Webtrends has received a number of really great ideas for Engage 2010 sessions in the short time we’ve had open submissions. In fact, we’re expecting several more promised submissions this week, well beyond today’s submission deadline. So, in the spirit of fairness, we’ve decided to extend the deadline one more week!

The new deadline, November 23, gives you plenty of time to share your modern way around the ancient problem of making enterprise customer intelligence data relevant to digital marketing plans. Submitting your idea is fairly straightforward – just post a short synopsis on the Engage 2010 submission page for review. We’re very interested in hearing about the strategies, case studies, and notable trends related to the following areas:

• Social media
• Site optimization
• Mobile data
• Offline integration of data

Engage 2010 touts several types of presentation delivery formats, so be sure to mention which format you think your session idea is most suited for when you submit your idea:

• Sprints: Ignite-style presentations (5 minute PowerPoint presentations with a total of 20 slides that rotate automatically after 15 seconds)
• Breakout Sessions: Hour-long, timely, relevant, and intriguing presentations
• Workshops: Hands-on and interactive sessions with no PowerPoint and no agenda
• Flex Sessions: Small round-table discussions guided by industry leaders

The Webtrends Engage 2010 conference is three days of interactive sessions that are focused on the collaborative learning and teaching of best practices in using data for marketing insight. The list of dynamic speakers committed to speaking at Engage is already truly impressive, and many more forward-thinking individuals are about to be announced. This conference is not to be missed!

Add your interesting idea to the submission page today for your chance to be a part of the Engage 2010 agenda! And, one more thing: if you register to attend Engage 2010 before November 30, you’ll get $100 off the regular conference fee.

Send us your presentation idea and type of format, and present at Engage 2010!

The number of impressive names on the speaker list for the Engage 2010 enterprise customer intelligence conference continues to grow! Webtrends is proud to announce four new inspiring individuals who’ve signed on to share their wealth of experiences with conference attendees. Register now for Engage 2010 to listen to great ideas from the great minds of people from the following well-respected organizations:

Join us at Engage in New Orleans

The three-day Engage 2010 conference is designed to encourage the exploration of ways to gain new understanding of the data gleaned from enterprise customer intelligence sources. It will be held in New Orleans, LA, a vibrant city with a history of reinventing itself, and an appropriate location for the convergence of old media and new media.

Don’t miss the exciting conversations and ideas these dynamic speakers will share at Engage 2010. And, if you register before November 30, you’ll get $100 off the regular conference fee!

We are also still accepting talks until Monday, November 16th. If you would like to submit a talk, either post your talk to our submission page.

Engage New Orleans is really shaping up to be something special. The speakers we have lined up and the surrounding events are arguably some of the best we’ve had the honor to host. Today we are pleased to share our first round of speakers.

Panel Discussion – Can Real-Time Measurement and content visualization Help Today’s Troubled Publishing World?

Media empires were never built on yearly subscription models or by individual readers plunking down fifty cents for the daily news. These empires were built on superior content, trusted branding and above all else highly profitable advertising sales. Webtrends will host an elite group of individuals that currently work in traditional and new media publishing models to discuss the massive changes that have affected this industry over the past decade. The conversation will tackle how all publishers can better understand why content measurement through the real-time web can help keep their work relevant.

The publishing panel will be a fascinating look into an over 100 year-old industry that has hemorrhaged profitability and good, talented people, and been forced to re-evaluate its entire business model. The Internet as a whole has started to progress beyond the two-way Web and into a real-time Web, and content producers no matter how big or small, must be ready to deploy measurement models to help make relevant content publishing decisions and in turn drive ad revenue.

Those who will participate in the publishing panel are:

Join us at Engage in New Orleans

The three-day Engage 2010 conference is designed to encourage the exploration of ways to gain new understanding of the data gleaned from enterprise customer intelligence sources. It will be held in New Orleans, LA, a vibrant city with a history of reinventing itself, and an appropriate location for the convergence of old media and new media.

Don’t miss the exciting conversations and ideas these dynamic speakers will share at Engage 2010. And, if you register before November 30, you’ll get $100 off the regular conference fee!

We are also still accepting talks until Monday, November 16th. If you would like to submit a talk, either post your talk to our submission page.

Get connected, get networking, get contacts

The free and popular social network for the next Webtrends Engage 2010 enterprise customer intelligence conference has set sail, and it’s powered by CrowdVine!

CrowdVine is an easy-to-use social network for conferences, and simply the best way get a jump start on networking with the folks who will be learning and teaching alongside you next February in New Orleans. It’s kind of like a virtual pre-mingling event! And, if you register for Engage 2010 before November 30, you’ll save $100 off the regular conference fee. What a great incentive to start connecting with other attendees prior to arrival!

Creating an account on the network takes just a couple of minutes. After registering for Engage 2010 and creating a profile on the conference social network , you’ll upload a “real you” photo to help your fellow Engage attendees put a face to your name when they meet you in person. The network’s uncomplicated interface makes it very easy to integrate your social web streams and data feeds into your profile – such as Twitter, RSS, Facebook, and Flickr – so other conference-bound folks can learn more about you.

Once you’ve got an account set up, browse the profiles and start networking. You  can “friend” your colleagues, add notes to your profile, respond to other people’s notes, and send anyone in the Engage 2010 network a message. Even presenters will have profiles! You can also click the link “want to meet” for anyone you’d like to introduce yourself to at the conference. There’s no need to wait until February start meeting the people who will attend the conference with you!

The Engage 2010 conference calendar also helps you plan which sessions you want to attend, all of which are jam-packed with ideas on getting the most out of your customer intelligence information. Use the network to keep track of which sessions you’re most interested in, learn more about who is presenting it, and see who else is planning on attending, too.

At last year’s Engage conference almost 800 connections were created on the social networking site. This is an average of four connections for every person. Whoa!

Don’t miss out on the chance to spend time getting to know your fellow attendees, plan your session schedule, and interact with presenters in the weeks before the conference. And remember, register for Engage 2010 before November 30 and you’ll save $100 off the regular conference fee. Go, on! Do it now!

Learn How the Webtrends and Teradata Integration Solution Paints the Whole Picture

There is little doubt of how highly critical the importance of integrating online and enterprise data is. It is necessary to analyze both types of data in order to get the whole picture in a customer’s buying habits and satisfaction, and to improve conversion rates. Knowing when a customer connects with sales staff, knowing which direct mailings and catalogs the customer received, and knowing if the customer is chatting in social networks about the company or its products – all of these are tiny pieces to the whole picture. Unifying this information helps a company fine-tune their marketing strategies, reduce their marketing costs, and helps gives the customer a more personalized shopping experience and an incentive to purchase again.

This is a marvelous idea in theory, but very challenging to achieve in practice. Unless, that is, a company is using Webtrends’ enriched online data and Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI) solution, a partnership that is part of Webtrends’ Open Exchange program.

On December 2, 2009, in a live, interactive webinar, guest speaker John Lovett, a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research, Inc., will discuss why bringing online and enterprise data together is crucial. Next, Webtrends and Teradata will demonstrate their collaborated efforts solution of integrating online and enterprise data, and then will facilitate a question and answer session at the end.

Sign up today for the Integrating Online and Enterprise Data webinar and learn more about Webtrends’ enriched online data and Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI) solution for painting the whole picture to your customer’s purchasing experience.

Integrating Online and Enterprise Data Webinar
December 2, 2009
10am PDT / 1pm EDT

Rives – Webtrends’ Engaged MC with an Edge

Imagine this: It’s February in the year 2010, and you’re at Webtrends’ Engage 2010 conference in beautiful New Orleans. You’re in The Big Easy, a place known for its ability to inspire and captivate with its vibrant, historic scene. You’ve just heard a presentation that’s chock-full of ideas on getting more out of your enterprise customer intelligence data. Your brain is racing with new methodologies, is searching for the true impact of these new ideas on your data marketing plans, is trying to focus on the strongest, underlying points to implement.

Your conference Master of Ceremonies, Rives, takes the stage.

The house hushes. All eyes are on the pacing Rives, who suddenly pauses and faces the audience. He then unleashes a spontaneous, lyrical prose that magically encapsulates the core meaning of what you’ve just heard in the presentation. Rives leaves you speechless. With simple, funny, poignant analogies, the man with the one-word, one-syllable name blows you away with his effortless ability to nail that bottom-line sentiment. In this moment, which is followed by many more moments, you are so happy you decided to register for Engage 2010.

Unique, intelligent and creative, the MC for Webtrends’ Engage 2010 conference stands out as the best man for the job. Why? Because Rives, a frequent TED contributor and former co-host of the Bravo channel’s Ironic Iconic America, has the truly dynamic ability to absorb any information swirling around him and instantly concoct a brilliant, improvised reiteration of the meaning to it all.

But don’t take our word for it…watch Rives earn his three-minute-long standing ovation after delivering the talk Rives Controls the Internet:

If you are attending Engage 2010, Webtrends’ unique customer intelligence conference, you’re in for a wonderful treat. If you’ve not signed up yet, what are you waiting for? Register for Engage 2010 now and be a part of the collective hive of industry leaders and groundbreaking thinkers working to find the newest, best case solutions to utilizing enterprise customer intelligence.

There are only 18 days left to submit your thought-provoking session idea for Webtrends’ Engage 2010!

November 16, 2009 is the last day to send us your fresh ideas on getting the most out of enterprise customer intelligence. We’re especially excited to receive strategies, case studies, and notable trends related to the following areas:

• Social media
• Site optimization
• Mobile data
• Offline integration of data

Got a clever idea in mind? Want to share your ingenious new view on the old ways of doing? Great! We can’t wait to see it! But there’s one more thing to consider: Webtrends’ Engage 2010 offers three days packed with interactive sessions, so you’ll need to choose from the following types of presentation delivery formats:

• Sprints: Ignite-style presentations (5 minute PowerPoint presentations with a total of 20 slides that rotate automatically after 15 seconds)
• Breakout Sessions: Hour-long, timely, relevant, and intriguing presentations
• Workshops: Hands-on and interactive sessions with no PowerPoint and no agenda
• Flex Sessions: Small round-table discussions guided by industry leaders

You can read more about the session types on Webtrends’ Engage 2010 blog. The video at right is an example of the Ignite presentation style.

Webtrends’ Engage 2010 is three days of interesting forward-thinking and interactive discussions on enterprise customer intelligence. As an unconventional conference, it’s designed to encourage the sharing of ideas and solutions between attendees and presenters.

Held this year Februrary 1-4, 2010  in beautiful New Orleans, LA, Engage 2010 is a chance to both learn and teach the latest in best practices for digital marketing. In addition to having an opportunity to show off your ideas and knowledge, valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders and experts abound!

Keep in mind, if you are submitting a topic, sales pitches and product plugs will not be accepted. Session presenters chosen will be notified by November 30, 2009. The clock is ticking! Send us your presentation idea and type of format, and present at Engage 2010!

This past week I joined a panel of retail experts at the ExactTarget Connections ’09: Success is By Design and spoke on behalf of our mutual customer Motorcycles USA (MUSA), ranked #223 in the Internet Retailer’s Top 500. They’re a pure-play ecommerce business selling motorcycle gear, apparel and accessories here in Oregon.  In order to successfully continue to grow their revenue year over year during a down market in the motorcycle industry and our overall tough economic conditions, MUSA has focused on dedicated customer relationship management, including exclusive promotions and highly focused email campaigns which is their leading customer touch point. As a customer of both Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget SBS, MUSA was eager to produce highly targeted product recommendations for specific website visitor segments.

MUSA’s initial work focused on scrubbing their list and doing a lot of A/B Testing. Using ExactTarget’s deliverability and email open rate reporting, together with Webtrends’ conversion reporting, they saw double the open rates and triple the click-through rates.

To take another step forward in the evolution of this behavioral retargeting initiative, customer project sponsor Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, worked closely with both Webtrends and partner ExactTarget as well as solutions integrator ACR Analytics to integrate ExactTarget and Webtrends Analytics.  MUSA studied detailed email subscriber click behavior via ExactTarget and onsite conversion behavior using Webtrends’ campaign and conversion reporting.

Recent behavorial retargeting campaigns focused on segmenting the subscriber list by products viewed during website visits, and products that were placed into the shopping process but abandoned. Using that datastream, customer segments received dynamically generated relevant offers in a special “Your Picks” section. Conversion rates were greatly improved – for example, within the group that received offers on products they’d abandoned – the email conversion rate over doubled the normal rate. Additional significant improvements were seen by looking at the merchandising space effectiveness. These two statistics are relevant to email marketers in all types of businesses, not strictly ecommerce companies. And what’s great is this was done with Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget – products that MUSA was already running. Additional products were not required like some other marketplace analytics solutions would.

MUSA will continue to maximize their use of email and analytics via the Webtrends-ExactTarget integration to drive three levels of retargeting: static remarketing emails based on website visitor data, dynamic remarketing campaigns with varied offers by visitor, and at the deepest level, move to 1:1 product merchandising efforts such as this one based on interest, shopping behavior and related recommendations. For this third category, leveraging Webtrends Warehouse and integrating yet a third datastream of CRM information together with website activity and campaign response data, other segmentation options can be taken into consideration such as products owned and geography.

Learn more about behavioral retargeting for email and banner campaigns on our Open Exchange site. Do you have a story, question or comment? Please let us know!

Straight from the successful Webtrends Engage London, I find myself in Washington DC for the Teradata Partners (#tdpug) conference and Teradata Cares. It’ll be quite the week – I’m also speaking the eMetrics on Wednesday. Will be posting some recaps of the shows here and as they happen on Twitter.

I started my last presentation at Engage with the strains of “Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the news an ironic doth of the cap at the perceived geekiness of the practice of using data, something that the 2500 practitioners here in DC would be acutely aware of.

That being said, I chatted over breakfast with some guys from the NFL players association all ex pros from the sixties and seventies, that’s the beauty of these giant conference centres separate societies homogenized into one  (I think one was called Ed “Too Tall” Jones apparently he is famous. But what would I know – in the UK we have REAL football) .

They asked what I did and the discussion of data came up, obviously as sports professionals they also live by data and statistics and were extremely interested by the fact that thousands of people got together to speak about it, In fact they thought it was COOL.

One guy who was wearing a ring similar to one I saw Dan Marino wear in Ace Ventura – Pet Detective said ” We all live by numbers in some way”  To quote Huey for the final time; “Take it from me, its hip to be square” 

One of the fantastic parts of my job at Webtrends is having the opportunity to work with our partners via the Webtrends Open Exchange .  We want to combine the strength of our platform with the strength of our partner’s to provide real solutions.

Many of you saw our press release about integrating with WebSphere Portal earlier this year. Webtrends services a significant portion of the WebSphere Portal install base and have for many years.  I would credit the flexibility of both solutions for making that so.  Ever since the initial release in 2001, WebSphere Portal has become one of the main enterprise web portal software platforms of choice.  The Java platform is easy to deploy and maintain for all types of organizations. My team has worked with WebSphere Portal customers to implement JavaScript based data collection and log file based methods.

When we first began the integration project, we did a review of challenges that portal users might face when trying to implement analytics reporting.  The items that bubbled to the top were:

• Uncertainty regarding best practices for deploying code.
• Inability to deploy code quickly, with low development costs
• Difficultly creating business ready, actionable reporting, without long design cycles
• Ability to analyze the log files that WSP produces

In short, people need a repeatable solution that is easy to implement, creating immediate business value.  Based on this feedback, we worked with IBM to create a better way to implement both solutions together using the SmartSource Data Collector JavaScript methodology and another for just reporting on log files.

Let’s talk about the JavaScript version first:

• So exactly how much development is required? Very little.  The solution requires JSP and JavaScript code that is plug and play.  The code required is contained in the solution.  All your developer needs to do is apply it to your WebSphere Portal themes.
• How rich is the data? Using this methodology we can collect data on pages, portlets, site navigation (using the site breadcrumbs), users by name, document tracking and all of the standard reports you expect out of Webtrends Analytics.  This also includes creating user readable versions of URLs for customer not using site mappings to simply the URL strings.  An example of this might be changing a URL like: http://www.ibm.com/wps/portal/!ut/p/kcxml/04_Sj9SPykssy to http://www.ibm.com/My Website/The Main Area/News and Views/, which is much easier to read and analyze.

Now, the Site Analyzer log file solution (Webtrends Software customer only):

• So exactly how much development is required? None.  You simply need to analyze the Site Analyzer log files WebSphere Portal creates.
• How rich is the data? The log files offer different but powerful data.  You can report on authenticated users, pages, portlets, administrative commands, page customizer and user management.

When can I get this and how much does it cost? The solution is available now.  You can take the white paper and start your implementation right away.  Best of all, this solution is completely free to use.  However, if you’d like assistance or need custom work Webtrends Solution Services can help you to find the right fit for you.

Download the Implementation Whitepaper

All of these reports, they are available using the classic Webtrends interface, the sleek new Analytics 9 interface or can be pulled directly using our REST API.  The API supports JSON, XML, Excel, etc.  This data can be pulled directly into a WebSphere Portlet in a matter of minutes.

Webtrends will be at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 October 12 -15 2009 held this year in San Diego, California.  I’m happy to say I’ll be discussing this solution in more depth October 13^th.  The Webtrends team will be at Booth #18 during the event providing demos, discussing the WebSphere Portal platform and our partnership with IBM.  Come by and say hi.  I’d love to meet every one of you.

Keep in mind this white paper is just one step in this integration.  Webtrends continues to work with the WebSphere Portal team to optimize ease of deployment and reporting.  If you’re excited about the project now, just wait.

See you in San Diego!