Davis ThinkingTwitter is amongst new media channels that are challenging how we communicate, with whom we communicate and perhaps most fundamentally how we (Marketers) influence people. Analysis of these new social media channels has been hobbled by old world thinking, when it comes to marketing, from the world of Television and Magazines or, when it comes to measurement, from the world of traditional web analytics. These new channels, twitter and facebook and youtube and tumblr and, yes, even blogs, are very distinct customer / participant experiences. Stale marketing or measurement thinking applied to them results in terribly sub optimal results for all involved.
When it comes to deep smarts, curiosity, with practical advice and sprinkled with a healthy dose of good humor, I cannot think of anyone more qualified than Avinash Kaushik. He's not only a real dynamo in all matters analytics, he's also a genuinely passionate, interesting, and kind person. Think that he wrote the answers to our conversation while his hand was healing from an injury because he had made a promise. Every single one of his posts - and now I can say the same for the books - is packed with step by step actionable insights that will make you think about online accountability as an art. I don't know about you, but he's changed the game of analytics for me - I now have a totally fresh appreciation for what you can do with data.
It seems absolutely dumb to argue that while the quality of data used to make decisions is important, it is actually not that important to have the highest data quality.
If brands can wrap their heads around why they should be on Twitter (hint: it should have a direct tie to your overall business strategy) and are creating compelling content, they'll quickly learn this dirty little secret about Twitter: it's not about how many people are following you. That's a traditional media measurement. What really counts is how often and frequently people are passing your content along to their trusted networks through the retweet.
When it comes to analytics, few know the space like Avinash Kaushik, which is why we took your questions to him. He's the author of "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day," a prolific blogger at Occam's Razor and Google's analytics evangelist, where he proudly claims the tagline "Data-driven decision making uncomplexified."
When in doubt, ask your customers to help you. I am quite fond of saying that in the context of using methodologies like Surveys and Experimentation and Testing in service of improving web experiences. Today I used that idea in a different context, ask you what was top of your mind so I could try and answer some of them. My question was very open ended.
Magazine websites still seem preoccupied with selling print subscriptions, a Google executive told a magazine conference Tuesday. "That sort of made me sad," he said, "because that is your strategic advantage." Content sites today, "especially you," are probably not making the most of their strengths, said Google "analytics evangelist" Avinash Kaushik.
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