X Change Web Analytics Conference
I’ve asked Gary Angel, CEO and CTO of Semphonic, a few questions about X Change.
What’s the number one reason to attend X Change?
For fairly experienced professionals, I think the most valuable part of many conferences is the side conversations you have with peers. At X Change, the fundamental idea is to make those conversations THE CONFERENCE. You get a chance to talk in-depth, peer-to-peer, with other leading enterprise level web measurement managers and practitioners about the problems and opportunities you are actually dealing with. You don’t have to do this in-between the presentations. Instead, you get a chance for long, in-depth exploratory conversations – the sort that are hard to fit into any other type of experience – and you get it in an environment where no one Is selling you anything.
What will be different this year?
Last year we had industry experts leading the conversations (Huddles). This year, we’ve switched to enterprise managers and practitioners. The idea is to further emphasize the peer-to-peer nature of the event. We’ll still have the consultants and vendor experts, but they’ll be supporting Huddles not leading them. Even Semphonic people won’t be leading any Huddles. In fact, to emphasize how much we want X Change to be an industry-wide event, we expect to have top experts from our biggest competitors. We expanded the event slightly (now it’s two full days) and I believe we’ll have an even stronger audience. We’ve also improved some of the supporting stuff – the event will be at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco this year – it’s a more robust venue and it should offer great spaces and some spectacular food and wine events. I’d like people to really feel special when they are there and have the opportunity to bond comfortably – and I want all of the surrounding stuff to reflect how unique the core conference feels.
Who will be facilitating the huddles this year?
We’ve actually nailed down most (but not all) of the Huddle leaders – but we are still getting many of them to sign the documents that allow me to say who they are and, of course, I’m not supposed to talk about it before we announce them. Pretty much every Huddle Leader will be someone who is leading a significant measurement effort at a sizable enterprise. Most of them are people Eric Peterson or I have worked with or know and these are people – really smart people – doing serious work in online measurement. What’s cool is that in the Huddle format you get to talk with them informally and in-depth – and get to hear stuff they could never and would never be able to put in a presentation. When you do a presentation, it’s sort of expected that you have to pretend like you have all the answers and do everything right. I think one of the most pleasant aspects of X Change is that people don’t have to do that. You often find that everyone has similar problems and frustrations and I think you learn more when people are relaxed enough to talk about what isn’t working or hasn’t worked for them.
Do you think there are enough web analytics conferences now? There is eMetrics, Omniture Summit, X Change, and more. Should there be more?
These are very, very different conferences. Omniture Summit is a vendor conference. And with Omniture a dominant player it’s obviously important and amazingly well run. But it’s ultimately more about product than practice. eMetrics is a much bigger, broader conference than X Change and covers almost every aspect of web analytics and online marketing. It’s the de facto general conference for our industry. But many of the presentations there aren’t really about web analytics specifically (there’s a lot of Search and Online Marketing) and aren’t necessarily geared toward an experienced audience. X Change tries to fill a niche for the serious, experienced analytics manager/professional. We don’t see it ever growing much beyond its current size. It doesn’t replace either eMetrics or the Omniture Summit, though I certainly believe that for the right person it adds more value than either. Do we need more conferences? I don’t see why not – especially more niche conferences like X Change. I think conference experiences that are focused on particular problems, industries and audiences can always add more value than the really large conferences. The big guys simply have to address a broad mean that is necessarily less interesting. I’ve been to conferences as focused as “Search Engine Marketing for pharmaceutical companies.” Since almost every person at a conference like that shares the same problem set, it can be uniquely valuable.
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