Disclaimer: I’m one of the nominees for the WAA board of directors. Shouldn’t really matter, but consider yourself warned.
This year, 21 nominees are running as nominees for five board of director positions – 1 in Europe and 4 in North America.
I’m running for three major reasons:
- Social Media Measurement: Let’s make sense out of them. I co-wrote a book on the subject in 2009 with Alistair Croll. I’ve talked to hundreds (thousands?) of practitioners / enthusiasts about the subject. The WAA needs to pursue it’s standardization, advocacy and education in the field. Yep. I can help that.
- Lean Startup Analytics: It’s time we give more love to the massive startup ecosystem. Startups have completely different needs than companies in the enterprise space. By appealing to them, we can grow our membership base considerably and help educate those that will turn into the mammoth companies of tomorrow. Think of it as “educating our young”.
- Non-Profit Analytics: Much of the efforts put into strengthening the startup base can equally help non-profits. By passing along educational material targeted to non-profits, we can empowering them with stronger abilities to understand where their efforts are successful, and where they’re not.
During the day time, I, eat, poop and sleep data convergence. We need to be more inclusive of non-traditional streams of measurement. This will ultimately help us grow our member base, and make the organization more relevant in today’s “big data” environment. This is the central thesis in Complete Web Monitoring.
There are 12 people on the board of directors and the WAA has over 1500 members (updated number from 5000, thanks Eric Peterson). We have the resources, collective intelligence and drive to make strides in each of these areas. We simply need a bit of support, encouragement, and direction to make these a reality. Aaaaand, that’s why I came to the party :).
But frankly, as far as the vote is concerned, I’m confused. It isn’t how I imagined things being. I never imagined that there would be as many existing board members running as there are positions. The people I’m “running against” aren’t people I want to run against. I’m supposed to be running against Jim Sterne, the founder of the WAA?
A big part of me wants to give Alex, Dennis, Jim, June and Vicky a second BoD term. Jim puts it so eloquently:
“Aside from being a major cheerleader for the cause, I bring the organizational memory which will help the next Board and our new Executive Director understand why certain decisions were made in the past.”
Another part of me wants to encourage voters to pass the torch on to new candidates armed with fresh ideas and new perspectives.
- John Lovett, analyst extraordinaire, brings an understanding and tenure in the web analytics industry that few nominees can rival. I encourage the WAA to take the opportunity to work with him closely over the next two years.
- Brendan Hart brings executive metrics knowledge from National Geographic that can greatly benefit our organization from a practitioner point-of-view.
- Eric Feinberg never ceases to amaze me with his candor, knowledge and ability in the field. He is a great person to talk and work with and would be a big asset to the WAA.
- Steve Jackson, who wrote the book Cult of Analytics, and pushes hard for awareness of the WAA outside of North America.
- And . . . well . . . I’m running and all. :)
I’m not sure which way to go. No matter what, I feel like the Web Analytics Association will gain some great directors, and lose some great candidates.
I’ll probably end up voting for a mix of organizational memory and fresh meat. Either way, the decision will be very hard.
For all of you planning to vote (and even those that aren’t!), I’d love hear your thoughts – either here or on your own blog (if you blog about it, let me know – I’ll add all WAA related posts to the end of this one). By encouraging discussion, I hope that it will help us all come to a conclusion that’s best for the association.
See you on the ballot.
PS: You can see a nominees in action on Twitter by following the Twitter list or finding their individual accounts here.
Here’s a list of blog posts related to the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors vote:
Those of us who are building web apps and services inevitably ask ourselves “if I build in the cloud, which one performs the best?”. In this scenario, the word “best” is a misnomer – what we really mean is “what cloud can perform better given the particular needs of my app?”. Well, Alistair set out to find those answers.
Alex Bowyer (
