The situation

My sister dropped her Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android phone and shattered the screen, so she gave it to me for my birthday. The screen is blank – it displays nothing – and it cannot be used to control the phone at all. Otherwise though, the phone, including the power and volume buttons, is fully functional.

The phone is protected with a PIN that you have to enter when you first power it up or unlock it. It’s running stock Android; it’s not rooted; the bootloader is locked; and it’s never had USB debugging enabled.

Objectives

1. Retrieve the contents of the phone’s storage, including photographs, which are not backed up anywhere.
2. Make the phone useful for something, like as a Squeezebox player. This would let me plug it into a hifi and stream music to it.

The approach

1. You need to unlock the phone in order to access its storage. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus supports USB On-The-Go. This means that if you buy a USB OTG adapter, you can plug a USB keyboard into it, in order to input keystrokes. Power the phone up, and use this technique to unlock it. My sister told me her PIN, which I just typed on the keyboard’s row of numbers that appear above the letters (i.e. the number pad didn’t work); and you hit enter to submit the PIN and unlock the phone.
2. Quickly, while it stays unlocked, plug the phone into your computer, and its storage will appear in your computer’s file browser. Copy the contents somewhere safe. Once you’ve started copying, the copy process won’t be interrupted by the phone locking again.
3. In order to be able to have any practical control over the phone, we want to be able to see and ‘touch’ its screen remotely. So, next step: put the phone into bootloader mode, and unlock the bootloader. You’ll need the platform tools that are part of the Android SDK. Be aware, this step will wipe the phone’s data, which is why we did steps 1 and 2 above first.
4. Now that the bootloader’s unlocked, you can flash a custom recovery that has USB debugging enabled by default. I used ClockworkMod.
5. Next, put the phone into Recovery mode. On the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, this is easy enough without being able to see the screen: from the bootloader, you press the volume down key twice, then the power key.
6. Now, you need to enable USB debugging in Android, i.e. for when the phone is booted normally. Read this post on Stack Overflow. Use ADB to edit /system/build.prop and /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db. You’ll need sqlite3 to edit the database file.
7. You’ll also need Android to recognise and accept your computer’s control via ADB. Normally, when you run ADB this authorisation is granted through an on-screen dialog; but with a broken screen you won’t be able to see or touch that dialog. Instead, you need to manually add your computer’s ADB public key to Android’s list of authorised keys. Read this blog post. Your computer’s key is in ~/.android/adbkey.pub and this needs adding to /data/misc/adb/adb_keys on the phone.
8. So that you can remotely ‘touch’ the phone’s screen, you’ll need to root the phone. This is done by installing a su binary: you need to install a zip file on the phone. You can get a su binary zip file here. Still in recovery mode, use ADB to push the zip file onto the phone’s storage. Read this post on Android Forums. Run recovery --update_package=/sdcard/whatever.zip to install the zip.
9. Now, you can boot the phone normally. USB debugging should be enabled and your computer should be authorised for ADB. You can use androidscreencast to see the screen, and you can input keystrokes using ADB. Tab and Enter are really useful keystrokes!
10. Install Webkey remotely, from Google Play.
11. You need to start the Webkey app now, which you can do easily with ADB. This post on Stack Overflow tells you how to start an app when all you know is the package name. Webkey’s package name is com.webkey.
12. Webkey needs root permission. When you start it, you’ll see (via androidscreencast) a SuperSu dialog open. You’ll need to quickly issue the tab and enter keystrokes required to grant root permission to the Webkey app.
13. You’ll also need to create a Webkey user account, so that you’ve got credentials with which to log into the phone remotely. You’ll be able to use ADB input commands to do this.
14. Webkey’s up and running, so now access the phone’s IP address (on your local network) in your computer’s web browser. Log in with the credentials you created previously.

You can now remotely see and ‘touch’ the phone’s screen. You don’t need the phone plugged in by USB anymore. You can install apps, like SqueezePlayer, and enjoy.

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Here’s a list of topics that I might cover:

• Logitech Media Server, Raspberry Pi & Android renderers, and synchronised multi-room audio
• Getting a Samsung Galaxy Nexus with a broken screen up and running and usable as a Squeezebox player
• Moving my web server to a virtual server and configuring Ubuntu, Nginx, PHP FPM, MariaDB, APCu, SSL certificates, and WordPress
• Enhanced link attribution for Google Analytics, and not using JavaScript to add IDs to your link elements
• Running your own URL shortening service
• My website’s privacy options

I’ll update this post with links to the relevant pages once I write about these topics; but in the meantime, if you find this page and you’ve got a question, you could ask in the comments below.

This image featured in this post is by epSos .de.

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KPI (usually) stands for “Key Performance Indicator”, and for me it means “a number that indicates success”. It’s really rare to come by a true KPI, because it’s really rare that a number should be so unambiguous that its going up or down, by itself, means either success or failure. Ten-year net profit (£) is a reasonable KPI, in my book; but then, should it be change, month-on-month… or deviation from target…?

The difficulty here is that metrics must always have context; and without some context, of other metrics, and of human knowledge and intuition, a metric can be ambiguous, uninformative at best, and easily misleading.

And yet still we must boil down web analytics to a spreadsheet. We must have reports! We must have ‘KPIs’! Why is that?

Actually this dependency inherent in virtually every marketer is not such an unreasonable demand. I provide excel dashboards for my clients, highlighting a few key – metrics. It’s because, with all the detail available, web analytics can feel a bit like being faced with an aircraft cockpit.

In order to know that we must act quickly – that something’s going wrong – it’s important to have reporting that is effective, but also simple. As Mike Teasdale will frequently remind you, when a pilot needs to know in a hurry whether he’s going to suffer a mid-air collision, he ignores all the dials and judges relative trajectories by a speck of dirt on the windscreen…

For as long as I’ve worked in digital marketing (nearly four years), reporting has always been focused on conversions, CPA and RoI; and that feels simple, because we all understand the notion of revenue driven as an obvious measure of success. The problem with revenue and digital marketing though is that for as long as we make the most of our ability to track behaviours online with cookie-based data, rating all our marketing efforts solely with attributed revenue is neither totally effective, nor at all simple.

Not everything drives revenue directly! Stop trying to report as though it does!

This is something that needs discussing separately, in its own right, but the important point is that by studying measures of reach and engagement, as well as revenue, you can allow each of your different marketing efforts to be credited for the jobs that it does.

Banners get credited for driving awareness and engagement; social media engages your audience, and gets credited with the value it deserves; different parts of your website’s content get credited with the different types of value that they drive; paid search and the web checkout process still get credited with sales.

And if you want, you can put pound signs next to your engagement metrics – seriously! Plus, there aren’t too many measures of reach and engagement – you can put them all on the spreadsheet :)

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My soundtrack begins with Muddy Waters’ ‘I just want to make love to you’, which I find provides an excellent metaphor for the value of web analytics.

Anyway… I cover what web analytics is, how it works, why that’s valuable and how you can sell it; also Google Website Optimizer, the Google Analytics partner network, and analytics as part of what we might call ‘data solutions’.

It’s this last point that I want to cover here. Here’s another slide:

Web analytics can quite easily not be the nuts, which you may find surprising. The problem is that without finesse and good use, it’s just clickstream data: i.e. a record of the content that your visitors view. At best, this is “the what” of your marketing efforts.

When you use visitor classifications and throw in segmentation techniques, in order to achieve some analysis, you begin to get “the where” and “the how much”; add content testing, like the MVT that you can do with Google Website Optimizer, and it’s only then that you’ll begin to understand “the why”.

And you need “the why”: after all web analytics is for making decisions. With clickstream data you might be able to see a series of key metrics and when they change; but you can never act on those metrics until you balance and qualify them with context. Segmentation, then testing, provide that context, “the why”, and so “the what next”, which allows you to act on the changes in your metrics.

It doesn’t stop there. Web analytics at its best has to be part of a data solutions ecosystem. Here’s another slide:

When your draw multiple sources of data together into a central place, they can enrich each other, and work together to personalise and time micro-segmented, customer-focused communications and experiences. Here’s a (by no means exhaustive) list of data sources:

• Web analytics and content testing
• Voice of customer surveying
• Brand mentions and sentiments (including those of your competitors and their campaigns) scraped from social channels and the web – e.g. twitter, facebook, forums
• Revenue databases, e.g. affiliate click value, and
• CRM databases, including call centre records

When you link these data sources together with common IDs, or simply over time, then the data can work together to operate your marketing channels:

• email
• paid search
• display
• call centre
• in-store
• mobile content
• online content

People get emails that correspond to their behaviour as observed by web analytics. The call centre staff offer a discount that corresponds to the customer’s CRM churn risk; and that customer’s experience online and in-store is made to correspond too.

This is the stuff that marketing “decision engine” softwares, like Agillic, and, to a lesser extent, Perfomable are doing. It’s exciting, most of all because it has the power to make advertising really valuable to the consumer….

So web analytics is the nuts? No, not on its own.

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That is as much of the incident as has sometimes been reported, perhaps because the image of a referee in a team kit grabs attention, and I’m sure also because it’s funny. In fact, mightn’t this have been just a joke? Isn’t this reminiscent of (though not quite so horrifying as) Paul Chambers’ recent conviction?

Actually, in this case, there was a little less ambiguity than the picture on its own would have preserved. Babel’s tweet included the line, “And they call him one of the best referees? That’s a joke. SMH [shaking my head].” ‘Best’ is indeed a subjective opinion when it comes to referees, but the fact remains: he is the referee, and Babel’s tweet was a sincere criticism.

For me, I think this puts Babel’s indiscretion in the same category as Pete Broadbent’s disparaging remarks about the royal wedding, posted on Facebook. We’re all entitled to make a frustrated and flippant joke about a service provider, even it’s a little distasteful; and even MPs, like Gareth Compton, can be allowed to make distasteful jokes; but a Church of England bishop can’t really get away with a sincere public attack on the monarchy any more than a professional footballer can get away with one on the referee.

It’s tough to judge: hardly the clearest cut of lines. Perhaps you could say, the difficulty is in properly sensing responsibilities (and their transgression) in the context of an unfamiliar medium. There are two important things with which I think it’s worth getting familiar:

1. Even if it’s a ‘social network’, it might still be a public medium. That means journalists. Children. Security professionals. Your boss.
2. The written communication of irony will often fail, especially with only 140 characters; and equally it’s difficult to ascertain – once in the court room or equlivalent – that it should have been perceived.

I loved Charlie Brooker’s withering response to the judgement on Chambers, and it would be great to be able to keep a new medium like twitter only for perfectly grown-up laid-back people who are hard to offend and who in any case enjoy a good dark joke. The problem is, when a new medium is successful – and really worth caring about – that’s probably because it’s accessible to everyone, including Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells.

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Visual language is about how you lay things out on an interface; but it also has to do with the symbols and shapes you use. Here’s one of my favourite symbols: the trippin’ shaver dude.

Look into his eyes. He’s like, very quietly, “whoooo’s… shaving… me…. ?”

I like his expression, but the important thing I think is that this is definitely shaving that’s happening.

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Sorry it’s not a very good picture. Taking photos of adverts on the tube is a bit weird anyway, even without pushing past people to get a better shot.

As I understand it, Orange and T-Mobile are using their mobile networks together to support each other’s customers. The ad concept basically is that an Orange and T-Mobile advert are placed side-by-side. They collaborate as part of the same execution, but each within their own brand guidelines – like the symbol for yin yang. The consumer reads, ‘teamwork’, ‘togetherness’, ‘sharing’, ‘harmony’, or whatever.

Tracey Stern spotted it too; here’s a clearer illustration lifted from her post:

Tracey’s concern was that the novel offering seems to have been broadcast to customers at a surprisingly low level. I guess that may be true, but what occurred to me about this is something different.

I’m sure more and more we’re seeing ad concepts that rely on consumers’ consciousness of marketing itself. I think that’s fascinating. Hasn’t there traditionally been a rule in advertising – “Ssshh! Don’t let them realise they’re being marketed to!” – where consumers ought not to feel like we’re being sold to? Brands should offer honest advice, good value, or expert knowledge… but never clever marketing!

I suppose that rule is born out of the sensible assumption that consumers don’t want to pay for marketing; we want to pay for a product. But are things changing? Especially with the growth of new mediums, we’re seeing more stuff being given away for free – music, games, services – but being bundled with and supported by advertising; and with on-demand television and a million cable TV channels, we’ve seen traditional advertising methods undermined in favour of increased “product placement”. Advertising is becoming prominent as part of the products we consume, and so perhaps there’s no use pretending any more: consumers recognise even the most subtle advertising, we know how it works, and that it’s essential – and that can be a new ‘hook’ for marketers.

Of course, I’m acutely aware that perhaps it’s just me. I’m hardly a sound judge on this question, when I work in marketing myself. I feel convinced that there must be lots of other recent examples of what I’m talking about, but actually the only one that springs to mind right now is the Google one I mentioned in a previous post, and that one was aimed at marketing professionals anyway! I wonder if I’m imagining things?

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KISSinsights

KISSinsights is a tool that can help you collect ‘Voice of Customer’ data about your website’s visitors. ‘Voice of Customer’ research, essentially, is the use of surveys to give your visitors the opportunity to tell you, actively and consciously, what they think. It can be really useful for collecting new ideas about what your visitors want, or for revealing the reasons for performance problems.

What really interests me though with voice of customer, is that conscious attitudes can be brought together with tracked behaviours: when someone tells you, for example, that they were disappointed with what they found on your website, you can understand more about that by bringing that attitude together with a record from web analytics data about how that visitor arrived at your site, what content they viewed, and what actions they took. This gives you much more power to act on your voice of customer responses.

Similarly, if you discover in your web analytics data a ‘problem’ visitor segment based on traffic source, or content viewed, you could examine the voice of customer records for that segment in order to help you solve the problem. Web analytics can often tell you where a problem is, but on its own it doesn’t often tell you how to solve it.

My solution with KISSinsights and Google Analytics involves using Danny Ng’s work to return a GA session ID into KISSinsights along side a visitor’s response. The responses in the KISSinsights reports then include this ID. In GA, the session ID is not normally visible in reports, so I’m passing the same session ID also to my GA reports on a session scope custom variable.

I hope you can see the value in voice of customer, and how that is multiplied by an integration with web analytics. If you’re doing this already – differently, or better – then let me know!

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Without wanting to gush too severely, I still have to say that the pres was pretty inspirational; which is why I’m summarising some of it here. Since the PDF is publicly available, I’ve reproduced a couple of Felix’s slides (which hopefully is cool!).

eCRM is electronic customer relationship marketing. (Thinking about it now, suddenly I realise what a silly phrase ‘customer relationship marketing’ is. I know we have B2B, but still, how else do you market if not with relation to your customers? Anyway.)

Felix started by referring to a condition common amongst lots of client organisations: loads of data, describing all sorts of different things, but in as many different separate places. Email lists. Email performance. Organic search reporting. Online ‘buzz’. User-generated content on your own web sites. Web analytics relating to your own web sites. Your e-commerce or revenue database. Loyalty card data. Customer profiling. Call centre….

You can do so much more with all this varied data when you bring it together. It’s a ‘holy grail’: the ‘single customer view’; one, combined database, whose value is a million times more than the sum of its parts.

With a bit of work (and sometimes, I suspect, some changes to the way you collect your data), you can do a lot to combine these data sources. You can also introduce mosaic (i.e. Experian’s geodemographic) profiling, and so you can begin to segment your database of customers through a really pretty richly informed view of their likely attitudes and behaviour. You can test your segments against the same in your offline sales data, and so be more confident that your understanding of these different segments is sensible.

Combining data

Once you know who your audience is, then you can begin to devise a strategy for helping your different types of audience to research, and then eventually purchase; and to be retained, and even perhaps evangelise for you.

Developing audiences towards purchase and loyalty

This plan can guide all your marketing activity: creative design, messaging, media buying, delivery, optimisation. Excuse the cliché, but this truly can be everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

And the part I really love is this: it’s not just about planning or reporting; it’s about dynamically-optimised delivery. The same data sources that informed your planning in the first place, will continue to provide a view of your audience. You keep each customer’s record updated with the most appropriate segment definition, and you can trigger emails to them as they graduate from one segment to the next. The result is the automatically-delivered ads and content that will most of all appeal to your customers, next.

Felix is MD at Underwired; they’ve built a website for McCain that he claims is dynamically optimising its own content, within three clicks of a visit, according to each user’s classification and behaviour as it corresponds to a segmentation scheme. I’m not sure though. It just offered me a coupon for hash browns, but everyone loves hash browns, right?

Does anyone else think this stuff is cool? If behavioural advertising works, but it needs to start offering more value to consumers, then it just needs to get better, right? Like this?

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For some people, that they can finally purchase a water-filtering jug to properly match the curtains is I’m sure quite compelling, and I know there’s £2,000 to win, but I can’t help but be reminded of the pointless drive-to-web concepts lamented in Brian’s ‘Open Letter to All of Advertising and Marketing’. Do people really want to visit an advertiser’s microsite for no particularly good reason?

A cash incentive may be more motivating than, say, the opportunity to upload a film of yourself explaining in less than thirty seconds why a pink water-filtering jug is so much better than a white one, and might more easily lead to greater response; but we know that luring people with the prospect of material gain often impacts negatively on the quality of a lead. (Actually, is filtering-jug-fanatical better than sane?)

Like any investment, when an advertiser incentivises response they raise the stakes in their gamble on a profitable return. So long as the volume of attracted and engaged visitors corresponds to the size of the incentive offered, then that incentive can be as big as the ad’s reach allows.

But can an incentive go too far? Can an incentive, for example, be so large that the prospect of actually winning or receiving it becomes incredible, and so not worth pursuing? “Nah, I’ll never win that!”

Or is there some level of incentive for some brands or products past which consumers begin to conclude, “they’re making far too much money – they can hardly be offering good value!”

Or maybe there are only so many consumers out there who are capable of forming a genuine opinion about coloured water filters; after a point, increasing your incentive merely brings in more of those who really just want a chance at £2,000, and will unsubscribe you in a flash if you even so much as think about sending them an email.

In digital advertising of course, campaign tracking can help each individual different advertiser get it right. We can monitor how many people see an ad, and how many of those people respond and engage; we can simultaneously test response rates for different incentive levels, and discover the sweetest one; and we can watch what happens to the ongoing value of each group of responsive consumers, so as to be sure that we maintain a true sense of profitability. Nobody often can count on getting it right all the time, but we can quickly, continuously and reliably identify what’s not working, and carry on with the business of getting it right. As Avinash Kaushik has written, “God created the Internet so we could fail faster”.

EDIT, 8 October:

I know most people won’t find this quite so deeply ironic as I do, but I couldn’t help but notice that the very same placement previously occupied by the rubbish Brita ad was yesterday replaced by this one from Google:

The copy reads, “Making display advertising amazing isn’t a techie problem. / It’s a techie dream. / WATCH THIS SPACE. / This ad is for all the media people on the platform, particularly the ones wondering how they can get richer data, better forecasting and more accurate targeting. If you want to know more visit google.co.uk/watchthisspace”

Great concept in combination with great media buying, I think. Certainly media people do ‘index’ highly on the platform at Tottenham Court Road, but there are loads of people for whom this ad doesn’t mean a great deal. This very thought will cross a media person’s mind; as will the thought of the beauty of digital: you don’t have to waste inventory, because you can show in an ad placement only when it’s almost certainly the right person watching.

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