blog.deanland.com

Destiny Loves Lox!!

If this were an AudioBlog you would hear Destiny, my cat, chomping away, licking her lips, and mewing at me as I type. Occasionally she puts her front paws on the side of my leg, looking not at me, but at a table next to the monitor.

You see, I chose to have some lox this evening, and to eat it at the keyboard as I work into the wee small hours.

Destiny, my cat who is really a dog trapped in a cat's body, is certain that when I buy lox and bring it home, it was meant for her. Any I happen to get is just my good fortune. This lox has her name on it, just ask her. What, you say, cats can't talk? Think again! She's been talking to me about this lox since it came out of the fridge.

Some time back I wrote all about Destiny. About how I'd seen her in the vet's window, about how she was destined (ahem) for euthanasia with only a few days to live, how she was originally my daughters' cat, and how a certain act of divorce-related cruelty landed her with me for the rest of her years.

Writing about Destiny created a short-term spike in DeanLand's readership. Although I have no real clue or practical insight into what the demographics of the blog's readership may be, I can say for sure that the incidence of "women who read blogs" visiting this page shot up considerably with the Destiny item.

That's because it seems that a good many of the women who were already reading DeanLand chose to link to that entry. And the e-mails coming in with response to that post were 100% from women.

There's much more to the Destiny story. At this past BloggerCon, a mention of the Destiny-related readership spike got me a book! Yes, Phil Greenspun, who led the session discussing Shirky's Power Law, gave away a number of copies of his book, Travels With Samantha. He designated responsibility for picking the recipients to Henry Copeland of Blogger Ads. Henry came over to me as the session ended and said, "Cat-guy, here's one for you." Philip signed my copy, writing in the front cover, "Dean, Keep writing about that cat!"

AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT

Iíd mentioned the Destiny spike in connection with a discussion of readership levels, and the lack of a demographic measurement, much less any form of real measurement that qualified readership.

I spent over 25 years in the Radio industry. In that time I worked very closely with the ratings companies on audience measurement. By that I mean the methodologies, the analysis, and manners and methods of exponentially interpreting and extrapolating the data. How could we learn more, what other data was embedded in the findings, were there [mathematical constructs] through which we could learn more?

Those audience estimates for radio were presented in initial overall breakdowns encompassing gender, age group, and expressed by individual and grouped-together time (of day) periods. The Arbitron report provided audience estimates for a broadcast week. All sorts of breakouts were available.

It was my good fortune to have a wonderful relationship with the people at Arbitron, with a virtual ìopen doorî policy, and I was granted access to review and analyze a great deal of data not generally in release.

I co-authored some annual Arbitron reports on certain audiences and programming formats, and consulted regularly with the Arbitron New York and Atlanta offices on publications and ideas for special reports. And those visits to the data centers outside of Washington, D.C., to review the raw data were always revealing, frustrating, and sometimes jam-packed with theatrics as clients would find errors of omission, suspicion, and sometimes just plain human errors in the listener diaries and the massive, computer-generated mechanical analysis of each individual diary entry.

From a programming point of view, one learns many things from Arbitron results. This is particularly the case when one does this over a period of time. Market trends, audience response, seasonal swings, and all sorts of activity come into a certain clarity for programmers over time. The how to and what to of programming, the format elements of a station, the way the listeners interact with the stationís air product in terms of the audience measurement methodology . . . this sort of analysis was my stock and trade for many years.

I loved reading the ratings books, studying them, and then programming the client stations in accordance with not only what we knew listeners told us they wanted (radio stations do tons of primary research, and initiate perceptual studies all the time), but also in a way that would show well, in "the book", according to how the ratings system worked.

Another entire world's worth of analytical and statistical data emerges from the ratings reports, in terms of the best ways for advertisers to place their flights (ìad buysî) on stations. All sorts of Cost-per-Thousand and Reach and Frequency data can be generated. And for multiple-station buys, designed to reach the maximum target audience, optimally at the best cost, the ratings book is an analystís dream.

Then there are data of interest to both the programmers and the advertisers. Shared audience levels, audience flow reports, day-part retune statistics, average listening spans, the five different types of listeners (ìhow can we convert more of our second quintile listeners into the first quintile?!î) and all the associated data when viewed in any number of statistical variants and manner of data manipulation.

BLOG READERSHIP MEASUREMENT

For blogging, at this moment in time, readership measurement remains a mystery. Sure, one can calculate page hits. But how many hits, for how long a readership period (as opposed to a page remaining up on a browser, perhaps without being viewed), how many return hits, what time of day do the hits occur, what are the age/sex/ethnicity/zip code breakouts of the readership? What about qualitative data, such as education level, income, household ownership, just to name a few.

We are still in an infancy period when it comes to the gathering and analysis of data as it relates to web pages and internet-site visitors.

Jeff Jarvis did an excellent job at BCII, leading a session that investigated and discussed the opportunities to make money via blogging. It is a statement on the maturation of blog culture that this session even took place. A few years ago the very topic would have been subject to derision, waved off as an attempt to commercialize (and thus taint and trivialize) a true vestige of a socially pure, idealistic process.

Times have changed, and like everything else in Internet Time, it moves at a rapid rate and progresses in what other disciplines might consider warp speed.

There was much discussion in the Jeff Jarvis-led session about not just the idea of measurement, but also of the concept of creating an Association, similar to the NAB, the TvB, the RAB, and so forth. ]

Iíd like to see and hear more discussion and brainstorming about this.

My background in a federally regulated communications arena, as well as interaction with many state and national associations, trade associations, and audience measurement analysis and research and development all combine to get my juices flowing.

More to follow on this.

And now back to letting Destiny have some of that lox!