At LEGO they have taken web analytics a step further than most organisations by aligning it with the business objectives. This was the message I received, when talking to Gbemi Petersen, Manager of the Process & Online Intelligence team at LEGO in Billund in Denmark. Her team has worked actively on spreading the insights they collect to the entire organisation. The ambition is to work smarter and to allow the business units to make more informed decisions.

Where most organisations find limited use of their numbers e.g. to encourage editors or to justify the costs of their work to managers, LEGO wants to make web analytics a key part of business development. To accomplish this, Gbemi and her team of 3 strive to get involved with new projects as early as possible in order to help set KPIs to clear business goals, and provide useful data on a regular basis.

The Online Intelligence team at LEGO still holds the responsibility of gathering and distributing traffic data, but in order to get more time for the business development efforts, self-service is encouraged.  The site owners and the key account managers are offered training in the analytics system at workshops facilitated by the vendor. In addition Gbemi’s team is going to setup a hotline, where support will be offered at specific times. This will free up time to focus on the more value adding tasks like setting measurable KPIs linked to business goals and providing actionable insights to the businesses when a KPI is met or not met.

According to Gbemi, the key to get web analytics this far is a strong buy-in at management level. The senior managers simply need to acknowledge the value of online analytics. Consequently the Process & Online Intelligence team meets with senior management to ensure that the things they measure support the overall business strategy.

In addition, Gbemi argues that you need a dedicated team responsible for gathering online intelligence. Even with a dedicated team it can be hard to work strategically if you don’t distribute the tasks to the online stakeholders and allow them to help themselves through training and support.

What is your organisation doing about analytics? Simply using it to justify the online team’s existence – or using the detailed results strategically? Share your experiences below…

Many online professionals consider a text editor intuitive, easy to use and something which doesn’t require any training or documentation. Most text editors in web applications resemble the familiar and to most people intuitive interface from Microsoft Word. Despite this Martin Risgaard Rasmussen, a webmaster at the Danish dairy giant Arla Foods, decided to create a cheat sheet for his online editors when they introduced a new text editor.

You can download the cheat sheet below.

Based in corporate communication, Martin says that “occasional editors are easily overwhelmed as many of the features contain several different options”. With 15,000+ employees, Arla has many irregular editors who will work with the new text editor. Martin is also working on a more extensive documentation for the editors.

Arla is beginning to use the open source TinyMCE editor, which has been customised to meet their requirements, including integration with SAP KM and SAP’s Web Page Composer.

It is often presumed that learning by trial-and-error is the preferred approach for online professionals. This may be the case for the advanced super users who are familiar with many interfaces and systems, but do remember that in larger organisations super users represent only a tiny minority and most others are still not familiar and comfortable editing web pages.

Download the TinyMCE cheat sheet from Arla:

• Adobe PDF (357 Kb)
• Microsoft Word format (57 Kb)

PBworks has now launched its
PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as
Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with
customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at
PBworks about this new offering that
they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration. This new term indicate
support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through
CRM.

Retrevo
does some interesting surveys that I have covered before. Their new Gadget
Census study pits the following U.S. cities against each other to see who has
the most consumer electronics per capita. This census was conducted online from March, 2010
through July, 2010 and received over 7,500 individual responses from Retrevo
users distributed across gender, age, and location.

1.
San Francisco vs. New York

San
Francisco has more Online TVs (12% more)

San
Francisco has more Mac OS computers (94% more)

San
Francisco has more iPhones (23% more)

New
York has 56% more BlackBerries than San Francisco

New
York has 30% more iPads than San Francisco

New
York has 34% more e-Readers than San Francisco

2.
Boston vs. L.A.

Boston:
44% more BlackBerries

Boston:
43% more e-Readers

L.A.:
11% more iPhones

L.A.:
54% more Mac OS computers

L.A.:
24% more game consoles

L.A.:
16% more Blu-ray players

3.
Washington D.C. vs. Chicago

Washington
D.C.: 53% more Blackberries

Washington
D.C.: 50% more e-Readers

Chicago:
23% more Macs

Chicago.:
45% more people streaming music

Chicago.:
66% more people with more than 3 TVs

So
the East coast seems the winner in BlackBerries and e-Readers. The West coast
has more Macs and iPhones. LA plays a lot of games and Chicago watches a lot of
TV. Now I am counter culture as I live in Boston and have a Mac and an iPhone. 

Today Vivvo CMS launched the new Online Documentation and Resource Center designed to give the customers the information resource they need to ensure maximum success with their implementation of the Vivvo CMS.

I guess we reached that point when you just don’t remember where to configure your Vivvo not to cache CSS, how to set up different category template, or what that VTE::box_article_module does? Well, the documentation team at Spoonlabs has come up with a way to make all product documentation as easily available as possible, allowing users to rapidly find answers to all questions quickly and easily, dramatically reducing time to search for information.

Our commitment to providing customers with premium support simply cannot work unless we’re 100 percent focused on providing access to information. By effectively disseminating technical information online, we can provide customers with access to Vivvo CMS resources and answers whenever it’s most convenient for them. As a result, our customers can speed problem-resolution and increase overall productivity.

We welcome you all to check out the new center at: http://www.vivvo.net/doc and http://www.vivvo.net/resources

read more

Packt is pleased to announce a new book that is aimed at helping Moodlers achieve outstanding results by using the ready-to-use recipes for reading comprehension, writing and composition from the book Moodle: The English teachers Cookbook. Written in a cookbook style by Silvina P. Hillar, this book is a guide that will help users improve their skills in Moodle and enhance their way of teaching in virtual classrooms.

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. It is designed to help educators create online courses with a focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content. Its open source license and modular design allows any developer to create additional modules and features.

The book starts off by teaching users to connect simple activities using Moodle that will improve student’s writing in different ways. Furthermore they will be able to match images, texts and import different pictures to their Moodle course. Embedding social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to create stories and design interactive activities will also be learnt from the book.

read more

Here is a topic I continue to be intrigued by (see category in the right column). While many
firms are competing in the race for the single box solution to TV Web
convergence, Mac Slocum at O’Reilly Radar reports that new data from Nielsen suggests they're all headed in
the wrong direction. “In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the
Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35% from
the previous quarter. Nearly 60% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a
month while also watching TV.” 

I am doing this right now as I am watching TV while I
write this post.  This is usually
an easy multi-task. Mac notes the differences between television's lean-back
experience and the web's lean-forward positioning. Competing manufacturers did
to consider this difference with the Web’s pull potential and TV’s push.  

The Nielsen report also said that that Americans watch
network programs online when they miss an episode or when a TV is not
available. Online video is used essentially like DVR and not typically a
replacement for watching TV. Mac adds consumers are supplementing their consumption with online video, not replacing
it. This is where I liked the On Demand options to see TV shows when I want to.
I used this extensively for the Treme series that came on too late. It also
helped me watch each episode at least three times.

Now Mac takes this data to an interesting conclusion. He writes
that it matters if content is consumed, not how it's consumed. Much
effort has gone into bridging the web and TV worlds through brute force into a
single box. However, the most successful cross-media efforts are the ones that
let consumers interact through the tools they already use. This is why many
enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform vendors enable their users to interact
with their tools through email. What makes more sense: integrating Twitter into
a television's hardware or helping users tweet during a show? I would choose
the latter. 

Identifying 10 online professionals that are making a difference in the industry was as fun an exercise this time around as when we first did it in 2009. Twitter remains a truly diverse medium with people using it to communicate on a wide variety of topics; mostly useful, but at times less relevant in a business context.

I have myself previously complained about noise on Twitter and proposed a simple quantity-rule to get around it.

Just like last year, the list includes some familiar faces as well some names new to Twitter and perhaps new to you as well. For each of them I have picked a selected tweet to give you a taste of their style. Enjoy!

1. @BGleba: Beth Gleba is currently Employee Internet Portal Project Leader at IKEA based in the Greater Philadelphia Area. She’s been with IKEA since 2001 and has developed their award-winning Intranet by focusing on key employee roles and required information needs.
   

   I like it! “We let (internal com) our blog comments be anonymous, this allowed comments to soar!” #10CCM Nicole Foster.

2. @bjfogg: BJ Fogg is the famous Stanford innovator. He appears on Fortune’s list of 10 gurus you should know and has spent the past years in the field of persuasion, including work on Facebook and mobile (and both). As our 2007 and 2009 Aarhus Conference keynote speaker, he’s made significant contributions to our programmes. He’s once tweeted that he regrets 20% of his tweets.
   

   “Email cheapens our lives” I explained at a Stanford event in 2007. One reason: Email can undermine our closest relationships

3. @BrianBentzen: Brian Bentzen is online communications manager at Servicestyrelsen (The National Board of Social Services) in Odense, Denmark. Moreover, he has previously acted as Lecturer of Communication Studies and worked at a local digital agency.
   

   Content Farming – SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t http://bit.ly/aY9dLT #contentstrategy #SEO

4. @ernstdecsey: Ernst Decsey has been working for UNHCR in Geneva Switzerland for the past 12 years. As part of the intranet team, he uses Twitter mostly to share recommended articles.
   

   Medecins Sans Frontieres: Social Media Lessons from the Haiti Crisis http://bit.ly/aUn8qY

5. @healthythinker: Jane Sarasohn-Kahn founded THINK-Health, a strategic health consultancy, in 1992 after 10 years as health care consultant in firms in the US and Europe. Jane focuses on the nexus of health and technology.
   

   Phonecare works – remote telecare for people with cancer, pain and depression; FCC #broadband implications #mhealth | http://bit.ly/d7uEbZ

6. @izahoor: Zahoor Hussain is a busy and recognized UK consultant. He co-founded a business which was later acquired by digital agency LBi. Zahoor is very good at engaging in conversations on Twitter and also regularly shares pointers to interesting reading.
   

   Defining & Defending The Meaning Of “Community” an Open Source imperative http://bit.ly/9kTH7W #cms

7. @kreidy: Kathleen Reidy is a respected Boston-based analyst at The 451 Group covering content management and collaboration technologies. I haven’t yet been successful in getting Kathleen to speak at one of our events, but hopefully it will work out in a not too distant future.
   

   technical founders / CEO / CTOs – if you hire a high-profile marketing exec, let him/her do the briefings – really

8. @lwelchman: Lisa Welchman is the founder of WelchmanPierpoint, a Baltimore-based consultancy. She has pioneered the field of Web Operations Management by distinguishing Web strategy, governance, execution and measurement as it pertains to large Web sites.
   

   opps. was it a Freudian slip to say For Web Managers and the Managers that “mange” them…..? hmm

9. @markgr: When Mark Greenfield is not at conferences, he is busy as the Director, Office of Web Services at University of Buffalo. Mark is also an Associate Consultant with Noel-Levitz, a US higher education consulting firm. He was first introduced to our community at the recent conference in Philadelphia and has accepted an invitation to speak on the higher education track at the  Aarhus 10 conference.
   

   Why do so many high profile blogs make it impossible to print? For that matter, the same applies to many websites #petpeeve

10. @stephlemieux: Stephanie Lemieux used to work as taxonomy practice lead at Earley & Associates, but just announced that she has started as Director of Search & Content Mgt at the Yellow Pages in Montreal, Canada.
    

    in a presentation on using a wiki to display enterprise metadata to users – divorce management from presentation layer #EDW10 #metadata

This list enables you to easily follow all 10 on Twitter.

Who do you follow on Twitter? Whose tweets do you hate to miss? If you think we have left out any unmissable online professionals, please feel free to drop a comment!

More than ever before, information is all around us and, while most people take it for granted, few can define the term. The word “information” in English is rather flexible and it means many things to many people.

The Urra-hubullu encyclopedia, one of the earilest of its kind

To borrow from Justice Potter Stewart, who was writing about the difficulty of defining “obscenity,” I know information when I see it.

When we need a phone number, we dial “information” (well, we used to, before the Web). We get information about a specific event (a party, a wedding) and we get information when we read a newspaper (be it online or a printed version).

We get information when we chitchat and we get information when we attend meetings and conferences.

The American Heritage Dictionary has one of the better definitions I’ve found, namely “knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.” It goes on to add “Knowledge of specific events or situations that has been gathered or received by communication; intelligence or news” and “A collection of facts or data.”

A brief look at the roots and origin of the word “information” also helps us to better understand it. The word comes from the Old French “informacion,” which in turn came from the Latin “informationem” (nominative “information”), which means an outline, concept, or idea. Informationem was the noun of action from informare, from which we derive our verb “inform.”

But I digress.

The reason information is important is because human beings simply have had to communicate with one another since the dawn of civilization. From cave paintings and oral history to the beginnings of a written tradition, mankind has documented and recorded that which is important and left it for future generations.

An increase in the human population, combined with improved tools for sharing information (starting with the tablet, paper, movable type, and going all the way into the computer age), has resulted in more information being created today than perhaps anyone had ever anticipated. What haven’t been developed in lockstep with this are tools that allow us to filter information so we get not only what we need but also that which we can absorb.

Despite great technological advances, we actually understand very little about how to manage information. Until we do learn more about managing what really has become a flood of information, all we can do is try to cope with the reality of Information Overload.

This Analyst Opinion is also available online at

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.