Making Friends + Influencing People at the eMetrics Summit

Imagine my embarrassment when I didn’t recognize her.

It was only moderate embarrassment at first. I re-meet lots of people… again. My memory for names and faces was never good and it’s gotten worse.

When Carey Wilkins of Evolytics came up to me at the last eMetrics Summit in San Francisco and said hello, she didn’t do a full eye roll while waiting for me to place her face.

I turned to her good friends Dylan Lewis and his wife Jen and joked that I should be forgiven for forgetting, but I had met Carey (many moons ago) very late one night, with her husband Tom and an effusive Eric Peterson who insisted that the four of us go out for one last drink before the last bar in town closed.

Dylan and Jen smiled and nodded knowingly.

Carey shook her head, grinned and said, “You don’t remember, do you?”

“Uhhhh….”

“Tom and I came to the eMetrics Summit in 2003 in Santa Barbara.”

Que the red face, the shuffling of feet and the effort to come up with something appropriately apologetic to say. But Carey, always ready to make one feel at ease, let me off the hook before perspiration dotted my forehead and the room started to swim.

“Well,” she said with a big smile, “it was ten years ago! Back then, I was at Director of Customer Experience Management at VML and Tom was a Business Analysis Consultant with Hallmark.”

“Working with Zina Wiest??”

“That’s right! See? You do have some memory left! In fact, we still have the binder with the attendee list – I’ll email it to you.”

With the tension broken, a group of us, including (left to right) Carey, Jen and Dylan, went to a dinner that was so good, it was photographable:

Sadly missing from the photo but not from the fun were Angel Morales and René Dechamps Otamendi.

I’m not sure how many of them were in on it, but just to rub in my forgetfulness, my dessert arrived decorated thusly:

A good time was definitely had by all.

True to her word, Carey sent me the PDF which started with the Agenda:

A full day workshop delivered by yours truly.

My opening presentation/orientation the next morning.

Matthew Berk from Jupiter Research on how to buy a web analytics tool and is remembered for saying, “And sometimes you just have to grep the logs.”

Ken McGaffin on analyzing search for intent but we didn’t know to call it that yet.

Guy Creese at Aberdeen group on the landscape of our burgeoning industry.

Kristen Zhivago and Mark Gibbs with a role playing demonstration of the tense politics between marketing and IT. (I think they’re still not talking to each other.)

Terry Lund with an amazing case study of Internet Analytics at Kodak.com which he had helped create.

Bryan Eisenberg who introduced us to the concept of personas with Persuasion Architecture – a real eye-opener.

Gary Beberman from the IT side of macys.com who famously said. “Sometimes you just have to tell them what the numbers are, what the numbers mean and what they should do about it!”

Our first Web Analytics Vendor Variety Hour which got quite lively when the audience asked, “If your product didn’t exist, which of your competitors would you choose?”

Mike Grehan on how Google looked at links as citation rather than just text on the page.

Phil Gibson from National Semiconductor who was already integrating visits from identified clients into their hand-build Sales Force Automation tools.