While walking to work this morning I thought about news of the last day; that we’ve been in a Recession since December 2007 (one year!), that several of my friends have already lost their jobs, that rents and other fixed expenses continue to rise, but income is falling and the economy,as a whole, is moving toward Deflation.

My mind races to paint a picture of what we’re likely to see next year and what I came up with, is this.

Economy continues to go deeper into recession as Barack Obama takes office in January 2009; the first stimulus package is passed by early Feb and the first money for stimulus flows out of the Tresuary in late April 2009. Unfortunately, the stimulus is too late to help the unemployed and nothing much happens.

A second stimulus happens in late 2009, but 2009 is already a wash out, and it’s not till spring of 2010 that employment starts to grow again, and not till 2011, before it recovers to a pre recession level. I think a third stimulus will happen in early 2010, and that will seal the recovery.

In all, about 2 Trillion Dollars will be spent over the next two years, trying to revive the economy, and that had nothing to do with stimulus going on in other countries at the same time.

I expect the usual challenges that everyone is talking about, but the problem is going to be, how to survive through 2010.

And the problem is that there’s going to be a lot of difficulty around “uncertainity” in when the economy will recover.

Maybe, the best thing Obama can do, at this point, for the economy is bring a sense of certainity back to the markets and to provide as many alternative energy jobs as he can create.

Of course, this is all my own views (no one else’s) and I may be all wet.

We’ll see.

Btw, this post was written on my iPhone, expect the usual spelling and grammar errors.

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.

I’m not really into holidays that much - but I did a ThanksGiving Painting

I’ve found, it’s really hard to translate from one medium to another - the painting looks one way on the iPhone, when it’s saved on a laptop, it looks a lot duller.   I tried to get the painting to look as much like it really looks to me, while I did it.

Also I put a link to the Collecting Smiles site so you can see how I painted it.

That’s going to be interesting … I mean …. this …. Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone); whatever you want to say about Google … they keep innovating Search - they just pushing the boundaries.  The other day they released data showing how Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread and just yesterday Google Exploring Old Rome Without Air (or Time) Travel.

I haven’t seen the iPhone application yet, it’s going to be available today.   It’s hard to say how much I’ll use it - but the fact they pulled something like Google Is Taking Questions on the iPhone is fantastic - beyond the scope of what anyone else could do.   Even the Google Earth for iPhone application is a stunning interface.   From The New York Times:

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.

And there’s been other innovations that I haven’t checked out yet, not so much from Google, but what Microsoft is doing where Microsoft Beats Yahoo and Google to Social Inbox 2.0

Thursday, Microsoft announced a complex new version of the Web sites and PC software that use the Windows Live brand. Over the next two months, the company will introduce dozens of upgraded features involving its e-mail, instant message, calendar, blogging and other services. It will also add some entirely new functions, including group collaboration and photo sharing.

A lot of the effort has gone into weaving the functions of social networks throughout many of these services. For example, the service has a “what’s new” feed, modeled after the Facebook news feed, that can publish short comments by users as well as links to when they take certain actions, like publish new photos. The feed will be displayed on the instant message client and on new profile pages for users. And after you send an e-mail to people who use the new feed, you will see their most recent updates.

Microsoft is also reaching out to draw in information from other sites.

I guess, what I’m saying is that Search is getting interesting again - no so much for the act of searching - but how one can search and also receive information - a lot of innovation happening - it’s almost like that innovation is coming in waves.

Thinking about the motivational videos I put up here, last night and this morning, with Gary Vaynerchuk, see Gary Vaynerchuk Videos from Motivational Meetup - 11-5-05 (a few more are waiting to be uploaded with Dennis Mortensen from Yahoo! Analytics, formally IndexTools).

Gary said if you had 2500 visitors to your site per day and you worked that well,you could live off the income, but it takes a lot of work, time and patience.

Typical advertising is far more expensive and probably less effective to select, niche audiences, than blog advertising, when we work it, ourselves.

Gary V spoke of his own wine site, and it’s success, and how he was dismissed early on, and still is by the likes of Zagat, who “don’t get it”.

Thinking about www.artnewyorkcity.com, for this, but this blog, too.

It takes time, and a lot of work, face to face meetings, actually.

Ha.

But, this says, to me, blog advertising has a bright future in this market, if you (me) can leverage your own Brand.   To further expand on this - I believe as the market continues to get tighter and tighter, over the next two or three years - blog advertising will come into it’s own in a big way - it makes perfect sense to me - and there will be analytics to tie it all together.

By the way, I wrote this entire post while walking to work this morning, start to finish - and I only slowed down, slightly.   To me, the iPhone has accomplished what I dreamed it would - a live blogging device/platform that allows me to post my thoughts from anywhere.

I wanted to see how far I could go with the iPhone as a replacement for my sketchpad and painting surface.

I had fun and lost sense of time, but when I finally gave up and felt as if I went as far as I could with my self portrait, 2 hours had passed.

A lot going on in the world, maybe more than usual. For one thing, I downloaded Google Earth for my IPhone today, and it felt as if the future, almost a science fiction future, suddenly materialized.

And then, the Economy, the World Mess, going into “withdrawal” over the “fake” pumped up financial system, that just crashed.

With all of this, decided to “go within” and paint about it, painting with Light, that is, on my iPhone.

I was really exhausted by the 5 days I spent in Alexandria VA, just outside DC, at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, but it was overall a great conference and most of the familar faces were there - and easy to network with.

By the way, I’ve begun to think in terms of including my imagery with my Web Analytics posts - most people know that I’m an artist and it’s part of my own unique branding - and it’s something I do in my own way - where I think it fits - I’ve included my iphone paintings, in this case, to capture the feelings I had, a combination of excitement and exhaustion - in this newer medium, which, lately, I’m finding very satisfying to work in.

Thoughts and Feelings - IPhone Painting - Using Colors Application

Marshall Sponder 2008

For one thing, there was an entire Social Media Track at Emetrics this time, that’s never happened before and I attended about half of the sessions in that tract - which was about the best I could do given the competition with other sessions and speaking with people, that I’ll often opt to do, even ahead of attending a session.   Most of the sessions I covered are at Emetrics Summit.

I also live blogged most of the sessions I covered using my IPhone, but ran into a glitch with pre-created posts (to capture Marketing Notes and hyperlinks); I required network connectivity in order to edit posts I created beforehand, and most of the time, the session rooms did not have connectivity.  I find creative ways around that limitation, and overall, decided the day of carrying a laptop to conference sessions is effectively over - it’s no longer needed as the iPhone has all the neccessary functionality to live blog with.   Applications such as WordPress, will continue to improve and make laptops unnecessary for most conference work within the next year.

Getting back to the Social Media Track at Emetrics, it could have been a conference by itself - there was certainly enough content to qualify and in many cases, first class speakers who were doing leading edge social media analysis with an analytics bent.  There was a keynote on New York Times Web Analytics by James G. Robinson which suggested that, for a Newspaper like the NY Times, weekly reporting has become neccessary as information is coming in so quickly that monthly reporting no longer is sufficient -  there was a number of interesting metrics James came up with, I was familiar with some of it,  other things were actually quite illuminating, and I was very happy I attended his keynote.

However, Bill Glassman from The Gartner Group noted that we’re all looking for the next big thing and it felt as if the conference was looking for it too - perhaps the closest thing to that was Mobile Analytics - it seemed to be the new darling of both Emetrics and perhaps, Web Analytics in general.   It’s almost as if Mobile Analytics has “replaced” the focus on “Social Media” which is now becoming “absorbed” into the general consciousness of Web Analytics practitioners.

Omniture had an excellent presentation, as did Sebastian Wenzel from Lifetopia Corp, who also writes www.webanalyticsbook.com (the mobile metrics guide is somewhere on his site, but I can’t find it right at this moment - otherwise I’d provide the link for download).

There was also a great session on Measuring Virtual Worlds, with Dr. James Bower of Numedeon Incorporated, Jared Freedman of Code4Software and Matt Bostwick of A4R4 Media.  Between Matt, Jared and James, Brand Metrics were explained and detailed in a way I had not seen before, and I think we all “got it” - what branding really has become - which is “product branding” - it’s all about the product, not so much the brand.

I also had a great talk with Jennifer Veesenmeyer, a senior consultant for Stratigent, who I’ve seen and spoken to several times at other Emetrics Summits and some WAA Events.

Finally, I stayed one more day to attend a Board Meeting of the Web Analytics Association, whose Board I am part of. There’s only one place in my life where I can discuss and create strategy that drives business forward, and that’s on the Board of Directors of the Web Analytics Association.

For most of my life, I’ve been affected by the decisions made by others - and being on the Board of Directors has given me an experience of what it’s like to make decisions relevant to the organization and for me, that’s was a very rich and rewarding feeling - especially this last meeting - which was the best one, for me, since I joined the Board.

I’m also attending DIY SEM: Your Agency May Not Be the Best Resource - Gary Angel, Mark Ruzomberka, David Harrod and here’s my notes and insights on it - coming to you from my iPhone, while live blogging - but first, here’s the marketing notes:

A06 Wednesday, 1:05 - 1:55
DIY SEM: Your Agency May Not Be the Best Resource

Gary Angel, Semphonic
Mark Ruzomberka, Traffic.com
David Harrod, Traffic.com

Tracking the ROI on thousands of keywords seems overwhelming and managing them against business goals feels overwhelming. But outsourcing the task to an agency might not be your best move. Traffic.Com manages a significant ($1M annualized) search engine marketing program that is one of the primary drivers of traffic to their site. Facing competition from Google in their core business, Based on the optimization opportunities revealed by a Semphonic audit, Traffic opted to bring their program in-house and run it themselves. Mark Ruzomberka of Traffic.Com and Gary Angel of Semphonic will describe the process of an agency process review, outline the key decision-factors in bringing a PPC program in-house, and discuss Traffic.Com’s experience managing the program. You’ll get a better understanding of how to audit your existing SEM program, how to identify the optimization strategies that make sense for your business, and some of the benefits and barriers to managing your own SEM program.

By the way, as I noted in my earlier post a few days back, that Jim Sterne has made it really hard for me by putting an excellent session on Voice of the Customer Panel - John Fernandez, Lance Jones, Mark Brooks to be at the same time … but look, I can’t be in two places at one time - and sometimes, you just need to pick and choose what to focus on.

Here’s my notes and insights now:

Excellent session which pointed to a few conclusions:

1. It makes sense to take a paid search program, if only for being able to react much quickly and take advantage if buzz events.

2. Larger agencies maybe optimized for certain types of activities, they may not suit many businesses that operate with a hybrid model, or atypical business cycle (for example, if your business depends on natural disasters happening) you might be happy when events happen that are most people’s misery.

3. Certain optimizations are not worth doing, even if they are possible to do.

When I met Matt Mullenweg recently at WordCamp NYC (WordPress WordCamp NYC part 1) I told him that WordPress blogging had helped sell me on the idea of switching over from TMobile to ATT because I now have the capacity to do a decent post, using my mobile device.

However, the first version of WordPress for the iPhone is somewhat limited in what it does - there’s no formatting controls and you can only place photos at the bottom of a post - plus you can’t put any hyperlinks in because the iPhone OS does not have that capability currently.

But I told Matt Mullenwag (who was on his way to a business meeting that concluded with the purchase of Polldaddy by Automatic, Matt’s company) that WordPress ought to make improving the iPhone application a priority, and he was receptive and suggested one might be upcoming soon.

However, I wish I told him to do one more thing - and I’m using this post to test it out - currently the Wordpress appication on the iPhone does not capture blog posts that are in draft mode - it will, however, capture those that are published.

In lieu of having that functionality - and preparing for Emetrics DC, I decided to prepare many of my posts for sessions I plan to attend beforehand, putting in the marketing notes, tags, hyperlinks, all from my laptop, then publishing my post for one minute, getting the data to sync on the WordPress application, then unpublishing my post before Google Reader or Google Alerts can pick it up. Most of the time I was successful but one - darn - my unfinished post was picked up by Google because I must have published it at an interval when Google was crawling my site.

So the first part worked - I could get my post, done on my laptop, transferred over to my iPhone Wordpress application - but …… I had not tested the post to see, if, on the iPhone, I could update the post, and then publish it from the iPhone.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do now - and I’ll write a line or two below this one - this will be proof of concept that my “workaround” for WordPress and the iPhone actually did work.

Ok, I am writing this text from my 3G IPhone and here’s the steps I took.

1. Write the parts of a post ahead of time on laptop or desktop, then publish it.

2. Immediately go to IPhone Wordpress app, sync posts with blog, the blog post should appear in the local draft listings of posts ( however the post has a status of “published” at this point.

3. Unpublish the post from the laptop or desktop.

4. Edit post from IPhone ( this step is what I did just now, here).

5. Finish blip post on IPhone then publish it.

Worked!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No problemo. I just finished the post back on my laptop, because I wanted to indent - everything worked perfectly.

So …. we now have a way to prepare a post, for say .. a conference session, beforehand, with a bunch of links and formatting - send it over to the iPhone - take your notes and finish the post without dragging around a laptop!!!

Thanks Matt Mullenweg for creating this application for the iPhone - and Matt, feel free to improve it, when you get around to it, so I don’t have to publish and unpublish my posts to get them over to the iPhone.

And this last line, I’m writing, again, from my iPhone.

WordPress Rocks -Especially on my 3G IPhone!