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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.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--It was a breezy evening in late April at the swanky Casa Del Mar hotel, and waiters in black vests had just started pouring Chardonnay.

Newly appointed Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan, dressed in white, was the belle of the ball--one of the few power women in a typically male crowd of technology entrepreneurs and investors at a mixer on the hotel's seaside patio. Not so much as a line, but a circle of people were waiting to swap business cards with her, following the opening-night panel at social media tech conference EconSM 2008, which featured Morgan.

On the perimeter were two unusual party guests--a gray-haired English gentleman about 30 years older than the average attendee, and his brown-eyed 30-something wife. They had bought $600 conference tickets like everyone else, but their name tags marked them as outsiders: "Ian Dunbar; Animal Behaviorist" and "Kelly Dunbar; Sirius Puppy Training."

A business development guy from Web video advertising company VideoEgg looked once, then twice, at Kelly's name tag. He asked if the badge was a hoax. After she explained, glass of Chardonnay in hand, that she and her husband are professional puppy trainers trying to figure out how to build an online community for new dog owners, the light went on.

"That's a great vertical," he said.

From puppies to social media
Outside a seemingly incestuous circle of Web technology executives, their investors, and their employees, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone--like a parent or a teen member of MySpace.com--who could define "social media." Even executives from Bebo and Microsoft speaking at a recent social media conference had difficulty agreeing on one definition.

That's always been the irony of the tech industry. People invent terms like "Web 2.0," "push technology," and "pen computing" to describe concepts that most of their cohorts only pretend to understand. And then a new series of frothy conferences devoted to its study are launched.

That event circuit is often populated by most of the people of the last big thing. Joanna Shields, for example, the president of social network Bebo who spoke at EconSM, used to be managing director of Google Europe (during the search engine marketing trend of 2002 to 2004). And before that, she was a vice president at RealNetworks during the dot-com heyday (and the broadband entertainment trend of 2000 to 2002).

What's different this time around is that social media is inherently about people. Technology executives aren't just talking about chipsets or geospatial positioning devices. They're trying to understand how people share photos; how they shop together; how they network; how they update friends on big news. Human behavior is at the core of social media, a layer on top of all those "tubes" and Internet connections.

And yet social media technology could be making us less social. Even a group of teens lamented at a recent tech conference in Silicon Valley that without those memberships to MySpace and Facebook, they might spend more quality time with their friends and family.

Still, everyone from Nike to Nickelodeon is trying to figure out how to create a social sphere around themselves. Sometimes it takes a group of outsiders like a crew of dog behaviorists to shed light on the strange culture of nerdy technologists and their wealthy investors.

Animal behaviorist Ian Dunbar (pictured right) at home with his son Jamie and dog Claude, a Hound mix.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News.com)

Outsiders looking in
In mid-April, Kelly Dunbar received an e-mail from Fast Company advertising a discount rate on EconSM 2008 tickets. She had recently been obsessing about social media and successful community Web sites, inspired in part by the thriving membership of the newly minted "Internet newspaper," the Huffington Post.

More than a year ago, she and her husband had launched their dog site, DogStarDaily.com, a hub for puppy training tips, videos, and a regularly updated dog blog. But it still only attracted about 8,000 visits a month. So Kelly and her stepson Jamie, a 24-year-old graduate of Brown University, were examining how to use social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and YouTube to attract new visitors. They were easily sold on a social media excursion to L.A.

It was harder to swallow for Ian Dunbar, who is prone to calling a URL an "Earl." He's famous in the dog fancier world for expertise on helping humans train their animals. He literally wrote the book on puppy training. He could teach you a one-minute sit-stay trick for a Jack Russell, but doesn't know the first thing about FriendFeed.

Yet Dunbar understands the world is changing fast--and dog-training amateurs are grabbing the limelight on YouTube with tips on doggie roll-overs and jumps. His professional fame hasn't translated online yet. So he wants to turn his puppy-teaching acumen into a marketable online franchise, with six-minute how-to videos, audio books, and a thriving community of dog lovers. That way, he can go directly to the public, without the need for traditional media.

DogStarDaily.com has puppy training tips, videos, and a regularly updated dog blog.

(Credit: DogStarDaily.com)

It's an expensive enterprise, however. The Dunbars have put about $20,000 into their site, DogStarDaily.com, in the 18 months they've been working on it. And they've made about $400 so far from book sales and ads. They don't pay anyone, but they have about 20 professionals who blog for free.

Ian's son Jamie, who studied visual arts in college and recently moved back in with his parents, just joined the DogStarDaily team in March as its video editing and social media expert. He's learning as he goes.

The Dunbars support themselves through Ian's 27-year-old puppy training academy in Berkeley, Calif., but they'd like to build a successful online "vertical" so that they could travel regularly or work remotely from a place like Barbados--or not work at all.

So with the vision of the Pets.com Internet heyday, the three of them hopped in Kelly's 1997 Honda CRV and drove 370 miles to Los Angeles. It was their first road trip as a new business team.

Looking for inspiration
After a night out at an Italian restaurant on Brentwood, the DogStarDaily trio was ready to learn about social media and eager to hear speakers like Digg founder Kevin Rose (who didn't show up) and YouTube executive Jordan Hoffner (the star of a video session) at L.A.'s Skirball Center.

The evening cocktail party turned out to be less fruitful schmoozing than they hoped. Executives from upstarts like Ning and KickApps spent less time explaining their social-networking applications and more time trashing each other. At one point in the night, a Kickapps' representative told Dunbar not to work with Ning "because Ning owns everything."

Dunbar's take: "I could not believe how snarky people were about their competitors. But then that's the grand irony--that the conference is about social media. That cracked me up."

The threesome was most eager to hear a morning session on the "social video explosion," which featured executives from YouTube, Seesmic, Veoh Networks, and Revision3. The Dunbar team want to host a collection of 1,000 short-form and long-form videos for their site on dog-training topics. (Right now, they have about 200 videos, but their technology is slow.)

The panel of executives gave them hope. Jim Louderback, for example, CEO of Internet TV network Revision3, was bullish about companies that create new niche shows of video content that can attract loyal followings of people. (Of course, that's the business of Revision3.) Advertisers are willing to pay rates as high as $80 per thousand viewers to reach people in a valuable niche like technology, he said.

"Your audience doesn't have to be huge, it just has to be loyal. 100,000 followers can do the job," Kelly Dunbar thought to herself afterward.

During a conference break, Ian Dunbar met Gene Mauro, vice president of business development from Bunchball, a social-gaming application that measures the "science of engagement." Their technology helps people learn to use a Web site or game and rewards them with points. Dunbar perked up to this technology because it basically helps train people on how to use a Web site, which crossed over into his occupation.

"I said, 'Oh wow. We're people trainers, too.' So much technology that we forget it's all about people. People want to be known and valued, and in this huge Web space, people just get lost and it's just numbers and click-throughs," Dunbar said.

After a demo of the technology, Dunbar wanted to use Bunchball to personalize his own Web site. But Mauro gave him a ballpark figure of about $50,000 to use the technology, a high multiple of DogStar's monthly operating budget.

That afternoon, conference presenters were preparing to interview AOL President Ron Grant onstage and Bebo President Joanna Shields live from London via a video uplink. (AOL had newly acquired the social network for $800 million.) But the video-chat technology wasn't working and there was an awkward pause.

Ian Dunbar chuckled in his seat. He had been feeling like a "miserable old fart" among the youthful, competitive scene, but that glitch made him realize that even the rich, fast-paced world of technology has its flaws.

During the session, Dunbar also was struck when Shields said that "community is the content." He realized that his site needs to appeal to women, given that as many as 90 percent of dog trainers are women. Now, he felt like a social media executive.

"It made me a bit competitive, like 'Let's go hell for leather for this,'" Dunbar said. "Why shouldn't we be one of these start-ups."

The three left the conference $3,000 lighter--including the price of tickets, two hotel rooms, meals and gas--and with more inspiration than actual how-to knowledge of social media.

At a dog-training or fancier conference, for example, the professionals onstage will deliver a how-to lecture like how to change the behavior of a dog. At this event, Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner was artfully trying to dodge questions about Microsoft and the company's plans for its Hollywood unit.

"Listening to the Yahoo stuff, I'm amazed at how enormous these companies are, but one part of the company doesn't know what the other part is doing," Dunbar said. "I'm working with my wife and son; we giggle and laugh; we write up a to-do list; and it's done within a week."

Back at their Berkeley hills home, which doubles as the headquarters of DogStarDaily, the three Dunbars are hopeful about turning the site into a powerhouse social network for dog lovers. Soon, they will have audio books available for sale on Lulu.com--recordings they made in a downstairs billiards room of their home with the help of a local band's lead singer. They also plan to produce 40 or so short-form videos this summer and launch personalized dog pages for community members.

They're doubtful that the site will become the next YouTube, but they're having fun together in the process.

"I'm not so sure how much I took from the conference. I didn't get any new radical ideas, but the bonding experience was worthwhile," Jamie Dunbar said.

His father summed it up. "The funny thing is, the whole gestalt of social media is now making people less sociable. It's why my industry is so popular. Dogs are universally accepting."

Flock, a Firefox-based Web browser that plays up social networking online, has raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by Fidelity Ventures. The company's previous investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, also participated in the round.

The deal shows continued faith in the alternative market for Web browsers, beyond the dominant Internet Explorer. Alternative-browser rival Maxthon, for example, has been downloaded more than 140 million times; and it's one of the most popular browsers in China. The Beijing-based company has pulled in investments from Charles River Ventures and Google.

Flock, which was built on Firefox code, caters to people who want to stay on top of services like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr with features that make it easier to broadcast messages to your network. The Redwood City, Calif.-based Flock did not say how many downloads it has to date, but the company said its user base has risen more than 250 percent since January.

The company plans to use the funds to expand its research and development, marketing, and global expansion efforts. To date, the company has raised an estimated $30 million.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya said Wednesday that the social network wants to work with anyone, including Google, as long as the company respects privacy.

Palihapitiya called a recent tussle with Google over the search giant's new social-networking application Friend Connect a "tempest in a teapot."

"Google built an application that violated our terms of service so we asked them, like we do with all applications that violate our terms of service, to remediate," Palihapitya, vice president of product marketing, said here Wednesday in an interview after a press event.

"We temporarily blocked them until it's fixed. We're waiting for the application to conform to our terms of service," he added.

Palihapitiya's comments come days after Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to sit down with Google to resolve issues surrounding the search engine's use of Facebook data.

Facebook and Google have been fighting over Google's Friend Connect service, which allows Web sites to add social-networking features. Facebook said the Google application violated its terms of service by redistributing Facebook user information to other developers without users' knowledge. Google denied the claims, and even took the step of putting up a primer on how its service works.

Facebook also recently announced that it would be extending its API to make data portable to external sites through Facebook Connect.

"Our focus is to ensure people have control over their information. We (blocked Google's Friend Connect) so third-party sites respect members' information," Palihapitiya said.

"As long as that happens we want to allow our users to share their information with everyone," he added. "We want to work with anyone. But the privacy model has to be respectful of users. "

Clearspring Technologies, a technology platform for syndicating and tracking widgets, has raised $18 million in a third round of funding from New Enterprise Associates and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, among others.

The Virginia-based company, which was founded in 2004, has previously brought in an estimated $18 million in private financing. Harry Weller, a partner at NEA, will join Clearspring's board of directors, whose members including AOL co-founder Steve Case.

The company supplies technology to the likes of NBC Universal, Newsweek, and Maxim.com to serve, track, and distribute entertainment or news applications across the Web. It distributes and analyzes the traffic of about 4 billion widgets monthly, according to the compnay.

Clearspring said it will use the money to expand its network of advertisers and publishers, and grow into international markets.

Remember the movie The Game, with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn as unlikely brothers, shot before the backdrop of vertiginous San Francisco?

Well, here's a new interface for the city by the Bay: SFZero is "a new representation for the data that's already there. Your mind is full of inaccurate representations that are affecting the way you use the San Francisco data flow, steering you away from interaction and collaboration and toward unproductive reflexive data loops.

SFZero designers are working double shifts to engineer this next-generation interface that will bring you together with your cohabitants to experience the freedom that is hard-coded into San Francisco's protocol."

Sounds enigmatic, looks enigmatic, and is enigmatic. I am therefore not sure if I fully get it, but in any case, SFZero seems to be a new kind of ARG (alternate-reality game)--a "Collaborative Production Game," as they call it.

"Let Someone Else Plan Your Day!" SFZero says. "Release total control of your life to an anonymous source that supplies you with instructions and directions!"

How can you not sign up for that?

Hat tip to Chelsea Holden Baker.

Many people think PowerPoint is a reason for a nap. But an Internet start-up that helps people share slideshows online has got the attention of several prominent Silicon Valley investors.

On Thursday, San Francisco-based SlideShare will announce that it has landed a $3 million series A investment from venture capitalist Venrock and individuals including Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams and David McClure of 500 Hats. Venrock general partner David Siminoff, an early investor in Yahoo and eBay, will join the company's board.

The company's advisory board also includes Hal Varian, who's chief economist at Google, Garage Technology Ventures managing director Guy Kawasaki, and Saul Klein, founding partner of The Accelerator Group.

So why the interest in slideshows? Since its launch in October 2006, SlideShare has turned into a kind of YouTube for PowerPoint junkies, albeit in a much smaller way. Using the site, people can share their text-and-image presentations, tag their favorites, or respond to another person's slideshow with their own creation. People can also create a mash-up of music tracks and PowerPoint. (People can upload slideshows using Microsoft PowerPoint, Open Office or the PDF format). In the last year, as many as 400,000 registered users have added 300,000 slideshows to the site, according to Rashmi Sinha, CEO and cofounder of Slideshare.

Still, one of the site's most popular slideshows is called "Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it)," with more than 350,000 views. "Lots of people are killing each other with bad presentations now," according to the 61-page document.

Sinha said that critics of PowerPoint are a loud few, but the format is so common that many people can express themselves easily with a slideshow.

"It's a medium that has been abused a lot. But people have learned that it's a simple, linear storytelling format. And navigation is under your control," Sinha said.

The company plans to use the $3 million to expand its team of 10 people in San Francisco and further develop its product, according to Sinha. One direction, she said, is to create more categories of slideshows in areas like technology and social media. At the moment, SlideShare makes money through Google ads, but eventually the company plans to collect fees from directing sales to third parties through the use of slideshows.

"Right now, we're focused on the growth stage," she said.

LOS ANGELES--Curious about why you're getting that Dog Chow advertisement every time you visit Yahoo Finance? One day you might be able right-click the ad to read your marketing-profile dossier.

That's at least the vision of Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division, which means he's in charge of groups like entertainment, search, and news.

"I could envision an icon that appears when you see an ad, and if you were to click through that icon, you would see the data we're leveraging...If we've got it wrong, you can tell us or you could turn it off," Weiner said here Tuesday at the second annual Economics of Social Media conference.

Jeff Weiner, right, during an interview at the Economics of Social Media conference.

(Credit: ContentNext)

His ears must have been burning. Earlier in the day at the conference, Toni Schneider, the CEO of Wordpress-creator Automattic, had said that while he was working for Yahoo three years before, the company had developed an internal system that allowed employees to see the background data used to deliver a targeted ad to a Yahoo user. At the time, Schneider suggested that Yahoo open that system up to users, but the company shot down the idea.

"They were appalled," he said during a panel on online start-ups.

Weiner said after his talk that someone had mentioned Schneider's comments to him. And although it's not a product immediately in the offing, he said Yahoo is much more open to those kinds of projects now. Someone in the industry will do it, he said, and he hopes that Yahoo will be first.

Still, it's not a new idea. For years, privacy advocates have called for similar open systems that hold people's advertising profiles on sites like Yahoo, Google, and Doubleclick--without success.

But Yahoo is already inching in that direction. Later this year, the company will introduce in beta a universal profile for all of its users. Under the plan, it will unify all profiles for users and developers across products like Yahoo Mail, Address Book, Flickr, and Groups so that people have a single log-on. (Weiner admitted that the company has almost a hundred different log-on experiences for its users.)

The idea is that with a single profile, Yahoo will cinch together a social graph for an individual across the network. "We're fragmenting extremely valuable data," said Weiner.

When asked who owns that data, Weiner answered that it would be the user.

"It's going to be very difficult going forward as an industry to limit users (access to information)," he said. "Companies are going to increasingly have to be transparent," Weiner said.

LOS ANGELES--Video may be the next content revolution on the Internet after text and photos, but it's still unclear how to sell it best to advertisers and Web surfers. And that's even for a Google executive.

"The challenge in the future of video is how to find video...and maintaining that sense of discovery," said Jordan Hoffner, head of content partnerships at YouTube, which is owned by Google. "Sharing and tagging video is a start."

Hoffner was speaking on a panel here Tuesday at the Economics of Social Media 2008 conference, along with executives from online media outfits FastCompany.TV, Seesmic, Revision3, and Veoh Networks.

Later in the morning on a separate panel, an executive from MTV, whose parent company Viacom is suing Google for copyright infringement, mirrored Hoffner's sentiments, saying it can be difficult to help people find relevant video among archives on sites like Comedy Central, for example. That's why MTV is tagging video in a way that helps build a recommendation system, according to Erik Flannigan, digital media vice president at MTV.

As to the question of making money from video, Hoffner said he couldn't predict how successful Google's new advertising service for video would be. But he highlighted an inherent challenge for media companies when it comes to video advertising online. With major TV networks, advertisers have a sense of scarcity in inventory, and that drives pricing up. But online, they have thousands of choices to advertise, and that produces the opposite effect.

YouTube also must cherry pick among its user-generated videos for the content that's legal (for instance, it doesn't use a copyrighted music clip) as well as popular among visitors.

"The format is great for users, but I'm not sure it's great for advertisers," Hoffner said.

When it comes to editorially produced video, the picture gets clearer--at least for the executives behind new ventures like Revision3.

Jim Louderback, CEO of the Internet TV network, is bullish about online video advertising. He said his company is building smaller, but loyal, audiences for its online programming, including shows like Diggnation and GigaOm.

Rather than focusing on building a "hit" show with millions of viewers in the broadcast model, Louderback said he's happy with a bunch of shows that have half a million people watching online regularly. Advertisers are willing to pay as much as $80 per thousand impressions (CPM) to reach those loyal audiences, he said. (In contrast, ads on social networks can run at about 20 cents per CPM.)

Revision3 also produces programming at a 10th the cost of what traditional broadcasters spend, he said. "This new model is viable," Louderback said.

Hoffner echoed that sentiment by giving an example of what the Associated Press has done with video. He said that the AP has posted tons of video online--and each of its clips gets roughly a few thousand views. Rolled up together, however, the advertising dollars amount to a "nice chunk of change for them," he said.

Robert Scoble, managing director of FastCompany.TV, said that his technology-focused show has a following of about 80,000 people, and he hasn't had a problem attracting advertisers. Seagate sponsors his show to the tune of seven figures, Scoble said.

"It's a Homestead Act for video...it's untapped for so many niche areas."