I’ve attended hundreds of conferences over my years and typically every conference provides some sort of giveaway (i.e. schwag). This past week at Graphing Social Patterns, the giveaway was a messenger bag (see photo below). It seemed like they couldn’t give them away and even asked attendees to take more than one! Lately more conferences seem to be providing some sort of bag to attendees. A couple of examples include: Techcrunch50 provided a messenger bag and SXSW provided a sack-type bag (for groceries or laundry).

I have two bags that I currently use. One is a bag I bought in Paris. The bag is perfect when I don’t need to carry my laptop. The other bag I received at a conference nearly 9 years ago and yet it’s still in perfect condition today. It has lots of pockets including a padded laptop pocket and I’ve carried it everywhere around the world when I need to take my laptop. Since that conference 9 years ago, not one bag I’ve received has made me want to change my routine.

Overall I find that bags are pretty much a waste of money. Attendees always show up with their own bags, a bag that they are typically comfortable with. It would take a great bag to get someone to change. And that’s why no one takes the bags - it’s just another thing to carry around at the conference. I am not exactly sure how much the bags cost but I am guessing they range from $8-20. I’ve actually started to pass on taking the bags.

So what is the perfect conference giveaway? I am a pen guy - to me you can never go wrong with a pen. You could do something nicer than a Bic and yet still stay under a couple of dollars. What about USB sticks? They could work as well as long as they have a good amount of storage but just like the pen would be used way more often than a bag. A nice mug perhaps - just please, no more bags. Actually what I’d vote for today is a nice umbrella - a foldup that has the conference logo on the top - that would certainly useful.

Others I’ve spoken with seem to like tshirts, hats and some attendees I spoke with would rather that the price of the bag be discounted off the conference pricing. If you do tshirts, make sure you buy styles for both men and women. Yes, there is a difference and it will make you look like a superstar if you create both.

What’s your favorite conference giveaway? Please take our survey below and share your thoughts in the comments.

What’s your favorite conference giveaway?
( polls)

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During the panel that I moderated at Graphing Social Patterns this week, Jodi McDermott from Clearspring noted that companies can swap out what’s inside of a widget to extend the life of the widget. This is something everyone knows but is it something we’ve actually thought about from the publisher’s perspective?

Widgets are great as they provide more interactivity than any other form of advertising. Whether it’s a brand, a company, a Web site, a blog or any online service, widgets bring users closer than ever before. When a user installs a widget that was sent to them or one they found and shared, what terms of use come bundled with the widget? Most widgets I’ve run have never asked for my acceptance of any terms — they just allow for immediate installation.

Let’s assume that The Incredible Hulk movie purchases widget placements through a widget distributor. Fans of the Hulk install the fun widget on their Web sites and blogs. The movie is now out of theaters and the ad run is over. Can the widget distributor now stick anything they want into the slot? Do the Web sites have to approve the swap? At a minimum, should the Web site or blog publisher be notified of the change? The panelists believed that brands wouldn’t want to hurt their reputation with customers so they would never swap out the widget content with something controversial. While I agree with this, most brands are currently using a third-party to handle the widget management - can we trust these companies the same way?

The easy answer is to say that the publisher will see the changed content and remove the widget if needed. That’s easy to assume if the widget is installed site-wide. But if the widget has been installed on a specific content page, the publisher won’t see it until it’s potentially too late.

The IAB and other industry groups have begun to discuss standards for widgets and widget advertising. Should we begin to discuss standards for usage and widget lifetimes? When you install a widget, should there be a clear understanding of how the widget will be used, both today and in the future? I say yes.

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Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, "want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace." Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a "featured app" - said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt - he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) - the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

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Today was day 2 of Graphing Social Patterns East. I attended a majority of the sessions, moderated a panel and also met more awesome CN readers. I think Dave McClure did a great job in leading the overall conference. He was approachable all day, greeted many of the conference attendees and kept things moving basically on-time. One of the techniques Dave used was to play funny and viral videos between each session. Since the sessions were all in the same room, it was a great break between the sessions and lightened the mood quite a bit, especially with the miserable heat outside!

The one thing the conference seems to be missing is buzz, excitement and chatter. The media/press room was basically empty except for Adam Ostrow of Mashable. Maybe it’s the fact that all the sessions are in the same room but the conversations and typical high energy just seem to be missing here (maybe it’s the heat). It seems more like a training session atmosphere. Nothing like the photos and videos from the GSP on the West coast.

Kent Schoen - Facebook

Kent was supposed to lead a discussion about "Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions" but to me it felt more like, "Facebook Stats Showoff." Kent noted that Facebook ads will always be unique and social in nature. Basically he explained that the benefit of buying ads on Facebook is that your ads will be seen by your friends and they can then interact with the ad and spread it to their friends, etc.

Here are some of the stats and updates he shared:

• Four times the invites sent on eVite are sent on Facebook monthly (16m vs 66m)
• Over 150,000 pages have been created and 85,000,000 fans have signed up to the available pages.

Hooman Radfar - Clearspring CEO

Hooman spoke about widgets in general during his discussion. I liked his definition of a "social application" = "widget plus a canvas plus the ability to push socially and virally." One thing he said that I agree with is that analytics and tracking is the key for a successful social campaign. I see way too many companies investing in social media without any measurement. It’s like throwing money down the drain.

Hooman closed by speaking about cross-promotion of widgets and social applications and how it’s one of the keys for success. He explained that Slide and RockYou can launch a new widget or social app and receive immediate users because they can cross promote it into the apps that are already in use.

Evening Party

Tonight’s party was put on by the SocialTimes and SocialCash. Josh at ReadWriteWeb has some info on Social Cash today. The party was held at a very upscale sushi club (wtf?) and the crowd was hopping. The place was jam-packed and the conversation was good. I finally got to meet Chris Saad of the DataPortability project and Sean Ammirati of ReadWriteTalk and mSpoke.

As I was leaving, the folks at SocialCash handed me a bag - which looks similar to a "loot" bag I remember getting as a kid. Inside the bag was a t-shirt (who wants it, email me!), a credit card which apparently is used to cash out the rewards you earn on SocialCash. Also in the bag was $1 dollar bills - 100 of them!!! Damn. I am waiting for confirmation from SocialCash but I may have been given the "winning" bag with all of the loot inside. Somehow I am thinking each of the 100 bags were supposed to contain a $1 bill. I will update this post once I receive confirmation. Check out the photo below for confirmation.

See everyone tomorrow - don’t be a stranger - say hi and grab a CN sticker!

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Just a week after announcing that they will support OpenSocial, European social network Netlog has announced that Yahoo will market the service in Europe. The deal is an exclusive one in Germany and Netlog is Yahoo’s first network partner in Germany. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Comscore reports that Netlog’s services reach 1.3 million unique users, who spend an average of 177 minutes on its sites and reach a total of 676 million page views per month.

Could this be a replacement for Bebo which may leave Yahoo now that AOL has acquired the social network. And more importantly, could this be the first step towards a Yahoo acquisition?

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Source:CenterNetworks

Here at Graphing Social Patterns, Userplane will announce later today the launch of white label plugins for a variety of content management systems (CMS). Plug-ins for Userplane Webmessenger, Webchat and Webrecorder applications are now available for VBulletin, WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and phpFoX.

This should help Userplane further their distribution by offering an easy integration for those users who utilize a CMS system. This isn’t as robust as what other white label social networks such as KickApps, Ning or Magnify.net provide but is an easy way to add additional functionality to a CMS quickly and easily. The key for users is to determine a strategy before installing any widget, plugin or social network addon. Changing strategies later on can be very costly.

I will report back with more details after the live announcement later today. In the meantime, check out our interview with CEO Michael Jones.