Pattern Finder

Shopping by Color, Time, and Location

The O'Reilly Radar blog this morning had an interesting post about Etsy.com.  It's a Web site that sells handmade goods (somewhat similar to Eziba.com, I suppose, which had a meltdown and then got bought by Overstock.com).

However, rather than just doing the normal online storefront thing (search by category, size, etc.), they've embraced the freedom of the interactive Web and come up with some fascinating ways to search the site.  For example:

• By color:  Pick one of the color dots, and it displays products in that color.
• By time:  The clock at the top of the screen runs backwards, showing which products were listed when.
• By location:  Where the sellers are from, based on a U.S. map.

Once I start looking through the site, my mind went wild with other navigation options.  For example, what about temperature?  Let's say it's 20 F out -- I'd want to see sweaters and overcoats rather than swimsuits.  I also thought about materials -- silk, wood, cotton -- but they've already done that one.

I like such sites, because they break the mental habits of buying from brick and mortar retail stores:  blouses are here, skirts are there.  Who knows?  If a store manager sees the Etsy site, maybe he or she will experiment with putting all the pink clothing together.

Thoughts Behind an Analyst Report

Dr. Richard Nokes, an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at Troy University, recently took me to task for my report, Best Practices: Online Crisis Management: 30 Top Colleges/Universities Respond to Katrina. In a blog post at Unlocked Wordhoard, he said that the methodology was flawed (I cited the U.S. News rankings as a way to define top colleges, which he took issue with) and that the report was irrelevant (I didn't talk about any universities in the region).  To clarify my reasoning and methodology, I posted a comment on his blog, and he then asked further questions in his comment.  (As you can see, this may go on for awhile.)

I will reply to his reply, but since my reply will be a long one, I thought I'd put the long, complete version here and the Reader's Digest version in my comment on his blog.

I think Professor Nokes raises some interesting issues, and in answer I'm going to discuss my thinking/methodology behind the report, for two reasons.  First, since the report's focus flies in the face of what the conventional media has been doing -- which has been covering the human interest stories in the Gulf Coast area -- it seems to flummox people that I haven't done the same.  I'd like to get rid of the flummoxing.  Second, my recounting of what went on in my mind may help demystify for my readers what analysts do and how they think.

RSS Drives Readers to the Web

Whether to embrace RSS feeds is a current topic of debate in the Web analytics community.  The Pro side says, "Do it -- it distributes your content, which is the whole idea of a Web site."  The Con side says, "Don't do it -- it cannibalizes your Web traffic and you lose the ability to track viewing behavior."

Nielsen//NetRatings now offers a datapoint, via its September 20th press release: RSS Users Visit Three Times as Many News Web Sites as Non-Users, According to Nielsen//NetRatings.  It notes that RSS users visit 10.6 news sites on average, compared to 3.4 sites for non-users.  While the Nielsen//NetRatings study concentrated on news sites, I'm inclined to think it would apply to other sites as well.  Think about it -- someone subscribes to a specific RSS feed because it's about a subject that interests them.   In short, the subscriber is an aficionado, an enthusiast -- and is therefore more inclined  to visit the RSS-generating sites more often.

Another interesting sidenote is that apparently 83% of the RSS users didn't know they were using RSS.  Companies like Yahoo! have done such a good job at hiding the technological underpinnings and terminology that users thought the content appeared by magic -- and I suppose it did: click a button and viola!

In short -- and Nielsen's data appears to back me up -- I vote Pro on this one.  Yes, distributing content via RSS makes it more difficult to understand reader behavior than if the readers came to the Web site.  However, RSS seems to generate more reading -- and that's the ultimate goal -- not to make measurement easier.  Let's not make the mistake of having the measurement tail wag the business dog.

Web Sites = PR, Blogs = AR (Aficionado Relations)

With Global PR Blog Week 2.0 in progress, there's a lot of musing about the role of corporate blogs:  should a CEO blog or not blog, and the place of external corporate blogs.

While one sector of the PR community thinks corporate blogs are good because they get the corporate name out there, another sector looks at them with horror, worried that it's a perfect vehicle for getting "off message."  In short, there's a huge debate because blogs are being analyzed in terms of PR -- public relations -- and that's skewing the arguments.

In my view, blogs don't fall under the realm of Public Relations -- they fall into the category of Aficiaonado Relations.  Let's step back a bit here.  Public Relations as a discipline arrived when mass marketing and consumption arrived.  Back in the days when everyone bought from their neighbors (pre-Industrial Revolution), everyone knew who made quality products and who made shoddy products; who was a joy to deal with, and who was a pain.

When mass marketing took off in the early 1900s, people relied less on their their own experiences, and leaned more on brand identity and communications to make purchase decisions.  Public Relations was founded to control the messaging to the public, by popularizing brands and smoothing over chinks in the marketing armor -- e.g., fourth or fifth in the market became, "One of the leading...".

This level of PR command and control, while permissible within the large public market, doesn't work among aficionados.  They already know company A is fourth or fifth, and declining rapidly.  PR folks claiming otherwise only leads to snickers among those in the know, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

Blogs, unlike press releases and Web sites, are the vehicles of experts and enthusiasts, who write about subjects they are passionate about and are willing to spend time reading what others are thinking.

Therefore, blogs are not really a PR vehicle; PR, in the larger sense, assumes its audience is naive.  Blogs are a different animal -- they are a way for enthusiasts to connect and communicate.  This is why ghost-written blogs and corporate edicts that "you can only say nice things" are such a disaster in the blogosphere.  While the public may not have the wherewithal to spot such "spinning," experts can.

Therefore, I predict that leading edge PR firms will use blogs well -- setting up guidelines for their clients, helping pick appropriate bloggers, and then letting their clients do their own thing.  It's the PR firms with the ham-fisted approach that will try to overcontrol and then watch blogs do nothing, or worse, cause damage to their clients.

PR Blog Week 2.0: Take a Look

Knowing that I'm studying the blogosphere and blog analytics, Barbara French of Tekrati gave me a heads up about Global PR Blog Week 2.0. For those interested in blogs -- if and how to use them -- I highly recommend you take a look at this week's worth of blog thinking.  While the emphasis may be a bit too PR-centric for some folks, the thoughts are quite intriguing.

Probably my favorite so far is Niall Cook's Blogging for our brand: Building a business blogging community for Hill & Knowlton, in that he offers ways to think of common problems: access vs. control, propensity vs. quality, and Blogtypes.

Katrina and Web Site Resiliency

I just noticed John Hegel's post entitled, "Katrina and Institutional Resiliency," which echoes the findings of my recent Online Crisis Management: 30 Top Colleges/Universities Respond to Katrina report.

In the report, the universities that did well in notifiying their constituents via their Web sites -- Dartmouth, Duke, and MIT -- either had already thought about dealing with a crisis, or responded in a "let's get everyone involved in a think-outside-the-box way."   Their Katrina pages were personalized for the different types of visitors, and they used message boards and blogs so that people could communicate quickly, without the university getting in the way.  Most of the other colleges and universities handled the crisis in a more two-dimensional fashion, putting up a press release or requiring readers to scroll through a long list of what they were doing.

John Hegel notes the same behavior, contrasting the "stay within the lines" behavior of the government and the more freewheeling behavior of enlightened companies.  He points to Yossi Sheffi, an MIT professor,

who contrasts the proactive actions of a number of companies in dealing with this natural disaster with the bureaucratic response of the government.  Sheffi, who is about to publish a book on The Resilient Enterprise, highlights a number of elements required to respond to unforeseen disruptions:

• push decision-making to the periphery
• instill a culture of communication throughout the organization
• create a sense of urgency in responding to events before they become even more damaging.

Web sites need to be resilient as well -- companies need to think through how their Web site should change when confronted with a crisis (home page links, maybe atypical navigation), as well as recognize that effective communication is a higher priority than good form.

In short, extraordinary circumstances call for atypical designs.

Site Timeliness Does Matter

I received an interesting comment back regarding my recent report, Best Practices: Online Crisis Management: 30 Top Colleges/Universities Respond to Katrina.  Morty Schapiro, the President of Williams [disclosure: I attended Williams], argued against my ding in the report against Amherst:

Two weeks after Katrina, Grinnell College and Harvey Mudd College still hadn’t acknowledged Katrina on their homepages; Amherst College did so, but rather slowly, finally putting up a press release (and eventually a Katrina page) on the afternoon of September 5th, a week after the disaster and three days after its peers.

Morty noted in an e-mail: "Amherst wasn't slow at all -- they were working extremely hard with Xavier from the very beginning."  I'm sure they were (Xavier is a college in the south that Amherst was working with to receive students from).  However, the important thing is, Amherst didn't tell anyone.  Companies -- and in this case colleges -- forget, especially in a crisis, that unless it's on the Web site, no one outside of the institution knows what's going on.

To alumni and prospective students, it just looked like Amherst was twiddling its thumbs after Katrina, especially in contrast to colleges such as Williams and others who had Katrina statements up by the Thursday or Friday before Labor Day.

So while reporters and analysts talk about the latest whizbang feature, sometimes the best value that companies can get is not to buy the latest gadget, but rather make sure that they're using what they have in a timely manner.  A simple rule, but enterprises violate it time and time again.

Trying out Google's Blog Search

Well, I've been trying out Google's new Blog Search.  I like it -- of course, maybe that's because if you search for "Web cookie," the first entry in the results list is Tekrati's Blog pointing to my recent report on Web cookies.  In contrast, if you look for "Web cookie" in Google's Web search, that same blog entry turns up in position 29 (at least at the moment).

As Charlene Li points out in her blog, rank in Blog Search appears to be a combination of "timing, links, and keyword frequency."  Getting the ranking right is something that's going to take everyone awhile to figure out, as the value of an entry to a reader is a combination of the person, the entry content, and its timeliness. Google has grappled with timeliness in its News Search, but the source as a variable is new.  For example, let's say President Clinton starts a blog (which he may already have done, for all I know).  Initially, before the blog is known, it wouldn't have many inlinks, and its importance may appear to be low.  But based on his previous employment history,  shouldn't his entries rank a bit higher in value than that of a selectman in Andover, MA, for example?  Of course, if he writes boring stuff, the rank will eventually go down; however, I'm thinking he should get some initial rank boost based on his experience outside of the online world.

Or, maybe he shouldn't, as the blog world is a free market of ideas, and no one should get a subsidy for aura.  In any case, blog search and results ranking is in its early stages, and it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

Salesforce.com: Doing a Superb Job of Herding Cats

Boy, I haven't seen a company herd cats like this in a long time.  At its Dreamforce '05 conference, Salesforce.com announced a bevy of partnerships.  The three that I noticed were Eloqua Corporation introduces Eloqua for AppExchange at Dreamforce ‘05, InStranet, Inc. introduces InStranet for AppExchange at Dreamforce ‘05, Omniture introduces SiteCatalyst for AppExchange at Dreamforce ‘05.  Notice anything?  These are three different announcements, issued by three different companies, but that all use the same exact nomenclature.  This is PR logistics and brand identity at its finest.  My hats off to Salesforce.  Even Siebel, in its most anal retentive days, wasn't able to orchestrate this kind of consistency with partners.

Of course, after I got over that shock, I then proceeded to read the announcements.  Although I need to do a lot more reading to better understand how it works, it looks like AppExchange is a really interesting wrinkle in the application development arena.  All of a sudden, on-demand doesn't look so closed anymore.

The Gap: Bringing Information to the User

After reading the article this morning in The New York Times about The Gap's take-down-the-Web-site experiment, I thought I'd give it a shot -- and finally got in after several tries.  (There appears to be some sort of random throttling mechanism.  At first I got a "you're one of a select few" to see this site popup; then I couldn't get in the next two times; then I got in again without the popup.)

While the Times article describes the behavior of the Web site correctly, "the mouse-overs and pop-up windows eliminated the need to bounce the shopper off her browsing path each time she needed information," it doesn't quite impart the visceral reaction that you get as a user -- that the site is bringing the information to you.  It's an interesting feeling, and quite distinctive.

While shutting the site down for several weeks to rearchitect the site may seem a bit drastic, it's clear it has some compensations -- after all, it rated an article in The New York Times, and here I am blogging about it.  Online retailers rejigger their Web sites all the time and no one talks about it.

This revamp features Gap.com-designed software, rather than commercially-available software, which The Times raised its eyebrows at.  In fact, it quotes Carrie Johnson, a Forrester analyst, who said, "All the companies that have home-grown systems are doing everything they can to ditch them."  While I think that's a correct observation in general, it doesn't apply to leading edge online companies.  Amazon.com runs almost exclusively on home grown software, and no one's raising their eyebrows on that one.

For companies with a vision and a willingness to invest, I think well-designed in-house software gives them a lead which they can't get any other way.  I remember having a conversation with Bill Bass several years back, when he ran LandsEnd.com.  He pointed out that Lands' End often had to build its own software because vendor software wasn't cutting edge enough for their tastes.  That said, Bill also would do a rolling phase out of in-house software -- when commercial software came along that duplicated something Lands' End had built several years ago, the company would yank out the homegrown stuff to decrease its maintenance burden.

In the end, I'm not sure how much more revenue this site revamp will bring The Gap.  For example, I'm more of an L.L. Bean, Lands End kinda guy.  The Gap's increased usability isn't going to make me buy clothes from www.gap.com.  Nevertheless, I think Gap customers will become more loyal.  And if Gap customers buy more items and more frequently due to the redesign, that's still not a bad gain.

UIMA in Pictures

I just sent in my latest DMReview.com column, in which I described the coming impact of IBM's UIMA on Business Intelligence.  In a nutshell, IBM's newly announced content analysis framework makes it easy to plug different knowledge discovery and content categorization engines together.  This will not only help enterprises to piece together sophisticated search applications, but generate a lot of structured information that BI tools will be able to analyze.

However, in the course of writing about UIMA, I had to work my way through a whole bunch of IBM musings and documentation -- not an easy task, I can assure you.  Since I'm inclined to think visually anyway, I was finally able to make sense of CASs, AE, annotators, and CPEs only after scribbling a bunch of diagrams on several pieces of paper.  At the end, I was thinking, "Hmm, if I found it difficult to understand UIMA -- and as an industry analyst I do this all the time -- it must be really difficult for IT and business folks who have better things to do than spend two hours wading through arcane interviews and documentation."

With that, created "UIMA in Pictures" -- a short deck that explains UIMA in a succinct fashion, largely through visuals.  So if you're struggling to understand UIMA, take a look at At-a-Glance: UIMA.  It might just save you two hours of time.

Media Sites: Katrina and 9/11

It's been interesting observing the impact that Katrina has had on media sites over the past several days -- and comparing that reaction with what occurred during 9/11.

Media sites on September 11, 2001 went into meltdown.  It was fast-breaking news, and sites such as CNN saw their traffic increase tenfold in the space of an hour.  I was working in Boston in a skyscraper at the time, and at around 10:00 that morning the employees just walked out, once we realized that the same disaster could happen to us.  (Only after three-quarters of the company had left did the VP of HR announce that due to concern for its employees, the company would shut down for the rest of the day).

Consequently, I spent the afternoon at home, monitoring how media sites responded to the crisis.  At around noon, The New York Times starting removing non-HTML content left and right, yanking out advertisements and JavaScript with abandon.  By about 3:00 ET, the site was one of the least interactive -- but also one of the zippiest -- sites around.