Ah. Now. Here we go. Suw must have noticed that the ROI is AWOL. She says that, a few years back, web marketing was all about the numbers... call it traffic monitoring, call it clickthrough rates.

That's changed now. What we're talking about is relationships; blogs are about conversations and, when these relationships are so tightly formed, say, around your product or service by people coming to talk, because people are coming to your site and conversing with you - that's more important than identifying how many visitors came to your site today, which is kind of a dumb metric.

Suw says it's about "quality rather than quantity". Asked by Suw what they think, Anthony Mayfield repeats that maps make these relationships clear through imagery, and Julian Smith says old, numbers-based marketing metrics are "myopic ... and [both] help and hinder marketers". That said, I know that there are representatives of blog tracking companies sitting around me, and I think we'll hear from them later...

10.33 Lee gets the first chuckle of the day when he jokes about his secret patented device for measuring culture. Why? Because you can't. Or it's difficult at least. He also floats talk of "blogjects" (automated blogging software) and says "you don't have to be human to blog". Some people would say "not all bloggers are human" (ho-ho)...

10.39 - Told you the blog monitoring folks would revolt. In a Q&A sesh, a representative of MarketSentinel says "it is absolutely possible" to use marketing metrics to track these new blog conversations using numbers.

There's a very interesting fork opening up here. Lee responds by saying "monitoring is more important than measuring". He says he's seen some pretty hamfisted attempts from software companies at producing blog tracking products and services - "measuring anything tangible is very hard and will continue to be so", he says. He's proposing using cheap, existing little services to cobble together your own "radar" for tracking and disseminating monitoring knowledge.

A member of the crowd counters "that's just CB radio!" I expect to hear boos and hisses from the blog crowd, but Lee advocates creating these simple networks - "they want to understand their customers and they're not going to that using monitoring".

10.47 - Jeremy Etenhausen of Penguin books says the "warm and fluffy" talk of customer relationships is nice, but his bosses also like "cold, hard cash".

Suw says "it's not really about the numbers", pointing to the niche Palm Treo PDA website Treonauts as the must-advertise destination for retailers selling Treos. That's the niche in effect - the smaller the niche, the higher the definition of the audience, the more tightly you can define an advertising market - that's valuable. What's more, these sites are already out there!

"Any creative person who isn't blogging really should be", says Suw. Mixmaster Matthew Y pops up on the mic to counter the suggestion that blogs can't be used for literary marketing - authors are taking it upon themselves to write about the their book research as they're writing it. That creates a great automatic audience buy-in for the work when it's finall released. Same principle behind Pop Idol and The X-Factor - a risk-averse music industry wants to test out its next artists on the target market before committing to a new artist contract. And it also chimes with another project I've been working on - a pair of science academics have just signed a book deal with Macmillan Science, and they'll be blogging the process of writing that book, with the content syndicated onto the publisher's site hopefully.

Let's break for coffee...


-- Rob