There were people from Sun, Cisco, Text 100, Fleishman Hillard, Weber Shandwick (well, me), Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis, Podtech, Andy Lark, Jory Des Jardins / Blogher that were in attendance (plus others), and Jeremiah Owyang from Podtech helped germinate the idea and Daniela Barbosa from Factiva ran with it – and, in a way, yes it was a Factiva focus group.

The measurement of social media – how is the best way to figure this out, and Factiva reached out to figure out how to measure such social media the best way.

Do you want a centralized algorithmic or a localized, emergence type data. Is it just about interesting data points or simple data points – but since there is money being moved, you need to figure out what people are asking for, and what data they need to bring back to the bosses. In deploying social media, you need to figure out how to best measure the results.

What needs to be measured: relevance, influence, reach, audience …. What is the high influence, what is the audience measurement? Niche blogs might not have a high audience, but they are reaching the right people.

Relavence, influence and reach all have to do with the goal – what might be influential for one person and / or company might not be for other groups. It’s the metrics (a la Nielsen Netratings) versus goals and objectives (what the company is looking for as an end-result is probably most important). A community activation – a call-to-action from the blog or post. A conversion rate, a download of a PDF or maybe a podcast.

But is there a difference between reach and influence? Someone might not have reach but is influencing the right people. It’s the attributes of the audience. And participation – social media platform via comments, post a blog ….

How is traditional marketing transitioning into social media and marketing. Can you measure the same way? Is it possible to measure?

Should we even call it consumer generated media, or social media – or for that point, is it new media? Not everyone is necessarily a consumer (according to Stowe) – but I disagree. We are a consumer society, dammit. When you participate, there is no consumption but more production – it’s a wrong, silly term (Stowe again). But, he has a nice hat on today (see photo).

We broke out into brain storm sessions – here are those notes.

Beyond metrics – there needs to be a standard on how they are produced out there. Statistics are radically different – if there was a standard set, a consistency, there is an issue in reliability that needs to be addressed. A working standard on social media – getting people to adhere is hard to do to begin with.

Click-thrus, who are we reaching is the important question. How do we define this in social media. Podcasting – who is watching, how long they watching, what’s the dropoff rate? What’s the engagement there within Podcasts – a “lurk” index, in a way.

Very basic web metrics tools – if you have those – you apply it to a blog, you get nothing truly valuable. To connect the domain name to a user behavior or a company would be great – like the top 500 people that you want to reach.

Should CGM be measured and is it important?

For us, yes, of course we want to be able to measure it.

Who is creating social media? What are they creating? And is the “who” more important than the “what”?

Blogs, wikis for how-to sites, newsgroups, message boards – all to help each other use products. Have to consider who the company – there are 100′s of millions of people that are probably creating the content that is just for family, that is just being done for fun. Do you mean relevant to commerce and business, or who is just creating social media? You have to figure out and distinguish the relevance versus the cabin blogging person who no one is currently reading. How do you find those bloggers that you want …. So, tagging does become an important role. Isolate who is relevant discussions – by being involved that does help.

Somehow create a filter to tag the blogs, in a way of importance. Media itself is very structured. Quantity does not necessarily equal quality – specific influence.

If you are producing social media as part of your PR marketing plan, how do you measure ROI? Answered above.

Do you think that social media needs structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metics (eg MSM’s ad value equivalenceand article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?

What kind of standards – transparency. How are stats created in a clear way … a level of confidence that this information is confident – the executives can pull it apart, and it still stands – it needs to be digestable . Start creating advanced statistics, such as reach, media signal (prominence, etc). What are the metrics, creating of algorithms. There needs to be some structure – but there is a softer side of measurement, some guidelines … flexibility, adapted by …. There is that pie-chart desirability, but is it possible. Resistance and uncertainty from advertising to PR, as the money switches hands. There are a ton of companies that are getting into measurement of social media, but needs to be an understanding. It depends on what you are doing – from the PR side, we are the first adopters bc it is lower risk and just part of outreach. Influencers is what PR is trying to figure out. CYA metrics – that’s what the corporate side also. The idea metrics – it’s a PR thing that wants.

So … what should be measured and how do you want it to be delivered?

In a simple way that can be modified for each companies / corporates needs. And, RSS to cut and paste into an email.

Thoughts from other breakout groups:

The metaphor that matters – a blogger is a blogger, even if he is a journalist.

ROI – no metrics, beyond engagement. None for new acquisitions, call to action, click throughs. Is there importance for these metrics, or is anecdotal information yet. Next year (prediction) is when company’s get over it – they are all looking for a decent metric, and page views is not the one. There has to be some better measurement, and 2007 is where it is going to likely going to come from. Engage or die.

Does ROI even matter – no one is going to ask for ROI on email or IM.

Who and what varies on the situation. Nothing is equal, not everything is quantified the same way, depending on the needs and interpretations.

Salesforce dashboards – the next board meeting, where you explain how many days it took to sell what and why. Should we measure – it depends, and why comes into play.

Open networks – open source metrics – the metrics to be embraced by them all. Need standardization, in order for there to be success. Paying for measurement is for the rich and the famous (it costs cash).

One of the who’s – it’s not about big far reaching community, but about narrow, gated community around the “who” more so than the “what” and vice versa.

There was a final overview at the end – see photo – that capsulated the whole thought about measurement and tracking, which is important in social media. It is something we all talk about, but are not thinking about solutions. Hopefully, there will be better than anecdotal solutions.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

He authors the popular Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy’s opinions and views – on public relations, publicity and other things.

Unfortunately for Dell, when it does finally decide to enter the blogosphere with One2One, it gets criticized by many of the same bloggers, such as Rubel and Jarvis.

I tend to agree with Andy Lark and Scoble. Give Dell some breathing room, let them find their voice, offer them advice. If they still suck in a couple of months, then have at them. In the meantime, think back to when you first started blogging and how nice it felt when people cut you some slack.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

What did I tell Nestle when someone asked “how do you start?”

Listen. Listen. Listen. Er. Technorati. Technorati. Technorati.

Link to your enemies. It takes away their karmic power.

I told Quixtar to link to everyone who says that Quixtar sucks. There are QUITE A FEW!

Why do that? Well, it takes away our power to poke at your negative spots if you openly admit them. That turns throwing rocks through your front window into a boring exercise.

By the way, I agree with Andy Lark that we should be nicer to new companies that try the bloggy Web. At least give them a couple of weeks to get settled into their new homes before we start lobbing rocks through their front windows. Of course, I doubt anyone will listen to me because these companies came into the bloggy Web so late that the mob isn’t gonna automatically be nice the way they were to me three years ago.

Shel Holtz noticed that they got inspiration from Channel 9. Very honored, thanks!

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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Bray recounted the story of Lark in a recent blog post. He developed what became Lark and released it in December 1996.

During that time of development, Bray and his fiance, Lauren, traveled to Australia to get married. An unfortunate knee injury kept Lauren out of action for the remainder of their trip.

“So I broke out my computer and finished the work I’d already started on my XML processor,” Bray wrote, “and decided to call it Lark for Lauren’s Right Knee.”

Bray noted how Lark worked, and called it “a pure deterministic finite automaton (DFA) parser, with a little teeny state stack.” Lark worked well enough, and it worked very fast. “This was before the time of standardized XML APIs, but Lark had a stream API that influenced SAX, and a DOM-like tree API; both worked just fine,” Bray wrote.

However, Bray never built support for namespaces into Lark, and with the development of XML processors by an array of technology’s heavy hitters (IBM, Microsoft, etc) Lark faded into the background.

Then, O’Reilly author and standards activist Rick Jelliffe made it known he wanted to find a Finite State Machine for XML through the XML-dev mailing list. Bray noticed the request and passed Lark along to Jelliffe.

If he were so motivated, Bray believes he could do even more with Lark, he said in closing his post:

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Racetrack II
Originally uploaded by melastmohican.

But if you’re looking too closely at things, you get distracted by all those cracks that go in seemingly random directions and lose sight of progress–how ever slow it might be.

In looking over all the feedback I’ve seen about adding blogs to Yahoo! News Search, I’ve seen a surprising number of folks confused and distracted by all those little cracks. But that’s okay, I guess.

To recap, a lot of folks seem compelled to make weird apple vs. oranges comparisons. In doing so, they’re missing what this is really about. Luckily, a few folks have picked up on it.

Andy Lark said:

Yahoo! News is now delivering blogs as a component of a news search result. This has major implications for PR practitioners. Suddenly those searching for news on your product get a feel for what users, the community, and the pundits are saying – unfiltered. It has equally major implications for blogging. It enables anyone with the energy and enthusiasm for a particular topic to potentially sit on the front page right alongside traditional news sources.

Dan Gillmor said “Yahoo Takes a Step for Citizen Journalists“. He’s right–but we’re thinking beyond those folks that consider themselves “journalists” of any sort.

Steve Rubel used the headline “Yahoo! Blog Search Puts News and Blogs on Equal Ground” in his post. While they’re not truly equal (yet), it’s pretty clear where things are headed.

This is part of the continuing evolution of on-line media. A few years ago, everyone talked about making “static” sites “dynamic.” Nowadays we take dynamic sites for granted.

I believe that blogs, as separate entities from non-blog sites, will be fairly short lived. The features that make blogs what they are (on-page discussion, chronological sorting, generous linking) will work themselves into “non-blog” sites more and more in the coming months. In other words, the line between “blog” and “non-blog” will become ever more blurry.

But right now blogs are “special” and the folks who write them sometimes expect special treatment (some more than others). But like I said last night, this was clearly aimed at everyone else. Otherwise we’d have created Yet Another Blog Search Site and expected most bloggers, PR/Marking folks, and journalists to use it. They’d be the same people already using blog search services.

Remember back when web publishing was fairly new and the term “webmaster” was very different than it is now? Many folks spent a lot of time trying to find the right “GIFs” for their site. Not images, GIFs. Back then the format, an implementation detail that users never cared about, was incredibly important. We all had to know what the heck a GIF file was and many of the tools for creating/manipulating them were primitive–much like RSS today.

Eventually we stopped talking about GIFs (and JPEGs), got better tools and used “normal people” words like “pictures” and “images” instead. That opened the door for more people to participate in creating on-line content. The same thing will happen to blogs and RSS.

To bring this back to where we started, I feel like we’re trying to move that rock along in the desert. The path is fairly clear. The cracks are just distracting.

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

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So, I think we’re in agreement that the media needs some transparency. And based on what I see being written elsewhere, some PR transparency appears to be on order as well. So, what about research? In our industry — the tech industry — if there’s a part the business that desperately needs more transparency, it’s the research part.

David shares some insight/examples of how research studies and reports can be misleading. He also questions why some of the biggest and most authoritative firms (cough, Gartner) fail to divulge their client portfolios and more important, potential conflicts of interest. The investment industry does this (albeit it was forced to), why can’t/don’t big research firms do the same?

Research transparency is definitely a discussion that needs to be had. For example, when presenting scoreboard like research like Gartner’s Magic Quandrants, shouldn’t the charts say which of the companies listed in the chart are also Gartner clients? Or how about when the press gets pitched on “new, earthshattering” results as a proofpoint of some vendor’s readership?

Update: Andy Lark and Elizabeth Albrycht chime in on the situation.

Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.

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