Guess I’m on a roll today - figure I might as well write these ideas down as they come to me, before I forget them, so as to fix them in physical reality, put my stamp on them, before someone else thinks of them (and I’m guessing, a few probably all ready have).

Ok, so the last two posts mapped out that we haven’t make a good case for Social Media and some of it is poor marketing - it’s psychological in my opinion.

But putting tracking code in place and have it “ping” a Social Measurement Platform - tracking a specific set of pattern strings we’ve set up for a campaign - we still have to figure out what that’s all worth and measure it .

Take “Friending” someone - what’s that worth - I compared the value of a “friend” to the value of “Gold”; but how is Gold Valued - how is it’s price fixed?  According to Wikipedia the price of Gold is determined by …:

“…. The price of gold is determined on the open market, but a procedure known as the Gold Fixing in London, originating in September 1919, provides a daily benchmark figure to the industry. The afternoon fixing appeared in 1968 to fix a price when US markets are open.”

What I’m suggesting is the value of a “friendship”, virtual OR real, as long as it pertains to the online world - varies from day to day, hour to hour, person to person.   In fact, like a molecule, a friendship can’t be evaluated entirely by only one node of it - in other words, a “friendship” needs at least one other person - you can’t friend “nothingness” - and in that sense, a virtual friend, can’t, by my thinking, be 100% analogous to a particle of Gold, or a “dollar bill”, as those units of value don’t suddenly change, depending on who holds them (some people will probably argue this point with me) while two nodes of a “network” could be of a different value than another two nodes, if you get my drift.

I thought of water and a glass as an analogy - but I don’t think it applies that well - but anyway, I’m just thinking this through now.

For one thing, you can’t have friendship with out some degree of attention, and that, alone, is difficult to measure.   Also, not everyone’s attention is worth the same amount - so getting, say Kevin Rose of Digg’s attention may be worth more than getting my attention, especially according to “Blogger King” Allen Stern.

I think it’s fair to say that people who have been online “longer” and invested more time in building relationships online, and leveraging the web, might have a higher “value” placed on the value of their friendship - for example, early adopters to Facebook (after the College Dorm days) like Robert Scoble have well over 5,000 friends - I’m at 623 friends now - and I’ve been  using Facebook actively for well over a year - but someone who just joined and isn’t really into Facebook, or maybe is more into LinkedIn and hardly uses Facebook, all things equal, is probably worth “less” as an Internet friend (again, given a system of determining value) than someone who has put in more time, and therefore, is more likely to have generated more value, online.

But, then again, there’s also a component of offline popularity that is totally applicable to online friendship - someone who is known to the general public, or even to a small community, but never been online, if they suddenly joined Facebook or Myspace, say Henry Kissinger (not that he would, but suppose he did)  the value of having him friend you online, or vice versa, would be higher than, say, me friending you (all things being equal); that’s just a hypothetical example, by the way.

Plus, not all friends are equal, we all know that - just like in the “real world” your close with a few friends, and probably know many more.

And then, if we think about the number of friends, getting back to Robert Scoble or Loic Le Meur, or Jason Calacanis, for example - each has close to or more than the limit of Facebook friends and Scoble has well over 10,000 Twitter followers - maybe double that - he doesn’t probably have that much time to interact with anyone but a few of his contacts … right?

And it goes with out saying, though I’ll say it outright, that the more friends some one has, the less the value of the friendship is for each person - this can be conceptualized in a similar way to the Google PageRank Algorithm - where more “links” on a page (which equate to more nodes a “hub” in social network fan out to, the less each connection, on average, is worth - in what ever unit of value you want to affix to a connection between nodes in a Social Network.

Along with all that I’ve said so far is the concept of “scarcity” and how it might translate into Virtual Friendship - after all, when all is said and done, you only have so many hours in a day - you only have so much that you can spend with anything or anyone - there is a limit.   Therefore, Robert Scoble has a limit, Loic has a limit - they can not, even if they wanted to, respond to every Tweet, or every request that comes to them virtually - no more than they could do it in the real (3D) world.

Another assumption would be that each individual, as they enter into Virtual Relationships, as they get involved with the Internet, has a certain pre set value.  This would be similar to the concept of “reach” in Audience Measurement tools like ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings - for example, for any customer segment you want to examine during a given time period, Comscore will give you the number of Unique Visitors that make up the segment compared to the total number of Internet Users who could, at that time, be online, and might go, or be part of the segment - the “reach” is the number of unique visitors in your segment, or site (if your looking at site numbers) divided by the total number of uniques online at that moment in time (and all Comscore numbers are “estimated” based on Panel data and calculations, just in case your unaware) of it).

So I think, given all that I have discussed, so far, we could begin to map out the idea for a workable formula for the value of friendship, the value of a contribution.

Here’s the basic parts that would make up the formula for the value of a unit of virtual friendship:

First, a “commodities market” that “bets” on the average value of “attention” for a particular segment - a fair trading system would need to be set up - and now would be the perfect time.

why?  The Sub-Prime Meltdown has taken down Wall Street -  consumer and customer credit has almost vanished for the foreseeable future, ever since Lehman’s fall last month, and now Real Estate value is dropping rapidly, even in New York - and yet there’s a lot of “Global” Money floating around - though, there’s not much left in America  to invest in - the Republicans have ensured that by de-regulating securities and all other kinds of “risk” starting in 2002 - that ended up fueling the housing boom that has now “bust”.   In order to revive the economy, at some point - we need a new place to invest - and perhaps, another bubble - maybe not as messed up as the last, though.

For an Avatar who we’re trying to Virtually “Friend”:

• [Formula] for the value of “unit” of virtual friendship - which has a sub dependency on the value of “attention” as determine on the “open market” - similar to the “Gold Market”, see the previous paragraph, above.

• [Variable] the number of friends a “virtual” friend has (both in the Social Network your friending them in, and all other social networks they belong to, along with the friends they have there.
• [Variable] the closeness of a friend vs. all the other friends you have online. I don’t know about you, but the individuals I interact with more (ie: more two way conversations) and the longer they are, the more “probability” that individual is a closer friend, relative to someone else - but of course, that doesn’t cover cardinality - you might have a burst of activity where you interact much more with a virtual friend than normal - maybe a joint project, for example.   I’m suggesting, two or more recent instances of a two way conversation that’s longer than a few minutes counts as the person being in a closer “rung” of friendship.

the first three points I’ve shared, above, would seem to be part of any standard network topology - things you’d expect to see in a social network diagram - such as nodes,  interconnects, with some being closer and others, not - and there’s a weight we can assign the interconnects and the nodes (and they don’t have to agree).

The next set of measurements have to do with the individual -who is “friending” - though some of this may be redundant - in other words - this is just a working idea - it’s not the final version - maybe I’m repeating the same info twice, maybe not -

• [variable] value of the individual’s time who is friending - this too, is determined in the attention commodity market.
• [variable] the number of online friends this person has in this network and in all networks.
• [variable] the online and offline influence the “friender” has.
• [variable] number of “inter-related” nodes - how many connections do you have to friends that are also connected to each other?

The next set of variables might be related to visitor segments a virtual friend is located in, for example:

• [variable] segment value time, segment value reach as a percentage of all visitors in that segment.
• [variable] duration of time between interactions been nodes - individual vs. average

In my mind, the “attention” commodities market would determine the value of units within a segment - maybe that’s what would be swapped, or go up or down.

The rest is “fuzzy” - I can see the outline -but it’s really for wizzards now working on Wall Street  or someone similar  to put this “Trading System” together and make it work, at least, as a computer model.

Then, there needs to be a broad enough agreement that a trading platform is needed - and then the fun begins.  Of course, all of this would need to become “standardized” and written up - no one is going to build Trading System based on something that can’t be codified - just common sense.

Let’s say, in the future, I see betting on the value of an “interaction” and the value of a “friend” say, on FaceBook, being determined and changing by the minute - financial calculations could be modeled - for valuation - this then, could - eventually, become the basis for a Social Media Capital Add, much as Micheal Cayley has in mind - but I’m sure his idea is way different than anything I’ve put forward.

To close this long, long post - what I’ve put forward is what I believe should happen going forward -

1. Way to Measure Social Media - a data collection tag is needed along with a “listener” on the sites whose Social Media traffic you want to measure - the Social Media Platform needs to collect information and correlate it with the the campaigns being run - it’s akin to the Web Analytics model - which is what I come out of - enterprise monitoring as well - so it’s easier for me conceive of something like Social Media Measurement - in sort of an “intelligent agent” communicating back to the “mothership”.  Think that model would work well for this kind of task.
   

   Making a Case for Social Media - are we doing a poor job of Marketing Social Media?

2. The need to find a formula for the Value of Friending / Contribution
   

   More ideas about Social Media Measurement

   - in a universal form, so it can be “traded”/ “swapped”, bought or sold, in some form.   This can’t be done if your just going to value Social Media traffic based on ROI your site produces - because the value of “THAT” is something the site owner decides - but can’t trade that - you have to trade something the MARKET decides, is of value - and that might not agree with what a site or business values the most.

3. Finally, in this post - I’ve worked out part of what you’d make a formula out of - but I have not figured it all out -and I don’t have the exact formula - I’m figuring someone else can figure out what that might be, at this point.    But, if I think of anything more, I’ll share it here.

I was curious to attend this session, especially as I have attended hardly any. I guess this session showed me I did not miss anything. However the session is pretty packed and I am getting bits of useful information.

2 1/2D - this term refers to ease of accessibility of the content. Immersion might occur inside us, not in the games.

I noted Keith McCurdy from Vivaty.com, the company that developed application for Facebook recently, and I wrote about it recently.

In fact, Social Networks came up as a point of overlap. However , as a counterpoint, some members of social networks do not want reality, they want fantasy. And Facebook and virtual worlds dont sync up too well and the asyncronous nature of Facebook is harder to interface with the syncronous nature of most Virtual World.

A useful metric is visits per month (up) while time spent per session (down) for virtual worlds.

Another idea is Empty Bar, only turn on a URL or experience after an event (commercial or show, etc).

Which reminds me, I spoke to Dr. Heiner Wolf of www.weblin.com today (see second photo); weblin.com has a pretty interesting avatar product with Co Browsing. I saw a few places where it could be used for a real time 2 way communication between content owner and visitors.

Questions?
1. Does utility like functions work for Virtual worlds? Not well, downloads cause 50% to 90%. However, retrendion increases for those downloading.

2. Does engagement mean imersion in 3d? The speakers argued about this one, especially about 3D vs 2D. It is not clear 3D = engagement.

3. Where is innovation, the next big thing going to come from? Could be a combo of UGC and Virtual Worlds creating a mass audience.

4. I asked a question on how to measure engagement - it was agreed more visits a month by engaged users spending longer per visit could be a valid metric.

That was pretty much the whole session. CoWatching videos is one area of future developments.

I am writing this post on my IPhone in flight towards Los Angeles for Virtual Worlds Hollywood. I guess, posting will be light over the next couple days.

Take that back, I got here and spent the day, mostly talking to people, while helping to staff Code4Software’s booth at the expo.

There’s a PayNova party taking place in Santa Monica that I probably won’t go to tonight and a local virtual world meetup that I will most likely attend.

It seems to me the virtual world space is evolving quickly but still is not “there” yet.

Among new things I am seeing are companies working on virtual world real estate and staffing. As in the past, the metrics are thin or non existant, which is a great opportunity, especially for code4software.com.

Must note that on the plane flying out here, the only thing to watch on TV that is piped in, was the Republician Convention, but little real content.

Glad to be off the plane.

Since I left IBM, early this year, I haven't been quite as active in Virtual Worlds - my work at Monster Worldwide does not involve Second Life or any other Virtual World at this time.

But I still keep my hand in that community and attend some of their meetings locally, which is the case for a Metaverse Meetup that happened last Wednesday, 7/23/08 here in Manhattan - and this is a video of the entire Meetup (it was about the Open Grid).

Metaverse Meetup: OpenSim & Virtual Worlds Interoperability 7.23.08 from Metaverse Meetup on Vimeo.

Here's some more information:

"…The topic for this Metaverse Meetup was OpenSim and virtual worlds interoperability and we were very fortunate to be featuring leading pioneers of OpenSim as presenters: David Levine of IBM Research (Zha Ewry in SL) and Adam Frisby of DeepThink Labs (Adam Zaius in SL). Tish Shute (Tara5 Oh in SL), who writes about OpenSim on her blog Ugotrade, was guest moderator and Global Kids generously hosted us in their space."

I was just having a discussion with Jared Freedman today on the Economy; Jared runs Code4Software.com, a firm that produced the first Analytics package for Second Life and the only In World advertising network with metrics (again, in Second Life).

Jared thinks the economy is going to curtail travel and encourage more virtual meetings, including meetings in Second Life; that's interesting to bear in mind while reading looking at an interesting graph on Second Life usage appearing in Futuristic Play today:

"…Total sign ups increased by 529,224 (4.73%) in December compared to a growth of 605,095 (5.72%) in November. New-user retention to 90 days is still about 10% according to Linden Lab, having apparently remained more or less unchanged over the last 12 months."

A post on Read/WriteWeb about  Virtual Worlds Poised to Become Valuable Work Tools that sites a Forrester  report  "…makes the big claim that "within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today"

Here's the Document Summary:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and more business-focused offerings are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools. Major companies and public-sector organizations — such as BP, IBM, Intel, and the US Army — are investing heavily in virtual world technologies. But it's still early, pioneering days. You've practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools — setup can be arduous, navigating in a 3-D environment takes practice, and processing and bandwidth requirements remain high. But within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today. Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds. Use them to try to replicate the experience of working physically alongside others; allow people to work with and share digital 3-D models of physical or theoretical objects; and make remote training and counseling more realistic by incorporating nonverbal communication into same-time, different-place interactions.

Until last week I worked closely with IBM's Virtual Business Center and I pulled metrics that combined Virtual World data (via Code4Software's V-Tracker) with Web Analytics data (SurfAid/Coremetrics) along with Survey data from an online poll and Siebel - opportunity identification of potential leads. 

Without giving away any details ….. in my opinion (and I said that openly) IBM did a lot of things wrong with the Business Center - and yet, in spite of all they did or failed to do, they still generated a MUCH, MUCH HIGHER OPPORTUNITY per Avatar Visitor than a visitor to IBM.com.  (of course, virtual worlds get a fraction of the traffic a normal website gets  so the real problem is "volume" - you can't get enough Avatars in world and to visit,  yet).

I'll even go farther and state that each avatar who visited the business center in Second Life  was worth five times more, at least, than an equivalent visitor to the IBM.com website!

Corporations aren't stupid - there are people of vision that see the potential of virtual worlds - and eventually Main Stream Media will come around, again, later in 2008 or in 2009. 

A recent post in Virtual World News titled - Feature: After Tumultuous Month, Developers Remain Optimistic.

There's also two people quoted in the the post that are on the Social Media Committee of the Web Analytics Association that I am the director of: 

Code4Software's Jared Freeman is one of the two co-chairs of my committee and Mat Small of Millions of Us is also on it; both are working on Virtual World Standards (from a Web Analytics/Engagement  Standpoint).

Now that I'm Leaving IBM I won't be working on IBM's Virtual Business Center in Second Life though I'm hopeful that I'll be working on similar types of projects elsewhere. If anything, while I had an very ambitious metrics strategy, I ran into many roadblocks, largely created by matrix style management, that made it difficult to realize the metrics strategy I envisioned in the first place.   Perhaps I've said enough.

Regardless, I believe the metrics I put in place, with the help of Code4Software.com,  merging Web Analytics and Virtual World Analytics - was the best in the world - second to none - what we put together was the best metrics at this time, in the entire world; perhaps in a year or two someone else will have taken this type of measurement further 

Virtual World Advertising and Virtual Ads, according to ClickZ are "…the ultimate combination of user-generated content and social networking – except you're not just creating videos, posting profiles, and communicating via email or IM. Participants basically create an entire society within the construct of the game."  I would argue the Virtual Society ought to have Virtual Advertising:

"…. As soon as you enable people to buy land and build structures, there's a need for skills like architecture and design, specializations and services that other participants are willing to pay for."

When Google bought AdScape, earlier this year, it was assumed that In Game Advertising would be red hot, or else, why would Google invest in an In Game Advertising platform?  Certainly, last year, advertising in Virtual Worlds seemed promising, and companies built islands to sell real world products virtually.  But does Virtual World Advertising actually Work, and if it did, how would we be able to measure the success of Virtual Advertising?

"…the problem with SL marketing doesn’t seem to be rejection of advertising in general, just indifference to the kind of virtual advertising they’ve seen thus far."

But it all comes down to Metrics - if you can't measure impressions, touches and click throughs (punch throughs) you can't really do analytics - and for all the hype of what Virtual Advertising promised - including Branding, there was not viable analytics to measure the outcomes, and no real strucured testing either.

 Adsoft enables Virtual World Advertising to tracked with the precision of high end Web Analytics.

Earlier this year, at the first Virtual Worlds 2007 in NYC, I met Jared Freedman (Ancient Shriner in Second Life), President of Code4Software, a Virtual World Development firm, that created V-Tracker, and I wrote about V-Tracker several times, including the work I do at IBM, providing metrics for the IBM Business Center in Second Life. 

In fact, Jared Freedman and I co-presented on Virtual World Metrics and Virtual World Advertising at the last Emetrics Summit in Washington DC this fall in a session titled "Old & New Together Again for the First Time".

Rick Wehrle, Monster.com
Marshall Sponder, IBM
Jared Freedman, Code4Software

We've been calibrating the business impact of the Internet since before the browser. Rick will relate stories of taking the measure of FTP, Gopher and USENET postings in the early '90s. Marshall is a Director of the Web Analytics Association, tasked with getting a handle on social media and Jared has written the first application for analytics for Second Life. What do these people have in common? What's changed? Come learn about much we've learned and how little we know, how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.

The In World Advertising Platform, what Code4Software named AdSoft, was talked about generally, at Emetrics, but tonight, for the first time, I was given a personal tour of the AdSoft platform running in Second Life by Jared Freedman and I think it's light years ahead of what anyone else has come up with yet.

First, I am under a non-disclosure agreement for the Web Interface of AdSoft; however I can write about how, using AdSoft, Virtual World Ads can be created, queued up, rotated, displayed (controling it's location) and measaured.   

If you desire, Urls can be tagged for tracking, using standard web analytics, when you have an analytics platform on the destination site - and your goal is to move people from Second Life to a Web Site; but you can do a lot more than this with AdSoft (which contains a version of V-Tracker), which is an in world adverting platform, much like Google AdWords is in the 2D Web.

I will be able to speak more about the AdSoft platform in the near future; it appears to be unique, no one that I'm aware of has anything even close to the power, complexity or stability of Code4Software's AdSoft in Virtual Worlds.

In addition, the AdSoft platform is portable to many all the major Virtual Worlds; pretty much any platform that uses http protocol can have a version of AdSoft ported to it.

One of the problems of many Corporate Islands in Second Life, is the low number of unique visitors that come on a weekly basis.  It's not an exaggeration to say the average visitation numbers are in the hundreds of Avatars a week - with perhaps, 750 Avatars a week being an unofficial corporate average.

But users of AdSoft have been able to achive 5 times more traffic, easily, running no events, just by using AdSoft.

I think this is the beginning of a wide open field, and a new level of metrics precision for Virtual Worlds, and I'm glad that I was among the first to know of it, see and it firsthand, and write about it here at Webmetricsguru.com. 

Interesting article in the Guardian, published earlier this month, about “Virtual China looks for real benefits”  by Victor Keegan:

"…virtual worlds able to support not millions or tens of millions but billions of avatars. When I looked puzzled, he said that people still did not realise how big a country China was. And he is right. It is tempting to dismiss all this as an Asian phenomenon with no implications for us. That would be a serious mistake. It is about the availability of broadband, not culture. The sky is no longer the limit. The world is changing."

"…It doesn't stop there. This site, now under construction, will have all the infrastructure (server farms, communication links, electricity, banking links, logistics etc) needed to make this the world's one-stop shop for consumers and producers. China, which is hosting a conference on the subject next month, wants companies around the globe to set up here - the likes of Cisco, IBM or western virtual worlds - to take advantage of state-of-the art communications, infrastructure and (for the moment) cheap wages. It could be a difficult proposition for many corporations to resist.

A friend of mine met Professor Lai recently at Virtual Worlds 2007 in San Jose - all of what is said in the Guardian article is probably true.   

I was at the Metaverse Meetup and Book Release Party at Third Ward - Williamsburg, Brooklyn last weekend and had a great time - mentioned that UgoTrade would be posting about the party with some photos, etc - well, here's the post - What The Metaverse Can Teach The Paraverse: Don’t be boring!

I left just around 11PM, last Saturday night - but if you ask me - I should have stayed out longer because if I had … I would have ended up at a much more interesting party at the Brooklyn  Marriott Hotel - oh well..you can't go to every great party - but this one would have been worth it - had I known it was going to happen - I would have stayed and went to it - here's what I missed care of UgoTrade -:

"…My interview with Peter Ludlow was conducted by email because the book party was too much fun. I could not ask one of the hosts and a man in demand to retire into a quiet corner. The book party was also a metaverse meetup and packed with Second Life movers and shakers including, Nathan Freitas of Cruxy, Joshua Fouts, Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions (Eureka Dejavu in SL - see her blog for more on meetup), Marvel Ousley (see he post on SLNN), Andrea Foster of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Reuters, Jessica Segal (aka Pica Paperdoll, Electric Sheep Company, Andy Fundiger, Marshall Sponder (see his post), Morton Swimmer, California Condor, Donald Schwartz Image Link Productions, Dean Pence, and many many more. I posted some pictures to Flickr.

Notably the party was held in 3rd Ward the artists/entrepreneurs city in a warehouse that is home to WelloHorld - the start up that is the brainchild of co-author Mark Wallace, with Christian Westbrook and Jerry Paffendorf. They are on stealth mode so Mark declined an interview until their launch. But I did snap this chart pinned to their office door that might give some clues to their direction.

The after hours party that Peter hosted back in the Marriot by the Brooklyn bridge was also too entertaining to interrupt. It included both a screening of Peter’s screenshots taken through “dawn of the metaverse” and a very rock ‘n roll drama with the hotel security who were bent on ending the party early.

In the picture below Ron Blechner (aka Hiro Pendragon) talks with Peter Ludlow about Peter’s early experiences in Second Life. Mark Wallace is on the left and Boris Kizelshteyn of Combined Story (aka Adonis Bussy in SL) is seated on the couch.

(I took the pictures out - but you can go to UgoTrade and see the whole post).

Darn….. like I say, you can catch some of parties most of the time - or most of the parties some of the time - but I think I've learned that …you learn the most and get the most done ….. in terms of business and learning new things - at parties - or at dinner - in a social setting - not so much at the conference.

Just like the LeWeb3 07 thing - most of the real action is not at the conference - per se - it's hanging with the people between and afterwards that most of the real learning happens - and that's the main reason to go, believe it or not.