Google Analytics recently added a new feature, called Alerts. At first glance, it’s an elegant way to show someone when a KPI on their site has changed significantly from what’s expected. It’s baselining, applied to all KPIs — even the ones you’re not looking at.

This is a great idea for folks who forget to check their analytics data, because now they can find out about significant events. It tricks you into being a better analyst. It encourages baselining, segmentation, and thinking about your business. But we think it’s the start of something bigger, once it incorporates the things Google and others know about your online presence.

Details, and some juicy UI mockup speculation, after the jump.

Baselining, even when you didn’t know you should

Beginner web analysts treat analytics as accounting. They use it to report the news, not make the news. It’s only the more advanced analysts that see analytics as a means for optimization, using things like A/B testing to learn whether a change made things better. And to do that, you need a baseline.

The new feature learns what normal is, then shows you deviation. This encourages experimentation: “I tried something new today, and I can see the results.” Google’s already introduced comparative rankings, showing you how you’re doing against others; now, they make it much easier to identify significant changes to your site, even if you don’t know where to look.

Imagine, for example, that you change your website. You don’t see an appreciable shift in traffic volume, so you decide it didn’t have an effect. But hidden in those traffic numbers is the fact that there was an increase in European traffic at the expense of US traffic. The new functionality would show you this, allowing you to tailor content to specific geographies.

Making segmentation easy to try

The new functionality tries to find chunks of traffic that have “broken away from the pack.” It does this for known metrics and segments — such as geographic regions — as follows:

Notice that little “create segment” at the end? It makes it easy to carve out a slice of traffic you should care about, which then means you can start to play and experiment with it. Segmenting traffic is a sign of web analytics maturity, but until recently, it’s been something few people play with. Now, Google Analytics is essentially telling you, “hey, dummy, have a closer look at this.”

You can use custom segments in lots of cool ways–for example, as the analysis above shows, I now know that returning US visitors are more likely to download content from the site, but first-timers aren’t. Once you’ve seen a segment that Google found for you, you’re more likely to create your own because you understand how they work.

Thinking about your business

You can also set up custom alerts within the system to tell you when something’s gone out of kilter. We know lots of companies who use revenue or transactions per second as the first sign that something’s wrong on the website — this is a great top-down approach if you can manage it, because it means everyone in the company is focused on what actually pays the bills.

The new functionality lets you look for specific occurrences even before they happen. Consider @alexbfree‘s recent post on Twitter Retweeting, which got picked up by Dave Winer. You can set up an alert to see if Dave sends you traffic:

Overall, these are excellent enhancements to the product. They’ll improve engagement — because the system will tell you when things are happening, rather than waiting for you to log in. They’ll encourage good behaviors like baselining and segmentation. And they’ll also satisfy the less business-centric, more hobbyist segment that just wants to know when the world is thinking about them.

What I really want: a holistic view

It’ll be more useful (and in keeping with the Complete Web Monitoring philosophy) when it includes other kinds of data:

• A timeline of posts created, based on Feedburner statistics or blog history
• A series of Google Alerts showing when some search criteria on the web is met
• A volume of followers or friends obtained through the APIs of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr
• Performance data from synthetic or real user monitoring
• Voice of the Customer feedback through systems like Kampyle

Here’s an example of what that could be like, for a content creator/blogger.

That’s a pretty intimidating amount of information. Most of it, Google already has; some, we’d get from elsewhere. We borrowed concepts from:

• Bit.ly’s historical views (over a longer time period) with a rollover for individual links on a given day
• Google Labs’ News timeline
• The dashboard of WordPress
• Postrank‘s content scoring system (we spent time with these folks this week)
• Feedburner RSS stats
• Email subscription management stats from a mailing list provider
• Moni.tor.us performance monitoring
• Trendistic‘s timeline graph of Twitter (with a rollover of Outwit.me‘s realtime tag cloud)
• Google Alerts, which come in by mail but could be turned into a timeline with rollovers

Anyone with a bit of time and some spreadsheet know-how can assemble this manually; it could also be done in Greasemonkey with a bit of work, using Google’s new views as the anchor.

Admittedly, this is still “reporting the news” — the real insight comes from observing correlations, such as what kinds of posts increase subscriptions or what news drives follower count. And this is targeted at a specific kind of site (media/community) whereas other businesses more focused on SaaS or e-commerce revenues probably want something that shows productivity or conversion rates.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of money in giving tools to bloggers. We’re a cheap bunch. So while there’s great multivariate testing for online retailers, a content creator has to cobble together many different views and data sources to paint a complete picture.

We’re finishing a busy week in New York, with presentations at both Web2Expo and Interop New York. We had a great time running our first Communilytics Boot Camp, and O’Reilly’s bookstore sold out of our book.

The Communilytics stuff was really interesting; we proposed a new “long funnel” model that incorporates both community metrics (such as followers, amplification, and the like) and traditional analytics (conversion rate, checkout value, and so on.) It’s a holistic approach, and we’ll write it up here soon.

We also looked at message propagation in communities a bit. Here’s a clip from the session, which discusses how the combination of Twitter’s formalized Retweet and an understanding of relevance can create “pagerank for humans” in microblogging platforms that share Twitter’s asymmetric-follow pattern.

Completely independent of this, Alex Bowyer over on Bitcurrent wrote a thoughtful piece on how Twitter should have formalized Retweeting, and some of the issues with the current model.

Unfortunately, there’s some strangeness going on between Youtube and Keynote’s video export, so the last 30 seconds of this are clipped. Basically we make the point that this is how to monetize microblog analytics, either by selling sentiment propagation analysis, finding out who influential proponents and detractors are, or knowing where to display ads and to whom.

I had a good conversation yesterday about the shift from traditional marketing to an interactive market (and all the things involved in getting “traditional marketers” up to speed).  I think the “deer-in-a-headlight” syndrome that companies face when establishing interactive marketing strategies can be mitiged with good goal setting and a complete measurement strategy.

Baseline Your World

Imagine living in this world, but stripped of your five senses:

Not so fun, is it? :)

The same notion exists online, and most of us are only using one or two of our sense!  With 0s and 1s, you need to make sure you watch:

• What your users did (analytics)
• How they did it (web interaction analytics)
• Why they did it (voice of the customer / survey)
• Could they do it (web performance monitoring)
• What did they say about it (social media listening)

If you make a web-based application, every employee in your company should have a strong sense of website visitors and associated analytics.

Of course, most people will pay close attention to a particular subset of metrics, but it’s crucial that the entire company be used to, and talk about metrics on a daily basis.  We’ll talk about why this is important very soon.

If you’re scratching your head trying to figure out how to do the above, read my open letter to startups for a rundown of tools that you can use.

Once you’ve got tools in place, take the time to baseline your site so that you know what’s normal and not.  Start by measuring your visitors’ entrances, places & tasks and exits.  I’ll talk about this more extensively in seperate post – but grab a copy of our book or reach out to us if you’re impatient.

KthxGoals

Once you’ve baselined, the critical step in marketing is figuring out what the heck you’re trying to achieve.  More people buying stuff?  Brand awareness?  New product launch?

It really doesn’t matter as long as it will help contribute to the following rules:

• Increase Revenue
• Decrease Costs
• Increase Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty

Avinash speaks volumes about this subject.  If you don’t have this printed on your wall yet, go for it, and make sure you use the biggest font possible! :)

So, using plain english, describe what you hope to achieve.

“We’d like 3,000 users signed up and using the product in the next 30 days.”, “We want 10 celebrity bloggers/twittererererers to mention how awesome we are over the next 7 days” or “we want a 20% reduction in people stating that we’re the worst company ever”.

Notice how there’s a number in each goal?  You’ve got to make your goal concrete, or else you won’t know how much is “enough”.  At first, you may be a little bit off when setting your expectations.  That’s ok.  Make it up, and revise your targets for the next campaign.

Go Forth And Be Markety, For Tomorrow You Die (Or Make Techmeme.com!)

You’ve got your goals set, your analytics are in place.  Now’s where you get to have fun.  If you’re a traditional marketer, starts screaming!  Maybe you’re more into the interactive thing?  Cool!  Start influencing.  The awesome part about setting up metrics and goals is that any marketing campaign is fair game as long as you measure and learn from the results.

Even if you were with Motrin and launched its ill-fated ad-campaign, by setting goals and monitoring, you could have

• noticed the fall out
• waited a strategic amount of time (any press is good press, right?)
• made reparations
• turned the negative sentiment to great success.

And even if none of those things happened, that’s alright.  Because all companies make mistakes.  The smart ones make them faster. Some key takeaways that you may have learned boils down to common sense:

• People can talk about you.  Try and be there.
• Maybe you should go hang out and build a presence where people talked about you
• Wow, that was tons of press.  You should do that again!

And hey, if the crap hits the fan – we can help ;).  Oh, and check out Alistair’s post on rednod.com for great insight about a campaign he led.

Always Optimize

So try wacky stuff.  It doesn’t matter what kind of marketer you are and what kind of campaign it is..  Your measurement and goal setting should naturally lead to constant iterations.  Though you should expect to make mistakes, learn from them quickly and encourage open lines of communication so others can to.  Share the knowledge up and down the food chain.

The key to unlocking the potential of every type of marketer is by helping them learn from their successes and failures.  A data driven organization wins by fostering this kind of potential.

And it makes for some fun and awesome marketing campaigns too ;).

Disclaimer 1: All site-related data found in this post comes from compete.com.  The company was kind enough to give us a “pro account” to help us research the O’Reilly book that we wrote called Complete Web Monitoring (thanks, you rock!).  However, compete.com did not sponsor this post (nor did any company, for that matter).  And yes, we know – compete.com numbers are simply estimates.

Disclaimer 2: I (Sean) worked for Akoha as Community Gardener while we launched at TechCrunch50 2008; but I’m now doing metrics, web analytics, performance, and social computing consulting.  The views found below are mine, and do not reflect those of Akoha in any way.  For the record, Akoha is awesome!

About us: This post was written by Sean Power with Alistair Croll.

Dear TechCrunch50 Startups,

Congratulations. You made the list. You’re finally launching, and that pent-up frustration of not being able to tell people about it for a month is almost at an end. Now, you have to live with a weekend of cold, hard fear that your demo will explode. You’ve got an interesting week ahead, and I know you’re short on sleep, so let me get to the point quickly.

You’re probably excited about the TC50 bump. I first saw the term used by Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital on the RedEye VC blog. The bump refers to the pounding your website is about to experience from TC50 attendees, readers, bloggers and their friends.  It’s not to be underestimated.  Here’s a glimpse at how the bump looked like for all TC50 startups in 2008.  If you squint a little, you’ll see Akoha somewhere in there!:

This is an unprecedented influx of attention. It may be the single biggest traffic spike you’ll ever experience. Thousands of visitors will drive by your site, stay for a minute, and leave — never to return. After the bump, you’ll feel a tremendous rush of adrenaline, then deep, soul-sucking disillusionment as your traffic dwindles back to its former levels.

Don’t waste this opportunity. If you take the right steps, you can make the most of your fifteen minutes of fame.

Being Talked About Is Nothing. Being Remembered Is Everything,

You’re probably celebrating the traffic you’ll get to your site. But you shouldn’t be, unless you capture the minds and hearts of your visitors.  The best way to do that is to target them.

On a normal day, you know very little about your site traffic. But today, you know lots. And that means you can tailor the experience to your audience. Let’s say you knew for a fact that 95% of your visitors loved the color red.  You’d probably redesign your site to make it bright red, right?  Well, next week, over 85% of your visitors will all come to you through TechCrunch somehow. Think about it. For a single week, you know exactly what kind of visitor will be visiting you.

TechCrunch50 visitors will load your site, scan quickly, and may even register (if registration isn’t broken, and is simple enough). Then they’ll leave.  In that crucial 10 seconds of play time, your job is to make sure that as many people remember your site as possible, and that you gain the ability to reconnect with them later, and to engage with them.

During TC50 2008, Robert Scoble blogged about Demo and TC50 websites as “sucking big time”. Knowing that he was an important influencer, we put his face on the front page of Akoha, with a speech bubble saying “If your name is Robert Scoble, click here!”, which brought the user to a small blog post explaining where we were going with our site design.

It worked. Scoble reciprocated in kind:

Being memorable is everything at an event like TechCrunch 50.  Find ways to be remembered by those who visit you.

Gathering Data

Since you’ve just launched, now is the time to start figuring out how unsolicited users react to your site. You’ve got a great lab for a few short, sweet days. Try a couple of site designs, and see which one works best.  This is where simple abtests becomes useful. Make sure you target people specifically. And turn on all the monitoring you can (without making the site slower.) It’s an excellent time to make baselines.

Google Analytics Is Not Enough

It really isn’t. For one thing, it doesn’t show you results fast enough in a flash crowd situation. Consider a more real-time analytics tool like Getclicky or Woopra, so you can see traffic as it happens — not the day after. Then find someone to watch it. While you’re on stage, or schmoozing investors, have someone back at headquarters (or whatever you call your mom’s basement) looking at the traffic.

But even if you have up-to-the-minute analytics, it’s not enough. It’s one thing to know what your users did, but chances are that you don’t even have goals set up in Google Analytics, and even if you do, you’re only measuring if people reached the goals, not why.

Measure Peoples’ Behaviors

Take a look at your site right now.  In two years, it will look completely different, because you’ll learn. What if you could speed up that clock? You can, if you measure what people do on your site and iterate rapidly.

A Web Interation Analytics tool measures where people click (or don’t), helping you figure out where your design flaws are without even asking people.  Go install CrazyEgg or ClickTale right away.  You can’t afford to miss out on this data. If you’re really serious, put Coradiant or Tealeaf in front of your site.

Ask People What They Think

People are weird. They’ll do all kinds of things you don’t expect. It’s one thing to watch what they do — but often, the real key to unlocking your business potential is to know why they did it. The simple way to find this out is to ask them. Do yourself a favor and set this up now.  Install 4Q, Kampyle, GetSatisfaction or UserVoice right away on your site.  Have the guts to ask what people like and don’t like about your site so you can fix it faster than your competitors.

And don’t just rely on tools. Be on Twitter, and be reachable. When that girl/guy in your basement isn’t watching analytics, have him or her respond to people online. When Alistair & I present at conferences, we take turns teaching and reading Twitter — fielding questions from the audience, responding to folks who couldn’t be there, and seeing if the folks in the back of the room can hear us. Do the same thing for your site.

Make Sure Your Site Can Weather The Storm

If your site is slow, people will leave.

This isn’t just a platitude: Google and Microsoft have both released empirical evidence that latency correlates with departure, and reduces conversion rates. Worse, people who had a slow experience will use the site less even when it gets faster again.

Bounce rate (the number of people that see one page and leave) may be a function of site latency. So test it! Call Keynote, Gomez, AlertSite or WebMetrics and start testing your site’s speed and availability every 5-15 minutes. Still haven’t got funding? Consider AlertFox or pingdom.  Are you at TC50, trying to load your site and it’s not working?  Not sure if it’s your computer, TC50′s Internet or your site?  Use AOL Page Test to test it remotely and find out why it’s sluggish.

Don’t forget to test the key pages and functions you want people to use, such as enrollment.

Have a Simple Call To Action

You’ll have a lot of folks on your site. Make it painfully obvious what you want them to do, whether that’s signing up, giving you permission to contact them later, trying it out, or telling friends. Don’t give them several choices — give them one. If 95% of people are just there to find out what you do, tell them. You can show them press releases or a list of your board members later. And consider tightening up your site copy, too. Less words is good.  Still not sure?  Talk to Josh Porter.  He can help.

Listen and Learn

Ultimately, you want to hear what people are saying about you elsewhere — not just on your site — and respond to the criticism and compliments.  Call ScoutLabs, TechRigy or Radian6 right away.  In most cases, all you need is a credit card and off you go.  Set up searches for keywords that matter and find conversations that concern you.  Twitter search is your friend. Google Alerts are too. There’s no better way to make a first impression than by actually being there to make a first impression.

Running The Booth?

Read this excellent post by Jason Calacanis on the subject.  It will help you avoid disillusionment when you come back from the launch party.

Learn From The Jedi Masters

Once TechCrunch50 is over, you’ll have very little time to rest on your laurels.  Chances are that your startup will die in the next year.

(Don’t die!  We don’t want you to die!)

Learn with the masters instead.  Follow Eric Ries, Dave McClure and Avinash Kaushik religiously.

Come And See Us In November (Or Call Us Before)

It’s awesome that you’ve come this far. Hopefully something in this list will help you learn from the storm, and turn the bump into a ramp. Whatever the case, once the dust settles you’ll have a lot of data to dig through. We’d love to help.

If you’re a finalist at TechCrunch50, we’re impressed that you’ve read all the way up to here.  Thanks!  We know you have so many things to do this weekend, and we appreciate that you’ve given us a few minutes of your time.

We feel for startups, we love ‘em!  So we’d like to make you an offer.  Once the next couple of weeks are done, give us a call.  We’ll spend an hour with you on the phone or online, gratis, and see if we can help you sort out your data, no strings attached.  You can reach Alistair and myself on Twitter, or simply email me directly – sean at httpd dot org.

We’ll also be doing an eight hour bootcamp called “Communilytics” at Web2Expo in New York in November on the subject of community metrics; if you’re coming, let us know.

Good luck out there, and knock ‘em dead!

- Alistair & Sean

ps; For those of you curious to know what sort of traffic the TechCrunch 08 attendees received, you’ll find the result of our findings below.

The Bump By The Numbers

When analyzing the TC50 08 finalist sites, the numbers from compete.com can be misleading.  For most sites, the traffic volume is relatively low, and therefore more prone to inaccuracies due to small sample size.  Consider that a disclaimer.  Averages were calculated between the months of October 08 and August 09 in order to avoid skewing the data as a result of the TechCrunch Bump.

It would be useless to lump all the sites in one bucket.  Grouping transaction and collaboration sites side by side is like admiring the similarities of hippopotamuses and cream puffs.

To get better insight, we must segment into the four types of sites found on the Internet.

Executive Summary

• Media sites showed relatively large traffic volumes, with unique visitor count often going up and to the right.
• Collaboration sites showed consistent traffic patterns from the month of October to august, but had no month to month average growth.
• The TechCrunch bump for transaction sites represented a small portion (8%) of the total unique visitor count they would receive for the next 11 months.
• The TechCrunch bump for SaaS portal on average represented roughly the total amount of traffic they would receive for the next 11 months.

Media Sites

These sites offer content that attracts and retains an audience. They make money from that content through sponsorship, advertising, or affiliate referrals. Search engines, AdWords-backed sites, newspapers, and well-known bloggers are media properties.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ’08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ’09), media site finalists:

• received, on average, 1,340,000 unique visitors (860,000 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 41% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 148,000 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %29 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 171,700 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of 21.33% from 84,600 unique visitors totaling 3,530,000 unique visitors.

• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed an average monthly growth of 2.57% from 16,800 unique visitors totaling 99,600 unique visitors.

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 57,900 unique visitors (55,300 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 8.55% of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (8.17% with outliers removed).

Transaction Sites

A site that wants visitors to complete a transaction—normally a purchase—is transactional. There’s an “ideal path” through the site that its designers intended, resulting in a goal or outcome of some kind. The goal isn’t always a purchase; it can also be enrollment (signing up for email) or lead generation (asking salespeople to contact them), and that goal can be achieved either online or off.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ’08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ’09), transaction site finalists:

• received, on average, 272,000 unique visitors (124,000 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 700% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 65,700 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %49 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 23,700 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of 15.49% from 113,800 unique visitors totaling 2,916,000 unique visitors.

• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed 0 growth and traffic.  (oof).

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 35,300 unique visitors (26,600 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 8.83% of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (6.64% with outliers removed).

Collaboration Sites

On these sites, visitors generate the content themselves. Wikis, news aggregators, user groups, classified ad listings, and other web properties in which the value of the site is largely derived from things created by others are all collaborative.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ’08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ’09), collaboration site finalists:

• received, on average, 138,000 unique visitors (86,400 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 316% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 29,500 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %63 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 24,600 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of -1.02% from 108,000 unique visitors totaling 997,000 unique visitors.

• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed an average monthly growth of -50.70% from 1,400 unique visitors totaling 5,000 unique visitors.

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 37,600 unique visitors (26,500 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 47.23% of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (29.58% with outliers removed).

Software-as-a-Service Sites

These sites are hosted versions of software someone might buy. SaaS subscribers expect reliability and may pay a monthly per-seat fee for employees to use the service. Revenues come from subscriptions, and a single subscriber may have many user accounts. On some SaaS sites, users are logged in for hours every day.

Between the months of OCT 08 (one month after TechCrunch50 ’08) and August 09 (one month before TechCrunch50 ’09), software-as-a-service site finalists:

• received, on average, 62,000 unique visitors (47,000 unique visitors with outliers removed (MIN and MAX)).
• showed peaks with a 337% increase in unique visitors, a positive influx of 18,200 unique visitors for that month.
• showed valleys with a %65 decrease in unique visitors, a loss of 15,400 unique visitors for that month. (ouch!)
• with the highest unique visitor count (MAX) showed an average monthly growth of 1.52% from 26,000 unique visitors totaling 250,000 unique visitors.

• with the lowest unique visitor count (MIN) showed an average monthly growth of 64.46% from 1,400 unique visitors totaling 5,500 unique visitors.

On average, the TechCrunch bump brought 23,800 unique visitors (21,800 unique visitors with outliers removed) for the month of September 08 and represented 100.23% (!!!) of the total traffic they would receive in the following 11 months (91.81% with outliers removed).

Notes:

Big thanks to wa7iut for helping me with the stats!

Alfabetic.net was not included because it was impossible to determine what kind of site alphabetic.net is (site is down, nothing on Google cache or archive.com and the ustream demo doesn’t make it clear).

We used a combination of fotopedia.com and fotonauts.com data due to a site rebrand.

footnote.com was not included in the analysis.  By the time that they were presenting at TC50, they had 1.3million unique visitors a month, with 1.4 million unique visitors in December 2007.  Statistically (and from a TC50 perspective), footnote.com was too much of an anomaly.  We do, however, think that their site is totally cool.

This is part one in a two part series explaining the lessons I learned from registering my username on about 150 social sites in a short time frame.  Part 1 deals with the process of registering my user name on many social media sites.  Part 2 takes an in-depth look at sign-up processes used by many start-ups, and suggests ways to improve them.  If you’re an entrepreneur into UX, make sure you read Part 2 when we release it.

Registering your user name on many social media sites is extremely time consuming, risks being disingenuous, will get you bombarded with emails and can even put you in a situation where you must deal with dozens of real messages across hundreds of websites every day.  Sounds horrible, doesn’t it?  But wait! There’s a bright side!

Some say that the username is the new domain name.  Registering early on ensures that you get ‘first dibs’ on a username that you may find desirable.  This will, in turn, help you with SEO, since your profiles should all point to the same websites.  Throughout the process, you’ll find that it will force you to ask an important question: “how should I represent myself on the Internet”.  You’ll end up using a password manager, which can only help you from a security standpoint.  Finally, you’re likely to find a treasure trove of apps that you can’t live without.  Oh, and if you happen to be an entrepreneur/designer/passionate about building web applications, then going through many registrations will inspire you to create or tweak your own.

Full details (how long it took, which sites rocked (and didn’t), how i saved time, etc) and analysis below.

The Process

Websites like usernamecheck.com and knowem.com brand themselves as sites that  “thwart social media identity theft” and “check username availability”.  They can also be used as gateways to many sites that you may not have ever heard of.  I believe that you don’t really know an application until you’ve actually used it.  With this in mind, I took a deep breath and chose to go through the knowem.com list myself to get to know these sites.  I chose knowem.com because the list was bigger, and easier to use.

Things to prep before you start (and that I wish I’d known first):

• Chose 3 usernames that you’d like to be identified with.  The first will be the one that you’d ideally like to hold on all sites.  In my case, I used “seanpower”.  The second and third are your fallback names if the first is taken.  I used “iamseanpower” and “seansense”.
• Have a good hi-res profile picture on hand.  It doesn’t really matter what it is – your face, a picture you made, a WeeMee – the idea is to have something consistent that people will recognize as yours, assuming they see it often enough.
• Have a profile picture?  Good.  Now make ‘light’ versions of it – ideally under 50k.  You’ll want multiple versions: PNG, JPG and GIF.  In my case, I had in total: “sean-hires.png” (209k), “sean-lowres.png” (21k), “sean.gif” (35k) and sean.jpg (8k).  By default, I use the hires .png unless the site has different requirements (some only accept, GIF and JPG, some only JPG, some only files under 100k, etc).
• Create a tagline for yourself, under 140 characters.  “Mine reads: O’Reilly author, analytics practitioner, startup accelerator, likes to throw sheep.”  Use our character counter to figure out if you’re over 140 characters, and for tagline examples & inspiration.
• Create a small bio, under 250 characters.  Mine reads: “I consult, analyze, write, speak and like to throw sheep. I co-wrote a book for O’Reilly called Complete Web Monitoring with http://twitter.com/acroll. You can find out more about me at http://www.watchingwebsites.com and on Twitter as @seanpower”.  Again, use our character counter to figure out if you’re over 140 characters, and for tagline examples & inspiration.
• Download and use a password manager.  You’ll find a great review of password managers on Lifehacker.  I swear by 1Password (OSX only, sorry PC folks).  It allowed me to quickly create many (150!) passwords, store them, and let me log in to sites with very few issues.
• I didn’t use this, but a form completion tool like Autofill Forms might help you save more time.

Thankfully, knowem.com saved me tons of time by bringing me straight to registration pages.  From here, the steps are pretty straight forward:

• Sign in as a new user if necessary,
• fill in all appropriate information,
• wait for a validation email (usually takes about 30-60 seconds),
• validate your email,
• log in to the site,
• fill in your profile information,
• upload a picture,
• invite friends if you want (I always opted out of this – I’m not going to harass my friends with hundreds of “Join This Site!” notifications),
• play with the site,
• note the ones that you want to come back to later.

You will need approximately 20 hours to register your profile on about 150 sites. I try and give every site at least 10 minutes of my time to poke around, search for friends, customize my profile and generally understand the site’s goal(s).  Even after 10 minutes, I was unable to determine the goal or purpose of some of the sites.  Go figure!

Once you’ve accomplished all of this, knowem.com should look like so:

What did we learn?

The Pros

Some of the benefits of registering your profile on many social sites include:

Owning Your Name

Registering the same name makes you findable and memorable.  For example, you can count on the fact that adding “seanpower” on most sites will likely be me.  When it isn’t, you’ll easily be able to search for my alternate names.  I’ve ensured that I’m holding onto a common and memorable name across popular social sites, make it extremely easy for you to find me if you need to.  I’m also preventing others from using/assuming my “digital identity”.

Creating An Brand/Identity Strategy

By the time that I’d registered on a few sites, I started seeing patterns emerge.  My bio, my picture, my tagline, my username, all of the sites asked the same types of things from me.  By re-using my bios and pictures, I ended up tweaking it (since it was constantly in front of me) until every word seemed right to me.  In essence, I created my online  “identity and brand”.  Now, everywhere you go, you’ll see a consistent information set that represents all of the things that I want you to know about me.  I hope to become a familiar face that you’re more likely to spot in a digital crowd.

Traffic Building & SEO

By including a URL in your profile (blog, company website, etc), you increase the likelihood that someone will click on it, increasing traffic to your site.  And, if the site in question has SEO ninjas working for it, it may help increase entries related to you in search engines.  For examples, this Google Alerts notification came in about 10 minutes after I registered on gather.com:

Using a Password Manager

There’s no way that you’ll be able to memorize a unique password for each site.  If you use the same password, you’re begging to be hacked.  Thankfully, this exercise should force you to use strong and unique passwords, controlled via password manager.  As I mentioned above, a review on Lifehacker turned me on to 1password for the Mac which worked extremely well.  The only issues happened when registration forms were embedded in JavaScript overlays (the passwords simply wouldn’t automatically fill in).  But there were so few instances of this that the problem didn’t really bother me at all.  I hear that 1Password is working on a PC solution as well.

Finding Awesome Apps

Best of all, using a service like Knowem.com encourages you to try out new sites.  I found that it pushed me to register on ones that I’ve been meaning to use for a long time (like Posterous, for example).  I also found new ones that I’m excited to keep on using, like card.ly, slidesix (please add Keynote support!) and Sphinn (I should’ve been on this years ago!)).

Analyzing Signup Processes

Finally, if you’re creating or revamping your sign up process, you will gain invaluable insight into the do’s and don’ts by learning from others’ mistakes and successes.  I saw abysmal failures and incredibly clean and snappy registration flows in different shapes and sizes.  I’m much more educated on the topic, and have some strong opinions about it which I will be sharing with you in a separate blog post.

The Cons

But it’s not all roses.  There’s a darker side to this post.

Time Consuming & Intense

First of all, it’s time consuming.   I mean . . . reaaaally time consuming.  Ten minutes per site ends up going by pretty fast.  I wouldn’t call the process boring – I was bombarded with lots of cool new sites and ideas every other minute.  But it quickly became too much; information overload.  After a few hours, my ability to enjoy new site experiences diminished considerably.

It’s Disingenuous

One could argue that this entire exercise is disingenuous.  After all, if you’re not registering with the intent of making use of a sites services, it becomes little more than glorified cyber-squatting.  It’s really just holding on to something out of fear that someone else will get the namespace.

You Will Get Flooded With Emails

Way to go, eHow.com!

Enough said?  I chose to opt-out from all newsletters where possible.

You May Become Too Socially Spread Out

The worst part about the above eHow screenshot is that these are real people wanting to connect with me.  It’s not eHow’s fault.  In fact, it’s totally mine!  I started getting tons of messages in my inbox: people complimenting my profile, asking if I’m single (creepy!), asking about my book, asking how I found the site, asking to help them.  Real people expecting to have real conversations, and I could barely do it!  Keeping up with a few social networks is hard work; keeping up with 150 is impossible.  There’s no way to genuinely deal with the signals and noise that multiple networks generate.

And that’s where the whole notion of registering on many sites starts to fall apart.  It’s not really about the cyber-squatting, the SEO or the time involved in signing up to sites . . the reason why it’s rubbish to sign up to 150 social sites is because our brains aren’t wired to keep up with this much data.  If I begin to follow 10 people, and each generates 2 events a day (ie – add a URL, a picture, an interesting status, a reply, a video), that’s a total of 3,000 events to follow and possibly comment on every day.   Halp.

See where I’m going with this? Until an application exists that can aggregate the content of any social site that I choose, the task of “being social” becomes too overwhelming once you “be too social” (sic’ing myself!).  In other words, there’s such a thing as being “too digitally connected”.

You May Always Feel Like You’re Missing Something

And so, as a result, the feeling that someone might be saying something about you and you’re not there to hear it will always be in the back of your head.  Since no consumer-targeted app exists that can track and respond to all of these social media sites in one single pane of glass, you’ll need to hope for lots of time to log into all of the sites that you’ve just created.

Dear Radian6, ScoutLabs, Sysomos, TechRigy and friends – you’re the most likely candidate to make an app like this happen, since you’re so close to being there!  Perhaps some of you are already and I just don’t know it yet! :)

In The End, You Just Want To Go Where Everyone Knows Your Name (Final Thought)

There’s a fine line between being part of social media sites and abusing services by holding on to an identity that you won’t use unless the site begins to show traction.  In the end, I think that it’s inevitable that enterprise services and persons with strong digital identities will come to rely on services like knowem.com to ensure that their online identities are being protected across social computing sites.  However, those that wish to profit from the appropriation of names and identities which do not represent them will continue to lurk in the shadows of our minds.  As is often the case, the burden of responsibility falls on us as individuals, until a common set of rules (ie – legislation) is defined for us.

For better and for worse, these services are here to stay.   What do you think?  Is registering en masse disingenuous or a smart/sound thing to do?

I want to give a brief head nod to 1password and knowem.com for having excellent applications that solve a specific need.  Well done, teams.

In the meantime, I leave you with this:

[youtube FD8ljNobUys]

Hello, fellow TechCrunch/blog readers.  This site supports the O’Reilly book I co-authored with Alistair Croll called “Complete Web Monitoring“.  Feel free to subscribe to it (we’re low volume).  We talk about things like this (how to launch a site and monitor it properly).  You can find information about us here.

I saw a tweet this morning in TweetDeck which I found bewildering. A friend of mine, Lori, claimed that my account was suspended.

I loaded up my profile page and, sure enough, the owl of doom stared back at me.

I jumped through the regular hoops, advising supended@twitter.com and resisting the urge to email folks like John Adams at Twitter (by the time I email them, I know they’ll have floods of notifications already).

I did a little bit of snooping and happened upon Tim Oreilly’s profile.  Also suspended.  Then @w2e, @brady and @palhlkadot.  All of them, suspended.

So, it seems that Twitter has decided to wage war on those of us related to O’Reilly Media! Oh noes!

In all seriousness, this appears to be an outage affecting quite a few accounts that are obviously legitimate.  I’m sure news about this will surface during the day.

Many of us have dealt with Twitter outages in the past – but it does give me a chance to reflect upon how bad it may look to others when they see the “Suspended” flag waving on my pile of sand.

Does it matter?  Thoughts?

(I wrote up a detailed outline of this at Bitcurrent.)

I attended a panel on crowdsourcing support at the SIIA Software Summit. The panelists had some interesting statistics on what the crowds within an online support community are like, and what they look for.

Changing metrics for changing focus

On SAP Community Network, 90% of people consume information; 10% contribute it, and 1% are active. No news here — this is consistent with findings by Charlene Li, Jakob Nielsen, and others. But the data that mattered to the community changed as it matured:

• Early on, SAP attracted people because it had content you couldn’t get anywhere else, so the metrics that mattered were those of a content publishing system — who’s creating content, what are people reading most, and how good is the content you’re creating.
• After some time, the connections community established with other people started to matter more, and the focus shifted to tools for establishing connections — so analytics looked at who was befriending whom, regulating spam, and the like.
• Eventually, the site was popular enough that a community existed in its own right, and it became a point system for ranking and thanks. The focus was a reputation management system — and the analytics had to track leaders, scoring, and so on.

This happened over a period of 6 years, and the company invested heavily in things like member recognition. Ultimately, community members with high rankings were able to use this on their LinkedIn profiles, because it’s a sign to potential employers of that person’s expertise and ability to work with others.

The goal of your community changes your magic 1%

Over at Lithium, they also have a 100:1 ratio of consumers to active contributors. But they point out that the nature of that 1% varies depending on the goals of the community.

• If the goal of the community is to drive down costs, your ideal 1% is the folks who have the answers.
• If it’s new product ideas you’re after, then you care about the 1% of members who ask the best questions.
• If you’re trying to generate leads, your perfect 1% is the people who know others.

The payoff

The payoff for these communities is big. First of all, there’s the reduction in support costs. Each call that doesn’t happen saves the company $5-$10. But there’s also the fact that the community knows better than a single vendor. Every support problem has many moving parts — browser, router, carrier — and no one company knows all of the issues. But the community does. Vendors simply can’t afford to test with every possible combination. But communities, by definition, can.

Ultimately, support communities are one of the most popular, visible sources of community ROI. But expect to change the metrics you track as they mature and as the goals you’re after change.

(image by Yiying Lu)

You’re new to Twitter.  Welcome.  Your first impression is probably just like mine was when I first joined:  “…… now what?”.

The answer: follow this guide.

Step 1: Getting set up

Let’s take care of some plumbing first.

Stop using the web interface (www.twitter.com) right now

Twitter clearly doesn’t want you to use its website, because it is horrible .  It is so abysmal that “keeping track of the conversation” is impossible.   Stop using the web interface right now.

Instead, use a Twitter client.  It will making twittering much easier (you’ll save time) and it will be more enjoyable to keep track of people (you wont need to visit twitter.com every few minutes to see if someone’s trying to communicate with you).

I use TweetDeck on my Mac and PC and strongly suggest you use it as well.  I’ve heard many recommending Twhirl as well.  There are other clients – many are listed at www.twitter.com/downloads if you’re interested.

Get used to 140 characters.

All talk on twitter is 140 characters or less.  Get used to URL shortening services like http://bit.ly and http://is.gd.  They take really long URLs and make them really short.  You’ll be using these anytime you want to share a URL that you think is worth sharing (happens a lot).  Thankfully, TweetDeck integrates these services – so you wont need to leave your client when you want to link to something clever.

Communicating with people: Using the @ sign

When you want to say something to everyone, just say it.  Example: “Hi everyone!  It’s great to be on Twitter!”

When you want to say something to someone in particular, begin your twit with the @ sign then their username.  Example: “@seanpower hi there!  Thanks for this guide!”

When you want to say something to someone but want everyone to read it, don’t start your twit with an @ sign.  Example: “You should follow @seanpower and co-author @acroll.  Their book, Total Web Monitoring is awesome.”

Step 2:  Connecting with others

Twitter is about connecting with people.  Since you’re starting out, you can check out what people are saying in a stalker-like fashion.  You can listen in on conversations without others knowing that you are doing so.   Don’t worry.  On Twitter, this is not considered creepy.

Don’t add people you don’t know (for now).

It might be very tempting to add as many people as you possibly can as soon as you join Twitter, but don’t just yet.  You’re new here, so you’ll probably get snubbed if you do it right away.  Instead, during your first couple of days on Twitter, add people that you know relatively well.  You can (and should)add more users once you get the hang of using TweetDeck.  I find that most people start to “get” Twitter by the time they’ve added 30 people, written 30 tweets and spent about 7 days casually poking around different profiles.

The key to twitter: Using Twitter Search – lots.

Tweetdeck has a magnifying glass icon.

It sets up searchs for specific topics.   Since I’m interested in web performance and analytics, I’ve setup a search like this: “analytics OR performance OR logs OR analysis OR optimization OR site down” (without the brackets).

If you’re interested in teaching, try “teachers OR classroom OR teaching OR brats misbehaving”.  Hiphop head?  Try a search term like “hiphop OR rap OR freestyle battle OR rhymes OR turntablism OR turntablist OR graffiti OR breakdancing”, etc.  You’ll probably notice that you get a few false positives (search queries that match, but aren’t about what you’re interested in), so you may need to tweak it a bit.  Either way, this search box will showcase a list of people talking of subjects that are of interest to you.

Once you’ve set this up, you can then “inject” yourself into a conversation.  For example:

In my “analytics” search stream, I found a person called @webtrafficroi that tweeted the following message:

Since I had a few minutes on my hands, I replied that it was probably larger than that, because he was not taking into account direct traffic from Twitter clients like TweetDeck.  I replied to him despite the fact that I did not know him, and had never talked to him before.

We conversed for a while, and the conversation ended up like this:

As a result of his tweet, I gained 7 followers (presumably people reading his profile).

My motivations weren’t about getting new followers.  I simply joined in on a conversation that was relevant to my interests.  Let me be clear.  You don’t have to talk to people if you don’t want to, and they may not follow you as a result of you talking to them, but joining a conversation is a great way to “get started” with Twitter.   Even if you’re only interested in finding a few cool people to talk to, using search is the way to unleash Twitter.

Step 3: Make people want to follow you

But if you’ve found someone cool to talk to, you’ll want to increase your chances that they’ll talk to you back.  Many times, if you speak to someone (or someone sees you say something mildly interesting), the first thing that they will do is to check out your profile.  They will judge you in an instant based on the information found here.

Tweak your profile

If you don’t fill out your profile, I probably won’t talk to you, because you’re probably a spammer.  You can demonstrate that you’re not a spammer to me by doing a few things on your settings page – (http://twitter.com/account/settings)

Username: most spammers that come on twitter have numbers in their username (ie – girl74, boy48, randomword62).  Try not to use numbers in your username if you can help it.

More Info URL: If you have a blog, profile or website that you’re associated with, tell people.  I often go to a person’s website to figure out if I want to listen to them or not.

One Line Bio: Fill in a short description of yourself.   Examples you can use: “music addict, architecture student, food lover.”, “mom that’s trying to outgeek her kids”, “marketing director at Acme Inc.”, “author and blogger passionate about marketing and PR”, “drummer for We Are Awesome, producer and remixer”.   By writing something about yourself, you tell me that you are a human, and give me an idea of who you are.  Don’t write something like “marketing expert”, “PHP guru”, “linux master” – you’ll just come across as being an egotistical jerk (unless that’s what you’re going for!).

Location: Filling out your location isn’t mandatory, but I like to know what city / country a person is in.

Upload a picture.  I don’t care what the picture is – just upload something.  It doesn’t have to be a picture of you.  It can be anything, really, as long as it’s not offensive and annoying or embarrassing to look at.  Upload your picture at http://twitter.com/account/picture

Add Alistair and I

Alistair is @acroll and I’m @seanpower :).  Click on those two links and hit the “Follow” button.

Follow Influential Twitter Users

They usually have interesting things to say, and will give you stuff to read, content to think about and things to retweet.  You can find a list of power twitter users here (caution, many of these people get pretty geeky).

Step 4: Don’t piss people off

You will piss people off on Twitter if you behave in certain ways.

• Don’t Twitflood.  Twitterers want to be ambiently aware of you.  They don’t want you their face all the time.  No more than 2 twits a minute, and no more than a handful of twits an hour at first.
• Don’t automate your Twits.  Don’t use tools that automatically tell people stuff unless you really know your audience, and you know that they’re OK with it.
• Don’t use more than 2 or 3 @names in one twit.  140 characters isn’t alot of space.  Wasting it by using more than two names probably means you don’t have anything meaningful to say.
• Don’t advertise. You will lose all your followers.  People will get angry at you.
• Don’t ego-twit.  No one cares that you’re so good at this and that.  Talk about things important to others instead.

This is a synthesis of the excellent blog post by Alistair Croll found here.  You should read it.

Step 5: If you’re a company, follow back everyone who follows you

If you’re a company, you’re trying to get an audience.  Do your audience a favor and show them that you care about them and want to listen to them by following them.

Step 6: Did I mention that you should follow Alistair and I?

Alistair is @acroll and I’m @seanpower ;)

Step 7: Now go have fun!

Hopefully, this will help you overcome any of the bumps and bruises that you may encounter along the way to understanding how to effectively use Twitter.  If you have any questions, ask us on Twitter.  More importantly, just go have fun!  Enjoy!