In an interview with Avinash Kaushik, I asked who I should interview next for the Compete blog and Avinash said emphatically, Mitch Joel. “I don’t know of anyone else who has a better handle on all things Social Media and Web 2.0 and Marketing 2.0 and how the web is fundamentally altering our lives.”

Mitch is President of Twist Image – a digital marketing and communications agency. Marketing Magazine dubbed him the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” and in 2006 he was named one of the most influential authorities on Blog Marketing in the world. He is a marketing and communications visionary, interactive expert, community leader, Blogger and Podcaster.

In your upcoming book a key focus will be on the ways that technology is empowering individuals to build personal brands that will rival corporate brands. Will that change where / how marketers add value and differentiate corporate brands?

What we’re really seeing is that branding and marketing is no longer relegated to the big companies with the even bigger pocketbooks. These digital channels empower and enable entrepreneurs of all kinds to direct the right message to the right people. Because of this, I think it is going to be increasingly more challenging for all marketers (regardless of size and money) to get their message through. In terms of personal branding, it’s going to be a big challenge for organizations to deal with individuals who have huge personal brands within the organization (through channels like Blogs, twitter, Podcasts, etc…) when compared against their own leaders.

What best practices can we all learn from when it comes to building a personal brand?

It’s important to understand that something like personal branding is so new, I would never say that there are any specific “best practices.” To have a successful personal brand (which, in and of itself, is pretty vague idea to define), you’ll need to follow the basic common sense rules you use in every aspect of your everyday life – be honest, be kind, say “please” and “thank you,” add value, build community by giving abundantly and always play nice. It may sound hokey, but the best brands (personal and corporate) that are doing this are scoring big. The most important aspect is to be yourself. I’m constantly reminded of what Oscar Wilde said: “Be you because others are already taken.”

Lastly, a personal best practice is to always see how you can add value to others. In turn, you will be surprised, shocked and pleasantly pleased with what comes back.

Has the rise of personal brands changed the way marketers are or should hire social media experts for their marketing organizations?

It depends. An individual being hired to manage the social media aspects of a business doesn’t have to – necessarily – have a huge personal brand. They have to be someone who likes to help others and get things done.

Many companies think they need “a name” to help build their credibility. What they really need is to be producing something remarkable (think about Seth Godin’s Purple Cow). Having someone who can speak to people in “human” and not “business” talk is huge.

There’s also been lots of Blog talk around what, exactly, is an expert… The waters are still a little murky simply because it’s still very new and most of the major success we’ve seen in the space could well be the exceptions and not the rule.

All this to say, that hiring someone to be the social media go-to person in an organization is not an easy task and you do want to ensure that whoever it is has some level of experience, knowledge and know-how.

Besides staffing, what are some of the other organizational shifts in marketing driven by social media trends that they need to address?

Wow, where to begin? We need IT and Marketing to work closer together. We need customer service and Marketing to speak with the PR and Communications people. We need to better understand the data we have about our customers and what we’re doing with it.

Silos have to change and the hierarchy of who can say what to who needs to also loosen a little. If you have an admin person who has got the Google Alerts going and can address an online situation, it’s important to empower and encourage that person to make things right.

This is a game of corporate pride. Your employees are your best brand evangelists and you can empower them to grow their personal brands by allowing them to connect with consumers.

How do you stay on top of trends in digital marketing?

I swear by Google Reader, Google Alerts, Technorati and the Podcasts I listen to. I’m also very transparent, so if you ever want to see what Blogs and Podcasts I follow, they are all on my Blogroll at twistimage.com/blog. I also share stuff I find in Google Reader (also available off of my Blogroll) and if anyone wants to connect with me via Facebook, you can feel free to, as the stuff I find interesting is also posted there.
On the traditional mass media front, I read a lot of books and pick up Wired, Fast Company and Fortune magazine.

What is the next trend on the horizon that marketers need to prepare for?

I don’t think it’s so much of a trend as the new reality. With all of these tools to publish our thoughts and share them, and if you tie this into how deep and long Google’s memory is, I think we need to be very prepared for these new individuals (and their personal brands) to rise. I think we’re going to see entrepreneurs grow new business like never before, and it’s a good time to be in the marketing and communications game.

You recently wrote a warning to marketers, “don’t forget your website.” At a time when companies are constantly battling public perception and outspoken individuals, do you have specific advice for optimizing a website to speak directly to potential or current customers?

Simply put: speak to your consumers in the same way that they speak about your products. Jargon, acronyms, fancy pants words don’t work. Speak from your heart. Speak with passion. Be real.

Who should we interview for the Compete Blog next?

Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen. If you can get to Presentation Zen, you can do it all.

If you missed it yesterday, please check out Part 1 of Compete’s interview with author, blogger and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, which discussed Web Analytics 2.0 and the best tools to use, among other things.

Are free tools really all that a company needs? When should you pay for premium content?

No.

Scared you, did I not? :)

No, free tools are not all that a company might need. I covered some examples in a previous answer about cases where you might want to get a paid solution. Here is one more scenario, you really want to create a data warehouse environment where you merge your web data with the rest of your company data. In that case I would just go with Unica because it makes it easy to get a standard data model and provides an easily organized output that you can plonk in your data warehouse or in front of your BI tool.

What is important to realize that as Marketers / Website Owners you don’t have to live in a data famine, you don’t need PhDs to use web analytics tools, you can do an astonishing amount of tracking and analysis with even a free tool. Zero barriers to you becoming smart. So start there. Then let your needs evolve you into the right paid solution.

Here is my recommendation for a process: How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative

How can organizations encourage more of their employees to use analytics (especially when they’re already paying for the solution)?

I recently wrote a post that focused on just this topic (and pointed out why Analytics is like Angelina Jolie!). Here were my recommendations:

1. Do Something Surprising: Don’t Puke Data Out.
2. Start With Outcomes / Measuring Impact, Not Visits.
3. Create Heroes & Role Models (and no, not yourself, put your red cape back).
4. Web Analytics 2.0 Baby! Use Your Customers & Competitors… :)
   
   

5. If You Want Excitement, Make It Fun!
   Hold contests.
   Hold Internal “Conferences.”
   Hold Office Hours.

Let me touch briefly on one of them here, Outcomes.

I find that most Analysts focus on visits and visitors and time on site and page views and what not. There is nary a sight of Outcome. I always implore them with this: “A million people came to the website, so what the heck happened? Did we make money? Did we create satisfied customers?”

Tying things to Outcomes means that people are focusing on things that matter, to their company (revenue), to their customers (satisfaction, net promoters), to themselves (bonuses!!!) - That is the key to your success.

How can people best use behavioral segmentation when gathering competitive intelligence?

Segmentation is key to truly finding any insights from your web data (be it yours or that of your industry/competitors). That’s because unlike old channels the web is used by a much more complex set of your customers and for solving many different types of problems those customers have.

We are quite used to using behavior as a key segment for our offline channels, think TV. Applying some of the same approaches on the web can be instructive.

Some of the ones I find to be insightful are types like: “people who visit this site also visit that,” “people who use these keywords also look for those other things or end up at these places,” “here are the clusters of behavior that are becoming more prominent in people who visit the biggest site in the industry,” etc.

What’s your perspective on capturing the voice of the customer using web analytics?

It is quite simple really: If you are not doing this then you will not be successful. You might not quite die, but you won’t come any where close to being as big as you potentially could be.

There are so many limitations to what you can do in response to your customer needs offline, many of those disappear online. You can respond to segments of your customers (say using better content targeting systems), you can involve them in identifying the right pricing structures or the optimal website experiences (using experimentation and testing systems), you can get them to identify the core things you stink at on your website (using surveys), you can get them to help themselves by improving your tech support websites, and on and on and on.

If you don’t, at the minimum, have at least a simple but effective survey listening mechanism (like 4Q) and you are not doing at least A/B testing (using free tools like the Website Optimizer) then you are not playing the “online game” as well as you can. And you can bet your competitors will get ahead of you.

The web is a rare medium where you can truly practice customer centricity. It is time to shift the power away from the HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in your company and to your Customers. Do it, you’ll love it.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve discovered using Web analytics?

How very wrong we are about what our customers actually want / need.

Or put another way, overlaying our own intentions and our experiences on top of the clicks data is a huge mistake. Because we are not the customer. We need to involve our customers and listen to them to truly understand how best to interpret the massive amount of data we have.

And here is another fun thing: The web, through analytics, is amazingly awesome at getting out there fast, with mostly baked ideas, take a risk and learn very quickly. Traditional Marketers are deeply risk averse because it takes too long to find out you made a mistake.

Consider a catalog for example. You make a mistake and it will take three months to find out (from idea conception to approval to printing to mailing to customer reaction to you finding out). On the web you can find that out in less than 24 hours, because you have access to all the wonderful analytics data!

Who should we interview for the Compete Blog next?

My good friend Mitch Joel (wistimage.com/blog/). I don’t know of anyone else who has a better handle on all things Social Media and Web 2.0 and Marketing 2.0 and how the web is fundamentally altering our lives. He is a true evangelist, and a fantastic speaker to boot.

For five years Compete has invited marketing pioneers from across the US to participate in its annual Client Forum. Among this year’s presenters was author, blogger and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. He entertained and educated us on how to turn web analytics into actionable insights. I decided to interview him for the blog to share what we learned with anyone that could not attend.

During the Compete Client Forum you spoke about the flaws in just using traditional metrics for measuring online marketing and the critical need for marketing strategies to deliver actionable insights. What are some of the pitfalls that online marketers fall into?

The biggest one is that unfortunately a lot of online marketing remains a faith based initiative.

In one of the most data rich environments in the world, the web, faith based initiatives are a sub optimal outcome.

The flaw is less that Marketers are using traditional metrics, it’s more that the world view of what should be used and what might provide the most amounts of insights has been severely limited.

The web is astoundingly measurable, and while it is not perfect, the insights that you can get from your web data far surpass those you can get from any other channel. At a very low cost to boot!

Here’s an example: Just compare the measurement of success of a GM Chevy advertisement in Time magazine and on Chevy.com (or a banner running on yahoo.com). In the former case you know how many subscribers Time has and you also know how many people buy it. At best you have a measure of possible “impressions”. At best. Now in case of the latter you know exactly how many people saw it, how many interacted with it, how many go to the site and maybe configure a car, and… a lot.

Online Marketers have just started to understand the power of data on the web, the onus is on all of us to lean, make things easy, and show much more of the web is accountable.

What is Web Analytics 2.0?

Traditional Web Analytics was all about clickstream data. Log files. JavaScript Tags. HITS, Visits and other such nice stuff. It helped us progress to understanding What was happening on our websites.

But even though we all did our best it did not yield the kinds of insights that would be actionable and, dare I say, earth shattering.

The problem was that all that data was sub optimal at explaining Why. And that right there was the key.

Without the Why, the What is not very actionable.

So a little while back I proposed Web Analytics 2.0, the next generation approach towards getting both the What and Why answered. Here is the official (well my) definition:

Web Analytics 2.0 is:

1. The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition
2. To drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have
3. Which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)

More at webanalytics20.com.

Everyone is making promises around their Web analytics solutions — what’s the bare minimum that should be included?

Here is the great thing, 80% of the data you will get out of any web analytics tool is the same. So it would be really hard for you to screw up.

The bare minimum that is included probably should be the 80 or so standard reports that you’ll get out of the free Google Analytics solution or the free Yahoo! IndexTools solution or the one from Microsoft. That means reports that show you traffic sources and keywords, allows you to track your paid search campaigns as well as organic traffic, easily illustrate what content is consumed and is of value (and what content is yucky and bounces traffic!), the ability for you to segment your data (at least to some extent), empower you to track rich media (flash, ajax, video etc) without having to create fake page views and of course finally a full complement of ecommerce tracking.

You can get all that for free now, so when you buy a solution it is a good idea to request that you get more than everything above.

And you can. For example some of the paid solutions provide a great ability for you to bring complex sets of data into the tool (beyond clickstream), others thrive on their ability to bundle testing solutions, others still provide you the ability to truly do some amazing and advanced segmentation.

Identify your needs, make sure you are not paying for features and data you get for free, then buy the tool that is right for you.

Here is a post you might find relevant in that process: Web Analytics Tool Selection: Three Questions to ask Yourself.

What are some of the free analytics tools that you use and like?

I have eight tools on my blog. I guess I am “special”. :)

I use Google Analytics and IndexTools amongst the free more widely used tools. GA is simply the most easy to use tool and I am simply loving how people are creating plugins on top of it (like the one report I really wanted “What’s Changed”). IndexTools is so great to create custom reports, when I have a fast question I just throw the Metrics and Dimensions on a “page” and boom (!) I have what I want, ten seconds!

I also dabble in ClickTale and CrazyEgg. They both have free versions and while they don’t have the depth of standard WA tools, each answers an interesting question uniquely.

While it is not free I am rather fond of ClickTracks. It is not very expensive. My fondness is because for such a low price I can get infinite segmentation capabilities (some call it “n dimensional” segmentation) and also the ability to “reprocess” data.
Now I don’t really need to do that on my blog, after all it only gets 45k Visitors a month, but it is fun. :)

Stay tuned for more Q&A with Avinash…

For those of us who spend our careers immersed in digital marketing and all things “online,” a live webcast doesn’t seem like big news. So when Oprah announced a live web event as part of her book club it didn’t seem like a huge deal to me (admittedly, I’m not one of her regular fans). What happened may surprise you. It surprised me!

The number of visitors to Oprah.com topped five million in February, making her site one of the top 225 ranked sites in the United States. To put this in perspective, more people went to check out Oprah.com in February than the popular NASCAR, eHarmony, Fidelity, Barnes and Noble or Walgreens sites.

Even for Oprah, more than five million monthly visitors represented large month-over-month and year-over-year growth. The site traffic jumped 69 percent from January 2008 and was more than 50% above its February 2007 level. So what contributed to these gains? Was the live web event featuring the bestselling author Eckhart Tolle a factor? The answer to that question is YES.

• Visitors to Oprah.com held steady between 800,000 and 1,000,000 per week in January. Then on January 30, “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle was named to Oprah’s Book Club selection. In February traffic to the site increased dramatically following the selection and announcement of a live web event, topping 2 million per week more than once.
• Buoyed by the publicity, traffic to Eckhart’s site surged in February to more than 70,000 the week prior to the first class. Quite a jump from a scant 2,000 people per week at the beginning of the year!
• From February 24 through March 1, additional data reveals that approximately 50% of the 1.7 million Oprah.com visitors went to the Live Web Event Registration page.

After the first class, more than 300,000 people showed interest in (re)watching the webcast. Reportedly, demand was so high for the initial event however, that some people had difficulty logging in. This trouble may have influenced post-event interest.

The appeal of the live web event becomes even more evident when we take a daily view. The total time people spent on Oprah.com as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users more than doubled on the night of the first live event.

Oprah’s live event with author Eckhart Tolle is a series of 10 weekly classes. Stay tuned to see if Oprah’s “students” remain interested or if they become drop-outs as the class wears on. A sneak peak at Compete’s daily Attention metric through March 10 (the date of the second class) reveals that interest may have waned quickly, and then bumped up again slight for the second session.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

This is the time of year that visions of sugarplums turn to scary thoughts about waistlines. My gym is currently overflowing with loud (and sweaty) people hoping to be among the “biggest losers” in the contest of the month.

For the past decade, the SUBWAY® restaurant chain has tried to stand out in the crowded fast-food market by striking a low-fat eating chord with consumers. SUBWAY, is celebrating “10 years of keeping it off” featuring spokesman Jared Fogle, who lost more than 200 pounds and his “fat pants” by exercising and eating at SUBWAY. On the 10th anniversary of the campaign and the new “Tour de Pants”, I wonder: has SUBWAY’s message resonated with consumers?

In January, traffic to Subway.com jumped to more than 500,000 unique visitors, making it one of the top 3,500 sites on the Internet. People are clearly interested in the restaurant. One glance at Compete’s Search Analytics data shows that some of Subway’s online visitors are interested in the nutritional information of the SUBWAY menu.

• “Subway nutrition” drives 2% of search referrals to subway.com.
• In contrast, the top 5 searches for Taco Bell and Quiznos have nothing to do with nutrition.
• Nutritional searches aren’t uncommon among rival fast-food sites. The keyword “McDonald’s nutrition” drives 3% of search referrals to McDonalds.com. “Wendys nutrition” also drives 2.8% of search referrals to Wendys.com, although it isn’t a top-5 keyword.

People are interested in the nutritional information of SUBWAY food. But that finding by itself isn’t a clear signal that SUBWAY’s marketing approach is resonating. Does SUBWAY attract people interested in diet and fitness in general? Better than fast-food chain rivals?

Compete data shows that approximately one out of 10 online consumers is a diet, beauty and fitness enthusiast, visiting sites like Weightwatchers and BallyFitness.

• These diet/beauty/nutrition enthusiasts were three times more likely to visit SUBWAY.com in January than the average online consumer.
• They are five times more likely to visit Subwayfreshbuzz.com. Visitors to this SUBWAY site can enter to be in a commercial with Jared, play the “Pants Dance,” and submit their own weight loss stories.
• SUBWAY’s “fresh buzz” site tops more than 25 fast-food rivals in attracting this desired segment.

SUBWAY is a national sponsor of the American Heart Association’s Heart Walks and is helping to promote the non-profit Jared Foundation online. Thanks, Jared and SUBWAY, for reminding us to make healthy lifestyle choices. It’s an important message that doesn’t seem to be falling on deaf ears.