Month: April 2005

Scott Jones links to an article from Accenture that once again highlights that CRM software is not the problem, it’s the planning and expectations that revolve around CRM solutions where the the industry fails.
It’s 3 years old, but still relevant today.

Given the amount of flack that I have been giving the folks at Apple lately (great products; arrogant marketing), it was refereshing to read this by Nick Wreden over at Fusion Brand.

Which are more valuable – your brands or your customers?
The choice represents an important strategic issue. If you answered brands, then youÂ’ll no doubt devote attention to increasing the value of your brands. YouÂ’ll pay homage to such concepts as “brand equity,” “brand image” and other buzzwords. You may even pay consultants who promise to refurbish your “brand architecture,” defined by David Aaker as “that which organizes and structures a brand portfolio
by specifying brand roles and the nature of relationships between them and their markets.”
Unfortunately, that answer is wrong.

Ouch! Nick hits the whole Apple conundrum in a short article. Reading David Sobotta’s comments on Apple’s failed attempts to sell to the Federal Government helps to highlight the fatal flaw in Apple’s marketing plan: you will buy our stuff because we say it’s cool.
Sorry, your customers and fanatics are what drive your business and allow Steve Jobs to tear down historic houses to build modernistic monsters in Woodside. And if you can’t sell to the federal, state, or local governments, the average consumer is all you have left, isn’t it?

Back in November, I mentioned that I was working on the idea of new ways to benchmark the success of online businesses in today’s more mature operational environment. I am still working on the base ideas, but a colleague of mine has helped me coalesce some ideas, and they are now forming the foundation of the concepts my company will begin using internally to more deeply understand the various Web performance benchmarks we monitor.
For those who use the existing Web performance benchmarks to determine the success and failure of your online business, you understand how thin the veneer is on these benchmarks. They do not provide true insight into the operational success of an online business, and they are more likely to sow the seeds of distrust between IT and Business operations in the long-term by creating an artificial standard which becomes the goal.
If an online business truly wants to achieve and maintain exemplary Web performance numbers, it has to start with a strong foundation, and build on it. Why? The team I work with spends a lot of time trying to understand and reverse engineer the broken processes, designs, and architectures that were laid out in order to get big fast. After 3-4 years of technical starvation and underfunding, these online businesses are beginning to show strain; the temporary fix has become the permanently broken process.
The rush into the Web analytics space in the last few weeks is a key sign that companies now see value in and want to exploit the vast quantities of data that they collect on their traffic daily. Web analytics is an astoundingly complex field, but most people boil it up to a single concept: How many Unique Page Views did I get?
Unique Page Views is an outdated Web server analytics metric. It does not tell me anything about the business, other than it has a lot of traffic. Back in the “eyeballs are everything” period, this would have been a big deal. Now, I say so what, and start asking:

• From where
• Dialup? Broadband?
• How many were able to successfully complete their transactions?
• What paths are most visited
• Average spend by connection type?
• Average spend by hour?
• etc.

Like Unique Page Views, the average Web performance and availability of a Web page or transaction does not accurately represent the overall health of any online business. Within the large populations of data that exist at the Web measurement firms, there is a wealth of data that could be used to clearly expose more important benchmarking statistics.
If you are from an online business, you already understand that the average performance over an artificially-defined period of time is a very inaccurate way to measure the success of the online business. However, it is the accepted standard in the field. Underlying those aggregated values, there are clearly-defined statistical methods which can be used to extract even more meaningful information from the mass of measurement data.
I would discuss more of the ideas and concepts that we are working on, but I know that I do get visitors from our competitors, so I will have to keep our ideas under wraps for right now.
But I want to hear yours. What does your online business use as a benchmark for success? Standard avergae performance and availability? Or something more complex that examines the performance data as a complete population, as opposed to an aggregated summary value? Does your firm tie business goals and objectives into the performance benchmarks so that people across the company can understand how the business is succeeding, and how delivering a good, bad, and downright awful online performance experience can affect the bottom line?
This is an exciting time to have access to large amounts of data on the health of the Internet.

One of my off-the-cuff comments just got picked up and published in Slate. [here]
Thanks to New World Man for telling me to look there.

Our entire household is sick with the last vestiges of the winter cold (or maybe it’s Avian Flu).
I am off to bed. Be good in the comments…

Damn! The Feds are nuts. How are they going to prosecute a million-plus people for doing this? [here]
I know why the publication ban: criminal trials and jury selection. The optics of the publication ban made it a target for leaks.
Frankly, the Liberals and all of their appointees might as well start looking for new positions.
Oh, and for the readers from the US: The Liberals are actually a lot more small-“c” conservative than the name applies.

Scott Berkun’s monthly essay is on the topic of why and how Smart People defend Bad Ideas. [here]

I have been in and seen people in these situations many times in my life. One of the great faculties we as human beings have is that which allows us to make decisions and then defend them.

But because you have arrived at an idea, doesn’t mean that it is the right idea. New evidence, further discussion and growing experience will affect the answer you give to the same question at ages 20, 40 and 60.

However, where I see this happening most right now is at Apple. To say it is a new phenomenon would be ignoring history. Steve Jobs Computers and Electronic Gadgets, Inc. has had a history of saying “we’re right and the customer is stupid.”.
Eventually, this attitude will catch up with them, and they will get to spend 4-5 years clinging to life, until they are able to generate a new whizbang gadget to pull them back from the edge. I am starting to see the rumblings of discontent from the Apple Fanatic community: Apple is their friend until they wander “off-message”. Then they are loose cannons that must be silenced.

Smart people defending stupid ideas. I know that some folks from Apple Inc have stopped by to read my postings. The question is whether they are brushed off as the ramblings of a lunatic who doesn’t use an Apple computer (YET!), or if it has sparked some internal conversation.

If Apple has not noticed the rumblings of discontent, then they are far more insular than I have heard them described.

Apple, let the other people out in the world who use and love your products talk about them freely. Let someone else invent the idea for a change. Steve Jobs will not live forever; and based on Apple’s success without Jobs, I believe that you need to apply an old ad slogan to yourselves now:

Dear Darren, et al. (al.):
Thanks for linking to the new Google Maps Satellite Feature. [here]
It’s 7:15AM EDT, and I can go home knowing that my geek nature has been fulfilled for the day.

PS: The arrow is at the wrong end of the block. I suppose that doesn’t matter with an ICBM…

Ok folks, you’re sucking my bandwidth dry. If you would like to keep a US-based Canadian online and able to cost-effectively serve up publication ban happiness, please consider donating to the cause!
PayPal Donation link in the right-hand column!
Thanks!

Captain’s Quarter Blog! (c/o Autonomous Source.)
And my Web Traffic looks like that of the Autonomous Source. So, if you can, donate to keep the aging Industry hardware running, and the Bandwidth Demons at bay.