From April 7th – April 10th, I’ll be attending and speaking at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization conference in Toronto. These are my thoughts, feelings, and (hopefully) epiphanies from interacting with the world’s best and brightest in the world of digital measurement.

WEDNESDAY – APRIL 7TH – 9:35 PM

eMetrics day one. First off, the conference director Andrea Hadley did an awesome job putting things together. As with any conference, the true direction of thought leadership happens over dinner (not on stage), and sadly my inbox had to take priority this evening. So at this point, all I can offer is a quick rundown and a few opinions from the first sessions of the day.

Kickoff

After Andrea gave a quick intro, Alex Langshur, President of the Web Analytics Association, talked a bit about the WAA. A good summary highlighting the emphasis on community beyond Web Analytics Wednesday, legislation of privacy information, and education. I’m a big supporter of the WAA’s agenda, so it was a great way to start.

NHL.COM

Theresa Locklear, the director of Web Analytics & Customer Insight talked extensively about the reporting practices of the NHL. I was impressed by their degree of transparency – sharing numbers, talking about real case studies (albeit, mostly wins), and highlighting a few examples of real life optimization success. She also showcased an analyst team bigger than many (five to be exact). Clearly the NHL sees value in data driven decision making.

But at the same time, something kept popping into my head. There were quite a few examples of web optimization in the presentation, and when I asked about testing, they said they did none. In my mind, that means the decisions are largely left up to heuristics. Can’t black box that.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative panel

I’ll be honest – I caught what I could of the panel. But I’m trying to buy a house right now in Toronto, and in this market when the phone rings, you answer. But I did see enough to have a few observations.

A. I’m not sure I fully understand the logic behind having five people with (or formerly with) “Analyst” or “Consultant” in their title debating the merits or uses of qualitative data. I think we lost an important perspective by having no pure qualitative researchers representing their field. Back in my old web days, I used to think anyone could do qualitative research. When you work with PHD’s in the subject, people trained in observing and interpreting human behaviour, you recognize that there’s a difference. A few discussions at the WAA Mixer after the session reinforced my thinking.

B. When did “Quantitative” and “Business” become interchangeable? As the discussion progressed, it felt like a bit of a B-School / D-School discussion – not in terms of one versus the other, but in terms of purpose. Research is used for a lot of reasons, and yes, in some situations one is preferred over the other. Tonight felt rigid, like every situation was an either/or but not a both. Marko Hurst was the exception who I thought represented both disciplines well.

So tonight was largely a technology, mathematics, and alienation free evening. A positive in my eMetrics journey. Looking forward to a big day tomorrow.

WEDNESDAY – APRIL 7TH – 7:54 AM.

Today is my start of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization conference in Toronto, an event I am simultaneously looking forward to and dreading. On the “looking forward to” side, there are many, many awesome speakers presenting. From Avinash Kaushik to Jim Novo (a hero in the space) to my always entertaining former co-conspirator Christopher Berry, it’s an all star lineup.  I’ll also be presenting the numbers behind the Aviva Community Fund, a marquee project for Idea Couture in the social innovation and cause marketing space.

On the “dread” side, I can’t help but feel this conference is going to be the end of my formal association with the digital measurement community.I’ve been a practicing Web Analytics analyst for about 6 years now – an old guy in digital terms. But even in that space, I always felt a bit like an outsider as a user experience strategist (researcher) first and an analytics practitioner second – a divide that is becoming an argument of validation versus prediction.

Meanwhile, many of the dominant conversations are distant and foreign. As Web Analysts, we focus our efforts on what will derivate the largest impact. Usually that means optimizing the user experience around the highest revenue-generating opportunities. Rather than focus our efforts on any one individual, we analyze patterns because it’s a better use of our time. But it seems as though we’ve lost our own way – now focusing in on technologies and methods designed to derive actionable results around strategies that most clients can’t afford to build in the first place.

Over the past six years, I’ve seen an industry migrate technologies, define definitions, formalize education, and find its way onto the book shelves of many of my friends (a big win when you feel you’re in a niche space). Our current direction has me concerned that everything’s about to get effed up.

For the rich few, yes, these new methods and technologies can (and will) create a competitive advantage. But for the poor greater, this only further creates barriers to entry – introducing alienating languages, foreign skills, and high costs. I’ve heard many people in this industry talk about how wonderful Web analytics is because it’s accessible to marketers and (with a little help), it can be understood all the way to the top. Because of this, there is power in our recommendations.

While I can’t be certain yet, I get the sense that digital measurement is going the way of the great black box – a fifedome for a chosen few to understand. It’s also focusing on things most clients simply can’t resource against. While, yes, the decision support may push us towards greater accuracy, we can’t forget the politics behind all of this. I’ve been in enough Marketing Business Intelligence briefings to know (whether right or wrong) who makes the final decisions. In the world of mixed quantitative and qualitative data, whoever tells the best story usually gets the most attention. Black boxes don’t make for good stories.

If you ever visit MIT, you’ll see that their floors look antiquated and cracked. It’s because, in many cases, the hallways of MIT were  where the building materials and construction methods were first developed, and they want every student to now, and remember the origins.

Evolution and revolution are both needed, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore where we came from. I’m hoping as the conference moves forward I see a little humanization in the midst of our attempts to automate human behaviour.

Like 75% of the world, I’m a visual thinker, and I need sketching as part of my tool kit to describe the problems I face and iterate on the solutions I ideate. The sad part is, as a business graduate, no one ever told me that this was a skill I needed. For some, sketching comes naturally. For others, a little inspiration is needed.

As a strategist and experience architect, sketching solutions is one of the most important tools I have available to me. While we’ve been trained over the years to believe that sketching is an artist-only skill, the reality is that any problem solving process, no matter what field it falls under, can be improved through the infusion of pen, paper and design thinking.

A wife, a thesis and a drawing

My wife is currently finishing her PHD in child psychology from McGill University and spends most of her free time analyzing the data associated with her dissertation. Over the weekend, I passed by her desk and saw the following sketch:

What you’re looking at is Meredith’s use of sketching to describe, understand and test the relationship between the variables in her survey data set.  The visualization of this information allowed her to better understand the systems of her data and progress her understanding of the problem at hand. My mind was blown.

A Sketching Definition
From the words of the always wise Wikipedia:

A sketch is a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not intended as a finished work. A sketch is a quick way to record an idea for later use. Artist’s sketches primarily serve as a way to try out different ideas and establish a composition before undertaking a more finished work, especially when the finished work is expensive and time consuming. Sketching sharpens an artist’s ability to focus on the most important elements of a subject and is a prescribed part of artistic development for students.

While this definition clearly leans towards the realm of artistic sketching, there are a number of important takeaways:

• Sketching is freehand. If you can put pen to paper, you can sketch. You do not need an artdegree, an expensive set of tools, or the ability to draw the perfect straight line. There is no barrier to using sketching as part of your tool set other than your own lack of self-confidence.
• Sketching is not intended as finished work. For some reason, non-designers feel the need to be perfect the first time. Sketching is not the same as a final marketing strategy, information architecture, project proposal or whitepaper. Your sketch will go through dozens of iterations before it’s done, so it should be treated as disposable.
• Sketching is a tool to try out different ideas. The old saying the first answer is usually the right one is an unfortunate one. Imagine how unsuccessful brainstorming sessions would be if you stopped after the first idea was delivered. When you sketch, there is a low investment required to try other avenues. Sketching is an opportunity to explore dozens of different directions with no consequences.
• Sketching lets you focus on the most important elements. It’s amazing how communicating through sketching can cause you to completely reframe the nature of your problem. By forcing yourself to communicate ideas visually, sketching can enlighten your problem solving process.

Sketching in the wild
When brought outside the domain of designers, sketching is a communications tool to help organize and socialize ideas. Literally, it’s using our innate drawing abilities to organize information in a way that goes beyond pure verbal communication. In this context, sketching is less a piece of design than it is an aid to thought. Sketching provides us with insight into our own definition of a problem, and the better we can define the problem we’re trying to solve, the better the solution.

While rougher sketches require more imagination as a tool to facilitate discussion, the bigger point is that using sketching as a descriptive tool rather than relying on verbal communication enhances our understanding of a problem.

Any problem.

Sure, sketching is a tool to visualize the solution,but it’s also useful in defining a system, organizing ideas and prototyping thought-based solutions. When we (business people) solve a problem based only on verbal queues, very seldom do we take the time to define the scope of a problem. The greatest benefit of sketching is that it forces us engage with an idea in new ways.

The reality is we blessed with the innate problem solving skills of my wife. I learned that sketching was necessary to describing the context of a problem after many painful client meetings facing tough questions that never even crossed my mind. For business people, sketching can enhance your understanding of a problem and allow you to try variations rather than settle on the first answer we think of.

There is no risk in sketching, other than uncovering some input you should have thought of long ago. So go ahead, be sketchy, and take your problem solving skills to the next level.

Innovation requires intuition not to help create more ideas, but to make sense of them. It is most needed when evaluating ideas, particularly transformative ones. Big ideas often seem stupid at a first glance, your little voice from your intuition is the one who is telling you “wait a minute, there’s something here…”. But is there something called “strategic intuition” and “tactical intuition”? I don’t think so.

All breakthrough ideas happen in all realms of human endeavor. Can you learn to improve your intuition or you are simply born with or without it? Again, I don’t have the answer here, but it probably lies somewhere in the middle. Intuition is closely linked to sense-making abilities. The act of sense-making is discovering the new terrain as you are inventing it. In the very process of mapping the new terrain, you are actually creating it.

Here are three tips for sense-making:

1/ Seek many types and sources of data (including raw data)
2/ Do not just apply your current frameworks, try to overlay them on the problem space
3/Try to use as many metaphors, pictures or stories to try to capture and communicate critical elements of your map.

Applied intuition, there are three things you can do to make it work better for you:

1/ The search process – you need to abandon your preconceived notions of what solution might be. Open-mindedness is an invitation for intuition to kick-in.
2/ The flash of insight – it is about making the most of stimuli, whether they are music, visual, a personal story, a physical environment or smell etc. Shower works best for most people.
3/ Seeing the forests – looking at a problem narrowly doesn’t help with intuition, sometimes distancing yourself allows you to see the whole forest and allows your intuition to kick in.

Image Source: http://www.thecoolhunter.net/food/; http://www.thecoolhunter.net/kids/

To many, the phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ has become an example of banal business-speak that gives management advisers the counter-intuitive reputation of NOT being imaginative in their thinking (don’t get me started on ‘adding value by leveraging synergies’). When executed well however, it’s one of the most invaluable services that advisers can lend to their clients, and one of the key ingredients is the elimination of false constraints.

Much has been written about how today’s manager is deluged with more information than ever before. Dealing with a steady torrent of daily demands and decisions, it almost becomes a necessity to employ the most convenient and conventional solutions to business problems – ones that are perceived to result in the least friction with the myriad constraints facing the manager. Very often, however, these solutions prove to be short-term patches. I’ve heard many managers lament that there simply ‘isn’t enough time for stepping back to do any deep thinking’ that would result in more creative and effective solutions.

Here’s where the value of the fresh perspective comes in.

We’re often engaged to solve long-festering business problems, and a key element of any engagement is a collaborative workshop with a diverse cross-section of participants from the client organization. Going into the workshop, we often uncover deep-seated mental blocks in response to constraints of the business and industry (both real and perceived). For example, a potential solution involving a relatively minor change to a technology system may never surface because ‘all I.T. requests take forever and are not worth the trouble’.

Freeing oneself from these paper chains is necessary to ideate the most creative and effective solutions. Often, these self-inflicted constraints are taken as a given (like wallpaper on the walls), and so no one even addresses them. So one of the most useful exercises that we’ve done at the outset of these ideation workshops is to have everyone anonymously jot down the constraints (chains) that they feel are exacerbating their business problem. Each one is then read out to the group and is given the second-guessing that is long overdue.

What then unfolds is the realization that many of these constraints are indeed artificial and eminently surmountable. This adds a multitude of arrows to the manager’s quiver and allows us to collaborate on creative, previously unexplored solutions that were artificially kept off the table in the past.

I counsel my clients to always re-examine the long-standing constraints that have stood in the way of the solution that your issue deserves. You may have more options than you think.

P.S. (After you’ve eliminated the false constraints, EMBRACE the real ones…that’s a post for another time).

Image Source: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/218058 Credit: Dani Simmonds