On The Trail

UPDATE: I wrote this a week ago and thought I pressed “publish”, but I guess not. It didn’t show up on my site and I only just discovered it… Anyway, better late than never!

I just got back from Eric Peterson’s talk at tonight’s MIMA meeting. I loved it — because his main thesis is that companies don’t spend enough on Web Analytics in general, and web analysts in particular. Can you say “job security”? Keep preaching the Word, Eric! Much of the data to back up this thesis was from his Jupiter days. It can be seen in a few archived webinars, I think this one has most of it.

He did have a few points that I hadn’t heard before. One was the concept of “The New Usability Framework”. Eric defined this as a marriage of automated a/b style testing, website clickstream analysis and survey/customer feedback with traditional usability best practices. This is one of the things we aspire to do at Ciceron (although we usually don’t have the budget for automated testing). We certainly didn’t have a snappy name for it like “The New Usability Framework” — get it in our marketing copy, STAT!

The other thing that stuck out for me was Eric’s answer to a question about how to most effectively present data. (I happened to have spent a good chunk of the day thinking about this so my ears perked up). He related a story about an analysis team that presented ideas in the form of a news story or a press release. Headline, copy, supporting graphics, all printed out on paper. That is a really good idea and I can think of quite a few instances where this concept will make our reporting more effective.

It was also an excellent networking event. I finally met my local WebTrends rep face to face and a bunch of others in the Minnesota Interactive Marketing scene (imagine that at a MIMA event). I’ll have to start going to these things more often!