I recently attended, and spoke at, Sports Marketing 2.0 in Chicago. I’m not going to lie; I’m a sports fanboy so it was pretty exciting for me to attend and meet the heads of marketing for teams like the Chicago Bears and Bulls, Detroit Redwings and more.  Now, having had a week to contemplate the discussions, I’ve wrapped my head around one of the challenges I feel digital sports marketers are facing. Interestingly, it’s a problem many of us face in our respective industries.

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.

The last couple of weeks have been a frenzy of developer conferences sponsored by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. The sheer amount of information released is staggering and because the events have been targeted primarily to developers the ‘marketing messages’ haven’t been fully formed yet.

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?

Josh Bernoff of Forrester published an article @ Forbes today titled: The Web Is Turning Into The Splinternet

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 bit less than 10 months ago I was invited to attend Ignite Portland by two of my colleagues Justin & Michele. To be completely transparent I didn’t know what to expect and suffice to say I was blown away.

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

Or does the Military need better data visualization?

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?

Have you sat down with your IT organization lately to discuss your company’s enterprise architecture framework? Did you know that having that discussion is crucial to your success as a marketer?

Our business as marketers has changed. We can attribute this change to data. Once a competitive advantage, data is now table stakes. It fuels our businesses. To be successful, it is a requirement to use this data to iterate, to continually adjust and improve. What has been traditionally referred to as the “IT stack” has made its way into marketing vernacular. Just as the IT stack enables an assortment of applications and software to work in concert to perform tasks, consider the ‘marketing stack’ as a combination of those same services and technologies needed to empower an effective iterative marketer and create game-changing marketing programs and campaigns.

A scalable, flexible marketing stack that enables iteration has three key components:

• Business Process (sales, marketing alignment, accountability, efficiency, etc.)
• Campaign Management (social listening, optimization, campaign efficiency, take rates, opens, etc.)
• Data Architecture (customer intelligence, CRM, etc.)

This is an oversimplified view for the purposes of this discussion, but it offers a framework within which to work. Here’s what we do at Webtrends….

Business Process:

Iterative marketing thrives when we recognize that the goals of Sales and Marketing can and should exist harmoniously. Ultimately, this means that Sales and Marketing agree to co-own the sales funnel and accountability on how that will be executed against. Further, iterative marketing accepts the fact that failure is a way to learn and will be celebrated.

At Webtrends, we have built an organizational structure and operate against values that support the iterative model. We support the idea of the noble failure and celebrate both successes and failures equally. We’ve also recently rolled out a new model for accountability with the sales department, including a worldwide sales and marketing funnel defining suspects, leads, qualified leads, through to closed business.

Campaign & Asset Management:

We’ve adopted iterative marketing as an operational methodology. Test, Learn, Improve, Repeat across all campaigns and assets.

• The team meets for daily scrums to check in on progress against priorities
• We’ve added new members qualified to handle the rapid pace.
• We’ve moved more communications to a collaboration portal for faster and better communications (less synthesis required, improved version control, less organization of local files, etc.)
• We take advantage of technologies like Webtrends Optimize, Ad Director, and Social Measurement to facilitate this process in an automated fashion where available.

Data Architecture:

Your marketing stack must enable iterative marketing, not hinder it. This sounds simple but it’s something I’ve run into again and again when trying to execute. Some of the principles to consider:
• Include Social Media: Your customers interact with your brand and products off your site, and utilizing a tool like Webtrends Social Measurement that will integrate with your Webtrends Analytics 9 data is hugely important. The technology, along with supporting business processes, can make substantive and positive impacts on your business in groups broader than just marketing.
• Marketing automation is a must: Understand how your marketing campaigns align with your digital asset investments and further align to your sales funnel. We use Eloqua at Webtrends.
• Business process change powers your experimentation platform: One of the most important learned lessons with an experimentation platform is that you have to enable your Creative Director to be successful. Utilizing a service and platform that can help get your team up and running with the new business processes and then running it on your own is a great tactic to get value faster. We use Webtrends Optimize because we not only get the most advanced platform on the market but we have access to an amazing team of experts.
• Analytics are the mothership: We use Webtrends Analytics 9 and Marketing Warehouse at Webtrends. Possibly this goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway. Analytics are the mothership for  your Marketing stack and you have to have unfettered access to all your visitor level data. Webtrends is the only provider who can do that for you and we certainly take advantage of what Webtrends has to offer.
• Integrating online and offline data should be a goal if it’s applicable for your business: Solid analytics and customer intelligence tools that enable you to look at the data together and take action are hugely important for business that operate in multiple channels. There is a great webinar taking place on Dec 2 that you should check out if you want to learn more about this.

Here’s an analogy that I think can be helpful to illustrate the concept of marketing iteration in present-day organizations:

In most of Europe, it’s really easy to be energy-efficient because the societal infrastructure supports it. Everyone has low-flow showers and toilets, energy costs more so people make a tremendous effort to conserve it, mass transit is ubiquitous and awesome, pesticide and farming laws mean that food is more sustainably produced, etc. This entire supporting framework (a combination of laws and cultural norms that transcends individual behavior) makes it much easier for individuals to “do the right thing”, per se. America is, obviously, quite different. Even if you want to be more efficient as an individual, you’re constantly at odds with culture, laws and institutions that, in many cases, make it harder to live sustainably (our dependency on cars is one example). I think of iterative marketing the same way. You can have individuals in an organization who champion it or try to be iterative, but in order to really succeed across the organization, you need to have a company-wide culture, the right marketing stack and processes that support iterative marketing.

In summary, at Webtrends, our data architecture is comprised of social media data (via Webtrends Social Measurement) campaign performance data (via Eloqua), Multivariate experimentation data (via Webtrends Optimize) and visitor + trend data (via Webtrends Analytics & Marketing Warehouse) along with all the supporting cultural and business process changes that act as the glue between the components of the stack.

What is in your marketing stack?

I recently had the opportunity to join Scott Hoffman, founder of CLIQOLOGY and a friend of mine from my days at Yahoo!, on his podcast. We discussed “Does the rise of Social Media make web analytics more important?” Short answer: Yes. It was a great discussion and Scott was kind enough to package it up and provide me a link to share which i’ve done below.

If you have any comments or questions please leave them below.

I was fortunate enough to have been invited by Sean Power and Alistair Croll to participate in a panel during their Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (November 16). I’ll be on the panel with Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics, and Jonathan Straus the founder of awe.sm. The bootcamp is sold out, Sean and Alistair don’t mess around, and I hear it will be quite the audience of attendees…all the ingredients for a great event!