Web Analytics Gossip: SES Chicago 2006
Although SES is not primarily a WA conference, there’s still news and gossip.
Last night, before I went out drinking with my friends from FeedBurner, I got to meet Jeff Turner, formerly of Blogbeat.net, whose company was acquired by FB in July. I sat down with him (well, I stood) and reviewed all the ways that I love Blogbeat and why I have to turn to Google Analytics when I need hard blog data. However, I’m expecting great things of the new integrated FB and Blogbeat.
By now everyone probably knows that WebTrends purchased ClickShift and announced it yesterday. I met the ClickShift CEO, John Rodkin, at the WebTrends party tonight. However, he was wearing a WebTrends shirt, so I didn’t really understand that he was “the man” until I started to wonder why he didn’t know any of the other WA vendor names. “So,” I asked him, “Did WebTrends buy Clickshift [which is a highly automatic, intelligent paid search tool] because WebTrends wants to get into search more?” I didn’t have a tape recorder but I think John’s answer was, “WebTrends wants to be the CMO’s best friend.” Then I talked to Jason Palmer, VP Marketing at WebTrends, who is incredibly impressed with John and his team – he thinks John is a genius.
Moving on, I was dismayed that Bill Bruno of Stratigent gave away all his passes to the free Google party and didn’t leave one for me. Bill and the Stratigent CEO, Josh Manion and I all got to meet the analyst from Oregon who calls Josh and me all the time, Chad Bartley. (Parentheticaly, many thanks to all the analysts who signed up to talk to investment bankers.) Speaking of which, I got to meet Gary Angel of Semphonic who was exhibiting here too — Gary signed up to talk to investment bankers after I posted on the Forum but wrote, “Robbin, your request was the strangest one I have ever seen on the Web Analytics Forum.” On the trade show floor, while I was waiting to talk to Gary, one of his employees tried to give me a printed book of all his blog writings. “Do you work with any web analytics?” she asked me.
Chris Spiek of Awecomm (WAA Marketing lead for the WAA website) and Nancy Taffera-Santos (co-chair for WAA Events) crashed the Google party with me, after the WebTrends party, but no one noticed. The music was too loud and there was no food (I am not sure which is worse.) Jason, your party was much nicer, wish I had had the chocolate-covered strawberries.
I rode up in the elevator with John Marshall from ClickTracks, musing about writing this post. “Well,” he said. “Everyone loves gossip.”
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
post script: At 12:41 this morning, one of the many people I mentioned wrote me to tell me that my blog gets crawled fast. The post had already pinged the services, been crawled by Google, and he had received an alert that someone was writing about him. (Always a good idea. I use Google Alerts but am not too happy with them, anyone have an alert service that they love?) rfs
