So, here are 6 lessons I feel, if I had learned earlier, would have really helped me out.

1. Learn the tool(s).

Duh.

Get training. For Omniture, you can’t do better than Keystone Solutions. For Google Analytics, you can talk to us, or any GACP. Learn the way the tool is laid out, how to use its advanced features, how to get lost going down a rabbit hole but still know what you are doing.

And then this (warning, you might not like this): take 2 vacation days and spend it getting completely lost in the tool. Click on surprising data to see why it’s doing what it’s doing. Click on unsurprising data to gain an appreciation for the surprises that probably lurk underneath. The vacation days will allow you to get away from everyone else, get away from specific requests, and focus on getting lost in the data and the tool’s capabilities. You aren’t going to break it. Learn all of the nooks and crannies. Click on everything you can possibly click on (maybe not in the admin side of the tool, watch your clicks in there). Make a list of questions, and get them answered by someone who really knows their stuff.

Finally, learn more than just the basics of implementation. This will do two things. First, it’ll help you understand how the data is gathered and why you might see odd things happening. Second, it’ll help you understand the pain involved in implementing and how “something simple” really isn’t. Use this understanding to build a relationship with your IT team, or even better, justify a tag management system (Satellite, Ensighten, Tagman, Brighttag) that will get you focused on using the data, not getting it. Focusing your time on getting data is not a good thing.*

* Don’t give me the argument that without getting data, there is no data to analyze. Without celery, there is no ants on a log. Without rain, there is no celery. Without evaporation, there is no rain. Without glaciers and the ocean, there is nothing to evaporate. Without hydrogen, there are no glaciers. Without the big bang, there is no hydrogen. Give me a freaking break. Which brings me to #2:

2. Focus on the output

Particularly, when presenting. Know your audience and deliver first, before anything else, a message that gets their attention. Your process is your content. Your conclusion is your headline.

Maybe conclusion is a crappy word, since it’s usually something you figure out a the end. But rather than making your presentation a playback of the process you went through, reverse the order and start with what you found out at the end. Usually, this is just the “hook” that you need to get everyone’s attention, get them asking questions, and help them arrive at the same conclusion you did.

I’ve found that when I start by walking through my process, the audience knows they are in for a long, boring meeting where I don’t get to the point for quite a while.

3. Focus on YOU

YOU can answer questions. YOU can get information and numbers. YOU can tell executives what people think about the web site. Not tools.

Yes, the tools provide this information, but YOU put it into terms (a la “focus on the output”) that the business can consume. SiteCatalyst was not custom-built for Best Buy. OpinionLab is not only installed on Williams-Sonoma. These tools have to be built to handle any web site and every business model. It is you who is valuable; you are the one who adds context and a sense of reality and applicability to the data.

Without tools, you can’t answer questions. But with tools, it doesn’t mean you can answer questions effectively.

How many people saw Tiger Woods crush the competition at the Masters and then went out and bought the clubs he used to win? Did those clubs work for these people? People think they can buy a better game. They think the tools will get them on the podium. Unfortunately, my golf game proves without fail that this is not the case.

Try to get people to ask you the question, not ask you to get data. If they do ask you for data, show them what they asked for behind a page that you put together. Try to illustrate on that page why the request for the data could have led them to the wrong conclusion (if that’s true) or didn’t tell the whole story. You don’t have to do it in an overt way, just show that the human is where the value comes from, not the tool.

Once you realize that you are the bomb, it’s time to…

4. Focus on THEM

When you are delivering your powerful message and wrapping that in your own brilliance, remember that even if your conclusion is the same, you will see that people from different departments will grapple with your ideas in radically different ways. The same sentence read by or spoken to a CEO, a CFO, a CMO, a Paid Search Manager, and a Usability Engineer may mean different things. Some may feel the message helps them. Others may feel threatened by it. Some may see savings and cost reduction while others see upside. Some will see increased productivity while others will see their fiefdom shrinking.

I have made huge mistakes in my work by throwing an “unframed” idea out to a mixed group of stakeholders or by framing it the same way to all stakeholders. Huge mistakes.

By learning what goals and motivations each of the players has, you can show each player how an idea benefits them. If it doesn’t benefit them directly, you can help them understand how it benefits others in such a way that it may warrant sacrifice (which may be repaid in the future). You will also understand their goals and motivations for the future, allowing you to be on the lookout for ideas that do benefit them, which will build a tremendously successful relationship.

If you see salespeople or other charismatic people who are seemingly able to do this on the fly, don’t despair. There is no gene for this: these people spend a lot more time than they let on trying to see things from other peoples’ perspectives. Charismatic people work hard to understand others’ wants and needs so they come into these meetings prepared to speak in a way they know will be successful. By giving others’ perspectives some forethought, you literally stack the deck in your favor, but it does take conscious effort.

5. Be the closest thing to a graphic designer possible

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why do so many people just say, “wow…,” when you put something truly amazing in front of them?

Some of my most successful presentations had just a single chart on the first slide. I make an introduction, and say, “Here is what we need to figure out today…,” change to this slide, and just watch the faces in the room.

A book written by the company that helped Al Gore design his famous “Inconvenient Truth” presentation shows a chart of two different kinds of companies. One line (red) shows the market cap of companies who have design deeply-ingrained into their company and culture. The other, blue line shows the rest of the companies in that exchange (a UK exchange). Over a period of about 7 years, the companies who had design at their core had grown by a factor of 2x compared to the companies that did not.

wow…

When you are able to convey ideas clearly, your customers know what your product is, what it does, how it works. When you can convey your thoughts clearly, and this usually happens graphically, people “get it” instantly. They want to know more. And they trust that when they ask questions, those questions, too, will be answered in a clear way.

Looking at companies and people who do not communicate through effective design, on the other hand, you may feel that interactions with these people are cumbersome and unproductive, that your questions are answered in round-about or indirect ways, and you are generally less-likely to interact with someone or see their value clearly.

Personally, I’m about as good of a graphic designer as Hellen Keller. But I try as hard as possible. I try to strip things down to their most basic elements, show them to people, get feedback. I try to be a student of effective communication. I can assure you it is a skill that can be improved.

6. Focus on reaction, not perfection

If you could answer a question 10 times (instead of just once) on Jeopardy, what would be your strategy? If it was me, I would answer as quickly as humanly possible with a semi-educated guess. What if Alex told you if you were getting “warmer” or “colder” with each answer? Yeah, I’d be jumping all over that buzzer to ring in.

Online, this is exactly how it works. Yet we are obsessed with trying to answer the question “right” the first time. We believe that analytics is a practice designed to help us make better decisions. I disagree.

I think that digital analytics is best used to help us make more decisions, more quickly. I would just about wager my life that if I can make 5 decisions in the time it takes you to make 1, I will get a better net result almost every time. This is the premise of A/B and multivariate testing, but even with tests, people criticize the “loss” in the test variants that fail to find upside or in a test where all variants produce inferior results.

“Getting colder” is the same as “getting warmer.” Remember that.

When we use analytics to make better decisions, it’s like when a shop owner tries to learn everything he possibly can about how to organize his shop, stock his shelves, hire help, and get it all just right for opening day. Imagine the OCD shopkeeper who delays his store opening for a month because he keeps getting little bits of information, reading just a few more articles in hopes he’ll get it just right on opening day.

Then the store opens.

Which period of time do you think taught him more about his customers and how to run his store? The months before opening, or the hours after?

When we use analytics to “open the shop early” and get ideas out into the real world, we can learn quickly and react. In the time it would have taken us to learn what should work, we can learn 5 times what does work.

There are exceptions, but to me, this is the rule.

See the light

What is the eventuality of your career? Where is this taking you? In 10 years, when someone else is putting the reports together, delivering the types of presentations you are delivering today, where will you be?

I don’t know the answer to this question. Not by a long shot. But my gut tells me that what we are doing today will train us for some pretty impressive roles in the future. And if that is the case, my gut tells me that these roles will get farther away from the kinds of metrics we work with today and closer to the kinds of metrics and questions that Wall Street works with every day: How efficient is your company? How is it growing? What is the promise intrinsic in the business’s plans for the future? What evidence is there that new business opportunities will pan out?

Those are things we are probably pretty good at today, and will be incredibly good at farther down the road.

Your turn

This has just been my experience and a few things I feel help me. But what about you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Less than 15% of what influences someone’s success in their career is their actual competence or skill in their craft. 85% of your success is determined by your ability to handle people and get them on board with your way of thinking.

This probably isn’t all that surprising. Looking at the most shining examples of success, people like Jeff Bezos, for example, we know for certain that his success doesn’t come from his unparalleled ability to ship packages, stock warehouses, build a web site, etc. And when we get out of the clouds of uber-success stories like Jeff and into more everyday situations, we may think the scenario changes, but it doesn’t.

So what’s with the cannon and the canoe? I was watching Mythbusters the other day and Grant had created this harpoon shooter that could shoot a 10 lb “anchor” 60 feet, or something bonkers like that. It used compressed gas at 3,000 psi to do this.

In their test run, Grant set up a mattress to catch the anchor, put the cannon on top of a tripod, pressed the fire button, and watched the tripod go flying backwards, crashing into the back wall of the warehouse with enough force to just about kill someone.

Whoops.

This episode reminded me of this “firing a cannon from a canoe” thing, and it all got me thinking about what we do. How we have this incredible, amazing power to effect change, but often struggle with making it happen. Perhaps it’s because we work so hard to become amazing at what we do, but that, unfortunately, may not be the place that needs the most focus.

Now among the community of brilliant people in our industry, I am yet to meet a person that I didn’t find convincing. When you work in our field, it’s hard not to be: you are highly intelligent people who have such great information. So, I think we are prepared to succeed at both the skill and the people side of things, it may just be a matter of how we apply these abilities, or a misunderstanding of what the people side really is.

Rather than pretending I am capable of helping 1% as much as this book, I’m just going to briefly summarize. Pick up a copy of the book and give it a read. You’ll see some things that are almost laughably simple, but work. Simple things like learning what other people are interested in, forging great relationships, building on success and learning, rather than focusing on failure. Ways we can create rapport and relationships that build a stronger base for our cannon, most importantly by not talking about the cannon at all.

The surprising thing is that the 85% isn’t our “delivery,” because the 85% has nothing to do with what we are going to talk about in the 15%. Our relationships with people are more human than that. Yes, a significant part of (and probably the impetus for) our relationships are professional in nature, but what Dale Carnegie writes about is world leaders talking about stamp collecting, boats, hunting, and other personal interests in order to lay the foundation for the professional discussion that follows. The 85% is truly a person-to-person connection, and once that is achieved, the potential for your talent to make a difference is amplified immeasurably.

Once that foundation has cemented, I’ve found that my cannon can actually do some real damage to inefficiency, poor execution, and misallocation of resources, rather than the ill fate I’ve suffered many times where I have just blasted myself farther away from my target.

Thoughts?

So, that last part may have been a give-away. We’re talking about YOU.

You are incredibly valuable to your company. Probably a lot more valuable than you realize (only if you are driving business decisions, not if you are providing reporting). And you know what valuable people get? They get what they want.

Web analytics people consistently want these things:

• More say
• More ability to influence decision making
• More people coming to them, earlier in the process, to discuss ideas
• And who doesn’t want more money?

Well, pardon me, but that’s ridiculous.

We are a group of people who deliver amazing results that have real financial meaning to our businesses. We reveal mistakes that, when fixed, close the gap on hideously large amounts of lost revenue. We find the nuances to turn good ideas into great ones, when executed. We make every one of our channels more effective and profitable. We ensure that our usability and information architecture “best practices” really work for us, and add accountability to hundreds of SME-based tactics. And we make businesses ass-tons of money.

If we want to reach these goals of influence, respect, and money, we need to be aiming at targets that are farther out. We need to be impatient with results. You can’t just count on your business to give you the raise you deserve, because to them, you are a gold mine who thinks you are a dirt farm. You make a company millions and then call yourself a “measurer.” And they love it, because you are one of the cheapest success stories in their entire portfolio.

Yes, we may never have million dollar salaries and we may never have influence over companies that won’t make a single move without consulting us. Maybe. But are we going to get closer by saying we aren’t going to get there, or will we probably get closer by trying to get there?

What do I think? Knowing you people, I think when we try to do something, we do it.

Not true.

The problem with this is that people look at their companies like they might look at a race car. If we put the best tires on it, the best engine in it, the best transmission, suspension, exhaust system, and fuel, it will win the race. But the problem is that they aren’t paying attention to the chassis. A better engine, tires, suspension and all of that on a mini-van will be the best mini-van possible, but it’s still going to lose every race. The idea that our chassis (the operational structure and tendencies of our business) is automatically going to change into a race car when we put better tires on it is an illusion.

Businesses that operate on the web have to overcome two key hurdles (and there are others) when integrating “better” into their process, and the hurdles don’t always look the same.

Technology, Marketing and Design

On the one hand, there are the hurdles that are presented when integrating best-in-class technology or when presenting isolated victories to the user (like designing great landing pages apart from the rest of your site). These hurdles represent incongruence to the user, conjure skepticism and doubt as to the consistency or quality of your offering, and ultimately can destroy the brand if people think you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Many brands come under intense criticism when users realize they are just pretending to care but really do not, and the idea that someone can buy technology to cover up the lack of a customer-oriented business model or a genuinely good experience is akin to the idea that someone can buy an official Kevin Garnett jersey and suddenly be able to dunk. It doesn’t work like that.

Let’s say your web site is poop (many are). How does poop look when…

• You launch a world-class marketing campaign? High-exposure poop.
• You create awesome landing pages? Poop behind a pretty door.
• You have awesome product photography, 360 views, and reviews? Interactive poop.
• You make the site super-responsive? Faster poop.
• You have the best checkout process in the world? Poop that accepts Discover.

People

The “issue” of hiring great talent is a different one altogether. The reason I say “issue” is that it’s never a bad thing to hire a rock star, but when you try to plug that rock star’s guitar into the same amp that someone else in the band is already using, their mind-altering guitar solo is going to come out like mud.

The people issue can be different than the technology issue, although there are many similarities. The most notable hurdle is that people consume resources. They consume budgets, they consume attention, they consume human capital; and all of this consumption can cause a lot of strain. Why? Because no organization has unlimited resources, and the resources these people consume are the same resources others wish to consume. Sure, it’s easy to split budget up, but what about the home page? How do you split that up?

• Hint: the way we do it today just makes our home page look like Mardi Gras — everyone loses, especially the user
• Hint #2: the home page isn’t your front door: that’s an outdated mindset, so quit fighting over it

The problem with hiring rock stars is every one of them wants to wail on their solo. But that’s not how music works. People have to take their turns soloing, and while they aren’t, they need to keep the beat and back the person who is. So why are most businesses creating goals and financial incentives to practically ensure everyone is trying to solo at the same time?

While you can layer technology on top of technology and often avoid conflicts (obviously not always), this is nearly impossible with people, especially if they specialize in different trades and think that that their trade is God’s gift to man. People think that marketing is more important than customer service. Other people feel the opposite. People think that aesthetics are more important than utility, others feel the opposite. And meanwhile, your company is bonusing everyone based on their solo. This makes for bad music.

Who will save the day? You.

You are a pretty unique person. What you bring to the table in the form of data that helps prioritize the solos and show how to integrate technology, marketing and design is invaluable. You, for example, can see that people on twitter are cutting your company down at the knees for hiding a crappy experience behind a lovely landing page. The information you can gather reveals how poopy your site is, where it’s poopiest, and how you can empower the right rock stars to make it awesome by getting the most out of their specialized talents.

But wait, that’s not the important part. Not even close.

What you really bring to the table is a perspective shared only with the CEO and COO of your company (hopefully): a lack of decision bias. What makes you truly special is the fact that you don’t get a bonus based on a marketing outcome. You don’t fight for a bigger budget to drive ever more people to your house of poop every quarter. You don’t think that any one sub-component of your web site will usher humanity to nirvana. You understand that we are making music.

You can help the company execute better by helping the company integrate better. You can help create scenarios where, when budget, resources, hires, or home page space goes to one stakeholder and not the other, they both win. You can reveal the positive impact of one stakeholder sacrificing for the sake of the other, and suggest that both be rewarded for a holistically good decision.

When someone asks me, “What does an engagement with your company look like?” that can be a pretty hard question to answer. We will do anything and everything to make your business better so you can make your site better. Yes, we can optimize your search campaign. Yes, we can do world-class SEO. Yes, we can create dashboards and do implementations, design landing pages and optimize your cart experience. But that doesn’t necessarily stand out: there are other companies out there that have amazing, incredibly talented people like ours, too. What makes us (and you) unique is we know we are in a race, not in a tire-quality contest. And if your company is a mini-van, the chassis is the main thing we need to fix.

I grew up friends with a kid that was a year older than me. We were great friends, even through elementary school where the difference between being in one grade vs. the next was practically equivalent to 10 current-day years of maturity. Never was this more apparent than when I was just starting 4th grade and he was beginning 5th grade. In “after school” (our parents both worked so we were in the after school program) one day early into the year, he comes over to my desk and drops a trapper keeper that must have weighed 15 lbs, stuffed so tight it looked like he tried to fit a medium-sized pet inside of it. As it thudded down to rest, he leaned over and explained to me that I would never be able to handle 5th grade. There is more learning, more homework, more studying, and more paper than anyone is capable of negotiating. 5th grade was going to kill me.

At the crossroads of every stage of life, I’ve tried to consult people who are on the other side. And in almost every case, a large percentage of the people on the other side report back that it’s harder than they imagined, more complex, and they literally call into question the human capacity to handle it. This was the case with 5th grade, high school, many tough college courses (thermodynamics does actually test the limits of the human mind and body), marriage, having children, and I’m sure it’ll be the same with other things. Every time someone has gone through it, they somehow survived, but question whether any other human could handle it (even though most every human for the last several thousand years has somehow survived the same).

This is called douchiness.

Where does douchiness come from?

In a nutshell, I believe it comes from a need to look smart; to feel better than the average bear and to celebrate our success in overcoming a challenge. How do I know this? Because I’ve been douchy many times in my life (and I knew it when I was doing it).

Our jobs are tough. Really tough, in fact. The debate about whether web analytics is easy or hard has been raging on for centuries (ok, maybe not centuries). But like our douchy definitions for the term “web analytics,” our focus on whether or not what we do is difficult is something we have constantly evaluated from our own perspective, rather than trying to appreciate what an outside perspective of our trade should be.

What kind of watch are you?

A metaphor I’ve been rolling around in my mind for a while relates what we do to how high-end wristwatches are designed. I do not have the money for these things, but maybe some day. Maybe I should put a paypal button on here. Anyhow…

Which of the two watches is more useful? Which of the two watches could potentially be perceived as douchier (to some, cooler, but in terms of actual usefulness)?

What we, as analysts, are paid to do is make sure we have an opaque face obscuring the complexity of our jobs. In watches, each feature the watch can handle is called a “complication.” It’s an apt name, because adding the ability to display a date, make that date learn which months have 30 days and which do not, add a chronograph, a lunar phase display, or any other feature significantly complicates its “motion,” or the guts of the watch. Classy watches like the one on the left simply allow that complication to exist in the background, electing to confidently show the user only what’s necessary; what they paid for. Watches like the one on the right are designed to impress. They are actually super cool looking, but to the user, they sometimes just present extra noise around the core message that is supposed to be delivered.

People in our industry believe that because our jobs are hard or complex, we can wave that flag to show the world how smart we are. We want to leave the face transparent to show our organization, our peers, our parents how smart we are. And worse yet, when someone gets into this trade, we tell them how hard it is. We tell them we don’t know if they’ll survive it. We tell people who say SiteCatalyst is complicated that they just don’t “get it”. That the complex, “enterprise” tool is like a Ferrari. Well I have news for you, my mom can drive a Ferrari. She can start the engine, put it into gear (which usually isn’t necessary with Ferraris since they have idiot-proof automatic shifting transmissions), turn on the radio, and drive wherever she likes. If my mom enters a race, yes, the car allows her to adjust camber, downforce, steering stiffness, single-nut tire changing access and all of that, but she can still go buy milk in the damn thing. To buy milk with SiteCatalyst (and just about all tools), you have to rewire a bomb. So don’t tell people they “don’t get it.”

In a nutshell, we slam our 15 lb trapper keeper down on the table to show the unprepared wussies what they are in for and how badass we are.

That’s douchy.

De-douching

(Get it, like de-duping? Such industry funnies!)

What organizations need from us is the appearance that what we do is simple and straightforward, because that makes what we reveal actionable. Business is simple. You have revenue, you have expenses, and you have capital (or assets balanced against liabilities). Those are the only things that exist, relevant to us.

But from that point, the business breaks down into smaller pieces that affect one or more of those things. That’s when it starts to get complex. And we can decide to talk about that those little pieces, or we can simply say things like:

• We have found a way to make x% more revenue
• We have found a way to trim y% expenses
• We have found a way to use our capital more efficiently

These are simple messages; compelling messages. And believe me, when the big cheese starts asking questions and digging into the claim you’ve put forth, there will be plenty of opportunity to look smart. But wait for the digging, for the love of God.

We are paid to make it look easy and have the goods to back it up. Any professional athlete makes it look easy. But they have 10,000 hours behind them that got them there and the confidence to not have to rub that in the world’s face all the time. Let’s do that. Let’s make it look easy. Let’s back that up with everything that exists behind the face, because we do have the goods to back it up. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be running around talking about these amazing business outcomes we can drive.

And finally, let’s be nicer to each other and stop playing secret service for Omniture. Stop jumping in front of bullets for a tool that doesn’t necessarily do the same for you (no, these improvements are not always based on user feedback, they are based on the imminent reality that the tool will become irrelevant without a feature roadmap: that’s how products work). The tool was a decade behind the times in terms of back-end architecture, and that is a fact. 15 is designed to get them to zero so they can continue to build an amazing suite of front-end utilities for smart people like you to use (and keep behind the face). People need to also stop defending the often terribly frustrating implementation syntax. It is not a Ferrari. It can instead feel like a Fortran mainframe that takes 200 square feet and 20 IBM engineers to do what an iPhone can do. They will catch up because they are brilliant, but today is not a happy place for many. They are working hard, but it doesn’t mean that complaints today aren’t legitimate.

Let’s move past all of this inconsequential tool obsession, let’s extinguish the burning desire to look smarter than the next person, let’s be the classy and incredibly valuable resource the world needs us to be, and let’s reap the rewards. We are one community stuck in a rut, and we are digging. We are better and smarter than this.

With love,

Evan

Companies are complex places. They’re complex like the olympics. Everyone is striving for a gold, but some people are skiing downhill and other people are brushing the ice to make a huge stone land in a target. It’s when the curlers are curling in the middle of the downhill race that things go wrong. It’s when different departments and different people are playing different sports that conflicts pop up and we have this, “We’re all on the same team,” BS talk with our managers. Yes, we are all playing for the USA or wherever you are from, but we earn our gold medals in decidedly different ways.

So something that is of huge value to businesses is objective people like us understanding the viewpoints of people in different disciplines. What pain are people feeling as a result of being aligned to a different goal than the people who are shoveling work on their plates? Where are the failure points?

I know that in many companies, it feels a little unrealistic, but if we can make some friends around the organization and go out to lunch with them once a month (individually), or at least have a standard 15 minute coffee every few weeks, we will have an unparalleled understanding of our organizations. We will start to see that peoples’ complaints are legitimate, we can identify the parts of the complex ecosystem that may be to blame for those complaints and pains, and we can give each of these people some context from something we’ve learned from another part of the organization. And we will learn things a little differently than the “team USA” coaches in the company (HR, centralized execs., etc.) because we are part of the infantry; we are the ones with the guns (not just the maps) in our hands. Even if you are an executive in analytics, you are still a practitioner, because this isn’t a profession you can avoid getting your hands dirty in.

When we get back to our analyzing and identify issues with the site’s performance or customer experience, we will have a new understanding of the types of conversations and decisions that led us to this point. We can also see these potential points of failure, losses of efficiency, and causes for bad decisions in current conversations taking place. We can become better analysts by putting our UX, IA, marketing, etc. “opportunities” into a qualitative context: that these could and should have been better experiences with higher ROI and overall performance, but there were giant stones sliding across the downhill course, causing the skiers to go flying into the woods.

When we do our analysis not just on the customer and the web site, but include some findings on the internal workings of the business, our work can take on a whole new light and reach a whole new audience. We can become the resource we should be to all arms and all sports, and we can do a huge service to the individual athletes by pointing out their overridden efforts to avoid these pitfalls when decisions were being made. We don’t need to point fingers or name names of those who steamrolled the “right” decision, just merely recap the facts in an effort to learn from our own mistakes.

So, who’s our next lunch going to be with?

So, here are some thoughts on how to measure, evangelize, and create delta in engagement.

First things first

We have two key issues in the area of measuring and expressing engagement to our businesses:

1. Most of the makeup of “engagement” consists of metrics that have not been translated to economic value. This requires extra explanation as the measures are passed around the organization, and may alienate certain very important audiences.
2. Largely, the types of “engagement” indices and calculations I’ve heard of are typically non-predictive in nature. They do not fold into or constitute a model that can be used to calculate the return of incremental investment or a shift in budget allocation* across media or resources. Typically, these engagement models are used to show delta in an index when delta in revenue or ROI is hard to create or isn’t enough for a pushy organization.

* Shifting your budget allocation based on distribution of historical ROI values is a highly unsophisticated long term strategy (fine in the short term) because it fails to consider the impact you can have on ROI by delivering better messaging and a better experience (read more).

It’s the economy, stupid!

The first thing to deal with is a nugget of wisdom made popular by James Carville. Fortunately, it’s a concept that the measure (argg! hate that word) community is transitioning toward as we speak: making measures economic in nature. Tweets, Likes, Pageviews, subscriptions, shares, etc. are the language of web metrics, and the good news is that they are all worth something. We just have to figure out what.

So let’s get started. The first thing to lay groundwork on is that there are two great, pre-existing models we can use to estimate the worth of something.

The first one is obvious: real return, which describes the actual dollars we get in a transaction. In a paid search campaign, we can see the money that the campaign drove in real terms. In truth, we only see a certain percentage of the money, because real return models don’t intrinsically consider ripple effects: that a single click could lead to a positive experience, a sale, lifetime value that can’t all be captured in our data systems, the potential for word to spread to their family and friends, etc., etc.

Real return is both a blessing and a curse: it gives us cold, hard data, but it also impregnates our businesses with the idea that everything is suddenly measurable in cold, hard terms. That is completely inaccurate.

The second model is probably the one that will be more powerful for us in translating engagement into value, and doing so in a predictive way: willingness to pay (WTP). WTP describes the investment a business is comfortable making to get a desired outcome, often an outcome that is non-financial in nature, or difficult to translate to financial terms. Investments in radio advertising, for example, are based largely on willingness to pay: “We can deliver your message to over 300,000 listeners in our lunch time block.” The advertiser does some back of the napkin math to figure out what the financial impact of 300,000 listeners may be (the business owner obviously wants some sort of a return), and they decide on whether the ad is worth the cost.

Truthfully, WTP models can and should be derived from real return data, but getting too obsessed about turning WTP into real return will bring your decision making to a halt. You must fight the urge to get stuck in this trap; keep moving.

Getting your Financial Figures

Now, it’s time to figure out how to put dollar signs on your tweets, likes, etc. One of the best places to start (if your business is large and does traditional advertising) is by finding proxies in the traditional advertising side. If a single post on Coke’s facebook wall reaches an audience of 3mm viewers (measurable), and is liked/commented by 10% of viewers (measurable), and that is seen by their friends (measurable), you can estimate the total reach. How much does it cost you to get that same reach with a billboard?

Now add a little premium to that figure because a) facebook is an interactive medium and builds affinity and b) you may have learned something about your creative or brand from the comments you received, which has value far above and beyond what non-interactive, traditional media can provide (you have to pay extra for the focus groups, in fact).

If you aren’t a big place with huge advertising budgets, you can just investigate what it would cost you if you did. Make a few phone calls to the newspaper, TV station, radio, or an agency, and see what you will get for what price in terms of reach for an audience that fits your target market.

You’ll have to go through your whole organization and look at each action, trying to understand the value of each effort (you will probably be using a mix of real return and WTP/proxies in each scenario):

• What am I willing to pay for a paid search click, email open, or display impression? (ROI + extra lifetime value + word of mouth potential)?
• What am I willing to pay for an additional developer? (cost or incremental revenue of releasing a feature or product earlier)?
• What am I willing to pay for a usability person or designer? (potential upside of a range of basis-point deltas in conversion rate [a fancy way of saying build a matrix] for applicable traffic sources).

ROI is NEVER the answer to any of these questions because ROI fails to consider anything but a moment in time. On the WTP side, don’t forget to factor in other costs like salary, resources, efficiency loss, etc. in addition to the hard cost of the media or whatever it is you’re looking at.

No, this is not going to be something you do in a week. But it’s also not something you have to do for your whole company before you can start making predictions. Take off a few bite-sized pieces and see where you get with it.

Making it predictive

Now that you have your models for valuation and a method of getting some numbers to work with, it’s time to make sure that your model is a predictive one, not a backwards-looking one.

Creating engagement data for the past is easy. Creating it for the future is much harder. The good news about a WTP model is that it is pretty forwards-looking, though: you are focused on what an incremental set of eyes, an incremental sale, etc. is worth to you. If you are stuck in the ROI trenches, you will never be able to understand what a sale is worth, and you will never be able to state what you are wiling to pay to create a new customer or rekindle the flame with an old one. As long as you get things back to WTP, you will have a predictive model on your hands (it would take me 20x the length of this post to actually start discussing a viable model, so if you’d like a post that dives into real models, please leave a comment!)

Delivering the message

Now here’s the critical part: when you deliver the message, deliver a prediction, not a predictive model. Use your model; don’t ask others to use it. Here are a few examples:

• “Mr. CEO, our work has turned up an opportunity to bring in an incremental 5% market share with a $1.75mm investment, all in.”
• “Mr. CMO, we have found a way to reallocate 10% of our radio budget to social media and improve that budget’s reach by 50%.”
• “Mr. COO, we have found that there is a significant tradeoff between process and productivity in the IT department that we estimate has cost us $7.5mm in revenue in the last 2 quarters. Some changes in our workflow can close that gap in the next 6 months.”

Also, deliver the right message to the right people. CEOs care about stock price and company valuation, which means cash flow, market share, and innovative things to talk to the world about. COOs care about efficiency and good ideas that will impact the business directly. CMOs care about using their budget effectively and being able to show the value of their existence in terms of changes since the last CMO was fired 3 months ago.

Your mileage with your executives may vary, but keep in mind that different executives come with different goals and perspectives. Try to guess what motivates them and reposition your idea in a way that suits their personal or professional goals.

What happened to engagement?

Nobody gives a crap about engagement. Engagement is just a stepping stone on the way to “worth,” and it’s a non-predictive stone. Once you’ve moved on, you’ll never look back.

• Statistics
• Modeling
• Tool implementation
• Tool use
• Data visualization
• Reporting
• Teasing insight out of the data
• Marketing channel expertise
• Usability
• Information Architecture
• A deep understanding of your business
• Sales

If you guessed “sales,” you are right. If you can’t sell yourself, sell your ideas, sell the need to implement well, measure, report, analyze, test, and optimize, you will be a servant to your organization and its various stakeholders, pushy personalities, and its operational issues. You will be infinitely more likely to be less productive, less impactful, frustrated, unhappy, unfulfilled, and paid nowhere near what you are worth. One skill can fix that.

Start with some good books:

• The Prime Solution
• The Gitomer Books
• Ziglar’s Wisdom
• The Exceptional Presenter

These are going to feel cheesy to you. They may feel weak on facts. They may feel lame or even a little manipulative. It’s up to you to decide what you will put into practice. I’m not suggesting you read any of these books (or any book, for that matter) without a healthy dose of skepticism or desire to challenge the thinking, but you won’t be worse off for reading them. You will find things you will put into practice that will wow you.

After you start selling internally, the next step is to find various internal partners. People who can teach you the ropes of what gets things done, get you to the right people with the right context, and make your selling and influence life infinitely easier.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking irrefutable evidence does its own selling. We spend our days building cases, and really good ones. But everything we do and everything we find needs a sale or it will be sidelined by other, sexier ideas that were sold better.

You need to be competent in the other skills, but if you’re not working hard on improving the one skill that will make you happer, earn you more money, and make you feel more valuable, it might be worth a second look.

Have a great weekend, hopefully with some good reading!

So good in theory, but in reality, the marketing promise has written checks the hiney is unable to cash.

Data centralization is something that people have been working on for 50+ years. Our digital data warehouses are only one of the more current attempts at the myriad ways businesses have tried to get it all in the same place so we can see the whole picture. And you know how much of a struggle this effort has been for us in digital? It’s always been that way. It’s actually always been worse.

Unfortunately, the promise that data centralization makes will never be realized. The promise is that centralization will get us away from the clutter of decentralized data and give us one place to build from. I don’t think we will ever get there.

For one thing, the data fights centralization. In all fairness, it is very, very hard to centralize data and link information from our various systems (CRM, point of sale, web analytics, web marketing/advertising channels, call center, etc.) And once the data is linked, it’s incredibly hard to collapse trees of data where metrics don’t match up (web uniques, customerIDs, credit card #’s, email addresses, invoice #’s, TV and radio performance data, coupon redemption, finance metrics, etc.).

This is HARD. Being a CIO would suck.

The reason I don’t think we will get there is because today, linking data and creating models almost always means sacrificing fidelity. Take cross-channel attribution, for example. The problem is that revenue is duplicated across the reporting delivered at the channel level: email reports $10,000 and search reports $10,000, but we only sold $15,000. Many tag management solutions today “fix” that problem by choosing which of the tags to fire, excluding the other tags. But is this a fix at all? We just lost fidelity into the revenue that each channel participates in. If two different agencies manage this media, they just lost some ability to understand how their media influences revenue; they lost some ability to optimize and boost results, because now they are only working with part of the story.

These tools fail to take outside influences into consideration like the creative, changes in budget, visitor history, etc. They teach marketers to assume that media channels intrinsically are “closer” or “further” from the purchase, or more/less related, and that this will be consistent over time. In other words, they suggest that because email was an early touch and search was a late touch last month, it will continue to be that way in the future and that’s how you should optimize the campaigns. Hogwash.

Yes, it is true that guns don’t kill people and tools don’t tell stories; people do. But when we create technologies that “fix” problems, we are stating that what comes out of the tool represents the truth, the whole story, or something like that.

The promise of BI and data centralization is that when information is married and central, we get a better picture of what’s happening and can make better decisions. It’s this fallacy that has led your company’s management to make decisions that make your head spin. It’s that false promise that leads businesses to invest millions in a solution that blurs the focus and liposuctions critical details that will influence decision making.

Am I saying that progress hasn’t been made? No. Immense progress has been made, and data centralization is a hugely important thing. But it isn’t the answer. It’s one of two barrels we need to employ to understand what is happening. The other is the specialist view. The highly trained and sometimes myopic perspective that crafts per-channel, per-market, per-issue solutions. Specialists on their own are highly dangerous. Generalists on their own are, too. It’s only when both fire together and you can take superb, but realistic solutions to market that you win.

This is just a, “where do you spend your time,” idea. If you are investing an inordinate amount of your attention into centralizing, de-duping, common-keying, etc., at the cost of per-channel, per-market, per-idea optimization, I believe this isn’t the best use of your time, as a ninja analyst.

It’s your choice how to tackle optimization. You can start at the central: Omniture Genesis, multi-channel attribution, etc., but you MUST go to the individual branches. You can’t make decisions from the trunk. Or you can start at the branches to find opportunities, but you MUST look at the trunk to make sure that growing one branch won’t tip the tree over.

“Simplification” through centralization is an illusion. What we do is hard, and it’s going to stay that way. It’s just a decision on how we’re going to spend our time.

While I was waiting to cross the street the other day, I noticed something that made me ask the question, “Who in the world thought that was a good idea?”

About 50% of the cars making a right at this intersection were hitting the curb, ruining their pretty wheels, and looking generally silly. For the angle of the turn, the curb was just horribly designed. It extended into the intersection, and for cars to make the turn if a car was coming the other way, they practically had to run over the curb to prevent the front end of their car from sweeping out into oncoming traffic.

I see situations like this all over the place, both in the physical world and on the web. Most of the time, these types of problems seem so obvious, but not to the people who can actually fix the problem or who could have expected / avoided it in the first place. Why is that?

In our industry, we tend to get consumed with the tools we have in our arsenal. We have a flow of data coming in, and like in the Matrix, we tend to watch that flow and look for kinks in the mesh. But there is a lot of data that doesn’t come in table or chart form. A lot of the data that our offering creates exists in a more qualitative sense. It’s there if we’re paying attention to the road ahead, rather than driving by watching the speedometer.

I think a lot of organizations miss out on some pretty high-potential enhancements to their offering, their marketing, to everything they do because they are looking at the dials rather than the road. This particular curb may not cause a “blip,” because maybe there are 9,999 other curbs with no issue. The averages smooth the curve. But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a significant problem out there, and maybe the charts and tables aren’t the easiest way to see it.

Some of social media’s greatest untapped potential is this qualitative view. People are out there talking. While we are trying to produce an ROI on twitter, we’re ignoring the “curb checks” that our customers are screaming about. We’re stuck on the dials, rather than the road.

Companies spend hundreds of thousands (and often millions) of dollars trying to make the spreadsheet and chart-creating tools better and better, or to get more of these tools. These tools, sadly, will never, ever substitute for looking at the road. No speedometer, odometer, GPS, or anything will ever be good enough to prevent you from missing something big happening on the other side of your windshield.

Of all the tools in your arsenal, I believe common sense may be the best one. How can you use it — and get your company to use it — more often? Take a look through the windshield today. I bet you’ll see some pretty interesting stuff.