Lava Lamp
Lava Lamp
Jason Burby has just written an excellent article on how one person’s journey to educate web analytics to the masses resulted in the discovery of incentive/reward based education – via the clever use of a lava lamp.
Lava Lamp: A Web Analytics Silver Bullet
Kristen Findley, web analytics manager at Ameriprise Financial, rewards those that preach the gospel about measurement. Now I’m all for highlighting the benefits and necessity to senior managers and I do agree that doing things in a fun way does tend to make things stick in people’s minds.
However, what I’ve found is that management buy in is “what a fantastic idea! Why haven’t we thought or done this before?” The they work out the fine print – who is going to pay for the install – who’s budget will pay for this going forward because you’ve always invariably missed one budget allocation meeting or other. Then other questions get asked – who gets the information, who runs the reports, who does the a/b testing and who takes overall responsibility.
Now, this may seem a bit of a depressing post but I want to highlight a few things which, in Financial Services, hinder managment information mix improvements. Similarly, I have heard of situations where brand and marketing teams question the reasoning behind web site measurement and why they weren’t consulted. They then went out of their way to prevent any use of the data – e.g. “lets change the colour of the apply button and see what click-thru rate improvments we see” are received with the replies “we must adhere to brand guidelines!”
Hopefully one day people will get wise and see that there is a differentiation between adhereing to brand guidelines and website improvements. On the day there will also be a massive change in management theory which will allow the free flow of information to aid business decisioning and people will be less concerned about their own little empires.
Right off to order a usb lava lamp – thanks Kristen….
