GregHay.com

The internet has no Uncle Joe with a glass of wine, no “Flying Walendas” (if New York State had seen my uncle toss my screaming and giggling infant body into the air, to perform flips, I probably would have been on the next train full of orphans out of town), no reading of Richard Scary books in my PJs and certainly no easy single solution to reading about my friends. When I was 3 they were Loli Worm and company, today it’s co-workers, family, friends and people I have interacted with online. Until today I used 3 tools to keep track of everything; Flock, TweetDeck and email, now I’m down to just two and I’m counting the days I’m down to one.

The TweetDeck update today added more content to the application and moved it one step closer to being the ultimate tool for watching and interacting in real time with the web. The addition today of TweetPics and Facebook status updates, for me, replaced the need I had for Flock. Why is this addition important? Why is cool? Because it brings all my streams into one place and allows me to monitor everything with a single application and minimal tabs.

What is TweetDeck?

It’s a simple application that runs on the Twitter API, pulling content into buckets as you designate them. You can set up searches to pull back any term (I set up and @ reply search so anything to me gets pulled in, yes I’m vain).

You can set up groups so you can sort your co-workers, friends or in some cases enemies and detractors. I’m not big enough to have those… yet.

Now, you can integrate Facebook status updates, which is awesome and got me excited today. For most of us the status update is the key feature in Facebook and this addition to the tool makes those of us that use Facebook in this capacity, very, very happy.

I can’t wait for the day when a single application can manage to bring back to me all of the feeds and information I have spent the last 5 years spreading myself out over. This is only the first step; I want to see the addition of my Gmail account and perhaps IM down the road. Thank you Tweetdeck for making my day.

I have switched to the Disqus commenting platform, so if your comment is gone. Sorry.

I made the decision because Disqus is a valuable tool for blogs. As a reader it allows you to carry your ID from blog to blog as well as your discussions. While many blogs on Wordpress allow comments with Google ID or OpenID, for me there has been no true way to port “GregHay” around the Internet. I’ve been siloed to your blog or site, not allowing my awesome comments to start a greater discussion. I’m kidding, my comments aren’t that awesome. But there is huge value in allowing comments to work across networks.

Disqus allows non-bloggers to steer conversation!

Many blogs have done “Banned Commenter of the Month” posts, which are basically just public outings of griefers and until now there hasn’t really been a good way for readers to impact discussions. Sure, they could say something crazy or be a nuisance with “ ^ You suck” but they really couldn’t do the heavy lifting of carrying discussions. As I build out my network and more blogs install Disqus, I hope that posts and discussions become much more dynamic and lead to cross pollination of ideas; allowing readers’ comments to do the long tail lifting.

So feel free to comment… what’s the worst that happens?

Blame James Gross for getting me thinking about this.

James asked in his post yesterday what is the New New Thing? Looking at the lifespan of each of the last three big emerging trends (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) and how long they each spent in the limelight being the “hot” thing, James asked how could we guess what’s next. He asked if search data or some other tool monitoring online discussion and/or activity might identify the next emerging “hot” thing. I think it’s a decent hypothesis, if we bloggers didn’t totally muck it up for James. And I’m about to throw my hat in the ring and become part of the problem.

You can’t discuss Twitter without saying, “twitter” and there in lies the problem. We all add to the buzz and drive outlandish hockey stick charts that end up driving these “hot” trends. Not by getting involved and using the platforms, but instead just by discussing them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, we chat about it therefore it must be the thing to be doing. Are we doing more harm than good? Perhaps.
Continue reading It’s over, it’s finished, put it in the dead pool!!!

Slowly building this up from a Go Daddy squatter page to a site with slightly more traffic than my Deli’s Menu Pages page, I’ve had the luxury of closely monitoring the site’s metrics and understanding how my messaging is getting out. It also allows me to understand how my network of friends and family uses the web.

The exciting tool for me is how Google reports on the geographic origin of my traffic. By looking at the map of New York I can quickly tell that my Aunt in Syracuse and my mother have visited. I know a friend in Rochester checked it out, my co-workers and several of my friends in NYC have looked at it. I have no idea who in Albany or southern NY looked, but it is cool to see that they’re watching.

A look at the whole US tells me that co-workers form other Nielsen offices in Kentucky, new co-workers in California, my aunt in Georgia, my father traveling to Miami for work (yeah, I know you checked it out Dad! So you saw the sweet ‘70s pic! Have to love Google ☺ ) and while I don’t know anyone in Seattle (greetings!) I’m happy that they’ve all looked.

Why’s this cool? As a marketer looking at this level of data is awesome. If I could write it, I’d have the site skinned to appear differently for each visitor based on where they were from. Visitors from Georgia could see a banner with myself and my aunt Shirley, Upstate New York visitors could get the current one of myself and mother, Cali visitors from Federated Media could get shots of me working hard at my desk. Now, how do I do that? Hmm….

Additional Sweet Facts -
28% of my traffic is from Twitter, which is awesome, that’s the only way I advertise and I’ve only tweeted a couple times about my ramblings.

A 51.56% Bounce Rate is great! Meaning half of my visitors do more than just look and leave, they click something. Now if I only had something to sell .

Average time spent is 2:34. This isn’t surprising; my aunts who probably just look at the pictures likely ignore the posts about data wonk stuff. It is still a good number however, when coupled with the bounce rate, it means I have an engaged audience which is ultimately the goal. Additionally, as a design decision I opted not to add links, outside content or any elements that would distract from the simple posts. So this decent time spent metric also is telling that my content is the focus, not RSS streams our widgets that point away from my content.

Only 4% of traffic comes from search. But the cool thing is seeing that a referring term is “Greg Hay Federated Media” meaning someone wasn’t looking for the football player that also comes up in results for “Greg Hay”

Nielsen, please listen, I want you to make a change or take a fresh look at web measurement. Give me something that I can use for media planning that makes more sense for the way the web actually works than what you’re giving me now. Currently you tell me who is on what site by applying an antiquated method of measurement modeled after the TV thinking that when a show is “on” the audience is there and thus that’s how you report it. The web is always “on” and you’ve shown you have no clue when I “watch” and have not taken the time to address that the web is a real-time experience and users don’t have to tune in when a content provider tells them to.

So, this is what I want. Tell me where my demographic goes throughout the day. There are reasons Cartoon Network runs Taco Bell ads during Adult Swim, to get stoners thinking about it. Why can’t you tell me where 35-54 year-old women go during the day? Or males 18-24? Use the panel, follow the group.

I think the ultimate win for online media planners is going to be when groups of people can be identified and targeted by how they move and navigate the web, NOT by who left a footprint by visiting a site at some point in time.

Before OneRiot switched gears and became a weird search engine, they had an amazing browser widget called Me.dium. It allowed users to see where their friends were in real-time and navigate to wherever that was by just clicking their avatar. It was genius. For me, I was totally sold when I spent an afternoon watching stay-at-home moms go on a shopping tour of the web with a blogger hosting, supplying the links and leading the chat in the plug-in. It was probably the coolest experience I had as a researcher; it was real time feedback on products, it was calls to action via commerce and best of all it was watching how a network would react to a shared web experience.

So, that got me thinking, how could this be looked at on a grand scale? How could we watch the web like the Me.duim tool did? Why continue to use metrics in an archaic way that TV dictates? Nielsen, switch. Show me what the crowd is doing right now. Do more men visit EPSN.com on their lunch break or after work? Would ads for iTunes music make more sense at night when people are at home on their machines or during the day when they get the impulse at work? Are more women on Amazon.com during the day and men at night? Build it, we will follow.

I hope someone out there is listening and taking notes…. no matter what time of day they find this.

(Full disclosure, I was with Nielsen Online over the course of the last year and a half in a research position)