ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

This is a wonderful video presentation on YouTube that focuses the anthropology, the behavior, and the culture that YouTube is enabling. This is a wonderful video from an educational standpoint and I plan to use it in the upcoming course on social media I will be teaching in the fall at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco.

If you are tired Bay Area conferences where you hear the same old cheerleaders in what has become an increasingly incestuous web 2.0 echo chamber you need to check out the PSFK conference in San Francisco next week. This is sure to be a very creative and inspiring conference with great people from creative and successful companies in the real world, like Virgin America, Method, Modernista, Apple, and NASA. My blog buddy from Ogilvy 360, Rohit from the Influential Marketing blog will be there i’m sure signing books as well.

This is the confirmed speaker list:

Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones
Amit Gupta, Photojojo
Andrew Hoppin, NASA
Charles Ogilvie, Virgin America
Chris Riley, Apple

Colin Nagy, Attention
Ed Cotton, Influx Insights / BSSP
Eric Corey Freed, Organic Architect
Ezra Cooperstein, Current TV

Frank Striefler, TBWA/Media Arts Lab
Gareth Kay, Modernista
George Murphy, Modo-Group
George Parker, Adscam / Author

Jean-Marie Shields, Starbucks
Jen Bekman, 20×200
Jeremy Townsend, Ghetto Gourmet
John Pollard, Microsoft
Josh Handy, Method
Josh Morenstein, fuseproject
Kevin Allison, Financial Times

Liz Dunn, FunnyOrDie.com
Lynn Casey, Team Noesis
Mark Lewis, DDB
Max Schorr, Good Magazine
Nate Pence, Method
Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence / Author

The liquid on top of a metal tray on top of a booming sub-woofer produces some memorizing effects that look supernatural. The liquid is a mixture of water and cornstarch at about a 1:6 ratio, start with the cornstarch, add water slowly, it’s a substance that feels ‘hard’, pours like liquid.

Lots of people have been talking about the right metrics for blogs and other kinds of social media for a couple of years now. It is in fact a desperate need in the blogging community because apart from the obvious ego-surfing, feedback and benchmarkeing is absolutely critical to managing and growing a blog. Also for anyone running a corporate blog, how do you show ROI and how do you show growth, progress, results? More to the point if you are managing a blog how do you provide the right metrics in place to drive the right behavior on the blog. The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure holds true, as does the idea that you only get what you measure, so you’d better be measuring the right thing

Most of the metrics thus far have been based upon typical web-site metrics, unique visitors, page views, incoming links etc. which are fine measures if you are only interested in popularity. Now this is fine if your business is pleasing advertisers because of course they are still obsessed (however misguidedly) on eyeballs. But popularity is a very misleading measure if your aim is something other than popularity, and is especially meaningless when you compare part time blogs, to professional with a whole editorial staff.

Many folks have compiled lists of blogs ranking them using various publicly available information. Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (recently expanded to include Social Media blogs) uses Technorati Authority to rank these blog, and the Ad Age Power 150 uses a multi-metric including Technorati, RSS subscribers, Google Page Rank and others, but IMHO still essentially measures of popularity. Seth Godin’s blog is at the number 1 spot on the Top 25 marketing blog and the Ad Age Power 150.

Now in comes Aide RSS a company that aims to provide measures of “engagement” (see Mark Ghuneim on Measuring Engagement). Now engagement has been a watchword in the marketing and advertising community for a couple of years now and I think there is a great deal of consensus that customer engagement is a more meaningful measure in the world of social media than measures of popularity. Beyond Social Media it is becoming clear that it is engagement over time that is one of the secrets behind building great brands in the web2.0/social media space, I really like the work David Armano is doing on Micro Interactions and Direct Engagement, it is those Micro Interactions which form the basis to measuring engagement.

Anyway, Aide Rss has been doing some engagement measurement using their soon to be released API and they used Mack Colliers Top 25 Marketing blogs as a baseline for that test. They published their results as an image, so I took the liberty of transferring it to a table and calculated the relative gains and losses of these blogs. I think the results are pretty interesting and there are some big moves in what for the last year has been a pretty static list. In the table I’ve got the Top 25 marketing blog standings based upon technorati rank and then on the right the Aide Rss Engagement rankings, and in the last column a +/- for where the blog has moved.

Here’s how they calculated engagement:

(BTW no idea why the table looks so bad, I guess k2 is overriding everything)

I think this is a pretty fascinating experiment and I for one am very excited for when Aide RSS release this API. The one thing that I think is interesting here is the number of blogs who I consider very authoritative (and personal favorites) like Jaffe Juice, Brand Autopsy, and Church of the Customer, that had quite significant drops on the engagement scale. Obviously this is just after a cursory glance at the results and doesn’t take into account blog design or other factors, but I wonder if the more popular a blog gets the less conversational it becomes?

Anyway, I coded all this by hand so there may be errors, especially in recording gains and losses so please let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve often wondered how to add an external mic to my N95, as i think it would make a killer podcast recording device. Anyway, looks like someone figured it out and put an instructional video on Qik.

I had a blog post brainstorm a while ago on what a “social media phone” would look like, check it out and feel free to continue adding ideas.

Where is Chris Cocker when you need him, anyway, next time you are on the verge of another jibe at Twitters expense you should bare this in mind. We are the early adopters and some of us are also some of the heaviest users of twitter, some people have literally 10’s of thousands of followers. Some, who are weblebreties, post tweets that attract 30 to 40 responses to every 140 character gem of wisdom is dropped. From what I understand it is the number of @ messages that are makes Twitter a difficult technology to scale. When I see the Fail Whale I just come back later, like others i’ve become rather fond of it.

Being a mega early adopter means having to accept that sometimes things won’t run right. The guys at Twitter are building a technology that has never existed before, and they are doing it while everyone is using it. Talk about building a plane while flying it and transporting passengers, I wish them the best of luck.

Love the fail whale, check out the t-shirts.