Attending the first ever MediaPost social media conference (OMMA Social) made me feel good. Why? Because it’s good to know that the experts in the industry have just as many questions about social marketing as I do.

It was an interesting day to be sure. The conference re-affirmed much of what I knew alredy, and provided a few new insights as well. I thought I would share key take aways from this conference, in case you were wondering if you should dip your toe into the world of social marketing.

1. Users are systematically ignoring traditional advertising both on and offline.
2. ‘Seeding’ is the new advertisement.
3. Social media is about infiltrating communities.
4. Be sure to listen before you engage.
5. As social media tactics are just beginning to emerge, learning and optimizing is key.
6. Because advertising has been in the forefront of media for such a long time, people are used to thinking that if millions and millions of eyeballs aren’t looking at your messaging, then the efforts are inconsequential. What they’re missing is the value in the relationships that are created through conversations.
7. To facilitate / create social marketing the following groups need to be involved:
   • PR
   • Media
   • Creative
8. Old metrics of ROI / RFM / CPM do not work with these new tactics. Measurement must be developed on a case-by-case basis depending on the campaign goals.
9. Walking away from a social media campaign isn’t an option

And finally: How do you know when a social media campaign succeeds? 

  10.”You get it on Oprah, and you’re done,” said one OMMA Social speaker.

A huge goal to reach, as I’m sure Oprah has a long list of things to talk about already .

But I’m interested in hearing from you – have you started any conversations through social marketing yet? And what are you seeing?

So I haven’t been exactly excited about a new browser for a long time. I was a faithful FireFox user since before 1.0, but in the last year I’ve been primarily using Safari. I feel it’s just cleaner, faster and well … more Mac-like. I’ve heard FireFox 3 is now much, much faster, but I haven’t felt overly compelled to upgrade.

That said, I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this browser called Flock. It’s been around for a while. In fact, its website says it was created in 2005. At its core, Flock is essentially just a customized FireFox. For the last couple years, that’s all I really knew about it. But with the recent release of it’s 1.0 version, Flock has become much more, and has jumped into the social networking fray with both feet.

Flock’s features are many, but the one that stands out most for me is its “People” sidebar. All you have to do is log into one of their many supported social networks, and Flock detects it and asks if you’d like to “remember” that network. If you accept, that network is added as a tabbed entry in the left sidebar (see left). Log into more networks, and more tabs are added. This gives you the ability to see your friend’s status updates, messages, file uploads and more.

Currently (as of version 1.2), Flock supports Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Pownce. It also supports media sites like Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket and Picasa.

And for you bloggers, Flock can also detect when you’ve logged into a supported blog platform like Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad or Wordpress. And it makes it easy to post new blog entries directly from Flock’s built-in editor.

Other useful features include a built-in RSS reader, the ability to post bookmarks to services like Delicious and Magnolia and integrated webmail like Gmail, Yahoo! and AOL Mail.

So far, Flock is filling a very real need for me. Seems my memberships keep growing (I finally just broke down and joined Facebook), and traveling to each site for updates was getting more and more time-consuming. Now I have the exact same browsing experience, thanks to the FireFox engine, but I have all my services at my fingertips and can see updates just by glancing at my sidebar. As an added bonus, most FireFox extensions, like the invaluable FireBug work perfectly in Flock.

So if you already use FireFox and also have a lot of social networks or blogs to keep track of, give Flock a try.

For a quick crash course, see Flock’s intro videos on YouTube, or this great segment from Mahalo Daily.

Facebook has been actively trying to keep their title as one of the top “social network” sites by expanding the capabilities of their site to allow their users to do more than on others like MySpace. One of their biggest moves happened about a year ago when they started allowing developers to create fun applications or widgets that users can add to their Facebook profile. This became very popular among the Facebook community, but has recently been met with skepticism as Slide.com, one of the largest Facebook widget creators, got in trouble recently for one of their applications that exploited a security hole in Facebook’s API.

So Why is it a Bigger Problem Than it Seems?

To allow applications to be fully integrated into the Facebook interface, Facebook allows for applications to retrieve any information that you have posted on your profile, except for contact information like email address and phone number. The tricky problem however, is that Facebook has no way of tracking what these applications do with this information once they obtain it because these applications reside on external servers hosted by the applications creators, not Facebook’s servers. To protect Facebook users though, Facebook put in their privacy policy exactly what you can and cannot do with that information. In particular, it states that applications may only store a person’s Facebook ID, all other information must be obtained by making a request to Facebook’s server.

Slide.com got in trouble because it stored users’ information, bypassed the privacy settings Facebook put in place, and displayed that information to anyone who has added the application. Unfortunately, this is not an easy problem for Facebook to solve; many applications in place use people’s information in fun, creative ways that go along the lines of Facebook’s vision, so they cannot remove that functionality. For the Slide.com incident, Facebook’s only available action was to remove the problem application, they can do nothing to fix the “security hole” but to reinforce their policies, because too many applications are dependent on the current functionality.

In an age when everyone’s personal information is digital in one form or another, everyone has become aware of the risk of personal information getting into the wrong hands. This is why I believe that yes, this is an issue. But, if there is concern over the way that Facebook handles personal information, then the quick and easy fix is just to not put any information on the site that you may not want others to see. I have created a couple of Facebook applications, and I can attest to Facebook’s good intentions with information handling and to their general security practices, but I won’t be putting my social security number on it anytime soon.

I’m a month shy of turning 35-years-old and I continue to grow more and more reliant on Facebook status updates to apprise me of the important (and unimportant) goings on of my friends and acquaintances. That’s kind of a scary reality for someone who never had a computer in college.

Yet there’s still part of me that thinks — and this is true when I find out that “John is tired” or “Jane is getting ready for a big day!” — I’m too old for this. Social networking is a concept I get — really, I do — but actually adopting it into my everyday life? I’m not sure that it can reach me on a really meaningful level. It’s simply too new of an idea.

Or at least that’s what I thought. It turns out that the concept of social networking — and the Internet as a whole — may be older than I am. It’s probably older than you, too. And maybe even your parents.

Paul Otlet (ot-LAY) was a Belgian academic who, in 1934, postulated that “electric telescopes” would transform the way people accessed information. A recent article in The New York Times goes on to say that these telescopes would:

“…allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. he called the whole thing a “reseau,” which might be translated as ‘network’ — or arguably, ‘web.’”

Here’s a short video [TRT - 1:20] detailing Otlet’s vision:

Unfortunately for Otlet, a combination of impossible scalability, government apathy, and Nazi occupation derailed his visionary project almost 70 years ago. But the remnants of his ruminations were always out there.

And so it makes me think about other ideas, both past and present, that have been discarded for one reason or another. Is the groundbreaking achievement of the year 2078 sitting in your Recycle Bin?

On Friday, I received an email from the Membership Director of MarketingProfs, Sharon Hudson. The title of the email was simply “3-Question Survey.” Out of pure curiosity, I decided to open it and see what insight they were trying to glean from such a brief, 60 second questionnaire. To my surprise, the email simply stated that MarketingProfs was considering adding a new feature to their website that would allow “members” to upload their own creative and to comment on the creative of other members. A so-to-speak “social-networking/peer review board” for marketers.

I quickly completed the survey and started thinking about the pros and cons of such a site. As a marketer in my past-life, I recall countless instances where we debated the effectiveness of our email creative and tried to prophesize whether or not our user-base would find the creative (and message) compelling enough to take action.

Also, having the ability to screen your creative prior to a campaign-launch is a comforting thought, especially if the success of your campaign is tied to your boss’ expectation of a strong ROI.

And on a total side note, it’s a purely ingenious way to increase the MarketingProfs membership subscriptions and drive revenue (props to you, Sharon!).

But on the other hand, what restrictions are put in place to prevent a competitor from “borrowing” your creative ideas and implementing them as their own? Surely this concern has been brought up and debated at MarketingProfs (perhaps the reason for their survey?). A few other questions:

• Is your creative archived for future review?
• Are comments made public?
• Can you really trust your peers?

Overall, I’m intrigued by this potential offering and am curious to find out what direction MarketingProfs decides to take. I’m also interested to hear what other marketers think about this new form of peer review. Does it unite marketers or pull them apart? Would you consider purchasing a membership to receive “free” feedback?  How much faith are you willing to put in the opinions of others?

I had the pleasure of speaking at the recent ACCM conference in Orlando on the topic of email marketing creative. No, I’m not a creative director, but I was particularly interested in this topic as I believe that email marketing as we know it is under attack and if we don’t make our emails more compelling, more relevant and in most cases more attractive, we’re going to continue to see results decline in this medium.

Email Insider had a nice article last week entitled, “Inbox Evolution May Force Facebook To Change Its Business Cards“. It’s a nice read but I can’t disagree more with the title. Facebook doesn’t have to change a thing. Marketers have to change in order to reach people today, as they have throughout time.

But I always think its great when we as email marketers (yep, we’re email marketers too, its still a very viable way to reach people — for now) put out studies like the one by ExactTarget mentioned in this article that says that 72% of respondents said they’d prefer to receive promotional messages via email instead of via social networks. Well, no kidding. I wonder why? Hm, could it be because you can unsubscribe or hit the “Mark as Spam” button in your email client when you get these promotional emails and you typically can’t in your social network?

Oh, I know, I just did a study in my mind. Turns out that 79% of people would rather get promotional marketing messages in magazines and newspapers rather than in email, where they might actually have to see it. Wait, more results just came in, 95% would rather get promotional marketing messages put right into their trash can at home rather than in their email inbox. So that’s what we should do, we should just create marketing messages and just throw them away immediately, that way the consumer gets what they really want, which is to be left alone.

Sometimes marketers get too far into the forest to see the trees and they/we lose sight of the fact that its not about kicking and screaming and fighting for the mediums that we are comfortable in to remain vibrant and worthwhile. It’s always been about finding relevant, non-intrusive ways to get a message in front of people in the hope that they may then, or later, take action on that message. And to do that, you have to be open minded, something that is foreign to most marketing people.

I have been thinking a lot about viral video …  What makes a video go viral?  Great content! 

What makes great content?  Who knows?  That is like saying “what will people find interesting, funny, relevant, etc.”  

Some colleagues recently shared a viral video with me that underscores that it does not take expensive production costs to create something that people will find interesting and pass along to friends.

Flea Market Montgomery

After watching this video just once, you will be humming the song and singing the tagline “It’s just like a mini-mall!”  The brilliance in this video (with over 2.5 million views on YouTube and counting) is that is it simple, catchy, original, and fun.  The Flea Market Montgomery owner, Sammy Stephens has become a minor celebrity with appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Family Force 5’s webisode series The Really Real Show. 

Why did this video become viral?  It is just plain FUN!

I just read a post on The Influencial Marketing Blog called “The 3 Philosophies of Word of Mouth Marketing.” The writer had attended WOMM-U 2008, an event dedicated to the fast-growing branch of marketing, and picked up on some common themes about how WOM was defined. These included:

1. WOM is a Channel
2. WOM is an Outcome
3. WOM is Viral / Buzz

He says “WOM as a channel” would be an excellent way to to describe WOM to traditional marketers who are accustomed to media channels, while”WOM as an outcome” suggests that ultimately WOM is an outcome to all forms of marketing. So in some ways, everything we do stimulates WOM.

The final idea is probably the most common description. “WOM is Viral” suggests that the ultimate purpose of WOM is for messages to go viral. The writer agrues that while this is perhaps the most popular thought, it isn’t necessarily true. He says that viral tends to describe one person passing something to another person, regardless of quality, while in its purest form, WOM is intended to create positive buzz.

So how do you define WOM?

At 11:30pm on Monday April 29, 2008 I was standing in line at Best Buy in Buckhead with about a hundred other die-hard Grand Theft Auto (GTA) fans awaiting the latest release of the game - GTA IV.

Being a Gen Y kid I have grown up with a video game in one hand and a computer in the other hand. So what’s the appeal of this game that makes me (and millions of other people) wait in front of a store for hours just to get it? Interactive game play.

The world that has been created by the Rockstar team is simply unbelievable. The amount of experiences that a user can have in this gaming world is amazing. For example, you can stand on a street corner and watch traffic, weather, people, and animals all interact with each other and with you all in a virtual world type of environment. The size of the city is mind boggling. In fact, there is such detail that you can roam most of the city and not run into the same character twice, which in the gaming world is very rare.

Truly the biggest appeal for me is the multiplayer component to this game - you and a group of friends can play in a match up to 16 players at one time! People can go to restaurants, clubs, bowling, pool halls, the beach … you name it, you can do it. The way the console makers and video game developers have teamed up to create a completely unique online experience may very well have changed the way we game forever. Fifteen years ago if you wanted to play with a friend you needed to be in front of a television together. Now, you just pop on Xbox Live or the PS3 Network and boom connected to millions of people.

To sum it all up this is a truely unique gaming experience with unlimited possibilities and it simply makes me very excited about the future of gaming and online interactivity.  But, it isn’t just me who thinks so. GTA IV is the first game in nearly a decade to receive a 10 out of 10 review from IGN. Impressive to say the least. Check out the full review.  

Honestly, I could ramble about how great this game is for hours, but I’ll let you find out for yourself. See you online and happy gaming!

MarketingVox just pointed me to a survey conducted by the Luxury Institute. Called the “WealthSurvey”, it uncovered that wealthy consumer membership in online social networks has reached 60% already this year.

This is interesting, but not as surprising to me as it was intended to be. I guess I would have thought that the wealthy - with their financial access to technology and desire to connect - would make them early adopters in social networks. But check this out: “consumer participation is up from 27% in 2007.”

That’s a pretty significant increase. This rise in participation among the wealthy set could represent a lot of opportunities for luxury marketers. The article suggests that luxury marketers should invest time and money in creating their own communities. However, I might suggest that existing communities - Facebook, MySpace, etc. - are equally if not more important, with communities like Facebook already leveraging the “influence” factor in their marketing programs.

In fact, the entire study appears to be based on existing communities: “Participation levels in leading social networks are: 16% for MySpace, 13% for LinkedIn, and 11% for Facebook. The wealthy average membership in 2.8 social networks, with an average of 110 connections.”

The article goes on to say “We are pleasantly surprised at the rapid acceleration in the over 55-year-old wealthy consumers whose participation increased five-fold, to 49%.” Now this is interesting and makes me wonder how much of this age group - wealthy or otherwise - is participating more heavily in social networks.

I’d like to get my hands on the full study, but perhaps this is only for the wealthy - hm, maybe somebody on A Small World can hook me up?

Here’s a quick snapshot of the study’s methodology:
I’m sure our Behavioral Research department would love this part (and be interested in knowing more details)

A national sample of 805 wealthy American consumers, with an average income of $287K and average net worth of $2.1 million, was surveyed online. Survey results are weighted to match demographic and net worth profiles of the same audience according to the latest Survey of Consumer Finances from The Federal Reserve.