Analytics Is King

As some of you may know, Arik Hanson and I have been responsible for the Social Media Business Summit Track at BlogWorld Expo for the last two years. Trust me when I tell you that it is an interesting experience. From combing through speaker proposals, to developing buckets of content we think people are interested in, to tracking down people willing to speak on those topics it is definitely an eye-opening experience. In the end, however, it is a blast watching all of the sessions come together. I know Arik shares my gratitutde to Rick Calvert for allowing us so much freedom in developing the track. Not to mention just asking us to be a part of such a great conference. Anyway, enough with the love festival.

Because the conference starts in exactly two weeks (GASP!), I wanted to take a second and highlight three sessions that might be flying underneath your radar. This, for the record, is no indictment of the speakers in these sessions. All of them are top-notch professionals with a valuable opinion worth sharing with the broader community. What I mean by under the radar is that they are people you may not have heard of before, but are doing some very interesting work.

So without any further delay, here are three sessions that are under the radar but deserve your consideration to sit through when we kick things off in a couple of weeks:

1. Why Facebook News Feed Optimization (NFO) Matters to Marketers - This session is scheduled for 3:45 EST on Wednesday, May 25th. When Bryan Person (who I'm assuming many of you know from Social Media Breakfast fame) came to us with this topic idea we were pumped. With the volume of posts that we all see in our news feed on a daily basis, making sure our brands' posts stick out in a crowd is critical.
2. Making Sense of Social Business - This session is scheduled for 3:45 EST on Thursday, May 26th. Now, before you come after me and say there is nothing under the radar about Peter Kim, Virginia Miracle, Chris Heuer and Ben Edwards you should realize the sheer volume of misconception about the topic of social business. We're talking about concepts WAY above and beyond managing a channel presence for a brand, though that's certainly one component. This session may be under your radar because you're skeptical of the term, "social business," but that would be selling short the work that these panelists have done. Trust me, you will walk out of this session actually knowing what social business really is about.  
3. So You Want to Hire a Community Manager - This session is scheduled for 11:30 AM on Tuesday, May 24th. Again, community management is a popular topic, but, like social business, is littered with misconceptions about what it actually entails. Jim Storer from the Community Roundtable, Lauren Vargas from Radian6 and Dan Brostek from Aetna are going to help you not only define it, but help you find someone that can fill this role within your organization.

Tomorrow, I'll give you three more posts that if I would consider to be must-dos if I were putting together a schedule for myself. In the meantime, the full schedule for BlogWorld NYC is currently available. Make sure you check out the interactive functionality. It'll help you with planning.

This week, I had the opportunity to take part in the first ever Radian6 User Conference. The conference brought together customers, industry practitioners and, of course, several members of the Radian6 team to participate in two days of new product announcements, sharing of best practices and general frivolity that comes from a social media conference. The conference ended on Friday and, truth be told, I suck for taking two days to get my recap onto paper (errrrrr blog post form). Honestly, it has taken me this long to really gather my thoughts on the event as a whole. So, let me try and provide a three-part recap in one blog post that doesn't take 4 hours to read. :) First, the product announcements:

• Radian6 Insights - The first major product announcement came on Thursday morning when Marcel Lebrun announced the new Radian6 Insights. I'd encourage you to check out this video outlining the product as it does a much better job than I could do. Here's what it means to us from my point-of-view... more sophisticated text analysis capability. That's the bottom line... Heavy users were beginning to move toward API access where they would take the raw data and plug it into a more sophisticated business intelligence tool. Will this stem that tide? Time will tell as the product gets rolled out more broadly. However, I think it's a step in the right direction.
• Engagement console - If you are more on the engagement side, you'll love the new features coming to the Radian6 Engagement Console in the coming weeks. The primary one is managed accounts. Think CoTweet meets the power of the Radian6 dashboard. The second is an extensions gallery. This is going to be a developers dream scenario. Not only will you be able to engage and analyze through the dashboard, but you'll be able to add extensions for twitpic, bit.ly, Klout (save your opinions on Klout for another post), etc..
• Klout integration - This is probably the most controversial thing announced during the week. As part of the new Radian6 Insights product, the user will be able to access Klout scores for folks talking about their brand. I've been a pretty vocal critic of Klout, but I do think this is a step in the right direction. If there's someone on the back end to scrub the scores, which there will be with integration into the R6 dashboard, the numbers become somewhat more believable.

Second, the content...

• Panel on influence - My participation in the event was a panel on influence in social media on Friday afternoon. The good news was it was a packed house in the conference room. I think this is a very important topic for people to understand, and clearly the conference goers agreed. Lots of positive tweets following the event, but I think we're a long way from understanding the topic. I'd encourage you to read more from Philip Sheldrake on this topic (including his upcoming book) if you want to understand influence even more. Bottom line, and I think this came through in our session, is that influence and reach are not the same thing. You should be pushing your brand to consider relevancy metrics just as much as reach metrics.
• Overall content - I don't know if this is a function of having low expectations for content at conferences or the tremendous thought given to the panels by the folks putting together the conference (combo of both, probably), but the content at the User Conference was very, very good. It was a mixture of content for the analyst and for the engagement professional (this line is continuing to blur, for the better). I hope they put on a second user conference because of the good experiences I had with the content.

Finally, overall perceptions of the conference/people behind it...

• Smaller is better with social media conferences - I don't remember the exact number (I think it was about 500) of people who attended this conference, but whatever the number was it was the right number. It was the perfect size to be able to network with people, and still learn a lot without being overwhelmed. I know this is a fine line to walk because conferences want to make money, but capping the list of attendees at a smaller, manageable number would be a move in the right direction.
• Lauren Vargas - She deserves her own shout out... She was one of the primary drivers of the conference and did a phenomenal job. Being a part of BlogWorld the last two years, I have a sense for the work behind something like this event. Not only was she managing the conversation flow around an acquisition and new product announcements, but she was responsible for handling a lot of the logistical elements behind the conference. Mad props to you, Lauren. You kicked ass.

At the end of day 1, the #social2011 hashtag generated more than 10,000 tweets. That's incredible. A testament to the organizers and the content. Here's hoping we have a second user conference next year.