Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

It’s another second Tuesday of the month, which means it’s another Web Analytics (Tuesday) in Columbus!

We had a good turnout — 13-14 people, including a good showing from the local Adobe User Group. ExactTarget graciously sponsored the event, and Brian Burson presented/led a discussion on integrating email, CRM, and web analytics. It was interesting, as he stressed that, while there is certainly a technology challenge in making that integration happen so that you can use web analytics and CRM data to improve the relevance of your communications to your prospects…an equally big challenge is setting up the heuristics (his $10 word — not mine!) to identify which people should get which messages and when based on that sea of data. It was great to hear a vendor acknowledge that it takes real thought and planning to pull that sort of thing off, rather than pretending that 99% of the battle is the integration of the systems! ExactTarget has a nice white paper on the subject on their site. Nice read.

Other random notes of interest from my end of the table:

• Google Coupons — Pretty. Slick. Michael described the implementation as being very similar to using sitemap.xml implementation for improved searchability. Try out the end result yourself: 1) Go to Google Maps, 2) Type in your home or work address, 3) When it comes up, search for “Jiffy Lube”, 4) Underneath the results that show up, click Coupons. You’ll get printable Valpak coupons for the location. NIF-ty…
• Google Chrome — the two things that, when prompted, I could say I liked about it: 1) the fact that multiple tabs spawned multiple processes, and 2) the fact that the search box and URL box were one and the same.
• Google Chrome — it’s not a browser, it’s an application environment (that’ll be a topic for me to ask more about next month…as I’m not sure what that means)
• Google Ad Manager — very favorable reviews from the people who have seen it and played around with it
• “Social media” is becoming a dirty phrase among a noticeable portion of this crowd

Other, people-oriented news of note:

• Monish Datta arrived and, as such, garnered a mention in this post to boost his Google-ability
• Scott Zakrajsek attended and shared disparaging remarks about various people and vendors freely
• Nicole…pulled another “mysterious and unannounced absence” from the event; we’ll tell her what we made up as excuses for her next time
• Several of our regulars and semi-regulars had to bail at the last minute due to late-breaking conflicts. They were missed. I won’t “Highlight” anyone in particular that might “Tie” an aura of self-doubt to those folk that could only be properly analyzed by Carl “Jung. He” would have an interesting assessment, I’m sure.

Next month’s event should fall on October 14th, which means I’ll probably have to miss it (unless I make my trip to Austin that week rather abbreviated). We’ll get it up and running on the WAW site a bit sooner this time. We hope.