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Just a quick announcement that I’ll be presenting at Burlington’s Web Analytics Wednesday event on May 27th, 6pm at the Red Square on Church Street. The topic will be Measuring Social Media. I’ll be talking about a few of the tools I use and also why I think it’s important. Hopefully you’ll come and add some of your own thoughts.

Web Analytics Wednesday is always fun and a lot of the town’s web geeks tend to be on hand. It’s great for web analytics practitioners (finally, there’s a party where people speak your language), people who use web analytics to make decisions (like business owners) and others who just want to learn more. It’ll be geeky and fun.

I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks. Who hasn’t I suppose. Here’s a rundown of some of the highlights

Conversation with Allaire Diamond

My friend Allaire is finishing up her graduate degree at the University of Vermont where she studies non-timber uses for forests. All the foraging, crafting and other uses for land that don’t involve chainsaws. Meghan, Allaire and myself were having a tea and conversation hang out and came up with some thoughts on combining technology and social networks to help connect people to their landscape. Sort of a localism for rural environments and field observation.It’s these sort of conversations that really get me going; synthesizing two or three disciplines to see what sort of meaning and overlap occurs.

Strategy development for media property in a post-television world

I’ve been working a lot on putting all the ducks in a row for a children’s media property. Assembling all the revenue streams, operations pipelines and marketing strategy for making a business (as opposed to straight licensing to a television network). It’s a lot of fun to work on this and you’ll definitely be hearing more about it over time. I’m not withholding details to be “hush hush,” I just want to have something more solid to show off later.

Hanging out and listening

I attended a well-organized (thanks Nicole!) Tweetup where I got to talk to former co-workers, new and old #BTV twitterati and have a good time. Tweetups are fun because in many ways, the participants have so little in common: they all use an internet-enabled publishing tool. But they might be non-profit workers, PR workers, artists, general business folks, education employees etc. So there’s lots of room for mixing up ideas.

I also made it to a Last Monday Interactive event and heard the full rundown on Vermont Film Incentive and how it didn’t make it through the legislature this year. Getting ideas and insight into the process is always eye-opening. I also got to grill a great Etsy shop-owner for ideas that I’ll be using with the childrens media property.

I had a slew of one-on-one meetings, lunches and coffee dates with area tech-heads and marketers. It was a great work for socializing with the weather getting nice around here.

Helping out

I was given the opportunity to present at the Burlington Women’s Small Business Program again this year. My topic was internet marketing and I start them out at the very beginning (you need to buy a domain name and get some web hosting) and then go as far as I can. I’ll be parsing out the slides and presentation and putting it here over the next few weeks. Speaking to that group is always fun because each of the participants has a different business and focus. Hearing how they solve problems and what questions they ask helps me remember what it’s like for people who don’t have their head in the code all the time.

Reading

I plowed through Guy Kawasaki‘s “Art of the Start” (for some of the pitching activities I’m involved in) and it was great. I’m probably going to be referring back to that frequently. Funny story about how I obtained the book. I went to Borders on Church Street to get it and at the checkout they did the usual “Do you have your Borders Rewards Card?” to which I said “No but I know my email address” and they took that and then when I asked about the discount was informed that they don’t give the discount unless I can remember the exact amount the discount was for. What’s the point of me being in the rewards program if I don’t get the rewards? I checked the book out of the library.

I’m also reading Osinga’s book about the strategic theory of John Boyd. Anyone who has talked with me for long knows how much I love the OODA loop. It’s great to have a dissertation on how the theory was put together, exploring the finer details.

Note: This is part of my speaking notes for the Women’s Small Business Program of Burlington Vermont.

Reach: how many people come into contact with your message.

Now that we know why we would want to use a consumer behavior model, let’s start understanding the RAECS model. The first phase of the RAECS model is Reach. Before you “reach” people, they don’t know about you or your message or your product or campaign or anything. You don’t have much of a chance to form a business relationship with them because they don’t know about your offer yet. Your message hasn’t reached them yet.

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Note: This post is part of my speaking notes for the Women’s Small Business Program in Burlington Vermont.

Getting the most from your web efforts: Understanding the RAECS behavior model

A consumer behavior model helps content producers make the right things for the right people by matching the content produced with behaviors exhibited by people coming into contact with the content. If you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of the stuff you’re making or if you want to learn from how people behave in relation to the stuff you’re making, then having a consumer behavior model is going to help. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m getting ready for a presentation on using the web to market a business to the Women’s Small Business Program in Burlington, Vermont. One of the things I’ll most certainly talk about is the “consumer behavior model” I tend to use: Reach, Acquisition, Engagement, Conversion and Satisfaction.

I first learned of the first four phases of this model from Justin Cutroni, web analyst and partner at EpikOne. I bolted on the last one, Satisfaction, because it helps with some of the media work I’m doing lately and I think it will complement the other four well.

I originally developed this slide deck to give in the hallways of BloggerConnect in New York, January 2009. I showed it to several people using my iPod Touch and they let me know that it was helpful. I’ve since revised the deck to include a slide about Satisfaction and include all the fancy links at the end.

Notes on the slides:

1. What’s a consumer behavior model? Learn why having a well-aligned consumer behavior model might provide your business with a strategic advantage.
2. Reach: how many people see your message Learn what Reach is, how to measure it and how to use it to take action.

Over the next few days I’ll be making explanatory posts for each of the slides in the deck.

The folks over at the Vermont Film and Media Coalition have produced a short video on why Vermont should pass a tax credit for film production. It features Bobby Farelly, Writer and Director “Dumb and Dumber” and “Me, Myself and Irene” as well as William H. Macy, Actor “Fargo” and “State and Main.”

I’ve always been happily surprised by the number of filmmakers and media producers who live and work in Vermont. Some went to school here at one of the several schools with excellent filmmaking programs. Others moved here because they could and continue to work due to proximity to contracts in New York and/or being situated on a good internet pipeline. I’ve been fortunate to meet and work with excellent film editors, directors of photography, actors, grips, sound crews, lighting specialists, animators and a horde of hard-working production assistants. All of whom live in Vermont.

As media production in all channels from print to 3-D animation to radio to video continue to experience changes in their production and business models, I think anything that helps develop talent and experience is a good thing and worth pursuing.

A commenter over at Bill Simmons’ Candleblog, stated how having a tax incentive has had an effect on the commenter’s boyfriend: “it means he doesn’t have to move to LA to work in film.”

Here’s the video and a transcript: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long languished under the nice but generic Kubrick. In a massive case of cobbler’s son has no shoes, I’ve just never made the time to create a theme for n0d3. Well, I finally decided to just give in and download one of the billions of excellent free themes out there. I chose Grid Focus.

Since I tend to be wordy in my blog posts, the theme had to have decent typography. While I’m not a fan of sans-serif faces for lots of text, Grid Focus does have a nice tight length and handles the multitudes of heading levels I like to use. Perhaps I’ll work on getting a serif face to look nice for the body copy later. The basic grid which is the errr focus of this theme got me.

So while the cobbler may not have time to make shoes for his son, at least his son can go about wearing something good in the meanwhile.

Next up, I’m going to completely re-organize my taxonomy. This includes going back through all my existing posts and re-categorizing them. Don’t expect this to happen overnight.

One of my clients has had recent trouble with a Troll on their blog. I got them set up with the flexible and useful WP-Ban and sent them some instructions. It occurs to me that others might find this useful as well. Here is my Spam and Trolls post:

The true objective of this email is talk about how to use the banning tools available. This blog has been incredibly fortunate to have a wealth of excellent commentary and community. However, there are some aspects of comments that are no good for anyone: Spam and Trolls.

Spam

It’s important to note that spam is different from trolls. Spam is usually automatically generated, computer distributed and like unceasing tide of crap the washes across the internet in all venues. There is no single human behind the wash of spam out there. It’s like fighting zombies. Fighting spam is definitely an arms race style of endeavor. Your blog makes use of two primary tools for dealing with spam: Akismet and Bad Behavior. Both of these, like the spam they fight, are automated. Think of Akismet and Bad Behavior as good zombies.

So long as the (unwanted) viagra and (unwanted) sex toy ads aren’t showing up all over the blog, your good zombies are doing the best they can. If you notice a rise in these unwanted comments, let me know and I’ll see if we can tweak the settings a little more. Some of the more broad-brush approach to comment spam may eliminate comments that from real people having civil dialogue (aka a false-positive). A little viagra ad now and then is worth keeping a sincere person from feeling left out.

Trolls

Near as I can tell, most commentors are sincere and well-meaning. But from time to time, someone gets a wild hair across their ass and decides to cause trouble. Trolls are different from spam because, unlike spam, Trolls are people. Some human being is actually using the few hours they have on this earth with the intent of distressing the readers of your blog. Putting your good zombies (Akismet and Bad Behavior) to work against Trolls will result in a lot of collateral damage (false positives). So you end up playing a little bit of whack-a-mole.

Your primary mallet in this digital version of whack-a-mole is called WP-Ban. Here’s how to use it:

1. Look at the navigation options running down the left-hand side of the screen.
2. At the bottom, notice the link titled “Settings.” There’s a little arrow to the right of the word “Settings.” Please click that arrow.
3. More options will unfurl. One of them, towards the bottom, will be called “Ban.” Click it please.
4. You are now editing who gets to see the site and who doesn’t. You don’t want trolls to see the site.
5. The section to use is called “Banned IPs” Here you can enter, one-at-a-time, the IP addresses of trolls. But even better, you can use a “wildcard” character to represent all options for some of the numbers. I recommend that when you spot a troll, you take the first three numbers and use a wildcard for the fourth. This will lessen the chance of eliminating all commentary from an entire town in order to get rid of the one troll (AKA the “burn the village to save it” approach). If this becomes a chore or too much to manage, then use the first two numbers and then wildcard it. You will see examples on the page.
6. Scroll down and save your changes.

Some additional notes:

There’s an option to ban by referrer. This is useful if, say, some wackjob uses his or her blog to funnel a lot of incensed people at your site and run amok. Sort of like a Troll invasion. Use the ban-by-referrer section to ban anyone coming to the site by way of that article. This is a little heavy handed but may be required from time to time.

Banned Message is what the banned people see. I have put a little note in there for now that reads “Sorry, we prefer a little more civility on this site. Usually the advice of “Don’t feed the trolls” works well enough. In your case, however, it didn’t.” If you want to, please feel free to change that message.

Ban Stats will tell you how often the ban has been applied. If you find yourself obsessively checking the Ban Stats, remember that the Troll is controlling your time every time you bother looking at the stats. As of this writing, the ban stat reads “1.” So yes, your troll has been put on notice.

After talking with Jonathan on his radio show The Browser I spent a lot of time thinking about epistemology. I first learned  that 50 cent word in college, in a music industry class. We were reading Neal Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I remember the opening, in which Postman says that much time had been spent worrying about about the dystopian future presented by an all-knowing government entity in Orwell’s 1984 when in fact we were much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World. The rest of the book goes on about how the kind of thinking that is valued by a culture whose primary media is television is different than the kind of thinking valued by a culture whose primary media is the written word (keep in mind that Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985–we aren’t talking about the internet, blogs or Twitter–the newspaper or magazine article might be the most shortest unit of writing used for transmitting knowledge).

Some of the basics of technology and the transmission of ideas/knowledge that Postman discusses are like so:

• Oral culture: values memory capabilities
• Written culture: technology displaces memory and promotes linear thinking
• Television culture: displaces linear thinking and promotes meta-discourse (which brings to mind Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer, forward to around 1:28)

It’s worthwhile to note that none of these technology/epistemology pairs completely obliterates the previous entry. Memory is still useful, just not as useful in a written culture, for example.

A culture in which data is the primary technology of knowledge transfer

What I’ve been mulling over, since being interviewed for the show, is a data-driven culture. I don’t foresee an immediate future in which everyone is numbers-literate or aware of the meaning behind various analytics metrics any more than I envision a future in which everyone is aware of how television is effective as a communication medium or a future in which everyone knows how to read, write and produce a well-reasoned essay.

But I do envision a future in which those who are data-literate begin to wield a distinct advantage over those who are not. How many lyric poets can be replaced by The Marble Threshing Floor: A Collection of Greek Folksongs? How will the advantage distribute itself? What sort of conversations will organizations and individuals have should a data-literate advantage become apparent? Will anyone miss the individual voice of the poet? The visual narrative of silent film? The letterpress version of Gill Sans?

Rate of change

I’ve been going down this rabbit hole of “change will increasingly be the norm” for awhile. Primarily as a result of reading and agreeing with a couple of HBR articles about change. I do think that we’re experiencing an exponential growth curve in turbulence of information/knowledge generation. We’re trying to assemble meaning around all of this.

I think maybe it’s like when you’re playing Katamari Damacy, growing a star. For awhile, children’s toys are pretty big but slowly you get the star bigger. Almost without noticing, those children’s toys are seeming smaller and smaller. The sense of scale changes and adjusts to the size of the objective (the star) and the size of the objects of your attention (the things you’re rolling up into your star). Before you know it, ocean liners are seemingly small objects. In the game, every now and then there’s a noticeable moment when the perspective really does change to allow a larger perspective to encompass larger objects.

Perhaps, with regard to the distribution of a data culture, we are in one of those noticeable moments when the perspective changes.

I recently heard that Burlington Vermont web host Silicon Dairy disappeared and turned off all the websites of their clients. They stopped returning calls. All the sites just disappeared. There were a number of non-profits that worked with Silicon Dairy that are now without websites.

I would like to help.

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