Last night I sat with a client in LA discussing the growth of social networks, social monitoring/intelligence projects AND transparent social eco-systems. We agreed with one another that no matter how transparent the eco-system of social networks becomes, there really are countless skins of the onion left to peel off. And that applies from the individual to the corporate level.

Could it be that complaining about transparency in social networks IS REALLY FEAR OF IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION? I submit to participants within social networks that your very participation in the social fabric of the internet IS a transformative act.

“Social-networking sites, blogs, online discussion forums and online journals represent modern arenas for individuals to write themselves into being,” writes Theresa Sauter. “A lot of people see social networking as a new way for people to interact but I’m interested in examining it as a way to form an identity and understand ourselves,” she added.

The potential of an increasingly transparent eco-system in social networks is an OPENING OF THE HEART. This opening is a kind of humanizing of all that was once mechanical and commercial. And, as a result, phenomena like brands, corporations and products take on a living nature as brand ambassadors, community managers and Chief Customer Officers interact with customers in a dialogue format. Communication between the “storied heights” of corporations and the humans that buy from these corporations has NEVER had such an opportunity for intimacy.

How does this work? We now have numerous examples of major international brands who have realized the necessity of humanization. Pepsi’s Refresh Everything project, Nokia’s Shot By Fans project AND Zappos, Best Buy and Jet Blue Twitter-customer-service portals are ALL great examples of brands relating on a one-to-one basis with their customers in helpful and generous ways. DTC’s “Drop Everything For Love” campaign is one of my favorites, where people logged in with stories about how they had “dropped everything for love”. The best stories were awarded with the opportunity to do just that.

So here’s a direct challenge and invitation to the CEO’s, GM’s and MM’s of the world: Would you drop everything for love? Consider the benefit of falling in love with your customer and steering your brand(s) in a direction that ATTRACT and enroll him/her/them in the process of brand vitality through intuitively designed reward-driven campaigns. We must hunt for dollars as the leaders of corporations with a responsibility to our shareholders AND we must also create a brand culture that fosters generosity, reward and a community/environment of friendliness. In a world where “friending” and “following” have catapulted customer equity beyond brand equity AND elevated customer lifetime value over current sales, IT BECOMES THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BUSINESS LEADERS TO CREATE HOSPITABLE BRANDS. The identity of corporate culture AND brand presence has never had a more favorable environment for transforming identity and re-making the world.

Virginia Satir, the fabulous author of The New Peoplemaking, writes, “I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them.” Brands that design/implement product, communication and sales strategy BASED upon listening to their customer WILL win. Listening IS the action that opens every petal of the human community and gives individuals and brands passage to the heart of vitality and re-productivity.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Who Owns Social, Anyway?
Beats Me, but There Are a Ton of Things to
Figure Out Before We Settle on the Answer

By Pete Blackshaw

So who the heck owns social?
That’s a tricky question, not only because every business stakeholder — marketing, PR, IT, research, investor relations, media, consumer relations — seems to have a piece of social baked into their new DNA and delivery road map, but also because its definition and scope keep getting pulled in new, arguably more complicated, directions.

Indeed, take a gander at all the new terms being used to describe our new world order — social CRM, social commerce, earned media, CRM 2.0, enterprise social — and you’ll quickly find the social juggernaut becoming synonymous with that broader umbrella term known as “digital.”

Indeed, I just dug up some notes from a consulting initiative I led at Nielsen for a major marketer. Digital, I noted, “is a new enabling framework for business and marketing grounded in four related characteristics: on-demand, interactive, sensing and connected.”

Still, legitimate schizophrenia reigns around the ownership question. After all, as marketers we want leadership roles clearly defined (usually in our favor). We’re restlessly — and rhetorically — impatient with silos and the “lack of organizational integration” — even though our “what’s next” appetite inevitably feeds the frenetic front line of fragmentation.

The good news is that social media appears to be softening organizational silos, ostensibly laying a runway for that coveted yet elusive marketing goal of “integration.”

In my pre-call for the Ad Age Digital Conference panel I’m moderating — featuring NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, Dell CMO Erin Nelson and Combe VP-Director of Interactive Communications Tom Cunniff — the vexing “integration” came up repeatedly. Much of this owes the furious pace of “social innovation,” which Schiller reminded us is still in early innings. Put another way, we might need to turn over countless new rocks before we find our stride.

Nelson, who leads an impressive medley of activity from community platforms to service innovation, suggested that Dell’s biggest need is “where to place bets.” Digital and social media, she said, offers countless possibilities, but in the end you have to make choices. And boy, is she right. Combe’s Cunniff concurrently hit the integration need hard but also suggested new centers of gravity would emerge in our socially enabled world, like consumer relations.

Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with “integration,” calcified by 15 years of marketing experience, from “best practice”-heavy P&G to “start with a clean slate” web startups. Two conflicting rules reign supreme in my head: One, that which forces integration and coordination, or prematurely synthesizes, inevitably slows things down. Two, that which liberates, loosens, decentralizes and draws inspiration from external sources, or walks off the beaten path, speeds things up.

Alas, such is the dualism of social media. We want order, but we can’t stand order. Jefferson-Hamilton reincarnated.

I mean, it’s not that corporate stakeholder groups don’t trust one another. It’s just that the group typically holding the social flag most firmly thinks the other groups are too slow, have no business running the social-media show, and are putting the enterprise on the precipice of disaster through naïve embrace of social silliness like transparency and “be yourself” authenticity.

Meanwhile, agencies and supplier networks are all storming the “social media” center: PR firms see social as an extension of their birthright in influencer marketing; ad agencies see it as a new frontier of high-impact ad impressions (for example, earned media); the growing crop of word-of-mouth agencies and buzz-monitoring firms see this as birthright. It’s almost as though we have the “internal” version of Bob Garfield’s “Chaos Scenario.”

Two recent developments really up the ante for both the ownership and integration questions: social HR and social CRM. For all our hype about the wonders of managing influencers and blogger outreach, the folks scoring the biggest wins in social outreach are the HR teams leading recruiting. Indeed, for those struggling with “social ROI” look no further than the fertile fields of open-source, “all content’s a resume” web.

Then again, the HR dynamic can also muddle the marketing track, especially when the flow of a Facebook fan page quickly shifts gears from an on-equity brand message to a college recruiting pitch, or vice-versa.

The rise of “social CRM” further complicates the ownership question. Perhaps the IT or tech experts do have a legitimate claim to a space that’s increasingly ornamented with enterprise software, cloud computing, scary-sophisticated databases, and scary-high consumer expectations (mostly set by the “marketing guy” freelancing “social engagement”) regarding customer service. Social CRM is also introducing aspects of “business-process innovation” (cost-efficient crowd-sourcing, internal collaboration, integrated listening platform, and the like) that halos well above the marketing space.

So what’s a CMO to do amid all this? We’ll set some of these questions in tomorrow’s panel, but in the meantime, don’t naively assume you’ll solve the social-media “ownership” and digital “integration” questions overnight. Your best bet right now is to manage the flow, sandbag unruly currents here and there, and do everything you can to “path the passion.”

Moreover, we all need to become better internal curators and “community managers.” Not unlike a devoted greenie, we need to work really hard to manage our social “ecosystem.” This is probably less about command-and-control than in establishing thoughtful guide rails, tempered by experience, good judgment, and even the lessons of a few legal hard knocks.

We can also get a few things going that will cultivate more meaningful ownership or cooperation in the enterprise. In my experience, the leader who gets the best (and most inclusive) listening dashboard or radar in place quickly accrues the most organizational legitimacy. Listening pipes, after all, feed many mouths and can drive unity around a common purpose. (I see this all the time — especially in crisis situations, where everyone has a stake in the outcome.)

Related, credible ownership also accrues to those who start making sense of the madness through smarter metrics. I’m particularly fond of the “paid/earned” model (even in my dialogue with in Nielsen) because it lowers access barriers to social media and speaks a language others in the organization can easily understand versus “shiny new object” gobbledygook.

Lastly, CMOs can make a world of difference rethinking incentive models. We have silos because we’re all fighting for a limited budget, often at cross purposes.

So who owns social media? Beats me, but there are a ton of things we can figure out before we settle on the “silver bullet” answer.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ann Charles is Founder and CEO of BRANDfog, an NYC-based company offering Social Media Branding and Corporate Social Responsibility Strategies for C-Suite Executives.

In December, I read a story about social scientists who believe that humans have evolved to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive. This was called “Survival of the Kindest.” The theory states that sympathy is our strongest human instinct, and helping others is critical to the survival of the whole species. These days, corporations are starting to have the same realization.

Thanks to a social media culture that reveres transparency and demands accountability, companies today are seen through the critical lens of the Triple Bottom Line: People, planet and profit. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) states that businesses should act as stewards of society, the environment, and the economy. The social media spotlight brings accolades and new business for companies that give back, while brands behaving badly are pilloried in online communities like Twitter and Facebook, followed by the mainstream press.

Creating a CSR strategy has become a primary challenge for CEOs. Fortunately, social media can be an invaluable resource for companies willing to commit to becoming better corporate citizens.

Here are 5 steps to develop a CSR culture using social media.

Popularity: 4% [?]

7 Takeaways From #BDI: Social Media As a Marketing, Branding & Service Platform

by Sarah Caminker

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a seminar in New York City on Social Integration: Harmonizing Social Channels into the Marketing, Communications & Service Platform. The Business Development Institute put on this fantastic event that included case studies and roundtables for social media marketing, PR and communication professionals. Top-notch speakers included:

Michael Mendenhall: CMO, HP
Joshua Karpf: Digital Communication Manager, PepsiCo
David Patton: VP & EIC, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
Brian Kenny: CMO & CCO, Harvard Business School
Lynn Mann: Director of External Communications, Michelin
Richard Pesce: Social Media & Digital Communications, Sprint
Michael DiLorenzo: Director of Corporate Communications, National Hockey League

They all stressed the importance of not seeing social media as a separate entity, rather viewing it as an integrated part of your marketing, branding and customer service. The list below details the top 7 takeaways that were discussed during the seminar.

*Note #BDI stands for Business Development Institute and is the event’s hashtag on Twitter that you can search for real-time insight from attendees.

1. Technology is NOT Social. People Are!
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social media sites are just tools. They are only *SOCIAL* if you engage and interact with people on them. Technology is great, but it is about the relationships. Note: these tools are intended for two-way communication and not as a megaphone for your next sales pitch.

2. Feeding the Beast: An Insatiable Appetite for Content
The beauty of the social mediasphere is that anyone can publish, edit or distribute content. We are going through a renaissance of how consumption of information and content is being managed and distributed. Social media has enabled a constant mobility meaning that people expect to receive information 24/7. There is a never-ending hunger for quality content, hence the expression “feeding the beast.”

3. The Era of the Advocate
Mass communication is dead, rather it’s about building personal connections with consumers. The more you serve and support your customers, the more likely they are to recommend your brand to their network (both offline and online). It’s more credible to have an outsider toot your own horn than to have the CMO do it. Remember to thank your “advocates” and make sure they know you appreciate them taking the time to support you and your brand.

4. Digital Newsrooms Are No Longer a Resource For Just the Media
We’re all content creators, and it’s unrealistic to assume that journalists are the only ones seeing your content. Company and industry news needs to be integrated, aggregated and curated for a broader audience. Press releases are just the tip of the iceberg. Begin incorporating multimedia like podcasts and videos and re-purpose content (in the form of white papers, E-books, articles) to tell your story.

5. Transparency and Authenticity is the Only Way to Go
Whether you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur or marketing professional you must communicate who you are, what you do and who you serve right off the bat. It’s also critical that you are upfront and transparent about the content and advice you are giving. If not, people will see right through you, run screaming in the other direction and land on your competitor’s virtual doorstep.

6. Social Media as a Listening Tool to Feed Innovation
Take a step back and listen. Whether that’s monitoring a dialogue on Twitter, following a blogger in your industry to see what conversation they’re sparking or hosting a focus group, you never know when you might get the next big break from just LISTENING to your fans/customers. The #NHLTweetUp is a perfect example. Guess how they got that idea??? By listening to their followers on Twitter! Bottom Line…. Stop, Look and Listen. Then Respond.

7. Crossover From Online to Face-to-Face
Twitter and Facebook are excellent relationship building tools, but there’s something to say about in-person communication that makes that connection even stronger. Take the time to go to industry events, conferences and networking groups to put a face to the avatar. On the business end of the stick, host tweet-ups in different cities, so your can connect with your followers.

I’m interested to hear your feedback and any trends/topics you think could be added to this list. …read more

Popularity: 10% [?]

Vail Resorts has abandoned its long-time advertising strategies and practices. In their place, the billion-dollar-a-year corporation, which operates five major resorts and twenty hotels, has built a new in-house marketing operation that uses social media and other digital venues to constantly engage skiing enthusiasts in real time…more here

Popularity: unranked [?]

For Big-Spending Consumer Brands, Has Scale Lost Its Power?

Small Players Like Method Leverage Digital, Social Media in Quest to Gain Share

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Have digital and social media leveled the marketing playing field so much that scale is losing its power? …read more

Popularity: 7% [?]

Check out Coke’s Expedition206! Wow!

Popularity: unranked [?]

According to a second annual survey of companies conducted by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, 94 percent of the respondents (major global companies) indicated that they plan to maintain or increase investment in their communities, while only six percent plan to decrease investment. …read more

Popularity: 7% [?]

Deloitte LLP’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) practice has recently released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, which evaluates the perceived potential of online communities* and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. Conducted in conjunction with Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, this second edition of the Tribalization of Business Study measured the responses of more than 400 companies including Fortune 100 organizations which have created and maintain online communities today. …read more

Popularity: -1% [?]

SmallBlue, an innovative expertise locator that helps those IN the IBM community find knowledgeable people or learn more about new acquaintances. SmallBlue is a suite of four tools:

•SmallBlue Find — to see a relevance-ranked list of people associated with any search term.

•Use SmallBlue Net — to get a view of the social network of the top 100 experts in any topic.

•Use SmallBlue Reach — for more information about a person, including a list of their latest blog entries, bookmarks or forum posts or to see which communities they belong to.

•Use SmallBlue Ego — to see your own connections, and through them, the number of other people you can reach.

…read more

Main SmallBlue site

SmallBlue demo movie at main SmallBlue portal

SmallBlue case study

Popularity: 4% [?]

Michael Stelzner, author of the book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, commissioned a recent study that simply asked, “What question about marketing with social media do you most want answered?” From that study here are the top 10 questions your clients want answered regarding social media marketing. …read more

Popularity: 1% [?]

Facebook’s Big Changes: Action Items for Marketers
Social-Media Site Streamlines Apps Before Fanning Across the Web

Facebook’s latest round of updates announced this week will affect everyone: marketers, developers, publishers, consumers and anyone else remotely connected to their site and platform. And some of the changes will especially impact marketers.

In a rare move for any company, Facebook not only announced what changes will take place, but it publicly offered a timeline for when it will happen. Of course, the timeline may shift, and some specifics have yet to be ironed out — I’ve found in consulting both with Facebook executives and analysts covering the announcements that, many of the details aren’t yet known and a number of important questions cannot yet be fully answered. However, marketers should still appreciate the wealth of information Facebook has provided on these changes, including a gallery of screen shots. …Read more

Popularity: 10% [?]

Charles Nelson, president of Sprinkles Cupcakes, doesn’t have a Facebook profile. Nelson, who works seven days a week, has no time for chatting online with Facebook friends.

But Nelson is logged on to Facebook all the time. That’s because more than 70,000 people have declared themselves fans of Sprinkles’ Facebook page, which is at facebook.com/sprinkles.

Each day on the site, Sprinkles announces a secret word, such as “ganache” or “bunny,” and the first 25 or 50 people to show up at any of its five stores around the country and whisper that word get a free cupcake.

“On Facebook, we can ask our customers what’s the next location they want,” Nelson said. “What do they think of our next flavor? It’s an amazing way to communicate with our fans.”

Facebook is not just for friends anymore. The free social networking site — blocked in some workplaces as a potential time-waster — is increasingly becoming an inexpensive marketing tool for small businesses.

Sprinkles is among a growing number of small businesses taking advantage of a relatively new program on Facebook, one that allows them to claim their name, become visible even to folks who aren’t on the site, and stay in close contact with their customers. The business, in effect, can act like any other person on Facebook, posting status updates and seeing what its fans are doing. …read more here–>

Popularity: unranked [?]

Companies Crave Corporate Versions of Twitter and Facebook.

How should companies embrace social media? Twitter co-founder Biz Stone ticked off examples of corporations and small businesses using Twitter as a tool to reach customers, but many Brainstorm participants said they need social networks for internal collaboration. Diane Bryant, chief information officer of Intel, extolled the virtues of sites like Facebook: the engagement, the constant feedback, and the ability to quickly discover what your “friends” find interesting and important — all information that would be valuable in a working group. “Why isn’t there a social media application for the enterprise?” Bryant demanded. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s executive chairman, later described an emerging service, CompanyGroups, that might be the answer Bryant seeks. The tool serves as a sort of online back channel for workers to chat and share information. Hoffman explained that many individuals now use LinkedIn to ask their associates or advice on, say, the best way to stay abreast of industry news. Now, he says, “you’ll be able to do that within a company.” Sounds as if Intel might soon be one of those companies.

Popularity: 2% [?]