Solution Analytics

Career Move: Web Analytics to Music Industry?

I was recently contacted by an old friend from Omniture with an interesting proposition. Richard, who was one of the star developers at Omniture, had put together a prototype for a company he is working for. They had been having some success and he told me a little bit about what they were doing. After signing an NDA and getting more information, I was extremely intrigued and it only reinforced my notion that analytics can solve almost any problem and will be used in very innovative ways in years to come. This company has a very intriguing business plan where using analytics they can solve the ills of the music industry. He was looking for someone to support their business development team from an engineering perspective, which I had a lot of experience doing with the Genesis program at Omniture. It also meant managing a small team to employ rapid development techniques. Very interesting and looking back on my Career at Omniture these were some of my favorite things to do (work with BizDev and create rapid solutions).

Personally I never saw myself working in the music industry, but who doesn’t like music and who wouldn’t want to be close to the industry that inspires the world every day? This is also one of those opportunities that contain the two ingredients needed for extreme potential; it is manifestly important and it is nearly impossible. Manifestly important to both society and artists; artists need to get paid and society wants them to be paid (just not from their own pocketbook). Nearly impossible because of the complexities of working this out with partners and customers. I can’t get into specifics, but expect good things to come from the music industry in years to come.

In short, I will miss doing the traditional web analytics with HP, but this job offer shows me that the analytics industry extends well beyond the online web site and offline business intelligence. For me it feels like the internet is just starting to experiment with crawling. I’m amazed by the potentials that are presented every day.

I’ll still spend some time on the yahoo user’s group for web analytics and follow #measure on twitter. Once you are in analytics I think it is hard to change that mindset.

Innovative Culture and Innovative Techniques

So I have had a few questions based on my last post and I want to make some clarifications with this post. In my last post I talked about how Omniture had gone from a highly innovative culture to a more organized culture. I’m hesitant to make this post for a couple of reasons: First, because I have used Omniture as an example for what I have learned on innovation, and I don’t mean to keep pointing fingers, but I learned a lot about how corporations work through observation of their organization while I was pursuing an MBA. Second, because I feel I’m getting a little off task of the original use of my blog site, namely looking at how storing incredible amounts of data is changing the world around us.

But, since I have already digressed in my last couple of posts, I’ll continue the digression and see if I can get back on task in the future. It’s turning more into a blog on organizational behavior and innovation. And I’ll just see where that goes.

So, some of the questions I received:

1. So are you saying that a company can only be innovative if there are no processes in place?

I wasn’t saying that at all. You definitely need processes no matter what the organization. The teachings of my professors and my personal observations of the workplace point out the more you concentrate on organization or “processes” the more you are really inhibiting innovation and locking the company into stagnation. The less you focus on organization and processes the more room you have to innovate but it also creates creating chaos. Going down the dark side of organization you are frozen by the processes around you. It is extremely efficient, but only in so far as the processes allow for efficiencies. Going the other way, down the dark side of innovation, there is utter chaos. No processes are in place to manage what is done or take advantage of what is done. Of course, we don’t want to go down the dark side of either side, so normally there is a line that needs to be smartly managed. It takes a REALLY good manager to understand where the line should be placed and that normally is done by way of where the market is and any opportunities that may present themselves. If a market is just emerging, in flux or uncertain then erring towards the side of innovation and less processes is the way to go. If the market is mature with little opportunities or disruptions then erring towards the side of organization and more processes is the way to go. But erring towards organization can be very dangerous because it is a hard hole to dig out of. If disruptors were to come along, and the organization was unable to move back into innovation, then you may find yourself out of business.

Now some may debate where the market is for online analytics and digital marketing. I think we are still in the beginning stages of the market and there are MANY potential disruptors on the horizon. I happen to think that the future of digital marketing is still up in the air and the prize will go to the most innovative company of the bunch. I wasn’t saying that Omniture is not innovative; I’m saying they are less innovative because processes have been given priority (in many cases) to innovation. That doesn’t mean they can’t change. I indeed hope Adobe learns from past mistakes, finds the innovators, and treats them well. I’ll talk more about how to find the real innovators later on.

Now, I’ll talk a little about Utah culture. I hate to say it, but it’s very true and people need to realize the dangers. You see, for those of you who don’t know, Utah is a very religious state. Take a look at the LDS church and look at it as an organization. It is extremely organized with many processes! The church members love the organization and everything runs like clockwork, as it should, the market is pretty much set for religious practitioners (if you want to see it that way). The Mormons aren’t going to change or modify any of their practices and beliefs to gain market share, at least not much. Anyway, the point here is that a lot of the managers in Utah companies come from an LDS background, and they believe it is not good to question authority. Many people don’t question because it is perceived as being disloyal. One of the main tenants of innovation is to question everything, especially your boss. Also, a lot of Utah companies are successful because they employ a top-down innovation technique i.e. founder innovates and has workers carry out the vision. I think that is why we see a lot of successful start ups in Utah. People are very smart here and willing to work hard. But I also think it is a reason why we don’t have many really big companies here. Because the technique of employing bottom-up innovation is not used once the organization finds success. I honestly think that is one of the reasons Eric Schmidt sees the importance of innovation because he had to struggle through the culture at Novell. He understands that only bottom-up innovation is scalable. Top-down innovation works well at first, but once the top has success; some can be less mentally invested because they have found their millions. It’s the bottom who is mentally invested at that point to innovate, and the top has difficulty giving up that kind of control. So, yea, it’s great that the Utah culture is on the organized side, but don’t forget to nurture innovation in the workplace. I think that is an area where Utah has some issues, but like is said in the Mormon religion, work at it and weak things can become strong (weaknesses become strengths).

Another question that was asked is the following:

2. So what techniques can be used to innovate in the workplace?

This is where it gets fun. There are several things that can be done to be innovative, but all should be used together to find innovative methods.

a. Questioning

In the classes I took with Jeff Dyer the one thing that really stuck out is questioning. Relentlessly questioning the status-quo (which Utah has a tough time doing). Challenging the status quo can put things into perspective and tees up the organization for innovation. My favorite story is the one of Edwin Land. He was taking a picture of his niece with a camera, and she asked to see the picture. He explained that she couldn’t see the picture now, only later. She innocently asked “Why not?” Edwin thought to himself, “Indeed, why not?” and invented the Polaroid camera. It was an outrageous question that challenged the status quo. Without that one question we may not have had the Polaroid camera as an invention. It’s not the question itself that is innovation, it merely spurs the process. But, in most cases, questioning is the beginning of innovation.

b. Observation

Observation is an important skill for innovation and I think this is where Steve Jobs excels. He can understand the details of what the consumer wants by simply observing their behavior. I think he is extremely adept at taking mental notes of how users respond to different interfaces for their products. Rather than looking at data and requests, he understands the details of what a user is experiencing and can hone in to that experience to create some great products. Taking mental notes of how a customer reacts to a product or problem is very important to innovation. IDEO takes this to the extreme by having their designers literally “be” the product and observer the world around them to understand how the world interacts with it. Although not the only technique to innovation it is an important one.

c. Experimentation

Experimentation is not what you would expect. It is not trying experiments on your present problem; it is crossing borders to try something new. This can complicate your life and your field of work, but provides valuable insights that you can’t get in other ways. Experiment by reading up on other techniques used in other industries. Attend conferences that are different from your field of work. Keep interests up outside of your normal day-to-day routine. Explore new worlds!

d. Networking

This one kind of surprised me, but makes total sense. Find smart people in other departments and other industries and meet with them (e.g. for lunch) and discuss their present projects, ideas and problems. Explain your projects, ideas and problems and you may be surprised by some of the insight that comes from others outside your department and field of work. It is one of the reasons IDEO looks for different backgrounds for their designers. It is a way to mesh different ideas and create something innovative that has not been thought of.

e. Associations

Creating associations is extremely important in innovation and it is more of a natural ability. This is a cognitive skill that allows someone to make connections across seemingly unrelated objects. By experimenting and networking one can have a bigger store of ideas, questions and problems to create connections with. The skill of association is VERY important to innovation and is the prime reason why one should experiment and network. The associations between seemingly disparate ideas are often the core of innovation.

That bring up another question that I’ve had, and I’m sure some managers have:

3. So how do I find the innovators in my organization?

This one is actually pretty easy, but can be a little counter-intuitive. There are individuals in an organization who are mainly concerned with the company as a whole. They are interested in the technology and the customer. But these people can often be perceived as a “pain in the ass”. I’m sure you have met the worker that questioned everything around him. He questions the bosses work and where the execs were taking the company. In short he was perceived as a “pain in the ass” and is often perceived as disloyal. This is where a good manager who knows how to nurture innovation comes in. They need to determine if the worker is a “pain in the ass” or a “pain in the asset”. If they are merely a “pain in the ass” get rid of them, but if it turns out they are a “pain in the asset”, empower them and let their ideas take shape and form. Questioning is a big point to innovation. You will be surprised by what they can do because they simply question the status quo. If they also do a good job at observing, experimenting and networking be ready for some great insights. If they also excel at associations, get ready to be rich.

Adobe Omniture Acquistion: Innovation is Key

So I have had some time to think about the Adobe acquisition of Omniture and wanted to relay some of my thoughts on the merger. I, like most, was extremely surprised at the move. This definitely feels like a good partnership, but an acquisition? It was a little hard for me to swallow. When I left Omniture almost one year ago I was asked to drop everything and work on integrating metrics tracking into flash communication server. I had scoped the work, but at the last moment decided I was ready to move on. Halloween was my last day and I got to see the execs rent “little people” as Munchkins for their Wizard of Oz theme. Every year the execs rented midgets and it made me snicker (4 years total).

Like I said in previous posts, I was sad to leave, but Omniture wasn’t feeling as innovative as they had been (at least the department I was in). Omniture does have a strong culture, but that was morphing into more organized and clanish. For most at Omniture it didn’t matter because at some point we were “destined to make it big”.

So, let’s speculate on what happened at Omniture. The one thing that gave me comfort at Omniture was that Josh James was shooting for the moon. He was looking to do 1 Billion in Revenue. I still remember at an Omniture Summit when he announced his vision and Eric Petersen, while explaining the importance of a vision, said soon afterward “I don’t think that will happen, but at least Josh has a vision”. I don’t think Eric was invited again then after. Well, looks like Eric is right, at least in part. The Omniture business unit may still achieve the billion mark, just not on its own now. Josh’s high expectations were comforting because it meant the company was going all the way. We were looking to be the next IBM or Oracle and it was part of our vision. I was on board 100 percent.

If they were shooting for the moon like this why did they sell? Someone was feeling the pressure and I don’t think it was the executive team. Those guys were hyper focused on building the company to be the next Salesforce. I think the execs had confidence that the stock would rebound. Or, I have to question, did they? With Google and others putting extreme pressure on clients to switch and creeping costs they may have been feeling the pressure.

My guess is that the executive team still had the same vision. But with clients leaving for Google and Unica (maybe even Tealeaf) and with the difficulty in keeping costs low, the Omniture board voted to take a bird in the hand. My guess is there was an offer to enhance Adobe’s own position and the Omniture board took the bait. At this point the executive team is just making the best of the decision. That’s what I think happened, but I’ve been wrong before, sometimes very wrong.

I tend to agree with Omni_man Adam Greco about Omniture’s ability to integrate products. They did have a hard time focusing, but I think that comes from the change in their culture. Innovators became gun shy because failure was getting high visibility from an organized-clanish culture. The old innovative culture just plowed through the failures to create some great products. Now there is a lot of finger pointing and power plays. I was very sad to see the change, but I do feel it was the fault of execs who hired management from large companies who were very good at being “organized”. The product and the digital marketing industry are not ready for that type of management. Innovation should have been the focus; it still should be the focus. Rather than hiring externally, Omniture could have hired internal innovators and paid for them to get their MBA. Innovators like Richard Zinn, Josh Ezro, Chris Error and Catherine Wong should have been given that opportunity. Catherine is now a VP over integrations which is good, but who let Richard Zinn walk away? Richard’s combination of innovative spirit and ambition would have spelled super innovative leader with an MBA. If there was someone that fought for him to stay, that’s the person who knows the importance of these types of people. Chris Error would have been an innovative rock star with a few organizational behavior and project management classes.

I recently finished my MBA and after taking a class on mergers and acquisitions I was surprised at some of the mistakes that Omniture made, specifically with Touch Clarity. It was a technology acquisition and all the metrics that would indicate a successful technology acquisition were not ideal. Take a look at linkedin and the talent exodus is definitely not a good sign. a Technology acquisition is all about the people. Keeping the people and allowing them to innovate is the big key. Omniture learned from this acquisition that due diligence could have been better and pre-acquisition integration work would have helped or at least given some warning signs. After the Touch Clarity and Instadia acquisitions, Omniture created task forces to work on the organization and cultural integration of acquisitions (i.e. websidestory). But when it comes to even more horizontal acquisitions like Offermatica, product integrations are a little more difficult. It would have been a breeze 3-5 years ago, but the culture change from innovative to organized-clanish made the innovators gun shy and the bureaucracy was tiring. This is only the fault of management and not the fault of the innovators themselves. Offermatica is a technology acquisition where hopefully the technical innovators stay. As for Adobe, Omniture is also a technology acquisition, don’t forget the innovators.

As far as the product synergies, I think most everyone in other blogs have touched on them. One of the value propositions I was working on when I left was automatic tracking of videos served by flash communication server. Obviously with the convergence of traditional media and the web, this is a great move. They could easily unseat Nielsen for media tracking and push flash as a standard for media delivery. The other tracking pieces are important, but the shot at standardized media delivery and tracking for top media companies is huge.

Overall, I wasn’t surprised to see this move by Adobe, but I was surprised by Omniture’s acceptance. The exec team was focused on making the company into the next Oracle. But with pressures from competitors, the economy, and cost structures my guess is the board voted to sell. I have heard that Adobe is even more business focused (organized) than Omniture. My only suggestion to Adobe is to find those innovators at Omniture and treat them VERY VERY well. Empower them and let them try things that may fail, because when there are failures, that is when they are at their best! (See my article on innovation and failures).

Built to fail: Innovation strategies for the web

Recently there was a post on the web analytics demystified users group about having a mistake in your analysis. This got me thinking about some of the classes I took recently around innovation and strategy (I recently finished up my MBA). The classes always pointed to the same thing, successful companies are built to fail. And the model of being built for failure is becoming somewhat of a disrupter because it nurtures innovation. Constantly staying ahead requires that you try different things and measure the success.

My last post was about Omniture and some of the concerns I had about the change from innovative culture to more organized and clanish. I thought about how this happened or how it was allowed to happen and it seems like this is a pretty common occurrence to any successful organization. Think about it, Omniture made some ground by being more innovative than Webtrends and other web analytics companies (well maybe not visual sciences, but visual didn’t get the marketing/sales piece). Having some success the executive team started looking around for experienced management that had success. They looked for the people that really did well at making money from existing products. When you move those people into another company with a successful product, they will also be successful. Why? Because they organize and market things very well.

Well, put them in a company where there is great uncertainty and that is where they have a tough time. Using the same set of tools that they have developed doesn’t work because it stifles innovation. You start to see huge planning cycles for products that may or may not have a market. A lot more money is spent to go after a market that may or may not want the product or the market may not even exist. The cool thing about being innovative is that you can try many things at a low cost and see which ones find a market. I was sad to see Omniture lose some of the agility it once had, but maybe Omniture has found its market, and they are ready to make the switch to being more organized. But if there is still uncertainty about where things are going with web analytics and web optimization they should focus on management schooled in innovation.

So, back to planning to fail. Planning to fail means that you try things that you think will be successful or at least have a chance at success and measure the success of the changes. The culture that creates innovation is the one that says it is “OK to fail”. But with that failure they build in a way to fail safely. That is the needed piece, designing an architecture that allows for safely failing. This way many things can be tried and a fraction will end up being a “bulls eye”.

I probably watched the sixty minutes video on IDEO like a dozen time in different classes. There probably isn’t a better company to get the point across about innovating better than IDEO. They basically get a bunch of people together from different backgrounds and allow them to brainstorm out a product for a market.

IDEO Innovation Techniques:

Different individuals’ backgrounds create more ideas.

• They don’t hire the “you are like me” people. They look for diversity to engender different ideas.

There is no bad idea.

• An idea should never be shot down. In fact the craziest ideas should be explored because there may be something there that has the seeds of innovation.

Rapid prototyping.

• Once they have a few ideas they quickly create the prototype to see something tangible and get feedback from customers. They have a machine shop on premise to rapidly create a prototype for their ideas.

Get out in the real world.

• They do a lot of customer research by leaving the building and interacting with potential customers. This includes showing different prototypes.

Even though they take these steps to be successful, still only a fraction of their ideas are successful, but the point is, they have successful ideas. With most companies they see a need and plain and simple get lucky. If they are looking at a market in fluctuation or at a market with an uncertain future, these types of concepts should probably be used to keep innovative and stay ahead of any potential competition, especially with those that compete on price.

But, back to my original thought on web analytics and web site optimization. We use web analytics to create actions that optimize the site, meaning we ‘help’ our potential customers better find our site and ‘help’ them convert once they click through. Doing any analysis without taking action is just silly, but sometimes that analysis is just going to be dead wrong. But as a web analyst we can’t spend our time second guessing if we truly want to find those gold nuggets that really kick the site into overdrive. That is why changes to the site need to be made, but measured and measured quickly. And, sometimes you really don’t know the affects of what your changes may have made. So, beyond using a good web analytics tool, a tool like RUM or Tealeaf would be great to quickly understand how the users are reacting to the changes individually rather than in aggregate. It is like observing your customer’s actions at a store when they pick up the new product. Also, survey any users who may have been affected by the change to get the attitudinal data. Combining the attitudinal and the behavioral should give the picture of the affects from the change that was made.

If the change is wreaking havoc on the site, get it back to how it was before and analyze what happened. You may learn something about your customers you did not know before and you may have just come closer to the gold vein you have been mining for.

And just to show that this should apply to the web here is part of a manifesto from Avinash Kaushik, a guru in web analytics.

“I believe that God created the Internet so we could fail faster. In the offline world it is very expensive to experiment and test, the cost of failure is very high. As a result we don’t take risks. We keep doing what we think ‘works’, until the day we go bankrupt. The web changes that. You can take dramatic risks, at very low costs and learn big. Your website is nothing but a machine built to make you smart by taking lots of risks. Why should you tolerate ideas getting killed on conference room tables or by your HiPPO’s? Why accept opinions when you can convert them into hypothesis and get them validated for cheap and quickly? Why not let your customers actively be a part of helping you create customer experiences that deliver value to them AND to you? The cost of taking risk on the web is low. You can try an idea. As soon as it is live data starts following it. If the idea is a total loser then kill it fast, does not have to cost you a ton of money. What is more likely is that you will find winners that you had never imagined. Give it a try. Fail faster.”

-Ryan Ekins

6 Months Since I Left Omniture

I started at Omniture in 2000 when it was named myComputer.com. Josh and John were younger, I remember seeing them enjoy a ride in John’s first Porsche. They built an engineering friendly culture and for the most part everyone enjoyed working there. Then came the bubble burst and I luckily found a more steady job in Utah Valley. MyComputer.com went down from 130+ employees to 30+ employees in less than a year. In 2003 the company, now rebranded Omniture, won a dark-horse race for the HP contract and I was hired on (kind of funny, now I work for HP). I was employee number 40 of the regrowth. I loved the Omniture Culture, I had come from a family-run business and was a bit tired of the nepotism and family politics. Omniture was highly innovative and innovation was explicitly expected from everyone that worked there.

Rather than working as an engineer, I came back to work as an implementation consultant. That is when I discovered my love for digital marketing and web-site optimization. And the next few years were a whirlwind of growth, new employees, and demanding clients. When the whirlwind started to settle I found myself working on the first Genesis integrations and passing those integrations on to engineering and consulting.

Over the years it soon became apparent the the engineering-driven culture was beginning to cease. The highly innovative culture became more organized and clanish. Organized because Omniture brought in more ”seasoned” management and more clanish because the “good-ol-boys” mentality seemed to increase as everyones’ pockets grew bigger and bigger. Not to mention that the CEOs balance from John Pestana was gone once Pestana left (think Jobs and Wozniak).

So, I was sad to see the culture change from highly innovative to organized-clanish. But a big thing that affected my decision to leave was the unsure future of web analytics. I hope Omniture wins the analytics game as I still have many friends that work there and it would be an overall benefit for Utah Valley if they are successful. As we start to see industry conversion in analytics I’m very interested to see who will come out on top.  If anything Omniture will definitely end up a successful consulting/agency group because of the knowledge they have gleaned over the years. And of all the vendors out there they have the best shot.

6 months later I must say that I do miss innovating at Omniture. There is still a lot of hope that Omniture will emerge victorious in this Petabyte Age, but only time will tell. If anything, they definitely have a shot. I feel they should probably fine tune their innovation rather than focusing on organization to increase their chances. All the best to my friends at Omniture.

-Ryan Ekins

Omniture Summit 2009

There is a saying amongst the entrepreneurial community here in Utah Valley “Going big creates trust” and this year the Omniture Summit was the biggest yet in many ways. The event was at the Salt Palace Convention Center a much larger venue than the Grand American Hotel or the Ski Resorts of the past. In past years you would find it hard to move in the partner showcase and other locations. This year there was plenty of room to stroll without feeling claustrophobic at every turn of the corner.

Omniture’s theme for the Summit was “lead the change”. The point of the theme; during these hard economic times we can let change happen to us or we can lead the change. Omniture made it clear that they are here to lead the change to the online marketing suite. They announced a few more products that will be added to their growing list of tool sets. The Online Marketing Suite, brings together all of Omniture’s applications for partners and agencies. Developer Connection, a spider that searches for pages without code and indexes keywords on pages for further understanding of SEO efforts. Omniture Recommendations, a product recommendation engine which was in beta with ExactTarget for targeted emails with product recommendations and supposedly had a 200% lift in conversion from emails.

A lot was said about the present economic environment, but Omniture perceives this environment as an opportunity because all online web sites have a reason to believe and a need to believe for optimizing their online marketing spend and widening their conversion funnel.

I had the opportunity to be a part of Mindmeld, which brings together the analytics and optimization experts of the industry and discuss new channels of marketing like mobile, kiosks, etc. We discussed bringing web analytics to the executive level, particularly the CMO level.

My main focuses for the breakout sessions were social media and SEO. A big takeaway that I had from the social media side is “fish where the fish are”. Building your own social media tools may be helpful, but if you are looking to help people convert or support users, you may want to build out tools or departments that work directly with existing social media tools. A guest speaker from Comcast described how using Twitter he was able to gain real time insight into customers that had service issues. Because he was able to interact with them directly he gleaned valuable information for their service department to fix issues. In fact, Omniture has just released a solution that takes Twitter data and pushes the number of times your brand is mentioned into a report in SiteCatalyst. This is helpful in showing how your brand is being mentioned, but a real solution would be a brand monitor that can detect negative and positive comments across the entire web, including all social media tools. There are many brand monitors out there and it is probably a better solution to import data from the brand monitors rather than from just one source, like Twitter.

The other side that I concentrated on was SEO. It was a lot of the same that I had already known. SiteCatalyst doesn’t do a good job of tracking natural search keywords and if you want better tracking either add in a HUGE piece of JavaScript that detects search engines or add a VISTA rule on the backend that takes the keyword and places it into a custom variable. It is a popular VISTA rule known as unified sources (besides better search engine traffic tracking it takes all marketing channels and places in a single variable). Then you can look at how landing pages from natural ultimately causes conversion on the site. This is done by segmenting out traffic that had a landing page with natural search. This works, but doesn’t take into account any mid visit searches. So as part of the unified sources it is best to add in the landing page into its own variable. Categorization of keywords was also another topic, but for those with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of natural search phrases coming through, categorization can be a daunting proposition. The only advice the speaker could give for that was to “hire an intern”. Coming from Omniture I know some of the tricks of the trade and created a solution to automatically classify keywords through a database driven VISTA rule. If anyone else is interested in automatic natural keyword categorizations, let me know.

As a side note, I had many people come up to me and thank me for having brought Maroon 5 to the Summit. I wasn’t able to attend the Maroon 5 concert (daughter’s birthday), but I guess HP had sponsored their appearance. Good move PR/Marketing/whoever from HP who set that up. J

At the end of the Summit we gathered in a large room and marketers are given the chance to stand and request feature additions to the product. I was able to make a feature request on behalf of HP. A tracking pixel that can be used for external impressions on banner ads, emails, and other external media that does not affect visitor, visit and page view counts. That way we can look at impressions to conversion for external media. About half of the audience agreed with the request.

Overall, it was another successful Summit for Omniture and I learned a few things here and there in the process.

-Ryan Ekins