Just arrived in Davos a little while ago, staying at the Hotel Sonnenberg and I’m speaking at ON THE TOP on the 17th and 18th (Thursday/Friday).

Going to take a walk now and look at the Swiss Alps before me,  but I wanted to share a few things that developed over the last 24 hours.

1. The entire ON THE TOP conference will be livecast starting Thursday morning (the embed video feed is below).

2. In addition to my normal presentation (below) on International Social Media Monitoring I have been asked to directly debate Paul Holmes on New Marketing vs. New PR at 10AM local time – which is 6 hours ahead of New York time – which means my friends on the east coast will still be sleeping when I debate Paul Holmes – hopefully the debate will be recorded and can be streamed again later.

Is there anything my readers might want me to push Paul Holmes on?  I certainly have my own ideas and have asked a few to give me their questions (I often crowdsource insights – my best work is done because of the team of great people around me such as Leticia Colon and Barry Flemming at WCG and Dean Landsman at the Landsman Communications Group).

Also here’s the information about the session where I will present about International Social Media Monitoring.

Social media
Moderator: Stephen Davies, Founder & Managing Director of 3WPR, blogger at stedavies.com, UK

14.30-15.30
· Integrating SM internally
Philippe Borremans, Chief Social Media Officer at Van Marcke Group, Belgium:
- “ROI of SM for internal comms: How organizations should apply collaborative and interactive social media tools to enhance productivity and communication?”
· SM into existing PR campaigns
Kerry Bridge, Global Digital Media Communications Manager at DELL Public Sector, UK:
- “Integrating Social Media into existing PR campaigns.”
· Multinational SM campaigns
Marshall Sponder, SM Metrics, Web Analytics, and SEO expert, owner of webmetricsguru.com, USA:
- “How can multinational organizations create a social media campaign to target a number of markets?”

Here’s an interview I did earlier last month with Dennis Mortensen, CEO and founder of VisualRevenue LLC.    Been so tied up with my Social Media Analytics book and upcoming trip to Europe this week (Davos, Norway, England) it’s been tough to post, really wanted to post about VisualRevenue a few weeks ago but just could not get to it till now – and I wish I could go in more depth, but here goes …

Dennis posted this statement earlier last month on his blog…

I am intrigued because finding the perfect front page arrangement in real-time is what I do for a living.

VisualRevenue is a Frount Page Analytics Platform functing as a decision support system running off the Cloud, it  works with any media destination to promote it through optimizing content channels  genrated from current content vs. achive content  (however it is defined).

The main funtion of VisualRevenue is to maximize the value of conent a publisher is  running.

Another capability of VisualRevenue is the ability to gague the lift in traffic, dwell time and ultimately, increased income from taking it’s reccomendations vs. going cold turkey and running content as it is currently done in most online properties today; this level of decision support information is not usually provided via Web Analytics platforms though elements of the information VisualRevenue produces to echo some analytics reports though Web Analytics data looks backward and rarely is able to predict how well new content will do – Web Analytics an only predict how well content that is already running might do.

VisualRevenue takes the viewpoint an article has it’s maxium value for the first 12-18 hours after it’s run.  Behind VisualRevenue is a real time analytics platform that collects various datapoints to calcuate a value for any piece of content running

Figure 1 – Value of a front page news item

VisualRevenue solves a problem that many editiorial and publishing sites have of knowing what content to run where on your site, and for how long (you can see monetary calculated values in the figure above).

Reporting screen from VisualRevenue LLC for a client.

VisualRevenue optimizing the Daily News frontpage.

VisualRevenue also predicts how well an article might do on a frontpage or section page and lets an editor decide what to run (if they want to make that choice) on the front page.   There’s a interesting case study of VisualRevenue working with Boston.com on the VisualRevenue LLC blog.   VisualRevenue uses RPM (Revenue per 1000 pages) as a calculated value in order to make reccomendations on what is the ideal position for any piece of content.

It’s also true, I think, just by seeing this system work, VisualRevenue puts foward, a greater power in hands of the Editor(s) to decide how profitable a publishing site can be by deciding what conent to run on the main pages and for how long – it may also put some pressure on editors to “decide” on what they should run – but in any case, the reccomendations VisualRevenue provides look as if they can improve profitablity of any large publishing site.

Note: I’ll try to get a post or two out before heading over to Davos later this week for On The Top Conference - I’ve had the banner for On The Top on my blog for the last 6 months or so, I guess it comes off shortly.

I haven’t yet had a chance to writeup my detailed notes and thoughts about VisualRevenue.com (which will be appearing shortly) but I feel, very strongly, the answer to a lot of what was discussed in last night’s event I attended lies there (see The Changing Environment of Online Content: Engage, Track and Measure – Social Media Week NYC – Cocktails & Conversations:), and not so much the bland, expected, tired (and I have to admit, I was tired as well) approaches it sounded to me that everyone up there had.    If your really going to measure and monetize content, I think you need a good analytics platform built for that, and VisualRevenue does that for Newspapers, for publishers.   Too bad I had not thought of it when I was there, maybe I could have floated Dennis Mortensen’s company as a question at the end, but didn’t.

Anyway, I want to take a moment to address a very big piece of news, that AOL Agrees To Acquire The Huffington Post. I have a few thoughts about that.  First, I asked Huffington Post for a Case Study because my friends at Adaptive Semantics (acquired by Huff Po earlier last year) are fully integrated into the newsroom and essentially power it, but the publisher didn’t want let my readers in to peak in, too bad).

I tend to look at acquisitions differently than most.  I see the Google – ITA acquisition as essentially about NeedleBase and a Patent – with the Travel Business thrown in as a second reason, but Google cares more about using Needle to crawl the Dark Web than they care about Travel Bookings – that’s just my take.   I won’t say exactly the same thing here – I don’t know if Tim Armstrong is adept enough to realize what AOL acquired – AOL may be looking at synergies of audience and revenue possibilities.   I see something else.

I see the infrastructure and intelligence to publish the next round of improvements in news and entrainment coming from companies like Adaptive Semantics and Visual Revenue.   I can’t say how much Adaptive Semantics  was on Tim Armstrong’s mind when he made the initial offer to Ariana Huffington (see When HuffPost Met AOL: “A Merger of Visions”), but surely, Tim most have noticed the amazing technology around Social Media that have been rolling out of Huffington Post over the last year.

How about this one, a merging of Adaptive Semantics and Klout (Adaptive Semantics runs in the background mapping the social graph of Huffington Post contributors and their friends and identifying influencers that way, along with merging Klout data as an overlay for subject area relevance).

The engine for that, and the creativity to reinvent publishing aren’t coming from Forbes or the New York Times (Old Media) – they are coming from new and more nimble companies who can take advantage of Technologies and Analytics that have emerged in the last 5 or 6 years, and have begun to mature over the last year.    If Tim doesn’t see that, he ought to … because along with the audience AOL just got, they acquired amazing technologies.

If AOL is smart, the will avoid becoming Yahoo – and really let those acquisitions be all they can be, instead of diluting most of them, which is what Yahoo did.   Here’s a funny take on that from TechCrunch – an AOL company – Ha! See  Aol Buys The Huffington Post, Animated Version [Video]

Stay tuned for my interview with Dennis Mortensen of VisualRevenue LLC coming, soon.