5 Multichannel Gems from eMetrics San Jose

Like most vendors at the eMetrics marketing optimization conference this year, I only had a chance to attend very few of the sessions. But each of the ones I did attend was awesome.

Even more awesome than I remember from past years.

Here are five track sessions that were real gems:

1. Kevin Hillstrom (Minethatdata.com) explained his online marketing simulations that are based on his Multichannel Forensics method. It is just so horizon-expanding to see Kevin’s innovative use of web data. It seems that 90% of the discussion in web marketing optimization is focused only on making websites and advertising better, and 9% on behavioral targeting. Not enough attention is given usually to identifying customer behavior shifts over time to forecast where the business is headed in coming years. Kevin’s method and his services are used by CxOs as a window into the future. They aim to reveal long term movement of customers between (micro-) channels or between initial vs. future product purchases. It helps the business leaders know where they need to bet their chips today if they want to increase their business on channels XYZ or with products ABC in the future.
2. Greg Dowling (now Semphonic) came back to share his experience and lessons learned in the area of analytics and especially mobile analytics. He manages to put 120 minutes of substance into a 60 minute presentation which made it especially rich in value. While the tactical recommendations on data collection details summarized the state of the art, I was personally struck by examples from his work at past mobile phone companies. These echo’d Eric Peterson’s keynote recommendations to balance people, process, and technology for success. They also demonstrated the opportunity to go beyond web analytics for the sake of making mobile sites and applications better towards analytics for interactive marketing with each individual mobile phone customer. Nobody mentioned the name 1:1 marketing, but that would have been an old name for the ultimate or utopian goal in the background.
3. Unica’s customer Breanna Wigle shared metrics from her experience working at a large and longtime social media website. But Breanna’s focus went way beyond the usual metrics such as reach, click-throughs and outcomes. Instead she discussed Social CRM and social network analysis. Adapting the RFM model to social media, she discussed her use of RFF (Recency, Frequency, Friends) scoring. This is a better name for what I had called RFR (Recency, Frequency, Reach) in the past. What I hadn’t thought about however is that there can be people with few “friends” that have however a critical location within the network. Breanna calls these “brokers”. For example, a broker might be the contact between two otherwise unrelated clusters of friends, e.g. high-school vs. college friends. So even if that broker had only two friends, one in each camp, the broker is of high potential value for growing the overall network more closely together. Eye opening! Especially for marketers.
4. In the same session with Breanna, Luane Kohnke from R/GA shared examples of her agency’s work with social-mobile applications. For instance, one large retailer’s mobile application allowed shoppers to get advice from their Facebook contacts about choosing between TVs to purchase. That same mobile app also allowed shoppers to order that TV. What is so intriguing to me here is that this mobile app strikes a connection to Facebook and also a connection to the customer’s identity in the website registration database when completing a purchase. So the client’s social graph and their purchase/marketing history come together with their mobile identity. Normally, identifying customers across devices, let alone across CRM vs. Social CRM, is always the #1 question that I get asked in my workshops. Yet, in examples such as this mobile app the connection happens seamlessly and as a service to users. Brilliant!
5. Adam Greco (now Salesforce) presented very skillfully on integrating web analytics with the CRM system (or rather SFA system). This was a real gem of a presentation on so many dimensions. Not only were the analytics well taken, e.g. the danger of making spending decisions based on proxy metrics such as lead registrations and the need to take into account offline sales results. But Adam framed the presentation in such a tremendously approachable way by walking us through one sample interaction example and showing what the CRM vs. analytics systems would know at each stage in the customer buying cycle. And finally, from product evangelist to product evangelist I have to take my hat off and say that I found the first person narrative sharing from his work at Salesforce extremely compelling. So I have to give this year’s presentation award to Adam.

With five such great sessions and skilled presenters, I am sad about all the ones that I missed and couldn’t attend.

It was also great to see again so many of our friends at Unica including Angie Brown and Gil Roeder who skillfully shared a nugget from his rich experience within just 10 minutes in the general session. Many thanks, Gil!