GigaOM » Collaboration

Whodini: Extracting contact gold from messy inboxes

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:04:58 +0000

Cutting edge collaboration tools and enterprise social software aside, for the great many of us, email is still how much of our work gets done. Every day a volley of questions, reports, updates and introductions flies back and forth creating an unofficial record of our work, our relationships and our productivity. What if an app could tap that reservoir of unstructured data to help you get more done?

That’s the principle behind year old, Los Altos, Calif. startup Whodini, which is currently in pilot. A sort of extremely pumped up address book or internal LinkedIn alternative, the product scours the Outlook accounts of employees of large companies, analyzing the content automatically to create a profile for each person, which lists their areas of expertise.

This profile is searchable by employees anywhere in the company, whether they’re based in Mumbai, India or Menlo Park, Calif. So if a sales guy in Chicago is looking for an expert on a prospective client or a complicated technical subject, all he needs to do is search Whodini to find colleagues in any part of the world with the knowledge he needs.

Making sense of the mess

Of course, our email accounts are messy places, full of invitations to lunch or maybe even personal missives about topics we’d rather not have broadcast to the company. But they’re also a very rich source of information, explains Co-Founder, President and COO Ani Chaudhuri, using a revealing back of the envelope calculation:

In a large company people send out between 30-50 emails in a day, so lets take the average of 40. Each email, and this is statistical, is about 60 words, so that’s about 2,400 words per day. Now 2,400 words times 200 is 480,000. That’s almost half a million words written every year by an employee.

Contrast that with the once- or twice-daily updates to enterprise social media – and the very rare times, instigated by HR nagging, that people update their profile in traditional company directories – and it’s clear why Whodini focuses on email and why, with the right analysis, that data could prove so useful. Whodini aims to make sense of that disorder and make the results searchable, with the minimum amount of effort on the part of users – no laborious updating, hashtagging or other effort required.

“People document stuff already; it was just not in a form in which it was usable. Our job is to take all that data that is floating around and making it accessible. We are an analytics company rather than a communication company,” says Chaudhuri.

And don’t fret that Whodini will accidentally reveal your embarrassing love of Civil War re-enactments or confidential negotiations. “We show the profile to you before anyone else can see it or search it. It’s all permissions-based,” stresses Bjorn Stromsness, the company’s director of business development, noting that users have absolute control of what goes public. Profiles are also constantly refreshed with users’ expertise in a given area decaying over time, so out-of-date keywords are unlikely to appear on profiles.

Who’s Whodini for?

Whodini isn’t for everyone, as the ability to pinpoint specialized knowledge is more valuable, and more difficult, in some contexts. “If you have a company of 10,000, but 9,000 of them are retail employees, you’re not going to find a lot of utility in what we’re doing,” says Stromsness.

But if yours is the type of firm that has expert knowledge spread across a large organization, the Whodini teams feels its product can make a big impact. “We see the product fitting particularly well within technology, energy, pharma and legal and consulting worlds,” says Stromsness. Large firms of 10,000 should derive the greatest benefit. “The more people you have [who are] having complex conversations, the better we’re going to work for you,” concludes Stromsness.

The product is also probably more beneficial for some types of employees than others, the team concedes. Braggarts and self-promoters, for instance, won’t prosper on Whodini as its evidence-based approach rewards no points for horn-tooting skills. Instead, the product is “the voice of the quiet achiever,” in the words of Stromsness.

“When people are self-nominating themselves for things, sometimes those are more aspiration than they are actual,” says Stromsness. But with Whodini, “everything is validated. If you want to know who’s dealing with a topic, you can find out who’s actually having those conversations as opposed to the person who might want to have those conversations.”

Forget notices of cookies in the break room or chatty camaraderie, Whodini takes a no-nonsense approach to work. “This isn’t about finding out if you’re passionate about cats. This is about finding out if you have worked on UI concepts,” says Stromsness.

What’s next?

The company has raised $2 million in angel funding, and the product is currently deployed in three locations with one more due to be added this week and a large company pilot in the works, but there’s no definitive date for a public launch as of yet. So what is on the horizon for Whodini?

Looking more long-term, the Whodini team isn’t troubled by constant chatter that email might be on its way out. According to Chaudhuri, rumors of email’s demise are highly exaggerated. “Instant messengers are being replaced by enterprise social networking. Email is not going anywhere,” he says. And even if communication should move to another channel in the future, “we will absolutely tap into that,” says Chaudhuri.

In fact, future plans include connecting to “other email clients and maybe other sources of unstructured data as well,” according to Stromsness. Other product improvements in the works include scores, which measure each person’s level of expertise in a particular topic, and a once-a-week alert showing users who in the company is working on similar things and worth getting in touch with.

And as the product develops, another hot trend in the business world could benefit Whodini — the rise of remote working and dispersed organizations can only help a firm whose aids people in pinpointing exact expertise spread across the globe.

“The way we look at it is the current platforms, whether it is email, social networking or collaboration tools, all of them assume that you know the people that you need to know – the right people are already at the table. Are the right people really at the table? By discovering people that you don’t know we increase the possibility of having better people,” says Chaudhuri.

Who wouldn’t want to know the perfect person at that critical point in time? It’s a fabulous concept which all depends on the quality of the analysis whirring unseen inside the black box of Whodini’s proprietary technology. Pretty soon public, real world field tests will prove if this is not only an awesome idea, but also an awesome product.

At Net:Work, we’ll explore how companies can harness social tools — and the data from them — both now and in the not-so-distant future. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Whodini.

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More employees want access to business analytics

Terri Griffith — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:00:29 +0000

As businesses rely more and more on analytics and data to make strategic decisions, they continue to struggle with some thorny issues, such as incorporating data into company culture and allowing employees to access the data they need, according to MIT Sloan Management Review and IBM’s Institute for Business Values Second Annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey. They surveyed more than 4,000 executives, managers, and analysts from around the world and across a wide range of industries to understand how people use information and analytics for strategic decisions and tactical moves. While their results indicate challenges, it’s good to see that both organizational and technology issues are considered as critical for success.

Some of their key findings:

Technology isn’t the problem, culture is. People tend to be tool- rather than implementation-focused, and respondents reported that organizational issues are nearly twice as difficult to solve as technological issues. The fact that the respondents see the organizational issues as being more difficult may mean that they are willing to put in the required organizational effort — perhaps signaling a change from what some research has found in the past.
Leaders should practice what they preach. Thirty-nine percent of the respondents say fact-based decision making is one of the “most important behaviors business leaders should advance to increase the effectiveness of analytics use within [their] organization.” Sharing data, distributed decision making, broad access to data, articulation of the value of analytics, and rewards were also mentioned by many. Even experimentation made the list. This last shows a growing understanding that all data is not created equally. Sometimes we need to be proactive in terms of how we set up our questions and measurement.
Employees need greater access to data. When asked whether they have “sufficient access to the information and analytics” needed to do their job successfully, only 33 percent of participants responded “to a great extent.” While transparency is a growing goal in organizations, it is still difficult to actually get access to information, even with the technology tools we have to track information. The IBM/MIT respondents report that “almost one-fifth either have limited or no access to the data they need to succeed in their jobs.”
Businesses use analytics to achieve their primary business objectives. More than 30 percent of respondents listed real-time decisions, improving resource allocation and reducing costs as objectives for using analytics. Increasing employee productivity, accelerating development, and fostering collaborative decision making are all mentioned by at least 20 percent of respondents. Our access to work-related information is growing, but I expect that our understanding of how to effectively use this information hasn’t kept up. Wishing your statistics teachers had done more than teach probability?

This reports gives a snapshot of how our increasing ability to measure aspects of work provides value. I look forward to the full report, available in the Fall, where they say they will provide refined results and, where possible, compare results from 2010.

However, as in most things, just having a new analytics tool won’t be the answer. We’re going to have to understand the information and then find ways to weave the results into organizational and personal changes. For example, I just bought Davenport, Harris, and Morison’s new book, Analytics at Work in hope that their examples will help me learn to apply the information I have more effectively. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see a review and discussion of how their ideas can be woven into the connected workplace.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user mandiberg

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3 More Google Analytics Tips

Dawn Foster — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 17:00:28 +0000

I’ve recently written a couple of blog posts related to analytics: You Blog, But Does Anyone Care? and 5 Simple Ways to Get More out of Google Analytics . It appears (based on the analytics, of course) that quite a few of you were interested in this topic, so I thought I would follow-up with another post and a few more tips. When I wrote the earlier post, I had a hard time narrowing it down to just five tips, so here are three more tips on Google Analytics features that you might not have used before.

1. Advanced Segments

Don’t feel limited by looking at your data through the segments that Google Analytics defines as defaults. While all visitors, new visitors, and returning visitors are certainly interesting, you should try defining some of your own. I have created a segment for looking at the behavior of frequent visitors, meaning visitors who have come to the site 5 or more times in particular time frame. It’s possible to compare such a custom segment with other segments, so I can see if frequent visitors spend more or less time on the site, and visit fewer or more pages than new visitors, or other returning visitors.

You can create some very detailed segments, too. For example, I created two test segments: both are from Western Europe, but one segment is Firefox users, and the other is Chrome users. I compared the two, and found that people from Western Europe using Firefox spent more time on my site and visited more pages. You can even use these advanced segments on the custom reports that I mentioned in my previous post.

You can define a custom segment by going to the “My Customizations” box and selecting “Advanced Segments.” Once you have an advanced segment defined, an “Advanced Segments” drop-down menu will appear in the gray bar at the top of your reports.

2. Navigation Summary

The Navigation Summary lets you look at any page on your website, to find out what page they came from, and what page they went to next. This provides interesting information about whether key pages are fulfilling their purpose.

For example, my blog has a “Starting Point” page that was designed to help people find articles that I’ve written. The Navigation Summary shows that from my Starting Point page, most people go to my page on Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks. I suspect this is because of the way the navigation on the page is designed; I can use the analytics data to reorganize the navigation to make my content easier to find.

You can get to the Navigation Summary by visiting the “Content Overview” page and clicking on “Navigation Summary” in the right column, underneath the graph. On the Navigation Summary page, select the “Content” drop-down box to see navigation data for any page. Dennis Graham has written an in-depth explanation of some other interesting ways to use this data.

3. Views

Detailed data in Google Analytics is shown as a table by default, but you can also see the data as a percentage pie chart, performance bar chart, comparison chart, or even a pivot table with all kinds of interesting data about your visitors. For example, a pivot table could be used to compare visitors from Google in Asia who are new or returning.

Looking at a pivot table of my top content, it was interesting to see that people who land on certain pages from Twitter spend much less time on the page than people who arrived from some of the other sources.

To access the various views, go to any page with a table and look under the right side of the top graph or just above a table to find a “Views” section with five icons representing your different views.

What are your favorite Google Analytics tips?

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5 Simple Ways to Get More out of Google Analytics

Dawn Foster — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:56:01 +0000

I recently wrote about ways to find out if anyone reads your blog, and in that post I briefly mentioned analytics as one of the many ways to measure it. I’ve used Google Analytics for years to learn about which of my blog posts people actually read, but it’s one of those tools that I tend to take for granted.

It’s free and easy to get started with Analytics, but there are also a lot of advanced features that can make it even more useful. I’m sometimes surprised by how many people only look at their dashboard page and never really drill down into some of the more interesting details and features. I thought it might be time to do post with a few quick tips for getting more out of Google Analytics.

Alerts. If you want to keep on top of your sites and know when something out of the ordinary is happening, you should visit the “Intelligence” section and set up a few alerts. You can configure the service to email or text you when something specific happens. For example, on one of my websites, I have it set to alert me when the number of visitors goes over a certain threshold on any one day. Alerts can be set using most of the many different metrics available in the various reports. You can also apply your alerts to multiple profiles and use them on several different websites.
Custom Reports. Don’t just use the built-in reports; create your own custom reports (available in the “My Customizations” menu). Spend a few minutes thinking about what you really want to know, and create a custom report that you can view every time you log in. For example, I have a custom report that shows the unique visitors, new visits, time on page and pageviews for each blog post, and when I drill down into a single blog post, I can see which keywords people used to arrive at the page from search engines. The best thing about these custom reports is that you can share them across your Analytics accounts and use them on multiple blogs.
Export. Most of us would probably think about exporting our data as a CSV or XML file that we could use to crunch the numbers in some other application, and Google Analytics can certainly do that. However, it can also be used to create some nicely formatted PDFs of your data that you can send to your manager or your clients. This is a great way to quickly give someone who isn’t familiar with Google Analytics an overview of some specific event or a monthly analytics report with little extra work on your part. My favorite is to create a report by exporting from the dashboard, which gives you a multiple page file with overview numbers and graphs for visitors, traffic sources, maps, content and anything else you’ve added to your dashboard. You can get PDF exports by using the “Export” drop-down menu of any report; you can even export your custom reports.
Customize Your Dashboard. You should also take the time to customize your dashboard. First, add any frequently-used reports to your dashboard using the “Add to Dashboard’ button at the top of any report. You can even add your custom reports to the dashboard. Each box on your dashboard also has a very faint and tiny “x” in the upper-right corner that you can use to remove any unwanted information. Now that you have the right information on your dashboard, you can use the upper-left corner of each box to drag the components around to put the ones you want to see first near the top of the page. and less frequently-used items further down the page.
In-Page Analytics. I saved the best for last. In-page Analytics is one of my favorite features, since it lets you see where people actually click on your pages. You can find In-Page Analytics under the “Content” section in the left-hand navigation. You can navigate to various pages on your website to get a different view of where people are clicking on your subpages. You can also use the drop-down filter at the top to hide any clicks below a certain percentage to focus on where most people are clicking, or you can create your own filters to only see clicks from new or returning visitors, certain geographies, or based on almost any other available metric.

What are your favorite tips and tricks for squeezing more out of Google Analytics?

You Blog, But Does Anyone Care?

Dawn Foster — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:00:56 +0000

I’ve noticed that bloggers tend to fall into two camps: the obsessed, who want to know everything and constantly monitor analytics for their posts; and the people who don’t really worry about who reads their posts and rarely check analytics. For a while, I was one of those obsessed people who constantly checked analytics, but lately, I’ve been busy, and I’m finding myself falling into a state where I rarely remember to look.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a good time to take a step back and look at some data to see which of your blog posts have been getting attention and which ones have been mostly ignored. You can do so much more than taking a quick look at your standard analytics package. Here are a few tools and tips to give you a deeper look at whether people are paying attention to your blog posts.

Web Analytics

A standard analytics package, like Google Analytics, is a great start, but make sure that you delve deeper than just checking out the simple graph showing how many people visited your blog. Here are a few of the things that I like to look at:

Traffic sources that show how many people found my blog from various other blogs, web pages or search engines.
Keywords to see what people were looking for when they landed on my blog.
Which blog posts got the most visits.
“In-Page Analytics,” which provides a graphical view of where people are clicking on the page.

Feed Analytics

Most web analytics track hits by using a snippet of code on your page in order. Feed readers don’t execute those little chunks of code, so you’ll also want to use a feed analytics tool, like Feedburner, for example. This gives you a better idea about how many people read your blog through a feed reader, and you can get access to information like how many people viewed a post in your feed, whether they clicked on any links, etc.

I get a very different picture from the people who read my feed than from those who visit my blog. For example, every couple of weeks, I do a short post on my personal blog with links to blogs posts that I have written elsewhere. These blog posts get almost no web traffic and are rarely posted to Twitter, but they get a lot of views in my feed, and people often click the links to my other blog posts. You might be surprised by how your feed data differs from your other analytics.

PostRank

PostRank is a nifty little tool that looks at which of your blog posts got the most attention on a wide variety of social networks. You can see how many people posted your content, or commented on it, on Twitter, Google Buzz and dozens of other social media websites. It also gives each of your posts a score between 1 and 10 , which is a great way to see at a glance which of your blog posts were interesting enough for people to want to share them.

Twitter

There are a few tools that make it easy to see which of your blog posts are getting attention on Twitter. If you shorten your links with a tool like bit.ly that has built-in analytics, you can see how many people clicked on the link and who retweeted it. BackTweets is another great service that searches Twitter for a URL and finds any shortened links to that URL, regardless of who shortened the link and which service they used. This is a great way to see when other people are posting links to your blog posts.

Blog Search

Google Blog Search also has a nifty little feature that lets you see any blogs that link to your blog simply by entering something like this into the search box:

link:gigaom.com/collaboration

You can look for posts linking to a website, blog post or section within your blog – basically, anything you can define by a URL. You can then sort the results by relevance or date and even filter by certain dates or timeframes, like most Google searches.

What are your favorite tools or tips for taking a deeper look at whether people are paying attention to your blog posts?

Photo by Tilemahos Efthimiadis used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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Analyze Site Feedback With Kampyle

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:00:31 +0000

How well do you know your web site visitors? What makes them tick? What makes them abandon your shopping cart or simply leave your site, never to return? What if you could read their minds and fix your site based on their thoughts?

Kampyle gives you the next best thing: the ability to take collect what might otherwise be random site feedback, then attach measurement parameters to it so you can quickly and efficiently analyze how your site visitors feel, and respond to their requests or complaints.

In the 90s, web site owners were relatively passive about trying to understand what their site visitors wanted and needed and didn’t actively seek out complaints; even the feedback link often sent email responses into a silent void.

Toward 2005, web analytics became a mainstay of most web sites as they sought to understand their visitors. Traditional analytics tools are quite limited, though. They provide impersonal graphs and charts that represent real people who are visiting and moving through our sites — or leaving. Data about our potential customers was limited to IP, keywords used to find the site, browser used, OS, and the like. Today, it isn’t enough just to know these cursory factoids about your site visitors. With the advent of social media, you must take the time to listen and respond.

When you install Kampyle on your site, your visitor sees an unobtrusive feedback graphic on specific pages of the site, each leading to a unique feedback form for each key feature or process on the site. Kampyle takes into account that every site feature or process creates a different user experience so a single feedback link or button that leads to the same feedback form doesn’t cut it anymore. Site visitors in a shopping cart, for example, will have a vastly different experience than someone conducting a site search.

How Does Kampyle Work?

The process of developing custom forms for each key site feature takes time. A site owner should consider the site experience from the visitor’s point of view and strategize in advance where feedback forms should be placed. Positioning the feedback button on the page of each unique site feature simply requires pasting in a bit of code that Kampyle generates for every feedback form. Multiple feedback forms give you the data you need to quickly drill down to the exact location of a problem or a potential problem on your site. Each form can be customized to have a compatible look and feel with your site.

Once feedback forms are in place, visitors can fill them out easily with just a few clicks. Kampyle then lets you view feedback individually, by timeframe, by site feature or process, and it can push the feedback into your CRM system — including Salesforce — so you can gain a deeper understanding of your site visitors and respond quickly, maintaining a record of your customer interactions. Kampyle can also direct feedback on certain features to the right department or individual within your company to handle an issue.

While Kampyle recommends passive feedback buttons instead of pushing feedback forms on visitors, if someone was unhappy with something on your site and was about to leave mid-process — such as within your shopping cart — you could set a Kampyle feedback form to pop up as they’re leaving to try to glean input from them. Imagine that a customer unhappy with how your shopping cart works can express this in a few clicks as they leave, then you can notify them at a later date when you’ve made site improvements that address their concerns. You might be able to win them back, or at least let them know that somebody listened to them.

The feedback and site analytics provided by Kampyle give you the opportunity to catch issues and problems with your site and potentially identify and fix them before an unhappy site visitor goes to Twitter or Facebook to complain.

Kampyle is compatible with a number of shopping cart systems, making feedback form integration easier. Kampyle feedback analysis in conjunction with web analytics such as Google Analytics can take your web-based customer insights to a whole new level. Kampyle also helps you identify your “power visitors” so you can treat them differently than first-time visitors.

Pricing

Pricing for Kampyle starts at the Express level at $49/month geared toward startups and nonprofits. With this package, you only get one feedback form, one user and 100 feedback items along with basic reporting. The Bronze level for small web sites includes three feedback forms, a single user and 200 feedback items along with encryption and basic reporting for $99/month. Mid-sized sites, especially with e-commerce, will probably want the Silver level for $249/month for five feedback forms, five users, and 500 feedback items as well as advanced reporting and integrations including Google Analytics and Salesforce.com.The next level up is Gold and offers seven feedback forms, 10 users and 1000 feedback items plus the encryption, reporting and integrations for $499/month. All levels come with a 15-day free trial.

When it comes to feedback, it is no longer enough to just read and file. Site visitors expect quick and accessible ways to reach you to let you know how they feel or what they need, and they expect to hear back and get some satisfaction. Kampyle lets you provide higher levels of customer service, hone in on site issues and strengthen relationships with your site visitors.

How do you handle feedback from your site, and how is that working for you?

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bit.ly.Pro: Create Short URLs With Your Own Domain

Imran Ali — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:36:50 +0000

As Twitter has rapidly risen to dominate the real-time web, related applications and services have also come to prominence; many in the field of URL shortening. Foremost amongst these is bit.ly, which today released a Pro edition of the service.

bitly.Pro is, in essence, a “white-label” edition of the public service, where a short URL such as http://bit.ly/bHRDfP can now be replaced by one with a custom domain, such as http://imrn.me/bHRDfP.

As well as the ability to utilise a custom domain, bitly.Pro also provides a dashboard view, enabling users to view analytics on all the links shared from your custom domain. I put bitly.Pro through its paces today by registering my new domain — imrn.me. Setting up the service is surprisingly easy; here’s how I did it:

I registered imrn.me with GoDaddy.
I changed the domain’s nameserver settings to point at my own MediaTemple-hosted server.
I altered the DNS records (A and CNAME) for the new domain to verify and redirect to bit.ly.pro.
I logged into bitly.Pro with my standard bit.ly account details to link both account histories.
Used the standard bit.ly bookmarklet to generate my first custom shortened URL: http://imrn.me/90mM9Q

All in all, the entire setup process took me around 10-15 minutes and the new real-time analytics dashboard will prove useful in tracking the “virality” of my shared links. Sadly, your shortened URLs still share their namespace with other bit.ly users, so your domain will still be suffixed by a five-character reference.

However, other than vanity and analytics, there are good reasons for employing a custom domain for your shortening your URLs.

Why use a custom domain?

In recent months, there’s been much discussion on the impact short URLs are having on the long-term stability of the web; notably by weakening the web with centralised hyperlinks, reducing transparency, introducing unwelcome interstitials and providing opportunities for phishing attacks.

Delicious creator Joshua Schacter suggests some publishers should offer their own shortening services to mitigate some of the negative circumstances of shortening.

Indeed, we’ve recently seen brands such as Flickr, TechCrunch, WordPress and Google offer short URLs such as flic.kr, tcrn.ch, wp.me & goo.gl.

For such prominent brands, content publishers and even prolific Twitter users, bitly.Pro offers a useful form of transparency and trust to users clicking on shortened links.

Though the service doesn’t address the problem of centralization of links, it’s a step in the right direction. For those who demand more control, installing a hosted URL shortening app may be more appropriate.

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Track Engagement With PostRank Analytics

Simon Mackie — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:38 +0000

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking who’s visiting your site and when, but how do you track things like the number of people discussing your content? PostRank (a company that we’ve covered previously) aims to provide that capability with its new PostRank Analytics service, which launches in public beta today. I was lucky enough to have access to the private beta over that last couple of weeks, and it looks to be a useful service, particularly for bloggers.

If you’ve used Google Analytics, PostRank Analytics will feel familiar, although it has a nicer-looking design. Once you’ve logged into the service, you get an overview of your site’s stats via a Flash-based chart (you can select to view last week, last month, last three months, or a custom period).

One thing that is different from Google Analytics, though, is the metrics you can track using the app. Not only do you get to keep an eye on your page views and visitors (PostRank Analytics will pull this data from your Google Analytics account, if you have one, for increased accuracy), you can also track “Engagement,” which is an aggregate score based on many times your content is commented on, how often it’s mentioned on Twitter, how many comments it has on FriendFeed, how many people bookmarked it using Delicious, etc.

Hit the “Analyze” tab to see a list of recently published posts, together with traffic and engagement stats for each of them, and individual scores based on number of Twitter mentions, bookmarks, etc:

Drill down further by clicking on a post title to bring up the “Analyze Story” page, which features traffic and engagement charts for that particular post. You can also get to these pages from the timeline on the Overview page.

Usefully, the “Analyze Story” pages also contain a “conversation feed,” which brings together tweets, comments, blog posts and bookmarks related to that content, so that you can see — at a glance — what people are saying about your content.

You can also choose to receive a daily “Concierge Report” in your email. In its current iteration, I don’t find this to be that useful, as it just contains basic page view and engagement stats — it would be better if it was customizable, like the reports that Google Analytics can generate.

While I’d like to see more detail on how the “Engagement” score is actually calculated, and think it would be useful to be able to get separate charts for stats like Twitter mentions and Delicious bookmarks, I’m adding PostRank Analytics to my toolbox, because it provides data that’s not available elsewhere. If you’re interested in getting a better idea as to what’s being said about your content, and where, or if you’re just a stats geek, PostRank Analytics is definitely worth checking out. It’s free during the beta; sign up at analytics.postrank.com.

Let us know what you think of PostRank Analytics in the comments.

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Watch Your Web Site Users With Clixpy

Scott Blitstein — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:00:08 +0000

Do you ever want to peek over the shoulder of your web site visitors to see how they move about and navigate? As site owners, we often make assumptions as to how people are getting to particular pages or using particular functionality. Armed with pages and pages of analytics statistics we focus on what people are viewing or searching for.

Sometimes, though, there is no substitute for just watching how people interact and use your site to really understand your users’ behavior. Usability and testing tool Clixpy hopes to make that possible.

Clixpy is a web tool that tracks and records everything that a visitor does while interacting with your web site. Every scroll, click, text entry and hover is captured in a video for you to view at a later time.

A convenient dashboard displays all of your captured videos.

Installation is fairly straightforward. A short piece of JavaScript is provided for you to place into the HTML of your site. The code is tied to your account and is independent of a particular web site, which is nice. This allows you to monitor multiple sites or pool your captures using just one account.

Clixpy captures are purchased in groups. Your first 100 captures cost $5, with discounts being available for larger buys. You maintain a credit pool and each capture just pulls from your available credits.

You do have some control of how and when your captures are taken, though. When turning on captures you are given the opportunity to set some parameters to limit how many or how long they will run. This allows you to target particular times of day or new feature releases.

The Clixpy folks provided me with a pool of credits for review purposes and I doled them out over the course of a couple of days on one of my sites. It really was informative to watch the recordings that Clixpy gathered. Seeing real users clicking around is interesting and challenged some assumptions I had about how people interacted with my site.

Since each capture pulls a credit, I was sort of irritated when I would get single page view recordings. My initial thinking was that these captures wouldn’t tell me much, but I now realize that careful examination of these sessions could help identify issues and offer insight as to how to make my site more “sticky” and reduce its bounce rate.

Clixpy generally works just as advertised but I did run into some issues. For example, a capture should include every page view by a user but I can clearly identify many instances in which the same user session is split among multiple Clixpy captures. As each capture session has a cost, it would be nice to not have them wasted like this. There were also a couple of instances where it seemed that the clicking through of pages didn’t quite match up properly and the timing of the recording was inconsistent.

Also, while not a function of the application or service, one irksome thing I noticed is that you need to register on the site before you are given any information on cost. Clear pricing information should always be provided before any user data is gathered or a sign-up is processed.

I also have some concerns about the privacy implications of Clixpy but, in general, it is just presenting the same type of information gathered by an analytics package in a visual format. Password fields are ignored and other form fields can also be disabled. For long-term usage I would be sure to include information in my own privacy policy alerting users that it is in place. Users can opt out of being tracked by any site using Clixpy by visiting the Clixpy disable page.

Clixpy isn’t a substitute for proper focus group or usability testing but a small investment could provide useful information that can be difficult to gather otherwise. Check out a demo of Clixpy or register for an account to get started.

How do you feel about “spying” on your site visitors with Clixpy?

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Tweet Business: 3 Apps to Help with Twitter Analytics

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:00:55 +0000

It can be hard convincing anyone that Twitter is a worthwhile business tool, even yourself. This is especially true if you’re business-minded and like to attach numbers to something in order to ascertain its value. It’s hard to get solid figures on the value that Twitter provides, as it’s about hard-to-measure concepts like connections, reach and influence. There are some tools out there, though, that aim to provide figures to help you with some Twitter metrics.

Who

Knowing who to follow, and when to communicate with them can be instrumental in making your Twitter interactions more effective and meaningful. Effective management of these two things can massively increase the likelihood that you’ll generate professional opportunities with your tweeting.

To know who to follow, you can keep your eyes open during browsing, pilfer names from the lists of friends and colleagues you already follow, or you can have them delivered to you via Mr. Tweet’s convenient service. Mr. Tweet automatically generates lists of potential connections to take some of the hunting out of finding new Twitter contacts. All you have to do is follow @MrTweet, and he’ll provide you with a link to site where you can view a list of matches made based on your tweeting habits and profile. Mr. Tweet ranks Twitter users based on a number of criteria, and provides solid numerical ratings concerning their follow/followed ratio, how often they post, the degree to which they actually converse, and how often they post links.

When

Once you’ve established who to follow, you need to know when the best time is to contact them to guarantee meaningful communication. Even when cold calling, you could at least leave a message and/or talk to an assistant or someone else, but with Twitter, you can send a message and people won’t hesitate to never give it even the slightest acknowledgment. Some of this might be people ignoring you on purpose, but it might also be the timeliness of your communication.

Tweet O’Clock crunches the numbers for you so that you can quickly and easily find the time during which someone is most likely to respond to contact via Twitter. All you have to do is type in a user name, and it spits out the day of the week, and the time during that day when they are most likely to be monitoring and responding to tweets. It pegged mine pretty good (I tend to slack on Fridays).

How

This tool actually gives you a whole lot more “Who”, which enables you to make some educated guesses at “How”. It’s called Twinfluence, and it measures, as the name suggests, how influential any given Twitter user is. It does this by analyzing their connections, and their connections’ connections.

Of the tools I’ve covered here, this might be the most useful for convincing others of Twitter’s value as a business tool. With it, you can point to some solid numbers about your potential reach and connections. Even if the person you’re trying to convince doesn’t rate net contacts very highly, the sheer volume of people Twitter makes available to you should prove hard to ignore completely.

I won’t deny it, Twitter is a circus. A fledgling circus with too many acts and not enough ringmasters. But, with a little care, it can be put to productive use in a professional context. Hopefully these tools will help you figure that part out.

What tools do you use for measuring Twitter’s value?

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