August 15, 2013

HyperIsland Review

On Thursday 15 August, Primetime members and guests went on a romp through digital media with Cofounder Jonathan Briggs and Partnership Director Maria Eriksson of Hyper Island — the experimental university college in Karlskrona, Sweden.

Jonathan recently relocated to Singapore; he and his team help businesses harness the power and insights that digital media brings. The Hyper Island team led a standing-room-only crowd through a 90-minute workshop that included hands-on exercises, discussion, and a deep dive into what data we can collect about visitors to our sites.

He also covered the often-uncomfortable reality of what other sites collect about us. I took away some important lessons:

1. There is an enormous amount of data available about who is visiting which websites, how visitors get to various sites, and what they’re doing when they get there.
2. Much of the data can be accessed for free or a small cost (we checked out sites SimilarWeb, SpyFu, and Likealyzer).
3. We all can — and should — leverage this data to make marketing and business decisions.
4. Digital is changing the way we live and work, and digital will not stop changing.

I’ve always been interested in web traffic, search engine optimization (SEO), and other metrics. I felt that this session took my analysis to a whole new level; the geek in me loved it. The data has worldwide implications.

Big companies like Google, Deloitte, and Burberry are using data to predict pandemics, economic strength and weakness, and buying behaviors. For example, go to this page to find out if the flu is heading for you, and visit this page to find out if you live in a Dengue hot spot.

Deloitte and others can now analyze real-time shipping data to predict the origin country and destination country’s relative economic strength. Kenya has posted government data on its Open Portal site to lure investors and economic development.

Small companies don’t have the internet volume to generate insights on this level. But as a small business owner, I can and should analyze the traffic to my site and find out where visitors come from, what they do on my site, how long they stay, and where they go next.

This analysis should inform my next marketing and product investment. Does all this data seem overwhelming, scary or intimidating? You are not alone. Are they watching us? Yes, they are.

The web is no longer a web of pages but a patchwork quilt. Other sites – like Facebook – are actually recording our visit and our activity (regardless of whether you see their logo on the site or not). Ghostery is following you all over the web. Airlines have the capacity to adjust the prices you are offered based on your search behavior.

Regardless of how you feel about Edward Snowden, we need to be aware that data is being collected and can be shared easily for the right – and wrong – reasons. Closed-circuit TV tracks our actions and conversations in real time. (By the way, the United Kingdom and Singapore rank numbers one and two, respectively, for the number of CCTVs in operation.)

There are oceans of information out there, and they change very quickly. So how do we stay current? Jonathan gave us the recipe for his Internet cocktail for staying ahead:

1. First, he reads Quora: real-time answers from informed respondents.
2. He tweets and reads Twitter posts. For Jonathan, Twitter is “the conference that I wish I could attend every day.”
3. He uses Pulse to aggregate news.

But what’s next? What is the right conversion rate? What’s the different between a page view and a visit? Jonathan and Maria did not set out to answer all of our questions in our short evening together, but they did a great job of showing us new tools and instilling us with a sense of genuine, valuable puzzlement. They also left us with a set of web innovators to aspire to – e.g., IDEO Consulting, IBM, Many Eyes, and TaoBao – and this set of suggestions for using digital to inform our marketing and business decisions:

1. People are often very specialized. We need to break down walls to work together (some companies have literally taken down walls to foster more collaboration).
2. Don’t let the numbers tell the whole story: let them tell just part of it. We need a mixture of analysis and storytelling.
3. Make sure that the people that work for you – and you too – are diversified. People should do more than one thing: that way, we can combine numbers and experiences every day.

Thanks for a terrific evening, Hyper Island, and good luck to the rest of you PrimeTimers on your digital journey. I’ll see you in cyberspace.

— Natasha Terk, Managing Director, Write It Well