This is one of the sessions I wanted and planned to cover:  What are we going to be measuring "Next".

4:15 pm – 5:00 pm: Workshop: How Does the Internet Change Media Metrics?
        Moderator: Ridgway Hall. Chief Strategy Officer, Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)
        Jonathan Carson, CEO, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
        Joe Davis, CEO, Coremetrics
        Paul Donato, SVP and Chief Research Officer, Nielsen Media Research
        Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner

Jonathan Carson, CEO, Nielsen BuzzMetrics - we're in the business of measuring consumer generated media - gather info from 40 million blogs / message boards and then using textual analysis software to understand that traffic.

Intuitively, marketers have always known about WOM but it was never treated as an internet channel and that becomes an important part of the overall media mix. 

One of the big things that will play out in the next few years is how the silos will brake down.

Advertisers are becoming more interested in measuring the online activity and buzz effect.

We're most interested, as a new metric, in citations - mostly blog citations and we spend a lot of time thinking about the structure of citations and linking - it also creates Google Juice.

Joe Davis, CEO, Coremetrics - Our business is mainly retail (60%) but we have we have broad representation and we need to measure everything.  The agency model (right brained) but what we're trying to measure is now more left brain.

We tend to go after depth in a site and time spent - and the basic assumption is that more time spent on site and the deeper they go (more pages viewed) the more they will buy.

Paul Donato, SVP and Chief Research Officer, Nielsen Media Research - a traditional media, TV, is reacting to the internet and we had services we had offered 3 years ago and could not sell that is now the hottest thing.

Everyone ultimately believes in Convergence.

The foundation will always be - did my ad get access to the target audience - but having said that - it's much more complicated than that. 

Engagement has been around for a while - picture yourself doing a campaign across multiple channels and so far, I haven't seen any good examples of cross channel marketing.  It's so different going forward than what we did before and it's probably the best time to be in media since 1985.

You need large sample sizes to analyze data for engagement.

Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner - As more people view content away from the original site it's up to the publishers to track it; the more things you try to measure the more questions you get (more like quantum physics).

Your hearing more and more the desire to measure "engagement" - and if you ask 5 people how to measure engagement you'll get 5 opinions.  You can get more answers but those answers will lead to more questions.

People are going to prefer to spend where there is measurable ROI but every answer you get generates more questions (IE: traffic from Digg - spends a couple seconds vs a referral - will advertisers begin to not want pay for traffic from Digg but will for a referral - that's the kind of issues we come up with in the new metrics measurements).