Thursday, November 16, 2006

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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would like to say that insight does a great job measuring pre-set instances of social media, but for a medium that's so fluid, this is going to be a challenge for many.

I'm quite sure that Factiva is farther ahead than most companies when it comes to understanding social media measurement, in addition to being the premiere measures at ECG. (And that's why I hired them at Hitachi)

I'm looking forward to working together to figure out how to measure the new medium of 'social media'

Ok, back to work, see you soon Glenn!