During the Trav­el­ing Geeks trip to the UK I had the good for­tune of hav­ing a Flip Ultra HD recorder in my pocket when I bumped into Jim Sterne. Jim runs the Emet­rics Mar­ket­ing Opti­miza­tion Sum­mit and is also chair­man of the Web Ana­lyt­ics Asso­ci­a­tion.

Our inter­view took place on the third story of the his­toric Globe The­atre over­look­ing the Thames dur­ing the Econ­sul­tancy Round­table on our last day in Lon­don, and the 5-minute video came out fairly well, con­sid­er­ing the lack of fill light­ing, the lack of a tri­pod and some audio arti­facts from the Flip.

Sterne, head of Tar­get Mar­ket­ing of Santa Bar­bara, breaks down ana­lyt­ics into three main buckets:

1Web­site rat­ings: What’s hap­pen­ing on the Inter­net in gen­eral? Which web­sites are the most pop­u­lar? Pop­u­lar ser­vices include com­Score, Nielsen/Netratings, Hit­wise as well other tools like Quant­cast and Alexa.

2Adver­tis­ing: The ad indus­try needs to know how many ads are being served and whether they’re being clicked. Dou­bleclick is the giant of the field; the Atlas Net­work, 24/7 Real Media and Right Media are other players.

3Web ana­lyt­ics: At each web­site, what is the user’s behav­ior? Are they arriv­ing on the land­ing page? Do they bounce off (hit one page and go no fur­ther)? Can I tweak the per­sua­sion process to improve the con­ver­sion rate? What’s their demo­graphic and behav­ioral makeup? Cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and track­ing social media traf­fic also tie into this. Mea­sure­ment tools and firms include Google Ana­lyt­ics, Omni­ture, Web Trends and Core­Met­rics.

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Back in the ear­lier days of 3rd party Twit­ter apps (just a few months ago, actu­ally), a few very effec­tive web-based ser­vices got my atten­tion: Social­Too, Tweet­Later, and Hoot­Suite. Sad thing was, while they were all very pow­er­ful ser­vices, they were all poorly designed, very hacked together, and fugly.  Enter the ele­gant, sexy, feature-rich Hoot­Suite 2.0 (no mat­ter what you think about all the con­tro­versy and extor­tion — see below).

Everyone’s talk­ing about Hoot­Suite 2.0

Today, while I was mon­i­tor­ing my stream-o-tweets, I noticed that every third per­son of the 2,587 I cur­rently fol­low were tweet­ing that they “upgraded to #Hoot­Suite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade.” Hoot­Suite — pro­nounced like it sounds (HOOT-sweet) and a play on the French phrase tout de suite — was the first online player to offer multi-Twitter-account man­age­ment and Twit­ter­ing, an essen­tial tool to any busi­ness appli­ca­tion of Twit­ter that required the man­age­ment of more than one Twit­ter account, such as @mar­con, @abra­hamhar­ri­son, @chrisabraham, etc.

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At the For­tune Brainstorm:Tech con­fer­ence in Pasadena, Calif., on July 22, 2009, one of the lighter moments came when Inter­net pio­neer Marc Andreessen spoke on stage about “one of the defin­ing expe­ri­ences of my career” when he spent 9 months as an intern at IBM in 1990–91 when it had 400,000 employ­ees. He used a pro­gram in the office that deter­mined the num­ber of lay­ers of man­age­ment between him and the CEO was 17, “from which I con­cluded that it was unlikely I would make a career at IBM. … It was essen­tially like work­ing for the Soviet Union at the time.”

He had a great expe­ri­ence at IBM, but that serves as his inter­nal ref­er­ence for big com­pa­nies. In this three-minute seg­ment, recorded with a Flip Ultra HD recorder, he com­pares the cul­ture of small and large com­pa­nies and con­cludes, “Star­tups are where a lot of inno­va­tion hap­pens. … But you have to get big to have a big impact. I’ve always thought an entre­pre­neur needs to think in terms of get­ting to a large size in scale in order to have a big impact.”

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The Emo Girl Talk pod­cast from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here’s a 4 1/2-minute video inter­view I did with Mar­tina But­ler after her appear­ance on a panel at the Teens in Tech con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco this past spring. (Now that my sched­ule is clear, you’re going to see a truck­load of inter­views from past weeks.)

Mar­tina has been host of the Emo Girl Talk pod­cast for the past four years — since she was 14. That’s 183 episodes. What’s most inter­est­ing is that this has blos­somed from a hobby into a pop­u­lar young person’s lifestyle pod­cast with sev­eral cor­po­rate spon­sors — enough to help Mar­tina pay for her col­lege tuition.

On the show she talks about her life, her favorite bands (mostly indie-rock) and TV shows, and she and co-host Peter Jacob­sen also offer tips on top­ics such as how to live a green lifestyle. About half of each show is devoted to answer­ing audio com­ments from lis­ten­ers who call and leave a mes­sage ask­ing for advice or telling about their day.

Mar­tina is not par­tic­u­larly tech savvy and has some help putting her pod­cast together, but says that other young peo­ple should feel daunted by the tech­nol­ogy. It’s not that hard to do, and if you pod­cast about a topic that you love and that you find inter­est­ing, you’ll build an audi­ence. “Even if you don’t get a lot of response right away, don’t give up, keep going,” she says.

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Dis­claimer: Donanza is a client of my firm, Blonde 2.0, a one-stop-shop for all your social media needs.

People don’t look for jobs in the news­pa­per clas­si­fieds any­more. Instead, job post­ings are dis­persed through a vari­ety of niche net­works, from groups on LinkedIn, tweets on Twit­ter, and wid­gets and search engines on a vari­ety of sites.

While increas­ing the abil­ity to net­work — one of the most impor­tant fac­tors in find­ing a job — the growth of niche job sites can some­times make it hard to find time to search for jobs. One often has to go to mul­ti­ple sites just to find social media jobs, for example.

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While the major­ity of traf­fic still comes through search engines, that’s all poised to change with these three trends:

1. Con­nect your con­tent to exist­ing social networks

Almost every Web 2.0 appli­ca­tion and com­mu­nity requires users to sign up and reg­is­ter. If you want to leave a com­ment on a blog, you need to reg­is­ter, some­times every sin­gle time you leave a com­ment. With all the times you’ve reg­is­tered on sites, you prob­a­bly have hun­dreds of accounts that you’ve com­pletely for­got­ten. Instead of cre­at­ing your own com­mu­nity, sim­ply latch on to exist­ing communities.

Social net­works such as Google, Face­book, and Twit­ter began reach­ing out­side of their four walls and let­ting any site or con­tent provider use a con­duit tool to con­nect their con­tent to their social net­works. Exam­ples include Google Friend Con­nect (video), Face­book Con­nect (video), and Sign in with Twit­ter.

These con­duit tools offer quick authen­ti­ca­tion, com­ment­ing, and other con­ver­sa­tional fea­tures. More impor­tantly, once these con­nect tools are installed, every inter­ac­tion a per­son has with your site can be broad­cast to that individual’s entire social net­work, giv­ing you access to their audience.

2. Dis­trib­ute con­tent through adver­tis­ing networks

With frac­tions of a per­cent­age click-through, ban­ner ads are on the verge of being com­pletely use­less. Some com­pa­nies have tried to attract more atten­tion with pop-ups and ani­ma­tion. In those cases, click-throughs may increase, but that may be by acci­dent. Ever try to close out a win­dow and miss? Peo­ple do want to click, but not on sta­tic adver­tis­ing. They want to click on information.

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Here are 32 Flickr pho­tos of par­tic­i­pants in the For­tune Brainstorm:Tech con­fer­ence late last week in Pasadena, Calif., with images of actor Ash­ton Kutcher (3 mil­lion Twit­ter fol­low­ers), Twit­ter co-founder Biz Stone, Bill Gross, John Chen, CEO of Sybase, Mark Hurd, CEO of HP, Jef­frey Katzen­berg of Dream­Works, and others.

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• Ash­ton Kutcher, the world’s most pop­u­lar Tweeter, on Twit­ter (dailyfinance.com)

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Howard Dean on Inter­net dis­rupt­ing pol­i­tics from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One high­light of the three-day For­tune Brainstorm:Tech con­fer­ence, which just wrapped up in Pasadena, came when Howard Dean, for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and for­mer chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­tic National Com­mit­tee, began riff­ing on the Internet’s impact on national politics.

Some high­lights from the 11-minute video:

• Howard Dean: “The tech­nol­ogy is mov­ing so fast and it’s hav­ing an enor­mous, enor­mous effect.” He briefly traced the influ­ence of the Inter­net on U.S. pol­i­tics, cit­ing YouTube flip­ping the U.S. Sen­ate to Demo­c­ra­tic con­trol in 2006 because of Va. Sen. George Allen’s Macaca moment.

• The 2008 cam­paign by Barack Obama made spec­tac­u­lar use of social net­work­ing. “2008 was the first elec­tion in the life­time of every­one in this room in which more peo­ple voted who were under 35 than over 65,” Dean told the audi­ence. “This is the pres­i­dent of the younger generation.”

• Dean: “Then along comes the 2009 Iran­ian elec­tion and they could shut down the Inter­net but they couldn’t shut down their cell­phone net­work with­out shut­ting down their whole coun­try. How did infor­ma­tion get out? Twitter.”

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Here is part 3 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chap­ters from my new book, A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion.

This book is meant to be a guide to build­ing an opti­mized foun­da­tion in the Social Web for begin­ners and advanced users alike.

Chap­ter 3, the longest chap­ter in the book, is about RSS feeds and blogs. This chap­ter is packed with infor­ma­tion and use­ful tips about con­tent prepa­ra­tion, feed read­ers, opti­miza­tion, and much more to ensure max­i­mum expo­sure in the Social Web.

The fol­low­ing excerpts are from A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion:

Chap­ter 3: RSS Feeds and Blogs

Opti­miz­ing Your Blog And RSS Feed

Your RSS feed or blog will do you lit­tle good if nobody knows about it or can­not sub­scribe to it. This sec­tion high­lights ways for you to opti­mize and pro­mote your feed. Most of these tips are for both blogs and RSS
feeds, but some of them only apply to blogs. It is made clear if some­thing only applies to blogs.…

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For the past 10 weeks I’ve been a fac­ulty mem­ber of the Knight Dig­i­tal Media Cen­ter Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence, help­ing edi­tors from 10 news­pa­pers learn how to incor­po­rate social media into their news­rooms. The online train­ing ses­sions cul­mi­nated in three days of hands-on, in-person work­shops this week in down­town Los Angeles.

Some top-flight social media con­sul­tants — Susan Mer­nit, Amy Gahran and Paul Gillin (whose slide show Get­ting Over Fear of Fail­ure to Make Rapid Deci­sions is embed­ded at top) — and USC’s Dana Chinn were also on hand, with Vikki Porter and Michele McLel­lan run­ning the show. (Fol­low KDMC and Michele on Twitter.)

I came away from the ses­sion more hope­ful than I’ve been about the fate of local news orga­ni­za­tions. While news­pa­pers still face for­mi­da­ble obsta­cles in address­ing the sys­temic shifts under way in the medi­a­s­phere away from mass mar­keted prod­ucts and toward spe­cial­ized, social­ized, frag­mented media forms, I was intrigued to see the energy and cre­ative fer­ment that ani­mate sev­eral of the projects.

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