The Basement

Jeff Jarvis Fills The Basement

Wow, it's amazing what a prominent mention from Jeff Jarvis will do for your blog stats! (Thanks again Mr. Jarvis!) I had record (for me) visits Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday and almost as many visits on Wednesday as I had on Tuesday. But it's finally settling down – alas, nearly no referrals from BuzzMachine today. I guess now comes the post 15-minutes-of-fame blog depression.

It's interesting though to see the difference in readership patterns between a critical niche-focused post like my News Flash from WOMMA – Industry 'Leaders' Are Clueless (July 27, 2005)post and a random general interest like post like Jeff Jarvis: Bell Cow or Bellwether? (July 30, 2005) when it gets pointed to by a prominent blogger like Mr. Jarvis. (I'll refrain from putting him on any list since that has seemed to be a soar spot as of late.)

Looky here at my Site Meter graph...

From the looks of it, I attracted folks who clicked around more by being critical of some member of WOMMA. Now, I don't know why exactly, but of course that won't stop me from speculating. There could be lots of reasons, but I'm guessing that the WOMMA stuff pulled in folks interested in my discussions about The Influentials, BlogPulse analysis, and the BlogAds survey. These are folks in the marketing, MR and PR space who were reading this blog for professional reasons or a reasonably high and informed level of intellectual curiosity. Or maybe they just wanted to learn more about this random blogger.

But the Jarvis crowd, those kids are different. They just clicked on the link next the pretty graph on Mr. Jarvis's post. I'm guessing most of them never read far enough to get to a another link on my blog much less click on it. Not that I'm ungrateful – I just find it interesting how different they are as an audience. Of course it didn't help that my most recent post during the height of my Jarvis endowed stardom was a niche-focused tome that academically tore apart The Influentials concept. For the general blogosphere public, it must have been riveting. Although, it did get a nice mention from local Tulsa political blogger Michael Bates of BateLine.

It's also worth noting what a hybrid of the two looks like. Steve Rubel, the prominent blogger of Micro Persuasion gave me nice mention on my Discovering the Blog Influentials post (July 18, 2005). On the 18^th and 19^th I got the casual onlooker crowd but shortly there after I got several mentions from professional PR and media folk – and they sent niche focused readers who clicked deeper than the first casual wave sent by Mr. Rubel.

Oh God, He's Reading Another Book

So what's here to learn? Hmmm. Well, I have been reading a new book (well, new to me anyway). I'm finally reading The Tipping Point and as such I now see everyone as a Connector, a Maven, a Salesman or a Schmuck. Oh, I've taken it upon myself to build on Mr. Gladwell's framework and expand it to include everyone who's not one of his three WOM epidemic players – I call these leftover folk Schmucks. So I don't offend anybody – I think I'm probably in this group, along with just about everybody according to Mr. Gladwell.

So as I stare at my declining stats – growing increasingly depressed – I think about Mr. Gladwell's framework – and I think about the things that I've written over the last few weeks – I think about finding Influentials by looking at other peoples blogs – and then I start wondering if there is information on the other side of the looking glass. Who are these people that are reading my blog? Might they be Influentials? Who cares – Influentials are so yesterday's blog. Might they be Connectors? Salesmen maybe? Hmmmmm. Can I tell from Site Meter data?

Maven Spotting

Well of course not... but, what if I had a site with lots and lots of pages – some with detailed specifications – some with pretty pictures – some that allowed to put things side by side to compare them. What if I was Amazon.com, or Google, or Buy.com or PCMall or Wikipedia? Well, then I would might have enough data to look for Mavens. As Gladwell points out, Mavens are data collectors, they're meticulous, they're thorough. Look again at my Site Meter graph – when the WOM crowd showed up [Mavens] to gather info from the critical random blogger they clicked a lot more that the casual Jarvis castoffs [Schmucks]. The WOM crowd was more interested (at least that's what I tell myself in the mirror). They were collecting data. Imagine if you were Double Click – forget about targeting car ads to people that have been to auto sites or cross selling to folks that are ignoring your ads anyway– think about finding Mavens. You know how many times they view specifications pages; you know when they're comparison shopping; you know when they read 14 different prospectuses before they buy stock – and you know what the bell curve look like so you can spot +2 standard deviations. (This is leading to my Santa Claus is Double Click theory, but that's another post.)

Influentials as Connectors... Still Not Bell Cows

As I read the Tipping Point, I can't help but notice how much Connectors sound like Roper Influentials. Hmmm, maybe I'm not quite done with the Influentials just yet. I mean, that's what the Influential questions measure – connections (not influence). And just like Paul Revere, Influentials might also be Mavens (or Salesmen) but they are definitely Connectors. A proof of concept test would be easy – post an online questionnaire with the 12 question Roper Influential battery and the 250 surname Gladwell Connector test. I might just do that – my first Citizen Market Research project. I predict that Roper Influentials are more likely to be Gladwell Connectors than non-Influentials are. I might then call people who pass both tests Galloway Bellwethers because they would always know what is about to happen – as Paul Revere did – and because it sidesteps the horribly misleading name 'Influentials'.

So if bloggers are likely Influentials (70%ish according to Blogads somewhat informal survey) and Influentials are more likely to be Connectors (yet to be even informally proved) then bloggers (and other online posters) are likely Connectors. We might be able to further narrow this down by measuring links from blogs (assume that maintaining lots of links to different sites means more people connections – which is pretty thin I must admit - but maybe we could measure reciprocal links...etc) or by using natural language processing (NLP) to count the number of people that bloggers mention having conversations with over time. The NLP approach is is pretty reasonable - BlogPulse is already mining for likely people names in posts. Alternatively, if I was Microsoft Hotmail or Google Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or Cingular or Southwestern Bell then I might just look for those people that are on the far right in the distribution of unique connections (emails, phone calls, IM)/person. Maybe in the future, marketers will buy lists of Connectors from phone carriers and ISPs. I wonder what privacy laws apply here?

Because Marketing Guy Can't Stop Himself

If the goal is to effect WOM in some specific, deliberate way (which everyone says isn't the goal right before they try to do it) then identifying Mavens and Connectors is an important piece. Simply measuring conversations doesn't seem to be enough to do this. Think about Gladwell's example of Revere and Dawes. If one were only to measure their connections that night the two men might look identical – but, as Gladwell points out – only one was a Connector and a Maven, the other a Schmuck.

So now what? I don't know. I haven't finished the book.