MeasureCamp 2012

MeasureCamp (my first unconference)

Those that know me, know that normally my motivation for going to conferences or digital events are usually to get out of the office and feel I should at least keep my head up, typically I walk out half way through and head back to work – MeasureCamp was utterly different, for starters it was an unconference – a concept that in theory shouldn’t work anywhere near as well as it did.

I think this is partly due to the fact that the attendee list was made up of un questionably awesome people, they somehow managed to blag really good food and afterwards free beer in the pub after with those awesome people!!   But I think one of the key points, despite the presence of vendors, no one was ‘hard selling’.

I am not a guy that tends to gush about events, typically I find more fault but in this instance they were smart, not sales people who loved, or at least were passionate about what they do, they gave up a Saturday to come many from outside London, some from outside the UK to attend a what can only be described as a meetup of smarter than average analytics people.

The analytics guys from Shell, Unicef, BBC, .gov.uk Trinity Mirror and numerous other places were all sharing opinions on everything from how to get the best out of Google Analytics to Internal Search, which despite being my professional focus at the moment I missed as I was presenting myself a “five for five” presentation – 5 minutes to present a subject – anyone that knows me knows that I can talk for England, so compressing it into 5 minutes … I did it with a couple of seconds to spare, but it was a challenge.

I listened to experts debate GA Premium vs Omniture, auditing configuration of Omniture more about multi variate testing and more about attribution that I have learnt in years. As well as many “soft skills” about presentation and discussing around visualisations of data.

I hope I get the opportunity to catch up with many of these people again.

Related links

– http://ukdaa.co.uk/ follow everyone on the attendee list!

– http://webanalytics.barrymann.com/ – smart Omniture related stuff

– http://www.l3analytics.com/ – Peter O’Neill (organiser)

– http://www.alwaysbetesting.co.uk/ – Charles who I am hoping will give me some insight into Internal Search, which I missed as I was doing a ‘Five for Five’ event…

– http://www.nicolasmalo.com/ – sorry to say it is in French, no idea what it says … but awesome info on attribution modelling (would love a copy of the slides)

– http://flavors.me/priteshpatel – Interesting conversations around ROI and developing far longer term strategies.

One of the best things about the day? A tie break in rock paper scissors where one person hadn’t got a clue about how to play … !  

Awesome food.

Attribution & smart thinking

I wanted to be in about 3 places at once, all day …

People are different, conversion in the real world helps if you know that