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Professor of Psychology at at Princeton University, Prof. Daniel Kahneman, has given an exceptional lecture at TED where he discusses the concept of ‘happiness’. Prof. Kahneman shines a light onto what happiness is and it is not what you may think. Watch the TED video of the lecture below and share your thoughts on happiness as your remembered self may allow, as the self of presence is limited to just 3 seconds!

Another year and yet another awards show.  Feeling wholly unchallenged I began watching the Grammy Awards anticipating cliched performances with its requisite stable of ‘Idol’ performing ‘Hall of Fame’ inductees.  Instead, I re-discovered Pink who presented in my opinion one of the most delicate and thoughtfully conceived performances that I have ever seen.

In an age of music where, much as everything else, commodity seems to matter most I feel musically more alive because of artists like Pink.  This single performance has endeared music to me as an art form once again.   What do you think?

Wired’s The Threat Level blog recently published a disturbing account of how two bloggers late December were subjected to governmental pressure to reveal a source. The Wired article centered around instructions that America’s Transport Security Administration (TSA) issued Christmas day in light of the latest attempted plane bombing by a suspected operative of the Al Qaeda, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

The bloggers, Steven Frischling and Christopher Elliott, travel journalists each wrote on their blogs about the advisory. A spokeswoman for the TSA, Suzanne Trevino, maintains that although the document was not a secure document it was not intended for mass dissemination.

Details from the document — guidance that passengers boarding flights for US bound destinations should be ‘pat-down’ with particular attention paid to the upper thigh and torso — were sent by the TSA to over 10,000 foreign airports and airline operators late Christmas day.

It seems that America is at a cross roads. On one hand there are the founding principals contained within the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment in particular which guarantees freedom of speech and of the press and on the other the passing of the USA Patriot Act in 2001 has undoubtedly produced shades of gray in how America protects herself.

When do these freedoms get overruled by the need of the State to protect the population and more importantly; who is the arbiter when presumed freedoms are crossed by the greater need of public good? What are you thoughts on striking this balance?

Further reading:
www.bordc.org/threats/speech.php

UPDATE: The TSA have withdrawn the subpoenas and offered a new computer to one of the Bloggers involved, read more at theconsumerist.org

Clever marketers have long sought to track the successes of the marketing campaigns that they run.   Well before search marketing and long before online marketing — in all of it’s forms that we are familiar with now — traditional direct marketing was king! DM executives would use a number of different devices, from PO BOX numbers, Offer codes and Pricing to Regional testing and Panel groups in an effort to record success and to reduce the cost of acquisition.

With online marketing almost everything is tracked and as a client if it is not then you need to be asking some serious questions of your planning and buying agency.   The upside to all of this tracking is that in isolation you know exactly which sources drive traffic and conversions to your website, or so you may think.

How often have you looked at your PPC or natural traffic data for brand terms and thought to yourself how well they seem to work in comparison to more generic and higher CPC cost keyword traffic referrals?   Many marketing managers have taken spending decisions on this data alone only to find that they loose out on brand name conversions.   Further analysis applied to your visit and unique visitor data can reveal further those traffic drivers and keywords that introduce, influence and convince users to undertake different actions on your website.

Once you have captured this data which can and will span non keyword sources of traffic.   For example clicks on online banner adverts or referral visits from your affiliate partners the task is then to assign a weighting to each of these channels.   Current methodology bases this approximately on the order of the touchpoint, the introducer and converter receive a higher weighting whereas the influencers typically receive lesser value.   Once the data has been assigned the analysis task requires a depth of data so that there is enough information on which to draw patterns and actionable decisions.

Dependencies against these results abound and every business and business units within them (responsible for separate marketing goals and budgets).

Analytics

Enterprise grade website analytics platforms such as Omniture, Coremetrics and Nedstat will have you believe that each of their tools respectively have the answers to solve all of your online marketing queries easily and out of the box.    It has been my experience that these platforms all suffer one critical point of failure, their complexity and inflexibility.

Unless you are fortunate enough to have an implementation team within your business who know the right types of questions to be asking any of these platforms you face the real possibility of suffering resource intensive corrective measures at a later date.   Key questions that should be asked of these vendors include:

1. Platform versions and flexibility – what are the different platform versions that they have available and how do they compare to each other? Is there flexibility to up or down grade during the contract period without penalty?
2. Data collection options – detail the data that is captured within the platform and how that data is made available in reporting.
3. Total cost of ownership – considering current traffic volumes and projected growth and additional support within your business and as professional services from both the analytics vendor and other partners that the platform impacts on (see point 7 below) create your total cost of ownership breakdown.   Be sure to consider set up fees, cost per 1,000 page views (CPM – as most vendors charge this), incremental costs, support costs, professional services, additional hardware costs associated with drawing analysis or delivering actionable data or additional head-count or administration costs.
4. Support – what are the routes to receive support? How much support and by what methods are included with the contract pricing? What if any would be separate chargeable support services?
5. Segmentation capabilities – what are the key value added benefits of your platforms segmentation abilities over competitors?   Can you provide testimonials of customers that have been dissatisfied and are now happy with their purchase?   A fundamental question to be asked is: Do you have to pre-code everything in custom javascript tags on each page on your site to be able to segment the data post capture?
6. Importing & exporting data – what capabilities are available (any additional price?) to import historical analytics, commerce and user data?  If we decide in the future to change to another vendor what can you tell us about the data ownership?
7. Integration with other data sources – with many competing interests in web analytics such as email, on-site search, multi-variate testing and optimisation you need to have a thorough understanding of how your platform vendor proposes to handle the nuances from each.
8. What’s next, the future roadmap – keep pace with practitioners in web analytics like Avinash Kaushik who have a breadth of experience that is second to none.  If the sales person of your proposed Analytics platform is unaware of these highly visible commentators then I would advise caution.

Affordable website Analytics solutions such as Google Analytics have held promise for a number of years and are now starting to deliver true enterprise scale in Analytics.  The recent expansion of Google Analytics to capture multiple custom variable data across many different dimensions of data, granular access controls and native support for MVT optimisation make it a worthy contender for you consideration.   Many businesses sighted their concern for data privacy and security – Google Analytics has one of the most robust privacy and terms of use/data use policies around – see it at http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html

Professional Services for Google Analytics are now also available by a wide range of IT solutions providers with multiple sector experiences.

As a marketer who needs to answer evermore diverse questions to target and respond to customer needs; the choice of Analytics platform is central to your continued success – make informed decisions.  Some vendors and products to investigate include:

Google Analytics – http://analytics.google.com
Site Catalyst – http://www.omniture.com
Coremetrics – http://www.coremetrics.com
Nedstat – http://www.nedstat.co.uk
Mint – http://www.haveamint.com
Web Trends – http://www.webtrends.com
Click Tracks – http://www.clicktracks.com
SiteBrand – http://www.sitebrand.com

Google have been testing for many months a feed of data from Twitter combined with increased crawl rate for trusted news and blog posting sources (such as the Huffington Post) and have announced today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA that they have now struck deals with both Facebook and MySpace to leverage their data feeds too.

This of course follows their announcement today that Google are now supporting real time search in earnest worldwide – here is a video about it and here is a link to real-time ‘Obama’ information:

Also announced today is that Google Trends is now out of Beta and is prime time, try it out today along with the improved Hot Searches feature.