Interesting Articles Archives - Mike Dixon's Blog

Leadership – What makes a great leader?

Leadership is something that I am really passionate about – and reading articles to help me to be a better leader is hugely important and I just read an article on LinkedIn entitled Great Leadership Starts and Ends with This which really resonated with me.

The Best Leadership Advice EverI was struggling to engage the audience. Okay, forget struggling — I was dying onstage. Maybe I was having an off day. Maybe they were having an off day.

via Linkedin

In short, Jeff Haden (the article’s writer) was talking in front of a number of CEOs and senior managers and out of the blue asked them what makes a great leader.

Not expecting any response from them, one of the CEOs chirped up with No one cares how much you know until they first know how much you care about them.

He went on to explain that you can convey to employees what the company strategy, vision and goals are and they might care for a short period of time, but they will then go back to what they normally do. It doesn’t resonate with them and doesn’t necessarily change their behaviours.

Only when a leader demonstrates their passion and how much they care about their employees will it really make a difference. He went on to say:

“We can try to communicate and engage and connect all we want but no one really listens. They just smile and nod and go back to doing their jobs the way they always do.

“Our employees don’t really care about what we want them to do until they know how much we care about them. When employees know — truly know — that you care about them, then they will care about you. And when they know you care, then they will listen to you… and then they will do anything for you.”

This really resonated with me. I have had a few different managers in my time and by far the best one was the one who cared about me and my career. Others who have either just barked orders or dictated what needed to be done and how didn’t inspire me or motivate me.

A great leader trusts their employees

It was under this manager who cared that I really progressed through the company. I completely bought into his strategy, which in turn allowed my team to buy into it as well. I learned that you need to nurture a good working environment and build up a level of trust to really engage with your employees and for them to engage with the business.

This really is the only other point I would make on this. Not only does a great leader care about their employees, they also trust them. Great employees are able to make decisions, try new things, feel comfortable to fail and learn from their mistakes.

My recipe: Great leaders create great employees which in turn makes these leaders even better – repeat.

I know that there is a lot more to it than this, but I felt that this article was worth highlighting as it gave a slightly different, tangible and achievable example of great leadership.

Mobile Native Browsers vs In-App Browsers

I was surprised to find that Adobe Analytics (Adobe SiteCatalyst or Omniture, depending on how far back you go) doesn’t allow you to report on mobile browsers. Even though, I’ve been using Adobe SiteCatalyst for many years and I had always assumed that the ability was there. I am actually a little ashamed that I hadn’t noticed this before.

SiteCatalyst Device Type with Browser Breakdown

The main reason for me to look at this was that a colleague sent me a link about Embedded Mobile Browser Usage on http://www.lukew.com. While the blog post is more to do with how developers should be testing on in-app versions of mobile browsers as well as native browsers. This is mainly due to the in-app versions of Safari and the native Android browsers having less functionality and lower rendering powers. Luke explains that the in-app version of Safari for example does not include the Nero Javascript engine, certain Safari caches, or the “asynchronous” rendering mode. Meaning that web sites could appear to load more slowly, contain errors etc that would normally not be detected if testing on the native versions.

As Facebook and Twitter app usage continues to grow, its going to become more and more important to understand the differences between these different browser types and how users browse your sites when using these apps. In addition, when users click on your content from apps such as Facebook and Twitter, they appear as either Direct or Typed/Bookmarked depending on which analytics package you use and whether you are using any form of campaign tracking or not.

When I realised that Adobe Analytics does not track mobile device browsers, I turned to our implementation of Google Analytics. Fortunately, GA does track in-app browsers on iOS – so you can see data for Safari and Safari (in-app).

What I have found in my initial dive into this is that users browsing our sites using an in-app verison of the native browser consume less content (in terms of pages per visit), has a higher bounce rate and are on the site for about half the time than the native version.

In-app browsers vs native mobile browsers

What is going to be hard to work out is whether this is due to a behavioural or technical motivation.

If the site renders slowly, contains certain errors, or is not fully optimsied for the in-app experience, you could attribute some of the reduction of usage to this rationale.

In terms of behavioural, you need to consider what users are doing. If I am on my Facebook app on my phone, its probably while I am in the middle of doing something else. Potentially on the toilet, in a meeting (hopefully my boss is not reading this) or in transit therefore I have limited time to view.

Also, to move this point further, if I am in my Facebook app, I’m also interested in seeing what other content my friends have posted. So I might just read the article that a friend posted, then click back in the app so I go back to my feed and continue my Facebook journey.

One of the main things that I tell colleagues at my job is that Analytics is great at telling you what happened. Trying to find the reasons behind a person’s behaviour is not generally achievable. You can find commonalities between certain types of users, segment them and try to implement changes to convert users to behave in the same way. But in terms of understanding the drivers for users to act in a particlular way is not something that I believe Analytics will answer.

You need to be talking to your users and understanding why they are doing what they are doing – whether it be done through social media, email or surveys. You really need to have all the information to make decisions and I believe that Analytics is only one part of it in this case.

How Google’s secure search is hurting analytics

It has been happening since 2011 but ever since Google introduced the ability to use their search engine over a secure (SSL/https) connection, the lack of visibility of search keywords has been steadily increasing culminating with a predicted 70% of search keywords not being reported in September 2013, according to this blog post about Google Query Data Disappearing at an Alarming Rate on the RKG Blog.

This has increased from 43% only as far back as July 2013. So why is this happening and what impact is it having on analytics?

Google has been moving users to the SSL version of their secure search result pages to ensure the privacy of their users and ensuring that prying eyes cannot listen in on what users are searching for. They seem to have stepped up this tactic ever since the public has been made aware of various hacks and leaks to WikiLeaks.

The impact this is having on anlytics is that when a user searches for something over a secure connection, the keyword(s) that the user searched for is removed from the referral string. Meaning that a referral is detected from a search engine, but as the keyword has been removed would be logged as Not Available (or equivalent for the relevant analytics package).

As mentioned previously, it is assumed that up to 70% of search terms will be affected by this by the end of September 2013. The huge recent increase of these secure searches has come from Internet Explorer who from IE7 onwards now only supports the secure verison of Google’s search results.

Suddenly trying to understand the impact of any SEO improvements you are making to your site will not be able to be tracked effectively using your standard analytics packages.

One potential way of getting insight for SEO purposes could be to create an Advanced Segment that sets the referrer type to Search Engines and where the keyword is unavailable. Once you apply this segment, you can then look at top landing pages and understand the performance of your top landing pages. You could start to trend this over time and validate any changes this way.

This issue affects all analytics packages, including Google Analytics.

Suddenly, SEO just got a lot harder for everyone. Ironic really as Google is trying to ensure that they eliminate what they term as ‘Search Spam’ from their search results pages – see this video from Matt Cutts – but they are not allowing website owners to see how these changes affect them and how to best optimise their sites through data.

It feels like they are giving with one hand and taking with the other.

Interesting piece on personal data held by Facebook

I do think that this needs to be taken with a slight pinch of salt, but if its accurate then it will be really interesting to see how this pans out.

In essence, the user requested their personal data from Facebook which eventually arrived and when printed amounted to 1200 pages of A4.

In addition, there was quite a bit missing and when he requested this data, Facebook replied stating that the law only applies to data that is not too onerous to extract – therefore, that the effort of retrieving this data was ‘disproportionate’ to the request.

As much as I enjoy Facebook, I am started to be increasingly concerned over how much data they actually collect and whether I am comfortable with that.