Early this week I read about Visible Measures Launches New Application For Online Video Performance which I finally got a chance to look at tonight – and it looked interesting though I’m not sure how 131 “Social Video Campaigns” are calculated.   My thoughts about it were

.. the hype lives up to the write up, this could be a very useful platform to have tracking of online videos. I have had campaigns I reported on where this tool would supply something different.

Actually, I was thinking how difficult it’s been to measure branded videos across all channels – the closest I got was the metrics YouTube provides, but that’s just YouTube, not the rest of the web.

Noticed a post by Andy Beal on Fortune 500 Spending $1.2 Billion on Paid Search, Because They Can’t Rank Naturally! and there’s nothing new about that as so many corporate sites suck (and often, the business reasons the site is meant to fulfill, and be measured by, aren’t clear).

According to a new study from Conductor, only 25% of the Fortune 500’s combined targeted paid keywords–97,555 keywords, totaling a daily spend of $3.4M–ranked in the top 50 natural search results …

But the study shows something else that wasn’t mentioned – companies are cannibalizing the natural placements they have (25%) and paying at least 25% too much on paid search.   I had worked on a project last year on balancing paid and organic traffic using Google Webmaster Tools reports, Agency Data on Clickstream (with spotlight tags), Ranking Reports and Site Analytics reporting and found that much of the traffic my employer was paying for, there was also an organic listing in the top 5 SERP results (Google).

That situation was another example of  wanting to use my full capabilities and being held back - by a dysfunctional environment I was trapped in – guess if businesses are mixed up, what can you expect from their websites AND … their paid search campaigns (that waste a lot of money).

But what really stopped me in my tracks last week was a post in Boing Boing on One inch equals $30,000 in online dating world

… the study showed a 5-foot-9-inch man needs to make $30,000 more than a 5-foot-10-inch one to be as successful in the dating pool.

So … the taller you are the less hard you have to “work at it”?

…. The study, still under peer review before publication, analyzed 22,000 online daters and found that women put a premium on income and height when deciding which men to contact, said Dan Ariely, a Duke behavioral economist who worked with University of Chicago researchers on the project.

Somehow, I thought Salesforce’s ServiceCloud was old news – but I hear “chatter” about Facebook and Twitter: SalesForce.com Offers Social, Real Time Enterprise Tools

Today, Saleforce takes the wraps off Chatter pilot program. After several months of testing with select customers, it is going into production for this group. We reviewed Chatter with SalesForce’s VP of Corporate Strategy, Bruce Francis and SVP Product Marketing, Kraig Swensrud to find out what all the excitement was about.

What’s interesting is that you can follow “documents” as if they were people – hmmm …..

…. In addition, a person can follow a document, or a record in a database. For example, a person may want to be apprised of all changes in a sales forecast document and have those changes piped to them in their feed. This feature follows the “like facebook” mantra that we’ve heard from the SalesForce product team, instead of the user going to the document, the updates are coming to them.

I find the idea of following the changes in a document (ie: via RSS) fascinating – there are all kinds of things that might be interesting to keep track that way.

Meanwhile – I just got access the other day to Scout Labs – as my readers know by now (if your reading my latest posts) but I didn’t actually know Scout Labs Rolled Out Powerful New Version Of Brand Tracker

… Scout Labs has added several new collaboration features such as new ticketing and assignments notifications. So a user could see an important Tweet and assign and send the mention to another employee for follow-up. The new version also integrates more data, including forums, discussion boards, news sources, Twitter, to be analyzed in realtime. The release also includes more powerful graphing capabilities to break out data.

In fact, I think I stumbled upon some of those new features in my post yesterday on First impressions of Scout Labs – a lot to like here – with Scout Labs roughly comparable with Radian6 in Workflow Management as you can assign a tweet or blog post to someone on the team to answer.

….The startup’s offering is also attractive because its pricing is basic. Companies pay a simple one-time fee to use the service, with an unlimited amount of users. The dashboard costs $199 per month for unlimited search results. Scout Labs doesn’t charge a fee per seat or per result. We initially reviewed Scout Labs’ product in 2007 and are big fans of tracking dashboard. But the real verdict lies in the eyes of the customer, and young startup has a number of big-name clients using its social media dashboard, including Coca-Cola, Netflix, McDonalds and Disney.

…. deep down, how different is web analytics as compared to other metrics analysis? Once you have the handful of principles, it really isn’t that hard. At least not in my opinion. Quite frankly, marketing students today are being trained in web analytics in many schools as we speak – and with their marketing backgrounds are in better positions to act as compared to today’s web analysts. Soon web analytics will just be part of being a business analyst – and web analytics professionals will now be competing with the likes of McKinsey and Bain.