Last weekend my wife and I went to see Keith Urban and Sugarland at the RBC Center in Raleigh. It was a fantastic show and a good experience all-around (save for the parking lot, which was a Mad Max movie.) Because I had opted in to a LiveNation promotion related to the show, I got an email a few days later with this message:
If you thought Keith Urban was great – tell us! If you thought Keith Urban was just okay, tell us! Whatever your reaction – tell us! Your feedback helps us build a better concert experience. It should take only about 5 minutes for you to help shape the future of Live Nation concerts.
Now, I never turn down a survey, and five minutes of my time is surely not an onerous request, so I took the survey. Sure enough, there were about five minutes of questions about the event, followed by the demographic/classification questions that to me signal the end of a well-constructed quantitative survey instrument.
Except, that wasn’t the end. Immediately after I answered the demo/classification questions, I got a new page advising me that now they’d like to ask me a series of questions about my entertainment preferences and music tastes. By page three of a series of long, tedious menu-based questions and sliders, I quit. Since I wasn’t allowed to skip questions, I assume that my prior inputs on the wonderful experience I had at the RBC Center were lost (creating a clear bias), but that is up to whoever is administering the survey.
Let’s set aside the fact that this survey was clearly in excess of the “about five minutes” I was promised. The real issue with this sort of survey is that this survey is more than just an anonymous survey instrument–it is the first step in an online relationship with LiveNation (I don’t believe I had ever attended a LiveNation concert before, and certainly wasn’t in their database). An online relationship is a lot like an offline relationship–there’s a courtship, a few awkward exchanges, eventually a kiss (or a kiss-off). First base comes before second base, and so on. With this survey, my initial relationship with LiveNation began with a modest request–five minutes of my time to talk about my recent concert experience. Anything after that was essentially trying to ’score’ before getting to first base.
The ‘courtship’ of email marketing and the process of giving up customer data should be a true value-exchange; a genuine quid pro quo. I give you five minutes of info on a recent concert, you give me something of value on a subsequent email. Maybe on the next email you give me a coupon, or a line on buying tickets before they go on sale. Next time, you can ask me for information about my music preferences. In the future, if you show me how giving up that data provides me with value, maybe I’ll give you something else.
Keep it up, and you just might score.
Try to round the bases all at once, however, and you’ll probably end up getting slapped–which is exactly what my cancellation of their lengthy survey amounted to. It’s not that I am averse to giving them this data–they just have to earn it first. If this were merely an anonymous online survey executed by an online market research company, then presumably I would have received some kind of incentive to complete a lengthy survey. In the case of a branded survey, however, it’s not just a data collection instrument, it’s the start of a relationship. This one, unhappily, is off to a rocky start.
…Fly Clear is gone. Just as I was packing to fly off again tomorrow, Clear has ceased operations with no notice whatsoever. The troubling thing about this economy is not so much that business are in trouble, it’s the alarming speed of their decline. There is so much leverage behind some of these ventures that if credit is cut off, they literally can’t function overnight (the same thing happened to Bear Stearns on a much larger scale.) I have to believe that Clear was succeeding, so I wonder why their creditors pulled the rug out from under them?
In an historic verdict, the Recording Industry Association of America has triumphantly defeated its customers by taking down one of its most sinister foes, the diabolical Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd, Minnesota. A jury ruled that Ms. Thomas-Rasset should pay about $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she posted on a file-sharing service, for a total of $1.92 million. Surely, the only way to score a more convincing victory over its customers would be for the RIAA to seek the death penalty.
Surely Sirius XM didn’t just release a paid subscription model iPhone app that doesn’t include Howard Stern, MLB NFL or other premium content? I realize that the rights to MLB and NFL on the iPhone are not theirs to sell, but they also didn’t have to charge subscription fees, either. What Sirius XM has done here is far more sinister than this strategic error might initially suggest. What they have really done, by putting their service on the iPhone, amidst myriad other (free) apps like Pandora and Slacker, is to invite listeners to make the kind of apples-to-apples direct comparison to other services that was heretofore impossible with the satellite-only, dashboard-full-of-wires iteration of their previous offering.
If all you have are an assortment of static, pre-programmed music channels and content I can get elsewhere on the iPhone and online, the direct comparisons are inevitable and inescapable. Why buy the cow when I can get the milk for free–especially when that ‘milk’ is as compelling as Pandora, Slacker and a host of other infinitely more customizable, personalized offerings? Far better would have been to make their non-premium offerings available for free (even with a one-time payment for the app) with the option to upgrade to get Howard and even custom music channels (as Slacker does). Satellite has lost its way, and lost the sound of the consumer’s voice.
I know, I know–I wrote about this yesterday. Today, however, I continue to see a constant barrage of tweets about this stat, and now this headline from MediaPost: Millenials Among Those Who Don’t Appreciate Twitter. First of all, the article gets the stat wrong–it isn’t 22% of 18-26 year-olds in the study that indicated they use Twitter, it’s 22% of 18-24 year-olds. Typo, maybe, but it’s one in a long, long series of innumerate crimes against data the social web commits every day (/rant). The original PMN data release, I think, has the right spin: “Twitter Has Yet To Catch On,” if we read “catch on” as “be used by the majority.” The reporting of this stat, however, has almost gleefully interpreted this datapoint as the MediaPost article has, that Millenials “don’t appreciate Twitter.” It is waaayyyyy too early to draw that kind of conclusion, especially when you look at the overall trajectory of Twitter–if a snapshot of such a moving target is feasible.
Consider: Compete.com shows the most recent unique user count for Twitter.com to be about 20 million. 20 million–if they were even all Americans (they are clearly not) would be less than 8% of persons 12+ in America. The figure presented in this study for Millenials suggests that “only” 22% of 18-24 year olds use Twitter–nearly three times as likely as the gen pop 12+. How does that translate to “only,” or not appreciated? The 22% looks small only when compared to the 99% figure (persons 18-24 who use any social network in this particular study) but I would hazard a guess that the 22% is going to grow a whole lot more than the 99%!
A panel-based survey of 18-24 year-olds found that while 99% have profiles on social networks, “only” 22% are on Twitter. The issue with this story, as with 95% of the surveys I come across, is not with the survey (though, let’s not get too excited about 44 persons out of a 200-person panel) but with the reporting of the survey. In this case, the reporting of this survey uses the word “only”, with all of its implications. Indeed, all of the reports on this study that I have seen on the web characterize the results in this manner, and even the quotes put out by the survey sponsor seem almost apologetic towards Twitter’s relatively “small” numbers.
Here’s the problem with that. Change occurs at the margin. Let’s drop the word “only,” with its tacit assumptions, and focus on this: If 22% of 18-24 year olds actually do use Twitter, that’s millions of young adults, a subset of millions more. “Only” around 30% of the population owns an Apple-branded iPod. If “only” 22% of Americans owned a GM car we wouldn’t have today’s largest story. Taking a snapshot of a moving target is always dicey–best not to compound that by making a value judgement on the number. When that target stops moving, then we can throw around words like “only.” If you look at Compete.com’s assessment of Twitter traffic over the last three months, you’ll see that “only” does the trajectory of Twitter a gross disservice. Instead, I’d humbly suggest dropping the prefix “only” and adding a suffix: “so far.” We don’t know what Twitter will become, and I sincerely doubt anyone really knows what it is…yet.
You’d think I would be a sucker for web metrics, being in the market research business, but I find a lot of metrics to be ultimately not as useful in practice as they are ‘interesting.’ By useful here, I mean “have a direct correlation to driving sales.” One that I love to track, however, is the percentage of site visits (landings/entry pages) that initially land on our home page. Much to my delight, this number continues to decline. Today, less than 15% of our site visits enter initially through our home/index page, and this continues to drop from month to month. The lower this number goes, the better we are doing with creating content, articles, studies and other search-sticky content: i.e., the other stuff people land on when they visit the site. When someone visits our home page, we really don’t know much about them, and they probably won’t be back–that’s the hard truth. When someone visits a page that is about something, however, we know a lot about them–that they are interested in that thing, at least–and when people find something of value on a topic they are interested in, they generally come back. When they keep coming back, they are more likely to regard us as subject matter experts, and that puts us one step closer to having a client relationship than we would have been had they simply stumbled across our home page at random.
I don’t really know what a ‘good’ figure is for this, but I am happy that most people come to our site because they are looking for something specifically, and that most people find that specific thing. The more valuable content you can create, the better this stat will be–and watching it continue to go down is a gratifying validation that the quality and quantity of our content is improving, bit by bit, day by day. If you are either new at analyzing web stats, or limit your analysis to a few top-line numbers, I’d encourage you to start tracking this one and use it as a yardstick towards continuous improvement.
