Interview with Adam Greco re his new blog
Adam Greco is a Director within Omniture’s Consulting team and heads up the Financial Services consulting vertical. He is also a frequent speaker at Omniture Summit where he most recently presented on SiteCatalyst Power User Tips & Tricks which was the highest rated breakout session of the conference. Adam is launching a new blog so we thought we would catch-up with him and learn about it…
You have been with Omniture now for a few years – how has your work changed from the time you started to now?
I would say that in the last three years, the biggest change in my area (Consulting) has been the formalization of processes. A few years ago, each SiteCatalyst implementation could be significantly different, but now using our Omniture Fusion methodology, most implementations are consistent using proven techniques based upon industry best practices.
How did you get Omniture to let you have your own blog? They are usually very tight in terms of controlling the brand…
I think every company has to make a decision about how open they will be. Our CEO believes strongly in using social media tools to communicate with customers and potential customers. This year Omniture has been investing heavily in blogs and other social media tools and our official Omniture blog already has 10 bloggers. We hope to expand that to even more in the coming months. I’m glad to be able to offer my expertise here and be a part of the conversation that is happening online.
At the end of the day, in anything Omniture does, the priority is to listen to customers and provide what they want. In this case, the feedback we got from my SiteCatalyst power user session was that customers need more product education in venues that are conducive to their work style. Given that I am part of the consulting organization, working primarily on billable engagements, there is a limit to what I can “give away” for free, but I truly believe that there are many ways that I can help customers out there without negatively impacting our consulting business. In fact, my hope is that when customers see how easy it is for our consulting group to solve the challenges they have (but are not new to us), they might consider engaging us in a formal capacity.
I know that you work remotely from the Chicago-land area. These types of opportunities are increasingly common. How do you like working remotely? What do you see as the biggest pluses and minuses?
Omniture has been great about this set-up and I believe has been a very forward-thinking organization in this area. I think they recognized early on that, as wonderful of a place as Utah is, someone’s decision to not relocate their family there should not exclude them from consideration as an employee. Personally, I like working remotely, but I could see how it might drive some people crazy over time. For me, what I like about it is that I can really focus on my work in big spurts of time without the usual office distractions which allows me to get more work done than I have in any previous role. The obvious downside is that I often feel like a web analytic hermit. Luckily I get to visit clients, which gets me out of my house and helps keep me sane!
How has Omniture changed as a company since you have joined? Specifically I am curious about the culture (you are not a start up any more), the vision, messaging, prospects, etc.
As a remote employee, I am not as immersed in the culture as the folks in primary office, so I am probably not the best person to ask. I would say that the biggest changes I have noticed in the last few years are an increased focus on growth which has led to me not being able to know everyone at the company like I did in the old days. I think Omniture has emerged from the start-up phase to become much like other companies out there, but there is still a start-up feel that persists…I know there is a desire out there to paint Omniture as “the man” when it comes to web analytics vendors, but in my mind, I will always feel like I work for the web analytics small start-up trying to make a name for itself. We forget that we work in a niche industry and I am reminded of this when my friend ask me who I work for and only 2% have ever heard of Omniture…
So why (yet) another web analytics blog and who is the blog targeting?
The blog I am starting is called “Inside SiteCatalyst” and it targets current Omniture SiteCatalyst users. I am starting it for two reasons: 1) Based upon my experience as an Omniture customer and knowing how much there is to learn about SiteCatalyst and 2) Because of the tremendous outpouring of response I got from my Summit session. While Omniture provides great manuals, support and training courses, I think many people need someone who is not technical (like me), but has been using the product for years to provide a “cliff-notes” version of what they need to know to be successful with SiteCatalyst. Initially I will start with the basics, but quickly move to more advanced tips & tricks I have learned over the years… With Omniture now having thousands of customers, the blog format seemed to be the most logical way to share this type of information in an easy, digestible format.
How will this blog be different from other web analytics blogs?
The main difference is that my blog will be practical vs. conceptual. This is not to knock the blogs that are out there because they are great and I think our space is one of the leaders in thought leadership in the blogosphere! I am just casting a much smaller net in that I am focusing on current SiteCatalyst customers, primarily marketers not technical folks, who are using SiteCatalyst daily to do their jobs. While these folks definitely benefit from hearing the thoughts of industry luminaries, sometimes they just need someone to help them learn how to answer a specific business question they have using the web analytics tool their company owns. Due to people changing roles or organizations, many of these marketers haven’t been to SiteCatalyst training for years (if at all) and are only using a portion of what SiteCatalyst offers. I meet too many customers who think they can’t answer a particular question, only to find out that a five minute conversation with me shows them that they could have answered it if they knew the product like I did. Another way that I am hoping to differentiate my blog is that I am asking readers to send me the topics that they want me to cover, instead of the norm where the blogger always dictates the topic. While I have a list of the things I find that customers need some help with, there is nothing better than having blog readers tell me what they don’t understand and having me respond to everyone with the answers. I am also asking readers to e-mail me real-life business questions they can’t figure out how to answer and I will do my best to answer them so everyone can learn. I have setup an e-mail address (insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com) specifically for these topic suggestions and questions.
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Can you provide an example of these differences?
Sure. In my Omniture Summit Power User presentation, I asked the audience (who were self-described power users) to tell me how they would go about showing their boss which internal search terms site visitors were entering into the site search box, the order in which these terms were entered and which internal search term groupings led to the most success. No one volunteered a specific course of action they would take to tackle these scenarios. For me, it is obvious that you would pass internal search terms to an eVar and an sProp, enable pathing on the sProp, enable SAINT classifications on the eVar and use that classification report with your desired success events (huh??). Sure that doesn’t make a lot of sense to most people reading this interview, but if you are responsible for SiteCatalyst at your organization, you need to know how to apply the various tools SiteCatalyst provides to be successful. The analogy I like to use is chess.  There is a big difference in knowing what each chess piece does and being able to use the various chess pieces in combinations to be successful (learned the hard way by a man who can no longer beat his son at chess!). I hope that my blog posts will slowly give people the confidence to know which SiteCatalyst tools they can use to answer the hard business questions they get every day…
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Where can people find the blog and subscribe?
The blog will be part of Omniture’s growing list of blogs on Omniture’s website. Specifically, my blog can be accessed at this address (http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco) where users can subscribe to my feed via RSS. For those so inclined, I am also on Twitter and can be followed at: http://twitter.com/omni_man.
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