WebTrends Engage 2009 London – Day 2

• Web Analytics
• October 15, 2009

The second and final day of WebTrends… did it fall flat?  Did fewer people turn up?  Was the hangover from the party on the first night enough to persuade people to stay in bed?  No! Its was just as good and I even turned up late!

I think that everyone will agree that the Roaring 20s party was a huge success!  The initial serving of beer and wine in coffee cups with a lady singing old classics from the Cotton Club / Duke Ellington era.  Before anyone asks no I’m not that old but, do know the music!  As usual I did take a few photos but, lets see what comments we get before I put any up on the blog.  We ok maybe one:….

So what happened in Day 2.  Well the three streams remained but the technical stream was an all day developer day where the techies sat down and looked how they could build apps using the apis and data extraction.  I’m sure that there was more than a little competition and Nick Sharp told me that the room was absolutely packed! 

I sadly arrived late and missed Vinesh Chauhan’s presentation and yes he did make me feel more than guilty (but after trying 3 train stations in the North Kent area to get a parking space I was amazed to be there before noon as it was). 

The first session I attended was Justin Kistner and he showed the audience the importance  of having an effective social media strategy and its impact on reputation, brand awareness, authority and search engine optimisation.  Questions were raised to the audience about how many were twittering whilst he was talking and yes I did put up my hand (I had a look at some Twitter analysis tools and it turned out that on Day 1 of WebTrends Engage I did 52 tweets and on day two 47 – wonder what happened on day 2 hmmm).   I wrote a blog post about it during the lunch break and have put a link at the bottom of this post.  Have a read!

Then it was @drcasio (Christian Howes in real life).  He was talking about the integration of online and offline data and how essential it was to business success.  By bringing together all the data sources which involve the customers (which is pretty much all of them – telephony, purchase, online behaviour, shop transaction) you are able to see where the process is failing.  Is your site pushing customers to the telephone when a FAQ section would suffice? (there are obvious cost benefits here)  What about if your customers are pushed to a store and you’re unable to track that the sale originated online because that is where the customer was researching that new ipod, dress, telephone, holiday? 

This is especially true in financial services.  Banks promote their products online and in some cases sell them.  However, only a few banks have taken the bold step of using digital signatures thus allowing the entire sales process to be completed online.  In most cases the application is scored online, accepted, yet you need to sign a document, send it back and then seven days later you get your card.  However, then you need to call up to activate it.  Thus touching three channels of communication.  Obviously, with some more complicated products like mortgages a face-to-face usually works better even though an agreement-in-principal is available online.

The next session was entitled ‘Harnessing the power of your analytics data’.  The analytics manager from Thetrainline.com talked about the implementation of WebTrends and how by extracting the information from WebTrends rather than giving executives access was the best way to get them to read the reports.  Lets face it few executives (other than the geeky ones) would be interested or have the time to log into an analytics tool and look for the information they need.  What impressed me most was Richard Rowsen said that they had a tag management tool in place (whether proprietry or bought in from say Tag-Man or ClickStream) – this meant that tags could be changed/added/deleted within a couple of hours.  Just goes to show lon g gone are the days of scheduling in weekly changes.

Finally, it was @drcasio’s turn again along with @justinkistner.  They gave a pretty good double act.  Pretty funny when Justin was asking about who was Johnnie Carson’s sidekick and Christian just looked up and said “They’re English they won’t know!”

Justin and Christian gave some interesting tips on metrics that matter to the social media network and an understanding of the networking between websites, social networking and value!  Now I say value rather than revenue because it means a lot more.  Value includes revenue, reputation, customer service, retention and more!  For example I twittered recently about Facebook and using the hashtag ‘Facebook’ immediately got a retweet from a Facebook twitter account.  So in the world of instant customer service you could be in a queue for Starbucks, send a moaning or complaining twitter using the necessary hashtags, then the franchise manager is sent an email from the ’social media’ team and the customer is then placated by given a free cookie?  That would be ideal!  However, I’d still vote for more Baristas and quicker service – all we want is coffee!!!!!!

How many of you follow @drcasio (Christian Howes) – if you do then I’m sure you’re aware that he tweets quite regularly about the UK’s most popular shows, Big Brother, Strictly and more.  Now I’m not the most avid watcher of such programmes (although Strictly Come Dancing is quite good) but, Christian does a lot of social watching on these – who is the most popular house mate according to mentions on twitter.  He got even so popular at it that he showed a video of ‘Big Brother Little Brother’ (a talk show which comments on the Big Brother show) where he is speficially mentioned and his graphs showing perceived popularity are shown on TV.  Not bad at all Christian!

NICE SOCKS CHRISTIAN!!! 

Related Blog Posts:

Justin Kistner talks at Engage about Social Media Strategies

Engage09 Events and Conferences London Web Analytics WebTrends