Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Stalking by another name

Wondering how that barista knew your name before asking you? Check-in-based social networking game Foursquare has taken another step toward relevancy by adding analytics tools for businesses that participate. The new dashboard feature, still in alpha testing, gives data such as total number of check-ins, unique visitors, gender comparisons, and breakdowns by time. It also shows how people are sharing (over Twitter, for instance) and can differentiate between customers and staff members.
via fastcompany.com

It's not that hard to imagine the barista in a coffee shop running this dashboard while you're in the shop and knowing how (and where) you spent the rest of your day. And you better hope that you don't attract the attention of a real creeper, because he or she will pretty much be able to know everywhere you've been and all the places you like to go.

I think I'm going to start checking in at strange places, late at night, just to throw people off. I can be the Foursquare bandit—dominating Wall Street late at night. Maybe there's a special badge for that.

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Looking beyond follower count

A fully interactive map showing everyone who follows BBH Labs (@bbhlabs) on Twitter. Also visualized as a heatmap.

Twitter is still something of a mystery to those of us in advertising and marketing. Everyone thinks they need to be on top of it, but no one is completely sure now to use it. Even fewer people have an idea of how to measure whether or not they’re using it effectively. Most of the time brands think about Twitter like this: Create an account, start tweeting, and then measure success by looking at how many followers we have. But that doesn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, that tells you almost nothing.

via work.ralphthemagician.com

Here's a little something I wrote up about how to use the Twitter API and Google Fusion Tables to draw insights about those who follow you (and others) on Twitter. It's amazing how much data is publicly available, and the kind of analysis you can do with a few lines of code. If you ever wanted to know how to map 12,000 points on Google Maps, this is your chance to learn how.

Gelocation information provided by modern mobile devices puts analytics data into an entirely new context. Not only do you know what someone did and when, but now you know where. I'm particularly intrigued to see how these kinds of APIs develop in the future, and at what point brands start using public API data to aggressively target their competitors consumers in a very hostile manner. We aren't far away from the breaking point where you can challenge massive incumbent brands by targeting their most vocal consumers right outside of their house.

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Measuring copypasta

Interesting: When you copy text from a New Yorker article and paste it somewhere else, it automatically includes a “Read more: URL” at end of paste.
via 37signals.com

Matt Linderman, of 37signals, points out an interesting feature on the New Yorker website. Apparently The New Yorker uses a service called Tynt to track readers who copy and paste text from their articles. Tynt is piece of JavaScript that you can embed on a site which tracks every time a user copies text, and can even append that snippet with a "Read more" link if you desire.

A rather brilliant way to measure engagement for a blog. The insights from the data that a service like this would return could be used to better optimize individual blogs posts in terms of word count, sentence structure, and sentence length. I tend to believe that this is just one of those incredibly simple things that no one ever thought of before, but will end up being a standard feature in analytics software going forward.

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Microsoft Excel is slowly becoming obsolete

The other day Google released an API for their Fusion Tables project. For those that don't know what Fusion Tables is, well...

What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.

It's quite remarkable in its simplicity. I only wish this had been available last year when I needed it. You can read the original announcement about Fusion Tables from earlier this summer on the Google Research blog here.

Fusion Tables is a pretty cool product in its own right, and with an API it becomes an even more robust utility for quick trend analysis and a host of other quantitative endeavors. It's pretty amazing how easy Google has made it to create visualizations that would have otherwise taken hours to create by other methods.

But I think what's really remarkable is how Google is shaping their web-based products to challenge Microsoft. Excel has long been the de-facto standard for working with small data sets, but Google may actually be capable of challenging the status quo with a combination of Google Docs and Fusion Tables. While they aren't (yet) a replacement for Microsoft Excel by any means, together they offer a large part of the day-to-day functionality while providing a considerable amount of added value and unique functionality that Microsoft can't deliver on.

There are two things I'd really like to see in the future from Google:

  1. Better integration points between Google Docs, Fusion Tables and Google Analytics. Imagine a flow where you can merge Google Analytics data with sales, inventory, et al. data in a few easy steps. Powerful.
  2. The ability to run (even if limited) regression analysis. Right now Google Docs supports LINEST and a few other tools, but it's pretty limited.

Every day I find that I need Microsoft products a little bit less. And it's not just that I don't need them – I don't even want to use them anymore, because solutions like Google Docs and Fusion Tables are simply better, faster, and inherently easier to work with in a collaborative environment.

Social media will not save your business

I was jotting down some notes the other day and creating some buckets for different ways brands and individuals can actually use social media. Far too often I hear people talking about it in the abstract, as if having a Facebook page is going to change your business. Certain people seem to imply that if spend a lot of money on Facebook suddenly people are going to be handing you money, for whatever your selling, hand over fist. Good luck with that.

Anyway,

  1. Broadcast
    You create an account on Twitter, Faceook and YouTube and start putting out stuff, because that's what everyone else is doing. This includes most advertising, PR, community building, and content distribution. The problem is that this only effective for certain brands. It's great for large brands that can leverage their might. But for most brands, your message gets lost in a sea of other broadcast messages. If you're Coca-Cola you can do something awesome simply by allocating a massive production budget towards making original content. If you're a small soda company like Blue Sky, you can't.
  2. Actually talking to people (& having something interesting to say)
    You have to find someone who actually wants to talk to people. You may have to hire someone new. And by suggesting that you hire someone to talk to your customers, I don't mean an unpaid intern who's a "social media expert" because he or she knows how to create a MySpace profile. I mean hiring a real person, who participates in all your business activities, actually knows what's going on and likes the brand. It has to be someone interesting that has something to say,  someone who can actually go back to the product guys or R&D team with community feedback, and someone who has the ability to actually fix customer problems. If everyone is ranting about how crappy your customer service is on Twitter, and your response is to pipe in the RSS feed from your blog, you might as well just not use Twitter at all.
  3. Research and analytics
    If you understand what the Internet looks like for your industry, and you know how your consumers are using social media, you can gain a better understanding of consumer behavior and sentiment (with regards to both your products and your industry) by actually doing real research. Reviews and search trends have huge retail implications today, especially as we move into a world where everyone has a smart phone and can see what everyone else has ever had to say about a particular store or product at point of sale. Research, in this case, is a little bit more than just buying an out-of-the-box social media monitoring solution. If you sell spirits, you need to know where people are checking in on Foursquare, and how the number of stars on Yelp impacts your revenue. There are no simple solutions for this kind of analytics, so you're going to have to build a database from scratch.
  4. Interaction framework
    Once you understand consumer behavior in your category, you can start using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as an interaction framework. Facebook and Twitter both have single sign-on services that allow you to create applications that leverage a user's network of connections. And once you start getting users to engage with you through one of these methods, you can start tracking them. You can ping them. When you want to conduct research, you don't need to host focus groups. All you need to do is ask.

Just a few thoughts I had.