Good.  That should have happened because analytics are important!  Below, some tips to making more out of your “new” Facebook Insights:

Get Past Total Likes

It’s easy to take metrics like People Talking About This (PTAT), Engaged Users, etc. and divide them into total Page Likes as a barometer for fan engagement levels. PTAT and Total Likes are prominently displayed next to one another on your page.  But this overstates your fan engagement, and Facebook wants you to start seeing the forest for the trees.  When grabbing reach metrics, make sure you’re looking at fans, friends of fans, and in some cases the unique visitor traffic to your page (if measuring stats at the page level.)  Engagements and stories are being created by more than just your fans, and should be measured that way.  Total Likes is important, and is just one of several metrics to use when measuring your Facebook audience.

Measure Engagement And Viral Engagement

The level of engagement with your content is the lynchpin to getting more exposure in the news feed and what better way to see that than understanding how many people interact with your content when they see it?  To get Engagement, divide Engaged Users by your Total Reach.  This will give you a % of all the unique users who potentially SAW your content that also clicked on that content in some way.

People Talking About This, a type of engagement, measures a unique user performing an action that creates a story in the engaged user’s news feed (ex – “Jane Doe just commented on Acme Brand’s post.”) Measure PTAT the same way as Engaged Users, dividing by Total Reach, to get % Viral Engagement (or “Virality” as Facebook displays it on the Insights dashboard.) Viral engagement is the more desired type of engagement in most instances, as it spreads your message through the social graph more quickly.

These metrics are helpful in understanding how well your message is resonating with the people you’re reaching.  Aim to keep engagement levels up as your fan base grows, and continue to increase the virality of your engagements by focusing on those actions that create stories, which in turn increases the distribution of your message.

Use People Talking About This For Competitive Analysis

Since PTAT is a public-facing metric, you can now take this number, divide by total Likes (I know I just advised not doing this above, but we don’t have much choice when doing competitive analysis), and trend this percentage over time for your brand and your competitors.  If you’re between 2-4% you’re on the right track (this may be higher for pages with less fans and lower for pages with more fans).  Keep an eye on this to gauge how well your message is resonating as compared to your competitors and similar brands with comparable fan levels.

Pay Attention To The Post Level

Post level metrics are the purest Insights Facebook offers for accurately measuring post content performance.  Try categorizing your post types by subject in advance, then group your posts’ performance by subject to better understand what content topics and execution tactics boost kpi’s like Engaged Users and Virality at the post level.  For example, you’re a wine brand targeting Millenials.  You may post about the properties of the wine, the brand values of the wine, lifestyle attributes of your target customers like the kind of music or food they may like, etc.  Group these posts into their respective topics, and revise your content strategy by learning how these topics generally perform by comparison.

Ultimately you’ll want to measure whatever metrics align with your objectives.  Maybe you’re looking to drive traffic to a product web site, and you want to measure reach with click through rates on sales or product announcements, or maybe your concern is awareness in which Impressions might hold more weight.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with metrics just like you would with your creative tactics.  Just remember that Facebook can, and will, manipulate and change their data and metrics whenever they want and however they want, so be sure to export and store your data regularly to avoid losing anything important.

How have you adapted to the new Insights from Facebook?

Solution Type – Digital Promotions, Social Marketing for nutritional supplement brand MuscleTech

Objective:
Counter declining brand sentiment and support the launch of a new line of products by developing and activating the MuscleTech audience in social media, engaging with targeted communities and influencers to educate and deliver key product and brand messaging where it would be heard.

Services Provided:                                      
Contests and Sweepstakes
Blogger/Influencer  Outreach
Facebook Advertising
Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Audit
Internal Policies and Education
Profile Management
Facebook Applications
Product Sampling/Fulfillment

Activation:
Formalized the social media program for Iovate prior to the program’s launch including conducting a social media audit, developing the communication workflow, engagement guidelines, and more.  Utilized a cross-platform content strategy (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Knowledge Base) to consistently deliver interesting and relevant content and brand messaging with MuscleTech’s audience.  Improved customer interaction across major social networks by engaging with people talking about MuscleTech, its products, and the sport of bodybuilding. Earned new customers and brand followers by applying audience development tactics across platforms, developing sweepstakes, exclusive offers and content supported by targeted Facebook advertising. Educated customers about new products through interactive Facebook tabs and a Support Center with answers to commonly asked questions, and empowered them to share and recommend content and products through targeted trial sampling programs.

Twitter is a wordsmith’s best friend, so it’s no surprise that authors flock to the micro-social networking service to help launch their books. While most book launch campaigns on Twitter go under the radar, every once in awhile a hashtag will hit it big, or at least be so interesting that you can’t help give it some props. There are no hard or fast rules when it comes to successfully building awareness about a book through Twitter, but by looking at two recent examples, we can glean some insights on how to run a successful Twitter campaign.

ROUTE #1 – Connect with the people

Back in September, British author (and Twitter addict with over 1 million followers) Lord Alan Sugar took to Twitter to launch his new ebook The Way I See It, a non-fiction anthology of his rants and ravings about everything. Using the hashtag #thewayiseeit, he called upon his followers to use the hashtag to tweet their rants at him so he could use them to sign copies of his book. For a more in-depth look at the campaign that was considered “the first Twitter book signing” watch the brief video below.

So why did this work? For starters, the author already had a built in audience – which always helps – but what he asked Tweeps to do was already a natural extension of something that happens on Twitter – ranting. That’s it. All he wanted was for people to use the hashtag and to Tweet their rants in 140 characters or less.

The results? Within 24 hours there was a grand total of 350,000 tweets using that hashtag and over 2,500 mentioned Lord Sugar directly. For more, read this article. 

Route #2 – Be Creative

When in doubt, do something funny. Twitter is a place where witty people come together to show how funny they can be. Why? People love it. So it was no surprise that the Random House Twitter campaign for the release of their zombie apocalypse book Zone One by Colson Whitehead was a success.

Utilizing the hashtag #RHZombies, Random House and ALL of their imprints took to Twitter to broadcast the publisher-wide zombie attack.

In total, the hashtag #RHZombies was used 211 times and even noted for it’s cleverness in some major book blogs like GalleyCat and BookRiot.

So, my advice for your soon-to-be-published book? Get your publisher involved! The Twitter campaign for Zone One was led by publishers, who on average usually have more followers and Klout. Getting them to launch a hashtag campaign on your behalf is always a great starting point.

If you aren’t as lucky to have the backing of a big name publisher or are self-publishing,  go the Alan Sugar route and make your hashtag relevant to the world. Be creative but simple. Make sure your hashtag is short enough so people can incorporate it into their own tweets (space is prime real estate!) but creative so that it will incite others to participate in the conversation.

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

BlueFly

Bluefly’s unique layout combines design elements from both the welcome tab and avatar. I particularly love the way it draws your eye from the avatar on the left to the like button on the right.  It’s stylish, it’s fun and it completely mirrors the company’s branding.

Champion

This is bold and definitely “in your face” design. Champion is using the oft seen technique of displaying the call to action OVER the content, giving potential fans a sneak peek at content and enticing them further to “like” the page.

Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson’s call to action is the tried and true method of displaying the current number of fans. While this isn’t anything new,  Sony Ericsson’s is the best one I’ve seen so far. I particularly like that the call to action with fan counter is supported by the locked message below it.

Reebok

Bold. Bright. Impossible to miss or ignore. Reebok gets an A+ for assertiveness!

Target

Another strong, bold design – similar to Reebok’s but less assertive. However, this still works really well for Target. I’m also a big fan of the cute tagline “If you like Target, throw your thumb in the air.” Nice touch!

Nutella

While not as bold as other designs in this  post, I have to give Nutella props for creativity and great aesthetics. Super fun and perfect for their branding, this call to action prompt is perfect for Nutella.

Carnival Cruises

What Carnival does well here is incorporating great visual tricks. Notice how your eye – no matter where you look – is drawn up to the ”like” button. While some of the colors are a little recessive and could use some punch, overall this is an effective and creative call to action.

What are your favorite examples of effective “like us” design? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Share them below in the comments or email me at margot@beaffinitive.com.

Many of you may have noticed the hashtag that is shown at the bottom of many TV shows recently.  If you do not have It is small, unobtrusive, and has great value to the studio. Turn on USA or Comedy Central most nights and you will see a hashtag in the bottom left of the screen with the title of the show that is currently on.  Watch a trailer for a movie, and you may see a hashtag which in some way indicates the name of the movie.  Posting with the hashtag shown to you on tv allows the studios to get a better glimpse as to how their show is doing in the public’s eye, how many are actually watching the show, and allows the show better publicity.

This has been seen to get actual real results when done correctly.  Comedy Central found that through the placement of their hashtag, their roast of Donald Trump brought about a huge surge in tweets, it actually reached 4,064 tweets per second at one point.  This caused a huge PR win for Comedy Central.  So much of a win, that scribbal wrote a post about it.  The hash tag did not even use that much of the screen, as shown here:

Learning from this, this year’s roast of Charlie Sheen had the #SheenRoast hashtags prominently displayed all over the place: from the corner of the screen, to the resulting webpage, to all advertisements I saw before and after the fact, including this image found on a redirect page before the show:

They also put each of the roaster’s twitter handles underneath them when they went up to the podium, as another way to track participation, but that’s for another post.

There are even whole companies that revolve around tracking these hashtags. Hash Tracking  allows you to enter a hashtag and see how much activity revolves around that hashtag.  This could be useful to see how long people are still talking about a particular event or how popular a television show still is.  This could also be useful to studios in the long run as they could use these services to sell more premium advertising space on the more popular television shows, and allow advertisers to see what kind of people are tweeting about the shows where their products are being advertised.  At the time of writing, which is a month after Charlie Sheen was roasted, there were 52 tweets, which generated 13,814 impressions, reaching an audience of 12,989 followers within the past 24 hours according to Hash Tracking. This data shows that people are still talking about it even almost a month after it aired.

Like all things, there is a proper way to do things and an improper way.  The reason for the massive success of showing hashtags in these shows are that they are easy to recognize and easy to type.  They are also unobtrusive yet prominent when shown on the screen and they do not take away from the experience of the non-currently-tweeting watcher.  They are also on screen for long periods of time so people have time to get on twitter and tweet them or remember them later on.

There are also many ways I have seen this done wrong.  One unfortunately popular source of bad showing of hashtags seems to be with movie commercials and trailers. Assuming I had a computer on and nearby, I wouldn’t be able to type in twitter.com and post a status before the commercial is already long gone.  They flash the hashtag as fast as most other car, airline and credit card commercials flash their small text.  This is not the way to get people talking about your movie.  In fact, I forget what the hash tag is by the time I’m done typing out my tweet.  They also seem to put hashtags in movie trailers when I am at the movie theatres.  I don’t think I need to tell you, if I can’t remember the hashtag after a minute of having to load up Twitter and write my post, I am surely not going to remember it after a full movie and the time it takes to get home.

An old advertising mantra can be adapted for hashtags.  That adapted mantra is that a bad hashtag is still a good hashtag.  I find that when I go on Twitter or Facebook, some of my friends that I follow are often saying things that only make sense if you are watching what they are watching at the current moment, but they are not posting hashtags to say what they mean.  Because I know these friends I know they are talking about some sports game that is currently on.  However sports’ games do not have hashtags that they promote frequently so my friends have nothing to rally around.  These tweets do not promote the game nor their favored team with any recognition and are thus lost.  One way they can get do this is having a hashtag with the team names and the date (ex. #yanksvbluejays916  or #subwayseries2011).  Since it costs only a few seconds to create a hashtag and there are examples of sports teams doing this for the big games (ex. #NBAPlayoffs) I don’t see why we have this for every game.

Promoting the use of a hashtag can do wonders for your studio’s publicity as well as giving you an honest, easy and cheap way to get a poll of how your television show or movie is being perceived by the general public.  But in order for it to be used by the majority of the people you are trying to reach, it has to be displayed and displayed correctly.  Bad placement of a hashtag can result in at best bad tweets or at worst no tweets.

Source: BusinessInsider.com

The introduction of the Ticker, a light-touch version of the news feed for less important updates, and ‘Graph Rank’, the new algorithm supporting Edge Rank that weights news feed items using your perceived interests, were also major announcements for marketers. Other updates included new permissions for ‘frictionless’ (read: automatic) publishing of content to a user’s stream, major media partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, Washington Post, etc. and more.  Catch all the updates on TechCrunch here.

This is the beginning of Facebook’s effort to create and surface ‘stories’, bite-size engagements, actions and content that together make up who you are and how you express yourself online. Facebook indexes everything you do to create a self database, your life story. Add to that the automated publishing of your expressions, and the gap between who we say we are (cognizant actions) and whom we really are (incognizant actions) begins to close.

How Does This Affect Brand Marketers?
First impressions on how these new features will affect how brands market on Facebook:

1. This will likely make it more difficult for some marketers to engage as consumers become more cautious or careful about who and what they interact with. “Does this interaction represent who I am?” Is now a more relevant question to ask as the famous internet adage that what you do and say online lasts forever becomes visible in the TIMELINE.
2. Millions and perhaps billions more stories will now be created and fed into TIMELINES, News Feeds and Tickers. Brands are now in more competition than ever reaching consumers on Facebook, meaning loyalty, advocacy and evangelism become enormous advantages for making a customer’s TIMELINE.  That, and having the money for Sponsored Stories, which will prove to play an even more important role in reaching consumers.
3. Brands will now be in the business of building stories, going beyond the one-on-one dialogue, the comment and the Like. Brands will look to build experiences that create opportunities for customers to share and populate their TIMELINE in new and interesting ways. Applications will play a key in staying relevant on Facebook (this includes integrating apps into other platforms and sites outside the Facebook environment.)

It will be important for brands to focus on the story, and provide customers with the tools, actions and experiences that empower them to tell that story. What happens on the Page Wall will always be relevant as long as you’re making real and true connections with customers, but it’s getting those customers to then go out and create more stories through opportunities you provide (apps, buttons, etc.) that will drive success on the new Facebook.

What do you think about the new Facebook changes?

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)?

Hopefully, you have the knowledge on how to mix up a batch of frozen cosmos on your own. Because not any of the major vodka brands – not Stoli, Absolut, Smirnoff, Svedka, Grey Goose nor Skyy – will tell you how to make one.  In fact, Absolut is the only of these brands to provide any frozen cocktail recipes whatsoever – and while you can mysteriously learn how to make frozen margaritas and daiquiris (neither of which contain vodka) and 19 variations of cosmos with different Absolut flavors from various Absolut platforms including their forward-thinking Drinkspiration app, there is not one frozen cosmo recipe to be found. Of course, it is understandable why a premium spirits brand, such as a Grey Goose, wouldn’t develop frozen cocktail recipes: if you’re pouring a high quality, high cost ingredient into your sugary, too-cold-to-really-taste beverage, you’re wasting it. On the other hand, if a consumer wants to turn their priciest bottle of hooch into a boozy Slurpee, shouldn’t your brand be there to help them achieve their drinky desires?

As brands become content publishers, it’s imperative that liquor brands learn to think seasonally.  A food magazine would never dream of not having recipes especially suited to the flavors and weather (not to mention the spirit, no pun intended) of Thanksgiving, Christmas or the Memorial Day/4th of July/Labor Day social summer season. Food publications know that consumers are becoming locavores, and therefore taking seasonality into account in their eating habits, at ever increasing rates.  The foodservice industry knows it, also: the use of “local” in restaurant marketing has climbed 13% in the past year.  And it’s not just chefs who are thinking locally: the trendiest mixologists have joined their kitchen-dwelling brethren in embracing seasonal cocktail programs and showing off the finest, freshest flavors in their concoctions. Even T.G.I.Friday’s is doing it!

Anticipating and embracing the needs of your consumer is, after all, a basic necessity in business. Conversations in social media are about the moment, and if you have nothing timely to contribute, you’re left out of the discussion. Ignoring whole events or seasons only increases the chances that no one will be serving your spirit in the punch bowl or pitcher at their big holiday bash.  From a gin toddy to, yes, a frozen cosmo, seasonally-suitable cocktails are an easy way to vary the conversation around your brand and create opportunities for party-givers (born influencers) to provide you with some old-fashioned “What is in this punch? You have to give me the recipe!” word-of-mouth marketing.

Of course, thinking seasonally means you will have to adapt your recipe content strategy throughout the year to stay relevant. Dedicating yourself to year-round recipe content creation and publication will educate and engage your audience more, the way Patron is with their Patron Cocktail Lab on Facebook. While it’s odd that the app exists on its own page and not the brand’s pages, the app itself combines education (the brand – often via guest mixologists who act as judges of the challenge – provides new recipes built around the theme of the current challenge), UGC content (fans upload their own recipe creation inspired by the theme), hints with the viral (voting period nominates the finalists) and rewards (the brand picks a winner from the finalists and awards them branded swag).

Year-round recipe content creation will also allow you to respond quickly to mixology trends as well as to the greater cultural zeitgeist. On both her final season as well as the reality television show about her final season, Oprah, her best friend Gayle King and Oprah staffers are often seen and heard enjoying and extolling the pleasures of their (minty) version of a Moscow Mule, Oprah’s new favorite cocktail.  Fans often Tweet about how they are drinking classic cocktail while they watch the show, and if you do an internet search for a Moscow Mule recipe, the top article is from Oprah.com.  A year-round cocktail program would have saved you from missing an opportunity for your brand to leap on the great O bandwagon.

Any newspaper or magazine editor will tell you that it’s not the big stories that generate the most consistent traffic and engagement: it’s the recipes. Recipes are king: Google even created a recipe search engine just to harness the power of the insatiable hunger of the masses for useful, creative or ridiculously indulgent recipes.  Spirits brands are in a unique position: most other beverages, be it beer or soda or energy drinks, don’t need to educate the consumer: their products are self-contained experiences.  But check out the Facebook pages of Oreo and Ritz: products that are great on their own, but as equally good – and useful – as building block ingredients in a bigger culinary experience.  Ask anyone who’s ever used Oreo cookies in a crust or Ritz crackers in a casserole.  Educating and engaging consumers on how to incorporate your product (a product they clearly enjoy, as they have invited you into their Facebook newsfeed or Twitter timeline) into more areas of their life will only help sell more product. If liquor brands step-up their recipe programs, perhaps one day Paula Deen will ride a bottle of their booze – instead of a stick of butter – into internet meme history.

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!