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.

When you want to take your blog to the next level?

Marketing
Messaging
Brand

Marketing and Social Media, blog is the hub, it is your idenity, pulls all the areas of you, together.

As a director of technolgy at B5 Media, and the fact of the matter is 90% of your traffic will come from new visitors.

Drive by visitors - if you create “Ever Green Content” that is always going to be there, it gets tons of traffic.

Related Content - if you can install a plugin that shows related info, or if you can get them to dive deeper, not just the last 10 posts, that is good.

It’s about your customer, not you, use the search query to give them what they want.

Messaging- know what your community wants. For example, the 10% of your users are RSS subscriber and those have bought into your writing.

Robert Scoble, Starfish paradigm, people often don’t know what they want but may happen onto your site, and may consider you an authority.

Brand - the Holy Grail of marketers
Your users actually control the brand, not the Brand.

Once you have a bad experience with a brand and can’t get it resolved, that brand goes into the toilet, and as a blogger, you can write what you want because your blog is your “hub”.

Corporate Brand is looked at in different ways by various people cited.

Question about less volume and consistency over more volume with less consistency (a few posts a week vs. 30 posts a day? Is engadget’s community as “tight”?). Aaron Brazell thinks quality, less posts, but tighter community is better.

With corporations, companies like Dell, SouthWest Airways, Comcast, have good interactions while some companies may be in the interaction and transparency with users on the web.

How do you convert a first time visitor to a regular reader? Aaron thinks that is a strategy decision. Aaron’s company deals with this issue but he did not want to plug it while speaking.

How to you get better relations with bigger blogs? People on the Head of the “Tail” like FriendFeed, as it’xmore closely monitored.

Note: this session was interesting but did not provide me with much new information.

I get the feeling there's deals going on around me, especially when I travel to conferences, like I did for LeWeb3 in Paris last December.  I bumped into Robert Scoble a few times, mostly at the conference hall - now Scoble has mentioned the main reason he was in Paris last year, it was to Walk around Paris with Dave Sifry and discuss his new TravelGuide platform.

I admit, I heard about the TravelGuide yesterday and thought .. so what? Don't we have a ton of travel guides as it is?  Apparently not - not like this, according to Scoble:

"…I was sworn to secrecy about what we were doing in Paris last December. You thought I was there to attend and speak at the LeWeb conference. I was. But we also were testing out Dave Sifry’s new business idea, which he now calls Offbeat Guides. Several people have blogged about them overnight. TechCrunch has a further writeup about the guides.

So, what is it? It’s a paper book. Horrors! Paper? Travel guides? How old school. Heheh.

But, from the moment I saw it I wanted it. Why? It was a paper guide customized to Dave’s agenda. His hotel was right on the cover. Inside everything he needed to know was there. His schedule. The restaurants within walking distance of his hotel (and other ones he wanted to visit). Weather. Transit stations. A list of cool tourist destinations we wanted to get to, and info that he needed to know about them. (When we tested his guide out we were standing in front of the Louvre in Paris).

Even things like key phrases in the language of the region (good for finding a bathroom, or buying a beer), plus exchange rates, tipping guides, that kind of thing.

But why are these so great? Because they are up to date to when you actually travel."

I asked for an invite code so I could try it out on my own, but I have to admit - if Offbeat Guides does what Robert Scoble describes, it will help while traveling to an unfamiliar place.

Wish I could stream video to QIK like Robert Scoble does in Twitter execs talk about scalability and troubles - but then, I don't have 20,000 Twitter Followers - and I guess this video explains what kinds of problems that may, from time to time, create for Twitter - I mean, Twitter staying up - as it's been going down a lot.

According to this video that Scoble made today, Twitter problems are going to persist for some time- and, perhaps, Twitter is a victim of it's own success - as more people have more followers - more messages are being replicated.

By the way, I'd addicted to Twitter.   Last night I was having dinner on W 21st Street in Manhattan and I twittered about it.  As it turns out, I was sketching from a table that was right outside the restaurant and in walks Frederic Guarino @fredericguarino .

Such a meeting could never have happened without Twitter, and it was totally unplanned. 

I guess the efforts of Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur (who I met at LeWeb3) are paying off as Steven Spielberg and other celebrities have just adopted Seesmic.com as a way to asynchronously respond and/or promote their efforts.

This use of Seesmic was probably unforeseen but seems to strike the right note - and Robert Scoble has been flooding Twitter today with Tiny Urls of various celebrities that have suddenly jumped on board the Seesmic.com Bandwagon. 

In fact, Robert Scoble posted about it earlier today on Scobleizer - 

"…Today Seesmic got a HUGE win. The Indiana Jones crew, including famous movie stars and movie directors, are on Seesmic. Here, check them out:

http://seesmic.com/cate
http://seesmic.com/georgelucas
http://seesmic.com/harrison
http://seesmic.com/steven
http://seesmic.com/karen

There’s a lot more on this over on TechMeme this morning. These celebrities are so well known in our culture that I don’t even think I need to put their full names in my post. Ever heard of Harrison Ford? Steven Spielberg?

It’s interesting, CEO Loic Le Meur bristled when I told him that FriendFeed was the World Wide Talk Show. He said he was going to turn Seesmic into that and this shows that he’s probably right. Funny, though, that I first learned of this on FriendFeed. If you look at everyone this morning talking about Seesmic, you’ll see there’s a TON of new conversation happening thanks to these celebrities showing up on Seesmic."

 

I used Seesmic to respond and post my own thoughts, asynchronously, to Steven Spielberg's comments on the new Indiana Jones movie Spielberg first, than my response.  

Thanks to @Fred2Baro for plugging me onto the Spielberg story. 

Personally, I can't imagine living now, in this time, and not using Social Media, for all it's worth. 

The other night I was at a party and I spoke to someone that didn't have a mobile phone (said it makes her sick), doesn't use Twitter, doesn't know much or anything about Social Networks - and is a film producer. 

Ok, maybe microwaves can make some people sick (I'll grant that) but more often, I think some people are just afraid to embrace new technology - and to some extent - those people will find themselves, more and more, being left out of the conversation.

I suppose if I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Davos, while the World Economic Forum was going on this month, this kinda thing could have happened to me.  Imagine Zuckerberg AND Musharraf hanging with Robert Scoble in The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook:

"…He invited me to a breakfast with Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf. We walked together to the breakfast, which was interesting because of Musharraf’s comments, where he defended his administration. After the breakfast Mark and I spent a bunch of time together, where he gave me permission to quote him."

Darn, I must not be going to the right conferences - my new measure should be if I can bump into Musharraf and Zuckerberg than I know I'm in the right room.

Nah! But it does sound like a pretty exclusive club - not that I would have minded being invited - I would have loved to go. 

Diden't know that Zuckerberg was uncomfortable around bloggers (how'd he do so well with Scoble)?

"…..asked him why he doesn’t like going on video and seems to have difficulty dealing with the press and bloggers. He said he was shy. Asked me not to video him “I freeze up,” he told me. He did promise to meet more with bloggers and to give me a video interview when he’s back home."

I know the feeling - I freeze up too, sometimes, when you put me in frount of a group of people and ask me to speak - but it's getting better. 

Well…. it happens -

Scobleizer Oh, oh, Facebook blocked my account because I was hitting it with a script. Naughty, naughty Scoble! about 13 hours ago from im  

 Right…   and it quickly became news - Facebook Bots Disable Robert Scoble

 

 

But Scoble admitted  that it was Plaxo that was running a script on his behalf - Robert comes clean. He was using a version of Plaxo Pulse to try to migrate his contacts over into outlook.

I guess that's what happens to you when you have 5000+ Facebook friends and you try something a little different ……. and all of a sudden… bang, your locked out of Facebook.

Not that I think pulling all that data into Pulse is really worth the effort or punishment -and I bet he'll be reinstated pretty soon. 

In Celebrating seven years of blogging Robert Scoble, who I saw several times this week in Paris at LeWeb3 (and nearly bumped into at the Louvre) talks about how long he's been blogging:

"…..Truth is that this form of communication is still in its infancy. Imagine talking about newspapers just 10 years after they were developed and thinking “this is it, no more to do.” Yeah, right.

2008 is going to bring us live streaming video from our cell phones. What’s beyond that? Who knows, but I’m along for the ride!"

"..December 15, 2000. That’s when I started blogging. In seven years a lot has happened. The first two years of my blog have disappeared. They might be on a hard drive somewhere, I’m still trying to track them down. Dave Winer first linked to me on December 29th (sent me about 3,000 people, if I remember my stats right).

The term “weblog” is 10 years old on Monday. So lots of blogging birthdays. Jorn Barger, the guy who came up with the name, has some tips for new bloggers to celebrate. It’s good advice and advice I try to listen to. It’s amazing that I was three years behind Jorn but that when I started there was still only a very small community of bloggers (less than 200 that I could find — I did some research since Dori Smith asked me to do a session on blogging at the Internet conference I was helping Dan Shafer plan)."

If Robert Scoble is 7 "blog" years old, I'll be 2 "blog" years old on February 9th, 2008 (which will be the 2 year anniversary of Webmetricsguru.com).   I suppose I have also blogged a little bit before that on my personal blogger blog - www.now-seo.com, which has been redirected to www.my-metrics.com recently, by me.

Scoble goes on to say the last 7 years have seen many changes - with the last one, 15 on the list, being ominous … but there's a question mark there too:

"…In the past seven years I’ve survived:

1. The bubble bursting.
2. A car wreck.
3. A terrorist attack.
4. A divorce.
5. My grandma dying.
6. My mom dying.
7. A new marriage.
8. Five moves.
9. Five jobs (soon to be six).
10. Three URLS (1 http://scobleizer.manilasites.com 2. http://scoble.weblogs.com 3. http://scobleizer.com ).
11. I don’t know how many social networks I’ve been on (Twitter, Upcoming, Seesmic, Kyte, Flickr, Orkut, MySpace, Google Reader, Facebook, Yelp, Pownce, Jaiku are some of the ones I’m on currently).
12. Successfully getting Patrick into teenage years.
13. Birth of a new son, Milan.
14. Writing a book about corporate blogging with Shel Israel, “Naked Conversations.”
15. A new bubble?"

Well, I did see Robert Scoble next to an attractive woman in the reception area of LeWeb3, so maybe that's the wife - not sure, but know nothing of the car wreck since I haven't regularly read his blog till over the last year or so - and then, not all the time.

But like Scoble, I share the same idea of needing to read my RSS Feeds constantly, and while I don't subscribe to 800 feeds, as he does, I have a pretty good selection of around 200-300 feeds I read every day - often on my handheld or iPod Nano - where I find it's easier to digest information in small bits, on a smaller screen.   I then put stars next to the feed items I want to write about - and the next time I get an opportunity, I post on them if I still want to.

I find it still too hard to actually post to any blog using my Tmobile Sidekick 3 (doesn't actually work) or iPod Touch - too cumbersome to type the post out.  But those devices are fairly ideal for reading and digesting information while in movement, on a bus, at a conference, on the John, whatever, it's easier to read feeds on a small device, and take in the information, than on a laptop…but that's just me.

I posted a couple of Compete.com Videos on Biggreenblog including an interview of David Cancel, who runs Compete, by Robert Scoble. Have been in communication with David Cancel for several months on metrics, so I'm glad to finally see a online video interview of Cancel.

Here's the Videos in case anyone would like to take a look - I noticed them on Scoble's blog and they're sharable.

COMPETE.COM DEMO

INTERVIEW OF DAVID CANCEL - COMPETE.COM

Robert Scoble read my post comparing Linden Labs backend metrics for April (and March 07) and Comscore's recent announcement regarding Second Life population and geographical preferences.

"…Almost every entrepreneur I talk to lately whines privately about the stats they see on places like Compete.com, Comscore, and Alexa. Today Tom Conrad of Pandora told me that they are extremely low. He says his service requires registration, so he has very accurate stats of who’s signed into Pandora and he can’t figure out why the stats services are so far off of the real stats.

Marshall Sponder, over on Web Metrics Guru, looks into Comscore’s stats of Second Life’s users and finds the same problem.

The thing is these services rely on toolbars (I can’t even use any of the toolbars on the Macintosh for some reason, and how many of you even have one of these folks’ toolbars loaded? None of my friends do and I’ve been checking). Or they rely on “panels” of Web users that they survey regularly. Do you know the selection mechanisms? How do they know they are getting a representative sample? Clearly very few people who run Web companies find their stats accurate. Yet we’re supposed to believe in them?"

ComScore got caught with their pants down because they reported on Second Life usage where there are backend numbers directly out of Linden Labs that contradict most of the findings.  

When there's no other data than ComScore, Nielsen or HitWise (which does not give absolute numbers, just percentages) to tell us about behavior of other sites, outside our own, or sectors of sites - the inaccuracies are accepted because it's still better than nothing. 

The Linden numbers just show us what we've settled for - an approximation from ComScore that's often way off. Meaning - you don't go to the bank with anything that Comscore, Nielsen or HitWise tells you - you can't - they're too inaccurate.