After hosting New Orleans’ first Ignite session
on Monday night, Webtrends Engage began on Tuesday morning with a series of
Ignite-style presentations – or sprints – replacing the traditional hour-long
keynotes. Presenters had 10 minutes to share their most valuable insights on a
wide range of topics important to digital marketers and analysts. Participants
included:
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, VP of Marketing at Webtrends
Jennifer Zeszut, CEO at ScoutLabs
Sean Power, Co-founder at Watching Websites
Christian Howes, Director of Solution Engineering
at Webtrends
Amber Naslund, Director of Community at Radian6
Inga Broerman, VP of Marketing at Vocus
Douglas Karr, CEO at DK New Media
Casey Carey, VP of Products at Webtrends
The big screen behind the stage ran the event’s
Twitter tagged messages #wtengage during the warm up including my post on last
night’s session: Ignite
NOLA Kicks Off Webtrends Engage 2010. I also liked their taste in music. The event sold out and I was glad I came
early to this session to get a seat.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff,
VP of Marketing at Webtrends kicked off the session. He suggested that we leave
with connections and I have already benefited from this. Jascha said there has been continuous
upheaval in the past two years but the need for connections has not. Mobile
apps have taken off. The largest grossing movie had 10% of tickets bought
through mobile apps. One to one connections can now be optimized on a global
basis. He challenged us to think about new ways to connect with our customers. This event is, in part, modeled on
Ignite - be brilliant and but be quick.
Webtrends has started a Facebook space facebook.com/webstrends and there
is a related conference.
Reeves was next. He is Web 2.0 poet and comic and
started with stories from his childhood. He was very close to sister and they
had their own language that their grandfather taught them. He would have fit in well last night.
Jennifer Zeszut, CEO at ScoutLabs, spoke on the
future of natural language processing.
NLP is the science of humans and computers working together. It is having
computers help us structure unstructured data. Often you need to teach the
computer how to do this. It can be used to poll the market on your
products. The future is real time
focus groups of millions of participants.
In the past humans wrote the rules for the computers.
Not now. NLP today involves humans labeling spam and the computers create the
rules. For example, people are to able
to decide what is spam and what is not. This is relatively easy. It can be hard
to define what something like spam or porn is but you can know it when you see
it and computers can figure out the patterns used by humans.
Sentiment is harder than spam to determine for
both computers and humans. ScoutLabs works on these issues. Words have different sentiments
depending on subtle changes in spelling - she gave the example of different
interpretations of motherfucka. Looking for people’s wishes is especially
helpful in product research. I like this but… I wish products did…
Sean Power, co-founder at Watching Websites, spoke
on communilytics. It describes how to apply metrics to communities. Communilytics givers you the data but
you still need to determine how to react. Louis Armstrong is a role model for
him on how to react. He would change set lists on the fly. He would respond to
audience moods. He was a partner with his band, not the boss. This is what you
need to do with your community. Today’s challenges include how to relate
Twitter to your business model. How do you find the numbers that matter and
support your business model?
Christian Howes, Director of Solution Engineering
at Webtrends spoke next. He was
the Brit who did the language jokes last night.
He talked about cyborg technology, as well as the proliferation
of devices. There needs to be a convergence of devices. I have written about
this a bit on this blog. He gave
examples of how companies have adopted to the next technology. Vodaphone can
give your data about where, such as a location in Paris, you are on your mobile
phone. There is now an iPhone apps
that lets you agree or disagree with football (soccer) calls.
Amber Naslund, Director of Community at Radian6,
was the next speaker. She said that social media is pervading the enterprise.
Many people look at social media as a marketing tool. However, social media is
now moving inside comapnies. I certainly agree.
Marketeers need to be aware of this. They need to build
bridges inside the enterprise to break down silos. All this needs to be aligned
with the business strategy. There needs to be hubs to facilitate this. There
also needs to be policies on this interaction. People need to wear more hats to help with this bridging, as
well as respond to today’s market. For example, sales people also need to be
customer service people. You need
to react, not just measure. You need to get insights to the people who can act
on them. These internal hubs can facilitate this.
Reeves came back and relate how he created a
dialog with the Web. He used Babblefish
to translate one of his poems into Italian then back again into English. The
results were really funny and much better than his original poems that were
cheesy IMO.
Inga Broerman, VP of Marketing at Vocus was the
next speaker. She talked about PR for lead generation and why PR needs to
change. Media consumption is changing. People are bombarded with messages.
People think it is too much and are getting rid of them. Click troughs are
falling. TIVO takes out ads. Sources are so much broader. For PR it has gotten much more
complex. The old channels are changing. In 2009 over 200 newspapers went out of
print, over 2,000 magazines went under. Ten thousands people lost radio jobs.
But many things have stepped in. This is an issue I cover a bit on this blog.
You need to go out more to find people to talk
with to promote brands. You need to be everywhere and be social. You need to enlist the entire
organization to help with this efffort. Southwest Airlines does this. A baggage
handler recently answered questions on Twitter without having to be asked to do
this. Everyone is a PR person now.
It is not a specialty. But you need to be on top of this effort as the PRT lead.
Monitor, engage, measure analyze.
Douglas Karr, CEO at DK New Media
He talked
about b2b blogging and how to increase convergence on your blog. He said he is
from Indy and made a Super Bowl prediction that got little applause. He started
with SEO. Google gets in the way of things and you have to figure Google out to
reach people. I liked his dance routines as metaphors. You now have to get out
on the dance floor through social media to be where your customers are. Get in
front of everyone through the social networking tools. For example, Ping.fm can put your
status in many places.
Second, you also need paths to action on your
blog. Third, you need to feed the senses. Go beyond words. Many people do not
read bodies of text. Fourth ask
for information and do not give any information for free such as white papers. Fifth is to measure. Make sure you
measure business results.
Casey Carey, VP of Products at Webtrends talked
about the wave of optimization.
Experts can quickly narrow down the possibilities within content so they
focus on the important. The future
is understanding customer behavior and points off customer interaction. Optimization
is now about customer interaction, not simply getting on top of search
engines. Making use of the new
channels is one key here. Webtrends has added targeting and personalization to
its optimization capabilities. You can identify content, do segmentation, and
define the business rules around these areas. It is easy to do so marketing can do it without IT help.
This session was a great way
to convey a variety of issues within an hour.