This week the Social Media Examiner just announced a follow up online conference to the extremely successful Socia Media Success Summit 2010, from earlier this summer, which is focused solely on Facebook. I attended the Social Media Success Summit 2010 and was very impressed by the quality of presentations and audience interaction.

The Summit utilized all the platforms it preached about and brought thousands of business professionals together from around the world.

Check out the Facebook Success Summit 2010 website to register.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms. - Quote from article.

The Oriella PR Network did an interesting study on how digital media has changed the influence of traditional press release methods.

Unsurprisingly email releases continue to be the most influential method to syndicate information.

Am I wrong in expecting these results? I'd consider myself an above average user of social media platforms and I still haven't written off traditional methods. I would expect different results based on varying demographic segments, but for business? No shocker there.

Has Super Mario trivia been keeping you up at night? Thought so. Did you know that Mario was originally called Jumpman? Check out this brief overview to learn all you didn't know about Mario himself.

 

 

Geez. With the way the world is nowadays, you've gotta teach your kids about safer Internet browsing at a younger age. Not only that, but you have to hide your porn stash better, too. [xkcd]

New service TypePad Micro. Will it give Posterous a run for its money?

A while back I did some research on the Ontario Science Center (OSC) and the lessons enterprises could learn from such a leader in customer experience design. Of particular interest was measuring the ROI related to customer experience initiatives – I know a lot of our member companies use social media to improve customer experience, but how exactly do you measure it? When I interviewed Kevin von Appen, director of Daily Experience Operations at the OSC, he used a turn of phrase that really got me thinking: “the systematic gathering and analysis of anecdote.”

Collecting and analyzing customer stories – the impact you have on specific individual – is one of three approaches that I think makes sense when calculating overall ROI in a customer experience context. The other two are mission and reach. Mission is easy – most organizations have some sort of mission statement, or if they don’t, they usually at least have a CEO or a board with a well-articulated vision. Reach is also pretty straightforward: How many people to you touch? What reach does is calculate the influence of an organization or an individual. It acts as a proxy for several influence measures including: authority, frequency (how often you create the opportunity to influence consumers), independence (lack of bias in their opinion), charisma (in the case of an individual), and persuasiveness. At the OSC, the measure of reach includes both the number of people that came through the physical location and the over five million that engage with them online.

For me, impact is the most interesting measure. When assessing impact, Kevin uses the example of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. Having someone like Hadfield say that going to the OSC as a child helped inspire him to be what he is today means the OSC had a strong impact on him. Most companies have at least a couple of these types of exemplary stories. But at a more pedestrian level, any organization can listen to and analyze the stories of people that come through the doors and that write online in blogs, forums, and social networks every day. There are now several companies such as Attensity, Scout Labs, Radian6, Visible Technologies, Crimson Hexagon (and many others), that have software to help analyze unstructured information like customer stories. These companies can identify basic metrics like the percentage of positive and negative sentiment, as well as provide deeper analytics about specific product and service features that lead to customers having positive and negative experiences. The end goal for those looking for quantifiable ROI numbers around customer experience is to convert all unstructured data to these types of “numeric” representations that are consistent, tracked over time, and can be charted in a dashboard. In short, the systematic gathering and analysis of anecdotes.

Would it be earlier than expected? By a lot. But given how long Google usually takes to test their products—and how long Android was public before the G1 launched—Techcrunch's report that Chrome OS is imminent isn't totally ridiculous.

Previously, Google had set the release date had been set roughly at H2 of 2010. In their words,

[T]he first netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010

Of course, that's when a dedicated product will launch, as in, a netbook from a prominent manufacturer running Chrome OS as sold. But Google did go on to say in the same announcement that that they'd "soon be working with the open source community," after which Eric Schmidt dropped a few hints that we could see Chrome OS, most likely in beta form, "as early as this year." So, that brings us to the new rumor: TechCrunch has it from a "reliable source" that we'll see Chrome OS within a week, available as a download. It'll have limited driver support, meaning Google will only endorse installation on a limited number of computers—mostly netbooks—including a number of Eee PCs.

The obvious question now is what will it look like, though I'd like to remind you that, in all likelihood we've been given a pretty good preview: Remember the version of Chrome browser for Chrome OS that leaked for Linux machines a few weeks ago? It had (or has, above) a nonoperational Start-style button, a clock embedded in the title bar, and a minimalist interface, and it's probably a pretty good indicator as to where Google's going with this. [TechCrunch]

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.