Forbes Article on Jive

How awesome is this. A great article in Forbes magazine on Jive

Upstart Jive Software aims to change the way people work by bringing social networking to the office. It's up against some firm called Microsoft.

Jive Software chief executive David Hersh has a lofty goal: a world where office work is so fulfilling, inspiring and free of trivialities that parodies like Dilbert and The Office cease to exist.

There are loftier goals--ending genocide, famine, cancer--but Hersh's is a good fight, and you can make a lot of money helping companies get themselves out of those endless e-mail chains and pointless meetings of office work. Jive's software uses the Web to do that.

"People live in e-mail and documents no one else can see. We're changing the way companies work," says Hersh.

Jive's newest product, called Clearspace, uses Web collaboration and communication tools such as forums, wikis and blogs to allow people in different offices to work on a short-term project using a single Web calendar, to-do list and discussion rooms. A manager can scroll over names of subalterns and see what they're working on and whether they're in the office, traveling or at home.

Very cool indeed.

Tracking Search Terms in Jive's Clearspace

Jive's Clearspace application is a very powerful tool for building active, engaged communities. Whether you are using it for collaboration, blogging/publishing content, for discussions, or documentation, you'll want to know what your visitors are searching for on the site so you can make sure the right content is available at the right time.

There are a couple of ways to get a handle on the on-site search traffic. For one, you can simply query the database (if you're running Clearspace on-premise) for search terms used by your visitors (among other things, the search table also includes which userID made the request, along with how many results were returned).

Even easier though is to make sure your analytics tool is setup to correctly interpret a Clearspace search query. A Clearspace query makes a request like this:

Example: http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/search.jspa?

Parameters include:

• q = the search term
  
• resultTypes = the types of items inside Clearspace to search
  
• peopleEnabled = true/false - whether to include searches on profiles
• dateRange = searching for something in a specific time period
  
• communityID = searching in a specific community
  
• rankBy = sort criteria

Generally speaking, setting up on-site search tracking for most of the web analytics packages is pretty straight forward. For example, to setup Clearspace on-site search tracking for Google Analytics, you'll perform the following steps:

1. Login to your Google Analytics account and navigate to the "Analytics Settings" for your account.
2. Edit your profile settings for the profile analyzing Clearspace
3. Select "Edit" next to your "Main Website Profile Information"
4. Scroll down to the Site Search section and enter the following information. You can only add 5 categories, and Clearspace has 6 different parameters (above), so you'll have to choose 5 of them (I don't include the CommunityID as most searches are not targeted at a specific community on the sites I've seen)

Save your changes, and that's it. Now just wait for those fabulous search reports to start coming your way so you can continually optimize the site for your visitors.

WebTrends Widget

I've updated my WebTrends widget to use the latest WebTrends ML2 web services, and give it a more ML2'ish look and feel. It's a very simple widget, which is another way of saying, I'm looking forward to other folks copying it and making it much more powerful (I have a long list of to-do's, so if you're interested in collaborating with me on improving it...please drop me a line!).

Any WebTrends On Demand customer can use this widget to view data for their account.

The basics:

• Install Yahoo! Widgets if you haven't already
  
• Download the widget
• Run the widget, entering in various widget preferences: your username, password, account name (WebTrends On Demand account name), profile ID and which time frame you want.
  
• That's it!

The new ML2 web services utilize SOAP to allow customers and partners to upload or download data. The upload capabilities are incredibly powerful for organizations who want to augment data collected (upload product data, or campaign information, or external visitor attributes, or ?!). I'm utilizing our data exchange service to query reporting data for this particular widget.

If you're interested in more of the guts of this widget, feel free to email me directly. As always, I don't speak for WebTrends...nor is this a WebTrends supported project...it's really just a tool to help folks think about how to use the data, and think of other ways to visualize data creatively. Enjoy!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, widget

Technorati Tags: analytics, web+analytics, widget

One View Of Widget Stats

Interesting "widget" stats from the smart folks over at Lijit. Their approach is to crawl blogs and look for "any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript". Most of those widgets are analytics tools, along with ad providers, and other social networking tools.

The information is a great commentary on our industry...look at the list of analytics providers. Does anyone else see our industry as a page torn from The Innovators Delimma? Where are the usual suspects you think of when you think of web analytics? Instead what you see are small, scrappy, smart solutions that are moving core analytics to a commodity service.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

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Behind Screen #3

The NYTimes has an article today discussing how content providers are plowing ahead with big plans for mobile devices.  The very smart folks at ESPN are at the forefront of this industry, as they've figured out how to deliver the right content, at the right time, to their customers.  They see the mobile "screen" as a critical delivery tool:

“People talk about it being the third screen,” says John Zehr, senior vice president for digital video and mobile products at ESPN. “I talk about it being the first screen because it’s the closest to you.”

The article notes that they are leveraging data derived from one screen (computer) to better understand what types of content to push to another screen (mobile):

"For its part, ESPN is not holding back. It already tracks what computer users read on its Web site to determine what like-minded sports fans want to view on their phones, and is pursuing a patent to protect the technologies underlying its multiscreen effort."

And reading on, it's clear that they aren't just looking to match up the right content to the right group of viewers.  They are also working hard to deliver highly relevant, visitor-specific content to their visitors:

"The goal is to monitor individuals’ interests on the Web site and then
use the information to match cellphone content to their tastes. If
someone is watching a football game on ESPN.com
and has to hit the road, Mr. Zehr says, chances are that they would
like the game to appear on their cellphone 20 minutes later."

Now that's targeting.



Some nuggets of data from the article:

• 9+M people visit the ESPN cellphone web sites each month
• 64% of 18-24 year-olds watch TV with their cellphones almost always nearby
• 44% of all cellphone owners use data services
• >75% of 18-26 year-old cellphone owners use data services
  
  

Technorati Tags: analytics, web+analytics, mobile+tracking

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Flash Tracking (and good music too!)

The creative folks over at Coke continue to innovate with their web properties. They are very heavy into Flash, and as usual, have some very fun marketing programs in place (check out the Virtual Thirst campaign which has been using MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Second Life to reach out...wow!).

They have a music player featuring "fresh new music" with some great tunes. The Flash-based player (which undocks from the site so you can continue listening if you leave their site) is instrumented to send analytics data for various activities (start, pause, next song, song rating, etc.). Very smart use of analytics.

Disclosure: Coke uses WebTrends for analytics...but I haven't been a part of their implementation...I just stumbled on their site while looking for something else!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, flash

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Open Web Analytics

I just came across this wiki, and blog, documenting "Open Web Analytics". The site bills itself as the "open source web analytics framework". The content is a bit fresh (read: some of it is clearly in development), but it looks like there could be some good useful stuff in the works.

Is anyone using this tool?

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

Technorati Tags: analytics, web+analytics