I am an advocate of an agency/club whose mission statement is to bring commonality, openness and simplicity to a complicated industry. It is great to have information pushed to you, see future trends and see other people’s opinions - best practice, benchmarking and so on. However, is it better to have such an organisation based in America where most of the vendors are situated (Webtrends in Oregan and Omniture in Utah) and where most of the innovation is happening? Or would it better to have something more local where local vendors are more prominent? For example WebTrekk in Germany and AT Internet in France. In the UK (where we have companies like SpeedTrap, RedEye and Site Intelligence). Currently, it is such networking events like the WAWs where we can meet other consultants and shre ideas, insights and best practice.
As Regional Coordinator of the Web Analytics Association for the entire UK I am responsible for delivering member value and raising awareness that there is an association for web analytics professionals.
A little history about the WAA. It was set up in 2003 by Jim Sterne and others after a gathering in the bar after an eMetrics meeting. The reasoning behind setting up the association was because whilst the vendors have their own education programmes and insight; they don’t have a holistic approach. So vendors could be talking about the same things but using different phrases or have a different understanding.
Their main aims are:
- Help standardize the terms, definitions, and best practices used by our entire industry.
- Influence legislation that affects you and the web analytics industry as a whole.
- Develop and implement training and certification programs thereby strengthening the professionalism of our entire trade.
- Unite web analytic professionals, consultants, and end-users to discuss, combine forces and powerfully promote our common interests worldwide.
Now in January 2008 the WAA published a survey of the web analytics “Outlook” for 2008. I set up an evening (20th March 2008) to discuss this with the vendors and UK WAA members.
We had a representative from Omniture (David Sigerson), the venerable Neil Mason and Vicky Brock, Ed Chatham from iPerceptions and many loyal WAA members. Neil kindly recorded the whole evening and I will post that on my blog soon.
Its interesting what came out of the conversation. Firstly, the use of blogs to share knowledge in an organisation, the concerns that those blogs could be soon classified as spam because of the volume of blogs that we all register and try to read on a daily basis. However, also how some businesses used blogs in order to get things done quicker rather than go through standard process and procedures. Clearly, blogs aren’t going to work in all organisations. However, even in financial services blogs are used to make executives seem more personable rather than a rank. In Barclays / Barclaycard the chief executive’s regularly blog on their diaries and its not just on how successful their meetings were or how a call center visit went. It is more about themselves. The perfect one was a diary entry for a certain executive who was travelling Africa and spoke to a British ex-pat who had started out a small fishing business and is now a multi millionaire. Stories like that always make me smile.
There were also questions raised about where does web analytics sit and what level to impact does IT have in the process. Now from my experience there is always a close relationship between IT and the web analytics areas (although not always such a close relationship between marketing and web analytics). Change requests are submitted and depending on the scale a project manager may be assigned to see the change through. It may then be passed onto a testing team (or more likely the web analyst themselves).
Is this the best way to get things done? Is this an effective use of the web analysts time (rather than just specifying the requirements and then waiting for the change to happen so he/she can then configure the reports and manage stakeholders’ expectations). I’d like to hear what you guys have to say on this?
I’ll write more about the evening over the weekend and as mentioned earlier I’ll post the
Miles Bennett has recently received a lovely award from the Web Analytics Association. So thanks to Jim Sterne, Brian Induni and Neil Mason.
I’m always a great fan of RedEye seminars. I’ve been going to many of them since I got into web analytics when I was working at the Abbey. Bertie Stephenson (formerly of Redeye and now Sales Director of Global Reviews) introduced me to some fantasic people – Jim Sterne, Mike Grehan, Mark Ritson, Pat Gildea, Dr Dave Chaffey. Made some great contacts (some of whom I’ve worked with – Alex Gallagher (formerly of Coutts and now an Internet Marketing Manager at Barclays).
Jim Sterne was in town and a number of weeks ago he contact myself and Neil Mason (International Director of the WAA) saying that he was going to be in town and could we organise an event. With my WAA hat on I found a fantastic venue and then who did we invite.
