Within the next few weeks this blog (which is also my company website) will move away from Wordpress. For the first time since I launched the business in 2007, I’ve found something that I think is far better. I’m moving to a solution by a company here in Nashville called NetEffect Services. NetEffect is going to provide a new blog platform for me, but more importantly, they are going to provide a blog that runs on the mother of all analytics solutions, Omniture.

Why The Move?
If social media is going to continue to prove itself as a set of viable business and marketing tools, it’s going to require proof of the return on investment. Businesses rightly realize that doing social media well requires time they may not have right now. In order to justify the time they are spending and validate a need to spend more time, they need data to show that it’s worth it.

Data is one of the best ways to make your case no matter what you’re talking about. I’m hoping data will push the adoption of social media further than it is today and really solidify its role in business. I think the social media ROI conversation is only going to increase in the future and the ability to measure the true impact and reach of your organization’s voice is going to make all the difference in whether or not your business is helped from using social media.

Why Omniture?
The guys at NetEffect are doing something I’m not aware of any other company doing. They’re creating a web development and marketing team that focuses on websites built with the world’s best analytics solution. This tool, Omniture, has previously only been available to large, Fortune 500-type companies because they were the only ones who could afford it. What NetEffect is doing is taking something that has always been inaccessible to the little guys like me (and probably you), and making it available to the average business.

What all of this means is that I’m going to know things about the content of my blog that I’ve never known before. Floyd at NetEffect wrote a blog post about it recently so I won’t talk much more about it now, but I’ll just say that I’m really excited to learn more about how data with content can lead to better content. I think my friend Brannan Atkinson said it best recently when he said that when you can put math with content you have something we haven’t really seen before. It’s my hope that I’m going to learn new things about content specifically, and social media in general, that we haven’t really known before.

Bottom Line
So that’s it. I’m leaving Wordpress for a blog platform that has an analytics solution that hasn’t really been used for blogs too much before. I feel like we’re stepping into the next phase of the evolution of social media. As such, I’m the guinea pig for NetEffect and they’re the guinea pig for me, so it woks out nicely that way. It’s my desire that I’ll begin learning more about how to create better content and also apply that knowledge to my clients.

Finally, I want to thank Nathan Moore and the team at Anthology Creative for designing and hosting my blog these last few years. Nathan is a friend as well as a business associate and I really can’t say enough about how great they are to work with. I’ll continue to work with Nathan and his team in the future and we even have a little side venture we’re developing right now that should be fun.

When the new blog is up, I’ll announce it here, especially for the feed readers who won’t necessarily see anything new. Be sure to subscribe to the NetEffect blog because they’ll be posting results about what we’re learning. I’ll talk about some of that here in the future as well.

In the latest episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I had the chance to interview Tom Cheredar. Tom’s a freelance journalist here in Nashville who also has a great understanding of the social news world. In the podcast he explains that social news is very different from traditional news and that marketers or PR pros (or anyone else for that matter) must understand them well before they hope to benefit from them.

You can listen to the full interview online or download it in iTunes.

In the most recent episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I discussed RSS. RSS isn’t the sexiest thing to talk about in social media, but it’s really important to know why (and how) RSS changes everything for content creators. Think about it like this: it used to be important for people to come to your website to see what you had to say. You tracked page views and unique visits because that was your gauge for success. Now, with RSS you can allow people to stay current with you content but they never need to visit your blog or website again. They can aggregate your content with all the other content they’re interested in.

For some content creators, RSS is a welcome technology because it increases the number of people who can be exposed to your content and decide for themselves that it’s worth their time again. For others, RSS seems like trouble because it threatens all of the control that once existed over the distribution of content. In this episode, we covered what RSS is and why it’s really important to understand and fully utilize for anyone who creates content.

In the latest episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I talked about banner ads and the prevailing attitudes from consumers about them. We cited some stats about the types of banner ads that are considered better than others, but in the end there are actually very few circumstances when a banner ad is going to be a good use of your marketing money.

I have actually changed my view on banner ads a little bit over the last year. I used to be completely against banner ads but have actually found there are a few cases when it’s worth the money. The only times I’ve seen banner ads bring positive results for my clients (both in brand recognition and direct sales) is in the cases where a blogger reviewed the client’s product positively and then we went back and advertised on the same blog a few weeks later…so that has become the exception to my previous ban on banner ads.

As always, you can download The New Mediology in iTunes or listen online.

You ever have one of those weeks where you think things are going to be one way and they turn out completely different? That’s what this week has been for me. Between a sick wife and daughters and the resulting cancellation of several meetings, a crazy storm night on Tuesday that derailed an entire evening of catch up time and a complete transfer and little details required for the redesigned MicroExplosion.com (thanks to AnthologyCreative) it’s been a little nuts. Somewhere in there I’ve been trying to squeeze in the time to finish my presentation slides for PodCamp Nashville this Saturday (sorry I’m late Kelly) and record the next episode of The New Mediology. Then, of course, there’s client work that trumps all of this (except the family stuff of course.) So…it’s been a little different than expected. Regularly scheduled blogging will resume soon and I’ll still have a video of the week tomorrow!