There’s an interesting conversation going on over at the Web Analytics Demystified blog around the utility of Twitter and it’s place in the Marketing mix. I started to respond in a comment but it was way too long and too disorganized so I’m trying to organize my thoughts here.

Essentially, one group - to a varying degree - are challenging Twitter’s utility to the marketing organization and others are defending said usefulness.

Jim Novo seems to be the most vocal of the former group and while his points are well taken I think that his POV is somewhat skewed. To wit:

Thanks for responding. I’m not saying Word of Mouth isn’t important, we get a ton of it for the Lab Store, and it’s everywhere - Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all of it. And, I’m happy to say, it’s very positive, because we take really good care of our customers, and they don’t hesitate one moment to contact Service if they have any issues.

Jim goes on to say,

So I guess my question is this: why in the world would a company create a relationship where customers “seek support or “service” from peers, whom they trust, rather than from the company”?

That’s insane, in my mind.

And

We love all the social commentary about the Lab Store but we don’t “do anything” about it, because it just is what it is, it’s a result of smart Marketing and great Service. This kind of chatter has (hopefully) always gone on about great companies. The only difference now is there exists a public, crunchable record of it.

In a perfect world, yes the customer service logs are going to have all the information you need and you can act on them instantaneously. The thing that gets me about Jim’s comments is that his company apparently enjoys the enviable position of being loved by most, if not all, its customers. Apparently, he can afford not to be involved in this channel - instead he can sit back and enjoy it. So why, indeed, track what’s going on out there and use it to your advantage? Why engage at all?

Beyond Jim’s colored perception (and kudos to Jim for having that luxury) most companies aren’t in the same position with their customers and I’m sure that most companies don’t go out and try to create a negative relationship with their customers. None the less, customer distrust is out there and while the customer is on the phone with Customer Service, they are also spreading the word … and increasingly doing it on Twitter, at least that’s where the influencers seem to be. Gone are the days when one disabused customer is telling 20 friends about her bad experience, now she’s sharing it with thousands or millions of people at a highly accelerated pace.

Remember "Dell Hell"? These kind of customer service nightmares are now playing out on Twitter and savvy companies are there trying to listen, engage and remedy. Two incidents recently with @davewiner and @techcrunch (Michael Arrington) stand as evidence and @comcastcares certainly seems to be having a mostly positive impact on perception as well as customer satisfaction.

I’m not sure that Twitter is usable as a quantitative tool yet but certainly the qualitative impact (positive or negative) shouldn’t be ignored. Arrington mentions Tweetscan as an easy way to keep track of buzz …

So, Jim, to summarize

• You may have a very rare or even unique POV based on your reputation among your customers
• Influentials are on Twitter and are tweeting their experience with your customer service team as it happens, so which do you pick - the call logs or twitter?
• Twitter is relatively opaque to J-I-T quantitative analysis but the qualitative impact of what is happening there shouldn’t be ignored
• In light of the examples above (just how many people listen to what Arrington says?) companies can’t afford to ignore Twitter or other social media channels, don’t believe me? Ask @jowyang (Jeremiah Owyang, Sr. Analyst - Social Computing at Forrester Research)

This morning, less than a week after the announced acquisition, Yahoo! decides that Index Tools will be free. So let’s see that’s three large Ad Networks (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) that have bought/developed a web analytics tool/service provider and are now offering that tool/service for free.

Obviously these behemoths see value in web analytics but not enough to make it a stand alone business. Instead, it increasingly appears that these ad networks think that it’s important to offer analytics as part of the ad suite in that it either draws in business, makes switching to them easier or makes it harder for advertisers to leave - if your spend AND your analytics are tied up in one ad network it will be harder to make the switch to another.

I’d love to see the folks at Jupiter or Forrester weigh in on this but it seems to me that consolidation is making the web analytics market weak and open to extinction as a stand alone. Either the current trend will continue and web analytics will be subsumed by the advertising market or the BI players will resurge and take over the remaining pieces of the WA providers.

On second thought, it will be both. Ad Networks will offer free, entry to mid-level analytics capability across the spectrum of the market (Individuals –> SMB –> Enterprise) while the BI players will integrate the remaining "Enterprise" level web analytics services into their suites in order to offer comprehensive channel analytics and advanced segmentation and data mining capabilities. Watch out folks, there are sharks in the water.

IMHO

Photo Credit: B. Stabler via a creative commons license

So, some of the buzz coming out of WordCamp - Dallas was for a new web analytics product called “Woopra” - a Java-based analytics app.

According to my email, I signed up on March 30, 2008 - 14 days ago. At the time, I was unable to configure a site because although I could register for the service, setting up a site required an invitation - which I didn’t have and there were no instructions for getting one. The next day, the invitation was made ‘optional’ so I was able to add this site. However, adding the site just sent me into a queue and I received the message that I would hear back regarding site approval within 7 days - this was 13 days ago.

Two or three days ago (don’t remember which since it was a form on woopra.com and I didn’t receive even an automated recognition of the submission) I sent a support request via the woopra website asking for a status on the site approval. Nope, haven’t heard a word.

I was just cruising the forums over at woopra and there’s a whole topic dedicated to the approval timeline. According to CEO John Pozadzides, Woopra is too busy with other things like a site redesign, bug fixes and infrastructure scaling to take care of approvals - or customer service apparently.

I’m a web analyst and I like to evaluate web analytics packages when I can, I’ve had as many as six running on this site concurrently (don’t try that at home - it’s like going down the rabbit hole not to mention the impact to load times) seeing how things work and blogging about them from time to time.

Of course, with Woopra so far behind the customer service curve I’m just peeved enough to write a review with the information I have at hand.

Woopra had set my expectation for one week, in one week after sign up I was to know the status of my approval. Seven days came and went and there has been no communication. No resetting of my expectations no “Woops! We’re sorry” - not a peep.

So, it would seem that the folks at Woopra weren’t prepared for their launch and are managing poorly. Instead of focusing - at least a little - on managing mine, and others’ expectations as well as other aspects of customer service they are busy launching a redesign a couple of weeks after their launch.

How would I rate Woopra so far?

• Technology: UNK
• Core Reporting: UNK
• Segmentation: UNK
• Campaign Analysis: UNK
• Intra-Page Event Analysis: UNK
• ECommerce Analysis: UNK
• Multimedia Analysis: UNK
• Data Visualization & Exploration: UNK
• Customer Service: Non Existent

I also checked their official blog and there’s no discussion of the approval process or problems nor is it discussed in the FAQ so it would seem that the only place to talk about it is in the forum since support requests seem to be in an endless queue.

I found one of the co-founders on Twitter and there’s no discussion there about how the flood of sign-ups has derailed their customer service. I wonder what @jowyang would say about their apparent lack of social media strategy and management?

I guess my point is this: Even if you (or Woopra) think of yourselves as a technology company, at the end of the day people use the technology and you need to spend at least the same amount of time on us, your customers (or potential customers), as you do on your technology and service and I’m not feeling that at the moment.

---

Has anyone else signed up for Woopra and gotten a site approved (since the launch at WordCamp)?

Anyone in on the private beta beforehand that would like to tell us about the service?

W

orking with Custom Number Formats

If you’ve worked with Excel very long, you have probably gone through all of the number formats available to you and seen some custom ones that you wish you knew how to do.

BTW, just to be clear we’re talking about Format Cells –> Number –> Custom

I’m going to cover a couple of my current favorites just to get the conversation going but it would be great if others chimed in with their favorite custom number formats or with their questions!

In science we have scientific notation, which Excel handles but it’s ugly and somewhat mysterious. Ten Billion (10,000,000,000) would be displayed as 1.00+E10 (one times 10 to the tenth power). In business we often shorten big numbers too right? 10 billion, 300K, 15M(illion), etc and it would be helpful if we could shorten really big numbers in a similar fashion because we often don’t need the full degree of accuracy to be shown (it will still be there but we want to shorten the number to a reasonable bite-size). So here’s the trick that I learned recently…

We’re probably all familiar with this number format:

#,##0.00 - this is Excel’s default number format (in the US) and displays the number with commas separating thousands, millions etc. and two significant digits e.g. 10,000,000,000.00. Well we get a lot of business speak around here and don’t need that level of accuracy - in most cases - so why not have the same shorthand in the reports that we do in language?

By adding successive commas to the custom number format, we can “divide” the original number by a thousand.

For instance, take our 10,000,000,000 and apply the custom number format of #,##0.00,

Now our number is 10,000,000.00 thousands I can even indicate this by adding the following to my number format: #,##0.00,”T” (or “M” for you Romans) and the number is displayed as 10,000,000.00T

Two commas (#,##0.00,,”M”) reduces it to millions as in 10,000.00M

Three commas (#,##0.00,,,”B”) reduces to billion - 10.00B

Effectively, we’ve taken a very large number and reduced the space it takes to display it - higher data density. We’ve given up a bit of the precision, from a display perspective, but when working with very large numbers, the significant digits can be effectively reduced and still convey the important information.

My other example today relates to a pet-peeve of mine - consistency. When working with currency - $1,000.00 - one of the choice formats is to display negative values in red and in parenthesis. Apparently people who spend all their time in ledgers appreciate this format. However, there is no matching format for percentages and I’m always calculating percent change. So, I want my negative percent changes in revenue to match my negative revenue numbers.

Again, the default currency format for negative currency is

($1,000.00) which is the equivalent of the custom format $#,##0.00_);[Red]($#,##0.00)

Ok, first an admission I don’t know what some of the above means - specifically the _) just before the semicolon, if someone wants to explain that would be awesome. But I do know that everything before the semicolon deals with positive numbers and everything after it deals with negative numbers. So [Red] in brackets tells Excel to display the text in red and the parentheses surrounding #,##0.00 tells Excel to surround it in parentheses.

So it’s pretty easy to map the same formats to percentages. First we take the custom format equivalent of Excel’s standard percentage display: 0.00%. Notice that it doesn’t do anything with thousands or with negative, so we just plug it into the custom format from above thusly:

#,##0.00%_);[Red](#,##0.00%)

1,000.00% | (1,000.00%)

Effectively, all we did was add the percent sign (%) after the significant digit declaration and we now have percentages that will be similarly formatted to currency.

What about you? What’s your favorite number formatting trick in Excel?