Okay. Something controversial to start.

The only problem is that to me what I’m offering isn’t controversial. It deals with measures and measuring.

Measuring what?

Well, when you put some Flash object on a page. What can you measure? I’m not a web analyst so to me the answers are obvious; measure the psychomotive and psychobehavioral cues that visitors are demonstrating. These and other elements are what make up the Cognitive, Behavioral/effective, Motivational matrix or “CB/eM”. The CB/eM tells you things like age, gender, buying styles, best branding strategies, impact ratios, touch factors, education level, income level, etc.

I understand that not everybody finds these things fascinating. Anthropologists, behavioral and cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, sociologists, behavioral etymologists, …, those kinds of people go nuts over this kind of stuff.

Some of the stuff listed above has to do with things like attention, engagement, authority, influence, …

This is where it gets a little … umm … interesting. I see words like the above used a lot in web and web based “behavioral” analytics. This is a mystery to me. Much in the same way that an anthropologist and a microbiologist use the term “culture” to mean two very different things, I think the way web analysts and web-based behavioral analysts use the terms attention, engagement, authority, influence, … to mean two sets of very different things. I’ve often commented and written that behavioral tracking as defined by the industry doesn’t track human behaviors at all. Not as I understand them, anyway.

Okay, so what do I mean by these things? To recycle content from Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites:

• Attention is a behavior that demonstrates specific neural activity is taking place.
• Engagement is the demonstration of Attention via psychomotor activity that serves to focus an individual’s Attention.
• Trust is what the consumer — well informed or not — gives the site (or whatever is asking for the consumer’s Attention) when their Engagement is rewarded with useful, relevant and meaningful information.

I can go into authority (something fellow SNCR member John Cass caused me to explore and which I’ll be publishing about soon) and influence. I know how to measure what I mean by these things. But the definition I use don’t come from the web world even though what I mean by them can be measured through any number of commonly used web-enabled devices.

And while I’m not sure, I don’t think my definitions are those used in web analytics and web-based behavioral analytics. What I can offer is that my definitions — and this is my opinion here — are more closely aligned to what is generally understood in the literature (in the disciplines I mentioned above) than what is meant by web analysts and web-based behavioral analysts.

I’m not equating “close alignment with literature” with “more valid”, merely offering that different paradigms can offer more understanding than any single paradigm alone. But right now I think I’ve gone on enough. I came here to learn. I’d really much rather hear what others think, understand what they measure and what value they assign to it.

So for me the real questions are:

1. What do you mean when you use the words “engagement”, “attention”, and “trust” online?
2. Can you repeatedly measure what you mean by them so that there’s a reasonable surety that what you’re measuring is what you mean by the terms you’ve used?
3. Can you make these measurements through a commonly used web-enabled device?

To push the conversation along, here are some external links that are worth reading:

• Attention, Engagement and Trust: The Internet Trinity and Websites
• Get the attention you’re already paying for
• Defining Attention on Websites & Blogs
• Focusing Your Customer’s Attention
• Expertise - Who Decides?

Remember, this whole blog is about having a conversation. Do you have these same questions? Do you agree with the definitions I propose or do you have different definitions? And most importantly, how do you answer the three questions I posed above?

I’ve known (and been intimidated by) Eric Peterson for some time now. I first met Eric at the 2006 DC eMetrics Summit. He stood in the middle of perhaps a dozen people like a warm, embracing sun bestowing life unto its myriad of planets. I was Haley’s Comet, coming in at a highly elliptical orbit, not known, from far, far away and with any luck never to be seen again.

Anybody garnering that kind of attention and delivering that kind of knowledge is someone to be in awe of.

So I did what I normally do when I want to meet someone and it seems an unlikely occurrence; I listened, watched and waited. Eventually the planets would lose their orbit or the sun would move away and it would be time for the comet to move in.

What I learned was that Eric is a generous, gregarious and engaging individual who’s very open and sharing with his knowledge and his feelings on things.

And did I mention that he’s inquisitive? Always questioning? Not only others but also himself?

That was and is very important to me. People can be very knowledgeable in their fields and my belief is that unless they’re constantly willing to explore, to investigate, to expand their own thinking and their horizons, their expertise fades fast. The sun may shine bright and eventually the stellar furnace cools and their knowledge fails.

The next time I had a chance to truly sit and talk with Eric was at the Semphonic’s XChange conference. We were sitting outside the bar at a WAT with Chris Ivy and some others and were talking about our different presentations. I was very taken by Eric’s thoughts regarding the future of web analytics and what tools might be used to better understand the growing audience.

Developing tools to understand humans is pretty much where I live, or have at least been setting up shop for the past 20 years or so. And as mentioned above, Eric’s enthusiasm was refreshing, so I put forth an idea I had been thinking over, something I’d been churning back and forth, waiting to find someone with like thoughts and like mind.

“Would you be willing to have an online discussion, a true Meeting of Minds or Glorious Accident, where people with different backgrounds and lots of knowledge and a willingness to share could get together and butt heads in a caring and considerate manner? I don’t want arguments, I want conversations. I want people willing to grow and learn, not people stuck in their own ideologies and experiential moraines. In the very least, people who recognize that their mountaintop might be merely a leaping point to greater and more glorious things?”

And Eric said yes.

So why am I co-authoring a blog with Eric Peterson and asking others to join in the discussion? Is there anybody who doesn’t enjoy a warm place in the sun?

(and people who know me should be truly impressed that I managed to post this)

Indeed, what does the future of web analytics hold? The smartest man I know posed that question to me at SEMphonic X Change last year in Napa Valley, asking honestly and earnestly as if I would certainly know the answer to his question. And trust me, when Joseph Carrabis asks you a question like that, you want to have a great answer!

Alas, I am human, and so I believe I said, “Hmmmm, what do you think?” knowing that Joseph is rarely at a loss for words. Ironically, he thought the same thing about me, but neither of us had a particularly excellent answer for this seemingly harmless question!

“What do you think will happen?” is among the most basic of questions, but as soon as you’re asked to voice your opinion for the record you immediately realize that there are ramifications whether you’re right or you’re wrong. If you’re right, people might think you had some type of inside information. If you’re wrong, people might think you’re losing your edge. And either way the answer has the potential to influence outcomes, especially if you’re widely read.

So I hedged my bets and we made a deal. Joseph and I agreed that we would get over our fear of being right or wrong, let it all hang out there, and talk about where the web analytics market is going. But upon reflection we realized that our voices are hardly the definitive word, and our opinions are inevitably limited by our experiences and our particular biases.

Fortunately “Web 2.0″ provides the solution: we created an open blog so the entire community can respectfully debate what they future might hold. In “The Future of Web Analytics, Demystified” we invite any-and-all to contribute their thoughts and ideas to the “debate du jour”, eschewing the idea of “comments” and instead creating conversations.

Each conversation will start with a single author’s position and evolve from there. To start these conversations, Joseph and I will invite individual contributors to proffer up their Utopian views … then, as in any good Socratic debate, the rest of us will respectfully tear that person’s view to shreds, either ending up with consensus or a complete lack thereof effectively highlighting an area of audience measurement that “needs work.”

Sound like fun? Want to contribute? Have great prognostications of your own? Excellent, we’re excited that you’re excited!

GROUND RULES

There are a few basic ground rules we’d like everyone to agree to in advance. Nothing too crazy, but just something that will help set the tone and keep things civil:

1. First and foremost, RESPECT. Individual contributions are moderated and no commentary that attacks a person, place, or thing will be approved. Remember what your momma said about not being able to say something nice …
2. That’s not to say it isn’t okay to disagree. Joseph and I firmly believe that we can have a respectful discussion regarding the multiple sides of any issue without bringing the world down around us. It is okay to have a difference of opinion! And we believe that it is far better to voice dissent than keep it bottled up inside.
3. Go ahead, link to yourself. If you’re putting yourself out there, get something back. Link to your own blog, your own site, your own ideas. But we appreciate and encourage you to link back to this blog and help grow the conversation.
4. Remember, this will go on your permanent record. With all of the above in mind, remember that your contribution will be forever public and likely cited in the place you least expect. Take the time to think about your contribution before clicking the “Publish your Thoughts” button.

What do you think? Is this blog a good idea? We already have the Web Analytics Forum and dozens of well-written web analytics blogs. Will you contribute? If so, what is your motivation for contribution? And are you a little afraid of putting yourself out there? We welcome your comments.