Some thoughts from the Emetrics Summit in Washington DC, October 2007
I’ve just returned from the Emetrics Summit where I was honoured to be presenting about some of the techniques our company uses to research online networks and global segments of tourism customers.
The Emetrics Summit is a global conference aimed at those working in web measurement and marketing optimisation and has a reputation for bringing together some great thinkers and industry practitioners.
While I was one of the few speakers covering the tourism industry directly, the themes of many of the presentations had strong resonance for those in any industry trying to understand their customers and their web interactions.
So this post highlights four things I took from Emetrics that I think would be of particular interest to those working in the travel and tourism industry.
First Think Different
Jim Sterne, first keynote speaker of the summit, urged attendees to learn to think different and to sharpen our cognitive processes in order to “think like a detective and can act like a scientist”.
Thinking different means tapping into your inner five year old and asking some great questions. Recapturing a childlike state is therefore a prerequisite in order to approach the process of analysis and research with curiosity and wonder, rather than with the jaded or prejudiced views of an adult.
Jim used the great analogy of your company or website being a house with windows and you’re inside looking out. Customers are flying by in helicopters, peering in windows and skylights in the roof, trying to decide whether to come in. And most of the time, as an organisation, we have no concept what that brief glimpse in through the window actually looks like.
Our role (as business owners, web analysts, researchers etc) is to find ways to capture evidence of that customer experience as they peer in through the window of our organisation or website. Our role is to analyze that experience in order to understand how that fits with the customer’s desires and expectations. And finally, our role is then to optimise that customer experience by adapting our website, products and services in order to deliver on those desires and expectations.
So what can thinking like a child possibly mean for tourism businesses? I think it means getting over what you haven’t got - whether that be full data sets, complete customer records or access to expensive tools. As fellow keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik so eloquently put it: “embrace incompleteness”. Once you get over what you haven’t got, you can use your imagination, your curiosity and your intelligence to find the right questions to solve.
And once you have the questions, from then on you can improvise. (Call it den building for grown-ups!) And believe me, if you can tap into your imagination, you can measure the whole world with free tools – I’ve done it.
Measuring multi-language content and campaigns
In a great presentation about robots (non-human web traffic), aliens (international web traffic) and false assumptions, Alex Langshur of Public Insite demonstrated some valuable examples of why it is essential to dig deeper into geographic or language based segments when analysing the success of websites and keyword campaigns.
In examples from Canadian public sector sites, he demonstrated how dramatically the behaviour of visitors to the French and English versions of the same website differed. For example, his research found differences not just in the type of content consumed by French speakers compared to English speakers, but differences in the time of year of content consumption. French and English speakers also visited different content areas of the same site, downloaded different pdfs and clearly had different preferences and concerns.
There were differences in promotional campaign response rates and differences in the specific keywords that successfully attracted people to the site. In an example particularly relevant to tourism, Alex demonstrated how they had promoted the same site (translated in French and English) with the same buckets of 50 or so keywords in French and English.
Although the same words were used in both languages for the paid search campaigns, the French words achieved a higher overall click through rate – a factor that would have been otherwise masked, given that 75% of the market speaks English. Additionally, the top 5 performing keywords were completely different between the two languages, with the French responses coming from a smaller concentration of terms than the English responses.
By realising that the need to not only translate their sites, but promote the different sites using different terms for the different market segments, the team behind the project can now make far more effective use of their budget. Additionally, they are better able to serve the needs of two different segments of web visitors now they understand those groups have different priorities and concerns.
Managing Social media the right way
Carie Lewis, from The Humane Society of the United States, provided one of the best examples I have seen on the right way to engage with customers using social media and online social networks.
It is her role to maintain an ongoing (ie an all day, every day) conversation with supporters of the charity, for example in MySpace and in blogs. With over 30,000 friends in MySpace, Carie gives a “face” to the organisation by sustaining a continued online conversation with supporters and potential supporters (and yes, she answers their emails, chats with them online and follows up when they point out things that she should be aware of).
She works hard in the online social media space to turn friends in MySpace and elsewhere into online advocates and donors. She uses the same communication tools her market uses, such as blogs and instant messaging and she engages with them in a manner for which the primary cost is time.
How can she possibly do this? Well, it is her job and it is clearly her passion. She does this full-time, funded by money removed from expenditure on printed marketing elsewhere in the organisation.
And it’s not about collecting online friends for friends sake. Her success has been in maintaining a marketing conversation that has allowed her to influence what these friends do and to be able to measure these using appropriate metrics for the organisation.
As a result, she has been able to demonstrate how her efforts have led to increased membership, donorship and campaign activism for The Humane Society.
Additionally, she also now has a string of volunteers to help her with the charities cause and finds that increasingly she no longer has to wade into arguments on blogs, because her MySpace friends have already got there first to advocate on The Humane Society’s behalf.
The Humane Society of the United States is a large organisation with many staff and interns. Nevertheless, I think it is highly enlightened that it has chosen to fund a conversational style of marketing via online social networks in the form of a person to shape and undertake those conversations, rather than simply by pushing out flashy content. As Carie puts it “you have to get over the fear of losing control of your message”.
Social butterfly metrics
Joe Pagano, of the Library of Congress, coined a fantastic term that relates to the effect of social media traffic on your website – butterfly metrics.
The term reflects the sight of Monarch butterflies ascending en mass – first just a handful, then hundreds, then thousands at a time – then in no time at all, they are all gone.
Joe described how like butterflies, people flit around the web, making a conscious decision on whether to land on content and perhaps integrate it their lives. And as he rightly points out “it only takes a small group of conscious people to transform collective awareness”.
The Library of Congress is a massive website and photo library and it sees dramatic (if fleeting) spikes in traffic when its content is rated highly on social media sites like Digg. Joe described how in a matter of days, thousands descended to consume content promoted from Digg, all to be gone in a matter of weeks. (His data comes from sources that includes page content view and referrer data from his web analytics tool).
So, why butterfly metrics? As I understand it, Joe is identifying a need to further understand the where, when and why of this traffic descends, where it goes next and the value of it when it occurs. He is also looking for better ways of understanding the distribution of this traffic, for example in terms of time spent on site and content consumed.
Personally speaking, from a tourism site perspective I would want to better understand what triggered the interest, where that trigger occurred and what form the escalation of interest takes, so I could understand whether I should be trying to stimulate this activity again in the future.
In tourism terms, I believe the Incredible India campaign described in an earlier post, really gets this concept too. I think they are putting out their beautiful content in places like You Tube to attract the very social media butterflies that Joe describes.
And finally…
What a long post – and this is the short version. My original list had eight things to report on!
I hope I have conveyed something useful from my experience at the most recent Emetrics Summit and I would heartily recommend attending if you ever have the chance. (Emetrics takes place in London, San Francisco, Stockholm and Munich – and next year in Toronto too).
I will be posting based on my presentation in the coming days.
Stephen also conducted a fascinating industry interview with fellow Emetrics attendee Jeremy Cooker, online marketing consultant and hotel liaison for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation - this will be posted later next week.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Online customer behaviour, Social media measurement, Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.