Tag: Teambuilder Search

Conferences/Community

Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday: A Speedy April

Posted on by Eric Peterson

We had our monthly Web Analytics Wednesday meetup at Barley’s Smokehouse and Brewpub last week. Once again, the Web Analytics Wednesday Global Sponsors (Coremetrics, Analytics Demystified, and SiteSpect) sponsored the event, which is always appreciated!

This month, in lieu of a formal topic, Dave Culbertson facilitated a round of speed networking — like speed dating, but with the purpose of driving interaction beyond everyone’s immediate tablemates. Each round lasted for 1 minute, and the main challenge was getting people to stop talking and shift on to the next person! It was a little intense, but Dave cut it off after 15-20 minutes, and the overwhelming consensus was that it was fun and useful!

 April 2009 Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday

April 2009 Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday

At the end of the exercise, Dave commented that he really hoped we could start extending these 1:1 connections and interactions through social media. As it is, Dave (@daveculbertson) is one of the most interesting people I follow on Twitter, especially when it comes to finding and tweeting links to content that I find interesting and informative. We’d actually thought ahead (if “six hours before the event” counts as “ahead”) and made a sign-up sheet that included a space for the attendees to write their Twitter usernames and indicate if it would be okay to post them. I then proceeded to leave the sign-in sheet behind when I left! Something about Barley’s — last month, I left my notebook behind and had to go and retrieve it the next day (2 beers over 2.5 hours plus a full meal…in case you’re wondering — it’s just something in the air there!).

So, instead, we’re broadening our social media presence. Consider joining one or all of the following, depending on where/how you hang out on the ‘net:

  • Facebook — we’ve had a WAW Columbus group there for some time
  • Twitter Group — this was Dave’s suggestion, and I haven’t used twittgroup.com before, but we’ve now got a cbuswaw group there as well
  • LinkedIn — might as well kick it old school, too, so we’ve now got a Columbus WAW LinkedIn group

Pick your poison, one or all!

Overall, the event had a great mix of both practicing web analysts (from companies like Resource Interactive, Highlights for Children, Victoria’s Secret, Lightbulb Interactive, Coldwell Banker, …and I’m just rattling off the companies I can remember, so this is an incomplete list) as well as some web analytics-centric companies: BizResearch, ClearSaleing, SearchSpring, and WebTech Analytics (all the way up from Cincinnati!). And, with a handful of sharp people in the crowd who are currently looking for full-time work, it was great that TeamBuilder Search came out as well! From a quick count of faces in my brain, the attendance broke down to be ~25% first-timers, ~25% loooonnnngg-time attendees, and 50% who have attended 1-5 times before. All in all, a great mix!

The most-interesting-but-random site/tool that I learned about this month was City-Data.com — think The World Factbook, but for U.S. cities rather than for countries! And, with a slew of charts that are pretty clean and provide a pretty good way to get the flavor of a town — weather, jobs, houses, and so on.

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Analytics Strategy, Social Media

"You only get one chance to do it right. Try not to screw it up."

Posted on by Eric Peterson

Thus were the words that subtitled Bryan Cristina’s presentation (PPT) on campaign tracking at the December Web Analytics Wednesday in Columbus last Wednesday, sponsored by CoreMetrics, Analytics Demystified, and SiteSpect at BJ’s Restaurant in Powell.

 Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday - December 2008

When it comes to screwing things up, we certainly had our opportunities:

  • Originally, we had planned on meeting at O’Shaughnessy’s Pub down in the Arena District. After initially being told we were good to meet there, we got bumped by a private party (apparently, a private party that has been occurring for a number of years at O’Shaughnessy’s and that takes over the entire place; it’s understandable, but still a bit irksome).
  • When we started looking for nearby alternatives, we realized the Rockettes were performing at Nationwide Arena that night, which was likely to clog alternate venues. So, BJ’s it was.
  • I forgot my camera. I was 3/4 of the way home to pick it up en route from work to BJ’s, when Twitter came to the rescue — @heatherdee409 shot me a tweet that she had a camera in her purse and we could use that. Thanks, Heather!
  • BJ’s had told us that we would have “the back room.” Unfortunately, that just described a large area, rather than any sort of private/semi-private space.

Thanks, I assume, to some more proactive promotion of the event (Dave Culbertson of Lightbulb Interactive accounted for at least half of the first-timers), we had record attendance. Combine the turnout with the fact that we were in a shared space, and we had less-than-ideal conditions for Bryan’s presentation. He brought a handout (PPT) and managed to semi-holler for a few minutes to quickly walk people through it. That was unfortunate, but I do think we are at least learning that we may have to settle for lesser quality food and a limited beer selection (read: The Spaghetti Warehouse) when we have a presentation.

Nevertheless, the presentation had some great information. And, some great lines that are typical Bryan-funny-caustic:

  • “‘We want to see what people from this campaign do on the site’ is not a goal, it’s an excuse for those who don’t know what they want to measure or for campaigns that have no purpose”
  • (When setting the campaign up) “Never trust anyone, especially yourself”
  • “Know the last possible second you can get things taken care of. People will forget you were excluded from everything until the last minute and will just blame you for being stupid.”
  • “‘It’s not in test, but it will show up in production’ means they have no idea what you’re talking about, don’t care, and none of your tracking tags will ever make it onto your campaigns.”

That’s just a sampling. Good stuff!

We had some first-time attendees I was pretty excited about:

  • Mark Whitman and Jen Wells of TeamBuilder Search — a relatively new recruiting company focussed on interactive talent; I had a good talk with Mark and got him to tentatively agree to do a presentation on building a career in the interactive space at a future WAW.
  • Noe Garcia of WebTrends — all the way from Portland! Bryan and I both go wayyyyyy back with Noe, and, interestingly, had had dinner with him earlier in the year at the same restaurant when he was in town; he’d been hoping that his travel schedule would line up with a Columbus WAW, and it finally did! Noe’s a great guy, and he’s tentatively agreed to have WebTrends sponsor a WAW in the spring and provide a speaker. Unfortunately, Noe was also partway through Super Crunchers, which I thought was a horrible book. We had a good-natured debate at the end of the evening about it and parted on speaking terms.
  • There were a few people I didn’t actually get to speak to, but who were new faces. And, embarrassingly, I had quite a conversation with a gentleman who has a local SEO/SEM firm…and I didn’t capture/record his name or his company! But, he did point me to Laura Thieme of OSU and bizresearch.com, who seems like another good contact for future WAWs.

List of tweeters in attendance who I could identify:

And, finally, I learned that there is apparently a Monish Datta fan page. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it. So, I’m stuck just linking to Monish’s LinkedIn profile. But, hey, in the process of looking, I realized that last month’s post got me some serious Google Love on “Monish Datta” search results.

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