.KEYWORD peeditorial0601
.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
.DEPT
.SUMMARY Recently, we undertook a rather intense analysis of our log data. We were able to find out, with a startling degree of accuracy, how many of you are out there and where you probably work. We felt a comprehensive understanding of this readership would help us better focus our editorial content to meet your needs and interests. In his editorial, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz shares some of what we learned.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
One of the most important pieces of information a magazine editor can have is a comprehensive understanding of his readership. Put simply, the more we know about you, the better we can focus our editorial content to meet your needs and interests.
Because of its enterprise focus, we know our PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition readers are more business-oriented than our consumer readers in PalmPower. But we really didn’t know who you were, where you worked, or what you did.
To find out, we undertook a rather intense analysis of our log data. We were able to find out, with a startling degree of accuracy, how many of you are out there and where you probably work. But we still don’t know what you do. That’s because we don’t force you to fill out forms before accessing the magazine, and we don’t do any intrusive tricks like drop cookies or otherwise pry into your life.
Over the next few pages, I’m going to share with you what we found out about you. That’s the "I’ll show you mine" part. Then I’m going to ask you to send me, voluntarily, a bunch of emails telling me about what you do to help us get an even better picture of who you all are. That’s the "show me yours" part of this piece.
In brief, we discovered some very interesting facts:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Traceable readership is, at minimum, nearly 70,000, a verifiable increase from our previous estimate of 20,000;
.BULLET IBM is our single largest reader in terms of employees;
.BULLET 17% of our readers come from outside the U.S.;
.BULLET We have strong penetration into a whole bunch of blue-chip markets.
.END_LIST
As you can see, the content of the analysis is exciting. We actually have three and a half times more readers than we originally thought. And, unlike our previous efforts, which were estimates, this number is based on verifiable, unique users reading the magazine.
.H1 Enormous purchasing power
These numbers are very interesting, especially if we look at the potential purchasing power of all of you. Some months ago, we tried to figure out how much of a budget each of you influences.
To do this, we looked at some estimates by other publishers. O’Reilly, for example, provides some estimates of their readers’ purchasing power for software. According to them, 30% of their readers have budgets between $250,000 and $1 million, while another 28% have budgets over a million dollars. And that’s just the software side of technology purchases!
Advisor Publications, a company that publishes a wide range of computer technology magazines, estimates a tools/equipment budget of $1.86 million per reader company.
From this, we can safely assume that most of you influence between a half million and one and a half million dollars in spending. On the surface, that’s pretty amazing. But when you multiply the number of readers with the amount you all influence, the total dollar amount is nothing short of staggering. Even at the most conservative, if we assume you each influence about $500,000, multiply that by 70,000 readers, then you, as a readership control or influence something on the order of $35 billion! Instead, if we were to assume that you have an impact of $1.5 million each, which is also not unreasonable, you folks, in total, represent a purchasing budget of $105 billion. That’s well into "Holy Cow" territory!
We’ve often thought of PalmPower, with over 2 million readers, as our flagship publication. But as we’ve seen above, PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition has a very targeted group of enterprise readers with a powerful degree of influence. In fact, even though this is only our eighth issue of PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition, as you can see in Figure A, we’ve already got more than seven times the readership of a typical business trade publication according to data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the Standard Rate and Data Service.
.FIGPAIR A PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition beats out most business trade publications in terms of readership.
.H1 Behind the scenes gathering data
This project was massive. First, we had to sift through over 27 gigabytes of log files. To put this in perspective, imagine someone gave you a hundred-page report of raw data and asked you to find trends in that data. Now, imagine every man, woman, and child in the United States gave you such a report and you had to analyze all the reports together. That’s the amount of data that had to be sifted.
Once we were able to extract PalmPower Enterprise Edition transactions, we had to get access to the only verifiable information Web sites are able to store: the raw IP (Internet Protocol) address of the person reading a page. So, from the mass of raw data, we extracted millions of raw IP addresses of the form "204.142.109.6." We then brought those addresses into a database, sorted them, and extracted almost 70,000 individual addresses. And that’s where the real fun started.
Before we go on, it’s important to understand that the 70,000 addresses we found represent only the minimum number of readers. That’s because not every person using a Web browser gets a unique IP address. Many companies use what are called "proxy servers." As Figure B shows, the proxy server stores a local copy of our magazine, which means we can’t see how many readers are really out there. The bottom line: the number 70,000 is, by necessity, a minimum count.
.FIGPAIR B Many readers access the magazine via a proxy server.
To find out where you work, we couldn’t just go from an IP address to a domain name. We had to go from an IP address to a company. So, we custom wrote a program that, for every single IP address, queried a domain name server. It then did a Web page query of Network Solutions to access the Internet’s Whois directory in order to discover what company had purchased a domain associated with the IP address in question. For each query, the program got back a complete Web page (with all the normal, human-readable HTML gobbledegook). The program then had to scan through the raw HTML page to extract the registering organization’s name. Of course, many IP addresses couldn’t be traced to a registrant organization, and the raw Web page query process had to be re-run many times, whenever the Internet hiccupped or Network Solutions’ servers were too busy.
In all, it took most of a full week to write the program, run it many times, and gather as complete a database of actual organizations as possible.
Once the organization list was retrieved, we had to determine the number of individual users per organization, sort out the organizations, and segment them into industries. There is no easy cross-reference list between organizations and their industry. As a result, we had to sift, by hand, thousands and thousands of raw database entries, looking at a company name, and assigning an appropriate industry, all the while looking for any trends that popped out.
From that effort, we were able to identify a set of companies that had more than ten readers each and then look at what industries those companies were part of. The results were, to say the least, nothing short of fascinating.
.H1 Readership overview
We have an amazingly diverse readership with a phenomenal sphere of influence. It ranges from the Department of Justice, the Federal Reserve, and the Pentagon’s Air Force Command all the way to power-influencers like McKinsey & Company and real, hard-core industrial firms like Enron and Schlumberger. Along the way, we reach healthcare firms, insurance companies, media outlets, distributors, automakers, and a whole lot of financial firms.
Here’s how some of that breaks out. First, as I told you at the beginning, about 17% of our readers are outside the United States. In order of the percentage of readership, the top twenty countries reading PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition are the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Singapore, Brazil, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Malaysia, Taiwan, Mexico, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, and Israel.
Of the traceable IP addresses we were able to attribute to PalmPower Enterprise Edition readers, 24% were accessing the journal through ISPs (Internet Service Providers) such as AOL, CompuServe, and EarthLink. As mentioned above, 17% were from outside the United States. 10% were readers who had unique IP addresses but could not be traced to any specific organization.
In our analysis project, we really wanted to find out those organizations with large blocks of readers. So we divided the remaining 49% into two groups: those where we found less than 10 readers per organization and those where we could trace ten or more readers to an organization. You can see how all this comes together in the pie chart shown in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C We were able to determine that at least 21% of our readers were at companies with more than 10 readers.
It’s that last 21% that we broke into industry groups and identified some of the companies and organizations reading the magazine. Let’s look at some of those groups:
.H2 Government
We have a lot of readers both in the U.S. Government and various foreign governments. International governments include the Australian government, the United Kingdom government, the Canadian government, the Singapore government, the Hong Kong government, and the Brazilian government. There’s even a block of readers at the United Nations. Inside the U.S., there are readers at the US Department of Justice, various National Labs, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Federal Reserve, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the DOE (Department of Energy), the GSA (General Services Administration), the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture), the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), as well as within many state governments.
.H2 Military
We have a bunch of readers in the U.S. military as well. Readers are from all branches of the armed services, as well as the Defense Security Service, the U.S. Army Research Lab, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, the National Computer Security Center, the Defense Logistics Agency, and various Pentagon commands.
.H2 Consulting and defense contractors
Crossing into civilian territory, there are also many readers at both consulting firms and defense contractors. Some of you work at defense contractors including Lockheed-Martin Corporation, Raytheon Company, The MITRE Corporation, Mitel Corporation, and Northrop Grumman.
There are also those of you advising leading corporations from your jobs at consulting firms. These include Andersen Consulting (Accenture), Arthur Andersen & Co., Computer Sciences Corporation, Whittman-Hart, Inc, American Management Systems, McKinsey & Company, Inc, Cambridge Technology Partners, Corporate Software & Technology, Perot Systems Corporation, and Booz, Allen & Hamilton.
.H2 Banks and financial services
A whole lot of you work for money managers. We have readers at Ernst & Young, Chase Manhattan Bank, Coopers & Lybrand, Deloitte & Touche, First Union National Bank, Citicorp, Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, Deutsche-Bank Group, J.P. Morgan, KPMG International, Bankers Trust New York Corporation, Zurich Financial Services, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, The Northern Trust Company, Fidelity Investments, Union Bank of California, Royal Bank of Canada, Merrill Lynch, Banque Paribas, Countrywide Funding Corporation, First Chicago, PNC Bank, Automatic Data Processing, Bank One, Arthur D. Little, Goldman Sachs, Prudential Securities, Lehman Brothers, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York, Fleet Bank, Thomson Financial Services, and even the World Bank.
.H2 Industrial
They say that one way to tell the men from the boys is the size of their toys. Well, the big industrial companies have some seriously cool toys. We have readers at General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Rockwell International, Cummins Engine Company, Unilever, Honeywell, Kraft, BASF, Fluor Daniel Corporation, Lyondell Chemical Company, Johnson Controls, Pratt & Whitney, Allied Signal, FMC, ALCOA, Union Pacific Railroad, Hughes, Underwriters Laboratories, Corning, United Technologies Corporation, and, of course, Caterpillar, which we profiled last month at http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200105/caterpillar001.html.
.H2 Energy
One industry area that came as no surprise was energy. It definitely makes sense, given the value mobile technology can contribute to the far-flung nature of many energy businesses, that we’d have lots of readers here. We’ve got a whole lot of readers at energy-related firms including Mobil, Chevron, Florida Power and Light, Shell Oil, Amoco, Virginia Power, Enron, American Electric Power, CMS Energy, Occidental Petroleum, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, EATON Corporation, First Energy Corporation, Schlumberger, American Power Conversion, Texaco, Phillips Petroleum, and Southern California Edison.
.H2 Healthcare and insurance
I feel much better knowing that some of the leading healthcare and insurance providers want to learn how to use mobile technology to make themselves more effective and to make us all more healthy. Some of our readers are at healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies like Abbott Laboratories, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Physicians’ Online, Kaiser Permanente, SAIC, Eli Lilly, Monsanto, Merck, SmithKline Beecham, Baxter Healthcare, Group Health Cooperative, Hoffmann-La Roche and United HealthCare.
Helping us all feel safe and secure are readers at insurance companies including Prudential, Nationwide, Metropolitan Life, Fireman’s Fund, Hartford, Phoenix Home Life Mutual, New York Life, The Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, CUNA Mutual Insurance Society, Manufacturers Life, CIGNA, and Standard Life.
.H2 Media
One of my most cherished events was when, last year, I got a letter from editors at TIME Magazine congratulating us on some of our coverage in PalmPower. Interestingly, we also seem to influence the media here in the Enterprise Edition as well (and probably help members of these companies bring more Palm devices into their organizations). Some of the media enterprises that have large blocks of readers include AOL Time Warner, Virgin, Ziff Davis, Disney, Singapore Press, InfoWorld Publishing Company, Reuters, McGraw-Hill, Sony Music Entertainment, The Washington Post, Charter Communications, Wired Ventures, Advisor Publications, and CondeNast Publications.
.H2 Consumer products and services
Thinking about media almost always is a good segue into consumer products and services, which break down nicely into six sub-categories. We have readers in consumer product companies like Coca-Cola Company, Colgate Palmolive, Clorox, Gillette, and Pillsbury Company.
We have readers in distribution firms including FedEx, UPS, Inacom, Ingram Micro, MicroAge, and W.W. Grainger.
We have readers in retail organizations including Tesco Stores, Nike, Jack in the Box, The Gap, and Walgreens.
Among office, printing, and paper companies, we have readers at International Paper (one of my earliest employers), IKON Office Solutions, Deluxe Corp (the chairman of which used a quote from my book in his address to shareholders; very cool!), Avery Dennison, Herman Miller, Champion International, and R.R. Donnelley & Sons.
Members of the auto industry also read PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition. Readers work at Ford Motor Company, Goodyear, Toyota, American Honda (both the Motor Company and R&D), and Delphi Automotive.
Finally, after telling you about our readers in the travel industry at American Express Travel Services, The SABRE Group, and Marriott International, we’re going to travel along to the next industry group.
.H2 Telecommunications
Figuring out who worked for telecom companies was quite a challenge. The problem is, many telecom companies are also ISPs. So IP addresses traced back to a telecom company might belong to an employee of the telecom or simply a subscriber to their ISP service. In determining which of you actually worked at a telecom, we were therefore extremely conservative. If there was any chance an IP address could be an ISP address, we didn’t count it. That probably means there are a lot more telecom readers and companies than we counted. That’s OK. We wanted to be conservative.
Given the above, we know that we have readers at AT&T’s Corporate HQ, Bell South Intellectual Property, Hong Kong Telecom IMS, Concentric Network Corporation, Sprint, Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions, British Telecommunications, Ameritech, Nortel, Southern New England Tel, Cincinnati Bell Telephone, U S WEST, Alltel Information Services, and Cable & Wireless. I’m not going to give you any numbers, but we have a whole heck of a lot of readers at AT&T’s Corporate HQ.
.H2 Technology
I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise that many of you work at technology companies. The company with the single largest group of readers of PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition is IBM (and that’s not even factoring readers at Lotus, Tivoli, and Informix, of which there are also quite a few). And, of course, there are a whole ton of you at 3Com and Palm, Inc.
Beyond those great firms, we have readers at Microsoft, Lucent, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Compaq, Sun, Apple, Applied Materials, Philips, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Unisys, Sybase, Cisco, Seagate, Symantec (another former employer of mine), Nokia, SYNETICS, Intel, Interliant, Novell, National Semiconductor, PeopleSoft, SoftTech, Dell Computer Corporation, IntellAgents Control, Computer Associates, Cadvision, Worldcom, Teradyne, Toshiba, Cadence, Micron, Silicon Graphics, Agilent Technologies, Candle Corporation, Lexmark, Symbol Technologies, Siemens (yet another former employer of mine), NCR, Quantum, NEC, Amdahl, and Varian.
.H2 Universities
Finally, we wrap up with you readers at universities. I have to admit that the substantial number of you at colleges and universities was something of a surprise, until I thought about how large an organization those entities are. You folks need enterprise solutions as much as any traditional corporation.
Those universities with employees studiously reading PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition include MIT, University of Michigan, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Cornell University, University of Minnesota, University of California, Los Angeles, Duke University, Stanford University, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University, Boston University, Carnegie-Mellon University, UC Davis, Columbia University, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, University of Illinois at Urbana, University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, Purdue University, University of Texas at Austin, Brigham Young University, Oklahoma State University, Texas A&M University, University of Southern California, University of Utah, University of Cincinnati, University of Kentucky, Baylor College of Medicine, Drexel University, Rochester Institute of Technology, UCSD, UCSF, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Virginia, Washington University, and Yale University.
.H2 Time to show me yours
This has been an amazingly rewarding project. There are so many of you out there doing great things, many of you helping to bring more and more Palm devices into your organizations. We’ve already learned a lot about who you are and, every month, learn more about what you’d like us to cover.
But, because we don’t have draconian forms to fill out, I still don’t know too many details about you. I’d like to know what you do for your company and perhaps how you’re considering using (or already use) Palm devices.
I’d love it if each of you would do us here at PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition a very special favor and send some details about yourself to the address: showme@palmpowerenterprise.com. Please include some or all of the following:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Your name;
.BULLET Your company;
.BULLET Your job;
.BULLET Some details about Palm handheld use in your organization;
.BULLET If you’re thinking about using more Palm devices in your organization;
.BULLET Any topics you’d like us to cover;
.BULLET Your favorite things about PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition.
.END_LIST
If you think your company would be interesting to profile in one of our application stories, let us know and include a phone number. Otherwise, no specific information about individuals will be released by anyone. We’d just like to get a better statistical understanding of who you are and a better subjective understanding of what you’d like us to cover. Also, if PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition has helped you in any special way, please let us know how, and how we can help you more in the future.
I know taking the time to answer these questions and send in this information is somewhat time consuming. As a reward, we’ll randomly pick a few of you from the list of respondents and send you out an official, special, enterprise edition Palm baseball cap (like the one shown on our home page). In all seriousness, it’d really help us out to have this information, so you’d be doing us all a favor.
Once again, send your responses to showme@palmpowerenterprise.com.
Thanks, and see you next month!
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For the article, " Caterpillar Pocket Technician retrieves data from truck engines," by Aaron Donnelli in the May 2001 issue of PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition, visit http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200105/caterpillar001.html.
For more information about Palm computers, visit http://www.palm.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee6f4e9
