Good article in the New York times on how Facebook Aims to Extend Its Reach Across the Web- which is an example of how we don’t necessarily need more Social Networks as much as we need a way to call Social Network information into every site experience, according to the article.

While there really should end up being just a few repositories of the data - instead of a zillion networks, Facebook is the closest to realizing a cloud that can touch most sites:

MySpace, Yahoo and Google have all announced similar programs this year, using common standards that will allow other Web sites to reduce the work needed to embrace each identity system. Facebook, which is using its own data-sharing technology, is slightly ahead of its rivals.   I think that’s a good thing, at least, for now.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

Facebook Connect is representative of some surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet giants have all announced plans to share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.

Supporters of this idea say such programs will help with the emergence of a new “social Web,” because chatter among friends will infiltrate even sites that have been entirely unsociable thus far.

Image via Wikipedia

I was thinking about my own issues about a Board I’m currently on and this post by K.D. Paine on The value of transparency.

Besides K.D. Paine’s story of her friend Nick Ashooh, I’ve read about the Yahoo! Board of Directors care of Carl Icahn, who is on Yahoo!’s Board, and the Board Politics are all too familiar.   Though I haven’t been on but one Board in my entire life - I must say,  is there any instance where a Board, any Board, embraced transparency?  Lip service, yes, transparency, no.

I expressed my own feelings in my post on Difficult days for Social Media a few days ago, which was also picked up by Social Media Today, as I hope this one is, as well.

I know in Business, and life, in general, your expected to be putting your best foot forward - that is the conventional wisdom - on an interview, for example, you present the “best you” even as the interviewer tries to find out what your not saying - kicking the tires, as need be.

In Business, due to all kinds of legal stuff and the need to raise money - the image that’s presented to the world is often not what’s really going on behind the scenes - and, we might not really want to know all the gorey details, anyway.

However, Boards have a more fundamental issue because the fragmentation of responsibilities magnifies inefficiencies and reinforces a need to be nontransparent.  And then, there are even cases of Boards that are renegade, that nay sometimes act against the interests of the organizations they manage, and that certainly seems the to be the case with Yahoo!.  Now that Jerry Yang is stepping down, - see Yang: ‘Time is right’ for new leader on CNET let’s hope their Board get’s it right, ongoing.

In fact, according to the Guardian - Microsoft-Yahoo could be back on cards now that Yang has stepped down.

But getting back to this idea of Transparency, and why Boards don’t seem to be able to be transparent, even when they try to be - it gets even worse when your talking about Non-Profits.

Actually, I’d be interested to know how K.D. Paine measures the “Trust” level of Corporations and the Boards that help run them, as well as the non-profits; here’s what she says about the AIG Board and how they got it wrong:

“…In reality, companies ultimately have no choice but to be more transparent if they have a prayer of restoring the public’s trust in their institutions. It’s not just that AIG was idiotic in trying to cover up its role in the conference, its that in doing so, AIG further compromised whatever trust the public, and its elected officials, may have had in the organization.
I haven’t done a formal measurement of their trust level, but I’m guessing from the comments I’m reading that its dropped even faster than AIG’s stock price. So my question is: When will the C-suite wake up and realize that people will only regain trust in these institutions if they are utterly open and transparent. (I know, only when they fire all the lawyers) But seriously, do the math. The cost in reputation, failed relationships, lower trust, and now, government support, far outweighs whatever perceived cost that transparency may entail.”

I think it takes courage and leadership to be transparent - it may be both are lacking on many Boards; but more often I think Board Directors are trying to do the right thing and they just don’t know how, or can’t - they’re too worried about losing control.

Fast Forward to my last post on YouTube Video Search gradually replacing Textual Search? and add the rapid growth of user generated content, especially video and audio content, on just about any subject, much of it interesting, and we come to the death of privacy - there is no room for opaqueness in life ,or the Board Room - but the Board Room hasn’t realized it yet; because transparency means sharing control, and Boards don’t like sharing control, I’ve observed.

Today, people automatically equate non-transparency with having something to hide.  If you have nothing to hide, then you can afford to be transparent.  In the past, before Social Media, hiding stuff was pretty common, the Government did it, Business did it, people did it - but now …… it’s different - times have changed.

I do think we need to be our own “curators” much as Brands need to be curated - but that’s more a function of moderation, not hiding things.

In fact, the new Branding does involve having Brand Managers act as curators and that has come up many times over the last two years at the conferences I’ve attended since YouTube, Facebook and MySpace have become some commonly used.  I would say the same thing holds true in the Board Room  - instead of trying to hide the dealings, we ought to act more like curators - making sure the information appears in the best context, but not hold back - to the extent that’s possible.

One more factor was brought up by K.D. Paine, who I’ve met several times, and that is Speed - Speed of the transmission of information - it’s so fast that transparancy within 24 hours or less, when a major issue comes up is a necessity - and that’s something almost no Board can handle - they simple can’t respond quickly enough.

Corporate has Public Relations people for that function - but Non-Profits probably don’t respond quick enough, and the Board of a Non-Profit might be clueless for weeks - though usually, there is a silver lining - a Non-Profit probably is not engaged in anything scandalous - but then again. .. you never know.

At any rate, what all this tells me is that we need to think differently about what we do - what is actually required of us might not be the same things we think are required - but that’s for another post.

Last week I was at Gary Vaynerchuk Videos from Motivational Meetup - 11-5-05 but I had a lot of extra footage, including a good bit of advice and insight from Dennis Mortensen, who is in charge of Yahoo! Analytics (formally IndexTools), is a friend and fellow Board Member at the Web Analytics Association.

But I was having a lot of trouble getting the videos up on this site - for some reason the files were too large and every time I tried uploading - it would go on forever, but I finally managed to get all 4 videos up here.

The first one, is the finish of Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk

The rest were more about questions and a conversation I had with Dennis Mortensen - here are those videos - they’re all full of information and worth viewing:

Have to admit, wish I sounded better on my videos - maybe no one likes the way they sound … can’t say that I could make it on the professional circuit as a speaker - though I wish I had the …. what do you call it …. presence that Gary Vaynerchuk has …. it’s as if, at any time of the day, Gary could give a speech, and it almost doesn’t matter what he is saying - it’ll sound good.

And look, Dennis has some pretty interesting things to say - stuff I should apply, too.

Thinking about the motivational videos I put up here, last night and this morning, with Gary Vaynerchuk, see Gary Vaynerchuk Videos from Motivational Meetup - 11-5-05 (a few more are waiting to be uploaded with Dennis Mortensen from Yahoo! Analytics, formally IndexTools).

Gary said if you had 2500 visitors to your site per day and you worked that well,you could live off the income, but it takes a lot of work, time and patience.

Typical advertising is far more expensive and probably less effective to select, niche audiences, than blog advertising, when we work it, ourselves.

Gary V spoke of his own wine site, and it’s success, and how he was dismissed early on, and still is by the likes of Zagat, who “don’t get it”.

Thinking about www.artnewyorkcity.com, for this, but this blog, too.

It takes time, and a lot of work, face to face meetings, actually.

Ha.

But, this says, to me, blog advertising has a bright future in this market, if you (me) can leverage your own Brand.   To further expand on this - I believe as the market continues to get tighter and tighter, over the next two or three years - blog advertising will come into it’s own in a big way - it makes perfect sense to me - and there will be analytics to tie it all together.

By the way, I wrote this entire post while walking to work this morning, start to finish - and I only slowed down, slightly.   To me, the iPhone has accomplished what I dreamed it would - a live blogging device/platform that allows me to post my thoughts from anywhere.

It’s been eagerly awaited for several months now, and I admit, I knew something was about to be announced on Monday night when I spoke with Dennis Mortensen while at SMX East, here in New York. I wasn’t quite sure what was going to be announced, but I had my suspecions, and this was it.  According to Dennis, in his VisualRevenue Blog -  IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics.

Yea! Now lets get on and take a look at what Yahoo! Analytics is going to be offering, under the covers, so to speak.  So what is Yahoo! Analytics offering that I think is useful or new above what anyone else is offering, at the price (free):

Real Time Segmentation - not offered by any other free platform - up till now you had to pay a lot to get the ability to segment data - and that’s what makes Analytics powerful.  Today, it’s almost a must have,  if your going to try to answer any serious marketing question - to be able to segment the data.

There’s also a Live Cost Analysis report that may be able to be morphed into something else - and appears to offer a capability Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics main competitor, doesn’t yet offer (see below):

Right now, I don’t think Google gives you any “non-Google” campaign data - up till now, maybe they didn’t need to.  I bet that decision is being reconsidered now.

Merchandise Reporting - Dennis mentioned, and I’ve known this for a while, that Yahoo! Analytics, be default, supports Yahoo! Store, Yahoo! Developers (Y!OS) and Yahoo! Head Advertisers (Microsites).  Yahoo! had the Yahoo! Stores for a while, and while they were often awful to optimize for SEO/SEM, they were often a great place to create an online store (if you didn’t get too ensnared with the Yahoo! Store template limitations) - but you could not get any kind of decent Analytics from the Yahoo! Store, last I heard - and now you can.   Google can’t compete here, because it doesn’t have stores  - that’s one place Google never went.

Getting the Analytics down to the SKU level - that comes out of the box now - you have a Yahoo! Store, you get the full support of Yahoo! Analytics.  Impressive.

Scenario Analysis - Many higher end platforms have Scenario Analysis - Google Analytics doesn’t have it - but you can set up something similar with Goals, still, this looks better than what GA offers.

Path Analysis - you can continue to drill down, just as you can in CoreMetrics - Google Analytics does not support this functionality today.

The Email Alerts (Marketing Workflow Management) are well beyond what Google offers today, though Coremetrics, for example, does provide this, as I recall, when I worked with it.   You can monitor events and send an email out when a threshold is reached.

You can read more about Yahoo! Analytics on VisualRevenue

IndexTools is now Yahoo! Web Analytics

Thinking about the Buzz I’m reading this morning on the possible AOL-YAHOO merger (yes, I am writing on my IPhone and don’t have great spell checking, over active auto-suggestion and no ability to copy an paste a hyperlink, plus limited tagging. Otherwise, I can post what ever I want via my IPhone and now just leave my laptop home, as did today, while at SMX East).

I think a AOLYOO makes more sense, to me, than a MicroHoo, and here’s why. Both are “media” companies and can expand, the culture of both are similar, the business goals, as far as I understand them, complement each other.

Let’s hear more, but I am predisposed to like this deal.

According to David Berkowitz, who I seem to run into a lot in New York, at various conferences, Blog Search Stuck in Beta - which has been my feeling for a while.  David also puts his finger on a perception I’ve had there’s no meaningful differences for most of the blog search engines - and I might as well use one or any of the others.

“…Blogpulse, Icerocket, and Trendpedia: It’s really hard to tell the difference between these blog search engines. I like Trendpedia’s charts and interface the best, but I can’t swear  which engine is really the best.

Ok, maybe Live is getting better just as the issue of Google Competitors is a mute point - but have seen the new Mircosoft Live Search page yet?  I love looking at this picture - I think it might change every day, not sure since this is the first time I looked at Microsoft Live Search page in a while:

Even as Google has won the Search Wars (ha, ha, I’m reminded of one of my earlier paintings featured in a post titled  The Search Engine Wars”

Right now, MSN is hardly in the picture and Yahoo is the “Y” in the upper left of my painting - I created this picture tonight because I wanted to paint about my life and world I live in - the world of information where the big players are the search engines.

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.

The last day has been intense - getting redirect issues (hopefully most of those are solved) with posts and categories was a learning experience and I hired Lara Leavitt, who used to work for Know More Media, to help us with the transition issues.

I’m sure Sebastian Wenzel and I could have eventually solved these problems but neither her or I have the bandwidth to do so, right now. I also hired a Web Designer to create a new template for this blog, Krissy S, and I’m very optimistic that she’ll come up with a really unique, different looking design for this blog - something that combines my love for Art with Web Analytics - I hope to have that in place before traveling to California next week, but I don’t actually know how long it will take. I have been delegating more responsibilities to others- I’ve had to, I’m getting too busy and I don’t have the actual skill set needed to fix many of the problems I came across (though I’m sure I could pick the knowledge up, if I were so inclined). Among other things today, I had an pelimanary meeting with some of my committee members to discuss a new proposal for how the Web Analytics Association may operate with Social Media in the future.

I also attended the local Web Analytics Wednesday at BARNA tonight and ran into Dennis Mortensen, who now works at Yahoo! and who sold IndexTools to Yahoo! (which is now called Yahoo! Analytics). And on another piece of news - I’ll be attending Virtual Worlds 2008 in Los Angeles on September 3rd and 4th working with Code4Software.com to present new Virtual World Metrics. And then, a Web Analytics Association Board of Directors Retreat near Boston on September 5th - 7th… will be interesting - esp since we have a new Board Member, but the name of that member hasn’t been announced yet. More later.