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Roller Coasters, Conference Innovations & Your Thoughts on Engage
A bit less than 10 months ago I was invited to attend Ignite Portland by two of my colleagues Justin & Michele. To be completely transparent I didn’t know what to expect and suffice to say I was blown away.
A little history on how Ignite began
Ignite got its start in Seattle in December, 2006, as a personal project of O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. They dreamed up an event where people could share their ideas over beer, and sent word out through their network. On December 7, two hundred Seattle geeks looking for “a fun night of geekery and networking” squeezed into a bar on Capitol Hill. They found beer, but so much more. First up, a friendly but intense competition to build the sturdiest popsicle-stick bridge. Then 25 intrepid locals took a turn on the stage for their five-minute Ignite talks. The consensus was that it was a blast. Word got out, and other communities wanted Ignite in their cities. Brady and Bre turned the event over to O’Reilly, and nearly 200 Ignites have been held, about half of them in the past year. As Ignite enters its fourth year, O’Reilly is launching Global Ignite Week to celebrate, amplify, and share the Ignite phenomenon.The video below is from an Ignite in Seattle and it’s one of my favorite examples of what Ignite’s are all about.
I’ve been very fortunate to have had many opportunities to speak publicly and I’ve attended no less than a couple hundred conferences during my professional career. As both a speaker and an attendee I’ve struggled with the traditional conference setup that is more often than not highlighted by a 45 minute keynote. When was the last time you didn’t start fidgeting when you listened to 45 minutes of anyone talking at you?
“Be brillant, but make it quick” is Ignite’s tagline and make no mistake Ignite was never and probably will never be billed as a a corporate event still, there is something special about the format that inspires. As I experienced my first Ignite in Portland I couldn’t help but think there was and should be a translation to the tired conference format we’ve all come to know.
On our cab ride back to the office Justin, Michele and I brainstormed about what we could do to innovate on the format of our customer conference Engage. We decided then we’d use Ignite as our muse and try to turn our conference on it’s head…in a good way of course.
If you’ve ever ridden on a rollercoaster there is a point, right before it drops into the first (and usually biggest) drop. It’s quiet with anticipation and all you hear is the ‘click…click…click…click’ of the chain pulling the cars to the launch pad. Right when you look over the edge there is a moment of anticipation, some would even say fear, that make the first drop amazingly satisfying. Last week, myself and the team were pulling our way to the launch pad and the anticipation was palpable.
Here we are 11 months later and a week after our Engage conference in New Orleans, where we introduced the concept of a ’sprint’ a 5 or 10 minutes opportunity for marketing leaders to be brilliant and we invited some of the best minds in marketing and customer intelligence.
Here is an example of one of my favorite sprints by Steve Woods of Eloqua:
Suffice to say I was thrilled with the outcome.
It was a great pleasure for the Webtrends staff and myself to host our customers, partners, and media at Engage 2010 in New Orleans. Many thanks to our speakers and sponsors for making this event the most fun and informative event we’ve ever held.
We’re already thinking of ways to change the game again next year in San Francisco!
While this one is fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d like to ask for your feedback on how the conference was for you.
How was the space?
The speakers?
Was the food good?
Did the wifi hold up well?
Anything you thought was missing?
What was your favorite part?
What should we try next year?
Please let me know by commenting on this blog or on our conference network or hit us on twitter.
Thanks.
Jascha
Does The Military Need Better Analytics?
Or does the Military need better data visualization?
There was a story published on the New York Times January 10th uncovering a deluge of information brought to the modern day military primarily via their drone programs. The article digs further into a handful of young analysts turning to techniques used by television to help them sift through the information.
Daniel A. Becker’s Random Walk: Could a visualization like this be the key to understanding massive amounts of video data in Afghanistan?
I, for one, think the military is missing the boat here. Television and television broadcasting as an industry hasn’t shown an early adoption for many of the techniques more common in business intelligence and forget about data visualization. Wouldn’t the government be more likely catch important information from the data collected in programs like the one written about if they were visualizing the information more like a digg labs or the visualization of randomness? I think so.
What do you think?
Top 5 trend predictions for analytics in 2010
December is a very popular time for retrospectives and predictions. As the weather grows colder and the holiday seasons approaches, we often look back to remember what has happened in our world. We also look forward, to the future, to imagine what lies in store for us in the future. As the CEO of Webtrends, I have a unique perspective about what the past and future holds for the web analytics industry, and have compiled some of my thoughts on upcoming trends.
In the year 2010, businesses will devote more time and money than ever to data integration and segmentation. They will also continue to seek out insight into the mobile industry and social web behavior, both of which will experience strong growth in the next year.
As we’ve seen the web progress to multi-threaded interactions across multiple domains, the year of 2010 will be one in which web analytics is re-invented. In 2010, we’ll see an increase in adoption of digital marketing, optimization, and real-time analytics, laying the foundation for the consumption and utilization of data that will give organizations incomparable insight into their business operations.
Here are our predictions in the web analytics industry for 2010:
- Multivariate testing and site optimization will cross the chasm and become an imperative for online businesses and marketing departments of any reasonable size. Next generation solutions will leverage proven approaches, ease of use, and expert services to enable this transition.
- 2010 will be the year that integration of online with other enterprise data will take off. Consumers are demanding that companies they engage with take into account their cross-channel behavior during interaction and as we go into 2010, if consumers are not receiving this tailored, informed interaction, they will find a new company to buy from.
- Interactive marketing will continue to gain adoption in 2010, as we’ll see email marketing, web analytics, and traditional campaign management vendors race to become the owners of the “hub” for interactive marketing, along with optimization and analytics.
- 2010 will define the principals for social marketing and lay the foundation for the next decade of marketing. As people recognize that media is still media, and that social is about behavior, the social behavior theory will emerge. Social search will heat up among top search players, thus the nature of SEO will give way to SSO and enterprise social platforms will hit a tipping point.
- Mobile applications continued to grow throughout 2009 and will explode in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, Apple will continue to grow as their exclusivity with AT&T expires next year and Android will accelerate exponentially as more droid phones will be brought into the market and developers will surge at the openness of the platform. This will give way to application analytics that will be generate significant buzz within the web analytics industry.
As you can see, there are (potentially) many exciting developments in store for the web analytics industry. I suggest you keep an eye on cross-channel behaviors, offline/online data integration, and developments in the social measurement and mobile web industries.
On behalf of Webtrends, I hope your own retrospectives are insightful and your predictions are realized. Happy holidays!
Should support through Twitter be free?
Social Media is rapidly becoming a legitimate channel and medium for doing business. In fact, it is more than legitimate; I would argue that it is quickly becoming a table stake. As more companies adopt social media as a support and service channel, some interesting questions start to arise. One can imagine some interesting legal issues born out of the blurring of the personal nature of social network interactions and the obligations and responsibilities of the company. Once you have entered the arena, what expectations should the “groundswell” have of the company? Some implications that come to mind for me:
Twitter and Service Agreements (SLAs)
How do you deal with entitlements and SLAs for people using Twitter as a support channel? The notion of verification of entitlement seems contrary to the very nature of the medium. Nonetheless, could offering free Twitter support erode the perceived value of an SLA? One way to address this is to collect Twitter handles from your SLA customers. If you collected all your customers’ Twitter handles in a database, you could then use a social media monitoring tool to receive alerts, automatically create a new case, and thereby respond quickly and efficiently when a customer tweets about your product. It would also mean ignoring tweets from unsupported accounts, which has implications of its own. At the end of the day, you need to recognize both entitled contacts, i.e. those with a support agreement and those who don’t. For customers who have a service contract, Twitter becomes just another way to contact you and having that contact’s Twitter handle is just another entry in the customer record. For the rest, I don’t think there is an expectation of a direct response, just that someone is listening and will engage in some way. The value of monitoring and being aware of this traffic is that a company can decide to take, or not take, an action to respond in a broader way, i.e. creating a blog entry, white paper, or knowledgebase entry. By doing this, the company is engaged but not in the same one-to-one way that they engage with customers with service contracts.
Twitter support ≠ Phone and email support
Support via Twitter, whether free or paid, cannot and should not replace the support relationship with a company by way of entitled or contracted service. If the idea of collecting Twitter handles and ignoring tweets from non-customers doesn’t appeal to you, another option is switching to a new medium, such as phone or email, whenever a case arises that requires escalation. From there, it’s easy to identify whether or not someone is entitled to receive support. This also keeps your Twitter account from getting bogged down in support requests and allows it to do what it’s designed to do – engage in conversations, identify trends, and take a pulse on what is working or not from a macro sense. Google’s bio on Twitter states that “Tech support in 140 characters or less doesn’t work…” and they are 100% correct. For technology companies, diagnosis of a technical problem or even explanation of a complex user scenario requires a more direct, and usually interrogatory, form of communication.
Technology is constantly creating new challenges for the law and we’re still figuring this stuff out. The larger implications of this convergence remain to be seen. What do you think?
The “Marketing Stack”
Have you sat down with your IT organization lately to discuss your company’s enterprise architecture framework? Did you know that having that discussion is crucial to your success as a marketer?
Our business as marketers has changed. We can attribute this change to data. Once a competitive advantage, data is now table stakes. It fuels our businesses. To be successful, it is a requirement to use this data to iterate, to continually adjust and improve. What has been traditionally referred to as the “IT stack” has made its way into marketing vernacular. Just as the IT stack enables an assortment of applications and software to work in concert to perform tasks, consider the ‘marketing stack’ as a combination of those same services and technologies needed to empower an effective iterative marketer and create game-changing marketing programs and campaigns.
A scalable, flexible marketing stack that enables iteration has three key components:
• Business Process (sales, marketing alignment, accountability, efficiency, etc.)
• Campaign Management (social listening, optimization, campaign efficiency, take rates, opens, etc.)
• Data Architecture (customer intelligence, CRM, etc.)
This is an oversimplified view for the purposes of this discussion, but it offers a framework within which to work. Here’s what we do at Webtrends….
Business Process:
Iterative marketing thrives when we recognize that the goals of Sales and Marketing can and should exist harmoniously. Ultimately, this means that Sales and Marketing agree to co-own the sales funnel and accountability on how that will be executed against. Further, iterative marketing accepts the fact that failure is a way to learn and will be celebrated.
At Webtrends, we have built an organizational structure and operate against values that support the iterative model. We support the idea of the noble failure and celebrate both successes and failures equally. We’ve also recently rolled out a new model for accountability with the sales department, including a worldwide sales and marketing funnel defining suspects, leads, qualified leads, through to closed business.
Campaign & Asset Management:
We’ve adopted iterative marketing as an operational methodology. Test, Learn, Improve, Repeat across all campaigns and assets.
• The team meets for daily scrums to check in on progress against priorities
• We’ve added new members qualified to handle the rapid pace.
• We’ve moved more communications to a collaboration portal for faster and better communications (less synthesis required, improved version control, less organization of local files, etc.)
• We take advantage of technologies like Webtrends Optimize, Ad Director, and Social Measurement to facilitate this process in an automated fashion where available.
Data Architecture:
Your marketing stack must enable iterative marketing, not hinder it. This sounds simple but it’s something I’ve run into again and again when trying to execute. Some of the principles to consider:
• Include Social Media: Your customers interact with your brand and products off your site, and utilizing a tool like Webtrends Social Measurement that will integrate with your Webtrends Analytics 9 data is hugely important. The technology, along with supporting business processes, can make substantive and positive impacts on your business in groups broader than just marketing.
• Marketing automation is a must: Understand how your marketing campaigns align with your digital asset investments and further align to your sales funnel. We use Eloqua at Webtrends.
• Business process change powers your experimentation platform: One of the most important learned lessons with an experimentation platform is that you have to enable your Creative Director to be successful. Utilizing a service and platform that can help get your team up and running with the new business processes and then running it on your own is a great tactic to get value faster. We use Webtrends Optimize because we not only get the most advanced platform on the market but we have access to an amazing team of experts.
• Analytics are the mothership: We use Webtrends Analytics 9 and Marketing Warehouse at Webtrends. Possibly this goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. Analytics are the mothership for your Marketing stack and you have to have unfettered access to all your visitor level data. Webtrends is the only provider who can do that for you and we certainly take advantage of what Webtrends has to offer.
• Integrating online and offline data should be a goal if it’s applicable for your business: Solid analytics and customer intelligence tools that enable you to look at the data together and take action are hugely important for business that operate in multiple channels. There is a great webinar taking place on Dec 2 that you should check out if you want to learn more about this.
Here’s an analogy that I think can be helpful to illustrate the concept of marketing iteration in present-day organizations:
In most of Europe, it’s really easy to be energy-efficient because the societal infrastructure supports it. Everyone has low-flow showers and toilets, energy costs more so people make a tremendous effort to conserve it, mass transit is ubiquitous and awesome, pesticide and farming laws mean that food is more sustainably produced, etc. This entire supporting framework (a combination of laws and cultural norms that transcends individual behavior) makes it much easier for individuals to “do the right thing”, per se. America is, obviously, quite different. Even if you want to be more efficient as an individual, you’re constantly at odds with culture, laws and institutions that, in many cases, make it harder to live sustainably (our dependency on cars is one example). I think of iterative marketing the same way. You can have individuals in an organization who champion it or try to be iterative, but in order to really succeed across the organization, you need to have a company-wide culture, the right marketing stack and processes that support iterative marketing.
In summary, at Webtrends, our data architecture is comprised of social media data (via Webtrends Social Measurement) campaign performance data (via Eloqua), Multivariate experimentation data (via Webtrends Optimize) and visitor + trend data (via Webtrends Analytics & Marketing Warehouse) along with all the supporting cultural and business process changes that act as the glue between the components of the stack.
What is in your marketing stack?
Does the rise of Social Media make web analytics more important?
I recently had the opportunity to join Scott Hoffman, founder of CLIQOLOGY and a friend of mine from my days at Yahoo!, on his podcast. We discussed “Does the rise of Social Media make web analytics more important?” Short answer: Yes. It was a great discussion and Scott was kind enough to package it up and provide me a link to share which i’ve done below.
If you have any comments or questions please leave them below.
See Jascha Kaykas-Wolff @ Web 2.0 Expo In New York
I was fortunate enough to have been invited by Sean Power and Alistair Croll to participate in a panel during their Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (February 16). I’ll be on the panel with Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics, and Jonathan Straus the founder of awe.sm. The bootcamp is sold out, Sean and Alistair don’t mess around, and I hear it will be quite the audience of attendees…all the ingredients for a great event!
Architecting for Customer Feedback
WOW! what an eventful summer – I was so focused on our product releases of Summer ‘09 (Analytics 9!) and the upcoming Fall ‘09 that I neglected this space. I can’t argue with this priority given the results. And, from the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers, soon to be customers and partners it appears we are onto something here. These releases are the result of much hard work from the amazing and talented team I have the honor to work with at Webtrends. They clearly demonstrate our commitment to innovation, architectural integrity and our customers.
For today’s discussion I want to focus on our customers and how their needs reshaped the Engineering organization at Webtrends. Many of the innovations we have pushed out have direct customer feedback at the core of the effort. We have strived to “bring the customer directly into Engineering” so that we are designing our solutions with direct feedback from those who will leverage them. A fallacy around technical teams is that they wish to be shielded from the market – this is of course complete nonsense with the reality that engineers crave real world examples and the more we can bring our customers into the process of developing our solutions the more value our solutions will deliver to our customers.
But this simple goal – customer centricity – it is not simple in execution. Much has been written on the challenge with a seminal work being the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. We must balance our customer’s immediate needs with their declared and anticipated future needs. And the speed of change is only increasing thus the speed of our change in our customer’s business is increase. We need to be able to receive feedback and adjust to it at an ever increasing frequency. Listening to our customers is critical, but even more critical is responding to our customers in a timeframe that is relevant to them.
As I looked at this challenge eighteen months ago I realized that for us to respond to our customer’s feedback in a timely manner we needed to change a number of core business processes at Webtrends. Prior to focusing on implementing customer feedback mechanisms and processes (which we have now built directly into our products), we focused our ability to respond to the feedback.
Let me explain – looking at it from the customer’s perspective: how do I influence a 12-15 month development cycle? I will have to time my input for the first few months of the vendor’s development effort and then I hope that my requirements remain consistent for the next 9-12 months. Not a very likely scenario with today’s pace of evolutionary and revolutionary change. Once viewed from the customer standpoint it is pretty clear that we needed to change the way we developed our products before we could truly increase our customer intimacy and centricity.
In waterfall, work is done in phases and comes together in the end. In agile, work is also done in phases, but work is released at each stage.
Starting in summer of 2008 we set out to transform the Webtrends Engineering organization to a truly agile organization. This was not an easy process – nor was it painless for our customers. But it was critical for Webtrends and we are now seeing the benefits of this transformation. By releasing every 3-4 months we have dramatically shortened the timeframe between feedback and delivery. We now respond to our customers needs in a timeframe that is still highly relevant to their business. Looking again from the customer’s perspective, I don’t think I would choose a vendor who isn’t as agile as my business…
Busy summer moving from waterfall to agile
WOW! what an eventful summer – I was so focused on our product releases of Summer ‘09 (Analytics 9!) and the upcoming Fall ‘09 that I neglected this space. I can’t argue with this priority given the results. And, from the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers, soon to be customers and partners it appears we are onto something here. These releases are the result of much hard work from the amazing and talented team I have the honor to work with at Webtrends. They clearly demonstrate our commitment to innovation, architectural integrity and our customers.
For today’s discussion I want to focus on our customers and how their needs reshaped the Engineering organization at Webtrends. Many of the innovations we have pushed out have direct customer feedback at the core of the effort. We have strived to “bring the customer directly into Engineering” so that we are designing our solutions with direct feedback from those who will leverage them. A fallacy around technical teams is that they wish to be shielded from the market – this is of course complete nonsense with the reality that engineers crave real world examples and the more we can bring our customers into the process of developing our solutions the more value our solutions will deliver to our customers.
But this simple goal – customer centricity – it is not simple in execution. Much has been written on the challenge with a seminal work being the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. We must balance our customer’s immediate needs with their declared and anticipated future needs. And the speed of change is only increasing thus the speed of our change in our customer’s business is increase. We need to be able to receive feedback and adjust to it at an ever increasing frequency. Listening to our customers is critical, but even more critical is responding to our customers in a timeframe that is relevant to them.
As I looked at this challenge eighteen months ago I realized that for us to respond to our customer’s feedback in a timely manner we needed to change a number of core business processes at Webtrends. Prior to focusing on implementing customer feedback mechanisms and processes (which we have now built directly into our products), we focused our ability to respond to the feedback.
Let me explain – looking at it from the customer’s perspective: how do I influence a 12-15 month development cycle? I will have to time my input for the first few months of the vendor’s development effort and then I hope that my requirements remain consistent for the next 9-12 months. Not a very likely scenario with today’s pace of evolutionary and revolutionary change. Once viewed from the customer standpoint it is pretty clear that we needed to change the way we developed our products before we could truly increase our customer intimacy and centricity.
In waterfall, work is done in phases and comes together in the end. In agile, work is also done in phases, but work is released at each stage.
Starting in summer of 2008 we set out to transform the Webtrends Engineering organization to a truly agile organization. This was not an easy process – nor was it painless for our customers. But it was critical for Webtrends and we are now seeing the benefits of this transformation. By releasing every 3-4 months we have dramatically shortened the timeframe between feedback and delivery. We now respond to our customers needs in a timeframe that is still highly relevant to their business. Looking again from the customer’s perspective, I don’t think I would choose a vendor who isn’t as agile as my business…
The little things matter
Recently I took my wife to a highly rated restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District to celebrate our 15th anniversary. I booked the date through Open Table and made sure to note that it was our anniversary. The food was good and the server was responsive but the overall experience was disappointing.
Why?
The host put us at one of the least romantic tables in the dining room, which was completely empty at the time. When we asked for a better location we were told the other tables were “reserved.”By the time we finished eating and left, many of the more desirable tables were still empty. Also, at no time did the restaurant do anything to acknowledge the fact that it was our anniversary. I can think of at least four or five little things that the restaurant could have done to make our experience better and make us want to recommend them to our friends. Instead, I wrote a critical review on Open Table, I can’t recommend them, and I will not return in the future.
I have been passionate about creating great customer experiences for almost 25 years. I joined Webtrends because I felt my beliefs about the value of delivering a superior customer experience were shared by our CEO and the rest of the leadership team. Fortunately for me, this has proven to be true. I moved my family from California to Oregon over the summer because I firmly believe that our company “gets it” when it comes to the true meaning of customer focus. I also believe that when clients give you money, they have certain inalienable rights, including the right to receive real value for the commitments they have made to you. Often, those commitments go beyond money. Many times, the people who are responsible for selecting you put their reputations on the line.
I have been an interested observer, and casual user, of social media for the last few years. In the past year I have become keenly interested in how these technologies, and the associated changes in human behavior, are affecting the ways in which companies interact with their customers and the world at large.
Now I am ready to take the next step into the social media world by starting my own blog. I want to use this forum to share my ideas about creating a superior customer experience, share stories about some of my personal experiences receiving either great service or lousy service, and to share ideas about how to turn customers into evangelists and disciples.
I hope this blog will start a dialog about what frustrates and delights you as a customer, not just with Webtrends, but in general. I hope those who follow us will find the stories and information both useful and even entertaining.
Webtrends is dedicated to helping companies create and execute superior digital marketing strategies to attract, retain, and recover clients. We are also practitioners of the discipline we profess. I think that companies can “extend” their radar when it comes to customer sentiment by incorporating social media and measurement practices into their operations. In doing so you can be more proactive, maybe even preemptive, in serving your client’s needs. We have started to implement this at Webtrends and I will be speaking about our journey at Technology Services World in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. I will post my presentation on the blog on 10/21 and will follow up with sharing what I learned at the show. In this case, what happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas!
