I’m still in London, wrapping up my European trip including Davos, London, Brighton and Norway; attending and spoke at #socialPR today in central London and back to New York Tuesday evening.

On this trip it’s been difficult to post to WebMetricsGuru much, but here’s a post I have meant to write for close to a week, and my travels have given me additional perspectives on Analytics Reporting.

For one thing, I’ve seen. the same type of unsatisfying Analytics reporting is being done, with the Analyst caught between a client unclear what they want and a PR/Marcom or Vendor who has time and Analytics constraints, and seems to often lack a deep contextual view within the reports.

On the other hand, I saw much better reports and decks, here, when analysts were given and scope to really drill down. It’s also true, an Analytics ask that is vague can affect the time it takes to deliver insights by a factor of 3. However an ultra specific ask can also increase reporting by almost the same amount.

Perhaps what we need is Analytics ask that are in “the Zone”, or are “just right” amount of information.

Decided to address a remedy to what appears to be a widespread, and possibly universal issue with unsatisfactory Social Media Analytics reporting.

First, SMM (Social Media Monitoring) is nor Market Research (yet) and can not provide, in most cases, the precision report required for a variety of reasons covered in my book, however I feel it is too often being sold as a proxy for market research.

The platform and workflow immaturity i have observed can be remedied through a 3 phrase deliverable including an initial readout and up to 2 additional refinements to a report, all billable with expanded time frames for execution and delivery for lockdown.

It appears to me there are nearly universal misrepresentations of workflow and timelines making this social media reporting unsatisfactory for all concerned.

It’s also true realistic timeframes and pricing, while making an Analysts life easier who works for a PR, Marketing or Services firm (for a change) would increase pricing of reporting beyond what most clients are willing to pay for this level of reporting at this point of time.

I think far more satisfying deliverables come from better leverage the advanced reporting capabilities of an SMM platform with the clarified ask.

And I really hope my book on Social Media Analytics sets the stage for a more realistic and improved reporting and insights. It may be that Analysts need to push back and ask the clients and agency what they really want to achieve with this report, or work according to Jane Wilson who leads the CIPR this year in the UK (I’m listening to Jane Wilson and Philip Sheldrake in front of me in London at #socialPR right now).

On another note when I was in Davos last week Brandtology was acquired by Media Monitors. Here’s the information my main contact at Brandtology, Jay Vasudevan, shared with me.

I would like to bring you the exclusive news that Media Monitors has acquired a majority stake in Brandtology. As a group, we now have over 1,000 employees in 17 countries serving 5,000 clients globally.

The combination of Media Monitors and Brandtology will provide our clients/partners an unprecedented, holistic and deep insight of mainstream and digital media.

This is the logical and exciting next step for Brandtology, allowing us to continue our rapid growth globally and to serve our clients better. We remain our strong commitment to R&D and high level of quality of services.

Attached please find the press release – there is a video link inside and hope you will enjoy it.
URL : http://bit.ly/brandtology

Been meaning to comment on an interesting thread about Klout, Trey Pennington and overall influence calculations that have been going on over the last 10 days.  Since I’m in London today, and still on my latest European trip, I haven’t been able to physically write as much as I’m accustomed to.  The Social Media Analytics book (which is in it’s final edit by McGraw Hill) also was an major contributor to why I’m posting less – but a curious thing is happening – my posts are often read more when I post less frequently.

There’s been a debate on weather one should post twice a day or twice a week – Chris Brogan posts twice a day – I often do too, and that’s fine if your goal is traffic acquisition – if Chris Brogan doesn’t have anything to say today, he’ll make up something so he’s gets his two posts a day in – rationalizing it by saying – there’s always something valuable to share with his readers.  On the other hand, coming up with two posts a day, it’s hard to imagine many of the posts are going to be that relevant and take them for granted – so in gaining one kind of traffic, he’s actually losing the value of attention.   Sure, a painter who paints 4 hours a day will produce many dogs (paintings that are unsuccessful from the artists point of view) along with a few gems – probably more gems than if they didn’t paint constantly – but that’s only one way of looking at it and for every “Van Gogh” that had to churn out work every day to satisfy their idenity issues with being an artist means painting, or post constantly, there are others, such as Manet, who didn’t have such a compulsive need.

Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle.  Now to the subject at hand, influence.

In Thinking Inside Out about the problem with online reputation it’s said

Often, social media tools afford a lack of critical thinking. See something, half read it, tweet and reweet it. It’s easier than crafting a thoughtful response. We’re all guilty. The problem is that it amplifies the connected group, without much analysis of the quality of the content. Through the lens of our online measurement tools the author looks knowledgeable, the content looks good, and the retweeters look influential. But none of those may be true. Being part of a clique community on Twitter does not make someone knowledgeable.

It’s easier to calculate an influence score on a digital signal than an offline (hidden or dark) signal, Klout works with measures it can get a hold of out of the Twitter and Facebook stream, and as Trey Pennington said, Klout is necessary (even though it’s not accurate and in many cases, not actually actionable).   I will say that some of my readers have said Trey Pennington is promoting Klout because he may have a financial interest in it; I doubt it.   I think Klout solves one problem while creating others.

For example, the Klout API makes it easy to feed Klout scores into publications like the Huffington Post and merge it with Twitter data and I’ve written about that already over the last two weeks.  The information is helpful even if it may not be totally accurate – the issue Klout solves is getting a calculation of influence into other streams of data so it can be used as a ranking factor and filter.   Now, we can argue the merits of the calculation – but we should not argue that we need some kind of way of calculating influence and relevancy and many of the other influence platforms haven’t really tried to feed, to my knowledge, their influence rankings into other digital media streams of information  – they have kept their influence rankings self contained in their own systems.

The reason Klout works at all, in my book, is it uses the Social Graph it pulls out of Twitter – inter-operating with Twitter and Facebook is necessary in order to effectively rank by influence/influencer, much the way that most businesses had to somehow cater to Google (until recently) because so much of what happened online connected to Google in one form or another.   The more successfully companies integrated with Google, the more successful they could become (unless Google decided to compete directly, like Saturn eating it’s own children, then Google became the enemy).

Getting back to the topic at hand, influence, Klout makes it easy it integrate it’s scores into other online content publications, that’s why it’s necessary.   Many people feel credit scores are not necessary – I for one don’t like them  – but they solve a problem of who to lend credit to.  Do I think the algorithms for Credit Scores are fair – not in one minute!  Do I think Klout Scores are fair or accurate – of course not!

We know that real influence and topic relevancy may have nothing to do whatsoever with Klout is looking at.  On the other hand, having a Klout Score intergrated with HuffPo does make some interesting interactions and engagements with online content that isn’t as likely otherwise.

So … is Klout as accurate as a  mood ring?  Yes – but for today, it successfully managed to integrate itself into online media and awareness in ways that other platform haven’t yet done.   Is MPact better – of course it is, and much superior to Klout as an influence detector – but it’s not yet scaling the entire social graph – which Klout attempts to do, at least on Twitter and then again, on Facebook.

So… if you want to take on Klout – model influence on the Social Graph – go after Twitter and Facebook because they are the new Google.

By the end of the afternoon I was having a hard time paying attention to the last panels of On The Top conference in Davos; maybe that was partly due to debating the legendary Paul Holmes this morning for 90 minutes and presenting a Social Media Monitoring Case Study later this afternoon.

It was all streamed live and I expect videos and interviews I gave will be available in a few days; a press release also appeared today complementing our debate and the conference.

I figured the odds were stacked heavily in my favor, and maybe my original opponent felt the same way, since he withdrew at the last moment.

As it turned out, he was replaced by Marshall Sponder, a Brooklynite, author of the upcoming book Social Media Analytics and an expert in the same subject. What transpired was probably not what the event organizers envisaged: I was there to advocate for a PR “takeover” of marketing, or at least for the merger of public relations and marketing into an all-encompassing function that I like to call public relations; Marshall was certainly not advocating the opposite.

But he was convinced that the PR business is doomed in the social media age, because the majority of its practitioners do not understand analytics and are unwilling to grapple with the metrics and analytics challenges posed by social media. He made a couple of interesting predictions: that PR firms would either wither and die because of their inability to prove their relevance, or that they would end up being led by people like him, who understand and embrace analytics.

We talked about management consultants providing new requirements that greatly complicate the level and breadth of  social media listening and measurement – Paul said that was nothing new and McKinsey and it’s like  were doing much the same thing 25 years ago when he started in PR.   That’s true, but the difference for me is “what” is being layered, mainly social media, search and web analytics data along with inhouse databases.

I argued PR is out of it’s league here – and i think Paul more or less agreed.   We didn’t agree on everything but we actually had more in common than I thought, and I’m hoping for more debates and discussions building on what happened today in Davos.

As far as the rest of the conference – I liked the presentation on CERN (by Dr. James Gillies (Head of Communication Group at CERN, Switzerland) and it got me thinking that if Dr Gillies had to convey the CERN particle generator was  safe in order to educate a public that was forming it’s own opinions and needed his, then I need to do the same thing with the Analytics and Metrics work I do here in the states.