There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

Tags: ad network, ads, adsense, advertising, advertising model, API, attention, audience, b5 Media, blog, blog advertising, BuzzLogic, BuzzMachine, community, content, control, conversation, current, data, digg, disqus, EAD, feeds, Fred Wilson, friendfeed, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, information, interaction, interactions, IP, it, Jeff Jarvis, LAN, Lookery, Mac, marketing, measurement, media, metrics, Newest Industry, Om, One, online, online world, pr, social media, social media advertising, social media advertising model turns, social media mavens, social media providers, Steven Hodson, Technorati, The Inquisitr, twitter, Union Square, Union Square Ventures

Three years ago, in a post on this blog, I stated that I thought that the browser was becoming less important as more data moved into streams of data through RSS and aggregated feeds, as well as a raft of other consumer-oriented Web services.

This position was based on the assumption that the endpoint, in the form of installed applications, wouldcontinue to serve as the focus for user interactions, that these applications would be the points where data was accumulated and processed by users. This could be best described as the firehose: The end-user desktop would be at the end of a flood of data being pushed to it a never-ending flood.

Firefox and Chrome have changed all of that.

The browser has, instead, become the window through which we view and manipulate our data. It’s now ok, completely acceptable in fact, to use online applications as replacements for installed applications, stripping away a profit engine that has fed so many organizations over the years.

The endpoint has been shown to be the access point to our applications, to our data. Data is not brought and stored locally: It is stored remotely and manipulated like a marionette from afar.

While Chrome and Firefox are not perfect, they serve as powerful reminders of what the Web is, and why the browser exists. The Browser is not the end of a flod of incoming data, it is the window through which we see our online world.

While some complain that there is still an endless stream of data, we control and manipulate it. It doesn’t flood us.

Tags: Chrome, consumer-oriented Web services, control, Firefox, firehose, hosted applications, interactions, online applications, online world, users, web 2.0, web applications, window

I submitted a presentation proposal for OSCON 2005 just now. The abstract is below.

The Open Source community has driven the online world for the last decade. PHP, PERL, Apache, Java, and MySQL are all major components of large online enterprises.

However, putting an application online and ensuring that it satisfies the performance, availability and reliability demands of the increasingly knowledgeable online consumer are often two separate concerns.

Performance should not be an afterthought; performance should be a leading force in creating a Web application.

Using simple Open Source Tools, Web performance measurement solutions can be built that rival commercial solutions. But what does this data tell you? And how do you turn this into useful business information?

This discussion will expose the participants to key Web performance metrics that make sense to both technology and business leaders in your organization.

I have a snowball’s chance in hell of having it accepted, as it is not hip, technical or trendy, and I am not an Open Source Guru, but if you design stuff for the Web, then you better be ready to have your site examined in detail, because if you don’t do it, your customers will.

Tags: apache, app, application, business, community, components, customers, data, design, EAD, HTTP, IE, IM, information, IP, it, measurement, metrics, mysql, Om, One, online, online world, OReilly, performance, performance measurement, Perl, PHP, pr, Reliability, web, web app, web application, Web Performance, Web performance measurement

Report: Craigslist costing newspapers millions

Well, this is no surpise. It’s fast, cheap and easy-to-use. THe classified industry has changed so substantially as a result of the online world that traditional classifieds almost seem quaint…at least to me.

Tags: HTML, HTTP, IE, it, Om, online, online world