Read a lot of good stuff in the New York Times, but sometimes, I notice, the news I get from the NYT is “non-news”, like a re-digestion of information that’s already out there and digested already - like Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click today.

How different is this “change” from Google Website Optimizer or Omniture Touch Clarity - or a bunch of other multivariate testing platforms, many that have been around for a while?

Top, an ad for Sears by Tumri, with changing pictures and type. Bottom, a version of the same ad with additional pictures.

Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients’ online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.

It is technology that could cause a shift in the advertising world. The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad’s success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad’s brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.

Nothing new here - no new information but it reminds me of something I noticed recently as I read the New York Times - that the same news story (with one headline) is added to then the headline is change (second headline) - it looks like a different story but ends up being, more or less, the same story as the first headline, but with an extra update or two.

Recently, I’ve heard that as newspapers cut back and change their business models (and Journalist bloggers like Jeff Jarvis write about it - see A complete ecology of news) there’s less and less Journalists left to write the news.  But rather than admit that - and just start using citizen journalists to fill in the gap, newspapers like the New York Times, make the same story seem like 3 or 4 different stories by just changing the title every hour or two - keeping the same stuff up on the front page as long as possible - to make up for the fact there really isn’t that much new content they have to put up.

Another aspect of this - I see some interesting stories from time to time, but don’t have the chance to bookmark them or post about it - or even annotate in Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter.   A day or two later, I try finding that story in the New York Times, can’t even remember what it’s called anymore and often have a problem searching for it.

It’s almost as if what I should have is a search that allows me to recreate what is on the New York Times frontpage (or any page) at a certain point in time - say, when I recall seing the article I want to go back and read about - but nothing like that is on the New York Times site.

However, I wrote about Zoetrope, the other day, and when Zoetrope is released, it might be able to do what all the technology of the New York Times is failing to do - tell me what was on a page at any point of time and what the content of the story was at any point in time.

I guess, my point in this post, is the technology for changing ads to see what variation is most effective is old news; unless there’s something new in the article - a new slant - I’m not sure it’s worth printing.  ON the other hand, to make up for the lack of content - newspapers like the New York Times are recycling the same stories by changing the titles and adding a few lines, but otherwise, not fundamentally changing the story or providing much meaningful new information.

It’s time to supplement paid journalists with social media provided by readers who, admittingly, might need to be reviewed first, but who have valuable input, and can make up for the lack of content papers seem to be facing, more and more.

Good article in the New York times on how Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web- which is an example of how we don’t necessarily need more Social Networks as much as we need a way to call Social Network information into every site experience, according to the article.

While there really should end up being just a few repositories of the data - instead of a zillion networks, Facebook is the closest to realizing a cloud that can touch most sites:

MySpace, Yahoo and Google have all announced similar programs this year, using common standards that will allow other Web sites to reduce the work needed to embrace each identity system. Facebook, which is using its own data-sharing technology, is slightly ahead of its rivals.   I think that’s a good thing, at least, for now.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

Facebook Connect is representative of some surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet giants have all announced plans to share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.

Supporters of this idea say such programs will help with the emergence of a new “social Web,” because chatter among friends will infiltrate even sites that have been entirely unsociable thus far.

I’m just about to go to bed, but, after a long Thanksgiving day I wanted to get out a few thoughts today about something I noticed, and it may relate to Social Media, in a direct way.

Found it hard to post much to any of my blogs today, even thought I tried - my mind was “tired”, yet I did post - but mostly to Facebook.

What I found was that I had ideas that I shared with a friend or two, or responded to my Facebook News Feed, either to sign up for events I’ll go to next week or to comment back on posts to my wall, or as a comment to something I posted earlier.

And that got me thinking of what I was doing was giving back though interacting with my Social Media feeds as opposed to blogging, so to speak.

In fact, that’s one thing I notice about Robert Scoble, with all the posts he shares in Google Reader with me, sometimes, what he’s doing in that way, touches me a lot more than his actual blog posts - and his notes on the posts he is sharing is often more contextually relevant to me than his writings, which I tend not to read all that much.

In like manner, I found myself putting more energy into sharing stories in Google Reader and taking the time to post a note with the share (that gets picked up by Friendfeed and also goes into my Facebook Profile (feed)),  plus developing relationships with real and virtual friends that might not be immediately tangible yet, function as a precursor or co-enzyme, to action.

I could have as easily just written focused on posting to my blogs - but instead, I found my self interacting with my Facebook News feed - or emailing a friend, or perhaps I would twitter  something (I didn’t, today) - and much of that activity would appear to be invisible (even though it’s not) - maybe some of it shows up in my Friendfeed - but all the work I did - what I gave, is just as important as any blog post (what about an iPhone painting?) I might do.

Hey, I’m not looking for the wisdom of crowds…

So, I want to put forward two ways of looking at giving, along with if that co-relates to Engagement, or not.

Today, my “giving” or engagement with interacting with my Facebook News Feed, was externally driven -  today is Thanksgiving Holiday (or was the Thanksgiving Holiday - it’s actually early Friday morning as I write this), if I was at work, or if it was another day, maybe I’d not be interacting with my Social Media feeds as much; I don’t think the externally driven factor and be ignored - it has to be a factor.

The other thing I want to put forward is a way to evaluate involvement in Social Media - the simplest way, at this point, is to co-relate the following :

1. Time spent on Social Media Site (compared to all the time spent online) - note, that can be looked at individually (all the time I spent on Social Media vs. all the time I spent online, period) - or in mass, all the time the internet population spent on Social Media vs. what they spend on the rest of their online activities.

I’m even willing to forget the number of times Social Media sites are visited vs. all sites.  By the way, looks like MySpace is having a problem since February - people are spending substantially less time there.

2. The number conversations taking place (this could be measured by the instances of interacting with a feed, such as the Facebook News Feed, or Twitter (Feed) or Friendfeed.  You can probably add them all up - and compare them to the overall internet audience.

The problem is that most of the conversation activity won’t show up - it’s AJAX, every time I comment on my Facebook or Friendfeed - a new page is not generated - for now, I need a proxy for conversations and the best I can come up with is Page views per visit - but it’s a poor proxy - but better than none at all.

There is some interesting research on Facebook that says that some activities you do are more “engaging” by nature than others (see this video clip to get a sense of that)

Perhaps this can all be combined into one metric - but what this really gets back to is there are many activities that are precursors to Social Media, to Engagment, in fact, but that are not measured - you can say the act of “Engagement” makes the assumption what ever needed to preceed it, happened.

But I would think that you do need to measure what preceeds an event or action - hey, I can take an exam and ace it, but doesn’t it also count how much I studied for it?

Anyway, enough of this for tonight - I just wanted to close out today by giving Thanks to all my friends, to my family and give form to the idea that we need to look at the whole picture.

Image via Wikipedia

I was thinking about my own issues about a Board I’m currently on and this post by K.D. Paine on The value of transparency.

Besides K.D. Paine’s story of her friend Nick Ashooh, I’ve read about the Yahoo! Board of Directors care of Carl Icahn, who is on Yahoo!’s Board, and the Board Politics are all too familiar.   Though I haven’t been on but one Board in my entire life - I must say,  is there any instance where a Board, any Board, embraced transparency?  Lip service, yes, transparency, no.

I expressed my own feelings in my post on Difficult days for Social Media a few days ago, which was also picked up by Social Media Today, as I hope this one is, as well.

I know in Business, and life, in general, your expected to be putting your best foot forward - that is the conventional wisdom - on an interview, for example, you present the “best you” even as the interviewer tries to find out what your not saying - kicking the tires, as need be.

In Business, due to all kinds of legal stuff and the need to raise money - the image that’s presented to the world is often not what’s really going on behind the scenes - and, we might not really want to know all the gorey details, anyway.

However, Boards have a more fundamental issue because the fragmentation of responsibilities magnifies inefficiencies and reinforces a need to be nontransparent.  And then, there are even cases of Boards that are renegade, that nay sometimes act against the interests of the organizations they manage, and that certainly seems the to be the case with Yahoo!.  Now that Jerry Yang is stepping down, - see Yang: ‘Time is right’ for new leader on CNET let’s hope their Board get’s it right, ongoing.

In fact, according to the Guardian - Microsoft-Yahoo could be back on cards now that Yang has stepped down.

But getting back to this idea of Transparency, and why Boards don’t seem to be able to be transparent, even when they try to be - it gets even worse when your talking about Non-Profits.

Actually, I’d be interested to know how K.D. Paine measures the “Trust” level of Corporations and the Boards that help run them, as well as the non-profits; here’s what she says about the AIG Board and how they got it wrong:

“…In reality, companies ultimately have no choice but to be more transparent if they have a prayer of restoring the public’s trust in their institutions. It’s not just that AIG was idiotic in trying to cover up its role in the conference, its that in doing so, AIG further compromised whatever trust the public, and its elected officials, may have had in the organization.
I haven’t done a formal measurement of their trust level, but I’m guessing from the comments I’m reading that its dropped even faster than AIG’s stock price. So my question is: When will the C-suite wake up and realize that people will only regain trust in these institutions if they are utterly open and transparent. (I know, only when they fire all the lawyers) But seriously, do the math. The cost in reputation, failed relationships, lower trust, and now, government support, far outweighs whatever perceived cost that transparency may entail.”

I think it takes courage and leadership to be transparent - it may be both are lacking on many Boards; but more often I think Board Directors are trying to do the right thing and they just don’t know how, or can’t - they’re too worried about losing control.

Fast Forward to my last post on YouTube Video Search gradually replacing Textual Search? and add the rapid growth of user generated content, especially video and audio content, on just about any subject, much of it interesting, and we come to the death of privacy - there is no room for opaqueness in life ,or the Board Room - but the Board Room hasn’t realized it yet; because transparency means sharing control, and Boards don’t like sharing control, I’ve observed.

Today, people automatically equate non-transparency with having something to hide.  If you have nothing to hide, then you can afford to be transparent.  In the past, before Social Media, hiding stuff was pretty common, the Government did it, Business did it, people did it - but now …… it’s different - times have changed.

I do think we need to be our own “curators” much as Brands need to be curated - but that’s more a function of moderation, not hiding things.

In fact, the new Branding does involve having Brand Managers act as curators and that has come up many times over the last two years at the conferences I’ve attended since YouTube, Facebook and MySpace have become some commonly used.  I would say the same thing holds true in the Board Room  - instead of trying to hide the dealings, we ought to act more like curators - making sure the information appears in the best context, but not hold back - to the extent that’s possible.

One more factor was brought up by K.D. Paine, who I’ve met several times, and that is Speed - Speed of the transmission of information - it’s so fast that transparancy within 24 hours or less, when a major issue comes up is a necessity - and that’s something almost no Board can handle - they simple can’t respond quickly enough.

Corporate has Public Relations people for that function - but Non-Profits probably don’t respond quick enough, and the Board of a Non-Profit might be clueless for weeks - though usually, there is a silver lining - a Non-Profit probably is not engaged in anything scandalous - but then again. .. you never know.

At any rate, what all this tells me is that we need to think differently about what we do - what is actually required of us might not be the same things we think are required - but that’s for another post.

I’ve been hearing about the Social Media Storm Spreads as Motrin Ad Angers Moms, that Social Media Campaigns for well established Brands, like Motrin, should always  be run by someone who knows the Brand very well AND knows  how  Social Media functions, well - and, evidently, that didn’t happen, as referenced by B.L. Ochman.

This Motrin ad about moms who wear their babies in a variety of slings has set off a fire-storm on Twitter, where #motrinmoms quickly became the topic of thousands of angry tweets, and in blogs from mothers and lots of others, like me, who find the ad condescending. A Facebook group of moms who find the ad offensive quickly followed.

Clearly, nobody at Motrin, or its agency, was paying attention today, Sunday. And by Monday, you can bet that you’ll hear about this on the evening news and in dead tree media. Sure, Motrin will respond, or take the ad down, withdraw it from its rotation, etc. But the damage to the brand, among the very large and vocal niche they were targeting, is done.

Lesson to Motrin: any company that wants to participate in social media and use the tools better know how to walk the walk.

Sounds like the Social Media Ad that got lots of Mom’s in pain protest was just another Ad Agency “manufactured” Social Media plug, that didn’t work - people see right though that kind of stuff now.

“…I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: an ad agency the last place a company should go when it wants to use the tools of social media. Before you venture into social media, hire creative talent that has already created successful social media marketing campaigns for major brands. Everyone and her dog says they’re a social media guru. That’s just not true. Don’t believe the hype. Look at the track record instead.”

But this goes back to another idea that I wrote about today, but in an entirely different context, at The Analytics Guru - about Detroit’s Dilemma and lack of support from Republicans due to their relience on, what I called, the Reptilian Brain - I wrote about the Reptilan Brain a while back in Power of Pervasive Subliminal Advertising.

Why does Social Media require transparency?  Think…..   In order to process peer to peer community information, genuine feelings, there require more complex brain functions that can’t be faked - where as primitive, two dimensional thinking can be faked and gamed -and often has been.

Just going and hiring an Ad Agency to do your Social Media for your is a mistake - they’re just hired contractors, doesn’t matter if they’re experienced by virture of creating other campaigns - they aren’t you - they can’t be genuine because the agency is just a hired contractor - perhaps a partner, but still, not you.

In order to be genuine, and to be worthy of trust, you have to real, open and transparent, and that’s something you almost will never get by just going out and hiring an agency.

By the way, the Reptilian Brain, is both the problem and solution to a lot of different things we’re facing - and I brought it in to this context because Motrin, took a passive role, it appears, by just hiring an agency to do their work for them instead of making it something more grass roots.

Honestly, with all the people that legitimately use Motrin and find it works, including Moms, you’d think they could have gone out and found real grassroots support for a Social Media Campaign.

By the way, I haven’t even talked about the measurement of this Motrin campaign - which would have been a whole different post.

Just a thought on this Sunday, at dusk.

You know what, Jeremiah Owyang put together these stats on Social Media and the 2008 Presidential Election in Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008

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Internet Usage in United States
United States Population: 303,824,646
Internet Usage: 220,141,969
Penetration rate: 72.5%
Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

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Facebook
Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

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MySpace
Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

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YouTube
Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

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Twitter
Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

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Community Platforms/Branded Social Networks
MyBarackObama: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)
McCain Space: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)

I mean, overall, Obama had 4 times more presense in Social Media than John McCain. 

And, with Search Engines (ie: Google Insights for Search) it’s about 3:1 in Obama’s favor.

But don’t forget to vote Tuesday; I am certainly looking forward to it.

By the way, there was an article in the New York Times today about Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World

It seems to me Social Media and Web 2.0 are becoming more vital, perhaps even the centerpiece of campaigns, going forward:

“…..drawing on Mr. Obama’s background as a community organizer, his campaign decided early on to build a social network that would flank, and in some cases outflank, traditional news media.“

“.. Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage — from Comedy Central to BBC America.”

Could it be, that besides having more to day than McCain, Obama had a lot more avenues to say it?

I see Facebook as the AIG of Web 2.0 - too big to fail - yet Facebook is running out of money, just like AIG did and Marketing Piligrim asks is Facebook Headed for Financial Ruin? According to TechCrunch:

“… Facebook’s growth, thanks to all these user-created translated versions of the site, has probably exceeded even their own internal projections. And running this engine isn’t cheap.

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly - we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake - earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

And don’t forget those human assets. With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.”

But that’s my point - Facebook is too much a part of what is happening today to be left to fail - so I’m not worried about Facebook falling on it’s face - I’m more worried about the rest of the world falling into a financial depression, and what that is going to look like and be like, to live though.

I do think Facebook will need to become more profitable, though - and that means developing stuff people will buy more of - and at that, in an environment when people are spending less and less.

Couldn’t sleep, maybe it was the spiced up Italian food I had for dinner last night, or just maybe it’s the Global Markets of Britian, Germany and France that are down an average of -5% morning, suggesting Monday will be another day of losses in the Dow - all too familiar by now - and nail biting.

Nope, reading my RSS Feeds in Google Reader this morning, as my stomach churns, is a Twitter message (which can be one of my “feeds”) telling me about a depressing New York Times article about Facebook…..

“…Awkward piece in NYTimes Magazine makes me never want to organize / attend Facebook meetup: http://tr.im/l4w [Via @serial_consign's blog.]

Actually, the article is titled Facebook in a Crowd and reminds me of three facts - 1) that few virtual friends are going to show up when you set up an event AND 2)  Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 services, are going to be part of the new “glue”  that holds us together as the World Financial System unravels, perhaps, entirely. 3) Maybe there’s a way to measure the influence of a “virtual friend” or an “event” by holding one of them and seeing “who actually shows up”.

As I get tired, and ready to try to go back to bed again, with that sinking feeling that may be part my own exhaustion and part what is going on in the world, or even with my friends, a few that have just been “let go”, and even the uncertainty of anyone’s financial future right now (including my own), even as my body is telling me it’s time to sleep again … my thoughts go to 2 OP-ED articles appear in Monday’s New York Times.

In Paul Krugman’s Widening Gyre there’s the crisis of the emerging markets to get my stomach to churn again, and get dizzy, along with some poetry to go with it, according to Krugman, the Hedge Funds are now failing and it’s taking down developing markets, that were thinking, even recently, of decoupling and thriving as the West declined  ….. but that is not to be … because….

“…..as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

“….The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.”

And if that didn’t finish me off, and give me more fatigue to go back to bed - William Cohen writes in  “Shoot the Horses?” that ….

“….a banker friend, and he told me the “unraveling” could go on for ages. I thought he meant the unwinding of all the leverage that had inflated everything from the price of stocks to the price of homes.

But, just to be sure, I asked him: “Unraveling of what?”

He paused, before saying, “Almost our way of life.”

A friend of his, he went on, has a horse farm north of New York City. “I told him, for heaven’s sake, you have to get rid of your horses. Shoot them if necessary.”

That got me thinking.

Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?”

Now, I’m really getting dizzy and need to sleep, again, when I read further down in the article:

“…. It’s really a wonder, when you think about it, that there are still two guys in the race to become U.S. president, pulling out all the stops in these last eight days of campaigning to be chosen as the one to face the nightmare.

Let’s fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels.

The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered.

New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom — that’s to say right now — a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels.

The hedge fund industry is decimated — its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up — and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004.

People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring.

I ask you, Senator McCain, Senator Obama, do you still want the job?”

To finish me off, but give us some hope again, maybe a new WPA program, a New York Times Editorial: As China Goes covers how China is doing what we should be, and spending money to stimulate it’s own economy, and support it’s people, which seems like we need to emulate, and hopefully, will emulate soon, with new leadership:

“….To get China’s consumers to spend, the government will need to spend more at home, investing in public works projects and providing more social benefits — including health insurance and pensions — so its citizens don’t feel they have to save so much for a rainy day.

This is clearly in Beijing’s interest, though China’s leaders are still clinging to the old export strategy.

China is already feeling the impact of a slower world economy. Both economic growth and export growth have braked sharply. The slowdown threatens job creation, direly needed to absorb millions of rural Chinese seeking employment in the cities.”

If anything, all of this stuff I read, which helped my stomach churn, or made it stop, is meant to highlight just how interconnected our world is now - how different it was from 1929 or 1932, in that those systems that were put in place to prevent the Great Unraveling that his happening now, were meant to safeguard on a national level - but no one thought the world would be so interconnected then, as it is now.

And now, time for bed, again - if only for a few hours - till I wake up and read the news, all over again.

I’ll also stay in the same room for the last session of the day on expanding your Online Community. I know Laura Lee Dooley, who joined the Social Media Committee I started at the WAA and read Beth Kanter’s blog which is an excellent resource for Non-Profits who wish to leverage Social Media (and honestly, a lot of what Beth Kanter writes about could be applied to for profit businesses just as well as non-profits).

“..S04 Tuesday, 5:10 - 6:00

Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community

Jonathon D. Colman, The Nature Conservancy
Laura Lee Dooley, World Resources Institute
Beth Kanter, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

If you aren’t on facebook, twitter, friendfeed, technorati, and delicious, should you be? And once you jump into social media, how do you track and measure success? Tips, tools and stories from the trenches from three people who focus on online engagement and have more links, friends and followers than some small countries have citizens.

Laura Lee on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Anyway, here’s my notes on Beth Kantor’s presentation. She looks at AideRss and the statistics and see’s what posts do best.

Also Beth looks at Technorati and noted her ranking goes up and down and says she says she’s noted when her rankings go up or down and what triggers it.

Btw, Beth raised 215k for Cambodian refugees as non profit. Beth goes and friends a lot of people who follow alerts on her name, or “Cambodia”.

Laura Ann - she uses Twitter a lot and suggests we all create Twitter accounts.

But….But… Most companies are not prepared to handle interactive feedback. That’s a major roadblock.

Ambient Awareness - Listening Post Exhibition. Post Ratio: 1 : 12 (once about yourself and 12 times about others)

Laura handles two Twitter accounts
She used several metrics including twitter clickthrough and posts.

Xefer and Twitter Grader.

Is twitter multiple relationships or a single one to Twitter?

A lot of concerns about Twitter downtime but the service continues to grow.

laura points out the person who has the Twitter account for your company needs to be a senior person who knows the Brand well. No Interns, that’s not a good idea for several reason.

Nature Conservatory Case study using DIGG

One thing to note was the Digg traffic wasn’t worth much though they got a lot of that traffic.

Digg is good if you want to reach new people but it can lead to other things that are valuable.

Results of Social News Campaign on Digg. Normally they get 20,000 visits a day but 76,000 visits for the day when a Digg story ran on Digg homepage.

But ….. Our goal was to spur conversations about the enviornment plus tons of links, which in turn drove new visits of higher quality plus SEO juice.

How much time required? A few years to become a crediable source on Digg, or whatever large Social Networks.

The ad itself, took a few hours to set up. But Digg helped reach people we normally would not be able to contact.

Nature Conservatory also uses Radian6 to listen to the conversation.

My take is that social media is a lot of work, learning to leverage relationships.

Many organizations are too stoggy to adopt Social Media but once they see the results you usually get but it’s a culture change.

Digg changes make it harder to get a story on the first page but many top Diggers have interests in causes.

Fact is that Digg has been gamed so much the top keyword in Google for a search on Digg is “gamed”.

I’m covering yet another session on Social Media Metrics by Jason Burby and Ryan Turner, both of ZAAZ.

Social Media Metrics

Jason Burby, ZAAZ
Ryan Turner, ZAAZ

I captured the tail end of Jason’s session.

Monitoring response and creating policies to respond. Plugging in ratings and reviews, intergrated social tools and internal communications.

How to handle authentication and user identities. Targeting popularity engines with your content.

Jason cited the case of a Sony camera with a review on CNET, and the feedback is mixed, you can respond in a fair way.

ZAAZ Web Analytics and ZAAZ Social Media approach are the same, defining what success is.

To be honest, so far, I am not hearing anything different on this talk then what I already know.

But here’s what I make at of this perception - Social Media Marketing is essentially web analytics, but with different inputs and outputs.

ZAAZ has a Social Media Conversion Calculator which is available on it’s site
-not a big deal, but you can fill in your own actions and related prices.

Both brand perception and shopping have always had a social context. Three years ago we accessed the opinions of 5 friends in the consideration process, today we can access the opinions of 5 million fellow customers. Measurement on the social web presents analysts with new challenges: How do you measure word of mouth? Can you model the relationships between online research and offline purchase? What is the value of a comment on a blog post? A connection in a social network? A question in a support forum? A tag on YouTube? How does engagement affect lifetime customer value? Jason Burby and Ryan Turner of ZAAZ will present some insights from their experiences grappling with these issues, and they’ll put forward some ideas about where businesses need to focus as the social web grows in importance over the coming years.