Was thinking about a post I read in Marketing Pilgrim this morning about viral videos and original content where, I think, one of the most fundamental aspects of social media was discussed (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/11/cup-of-joe-how-not-to-go-viral-and-look-like-an-idiot.html)

I’m on my iPhone at Waterloo Station in London, so I have limitations on what links I can put here, and my spelling.

Upshot is – if your content is really good, interesting to your community of readers and followers – that’s all you need.

If, your content is not original, and most corporate social media, isn’t, you better have your presentation, everything, be super, super great.

Interesting factoid, paradox, that most companies get into Social to save money – and often make the wrong choices – they skimp when they should spend, and spend, when the could have avoided it.

That’s what I think.

I’m enjoying London and not as focused on blogging while visiting, but when I read Kevin Hillstrom’s post on Sharing Information with Executives, today – I immediately had some thoughts about it, which have been in my mind all day and decided to write about it now.  I like Kevin’s post and he’s  spot on, but his post and viewpoints therein are also somewhat disturbing; here’s what I mean:

…..The responsibility for ferreting out information is on you, dear analyst, because executives are not going to ever volunteer enough information to inform your work … in fact, in some cases, they simply cannot tell you the real reason for an analysis (i.e. they need numbers to determine if 5% or 10% of the workforce will be let go next month).

I think this is true, and feels all too familiar, but it also suggests the very nature and setup of many organizations, that employ analysts, are the real problem – Hillstrom’s suggestion to ask a bunch of subtle questions to ferret out of Executives, the real information they  don’t want to share (because they can’t or won’t tell us) reduces  delivery of analytics insights to some form of Machiavellian game, a game no one teaches you how to play.

I don’t think this is where we really should encourage people to go - even if, at the end of the day, what Kevin Hillstrom says, is right, for now. At the end of the year, this strategy of tricking an executive into giving information they are trying to avoid giving, so the analyst can do the job they’re hired to do – just compounds the problem of lousy communications.

….. An executive wants a loyal employee. But sometimes, loyal employees (I’ve done this) develop an “agenda”. And if the agenda is not congruent with the executive, look out. Maybe you want to do multivariate testing on the home page, but the executive you work for is having a battle with another executive in another department, and wants to “be right”. In this case, even though you are doing the right thing (by wanting to execute a multivariate test), you might appear to have an agenda (i.e. prioritizing testing over the executive). And once you appear to have an agenda, you are banished to the island of misfit toys. You’ll see this happen all of the time when a new executive takes a job — the new executive has a vision for what she wants to accomplish, and if your agenda is not aligned with the new executive, it doesn’t matter how good of a job you do, you’re going to be banished to the island of misfit toys.

Sounds like the only agenda that is allowable to follow is the one your boss has – implying you have to come into a job subverting any agenda you may have, to whatever the boss has as their agenda.   I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do, even, if, on the face of it, what Kevin Hillstrom wrote is actually true, and effective.

I believe it was Stephen Fry, who said on Tuesday, at the 140 Conference, that took place in London (I attended the morning sessions, once of which, Fry spoke at), that when he spoke to the people who run corporations, they aren’t asking the typical questions (like how will this product or service help me and my company, etc), rather, they’re asking to get guidance on how to accomplish what they want to achieve.

My take away is to  find the right person (the guy at the very top) to present information and receive guidance from, rather than the people under them – which, unfortunately, is what usually happens.

So ….. your a bright web analyst – but you have to spend all your energy proving your total loyalty to superiors (who also happen to be extremely insecure in their own positions), according to Hillstrom, leaving you next to nothing or no room to actually be creative, innovative – all that has to be subverted to the personal loyalty of the group and organization your in – even if that organization is largely dysfunctional.

I don’t happen to agree this is the way we should approach our jobs in order to succeed.  Maybe the organizations that do the best are the ones who aren’t structured this way – maybe all this work you have to do in order to get the boss to trust you by following their agenda, is what you would have used to come up with the creative solutions they needed (but don’t want to consider) in the first place.  If we are reduced to playing Machiavellian games just to get anything done, no wonder the results are pretty diluted.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason leaders of organizations are at the top, the most creative minds, is because, according to Stephen Fry, they don’t play those games; too bad, so many under them, do.   Maybe, that’s the problem we need to solve.

In a future post I’ll explore what to do about this situation.

I had two new articles appearing today – the first is about 7 Indispensible–and Free–Keyword Tools just appearing in Entrepreneur.com and another on USING GOOGLE ANALYTICS BENCHMARKING TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE appearing in Wordstream.com blog.

I’m in London this week and haven’t had a chance to post much, yet, since I’ve been here – I plan to put up a few new posts shortly.

I am at the 140 Conference this morning at O2 Indigo (#140conf) listening to Robert Fry.

Robert Fry talks about how Twitter used to be unfamilar to most people but now it’s part of mainstream news (begrudgingly) and to by participating with Twitter you can find out where is value and where is noise.

Robert Fry admits the next big thing might not be Twitter, but admoinshed us not to give up our humanity, by trying to put a rational approach overlay an emotional one.

Andrew Keen spike next about authenticty – being authentic and human you appear, the more powerful you become in the new structure of power in the 21 century (my spelling is not as good since I’m writing on the iPhone).

Andrew Keen seems to feel this new structure is dangerous.

I’ll be at Monitoring Social Media 09 later this afternoon, speaking about The Future Of Social Media Monitoring (check my presentation on Slideshare).

I’m in London now and it’s harder to post, though I managed to record a lot of my first walk into Hyde Park, earlier today, on ArtNewYorkCity.com.

Was thinking of a post I read earlier today about Google making the Web better – or not ….

“…with Matt Cutts dropping hints that Google might utilize page load times as a factor in ranking sites. While this sounds all warm and fuzzy, it honestly concerns me. Does this mean that only sites with deep pockets will be able to rank well in Google’s index?”

“…Is this Google’s way of interfering with Net Neutrality? Or is it simply trying to save money? Imagine the savings to a company like Google when their crawlers are capable of crawling sites in a fraction of the time it takes now… the numbers are huge.”

It may be something I can add to my presentation at Monitoring Social Media 09, on Tuesday – that the future is looking more and more undemocratic – and if many websites are being penalized just because they load more slowly than they should, it would, indeed, be very telling.

I’d post more here, but I’m simply too exhausted from the trip over – posting might be light for a few days – but I’ll make up for it once I’m back.

KeenKong – is what I call a “conversation analytics” platform that is just about to launch (English and French) in Beta; I’ve known of KeenKong since early this year, when a friend, Frederic Guarino showed me what he was working on.   Occasionally, I’d hear references to KeenKong, and I saw a short demo of it this summer.

Yesterday, I was able to see a working version and get questions  answered  by Fredric Guarino and Oliver Berger.  KeenKong is based in Montreal, but Fredric is a frequent visitor to New York, so I have seen him often here, and I may go up to Montreal at some point in the near future.

KeenKong is designed to handle and add structure to a large number of personalized conversations with Brands and/or Individuals, where it is also desirable to reply personally.

KeenKong captures, parses and groups conversations into several buckets that are defined, partly by the conversation, and partly by the beliefs of it’s creators (I believe, based on Neurolinguistics) that conversations will always fall into 24 (or so) brackets or buckets, if you will – and this is a built in feature of human communications.

KeenKong is built to first take whatever conversation your having online, and structure it into those buckets – so you can better sort on the conversations and respond, in kind.  For example – if you have several thousand people trying to converse with you (say your a famous celebrity), or a with a well known Brand, through a blog or website (KeenKong will soon be available for Facebook, MySpace, Identi.ca and will have iPhone and Blackberry applications available in the near future), KeenKong will greatly simplify how you can respond and build trust by providing personalized answers, and back and forth communications.   As more and more people converse with each other – it becomes neccessary to invent platforms like this one – to facilitate much more optimal conversations.

You start by viewing your conversations on a “TalkBoard” (see above) that groups the conversations into the buckets or categories, on the left, then finds common objects in the conversations (ie: shirt, belt, shoes, etc) – Demographic information is provided, when it is available.

when you select one of the power words or objects, you get all the conversations they’re part of and you have the option of responding to those conversations in the same way by tagging individuals as a group you want to identify.

Once you have the conversations, you can look at the effect of your work using KeenKong over time for Sentiment and Effectiveness.

When I saw the demo for the first time this summer, @whitneyhess was testing it with twitter conversations she was taking part in and it was amazing what she was able to accomplish with KeenKong.

After looking at the Demo yesterday I was tempted to think KeenKong would work out really well for Customer Service, but Fredrick and Oliver were quick to point out that KeenKong was designed for a much wider variety of uses.   We also talked about what the definition of a conversation is, and of “active conversations” (back and forth between one individual and one respondent) and “interactions”, which are more like what most Social Media tools count today (all Tweets, Blog Posts, comments/posts on Facebook and MySpace, when they can be read, photos and videos) as conversations when they are often really one way “interactions”.

Since there is no “standards” that are in place for each vendor of a Social Media package to define what a conversation is, each vendor ends up deciding this for themselves – often making information between platforms totally incompatible – a much worse situation than what Web Analytics had/has with different platforms reading raw data logs in their own way – but at least, most Web Analytics platforms agree with the definitions of what a unique visitor, visit, pageview, bounce rate, etc, are – whereas most Social Media platforms, have no such agreement (see my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring, above for a fuller rundown on this issue).

By the way, I’m excited to give the presentation to a large audience in London next week – and what I’m sensing is KeenKong is a platform that falls in the category of “applied social media monitoring” – it’s more of a next generation application that’s used to make life much easier for individuals that need to understand the conversations and respond to them, in kind.  KeenKong is not a monitoring platform that tries to find out what people are saying about a topic or Brand – it’s purpose is to enable and supercharge conversations between “You” and your customers.

What do I think of KeenKong?

I don’t know about the subdivisions/bucketing of conversations – but as long as it works, whatever way KeenKong wants to classify information is OK.  Furthermore, by classifying conversations at the GetGo, KeenKong is “segmenting” information much in the way some websites are able to segment visitors by offering a simple homepage, but pointing visitors to options (do you want to “learn”, “shop”, “buy”, “get support”, etc) – much as sites like IBM.com, have done – and customers self select/segment themselves by what links they click on and what pages they land on.

This kind of “self selecting” / “navigational” segmentation works very well for Web Analytics – but hasn’t really been applied to “conversations” till now.

What KeenKong has done is look at conversations as if it’s a website, and given us navigation – while adding unique tags to the conversations so you can respond to them in a highly personalized way – but in volume.

There’s a lot of promise in KeenKong – since it’s just launching now – I’m sure there will be an open beta soon, and I suggest signing up for it, ASAP – I know I will.

Edelman sure has been active over the last day – yesterday they released a Digital Brand Index with Brandtology and today …. TweetLevel.

It’s interesting that Edelman comes up with it’s own Twitter Analytics – and blurs the line of what PR firm is (sure, a lot of PR firms have their own backend analytics, but I haven’t seen many, or any, play in the public arena … with their analytics …. Edelman PR just did ).   The obvious benefit of offering Twitter Analytics to the public is the data Edelman will collect – much in the way that Google Analytics and Yahoo! Analytics offer their platforms for free – often to collect data that makes their advertising better.

I don’t know if all the factors above should be weighted equally – otherwise, the factors themselves are the right ones to use, as far as I can tell.

The other thing have TweetLevel does is effectively increase the Edelman Brand and it’s intellectual products such at the Edelman Trust Barometer – of which the trust score listed in TweetLevel, is a derivative.

I wonder if Edelman, in releasing TweetLevel to the public, is issuing a direct challenge to other PR firms to innovate?  I think so.

At any rate, collecting the information using their analytics tool could lead to more case studies – and more of feeling of Trust for Edelman – and that’s a good thing, I would think.

As far as the scores – I’m not sure if they are really that meaningful – however I don’t mind being just a little less influential than @Matt_McGowan and @jowyang.     Also, note there are some features Edelman temporary disabled such as “Location”, “Job Category” and “Industry“, each had sub-levels, and they’re clearly trolling for more information – information I’m sure they’ll use at some point.

There’s also tips on how to improve your scores – though I rarely look at that stuff – I feel the whole point of these metrics is measure your actual activity – I don’t want to change my behavior just to up my scores – I would take that to be “artificial” and … who cares,  anyway, what your, or my score on TweetLevel is?

Perhaps, the main point is to engage people – Tweetlevel does that.

Can’t sleep -maybe I’m thinking about London and Monitoring Social Media 09, next week; perhaps, I  was thinking about a post read earlier today on how Good Bloggers Make Good Neighbors, in ReadWriteWeb, based on a Pew Internet Study suggesting  “geeky” people (similar to the type I met at the Singularity Summit last month in NYC), especially if they’re bloggers, are more socially well adjusted and  ..

…almost 80 percent more likely to do small favors for their neighbors than other groups, and they’re 84 percent more likely to help a neighbor care for a family member, e.g., offer babysitting help.

…… Bloggers and mobile phone users are also 72 percent more likely to belong to a local group or organization such as a charitable organization, a youth sports league, or a religious group.

I think this study shows people who are internet savvy, particularly if they are regular, active bloggers – are more likely to be interested in the world around them, and what’s going on locally.

Social Media, also, can not only help us be more socially adjusted, it can also, according to a Gizmodo post I read today, keep someone out of jail -

“….Rodney was arrested on October 18 as a suspect in two crimes. He declared himself innocent and Robert Reuland—his defense lawyer—found the key to free him: “Where’s my pancakes?“

That seemingly inconsequential Facebook status update proved crucial when the Californian company confirmed that someone wrote it from his father’s Harlem apartment computer, using Rodney’s user and password at around the time of the alleged crime: Saturday October 17, 11:49am.

…. The most interesting thing in this case, however, is that this seems to be the first time in which social networking has been used to save the ass of someone, rather than nailing a really stupid thief.

But then, I’m wondering if something totally unrelated, such as a recent study mentioned in Brain and Cognition shows that Performing horizontal eye movement exercises can boost your creativity

…  Elizabeth Shobe and colleagues have provided the first evidence that creativity is boosted by an intervention designed to increase hemispheric cross-talk.

… The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who’d performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use. Staring straight ahead, by contrast, had no effect on creativity.

…. overall, the mixed-handed participants performed better on the creativity task than the strong-handers, thus providing further evidence for a link between inter-hemispheric interaction, which mixed-handers have more of, and creativity. But it also turned out that mixed-handers didn’t benefit from the horizontal eye movement task.

Now, I’m going to be doing my horizontal eye exercises alot more often – they’ll probably help my blogging, analytics insight, and painting (when have the time and inclination to).

Rambling on to another subject – as I begin to feel sleepy – recalling a post I read earlier today on Top Rank Blog on how major Vegas hotels are using Social Media, presented at PubCon, day 2, that is putting me to sleep …

“…prominent brands on the strip have stepped up to the plate and are actively engaged in social web participation.”

” …While not everyone may check their emails in Vegas, many of them still check their social profiles while traveling. “

“…. have a “toys for Tweets” promotion that will bring awareness to the fact that there is a Hilton in Vegas in a positive light.”

“….The MGM Grand was late to the social media game compared to competitors on the strip – we finally joined for a few reasons.  The effectiveness of our email marketing was beginning to degrade a bit. ”

It’s encouraging the hotels at Vegas are begining to take Social Media seriously – but they seem so uncreative – I feel like telling all the panelists to do horizontal eye exercises for a month – then do your social media – maybe it’ll be different!   Ok, I digress.   Sounds like I didn’t miss much at PubCon this year (haven’t been to a PubCon since 2005 in New Orleans).

Then again, maybe Todd Defren at PR-Squared – is doing his horizontal eye exercises – as he said some good stuff in his post on THE FUTURE OF MARKETING (which reminds me of my slideshare presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring(see below)

and he has a nice graphic which I’m adding to this post, similar to one I put in my presentation  ..

I like how Todd says …

…. Facebook and Google will be the long-term winners: it’s not just the fact that they have critical mass, but that that critical mass comes at a time when Social Networks are not just destinations (a la the old AOL and MySpace), but are becoming integral to the holistic Web Experience.

….When we surf and when we search, beyond the Social Network sites, we’re going to be taking our Friends with us; we’re taking our known online activities with us.  Sites and search engines will re-orient themselves dynamically to match our identities. The entire Web experience will re-architect itself on-the-fly based on where we’ve been, what device we’re using, what we’ve looked at or purchased in the past, who we are friends with, what offers and content our contacts have been sharing and purchasing, etc.

That’s an interesting observation – all this stuff is poised to happen – but still hasn’t because the semantic web is still in it’s infancy – and a lot of the automation to make it happen hasn’t evolved yet – ie: Microformats.  In fact, if you read my Slideshare, above,  one thing I left out, is the reason why Alterian and Radian6 can’t geo-locate well – their tools, and the rest of the Social Media Monitoring tools, for the most part, were built, as Bill Hunt, pointed out to me recently, by marketing people looking to track Buzz, and not so much, for the kinds of analysis we really need.

However, even if Alterian/Radian6/Cision/Scout Labs, etc, wanted to – they could not get the precision needed to tell me where most of the content they are monitoring on the web actually originates from, or do topic/sentiment analysis well – that is at least a few years away – and needs the Semantic Web in order to become more accurate and useful.  That’s what I left out (maybe I would have put it in if I were doing my eye exercises).

The rest of Todd Defren’s post is worth reading … but now I’m really fading – time to go back, maybe work on all the nice things going on in London next week, including Monitoring Social Media 09, and London, that I haven’t visited before.

Of course, I’ll be missing Web 2.0 conference, here in NYC – but I had to make a choice on where it was more important to be.

Losing track of all the different indexes – I wrote about the Digital Footprint Index last month, but this index by Edelman is much different – it’s a Digital Brand Index of the top technology brands in the top Asian markets on a quarterly basis – see Social Media Today’s post on the Edelman-Brandtology Digital Brand Index.

Currently only 8 markets are covered by the DBI (links are PDF files):Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesiaand Taiwan. Japan and Korea will soon follow.

On one hand Brandtology, Edelman’s partner in this study, looks at 830,000 conversations to come up with the index – but I never feel quite comfortable taking someone else’s word for that because I don’t know how a conversation is defined.

I’ll comment more about the DBI once I can take a closer look at what it contains.

The LinkedIn – Twitter agreement to share data seemed to be the biggest news today, being covered by MarketingPilgrim’s  The Tweets Are Coming — To LinkedIn and TechCrunch’s Social Networks Continue To Rally Around Twitter As LinkedIn Goes Tweet Crazy Too though I don’t think it will make much of a difference – at any rate, the connection from LinkedIn to Twitter wasn’t working tonight, when I last tried it.

Why won’t it make a difference?  Status Updates aren’t the main reason people use LinkedIn – in fact, many of the people who use LinkedIn aren’t into Twitter at all, and I doubt they’ll suddenly learn to use Twitter more often.  On the other hand, from Twitter’s point of view, every little bit of extra usage, helps.

Every day, there’s something new and amazing that happens, but often, within a day or two, it’s like it never happened, or, was always there.