I recently presented a webinar with the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), “The Medium Is NOT the Message: Social Media Analytics Deliver Insights Beyond Social Monitoring.” It’s a play on Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message.” And, really, I don’t disagree with his assessment that the characteristics of any substantial media channel [...]

Ad:tech set an attendance record this week in San Francisco: over 11K. And the crowd, which included plenty of big marketers, was decidedly upbeat. They were talking about spending again. Over and over, I heard: “Lousy first quarter, Q2 is looking good.” There was a feeling of having turned a corner.

By now, everyone agrees there’s great value to be drawn from the social-media dataset. But how do we define and categorize that value? PR and marketing activities are generally separated along reactive/proactive and tactical/strategic lines. Analytics is the key to a world of ROI from social-media data.

Five themes top the list. And there’s a thread running through these topics: Foursquare and Gowalla. They create lot of buzz across multiple categories. Here’s the Networked Insights Buzz Report from SXSW 2010.

Marketing experts are telling Toyota that it needs to rebuild the trust of women in the wake of the recall mayhem. Social-media listening can play a critical role in campaign design, helping to fill in the gaps left by traditional methods.

The Oscars are one brand that still controls its equity from the top down: Winners are chosen by the Academy. But outside of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, winners are decided by thousands of movie buffs posting their opinions online.