Want to get this video up of the New York Tech Meetup I attended tonight at the IAC Building

My thoughts about SMX East starts 6 minutes into the online video, above.  For one thing, the advertisers were much the same as what I’ve seen at all the other search shows I’ve attended, so I can’t really get excited over the floor, because there wasn’t much to note.   On the other hand, the session I went to on Search and The US Presidential Election at SMX East that Sara Holoubek put together was absolutely fantastic and probably never would have happened at a SES Show.

On the other hand, doing a panel about a topical subject, such as the US Presidential Election, and the interest in the election, is hard to do on a regular basis, from show to show.  Still, I think, in  a lot of cases, content could be better than it has been.

Overall, I’d give SMX East more points than Search Engine Strategies in terms of quality of panels, it truly is a better experience.

And the Tech Meetup was great - plus I got to see the US Presidential Debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, on a gigantic screen - who can ask for more than that?

Here’s the four presentations from the Search Engine Strategies session I moderated and presented at on Social Media Analysis and Tracking last Wednesday, August 20th, 2008, in San Jose.

Track: Social Media
Social Media Analysis and Tracking
Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening in cyberspace, often in real time. By using buzz monitoring tools such as Buzzlogic, search professions can be very effective in finding influencer’s within online conversations and reaching out to them. As one example of a few that will be presented, learn how Military.com leverages social media and buzz monitoring tools, together with a solid understanding of business goals, to increase profitability.

Moderator:

• Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst, Monster.com

Speakers:

• Breanna Wigle, CRM Manager, Military Advantage
• Edmund Wong, Vice President, Strategy, iCrossing
• Todd Parsons, Co-founder & CPO, BuzzLogic.com
• Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

sessanjose08_social-media-analysis_msponder I felt that I had not really presented my ideas the previous day at the Audience 2.0 Measurement Panel with Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne and Matt Bailey - I was the only speaker without a presentation.  Felt bad about it but decided, better live and learn and put much of what I would have said, in this presentation, along with a binding to the rest of what was presented below (in the other 3 presentations).

In fact, I had “touched” the Military/Buzzlogic study, having also done analytics work for Military to find out how much Social Media traffic converted, and supplied the 6% improvement over non-social media referrers that was cited in the study.

In a real way, the Social Media Analysis and Tracking session was my idea, and I pitched it to Kevin Ryan and he took me up on it - I felt I had to deliver, and I did.

sessanjose08_social-media-analysis_tparsons When I brought Military.com and Buzzlogic together I wasn’t really sure what the outcome would be - wisely, Breanna Wigle, living in the Bay Area, was able to meet directly with Buzzlogic, and to her credit, come up with a 5K insertion order to test the concept of Social Media here.  I feel we broke new ground - really new ground - and I give Breanna Wigle a lot of credit for being able to even get Military.com to take a chance.

In this role, I saw myself as a connector - I brought the circumstances about, and they moved in their own direction - but I kept my hand in it - meaning, I touched this study, even if I was not directly involved in it’s actual creation.

sessanjose08_social-media-analysis _rkey -I’ve worked with Converseon for a good 5 years, and spoke at their Social Media Roundtable a few weeks ago in their Manhattan offices, along with K.D. Paine and Mike Moran.  Rob Key and the Converseon team are the one of the leaders in Social Media - the people you go to when you want to find out how to do it - the people who deliver results - from ground up - they know Social Media; Converseon probably has one of the best teams for Social Media in the World (and their new offices are pretty Ritzy, if I do say so, myself).

If I could wish for one more thing - it would be for some of my paintings to hang in Converseon’s offices - as I think they’d look great in that setting.

sessanjose08_social-media-analysis_ewong -The iCrossing case study was actually pretty darn good, and well researched and supported.  Also, Edward pointed out, and I noted, that he had to do a lot of url mapping to Social Media, just as I had, for some of my projects.

All of this brought home that it’s possible to do Social Media Analysis and Tracking with some degree of percision, even now, but in most cases, you’ll need a variety of tools and the ability to mash up the data.

Enjoy the presentations and I’d love to hear feedback from any of my readers on any of the presentations or ideas presented herein.

While I was riding in the the rented van with Greg Jarboe driving to John Marshall’s house last Thursday night - we all talked about what we learned at Search Engine Strategies and how much of the information needed to come up a notch so that people would value coming (see On the way to John Marshall\’s House in Santa Cruz)

But then, Greg Jarboe said he had given away some really valuable information in during the Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) session on day 1 of Search Engine Strategies San Jose pertaining to related Searches and YouTube traffic on Google sites in slide 6 of his deck and I saw a blog post about it, here on a post about -SEO-PR president shares Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) case studies at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose (see below):

There’s also a blub about the VSEO session at SearchEngineWatch blog:

“…Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)
Blogging for Search Engine Roundtable, Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp writes, “According to comScore, nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March 2008, viewing a total of 11.5 billion online videos during the month. However, the average YouTube video receives only 100 views a year. This makes optimizing video for YouTube one of the biggest opportunities in the fast-changing and complex world of search.”

While the Jarboe presentation ends up focusing on the Search Engine Strategies Video player widget - the bigger takeaway is - the best way to get traffic to your online videos - is to figure out the qualities that bring up your content on related searches in YouTube, then optimize the metadata round your video to match that content.

While it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how much work that will be, the results seem to say that taking this kind of approach will get your video seen a lot more often, which is the point, I think - and hopefully, by the right people.

Thanks Greg, for a great ride down to John Marshall’s house and a great tip of value - real value - real stuff - from being at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

And of course, when the videos from the session I monderated and contributed to on Social Media Measurement come available online, I’ll will make them available here.

Got pretty good feedback from the 2 presentations I did at Search Engine Strategies San Jose - including this one from Lloyd Grafton of Liberate Media  titled SES social media measurement round up.

“…

As you may have seen, there are a whole host of informative posts on the measuring success in a web 2.0 world and social media and analysis sessions, which both took place earlier this week. My favourite posts can be found via the online marketing blog, which gives a step-by-step rundown of the sessions and valuable learnings.

Both sessions involved Marshall Sponder, senior web analyst for Monster.com. Marshall’s presentation can be seen here.

There are two things that I would like to pick up on specifically.

First a good point from the measuring success in a web 2.0 world session, where Marshall Sponder confirmed that as well as understanding that social media measurement is about conversations, we will only get to the next level of measurement if we treat visitors from Twitter for example, differently than visitors from forums, and then differently again from direct visitors. Without measuring the conversation, and the outcomes of that conversation, we are missing a huge chunk of useful data.

The online marketing blog listed the key takeaways from the social media and analysis session as:

1. There is no killer metric

2. Track anything possible to glean insight

3. Social media is not just about numbers

4. It’s all relative (focus on benchmarking and trends)

5. Measuring social media does not + ROI for social media

6. View monitoring social media as a Social Intelligence programme, involving the world’s biggest focus group….”

There’s more that I said, and the panel in the second session on Wednesday was hand picked by me, for the most part.   I’m hoping I get invited back to do more of these presentations - they’ll continue to get better.

One thing want to say, and then I’m off to check out of my room and head back into San Francisco, for a full day of meetings - is that people attend conferences like SES for a number of reasons, but the main one is to gain knowledge - and while, in many cases, there is new content, it’s a vary familar remark I’ve heard - that it’s mostly the same stuff, year after year - being presented by the mostly the same people.

To Kevin Ryan’s credit - he’s tried to mix it up a little, and focus more on content - and he gave me a chance to present what I believed to be real content - not that anyone was giving away any “secret sauce” … but we just want to give people what the came to this conference for.

And we delivered… at least, we did in any session I was connected with.   Anytime someone comes to a session I’m in - there’ll be something new, I’ll talk about some new insight or way of looking at Social Media, or life, or Art - it’s all part of the same thing, in my book - and how it applies to measurement - to metrics.

Ok, and now I really do have to get moving.

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:

This has been my first SES in San Jose and my first GooglePlex Party, but the GoogleDance Party at the GooglePlex is one of the main attractions and reasons for going to San Jose Search Engine Strategies, in the first place.

Naturally, I got plenty of t-shirts, 3 to be exact - the GoogleDance 2008 black t-shirts had a mosaic or crossword puzzle on them, but Brett Crosby says what is really on that shirt is ………….. a face, but you need to look view the shirt in black light to see it.

I also got a GetFlipped image of me taken at one of the exhibits - it’s from www.getflippedsanfrancisco.com and I liked it - though someone said it’s just a glorified baggage tag - though the one you’d always wanted to put on your bag (like a photo id that changes as you look at it).

It was nice to see Sebastian Wenzel, my partner in the BlogSpeedway.com Blog Network and his friend stop by - and it was great hanging at with Rick Wehrle who was my boss at Monster.com, till recently.

I got on the SearchEngineWatch bus by mistake - but it was OK - packed it was - and the party at the GooglePlex was pretty cool - lots of food and drink and entertainment.

One thing I noticed was the branding message of Google is really aligned with the way their campus, the Googleplex, is structured. Google has figured out what it’s good at, and has really built a branding message that is consistant - down to the details, at the GooglePlex.

I’m wondering if Microsoft and Yahoo are as good at merging the branding message with the actual layout of their campuses as Google has been.

By the way, I’m having lunch with Avinash Kaushik at the GooglePlex on Thursday (tomorrow).

More about that meeting, later on - after it’s happened.

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.

Microsoft Keynote at SES San Jose

User Intent -long searches with sessions longer than 30 minutes.

Over 50% of the searches are the same as what searcher already searched on.

Understanding search patterns to understand what searcher is trying to do (6 types).

Content and context, multi media, index is becoming broader and deeper. Given rich context and understanding of content, this is what is being worked on.

Advertising Efficency - is there more that can be done here? Opening the black boxes of search advertising systems.

Queries in isolation vs. Compleating a task.

1. Openness and transparancy
2. Microsoft as rich tools they can add to the search experience.

A. Simplify key tasks
B. Powerset aquisition and natural language processing.

Interesting Experiments
1. Put images of current events on home search page.
2. Use Powerset to disinbuagation of search query and rich information (Dali paintings)
3. Travel mata search (Faircast), interesting.
4. Product Search with rich ability to navigate and use sentiment analysis.
5. Cashback program, learning alot.

New advertising tools

Keyword Generation.

Nice tools but I suspect the real issue here is not the power of Microsoft tools, but the awarenss and interest in using the tools.

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.

Well, you name it, but I’ll take some work, digging, if you will, and you won’t find many sites, but the ones you do find might be really relevant and helpful, especially in terms of Social media, Engagement, etc.

I have a client who runs a OCD site (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and while I had used Radian6 and SEOElite to come up with a list of sites, overall, SeoElite’s list was not geo-targeted, was based on Google, and wasn’t too useful for advertising.

Radian6’s result on a profile for “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder + OCD” and a few related keywords, came up with a lot of forums and sites that didn’t seem obviously connected, yet had some relevancy at some point during the last month (topics, comments, unique IP addresses, etc).

However, I found this technique while trying to answer a question I posed to myself - as I had seen one of the urls Radian6 pulled up was a search of YouTube for “Obsessive  Compulsive Disorder + OCD“.

So, I started looking at the videos and focused on those viewed between 10,000-80,000 times (it’s a niche subject, after all) and got the top 5 links for each (YouTube publishes this info for each video) and was able to find a few more sites that were highly relevant.

Here’s the thing - depending on the subject, you’ll have to spend a few hours on this - but you might uncover some blogs and communities where that are very targeted, very relevant to what your trying to get attention for - and I think, that, may ultimately yield the best results - since the needs to be a human being to interpret what your looking at.

Just go ahead and try it - if your into this kind of thing.   And, btw, I did look at Google Insigtht, but it wasn’t all that helpful for this kind of thing because it didn’t identify sites, just other keywords.

In the end, I could always fall back on ComScore Media Metrix, and get top sites for a country/segment, etc - but the problem is here, again, what’s the demographic/age/sex of the target audience, what is the target income?

Unless you know that - it’s hard to get the best results - usually people don’t rattle off that information - though you’d think, they’d know it (esp a clinic, for example - they know the breakdown of their patients who come in - and if you step back to think about it - it’s a great place to start with ad targeting, based on what you can already pull in from “house” files.

So… just looking, just letting your curiosity lead you - is the best way - and yes, I still have technique and analysis to back me up.

BTW, I’ll be in California most of next week at Semphonic XChange and Search Engine Strategies - home to see some of you there - my twitter handle is …. webmetricsguru in case anyone is into Twitter.