Over the past year a lot of things have driven my extracurricular passions and interests. I thought that after a year of no new posts I’d attempt to synthesize the types of things that have been driving my mind in the past year (or so).

1. Congressional data: Congress has been a treasure trove of data with regards to how it operates, the life of an office and lobbyist, and how much candidates spend and devote to getting elected to office. I’m been interested in mashing up these bits of information and data pieces into something that could be utilized by individuals/organizations to do, we’ll, whatever they want with it.
2. Airports: I’ve had a long interest with the functional and operational design of airports and general airline operations. For example, I’m absolutely fascinated by how different airlines load an aircraft; some by zone, some by row, others a free-for-all. JFK’s terminal 5 is a beautiful new and efficient model in a post 9/11era of airline travel. Last year SFO reopened terminal 2 (home to Virgin America and American Airlines) as one of our nations newest terminal renovations. For me though, it’s also about the data. The FAA/DoT publishes a ton of raw data on airline performance including on-time performance which I find enthralling.
3. The Stock Market: I’m very new to investing but have really taken an interest in how the market reacts to news, quarterly reports, analyst expectations, etc. I’ve been tracking a few stocks over the past 6-9 months that IPO’d and, well, currently thankful I didn’t invest in them. I have very little interest in becoming a day trader, let alone a week trader, but very interested in where the tech stock market is going.
4. Podcasting: I’ve got big plans for a podcast focusing on the intersection of technology and government. There are a few podcasts in this arena already and I feel I can bring a new twist on a movement that continues to grow. Between federal a state advances to open data initiatives, there’s a wealth of topics ripe for discussion.
5. Book Writing: I’ve been working on writing a self-help/leadership/management-esq book; think of Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve outlined about five chapters and am excited how it’s turning out. I’m still exploring the stories and the angle those those stories play within the overall message.

I’m really excited about the things going on this past year and what’s in store for the future.

Adobe is selling 3 versions of the product: single, professional, and enterprise. Forget enterprise – I’m not going down that path today, so let’s just look at single and professional.

Single is great. For a one-time price of $395 (very reasonable in the digital publishing field) you can have your own iPad app that will be a magazine of your choosing. The downside is, you get 1 app…no updates. So, you’re really not publishing a magazine, more of an informational app that will never change. I’m not sure who this will really work well for. I guess if you’re going to, say, create a app for a school project, have a hobby that you plan on doing once (maybe a book or short story) – than yah, this is great for you. But I’d want something I can update and change, which rules this out. With that in mind – we upgrade ourselves to the professional edition.

The term professional just sounds fun – don’t get me wrong. I can go from an idea in my head to iPad app in a +/- a few weeks. I really think they put together an awesome product (from what I’ve seen). The web interface looks great for arranging and managing the magazine. There’s simple integration with InDesign – everything you look for in an easy iPad publishing solution. I was excited…until I started digging into the pricing. Here’s the real business-angle breakdown of the pricing and a little break-even analysis.

First, a few assumptions, as there are a few pricing levels:

• We’re a new magazine with no clue how much our reach will be. We’re in year 1 of operations and we will publish 12 issues a year. We’ll only explore the costs associated with using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (yah – you still have overhead, labor, etc.).
• Readership levels will impact price. We’ll assume steady growth as follows:
• Months 1-3, 1,000 per month
• Months 3-6, 3,000 per month
• Months 6-9, 5,000 per month
• Months 9-12, 7,000 per month
• Total: 48,000 downloads in year 1
• Final pricing note: We’ll purchase a “package” based on what our current readership levels are. We’re a new company and don’t have a lot of extra funds to go throwing away.
• We’ll assume you’re giving away the app and your revenue stream comes through subscriptions (I’m sure you have ads too, but we’ll skip those for now).

Okay. Now for some Adobe expenses:

• Fixed rate of $495/month for the license, or $5,940 for year 1.
• The lowest download package is for 10,000 ($.30/issue costs) units at $2,995. We’ll need 5 of those to cover our downloads in year 1: $14,975.
• Total year 1 costs to Adobe: $20,915

1. First, most of this is automated. If you know me at all, and how I like to work, if there’s a way to automate a part of a job, I’ll attempt to do that. In this case, I’ve automated the data collection process. I’ve created software that grabs key data points daily for a selected group of users. Right now it’s grabbing government accounts, but it could in reality grab any public Twitter account. (This will probably feed into a future research project similar to TheFacebookStudy – which I’ve been sitting on for a while, I know.)
2. Following my favorite ETL method, the automated kind, I pull the data into my big data machine, do some data cleansing (not changing, just cleaning up), and load it up for analysis.
3. From there, the sky’s the limits. I have some automated data functions that return the type of data you see in TWT: follower and friend changes, tweets analysis, etc. I can pull data for any date range, so the flexibility of comparing different areas is great. Also, Twitter users are in groups – which makes combining and comparing data points much easier.
4. Finally, I spend some time putting the data into the design you see published. I think the design can use a bit of work – there’s a lot of data there, and frankly I would like to put even more on there. I’m trying to figure out the best way to display a ton of data in a nice graphical format…that I can easily and quickly update on a weekly basis. That last part – regular updating, is key. The consistency you see online now makes it easy to read and follow from week to week.

That’s the short, behind-the-scenes look at The Weekly Tweet. As of this post I’m tracking the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and 2012 Presidential Candidates. Soon I’ll be adding the executive branch to the listings; probably in the next 2 weeks. I’m also trying to figure out a way to turn this information into a podcast as well. I’d prefer an audio podcast – but this much data much be tough to digest in an audio format. If anyone has suggestions – I’m all ears.

Researcher friends: any interest in doing some data mining and Twitter analysis? Precedent suggests I cover how college students use/don’t use Twitter.

Update: 8/6/2011: I am in the process of redesigning The Weekly Tweet and hope to relaunch it in the upcoming months. The new version will be an interactive version with more data and analysis.

Without further ado, here’s my graphical resume.

Logistically, these are 60 minute events with presenters including trusted partners or experts throughout the industry. We typically have a 45 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes for Q&A from the audience. We ask attendees to complete a short, 8 question evaluation after attending the event. The following day we post an archive of the video online as well as a copy of the slides used in the presentation. Those are they key points – here are some of the numbers that drive this series.

We launched our monthly series last September (2010). We have traditionally seen about 300 attendees at our events; with attendance varying based on the topic and general applicability to the broader industry. In the past 2 months, attendance has drastically jumped to over 1000 registrations and over 700 attendees at our live events (image above is actual registration (blue bars) and attendance (red line) for the series). I attribute this 300% increase to an expanded online marketing effort.  We’ve been working more closely with our partner organizations on cross promotion as well as with our government agency for broader coverage of the announcements. I believe this will level out to about 900-1000 registrations and attendance around 600 / month. Some key stats:

• Highest registration count: 1252
• Average attendance: ~56%
• Average evaluation completion rate: ~62%
• Average playbacks: 151 (times viewed after the event)
• Average “reach” per event: 667 (number of people who watched event – live or recorded)

Return on Investment (ROI): One quick note about the ROI on webinars. We purchased a service for $130 / month which includes hosting unlimited events and toll-free calling for attendees (toll-free calling comes at a large price for this service – probably about 50-60% of the cost). We spend, on average, 7 staff hours on each event, including all prep, live event support, and post-event support. At our current (and past) levels of outreach – this has been a huge marketing tool for my office and a great marketing tool for our government agency. We count our ROI not only in terms of attendance, but requests for our services, which has steadily increased since the launch of this series.

I’m not here selling any webinar technology, nor am I paid to promote anything. I just really think webinars are a unique, innovative, and creative way to share information with your audience and build interaction between you, your office/staff, and your constituents. Let me know if you have any questions – I get really excited when we find innovative ways to reach out to audiences online. Here are some ways I could see utilizing this concept in a variety of industries:

• Non-Profits: Share information about developments on your cause, host town halls with NPO leadership, share annual reports through an interactive medium, host membership/development drives, etc.
• Higher Education: New way to host parent orientations, give information about housing options, share information and answer questions in financial aid, etc.
• Political Campaigns: Host an online town hall with the candidate and constituents, share information about campaign topics and position, etc.

These are just a few ideas – lots of room for growth in the online outreach world. What are your thoughts of using something like a webinar in your organization?

• Work: We launched that CMS back in the day for the Department of Defense – it was super cool and unlike anything I still have yet to see in the CMS world. I left the company and now am a contractor for the Department of Justice doing more web development work and communications outreach. I host a monthly webinar series focused on criminal justice topics which has been pretty successful. I have really honed my skills in online outreach and hope to build-up my “traditional” press-shop skills. Ideally I’d write more on public policy, but since my current job isn’t in line for that, I’m looking at other means (see podcasting below).
• Academic: I graduated with my MBA and am preparing for my next adventure. Long term sites are still on a PhD – looking at public policy or some other interesting area where I can blend government and technology. On the side – I’m starting to compile more research on social media for my Facebook Study site and have plans to launch a sister site for Twitter (probably not focused on college student research, but Twitter research in general).
• Personal Biz: Webtomic officially closed last year and DemConnect is still a work in progress. Programming and time were lost these past few months, had a few bad developers come into my life, and now I’m spending time refocusing the company prior to launching. I want to make sure it’s hitting the mark I want it to hit and I’m really prepared. I’m seriously hoping that in the few months I’ll have our first product up and running.
• Podcasting: I’m working on launching a podcast site that will feature regular (looking every 2 weeks to start) discussions on the intersection of technology and government. My first show will be a 30-45 minute discussion on policy-centric issues around Congress and the White House. Hoping to get some regular guests and a cohost too. The second show I’m planning is a weekly look at the social media arena in government – who’s making moves and who’s falling behind.

I spent some time thinking this past weekend also thinking about this blog, where it’s been, where it’s going, etc.  and I’m thinking it’s time to figure out it’s real purpose. In the past, I’ve covered everything from tech tutorials to startups, to e-commerce (partly required), to research, to gov-tech. I am thinking it’s time to decide if this blog will continue to be the randomly update potpourri of things it has been or if it’s time to chart a course for what it will be in the future. I have plans for what I want to be doing in life – lots of plans. How this blog fits into all those plans will not necessarily shape the plans themselves, but can enhance the message being sent out to world.

The reality is, I’m probably going to write about what’s on my mind at the time. I don’t think this blog will be limited to any one topic — it’ll probably the be catch all for other blogs I’m writing on (assuming I write on other blogs). So, what to see moving forward (theorically):

• Gov-tech stuff: it’s what’s on my mind for the past year. Really interested in the intersection of politics/government and technology. I’m working on a blog post around the research of Bartle which I hope/expect will start to draw connections between classic MUDs and current online political campaigns.
• Business and Startups: I like tech and I like my MBA (thank you George Mason). I want to keep talking about the trends and what’s hot in the online IT space. There are some cool business models out there, and some I just don’t get. I wrote a some notes regarding Twitter last May I might through up in the upcoming months regarding its potential business future. I’m curious which of those will come true and how they will evolve.
• Research: I still am into social media research. In the past I’ve focused in the 18-24 year-old market and now I’m focusing on government social media outreach. I have a few things I’m working on from the business side to try to tie things together, but the reality is I will be gathering a ton of data…and with data we’ll be able to do something with it. I’m hoping to do some serious research this next year on Twitter and Facebook and the impacts it has had. Additionally, I wouldn’t mind finding an institution to sponsor a continuation of my master’s research. (I’m happy to say I tend to be the most viewed thesis at K-State’s online library…available worldwide!)

What you probably won’t find moving forward (unless something crazy happens or pure brilliance):

• Tutorials: I never posted many of them, and my ability to do a great tutorial is past my time now. Many others are doing great tutorials which are far more detailed and current than what I can do. I might throw something up if I get frustrated enough not seeing one online that’s needed, but this really won’t be the go-to place for tutorials.

So, that’s the update on my blog (and parts of my life).

• Moderators
• Professionals
• Participants
• Lurkers

Each of these roles has a function within the community; and I’d argue that every community (or website in general) has each of these roles.

Moderators: The moderator(s) is usually the founder of the site and the overall administrator of what’s happening online. The moderator is in charge of enforcing policies and ensuring the community stays true to its purpose. One of the main day-to-day responsibilities of a moderator is managing the spam and conflicts that occur within their community. Unwanted spam and inappropriate language can quickly spin an online community out of control; making the moderators job even more critical.

Professionals: Professionals are users within the community who take on a larger role, serving as an expert or qualified member. Professionals may be invited into the community or may evolve over time into the role (evolve from a participant).

Participants: Participants are the day-to-day community members who drive an online community forward. Some participants will be positive forces within the community while some will play a destructive role. Moderators benefit from positive participants in that they will help self-regulate the community. Participants may evolve into the professional role and are also involved in inviting new members to join the community.

Lurkers: Lurkers are “members” of the community who are non-active participants. Research suggests that over half the populations of online communities are comprised of lurkers. Lurkers in some communities feel like active participants, by reading and knowing the community trends. Some researchers suggest lurkers have a negative influence on communities; with lurkers present, participants might not be interested in sharing information to a population who, themselves, is not interested in sharing information.

When curating a community, it’s important to think of the participation and activity each of these roles play online. One must consider the type of community desired to be portrayed against the type of community online members are interested in. Communities moderate these roles with techniques like: requiring users to apply for membership, requiring a login before viewing/participating, and even by being an invite-only community.

Here are some recommended resources for more information about online communities: (Preece’s book is a must-read for those interested in the science behind online communities and the people behind them. Her theory of “purpose, people, and policies” is a great base for considering how to build a successful online community.)

Preece, J. (2000). Online communities. designing usability, supporting sociability. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, LTD.

Nonnecke, B., Preece, J., Andrews, D. & Voutour, R. (2004). Online lurkers tell why. New York, New York. August 2004

Measuring success online should come down to users taking some type of action – more than just visiting a website. While visits and views are good measures of online outreach (they really serves as a baseline statistic), great websites will encourage users to take the next step online. Here are two ways I push conversions for an organization I help with online outreach.

The first way, and the least invasive one, is encouraging users to sign up for our regular newsletter. We send a monthly email newsletter and all we ask is for a person’s email address. We don’t ask for first names, last names, phone numbers, etc. Nothing else – just email addresses. We do this for a few reasons. First, as soon as we start asking for additional information, people will be turned off and less likely to sign up at all. We’d rather have an email address over nothing at all. One of our main goals in the newsletter is to get our information out to audiences; to do that we just need an email address. Second, the newsletter is just a baseline method or reaching people. Once we have a person’s email address, we’ll start managing that connection and tracking where it pops up in other areas (online events, blog posts, etc.). An email is a great unique identifier, unlike names (how many John Smiths or Test Test are signed up for e-newsletters?!?). Emails are the gold standard in online marketing – so we’re stick with gold and work on increasing its wealth.

The second way, and by far the strongest measure of online success, is the user taking action that gets involved with our organization. In this case, we offer two main ways of making this happen: contacting our office (standard phone/email) or submitting a request form online for our services. Phone/Email is something almost every organization will push for online — but the target audience doesn’t always want a one-on-one conversation. To supplement this, we’ve put an online form that allows people to discuss there need with us, how they’d like to utilize our services, and additional information they want to provide. From there a staff member follows up with the person, having taken the time to do some initial research based off the information submitted, and work on fulfilling their request.

After we send an email blast about our organization our metrics spike. First we see increased traffic to our website; and then we start seeing the request forms coming in. Yah – we get excited about web traffic and buzz, but once people start requesting our support or calling for more information – that’s what we’re really excited about.

It’s really through people contacting the office and making requests that we measure our success. When people call in, we gather information on how they heard about the organization. We’ve learned that over 80% of people learned about our services online (the remaining 20% from conferences or other organizations sending referrals). With this in mind, we’ve loaded our website with tons of information on the types of services we provide, what they entail, and great details on what can be expected and what can’t be supported via the organization. We enable people to reach out to us in whatever medium is most comfortable for them – measuring our conversations by how many requests come in. The easier we can make it for people – the more successful we’ll be. Anything we can do to lower barriers to requesting our services and enable people to take action, the better.

We regularly look at our website and think of ways to reduce barriers. Right now there’s a lengthy request form to utilize our services. It’s intentionally long, but also includes information we need to know to determine if we should fund your activity. In the upcoming weeks we’re going to create a new form that will serve as a ‘request for information.’ This new form will get the ball rolling (just about 5 questions) and encourage people to begin funding discussions with our organization. If it’s determined this is a worthwhile endeavor, then we’ll direct them to fill out the old form (the long form) to get the rest of the information we need (and make it official).

In conclusion – you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Nothing is more true than this statement when it comes to being successful in online outreach campaigns. Whether you campaign is ongoing, for an annual event, or just a one-time thing — you need to understand what to look for, how you can build on the success you’ve had, and truly define what it is you want to see as a result of your outreach.

• Mondays: people are playing catch-up for the weekend and have that “Monday” feeling. People are less likely to really read messages coming in and are focused on just checking things off their lists.
• Tuesdays: Monday is over and it’s time to focus on work. We send messages in the early afternoon for three main reasons: 1) avoid the morning email blast – people are catching up from the night before, and 2) we’re on the East coast and we want to hit the West coast while they’re in their prime, and 3) at the end of the day (any weekday) people are focused on leaving the office and aren’t going to read our full message.
• Wednesdays: Hump day. It’s the mid-week grind and people aren’t always as focused. It tends to be a meeting day for workers (Monday is as well) and it’s the general slump. We want people to be excited and ready to dive into some events or key information when we hit them up – not be urning for the week to be over.
• Thursdays: This is actually another day we’ll send emails. It’s the second choice as, similar to Tuesdays, it tends to be a day where people are open to things, not too focused on the beginning/end of week, and we can get a decent response.
• Fridays: Simple, it’s the end of the week and people are ready to go home. Another big reason for not sending on Fridays is it’s a huge vacation day. Lots of people take Fridays (and Mondays) off, so any messages sent on a Friday might as well just have arrived on Monday morning (see Monday above).

That’s the scoop. Sure, we will send emails on other days. One thing we’ve started is a monthly newsletter. We send this the last business day of the month. It’s a bit of hit if the last day is a Friday, but we focus on the time of day it’s being sent to aid us in our outreach.

The important thing to note is this: you have to consider the work-style of your audience. If you are in an organization that is traditionally closed Fridays, Thursdays are your new Fridays. If you know people look for communication on Wednesday mornings — you need to work with that. If you do outreach for an organization that is targeting working parents, you might send at the end of the work day so the parents can read it when they get home.

In the final post (next week), I’ll discuss how we measure conversions and the success this brings in our online outreach campaigns.

Our website has trends, in this case weekly. When I dive into the metrics, I’m not just looking at the raw number of hits, but where the hits are coming from, what people are looking at, and also trying to extrapolate some level of content progression. What does that mean? I’m looking at the keywords they used to get to our site (if they searched), what sites they’re coming from, what type of searches they’re doing within our site, and what pages and areas of our site are most trafficked.

Looking at the chart on the right, we spike during the week. This website is targeted towards federal, state, and local government officials who view the site primarily during the work days. On Mondays our site starts its weekly climb up, and on Thursdays it begins its slow decent. The weekends are huge dives in our numbers (note the trough) — we’re not updating the site during these days and people aren’t viewing it. I should note, we don’t post too regularly, we aim for about once/week – twice on busy weeks.

Here are the things I tend to check on a regular basis…and what it tells me about the site:

• Raw visits/page views: I’m not really concerned with the number, but more so the trend from the previous day. Did we go up? If so, why? We might have posted content, sent an email blast, or hit up a new audience from a conference. How does today compare to a week ago? The number is just a number. I have goals for the number of visits I’d like to see, but what’s more important to me is a steady growth. Spiking is great – but can be lost if people don’t come back.
• “Content Overview” – as Google calls it: Where are people going and why could that be? Yah – homepage tops the list…no surprise. But what’s interesting is the rest of the list. We tend to do a short teaser on the homepage of articles (excerpts) and encourage people to ‘read more.’ I’m interested in seeing how that teaser went (from a content perspective) and how many people are reading more. If the teaser is good – we are probably getting more views for that post. If not, people probably will just skip to the next article.
• Traffic sources – This shows me how many people are directly coming to our site vs. being referred or through a search engine. We get about 55% – 60% through direct traffic, 25% referred, and the rest via search engines. After an initial pie-chart view, about once/week I’ll dive into the referrer and search engine logs to see what sites people come from (Google dominates our search engine results).

From here, I go a few different ways depending on what I’m wanting to learn on a given day. Other things I’ll check on a weekly basis are:

• Keywords: I’m always curious what people are typing into search engines to land on our site. The top is usually just the URL for our site (which I’m thinking is the group of users who think that you need to Google a URL to get there). Following that it’s the interesting combination of words, phrases, etc. that can really be interesting. This site is focused on a variety of training topics, so it’s good to know what training topics people are searching for – then comparing that to our site’s content and whether we have adequately met that need (or not).
• Site Search: Similar to keywords, our site search metrics track what people are actually searching for once on our site. I don’t feel this is the best metric/tracking that Google Analytics provides – but it’s another data point of things to focus on. We get a wide range of specific topics to very broad topics. Sometimes I take a given search word and see what results come up. If the results aren’t what we’d expect, we may tweak the language we’re using, add emphasis to certain areas, or investigate whether our navigation/site structure is still meeting the need/expectation of readers.
• New vs. Returning: This tells us, roughly, how many of our visitors are first-time viewers and how many are returners. We get about 30% returning visitors and about 70% new. I don’t live/die by this metric as it’s harder to track new v. returning with people clearing cookies and supped-up privacy settings…especially with our target audience. We’re comfortable with these numbers as we offer a few services and events that hit a target reader just once and leave them with the knowledge of where to come back. The flip side of this is we also have a good handful of returning visitors. Our site has real good FAQ and ‘about’ pages that have a wealth of information. We don’t want to discourage phone/emails to our office, but we find that if it’s easily available online, people are more comfortable getting information that way.

Those are the key things I look at on a regular basis. Any thoughts on what other areas you think are important to online success?

Two more posts coming down the pipes in this area:

• Email campaigns
• Conversion (getting people to take the next step online)