Reid Dossinger

With the launch and demo of Google’s Chrome OS, where the OS is the browser and all your information lives online, my head was in the cloud (HA! No? Oh, alright). As much as I love the move towards an online life—where information stays in one place and the only thing that changes is the devices we use to access it—it’s hard not to take in the arguments that we’re throwing our privacy away.

Playing the part of the skeptic (not too much of a stretch for me), it’s not hard to see the concerns. Sure, at the moment there’s nothing in my Google Docs or on my blogs that will put me in jail or get me blackmailed, but it’s pretty easy to see a 9/11-type event or massive change in government that means more scrutiny on what we say and do. Our world can change in a big way, and what formerly seemed innocuous is now a crime, with all the evidence needed to convict available in the formerly-friendly-sounding cloud.

Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are sweeping the ashes of their burnt hard copies under the rug and going about their lives, which probably will involve embroidering a lovely “I Told You So” for their living room walls.

It seems extreme, but it’s happened before, and recently. We tend to believe that we can only get more free, but it can get snuffed out all too easily. Look at Afghanistan in the 20th century, and now imagine that kind of crackdown when everything you’ve said it not only easy to find, but is traced to your name, address and even social security number.

And that’s not even to mention smaller things like what your bosses or potential employers can find out about your, or what thieves of property or identity could use to more easily take things away from you. It happens.

But what if the flipside negates that? What if what we give up in privacy, we gain in freedom?

Yes, on the political front, having your opinions easily read as disobedience in a sudden government crackdown is chilling, but the ease and speed at which we can share stories in a wide broadcast means that it’s a lot harder for authorities to disappear people. If one person knows about it, they can get it to everyone, and it doesn’t even require convincing someone at the news station that it’s a story worth airing. It’s just aired, then and there by anyone who cares.

Yes, it’s concerning how much a thief or other ill-intentioned individual could find out about just with access to your Google password, but by the exact same token, we have instant access to our accounts, can find out much more quickly when things have happened, and cut things off, often remotely. And even in these small cases, the ability to get advice and help from a community of the whole world means it’s much easier to take action when it happens, and find out how to keep it from happening before it does.

There’s still enough skeptic in me that I do sometimes suddenly get freaked out by how much of me is out in the cloud. But a deep breath of the wider picture usually brings me back to wanting as much of my life online—the easy-to-use, information-filled, convenient as all hell online world—as I can get.

The debate is open in the comments…if you aren’t nervous about comments.

You know, headlines like that one really put me on the fence, balancing between “Ooh! Metrics!” and “Wow, no wonder people think it’s boring and geeky.”

ANYWAY…today I’m definitely in the former camp, in the sense that it’s exciting because it’s a philosophical puzzle: how can you solve a problem that can never really be solved?

Yesterday, I commented on Avinash Kaushik’s post where he asked, “If you were to measure the success of a company’s social media efforts how would you do it?” My answer:

For social media, the obvious metrics still hold: referrals and conversions from referrals.

But being from a nonprofit background, where the higher-ups are often skeptical of social media, the real metrics are the words. There’s nothing more valuable than the tweet that says “I love that {your org} is on Twitter” or the time you respond to a comment on Facebook addressing a wide concern about your organization or when you comment on a blog and the author is blown-away impressed that he got your attention. Those are the things that really get the higher-ups’ attention. And that’s the social media that I want to measure, because that’s what makes a difference to the organization.

To expand on that, at nonprofits, managers tend to be skeptical and stereotyping of social media. They think of comments as the land of the crazies, blogs as being only about self-obsession, and social networks as only for kids and techies and just fads that are soon to pass.

So it’s not just sentiment analysis that I’m talking about, mostly because the tools I’ve seen that try to gauge sentiment as metrics are crap. Now, maybe there’s some enterprise solution that’s done a better job at metric-ing sentiment, but what’s more important when trying to convince the skeptics is showing actual words. Telling a manager that we got “17 favorable tweets” isn’t anywhere near as valuable as the single tweet that says “What an amazing service you’re providing, and we’re thrilled that you’re on Twitter.”

Now, maybe later down the road, a line graph showing increased favorable comments and tweets will be valuable, but until then, you’re much better off with a short list of text of individual comments, tweets and blog posts that give a quick and clear sum to “social media isn’t what you think it is, and this is why we should be doing it.”

In years of working with web analytics, I’ve had to try and explain the difference between page views, visitors and visits, and why people looking at basic stats should focus on visits. I can usually get the point across with the simple explanation and be pretty sure that people get it, but I once told a more involved (and more fun) story, and it seems that this story was the difference between a still-slightly-confused “Oh, okay” and what I got after this story, which was “Ohhh! Okay, now I understand it.” With smiles.

The story:

Tom just moved into a new 4-room apartment and is exhausted. He just wants to spend the day sitting on the couch and watching the full season three of Mad Men that he has squirreled away on his DVR.

About fifteen minutes into the show, Tom’s doorbell rings, so he has to stop the DVR and get up off the couch. It’s his friend Kate, stopping by to pick up a DVD she’s loaned Tom, so she only see’s the front room as Tom picks up the DVD and hands it to her. She leaves. One visitor paying a visit with one room viewed.

An hour later, the doorbell rings again and Tom pulls himself up again (getting kind of annoyed now) and gets the door. It’s his friend Cortney who’s stopped by to see the apartment. Tom shows her the full apartment and she leaves. One visitor paying a visit with four rooms viewed.

A little while later, Greg stops by, but he’s only interested in the new TV that Tom got, so he never leaves the living room. One visitor paying a visit with one room viewed.

Just as Tom wonders if he’s going to get interrupted again, Kate comes by again and says, “I forgot to get a full tour of your new place!” He shows her around and she leaves. One returning visitor paying a visit with four rooms viewed.

So that’s four visits paid by three different people, with ten views of the rooms. But why should Tom care more about how many visits were paid than the people who came by? Because it means he had to get up off the damn couch four times! They’re all his friends, and once he’s off the couch, the number of rooms he shows off doesn’t make a difference, so really what matters to him at the end of the day is that his perfect, Mad Men-filled day was interrupted four times.

The apartment is a website, room views are page views, visitors are visitors, and visits paid are visits. Which is obvious, but this not only explains in a more real-world way the difference between the three, but also makes it clear why it’s the initial visit that’s the most basic measure of action: because we hate having to get up to do something when all we’re trying to do is loaf.

I know it’s about as boring as anything to complain about Facebook homepage redesign, but, well, here are: complaining.

This isn’t a crank about how it looks different, though. We all know that there are plenty of people that will bust a gasket at any change, but my perspective is on web statistics. And if your experience is anything like mine, Facebook’s new design will slice your referrals by about a quarter.

Every Friday, I post my favorite song of the week on my music blog Naive Harmonies, and I used to promote it by feeding the site’s RSS into Facebook. I got almost no referrals from Facebook, so a few weeks ago, I stopped the automatic posting, and instead manually posted a link. I could include a short writeup about what exactly I was posting, and I could often include a picture.

The effect was dramatic. I went from one or two Facebook referrals each time to about twelve to fifteen, plus would get between four or five comments and a few likes, none of which I got when I was automatically posting them.

Then Facebook changed their new homepage so that the “News Feed” is the default and only includes people that Facebook thinks you’d be most interested in, which dramatically decreases the number of people who are likely to see your posted link. For the last two weeks, my Friday posted link has gotten a quarter of the clicks they did the previous two weeks.

Those two peaks are the manual posts and two tiny nubbins at the end were the last two posts, which apparently far fewer people saw thanks to the News feed showing much fewer friends.

Facebook can make their design changes all they want, but they’re doing far too much algorithmic guessing here as to who wants to see what. From the user side, I feel that they’re making things more complex than they need to be. But from a business side, it seems as though getting viewers to your website from Facebook just got a whole lot harder.