It has become an annual traditional here at MBWA to do a short assessment of how my blog has done in the past year. Unfortunately, most of the available statistics are classic ego metrics but I can usually dig out a few interesting conclusions. In last year’s assessment, I even managed to channel Jay-Z.

This time, analyzing MBWA is a bit harder than normal because I switched from a WordPress hosted blog to the self-hosted JonathanBecher.com in the middle of the year. Overall, I had nearly 95K views during 2013, a small increase over 2012.

There was no obvious seasonality so that works out to about 8K views per month or more than 250 per day. Not bad!

Internet metric aficionados might be interested in the difference between visits and visitors. Historically, this ratio has been about 1.6 to 1.  As a result, I would have expected nearly 60K visitors (95K /1.6). I was initially puzzled the actual number of visitors was so much lower until I realized email subscribers counted towards views but not visitors. So much for the common wisdom that email is dead.

The top posts based on views are a little surprising:

1. Scorecards vs. Dashboards, Aug 2006
2. Performance Management Quotes, Feb 2009
3. Talking to Senior Executives, Mar 2010
4. How Strategy Really Works, Sept 2013
5. Does Language Influence Culture? Sept 2010

While each one was viewed 1500-2000 times, only the strategy post is actually from 2013. A negative interpretation might be that my newer blogs are less interesting, but I think a more realistic point of view is that the older ones have been better indexed by search engines and other sites.  After all, two other 2013 posts, Sandwiches and Failure Quotes, aren’t far behind the top 5.

It’s also interesting to note that last year’s most popular post, 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life, didn’t even make it into the top 20 this year.

There were no real surprises in which sites referred the most traffic to my blog. As expected, twitter topped the list as it has for the last three years. This year, LinkedIn came in second; presumably due to my Marketing Influencer series. Loyal readers will probably not be surprised that the most popular referring keywords were ‘performance management’ and ‘culture eats strategy’.

Finally, I had lots of international visitors this past year — 139 countries in all. Most visitors came from the United States, but Germany and the United Kingdom were not far behind. Special mention goes to Russia which catapulted into 6th place from 14th last year.

Happy New Year! Or for my new Russian readers: с новым годом!

The post MBWA 2013 in review appeared first on Manage By Walking Around.

You may have noticed things look a bit different around here. I am extraordinarily pleased to welcome you to JonathanBecher.com – the new home of my blog, “Manage by Walking Around.” I hope you enjoy the improved look and expanded functionality.

Change presents opportunity but also comes with challenges. Some of you may have accidentally received email alerts from colleagues who are helping me to migrate seven years’ worth of data from my previous site. I appreciate your patience as I finetune the infrastructure.

I hope you have enjoyed reading “Manage by Walking Around” as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Thanks for sharing feedback on many of the posts – the interaction has been an inspiration to me.

Welcome to JonathanBecher.com. I look forward to continuing the conversation!

Jonathan (@jbecher)

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6 1/2 years into my hosted WordPress blog, the only complaint I’ve ever had is the statistics are a bit weak. As someone who ran a Web site analysis company more than a decade ago,  it’s always been surprising to me that all of the reports are based on page views.

However, the statistics have significantly improved over the last year. For example, the reports now distinguish between views, visits and visitors. In the last month I’ve averaged 1.6 views per visitor. Since very few visitors are tracked across sessions, this suggests that 1 out of 2 visitors to my blog reads two posts. That’s a pretty good result.

On the fun side, the so-called WordPress “stats helper monkeys” prepare an annual report. Here’s a (slightly-edited) excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. Manage By Walking Around was viewed about 83,000 times in 2012. If my blog were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take more than 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Shout out to Shawn Carter.

From their report, these are the posts on my blog that got the most views in 2012:

1. 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life July 2012
2. Performance Management Quotes Feb 2009
3. Scorecards vs. Dashboards Aug 2006
4. Dilbert on risk management Dec 2008
5. Culture eats strategy for breakfast May 2010

Since it’s ranked third, even though I wrote the post 6 years ago, I can only assume people are still confused about the difference between a scorecard and a dashboard.  Maybe that’s good news: people will keep reading my blog.

The post MBWA 2012 in review appeared first on Manage By Walking Around.

WordPress.com provides a wide variety of statistics that help you understand the health of your blog.  Like most metrics, the WP statistics are one part useful and one part entertainment. To reinforce both of these attributes, earlier this month WP sent an email with their take on my blog.  I’ve borrowed from their email but sprinkled in my own commentary:

Crunchy numbers

This Manage By Walking Around blog was viewed nearly 60,000 times in 2010.  By comparison, about 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. If my blog were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of 2010 was April 6th with 377 views. The most popular post that day was The No Asshole Rule. The busiest month of the year was October with 5,944 views or an average of 192 per day. Compare that to 150 per day in Jan. 28% growth is not bad.

Favorite attractions

In 2010, there were 27 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 168 posts. The ones that got the most views were:

The No Asshole Rule April 2010
11 comments

Scorecards vs. Dashboards August 2006
15 comments

Dilbert strikes again June 2007
7 comments

Performance Management Quotes February 2009
8 comments

Dilbert on risk management December 2008
1 comment

WP compliments me that my older posts have “staying power.”  I wonder whether my newer posts are less interesting — or maybe I’ve just used the Dilbert crutch too much.

Visitor sources

The top referring sites (not counting search engines) were twitter.com, bx.businessweek.com, stumbleupon.com, weblogs.sdn.sap.com, and business-intelligence.alltop.com.

The most popular search terms were performance management, most popular blogs, dilbert strategy, goals, and leadership.

I’m surprised by Business Week and “most popular blogs”.

So how did I do?

Apparently pretty well.  Here’s their summary:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter reads Wow.

Like I said: useful and entertaining.

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“Which blogs are the most popular?”

It’s a question I’ve started hearing again lately, especially as many of my work colleagues have begun experimenting with social media. This is an unanswerable measurement question, just like for analyst relations or marine terminal gates.

To try to answer the question, many people cite Technorati’s Top Blogs (original link gone) as a ranking of blog traffic. Only it’s not.

Technorati’s top 5 ranked blogs as of Feb 1, 2010 are as follows:

• The Huffington Post
• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Mashable!
• TechCrunch

The Technorati Authority metric is based on the number of inbound links to a site. While this is a reasonable proxy for influence, it’s not necessarily the same thing as traffic. (Although I admit there may be a loose correlation.)

So what are the most popular blogs based on traffic?

The best estimate that I can find comes from a site called eBizMBA which ranks blogs by a combination of inbound links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.

According to eBizMBA, the top 5 sites are:

• TMZ
• Gizmodo
• Perez Hilton
• Engadget
• Boing Boing

Of course, just because a blog is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. As an example, Time Magazine’s 25 Best Blogs of 2009 don’t include most of the ones listed above. In fact, a few of them are listed in the most overrated category.

Inbound links, traffic, and a magazine’s subjective assessment. Three different measures which can each be used to track the same thing. It’s a common performance management problem. The measurement definition is more important than the measure value.

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Despite the fact that only two of my readers have pointed it out, it’s painfully obvious to me that I haven’t posted in two weeks. While two weeks isn’t very long, I pride myself on posting weekly and commited to measuring frequency of posting just a few months ago.  The few days off I took for Thanksgiving is partly responsible; given the low readership of the Thanksgiving measures post from a few years ago, I wasn’t inspired to try a repeat.  To compensate, I’ve been more active on Twitter (@jbecher); in a future post, I’ll establish some success metrics for that channel.

However, the real reason for my two week absence is that I’ve been consumed with getting ready for the SAP Influencer Summit.  While I’m really looking forward to spending time with 250+ of the industry’s top influencers and advisors in Boston on Tues, the preparation has taken virtually every moment of my time over the last few weeks.

Speaking of virtual, you can watch the Summit keynotes and browse associated content using an on-line platform. I’ll also be tweeting and blogging about the Summit.  Instead of posting here, I’ll be using my work blog on the SAP Community Network.

As for the odd subtitle for this entry?  That will be more clear after my session at Influencer Summit on Tues.  See you (virtually) there.

The post The Other Blog: Work Odyssey 2010 appeared first on Manage By Walking Around.

For those of you who remember the series of posts two years ago defining objectives for this blog, you’ll recall that I decided that average number of comments per post and number of unique visitors per month were better measures of my success than number of page views or frequency of posts.  Regardless, I was more than a little disappointed when I realized that I’ve gotten out of my weekly rhythm this summer.  As I haven’t had any time to work on my personal writing in almost two years,  I’ve missed more than 5 posts this summer; I’ve missed a creative outlet.

Given that thought process, I wonder if frequency of posts might be a reasonable metric for me. Curious what others might think, I did a little informal research.  Not surprisingly, there are dozens of posts about how to measure the success of the blogs.  Most of the insightful ones seem to focus on the number of inbound links (essentially citations) or the average number of comments per post (essentially conversations).

However, my favorite summary came from a post entitled Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success.  Avinash recommends six categories of metrics:

1. Raw Author Contribution 
2. Holistic Audience Growth
3. Conversation Rate 
4. Citations/ Ripple Index
5. Cost
6. Benefit / ROI

While Avinash’s measures of raw author contribution don’t include frequency, he does include this note: 

The important thing is to measure: consistency. I find it builds traffic.

I agree, so frequency of posts is back as a measure to watch. And since Sunday posts seem to drive the most traffic, I know how I’ll be closing out my weekends.

The post Blog Metrics: Frequency of Posts appeared first on Manage By Walking Around.

It’s pretty common for people (and Dilbert) to poke fun at Marketing.  The jokes typically come in three flavors:

1. Product Marketing and Public Relations often have amusing conversations as we try to describe products in colorful, but believable, ways.

2. Marketing sometimes has to use a little artistic license to get people interested in products that engineers make.

3. And really good Marketing should definitely be an Olympic sport.

Copyright © Scott Adams, Inc.

These are good for a laugh but one of the best parts of my current job is that we don’t suffer from these delusions.

The post Poking fun at Marketing appeared first on Manage By Walking Around.

One part writer’s block and two parts schedule overload means I don’t have time to write an original post.  Speedlinking to the rescue:

Over at ‘I Help You Blog’, Philip suggests 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle.  My personal favorite is #101:  Create a post with a 101 ideas.

In a relatively new blog, Michael and Barry write about many of the same topics that I’m interested in, including key risk indicators, setting targets, and the problems caused by complexity.   I’ll be reading them regularly.

In Leadership: Making the Tough Decisions, Don Bulmer provides three basic steps to making tough decisions.  Timo Elliott suggests how technology should help make decision making easier in the future.  Technology can definitely help but I’m not sure it will ever replace intuition and experience.

The BiPM Institute believes that people become the way you treat them and recommends that every manager ask his/her employees what they would do if they were in the manager’s place.   I think managers would be taken aback to hear what their employees would suggest.

And finally, Adrian complains that only 15% of UK government councils make information easier to find and consume by using RSS.   Whether in public sector or for-profit enterprises, strategy is too often a secret from core stakeholders (citizens and employees).   Strategy, like information, wants to be free.

The post Speedlinking, May 2009 appeared first on Manage By Walking Around.

I generated the above word cloud using wordle on my ten most popular posts. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of word clouds, the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

While most of the larger words make sense, I’m surprised by the relative size of the word ‘better’ on the left hand side of the image. Since this blog is often about helping organizations improve, maybe I just need to find some synonyms for the word better.

I am even more surprised by the presence of the word ‘tied’ underneath the very large ‘satisfaction’. I have no good explanation for it being there.

Anyone see any other surprising words?

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