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Publishers Weekly® Reviews
- Reviewed in: Publishers Weekly, page 61.
- Review Date: 2008-07-14
- Reviewer: Staff
Do Americans really spend that much time surfing porn sites? Which demographic visited Anna Nicole Smith's Web site most frequently? Who reads Perez Hilton? More than mere trivia nuggets, the answers to these questions define online behaviors among a varied mix of Internet users. Tancer, who leads global research at Hitwise, an online market research company, guides the reader through the search patterns among 10 million Internet users, challenging myths and making new discoveries about the psychology of consumers, illustrating that clicks speak louder than words and can reveal unspoken truths about individual drives that are not expressed via other forms of media. Everyone from marketing managers who want to know how much power social networking sites wield in the online market to political pollsters trying to decipher the disconnect between exit polls and election results would be advised to heed his research. Witty and invaluable in its insights, this book is destined to become a primer for online marketers and usability experts while shedding new light on the mindset and curiosities of the average Web surfer, i.e., your friends and neighbors. (Sept.)
Data is the new black
Bill Tancer loves data, and he's not ashamed to say so. The Time.com columnist and manager of global research at Hitwise, a competitive intelligence company, is passionate about his work: he monitors and analyzes online behavior in search of clues, trends and patterns that can help companies understand their customers. Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why it Matters has real-life examples aplenty drawn from Tancer's work at Hitwise, plus anecdotes that detail his experiences as a speaker and/or attendee at various conferences and trade shows, where he encounters all manner of data aficionados. He offers interesting, odd statistics (more than 20 percent of all inbox spam is related to Viagra; online searches for "prom dress" peak in January, contrary to the April or May surge one would expect) and shares the details of his quests to understand these phenomena. Tancer believes "we can learn more about ourselves through our Internet behavior," and his enthusiasm for data-modeling is infectious. (Really.) Here's a bit of data-modeling: readers who liked Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point will enjoy this book, too.