A good digital analyst is also part detective and while an advanced degree in forensic science from the University of Mississippi isn’t necessary, they need to go beyond the obvious metrics to tell the story. I know what you’re thinking. The digital story is direct- so it tells itself! This is not really the case. When dealing with situations where the call to action is not directly related to the bottom line, analysts have to be willing to dig. And, to make matters more complicated, they will need to understand the disciplines of their colleagues.

Campaign planning, with variables like competitive spend, weather, seasonality, trade volume, economic conditions, fashion trends, health fads, hairstyles, income levels, pets etc can be chaotic. It’s important that planners, interaction designers and analysts are aligned in their objectives. Planners use their audience intelligence insight and negotiation prowess to get the message in front of the right person at the right time. UX Jedis use the Force to create high quality experiences that make a user want to convert. How do they know if they have been successful? Enter the analyst!

Analyzing click-through, view-through and even residual data is a lot like looking at page impressions. They do not tell you what to do, only that you got someone to do something. They are however, clues that can be used to build more effective metrics. Analysts must not only create actionable metrics that are based on campaign goals, but need to tell a story to planners, interaction designers and their clients. Measurement of a digital media plan does not happen by accident, it requires collaboration, planning, testing, learning and repeating.

Start by defining campaign success. Next, build a page tagging recommendation and agree on success metrics.
Incorporate the model into reports and dashboards. Socialize metrics with marketing strategists, user experience gurus, digital media planners and client marketing analysts. Most importantly, dig into the data and your model to tell the story. The elementary metrics are not enough.

When talking to marketing managers, the subject of segmentation often comes up. The conversation can seem forced and usually takes a turn from casual talk about business to a certain bitter formality, probably because now we’re talking about data. These marketing managers have never tasted our variety of data, theirs is like the grubs on Fear Factor .

Expensive : Complicated : Useless

These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.

Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.

Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.

December 17, 2008, K&L Gates’ gorgeous, white, marble offices played host to MITX: Planning Your Online Video Strategy 2009. I sat in on an amazing session that was well worth far more than the price of admission. There was a perfect blend of technologists, analysts and practitioners. The session was unselfishly and actually was beautifully moderated by Will Richmond of VideoNuze. He masterfully kept the conversation flowing.

The session confirmed what I suspected; 2009 is the year of video. Nimble companies like Hubspot.com spent 2008 paving the way, showing people the power of communication through “under-produced” content. Mike Volpe of Hubspot contended that he would rather do 100 (under produced) videos for $10,000 than 1. And this is what 2009 is about.

Companies are going to try to figure out ways to act more like people. One to one marketing has traditionally been about customization of message for a particular audience using matrices and models. Social Media technologies make actual human contact and conversations practical and scalable and inexpensive. Sure, a commitment is necessary and I did not say it would be easy, but the relatively low cost of technology, combined with creativity and dedication to the scene will allow companies to adopt strategies based on a range of video content: under-produced content, produced and a percentage will even delve into non-linear video.

James McQuivey of Forrester agrees, asking: How do corporations act more like individuals? Can they be more comfortable with the personal, lower quality approach? Corporations need to do do this. He also reminds that this is not a put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket strategy, but an approach to one marketing channel.

It’s measurable. It’s consumable. It’s understandable. It’s doable!

Since Microsoft Surface was introduced in May 2007, I have been excited about the possibilities.  While the coffee table model is cool in a retro-pac-man-in-a-pizza-joint way,  I immediately envisioned form factors from walls to phones to smart cards that can fit in your pocket.

Imagine the walls of your house in Surface. You would have total control of the style of the room from the wall colors, to the artwork. There would be no need to have a television, it could exist whenever you wanted it to and then disappear as artwork, solid colors or maybe even an aquarium.

The placement of your TV would be variable. If you wanted the kids to be able to watch a small “television” in their beanbag chairs, you could drag a small TV down near the floor where they could watch. You could also drag the TV around the wall and modify the size, the shape and even segment into multiple TVs to monitor other channels. Imagine that during sporting events! Who needs picture in a picture?

In the office you could have relaxing scenery that transforms into a conference call command center, complete with charts, stats and live avatars of participants. Want your office to look like a library or a beach? Surface!

One of Surface’s powers is its ability to interact with objects and devices. The examples we see are the camera being set down on the coffee table version and the pictures spilling out. People can then put their Zunes on the table and drag photos onto the Zune. That’s pretty cool, right? It’s true social computing because the Surface does not limit the number of active interfaces, meaning I can drag photos to my Zune while you do the same, at the same time, on the same Surface.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am big on process innovation. Technology is a big enabler for me, however I try hard not to force technology into a situation just because I think it is cool. That said, if we do not start innovating with Surface, we are not going to see its benefit anywhere.

Dear Apple:

I am writing to express my disappointment in the Apple 3G White 16GB iPhone. I have found areas of the iPhone to be inferior to my previous smart phone, the Treo 650p. As most would agree, Apple is a visionary organization known for pushing the limits of user experience and customer satisfaction. Therefore, I did not expect that things like battery life and phone reliability would give me fits when I made my “investment” in your technology.

iPhone 3G Battery Life Sucks

So let me just come right out and say, without mincing words, that the battery life of my iPhone 3G is horrible. I get all of these great phone features like: email, youtube, applications and web surfing and Apple’s marketing encourages me (in every marketing campaign) to use them, and then find that my battery needs a boost around 2PM every day.

I even believed some of the Apple zealot propoganda out there. See the third comment on that thread. It basically “reminds us” that lithium batteries need to drain totally, then have several 12 hour charging cycles before we judge them. I did this. I made sure that my battery was totally drained, not just mostly dead.

I have 2 problems.

• Apple obviously knew that the battery life was going to be a problem or they would not have put out this comprehensive guide to becoming an iPhone battery ninja. It’s practically a course syllabus.
• The phone is sealed so that I cannot swap the battery for a replacement mid-day even if I want to

Let’s take an in depth look at the suggestions for improving battery life.

• Minimize use of location services: OK done!
• Fetch New Data Less Frequently: Oh, ok. I guess I can get my mail less frequently.
• Turn off push mail: How infrequent are we talking now? Every hour is a long time to wait
• Auto-check fewer email accounts. Is 3 too many? Gmail, Yahoo and Corporate email are all pretty important. I guess I could scale back.
• Minimize use of 3rd party applications. But, I thought you wanted me to get cool stuff that differentiates my phone from every other phone. So I can have it, but I just shouldn’t use it that often? What if I meet a Sith Lord and need to battle with my Phone Saber? What if I don’t recognize a whole block of songs and need a whole lotta Shazam? Seems unfair that I should be encourages with 16GB of space and not be able to use the apps when I want to.
• Turn off Wi-Fi. I thought that WiFi was supposed to help battery life. Oh, I see it does! “If you rarely use Wi-Fi, you can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. Note that if you frequently use your iPhone to browse the web, battery life may be improved by using Wi-Fi instead of cellular data networks.” Man, that sure is confusing. I hope there is a one-click method for picking which configuration I am using. I move around a lot during the day.
• Turn off Bluetooth: I don’t use it. It’s off.
• Use Airplane mode in low coverage areas. AT&T has low coverage areas? GASP! It’s the “largest wireless operator in the country”.
• Adjust Brightness. All the time?
• Turn off EQ. Reduction in sound quality! AWESOME
• Turn off 3G. Great idea. Turtle phone.

Would it have been that hard to expose the battery and let us buy another battery/charger so that we could run all day?

Sincerely,

the Michael Schneider

Readers: what thoughts would you add?

I figure that Google must be close to having some technology that can actually distinguish the voices in a film or video from the music track. I would guess they can use their text-to-speech capabilities to listen to video content and save either the entire contents or a set of keywords as determined by a secret-sauce-like formula.

I know that Google understands the importance of video, after all they bought youtube. They also have at least one text-to-speech experiment in Goog-411 (that we know of) and they have the resources of Emperor Palpatine. If Amazon can scan the lion’s share of their books, couldn’t Google “watch” and digitally imprint all of youtube’s videos? They have the processing power.

The trick is the isolation of the vocal tracks. Most would argue that this is impossible because when you combine all the tracks like in a .wav file, the track information is left behind, but there are people who claim that they can get (most of) the music track to go away.; If anyone can do it Google can, right? And if they can do that, they can implement speech recognition technology and output the results to good ol’ XML.
What do you think? Could they be close? Are they working on it?

Seeking Developers

For as long as you can remember you have been into computers and programming. You spend most of your day connected via your desktop, laptop or device. You sometimes solve coding problems in your sleep and then implement your solutions when you wake up. Even though you are passionate for a particular development platform, you see the need for others.

Every third book on your bookshelf is an O’Reilly and you know who Dr. Dobbs is. You often code for fun. Your RSS reader is full of sites like Slashdot, Tech Crunch and Gizmodo and your offline reading staple is Wired. When you see two cool technologies, you try to figure out how to make them work together. Your ideas of fun are gaming, jail breaking your iPhone or hacking together a Google maps mashup. You’ve probably had more than your fair share of Mountain Dew, Red Bull or Monster Energy. Your de.licio.us bookmarks are mostly coding how-tos. Bonus if you like to blog, use Twitter, Plurk or Froggums (I made that last one up). If your apartment or house has a mat that says “Welcome” in binary, that may be taking things too far. I am only kidding. You are our guy/gal. Seriously though, that Bluetooth earpiece is not meant to be worn all the time.

Apply for Developer positions here.

You strive to write simple, elegant and accurate code. Reuse is vital to you and you wouldn’t generally think of writing something that is not version controlled. You can think in Java (or C++/C#) as if it were your primary language. You neither fear Databases nor XML. You favor Agile methods for new development. Bonus if you know what a scrum is and brownie points if you have been a pig. You see the big picture. People call you smart behind your back. You have the ability to work on more than one project at once. You are either a technical lead or on the cusp of being one. You have between 4 and 8 years of professional development and you are ready for more responsibility. You want to work in a nimble, flexible and fast paced shop on projects that matter.

If this sounds like you and you want to get involved in high profile, digital and social media solutions, then we want to meet you. Please come armed with examples of tasty projects that you have played a major role in developing.

Apply for Developer positions here.

On June 30, 2008, Google quietly made one of the largest non announcements the organic search space has seen. It lacked the visibility of “No Luke, I am your Father”, but has elicited the same kind of response from all of the web geeks that I have given the information. For instance, one of our new media strategists, Mike D, said “WHAT!!? HOW!!?”. After a trip to snopes.com turned up nothing, we soon began furiously googling for keywords on full on flash sites to assess the impact. A search on “peasant quest” turned up the mostly flash Videlectrix game portfolio site. The peculiar thing is that similar searches on other game names did not return the site. So like any good team of computer geeks on a mission, we killed a few hours playing Duck Guardian instead of solving the mystery.

Everything we have been told about search engines is about to be flipped on its ear. WOW! Now Google can read and crawl your Flash .swf files, but do not expect Digital shops to start recommending that everything changes to Flash just yet.

While Google may be able to crawl flash the following questions are still shrouded in Googley secrecy

• How much of the site can Google crawl?
• Which pieces is Google indexing?
• What are the most important parts code wise?
• How will results be displayed in a Google search?
• Can Google take you to specific “pages” within a flash app?

Since paging within a Flash application is not as cut and dry as an HTML site, it is not clear that whether Google will be able to find specific pages within the application. In order to judge the impact, we will need Google to provide a text cache for a Flash site. This is unlikely to happen for until the other (hahaha what other?) engines catch up. Until then, it’s a whole lotta test and learn.

During my first year at the agency, I had the pleasure of working with strategic mastermind, Justin Holloway, now with Dye, Holloway, Murray in London. We were working on a pitch and he was explaining the brand identity of Trader Joe’s. He summarized it as a company that sort of brings the epicurean delights of society to the common man.

Trader Joe’s specializes in being an affordable gourmet store. They eliminate the middle man by producing their own foods with vendor partners. If the food does not meet their quality standards, they have no problem with axing it or making it unavailable until they find a new partner. They carry very few brand names and will often carry a brand name until they can clone it to their standards (like Nutella). The shocking thing is that the industry average for product development is 9 months. Zara is rumored to be able to develop a product and get it to market in 2 weeks. When I first read about Zara, I thought not only is this a fantastic model, but it is a lot like Trader Joe’s.

We rely on the Internet to do everything from communicating with our friends, families and colleagues to choosing a new cappucino maker. A good deal of the technology we provided for your webbing enjoyment is free, but supported software with guaranteed uptime generally does not exist without a revenue model (for long). Companies like Yahoo! and Google provide us with oodles of free tools without so much as having to say “Oh Toodles”. We know the juggernaut model. They sell ads and they roll in dough. So when people complain about Yahoo or Google tools being down, I am sympathetic because whether the notice it or not, those companies are earning money by having you as a user. But what about those that do not have a revenue model to speak of?