Monish Datta Stays on the Vegetarian Wagon (Sort of) at WAW

I’ve officially dropped off the first page of results for a Google search for Monish Datta. Further proof that SEO is an on-going process! Monish made a crack last year that this blog was going to start dominating search results for his name. I took his wisecrack and ran with it! “Dominate” has never really happened, but I did briefly climb into the top 5 of organic results a few months ago.

From Monish’s tweets, a handful of us knew he had gone vegetarian a few weeks ago, and no one (Monish included) knew how he would fare at a barbecue joint. As it turned out, he ordered fish, which he said was good enough to count as staying on the veggie wagon. Laura Thieme asked if Monish had actually tweeted about what he was eating. Indeed, he has!

Although I wasn’t cognizant of it as I was reading his tweets, Monish has provided fodder to Twitter critics who equate “tweeting about what you eat” to public navel-gazing. The question is: will he now become self-conscious about it, or, rather, will he go to the other extreme and provide detail at every meal? I’m sorta’ hoping for the latter.

Yes, There Was Actually a Topic Beyond Monish’s Diet and Twitter Usage

This month’s event was sponsored by IQ Workforce. Corry Prohens made the trip to central Ohio to present on what he is seeing on the jobs/careers front for web analysts and search marketers.

Highlights of the presentation included:

• The Good News: internet retailers and online advertising have both continued to grow throughout the current economic downturn
• The Bad News: there are more people chasing fewer full-time web analytics jobs, and there are fewer remote/virtual office positions and less willingness/need on the part of companies to relocate candidates to fill positions
• Many people find their way into web analytics as a complement to another role: SEM, SEO, digital media analytics, offline marketing analytics, research/qualitative analysis, BI, etc. Having this complementary skillset clearly identified and articulated can be useful in a job search
• Contracting has its pros (high demand, usually more money, more flexibility, less politics) and its cons (the need to always be selling, limited “depth” with any project/company, travel often required, administrative headaches, and it can be hard to go back to a non-contracting role)
• When trying to hire a web analyst, work directly with the recruiter (don’t use an HR intermediary), write the job description yourself, be clear as to “needs” vs. “wants,” and choose a recruiter with expertise in the area you are hiring

A handful of resources that Corry provided for anyone who is looking to more effectively manage their career in web analytics:

• Job board consolidators such as Indeed and Simply Hired
• IQ Blast — the excellent e-newsletter that IQ Workforce produces
• The Web Analytics Association
• Analytics Demystified (Eric Peterson’s company)
• Newsletters (besides IQ Blast):
  • Internet Retailer
  • WebGuild Searchnomics (Dave Culbertson was floored that he and Corry were the only two people in attendance who were subscribers to this one)
  • ClickZ

My one addition would be WebSight, Stratigent’s monthly newsletter.

Attendees from Far and Wide

As I wandered around the room chatting with attendees, I realized we probably had our widest geographic reach of any of our Columbus WAWs to date:

• Portland, Oregon — Noé Garcia from Webtrends (a Columbus WAW sponsor several times over)
• Cincinnati, Ohio — Cindy Rabkin from Web Tech Analytics
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — Steve Colon from Webtrends
• Long Island, New York — Corry Prohens from IQ Workforce
• Durham, North Carolina — several attendees from McKinney

Locally, we had had attendees from Acappella, AOL, Bizresearch, Cardinal Solutions, Cisco, Highlights for Children, JPMorgan Chase, Lightbulb Interactive, Nationwide, Ohio Historical Society, Real Estates’s SEO, Resource Interactive, Victoria’s Secret, and a few others that I probably missed (note to self: a sign-in sheet would really be helpful!)

We had a good set of mingling/mixing before and after:

Cheng Deng and Todd Greene

Dave Culbertson and Steve Krause

Monish Datta, Karen Schneider, Bill Carey, Jen Elliott, Andrew Blank, and Steve Colon

Noé Garcia and Eric Moretti

Franklin Gbenah and Carol Fleming

What’s Next?

Our next WAW is tentatively slated for September 16, 2009, but I have yet to secure a sponsor. Let me know if you can help on that front — I’ll pursue any lead!