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This morning, I attended Boston’s Social Media Breakfast 10 where Brian from Hubspot, Matt from Visible Measures and Andy from HBS each presented their point of view on ways to measure the ROI of social media.

Aside from the framing of the issue that unnecessarily restricted the definition of social media (how is blogging not social media?!?), the talks were quite interesting.

The highlight of the session (that may well have corresponded with caffeine finally kicking in) was a quote by Bob Kaplan relayed by Andy McAfee who was answering a question about measuring the ROI of technology and the answer of the Accounting Hall-of-famer (yes there is such a thing) was simply: “you can’t do it.”

His point of view is quite straight-forward really: one can’t apply reliable ROI calculations to very complex and ill-defined environments. This of course applies to Social Media as well and is a lesson for us all: don’t overreach.

Does it mean that we should give up on measurements, and that Visible Measures, or Traackr for that matter, shouldn’t be in business? Quite the opposite.

Andy made it clear in his talk that the cost side of ROI ought to always be tracked diligently.

I would add that the opportunity side (aka revenue), though largely qualitative at the beginning needs to be followed with equal, if not greater, attention. There are two reasons for this: first, by tracking performance over time, you will get reliable trending information very quickly, second, by observing a variety of performance metrics you will end up being able to close the loop and calculate an ROI.

As an example, Traackr has started following the impact that Amazon reviewers have on the sales rank of the products they write reviews on. We can discern clear performance patterns and build reliable ROI calculations around this because we operate in a controlled environment (here Amazon) and have a set of historical data to work from - and btw these Amazon reviews also belong in social media.

The issue that Andy McAfee and Bob Kaplan are highlighting is that this data is not available beforehand thus can’t drive an investment decision and that it will ultimately take the leap of faith of a business leader to make it.

If you’re the one doing the convincing, remind your boss that they most likely have their job today because someone made such a decision before. The fact that your company is in existence is all the proof you need.

Dentyne launched a new ad campaign I saw this morning in the subway for the first time around the idea of spending quality time with real people rather than on chat rooms and in front of your PC: make face time.

I really like the creative work and concept of the campaign. You should check it out.

Now, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it says about the brand… People don’t chew gum in front of their computer so they should go out? Chewing is a social activity to be shared among friends? I don’t get it.

My guess is that someone at the ad agency came up with this cool concept for a brand like Quiksilver or REI and the brand passed on it, so they repurposed and repackaged it.

So as much as I like the execution, it’s really missing the point that whether with old or new media, advertising is supposed to communicate something meaningful about the brand. From that very basic measure of success, it fails. Too bad.

We have been featured in a Forbes.com article:

How To Get Paid For Being Cool

Technocrati is releasing its 2008 State of the Blogosphere. Some interesting tidbits of information are worth calling out.

Yesterday’s piece on the How of Blogging gives some interesting insights on what the top bloggers (as defined by Technocrati) do different from others.

In a nutshell, and it should come as no surprise, top bloggers: 1-Publish more often, 2-Use tagging of their posts more intensively, and 3-Leverage any and all tools and tricks to promote their blog.

As a side note, we found entertaining the fact that Technocrati highlights the most widely used promotional tool for bloggers to be “List your blog on Technocrati”. Hum… wasn’t the sample they interviewed all bloggers listed on Technocrati? Isn’t that called a self-fulfilling prophecy? Anyways, the article still remains interesting and abstractly valid when it comes to studying and emulating the top 500 blogs on Technocrati.

We take issue though with the fact that except for a handful of bloggers who can realistically aspire to make it to this very select list of most referenced blogs, the methodology applied by Technocrati, thus any advice stemming from it, is utterly useless. What matters for most of us is not what we need to do to become a Techcrunch or RWW but rather how to stand out in our own community.

For exemple, “Tag your posts” is a good piece of advice but it’s not nearly sufficient for me to do anything with it… What I really want to know is what tags have the highest success rate for the topics I blog about.

Contrary to Technocrati’s top-down approach to measuring performance, Traackr has taken a bottom-up one and providing Traackr users with first and foremost a sense of self (what am I doing right, what can I improve) and then a sense of the community around them (who else is in my community and what do they do different).

Hopefully, these 2 opposite approaches to measuring success will meet somewhere. Stay tuned!

The Traackr team has decided to run for this year’s Forrester Groundswell Awards. You can find our submission here.  The Groundswell’s philosophy and principles are very much in line with the conceptual framework behind Traackr and we feel it is a great forum to initiate discussions, get feedback on what we have done so far.

We encourage you to go to the Traackr submission on the Groundswell’s site and share your opinion on Traackr!

We have experienced a little snafu with our weekly email that showed a score of 0 for all Traackr users… For those interested, we migrated servers last week and it messed up the queries we run for these weekly emails that compares the scores of week n to week n-1.

Apologies to all for this. No need to hyperventilate though: your score is kept safe and sound in our database (and its backup) ; you can go see for yourself by logging in Traackr.

Last night, I had the chance to briefly meet Tim O’Reilly at Ignite 4 Boston (thanks Sara!). Better yet: I had the opportunity to talk to him about Traackr!

So I went on to explain that Traackr is about finding and qualifying social influencers in online communities, helping them become aware of their role and influence, and, when relevant, connecting them with marketers (I guess it you’re reading this post I probably didn’t need to tell you all this, right?). Tim’s reaction was to say “you had me until you mentioned marketers”. I tried to qualify what I meant but my window of attention was closing, darn!

I have grown increasingly frustrated since last night about this interaction. Not at all at Tim O’Reilly but at the fact that “marketing” or “marketer” has become a quasi curse word in social media lingo, and in many ways, rightly so due to decades of mass media.

So now is the time to reclaim the term ‘marketing’ for what it is intended to be (and in some ways is): an open channel between a brand and its customers.

For too long brands have had the “luxury” of mass communication, primarily consisting in pouring TV dollars in marketing campaigns. Exxon Mobile has an image issue? Let’s do a large TV campaign on how they works hard at solving all the world’s greatest problems.

The theory behind this approach is that perception trumps reality and you can muscle your way to controlling perception (much cheaper than actually changing reality). There is nothing new here and Exxon has perfected this craft over and over again.

So if *this* is marketing, no wonder that the perception by most is that marketers are there to get you, crafting messages to shape perceptions, deliberately manipulate cognitions and direct behaviors.

Here is the glitch: the definition I just gave is the one for propaganda, not marketing; propaganda never made the list of the famous 4 Ps defining marketing.

No question that some (many) marketers still behave like propagandists. So let’s just call them for what they are instead of polluting marketing.

The good news is that they are an endangered species as the propaganda machine only functions when the leaks are limited, meaning when the audience targeted has limited access to other sources of information and opinions. With mass media is taking a plunge, the one-sided perception of brands is weakening; meanwhile new social media are offering the general public amazing opportunities to voice their opinion, seek the one of peers, unmistakably leading to the end of the era of propaganda. I don’t mean that there won’t be (or isn’t for that matter) propaganda in new media but rather that the openness of the system makes it impossible to succeed.

I understand Tim’s concern when we talk at Traackr about connecting social influencers (i.e. the most influential voices in communities) to marketers, envisioning these community leaders becoming themselves propaganda agents. This is not this type of relationship we’re anticipating.

Traackr’s perspective is that there is a fundamental and symbiotic relationship between social influencers and marketers that is in the making and will accelerate the downfall of propagandists.

What form could this collaboration take? We don’t believe that it is or will be one-size-fits-all. Depending on the role played by a social influencer, their community, and the brand a marketer represents, the collaboration could take very different forms (from simple information sharing to product endorsement).

A good example of how this is already happening may be the way the Obama campaign collaborated with social media moguls to call out the misrepresentation of the facts by the McCain campaign of Obama’s comment on “putting lipstick on a pig”, falsly presented as describing Sarah Palin. All the Obama team had to do to stop the propaganda machine was to make available the full clip of his speech and let social influencers communicate on their own terms.

A more symbiotic collaboration as described above between influencers and marketers has the potential to lead brands into the social media revolution by forcing them to pay more attention to their audiences and not only on how to sell to them but more importantly how to be relevant. Social influencers in turn can provide better insights for the community they represent and further their role by impacting decisions on products and services by brands.

Now I need to find a way to summarize all this in a couple of sentences for the next time I meet Tim

Earlier this week, Tubemogul released a new piece of functionality called Marketplace, in their own words, a dating site for video producers and advertisers.  We love the simplicity of their interface showing a list of ranked producers and a simple search box to filter them.

The accuracy of the information provided is quite limited at this stage but it’s a good starting point they can expand from.

Our one concern about this effort is the fact that it gives the false sense that “View Count” is the sole measure of the performance of these producers. The reality is much more complex and the data required to truly measure video producers’ (or any other web content producers’ for that matter) performance much more diverse, View Count being one of the many pieces of data needed.

The reason why we want to drive this point home is because it is important for marketers to start thinking differently about performance metrics and the focus of View Count reinforces the (mis)perception that new media can be treated the same as old media, by looking at viewership for shows.

New media, and social media especially, are quite different in that respect and limiting performance measurment to this concept of viewership really missing the boat of what social media is about: participatory audiences.

At Traackr, we have embraced the richness of the data and its complexity from the start of our venture (and have grown a few white hair because of it since then). For that reason, we are measuring content producers’ performance along 3 separate axes: popularity (how many people view my stuff), buzz (how many people talk about my stuff), and reach (how far does something I say can travel). Each of these axes is composed of a wide spectrum of data sets that get normalized and aggregated across sites we track.

We’re working on making all of our geeky stuff more sexy to our audience. So stay tuned!

We’re usually not into bragging. Let this be the exception: didn’t Traackr tell you back in January that Barack Obama was on his way to win the democratic primary boosted by his social media strategy? Here, let’s refresh your memory.

Back then, Obama’s popularity and buzz scores on Traackr were already off the chart while the poll numbers still showed Clinton very much ahead.

We later provided a more thorough analysis of Obama, Clinton, and McCain’s social media strategies (or lack thereof) to explain more qualitatively what Obama did differently that made him more successful with social media.

We won’t go as far as saying that we have a crystal ball in Traackr’s score, but interpreted the right way, our scoring system can be a good predictor of future trends.

Stay tuned as we’ll start looking into the McCain-Obama contest next!

I usually enjoy reading most of Techcrunch’s posts from Michael Arrington on Twitter as I find them incisive and informative. Today’s rant against Twitter former Chief Architect just rubbed me the wrong way.

Is it or is it not Blaine Cook’s fault that Twitter seems to be in technical hell? Did Twitter’s early outages correspond to Blaine Cook’s vacations?

As far as I’m concerned, the answer to both questions is “who cares?!??”

Cook is not at Twitter anymore and blaming the guy who was there before has never solved any problem…

Twitter has not been playing the finger pointing game, nor should they. Their full attention is required to fix their performance problem and taking ownership is the best way to go about it. No excuses, just results.

Update: Twitter responds to Techcrunch’s post but is not taking the bait and stays on the high road. Excerpt: “The folks at TechCrunch singled out a former employee of Twitter by name in their questions but Twitter is a team—we share responsibility for our victories as well as our mistakes. (…)”. I’m starting to like the folks at Twitter