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Though there seem to be two a week that are “must be there” conferences — this week, for example, the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas and Web 2.0 in NYC — I was glad to come across this helpful list today, from Paul O’Brien:

1. Search Engine Strategies (SES)
2. Pubcon (WebmasterWorld)
3. ad:tech
4. eTail
5. Search Insider Summit
6. Affiliate Summit
7. Shop.org
8. Online Market World
9. Direct Marketing Association
10. eMetrics Summit
11. Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
12. OMMA Expo
13. Internet Marketing Conference
14. SXSW - which you should attend just because
15. iMedia Agency Summit & iMedia Summits
16. PPC Summit
17. MarketingProfs
18. American Marketing Association (AMA)
19. Online Marketing Summit
20. MIXX Expo
21. Media Relations Summit
22. ACCM (DMA)
23. DM Days (DMA)
24. Searchnomics
25. ClickZ Specifics
26. Internet Retailer
27. Web Analytics Association Base Camp
28. Next Generation Marketing
29. eRetailer Summit
30. New Marketing Summit
31. IAB Events
32. MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit
33. Apartment Internet Marketing - really!
34. Frost & Sullivan Marketing World
35. T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
36. Catalog & ECommerce Club
37. Blog World Expo
38. eComXpo

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Pat LaPointe takes some folks to task about the nebulous metrics of social media measurement tools. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with the ultimate premise — that social media measurement shouldn’t get money because ROI is fuzzy. However, it does bring up the issue for me that measurement of social media ought to have specific goals, such as:

• Baseline understanding: what’s our competitive position or share-of-voice?
• Location: where are the conversations happening that are important to the company, brand, industry, etc?
• Sentiment: are there glaring issues with perception of us?
• Trends: what’s the general context of the conversations? Do participants talk about us the way we expect?

Based on initial baselines, you’ve got somewhere to go — somewhere to move the needle. Can you make a difference through some kind of tangible engagement? What will have the greatest impact? If we change the way we talk about us to be more like what people say about us in social media, will it have a positive result on some other metric?

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How do you use, interact with, and communicate with social computing/social media tools? Lately, I have spent some time thinking about the way I use specific social computing tools and why others bore me, or why I simply have no interest in others. Certainly not a science, as these are my observations about my personal usage, but I do think that perhaps it bears some useful information, particularly about motivations, necessities, distractions, connections, and other words ending in -ion.

Blogging: Writing and Reading

The ol’ stalwart blogging. Yes, I blog, but certainly not an A-lister - more like a D-lister or lower. My blog isn’t bringing in money, nor is it set up to do that. I blog about mostly business topics that interest me. I am not really a personal blogger, except for the occasional anecdote. I blog for this blog, guest blog on occasion, and blog where I work.
As far as reading blogs, I subscribe to a number of blogs via Google Reader, but I have to say I rarely read them. Having worked at a social media measurement company, I am spoiled, and so I don’t like sifting through blog posts I don’t care about. So, I use Filtrbox to streamline my reading. I have a few filters set up, and I sift through those when I have time to peruse posts that are of interest. I am less interested in who is doing the writing, because there are plenty of unknown bloggers that write good, interesting, thought-provoking posts.

Generally speaking, I find a lot of interesting and relevant things to read through people I follow on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Micro-blogging or update services

Twitter: I use Twitter for updates that are both personal and business-oriented as well. I follow friends, business associates and interesting and important people in the social media space, and I am followed by similar folks. I don’t necessarily follow everyone who follows me. Early on, I did, but I found that some people were micro-verbose (meaning, they would tweet 6 or 7 tweets in a row, which is really annoying). So, I have reduced somewhat the number of people I follow, but am always adding new people as well.

How I access Twitter: I never login to Twitter’s web page to tweet, only to read profiles. I use Twirl as my desktop tweeting app (its also my friendfeed app). I don’t like having to visit web pages to update messaging, it takes too long and makes it even more disruptive than it needs to be.

What I hate about Twitter use: It’s bad enough when someone you’re talking to gets a phone call or email, but by far the rudest interrupter is getting tweets delivered to your phone. TURN IT OFF. I can certainly envision a helpful aspect to getting tweets to your phone — getting updates in an emergency, for example, or getting organized with a large group you are traveling with. But, I have to say, the tweets I get seem really not important enough to interrupt me when I am away from a computer.

FriendFeed: This very helpful aggregator of social tools, from Digg and Technorati to Plurk and Twitter to LinkedIn. After plugging in all my accounts, I have no reason to visit the FriendFeed site, except to find people to follow, which makes it very easy to interact with, at a low commitment level, which I prefer.

In part 2, I will discuss many other micro-blogging or update services, plus social networks.

Interesting posts I read this week, so far:

• Improving your website as a business asset and lead generator: This post at conversation marketing gives you concrete steps to take for a 3-hour improvement on your site (probably good for sites that don’t have 100’s of pages).
• WOM moneyback guarantee: WOM agency BzzAgent is challenging themselves by pitting their efforts against a typical interactive shop — if they don’t do 20% better than an agency, your WOM campaign is free. Kudos to them on that challenge, its very compelling.
• Top 50 Women Bloggers: Want to know which women bloggers have the most influence (granted, as per usual, this is a subjective analysis)? What really intrigued me about this story was the incredible diversity of topics of these women, from knitters to sex therapists to techno-geeks.
• Alisa Leonard has great, cheeky insights when I remember to read them. She added to her list of things to do when you want to get social.

Ok, definitely been a slacker here on tracking interesting social media-related posts.

Social Networking Digest: Jeremiah Owyang, who covers social media and social networking technologies for Forrester, is keeping a list of news, new research, launches, etc related to social networks. Interesting tidbit from the Consumer Internet Barometer is that 25% of North Americans use social networks.

Ok, I had another link but I changed my mind, and, since now that week is over, well, I guess I have just one link for the week. and that would be last week.

Alisa Leonard put out an interesting post today on the heels of getting demos from both Collective Intellect and Radian6, two competitors in the social media measurement space, and probably some others as well. (Disclaimer: I used to work for Collective Intellect). As someone who used to work in the measurement space, as well as a marketer, I find it interesting that the measurement piece wanted most by brands and PR folks alike is post-level tonality. Specifically, the ability to decipher whether a post, video, tweet, etc. is positive or negative towards the brand or whatever subject at hand.

Just to be perfectly clear: I also think it would be great, however, measuring tonal sentiment is difficult - for humans and machines. So, even if you are currently using a manual approach (ie, you’ve got a dark room full of low-paid interns reading posts and viewing videos, then categorizing for tonality) — you’re getting very inaccurate information.

Why? Plenty of reasons, here are a few:

• All people do not score a post in the same way: I might think a post is really negative, you might think its neutral
• Sarcasm: some people are sarcastic, others are not, but again, depending on the reader, sarcasm could be inferred when there is none

Basically, what I am getting at here is that particularly for written forms of social media, humans are not going to agree on tonality because how they read something is reflective of many things: comprehension, state of mind, attention level, etc.

So, is automated tonality better? Yes, but with a major caveat: Its better only in the aggregate. Anyone who tells you that they can measure sentiment at the post level with high accuracy is really pulling a number on you. Here are some reasons why:

Associations: determining tonality is complicated by the language used (how exuberantly negative or positive) and also how many different subjects are discussed in either a positive or negative way. For example, if a blogger writes about Coke, Pepsi and Diet Rite, and is positive about Coke and Diet Rite but negative about Pepsi, how is the post ranked? Even if you are only interested in posts about Pepsi, the automated tonality engine is looking for text that indicates tonality, so if it sees more positive than negative language, guess what? The post is scored as positive.

BUT, again, if you are looking for an aggregate view of all social media postings, then some of those misses become less important (unless you are measuring such a small number of posts that there is no real aggregate).

Social media measurement tools are very helpful in measuring certain things at a granular level, but tonality isn’t on that list. For anyone out there investigating these tools, you will be greatly helped by having realistic expectations of the accuracy of tonality from any of these vendors.

Here are some interesting posts that I have found over the last few days. How do I find my links? Certainly not through RSS — I don’t have time to peruse all that content. I get interesting reads from tweets from the people I follow, links posted on Facebook by friends and also by using Filtrbox, a great little tool for social media/online content monitoring that was started by local Boulder entrepreneur Ari Newman. I search for content related to social media and also online surveys (because I do some consulting for another local start up called SurveyGizmo).

Challenges of corporate blogging: Jeremiah’s post certainly hits on some of the exact concerns that many marketers at large companies face. I seem to talk about this with marketers at least a few times a week.

Targeting social media: On the mediapost blog, a Q&A with Jim Calhoun from Popular Media that talks about some of the interesting things they are doing for customers using behavioral targeting. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim last week, smart guy with a great sense of humor, which is always a good combination.

Looking for a social media job? (well, now that you mention it…yes) Jim Durbin has started a head hunting firm to match social media experts with companies that want them. Seems like a good idea.

Last week, I attended the WOMM-U Conference in Miami, put on by WOMMA. There were some interesting case studies presented, and for me, it was an excellent opportunity to network with some of my cohorts in the social media and word-of-mouth marketing space.

The format for parts of both days was different than most conferences, and had the potential to be great learning experiences. There were interactive sessions with a group leader, where a particular focus was the starting point for people to share their own experiences and ask questions of the group. For example, Lynn Eastep from Fleishman Hillard headed up a session on KPI’s of social media marketing efforts. She did an excellent job of framing the discussion for people, but with a 30-minute format and 12 people, it made it very difficult to learn too much. An hour would have been a better chunk of time. Another interesting session was put together by Jason Anello of Yahoo and Rohit Bhargava of Oglivy PR, on learning from social media successes — and failures. They asked the group for examples of social media tools that people have used to engage an audience or create buzz. A few people — including me — shared, but I felt pressured to be quick with the 30 minute time limit. Both Rohit and Jason shared small failures from experiments they tried on Facebook.

The last session I went to, on community-building tools, was brought together by Leslie Forde of Communispace and Bonin Bough of Weber Shandwick. They pulled together a nice packet of info for people to take with them, and showed a few example communities — both private (from Communispace customers) and public (like the Alli community).

My feedback on these sessions is this: as someone who has an understanding of the space and is immersed in it, it was hard for me to gain value from the setting. It might have worked better if there were an newbie and non-newbie tracks, or even if the time had been extended.

I commend WOMMA for trying out this format, and I think it has good possibilities with some more thought behind it.

My favorite moments of WOMM-U are all personal:

• Finally meeting Erik Rabasca from PHD in person, and getting to share his birthday dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab
• Dinner with Sonya Schweitzer from AOL and Kevin Burke from Lucid Marketing
• Harassing Bonin Bough from Weber Shandwick about the drink he still owes me (or, maybe I owe him?)
• Playing Guitar Hero with J.C. Hutchins
• Connecting with Kate and Jerry from Nielsen
• Chatting, if only briefly, with Lynn Eastep

Last night I bought a new pair of boots on Zappos.com. Big deal, right? Exactly. So, I am just almost through with the check out, and I get a pop-up window that asks the following questions:

• do I want to share what I purchased on Facebook? Or,
• do I want to share that “I bought something cool at zappos.com” on Facebook? Or
• no thanks

Why do I want to share what I bought on Facebook? The fact that I spent probably a little too much money on a pair of boots — a very nice pair of warm winter boots — why do I want to share that information? Maybe I am just not that kind of person. I mean, it isn’t like I called all my friends last night and told them about my purchase.

Maybe I am just not that interested in exposing that much to the ether. I really love shoes, but that doesn’t compel me to let other people know. Can someone please explain to mean this desire to express my purchases?

To be fair, I do expose my music stations that I listen to on Pandora, but I think that is different somehow. What I listen to is more of an expression of who I am than my winter boots. In fact, the whole idea of letting people know about what kind of boots I bought is boring me so much I will stop now.