Tracking Twitter, Understanding Metrics and Persuasive Discounts – The Monday Aug. 9th Roundup

Maybe this will convince the Vancouver blog crowd to start posting some more, since this was a difficult week for the roundup. That said, we’ve still got posts on tracking twitter followers, improving peoples understanding of metrics, persuasive discounts, and more…

• Following the old topic of “will social media replace email” (the answer is ‘no’), adage has an article on how email marketing is stronger than ever, despite Nielsen’s note that emails share of time has declines 28%.
• While I normally try to shy away from list posts in the roundup, Mashables “5 tools to track Twitter unfollowers” presents an interesting analysis opportunity. I’m still not sure what Ill learn from twitter “unfollowers”.

• Another SEO by the Sea, this week on how Google might fight web spam based on classification and click data.
• Kinda techish I suppose… perhaps more social media… what can I say, I was short on posts and this one is good. Over at Slashdot CmdrTaco writes that one way to prevent Digg spamming is to compare random votes to linked votes and discount those which vary too much. Not a bad idea.

• Alright, so I did already do a blog post on this, but it’s worth noting either way: the Google Analytics blog posts that you can view GA reports by a pivot metric. How did I not know this? Ugh…
• This is one of my favourite Avinash posts in a while. He uses his Nexus One’s Cardio Trainer application as a model for how to improve the willingness of higher-ups to act on data. It uses a food metric – in Avinash’s case, pears – tell you how much food you’ve burned off.

• From Humanfactors July newsletter: using the “Goldilocks Principle” to get a design “just right”. Really, they’ve just used a new phrase to describe the same old philosophy of “design iterate verify”.
• Get Elastic recommends not stating the lower half of your percentage range when describing a sales. In other words, instead of saying 25-50% off, just say “up to 50% off”. The reason? A talk by one Dr McGlaughlin which claims that people use a lower percentage as a mean when calculating what they think the average sale price is.

• In order to know if you’ve cataloged the worlds knowledge, you need to know how much knowledge there is, right? Well Google Books claims that they’ve roughly calculated the total number of books in the world, and there are only 129,864,880.
• I got an email from coworker BrianT the other say which only contained the subject “you were right” and this link. Yes, Google Wave is dead, and the technology is going to go into other Google projects.