In a month I’ll be in London to speak at Monitoring Social Media 09 – I looked over the program again (anyone who wants to come to #MSM09 can get a 10% discount by using code MSM0910) and decided to put out some ideas beforehand.

BTW, I wrote a follow up post to this one that covers the remaining sessions on Monitoring Social Media 09 that I didn’t cover here – read it after you finish here for more insights – link is at the bottom of this post.

In the first panel the case for investing in Social Media Monitoring tools and methodologies is discussed.

The ROI of Social Media Monitoring
Panel discussion
Social media monitoring produces interesting facts and figures, but how does it impact on the bottom line? In this session we dicuss practical examples of how monitoring makes financial sense to large companies and examine whether this is the case even during an economic recession. We ask our panelists to justify the existence of social media monitoring in the world today.

I don’t think it’s too hard to make a case for monitoring Brands using Social Media, especially after some recent fiascoes like Motrin – Mommy Bloggers debacle a year ago and even a recent post in Social Media Today on Saving your reputation in 48 hours because you might not even have four hours.

The details are in the Financial Times - in short ..

You have 48 hours to save your reputation. People will come to your site when they hear about an issue, but only for a very short period. Peter Warne, Nestlé’s senior corporate internet manager, says: “We’ve tracked traffic to our site when negative stories about the industry have come out. There’s a very sharp peak which dies down in 48 hours.”

Given that, as imperfect as the monitoring tools for Social Media are, if your running a business of any size, you can not afford to ignore the viral spread of information.

In the second session on what’s wrong with Social Media Monitoring Platforms …

What’s Wrong with Social Media Monitoring Services?
Panel discussion
Following on from Asi Sharabi’s popular and highly critical blog post, we analyse the market for monitoring solutions and ask the panel some tough questions: How are these services differentiating themselves? Which are the best? Are the free tools as good as paid ones? In a highly competitive market, is there a temptation to oversell? Is the whole industry living in the shadow of Google?

I think Asi’s blog post (cited in the session notes) does sum up where we’re at today – and one of the reasons I asked to attend and speak at Monitoring Social Media – this conference is the first to openly address the reliability issues with all the platforms – and I look forward to what the panelists will say -though, I have my own ideas about what they should say.

The Third Session, Future of Social Media Monitoring, I’ll be on the panel (yea!) as I have a strong opinion about the Future of Monitoring:

Beyond Listening: The Future of Social Media Monitoring
Panel discussion
With leading brands now seeking to track online conversations and engage with customers in real-time, the future is never very far away. In this panel session we ask where social media monitoring will be two years from now. What are the growth areas? What new techniques are emerging?Will access to data become more open or closed? Howwill large corporates integrate listening into their processes? And, what will the wary consumer make of it?

I’m thinking about what I’ll say next month, now.  I think Crimson Hexagon’s approach to determining opinion is interesting technology, even though they haven’t carried it nearly as far as I’d like them to; I wrote a post last month on what  Crimson Hexagon ought to  evolve into.  I see matching up opinion and identity (esp with Twitter – where pulling a twitter handle is fairly easy and common, but hasn’t been done against opinions – this would give us real time online polling – even down the district level.

In my opinion, the growth areas are the integration with with Web Analytics, CRM and Search Marketing and I wrote about it in Entrepreneur.com earlier this year in an article titled Learn to Measure your Web Presence; since then, the Omniture – Comscore deal happened, Omniture was purchased by Adobe and Nielsen is doing a deal with Facebook to share marketing information.

I suspect the data will be more open, not closed, and I do think many more businesses and Brands will set up listening services and people to react  quickly … hopefully in less than 8 hours, but certainly, no less than 24 hours.

In the next session, Alan Moore, who I met this spring in NYC, will be speaking on who owns the data about us that’s on the Web:

Refined Social Data Changes Everything You Ever Thought About Marketing
Alan Moore, Author & Speaker
In the networked society we leave data trails; plumes of information – the personal exhaust from our digital interactions. These are the shadows and footprints of our daily lives. In the highly competitive world of marketing and commerce, this data is moving centre stage, with companies desperate to harvest, aggregate and refine it. Yet our destiny with data is complex.There are legitimate concerns about who actually owns this information and, when our identities can be pieced together via data flows, privacy becomes a key battleground. This requires companies to rethink how they create value. In the search economy, the old way of doing things just won’t do.

Over a year ago, I attended a PodCamp in Brooklyn PolyTech that had an interesting session on Identity Management – when I think about who owns the data – I think about who manages Identity Management on the Web?  As far as who owns the data, I think no one actually “owns data”, even when they think they do.  Let’s see what Alan Moore has to say about Identity Management.

The next session reminds me of Michael Cayley and his Social Capital Value Add. I met Michael Cayley last spring in Toronto

After Brand: Listening and Organisations
Antony Mayfield, VP, Head of Global Media, iCrossing
The social web is the edge of the massive, disruptive wave of innovation that is the Web. Brand is an excellent place for organisations to start from in surveying and understand the changing world they now live in, but there are significant challenges and opportunities for brands beyond marketing alone. This session will discuss how social media represents a strategic business challenge and how how active listening (measurement, monitoring and storytelling) by organisations will not only be the heart of communications but a key business process that touches finance, IT, customer service, product development and beyond.

I think the point, here, is Social Media is affecting the value of  corporations, positively or negatively.  Michael Cayley came up with a method to analyze the social media value in a corporation that led to changes in the company’s valuation on the Stock Market.

In the Business Case for Buzz, I’m looking forward to hearing what Ann is going to say about doing research using Social Monitoring tools to figure out what the strategy of a Brand’s messaging ought to be.

The Business Case for Buzz
Ann Longley, Strategy Director at Mediaedge: CIA
Social media is creating new challenges and opportunities for brands including a bewildering array of new touch points and potential approaches. How should brands approach this media landscape? This session, based on real case studies, builds the business case for using buzz research as the ideal starting point for social media engagement and integrated planning.

So who is actually an influential?   The following session attempts to find out:

Knowing Who Matters: Discovering and Analysing Influence
Marshall Manson, Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman EMEA
Marshall advises clients on digital strategy, online reputation management, crisis management, advocacy, engagement and viral marketing. A pioneer in the field of online strategy, communications and reputation managemen, his clients have included Shell, HP and English Heritage. He moved to the UK in 2008, having previously worked in Edelmans’ Washington DC office as Vice-President of Online Advocacy.

That’s only half the sessions and this is already a log blog post, so I’ll stop here.   If you want to know more about Monitoring Social Media 09 , check the site.

Also read the following post that covers the rest of the session at Monitoring Social Media 09 -Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – Part 2 – November 17th

My second post is even more filled with insights, than this one.

By the way, I’ll be in London between November 15th and November 22nd.