Web Analytics Wednesday Toronto: February 2010 Summary

A massive thank you to Patrick Glinski (@glinskiii) for hosting Web Analytics Wednesday (On a Tuesday) last night. The venue was great and it was all well organized. Also a big thanks to Jim Sterne (@jimsterne) for coming out and Lee Isensee (@OMLee) from Unica for sponsoring the event.

I didn’t expect to join the panel – but it was nice to have been loudly trolled up (eh – @Jason_Dee ?). I also enjoyed giving the first stabs on what are really hard and really early solutions. What I wanted to talk about, but couldn’t, was the launch of our product socialTALK™ today.

It’s exciting because it addresses the human process issues that are common in social media marketing. It’s an important instrument in closing the execution gap between insight and action. Since you won’t improve what you won’t measure – we’ve included metrics right in there. If you’re executing a social media strategy, you need socialTALK.

Check it out.

While I would have really loved to cause trouble and leak the news, a few other themes did manage to dominate:

The discussion started off really technical – especially around the most complex topic – sentiment analysis. We talked about the problems with the English language and meaning and how humans, in general, are the source of a lot of error when it comes to the summarization of what something meant. Error is okay, so long as you know it’s there and you’re consistently erroneous. Consistently erroneous data produces a trend you can use to gauge success.

And we’re never going to eliminate complexity and error in language. But we can manage it.

We all generally agreed that it wasn’t so much about the data inasmuch that it was about the insights and what you do with them. This notion of social media is about people and social media measurement is about people became recurrent after Glinski pointed it out.

He went onto to emphasize that his not-so-hidden agenda was a desire to see everybody make more money. That prompted more discussion later on in the night about collective challenges.

There was an electricity in the room about the opportunities in social media measurement. People were happy and genuinely alright with missing #lost.

I had good conversations with @june_li , @jonlitwack @web_analyst , @jntn , @will_lam , @marktoronto , @SionneRoberts , @mmonaa @dynamicdeanna and @jenvetterli and Debra Luneau, among many others. Those are just the tweets I found during the night. The Syncapse team had a great time too.

It was a great event. Last year when Jim was in town at about this same time we talked about a lot of things – but social media measurement really didn’t feature all that prominently.

What a difference a year makes.

A big thank you to all who came out and all who engaged. I look forward to seeing you at the next one. 😉

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