Next week I will be moderating a panel at the NCDM show. 

Don’t know NCDM?  If you’re a web analyst interested in what happens in BI from a Marketing perspective, this is the show for you – National Center for Database Marketing. 

I’m moderating a “shootout” panel titled Web Analytics Solutions Showdown: How Do You Measure Customer Engagement? with panelists Barry Parshall from WebTrends, John Squire from Coremetrics, and David Kirschner from Omniture (Jon Gibson / ClickTracks had to drop out).

No right or wrong answers for this session, mostly a demonstration of how different WA platforms approach the challenge of “Measuring Engagement” differently.  Just tell us what you believe “Engagement” is and how it is measured with your tool using a case study.

Then moderated audience tears your vendor heart out.  Should be a hoot!

I came up with this idea because I thought it would be quite useful for the NCDM audience to see what web analytics looks like when it mimics traditional offline database marketing thinking.  An “outreach” kind of idea, from a Web Analytics Association perspective, if you know what I mean.  And these BI folks, they can be a very tough crowd, they’ve seen a lot of this before, just from different data / systems.

In fact, there are tons of BI people out there who want to learn as much about WA as they can, because they can see what is coming, they want to figure out how to merge offline and online Intelligence.  And by my way of thinking, “Engagement” – however you want to measure it – is probably the single most important data export WA offers into the BI world.

Why?  Because BI can’t measure the “high funnel” nearly as well as WA can.  But this capability is also the curse of WA, because there’s so much irrelevant data.  So what BI really wants to know is this: How do I define and extract the important events (what Gary calls Magic Moments) from WA data?

If you are going to the NCDM show, hope to see you there!

If you’re not clear why this show could be really important to your web or business analyst career, read the post on Web Intelligence, and then read I am an Analytics God, I want more $$.  How? by Avinash and think about the 4 paths he describes.

Back in 1993, I went with the HSN analytics team to NCDM.  We were the only team talking about getting data in real time (from the live show) and overnight customer updates.  Everybody else was dealing with lags of a month if not a quarter to get data.   On the way home we were all were wondering if HSN was a unique case, that this idea of running a business “interactively, in real time” was something other companies simply would never have to deal with.  How would the systems interact?  How would you deal with the Latency issues between “interactive” and “regular” business? 

What is the value of “transient data” versus “static data”, of group versus segment versus individual behavior?  How much transient data do you need to store, how do you convert transient group and segment data into individual static data that is meaningful?  

15 years later, I’m proud to explore those very ideas in this session with the attendees at NCDM.

By the way, if you’re sticking to the tech track up the BI ladder, the show for the opposite side of the brain to NCDM is the TDWI show.