|
Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters | 
 enlarge | Author: Bill Tancer
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $11.00
You Save: $14.95 (58%)
New (20) Used (5) from $11.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 1228
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1401323049
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.312
EAN: 9781401323042
ASIN: 1401323049
Publication Date: September 2, 2008 (New: This Week)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Book Description
What time of year do teenage girls search for prom dresses online? How does the quick adoption of technology affect business success (and how is that related to corn farmers in Iowa)? How do time and money affect the gender of visitors to online dating sites? And how is the Internet itself affecting the way we experience the world? In Click, Bill Tancer takes us behind the scenes into the massive database of online intelligence to reveal the naked truth about how we use the Web, navigate to sites, and search for information--and what all of that says about who we are. As online directories replace the yellow pages, search engines replace traditional research, and news sites replace newsprint, we are in an age in which we've come to rely tremendously on the Internet--leaving behind a trail of information about ourselves as a culture and the direction in which we are headed. With surprising and practical insight, Tancer demonstrates how the Internet is changing the way we absorb information and how understanding that change can be used to our advantage in business and in life. Click analyzes the new generation of consumerism in a way no other book has before, showing how we use the Internet, and how those trends provide a wealth of market research nearly as vast as the Internet itself. Understanding how we change is integral to our success. After all, we are what we click.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Obvious Information, Boring and an Ad for Author September 4, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Throughout the book are boring antidotes about Bill Tancer--Tancer as speaker, Tancer writing that he didn't know what to say moments before he was to speak, Tancer and his obsession with proms. I found all of this tiresome and beside the point.
Additionally,the book doesn't teach you how to search for material yourself. Instead, I have to wonder if Tancer wrote this book to get jobs and more speaking engagements.
Part I he illustrates why we do what we do and in Part II, he provides cases of internet data to help spot new trends.
Unfortunately, the subjects he chose to write about I have zero interest in. Because he provides no methodology, you are stuck with the examples he provides--they don't allow you to do research on what matters to you.
Chapter 1 covers porn, pills and casinos. Chapter 3 is all about how fascinating it is that prom dress searches peak in January. Tancer just finds this amazing and searches for answers--even discussing this *phenomenon* during a speech. As I read, I'm thinking, magazines work 6 months out--and sure enough, teen magazines covered dresses in December and thus the hits in January.
Tancer was equally fascinated with the fact that weight loss, smoking cessation and fitness searches spike in January. HUH? Doesn't everyone know that people make New Year's resolutions to lose weight, stop smoking and exercise?
By Part II, I was too bored and disgusted with the author's writing about himself to do anything but half-heartedly skim through.
 Not sure if this is an informercia or a micro-biography on the author's life in search? September 2, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Summary:
--------
The book is written in an acedotal style that is distracting from the message of the book; it is similar to listening to a person with ADD or a person jumping around the web on semi-related web links. The underlying message that real-time consumer/web user data is very powerful when you have access to it and know what you are doing is hidden below the self-grandizing of the author.
The author makes references to searches / research that only someone who has access to the search data of his firm (name left out intentionally) through out the book. It is annoying as no one but a client of his firm could really attempt what he describes in the book. Note: You will not get great insights into what can be done. He only hints at it as the searches being described would be fairly obvious to someone familiar with the data being gathered by the author's firm or other firms specializing in web traffic information gather. It seems that he is looking for potential consulting gigs with other businesses.
Purpose:
--------
The book is clearly an informercial for the client's firm. There are not great insights to be had by reading the book. The chapter on why prom dress searches spiking in January could easily be answered by asking a teenage where magazine ads for the Prom start to come out -- a pretty obvious logical why to find out. If the author has described his methods from the ground up including what data was available, the book would be much more useful for someone new to web marketing and what data is being gathered by web information companies.
Prose:
------
The prose is not terribly well written. The author uses a circular style of writing that takes a while to get to the "wheat" amongst his self-grandizing "chaff". He should use a more straight-forward communication style. The book is a fast read, so you can get through it quickly if you are interested in the book.
Content:
---------
The content of the book can be boiled down to the following:
1) near real-time web usage statistics are available
2) the web usage statistics include where a brower came from, what was searched on, and where the browser was redirected to from a given page
3) you can use simple statistics in combination with other searches to find patterns
4) The number of patterns in near infinite and you need an organized/intelligent heuristic to quickly locate non-surface patterns.
Some of the examples are interesting but only toy examples nothing that is earth shattering or overly useful from a marketing perspective.
Summary:
Overall: 2.5 to 3 stars
Purpose: 3 stars -- get more clients for the author's firm
Prose: 2 stars
Content: 2 stars to 2.5 stars
Subtitle doesn't lie: Unexpected insights for BUSINESS and Life. September 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The data offered in the variety of "search stories" is quite interesting, and presents cases that various search terms are predicated on seemingly unrelated advertising campaigns. This truly is an interesting book, but I believe it could have been much more than just interesting.
I'm at a loss for who is actually the intended audience for this book. While the book listing is "BUSINESS," it is difficult to believe that any small to mid-sized business would find this useful to running and operating their own business. Additionally, since these smaller companies wouldn't have free access to the data described in this book, any pertinent ideas for a business would be somewhat useless. For large businesses that could purchase or "rent" the data - the discussion simply isn't in depth or technical enough to be a useful guide. (For example, the author repeated makes assertions that coupling a TV ad or TV show with a web search term or website increases search patterns. While I suppose it's nice to have confirmation, I think most people would pretty much assume that if people are watching ShowXYZ and enjoy it, and are told to go online and look at TermXYZ...they're likely to do it.) Again, not much insight. INTERESTING for the various moving parts (including some unexpected) that the author mentions, but not really ground-breaking for any company that has a marketing department.
As far as the individual reading this book without a business purpose - It IS an interesting read, but unfortunately, it doesn't seemed geared for individuals, so it's a little dry and isn't written as a piece of entertainment.
There are occasional sections of absurdity as well, but fortunately, there are not many of them. For example, "And as far as regional spread, more than 35% of Oprah's U.S. visitors come from powerful voting states like California, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Florida." Pretty much by definition, a "powerful voting state" is a state with a high population. A high percentage of TV viewers watching a show from a region with a high population? That's *completely* expected.
Later in the book, there is a suggestion that results of certain events (quarterly company results, winners of "talent" game shows, etc) can be predicted before the official outcome based on search queries. This again is very interesting, but there are many external factors (that the author keenly points out, and even admits that his predictions have failed, and then researched and informs why they failed) that make it extremely difficult or perhaps impossible to use search terms as a sole predictive indicator.
Some parts of the book read like one of the PowerPoint presentations he often refers to.
I personally believe that the book could have been done a couple of alternative ways to provide a more compelling read:
1. Have the author team up with an author experienced in Marketing and/or Advertising. This could have the effect of creating a bit more actionable ideas for the business readers that are apparently the intended audience. (Of course, this would have the drawback of the appearance to be a sales tool for the authors company, Hitwise. However, if a business wants to learn or do anything with the insights presented, it already is an advertisement in book form for said company.)
2. Written 2 books, or made this book with 2 sections, once for Business (preferably teamed up with a Marketing person), and 1 for individuals (as an interesting/entertainment endeavor with stronger narrative and slightly less data/charts.)
Overall...an interesting book. Not a great book, not a bad book...but worth getting if you're already interested in the topic.
Stats Can Be Fun September 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am not usually one who cares much about stats, but Tancer does a really good job of presenting web stats and, in many instances, what those stats mean. Not sure how this book will really help me with the two sites I run, but it is interesting nonetheless.
Raw traffic statistics aren't the answer September 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a great book which gets you to think about much more than raw traffic statistics when trying to understand how, and particularly when, people find your site. The cover blurb describes the prom dresses example (the web has enabled girls to start searching for prom dresses in January, far in advance of the March-April season that stores put them in the window). But I found other examples in the book more interesting, like the long discussion of how, and when, YouTube launched and overtook Google Video and Yahoo Video within 60 days. This detailed example is worth the cover price of the book.
That "when" dimension was one of the two key concepts I got from this book. Using an extremely deep database of web behavior, gathered from traffic to hundreds of thousands of web sites, author Bill Tancer provides many examples of how the timeline of hits is more important than the raw number. One example is his identification of an S-curve over time in social network exposure vs search engine exposure of indie bands, a phenomenon I expect is repeated with many consumer-media products. Essentially, he demonstrates with data how social networks like MySpace or Facebook are the starting point for indie band exposure, but the bands don't take off until the search engine traffic surpasses and overwhelms them. This example is also worth the cover price of the book.
The other key concept here is what I'll call "from where". This goes way beyond just "from a Google search on X" or "from hotmail". You really need to think about the rate of change of "from where" over time, as in the indie music example above.
Please note: Bill Tancer is a senior executive with Hitwise, which sells the data he uses so eloquently and often throughout this book. At times, the book does come off as an advertisement for a Hitwise subscription. He does not give any specific instructions for how the reader might begin to do this type of research on their own, perhaps as a prelude to purchasing a Hitwise subscription. This is my reason for knocking the rating down to four stars from five.
If you are in the business of driving consumer traffic to your web site, this book is a must read. But it may leave you drooling for that Hitwise data.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
