The Paradox of the Big, Bad Burrito
One of the biggest changes to this year’s X Change isn’t actually a change to X Change at all. It’s the addition of a day of training prior to the conference – the Think Tank. This may not seem like a big deal – after all, every conference comes with a training day – but I’ve modeled Think Tank closely after X Change and I think it will be significant advance on the art of training in web analytics.
To explain why I think that, I’m going to fall back on one of my other interests (junk food) and explain the mystery of the big, bad burrito. Here in San Francisco we have a significant Mexican population and with that, a plethora of cheap, occasionally good Mexican food. Now I love dive food and I love burritos. But I don’t love most of the burritos that I find in SF. Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern. When a new, divey Mexican restaurant opens, they often have pretty good burritos and these burritos are usually normal sized. As time passes, the burritos get bigger and bigger and they taste worse and worse.
What’s going on?
It isn’t hard to figure out that there must be a large population of burrito consumers for whom quantity relative to price is the most important attribute. To draw that population, you have to make a large and cheap burrito and to make that large and cheap burrito, you have to either remove the expensive ingredients or substitute ones of poorer quality. Pretty soon you get a burrito arms race – with bigger and bigger burritos that taste worse and worse.
Unfortunately, the economics of business training tend in a similar direction.
People won’t generally pay more for training just because it’s advanced. And there are always more people who want introductory training than advanced training. This may seem paradoxical but it isn’t and not just because web analytics is a young field. There may be many more experienced practitioners than new ones; because they are experienced, however, their training needs and interests will be very diverse. No one class is likely to draw more than a small percentage of their interests. Beginners, on the other hand, all have the same needs and interests.
So training ends up focusing almost exclusively on broad introductory topics for the very good reason that you make more money that way. The economics of the big, bad burrito also explain why every time we've tried training for our more advanced analysts, they've come back disappointed.
Fortunately, the economics of X Change lead in a fundamentally different direction. First, X Change isn’t a money-maker for us; it’s a branding exercise. That changes the dynamic of who we want at the conference and how we approach it. Getting the wrong people to pony up the 2K to attend doesn’t really meet our goals. Since the conference is small and designed for serious managers and practitioners, we start out with an audience that essentially precludes the big, broad approach to training.
The result is Think Tank.
For Think Tank I took the core ideas of X Change – real practitioners, real expertise, no fluff – and extended it into training. In each session, a small group will actually work through a real-world analysis or topic. No canned case studies. No boilerplate.
Because the topics are advanced, we know that not everyone will be interested in every session. But we’ve structured the day so that there will be five different classes at any one time – and you have the option of choosing which one you want to take. Check out the full grid on the web site and you’ll see that’s it’s pretty advanced stuff.
Each training session will be small (we’re thinking around 6 or 7 people per session). Each session will be lead by one of the leading consultants from Semphonic and Web Analytics Demystified – a real practitioner not a paid trainer working from a canned syllabus.
For instance, I’m doing the classes on warehousing web analytics data, correctly integrating survey and behavioral data, and on working with a web analytics data feed. If you follow my blog, you know these are subjects close to my deepest interests and they are the sort of topics I just couldn’t cover well in a Powerpoint presentation intended for a broad audience. These are topics that blend my technical and analytic interests and in a small room with a half-dozen highly engaged participants, I hope each class will drive tremendous value.
In one of my recent blogs I mentioned Paul Legutko’s "Measuring Microsites" Whitepaper and what a fine piece of work that is. If you’ve read it or you know Paul, you’ll know why I think he’s one of the finest practicing analysts in the world. Paul’s teaching classes on Microsite measurement, using Discover for Business Analysis, and on SEM analytics. And like my own choices, Paul’s classes reflect his hands-on analytic bent and the particular analysis area’s he’s most drawn to.
Of course, many X Change participants are what I would describe as “advanced analytics managers.” They aren’t necessarily hands-on with web analytics data feeds or Discover. No problem.
We have advanced training around managerial issues as well. Eric Peterson will be leading several classes (because I expect such demand) on Building an Analytics Organization. Our own Phil Kemelor is teaching a class focused on managing web analytics on a shoestring. Weathering these tough times is no small challenge and Phil will focus on strategies for getting the most out of your budget.
These classes are for managers, but they aren’t for beginners. We’re assuming that you know your stuff already and want to dig deeper with two of the leading thinkers on strategic web analytics.
The classes take advantage of all the many areas of expertise that we’ve built up here at Semphonic: from doing a better job of automating your Excel-reporting to tagging Web 2.0 sites to Functionalism. We’ve tried to cover a variety of key issues that managers, analysts and even IT people supporting tagging or warehousing of analytics data may face. But we haven’t tried to be comprehensive; I let each teacher choose their topics so that each course reflected the passion and experience of the practitioner. That passion is, to me, is the single most important part of any really good education and it's what's nearly always missing from those who make their money teaching outside of academe.
We’ve also set up Think Tank so you can register for it separately or even share a Think Tank training within your organization. One person can attend the conference while another does training. So you can take advantage of X Change’s networking and broad perspectives for analytics managers AND get world-class advanced training for your team.
It will be a training experience like no other – and it’s a chance for you (or some of your analysts) to leapfrog countless hours of learning.
I believe X Change has re-shaped what people expect from an industry conference. With X Change Think Tank, I hope to re-shape your ideas of what to expect from professional training.
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