Will Marlow - Filed under 'Web Analytics'

February 1, 2010

How Much Do You Measure?

I think it would be interesting if Nielsen's BookScan unit installed tracking chips randomly on books, to measure reading trends.

This would tell us:

1. How much time people spend with their books opened.

2. How many books are never opened or read.

3. How many books are opened repeatedly.

4. How many books seem to be read more than once.

5. How many books are only read at night.

6. How many books are only read during commuting time.

7 Which pages people like to linger on.

8. Which books seem to be read immediately following other books.

Of course, we already do this (and more) on websites, and the more that devices like the iPad and Kindle catch on, the more information like this we'll know about peoples' reading habits in general. Going forward, I think there need to be better disclosures on websites and products about what information is collected, because (1) people ought to have a better understanding about what type of footprint they leave, and (2) businesses, schools and charities need to have a better understanding of what type of information they should be gathering, and how they should be using it.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // iPad Kindle Marketing Privacy Web Analytics

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January 12, 2010

Day One of Twitter Experiment: Unfollowing 12,000+ People

Today I am beginning to unfollow 12,000 people, making my way down to zero. Currently, almost everyone I am following is also following me back. And starting last Friday, I began informing my "followers" of this experiment, and anyone who has been paying attention to my feed has had ample time to hear me announce that I am culling faux-followers, and that I will quickly begin to add people back who I interact with, or who reach out to me, or who I am interested in.

Yesterday I wrote about what I hope to learn from doing this.

On Friday I wrote about why I am doing this.

Today I just want to write briefly about which Twitter tools I am starting with. I am going to use Tweepi, which my friend Russ Dean helpfully turned me on to, and once I get beneath a certain level (say, around 10,000), I will use Twitter Karma, which works for Twitter accounts that are not humongous, but begins to fail when it needs to deal with too much information.

I will report back on whether these two tools are sufficient, or if I stumble upon others, or if I end up needing to unfollow folks by hand!

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Experiment Twitter Twitter Influence Unfollow Web Analytics Will Marlow

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January 10, 2010

One Reason Facebook is Worth Billions of Dollars

(Tomorrow I'll re-continue my posts outlining my next steps in my Twitter experiment to unfollow 12,000 plus people and only re-follow legitimate accounts. Email me with questions on that.)

Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.

It's not just the fact that it has 350 million active users. The more important point is that before any one of those users does something on Facebook, they need to login. That means that, unlike the great majority of websites, which analyze aggregate data and trends, Facebook has names attached to activities. They can measure what you do. Not just what nameless "visitors" do. For this reason, and for a few other good reasons, Facebook has tremendous advantages that get it closer to understanding why you do things. This is the same reason why Google hit such a home run with Gmail. People login (and stay logged in) to Gmail all day. Then, when they search, their searches can be indexed in a personal search history.

The bottom line is, this type of system makes it a lot easier to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time to get them to buy something. That's why Marc Andreessen can say that Facebook will one day "be bigger than Apple" and he's not crazy, even though Apple's 2009 reven ue was $32 billion.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Apple Facebook Gmail Google Marc Andreessen Valuation Web Analytics

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