EMetrics 2011 — Part 1
This is a long pending post from EMetrics Market optimization summit that I attended in Oct 2011. I am highlighting some key talks that caught my attention.
Expedia — Joe Megibow( vice president and general manager of Expedia Global)
Top execs are coming from analytics area — Joe from Expedia is an example. Joe used to work at Tea leaf and has published a white paper. He like most of the analytics gurus mention, it’s not about tools but people using tools.
Some of the key items that he mentioned that made him successful
* Always be honest and always be transparent
* Know your customer. You are not your customer
* It’s not about click conversion it’s about intent
* Translate data into actionable terms (and get action)
* If you give your customers a voice, they will give you gold.
* Borrow, steal, and plunder from other industries and disciplines. Many of our problems have already been solved for us.
* To compete on analytics, not on politics, you have to have a single source of truth
* Don’t just count. Do!! Make decisions. Make mistakes.
Joe talks about the same challenges that I have seen in many companies.
* Expedia had 50 active definition of conversions
* U gotta have a single definition across
* Single set of data source and single set of truth. Took them 2 years
Suddenly they were competing on data then politics. Their MVT strategy really paid off. Removed buttons on all booking path. Less distraction to the users
Some stats about Expedia:
* Expedia has around 90 tea leaf servers
* 90M unique Visitors per month
* >$16B bookings
* 30M transactions in 2010
* 110 omniture sites
* >500TB of web data
IBM — Big Data — Jeff Jonas (Chief Scientist)
Jeff mentions some key points that are worth thinking about: Organizations are getting dumber and computer smarter. Enterprise amnesia is a new term that I heard for the first time :-)
He uses puzzles to understand to how to put organization together. Same thing can’t be in 2 places at the same time. Space time travel. Cell phones generating 600b transactions a day in US.
Some key points
* Ultimate biometric
* Information in context
* Time is of essence
* Customer lifetime value
* Network value