Category Archives: Uncategorized

The most odd, yet perfectly representative, forum post title showed up on our local neighborhood blog a few days ago, which I just happened across:

“Did anyone notice their chicken missing last night?”

Those insolent nocturnal vermin ate my daughter’s foamy soccer ball last summer, and now they’re moving on to urban hipster backyard pen poultry. The horror!

R.I.P. UrbanChicken

Tonight I received an automated year-in-review Stats email from WordPress, the platform on which I manage this blog, and I felt compelled to post it automatically from the simple link that concluded the email because I wanted to add this commentary on why this is awesome (as opposed to post it simply to highlight the extremely modest, but interesting, performance of my blog this past year…).

First of all, this email is the perfect example of “delightfully intrusive” communications.  It’s delightful because it’s genuinely useful, interesting, and valuable information that I wouldn’t have taken the time or given the attention to focus on for a few moments had WordPress not sent it to me via another medium (email). It’s delightful because it uses certain emotional triggers to reward and reinforce my inclination to keep blogging. And it’s delightful because the timing was perfect — right on January 1st, when the information it contains is timely and interesting.

Secondly, it’s an example of the goodness that can come from using statistics and analytics and data in the right ways: to inform, to compel and motivate additional high-value activity, and to retain customers. I live my professional life in the realm of analytics these days — focused primarily on social media analytics, via my company Spring Creek Group, but also remaining mindful of the ways that site and paid-media marketing analytics can compel better and more valuable programs — so I really take note when smart analytics data is provisioned directly to stakeholders in ways that are timely and valuable.  In this case, WordPress is nailing it:  automatically, presumably at low-cost, and provisioning just enough data (but not too much) to answer a few key questions without raising too many others.

Third, the info contained within the “2010 in Review” email about my blog is almost all extremely interesting because of the fact that it’s a combination of quantitative (# of posts, # of visitors, # of views, etc.) and qualitative (which posts generated the most interest and views, which sources of traffic to the blog were the most valuable last year, comparisons to other data sources or points that place things in broader context – see the Boeing 747 capacity stats that WordPress cleverly married to my viewership stats in order to make me feel emotionally rewarded for the the impact, however small and modest it really was in comparison to truly high-reach and big-deal personal blogs out there).

Fourth, WordPress editors used a clever combination of infographics, stats, and good copy (the use of “stats monkeys” is a sly humorous nod to the kind of language that analytics geeks really use, acknowledging that at least some of their intended recipients of emails like these probably live or work in the realm of data and stats daily).

Fifth and finally, the WordPress team recognizes the power of making it easy for someone to find value in what they’ve provided and ‘share the love’ — in this case, making it easy for me to further highlight the value I’ve gotten from their communique *and* to share it onwards via a one-click “Post This” link within the email that automatically links back to their own platform and automatically populates a new post (this one, below) with all the information they provisioned to me.  Smart, directly tied to their own success metrics (which no doubt include both quality and quantity of new posts generated by their high-value users on their own platform).

Well done , WordPress team.

[p.s. Probably the most interesting insight I took from the wrap-up Stats in the email, reproduced below by WordPress' magical "stats monkey's", was the fact that the biggest drivers of traffic to my blog were the things I've been experimenting with in the first place: 1, occasionally linking back to it via my Twitter account; 2, trying out posts utilizing high-volume search-term topics like cars and popular movies to see if it drives a decent volume of organic search traffic (which it does, apparently - see the 'Cars' and 'Social Network' posts); and, 3, the very domain and H1 Header title of the blog itself, which i intentionally chose a few years ago because I thought it would be funny to claim the domain and choose a blog Title that matched the default phrase used by Firefox when direct-type URL's fail to find a registered domain.  All of this provides a feedback loop to me, and encourages me to keep experimenting with both blog topics and copy as well as to keep renewing and building out my domain-specific personal presence on WordPress' platform.]

[p.p.s. For those who have gotten this far, the full content of the "2010 in Review" email content below. All comments above added on by me as a post edit to complement the original content. Cheerio and Happy New Year 2011 to anyone who finds their way to this post!]

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 35 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 191 posts. There were 16 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was October 26th with 89 views. The most popular post that day was Awesome Things in the Movie The Social Network.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, feedly.com, facebook.com, linkedin.com, and claymcdaniel.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for cars with fish names, oops! this link appears broken, oops! this link appears to be broken., subaru pzev badge, and oops! this page appears broken.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Awesome Things in the Movie The Social Network October 2010

Holy Cow There are a Lot of Cars Names After Animals, Fish, and Birds February 2010
1 comment

Bags, bags, and more bags January 2010
2 comments

About August 2007

I love my Subaru, but their new “PZEV” badge makes no sense March 2009

Thursday is the new Saturday! Or Friday. Or whatever.
Tonight @springcreekgrp held our annual holiday party, team Thank You, and gathering of the masses. While I assumed that our selection of a date this year on the first real week of December would guarantee us pride of place, I soon started seeing evidence of other holiday shindigs… Wunderman, holiday tidings! … Blackrock, auld lang syne! …@wexley, may ye dray your cups verily!

Next year we select a random Tuesday, and we take over Ballard Ave, mark my words!

I’m not sure what I just saw, but I feel strongly that I agree.

(Well done, Cameron, with the Jedi mind trick.)

Am presently sitting in a small cafe in the west village, trying to use caffeine and protein to slough through the mid morning punchies after a red eye flight. This place isn’t too far from where I used to live in a crappy railroad walkup on bleecker 15 years ago, but in terms of demeanor its a whole Giuliani-and-hedge-funds economic boom away from the usual joints that previously occupied most Villagew storefronts near me.

Anyway just as I walked in to a sitting room small enough to hear everyone, I noticed two guys about my age with the glasses and accoutrements that placed them squarely in the New Media Industry (to my eyes at least, having crashed this industry by hook or crook 5 years ago…). This being a pretty small place, I couldn’t help but overhear one of them say as I downed my first slurp of coffee: “well, actually, our strategy really hinges on working with the influentials…”

Not knowing anything about what either of these two actually do, it struck me as the perfect moment of over-hearing to capture the present mood of all things marketing. Malcolm Gladwell should get a dollar royalty every time that phrase, or one of its many variants, echoes off the walls of Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, and anywhere else well-dressed entrepreneurs and new-model-marketrers chase the dream of explosive business growth through awareness leverage.

But does it really exist, this pervasive dream of marketing leverage via an elite few who have reached the exalted uppermost tier of knowledge, opinion, and prestige for any given market vertical or product/service category? Or have those individuals, the so-called Influentials, achieved this rarified rank within their particular sphere of knowledge precisely because of their ability to remain unbiased, objective, broad-purview in their scope and passions… in a word, “un-influence-able”??

Put more simply, could it at least be possible that what makes any valid “Influencer” credible is his or her steadfast resistance to easy influence-ability?

In which case, Malcolm Gladwell might still be able to cling to the core tenet of his (rather thinly researched) argument… But an awful lot of marketers would need to go back to good old-fashioned 1:1 direct-to-the-customer tactics to actually build true advocacy for the long run.

Time will tell. Presently only the newly-ascendant “Influentials” really know the answer. Oh, , to be one… and to be so coveted so pervasively, at least for now!

I’ve been obsessed with Lordy Rodriguez‘s stylized hand-inked large scale drawings of imagined maps for as long as I can remember first seeing them at an art gallery in New York more than a decade ago. I could only afford – and still cherish – a “Seattle, Washington” map (imagined) that he made around the same time, maybe late ’90′s, which was an odd mashup of streets and places from New York, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere consolidated into a single 8″x10″ non-city. It’s a dense amalgam of a variety of great cities that I lived in for some length of time in the last 20 years, and it hangs on my dining room wall. I always lusted after one of his larger non-place-identified maplike drawings though. They seemed even more beautiful for having no connection to any real place on earth except his imagination.   When I found this article on MSNBC today with a variety of color-corrected images of satellite photographs and the like of real place on earth, it seemed somehow a late-to-the-party life-imitating-art copy of what Lordy had done years ago. Enjoy both…

Marouane Chamakh’s wackadoodle rooster hairdo.
Beckham’s sneetch-esque top-knot plus mullet.
The all-for-one, beards-for-all LA Galaxy team facial hair unity.
Bacary Sagna’s bleached dread-rows.
Whatever craziness Cisse is doing with his hair this week.

There must be a mad barber in London where all of these guys go out of familial obligation or peer pressure or because the FA requires it or something…

The bus driver on your 71 express 4:50pm bus out of downtown bus tunnel is 100 rad, good, and focused on excellence. If you are listening, MetroKC bus service supervisory people, give that guy a raise and ask him to lead training sessions for all other city bus drivers. I’m serious.