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52 Ways Social Media Week is Every Week

52 Ways Social Media Week is Every Week
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Happy Social Media Week! OK, I’m only referring to those of you in Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington, DC. I’m also referring to everyone else, as you can watch the biggest sessions live or on-demand.

A lot has changed since last year, when I wrote about why Social Media Week should be every week. That feels so quaint. By now, Social Media Week really is every week. In case you’re not convinced, here are 52 reasons why:

1)     Facebook will soon have a billion users. A billion is cool.

2)     Facebook will soon have half a billion mobile users.

3)     Search and social are becoming more intertwined. It’s messy now, but Google+ and Bing are starting to figure out when it works.

4)     Pinterest can become one of the biggest social media properties without any help from “typical” early adopters of male teens and twenty-somethings.

5)     Tumbling is the new blogging.

6)     Blogging’s still as important as ever.

7)     No one remotely sane thinks social media is a fad.

8)     Scrabble and Boggle addicts can play similar games with their friends through their mobile devices without ever worrying about lost game pieces.

9)     You can’t help sometimes checking out your friends’ pictures of their kids.

10)  It’s so big that whenever two or three people say they stop using a massively popular service, The New York Times publishes a “trend” story about its demise.

11) “Social media is a messy, magical gift. It's the unexpected that creates value for both the brand and customer. Done well, social media brings customer and the people of the brand closer together.” – Toby Bloomberg

12)  Wikipedia.

13)  Shaq has always been and will always be one of the best things about Twitter.

14)  Social media gets people to turn on the TV for live events.

15)  It gets people into stores.

16)  In those stores, retailers and product manufacturers can incorporate social content digitally and physically to educate, empower, and excite customers.

17)  Friends’ endorsements sell products.

18)  People get crowds to fund their passion projects…

19)  …and charities…

20)  …while refining their product ideas.

21)  Brands do this too.

22)  “We are the nation… of Google and Facebook.” – President Obama

23)  Are there any weeks where there aren’t social media-focused events?

24)  Job descriptions for people with at least five years of experience focused on social media are looking less ridiculous.

25)  Thanks to Skype, Google+, Apple’s FaceTime, and others, the “Jetsons” vision of video telephony has become real.

26)  Spotify and others have reminded us that music is better with friends.

27)  Social media works best when it brings people together in real life.

28)  It makes professional collaboration far easier and richer.

29)  It has become an essential part of R&D.

30)  “People will tell you social media is some kind of unicorn, but it’s really just a horse.” – Jay Baer

31)  Amazon’s Kindle and Goodreads prove that some social media users have the attention span to read books.

32)  Thanks to Reddit and MetaFilter, even guys who should be ironically over social media by now are non-ironically into it.

33)  Memes are social. And occasionally brilliant.

34)  Social media doesn’t create democratic revolutions, but it helps get people together to change the world.

35)  “People publish. Instead of denigrating user-generated content… marketers need to understand that this is what we care about.” – Seth Godin

36)  There are still a few great social services and apps that haven’t been acquired and subsequently shut down by Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter. At least, that’s true until Facebook’s IPO.

37)  A few years ago, a presidential candidate was lambasted for being a community organizer. Now community management is one of the hottest professions.

38)  We’re getting closer to figuring out this whole ROI thing.

39)  Foursquare Day is April 16 (think about it). And it was started by a fan.

40)  Brands don’t always have to create; they can curate.

41)  Organizations like Kiva, (RED), and CharityWater keep finding ways to use social media to improve lives.

42)  Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube. Whether or not you like him, accept that the kid’s ridiculously talented.

43)  We have events like the Suxorz to prevent us from staying too full of ourselves. Even if the event’s during Social Media Week, nominees come in all year long.

44)  Super Bowl comments jumped nearly sevenfold in a single year.

45)  There will be more Tim Tebows and Jeremy Lins.

46)  Some people do care about what their friends are eating.

47)  We’re exposed to more cute animals than we ever were before. That has to elevate our moods enough to reduce healthcare expenditures.

48)  Craigslist, breaking every design rule there is, remains a top 25 website.

49)  The sites ranking higher than Craigslist include strictly social sites Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Answers, Blogspot, Blogger, LinkedIn, and Tumblr, along with socially driven properties like YouTube and Huffington Post.

50)  LinkedIn has proved that social media services can be successful even if they don’t depend entirely on advertising.

51)  “Social has no regard for silos, business units, or geographies. It transcends all of those. The question then isn’t ‘How does social media fit into my organization?’ The question is, ‘How do we adapt our organization’s realities to the realities of social media?’” – Jeremy Epstein

52)  Try going a week without social media.

10 Social Super Bowl Marketing Strategies

originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

On Sunday, I’ll be hoping for more than just another Super Bowl where the New York Giants leave New Englanders weeping in their clam chowder. I’m hoping to see advertisers use social media in ways that make sense for them -- and their consumers.

Marketers’ Super Bowl strategies are locked up by now, so consider the suggestions below more of a wish list than a guide. These apply to far more than the Super Bowl, though, so print them out or save them in Evernote and use them throughout the year ahead.

1) Think like your target consumers. If you don’t have this memorized, internalize how they use social media, and learn what they do while watching television. Learn what they share, how they share, who they share it with, and why they’re sharing it.

2) Give your current fans something first. Anything. Now’s the time to remember them. How often do people walk down the street thinking, “I wonder what advertisers are going to be shilling a week from now?” The crazy thing is that this is happening right now. Reward your loyal fans who already have publicly expressed an interest in you.

3) Integrate with television through mobile social media. Shazam has teased that up to one- third of Super Bowl ads will have a “Shazam This” callout. Why only one-third? Services like Shazam offer easy ways for consumers to instantly share ads and engage in other kinds of mobile experiences.

4) Provide access to the people in or behind the spots. Our culture doesn’t just value celebrity; it values talent. Social media offers many perfect ways to connect talent with the people who care about them, whether it’s through tweets, chats, behind the scenes video, Google+ Hangouts, or countless other options.

5) Reach out to at least one community beyond Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What are your customers most passionate about? Who will be especially interested in what you have to say? Consider this an opportunity to branch out beyond your checklist or comfort zone.

6) Bring people together in person. Are people already coming together in person to watch the game? That sounds like a social opportunity, one that can combine the physical with the digital.

7) Offer still images that can be pinned, tumbled, and grammed. Brands invest so much in the spots that they may forget how powerful still images are now. Make it easy for people to share images through sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram. What’s great is that the brand doesn’t even need to actively participate in those social platforms (though brands would do well to evaluate them). Just look at the images popping up on Pinterest via VW.com, with screen shots of the Volkswagen ad teaser of dogs barking the Darth Vader theme. Now imagine how much traction there would be if VW offered still images and a simple “pin this” icon.

8) Monitor everything. Hint: the previous example from Pinterest is actually a useful brand- monitoring tool to show images shared there from any other site. The more you know about what’s being shared, the more you can facilitate more of that behavior, add your voice, and respond as needed.

9) Connect search and social. One way brands will start doing this is simply by participating in Google+. That will be increasingly important this year. Beyond, that though, brands should ensure all their owned digital touchpoints are optimized for search engines. Given the budgets involved for Feb. 5, perhaps some paid media is in order too.

10) Plan what happens after the game is over. Ideally, you’ll have all these new fans and followers and friends, and you’ll need to give them a reason to stick with you once your promotional stunt is history. With the potential for social media to create an ongoing dialogue and even relationships, this is an asset marketers didn’t have a decade ago. Use it.

The game lasts a few hours. The build-up takes a couple weeks. Two days after the game’s over, most of the ads are forgotten. The mechanics of social media aren’t generally as flashy as a 30-second spot, but social experiences should last far longer.

Instant RFP in Jeopardy at Social Media Insider Summit

image of four great presenters and a moderator talking too much courtesy of Drew Neisser via Foursquare

Instant RFP in Jeopardy
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider Summit

Florida is one of our more unpredictable states. The weather, the voting patterns, and the Florida Marlins can constantly surprise the locals, and there aren’t many other places where you can reasonably ask, “Is the Buick driver in front of me taking a nap, or is there an alligator crossing the highway?”

That helps to explain why MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit in Florida this week sparked far more questions than answers. The session I hosted was supposed to provide answers to the question, “How can a retailer use social media to drive in-store sales while positioning the marketer as an innovator?” That was the premise of “Instant RFP,” a panel where I presented four social media startups with a scenario they had to address. They had a week to prepare their answer, but just five minutes to present it, with additional time to answer questions.

The presenters were: CrowdTwist CEO Irving Fain, MicroStrategy Senior Director Marc Hayem, Echo VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant, and Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford. Their responses were strong, but the questions they provoked were far more interesting. SMIS event chair Cathy Taylor introduced the session saying it was like a game show and I was Alex Trebek; she couldn’t have been more prescient. I wound up providing an answer, and the panelists served up the questions that marketers should ask. In this case, the answer is, “A retailer should use social media to drive sales at their individual stores.” Here are the questions:

1) What’s the return on investment of social media?

This was a favorite of Fain’s, and it was echoed in all the presentations in this session, as well as others during the event. There doesn’t always have to be a clear-cut ROI. For instance, Coca-Cola’s Laura Houghton mentioned in a session on Google+ that Coca-Cola needed to be where its fans expected the brand to be, and it also needed to capitalize on any search-related benefits. She wasn’t looking at how many cans of Coke were moved. Yet for retailers and other marketers, it’s increasingly possible to track sales. What’s even better is that consumers who are fans of a brand will be especially interested in purchasing that brand’s products. From the panel, there were many answers on ways to do it: segmenting audiences to message the most influential shoppers; mobile sale alerts; live events promoted through social media; allowing local store owners to create their own sales. The specific tactics matter less than the bigger idea that marketers can push for answers relevant to their brands.

2) How much control of social programs should be given to local store or market managers versus a centralized marketing team?

Tedford seemed to have the most experience here, and he was a strong advocate of shared responsibility. He acknowledged that local managers often know which promotions will resonate best with their individual markets, but the centralized team will have more experience with what works across a large array of locations. Local managers also tend to differ in terms of their interest and activity with various marketing channels, so one store’s presence could be flourishing and another could be dormant without national promotions to even out the discrepancies.

3) How should marketers use their physical stores?

This question was inspired by Hersant, whose response focused on simultaneous live events at all of this hypothetical retailer’s 1,500 locations. The build-up would occur largely through social channels, while live feeds of the hottest products would appear in stores. Much of what Hersant proposed, including a live chat with a company spokesperson or celebrity endorser, could be done entirely digitally, which made the program all the more intriguing. Just because it can be done digitally, should it involve the physical locations somehow? And how can retailers with a physical presence bring digital experiences into their stores? What’s key is that digital marketers consider all consumer touchpoints, including the physical stores and people working there, as assets that can be incorporated into social media marketing programs.

4) How much do you segment your audience?

All presenters addressed audience segmentation in various ways. The most explicit were Fain, who discussed identifying the most influential consumers and targeting them separately, and Hayem, who proposed using data augmentation to make inferences about consumers and segment them accordingly. Segmentation is hardly a new discipline for marketers, but social media adds more variables. Once you define what influencers are, how do you treat them differently? How uniformly do influencers act across local markets? How much do you factor in one’s purchase history versus social sharing activity? Does all of this segmentation lead to a better ROI than mass messaging, given the added investment of resources needed?

Clearly, there are more than four questions here. The biggest lesson is that these are all questions you can ask today with the expectation of getting answers relevant to your brands, markets, and campaigns. Which questions will you ask first?

The Chosen Media

The Chosen Media
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider
(update: for the benefit of the Walgreens representative who commented below, and the benefit of anyone else who may be confused, this entire column is an opinion, as is everything else on this blog)

“Now therefore, if You will obey our voices, and keep our covenant, then social media shall be a special treasure to us above all media. For You are holy media to us, and we have chosen You to be our treasured media from all other media on the face of the Earth.” – The Gospel of Zuckerberkowitz 3:16, shamelessly bastardized from Biblical passages cited in Wikipedia

Social media has clearly become the Chosen Media. If you have any doubt, consider the outcries over the past week directed at Google, Facebook, and Walgreens:

1)     Google sparked the biggest backlash. As noted by fellow columnist Cathy Taylor, Google betrayed users’ trust by pumping Google+ results into natural search listings while shutting out Facebook and Twitter. The outcry will reverberate as more people initiate searches that trigger questionable social results. My friend Dan Lewis tweeted, “Google's social-ly image search stunks. [sic] I like @dberkowitz, but I don't want his vacation pics when doing a search on ‘Tiananmen Square.’”

The headlines coming out of it were sometimes scathing. The Washington Post ran a guide to its privacy and antitrust implications. Gizmodo declared, “Google just made Bing the best search engine.” Relevance is personal, so Google had some defenders, but if this is what social search looks like, the early verdict indicates people would rather keep the two separate.

2)     Facebook can thank Google for taking attention away from its own controversy. The social network is now mining public and private Facebook posts for data that Politico can use in its reporting. Anytime you reference Mitt Romney driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car (that means you, Gail Collins), Facebook will tabulate your feelings about it and send it over to Politico’s editorial desk.

The problem lies with Facebook mining private posts without educating users about what it’s doing or providing a way to opt out. There are probably millions of people paranoid about the government monitoring their lives who don’t realize that Mark Zuckerberg’s operation is at least as sophisticated. ReadWriteWeb noted that this is a great potential service from Facebook, but Facebook can’t violate users’ trust.

3)     If you can’t trust Google and Facebook, you can at least trust your local pharmacy, right? Not so fast. Walgreens has been involved in a lengthy and public dispute with pharmacy benefits provider Express Scripts. While Express Scripts is reaching out to consumers to help them switch pharmacies, Walgreens is wagering that the court of public opinion will be decided through social channels. It kicked off a widespread campaign by sponsoring tweets and paying off bloggers, with the goal of pressuring Express Scripts to relent to Walgreens’ terms.

The problem for Walgreens is that it’s bringing a lot of extra negative attention to the issue. Promoting a tweet with the hashtag “ilovewalgreens” hardly feels authentic, and the bloggers being paid don’t necessarily have any connection to or affinity for the retailer.

In each of these examples, the offending party is being accused of violating the Covenant that was formed between the People and the Chosen Media. It’s a Covenant that says transparency, privacy, and authenticity are sacred. It’s a Covenant that says the People own the Chosen Media, no matter which corporations participate. It’s a Covenant that says that the People’s loyalties are to the Chosen Media, and to each other; everything else is fluid.

Few other things are sacred anymore. The prophets of Lucy and Berle and Cosby no longer carry the same resonance. Newer idols, like “American Idol,” work precisely because they resonate through the Chosen Media. In lieu of temple chambers, we have echo chambers.

What’s sacred today may not be tomorrow. Yet right now, media companies, marketers, and everyone else must respect the Covenant between the People and the Chosen Media -- or face the uproar by those aggrieved.

Presenting CES: Consumer Electronics Socialization

I'm just getting started with post-CES recaps, and I've got two that came out today. In Advertising Age, I shared "Five Key Things to Know about CES." It's a guide for marketers that may prove useful when digesting CES 2012 and planning for the 2013 event.

In MediaPost's Social Media Insider, presented below, I take a little bit of a lighter approach that focuses on the gadgets' point of view. There's plenty more to say about such event that attracts 140,000 people, and I welcome your thoughts on it too.

Presenting CES: Consumer Electronics Socialization

Emcee (an actual microphone): I'd like to introduce you to CES, which we all know stands for Consumer Electronics Socialization. We've got a lot of great speakers here -- and Bose SoundDock, you know that doesn't just refer to you!

Bose SoundDock: Boo!

Emcee: Thanks for the annual heckling. This year's CES has been especially meaningful for us. Unlike a show like South by Southwest (SXSW), which is social in the sense of people connecting with each other, CES is all about us. It's designed for us devices to communicate with each other. To start off, I'd like to go around the auditorium here and hear a handful of examples of how you've been socializing at CES 2012. Xbox, why don't we start with you?

Xbox: I have never felt younger. This year, you’ll be able to browse content on your Windows Phone and access it through your Xbox. And just wait until I fully integrate with my new cousin Skype.

Emcee: Skype, why don’t you tell us more about that. Skype, are you there?

Xbox: She was just here a second ago but dropped off. Anyway, I’m also really excited about our improvements in voice controls.

Dragon TV: You know I’m already doing that, right? My parents at Nuance Communications are taking voice recognition technology from the PC to the mobile device to the TV set this year.

Vlingo: You’re not the only ones. We’re taking our Virtual Assistant from the phone to the TV.

Emcee: The TV is such a focus of cross-device communication. Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, LG, put down your remotes. We know that you’re all very excited about this.

Simple.tv: It’s so much bigger than voice control. You can now pre-order my DVR that can record broadcast television shows to watch from your other devices, like laptops and phones.

Emcee: Sign me up. CES is hardly just about us socializing with the TV, though.

Atari Arcade: That’s right, my parents at Discovery Bay Games made me so that I can instantly turn an iPad into a classic retro arcade game console. Socialization is supposed to be fun, isn’t it?

Emcee: Exactly. From gaming, it’s extending into other areas of the home.

Whirlpool: I’ve come out with new washing machines and dryers that allow people to monitor the status of their laundry cycle on their mobile devices.

Nest: Mind if we chime in? We’re new here this year, but we’ve got a new thermostat that adapts to people’s lifestyles and adjusts energy usage to fit with their consumption patterns. You can then access the thermostat via mobile apps. 

Emcee: And it goes even further -- like the garage.

Ford SYNC: Well, I get a little claustrophobic in the garage, but I know what you mean. I’m an actual platform for my cars, so I can become a search engine, an entertainment console, or just about anything else. And then when you pair your phone with me, I make communicating even easier.

Mercedes: I’m also pairing with Facebook, Yelp, and others. Just think of all the ways you can rationalize buying me now. Pay $50,000 for Facebook, and the car is free!

Emcee: Good point. Meanwhile, CES is playing out in all kinds of ways across mobile devices.

Android: From early on, I’ve been designed to sync up with the Chrome browser and other Web-based services.

Kindle: Mind if I chime in?

Emcee: How did you sneak in here?

Kindle: Well, Amazon doesn’t usually let me come to this, but for a lot of consumers I was the first to deliver on the promise of starting content on one device and continuing it on another -- even if you only use the software and don’t buy my hardware.

Netflix: Word. I may compete with Kindle’s people, but I’ve also built the future of my business on universal access to all of my content.

Emcee: It’s true. What you’ve already created is a sign of where everyone else here is going. Years ago, it was hard to have this show, as none of us at CES actually socialized with each other. We’re getting so much better at talking to each other that it’s making people love us so much more.

Android: (zzzzzzz)

Emcee: Oh no, Android ran out of juice already. Let’s power up at the buffet. We still have a lot more to talk about, especially as we plan for CES 2013, when none of us will be able to shut up.

 

So-Called Predictions For A Social 2012

So-Called Predictions For A Social 2012

originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

I used to really like reading and writing prediction roundups this time of year. Then I started reading and writing them. They all tend to include most or all of the following elements:

1)     Predictions based on events or trends that already happened in the previous year (Facebook’s mobile usage will take off in 2012!)

2)     Financial predictions that can be expressed by plotting past performance on a chart and extending it another year (The past four New Year’s Days through this week, AAPL shares went from about $100 to $200 to $300 to $400, so you’ve probably read predictions that Apple’s shares will hit $500 this year)

3)     A couple wacky, outside of the box examples of either of the above to show that the writer has some original thoughts that have no grounding in reality (AAPL will reach $1,000! Facebook will launch a new line of hand soap!)

Learning from previous events to plan ahead may not be as exciting as claiming psychic powers and telling fortunes, but there’s value in it nonetheless. That’s why a lot of my so-called predictions for 2012 are really extensions of the previous week’s roundup of everything that happened in 2011. Read that for added context, and read more below about what to expect for social media this year. You may not be shocked or even awed by this modest list, but it should lay the groundwork for all of our work ahead.

Community management

Which company had the biggest impact on community management in 2011? Facebook and Twitter evolved and grew, but the real change agent has been Google. First, Google+ became a social network whose greatest value will likely be what happens outside of the Google+ site, and then YouTube transformed from a distribution tool to a community. These changes will influence how community management works with other marketing disciplines. There goes another silo.

Gamification

Gamification will be exposed for the gimmick it is, but marketers will still benefit from selective uses of it. There are so many companies that either openly promote gamification or couch it as something related like social loyalty, such as Badgy, Bulbstorm, Bunchball, Crowd Factory, and CrowdTwist. The g-word is mercifully in decline. It’s akin to how we no longer discuss widgets, but there’s still a place for distributed content.

Health

Despite my issues with the aforementioned g-word, it played a big role in the consumer health technology market over the past year, with services such as Lark, Striiv, and Jawbone’s Up using game mechanics to help consumers achieve wellness goals such as sleeping better and being more physically active. My personal favorite is Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 for Xbox Kinect, which constantly reminds me how far ahead Jeremy Epstein is in burning calories. These social hooks will keep consumers more hooked.

Influence

Not only did millions learn their Klout score in 2011, but some learned their Kred score (ugh), and their PROskore (double ugh), and their ranking on the Empire Avenue index (please, make it all stop). More importantly, so much effort has been made into creating new definitions of influence. For instance, an influencer on Crowdtap is very different from one on Expo TV or Circle of Moms. In 2011, influence got really messy, in the way that your home gets really messy when you’re sorting through everything, right before it’s all put back together in a more orderly manner. It will take more than a year to meaningfully reassemble the influence puzzle, but expect plenty of effort expended here.

Location

Local hooks tie in seamlessly with mobile marketing, but it’s bigger than that. Brands, publishers, technologists and others need to figure out how to use location in fun and useful ways. One of my latest gaming obsessions is Life is Crime, an Android app that’s basically Mafia Wars using real locations. My wife is a little worried about how proud I am that I’m the kingpin of a Chase bank branch and a health clinic in our neighborhood. It’s the real-world angle that makes it so exciting.

Mobile

The one milestone to note here is that Facebook is on the cusp of having more than half of its users accessing from mobile devices. As goes Facebook, so goes media. Ready?

Professional productivity

Pay attention to the professional services space. Whether it’s a network like LinkedIn, a content platform like SlideShare, or productivity tools like Rapportive, Boomerang, and Buffer, there are ways for you to use social media right now to do your job better. Master them now; don’t wait to catch up when you’re actively job hunting later.

Shopping

Social commerce became a known entity in 2011. Now it’s here, so what should marketers do about it? This will be one of those years where the pendulum swings back from gimmicks to fundamentals, whether through marketers making better use of their social channels for explicitly commercial purposes, or through new uses of emerging mobile social shopping services.

TV

In many ways, TV powers Twitter, and Twitter drives TV ratings. Apps like Shazam, IntoNow, and GetGlue are creating new kinds of interactions. Accessing real-time content relating to what’s on TV will be far more meaningful than the fleeting fad of check-ins. Meanwhile, regardless of what Apple does in the TV space this year, Microsoft already has tens of millions of people using interactive and increasingly social TV experiences through Xbox. This year, Microsoft is in the best position to transform how we think of social TV. Regardless of which platforms and apps win, TV is already extremely social, and some of the best untapped social marketing opportunities right now are in the living room.

Get cracking

If that’s not enough to get started with for 2012, you must be planning for 2020 already. Happy New Year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Social 2011 in Review

10 Mobile Social Trends for 2012 and Beyond: Customer Engagement Technology World 2011 Keynote

View more presentations from David Berkowitz

Mobile social media was a big trend for 2011. And aren't you glad not to see a Weiner picture here?

A Social 2011 in Review
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Where did 2011 go? How did Pinterest, Bo.lt, and Sonar change how we interact with media, and with each other? What happened to Anthony Weiner and Osama Bin Laden? When did “+”join “@” in the digital lexicon?

In a year where I visited eight countries and read 95 books, I also managed to pen nearly 50 columns, and I reread them all so you don’t have to. Several themes emerged, with quite a few posts about startups, shopping, mobile social media, Google, and events. The year also brought its share of failures and disappointments to learn from. Here’s 2011 in review.

Startups

In January, we looked at how OneTrueFan extended check-ins to websites. It was subsequently acquired by gamification company BigDoor. Bo.lt made publishers squirm by letting anyone doctor webpages, and Sonar made some mobile users squirm by making it easier to find people near them. In August, we checked out what made Pinterest so addictive, and it only gained momentum since then, with Hitwise recently reporting that its traffic rose 4,000% in the past six months.

The year ended with two more relevant features. The previous column presented the first-ever Berky awards for social innovation, starring many startups, along with Google, which acted more like a startup this year more than any time since it went public. The week before, 16 resolutions for vendors provided advice that I wish was heeded more often. Just after the column was published, one visiting startup was so off-kilter that I thought it would go 0 for 16 until the head of business development pulled out his dongle (sorry, there’s no way to say that without a double entendre). 

Shopping

Social commerce went mainstream in 2011, at least in terms of marketer awareness. Unlike gamification, this isn’t a fad; it’s part of a lasting shift in consumer behavior. Social shopping was featured in April’s “Five Social Trends To Get Excited About Today” and later in “The Seven Types Of Mobile Social Commerce.” Recommendations are an especially important driver of social shopping, as certain people appreciate more than others (“The One-Percenters Of Recommendations”). At times, social media wasn’t given its proper credit for its role in how people shop. “The Infinite Moment of Truth” aimed to fix that, building on Google’s “Zero Moment of Truth.”

Mobile

Well over half of this year’s columns significantly featured mobile. If you want to brush up on mobile trends before 2012, consider some of these highlights: “Mobile Marketing Is Exploding, So Get A Strategy,” “Ten Social Local Technologies For Marketers,” “The 'S' In 4S Stands For Social,” “Facebook's Little 'M' KOs Three 'Ws',” “Ten Mobile Social Trends For 2012,” “20 New Confessions Of A Foursquare Super Mayor,” “101 Types Of Mobile Social Alerts,” and “The 7 Social Stages of NFC.”

Google

It’s amazing in retrospect that the one company most often featured in this series is still trying to find its footing in social media. That’s part of the fun, and it’s why Google inspired a column roughly every six weeks. Sometimes the focus was much bigger than Google, such as in “The Infinite Moment of Truth” mentioned above and “Keep It Strategic, Stupid.” This month brought the first post in quite awhile on YouTube. And then there were five about Google+: “Your Google+ Strategy Calculator,” “Your Google Plus FAQ,” “Why Google+ Matters,” “Why Google+ Doesn't Matter,” and “What You Won't Like about Google+ Pages.” For a social service with relatively tepid consumer interest in brands’ pages there, was this justified? I have no regrets, as the way Google infused the social layer with its other offerings may forever change marketers’ perceptions of treating social media as a silo.

Events

The universe is expanding, according to Hubble’s Law. So is the universe of events that marketers supposedly need to attend. It’s hard to top SXSW, which merited two columns each with its own metaphor: first the Tower of Babel, and then a Petri dish. Other highlights included the Consumer Electronics Show, the Shorty Awards, Social Media Week, Social Week, and MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit. Then there were global events that united many more of us. When America’s most wanted terrorist was killed, it created an opportunity to reflect on how social media contributed to our awareness of the event.

Failures and Disappointments

Did I get more cynical this year or was there more to be cynical about? It will be hard to ever top the epic failure of Representative Anthony Weiner, unless there’s a Senator Don Keeshlong setting up a Google+ Hangout with his webcam aimed below the belt. I may never get to have as much fun writing a column than when writing the headline, “Don’t Be a Weiner.” As for other blunders, Netflix will recover from its horrible year far sooner than Weiner will. Foursquare’s all that’s left of the check-in field, so it was a good year to see why some people stopped using it, and what happened to all the other check-in apps; the latter post came a month before Facebook acquired the ailing Gowalla. When I disliked MyLikes, it led to a rare rant on why “I Am Not A Social Publisher.” Fortunately, some bad ideas are short-lived, as discussed in “The Wrong Route To Social Commerce.”

People

Social media is, of course, all about people. My first column of 2011 paid tribute to my social family. I then checked in on our future bosses – the digital natives, many of whom I continued to meet during guest lectures at universities. Thanksgiving was then an opportunity to share who I’m thankful for. As I mentioned then, it’s only because you’re reading this that any of these posts matter, so I can’t thank you enough. May 2012 bring you success and fulfillment. And if anyone must be publicly humbled in the year ahead, may he or she have as perfect a name as New York’s former Congressman.

The 2011 Berky Award Winners

Congrats to Traveler's Quest, a dark horse Berky winner

The 2011 Berky Award Winners
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Have you been staying up all night wondering if you or a loved one won a Berky? It’s time for the most anticipated time of year, as the Berky Awards have arrived.

Here’s how the Berky Awards work: each year (alright, just this one so far), millions of people vote on their favorite social media services and technologies. None of those people tell me their votes, though, so I have to come up with the winners myself. The winners are treated to a printout of this column at their own expense, and a free beer at 360i’s bar whenever they’re in Tribeca.

Without further ado, here are the Berky Awards for Social Media Excellence in 2011. Please hold your applause until the end.

Design

Pinterest is a winner in too many categories to name, from Design to Curation to Photography. It also taps into that feeling of “je ne sais quoi”: the apt French phrase for the indescribable.

Development

For do-it-yourself developers or people who just like putting technology to work for them, If This, Then That is a brilliant way to combine services to make all of them more useful.

Email

What’s more social than email? Meeting people in person. But email’s way up there. For Gmail, there are two apps that get to share the Berky: Rapportive and Boomerang. Rapportive provides complete contact details, along with social profile listings, for anyone who emails you. Boomerang lets you send Gmail messages at a custom time, and (in a feature also useful for Outlook) clears non-urgent messages from your inbox and “boomerangs” them back at a later time. Boomerang parent Baydin also created The Email Game which wins two more Berky Awards for Best Productivity Game and Least Gimmicky Use of Gamification.

Fashion

Do you like showing off what you’re wearing? Neither do I, but I’m not the target audience. For teenagers, 20-something women, urban fashionistas, and hipsters of all ages, social fashion apps had a tremendous year in 2011. While Pose and Fashism earned nominations, the Berky Award for Fashion is Go Try It On, which has one of the most intuitive user experiences I’ve come across.

Games

I have a not-totally explicable obsession with Traveler’s Quest, where you find and bury virtual treasures mapped to your actual location. It’s at the forefront of the mobile trend of geo-gaming. While totally geeky, expect mainstream games to adapt a lot of the mechanics.

Humor

Visit some HappyPlace by someecards to ruin any attempts at productivity. A personal favorite: obnoxious responses to Facebook misspellings. Runner up: Literally Unbelievable, a round-up of people taking Onion stories seriously.

Media

One of my favorite technologies is Summify, which aggregates the top links shared by friends across social networks. Summify makes Twitter more useful, and it also wins the Berky for Best Customization Options. There are few other services I’ve enjoyed so much that I’ve updated the frequency of how often they email me.

Meeting People

I love using Sonar to meet people with whom I have several shared contacts. Sonar also thus wins the Berky Award for Stalking. It’s a co-runner-up with Bo.lt for Technologies That Creep People Out; neither could get the required votes this year to trump Face.com. 

Music

I don’t always listen to music, but when I do, I prefer Spotify.

Product Launches

Debates over the initial usage of Google+ tend to overlook how well Google created a new social paradigm that is integrated into all of its offerings, spanning YouTube, Blogger, search listings, and display ads. Google can safely bury the ghosts of Wave and Buzz, as there’s no doubt the company “gets” social media.

Research & Insights

Google’s unprecedented streak continues. There are so many vital and useful tools in its Think Insights, including newcomers like Google Correlate. Bookmark this and keep exploring it, as there’s so much to mine.

Shopping

Etsy’s spin on social shopping with gift recommendations is the embodiment of the value that can be accessed through Facebook’s social plugins.

Television

Interactive TV is here, if you use IntoNow (for the programs) and Shazam (for the ads). They deservedly both get Berkies. IntoNow gets a second Berky for Least Bungled Yahoo Acquisition of 2011. Hooray!

Travel

There has been an explosion of social travel apps this year. They’re really useful when you want to find advice from the two other people you know who use them. Maybe 2012 will be better. The two travel services I can’t live without are TripIt and TripAdvisor. TripIt is one of the best apps ever invented, especially due to its ease of use; you forward email travel confirmations to plans@tripit.com and it automatically builds your itinerary. TripAdvisor may be the only truly meaningful site for comprehensive travel reviews.

Twitter Apps

In the past few months, I’ve been posting heavily through Buffer, a service which spreads out your tweets so that your followers aren’t bombarded by links all at once.

Congrats to the winners!

This is an abbreviated list culled from hundreds of strong contenders. It was an honor just to nominate all of you. Let’s toast 2012 and all the innovation ahead.

16 Resolutions for Vendors

Some of my best friends are vendors! (playing Kinect with Relevvant founder Craig Davis)

16 Resolutions for Vendors
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

I can’t do my job without great vendor relationships, but I could do my job a lot better if vendors focused on building relationships first and selling later.

Over the course of a year, I’ll get about a thousand pitches from vendors. The great ones lead to vendors becoming partners. The bad pitches get deleted. The worst get forwarded around.

In light of that, here’s my wish list for vendors. Vendors that follow the list will win more business. Granted, the best vendors don’t need this list at all, but most can use at least a few reminders.

BEFORE THE MEETING

1) Do your homework. Google whom you’re meeting with. Find shared connections on LinkedIn. Look at recent agency news.

2) Be personal. A one-line description of what you do is so much more effective than a form letter.

3) Ask questions. It’s in my best interest to make the meeting as productive as possible, so if I can help with that in any way, I will.

4) Listen. I may tell you that just because I have the word “media” in my title doesn’t mean I’m a media buyer. That’s probably an indication that you shouldn’t keep telling me about your CPMs. This is just one of the more egregious and oft-repeated examples.

5) Confirm meetings. The element of surprise is vastly overrated.

DURING THE VISIT

6) Show up five minutes early. If you’re on time, you’re late, given the time it usually takes to set up.

7) BYOD: Bring your own dongle.

8) Show, don’t sell. Share live demos of the site or app whenever possible. Make it interactive.

9) Get to your examples early. I love the meetings where the vendor says, “You guys are really well ahead of the curve, so you don’t need our 20 slides on making the case for social media,” and then they spend the next half hour on those 20 slides. Cut the set-up and get right to what you’re doing. 

10) Co-create. Often, the best meetings I’m in involve impromptu brainstorms. You’re the product experts; we’re the experts on our clients’ needs and plans. Seize the opportunity to bring the two together.

11) Food helps. In his bestselling book “Influence,” Robert Cialdini wrote, “Using what [psychologist Gregory Razran] termed the ‘luncheon technique,’ he found that his subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating.” And then there’s the illustrious Jenna from “30 Rock,” who timelessly said, “Me want food!” Both apply equally well.

FOLLOWING UP & ONGOING COMMUNICATION

12) Send follow-up collateral in a timely manner. The same day is preferred. If it’s a week later, you risk losing any interest from the initial meeting.

13) Attach small files. Whenever possible, do what you can to make your attachments smaller. I’ve begged and bribed my IT department enough to be able to accept 10MB files, but I can’t quickly forward those to anyone else.

14) Ask before subscribing people to your newsletter. If you’re worried about the response, maybe you don’t need a newsletter. I can’t tell you how often I unsubscribe to these. You know why I don’t need to read newsletters? Because great vendors keep me current with personal updates.

15) Respond fast. If two days go by without a response, I may not remember why I reached out in the first place. Agencies suffer from chronic attention deficit disorder. If you’ll be tied up, send a note saying when a full response will come, or forward the inquiry to someone with more bandwidth.

16) Send case studies. At a Social Times conference years ago, I was on a panel where the last question asked was, “What advice would you give the vendors in the room?” I answered, “Three words: send case studies.” I meant and still mean this in the broad sense. Send live examples. Send results with the client’s name omitted if there are privacy concerns. Send a great idea you pitched someone else and want to repurpose until you find a buyer. Whatever it is, this is the most important kind of message you can send. When they’re especially interesting, I forward these updates to anyone working on relevant clients’ accounts.

These are starting points. As my CEO would say, they’re table stakes. Practicing these will eliminate a lot of pain points for agencies. Fortunately my job involves far more pleasure than pain.

To the hundreds of vendors I actively work with, I can’t do my job without you. I admire your entrepreneurialism, vision, responsiveness, creativity, showmanship, support, and, in the best cases, friendship. I’m excited to create great experiences together in the year ahead and beyond.

How YouTube Became A Community

The new YouTube: a great new branding and engagement platform, or another (@$&ing community to manage?

How YouTube Became A Community
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Hey, community managers, the good news is that you have a new community to manage. Of course, that’s also the bad news.

YouTube has always been a funny site to include in social media plans. In the past, it hadn’t felt that social. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other explicitly social properties, it’s possible to use YouTube with absolutely no social interaction. For instance, if you’re interested in finding more coverage about the White House’s proposed extension of payroll tax cuts, you can search YouTube and find footage from the White House, Reuters, Fox News, and other established media outlets. Or perhaps you’re a normal human being and you just want to see a music video you heard about, or get a walk-through for a challenging Angry Birds level. In those cases, you’re still just there to find a video, watch it, and move on.

Sure, user-generated content has always been central to YouTube’s success, but even that is often used for broadcasting rather than interaction. And the first widely recognized breakout hit on YouTube, “Lazy Sunday,” was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch (it was shortly thereafter removed from YouTube; instead, you have to go to Hulu or NBC.com to watch it).

YouTube can rightfully counter that it’s tremendously social.  Its stat roundup notes that 150 years of YouTube videos are watched daily on Facebook, and 100 million people take a social action on YouTube weekly. With an audience of 800 million unique users, it’s an increasingly social audience. Yet it never really felt like a place for community. It always felt like a way to distribute content -- a channel.

The latest updates to YouTube change everything. There are a couple reasons for this in particular:

1) The homepage is entirely designed around subscriptions, whether that’s to people, publishers, or brands. Your experience on YouTube now heavily depends on these content creators and curators, whose updates appear in a central column reminiscent of Facebook’s News Feed. In my center column as I write this, I see updates from my friends: Jeremiah Owyang shared a video on Google+, Kevin Nalts uploaded a new short, and Walt Ribeiro commented on a music video. These are mixed in with uploads from NASA, Old Spice, Coca-Cola, and National Geographic Channel.

2) As a content producer on YouTube, it’s no longer just about uploading videos. You can share videos with comments, or even post textual status updates. These are far more social and conversational features, rather than before when it was solely about broadcasting your own content. There are more ways to engage audiences.

Granted, this could just turn YouTube into a new form of an interactive program guide. But the more time I spend with the new YouTube, the more I’m sucked into it because of the social features. If Coca-Cola publishes a video and I like the brand, sure, I’ll want to get those updates; as they’re a client, I’m especially interested. If a friend shares a Coca-Cola video, though, then it will really stand out, and I’ll be far more likely to watch it.

Now this leads to a whole series of contorted pros and cons and benefits and challenges. As a consumer, I’m now more motivated to return to YouTube to see what other people are sharing, and possibly share more videos myself. But a lot of the videos are being shared on Facebook and Google+, so then maybe I don’t need to spend any additional time at youtube.com. Then again, there’s so much noise on other social networks that I’ll need to go to YouTube’s homepage to see what my friends are sharing. But do I really need to see more content? As an added hurdle, it’s harder to find and add friends on YouTube than it is on just about any other network.

I don’t know where I’ll net out as a user, but the fact that people can make all of these decisions about YouTube is a strong indicator that community managers need to pay attention. Brands that are already active on YouTube now have a chance to see which approaches attract more viewers, subscribers, and interactions. Should a brand upload more videos? What about sharing more of others’ videos? What about creating new playlists? Do textual updates generate any responses or make a difference in some way? It’s not clear, and it will likely vary based on the brand and how consumers relate to that brand. Yet those brands active on YouTube can start finding out what works. Brands that aren’t involved with YouTube may be more motivated to try it.

All of this means that community managers have more work to do. Given how much demand there is for their services right now, I’m not sure how many are thrilled by the news. They should relish knowing that all of the Web is readily migrating to their worldview, with every site a community just waiting to be managed.