The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

First, no sooner do I write in the last newsletter (if you didn't receive yours, email me) that I hope TheFutureOf blog will go in some new directions than my wish is answered. The blog is no more, no newer a direction could there be, yes? Makes me want to go back to studying PsychoPomp so that I might find it. I'll probably either place posts here that I was hoping to put there or start a new blog series devoted to what might be in the Future. Stay tuned.

<UPDATE>
That blog no longer exists in its original form. The blog name is still there and it's no longer what I'd hoped it would be. All of my FutureOf contributions can now be found on TheAnalyticsEcology.
</UPDATE>

And I'm learning about Twitter. NPR did a piece, Keep Your Tweets To Yourself, today on Morning Edition that gave me a chuckle. I lost a follower today. She joined on Friday, I think. As I'm always curious who's interested in me (again, don't you folks have something better to do?) I clicked on her picture.

And quickly called over Susan (beloved wife, partner, ...) who commented, "Are we going to have people throwing themselves at you at conferences, saying they want to have your children?"

I doubt this will happen. Susan and I travel together now more often than not and have you heard the horse story yet?

Anyway, I discovered I could do a search on @JosephCarrabis, NextStage, all sorts of things. Lots of 140 character discussions going on, questions and answer back and forths...none of them directed at me. Not that I know of, anyway. And people who know me know I won't intrude in the conversations of others unless invited.

More interestingly, many of those twitterings that I discovered in my searches demonstrate stress responses along the Tend-Befriend axis. The most familiar of these axes is the Flight-Fight axis. The Tend-Befriend axis often demonstrates itself in female social interaction patterns. Ha, folks, bet you didn't know you were all thinking like women.

In any case, I'll offer some responses here in (what I hope is) chronological order (LIFO)...

@rdo - I can't wait to learn more.

@christopherb_ - "I think the ability for NextStage to predict age and gender is directly actionable and relevant for certain companies." I should go on record as saying that I consider gender and age low-hanging fruit. We first demonstrated our ability to predict these vectors with 75% accuracy back in 2001-3 and truly, gender and age are useful only in conjunction with some other vectors. To wit (and pulling from the conference whitepaper and sometimes using NextStage terminology)...

<True Cases from the NextStage Archives>
First, from a largish company: Four pages to completion event (closure, transaction, the visitor gives you something you want). Traffic on pages 1 and 2 is good and fairly even, dies after page 3. Note that the client didn't see anything odd about this.

What's happening?

My first thought was to determine if the same visitor was sitting at the computer through the entire browsing session. Drops off such as shown here often occur because different if not conflicting {C,B/e,M}s are interacting with the same information. One of the reports we developed early on was a measure of how many different visitors were using the same computer. It originated early in the days of NextStage, back when it was quite common for there to be a single workstation that was used by several different people. A client wanted to know how many different people were browsing their site because such information was a demonstration of how many dollars would result from contacting the group browsing.

That report showed that the number of real humans using the computer during these browsing sessions was 1:1 human:computer on pages 1-2 of the sessions, was almost double on page 3 (the "FailurePage") and went pretty much back to 1:1 on page 4. Looking at the {C,B/e,M}s that showed up on page 3 and weren't present before and after I noted that the majority of them demonstrated female neurologies, pages 1,2 and 4 were dominated by male neurologies.

So far and knowing nothing about the content of the pages, it's obvious that males ask someone else to look at the website on page 3 and these others demonstrate negative biasing female neurologies.

The suggestions were to add some positive biasing female design factors to pages 2-4. Completions increased. And do remember, the client was happy with things as they were (8%). Getting them to just under 22% only involved a few design changes so the cost was minimal.

Numbers and numbers and numbers

Look carefully and you'll see that the number of "visitors" goes down on pages 2-3 once ET's suggestions are taken into account. This decrease is due to the influence of the positive-biasing female design factors driving away the predominately male neurologies. Note, however, that actual completions increase on page 4 as the other, predominantly female {C,B/e,M}s brought into the browsing session are positively reinforced (ie, "Sure, dear-partner-o'-mine, let's get that"). Biologic gender isn't a factor here, neurologic gender (are they thinking male or female thoughts?) is.

And now an anecdote from a smallish company.

I mention in the above that the Real Visitors/Session report came about due to the request of an early client. That client gave me space in their building to work. They had sent out print flyer that directed people to their website (yep, back when not everyone could be counted on to have an email account). The CTO of this company, Ed, and I were watching the data come in. I absent-mindedly said, "Hey, this hospital is sure interested in this stuff on your site." (I didn't know about the flyer).

Ed sat forward. "Really? How do you know?" and I explained. "But that's not what we advertised in our flyer. Are you sure about this?" and I showed some ET response charts and told him yes, I was sure.

"What else can you tell from that?" Ed pointed at the data streams coming in. "Well, the person browsing the web is a youngish woman, probably in her late 30s. But the decision maker is an older woman. I'm guessing early 50s. And you better contact her about these, not those, because that's what they need right now."

"Hang on a second." Ed walked out and came back a few moments later with Dave, the company president. "Tell Dave what you just told me."

And I did.

And Dave said, "I don't know who that young woman is, but the other woman is Sarah ... . She's the Head Buyer for that hospital."

(and yes, I wondered for a moment why hospitals would need to purchase heads (or did Dave mean toilets or...)) 

"Call her and tell her that since you mailed the flyer you got a good deal on an overstock of these and can pass the savings onto her."

Dave did call, chatted for a while and learned that yes, they were looking for product B even though product A was highlighted in the flyer and on the site and made a sale.
</True Cases from the NextStage Archives>

@ssegeroth - "...It's simple and actionable..." ROFLMAO. Susan (wife, partner, ...) use to tell people that I had to be within 15' of the servers in order for them to do their calculations. Hopefully the next generation of our systems will be simple and actionable and I can go on a vacation (have you seen my latest kite, what a fellow kiting enthusiast calls "a hang glider on a leash"? Or how about my next one (just asked Susan last night, still waiting for her okay)?).

@web_analyst - One of the whitepapers I have in the queue is entitled "AB and Multivariate Testing Optimized for Non-Conscious Decision Strategies". Hopefully now that Rene is running the show I can devote more time into publishing our research.

@June_Li - What insights are you interested in gleaning?

@rdo - "...mixed with other reports, eg. Interest level or engagement by gender..." Correct, I believe. Has anybody ever looked at the types of reports we generate (these are the old style reports, what Rene deems "unsexy")? There's a lot more than is shown on that page and I've been sharing similar reports and charts for years, usually in my writings and presentations.

@June_Li - "...running continuously would give a data point for each visit." Yes, and then I'd have to sit within 15' of the servers all the time, yes? (laugh, folks)

@ssegeroth - "People are still confused with NextStage (and NextStage knows what, where, why and how to fix it)..." Well, not to put too bright a light on it, but what are you confused about?

@June_Li - "...for challenging NextStage Analytics to "Prove it!"" Okay. I'm confused. All those papers, the patent and previous tests didn't?

@ed_wu - "Can't wait to see the first release. Congratulations!" Neither can I, and thanks.

@mymo - "...can tell your gender and age with a piece of JavaScript. This is amazing stuff." Thanks, and we could tell that years ago. The stuff we're working on now, though...

@octothorp - "Every page is a home page" certainly sounds like something I'd say and I do agree with it. I think the closest to a quote would be in Listening to and Seeing Searches and am happy to learn I actually made such a concise statement as you offer.

@davidturney - a quote for you, "The searchbar is the last bastion of poor design." No idea who the source is, just love the quote.

@benry - "People are still confused with NextStage..." see bright light comment above

@benry - "...the always brilliant Joseph Carrabis..."??? No doubt this was one of @davidturney's bad results. Thanks for the nod. I plan on writing some more on Marketing as a Science, probably in this very post as I get through the various twitterings.

@June_Li - "Twitter is dominated by males. Quick: What does that mean?" This doesn't surprise me. I mean, short messages that usually require insider knowledge of the subject matter or medium jargon, dispersed (some hope, I'm sure) widely and quickly and as often as not engender a quick response. It surprises you that males like this? Pretty sure I wrote about applying this to marketing in my gender-marketing presentations and writings. I can go dig them out if you'd like. Until then, here's some Gender Marketing blog posts.

@bradberens - Brother Brad, you still haven't told me what you're talking about (which fits in with my response to June Li above).

@ericpeterson - "Carrabis is perhaps the Wizard." Obviously Eric is writing about Susan.

And I think that catches me up. Thanks to all you liked some of the posts I've written lately. Let me know if there's something more or other you'd like and I'll do what I can to make it available.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

• I'm teaching a Masters Class among other things at the iMediaConnection Brand Summit 7-10 June 09 in Colorado Springs, Colorado
• and doing a poster session on Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples at the Towards a Science of Consciousness 2009 11-14 June 09 in Hong Kong, China
• and presenting a formal research paper entitled Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples at The 7th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2009, The 2nd International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation: IMETI 2009 10-13 July 09 in Orlando, Florida

Sign up for the NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.