Seasonality is the idea that business volume ebbs and flows at different times. While landscapers and lawnmowers know that their busy season coincides with summer, seasonality is affected by a lot more than just the weather. Retailers’ busy season coincides with holiday shopping (of course), wedding season is in the summer, and so on.

Check out http://www.google.com/trends to view the seasonality of any keyword search.

It’s easy to figure out the seasonality when it coincides with a certain month of the year; even if the link is not obvious, (for example, Pablo Picasso is a hot topic in February/March, but unpopular in July and December). But what about businesses that don’t experience seasonality within a calendar year? It’s tougher to spot the busy and slow seasons when they may extend over a period of 2 or 3 years, and you don’t know WHEN the season starts and ends, nor the duration.

So how do you figure out what drives seasonality for a particular industry? Look for leading indicators.

Leading indicators can tell you what is about to come. Such as in the weather - right before a major hurricane, it usually gets pretty windy outside. One of the most interesting is the “Lipstick Indicator” which Estee Lauder spotted. During recessions and uncertain times, they noticed that lipstick sales went up. “Why?” you ask? Probably because women want something luxurious to feel pampered, but can’t afford expensive items anymore, so they settle for lipstick. Amazingly, this indicator has been quite reliable over the years. In fact, right after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, lipstick sales doubled.

Sometimes leading indicators come right before an event, sometimes far in advance of an event, but once you spot them they can be very valuable, because it warns you of what is coming. Leading indicators can signal either to hire more help to prepare for a busy season, or cut back on inventory heading into a slow one. Your goal as a business owner is to smooth out the peaks and troughs of cash flow and business volume. Looking for the indicators of your seasonality can help you predict and adjust your business plan quickly to compensate.

“Supercrunchers” is a great book that discusses how to crunch numbers on any problem, to figure out the driving forces behind events. I definitely recommend everyone to read it, if you haven’t. The idea behind it is that you can use your own past sales data to crunch numbers to discover hidden patterns that you haven’t noticed. Regressions are a powerful tool in crunching these numbers, so find a strong statistician to help you run through the data.

And of course, remember that in order to HAVE peaks, there have to be troughs. Plan for them, and when the slow times come, don’t panic. Use some of the surplus you enjoyed in the busy season to get you through the slow season. And watch for those leading indicators to help you know when business will increase again so you can gear up for it.

I’d like to start tracking innovative Utah companies and publishing their online progress, or regress every month. We can use this type of list for a lot of things, but I’d like to show where internet professionals can look to for a good, local, example of good online strategies. As well, it’s pretty neat to think about working for the top firms, if a corporate job is your thing.

Index Description
As you will see, this internet rank index for Utah companies is composed of the estimates from Alexa and Compete rankings, and the two estimates are averaged. The list is then sorted with the highest rank first.

Personally, I’m surprised by the rank of some of the companies over others I thought would be much higher.

If you have a suggestion for another category to measure or source of data we can use to estimate the most innovative Utah companies, then, by all means - leave your comment below and we’ll take it into consideration next month. I’ve thought about adding the number of back links from Yahoo or a Google Page Rank. I just don’t know yet how to weight each variable. Either way, tell me what you’d like to see. Enjoy!

If you think we should see another company on the list then comment about that too.

Omniture recently announced that they are working with Adobe to: “provide greater measurement of rich media for applications built with Adobe® Flash®, Adobe Flex™ and Adobe AIR™” (source). In my opinion this could cause a monopoly for rich media analytics, but hopefully they would share with the rest of us.

What jumped into my mind first when I heard this was the fact that traditional analytics companies like Nielsen Media Research are losing their share with measuring audiences, especially internet audiences. The second thing that came to mind, and the fact one that affects a lot more of us, is that gathering analytics from most Adobe products will be expensive and on a tight leash.

The architecture of flash, adobe products are traditionally constructed as independent files. Advanced flash development can produce a file that provides usability and interaction with the user, which can help the webmaster in collecting data off these files (mostly from where the user navigates to from the rich media file). Otherwise the entire flash file is one link, which does very little for a webmaster because it provides the same data as a link.

What would do a lot of goof for my view of Adobe and Omniture is to produce a free syndicated application or service that can be imbed into flash which reports to a analytics system (which Omniture just happens to specialize in).

If Omniture and Adobe’s collaboration is kept on a tight leash then the analytics for rich media like flash will become very expensive and available. You might say they could have a monopoly on the data.

I pose the question then as to how webmasters and those in charge of analytics are getting data off their rich media files and plan to in the future?

I’d also like to know what you think a cooperation between Omniture, Adobe and YouTube would produce in testing and developing greater analytics for the public, since they are trying to do that anyway.