Akin: LOL! Yes, our discipline is increasingly being morphed into a multichannel role, and each role demands specialization. I am still shocked to hear that people can’t measure RSS well. I mean Feedburner provides a nice set of free services for RSS and could be part of solution to the RSS measurement puzzle, and they have a REST API so if you really need to get data out, and say feed it to the data warehouse you can. Powerful tools, like the tool from your company, Unica (NetInsight), make it really easy to parse a parameter specific to RSS to see the onsite behavior after clickthrough (and segment it every which way you want). The bigger challenge I see is all this Web 2.0 stuff related to a brand that happens off the site… Hard to measure! As always, thanks for reading and commenting on my blog.

The call for specilization within online analytics is well taken. Seems that a mainstream web analyst is getting stretched thinner and thinner if asked to understand in detail what it takes to analyze site, RSS, blogs, RIA, social media, viral campaigns, email campaigns with matchback attribution, etc.

A recent article on the WAA board was pointing out that even RSS by itself stretches the limits of most web analysts’ know-how. So do we also need an RSSist on the team? Just kidding. That would be too narrow.

Great post!
Akin

Important post here. sure, the human resources dimension is important, but your article also underlines that beyond the functions, lies a new marketing model. I believe that web marketing in itself is coming to an end, or rather is posed to become marketing itself. In fact, it would be more correct to say that multichannel marketing, with a strong web bias, is the future.