John Lovett - Happy Man

It’s a new year, and it’s time to clear the cobwebs and begin as you mean to go on by learning more about your colleagues in the web analytics industry.

Today, it’s web analytics’ cheerful chappie, John Lovett – a man who likes a good metric of a morning.

John, tell the lads and ladies about yourself.

I’m a Boston native who arrived at web analytics via English Literature, marketing, performance management, and industry analysis.  Roughly in that order.  My biggest accomplishments, besides paddling class V whitewater when I was a younger man, include helping companies realize the potential of the Internet.  I was fortunate to work at research firms like Gomez.com (yes it was a research firm in 1999), Aberdeen, Jupiter and Forrester, which allowed me to talk to lots of people and vendors in the #measure industry and formulate my own opinions.  Now I back those opinions with experience.

When I’m not scheming up brilliant analytics strategies, I love spending time with my wife and growing family, road cycling and fly fishing.

It’s the end of the world and you and Eric Peterson have to fight it out for the last place on the rescue shuttle to Plaxus Z10-b.  Who wins?

Oh, I would definitely win. On the way to the shuttle, Eric would stop to talk to about a hundred people – he’d set up a mini-group that’s focused on calculating the trajectories of interplanetary space travel and he’d build an analysis tool so that we could all understand how people communicate using PlaxusHTML.  But of course, by the time that Eric got to the shuttle, he’d have so many people following him that they’d rally for another shuttle.

You’re currently writing a book on Social Media Metrics.  What’s the 5th word on page 80 and how does it make you feel about cake?

It’s DATA.  I actually did a word cloud and a really ugly spreadsheet of all the words I used in Chapter 2 to exemplify that visualizing your social media data can be very productive.  Data turned out to be the most frequently used word.  When I finished, I ate carrot cake. Yummmm.

You recently had another baby (with just a little help from your other half) – would you be happy for your sons to follow in your career footsteps?

My oldest son (5 yrs) told me yesterday that he wanted to be a paleontologist, which when I think about it isn’t all too different from what I do.  While I don’t dig in dirt, I do dig around in data to find interesting things.  So I’d be ecstatic if he followed my footsteps, but I seriously doubt that web analysts will be around in the same capacity that we know it today when my kids enter the workforce.  It will however be about being able to find interesting things in the data.

Who is your superhero-sans-cape in the web analytics community and why?

I really believe that the unsung heroes are the analysts that toil everyday to make sense of analytics and explain it to their organizations while continually demonstrating value.  We have plenty of rock stars in web analytics, but it’s the people who do the real work that have super powers.

What do you say to people who think website tracking is an evil task by evil people for evil purposes?

I say you’re absolutely right, and you shouldn’t be visiting so many dubious web sites.  C’mon…that’s preposterous!  I argue till I’m blue in the face that analytics and tracking is about making the Internets a better place.  I pontificate about the incredible value of cookies and targeted advertising with elegant descriptors, colorful adjectives and apple-pie clichés.  When I finally climb off my soapbox, most people usually walk away muttering…yep, that’s spyware!

What is your wish for 2011?

I would really like to get out in front of privacy regulation and illustrate to consumers, institutions and governments that what we do is ethical.  I’m hoping that web analysts across the globe will pledge to our soon-to-be-published Code of Ethics to demonstrate that we are accountable for holding the data we collect safe and secure.

If you could go to dinner with two members of the web analytics community, who would they be and to what would you toast?

Wow, this is a really tough question. There’s so many people that I have shared – and would like to share – dinner with that it’s tough to answer. So, I’m gonna cheat this one: I’d bring in David McCandless of Information is Beautiful, Albert Lai of Kontagent and Guy Kawasaki.  We’d be toasting our new idea for the most powerful and intuitive analysis tool ever created.  Which of course, we hatched over appetizers, developed during dinner and sold by the time we ate dessert.

You’ve done quite a bit of public speaking in your time.  Do you picture the audience naked or get rip-roaringly drunk to handle your nerves in front of a crowd?

Well, I was only drunk that one time… Ha, not true. I typically just look out at the crowd to see who’s nodding vigorously, who looks unconvinced and who’s sleeping.  I try to get the sleepers and the unconvinced to come around

What’s the strangest request you’ve ever had from a customer?

Hmmm… My client requests are typically pretty orthodox.  My son however did ask me if I would build a tank in our backyard so he could keep sea turtles.

Check out the full list of interviews in the Silly Series here!