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Feeling fragmented by digital?

by Kelly Kubrick on October 15, 2012

Working in digital is like being caught in a earthquake of change.

Late in April 2011, after many conversations with my web analytics industry colleague, Andrea Hadley, I made a fateful comment. Since first meeting in 2008 and as a past member of her advisory boards for Internet Marketing Conference, SMX Canada and eMetrics Canada, we had spent many hours debating the future of our industry.

Kelly Kubrick, Vice-President and Partner, dStrategy Media, producers of Digital Strategy Conference

Andrea Hadley, President and Partner, dStrategy Media, producers of Digital Strategy Conference

Andrea is as passionate as I am about digital, and also happens to be a conference producer, based in Vancouver. She and I regularly discussed how it seemed that everyone we spoke to felt increasingly overwhelmed by the never-ending tactical options in digital.

The only advice out there seemed to be “You should quit; go work for someone who ‘gets’ digital”.

We didn’t like that advice. How could our industry build capacity in digital if the only advice was to encourage churn? We’d get nowhere as an industry or country.

“You should bring a conference to Ottawa”, I said. Innocently. Not understanding the significance of the gleam in her eye…

Within the year, we formed dStrategy Media, producers of the about-to-be-launched Digital Strategy Conference.

Introducing Digital Strategy Conference

In digital, not only are we challenged by the need to juggle multiple dimensions – our people resources, our technology resources, our data, our content and social strategies…but on top of it, there’s non-stop fragmentation: new platforms, new channels and new business models.

What do do? Join us at Digital Strategy Conference. It will be a deep dive into digital strategy, bringing together senior directors and managers with industry leaders to learn the essentials of planning, organizing, integrating and implementing digital initiatives.

Digital Strategy Conference is an instructor-led, three day educational event intended to explore the fundamentals of digital strategy. We’ve outlined the key areas of learning so you know what to expect. Learn more here:

The first Digital Strategy Conference will take place in Vancouver, British Columbia in April 2013 followed by Ottawa, Ontario in June 2013. In each city, we’ll be tackling the following topics:

Defining Digital Strategy
Establishing Your Digital Maturity
Data Strategy and Performance Measurement
Digging into Content Strategy
Mobile to Multiscreen Strategy
Social Strategy
Making Sense of Paid Media

The call for speakers for both Vancouver and Ottawa is now open, and we look forward to reviewing your submissions. We hope you can join us!

Ottawa Web and Social Media Events

by Kelly Kubrick on May 13, 2011

Ottawa’s marketing community continues to impress me with its increasingly rich offering of web and social media related events. I’m sure I’ve missed several, but the month is flying by me and I wanted to get these one published:

“Better Leads. Richer Insights. Bridging the web analytics and CRM divide“, presented by Zone5ive, OCRI‘s Tech Marketing Forum on May 12th, 2011 at the Marshes Golf Course. Kudos to Alex Langhshur and Tyler Gibbs of PublicInsite who presented a valuable case study on exactly how they’ve helped Ottawa’s own Dragonwave Inc to convince their sales team of the worth of the web channel by integrating web analytics data into Dragonwave’s CRM
“Content Strategy from A Global Perspective”, presented by Content Strategy Ottawa Meetup. Billed as an informal night of networking, the group meets at Blue Cactus Bar & Grill in the Market on May 13, 2011 at 6pm
Now SOLD OUT – “People Before Pixels“, a one-day user experience workshop offered by Follow the UX Leader, on May 16, 2011 at the Courtyard Restaurant
“Between the Lines of Privacy“, a breakfast with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, presented by WXN. the Women’s Executive Network on May 17, 2011 at the Rideau Club
“Results, not more Reports“, a free web analytics seminar offered by Unilytics also on May 17th, 2011 at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier Hotel
“Designing for Humans“, a presentation by Martin Gomez of Sparkart from SMBOttawa (Social Media Breakfast Ottawa) at 7:30am on May 18, 2011 at the Great Canadian Theatre Company
“Stop Searching. Start Finding.” a full day of information architecture training provided by Follow the UX Leader at the Courtyard Restaurant on May18, 2011
“Creating Web Content that Clicks“, a one-day web writing course also from Follow the UX Leader on May 19, 2011, also at the Courtyard Restaurant
Ryan Short from Teknision will be the speaker at the next Web Analytics Wednesday at the Heart & Crown ByWard Market, hosted by PublicInsite on May 25, 2011 at 6pm
FUN for Tech Women event to be held at DiVino’s at 225 Preston Street on May 30th, 2011 from 6pm-8pm. To register, call DiVino’s at (613) 221-9760
Canada’s Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, or SEMPO Canada, is holding its first SEMPO Ottawa Members Only Meetup on May 30th, 2011 at 6pm at Johnny Farina on Elgin Street
“New Era Marketing Mosaika: A Spectacular Multimedia Creation” with Guy Laflamme from the National Capital Commission, presented by CMA Ottawa on May 31st, 2011 at 11:15am at the Hampton Inn and Conference Room

If I’ve missed any, comment away, and I’ll be sure to add it to the information.

Hope to see all of you at one or more of these events!

eMetrics Toronto 2011 agenda posted

by Kelly Kubrick on February 6, 2011

I’m very pleased to share the news that the agenda for the 2011 Toronto eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit agenda has been posted. It’s looking good, and I’ve already got my eye on several of the sessions including:

Stéphane Hamel, famed analytics Immeria blogger on “Establishing your Web Analytics Maturity”; I’ve had the bad luck of conflicts at past eMetrics Summits when Stéphane has presented his web (now online) analytics maturity model. However as a long-time fan – that’s it this is my year!
We’ve got a double serving of Canadian business icon Research in Motion (RIM) as Dan Quinn compares panel notes about “How Decision Makers Consume what Analysts (and Agencies) Produce” and Simon Austin will be tackling Social Media Metrics – more of that is always better…
Anne Nash from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will share stories about “What Happens when the Home Page is NOT your front door”

We’ve got attribution sessions, managing multiplicity (multiple data sources), measuring mobile, measuring video, best practices of testing, the value of data and more – tons of great topics. As usual, there’s far more sessions that I’m hoping to catch than I expect time will allow.

I’m also very honoured to announce that I’ll be speaking this year, with my web analytics compadres, Alan K’necht from K’nechtology and June Li from ClickInsight. We’re part of the eMetrics Campaign and Acquisition Optimization track where we’ll be answering audience questions on the Fundamentals of Acquisition Optimization. Our session will be held from 1:15 – 2:00 PM on Thursday April 28th, 2011. Hope to see you there!

Call for Speakers – eMetrics Toronto April 2011

by Kelly Kubrick on November 4, 2010

Calling all Ottawa companies, organizations and associations – we need you! Toronto’s eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit is on the hunt for speakers for the April 26-29, 2011 summit to be held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel.

The speaker submission deadline is December 12th, 2010.

In particular, eMetrics is looking for stories that tell the ” how-to and how-much, about the challenges you overcame, the experiments that failed, how you won a budget increase for online marketing because your ROI rocks! And, how you are evangelizing online marketing analytics and experimentation in your organization.”

In other words, open your measurement kimono! Consider sharing the good, the bad and the ugly from your recent analytics learnings. Why would we ask such a thing? Simply because it works – eMetrics is about receiving golden nuggets of learning from fellows and friends in our burgeoning analytics industry. Having attended three eMetrics summits myself, I can tell you the best presentations were those where practitioners described the particular digital measurement problem they tried to solve and explained the results. No holds barred.

Memorable speakers for myself include Breanna Wigle, who proposed an “RFF Score” (Recency+Frequency+Number of Facebook Friends) as a methodology for social network analysis for Military.com. Then there was Alain Tremblay from Bell Interactive who walked us through identified points of failure in a shopping cart, and explained how qualitative data analysis pointed them towards solutions. Wonderfully concrete. Or the always charming Vicky Brock who delivered a great case study on understanding visitor behaviour when you don’t sell online. She described specific content improvement actions that could be taken based on her analysis of a university’s onsite search engine data. Great stuff.

I’m hoping that Ottawa folks will consider submitting a speaker proposal – whether it be for an analytics or a social marketing outreach campaign within a federal government department, or a search marketing program at a private sector company, or a social media membership recruitment effort from an association. I know you’re out there, fellow Ottawans – let’s make sure we let the rest of Canada know it!

Please contact me if you have any questions about the event or to discuss ideas or topics you are considering. To help you brainstorm, the 2011 eMetrics content focus includes the following topics:

Digital Management
Media Analytics: Cross Media, Cross Platform
Site Optimization and Usability
Campaigns and Acquisition Optimization
Social Mobile Marketing Metrics

Good luck!

Ottawa’s jam-packed June

by Kelly Kubrick on June 23, 2010

I’m not sure if it was intentional or not – trying to beat a pre-summer vacation frenzy? – but this past month, Ottawa has been jam-packed with with web-related events. Which is, of course, excellent news for our fair city. Our web-ian community grows!

A quick round up of those I was able to catch:

GovCamp Ottawa, our local version of GovCamp Canada: “an open environment for conversation about the role of municipal, provincial and federal governments in cultivating the growth and prosperity of Canada’s vibrant communities…”. My first ‘un-conference’, and an intriguing experience. After hearing from a kick-off panel, the audience created the agenda on the spot. I joined a debate about how valuable (or not) subject matter experts are in an open government model, a discussion about inter-jurisdictional (federal, provincial and municipal) applications and a session about how to measure the impact of open government data using examples and success stories. Overall though, my favourite part was the live Twitter feed during the panel itself; highly amusing to be part of a top-trending topic on Twitter for a day…

“Winning the War on Google” featuring Rebecca Lieb, presented by the nascent Ottawa Web Marketing Club.ca. Rebecca has an impressive search pedigree and covered a lot of the fundamentals of search. Unfortunately, the most interesting material – the future of search – came at the end with little time left. She touched on implications of universal search e.g. the blending of search results – organic, news, images, video, social, etc. to illustrate why it’s – truly – no longer about rankings. Also, intriguing stats from comScore: “In early 2008, 17 percent of searches contained some type of blended result. In late 2008, it was 31 percent of all search results.” Look out marketers!

“Social Media Marketing Experts Reveal All” with panelists Scott Lake from SWIX, Erin Blaskie, Lifestreamer (my new favourite word – see BabyCenter’s research segmenting social moms) and Michele Bedford-Thistle from Microsoft, presented by OCRI‘s, Zone5ive technology marketing speaker series. Each panelist had an extremely different take on social and how they’ve incorporated it into their professional selves and businesses. Finally – concrete evidence about why organizations don’t need to panic about the ‘right’ way to ‘do’ social.

There were still other events I was not able to attend, including:

“Wikibrands – Reinventing Your Business in A Customer Controlled Marketplace”, featuring Sean Moffit and presented by SMB Ottawa (Social Media Breakfast Ottawa). For reasons that I’m unclear about, there’s no reference to the event on the SMB Ottawa web page, but you can find the presentation on slideshare. Perhaps they are pure-Twitterists?

MARCOM 2010 – “professional development and educational forum for public and not-for-profit marketers and communicators”

Your Facebook Business Account – Turn “Fans” into Customers Session 3 of Using Social Media to Drive Business featuring Erin Blaskie, presented by the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce. Fortunately for me, Erin posted the presentation on slideshare.

If you were able to attend any of these, comment away – I’d be curious to hear what you learned at each.

And finally, although it not exactly an event, there is a deadline worth noting – CMA Ottawa is touting the fact that the entry deadline for the 2010 Canadian Marketing Associations Awards is June 24th, 2010.

Go Ottawa!

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