BlogHer is presenting at this session.

Blogging a daily part of life, blogs are mainstream. BloHer - people are spending less time watching TV and reading blogs, instead.

Definstion of a Blogger is changing and Social Media has fundamentally changed the way we communicate.

Why are people “there”? Social Media, which used to be just a set of tools, now have changed how we communicate.

Also, most people in the Blogosphere consider their online friends as real friends. Many BlogHer bloggers blog for their children, to record the story.

If you look at most bloggers that are successful they are “driven” and they feel need to say what they are saying regardless of what they are paid, or not, and they’d write anyway; Heather Gold added, that is why people are interested ( Boing Boing, TechCrunch, Beth Kantor - who I recent met at Emetrics Summit DC ).

The Power to be Heard; The Evolution of Community. We still trust People.

How can you be TrustWorthy?

How you can represent youself as a person and still represent your Brand.

Fleishman Hillard - Blog Relations Case Studies

- Tamiflu case study - a blogger who was also a contending for American Idol, came down with the Flu and was offered TamiFlu and blogged about it. Target person who already had the flu.

- David Beckham RAZR2 Campaign - you need to offer not just the blogger, material, but their readers, too, so they can particapate and voice their opinions.

- Purdue Perfect Portions case study. 1.5 million consumer impressions, 59% of interested bloggers requested coupons, 50% wrote positive reviews. One blogger produced 2 videosinvolving cooking Perfect Portions with 2000 views on YouTube.

My Takeaways - this is another good session suggesting you need to think about bloggers readers, indentifying influential bloggers for a subject first, but thinking about the end goal, all the while.

What criteria do you use to identify influntials?

I came up with an idea of a method by which you identify a community where the blogger is in, then do additional research to find out how influential a blogger/blog are in that community (that might require offline data).

Fleishman Hillard uses Collective Intellect, Radian6, one other tool I can’t recall the name of, and a inhouse tool that rates a keyword against it’s use in an online community.

While writing this post, my thoughts go back to Radian6. I got an email on Sunday, that was very untransparent, not well explained, offering to cleanup free accounts, including mine. No reason or advanced warning was given, though one could guess, the reasons might be tied to new partnerships Radian6 just entered into, which might suggest they no longer wanted or needed blogger feedback …. But they did not explain any if that (the real story, in my opinion).

So, until this week, I had access to Radian6, and while it was a good product, Radian6 didn’t really provide data to me in structured way that could be most useful to a Web Anslyst.

Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the 6 months, I had use of it.

Yet, one thing does bother me about the Radian6 “cleanup” of accounts, and to me, it’s somewhat representative of many Social Media firms, who, while they claim to provide excellent tools, including Radian6, still don’t communicate well, openly, honestly and are not as transparent.

In the case of my “account” and their “cleanup”, Radian6 didn’t explain why they were doing it, if it applied to all of the free trials they set up, or just some of them, or what the criteria was, in order to make those choices. That bothers me.

It means, as far as I can tell, Radian6 failed to practice openness, that they designed their tool to “monitor”.

I’m my case, Radian6 allowed me to use their platform to monitor other people’s conversation, but did not
have time or organizational will, to have a conversation, with me. I see that as an unfortunate oversight, a mistake.

Compete.com made a similar mistake, several months ago, but once they realized it, quickly changed course.

Compete engaged in conversation, and, they listened.

Providers of the new social media platforms and tools, sometimes they fall into talking the talk, without “walking the walk”, they are not transparent about motivations or communications (with Bloggers?). Compete got it right, so far, Radian6, didn’t.

But in Social Media, should not a Social Media platform provider be good communicators too?

It appears not to be the case, all too often, but then, you could say the same thing about Web Analytics providers, and even the WAA, whose Board, I sit on.

And, Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Perhaps the old saying “the first will be last and the last, will be first” applies here, too.

I believe, we (and I include myself here, as a WAA member) who provide the “tools”, who embody “the way”, we need to also practice openness, transparancy AND, in the case of Web Analytics, the ability to “measure” and provide “insight”, that our audiences have the right to expect of us and hold us accountable for.

Enough said, missing the next session while expressing myself on this one.

Search and the US President election - Wow! A lot of search and political campaign strategists are on the panel.

Motivations in getting involved in search and politics are varied but unlike other business it never shuts off and your in it to win.

There is no budget and there is a lag in knowledge in running campaigns for search and current spending is only 40-60 million in this election, and that is a drop in the bucket of all spend.

Also, the lady from Yahoo said there hasn’t been many or any studies on campaign effectiveness and paid search. But you need to communicate directly with the campaign manager and to a lesser effect, the canditates, need to understand the utility of paid search marketing and political campaigns.

Long Tail approach (misspell Sarah Palin’s name in every way possible).

Duh! Candidates don’t seem to understand geo-targeting and micro-targeting! They understand TV and Radio and media markets, but seldom do they yet understand the precision avaiable.

McCain’s campaign is very active in gel-targeting and Eric Frenchman, who runs McCain’s online search advertising, said so.

What I don’t hear is micro targeting on the actual DISTRICT level, or anything with RSS feeds.

Interestingly, just as I wrote this, a question came up about bundling to the District level, did come up and Google and Yahoo, while they allow custom maps of Geo-Targeting, don’t actually facilitate that level of targeting.

And nothing about RSS feeds and Twitter integration on the local district level. It’s amazing to me how much of modern technology is not being utilized.

Amazing how campaigns use speeches of Biden (in the case of McCain) to a negative landing page on the candidate.

Also, Google and Yahoo haven’t yet offered geo-targeting on District Level but….. They are not, as yet willing to set up that specific a level if targeting yet, but are studying doing so in the future.

For some candidates, easing fund online is easier than others, and some times they can’t spend it all, so managing expectations is necessary.

Online Persuasion.

Do you need to be a true believer in the candidate and party ideology to work for a campaign as a search strategist for them.

However, now, there are many online digital strategists are on both sides.

Social Media and Search with political campaigns. Blog or not? Tracy Russo says no, not enough worth while content. I disagree. And Obama had people who were hired to write to the blogs, etc.

However, the community forming around a blog often continues after a campaign is over, win or lose, and, honestly, not fostering and nuturing that is foolish, I believe.

The idea that there is not much worthwhile to say is lunacy.

Twitter? Again, not as used as much as you’d think, by candidates. Amazing how much is being left, on the table, so to speak.

But, then again, I’m more of a visionary than anyone on the panel, or, for that matter, in the room, judging from the questions from the audience.

Facebook, what works? Buying admin rights for a group, Dan Steele, from Comedy Central.

Interestingly, the question of what kind of participation exists on November 5th, after the election, came up. It seems to me a new “channel” is being created via online media, Paid Search, FaceBook, Twitter, and targeted Blogs, along.

Justine Lam, worked for Ron Paul, and talked about all if that, and how it took a life of it’s own.

What tools used for monitoring Online Buzz?

Google Trends, Google Alerts, but many of the online tools are not useful, yet, to campaign strategists, yet.

Yahoo, Diane Rinalado, says Yahoo Buzz was sited as being better than Google Trends, and HotTrends, but not as highly used.

I brought up a few observations that I voiced including:

1. Increase links shown for embedded videos in Yahoo to include the long tail.

2. Data collected for Buzz Tools need to be refreshed hourly, not days or months later, as Goigle Trends and Yahoo Buzz often are.

Media Buys, as Eric Frenchman said, need to be decided in a few hours. You can see the gap.

Which campaign is doing better online?

Don Steele, Comedy Central, says he’s surprised media companies aren’t better at this yet.

Excellent Panel.

Here at Ripple6 headquarters for a Tweetup for Geoff Livingston and his new book, Now is Gone.

Read it, err… I need to readit too!

I have to admit - using Twitter as a user generated movie review service is pretty interesting - even if it's also pretty straightforward.  

Take a look at FlixPulse.com - http://www.jazzychad.com/twitter/movies/

Wish I could stream video to QIK like Robert Scoble does in Twitter execs talk about scalability and troubles - but then, I don't have 20,000 Twitter Followers - and I guess this video explains what kinds of problems that may, from time to time, create for Twitter - I mean, Twitter staying up - as it's been going down a lot.

According to this video that Scoble made today, Twitter problems are going to persist for some time- and, perhaps, Twitter is a victim of it's own success - as more people have more followers - more messages are being replicated.

By the way, I'd addicted to Twitter.   Last night I was having dinner on W 21st Street in Manhattan and I twittered about it.  As it turns out, I was sketching from a table that was right outside the restaurant and in walks Frederic Guarino @fredericguarino .

Such a meeting could never have happened without Twitter, and it was totally unplanned. 

I attended a Tweetup at 41 First Avenue, D.B.A. - for a few hours tonight and it was great!

Just wish they had some food there - ended up ordering Pizza - and I try to avoid eating Pizza but I could not resist.

Love New York - there is just so much, so much happening here - every day, every afternoon, every evening of the week - there is something …. something that, in this case, was very good attend.

Anyway, here's the YouTube Video I made which has a lot of good footage in it.   

I don't know …. but just because you can do something doen't automatically make it a good idea and I'm not even sure if this one is useful or not - it's called TwittEarth
and it's an interface that shows you a realistic (Google Earth like) globe that's constantly rotating to the location  where the next tweet is showing up.

The next effect is to make me dizzy when I look at the globe moving back and forth - but not much else.

Maybe TwittEarth could be useful for something and we just haven't figured out what.

Honestly, I don't want Twitter Advertising; TechCrunch reports Twitter Testing Advertising In Twitter Streams though there's no advertising to be found on Twitter at this moment.

However, were behavioral targeting and profiling part of the advertising selection, it's possible that Twitter could be very effective as an advertising medium, especially if it's based on the latest Tweets that a person enters into Twitter.

Just a thought - Advertising doesn't need to be a bad thing - and in fact, some of the Advertising I've seen lately, especially the type that runs in Second Life, could be good, depending on how it's done and displayed, the kind of AdWords advertising or Banner Advertising on Twitter that I get off of Search Engines and Publisher's sites would really turn me off.

And that seems to be reflected in the poll data on the TechCrunch page (see below)

Do you support ads on Twitter?

• No, keep it ad free
  939     43% of all votes
• Yes
  657     30% of all votes
• Yes/ No, but I'd pay for an ad free version
  564       26% of all votes

Total Votes: 2160 Started: April 14, 2008

 

Twitter got a bad rap over the last day or so as Hugh Mcleod has deleted his Twitter account and I heard the Robert Scoble deleted his as well - there's a pretty long post about at Deep Jive Interests - In Defense Of Twitter (Not That It Needs Defending, But … ) and Syntagma's The Gadarene rush from Twitter suggest that busy people don't need Twitter as it's just another distraction.

[A cartoon from 2007 etc.]

I don't feel that's true of most people - both McLeod and Scoble are insanely connected to the point where maybe it makes sense to be less so - but I've found Twitter very helpful and comforting and it enables "Tweeups" to happen - and so I'm suggesting that staying on Twitter is a good thing - but don't make it an addiction.

I think the lesson is, if it becomes too addictive, as I think it's clearly been for Robert Scoble (and I'm not sure if it was that for Hugh McLeod) then just not using it might be a good thing to do - but I don't think deleting the account is necessary - I think that's not necessary as there are still times when it's useful to have Twitter. 

It's clear Twitter is changing the way events happen - allowing interaction during an event in an unscripted way that was probably not possible before and I wrote about this phenomenon in

Zuckerberg-Lacy interview @ SXSW: Sarah’s not a Geek

But I didn't really have any footage of the interview - to see what got everyone so upset and now I have a link to footage of the event - (but not the entire interview - just parts of it).

The end of the interview looks awkward - but what's more interesting is the number of people who were listening to the accounts on Twitter and interacted in real time as the interview was progressing.

I wonder if the US Presidential Election in November is going to play out differently because of Twitter.   You can already see how the primaries are occurring in a different way due to all the social media that's present now that hardly existed 4 years ago.