This has been a very busy week for with two interviews with me appearing within a day apart, plus two new articles in Search Engine Watch Magazine, and the continued interest in the AllAnalytics.com article I wrote last week on Mining for Terrorists .

Two Interviews:

1. Technorati Interview  - No Center of Excellence in Social – Interview with Marshall Sponder, Author of Social Media Analytics covers my thoughts around The Social Media Analytics Summit San Francisco, two weeks ago, where we briefly met.  The interview was conducted last Friday and appeared Monday morning.
2. The other interview  with Mike Lewis of Awareness Networks,  appeared in a number of publications including Socialnomics, Business2Community,  The Customer Collective, Social Media Today, titled  Evolving Social Media Analytics: Insights from Marshall Sponder took place a few weeks ago and had a similar overlap with closing the loop on tracking social media and deriving return on investment.

This week also had two key articles appearing in Search Engine Watch (normally, might have written them for WebMetricsGuru.com, but the topics were skewed for the audiences and the opportunities to connect with larger groups, beyond the people who read my thoughts, here.

• What Google Analytics New Social Reports Offer & What They Can’t was written by request from Search Engine Watch, who wanted to know what an Analyst thought about Google’s new offering within the Google Analytics platform.  I had waited to write about the new social reports in GA till I got access, but once I did, found them interesting, though lacking in some ways – and not even remotely close to squaring the circle of social media roi.  Read my post and let me know what you think.
• Fishing for Insights About Google’s Penguin Update – was written on request for Search Engine Watch to explore the aftereffects of Google’s new algorithm update which is code named “the Penguin“.  To be honest with you, for a long time people have used SEO to compensate for a lack of branding, or simply having not invested enough in Branding.   Well, Google has decided to penalize brands that too obviously did this (used SEO to unnaturally, they think raise their search engine rankings).  I put in some of my own thoughts on the matter, and asked if we could all still function as “dogs” on the internet – much as people thought  to be in early years of this century.  Truth is, the big brands are dominating again – but that’s because they spent more building their brands – the very thing that SEO was supposed to be a shortcut to – gone now, thanks to The Penguin.  No doubt it will be readjusted in a few weeks – and many who lost ranking will gain it back, till the next update, when it will happen all over again.

Also, last week Mining for Terrorists (or Tourists?!) appeared at AllAnalytics.com, where I regularly write, which examined the inability of the NSA and DHS to effectively monitor Social Media due to the complex language/lexicon/syntax issues that are not scalable.  The post sparked a lot of debate that is continuing to smolder this week - definitely should check that post out.

Finally, my recent post on SEW on The new Social Reports in GA gave me an intuitive flash on where Google might go next in it’s expansionism - HubSpot is a logical target for Google now.  Here’s why.

• My post highlighted the weakness of Google Analytics Social Reporting in that the new capabilities of Google Analytics are of little use if you can’t track all the pieces and tie them together.  But isn’t that what HubSpot charges people thousands of dollars a year to do? Yes they do – and so become one of Google’s next targets, weather it happens now, a year from now, or two years from now, HubSpots days are numbered, I predict – because Google Analytics will eventually want to own the entire marketing suite.  Mark my words.

And that’s it.  I have a bunch of students at Rutgers waiting for their final projects to be graded along with a bunch of commercial real estate insights to deliver, unrelated, of course, to give out (more about that, another time).

A couple of thoughts:

• Why we need Social Media Metrics Standards –  I was thinking about this post, and had mixed feeling about it because I’m often nervous when insiders (in this case, PR Insiders – The Conclave) put their stamp on a definition, perhaps, making it something they end up dominating.  I feel this should be a “democratic process” in order for it to be completely fair.  I’m sure the motivations here are good, but  I remember a friend of mine told me several years ago, that when SEO first emerged ~1997, it was make into something more complicated, so the insiders, at that time, could make a living off of it.  I won’t go into the details, but I suspect, the same thing is happening here by Social PR firms.  I better stop before a bunch of them come after me for drawing attention to this. It feels wrong.
• Still, I see a lot of good here, with the standards work, and I suppose, industries have a right to structure their metrics for themselves – so perhaps that’s what this is about.  If it’s Agency speak for Agencies – then may it’s OK.  If it’s an attempt to tell “the world” how to measure these things, then it should be wide open to everyone who wants to weigh in.
• The same could be said for the field of Social Media Analytics – do we let PR folks tell us what that means and how to measure it? Hmmmm.  Let’s beware of having “insiders” in agencies define how we see the world (unless they clearly state it from the agency perspective, and stay within that framework), perhaps writing their own books about how measure it.
• I was at the Big Data Hackathon yesterday afternoon at Bloomberg LP headquarters in Manhattan – but too late to really get involved with the teams working on data.   It’s as if I walked into an Art Class, everyone working on the big data problem, but it was impossible to speak to many, without interrupting – so I didn’t (speak to all but one person).  It reminded me of how much Big Data is like Art, at the end, everyone was doing it their own way, trying to figure out what was the essential truth in the data, in this case, I think it was a 500GB file – details are online for the meetup group where this took place.

Managed to take this picture yesterday – I c an see why Bloomberg built this building – and the colors and fishtanks on the 28th and 29th floor were amazing!

My latest post at AllAnalytics.com was just posted this morning - Mining for Terrorists (or Tourists?!) which you might want to check out there.   There’s plenty of writing still to do – and I’ve had my hands full trying to keep up and this article was planned for last month, but I didn’t get down to write it till a few weeks ago.

You can read the rest of the post, along with the comments, here.  Feel free to leave your comments (you may have to register at AllAnalytics.com) there or here, at WebMetricsGuru.com.