I'm Blogging Over Here, Now...

I've moved my blog to WordPress. Over here.

Sentiment Marketing is Coming - and it Looks More Like Direct Marketing than You Think

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X Change 2008 - Be There!

I'm very happy to be able to say that I'll be attending the X Change 2008 conference in San Francisco this August. In my book it is the best web analytics conference running due to its intimate, participatory, and conversational format. If you did not attend the inaugural X Change conference last year in Napa, you really missed something special.

Special kudos to Eric T. Peterson and Web Analytics Demystified for sponsoring this year's event, too.

I'm really excited for this year's X Change. It's shaping up to be even better than last year, if that's possible. I'll blog more about it soon.

Eric T. Peterson Doubts the Importance of Twitter

Eric Peterson spoke at Web Analytics Wednesday last night at WebTrends HQ in Portland. As usual, he was engaging and animated. I'd say there were about 30 people in attendance, and Eric kept the attention of every one of them. The question and answer session went on for 20 to 30 minutes.

Afterwards, a smaller group of us, including Eric, went to Dragonfish for beer and sushi (Eric's treat -- thanks Eric!). Eventually the conversation turned to Twitter. I found myself in the unexpected position of being the only one in the room who a) uses Twitter; and b) actually understood what Twitter is, how it is used, and it's potential value to the marketing organization.

Eric actually went on record with this statement (paraphrasing here): "Twitter has no value. You can't measure it. It's just a bunch of people talking." (Cue uproarious laughter.) Eric's a friend of mine, so I'm poking fun at him here. But seriously, I think he's missing the boat.

I can think of a way that Twitter is immediately measurable with web analytics, and some ways that it can be measured or support future measurement outside of traditional web analytics.

Use it as a viral or direct marketing tool. Use a URL minimizer (or smallerizer, as I like to call them) such as Twurl for all embedded links. Twurl has built in measurement, allowing you to see click-throughs on all your links. It's just an experimental tool at this point, but there are a lot of things it's creator, Rick Turoczy, could do with it. Of course, you could put a web analytics campaign tracking code on the redirect URL to track response and subsequent site behavior, too. Seems pretty measurable.

Use it to mine past or monitor for present conversations occurring about your brand. Track those conversations across the social mediasphere as they start on blogs, move to Twitter, and then end up back on the blog again. Use this as a component of buzz measurement. Go a step further and score sentiment. Are people talking positively about your brand or negatively about your brand. Identify the influencers and model the conversations. Are you trending in a negative sentiment direction? Does a negative comment from an influencer change the sentiment of those in their sphere of influence? Twitter's APIs provide access to a massively rich source of data about conversations about your brand, and even provide the FULL TEXT of the conversation. We're not too much engineering effort away from being able to mine that data, follow the conversations to other social platforms, map out who's influencing who, and get notified who you who you should be engaging and why.

As I write this Chris Grant and John Hawbaker are having a conversation on Twitter about the the engagement model Eric Peterson has proposed.

Regardless of measurement, though. Twitter is important for the same reason that blogs you don't write are important. Your brand has an online community whether you choose to participate in it or not. (I read that somewhere, but I don't remember who said it. Citation, anyone?) Participating allows you to impact the conversation.

Update: Forgot to mention, Eric did create a twitter account from his iPhone last night while he was arguing its unimportance. Welcome aboard, Eric. ;-)

Web Analytics Wednesday (as in Thursday) at WebTrends HQ tomorrow.

Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland will be held tomorrow (Thursday) at WebTrends HQ. Eric Peterson will be presenting on The Future of Web Analytics. If you are in Portland, please plan to attend.

More info and RSVP here: http://twurl.cc/t2

Measuring Web 2.0 Technologoes - Panel Discussion

I'll be a panelist on the Web Analytics Association's upcoming webcast Measuring Web 2.0 Technologies on Thursday, March 20, 2008 @ 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT. Other panelists include Brett Crosby of Google Analytics, Brian Tomz of Coremetrics, and Wes Funk of Omniture.

If you want to hear some lively discussion, I recommend that you register and attend.

Narrowing the GAP

Here's another example of a languishing brand attempting a turn-around. The GAP hasn't stood for anything in particular in years (except bland, I guess). I'm not sure they've actually narrowed the focus to a point where they will be successful.

Laura Ries has some thoughts on what happened and where they should go. It's an interesting read, and I recommend it.

This will be another one to watch.

Semphonic X Change 2008

The 2nd annual Semphonic X Change is now on the calendar. Eric Peterson has some good thoughts about last year's conference.

I was a huddle leader (there are no presenters) at X Change 2007, and it was an awesome experience. X Change is different because we are all there to learn from each other in intimate, small group settings. As a huddle leader, what I witnessed was a group of people who realized that each of them held key pieces of knowledge that, if they opened up to the group, became incredibly valuable as a part of the whole body of knowledge and experience contained in the room. We all learned far more from each other through discussion than any of us would have learned just listening to me talk.

If you have a chance to go this year, I highly recommend it. I hope to be there myself.