As you can see it’s quite a bit of data and it needs to be collected from a number of different services. Then you can compound this with trending, that is collecting the data at different intervals during the day.

Of course, that’s just the raw data. As I said previously, the value is in the analysis. More on that in the coming weeks.

Cross posted to Hyku

One of the examples I gave was how we look at engagement with online video and compare that CPI with traditional media. During the Q&A I was asked if using the equivalency model to compare PR to advertising was the right model. Whether you like it or not you need to have some basis of comparison. With social media though, those comparisons are all over the place. You might compare elements of a program to advertising, or traditional PR, or even customer service. Going further down the rabbit hole, you look at things like: client acquisition, customer retention, employee retention, recruiting, to name just a few.

In any of the measures, the big focus is to determine which medium is performing more efficiently. It’s also important to remember that all clients have different results that they value. Measurement is not a one-size-fits-all approach. However, the core data that you can track online is always the the same. It’s how you analyze and compare that provides that measurement value.

Cross-posted to Hyku

After we saw Buck’s follow-up post on 10 Don’ts for PR job applicants, we thought it would helpful to give some additional tips to students, based on our experience, that will help them in their interviews. In fact, given the current state of the economy, we know there are a lot of students out there searching for jobs in PR, so we decided to do a short summer series focused on the topic. Over the next few weeks you’ll see a couple more posts from us focused on giving students tips on getting into the industry. Today we start with some things to keep in mind NOT to do in a PR interview.

1. Don’t tell us you’re interested in PR because “you like to talk to people” or “you’re a people person.” That doesn’t mean anything to us. A used car salesman likes to talk to people too. Why are you interested in PR over sales? We want to hire someone that has some knowledge of what we do.
2. Don’t let the interview end without asking us any questions. If you ask zero questions then we’re not really convinced you’re interested. There’s nothing about the job/company that you’re not curious about? The interview isn’t just an opportunity for us to learn more about you, but for you to learn more about us. In fact, it really impresses us when we can tell you’ve come prepared with questions.
3. Don’t act snotty or talk down to the person sitting at the front desk. How you act with them tells us a lot about your character and how you’ll act as our employee. And don’t think we don’t ask them about their impressions of you. We do. And we take it into account.
4. Don’t pick one person out in the interview to focus on if you’re interviewing with multiple people at one time. Make sure you make eye contact with all involved in the interview. Sometimes candidates focus on one person thinking the person with the higher title is the decision-maker. That’s not always the case. In fact, at Voce we weigh each person’s feedback equally.
5. Don’t come into an interview without having first researched the company. Know what the company does. At a bare minimum, check out the company’s website (and that’s a very, very bare minimum). In our case, know that we focus on PR, social media marketing, and web development. Be able to name some of our clients. You’d be amazed at the number of times we speak with people that have no idea what we do.
6. Don’t forget to write a thank you note to everyone you interviewed with and the person that coordinated the interviews with you. Email or an old-fashioned handwritten note is fine. Either way, just don’t forget to send one.
7. Don’t fidget. We know you’re probably nervous, but don’t do anything that makes that blatantly obvious to us. Interns at Voce sit in on client meetings. We want to bring in people that can act professionally in those situations and not provide distractions to the client. If you’re fidgeting during the interview and crinkling up our business cards it makes us think that’s how you could act during other types of meetings.
8. Don’t act overconfident. There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. It’s okay to admit you don’t know something. You’re just starting out in this career, we don’t expect you to know all the answers. It’s not good to fake your way through an interview. We can tell if you don’t really know what you’re talking about, so just be honest.
9. Don’t go out partying the night before your interview. I know, it seems like common sense. We’ve interviewed people that actually admitted to being out the night before. We want fun people, but telling us about your partying habits in a first interview doesn’t show us you’re fun, it shows us that you lack intelligence and more importantly, common sense.
10. Don’t bash your former employers. We know there will be things you didn’t like about past employers and we’ll likely ask why you left them. When you answer that question, do so in a constructive manner. If you badmouth past places of employment we’ll probably just see you as a negative person.

Note: this post (and future posts in this series) will be cross-published to the San Jose State Career Center Blog. Please go read their blog for additional insights and perspective on interviewing and career prep!

Web users spend the majority of their time online NOT on your web site.

From a usability standpoint the convention was, don’t do anything too ‘out’ there. If you break too far from the standards that users are familiar with, then you might confuse them. This applied to things like navigation and search-box locations on the page, link highlighting, information design, etc.

Now, let’s apply this to social media strategies. With more users turning to each other for information via the multitude of services out there (Facebook, Twitter, etc) then the statement is also true for comms. Web users spend the majority of their time online NOT on your web site.

The graphic above illustrates the various tools available online and how an organization’s web presence sits in the middle, disconnected in many ways. Sure, there are ways to integrate the traditional corporate web site with social networks and other platforms, but that’s not always easy.

While it’s important to reach beyond the traditional web presence, I think it’s still important to have that ‘home’. There are a number of reasons, but I want to focus on two that are related to relationships.

1. I Need to See Stability: While my impression of a brand may be influenced by how savvy they are with social media, I still want to see that they have a home base. I want to see their web site, is it professional or some fly-by-night operation. Think about this in real-world relationship terms. You meet a great guy/girl and you’ve been dating for a few weeks. Each time you say, “Let’s go to your place” they change the subject. It dawns on you that you’ve never seen their home….and you don’t even know if they have one. That doesn’t exactly instill confidence in your relationship.

2. You Need a Home: How would you like to live out of a suitcase for a year, moving from location to location? If your ‘home’ online consisted of presences only on social networks, you might feel a bit disconnected. There’s the term ’spreading yourself too thin’. It’s also impossible to be everywhere at once. If you focus all your efforts on Facebook, then you’re ignoring the MySpace crowd, or anybody else for that matter. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but there are people that are not on Facebook.

As Mike argued, it’s important to find that balance between communication strategies on your site, as well as off your site. The goal is to integrate the strategies and give folks a reason to come to your site. After all, your ‘friends’ just might want to come to your house every so often.

This month starts my 14th year in Web development (shocking to think about). In that time there have been some seriously hard lessons about process and structure that I’ve learned.

Those lessons have led to a team that executes projects from nothing more than a concept through to the post-launch management of those projects.

In order to offer a complete solution along with well-advised recommendations, we must be closely involved in each step of the process. This process breaks down into five large chunks:

• Project Strategy – Think content structures, functional specs, wireframes and design briefs.
• Interface Design – Think site designs. Provided based on project strategy and brand standards.
• Front-end Development – Think HTML, CSS, browser compatibility and platform compatibility (mobile devices vs. a desktop computer).
• Custom Application Development – Think custom programming for specific tasks as well as content platforms such as WordPress.
• Deployment and Support – Think taking your new site and making it live to your audience. Also, the coordination, planning and optimization behind such a launch.

The Platforms Team is made up of individuals representing each of these main buckets and it’s absolutely imperative that we make this expertise available to every project.

The team brings an outside perspective that’s as varied as the projects we develop.

As a result, the gaps that can exist in a development life cycle are minimized, and subsequently, resources and timelines are also minimized.

In the coming weeks, members of the Platforms Team will be providing deep insights into these areas and the approach to each.

Nick Gernert leads the Platform Services team that’s part of Voce Connect and oversees all web development efforts as well as making sure all those efforts are strategically sound. He contributes to the cnp_studios blog and is on Twitter as @NickGernert.

Most of the related content, according to Pathable, is more about people and their experience at the event or its sessions. About a third run along these lines, with another third being information about what was going on that might be useful or interesting to those who weren’t actually in attendance.

In all there were 797 individual tweets about WordCamp SF from 258 people but just 20 people account for half of that total number. That’s a fascinating statistic showing that is actually a bit surprising considering what I would have assumed about the attendees, which was that they were all on Twitter hashtagging away.

Chris Thilk works on the Client Services team, part of Voce Connect, developing and executing social media strategy. In addition to the Voce Communications blog Chris runs his own personal site at Movie Marketing Madness and you can follow him at @ChrisThilk on Twitter.

Danny explains:

“One key culprit may be that a large number people view web pages using mobile Twitter applications such as Tweetie. Click on a link from a tweet in some of these applications, and they load web pages using their own browsers. Those browser may not run JavaScript. And if JavaScript doesn’t run, then some hosted metrics tools like Google Analytics never realize that your page was viewed.”

A ha! Yet another reason not to put all your analytics eggs in one basket. For many of our clients we’ve been seeing Twitter climb up in the referral traffic rankings, so it’s interesting to think that even those numbers may not be fully capturing the amount of traffic Twitter really pushes to their sites.

Bit.ly’s Andrew Cohen provided some additional insights to Danny about why numbers aren’t matching up, and diplomatically says that “bit.ly complements rather than replaces JavaScript-based packages like Google Analytics or Chartbeat.”

I definitely recommend cruising over to Search Engine Land to give Danny’s post a read. For more information, check out these links:

• MIT Technology Review, “But Who’s Counting?”
• Bit.ly, “Registered Applications And Better Click Referrer Data”

Should it be with” on-domain” strategies (e.g., brand communities, business blogs, corporate video, etc., basically any sort of effort that folds into a company’s existing website)? Or should it be with “off-domain” strategies (e.g., microblogs, social networks, monitoring projects, etc., basically any sort of third-party platform or service that could be ‘officially’ adopted to help the company participate with the larger web outside its walls).

I guess the ’strange’ part is that this split, this tug, really shouldn’t exist at all, because it’s not an either-or situation. The best programs will inevitably be those that strike a balance between how social media is used on-domain to communicate and connect with people, and how it’s used off-domain to accomplish this exact same thing. I think finding the perfect blend between those two experiences is where every marketer ought to be focusing their time, energy and money right now.

Coming on the heels of WordCamp SF, we bring you a video interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and Automattic.  Matt was kind enough to step away from his speaking platform to chat about his inspirations, memorable moments from other WordCamps, and plans for VideoPress.

And since we’re talking WordPress, here’s a profile of VideoPress, part two of my “Cool Video Upgrades” series. You can also read part one on the new YouTube Beta features and functionality.

What is VideoPress?

It’s WordPress’ new video sharing service that runs on an open source framework.  VideoPress allows bloggers to host and play videos right from their blogs.

Videos can be streamed and embedded on WordPress.com or on any site, even in full HD.

Costs

About $5 per month at WordPress.com.

Metrics

Currently limited to the basics such as number of views.  But WP is working to integrate more sophisticated tools.

Technical Specs

VideoPress will convert your video into h.264 MP4 and output to several different formats and bitrates:

• Standard video has width 400 px, and bit rate 796 kb/sec.
• DVD video has width 640 px, and bit rate 1528 kb/sec.
• HD video has width 1280 px, and bit rate 3128 kb/sec.

VideoPress can upload files up to 1 GB each.  It can even be optimized for iTunes and Miro.  Pretty powerful, I must say.

Customization

The video player can be stylized on the CSS stylesheet.

How to activate VideoPress

Available on your WP upgrades page, bottom left of the dashboard navigation.

What else?

WP is continually working to provide viewers with more options for streaming and downloading videos, more in-depth stats, player customization, and easier ways to embed the new player.

Personally, I’m excited to see this video service grow and mature – see more of a community-driven landing page for VideoPress.com, make it more conducive to ‘viral’ push, and dethrone sites like YouTube with video aggregation.

After what seems like a brief period of speculation that these gains were simply a problem with FeedBurner’s reporting, word finally began to spread that the jump was because FriendFeed was now reporting the number of subscribers a publisher has there as subscribers to the source FeedBurner feed, a change that was noted on the FriendFeed blog.

I’ve been a big advocate over the years of RSS subscribers being a more accurate measure of a blog’s influence. My thinking on this is built around the notion that RSS subscribers show who’s taken an affirmative action to keep up with a blog’s updates. That’s especially important when it comes to marketers looking to send out review products and such since those subscribers will actually see the eventual review. By focusing on site visits, you’re counting a huge percentage of people who come into a specific post or page through search but never hit the front page or dive any deeper and therefore never see the review or other relevant post.

Anyway back the FriendFeed change.

My first thought was that this was great since it meant that the FeedBurner numbers were now more truly representative of a feed’s reach. If someone has chosen to subscribe to my FriendFeed profile they’ve taken, more or less, the same positive action they would if they were subscribing to my main feed or my Twitter updates or anything else.

The more I think about it, though, the less entranced I am with this move and the less I think it’s going to be as useful as it initially seemed to be.

For one thing, FriendFeed subscribers almost certainly overlaps to a large extent with existing RSS subscribers. If someone is getting my FriendFeed updates I’m guessing it’s because they already subscribe to my blogs and just wanted to connect with me elsewhere.

For another, I’m not yet convinced that everyone is using FriendFeed as actively as a small subset of folks are, where that becomes a combination of Inbox and RSS reader and other input channels. I don’t have stats to back this up, but most people I talk to kind of have their FriendFeed account sitting there, collecting their various feeds and as a place to turn occasionally to see if they need to add any more friends but that’s about it.

I’ll admit these might be nit-picky points. But it seems like a somewhat artificial inflation of an RSS feed’s subscriber numbers. There are multiple Twitter tools that will let you pull your feed into your Twitter profile. Would those eventually report into FeedBurner reflecting the number of people who follow you on Twitter?

At the end of the day I do think that reporting FriendFeed subscribers into FeedBurner is a good thing since it does make those numbers technically more accurate. But there are things about it that marketers need to be aware of if we’re using those numbers to divine insight into the blog in question. Likewise there are things publishers need to keep in mind to make sure they’re not over-stating their blog’s reach.