Due to the inordinately non-existent budget for interviews I didn't fly Dan Zarrella over from the states to interview,  instead I plumped for a juicy, all-you-can-eat expose (ish!) email interview for you, the pretty people. Dan is a VEEEEERY smart cookie when it comes to analytics and social media.  He thinks about differently to most I have met (although we have actually never met) and, like me, loves a bit of Psychology.  Full bio here but suffice to say he's involved with more social media shenanigans than there have been series of Big Brother.

From creating apps, completing research, blogging and writing for outlets with slightly more traffic than this one (like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, ProBlogger etc.) Zarrella would whoop you blind in a social media geek-out.

Follow him on Twitter

You call yourself ‘a social & viral marketing scientist’ – what does that mean and why do you approach it in that way?

I like to approach social and viral marketing from an analytical perspective. I think there is an abundance of "truthiness" in this space, what I like to call "unicorns, rainbow and soft-focus" advice. Rather than say what feels right, or what I think should be true, I like to look at actual data, experiments and science to understand what is really true. Word-of-mouth, social, viral communications have been occurring for thousands of years between people and while the internet changes how these mechanisms works, and while it certainly accelerates them, the most important effect the web has is to make them observable and measureable in ways never before possible.

 
What’s the main point(s) PR pros still aren’t getting about social media?

Its not about being sunshine and rainbows all the time. If you ever find yourself thinking that your "brand" is just to be uncontroversial and unchallenging, you need to re-think your positioning. You can't be everything to everyone, to really reach some people you need to piss some people off. Pick sides.

 
TweetPsych builds a mini psychological profile of Twitter users – is profiling the next big thing for social media or is it something else?

I'm not sure that profiling per-say is the future, but I do think that deeper analysis is going to be very important moving forward. There is a wealth of information to be studied about consumers and their behavior, and this information comes from analysis of content users are putting out there themselves. Its like behavioral targeting without the privacy concerns.
 

Three tips you’ve never given anyone else about social media / pr / pros.

1) Hug the haters. I get some criticism sometimes for calling myself a "scientist" and rather than back down and stop doing that, for April fools day I launched IVMS (http://ivms.danzarrella.com). I doubled down on the label and laughed at all the possible attacks against it.

2) If someone is giving you advice or defining strategy or tactics, ask them what data they're working from. If they don't answer, or give you some hand-waving about "experience" run the other way.

3) Learn to code. You don't have to be a super-programmer, but if you're working on the web or in technology and you can't even speak the languages a little bit, you're doing yourself a disservice. 

What are your top tools for pr pros when it comes to monitoring?

Honestly I do most of my monitoring by hand, the occasional Google search and several always-open Tweetdeck tabs. I've heard great things about Radian6's product and the company I work for, HubSpot, just added social media monitoring functionality to our product.

Web 3.0 and the semantic web are being bantered about – what’s your take – what is next to come in?

Semantic web technologies will clearly be very important as will the ubiquitous web where all of your devices are plugged into the net. For web marketing I think the future will hold much more analytical approaches to our work, understanding human behavior and how to manipulate it.