By Will McInnes

MeasurementCamp 'activist' list so far

These are the people that have declared themselves up for the first meeting to start working on open source standards for measuring social media:

• Craig Hepburn, STA Travel
• Will McInnes, Nixon McInnes
• Giles Palmer, Brandwatch (from Magpie)
• Michelle Goodall, E-consultancy
• Daljit Bhurji, PR & Social Media Consultant
• Jonathan Hopkins, Bite/Shed/middledigit.net
• Tom Hume, Future Platforms
• Tim Hoang, Rainier PR / New Media Knowledge
• Jenny Brown (jenny-bee.net)
• Jez Nicholson, NCsoft
• Helen Lawrence, Dare Digital
• Ged Carroll, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
• Kelvin Newman SiteVisibility
• Alex Stacey FATdrop
• Dan Thornton, Bauer Consumer Media
• Mark Rogers, Market Sentinel
• Chris Reed, Fishburn Hedges
• Nathan Gilliatt, Social Target
• Rob Dobson

Frankly I'm in awe at the breadth and quality of people keen to get stuck in.

We have clients, agencies, specialist buzz monitoring firms, mobile, music, PR, SEO, and internal communications represented.

A date and venue will now quickly follow - Sam Michel from Chinwag has something in mind.

It will never be too late to join in - head to the wiki and edit the page there: http://measurementcamp.wikidot.com/

Where to find my del.icio.us feed!

My delicious links will no longer be published to this blog; change = good.

Instead, if you'd like to stay up to date with my bookmarks you can subscribe here: http://del.icio.us/willmcinnes

Quick video write up

This year, with the perfect storm (buzzword-tastic, that is) that is:

near-ubiquitous video camera availability in new mobile phones,
the maturation of online video providers,
the high availability of broadband,
and subsequent rise in website visitors expectations,

...I'm personally committed to using as much video as I can.

I wanted to try some of the mainstream video hosts that are out there - here's my very brief take on things so far in case it's helpful to you too:

YouTube - slow, ugly, bad video quality, large community, which is only valuable depending on your aims. Deeply flawed for my purpose, I now think, which is hosting videos to embed in web pages, specifically on blogs. But clearly if you have a 'fish where the fishes are' strategy, and want your content to play on the biggest stage, then YouTube is probably essential.

Viddler - most advanced feature set, with the ability for viewers to comment in the video's timeline which works fantastically on the Gary Vaynerchuk vlog, and the neat little incoming links feature which picks up inbound links to the video, and miles smoother and tastier than YouTube. Just basically feels like pro vs amateur, compared with good ol' YT.

Vimeo - smoothest, nicest interface, incredibly fast upload (which may have been due to lack of other people using our office bandwidth after office hours), I like the look of the community features, but can't personally vouch for them yet.

If you know of any other good contenders or have an opinion on any of the above please let me know - I'd like to keep trying out new services or find deeper smarter bits that can help me on the above 3 services.

What's your Twitter Popularity Index? (TPI)

So in blogging we have the conversational index (CI) thanks to Stowe Boyd, which is the ratio of comments per post, indicating the level of interactivity and dialogue on a blog.

What got me thinking about the Twitter Popularity Index (TPI), my newly conceived and totally useless Twitter equivalent, was looking at tech journalist rockstars like Jemima Kiss and Bobbie Johnson (come on the Brighton massive!) and geek lords like Dave Winer, and noting the glaring difference between how many people they follow (e.g. Bobbie Johnson - 34) and how many followers they have (Bobbie - 243).

Bobbie Johnson - 243 / 34  = 7.1
Jemima Kiss - 172 / 57 = 3
Dave Winer - 3,276 / 284 = 11

Of course, you've got the odd wildcard in there, like super-influencer Scoble who democratizes things by following you if you follow him (bless).

Scobleizer - 6938 / 7575 = 1.09

And also of course, you can manipulate, to a degree, your TPI by following as few people as possible. So it's deeply flawed, this TPI thing, as well as being totally useless.

A further flaw (more?!) is that good ol' Flemming Madsen would say 'it's not how many people that follow you - it's WHO follows you and how influential THEY are'. And he's right dammit.

But it's still interesting to me, this Twitter Popularity Index (TPI).

Excellent. Better go to bed now.

7 observed Twitter archetypes

These are the archetypes I've noticed using Twitter.

1. Mickey ME-ME-ME!
2. Tina Trivia
3. Freddy Fragmentation
4. Polly Phoney
5. Cedric Spam-again
6. Lucy Local
7. Ozzie Occasional

Mickey ME-ME-ME!

Constantly posts, and has racked up over 12,000 updates in less than 10 days. Old wounds from playground days cause constant need to be talking about and promoting self - more than 80% of tweets are about self successes. Remaining 20% of tweets are self-promotion-by-proxy, bigging up cronies and analgazing towards the few people loftier than selves.

Tina Trivia

Sweet, endearing, and decent person basically having a fiddle with Twitter.
Tweets once a day with something like: 'got foot scrub caught in drawer - took me ages to get it out again. Probably have a beer now'.

Freddy Fragmentation

Is a publisher or micropublisher (blogger, other website / service) boshing out stream of syndicated content from main platform to Twitter because it's another available outlet in this ever-fragmenting media consumption world.

Polly Phoney

Got into it to say they had for professional reasons. Genuinely they feel they understand it and know which box Twitter fits in, but actually don't at all.

Cedric Spam-again

Cunning new age spamming twat that is followed by 9 people and is following 34,873 people, because they've realised that people get a high when they get a mail saying 'Spam Captain is now following you'. Working the numbers. Should have their intimate bits nailed to a fridge door.

Lucy Local

Has a ring of local mates moderately or heavily using Twitter. Is using it overwhelmingly as a social network and actually finds it very useful for keeping in touch and ambient intimacy with people they already care about and/or know.

Olivia Occasional

Potters about with it. Posts infrequently - once one week; 3 times in a day on another day.

Me? I'd hope I was mainly Lucy (oo-er - OK, maybe Louis) Local, but I have been known to send the odd nauseating Mickey Me-Me-Me! tweet too.

You'd have to be a regular twitter user to recognise these, but if you are I wonder which you are :)

Thinking about presence

Presence.
The web world is a-buzz with it.
Or perhaps ambiently intimate about it (I'll come back to that).

Heard of Jaiku?
Heard of Twitter?

Oh, you're 'normal'.
Well then for you its the status updates in Facebook or the various statuses (statusii?!!) in MSN Messenger or Skype...'Dave is Away', 'Dave is busy', 'Dave is halfway down the drainpipe with his trousers round his ankles'. That kinda thing.

And by the way, don't hide behind that 'normal' tag.
I know you're not.
You're not.

And 'normal', if that is a by word for 'slow to adopt', isn't necessarily good.
On the recent BBC futurist documentary some American expert said 'staying out of the game with the next phase of technology could have very serious affects' or words to that affect. It's bollocks, of course, but I agree because it's harmonious with my views. You've gotta be in it to win it. Luddites die. Fuck yeah.

Anyway.
Presence.
It's baffling really, but as we share more and more of ourselves online systems and applications are developing to facilitate this ever-updating-navel-gazing-trivia.

Some of these have presence at their core (e.g. Twitter, which is purely and simply the status bit of Facebook all on its lonesome. Crack for the digerati), whilst others - like Facebook - have presence as a nice little add-on.

Within the wider sphere of presence other phenomena arise.
Lifestreaming is interesting - tools that create a personal super-portal, a 'me me me' super-highway-roundabout, presence on steroids - 'here's what i'm thinking (blog feed), doing (microblogging/pure presence e.g. twitter), seeing (photo feed), reading (bookmarks feed), listening to (last.fm feed). (Another useful and related concept is 'attention streams' - people's bookmarks being a particularly excellent way of tapping into 'what their attention is going into'.)

And ambient intimacy, a gorgeously apt term coined by Leisa Reichelt for the net effect of all of this. When you've followed someone on twitter for a while, someone you don't know well or at all, a month or so in and you develop this ambient intimacy, this understanding and access to the trivia of their lives which independently is the classic 'wot i had for breakfast' but combined makes for a rich and nuanced tapestry. And normal people report the same thing from checking out people's statuses in Facebook regularly - an asynchronous and very manageable, arms-length way of staying in touch and up to speed with all the people that fitted into the 'I liked you but not enough to fit into my life regularly' box. Which is nice.

Finishing up on this fairly shallow and pointless overview of presence, where do or can we go from here?

Business applications - harnessing this presencey goodness for 'the enterprise'. At NM, most of the team are using Twitter now for minuteae and daily updates. I'm also seeing family use of this goodness too! I have two wife/hubby combos in my network, and I can see them using it in useful ways - sounds weird but isn't and will be normal in 18 months time. But perhaps specific apps will evolve?

Portability of presence - so Facebook has a Twitter app, so that I can feed my Twitter updates into my Facebook status, cool tool. The broader it can go, the better - could that make my LinkedIn more useful to people? Could it blend in the iTunes tune I'm listening to, too?

Location-based presence - this would be wicked; using bluetooth or wifi or some proximity thing, it'll be wickedly cool when you can expose your status to others nearby according to a combination of privacy and location variables. E./g. you're on a train, you're from Brighton, heading back from Leeds - you decide to make it public to people that have a trusted link with Brighton (in Facebook terms, they belong to that network - but I'm looking for a more trusted mechanism than that), and you decide to offer this up to a given range (dunno if that's possible). Anyway, it's an idea. I better coin it.... ummmm.... Geopresence. There we go.

Presence pattern recognitions - that'd be interesting. Like memetrackers but for presence clusters. Presencetrackers. Another term coined, destined for instant forgetability. So you could see a swarm of presence centering around an issue, a location, a meme, a thing.

Right. That's it.

Twitter swearing genius

I love Twitter. FACT.

When swearalotdotcom popped up in my followers, my twitter experience just got even better.

If you like silly swearing (not always PC, since it's 'user-generated'...) then follow swearalotdotcom and/or check the website here.

Tee fucking hee.

Alternative worlds, Atomisation, Agility, Access Anywhere

Towards the end of training days people often say 'what does the online future look like?' or words to that affect.

Being a professional online 'translator' and communicator rather than a binary-eyed futurist, I don't have any genius insights beyond those of any online dude worth their digital dollar day rate.

But I do agree with William Gibson's fantastic accurate and catchy proclamation: 'The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet'.

Looking at bumps of tomorrow that are here now, but not yet distributed into the lives of normal people, I think that the more evenly distributed future has more of these four As and a T in it:

• Alternative worlds
• Agility
• Atomisation
• Access Anywhere
• Transparency

In detail -

Alternative worlds

Virtual worlds are part of every single persons online future. Absolutely. Second Life or not, our online experiences become more nuanced, more textured, more multi-dimensional, more mixed media, and more immersive every month, every year. Second Life is a window into the future. Snow Crash is a window into the future. When we fire up our online experience, will we open a browser or a virtual world? Will we even fire up anything or will it be running constantly, pervasively?

I had a wonderful experience shared at my most recent training day, for marketers at Cisco - tech savvy people. A lady there had attended a conference in Second Life. She said that after about 15 minutes she'd forgotten she was in a virtual world - she was absorbed by the content, was asking questions, was involved, IMMERSED. She'd forgotten the medium, just like you do when you watch a great film in a dark cinema, or here an amazing piece of music through headphones.

Yes alternative worlds are currently inhabited by a funny old mix of men pretending to be women, people seeking 'sex', uber-geeks, and out-of-touch-fantastists. But so was IRC, so were forums, so were so many of the meaninful, interesting online innovations previously. This is part of the future.

Online social networks will continue to become more and more nuanced and the lines between them and alternative or virtual worlds will blur.

And check out experiments like Justin.TV, and how technology and real-life are blurred for him - is that not the start of cyborg? Is pervasive personal technology, and even crusty crap like smart devices and bluetooth headsets, first steps to a blurred on/offline existence.

Alternative worlds...

Atomisation

Cue the usual start: in the future (now, but not evenly distributed yet) your online presence will NOT be a monolithic thing, a giant gleaming tower in the desert, a 'destination' - it will be a tapestry, a mosaic, made up of many parts, each different and unique yet bound by a cohesive whole (or maybe not).

The here and now of all of this, the first and most obvious iteration is widgets. These are the past as much as the future - Ivan will tell you that YouTube is a widget, AdSense is a widget...etc..

But big brands are getting the whole widget opportunity (a few of them are working with us ;-) and starting to appreciate a future where our online personality - as individuals - and our online presence as organisations, which is distributed far and wide, across the network, across the plumbing of RSS and Twitter-like services.

See how lifestreaming seeks to make the mosaic from the individual online parts, reforming an already atomised online presence. The future will be atomised...

FuckedCompany.com, Satisfaction, Google and grassroots-campaigning-on-steroids via online social networks mean that you can't hide the bad news, you can't control the message and you cannot stifle the people.

Every website, from Wall-mart to your ruddy-faced posh talking local solicitor will have Amazon-style ratings and reviews functionality on their web presences. You can and will rate everyone in a public forum.

This encourages marketers to go back to their marketing textbooks, remember that a big part of their job was to find out what people actually want and get it built, and so life for everyone gets better - products get better, competitors get stronger, markets get more efficient, marketers become happier because they're making a difference rather than making a lot of noise.

Radical transparency will become the norm: intranets will become wikis for public consumption and sharing; crowdsourcing will replace traditional expensive and slow R&D / market research. Maybe :)

Can you recommend me an OpenID provider?

OpenID is on my list of things to learn about (along with microformats and pushing my knowledge of the widgetsphere further too).

I've looked on this list of OpenID providers but really a recommendation would mean so much more. If this is a dumb question somehow my need for help is obviously even greater than I realise, so general signposting is welcome too.

Thanks, if you can help, much appreciated.

My notes / key points from What's New in Online Marketing, e-consultancy, 2007

These are my key points from the first 3 speakers at the Whats New in Online Marketing show, by e-consultancy in London, June 2007.

Please note - These aren't intended to be comprehensive or even comprehensible as they are mainly for my own ref, and for sharing with my team.

Flemming Madsen, Onalytica

Great talk full of proof, real-world research and examples. A good way to start the day and a great counter to any of those that say cutting-edge marketing is fluff.
These guys know their buzz monitoring onions.

• Crucial difference between popularity and influence online e.g. on the blogosphere. Influence behind online memes is often started by relatively un-popular websites of say government bodies, but then distributed afar by more popular websites.
• Key is to engage with the influencers, not necessarily the most obviously popular - popularity is democratic, each 'vote' is weighted equally whereas influence balances and weights the relative importance of each vote
• Example: for terms 'juvenile obesity' only the NHS has more citations than Jamie Oliver, yet Jamie Oliver is the 21st most influential voice on the topic after organisations like the BMA, National Obesity Forum, Sport England etc.
• Key tip: engage with those who are relatively influential but relatively unpopular as less people are clamouring for their attention, yet the influence and power they have is relatively high - more bang for your filthy marketing buck

Antony Mayfield, Spannerworks

Best talk of the day in terms of interestingness for the clients in the audience, for delivery and charisma. Not as educational for me, because we have very similar interests, but well delivered and received. Had fun with the 'laser' to point at slides.

• 70% of online content will be created by individuals by 2010 - IDC
• 5 fundamentals of the new online world: speed; scale (of available content); geography; interaction with content and authors; complexity
• New skill required is combination of "cartography & anthropology" - alberto bassi
• To clients: 'do you know what your neighbourhood looks like?'
• Don't forget forums as social media - not glamorous, but proven
• "google is a reputation management system" - clive thompson
• ASOS.com website is more compelling than TopShop and therefore kicks ass as measured by various social media yardsticks (e.g. links in delicious)
• LEGO community and Catster & Dogster as good examples

Brett Hurt, CEO, BazaarVoice

• 36% of adult americans consult wikipedia
• average rating across all bazaarvoice client websites is 4.3 stars out of 5!
• This holds true across different industry categories
• Ratings and reviews have significant positive impact on conversion but also returns (due to better setting prospective client's expectations of the item)
• Golfsmith, client, is now using user reviews in magazine advertising as credible personalities
• President's Choice, client, is using user reviews on in-store signs (supermarket)
• BazaarVoice uses 'stay at home moms' to moderate all reviews
• 6% of reviews are rejected for breaking policies, sometimes innocently
• Proven techniques to increase volume of ratings and reviews: splash page on website to consolidate ratings and reviews; home page real estate coverage; competitions for best review etc; email marketing driving reviews; featured products highlighting highly rated products to reinforce this feature
• Also, recommend an email to all recent customers signed from CEO, asking for their rating
• PetCo ran a competition on reviews - prize = 1 X $100 voucher (but massively worked)
• Average review length is 80 words
• They recommend picking the best (usually longest) reviews and marking them as 'featured' or 'spotlight' reviews and putting at top of list