Social Media Week is upon us! The Affinitive team will be in and out of the New York and San Francisco offices all of next week attending presentations hosted by leaders in emerging social and mobile media.

While we are all excited about the number of “can’t miss” events, especially The Interplay of Sports, Business, and Social Media featuring our Founder & CEO Bob Troia on the panel, we don’t have the time to see them all! So if you find yourself in a similar situation, and want a look at some of our favorites coming up, we’ve got a list for you. With that in mind, we bring to you Affinitive’s can’t miss events for Social Media Week 2012. Hope to see you there!

Rob Marscher’s Recommendation (NYC):
How to Embrace the Metagame to Produce Long-Term Social Engagement
As a word of mouth marketing agency, we’re always looking for ways to extend online engagement to offline engagement and word of mouth.  Gamification has been a hot topic among branded social apps.  I’m interested to discuss how “Metagaming” can be applied to social apps.

Bob Troia’s Recommendation (NYC):
J.C. Herz on Unpacking the Quantified Self followed by Panel: The Sensor Continuum
“Quantified Self” is cresting as a theme in the media, with buzz about all sorts of devices and apps logging everything from heartbeat and mile-times to sleep patterns and indoor air quality.

Margot Wood’s Recommendation (NYC):
@HAHAHAHA: How to be funny in 140 characters or less
Why do I want to go to this one? Honestly, who wouldn’t?

Christina Ku’s Recommendation (NYC):
Using Social Media to Change the Way We Do Government
Because love it or hate it, your government affects you and the way you live. It’s only logical that the next step in transparency and communicating with your representatives is through social media. What I REALLY want to go to though, is #kittencamp – memes, cats, and beer? Wish I was there!

Warren Ackerman’s Recommendation (SF):
Leveraging Gamification to Drive Engagement
Eager to hear about innovative B2C examples and how they match up against our own work for MLS, Jeep, Contiki and BlueCross BlueShield.

Erica Hall’s Recommendation (NYC):
Social Commerce Is Here, Is Your Brand Ready?
Social commerce is the future, wondering what insights these folks will have on best practices and adoption rates.

Patrick Courtney’s Recommendation (NYC):
Big Data and Bigger Conversations: Measuring Your Brand’s Social Performance
Measurement measurement measurement! I eat it up.

Andrew Fox’s Recommendation (NYC):
Consumer Engagement and Online Community in Social Media
As someone who spends his day creating and consuming branded content, and as sharable content becomes even more vital in engaging consumers and increasing reach, I’m hoping this event with Causes.com VP James Windon will provide some interesting insights and spark a few furiously scribbled down moments of inspiration.

Jon Heinrich’s Recommendation (NYC):
The Insidious Plot to Socialize the Enterprise
I will listen to anything that the Global Managing Director at Ogilvy has to say about social media.  As one of the leading ad agencies in the world, they have been around from the beginning, with David Ogilvy himself being known as “The father of Advertising”.  They are leaders in interactive marketing and known as industry innovators.  Listening to global brands like Nestle, Ford, and American Express talk about how the integrate social into their corporate environment sounds like a great way to start off Social Media Week!

Adam Kossoff’s Recommendation (NYC):
To Change Faster, We Must Decide Better
It’s a topic that can have a profound impact on anyone’s life. We make millions of decisions over our lifetime, but we rarely stop to think why we do certain things. I want to better understand the decision process, why certain decisions are made, and how I can learn to make better decisions.

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!

To get you up to speed, “Get On The Bus” was a contest encouraging US-based travelers to Like Contiki on Facebook and create virtual buses heading to one of eight Contiki vacation destinations, fill the buses with four of their friends and campaign to get the most votes of any other bus. You can learn more about this contest at the Facebook Studio.

The campaign generated over 10 million impressions through press coverage and sharing, and millions more impressions through offline WOM and advertising that supported the contest. Contiki additionally benefited from nearly 10,000 new US-based Facebook fans and thousands of newsletter signups.

Get On The Bus was deemed a success, but even the best campaigns have challenges and lessons learned. Here are some of ours:

Don’t

Overcomplicate. Buses could be made private (invite-only) or public. Not all users understood how the Facebook invite friends feature worked, if their invites were sent, where they could be found and how to accept an invite. It goes to show that sometimes features can easily overcomplicate, even if those features are native to Facebook.

Draw It Out. The contest ran for 6 weeks, and while the application shot up to tens of thousands of active users in that time, in hindsight the same contest might have been executed with the same results with a shorter duration. The best contest is one that keeps participants on their toes and engaged in the event, so it’s important not to draw it out and lose interest from fans.

Make Rules You Can’t Enforce. It was decided prior to the launch of the contest that vote-swapping and vote-buying would not be permitted. This was more difficult to monitor or define than originally planned. Once it was discovered that participants who were caught vote-swapping/buying were being disqualified, contestants began setting each other up to look like they were breaking the rules. The intention behind the rule was good, but the varying definitions and scale of incentives and swapping was too much of a gray area to enforce accurately.

Do

Personalize The Experience. Bus creators could name their own bus and give it a story.  Bus pages pulled in passengers’ common likes and interests from Open Graph to display the music, movies, etc. the passengers on the bus liked most as well as their average age, gender breakdown, and whether they were “Party” or “Culture” travelers.

Pages also included Facebook comments and activity streams updating the latest happenings on the bus. Participants had a ball with the personalization built into the contest experience and it showed with impressive time spent metrics.

Promote Sharing. Millions of impressions were generated through pass along on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. The contest made sharing and spreading the word a core component of the campaign, and it paid off in reach and awareness numbers. The critical piece is to make sharing a natural extension of the contest, and not just a mechanism to spam friends.

Create A Sense Of Urgency. The contest leader board showed, in real-time, which buses had the most votes. Participants were glued to the leader board checking in on how their bus was doing as voting wound down, which was in turn a huge motivator to get more votes. Additionally, email notifications were sent as the contest neared its conclusion, which drove many people back to the contest to turn their campaigning into high gear.

We had a blast working on this project with Contiki, and are happy to see them getting the recognition they deserve for hosting an innovative contest like this one.  We hope these learnings can help your team execute some great Facebook contests down the road.  There are many more Dos and Don’ts, so please share yours in the comments!

Here are a few recent nuggets of measurement metal you might find helpful or interesting:

1.     Radian6’s Practical Social Media Measurement & Analysis – In the March issue of their Community eBook, Radian6 puts together a concise and insightful guide to measuring and analyzing the primary objectives of social marketing including Cost Savings, Leads, Conversions and Sales, and Awareness, Attention and Reach.   Each section explains the process and includes example metrics you can use to analyze the performance of your programs and generate clear and visible results.

2.    Dag Holmboe’s Social Media ROI App – Dag has posted a series of Social Media ROI explanations on his blog, and his most recent post demos his Social Media ROI Application, which plugs in specific metrics of your program and spits out some interesting insights into its ROI.  You can demo the lite version of his app here.

3.    Google Analytics on Facebook Pages – This helpful how-to made the rounds late last week, and piqued my interest as I have made it known my disappointment in the current iteration of Facebook Insights.  I highly recommend this read and testing out Google Analytics on your Facebook page for further insights into referrals, visitor statistics, and more.

4.    Omniture Partners with Facebook – AdWeek announced last week that Omniture will be adding Facebook advertising data to its dashboard, allowing for greater insights and comparisons against campaigns running on other networks like Google.  This is great news; however, I tend to agree with KD Paine’s view that data may be incomplete.  Some of the most successful ad campaigns on Facebook direct users to a Facebook fan page, or the CTA is not a click-through but to fan the page from the ad itself.  Since the action is often not of direct sales, one must measure true success through the relationships developed by way of these conversions such as conversation volume, changes in sentiment, etc. which Omniture will not have.  I’m interested to see where this goes.

If you have additional stories regarding social media measurement and analysis please leave them in the comments!

It appears now that Facebook is ramping up their Insights offering, having debuted a new ‘Impressions’ metric for page admins to sink their teeth into.   Impressions, according to a Facebook spokesperson to AllFacebook.com, is defined as “the raw number of impressions shown to users. These impressions may appear in users’ News Feeds, visits to Pages or through a Fan Box widget.”

As a marketer with a soft spot for hard metrics I’m not amped by this.  For starters, this new metric doesn’t give me unique reach, frequency, or placement.  Facebook counts impressions beneath the fold, and when the majority of these impressions are funneled through a dynamic, vertical news feed, it’s probable that some of my impressions are displayed below the fold and never actually seen by the user.

Second,  I cannot measure with any certainty the number of impressions that are targeted to my intended audience (fans or friends of fans).  Whether passersby visit my publicly accessible page, or if I have a “Fanbox” widget on a site outside of Facebook, ‘Impressions’ lumps together both fans and non-fans into one big fat super-impressive number.  In a time where measuring reach and interactivity can be pinpointed to the individual user, it seems a bit archaic to use ad-based, unwashed masses metrics.  I know neither who viewed my content nor how it was viewed, if at all.

Targeted messaging and engaging opt-in consumers is a key advantage of a Facebook page as a marketing tactic, so why doesn’t Facebook let me measure that?  I’d like to see how many fans I reached, or friends of fans, and whereabouts in the news feed my status update appeared; or integrate more specific content update data into the dashboard to better measure performance and sentiment in lieu of the ambiguous ‘Post Quality.’ I could think of a laundry list of metrics I would rather have seen with this update than ‘Impressions.’  I’m disappointed.

Unfortunately Facebook plays host to more than 400 million people and as long as they provide an outlet for brands to engage with this audience, I will take whatever insights Facebook provides.  They’ve hinted at more sophisticated updates in the past, I just hope more of these updates are in the offing so we can stop regressing and start advancing our measurement standards.

Word of Mouth is the act of people talking.

Word of Mouth Marketing is giving people a reason to talk.

Social Media is simply one of many channels for Word of Mouth to occur. Just as is a telephone. Or standing around a water cooler. It benefits from the fact that it can scale quickly due to its online nature.

The point is, they are related, but different.

More case studies here.

However, Facebook’s success isn’t all good for marketers.  For one, Facebook’s staggering growth has exposed them to more legal issues, and as Facebook fills up their liability soft spots, marketers feel the pinch.  Just recently, Facebook outlawed conducting any giveaways or promotions through page status updates.  All promotions on Facebook must now be done through 3rd party apps, and Facebook must be indemnified.  That’s a pretty high barrier to what used to be a casual, effortless process.  Countless Pages from small to big name brands have been running these types of promotions to garner fans, grow brand awareness on Facebook, and increase customer engagement for quite some time.   It doesn’t appear as though Facebook has begun to crack down on this just yet, but they will likely soon.

Second, the discovery of Facebook as a viable marketing tool has led to a deluge of brands jumping into the Facebook Page game.  As consumers become fans and interact with pages, their friends’ news feeds begin to fill up with these brand interactions, which they may or may not care about.  To counter this and other issues, Facebook launched a simplified version of its platform, fittingly called Facebook Lite.  The biggest change for marketers is that no longer do these Fan Page actions hit the news feed.  You won’t see “Jane Doe became a fan of Brand X” anymore, or “John Smith added the SuperBrand Application.”  The stream is streamlined, with only status updates populating the stream, and the Highlights section is 86’d.

It all sounds like bad news but in reality this is an opportunity for marketers; marketers who understand what engagement really means, that is.  As the marketing fence goes up, brands that’ve relied solely on giveaways, promotions, flashy games and stumble-upons will be looking through the pickets, and the brands that authentically engage with consumers and keep a real person behind the voice will be tending the greener garden.  Better to start now while you can still hop the fence.

At least that’s the question that keeps coming up in conversations with my current / future / probable clients as we look at how to integrate Social Media Marketing into their strategy for 2010. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, it’s no longer an uphill convincing battle of us trying to say to clients YES YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST DO SOCIAL MEDIA AND HERE ARE 1,052 REASONS WHY… now the conversation is more WE KNOW WE NEED TO DO IT SO HELP US FIGURE OUT WHAT WE SHOULD DO?

Lately most of those conversations can’t seem to exist without the mention of the one, the only TWITTER.

The Social Media Marketing landscape is a lot like the world of sports. It has some mainstay platforms (like franchise teams -  the Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves = Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr) and then it has it’s emerging greats – powerful players who people believe could become a franchise all on their own (like Jordan + Chicago, LeBron + Cleveland, Bonds + San Fran,… well you get the idea). The emerging greats – like players – can come onto the scene from nowhere and stick around.

Sticking around is what separates them from the majorly buzzed about but often prematurely hyped players – who come into the game and can leave it just as quickly – whether they leave it injured due to technology issues, an acquisition, a lack of providing that niche/unique experience that keeps them around or they simply get beat by a better competitor and bow out.

2009 is Twitter’s year. In 2008 many tech pundits questioned whether Twitter would stick. The most common statement about Twitter seemed to be “I just don’t get it.”

But this is a new year. It’s like Twitter has been drafted out of high school straight into the pros.

Entering into the Twitter game isn’t, however, a right of passage, as some might leave you to believe. Although Twitter is becoming as common a search tool as Yahoo, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that your brand HAS to have an account on Twitter. It’s a platform just like any other – and decision to engage has to be strategic and tie to your business objectives. Just like a team wouldn’t draft a really great point guard if they really are in desperate need of a center forward, Twitter might not be an absolute for your brand.

Without further ado (har har, I couldn’t resist! I’m cheesy!) a few things to consider when trying to answer the epic question “To tweet or not to tweet?” (if you’re asking it as a brand, not as a person…unless your person is your brand, of course…)

As a brand there are a variety of ways you can interact with your existing and potential consumers, or your target or aspirational audiences (or all of the above). It isn’t as simple as a micro statement. Like anything else – the tone, the audience, and the approach can vary based on how the deployment of Twitter would impact your business objectives.

A few common ways brands use Twitter (effectively) are as follows:

• To engage in conversation. At it’s core Twitter allows you to develop, facilitate and engage in B to C and C to B and three way conversations – with those who are talking about you, to you or about /within a marketplace segment you’d like to dominate (or you do dominate).
• To answer customer service questions. Are you in an industry plagued with power outages? Are you like Sprint PCS with your customer dissatisfaction chronicled across the web? Twitter is a great place to begin to answer or facilitate the answering of key consumer questions.
• To provide crisis communication and curb rumors. Celebs are doing the best job of this currently – but brands can as well! Don’t let the blogosphere or some stodgy press release that goes out to the AP tell your story.  Talk to your friends, tell them the truth in a simple, short statement that links to further details. They’ll spread it for you quickly, guaranteed.
• To share new product information and get feedback. Add a new item to your menu? Ask people to check it out and share their micro reviews.  Have something you want to seed? Give it away to some influential tweeters. Don’t let joe schmo rogue blogger from Detroit show the first images of your new concept car, break them on Twitter yourself in an ownable way. Give your consumers a backstage pass to the shaping and molding of your brand.
• To drive traffic to another online destination. Check the web analytics of any brand site who deploys social media marketing. I guarantee Twitter and Facebook rank in the top 5 traffic drivers if they are deploying good strategy within either.
• To host giveaways and other consumer promotions. Invite Tweeters to come to a live tasting of your product. Do a giveaway to your followers. Ask people to retweet a statement in order to win XYZ. Note: there is a fine line in executing this well and with good intention/strategy. I’d suggest not deploying this unless you are sure you’re doing it in a genuine way.
• To tell a story about a brand, experience or persona. This is really the reason to being. What/who/how/why is the voice of your brand? This is the essence of who you are. It blows my mind when people leave this voice to interns. This is your story on the front lines…directly playing with the key players who will BUY your product, make sure you are 100% confident in the storyteller.
• To develop your brand identity. See bullet above.
• To establish relationships by facilitating simple brand interactions. This probably should have been at the top of the list. 9 times out of 10, Twitter makes the most sense when brands really can benefit from relationship marketing with the right audience.  Before brands used to have to go through a third party to make that happen. Those days are gone resulting in an exciting (and often scary for the old school set) new set of opportunities.

The scope and possibility here is way too expansive to be encompassed in this single post.

The point is that although in most cases we would likely determine that drafting Twitter as a new member of your marketing team mix is the right thing to do – it isn’t as simple as signing up for the account, slapping on a background image and tweeting.

There are lots of other players on the field, so if you want to really play, you better step onto it with your A game.

Note on image: The top tweet is one of my favorites, from the man… Mr. A-Z himself twittering about his experience with Surfrider Foundation at a Barefoot Wine sponsored event. Barefoot is one of the brands I have the extreme pleasure of working with on Social Media Marketing.

Less than 10 months ago, I remember creating massive PowerPoint presentations explaining exactly who, what, and WHY platforms like Twitter were going to become key social platforms for brands to engage with consumers – especially when loyalty and retention are part of the brand’s goals and objectives. Now we are getting requests for Twitter and Facebook strategic proposals on a daily basis. The tide has definitely turned.

According to a recent study by Burson-Marsteller, Twitter is the top Social Media platform for Fortune 100 companies. Not a huge shocker if you work (live! breathe! all of the above!) the space, but nice to hear tools that you believe, as a marketer, to be viable if properly adopted to begin to emerge as frequent parts of  brands’ strategies.

What is even more interesting is when you drill the reported Fortune 100 numbers down:

• 54 percent of the Fortune 100 have a Twitter presence (Anyone have that list? Mashable? Couldn’t find it on their Mega Lists)
• 32 percent have a blog
• 29 percent have an active Facebook Page.
• only 17 percent use all three (blog, Facebook, Twitter)
• 94% of companies who use Twitter use it for news/announcements, 67% for consumer service and 57 per cent for deals and promotions
• average Twitter account has 5,234 followers,  median is 674 followers.

At companies using only one of these tools, 76 percent of them use Twitter as the tool of choice. Whew. In some ways this makes me want to dance around in circles and sing “I told you so” like a 4th grader…but mostly this just makes me want to work harder to ensure that all of our current, future, past, potential clients step into the space with purpose AND best practices.

As the best practices for the space continue to get defined and redefined by the people who actively engage in them (as users,  brand leaders, marketers…), the ownership over social marketing as a strategy and the social mediums that fall underneath it’s umbrella enters into a huge gray area.

As the popularity has ensued, the land grab for control over social marketing has hit full swing.

In what can perhaps best be analogized as a social marketing gold rush,  marketers and agencies across the board are racing to own that space within their existing (and future) brand relationships. Simultaneously brands are racing to get started in social marketing (for the most part) and aren’t sure which direction to go.

Who best owns Social Marketing? PR? Digital? A boutique agency? Internal brand managers and team members?

While there is clearly no universal answer – despite what we’d all love to think – there are a few key items on the list that seem to be basic rules of thumb that most brands simply can’t ignore.

So without further ado, let me present my list of Social Marketing tidbits for thought, the growing/morphing changing stream of practices, ideas, and 411s that go into most of my brainstorms:

1. People are talking about you on Twitter… and likely on Facebook, and definitely out there in the big, bad blogosphere. And will talk about you. They are asking for you to join the conversation.
2. The person (or persons) communicating on behalf of your brand have to really know your brand.
3. But they also have to really know the medium…and the medium’s user base.
4. There are rules to engagement in all platforms – you cannot go into this blindly as a brand. You have a lot more at stake than Joe Schmo’s anonymous testing of the waters.
5. There is a true strategy to using social mediums properly. Frequency of content, types of content, ways to advertise (if you should advertise?), metrics and measurements for success, best type of communication, even the lingo is often strategic.
6. The worst thing you can do is feed all your blog posts into your Twitter, all your Twitter posts into your Facebook, and all your Facebook status updates back into your Twitter.  Sure you want to cross-link and have an integrated strategy, but each audience deserves to be communicated with directly.
7. Transparency. (Always, always, always).
8. There is a major debate with regards to the ethics of paying bloggers, tweeters, etc. Be sure to know where/how your social marketing team approaches this (and know the backstory).
9. Just because [insert cool brand name here] and Oprah are on Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be. Enter all mediums with a plan and with purpose.
10. Chances are your legal department is going to need a full-fledged tutorial on whichever platforms you choose.
11. Don’t give up if you’re facing some legal challenges. You can work through them. We have navigated through (and prevailed!)  highly regulated industries and it is worth it.
12. The number of “fans” and “followers” and “friends” your brand has only matters if you are actively engaging them with content that makes sense, that they want to consume, in ways that they want to consume it, and in ways it best fits in with your overall marketing mix.
13. Debating social strategy internally? Starting with Forrester’s P.O.S.T. analysis really is a good way to get the ball rolling.
14. The blessing (and curse!) of online is how fluid and flexible it is. Make sure you are, too.
15. If the people doing your strategy aren’t active personal users of the platforms – mega red flag. Find their accounts, verify they actually are practicing the buzz worthy mantra they are preaching.

I’m sure I’m missing many on the list. So, marketers, tweeters, bloggers, strategists, tumblrers, Facebookers, social media enthusiasts, what do YOU think?