I have to admit – using Twitter as a user generated movie review service is pretty interesting – even if it's also pretty straightforward.  

Take a look at FlixPulse.com – http://www.jazzychad.com/twitter/movies/

Wish I could stream video to QIK like Robert Scoble does in Twitter execs talk about scalability and troubles – but then, I don't have 20,000 Twitter Followers – and I guess this video explains what kinds of problems that may, from time to time, create for Twitter – I mean, Twitter staying up – as it's been going down a lot.

According to this video that Scoble made today, Twitter problems are going to persist for some time- and, perhaps, Twitter is a victim of it's own success – as more people have more followers – more messages are being replicated.

By the way, I'd addicted to Twitter.   Last night I was having dinner on W 21st Street in Manhattan and I twittered about it.  As it turns out, I was sketching from a table that was right outside the restaurant and in walks Frederic Guarino @fredericguarino .

Such a meeting could never have happened without Twitter, and it was totally unplanned. 

I put two good posts up on The Analytics Guru tonight – the first one, Too many friends? deals with the biological limits to the number of friends you can have and how Social Networks may have altered the limits and made them go much higher.

The second post, ComScore buys M:Metrics  is not really a surprise but it does bring up the question on how ComScore is going to add the M:Metrics data in to the rest of it's reports – and I have some ideas about it.

By the way, I'm going to be pretty busy the third week of August in the Bay Area with speaking engagements at two conferences that overlap somewhat:

1. I'll be attending August 17-19, 2008 – not sure if I'll be a huddle leader or facilitator yet – that's still being worked out.

2.  I've been invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies San Jose (August 18-21st) on two Social Media related sessions.

1. The first session is “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World. That one is a panel of analytics experts (Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, Matt Bailey and me) and it is scheduled for Tuesday, August 19^th, 11:00am – 12:15pm.
2. The second session was my idea entirely -  “Social Media Analysis and Tracking.”  I'll try to get a few sites I work with/for on board along with Todd Parsons from Buzzlogic, who has agreed to speak. It is scheduled for Wednesday, August 20^th, 2:45pm – 4:00pm.

What I've been thinking, having attended several Search Engine Strategies conferences (all in New York – I've never attended one in San Jose) is that I'd like to offer even more information that is really useful about Social Media Measaurement - stuff I've never heard any where before – I'd like to offer that to the audience in San Jose.  The Social Media tract at SES New York was really good – and I want to add more to it.

Of course, I'd like to see the GooglePlex too …. will ask Avinash Kaushik to take me over to his office there (I'm sure I'll do that) and go to the GooglePlex party – .. they always have a GooglePlex party at SES San Jose.

Here's something to nibble at – just an idea.  Does anyone really know how much Social Media traffic a site gets?   I wrote about it a while back in Webmetricsguru in Monitoring Social Media Traffic on a site but there's another way via ComScore:

1. Generate Source/Loss reports for a site property or properties you want to compare.  I recommend expanding the listing (see all the sites that make up a property).  I think collecting a few months of data is also a good idea (you can get the last 15 months of Source/Loss reports on any site that ComScore reports on).
2. Generate the latest Conversational Media Report from Top Measures in ComScore MyMetrix.
3. Using Vlookup in Excel, match up the Source traffic to the Conversational Media sites it came from (this includes a listing Blogs, Forums and Social Network sites that ComScore has associated with Conversational or Social Networking activity).
4. Add up the traffic in UV (000) and divide it by the total traffic, UV (000) the property received that month to get the % traffic from Social Media.

You can do this over time and using competitors – as I did – and find out some interesting things.

Overall, for the sites I looked at today, Social Media traffic was hovering between  3%-6% of total traffic but if you looked at certain sources of traffic like LinkedIn or MySpace*, you could see interesting patterns of where one competitor leveraged Social Media better than another.

Finally, I wanted to mention a point I brought up in an earlier post tonight on Techrigy SM2 Social Media Monitoring Platform  -  that Social Media activities and platforms need an "owner" in many corporations … and often … there's no clear owner or even someone that wants to own things like Social Media activities (say, a breakfast or similar face to face networking function) and more exotic things like membership in organizations such as the Blog Council.

What I'm saying is that we're in a curious state of affairs with Social Media – that's unlike Web Analytics or Search Marketing (the last two have been accepted at most organizations and have a place somewhere within that organization); the same can not be said for Social Media.

Perhaps the issue of no clear ROI from Social Media (I don't think that's true, by the way)- meaning, it's not clear to many companies how reliable or measurable Social Media really is ….. and therefore, organizations haven't yet invested enough in it because they would rather spend money where they know it'll work and get the most demonstratable value.

The other point is  – even when organizations accept Social Media – they might not know where it belongs (who is the owner of it – who has the budget for it?)  Does it lie in Marketing, or is it somewhere else? Who do you ask?   The answer is, often, unclear. 

At least, that's what I've experienced.

How does that tie into Search Engine Strategies and XChange conferences later this summer?  

Well … attend, one or both conferences, make sure to attend my sessions and you'll find out.