchising. The rise of many national chains has been predicated on some aspect of franchising or 3rd party management, not just hotels.

But this middleman aspect, this separation of the brand from the actual “implementation” of the service and experience, continues to hobble brands. Like outsourcing customer care, like putting luxury names on cheap goods, like having a management company and investment house deliver the hotel experience, choosing to place your brand on products and experiences obligates you to make sure they are at the quality your brand demands.

If not, all those years of building up a brand can be destroyed in seconds when that “Samsonite” travel strap breaks open and spills your gear, or that “Duracell” flashlight switch bends and breaks after a single use.

If it seems to be the right thing to do for your brand, I won’t argue with success. And I know we are all desperate for any revenue. But your brand name is all you have at the end of the day when things go wrong (and things do go wrong; just look at youtube any day of the week to see a brand getting pranked or put in a bad light), so tarnishing it yourself early (beat the rush!) seems like a huge mistake. Instead, if you stand for quality in all that you do and put your name on, then you have a leg to stand on when things turn dark.

This goes for people, for companies, for product lines. Brand-extension, even when you control the production, may not always be wise (yes, Burger King Underwear, we are talking to you).

Look around you. Look at each brand you see in a day, and ask yourself: How much of that service/product/experience does the brand actually influence… and if it’s not very much, one could ask, is the brand actually worth paying for?