Week 15 – Big Data

The readings this week on “Big Data” was pretty informative for me. I was surprised to read about potential employers asking for interviewees’ Facebook passwords, and alarming that people actually would give them up. Apparently this was a thing back in 2012, but I had never heard about this going on, or at least do not recall. I am pretty sure I would shoot that down right away if I was in that position. The article suggests polite ways to decline, but I do not think I would hide my disdain for such a request. To me, that would be an outrageous request, even if it were for a Top Secret position. I have no interest in working for a company or organization that would think that is a reasonable course of action. Spy on me all you want, however you are able, but I’m not going to just hand over free access to all my personal online life details.

I thought the article about LinkedIn was interesting, as I could relate to much of it. I forgot when I first started using LinkedIn, so Searched my email for the email confirmation. It was September 2009, right after graduating undergrad and moving up to DC and beginning my job search. I don’t think it was very useful for someone like me with basically no contacts, and not many people using it compared to today. I think as I got a job and met more people, I built up contacts, but was never sure how useful the site was for me, so I stopped using it for a while. I’d periodically update my profile, and get a few random inquiries about jobs I wasn’t really interested in, but usually only returned to the site if I was notified of something. The new data driven approach has worked on me, and I have been using it a lot recently. I like reading the Influencer articles. They are usually pretty relevant to my interests and good for professional development. I don’t mind giving up this data to LinkedIn, because I feel like I’m getting something in return.

The same can’t really be said about the ad companies snagging all of our web browsing data. I always knew that it happened, but didn’t really get the whole economics of how it works, and the ad tracking article really laid it out in a way that I could understand. I think I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but we really need to be careful about how much power these advertising companies have over their use of the data they gather. Right now, there is no way for the computers doing the data gathering and ad placement to match real individuals to their online identities, but it doesn’t seem far off.

These articles bring up interesting points about the ambiguous state of our online privacy and rights. There is a lot of gray here, and we as a society are still in the middle of figuring out what our rights are with respect to data collection and online privacy.

Q1 – If adblocking technology becomes more popular, do you think the ad companies would start ignoring “Do Not Track” requests? If so, what are the repercussions of that? If not, how would that affect online content?

Q2 – Is it possible that we could move away from super-target advertisements? Why or why not?

Week 14 – Message Testing

To be honest, I did not retain much from these readings. I think I need to see a bit more visual representation of what is going on, because I don’t really know anything about the statistics methods and formulas and number thrown about. The images and charts they did have didn’t really make much sense to me, either.

That said, I think one thing is clear. More advanced research is providing a clearer picture of what different types of people will respond to in certain situations. The days of basing campaigns on what the majority of people might like are waning, and developing messaging and design specific to your intended audience is the new standard. Using highly specific studies to determine how people may be persuaded or influenced is proving to be a very effective method for determining how to shape a campaign. One thing I thought was quite interesting from the Online shopping article was that the research showed that site effectiveness did not influence site involvement. I think that means that if your site works well, and is effective in getting your point across, it may cause the user to leave sooner, and that it is not having an effect on engagement. Vice-versa, a site that is not effective can lead a user to take more time. Either way, they are still trying to complete the task they were intending to do. The research was able to determine what really plays a role in keeping users engaged, and that data can help inform design for the future.

Q1 – Do you think people from North America are well suited for designing sites for people of other cultures, or should these projects be head up by someone native to that culture?

Q2 – If you are managing a campaign for the entire U.S., can message testing really work across such a diverse landscape, or do you need to break it down more regionally/locally?

Week 13 – Information Aggregators

In reading the Winterberry white paper “From Information to Audiences”, I was immediately struck by the bullets from the Executive Summary, particularly the following:

• From the dawn of time through 2003, according to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, human civilization generated approximately 5 exabytes of aggregate information. In 2009, that much data—captured in the equivalent of 25 quadrillion tweets—was generated every two days

I think I have heard that before, but in the context of this class, it made me think about it a little more. It is truly amazing to think about, and a little scary. It is hard to not wonder about what is generating all this data and why? Who is collecting it, and why? How is it being used? Is it being used, or is it just floating off into nothingness. Not knowing is kind of stressing me out. I think a lot of people have a fear of very massive objects (I believe it is called Megalophobia), and seeing the amount of data generated being quantified in this way sort of taps into that fear, even if it is irrational or unfounded… For me at least.

The white paper also really speaks to the idea that companies that are not actively and seriously invested in understanding and embracing the challenges and opportunities that this massive amount of data being generator presents will be soon left behind. Whoever is able to take huge amounts of data, cross referenced with another massive stream of data, and again, and again to the nth degree, and can come up with a model that can be used to predict consumer trends and actions, will be very successful in the future marketing landscape, while everyone else is wasting money on far less effective, traditional marketing.

Switching topics somewhat, news aggregators present an interesting challenge to content producers. The paradox is that aggregators widely distribute content that would otherwise not reach a large amount of viewers, however, they, or rather, some are also discouraging  click-throughs to the originating site due to the aggregator providing too much of the original content, and the reader is not compelled to check out the original source. The World News Publishing Focus article talks about proposed legislation in Spain that would require news aggregators to pay fees to the original media source when linking to an article. They would need permission, and required to pay a higher fee to reproduce the entire article. I’m curious if that would work. I think large aggregators would end up setting the prices, by not linking certain news publishers that want to be paid more, and only linking to smaller sources, or less reliable sources that are willing to be paid smaller fees. Ultimately that leads to a diminished product, which leads to a less informed public (or a more misinformed public). However, as so many news publishers have gone out of business, and the ones left are forced to adapt their business model, the last thing they need is for news aggregators to steal all the page views. If that continues to happen, more cuts will need to be made, leading to an even further decline in journalism, replaced with AP wire stories and less reliable blog form, sponsored material, and other forms “news” becoming more and more prevalent online.

Reddit as an aggregator is an especially interesting beast. While generally self-policing, the situation where users wrongly identified a man as the Boston Bomber, and even produced a spreadsheet of possible suspects based on an aggregate of photos from the blast areas, shows how there is the potential for some awful things to happen when people start massive internet witch hunts. People’s lives can literally be destroyed, so it is good to see that Reddit immediately took steps to try and prevent something like that to happen in the future.

Reddit is also interesting in that lazy content producers from news aggregators and publishers as well, are increasingly snagging content from Reddit users, without an understanding of how the community works, and how to obtain permission to use and properly attribute. I have seen a lot of news articles in the past that simply source Reddit, which would sort of be like sourcing UF for something that I wrote and published on our Canvas discussion board.

Q1- What do you think it will take to be successful in the future of marketing in this age of incomprehensible amounts of data being generated?

Q2- How do you think charging aggregators would affect the new industry in America?

Week 12 – Online Reputation Management

I feel like I start off every weekly post by talking about how interesting that particular topic is, and the streak will continue for another week. In the past, I had felt that reputation management was sort of an unsavory enterprise, and I suppose if not done professionally, it can be. I thought it was more a service to “get rid of” bad reviews or press by flooding the internet with more positive information about a given business through the use of fake social media accounts and blog posts. I’m sure this still happens, much the same way that some shady people might provide sham SEO services, but online reputation management a lot more than just Google and Yelp reviews, and is a necessary part of painting a business and a brand in this day and age.

Until this class, I wouldn’t have thought about social media as being a tool for reputation management, but when you think about it, it is pretty obvious how powerful a role social media plays in defining a brand, so you had better have a plan in place to manage what is being said about you. One thing I learned is that “managing” online reputation and “controlling” it are entirely different strategies. When companies attempt to control what is being said, they tend to make the situation much worse. Deleting negative comments, posting dismissive, defensive and aggressive interactions with the public via social media channels and trying to bully other sites to take down negative reviews is a major turn off to potential customers. What you think is an attempt to protect your brand is actually hurting it. Managing vs. controlling, is a much more positive approach. Instead of shutting down negative comments, you can approach them as opportunities to improve your product or service, and more importantly, showing the public that you care, and are willing to listen in order to put out a better product/service.

The AdWeek infographic shows that 87% of people in 2011 say that positive information online has reinforced a decision to purchase an item recommended to them, and 80% of people say they have changed their mind about a product recommended to them, based on negative information seen online. It is clear that what shows up when people search for you has an effect on sales. The question is, how legitimate are the reviews. In general, I think people are less likely to rave about adequate, good or even great products or services online, than people who have had bad experiences, so in that sense, you need to be on the look out for, and address these complaints, before they snowball into something bigger, like a web site dedicated to telling the world how awful your product is. Sometimes that isn’t enough, though. I wonder, how much negative feedback online is posted by someone who was having a really bad day, and took it out on you over something small – like an undercooked steak or a forgotten drink order, or even worse a competitor posing as a dissatisfied customer. There are certain actions you can take, to take blatantly false reviews down from some sites, or have false information that hurts your business removed, but I imagine that can be some dicey territory, and you need to be careful differentiating between bad press and lies, and could require lawyers and other experts, which means these services are probably out of the price range of a lot of smaller companies.

Q1 –  In your opinion, are online reputation management firms/services mainly for larger companies?

Q2-  What are some things you could do if you have a small business, and an angry customer writes a bad review online that is based on facts of a poor experience?

Week 11 – Social Analytics

I’ve picked up a few things here and there this semester regarding social analytics, however, I found this week’s readings to be quite interesting and informative. A year ago, the only social analytics I really knew about were Facebook likes, Flickr views and favorites, and follower counts and retweets. That is probably not exactly true, but I definitely didn’t realize how important and useful social analytics can be, and all the different methods to collect and decipher meaning out of it all. In fact, while researching graduate degrees, I decided that I would apply for this WDOC program as well as UF’s Social Media Master’s program. But when I found out that you were only allowed to apply to one graduate program in the College of Journalism, I decided that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to get an MA in tweeting and Facebooking. Obviously, I know social media  and SM analytics go a lot deeper than that, but at the time, I’m not sure I really grasped the importance, and I don’t know how seriously everyone takes it as a business tool, but they should. One problem is that a lot of people in older generations don’t really understand social media in the first place. Personally, I am very familiar with a lot of social platforms. I’ve tried a lot of different ways to connect with friends and to showcase my photography, but I never really knew how to turn it into a really useful tool. I’m still not sure I do, but I have seen plenty of examples that doing it right can make a big difference. The Guardian article really says it all, though, when it says that likes and retweets mean nothing to a CEO, but if you can equate them to ROI, now you are speaking their language. The hard part is actually linking social media interactions with sales figures. That is where software like Adobe’s SocialAnalytics and Google’s Social reports through Google Analytics comes in, and attempts to help make those connections.

Once you understand how social data can be collected and used, it is clear how great a tool it is for business, but I think it’s also quite interesting to see how social analytics are being used in other ways. The study about how different events in the UK affected the mood of the public is pretty neat. I couldn’t help thinking that the way they tracked emotions was a little simplistic, and I’m glad they sort of acknowledged it later on in the paper, admitting that there were large spikes of happiness around Christmas and New Years, when there are probably a lot of seasonal greetings like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year”. I do think it is odd that Halloween seems to coincide with a spike of sadness. I’d be interested in seeing what words constituted a sad tweet. Perhaps “boo” as in boo hoo… Just speculation, but my point being, I’m not sure this was the best way to measure the mood of the public, however, with some more advanced word structures and algorithms, they could really be on to something. One thing they mentioned, almost as a throw away line, but really resonated with me was that perhaps the media coverage has more to do with the mood of the people than the actual event, and I think that would be something worth taking a look at. I think we all know that watching the news can be depressing, or uplifting, depending on what the story is about, but I think it would be really interesting to know just how much the news coverage affects the mood of the general public.

Q1 – Are you concerned that companies may soon be able to stitch together a profile on you based on an aggregation of your personal social media habits?

Q2 – What is an issue or problem that social analytics could be used to get to the bottom of or shed some light on?

Week 10: Usability Testing

Coming into this week’s readings, I’ve had no real experience in usability testing, but it became clear fairly quickly that there seems to be an issue of a lot of people performing inadequate and/or dysfunctional usability tests. I have been browsing design jobs recently, and there seem to be an abundance of UI/UX jobs out there, but tone the articles suggest that there might be a widespread lack of understanding about what usability testing should entail. To be honest, a lot of the things that they say should be avoided, are sort of intuitive, at least initially. Especially for someone like me, who is not trained in how to properly run a usability test. For example, if someone was having issues completing an assigned task, I might very well have thought to ask the participant what changes they would have liked to see to make things more clear. After reading, and just thinking about the design process, it is clear that that would be a bad idea. If I were to paraphrase everything we read this week, it is that the point of usability testing is to find design problems. With the results in hand, the professional designers should be the ones coming up with the solutions, not crowdsourcing the design.

The video was pretty informative as far as showing some of the ways you can make usability testing more effective, even if you don’t have a fancy  lab setup. I was sort of against the idea of having all the cutouts at first. It seemed like too much of a hassle, and not worth the effort, but it proved to be a good way to make design updates on the fly. There is one concern I have with the video, which is that I found it to be a little contradictory to one of the articles, because the demonstrator was asking for the participant’s opinion, and made some adjustments on the spot to accommodate. These updates, like not having a link to create a profile on the log in page is obviously something that you would have to address, but to me having all these UI pieces seems like it would lend it self to a trial and error season to see what the participant likes the most, which should not really be the focus of your testing.

Q1 – What kind of benefits and insights can you can from proper usability testing, rather than a call for feedback?

Q2 – What are some questions to ask yourself to be sure that you are testing the “red routes” and not heading down an extraneous path?

Week Eight – Eye Tracking

I found all of our reading material this week regarding eye tracking extremely fascinating. The most I’ve ever learned on the subject (formally) was in our Layout/Design course a few semesters ago, that people tend to view websites like they read a book. In a “Z”, starting at the top left, across the page to the right, and back down and left, then across to the right again, repeating as necessary. I think the image at the top of the Fast Company article sort of shows that. The Canvas article really explained a lot about how our vision actually works, and all the different things that are factors when you are looking at something. One reference that intrigued me was that people looked in the  same direction that a baby in an ad looked. The link didn’t work, but I googled it and found this.

When the baby is looking at you, then you tend to stare back at it, fixated on the eyes, and not the ad. But when the baby is looking up at the ad, you tend to look up at the ad much more, and also the rest of the content.

Standard methods of usability testing requires people to look at a site, remember what they looked at, and the order that the looked at it. You also have to take the subject’s word for it, and there are many reasons why their word can be inaccurate. Eye tracking is able to tell you what people are looking at, in what order, how long and all the little distractions that they might not want to admit or even be aware of. One flaw of eye tracking that I think was interesting to note was the “ketchup bottle” example, where you can look directly at something and not “see” it. Rather, you don’t report seeing it, even though you did, but you didn’t notice it. I find this happens to me every one in a while, and it is very perplexing as to why it happens. I have found that it often happens to me on the computer when someone is trying to show me something. They will say, its right there at the top and I won’t see it at all, until it is pointed out, and I was looking right at it. With eye tracking, you might interpret that as “seeing” the link, but for all intents and purposes, you didn’t actually see it.

As every new technology, it is not surprising to see that eye tracking is being developed for military use. Vision-based targeting is pretty cool to think about, though I’d hate to have to explain to somebody that a missile hit an unintended target because the gunner sneezed and looked away, or something like that, prior to impact. I can’t help but wonder about the ways eye-tracking can be used in everyday life as well. Perhaps HUDs in our vehicles that can control music/climate control/navigation. But maybe that is too distracting and dangerous. We should have self-driving cars soon, anyways, so you’ll be free to use your hands all you want!

The Poynter Eyetrack research was interesting, in the I feel like I’ve heard a lot of the findings in the form of best practices. I’m assuming that they were formulated using this data, but I supposed it could be that this research confirms the best practices’ validity. They say a picture is worth 1000 words, and especially in newspapers and print, this is proven true. People claim to read more text than they actually did, but the eye tracking showed that they we definitely looking at images and visual data the most. That research is about 25 years old, but still holds true to this day. One thing that irks me is the extremely small number of those test, and the homogenized sample. We go from top left, to the right then down. I wanted to know if the same holds true for Hebrew and Arabic readers. Do they naturally focus at the top left?

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-left/

 

You can see that the Arabic site is pretty much a mirror of what we see in standard web design. The Hebrew one is a little bit of a mix. The text is right to left, but the navigation is still left oriented. The people writing the article have not done eye tracking on Hebrews, but I think they should, because it seems like a complex web of movement (or maybe it is just a very poorly designed site).

Q1 – Knowing that we all are in the process of finishing up our websites for Advanced Web 1, what are some things you would consider changing based on what you have learned about eye tracking?

Q2 – What are some other practical uses of eye tracking that you think might be plausible in the near future?

Week Seven – Crowdsourcing

When I think about crowdsourcing, Wikipedia and Kickstarter come to mind, as well as any number of problems or questions posed by people looking to the masses for answers. The readings this week have opened my eyes to the fact that crowdsourcing is a lot more prevalent on the internet than it had ever occurred to me. You can even make the argument that the internet it self is just a huge exercise in crowdsourcing.

Reading about the rise of iStockPhoto and shows likeWeb Junk 20, or for a more modern reference, Tosh.0, being products of crowdsourcing really made me think about the role the internet has played in the evolution of business, information and everything, really. As a photographer, I am well aware of the effect that websites providing cheap stock photography has had on the business of selling photographic work. In order to make any money, you need to produce a much larger quantity of highly specific, high quality work to be compensated. The competition from stock sites, as well as other social media sites like Flickr and 500px where anyone can contribute work makes it increasingly difficult, if not next to impossible to make a living off stock photography. Photographers have adapted by looking for contracted work, but that market has become saturated as a result of more photographers looking for this work, as well as the massive influx of new people with more affordable  professional DSLR cameras. Amazon’s Automated Turk is still going strong, and I decided to take a closer look. I singed in to be a “worker”, and all the “HITs” or takes are for pennies or less. I opened up to highest paying HIT I could find on the front page, and for $0.09, all I had to do was transcribe the first 20 items of a $400+ Whole Foods receipt. You can earn an additional $0.01 for every four items transcribed after that. I can’t imagine why anyone would do these tasks unless it was just for laughs, but apparently people do. There were 58 HITs worth over $10, most of which requiring hours of time. Mostly for transcribing audio. So if you are a good listener and are a really fast and accurate typist, maybe you can make a few extra bucks. I’m sure that if you think about every industry, you can find ways that corporations have implemented crowdsourcing principles to majorly reduce the costs of hiring experts. This cost saving, coupled with the reduced earning capacity of many experts professionals in any given field might have a lot to do with the every growing income gap in this country and the world. People are always concerned about outsourcing of jobs, but crowdsourcing could be just as significant in terms of affect on the US economy. Ultimately, it is impossible to justify paying $2000 for a service from a niche firm, when the same job could be done for pennies on the dollar to the lowest qualified bidder anywhere in the world.

I think one of the more fascinating aspects of the growth of crowdsourcing is the emergence of crowdfunding. For the last couple years, I’ve kept an eye on a lot of Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects that have tried to get off the ground. One of my favorites, MagMod, which is a camera flash accessory setup, exceeded their goal, and has since put out a new version. It is pretty cool that people can fund great ideas without giving up control of their ideas and potential profits to conventional investors. Another interesting case is that of the Veronica Mars movie project. There are a lot of smaller documentary and indie films trying to get funded out there, but then this big franchise comes along and, as of today, raises over $5.7 million. That is pretty amazing to me, but potentially a problem. If Hollywood starts trying to emulate this, and people get used to the idea of funding projects they want to see, then we are going to end up paying even more for movies, music and any other type of entertainment.

Q1 – Have you participated in any type of crowdsourcing? If yes, what types, and for what reasons? If no, are there any reasons you can think of?

Q2 – What do you think are the future implications of the increased role of crowdsourcing in daily lives?

Week Six – Mobile Analytics

If I thought I was coming into last week’s conversation on web analytics with little knowledge and experience, then I’m pretty sure that goes ten-fold for mobile analytics. I can’t really think of any instance where I’ve even considered mobile analytics, or rather, the gathering of mobile analytics. When reading Cisco’s white paper about the recent and projected trends of mobile, there are few surprises. Global use of smartphones will continue to increase, while non-smartphone use will decline dramatically over the next few years. In the U.S. 93% of cell phones are projected to be smartphones, and 83% in Western Europe, as the rest of the world steadily increases smartphone use as well. Tablets, machine to machine (m2m) and wearable devices will grow at high rates, and at will function with higher speeds and volume.  Like I said, I don’t think those projections should surprise anyone. What I did find interesting in the trends is that mobile device users will increase their use of WiFi (Mobile Offload) because as mobile network speed increases, so does data consumption by more advanced devices. Data consumption increases will be met by the mobile carrier’s data caps  based on price tiers, forcing more people to utilize wifi more. One thing I don’t think they mentioned was if they think wifi could be more easily accessible in public places. I do remember reading about the assumption that more people will have wifi in their homes by 2018, but if wifi is available everywhere you go, either privately owned public networks, or municipalities providing the service, these types of changes in technology can disrupt the projections in this area.

I was curious about the mobile analytics for my photography site over the past year, and I get just under a quarter of traffic from phones and tablets. I found it interesting that the bounce rate for mobile and tablet is a little lower that desktop, but digging deeper, I see that the majority of users on mobile and tablet devices are from the DC area, or Florida, so I can assume these visitors are either interested in my services as a local photographer, interested in the local photographic content, or just a friend or family member, all three being groups that are more likely to stay on my site longer than the general public. The other thing I am deducing is that, even though desktop bounce rate is higher, desktop users view more pages per session. If I had to guess, I’d say it is because viewing photos on my site is a much better experience on desktop than mobile.

Q1 – What are some less obvious examples of increased mobile data usage impacting our lives today?

Q2 – How can using mobile analytics inform your site content creation?

Week Five – Web (Google) Analytics

If there is anything I’ve learned over the past week, it is that search engines have revolutionized how people use the internet and are completely taken for granted by the public at large. For some time, I’ve understood that Google indexes all the sites that it can, and uses that to help you find what you need, but that was always an abstract thought. It never occurred to me that when you type something into the search bar, you aren’t actually searching the actually web, but rather, Google’s index of the web. It seems pretty obvious once you hear it for the first time, but I think most people think of search engines as access point to the web instead of what the really are, which is essentially a library of all the websites that it can find.

It’s really is crazy to think about how much computer processing must be going on to be constantly crawling billions of pages. It’s also kind of funny, but a couple days ago, I got an email saying that there was a problem with my website, and Googlebot could not access my site, and that the error rate was 100%. I’m not really sure what that means, but I’m sure it isn’t a good thing. I didn’t make many changes recently, and I can’t imagine what would cause this to happen. Hopefully it was just a hiccup, and everything is fine, but I’ll have to look into some more. I checked out Google Analytics, and took a look at the all my site’s traffic over the last 12 months. According to Google Analytics, the majority of my site’s traffic comes from Facebook links to blog posts and organic Google searches. However, most of the searches include “bassett” and “photography”, so I’d like to expand that some. This goes back to SEO, but I want to be found more often when people are searching for photographers in Washington DC or more specifically, wedding photographers in Washington DC, as that is generally my most lucrative offering. My most popular landing pages are the home page, and then the blog page, followed by my most popular blog posts. I really need to get my “Sessions”, “Wedding/Engagement” and “Portraits” pages some more landings.

I’ve been messing around with Google Analytics for a couple years, but never really knew what to do with the information it was provided. I would just look at the geographic locations of the visitors, which is mostly Florida and the Washington, DC Metro Area, meaning it was mostly just people that already know me. Only as I am writing this post, combined with the SEO discussions we’ve had over the past week or so, has the data made enough sense for me to be able to see an area to grow and put together a plan to improve. I hope to really dive deeper into GA as we learn more about it this week, and hopefully, I’ll be able to gather more insight to my visitors’ behaviors and what I can do to make them more likely to interact more as well as shed more light on the areas of my site that need fixing so I can attract “better” visitors who are looking to buy my products or services.

Q1-What are some tactics you can employ to reduce the bounce rate of you home page?

Q2-What are some ways you can turn social media “likes” and “follow” into purchases?