I’m live at the Search Marketing Expo in New York City. The first panel this morning is about “Effectively Leveraging Social Networking.” The panelists are Danny Sullivan, Dave McClure, Helen M. Overland and Cindy Krum. First up is Dave McClure of 500 hats.

9:06 am - Dave has taken a brief poll of the audience to see how frequently they use Facebook. Following the poll, he is showing his Facebook profile to the audience as well as the news feed. Dave is discussing the theoretical news feed optimization through tagging items and status updates. Dave is illustrating the sharing of an image and how it is posted into the feed as a result. Via tagging “super nodes” in your network, there is a greater likelihood that the information will end up being displayed in your newsfeed.

9:20 am - Question from the crowd: Can you create and organization in Facebook similarly to the way you do in MySpace? Dave: You can create a network or a group within Facebook. Dave is also giving a brief overview of sponsored groups. Ultimately, the response is that you cannot create company profiles.

9:24 am - Up next is Helen M. Overland from “Non-linear creations.” Helen’s topic is marketing on LinkedIn. Helen is giving an overview of her company as well as LinkedIn. Helen is emphasizing the fact that you can reach just about anybody in the professional sphere through LinkedIn. Personally, I think you can do this through Facebook as well, but Helen is here to discuss LinkedIn. According to Helen, LinkedIn can be used for increasing visibility & branding, generate direct sales and generate traffic & support SEO.

9:28 am - If you want to increase the visibility of your brand you can display your expertise in the “answers” section of LinkedIn. (There is already a number of applications that have been developed to provide a similar service on Facebook but many of those have been considered spammy.) Helen is displaying an example of Brack Obama asking a question on LinkedIn. If you are looking to increase sales via LinkedIn you can find a way to get in touch with those people. Helen also suggests that you get recommendations to further your brand exposure. Since answer pages are indexed on LinkedIn, you can use these to link back to your blog or company website. After using these links to drive traffic to her site, Helen witnessed LinkedIn users spending more time on her site.

9:33 am - Last up is Cindy Krum from Blue Moon Works to discuss MySpace. Cindy is covering starting off by displaying profile that have been used well to promote. The first company she is using as an example is Flying Dog Brewery that is using MySpace to drive sales to their brewery. As a side note, it would be interesting to see a case study on how a company is leveraging Facebook to generate revenue for their brand. Cindy is now highlighting how Flying Dog displays all of their beers on their MySpace profile. Flying Dog has also placed a number of photo albums on their MySpace profile. The company has also added events. Cindy is highlighting the SEO impact of a MySpace profile and how Flying Dog’s MySpace profile shows up forth in their Google results.

9:42 am - The next profile up is for the True dating site. True has created a fortune cookie widget, somewhat similar to the Facebook fortune cookie application. True has leveraged a number of other widgets including a “Create a date” widget, a “Date-o-Rama” widget and a “Heart Beats” widget. Cindy is now covering the downsides of MySpace. The first example is of Westwood College. After creating their profile for the client, people started adding them. The initial people that friended them didn’t have the most professional users. As a result, Blue Moon and Westwood College were forced into determining who to approve for friends. One of the users that became extremely active on the page ended up switching their photo to be them in S & M gear.

9:53 am - The next client is Auto Europe that wanted a widget that would work across multiple social networks. One problem that they faced is that most links in MySpace don’t work. Links that do work include: links to pages within MySpace, links within blog posts, links within news articles and links within events. When building a widget in MySpace make sure that you use flash version 9 & action script version 3. Links in Flash files just don’t work. Cindy is highlighting that not all developers can develop widgets. That’s it!

Overall, this panel was a general overview of social networking. Most of my readers are probably thoroughly knowledgable on this topic so nothing new was revealed unfortunately. The panel was definitely great for those that are trying to understand further the benefits of social networking and techniques for utilizing 3 of the most popular social networks on the web (Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace).

10:05 –

San Francisco (UCSF, South of Market):I am sitting here at Widget Summit 2007 listening to a keynote conversation between Niall Kennedy and Slide founder and CEO Max Levchin on the current state of the widget industry.Slide’s slideshow widgets are seen by over 134 million viewers per month (comScore, June 2007). Slide also authors three of the top four applications on Facebook. Top Friends ranks your friends list and has attracted over 17.5 million Facebook members. FunWall adds some of the most popular features of Slide.com, photo and video customization, to the wall of almost 9 million Facebook members. SuperPoke lets almost 10 million Facebook members send virtual hugs and other expressive “pokes” around their network.

This conversation is great because Slide is at the forefront of the widget industry, defining many of the monetization and audience engagement issues. All comes back to data mining – cookies and anonymous tracking – which is tough when people simply upload what they have looked at, what other widgets interacted with and where widgets came from. 90% from previous instances of that application – that is the viral nature of this distribution. The way that the advertising industry thinks doesn’t lend itself to his analysis.

For Slide, it is a “sales challenge” to present widget style metrics as a basis of valuing impressions and usage. In a light moment Max gave “monkey lovers” as a tongue in cheek example of a demographic which advertisers have expressed an interest for a particular basic cable channel….Max is definitely emphasizing his company’s pioneering experience in monetizing widgets. This topic obviously got the attention of the whole floor. Slide takes a total diversion from classic ad models where advertisers get run of network advertising or third party ad networks insert ads as they choose.

Instead, users define what ads they want, what skins appear, and this is done by working with pioneering brand marketers including AT&T, Activision, Discovery Channel and Lions Gate. Widgets were the fastest path to reach the scale that Slide has achieved – talking about Yahoo! Even Google has taken up to 10 years to get this kind of reach. Slide has achieved this in less than three years.

What about a “user network” around impressions? A personal media network – a successful one at this point – is a system that understands the behavior of users, all driven by going beyond a 400X600 box. Ultimately, widgets are like tiny little TVs, hundreds of millions of them, around the web – little TVs that people click on. The TV analogy works well with advertisers. TV can integrate ad placement into shows via product placement – zero learning curve to discuss in TV terms.

It is the equivalent of sponsoring the chrome around the TV. Let users choose ads and how they appear. That is something that advertisers will increasingly learn how to come to terms with. The trick for advertising in widgets is that the medium is really about the widget that users choose, and that makes the relationship between users and widgets very different from that of users and the banner ads running on the edge of their screen.

Max is repeating the theme of the number of communities his widgets work with, listing of an impressive group of roughly 30 sites with a deft move of the mouse, and then going through what things look like when they publish. For the newbies in the group … the first phase of Slide is characterized as consumer self expression through rich media.Facebook changed everything. It took them a moment to figure out the usage mode of Facebook and how it differs from MySpace, but they discovered that media gathering and media giving – rather than just self expression – are the primary drivers.

He believes Slide figured this out and moved quickly and successfully on this trend. Also, Slide is becoming a clear winner in and by feature arbitrage (Max is giving an example of how Top Friends lets friends filter friends through stating who their BFFs are… a feature that was missing from Facebook).There was a range of interesting innovation both from Slide and from their users that show how innovative the platform can be.

Some applications are being enhanced by value added features, or “Leveled up,” with elements of gaming where users gain points for certain actions and successful interactions within frameworks. Hungarian Jewish composer with credits including Space Odyssey uses his Slide widget product for self expression on their site – taking the conversion to the edge of the long tail.One surprising comment was that Facebook is characterized by “communication through cutesiness” and that many users are “refugees from MySpace” after stating that the ad model is placed squarely in the hands of users and user choice.

Tone was kept up by asking how Max went from cryptography to PayPal to glitter on photos. Max responds well by saying that his goal is to help people and that his #1 criteria is that he has to impact 100s of millions of people, not willing to do anything less exposed to the world – the number of simultaneous people looking at his product has to be staggering to feel satisfied. Also, he is defeating of fraud.

Comscore is portrayed as needing to innovate because they must embrace things like widgets to stay relevant as a stakeholder in the media buying process.Symbiotic relationships with MySpace, Bebo, Facebook explored in depth by the moderator. Max emphasized that “doing good by the users” is the most important – flashpoints like security problems, runaway content, etc. are simply bumps along the road.In the widget industry and for the “widget carriers” that have become platforms – fundamental trend is churn. #1 driver is coolness and “in-thing” – Ryze and other fallen social networks cited.

Blogger used to be the platform to have a blog on, now is all about Word Press and its 16 million users.  People there, need things to do.  Widgets provide the uses… we are shop keeps of the most exciting places in “the mall” - they have the development resources to complement the “malls”.Few widget conference clichés came out in a great overall dialog, however, in the spirit of openness we will share the clichés … 1) Max: Microsoft in 80s – we want to own, you guys do the rest – some mistakes – grabbed by Intuit – thought that was fine for Microsoft because in the end it just strengthened the operating system and “barely scratched the retention” of the windows OS. 2) Moderator: Isn’t this stuff a bit juvenile, with max shifting to citations of usage “we throw 20MM sheep an hour” with a vague reference to utility, citing resume building and job hunting on Facebook.

His closing remarks were pretty interesting, focusing on a TiVo type pitch, talking about the aggregate value of consumer information, how Slide makes sure that they user data remains anonymous, he is an expert at securing information, with the tantalizing thought he can let you know who is on the rise and on the fall with his overall trend data. Specific questions about Slides measurements of clicks within the widget versus overall impressions were not answered directly, focusing on the overall grail of collecting the most monetizable information in advertising via widgets and Facebook apps.

I look forward to the Facebook developers panel at 4:30, which will explore these issues as relate to the worlds most innovative social media platform.

Mitch Kapor is an industry luminary. As Wikipedia states Mitch, “is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the ‘killer application’ often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.”

Mitch appeared at the Community Next to discuss the evolution of platforms. In the video below, Mitch discusses platforms. Unfortunately, I didn’t get all of the slides but if you listen, Mitch describes the slides well so viewing the slides are not necessary.

RockYou is among the top two most popular application development groups. They have applications including XMe, Likeness, Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves and others. I had the opportunity to interview Jia Shen, the CTO and co-founder of RockYou back in August. Jia was present at both the Community Next event as well as the Graphing Social Patterns event, both of which I attended last week. Below is a video of him speaking at Community Next about the business of Facebook applications.

I had the pleasure to hang out with Dan Peguine, developer of the Honesty Box application, at the Community Next conference. I covered Honesty Box back at the beginning of June. Since then, the application has gone on to become one of the most popular applications on the site. Below is a video of Dan talking about his experience with the Honesty Box application.

Back at the beginning of June I covered the Free Gifts application. Since then, the application has continued to grow and now has around 350,000 active daily users and over 3.5 million users in total. Many people thought that the Free Gifts application would be banned by Facebook but Facebook has instead embraced the application. Even Facebook employees that I’ve seen speak frequently reference the free gifts application. Below is a video of Zack Allia talking about his experience developing and scaling his application at Community Next.

Keith Schacht and Ben Pollack were two of the developers that worked on building the Grow-A-Gift application. Mark Achler then partnered with Ben Pollack while Keith went off and started his own company. Below is a video of all three of them discussing the Grow-A-Gift application. Check it out!

Joe Winterhalter and Eric Diep developed an immensely popular application called Quizzes. Quizzes does exactly what you would imagine it to do: create custom quizzes. The benefit of this application is that your friends can take the quiz directly from your profile. We hadn’t reviewed this application on here previously. Instead we reviewed another quizzes application that failed to gain as much traction.

If you want to place quizzes on your profile that your firends can take, then this application is for you. Go check out the Quizzes application or listen to Joe and Eric discuss their experience building the application below.

Below is a pretty entertaining video of Paul McKellar discussing his SocialMoth application (which we previously reviewed) at the Community Next event. The application enables users to post anonymous confessions somewhat similar to post secret but a little more creatively. I’ll let Paul explain the rest.

Over the next couple days I’m going to post all of the videos from the Community Next event and Graphing Social Patterns. Below is a video of Ian Swanson from Userplane. Unfortunately the video display ratio is a little messed up so it looks slightly distorted. I tried to fix this and hopefully future videos will have a better ratio. Either way, here is the first video in a series of videos from Community Next.

• Power.com And Facebook Are Friends Again (Almost)
• Classroom locked down after Facebook threat
• Facebook Frenzy
• The Facebook Effect: How Social Media are Transforming Our Capacity to Achieve
• Facebook turned little black book? Whitney Casey thinks so!
• Facebook and The Myth Of Contextual Advertising - ReadWriteWeb
• Integrating Facebook Connect with Django in 15 minutes
• Battlestar Book: Battlestarbook Tells The Tale Of BSG, Facebook-Style
• Satellite offers advice on tricky Facebook relationships.
• Oasis' Liam and Noel in Facebook war - Daily Gossip
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• In 2009, Facebook Connect Makes Us Forget Facebook Widgets
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• Tech Crunch
• The Webpreneur
• Mashable
• Del.icio.us
• Facebook
• Google