Personally I love Infographs and I am always excited to share the best ones with friends and colleagues. Infographics do a great job at illustrating data and concepts in a way that’s attractive and understandable. If you talk to any researcher they will tell you that having the data is just half the battle won, but knowing how to slice it and represent it, is the other important half. So I thought it would be a good idea to curate the 10 most effective Infographics that I was most impacted by in 2011. Hope you enjoy the list as much as I do.

 60 Seconds: Things That Happen Every Sixty Seconds

Going Viral Visualized

Top 5 Mobile Phone Statistics 2011

The Geo social Universe 2.0

Social Sharing: The Impending Sharepocalypse 

Top Tech Trends of 2011

50 Hot New Social-Media Stats from 2011

The History of E commerce

What does a 2011 Android user look like?

Google: Top Algorithm Changes of 2011

A presentation i am giving early next week on Reputation & Risk Management from a perspective of a Social Media Practitioner.

My presentation focuses on these areas.

• Growing Importance of Social influence and Social capital of people and brands.
• Examples of Social Media disasters both Personal and done by brands that have impacted reputation.
• Importance of Social Media Guidelines and training.
• Listening solutions and identifying influencers for your brand.
• Managing potential Crisis and discuss best known methods to navigate through them.

If you are a part of the social media fraternity or even a keen observer of social, you would have heard about the big fuss around Klout changing their methodology for scoring online social capital. If the buzz on twitter is to be believed it seems that more people have had their scores downgraded than upgraded as positioned by a blog post from them. But then again it’s always the unhappy people that are the vocal ones in a situation like this rather than the ones who are positively impacted, so it’s hard to refute their claim and possibly wrong as well. Personally I understand the frustration some people may have around their new lowered scores, me being one of the people impacted as well (-ve 10 points). But I believe Klout has done the right thing here and here are my thoughts on this.

Obsession with Social Capital will continue
I found some of the conversations about the new Klout scoring very amusing. Many people professed that they didn’t care about their social score and that the entire system of measuring social influence was flawed and superficial but to me the fact that they were upset and bothered to have an opinion was proof enough that they really cared. Let’s accept it, checking out your klout score is equivalent to checking yourself out whenever you are in vicinity of a mirror, you can’t help it, it’s just the way we are all wired. We all need a standard or benchmark that we measure ourselves with and that doesn’t necessarily translate into being superficial, because we all know looking good is as much how you feel on the inside as much it is on the outside. So no matter what the social media enthusiasts tell you about them not caring, they actually do. Is Klout the only answer out there? i don’t know, but I am pretty sure measuring social capital is here to stay for good.

Brands and marketers will always pay attention to Social Capital
Most marketers today know that there are no accurate measures to social capital and influence and that this industry is in its nascent stage but there is no doubt in my mind that this will get better and more transparent with time. As a marketer closely associated with social I haven’t seen any listening or Buzz tool worth its salt that doesn’t filter buzz by some influence measure or the other. Its common sense that with so much buzz around marketers may not have the resources to cope with all of it so they will need to prioritize and one way to do that is by influence.

What is the best way to measure social capital is debatable, but its importance is not in question.
Make no mistake that no matter which side of the debate you are on social capital is here to stay. Klout and others like Peerindex and Empire Avenue may not have nailed it completely but they are definitely on the right track to have chosen a high growth and high potential service offering. I must say Hats off to them to have got in early here.

Why I think Klout did this.

These are some of the reasons I think they did it but this is just my gut feel and not backed by any data. So don’t come after me.
- They may have been highly skewed towards twitter and the fact that there were many more formidable networks emerging, it may have been difficult to keep it real, relevant and balanced. So was there previous algorithm wrong, not really it made sense in a world where twitter and blogs were king in terms of public content, but now things are different.
- The other reason I think is that they may have been too volume focused and less engagement focused and they decided that it needed to be fixed.
- Better getting it right and keeping it relevant then staying wrong because of fear of upsetting people is the philosophy here i believe.

Final thoughts if I think could they have done this better? – I say yes. They could have given more heads-up, been more transparent about ‘Why’ and done it gradual. Will this affect their future – No way. If you ask me, I think they have benefited out of this. There are so many people who didn’t know about Klout and have now decided to join to figure out what the fuss is all about, and for those who are upset, they are going to forget about it as soon as they have their weekend drinks.

I recently had the privilege to speak at “The Futurist CMO Conference” that recently happened at Gurgaon, India. The topic I spoke on was ‘Channels 2.0 – how digital marketing can help OEMs’, well this blog post is to provide general pointers i made on marketing partnerships in that presentation. I am leaving out the digital parts for another time .

I guess we all know the importance of partnerships, especially in the area of marketing. Carlos Slim Helu the Mexican business magnate recently said – “In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself, you have to form alliances.” and he is spot on. We all need alliances and partnerships to achieve our business and marketing goals. The key to is finding the right ones and navigating successfully through it, the latter sometimes being more difficult than the former,  especially when you are dealing with large size organizations that may have different goals and a totally different culture.

Starting Early – Campaign Influence levels

One of things that I personally found challenging is that many marketers view alliances with a narrow goal of covering their gaps in their marketing budget.  Most of the times the search for a partner starts after the activity is completely thought through and then they realize that they are short of budget. Most marketing efforts that arise from partnerships of convenience like stretching the marketing dollar will mostly appear patchy and disjointed. Therefore it’s extremely important that partners decide to work at the early stages of conceptualization and ideation rather than down the line when the only thing left to do is add one more brand logo. Starting early also increases the level of influence you can have in the campaign idea and it works as a Win-Win for both parties.

What role does your partner play in your purchase funnel?

Depending on what industry your product or service belongs you would know best which part of the purchase funnel of opinion forming, research, consideration & purchase does your marketing efforts pay off on. On areas which you can’t play in or not that relevant you can let partners in. For example you maybe an ingredient brand and hence working with partners during the consideration and purchase phase of the funnel would be of great importance.

Driving change with partners

Sometimes driving change within partners in your ecosystem maybe challenging, for example convincing your partners to work on more digital marketing projects vs. traditional marketing.  A certain degree of education and evangelizing is sometimes needed within your partner’s organization.  Nothing works better than research insights and data here. Working sessions where you discuss latest sociological trends in your market can go a long way in opening up minds to new ideas and new ways of marketing your products.

I would summarize the key lessons from driving partnerships as

-          Change needs a certain degree of evangelism

-          Start early in order to be clear about audience, target, objective and messaging.

-          Set mutually agreeable success metrics.

-          Be sure to involve stakeholders –Finance & Legal

-          Behave as a brand Equal

-          Target your weakness and look for a value exchange

-          Your Partner can be anybody even your consumer

I recently had a conversation with the Paul Writer team where I talked at length about Intel’s integrated social media strategy and highlighted some of the cool digital ideas that were executed by Intel. Based on that conversation, one the things on which I got a fair bit of feedback and affirmations was on the question of outsourcing social media and what was the right balance between internal and external social media teams. So I thought it would be a good idea to list them down here for Corridor Conversations readers as well as elaborate my personal view on this.

My take on outsourcing social media and how do you strike the right balance between internal and external social media teams.

Personally I don’t think outsourcing the entire social media program to an agency works. If your organization is lacking in resources and for some reason your management is not convinced on the merits of being social then my humble request is not to venture in it. Making a brand Social is definitely not free and not something junior interns of a so called cost effective Social Media agency can do. It requires top management buy in and participation, senior strategic social resources and an agency with a track record of good social executions. All this requires time investment and money and no there are no alternates or short cuts to this.

I think the model that works best for most organizations that are serious contenders in the game is a hybrid model with the important and critical aspects still managed by principal brand and organization.

Things that companies should definitely own are:

1. Overall objective and strategy to the social media initiatives.

Nobody knows this better than the brand custodians themselves and it needs to be more than something like ‘Social Media is big so we need to our presence there’. It’s amazing how so many organizations stumble when asked about their objective for participation in Social Media. Standard responses are that’s it’s the latest trend and that the latest social statistics are compelling enough, well yes but that still doesn’t help define your objective to participate. This objective needs to be clearly articulated and explained to both internal and external social media teams so they know what goals they are chasing.

2. Content Strategy & Tone of engagement

Tone and engagement of the online conversations that happen with fans and followers determines how your brand is perceived and the personality it takes on. The tone can make you look cool, confident and all the necessary associations you may want for your brand, but thought has to be put into the content strategy which only the brand custodians are in a position to execute. What fans and followers like to hear from a brand may differ from industry to industry and country to country as well. Timing and frequency of the content makes a big difference and this can be only be determined over a period of time by looking at the engagement metrics.

3. Moderation policy and replies to post

Though the actual technical posting can be done by the external parties the content of the post & replies needs to come from the right people in the parent organization. The guidelines and detailed training needs to be provided and articulated by the brand to external teams. The agency also needs to set up a standard work flow where it needs to know exactly whom to contact when certain information is needed to facilitate responses.

4. Following promotional, legal and privacy guidelines

This is more often than not a neglected part of many social media executions, in the recent past many fan pages and other social media implementations have been found flaunting basic legal and platform guidelines resulting in damage of reputation for the organization. Unfortunately many social media agencies have been found lacking in their understanding of guidelines and policies which makes it imperative that the host organization takes it as their responsibility to make sure everything they do online is meeting all internal and external guidelines.

5. Crisis management

The very nature of social media makes it prone to having some form of crisis or the other where there may be a disgruntle customer or someone inadvertently offended someone or a group of people. It can happen to the best of brands with the best social media policies in place. It’s very important to pre determine what steps an organization should take and follow if a crisis does arise. Of course you can’t be prepared for every eventuality but most problems can nipped in the bud by some simple, humble and quick actions.

And the agency can own:

1. Metrics on Traffic, buzz and engagement

Most social platforms are measurable and there are various tools that are available out there both free and paid that give you good insights to how your efforts in Social media are performing. This can be a rather time intensive and manual process and it is best left to external agencies to collate and provide intelligent analysis and action items from the data collected.

2. Setting up and aesthetics of the social accounts

As long as agencies follow brand guidelines most of the aesthetics should be managed on regular basis by external teams. Keeping the look and feel fresh is extremely important to keep the asset vibrant and attractive for a returning fan or follower.

3. Technical aspects of creating tabs, page SEO, short links etc.

Most brands won’t have web specialist and it may not make sense to have these capabilities in house and outsourcing to experts may be the right strategy here. Things like vanity URL’s, search engine optimization, FBML and other related technologies to help maintain the social presence can form a part of scope of external teams.

One of the biggest cancers that affect many organizations all around the world is the ‘corporate free rider’. The dead beat corporate free riders are these unique breed of individuals that have no qualms of taking credit or been given credit for something they haven’t worked for or participated in. Their sole aim in their corporate careers is to do minimal work and spot the next big wave of success where they can suddenly show up with their surfing board and ride the wave. The sad part is that in many work places managers and HR turns a blind eye to this kind of behavior which in turn propels more of the same. Not only do free riders add to the dead wood in the organization but they also de-motivate other team members who don’t get recognized for their rightful work or have to share credit with non participatory members.  It’s a problem that any organization, manager or team member needs to call out immediately before it affects the team where the real talent soon leaves and the only people left are incompetent people.

How to spot a free rider

• They show up when things start to look good and flee when things start to turn bad.
• Quick to own victory but quick to blame defeat on others.
• They are quick to show up at victory laps but always absent at execution.
• They always say ‘I always knew this would work’ when the team wins, and say ‘I told you so’ when the team loses.

But what they don’t know is that they can fool some people sometimes but they can’t fool all the people all the time. People will catch on to their agenda pretty quick and once trust is lost it takes a lot of effort to build it back. Some food for thought ha?

Lenovo, one of the world’s largest laptop brands, has developed a series of online viral videos for their latest flagship product – the ThinkPad T420s. It comes with a powerhouse of proven features such as faster graphics performance, faster boot up, faster wireless connections, faster data transfer, etc. To further enhance its credentials, these features are inherited from its forefather – the T410s model, ranked the ’2010 Fastest Notebook of the Year’ by Laptop Magazine.

This seems like an interesting attempt by Lenovo’s emerging marketing team to utilizes viral marketing on their high-end product range, with aims to gradually shift consumer perception from an older image to one that is younger, more vibrant and unorthodox.

These virals are specifically developed for use in the emerging markets such as Russia, India, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Turkey, South Africa, South East Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

You can watch some of the neat videos below where office executives are seen enjoying the benefits of their superbly fast laptops. Have Fun!!

GetIT Comms recently launched a complete fun, free and open source project called SingMood, a real-time, tweet-driven gauge which reflects the collective mood of Singapore.  SingMood aggregates tweets located in Singapore and examines them for “happy” and “sad” keywords. Keywords such as: happy, glad, fabulous, awesome, funny, laughing, fun, excited, exciting, ‘yay’, enjoying, overjoyed,  blissful, sad, disappointed, angry, irritated, frustrated, regret, heartbreaking, heartbroken, ‘pissed’, ‘fml’, ‘sucks’, despair, sigh, bad, sick and cry. The data is aggregated and the overall mood is displayed on a “mood-o-meter” which refreshes with every tweet.

Here goes a short video explaining how it works -

SingMood also shows a graph displaying the number of happy and sad tweets by-the-hour so you get an idea of when people are happier/ sadder during the course of a day. Click on the happy/sad “bar” to see who tweeted.

SingMood is open source. Download the source code for free and tweak it the way you want – be it for entertainment or business. Fun, guaranteed.

Guest Post by Euan Wilcox (Regional Managing Partner - The Upper Storey )

There is a lot of talk, and honestly a lot of contradictory information, about Social Commerce. No wonder some brands might approach the whole opportunity with some trepidation and caution. Fortunately for me, my agency The Upper Storey, and Dell, we jumped headlong into Group Buying at the end of 2008 way before the over-hype made the picture significantly more complex.

Some people might question if group buying is a significant part of social commerce. I would agree, I think its true relevance to the potential field is probably minor. But it certainly fits under the broader definition of social commerce and is one of the most talked about today. For me there is no point arguing definitions and I find the Wikipedia definition more than satisfactory: Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.

So by this definition, and all logic, social commerce has been around for quite some time. Commenting and User Generated Reviews are adopted everywhere in online commerce. What is different now is the “FB-phenomenon” where every marketer, business manager and CEO seems obsessed with Facebook as the quasi entry point into the power of social media. In fairness, social media is helping to fill a void in a marketing environment coming apart at the seams through declining effectiveness of traditional mass media. Social at least holds a great promise for the future and a marker of how things will change in the new digital environment.

My issue is not so much with the fact social media, and Facebook, have joined the social commerce party – they have every right to be there – but my issue is that people are not really questioning what is said to be a fundamental truth of social media thinking; “I am more likely to buy something because my friend likes it”. At the surface this is fine. Yet as a significant part of my media budget, my marketing time and effort – it does deserve more thinking.

My questioning and thought process of this fundamental truth is greatly influenced by my experience on the Dell social commerce program; Dell Swarm. For me it has put into perspective why social commerce can work and in what ways it is social. This gives me a lot of clarity on where to take this program and others like in the future.

Dell Swarm background

Born from a group brainstorming session with media agency OMD and Intel, our inspiration for the program was the China phenomenon of Tuángòu, which we wanted to turn into an online social media idea for Intel OEM partner; Dell. My trepidation at the time was not a confusing array of conflicting opinions, there was virtually no chatter at all then, but more the worry that we had ‘seen this all before’. People seem to forget (or just were not around to see) that group buying sites Mercarta, MobShop and Letsbuyit.com were big hits of the late 90’s, spending hand over fist on branding and awareness. So my trepidation was more about the fact that this was already a failed business model, and thus I did my best to research what I thought made them fail and why this time things might be different. In the end we were satisfied that these group buying sites of the past failed primarily because they tried to be all things to all people. They carried a wide range of products with no focus on a specific audience. So despite the hyped awareness, they had no critical mass to carry off a deal. Additionally the fact that ten years later there is greater sophistication in web technologies, including large scale social sites like Facebook, gave this idea a better fighting chance. So Dell Swarm was born, roughly the same time as Groupon, and two and a half years later we have our own data about what has worked and what has not.

Dell Swarm has run fully in three markets; Singapore, Canada and Australia. It has gone through at least 5 different stages of evolvement and development. The business model, product mix and discount model has evolved and developed as well. This makes it, in many ways, an excellent platform to draw learning’s from.

The most significant and obvious evolution was the change in product mix. Originally, in Singapore, the products were all laptops, many focused on the higher-end Intel based processors. In Australia however the weekly swarms mainly comprised of peripherals and accessories. Logically this was better from the audience POV, as there were more lower-priced, low involvement items to purchase. This model also allowed for steeper partner-funded discounts more in line with consumer expectations. Rightly or wrongly consumers expect large discounts on group buying. This may in part be their experience of services like Groupon where ‘up to 80%’ might be possible. But there is a very big difference between a Chicken Burger at Kenny Rogers or a massage at the local beauty salon to the consumer electronics sold on Dell Swarm. PC’s simply don’t have the margins people imagine them to have and so Dell cannot offer enormous discounts over the long term. Offering other products allowed for more flexibility in discounting and helped build a great critical mass of people generally interested in everything offered. This included software, printers, cameras, TV’s and of course some laptops.

The evolution also included the mechanics of how we discount products and the interface to participate in the offer. Like Amazon did for eCommerce in the late 90’s, Groupon has now done for group buying. There is a standard way to communicate that a deal is on, and by adopting that standard, we helped significantly improve the 1^st time participation rate by new users. First time visitors grew to almost 60% of sales in Australia up from around 30% in Singapore, where the average user had to come back 2.1 times to eventually participate in the deal (the discount and product mix obviously made a significant difference too).

By all accounts the Australian Swarm was a business success at Dell. Selling out Printers in minutes, selling higher value items like TV’s in hours. We also gathered a lot of data about people’s future buying intentions and ‘wish list’. We offered some swarms to help satisfy their desire, and will be taking this part of the functionality even further in future iterations.

There is a lot more we can do – and will be doing as this gets more attention at Dell. Some improvements are really quite obvious as the service eventually scales up. They are all in development. But what surprised me originally was the fact that as Swarm became more popular from a sales point of view, with even more attractive offers, the less social traffic and less monitored social conversations were happening.

Declining traffic from social sources is not confined to Swarm. Data from Hitwise shows that upstream traffic from social sources to Groupon has declined from roughly 40%-50% in December ’09 to 8.31% in Dec 2010. Famously Groupon’s traffic and sales have exploded in that time period.

Dell Swarm behavior

My data from Dell Swarm troubled me even further. The statistics showed not only was social traffic on the decline, but the quality of social traffic was appalling. In the end there were two quite distinct groups: Buyers & Socialites. And by Socialites I mostly mean the catchall-simplified-pseudonym for social: Facebook/Twitter.

Buyers were easy to identify. They primarily came from sites focused on PC purchase and discussion. This include Gizmodo and Ozbargain. Sometimes it was activated with affiliate marketing but not always. These people were vivacious in both their buying habits and likelihood to return to the site. A person from Ozbargain was 104% more likely to buy and 41% more likely to return to the site than the average person.

The polarized opposites were the Socialites. Facebook (non-paid) traffic was 70.5% less likely to buy, and 72.3% less likely to visit again. Traffic from Twitter, which was only user generated sharing, had incredibly low loyalty. 96% of traffic leaving the site in less than 1 minute and only a minor percentage of return visitors. Facebook Ads did not fare much better. They had 158% higher bounce rate than average and spent on average 53% less time on the site.

Somewhere in the middle, across all sites, were the like-minded communities Dell has across the world particularly in Canada. The Dell Community for example. They spent roughly twice as long on the site, sales were negligible (it’s a low base), and repeat traffic was very low. They found it interesting, but they were not a great source of potential buyers.

In fairness to Facebook, there is some mixed data. In Canada, where they have 97,000 Dell fans, data was roughly the same as the Dell Community. They were sort of interested, but they don’t come back and their low numbers weren’t significant in total sales. Twitter is must be said can be used in other ways to help attract the right audience. This is planned for the future, but was not possible due to manpower restrictions. Twitter was actually a great traffic driver and large buzz initiator in Singapore. But these people were great talkers, mainly loving the idea, not buying the products.

Dell Swarm is social

Despite some gloom, for the social media evangelist within me there is some hope, a savior for social hype: Word of Mouth (WOM). It was no surprise to see ‘direct’ traffic grow in Dell Swarm Australia. What surprised me was the amount of that growth and the value of the traffic. It grew from low 20’s to high 50’s in percentage terms over a 3 month period on growing traffic volumes.

Direct traffic does not come from any referring domain or cannot resolve that referring domain. So in many ways it is a bit of a mystery. Of course people can book mark the domain, or type it in directly to a browser. New browsers auto-complete URL’s. There are many more reasons for which this article on Actionable Analytics has a good summary. Many of the common reasons I can discount through simple deduction. For example while the email database grew, we could see open rates and that could not account for the growth. Many of the IE browser issues account for some direct traffic, but that should be proportional, and looking across browsers, the data is the same. So this cannot account for the growth of direct traffic over time. We knew what advertising ran and it was comparatively very little. There are server side redirects, but just to move from Dellswarm.com.au to Dellswarm.com/au and we monitored social conversations where possible and saw social mentions actually dropped over time, not grew.  Yet, overall the most interesting thing about this direct traffic was the fact that they were 5% less likely to be a repeat visitor (discounting eDM, book marking etc) and more astonishingly, 19.3% more likely to be a buyer.

Dell Swarm grew from a wider distribution of the “Dell Swarm” concept between different people. A person got to know that there are great bargains, but not by sharing individual offers through the online share functions but sharing the service name and what that group buying service offered as a whole. This was not all through online channels which mostly can be tracked, or through online advertising or key community channels which we could also track, but through a growing awareness of the term “Dell Swarm”. It was not via PR as there was virtually none in Australia by intention. So in general it got people talking, which by all accounts people spread amongst people driving them to come directly to the Dell Swarm domain, and be more likely to buy as a result.

Beyond the “Socialgraph”, the power of “Interestgraph”

Underlining the fundamental concept of most social shopping is the fact that I am more likely to like something because my friends like it. There is no doubt that this can be true, certainly for younger demographics (e.g teenagers), however I do believe it needs to be questioned.

If I look at my own socialgraph I think it provides a good illustration of some issues. I have about 350 friends (pretty typical for people I know, especially in this industry), and they are roughly broken down into 3 key buckets;

1.  The Ancients; people I went to school or university with and my family and friends associated with my family. In the end, these are people I have known for well over 15 or 20 years.

2. The Colleagues; people I have worked with and met during work related activities. Having lived in many places and having worked in digital this is quite a large group.

3. The Club; being involved with a social sports club with much of its activity centered around Facebook, I have accumulated many friends associated with canoeing and dragon boating in the region.

So while this group of people might be a good predictor of how I might spend my social time, they are not a good or efficient representation of my likes and dislikes. Take for example Music; I can very safely say that my ‘friends’ (as defined by Facebook which is the default way people talk about social in this context), do not share my tastes at all. And I certainly don’t share theirs. This is true of almost anything I can think of. There are some exceptions which are mainly based around a shared interest. For example if you wanted to sell water proof watches with GPS and heart rate monitor, you would tap into over 100 very interested people. In fact we have had informal ‘group buying’ arranged through our Facebook group to buy products just like that.

There are other examples like travel or food, where what I see on my social does interest me. However overall I trust a persons recommendation because I feel they know something, or are similar to me – not because they are my ‘friend’.

Enter the power of the ‘interestgraph’. In many ways it overlaps a socialgraph but it is a far better predictor of what I would be interested in from a social commerce point of view.

An excellent description of the relevancy of Interestgraphs can be found on the Assetmap Blog. And much of this based on the description of Interestgraphs on TechCrunch where the valuation of Facebook over Twitter was put to question.

Of course ‘likes’ are a way of defining interests, however in Facebook you don’t follow someone just because of their interests or tastes. You ‘friend’ them based on personal contact or social interaction. Other services are geared towards an ‘interestgraph’ where you typically ‘follow’ people because of that interest. In Twitter for example the best use for me is following marketing professionals who expose me to new ideas and articles. Tumblr or StumbleUpon are other well-known examples. And there are whole host of new services which seek to collect and network people of similar interests and tastes. My favorite at the moment is Pintrest, which is a beautiful way to organize thoughts or interests and introduce you to people with similar likes.

From a commerce and shopping point of view this can manifest itself in many forms. From Nuji an online and offline shopping experience based on things you like, to Shopkick, a mobile location based service offering rewards for shopping ‘likes’.

Future of social shopping, and Dell Swarm

The social shopping scene is greatly hyped at the moment. I keep reading quotes like “It’s a matter of time—within the next five or so years—before more business will be done on Facebook than Amazon” (Sumeet Jain, Principal, CMEA Capital) and I am sold the big picture by social commerce infographics. But then again, when you start really delving into the topic, and reading the discussions and expert opinions, you get your feet back on the ground. The single best resource I can think of which covers this topic is Social Commerce Today (SCT) by Paul Marsden. Of course there are many articles painting a bright future, but look again, many are usually service providers looking to profit from this rising trend. Importantly there are many people engaged in the ‘industry’ who share their views and help keep perspective.

For me, I am exploring different avenues to help take the thinking behind Dell Swarm and the future of social commerce forward.  This is pretty much in line with the thinking and trends which were identified by commentary from this years Crunchies awards and discussed on SCT.

• Not all ‘social’: many services use Facebook Connect as easy sign-in. But the networking and sociagraph defined from this is not greatly used. Understanding ‘likes’ of friends is a key data point, but the data is limited and inconsistent
• Deal based: in the end most services are based on Deals. It is the value of the deal which makes people talk in Dell Swarm. And it is no different in the vast majority of social commerce service.
• Vertical specialty: social shopping is getting more vertical. And I believe this is in reaction to tapping into a more defined and refined interestgraph. Once you share an area of interest it is easy to define who knows the most, or who shares similar thoughts and interests to yourself.
• Online events: social shopping is mostly about an event online. Be it a short time based deal, or exclusivity and scarcity.
• Clicks and mortar: extending real shopping into the digital world. Including real-world ‘likes’ which link back to online assets.
• Location based: social shopping and offers lend itself well to location
• Mobile: to make much of the above happens and to engage people wherever they are, especially in the process of establishing their interestgraph and preferences. And also helping to create action anytime

Above all, I am also keen to take further and better leverage so called ‘old school’ social commerce intelligence. User and customer reviews defined the social shopping category, and in the end these review make a big difference to future buyers interested in a particular product or service.  And whether defined as ‘social’ or merely ‘behavioral’ I still feel the data gathered from ‘recommended’ lists is a better predictor of potential likes than my ‘friends’. Take Amazon for example; the socialconnector will tell you what products you might like based on what your friends like. This is based on pretty shoddy data (what they say they like) and off a pretty low base. It is also based on assumption that all friends are equal and all of us have a lot in common. Compare that to the Amazon recommendation engine; it uses a massive amount of data to suggest other products liked or bought with the product you are interested in purchasing. In a way it is based on an ‘interestgraph’ albeit anonymous data from people you don’t know. This behavioral information is a very good predictor of additional products I may want to buy.

What we do specifically with Dell Swarm will be based on time, budget, business and a whole host of other factors. Yet the game has just begun, and the scrabble to win at ‘social’ anything is just reaching fever pitch.

If your organization has already decided to take the plunge and commit to building its communities across the various social media platforms, then the imperatives around social media campaign integration discussed in this post should be a no brainer. A solid social media integration plan does not only help in leveraging existing social media channels for marketing campaigns, but also helps in growing and nurturing your community. It helps in creating engagement & talking points and makes the customer feel connected and special. But despite the benefits, campaign integration in many organizations is not a well oiled engine that cranks up when needed. So let’s list the imperatives of social media integration into marketing campaigns.

1.  Websites (Corporate, Campaign or  Blogs) need to be Social friendly:

It’s amazing how still many companies are failing to optimize their sites for Social media. They either don’t have social media share buttons or then the content or site format is no conducive to extract content on a share. It’s crazy to even think that one can propagate a campaign microsite if the share functionality on it doesn’t work. All the community building is a waste if you can’t drive traffic or awareness to content on your web pages.

2. Need for a content calendar

The content calendar becomes extremely important if you are running multiple campaigns across multiple social platforms.  You can’t plan your content distribution on a day to day basis it has be more long drawn and shared with content publishers much in advance. It may be worthwhile to invest in tools that help you optimize your publishing by scheduling it in advance and helping you post content at the appropriate time. There is definitely a science involved in timing your content based on time zones, demographics and amplification sweet spots.

3. Knowledge of promotion guidelines on Social media Platforms

Many agencies and companies seem to struggle in the area of understanding the ever evolving policies of social media platforms. Though there is a lot of talk around use of social media in contest, sweepstakes and promotions, many promotions fail to meet both internal & social platform guideline criterion. Special precautions need to be taken to make sure that your campaign meets all the guidelines around privacy and any dispute that may arise around the promotional terms and conditions. Constant training and communication of internal as well as agency staff could help mitigate and prevent many of the problems that may show up around this.

4. Blogger/ Influencer Integration

Along with traditional media channels many organizations have started to engage bloggers for their product, service or campaign launches.  But unfortunately not many PR agencies and organizations completely understand the needs of bloggers and that they behave very differently from traditional media. One of the most common approaches of engagement used currently is blogger meets where presentation and handouts are given out to influential bloggers. But if you notice closely you will see that the information handed out is not very different from the content and format that the traditional media get. More thought needs to be put in when designing the Blogger PR kit and organizing the Blogger event. This form of media definitely needs more hand holding then managing traditional media. The content ideally should be modular and giving bloggers different angles to the same story.

5. Metrics

It’s extremely important to define what success would look like at the end of a social media integration exercise. Just standard web metrics may not be sufficient to judge the effort as successful. Goals should be around things like campaign amplification, customer engagement & acquisition, incremental business results, increased margins etc. Goals that measure brand or business impact are more appreciated by the management.