Jackson Miller

BusinessWeek is reporting (via WaPo) on National legislation that would restrict behavioral targeting of web advertising. This legislation could impact how web analytics companies track surfers. You might think I would be worried, but I am not and here is why:

• Some web analytics companies are also advertising companies. The legislation is targets at advertisers. I think statzen would be immune because we are focusing on providing great analytics, not ads.
• Most web analytics are tracking visitors. We keep an eye on the visitors, but we are mostly watching the content. The difference here is key. If we were to target ads it most likely not be based on visitor behavior but on targeting the content that gets the most attention.
• This could shake up the web analytics and advertising industry. A shake up gives us the opportunity to redefine some things.

I knew this kind of legislation was coming. I think New York state was the first to propose it. I am pretty excited to see how it plays out.

I like Rex Hammock’s term “Mediacasting”; he is good at the semantics of “conversational media” (another term I got from Rex).

So, we are casting out communications on all these different channels: web sites, RSS feeds, Twitter, social networks (Facebook, Plaxo Pulse), email, etc. The goal is to make sure everyone is able to get the message via the channel they want. This creates the temptation to cast the same message to every channel.

There are ways to automatically post links to new blog posts to Twitter. There are ways to aggregate summaries from various sources into your RSS feeds. There are ways to have Twitter update your Facebook status and Facebook to send status updates to your Twitter account. All of these are problematic in some form or another.

Absent that ability for subscribers to define detailed preferences on every channel, these tools create some unwanted redundancy. The trick is to find a balance between getting the message to everyone while reducing unwanted redundancy. I have some guidelines that I use and would be interested in suggestions. So without further ado…

5 tips for integrating social media:

1. Cross post with care
   I see the benefit of posting a link to a blog post on Twitter. Just don’t do it with every post.
2. Use the inherent advantages of each channel.
   Every item in an RSS feed should have a permalink. Twitter should have immediacy. Facebook should be social. Plaxo should be spammy (kidding).
3. Content should be related, but unique.
   If there is a message you want to get out, chances are it is more complex than any one channel can convey. The initial thought could be a blog post. THe conversation could take place on Twitter. Del.icio.us can hold related links. Flickr can hold pictures or screenshots. Facebook can be a place for solidifying spawned relationships.
4. Post exceptional related highlights to other channels.
   If a great conversation starts on Twitter, update the initial blog post with a pointer. Great responses can be bookmarked.
5. Keep original content off aggregators.
   If you use something like Tumblr to aggregate all the channels together, refrain from posting original content to the aggregator; it makes it too hard to get that content without getting overwhelmed with stuff you have seen elsewhere.

The tips above are things I have learned from watching other people get it right. It is a rough set of guidelines that I try to follow. It seems like the key is to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. Cross posting can create a lot of noise which really reduces the message.

What am I missing?

Rex Hammock has posted some thoughts on what he has termed Mediacasting. The basic gist is that “advertising” is the conversation with your customers. It is a conversation that is happening across a wide variety of communication channels on a wide range of devices. A key point is that the only barrier to entry is new media savviness; these new channels are not based on finite resources (spectrum) and therefore are not regulated by the FCC.

So what is an organization to do? Rex is encouraging that we all rethink our goals and get out of the typical advertising paradigms. It is not about drawing in eyeballs to your site, but rather about getting your message out to your customers via the channels they want. It is time to let the message fly free.

What interests me is the part about how to measure the success of Mediacasting:

“Unless your business model is advertising, page views are not the correct metric to measure your online strategy. Action, engagement, sales, enrollment, loyalty, retention, increased contributions, advocacy and education are business goals that require you to get content in your audience’s hands, eyes and heads — in any way they want to receive it.”

This is something I have been trying to work on with statzen (though I have to get it out the door first). In the world of Business Intelligence I work with “actionable events”. When something happens, it needs to fire off some sort of notification or process. Event based analytics are going to be big. What Rex is talking about needs event based analytics. Statzen provides analytics for individual pieces of content that you cast out (and your website is one of the channels used for casting). When tracking these events, you want to know what works. Which posts are getting people to enroll? Posts with these 5 tags have the highest sales conversion rates.

So the one of the problems I want to solve is how to create a simple system that can observe Mediacasting and the related customer events to help you know what works and what doesn’t. It is a level of accuracy that is hard to get with traditional media, and it is a big reason that I also think we will see a serious shake up of advertising prices in the next few years.