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.

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.

I’ll be at SMX East on Tuesday Morning, October 7th, and I’ll try to make it for the morning Keynote on with Google’s Tim Armstrong, who is President of Advertising and Commerce for Google, Inc.

I also plan to attend Search & The US Presidential Campaign, Personalized & Customized Search and the Paid Search Analytics sessions.

I’m also attending the NYC Tech Meetup on Tuesday evening and a SMX East party bash later on Tuesday evening.

Meanwhile, there are some good posts by others I wanted to mention, including one by Shawn Collins who did an Affiliate Summit Social Media Recap for the conference I missed last Sunday; I also wanted to go and had a ticket, I just had the problem of not being able to be in two places at once - I opted to attend WordCamp instead of Affiliate Summit.  Fortunately, Shawn’s post gives me much of the information I missed.

Also, Michael Arrington is plugging LeWeb3 in Paris this year - Get Yourself A Ticket To LeWeb and writes about it in TechCrunch- I attended LeWeb3 last year but am on the fence this time, awaiting a Press Pass though I really wanted to speak, instead.  However, SES Chicago is happening at the same time, and I have a shot of speaking at it, redoing my San Jose panel, so if I had to choose I’d probably pick the Conference I can speak at over one I can’t.

On the other hand, at the rate the global economy is collapsing, I am wondering if going to Europe now is such a good idea.

I also briefly saw SEOmoz show me his new SEOToolKit - SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset.

Honestly, I’m not all that impressed, and many SEO tools are hard to use and don’t add much value; we’ll see.

That’s enough for tonight, going to sleep now.

Came in after lunch and Allan Stern, Gorden Peters, Mike Miller and Scott Rafer are speaking about Social Ad Network Solutions.

This an interactive panel.

Movement to use of more engaging applications, which makes sense, as the more engaging creative is needed for social media.

This may be meaningful for companies such as the online job search engines like Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs where it makes sense to advertise in Social Networks only to the extent you can make applications (say, in FaceBook) engaging and interactive.

CPM’s, presently at ~ 1.00 USD, are in visioned to increase to ~ 10.00 USD within the next year.

Metrics to be aware of:
Page segmentation data; silo ing of Social Networks is a going away. For people whobwant to piggy back on FaceBook Connect, now is the time as FaceBook will end up doing the same thing with OpenConnect as they did with applications a year ago.

Idea: there needs to be a standard for a “Social Media Endorsement”; not doing so leads into more trditional metrics that play into Google’s hand.

2010 seems to be the agreed on time when the value of social media, in a way that can be qualified, will emerge.

The space is less than a year old, it’s really just starting, perhaps equivalent to 2004 for search and online advertising.

CtR is not the metric we think should be focused on. In 2010 we’ll move to a space where we’ll be able to qualify and monitize social media.

Metrics we can look at today is do they come from a social media site and then search for one of the relevent keywords for the brand.

Brand affinity would be great if metrics could track it; the money will open up once this happens.

It is also true there I’d so much unsold inventory on Social Networks, and the only way to get larger spends is 3rd Party Reporting.

Today, impressions are like air and inventory is really, really cheap, but in two years it will not be the case.

Demographic targeting is present, today, but can’t fully be used, yet. Interactions need to be classified and ranked and that is more important that demographic data.

By the way - here’s a more detailed writeup of the same session from Inside the Marketers Studio by David Berkowitz, who takes pretty detailed notes, I’ve found - Social Network Ad Solutions

I came in to the Social Ad Summit about 2 hours after it started. After running into a few friends, I sat down and started live blogging using my 3G IPhone (forgive my spelling errors and lack of hyperlinks, bolder text and underlined text).

Branded Experiences on Social Networks
Hyper Targeted Ads (Facebook)
Social Banners
Branded Virtual Gifts

Branded Apps
Fans (Fan Pages)
Groups (funny pages like when I was your age Pluto was a Planet). Need adjust your tone depending on where you advertising.
Events (event page on FaceBook)

What do you need to do?
1. Clear, definable goals
2. Use multiple channels and be ready to fail on some channels.
3. Leverage metrics to qualify your success.
Keep on testing.
========================
Advertising on Social Networks _ what Brands spend on Social Media

tFocus Agency: moderator

mTV - spend about 500k in Social Media (awful)
JPMorgan - didn’t say
FORD (Scott Monty) - know he’s a Social Media Czar at Ford.

How does a Brand inject itself in a conversation. Scott Monty says Social Media is about building longer term relationships because it buys you more in the long run. Note to myself( if this is so, there needs to be a way to prove it).

Look at the lifetime value of those who download an application. From a brand marketing point of view, there’s a lot of percision in the online digital platform missing in offline channels.

Scott Monty mentions people want data to be embedded in their own ways.

MTV - use our content to “express yourself”. Eventually, we’ll make more money.

Control - choose the communities you wish to engage with (Ford, Sims, personal vechile), led to 4.5 million downloads in the game.

Metrics - look for absense of saying “this is really stupid” as a sign of success.

Give something of value such as widget, etc. Also, the more time a visitor is exposed to a brand can be looked at as a network.

Why does someone choose Facebook vs. Myspace?

Commedians- use Myspace. Scott Monty thinks Ford can do a better job in terms of long term value and engagement.

Ford has to do micro-targeting to figure out where their audience is because all we know, so far, is they drive.

Mobile?

By the way - here’s a link to a more complete writeup of this session from Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz’s Marketing blog - Branded Experiences on Social Networks

David was sitting at the same table I was at.

I recently wrote about The Engagement Ramp which is a formula I made up to try to figure out, using ComScore’s panel data, if a site or Social Network had “momentum“.   The formula I use is the average number of times a unique visitor visited a site per month / the average number of minutes per visit.

I reasoned, if a site is growing more interesting - the average number of visits will increase, up to a point, and visitors will be spending longer during each visit.   But that would not always work, except, in this case, I used Social Networks as the focus of this study - usually you want members to stay longer.

I used the Media Trend for Conversational Media/Social Networks, and he’s the embedded spreadsheet.  I think the larger social networks aren’t changing that much, but some of the smaller, less well known properties, are - that’s my takeaway.

By the way, I’ll be at the Social Ad Summit most of Monday -and was thinking about the value of knowing if a property is growing to be more interesting to it’s members, as a basis for advertising - just a thought.

Ok, so today, you have a 1/5 chance that if your looking for a job, your potential employer will be crawling Social Networks to find out why they should/should not hire you according to a story in ComputerWorld yesterday - titled One in five employers uses social networks in hiring process.

The study was conducted by CareerBuilder.com:

“… The study found that the number of hiring managers that are turning to social networks like MySpace and Facebook to delve into candidates’ online behavior is increasing quickly: Some 22% of employers said they already peruse social networks to screen candidates, while an additional 9% said they are planning to do so. Only 11% of managers used the technology in 2006.”

“….”Hiring managers are using the Internet to get a more well-rounded view of job candidates in terms of their skills, accomplishments and overall fit within the company,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder.com, in a statement. “As a result, more job seekers are taking action to make their social networking profiles employer-friendly. Sixteen percent of workers who have social networking pages said they modified the content on their profile to convey a more professional image to potential employers.”

My feeling is that anything you put up online, is fair game - if you put it up yourself.   What’s more tricky is stuff that a Search Engine finds that you didn’t put there - and that can’t entirely be stopped, given the state of search technology, today.

I applied to speak at LeWeb3 08 this year - I attended last year as press, but I felt I had more to say, and it was on the stage.  Well, we’ll see if they pick up on my proposal - the theme this year is “Love”.  I’m getting into liking to speak - wanting to be in the larger stage.  It’s one thing to write about what others say - I’m doing a lot of that - but I also want to be part of the action.

Hmm… Love and Web Analytics, and Art.  Why not? I can definitely talk about Love - especially if that’s what they want to hear in Paris.  And I would not be stretching things much.

Here’s what I proposed I’d present  - Stay Tuned.   I’d really Love to speak at LeWeb3 08.

Oh well, we’ll see.

A brief synopsis (200-250 words) outlining the talk the speaker proposes. This must very clear address how the talk relates to the conference theme of “love”:

As a Web Analyst and an Artist I’ve been most interested in Social Networks for participating in the “global village” and as a platform to infuse more love in our lives.  We can measure the impact of Social Networks by those things which would not have happened without them (ie: Tweetups, Virtual Friends that become Real Friends), the much larger web of social connections that can be leverged for the good.  As an analyst, I’ve wanted to measure the effects of Social Network togetherness (that can be called a form of love).

Concepts like “engagement” (an investment of time and energy) can be measured, and therefore, concepts of love and togetherness, can be defined, and measured, even if the act of love, and love itself, is defies precise measurement.  I want to say that I love my friends, and I could have never met many of them without Facebook and Twitter.

It was the Social Network, and love of Art, that bought me to Paris twice last year and to Aix, to see my hero, and my favorite painter, Paul Cezanne, to walk though Mt,St Victore,, to connect with friends that I could have never known, so easily,  had it not been for the internet - I’d like to talk about how that all happened.  I’d like to talk about how Social Networks made my life better, and how it can be a constructive force in yours, and in anyone’s life.

As an additional note: I’m prepared to present the first set of Social Media Standards, crafted by my committee at the Web Analytics Association (you might say, crafted out of love) and how it might be used, to measure all the above).

I attended Optimization Lunch today with a co-worker for a SWIG Roundtable on testing and optimizing key pages using Analytics.  While I saw some similarities between Usability Testing and Web Analytics (a convergence of sorts), it suddently “hit” me where the future of Conversion Marketing and Social Networks lie - it’s in the Social Graph.

Why do I say that?  In flash, it came to me.   Here’s what I saw.

Most business entities (companies, corporations, for example) are building sites and want to covert or inform visitors - jumping on Social Networking, Social Media and User Generated Content might seem like the right next step.

However, people are also saturated with having to put the same information in multiple places - so much so, they don’t want to join every social network they come across, they can’t even handle the social networks they belong to now - there are so many demands on our time and attention.

What I think needs to happen, is not more Social Networks, not more filling out of information in disparte sites, but less.

For example, everytime I order something from Amazon, it should communicate with my Facebook or MySpace account - any time go to a site and fill out a form, and it has a social networking component to it - it should connect, via a module, to the Social Graph.

Not more Social Networks are needed, but less.

What’s needed, instead, is Social Networking as a Service that all sites plug into - that’s where we’re going - that’s the only future that makes any sense to me.

How fast we get there - I don’t know - it seems Tim Berners Lee’s Social Graph is the right direction (again) - we need to create applications that pull in the Social Graph, and write back to it - so the Social Graph becomes a repository for our lives and activities.

Does that create a threat to our privacy?  Yes and No.

Yes, it does, if the Goverment can get a hold of it and control it - and it will want to do that - and should not be allowed to control the Social Graph of anyone.  But, on the positive side, having one place that is authorative, for your social graph, makes it much easier to prevent mistakes and inaccuracies in your data that, currently, are spread all over the place.

So, that’s what I think - our future - the future of Social Networks - is as an online service for applications writing to and pulling data from the Social Graph.

Now, lets start making it happen.