Social Networking, User Generated Content and Designing Analytics

I have, for several years been a subscriber to Christopher Knight´s free newsletter www.ezinearticles.com. This morning, I received an invitation from him to connect via:

Linkedin
Myspace
Facebook
Twitter

I accepted his invitation to connect on LinkedIn, because of their handy notification system which tells me when he adds new connections...and as a metrics junkie, I am really curious to know what kind of conversion rates he gets. I wrote in my invitation to connect and asked him to let me know how many invitations went out, so I could get some kind of ballpark idea of the response rates. Of course, I have no idea where I fall in the response curve, so whatever I can observe is suspect as an indicator of what Chris actually experiences in terms of response.

Hopefully he´ll write and tell me what kind of response he got. Now that we´re linkedin buddies.

I recently joined the Web Analytics Association, and volunteered to help coordinate an online special interest group on "measuring user generate content". So, of course, faced with the pressure of writing some stuff to contribute, I´ve been looking at everything through the UGC lense the last little while.

I have to admit, UGC and Social Networking to me spill over into eachother´s swimming pools a lot. I have no idea where to draw the lines. I mean, here is some UGC spawned by Chris´s mailing this morning (look at me, calling him Chris, now).

So, like always, when puzzling with this kind of fuzzy area, I go back to what for me is "first principles".

"What am I trying to acheive?" defines how I approach measuring. How well does the UGC serve my objectives? and what proxies can I construct from within the available data to represent the milestones in moving toward my objectives?

So...connecting to someone I have never met or worked with on linkedin.com presents all kinds of interesting questions.

Have I in some way established a closer relationship with Chris Knight by connecting to him on linkedin? He surely will get a better idea of who his readers are. I checked, and he has 500+ connections (we were already 3rd level connected via 7 or 8 other people). Now, the UGC of his contacts, their profiles, their relationships, has been brought into my field of vision. I wonder how the Web Analytics guys at linkedin interpret that data.

How do they measure UGC?

What defines success for them? If each of their members has a higher average number of connections, can they take that stat as indicitave of business success? Or could it possibly be indicative of a dilution of the primary objectives of linkedin? which for me, as a user, is at least partially to establish some level of prequalification or trust among new contacts. If everyone is a contact, how do I differentiate?

How do other people decide who to connect to via various social networking channels, and how do those decisions to connect define their perception of the channel, its usefulness, and their propensity to generate UGC for the channel? And most importantly for the analytics junkie...how can we extract and interpret data that will accurately inform us about these things...and serve our objectives?