While the rest of the web analytics folks attended eMetrics in San Jose last week, I
had the pleasure of participating in JBoye’s Philadelphia 09
conference. This was the first US conference for JBoye; Janus started these
conferences in Aarhus, Denmark in 2005 as annual user group meetings for his
firm’s Communities of
Practice…a really great concept in which practitioners with similar
interests but in different verticals exchange experiences and learnings on a
monthly basis. I’ve had the good fortune
of presenting and teaching at the Danish conferences, and had a great time
doing a joint session at last week’s event with Susan Fariss, Web Analytics
Manager from the American Chemical Society on taking a strategic
approach to web analytics implementations.
One of the reasons I like the JBoye conferences is because most
of the folks are content managers, information architects and user experience
professionals and there is a spirit of conversation, questioning and
inquisitiveness that gets me thinking outside of the web analytics box. It also
gives me a good perspective on how non-web analysts deal (or not) with web
analytics.
Some of the takeaways this time:
1. We (fill in the blank) get no respect
Recurrent themes of a lack of appreciation,
respect or influence articulated by content managers, user experience folks and
information architects within their organizations would resonate with web
analytics people.
A thought: Build more cross-discipline
support and help each other out in developing business cases that get joint
initiatives funded and recognized by senior management. For more ideas, check
out: http://wam.typepad.com/wam/2007/09/california-drea.html
and http://wam.typepad.com/wam/2008/05/its-been-awhile.html
2. Soup or Art?
Have you seen Lily Tomlin’s “Search for Signs
of Intelligent Life in the Universe”? Great show…one of the memorable bits was her
holding up a can of tomato soup and asking the crowd if it was just soup or art (a
la Warhol).
I saw something similar in Erik
Hartman’s and Bob
Boiko’s presentation about an Information
Management Framework and trying to
get content managers to think of themselves not only as managers of Content
Management Systems, but Information Managers who are responsible for providing
quality information to their stakeholders.
In the same vein, I thought of how many of
us in the web analytics space spend a lot of time talking about tools and
techniques, rather than the information and analysis we provide. Something to
think about...
3. What am I missing?
I got into the concept of web analytics and
qualitative techniques at roughly the same time I started managing web sites…1996.
I used WebTrends, surveys, interviews and usability testing to change web site
content, navigation and interface design…this just seemed like the thing to do.
So I guess I’ve never understood why analytics seems like a foreign concept to
those on the content side of the house.
I was heartened that this seems to be
changing...most notably in Erik and Bob’s presentation as they discussed the
importance of content monetization through modeling in non-commerce scenarios
and in Lou
Rosenfeld’s keynote on the need for User Experience and Web Analytics to be
used together. If you’d like to get some ideas on how to combine qualitative
and quantitative measurement methods, and how to develop monetization models for
content, you might want to take a look at my book The Executive’s Guide to Web Site
Measurement and Testing. I think you’ll find some useful stuff there. There
was even some talk of the need for one role to bring all
site measurement disciplines together…a concept that I think makes a lot of
sense as organizations seek to get out of site evaluation and testing silos.
Check out my post http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1592-Web-Analytics-Vs-Design about the discussion over Douglas Bowman's leaving Google over a tiff about web analytics.
The next JBoye
conference is scheduled in Aarhus at the beginning of November. I suggest
if you’re looking for a conference with a bit of personality, you should check
it out….speaking of conferences with personality, remember to put X Change on your calendar for September.
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