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. 

Judah Phillips mentioned to me a post on SeoMoz about Bad Bots Confound Web Analytics By Executing Javascript Tags and I wondered just how far one could take this "bad bot" from hell thing?

Well, how about creating bots that inflate traffic for sites deliberately?  How far fetched is that in light of this post that Judah Phillips and the post he wrote last July.

Might we see pages that have stats like this one if we started to look for them more often?

The bots that can execute Javascript are not only becoming more numerous, but more sophisticated as well, mimicking human behavior in ways that make it harder to filter them out:

…we're seeing is some bots that are completely obvious (like the one that hits the same page over 1,000 times in rapid succession), and other cases that may well be bots, but it's hard to say. One can assume there is also more discrete bot activity mixed in there that isn't easily identifiable…

The motivations for creating bots that mimic human behavior and read Javascript tags are many:

….What if competitors and other unfriendlies decided to manipulate the system for their advantage? Or what if bored computer science students decided to mess with your web analytics rather than hack your root password? What if it became common for botnets to roam the Internet and toy with the analytics of random sites? And what if they were good at doing it - mimicking human behavior in relation to geolocation, browser type, time on site, pages crawled, etc?

In light of this post, one of the things I'd suggest doing .. become more conscious of strange patterns when they appear.

When you see behavior from "bad bots" on your sites, try to trace it back from where it came and figure out what the intent of the creator of the bot(s) is.

I don't know what else to say besides that about this behavior except that it's opened up my eyes to other possibilities of what makes up the traffic I may be looking at, in some case, in analytics packages. 

Recently, I got access to Techrigy's SM2 platform with the capacity to run anything I wanted on it - it came about as a result of attending the Social Media Roundtable in Toronto last week. 

I was live tweeting at the Roundtable (Social Media RoundTable Summary and WhitePaper ahead ) and when I mentioned that everyone seemed to want a Social Media Dashboard, I was contacted by Martin Edic of Techrigy about Techrigy's SM2, which is has a "Freemimum" account (anyone can try the product, the limit is how many terms you can monitor).

Above: Monitoring "Web Analyst"

You can look at the results against a term, similar to what you can do today in BlogPulse and IceRocket, etc - but you can do a lot more here - like put terms into "folders", generate a list of keywords against a folder (based on user generated tagging), categorize based on Sentiment, tag content manually based on Sentiment and Positive/Negative, and view a histogram of sorts on how topics interact with each other.

In terms of the "Web Analyst" term, the peak in the second week of May probably relates to many of us attending Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco.  But what's also nice is being able to search blog citations on a physical map (see below):

To test my theory about the geography of blog posts, I refined my report to May 4th - 9th (when the Emetrics Conference was taking place in San Francisco) and was able to see the posts that were tied to the term "Web Analyst" based on location of the blogger. 

The Results below confirmed that I had been right in my hutches about Emetrics connecting with Web Analyst that week:

	Search results
on 603894	Published date: 5/9/2008 web analyst (ID 603894)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati AutTechnorati http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/05/web-analyst-interview-jacques-warren.html Web Analyst Interview: Jacques Warren Continuing my series of interviews with Web Analysts, here is an interview with Jacques Warren.What isWarren.Whatnt position and the name of the company you work for.I am an infor.Ident consultant in Web Analyti…   SAnalytie… SM2 Authority (4 of 10):
on 736231	Pub lished date: 5/9/2008 web analyst (ID 736231)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://www.maianalytics.com/e-metrics/e-metrics-at-san-francisco/ E-metrics at San Francisco …g, much like Web 2.0, there is Web Analytics 2.0. The industry is adapting and changing rapidly. As web analysts, it is up to us to make our mark. The web analyst plays a very vital role to the growth of your bu…   Show More… SM2 Authority (0 of 10):
on 603915	Published date: 5/7/2008 web analyst (ID 603915)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080507-192020 A Seat at the Table for Web Analytics … conversation I had with Marshall Sponder triggered this post. Marshall was bemoaning the fact that web analysts can't even get "a seat at the table" (i.e. serious consideration) within many companies….   Show More… SM2 Authority (10 of 10):
on 604090	Published date: 5/7/2008 web analyst (ID 604090)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sewblog/~3/285716087/080507-192020 A Seat at the Table for Web Analytics … conversation I had with Marshall Sponder triggered this post. Marshall was bemoaning the fact that web analysts can't even get "a seat at the table" (i.e. serious consideration) within many companies.   Show More… SM2 Authority (0 of 10):
on 736246	Published date: 5/5/2008 web analyst (ID 736246)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://hurolinan.com/index.php/2008/05/06/advanced-web-metrics-with-google-analytics-by-brian-clifto… Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics is a ‘must-read’ for all web analyst regardless of the platform they work with. It lays out possibilities in data capture, reporting and integration whi…   whi Show M

The results are good, and maybe one improvement I'd suggest - would be nicer if clicking on a map point brings up the blog posts associated with that location (or vice versa, looking at results).  

On the other hand, Techrigy SM2 is a pretty new platform and they are trying something different than everyone else - the "free" approach they are taking and "community building" of category definitions, sorta a "crowdsourcing" approach - which should come into play more as the platform matures and more people use SM2.  

The fact you can sign up and start using it for free - and have almost the full power of the platform (but only 10 terms you can track) is very generous offer by them.

The community defination building idea is appealing, if it actually takes off, because it's tedious to go and create definitions for everything you want to track  and building on the work of the community by  quickly throwing together Social Media Monitoring (sort of the way Linux is built, opensourced - which many people writing the software - and now Linux is pretty much .. Unix, whereas the prioportry versions of Unix have all but dissipeared - I know, I used to make my living on HP-UX at one time).

For me, the most useful feature of Techrigy SM2, at this point, is the "Author Categories" - for example, in the "Web Analyst" folder I could build a "cloud" map and a list of the keywords in it hyperlinked to the blog posts or sites they referenced - this could be useful in coming up with a keyword list.  

I will point out one annoying feature was the same post referenced twice, once by it's feedburner url and then the actual blog post -feedburner, but Turhrigy will work the kinks out in time.

Summary - on the Pro side, Techrigy SM2 Social Media Monitoring Platform is free and offers more than you can get with Blogpulse, Talkdigger, and the rest.  You can also categorize terms by putting them into folders and this reminds me of Web Analytics - categorization is all important - and you can do it here as you can in most high end Analytics platforms.  

But, on the other hand, you can't do all the other things with the data here that you can do with Web Analytics platforms - you can't do pathing, you can't determine time spent, bounce rate, pathing etc - those things don't apply - yet one wishes for them, based on how the data is organized.  In other words, perhaps the structure and features of SM2 remind me of Web Analytics more than they should - as they suggest functionaity the package can't really deliver - but then, neither can any other social media monitoring package.

The other thing is not so much an issue for SM2, its a problem with Social Media - it's still too new - and packages like Techrigy SM2 have no clearly defined space in Corporations -  often there's no Stakeholders - there's no one to sell it to …. because it's hard to find "owners" in organizations who believe Social Media Monitoring is their job.  I know that is a fact.   While SEO and SEM are now part of many organizations, as their worth is clearly defined, as is their ROI, the same can not yet be said for Social Media - and we're probably 2 to 5 years away from that happening.

And, from what I saw in a call with Techrigy, SM2 needs a bit of time to really set up to it's full advantage - it's not something you want to do in your sleep and you get out of it what you put into it. In fact, itt might take hours a day
of someone's time to effectively use and monitor a site for Social Media using Technigy SM2 … and it's not yet clear most businesses are ready to assign those resources or that they even need to (I think they do, but it's only as Social Media matures will business adopt it as they have Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics).

So where Techrigy SM2 will end up, down the line, depends on how it's sold to the people who would potentially use it. 

You can purchase an Enterprise version - with unlimited amount of searches and terms - but most people won't need that much power - and can get by with the free version; and, often large corporations do need a full enterprise platform -  it's there for them, from Techrigy, at an attractive price.

So far, I liked the features of Techrigy SM2 that I've seen and I made suggestions on the new ones I'd like them to develop. 

On a closing note here, SM2 reminds me of Nielsen Buzzmetrics - in that you can define search terms, product terms, competitor names, in a very controlled manner - and that seems to suggest inexpensive Social Media platforms are becoming as powerful as their more expensive and upscale brothers;that doesn't spell a good future for Nielsen Buzzmetrics, by the future, but that's fine with me - not shedding any tears for Nielsen, the more power that's in the hands of content creators, the better.

I attended a Tweetup at 41 First Avenue, D.B.A. - for a few hours tonight and it was great!

Just wish they had some food there - ended up ordering Pizza - and I try to avoid eating Pizza but I could not resist.

Love New York - there is just so much, so much happening here - every day, every afternoon, every evening of the week - there is something …. something that, in this case, was very good attend.

Anyway, here's the YouTube Video I made which has a lot of good footage in it.   

I can really get into this thing of speaking at events (and I hope to do a lot more of that ongoing) - I just got word via Google Alerts that a podcast was made about Third Tuesday -my post about Third Tuesday in Toronto - what a long night! - I also made a YouTube video of parts of the event (mostly the dinner conversation before speaking).

This morning I found out there was a podcast made - unfortunately - it wasn't a podcast of the actual meeting but of the recounting of Third Tuesday, by Yaro Stark - who I wish had spoken to me - I've known of him for years but had no idea he was in the room - thinking he's in Australia.  But Yaro was visiting Toronto - is visiting Toronto - and happened to be in the room - here's his podcast  Podcast: How Companies Use Social Media And What It Means For Bloggers.

Also, K.D. Paine wrote a blog post (Social media measurement is the theme of the week) and linked to the idea I wrote about yesterday - because much of what came out of the RoundTable on Social Media is happening as a result of the meeting - it happening now - the ideas are coming to me as in ..  An Idea of how to measure Influence (online and offline).

And just in case you missed it - here's the YouTube video, again, that I made while in Toronto last week - it gives you a feeling of being there past my written posts and I like to mix in the thoughts and ideas I have, what others have said to me, what I draw about (in my black sketchbooks)….

….AND the videos of the people I spoke to. 

Granted, I did not film the RoundTable - that would have been difficult to do - i didn't feel that was something that needed to be filmed (there was audio transcript that will be used to create the Whitepaper)- though I did attempt to use Seesmic for my own responses, but since I didn't know for sure when I was going to speak, and what I was going to say - till that moment - I ended up not using Seesmic at all:

As a result of attending the Social Media RoundTable and Third Tuesday in Toronto earlier this week - it's as if many ideas that weren't actually said at the RoundTable are coming to me - almost as if the RoundTable was a catalyst to stimulate my thinking (Social Media RoundTable Summary and WhitePaper ahead) and it's outcome depends as much on what was said, on tape, at the RoundTable as what comes after - and how the Social Media Measurement paper that is published is edited and added to (we'll see it in a few months, so I was told).

(Above - a video I made while in Toronto this week for the Social Media RoundTable that I attended on behalf of the Web Analytics Association - Social Media Committee that I direct).

It occured to me later, and I didn't say it, that most influence (see below) is measured by online factors (as we proposed) while the real measures of influence is what we can do "offline" with people and institutions. 

We looked at all the things below, and I also wrote about the Flawed Edelman paper - that I think is next to worthless in measuring Social Media - Distributed Influence of Social Media - Edelman White Paper  - where Edelman clearly "overreached" for an answer they didn't have…(that's OK, no one yet has the answer) - but we're getting closer.

We didn't come up with that much new either …perhaps because we didn't include offline or a way to harvest that information.  Eli Singer did play off of my questions and propose "an amplification factor", that Social Media "amplifies" what other media and efforts your already running and we need to measure that "X" factor and that could then be called "influence".

What we considered, below, doesn't account for real influence measurement. 

Inbound Links, Technorati, Google PageRank, Use Google AdWords and monitor AdWords Impressions, Google Trends, Compete / Alexa, Xinureturns (interesting tool), Topic / Focus (volume of conversation) - conversation of comments that are relevant to your topic,# of specific Permalinks that occur around a blog post in the blogosphere, off line influence of a blog post.

Does everyone who talks about your brand an “influencer” or does it apply to specific individuals - but that’s a line that each company has to determine on their own.

 And here's the idea that I saw in my mind:

(Above: my sketch, yet incomplete, of an idea on how to measure influence).

I see "influence" as "topical" - (you can be influential across one or several topics, but it's difficult to envision influence without a topic - though I suppose a historical or well known political figure could be influential on any topic based on their position). 

I envisioned influence as a "vector" (which I actually didn't draw in my sketch) that can "spin" based on the accumulated relationships of online, offline, inherited relationships and what we do going forward (IE; buzz). 

To me real influence is "who I know and what favors I can ask of them" … it has almost nothing to do with digg, PageRank, inbound links, blog posts, comments, citations. 

Influence could be related to Brand Recall (IE: Avinash Kaushik is the most well known Web Analyst and speaker - his influence is clear, as is his brand recall, as is Jim Sterne and Eric T. Peterson) … but what about people who are not so well known? …(sorta like the power behind the throne ..thing) …could not people who are not as "popular" or top of mind, be as influential or even more influential?

I don't know the answer, but, i do know that if we don't include conferences, white papers, meetups, tweetups, people who know you …. who feel comfortable exchanging favors for - I doubt we'll come up with a satisfactory formula for Influencers by looking at online factors, along.

And to be totally honest, many "offline" events and meetings are recorded online (but they are rarely datamined, and could be, very effectively). 

For example, attendance at the last several Emetrics Summits in the US are recorded, as well as, for the most part, the sessions attended and in some cases,  the people spoken to…. who had dinner with who ….most of that information is actually online, in some form, but not as technorati links - and certainly isn't represented in the top 150 power blogs, or whatever ranking one wants to apply.

And yet, I would say "offline" factors, that I maintain, are part of the formula for influence, are actually much more important than the online factors (which can be "gamed" and often are).

Above: Edelman's measaures of Influence, most are online factors (except business cards) that can be gamed.

Besides, as I pointed out in my review of theDistributed Influence of Social Media - Edelman White Paper where all the "channels" of influence were weighted equally, even though many don't use social media the same way. (for example, I don't look at Digg much or at all …. for me that channel has next to no significance - or a negative significance ..) are represented in a table format - (I've done the same thing when I try to come up with a scorecard, but one needs to come up with weighting factors past what was proposed in the paper).

In fact, I doubt you can rank anything before you know the intended vs. actual audience.

And that's it for Sunday, Memorial Day weekend - my mind is tired with the thoughts of all of this,  yet stimulated, at the same time. 

So many conferences to go to - the one's that I attend (IE:Social Media RoundTable Summary and WhitePaper ahead  - wrote about it at my own personal Web Analytics - The Analytics Guru Blog Third Tuesday in Toronto - what a long night!) vs. the others that I could not attend or didn't know anything about, like the Executing Social Media L.A. Wrap Up that just happened - and the same time, more or less, that I was in Toronto.

I wrote down much of what heard and spoke to - at the Roundtable - on The Analytics Guru, the eventual place my readers will go, hopefully, should I ever stop writing to Webmetricsguru.com (BTW, I'm not planning to stop - just want readers to look for my writings at TheAnalyticsGuru.com as you'll always find me there).

Getting back to Social Media and where it's all going - think The Flip (according to Peter Shankman who spoke at Executing Social Media L.A. Wrap Up, which I didn't attend - but I've been using The Flip for over a year, and took it to me to France, twice, and more or less with me everywhere.  I've gone through two Flips and I'm on my third one right now (they don't survive a drop very well - one drop could bust it, but in practice, it might take two or three times of dropping it to take a Flip out).

According to Stephanie Weingart, who attend Executing Social Media:

"…One very important thing learned and reinforced by the pros is the necessary purchase of the Flip TV camera. First pointed out by Phil Gomes when he shared an interactive review of the ESM Live Will it Blend of a Rake. Showing how 3 minute videos are more powerful than commercial, more engaging, and can be put into interactive forums with communities like PR Open Mic."

Ok, so  here we go - Where is all of this going? The Future of Social Media? 

Well, for one thing, if it's on Mashable - it loads slowly!  (reminds me to talk to Pete Cashmore about helping them …. perhaps the platform they're using, it can't serve up their content fast enough…..would not mind looking at their analytics. 

OK, the future … it's one platform, which a lot of feeds and intelligent agents - there's too much data coming at us and we can't keep up - or maybe it's me ….. Psychological Disorders Affecting Bloggers & Social Media Addicts (ha, ha)! 

Anyway, in the true spirit of Social Media …. and having done The Flip for longer than anyone mentioned (my YouTube Channel is full of videos of France and everywhere I took with The Flip - along with all the Art Openings and meetups I've recorded) - here's my video of the Social Media RoundTable and related events that I took this week in Toronto. 

As a result of attending the Social Media RoundTable Summary and WhitePaper ahead  I got a copy of Distributed Influence: Qualifying the Impact of Social Media, and Edelman white paper by Johny Bentwood of Edelman.

I got to thinking about the paper and decided to review it - it's several months old, but I had a lot of thoughts stemming from the RoundTable and it all came in as an influx this morning while on my way to work.

I don't think the Distributed Influence paper is mature document - it's more of a groping attempt to define social media measurement that misses the mark and some very obvious things (sorta the "Pink Elephant" standing in the room which everyone seeks to ignore).

For one thing, on page 4 of the document PDF file, it's assumed people will

act the same across all the channels listed above; yet often, we as individuals, and parts of a group don't utilize channels in the same way, or in some cases, at all.  Therefore, weighting them in a uniform way misses the mark.   In fact, the channels above might be weighed differently based on each audience finds important - that's not taken into consideration at all.

But why don't we cut to the chase (page 5) and stop analyzing blogs as if they were magazines - instead of looking at blogs, look at the people who write them and their demonstrated audiences and following.

In fact, what would be more helpful is to have every topic in Wikipedia (pretty much every page) with the influentials (blogs and the human authors) identified - and while the tools exist to mine that data, it's never been organized so that we are able to view information this way - CNET tried to do this and failed (CNET: We Can't Find the Influentials Either) because CNET was unable to find a few individuals from which everything else flowed - they found many people moderately well connected, instead.

In fact, influential bloggers probably have influential posts - and the way to determine that is to look at the search ranking of those posts (more about that in another post).

But the real flaw of Distributed Influence: is the assumption that influence can be measured by online activity only, when it's actually best measured based on offline activity (page 6).  For all the blogging I do, it's the influencers I meet at conferences and meetups (face to face) where influence is built and solidified.

In other words, influence is really who I know and what I can ask of them.

Another problem with Distributed Influence: is the mistaken belief that people who control content dictate metrics - but I don't think that's true (page 10).  and on page 13, a formula to measure online influence is proposed:

But how is "quality of attention" measured? What about Quality of Audience?  Isn't this just another example of a pretty diagram that can't be finished, ever?

For a while I've said that social media metrics were going to be defined soon - if not by us, then by someone else - we need to be part of the conversation or be left out.

So, I see many problems with the Edelman paper, and I'm not the only one who had a problem with it.