I attended Optimization Lunch today with a co-worker for a SWIG Roundtable on testing and optimizing key pages using Analytics.  While I saw some similarities between Usability Testing and Web Analytics (a convergence of sorts), it suddently “hit” me where the future of Conversion Marketing and Social Networks lie - it’s in the Social Graph.

Why do I say that?  In flash, it came to me.   Here’s what I saw.

Most business entities (companies, corporations, for example) are building sites and want to covert or inform visitors - jumping on Social Networking, Social Media and User Generated Content might seem like the right next step.

However, people are also saturated with having to put the same information in multiple places - so much so, they don’t want to join every social network they come across, they can’t even handle the social networks they belong to now - there are so many demands on our time and attention.

What I think needs to happen, is not more Social Networks, not more filling out of information in disparte sites, but less.

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.

How fast we get there - I don’t know - it seems Tim Berners Lee’s Social Graph is the right direction (again) - we need to create applications that pull in the Social Graph, and write back to it - so the Social Graph becomes a repository for our lives and activities.

Does that create a threat to our privacy?  Yes and No.

Yes, it does, if the Goverment can get a hold of it and control it - and it will want to do that - and should not be allowed to control the Social Graph of anyone.  But, on the positive side, having one place that is authorative, for your social graph, makes it much easier to prevent mistakes and inaccuracies in your data that, currently, are spread all over the place.

So, that’s what I think - our future - the future of Social Networks - is as an online service for applications writing to and pulling data from the Social Graph.

Now, lets start making it happen.

There’s a Facebook Photo Album of the Pizza Party I attended last Thusday night in Santa Cruz at John Marshall’s house - it was great - maybe I should have stayed longer (I only appeared in 1 photo, #49 of the album - below):

The party was a “who’s who” of the Search World, both Paid and Organic.  In a way, I’m both an insider and an outsider to it - but I really appreciated John and his wife’s hospitatlity in inviting me.

By the way, I posted about the SES Party in Santa Cruz last week, along with two videos I took which suppliment the John Marshall Photo Album nicely.

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

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

Moderator:

• Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst, Monster.com

Speakers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m going to be attending Virtual Worlds Hollywood next week (any readers who are going to be there, as well, contact me and we can meet) to assist Code4Software (speaking at the Technology Track), which is a sponsor for the show.

Virtual World Advertising: Lessons Learned
Marketing and advertising inside of virtual worlds can represent a challenge on many levels. Drawing upon over two years of practical in-world advertising experience, Jared Freedman of Code4Software will present hard statistics showing the results of advertising inside of one of the most popular Virtual Worlds, Second Life TM and some important lessons for those seeking to monetize their virtual world venues. Code4Software created the system that currently runs the largest centrally controlled advertising network in Second Life that logs over fifteen million impression minutes per month.
- Jared Freedman, President, Code4Software LLC

And that reminds me, BusinessWeek has a story on Second Life this week - Business, and Startups, in Second Life, which says that virtual worlds are succeeding as a prototyping tool for business projects:

“… The crucial advantage to working in virtual worlds is that they offer much more potential for customers to interact with new products, even ones that don’t exist yet, says Brian Mennecke, associate professor in information management systems at Iowa State University. The cost of entry is low, too. “It’s open to everyone from day one,” says Paul Jackson, principal analyst with technology researcher Forrester Research (FORR). In a report that was co-authored by Jackson and released earlier this year, Jackson points out that, even with collaboration software, sharing 3D or CAD models “has proven tricky, especially when much of the required data lives in proprietary design systems.” Working in virtual worlds helps solve that problem.

Curet is a fan of Second Life because it saved him time and money and made it easier to meet with his engineer in China. But other businesses are using Second Life to offer services not readily available in the real world or to build products they couldn’t otherwise afford to prototype. And some entrepreneurs are using Second Life to test ideas—such as a mass transit system with individual pods for riders—that aren’t feasible to prototype any other way.”

I did a lot of work with Metrics while I was working at IBM and on the Virtual Business Center - and while I don’t spend a lot of time in Virtual Worlds right now - I do see that has an application of Social Media and worth studying.

In fact, the Web Analytics Association is in the process of drafting a standard for Virtual Reality - metrics wise (what we can measure and how we can measaure it) and it will be released, in draft form, later this year.

I’ve been back in New York most of the day; still trying to figure out Webmetricsguru.com disparity between RSS Feed traffic stats/ Sitemeter stats and overall, getting the site looked at by Google after the damange Know More Media did to it.

It’s nice to finally be in the control of my blog - though I am waiting on some things such as the template update (which hasn’t happened yet), some plugins to be added and stuff like that.

Meanwhile, I had some footage I took from South Park and Buzzlogic’s offices yesterday that I just uploaded.

I was thinking how much Web 2.0 (which may include Web 2.0 and Web 4.0 and maybe even Web 5.0 - whatever that is actually called) is about peer to peer sharing of data with users and the generation of wealth from the content those users create on a site.

Having that in mind, having South Park called the “Center of Web 2.0″, along with good coffee, as you an see in my video, peeked my interest to know more.

Yeah, I saw the original home of Twitter and how people are relaxing in South Park - how culture in San Francisco for techonology is alive and strong.

On the other hand, I’d still much rather live in New York City - but I can see why many people like San Francisco.

Still tired from the trip - and I can’t believe I’ll be out in Hollywood in 10 days for Virtual Worlds Hollywood.

Hope you enjoyed the online video, by the way!

I got back home this morning and saw a tweetup with some people I know happening nearby, in Park Slope, at The Miracle Grill.

Figure I will collapse,later today. One more reason why I like living in NewYork.

I had a great trip in California this week and today was a packed and busy day, but one of the most productive I have had.

Worked at Military.com part of the day then paid visits to Buzzlogic and Quantcast with evening dinner at Gary Angel’s house.

Flying home now and will try sleeping on the plane back home.

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

“…

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

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

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

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

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

1. There is no killer metric

2. Track anything possible to glean insight

3. Social media is not just about numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I attended the SES Pizza Party to celebrate a successful SES show which was hosted by John Marshall and his wife in their house 30 minutes from San Jose.  I stayed an extra day in California, mainly to attend John’s party and I wasn’t sorry.

However, I stayed about 2 hours, which felt right - while I knew the majority of people at the party, I didn’t really feel I was fully a part of the crowd so when Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR was preparing to leave, and offered me a ride back to the hotel, I decided it was a good time for me to leave.

Here’s two online videos - the first is of the journey to John Marshall’s house in Santa Cruz, and the second film was taken at the party, itself.   I had a good time.  Hope you enjoy the movies, they may seem to ramble, but really don’t.