Perry

Hewitt

Tag: analytics

  • Friday 5 — 10.3.2014

    Friday 5 — 10.3.2014

    active_exposure

    1. Pageviews and clicks provide some insight into your content’s performance, but understanding if and where your users are paying attention is far more valuable for content producers and advertisers alike. Chartbeat announced that it’s been certified by the Media Ratings Council for a new way of measuring reader attention: active exposure time.
    2. Are we actually reading the articles we share on social networks? Buzzfeed’s new data blog has some encouraging news: on average, users who share spend 68% more time on page than users who don’t.
    3. Google Ventures shared these five rules for creating great interface copy. The rules offer designers and developers a useful reminder of the importance of well-crafted microcopy, and how all those little, big details add up in interface design.
    4. Reddit received $50 million in funding, to be used in part for product development, community management, and mobile tools (maybe an app, finally?). Reddit also announced plans to share back 10% of equity with the site’s users via crypto-currency.
    5. Overwhelmed by your inbox? Try Eric Schmidt’s 9 rules for email. I’ve been rescued by the LIFO strategy more times than I can count.

    Weekend fun: Anyone else remember using an SE/30 for wordprocessing or playing Dark Castle? A team working at the Harvard Innovation Lab has visualized the evolution of the desk (see the original video created by bestreviews.com) from an old-school Mac with accessories to your laptop today. Spoiler alert: there’s an app for that.

    desk evolution

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 9.19.2014

    Friday 5 — 9.19.2014

    1. Facebook trending topics Facebook is updating its News Feed, again. This set of changes focuses on putting more weight on trending topics, so your feed reflects more discussion of what’s going on right now. Now the recency of the likes and comments on posts will matter more, perhaps reducing the frequency of those odd moments when a friend’s heavily-liked wedding post resurfaces in your feed as they’re celebrating their third anniversary.
    2. Compared with the emphasis most organizations put on growing a house email list, it’s surprising how little effort is spent to re-engaging those subscribers when open and click rates falter. Here are some tips on how to clean and re-engage your list.
    3. Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik makes a compelling case for better mobile site analytics (and throws in some fighting words about responsive web design for good measure). If you are working with Google Analytics to measure mobile, his comprehensive post provides useful examples from implementing Google Tag Manager to advanced Cross-Device Tracking.
    4. Wired delivers with 15 insanely great tricks to master Apple’s iOS 8. Word to the wise: don’t make your first trick downloading iOS 8 on your iPhone 4S.
    5. That said, there are some clear advantages to downloading iOS 8 on a newer device. Do you spend too much time swiping through your emoji keyboard to craft a perfect, visual response? Then, you might need Keymoji, a downloadable keyboard that converts your text into emojis as you type.

    Weekend fun: Tough week? Nervous about going long on today’s Alibaba IPO? Go ahead: watch some puppies playing with a GoPro.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 8.22.2014

    Friday 5 — 8.22.2014

    instagram analytics

    1. Brands are active on social networks to reach engaged audiences, and the networks are finding creative ways to monetize their involvement. SoundCloud this week announced a new advertising platform, just as Instagram rolled out its analytics tools for brands. Both SoundCloud and Instagram have afforded brands huge organic growth; the challenge will be to offer them new business tools without alienating individual users.
    2. We’re all suffering from The Stream, a deceptively gentle term for the firehose of ideas and links aimed at us every day by well-meaning friends, colleagues, and social network connections. Can radical scarcity improve quality? That’s the premise behind This., a social network incubated at the Atlantic which allows users to share a single link each day.
    3. Twitter is addressing onboarding issues to make the platform more compelling, but both the 140 character limit and a longstanding, insider-y community can mean that new users encounter daunting jargon. If you’re struggling to tell your RT from your MT, here’s an illustrated guide just for you.
    4. Launching a digital project can be like pulling the thread on a sweater — the more the new site/app/service makes possible, the more internal processes get disrupted and ideas get awakened. In a newly-launched responsive design podcast, Miranda Mulligan of the Boston Globe describes the politics between the newsroom and the design team, and how responsive design brought them together.
    5. In far too many organizations, potentially transformative digital and social strategy is outsourced to agencies or relegated to interns. Or at least, it’s reliably blamed on the interns when it all goes horribly wrong.

    Weekend fun:  Take your pick: you can watch a fascinating brief look at texting and the internet in film, or while away the hours with Serendipity, a gorgeous visualization of songs played simultaneously on Spotify.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.

     

  • Friday 5 — 7.18.2014

    Friday 5 — 7.18.2014

    instagram graph

    1. With a growing and highly engaged (dare I say fanatical?) user base, Instagram has remained a social media darling. This comprehensive piece describes how its founders make the business tick, keep user engaged in a landscape of mercurial tastes, and prepare the app for monetization in the future.
    2. There’s a new Facebook app, but only for famous people. Features focus on ease of use for content publishing (rather than perusing friends’ vacation pics), tracking mentions, and hosting Live Q &As.
    3. Anonymous app Secret, famous for airing the tech industry’s dirty laundry in a mobile-friendly, passive-aggressive art form, raised $25M this week. Here’s how.
    4. Is the internet dumbing us down into a culture where we merely share attention-grabbing headlines without consuming the content? Or can content that’s not aggressively shared find a readership over time? If you’re publishing online, it’s worth understanding how the curve of content consumption that dives into the valley of “meh” sometimes results in the hill of “wow”.
    5. Did you ever write an email in haste and repent, well, immediately afterward? If you use gmail, these tips on un-sending that email might help.

    Weekend fun: Who’s the biggest Star Wars geek fan: Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart? Watch and find out.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

     

  • Friday 5 — 4.11.2014

    Friday 5 — 4.11.2014

    twitter michelle obama

    1. Twitter is going all Facebook with new, expanded profile pages. The new profile pages offer a wider banner, a larger profile image, and the ability to “pin” a tweet to the top of your profile. The profile pages will now emphasize your tweets with the most engagement by making them larger. First Lady Michelle Obama is already up and running — soon you will be, too.
    2. Good explainer post on the difference between the card design proliferating across the web and emerging card architectures. The former reflects a design aesthetic, which may be a more ephemeral trend. The latter supplants embedded media, and enables third-party and first-party content to co-mingle — potentially delivering more value to the user.
    3. Speaking of cards, the explanatory journalism startup Vox launched this week with a lush, card-enhanced look. Bright yellow highlights tease explainer cards that act almost like dynamic FAQs. Topics range from “what is marijuana” (really?) to “is it the Ukraine or just Ukraine.” GigaOm broke down the benefits and challenges of the new site.
    4. Internet of Things was canonized as the biggest new thing when John Chamber at Cisco referred to it as a $19T (t, as in trillion) market back in January. This Business Insider scrolling presentation walks you through examples (smart TVs, connected cars, wearables), venture capital investments, and security questions.
    5. A new report from mobile analytics and advertising firm Flurry tracked mobile behaviors from January to March 2014. Findings confirm that native mobile apps (versus mobile web) continue to dominate, commanding an astonishing 86% of the average U.S. mobile consumer’s time. HTML5 and CSS3 were the mobile web darlings of 2010 — today, not so much..

    Weekend fun: Turns out, Game of Thrones is more than a blood-thirsty way to spend a delightful Sunday evening with the family. The show’s popularity has ensured that there are now more baby Khaleesis than Betsys, and has spawned a veritable spike in female baby Aryas. But cheer up — weekend is coming.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 3.14.2014

    Friday 5 — 3.14.2014

    1. social referralsComscore data show that users coming directly to a news site stay longer and view more pages than those coming from search and social. Users arriving via search and social drive up views, but are more difficult to convert into loyal readers. Two caveats to the study: mobile traffic is not included, and email is often improperly tagged, which causes some users to be improperly counted as “direct.”
    2. Tony Haile, CEO of realtime analytics product Chartbeat, will convince you: what you think you know about the web is wrong. Saddled with a web measured by the click, we’re now trying to better understand user behavior while interacting with a site. Among the more compelling observations: if a site can hold visitors’ attention for three minutes, they are twice as likely to return than if you hold them for only one minute.
    3. The Web turned 25 this week, kicking off a flurry of pieces reflecting on the internet era. Here’s a brief timeline from Fast Company. Fun fact: When web creator Tim Berners-Lee was asked to name one thing he never envisioned the web being used for, his reply was “kittens.”
    4. It’s astonishing to think that a gigabyte of hard drive would have cost you about $190,000 dollars back in 1980. In a move designed to compete with rival Dropbox, Google Drive is now offering 100GB storage for only $1.99/month.
    5. Sadly, the money you just saved on storage will now be spent on Amazon Prime membership, which just rose from $79 to $99/year. Prime was a genius feature — the ultimate gateway drug for online impulse buying. I guess those drones aren’t going to pay for themselves.

    Weekend fun: According to a recent report on millennials, 55% of them say they’ve shot and shared a selfie, versus 24% of Gen X, and of 9% of boomers. Bucking the trend, this former Secretary of State beats Ellen’s product placement hands down.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • 5 lessons from Buzzfeed @ Harvard

    5 lessons from Buzzfeed @ Harvard

    Today, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith spoke to fellows, students, and a few curious onlookers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center (Storify recap). Listen to the full audio above; below are my top five takeaways from the discussion:

    1. Headlines definitely matter — and if you’re writing headlines for catchy listicles, be sure to lead with the number. Headlines at BuzzFeed are a collaborative effort among writers and editors, and employ rigorous A/B testing alongside a custom analytics platform and Google Analytics to measure performance. Also, headlines sure look a lot like tweets these days.
    2. With the right headlines, clicks can be easy to elicit. For optimal social growth, publishers must entice users to share their content. With 75% of traffic referrers from social media, and the bulk of that from Facebook, BuzzFeed has succeeded in creating content compelling enough to drive social sharing.
    3. BuzzFeed’s partnership with duolingo helps address the challenge of publishing in multiple languages. Duolingo, which recently secured another $20M in series C, gives BuzzFeed a smart algorithm + human equation to scale and boost international growth.
    4. The viral web can be put to work for serious news as well as cat memes. Smith wrote a compelling piece to this effect in Foreign Policy back in April 2013. Today, Smith cited a recent interview with Shimon Peres and a gimlet-eyed profile of Donald Trump as evidence of serious journalism residing comfortably in the same viral wrapper as lighter fare.
    5. 99% of success is hiring and retaining amazing people. One example: video innovator and rockstar Ze Frank who built and staffed the BuzzFeed studio in Los Angeles. Great reporters are always hard to find, and competition for the best is getting tougher as both traditional and newly-monetized internet media compete for top talent.

     

  • Friday 5 — 2.21.2014

    Friday 5 — 2.21.2014

    1. facebook whatsappFacebook forked over $19 billion for WhatsApp, and the internet is full of articles explaining why. Among the most compelling is Buzzfeed’s take that WhatsApp posed a significant threat. WhatsApp is growing fast globally, consumes a great deal of young users’ smartphone time, and fills that critical “staying in touch” niche that Facebook would like to own.
    2. The visual social network Instagram, another Facebook purchase, is looking like it might be living up to its relatively modest $1 billion price tag. Explosive growth and high engagement mean that Instagram is increasingly attractive to brands. It has exceptionally high engagement with affluent, young women — a demographic particularly attractive for retail.
    3. If you’re an online publisher — and pretty much all brands are these days — you might be interested in Echobox. This analytics package offers data-driven insights about your content’s performance both on site and as shared across social channels. The end result is fewer charts and numbers, and more specific recommendations for your content.
    4. LinkedIn this week entered the realm of “platisher” — the dreadful coinage for part platform and part publisher — as it opened up its content marketing Influencers program to everyone. Like Medium, LinkedIn will cultivate brand names and high-quality submissions, but sees value in building a broad-based content empire.
    5. Just where will we wear the internet of things? We’re easing in with wristbands and the stunningly awkward Google Glass, but there’s more to come. Quartz provides a list of body parts likely to be adorned with tech in the near future.

    Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon took over The Tonight Show this week with a celebrity-studded vengeance, but the #hashtag2 performance sealed the deal.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 12.20.2013

    Friday 5 — 12.20.2013

    1. Mandatory reading for web design geeks: Snow fail: Do readers really prefer parallax design? New research poses good questions about user orientation to parallax scrolling, which may be better suited for content heavier on video and other visualizations rather than text.
    2. NPR continues its leadership in forward-looking digital initiatives by securing $17M in grants. $10M will pay for the development of a new, presumably mobile-first platform to provide a personalized, location-based listening experience for content from NPR and affiliate stations.
    3. Harvard’s Berkman Center published its annual compendium of essays in Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World. Sections include governments, companies, and citizens as actors in the digital world. Favorite excerpt: Potentially lost in the debates over privacy, security, and surveillance, is the fact that access to information plays a critical role in human development, governance, and economic growth across all sectors, including health, education, energy, agriculture, and transportation.
    4. What’s App, a company of ~50 employees, is up to 400M users — and added 100M over the last four months alone. But how will all these social messaging apps make money? Some smart plays are emerging around e-commerce, with flash sales and sticker products driving revenue in Asia.
    5. This terrific, long read outlines a step-by-step approach to digital marketing success. Written by digital marketing evangelist and bigtime analytics nerd Avinash Kaushik, the piece provides great guidance on how to focus your analytics efforts and avoid endless “data puke”.

    Weekend fun: In case you’re suffering through an awkward office Christmas party or Yankee swap today, let me ratchet up your holiday envy: Bill Gates is an awesome Secret Santa.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Enough said