Now that I'm starting at Monster.com (as of Monday, Jan 7th) I'm more conscious of news about Monster and one thing that very interesting, especially for someone like me, who works in measuring Social Media (and heads a committee on Social Media at the WAA) is the news that Monster Renews Life, Acquires Affinity Labs in Adotas:

 "…

Monster Worldwide, an online job market has acquired Affinity Labs. The company was bought for $61 million in cash. Affinity Labs creates industry vertical career-oriented sites including “PoliceLink” and “TechCommunity.”  Monster Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi stated in The Dow Jones Newswire that “Affinity’s model complements the core Monster business and significantly enhances our presence in key verticals within the online vocational and networking market.”

I don't know yet, what projects I'll be working on at Monster.com in any detail, but certainly, this would be one project, from a metrics perspective, I'd love to work with.

For one thing, we're talking about Social Networks, vertical ones, but still … Social Networks and how to measure the success of that … and no one really knows how do that YET.  Membership up/down (yes, we can get those stats), Influential Members (Yes, we can get those stats do – easy or difficult depending on how easy it is to tie in proprietary data from Affinity into Web Analytics tools (or maybe, they're just overplayed somewhere else)).

Still, probably, within my Social Media Committee, within work I've done both with Second Life (IBM's Virtual Business Center) or the Social Network and Social Media Standards we're working on in my Committee at the WAA, I can draw up all of that, plus more powerful platforms like Visual Sciences – to define success.

Yes, it's going to be an interesting 2008!