OmnitureCare v2.0

On Decem­ber 18, 2008, a friend and man­ager in the Client­Care orga­ni­za­tion here at Omni­ture approached me about head­ing up a new approach to sup­port: social media. I was an avid Face­book user and blog­ger, but had never used Twit­ter. To call the next few weeks “trial by fire” would be to under­state the size of the fire­hose from which I drank. When the dust set­tled, we learned some­thing wonderful:

Tech­ni­cal sup­port in 140 char­ac­ters works. In fact, it works really well.

I have spent the bet­ter part of the past 18 months work­ing with Omni­ture users on Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, blogs, forums, and else­where, and a num­ber of great things have come out of it. First, you all get near-immediate answers to pesky ques­tions. Sec­ond, you get to meet and share knowl­edge with one another; I am con­vinced that our com­mu­nity of users will always under­stand how our tools are really used much bet­ter than I will, so you are fre­quently the best can­di­dates to answer another user’s ques­tion. Third, we get much closer inter­ac­tion with you, lead­ing to more direct prod­uct inno­va­tion and things like the Idea Exchange. I could go on, but you’re prob­a­bly already won­der­ing what my point is.

In response to the tremen­dous suc­cess of these pro­grams, we would like to make you aware of a few changes to the Omni­ture Client Ser­vices social media pro­gram. I’m call­ing it “Omni­ture­Care v2.0,” because that’s exactly what it is.

First, as some read­ers have already noticed, Jor­gen Sorensen has begun to field your ques­tions using the @OmnitureCare Twit­ter account. Many of you have worked with Jor­gen in your inter­ac­tions with Client­Care, and have let us know, in no uncer­tain terms, that he is extremely pas­sion­ate about your suc­cess in work­ing with Site­Cat­a­lyst and other Omni­ture tools. (Bonus: He speaks Japan­ese.) Jor­gen will also be mon­i­tor­ing var­i­ous forums for web ana­lyt­ics. We strongly believe that a sin­gle indi­vid­ual should rep­re­sent the @OmnitureCare account, and it should always be the per­son clos­est to the action. More than 2,000 of you have come to rely on the @OmnitureCare account for impor­tant updates and infor­ma­tion, and that won’t be chang­ing in the slightest.

Sec­ond, we are look­ing at addi­tional ways to broaden our impact in social media chan­nels. As an exam­ple, some of you may have noticed the addi­tion of Fran­cois Coque­mont (@OmnitureFC) to our Twit­ter team. We will con­tinue to refine and improve our approach to make sure that we are tak­ing care of you. The prin­ci­ples of test­ing, analy­sis, and opti­miza­tion all apply to our usage of social media.

Finally, in case you are won­der­ing about me, I will be stick­ing around as @benjamingaines, and will con­tinue to par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sion about our prod­ucts. How­ever, my role here will be chang­ing some­what; I will be join­ing the super­heroes on our Prod­uct Man­age­ment team and work­ing with Site­Cat­a­lyst, a prod­uct that I have used lit­er­ally every work­day (and many week­ends!) for more than four years, as well as our new Dig­i­tal Pulse tool and the Idea Exchange. I’m excited about this for a num­ber of rea­sons, not the least of which is that I will get to con­tinue work­ing closely with you, our user com­mu­nity, and doing my best to ensure your suc­cess going for­ward. Social media has become, and will con­tinue to be, an ideal way for our Prod­uct Man­agers to learn what you need from us and our prod­ucts, so I hope you will share your thoughts and par­tic­i­pate the dis­cus­sion. Also, I will con­tinue to pub­lish reg­u­larly on this blog, so don’t update your feed readers!

I am excited about these devel­op­ments, largely because they will enhance our abil­ity to inter­act with you and ensure that you get answers exactly when you need them. I hope you’ll join me in wel­com­ing Jor­gen (if you have not done so already) and oth­ers who will take part in our social media sup­port efforts in the future. We are thrilled to be a part of an orga­ni­za­tion that takes social media sup­port so seriously.

I’m used to clos­ing my blog posts by invit­ing you to con­tact me on Twit­ter. I’ll do the same this time; if you have any ques­tions about any of these changes, please feel free to con­tact me… at @benjamingaines.