eMetrics Boston 2012 Highlights

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend eMetrics in Boston. (I actually started this blog post on the plane home but am only now finishing… I blame on-boarding a new job for taking up all my free time ;)) No surprise, it was a great time. I learned a lot, met some great industry people, and had a fun time. Given that there was 3 full days of content, I’ll give a recap of the major takeaways and some notes from a few of my favorite sessions but I won’t break down each session individually. Let me know what you think! Big Takeaways: 1. Tag Management! With the announcement of Google Tag Management, the acceptance and proliferation of tag management across the board will see a sharp
Continue reading...

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
Continue reading...

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 –
Continue reading...

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
Continue reading...

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?).
Continue reading...

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
Continue reading...

Twitter: the #PowerofSocial as a Customer Service Tool

We’ve all been there… cancelled flights, headaches, worries of never getting rescheduled, and an endless phone tree that takes forever to wade through… and now enter the #powerofsocial I happened to pick a particularly dark and stormy weekend to travel on a recent trip from SFO to Virginia. The day of my flight, I get an automated phone call from Delta letting me know my flight had been canceled. Crap, what do I do?! First reaction was to get on the phone with customer service. 30 minutes later I hadn’t gotten anywhere and was dropped shortly after finally connecting with an agent. *Lightbulb* – Delta has a Twitter assist handle. Why not give it a try? It couldn’t hurt. Turns out, Delta’s @DeltaAssist handle gave me one of the best
Continue reading...

Social Media’s Impact on Love

A tribute to Valentine’s Day (thanks Guy Kawasaki and Julianna Rae) 60% of Facebook users list their relationship status. Wow, that number in and of itself is says a lot in terms of the amount of private data that people today are willingly exposing to the world wide web. As we become a much more social world, the trend is to share more and more about our personal lives with everyone else. It will be interesting to watch this trend and privacy laws evolve over the next few years. Infographic:
Continue reading...