Kevin Hillstrom - Mining Man

An absurd set of successive volumes or issues of a periodical published in like form with similarity of subject or purpose – it’s the Silly Series of web analytics people profiles.

Today, we turn our attention to Kevin Hillstrom, a man who likes oft-misunderstood surface graphs.

Kevin, tell us something about yourself.

I currently do freelance analytics work for CEOs of e-commerce brands, retail brands, and catalog brands.  Prior to founding MineThatData, I spent twenty years working in various analytics roles, including Vice President of Database Marketing at Nordstrom, Sr. Consultant at Avenue A, Director of Analytics and Circulation at Eddie Bauer, Manager of Analytical Services at Lands’ End, and Statistical Analyst at The Garst Seed Company.

What is the difference between Us and Them?
The biggest difference is that we are willing to think for ourselves.  In addition, we try to be unbiased.  We listen to our users/customers through data, in fact, we speak on behalf of our users/customers, we say what the user/customer is unable to say for herself.  We communicate our findings in a manner that makes it easy for business leaders to make decisions.  We are humble.  We are curious.  We aspire to do more than is asked of us.  We do not settle for best practices.  We are ethical.  We are kind.  We are not afraid to call out things that are untrue.  We help others.  We aren’t perfect.  We aren’t always right.  We make mistakes.

What Is “Gliebers Dresses” and how much is Meredith Thompson like your mother?

Gliebers Dresses is a fictional account of a catalog company that is struggling to adapt to a customer that used to shop via catalogs, but now shops via search, e-mail, social, mobile, and any other channels that come to mind.  A few years ago, I went through a stretch where my data suggested that many industry best practices were essentially false.  I questioned industry best practices on my blog, or via Twitter, and I was loudly criticized.  So I tried a new approach.  Instead of saying that specific best practices were no longer effective, I wrote stories about a fictional Executive Team trying to deal with specific issues.  What I learned is that readers do not get angry with fictional characters.  If I publicly say that e-mail marketing does a terrible job of generating a large amount of profit, I will be publicly shamed by the e-mail marketing community.  If I have a character in Gliebers Dresses say that e-mail marketing does a terrible job of generating a large amount of profit, I end up with readers who consider whether the hypothesis is true or not.  All I want is for my readers to think, to not accept commonly held customer behavior myths.  Meredith Thompson is the Chief Merchandising Officer in my story.  She is not like my Mom.  Her job is to represent “what is known”.  Meredith is not a believer in Social Media, she is not a believer in Mobile, she barely accepts the premise that customers shop on the internet.  She argues via existing data, the metrics and numbers that appear in the reports that she sees every morning when she gets to work.  When Roger Morgan (the Chief Operating Officer and a devoted evangelist of all that is shiny and new) makes the case for Social Media, Meredith uses sales figures to illustrate that Social Media only represents one or two percent of company sales.  Meredith’s job not to hold the company back, but rather, to remind people to keep focusing energy on the channels that deliver 80% of company sales and profit.  But in arguing via existing KPIs on existing dashboards, she clearly holds the company back.  She believes that most customers behave the way she behaves, and she can point you to any number of friends who behave the way she behaves.  She is the individual that the Web Analyst must win over, if the Web Analyst wants to make a difference.

Which of your books was the most difficult to write?

Hillstrom’s Database Marketing was the most difficult to write because it came first.  I was working at Nordstrom at the time, so I didn’t have a consulting business that I was trying to build.  It is easier to write when you are trying to sell something, it is hard to write when the goal is to teach.

Who is your Superhero-Sans-Cape in the web analytics community, and why?

My favorites are those who ask the humble questions. I am always looking for people who ask questions, people who are curious and want to learn.  Too often, the folks who are perceived to be superheroes are those at the top of the mountain, telling everybody what to do and how to do it.  A real superhero is a Web Analytics Sherpa, one who tries to help others climb to the top of the analytics mountain.  Most of the time, these folks aren’t out there sharing facts on Twitter, they are too busy doing real work.  Yes, I am even criticizing myself with that statement.

If you were to climb to the top of the nearest tree to you, what would you see over your right shoulder, assuming that you were facing North?

The Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.  If it is at sunset, then the mountains are likely to have a purple color to them, and that’s a pretty sight.

What is your wish for the remainder of 2011?

My wish is for the hype to end.  Our business won’t go bankrupt if we don’t have an industry-leading mobile website or app by the end of 2011.  We won’t go out of business if we don’t establish “deep, emotional connections with customers via Facebook.”  2011 isn’t the year that Social CRM finally garners the attention of the “C-Suite”.  My wish is for the Web Analytics community to stand up to the hype, the Web Analytics community has the data to prove or disprove anything.  My wish is for folks to use data to “tell the truth”.

Are statistics in fact your best friend?

In some ways, yes.  A best friend will tell you when you are wrong.  A best friend is there for you when things aren’t going well.  A best friend surprises you.  A best friend shares in the excitement of a positive outcome.  A best friend is unbiased.  Statistics do all of those things.

What is the worst job you’ve ever had?

The worst job I ever had was being a customer service representative for AT&T.  My job was to call customers who recently had problems with their telephone service, asking them a series of questions regarding the quality of the repair service they received.  Surprisingly, people don’t like taking a ten minute survey over the phone at 9:03am when they were sound asleep at 9:02am.
A close second was being a basketball referee for a men’s recreational league.  One night, my partner was drunk.  One of the teams figured this out and began to be highly critical of the drunk referee.  I heard one individual say something very negative about the drunk referee, I asked the person to repeat the comment, and then I gave a technical foul to the person offering the comment.  Well, that was a very lonely moment, because everybody in the world knew that the referee was drunk, but it was my job to protect the individual and to keep the game moving without distractions or personal attacks.  Just about every person at the game screamed at me, loudly, asking how I could defend the drunk referee?  Within 30 seconds, however, the yelling ended, and nobody said a word for the rest of the game.  That experience prepares you for what it is like to say something unpopular on Twitter!

What is your favourite type of graph, and why?

I adore surface graphs, I could look at them all day long.  My brain loves seeing data in three dimensions, it loves to look at conversion rate (peaks = increases, valleys = decreases) plotted against two dimensions (say, recency and frequency).  Unfortunately, I’ve never been in a meeting where an Executive understands what the heck it is that I’m sharing in a surface graph, so I don’t use them much.

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