Tonight 9PM

 COI at 1:30 PM http://smanalytics.eventbrite.com/   (this is a private event, contact me by leaving a comment and I’ll provide information on how to register)

London Book Signing –  http://integrasco.com/?menuid=9&articleid=77  it’s at the Hospital Club at 8:30AM Tue  and follow the information to sign up.  As of now there are close to 100 guests.  Everyone who comes will get a copy of my book (unless we run out – which we probably will, judging from the response – not to worry, McGraw-Hill will be in attendance and we can get your information and have a book sent to you soon after – but that’s only if you show up – assuming your in London, that is).

……

This has been a great trip so far, my 6th to London in the less than two years.  Yesterday I was at a Japanese Tea Ceremony in a part of London I’ve never been to before, but I quite liked called Crouch Hill (I think).

There’s also a lot to write about – but I’m taking in information so fast, I’m finding I can’t quite get the time (esp with the often difficult to get Internet here) to write it down.   One thing that has stuck in my mind for the last few days is Gary Angel’s long post about the results of the latest XChange Conference that occurred last week in California.   X Change 2011 : It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine (Part II) and I haven’t read part 1 yet (I see there is a part 1) but it’s always great to hear Gary’s insights – as far as the web analytics/data analytics space, Gary Angel is, in my opinion, the finest mind in the field, and at XChange, he has the finest people speaking – so when he said…

So what’s the big picture take-away from having all those top enterprise practitioners talking and sharing their experience?

I see two big changes from prior years. First, there was virtually no discussion of the “Omniture vs. Coremetrics vs. Webtrends” sort that would have been common in past years. That’s actually kind of nice. I don’t miss it at all.

Second, there was a huge, almost overwhelming consensus that analytics data warehousing is not just the future of Web Analytics it’s the immediate reality (Theme #1 may well be related to this). This discussion (and real work) was everywhere. The move toward data warehousing is, for the moment, complementary to Web analytics tools. It relies on Web analytics tools for data collection and it has yet to seriously impinge on traditional Web analytics reporting.

How long will that last?

I’m just not sure.

I do know that Web analytics solutions are an expensive way to collect clean server calls. If that’s all you’re using your Web analytics tool for, you’re better off with a different solution.  Nor is data collection much of a long-term business model for a big company.

Will the current advantage in democratization of data that Web analytics tools enjoy last or be enough to sustain the market? At really sophisticated organizations like eBay, even that advantage has largely dissipated. But I know, too, that making data readily accessible out of traditional BI and Warehousing systems is NOT easy. Lots of companies have struggled and failed at this. If I were an enterprise vendor, however, I’d stop worrying about GA and start worrying about Hadoop (and the myriad other technologies that facilitate big-data warehousing and analytics).

Right now, it’s a race to see whether Web analytics tool vendors can extend their platforms rapidly enough to head-off the migration of their mature client-base to internal or cloud-based warehousing tools. Looking at the landscape of X Change in 2011, that’s a race that, while far from over, they seem to be losing.

It really may be the end of the world as we know it.

Well … kudos to Gary for seeing the obvious – but if read the lines – the same will be true for Social Media Analytics within a few years – I have found the movements of the Web Analytics space are closely aligned with Social Media Analytics – and……. I predicted almost two years ago (while in London, by the way) that Social Analytics would become more modular, but really, what I think I saw is that the platforms, themselves, will begin to become less important (the interface, that is) and we will just take the data and combine it in a larger repository, something akin to a Data Warehouse, and create the custom dashboards we need out of that.

Notice that Gary Angel said … ” If I were an enterprise vendor, however, I’d stop worrying about GA and start worrying about Hadoop(and the myriad other technologies that facilitate big-data warehousing and analytics)” – he was underlining the obvious – Social Analytics platforms ARE ENTERPRISE PLATFORMS … which means, don’t put all your secret sauce in your interface – you better start focusing on the DATA COLLECTION – because in a year or two, that’s all your going to have to offer to medium and big sized companies, where the bulk of the money in this space really is.   Your “interface” which is what people were keying on all along, will become less important, because it will have become  irrelevant. 

After all, on the lower end, most smaller companies aren’t yet sophisticated enough, and are having problems even understanding the lexicon and what these systems do, and regularly churn from one platform to the next every so often, once they get fed up or get a client that needs something different than what the systems they have now, provided -that will only get worse.  Small and medium sized companies are where most of the headaches are, esp in the MARCOM space, where people are just beginning to understand the lexicon of data analytics – there are signs of life, but most people are still creatives that are living in different, perhaps largely hype and messaging world – and what they want is often too much work for vendors, for not enough money to make it worth doing.  At least, that is what it looks like, today.

Now, if you think about it, grabbing the data and putting it your own interface makes even more sense in Social Media Analytics than it does in Web Analytics.  After all, in Web Analytics, there were some advantages, as Gary Angel points out, in the way each platform got at largely site centric data through a variety of server logs or JavaScript tag capture (beacon captures).     But Social Media Analytics comes right off the web, for the most part – the same data Radian6 gets, more or less, BrandWatch can get, so can Lithium, and so on.  

True, each platform in Social Media Analytics is different in the way they layer the data and process it (often a major problem, making most of these systems currently stand alone and difficult to integrate or interface with anything else outside themselves, and therefore, somewhat limiting), I talk about that alot in my book, esp Chapter 10.   The advantages some systems get by using customized crawling and data extraction for custom KPI’s is what makes the current scheme valuable, more than anything else.

But the data itself, suggests that the customized crawl could still happen, and the result fed into a Data Warehouse.  So what Gary said, regarding Web Analytics – is probably the future of Social Media Analytics – and that may destabilize the market quite a bit, I suspect.  I see this as a reality in between 2-3 years, perhaps sooner.

So vendors, remember that your secret sauce, you may just end up with a Data Feed, selling it in an App Store or Data Exchange – down the line – at least on the high end (I know that sounds cryptic, but I type these ideas as they come to me, and these are the words that forming in my mind).  Vendors may need to work on how to make their data inter operable and have enough unique features (and hopefully accuracy will be one of them) to make it worth while to buy the data in first place.  THAT’s what I SEE.

There was also a interesting section in Gary Angel’s post about the kind of behavior and interest targeting that Facebook does – read his post to get all the details, but this paragraph stuck out to me.

Yes, the Web Analytics space and Social Media Analytics have merged – which means – Social Analytics vendors – study what is happening in Web Analytics, as it is now, your space.

PS – I’ll add more about the Rome, Italy book signing shortly – in a day or two.  Posted about it earlier this week though.