You might be squandering a huge opportunity if you aren’t using web analytics as a rich source of behavioral insights on individual prospects and customers.

Read the full article published on the brilliant new online-behavior site. There you’ll also see uses of Venn diagrams for behavioral analytics that are more serious than the recent fun with the nerd vs. geeks Venn diagram post.

Kudos to Daniel Waisberg for launching online-behavior.com!

Social CRM has just gone from being a buzz word to being an official software solutions category: Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for Social CRM!

On that occasion, let me post the Q&A from our recent webinar with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas below. The replay of the webinar is available to Web Analytics Association members from the webcast archive.

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Which kind of organizations are ready for social CRM?

Lauren: Any organization willing to listen and participate in a two-way dialog are ready for social media engagement.

Social media is another business channel, but the thought process to accept this conflicts with many organization cultures. Invest in education, time and resources for your social media efforts and ensure your success and lessons learned go from campaign to program commitment.

Akin: Additionally, there is a side to social CRM that is about marketing automation. E.g. registered site visitors who are not only readers but contributors on a company’s branded community site could be prioritized for special offers. Going to this step requires an organization where the customer marketers have built up expertise on marketing automation (often the case) and where they are cooperating with the web and social media team (not as often the case as should be).

Ever since the brilliant Nerd-Geek-Dork Venn diagram below started zipping all over blogs in Sept 2009, I have been waiting for genius to strike me so that I might think of ways to apply this to the analytics topic.

Sadly, genius never struck.

But here are a few venn diagrams anyway that kind-of, sort-of make sense and contain a few useful reminders.

The Analyst vs. Change Agent Venn Diagram

A good reminder how critical both business acumen and political skills are so that analyst can be the change agents that they so much desire to be.

The Segmentation to Recommendation Venn Diagram

A good reminder how critical segmentation is to analysis because static reports probably never tell a story that leads to action. Good reminder also that the true goal of analysis is to get to recommendations as Eric Peterson was pointing out in his keynote at the eMeterics Marketing Innovation Summit conference in San Jose in May.

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:

The team at Online Marketing with RSS Ray kindly invited me to present on BrightTALK yesterday on five ways to increase returns from SEM.

This was a welcome opportunity for me to detail my recommendations for how to optimize search engine marketing from end-to-end rather than focusing only on search bid management and SEO.

If you are new to online or search marketing, you will hopefully find this a useful intro to help you plan your optimization efforts. If you are already experienced in online marketing, especially SEM, then the only useful piece for you in this presentation will be a reminder that SEM optimization requires you to take a complete view.

Otherwise, the weakest link in the chain will break your ROI.

So much has been written about our little world of web analytics, that it is getting increasingly difficult to come up with useful new contributions.
But the Beyond Web Analytics trio, Adam Greco, James Dutton, and Rudi Shumpert, managed to do just that. Their series of podcasts featured past guests such as Gary Angel, Jim Sterne, John Lovett, Josh Manion, Greg Dowling, and others.
So, I was honored to be next as their guest. In the podcast that Rudi published today, we discussed many recipes for web analysis ranging from the web analytics wizards, to the desire for ever smarter web analytics tools, and more.

I must admit, I feel a bit tickled like Elmo to see podcasts on our nerdy subject show up within cool places such as iTunes.
Listen online here.

In hindsight, the experience reminds me of something my grandfather used to say:  Everybody, once a week, should visit one hospital and one cemetery so to get a better perspective on what they are doing with their own life and healthy years.

Well, for any of us that work in the world of big enterprise software and SaaS solutions, a similar recommendation would be worthwhile:

Pay a visit to a small business regularly!

No, no …, not to appreciate better being in the big company world with a fancy office coffee machine.

But to keep us down to Earth in our recommendations. Enterprises have more man power and resources than small businesses - but as advisers our recommendations still need to be feasible and not pie in the sky.

So, what did I have to recommend that the captain of a small business operating their web based business from their home office could use to turn out better business results?

“The best things in life are free”, they say, and organic search traffic might seem free at first glance.

But in truth, as you will know, organic search isn’t free at all. It requires hard SEO work upfront before you can rank well for highly coveted keywords.

This wizard is the third example of an expert system that I got a chance to work on now. The wizards aim to help web analysts (and in this case also search engine marketers) with their complex work. Earlier releases were the wizards for PPC optimization and troubleshooting a drop in website conversions.

Couple comments and observations:

“Hey, in 2010 let’s be strategic with our web analytics. Let’s not get lost in the tactical weeds”

OK, so what’s a web analytics strategy vs. tactic then?

• The web analytics solution that you use is a tactic. The strategy is in the reports that you run.
• The reports that you run are a tactic. The strategy is to start with your key performance indicators (KPIs)
• The KPIs are a tactic. The strategy is to equip, free up, and incentivize your web analytics team so that they will focus on value generating analytics vs. lolligagging or answering to never ending reporting requests
• The web analytics team and incentives are a tactic. The strategy is to compete on analytics
• Competing on analytics is a tactic. The strategy is to treat your customers well
• Treating your customers well is a tactic. The strategy is to increase their lifetime value to your company
• Your company is a tactic. The strategy is to have a happy, healthy, peaceful 2010

Some people wield the words “strategy vs. tactic” as if they were swinging a sword and being profound. Yet they mean not much more than “left vs. right”.

No matter where you stand, there is always something to your left and always something to your right.

So, … maybe the strategy is to hug both of them, the strategy and the tactics.

Happy holidays

Social Marketing is customer-centric marketing. After all, the company is ideally meant to build its brands by first building support and enthusiasm among its customers.

But social media are challenging and humbling. The discussion of how marketers should go about using them is often clouded by vague recommendations, niche anecdotes, and buzzword mania.

The confusion has also impacted marketing analysts. More than ever they are facing questions of what can be measured and how. But very often there is neither a clear business goal nor action plan behind the question.

In order to select meaningful analytics for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs and videos, the key (as always) is to start with the business goals that your company is pursuing with each social media marketing effort.

But, as author Jim Novo pointed out, your team must come clean on what these business goals really are.