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Soundout

Datenschützer nerven. Folgt man den Medienberichten der letzten Zeit, so scheint ihre Arbeit nur noch um grotesk Irrelevantes zu kreisen. Die langjährigen Lieblingsthemen: IP-Adressen als personenbezogene Daten und formale Nörgeleien an Google Analytics. Relevant ist das kaum und es interessiert auch keinen. Warum tun die Datenschützer das?

Vielleicht versuchen sie nur, mit einer Situation umzugehen, die sie zur Hilflosigkeit verdammt. An den Stellen, an denen es darauf ankäme, ist Datenschutz politisch nicht oder nur als formalistisches Deckmäntelchen gewollt. Eigentlich müssten sich Datenschützer mit Vorratsdatenspeicherung und Bankdatentransfer beschäftigen, aber auf diesen Gebieten werden sie von vornherein durch die Politik übergangen.

Ähnlich machtlos ist der Datenschutz gegenüber dem Gegenstand seiner Bemühungen, dem Bürger. Der macht von seinem Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung Gebrauch: er unterschreibt fröhlich Verträge für Rabattkarten und hat zu Hause ein Trojanisches Pferd auf dem PC, das ihm beim Online-Banking zuschaut.

Das lässt den Datenschützern zwei Möglichkeiten. Sie könnten erstens das Scheitern der Idee Datenschutz eingestehen und ihre Ämter niederlegen. Was aber auch nur einen personellen Wechsel zur Folge hätte, ohne das Problem zu beseitigen. Oder sie können sich zweitens neue Betätigungsfelder suchen, die zwar nicht relevant sind, auf denen ihr Gegner aber nicht so haushoch überlegen ist wie im Kampf gegen die Politik. Diese Möglichkeit haben sie gewählt und deshalb beschäftigen sie sich mit Diskussionen über IP-Adressen als personenbezogene Daten, über Google Analytics und ähnliche Themen.

Vielleicht ist ihnen sogar bewusst, dass das eine Ersatzbefriedigung mit einem nur sehr vagen Realitätsbezug ist. Aber irgendwie müssen sie vor sich und der Welt rechtfertigen, Datenschützer zu sein. Die Alternative wäre das Eingeständnis, ein totes Pferd geritten zu haben, und das fällt keinem leicht. Auch wenn es nervt, menschlich verständlich ist das alles schon.

(Erweiterte Fassung eines Kommentars im Heise-Forum)

Ergänzung: Zur angeprangerten Nutzung der IP-Adresse für die Geolokalisierung  steuert User REPNZ im Forum noch diese schöne Bemerkung bei: »…wissen das auch “Angelica and Sheila from Offenbach”, die immer mal wieder mit mir “chatten” oder “daten” wollen?« Das ist eine sehr gute Frage, denn so ziemlich alles, was Google Analytics technisch anstellt, um Daten zu erfassen und auszuwerten, findet tausendfach an anderer Stelle auch statt, ohne dass es angeprangert würde.

A pub conversation with a client after work earlier this week ended up on the topic of what the benefits of multivariable testing are for the end customer / website visitor / user. As marketers we sometimes unwittingly find ourselves using phrases such as ‘effectively exploit all inbound traffic’. The term sounds quite harsh when you read that as a consumer and we should perhaps be more careful to stress the point that multivariable testing has benefits for the customer too.

This was only a conversation over a few beers but we came up with quite a few very good reasons as to why multivariable testing is good for the consumer, here’s a quick list of them:

• User experience is improved – as consumers we arrive at sites aiming to do something, if we can do that more effectively because the marketing team have optimised the experience based on live visitor feedback then that’s a good thing to my mind.
• The marketer has made the site more efficient at converting traffic, hence he doesn’t need to spend as much on acquiring you as a customer and hence he is a leaner operation and perhaps pricing might fall? (I’m stretching there but perhaps I’ll get away with it!)
• The pace of innovation is sped up – by using multivariable testing to measure changes against a baseline (control) marketers can remove the element of risk inherent in making changes without any means of measuring their real-time impact on conversion.

There are probably more but that’s a good start, I might edit this post to add more as I think of them. So there we have it, multivariate testing also holds benefits for consumers – most notably that online experience is improved.

PS – happy thanksgiving to our readers in the USA!

Images are an important component of your blog post because they add interest, often reinforcing your written message.  They’re also a way to attract the search engines to your site.

When you upload a photo to your blog, most blog systems will give you the option of adding an alternative title. Often the existing title, if you’re importing a photo you’ve found on Flickr for example, is just a string of numbers.

I’ve tended to skip over this step, but won’t anymore, after hearing Ross Dunn’s SEO presentation to our Social Media Club last night.

The problem according to Ross is that a string of numbers is not search engine friendly.

You’re better off to use a more descriptive title such as:

• image of man reading newspaper, or
• picture of person at computer.

There’s a much greater chance that this will get picked up by sites such as Google.  And in addition to the SEO benefits of a descriptive title,  visitors to your site who have images turned off will appreciate it, as will those who use assistive technology to surf the net.

Use a title that’s meaningful, and don’t stuff it with keywords.

With your images appropriately titled, people searching for specific images may end up coming to your site. If it’s inviting and your popular posts are easy to find, there’s a good chance these passersby may stay and look around.

Good luck, and I hope this gets your blog some additional traction.

Photo credit: pedrosimoes7

It’s a good thing! After all, you don’t want a bunch of users who just come to your site only to leave again.

At first glance, this is correct. You do not want people to hit the front page of your site and just hit back. This is not the same thing as a low bounce rate.

A lot of marketing professionals monitor their site via the dash-board, it’s like in-depth analysis on cruise control! They skim the basic site-wide stats and choose their actions from their. The bounce rate is one of these basic stats.

There are a number of issues with this approach. A higher bounce rate can be symptomatic of activity on the site that is actually good for it.

• Some organic traffic sources will bounce more than others
• Some pages can still be effective even if users view just them
• Some traffic sources with a high number of first time visitors will bounce a lot more than average

A low bounce rate might not be a good thing either, it may indicate other issues.

• Decline in long tail search traffic
• Decline in number or visibility in incidental linking

So, if you are inclined to glance at the site wide bounce rate, and then decide to act based on how low or high you feel it is. Please ensure that you look closer and actually see what is happening on your site that actually produces value. If the bounce rate is somehow linked to a mode of user behaviour that is impacting on the bottom line, act, if not, do something more productive.

When I start a new project, I like to check performance from as many layers as possible.  This helps to verify things are working as expected and helps me to understand how the pieces fit together.  My recent work with dNFS and Oracle 11gR2, I started down the path to monitor performance and was surprised to see that things are not always as they seem.  This post will explore the various ways to monitor and verify performance when using dNFS with Oracle 11gR2 and Sun Open Storage “Fishworks“.

why is iostat lying to me?

“iostat(1M)” is one of the most common tools to monitor IO.  Normally, I can see activity on local devices as well as NFS mounts via iostat.  But, with dNFS, my device seems idle during the middle of a performance run.

bash-3.0$ iostat -xcn 5
cpu
us sy wt id
8  5  0 87
extended device statistics
r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device
0.0    6.2    0.0   45.2  0.0  0.0    0.0    0.4   0   0 c1t0d0
0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0    0.0   0   0 toromondo.west:/export/glennf
cpu
us sy wt id
7  5  0 89
extended device statistics
r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device
0.0   57.9    0.0  435.8  0.0  0.0    0.0    0.5   0   3 c1t0d0
0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0    0.0   0   0 toromondo.west:/export/glennf

From the DB server perspective, I can’t see the IO.  I wonder what the array looks like.

what does fishworks analytics have to say about IO?

The analytics package available with fishworks is the best way to verify performance with Sun Open Storage.  This package is easy to use and indeed I was quickly able to verify activity on the array.

There are 48,987 NFSv3 operations/sec and ~403MB/sec going through the nge13 interface.  So, this array is cooking pretty good.  So, let’s take a peek at the network on the DB host.

nicstat to the rescue

nicstat is wonderful tool developed by Brendan Greg at Sun to show network performance.  Nicstat really shows you the critical data for monitoring network speeds and feeds by displaying packet size, utilization, and rates of the various interfaces.

root@saemrmb9> nicstat 5
Time          Int   rKB/s   wKB/s   rPk/s   wPk/s    rAvs    wAvs %Util    Sat
15:32:11    nxge0    0.11    1.51    1.60    9.00   68.25   171.7  0.00   0.00
15:32:11    nxge1  392926 13382.1 95214.4 95161.8  4225.8   144.0  33.3   0.00

So, from the DB server point of view, we are transferring about 390MB/sec… which correlates to what we saw with the analytics from Fishworks.  Cool!

why not use DTrace?

Ok, I wouldn’t be a good Sun employee if I didn’t use DTrace once in a while.  I was curious to see the Oracle calls for dNFS so I broke out my favorite tool from the DTrace Toolkit. The “hotuser” tool shows which functions are being called the most.  For my purposes, I found an active Oracle shadow process and searched for NFS related functions.

root@saemrmb9> hotuser -p 681 |grep nfs
^C
oracle`kgnfs_getmsg                                         1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfs_complete_read                                  1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfswat                                             1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfs_getpmsg                                        1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfs_getaprocdata                                   1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfs_processmsg                                     1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfs_find_channel                                   1   0.2%
libnfsodm11.so`odm_io                                       1   0.2%
oracle`kgnfsfreemem                                         2   0.4%
oracle`kgnfs_flushmsg                                       2   0.4%
oracle`kgnfsallocmem                                        2   0.4%
oracle`skgnfs_recvmsg                                       3   0.5%
oracle`kgnfs_serializesendmsg                               3   0.5%

So, yes it seems Direct NFS is really being used by Oracle 11g.

performance geeks love V$ tables

There are a set of V$ tables that allow you to sample the performance of the performance of dNFS as seen by Oracle.  I like V$ tables because I can write SQL scripts until I run out of Mt. Dew.  The following views are available to monitor activity with dNFS.

• v$dnfs_servers: Shows a table of servers accessed using Direct NFS.
• v$dnfs_files: Shows a table of files now open with Direct NFS.
• v$dnfs_channels: Shows a table of open network paths (or channels) to servers for which Direct NFS is providing files.
• v$dnfs_stats: Shows a table of performance statistics for Direct NFS.

With some simple scripting, I was able to create a simple script to monitor the NFS IOPS by sampling the v$dnfs_stats view.  This script simply samples the nfs_read and nfs_write operations, pauses for 5 seconds, then samples again to determine the rate.

timestmp|nfsiops
15:30:31|48162
15:30:36|48752
15:30:41|48313
15:30:46|48517.4
15:30:51|48478
15:30:56|48509
15:31:01|48123
15:31:06|48118.8


Excellent!  Oracle shows 48,000 NFS IOPS which agrees with the analytics from Fishworks.

what about the AWR?

Consulting the AWR, shows “Physical reads” in agreement as well.

Load Profile              Per Second    Per Transaction   Per Exec   Per Call
~~~~~~~~~~~~         ---------------    --------------- ---------- ----------
      DB Time(s):               93.1            1,009.2       0.00       0.00
       DB CPU(s):               54.2              587.8       0.00       0.00
       Redo size:            4,340.3           47,036.8
   Logical reads:          385,809.7        4,181,152.4
   Block changes:                9.1               99.0
  Physical reads:           47,391.1          513,594.2
 Physical writes:                5.7               61.7
      User calls:           63,251.0          685,472.3
          Parses:                5.3               57.4
     Hard parses:                0.0                0.1
W/A MB processed:                0.1                1.1
          Logons:                0.1                0.7
        Executes:           45,637.8          494,593.0
       Rollbacks:                0.0                0.0
    Transactions:                0.1

so, why is iostat lying to me?

iostat(1M) monitors IO to devices and nfs mount points.  But with Oracle Direct NFS, the mount point is bypassed and each shadow process simply mounts files directly.  To monitor dNFS traffic you have to use other methods as described here.  Hopefully, this post was instructive on how to peel back the layers in-order to gain visibility into dNFS performance with Oracle and Sun Open Storage.

Over the last several years there have seen significant changes in what media agencies can provide to clients to support plan development.  Today a considerable amount of time is allocated to advancing targeting work, communication planning and ROI analytics, to name just three important areas.  These excellent developments have allowed media agencies to jump to the forefront as client advisors

No doubt having the capability to more accurately develop target insights are tremendously helpful in constructing a media approach.  Incorporating Communications Planners into the overall media team has made a great difference in increasing relevant connections into the plan, be they cultural, entertainment, social, etc. The advances in measurement analytics of these relevant connections has and will continue to improve plans by demonstrating how accurate the strategic direction is as it relates to established goals, sales, brand awareness scores, etc.

As we continue to develop capabilities in these areas there are a few things that warrant consideration.  Proprietary target assessment programs can generate enormous amount of information, all helpful in formulating a media approach,  but much of this information can’t be measured in the actual plan.  This creates an uncomfortable disconnect.  When standard research is considered, it often can’t tie back to much of the proprietary data and without a direct link all the proprietary information must still be evaluated and judgmentally applied to the plan.  Network audience measurement serves as an example.

Data consistently supports a multi-channel media plan, but, can clients afford that…can they actually stake out a position in the market when pressure to increase brand “presence” is so intense.  In fact, many clients seem to be consolidating ad dollars and exerting that “pressure” in fewer media, more defined media, fewer channels – not more channels…to increase presence.

If there is no direct, measurable connection to the actual media plan output, clients are questioning the need to pay for the research.  This data has also outrun the capabilities of the fundamental planning tools.  It seems many clients want a media agency to provide what few other companies can provide…smart, strategically focused media plans that cover the critical areas like target analytics that are linked to an actionable, executable media plan.  Plans that address where and when marketing efforts should be focused and how much money should be spent to effect a desired outcome.

In short, with all the advances in planning tools, we need to make sure that any and all of it can be directly applied to plan development and output…and if it cannot, use it cautiously.   As investment advisors we need to be able to clearly articulate how a client should allocate it’s marketing resources and be able to show it on a media plan and strip away confusing theory not delivered in the actual plan.

-Don Morrison, EVP, Managing Director, UM

MindSource specializes in placing technology professionals with companies in the Silicon Valley Region and beyond. We have an immediate need for a SENIOR ORACLE CRM ON DEMAND CONSULTANT with our client in SUNNYVALE, CA. This is a contract opportunity for 6 months with a possible extension. Local candidates are preferred as there will be face-to-face interview after a brief phone interview.

The ideal candidate will have very strong hands-on experience with Oracle CRM On Demand (Siebel On Demand) which is a must for this role. The hiring manager is looking for someone who can blend BSA and application configuration work.

REVELANT SKILLS INCLUDE:

• Solution Design based on Business Requirements
• System Administration of Oracle CRM On Demand
• Application Configuration
• Workflow
• Analytics (Answers On Demand)

In the implementation, they are also using Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, Opportunities, Custom Objects, PRM and Analytics Dashboards.

If interested, please send us your resume along with the hourly rate, contact number and availability for a phone interview to raj@mindsource.com.

A couple of quick post hoc thoughts to add to Google/Feedburner Link Pollution:

1) there’s an infoskills issue here based on an understanding of what proxied links are, what is superfluous in a URI (Google tracking attributes etc);

2) there’s fun to be had… so for example, @ajcann recently posted on how students are Leicester are getting into the bookmarked resource thing and independently “doing some excellent work on delicious, creating module resources”: Where’s the social?.

Here’s the original link as polluted by Feedburner (I clicked through to the page from Google Reader):
http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2009/11/wheres-social.html
?utm_source=feedburner
&utm_medium=feed
&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SOTI+%28Science+of+the+Invisible%29
&utm_content=Google+Reader

Normally, I would have stripped the tracking cod from the link I made above to Alan’s post. Instead, I used this:
http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/2009/11/wheres-social.html
?utm_source=ouseful.info
&utm_medium=blogosphere
&utm_campaign=infoskills,analytics
&utm_content=http://wp.me/p1mEF-EH

(The campaign element is the category I used for this post, the content is the shortcode for the post.)

Don’t ya just love it: tracking code spam

So I’m thinking – maybe I need a WordPress plugin that will preemptively clean all external links of Google tracking codes and then add my own ‘custom’ tracking stuff on instead (under the assumption that the linked to site is running Google Analytics. If it isn’t, then the annotations are just an unsightly irrelevance, or noise in the URI…

In general, sites that have utilize social functionality about 90% of the visitors will simply consume the content (read blog posts, watch videos, browse pictures, etc.). While 9% will occasionally create/add their own content, and only 1% will frequently contribute. From our experience, this distribution changes based on how passionate the audience is about a topic. If you have social functionality on a car battery site, you’ll likely have less content creation. But for sites that have passionate members like cafemom.com you will see a much larger active audience.

It’s important to note that there are two ways to measure a Community’s success. User-to-User Interaction and Behavior on site (via Analytics).

User-to-User Interaction

The quality of user-to-user interaction, which is a manual evaluation, needs to be done regularly by a community manager.

These metrics could include:

• Do users refer to one another in a familiar tone?
• Are users supportive of one another?
• Do discussion boards read like a conversation that is ongoing (references to other discussions, etc.) as if walking in on an active party, rather than an isolated exchange?
• Do users make references that sound as if they interact by email or other paths in addition to the site?
• Do you see lasting friendships developing?

This can’t be an automated evaluation, but is critical to the quality of the relationships online. How users are engaging one another is as critical as how often.

Site Behavior

This is the easiest and quickest data to get since you can rely on your Site Analytic tool to gather everything you need, most data is out of the box functionality.

We came up with the following guide to grouping users based on activities, of course the metrics can change based on the site but we have found that this formula works well.

To forecast the future, marketing leaders often look to the past. But the past isn’t always a very reliable gauge of future conditions. For proof, we need to look back to a day-in-the-life of a turkey, and implications of not preparing for possible “extreme” events around the corner.

First, let’s start with a fun exercise courtesy of Wilmott Magazine. Let’s look at damage estimates of earthquakes in California from 1970 to 1993 in the table below. Can you make an educated calculation of losses due to earthquakes in 1994?

Taking a look at the distribution of data, notice the low end is “0” and at high end, the most damage caused was “129”. So what’s your guess?

If you’re like me, you probably guessed wrong. Using the above numbers as an “anchor”, most people would reasonably assume that 1994’s earthquake was either an average of the above numbers or perhaps a bit higher than 129. Maybe you even threw out “129” as an outlier in the dataset. To be honest, I guessed around “200”.

The correct answer is “2217.2”! FEMA estimates that every year earthquake losses in the United States add up to $4.4 billion a year. But then, some extreme outliers can really skew that number, especially years like 1994 where just the Northridge Earthquake in California alone tallied $20B in damage!

Let’s get back to talking turkeys via a parable from Nassim Taleb, author of the “Black Swan”. Dr. Taleb reminds us that fat, dumb and happy is probably the best way to describe the life of a turkey. They’re fed and nurtured for three years straight. Day after day, they expect the same thing. But then, one fateful day arrives and the “life” of a turkey ends quite abruptly.

Can we accurately predict the future based on reviewing and analyzing historical data? Sometimes, but we have to make assumptions of similar conditions, a normal distribution, and event independence. Complex systems will have none of these characteristics. Dr. Taleb says as much; “Real life isn’t a casino.”

Indeed, the parable of the turkey and the earthquake loss estimation exercise show us that predicting the future in complex systems can be a futile exercise because there are so many unknowns, changing conditions, and inter-connecting relationships. Extreme events that carry a huge impact happen, and some would argue they’re happening a whole lot more often as interlocking financial markets and globalization become commonplace.

Should prediction exercises be avoided? Nassim Taleb would argue otherwise; “We need to start thinking of the inconceivable,” he says. And while we cannot determine the exact probability of tomorrow’s events, we can “get a general idea about the possibility of their occurrence.”

And that’s where scenario planning comes into play. Bill Ziemba, author of the aforementioned Wilmott Magazine article says, “Getting all the scenarios and their probabilities right is impossible and doesn’t matter much anyway. What is important is to cover the board of possible occurrences. Then you will make sound decisions with risk under control.”

The fact is, like the turkey, we just don’t know what tomorrow will bring. So, plan for the five to seven most likely occurrences and then develop contingencies based on those scenarios. French microbiologist Louis Pasteur says it best, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

For a turkey, today may appear like any other “normal” day. However, tomorrow could be the chopping block.

Questions:

• Nassim Taleb says, “It is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making.” Does this mean that historical data analysis isn’t worth the effort?
• If chance favors the prepared mind, what’s the “next unexpected twist” that marketers should be looking for?

The NextMark Mailing Lists Search Tool is now available for librarians to add to their business resources pages. 

Just click the link below titled “List Search Tool Instructions“.  It only takes a minute to copy and paste the html code.  Feel free to send me a message via LinkedIn or email me directly if you need help.

Lists Search Tool Instructions

Here’s my work e-mail address if you need some help with the widget installation:  cdemartine@nextmark.com

Enjoy!

Susan Elford and the gang at Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) Calgary asked me recently to present to the “Indy 500″, the independent practitioners’ sub-group of CPRS. The topic was “Social Media Strategy”. While I provided my usual overabundance of blah blah, attendees seemed pleased and asked for the slides to be posted. Here they are, plus a bonus video I couldn’t connect to in the room:

Video: Social Media Revolution