Steve Rubel wrote a post about Trends That Will Help Define the Future of PR and Marketing that doesn’t say anything new - but defines ideas I’ve been thinking about lately - especially that Social Networks in the future will be like “Air“:  According to Rubel:

“… Social networking is here to stay - but it’s changing. As my fellow panelist Charlene Li says, it’s becoming “like air” on the Web. In essence, social networking is nothing new, really. It’s simply a digital, global and scalable manifestation of our desire to communicate with other humans. The technology makes it easy for like-minded individuals to connect and collaborate around the topics they care about. This can range from personal to professional interests. A lot of it revolves around social causes.

Today we have three big social network hubs - LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace (an Edelman client). In addition, we have an expanding constellation of smaller social networks such as Beebo, Twitter, YouTube and the hundreds of thousands of vertical communities that comprise Ning - a do-it-yourself platform. There will be room for all of them to thrive, but consumers soon won’t need to visit these destinations to connect with their network.

Social circles are becoming portable so they can follow the consumer to any site they want to visit. Facebook and Google, for example, each have competing technology platforms that Web site owners can integrate to allow consumers and their social circle to connect in new experiences without having to sign up for another network.

Brand marketers that may be tempted to build their own social networks need to consider that there may not be room in people’s lives for more than one or two. They will need to plug into the social “air” supply that the large networks are building across the Web so that consumers can stay connected to their existing networks.

I wrote about this trend of Social Networks turning into “Air” - but not in those words, last week in a post titled Thoughts about Social Networking - where it needs to go

“… For example, everytime I order something from Amazon, it should communicate with my Facebook or MySpace account - any time go to a site and fill out a form, and it has a social networking component to it - it should connect, via a module, to the Social Graph.

Not more Social Networks are needed, but less.

What’s needed, instead, is Social Networking as a Service that all sites plug into - that’s where we’re going - that’s the only future that makes any sense to me.”

The other ideas that Steve Rubel mentioned - Attention Crash and Google Reputation are already dealt with quite a lot both in my blog and other places, so I won’t really go into them much except for one point - Friendfeed and Facebook are morphing into each other - kinda - see Facebook Live Feed Kills Twitter & FriendFeed

In a post on the The “Status Update” Mania,

” ….. new features appeared in the new Facebook interface is the Live Feed. Through this functionality, you can get a realtime update of your friends’ activities, wathever they are doing within Facebook or in other services integrated with it (Twitter, Friendfeed, Applications etc.).

“….That being said, only time will tell, but it’s pretty clear that users start looking for a sort of “social networks consolidation” and for an efficient way to limit the enormous quantity of content they consume everyday. Me too… what about you?”

Since I have access to use it to figure out the influential voices online shaping the debate about John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as Republican VP Candidate last Friday  - here’s the list of “influentials” though you’ll need Radian6 to pull up the actual blog posts that are being listed) - the file is called sp-2.

And here’s what it looks like in Radian6

However Radian6 lacks something I think they need to add - as it becomes apperant when you try to drill down to find out sentiment for the Palin choice - for me there’s no easy way to create a set of comparision phases that accurately define the current opinions online - nor are Search Engines any help, since they just pick sort and rank phrases, not the sentiment around them.

Also, people often don’t say what they mean - when you’ve got millions of people repeating slang and common terms, it’s often difficult to settle on any set of terms that accurately defines opinion.

Another thing I wish Radian6 had, was a “nearness” or “close to” operator, similar to what Search Engines have had for a while, particularly Google - but most do have it - it looks for how close a word or phase is to another and makes a determination of relevence of the two phrases by their “proximity” to each other - there’s nothing in Radian6 today, that does that.  They should add it - but I imagine, it will add to processing time and make calculations of engagement and relevance more complicated.

Still, Radian6 and other tools like it need “Proximity” operations - saying “inexerienced” directly next to Sarah Palin’s name is different than saying “inexperienced” a few paragraphs away from her name.  In this way, Radian6 needs to incorporate some of Google’s intelligence - but that’s just my opinion - otherwise, it’s too much work to wade through every post to figure out what the sentiment and point of it is.

Another example - look at this - Scary - is Sarah Palin going to end up being US President? Somewhere else Hillary Is Smiling

But when you look at the actual posts in the “experience” category I created, you see its’ all over the spectrum - in other words, I could not get down to a filter that was sufficently precise to just those posts that expressed Sarah Palin had enough experience against those that said she didn’t have enough experience.

What would be great is if Radian6 did that for me.  Right …. Take those posts from Blogs, Mainstream Media and break them into phrase combinations - and then - offer to run those through a comparative topic monitor (shown above) for you - that way, at least some of the work of wading through conflicting opinions will be done for us.

And, another source of possible ideas for how to pick the phases you’d run into the comparative topic monitor (let alone Sentiment Analysis - which really isn’t done fully, or enough, today) is tapping into the BlogPulse Key Phrase Analysis for the day - here’s part of the analysis for August 30th, 2008 pertaining to the Sarah Palin VP Choice, the latest one at the time of me writing this post:

If we could get even to the level of content analysis of isolating phases like those above (”disaffected hillary clinton supporters” AND “sarah palin” with “good choice” or “bad choice” or something that works) we’d magnify what tools like Radian6, already very powerful, can do.

Right now, I could probably take those phrases and stick them into the Comparative Topic Monitor - no big deal - so I did that - at least for the top 6 phases - there were quite a few more but this is enough to prove a point.

Of the terms I picked “Palin pick” occured the most often in the last two days - and finally, I get to something I can use today -and can chart over time:

Look at this:

Now we have something - still very crude - but useful - perhaps, even a KPI metric we can monitor over time (were I in the political monitoring business - which I was some time - it feels like “horse racing” - sorta - handicapping the winners - too bad there’s no prize - like a million dollar ticket on a bet - oh well - just wishful thinking.

But here, at least, in the chart above, after a 4 or 5 hours of work - I managed to figure out some way to at least “filter” what Radian6 supplies, out of the box, into a “Yes” / “No” metric.

Of the content that had “Palin pick” in the last two days, about 1/3 also had the phase (experienced or inexperienced) - I filtered those out and today - it looks like twice as many voices (conversations) think Sarah Palin is too inexperienced to be Vice President than those who think she should - again, a  useful KPI (were I John McCain or Barack Obama, or running those campaigns).   If that number gets a lot smaller - if say 20% think Sarah Palin is not experienced enough in 2 months time, vs what it is today - I’d day, that’s very bad news for the Democrats.

But even here - if we ffurther refine this view of who thinks Sarah Palin is too inexperienced to be Vice President - to the top 10 influencers - also offered by Radian 6

.. there’s only one place where the debate is really being shaped, and that’s the Penny Arcade (ha!)

Whereas, for the view that Sarah Palin is experienced enough - we get three top sources where that debate is being shaped:

A lot of it (opinion shaping on weather Sarah Palin has the experience) is on the AOL Message Boards, Go My Town, and Campaign Diaries - I took an except from Campaign Diaries post, below

“…If my first post’s general sense was that McCain had made a strong move, this one is going in the opposite direction. My indecision isn’t surprising: This is a huge gamble and we will have to see how Palin performs in the months ahead, what coverage she receives and whether she can move the female vote before having a better idea of how her presence on the Republican ticket will play out.”

So the metrics, if one wants to pull out of this last statement - for how this all will play out - in some measure, might now be how well “Palin performs” and if the “female vote” of “dissaffected Hillary Supporters” actually moves over to Palin, or not - or how much it does move over to Palin.

This - the movement of the “dissaffected Hillary Supports” would be the main metric I’d suggest monitoring - via polling and Radian6 - provided you can get a decent filtering mechinism into Radian6 that pulls out the noise in the content being crawled - again, not an easy thing to do.

Right now - I’m not too happy with the map I’m seeing below - the electoral collage as it appears today - I think it’s way too close to call - and that scares me -

Let’s hope Barack Obama will use Hillary Clinton to highlight how different they both really are - it’s not just about woman in the White House - its what kind person is there - what their values are - let’s hope - because this map, is scary - I don’t care what anyone else is saying - thre’s not much Blue in the map - way too much Red.

Not good for Barack Obama - he needs to get a lot more Blue in that map -that’s my take on August 31st, 2008.

Boy, the world is a small place - I knew about TechCrunch and TechCrunch 50, along with Ashton Kutcher’s connection to TechCrunch 50 (about the only launch of a company at TC 50 that is public), but wonder if the news that released today that he was also connected to an unsolved murder of a former girlfriend impacts Ashton’s appearance at TechCrunch 50 and the launch of his new product, it at all.

Bad timing or good timing?  Hard to day. The Ashley Ellerin Photo link to Kutcher might overshadow, or perhaps, push to even more attention to what Ashton Kutcher is doing at TechCrunch 50 with his new Blah, Blah Girls (which doesn’t show anything right now, when you go to it).

To me, the story surrounding Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg’s Katalyst Media launching Blah Girls, issomewhat over the top ( judge for yourself):

Someone I know is going to be there (but I can’t say more).

I was thinking of writing this post about the 3G Iphone anyway, as I had discovered some things that are helping me have a better experience with it - and just as I was about to begin - Deep Jive Interests - when ahead and did his own critique of the 3G Iphone (though I missed meeting Tony Hung when I was Tornoto last May for the Social Media RoundTable and Third Tuesday - we did try to hook up).

Tony Hung’s post on Some (Late) Thoughts on the iPhone 3G: Its Good, Bad and sometimes Ugly was just published - and he noted the bad battery life - well ….. there’s actually a work around for that one as mentioned earlier this month in Gizmodo - Apple’s iPhone 3G Fix: Turn Airplane Mode On and Off - I’ve been doing that when I’m not home or somewhere that I know I can access the wireless network without a password (not that many places) and it’s doubled the battery life!

Of course, if I’m on the phone much - I’d say, more than an hour - that will eat away about half of the battery right there - but the ATT 3G Network works OK, most of the time, if you run into trouble, just Turn Airplance Mode On and Off - as mentioned in the Gizmodo article and that seems to trigger a reconnect to ATT which restores my connection, 9 out of 10 times.

The last firmware update helped as well (don’t keep track of the exact release number) and another coming in September will help even more, so I’m told.  And a post just published by Gizmodo on August 28th gives the reason why the latest firmware patch helped with the 3G Network - Power Consumption (but it had to be more than this, I feel) -The iPhone 3G’s Problem May Have Been Found and Fixed:

Essentially, the 2.0.2 updated the iPhone to ask for less power from AT&T’s towers for UMTS voice and data transmission.

Essentially, the 2.0.2 updated the iPhone to ask for less power from AT&T’s towers for UMTS voice and data transmission. Apparently iPhones were simply asking for too much power—more than the handsets actually required—and when many iPhone users were stacked on one base transceiver station tower, the tower simply ran out of power. No/low tower power equals dropped calls and poor 3G connections.

However, since it’s a power problem, most of the 3G Iphones need to get the update so that all benefit - as it’s also the cellular towers that are losing power (did I get that right?).

About the rest of what Tony has to say in his post on Some (Late) Thoughts on the iPhone 3G: Its Good, Bad and sometimes Ugly I agree with most of it - except that I was not even expecting to use the iPhone camera for much, to be honest with you - and have lately, in the WordPress Application - where I have been able to take a picture and post it along with my thoughts.

Darren Rowse wrote a post about blogging on the 3G Iphone - The iPhone 3G as a Blogging Tool - My Review

“…. as a blogging tool, the iPhone meets the expectations that I had when I bought it.

I didn’t expect it to be ever be a primary blogging device - and it isn’t - however it will be a very useful device to use as a secondary and supporting blogging device. It will save me time, allow me to be aware of important events that are relevant to my blogs and help me to connect better with readers and other bloggers.

I’m certain that other mobile devices can do similar things (in fact some like the Nokia 95 have a number of the things in my wishlist below) but for me, at least for the next little while, it’s the iPhone that I’ll be carrying in my pocket.”

My thoughts are that I’m happy to have a way to finally blog to my WordPress blogs, for a change, even if buggy, and even if I can’t spell check what I write very well - it’s much appreciated.

I’d say, in a year from now, with an external pluggable Keyboard and some more improvements in Battery Life, the 3G Iphone released then (next year) will become a viable laptop replacement.

And one more thing Tony, you say the battery life of a 3G Iphone is awful - and it is - but have you been carrying around the outlet plug so you can change it up from a normal power outlet?

I carry mine everywhere I go now.

This is pretty scary - and funny - at the same time, as covered by the New York Times in an article today titled Sarah Heath Palin, an Outsider Who Charms.

I suppose what’s really interesting here - Sarah Palin was choosen - to drive a wedge between Hillary Clinton supporters and Barack Obama’s campaign. Somewhere, Hillary must be Smiling, according to Monica Crowley, Ph.D

According to Crowley:

“… A few months ago, Obama put down people like her, saying they “cling to their guns and their religion.”

Something tells me Governor Palin is going to be a rock star in the states that really matter — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. They like their guns and religion, too.”

I really hope that’s not what happens; we’ll see.  I think people are smarter than just voting for Palin because she’s a woman - her values are directly opposite what Hillary Clinton’s views are.

According to the New York Times:

“…She wouldn’t have articulated one coherent policy and people would just be fawning all over her,” said Andrew Halcro, a Republican turned independent, who along with Tony Knowles, a Democrat, ran against Ms. Palin for governor in 2006. “Tony and I looked at each other and it was, like, this isn’t about policy or Alaska issues, this is about people’s most basic instincts: ‘I like you, and you make me feel good.’ ”

“You know,” said Mr. Halcro, invoking the Democratic presidential nominee, “that’s kind of like Obama.””

It’s not like Obama - except that McCain is fighting one type of persona with another and attempting to divert and confuse voters, hoping they’ll fall for it.

Clearly, John McCain is desperate - and willing to roll the dice  - he figures he has nothing much to lose, but we have alot to lose.

Radian6 - Top 10 Posts on Gov. Sarah Palin - 8/28/08

Whoopi Weighs in on Sarah Palin and Reader Comments on Her Obama Post!

Radian 6 targeted the Woopi Goldberg post as being the most important in the last 24 hours, for Sarah Palin profile I’ve set up.  Here’s the main part of what Woopi said - which Radian6 targeted on:

Well, as I’m watching television this morning, it appears that John McCain may pick Gov. Sarah Palin, of Alaska, to appease all of those angry women — the ones who were going to vote for Hillary and then threatened to vote for John McCain — by just picking a woman. It’s expedient, and should make everybody feel better. After all, what do women actually know? They’ll pick any female, as long it’s not a guy. That kind of thinking is so insulting I don’t know what to say.

I’m sure Sarah Palin (we’ll find out more information on her) is a wonderful woman, but if you’re a Democrat why would you go for a Republican female that you don’t know much about just because she’s female? Has John McCain missed the point? Or is that the point? That these angry women are angry because a woman was not picked … not Hillary Clinton … but a woman.

I looked at some of the comments to my Barack Obama post this morning and I thought they were fantastic. There was one lady who was irritated with me, I guess because I called Barack Obama an African American.

Governor Palin is attractive, I’ll give her that - but that’s not a qualifer to hold elected office.

I’ve been using Radian6 quite a lot thanks to meeting with Marcel LeBurn and working with the great people at Radian6 to funnel web analytics ideas of how to make it more of a tool that can be used for Data Analysis beyond what PR or Marketing departments might employ it for (ie: reputation monitoring is fine, but identifying influentials and then setting up the analytics to segment on that traffic can yield very deep insights - but no one thought of Radian6 as something to use that way - till I bought it up).

Another capability of Radian6, and packages like it, is to come up with keyword phrases that are connected to conversations around major topics - this is a capability totally absent from the current set of Keyword Research tools, that were never built for that purpose - never really built with Social Media in mind, and don’t have a concept of a “conversation” - while in Social Media, Conversations are the “brick and mortar” of communication - you can’t have Social Media without a Conversation - 2 way or peer to peer.

With that in mind, Radian6 is making improvements to their core product this weekend - here’s the notice that went out today to current users of Radian6:

Advanced Data Drill-Down Capabilities
Now from within your widgets when you want to drill-down into the data in addition to being able to open the data in a River of News widget, you can also launch it into a Times Series widget or a Topic Cloud widget.  For example, if you are clicking on a spike in activity in a Time Series graph, you now have the option of opening the content in a River of News widget or in a Topic Cloud widget so you can see the top words being mentioned during that spike.  To access this feature, when you click on a widget (i.e. A word in a topic cloud, a bar in a chart or a line on a time series graph) simply click and hold your left mouse button down and a new menu will open providing the advanced drill-down capabilities.

All of the widgets now have this capability and you can keep drilling down multiple times to get more and more specific in your research.  As an example, you could open a time series graph from a topic cloud, then drill into the time series graph and open another topic cloud then click on a word in that cloud and open the content in River of News.

New Social CIM (customer interaction management) Module
This optional add-on to the core R6 dashboard enables you to effectively management and track your team’s online engagement efforts.  Seamlessly integrated into your River of News widget and into your browser through an integrated toolbar, you can now easily assign/manage engagement tasks, categorize posts, set priorities on posts, track notes and your online responses, and run reports including detailed audit trails of your team’s engagement activities.

This new module also introduces the flexibility to have users accessing Radian6 directly through their browser, without needing to configure the entire dashboard.  The browser plug-in gives you quick and easy access to the information you need, with the Social CIM capabilities you need to get engaged in your brand’s conversation with a quick and easy workflow.

New Training Videos and New Feature Overview Videos
In the Help section of the dashboard you can now access training videos if you need a refresher on building Topic Profiles or configuring widgets.  You can now also access short demonstration videos of new features that have recently been added to the system.

Check out the video section to see quick demo’s of all of the new features in this release!

Enhanced Vote Count Dynamic – Digg.com support
In addition to tracking de.licio.us bookmarks, our Vote Count dynamics (listed in River of News widget and in Influencer model) now includes support for Digg.com.

Enhanced API Feed
The programmatic interface into the Radian6 content now include three new data elements for each post: language of post, country of post, and author of post.
In order to deploy these new changes, the Radian6 dashboard will be offline Friday August 29th from 9pm EDT to 10pm EDT.

Which reminds me - Radian6 will be attending BlogWorld.com and so will Buzzlogic.com - and that sorta suggests that BlogSpeedway.com, aka, me and Sebastian Wenzel, or just me, should attend as well.

I’m still making my mind up about this as if I do attend, it’ll be a last minute thing - but many of my friends will be there and we’re looking for a lot of new bloggers to join our Blog Network - BlogSpeedway.com

Read about Two more Measures of Twitter Influence from K.D. Paine’s blog tonight - I was able to see http://twitter.grader.com/ (Twitter Grader) from a company called grader.com that I’m somewhat familar with.

I’ve played with Website Grader before, a while back and wrote a post on it WebSite Grader - free Seo Tool.

I haven’t found the Twitter tools for competetive analysis particularly interesting or useful, but that’s just me.

Been so busy today I haven’t had much time to post - but the news broke today about Sarah Palin - didn’t take long -  Search Marketing & The US Presidental Race, Case Study: Sarah Palin.

Also, found a reference to me on Flickr from Andy Beal.

I wanted to write about this earlier but my thoughts on this subject were subtle and eluded me - I was distracted by a lot of other stuff going on today and didn’t find the time - till now - and then, I had a problem capturing the right phases, so I could bring the idea into my mind and examine it.

My point really is - we need a influx of money to  rebuild this country - but what could we now invest in since we can’t really do it with real estate anymore - where can we generate a lot more money coming into the United States?

Just a thought - and again, I haven’t expressed this very well - I just thought … hey, what if someone could take out an option on someone else’s future performance, it would be speculation - but not much different than the futures market now - just an investment in ourselves, intangible, in a way.

Anyone have a better way to express what I’m trying to say?  if we can bet on the future of the stock market, of any market, what about betting on the future of what someone else does?  (I can imagine the object of what is being bet on can’t about the details or it would alter the results - maybe that’s why it’s OK to do options trading on oil, and not on how someone will perform in the future).

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that such a bet was possible - that would be a way to generate the kind of money that used to be put into real estate before the bubble burst last year.

This is a hard idea for me to express - I’m not even sure I’m using the right termonology.

QuarkBase does look interesting, if for nothing else, it tries to create a mashup of a lot of different information that normally you don’t find in the same place - so maybe, it’s worth looking more deeply into it.

For example, look at the information you get out of QuarkBase for the popular European Social Network - Netlog.com

In Short	:	Netlog is a Belgian social networking website specifically targeted at the European youth.
Tags	:	social, netlog, community, socialnetworking, blog
Language	:	Dutch
Homepage	:	http://netlog.com
Blog	:	http://www.netlog.com/go/news
Slogan/Tagline	:	-

Unless I’m mistaken, the “In Short” description is no where to be found on the site - I believe, similar to what Quantcast does in describing sites - it may have been written partly via by programming  - but I’m not sure.

The Social Popularity is also pretty interesting - for those of us who track it -

Social Popularity

Popularity of netlog.com

popular_basic

	98 bookmarks at Delicious
	23 pages posted on Digg
	90 pages posted on Reddit
	1015 page references from Yahoo! Answers
	47159 blog reactions from Technorati

	12 inbound links from Wikipedia
	0 pages made to the first page of Digg
	0 comments on StumbleUpon
	7 inbound links from Google Groups

Along with the Alexa traffic graphs comes specific business information (who is the CEO, who is the founder) and RSS Feed information is present when that’s available.  Even Twitter and magazine stories are highlighted and reported.

It’s one more indication of how much information is being “mashed up” to create more, in sum, than the individual bits of information mean, by themselves.

Gosh, even Venture Capital and Funding information appears on the bottom of the page, when available.

Definately a tool to pay with - and while your at it, look at Netlog.com, itself, a very intersting new Social Network - something more in the Europe space than here in the US.

Maybe Sebastian Wenzel, my partner in Blogspeedway.com, who writes Webanalyticsbook.com, knows more abotu Netlog.com than I do - since he’s European and the target audience for Netlog.com.

I thought Tamar’s post at Techipedia on The Great Social Media Traffic Debate: Niche or General Networks? was pretty good and Tamar Weinberg, when I meet her here in NYC, always strikes me as pretty smart and connected woman - she’s aware of pretty much everything that’s happening in the Tech World, in Social Media and in the Search World.  I don’t think of her so much as an Analyst, yet her Traffic Debate piece was good reading - even if it confirms what we already know.

In fact, if you read her post and then download the Military/Buzzlogic presentation we presented last week (see Social Media Analysis Presentations from Search Engine Strategies San Jose) (see below) ….

sessanjose08_social-media-analysis_tparsons When I brought Military.com and Buzzlogic together I wasn’t really sure what the outcome would be - wisely, Breanna Wigle, living in the Bay Area, was able to meet directly with Buzzlogic, and to her credit, come up with a 5K insertion order to test the concept of Social Media here.  I feel we broke new ground - really new ground - and I give Breanna Wigle a lot of credit for being able to even get Military.com to take a chance.

… you’ll see that Social Media traffic is not only a superior way to get new visitors to a site - but … Social Media traffic, I found, acts in a more directed way than Search Traffic - (darn! I just uttered blasphemy in the Search World).

Yes, depending on the context - Social Media Traffic from Niche Social Networks - traffic from Social Media will typically be more directed and focused than Search Traffic, and paradoxically, often have a lower pages per visit and higher bounce rate while having a higher “engagement” level and more of a “trust” factor.

You may ask me how that can be?

Easy - you know those TinyURLs in a Twitter feed?  How about a Facebook link or a FriendFeed link?  How long do you think a visit to your site from one of those sources is going to last? Not long, because they are looking directly at the content they want - they don’t have to search for it - they found it!