I’m studying different help sites and applying web analytics. I wanted to write up some of the processes, potential wins, and possible short comings of web analytics for technical communication.

When I spoke with a few Google technical writers at the STC Summit, one of them confirmed that their performance reviews include a web analytics component. This concept got me thinking about help sites I’ve worked on and how well they’d stand that test. Or rather, how well my writing and information architecture would stand up to an investigation with web analytics data. I started looking at what I’d measure. I looked at sites I’ve monitored to find examples. I collected some ideas here.

What are the goals?

I believe tech pubs groups may serve different masters or several masters. Pre-sales or marketing goals are different from support goals, and training or education goals are different still. So you would pay more attention to different measures depending on your goals for the site. This section discusses customer support and preventing costs in the company caused by a support issue being filed. The goal here is preventing support calls.

In the Web Analytics Demystified book, Eric Peterson  points out a distinct difference in goals for a customer support site.

…while the other business models are driven financially by the idea that “more page views are usually better” the customer support model tends to be the opposite, the more quickly the visitor can find the information they are looking for the better.

I’d highly recommend these books for understanding how web analytics tie into business goals. The book has an entire section devoted to Customer Support sites.

For training sites, the goal would be for the person to spend time with the content, digest it, and meet training objectives because they have learned the material fully. Time spent should be higher for training sites.

Another crucial difference between a support site visitor and a training site visitor is that for the support site visitor, you want to observe the behavior of new visitors, but for the training site visitor, you want to ensure retention and repeat visits. To put it simply, customer support deals with acquisition of visitors, training deals with retention of visitors.

Another business goal is conversion – converting site visitors to paying customers. A technical manual can assist with three main goals – acquisition, retention, and conversion.

Support cost deflection – what to measure?

If the site has a question and answer section, compare the page views of the FAQ or Q&A pages to the other pages in the site – are there more views and longer time spent on pages in the FAQ area? That might be a good sign to indicate the help site is deflecting support calls.

Set up a custom segment to look for pages that have troubleshooting or particular error messages in the title or page content. Next, look at the bounce rate for that segment compared to the rest of the site. You want the bounce rate for the troubleshooting topics to be lower than the overall bounce rate. You want the trend for bounce rate for troubleshooting pages to stay the same or go lower over time. In other words, if visitors do not spend any time reading the troubleshooting information you’ve provided, what can you do to improve the content to prevent a visitor from leaving (bouncing)? This screenshot shows an example of a lower bounce rate for the troubleshooting segment of pages compared to all pages, which you want to maintain if your goal is to help users troubleshoot independently.

Pay attention to the pages that have the highest rate of exit, the page that most people leave the site after viewing. But also look at the percentage of exits. I have seen great pages on tech comm sites that have 9% exit rates but the highest number of page views. One explanation is that non-users found them through organic searches and the entire site wasn’t what they expected, not just that page.

What is the responsiveness of people to updates or comments on the site? If it offers comments, how much time elapses between a comment and a corresponding response? Do the questions get answered by a company representative or by another user? Not all web analytics packages will offer this measurement so you may have to do a sampling yourself. You can also try to get a sense of cadence, the rate of comments per day or per week or per month.

Analyzing searches will go a long way towards understanding whether user’s needs are being met by the help site. Look for searches that have zero yield – that is, the user didn’t click through on any hit or no results appeared at all. You can also look at the search results to site exits ratio.

Watch first time visitors‘ data like a hawk. New visitors may struggle at first while they learn their way around the site. As the number of first time visitors goes up, support call volume may also increase if visitors can’t find what they need or if they find the call-in number quickly. A good method for tracking real-world data along with web site data is to use a special phone number displayed only on the online help site, so that you know only those people who found the page with the special phone number can call it.

You can set up a visualization funnel from the home page to the support site to specific information to generate what Eric Peterson calls the “Information Find” conversion rate. For example, consider a flow of visits to the home page, to a product page, to a list of commonly asked questions, to a page containing a specific answer to a question. You can track travel through this series of pages, measure abandonment along the path and track a conversion as a certain amount of time spent on the final answer page.

Potential problems

Limited data will certainly make it harder to provide a convincing, statistically-significant analysis. One of the problems I foresee with applying web analytics on technical documentation sites is the small number of page views per day. I recently analyzed a help site that had about 40-50 page views per day on weekdays, pretty consistently. That was a software-as-a-service product available online. Another site I’ve watched for more than a year consistently gets 200-300 page views on weekdays and just under 100 page views on weekend days. I hear (don’t have an official citation to point to) that the 10k visitors per month is a common benchmark for starting to pay attention to web analytics. Do we get much value or accuracy from analysis if our sites don’t get to that point? I think it’s okay to monitor but to recognize your data may not have the clout you’d like it to.

Benchmarks to compare your site to would be valuable, but there aren’t categories as specific as “help site for consumer gadget” or “help site for enterprise software” yet.

Site search analytics, while most valuable to us, may be harder to enable unless you use specific tools. Site search analysis shows you what users look for, whether they find anything, and the path they take after clicking on a result link. Search analytics focused only on your tech comm or online help site require you to use a Google Custom Search Engine or the MindTouch 2010 platform which has site search analytics built into their reporting system. It appears that Adobe RoboHelp Server Analytics offers the ability to see what users search for but I don’t know the depth of analysis beyond keywords.

Connecting to the greater web analytics group at your company may be a challenge. Google Analytics is the free offering, so I expect it would have the highest uptake in tech comm in the beginning. Also, tech pubs departments aren’t usually tied in to the web content management systems so Omniture or Coremetrics (now owned by IBM) which are two other web metrics tools may not gather data on a tech comm site.

One takeaway from the Web Analytics Demystified book that makes a lot of sense is to always ask, “Is the information actionable?” In other words, when deciding which metrics to watch, make sure you can do something about the resulting metrics, whether you make changes to content or dive more deeply into the metrics. In certain environments, actionable items could be problematic if politics or tools get in the way.

Definitions to Understand

It’s important to get a handle on the basics of web analytics. I appreciate Avanish Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor, for learning about web analytics and the definitions that are so important to understand. What are visitors and what are visits, and what are clicks and what are views? What’s the difference between clicks, visits, visitors, pageviews, and unique pageviews? is a Google Analytics help topic that explains these well. I also pursued and attained a Google Analytics Individual Certification which was extremely valuable for understanding definitions and the mechanics of web analytics.

Sources

I refer to a great article by Rachel Potts titled, What can web analytics do for technical communications? that she wrote for the ISTC’s Communicator magazine last year.

I downloaded and devoured two web analytics books from John Lovett and Eric T. Peterson on their site at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com. The titles are available for a free (give them an email address) download, Web Analytics Demystified and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators.

I recently needed the assistance of Apple Care when my iTunes account went a little wonky. Long story short, I needed to disconnect my iTunes account from my credit card.

The support rep was friendly, kind, and understanding. She worked pretty quickly within the system to get me what I needed. All in all, a great customer service experience.

The next day, I received a link to an online survey and was happy to fill it out – whether a sense of obligation or plain appreciation motivated me, I took the time to fill it out.

After submitting the survey, this page displayed:

I love it! It’s simple, minimal, and international. I instantly recognized “Tack” as Swedish thanks to my recent guidebook purchases in preparation for my trip to speak at UA Europe. It doesn’t contain any links, as if to say, thanks for your time, we won’t tempt you to take any more time reading.

On today’s web, where some manipulate content to manipulate people, this was a wonderful page to land upon. Thank you Apple.

Engaging technical documentation isn’t written by Tina the Brittle Tech Writer. Who is she?

She’s the technical writer in Dilbert’s engineering department. Tina believes any conversation within hearing distance is intended as an insult to her profession and her gender. She strives to maintain her dignity while surrounded by engineers who don’t have a proper respect for her work.

Tina cares more about defensible positions on the engineering department than serving the customer. I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.” They say it with disruption and evolution in their hearts and minds. They fully intend to serve the user the best they can.

Of course, even the best laid plans can get thrown out the window in a tech writer’s daily work. But here are some ways to engage users with technical documentation. If you’re skeptical that these techniques are effective, go straight to the content analysis of user ratings. Helping 800,000 users in a year is an impressive number.

Go beyond text

People are drawn to images on a computer screen. The Community Roundtable has a great report available that you can glean many content best practices from. For example, the report indicates that “People seldom form relationships with text alone.” Boy, that’s true, and should compel us to incorporate pictures or a video.

I know, I know. Screen captures are a pain to take in the first place, and hard to maintain over time. Let’s think outside the box for a moment. Another way to incorporate images is to use artwork, however simple or stylistic. Take a look at this watercolor created by Oceana Rain Fields, a participant in this summer’s workshop at the Rural Design Collective web site. Illustration used under the CC Attribution 3.0 license (credited to Oceana Rain Fields with permission).

This image sticks with the readers of the manual, especially kids like the child-like figure shown. It should help the users identify with the manual (available online) and get cozy with it.

A friendly, helpful, and confident voice goes a long way in building a relationship in this asynchronous conversation. Screencasting, where you narrate while demonstrating a software feature, is one way to go beyond text in user assistance delivery. As an example, WordPress.tv offers screencasters and users a voice by enabling video uploads to their site. They pre-seeded the site with about 20 professionally-created videos, but after that, users were encouraged to upload videos.

Write informally

Michael Verdi, the content manager for support.mozilla.com (SUMO) has an excellent slide deck talking about Awesome Documentation where he describes some writing style choices they made recently to “Engage the Brain” including inserting humor or surprise and writing conversationally, such as “Can’t decide on just one page? No problem. Firefox lets you set a group of websites as your home page.”   Janet Swisher noted on the FLOSS Manuals discussion list that he also rewrote pages to not just answer what you can do, but why you’d want to do it.

Measure and adjust

Copywriters for campaigns know to do AB split testing – try out two brochures or two web pages on a sampling of people in the database. See which copy and design does best, then stick with that messaging until you see a drop off in use of the information. We don’t employ that technique often in technical communications, but as our copy becomes more web-enabled, I think we should start.

For example, some of the rewrites to pages on the support.mozilla.com (SUMO) site had measurable impact to the helpfulness of the page. For two of the rewritten pages, ratings were enabled. They could measure a 13% increase the number of people who clicked “Yes” for “Was this article helpful?” at the bottom of the How to set the home page article. Because of the high traffic on their site, that’s over 1,000 people per day. Given the number of people who view that page and the similarly-edited Profiles page, the two re-written pages were helpful to 800,000 more people per year. This demonstrates the power of web analytics, especially on high-traffic help sites! This example is fantastic.

Comment and be commented upon

I have many ideas for implementing comments in nearly any online help system in my article on the WritersUA site titled, Putting the User in User Assistance. Comments connect users to each other and to the authors of the content.

Enable storytelling

Your users have stories. Can you find them with some online searches to discover a hurdle they recently cleared or a snafu they’ve found? While case studies are typically under the purview of a marketing department, try to let users tell their stories, or find a way to showcase user stories periodically by linking to their blogs or tweets.

What other ideas do you have for engaging users with documentation? I’d love to hear more ideas.

Last spring I wrote up a blog entry pointing out some additional technical documentation wikis to add to a list I had in my “Wiki-fy Your Doc Set” presentation. A recent Twitter request asking for technical documentation wiki examples brings me back to both lists to try to compile an even longer, more updated list. These are in no particular order and the links were tested in August 2010. Other wikis are behind support logins but this list offers wikis that can be viewed without a login.

• All of the manuals on FLOSS Manuals site are authored and displayed in a customized Twiki wiki.
• Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) has many documentation wikis. The OpenDS Wiki offers a nice example. Also all the OpenOffice documentation is available on a wiki.
• Mozilla Developer Network
• Adobe Labs wiki
• Splunk product documentation
• Atlassian product documentation, specifically the Confluence documentation
• OpenCloud
• GigaSpaces
• Firefox Support Knowledgebase
• Second Life In fact, they single-source their embedded online help with the wiki as source.
• Ubuntu
• RightScale
• ExactTarget
• IBM developerWorks Wiki
• The MSDN Library from Microsoft offers many wiki-like features.
• Embarcadero RAD Studio wiki is actually 9 wikis, read the manager’s blog entry about it.
• WebWorks Documentation Wiki
• Tideway (now BMC Atrium Discovery) documentation

It’s no wonder I have to keep creating new lists. The examples are constantly changing. For example, the Facebook Developer wiki is being moved to another site.

Finally, if you are considering a wiki for technical documentation, I recommend reading my post, Hurdles and Hardships using Wikis for Documentation, reading Sarah Maddox’s blog, buying my book, and sharing your experiences with others. Here’s to enjoying the wiki journey.

I’ve been immersed in Social Media Metrics working with LugIron since early 2010. Because of this recent immersion I took a nerds-eye view of the recent post on the MindTouch blog, The Most Influential Technical Communicator Bloggers. Pretty exciting to be in such esteemed company. Excellent to have a badge to display, check it out!

Thanks go to Mark Fidelman and the MindTouch crew for compiling this list. The metrics nerd in me wanted to investigate further and do some more analysis. So here goes.

Metrics for bloggers and more

To be sure, social networking metrics do not have to be the same as blogging metrics. One missing metric, oddly enough, was number of subscribers. Understandable though. It’s not easy to find out subscriber numbers for other people’s feeds. It’s straightforward to get statistics for Feedburner feeds using either their API or the ol’ ~fc trick (See http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/justwriteclick for an example and my own subscriber stats.) But unless each blogger is willing to share their subscriber numbers, that column couldn’t be filled out. Plus, I know that some bloggers don’t worry about RSS subscribers and focus on building up an email subscriber list instead. For example, Scott Able’s RSS subscribers likely total less than 10,000, but his email lists are upwards of 70,000 addresses.

Then again, perhaps subscriber numbers aren’t all that descriptive of someone’s influence. As it turns out, Google’s PageRank is quite good at social network analysis. It’s on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rank. The highest of all the tech comm bloggers has a 7/10, which is the same as TechMeme. That’s great for tech comm!

In case you’re curious about the formulas that go into Google PageRank, it takes these four factors into account according to Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics Michael Wu in his post, Are All Influencers Created Equal?:

1. Degree centrality: measures how many connections a user has.
2. Closeness centrality: measures how fast a user can reach the whole network.
3. Eigenvector centrality: measures how reputable a user is.
4. Betweenness centrality: measures how many critical diffusion paths go through the user.

With those centrality measures in mind, you can see how each blogger’s blog works to help them acquire higher page rank. And these work into other scores on the list, such as Twitter Klout and so forth.

What is influence, really?

Very recently there was a quite loud backlash to Fast Company’s Influence Project. Check out these scathing posts.

• TechCrunch: Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With a Pyramid Scheme
• Amber Naslund: How Fast Company Confused Ego with Influence
• Laurel Papworth: 3 Surefire Ways to Win the FastCompany Influence Project
• Esteban Kolsky: Breaking Rant: Fast Company is Incredibly Stupid

Wow! The project was not about influence, nor even popularity. It was plain old link baiting. There didn’t seem to be any goal from the start. Without goals, influence is useless anyway. The supposed goal of a participant in the FC Influence project would be to get a big picture on the Fast Company site. Unfortunately it ignored the fact that many people want not to get attention paid to them but to their cause or passion.

Earlier this year, Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics Michael Wu posted about the six factors of influence in online communities. His model is wonderfully simple – there are influencers and targets. Two factors for influencers are credibility, meaning how much expertise the person can provide in their domain) and bandwidth, the ability to transmit on a particular channel. In this case, both their blog and Twitter use was measured as a channel. The list would be a bit different if it were to measure influence in STC, on the Techwr-l mailing list, or on Twitter alone. I believe combining Twitter and blogging is a good move, because as Technorati points out in the 2009 State of the Blogsphere report, “Bloggers use Twitter much more than does the general population.”

Without targets, though, the influencers cannot share their passion.

Any keys to success?

I’m presupposing with that section heading that you actually want to know how to become an influencer. Perhaps you do not. But here are some takeaways from my experience and from my book about using social media for tech comm goals.

• Relevance – Make sure your message is nearly always relevant to the subject matter. It’s okay to stray once in a while, to blend the personal with the professional, and make sure people know there’s a real person sending out these messages.
• Timing – Understand when your audience is listening and looking for articles to read. Be aware of a follow-the-sun message system when your audience spills beyond your time zone borders. If you are looking for a decision to be made based on the timing of the message, put yourself in the readers shoes and walk through their decision process. Watch the stats and see when the most visitors come to your site and when the most conversions occur.
• Alignment - You can align yourself in one channel for the greatest payoff. For me, I don’t spend much time on mailing lists or forums but mainly use my blog as an outlet for my thoughts. This laser focus over the last five years has paid off for me.
• Confidence – Being the right person at the right time is one key to success. You have to make sure people have good reason to trust what you say. Whether that’s through proving what you know or admitting when you’re wrong, you have to instill confidence in people to be a good influencer.
• Proficiency – I’m not as proficient with video for communication as I am with text and images. I’m aware of that in my blogging work and haven’t tested myself recently to stretch those boundaries. Tom Johnson has become increasingly proficient in audio and often works in new media such as screencasting to improve his channel reach and message. We can certainly learn from his good examples.

Notice that I don’t have super prescriptive keys here – I don’t tell you to blog twice a week or make sure your posts are at least 500 words long. You have to find your own ways to make these keys work for you.

My goals certainly involve influence, but also to be helpful. I think you’ll find that in my blogging. Personal and professional connections are also important to me – call them weak ties but I enjoy meeting people through my blog. It has offered me opportunities I hadn’t imagined when I first started blogging for my employer five years ago.  I’m extremely happy that tech comm has emerged as a profession as “one to watch” on the blogosphere.

I’ve written a pair of highly interesting blog entries for LugIron in the past month, looking at user engagement for brands varying from cameras and photography to airlines and travel.

Check ‘em out if you’re interested in social media metrics for brands especially, and user experience in interacting with brands.

Engagement Measures: Kodak versus Polaroid

Engagement Measures: Southwest versus JetBlue

I’m pondering the 1998 article, Pages Must Live Forever (from Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox) while documenting the content aging report in MindTouch 2010 (Read the spec here, read the user guide here).

With redirects helping stave off link rot, it seems that we can fulfill the wish behind Kristina Halvorson’s plea not to allow the web become like the junk-filled planet in Wall-E. Instead of piling up old versions of pages, the links stay fresh while the content might age a bit, like a fine wine.

For help content, I can list reasons that older content might be just fine, no need to send off alarms.

• Software that has classic features that were well documented in the first place, those pages can be static.
• Pages that haven’t been updated but are still oft-visited I would consider to be fresh, not stale. As long as the comments don’t indicate a problem with the content, it can be considered fresh.
• Depending on how well it’s resourced or energetic it is, your writing staff and community can only add a finite amount of content per week (or month). So the percentage of old content may be higher than the percentage of new content. That ratio is probably okay as your site ages. The mark the report sets is two years (24 months), then the content might be “old.”
• Depending on the scope of the aging report, an older product would have older help pages. Filtering helps you tune in the grouping of pages where you might be concerned about stale pages.

Two years would be a long time in a web application’s life, but perhaps not so long for an enterprise application. As usual, the answer to “Must Help Pages Live Forever?” is “It depends.” The real question that I’m trying to answer is “When are Help Pages Stale?” I believe two years is a valid and reasonable line to draw. What do you think?

I’m going into a listening phase for a client, where I observe their customers and partners habits online.

I thought I’d write up some of my techniques. The overarching task is listed as “Set up a monitoring system for “listening” to the social media participation by customers or partners.” The deliverable for this monitoring system is in the form of a report. But I’m also thinking of ways to set up a Google account so their technical writers can continue to monitor for months and years to come.

For starters, though, I’m going with who I know as much as what I know, picking the online brains of people who are close to this type of product. First, I searched through the archives of a blog of an industry analyst. I found a great post about a set of opposing videos the company had responded to when they were called out by a larger company (my client is the small company). What a find! Definitely set the tone for what they had recently gone through on the social web.

Next, I set up Google Alerts for the company name and two or three keyword phrases that relate to their products. I found a small group of blogs and bloggers dedicated to discussions about the technology behind the products, but not the product itself. There is also some standards work related to the product, which is good to know.

I also searched on LinkedIn for people’s profiles that have this company’s products listed. Then I made a list of their job titles. This client is already providing me with personas, which is great, but I want to add on more information if needed.

I searched on Indeed.com for jobs in high-tech metro areas where the job description contains some of the key skills the product requires as well as the product name itself. This search also reveals job titles.

I also set up a Twitter search that summarizes keywords and the company name, mimicking the Google Alerts. This search yielded more news and marketing information than I expected, which I could interpret as users aren’t on Twitter, but the companies are on Twitter.

Finally, I want to segment the customers by demographics, such as men in the U.S. aged 35-44, to see what their tendencies are for using online information based on the latest Groundswell Social Technographics ladder and data.

I’m also going to revisit the user assistance research that Scott Deloach put together, assembling best practices for user assistance.

Bug vacuums are a big hit in our house this month. I’m such the mom of boys, huh?

I like the bug vacuums because the bugs aren’t harmed and we can see them up close. Plus, it’s not a terribly loud activity. The bug vacuum hums and the boys just have bouts of mild shouting when they’ve found a cool-looking bug.

A great instruction booklet came with this particular toy. It’s compact, informative, pocket-sized, and I haven’t seen a better quick reference in my life. I immediately thought of Tom Johnson’s nice collection of quick reference layouts and links.

Here’s the first unfold, showing 10 essential field tips.

Unfolding the interior is a real treat – it expands to about eight times the size!

Sure, you could see this as primarily a marketing or sales piece, but only one side of the interior is attempting to sell similar toys – the rest has great instructions and ideas to “Get in the field!”

Anyone else have some “field observations” to share?

Today’s Technology Tools and Social Media for Growing Business was the title, and this session was the last one for Tech Fair, and the Panelists and their company names form an impressive lineup:

Doug Whatley – Human Capital Consultant, moderator

• Scott Ingram – Sales Director, Bazaarvoice / Founder, Network-In-Austin
• Julie Niehoff – ConstantContact
• Dave Evans – Principal, Social Web Strategies
• David Armistead – Principal, Social Web Strategies
• Britton Manasco – Manasco Marketing Partners

After a development manager from Paypal gave a great inspirational talk about how the inflection point for electricity’s usefulness came after an electrical washing machine was invented, bringing the outlet from the ceiling to the wall, Doug Whatley introduced the panelists. Each panelist talked briefly about their perspectives on social business. Here are some notes from the valuable session with interesting insights. I mostly wrote down quotes that I found insightful or that offered a perspective I hadn’t heard.

Britton sums up the social technologies that enable businesses to get work done with a simple phrase: Guidance imperative – the ability to provide expertise, advice, coaching, to be a trusted authority and advisor in the marketplace. He says, social media outlets amplify our ability as authorities – helps us personally brand ourselves. Helps us target and reach prospects.

David Armistead says his perspective is that the C-suite is grid locked on what social media is and what it can do. He typically explains it as, social tech does 2 things well – lower cost of communication and lower cost of coordination. There’s a lot of work to do in comprehending the change and effecting the change – transforming the way we work. No piece of the org will not be affected. We are not “messaging’ any longer, taking a known message through the structures in place – we’re talking.

Dave Evans has been working with groups in Argentina, Netherlands, US and Canada. He observes that 15-45-year olds are doing the SAME things with social tech across all four countries. The other countries just need time to catch up. For example, in India, the 3G spectrum bidding has started, and will enable much more mobile technology. Dave also sees opportunities for businesses monitoring the Social Graph – using TweetDeck and BuzzStream in combination he can monitor microscopic conversations.

One example of business tie-ins with people’s social graph – Social Web Strategies uses the LinkedIn API to build a specific landing page on the 2020 social site that shows C-level people who visits their site a page that shows anyone in their 1st tier who has used their social site. He said later that this is their highest converting landing page. This is B2B lead generation, folks.

Dave also says, this shift affects the whole organization – not just marketing. His example – marketing can’t possibly respond directly to comparison of carbon footprint of products. Basically, consumers can take out their smart phone and scan the barcodes of products while shopping to find out carbon foot print and make your purchasing decision based on the data. That type of decision isn’t made due to marketing or sales team’s efforts.

And next, Julie Niehoff, a development manager at Constant Contact, spoke on her perspective as an email marketing and list segmentation provider. They also acquired Nutshell mail this week, which caused a bit of excitement in the room. She reminds us all that you need a strategy first. Know what your objective is, try and test, then stop doing that when it doesn’t pay off. Loved hearing this as it validates my thoughts in this area. She said, always test just 10-20% of people on your list to try something new – don’t make them all dislike a new method or approach. Later she asked, “Can you segment your lists based on ‘raving fan/brand ambassador’ vs ‘kinda maybe’ vs ‘never gonna’? Do it. Treat brand ambassadors well.”

Another speaker noted that the gaming generation has gained a lot from the mentality that it’s always okay to hit reset and restart.

Where technology turnover is higher, adoption rates are higher. The pay offs are doing business faster, easier, or cheaper.

Scott Ingram spoke from BazaarVoice’s viewpoint, where one of their clients, Sephora, garners lots of reviews, such as 17,000 reviews on a base foundation. Goodness. He noted that people are starting to “live’ in Facebook. One of their customers has 20% of traffic from Facebook. Wow.

I think it was Scott who also said that Twitter is a relationship accelerant. It allows you to stage when you personally and physically interact with others. For example, sales people don’t get on planes until they know what people are looking for. Julie noted that there are also tools that actually mask the relationship – ratings and reviews set the rhythm of the relationship, but you can screw it up with the wrong copy.

The panel session had a question about privacy as the last question, though I think discussion continued after I departed. I liked David Armistead’s assertion that we mostly format questions around privacy when what we need to discuss is security. Julie had good points that there are laws around data collection and privacy policies and companies need to be governed accordingly. She also noted that as individuals we personally need to draw our own points of privacy in what we share online, read the policies before sharing info, and prevent certain connections in order to prevent correlation of data for those people under 13, for example.

What a great session – I could tell many people in the room were learning, taking notes, and nodding in agreement. Thanks to Matt Genovese for starting Door64, to Paypal for sponsoring the session, and to the presenters for sharing their valuable insights.