Clearly, for businesses gone social, the pressure is on to measure the efforts and investments around it. This will be a hot topic at next week’s conference Socialize West (Oct 20-21 in San Francisco), which OpenAmplify is sponsoring. The conference has a terrific line up of speakers around the four themes: gamify, mobilize, optimize and monetize.

FaceBook announced yesterday the Open Graph Protocol which enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you will have the ability to publish updates to the user.

If you just read a lovely travelogue on the joys of Martinique, you might go ahead and book a vacation cruise.  If you just found a really luscious sounding recipe for Crème Brulee, you might go ahead and order a kitchen torch. As publishers, we intuitively understand how content leads to outcomes. But how can we work in the other direction?  Given an outcome, booking a vacation cruise or ordering a kitchen torch, how can we create or curate content which will produce that outcome?

SimpleReach is a NYC-based company at the intersection of content and advertising.  They've partnered with OpenAmplify to help power the targeting technology behind their content recommendation unit, The Slide, and social influence measurement tool, LinkCurrent.

The Slide:  Helps readers discover more of your content by recommending related posts on a widget that "slides" in at the bottom of the page -- increasing pageviews, time on site, and ad revenue (optional).