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 future career opportunities. And most importantly, it builds a sense of community amongst those in the industry – this is key in terms of innovation and striving to get to the next level.

eMetrics Takeaways:

Here are my key takeaways from the conference (note that I only attended Day 2 and focused on the Social and Mobile tracks)

1. Multi-Channel, Big Data, and Personalization

With the #measure industry growing and finally taking a ‘seat at the table’ with upper management, it’s time to step up the game. We’ve moved past simple metrics like pageviews and time on site – it’s time to align all of the data we have about our customers and use it to improve their experience. Our customers are no longer in a single channel mindset – they have access points via web, mobile, social, and offline – we can’t be single-minded either. Setting up proper infrastructure and purpose-built automation enables the business to connect the dots behind the scene. As @adamgreco so eloquently noted, this is the ‘holy grail of customer analytics.’

With Multi-Channel also comes the need for an Integrated Analytics System – combing Voice of Customer, Text-mining, Click Stream, Dashboards, A/B testing, etc gets the business much closer to the highly desired ‘360 degree view’ of the customer.

Walmart.com sums it up pretty well with the following slide from Balaji Ram:

2. Social is everywhere!

Social is the glue that can make your brand or message sticky. It’s important to have your customers talking and sharing about your brand via social channels – it drives engagement/re-engagement and helps customers to return to your site.

Another key point on Social Media is the need to map your Social Media vision/strategy to your corporate goals/KPIs/ideology. Social does not exist in a vacuum, it needs the same love, attention, and respect as any other medium you use for marketing, brand awareness, customer service, etc.

@tgwilson made some great points about Twitter. I particularly like his ‘social sphere’ twitter analogy with Chipotle. It gets to the point that even though your direct brand might not have a huge reach, the circles in which you have impact do:

Also loved this summary of ‘The 5 rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) by @RohitBhargava
1. Create Sharable Content
2. Make Sharing Easy
3. Reward Engagement
4. Proactively Share Content
5. Encourage the Mashup

3. Mobile is an extension of the web, not a separate experience

The mobile experience is not cannibalizing the web. Users are spending more time, interacting with more content, and exploring more places than ever before. They even use more than one screen at a time (ex. using smartphone while in front of the computer, tablet in front of the tv, etc). People are using mobile because it’s easy, convenient, often limitless, can offer real rewards, and can connect users with one another via ‘find me’ and social gaming.

Here is a good slide from Shari Cleary of Viacom summarizing her POV of multiple device usage:

Two different themes here – mobile is the same, and mobile is different.

Same:
Mobile is shattering the web-centric engagement paradigm – PC, tablet, mobile, and social are all part of the user experience.

Different:
Mobile apps are programs, not web pages – it’s a different mindset than Web Analytics. This is a big issue with current traditional web analytics vendors – they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. They need to adapt their technology for mobile specific tracking (not just try to use pageviews and events). Here is a good 140 character summary:

4. Tweet. A lot. The cartoon says so.

My favorite, off-topic moments from eMetrics include:

@erictpeterson standing up at Roe, thanking us all for coming to the event, and then begging us to go drink more (specifically a $31 scotch) because we were $500 short on the bar tab… at which time @OMLee proceeds to take care of about a third of that deficit with one drink order! 🙂

@Exxx‘s tweet (in reference to @johnlovett‘s beautiful @Prezi preso):

Finally – the Lobby Bar at the Marriott Marquis is beautiful. You should check it out.

 

 

 

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2 Comments

  1. A informative and succinct post bloggerchica.
    Its almost as if I were attending just with the $31 Scotch! ;))
    Thanks for the insights

  2. I was thirst and Eric ended up taking half of it. 🙂

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