Saturday I was at Stanford all day for the CommunityNext conference, then Sunday I was part of the HousingNext conference as my husband and I agreed on a new place to live (we’re moving from a one bedroom, 700 square foot apartment to a four bedroom, 1900 square foot house.).
After getting back from my day job, I see a couple of dozen other people have written about the event, and given summaries of other blog posts. Noah has a link to all of the blog mentions on the front page, along with email signups for information about the next event. The Creative Extreme blog has seven detailed posts covering most of the sessions.
I found it interesting there was little mention of is search engine optimization and metrics. Hiten Shah of Crazy Egg was there on a panel, but I heard very little talk of the numbers side of the game — knowing where their visitors came from, if ads were effective, etc. I spoke with one of the people from a site with about a quarter million registered users, and he said he didn’t know which subscribe button (on which page and/or location on the page) got the most traffic. I mentioned he ought to look at the presentation Rob Snell did for PubCon on Ecommerce Site Optimization where he talked about making the “buy now” button bigger and bigger, and found there were more and more sales. When sales started to drop, he dropped the size of the button down slightly, and things were great. It made me wonder how that suggestion would work for this particular site.
A session for the next event might be getting some of the analytics people to speak on finding out where your visitors are located, how they found the site (referrals), how long they spend on a page, which referrals bring the most number of page views for a visit, and heat maps showing your clicks. Either have Hiten from Crazy Egg give a session, or have a panel of people involved with analytics speak about the different types of measurement and how you can use that information to help better serve your community and to increase revenue for your site. I think many of the speakers and participants at CommunityNext would benefit from Pubcon or SES attendance — and the regular Pubcon and SES attendees might do well to look at the social aspect of online communities through a different lens.
AOL ran a contest, asking people to define the difference between a nerd and a geek. My definition for this week is a nerd is one who cries when they find out their new (rental) house is 18,500 feet from the CO and they can’t get good DSL. A geek is said nerd’s brother, who gets ready to move by getting someone to come 250 miles and pick up the VAX 6000 from his garage and donate it to the Computer History museum. I love you Scott, but I’m glad I’m too far away to help you move the rest of your treasures.
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It was finally nice to put a face to an email address / name. Thank you for coming out and being such a huge supporter. I hope you got what you wanted out of the event. Keep in touch.
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