It’s also the first get together after eMetrics New York, which was a major, and had big time Canadian attendance. These tend to be among the more interesting evenings. It has also been some three months since the last WAWTO event, so there should be quite a few fresh stories.

Among other reasons:

• 43% said “My wall was becoming way too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to get rid of some of them”.

• 38% said “The content became repetitive or boring over time”.

• 19% said “The content wasn’t relevant to me from the start”,

• 17% “The company’s posts were too chit-chatty – not focused on real value”.

All of these reasons cited go directly to the concept of relevancy.

When does content become too much? When it ceases to be relevant.

When do you want to make some content go away? When it ceases to be relevant.

When does content become boring? When it ceases to be relevant.

This competition for relevance is one half of the defining challenge for social media marketers. To a certain extent, paying for the privileged of pushing an unwanted message into the yawning maw of consumers provided a specific degree of insurance. Relevancy was always theoretically important to marketing effectiveness. It’s just that it wasn’t a big enough factor to truly matter. Or rather, it didn’t matter to enough people.

It’s not a new problem. Rather, it’s an intensification of a latent one.

There are two civilian air travel economies – the public and the private. Private air travel, on private jets from quasi-public air fields, is a completely different experience. For one, there is no invasive security. Delays are fewer. Service is better.

The drawback is the cost. Very few people can afford a private flight.

Enter the what if.

What if the coordination problems among a large group of people could be reconciled? What then? Why, you’d be able to take a private jet with a number of like minded people, at a coordinated time, without delays and harassment – and probably do it for less than you would flying commercial.

Enter the solution.

Social networking technology to coordinate the movements.

The original social network in this field used to be the corporation. A group of executives would coordinate their travel and flights together. For very major corporations, they all catch the jet from LA to New York together.

For everybody else, the distributed network, you have to use social. Can a social network be more effective than a corporation in coordinating such efficiencies?

Watch social flights to find out. It’s a novel solution to the problem of commercial air travel.

The goal of target setting is to make a statement about a desired future state – with or without a forecast.

Targets are political artifacts. You can read all about such dynamics in public policy here.

Forecasts, ideally, are scientific artifacts.

The interplay between forecasts and targets is particularly interesting. Those who produce sophisticated forecasts should understand that the motivation of those probing models is to assess whether or not a future state is possible, or, in certain situations, just how probable a given scenario could be.

Don’t become trapped into the mindset that a trend is locked in permanently. Actively explore what needs to be true, in which circumstances, to produce a better outcome. Most importantly, and I’m learning this the very hard way, make every attempt to make affirmative recommendations.

I told the story about how different versions of ROI is rooted well before anybody in the room had been born. And it’s such a contentious issue because it goes directly to one’s being. ROI is the reflection of your own worth to an organization, and naturally, as such, it’s going to be contended.

The approach taken in the Syncapse Value of a Fan study was selected for a very specific reason – emphasizing a longer view of time and an emphasis on the monetary value of relationships. The approach taken with Earned Media Value is selected for being very direct, rapid, and comparable with other mediums. They both correspond to a personal concept of time and the value of relationships. Recurring LTV versus instant Impressions.

The biggest cleavage that emerged in the subsequent hour was around a different fundamental belief. For a marketing scientist, CEO, CFO, CMO – the dependent variable is always money. There are many independent variables, of which, one of them is relationships. Relationships can be an important source of sustainable competitive advantage. However, relationships are an independent variable, not the dependent one. In business, the reason why you build relationships with customers, suppliers, governments and employees is to realize sustained money. It’s not simply or purely out of altruism.

Other organizations seek good relationships to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Typically though, it boils down to money, even for a non-profit or a not-for-profit.

I didn’t anticipate this difference in belief, and I’m happy to have discovered it.

I thank Joseph Thornley for the opportunity to come out and speak to a new audience, and look forward to carrying on the discussion.

I knew most of my followers by name, and met with most of them monthly. It was just a coincidence that 95% of them were in analytics. Even though I was living between Toronto, Calgary, Chicago, Vancouver and New York, Twitter was a localized, central hub.

I was in 5 places at once.

Twitter was a place where conversations happened out loud, in public, and other people who were interested in what we were interested in could come along. It was an always-on Web Analytics Wednesday. There’s somewhat of a Lwaxana Troi quality to it. And that’s what made it so grand.

This was the period of Twitter as a true conversation medium.

Twitter itself hasn’t changed of course.

I have. And I’ve noticed it has changed for many of my friends, too.

It’s increasingly an RSS newsfeed, each neatly organized into their own columns. So, usage changes.

I’ve long since stopped following the people who RT mashable and TC. (Seriously. Stop it.)

In return, I’ve long since stopped live tweeting major TV events. I don’t tweet from conferences as intensely. Sharp exchanges of image macros has settled out. There’s considerably less fun. Naturally, these are all changes in my own behavior – the difference between daytime Berry and nighttime Berry. And twitter is now the channel of choice for daytime Berry.

I’m still generating just as much content as I always have. If not more. I just don’t generate it on Twitter. I generate the funnest material anonymously. And at the root of that – of course – is becoming captive to those who follow you.

The pattern is only interesting because I went through the same thing with Facebook prior to May, 2008.

It’s relatively easy for me think of such technologies. Bronze, printing press, and internet are the three that come to mind most easily.

The incremental evidence of benefits is what caused them to be adopted. That adoption, for those benefits, resulted in changes in their behaviour. We generally like to believe for the long-term good, though, for every social action there is a reaction. The environment didn’t benefit from bronze wielding humans too much. Certain factions certainly didn’t benefit from the press. And, ask the RIAA what they think of the internet.

Social internet technologies have enabled the mass expression of an already existing trait in people – the tendency for self-expression. The transference of word of mouth (WOM) from the analog world into the digital world is one of those changing customer behaviours.

As I wrote a few weeks ago on Topic Bearing WOM, a relatively small number of people are generating a large amount of content. The challenge has been to understand a relevant section of it. A very recent technology, twitter, empowers anybody to tell the world a few snippets of what they’re thinking. The result is a massive corpus of information that isn’t processable by a single human being in any meaningful amount of time.

The belief is that by enabling people to understand a large quantity of feedback, they’ll actually be enabled to respond meaningfully to the largest number of people with their limited resources. This would constitute a change in their own behaviour.

Bringing it back – Twitter is a technology which has resulted in a change in customer behaviour. It is not profitable as of yet. It could be in the future. (Lagging revenue S-curve is lagging).

It would be great for the current nest of innovators to think about which behaiours they want to change using technology upfront, and then tailor their technologies and monetization models to that end. Profit isn’t guaranteed, but at least it solves some of the ???? problem.

The invite:

“Developers make it possible to measure anything, statisticians and dataminers work models, IAs finesse interfaces, analysts mash and managers action. Effective Analytics takes an orchestra. Lets talk to each other and see whats possible.”

Historically, WAW’s attract a strong contingent of web analysts, social analysts (many from Syncapse), IA’s, a few dev’s, recruiters, vendors, and yes, two dataminers. And it’s a great mix. Let’s keep that mix and expand it. Additional invites to business strategists, eScientists, Marketing Scientists, and specialized developers.

Ideas might be a dime a dozen. When I spend several hours thinking about each though, they become worth more.

I can’t and won’t talk about the first. (Nod.)

The second revolves around frustration with the difference between ‘design strategy’ and ‘business strategy’. Specifically – there being too much rigor in the one, and too little in the other. There are issues with the heuristic-based way of thinking, and with the algorithmic. I’ve finally just understood enough about the problem to be able to articulate it, and now going through that rage-phase where the more I research and the more I learn, the more I become upset about the current state of affairs. It’s not right dammit. It’s not right.

The third revolves around the decision to write a pamphlet-booklet of some sort. Somebody might say “I knew Keynes, I worked with Keynes, and you sir, are no Keynes” about that decision. I can’t bring myself to write a full on book at this time in life. So, a pamphlet, in that old Keynes style, might be the way to go. You know, sit down with the paper copy in New York and have it read by the time you’re in Vancouver sort of read. Fly-over country reading.

It’s probably around that third point that is the most agonizing. No disrespect to others who have written books – I just don’t think that I could do a very good job at writing something that long. I may be long-winded in the mouth, but frankly, I only say 16,000 per day on average (Mehl et al, Science, 317, p. 82). I couldn’t image talking for 4 consecutive days by way of a book.

That’s where I’m at.

A few major announcements in the wings and a massive weight of work – but generally feeling good.

The results of that study were presented at Internet Week on Friday morning and can be downloaded here.

I have hopes.

I hope it throws some wind into the sails of people who are doing good social media marketing strategy. Absolution is frequently sought in simple numbers. The importance of activation strategy should be very clear in the charts and text of the paper.

The second is for the lack of misquotes. It would be really nice if it wasn’t misquoted.

The third is that I hope you’ll find it useful.

In sum, take a look, and feed on back.