I recently attended the Coremetrics 2010 client summit.  My role there was dual purpose.  Officially, I was there as an advanced Coremetrics user for the company that I work for.  As a three time attendee of the conference, my main goal was to make sure that my co-attendees enjoyed themselves and gleaned some good information specific to their role at our company.  Unofficially, I attended the conference as a published author of a web analytics book and co-owner of the website on which you are reading this post.  My main goal in this capacity was to continue making contacts and crowd source the topic of the next book that Carlos and I will publish in January.

The gist of the Coremetrics conference is this: keynote speeches, breakout sessions on specific web measurement and web marketing topics, meet and greet with a multitude of vendors, showing off new features of the new analytics tools, and socializing between clients.  The gravy of the conference, as is with most conferences, is the time available for socializing and bouncing ideas off of each other.  I balanced this time between being a web analyst for a large company and engaging my peers as a fledgling thought leader in the web analytics arena.

As you might have previously seen on this website, we’ve published a poll of four different book topics for you to choose from.  We’ve done some crowd sourcing over the multitude of social media forums and have had a good response from our friends and followers as to what book they would most like to read.  I felt that it would be a brilliant idea as I was chatting with my peers at the conference to give them the opportunity to peruse the four book options and make their voice heard.  So I set out to this task in the midst of enjoying the rest of the conference and learning some brilliant new marketing and analytics ideas.

It was interesting for me because most people at the conference recognize me from my company name, but not as many knew me from my previous book.  Such is life sometimes.  It definitely added an interesting perspective for me and for the peers that I spoke with.  Most analysts it seems, are content with their single job and don’t necessarily take it upon themselves to b ranch out.  For me, writing a book and keeping up with a web analytics blog has allowed a great outlet for me to expand my analytics knowledge while at the same time, allowing me to share some of my knowledge with my readers.  If you are reading this I hope it is because you are like me and are seeking additional knowledge and are not satisfied with just doing your job.

If you have not attended a web analytics conference, or any type of web marketing conference, I encourage you to do so.  Specifically, if your analytics provider is hosting a conference, there is a mint of information you can glean off of the presenters and your peers alike.  It might be very minute and tangible such as how ad retargeting works, or it might be more topline and holistic like why tagging matters, or why segmentations helps better identify what your customer is doing on your website.  As well, if you are like me and you want to make a bigger name for yourself, attending a conference is great for making acquaintances and garnering a following.