Sound impressive? It is. Estee Lauder gets it.

They understand the importance of digital and it’s relationship to their consumers. Congratulations to Marisa Thalberg, VP, Global Digital Marketing for Estee Lauder for creating such an impressive and important event for your company.

It begs the question. What is your company doing to educate employees on the importance of digital in creating customer relationships today and in the future?

In this panel, we attempted to discuss how measurement and analytics experts are answering these questions and the kind folks at OMMA were thoughtful enough to post the panel video to Ustream. I’ve embedded it below for you to check out.

Aside from myself moderating my fellow panelists were:

Anil Batra , VP, Search & Analytics , POP
Jonathan Corbin , Director of Consulting , Wunderman
Todd Cunningham , Senior VP Strategic Insights and Research , MTV Networks
Taddy Hall , COO , Meteor Solutions

…A great beginning to some of the worlds best narrative tales. The classic storytelling beginning. I’ve been struggling with how to begin this inagural post and what better way than to start at the beginning. And, discuss the impact storytelling has on us all.

I began my career as an account manager turned product marketer, turned eCommerce marketer, sprinkled with business development and consulting, and always with IT chops. For the past several years I’ve focused my energies on corporate marketing and brand marketing principles and have seen, first hand, the efficacy of what good brand marketing can do for a product and company. I’ve had the luxury of working for some of the top consumer and busines brands on the planet and have been able to make some significant impacts to businesses I’ve been a part of. I feel incredibly proud of accomplishments as well as the opportunities I’ve gained along the way. Though I’ve been fortunate enough to collect some great resume data, my largest professional accomplishment to date has been the connections and friendships I’ve garnered along the way. The ability to connect with other like-minded professionals people is what inspires growth and opportunity.

Yesterday, I spent the day with Shel Israel, along with a few key members of the Webtrends team where we spent the day discussing social media, enterprise technologies, data and storytelling. Yes, storytelling came up in our technology and marketing discussion.

We discussed how…In a world of communications dominated by email, Facebook, twitter, IM, and SMS there is a strange comfort in dehumanizing what is going on around us. We are simultaneously over-connected and not connected at all. I can share my successes professionally by talking about the number of twitter followers i have, the number of comments on my blog, the number of {fill in the blank}. But the numbers, by themselves, don’t mean anything. The reality is that just connecting into the technology opens us up to miss what is important; miss the meaning of the messages in the stream or worse, to ignore them.

Success and happiness professionally and personally will very rarely be driven by technology. They will be a product of the people you surround yourself with and the stories you tell and create together. Professionally, It’s pretty comfortable to fall back into a glaze and just connect into the technology. It’s easy to wake up every day and decide what needs to be done to to move the needle .005% one way or another. As a marketer however, we have to fight that warm and comfortable blanket that is technology and get back to telling great stories. Connecting with people. Learning. Being Agile.

Welcome to the new Marketing Iteration blog. This blog is the product of a vision to share and realized by an amazing friend and designer Benjamin Diggles.

From here on out i’ll be sharing my thoughts on how I see marketing evolving and people + process + enabling technologies that are allowing us to bring the human element, the storytelling, into what we do at a scale many of us could never have imagined.

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.

What do I optimize?

In whole, I envy digital sports marketers. Having played sports in college and being a fan of the NBA, NFL, and MLB I don’t believe there are many verticals that have access to better content and personalities with which they can promote their products. That said, the challenges remain fairly consistent with other industries:

Constant: I have finite resources

Constant: I need to get greater returns for my investments

The discussion swirled around two primary areas during the day.

First: There was lively discussion surrounding the ad spend for the teams and how to best optimize that ad spend (the channels, the creative, the forms, etc.).

Second: Investments in Social and Mobile and how teams could dip their toe into the space coupled with how they could jump headfirst into the deep end.

Interestingly, there was almost no discussion about how to optimize core digital assets (websites, landing pages).

Optimize where you can have the highest impact to your business

Whether or not we are in sports marketing, the same basic optimization priority challenge is one we all face. Where do I put my priorities?

Often times priorities are stacked next to each other like this:

The reality is that optimization isn’t equal. Optimizing your ad buys and ‘whatever is new’ in the case of the summit, social media and mobile might never have the same effect as optimizing your core assets…especially if your business is driving towards any type of a success action (selling tickets as an example).  A 1% lift in conversion on your website or landing pages can actually make your ad buys and investments in social more effective. Priorities, more realistically, look a lot more like this…

…where success is achieved at the bottom of the funnel.

My words of advice to Sports Digital Marketers?

Consider moving resources to optimize your core assets as a part of your marketing plans. At the end of the day, an incremental lift in the successes you care about can provide you with a lot more leverage to experiment with new investments.

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.

As such, having the opportunity to dissect the announcements and share perspectives with peers is important. And last night I attended a Portland event hosted at Webtrends and moderated by local celebrity Rick Turoczy where a group of developers and marketers that attended F8, Chirp, InsideSocialApps, and iPadDevCamp shared their views on the implications of the announcements from the event.

In typical Portland fashion the conversation was relevant, smart, and provided some smart insights into what has transpired over the following weeks. One question stumped the crowd though (and I’m paraphrasing):

How can I, as a marketer, spend money on Twitter [compared to Facebook]?

Personally, I was a bit struck at the fact that there was any pause at all so I tweeted:

I sincerely didn’t expect much in terms of replies. I was wrong.

What is curious is the diversity of answers and the lack of direct answers about how to spend 100k on Twitter directly. Could it be the way I phrased the question & comment? Is it a lack of comprehension on Twitter’s business model?

To set the record straight, I not only agree you have to have the why defined and the goals defined prior to launching a campaign i’m an advocate in the industry for the process.  However, for the purpose of this discussion let’s put the following paramaters around the question:

1) You have defined your goals to drive 5000 leads to your b2b technology company, Webtrends.

2) You have dedicated 100k to explore Twitter as a channel.

3) Your CEO will only let you spend the 100k on Twitter (you can’t buy additional resources, software, etc.)

So, with that…how would you spend 100k on Twitter?

He brings up some thought provoking topics and generally a challenge to use data to drive your decisions:

And the analytics that we’ve all grown used to depend on an open, standard Web. Analytic tools are developing for these new platforms, but they’re not nearly as mature as what we’ve got for Web pages.

My message here is not to avoid the new platforms–in fact, they may be the most exciting evolution of the online environment since the Web came into existence. But realize that as you embrace these shiny objects, you can’t take the same old online tools for granted. Everything will be a little more painstaking and you’ll have to invent a lot more as you go along. It’s worth it, as long as you take into account the extra effort the Splinternet requires.

I agree with Josh, the Splinternet is here to stay, for good. I also believe that standardization will come. The catch? That it will not come in the traditional sense (i.e., Web Standards, etc.), it will come in the form of data and business processes. However, I don’t agree with Josh’s assertion that traditional analytics tools are not mature enough in the Splinternet (compared to Web Pages).

Marketing is empowered with data; Marketing is burdened with data.

Our opportunity and challenge is to unlearn the often obtuse and action-less data that we have been trained to look at on web pages to create the business process standards of the future. In all sincerity, it’s the same

Pick your data pipe in the Splinternet

challenge and opportunity in the Splinternet or not. We have more data than we know what to do with and every new channel (Facebook, iPhone, Android, etc.) means more data is becoming available to us. We have to take action with it.

Iterative Marketing Takes Hold

What comes of the Splinternet? I predict the only standardization we get as marketers moving forward is on our data and how we use it in our businesses. The notion of Iterative Marketing is beginning to take hold. We will use our data, no matter what channel or new shiny thing we collect it from to try more, fail faster, and not repeat our mistakes twice.

It’s the use of data that puts us in the unique position to take advantage of the ‘shiny new thing’ but always keep us grounded to our business.

Data+Iteration+Splinternet=Marketing.

How will you use your data?

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

There was a story published on the New York Times January 10th uncovering a deluge of information brought to the modern day military primarily via their drone programs. The article digs further into a handful of young analysts turning to techniques used by television to help them sift through the information.

Daniel A. Becker's Random Walk: Could a visualization like this be the key to understanding massive amounts of video data in Afghanistan?

I, for one, think the military is missing the boat here. Television and television broadcasting as an industry hasn’t shown an early adoption for many of the techniques more common in business intelligence and forget about data visualization. Wouldn’t the government be more likely catch important information from the data collected in programs like the one written about if they were visualizing the information more like a digg labs or the visualization of randomness? I think so.

What do you think?