Engage 2010: The Second Day

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The first full day of the Engage 2010 customer conference began yesterday morning with a ballroom packed with professionals eager for inspiration into the methodologies of making sense of customer intelligence.

We started off with a short speech from Webtrends’ VP of Marketing Jascha Kaykas-Wolff. Jascha welcomed everyone to New Orleans, explained the philosophy behind the Engage customer conference, invited everyone to enter to win great data-centric prizes offered in The Great Data Give Away, and thanked all who attended the previous night’s first-ever Ignite NOLA for helping to make it a huge success. Next, he encouraged everyone to “s’asseoir de retour et apprécier…sit back and enjoy!”

Next were two blocks of sprint presentations. Sprints are a unique format of presenting information to a group, Ignite-style. This means presenters have 10 minutes to share their insights about topics important to digital marketers, analysts and customers. (You can find out more on how sprints work by reading this post.)

Webtrends decided to use sprints instead of traditional hour-long keynotes as a way to keep things interesting and to deliver a large amount of top industry thinking in a short amount of time.

The sprint sessions Master of Ceremonies was Rives, a Web 2.0 poet with a reputation for unleashing a “spontaneous, lyrical prose that magically encapsulates the core meaning of what you’ve just heard in the presentation”. He performed three times during breaks in the sprints. First he shared a hilarious, touching poem about his sister and their secret, childhood language. In his next performance, Rives told a story about his daughter, using only emoticons. At the end of the sprint sessions he wrapped things up doing his signature on-the-fly performance by reciting a poem that perfectly captured memorable points in the sprints. It was about a mocking bird. You might not think that birds have anything remotely to do with customer intelligence, but I think everyone who heard this astounding narrative would vehemently disagree.

Some of the Engage sprinters included:

  • Jennifer Zeszut, founder and CEO of the sentiment analysis startup Scout Labs who talked about natural language search and how the phrase “mutha fuc**” can mean many things.
  • Sam Yager and Christian Rudder of OKCupid taught us that men think most women are OK looking but they only message the hot ones, and that women think most guys are ugly but they message all of them.
  • Sean Power, O’Reilly author and co-founder of Watching Websites, who explained the definition of a word he coined, “communilytics”.
  • Douglas Karr, CEO of DK New Media, who used a school dance analogy (and danced a little for us, too!) to explain the 5 steps to conversion.

Judging by the conversations on Twitter and in the Roosevelt Hotel hallways, the sprints were a huge success. We’ll definitely be doing them again for the next Engage conference.

Another Engage 2010 “first” is the Open Exchange Science Fair. This consists of several tables staffed with Webtrends personnel who lead hands-on exhibits (with monitors, placards, and white lab coats!) explaining such things as web portal integration, mobile analytics and email retargeting. Awesome!

Also a first at the Engage conference is the use of augmented reality. On the back of every attendee badge is a sticker with a special character. When this character is shown to the camera attached to several monitors throughout the hotel, data about the badge wearer is broadcasted to all the monitors. It’s a way for attendees to introduce themselves to everyone in the building at the same time. It’s also super geeky and, consequently, also very popular with this data-loving crowd.

augmented_reality

The afternoon breakout and workshop sessions kept the innovation river flowing. Justin Spohn of Fight gave a very thorough introduction into the ideas behind iterative marketing. Webtrends’ Bob Garcia explained how to turn good results into great results by optimizing, and Deanna Meyler of imc2, Sean Power, and Justin Kistner from Webtrends lead a standing-room-only discussion on how to accurately measure your social media investments.

While the conference rolled on, yesterday we also announced that Webtrends’ Optimize has expanded to include Advanced Targeting, a new sophisticated functionality that provides marketers with the ability to easily leverage tested and relevant content directly to targeted visitor segments – all within a unified enterprise site optimization platform.

We also announced that Spirit Airlines, the largest Ultra Low Cost Carrier (ULCC) in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, will leverage Webtrends Analytics, Visitor Data Mart, and Optimize offerings together to help drive a better customer experience online.

At the end of the day, a bevy of short buses drove groups of Engage conference attendees to Marion’s Jackson Square for the after-party. There we enjoyed a concentration of the ambiance of New Orleans, complete with a small table at the bottom of the staircase leading to our party set up with two glasses of red wine and plates of sliced artisan bread for the ghosts that haunt the space, a trio of seasoned musicians obviously enjoying themselves while playing their beloved jazz for us, and several, rambling rooms chick full of spirits and excellent foods.

We promised an nontraditional conference, and I think it’s safe to say Engage 2010 attendees agree we did just that!

We’ll be posting the links to session PowerPoint presentations on the Engage social network and on the Webtrends Facebook fan page. Speaking of Facebook, don’t forget to enter The Great Data Give Away.

Tune in tomorrow, where Justin Kistner will provide a recap of the last day of the Engage 2010 customer conference.