It’s a real challenge to find clear distinctions between observations and commentary in online media. The web is littered with blog posts that are opinions, repackaged opinions, and responses to repackaged opinions. Now don’t get me wrong, I love good analysis and commentary. But it’s always good to get the full and complete source along with it.

My “Follow Friday” this week is a guy who always does a great job of this.

Why follow Eric Bryn?

In the whole Observe/Orient/Decide/Act (aka OODA Loop) strategic method, being clear on what’s an observation and what is someone’s analysis or commentary is critically important. For those who can find meaning in original research, finding original research and data is critical for making meaning and informing better decisions.

I first started paying attention to Eric Bryn after meeting him at an Inman Connect in San Francisco a number of years back. We were at a vendor party, the place was packed and loud. But we quickly got into talking about web analytics and how traffic data can be put to work in the real estate industry.

Eric was one of those guys who not only got this stuff, but was already doing it and thinking it. Later during the conference I saw him on a panel discussing A/B testing and ways to optimize a home page in a sort of live “real estate site makeover” kind of thing. His comments during that session were spot on.

But what ultimately makes Eric a great person to follow is his ability to find original research online, tease out a few worthwhile insights and then provide a link to the original research. For those of us who are tired of getting pre-chewed opinions on the usual suspects of research and white papers, Eric’s ability to find solid research and willingness to share is a goldmine.

There are, of course, a lot of ways to follow Eric Bryn. I recommend, first and foremost his blog (it’s one of very very few that get directly emailed to me whenever there’s an update), Real Estate Relativity. Given that Eric’s blog is filled with references to research papers, the blog should be of value to those in industries that aren’t real estate.

Other ways to follow Eric Bryn:

• Meet him in person at a conference, I’ve seen him at Inman Connect and several other tech/real estate events.
• Eric Bryn on Twitter
• Eric Bryn on LinkedIn

Dale Chumbley is a real estate agent in Vancouver, WA. But, since I’m not looking to buy or sell near Portland, that’s not why I follow him. And even though I do a lot of web strategy work in the real estate industry Dale isn’t a client (in fact, I should probably pay him consulting fees) so I don’t follow him for that either.

I follow Dale because he’s an awesome example of endurance and perseverance in social marketing. In any web marketing tactic that requires continued or repeated activity, Dale is there doing it to the fullest and he just doesn’t stop.

Remember those cool daily mugshot things people were trying out? Remember how people couldn’t keep doing them and gave up? Or how they just changed their clothes and background and shot them all in one day? Dale Chumbley is, as of this writing, on his 652nd mugshot. That’s tenacity.

Another example of his tenacity, is his approach to the  “365 Things to Do” meme. You’ve probably seen these pages pop up on Facebook “365 Things to Do in YourTownHere.” Lesser town curators abandon them after the fifth day or so. Dale is, as of this writing, on day 86 on his Things to Do in Vancouver WA project and I’m sure he’ll make it all the way through. Oh yeah, and he incorporates video into that as well. Once he starts stuff like this he just keeps going.

Dale does a lot of this social media marketing stuff without over-strategizing. I asked him once how long he spent planning out his 365 project, making an editorial calendar and so on. He said “I didn’t. I heard about it on a Monday and I started doing it on a Tuesday.”

What makes a lot of his stuff successful is that he knows his own work habits and is able to incorporate his social media marketing into his daily routine. For example, he does all the video for his 365 project on site, including uploading and posting. He shoots it with his iPhone, edits it with ReelDirector while sitting in his car, and then goes on with his day. Learning how Dale Chumbley does all this is the main reason I follow him.

Here’s the checklist of a few reasons you might want to follow Dale Chumbley as well:

• See an example of someone pursuing social media marketing over the long haul.
• See an example of someone integrating their marketing practices into the flow of their life/work.
• Learn about the Vancouver that isn’t in Canada.

Follow Dale Chumbley on:

• Twitter
• Clark County Real Estate Guide (including 365 Things To Do in Vancouver, WA)
• Flickr
• His mugshot

Everyone who takes part in the information economy should have a librarian or six among their watch-list. Librarians have been dealing with issues of taxonomy, location, storage, usability, findability, distribution and audience segmentation since sometime around the 3rd century B.C.

Being focused on the nature of information itself, librarians sit in an interesting quasi-neutral place for figuring out what to do with all the data that washes down the internet every minute. There are a ton of super active, highly digital, info-junkie librarians out there to expand your mind. I’ll suggest one for this Follow Friday.

Sarah Faye Cohen, Social Media Librarian

I first encountered Sarah Faye Cohen when she gave a presentation on social media to a bunch of lawyers at the Vermont Bar Social Media Summit. She gave an excellent, practical and engaging talk on how social media tools work and how they might be relevant to the audience.

If you’re looking for a solid intro to social media tools you would do yourself a favor to catch Cohen’s presentation. Other than that, you’re left with the usual options of follow.

Here’s how I recommend following:

1. See her in person if you can.
2. Read Sarah Cohen’s blog, The Sheck Spot.
3. She’s got a solid collection of presentations on Slideshare.
4. And, of course, Twitter serves up the short form and pointers to other great content.

For those of you who have reviewed my slide presentation on using web analytics with social media, you’ll notice that I have a minor addition to the usual Reach-Acquisition-Conversion consumer behavior model. That addition is Satisfaction. With social media, the customer’s ability to express satisfaction is significantly increased and also removed from the control of the producer or company. Customers have just as big of a printing press as companies do. Sometimes bigger.

On a practical note, if we’re going to measure satisfaction, what exactly will we be counting? Here’s an outline a few of the possiblities available on Twitter.

• Favorite button
• Retweeting
• Spontaneous mention
• Adding an individual to a list

It’s simple enough to figure out when you or your content has been the subject of any of these actions on Twitter. Usually a search for your name will catch the vast majority of these actions. From there, how you keep records is whatever way works best for you. A spreadsheet is helpful.

Let’s look at all four of these potential satisfaction indicators one-by-one.

The Twitter Favorite Button

Probably the easiest thing for a person to do, when they see something they like on Twitter is to click the little star next to the tweet. This adds the twitter post to the person’s “favorites.” One side effect of people “favoriting” your tweets, is that they don’t disappear into the Twitter memory-hole. You can find those tweets which have been favorited beyond the usual one or two weeks back.

Gathering data on Twitter favorites

To gather data on which of your tweets are being favorited and by whom, use Favstar. You might want to gather quantitative data on how many tweets get favorited, how many different individuals favorite your tweets, which individuals favorite the most tweets, etc. You might want to gather qualitative data on the topics of tweets that tend to get favorited (either by a wide variety of people, or by your target audience, etc).

Retweeting

Probably the second-most easiest way someone can express satisfaction is by hitting the Retweet button on Twitter. This simply reposts something you posted into the persons Twitter stream. It’s sort of like a “ditto” or other sign of agreement. Sometimes people put additional comments on as well which can qualify the retweet, adding more insight into the nature of their reason for passing along your tweet to their followers.

Gathering data on Retweets

To gather data on people retweeting you, do a Twitter search for your Twitter handle and the letters “RT.” You might want to gather quantitative data on how many tweets get retweeted, how many different individuals retweet your tweets, which individuals retweet the most tweets, etc–just like with favorites. You might want to gather qualitative data on the topics of tweets that tend to get favorited (either by a wide variety of people, or by your target audience, etc) and also if there is any commentary that goes along with the retweets.

Spontaneous Mentions

Sometimes someone will, out of the blue, say something about you on Twitter. If you’re speaking at a conference or maybe they just found something you made that they liked that isn’t on Twitter, for example. This requires more effort on the part of the Twitter user: it takes more than pushing a button to do this.

To gather data on mentions of you on Twitter, make use of the Twitter search again. This time, search for your Twitter handle and also do one for your name (sometimes people will be saying nice things about you without knowing that you’re on Twitter). The same suggestions for qualitative data and quantitative data for retweets is probably effective here as well. Though there’d be even more focus on the qualitative messages being passed along.

Adding to Twitter lists

This is another one that is done with a click of a button–add to list. What’s useful about a Twitter list is that entire lists can be followed. So if a lot of people are following a list you’re on, then your reach is increased significantly. It also lets you know how others are categorizing your use of Twitter.

To gather data on Twitter lists, look at at your Twitter profile and click the “lists” link. There you will see all of the public lists you’re a part of. You might want to gather quantitative data on the number of lists you’re on, the number of public lists you’re on, and the number of followers you have that are via lists. As for qualititative data, the titles of each list should give you a sense of how your audience is valuing your Twitter contributions.

This is all just data

All of this observation is just that, observation. It’s the first step in using the OODA Loop strategically in your Twitter practice. Just gathering this data probably won’t lead to any insights (though if you discover massive dis-satisfaction then you’ll probably get right to fixing it). Once you have some satisfaction data you can start to put it in context and from there move on to make decisions and take action based on data. I hope this is helpful.

A perfect example of a cross-channel communicator is Karthik S. I first came across his writing when I was logging in to LinkedIn to quit a social media group that had become a little too spammy for me. I navigated to the group to turn it off and noticed a headline that wasn’t spam. It was an honest request for information that also gave some great insights into a social media and communication issue. Intrigued, I went to his blog and found an entire pile of great content.

Karthik is the Head of Digital Strategy (India) for Edelman and writes from an Indian perspective. As a result his examples are fresh to those of us steeped in the US-based case studies.

Getting this additional global perspective helps to identify which social media traits and habits are more inherently human vs those which are based on a specific culture–sort of a nature vs nurture thing maybe. Anyway, I find his perspective valuable for cross-checking any assumptions or insights I might gather in my work.

In addition, Karthik is incredibly easy to read. His thinking is clear and direct. He has a sense of humor in his writing that doesn’t get in the way of the point he’s making. His deep and tangible understanding of branding mixed with his experience in technology is potent.

He’s tackling the problems that all of us in web strategy are facing each day, but from his specific market background and perspective. For example, his post today on using Facebook URLs in advertising is relevant to a number of the projects I’m working on at the moment–how much control will organizations hand over to Facebook anyway?

I also like that he’s a connoisseur of Indian pop music. His personal blog is a collection of plagiarism in Indian music. This is super geeky and since I’m involved in music and also very interested in intellectual property stuff, I get a kick out of his blog. Your mileage may vary.

How to get the most out of Karthik S

I get the most out of reading his blog, focused on communications and social media from an Indian perspective: Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

His personal blog, focused on plagiarism in Indian music is: ITwoFS

And, of course, you could follow him on Twitter.

For me some of the big takeaways were:

• Identify existing human behavior that can be made faster/easier/better through good design and programming (see the teen girls photobooth for Nordstrom’s or the Nordstrom Backroom program).
• Your company doesn’t have to “engage” in a conversation. Real people engage in conversations. So put real people in charge of your social media. Or try something else.
• Something else might look like an application or curated collection of content that your audience finds useful and valuable.
• And the biggest: stay focused on a real business objective. Buzz is not necessarily the best metric to measure the success of your online initiatives.

Some other Burlington, VT Social Media Breakfasters have made posts as well:

• Mitch Lieberman’s quick followup, focusing on the “people don’t want relationships with companies” aspect of the presentation.
• Jonathan B Wilson’s assessment of the point that it’s important to find and create value for your customers, and that’s social media.
• Rich Nadworny, one of the organizers of the #btvsmb, writes more about the idea of social media being a way to do something for people.
• Also, for my real estate industry friends and colleagues, I wrote a review of the event for Inman.com (free on the date of publication, requires premium membership later).

I love Wordpress. And I love Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress. It makes installation of GA so much swifter. And I really hate hacking plugins because that means I have to be careful when I upgrade them. But there are two things that really stick in my craw:

1. The RSS campaign tags are configured so that each article is it’s own campaign.
2. I’d love to be able to implement additional tricks, like using a timer to make my Bounce-rate a function of time, not pageviews.

Campaign Tagging URL for RSS hack in WP

Since the (super-awesome) plugin doesn’t allow you to manually configure the tagging for the RSS feed, I had to go in and do it myself. You find the code for RSS tracking around line 560 in the plugin code. It’s all hard-coded and easy enough to adjust.

I set mine up so that the post headline is matched up with the utm_content tag, so that it accurately reflects the content of whatever it was someone clicked on.

Time-based bounce-rate for Google Analytics and Wordpress

I got the idea to make a time-based bounce-rate from Padicode. But instead of hardcoding WP into my site template, I had to hack the Yoast plugin. You’ll find the location to insert a timer into your GA tracker around line 400 of the plugin code. You’ll need to escape some characters so the line will ultimately look something like this:

echo "\t\t".'setTimeout(\'pageTracker._trackEvent(\'NoBounce\',\'NoBounce\', \'Over 20 seconds\')\',20000);'."\n";

Good luck and have fun!

A lot of the work I do is focused on web analytics. When making things for online consumption, one of the few ways to know whether anything is working as intended is via web analytics. It’s our only way to observe how humans are really interacting with the things we make.

And while Google Analytics and other tools like it are great at getting the quantitative story–how many people saw what and did something–it isn’t very good at getting the qualitative story. The qualitative story would let us know how much people liked (or didn’t like) something we make. It might let us know more about the intent of audience when they found the things we made. Why did they use it? Did it work? Why so, why not? That kind of thing.

I use iPerceptions 4QSurvey tool. And I set the rate fairly high–if you’re reading this on Thoughtfaucet blog, you’ve probably been asked to fill out the response at some point. 4Q has an open-text-box as part of it’s data gathering survey. It isn’t uncommon to see people leave comments about the survey itself. It isn’t uncommon for those who leave comments about the survey to be unhappy about something (usually that it asks about whether you want to take the survey when you first arrive on the site, then gives you the survey to take when you leave the site).

Sorry unhappy survey-takers, the value of the information I get about what tasks people were trying to accomplish on my site and whether they were able to accomplish it or not is worth a couple unhappy survey-takers. It’s often easy to get worked up when the unhappy survey-takers unleash their unhappiness into the open-text-box. It’s easy to second-guess whether you should be getting that qualitative data when it might mean someone is upset. I tend to take the view that someone is upset before they take the survey.

That, and then there’s this: Thoughtfaucet works every day making things that can be measured–things where the success is important to a specific business metric. It’s important to walk the walk and so gathering data about how this site is doing makes sense. That’s the story from Thoughtfaucet’s point of view: we’re gathering useful observations about how well (or not well) we’re doing.

From the audience perspective it might look like what someone recently typed into the open-ended text-box in 4Q yesterday:

I love that you care enough to ask these questions.

That’s a response from someone who trusts that Thoughtfaucet is using that data to improve and make things people like. You can be doing the same thing for your online presence.

[Warning: navel-gazing ahead] One of the salient features of Twitter is its ephemeral nature. We post our short snippets of life or thought and then on we go. Our post gets buried and eventually forgotten in the piles of others’ thoughts and life-snippets.

I’ve wondered if this isn’t somewhat like a literary version of oral culture. Things are said and then forgotten, or perhaps left unremembered. Instead of being unremembered due to a lack of technology, they are left unremembered due to the overwhelming deluge of other things that come and go. No need to stockpile water if you live next to a spring.

In an oral culture, if something is to be remembered it must be repeated and passed on (if the remembered thing is going to continue beyond the lifespan of the rememberer, anyway). This got me thinking about how a Twitter remembering would work and the nature of search in relation to memory.

Search can only help you find what you already know exists, what you already remember. In my marketing work, one of the first steps I take is to help my clients understand what language is being used by those who are trying to find what my clients can offer. This language is often different from the insider language that my clients take for granted in their everyday practice. Search can’t help you discover new ideas due to the fact that you must have some sort of start-point, a search term or key word to begin the search. If you can find it via search, you already know something about it.

The living oral culture of Twitter lends itself to a living memory based on individual decisions/actions, like communal recreation. Since we’re accustomed to search engine interaction, coming across an oral-memory kind of Twitter could be jarring but it could also be fun or enlightening or otherwise meaningful.

Twitter memory in practice:

For the past few months, whenever I see a Twitter post that I think I will want to remember, for whatever reason, I log into Tweetlater and schedule a retweet for some time in the future. Many of them I set arbitrarily to retweet a year later and instead of using the common syntax:

RT @somebody: Here's something interesting

I use 1YR syntax:

1YR @somebody: Here's something interesting.

For periods of time less than a year I just use L8R syntax:

L8R @somebody: Here's something interesting

Some examples of this memory device in use include:

• A reminder for a conference organizer that they thought an idea on Twitter might be good at their next event.
• A funny statement that becomes even more curious some time after its original posting.

Quite a few more will be coming from my account in the coming months. Some are simple reminders: someone mentioning something relevant to outdoor fun in the middle of winter, time-shifted to the summer. Some are time sensitive indications of mood and emotion (during the onset of the October financial woes). And so on, whatever I found interesting at the time and thought I might find meaningful in the future.

I suppose, just like in “normal” oral history, the chosen posts to retweet say as much about me and what I find interesting as the actual content that gets retweeted. Just like I’m sure there were more poems than The Odyssey floating around pre-historic Greece, but for some reason that’s the one that people chose to remember often enough that it survived to be recorded.

Related articles:

• In Defense of Twitter (fimoculous.com)
• Kottke: In defense of Twitter (daryn.net)