Just got back to New York from an invigorating and slightly unsettling weekend near Boston that was proceeded by 2 days in LA at VirtualWorldsHollywood.

My mind and emotions are all scrambled up even as I head over to Bridgewaters in Fulton Mall for the PMA Digital Conference where I am due to speak, on a metrics panel, at 11 AM.

But here’s what I want talk about.

Sometimes we can only go so far with our work and deliverables because of the organization and situations one is in. This is particularly true for Social Media, but it also applies to many other things, including Web Analytics and even Search Engine work.

Here’s what I observed and what I make of it.

When I have produced reports for stakeholders I have noticed the closer my report became to what they originally specified, usually in writing, word for word, the less it was what they actually wanted and needed.

The process of producing, almost word for word, what they asked for let to new requirements which led to a report that morphed into something different.

A lot of Social Media and Web Analytics is like that; we’re not really dealing with a set of deliverables as much as a set of processes that lead to conversations and where reports are just milestones in that process.

When we fund projects, I think what we are really funding is conversations that lead to some deliverables, of not, and should be re evaluated periodically. But we need to look more at the conversation and what it leads to and less at specific reports and deliverables that was funded, initially.

It gets really interesting when we look at Social Media. Most organizations aren’t too sure what it is, what it’s value is, and where it belongs in the scheme of things. They don’t know how to measure success of Social Media either.

It’s probably too early for most organizations to benefit that much from Social Media because they are not structured to, and for one other reason.

The reason is the evolution of social networks and identity. We need to get to a point, as Forrester Research mentioned (Groundswell, Charlene Li) where Social Networks are “air”. You go to a site and your friends and the social graph are pulled in from a Cloud of data.

Not Facebook, not MySpace, but the Cloud, where your digital Social Graph resides.

We will then evaluate experience with the Social Graph in mind, for all enabled sites we visit and spend time on.

And the Social Graph measurement will also, only then, start showing up in what we now call Site Analytics.

New tools will evolve to measure the social graph activity across sites and business entities.

And then, Social Media will get funded, much as Search and Web Analytics are now being funded and have a place in most medium to large businesses.

But before all that happens it’s hard to see how Social Media will get that far no matter what anyone does now.

Because we are talking process and conversations, not results or large ROI.

It’s too early.

Same thing happened this weekend with Social Media and and an organization; deliverables and where an organization is at, need to be in sync.

And now I am standing before BridgeWaters.

QuarkBase does look interesting, if for nothing else, it tries to create a mashup of a lot of different information that normally you don’t find in the same place - so maybe, it’s worth looking more deeply into it.

For example, look at the information you get out of QuarkBase for the popular European Social Network - Netlog.com

In Short	:	Netlog is a Belgian social networking website specifically targeted at the European youth.
Tags	:	social, netlog, community, socialnetworking, blog
Language	:	Dutch
Homepage	:	http://netlog.com
Blog	:	http://www.netlog.com/go/news
Slogan/Tagline	:	-

Unless I’m mistaken, the “In Short” description is no where to be found on the site - I believe, similar to what Quantcast does in describing sites - it may have been written partly via by programming  - but I’m not sure.

The Social Popularity is also pretty interesting - for those of us who track it -

Social Popularity

Popularity of netlog.com

popular_basic

	98 bookmarks at Delicious
	23 pages posted on Digg
	90 pages posted on Reddit
	1015 page references from Yahoo! Answers
	47159 blog reactions from Technorati

	12 inbound links from Wikipedia
	0 pages made to the first page of Digg
	0 comments on StumbleUpon
	7 inbound links from Google Groups

Along with the Alexa traffic graphs comes specific business information (who is the CEO, who is the founder) and RSS Feed information is present when that’s available.  Even Twitter and magazine stories are highlighted and reported.

It’s one more indication of how much information is being “mashed up” to create more, in sum, than the individual bits of information mean, by themselves.

Gosh, even Venture Capital and Funding information appears on the bottom of the page, when available.

Definately a tool to pay with - and while your at it, look at Netlog.com, itself, a very intersting new Social Network - something more in the Europe space than here in the US.

Maybe Sebastian Wenzel, my partner in Blogspeedway.com, who writes Webanalyticsbook.com, knows more abotu Netlog.com than I do - since he’s European and the target audience for Netlog.com.

I thought Tamar’s post at Techipedia on The Great Social Media Traffic Debate: Niche or General Networks? was pretty good and Tamar Weinberg, when I meet her here in NYC, always strikes me as pretty smart and connected woman - she’s aware of pretty much everything that’s happening in the Tech World, in Social Media and in the Search World.  I don’t think of her so much as an Analyst, yet her Traffic Debate piece was good reading - even if it confirms what we already know.

In fact, if you read her post and then download the Military/Buzzlogic presentation we presented last week (see Social Media Analysis Presentations from Search Engine Strategies San Jose) (see below) ….

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.

… you’ll see that Social Media traffic is not only a superior way to get new visitors to a site - but … Social Media traffic, I found, acts in a more directed way than Search Traffic - (darn! I just uttered blasphemy in the Search World).

Yes, depending on the context - Social Media Traffic from Niche Social Networks - traffic from Social Media will typically be more directed and focused than Search Traffic, and paradoxically, often have a lower pages per visit and higher bounce rate while having a higher “engagement” level and more of a “trust” factor.

You may ask me how that can be?

Easy - you know those TinyURLs in a Twitter feed?  How about a Facebook link or a FriendFeed link?  How long do you think a visit to your site from one of those sources is going to last? Not long, because they are looking directly at the content they want - they don’t have to search for it - they found it!

I wrote about LonelyGirl15 two years ago when the story first came out (see The whole story about Lonelygirl15 as revealed by the New York Times, Pluto’s fate according to Lonelygirl15) but lost track of what was happening with that story until tonight when I saw a post in TechCrunch -EQAL Shares Details On LonelyGirl15 Followup - which said that not only was the original tactic successful, but it had now spawned a new Social Network.

As part of the new series, LG15.com will be relaunching as a hybrid blog/social network designed to further the level of viewer immersion. Equal’s founders say that they’ve built the social network themselves because it gives them greater freedom during the course of the shows (for example, they could modify the look and feel of the site depending on recent events in each story), but that the network isn’t designed to compete with the likes of Facebook or MySpace.

Having thought about, especially in light of my earlier post today, I think building hybrid Social Networks is a mistake - more of an overall waste of time and money.

I’m sure this venture will be successful in the short term - people want to create reality around characters, even if the character is fictional, as is LonelyGirl15; according to TechCrunch:

There have been a number of attempts to create “distorted realities” online through online shows and games, but few of these have managed to take off - users generally find it hard to suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy themselves. EQAL’s approach may be able to skirt this issue by catering to hardcore and casual fans alike, allowing users to consume as much content as they’re comfortable with.

I guess you can have as much of LonelyGirl15 as you want - the creators of this yawn are not going to remind us that it’s not a real story … and use Social Media as a means to captivate people.

What really needs to happen is using the Social Graph as a service - which FaceBook has begun to do, except I’m thinking way beyond Facebook - that’s just the beginning.

By the way, I haven’t looked at any of the recent LonelyGirl15 videos, but I’m sure TechCrunch is tracking it all - I saw it as just another way to get attention, and it worked.

OK, so blogs are now going to get the Social Networking tools Social Networks  have - according to Read/WriteWeb in a post titled .. The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type

“…BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each adding a new feature. When complete, BuddyPress will offer extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, friends, status updates, albums, as well as something called “the wire,” which sounds a lot like Twitter.”

Sounds like Movable Type already has Social Networking, as of V4.2

“..With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more.”

That reminds me, about a year ago, I thought about how great it would be if you could build a Social Network around a blog.  But then, I thought - well, how many Social Networks can one belong to?  Certainly, not a different Social Network for each blog.  According to the RWW post, that is a problem here as well…

“…the only problem with MT and WordPress going the social networking route is that they are adding yet two more social networks where you will have to establish a profile, find and add friends, etc. Where’s Facebook Friend Connect? Where’s Google Friend Connect? Where’s your portable social graph in all this?

But now, I’m seeing, we don’t really need to have different Social Networks for blogs, all we really need to do or want to to is enable Social Networking features on blogs - and let the Social Graph to the rest.

And, I feel, that’s what we’re going to come to - that point, in the next year.

Wrote a post on my Thoughts on TechCrunch’s Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks  today - as there was a lot of comments on the TechCrunch post my Michael Arrington Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks.

That was a major post, wish I had wrote it myself - certainly could have - in fact, I could have done better - but I didn't write it, he did.

I think though, I will try to try to do some along the same lines, soon - if he's willing to take ComScore data and mash it up and try to make that data answer what a Social Network is worth - I can take certainly do the same thing - as I have access to all the same data, in this case, that he does.

I think, the answers we get are based on the questions we have - people have been wondering what a Social Network is worth - that's his question, and he got an answer - it was simplistic and 2 dimensional, as many of the comments pointed out - but a damn good piece of work, anyway.

While I was at the Personal Democracy Forum After Party tonight I spoke to many people, including a few employees of Linkfluence, research software used to categorize websites for political affilation. 

You can see an example of Linkfluence software at work in the Presidential Watch 08 website

I found the software interesting in it's potential use to categorize websites as Democratic leaning or Republican leaning before they declared themselves - mostly by looking at backlinks and where they go and analyzing textual content of the pages.

I don't think the charts reflect traffic, nor can they, at this point - but I can imagine several enhancements which, could improve the software.   I like what I saw, though.

Looking at the Trends for Obama vs. McCain, right now, Obama wins, but it's closer than one might think - and it will be very, very interesting to watch this trend chart change after Labor Day and into October 2008.

I believe Technology will have a strong inpact in this Presidential Election - but I don't yet know if it will alter the outcome - that remains to be seen.

Here's video I took tonight about Linkfluence at #pdf2008 

I put two good posts up on The Analytics Guru tonight - the first one, Too many friends? deals with the biological limits to the number of friends you can have and how Social Networks may have altered the limits and made them go much higher.

The second post, ComScore buys M:Metrics  is not really a surprise but it does bring up the question on how ComScore is going to add the M:Metrics data in to the rest of it's reports - and I have some ideas about it.

By the way, I'm going to be pretty busy the third week of August in the Bay Area with speaking engagements at two conferences that overlap somewhat:

1. I'll be attending August 17-19, 2008 - not sure if I'll be a huddle leader or facilitator yet - that's still being worked out.

2.  I've been invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies San Jose (August 18-21st) on two Social Media related sessions.

1. The first session is “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World. That one is a panel of analytics experts (Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, Matt Bailey and me) and it is scheduled for Tuesday, August 19^th, 11:00am – 12:15pm.
2. The second session was my idea entirely -  “Social Media Analysis and Tracking.”  I'll try to get a few sites I work with/for on board along with Todd Parsons from Buzzlogic, who has agreed to speak. It is scheduled for Wednesday, August 20^th, 2:45pm – 4:00pm.

What I've been thinking, having attended several Search Engine Strategies conferences (all in New York - I've never attended one in San Jose) is that I'd like to offer even more information that is really useful about Social Media Measaurement - stuff I've never heard any where before - I'd like to offer that to the audience in San Jose.  The Social Media tract at SES New York was really good - and I want to add more to it.

Of course, I'd like to see the GooglePlex too …. will ask Avinash Kaushik to take me over to his office there (I'm sure I'll do that) and go to the GooglePlex party - .. they always have a GooglePlex party at SES San Jose.

Here's something to nibble at - just an idea.  Does anyone really know how much Social Media traffic a site gets?   I wrote about it a while back in Webmetricsguru in Monitoring Social Media Traffic on a site but there's another way via ComScore:

1. Generate Source/Loss reports for a site property or properties you want to compare.  I recommend expanding the listing (see all the sites that make up a property).  I think collecting a few months of data is also a good idea (you can get the last 15 months of Source/Loss reports on any site that ComScore reports on).
2. Generate the latest Conversational Media Report from Top Measures in ComScore MyMetrix.
3. Using Vlookup in Excel, match up the Source traffic to the Conversational Media sites it came from (this includes a listing Blogs, Forums and Social Network sites that ComScore has associated with Conversational or Social Networking activity).
4. Add up the traffic in UV (000) and divide it by the total traffic, UV (000) the property received that month to get the % traffic from Social Media.

You can do this over time and using competitors - as I did - and find out some interesting things.

Overall, for the sites I looked at today, Social Media traffic was hovering between  3%-6% of total traffic but if you looked at certain sources of traffic like LinkedIn or MySpace*, you could see interesting patterns of where one competitor leveraged Social Media better than another.

Finally, I wanted to mention a point I brought up in an earlier post tonight on Techrigy SM2 Social Media Monitoring Platform  -  that Social Media activities and platforms need an "owner" in many corporations … and often … there's no clear owner or even someone that wants to own things like Social Media activities (say, a breakfast or similar face to face networking function) and more exotic things like membership in organizations such as the Blog Council.

What I'm saying is that we're in a curious state of affairs with Social Media - that's unlike Web Analytics or Search Marketing (the last two have been accepted at most organizations and have a place somewhere within that organization); the same can not be said for Social Media.

Perhaps the issue of no clear ROI from Social Media (I don't think that's true, by the way)- meaning, it's not clear to many companies how reliable or measurable Social Media really is ….. and therefore, organizations haven't yet invested enough in it because they would rather spend money where they know it'll work and get the most demonstratable value.

The other point is  - even when organizations accept Social Media - they might not know where it belongs (who is the owner of it - who has the budget for it?)  Does it lie in Marketing, or is it somewhere else? Who do you ask?   The answer is, often, unclear. 

At least, that's what I've experienced.

How does that tie into Search Engine Strategies and XChange conferences later this summer?  

Well … attend, one or both conferences, make sure to attend my sessions and you'll find out. 

I guess the efforts of Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur (who I met at LeWeb3) are paying off as Steven Spielberg and other celebrities have just adopted Seesmic.com as a way to asynchronously respond and/or promote their efforts.

This use of Seesmic was probably unforeseen but seems to strike the right note - and Robert Scoble has been flooding Twitter today with Tiny Urls of various celebrities that have suddenly jumped on board the Seesmic.com Bandwagon. 

In fact, Robert Scoble posted about it earlier today on Scobleizer - 

"…Today Seesmic got a HUGE win. The Indiana Jones crew, including famous movie stars and movie directors, are on Seesmic. Here, check them out:

http://seesmic.com/cate
http://seesmic.com/georgelucas
http://seesmic.com/harrison
http://seesmic.com/steven
http://seesmic.com/karen

There’s a lot more on this over on TechMeme this morning. These celebrities are so well known in our culture that I don’t even think I need to put their full names in my post. Ever heard of Harrison Ford? Steven Spielberg?

It’s interesting, CEO Loic Le Meur bristled when I told him that FriendFeed was the World Wide Talk Show. He said he was going to turn Seesmic into that and this shows that he’s probably right. Funny, though, that I first learned of this on FriendFeed. If you look at everyone this morning talking about Seesmic, you’ll see there’s a TON of new conversation happening thanks to these celebrities showing up on Seesmic."

 

I used Seesmic to respond and post my own thoughts, asynchronously, to Steven Spielberg's comments on the new Indiana Jones movie Spielberg first, than my response.  

Thanks to @Fred2Baro for plugging me onto the Spielberg story. 

Personally, I can't imagine living now, in this time, and not using Social Media, for all it's worth. 

The other night I was at a party and I spoke to someone that didn't have a mobile phone (said it makes her sick), doesn't use Twitter, doesn't know much or anything about Social Networks - and is a film producer. 

Ok, maybe microwaves can make some people sick (I'll grant that) but more often, I think some people are just afraid to embrace new technology - and to some extent - those people will find themselves, more and more, being left out of the conversation.

Interesting - Wikia Open Sources Social Networking - Focused Networking Now Open to All - as written up in Read/WriteWeb

"…More generally, though, it could impact the social news and networking economy overall. We wrote earlier this week that the big social news aggregator model (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz) is vulnerable to market share erosion at the hands of niche social news sites. The same can be said for the big, general interest social networking sites. While most users will probably always want some presence on big sites, the potential is there to have the majority of communication online occur in a targeted niche community of people interested in and informed about the specific topics that an individual is interested in."

I would not shed a tear if Digg were negatively impacted by Wikia though I doubt that'll happen. In fact, just because you have Social Networking tools doesn't mean visitors will use them - posted about it in MediaWiki’s Social Profile extends White Label Social Networking.

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