1. Profile yourself
2. Don’t be a loner
3. Befriend random strangers
4. Browse for likely friends
5. Find your friends in groups
6. Google for friends
7. Speak up
8. Approve away
9. Gossip in public
10. Broadcast yourself
Bonus: Feeding forums for fun and profit

My first real knowledge of MySpace came during a 2006 SxSW Interactive seminar, on the topic of spreading the word about your startup, when one of the panelists stated “you will get more traffic from MySpace than from anywhere else”. Wow, I thought, that’s a pretty strange thing to say - isn’t MySpace the place where teenagers go nuts with HTML and produce ad-hoc, mostly ugly, hard to read ego-feeding profile pages? Ok, so maybe I didn’t get what MySpace was all about, or how powerful it was. And what the heck, it was free, so I went ahead and created a default profile, linked it to AustinMash!, and left it alone to focus on other things. Needless to say, my basic profile page referred exactly zero people to this web site.

That was in March, when I was still pretty busy building out the site. Later on (sometime in April) I went back to MySpace and took the time to study how it worked and what could be done with it. I saw how users modify the basic, default profile page by inserting HTML and CSS Stylesheet code into form fields that are provided to allow you to write about your interests and hobbies. Most ’spacers get their code from third-party web sites, whose sole reason for existence is to provide such code so the ’spacer can modify their page without knowing any HTML or CSS. In fact, it seems one of the reasons a lot of profiles are so cumbersome is that novice ’spacers will insert more than one set of code from, perhaps, different suppliers, whose code will then collide to produce a mess of a page. Or, they might thinks it’s cute to choose the same color for their scroll bar and it’s background, which in effect makes the scroll bars invisible, which when attached to a super-wide and long page, makes the profile almost impossible to navigate. But whatever, this is the ’spacers page, and the only ones who would care would be their friends, supposedly.

Ah yes, friends, that’s what was missing from my profile. Now, you must understand that the word “friend” takes on a different meaning in MySpace. A MySpace friend is merely another profile with whom you have mutually agreed with to call each other friends. It matters not if you actually know the owner of the profile; it matters less if the profile is even of a person. Yes, there are profiles that have been set up to just convey an idea, and generally, if you request to be their friend, they will automatically agree (”approve” you in MySpeak). In this manner, these “concept profiles” can amass thousands, perhaps millions of friends, and you show off your affiliation to the concept by including it in your friends list.

For example, one of my friends is Beer. Beer is my friend. Beer is listed alongside my other friends, some of which are real people I actually know and hang out with in real life. I am also a friend of Austin, by the way.

Another thing about MySpace friends is that they are visible to anyone who views a profile. If you land on an interesting profile, you can see their list of friends, and by clicking on the friend’s picture, you go to that person’s profile. Very often they will have similarly interesting profiles and list of friends, which you can click on to explore more profiles, and so on and so on. This is why friend-jumping can be such a vast time-sink.

Having friends on your MySpace profile is important for several reasons. First of all, if you don’t have friends, you’re obviously not popular and therefore not very interesting. Second, a couple of important features are available only with friends: the bulletin and the comment. A bulletin is a message that is broadcast to all your friends at once, and a comment is a message that you leave with one particular friend. Comments are important because they appear on your friend’s profile, and they contain a link back to your profile. So, by leaving a comment for a friend, anyone who lands on the friend’s profile might click on your picture and by taken to your profile. If your friend receives a lot of comments, however, your comment will soon scroll off the page and your link will be gone, unless you comment again.

With this basic understanding of how MySpace works, you can start to appreciate how to use it to promote your goods or services.

1. Profile yourself
You start by creating a profile that augments what you are promoting. Include links to your web site, of course. Try to create an environment, convey an attitude that represents your business. However, you have to consider how you want to separate your personal life from your business life. Is your new profile going to be based on you, as an individual who happens to run a business, or are you trying to represent only your business as it’s own entity? MySpace is geared towards individuals, but that doesn’t stop thousands of businesses from setting up their own profiles. You may want to consider taking the personal route. The rest will flow more naturally and not seem so contrived that way. Making this decision now will help guide you in your future interactions with ’spacers.

My MySpace profile was set up to mimick this site. It uses the same color scheme, has links to this blog, and incorporates the Skyline graphic. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of what you can do in your profile (for example, you’re not allowed to cover up the banner ad at the top, and Javascript code is blocked) I could not make the Skyline clickable and functional, and it’s placement was a problem – I couldn’t place it at the right height on the page, and even if I could, it wouldn’t look right. In the end, I just made it a static image at the bottom of the page, but since the image file is from the same server AustinMash! runs on, the Skyline is guaranteed to show the same ads as are displayed on the site.
Besides these items, I included pictures and some facts about myself to humanize the page. Although my profile is heavily linked to my web site, I represent myself as a person - an Austinite who runs a web site for and about Austin, Texas.

2. Don’t be a loner
Once your profile is ready, you then go about adding friends to it. You can start with your real-world friends by searching for their profiles by their e-mail address. You can find your friends one at a time from the “Search” link near the top of your home page, or if you use Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, or AOL address books, you can find them all at once from the “Invite” link (click on one of the “Import From…” links).

You can also search for concept profiles using keywords, if that makes sense for what you’re trying to do.

3. Befriend random strangers

Asking people you don’t know to be your friend is a form of promotion in itself. When a ‘spacer receives a friend request from you they see your picture, which is linked to your profile. The prospective friend will then very likely visit your profile to see if you are worth adding to his friends list. That right there increases your profile views. Of course, like most promotional efforts, focusing in on a relevant target audience is half the battle. With 119 million profiles on MySpace and climbing, random friend requests will not be as effective in promotional terms as a targeted approach.

Here are a few tactics to find the right “friends” for you.

4. Browse for likely friends

Use the Browse feature. MySpace allows you to search for profiles based on many criteria (hint: use the “advanced” browsing tab). You can search by gender, age range, geographic location, interests, and many other factors. You can sort the results by last login time, which puts the more active users first, and moves the abandoned profiles to the end of the list.

Browsing for AustinMash! friends is fairly easy, as I can specify "located within 5 miles of zip code 78701". There are a few 'spacers in Austin: looking just for the ones between ages 30 and 35 within 5 miles of downtown yields 3000 profiles, which seems to be the maximum returned in any query. Who knows what the actual number of this "small" sample realy is?

5. Find your friends in groups

There are also thousands of “groups” in MySpace, which can also be searched for by using keywords. Groups are sections of the site where group members can discuss topics of interest to the group in a forum. In my experience, the forums I’ve seen are not heavily used, with rather shallow discussion threads. It is likely some groups are more active than others, although this is not important at this point. What is important is that each group has a list of members, and presumably each member is interested in the topic of the group. So, by finding groups related to your product, you will find ’spacers who might react favorably to a friend request from you.

A major drawback to this method is that there is currently no way to sort a group’s member list by any criteria. If a group has thousands of members, finding the most promising targets is, at best, very time consuming. But, the ’spacerSphere (the cloud of third party services dedicated to servicing ’spacers) is growing all the time, and there already or soon may be companies offering data mining services for this purpose.

I belong to a few Austin-related groups, such as Austin!, Austin Music Exchange, Austin Party Boats, Progressive Austin, and Austinites. As a member, my profile is listed in the membership rolls, creating another avenue for Austinites to find my site.

6. Google for friends

Another way to find appropriate ’spacers is to google for them. In Google’s search box, type in “MySpace” and your relevant keyword(s). The results will include profile pages with your keywords, plus blog postings that mention them. Oops, did I forget to mention the MySpace blogging feature? Yes, ’spacers can maintain their own blogs within the MySpace system. These are rather limited blogs, however, in that they do not provide RSS feeds, categories, or archiving functions. They are isolated and not a part of the Blogosphere as we know it, but this is not important at this point. What is important is that ’spacers will write about what interests them, and you can find those posts through Google. This results in a highly targeted set of users you will very likely approve you as a friend.

I found some of my profile friends after posting my ROT Rally blog entry. I found 'spacers that had written about the rally, and I added to their blog comments to let them know where they could find another perspective on the event (and more pictures, of course). I also still receive friend requests from people who were there or are otherwise interested in bikes.

7. Speak up

By the way, once you land on a ’spacers blog post that is in line with your thing, feel free to leave a comment for the post. This not only makes the ’spacer’s blog more interesting to others, it will leave a permanent link to your profile (and perhaps to your web site) from that post, which will accessible to everyone else who reads it in the future.

My Google Analytics stats show people are landing on my blog directly from the blog.myspace.com domain, which means they are clicking on the links I left in comments on other ’spacers blogs

8. Approve away

By and by, over time you will receive friend requests yourself. Some of these might well be from a real-world long-lost friend, who noticed your profile in one of their friend’s list of friends. Some of these will be from bands or other entities looking to promote themselves. And, some of these will be spam, or from profiles set up solely to lure people to porn sites or other malicious sites. Yes, like the internet at large, MySpace has its share of miscreants.

If the request is of either of the first two categories, go ahead and approve them. If you are not sure, don’t worry. Just visiting a profile of the third category is generally safe in itself - MySpace has gone to great lengths to ensure malicious code cannot be placed in profile pages, and seems to promptly remove obscene profiles. If you do land on one of those, it’s still fairly easy to tell this is not someone you want to add as a friend, and you can block all future friend requests from them if you need to. Actually, I have seen a diminished number of these types of requests lately. I guess the bad guys decided it was not worth the effort, maybe because most ’spacers were savvy enough to ignore them.

This brings us to the issue of the fine line between promotion and spam. You know about spamming - don’t do it. It will backfire on you, or at best waste your time. Problem is - what is spam? You will have to use your own best judgment on that, although you are not the final authority: the recipient is. In general, if you are providing real value and content to an audience that is likely to appreciate it, you are probably not spamming. Just try to err on the ham side of the line, not the spam side.

I "promoted" my ROT rally blog post to all the Austin related 'spacer groups I could find. Most of them removed my submission fairly quickly. Ok, so maybe not everyone who's a part of the Austin community is into rockin' and rollin' with biker babes and more. Duly noted, and I will try to be more selective in my group posts from now on. The last thing I want is to be blocked from any groups I may have appropriate content for in the future.

9. Gossip in public
As you gather friends, leave comments on their profiles. Comments can be nothing more than “thanks for the add” (meaning, thanks for adding me to your list of friends) or “have a great day”. Sometimes friends do this just to say hi, but because newer comments move the older ones off a profile, a lot of people seem to do this so their profile link remains on their friend’s page. Some of these profiles are getting hundreds of views a day, so staying connected increases your own visibility. And if your comment is interesting (you can include a picture, if the friend allows it), you can increase the chances some of those visitors will click through to you.

Also, leaving comments on your friend’s profiles makes it more likely they will leave comments on yours, which makes your profile more interesting.

This is something I need to work on more. I have left a few comments on my real-life friends profiles, and some have commented back, but I am not making enough of a time investment in this yet. I also had to remove a few comments from my profile, mostly because they were a response to my comment or an e-mail or something, and they didn't make any sense just sitting there out of context. The upshot is the comment section on my profile is pretty weak right now.

10. Broadcast yourself
The bulletin feature allows you to send the same message to all your friends at the same time. Think about this a second - this message goes to ALL your friends: real-life, ’spacers, concepts, bands, and anything else you may have in your friend list. This is one reason you should decide early on how you intend to use MySpace, and what kind of profile you want to maintain. Will you send personal bulletins - “great news - my sister’s no-good boyfriend finally moved out and took his ratty friends with him”, or will it be business - “overstock sale, special MySpace promotion next 24 hours only”? So, while bulletins can be a great way to stay connected, some up-front planning might be in order if you are concerned about maintaining a certain image. That said, if your strategy is to humanize your business, by all means tell everyone all about your bunions!

Bonus: Feeding forums for fun and profit
I’ve mentioned the group forums, where members can talk about topics of interest to the group. These are moderated by the group leader, and are either public or private, depending on the leader’s intent. But with millions of groups (the “other” category alone has over 1.5 million groups), participation activity in any particular group can be spotty, and your submissions there are not likely to receive wide viewership.

A better bet is the global MySpace Forum, which is much more active and has heavy participation. There are 22 main forum categories broken out into 80 sub categories, currently totaling over 1 million topics containing 12 million posts, and as of right now, the most recent post in each of the 22 categories is no more than 20 minutes old. That’s some lively discussion going on there folks.

With the exception of a couple of MySpace-specific areas, including one devoted to helping you customize your profile, the categories and topics are those you might find in any general purpose online forum, which is to say, it runs the gamut of possible interests. Surely one or more of them will be appropriate for postings in your field.

The MySpace forum works like most, with someone introducing a topic by asking a question, and people responding as they see fit. One difference from other forums, though, is that the high level of participation means the topic turnover rate is also high, and your responses may not have the longetivity you would expect in less popular forums. Keeping yourself visible on these forums would require an ongoing, dedicated effort.

So, is MySpace a good way to promote your business? Depends on the business and on you. The forum, the bulletins, the commenting system, and the groups are just tools you can use to spread the word about your endeavors. Like most tools, these can make you more efficient if you let the tool do the work, as opposed to trying to force it (like, by spamming). And also like most areas of life, you get out of it what you put into it. Once you’ve decided MySpace contains the people you’d like to reach in your promotions, you still need to invest the time necessary to be an active participant in the community if you expect to be noticed. Being online, social networks are no longer limited by geography, and while the opportunity for individual self-expression is unprecedented, they nevertheless continue to be ruled by the same human dynamics that have existed for centuries. Some things never change.

Today, I went to Google’s blog search tool, typed in “ROT Rally”, and there, at the very top, first on the list, was my blog entry!

Who would have thought I’d somehow get top billing at Google? Yeah, it’s a narrow search, but I’ll take it !!

Top ‘O the heap !

Yes, I think my Summer had schizophrenic traits, as I was exhaustively busy on several fronts, while others, such as this web site, were left to cool their heels. Days and weeks went by all full of activity, yet no progress was made on AustinMash! It’s not what was planned, it is what happened. And in case it matters, said activity was not of the leisure kind. No, this Summer did not find me out for day-long rides in the hill country, nor lounging on a boat, nor skipping town for exotic locales. Not a single group ride since ROT Rally in early June, not one day at the lake, not one sleepless night banging on the keyboard in all of Summer – how did that happen?

Probably the biggest time-sucking activity was moving to a new house. Wait - the moving part certainly took much longer than I would have thought - but there is an implied mountain of time in that statement, which was spent on a few related activities such as actually finding the house to move into. We were already living in a house we liked, which had a number of appealing features (think 3 car garage and super large yard adjacent to a greenbelt) which was purchased at a very reasonable price. This made our house hunt more difficult, as anything we found had to be measured against our current situation, and our features-for-the-price benchmark was pretty tough to beat. When we did find something that moved us to present an offer, we were typically late by a day or two – already gone! The best houses go on and off the market at lightning speed. Very frustrating. This is how several months of weekends were taken up by nothing but house hunting, followed by weeks of moving, fixing up the old house to sell, and settling into our new place. Yep, between the move and other stuff going on, it was once again proven that today’s most precious commodity is time – demand for it grows unimpeded, and new supply is sharply constrained :)

Normally my life outside AustinMash! is not a subject for this blog, but I include a portion of it here as an illustration of how personal life can interfere with business life, despite your best intentions. As it happens, AustinMash! is not my primary means of financial support. If it was, I would naturally not have the luxury of leaving it alone while other concerns capture my attention.

It has been interesting to see, however, that even with no active promotion on my part, AustinMash! continues to enjoy a steady flow of traffic. This is no doubt due to my previous efforts at SEO and some promotional initiatives with lasting effect, such as participating in forums and other blogs. The bulk of my visitors arrive from a search engine – mostly Google and Yahoo, in that order, and the top search terms used to find my site relate to the ROT Rally and Biker Babes – go figure. After that, the posts related to my experiences with flash-based video and WordPress issues seem to get attention. Oh, I even get visitors from people looking for Gary Hoover info.

Speaking of finding stuff, I’ve discovered a couple of very interesting marketing and promotion related blogs. The first is written by Guy Kawasaki, the original evangelist for Apple. He writes about what he knows, and he seems to know quite a bit about in-the-trenches marketing, software companies in general, and startups in particular. He is also relatively new to blogging, and is not shy about sharing his discoveries with the rest of us. Plus, his writing is just cool. Check out, just for starters, The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog and The Art of Distribution .

Another blog I just discovered (through Guy’s RSS feed, actually) is Pronet Advertising which also has a wealth of practical advice. For example, in the How to get on the digg homepage post, I learned there is a new way to code the digg button on my blog, that allows readers to digg an already submitted story directly from the post, and which I will be implementing shortly.

Hmm, there are enhancements to the digg process that I was unaware of. Boy, you take your eye off the game for a moment, and all of a sudden the rules are changed (what - no celebrating with props anymore?) and it’s a whole new thing out there. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but the point remains valid - the blogoshere is still young and evolving, and it pays to keep up.

Although this setup worked great for its intended purpose, it left a lot of unanswered questions related to what users were doing on the site. For example, I started to see, in the report page, a large number of page views from the same person. I mean, page views in the 60-90s in the same day, and again the next day, and the next. Since there are only about 40 pages in the whole site, this was pretty weird. I can appreciate someone being so mesmerized by my site they keep re-reading everything, but come-on, over 200 page views in 3 days? I had to go dig into the server log files to see that this user was not going through all the content at all, all requests were the same, for the blog home page! The logs also showed all the requests were being referred to from BlogSlides . Aha! I had recently added my blog to their index of blogs, and their unique feature is that they automatically cycle through a series of blogs in the same browser window, hence the name BlogSlides. Sure enough, the logs showed this visitor loaded the main blog page at regular intervals all day long. Ok, so this minor mystery turned out to be someone who left his BlogSlides window running, and by doing so created a bunch of bogus requests for all the blogs in his slide show, not just mine, providing another example of the unintended consequences of someone trying something new. Anyway, I found my answer through tedious scanning of my log files, not through my automated visitor counters. This would have been a lot easier with dedicated Web Site Analysis software.

So, I knew my hit and click counters were not good at providing the kind of deep analysis you can get from web analytics software, they were never intended to be, and creating such a system was never a reason for AustinMash!’s existence. All along, I’ve thought that if detailed visitor stats ever became important to me, I would have to shell out several hundred dollars for a decent and robust solution, something like WebTrends .

Then, a little while ago, an interesting e-mail appeared in my inbox – it was an invitation from Google to try out their new Analytics solution, which was, of course, free! Apparently I had asked for an invitation some time ago, probably when I set up my AdSense advertising account, and then forgot all about it. So, here was Google, one of the most impressive software developers of today (Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Spreadsheet, need I go on?) inviting me to try their latest creation. Guess how long it took me to add their tracking code to my pages? Not very, I’ll tell you that right now.

The hardest part in adding their code (about 4 lines of JavaScript) was in deciding where it should go. In my case, since I have made the commitment to have the Skyline appear on all publicly accessible pages, it made sense to put the Google code next to the code that generates the Skyline Ads area map. Although Google says it may take a day, within a few hours of uploading the new code to the site my personal Analytics page was showing visitor data, and a few minutes after that, I was once again impressed with Google’s software and user experience prowess.

Screenshot 1 - Default View

Now that the tracking code has been active on the site for a few weeks, there is enough data to take a good look at most of the features Google Analytics offers. Screenshot 1 shows the default view when you load the application, the “Executive Overview” Dashboard view. This screenshot shows the overall page layout for the reports within Google Analytics, with collapsible report links on the left, a date picking calendar below that, and the reports on the right, with help text below them.

Screenshot 2
Three Dashboard Views

Screenshot 2 shows the three pre-configured dashboard “views”, which seem meant to be specific to the role of the person using Analytics. Ok, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. I should mention that Analytics supports the ability to monitor multiple web sites (you set up “Website Profiles” to define them), and that a user with administrator privileges can set up additional users who can access specific profiles only, or all profiles. You can set up more than one profile for the same web site, each with its own set of available reports, which is how you restrict users to seeing only the reports they should be seeing. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes power in Analytics, with features to help small to mid-sized businesses make the most of their online efforts.

Fully expanded Nav bar,
showing all available reports

Now, I am not going to sit here and bore you with a frame-by-frame description of every feature of Google Analytics. I took a lot of screenshots which pretty much speak for themselves, so look them over and you’ll get a sense of the kinds of data this program gives you access to. However, I will mention a few things that are not apparent in these static pics.

Visitor Location Map - Austin has the biggest marker!

First: Browser Compatibility. My own experience is that you pretty much need to be using IE for Google Analytics to work properly. The pages will load in Opera, but all charts are empty, no data gets loaded into them. Firefox support is better (as you can see in Screenshot 1) but other pages do not work, such as the site overlay reports. I switched to IE for the rest of the screenshots.

Site overlay - Each link has metrics data
(very small bars for my site, small data sample size still)

Second: Visitor Counts. Google Analytics gathers visitor information by running JavaScript in the user’s browser when they load a page (client-side method). Although this allows for capturing a wealth of data (such as length of visit, connection speed, and screen resolution) that would not otherwise be available, this collection method inherently leads to lower visitor counts than a server-side method, such as my own hit and click counters. This is because JavaScript must be running in the user’s browser! There are two sets of visitors that are not counted in Google Analytics: automated spiders, or robots, that don’t use a browser at all, and users who switch off JavaScript while they surf.

Visitor Source Pie,
with two slices highlighted

Whether the exclusion of spiders from your Analytics data is a good thing or not depends on your need for that information, and whether you can get it some other way. Of course it’s there in your server log files, but going through them is pretty tedious. In my case, those visits show up in my hit counter data report, and I can trace a particular visit or set of visits to a specific search engine, or I can deduce I’ve been visited by a badbot based on the origin, network used, or pattern of requests. Knowing that I get regular visits from Google, Yahoo, Bloglines, Pluck, IceRocket, and other legitimate search and aggregation sites lets me know my latest content is available for others to find.

An example of a powerful
cross-segment report. Here,
we see the breakdown of
screen resolutions for Firefox users.

You may be wondering how many people really go around the internet with their JavaScript turned off. I didn’t think there were too many of them, but early on I started getting complaints that the blog page layout was all messed up for some folk. It took a little while and exchanges with several complainants for me to realize the problem was they had JavaScript turned off, and since I was using JS code to position the sidebar to the right side of the page, of course it looked terrible for them. I’ve since modified my templates so they don’t rely on JavaScript to position the sidebar, but this experience demonstrated there are a fair percentage of visitors who will not be counted by a client-side data capture method. This is not that big a deal for me, because I am not using Google Analytics for total traffic counts, and I am assuming this exclusion will not skew the report percentages too much. Also, since it’s impossible to buy pixels without JavaScript running, these visitors wouldn’t be in any of the e-commerce related reports anyway.

Visitor Location Pie
with pulled out slice

Finally: Impressions and Opinions. The default date range is the past 7 days when you first load Google Analytics. This range is easy to change via the calendars to the lower left. You can quickly select a standard week, month, or day; a column of days (for example, all Tuesdays in the month); or you can specify an ad-hoc, custom range via the “Enter Range” icon. When you click that icon, two calendars expand into being next to it, where you merely click the start date in one calendar, and the end date in the second one. When you click “Apply Range”, the two new calendars collapse away. Any time you change the date range, the currently displayed report or dashboard is automatically redrawn for the new date(s). From that point on, all reports will use the newly selected date range, unless you change it again. This immediate and “sticky” response to your changes is intuitive and makes it easy to get the report you want. The tool does its job quickly and efficiently, so you can too.

Date Range calendars expand
and collapse on the page - nice

Notice I said the date range calendars “expand into being” and “collapse away”. They do not merely pop into existence all at once, or even more ghastly, open in a new browser window. No, they very pleasantly expand from and collapse into nothingness on the page, a very nice touch. As a web developer, I can appreciate the extra work that goes into implementing such niceties, and although it is arguably just eye candy, little touches like this go a long way towards enhancing the user experience. Likewise, all charts draw themselves over a very short time interval (line graphs trace a path across the grid, and bar graph columns grow from their base to their final length), another nice touch. Ok, pie charts do pop into being all at once, but you can pull out a slice of the pie by clicking on an item in the legend.

Some of the search queries
that led someone to AustinMash!

A couple of gripes: The dashboard and certain reports lack one-click drilldown capability, and the login process could be better integrated with other Google services. When you first load Google Analytics, for example, you may see you have 25% of your visitors being referred to your site by “other”. It should be possible, right there, to click on that pie slice and see the data for “other”. As it is, you have to go to the detailed report (Marketing Optimization/Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source), and set the display list size to something greater than the default 10 lines. A drilldown click from the dashboard would have been much nicer. Also, Google does not have a single login and authentication mechanism for its various services. Maybe this is by design, but it seems inconsistent with the company’s otherwise user-centric implementations. Perhaps it is a consequence of trying too much, too fast, as various divisions race to provide new applications on their own. One would hope Google will make the effort to tie everything together, from a user account perspective, at some point in the future.

Most visited content, with bounce and exit data

On a happier note, a technically interesting aspect of the reports is the seamless way flash animations are integrated into the page. All the pie, line, and bar charts, plus the geo maps, are Macromedia Flash mini-applets, while the textual data, navigation, and help text are just that, regular HTML text on the page. The calendars are HTML as well, yet all the pieces are interact with each other and are integrated into a well-honed, solidly built web app machine. I like that. Actually, as far as I can tell, this entire application, with all the reports and various date and range picking controls, are really all on the same HTML page. All that happens when you click on a report is that different chart mini-apps get loaded and fed the proper data in the report area of the page, without the whole page refreshing in the browser. Very slick, and in my opinion, the way all web apps should work from now on. Yes, I know Google Maps and Google Finance, as well as numerous other “Web 2.0″ sites (like Flickr) use the same approach. Google just seems to have mastered the art and they are not shy about showing it off. Kudos!

You can compare data from
two time ranges, to measure the
effects of a marketing push, for example

But wait, there’s more! Not only does Google dress to impress, it is also a well behaved, soft-spoken host, which only serves to enhance its popularity in the increasingly crowded internet party scene. After exploring the available reports, it becomes apparent why Google spent the resources to buy the company that developed the core technology, and to enhance and distribute this remarkable tool for free. It’s all there in the “Content Optimization” and “E-Commerce Analysis” sections. As a Google Analytics user, you have the ability to track the effectiveness of various AdWords campaigns, and to analyze the effectiveness of your site in converting visitors into revenue-generating sales. You can define “goals” (such as showing a customer the payment receipt, successful transaction page) and “funnels”, which are paths a visitor would take through your site to reach a “goal”. Then, the reports help you understand how and why visitor landings translate into income. This helps you make more money, some of which you will then spend in more AdWords advertising (with a greater knowledge of what works and what doesn’t), which of course is good for Google.

Another cross-segment report
Where are my Google visitors
coming from?

It seems clear Analytics is one way Google hopes to address its primary weakness, which, as numerous analysts have pointed out, is that despite all the cool technology it produces, Google has very little ability to “lock in” users. In one sense, Google is like the genius kid who enters a hyper-competitive graduate program way too young. Because his peers, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, and Amazon and eBay to a lesser extent, are entrenched and have a built-in ability to keep its users coming back, Google has to be that much better at everything it does so that people will prefer to hang out with it instead of the older kids. So far it has been able to do this, but at the cost of running full speed everywhere it goes, trying to be Mr. popular in all circles to make sure its parties are always well attended. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to relax a little and not worry about everyone running out the door when the cool new frat house throws its first party? Or worry that folks will get tired of the music and beer and just drift back home to Yahoo and MSN? You bet it would, and if Google’s customers come to rely on Analytics to manage their business, there is much less chance they will eventually migrate away from AdWords or any other revenue-producing service that may be offered – such as the new Google Checkout service.

Some reports help you visualize
how visitors navigate through your site

So, even though Analytics can be considered strategically important to Google, and the AdWords integration is what makes it so, the user experience was not compromised to put these features front and center. Much to Google’s credit, the default views and reports were chosen based on what the users would find most useful, not on what would further the company’s goals. The genius kid doesn’t go around shouting how great it is, it merely does what it does very well, confident that it will pay off in the long run.

I believe that it will – how many Web 1.0 startups when nowhere because they neglected to put the user first (RealNetworks, for one, comes to mind)? Google absolutely needs tools like Analytics to become ingrained in its customer’s business processes, but it seems to understand that providing super-easy, hyper-helpful user experiences is the way to go about it. Despite the muscle under the outfit, Google’s charm and graciousness exudes a confident and understated vibe. This is my kind of party!

Most of my Texas visitors
are from Austin!

Some notes on the data in the screenshots: These of course are actual reports generated from real data about AustinMash!. The spike in traffic on June 15th was due to my blog posting on the recent ROT Biker Rally here in Austin. Since Google Analytics has just started gathering data, most of the visitors are “new” to it and not “returning”. You will note there were some visitors referred to my site from MySpace, I will be talking about my experimentation with that site in a future posting.

Finally, I am gratified that the bulk of my visitors are from Austin. While it’s great to see people in Russia or Saudi Arabia are checking out AustinMash! (and because the data gathering is client-side, I can be fairly sure these are real people and not robots), it has always been my intention to make this site primarily for Austinites. I am very pleased to see my promotional efforts are on-target, that I am doing the right things as far as reaching my intended audience. Very cool indeed.

Most reports include the ability to further graph a metric over time. Here, we see the time distribution of the 23 visitors using Dialup access during this report period.

The browsers people use, and their operating systems. The purple up-arrow icons create new floating graphs with Data-Over-Time, To-Date Lifetime, or Cross-Segment reports. Very powerful stuff.

This does not mean I’m abandoning this project - this fun, educational, enlightening, and empowering journey I’ve started. No way, it just means I’ll have to go about my business in a much more focused manner, and at the same time rely less on activities that require my physical presence.

Actually, when I look at the timing of everything, I can hardly believe my luck. I decided to proceed with this project when I still had a job, and I managed to build the bulk of the functionality in my free time and on weekends. Then, I got laid off, but with plenty of notice, so I knew it was coming. This removed all time constraints, and I was able to devote as much time as I wanted on AustinMash!, technically, and on the various marketing and networking activities I engaged in. Then, I finally did get a job offer, but with a start date two weeks out – so again I had plenty of time to plan – and take a little vacation to boot! (yes, I was out of cell phone range for 5 days. One word of advice: when the resort lists high-speed internet access, ask if it means wireless in the room, or if it means they have three PCs in a little “business center”, one of which is broken, and on which they limit your time to 15 minutes a day. I still haven’t decided if this was a good thing or not). So, now my week days are once again someone else’s, but that’s ok, since lately I’ve been thinking it was time to move on to the next phase of marketing, and start advertising the site. The real challenge, really, will be in continuing to develop AustinMania! while at the same time have some kind of a life.

Another change is that I am going to focus less on selling ads, and more on building a site that I and others will hopefully enjoy. I’ll work on my original goal of making an entertaining site, and I’ll let the traffic take care of itself (ok, I will be boosting it from time to time through advertising). Then the ad sales should take care of themselves too, once the traffic is there. The good part is that this is fun, so I can just keep working on it and see what happens. Do you want to see what happens? Stay tuned – same Mash-Channel, same Mash-time!

As I was pondering my next move, which included considering if I should switch web hosts, a sudden realization struck me – I already had all I needed to implement the beginnings of a user-generated community – a WordPress blog! All I had to do was to make a new, separate database, re-install WordPress with a new blog name, and presto, a new blog was created on the site! The main difference in functionality vs my regular blog is that when a new user registers, they are by default granted “contributor” level access, which means they can create new posts themselves (subject to approval by me before they are published). I also opened up commenting privileges so anyone can comment, and they appear right away without moderation. I can always go back and remove inappropriate comments if I need to, and since the initial goal is to encourage use, this should be ok for now.

I made a few changes to the sidebar from the one this blog is running to better fit the community aspect of AustinMania!, such as listing all the authors and removing the blogroll. Also, I tweaked the entire user registration and login process to “hide” the fact AustinMania! is really a blog, it’s supposed to look like just a community website. I added helpful instructions to the e-mail that sends the initial password, and to some of the registration pages, and removed certain pages or sections from the admin console to simplify it for people who have never blogged before. For example, the dashboard seemed fairly superfluous, so it’s gone. I will probably continue to tweak the admin pages over time so they better fit the theme of AustinMania!

The best part of this is that it is up and running, anyone can contribute, and I can continue to tweak it and add features. I still intend to bring to life my “grand vision” of what AustinMania! can be, but at this point I am not sure if it will evolve from this WordPress platform, or if I will build an entirely new RoR application. Perhaps in the end it will be a hybrid. Whatever the case, I am glad I was able to implement something that works today, and I didn’t let the bigger ideas get in the way of progress. I hate it when that happens, don’t you?

On the same day, more than 280 pages were requested, which means that, on average, each visitor clicked on almost two other pages besides the one they landed on. Not too shabby, sez I ! Some folks might sneer at these numbers, and harrumph that they get as many hits every time they sneeze – well, that’s great, but how long has their site been online? How long have they been promoting themselves? My public debut – in person at a local event, was only three weeks prior to that, so no one besides my wife and a few relatives and friends knew the site existed before then. Consider also that I had purposefully not advertised the site online anywhere – that everyone who knew about did so by word of mouth, and yes, I was pleased with the traffic.

I quick query of my database also reveals that before that date, a total of about 200 unique visitors had come by, so in one day the “audience” grew by about 50%. How did I do that? By registering my blog at a number of blog aggregators and feed services. It seems that people came to check out the newbie, and judging by the almost triple hits-to-visitors ratio, apparently they liked what they saw enough to take a look around. Cool!

As of now, a grand total of 475 unique visitors have darkened my URL (see the PixelList page for current stats), and if you subtract the roughly 5-10 robots that stop by nightly (mostly the same ones), that’s maybe 450 humans on this planet who are aware of my site’s existence. Ok, not earth-shattering or cyber-rattling, but hey, wait till I actually start promoting this on a broader scale !

So, why am I waiting? Mostly because I feel very strongly that this site is for and about Austin, and I really want to capture the flavor of this unique culture. I want all Austinites who visit here to make no mistake about where they landed, and to be able to identify with this space on an intimate level. Although the Million Dollar Home Page was an inspiration for this endeavor, I don’t want my home page to end up looking like that one did. We can do better. This is Austin, y’all !

So, although my marketing and sales methods right now are not scalable at all (it’s just little ol’ me), I think it’s the right thing to do. For now. I am starting to make small forays by advertising in very Austin-specific blogs, but mostly I am doing direct, in-person appeals.

Speaking of which, quite by accident I’ve discovered a web site promotion technique that I have not seen mentioned anywhere – LOOK FOR A JOB ! Yes, since one of the secondary reasons for creating this site was to demonstrate my web development skills, and specifically to show I can pick up and run with just about any technology new to me (I had never seen PHP code or downloaded MySQL before this), I have this site listed as a “personal web project” at the very top of my resume. So what happens is, I e-mail the resume to a recruiter or hiring manager, and sure enough, the first thing they do is check out the web site. One time, it looked like an entire office had landed here – wow, 80 page hits in a couple of hours, all from the same IP address! That was a fun interview, let me tell you.

My daily visitor count did not stay at the 100-something level, it dropped off after the initial curiosity, which was to be expected. I am using this blog to drive traffic for now, with the goal of establishing a base to grow from, so site promotion is really about blog promotion. This works well for the early advertisers, since the Skyline is on every blog page. Also, there is no real rush, since the ads are not time-based. Just a one-time, up-front payment, and the ad is there for all future traffic to enjoy.

I am having fun with this “personal web project”. Surprisingly, even making cold sales calls does not suck as much as I thought it would, and seeing the traffic build is very addictive. Coming up with ideas and implementing them as I see fit is also way cool (especially when they feed my addiction – like the cell phone accessible statistics feature).

My immediate goals now are to sell a few more ads and continue to tweak the site. Then I will embark on expanding the AustinMania! section, to convert it into a community-driven site. Stay tuned!

Oh, I know the server’s access logs allow you to see where people are coming from, so if I was so inclined, I could spend time analyzing them, and trying to correlate activity X with an increase in referrer A, but frankly, all I care about are the numbers on my little real-time stat counter on my laptop screen (and now, also on my cell phone screen – check out the PixelList page). Besides, such an analysis requires either the assumption that all activities have an immediate effect, or that the effect delay is known for each activity. Suppose you also did activity Y, and it’s effect delay was shorter than activity X, you could easily come to erroneous conclusions about causality.

If you become a slave to analysis, you will find yourself delaying activity Y until you know the effects of activity X, which is fine if your goal is to become an expert in these matters. If instead, like me, all you want is traffic, you’ll do X, Y, and Z right now, and maybe X again, and try Y.y for the heck of it, and start doing research on alpha and beta. Did Z work better than Y? Who cares? It didn’t hurt, and if traffic went up, so did my smile!

Without further ado, I got most of my SEO ideas from this excellent post by Mark Bloomfield, and I added some tweaks of my own.

The name of the game in SEO seems to be “appeasing the Google God”. Like any good god, gGod is awesomely powerful, with unknowable motives, mysterious ways, and cult-like followers who’s job it is to tell the rest of us how to write virtuous code, so that maybe, if gGod smiles upon us, we too may achieve the highest levels of search results nirvana.

Ok, maybe cult-like is too strong a phrase, but some of the parallels between gGod and Zeus are pretty striking, don’t you think? Zeus had his thunder and lightning, and gGod has his search index, which he can use to smite those who displease him . While Zeus feasted on sacrificial lambs, gGod gets his pleadings via e-mail :
 

I-Newswire owner Eric Borgos:
“I e-mailed Google today to let them know about these changes, so hopefully they will add my site back,”

Good luck, Eric!

As befits the information age, gGod seems to be fixated on words (good thing, I’m fresh out of lambs), and the consistency of the “message” is as important as the sincerity of the sacrifices of yore. For a proper sacrifice, you know, the lamb itself was not enough. If you really wanted things to go your way, you had to make a sturdy pyre to set your offering on, start a good, roaring fire, and make an impassioned speech. Wailing like a baby probably didn’t hurt, either, especially if others joined you. Likewise, the content of a web page is not enough. For gGod to notice you, you need to set your prose at a sturdy URL (with words that support your content, while making a short directory stack), engulf the text with clean code, and expound on your content with relevant meta keywords, page title, and description. Wailing like a baby probably doesn’t hurt, either, especially if others joined to you with hyperlinks.

I was able to implement most of these concepts in this WordPress blog. If you are reading this on my web site (and not through an RSS feed), take a glance at the page title at the top of your browser. You will notice either the blog name and description, category name, or post title in the page title, depending on how you accessed this post (on the blog home page, as part of a category, or as a single post). This text is generated automatically for every page, it is not hard-coded for each post. Also, if you view the source code for the page, you will see the same title text at the beginning of the keywords meta tag, and the first few words of the post excerpt (if it exists; older posts without them will have the first words of the actual post) in the description meta tag. All of this was done to surround the post contents with a relevant “envelope” of data that is consistent with the topic of the post. Supposedly, gGod looks favorably upon this.

A related technique is to put the title of the post in the permalink URL. I have not been able to implement this yet, because my web host does not allow me access to the .htaccess file that is necessary to implement the redirects to make this work. I hope to be able to figure out a workaround to this soon, but I cannot spend too much time on it at the expense of other activities that may bear more fruit. I hope this does not displease gGod too much.

As far as surrounding the page content with clean code, the objective here is to get the words of the post nearer the top of the page HTML. So, I moved the Skyline area map code and related <Form> to the bottom of the page, by moving the PHP that generates this from the header template to the footer template. I also did the same with the call to generate the sidebar, it is now in the footer as well. The result of these efforts is that all the words gGod cares about are consistent in their meaning, which increases relevancy.

The changes to the blog page structures were accomplished by implementing these plugins:

Head META Description
Optimal Title

I also tweaked the title code like so:

<title><?php
if (!$Prod) print "Local ";
optimal_title(' @ ',TRUE);
bloginfo('name');
if (!optimal_title('', FALSE)) { print " > "; bloginfo('description'); }?></title>


The first line of this code prepends the word “Local” to the page title when it is running on my laptop. I got tired of not knowing which of my many open browser windows had my local test and development web site, and which had the public “production” web site. The next two lines just use the Optimal Title plugin and standard bloginfo function, and the last line adds the post description if the plugin is not available for some reason.

Will any of this make any difference in my traffic? Who knows? At the least, I’ve learned something new, I’ve experienced implementing it, and it can’t help but increase my blog rankings in the future. The journey continues, and these side trips make it that much more interesting. Onward ho!

I now know how his character felt when he said that, I felt it myself today!

In his case, he had just detonated his first nuclear bomb, and had experienced the electromagnetic and seismic shock waves from the blast. In my case, I had just sold my first AustinMash! ad, and had experienced the “Oh Shit, this is working!” shock wave after the meeting. Both experiences are of comparable potency, don’t you think?

Many, many thanks to Rodney Barkalow, general manager of Central Texas Harley-Davidson, for taking a chance on something new. Also, special thanks to Denny and Brad for supporting the idea, and to Bob and the rest of the CTHD crew for their hard work over the years.

As the first real customer, Rodney snagged the UT tower Skyline parcel (number 8), a whole 877 pixels in size. Wow, three days after official launch, and already AustinMash! is profitable. I say god-damn what a rush!

Ok, now I just need the image from CTHD so I can post the ad, and I also need to get the ads from the auction winners. Wow, actual customers! I guess this means I need a login page for them, and an account maintenance page, and I need to set up the weekly reports… and… and… time to get off the top of the mountain I’ve been shouting from, and back to work!

Check out my snazzy shirt!

Keep in mind this is a benefit for an injured biker, so the folk there were mainstream, real-life people from all walks of life, as opposed to the attendee list of, say, a webinar on the collaboration features of Microsoft’s VS.Net 2.0. For this reason, I was particularly interested in initial reactions to the pixel ad concept and its execution in AustinMash!

Well, there were the few people who don’t get this whole internet thing, and that was ok - great band, huh? But those that got it seemed genuinely surprised and enthused, and I did get a high level of interest from small business owners - yeah! It was especially gratifying when, at one point, I stepped away from my display, and observed someone I had talked to earlier showing someone else my site. Coooool.

The main idea was to kick the whole chicken-and-egg problem off center by donating some pixels to the silent auction. That way, the benefit benefits, and I get some ads for the site, which will hopefully form the nucleus of the snowball I’m trying to build. Plus of course, I get the word about my site out to all the other vendors at the event, and any other business owners or managers who attend.

Sounds like a plan, let’s go peddle some pixels !!

You know what’s fun? Watching the visitor and hit counts go up. Look - another visitor just arrived! I made a web page that runs on my laptop, that accesses the same site stats straight from the AustinMash! server that the PixelList page uses. This way I can check traffic on the site in real time without actually going to the PixelList page and logging another hit. Now, the PixelList site stats refresh every second (the pixel stats every 5 seconds - fairly optimistic, aren’t I?), but my laptop page can be set to refresh from every 1/2 second to every 2 hours. Hey, another visitor - cool! Right now it’s set to update every minute, and I must admit, it’s exciting to see the numbers go up. I suspect, however, that my wife might be getting tired of my constant verbal updates. Look honey - another one!!

At first glance, this effort seems pretty straightforward: as the potential pixel purchaser expands the grid parcel they want, check to see if there is an existing ad in the way, both in the horizontal and vertical directions, and if so, prevent the new grid parcel from expanding under it in that direction. So conceptually, I just need to know all the x coords and y coords of the upper left corner of each existing ad, to compare them against the coords of the user’s mouse. Since the ad locations are already being generated by PHP code accessing the ad data in the database, it is fairly simple to construct a couple of JavaScript arrays to hold the X and Y coords.

After working this code into the page, it quickly becomes apparent I also need to know the height and width of each ad, since the purchaser will very likely not start his ad on the same grid row or column as the “collision” ad I am trying to avoid. If he starts one row below the top of an ad that is to the right, then I need to know the height of the ad to see if it is in the way

In order to keep the x coords and the heights, and the y coords and widths, grouped together in the arrays, I set them up so that each item in each array is actually a new, 2 item array, with for example the x coord of ad 1, and the height of ad 1, as a small array, which is the first item in the X coords (horizontal) array.

This way, as the code traverses the horizontal and vertical coordinate arrays looking for the next potential ad collision, when it finds it, it will also have the “thickness” of the ad, and so can calculate if there really is a collision or not.

Ok, so I get this working, and it seems to do ok, although the new ad selection rectangle does not behave as smoothly as I would like. No problem, I can tweak it later, but first let’s see how it behaves when there are multiple existing ads on the page, not just this one test ad.

Consider this scenario:

With multiple ads scattered around the page, the code runs into an ordering problem. In order to determine which is the next ad in either direction, the coord arrays need to first be sorted in ascending order. Well, the horizontal sort for these three ads is 2-3-1, while the vertical sort is 1-2-3. So, I ended up with the selection rectangle being limited by the horizontal position of one ad, and the vertical position of another! That ain’t gonna fly…time to step back and rethink my approach to the problem - again.

In case you are wondering, let me explain why all the effort. It starts with the CEO voice, who says: Maximize Revenue! The President voice then echoes: Optimize the Pixel Sales Process! The Engineering VP voice hears this, confers with the Marketing voice, and decrees: Develop a streamlined pixel purchase system - make it simple, fast, and accurate - strive for zero re-work! Naturally, the Product Manager voice then puts in his two cents: Allow Skyline parcel purchase from any page, enable grid ad selection directly on the home page, minimize clicks, maximize accuracy, make it fun and easy! So here I was, the guy actually doing the work, trying to meet requirements. Luckily these particular voices are all in my head, so they normally sing in a smooth chorus, but at times like this they can sound like so much heavy metal.

The codemonger in me warns me to go back, forget it, don’t even try. But the Furion in me hopes I won’t listen…

So I soldier on. After a bit of reflection, it becomes clear I only need one array, with each item in it holding all 4 values of interest for each ad: x coord, y coord, width, and height. And, after futzing around with the previous versions of the collision detection code, I now came up with a wonderfully elegant solution that only takes 2 lines of code in one IF statement, inside of a single FOR loop for each axis, as opposed to the complicated nested mess I had before. I love it when that happens - that’s how I know the solution is right!

Theoretically, this new algorithm should now work in all ad placement scenarios, but I can’t help but still hear the Legal voice muttering something about liabilities, so the “overlapping pixels” disclaimer remains on the buypixels page, for now…

Getting the PHP and MySQL working on the host’s environment took a bit of work. It turns out that the version of MySQL they use, 4.x, does not support Views, and I had set up a few of them in my local environment. I had already checked and discovered that since the host did not support mysqli functions, I knew stored procedures were out, but no Views either? Geez, there go my efforts at creating a scalable system. Ok, maybe it’s not that bad, and it is not that big a deal to convert the View sql to PHP code, but it seemed like a step backward. Time and traffic will tell how this performs in real life.

While I was mucking around in the online version of phpMyAdmin (the MySQL administrator they provide), I noticed some options that are not present in the desktop version of MySQL administrator for version 5.x that I downloaded, such as the apparent ability to safely handle special characters in user text box inputs. Wow, freedom from fear of user hacks - without the usual massaging code - what a concept! I definitely need to experiment with this sometime.

I also took the time to implement the hit, visitor, and ad click counting routines. This task was lower in priority, but then I thought, why cheat myself? Early on, I can use all the hits I get, plus it will be fun to see the numbers climb - assuming they do, of course. I must admit I’m a bit nervous. What if I build it, and no one comes? Anyway, I am aware that my web host has site statistics, and gives me access to the raw logs, but I thought it would be interesting to compare that to data I log myself. Plus, having my own data gives me flexibility in how I can view it.

So the site is now live, but not yet “launched”. I need to put my marketing hat on now. This just gets funner and funner!

The next question revolved around how visitors would access the new page. I am very happy with how the Nav blobs look and work, so I didn’t want to add another one for this - it would throw off the whole symmetry! Since I had already decided there would be areas of the site not directly accessible from the Nav Blobs (such as the terms page, and the whole pixel purchasing process), this was ok, but the question remained: how and from where would I link to it?

In the end, I decided to hide the page and make a game of finding it, sort of like a puzzle, a bonus for those who chose to play. Yes, this is risky, but then again, this whole site is a grand experiment. The challenge then was to design a puzzle that was fairly easy, yet not obvious - plus of course, I still needed to devise and implement the solution.

Making this happen was fairly fun, but it ate up time, and the site didn’t launch this weekend.