So I’ve taken a hiatus from the blog to focus on work at Cobalt (which is pretty kick-ass) and as anyone who writes a blog knows, it can be a pain to write regularly.  A ton of stuff has been going on since my last post and I will write about it all soon, but for now I need to do some site housekeeping and transfer everything over to Wordpress to make things easier.  I could pretend like I have time to do a redesign but I don’t.  Dreamweaver is not really working right now, so I may have to find someone to help me do this without getting the Wordpress blank screen of death.

Just know that I’m alive and well and I will start posting again if for no other reason than to keep people from teasing me about not updating the blog. Oh and here are some awesome upcoming events in the Seattle area:

• SAS Social Media Analytics reception! I’ve been helping SAS get this event set up and it should be a really interesting discussion on SAS’s new tool. @kdpaine and @minethatdata will be there, so if someone comes out of it with the secret to measuring social media ROI, let me know. RSVP here.
• Web Analytics Wednesday sponsored by Unica: free food, free drinks, good times as usual.  RSVP here.

I kind of knew this was happening a week ago, but I didn’t want to post about it until things were finalized. As of November 2nd I will no longer be working at ZAAZ and Microsoft, because I’m moving over to Cobalt to be a web and optimization analyst there.  Cobalt is a Seattle-based company that does digital marketing in most of the automotive space in the U.S.  One of my Microsoft bosses made fun of me for moving into that industry, but I see it as continuing to work on analytics, whatever the client.  And Cobalt just made the Deloitte Fast 500 for the 9th time, so they’re doing ok.

It is a really cool and exciting opportunity for me, and it should be an interesting challenge to deal with monetizing site activity and conversions for cars instead of software. I’m lucky to have the chance to work on both analytics and optimization (finally!), which means I should start brushing up on my statistics now.  If anyone knows of good stats resources/tutorials, let me know!

I’m sad to leave the people at ZAAZ and Microsoft, but I’m glad to have had the chance to work and learn at both places, and I even got to play on the ZAAZ soccer team. Hopefully this transition means my blog posts will include even more interesting and complicated problems from working in a new area.

Twitalyzer Top 100 Most Influential #Measure Tweeters

Twitalyzer rankings for #measure

In other news, Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer tool ranked the top 100 most influential people using the #measure hashtag on Twitter. And you’re probably thinking “Whatever that means”, which sounds about right. I’m currently #20 on the list, but it only shows people who have been “twitalyzed” in the last 14 days.  When I saw that in the fine print (I initially did not make the list), I ran the Twitalyzer tool on my account, and lo and behold I ranked at #19.

I’ve only sort of tried to understand the Twitalyzer metrics, but like most social media ranking/grading tools, I’m not sure what they define as success is always correct. It was useful for finding new people and for making me feel very important and influential until I dropped to #20 after 30 minutes.