I would not want to miss the New York Times Presentation (Keynote) by James G. Robinson, who directs Web Analytics at the NYT; in fact, there was an excellent presentation from the NYT at the last Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, one of the best, if not the best session I attended then - I definitely will not miss this one. Here’s the marketing notes on James Robinson’s keynote:

“…Web Analytics as a Value Driver Across Media

James G. Robinson, Director of Web Analytics, The New York Times - Wednesday, 9:00 - 9:50

A massively well-received presentation in both London and San Francisco, you’ll learn how The New York Times uses web analytics to grow both their print and online audiences, improve web engagement, and increase revenue and profit. The presentation will trace the development of the Times’ web analytics strategy which is mapped directly to value drivers for customer and the business. Learn how The New York Times:

• Integrates online and print data to better track and profile users
• Uses web data to make the print newspaper more profitable
• Shapes insights to flow through “the last mile” to senior management

Again, I find myself drawn to attend the Social Media Analytics Session(s) at Emetrics on Wedensday.

I am sitting here listening to Jim Sterne introduce James Robinson. James starts with asking us if we read the paper this morning. He’s been at the Times for a year, and what a year it’s been!

Customer Insights Group - micro of intergration happening at the Times. Print and Digital are very different culturally.

Prolifiration of tools, but what drives the business, what is important?

We look at week over week analysis over month over month, things

Web analytics bulliten published weekly that ties in with current trends. Weekly reports are awsome and stakeholders love them but they aren’t enough.

We came up with 16 user behaviors that result in revenue and qualified it and came up with signing up for a subscription as by far the most profitable.

And we found 2 links on the site generating the most revenue and we ended up seeing the Print and Digital needed to talk to each other, so we got both talking.

James went into a new approach of predicting how many newspapers extra to print after a scandel (covered at the last emetrics in SF).

We came up with a metric based on total pageviews / revenue to drive the print business. Circulation Analysis.

Eggs and Investment - we had to decide weather to invest inall of this - Pageviews per Keywords. We have millions of possible. A page has a value, a keyword has a value. We haven’t figured it all out yet but our approach is determined.

Here’s our approach - if you do a user behavior analysis, it’s a single, tie to revenue, a double, investment a triple, ROI, a home run.

What does each if our tools used for? We have a clear idea now, much more than a year ago.

Newstracker - an interesting story.

Questions:

1. How do combine audience measurement with web analytics? They do, but James didn’t go into detail.

2. How did James get to this Job? He said it was a long, winding path.

Summery; James came up with a few really interesting insights from his first year running New York Times Web Analytics and the key takeaway for me is the weekly reports that are published internally and tie in current events, being a newspaper, they can do draw on it and these reports create company wide awareness of the web analytics group.

The question about intergrating Nielsen NetRatings with Omniture/WebTrends mirrors issues I’m dealing with currently, but I don’t think James really answered the question exceptvto say that it has been accomplished by his team.

Also, James said audience measurement sits on a different part of the New York Times Tools map than Web Analytics, and pointed out that you dont’t use a hammer when a screwdriver is required, and it’s important to have a map of tools your organization uses and the purposethey are used for.

But having said that, James said audience data is used to figure out “who” is reading the paper and web analytics shows “how” they are reading the paper.

Interesting point.

At the end of the session Omniture had a presentation mobile phones.

What does the market look like for mobile? Quite a lot of growth in numbers and capabilites.

Interesting presentation about celiberities and mobile phones. Analytics show mobile “referrers” by make.

Many challenges for web analytics and Matt from Overture went over the main ones.

Image tags used for identification. Omniture has intergrated Site Catalyst with mobile analytics. Partly we need to identify the handset so site owners can determine if the site experience works for the site. Capturing data and geolocation.

I’ve been back in New York most of the day; still trying to figure out Webmetricsguru.com disparity between RSS Feed traffic stats/ Sitemeter stats and overall, getting the site looked at by Google after the damange Know More Media did to it.

It’s nice to finally be in the control of my blog - though I am waiting on some things such as the template update (which hasn’t happened yet), some plugins to be added and stuff like that.

Meanwhile, I had some footage I took from South Park and Buzzlogic’s offices yesterday that I just uploaded.

I was thinking how much Web 2.0 (which may include Web 2.0 and Web 4.0 and maybe even Web 5.0 - whatever that is actually called) is about peer to peer sharing of data with users and the generation of wealth from the content those users create on a site.

Having that in mind, having South Park called the “Center of Web 2.0″, along with good coffee, as you an see in my video, peeked my interest to know more.

Yeah, I saw the original home of Twitter and how people are relaxing in South Park - how culture in San Francisco for techonology is alive and strong.

On the other hand, I’d still much rather live in New York City - but I can see why many people like San Francisco.

Still tired from the trip - and I can’t believe I’ll be out in Hollywood in 10 days for Virtual Worlds Hollywood.

Hope you enjoyed the online video, by the way!

I had some footage of Rachel Scotto’s Huddle at Semphonic XChange that took place on Monday morning - plus a few more minutes of things I saw in San Francisco - here’s that footage in a small movie:

There were a couple of reviews of the session I spoke at today at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose including one in Web Analytics World and another at Online Markeing Blog which had a more detailed write up:

“… To wrap up, Marshall Sponder discussed the use of social media within Web 2.0. Social media is about the conversation, just as Matt Bailey said that it is about asking questions. Having that interaction will get us all up to the next level of measurement and understanding. Marshall shares that in order to get the most conversions, you need to treat the visitors from Twitter differently than the visitors from forums, and differently from the direct visitors.

And within the social space, there are millions of conversations going on daily. But how do you measure this conversation? Marshall mentioned using monitoring tools such as Radian6 to track the effects of a social media conversation. Without measuring the conversation and the outcomes of that conversation, you are missing out on a huge chunk of useful data.

It seems from this panel that the best way to measure web 2.0 success is to ask questions of the data and challenge yourself to find the results in the communication happening between users. These questions and communication could easily generate a new idea for tracking and monitoring, which will benefit clients and companies in the long run.”

Being on the same panel with three, really strong speakers and not having a presentation ready, as everyone else did, made it more of a challenge for me to hold the attention of the audience - there were about 450 attendees to the session.

Tired.  Was up early this morning; left San Francisco early this morning and got here care of Jim Sterne, who attended XChange along with me, and,  who gave me a lift to downtown San Jose.

I had a wonderful time tonight at the Opening Welcome Reception Streets of San Francisco at Semphonic XChange and had several great conversations as well as hanging out afterwards in the Ritz Hotel Cafe.

I managed to pull my self away from conversation, or to have some more conversations, while filming this online video, hope you enjoy it - thought it is over 9 minutes along.

Having lunch with a spectacular view here at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. I am here for Semphonic Xchange, where I will be leading a Social Media Huddle on Monday.

Trying to add a photo I just took using the Wordpress application my 3G IPhone, but not having any luck.

By the way, the Web 2.0 Strategy guide I mentioned yesterday, and talked about in the YouTube video, is well worth purchasing. In fact, I noticed O’Rielly does something really smart by giving purchasers of the book 45 days of free online access to the full version of the book (once you register it, which I haven’t done yet) allowing me to fully Quote and search from within the book, online.

Really smart. By the way,I think one or two people from O’Rielly will be attending XChange, so I will personally reach out to them about the book.

And forgive me for my spelling errors….I am writing on my IPhone, need I say more?

I'll be speaking at Semphonic's XChange conference next month in San Francisco - it'll be my second time at XChange, having spoken at the conference last year at the Copia Institute in September 07.

The Semphonic XChange Huddles are interesting and diverse -  with mine being on Measuring Social Media and Its Enterprise Impacts  which will be an extension of the buzz monitoring / web analytics work I'm doing right now and why I think it's important that Web Analysts have these tools - normally, when you have tools like Radian6 and Buzzlogic in an organization, it's just for Marketing and Communications professionals - but I think they also belong in the Web Analytics Group, perhaps even more so then in Communications - but that's just my point of view.

Anyway, I did an interview with Gary Angel that is featured in a post titled X Change Mania - which I hope you'll read - put much of the synthesis of my thoughts on marketing in that interview.

The other day I wrote about Conversational Measurement Toolbox from Federated Media - I was trying to find out what the Conversational Measurement Toolbox looked like (I'm not an advertiser or publisher with FM … so how do I actually see it?) and parts of the information that is fed into that platform by Buzzlogic (I interviewed Todd Parsons last month in San Francisco while at Emetrics - see linked videos).

I also spoke to Rob Crumpler and Valerie Combs of Buzzlogic recently, and met both last week in New York at an IAB Conference on User Generated Content.

Here's what I think is going into the Conversational Measurement Toolbox platform from Buzzlogic - how that all gets integrated with everything else FM is pulling in … I don't yet know.

According to Valerie Combs (I have a video of Pete Cashmore - who I saw a few times last week in NYC along with Valarie talking about Wine) of Buzzlogic:

Essentially, we’re capturing all of the activity occurring across blogs within specific conversations, and demonstrating for advertisers where there are shifts, spikes, etc to help them inform and optimize campaigns..

Assuming this chart and the table below refer to influencers already isolated by the Buzzlogic Platform (or, would the site volume refer to Federated Media properties where an ad is running via the Buzzlogic platform, and how the traffic from influencers on the topic of the ad is impacted). 

Interesting chart and table below - my guess is this information I just presented is for the Federated Media Advertiser.

I'm assuming the "conversions across all publishers" is a number that's going to be supplied by Federated Media to the Advertisers. 

The next chart and table, I think, is geared to the Federated Media Site (ie: Smartmobs.com runs Federated Media, and I have, on occasion, written for them, not so much lately - but I can see where you'd have to provided two sets of metrics, one for the Advertiser and one for the Publisher - and what I think the chart below does is give the benefits to the publisher - but maybe I have it wrong, or mixed up - happy to be corrected here).

Now, maybe, this chart is not for the publisher - but it could be for the site that is doing the advertising - which means that Buzzlogic (or FM, in this case) has a tag based solution for tracking the analytics - my next discussion with Buzzlogic or Federated Media, will give me the extra context I need to read these charts properly - but if any of my readers want to chime in, feel free to.

 I put a lot of information in this post and the links in it - perhaps I haven't absorbed all of it, myself, but one thing stood out - hidden in a press release about The Conversational Measurement Toolbox(which I repeated, below):

".. FM also announced that Battelle, a member of the IAB board, will join an IAB taskforce on measurement in social media, and will work to align FM’s work with the IAB's. "

That's interesting because it puts John Battelle right on an intersection with the work of the Web Analytic Association, specifically the Social Media Committee that I direct, the Standards Committee, as well - in fact, I hope to have a few "Web 2.0 Standards to release, in draft form, at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.

FEDERATED MEDIA INTRODUCES CONVERSATIONAL MEASUREMENT TOOLBOX

Launches Industry’s First Open Platform for the Exchange of Conversational Media Metrics

SAUSALITO, Calif., June 10, 2008 – Federated Media Publishing (FM) today introduced the Conversational Measurement Toolbox to leading media and marketing industry executives at the Conversational Marketing Summit: New Brand Way in New York City. The toolbox consists of a suite of campaign measurement, planning and reporting tools offering marketers greater control and insight into their conversational marketing efforts.

"One of the greatest barriers that we’ve seen for marketers in social media has been a general lack of standards and tools for campaign measurement and reporting,” said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at eMarketer. “There are, of course, vendors who supply disconnected data points, but it has so far been up to the marketer to wade through this sea of data themselves. What is needed is a single device or methodology that aggregates relevant data in an easily digestible form.”

The integrated suite of tools and services is built on an open, scalable architecture used to collect, aggregate and report data from internal reporting, third-party tracking providers and social media application developers. The data is then available via an automated, easily accessible campaign-reporting dashboard that informs the delivery, engagement, amplification and equity sought by marketing partners. The data will also be available via API/SDK to social application developers who want to use and exchange rich conversational metrics. an>

“Prioritizing a focus on measurement is key in the social media space,” said Daina Middleton, SVP Sunao, Moxie Interactive. “We were encouraged when we heard FM was rolling out a conversational media measurement methodology and toolbox and are looking forward to the insights that the new service should produce.”

The toolbox was created specifically to build visibility and accountability into today’s eclectic media and marketing mix consisting of IAB advertising, sponsorships, video advertising, widgets, social networking applications, conversational media hubs and more. FM will roll out the newly-minted Conversational Media Measurement Toolbox in conjunction with several major brand marketers and leading digital media measurement firms who have been enlisted as beta partners.

“The Internet has become a vast network of socially-connected content, which paves the way for advertisers to go beyond the final click when measuring and understanding digital media performance,” said Rob Crumpler, CEO of FM partner BuzzLogic. “The conversational nature of the Web enables advertisers to recognize consumer engagement across multiple touchpoints, and leverage this data to fuel an online ad strategy – before, during and after a campaign.”

“Digital media and marketing has come a long way in the last few years,” said John Battelle, IAB board member, executive producer of the CM Summit and CEO of FM. “The success of online advertising can no longer be defined only by direct response metrics. Today’s brand marketers are focusing on an entirely different set of parameters. This toolbox was designed specifically for the needs of the brand marketer looking for the power to leverage the conversational media space in the most effective and efficient way possible.”

FM also announced that Battelle, a member of the IAB board, will join an IAB taskforce on measurement in social media, and will work to align FM’s work with the IAB's. 

About Federated Media

At FM, we believe great voices attract great audiences. We're in the business of supporting those voices by connecting them to great marketers, as well as providing a suite of services that let authors focus on what they do best: make compelling media. In so doing, we are creating federations of respected voices that prosper on their own terms. Current federations include Sports, Technology, Automotive, Business & Marketing, Media & Entertainment, Video Gaming, Graphics Arts, News 2.0, Lifestyle, Parenting and Green. For more information, please go to http://www.federatedmedia.net.

Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

I put two good posts up on The Analytics Guru tonight - the first one, Too many friends? deals with the biological limits to the number of friends you can have and how Social Networks may have altered the limits and made them go much higher.

The second post, ComScore buys M:Metrics  is not really a surprise but it does bring up the question on how ComScore is going to add the M:Metrics data in to the rest of it's reports - and I have some ideas about it.

By the way, I'm going to be pretty busy the third week of August in the Bay Area with speaking engagements at two conferences that overlap somewhat:

1. I'll be attending August 17-19, 2008 - not sure if I'll be a huddle leader or facilitator yet - that's still being worked out.

2.  I've been invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies San Jose (August 18-21st) on two Social Media related sessions.

1. The first session is “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World. That one is a panel of analytics experts (Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, Matt Bailey and me) and it is scheduled for Tuesday, August 19^th, 11:00am – 12:15pm.
2. The second session was my idea entirely -  “Social Media Analysis and Tracking.”  I'll try to get a few sites I work with/for on board along with Todd Parsons from Buzzlogic, who has agreed to speak. It is scheduled for Wednesday, August 20^th, 2:45pm – 4:00pm.

What I've been thinking, having attended several Search Engine Strategies conferences (all in New York - I've never attended one in San Jose) is that I'd like to offer even more information that is really useful about Social Media Measaurement - stuff I've never heard any where before - I'd like to offer that to the audience in San Jose.  The Social Media tract at SES New York was really good - and I want to add more to it.

Of course, I'd like to see the GooglePlex too …. will ask Avinash Kaushik to take me over to his office there (I'm sure I'll do that) and go to the GooglePlex party - .. they always have a GooglePlex party at SES San Jose.

Here's something to nibble at - just an idea.  Does anyone really know how much Social Media traffic a site gets?   I wrote about it a while back in Webmetricsguru in Monitoring Social Media Traffic on a site but there's another way via ComScore:

1. Generate Source/Loss reports for a site property or properties you want to compare.  I recommend expanding the listing (see all the sites that make up a property).  I think collecting a few months of data is also a good idea (you can get the last 15 months of Source/Loss reports on any site that ComScore reports on).
2. Generate the latest Conversational Media Report from Top Measures in ComScore MyMetrix.
3. Using Vlookup in Excel, match up the Source traffic to the Conversational Media sites it came from (this includes a listing Blogs, Forums and Social Network sites that ComScore has associated with Conversational or Social Networking activity).
4. Add up the traffic in UV (000) and divide it by the total traffic, UV (000) the property received that month to get the % traffic from Social Media.

You can do this over time and using competitors - as I did - and find out some interesting things.

Overall, for the sites I looked at today, Social Media traffic was hovering between  3%-6% of total traffic but if you looked at certain sources of traffic like LinkedIn or MySpace*, you could see interesting patterns of where one competitor leveraged Social Media better than another.

Finally, I wanted to mention a point I brought up in an earlier post tonight on Techrigy SM2 Social Media Monitoring Platform  -  that Social Media activities and platforms need an "owner" in many corporations … and often … there's no clear owner or even someone that wants to own things like Social Media activities (say, a breakfast or similar face to face networking function) and more exotic things like membership in organizations such as the Blog Council.

What I'm saying is that we're in a curious state of affairs with Social Media - that's unlike Web Analytics or Search Marketing (the last two have been accepted at most organizations and have a place somewhere within that organization); the same can not be said for Social Media.

Perhaps the issue of no clear ROI from Social Media (I don't think that's true, by the way)- meaning, it's not clear to many companies how reliable or measurable Social Media really is ….. and therefore, organizations haven't yet invested enough in it because they would rather spend money where they know it'll work and get the most demonstratable value.

The other point is  - even when organizations accept Social Media - they might not know where it belongs (who is the owner of it - who has the budget for it?)  Does it lie in Marketing, or is it somewhere else? Who do you ask?   The answer is, often, unclear. 

At least, that's what I've experienced.

How does that tie into Search Engine Strategies and XChange conferences later this summer?  

Well … attend, one or both conferences, make sure to attend my sessions and you'll find out. 

Took a video of events this evening in San Francisco after the XChange Conference.  Tomorrow we'll be meeting Howard Rheingold whose Smartmobs blog I also post to (lately I've been so busy that my posting at Smartmobs has been less frequent than normal … will try to up the frequency of my posts there).