Human Analytics – The Quantification of Myself

I recently gave a talk about one of my passions, the quantification of self, to my team. Given the great feedback, I’m turning that preso into a blog post to share with everyone! I’d like to note that this preso and subsequent blog post was inspired by an awesome presentation that Michele Kiss gave at the Digital Analytics Association SF Chapter Symposium last fall in San Francisco. You can see her preso on her blog. The market today is full of tools, apps & wearables and the idea of self-quantification is steadily moving towards the mainstream. A lot of my friends have some type of an activity or fitness tracker (though my groups of friends are divided between the Fuelband, Fitbit, and my favorite, the Jawbone UP – each group
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Adobe Summit 2014 Recap

Summary & Key takeaways from Adobe Summit 2014 The Adobe Summit has exploded over the past 3 years as it moved away from the Grand/Little America, where it was still hyper focused on analytics & testing (~2,000 people attending 1-2 years post Omniture acquisition), to a large scale (6,000+ people) pan-digital marketing showcase hosted at the Salt Palace Convention Center. The growth and integration with other tools in their suite has allowed them to shift focus from solely an analytics/optimization product line to a ‘Marketing Cloud’ of tools marketed to the CMO and used across the digital/marketing organization. Here are my top high level takeaways from this year’s Summit: Key themes: Testing, Platform, & Personalization Takeaway #1: Over the past 2 years Adobe has pushed hard on integration & product
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eMetrics Sydney Recap

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend and speak at eMetrics in Sydney, Australia. This was the first conference I had attended or spoke at outside of the US, and a very unique opportunity to see how the digital analytics industry is thriving elsewhere. One thing that stood out to me: the analytics industry in Australia is a tight knit community with a ton of engagement via IAPA which is a similar organization to the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) in the US. It was great to meet and talk with everyone at this event and I walked away very impressed with the level of talent and enthusiasm that I saw. The second thing that stood out to me: Twitter is still an up and coming medium for
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How Social Media Broke the Story of the SFO Plane Crash

Yesterday I had the unfortunate experience of watching the Asiana Airlines flight 214 Boeing 777 crash land at SFO (San Francisco International Airport). While viewing the crash landing, I had my phone out. My first instinct, before all else, was to snap a photo. Then, as I yelled out “Holy shit! A plane just crashed” I began tweeting about the crash. The first tweet and photo of the crash went out to the world before anyone had even finished comprehending what had just happened, within 20-30 seconds of the plane hitting ground. Omg a plane just crashed at SFO on landing as I’m boarding my plane pic.twitter.com/hsVEcVZ2VS — Krista Seiden (@kristaseiden) July 6, 2013 The incredible thing about social media is how instant it is. Within seconds twitter was exploding with
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DAA San Francisco Symposium Recap

This past week I had the pleasure of seeing months of work come together in the form of the DAA San Francisco Chapter Inaugural Symposium. It was a great afternoon of analytics insights and learnings as well as networking and catching up with nearly 200 other industry professionals. The theme for the day was “What’s Next” in Analytics and was carried throughout 3 different tracks: LoSoMo, Big Data, and Careers. Jim Sterne (@jimsterne) kicked off the event with a keynote titled ‘The Key to Omni-Channel Marketing Analytics’ which focused on bringing together the theme of the track ‘Local, Social, and Mobile’ (as well as other marketing channels) to give the consumer a single experience across multiple channels. Jim talked about using online and offline data together to give each customer the
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Issue: Passive Customer Support via Social Channels

I’ve recently been pondering (ok, maybe more like fuming) over customer support via social channels. There is so much diversity in terms of levels of support offered, but to me, one thing is clear: if you have a social presence, I expect you to be responsive when I Tweet/Facebook/G+/etc to you (ok, who really uses G+?!). The proliferation of customer support channels on the social web has engrained this expectation in me. Is it fair to the business? No, not necessarily. But as a customer, do I care? No. I want you to answer my question/complaint/desperate cry for help. Now. Like I said, I’ve been pondering this for a while, but one recent experience has finally convinced me to write a blog post on the topic. My biggest issue –
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eMetrics 2012 Recap

The other week I had the opportunity to attend a few networking events and 1 day of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco. I have to say, I was quite impressed! While the conference itself was jam packed with relevant and interesting content (I had a seriously hard time choosing which sessions to attend), the caliber of the talent who attended the conference was out of this world. I can’t stress enough how important it is in our industry to network, troubleshoot, and spend actual, physical time with others from the industry – it’s a great way to build your personal brand within the industry. It drives home concepts and points that otherwise may have been fuzzy. It allows for building relationships which one day may lead to
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Conferences, Conferences, and more Conferences!

It’s that time of year again… you know, the one where every week brings a new industry conference and you are having trouble choosing between them?! I’m in that boat right now, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on what I find valuable/look for in a conference when choosing amongst the many many options. First of all – is it industry related? Yes? Check. But what parts of the industry? Social Media? Digital Analytics? Mobile? Specific to a vendor? Cross-vendor/tool? There are a lot of ways to slice and dice these conferences (just like data!), so it’s important to know what you are interested in and what will provide the most value to both yourself and your business (after all, it is their time and $$ sending you, right?).
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Digital Analytics Industry Salary Ranges

Searching for a new role? Career change? Be sure to go into the interview process armed with the salary range you think you deserve, based on experience and specialties. There is info all over the web for salary ranges for various roles in Digital Analytics, Web Analytics, Social Media, Digital Marketing, etc. – it’s important you do your research! Some skill sets, in particular, help to drive up your potential salary range (as well as the # of offers you may receive). Tops amongst them is knowledge and hands on experience with the Omniture suite of products. What sets this skill apart from others is the difficulty in gaining it. Omniture is a large, enterprise level tool. There is no free version and no free trainings (unlike Google Analytics and
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