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!

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!

Engage starts tomorrow!

It’s finally here: The WebTrends Engage 2009 customer conference at the Red Rock Casino and Hotel in sunny Las Vegas! We are very excited to host our customers, media, and other attendees over the next few days as we share updates about the future and gather insights from all of you. If you are attending or following the conference, here’s what you likely want to know:

Agenda and general information

Here are a few links that attendees frequently need:

• Hotel and Conference location
• Conference network
• Agenda
• Speakers
• Sessions
• Training
• Vegas Weather

Live Updates

Whether you are attending or following from afar, you might want to stay up to date with live updates from the conference. We are pulling live tweets and content on our conference microsite. Follow Twitter by RSS using our conference search feed.

Tags and Hashtags

If your are going to live tweet and would like to be included in our live coverage on the website, please use #wte09. If you have blogs posts, videos, or pictures that you would like to share with the group, please use wte09 as your tag. We will be pulling all links with these tags and hashtags from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Technorati. If you plan to use another service we may find you through our monitoring, but feel free to share your web service of choice in our comments below.

Daily wrap ups

While at the conference, we will be recording videos, taking pictures, and writing notes. Every night we will pull this content together in a daily wrap up post. Be sure to check back on our blog each night for the daily wrap up post.

We are looking forward to meeting everyone beginning at registration this evening. If you have additional questions or would like to share suggestions with the group, please leave us a comment below!

Silverlight and JavaScript play nice together, so making manual requests for each interaction you want to track via DCSMultiTrack should not be a problem, though it will be time consuming to go through and add all these calls yourself.

The interaction between Silverlight 2.0 and WebTrends logging has been simplified by using a custom class developed by WebTrends. All you need do is simply add the class to your project by either including it in your current file, or by adding a new Silverlight class library.

The class is called “DcsMultiTrack” and lives in the namespace “WebTrends”. This code is essentially a tunnel between the Silverlight and the JavaScript function “dcsMultiTrack”. The “Send” method is used with the same name / value pairs as you would if making a standard JavaScript call to dcsMultiTrack. Here is an example:

DcsMultiTrack multitrack = new DcsMultiTrack();
multitrack.Send(”WT.ti”, “PageTitle”, “dcsuri”, “/silverlightapp/search_button”);

The Send call will not fail if the application is embedded on a page where WebTrends tags are not available. And… here is the class code:

namespace WebTrends
{
using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Browser;

///
/// WebTrends Tracking function for Silverlight
///
public class DcsMultiTrack
{
///
/// Private value
///
private static bool hasDcsMultiTrack = false;

///
/// Initializes a new instance of the DcsMultiTrack class
///
public DcsMultiTrack()
{
if (!hasDcsMultiTrack)
{
try
{
string typeOfFunction = (string)HtmlPage.Window.Eval(”typeof(dcsMultiTrack)”);
hasDcsMultiTrack = (typeOfFunction == “function”);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(e.Message);
}
}
}

///
/// Gets or sets a value indicating whether or not dcsMultiTrack exists in JavaScript
///
public bool LoggingEnabled
{
get { return hasDcsMultiTrack; }
set { }
}

///
/// Issue log request to WebTrends
///
///
Name/value pairs eg:(”WT.ti”, “title”, “dcsuri”, “/silverlight_app/button1″) /// multiTrack.call(”WT.ti”, “title”, “dcsuri”, “/silverlight_app/button1″)
public void Send(params object[] args)
{
if (HtmlPage.IsEnabled && hasDcsMultiTrack && (args.Length % 2 == 0))
{
try
{
HtmlPage.Window.Invoke(”dcsMultiTrack”, args);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(e.Message);
}
}
}
}
}

Simple right? Any questions? Well there is one blringly obvious question; When do I make my Send call? In call these Rich Media Technologys yes we can make logging requests but when? And what do we put in them? What constitutes as a page view in an interface with no pages. This is a question we will focus on in our Workgroup.

Accessing the logging script and making calls to DCSMultiTrack from AJAX should be very simple since you are likely using JavaScript already to handle user interactions, build your XHTML controls, and utilize XMLHttpRequest. Even if you are using a different scripting language such as VBScript you can still make a call to a JavaScript function in much the same way you would from within JavaScript.

If you wanted to make the deployment of your AJAX ‘tagging’ more efficient rather than add a call to every object action you want to track you may consider adding it into your event handler function to your AJAX application that will automatically make calls to DCSMultiTrack when triggered:

Button1.onclick = updateData()
…
function updateData(event, param) {
var myurl = www.domain.com/service/ajax.aspx

http.open(”GET”, myurl + “?id=” + escape(param), true);
http.onreadystatechange = useHttpResponse();
DCSMultiTrack(”DCSURI”,”/ajax/menu/”+event.target+”/”event.type,”DCSext.param”,”param”)
http.send(null);

}

Here I have used the example of on click event handler but it could just add the call within a wrapped up function and attach this to a rootElement event handler. The issue there then becomes that you will be tracking all user interactions so what do you start passing as page URL’s and other parameters just to say represent a mouse drag.

Should the handler be attached to all events enabling you to collect information on any and every interaction? Or prehaps limited only to duistinct content loads/views within the applet? And what should you be passing as parameters? Why not join us to discuss this at Engage 2009 in our Workgroup.

It is sometimes the case that from some technologies we are unable to make a call to JavaScript or in some environments even execute JavaScript. One example of this would be RSS feeds where sites content or some other kind of informational stream is downloaded directly from a web server into desktop or third party web based aggregator. We will need to combine a variety of different technologies and reporting approaches to give us encompassing view of RSS utilization, from subscription to consumption.
What we can easily track are clicks on the RSS feed or subscribe link. If a visitor clicks on the link we will want to count that as a subscription using DCSMultiTrack:

This dcsMultiTrack call will populate both of the WebTrends 8.5 + out of the box RSS subscription reports.
But once people have subscribed are they reading the feeds? A “Feed Read” is a request for the RSS file on the server. Since it is impossible to tag an RSS file with JavaScript like we might a web page, the collection of this data will need to be implemented at the server side, sending a logging request directly to the SDC from your own web server. Since we don’t have the WebTrends JavaScript around to build and format this request for us we will have to do it our selves but hopefully is should be something similar to this:

“http://SDC DOMAIN/DCS ID/dcs.gif?dcsdat=POSIX TIME STAMP&dcssip=THE DOMAIN SERVING RSS FEED&dcsuri=PATH OF RSS FEED&dcsua=USER AGENT&dcscfg=1&WT.dl=10&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_ev=f&WT.ti=TITLE OF RSS FEED&OPTIONAL QUERY STRING

The other standard measure is “Article Requests”; the number of clickthroughs a RSS article or item receives. The tagging of these items is similar to how campaign links are tagged with WT.mc_id. An example of how we might want to format the RSS feed tag link would be:

HTTP://THE ARTICLE URL&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME&WT.rss_ev=a

If we wanted to consider a RSS feed a campaign channel we could also add a WT.mc_id too:

HTTP://THE ARTICLE URL&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME&WT.rss_ev=a&WT.mc_id=CAMPAIGN ID

Moving beyond the out of the box RRS reporting can we track the number of times a post or item is viewed? While most portal based aggregators do not support the viewing of images, web based personal aggregators and desktop based aggregators do. Using an image calls embedded in the items we can get simple item view information similar to the noscript tags used in standard pages. As is the case with tracking feed requests, the image call needed to track this data will need to be generated manually. The format of the generated image request should be something like:

“http://SDC DOMAIN/DCS ID/dcs.gif?dcssip=THE DOMAIN SERVING RSS FEED&dcsuri=PATH OF RSS FEED&dcsua=USER AGENT&dcscfg=1&WT.dl=10&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_ev=av&WT.ti=TITLE OF RSS FEED&OPTIONAL QUERY STRING”

Note: WT.rss_ev state “av” is a custom parameter, It is not officiall an WebTrends parameter.
It is very important that the image call occur in the body or content of the request. This will ensure that the request will fire when the item is viewed. Putting it in another section of the XML may result in the image not being rendered.
What about tracking activity from RSS aggregators? The neat thing about most portal and web based personal aggregators is that they actually pass the number of subscribers in the agent string.

Here are a few common examples:

Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=124155534636)

NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 20 subscribers)

Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 81 subscribers)

ThePort Web/1.0; subscribers 1LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for your url/; 1 readers)

YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 2; views 169)

As before, we can pull this data into WebTrends using server side code. This process would occur during the “Tracking Feed Reads” process described above. You would simply need to replace the code under “preprocesses user data to remove junk data at the end of the string” with this more functional code. It is very important that this code IS NOT added to the Article View functionality. Adding it to that code may cause the subscriber numbers to be reported incorrectly.

This of course is all a lot of work for your developers, and would certainly be considered advanced tagging. Are there any alternatives? You could use log files, but you would lose the rich information with tagging that you are able to ascertain about each Feed being accessed and read.

Another alternate to both web logs and server side tagging would be WebTrends partner Atomic Labs. Product; Pion. It use passive network data capture to listen to customer interactions without the need for page tags or server logs. It can strip out information from web documents including RSS feeds as they are requested by visitors and process these into WebTrends parameters in SDC logs. You can find out more about this in Engage 2009 Workgroup Session.

With broadband now common place in the home, Web Developers are using more and more Rich Media content in their websites. The sinus and flowing interfaces of applications built in technologies such as AJAX, Flash, and SilverLight are replacing ‘blocky’ single state HTML pages. How do we track visitors in these new technologies, and how will we redefine the page view to reflect these fluid interactions?

Part I: Tracking

Let us first address the fundamental problem of issuing logging requests from the client side to our SDC server (web server log files will be no use to us here) from within these technologies, as it is perhaps the most straight forward of the two questions we will address here.

The gap we must bridge is that between our application and the WebTrends logging JavaScript, our end goal being a call to the DCSMultiTrack function… used to trigger subsequent logging requests to an SDC server so that we might capture events that occur after the initial logging request that is made by the script when a page is loaded. These include client-side mouse events (clicks on links), form events, and interaction with embedded objects such as our rich media applications.

The function takes paired values as arguments:

	dcsMultiTrack('name1','value1','name2','value2',...)

All arguments are JavaScript strings which must be enclosed in quotes. The first part of the pair is the parameter name which must be of the form ‘object.name’ where ‘object’ is the name of one of three pre-defined custom objects: WT, DCS, DCSext. And ‘name’ – The property name of the custom object (for WT and DCS these are reserved names). The second part of the pair is the parameter value.
Note the all initial parameter assignments from the initial page load remain unchanged in the triggered request unless overridden by parameter values passed to DCSMultiTrack.

DCSMultiTrack will act as a bridge for us between our Web technology and JavaScript since most client side languages can utilize or make calls to JavaScript functions directly or indirectly. What we record with these DCSMultiTrack requests however we must define ourselves. How do we designate page views and parameter values that will give us a wide enough data set to fully understand how our visitors navigate these technologies.

However it is sometimes the case that from some technologies we are unable to make a call to JavaScript or in some environments even execute JavaScript. One example of this would be RSS feeds where sites content or some other kind of informational stream is downloaded directly from a web server into desktop or third party web based aggregator. We will need to combine a variety of different technologies and reporting approaches to give us encompassing view of RSS utilization, from subscription to consumption.

When do I make my Send call? In call these Rich Media Technologys yes we can make logging requests but when? And what do we put in them? What consitutes as a page view in an interface with no pages. This is a question we will attempt to answer at our Engage 09 Workgroup.