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These Days blog

These Days blog

Meet us @ Webanalytics Congres (Netherlands)May 28 2008

These Days will be present on the Web Analytics congres in the Netherlands (Maarsen) on 29 may. Join Siegert Dierickx (Web Analytics Manager These Days) for his presentation of the Pioneer Europe case-study at 15h30.

Siegert will do a joint-session with Google on the benefits of Google Analytics and how it’s used for Pioneer. During the case-study you’ll learn that GA is not only for small companies, but if used wisely and with adequate support of web analytics experts, benefits of a freeware solution can be demonstrated also for larger companies. And as a result of using a professional freeware tool, Pioneer Europe can free up marketing budget for media and advertising campaigns instead.

eMetrics San Francisco - Part 1May 13 2008

Back from a fantastic trip to San Francisco!

My jet lag is fainting away a little but my brain still buzzes with lots of ideas and things I need to follow-up. While all this is still fresh, I thought I’d share with you some of the insights from last week’s eMetrics Summit, the world’s largest gathering of people working in online measurement and optimisation.

There are numerous tracks to satisfy beginners as well as more experienced practitioners: Web optimization, Marketing Optimization Management, Campaign optimization, Search Analytics, Email metrics, Advanced Web Analytics and Integrated Marketing.

My three key summit findings demonstrated me that the “way” web analytics is used these days, is gradually changing and some of these changes are setting the path for the future. Here are my three outcomes:

Testing & optimization

Bringing the “testing” culture and the right tools (software and methodologies to do it) into a web-enabled project (website, e-mail or ad campaign) is a key process step in order to optimize and achieve success. The web also allows us to quickly deploy these and continually improve as such. Jason Carmel, one of my Wunderman colleagues at

eMetrics San FranciscoMay 5 2008

These Days will be present on the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco from 4-7 may. For one week long SF will be “the place to be” for web analytics professionals and we have sent our analytics captains Siegert Dierickx (Web analytics Manager) and Johan de Keulenaer (Director Relationship Marketing) to the mothership of all analytics events.

At These Days we take web analytics and marketing optimization very serious and actively promote our practice within the European part of the Wunderman-network, just like our colleagues of ZAAZ or VML who focus on the United States region.

eMetrics is our annual moment to touch base with the industry, vendors and other professionals so don’t hesitate to send us an invite for a meet & greet in between the great summit schedule. You can recognize us by our These Days eMetrics badges.

On 4 may, we’ll be attending the Web Analytics Association panel meeting to motivate the need for a European approach, not a seperate association, but a local flavoured committee.
More on this topic can be read on our Web Analytics team blog called “ActiveMetrics.”

If you cannot make it then track this blog for regular summit reports including sess

ROFLCon 26/04April 30 2008

The second day here @ ROFLCon was again kicked off by a keynote speaker. Alice Marwick discussed the fabulous life of ‘microcelebrities’ and raised the question whether Internet celebrities are more honest, true & real than traditional celebrities… During her talk we hoped for more useful content…unfortunately this was not the case.

Clearly, Internet humor is NOT universal humor, it’s locally. And we experienced this during this conference.

Next up: ‘Making it big’: a panel discussion about how some of the ‘big stars’ have made it online. For our entire panel, consisting of Burnie Burns, Brad Neely, The Brothers Chaps, Rob, Kris, Matt and Dave, it happened to be a coincidence… None of them planned to be a star on the net!

Next discussion was titled ‘Incubating the mindvirus’. A lively panel, consisting of Matt Haughey, Josh Schachter, Alexis Ohanian, David Lloyd, Drew Curtis and moderated by Anil Dash, debated the following issues: ‘how did your community form? What do you

ROFLCon 25/04April 26 2008

The first day at ROFLCon started with an opening keynote by David Weinberger. He is a Fellow at Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He talked about being famous on the Internet and how everyone can be famous - in his/her own way. Afterwards they held a panel discussion. I give you a couple bite-size ideas:

* Blogging should be like taking of your make-up, showing your true self, just the way you are. As perfection is the enemy of credibility.

*Fame now follows the Long Tail distribution. Being famous on the Internet can mean different sort of things. It can be a one-to-many thing, one-to-a lot, or one-to-few.

*The Internet audience differs from the TV audience in the way that the first thrives on interactivity and likes to be involved.

*The million dollar homepage: people tend to like stupid ideas. It got more & more attention along the way and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The secret to success is that it evolved into a story, just like the