This week I was at all three conferences here in New York; managed to capture some of each conference on my Flip video camera, including some thoughts while at the Social Ad Summit that I didn’t write about.

At the Social Ad Summit, metrics for Social Media needed to include measurement over a longer period of time – because the relationship that is being built via Social Media is more long term.   Some ideas of how to measure the value of a Social Media Contribution are swarling in my head now – but I haven’t tried to see if they work yet, but intend to, in the next few weeks.

Except for SpinScape, which was most exciting platform/product I saw this week, I didn’t see any platform product really stood out.  I expected to find a SpinScape over at Web 2.0 Expo, instead it was at OMMA Global.  Weird.

Went to the Eluma party Thursday night, thanks to Allan Stern from Centrenetworks.com, which was enjoyable – should have gotten there earlier and had dinner – there were prizes for Flip Mino’s – doesn’t appear I won one.

Leaving the Web 2.0 Expo, I thought about the few sessions I attended and realized that all the conferences I’ve been to lately are beginning to blur, at least, blur in my mind.

Perhaps the only conference that sticks out as being different is Semphonic XChange – and the reason for that is more that it was trying not to be a conference – the “Huddle” approach in a small setting with “thought leaders” works better, I feel, for a knowledge exchange, than large expo halls, though I admit that many conferences could not exist if they followed Semphonic’s example, and had small huddles.

On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of information that is essentially, the same, with little nuggets of gold, here and there.   For example, the Social Ad Summit was great, in that the conversation focused on how to monitize Social Media using advertising geared for Social Media, but having said that – nothing really new came out of it, it was more about what is going to happen by 2010 with Social Media that was the take away for me.

And even today, at OMMA Global, there was a session (OMMA day 2 – Marketer’s Dilemma: finding and managing digital resources) where it was admitted (and I didn’t write it down fully in the post, above) there is no place, today, for Social Media in your typical Madison Avenue Agency – and if you budget Social Media projects in “experiments”, that budget will be the first thing that’s cut when budgets are readjusted (which ususally happens).

Therefore, Social Media is in a “Catch-22″ phase – to get Social Media to be a sustainable part of any marketing spend, there has to be measurable ROI; there isn’t measurable ROI yet, for the most part, because no one has figured out how to measure Social Media in any kind of standardize way, where you know what the value of a campaign(s) were or are.  I forgot to mention that there was a lot of talk of “Branded” Applications at the Social Ad Summit – see What’s a Social App Developer to do? at Technosailor.

Until the dynamic is changed, it’s hard to see how Social Media will find it’s place in most organizations (Search Marketing and Web Analytics have found places in most medium to large companies, and even many SMB‘s).

And, while I wasn’t at Web 2.0 Expo of Friday, I heard about Tim O’Reilly’s presentation where he said Web 2.0 companies need to figure out how to make a profit (see  Wakie Wakie Web 2.0, Daddy Says It’s Time To Earn A Living).

Anyway, here’s the video I took this week at Social Ad Summit, OMMA Global and Web 2.0 Expo; at least, the parts of those conferences that I attended.