Even the friendliest community manager won’t keep your customers coming back if you don’t pay attention to the numbers. Sean Power and Alistair Croll believe cold, hard data take precedence over any marketing or design decision or strategy, and they’ll be teaching others how to better analyze their situation this November at Web 2.0 Expo New York. Their Bootcamp, Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics, is an exploration into how to quantify your community efforts for the purposes of honing in on what’s working – and what’s not.

Sean recently spoke to us about the Bootcamp, communilytics, and how many traditional offline businesses still have a lot of work to do in transitioning to the Web:

Kaitlin: Chris Shipley recently spoke about how smart companies learn from their mistakes faster. What role do analytics play in this?

Sean: Simply put, analytics is how you understand where you are. They’re a snapshot of your current state. But if you look at the right metrics — the ones that drive your business — over time, they’re invaluable. The Web makes it easy to experiment with your business, by changing message, offer, product, and target audience; and analytics are how you tell if the experiment succeeded or failed.

A lot of startups think it’s about “failing faster.” It’s not; it’s about learning from your mistakes, and adapting, faster. And analytics is how a company learns. Whether you’re a non-profit, a government, a huge multinational, or a fledgling startup, you save time by knowing when things go wrong and quickly making them right. A comprehensive analytics strategy increases the chances that you’ll catch, fix, and learn from a mistake.

Kaitlin: Why are cold numbers so important? Isn’t online marketing all about the Whuffie? How do analytics help you create a better user experience and make customers happier?

Sean: Social capital is great. But if you’re a community manager that isn’t trying to connect your work to the bottom line of the business, your days are numbered. Whuffie means you get wiser about features people need. It means your customers become your advocates. It means users help one another rather than calling you. And it means a safety net when you commit an inevitable gaffe. All of these things have hard, tangible numbers behind them.

Numbers don’t change companies. Interpreting those numbers, and acting on them, change people. Analytics — particularly tools that listen to social sentiment and monitor communities — are an essential tool in understanding your markets. But companies can’t hide behind numbers. Analytics show you what people care about; where they’re having those discussions; and who’s behind a particular concern. Then it’s up to you to connect with those people.

Kaitlin: One theme I notice from your and Alistair Croll’s blog is the importance of speeding up websites to improve business. What do you mean by speeding up? Why is this important?

Sean: It’s simple: People visit, stay on, and buy more things from faster sites. Until now, the value of performance has been anecdotal. But recent studies by Google, Microsoft, Shopzilla and Strangeloop Networks — among others — have finally quantified the impact.

Slow sites make people leave; lower search engine ranking; reduce shopping cart size, and lower conversion rates. What’s more, visitors who have a slow experience are “poisoned” by that experience — even after the site gets faster, they still do less of what we want them to on a website.

This is natural. Research from IBM in the 1980s showed a strong correlation between fast applications, user engagement, and productivity. We want to feel like we’re interacting with something, not waiting for a response.

Because of this, marketers and community managers in mid-to-late-stage startups need to track web performance as they build more sophisticated campaigns that send a rush of users to a destination.  Thankfully, more and more tools exist today that make it much easier to measure the correlation between site speed and conversions.

Kaitlin: Everyone is focused on real time and fast results, but is there anything social media strategists need to step back from and give a good long think about? Do we need to slow down our approach to anything?

Sean: We think contemplation is extremely important. Good web analysts step back from the individual metrics, and try to form a hypothesis of why something is happening. Then — and this is the critical step — they test their hypothesis and see if it was correct.

Consider, for example, the travel industry. Websites weren’t seeing conversions. They hypothesized that this was because of bad page design, or bad pricing. It turned out that visitors wanted a specific hotel whose loyalty program they were a member of. So they tried a model where you buy a room before you find out what hotel it is — and sure enough, this addressed many of the abandonment problems. That’s taking a step back and testing a “big picture” hypothesis. This kind of thing is what the best web analysts do.

Thankfully, when properly implemented, the tools to measure these interactions require very little extra effort.

Kaitlin: With the amount of content about social media strategy available on the web, why is it that many large companies are having problems translating their offline messaging onto the web? Do you have any examples of how a big name company failed online and what they should have done?

The web is a two-way medium, where interaction trumps promotion. Many companies still think of the web as just another form of broadcast, and fail miserably. Jeremiah Owyang has a great list of brands that have been Punk’d online. The usual culprits are a lack of monitoring tools and a sluggish, bureaucratic response time.  Many companies can’t easily find if they’re being talked about, let alone whether the tone is positive or negative.  Without a good response management policy in place, hasty decisions or paralyzing fear take over, and disasters often ensue.  Analytics tools aren’t just great for business accounting and optimization, they help in cases of damage mitigation.

Kaitlin: Thank you, Sean!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e.

Sean Power and Alistair Croll will be at Web 2.0 Expo New York for their Bootcamp, Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics.

Edit: My apologies to Sean for misspelling his last name! It’s “Power” not “Powers.”

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