Jive's Clearspace application is a very powerful tool for building active, engaged communities. Whether you are using it for collaboration, blogging/publishing content, for discussions, or documentation, you'll want to know what your visitors are searching for on the site so you can make sure the right content is available at the right time.
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Jive's Clearspace application is a very powerful tool for building active, engaged communities. Whether you are using it for collaboration, blogging/publishing content, for discussions, or documentation, you'll want to know what your visitors are searching for on the site so you can make sure the right content is available at the right time.
The following is from the January 2009 Drilling Down Newsletter. Got a question about Customer Measurement, Management, Valuation, Retention, Loyalty, Defection? Just ask your question. Also, feel free to leave a comment.
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The following is from the January 2009 Drilling Down Newsletter. Got a question about Customer Measurement, Management, Valuation, Retention, Loyalty, Defection? Just ask your question. Also, feel free to leave a comment.
Want to see the answers to previous questions? The pre-blog newsletter archives are here.
Q: The research folks in my company are trying to convince me that measuring sessions and Page Views per Session is more effective than using Recency and Sessions, as you advocate in your book, for a retention metric.
A: For a content site, the Page Views / Session measure can be used as a measure of visitor quality and appropriate marketing to the right audience - a customer acquisition idea - not retention. And it really needs to be broken out by Source - the average has little actionable meaning. You want to know the Visitor Sources, and then look at this metric by Source. This is still Frequency though - what about visitors who don’t come back?
Q: I am having some difficulty in making a decision regarding this. They want to give me a matrix with Page Views per Session on the Y axis and Total Sessions on the X axis as the “customer retention map”.
A: I’d call that a Customer Activity or Customer Engagement map, I don’t see how it has anything to do with Retention. This is a “Frequency Map” with no Recency, which is more of a visitor quality thing, it doesn’t tell you anything about Retention.
For example, as long as you are growing your visitor base, with this kind of map you would never realize Visitors were defecting until the Visitor totals started to go down. By then, it would be too late
to take action, the damage is done and you’re into the death spiral.
Amazon used to boast about how many “best customers” they had based on Frequency. When Wall Street found out 60% of these best customers had not made a purchase in over a year (Recency), the stock was cut in half. Frequency is a measure of Current Value, it doesn’t mean anything for Retention without Recency.
Recent-Frequent visitors are best customers, now and in the future; Frequent visitors who are not Recent are former best customers. Further, without Visitor Source, I don’t know how you take action on the reporting above.
Q: They say that if I need to send messages to only the recent users I could by only querying the users with high sessions that were only generated over the recent past, say, 1 week. This will be enough to target the users who you say are most likely to respond.
A: Well, this is true, they are saying to pull the listby Recency and Frequency. So if targeting an e-mail to most likely to respond is what you want to do, this would work. But it doesn’t give you a “Visitor Retention Map”, if that is what you want.
See a detailed example of such a map here.
The method your folks are suggesting doesn’t tell you how to get and keep Best Visitors, or which Best Visitors seem to be defecting, providing a head’s up on a weak Visitor Source.
So if growing the best Visitor base as rapidly as possible is what you want to do, you need to know if you are churning through a ton of best customers each week. I would be more concerned about mailing to best customers who are not coming back. You can’t do that without Recency. Sounds to me like they want to take the easy way out. It’s easy to pull a list of people who have been to the site, harder to pull a list of people who have not been there for some period, which is what you want if you intend to act on Retention data.
Q: What are we missing here? Why, if at all, is it more important to gauge Recency and Frequency (sessions) than Sessions and Page Views per Session? It sounds like Page Views per Session is more
like “Intensity” than anything else, and I can see how it is also valuable. Can you shed some light here?
A: Yes, Intensity, which implies Quality, as I said earlier - for most sites a desirable thing. It’s just another way to measure Frequency. So if this metric is more important than Total Page Views or Total Sessions to your business, then use it. But without Recency, you have no predictive power. If you are going to do list pulls based on Recency but not track based on Recency, it seems to me you will be missing the data you need to achieve your retention Objective.
How do you know if it’s working?
Under this method, you could start with 10,000 Best visitors and work your way all the way down to 100 that actually still visit, never learning anything or coming up with a plan to reduce defection. Worse, this mass defection could be covered up by Acquisition efforts without the Recency reporting, meaning you’d just be churning Visitors and not making any progress.
This kind of Frequency reporting, at best, tells you what has happened in the past, e.g. at some point you had 10,000 visitors who were considered “Best”. It does not tell you how long it has been since any of these Best Visitors visited the site.
For example, say you are running two ad campaigns. Ad A generates Views/Session of 6.4, Ad B Views/Session of 3.2. Based on the tracking proposed, Ad A generates the “best customers”. So you put all your money into Ad A, and kill Ad B.
Later, you want to do a high-response e-mail, so you pull all the 1 week Recent visitors with high Views per Session, send it out, and get high response. So far so good. On further analysis, you find most of these people originally visited as a result of Ad B. Curious, you look at the Recency of Ad A visitors and find 90% never came back after the 2nd or 3rd visit.
So you have just wasted money and time, because you were not tracking Customer Retention, just using a Retention-oriented metric to pull lists. You’re only hitting people who decide to keep visiting, and as a result, never learn why people stop visiting. Whatever you are doing to create this scenario goes unchecked, and all of a sudden the business is in freefall. The Recency metric can predict this is going to happen for you, give you the head’s up that something is not working for the Visitor segment and allow you to take action.
See the difference? The value of this kind of modeling is to be able to predict the future, not react to the past. I don’t know what you are trying to accomplish in the end, what is the Objective of all this? But assuming high Page Views / Session is good, then you have a way to track Frequency, which is one vector on the Customer Retention Map, the Current Value. But what good is knowing “initial quality” if this quality doesn’t stick over time?
That’s the other half of the Customer Retention map, the Potential Value. And that’s where Recency comes into the picture.
If you intend to increase Retention, try to keep your customers longer, you want to:
1. Understand which Visitor sources create Visitors who don’t come back, and if paying for any of these sources, reallocate the budget to those sources creating Visitors who do come back again and again.
2. Take action with the folks that were high value Visitors who have stopped Visiting. Getting a high response rate from Current Visitors doesn’t imply anything about Retention; it just tells you that engaged visitors are more likely to respond.
What you want to know is what Visitor dis-engagement looks like, how many high value Visitors are you losing? What were their Sources? What kinds of content did they Engage with / Products did they buy? Were they frequent contributors? Did they have Service encounters? Then find out why they are leaving and take action.
For detailed examples of Visitor & Customer Retention Mapping, see the Measuring Engagement Series. For examples of how to measure Visitor Recency in Google Analytics, see this post by Avinash.
Jim
Have a question on Customer Valuation, Retention, Loyalty, or Defection? Go ahead and send it to me here. If on the topic above, please leave a comment.
I’ve compiled a list of 100 possibilities and things happening out there on the Internet that might be of interest to you. You may have even more to add. Please do.
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The future is now. Sometimes, we don’t look outside our little angle of it, and that means we miss some possibilities. Other times, we realize something’s out there and we have part of the puzzle, but we’ll catch a different view that gives us even more. I’ve compiled a list of 100 possibilities and things happening out there on the Internet that might be of interest to you. You may have even more to add. Please do.
Quickly, what I mean by this is that you might consider looking for web-based equivalents to most of your applications, or web-desktop hybrids. Here’s a list of applications for your consideration, and how they might fit into your work flow. In almost all cases, the apps mentioned work well on both Mac and PC.
That’s all I’ve got. Here’s hoping we get tons of interesting add-on links and ideas on the comments. Oh, don’t forget that comments with URLs often get flagged as spam. Give me a little while to fish you out.
And hey, if you like this post, please subscribe for free to get more information daily (if not more).
As a collective people, we aren’t always the greatest spellers. Even those of us (ahem) with English degrees have our weaknesses (as you’ll see in a minute). Knowing that, site owners have long wondered about how best to make sure their sites show up in search engines for misspelled queries.
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As a collective people, we aren’t always the greatest spellers. Even those of us (ahem) with English degrees have our weaknesses (as you’ll see in a minute). Knowing that, site owners have long wondered about how best to make sure their sites show up in search engines for misspelled queries.
Site owners try to account for misspellings
Site owners have tried putting the misspellings in the meta keywords tag (doesn’t really work; search engines typically don’t use the keywords tag) or occasionally using the misspelled version in the word in place of the correct spelling (can hurt conversion as it can make the site look less professional).
Search engines say they account for misspellings
Search engines generally tell site owners not to worry about it. They have spell checkers that work pretty well so when searchers misspell queries, the results will still match the right sites. Searchers know this and tend not to worry about spelling things right, knowing they’ll get the “did you mean” prompt that provides the right spelling. And search engines see so many queries that they know better than anyone how people are likely to misspell things.
What really happens in search results
For the most part, the search engine process works well. Someone misspells a query, the search engine asks them if they really meant the correct spelling, the searcher clicks and all is well. But I’ve recently come across two very different behaviors. (Note: neither of these behaviors are new, some recent searches just caused me to think about them a bit more.)
When a search engine is REALLY sure the query is misspelled
I assume this can happen if the search volume for the typed query is really low. If the search engine is pretty sure the searcher meant something else, they may not only show the “did you mean” prompt, but they’ll treat the misspelling the same way they treat synonyms and just show results for what they think is the correctly spelled query.
You can tell this is happening because a different word than the search term is highlighted. Normally, this is a great search experience, but it can be frustrating when the searcher really meant the original. For instance, this morning, I was looking for my doctor’s number. This was the result:
Google autocorrect search results
As you can see here, Google autocorrected the query from [robon] to [robin] and not only showed me the “did you mean” prompt, but is treating “robin” as a synonym for “robon”. You can tell this is happening because “robin” is bolded in the results. Normally, this behavior is helpful. For instance, “washington” is highlighted in the results because Google is matching it to the “wa” in my query, and that can help me as a searcher see results for my state, whether the site used the abbreviation or the spelled out word. But in the case of finding my doctor, he doesn’t show up until the very last result of the local one box.
So in this case, letting Google sort out the misspelling isn’t helpful for either the searcher or the site owner. (And in this case, the query wasn’t misspelled; Google’s misspelling algorithm just thought it was.) If you see this behavior as a searcher, you can force Google to only return exact matches by adding a “+” to your query. For instance, in my search for my doctor, this was the new result:
Use + to force an exact match in Google search results
Google still showed the “did you mean” prompt, but only showed exact match results and for this particular query, the relevance of the results were much better. But how many searchers know to use the + sign? Maybe 3.
When A LOT of searchers mispell a word
Search engines might see so few queries spelled a certain way, that they are sure it’s misspelled and show the “corrected” result automatically, but the opposite can happen as well. A search engine might see so many misspelled queries, that they think searchers are really looking for that misspelling. (Spelling correction is primarily, if not entirely based on query data.)
Take for instance my post on my Sony Vaio. Apparently, I don’t know how to spell it. But apparently, neither does anyone else (including Sony, as you’ll see in a second). So when you search for the incorrectly spelled [sony viao], Google does suggest the correct spelling, but it doesn’t automatically show sites with the correct spelling in the results. How do I know this? Because my post is the first result. (And a sony.com page with the incorrect spelling is in the top five as well.)
Sony Vaio Mispelled Query
[sony viao] is currently the second highest volume query to my site. (Of course, it’s not bringing my target audience, but that’s a different issue.)
Query Volume: Analytics for Sony
So what’s a site owner to do?
In most instances, spelling corrections from the search engines work great and generally, I don’t think site owners need to worry. In the second case of the misspelling have enough query volume to warrant a full display of its own results, one answer may be user-contributed content. If that many people misspell something in a query, you’re likely to get people misspelling it when they add comments (reviews, ratings, discussions) on your site. I wouldn’t suggest misspelling it on purpose to get the mispelled queries. If you optimize for the misspelling (as I accidentally did), you’ll miss the far greater number of correctly spelled queries. And if you optimize for them both, you’re likely to look unprofessional and may lose visitors. Credibility at a glance can be really important online.
The far greater concern is when you don’t show up for correctly spelled queries because the search engine thinks the searcher meant something else, as in my search for my doctor. I don’t necessarily know the answer here, as this is based on query volume and if very few people are searching for you compared to a similarly spelled word, you could run into problems like this. Certainly the first step is making sure that your site is well-optimized to be found in search. As you can see from my + query, the doctor’s site still is nowhere to be found, even though the search results are all sites that reference him. (And why that might be is an entirely different post!)
Update: Thanks to Glenn Murray for pointing out in the comments that I misspelled “misspell”. In my defense, it’s a common mistake. On the other hand, I do have an English degree, so that’s just embarrassing.
This post, the first part of three, is a How-to guide for integrating your voice of customer data with Google Analytics. I have chosen two popular VoC tools: , Clicktools and Kampyle, though it is not my intention to review the merits of the respective tools themselves. However I do use them both, which makes me a fan of them both.
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As I have written before, Voice of Customer techniques are your direct feedback mechanism from visitors to your web site. It provides invaluable qualitative data to your web design, development, marketing, PR and content creator teams. It compliments the quantitative data of web analytics by providing the “why” to the “what” and “when”. However it is often the case that this data remains in a separate silo within the organisation, never to be compared with the quantitative data of your web analytics platform.
This post, the first part of three, is a How-to guide for integrating your voice of customer data with Google Analytics. I have chosen two popular VoC tools: , Clicktools and Kampyle, though it is not my intention to review the merits of the respective tools themselves. However I do use them both, which makes me a fan of them both.
This is Part I - Integrating Clicktools with Google Analytics. Part II - coming soon.
My standard word of caution for all “GA Hacks” posts - This is a tech tip and requires you to have a knowledge of html and JavaScript to implement and use it…
Integrating third party data with Google Analytics
Why should you do this? Well, knowing where visitors come from that take the trouble to give you their valuable time and feedback, is a key component of understanding why things may, or may not, be working on your web site. For example, perhaps visitors that come via a banner advertisement have a poor user experience compared to those that click through on a email link or find you via a search engine. In order to know these when viewing your survey results, you need to obtain that information from your Google Analytics data - and specifically at the point when the visitor clicks through to start your survey.
Essentially, there are two approaches to any kind of data integration - either importing or exporting the data of interest. By this I mean importing your third party data into Google Analytics, or alternatively exporting from Google Analytics into your third party system - a third option is to export both data sets into another system.
Google’s approach is to facilitate the latter. That is, make the exporting of your Google Analytics data as easy as possible. An often used phrase at Google is “data democratisation”, which means making the data accessible to everyone (with suitable access restrictions of course). So the general rule for integration, is to always think in terms of how can I get data out of Google Analytics to integrate it elsewhere. This is the approach I use here.
Of course, that may change in the future. The recent announcement of the Analytics API in theory allows for both the import and export of data into Google Analytics. For now though I am considering only the export of Google Analytics data and without any API programming skills!
Clicktools background information
Clicktools positions itself as an enterprise version of the very popular SurveyMonkey product. And although the name isn’t as intuitive, it is a powerful visitor survey system. Founded in 2001, Clicktools is a UK company based in the beautiful coastal town of Poole with offices in San Francisco (another beautiful place, but sorry Poole beats it!). The product already integrates with SugarCRM and Oracle CRM, yet surprisingly not yet with any web analytics vendors. Prices start at $3000 for an annual license, though there is a 30 day free demo.
For me, there are two strengths to the Clicktools approach:
Integrating Google Analytics with Clicktools
By integrating with Google Analytics data, you can understand how survey respondents found you, which search engine, keyword, referral, affiliate etc. - without having to laboriously ask for this in the survey. The result is Google Analytics visitor data incorporated into your Clicktools survey reports.
There are 4 parts to this integration:
1. Setup your survey
I have assumed you have opened your Clicktools account and built your survey - a relatively straight forward process of writing your questions and deciding how you wish visitors to respond to them i.e. using a free form text box, radio button, drop down selector etc., and that your survey is ready to be deployed. That is, there is a link on your web site soliciting feedback - no pop-ups please!
Important for the purposes of this example, I have assumed you have a total of 7 survey questions. Always try to keep this to single figures or risk loosing your valuable respondent.
2. Add hidden questions to your survey
At the end of your Clicktools survey setup, add hidden questions to capture the referral data from Google Analytics. These questions are not visible to the respondent when they complete the survey, but can be populated with values passed through the URL link that calls the survey.
In this example I use two hidden questions, corresponding to the referral source (e.g. search engine) and search term (if used). However, you can add all five referral variables from Google Analytics if you wish - for source, medium, campaign, term and content. As my survey example contains 7 visible questions, my hidden questions are numbered q8 and q9 for search engine and source respectively.
3. Add JavaScript to your pages to grab Google Analytics data
Google analytics stores visitor information, anonymously, in first party cookies. That is, cookies owned by the web site in question. Therefore, if you can add JavaScript code to your web pages, you can also access the Google Analytics cookies. Below is a function to do this for you:
function _uGC(l,n,s) {// originally from urchin.js if (!l || l=="" || !n || n=="" || !s || s=="") return "-"; var i,i2,i3,c="-"; i=l.indexOf(n); i3=n.indexOf("=")+1; if (i > -1) { i2=l.indexOf(s,i); if (i2 < 0) { i2=l.length; } c=l.substring((i+i3),i2); } return c;}var z = _uGC(document.cookie, "__utmz=", ";");ga_source = _uGC(z,"utmcsr=", "|"); //alert(ga_source)ga_medium = _uGC(z,"utmcmd=", "|"); //alert(ga_medium)ga_term = _uGC(z,"utmctr=", "|"); //alert(ga_term)ga_content = _uGC(z,"utmcct=", "|"); //alert(ga_content)ga_campaign = _uGC(z,"utmccn=", "|"); //alert(ga_campaign)// Replace the "iv" value with the one from your Clicktools accountvar survey = "http://www.clicktools.com/survey?iv=123qwerty&q7=4&q8=";survey_url = survey +ga_source +"&q9="+ ga_term;document.write('feedback survey')// modify "feedback survey" to what ever you wish to be displayed to the visitorSave this code to your web server root in a file called survey-import-ct.js.
This code grabs the referrer information that Google Analytics has (from the cookie named __utmz) and sets 5 variables - all preceded wtih ga_. These are then available for passing over to Clicktools when the visitor clicks your survey link.
4. Populate the hidden questions with Google Analytics information
Wherever on your page you wish to invite a visitor to participate in your survey, simply call the JavaScript function as follows:
For example:
Please visit the
This generates the “feedback survey” link on your page. When rendered by a browser, the survey link will be as follows:
http://www.clicktools.com/survey?iv=123qwerty&q7=4&q8=ga_source&q9=ga_term
In this example, I am passing over two of the referral variables; ga_source and ga_term as the answers to the two hidden survey questions, q8 and q9. These are the referral source (e.g. google.com, yahoo.co.uk etc.) and the search term used (if any) by the visitor to the site, respectively.
The results look this…
This report (q8 responses) shows where respondents came from in order to find the site prior to completing the survey. Each respondent is listed as a separate row, though aggregate reports can be generated using the Clicktools Analytics add-on. As with all Google Analytics reports, the entry “(direct)” corresponds to visitors that type in your website URL directly, though it can also be the result of a bookmarked link, or a non-tagged email campaign.
Important: Note the numbering used is this example. I have assumed a 7 question survey - that is, 7 visible questions to the respondent. Then I have added two hidden questions (q8 and q9) within Clicktools and passed over the answers to these via the survey URL. You will need adjust numbering accordingly to the length of your own survey - both with Clicktools and the JavaScript code survey-import-ct.js
The next post in this series will discuss integrating Google Analytics with Kampyl.
Are you integrating your data sources? I would be interest in your techniques and experiences - please add your comments below.
No related posts.
Riffing off a great post by George on marketing measurement, here’s a very specific example of how Marketers have to think differently when they are dealing with interactive environments, from my days at HSN.
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Riffing off a great post by George on marketing measurement, here’s a very specific example of how Marketers have to think differently when they are dealing with interactive environments, from my days at HSN.
We spent about 5 years and $100 million dollars trying to prove offline media would drive new customer acquisition and sales. We tried everything. Billboards. TV. Radio. Newspapers. TV Guides - local, national, and cable. Flyers, Shoppers, FSI’s. Spot cable. All of it, in just about every combination you can think of.
Each time we did these tests, we set up control markets and looked for Incremental sales in the media markets versus those with no media, based on revenue per household. We found incremental sales in just about every case.
The problem was this: even though the media created incremental sales, these sales were never enough to pay back the media on a net basis, meaning (roughly) (Gross Margin - Campaign Cost) - Variable Overhead was negative - even when you took into account the LifeTime Value of a new customer. Even when you looked at the test markets versus control 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months later, for those who might be thinking about “Brand” or “Awareness”.
If you’re thinking perhaps the campaigns were weak or light on exposure, I offer you this: when the campaigns included coupons, the redemptions were absolutely huge. That’s good, right?
Well, in a word, No. Think about it. There was barely any lift in sales at all, yet huge numbers of coupons were redeemed. Meaning?
This means that virtually all the coupons were redeemed by current customers, and the coupon / response did not change their behavior. They bought at the same rate as they would have without the coupon. It means we gave a ton of margin away in addition to the cost of the Campaign, and generated no increase in Sales. We literally would have been better off (financially) by doing absolutely nothing.
So, we’re talking through all this and thinking, we have to be missing something. I mean, you just can’t possibly buy a 100 showing in Boards with saturation TRP bombing on radio and 1/2 page ads in the Weds shopper section of the daily newspaper, along with FSI’s on Sunday and get no effect on sales. That breaks all the rules of Marketing. You know, Reach and Frequency and all that. Awareness and so forth. Branding.
Unless, of course, the rules have changed, for us, for this Interactive thing. Maybe it’s, you know, different.
OK, so let’s reverse engineer the question. Let’s find the markets where we have the best revenue per household, and compare them with the markets where we have weak revenue per household, and see if we can find any differences. You know, demographics and such. Household income. Presence of children. All that stuff.
Nothing. No correlations.
Then we’re analyzing the results of some spot cable testing, where we were running heavy rotations on the local cable systems carrying the HSN signal, again with test and control systems. Sometimes, it seemed to make a huge difference. Other times, nothing.
We boosted investment in the cable testing to try and replicate the positive outcomes. Nothing. In fact, the cable systems with above average revenue per household seemed to stay that way, with or without ads. The poor performers stayed that way, with or without advertising. You would normally attribute a result like this to demographics. But we already knew demographics didn’t matter.
OK, what do the high performing systems have in common? What do the weak performing systems have in common?
Then it hits us. Channel position. The high performers tend to carry our signal on a low channel number, the low performers tend to carry us on a high channel number. But that doesn’t make any sense, what could ”channel number” do to affect sales?
Then we get the 2nd smack to the upside. The major broadcast networks are almost always carried by the cable system on low channel numbers, typically the Frequency (local TV 8 on channel 8).
Oh, man. $100 million in advertising spend to find this out?
It can’t be.
So, we go down to the cable affiliate area and find some cable systems that might want to play ball with us on a test. We’ll pay all the costs of them moving our signal from up in the 40’s down to the single digits, where the major networks are carried. We’ll pay for customer notification letters, new channel cards, all that, if they’ll just try it.
It worked. Almost every time. And it made sense. Think about it.
The HSN TV program itself (the “user interface” for you web analytics folks), the interactive nature of the real time presentation, the games, the bargains, pulls people in, gets them hooked. But they have to see the program to get hooked, they have to experience the Interactivity of it to really “get it”. ”Advertising” can’t do that, can’t provide or describe what the experience is like. So we can’t Push them to the signal. We have to Pull them, and to do that we have to go to where the eyeballs already are - on the major networks.
If we move our channel next to where all the eyeballs are, then we dramatically increase the number of times the average person passes over our channel as they search for entertainment using the remote, which increases the likelihood they will see a product they are interested in, which causes them to watch the show and experience the Interactivity of it.
In other words, we get a higher ranking in the “TV Search Engine” by being close to the broadcast networks.
This play was so consistent, we built a predictive model off the results, and could estimate the increase in profits from doing this for each cable system. This means we can calculate how much we could spend to make it happen. The ROI was enormous, just huge.
So we took the Mass Media budget and spent it on cable channel realignments, which involved no Advertising at all. Because it was the right thing to do - there was no more efficient way to optimize that piece of the Marketing budget for the Company.
Sometimes, Marketing isn’t about Advertising. It’s about understanding Behavior. When you add the word “Interactive” to the mix, this Behavior issue becomes much, much more urgent to address.
Will you do the right thing? Perhaps invest in analyzing customer behavior, so you can allocate your media budget more efficiently? Maybe try some control groups in your e-mail program?
Or will you buy Advertising just because you have an Ad budget?
Have a question on Customer Valuation, Retention, Loyalty, or Defection? Go ahead and send it to me here. If on the topic above, please leave a comment.
The MvixBox 2-bay high performance NAS / media server is a 3-in-1 solution for storing media files, operating as a media server, and facilitating file transfer.
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The MvixBox 2-bay high performance NAS / media server is a 3-in-1 solution for storing media files, operating as a media server, and facilitating file transfer. These features are already available in other options, such as the DViCo TViX M-6500A, but the MvixBox is a more affordable solution that also offers the bonus of dual drive bays. The functionality could also be achieved by buying a home PC, installing a server OS onto it, and connecting it to the network. However, chances are that even if you manage to get this working without problems, it would cost quite a bit more than even the DViCo TViX M-6500A.
Understanding the needs of small businesses and home users, MvixUSA has come up with a very attractive solution. The MvixBox offers many of the features consumers have been asking for in a network media player. Here are some of the features that the new system offers:
Media server
The MvixBox provides gigabit network speed and large storage capacity, which makes it an ideal system for storing, serving, and transferring media files from one location to another. You can store media files, such as AVI, MPEG, and DIVX movies or MP3 files. From a different room in your home or a meeting room, you can access the content any time needed.
Web Disk Capability
The MvixBox is a Linux-based system, and it comes with what everyone expects Linux servers to include – Apache, MySQL, SQLite, and PHP. To make the server user friendly, a web-disk capability is also provided. This means the user can drag and drop files between the PC and NAS server. User can launch applications like Windows Explorer, WebDisk Explorer, blog software, RSS reader, Torrent client, and more. The setup ensures that anyone who knows how to operate a PC in the Windows environment will know how to handle a MvixBox.
Web Server
The web server is perhaps the most interesting feature of all. Since the MvixBox comes with support for Apache, MYSQL, and PHP, you can host web sites directly from the server. There are many different types of sites that you can setup – blogs, wikis, personal home pages, etc. If you don’t want to host web sites, you can even develop scalable intranet solutions using the database support. This capability makes it one of the most affordable web server solution that the market has to offer for small businesses and home users.
DDNS Server
In order for a web server to recognize Internet domain names, there needs to be a DNS server (or in this case DDNS so that dynamic IPs can be supported). The domain name is mapped to the server IP address, and the DDNS service enables the server to recognize the domain name. Traditional servers supported mostly static IPs. For this reason, you can’t usually operate a web server from home, as most home Internet connections operate on dynamic IPs. Dynamic IPs change all the time, as they are assigned by the ISP. Fortunately, the MvixBox offers free support for dynamic IPs. There is no extra charge for the use of this service.
NAS, Torrent Sharing, and FTP Management
MvixBox offers a simple file sharing feature that provides file encryption when transferring files using HTTP or FTP protocols. You can use the built-in Explorer to transfer files, without having to install additional software.
The system boasts simple and secure administration.
As this is an NAS server, one would expect it to come with simple backup features. The MvixBox does come with easy-to-use data storage scheduling and synchronization. The software is included with the system.
For all the above features, an enthusiast would expect the price tag to be hefty. However, this is not true. The MvixBox retails for around $249.00. Each unit includes two built-in hard drive bays that are capable of holding up a 1.5 terabyte (TB) hard drive. The hard drives are not included. Therefore, you can buy any size that best meets your needs. Even with the most expensive hard drive bundled, the entire system still costs just about $600.
Después de unas cuantas horas y de un baile de opiniones y números, me he dado cuenta que estoy pero que al principio. No me entero de nada, estoy perdido. ¿Porqué no podría existir un lugar con todo ese curro que me he pegado de forma centralizada?
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Ya llegan las navidades y con ellas sacamos a relucir nuestro lado más consumista y derrochador. Quizá no hay motivo aparente pero nos gusta hacer regalos y mas aún recibir alguno, así que nada mejor que una buena excusa para gastarnos algunos euros. ¿Afectará la crisis al derroche navideño? Veremos si al final gastamos más o menos que en años anteriores pero lo que tengo claro es que seguramente nos lo pensaremos dos veces antes de comprar por puro vicio.
Este año he decidido regalarle a mi padre uno de de esos regalos de los que podríamos considerar clásicos: una cámara de fotos. Mi padre es un apasionado del tema y ya hace tiempo que tenía en la mente comprarle un bichillo de esos… que si reflex digital de mil millones de pixels con rangos de ISO de 100 a 1500, slowmotion, multidisparo y de paso máquina de palomitas.
Si, no tengo mucha idea del mundillo este, por lo que me he puesto a buscar información por internet. Me he mirado todas las webs oficiales en busca de especificaciones, e-commerce comparando precios y, como no, he buscado opiniones y reviews de otros usuarios a ver que opinan del tema, no sea que compre una cámara que sea una auténtica birria.
Después de unas cuantas horas y de un baile de opiniones y números, me he dado cuenta que estoy pero que al principio. No me entero de nada, estoy perdido. ¿Porqué no podría existir un lugar con todo ese curro que me he pegado de forma centralizada?
Entonces aparece la luz. Mejor dicho me cae un perro del cielo.
Cae a mis manos Swotti. Una idea web/negocio/herramienta que ya me había pasado por la cabeza alguna vez. Y me sorprende con que exactitud han plasmado todo lo que tenía en mi mente.
Swotti es ni más ni menos un analizador de las opiniones que andan sueltas por la red. Genera resultados y te los muestra de forma muy ordenada. Los propios creadores de la criatura la definen como:
“Con Swotti lo que intentamos es acercar todas las opiniones que otros internautas han escrito, interpretarlas y organizarlas para que sean comparables. De tal forma que se pueda encontrar el mejor producto o servicio que se ajuste a las necesidades. Intentamos y creemos que hemos logrado, en gran medida, solucionar uno de los problemas de Internet.”
Personalmente Swotti me tiene enamorado y creo que han realizado un trabajo excelente. Falta ver exactamente cual es el algoritmo de interpretación de resultados, pero la organización de la información y la estructura me parecen geniales. En el caso de mi cámara, se pueden conseguir rankings generales, por precio, prestaciones, pantalla, diseño, imagen… ¡Felicidades!
Swotti aún se encuentra en fase beta, pero os invito a que le hechéis un vistazo. Según su análisis de opiniones este es el pódium de cámaras de fotos
¿Evaluarà personas? ¿Eres famosete? Prueba con tu nombre. Yo he probado con un par:
P.D: Lo siento por mis amigos merengones per hay que empezar a caldear el ambiente 
What we’re finding, more than anything else, is that customer relationship management is not about technology at all. It’s an attitude. It’s a mentality. This isn’t a new concept, but I do think that we take it for granted. We expect the tool to just do everything inherently. That’s not how it works - GIGO is so true and happens all too often.
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At work, we’re implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool in an effort to better our communication and … well … customer relationship management.
What we’re finding, more than anything else, is that customer relationship management is not about technology at all. It’s an attitude. It’s a mentality. This isn’t a new concept, but I do think that we take it for granted. We expect the tool to just do everything inherently. That’s not how it works - GIGO is so true and happens all too often.
To have good customer relationship management, an organization doesn’t have to have any technology *tool* - it simply has to have the commitment and attitude to manage relationships better in order to make the customer’s life better. Period. Tools may make that easier to do, but if the mentality isn’t there, the tool does nothing.
The same can be said for web analytics. All this talk about Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends - what they can and can’t do - none if it matters if we don’t have a true desire to use the data that is pulled from these tools to improve the usability of the web site.
Before the tool, it starts with goals. No, not website goals … before that.
Seriously, really think about those questions. The corporate world is good at answering those questions, but higher education? Not as good. Sure, the school has a mission, but do our units? Do our websites?
Remember that all websites, even higher education websites, are customer service sites. Yes, I know we don’t like to talk about our students as *customers* but they really are. They pay us to provide them with a service. They are customers, whether we like that term or not.
KPIs! KPIs! How I love my KPIs!! What are our key performance indicators? Do we have any baseline data to measure against? Here are some quick examples of website KPIs (remember they will be different depending upon the type of website):
… and on and on and on … again … all different depending upon type of site. Also remember that analytics doesn’t mean just *online* data. Are you a support desk or a call center with a corresponding website? Track call volume. When a knowledge base is implemented, does the call volume go down? It should, especially for simple questions.
Finally, *after* we answer these questions, then we can talk about analytics implementation.
Now let’s talk implementation. Just because we slap some javascript above the tag of our pages doesn’t mean we have an analytics mentality. Repeat after me - I/we have a true desire to deliver to the customer the best, most usabie website in our power. We need to become user advocates! Now we’re getting it … now we have the attitude!
Ok, now that we have the attitude and the mentality of analytics, let’s get started on the technical stuff.
First, take a look at this quick list of implementation tips from our good friend Avinash. That post is almost 2 years old, but I think it still holds true today.
If you’re implementing a proprietary tool like Omniture or WebTrends, make sure to talk to your vendor about your business and web site goals before implementation.
Since most of higher ed uses Google Analytics, here is a quick list of implementation and other tips and tricks:
There are so many more as well.
Now that we have the user/customer/student advocate mentality *and* we have the tool to help us, now we can truly say we have an analytics attitude!
FatWire Software today announced the launch of FatWire Content Server 7.5, a new release that extends the market-leadership of FatWire’s web content management (WCM) solution. FatWire Content Server 7.5 drives greater efficiencies in content management and promotions online, and delivers powerful capabilities to make content publishing more transparent, configurable and error-proof.
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We at FutureNow are big proponents of setting up a business culture of testing, optimization, and continuous improvement. There are lots of advantages like improved conversion rates, bigger bottom lines, surviving tough economic times, getting past draining internal debates, and so much more.
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We at FutureNow are big proponents of setting up a business culture of testing, optimization, and continuous improvement. There are lots of advantages like improved conversion rates, bigger bottom lines, surviving tough economic times, getting past draining internal debates, and so much more.
Another advantage that we haven’t talked about as much is that an optimization culture can get you past the dangers of “best practices.” Many of our clients have implemented the “best practices” of other sites (or even other industries) and then wonder why they aren’t seeing big gains. The main reason is that they’ve merely copied other sites’ ideas, and not tested to validate that those practices will work for their own unique site and business model.
I saw an interesting deviation from an industry “best practice” the other day, and whether it’s true or not, I imagine that testing allowed the site designers to go their own way instead of following the herd.
See the screenshot from Amazon.com’s “submit order” page. Take a look at how they’ve handled the common issue of getting the purchaser to agree to terms and conditions before purchasing. Many sites and site designers struggle with their Legal departments on how to secure agreement to terms while not reducing the quality of user experience (and conversion rate).
If you’ve read Always Be Testing, you’ve seen how we reference Amazon.com’s many evolutions of their site designs over time which come out of a very disciplined testing and optimization culture.
The common “best practice” in this scenario is to either:
a) have a checkbox near the call to action button that says something like “You must check the box to agree to terms before you submit your order.”
b) have copy near the call to action button that says something like “By clicking the button below, you agree to our terms and conditions.”
In either case, the common design pattern is to hyperlink to the terms and conditions (near the call to action) so concerned visitors can read them in full.
Now note the subtle deviation from “best practice” on Amazon.com’s current page:
So how did Amazon.com get the gumption to leave “best practice” design in the dust? Again, I can’t be sure of this, but we wager that testing results and analytics data played a major part in the design. I highly doubt that their Legal experts are playing fast and loose with legal and financial risk!
So there you have one of the less-thought-about benefits of a testing and optimization culture. Only through testing can you gather the data you need to safely and comfortably make the decisions that work for your business, not your industry. Best practices are pretty dangerous when you haven’t tested to validate and re-validate them.
As we’ve said many times, don’t copy Amazon.com’s design just because they’re an industry leader. Do your own testing to gather insight, then make the design decisions that work for you. And in the spirit of shameless plugs, we’re here to help if you need us.
----------------------------------------------------When you ask salespeople about their biggest gripe about marketing, they complain about not enough qualified leads. You can often tell that this is an issue just by looking at a company’s lead forms.
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When you ask salespeople about their biggest gripe about marketing, they complain about not enough qualified leads. You can often tell that this is an issue just by looking at a company’s lead forms. What you’ll typically see is that the the forms ask for too much information and that can hinder conversions from visitor to lead.
Marketers are often measured by the number of leads they generate. Sales people are measured by sales. Marketers don’t want to be held accountable for sales because they aren’t actually selling. Sales people criticize “poorly qualified” web leads. This all leads to a lot of tension.
In fact, in a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com they set up aliases, such as John@xyzcompany.com, and completed the lead or request information form of 700 different companies, several different times. Then kept track of their lead response and nurturing strategies and found:
Web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6x in the first hour according to InsideSales.com.
Obviously, there is a huge disaster in the making. Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond. In the end everyone loses out.
1. Identify which sources of traffic generation are creating improved qualification rates and ideal close rates. You need to have the analytics and a CRM / sales workflow system that helps you close the loop from marketing all the way through the close of the sale.
2. Identify which offer types improved qualification rates and close rates. Understand your personas and what actually matters to them. Spend time testing and refining offers and generating additional content that you can prove matters to your prospects.
3. Improve your method of qualifying and capturing leads. Test your lead forms to find the right balance of questions that keep the quality and lead count up. Use a platform that enables you to capture web activity (pages/content viewed, tool/calculator interactions) and include that information in the customer profile for sales. This usually involves tagging content to identify its value in the sales and buying process. Content tagging is so simple when you use Persuasion Architecture.
4. Improve your met