You can install it in the Chrome Extensions MarketplaceAppWhateverTheyCallIt.

You can also see the extension’s source on Github.

In that spirit, I made a little WordPress plugin to do something similar. Props Pete Davies for the idea.

Gravatar emails should be trimmed before being lowered and hashed. props evansolomon. fixes #19614.

via nacin // core Trac

I spent this weekend at WordCamp Las Vegas with several fellow Automatticians and WordPress contributors. I gave a talk and tried to take a fun approach: prepare lots of little topics and make the presentation interactive so we could jump around as needed. Everything was focused on experimentation, data analysis, and learning from customers, with the goal of making stuff people want — a phrase I unabashedly borrowed from Y Combinator. Given the unusual format of the talk, I’m not sure the slides are particularly useful. We didn’t go through nearly all of them, and they weren’t used in any particular order. That said, here they are.

Gist #1428452

A note about UTC time, which we use for internal stats — peak hours in the US, which our data tends to be highly correlated to, are roughly 13:00-02:00.

First I looked at the daily chart of pageviews from iPads.

I noticed that it didn’t look like most pageview charts, which typically follow long peaks and short valleys for weekdays and weekends, like our aggregate pageview data for WordPress.com.

If you look at the main pageview stat by hour, you see that there are spikes basically when people are at work — during the day in the US, Monday through Friday. This isn’t really news, and it’s very, very common across most websites.

iPad pageviews, on the other hand, look totally different on an hourly basis.

There are two important things to notice here:

1. Weekends spike, not weekdays
2. Intra-week differences disappear almost entirely after 21:00 (1pm PST/4pm EST)

The explanation for this is actually quite simple — iPads are primarily used outside of work, which is where people tend to be on the weekends and at night. If you were to translate the last chart into a story, it would basically be this:

On weekends, people wake up and use their iPads throughout the day, well into the night, but on weekdays the iPads are stuck at home alone while their owners at work, and thus dormant[1].

I don’t think this is a particularly important revelation (maybe we should promote iPad stuff on the weekends?) but I do think it’s a cool example of how showing the same data in a different form (line chart vs hourly grid) tells a different and much more useful story. Also interesting is that the use of the hourly grid here is probably not what most people assume it’s good for, which is seeing data on a really granular level. It’s actually the near-exact opposite, it’s the best way to view this data on an aggregate level.

[1] Though the modifier is dangling, I meant the iPads were dormant, not the people — but I suppose from our overall pageview stats, that may not be completely true.

SOPA & PIPA don’t attack the real problem, do nothing to build up the services that do solve the problem, and won’t work from a technological standpoint. And that’s just if we look at the what these bills are supposed to do.

From TechDirt’s “Definitive” Post SOPA And Protect IP

Of all the changes in 2011, the people are overwhelmingly the high order bit. There are the impressive coworkers, the generous WordPress community, and the strangers who, through travel and shared interests, have been maybe the most consistent part of my life this year.

Yesterday I gave a presentation, cheekily-titled “You Don’t Know People”, at the Washington DC WordPress meetup. I talked about learning from yo users and some of the things we’ve done on WordPress.com. The group was great, especially when I finished the talk and they jumped right into Q&A without the usual 30 seconds of silence.

IsValid started as a little tool for myself to automate data analysis. It will take the results of an A/B test, perform some basic statistical tests (significance and confidence intervals), and return some data and charts to help you understand what the results mean.

If you’re into that sort of thing, check out IsValid on Github.

Alternatively, assume that once you delete something, you (and only you) will never be able to recover it.

Everything else will be simple.

wp_strip_all_tags() in wp_trim_words() to remove CSS and JS within tags. Props evansolomon. Fixes #18726.

via duck_ // core Trac

I have lower than average risks of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s — about 30% and 15% lower, respectively. I have a 75% lower than average risk of type 1 diabetes, but a slightly higher (8%) than average risk of type 2.

Of all the diseases I am at high risk for, Venous Thromboembolism (causes blood clots and things) and prostate cancer are at the top. I have about a 1/3 chance of getting each of them. Additionally, I carry one known problematic trait, Alpha-1 Antitrypsin deficiency, which makes parts of my body (particularly fragile lung tissue) less able to protect itself from an enzyme released by white blood cells. This increases my risk for lung and liver diseases. I am more sensitive than average to warfarin, a commonly used blood thinner, which means that if I ever need it my optimal dose would be smaller than normal. On a bright note, I have decreased risk of male pattern baldness.

Overall I’m quite “typical” according to 23andme. Most of my appearance factors (hair curl, freckling, etc) fall into the typical range, as do most of my chemical predilections (food preference, alcoholism risk, etc). My ear wax stands out as “wet”, my non-verbal IQ (whatever that is) is likely to be slightly higher, my likelihood of complications if I contract malaria are higher than normal (something I’m glad I didn’t know before going to Vietnam) and my odds of menopause are unsurprisingly not applicable.

My genes corroborate the stories that my mom’s family was northern European and my dad’s was eastern European Jews. This makes me — and this will come as a surprise to literally no one that has met me — overwhelmingly white:

I was actually thinking about this earlier today, and Nik Cubrilovic’s post on yet another way to secretively store data just reminded me of it. There are a few reasons why I think the concern over this is mostly misguided.

First, it’s not new. Store owners can write down your shirt color, your height, your race, the time you came in, what you bought, etc. They can track plenty of “personal” information, which I put in quotes because I think the whole concept of some special class of information leads to more confusion than awareness. The key difference, obviously, is that computers make tracking this information cheaper and faster. I tend to think that we shouldn’t legislate against actions based only on their relative efficiency, so I don’t see why this should make a difference. Worse yet, it’s far more likely that real world businesses can connect your actions to your real “personal” information, like your name, family and address.

Second, it’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse. There are limitless ways to store data and acting like anyone can stop it is foolish. The whole thing seems eerily similar to the war on drugs, a failure I think we’ll have a hard time contending with any time soon.

Third, for the overwhelming majority of people there is nothing to worry about. Awareness of risks is great, but confused fear based on misinformed media reports is awful, and that’s mostly what we’ve created.

I’d liken responsible web security education to something along the lines of wearing your seatbelt and not driving drunk. What we have today is much closer to fear-mongering along the lines of urban legends about exploding engines or murderers at drive in movies. Those things can certainly happen, but I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to treat them as likely consequences of driving a car.

To be clear, I think it’s great if websites and web services don’t do these things, but some of them will and you should probably assume all of them do, particularly if it’s something that concerns you.

At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them every staff meeting, my people intensely focused on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result.

via When Employees Misinterpret Managers // Ben’s blog.

The Tiger Woods That Saved Golf.

The 1997 Masters is my earliest golf memory, which probably doesn’t make me unique among mid-20′s Americans. What does make me unique is why I remember that tournament. When asked about anyone in the field catching Tiger Woods after Saturday’s third round, Colin Montgomerie said:

“There’s no chance humanly possible that Tiger is going to lose this tournament. No way.”

Read the rest of the post over on Perfecting The Upset.

You don’t want people using your product because it’s cool, because then you’re a fad. What you want is people using your product because it’s a part of their life and they can’t stop using it.

-Sean Parker

The lessons have been pretty consistently focused on getting my club on plane and shortening my swing. We worked a lot on “getting to impact faster,” which meant both speeding up my tempo and abbreviating my backswing. The result is a swing the is a lot simpler than what I started with — looking at it, it’s hard to believe that I’m hitting the ball as far, if not further than before, given how little motion there is.

Here’s where I started this week.

My swing is in good shape through impact but occasionally I’ll flip the club shut, so we spent a lot of time working on keeping the club face square through my follow through. This was a very awkward change at first but it’s getting more comfortable as I make more swings.

We worked on a drill to pull my hands in more through impact while keeping the club square. I’m swill struggling with this but it’s getting better, and the result is that I can effectively release the club without flipping it shut through impact. I’m trying to keep the club face parallel to my spine angle for as long as I can and not get my arms too separated from my body, which leads to hooks.

Next we worked on my posture, getting my back straighter and my chin up more. Other than just looking better, this gives me more room to clear my hands and make the release we’re aiming for.

After straightening my posture and working on my hip and shoulder tilt, I was able to clear out more room for my hands through impact and had an easier time keeping the club square. It’s not perfect yet, but we’re getting there.

I’m off to Myrtle Beach in 4 hours and looking forward to getting a few rounds in with the new swing.

Last time we worked mostly on my takeaway, getting my shoulders controlling my swing rather than my arms and decreasing the angle in my wrists.

Today still focused mostly on takeaway, but on my swing plane and keeping the club face square through most of my swing rather than opening it and flipping it shut at impact.

My takeaway had improved a lot, but I was still getting the club far too open and inside. A comparison to Tiger Woods, who’s got a pretty good swing, made the problem very clear. We would spend most of today’s lesson getting the club on plane and the club face pointed in the right direction for the bulk of my swing. The goal is to keep too many things from impacting my shots, especially having to time a very active release at impact.

After a few drills to keep my right hand and arm on top throughout my takeaway, my club was in a much better spot during my backswing — square and right on plane.

As a result, my impact and release has a lot fewer moving parts, which will hopefully make it (and my ball flight) much more consistent.

When I put it all together, my swing is pretty much on plane the whole time. While I’ve taken a lot of the action out of my hands and arms, I’m making a much better turn with my shoulders to generate power without moving the club all over the place.

I spent a lot of time making pretty short swings to work on the impact zone. Here is one where you can see the club head stay right on plane, passing directly over my hands on the view from behind.

And another one with a detailed explanation of where my club is going from the top of the backswing through impact.

See all GolfTec posts

First, the “before” swing with a 6 iron:

This is a pretty accurate representation of the swing I’ve had most of my life. To start, we walked through how I stacked up against the ideal measurements in several parts of the swing.

My setup was pretty good, but my head was too far forward in my stance — this was an intentional compensation covering up (or not) some other problems — and my takeaway was controlled too much by my arms. Most of my swing evaluation focused on correcting these two problems, and the impact those fixes had on the rest of my swing.

The first fix, getting my head behind the ball at address was a relatively easy fix, though still feels a bit awkward as I get used to the new position.

The next fix, turning my shoulders to start my backswing rather than leading with my arms, was a bit tougher. It was a classic case of having a poor ability to actually feel what you were doing. A combination of the video/data feedback and a helpful drill (holding a ball between my forearms, which you can see in the video) worked wonders.

These two fixes in the early part of my swing had some really awesome effects all the way at the top of my backswing and even in my downswing through impact.

At the beginning of the lesson my swing was controlled mostly by my hands and arms, as it’s always been, and was very steep at impact. Working on my setup and takeaway got my body in control, and moved my swing to a much flatter (better) plane. My instructor gave me a pretty surprising and fun drill to feel the effects of the flatter swing plane: hitting two balls at once with a lob wedge.

Here you can see my “after” swing, this time with a driver. The club is on a much better plane, my impact and release are a lot more controlled, and a short trip to the driving range the following day suggested that the progress so far is really great. I have another lesson tomorrow and 5 more hours of lessons that I plan to use over the next month or so. I highly recommend GolfTec if you’re thinking about taking any golf lessons; they have lots of locations all around the country, and probably at least one near every major city.

Again, thanks to Nick for recommending GolfTec to me.

See all GolfTec posts

I have often wondered why Facebook put their search box right next to the “tell this to everyone in the world” box.

My status update was just the girls from the previous night name about ten times, often within a couple seconds of each other. To make matters worse about half of them had the caps lock on. This clearly made me look like I was beyond obsessed, and potentially a serial killer.

Full story on Deadspin.

Apparently it’s election season in Canada — yup, they have elections just like a real country — so the message volume is heating up. Today I tried to find a peaceful resolution, but it was to no avail. Instead I just decided to start impersonating the Canadian me.

First, a fine Canadian lady (Calady?) told me I had very nice hair. I promptly thanked her, but was told the compliment wasn’t for me!

@evansolomon you actually look a lot like @evansolomoncbc who is a smart, hip Canadian talking head. But you look much younger.

March 28, 2011 1:50 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kellypatrickxox

Kelly Patrick

Not a problem though, apparently goldfish-like memory takes over when you’re interacting with a television star’s name, so Kelly was shortly back for more.

@evansolomon should lobbyists who pay for sex and who were charged with fraud be able to run for office?#elxn41

March 28, 2011 2:46 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kellypatrickxox

Kelly Patrick

@kellypatrickxox According to Wikipedia, prostitution is not illegal in Canada. So why the hell not?

March 28, 2011 2:48 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

@evansolomon there is always more to it than that. She has been abused since 10 and poops on her johns. He advised the PMO until last week.

March 28, 2011 2:56 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kellypatrickxox

Kelly Patrick

@kellypatrickxox If everyone who paid to get pooped on wasn't allowed to run, would we have any candidates left? No one I'd want in charge.

March 28, 2011 3:07 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

@evansolomon in Canada it's okay to solicit sex but not okay to get paid for it. So it's a win win for some.

March 28, 2011 3:15 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kellypatrickxox

Kelly Patrick

@iancapstick @evansolomon @evansolomoncbc relationship building!

March 28, 2011 3:26 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kellypatrickxox

Kelly Patrick

@kellypatrickxox @iancapstick @evansolomoncbc That's probably a good description of what those lobbyists were doing too!

March 28, 2011 3:35 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

In America these days, it seems like half of politics is healthcare. Well Canada is no different, but I’m not sure about their focus.

glad to see @evansolomon talking about the 2014 health accord. who do you trust in negotiating this agreement? #elxn41 #cdnpoli

March 28, 2011 2:17 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@emozes

Erika Mozes

@emozes I'm happy when you're happy. I don't trust anyone in negotiating this agreement, and neither should you!

March 28, 2011 2:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

@evansolomon seriously, thank you for talking about it. A real discussion needs to happen. Pharmacare is just the tipping point.

March 28, 2011 2:22 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@emozes

Erika Mozes

@emozes If we can break down walls and get a real discussion started on pharmacare, who knows how far we can take this!

March 28, 2011 2:32 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

@evansolomon ...an orphan drug policy wld be a good 1st step... Health first ministers meeting this Spring.

March 28, 2011 2:56 pm via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@emozes

Erika Mozes

@emozes I disagree with you and do not think we should be giving orphans drugs. They have gone through enough already!

March 28, 2011 3:03 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

It wasn’t all fun and games though, some people wanted to put an end to the shenanigans!

Hey Twitterverse: Loving pol comments. But please send to me at @evansolomoncbc. There is another @evansolomon in USA who is going nuts.thnx

March 28, 2011 3:03 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomoncbc

Evan Solomon

Current events are fine, but let’s dive into some history, shall we?

@evansolomon do you remember in the 2004 debates when Harper said "He owns children"? #cbc #elxn41 #cpac #cpc #harper

March 28, 2011 3:19 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SDHSFBRULES

San Dimas

@SDHSFBRULES No, but if we go with @ezmoze's policy of giving drugs to orphans we can probably all own some children one day.

March 28, 2011 3:24 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

And it’s not just commoners, even the pundits (and their possibly official guides) got in on the conversation.

Love it. IT guy somewhere in the States whose firm runs Wordpress.com has been chatting #CdnPoli all day w/ppl thinking he hosts show on CBC

March 28, 2011 3:10 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@punditsguide

Pundits' Guide

@punditsguide Hi there. Have I been added as an official pundit yet? Where do I sign up for this guide?

March 28, 2011 3:14 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

@evansolomon http://www.punditsguide.ca A web DB of Cdn elxn stats w/covering *Wordpress* blog. Migrated from Blogger; not totally loving WP

March 28, 2011 3:23 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@punditsguide

Pundits' Guide

But don’t let anyone tell you the Canadians aren’t a sharp bunch, a few of them caught onto my ruse.

This is freaking great - @evansolomon meet @evansolomoncbc - bet our new Evan now knows more that he ever wanted about canucks & elections

March 28, 2011 3:20 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@iancapstick

Ian Capstick

@evansolomoncbc Oh but this @evansolomon 's responses are epic! Too funny.

March 28, 2011 3:11 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nduhamel

Natalie Duhamel

@evansolomon hahah this is gold. keep answering the questions :P

March 28, 2011 3:13 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@enektyk

enektyk

Newest #elxn41 pundit: American software developer(?) @evansolomon - he has some great ideas about Canadian politics!

March 28, 2011 3:10 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@readeverything

David Alexander

Quite amused reading @evansolomon reply to #elxn41 questions intended for @evansolomoncbc.

March 28, 2011 3:02 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@BradInToronto

BradInToronto

Fave thing of the day=American @evansolomon pretending to be @evansolomoncbc and answering Canadian's election question #elxn41 #cdnpoli

March 28, 2011 2:59 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@lismeister

Lismeister

@evansolomoncbc @evansolomon You've gotta admit that SF Evan is pretty smart! I think he might even be able to find Canada on a map!

March 28, 2011 3:22 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@canteach

Shirley Jennings

That was fun, but all those messages later and my initial electoral goals haven’t changed.

@evansolomoncbc I was mostly joking. Carry on. I hope whichever party can offer lower Molson Ice prices wins. Go Maple Leafs!

March 28, 2011 2:04 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@evansolomon

Evan Solomon

Update: I should be on Canadian TV!

@evansolomoncbc @evansolomon seriously hook this guy up for P&P for fun 2 or 3 minutes - day 4 always needs to be lighthearted (new rule)

March 28, 2011 3:54 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@JacksonUTE

Adam Jackson

To the extent that any educational facilities teach you how to find a place in the labor force, that’s it. Pretty accurately, you could call this “How to get a job.” That is, how to get offered a job. With the national unemployment rate at whatever it’s at, that’s certainly a valuable skill these days, but lots of people have the chance to aim much higher — at least high enough to get two job offers. Then what?

You’re pretty much flying blind if you rely on the same folks that taught you about one page resumes and how to talk to recruiters at job fairs.

I think every college student would be well-served to have some guidance on how to choose a job or a career. And the problem starts way before college; high school students pick colleges, which are long-term expensive decisions, basically on a whim. It all seems kind of insane looking back.

Company cultures, hierarchies, job roles, products, businesses and dozens of other factors that will impact your daily life, probably making the difference between being happy and miserable at work, are never formally taught or even discussed. I think it’s one of the reasons that startups seem so magical to so many, because they appear to break rules when they just do things differently and the rules were never there in the first place.

I’m not convinced that a vocational education is the best fit for most, but I do think that some sense of practical decision-making would be immensely valuable and hopefully prevent a lot of people from finding new ways to kill time for eight hours, five days per week.

It’s far from user friendly, but definitely powerful. Last night I was shown R Studio which seems like it may make things a bit faster to get up to speed on.

We’ll see, hopefully this is not my last mention of R.

I think the idea of test-driven development is pretty cool. It forces you to set specific goals, makes it clear when you achieve them, and hopefully makes achieving them even easier and faster since the scope is so clearly defined. Thinking about it more, there are probably other parts of life and certainly work that would make sense to approach this way. One that came to mind and made for a catchy title was testing itself, in the product and user sense.

Surveys, A/B tests, multi-variant tests and many other methods of learning from customers have become wildly popular, and rightly so, thanks to the work of Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis (who first taught me about it) and others in what’s generally been termed “The Lean Startup” movement. Like any good fad, I think that some followers have fallen victim to function following form — in other words, I’ve seen a bunch of people use these tactics for the sake of using them. One instance of this that sticks out is running tests where virtually no result is going to teach you anything.

The most egregious offender has to be surveys, I think because they’re the easiest to create and the most vulnerable to lazily copying from others. Every question on a survey — like every line of code in an application — has an implicit, real cost. Usually it’s a lower response rate, which means you get less information and it takes longer to get it. So a great deal of effort should be put into eliminating unneeded questions, just like a great deal of effort is often put into eliminating unneeded code. Or (here comes the theme) in a test-driven development world hopefully the unneeded code is never written in the first place, because you’re writing code based on test requirements and writing tests requirements based on what’s needed. It’s a beautiful system.

Back to the surveys. There are several “standard” survey questions that I see almost everywhere and have a way of creeping into new surveys as you write them: gender, age, income, location, referral source, etc etc. Certainly all of these can be valid survey questions, but they’re probably not all important all of the time. Unfortunately it’s really, really easy to add them to your product survey and some services like SurveyMonkey will even automate it for you. Pretty soon this turns into survey-by-committee and you’re asking 30 questions with boondoggles from every part of the company added. Biz dev wants to know about the users’ favorite websites, marketing wants to know about age and gender, sales wants to know about purchase intent for mid-size cars (wtf?) and the list goes on. Meanwhile, if the scope of the survey had been properly defined, it would be clear that none of these were actually required; or, if these were actually required, it would have been made clear sooner and maybe someone would have fought against it, thanks to a test.

This is a trivial example only to make a point, but I think it’s an important point that comes down to two ideas for me:

1. Keep in mind that just because something is easy to do doesn’t mean it’s low risk
2. Upfront investment in making sure everyone agrees on the goals can pay huge dividends later

Testing to accelerate learning is great and more companies should do more of it, but adding unneeded complexity (for you and for your users) through more survey questions or button colors doesn’t always improve your tests.

People get up in arms about these things. They post on Facebook and Twitter, often promising to never buy the offender’s products again. But it’s nonsense, more often about showing off how upset you are than actually being upset in the first place.

I’d like to ignore whether or not any of these things were good ideas (for whatever it’s worth, Facebook’s and Groupon’s almost certainly were, Kenneth Cole’s almost certainly was not) and instead focus on whether or not it makes any sense at all to be upset about what they said or did.

I think the most reasonable litmus test for these kinds of things is whether you’d be offended (even a little bit) if someone said it to you at a party or if you learned about it in isolation.

In the case of Facebook’s privacy mess last year, I knew many, many people that were up in arms about it. Most of them thought it was unethical, immoral and downright mean-spirited. But for all the wrong reasons, I’d argue. They were all (every single one, among the people I personally knew) fine with their own use of Facebook; some changed their settings, most didn’t, and all went on with their lives. But, boy, were they ever worried about everyone else who wasn’t as smart as them and able to avoid making asses of themselves on the internet. I’m sure it’s all good intentioned, but it tweaks me in the same way that any evangelical religious people attempting to spread their morality to others does–it just seems like a lot of overreaching without a lot of logical thought.

In the case of Groupon and Kenneth Cole, I’m hard-pressed to believe that anyone wouldn’t laugh if similar things were said at a party. “How about those Egyptian riots? Like a Black Friday sale, right!” “I’m sick of all these daily deals, how about something new like 2 Free Tibets for the price of one!?” This is pretty harmless stuff by any reasonable measure. Except when it affords you a soap box to preach from.

And that’s really my biggest problem with all this. That the complaining isn’t really complaining, it’s preaching and it’s often baseless. If you’re legitimately offended by any of this stuff, I really do think that’s fine. But if you just want to protect the less-refined masses, then it doesn’t make any more sense to me than censorship.

In any competition, having more information about other players’ motives strictly dominates having less. That is to say, it’s always beneficial to know more about what other people or companies in your market are doing since it gives you the opportunity to ignore that information or act on it. Now we know more about AOL’s strategy and there are a couple key things that people trying to get coverage from AOL publications can exploit.

I think this is really valuable to people who work in PR in two ways.

1. Any organization that relies on a large number of people doing a large number of things is inevitably going to struggle with internal communication. Ordinarily it’s very tough to get repeated attention from a single media outlet; in other words, it’s really hard to get TechCrunch to write about you 10 times in a month, which you’d like to do because it decreases the unit cost of learning how they work, what they like and how to pitch them. With hundreds of reporters writing hundreds of stories per month, AOL’s staff is hardly going to have time to chew their lunch, let alone cross check who has covered whom. It’s going to be much easier to double (or triple or quadruple) dip in multiple press hits on AOL properties, all of which are motivated by the same high level goals of SEO and pageviews. Let’s say the upfront cost of researching how to pitch a new outlet takes 5 pieces of coverage to recoup — on TechCrunch that might take 2 years, on AOL you might be able to do that in 3 weeks.
2. PR is a historically difficult idea to get companies to rally around when they’re early-stage, resource-limited and engineering-driven. PR is notoriously difficult to measure and relies on a lot of soft value props like “branding” that make anyone who knows how to use Vim want to shoot anyone who likes writing emails. With AOL producing content and making decisions based on pageviews and SEO — hard metrics and measurable tactics that any news.ycombinator reader can appreciate — the internal pitch to invest in PR is a little easier. If AOL is measuring their success by things that you like, you get a bit of associative property help in justifying its existence (PR, not AOL).

If I were doing PR right now, I’d be turning a lot of attention to understanding AOL as it grows into Tim Armstrong’s army of bloggers.

Messaging and positioning

Three weeks ago I took a look at our messaging and positioning for my new company, Insidr. In other words, I had to figure out how to optimally present our company and product: the words to use, the example to cite, the feelings to emote, etc. I wanted to be very analytical about it and arm myself (and my team) with as much data as possible to inform decisions (and let us call bullshit when needed). What follows is the process I used, from start to finish, to make an analytical decision about an emotional question.

Cast a wide net

I wanted to force myself to try lots of things and at least allow for the chance to be surprised. I wrote (read: stole from someone else) a 5 part sentence that included all the key elements I wanted to test: our target customer, a reference point to explain what we do, our point of differentiation, why customers should believe we can do what we claim, and what benefit our customers will get.

I think it’s safe to say that if you can nail all these things, you’re going to be in a great spot to communicate what you’re all about. I wrote 3 ideas for each of these 5 pieces and made sure they could be plugged into the following sentence model:

For [target] [company] is [reference] that [differentiator] because [believe], so that you can [benefit].

Here’s a (made up) example: For [people that like hamburgers] [Hamburgler] is [a way to eat more often] that [has indexed the world's burger joints] because [we had a great idea about finding burgers], so that you can [avoid overcooked beef].

With 3 versions of each piece, I suddenly had 243 versions of positioning statements for Insidr!

Multi-variant testing

Next I needed a way to test all of these ideas and measure the results. I wrote a small app that would create two versions of the full positioning statement using randomly chosen variants (without any overlap) and let a respondent vote on which one they preferred. Here’s what it looks like:

Each time someone choses an answer, the winning and losing variants for each piece of the sentence are logged in a database for safe keeping.

Next I setup a Mechanical Turk task that gave Turkers a short explanation of what they were about to see, then loaded the voting app in an iframe. I turned it on and went to sleep.

Because I wanted to avoid people randomly clicking over and over to make money, I limited it to one vote per user. I also limited the task to people in the US, Canada and the UK. This meant it took about 3 days to get reasonably significant results. To my mild surprise, there were clear winners and losers.

Refining and more testing

There were two themes that emerged from the multi-variant tests for Insidr: positive and goal-oriented statements did best. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Until this point our positioning for Insidr had been, in many ways, exactly the opposite. We were, if not negative, at least confrontational in regards to the companies we were supporting. We were also very tactical and thought it was important to make it immediately clear to customers exactly what we did and how we did it. The data seemed to be suggesting the exact opposite.

I got 168 results from MT after a few days and in each case the results were pretty similar, with the best variant winning 65-70% of the time and the worst winning 30-35% of the time. I did the confidence intervals on these and got back between 85-99% confidence that the best version was beating the 2nd best version. That was enough for me to move on to the next step.

Next I setup a new and more detailed test. This time we created three short positioning statements: one using our existing (tactical, confrontational) positioning, one with a purely positive and goal-oriented positioning, and one hybrid of the two. We used these statements as a basis for demand testing asking respondents if they would use the service described, how often and whether or not they would pay for it.

Again I used Mechanical Turk to drive responses and now added SurveyGizmo to the mix to handle the questions, which let’s you do a little bit of scripting using custom URL parameters to change pieces of the survey. I setup a custom redirector to split test traffic to different survey versions that each used one of the three positioning statements to describe a “hypothetical website.” Another Mechanical Turk task and we were off to the races.

Again, there were clear winners and losers, and the data from the multi-variant test held up. Positive and goal oriented was the way to go with about 95% confidence.

Acting on the data

Now that we had a clear signal about what to do, it was time to roll the changes into our product and marketing. First up were our front page and search ads. Both were updated with new messaging (and the front page got a new design) that was positive and goal-oriented to the point of being almost vague. Before the tests that led to this point I’m pretty confident we never would have thought this made any sense, but we trusted the data and tried it anyway.

The results were shocking. Literally overnight our search ad click through rates went up by 135% and our front page bounce rate went down by 36%. The combined effect was almost a 200% improvement on what we were doing before. To add some icing on the cake, the improvement in the quality (CTR) of our ads resulted in the CPC’s dropping by about 50%. Not bad for a couple weeks’ work.

Here’s an example of an old ad. It’s pretty tactical, and maybe a bit negative (certainly not overwhelmingly positive):

And here’s a new ad. It gets rid of the details about how Insidr works and focuses just on a benefit to the customer, even to the point of being unclear. The new ad KILLS the old ad:

Here is the old version of the front page. It’s pretty detailed and leads with a very negative question. We thought this was a great way to empathize with a frustrated consumer:

Here is the new version of the front page. It’s got a big, happy looking image and makes a lot of nice sounding promises without much information to back them up. It KILLS the old front page:

If you wan to see the code I used for the multi-variant testing, it’s on Github here.