Only two years ago Alex Yoder, and the Webtrends team, provided me  the opportunity to join this company at a monumental time of change and growth. And over the past two years we’ve had a phenomenal run at Webtrends. We’ve introduced groundbreaking upgrades to our core platform with Analytics 9, industry firsts with our Visitor Data Mart segments offering and Facebook analytics. Were joined by an amazing team via an acquisition of Widemile and we’ve thrown one of the best customer/industry conference I’ve ever attended. On a whole we’ve rebranded and relaunched Webtrends and we’ve increased the relevance of the Webtrends brand and our share of voice in the marketplace substantially.

I’m excited about the leadership position we’ve taken in the market of social analytics. Our work in this space has provided me with a wealth of information forever shaping the way I think about and manage marketing. The Iterative marketing model is the future and social media is affording us the ability to test and learn in ways many of us never imagined. It’s with this knowledge and passion for the social space that I’m announcing my departure from Webtrends at the end of this month.

I want to thank Webtrends for an amazing journey. In particular I want to thank my team, the marketing team, whom have been drivers and owners for a very aggressive and lofty vision we put in place. I have the deepest respect for my colleagues and while I will not be with Webtrends  l will always be an advocate. With my departure Webtrends is looking to find an amazing head of marketing; if you are that person or know that person please reach out.

I can say, definitively, that this lucky person will be joining one of the most amazing marketing teams I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

Thank you to Alex, my team, my colleagues in the industry, Voce Communications, Sandstrom Design, DK New Media, and Webtrends.

Jascha

P.s., I’ll be announcing more about what is next for me in the coming weeks and will be relaunching http://marketingiteration.com with that news.

my own bit.ly pro account

Last night bit.ly announced, via their blog, a partnership with Webtrends in concert with the release of information about bit.Ly Pro Enterprise. Right now, more than 12,500 publishers, bloggers and brands are using bit.ly pro, and quite frankly I only expect that number to skyrocket.

bit.ly + Brands = Required

Because bit.ly is now decoding 4.7 billion URLs a month! The fact of the matter is that, as a brand, your content is being shared and bit.ly is, in some capacity, is helping facilite that. I’m excited for the enterprise offering because it will give me the ability to maintain my brand (trend.me) as well as get better visibility into where and and by whom is my content being shared.

Webtrends + bit.ly = Goodness

From the bit.ly blog:

“We’re [in addition to bit.ly Pro Ent] pleased to announce our new partnership with Webtrends, one of the leading analytics companies in the world. We’re working on an integration to put bit.ly data in front of thousands of new customers that will be ready later this summer. Webtrends shares our belief in open API access and is an ideal partner. Data is ever-growing, and interest in measurement is ever-growing, so choosing Webtrends as an early partner here makes tons of sense. Stay tuned for more details.”

This relationship is in its early stages and the outcome will be powerful. As Thomas Bosilevac commented “I can’t wait to see how the integration with Webtrends pans out! http://allinonestats.com has been hacking pageview, visit and bit.ly clicks together for quite some time, but, something tells me this could go much deeper (auto-dropping segment parameters, auto “source” tagging, etc.).”

Thomas, you are onto something, and we have lots in the works. Stay tuned!

Webtrends + Social = Innovation

At Webtrends, we are particularly excited about this relationship. Our company continues to innovate through our own R&D, as well as partnerships with the hottest and most relevant companies in social space. We offered the first and still the most comprehensive solution for measuring investments on Facebook, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be the first in our industry to connect the social sharing of 4.7 billion links a month through bit.ly to our customers’ core website analytics.

A little history on how Ignite began
Ignite got its start in Seattle in December, 2006, as a personal project of O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. They dreamed up an event where people could share their ideas over beer, and sent word out through their network. On December 7, two hundred Seattle geeks looking for “a fun night of geekery and networking” squeezed into a bar on Capitol Hill. They found beer, but so much more. First up, a friendly but intense competition to build the sturdiest popsicle-stick bridge. Then 25 intrepid locals took a turn on the stage for their five-minute Ignite talks. The consensus was that it was a blast. Word got out, and other communities wanted Ignite in their cities. Brady and Bre turned the event over to O’Reilly, and nearly 200 Ignites have been held, about half of them in the past year. As Ignite enters its fourth year, O’Reilly is launching Global Ignite Week to celebrate, amplify, and share the Ignite phenomenon.

The video below is from an Ignite in Seattle and it’s one of my favorite examples of what Ignite’s are all about.

I’ve been very fortunate to have had many opportunities to speak publicly and I’ve attended no less than a couple hundred conferences during my professional career. As both a speaker and an attendee I’ve struggled with the traditional conference setup that is more often than not highlighted by a 45 minute keynote. When was the last time you didn’t start fidgeting when you listened to 45 minutes of anyone talking at you?

“Be brillant, but make it quick” is Ignite’s tagline and make no mistake Ignite was never and probably will never be billed as a a corporate event still, there is something special about the format that inspires. As I experienced my first Ignite in Portland I couldn’t help but think there was and should be a translation to the tired conference format we’ve all come to know.

On our cab ride back to the office Justin, Michele and I brainstormed about what we could do to innovate on the format of our customer conference Engage. We decided then we’d use Ignite as our muse and try to turn our conference on it’s head…in a good way of course.

If you’ve ever ridden on a rollercoaster there is a point, right before it drops into the first (and usually biggest) drop. It’s quiet with anticipation and all you hear is the ‘click…click…click…click’ of the chain pulling the cars to the launch pad. Right when you look over the edge there is a moment of anticipation, some would even say fear, that make the first drop amazingly satisfying. Last week, myself and the team were pulling our way to the launch pad and the anticipation was palpable.

Here we are 11 months later and a week after our Engage conference in New Orleans, where we introduced the concept of a ‘sprint’ a 5 or 10 minutes opportunity for marketing leaders to be brilliant and we invited some of the best minds in marketing and customer intelligence.

Here is an example of one of my favorite sprints by Steve Woods of Eloqua:

Suffice to say I was thrilled with the outcome.

It was a great pleasure for the Webtrends staff and myself to host our customers, partners, and media at Engage 2010 in New Orleans. Many thanks to our speakers and sponsors for making this event the most fun and informative event we’ve ever held.

We’re already thinking of ways to change the game again next year in San Francisco!

While this one is fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d like to ask for your feedback on how the conference was for you.

How was the space?
The speakers?
Was the food good?
Did the wifi hold up well?
Anything you thought was missing?
What was your favorite part?
What should we try next year?

Please let me know by commenting on this blog or on our conference network or hit us on twitter.

Thanks.

Jascha

"Analytics...form the connective tissue."

The ecosystem surrounding a business – developing IP, building a brand, motivating people, managing operations – often appears disjointed. We employ separate technologies, have separate (often competing) departments, separate sets of processes, even separate offices. Thus it’s easy to forget that business does indeed operate within an ecosystem, that all these seemingly separate entities must work together to make business flourish. Managing your business ecosystem is hard, but truly successful business – that is, to understand the problems we’re solving and take care of our customers:

1) They understand the business problem they are solving.
2) They take care of their customers.
3) They innovate.

All of our businesses have problems, whether they’re related to internal processes or those of our customers, and we face an ever-widening array of tools we can use to address them within the business ecosystem. Analytics are one of the most basic parts of that ecosystem. They form the connective tissue that intertwines with marketing automation, multivariate testing, business intelligence and a bevy of maturing technologies that make it easier for us to run a successful business that understands the problem they are solving and takes care of their customers.

Yet all too often there is an expectation that analytics are removed from your business. That they are a business within your business. That only from identifying separate processes and separate resources can analytics be successful. I’ve heard businesses say more times that I care to share in the last year that they need to “make analytics successful.” We’ve got it wrong.

Technology can’t be beneficial to your business if it operates in a vacuum of resources and expertise. Maybe your business can be stronger with the newer tools (or maybe the new tools get in your way), but they can’t replace a good recipe and a skilled cook.

Success happens because of people and process supported by technology, not technology in and of itself. Web Analytics is not hard, running your business is. I think you’ll agree, however, that when operating within the context of a well-run business ecosystem, analytics can help you solve your business problems better, take better care of your customers and support innovation. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be exploring how marketing plays a role in a successful business. How the practice of marketing iteration is practiced and how it is supported by a recipe of analytics, mvt, a myriad of emerging technologies and, most importantly, skilled cooks.

In the meantime, I’d love to know what makes your business hard, what challenges you are facing, and how you use process and technology (like analytics) to make your business better.

Gone are the days of the all-in-one suite falsely promising it can be everything to everyone.  Today’s business owners should refuse to pay for the convenience of getting at their data through vendor APIs. We launched public beta of our web services on April 7, and customer response has been fantastic – we have about 20 times more accounts (customer and developer/technology partner) enabled today than we did at the end of our private beta period a few weeks back.  The release of the Google API a few days ago reinforces all the reasons we were so excited to announce the Open Exchange to our customers.  We believe you should be able to get to your data in a way that makes sense to your business and that includes the integration of the data into tools/processes that provide true meaning of the data – whether it is a complex business intelligence tool or Microsoft Excel, a tool that most people use every day.  Providing unfettered access to your data is why we announced Open Exchange at our Engage customer conference a few weeks ago and why we talked about it during our seminar series last November.  Having Google join us in this effort is exciting.

We believe that our new web services, and the developer network community we launched, provide powerful tools for integrating Webtrends data with everything from Excel or your own custom reporting apps and everything in between.  We created these new web services so that our customers can:

• Build their own powerful applications by integrating data directly in to their apps. Custom dashboards, widgets, and analytics apps just got a lot smarter with REST URL methods
• Build dashboards in Excel by bringing in live data from your Analytics reports. In Excel, you can use the “import from web” option to import report data.

Why build something that makes it easier to get data into Excel?  Excel is the most widely used analytics tool in the world.  Fortune 100 companies to small businesses us it to analyze, understand, and present this data throughout their organization.  A typical barrier is that most business users aren’t programmers or developers, and think that REST is something your body gets at night when you are asleep.  We had a challenge to ensure that our business users could take full advantage of our new REST API from within Excel.  To support the typical business user, we developed the REST URL Generator tool as part of the new web services.  Check it out and see how easy it is to get this data out of Webtrends and into Excel.

So maybe you are reading this and thinking you’re a programmer, what’s in this for me?  The same powerful and elegant solution we’ve created for business users is what we’ve set out to accomplish for developers as well.  As I mentioned, we’re using REST, which is a powerful standard that is widely accepted to program on. Our simple XML and JSON formats are easy to consume into applications you can build.  The JSON format is a less verbose option than XML, which will make performance better for applications that can consume it.  Plus we have an Excel-specific XML format to make data appear in Excel the way you want it to – in case you are programmer building powerful Excel applications for business users described above.

Open Exchange doesn’t end with web services.  We’ve released enhancements to our solution for managing the complexity of javascript tagging, Tag Builder, to allow for easier partner connections and more efficient tag management.  We’re building a new Data Collection API to further enable customers to derive value from our partners, which will be out in beta this summer.

In all we believe that the future of the analytics industry is going to be driven by enabling customers to get their data, in a way that works for their business, that gets them to insight and leads to action.  We fully expect that all the other players in the analytics space will be moving this direction too.  We welcome it because it ultimately benefits our customers – and that is what truly excites us.