Jeff Pulver says losing your job is not the worst thing to happen to you and suggests you stay positive.

Jeff said he grew up feeling invisible, he also said he used to work at the Word Trade Center for Cantor Fitzgerld and had he stayed might have been dead (because he would have been up at the top of building 1 in the morning of September 11th).

It’s all about friendship (does some one ask you how you are when they greet you?).

Jeff talks about his kids (twins - 14 year old).

Jeffpulver.com

Where is it going now?

Social Media Jungle, last month.

Btw, I met Jeff Pulver at Leweb last year, but I’m not going this year, and neither is he. Jeff said he found Leweb big on ego and short on substance.

SoCal on Feb 10th and 11th at Puck Building, call for speakers till December 5th.

He is also taking Social Media Jungle on the road and set up breakfasts in 14 cities and invites people who are passionate and have an idea to paticipate or even join him on the road.

And Jeff Pulver says that Social Media is a lifestyle.

And Jeff is going to start doing evening events in 2009.

Ha! I’m glad I came today.

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.

I was thinking about a paper I read today on Innovating Through Recession by Andrew Razeghi, Kellogg School of Management, which I heard about via @ecevents on Twitter, I attempted to Embed the paper here.   By the way, I often think as I write - and the attempt to “marshall” the information (no pun intended on my first name) often leads to my flashes of insight - as I write.  I can tell you right now this is going to be a long post - and furthermore - it’s worth reading it - all the way though, maybe a couple of times.

Want to say something, about me, first - lately I’ve been really busy, and gradually, I found myself, over the last year or so, not responding or reaching out as much, via Social Media, to people who comment on my blogs, but a meeting with Gary Vaynerchuk cured me of that error (see  Gary Vaynerchuk Videos from Motivational Meetup - 11-5-05 and More footage from Gary Vaynerchuk and Dennis Mortensen)

Gary thought me that if you have a Brand, and I do, it’s me, my Web Analytics and my Art, you need to work that Brand, and reply to every comment, and even as many tweets as your can - you need to show your open to conversation and having one.  Gary Vaynerchuk even said that if you have a blog with 2500 visitors a month or more, you can turn that blog into an income of 4K or 5K a month, if your willing to build up the Brand - but it’s a lot, a lot of work.   But it was always work.    I wasn’t thinking about the money - but then again, I would not mind it.   But at least, I know what I need to focus on - and it’s what I want to do, anyway.

Getting back to the Innovating Through Recession paper (below)
Innovating Through Recession (Andrew Razeghi, Kellogg School of Management)

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 also stay in the same room for the last session of the day on expanding your Online Community. I know Laura Lee Dooley, who joined the Social Media Committee I started at the WAA and read Beth Kanter’s blog which is an excellent resource for Non-Profits who wish to leverage Social Media (and honestly, a lot of what Beth Kanter writes about could be applied to for profit businesses just as well as non-profits).

“..S04 Tuesday, 5:10 - 6:00

Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community

Jonathon D. Colman, The Nature Conservancy
Laura Lee Dooley, World Resources Institute
Beth Kanter, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

If you aren’t on facebook, twitter, friendfeed, technorati, and delicious, should you be? And once you jump into social media, how do you track and measure success? Tips, tools and stories from the trenches from three people who focus on online engagement and have more links, friends and followers than some small countries have citizens.

Laura Lee on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Anyway, here’s my notes on Beth Kantor’s presentation. She looks at AideRss and the statistics and see’s what posts do best.

Also Beth looks at Technorati and noted her ranking goes up and down and says she says she’s noted when her rankings go up or down and what triggers it.

Btw, Beth raised 215k for Cambodian refugees as non profit. Beth goes and friends a lot of people who follow alerts on her name, or “Cambodia”.

Laura Ann - she uses Twitter a lot and suggests we all create Twitter accounts.

But….But… Most companies are not prepared to handle interactive feedback. That’s a major roadblock.

Ambient Awareness - Listening Post Exhibition. Post Ratio: 1 : 12 (once about yourself and 12 times about others)

Laura handles two Twitter accounts
She used several metrics including twitter clickthrough and posts.

Xefer and Twitter Grader.

Is twitter multiple relationships or a single one to Twitter?

A lot of concerns about Twitter downtime but the service continues to grow.

laura points out the person who has the Twitter account for your company needs to be a senior person who knows the Brand well. No Interns, that’s not a good idea for several reason.

Nature Conservatory Case study using DIGG

One thing to note was the Digg traffic wasn’t worth much though they got a lot of that traffic.

Digg is good if you want to reach new people but it can lead to other things that are valuable.

Results of Social News Campaign on Digg. Normally they get 20,000 visits a day but 76,000 visits for the day when a Digg story ran on Digg homepage.

But ….. Our goal was to spur conversations about the enviornment plus tons of links, which in turn drove new visits of higher quality plus SEO juice.

How much time required? A few years to become a crediable source on Digg, or whatever large Social Networks.

The ad itself, took a few hours to set up. But Digg helped reach people we normally would not be able to contact.

Nature Conservatory also uses Radian6 to listen to the conversation.

My take is that social media is a lot of work, learning to leverage relationships.

Many organizations are too stoggy to adopt Social Media but once they see the results you usually get but it’s a culture change.

Digg changes make it harder to get a story on the first page but many top Diggers have interests in causes.

Fact is that Digg has been gamed so much the top keyword in Google for a search on Digg is “gamed”.

I guess someone had to do - start somewhere.  I read about it on Beth Kantor’s blog earlier today and in this post of hers - What’s Your Twitter Influence? Social Network Analysis of Your Twitter Network

The program is TWinfluence and I’m more interested in the “definations” part than the actual social media tracking - but I would like to see this type of analysis translated over to Facebook, and other Social Networks.    The problem with doing it on Twitter is that is so easy to have people that you know next to nothing about, following you, that I don’t feel there’s enough involvment or choice, to make the measurements as meaningful, in most cases as with other Social Networks where friending is more “deliberate”.

For example, First and Second Level nodes are applied to Twitter - the API makes it easy to track this, but again, how meaninful is the social capital you get from Twitter?

“….The Twitterer is the primary node (shown in red); its first-order neighbors (shown in green) surround it, and its second-order neighbors (shown in blue) surround the outside.

Given that Reach is defined as  the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers) and a measurement of potential audience and listeners that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.     It’s a simple concept, as far as it goes - I guess then, my Facebook “Reach” would be all my friends plus all their friends - and that could be interesting, in a way.

Velocity - I don’t put much stock in - mainly due to Twitter fatigue - but also because people will use something like Twitter, more frequently at some times over others and therefore, that’s going to effect the velocity.

Velocity averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence and is scored from “very slow” to “very fast” relative to other twitterers at your network size.

Also, there’s “Social Capital” which is a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social Capital is scored from “very low” to “very high” relative to other twitterers at your network size.

Finally, there’s “Centeralization”, which is a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social Capital is scored from “very low” to “very high” relative to other twitterers at your network size.

I think that have practical examples of each measurement would help to put the Social Media Metrics surrounding Twitter more meaningul and easier to apply.

Ok, so here’s some pratical examples.

Reach - If I want to reach out to influentials - it may make sense to find those that have the most reach, first, and try to sell them on my ideas - because they can then pass that information to their network (reach).  Again, I think this would be a lot more interesting if we had an analytics tool set and Facebook to play with - but OK, Twitter is a good place to start - and it gets me thinking about the reasons behind why I might be invited to some event by someone who has not yet friended me (I get those from time to time).

Velocity - well, I suppose Velocity is important for a political candidate - @barackobama , for example - the faster the audience (reach” grows, the better he’s doing (more or less).   But I don’t think Volocity is as meaningful for most of us - it depends on what you want to do with the information, what your goals are.

Social Capital might be the most important metrics that TWinfluence tries to map - I mean, not all friends are equal, and certainly, from a network node perspective, some friends are simply a lot more valuable than others.

I could go on more but I’ll stop here - point being - TWinfluence took a great first stab in coming up with Social Media Metrics - a lot more needs to be done - and I’m glad someone actually tried applying what the read and studied to real life.

Search and the US President election - Wow! A lot of search and political campaign strategists are on the panel.

Motivations in getting involved in search and politics are varied but unlike other business it never shuts off and your in it to win.

There is no budget and there is a lag in knowledge in running campaigns for search and current spending is only 40-60 million in this election, and that is a drop in the bucket of all spend.

Also, the lady from Yahoo said there hasn’t been many or any studies on campaign effectiveness and paid search. But you need to communicate directly with the campaign manager and to a lesser effect, the canditates, need to understand the utility of paid search marketing and political campaigns.

Long Tail approach (misspell Sarah Palin’s name in every way possible).

Duh! Candidates don’t seem to understand geo-targeting and micro-targeting! They understand TV and Radio and media markets, but seldom do they yet understand the precision avaiable.

McCain’s campaign is very active in gel-targeting and Eric Frenchman, who runs McCain’s online search advertising, said so.

What I don’t hear is micro targeting on the actual DISTRICT level, or anything with RSS feeds.

Interestingly, just as I wrote this, a question came up about bundling to the District level, did come up and Google and Yahoo, while they allow custom maps of Geo-Targeting, don’t actually facilitate that level of targeting.

And nothing about RSS feeds and Twitter integration on the local district level. It’s amazing to me how much of modern technology is not being utilized.

Amazing how campaigns use speeches of Biden (in the case of McCain) to a negative landing page on the candidate.

Also, Google and Yahoo haven’t yet offered geo-targeting on District Level but….. They are not, as yet willing to set up that specific a level if targeting yet, but are studying doing so in the future.

For some candidates, easing fund online is easier than others, and some times they can’t spend it all, so managing expectations is necessary.

Online Persuasion.

Do you need to be a true believer in the candidate and party ideology to work for a campaign as a search strategist for them.

However, now, there are many online digital strategists are on both sides.

Social Media and Search with political campaigns. Blog or not? Tracy Russo says no, not enough worth while content. I disagree. And Obama had people who were hired to write to the blogs, etc.

However, the community forming around a blog often continues after a campaign is over, win or lose, and, honestly, not fostering and nuturing that is foolish, I believe.

The idea that there is not much worthwhile to say is lunacy.

Twitter? Again, not as used as much as you’d think, by candidates. Amazing how much is being left, on the table, so to speak.

But, then again, I’m more of a visionary than anyone on the panel, or, for that matter, in the room, judging from the questions from the audience.

Facebook, what works? Buying admin rights for a group, Dan Steele, from Comedy Central.

Interestingly, the question of what kind of participation exists on November 5th, after the election, came up. It seems to me a new “channel” is being created via online media, Paid Search, FaceBook, Twitter, and targeted Blogs, along.

Justine Lam, worked for Ron Paul, and talked about all if that, and how it took a life of it’s own.

What tools used for monitoring Online Buzz?

Google Trends, Google Alerts, but many of the online tools are not useful, yet, to campaign strategists, yet.

Yahoo, Diane Rinalado, says Yahoo Buzz was sited as being better than Google Trends, and HotTrends, but not as highly used.

I brought up a few observations that I voiced including:

1. Increase links shown for embedded videos in Yahoo to include the long tail.

2. Data collected for Buzz Tools need to be refreshed hourly, not days or months later, as Goigle Trends and Yahoo Buzz often are.

Media Buys, as Eric Frenchman said, need to be decided in a few hours. You can see the gap.

Which campaign is doing better online?

Don Steele, Comedy Central, says he’s surprised media companies aren’t better at this yet.

Excellent Panel.

I’ll be at SMX East in Manhattan late on Monday and all of Tuesday; if any of my readers are also attending, please say hello (I’m reachable by Twitter - @webmetricsguru).   I thought I’d throw in some Organic and Paid Search Research I’m doing - I blurred the details to protect the innocent.

For one thing, I was surprised, looking at the Paid Data, that advertising per click was cheaper in the first 2 or 3 positions in Search and got progressively more expensive (maybe that’s due to buying impressions in bulk, especially at the top):

Meanwhile, I hunted around and found some information on average Click Through Rate by Search Position in Search Results; this information is as accurate as it can be, under the circumstances  - here’s a chart of that information, below:

Yet, while the majority of all the action happens on the first or second Search Result (SERP), the 4th, 11th and 17th Position in Organic (Natural) Search had a golden lining but wasn’t being optimized as well as it could be.

As far as the customers were concerned, after position 4 in the Search Results, it was all “long tail” traffic takes time and effort to seed and control.

Interestingly enough, there’s usually a lot of low hanging fruit to any campaign, and this one has been no exception -

While being sensitive to situations where paid spend (an ad) is clicked on when a perfectly good search result was also in the first page, I detected some interesting mismatches (see below):

One of the things that occurred to me is that while Paid Search is fairly well optimized in terms of spend, it’s hardly ever balanced against Organic Search results with an eye on reducing spend - cases where an organic result is perfectly good and providing coverage but where there’s also a paid ad for the same site - sometimes the paid ad “cannibalizes” traffic that would have just as easily clicked on the Organic search result.

In order to optimize Paid Spend against Organic Search Traffic - I’ve found 2 tools that are particularly useful - Ranking Manager 6.0 and Google WebMasterTools Search Query Logs.

The interesting thing about Google’s service is, when your site is verified, able to show you the average position of any key phrase that drove traffic to your site, including those you never knew to search for.   Google WebMasterTool also shows the average position in Google when a specific url was clicked on based on the keyword traffic.

My basic philosophy for optimizing paid / organic traffic is to determine the rankings of all the keywords you care about, using Ranking Manager 6.0 and merging that with your paid data, determining which keywords you have organic results for in the first page of results and cutting spend down by a certain percentage; in my model, I did not reduce paid search spend past the first page of results though I consede, my charts, above, suggest one could and, perhaps, should consider optimizing paid spend right up to position 30- but that’s a lot of work.

Anyway, I tried to find a chart showing how Social Media ranks in Search Results, particlarly Google, but the best I could find was this post in SearchEngineLand -

Leveraging Social Media Sites To Increase Search Visibility

Yammer is so much like Twitter that I find it hard to understand why Yammer would win an award for innovation at TechCrunch 50 today.   I’ve been using it for a couple of days and it’s great - still, it’s more of an adaption of Twitter for the Enterprise, but where’s the innovation in that?

According to VentureBeat - TC50: Twitter-for-business startup Yammer wins TechCrunch50, I may eat my hat

Here’s why Yammer won, anyway. Lots of companies might not want to bother setting up and customizing their own service. Instead, they just want to get started quickly with as little hassle as possible.

And Yammer comes loaded with useful features for businesses. There’s an application for business-favorite mobile device Blackberry, and a desktop application. You can even set up an organizational chart within the site, which is useful for larger organizations. You can customize your profile with additional work information and set notifications for email, mobile and instant messaging.

It also includes a smart, subtle interface for getting users to join.

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).