Do your colleagues still tilt their heads when you say 'social media'?

Here's a concise overview of "social media" from Spannerworks, an SEO company. The PDF is somewhat basic, but it's a nice tearaway to hand to your colleagues who still tilt their heads when you talk about "conversations" that don't happen face to face.

Factiva's First Social Media Roundtable

A few months back several of us in the Product Development group at Factiva got into some conversations with Jeremiah Owyang, then of Hitachi Data Systems, about social media measurement. (Jeremiah has since moved on to Podtech.)

The conversation started around a product of ours, Factiva Insight, that Hitachi is using. Jeremiah basically told us, (paraphrasing) "hey, the product is pretty impressive, but it doesn't really suit my particular needs in the measurement of social media." We thought we were doing a pretty good job but we were open to hear about why Jeremiah disagreed.

Those discussions, helped greatly by the coolest Factiva employee, SF based Daniela Barbosa, grew into the idea that we should hold a roundtable event and learn from those who are in the social media what we could be doing differently and what the state of the social-media-measurement space is.

So, Dec. 5 at Zabbio in Palo Alto about five of us lucky folks from Factiva and 20 or so big brains in social media will spend a few hours chatting about where social media measurement is going.

It is an invitation only roundtable with no audience. But we will produce from it stuff like a podcast, video clips and a paper of some sort (which the always witty Matt Toll has promised will be spectacular -- no pressure).

Daniela and Jeremiah , who's agreed to emcee the event, have already been posting about it (I've been under water with my real job, not that they're just sitting around, I know.)

But I'm going to try to catch up and post some of the questions here that we will be throwing out to the participants. This will give people a chance to start a discussion online before and after the event.

More soon.

MSM Just Keeps Taking Blog Prophets' Word for It

Michael S. Malone writing on ABC News's Web site has taken Technorati's word for it that the Blogosphere is N big. Technorati says 57 million blogs? OK, the number must be 57 million. 100,000 new blogs a day? 1 billion bloggers by 2010? Yup, they must be right.

Nowhere is the question that these numbers are at best only part of the story and at worst an exaggeration. How can you not even mention all the blogs that are created one day and abandoned the following week? Or the fact that many bloggers have multiple blogs? Or all the spam blogs that get counted as real blogs? It's lunacy.

57 million blogs ever created hardly equals 57 million people now blogging.

The number of active bloggers is growing and it's probably an impressive number but there are lots of caveats to those numbers and to understand their meaning the MSM has to ask questions. Remember J-school guys?