Feedburner displays my feed subscribers in the left column. I keep an eye on as a casual reference to growth in readership and declare little victories everytime the odometer clocks another 100 readers.

Typically it hovers around 600 subscribers but in the last few days it has spiked to 900 plus. Why? No clue. The number fluctuates up and down, but a 30% spike means either Feedburner has burped or … (update, Nathan Gilliatt said FriendFeed subs are added)

Some undetected thing spiked inbound traffic.

Look at the green bar just go nuts in the last week.

I’m not a collector of stat counts — I have to worry about followers and ranks too much in the real world of Lenovo — but it is an ego-stroke to know someone reads this stuff.

Then again some don’t ….. Stefan Constantinescu, a great commentor on all things related to ThinkPads, had to unsub when he realized that my professional title doesn’t mean this blog follows in my career’s footsteps. (No hard feelings Stefan, just citing your decision as example of blog identity crisis).

1. Churbuck: David Churbuck works for Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY), a company that makes a line of laptops known as the ThinkPad. Why do I know this? I’m a huge ThinkPad nerd. Practically every laptop I’ve ever owned has been a ThinkPad. I love the design, the dependability, the battery life, but do I love David? This is his personal blog more or less. He constantly writes about getting back into shape and fishing. I’m sorry, but I just don’t care. Decision: Unsubscribe.

This came to me via colleague Gary Milner, who forwarded a column by Joe Marchese,president of socialvibe, who quotes Rishad Tobaccowala who in turn channels the ghost of Albert Einstein:

“Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts”

I have been in solid meetings the past two days and yesterday watched a presentation that reminded me of the story of the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in 1972.
The pilots were coming in for a landing but the “gear down” light didn’t illuminate in the cockpit. They tapped the light. They flipped switches. The co-pilot opened a hatch and climbed down to see what the problem was. They continued to obsess about the light but they didn’t notice when one of them bumped into the steering column and turned off the autopilot, putting the jet into a slow descent.

No one looked out the windshield. They were looking at the dead nose gear light.

Splat. 99 dead. 77 survived.

Metrics — the act of collecting data about systems and processes — and then reporting them in dashboards can lead to the type of tunnel vision those pilots displayed 36 years ago. The obsession with gathering status reports for the sake of gathering status reports can divert the organization and its people from the task at hand. If you’re trying to smelt gold but you spend so much time tracking ingot development that you fail to notice that you’re in fact smelting lead — then you’re going to be really good at ingot development, but oblivious to the quality of the final output. This is why formerly good things get ruined when big companies acquire them and start to obsess about the efficiencies. “We’ll just swap out the good stuff for the okay stuff and no one will notice.”
Subjectivity — the measurement of quality — is it good? is it bad? Do we suck or do we rock? Those unmeasurable intangibles are dismissed by technocrats as “feeling” behavior prized by people to sloppy to appreciate precision. Or, they attempt to quantify the subjective with surveys and stupid metrics like “sentiment.”
Objectivity — the measurement of facts — has become de rigeur ever since Neutron Jack Welch of GE set forth the commandment that you have to measure it to manage it. And so commenced the age of the tyranny of metrics. The Excel tyrants are really really good at demanding status reports and updates, but the reality is no one looks at their work and is terrified to say: “Go away. Here’s a beach. Start counting grains of sand and give me a TPS report by tomorrow.”

Metrics people — turn yourself into analysts by looking out the window and telling your boss the swamp is getting really close.

Google’s Data Asset | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

Brad Burnham, partner at Union Square with Fred Wilson, blogs about the impact of Google’s data driven services. In discussions over dinner last week with Dan Gertsacov from GoogleTV, we got onto the topic of data as differentiator in advertising. Brad nails the same point in this post (which is about the impact of marginal data collection on services)

“Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. It is easy to see this in the context of an advertising network. If the ad network knows that a user is female it can show more relevant ads. But, If the ad network knows that female’s age, it can do even better, and data about location, household income, and recent web sites visited all add value to the existing data points, making it possible to show more and more relevant ads. Google’s services all benefit from additional data albeit in different ways.

“So what does all this mean about the market for web services. It means that we all need to begin to think about the degree to which Google’s enormous data asset will allow it to dominate this important sector.” [emphasis mine]

The hot buttons in the last paragraph are “think” and “dominate.” Data driven ad services (or cloud computing) are squarely in the sights of the privacy stewards and the federal government. Anyone who had to answer reader mail in 1995 when a web user freaked out about a cookie being placed on their harddrive knows never to underestimate the public and government’s paranoia about data.

As an advertiser, Google’s data store and processing capability is extremely valuable in transforming next-marketing-dollar allocation. The other networks don’t possess the same analytical and data driven rigor. It could, if I take Brad’s post to the paranoid extreme, be a harbinger of Google’s future focus on persuading the world that a) their data is anonymous and b) safe with Google.

I’m a Feedburner fan and run this blog’s RSS through the service so I can gain some sense of traffic trends. Per Peter Kim’s M20 measurement criteria, I made my RSS subs visible with this badge that tallies my feed subscribers.

Every weekend about ten percent of my subscribers seem to unsubscribe or vanish. By Tuesday, they return.

So what happened to the 43 mystery subs? And why do they go away every Saturday?

Compared to what! Television? Print? Mark Cahill calls my attention to this insanity.
Scott Karp rips apart a recent McKinsey survey/report on online advertising (which I meant to do, but got sidetracked). Here’s the upshot as reported in Adweek:

“McKinsey polled 410 marketing executives in five sectors, and among those already advertising online, 52 percent said “insufficient metrics to measure impact” [emphasis mine, ed] was the biggest barrier, followed by insufficient in-house capabilities (41 percent), the difficulty of convincing management (33 percent), limited reach of digital tools (24 percent) and insufficient capabilities at agency (18 percent).”

Scott gets right to it:

“Does that mean advertisers really believe metrics like cost per lead, cost per sale, or even cost per visit are inferior to traditional “bottom line” metrics like reach and frequency, gross rating points, and rate base? Does that mean advertisers believe mass media have better “capabilities” than online advertising platforms like keyword-targeted search advertising, behavioral targeting”

Client-side as I am, let me agree with the survey panel that the primary barrier is indeed in-house capabilities. Budgets, staff and mindset are still geared towards television, print and out of home. Convincing management? Not an issue for me. Limited reach? Sure, online is growing more expensive and yet it is harder to put money in market as strong opportunities begin to vanish under high demand. Agency capabilities? Agencies are scrambling to staff up, I’d put the onus on the client to deal with the in-house capabilities, we’re moving to a multi-agency, specialist network model with the client providing the management and the glue, the metrics and the execution.

But insuffiicient metrics? That is doubtlessly the most ignorant thing I have heard all year. McKinsey needs to either change its survey methodology or find marketers who have a clue, because the one’s they surveyed are probably relying on their agency to give them click-through reports and therefore, deserve what they get.

Metrics in online advertising are the responsibility of the client, not the agency, not the publisher. If the client is incapable of attributing revenue to a dollar placed in the market, then the client is wasting its money. Only the client can detect the action on the client site. Period. If an advertiser is spending online (I suspect McKinsey’s survey panel is obsessed with CPM and CTR on banners) and not measuring the impact end-to-end then they need to fire their agency, hire an interactive marketing manager, and invest in a decent metrics package. If not, well, stick to your TV, radio and print and have fun with such wonderful measurements as “pass-along” and “drive-time impressions”

Note, McKinsey loves its registration wall, in the belief that its content is super precious (it is good, but sorry Stuart and Jeff, it needs to be easy to get to), so I shall not waste your time with a link to the survey which I can’t find anyway.

Spot the day when Valleywag came after me.

Avinash Kaushilk, something of a hero to web analytics people, writing incisive stuff at Occam’s Razor has published Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and I returned home to find the package from Amazon, having pre-ordered it about six months ago.

Now to read it. Knowing Avinash, and appreciating the expertise he’s been sharing at his blog, it is sure to become a bible for the art.

Rob O’Regan at Magnosticism reports Nielsen’s decision to drop pageviews as the primary metric for site measurement. Good riddance say I.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

I posted on this a while back, arguing that Ajax and other page-cache models were making the Web 1.0 model of page-by-page sessions irrelevant. Expect to see some sites rail against this decision, and don’t expect the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to make a move anytime soon.  Here’s the pdf of the Nielsen-Netratings release.

There are some great resources and wiser minds than me on the topic of dashboard design, but let me go back to the oft-quoted Kenneth McGee at Gartner, and his 2003 book, Head’s Up, for some fundamental guidance on how a community/engagement marketer can best act as a listening post for an organization.
In a meeting with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim last month, I cited McGee and his case example of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which decimated the Texas coastline and killed over 6000 people because the local weather expert, Issac Cline, ignored the obvious warning signs. McGee’s thesis comes down to this: in business intelligence the issue is not measuring enough things, it’s knowing which things to look at. Pilots crash planes when they take their eyes off the job at hand and worry about fetching the pencil that rolled under their seat. CEOs can crash companies if they fret over the wrong bullshit.

McGee cites as one of the book’s case studies the CEO of GM, Rick Waggoner, and what he looks at every day. Comes down to three things: daily dealer sales (for a geographical view of demand), factory floor rejection rates (for a view of quality), and a third I can’t remember but will when I return to my home office and my bookshelf.

So what do dashboards have to do with my lot in life? Lots. We run the business on dashboards. We spend a lot of time peering at red, yellow and green spreadsheet cells to determine if the business is on track for the quarter, if our advertising is delivering the ROI we expected, and if we need to develop a promotion or coupon to make our goals.

Now I need to develop a single page, to be produced once a week, for the company’s leadership that encapsulates, at a glance, what they need to know about Lenovo and the online world known as Blogistan. This isn’t a KPI achievement dashboard. This isn’t a green-yellow-red series of gauges. This is a simple thing that permits a CEO or SVP to see, at a glance, that last week the Blogs were chattering about us more or less than the week before and the prevailing themes were A, B, and C. Maybe a chart scraped off of Technorati showing number of gross mentions of “Lenovo” and “ThinkPad” trended over the last three months with a Plus/Minus indicator. This basically is blunt buzz. Then, underneath two sets of bullets. One titled Highlights with the three good things that were blogged, posted, or commented in the previous week. Then Lowlights with three bad thing. And, at the end, a sentence or two from me saying something like: “Buzz spiked on Thursday with the announcement of the R61 and T61. Commenters hate the placement of the audio jacks on the front panel. Competitor X stepped into a mess when it told the Old Lady Association to go to hell and Blogger X called the CEO of Competitor Y a pinhead.”

This word of mouth dashboard is dependent on the verbatim quotes of the forum posters, bloggers, and blog commenters. What I lack is an overall positive-negative sentiment rating — a leading indicator of customer satisfaction — and in the ideal world would have one benchmarked against my competition. Yes, there are services that provide such ratings, but we don’t subscribe to them. I sense there may be a way to kludge something together with some degree of dependability.

What is the purpose of the measurement and reporting (the battle cry of our metrics and analytics leader, Jim Hazen)? Primarily as a communications mechanism to alert our CEO and his direct reports of commentary and customer satisfaction over issues which may not be understood, or detected internally as soon as me and my team see them. As McGee emphasized, the earlier something is detected the number of options and the amount of time to react to increases. Waiting for the hurricane to arrive is too late to evacuate or bring in the patio furniture.