If you are on Twitter, I’m sure there are some tweeters you pay more attention to than others. What is the secret sauce that causes you to give your attention to someone on Twitter?

That’s the question I asked on the Feed140 blog today.  I’m starting an informal research project to dig in to the Twitter timeline of  ‘attention worthy’ tweeters and see if I can extract some consistent factors that shed some light on the mystery of what makes us pay attention so some people and not notice others.

Want to help? Share with me 3 of the people you follow on Twitter who capture your attention.

Please visit this post on my Twitter marketing blog to share your response…  Thanks!

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“It is true that what you measure, gets managed. But it’s also true that you should only measure the things that matter. And Google Analytics can often send people down rat holes and many different decision trees — spending time on many things that won’t necessarily have a huge impact”

Tim Ferris – From Tim’s Blog

This is a hugely valuable video for bloggers, but the ‘fact based’ mindset of Tim Ferris is it’s most valuable lesson.

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An assumption is a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were true based upon presupposition without preponderance of the facts. (From WikiPedia)

I used to base almost all of my decisions on assumption — business and personal. And I still base most of my decisions on assumptions because assumptions are necessary if we expect to get through the day.  I don’t need a “preponderance of facts” to decide where to stop to get coffee in the morning or to decide what podcast to listen to first because these are not high-value decisions. On the other hand, critical decisions (like what to prioritize in my marketing activities) should never be based on assumption.

You don’t have to base every decision on “a preponderance of the facts,” but important decisions should not be based on assumption.

Here’s the problem with assumptions — they are often wrong.

Of course, right? If you make a decision based on little or no facts, your decision stands a good chance of being “wrong” (or as I prefer to think of it, ‘not optimal’ because a decision can often be OK, but sometimes OK is the result when the result could have been ‘fantastic’ given a slightly different decision).

Assumptions are basically gambles where you hope for winning hand even though you can’t really see the all the cards.

Now making the ‘wrong’ decision about where to pick up a latte in the morning isn’t a big problem — so what if the line is a little longer than you expected or they are out of cinnamon chip scones?

But if you are talking about planning your marketing activities, then it pays to see as many of the cards as you can.

Think about it… in the absence of facts the only way to know if you are on track or not is to wait and see what happens.  The problem is, with some decisions it may be months or years before you know you’ve made the wrong decision.

Take, for instance, the big decision of which niche to target.  If you make your niche decision based on assumption, you might spend 6-24 months working at building a presence in that market, building a list, creating products, developing JV relationships, etc. before you know if that niche is profitable. But with just a few facts (niche size, competitive analysis, etc.) you can greatly increase your chances of making the right decision about what niche to target.  The wrong decision can, in this case, put you out of business.

For every one fact you acquire relative to any decision, your chances of making a serious error decline dramatically.

Like in a card game, a single fact goes a long way. If you are seeking a four-of-a-kind in Kings, and you see another player pick up a King from the discard pile, that one fact will tell you that your strategy is not likely to work out.

If you are trying to decide where to focus your traffic generation efforts, knowing which of your current traffic sources is the most profitable will help you dramatically.

Lately, I’ve gotten much better at forcing myself to make fact-based decisions; especially when it comes to anything that requires my time.  Time is my most precious asset and where to spend my time is among the most critical of decisions for me.

Facts are not always statistics, sometimes they are simply true statements.

For instance, I mostly use ‘true statement’ type facts when deciding what VisiOlo projects to spend my time on.

Here are the key statements that I want to be ‘true’ in order for me to spend my time on a project.

• This project serves the needs of my core audience.
• This project will result in increased profit for my business.
• This project is something that my team is technically capable of doing without excessive effort.
• I have/have not proven the core assumptions of this project through testing.
• This is project is more critical than any other project on my ‘open project’ list.

Now, these statements are usually ‘relatively’ true for my projects — which means they are tru-ER for my top priority projects than they are for my lowest priority projects.  For instance, I may not know (for sure) how much increase in profit I will see for a given project — no one has a crystal ball — but I can know that relative to my other projects, my highest priority project appears to have the highest probability of generating profit.

OK, that is getting a bit too technical, what I mean is when I say “this project will result in increased profit for my business,” what I really mean is “based on what I know today, this project looks like it will generate more profit than other projects I could work on.”

I haven’t really formalized the process, but these are generally the statements that guide my project choices.  When I do get around to formalizing this ‘project vetting’ process, I’ll add a quantitative scale to each statement.  I’ll have something like a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being false and 5 being true.

Hmmm. That would be a nice feature for VisiOlo too, because the more I think about it, I think the VisiOlo’s true role is to help Infopreneurs make the right decisions about where to spend their ‘project’ time.  We do a decent job of providing data about sales systems, but I’m also interested in helping with the decision making and prioritization process because facts without implementation are useless.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/ / CC BY 2.0

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Google Reader is a powerful tool when it comes to collecting and managing lots of information within your market.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a relative novice when it comes to how to use Google Reader effectively, but there are a few things I’ve discovered that I think will be helpful to my readers.   One of those things is how to use the tool as a way to quickly get the pulse of a particular market niche.

Want to start getting to know who the thought leaders and major players are in a given market?

Want to know what kinds of questions people in the market are asking?

Want to know what the *hot* topics are?

Want to find great places to ‘join the conversation’ and start interacting with potential joint venture partners?

The best way to quickly answer these questions is to find all (or most) of the popular and active blogs in a niche and subscribe to their RSS feed in Google Reader. Then you can use the search function in Reader to ‘mine’ these blogs for answers to your questions.  At first, our goal is to amass a knowledge base, so you will need to subscribe to as many on-topic blogs as possible. You can start weeding out to improve quality later.

Here’s how, in 4 steps…

1) Open a Google Reader account.

2) Use Google Blog Search to find blogs in your market using your primary keywords. (Another way to find blogs is to look for the words “Best” “Top” and “Favorite”  in conjunction with your primary keywords and the words “list” and “blogs”  For example, “Top <insert keyword> blogs list”  This will help turn up lists compiled by other bloggers. )

3) When you find blogs that are on the right topic, frequently updated, and have some comments, subscribe to their feed in Google Reader.  At this point, you might want to organize your subscriptions into folders, but you can also save that for later. If you want to research multiple niches, at least create one general folder for each niche.

4) Now, in Google Reader, use the search function to begin finding answers to your market research questions.

For instance, you might search for the words ["how to"] (include the quotes to make it a specific phrase search) — this would begin to reveal some topics that are frequently addressed with ‘how to’ type answers.  You can further refine your search by adding the topic to your search. If I search ["how to"] in my Google Reader account, I find this article on the list:  Headline Writing 101: Taught by TechCrunch from Conversation Marketing.  Now I know that at least one blogger is writing about Headlines.  If I want to know if it is a hot topic, I can search for ["how to" write headlines] — this search returns 85 results, so it’s safe to say that the market is asking “how do I go about writing great headlines?”

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I just read an interesting post from Ahmed KIRTOK about the concept of “Commercial Intention” in keyword selection.

I’ve been hearing a lot about this lately because Microsoft’s adCenter just released a Commercial Intention Tool that provides a scoring method of sorts for individual keywords and key phrases.  The commercial intention score his purported to be able to predict the “intent” of the person using the search term.

I think this could be very useful for people using pay-per-click campaigns (of which I am not one).  The idea does intrigue me because most marketers can tell, to some extent, which keywords are showing commercial intent and which ones aren’t.  I would expect that with a huge database of information, Microsoft would be able to do a better job than the average individual.

If I was using pay-per-click campaigns to promote my products, the accuracy of commercial intent predictions would be fairly easy to test.  For now, it’s just an intriguing idea.

Unless you can actually test Commercial Value of a keyword, Commercial Intent doesn’t mean much.  But Commercial Intent could really help marketers narrow the field of likely keywords, which would be a huge help.

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