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Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.

Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.

The move is part of Redmond's push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the "cloud."

"Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.

Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

Microsoft's per-user monthly fees for its online business services.

(Credit: Microsoft)

For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.

The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.

Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.

One can sign up online to try the beta services.

Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.

The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft's QuickStart Web site.

Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.

Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The Olympic Games are supposed to be about international brotherhood and friendly competition, but NBC apparently doesn't want its competition to get too chummy.

NBC, which has the exclusive rights to televise events from the games in Beijing, has made great strides over the years in bringing more content to viewers. For the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, the network set up NBCOlympics.com, but alas it offered little more than photos and schedules intended to drive Web surfers to their TVs.

In 2004, the network discovered high definition, which was nice--unless you weren't too keen on waiting an extra hour for the opening ceremonies to be broadcast, or had no interest in watching the same footage of a diving competition for days on end.

In 2006, NBC seemed to discover the Internet, offering live Internet streaming of the gold medal hockey game at the Turin Winter Olympics.

So it seemed the entertainment giant had finally gotten its act together: in addition to the 1,400 hours of TV coverage, the network plans to enlist the Internet to offer 3,000 hours of on-demand highlights, blogging, analysis, and even fantasy league gaming.

However, the Internet will still be taking a backseat to the TV. NBC will not make televised events available online until after they are seen on TV, Perkins Miller, senior vice president for digital media at NBC Sports, told the Associated Press .

And NBC, which ponied up $3.5 billion to the International Olympics Committee for the rights to televise the games, isn't making friends with other Web sites. NBCOlympics.com is the only site where you will see video coverage of events on the Web. Other Web sites are permitted to show Olympic trials events, but they must link to NBCOlympics.com--and all that video content must be taken down before the games begin in Beijing.

Is NBC being a bit paranoid about Web sites stealing its TV viewership?

"It's not that we aren't nervous," Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics, told the AP. "But we're up to it, and we're going to perform as we always have in the past."

Maybe NBC will surprise us and do better.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it.

The music giant is suing social-networking site Hi5, video advertising start-up VideoEgg, and 10 unnamed defendants for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of those and hundreds of other pop throwbacks.

The lawsuit alleges that Hi5 users have uploaded and disseminated hundreds of music videos the company owns rights to. VideoEgg is on the hook because it's a former partner of Hi5, and those allegedly infringing videos were uploaded to its servers. (On May 31, VideoEgg stopped hosting videos uploaded by the public and refocused efforts on its ad network, prompting rumors that the company was on its way out.) The lawsuit doesn't say much of anything about who the 10 John Does are.

The companies had attempted to work out some kind of deal for more than a year, a source told TechCrunch, but those efforts eventually failed.

Microsoft and Google have joined a collection of insurers and health care providers in endorsing privacy standards intended to protect medical records stored online.

The new "Connecting For Health" guidelines, which are also intended to reassure people that storage of their medical records online is safe, aim to break the "typical logjam in health care," according to a statement released by the Markle Foundation, which organized the consensus framework.

The move comes as Google and Microsoft ramp up their efforts to create portals where consumers can l upload, store, and view personal information, as well as share that information with medical professionals and insurance companies.

However, consumer adoption has been slow. Just 6.1 million adults in the United States have electronic personal health records, according to estimates released by the Markle Foundation.

"Consumer demand for electronic personal health records and online health services will take off when consumers trust that personal information will be protected," Zoe Baird, the Markle Foundation's president, said Wednesday in a statement.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine in April suggested that Google and Microsoft's databases of patient information could eventually grow to be larger and more up-to-date than the databases of other well-known medical research programs. As a result, researchers may find it easier and cheaper to team up with Microsoft and Google when doing their research, rather than relying on a number of sources for data to do their research.

Others supporting the guidelines include WebMD, lobbying group AARP, Aetna, America's Health Insurance Plans, BlueCross BlueShield Association, and the American Medical Association.

Blockbuster announced Tuesday it's teaming up with PayPal to offer users another payment method for purchases off its Web site.

Under the arrangement, consumers can use their PayPal account to pay for their online movie rental subscriptions. And later this summer, Blockbuster expects to launch its downloading service for movie rentals and purchases.

Eventually, Blockbuster expects to make PayPal available for use to purchase other things off the Web site, from gift cards to new and used DVDs.

Blockbuster is offering users a $10 cash back to their PayPal account, if they sign up for a new online Blockbuster rental subscription.

Despite having access to a treasure trove of data about people's hobbies, demographics, and friends, social networks can find it tough to sell banners ads for more than the price of a stick of gum.

So ad start-ups such as 33Across are trying to take advantage of profile data on social-network members to create the next generation of behavioral ad targeting. Or behavioral ads 2.0. (For a portrait of another start-up targeting the intersection of social networks and advertising, with an announcement due Monday, see "SocialMedia to unveil 'friendship ranks'.")

New York-based 33Across has developed an analytical engine that can look at behavior patterns of members of a social site in order to track who, in the so-called social graph of friends, is most influential to others. It examines things like how many messages a person sends or receives, how many people he or she has befriended, or whether that person tags photos, blogs, or forwards links to friends.

With that information, it can pinpoint who are so-called viral propagators, or the people most likely to "start a viral cascade" about a product or service, according to CEO and founder Eric Wheeler, a former ad executive from Ogilvy.

"We understand where a person sits among their friends and friends of friends...and the likelihood of how viral they would be," Wheeler said.

Meebo partnership
In recent weeks, 33Across signed its first major customer, Meebo, a social site that synthesizes multiple chat applications into a single browser interface.

Martin Green, Meebo's vice president of business, said the company is using 33Across to provide better analysis and research for advertising clients such as Universal Pictures. It is not using the 33Across self-service ad technology to target ads yet, though it is talking to 33Across about adding that functionality.

In a nod to potential privacy concerns, Green said Meebo is prepared to disclose its practices to members and give them a way to opt out.

Under the deal, Meebo gives 33Across information about its roughly 36 million monthly active users, excluding names, phone numbers, and addresses. With that data, Meebo and 33Across can see how a marketing promotion spreads throughout the members of its service by looking at which members are sending links to friends on the The Incredible Hulk, for example.

Meebo can study those users' demographics, how many "buddies" they have, whether they're influential among a group, and whether they typically shy away from sending links but are apparently inspired by a certain campaign.

"We're giving advertisers more information on how their ads are pervading the network," Green said. "We're looking at the nature of the people who shared that studio's trailer or content with friends. Are they (the) same 'connectors' in the network? Or did you appeal to people who don't normally act on promotions?"

Whereas most advertisers pay as low as five cents to reach a thousand viewers on an ad network, Meebo is charging a list price of $12.50 per thousand impressions using 33Across' technology, Green said.

Tracking social patterns
Technologists have long talked up the ability to track people's behavior across the Web, create individual profiles, and then better target ads for higher rates. And the trend took off with behavioral-ad start-ups like Revenue Science and Tacoda Systems, the latter of which has since been bought by AOL. Now, with the rise of social networks, a new crop of companies is trying to mine even more profile data about people by analyzing their social patterns.

33Across, which has raised more than $1 million from backers such as First Round Capital and former Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan, eventually plans to use data on people's relationships and influence in social networks to better target ads to them on mainstream sites.

33Across' Influence Map shows more influential people in warmer colors (red, orange, yellow) and less influential in darker colors (blue).

(Credit: 33Across)

Wheeler said 33Across cross-site tracking would work like behavioral ad targeting, in which partners of 33Across would place a tracking pixel on their page and that piece of technology would call its servers to place a cookie. The cookie would identify that person without linking his or her name, address, or phone number. That way, 33Across could target an ad to a person on a hypothetical partner site such as eBay, based on the behaviors at Meebo, for example.

Wheeler said today, people don't need to opt out of 33Across' site-wide ad program because it's not in operation yet. But the company plans to announce new partners in the coming weeks, and that could prompt the start of its cross-site tracking and ad delivery system. When that happens, he said, 33Across will give people the ability to opt out of the service at its Web site. (He did not say that program would be imminent, however.)

So how does all this friend and influencer targeting work? Much of it is based on machine-learning algorithms for social networks that have yet to be proven.

One issue with this technology is that it can be hard to track down who's most influential in a group. That person may be influential among friends, when it comes to autos, but he or she might not hold sway, when it comes to travel. Pinpointing expertise can be tough, and influential people might be the same for each category.

And then there are the privacy qualms.

"The issue with social networking and advertising is largely not a technical problem; it's a cultural one. When you're out there with your friends and interacting, people are somewhat resistant to ads. It's a different context, and people can get pissed off," said Jeffrey Davitz, program manager and director of the social-computing group in SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center.

At SRI, Davitz has researched machine learning in social networks as part of a multimillion-dollar project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Specifically, he developed an application that could automatically monitor people's interests and influence in military communities such as Company Command (for captains).

The idea was to identify influencers who care about specific topics, such as attacks involving improvised explosive devices in Iraq, and then ensure that they see relevant information in a news feed to that topic, such as an officer posting a document to the site pertaining to explosive devices.

That's what's called "smart push," he said. The technology is currently deployed on three military sites, but SRI is looking at commercial applications for it, not related to advertising.

"You clearly can learn more about people from MySpace and Facebook," said Davitz. "The question is whether or not people will accept that kind of advertising. People feel it's kind of creepy," he said.

Know how to win friends and influence people? Advertisers want you to peddle their stuff to peers on Facebook and MySpace.

Internet start-ups out to crack the problem of advertising on social networks are developing ad technology that can analyze which people are most influential to their friends on social networks so that they can target those people with pass-it-on messages about Apple's latest iPhone or The Incredible Hulk movie.

The upstarts are basically scouting for the social-media equivalent of a Typhoid Mary who can spread a message, with effectiveness, to friends on sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Two such start-ups, SocialMedia Networks and 33Across, are on track to deliver those influencer services with the goal of becoming the advertising players of the social-media age--that is, if they can carefully navigate privacy concerns. Though they have different business models, their technology is part of a lineage of online ad targeting.

"We're trying to make ads suck less in social networks," said Seth Goldstein, founder of San Francisco-based SocialMedia Networks. (Are SocialMedia and 33Across on a collision course? Read more about 33Across here).

On Monday, Goldstein is expected to announce "social banners," or display ads that turn you or your friends into the hook of a marketing message. In tandem, SocialMedia will announce that it's developed a patent-pending algorithm called FriendRank to power those social banners. It's like Google's PageRank, but instead of ranking pages for their popularity, it ranks friendships.

The company looks at how people interact with Facebook or MySpace applications--those 5,000 widgets in its advertising developer network--to determine who, among someone's 100 or so friends, are most important to them. It might infer relationships by seeing who you've played Scrabulous with or turned into a vampire. (The company said that it works within Facebook's terms of service so as not to collect and store someone's profile data.)

"FriendRank basically helps us choose which friends to put in the ad," Goldstein said in an interview. Beyond that, he wouldn't describe the secret sauce behind the technology.

For example, instead of a banner advertising The Incredible Hulk movie, a social banner would ask which of your close Facebook friends, among a short list, you'd like to invite to see the movie. Or a social banner might inform you that a friend Jim just ranked Iron Man with three stars, and it might ask to "click here to buy tickets at Fandango."

Understanding people's relationships
Of course, online advertising has taken many shapes over the years, and this is just the newest twist. Companies have targeted Web ads to people's demographics, geographies, and behaviors. They've also targeted ads--and it's met with the most success--to keywords typed into the search box or the content of a story page. Those ad models are still in practice, but now that social networks are taking up so much of people's time, a new breed of advertising is taking shape.

"The next step is to understand people's relationships," said Martin Green, vice president of business at social instant-chat site Meebo. Last week, Meebo signed an ad partnership with Mountain View, Calif.-based 33Across to monitor the effect of advertising promotions from Universal Pictures. 33Across is helping Meebo understand which types of people--mavens or influencers--respond to which ads.

Certainly, everyone from Google to Facebook to widget makers is trying to figure out how to better sell ads on social sites, at higher rates than their lows of 5 cents per thousand impressions.

Despite the millions who regularly spend hours on social networks and sites like Flickr or YouTube, advertising spending in the category is worth less than $2 billion annually. (Projections from research firm eMarketer were recently downgraded because of an expected ad shortfall from MySpace.) That's less than 2 percent of the total advertising spending in the United States.

The problem with social advertising is twofold. People aren't very receptive to advertisements in the first place, but they're even less so when "hanging out" with friends virtually on MySpace or sending photos on Flickr. Traditional advertisers, the big spenders on commercials and brand advertising, are cautious when it comes to placing their logo next to racy or potentially inflammatory images. Technology and media companies must find a way around both of these issues.

Goldstein, a veteran Internet advertising entrepreneur, founded SocialMedia in April of last year to initially be a widget developer for social networks. One of its first widgets, Appsoholic, measured how people respond to other applications on the site. With that data, the company realized that it would be better off helping other developers make money from their applications, given that the popularity of widgets can be fleeting.

So it built an automated ad system to sell banner, text, or Flash ads for as many as 5,000 applications running on Facebook, among others. SocialMedia advertisers can target people based on "appographic" parameters like people who've installed dating, car, or travel widgets.

Typical run-of-site banner ads on social networks can cost as little as 5 cents per thousand people they reach, or cost per thousand (CPM), and can go as high as 20 cents per CPM for targeted ads based on someone's profile or interests. Application ads can run as high as 50 cents, according to Goldstein, who's trying to break the dollar mark with social banners.

SocialMedia has tested social banners with BMW in a campaign worth more than $100,000. It created an application for the car company that allows people on Facebook to customize the features of a BMW 1 Series, or create a "dream ride." The related social banners, for example, advertised to Seth's closest friends in their news feeds that "Seth is taking a joyride in a BMW 1 Series on the Autobahn. Would you like to join him?"

SocialMedia's also been experimenting with the ads for Universal Pictures, among others. In early tests, the company has shown that people are 200 times more likely to respond to the social ad. (A non-social ad might command a click-through rate of 0.15 percent vs. a social banner at 0.5 percent.)

Possible privacy concerns
Still, with its social banners, SocialMedia could run into the same privacy concerns that Facebook encountered when it launched Beacon. Late last year, Facebook teamed with sites like eBay and Yelp so that when Facebook members performed an action on one of those sites, like buying a pair of shoes, Facebook would automatically alert their friends to it in their news feeds. After members reacted badly, the company backed off and made the program entirely opt-in for members.

SocialMedia isn't drawing data on people's behaviors from third-party sites, but it is using friendship data it collects to seed marketing messages. That could tick people off. Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the main issue with social ads like these is that people need to know how they're being targeted and be given the ability to opt out easily.

"People need to have clear notice and the clear opportunity not to participate," Harris said. "The lesson of Beacon (Facebook's controversial targeted-messaging project) was that people have no expectation that they will be linked to or targeted in any way outside of a social network."

Goldstein said SocialMedia will be sensitive to people's privacy, partly because of the backlash prompted by Facebook's Beacon program. People will be able to click a tab on a social banner to read about how it works and how to easily opt out of the program, he said.

At recent social-media conferences, Goldstein has said that programs like Beacon are the future of this type of conversational marketing.

"Technically people are collecting cookies all the time," Goldstein said. "What Beacon has shown us is that when you try to cross information between networks, the psyche isn't ready. But over the years to come you'll be able do this in any forum."

For the first time since 2004, quarterly sales of Web advertisements dipped slightly from the previous three months, according to new research released Tuesday.

From January to March, Internet ad spending hit $5.8 billion, down from an all-time recorded high of $5.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Not since the end of 2004 has ad spending retreated slightly from a quarterly percentage growth.

The upside is that first-quarter sales represented an 18 percent rise from the comparable period in 2007. And the quarter's expenditures were the second-highest ever recorded by the IAB.

David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, attributed the drop to the overall economic downturn and a typical retraction in media advertising spending from the fourth to first quarter. "The fundamentals of interactive advertising spend continues to be positive and I would expect to see continued growth in the future," he said in a statement.

The IAB and PWC did not break out types of spending, e.g. search vs. display advertising. But a recent report from TNS Media Intelligence showed that the growth of display ad spending has been hit hardest by economic belt-tightening.

John Battelle's Conversational Marketing Summit, which debuted last fall with much acclaim in a more intimate setting in San Francisco, faced a challenging task with its second edition last week in New York.

For starters, the speaker lineup was impressive, but two of the most important players of the social media Web were noticeably absent: Facebook (which, to be fair, took part last year) and Twitter. Yes, where was Twitter, the epitome of online conversations? Or at least another micro-blogging service?

Additionally, and more crucially, the program had to deal with what business lingo calls a "good problem:" the summit last fall had done such an excellent job establishing and exhaustively addressing the topic that it was hard for the NY program to offer new insights. Sure, the trend toward and the need for conversational media have continued and amplified. So has the emergence of the distributed Internet, or in Battelle's words: "To keep building our brands, we have to go to where the audience has gone." And the audience has gone to conversational media, as traffic data suggests, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

The most successful new online brands are indeed conversational: Blogging service Wordpress, for example, experienced a whopping 202 percent traffic growth since last year, YouTube is up by 80 percent, Wikipedia by 28 percent, Facebook by 72 percent, and Flickr by nearly 86 percent. Sites with tools, services, and platforms that enable conversations to thrive are thriving themselves while the traffic to traditional properties (aka portals) stagnates or shrinks.

"Too many advertisers buy impressions instead of making impressions," Matt Freeman of GoFish remarked. Despite all the momentum that conversational media enjoys, as far as marketers' best practices and tools are concerned, not so much has actually changed since the last CM Summit. And some of the panels seemed to artificially prolong a conversation that had already ended last fall.

B2B = B2C²
Yet it was still an excellent program that Battelle and team put together. Focusing on the role of conversational media in building brands, the summit set out to find the "online analogs to the executions we so love in magazines and television."

Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer of General Electric, was well-suited to provide answers, for she represents an old, venerable brand (the "Hillary Clinton of brands," as someone in the audience framed it) that is successfully adapting to the new branding paradigms on the web. Overseeing a $1 billion budget, she can afford to experiment. But it's not only the money, it's the latitude: "GE is a brand with the permission to do a lot of things," Battelle described it.

Comstock spoke about the importance of "visual storytelling" and GE's continued foray into social media and conversational marketing. She said that the company should--and will--be more aggressive in embracing online conversations, further enhancing the use of embedded video ads and engaging audiences through multimedia content in all of its online channels: "The media plan is becoming the distribution channel." Comstock also made an interesting point about GE's investment in consumer marketing: in her eyes, it elevates the overall brand because it provides a strong umbrella for all of GE's B2B marketing. She's on top of an emerging trend: at the end of the day, enterprise clients are consumers and have the same emotional needs (or as the saying goes, "B2B customers are consumers who have the luxury of having a company pay for what they desire"). On the engagement level, conversational media seem to increasingly force B2B marketers to think like consumer marketers and develop programs that connect directly with the customer--through narratives rather than benefit statements and feature lists.

Will standardized metrics stifle innovation?
The most interesting debates throughout the two-day program centered on the elephant in the room: measurement. Most people in the industry would probably agree that the "end of the click" is near. CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) and CTR (click-through-rate) do not suffice anymore as go-to metrics for the effectiveness of brand-building display advertising campaigns.

A recent report from Starcom MediaVest suggests that the majority of clicks being purchased are being consumed by unemployed, twenty-something, gambling, shopaholic, Internet addicts: "Heavy clickers represent just 6 percent of the online population yet account for 50 percent of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, (...) heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites--a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

Therefore the cry for new types of brand engagement metrics is getting louder: "There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available," said Grant Prentice, Starcom USA's director of connections research and analytics. "'Natural Born Clickers' shows us that we can't count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying online exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy." Added Battelle: "The success of online advertising can no longer be defined only by direct response metrics. Today's brand marketers are focusing on an entirely different set of parameters."

However, at present, there exists a plethora of metrics but no standardized set of measurements that lets conversational marketers prove the impact of their programs.

"One of the greatest barriers that we've seen for marketers in social media has been a general lack of standards and tools for campaign measurement and reporting," said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at eMarketer. "There are, of course, vendors who supply disconnected data points, but it has so far been up to the marketer to wade through this sea of data themselves. What is needed is a single device or methodology that aggregates relevant data in an easily digestible form." Several companies and industry alliances have developed dashboard models seeking to fill that gap.

Federated Media, the summit organizer, introduced its own product: the Conversational Measurement Toolbox, an open suite of campaign measurement, planning, and reporting tools across the three dimensions--"engagement-amplification-equity"--offering marketers greater control and insight into their conversational marketing efforts.

Not everyone working on the creative side of the business is buying into the quest for a standardization of metrics. George Bennett, founder and CEO of branded entertainment firm Magic Bullet Media, contends that viral marketing campaigns are by nature unmeasurable, at least by standardized measures.

In his eyes, viral content, by definition, spreads through paths that are outside of the marketer's domain and are therefore difficult to track--and that's exactly how it should be. Well, probably not much longer. Video analytics firm Visible Measures announced Monday that it is launching a service that enables advertisers and agencies to measure the viral reach and audience engagement of video campaigns. Visible Measures' technology monitors user engagement in a given video stream, and its Viral Reach Database tracks video performance over 80 million unique videos across 150 of the Web's most popular video-sharing sites.

Let 100 flowers bloom
Amid the fixation on engagement metrics, Rich Silverstein, co-chairman and partner of advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, brought back the idea of the good old big idea: "If it's good, it will work. Nice ideas that are big and deep will go a long way." And they even become a broader conversation, a cultural phenomenon, as proven by the recent Clinton vs. Obama Saturday Night Live spot (and a Time cover), both of which were inspired by a Silberstein NBA commercial.

Maybe a standardization of metrics would indeed stifle innovation and social media marketers' appetite for experiments. In the unregulated, fragmented social media space that we're in right now, anything goes, which may very well be a major factor for its vibrancy. Failure is always an option. Andy Markowitz from Kraft Foods quoted Guy Kawasaki: "Let 100 flowers boom."

However, Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights for Edelman Digital, slammed the industry.

"We've gone backwards. There's no standard. The TV screen has a number. A dollar is a dollar. Having a standard makes transactions work. IAB has been moving slowly, fearing, justifiably, that if they come down from Mt. Sinai with two tablets offering a Ten Commandments of metrics, they worry that things could change in six months and render any standard useless," said Rubel, who also writes the Micro Persuasion blog. "Because there are no standards, all agencies are speaking different languages and no one has an answer."

Yet he reminded the audience that the "social Web is made of people" and demanded additional qualitative metrics that measure the impact of conversational marketing on the other side of the equation--the consumer. Social media, at its core, is about collaboration, he argued, and attempts to simply apply the old, quantitative templates of tracking marketing programs would fall short of capturing the essence of online conversations. They are no longer one-way streets: "Consumers are tired of being treated like cattle." They know they are marketed to and expect substantial value in return for their permission, said Rubel.

Consequently, metrics failing to measure the value of marketing programs for consumers would be one-sided and skewed. He also suggested rebranding "conversational marketing" as "collaborative marketing."

"Conversations are just a means to an end," he said, and he finds them valueless if they don't have a positive impact on consumers' lives. That's a somewhat radical proposition, seemingly far ahead of its time. What would truly consumer-focused, impact-driven conversational marketing metrics look like? A good question for the next CM Summit, this fall, in San Francisco.