Web Analytics Wednesday in Boston was a success!

I went to Boston’s first Web Analytics Wednesday event last night and no surprise had a great time. Some highlights include:

• Meeting Jared Spool from UIE and hearing how he approaches giving presentations. Jared, in case you haven’t seen him present, is a fantastic presenter. Like the Eisenbrothers, a “must see” presenter in my book!
• Meeting Frank Faubert from Sane Solutions (recently acquired by Unica), someone who has been at this whole “web analytics” thing for about as long as any of us. His partner in crime, Akin Arikan, co-sponsored the event with me (don’t tell my wife, okay?) and had a nice post about the event today at the Yahoo! group.
• Meeting Jeff Cram from ISITE Design, a Boston and Portland, Oregon based design and analytics firm. Jeff’s company is so cool they even put out a press release about their sponsorship of the Portland, Oregon event!
• I also met Jeff’s wife, Jennifer, who is the Web Marketing Manager for Farm Aid. She asked me to mention to watch the Farm Aid Webcast on September 30th at 3:30 PM Eastern at www.farmaid.com. I asked her if she had met Willie Nelson but she just scowled at me.
• Catching up with Eric Hansen, CEO of SiteSpect, and talking about the value that controlled experimentation provides for online businesses.
• Meeting two very nice folks from the Harvard Business School who I pestered about the need for HBS to start offering coursework in web and multi-channel data analytics. They said they’d get back to me …
• Meeting Hossam Elkhodary from Technology Leaders finally in person. Hossam has been a frequent contributor to the Yahoo! group for years so it was nice to meet in person.
• Meeting Joseph Carrabis, Chairman and Founder of NextStage Analytics, who recently published a nice piece on Matching IT and Marketing Mythologies at iMedia Connection that references some background conversations we’d had.

Did I miss anyone?

All in all I am pretty excited about how this whole Web Analytics Wednesday thing is going. Someone asked me what I was thinking when I started it and it’s simply this: Web analytics can be lonely work in an organization, especially in an organization that doesn’t really value the data or ask for deeper analysis. In a world where social networking is the next really big thing, not having a social networking spot for web analytics people simply didn’t make sense! I mean, I wasn’t trying to be “Web 2.0” about it, it just happened.

Anyway, if you went to a Web Analytics Wednsday last night, how was it? And if not, WHY NOT?!