I am admittedly late to the party with regard to the social media explosion. The MySpace and Facebook revolution hit about 20 years too late for me to become immersed in profile pages and virtual friends during my high school and college years. Nevertheless, working in this industry continuously pushes us to stay current, so I took the plunge and created my own Facebook page several months ago. Feeling emboldened by my newfound hipness, I began to explore the site to find out for myself what makes a publisher like Facebook such a desirable destination for marketers, aside from the obvious reason that their target demographic might be there. After clicking around aimlessly, adding a handful of applications to my page and ignoring countless friend invitations and pokes, I decided to talk to someone who actually had some expertise in this area: Chris Johnson, CEO of Terralever.

I am admittedly late to the party with regard to the social media explosion. The MySpace and Facebook revolution hit about 20 years too late for me to become immersed in profile pages and virtual friends during my high school and college years. Nevertheless, working in this industry continuously pushes us to stay current, so I took the plunge and created my own Facebook page several months ago. Feeling emboldened by my newfound hipness, I began to explore the site to find out for myself what makes a publisher like Facebook such a desirable destination for marketers, aside from the obvious reason that their target demographic might be there. After clicking around aimlessly, adding a handful of applications to my page and ignoring countless friend invitations and pokes, I decided to talk to someone who actually had some expertise in this area: Chris Johnson, CEO of Terralever.

My two cents is worth less than yours is some areas, and just as much in others. I can prove it. I dumped my brand new air conditioner out the window while installing it. Thankfully, I was smart enough to attempt this installation in the back of my apartment, two floors up and over a courtyard that hasn’t courted anyone in years. As the machine fell to the ground, it caught the back of the air conditioner protruding from the window of the apartment below me, busting that one too….

If you are familiar at all with “Monty Python” movies, or know someone who is–and that person incessantly repeats their favorite quotes in their worst British accent–you’ve heard the line, “I’m not dead yet.” Attending OMMA Video and OMMA Publish earlier this week, there was a great deal of discussion focused on which old or existing technologies, methods and media platforms aren’t quite dead yet–to borrow from “Monty Python.”

Every time an ad guy uses the absurd example of your mobile phone displaying a coupon when you walk by a Starbucks, an angel loses its wings.

This is one of those incredibly stupid ideas that only sound good when you ignore all the details. The mobile advertising industry needs to grow up, get realistic about how to drive revenue, and damn it, pick a better example.

Today’s social networking executives seem hell-bent on making history repeat itself. MySpace, Google, Facebook and others are trying to “out-open” each other by giving third-party developers access to their users, their platform, and their data. While opening your network may be popular in the media, it could have devastating results.

In “Dubliners,” James Joyce developed a sequence of short stories that redefined the genre. One feature common to each story is an “epiphany” at the end, a moment of deeper awareness. At the end of “The Dead,” the central character, Gabriel, looks into the falling snow and suddenly sees his relationship to his wife in perspective, powerfully moved by how disconnected he has been from her. I am reminded of Joyce and the epiphany in our discussion of engagement. For publishers, all of this needs to lead to marketing insight. Otherwise, we may end up like Gabriel, looking out our windows and wondering about the disconnect between our sales efforts and how our advertiser partners are spending their money.

On the publisher side, is there a value to trying to quantify engagement? At the recent eMetrics Summit in San Francisco, Gary Angel and Eric Peterson, two leading Web analytics experts, both wondered whether, from an advertising perspective, high engagement on a publisher site might indeed be a negative. The argument: If visitors are “too engaged” on a site, they might be less likely to leave to visit an advertiser’s site. “You probably want visitors who are moderately engaged,” Peterson said.

Recently some of the best thinking about engagement has been percolating in the Web analytics community. In addition to Eric Peterson’s groundbreaking work in developing what I have called “The Peterson Model” as a way to capture a more fully developed idea of visitor engagement, over the past few months, Gary Angel of Semphonic has written five highly nuanced and evolving perspectives of engagement. And Young-Bean Song of Atlas has contributed, “Engagement Mapping,” a white paper that shows ways that advertisers and publishers can begin to tell a more fully developed engagement story than the “Last Ad” measurement that gives 100% credit to the last place an online customer visited — very often Google.

If nothing else, the industry of online advertising and its ever-growing tentacles is interesting. So much news and innovation, though, is clouded by so much hype injected by press releases from those companies that benefit from the use of these publishing product extensions. As a publisher, it’s hard to sift through it all — and yet these headlines materially impact how you guide your internal resources. So for today’s column, I thought I would fight the hype and provide my two cents on how or if you should spend time and money integrating the following products or services into your publishing business.