There’s a winter break currently in France, and, while most of my customers are on the ski slopes, I am finally able to catch up on some long-due blog posts!
Last December, I was very fortunate to attend my first WebTrends Engage conference in London. I had read positive feedback regarding this event from my good friend Michael Notté (“WebTrends London 2010 – I was there!") and it was a perfect opportunity to get an update on WebTrends’ latest news and innovations. WebTrends Engage London's objective was “to explore today’s digital universe and how it resolves around your knowledge and expertise”, a promising program!
The event took place with 650+ attendees on December 5th and December 6th, 2011 at the Park Plazza Westminster Hotel, right on the Thames and in front of the Parliament house. I was only able to attend the second day because of a busy schedule.
The conference day was organized in two parts: keynotes sessions in the morning and break-out sessions in the afternoon. You will find below a recap of the main keynotes.
David Rowan from Wired was the first to keynote on “Where your digital universe will be in 5-10 years”. He started to share his personal career experience as chief editor of Wired UK, where he had to learn new skills on top of editing a print magazine: multi-tablet editing, podcasting, video production, live event organization, etc… According to him, the next business model of magazines will be more into building communities selling high-prices tickets for events than selling advertising. We are globally no longer in the Desktop Internet era, but in the mobile Internet area. Most of mobiles phones on the planet are not smartphones although. Data scientists are the new rock stars of Silicon, that everybody overthere is trying to hire them. Data scientists are mathematicians who try to find patterns in a huge amount of data. 4G changes everything : you have high bandwidth, everywhere and all the time. Data is everywhere and smart fresh-thinking is required to solve problems we did not think were solvable. Geolocation is going to help bring our physical world closer to the digital world and integrate it in very useful new ways. Augmented reality was a bit “cheesy” but we are starting to see valuable applications in this field: for instance, in Netherlands, an application helps to see property prices in the street of Amsterdam where you are. All of us have to rethink how we can turn our business SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile), and it does not mean only repurposing web sites into mobile web sites. E-commerce as an idea is invalid now. It is commerce now, but commerce that is social and mobile. Social commerce is not only Facebook, but also YouTube, where you can find videos of product testing. Social commerce is also reorganizing around the Open Graph, like trippy.com, where your friends on Facebook help you to plan your trip. Peer-to-peer business will also become more and more important.
John Yi, manager of Facebook’s Marketing API Program, continued by explaining first his role at Facebook: facilitating an ecosystem of market-focused solutions built on Facebook APIs. WebTrends is one of their leaders in the analytics space. 2 billions shares every day on Facebook. Web is organizing around people. Social is changing the way we consume content. Pages are the hub of your activity on Facebook where you can connect to customers. Brands can now sponsor persons' checkin to bring more context (for instance: more information on a product when Facebook users check at a coffee chain). Facebook Insights is the analytics feature for your company pages, with agreggated customer information. Social metrics are : total likes, friends of fans (additional reach), people talking about this and total reach (the amount of total people that could have possibility see for story). Social commerce is not a new thing, but it is putting traditional word-of-mouth into a more scalable way. Markets will have to help brands to create stories around their brands. Measurement and social measurement have to be considered as a new frontier, leveraging with technology the same sort of human interactions that we've had since people have been around. Technological partners like WebTrends will build the technology that will allow Facebook to go to marketers.
Mike Ricci, Vice-President of Mobile at WebTrends, started to share a study from IBM on areas where CMO feel unprepared for: 1. data explosion (71 %), 2. social media (68 %), 3. shiting consumer demographics (63 %), 4. decreasing brand loyalty (57%) and 5. ROI accountability (56 %). Being a veteran, Mike found very interesting that ROI was on top of the list, since CMO did not believe 10 years ago that their jobs were to measure and to be accountable for ROI. Regarding top priorities in the next 3 to 5 years, CMO plan to increase the use of technology in the following fields: 1. social media (82 %), 2. customer analytics (81 %), 3. CRM (81 %) and 4. mobile applications (80 %). Shipments of mobile devices (smart phones + tablets) now exceed shipments of laptops and desktops. 33% of Facebook's traffic and 55 % of Twitter's traffic come from mobile devices. According to a study of IAB with marketers, over 50 % stated that they are treating mobile as integral to advertising strategy, 60 % revelead smartphones are a high priority, 31 % stated they are actively developing tablet apps and 69 % stated their largest frustation is lack of standardized metrics / measurement. According to a study from Forrester, two-thirds of global brands have no real mobile measurement or mobile analytics in place. WebTrends is working with its customers, like Microsoft, to create a real mobile measurement strategy. To start, it is important to measure correctly what percent of your current site traffic is mobile. Not all analytics solutions are acurate on this. Microsoft's team used WebTrends to understand the role of mobile at every stage of the purchase funnel, as well as the performance of each tactic by marketing priority. Mobile works most effectively when it's part of a larger digital ecosystem. For instance, Coca Cola's team used WebTrends to understand the impact of mobile campaigns on the other digital channels (applications, Web, Facebook, YouTube, etc...) and get ROI on their mobile campaigns. Key takeaways: 1. marketers need to prepare for the day when mobile is no longer a sideshow. That day has arrived. It's time that marketers get serious and measure mobile. 2. The future of mobile is all about sophistication and integration. 3. Mobile has become a mainstream channel as part of the multichannel experience.
Videos of the other keynotes may be watched on this page.
During the afternoon sessions, I got more updates on WebTrends’ products and services:
1. Launched in April 2011 with a new architecture and UI, Analytics 10 provides the ability to analyze data from web sites, mobile applications and social networks like Facebook with advanced visualization capabilities.
2. In December 2011, a data center opened in Amsterdam, in addition to the existing ones in Oregon, Nevada, Virginia, Ireland, Singapour and Australia
3. Launched in August 2011, WebTrends Social empowers digital marketers to : 1. measure the performance of Facebook pages and applications, 2. manage Facebook walls (post scheduling, automated comment moderations, workflow management, etc.) and 3. create Facebook applications without any coding skills in order to increase the number of fans and to drive traffic to the Web site. This application is provided free of charge until 100.000 fans (administrator rights required on the Facebook page).
4. Hoverstats is a free Chrome extension, launched in October 2011, which enables the calculation of the PSI (Post Strength Indicator) to assess posts' performance on Facebook.
Going back to the title of my blog post, "When Digital Met Analytics", it was the first conference I attended where there was so clear a connection between digital and analytics in the content and presentations. Looking forward to WebTrends Engage London 2012!
ON THE SAME TOPIC:
- Videos from WebTrends Engage London 2011
- Pictures from WebTrends Engage London 2011
- Webtrends Showcases “Your Digital Universe” and Enhanced Global Capabilities at Engage 2011 in London, WebTrends.com
- Webtrends Engage 2011, Making Web Analytics Sexy, Entreprise Irregulars
