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I'm now back from my trip to Austin and pleased to say that the panel session went just great!  Big thanks of course to my co-panelist Rand Schulman and our moderator Joanna Burton.

I want to blog about it in a bit more detail, but for now I thought I'd just collect together the online resources that support the panel.  It's pretty amazing just how much content has been generated around a single panel - perhaps an indication of how interesting people found the subject.

So, vaguely in date order we have:

1) Original proposal on SXSW Panelpicker

This is the original idea for a panel which was commented and voted on.  Looking back, the list of questions answered looks fascinating (What are agencies for?, What kind of marketing do customers really want?...).  Shame we didn't really get to all of these in the final panel.

2) Slide deck on Slideshare

The proposal then got kicked around into this final presentation - the session itself was formal presentation followed by Q&A.

3) Twitter comments on #toomuchmath

Every panel at SXSW had a pre-set Twitter hashtag, although some panels (including some keynotes) didn't do a great job of publicising the tags before the session. Luckily I caught a session with Cliff Atkinson reading from his book The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media earlier in the week, so borrowed the idea from him of putting our hashtag and Twitter name on every slide. 

I'm sure that this helped generate a ton of comments on Twitter - mostly favourable, although being English I have fixated on the negative ones :-)

It also definitely helped that we had a nice short hashtag.  This wasn't an accident - Rand's PR agency Launchsquad liaised with SXSW to get this sorted out, so good attention to detail Emilie Cole!

Apparently searches on Google for 'toomuchmath' during the panel were bringing up live results off Twitter - hats off to Google for this, as the tag wasn't showing any traffic before 9.30am on Tuesday.  I guess that's what realtime search is all about :-)

4) Live blog

Daniel Slaughter did a pretty amazing job of writing his notes up into a live blog.  My takeout from this is that if I used more slides with really simple bullets on them and maybe talked a bit slower, people might do better at taking notes.  Oh well...

5) Lunch.com reviews / ratings

Lunch.com launched a community feature at SXSW - and to show how it worked, they put together a SXSW Community where every panel (and party!) could be reviewed and rated.  I think this is a great idea - and in our case it generated a fantastically detailed review by Derek Overbey which I really appreciate.  We're currently rated at a +2.6, dragged down by a single negative vote from Robert Scoble - was he even at the panel?

6) Interview on WebProNews

Finally here's the unedited stream of a TV interview I did before the panel - where I'm talking off the cuff about some of the ideas we dealt with in our panel.

Will be interesting to see the edited version which I'm promised will be released soon.

Phew - so still to come is the podcast, possibly - I think that SXSW were recording the session.  Anything I've missed?

This month DoubleClick published a useful benchmark of online advertising performance rates across all activity in 2008.  This is pretty much the most solid data you'll ever see on display advertising performance, based according to DoubleClick on: "hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions."

It's a useful set of benchmarks showing for instance variations in click rates by size and format of ads.  The data is also split by geography - which shows some fairly disappointing results for the UK.

The table below shows the average click through rate across all formats (static image, flash, video) for the main economies in Europe, plus the United States.  (The DoubleClick report has worldwide performance data for twenty nine countries).

This is really disappointing - and not just for the online advertising industry.  As the Guardian recently pointed out, the British newspaper industry is also desperately hoping for a renaissance from online advertising.

So why the poor performance.  Probably no single reason, but possible reasons would be:

• banner fatigue - advertising creative not being refreshed often enough
• lower percentage of inventory going on larger sizes / more static formats
• larger percentage of media going out across networks which tend to deliver a lower CPC
• more brand advertising versus direct response campaigns

Any more ideas anyone?

Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions.  It excludes searches from a contestants own country, because you can’t vote for your own entry.

Personally I’ll be impressed if Google can pull this off.  As any student of Eurovision knows, simple ‘popularity’ ranks quite a bit behind the simmering stew of post-cold war politics across Europe in terms of influence on voting.  So the countries of the former Soviet Union may hate Russia at a governmental level, but the large numbers of Russian diaspora guarantee a healthy slug of votes flowing back to Mother Russia.

Presumably search volume – and hence accuracy – will improve closer to the final on the 16th May.  Right now Google has Turkey and Norway neck and neck for the win, just ahead of Greece.  The punters on Betfair have the same top three, but with Norway clearly ahead of Greece and Turkey. 

I had heard about Zappos and their relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction, but hearing their founder Tony Hsieh speak at SXSW really brought the message home to me.

OK, so there’s the five week training course that all employees have to go through before starting work.  Then there’s the $2,000 dollar ‘reward’ you get at any point during training if you decide that Zappos isn’t for you.  Then there’s the insistence on cultural fit as well as talent – Zappos will turn someone down with excellent skills rather than compromise on someone that they don’t feel will fit in.

But I rather liked their interest in happiness as a goal.  They like to talk about Zappos delivering “happiness in a box” – but they have clearly gone beyond sloganeering and thought hard about the science behind happiness.  So one simple example – they split their promotion process into six six month modules, simply because they felt that giving their employees a regular indication of progress would make them happier.

Some great slogans as well – particularly: “Don’t chase the paper, chase the dream”, which if memory serves is Puff Daddy!

And I liked a quote of Al Gore (quoting an African proverb I think):

“If you want to go quickly, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.” 

From Friday, Econsultancy started to display every tweet that referred to it on their front page.

It was an interesting experiment (actually still continuing) - but it does look like momentum has fallen away according to this data from Flaptor.

Perhaps it's just a little *too* transient - people know that they will only have their three minutes of fame, so once they have experimented with it once, they move on.

Alternatively perhaps this is the kind of thing that always does better on a Friday afternoon than on a busy Monday morning?

[Go here for an updated celebrity twitter chart]

I’ve revisited last week’s Twitter celebrity chart, adding in a few names that I missed (and I’m sure there will be others). 

I’m too, er, indolent to indicate chart movements on this, but the big stories are that Stephen Fry has put on almost sixty thousand followers in a week, whilst Phillip Schofield has added thirty-five thousand followers to take third place in the chart.

Meanwhile Chris Moyles takes number five in the chart after just eight days on Twitter. There seems to be a natural affinity between DJs and Twitter – Twitter is a fantastic feedback loop for them.

To put the chart into perspective, the top five here also rank in the top thirty of Twitterholic’s global chart of Twitter users, ahead of illuminati like Al Gore.

I’ve added Coldplay to the chart, who obviously aren’t a single personality, but I guess they are famous. I sense the dead hand of their record company behind the tweets, but perhaps I’m wrong: they are currently appealing directly to their 30k followers to vote for them in the Brits, so it will be interesting to see if this ploy works.  If it does, it’s bound to be widely copied.

Update: I forgot about David Mitchell – I think he will be somewhere around the Rob Brydon level, tragically easing Andy Murray out of the top twenty!

[19 Feb: Go here for an updated celebrity twitter chart]

OK, I missed a few people out of my initial list – Chris Moyles apparently spent most of his breakfast show on Radio 1 talking with Andi Peters about how he has signed up to Twitter.  So some shock new entries there.

I’ve extended the list to a top fifteen, so that I can squeeze Andy Murray into it as a token sportsman (and Fearne Cotton as the only female celeb to make the list).  Dave Gorman is a useful base point – below his 5,000 followers I suspect we are well into the C-list.

By the way, whilst Chris Moyles has done a fantastic job in getting 12,300 followers over the course of the day, Stephen Fry has added a good five or six thousand followers today simply by being stuck in a lift.

PS. If you really care about this stuff, the Guardian has a much more comprehensive list of celebrity twitterers.

Great post by Mike Butcher on TechCrunch arguing that AOL may be contemplating a sale of Bebo.

One strategic issue I can see with Bebo as a media property is that it is very very strong with kids of school age – but as kids get older, they seem to gravitate to Facebook.

If Facebook can hold its audience from the teen years into their twenties and thirties, clearly that’s going to be more valuable to many advertisers.

Whilst I don’t doubt that AOL is probably looking at some disappointing numbers from Bebo right now, I’d be surprised if they decided to sell at what (I hope) is close to the bottom of the market.

That’s especially because Bebo has delivered some great innovation around ad properties, particularly around online soaps like Kate Modern. It’s easy to pigeon-hole Bebo as a social networking site – but it is also an important delivery channel for video.  And video, as bandwidth increases, will be the channel of the future.