MVP- Nestor Portiollo from Microsoft found influentials using their program but caution that you can identify MVP’s but, depending on how your company is set up, might not be able to close the loop.

That’s my main takeaway from Nestor, you can engage all you want, but if you can’t deliver, you may need to focus on that, first.

Molly Schonthal from Nokia spoke next about building Social Capital, which takes time. Messaging influentials, it needs to be defined in an organization, wide adoption is best, cross functionally. BlogHub, VideoHub, Nokia Conversations Blog.

Nokia uses Social Media in real campaigns like SXSW, engaging with influencers, and reached a Twitter Audience estimated at 300K. Social Media require continuous improvement and community culture and knowledge sharing. Molly ended by saying that Listening is the hardest thing to constantly do.

Personally, I had a problem with the Nokia presentation because she would not share the platforms Nokia uses for collecting their social media data. It’s interesting to me how companies like Nokia talk transparancy, yet, they are not transparent.

Had taped a performance by Rhett & Link which will be up on YouTube and embedded here, shortly.

Ed Nicholson tom Tyson Foods spoke next, which I have to admit, didn’t find out much from. Ed, affectionately, say he doesn’t have money to spend but he does have chickens.

Finally, Adam Brown from Coca Cola shared ” what matters”.

Ok, two great pieces of news – first, Yahoo! Web Analytics 9.5 Launched – got the news directly from Dennis R. Mortensen who is a good friend, Entrepreneur and currently in charge of Yahoo! Analytics.  Dennis is also writing a book about Web Analytics that will be published later this year.

In case your wondering, Yahoo! Web Analytics used to be called IndexTools.

Of particular interest is Yahoo! Analytics new Demographics and Psychographics capabilities – these are totally absent in Google Analytics, it’s main competitor, today – and the data comes from Yahoo! and has a high degree of confidence:

Please note that the data in reports, based on these two new exciting dimensions, are based on Yahoo! Visitor Interest data and may not be available for all your website visitors. YWA generate the output based on a sample of your visitors with their behavioral data, and YWA will only display the numbers meeting a certain confidence level.

I have an account in Yahoo! Analytics but I need to really use it now – darn … so many reasons too – and honestly, Yahoo! Analytics is better than Google Analytics, just not as well known, yet.

The second piece of news, my article on  -

Learn to Measure Your Web Presence

was picked up by The Street, today.

I’m feeling like a Pig in Mud … smiling!

Friday night I was at Sarah Elizabeth Foster‘s concert in Astoria, Queens (see playlist on YouTube that I filmed, plus an interview at the end).

I was thinking about what kind of things a music Entrepreneur could do to promote their cause (music, following) and my mind started to race towards solving that problem using some of the tools I’ve been exposed to lately, such as Mailana.   We know that many people are now on Twitter, including many gatekeepers and musicians.

Thinking of Sarah Elizabeth Foster, what phrases would I start with – to search Mailana with?  Thinking of first getting bookings in NYC area, I did some research on her website and come up with “online music” ( see http://twitter.mailana.com/findneighbors.php?near=new+york+city&radius=25km&q=online+music&)

You could take any and all locations in the United States, or anywhere else, where you’d want to say, connect and perhaps book events, and see if this will yield any meaningful connections – then again, I don’t know it will – in this case only a few accounts discussed online music lately, and there wasn’t much interaction between them.

In the first case, I found an influential for Sarah to contact at the first bat – look at this site from plus Rob Nelson and Damian Basile.

But I wanted to go beyond this – what does Sarah Elizabeth Foster want?  I think, to have her and her band discovered and make a decent living off of it  – so what would be some of the phases for that (ie – “looking for new music artists” or even better, what Sarah describes in her interview with me, “Chamber Pop”) and came up with @brainpicker and @Picocool – an online  community based in San Francisco

What is PicoCool?

PicoCool is a global community dedicated to uncovering the cool, whether in art, design, environment, culture, architecture, fashion, travel or technology. Our community finds and shares tiny bytes and unique content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. We discover upcoming designs, cool products, micro-trends, subcultures, artists, human experiences, innovations, philosophies, technologies, and more.

Somewhere in the undiscovered and the mundane lives real brilliance. PicoCool is about uncovering these microscopic moments when things first begin. Cool content from real people! You can join us by simply requesting an invite.

“A precision dose of cool” was conceived by Gary Arthur Douglas (@garyd), one of our original members and supporters when PicoCool was just a little blog.

Ok, I’m going to take a jump, or leap and suppose that those who are going to visit Picocool.com will be the among the audience for Sarah Elizabeth Foster – because her music is described as “chamber pop” and influentials are … more Male than Female and 18-24 years of age (I don’t believe that, btw, just using AdLabs tools for a prediction of the potential audience).

Problem is – this information is too general and doesn’t tell me enough to figure out anything useful.

But it’s a start – and if anyone has something to add, let me know.