Fictional character creation is a useful tool in creating an intriguing narrative that captures attention, especially since the character can be easily adapted to fit different digital spaces, such as Video, Microblogging, and Image sharing sites. Media diversity  is also useful in building and unifying online communities that access with media in separate channels.

Creating a consistent brand all through many all social sites one of the best ways to maximize the value of a character or brand campaign.

Ryan Summers and I created a presentation on how to track users across various social media sites using mostly free tools. It was given at Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland, Oregon.

History

A few weeks before the MITX awards ceremony, ISITE Design created a short video called “El Consultador” as an introduction to other agencies.

The El Consultador campaign generated diverse social data. This created issues with tracking data from multiple social media sites across problems with social media is that these is no singular way to gather and rank all of the data over time. Tools like Radian6 and Trucast are in use by larger agencies and businesses, but there exist an increasing amount of free tools for data visualization and engagement reporting that are available online.

This Powerpoint was made for an audible presentation. I collaborated with Ryan Summers of ISITE design on it and presented it at Web Analytics Wednesday. I will attempt to explain the results/processes in a textual manner here.

Profiles Created for the El Consultador Campaign

We used analytic data from Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Twitter to determine the most successful aspects of the campaign.

On Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/2309025

On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6jt_aSFg0

On Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/elconsultador/
(Workers at ISITE design superimposed the Consultador face onto a variety of characters in pop culture).

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/elconsultador

——

Key Performance Indicators

We determined a number of Key Performance Indicators of the social media campaign.

-Direct awareness of ISITE design agency
-3rd part mentions
-Social media followers (number of Twitter followers, comments on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr).
-Direct communication

YouTube Reports

We used YouTube reports to track the engagement with the video campaign.

Data tracked included:

-Age Demograpics
-Gender Demograpics
-Discovery Sources
-Timeline Trends

The campaign was viewed predominately by 26-45 year old males and mostly during and around the date of the MITX awards. This is the demographic it was aimed at.

Vimeo Stats

Vimeo is a high-quality Video sharing site with a limited but very engaged traffic demographic. We used Vimeo data to find more about who engaged with the campaign and compared it to YouTube data.

Flickr Reports

Flickr has a reporting tool for image views over time for every image. The data can be accessed with a premium Flickr account. We used this data to determine the most viewed (strongest/most impactful) pictures associated with El Consutador on the El Consultador account, and which images should be associated with the campaign on other sites (if future campaigns needed to be implemented).

Google Analytics

We used data from Google Analytics for the page on which El Consultador existed on the ISISTE Webpage. Data was tracked from the “El Consultator” and “MITX” keywords. New visitors and direct traffic were also analyzed.

Social Nodes

The campaign was picked up by three prominent bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Davaid Armano (VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass), and C.C. Chapman (Prominent figure in the community of podcasting, new media, cofounder of the Advanced Guard, a marketing company which focuses on utilizing social media and other emerging technologies).

Blogs linking to the campaigns were not found via inlink searches in Yahoo! Site Explorer, but with an intelligence feed created in Yahoo! Pipes (see below)

Tracking Overall Data

Custom intelligence feeds are useful for checking overall propagation of data. Yahoo! Pipes provides a free custom way to aggregate data across Google blog search, Google news, Technorati, Flickr, and Twitter.

———

Data Visualization and Tracking for Twitter

I presented an extended set of tools and data visualization methods for Twitter. Links for all of them are here:

Reports/Demographic Research:
Summize
http://tweetstats.com/

TweetVolume
http://tweetvolume.com/

Twitter Mobile (vs. Twitter in browser)
http://m.twitter.com/home

Neoformix Twitter Stream Graphs
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php (I provided a live demo of this).

Twitter Stream Graphs are a simple way to rsearch keyword volume associated with a brand or campaign. Neoformix also tracks keywords over time, meaning that one can see when a certain keyword became popular.
——–

Future Suggestions:
More Flickr photos could be linked to all of the other accounts, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Vimeo. Linking together social media campaigns in a more robust fashion will affect CTR’s by making the campaign spreadable across various demographic profiles and types of social media users.

——-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers. She enjoys data visualization (click for more info on conference tracking), search engine optimization (ask), and how marketing works in the online ecosystem.

She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy.

You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, or drop her an E-mail at caseorganic[at]gmai[dot]com. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3, Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conferece, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder.

She also blogs at Nerdabout.com and http://www.blog.makerlab.org, a Portland new media incubator. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She is also involved with building and studying electronics with DorkbotPDX.

After seeing presentations from both Ignite Portland and Ignite Seattle at Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex this September, and then speaking at Ignite Portland 4 last month, I kind of got addicted to the Ignite-style conferences.

More Ignite-like Events

It’s not just Ignite that inspires people to press great information into short chunks — there’s also Pecha Kucha which in Japanese means ‘the sound of conversation’, and allows a slightly longer period of time (6:20) for a symbiotic exchange between a human, an audience, and a automatically-progressing series of Powerpoint slides.

I grew up in Denver, Colorado, and am currently visiting Colorado for a week to see my parents. When I heard that Ignite Boulder would coincide with my visit, I was extremely excited.

Cool New People

So tomorrow, I am very excited to meet some very excellent Denver/Boulderites. Namely, Jeremy Tanner (@Penguin), Kit Seeborg (@zsazsa), Andrew Hyde (@andrewhyde).

Thanks to Portland and Seattle for getting me hooked on one of the best ways to present information. It will be very exciting to see presentations from a different region! Hooray Hoorah!

———–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

While doing research for my thesis on cell phones, I came across a report prepared by Anthropologist Sadie Plant called “On the Mobile”. It was extremely well written, and very enjoyable to read. [You can download a .pdf of it from Motorola here] But recently, I found this video of another lecture on cell phones at MIT.

In the past, people lived in zones: you live at home, do other stuff at work, or while traveling. That’s changing now. Things are continuous. There’s no difference between work, home and travel. You want to have the same things with you. We believe people don’t live in categories anymore. As we’re moving around, we want seamless transitions to occur in life.

We’re living as low tech cyborgs now. It is only going to get more interesting in the future.

I’m posting this video to get everyone into the mindset for CyborgCamp this weekend [Dec 6th, 2008 at Cubespace from 9-6 Pm [Get a Ticket] [Preparty at Vidoop, 8:30 Pm Dec 5th, 2008 [RSVP] ]. The world around us is changing, but I’ll let Padmasree Warrior, now CTO at Cisco (and @padmarsee on Twitter [thanks, @nelking] tell you her story:

Nancy King / nelking

Warrior describes how thousands of Motorola engineers are trying to create a transparent network so that individuals can take their music, video, pictures —virtually any kind of data with them — wherever they go. “Mobile devices have become the remote control for life. Let us do things we have not thought about before,” says Warrior. For 75 years, Motorola has specialized in what Warrior describes as “preemptive innovation.” This means not just enabling new ways to communicate (for example, creating the two-way radio and cell phone), but giving customers new reasons to communicate. Within technological view are cars that can download information about a driver’s preferences, from seat height to mirror settings, and homes that can broadcast a favorite radio show from room to room, so the listener misses nothing.

Thanks to MITWorld for the video.
April 27, 2004
Running Time: 46:22

About the Speaker

Padmasree Warrior
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
Motorola Incorporated

Padmasree Warrior has worked at Motorola since 1984. She currently leads a global team of 4,600 technologists, guiding creative research from innovation through the first stages of marketing. She also serves as a technology advisor to the office of the chairman and to the board’s technology and design steering committee.

Before assuming her current role in January 2003, Warrior was corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola’s energy systems group. Warrior was corporate vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and was elected a corporate officer in 2000.

Warrior received an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India.

Warrior served on the Texas Governor’s Council for Digital Economy, and is a member of the Texas Higher Education Board review panel. She was one of six women nationwide selected to receive the “Women Elevating Science and Technology” award from Working Woman magazine in 2001. She also is a director of Ferro Corporation.

———–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, see also the Makerlab blog, as well as coverage of local Portland tech events at Nerdabout.com.

If you haven’t already, please purchase your ticket for CyborgCamp. This ticket covers food and lets us know you’ll be there.

It’s important that you register as early as possible, the ticket costs $10 person before Wednesday December 3rd, 2008, at Noon. If you register afterwards, the ticket before $20. The form is secure and accepts credit cards.

>>Click here to buy a ticket<<

• The $10 ticket is for food, and because we want to know how many people to order food for.
• Formal conference speakers (BIll Derouchey, Ward Cunningham, Hideshi Hamaguchi, and Lia Hollander) and Sponsors do not have to pay or register, but can if they can if they wish to contribute to the CyborgCamp fund/food items (if you’re a sponsor and have already purchased a ticket, I can refund you if you wish).
• All unconference session speakers must pay.
• 5 student tickets are available. If you’d like one, please contact me (see contact info below).
• The reason we’re charging $20 on the 3 days before the vent is simply to get you to register before then. We’d still like people to be able to register — but we want to know how many people are going to come to the event 3 days before we have the event.
• If you’re tuning into the live streaming, there is no need to register.
• If you’re not registered, you won’t be able to attend the event. Plus, we won’t have a badge for you. This will be sad. Registering on Upcoming is only for approximation purposes and does not count as real registration.

Questions? Extraneous needs? Contact Amber Case at caseorganic@gmail.com, CyborgCamp on Twitter, or Caseorganic on Twitter. We’re really, really excited to have you there, and to have a super-live streamed event with amazing people at it.

A lot of times we wait around for technology to just “appear” like we see in films. But if we continue to do that, nothing will get built. Thankfully, people are out there filling in the gaps.

There’s a set of a new sign language for controlling movement from a distance. Very intuitive and simple to learn. Especially with the rewards of being able to move things across the room without touching them.

The rest of this post is over at the CyborgCamp.com Blog, as it relates directly to the event.

Gesture Recognition Demo at the MIT Media Lab with Jamie Zigelbaum.

—————

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who also posts over at the Makerlab Blog, which is something you might enjoy reading if you enjoyed reading the post above. It’s about more experimental tech and activities related to pushing the limits of art and technology. If not, you can always follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Recently, multiple people have been asking me about cool conferences occurring in 2009. I have two answers for them.

1. These conferences are difficult to search for and place in one spot. I’m really interested in knowing what conferences everyone is going to in 2009. I don’t have an exhaustive list.

2. Regardless, and for visibility’s sake, I’ve made the following short list of conferences that I’ve found to be awesome. Please add yours in the comments, if possible.

I’d like to set this us as a Wiki so we can all edit, add, and collaborate. Blog posts are good for getting an initial idea to many people, but are not so good at allowing additional ideas (unless people read the comments).

Search Marketing Expo - West 2009

Santa Clara, California. February 10-12, 2009
Search Marketing Expo - West 2009 Website

SMX conferences serve up some of the most innovative minds in search marketing as keynote speakers, so you know what’s about to happen and prepare for inevitable change. Past speakers have included:

* Tim Armstrong, President, Advertising and Commerce North America & Vice President, Google Inc.
* Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft
* Bill Tancer, Author, “Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters”
* Frazier Miller, Yahoo! Local General Manager

———–

MakerFaire 2009

Saturday May 30, 2009 - Sunday May 31, 2009
San Mateo Fairgrounds
2495 South Delaware Street
San Mateo, California 94403
MakerFaire Website
RSVP on Upcoming

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

Like a science fair, the Maker Faire will have lots of DIY tech projects from the magazine and elsewhere.

Make magazine’s and Craft magazine’s “urban Burning Man” for tinkerers and crafters returns to the Bay Area this year.

———–

Interaction 09

Interaction’09|vancouver will be held from February 5-8, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in conjunction with Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Join several hundred Interaction Designers from around the world as we address the design of interactive systems of all types: applications (web and desktop), mobile, consumer electronics, digitally enhanced environments, and more. Start your year off with stimulating talk, fun parties, and smart discussions about our growing field.

http://interaction09.ixda.org/

————–

SXSW 2009

Austin, Texas.
Interactive: March 13-17
Film: March 13-21
Music: March 18-22
SXSW Website

Music, film, and interactive conference and festival. Includes schedules and band and film lists. The SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE features a legendary festival showcasing more than 1,800 musical acts of all genres from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, the Austin Convention Center comes alive with conference registrants doing business in the Trade Show and partaking of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature. In its 23rd year, SXSW remains an essential event on the music industry calendar.

———–

Webvisions 2009

May 20-22. Portland, Oregon.
Webvisions 2009 Website

Discover the future of Web design, user experience and business strategy for two days of mind-melding on what’s new in the digital world. Get a glimpse into the future, along with practical information that you can apply to your Web site, company and career.

Submit a Session, Panel or Workshop Proposal for WebVisions 2009

WebVisions is now accepting submissions for sessions, panels and workshops for WebVisions 2009, which will be held from May 20-22, at the Oregon Convention Center.
———–

WWW 2009 - 18th International World Wide Web Conference Madrid

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. Apr 20-24, 2009.
www 2009 Madrid Website

The World Wide Web Conference is the global event that brings together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies working to shape the Web.

Organized by IW3C2 since 1994, the WWW conference is the annual opportunity for the International community to discuss and debate the evolution of the Web. The conference will feature a range of presentations on world-class research, as well as stimulating talks, workshops, tutorials, panels, and late-breaking posters.

WWW2009 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of the Web covering the implications of ubiquitous access to the Web through the “three screens” – computer, phone, and TV – and how such Web access will change the way we live, work, and interact in the future. Accepted refereed papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Topics of discussion will include Browsers and User Interfaces, Data Mining, Industrial Practice and Experience, Internet Monetization, Mobility, Performance and Scalability, Rich Media, Search, Security and Privacy, Semantic / Data Web, Social Networks and Web 2.0, Web Engineering, XML and Web Data. The conference will also feature plenary speeches by renowned speakers, and tracks devoted to developers and to recent W3C activities that are of interest to the community.

————

Improved Mobile User Experience 2009 (IMUx 2009) | HIIT

This the third IMUx workshop and it will be held in conjunction with Pervasive 2009 in Nara, Japan. The first IMUx workshop was held in conjunction with Pervasive 2007 and the second IMUx workshop was held in conjunction with Pervasive 2008.

Improved Mobile User Experience 2009 (IMUx 2009) Website

Topic Description

Current interfaces of mobile devices are rather limited when adaptability, context-awareness and proactiveness are considered. For example, they do not utilize the context of the interaction, nor the environmental changes in the user’s proximity or the capabilities of the device itself. This context can include information about the situation and the user preferences, longer or shorter time usage histories, etc. To improve usability and to provide a better user experience, the interfaces of the devices should become more intelligent and require less intentional user inputs. In order to achieve this goal, novel interaction methods need to be developed and combined with statistical models of the user that capture, for example, her behavior, personal preferences and goals.

Furthermore, the developed solutions need to be evaluated via extensive user tests to guarantee they are valuable to the users. To improve the dialogue between the different research areas and their practitioners, the workshop aims at bringing together researchers from the fields of user modeling, user interaction and user experience, with developers of mobile and ubiquitous applications. The ultimate goal of the workshop is to provide a common forum for exchanging ideas between these domains.

Submissions:

The workshop welcomes two kinds of paper submissions: research papers and position papers. Also demonstration and video submissions are welcome.

The research papers should present original research related to one or more of the following areas:

* user modeling in mobile environments
* user interaction in mobile environments
* user experience in mobile environments

The position papers should address challenges in combining the above-mentioned areas, and beyond, for an improved mobile user experience, and propose approaches for overcoming these challenges. We encourage authors to take a visionary view and a critical stand towards current practices and trends.

Example topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* adaptive interfaces for mobile devices
* case studies of mobile computing applications with adaptation (e.g., mobile guides)
* considerate computing
* context-aware information retrieval
* embedded solutions for machine learning
* evaluating mobile user experience in situ or in the field
* large scale data gathering and its challenges
* methods and tools for evaluating mobile user experience
* meaningful abstractions of sensor data (e.g., activity recognition, social analysis, place identification etc.)
* minimal/implicit/reduced user interaction
* mixed-initiative interaction
* mobile spatial interaction
* sensor fusion on mobile devices
* statistical methods for providing feedback to the user
* use of machine learning for instrumented usability research

Publication

Authors of accepted papers are invited to submit a revised version of their work to a special issue at IJMCHI (International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction) or PUC (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing).

Timeline

* Submission deadline: February 10, 2009
* Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2009
* Workshop: May 11, 2009

———–

More Conferences in ‘09?

I apologize for the brevity of this list. Surely you know of more conferences than I do. If you’d like to see something added to this list, please send an E-mail to caseorganic@gmail.com with the following:

*Conference Title
*Date
*Location
*Venue
*Website
*Description
*Optional: Paper submission details (if any).

Or simply comment below.

———

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Journalist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

Yesterday I attended WebTrends Connect ‘08 in Seattle, Washington with Ryan Summers of ISITE Design.

The event was three hours long, and fast-paced. We arrived at 9:00 Am to find a speaker from WebTrends discussing the future state of news. He asked us to consider what could happen if one used online traffic to drive what is written about in analog newspapers.

As the seminar progressed, the ability to stitch together a holistic view of customer experience became a primary area of concern. One of the first major points was that Marketing and IT need to be working together.

“There is a lot of information locked behind closed doors”, said the next speaker, who was from TeraData. “There is no way to get the data out of the web analytics solutions and into the reporting dashboard.

He proposed the idea of business intelligence tools that could access this online visitor data and put it into an enterprise data warehouse.

He pointed out that one of the current difficulties of using data is that we are making a transition from 2nd Generation Enterprise to 3rd Generation Enterprise systems.

The 2nd Generation is Closed + Proprietary, whereas the 3rd Generation is Open standard-based. You simply can’t inegrate data systems when they are separated by proprietary, closed systems.

As O’Reilly once stated, “The internet is becomnig an enormous database that can be quiried, sorted, and applied to existing models and practices to change things”. WebTrends, TeraData, and other new systems seek to integrate many different systems with Analytics. The only way to streamline the spaces between data and change is to remove the closed doors betwen that data.

He stated that tech solutions should be open source based. These technologies seek to implement solutions that bring the two together and erases the nodes between them. He also pointed out that standards need to be in place that everyone agrees about across the organization.

Data Flow and Analytics

Online data can influence customer marketing, call centers, data warehouses, CRM and merchandisers.

Business Centric
—-
Business strategy
Performance Management
People — Processes
Analytics Processes
Analytics Applications
BI Platforms
Information Management Infrastructure.
——————

The next speaker was Paul Barrett
Global Director, Customer Management and DIgital Advertising

“How does one create one vIew of your customer?”, he asked, responding that the solution was “an Interactive marketing Intelligence across the enterprise”.

“Marketing an IT don’t like to play together — they have completely different mindsets.” A solution is to create Integrated Data warehouses so that the website and the customer service can blend into each other. Bringing that relationship closer together allows a more holistic view of all of the data coming into a company.

One of the most difficult issues is getting the recommended changes implemented in a shorter period of time every time.

It’s not about the data you can get at, but the risk of not knowing the data you’re missing.

The metrics are cheap, bu the metrics you don’t know are not.

Case Study: Travelocity

Tavelocity took the idea of using the CRM to drive customers to offers through the website. They had to avoid things like, “if you get a flight to NY for $500, and you log back out, when you next visit the site you can’t be shown an offer for $300, since you just bought the $500 one”.

They have a lot of dynamic decision making since you’ve already placed an order for $500.

Whne you become able to share the data between these systems, you become able to provide customized experiences for your customers with data that revolves around them.

You can also begin to bring unstructured data, such as the data on blogs into analytic understanding. For instance, when people blog about your website you can bring that data into your data warehouse.

The next speaker was Kevin Bobowski: Vice President, Client Services at Statigent

Stratigent is Partnering with Exact Target to provide a variety of KPI’s, such as benchmarkeing, competitive intelligence, visitor engagement measurement, optimization, proactive reporting and analysis, website testing and optimization.

“Don’t start with strategies that are too high-level that you don’t see value from them in the short term”, Bobowski said.

Primary challenges facing organizations today:

• So many initiatives and not enough time to implement all of them
• Picking and choosing what to do in a timely matter reduces liability
• Intense pressure to produce results
• Increasingly complex demands (coming from your business stockholders — their demand for information, customer insights)
• New marketing technologies create more data and more silos
• Balance to Building out these Capabilities

Strategy + Business Process

Do you have a unified strategy and clear goals that are measurement?

Infrastructure

Is realible and flexible technology in place to meet the evolving needs of ke sakehodes?

Value Creation Tactics

(Any processes a business uses to glean value from your data, testing, campaign analysis, conversion testing, customer segmentation).
What actions are you taking — on a consistent basis - to drive ROI?
Are the building blocks in place for this?

Isolated Successes vs. Long-term success

An organization with isolated successes - look at the successful campaign. This is often an indicator that there’s an executive sponsorship.

Where did you get your data, how did you get your data? instead of how to analyze your data.

Building a ‘culture of analytics’

The organization needs to invest in value creation tactics.
Demonstrate short term results that allow you to gain greater sponsorship and credit for lager projects — with the long term strategy and goals in mind.

He coined the term ‘Stratactical’, which he defined as, “of or relating to a strategy driven-approach using value based tatics”, adding that “while it’s great to have a long term strategy, you also have to balance it with results on the short term. You need to develop reliably, stable success.”

43 Percent of organization say they’ve started the process — but they’re not seeing any value.

How can you get hte results? How can you guarantee that those results will net short term wins

Key Preformance Indicators

It is difficult to show ROI from a seamless cross-channel customer experience with personalization and customization in place.

It is less difficult to Show ROI from a trigger-based communications program with customer profiling and predictive modeling.

4 tactics for a successful business case

-Build an actionable strategy
-Connect your marketing data
-Establish relationships (where are the shared pain points across the organization? Data silos make it difficult to have everyone on the same page).
-Optimize, Test, and Repeat…
-Incorporate resting to amplify the value you generate

Building an Actionable Strategy

-Optimize the Media Mix (return on ad spend)
-Increase the most productive spend
-Increase E-mail spend if cost per acquisition is less than direct mail and other marketing tactics
Reduce acquisition costs and increase profits per customers
Find and understand the total cost per Acquisition.

5 Types of KPI’s

-Outcome/Business driver

Return on Ad spend (Answers the question of”how well am I doing?”

-Diagnostic metrics (Helps you answer the question “how can I do better?”. An example is a conversion rate — click through to a landing page).

-Smoke alarms (Helps you anticipate potential problems that may exist. Example is number of unopened E-mails. That’s an indicator that something might not be right — might be sending E-mails to the wrong audience. Allows you to dig deeper).

-Predictor KPI’s (Allows you to look into the future — Answers the question of will I do better tomorrow? A client may invest in a banner campaign. Customers may need an amount of time to evaluate the purpose. Banner clicks might not convert immediately — in a day, week or month. Some organizations know up front, and they can prepare for revenue and stock — for how well they’ll be doing in 45 days).

-Latent KPI (the most valuable of all. Helps you answer the question of where are my marketing opportunities. Can take the form of customer surveys on the websites. This data sometimes sits solely in the marketing department and is not let out, but the data there should be shared across many channels — because it can help every department understand how others are seeing their organization).

Business Philosophy

Don’t let the KPI’s change every week or month, or else everyone in the organization will have a difficult time synching with each new idea, method, or direction. Focus, and slough off things that don’t match that focus.

Connecting your Marketing Data

The question is where are you as an organization? If your organization is not advanced enough

ExactTarget Email Integration

You can exact a customer’s E-mail address and the Product SKU’s they’ve purchased/looked at, as well as sales funnel abandonment info.

You can use ExactTarget automation to pick a file up, bring it in, and send and email leveraging that data.

Creating a targeted,one-to-one message using our proprietary scripting language.
Press the “Start” button and go about you your daily business.

Promote product A, but you know that customers who purchase product A also purchase products B and C. So you can include those in dynamic E-mails based on their interest in product A.

Promote product B and C automatically, but only if that product is in stock.

Optimization

Optimization is bigger than testing but testing plays a key role in the organization. Testing can drive short term wins.

Optimize emails creatives to increase click-throughs

-Headlines
-Offers
-Message/Copy
-Images
-Call to actions

Try different calls to action — when you begin to use multi-variate testing, you increase the capability to really increase your ROI.

Increase lending page conversion rates by multi-variate testing in the same way

-Headline
-Form field
-Color scheme
-Calls to action

1. Be Stratatical. Make sure that strategy is actionable.
2. KPI’s. Abolsutley essential.
3. Breaking down data silos allows data to flow into larger areas. These data areas combine into one bigger view of the customer. Which allows a richer view of the customer.
4. Optimization testing. It cannot be said enough how important optimization testing is. How else can you know what is successful in the site and wha epople are looking at.

KPI’s can exist on every level.

For copies of the Slides, E-mail:
Kevin.Bobowski@Stratigent.com

Many Ways to Get One View

Barry Parshall, Director of Product Management

The more plugged in the rest of the organization is, the more successful that organization can work together.

We see more and more organizations taking the data out of WebTrends and turning it into their own

Microsoft has categorized all of their key metrics into dashboards.

WebTrends 8.6 Demo

The UI was taken from Microsoft Outlook.

OTBC Drivers

A means for getting direct access to WebTrends data bins with an ODBC-compliant application.

Same driver for WebTrends Analytics and WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

Easy to install and use.

Demo, WebTrends ODBC Driver

-Open Excel 2007
-Click Data from other sources —> from Microsoft query
-WebTrends Demo — the data source for WebTrends already set up.
-Click ‘ok’
-This will connect you to the webtrends backend — select the profile. double click the ones that one cares about. Can grab multiple data channels and pull them into the same Excel data sheet.
Next –> you can sort by anything you want.
-Choose ’sort by revenue’, descending.
-Click Finish.

Limitations

Ryan Summers informed me that, “you can only quiery one time period at a time. You can’t query two time periods”.

Datalinks for Microsoft Excel

From Business Intelligence, Inc. (a Portland, Oregon Company).

You can join all of that data with other data sources. Provides a real simple way to join that data with other data sources. Will also export the data intelligence to Excel — so that you can go to Excel, hit refresh, and Excel will auto update all of the fields.

Webservices API —> can directly implement data in and out of the data warehouse. Bi-directional data transport for WebTrends Marketing Warehouse
Based on SOAP.

TechnologyLeaders (New York)

Dynamic Alerts lets you know when to act — when a variable changes dramatically, you are sent a notification E-mail.
Event envelope based on historical norms. Alerts are sent when activites exceeded historical norms.

DataMind (Seattle, Wa)

They produce a very slick custom scorecard offering the capability to export all of your analytics to one place. There’s also a browser overlay application.

Demo

All Excel based. Data arranged by tabs. Capturing a thumbnail of your website and overlaying the analytical data over it. Consultants customize the scorecard for your business.

Data Scheduler
Allows the scheduling of an export for the underlying analysis tables that contains hundreds of thousands of data sources.

The WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

-A true data warehouse, based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
-Stores and maintains discrete records of visitors, and all “events” taken by them.
-Every campaign click-through, ect.
-Limitless correlations and audience segmentation capabilities
(Get me a list of visitors that met all of this criteria).

The fundamental difference between aggregate web analytics, and customer centric web analytics is the ability to run queries.

Case Studies

Orbitz, a TeraData customer, is using it for:
-Web behavior connected with offline transactions
-Combine data analysis, reporting in its own warehouse.
Polaris
-Web scoring accurately segments diverse audiences
-Use WebTrends Score to assign point values to particular onine actions (as a mean to quickly asses consumer interest in some products vs. others)
-On a nightly basis exact
use this to populate further interaction .

The Microsoft SQL Database is automatically populated with data and assigns each user action with a number.

Polaris Home Page (rule sets)
New vehicle interest: 1 (user clicked here but left after a few seconds)
Racing Interest: 0
Parts and gear interest: 15 (user clicked here and watched a video on parts and gear)
Engaged (how interested is your user?): 10 (video watching)
Total Score: 26

————

Conclusion

While some of these techniques are not new, it was nice to see many of them presented in three hours. It is apparent that bringing data from different sectors into common areas will help many to understand how users and companies are interacting. Analytics are becoming essential for companies to efficiently connect and deal with many customers at once while providing them with customized experiences.

I look forward to watching industries and products that help reduce the data silos that affect many current companies. The technologies are there — it is just an issue of getting these technologies into companies so that more users can be understood. I am sure that interest in these tools will only increase in the future.

———–

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. She likes to attend events and meet people in the industry. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Tonight was an event associated with Portland Web Innovators called Social Network Spaghetti. It happened at 7pm at Vidoop in Downtown Chinatown.

Adam Duvander started off by explaining that Portand Web Innovators is around three years old now. That makes it one of the cornerstones of the Portland Tech scene.

Scott Kveton told us his ideas on the state of current social networks. His charisma and ability to explain and parse complex ideas, systems, and trends was interesting and enjoyable to watch. I estimate around 30+ people showed up, and many interesting questions were raised from the audience.

Oh yeah…and there was lots of Bacon.

In case you missed it, the entire event was archived. Yes — every moment of the presentation can be viewed, thanks to @brampitoyo and @maestrojed.

Video chat rooms at Ustream

Scott Kveton is a digital identity promoter, open source contributor, and VP of Open Platforms for Vidoop.

>>

Check out more Scott Kveton

Scott Kveton’s Blog
BaconGeek
Twitter Scott Kveton
Vidoop

—-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. She enjoys tech events and the minds of people who attend them. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

I wanted to write about this before, but I had to wait until everything was secured and verified.

In September, Steve Gehlen invited me to speak about Cyborg Anthropology at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference on September 5th of this year. The conference was a refreshing and entertaining look at where entertainment, art, culture, business, and social media are going. The keynote was Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium.

After Inverge, Joshua and I compared theorists and research, and had a great time socializing along with all of the other conference attendees and speakers. A month later, Joshua informed me of a conference at MIT called the Futures of Entertainment, and wondered if I would be interested in being on a panel on social media. He said that my analysis and understanding of both the academic and corporate world would provide a useful bridge between two separate fields.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

I very carefully prepared two forms of submission — one on Cyborg Anthropology from the academic perspective, and another from the business perspective.

However, I feel that what I am doing pales in comparison to the accomplishments of those whom I will be participating with. I am both honored and overwhelmed by this opportunity. I hope to be able to add value to some aspect of the conference.

I’ll be participating on the social media panel, which is described as follows:

“Moving lives online, creating conversations across geography, connecting with consumers - how is social media defining the current entertainment landscape? As people not only put more content online, but conduct more of their daily lives in networked spaces and via social networking sites, how are social media influencing how we think of audiences? Video-sharing platforms have changed how we think of production and distribution, and Facebook gifts point to the value of virtual properties, how are these sites enabling other processes of production or distribution practices. Spaces where commercial and community purposes intertwine, what are the implications for privacy, content management, and identity construction of social media? How have they impacted notions of civic engagement?”

Conference Attendees

Kim Moses - Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, Lost, Medium, Yochai Benkler - Harvard Law School, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press), Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Alex McDowell - Production Designer, The Watchmen, Kevin Slavin - Area/Code, Sabrina Caluori - Director, Marketing and Promotions, HBO Online, Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press), Donald K Ranvaud - Buena Onda Films, Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), Gail De Kosknik - UC Berkeley, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre, Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com, Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting, Mauricio Mota - New Content (Brazil), Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing)….more.

Steve Gehlen, Paige Saez (on a grant from PNCA) and Kris Krug will be flying out to join me at the conference. In case you’re in the area too, the conference information is as follows:

MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3

Friday, Nov 21 8:30a to Saturday, Nov 22 8:30a
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Wong Auditorium, Cambridge, MA

Thanks

A great big thank you to everyone in the Portland Tech community for being supportive and welcoming of interdisciplinary thought. Special thanks to Joshua Green and Steve Gehlen.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

We have everything in Portland. We have Linus, we have biking, we have Open Source, and we have an amazing Portland Tech community. Up until recently, we also had O’Reilly’s OSCON.

Now that OSCON has moved away, the Portland community has taken the baton and is going to launch a new conference to replace the old one. The first meeting of Open Source Bridge was tonight at CubeSpace, and it was attended by around 70 people. Selena Deckelman and Audrey Eschright started the meeting off with a Powerpoint of all of the great things Portland has to offer. Her and Audrey introduced the Bridge team, which is as follows:

Marketing

Rick Turoczy

Finance

Jake Kuramoto

IT

Adam DuVander (which he is going to be calling ‘Technology Experience’). A Technology Experience happens before, during, and after the event.

Logistics (food

Kelly Guimot

Content

Selena Deckelman and Audrey Eschright

How will we get it done?

Well, as Selena Deckelman pointed out, “Portland is known for its DIY spirit — so we’ll get something done”.

Who we want involved:

All of you.
Your friends.
Your Mom.

“The real challenge,” explained Rick Turoczy, “is creating something that attracts not only the speakers around here that are well known, but speakers from outside of Portland as well”.

——

Getting Involved

Please send me any resources you have and I’ll begin to gather and repost them here, as well as expand the post to include any other resources I find relating to Open Source Bridge. Tonight was a good start.

Also, check out the Open Source Bridge website for details as they happen.