We’ve nailed down the Huddle Leaders and topics for X Change this year – probably the single most important part of putting together the conference. This year, we have senior measurement managers and leaders from an amazing group of companies: Adobe, AOL, Barclays, Best Buy, Charles Schwab, Discovery, HP, Intuit, Kohler, Microsoft, Nokia, Salesforce, The New York Times, and Turner Broadcasting and they are covering just about every aspect of enterprise web analytics - from team building to targeting and testing to mobile and video measurement.
The breadth of this lineup – leading companies in Financial Services, Media, Technology and Software, SaaS, and even Manufacturing should make for a unique cross-pollination of views, opinions and experiences.
And given this economy, I’m very happy indeed that almost everyone we asked was able to come out and lead Huddles. Many of our leaders are previous attendees; (though we try to rotate in mostly new leaders) so they know how special X Change is.
As usual, there are so many great huddle leaders and topics that I’m going to use a couple (of my usual lengthy) posts to describe them.
Let me start with some old friends first.
Intuit has built up a formidable and well deserved reputation in online measurement. They’ve had an amazing number of top measurement people there. Dylan Lewis, returning from last year, has been years building a practice for the TurboTax unit (which means he’s a lucky dog who gets to live in San Diego) – and he’s always one of the most consistently interesting people I talk to. Dylan’s going to lead discussions on how to find, hire, and train people to work together as part of a valuable web analytics practice. Whether you’re building a practice inside an enterprise or creating a consulting outfit like Semphonic, we all know it’s people that ultimately matter. This is one of those topics that you can only really do at X Change – a powerpoint and presentation is never going to be a substitute for a real conversation around what works and what doesn’t around hiring and training in our field.
We’ll also be welcoming back Dennis Bradley and Kevin Chan from Charles Schwab. Dennis is one of a very small number of repeat Huddle leaders from last year. I was in the Huddle he led on “Bridging the Gap between Analytics and Marketing” and it was probably my personal favorite in 2008. Dennis and Kevin have spent much of the time since then measuring a massive overhaul in Schwab’s core customer site, and they’ll be co-leading Huddles on measuring large-scale site re-design efforts. If you’ve ever tried this, you know there is a lot more involved than just running some reports. They plan to cover everything from establishing a site baseline to tracking key audience segments to creating a set of expectations throughout the organization about what to look for and how to interpret the results.
Matt Jacobs attended the first X Change and led what may have been my favorite Huddle of that year – talking about data integration. Last year, our no vendor policy precluded Matt from leading a Huddle, but fortunately he’s made the leap from Digitas to Adobe where he heads up their measurement/reporting team. So he’s back as a Huddle leader and he’ll be leading a discussion on common targeting strategies, audience segmentation and identification, magic moments, behavioral profiling and targeting, and the tools and techniques necessary to refine your audience and your message to achieve maximum relevancy. This is material close to my own heart and Matt consistently does some of the most in-depth and interesting work of anyone in our field. The demand to improve the ROI on measurement is especially keen in this economic climate and using analytics for targeting is probably the single most likely path for most organizations to do that.
I’m also really happy to be welcoming back some former attendees who are now going to be leading Huddles.
Francis Lavelle of HowStuffWorks (part of Discover Communications best known for the Discovery Channel) has been to each X Change. He and I have sat in a number of Huddles together and shared a lunch or two as well. One of the great things about X Change is that you make real connections there – not just swapping names and business cards. Francis has been grappling with the challenges of measuring and disciplining SEO work in a very rich-content heavy environment. It’s a big issue for many companies and he’ll lead a discussion group on ways to better measure organic search including stuff you really need to know about tracking organic search as a separate event, using page rank parameters, minimizing the SEO impact of measurement in terms of URL encoding, and techniques for wrapping video and other rich media assets for SEO. If Semphonic’s practice is any guide, measurement has been a growing concern for SEO and it’s a field where shared experiences are at a premium. You’ll have an opportunity in this session to learn what’s really worked for other organizations.
James Robinson of The New York Times was an attendee last year and was terrific. I think one of the best things about X Change is that everyone is a full participant – it isn’t just about speakers. I often hear the most interesting stuff at X Change from people I haven’t met before and don’t know at all. Since then, of course, James delivered one of the best keynotes I’ve ever heard at eMetrics in D.C. So I’m pretty happy to have him back at X Change leading a discussion on fully leveraging online measurement in the organization. A fundamental learning at the Times has been the importance of simplicity in arriving at and explaining analytics. It’s a hard lesson to learn because, as analysts, we are always tempted by the complex and difficult. You’ll get a chance here to explore some novel tactics for using measurement and for getting measurement used and, of course, you’ll be able to contribute your own special experiences.
I first met Tom Cattapan of Turner Broadcasting at last year’s X Change, though we’d talked on the phone before that. I’ve been working with him over the course of this last year and it’s always been a lot of fun. Since I work with Tom to put together web seminars on web analytics theory and practice for Turner’s many online teams, we get to talk about the most consistently interesting stuff! Tom is going to lead two different Huddles. The first is a natural from a Turner perspective – a discussion on video measurement that will cover the best trade-off between cost and measurement coverage, the appropriate role for web analytics and player reporting, and some in-depth discussion of measuring distributed video. These are cutting edge topics and if you’re at all invested in video assets, it should be a highly informative discussion.
Tom is also going to lead a first for X Change – a vertical specific Huddle. I’ve toyed with the notion in the past and after talking it over with Tom I decided to try it here. We have so many outstanding media leaders and participants that I think a discussion on "Media Metrics" is highly appropriate. This is a chance to talk over your thoughts on the most important, most revealing, most unfortunately deceptive, and most interesting ways to measure content and advertising. The group will cover metrics for audience measurement, site efficiency, channel performance, editorial support, video impressions and all things media. I think there is a big opportunity for vertical specific conversations and I’m anxious to see how this works out!
The breadth and depth of these topics is what really differentiates X Change. Keep in mind that these aren’t canned presentations; these are conversations led and sustained by a whole group of serious enterprise measurement leaders on the most important topics in our field. X Change gives you a chance to be a part of what I hope will be the most interesting web analytics conversations you will ever hear.
You can register for X Change at http://www.semphonic.com/xchangeregister.aspx!
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