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He works for Desjardins and his passion off-work has really been Web Analytics for 2-3 years. Stéphane said that the attendance for the informal and relaxed meetings kept growing and he had forthcoming plans to organize greater events with the help of other people and willing sponsors.
We covered a few different subjects, and he told me about Swivel where people could upload data sets and analyze them online.
The Internet as a database – Swammer
I spoke to him about a concept I was thinking about for a few days, namely viewing the Internet as a database when doing analysis. This way, we don’t need a local database for storing a subset of the net, thus alleviating maintenance.
“You should have been here last time, you would have loved it. The people from Swammer presented exactly this. They manage to analyze internet trends and for instance provide a comparison of Enterprises’ values.”, Stéphane said.
I thought “Too bad I wasn’t present at the last W.A.W. then, it would have been great to meet them.”
At this point, three lively and friendly persons came in, greeted Stéphane (they obviously knew each other) and guess what? It was the Swammer team! So I did meet Jérôme Coutard, Stéphane Muller and Andreas Möllmann after all.
SWAMMER monitors public perceptions and corporate values using KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS, providing valid scientific insight and trends about an image and the perceptions associated with it, how it is shaped and how it evolves.
Swammer is a collaboration between Filteris (Jérôme Coutard, President) and Compurangers (Stéphane Muller and Andreas Möllmann). The technology provides a way of detecting trends of perceptions online, but also a way to link these emerging trends (qualitative values and external metrics about them) with internal quantitative values. Swammer uses no local databases and relies on the internet for analysis.
Jérôme and Andreas described the technology to me. Andreas handed me a Swammer brochure and we swapped cards. Jérôme said that people did not usually think of Quebec City as a technology or business centre when compared to Montreal but they all were based in Quebec City and loved it there.
Many of Swammer’s clients are in the financial industry – banks in Switzerland, Geneva (from a few days I spent in Geneva last June in Summer, I love this city) and Zurich for instance.
Andreas showed me in the brochure how Swammer detected the rise of François Bayrou’s popularity weeks before surveys did. Another strength of Swammer is its dynamic, near real-time operation. Andreas explained how surveys sometimes take too much time to provide results.
I concur, especially in this fast-changing world, or at least this fast-changing sub-world which is the internet.
Coradiant
After this, more attendants came in and we had the pleasure of meeting two people who work for Coradiant. I spoke quite a lot with Sean Power, who is a Support and Interoperability Specialist there but also a member of the Web Analytics Association.
Sean described how Coradiant linked Web Analytics with things happening at the internal operational level. He mentioned an example where the usage of a website may have dropped at a certain period when the actual issue was some internal server inaccessibility (let’s say it was a bandwidth issue for instance). Coradiant enables the diagnosis and mapping of such issues. Sean also mentioned issues that can be detected within the TCP packets for instance, and that Coradiant has an AI department as the technology relied on machine learning to detect patterns of failure.
It was therefore interesting to see how Swammer or purely external Web Analytics and Coradiant are complementary technologies and together can provide a better overview.
Analysis and forecasting
I told Sean that I thought that it would be difficult to sample web usage currently because sampling right now is akin to taking a snapshot (which is done in a survey), but the very thing you want to sample or take a snapshot of is in the midst of a wave of change. The possibilities of what users can do nowadays are changing on a daily basis, and so fast that the result of extrapolation of that sampling may be out-of-date already by the time it is produced.
Of course, I was thinking more in terms of extrapolating trends in the future rather than diagnosing existing ones. The forecasting aspect was also raised by Jérôme later on during the informal discussion round.
Healthy food, healthy discussions
With more attendants, we sat briefly while Stéphane introduced a few ideas for discussion and we did a round of introduction. Sébastien Brodeur who was also from Desjardins was present. Sylvain Amoros from Teksteel was also present as was Nicolas Malo, Senior Director for Vidéotron’s Website, among others.
We fetched a plate and came back upstairs for the rest of the discussion.
There was a lot of discussion relative to Web Analytics technologies. Google Analytics, of course, but also iPerceptions, Omniture, HBX, Webtrends and Gomez, Clicktracks JDC.
Stéphane Hamel and Nicolas Malo spoke of Bryan Eisenberg’s excellent book “Call to Action”. He described how one’s online strategy for building traffic and for conversion (of a prospective client into a buying one) were very different. He spoke of the different web structures necessary to target different customer demographics. Jérôme added how focus groups were a very good way of studying and directing the creation and design of usable websites. Sean told us about how he viewed IBM’s website as a reference – it’s much more functional and user-oriented than fashionable or design-oriented and has won many awards.
Stéphane Muller observed how as a user he would love to be able to see search results for a product, together with blog search results about the same. From this comes the question of who to trust as bloggers.
Google Technology, Abundance and The Attention Economy
I was thinking how this links to Google’s technology (PageRank -> Search -> Advertising), the Digg model (votes on news items) and the Technorati model (Blog popularity + Technology-specificity i.e. a vertical orientation).
Many times during the discussion, I kept thinking how Google’s technology was key to everything that came after it. Search is the key to everything that comes after the internet explosion, especially as we live in an abundance of information which implies a shortness of attention span. Jérôme was probably thinking along the same lines as he noted more than once that anything that enables one to save time is valuable business-wise, and said that pure information selling is not as valuable as selling an analysis of the mass of overwhelming information.
More on Google in a later post.
Various “Answer” services
Nicolas Malo spoke about Yahoo Answers and Google Answers. The latter has been since closed, and I talked about LinkedIn Answers which seemed to work well. Sylvain remarked astutely how now some people on LinkedIn were now rather responding “Give me a call and we’ll talk about it”.
Sylvain also added how he noticed that for some cultures, just having the proper color for your ad background could double up your revenue in no time. Jérôme made the link between Swammer’s operation and cultural specifics.
Related Conferences and summits
There were some more discussion about the mailing list of the Web Analytics Association and past and forthcoming conferences of relevant interest, namely WebCon, IntraCom, the eMetrics Summit, and Web 2.0.
It was great to learn more about Web Analytics and meet so many new people. I spoke some more with Sébastien, Sean and Stéphane, learned about the WASP plugin for Firefox which Stéphane had developed, before I left.
