I was lucky enough to escape yet another New England ice storm for a trip to #CES in Las Vegas.  Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle brought in interesting people from around the country, who in turn raised even more interesting questions about whys and hows of social media, including:

• How to steer your own pirate ship, and when to interact with those that don’t “get it” (and what does that mean, anyway)? [Chris Brogan]
• What are some different lenses for thinking about social media ROI? [Ben Grossman]
• How can companies adjust when rules of brand control and traditional tactics no longer apply? [Susan Etlinger]
• How can companies avoid common mistakes when starting out with social media? [David Berkowitz]
• When people participate in online community, what are the “artifacts” left behind? [Robert Scoble]

The question about the artifacts really intrigued me – what are the traces we leave behind when participating online? On Twitter, if I delete someone from the list of people I follow, their conversations (if they are influential, and if they are connected to my other followees) will continue to break through.

These community artifacts feel like a meaningful, but comparatively hard to quantify, measure of influence. For example, on Twitter, people frequently retweet others’ messages, repeating and spreading valuable content. This type of rebroadcast can be quantified: Dan Zarrella created a terrific tool to track individual Twitter users’ levels of retweets.

But beyond the repetition, how do we measure the way influential people consistently introduce valuable ideas, topics, and memes? For example, if David Armano launches a charitable campaign for a victim of domestic violence, his page views and retweets are easy to capture. But how do we track the far-reaching effect of his content and measure the new ideas he’s responsible for germinating? This may well be an instance where “not everything that matters can be measured”.

Photo credit: kimba

Tags: measurement by admin
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Came across Twitchboard on today’s ReadWriteWeb post on The Rise of Cloud Agents. Twitchboard goes after the problem many web users are encountering: Humans just don’t scale. You sign up for a bunch of online services (my toolbar is littered with them) and then you have to remember you have them, use them, and, in an ideal world, integrate them.

Services like Ping.fm do a terrific job helping you publish across multiple platforms, like updating your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn statuses all at once. But Twitchboard takes it a level further by automating the interactions of these social web services.

More from ReadWriteWeb:

Blogger Chris Arkenberg says Twitchboard is a part of the “emerging class of cloud agents.” These cloud agents, as he describes them, will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. He envisions that soon we’ll have many of these cloud agents, swarming around us, working on our behalf, helping to parse the data flowing in and providing us with the information that we need, separated from the noise.

The Apple app store not too long ago passed 300 million downloads, and yesterday we learned that even the lowly iFart is earning over $10,000 every day. The problem is not that there too few useful or amusing applications, but how to manage all the resulting data and their interactions. I, for one, welcome our new cloud agent overlords.

Tags: events, research, social web by admin
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Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect today fully opened up their rival data portability initiatives. What does this mean for you? Now, you can log in to partnering sites using either your Facebook or Google account, and bring with you your “social graph”:  the network of folks you’re already connected with to share in the website’s experience. Here’s are some thoughts from Shiv Singh and colleagues over at Razorfish about how implementations of the portable social graph might look:

On the one hand, this service feels like a tremendous win for convenience: a digital E-Z Pass,  obviating the need for creating and managing myriad accounts and passwords across the web. But the convenience may come with a cost. Any time a large company offers to manage your data across multiple purchase points and interactions, the question arises of what that aggregated data about behaviors and relationships might be used for. The E-ZPass analogy holds true: the same guy who signed up for an electronic pass to avoid long lines at tolls might not want those travel records showing up in divorce court.

Privacy concerns aside, it’s too early to tell what portable social graph interactions will ultimately look like. In the 90s, the beginnings of e-commerce made most of us envision bringing bricks-and-mortar stores online, not predict the resurgence of handmade goods on Etsy or the crowdsourcing of designs on Threadless. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine today which new practices—and entirely new businesses—will emerge as the portable social graph becomes a reality.

Tags: social web by admin
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BusinessWeek Online reports on a move by Google to make social network advertising more relevant by developing an InfluenceRank. This technology would help assess an individual socnet member’s level of influence over a group of peers — sort of a FICO score of your personal profile’s influence.

Joe Marchese at MediaPost’s Online Spin offers an interesting perspective: it’s clear you can’t directly correlate activity with influence, without risking overvaluing the influence of a follow-happy Florida car dealer who’s finagled more reciprocal Twitter relationships than Peter Kim. More importantly, what will marketers do with influence levels; will paying a higher CPM on a higher InfluenceRank personal profile actually achieve influence? This capability might end up a red herring; offering a quick-fix to marketers reluctant to dive deep into developing the social media capabilities that might drive longer term community value.

Tags: advertising, marketing, measurement by admin
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