I'm greatly looking forward to SXSW 08 in a couple of weeks. I'll be doing a "core conversation" with Micah Alpern:

Core Conversation: Design Metrics: Better Than 'Because I Said So': Too often designers are put in a position of defending design decisions based on personal preference or an unarticulated sense of expertise. We'll discuss how to use metrics to understand user and business goals. Then how these metrics can be used to evaluate design decisions, make tradeoffs, and shape strategies.

While design efficacy can be treated as a contributor to overall site success, there are some more subtle metrics which can reveal specific strengths and weaknesses of design. I'll post a recap following the gig.

Congrats to the participants of startup weekend atlanta for one of the most successful SW ventures to date.

I've signed up for the "solicit ideas from your readers" product offering at skribit and hope to put it up on this blog soon.

I was scheduled to attend but family concerns kept me home. Nonetheless, the Atlanta tech crowd did itself proud.

I attended a very interesting session on Word of Mouth (WOM) this morning at ACR titled "What Drives Word of Mouth: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective". I'm sure the buzzphrase "media of the masses" is old news to many, but I appreciated the twist on mass media as a corporate vocabulary rendering of "user generated content" and long tail many to many communications.

It's challenging to summarize the results directly, so I'll cherry pick some of the more concise insights. If you only take one thing away from this post, realize that word of mouth marketing was challenging to study prior to the internet. It's now something that can be quantified and, potentially, manipulated. Novelty and originality may generate buzz, but usefulness trumps all. Heck, a Technorati buzz chart showed up in one of the presentations.

The first study, "The Different Roles of Product Originality and Usefulness in Generatoring Word of Mouth" by Moldovan, Chattopadhyay, and Goldberg, showed that across a range of laboratory experiments and a real world look at products, originality drives the amount of word of mouth activity, but usefulness is still the key determinant of market share and of the polarity of commentary. In other words, you may be able to get people to talk about a novel product, but if it's not useful, the commentary won't be especially productive. This may not seem counter-intuitive, but to be able to reproduce it in the lab and across numerous product histories shows that even marketing can't trump usability.

The 2nd study, "Opening the Black Box of Buzzing Bloggers" (Kozinets, De Valck, Wilner, & Wojnicki) looked at a case of a company distributing a gadget to a set of bloggers. The bloggers were given the device and asked to talk about the product. In general, sponsorship generated a different type of buzz than organic word of mouth. While 80% of the bloggers wrote about the product, they typically included a least one thing they didn't like.

The final study is too deep for casual summary but the presenter did reference a very tangible and well established finding: positive word of mouth outweighs negative across numerous research projects and cultures 3 to 1 (East, Hammond, & Wright in IJRM 2007). This contrasts only slightly with the first study, and suggests to me that if you've got something useful to promote, do everything you can to drum up word of mouth. The odds are in your favor.

Here's a shout out to my (few) fellow ACR bloggers at Brandthroposophy & the UCR E-Lab (fix your RSS Feed!), and DecisionScienceNews.com

I'm off to attend the ACR conference in Memphis this weekend, participating in Roundtable Session: Internet Tracking and Clickstream Data: Methodological Issues.

Some of the talks I'm looking forward to:

• Scale Development and Measurement Issues
• Consumer Response to Aesthetic Aspects of Product Design: 1-, 2-, and 3-Dimensional Perspectives
• Social Contagion Effects in Marketing
• Watching Gen Y Grow Up: Consumer Behavior Across Lifespans
• What Drives Word of Mouth: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective

This genre of research investigation is a bit far from my roots in cognitive science / psychology, but I'm sure it will be enlightening. Stay tuned for the insights.

I'll be in Toronto in a few weeks, speaking at the E-Business Congress in a panel on eManagement in the Dynamic Digital Environment.

This panel combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together three different facets for managing in a Digital, eBusiness environment. 1) the evolving relationships among managers and their employees; 2) a leadership and advocacy approach to managing digital creation and collaboration; and 3) a performance-based management approach for eCommerce-related work.

Steven Spencer has a nice series of E-Commerce Tips.

There's not much to argue with here, but I found the ideas on coupon codes especially interesting. Consumers reactions to paying more than they have to, implied by the presence of a coupon code form element in the checkout process, is often very strong.

In the StomperNet "Getting Serious" Series 1 video, I'm lucky enough to provide an opening act to the guru faculty of StomperNet with a conscious raiser on web site design.

We all have an intuitive appreciation for a well designed site, but it's holistic, while the actual truth of the experience of assessing the design is that it's a series of small samples from your visual system stitched together.

The image below is a small excerpt from my segment of the video, the first 6.5 minutes, and depicts the high resolution foveal area of vision and the low resolution periphery. There's also a short video from the discovery phase on this tech over at my surfMind blog.

Check out the video. Following what I hope is a "eye opener" on how site design affects user behavior, there's some great stuff from the other Stomper faculty on nofollow attributes, web analytics, and AdWords.

Digg It - stompernet

Conversion Rater has some nice coverage of Avinash's talk at the Expo. Amy Chan has coverage of measuring web 2.0.

I also attended Kelly Goto's Iterative Application Design session. Great stuff all around. While a lot of the speaker's in the space favor a specific method, multivariate testing in Avinash's case and ethnographic work in Kelly's, my talk was all about triangulating across available methods.

Relatedly, I had some fun this weekend with the Google AJAX Feed API. Here's a little mashup of Windows Live and Google to provide a snapshot of the web 2.0 expo buzz, the latest analytics blogs and more specifically Google Analytics focused.

Wow! What a week -- just back on a redeye from California. I've put up my slides and an audio excerpt at Free IQ from my intro on Internet Scale and the 2.0 Challenge.

Tagged web2expo/

I'll be presenting on the last day of the Web 2.0 Expo in SF on April 18th. The talk description is:

How do you convert gigabytes, or terabytes, of user data into insights? This session will explore triangulation to richer but sparser data like that from the usability lab, surveys, and feedback forms. In addition, learn how to generate maximum value from traditional analytic packages as well as the types of custom analyses you should be exploring. From the methodology of task analysis to the techniques of markov modeling, you'll go both wide and deep on the state of the art in assessing your customers' experience at internet scale. http://conferences.oreillynet.com...

I'll be speaking from experiences across my career and debuting some of the technology for instrumenting AJAX interfaces I write about in my upcoming publication, "Instrumenting the Dynamic Web".

Relatedly, I've added an about the author page which has the full publication details, as well as PDF links for most of my publication history.