This is a guest post from Corry Prohens of IQ Workforce.  Corry is a sponsor of the Web Analytics Demystified Job Board and one of the most plugged-in folks I know in our industry.  He’s helped some great companies find talent, and some amazing talent find great companies which is, as we all know, one of the hardest things of all about web analytics.  Thanks to Corry and IQ Workforce for sponsorsing the job board and I hope all of you have either a safe and relaxing 4th of July or a nice respite from U.S.-based email, depending on where you live in the world!

Without further comment, Corry Prohens:

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This past spring I was growing concerned with the condition of the economy.  Skyrocketing oil and food prices, plummeting real estate values, an unprecedented credit crunch, investment banks folding and teetering…

The lead question for business publications and programs shifted from “Will there be a recession” to “How long and how awful will the recession be?”

In a previous life I lived through the dot com surge and bust as a technology recruiter.  I did NOT want to go there again. The last few years have been very kind to our community / career landscape and my paranoia was growing that the good times were going to end.

As a coping device and because I assumed that my colleagues shared my interest/concern, I decided to poll the community on the issue in our Summer 2008 industry survey.

It turns out that while most economists say that the United States is either experiencing or entering a recession, web analytics practitioners in the US are overwhelmingly optimistic about their career prospects in the short and intermediate-term future.

A sneak preview into the survey results shows that individuals and departments around the country are downright bullish:

• 74% of practitioners expect that spending on web analytics will increase at their company during the recession (40% said it would increase a bit / 34% said it would increase significantly)
• 60% of practitioners said that the recession would either increase the likelihood of hiring additional web analytics resources or have no impact
• 17% said that their company was either somewhat or very likely to reduce web analytics headcount during the recession
• 2% thought that the recession would have a major negative impact on their career

Thank goodness! And just to prove that these folks are answering with their heads and not their hearts, my team is literally busier right now than we have ever been.  Entering the short July 4th holiday week, we have been absolutely inundated with new requests from clients for permanent and contract web analytics resources.

As a longtime LinkedIn fan, I decided to throw the question up there last week to see what kind of response I would get.  Eight people – all web analytics practitioners – answered in a single voice:  “What recession?”

The only concrete difference / pattern that we have seen in our business over the past several months has been the exploding demand for web analytics contractors.  A year ago we were working on one contract position for every eight permanent positions.  Now contractor requests make up over a third of all new requests for resources.  I am not sure if I am ready to draw a direct correlation between the economy and the rising demand for contractors since there are several other viable explanations.

Here is the link to participate in the current survey (or to view results of previous surveys):

http://www.iqworkforce.com/survey.asp

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Thanks again to Corry for his support of Web Analytics Demystified!

Things are starting to heat up for the X Change conference in August (17, 18, 19 in San Francisco … more details here) with two announcements made this week and last.

First, we’ve announced the X Change Scholarship program which will allow us to encourage and promote the innovative use of web analytics for improving web site performance. Our goal with the scholarship is to help one deserving web analytics practitioner join us at the X Change free of charge; all we’re asking is for a well written essay describing a great use of web analytics. You can read the details here and I’m happy to answer questions directly as well if you’re interested in applying for the Scholarship funding.

Second, we’re starting to announce more about the content of the 2008 X Change beginning with the news that the conference keynote will be a “Town Hall” type event with three of the most respected industry analysts in the business today: Megan Burns from Forrester, Bill Gassman from Gartner, and John Lovett from JupiterResearch. Gary and I will be facilitating a discussion between X Change attendees and these three analytics insiders to help get to the bottom of the relationship between people, process, and technology.

As I’ve said before, X Change is like no web analytics conference you’ve ever attended (unless you went to X Change last year …) If you’re really interested in web analytics, I hope you’ll come to San Francisco and join us in August!

While clearly next week will be incredibly hectic with Emetrics, vendor announcements, and what is shaping up to be the largest Web Analytics Wednesday ever held, I wanted to quickly drop a note thanking Corry Prohens and the team at IQ Workforce for sponsoring the Web Analytics Demystified job board.

Corry is a great guy working in a pretty tough market and all indicators are that he really understands the needs of companies looking for web analytics talent. Corry is publishing industry survey data, featuring some of our real rock stars, and sharing the industry buzz. More importantly, Corry and his team are talking to some really talented people who are thinking about switching jobs.

The big advantage that Corry’s sponsorship brings to Web Analytics Demystified is a greater number of high-quality jobs being posted. We’ve been seeing this in our traffic volumes but having more good jobs brings in more great job seekers which is bringing in more great jobs!

Corry will be at Emetrics next week and is coming to the Web Analytics Wednesday event at Fluid Nightclub. If you run into him, take the time to chat him up and hear his perspective on what is indeed a topsy-turvy job market. Otherwise, pop over to the IQ Workforce web site and have a look at what Corry and his team have to offer.

Yep, it’s that time of the year again, time for my bi- (soon to be tri-) annual pilgrimage to Europe to meet with some of the best and the brightest overseas. I’m very excited about this trip for a handful of reasons:

1. The trip begins in London next Monday at what is likely to be the largest event in the history of Web Analytics Wednesday. Thanks to the fine folks from SCL Analytics and Unica and a little support from E-Consultancy there are currently 128 people registered to attend the event! London has always been a hotbed of WAW activity and this is my first time attending the event. I’ll be giving a short presentation on “The Future of Web Analytics” and taking questions from the audience.
2. On Tuesday I will be presenting at Nedstat’s “Streaming Media on the Move” event at London’s Soho Hotel and talking about the white paper I recently authored with Nedstat’s Chief of Innovation and how measurement is changing in a Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 world.
3. Wednesday and Thursday I will be in Amsterdam doing private presentations. Over the years I have grown to love the beauty, culture, and diversity Amsterdam has to offer (despite the presence of what Aurelie lovingly refers to as “the narcotourists!”)
4. Friday I will be in Brussels, Belgium with the fine folks at OX2 giving a private presentation and participating in another special Web Analytics Wednesday event (albeit a somewhat smaller affair)
5. The following Monday I will be in Helsinki, Finland working with my partner Trainer’s House/Satama and giving a presentation on Measuring Lead Generation site. The folks at Satama are great to work with and I’m very excited about getting to spend more than 18 hours in Helsinki this time …
6. Back to London on the 8th for some client work and home on the 9th. Phew!

If you’re in or near London or Brussels I’d love to meet you at one of the Web Analytics Wednesday events. I suspect I will also have a little free time in Amsterdam and Helsinki so if you’d like to meet in one of those cities, please feel free to drop me a line and we can try and meet!

Following up on my post from Monday of this week announcing that Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution will be joining “The Engagement Project” and bringing his mathematical expertise to the table, Mr. Carrabis has summarized what he’ll initially be doing for the chef in all of us.

According to Mr. Carrabis:

“Eric’s already posted that I’ll be working with him to make the formula more applicable to a wider variety of interfaces with greater general use features. I also know that I can always use help and have repeatedly and publicly stated that I don’t know web analytics.

So, first steps? A semantically exact statement of what we’re hoping to measure. I suggest this step because it’s much easier to know if your variables will result in the desired solution if you are exact in what the solution looks like and what you have to put into that solution.

Think of it this way; You want to make some chicken soup and you use your grandmother’s recipe. I want to make some chicken soup and I use my grandmother’s recipe. But your grandmother is Irish and mine is Italian. I’ll bet we’d use different spices, different vegetables, different noodles (if indeed we both did).

But I’d bet we both use chicken stock as a base. And is your chicken stock from the leftovers of a roast chicken? What spices did you use there? Or is your stock from bullion?

So the first step is to decide what we all mean by “chicken soup”. One of my mentors was a genius of an author who use to write “speculative fiction”. I would ask, “What is speculative fiction?” and he’d reply “It’s what I’m pointing at when I say it.” This is a great anecdote and an undefensible statement (except in cultural anthropology). If one person “owns” the definition of “speculative fiction”, “chicken soup” or “engagement” then that definition is only valid so long as there exists a market for that definition.

However, a definition that says something like “Basic Chicken Soup”, that is something I can start with to make “Italian Chicken Soup” and allows my Irish friend to extend it to “Irish Chicken Soup”? Now that’s a good definition.

I snuck the concept of “extendable” into the above. “Extendable” means the definition accommodates special cases (Italian, Irish, etc). Think of a recipe for Italian Chicken Soup that begins “Step 1: Make the Basic Chicken Soup. Step 2: Now add garlic, oregano, …” That “Step 2″ part means that the original definition isn’t limited, that it can be extended to incorporate specific features to make it unique to a given environment (Italian, Irish, …).

The concept of “extensible” has two parts; First, you can substitute one thing for another if they share some basic properties. For example, you can substitute a glass of wine for a glass of water in the recipe because they’re both liquids. You can’t substitute a lamb chop for a glass of water, though. Mathematically, this means that if we want to include “clickthroughs” we can use whatever product A calls clickthroughs, whatever product B calls clickthroughs, etc., so long as they all meet some definition of “clickthroughs” (I’ll let the WAA worry about things like that).

Second, “extensible” means new spices, new vegetables, new types of noodles, etc., can be used to make the chicken soup better. This means that you can add a new spice to your recipe in addition to the existing spices already in it. Extensible (in this sense) means you’re doing what you already do to make your style chicken soup and now you’ve discovered something more you can add to it to make even more “your style”. You’re not watering it down or adding more vegetables to make the soup go further. That’s scalability and the equation should be scalable without needing to define it as such.

The sum of these two concepts of “extensible” translates to “the equation is valid across all interfaces including those we haven’t thought of yet.” Mathematically extendability and extensibility form the axes of a very rich solution space.”

Joseph says “Basic Chicken Soup” and I say “a measure of the depth and degree of visitor engagement online” … clearly he and I both have our work cut out for us. If you’d like to join us in our quest for a better measure of visitor engagement online, please let me know.