So I’ve taken a hiatus from the blog to focus on work at Cobalt (which is pretty kick-ass) and as anyone who writes a blog knows, it can be a pain to write regularly.  A ton of stuff has been going on since my last post and I will write about it all soon, but for now I need to do some site housekeeping and transfer everything over to Wordpress to make things easier.  I could pretend like I have time to do a redesign but I don’t.  Dreamweaver is not really working right now, so I may have to find someone to help me do this without getting the Wordpress blank screen of death.

Just know that I’m alive and well and I will start posting again if for no other reason than to keep people from teasing me about not updating the blog. Oh and here are some awesome upcoming events in the Seattle area:

• SAS Social Media Analytics reception! I’ve been helping SAS get this event set up and it should be a really interesting discussion on SAS’s new tool. @kdpaine and @minethatdata will be there, so if someone comes out of it with the secret to measuring social media ROI, let me know. RSVP here.
• Web Analytics Wednesday sponsored by Unica: free food, free drinks, good times as usual.  RSVP here.

Page Tagging

As promised, I said I would post about social media and page tagging. Even though I haven’t done much page tagging outside of Google Analytics, I had a few discussions about it at ZAAZ this past week.  Omniture and WebTrends have some structure around the variables you can tag links/onload events within a page, such as campaign variables and traffic counting variables.

One co-worker showed me her process for keeping track of what she was tagging and how you could use the tags for a variety of purposes when thinking creatively. She had to create a data dictionary to keep track of what she was tagging and why she was tagging it that way for herself, the developer, and any future people working with these pages.

To me this seems like a less than ideal system, and the information science training kicked in and made me think that there should be some kind of taxonomy or controlled vocabulary for page tagging within a company or group.  At least on a project, or in the long term, it would make it easier on everyone if people were naming their variables in a similar way, especially if someone has to decipher your tags later.  It seems almost necessary for Google Analytics, where the user has complete freedom in naming each part of the event tracking tag. I will want to discuss this idea with other people, maybe there’s some obvious reason I don’t know about that prevents people from creating a taxonomy.

Social Media

So I won’t repeat how to do this because I just followed the instructions on this very useful post, but I created a custom advanced segment matching a regular expression in Google Analytics to track the social media traffic sources as a group.  Very easy to setup, you basically just list all the sources you want to track (e.g. “Facebook | Twitter”). It showed social media traffic as much lower than I expected based on the referrers, especially from Twitter, but I’m not sure why that is. I had an interesting discussion today at lunch in the Microsoft Commons, about whether there is really an ROI in social media, and basically I thought that it was more about brand perception and viral marketing, and he thought you had to rely on organic interest and creating a tsunami effect with your sphere of influence.

Side note: GA now offers pivot tables?? But is rolling them out gradually. I am not one of the lucky first.

Why so low social media?

Other Things

Last night FC ZAAZ 99 lost, 4-2 (I think?).  It was a frustrating game not because we lost but just the playing style and some of the issues that come when playing with new people and boys. I felt like I was running like a maniac all over the field and not getting the ball enough to make it worthwhile. Also how ghetto does a high school have to be when they lock their toilet paper dispensers to the wall?

Today I officially became a real person at Microsoft because I show up in the system and have my ID badge. So now I’m not just a pseudo-person getting locked out all the time.  I’m working on a laptop that runs Windows 7, and so far I really like the new features. Then I got to play with a Surface table for the first time, which was very exciting after all of the videos/discussions/projects I’ve worked on this year that relate to it.  It does work pretty much as I thought it would, though this one was not interacting with devices.

Just for fun, the Microsoft Surface parody video: