Ever wonder about what goes through the mind of a creative executive? You know, those people who produce the content that brings the traffic that you analyze?
Well, lucky for you, my wife has restarted her blog.

My favorite post so far is on how Bluefly uses sweepstakes and contests in a totally effective way.
Also check out her post on how to run a successful focus group which has some great tips.

In case, you’re wondering, Jess has been at this for a while, building world-class entertainment sites for kids and families for the better part of 7 years.
In other words, she knows what she is talking about so check it out!

Well, it’s not particularly scientific, but the results are in. The poll was quite simple: Ask my readers how many of Eric’s books they currently own – zero, one, two, or all three. I ran the poll from Feb 11 to Feb 16, 2007 (well 17 if you count this morning) and had 23 respondents. Here’s the breakdown of responses:

• 39.13% of respondents own all 3 of Eric’s books
• 39.13% of respondents own two of Eric’s books

Channeling a marketing director I used to work with, I could say, my site has a top two box score of 78.3%. That’s pretty darn good although not the nirvana of 80+%.

• 13.04% of respondents own just one of Eric’s books
• 8.7% of respondents did not own a single book (maybe they do now )

- Respondents are 4.5 times more likely to own two or three books than they are to own none

- Respondents are 3 times more likely to own two or more books than they are to own just one

So when Eric complains that none of my referrals are purchasing books, I can say, “Fine, write a new one, most of my readers already own the others already.”

If we combine respondents that own one, two, or three of the books we’re talking about 91.3% of all respondents. In other words, you dear readers are not the target for Eric’s book selling any more unless he writes a new one.

A big thanks to everyone who took the poll!

The poll is now closed, I will be posting a breakdown of the results soon.
Eric recently responded to Gary Angel about building context with metrics and KPIs. The whole thing had me quite worried.

I send quite a bit of highly engaged traffic his way, but none of my readers buy his books! So it’s time to find out why. Over on the right panel, you should see a poll (provided by MajikWidget), please take a few seconds to answer the question and let’s see what happens.

Oh, if you answer ‘zero’ and you are a web analyst, then you should go buy Eric’s books!

Yep, that’s short-hand for Eric Talks Engagement. Eric gets one step closer to brass tacks by defining the activities that occur on his site, or with his content that are relevant and engaged – for him.

Here’s his list of activities, grouped into moderate engagement and high engagement sets (as defined by Eric):

Moderate-Value Activities

• Read my weblog
• Read about the Web Analytics Business Process
• Research web analytics jobs
• Add a link to my link database
• Read comments about my books
• Give me an email address
• Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
• Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group

High-Value Activities

• Consider buying one or more of my books
• Buy one or more of my books
• Read about any of my books
• Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
• Download a sample copy of one of my books
• Email me directly
• Submit a comment to my weblog
• Go to Amazon.com to check out my books

Now, score one for Eric for actually thinking through a framework for measuring engagement, and putting it into practice, but it’s late and I’m feeling nit-picky.
Because Engagement has been talked about so much lately in terms of Web 2.0 and ‘Social Media‘ I’m putting Eric’s listed activities through that lense. Of the 16 activities, only 5 measure social media engagement:

• Read my weblog
• Add a link to my link database
• Host a Web Analytics Wednesday
• Join the Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group
• Submit a comment to my weblog

7 seem to be about commerce – dealing with buying Eric’s books

• Consider buying one or more of my books
• Buy one or more of my books
• Read about any of my books
• Read about my Key Performance Indicator Worksheets
• Download a sample copy of one of my books
• Go to Amazon.com to check out my books
• Read comments about my books

Two of them I would equate to traditional CRM efforts

• Give me an email address
• Email me directly

The last two I’m having a hard time categorizing, but my guess is they relate directly to the Eric T. Peterson brand

• Research Web Analytics Jobs
• Read about the Web Analytics Business Process

So, here’s the breakdown:

• Social Media Activities: 31.25%
• Commerce Activities: 43.75%
• CRM Activities: 12.5%
• Other (Brand) Activities: 12.5%

Ok, so Eric’s in a bit of a hybrid situation, which ‘traditional’ (web 1.0?) companies will also find themselves in where social media is just one of many things going on.

But the blogger in me says ‘Come On! Only five of the activities are related to the social aspect of the site AND only one of those five is of high engagement value?’

Eric you gotta get out of your traditional corporate shell! (Disclaimer: I’m a traditional corporate dog too)

Where are the subscriptions to your RSS feed and the associated click-backs?
Where are the track backs?
Where are the buzz-rankings (e.g. post/discussions picked up in other places)?
Let me put this another way, is engagement a practical measure for non-social web activities?

It seems like forever ago that Eric and I talked about engagement and how I expressed some frustration over Scoble’s post about the need for Engagement metrics. Haven’t we web analysts been talking about this like FOREVER (well maybe 18 months or so anyway).

At the time, Eric told me he was measuring engagement on his site and that he planned a blog post on the subject. So I held off because Eric had some real-world experience, and better tools for testing it out. So here we are, more than a month afterwards and that very busy man finally had a chance to get out his thoughts on his experimenting – yeah! Something to look at and noodle over.

Anyway, it’s time to get to work, so more thought on this will have to wait until later. In the meantime, go read Eric’s post and see what you think.