eMetrics Summit 2008 Impressions and Reflections (Day 3)

The final day has finally come. To be honest, it has been quite exhausted in the last two days, bombarded by so many different ideas, vendor pitches, roundtable discussion and endless networking…My caffeine intake has been increased from two cups before I came here to … (don’t want to tell you, since my wife won’t be happy about it). Anybody thinks attending eMetrics summit as a vacation opportunity is seriously mistaken.

The “journey” message came along again with the first keynote from Kim Johnson, VP of Global Sales and Marketing Operations, Symantec Corporation. It is an amazing to see how she is able to manage all marketing segments in a centralized and integrated way, being able to balance the needs of the brand, the product lines and the sales organizations across the globe. For many large corporation, that’s simple a dream, probably never able to achieve though.

eMetrics Passport draw was the next on the agenda. Knowing that I won’t win anything, if the history is truly an indication of the future, I still went to each booth, having my passport stamped and prayed that miracle will happen. Of course it doesn’t. Tom-Tom GPS, $500 gas cards, 42” LCD TV all goes to our lucky winner, but not me. (crying aloud)

The next two sessions I attended both are focused on data mining, behavior segmentation and predicative analysis. Neil Mason talked about how to apply data mining and predictive analytical techniquest to get to grips with issues like visitor segmentation and understanding customers’ propensity to purchase. Gary Angel from Semphonic, continues to walk us through the process of doing behavior segmentations integrated with VOC data.

We talked about segmentation a lot. Avinash even goes to say the clickstream data and behavior analysis is useless without segmentation. But in most cases, segmentation we talked about are more “micro-segmentation”, just another name of different ways of slicing and dicing data. For example, don’t look at the aggregate site level conversion rate, but look at new visitors and repeating visitors. What Neil and Gary talked about are more “Macro-segmentation”: to look at all visitors, find variables that differentiate them from one group to the other, profiling them with demographic or voice of customer information and use the results segments to drive online marketing campaigns. This is the traditional definition of “segmentation” and it is the offline segmentation many companies have been doing for centuries. Neil and Gary are now taking them to the online world.

It’s hard to believe the summit has finally come to the end and the last 30 minutes belong to Mr. Jim Sterne, the godfather of web analytics. He highlighted the challenges ahead of us but also encouraged us to leverage the knowledge we have learned and the network we have built to create value for the organizations we serve and help the new comers in the community. So moved by his words and heart, I asked to take a picture with him like many others did.

My trip to the eMetrics Summit has come to close, now I need think about how to convince my boss to send me back to summit next year. The only way to convince him is to deliver higher value to my company. And I am confident that I can, because I have learned so much in the last three days, and I have got many friends and mentors that can help guide me along the way.

See you next year.