4 conferences, 4 continents, 3 weeks

My trusty little model t PC gave up the ghost this weekend with a blue screen of death so I am writing this on my MAC that just doesn’t seem to do these things. But I love spending my weekends trying to reconstruct my PC – don’t you?

It has been an exciting few weeks where I got to be surrounded by fascinating, interesting people with incredible insight into the changing online world around us. It reminds me of the days when Skiers and Snowboarders first clashed, but then adopted each other positives to transform the extreme sports world. Online and offline marketers are a few years behind, but when they come together there is going to be an incredible spark of innovation and insight that will transform marketing…

My trusty little model t PC gave up the ghost this weekend with a blue screen of death so I am writing this on my MAC that just doesn’t seem to do these things. But I love spending my weekends trying to reconstruct my PC – don’t you?

It has been an exciting few weeks where I got to be surrounded by fascinating, interesting people with incredible insight into the changing online world around us. It reminds me of the days when Skiers and Snowboarders first clashed, but then adopted each other positives to transform the extreme sports world. Online and offline marketers are a few years behind, but when they come together there is going to be an incredible spark of innovation and insight that will transform marketing.

Between the ETIS Conference, eMetrics, CTAM and, of course, Teradata PARTNERS. It has been really cool to see so many ideas presented, audiences engaged and concepts come to fruition. My only regret is that I couldn’t be at Webtrends Engage in London. I am sorry I missed Chris Jenkins from Vodafone UK, Zeljka Stojanovic from Total Jobs, Christian Howes from Webtrends and Eduoard Servan-Schreiber speak. Fortunately I got to meet all of them separately outside of the the Engage Conference.

To some extent, I guess I got the virtual Engage experience by speaking at eMetrics with Christian Howes on the demand for integrated online and offline marketing analytics. Christian does a much better job at the describing the analytics rock-october fests in his blog post than I could ever imagine. Leaving only the question “do all Englishmen find pumpkins so fascinating?”. Let’s just say I hope not. By the way, watch this blog for a guest posting by Christian in the coming days.

eMetrics was great having a chance to finally meet Jim Sterne and Eric Peterson. Jim and I have a white paper coming out in the near future about bridging the online and offline gap in your enterprise. Hopefully we can post about it soon. My favorite part of the eMetrics conference was the closing panel discussion with practitioners from a wide ranging set of disciplines. One of the insights coming from that panel was that the challenge to integrate online and offline analysis is more of a people and process challenge than a technology issue. John McKean kicked off that discussion – he is the moderator of The River, a site completely focused on online and offline integration. This is an invitation only site, so Drop John a note and join the conversation.

Teradata PARTNERS was incredible as usual. Teradata customers put on this event and they are always the highlight of the show. It is too bad anybody missed Daniela Calaes from VIVO’s presentation. VIVO is a leading wireless provider in Brazil that has used Teradata to successfully enable multiple strategic business initiatives. VIVO has really used its Teradata investment to drive ROI across the organization.

While at Partners, I had the chance to present with some of the most interesting people working on transforming the marketing space into an integrated, data driven, automated environment. Doug Dorrat from Microstrategy and I did a workshop on new reporting tools for the customer experience. It seems like there is a lot of demand for new tools that bridge this gap between different marketing groups and Doug has some great thought leadership in this area.

On social media, I got the chance to work with a great panel including Sheryl Kingstone from Yankee Group, Christine Baumler from Freddie Mac, John McKean and of course the great James Semenak. Sheryl has been doing some ground breaking work in the convergence of CRM and Social Media and has staked out a clear vision as to how this convergence will transform Social Media into a pervasive marketing technology.

Lastly, our session on real time marketing “Customer Time is now Real Time” was really fascinating because of the insight that Laura Squier (spelled it right this time, I think) from KXEN and Diane Strahan from Nuestar. Diane’s insight into the habits of Generation Y and their mobile phones really framed the challenge that carriers and marketers face in the coming years as customers expect more and more mobility and real time service.

Finally, if you get a chance, check out some of the Podcasts from Partners done by the BeyeNetwork. Rebecca Bucnis, Malcolm Duckett, Christian Howes, and I got a chance to speak with Claudia Imhoff – which was really a treat. Hopefully you might enjoy some of these as well.

CTAM was cool – by that I mean snowy. It was in my hometown of Denver, unfortunately right in the middle of an early season upslope snow storm that dumped 2 feet of snow at my house. I didn’t get to as much of the conference as I would have liked since I was spending my time shoveling October snow and building snowmen. But I really enjoyed the Walter Kaitz dinner. TJ Holmes was the anchor and he would have been great if he knew he was at CTAM instead of NCTA.

Did you get to any of these conferences? If you did, let me know about your experience, your highlights etc. What did you find fascinating?

Paul Barrett

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