Update from Omniture 2007

About one thousand people representing dozens of companies and "25% of the global online marketing budget" were on hand at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City last week to discuss Marketing 2.0 strategies and Omniture products.

Keynote speakers included Josh James, CEO and co-founder of Omniture, and Megan Burns who is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Anne Holland, CEO of MarketingSherpa, and Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media.

Omniture is growing in leaps and bounds (customers and employees) and their recent acquisition of British Behavioral Targeting company - Touch Clarity - has made them a new global enterprise.

Products such as SiteCatalyst, Discover, and the new Genesis platform that use cutting edge technology to provide everything you need to know about every site visitor, and report on their usage make Omniture a favorite in the Web Analytics space.

All of the keynote speeches were excellent and geared to the topic of new trends in online marketing and web analytics. O'Reilly gave what was probably the most riveting presentation on the importance of online social networking in the future of internet applications. He's definitely seen everything over the last twenty years and I believe he is on the mark with his research on how much information is available about all of us on the web (and the wireless web) that we happily provide in the form of user created content. And the most successful websites will include such content to allow visitors to drive how the sites will serve the community of users. These networks that "get better the more people use them" are at the heart of Web 2.0. BTW, O'Reilly is credited for the term Web 2.0.

Read the Omniture Summit 2007 press release:
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/070321/0229457.html

Visit O'Reilly Media:
http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/

Omniture Summit - 3/13 -3/16

I'll be speaking at the Omniture Summit 2007 conference this week in Salt Lake City during one of the breakout sessions.We'll be presenting our Sprint Nextel Customer Satisfaction case study. We've partnered with ForeSee Results and Omniture to create "micro segmentation" of the visitors to Sprint.com to identify their click-through experiences and match them to the online survey results they've volunteered to provide.

More here: http://www.omniture.com/summit07/slc

A recurring theme you will see in this blog is about focusing on the customer experience. Frankly, I know, that's what everyone says. But I believe you will see that C-Sat surveys, combined with an open customer forum at http://www.buzzaboutwireless.com/, added to increasing the functionality of the self-service side of Sprint.com are all part of a "Path to Loyalty" that we're creating at Sprint.com.

A new Forum at Sprint.com

The views of this blog do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Sprint Nextel Corporation. I'm providing these comments as an independent blogger who happens to work for Sprint.

We launched our new Sprint Online Community - BuzzAboutWireless (www.buzzaboutwireless.com) on March 1st. So far we've received a lot of feedback from visitors. The people who have posted messages mainly believe this is a good idea and express hope that we will fulfill our promise to be open and honest in the community.

We created the site to provide a forum for customers and prospective customers to share ideas, get information, read and submit product reviews and ratings, and to just "rant". The Rant and Raves forum has received the most attention so far. That wasn't unexpected.

Our hope is that be being honest we will build trust. This is not a Marketing scheme, it's being run by eBusiness people. If a visitor wants to describe the problem they have with Sprint service or with a given phone, we won't censor the message. There are guidelines for conduct and content, but we are striving to avoid a "sterilized" site. And the objective is to make sure someone in our Customer Service, Product Development, Billing, or Network team sees these posts and will take action where possible.

In one week we've seen 20K visitors averaging 3.9 pageviews each. It's a start.

Managing Through Adversity

Layoffs and voluntary separation packages (VSPs) have become part of the Sprint Nextel culture this year. It's been such a distraction that many teams have become paralyzed. Our department has been lucky in that we were relatively untouched by the downsizing. However, our favorite Vice President submitted his resignation two weeks ago and left promptly last Wednesday. He's pursuing a great opportunity, as many people do. One of our favorite Directors, my friend, is also leaving at the end of March. Another great opportunity, this time in San Francisco. More adversity for a large team.

As a Director myself, I know that it's important to remain "human" through all of this. People react differently to these changes and times of uncertainty. Many keep their noses to the grindstone and shuffle between meetings like dutiful "Bedouin nomads" as one employee put it. Others want continuous information and communication. It seems that gossip abhors a vacuum. So if you're not giving updates, updates are being given on your behalf, truth be damned.

Talk to people and broadcast information to the team. I've never gotten negative feedback for over-communicating.

Dipping my Toe in the Blogosphere

Guess it won't be long before everyone has a Blog site.

Some will seek fame or attempt to gain notoriety via their blogs. An incendiary soapbox, if you will.

I'd just like to have a place to share my opinion on a few things.

You know what they say about opinions...

Then again, we know that opinions can change with the arrival of new information. But there's a fine line between being open-minded and being wishy-washy. After all, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

Oh yeah, this is a great place for anecdotes, metaphors, and platitudes.

Welcome.