Last weekend Shashi (Social Media Swami) and I had the opportunity to attend the Successful and Outstanding Blogging Conference or SOBCon which is an advanced forum of speakers and workshops for bloggers. It was held in Chicago at the Summit Executive Center on Michigan Ave on the “Magnificent Mile” in downtown Chicago.

We arrived from our quick flight out of Dulles to a cool building with an awesome view of downtown Chicago. When walking into the room it was bustling with people clustered around tables and it reminded me of the blogger lounge at South by Southwest (SXSW). If you took the blogger lounge times four put all of the top bloggers from around the country in one room and added content to the discussions you have SOBCon. An awesome feat to acheive and Terry Starbucker & Liz Strauss did an outstanding job.

(Photo by Geoff Livingston)

Few things new this year:

Corporations that understand social media or are making a great attempt at engaging using social media

Sponsors like Colgate and marketing firms that brought in cool products we know (like Klondike Bars) and things we are going to see soon (reusable soap dispensers) to get feedback and engage a community of people that understand the concept of community and conversation.

Dual tracks the first day

This is only thing I didn’t like because it split the room up and made you choose between speakers you wanted to see. I guess I am more of a Gnomedex person with a single track, but that is just a personal preference.

Outstanding Content Examples from the First Day

Since our flight came in later I missed Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talk about their book “Trust Agents”. These guys wrote the book on trust in building community and participation in a 21st century business.

Photo: JD Lasica

I then was able to finally meet Brian Clark, Founder of Copyblogger and then meet the other half of the book Barack 2.0, David Bullock. I did an interview with his writing partner, Brent Leary about Social CRM (his specialty) and the Barack 2.0 project in October, five days before the election. David stated that their book was a matter of historical record and was not there to be political but a true analysis of the campaign’s use of social media through election day and beyond. He noted that many of the services used (Facebook, Twitter) didn’t even exist during the last election which was a very poigiant observation as to the adoption and rapid evolution of social media.

We had some other great presentations in addition to awesome networking in the halls and at your table. At the end of the day we had the opening day party at Hotel 71 on the top floor which was spectacular. On a side note, it was used as the set for Batman’s apartment in the movie “The Dark Knight” so you know this place was ultra cool and again showed that Terry and Liz know how to put on a conference.

More awesome sessions and content from Day Two

After a late night of umm, networking, we arrived bright eyed and ready for day two with started with a lively Q&A consisting of Chris Garrett, Lucretia Pruitt, Jason Falls and Zena Weist they had lots of feedback on social media in general and that basically we have only scratched the surface since 24% of people are even aware or planning to use social media.

We were then treated to a change in presentation with Kali Evans-Raoul talking about appearance and her image consulting business. We learned alot of major things (dress and ettiqute) to weird little things (your teeth move and change color over time without you realizing it). It was a very appropriate conversation since most of the mainstream media thinks that all bloggers work in their pajamas this session was to prove that we don’t, well most of us…

After lunch Geoff Livingston spoke about how to do a complete customer outreach program that consisted of online and offline components.

Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda

This was followed up by KD Paine and her awesome presentation on metrics and the ROI of relationships in social media. I have embedded the presentation here because it is that good and feature rich.

Wrapping up the day we had fun at Morton’s in Chicago and many headed off to Karaoke or off to bed.

Heading out and Wrapping Up

On Sunday morning they had a farewell breakfast and wrap up back at “Batman’s Apartment” at the top of Hotel 71. Not to let a good gathering go to waste, Terry Starbucker & Liz Strauss did some experimentation with this year’s conference and allowed sponsors to show a product (physical or software) to the attendees and get their input and feedback along with how they would leverage social media to maximize outreach and promotion of the product.

Think about it… Attendees get tapped for their expertise because they are experts and not just getting pitched to and sponsors maximize the investment in the conference and get some great feedback and free consulting from the top people in the social media space.

This was truly brilliant and I am sorry we had to catch a plane home. There is always SOBCon 2009 and I am looking forward to it next year.

One of the many things I know I need to work on is getting better at Web metrics and analytics — both understanding them, and presenting them.

I’m trying, really I am. Part of the problem is that any liberal arts major can look at a chart (or worse, make one) and draw completely specious, unwarranted, and often contradictory conclusions. Or rationalize around numbers we don’t like: “Have we accounted for seasonality?” “It’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison.” “True, pageviews are low, but we’re targeting influencers.”  “The numbers we can collect don’t capture the true impact.”

Actually, those last two sound a lot like last week’s “The ROI for Social Media Is Zero” by Augustine Fou [link via @MaddieGrant], which reads a lot to me like an apologia for social media metrics, though it’s more of an indictment of traditional media marketing metrics.

On the other side (well, on another side), is Geoff Livingston’s “Thoughts on Measurement,” which says that social media measurement isn’t that hard, if you start by looking at a strategy’s desired result, which informs the type of metric to use, which implies the tools needed.

It’s all very confusing. It’s handy to have a few metrics aphorisms to whip out when you get into trouble, including grumbling “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” “correlation is not causation,” and the whole, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Getting beyond the aphorisms, I’m going to list out a few Web resources that I’m tracking in an effort to bone up a little more on Web metrics and analytics. This is by no means a comprehensive list, so if you’ve got your own resources that you’ve found useful, leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list:

* KD Paine’s PR Measurement Blog – I was first introduced to KD at 2008 Blog Potomac conference. Her book, Measuring Public Relationships, had just come out, and though I didn’t get it then, I have it now and I’m catching up.

Her blogroll and sidebar are chock full of other resources to check out, and you could probably do worse than running down the list.

* Measuring Success, the Web site for the book by Brian Clifton — I came across this site after searching on a question about Google Analytics.

* Speaking of which — whatever tools you’re using, read the help resources, docs, and other learning guides (Google Analytics has Conversion University, for example) –basically, RFTM.

* Trending Upward — this blog is targeted towards analytics in higher education, but there’s good primer material on all sorts of Web metrics stuff.

* Social Science Statistics Blog — this one is way, way in the weeds and thus over my head [to mix my metaphors], but I’ve known since the 2007 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media that I need to bone up on my knowledge of statistics. At the very least, I’m trying to get to the point where I can ask better questions after reading, say, the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project report.

Anyway, like I said, this is just a short list of resources I’ve added to my feedreader to try to get better at applying analytics. If you’ve got your own suggestions, please share in the comments.

This is part 3 of 3 in the recap of Blog Potomac

Frank Gruber, AOL’s Social Media & Web Product Development Expert, and Author of Somewhat Frank
He writes the blog “SomewhatFrank.com” and started a few years ago and got started when he went to an SEO conference and there was a session on blogging. He moved into blogging about products he loves and met Mike Arrington the same time TechCrunch launched and he started writing comparison pieces on products out on the market. That lead to some popular posts and was contacted by AOL to join them and help start My.AOL.com and it was launched in July of 2007.

We then began to evangelize social media within AOL and educate the other marketing teams on how to leverage this area in their own marketing departments. He is in the “Social Platforms” group that includes AIM, Bebo, ICQ and Gooey in its product stable.

Here are some of his favorite products:

Twitter
Summize
Tumblr
FriendFeed
SocialThing
TubeMogul
Viddler
Mixx
Digg
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Shareaholic
Evernote
FiltrBox – Track your name “Vanity Search”
AwayFind
Lijit
TripIt
Dopplr

He started TechCocktail in Chicago last year and the first event had 250 people by word of mouth. It has grown to other parts of the country (Boulder, Boston, DC) and we get about 500-600 people. We held our first conference and it was very well received.

He uncovers all these shiny objects (products) through invites and sites like TechCrunch. By starting the blog he started reading more and uncovered all of these sites.

Since most of this stuff didn’t exist 3 years ago, there is a concern of sustainability. People are having a tough time sort out all of the choices. People are incorporating things more into their lives everyday once they find the products they are most comfortable with. But most importantly are those products that actually solve a problem or make a social connection.

Author KD Paine

KD has headed her firm KD Paine & Partners for six years which is a social media marketing and measurement firm. Despite being a measurement person, she hasn’t balanced her checkbook since 1973.

That is cool since I was born in 1971 and I never have balanced mine.

The way you know you need to have something and that it is having an impact is to measure it. There are six steps to this:

Step 1 – You have to understand the return on something
Step 2 – You have know who your audience is and the impact
Step 3 – You have to have metrics
Step 4 – You have to have something to benchmark against
Step 5 – You have to get away from the notion of eyeball counting
Step 6 – You have to know the value to you

The least paid attention to element to measurement is “so what?”. When you do a campaign, you have to provide the “so what” for others in order to continue the project. Because if it is not working, then why continue in the first place?

MyPrPro Principle Kami Huyse

She has been in PR for 15 years and started here in DC. When she moved to TX in 2002 she realized that the world was moving very fast and started following blogs and becoming an anthropologist of social media.

In the vein of ethics, there is stuff that goes beyond right and wrong and then there are the gray areas. Like the “Flog” – the fake blog. A good example of this is last spring at Hunter College where a class was funded by an anti-counterfeiting organization. An imaginary person had a blog and lost her coach bag and there was a reward. Then they said that they got their bag back and the funny irony was that the bag was fake.

The question is – is this ethical? Maybe, but it is definitely stupid marketing. An audience member thought it sounds like an after school special.

The Word of Mouth group has a great code of ethics, “honesty of relationships, honesty of identity, and honesty of opinions”. “Blogging is not a sales channel, it is a communications channel.”

That’s a wrap

This concludes our coverage of the BlogPotomac event. It was a great event with great people and great content. If you want more information go to the site and hit the news section to see the full presentations in all their video glory. We are looking forward to Jeff’s team doing this again next year and making it bigger and better.

Last Friday, Network Solutions sponsored Blog Potomac in Northern Virginia which brought together some of the top minds in social media and public relations. They talked about the current landscape and how companies can benefit from implementing a social media strategy. You can see recordings of the presentations on the Blog Potomac site.