I guess it’s time to do my predictions for 2010 and I’m game for it – except this time, I’m pretty sure about my predictions – and can feel 2010 is here already.  I don’t want or need to repeat what a lot of others are predicting – go look to Emarketer or Forrester if you want to get overall trends – I’m into telling you what I am pretty certain will happen in 2010 because I have touched the data.

1. As highlighted by OurSocialTimes – Social Media Monitoring will go niche, in a big way, in 2010 -  the first few entrants already emerged – and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I wrote about one of them in a post titled stories I didn’t write about, yet …,  a monitoring tool for pharma was released in Nov 09, called ScanBuzz - the first platform for life sciences companies that monitors online mentions of their brands and products in the social networking arena.  Another entrant I just became aware of today, HotGrinds, a monitoring platform built around the hotel and pharma verticals – I’ll do a post on HotGrinds soon, I expect many Social Media Monitoring platforms to specialize because the sentiment and textual analysis is fairly poor now, but improves quite a bit when it’s focused on one area or vertical.

2. Marketers fall out of love with Search Engine Optimization – Robert Scoble may be on to something with his post 2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore – Scoble cites 2 big reason for the change of heart

a) Search Engines figured out what’s important and are bypassing deliberately optimized pages.

b) Search Engines have collected so much information about us, in aggregate, and individually, they will show the pages they think we’re interested in, and not so much, the pages that have been deliberately optimized for search ranking.  When factoring in personalized search now defaults to everyone, even when your not logged into Google – Conversation Marketing has a good post spelling out what Google now knows.

3) As predicted by Alterian – I fully agree -in 2010,  data analysts will become hot property for marketing departments – and, according to Philip Sheldrake, I ought be smiling.  Let me put it another way …. “I am smiling“.   Hopefully, I’ll be smiling even more in 2010 … we’ll see.

” … Introducing analytics, or better analytics means empowering marketing with intelligence about their customers and prospects, so they can more rapidly, and more accurately, identify the hidden value in their customer and prospect databases.”

Your seeing the beginnings of it now in Public Relations – analysts like me are working for PR firms – Public Relations is itself, transforming, and in some cases, encompassing marketing, advertising and social media, but someone has to put metrics around all of that – and it turns out – it’s someone, kinda, like me.  Or someone that likes to slice data – do regressive analysis, and turn that into business analysis. ..whatever.

While it’s true that someone who goes into data analytics is going to have a harder time fitting into what PR is, today (many  of the best data analysts have a little bit of asperger’s)    ….. it’s also true, PR needs people like me, more and more, to prove what they’re doing is successful, because clients are demanding it – and will demand it even more in 2010.  The main problems with the mix are

a) putting data analytics findings in common sense terminology the rest of the team can understand

b) mapping activity processes into business processes and goals via measurement methodologies.

It won’t always be a match made in heaven, though PR and Marketing need people like me – and they’re going to need them a lot, lot more in 2010 and onward.

4) Competition in the Social Media training and enablement space is going to get fierce and Red Hot – as everyone wants a piece of the action. In fact, last month I wrote a post about  Building Social Media Programs from inside out where I signaled out Olivier Blanchard  ( RedChair), Jim Sterne (with his new book on Social Media Metrics coming out next May), Gary Angel (Semphonic  recently had a seminar on Social Media Measurement, more as a feeler – dipping their toes into a market to feel it out – mostly from the Web Analytics perspective), Eric T. Peterson  morphed from strictly Web Analytics into Mobile Analytics and then, this year into Twitter Analytics with Twitalyzer – and while he isn’t “training” people yet, he and his group are busy writing white papers up the yazoo and consulting, and making sure the space is staked out.  However, with Web Analytics Wednesdays (which I have often attended – Eric and the WAA have built a large, niche community that is continuing to expand out).  And, Avinash Kaushik – Web Analytics 2.0 guy – is staking his claim with a whole chapter on Twitter Analytics and Social Media Analytics in his new book.

What we can  clearly say is … Social Media Training and Thought Leadership – that’s where EVERYONE wants to be – expect it to get QUITE crowded in 2010 as everyone I know, practically, decided (along with the rest of the world, that I don’t know) they want to provide definitive training in Social Media, including the monitoring and interpretation of it.

5) Social Media gets a new name – everyone is sick of the term “Social Media” ….. just the other day I heard Rob Key of Converseon, waxing at DigiDay Target conference that Social Media is going to be renamed in 2010 .. in fact, we’re all trying to figure out what it’s going to be called.

First of all, by calling “Social Media” …… “Social” … Media … we’re denigrating what we’re doing by making light of it  … hey …. it’s just “social” activity and that’s not “work”.  Fact of the matter … a lot of work is “Social” AND the boundaries of work and home life have just about dissolved, for many people – therefore, the boundaries of “Work” and “Fun” and “Social” have also dissolved … and calling Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc, calling all of that and a host of other things we now are seeing as “business activities” in some cases – doesn’t fit …… being Social is not … jacking off … it’s work … and it’s not fair to call it “Social Media” anymore.

So what’s the name … what do we call Social Media in 2010?

How about “Identity Marketing” or “Identity Analytics” or “Identity Strategy”?  Either that, or replace “Identity” with “Influence” and call Social Media .. “Influence Marketing”, “Influence Analytics” or “Influence Strategy” … and doesn’t that sound a whole lot better than “Social Media”?

It’s also a whole lot easier to fund “Influence Marketing” … than “Social Media Marketing” – people instinctively know Influencing someone is Work – your not jacking off while trying to Influence people … so I think … this is where it’s going to go in 2010.

Look, we know a lot of work is being focused on buying “cookies” now … and that gets down to “Identity” , or maybe, “Influence”. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are building gigantic clouds of “Identity Management” and a single sign in for the web, be it via Facebook, or by Google, or by Open ID …that all comes down to Identity or Influence  – and Audience Measurement also comes down, eventually, to who is in the audience and how Influential they are considered to be, by the audiences they are in.

Yep, whatever the new name of Social Media becomes – I think it will, and probably should, have “Identity” or “Influencer” in there somewhere.

6) Based on all the above, it stands to reason that Marketing Budgets will increase for Social Media, including measurement – but, because this is a moving target - business will demand a bit more than what they have been getting, up to now, in this department.

A few weeks ago Philip Sheldrake held the first Influencer Scorecard Summit here in NYC -I was part of it and now it’s beginning to sink in what that’s really all about (more than when I was there, at the Summit).   Here’s what I mean – say your one of the  big corporations – you want to know how every cent your spending on any media or promotions (including Social Media) and how that  drove more sales … they want to see that … detailed and broken down by campaign, and you want it directly fed into your Operational Metrics platform – that is what the Scorecard was soposed to be.

We didn’t get to that level in the first meeting – but I am certain, we will give it a full airing in 2010, at a future meeting next Spring or Fall, probably in New York, or perhaps, London.

In fact, what Philip was proposing is Influencer Scorecard, The Chief Influencer Officer & the transmutation of Social Media and PR.

And where we were worried about having data all over the place in the enterprise – in various silos, we’re now going to settle on a few data-warehouse models and in 2010, many advances will be make in merging disparate data to understand customer behavior and we will begin to crack Social Media ROI – and not Oliver Blanchard’s type, which did not explain what to replace proxies for social media measurement with (he just told us what it wasn’t).

While there will be a lot of slick marketing out there – to claim Social Media – put the stake in the ground – you’ll also have the rise of the Chief Influencer Officer – who will be (he or she) very hard to convince … they will want to see HARD DATA …. not marketing hype …… nuff said.

Data Analysts will a lot better with an Chief Influence Officer – at least, if we can figure out how to speak their language.   Who knows, maybe a few of us will end up being Influencer Officers, ourselves. We’ll see what the cat drags in, next year.

7. My final prediction for 2010 is Google is going to go Goggles and blow half the Social Media Monitoring vendors out of the water – by entering in to the “Reputation Monitoring” space, itself.

While in London, last month, I presented my predictions for the Future of Social Media Monitoring were I said (in slide 15) Google will accelerate the merging of Web Analytic and Search Marketing (plus Organic Search) by integrating Social Media Monitoring into Google Analytics.

1 – There are no “Standards” definations for Social Media Vendors – (see slide 11 in my deck , embedded, above) – though there are standards for advertisers.   For example, how Alterian/Techrigy, Radian6, Sysomos, Scout Labs, etc, measure sentiment, all differ – in fact, everything they measure is a custom hack – there’s no interoperability… correct?  Just look at slies 5-8 in my deck to see what I mean.

But we know, as I detail, in Slide 11, that when there are standards, like the Web Analytics vendors have, like the IAB VAST standards – when these things are in place – it’s alot easier to monetize media.  Just look at my VentureBeat Post on  BrightRoll: Video ad revenues are soaring, despite downturn where …

“…. Monetizing online video has been somewhat problematic because the technology in place interfered with easy communications between publishers and third party video ad platforms.

But that’s beginning to change, partly due to the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), via the VAST Standard. According to the IAB, VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) includes a standard XML-based ad response for in-stream video and an XML Schema Definition (“XSD”) for developers. It’s meant to accommodate the majority of current practices within the online digital video advertising business. The gains we‘re seeing now were almost impossible to achieve until the VAST Standard made it easier to obtain end-to-end control between ad servers and associated video players.

2 .  At it’s heart, there is no company in the world that has anywhere as much information on us as Google – and there’s no company that can leverage it as well as they can – but the fact of the matter is … most of the tools that are good, today, cost way too much for the average business to use, and even if they did buy those tools, like Radian6, they have no idea how to use them effectively.

But .. we know Google – tends to build things that are simple and easy to use …this is their history – and if and when they go into Social Media Monitoring in a big way – they will give it away for free – like they do with Google Analytics … and that’s going to help people really understand Influence better – and it’s going to help Google improve Search, as well.

I decided to write a long post as nothing that took place at the Influence Scorecard Summit needs to be kept back – but I’m still trying to wrap my hands around what we came up with, in the first meet (we’ll meet again in second quarter of 2010, probably in New York, San Francisco or London).  Frequently, as  I write my ideas down in this blog, the ideas crystallize and evolve – maybe that’s what will happen, here.

The working group that attended the Influencer Scorecard Summit included Katie Delahaye Paine, Marshall Sponder, Ted Shelton, Jay Krall, Harish Rao, Diane Meier, Connie Bensen, Philip Sheldrake, though we had a few more who attended but were not present on day 2.

We also have an open Wiki for collaboration, thanks to Ted Shelton.

While the slides I’m presenting are in no particular order, we attempted to define, for our own working knowledge, what influence, engagement, advocacy, sentiment, ROI, transparency, authentic and trust meant; these were not absolute definitions, but those we could all agree on when referencing those terms.

We decided Influence was the power to affect someone’s actions – and that makes sense to me (I’ve often thought this, but it’s not always easy to prove – but we were not going to get caught up proving this, we just wanted to agree on what we call “influence”).   Engagement was defined as some action more than “0″; essentially, moving from one state to another (we didn’t define what “0″ was).   Advocacy we agreed was “engagement” with an “agenda” while Sentiment is taken to be an expression of an opinion.  We didn’t attempt to define Return on Investment for the time being.  Transparency we defined as the “default state” of deciding to allow all information to be publicly accessible (unless there is a specific reason to keep information private); we discussed the implications of companies operating with their default state of  public vs the default state of treating all internal information as  private (the norm).

It would seem to make sense, I think,  if your into Social Media, you’d want to have your default state of transparency to be set to “public” and only keep things “private” if there is a reason – and I’m sure this issue of “transparency” can be debated, one way or the other.

Authenticity we defined as “genuine” and “real” while “Trust” is made up of competence, integrity, reliability and authenticity.

We treated “Engagement” as a “breadcrumb”, a sign, trace, crumb to which there was “attention” applied – and we postulated “Engagement” could be “visible” or “invisible”; linking Engagement to Forrester’s Technographic profiles (via GroundSwell) seems to make sense to us, but we dropped out “inactives”.  We inserted the idea of “passion” without defining yet how it would be measured – though passion probably has to do with “acceleration” of “engagement”.

We didn’t come up with a formula (yet) though we probably could have, but it felt premature – and quite frankly, many in attendance felt that most formulas for Engagement contain “compound measures” which aren’t measurable/provable and end up creating more confusion and controversy without leading to much that’s useful  (in my own words).

However, at some point, we’ll need a formula for Engagement, based on our definitions, otherwise, we won’t be able to operate on the data we collect or refine (correct) the formula by applying it to real use cases using “transparent algorithms”.  I think it can be argued that the current formulas for Engagement are, or are not, transparent (I’m thinking of Peterson’s which would seem to be transparent, but also other others, that are harder to apply to an actual data set because some aspect is missing, and you have to put in a “0″, and that’s not what we want.   Maybe we could come up with a formula for Engagement, even in our meetings yesterday and today, but that doesn’t mean we should.

In defining “Engagement” (and we’re trying for a model that includes “offline” as well as “online”) we looked at bell curves (see below), we also postulated that “positive” or “negative” sentiment was at one side of the bell curve, or the other, and “neutral” was in the middle of the curve – and most social media data that’s collected, typically, will be in the middle of the bell curve (neutral) but what we end up caring most about is the what’s at either side of the bell curve – as those things impact business the most.

The particular bell curve shown above doesn’t really tie into sentiment – but a similar one could have been show that does tie in to sentiment (we discussed this though we may not have drawn out a diagram for it).

In defining “Influence“, I began to visualize a “map” or “diagram” and even though I give David Armano (and sometimes, Brian Solis) an hard time because I’m sick of pretty marketing diagrams that are next to meaningless when you try to operate on the information – I opted and voiced an opinion that we needed a map for Influence, and Philip Sheldrake will produce it by year’s end based on our notes (below).

The “map” of “Influence” includes “topical values”, “demographics” and “volume/reach”, but we defined reach as being subordinate to relevance, and my take is we’d only want to determine the reach an Influencer has/had with a “relevant” audience for the message.   I don’t think many, or any Social Media platforms really have reach calculated as best it could be – because the audience would have to be determined to be “relevant” to the topic query, first.

One example I can think of is a restaurant chain I do some work with – they want to reach the target audience (people who will come in to one of their restaurants and order a meal, hopefully, return often to repeat the meal) – the “reach” metric will be more useful if we can tie it to those individuals or groups most likely to do so – but no social media platform can really do that, today – therefore many of the definitions we came up with might not be fully implementable, today (though they probably will be within a few years).

We talked about “Network Effects” and equated it to “Word Of Mouth” and “amplification” of messaging; Harish Rao argued that there is a lot of “Network Theory”  and proven equations that could be overlay to our working definitions, even now, though it is probably premature to do so at this time.   We also discussed “potential” engagement vs. “actual” or “post” engagement (don’t recall what we cited as an example of it – probably Katie Paine could speak to it better than I can).

We looked at “Relevance” as topical, possibly obtained with Qualitative data, and this may be possible using Social Media Monitoring (I was thinking Crimson Hexagon, but they didn’t attend – wish they had – tried my best to get them to the table – that’s all I can do).  Credibility was defined by source and message – again, a practical example might be finding someone who has demonstrated knowledge in a specific area that’s relevant to what is to be influenced.

Finally, we left today with some action point, with my preference to create a real use case, beyond a hypothetical one- and for that, we’d need real data (we’re working on it).

Of course, we don’t have the formula for “Influencers” mapped out yet – though it’s strongly suggested by the charts I’ve presented.

There was a tension created by what we could achieve in a day and a half of intense meetings – and of getting caught in the weeds of details we can’t solve now.    I’ve been in roundtables and meetings before where “strategy” and “concept” were more important to get right – but I found those meetings unsatisfying because we could spend our time talking concepts and strategy and never get to do the second or third pass and come up with something that actually works.

It’s in my nature as an analyst and artist to want to “touch the data” and work directly with it – for me, it’s frustrating talking about ideas that are, as yet, un connected with the details and measures that might prove/disprove them.

Also, in giving a short version my presentation on The Future of  Monitoring Social Media that went over very well in London, on November 17th (below) ….

… I found a curious but interesting reaction when I described the typical analysis I do for clients and stakeholders in PR coming from someone who is a CMO currently – that it’s up to the analyst or social media person to question everyone, including the CMO, on what they want to achieve by having analysis done.

Personally, I find that attitude, offensive – it’s almost as if people are so busy, they can’t think and define, or figure out what they mean or what they want – and they want analysts – who are not often allowed to be decision makers, to figure it out, for them – meanwhile – even though that kind of back and forth is time consuming and difficult to accomplish on a regular basis.   I guess that’s why I like be grounded to the work I do – that I don’t want to get to the point where I’m talking about “boxes” and “concepts” that are “abstracted” from the actual things they measure – which to me, is somewhat, dehumanizing.

On the other hand, i found myself getting caught up in details where maybe, what was needed, was to agree on broad principles, first – so, I think there’s an interaction coming from different members of our working group, where this “tension” was actually constructive – even if, at times, it didn’t feel that way.

Overall, I’m glad we had our first meeting – though my head is still buzzing with the information and it’s going to take time and work for it to crystallize – but I hope I took the first step here and K.D. Paine will have a post up soon at The Measurement Standard site covering this Influencer Scorecard Summit gathering.

Can’t sleep -maybe I’m thinking about London and Monitoring Social Media 09, next week; perhaps, I  was thinking about a post read earlier today on how Good Bloggers Make Good Neighbors, in ReadWriteWeb, based on a Pew Internet Study suggesting  “geeky” people (similar to the type I met at the Singularity Summit last month in NYC), especially if they’re bloggers, are more socially well adjusted and  ..

…almost 80 percent more likely to do small favors for their neighbors than other groups, and they’re 84 percent more likely to help a neighbor care for a family member, e.g., offer babysitting help.

…… Bloggers and mobile phone users are also 72 percent more likely to belong to a local group or organization such as a charitable organization, a youth sports league, or a religious group.

I think this study shows people who are internet savvy, particularly if they are regular, active bloggers – are more likely to be interested in the world around them, and what’s going on locally.

Social Media, also, can not only help us be more socially adjusted, it can also, according to a Gizmodo post I read today, keep someone out of jail -

“….Rodney was arrested on October 18 as a suspect in two crimes. He declared himself innocent and Robert Reuland—his defense lawyer—found the key to free him: “Where’s my pancakes?“

That seemingly inconsequential Facebook status update proved crucial when the Californian company confirmed that someone wrote it from his father’s Harlem apartment computer, using Rodney’s user and password at around the time of the alleged crime: Saturday October 17, 11:49am.

…. The most interesting thing in this case, however, is that this seems to be the first time in which social networking has been used to save the ass of someone, rather than nailing a really stupid thief.

But then, I’m wondering if something totally unrelated, such as a recent study mentioned in Brain and Cognition shows that Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity

…  Elizabeth Shobe and colleagues have provided the first evidence that creativity is boosted by an intervention designed to increase hemispheric cross-talk.

… The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who’d performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use. Staring straight ahead, by contrast, had no effect on creativity.

…. overall, the mixed-handed participants performed better on the creativity task than the strong-handers, thus providing further evidence for a link between inter-hemispheric interaction, which mixed-handers have more of, and creativity. But it also turned out that mixed-handers didn’t benefit from the horizontal eye movement task.

Now, I’m going to be doing my horizontal eye exercises alot more often – they’ll probably help my blogging, analytics insight, and painting (when have the time and inclination to).

Rambling on to another subject – as I begin to feel sleepy – recalling a post I read earlier today on Top Rank Blog on how major Vegas hotels are using Social Media, presented at PubCon, day 2, that is putting me to sleep …

“…prominent brands on the strip have stepped up to the plate and are actively engaged in social web participation.”

” …While not everyone may check their emails in Vegas, many of them still check their social profiles while traveling. “

“…. have a “toys for Tweets” promotion that will bring awareness to the fact that there is a Hilton in Vegas in a positive light.”

“….The MGM Grand was late to the social media game compared to competitors on the strip – we finally joined for a few reasons.  The effectiveness of our email marketing was beginning to degrade a bit. ”

It’s encouraging the hotels at Vegas are begining to take Social Media seriously – but they seem so uncreative – I feel like telling all the panelists to do horizontal eye exercises for a month – then do your social media – maybe it’ll be different!   Ok, I digress.   Sounds like I didn’t miss much at PubCon this year (haven’t been to a PubCon since 2005 in New Orleans).

Then again, maybe Todd Defren at PR-Squared – is doing his horizontal eye exercises – as he said some good stuff in his post on THE FUTURE OF MARKETING (which reminds me of my slideshare presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring(see below)

and he has a nice graphic which I’m adding to this post, similar to one I put in my presentation  ..

I like how Todd says …

…. Facebook and Google will be the long-term winners: it’s not just the fact that they have critical mass, but that that critical mass comes at a time when Social Networks are not just destinations (a la the old AOL and MySpace), but are becoming integral to the holistic Web Experience.

….When we surf and when we search, beyond the Social Network sites, we’re going to be taking our Friends with us; we’re taking our known online activities with us.  Sites and search engines will re-orient themselves dynamically to match our identities. The entire Web experience will re-architect itself on-the-fly based on where we’ve been, what device we’re using, what we’ve looked at or purchased in the past, who we are friends with, what offers and content our contacts have been sharing and purchasing, etc.

That’s an interesting observation – all this stuff is poised to happen – but still hasn’t because the semantic web is still in it’s infancy – and a lot of the automation to make it happen hasn’t evolved yet – ie: Microformats.  In fact, if you read my Slideshare, above,  one thing I left out, is the reason why Alterian and Radian6 can’t geo-locate well – their tools, and the rest of the Social Media Monitoring tools, for the most part, were built, as Bill Hunt, pointed out to me recently, by marketing people looking to track Buzz, and not so much, for the kinds of analysis we really need.

However, even if Alterian/Radian6/Cision/Scout Labs, etc, wanted to – they could not get the precision needed to tell me where most of the content they are monitoring on the web actually originates from, or do topic/sentiment analysis well – that is at least a few years away – and needs the Semantic Web in order to become more accurate and useful.  That’s what I left out (maybe I would have put it in if I were doing my eye exercises).

The rest of Todd Defren’s post is worth reading … but now I’m really fading – time to go back, maybe work on all the nice things going on in London next week, including Monitoring Social Media 09, and London, that I haven’t visited before.

Of course, I’ll be missing Web 2.0 conference, here in NYC – but I had to make a choice on where it was more important to be.