For the second time, the Nashville Business Journal has run with my photo on the top of the front page, and this time they printed a full-page executive profile.

Kate’s executive profile in the Nashville Business Journal

Here’s the link to the digital edition. I won’t quote the whole thing here because that wouldn’t be, you know, fair or legal or whatever, but here are a few excerpts you might enjoy:

What single thing makes your organization stand out? We are committed to the ideas that a disciplined approach to measurable and meaningful marketing drives accountability, and that business data by-and-large represents the real interests and needs of people. The marriage of those concepts can lead to powerful opportunities to create outstanding customer experiences and return strong profit.

Organization or company other than your own that you most admire? Netflix. I appreciated when I worked there but have grown to appreciate even more how well-run that company was. We all knew a single metric we were focused on hitting, and every department had a metric that influenced the company-level one, and each individual had his or her own metric as well. It was a great example of using visibility and transparency to get everyone running in the same direction.

What do you do to relieve stress? I probably ought to say something dignified like “go for a hike in the woods,” but a more honest answer is: post non sequiturs about cats and beer on Twitter.

What does your organization have in the works for 2013? We’re focusing on developing content out of the work we’ve done over the past four years, and getting [it] in front of a broader audience.

By the way, one of the ways we’re doing that is by creating one of our most-requested programs: a series of educational seminars and workshops for people who want to get better at marketing. The first of those is coming up on Wednesday, June 19th and is, again by popular request, actually geared toward entrepreneurs, business owners, and other folks who aren’t marketers who find themselves doing marketing anyway: Smarter Marketing for Non-Marketers. There’s still some room; maybe we’ll see you there.

We’ve got a whole lot more in the works. We’d encourage you to subscribe to our mailing list (that’s a link to the full form, or you can just enter your email below) so you can find out about upcoming events. Don’t worry: we’re all about being respectful marketers, so we won’t overwhelm your inbox with junk you don’t care about. And we promise not to send too many non sequiturs about cats and beer. That’s what Twitter is for.

So it’s no wonder these conferences draw such a colorful crowd.

Pubcon has largely grown up around search marketers, served with a generous side of affiliate marketers. But more and more lately, analytics and marketing optimization content has been slated on the agenda coming from folks like myself, Tim Ash of SiteTuners and Conversion Conference, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim and Trackur, Adam Proehl of NordicClick Interactive, Brad Geddes of Certified Knowledge, and Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo, just to name a few.

I thoroughly enjoyed speaking on a Conversion and Landing Page Optimization panel with Brad Geddes and Tim Ash, who are truly some of the leading experts in these topics. Brad addressed improvements that could be made on even average websites and landing pages. He showed an example where merely highlighting a phone number in yellow increased conversion considerably. Tim talked about the irrational brain and how to use knowledge of it to improve your calls to action and overall design. I particularly enjoyed his “brain funnel” illustration spoofing the traditional metaphor of sales and marketing and pointing out that the real marketing process has to progress through the brain stem to the limbic system to the neo-cortex.

The focus of my talk was on how to think about marketing optimization in an incremental way so that it can scale with your organization. I used “cat wings” as an example of a product the market would have no prior knowledge of or existing demand for, so that you have to start from documenting your assumptions and hypotheses, and test those to understand what’s going to work. The slides from my presentation are below.

It’s exciting to see marketing analytics, marketing optimization, and marketing intelligence as a whole come along and develop acceptance in the Internet marketing community. I’ve been speaking about these topics for years, and the audience definitely seems to be getting savvier based on the questions they ask and the follow-up discussions we have.

Meanwhile, though, for marketers out there struggling with making marketing more effective, take heart: it’s not difficult to develop sophistication in marketing practices; it just takes awareness and intention to follow a process that will lead to insight, the discipline to repeat the steps and refine them, and then the good sense to use the insights you gain to improve your marketing overall.

panoramic shot by Matt Largen of the standing-room-only crowd at the Williamson County Chamber of Commerce event on 4/5/13 at E|SPACES Cool Springs

During the wrap up, Mark drew down a challenge to me and Keith to publish what we are reading, or what our current sources of learning are.

Since [meta]marketer is all about getting smarter, I am totally down with this challenge. As someone who regularly bites off more reading than I can chew, I’m a little nervous about revealing just how insane I am when it comes to the number of books I am ever “currently reading” at any one time.

It’s funny and: if you saw the foreboding stack of books on my bedside table, you would laugh. (In fact, here’s a fairly recent photo I posted to my Facebook profile of that stack. If you’re a book junkie like me, you will not be surprised to learn that it has only grown since then.)

And then there are all the e-books. Oh, I’m not kidding, it’s embarassing.

Anyway, here are a few of those:

• In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World
• The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity
• The Lean Entrepreneur: How to Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
• Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
• The Startup Playbook

So that’s enough confession about me and my craziness. What are YOU reading to make you think?

Fine. But let’s say you’re a VP of marketing at a B2B company based in the Chicago area. What do Nashville’s tech talent recruitment efforts have to do with you?

Plenty. Because the line between marketing and technology is increasingly blurry. In organizations all over the world, marketing groups are starting to use more and more technologies that require geeks (I use that term fondly; my own geek quotient is high) to understand and run them. The world [meta]marketer lives in – that of marketing intelligence and insights, powered by analytics and optimization – is a hybrid world. We rely on classic marketing skills, like good instincts about audience segmentation and relevant messaging, but even more on technological skills, like data analysis, A/B and multivariate testing, on-page factors for SEO, and so on.

These latter skills are not typically taught alongside the four P’s in marketing classes (although I’m game to discuss whether they ought to be). And if you’re a marketing leader, that should make you a little nervous.

Every business generates tremendous amounts of data in day-to-day transactions with customers. The table stakes for competing in this accelerating marketplace are the abilities to identify and enhance effective marketing efforts, phase out or adjust efforts that prove ineffective, and build up business intelligence and customer insights incrementally over time.

The skills it takes to do all of that are increasingly valuable and still rare. To remain competitive and relevant, marketing leaders need to embrace the growing role of technology in helping to build relevant and responsive relationships with customers. Initiatives like the Nashville Chamber program, as a high-profile acknowledgement that technology talent is increasingly powering the economy, should serve as a wake-up call to any marketing executive who isn’t yet up to speed with the growing importance of data and tech tools in marketing.

It’s a data-driven world. The savviest marketers are either recruiting geeks or becoming them. (Or hiring companies full of ‘em, like ours.) One way or the other, marketing and technology have got to be best friends, or the trends will slip away from you faster than you can tweet about your lunch.

Short version: meet the new marketing. It’s like the old marketing, except geekier.

The gist of what we had to say was that although human resources departments often seem to fear and loathe social media (and a poll of the room confirmed it!) because so much can go wrong there. But in a well-aligned organization, the message in social media can be a powerful recruitment and retention tool, on both the talent and the customer sides. That’s two dimensions by two dimensions for ROI recovery — four places where you can go digging for dollars back on your investment in getting the message right. That’s a lot of potential reward. We point out that in order to align, you need focus. But once you have that focus, and you create alignment, then the power of amplification is on your side, not against you.

Our slides are below, saved on Slideshare.net. You won’t get the full thrust of the narrative from just the slides, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts in the comments if you do flip through them. In what companies have you seen the most alignment?

If you use Chrome, you have the opportunity to set up Chrome Extensions, which are basically like visual bookmarklets: little snippets of Javascript that take what you’re looking at and transform it with contextual relevance for a particular purpose, like sharing to Twitter or posting to your blog. I use a lot of bookmarklets, but I limit the Chrome Extensions I have visible to those which help me get things done nearly every day, and those are the ones shown here:

These are:

Evernote

If you’re not already using Evernote, you’re either scrambling to keep up with odds and ends of information scattered everywhere, or you’re using another digital organizing system that may not be as good. What’s great about Evernote is how many ways there are to get tidbits into it, and how many ways you can get stuff you need back out. Besides the Clipper extension and the bookmarklet, they have mobile apps, the ability to send notes by email, integration with lots of other apps, and multi-format note capture (audio, photo, and/or text).

The Clipper Chrome extension enables you to enter some tags and comments and specify a notebook other than the default if you want to, but you can also just quickly save the note (as either the whole page, whatever you have selected, or just the URL) so you can get on with whatever you were really doing and deal with sorting it later. The best part is that notes are indexed and readable text in images is recognized, so even if you’re too busy to go back and sort your notes out, you should still be able to find what you need with a good search.

Clearly by Evernote

Clearly is also by Evernote, and it’s a great way to simplify the formatting of a page so you can reduce visual clutter — and lighten the page footprint so that it takes up less space if you want to save it into Evernote. I use it all the time. My notes in Evernote are so much more streamlined since I got into the habit of clicking this button first, then clicking the little Evernote elephant icon within the Clearly-reformatted page.

bit.ly

We have a custom short link domain: optmz.me (you know, like “optimize me”), and bit.ly allows us easy custom shortening of links for sharing and also provides a high-level but helpful snapshot of how those links are performing in the social channels where they’ve been shared.

HootSuite

If you manage multiple social profiles, it just doesn’t make sense not to have a tool that supports multiple profiles per channel and gives you great tools for listening, participating, and measuring the effectiveness of your presence. Our tool of choice is HootSuite, and this Hootlet extension works beautifully as a time-saver and facilitator of social sharing: click it, and it pops up a small window so you can share whatever you’re looking at to whatever social profile you choose, now or at a scheduled later time.

SEO for Chrome

The starting point on understanding SEO is always user experience: the site should have meaningful, relevant, well-architected content that addresses potential user needs. But to diagnose and understand technical considerations of how a page or site is ranking relative to others, it really helps to know some of the site’s quantifiable characteristics: how many pages are indexed, what’s the PageRank, how many backlinks does it have, both to the site overall and to whatever page you’re currently looking at. This extension is a very handy tool for a quick assessment of those numbers.

SEOmoz

If you want to look a little more closely at the SEO-relevant characteristics of a page or site, the SEOmoz extension digs a bit deeper and provides a look at metadata, configuration settings, and other attributes that can affect rankings.

BuiltWith

It happens surprisingly often that I sit in meetings with prospects and ask about what technologies their website is built with, and the answer is “I don’t know.” Fortunately, I can pull up the prospect’s website, click the “bw” button, and have a pretty darned good list of platforms and tools so that we can move into the next level of detail about what it might take to optimize their marketing performance. You gotta love anything that reduces the time from sales inquiry to getting the job going and showing the client their first results.

Yslow

It’s important that your pages load quickly, both from a user experience perspective and to ensure that your perceived quality by search engines isn’t adversely affected by a slow-loading script or badly-sized image. The Yslow extension, based on Yahoo!’s guidelines for site performance, gives you a fairly robust assessment in a few seconds about what factors may be affecting page load times, and grades each area so you know where your site performance sits relative to other websites.

GAdebug

If you work with Google Analytics in any sort of advanced way, you will periodically need to check how it’s configured for a certain page, what variables are being passed, and so on. Especially if you are in an agency or consultancy. This little extension comes in handy on sales calls, too, where I can quickly determine how savvy my prospect’s organization is when it comes to their web tracking.

Buffer

I’ve only recently started using Buffer and I’m still only on the free version, but it’s already been useful nearly every day and I will likely be upgrading to include all my social channels, and to get the ability to schedule updates. But even in the free version, Buffer encourages you to update  your social profiles with greater regularity, posting your queue of updates on a pre-determined schedule and even suggesting quotes and tidbits to share if you can’t think of anything. If you frequently struggle with remembering to update your accounts, this could be a big help for you.

So there you have them: the 10 Chrome Extensions that make me a more productive, connected, and informed digital marketer. What are the must-have browser extensions for you? Let us know in the comments.

If so, you might just be the smart marketer we’re looking for.

We’re [meta]marketer, a team of geeky (but sorta cool, we like to think) armchair digital sociologists and marketing data scientists who’ve figured out a way to turn our overly-analytical mindsets into an asset for our clients: by helping them mine their data to learn about their customers, and using those findings to improve their marketing from top to bottom. And bottom to top.

And we need a few more folks like us.

The people we’re looking for, first and foremost, are super-smart. They already have above-average comfort with the more advanced features of Google Analytics (and if they already know SiteCatalyst, that’s a big help, too). They regularly read digital marketing blogs, so they already know a lot about A/B and multi-variate testing, even if their exposure to testing has been minimal. They probably write blogs of their own – no doubt with cheeky opinions about digital stuff, like why QR codes suck, or how Google+ will become the new online infrastructure, or whatever. They probably register domain names for fun. With friends. At bars. And they definitely know what keywords drive traffic to their websites, and probably tweet about the funniest ones.

As far as specific skills or traits we’d love to see: analysis, analysis, analysis. A capacity for true high-level strategy, not just planning. Insatiable curiosity. Knowledge of SEO and what Google ranking factors are. Agility with AdWords and other PPC models. Understanding of landing page optimization.

Yeah, we know: it’s a lot to ask. But hey, like we said, these people are super-smart – they can do all of this before breakfast. (But not necessarily before coffee.)

And we’re hoping they live in Nashville. If not, we’re hoping they want to relocate here. And if not, we’re open to discussing remote work, but honestly, we think you’d have to be, well, not all that smart to not want to live in Nashville, so maybe they’re not the people we’re after anyway.

(By the way, we’re all about equal opportunities, but we reserve the right to discriminate against people with negative attitudes. That’s about all.)

What to do next: Email us at jobs@metamarketer.com with an explanation of why this sounds like it’s perfect for you, a link to your completed LinkedIn profile (or you can attach your resume, if you’re old school), and any other links you think we should see that help establish what you know about the Web: your Twitter, your blog, whatever.

We know being awesomer than most can be a lonely business. That’s why we’re set on assembling a growing group of awesome people so we can work together and keep each other company while we improve the way the business world does marketing.

If you’re the next member of our Team Awesome here at [meta]marketer HQ in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, you’re not just a project manager, you’re also a process optimizer. (Or as we like to say: “optimizizer.”) You help us track and manage our workload, coordinate with our team to plan work and with clients to track progress, and keep the CEO informed and at ease about everything so she can sleep at night. (It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try.) But the beauty of the role is this: whatever you see that needs improvement, you improve.

Of course we’ve already established that you’re not merely familiar with Gantt charts: you dream in them, complete with dependencies, critical paths, and pretty colors. We like that about you. Ideally you know and love OmniPlan, but if your preference is Microsoft Project or another tool, we can definitely make that work and we’ll listen to you rant about why it’s so much better than other tools and yet why it still sucks. You’re also more than passingly acquainted with resource management, capacity planning, forecasting, risk management, etc.

And what’s most amazing is, you already know how a consulting agency works and in your first few weeks of work, you’ll start noticing right away some ways we can improve how we handle client work, how we capture knowledge internally, how we assign and manage tasks and resources, and how we order lunch. (Hey, we’re open to input about anything.)

It goes without saying that you’re fun to be around, fearless about figuring things out on your own, and organized enough to do something about what you learn. We also admire that you take suggestions for improvement as well as you give them, that you smile often, and that you get our nerdy jokes that combine references to Star Wars, LOLcats, and Jason Fried.

OK, that last bit is admittedly a bit of a pipe dream, we know. But if the rest of this sounds like you, well, we can’t wait to meet you.

(By the way, we’re all about equal opportunities, but we reserve the right to discriminate against people with negative attitudes. That’s about all.)

What to do next: Email us at jobs@metamarketer.com with an explanation of why this sounds like it’s perfect for you, a link to your completed LinkedIn profile (or you can attach your resume, if you’re old school), and any other links you think we should see that help establish what you know about the Web: your Twitter, your blog, whatever.

Come prepared to show us your prettiest Gantt chart.

So here’s the part I most want to tell you. The unconference scene in Nashville — meaning both BarCamp Nashville, which takes place in the fall, and PodCamp Nashville, which is coming up this April 14th — have sort of been my secret superpower. I don’t think it’s in any way a stretch to say that my involvement in attending, organizing, shaping, sponsoring, and speaking at both BarCamp Nashville and PodCamp Nashville over the years has been instrumental in providing me with the network and the confidence to launch and grow [meta]marketer.

The unconference idea was interesting to me from the get-go: I attended and live-blogged the first BarCamp Nashville at Exit/In in August 2007, when it was sweltering and miserable outside, and perhaps even more so inside.

Here’s me live-blogging (which was how we all made short, snarky comments online before Twitter was popular) BarCamp Nashville 2007 for the now-defunct “Music City Bloggers” website, with my buddies Newcastle Brown Ale and Treo 680 on my right side and my other buddy Jim Reams on my left.

I remember feeling really strongly that day that this could be the start of a really important momentum in Nashville. (Of course I was also pretty hammered by 3 PM, so y’know, take that with a grain of salt.) And sure enough, some of the folks I met that day remain central to my network, and some of the people who continue to inspire me to get beyond talking about new things; to get off my ass and get stuff done.

So in March 2009 I got off my ass and launched [meta]marketer. And many of this company’s early associates, referrers, and clients were ‘Campers, both Bar and Pod.

The next tipping point occurred when, while I was serving as the marketing chair for BarCamp Nashville 2009, the crew agreed that the website needed some revamping. I ended up working closely with Josh Oakes and Brad Blackman on sketching out the user experience for the website. We spent considerable time and detail on diagramming how each area of the site should function:

and what we came up with is still the underlying design for the BarCamp Nashville and PodCamp Nashville websites today:

A few months later, I offered Josh a role with [meta]marketer, and he has since grown into our Director of Optimization. (We also continue to work with Brad on design projects as they arise, and refer work to him as often as we can.)

There’s really so much more to tell. But what I most want to convey is how integral a role the ‘Camps have played in stringing together this company’s history, and how possible it is that they’ll be a catalyst for you too. If you’ve been wanting to meet more people who are bright, forward thinkers, who aren’t constrained by traditional definitions of technology (after all, the term “geek” can apply to almost anyone in any field), and who may share your hope for a more connected future for Nashville, then, well, this is your place.

So be at Tequila Cowboy (formerly called Cadillac Ranch) on April 14, 2012, or you’ll miss out on one of the best secret superpowers around.

Before I dig in too far, there’s something you should know about me, I naturally lean more towards the creative side. Which means graphs look like pictures and a spreadsheet of numbers looks a lot like the code from the Matrix. I’m also a big picture and big idea guy, so the thought of addressing the tiniest of details is little intimidating for me. But I like the idea of stretching myself, and I felt like the best way to get more people to visit my Youtube page is to be able to understand what the metrics tell me.

So I ended up here.

I think that the reason analytics can be challenging for people like me is the illusion that numbers are nothing more than cold facts. This is not always true.

Back in the fall, the entire [meta]marketer staff (as well as a few other “outsiders”) gathered in the little conference room to brainstorm and further construct the vision of [meta]marketer. We talked for a couple hours and at the end the phrase that we all walked away with from that meeting is that “analytics are people”. As much as this seems like common sense, it really brought a new understanding to me of what working with metrics can be like.

The temptation with numbers-driven data is that it is very easy to boil everything down to formulas. Yet people aren’t formulaic. Yes, we repeat are patterns and are fairly predictable, but not formulaic. Motivations change and are different for every person. Thinking about the motivations behind the numbers is what I find fascinating.

When I was in high school I remember the most dreaded question that teachers always ask… “why?”. I hated that question mostly because I felt like I was being cheated out of my right answer. I thought my correct answer alone was enough. My high school economics teacher told me I was the most concise student he’d ever had because I just simply wrote the answer in as few words as possible (usually just 1). But embracing the why behind something opens up so many more possibilities.

Several times I’ve come in to the office when Josh is breaking down potential audiences for a client and I get to sit in and throw in my 2 cents. We brainstorm potential consumers for various products and services and attempt to describe how they might operate on a site. In order to do this, we really have to step into people’s shoes (which can be a bit of a challenge when you’re talking about a sports or cars or other things I know very little about). The degree to which we are able to imagine and understand those motivations we can better predict an outcome and can better meet their needs as consumers.

I’m probably not saying anything new, it’s really just what has helped all of this make sense. I’m still learning, and apparently I’m still concise (since I took a 2 hour conversation and boiled it down into 6 sentences). There are lots of things about metrics that I don’t get yet, but they bought an “intern desk” so I hopefully I’ll have a few more things figured out soon.