Conference season lead the change
This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.
The first sign of spring is the beginning of the conference season and it kicked off for me this week when Omniture came to town hosting their European Summit in London. Around a 1,000 people from across Europe gathered together last Tuesday to listen to what one of the largest marketing technologies companies had to say.
The theme of the conference was “Lead the Change” and was kicked off with a keynote session from Josh James, Omniture’s co-founder and CEO. I wasn’t at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City but I assume that the message was the same. James asserted that prospects were still good for our industry even in these difficult times. “Technology is no respecter of the economy” he told us and outlined the potential based on the fact that “less than 10% of transactions are being optimised”. A number of product announcements were made in the keynote including the introduction of the Omniture marketing suite into Europe, the launch of Omniture Recommendations, new reporting capabilities in Site Catalyst for measuring how viral videos are and the integration with 24/7′s Open AdStream. Much was made also about Omniture’s partnership with WPP and James interviewed Mark Read, the head of WPP Digital. Read stressed the importance of digital to WPP these days (accounting for over 25% of business) and it was interesting to hear that WPP’s digital priorities were around social media, mobile and analytics.
My sense of progress from the opening sessions was it was more evolutionary than revolutionary. There was talk about the impact that social media and mobile would be having on the way that consumers and marketers interact and there were announcements of new measurement capabilities in those areas. There were also hints that there would be more focus on improving measurement capabilities on content and lead generation sites in the future. There was also talk about more activity on integration, including the integration of SearchCentre (their keyword bid management) tool and Test an Target (their multi-variate testing tool), as well as more concentration on Developer Connection and their data integration capability, Genesis. So for me the start of the conference painted a picture of consolidation and amalgamation which is perhaps not surprising given the expansive and acquisitive nature of the company over the past 2 years.
Ed Thompson from Gartner Group gave an interesting and wide ranging presentation. After talking about the shifts in the CRM space from operational CRM to analytical and collaborative CRM strategies, he focused on talking about customer experience management. He highlighted the trend for companies to look to differentiate themselves through the customer experience but identified some of the major challenges facing those companies. First of all customers are becoming more powerful, secondly no-one in those companies “owns” the customer and thirdly, on the whole, employees don’t care. So the challenge is to find someone who “cares about customers” in the company and then to put the right measurement frameworks in place. Thompson also offered an interesting insight based on his analysis on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). He looked at the profile of the companies with the highest customer satisfaction scores. They were food companies, internet companies and the like. From this he came to the view that most of the companies with good customer satisfaction scores didn’t actually deal directly with customers. “Humans screw up the customer experience” he said and warned companies not to confuse customer intimacy with good customer experience. I guess that underpins the need to get the web experience right as often people don’t want to deal with other people, they just want to get the job done.
I took the opportunity to take in a few presentations from the social media track at the Summit, covering aspects such as mobile and video measurement. Greg Dowling from Nokia summed it up for me when he said “mobile measurement is hard”. Many issues such as the proliferation of devices and browser, the lack of industry standards, problems with visitor identification combines to create a number of different measurement challenges. It reminded me of the web analytics world about 8 or 9 years ago. Matthew Langie from Omniture outlined a mobile analytics “maturity model” which starts by measuring the mobile opportunity through to profile based targeting. I think for most companies measuring the opportunity is about as good as it gets at the moment.
Later this week I head out to the West Coast to get another dose of conference input at the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in San Jose where I’ll present on predictive analytics, May 4. I’ll give you a round up on that one next time.
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