René and I (“Wandering” Dave Rhee) had the pleasure of attending eMetrics Munich last week, where we were able to meet with many of the other thought leaders in the Web Analytics industry. We are delighted to sponsor such a gathering of the industry’s finest minds, and the reason we recommend to OX2’s existing analytics clients as well as our analytics prospects who are already LBi Group agency clients is because of the breadth of real case studies you can find presented.
In the early years of the industry, back when Jim Sterne and OX2 partner Eric T. Peterson were just getting started with the Web Analytics Association (which we are also proud to sponsor), the discussions were usually about tools, what they could measure, and what they couldn’t. Even recently, when we’d grown to understand that both logfile analysis and page tagging solutions were complementary, and not competitive with each other, we’d hear the endless debates about cookie deletion, or today’s technology-based issues such as how to tag flash or video. (Should AJAX events be considered page views? It depends on what’s important to you!)
What keeps the conference fresh and exciting, though, is that each year, in each city (Munich, San Francisco, London, Stockholm, Washington DC, or Toronto), practitioners show up to tell us what works for them — and more importantly, what interesting and unexpected ways their analytics initiative may have failed to drive their business forward, so that we can all profit from their lessons learned. Now, it’s rare in any industry to find such cooperation between practitioners, whose firms are ostensibly competitors, and we give Jim and his team all due credit for taking the time to find presenters who understand that thinking carefully about what didn’t work as expected can be just as good an investment of your time as building on your past successes.
In that spirit of cooperation, I’m happy to cite as one of my favorite sessions this year the presentation covering how to monetize online activities, delivered by Chris Kerns, Director of Analytics for Zaaz. Unfortuantely, Iris Laband from their German office was sick that day, so Chris delivered it in English rather than German, but judging from the heads nodding in agreement during his talk, it’s clear that language wasn’t a barrier towards understanding that every online activity can be assigned a monetary value. As our own experience has proven, getting to the final value often is not the true goal of the exercise. Instead, getting management, and especially non-marketing management, to consider all the ways in which online activities can drive profit and cost savings to your business model in unexpected ways, is an eye-opener for most organizations.
Chris shared with me later a nice example of how American soft-drink company Dr. Pepper challenged music group Guns N Roses to release their long-delayed album, or Dr. Pepper would offer a free drink to everyone in the U.S.
Of course, there is some natural PR value associated with this clever, viral promotion, but to use a thoughtful methodology to find that the value is on the order of $8MM, and if they “lose” their bet, actually double that amount, was the kind of insight that all clients can benefit from.
Unfortunately, while I was listening to Chris’s talk, I missed out on another one I really wanted to hear — Fred Türling from SHS Viveon AG speaking about Web 2.0 Communities — Analysis, Segmentation, and Communication. However, I did get the chance to speak with him at length during some of the session breaks, and was impressed by the work his team has done with Social Network Analytics, the subject of my own Ph.D. dissertation. While my focus is on the best practices of community moderators to improve goals (such as driving revenue, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction), Fred’s tools are geared specifically towards marketing segmentation of a community audience. I believe our ideas are quite complementary, and look forward to collaborating with them together in the future. We each have quite a bit to offer clients who are serious about developing a sound, metrics-based social network strategy, and understand that only a very few firms have the deep understanding necessary to help manage online communities effectively.
All in all, another great eMetrics Summit, and I hope to see you in San Francisco!
0 Responses to “eMetrics Summit Munich 2008”