I noticed a brilliant full moon tonight as I was walking home and found it was indeed called a “Super Full Moon” and happens only once every 18 years or so – it’s the point in the Moon’s orbit where the Earth and Moon are closest together, wish I had seen it just before sunset.

Well, I have an iPAD 1, but now the iPAD 2 came out people are wondering if it’s worth upgrading.  When I replaced my iPhone 3GS with the iPhone4, I didn’t expect it would be much of an improvement, but it was, because it added new features like an extra camera that I use a lot with Skype.   The same could be said about the iPAD 2, but if you’re looking for sheer processing power, the differences aren’t enough to buy one, though no doubt, with applications being optimized for the iPAD 2, the differences between old and new will be more significant.

But that gets me going on one point – optimization.   After all, it’s one thing to have a good idea or piece of hardware/software, another to optimize the use of it, and we just come up with something new, if we end up using it the same old way, there will be little difference, as the video above, showed, and we can apply that idea to a lot of other things beyond the iPAD and stretching my imagination, can think of many instances where an idea or product might be great, but all the surrounding things around it didn’t change, muting any improvements that might take place (and somethings making things worse).

And this week a new version of Google Analytics was released, and this was rumored a week or two ago in various Web Analytics boards that I read.  Here’s a video of some of the new features – there aren’t yet too many examples of the new features and this video is the best I found so far.

Most of the new Google Analytics features focus on usability, unlocking more of the power inherit in the platform and presenting it a more streamlined and quicker way – I don’t see anything earth shattering or game changing here – but it is interesting to see word clouds appear in Analytics; it’s another sign that Web Analytics and Social Media Analytics are merging.     Sure, word clouds and tag clouds are nothing new – but they almost never appear in site analytics … till now.

And EMetrics San Francisco took place this week – as usual, I didn’t attend; the last EMetrics I went to was in October of 2008 in Washington DC, but the conference continues to innovate and I expect when my book is published I may end up being at EMetrics again, at some point.   I certainly have many friends who attend it including Gary Angel of Semphonic.com who wrote a great post about Sentiment Analysis (along the lines of what is in the book); here’s some of what Gary Angel said that struck home with me:

What’s the right way to start using Social Data?
As impactful as Social Media Dashboarding and the integration of Social Data into Scorecards is, it isn’t necessarily the right first step. In Web Analytics, almost every organization does reporting before analysis. In Social Media, they should do it the other way around. Why?

It’s pretty simple really. It takes time and effort to get comfortable with Social Media data collection, culling and classification. The best way to really understand your data is to analyze it in-depth. Dashboards and reports don’t do that – and they tend to leave serious problems in the data buried and undetected. With the Web Analytics vendors, a reasonable job in implementation will get you a pretty clean and understandable data stream. That’s just not true in Social Media.

Companies need to walk before they can run. In Web analytics that means reporting before analysis, but in Social Media it’s just the opposite.

I interviewed Gary for my book and got him to go into more depth about the uses of Social data, how long it takes to prepare it and there’s an excellent case study that no one has seen yet which illustrates a successful implementation of social listening with 10  disparate data sources.   I also agree with Gary that it is too early for agencies to standardize on one platform or tool:

….Tools are a big decision and big pain point for Social Media analysis. One of the most important points I’d make here is that organizations don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) standardize on a single tool. The market is too nascent and the functional requirements too distinct to make it likely that one tool will meet all your needs.

And talking about mobile devices, AOL TechCrunch has a thought-provoking post about under counting that is going on with mobile ads on the iPhone platform, see  Study: Mobile Ad-Tracking Systems Are “Blind” To 80 Percent Of Apple IOS Devices.

There was also rumors that Google is launching a new product called Google Social Circles – but Google has denied it. However, given who is involved in the rumors, it’s hard for me to believe Google here; more likely the news was leaked too earlier and PR is trying to mitigate the damage.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google – having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

It’s one thing to say a platform is coming out, quite another to tack a few well-known influentials to it and hard for me to imagine the whole thing is made up.

There’s also unofficial news that Eric Schmidt of Google (who is stepping down as CEO) has been nominated for the new Secretary of Commerce position by President Obama; that doesn’t surprise me as he was widely looked at to run the technology of the US Government when Obama ran for his first term in 2008.  I think it’s a good choice to pick Eric Schmidt and is illustrative of another point I make in my book that technology and the means to deliver it are now so bound with the messaging and ways we do things that it no longer is possible to separate them.  In order to succeed now you need to master both technology and business, both the idea and it’s execution – not by separate teams, but in fact, by the same team and often, it ends up falling to the same individual to merge them.

And by the way, Digg is dead, according to AOL TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy… RIP Digg. That news doesn’t surprise me as I have heard less and less about Digg, it’s as if they have faded out of awareness.   Digg was about community, but to me they lost  credibility when it became obvious that Digg could be rigged.   But I think what really might have done Digg in is the fact people moved on to something else, and Digg didn’t.

It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving.

It seems to me that to remain successful and relevant means to evolve and perhaps, change into something else (you have to keep raising the bar because your audience is evolving and they are constantly asking for more); and it’s always dangerous to have a company too closely associated with a single valued asset.  If Kevin Rose really is the spirit of Digg, well, Digg is probably done.

I know it’s a busy week in New York City with several events and conferences happening all over the city …. but  … there is one event, one event you should not miss, and I’ll definately be there as well .. because it’s my own meetup group, DataStories.

BOOK REVIEW: Pre-Commerce: How Co’s & Customers R Transforming Business Together

I’ve been reading a copy of the new Pre-Commerce book by Bob Pearson and it’s hot – not only is it  very hot, but it’s got some of the top business leaders, top corporate leaders who have written exceprts and case studies personally, for the book.

The idea of PreCommerce is that most of the selling of an idea or brand comes way, way before you actually try to buy anything - and I guess, it's another way of saying the relationships you build, or the "pre-commerce" if you want to put it that way, are what determines weather customers are going to buy from your brand, or not.

Anyone who shows up next Wenesday will probably be able to get a free signed copy of the book , and this will be a book you'll want to own, especially if your into marketing, sales or public relations.  And, you get to hear it from the author, Bob Pearson, himself.

I want to say something else - having just finished writing a book I'm much more appreciative of what goes into it creating a living, breathing manuscript.    One other thing - that the idea of pre-commerce could really be extended out to friendship and social networking - though that's not the focus of Bob's book.

When I think of Pre-Commerce, I think of friendship, pure friendship, just liking people, hanging out, having fun - and "being there".   For several years I did just that - go to events in New York, hang out with people I liked and for the most part, asked nothing from them.

Eventually, I needed a job, mine had just ended at Monster and I was talking to a friend who just started at Porter Novelli (at the time, Stephanie Agresta was working for PN, she now works for a different company) ... when I asked for a favor, it was much easier  because I already had a relationship and established my identity and authenticity.

In the same way, when I wrote my book on Social Media Analytics for McGraw Hill, I had many friends in the Analytics Industry to draw up for case studies, interviews and advice.  People like Gary Angel, Dennis Mortensen, Philip Sheldrake, Avinash Kaushik and so on, and the list is long, very long in fact.

But it gets back, I think, to Pre-Commerce.  You can't expect to just cash in on an idea, a campaign, a slogan, a message now, if you haven't build a relationship with your audiences beforehand, the old way of doing business, or friendships, or anything, has more or less changed - or should I say, that it was was about relationships and we just now realize it.

Anyway ... I hope to see you at WCG next Wednesday evening for the next NY DataStories meetup and bring your friend - the first who show up get free books, and you might learn something new - and build relationships ... and who knows where that leads to ... esp in these tough economic times.

The medium is the message – I’ll start and end with that.

I was at some art openings tonight in Chelsea (Manhattan), mostly to take my mind off some pressing, perhaps annoying matters and focus on what really matters.  I’m also strugling to express an idea that came to me while I was there but which it’s hard to find the just right words.

And yes, my book matters to me (and is comforting to think about – esp. that it’ll be published in 5 months), but I’m totally exhausted from several months of being totally on it,  and now it’s more or less done, thinking about what comes next (another book?).

No, it’s taking a breather from all of that, at least for a moment.

Occurred to me as I attended one  art opening (and I liked everything I saw tonight – which really surprised me) – even though nothing was truly that “far out” and most of the work played it safe that…

… art that is innovative and new is probably not going to be immediately appreciated when it’s created.

The reason is simple, with something new there is not enough context in society, yet, to appreciate it – people  receptive to it are needed first,  in order to first take in the information and then disperse it.  Once the message digested and understood by the few  it can be  “reflected and spread out” so  that others can appreciate it.

Another way to view influentials – they are the  people who are the first to appreciate a new idea or concept (on the same wavelength), and then disseminate it to their followers.

In some ways, Social Media Analytics is like that – it’s an emerging discipline  within marketing that is generally not understood within MarCom because the context of it is too new.

Hopefully, my book on Social Media Analytics will help to bring the field into more appreciation within the disciplines that utilize it the most (at least, one can hope for this outcome).

But it also occurred to me that anything new and original isn’t going to stay that way for long and what might be the value of “newness” which is temporary.   Originality almost has to have a societal benefit, similar to what I heard about the NYC Singularity conference in 2009 from Jurgen Schmidhuber @ IDSIA

According to Schmidhuber – it’s about compressing information – we, as human beings, take in information all the time, but unless we  compress and encode it in way that saves data (that makes that information, or vision) it’s not viewed as interesting to most people.

I’ll go further – the value of  the new and original, and spreading of it is due to the influence on others (that then spread the message),  not  for the quality of the work  and it’s not even for its originality (originality soon becomes “absorbed” as others come to understand and imitate).

Huh – that’s radical – even the client doesn’t control their own message and meaning?  Really?

As society’s values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions^[3] that we are not aware of.

McLuhan describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.^[4] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time.^[3]

McLuhan’s famous saying ….  the medium became the message.

Because the medium is the message.