Recap of eMetrics Stockholm 2009

eMetrics in Stockholm gathered less than hundred participants two weeks ago. Main reason for this, by Sandra and Matthew Finlay from Rising Media, was that companies are cutting their traveling costs. Well, those end customers who where on site got really good value for their money because there was constant opportunity to get even personal coaching from several consultants and vendors!

It was really nice to hang around all day (and night) long with top people in the field, including Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, Aurélie Pols, Oliver Schiffers, Steve Jackson, Lars Johansson, Marc Saarde and Gillian Muessig from SEOmoz.org. You can check out my photo slideshow from this event by clicking the picture below.


Jim Sterne opened the whole event with a keynote presentation "Time to shine". To people working daily basis in the field, it's obvious that:

"You can actually create competitive edge with web analytics, or should we rather say web intelligence or business analytics."

But in my mind, for example in Finland, although we have raised awareness of web analytics;

"There are still too many companies tracking visitors and lacking wider view how to get benefits from analytics."

We have planned little bit a web analytics research in Finland with TNS Gallup. I really hope that this research would prove me wrong about maturity level of our customers. Maturity model was also topic of the discussion session during the second day. Personally I really like Stephane Hamel's key success factors and maturity model of web analytics. If you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe you should check out his presentation below.

Web Analytics Maturity Model

View more presentations from Stephane Hamel.

It was nice to hear a brave presentation from Andreas Petterson and future strategy of SAS. I missed Telia's case and Eric Peterson's testing clinic, but it was glad to take part of testing test and presentation of Lars from Mark Red. I shows very clearly that we are only guessing and testing is the only way to really know what works for customers and what doesn't. I beat the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Office or Highest Paid Person's Opinion) but lost to monkey and mom. : )

I was in the panel moderated by Jim Sterne, and because I had to concentrate and think things in English, I can't comment the overall outcomes of the panel session. If you were there, I'm more than happy to hear your comments and feedback. During the Monday afternoon we had a presentation with Lasse Leponiemi about how Valmennuskeskus increased their overall business by 28 % and how they got 95 % of all sales from Internet last year! You can get our presentation (pdf) by clicking the picture below.

Presentations from Per Strid and Steve Jackson were solid as expected, Aurélie Pols replaced Eric Peterson and she completed the idea of competing with web analytics. Her presentation included several good and useful check lists. I really liked the presentation by Lasse Rubin Skov and how Canal Digital improved their business just in four months or so (see his presentation in Danish).

Especially I liked Jesper Åström's presentation of how to combine social media and email marketing. I like Jesper's style to present things and if you're thinking how to measure social media, read my post about it, check out this video from Jesper and stay tuned.