With winter winding down and marketers coming out of hibernation, the fresh air means one very important thing: It must be conference season!

Along with South by Southwest and a variety of vendor conferences, you'll find me gearing up for Forrester's Customer Intelligence Forum, being held on April 18th and 19th in Los Angeles. The Forum theme is "From Cool To Critical: Creating Engagement In The Age Of The Customer," and we will explore the ways customer-obsessed marketers will win in the next digital decade. This will be an excellent opportunity for data-driven marketers to connect and learn about industry best practices and future trends.

One trend I find most fascinating (and this will be no surprise to regular readers) is the abundance of new data sources for customer intelligence. As a result of my interest — and of course, attendees' interest — this year, I'm leading a track about identifying customer insights from emerging data sources. With help from my awesome colleagues Tina Moffett and Roxie Strohmenger, we're going to host four interactive sessions around new data, how to evaluate the various channels, and how to harness data from these sources to uncover actionable insights.

So if you find all this geeky data talk as exciting as I do, then I hope you can join us at this year's Forum. Make sure to check out the rest of the event details as well — we have impressive speakers lined up for the keynotes and many other Forrester analysts attending. Also, if you sign up by March 9th, you'll save with the early-bird rate, so what are you waiting for?