More Fun with Numbers

By Jake • March 17th, 2008 • 10 Comments

Rich and Anthony deployed a few key fixes last week, nothing too bloggable. They were focused on securing private group activity and caching, which was causing some weird behavior. So, rather than blog those, my periodic Mix post this week is more metrics.

As a follow up to my first Fun with Numbers post, I did some more digging to find the data points requested by Shishir.

Again, my SQL is rusty, so I had to hack some queries together. I think the numbers are right, but who knows? The analytics information is a bit iffy, since we switched analytics packages a week ago. Anyway, here are the numbers Shishir wanted to see:

Demographic Data
Mix doesn’t store any geographic or demographic information, so the only thing close is the location and browser data collected by our web analytics. The regional data are subjective, but here are the top regions by percentage of visits.

The new analytics package we’re using also tracks the browser type and version, so for giggles, here are the numbers by browser, keeping in mind this is only for a week’s worth of data.

Idea Metrics
Shishir asked for a couple idea metrics to judge how active the community is around ideas.

I actually expected both metrics to be lower, maybe 25% or so. Not too shabby. One thing to keep in mind is there is a small group of active users, I myself am chief among them, that is responsible for a large percentage of the commentary. On some ideas, I have commented multiple times, but rather than bang my head against that wall, I didn’t filter for any of that.

Popular Tags
Shishir points out that Mix lacks a tag cloud, and this is not by accident. None of us really finds tag clouds useful. They tend to push focus onto common tags, which isn’t always good. Plus, in a highly flat tag environment, i.e. lots of tags used relatively infrequently, the cloud is pretty useless.

I crunched the numbers, and here are the top 20 tags by use, keeping in mind that Mix allows tags on user profiles, questions, ideas and groups.

  1. retail
  2. merchandising
  3. oracle
  4. fusion
  5. java
  6. crm
  7. peoplesoft
  8. dba
  9. management
  10. database
  11. pl/sql
  12. siebel
  13. soa
  14. mix
  15. web2.0
  16. sql
  17. ebs
  18. allocation
  19. rpm
  20. apex

If you have other metrics you’d like to know about Mix, sound off in comments. I may or may not be able to get them, but I’ll try.


Possibly Related Posts

  • yo

    “None of us really finds tag clouds useful.”

    … but you do have one on your own blog… :-)

  • yo

    “None of us really finds tag clouds useful.”

    … but you do have one on your own blog… :-)

  • http://noblognameleft.blogspot.com Shishir

    Thanks a lot Jake for pursuing these request.

    As surprising is the fact that ‘retail’ is the number 1 tag , I am equally amazed to see that 69% (100-31) of the ideas don’t have a single comment.

    What do you think it tell us about the online communities at large? What is the threshold figure which tell us whether a community or platform is active or passive?

    -Shishir

  • http://noblognameleft.blogspot.com Shishir

    Thanks a lot Jake for pursuing these request.

    As surprising is the fact that ‘retail’ is the number 1 tag , I am equally amazed to see that 69% (100-31) of the ideas don’t have a single comment.

    What do you think it tell us about the online communities at large? What is the threshold figure which tell us whether a community or platform is active or passive?

    -Shishir

  • Jake

    @yo: Good catch. Useful or not, people keep looking for tag clouds. I honestly forgot it was there b/c it’s right at the fold.

    @Shishir: I think the retail tag’s popularity can be attributed to that team’s uptake of Mix. They are forming groups and engaging customers.

    The 69% you reference didn’t surprise me. Mix includes a lot of people (employees and customers) new to communities, and the dialog part is new too. I expect this to take some time. Plus, we understand that Mix could always use improvement, i.e. it may not be universally intuitive. So, users may not always find what they want to discuss.

    I don’t think you can apply this metric as a pass/fail bar to any community. There are too many moving parts, the user population’s demographics, the number of community monitors, etc.

    However, rather than dodge your question, I think my personal success metric would be 80%, optimally. We won’t reach that for a while.

  • Jake

    @yo: Good catch. Useful or not, people keep looking for tag clouds. I honestly forgot it was there b/c it’s right at the fold.

    @Shishir: I think the retail tag’s popularity can be attributed to that team’s uptake of Mix. They are forming groups and engaging customers.

    The 69% you reference didn’t surprise me. Mix includes a lot of people (employees and customers) new to communities, and the dialog part is new too. I expect this to take some time. Plus, we understand that Mix could always use improvement, i.e. it may not be universally intuitive. So, users may not always find what they want to discuss.

    I don’t think you can apply this metric as a pass/fail bar to any community. There are too many moving parts, the user population’s demographics, the number of community monitors, etc.

    However, rather than dodge your question, I think my personal success metric would be 80%, optimally. We won’t reach that for a while.

  • http://www.manchester.ac.uk Paul

    Jake

    You really need to make the web site the number one agenda item for ALL Oracle User Groups and their SIGs. The product is great and something i have wanted from our SIG (Projects) for a while – we are being signed up to a ListServe (Doh!)

    Time to promote your product! You need buy in from Oracle bosses to get this out there to the user base – the more the better.

    I would be pushing to get rid of the metalink forums (not metalink itself) and replace them with Mix – i hate the forums!

    Paul

  • http://www.manchester.ac.uk Paul

    Jake

    You really need to make the web site the number one agenda item for ALL Oracle User Groups and their SIGs. The product is great and something i have wanted from our SIG (Projects) for a while – we are being signed up to a ListServe (Doh!)

    Time to promote your product! You need buy in from Oracle bosses to get this out there to the user base – the more the better.

    I would be pushing to get rid of the metalink forums (not metalink itself) and replace them with Mix – i hate the forums!

    Paul

  • Jake

    @Paul: Agreed. We’ve been working with the User Groups and SIGs since November when Mix launched. In fact, Mix exists primarily as a vehicle for Apps User Groups, i.e. we built it with them in mind.

    Uptake was initially slow in Apps, so we branched out to include tech.

    Promotion will pick up this year as Marketing moves its activities to Mix, so you’ll see more at conferences (e.g. Collaborate) and more on oracle.com in the coming months.

    We’ll see how traditional promotion works as compared to viral spread. Our little team may need some help though, being only 2 developers. It may be time for me to break down an learn some Ruby.

  • Jake

    @Paul: Agreed. We’ve been working with the User Groups and SIGs since November when Mix launched. In fact, Mix exists primarily as a vehicle for Apps User Groups, i.e. we built it with them in mind.

    Uptake was initially slow in Apps, so we branched out to include tech.

    Promotion will pick up this year as Marketing moves its activities to Mix, so you’ll see more at conferences (e.g. Collaborate) and more on oracle.com in the coming months.

    We’ll see how traditional promotion works as compared to viral spread. Our little team may need some help though, being only 2 developers. It may be time for me to break down an learn some Ruby.