The Bee Hive

• SunJournal.com - John and Barack want to get to know you better
  Demographic and psychographic profiling and targeting go political. Quotes from Netflix spokesperson also included in article.
  (tags: behavioral_targeting marketing politics)

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• Nashville law firm pays more than a $1.07M for Germantown building - Nashville Business Journal:
  The house around the corner finally sold, for a few hundred thou less than originally listed. It's a real beaut, too! Not exactly saying they got a bargain, but it's a good building.
  (tags: germantown nashville realestate)

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Riding the river trail

Originally uploaded by Kate O’

Note both shoes and helmet in basket. Good times.

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Barefoot summer bike ride

Originally uploaded by Kate O’

Riding bike barefoot = summer

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I want to reduce my gas consumption and my carbon footprint. But little by little, I’m getting talked out of my bike commuting plans. Several people in the past few weeks have expressed concern over the lack of shoulder in several places on the road I’d be riding along with the speed of traffic on the road, particularly relative to a (slow) cyclist.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that, dammit, they’re probably right.

So now I’m left wondering what I want to do about my commute. Besides commuting by bike, I’ve decided to catalog the options I’m weighing, and see if anyone has any other suggestions:

Drinkhaus - our new neighborhood coffee shop

Originally uploaded by Kate O’
Very excited about this cool new coffee shop with tasty drinks and a
lot of style.

Check it out: http://www.drinkhaus.com/

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Karsten’s father passed away yesterday. He was 84, and he’d been dealing with a variety of illnesses including emphysema (despite having never smoked a day in his life) and prostate cancer (which he beat — it was the treatment that led to complications). So while his death was not entirely unexpected, it was still rather sudden.

He hasn’t decided if he wants to be present for the visitation, but I think he’s leaning towards going. I’m navigating this as carefully as I can, because even though I know Karsten and his dad had a complicated relationship, I think Karsten is more affected than he expected to be.

We’ve been through so many shades of loss in the ten years we’ve been together, from the long, drawn-out, excruciating loss of my own father to the abrupt and devastating loss of Karsten’s mother, and now the sudden and emotionally puzzling loss of his father. We could really write a book. I suppose it would be more appropriate if we just wrote a song. Maybe that’s the project for this week.

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• Silverback — guerrilla usability testing
  Maybe this can replace Morae for me now that my primary work laptop is a Mac and Morae doesn't run on OS X — and I really don't want to have to run a Windows emulator.
  (tags: usability testing osx tools)

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My first article in Circulation Management’s “Monday Morning Expert” column is now up on their web site:

Can’t believe anyone believes a word I say with a promo picture like that.

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Poker birthday party

Originally uploaded by Kate O’

Joe & Karsten looking up drink recipes online; others playing poker;
others experimenting with mixed drinks in the kitchen…good party.

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I don’t know how I missed the news that my favorite local cafe and patisserie, Provence, is now partnering with Intelligentsia Coffee. From Chicago. It’s my favorite coffee EV-AR.

I detect the need to modify my daily commute so that I head downtown before leaving the city on my way to the exurbs each morning: I’m going to need to stop by the Provence at the main library.

Now if only that location would open on Sundays, I’d be a very happy girl.

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Cake!

Originally uploaded by Kate O’

That is a hell of a big piece of cake.

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• array bookcase shopping in CB2 office furniture
  Want! Would like several for my home office. Must figure out how to afford.
  (tags: furniture orange)

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I got email this morning from an editor at Circulation Management asking for clarification on some of the points from the presentation at the Circulation Management show in Chicago a few weeks ago, and since I was writing up some thoughts for her, I thought I’d put them here, too. Enjoy!

Behavioral Targeting: Six Easy Ways to Get Started

1. Read your reports for meaningful segments

   Chances are, you’re already collecting data that, when analyzed and applied, could optimize customers’ experience as well as your revenues. Most analytics platforms can tell you about new vs. returning visitors, and can usually further break the latter group down into first-time buyers vs. repeat customers. Chances are also pretty good that each of these groups is behaving somewhat to very differently on your site, and if you don’t figure out what works best for each, you’re leaving money on the table.

   

2. Traditional direct response tactics still work

   Behavioral targeting and marketing approaches are heavily borrowed from the domain of direct response. Meaningful segments, appealing offers, and consistent remarketing are all part of a well-rounded practice.

3. Focus on your easy-to-segment audiences

   Sometimes you can spot a useful segment, but actually breaking it out for targeting purposes may be trickier than you expect. (Geotargeting falls into this category for many sites). Unless you’re a black belt behavioral marketer and there’s nowhere else to turn for optimization, you probably have lower-hanging opportunities to pursue. Think in terms of both providing the biggest returns and taking on the least daunting setup to find the hidden treasure on your site.

4. Start wide and optimize campaigns

   It’s likely that you can realize substantial gains in your success metrics by thinking at a high level about audience characteristics, and then monitoring more granular groupings for meaningful patterns. Most of the groupings you follow in any given campaign won’t perform in a way that bears statistically significant differences to your control group, but the ones that stand out can always be segments in a future campaign.

5. Match message with media and audience

   The beauty of online marketing is the wealth of data and control you can exercise over context. The content you display on your site and in your ad networks can be adjusted based on any number of factors. Look for opportunities to tighten your message and your call to action based on context.

6. Test, test, test

   The key lesson in all of this is: it depends. It depends on your audience, it depends on your site, it depends on the time of day, the time of week, the time of year, and so on. The only way you’ll know what works for any given audience for any given situation is to test it. And test it, and test it again. Invest in a testing platform and process that provides you with the flexibility and the visibility to act quickly and learn quickly, and it will pay for itself many times over.

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Sometime between yesterday morning and this morning, our freezer had an identity crisis. It decided it was a refrigerator, and that it would act accordingly.

So this morning, we had goddess-knows-how-many pounds of thawed food to figure out what to do with. I cooked up all the fake breakfast sausage and had FIVE pieces (yum!) along with a once-frozen blueberry waffle and some conveniently pre-thawed berries. We transferred as much of the food as would fit into the real fridge, and are feverishly making meal plans for the next several days to use up as much of the food as possible.

Even with good planning, though, we’re going to lose some food. So if anyone in the vicinity of near-north Nashville would like some thawed veggie burgers, veggie bratwurst, or veggie ground “beef”, or some formerly-frozen fruit, come on over. We’ll be cooking and feasting all day.

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My neck and throat feel all puffy and swollen today, for some reason, even though they don’t really look any different. Still, I keep making jokes to Karsten about it, like asking while he drives if my neck is blocking his view of the road — stuff like that. He shakes his head and asks if it’s going to be another two months of neck jokes before my surgery. Magic 8 Ball says “you may rely on it.”

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Well, I just scheduled my thyroidectomy. October 2nd, 8 AM. I have to be there by 6:30, apparently. The nurse told me it’s “at least” a three-hour procedure. But I guess I’ll be knocked out so I probably won’t care how long it takes, really.

Gulp.

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• b-spirit.com » Scrum in marketing: making enterprises adaptive
  (tags: marketing projectmanagement)
• ::WASP::Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger::
  (tags: add-ons firefox analytics)

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I’ve only done one practice ride and I didn’t even make it all the way, but I think it’s still feasible enough to say it out loud: I may become a bike commuter.

Mind you, my commute route is 18.14 miles long (according to Google maps), over hilly middle Tennessee terrain (according to my legs). It’ll be one hell of a workout. But on the plus side: it’ll be one hell of a workout! I’ll never have to visit a gym again.

Except, of course, that part of the logistics involve visiting a gym every morning. Part of what makes this possible is that the Cool Springs YMCA is mere blocks from Magazines.com, so I can shower at the Y and coast downhill to work.

My next step is to try another test ride, this time with some of the gear I might use to commute. If I go through with this plan, I’ll need to invest in:

• lights and reflectors to be safe on the ride back after work
• panniers to carry change of clothes, laptop, and miscellaneous stuff
• neon-bright bike wardrobe that protects against leg chafing — definitely an issue yesterday

And yes, I probably want to buy a new bike. I love my fun and adorable cruiser for riding around town, but I gather that a road bike would make the long ride much easier and more efficient. But I want to be sure I’ll actually do this before I invest in a commuting bike.

Because there are several other considerations: I’d also want to try to adjust my schedule so that I leave the house as early as daylight will allow and leave the office while there’s still enough light left to avoid riding home in the dark, at least for now. If I do this through the winter it’ll be pretty tough to avoid riding in the dark, since it’s already pretty dark by 5 most days in December. Not to mention what it might be like to ride that far in the cold.

But December is a long ways away, and the conditions now are pretty much opposite: plenty of daylight, and too much heat for comfort.

Still, I’m excited. I really want to do this. If I could manage to do it five days a week, I’d be riding 180 miles, saving 175 lbs of CO2, burning 8,460 calories, and saving almost $40 in gas costs each and every week.

Any one of those numbers would be incredibly motivating, but all of them together? How could I not give this a go?

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• Meagan’s pic of our front porch
  I didn’t even realize she took a picture from this perspective. Funny.
  (tags: photos frontporch house)

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• moderNash | bringing ikea to nashville
  What a great idea! Somebody figured out a way to profit from Nashville’ lack of an IKEA. And according to Nashvillest, they donate 10% of profit to charity. How cool is that? (Though if it were me driving, I’d go to Cincinnati instead of Atlanta.)
  (tags: nashville ikea)

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The Nashville Feed has a great entry today about the “science” of cutting a killer demo, but the write-up goes on to demonstrate that it’s really anything but science. Several anecdotes from hit songwriters and producers nail the dilemma: music professionals often claim to prefer a work tape, because they say they want to hear their own interpretations, but a good many of the so-called “golden ears” on Music Row don’t seem to be as objective as they might claim. From what we’ve observed (and I’m not just talking about our own pitching, but what we’ve been witness to in various pitch sessions), a slightly less commercial song wrapped up in a well-polished demo has a better chance of being noticed than a slightly more commercial song recorded at home with just a guitar and some less-than-stellar vocals.

Perhaps the best of both worlds might be to make a home recording, but use a great singer. That’s an approach we’ve thought about taking, but in the end, we always feel our songs are better represented by studio demos anyway.

Anyway, the entry goes on to include a bulleted list of “how to make your demos real contenders,” and based on Karsten’s and my experience, there’s some good wisdom there. For example:

Trust Your Musicians: “In Nashville the session musicians are the best in the world at getting demos done,” said Hambridge. “Songwriters are not usually producers, but good musicians spend so much time in the studio playing on all kinds of songs that they often know exactly what you’re going for. Listen to their ideas.”

That’s one thing I haven’t written about often enough here: how impressive the talent is in Nashville. The first time we took a demo into the studio, we were completely knocked out by how quickly the musicians picked up the melody and laid it down for the recording. The guys were milling around, chatting with each other while the scratch demo was playing on the studio speakers, apparently not paying any attention. Yet when they all sat down to play it through, they had it sounding nearly radio-ready on the first take.

Part of that, of course, is song structure. We intentionally write pop songs, and pop songs by definition have straightforward chord progressions, so it’s not like we typically give studio musicians much of a challenge. But the quality of musicianship is so high that they even replicate the turnarounds and licks without appearing to try.

There are more tips, and some good anecdotes at the Nashville Feed. Click on over there to read the rest.

And as a bonus, here’s some video from the “By Surprise” demo session we did back in ‘05:

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• GuitarCardio.com: Select Your Exercise
  (tags: guitar practice workout technique)

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• Why eCommerce is a Lot Like ICanHasCheezburger | Get Elastic
  Good list of points about ecommerce… oh, who are we kidding? It’s a bunch of LOLcats (and other animals) that tie loosely to the theme, but it’s worth it.
  (tags: ecommerce lolcats marketing humor)

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Seen this?

It’s Yahoo’s SearchMonkey program. Hmm. “Searchmonkey.” That’s kind of cute… and very familiar! Where have I heard that before?

Oh yeah! Here:

I’m not bitter, though. They can have it. What with Yahoo’s current difficulties, it’ll probably do them about as much good as it did me.

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