While viewing the NYC Marathon in Williamsburg, yesterday, and listening to Nikki Shannon and her band play, while waves of runners past, I had a glimpse of an idea, not sure if this has been done yet, but parts of it already exist.

To begin, many artists, of all types, have lousy websites that aren’t found easily in search engines. Even worse, manyof those same sites have lousy usability issues, and, there’s little if any web analytics tracking.

There are a few web services such as Pandora, Genius from Apple, I believe, iLike; these services a built to figure out music you like, play more if it, and hope you buy some of it.

Also, services like Upcoming, Yelp, to some extent Facebook, MySpace and other Social networks connecting events and friends. Social Networks like Going.com and Meetup.com want to figure out what you like and match you up with a group or event, Going is more focused on event promoters than on you while Meetup is becoming annoying in it’s attempts to sell me on every new meetup that meets what it thinks I’m interested in.

But what connects up a group like Nikki Shannon, who a friend of mine said sounded to her like Sheryl Crow, and a Pandora preference for that kind of music?

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see anything that does that.

So, let’s say that I have Pandora (if it doesn’t go out of business, first), it knows what I like, knows where I live or am at the moment, knows what I am prepared to pay, has clips of the artists and information about the venue.

Most of this stuff exists, but it lives all over the web, not in one service, and even if it did, not well.

My point is, in this era of economic contraction, innovation may come not so much, from inventing new things, as much as making what we already have done, work well ….. Connecting the Dots.

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.

Jeremiah has some more thoughts about Google Chrome - Thinking Long Term: Google’s New Browser ‘Chrome’ including the Web Analytics and Social Network aspects - that had not been mentioned by anyone over the weekend, when the news first broke.

But if Google Chrome ends up being the vehicle to create Social Networking being as available as Air - it’ll be one more example of Google’s goals of long term domination of any market they get into.  However, it’s fair to say, if they end up making Social Networking like “Air”, that’s everywhere - maybe they deserve to dominate the market.

Anyway, I wrote about this the other day in Future Trends in Social Networking already happening today

Steve Rubel wrote a post about Trends That Will Help Define the Future of PR and Marketing that doesn’t say anything new - but defines ideas I’ve been thinking about lately - especially that Social Networks in the future will be like “Air“:  According to Rubel:

“… Social networking is here to stay - but it’s changing. As my fellow panelist Charlene Li says, it’s becoming “like air” on the Web. In essence, social networking is nothing new, really. It’s simply a digital, global and scalable manifestation of our desire to communicate with other humans. The technology makes it easy for like-minded individuals to connect and collaborate around the topics they care about. This can range from personal to professional interests. A lot of it revolves around social causes.

Today we have three big social network hubs - LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace (an Edelman client). In addition, we have an expanding constellation of smaller social networks such as Beebo, Twitter, YouTube and the hundreds of thousands of vertical communities that comprise Ning - a do-it-yourself platform. There will be room for all of them to thrive, but consumers soon won’t need to visit these destinations to connect with their network.

Social circles are becoming portable so they can follow the consumer to any site they want to visit. Facebook and Google, for example, each have competing technology platforms that Web site owners can integrate to allow consumers and their social circle to connect in new experiences without having to sign up for another network.

Brand marketers that may be tempted to build their own social networks need to consider that there may not be room in people’s lives for more than one or two. They will need to plug into the social “air” supply that the large networks are building across the Web so that consumers can stay connected to their existing networks.

I wrote about this trend of Social Networks turning into “Air” - but not in those words, last week in a post titled Thoughts about Social Networking - where it needs to go

“… 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.”

The other ideas that Steve Rubel mentioned - Attention Crash and Google Reputation are already dealt with quite a lot both in my blog and other places, so I won’t really go into them much except for one point - Friendfeed and Facebook are morphing into each other - kinda - see Facebook Live Feed Kills Twitter & FriendFeed

In a post on the The “Status Update” Mania,

” ….. new features appeared in the new Facebook interface is the Live Feed. Through this functionality, you can get a realtime update of your friends’ activities, wathever they are doing within Facebook or in other services integrated with it (Twitter, Friendfeed, Applications etc.).

“….That being said, only time will tell, but it’s pretty clear that users start looking for a sort of “social networks consolidation” and for an efficient way to limit the enormous quantity of content they consume everyday. Me too… what about you?”

I wrote about LonelyGirl15 two years ago when the story first came out (see The whole story about Lonelygirl15 as revealed by the New York Times, Pluto’s fate according to Lonelygirl15) but lost track of what was happening with that story until tonight when I saw a post in TechCrunch -EQAL Shares Details On LonelyGirl15 Followup - which said that not only was the original tactic successful, but it had now spawned a new Social Network.

As part of the new series, LG15.com will be relaunching as a hybrid blog/social network designed to further the level of viewer immersion. Equal’s founders say that they’ve built the social network themselves because it gives them greater freedom during the course of the shows (for example, they could modify the look and feel of the site depending on recent events in each story), but that the network isn’t designed to compete with the likes of Facebook or MySpace.

Having thought about, especially in light of my earlier post today, I think building hybrid Social Networks is a mistake - more of an overall waste of time and money.

I’m sure this venture will be successful in the short term - people want to create reality around characters, even if the character is fictional, as is LonelyGirl15; according to TechCrunch:

There have been a number of attempts to create “distorted realities” online through online shows and games, but few of these have managed to take off - users generally find it hard to suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy themselves. EQAL’s approach may be able to skirt this issue by catering to hardcore and casual fans alike, allowing users to consume as much content as they’re comfortable with.

I guess you can have as much of LonelyGirl15 as you want - the creators of this yawn are not going to remind us that it’s not a real story … and use Social Media as a means to captivate people.

What really needs to happen is using the Social Graph as a service - which FaceBook has begun to do, except I’m thinking way beyond Facebook - that’s just the beginning.

By the way, I haven’t looked at any of the recent LonelyGirl15 videos, but I’m sure TechCrunch is tracking it all - I saw it as just another way to get attention, and it worked.

I wrote three good posts today but haven't had a chance to write anything here - so I'll talk about the Analytics Guru posts.  In

Microsoft BrowseRank favors Social Networks

I keyed into Aaron Wall today - and noticed he had a writeup on BrowseRank that tests it and finds it's better for Social Networks, and probably not that good for Google, which favors links over search behavior.

Then I read another post about

The Bloggers guide to SEO looks pretty good

..from SEObook, and decided to write about that … with the goal of not overusing these strategies - because, let's face it, if you do it too much - you'll bring down a penalty from the big G.

And then

house content is favored by the Google algorithm - further proof that Google stacks the cards in their own favor

….  talks about Google Knol and how it's ranked over duplicate content that was created somewhere else (off of Google).  I think this post is quite revealing.

I think How Does Facebook Know I'm Jewish? post by David Berkowitz was pretty amusing and interesting - I've meet David at several conferences and events in New York over the last 3 years or so, most recently, last week.

David saw this ad

I'm Jewish too, but I've never seen that ad, and I'm on Facebook, alot. David was intrigued - was this some new targeting capability that Facebook turned on and he didn't know about yet?  He wrote in his blog post:

"…But how? How did it do it? I don't list my religion (or my politics) on my Facebook profile. I don't even have those Israeli flag Facebook apps.

Some plausible theories are that the marketer used some combination of targeting around my city (New York), alma mater (Binghamton) and entertainment interests (The Daily Show, Seinfeld, Everything Is Illuminated).

Some less plausible theories: top secret Jew-havioral targeting algorithms… perhaps that's what'll be unleashed at Facebook's F8 next week.

Or it's just targeting people who look Jewish. I tried calling and emailing Katan Adventures, which ran the ad."

Turns out the answer was less complicated than one would have supposed - but via the power of Social Media - the targeting worked more powerfully than if it had reached David via some other way, I feel.  According to his blog:

"..Here's what Katan wrote back:

Hey David -

I assume you are from NY?  In order to reach Jews who haven't listed their religion on Facebook (which, by the way, is the vast majority) we run ads in metro areas with large Jewish populations and try to grab their attention with ridiculous lines such as "hey jew" but we obviously get a lot of wasted clicks with this strategy as well.   And some angry emails.

Seinfeld fans is a good idea though.  And maybe Zabar's fans, but I'm sure that is a small group.

Thanks for your interest and if you ever want to pass along any online marketing ideas, we'd love to hear them.

 

So … just by using an established way of targeting, along with Social Networks - the result became more powerful and more personal.

That reminds me - I wrote a post about just how powerful Social Media can be in

Nikki Shannon LIVE @ The Cutting Room - Social Media Worked!

To be perfectly honest, I've been pretty critical of Google in the majority of posts I've written here over the last two years - but this one post I'm going to write about today is 180 degrees different.

First of all, Google's new, "experimental" "Digg like" Search Interface is not only the future of Search, it's also a lot of fun and a 100 times more interesting, in my opinion, than anything else they've come up with in the last 4 years.  The new search interface is also a "logical" evolution of Social Media, Social Networks and Search Technology and what I've seen in the movie below is almost exactly the vision I have for the Future of Search - and it can't come fast enough because the search of today, on Google, or any other Search Engine, sucks compared to what it could and someday, will be.

TechCrunch's post by Michael Arrington Is This The Future Of Search? has the most detail, yet, of this fairly new development in Search - that has just hit the blogosphere over the last day or so.

What excites me is not, so much, the "Digg" part, which is probably going to end up being "gamed" by "Google gangs" just like "Digg Gangs" did/do now - though it's still an improvement over what we have now, and this new "Digg like voting" is much more "democratic" than Google's current Search Engine which gives all the power of ranking and determining what gets into the search results to the computer engineers and scientists who program the search engine.

What excites me is the "FriendFeed/Twitter" part of this new Search Interface and ranking system, which allows the wisdom of Searchers to mix in, rate, and comment on the Search Results - this is truly the future of search - and it allows the users the control and transparency that Google and the other Search Engines have deliberately withheld. 

But now, all the Search Results, in all the Search Engines, are so lousy, overall, that even Google, spending all it's time now patching up it's failed Pagerank system, it's failed back link, it's failed spam filtering, and everything else that has evolved, finally, is ready, to share control of the search results with the users of it's search engine.

We're not talking about some dials - the stuff they gave us a few years ago (both Google and Yahoo had versions of this feature), we're talking about Personalized and Social Search merged in one interface that will allow anyone to see comments on the Search Results (and I guess, Google will study those comments and re-rank the results - using their "semantic" technology - perhaps the right place for automation, at this point - since there's going to be so much commentary on the search results, no army of humans could possibly  read it all in time to act on it - before a ton more comments are made.

In my follow up post on The Analytics Guru -

Future of Search Engine Optimization - Google’s New Search Interface

I'll envision the future of Search Engine Optimization once the new Search Interface is fully rolled out, probably anytime between the 18 months from now, and five years (it'll depend on how "aggressive" Google wants to be here - setting this new interface as a Google Experiment is OK for now, but to get the full interaction, at some point, they will need to take the plunge and make this new innovation, the default interface for Google Search - the sooner the better, in my book).

Vivaty- 3D Virtual World Plug in for Facebook / AIM IM

But I didn't realize when I wrote that post earlier today - and played with Vivaty in my Facebook account using IE6 (it was buggy, but interesting) that Google, on the very same day, came out with Lively.com, which appears to do much the same thing, and looks pretty cool, also.  Honestly, Vivaty seems more focused on Social Networks and Brands (like Target, which I talked about) while Lively.com, on the other hand, is more about people taking a virtual room and doing whatever they want with it and embedding it into any page, pretty much.

In fact, I even embedded my own room (I'm struggling with my design, can't you tell? - in fact, I can use some help, if any one wants to visit my room and help me decorate - feel free to try your hand at it … ha, ha, maybe I need to throw a "house warming party" for myself in own virtual room.   Ok, I digress)

Marshall Sponder's first Lively.com room - come in and help me decorate it - I need help with it.

But really, Lively.com is a lot of fun, once you figure out how to build stuff - perhaps people who have worked a lot with Virtual Worlds - building stuff within them, will have an advantage here.

Here's a video that was created by Google to show off Lively.com

But I can see both Lively and Vivaty taking off - and in truth, they don't exactly do the same thing, but they are similar ideas.   Vivaty words with Social Networks you already have - Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger Buddies - for now - and we can guess, Facebook and just about every other major Social Network - soon.

It's almost as if we've jumped into another dimension , a Dimension of Sight and Sound (no, it's not the Twilight Zone - Ha, Ha!) where people can interact in 3D, something that hasn't really been possible in this way, before.

One can also suppose that this new "3D" room environment is going to be the backdoor to an entirely new experience of the web - and, perhaps, a backdoor to defining "engagement".   Another thing this will spawn is more "metrics" - undoubtedly, Google will be collecting data - data that will probably end up, in some form, down the line, in Google Analytics, just as TV Ads and Radio Ads are now finding their way in.

And let's face it … Ads will find their way into Lively.com soon enough - you can be sure of that - and to be honest with you - I'm not entirely against that - as long as the owner of the room has "Control" over where the ads are shown, and what type of ads are shown - and gets a cut of the revenue the ads generate.

Let's frame this a different way - say, most people build a room, a couple people come and see ads, they click on them, or they just look at the ads - and the software (Google) knows they've been exposed to the ad - the owner of the room gets a monthly payment - small, at first.

But what if your Robert Scoble, someone that can get a lot of people to view your room(s) (but we don't know how many avatars Lively can handle at one time - so that will be a limitation) in some sort of orderly fashion - he could cash in - so could anyone - if they can get enough avatars to visit - and maybe, take a desired action.

And then, in the middle of all of this is Google - recording everything - building metrics, personas, demographic profiling data - which they will store and use, in one form or another.

In another arena, GaryVee (Gary Vaynerchuk) creates a Virtual Room(s) to match his popular WineTV show - and gets Metrics and Engagement beyond the Video Clip - in fact, down the line, Google Analytics is merged into the Lively.com rooms and you get the metrics up the Yin Yang - anything you, the publisher of that room want.

And then, you can embed the room as an iFrame, where ever you want.

I see a future here - and this is a time to start ramping up.   I think now, is the time to start mastering this new language.  Some of this probably evolved out of Sketchup, a drafting tool that Google bought almost 2 years ago - and some of this was on the drawing board for a long time - probably as an adjunct to Google Maps and Google Earth.

Meanwhile, Education uses the Lively to build environments that help children learn concepts better - Google gets involved and starts showing of the best rooms.

And then, some artists, design rooms as forms of Art; meanwhile, others build rooms to resemble the settings of famous paintings - and Museums even use those rooms as part of the way they publicize and educate the public.

I would say - today, with the dual releases of  Vivaty- 3D Virtual World Plug in for Facebook / AIM IM and Lively.com, the game  changed - and it will probably become apparent in the next few months.

By the way, here's the way one of the preformed outdoor spaces looks - I have my avatar parked here - Webmetricsguru - naturally; come by and say hello (I wonder how I'm going to know I've got visitors if I'm not actually logged in when other Avatars show up).

Oh well, can't solve all those problems in one day - we've already made some big steps today into the next level of the web, the 3D Web.

I arrived in Paris this morning and everything went smoothly except the hotel, which is kinda depressing to be in, I think the next time I'll stay in a Bed and Breakfast instead a 2 star hotel.

Having said that I went to a meetup (via a social network) that I would not have been able to do when I first visited Paris 20 years ago; in fact, even 5 years I would have been hard pressed to find a way to connect up with total strangers the way I did this afternoon at Maxim's Art Nouveau Museum.  The meetup organizer, Chiaki, was very helpful and friendly giving me tips about where to go (see ST. Martin's Canal) and she, as well as others, told me about a nearby Starbucks, where I am now.

To me, Social Networks make possible events like what happened this afternoon at Maxim's - which was a wonderful tour of Pierre Cardin's collection of Art Nouveau art from the turn of the 19th Century.   I felt very much at home at Maxim's; where ordinarily, I would never have gone.

.

And that's part to the value of Social Networks - because I've said that what Social Networks enable is interactions that could not have happened without them- that's, perhaps, the best way to show the effectiveness of a Social Network, in my opinion.

"…I often advise my clients to at least visit
the Musee d?Art Nouveau de Maxim, which
is a huge private collection of the renowned
fashion designer Pierre Cardin who is
an admirer of Art Nouveau as I am when
they don?t have enough time to extend
their visit to Nancy or to stroll around Passy.

This museum certainly can be a good
substitute for those Art Nouveau visits.
As a very successful businessman,
Pierre Cardin has traveled all over
the world and has created this Art
Nouveau Museum above of his restaurant,
MAXIM. Here you may find early works
of Tiffany or some personal belongings
of Sarah Bernhardt and paintings of
Toulouse Lautrec."

Now, let's see how Seesmic.com does (can I go to a party on Wednesday night or even something Monday night that I'd never have gone to save through Seesmic?