The Lab. A media arts company.

In August, our interactive team here at thelab ventured out to San Francisco to take part in the SES Conference & Expo. The conference is the leading global event series that educates delegates in search and social marketing, putting a special focus on tactics and best practices. Each year thousands of marketers and agency professionals gather here to focus on issues and technologies in search marketing including SEO, PPC, social media, local advertising, mobile engagement, video, site optimization and usability. Now in its 13th year, SES is organized by its Advisory Board and online marketing publications ClickZ and Search Engine Watch.

Our statdash team was one of the 100+ companies to exhibit at the expo as part of Connected Marketing Week. statdash, launched as a joint venture between thelab and Promediacorp, is a customizable web metrics site, that allows users to easily track and gather metrics about their website or brand on the web.

On stadash’s website it humorously states that the site lets you build and customize your own analytical platform in “less time than it takes to cook a chicken”. So for the conference, statdash founders Avi Wilenski and Max Oshman, decided to take the chicken concept to another level, setting up camp in the Texpo Pavillion with a booth like no other - complete with a prize wheel and not just one, but TWO live baby chickens.

So how did they get these chickens? Well, the guys decided to post a task on Mechanical Turk to see if anyone can find them a chicken in the nearby area. It worked, and the chicks, as small as they were, brought a great amount of buzz and activity to the statdash booth. The team held a “name the chicken” contest on Twitter (the winning name was Inigo Montoya, inspired by the character from The Princess Bride) and statdash became the center of attention, not only for the chicks, but of the interesting and unique metrics site itself. As the conference went on, word got out about the statdash team and they were able to retain a number of new users and much more follow up interest than they could ever have hoped for.

Actually, the party got so big over at the statdash exhibit, that a concerned yet anonymous (and possibly jealous) neighbor decided to call animal control because of the chickens. Hey neighbor - and you know who you are - you think you can stop statdash with some Animal Control Cops? Pssssssssst. Puuuuhlease. These metrics don’t run. Fortunately there were no violations with the chicks, and in fact, a generous visitor and volunteer at St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, offered to take the chickens after the conference and we were able to donate them to the hospital’s children program, which is where they happily live to this day. 

All in all the conference was an overwhelming success for our team. Many thanks to the SES San Francisco organizers Johnathan Allen, Mike Grehan, Matt Mcgowan, and Joann Simonelli. Also a big thanks goes to the San Francisco animal control for checking in on our chicks and the St. Jude Hospital for so kindly adopting them!

Last week thelab hosted an event for the launch of statdash, a customizable web metrics site, that allows users to easily track and gather metrics about their website or brand on the web. Launched as a joint venture between thelab and Promediacorp, whose offices are housed within thelab space in Chelsea, the idea for statdash began when the Promedia team and thelab became frustrated while trying to manage stats and data for hundreds of client web properties.

Our solution was to build statdash, which tracks, trends and reports on key performance indicators that a brands and businesses generate on the web-all in one place. At the core of statdash is the widget gallery of widgets that span the social, search, video, local, and other online marketing channels.

The event at thelab took place in conjunction with our friends at SEOmoz, the largest provider of SEO software on the web. Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz, who guest spoke at the event had this to say on his Facebook about Statdash, “Anyone else think this looks awesome? Moz is actually working to build a few of these into our platform, but they have so many options! Simple, but pretty cool app, IMO.” Guests came from all over the world to attend the event marking the first time Statdash will be available for the pubic to test and share. And it’s all possible to build in the time it takes to cook a chicken. Seriously, try it. Sign up here.