A short break from Analytics today to proudly crow about my colleague Terhi Mertanen (Mertanen means crab catcher in English by the way), who won an Olympic bronze for Finland yesterday by beating Sweden 3-2. We’re all of course delighted for her and the Finnish ladies team. Congratulations Terhi! Onnea!
Personally I find standing up in front of hundreds of people a nerve wracking experience every time I do speaking engagements so I can only imagine what it is like to put yourself in front of 19,000 people including the Finnish president Tarja Halonen. If she was nervous when she went out there it didn’t show as she got on with the job of battling and eventually defeating the Swedes.
I don’t know much about hockey truth be told but I do know about character, fight and spirit. Finns call it Sisu. Terhi and the Finnish team had plenty of that (as well as considerable skill) twice going ahead with superb conversions and twice being pegged back by a somewhat fortunate Sweden, at least that’s how I saw it.  When sudden death extra time ensued and the Finnish came out they looked hungrier, faster, fresher and far more dangerous than their Swedish counterparts. Suddenly it was all over. Victory was theirs and the celebrations began both on the ice and in the bars in Helsinki!
Salue! and enjoy the moment Terhi, they don’t come around too often and I know like anything else good in life it was hard earned and thoroughly deserved.
Steve is a well known analytics specialist, author and speaker. A pioneer since 2002, he established one of the first European web analytics consultancies (Aboavista), later acquired by Satama (now Trainers’ House) in 2006. In 2008 he wrote his first book Cult Of Analytics published on May 14th 2009. He currently serves as CEO at Quru and has presented and keynoted web analytics topics across Europe. These include The Internet Marketing Conference (Stockholm), The Search Engine strategies (Stockholm), IIH (Copenhagen), the IAB Finland (Helsinki), Media Plaza (Amsterdam), Design For Conversion (Amsterdam) The eMetrics Summit (London, Munich, Stockholm), Divia (Helsinki) in addition to sitting on dozens of panels.
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