Been really busy writing my Social Media Analytics Book – the site for the book is live but still being worked on (hopefully it won’t be taken down much for additional work but that’s a possibility).  The trip to London and Oslo ended Sunday night with jet-lagged me on  a flight back to JFK.  I put my presentation at the CIPR below in case anyone wants to view it.  Also the first two parts of the talk that followed mine is here and here (still waiting to upload the third and last clip)

As far as the book site, I’m getting ready to share some teasers for the book and lay out a vision of what comes next in the monitoring field.

Meanwhile, on Saturday night I was in Brighton meeting with Giles Palmer, CEO and founder of BrandWatch and interviewing him for the book.  Giles gave me a lowdown of how data is collected for Social Monitoring platforms and I came away with a new appreciation with for platforms such as his that crawls data instead of buying most of it from data aggregation services like Moreover and BoardReader.  Here’s a video of the visit – let’s put it this way, I have 3 or 4 hours of solid information and I’m not even half way from processing it all.  Having said that, information Giles provided me will probably make most people hyper aware of the difficulties in collecting data and how much of it is questionable.

Before meeting Giles I filmed this clip just outside the Hotel Du Vin, where I stayed last Saturday night – every room of the hotel is named after a wine and Giles told me it’s the best hotel in Brighton, and it’s not hard to see why.

As far as the whole trip, I sensed many of the vendors I spoke with are waiting for the big shakedown in Social Media Monitoring to happen, not sure it’s going to be like that or not, but the market in Europe is much smaller and more segmented.   Having said that, many of the technological advances in the European systems are better than the one platforms that originated here in the US and I clearly saw that.

I’ll be back in the UK and Davos in mid to late February, after my book is submitted to McGraw Hill, and be able to access the situations more closely then.   Finally, there was a lot that I missed in the US while I was gone, including Thanksgiving and a nasty article about Google in the New York Times.  Try as I may, I can’t get the article to render for me.   Also, Google is buying Groupon, and some people think Groupon is evil, but some people say that about Google, too.

I’ll have more to say soon, but with the writing of my book, my time is cut down and it’s harder to post – then again, traveling to Europe last week didn’t help there – I stayed in 5 different hotels over 9 days I was in Europe, including one night in Oslo, Norway.

But it was the best trip to Europe I’ve taken yet!   And if I could tell my readers just how many weird, fated things seem to be happening to me, things that can’t be chance, the whole thing is almost surreal, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just me, doing the stuff I meant to do.