Shocked? Don’t be, because I still get my daily fill of timely news, information, and gossip. Only now, I rely exclusively on my “social lens” – the filtered/curated content that is passed along to me from my social connections.  It was only a few years ago when we relied on sites like Technorati to discover blogs and sift through information. Now, the proliferation of various social channels has created a virtual “firehouse of information“, curated by my social circles.

Depending on the subject matter, I then decide whether or not a story is worth checking out based on the “lens” I am viewing it through (how influential I feel a given connection is on the topic), and  if an item is newsworthy enough then other connections will also be sharing it throughout the day so I’m not prone to miss out on something. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ will even highlight which stories have been most shared by my connections.

The same way people will accumulate a pile of unread back issues of The New Yorker, I don’t have the time nor the patience to read through every article on every blog or news outlet, so this filtered approach also saves me a lot of time.

A study by Yahoo Research found that 50% of URLs consumed originate from only 20K “elite” users on Twitter. Most of these accounts are either major media outlets or notable personalities. So, in essence, my connections act to filter out the noise and direct me to the most relevant/newsworthy content. To accomplish that 5 years ago, I would have had to run my RSS feeds through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to pay other humans (strangers) attempt to decide which items might be most appealing to me!

Don’t get me wrong, there is still tremendous value in RSS, but mainly “under the hood” in terms of data exchange with other platforms/applications. And yes, there are still a few blogs I visit regularly, but it’s more of a one-shot, Sunday morning ritual where I’ll sit down with my coffee and read back through the past week’s content, cover to cover.

How did you come across this post? Do you subscribe to Social Media Playground’s RSS feed, or did you follow a link posted through your “social lens”?

Photo credit: OakleyOriginals

Types of Graphs

Over the past year, we’ve seen the emergence of a number of other “graphs”, each of which having players that are vying to “own”… thereby, controlling particular slices of the social fabric by becoming the de facto source for that data which in turn everyone else relies on:

Interest Graph- Identifies connections between people and things they are interested in via social and search activity (typically by “following” something). Along with the Social Graph, the Interest Graph is “foundational” to the social web.Who owns it? No one at this time, but keep an eye on Twitter, Google+ Sparks, Topics in Quora, and of course, Facebook.

Taste Graph- Identifies shared preference of behaviors.Who owns it? Hunch were the ones who introduced the Taste Graph earlier this year, which is built on a massive data set that powers their predictions platform.

Location Graph – Identifies the personal location pattern (checkins) of individuals and how they are connected to these places (venues).Who owns it? Foursquare‘s Venues Project seeks to cement them as owners of the Location Graph by creating associations with 3rd party location data to their venues (they’ve already partnered with The New York Times, New York Magazine, Thrillist, and MenuPages ). Yelp and Gowalla seem to have missed the boat (even though they were in the space first), but Facebook and Google aim to own this space as well.

Health Graph - A digital representation of a person’s personal health, body measurement stats, and health/fitness related actions, and their evolution over time.Who owns it? The Health Graph was created/announced by Runkeeper earlier this year, who saw an opportunity to go beyond just being a GPS fitness mapping mobile app and by opening up the Health Graph to allow others to not just tap into it, but build on top of it as well. This probably has the most “real word” (physical) implications, since 3rd party fitness device manufacturers like FitBit, Zeo, and Withings have begun integrating their data with the Health Graph.

Developing New Graphs

What’s common about these graphs is that in most cases, the companies had no original intention of creating them. Essentially, what they did was:

• Look inward at the data they have already amassed and identify a set of data no one else has but is of extreme value
• Provide structure and open up the data(via APIs), thereby providing both read/write access (letting others in turn grow/add value to your graph)
• Give it a cool name

The Intersection of Graphs

Where this whole graphs business gets interesting is when new businesses are built by layering or combining several graphs to form a new business model, i.e.:

• Yelp - Social Graph + Locations Graph
• Pandora - Social Graph + Interest Graph + Tastes Graph + Music Graph
• SCVNGR – Social Graph + Locations Graph + Gaming Layer (I’ll talk about “layers” some other time
• GetGlue – Social Graph + Interest Graph  + Entertainment Graph (music, movies, tv)

As Mark Zuckerberg put it,”If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”

The Business of Graphs

How do companies intend on making money off of these graphs? Primarily, two ways:

• Advertising. By understanding the relationships between people (Social Graph) and what they like (Interest Graph) that creates a powerful opportunity for highly targeted content. Once Facebook starts to better automate their targeting (right now it’s self-serve unless you use a 3rd party tool) and combine this with retargeting (since they’ll know if you visited a 3rd party site), the opportunities are tremendous. Twitter will be playing in this space as well. The Taste Graph offers the next biggest opportunity to make money (for the same reasons as Social and Interest Graphs).
• Licensing. Another way companies will make money is from commercializing their graphs by licensing access to them. This is no different than, say, companies like All Music Guide license their database of music-related info to third party sites to supplement (i.e., if I’m browsing music on Spotify and click on “artist bio” or “related artists” to see more info).

The Future of Graphs

It will be interesting to see what other graphs and layers emerge in the coming year. Some ideas that come to mind:

• Knowledge Graph?- One would argue that Wikipedia owns the knowledge space. Quora is building a pretty large body of knowledge through a well-maintained repository o fuser-contributed questions and answers, grouped by topic and tied to both social and interest graphs.
  Who *could* own it? Wikipedia, Quora, Yahoo Answers
• Deals Graph?- These could be tied to locations (via the Locations graph) or within the social graph (tied to brands, etc.).
  Who *could* own it? Groupon, Living Social, Facebook, Amazon, Yelp
• Stats Graph?- Sports Statistics comprise a pretty large, constantly updating data set.
  Who *could* own it? Elias Sports Bureau, ESPN, STATS
• Genome Graph?- Provide access to the most up-to-date set up data related to DNA sequencing.
  Who *could* own it? Human Genome Project, 23andMe

In Summary

• Social and Interest graphs are the foundation of the social web. Facebook outright owns the Social Graph (“one graph to rule them all”).
• After Social and Interest Graphs, the Taste Graph has the most potential to make money through ad targeting and predicting user preferences. Other graphs will be monetized through licensing/access fees to third parties.
• Niche-based and long-tail graphs are being developed which in themselves will have business models, but will not succeed financially on the scale of the Social or Interest Graphs.

What graphs might you be able to own (and transform your business with)?

1. Sharing

Social media is built on the foundation of exchanging information. Or, as Wikipedia defines it:

And sharing is instinctively social. Whether it’s sharing advice, a funny joke or the latest gossip, people want to come across to others as helpful, knowledgeable or simply the first to know about something.

see: viral videos, chain emails, gossip, social currency

2. Status

A double meaning! It can indicate “What am I doing right now” (as in Facebook status), or represent a person’s prestige within their personal and professional circles. A person’s online status could range from informational, to too much information (“our baby just threw up the rug – how cute!”), to outright bragging (“I’m poolside at some tropical resort in January while you are all back home buried in 3 feet of snow – suckers!”). This has evolved into the realm of game mechanics, where users are motivated to gain “status” (or some embodiment of how influential or special they are) based on the social actions they take and achievements they reach.

see: status updates, tweets, Badges, Mayorships, Klout scores, “social capital”

3. Support

Another “S” with more than 1 definition. On a consumer level, it means real-time customer service conducted in public view, or consumer-to-consumer support via support forums where others have already found a solution . On a personal level, it means seeking the support or encouragement of others in times of need (loss of a loved one or job, motivation to stay on diet, or simply seeking sympathy because one woke up with a sore throat this morning). Social media has made people realize that the social web is one giant support group.

see: Twitter, customer support forums, Get Satisfaction, insight panels, Wikis

4. Shopping (and Savings!)

Social media relates to shopping in 2 ways – leveraging research and recommendations to make purchase decisions, and the emergence of new commerce models.

Social media has shifted consumer behavior from the traditional “sales funnel” to what McKinsey refers to as the “Consumer Decision Journey”, where once a consumer decides they are going to buy a product, they move into a stage called “active evaluation”, where the number of brands they are considering *increases* (the opposite of the premise of the original funnel). This is the stage when the consumer is intent on purchasing and they are actively researching the product, and begin to rely on reviews and ratings, comparing prices and tapping into their social circles for advice.

Shopping in itself has become more ‘social’, with a number of copycat Flash sales, group buying, location-based “deals” and coupon code aggregation/sharing sites popping up over the past few years. Who pays retail anymore?

see: Online reviews, Groupon, Gilt, group buying, flash sales, Foursquare deals

5. Search (and SEO)

A secondary benefit of UGC (user generated content) is that social media driven content is weighing more and more heavily in search result rankings. Social SEO is defined as traffic to your website via search engines, based on the relevancy of consumer-generated content on your site to keywords. You can apply all sorts of SEO to a product page on your ecommerce site, but all of the “likes”, shares, and consumer-submitted reviews and ratings will play a big factor in your content’s relevancy. And the relevancy of that content can be short-lived as trends/memes come and go and your content isn’t dynamic and gets “stale.”

see: Google +1, social seo, Facebook Likes, twitter trends, reviews and ratings, Social Mention

6. Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like winning stuff? In the social landscape (especially on more light-touch touchpoints such as Facebook and Twitter), an easy way to quickly amass lots of fans/followers is to conduct a social media-driven promotion. Brands are running contests and product giveaways, and those entries in turn virally promote the promotion to others (as well as increase exposure the brand). For other brands, they are seeing the opportunity to leverage social promotions as way to begin developing larger scale CRM and loyalty initiatives.

see: Facebook contests, Twitter giveaways, product samples

The final four “S’s” deal with the darker side of social media…

7. Scandals

It’s not that people’s behavior has changed much over the past 100 years so much as technology has brought into the public eye what has traditionally happened behind closed doors. And more often these days, social media has been the medium in which the scandals occurred. Politicians and athletes have always had affairs. Band groupies have always been around. But with the prevalence of camera-enabled smartphones, the public has become a mass paparazzi who can snap a compromising photo and post in real-time.

Also, social media has provided a direct way for celebrities/public figures to engage directly with the public, which has historically been a tightly controlled PR machine. Many of these forms of social media scandals are the result of spur of the moment actions – an insensitive tweet or a public message meant to be private. These public figures need to be given social media training in the same way they are trained to handle press conferences and interviews. Imagine if Joe DiMaggio, Bill Clinton, Robert Plant or John F. Kennedy had Twitter or Facebook around during their heydays?

But at the end of the day, the biggest social media “scandals” really didn’t become such until they were picked up by more mainstream media. How many actual consumers actually got worked up about the whole “Motrin Moms” controversy?

see: Wikileaks, Anthony Weiner, Brett Favre, Kenneth Cole, TMZ

8. Stalking (and over-Sharing)

Doesn’t it seem like just yesterday that most people were afraid to use their real name or even post a real photo of themselves online? The social web has lifted the guise of online anonymity, as people have shifted from using online personas/usernames to their real identities. By connecting a user’s online profiles and social media-based actions with other data, companies can mesh your social data with online behavioral data so they could, for example, better target ads based on your gender, age, number of children, or interests you have shared through any number of social media touchpoints.

Law enforcement, collection agencies and prospective employers are now using this information as well to track people down, conduct background checks and catch people lying (“I can’t pay my credit card bill, but here are photos of me on a luxury vacation!”)

For minors, there are legitimate concerns for parents about their children’s use of social media, what information they reveal and who they interact with.

see: Facebook privacy, Spokeo, Rapportive, PleaseRobMe, check-ins, online bullying, online predators

9. Sex

The adult industry has always been on the bleeding edge of technical innovation because, quite simply, they’ve had to be. They pioneered anti-credit card fraud checks in the 90′s, online subscription models, online dating, video delivery (including secure video, video chat systems, etc.), anti-piracy and even were a key player in the success of the Blu-Ray DVD format winning out over HD DVD. Any new innovation that gains wide adoption was most likely pioneered in the adult space first. While the “old” guard adult publishers are fading out of existence, the online industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry. “Innovate, or die” indeed.

see: chatroulette, webcams, online dating

10. Scams (and Snake Oil Salesmen)

Not to end on a downer, but it was only a matter of time before unsavory types would jump on the social bandwagon and figure out ways to make a quick buck off of others.

While historically online scams involving Nigerian princes looking to share their wealth or phishing scams that would trick people into sharing their banking info were done my mass-emailing people and playing a numbers game (assuming that even 1/100th of 1% of people were fooled, that would still translate into millions of dollars), scams can now spread at scale by leveraging the social web and the trust of users among their social media peers (from “Free iPads” to fake Japan charity scams).

In marketing circles, an entire cottage industry of social media ‘experts’ have emerged who have little previous experience other than reading Mashable or some presentations on SlideShare (what the heck is a “Twitter coach”, anyway? Were there “email coaches” 20 years ago?). “Books! Speaking engagements! Consulting gigs!” Don’t buy into the hype. Check their CV and see what they were were going 5 years ago (most likely flipping real estate). Ask to see actual work and case studies, and less jargon and hand waving.

At the end of the day, if you come across something that is too good to be true, then it most likely is. Caveat Emptor.

see: social media scams, phishing, botnets, fake charities, consultants, Twitter coaches

What does social media mean to you? Do you have any additions to this list? Leave a comment below or drop me a tweet!

IBM surveyed 1,000 customers around the world (including 350 executives) to understand what drives consumers to engage with companies via social media channels. The results show there is a major perception gap between what brands think consumers want versus what consumers really want:

• When asked what they do when they interact with businesses or brands via social media, consumers rank “getting discounts or coupons” and “purchasing products and services” at the top two activities
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, executives ranked getting discounts and purchasing products as the two activities consumers were least interested in doing (the exact opposite of consumers’ rankings!)

• Businesses are three times more likely to think consumers are interested in interacting with them to feel part of a community or engaged with their brand
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, those two actives were among the least interesting among consumers. Consumers are seeking value, whether it be information, advice, or a coupon. So while engaging with a company via social media may *result* in connectedness, the wish for intimacy with a brand is not what drives most of them.

The study advises (rightly so) that brands should not look at social media as an isolated program, but needs to be integrated across all other customer-facing initiatives. If you know your customer in one channel, you need to know them in other channels as well.

A successful Social CRM strategy is one that facilitates collaborative experiences and dialogue that customers value. But brands must understand consumers’ motivation for engaging with them.

As Facebook puts it:

What separates a PDC from most other development firms is the ability to understand social mechanics and technical possibilities on Platform.

Affinitive was chosen in recognition of our innovative Facebook Platform solutions ranging from Facebook applications and platform integrations, to brand social management, to social sweepstakes and loyalty/CRM integration.

We look forward to continuing to deliver innovative social experiences for our clients and their customers on Facebook Platform!

Without further ado, here is my Top 1 Prediction for 2011…

1. Facebook Launches Distributed Ad Network – an Endgame to Take on Google

I’ve been preaching this to colleagues/friends for the past year, and with each strategic move Facebook makes, I feel more certain about it. Facebook’s ultimate Google-threat is going to be the launch of a distributed ad network. Let’s review the evolution:

Facebook Platform (Social Graph)
While Google may know your search history, sites you visit, and can mine through your Gmail messages, Facebook has been gathering data on everything about you (well, as much as you are willing to reveal). They know not just where you live, but your phone number, your various social relationships, religion/sexual orientation/political leanings, the things you “like”, as well as your level of influence (how much of what you post gets likes/comments/reposts or how many people “hide” you in their newsfeed). Everything is represented in the “social graph”, and Facebook owns it.

Facebook Pages
As Facebook’s popularity began to skyrocket, brands wanted in the game so they could “fish where the fish are”. Pages allowed brands to set up shop and connect with an audience. Applications (built on the Facebook platform) could be integrated into pages as well, providing another level of data acquisition/usage tracking.

Facebook Ads
With the amount of traffic Facebook was generating, launching an ad service (albeit a rather shoddy one) was a no-brainer. Not only could they monetize their existing site traffic, but brands would throw them millions billions of dollars – to buy ads that drive people back to Facebook (and, in turn, add value back to Facebook). A brilliant business model, indeed!

Facebook Connect
Next, Facebook launched “Connect“. This allowed external sites to provide an easy way for users to log in using their existing Facebook credentials. As more and more sites adopted Connect, Facebook began to control identity, and in turn bring those external sites into the social graph (with the launch of Open Graph, Facebook has since killed off Connect in favor of using Oauth-based logins on top of the rebranded Facebook Platform).

Facebook Places and Social Commerce
Given some of their recent acquisitions (such as Hot Potato), Facebook isn’t hiding the fact that they are investing heavily in mobile/location-based-services (LBS’s). “Places” tie everything together. You “check in” at a place. You attend an event at a “place”. Not only do they want to know who you are and what you like, but where you are and who you are with as well. With the proliferation of “deals” services (most notably Groupon and LivingSocial, and location-based deals/offers provided by Foursquare, Yelp, Shopkick, etc.), it’s a proven model that a) $$works and b) has a long tail effect that even the smallest local mom-and-pop business can leverage.

Rumors have been swirling that Facebook might begin to charge users, but Facebook stands to make way more money by charging for their users than charging from their users directly (they will still make money off their users in other ways, such as Facebook Credits).

Social Plugins
After unveiling Open Graph, Facebook then released a suite of “social plugins” that anyone could customize/embed into their website with just a few lines of JavaScript code to instantly add Facebook-powered comments, content recommendations, and friends’ activity. Wouldn’t it be trivial to provide a customizable ad widget to majorly trafficked sites such as CNN.com or WashingtonPost.com who are already using Facebook’s social plugins? This would long-tail all the way down to the least-trafficked websites who use “like” buttons.

Facebook Apps and iFrames
Without getting too technical, Facebook has made some changes in the way applications are built on the Facebook platform. In the past, you could utilize FBML (Facebook Markup Language), but this is being deprecated for iframe-based development using Facebook’s JavaScript SDK and Social Plugins. This basically means you will be able to build Facebook apps that can run the same way on either on your own website or within Facebook. The new page design that was recently leaked shows they are doing away with “tabs”. What does this mean? Facebook may control the user’s wall/news feed, but they want to push the traffic back out to external sites (scale out traffic/users/ads/reach).

Search Partnerships
Yahoo and Google both know they screwed up big by not scooping up Facebook when they had the chance for a few “paltry” hundred million. Instead, Facebook took a minority investment from Microsoft. Since that time, Facebook has struck out a search partnerships with Microsoft-owned Bing and has been speaking with AOL (even though AOL just renewed their search deal with Google).

Even though these search engines only make up only around 13% of the current search market, Facebook is already the most-trafficked website on the planet, so this will only add to their reach (that’s a lot of potential ad impressions!).

Facebook Messages
Facebook recently relaunched their messaging service to be a unified communications platform blending email, IM, and SMS. Think about it – how many of your Facebook friends do you ever email (or even know their email addresses)? Now Facebook can mine your conversations and use that data to target ads. Combine that with the fact that Facebook is now allowing people to grab @facebook.com email addresses, and that looks like a direct attack on Gmail. I would venture to guess that there are more Facebook users with @aol.com addresses than @gmail.com addresses – they could potentially acquire tens of millions of more users who might be more apt to switch to an @facebook.com address than @gmail.com. And then they can run advertisements against them.

Conclusion
Do you see a pattern emerging here?

At the end of the day, Google’s bread and butter are the revenues they generate from Adwords. And you may argue that for Facebook, and IPO is their endgame. However, any thoughts of an IPO will hinge on the successful launch of a large-scale ad network initiative, as it will add billions to their pre-IPO valuation.

This is some serious stuff. If/when Facebook decides to launch their end-game ad network, they can simply flip a switch and enable millions of sites to start displaying highly-targeted (“scarily”-targeted, in fact) ads that will instantly put a damper on Google’s revenues/market share while catapulting Facebook’s revenues into the tens of billions.

Curious to hear what you think – drop a note in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter.

You can view our case study below. We’ll post up a video overview shortly.

There were a ton of great entries from some really talented brands and agencies, so it’s truly an honor to be in such great company. Congratulations to everyone on our team as well as the team at Random House.

I refer to these concepts as Social Referrals and Social SEO – two related, but very different concepts that any social marketer needs to understand:

Social Referrals:

Traffic to your site via content and/or links posted on social outposts such as Facebook and Twitter by yourself and others.

Social Referrals are driven by a combination of brand-driven referrals (posting a link to your Twitter/Facebook accounts), amplified sharing (consumer retweets), and via built-in sharing tools tied to content on your site.

For many companies (especially those with constantly fresh/dynamic content such as news sites and blogs), social referral traffic has risen to probably the #2 or #3 source of referral traffic (behind organic search and any online advertising).

Types of Social Referral Content:

• Breaking News (people share this quickly because they want to be the first to ‘break’ this to their friends)
• Viral Content, such as a funny video or photo (sharing this via Facebook/Twitter is considered ok/non-intrusive versus through email)
• Online Coupons/Sales/Offers (what can I say, people love free/discounted stuff!)
• Interesting/Informative Stories/Blog Posts (again, this content acts as social currency for the person sharing it, making them look good/in-the-know – the reality is, many people share this sort of content without even fully-reading the article! I’m as guilty as anyone else)

Social referrals tend to have a very short shelf life, and while true, some of the major search engines are starting to index them, their “relevancy” value in the eyes of search engines diminishes quickly.

Social SEO:

Traffic to your site via search engines, based on consumer-generated content relevancy to keywords.

Social SEO is a side benefit of facilitating user-generated content on your company’s website. For example, consumers aren’t necessarily seeking out information on, let’s say, a bottle of Redwood Creek wine. But, what if the brand has a thriving consumer community of outdoor enthusiasts who love to post/share BBQ and campfire recipes? Over time, the relevancy of that content trickles up the search engine ranks, and eventually can work it’s way to the top! We refer to this valuable, relevant, organic, indexable content as “Google Juice“.

Next, you’ve connected with this consumer based on their interest, while introducing your brand to them in the context of that interest. Not only will they find the user-generated content they discovered as relevant and informative, but they may in turn go on to become a part of your community to connect with other like-minded folks.

(note: Social SEO only truly works if you have also implemented proper search engine optimization techniques into your website, i.e., title, meta tags, <h1>/<h2> html tags, etc.)

Types of Social SEO Content

• User-Submitted reviews, recipes, photos/videos (with proper meta info)
• Forum Posts/Discussions/Knowledge Bases
• Comments
• User Profiles

The value of Social SEO builds over time, since this content acts as a permanent archive/repository. It also creates a “long-tail” of relevant content, as each piece of UGC becomes in itself an SEO landing page. This makes it easy to measure/learn  what types of content drive the most search engine referral traffic.

Measuring the Impact of Social Referrals and Social SEO

If you are not measuring (both quantitatively and qualitatively) the impact of Social Referrals and Social SEO , you are leaving out a large component of the Social ROI equation! Some examples include:

• Short term traffic bumps (Social Referrals), long term traffic growth trend (Social SEO)
• Increase in engagement metrics, time on site, etc.
• Community registrations, email signups, fan/follower acquisition
• Coupon redemption/conversion to sales/transactions
• CRM insights (do social referrals result in larger/more frequent purchases? Are community members who joined via Social SEO more active/engaged than others?)
• Insights into consumer interests/needs and where your brand is resonating/standing out (i.e., wine + campfire/BBQ recipes = brand positioning)
• Customer support savings (consumers solving own problems via locating answers provided by other consumers on your community/knowledge base)

Let’s me finish by asking you a question – how did you come across this blog post? Was it via a link someone tweeted or a Google search result? Drop me a line or leave a comment below if you’d like to discuss/debate further!

I’m as excited as anyone about the social marketing potential of the ‘real-time’ web, particularly as it applies to the mobile/location-based space. As more and more people flock to apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and BriteKite to document their every movement, everyone from local businesses to global brands are taking notice and trying to put together strategies to engage and reward consumers with “badges” (virtual “social currency”) and discounts/offers (tangible incentives) through these platforms (for the sake of my post, we’ll assume these are mostly actual consumers and not just all of us industry folks).

But the question remains – are you engaging/rewarding the right people? Let me use an analogy to illustrate…

Growing up, I spent a good deal of time working/hanging out at my family’s pizza business. Like a typical small-town local business, there were always a few interesting characters/regulars who would make it their home away from home, hanging out in the store day after day. They’d interact with other customers, tell jokes, and drink soda. Lots and lots of free soda. But they would never buy more than a slice of pizza during the course of a day.

In their minds, they were the “mayors” of the restaurant, where “everyone knew their names” and in a way they felt like they “owned” the place. But to us, they were “mascots” – nice folks, fun to have around, but of no real value to the business (and in some ways, potentially distracting to both customers and staff). They often came alone (didn’t have many friends), nor did they go out of their way to promote the business. My point is, don’t equate activity with influence.

So, when executing your location-based (or any consumer engagement) strategy, ask yourself – are you actually targeting “Mayors” or “Mascots”?

(Note: Even one of my company’s clients, Sports Authority, recently dove head-first into the location-based marketing space by offering $10 in-store cash cards via Foursquare to the “Mayors” of each of their stores nationwide. While it has made for a great PR/industry piece, the overall impact is just a blip on the radar compared to what they have seen by providing Facebook and Twitter-exclusive offers to their hundreds of thousands of fans and followers (or millions of others through weekend circulars), and won’t have solid loyalty metrics for some time. And like any other business, unless these location-based social tactics are integrated into a larger CRM/loyalty initiative, you will never know if you are in fact targeting “Mayors” or “Mascots”)

(click to enlarge)

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