Yesterday (or today) I wrote about Spending time with Social Media on Thanksgiving – Does Social Media act as a “co-enzyme” or precursor to action? and I’ve been noticing that I really need to interact more with comments, feeds, etc -  and I did, especially yesterday and today.

But then I came across an excellent post by Kevin Hillstrom on his MindThatData blog titled Measuring Paid Search, E-Mail, And Social Media Influence Via Matchbacks Kevin makes an excellent and very true point that….

” ….we don’t attribute orders to the emerging channels — we simply don’t have business rules to do this, so we attribute orders to the most established channels. But if we focus on influenced sales, we notice that channels like e-mail and paid search and social media play a bigger role, helping cause an order to happen.”

Got it – that’s one of the problems we have to overcome – we simply don’t have the Business Rules set up for MatchBack Attribution where Online Activity, perhaps, precursors (or Co-Enzyme’s according to me) are given credit – because the Business Rules aren’t yet developed to measure those things and assign a value to it.

If you follow the examples in Kevin’s post – and use attribution that he applies in this example – what we get is this:

Each quarter, we produce a table that illustrates, for each channel, direct attributed sales, and influenced sales.

Influenced sales make a huge difference in viewing a “mutlichannel strategy”. In the illustration above, e-mail, paid search and social media are key influencers. They do not get direct ROI attribution, but are clearly used by the customer as part of the purchase process. From a strategic standpoint, these channels should receive strategic attention. Or maybe catalog marketing should not receive direct credit for all orders!

	Direct Sales	Influenced Sales	Index
Catalog Marketing	$10,000,000	$1,200,000	0.12
E-Mail Marketing	$1,000,000	$4,000,000	4.00
Paid Search	$2,000,000	$4,000,000	2.00
Other Online Marketing	$1,000,000	$1,000,000	1.00
Social Media	$100,000	$3,000,000	30.00
Mobile Marketing	$100,000	$1,000,000	10.00

Gee – TechCrunch had a post today on When Everyone Is A Blogger, Nothing You Say Is Off The Record.

In a way, isn’t that what we’re moving to?  With Google Search Wiki – I could pretty much comment on any url from any search result, and anyone else who wants to see my comments can.

Look, this story about a Belgian Diplomat and a New York Based blogger is pretty interesting in the level of “over reaction” that happened – here’s the story, according to TechCrunch:

Current Belgian Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem apparently stumbled into a Belgian bar in New York City on Monday evening with his entourage.

Ha, ha, guess he was drunk, or something … anyway – here’s the rest of it….

Following his visit, bartender Nathalie Lubbe Bakker blogged about their visit (in Dutch), talking about how disgusted she was of how drunk De Crem was and how embarrassed she was about his behavior. Worst part, she wrote, was the fact that one of the politician’s advisers admitted to her that the meetings they were there for on taxpayer’s money were in fact canceled because the UN was meeting in Geneva (which is about 330 miles from Brussels).

Clearly, one of the Diplomat’s advisers was out of line – and talked about a sensitive issue in a bar – which unfamiliar people.

He reportedly told her they had decided to come to NY anyway despite being aware of the cancellation because the policital situation here was ‘calm’ and that he’d ‘never visited the city anyway’.

A couple of days later, someone from De Crem’s office had a telephone call with Nathalie’s boss, after which she was promptly fired. This was initially denied by the politician, and it remains unclear if her termination was a direct result of the call or the blog post in question.

Somehow, the story was picked up and got a lot of attention from local bloggers and the mainstream media, which ultimately lead to the Minister having to defend himself about the NY trip in Parliament.

That’s how it is with Social Media happens – it’s the democratization of information – everyone can share – there is total transparency – and it can’t be controlled easily, if at all – but if people relax about it – it’s much easier to influence.

Yesterday, he made a statement to the Parliament admitting that a call was made but that there was never any insinuation about the girl getting fired from her job (which makes me wonder why the call was made at all then).

But then, the story unfolds some more and it ends us being blamed on the Blogger -according to what I just read in TechCrunch:

He also stated:

I want to take this opportunity and use this non-event to signal a dangerous phenomenon in our society. We live in a time where everybody is free to publish whatever he or she wants on blogs at will without taking any responsibility. This exceeds mud-slinging. Together with you, other Parliament members and the government I find that it’s nearly impossible to defend yourself against this. Everyone of you is a potential victim. I would like to ask you to take a moment and think about this.

De Crem added that he’s asked his legal counsel to see which measures could be taken to ‘defend his integrity’.

Needless to say, his statements indicating that ‘blogging is a dangerous phenomenon’ spurred a lot of angry (and funny) reactions in the local blogosphere, making the situation for him much worse than it already was (much like that German politician who blocked the local wikipedia.de website).

Let me just say this – is a blogger now sopposed to go out and get training on what he or she can or can’t say?

The TechCrunch Blogger Robin Wauters takes the point of view that it’s not Blogging that is a problem for the Belgian Diplomat, but that he comes from a culture and time that doesn’t know what to do with this kind of media – and treats it like a news story or news leak, when it’s sharing a personal experience in a blog.

People, and especially politicians representing them, need to wake up and smell the coffee. The world is changing, and blogging is now a big part of it, with all of its good sides as well as its bad ones. Live and learn. The sooner you get the hang of social media, the more you’ll see the opportunities in there rather than the threats.

To be totally honest, I would not be offended if there was some sort of Guidelines no so much what we can say, and what we can’t, but what information needs to be included.  For example, would it have helped if Nathalie Lubbe Bakker pulled at a Flip Digital Camera and filmed the statements?  Or would that be more damaging.

And if the Dimplomat’s party really felt pissed – maybe they should have been more open about it at home, instead of a Belgian bar in NYC – but that’s another story.

I’m just about to go to bed, but, after a long Thanksgiving day I wanted to get out a few thoughts today about something I noticed, and it may relate to Social Media, in a direct way.

Found it hard to post much to any of my blogs today, even thought I tried – my mind was “tired”, yet I did post - but mostly to Facebook.

What I found was that I had ideas that I shared with a friend or two, or responded to my Facebook News Feed, either to sign up for events I’ll go to next week or to comment back on posts to my wall, or as a comment to something I posted earlier.

And that got me thinking of what I was doing was giving back though interacting with my Social Media feeds as opposed to blogging, so to speak.

In fact, that’s one thing I notice about Robert Scoble, with all the posts he shares in Google Reader with me, sometimes, what he’s doing in that way, touches me a lot more than his actual blog posts – and his notes on the posts he is sharing is often more contextually relevant to me than his writings, which I tend not to read all that much.

In like manner, I found myself putting more energy into sharing stories in Google Reader and taking the time to post a note with the share (that gets picked up by Friendfeed and also goes into my Facebook Profile (feed)),  plus developing relationships with real and virtual friends that might not be immediately tangible yet, function as a precursor or co-enzyme, to action.

I could have as easily just written focused on posting to my blogs – but instead, I found my self interacting with my Facebook News feed - or emailing a friend, or perhaps I would twitter  something (I didn’t, today) – and much of that activity would appear to be invisible (even though it’s not) – maybe some of it shows up in my Friendfeed - but all the work I did – what I gave, is just as important as any blog post (what about an iPhone painting?) I might do.

Hey, I’m not looking for the wisdom of crowds…

So, I want to put forward two ways of looking at giving, along with if that co-relates to Engagement, or not.

Today, my “giving” or engagement with interacting with my Facebook News Feed, was externally driven -  today is Thanksgiving Holiday (or was the Thanksgiving Holiday – it’s actually early Friday morning as I write this), if I was at work, or if it was another day, maybe I’d not be interacting with my Social Media feeds as much; I don’t think the externally driven factor and be ignored – it has to be a factor.

The other thing I want to put forward is a way to evaluate involvement in Social Media – the simplest way, at this point, is to co-relate the following :

1. Time spent on Social Media Site (compared to all the time spent online) – note, that can be looked at individually (all the time I spent on Social Media vs. all the time I spent online, period) – or in mass, all the time the internet population spent on Social Media vs. what they spend on the rest of their online activities.

I’m even willing to forget the number of times Social Media sites are visited vs. all sites.  By the way, looks like MySpace is having a problem since February – people are spending substantially less time there.

2. The number conversations taking place (this could be measured by the instances of interacting with a feed, such as the Facebook News Feed, or Twitter (Feed) or Friendfeed.  You can probably add them all up – and compare them to the overall internet audience.

The problem is that most of the conversation activity won’t show up – it’s AJAX, every time I comment on my Facebook or Friendfeed – a new page is not generated – for now, I need a proxy for conversations and the best I can come up with is Page views per visit – but it’s a poor proxy – but better than none at all.

There is some interesting research on Facebook that says that some activities you do are more “engaging” by nature than others (see this video clip to get a sense of that)

Perhaps this can all be combined into one metric – but what this really gets back to is there are many activities that are precursors to Social Media, to Engagment, in fact, but that are not measured – you can say the act of “Engagement” makes the assumption what ever needed to preceed it, happened.

But I would think that you do need to measure what preceeds an event or action – hey, I can take an exam and ace it, but doesn’t it also count how much I studied for it?

Anyway, enough of this for tonight – I just wanted to close out today by giving Thanks to all my friends, to my family and give form to the idea that we need to look at the whole picture.