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.

Client Name

Solution Type — Digital Promotion

Objective — Promote the release of Chrysler’s 2012 Jeep Call-of-Duty edition Wrangler through an immersive, social-driven consumer promotion within Facebook around Activision’s much-anticipated release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.

Activation — Jeep Ops, an immersive Facebook sweepstakes game, asked fans of Jeep to play the game, mimicking the in-game Call of Duty story to earn entries into the contest by completing Missions in order to win the first-off-the-line 2012 Jeep Wrangler COD version.

Results
•       453,842 Visits | 940,964 Page views
•       51,569 Total submissions | 46,592 Playing the game
•       2,435,164 total ballot entries

Campaigns/Initiatives

Engage users by creating a Call-of-Duty themed virtual scavenger hunt on Facebook that highlights both the capabilities of the new Wrangler Call-of-Duty MW3 Edition and the game locations.  Users earn “ballots” for participation, solving clues, and referring friends that result in additional chances to win.

Services Provided

•       Social Media Sweepstakes
•       Social Media Monitoring
•       Technical execution of Facebook Application

Notes
This effort was a highly technical one, executed under a tight timeline. Affinitive, as a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC), leveraged its extensive expertise with Facebook Platform among a collaborative team of several other creative and media agencies, including Sapient Nitro.

How it Works

Once a user has "Liked" the Jeep Facebook page, they are directed to a Call-of-Duty-esque commander module where they receive instructions on the game.

Next, users were led through four different "missions", where they were given clues about a specific location they that they must solve—by any means necessary—to locate various parts of the vehicle.

Completed missions earn achievement badges and bonus ballots for the sweepstakes to win the first-off-the-line 2012 Jeep Wrangler Call of Duty: MW3 Edition. The farher along users advance through the four stages of training, the greater the number of ballots earned.

Ballots will be tallied after midnight on December 31, 2011 and the winner will be drawn at random for the new Jeep Wrangler, Call of Duty: MW3 edition.

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.

(click the image for an easier-to-read version. Note that this a ‘living’ chart that I have been soliciting feedback/input on – if you have any suggestions/additions/changes, just post a comment below or at the SlideShare page!)

I’ve already noted how social media is not the same as Word of Mouth. And as the social landscape broadens, it’s simply causing more confusion as the term “social” gets slapped on just about anything to make it sound cool and relevant.

Above is a chart I’ve been working on that tries to illustrate the “social” landscape in terms of tactics and goals. You should be able to take any social touchpoint/tactic/business model (brand community, Twitter profile, blogger outreach, CGM sweepstakes) and plot them on this chart.

Essentially, this chart segments the social landscape into four quadrants… as a function of:

• CRM (social CRM or sCRM)
• Marketing (social MARKETING)
• PR (social PR)
• Media (social MEDIA)

The horizontal axis represents “owned” social channels (that you own/control) versus “leased” ones (i.e., paying a company for access to their network of consumers willing to try and/or talk about your product). The “partially owned” area represents social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook where yes, you can establish a brand presence but you don’t own any underlying data and are at the whim of the service provider in terms of metrics or even having your account suspended. The vertical axis represents the depth of engagement from very 1-to-1/personal to impersonal/3rd-person – i.e., “engagement” vs. “reach”:

In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with leveraging the social web to facilitate high-impact, quick hit consumer promotions, but at the end of the day was your goal to “reach” 1,000,000 consumers with a message about your product, or simply “acquire” a 10,000 email addresses into your company’s email database? As the social landscape broadens, marketers need to ensure that their success metrics are in line with the tactics they are leveraging. And that unfortunately can’t happen until you have properly educated the folks holding the pursestrings.

Recently, Chris Brogan’s article “Attention as Currency and Noise” briefly delves in to the concept of attention budgeting, as he explores the value of attention.  As social marketing “pros”,  we are attempting to catch the attention of our target audience in a manner that conveys trust and reaffirms our clients’ brand reputation.  For a busy social media professional it can sometimes be difficult to decide how to effectively manage all of the  “one-to-many” conversations you are having online, which Brogan describes as “where the real value of social media kicks in.”

As with most marketing functions, the first question to ask yourself is “what are my goals?”  Are you trying to grow fans, trying to influence key tastemakers, or trying to drive traffic to your brand’s website? Once you know your goals, you can begin to plan a strategy.  Every brand and every industry will have a different set of problems and solutions.  Since social media affects different industry verticals in different ways, you need to determine an overall social media strategy that works best for each client.

Within that framework you then must decide on a client-by-client basis how much time you should spend on audience development, and on which social platforms to focus your efforts.  Mark Tosczak offers some great ideas on how to determine this for your clients, including focusing on how much content you have, how much time you have to create content, and the importance of taking time to listen, read and interact.  He offers that you should concentrate most of your attention on the “20 percent of tools/sites/strategies that are going to yield 80 percent of your results.”

Once this has been done for each brand I recommend plotting out all your brands and categorizing them by: category/vertical (retail/brick and mortar, CPG, celebrity), goals (brand awareness, fan acquisition, generate UGC), social network (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and then assign the amount of time per week associated with accomplishing each goal.  By placing everything in one place you can determine how much of your day and week you allow yourself to be sucked in to the world of social (which for some of us can border on addiction).

Of course, this is just one method of determining how to budget your attention.  I’d love to hear what’s worked for you? Let me know in the comments below.

When marketers decide to use any marketing channel, they should always ladder back to the brand’s objectives. This is hardly a novel concept and is part of any strategic process, such as the famed Forrester POST methodology, that many use to determine a Social Marketing plan of action.

When it comes to Social Marketing specifically, those objectives can often range from increasing brand site engagement and traffic to Public Relations and everything in between. Just like any other channel, it can be used as a funnel for a variety of types of messaging that is targeted at a varying set of objectives.

Enter an interesting little chart (embedded here).

Like many other marketers, I subscribe to Marketing Sherpa’s Chart of the Week.  These handy charts often give a snapshot on one element going on in the world of marketing that they’ve done a broader research initiative surrounding.

I thought this week’s was particularly interesting. It measures the objectives, targeted and measured, by marketers within the social sphere. The big “aha” finding in this is that 3/4 of marketers claim that site traffic increase is one of their key objectives for deploying social tactics.

Marketing Sherpa’s conclusion is the same one that I would come to – while an increase in time on site, overall site traffic, SEO optimization and other objectives within that zone are great secondary benefits of Social, there is a larger opportunity to leverage social in a scalable way to provide self service tools and information to consumers that can then, in turn, reduce overall brand cost that can be very heavy when dealing with and addressing customer needs.

There are several brands who actively leverage social platforms to reduce these customer support costs including:

• JetBlue and Virgin America – who actively tweet and provide information about flight delays, schedule changes, weather alerts, and responses to specific customer inquiries
• Best Buy’s “Twelpforce” – integrated from Twitter all the way to in-store Point-of-Sale (POS), this massive program helps answer customer questions, provide product information, support, etc in a scalable way
• Comcast’s service guru Frank Eliason, who has been deemed the “most famous customer service manager in the US” by Brandweek for his work primarily in the social space (major points for early adoption)

Have you seen any other examples of brands leveraging Social Marketing to help create a supportive consumer environment?

Unfortunately, I have work to accomplish. And well, if I don’t get this left brain humming, that universe of opportunity will do me no good!

With Facebook, Tweets, IMs, SMSs, emails and good ole telephone calls, a constant barrage of information can consume our day leaving us myriad half-done tasks and unchecked to-dos. Here are a few ways of making sure you are being efficient and effective with your time, while keeping your finger on the pulse of the matrix:

1. Stop Multitasking – I know we always ask our prospective employees to be good at multitasking, but unfortunately it really is less productive.Want some research to support that? It’s out there.  I thought this quote nicely sums it up:“In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages.” Fifteen minutes for a 30 second email. The moral of the story is, when you start something, finish it before you jump off to that new notification on your status bar.
2. Mind the Pareto Principle, a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule: 80 percent of the benefit comes from 20 percent of the causes. Going through your work day ask yourself, is this the most important thing I can be doing right now? Am I spending my time wisely? Don’t feel the need to be busy just to be busy, bring your focus to the 20 percent that is giving you the greatest return. Deciding what not to do may be the most important decision you can make.
3. Remember Parkinson’s Law? We learned it in college: work expands to the time available. I don’t know about you but I waited all semester to write my paper then banged it out on a caffeine-inspired all-nighter only to receive high marks. Take a look at your to-do list, what can you knock off in the matter of an hour? Do it! Then go outside and take a walk around the block to reward yourself for your hard work, and think about what you can do to capitalize on that 20 percent when you go back into the office. (A hint: if you shut off your Tweetdeck and email for that hour, you will be amazed at how much you get done.)
4. Protect the critical chain – In every process there is a set of steps that represent the minimum lead time it will take to finish a project. As you prioritize your day, keep in mind especially how your tasks affect your projects. The rule is: one minute lost for the critical chain is a minute lost for the entire system.

Last weekend, some good friends and I put this theory to work. We knew the first coat would need to dry before we applied the second coat of charismatic purple paint to the walls of my friends’ new nursery. We decided that despite the fact that we were in the middle of installing the headboard, we should stop and get the critical chain rolling…and brushing, and masking. And we finished the headboard while the paint dried, adding no net time to our day of chores. Well done team.

As you tread the river of updates, be aware of your own effectiveness. Manage your multitasking by not checking your Tweetdeck every time a post comes in. Decide when to be involved with social river and when to focus on leveraging that social river. How can we tap that top 20 percent for a bigger piece of the pie?

Please, keep me posted.

Related Links:

Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work, by Mark McGuinness

The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I don’t claim to have any of the answers to the many major issues that are currently plaguing the music industry. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting at this desk. I’d be in world domination mode somewhere up on Broadway where Bad Boy holds court convincing Diddy to let me revolutionize his label.

However, I can tell you that there isn’t a week that goes by when as a music lover and marketer I don’t get extremely frustrated by the current state of affairs. As a marketer, I can understand that there are multiple clients if you are sitting at the top of a music hierarchy – the musicians, the music lovers, and the shareholders, who keep you in your throne. The latter in that list want restrictions – they want content to be controlled by the label – they don’t want fan videos or content sharing – they aren’t convinced in the power of WOM, because as we all know the ROI is not always so black and white. They want every view or play to count for at least one red cent.

As a music lover and a blogger, I just want to be able to share music I love. Whether it is posting an MP3 of my favorite new Buble song or embedding a video from one of my favorite bands to run to - Ok Go. I still believe in my heart that if you love the music, you’ll pay for it, even if you can find it on a million torrent sites for free. Naive? Perhaps.  But I also believe that if someone wants to steal music – they can find it, no matter how many hurdles and hoola-hoops the labels throw their way. And it doesn’t take a PhD in hacking to figure it out.

I find it hard to make an argument that allowing a video to be embeddable really hurts the bottom line. Sure, YouTube (in an attempt to pacify the label gods and stop the endless stream of infringement suits)  pays labels for video views – as long as they are within network – embeds don’t count for obvious, scalable reasons. But, doesn’t the ROI of a new potential consumer discovering the video on their favorite music blog and then buying the song because of that outweigh any penny per view? Or is the ambiguity and hypothetical nature of this ROI deduction make things like embeds the new martyr of the industry?

Perhaps it is a small victory that now, on some label controlled official YouTube channels – the videos can exist. As a fan, I can now at least see the video – most of the time, which is  quite a feat in a world where MTV is filled with Jersey Shore reruns and no real music at all. However, as a marketer who specializes in Social Marketing & WOM – this is infuriating. Cutting out the ability to share via embed is hurtful – to PR, to the artist, to the virality of the content that is created. It’s cutting off the legs of something that could be easily buzzworthy via the social actions of share/rate/review that foster a bevy of C to C interaction.

Quite simply – Socializing content is a proven tactic to generate awareness leading to consumer loyalty and retention. This is a fact.

In a land where many musicians become famous (and get record deals) through social media platforms (Colbie Caillat + MySpace = one example) it truly comes full circle when on their new big prestigious label – they are no longer allowed to share their creations on the platform that the label discovered them through – primarily through content embeds which generate a bulk of the views, which increase awareness / buzz, etc.  It’s almost mind blowing.

One of such examples sprouted up this week with Ok Go, whose member Damian posted on their forum a message about how their label is insisting on prohibiting embedded playback of their new video. [Full disclosure, way back in the day, we created their fan community for the label]:

“Four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared.”

It is hard to ignore the irony that this all seems to bleed. What is OK Go’s solution to this situation? Syndicate the video on sites like Vimeo where labels like EMI can’t stop them from sharing it. The irony layered upon the irony is that if the label had any digital strategy whatsoever – the video syndicate would be part of the launch of any new artist material already.

Now, as we’re just oiling the gears , the first major cause marketing program of the year has kicked off, courtesy of Pepsi. Dubbed the Pepsi Refresh Project, the effort has begun accepting ideas for community projects, and setting aside a Super Bowl-sized sum for funding the best of the best as voted on by the public.

Initial evidence points to a home run here (despite a slight stumble out of the gate).  A recent study from Cone reports that a majority of Americans are keen to support causes online, especially if the support isn’t a direct financial contribution. This is exactly how Pepsi is playing it, backing the funding of winning projects with dollars traditionally spent on Super Bowl advertising.

“Eighty-five percent of respondents say new media provides them (Americans) with an opportunity to learn about new issues, and a similar number (80%) believe it provides another way to support their favorite causes. They champion important issues in a variety of ways, including advocacy (36%) (such as forwarding a message to friends), personal behavior change (34%) and purchasing cause-related products (23%).”
-2009 CONE CONSUMER NEW MEDIA STUDY

Cause marketing is nothing new, but innovations in crowdsourcing has allowed Pepsi, a brand not necessarily built from the ground up to be socially conscious, to take a step back and empower consumers to make a difference on an individual and personal level.

It’s a program we’re watching here at Affinitive. What are your first impressions of the Pepsi Refresh Project?

As the new year hits full swing, we’re all in search of our list of hopeful (and overly ambitious?) resolutions for what the new year will bring. Eat healthier. Exercise more. Work hard. Play harder. My list seems to contain some variation of this every year.  So what will the new year bring to Social Marketing?

Many people believe this is going to be the “Year of Social Marketing” – a build upon 2009, which seemed to be the year of the Tweet, that catapulted everyone from @Oprah to your favorite brand (well, that’s one of mine) into the conversational micro-blogging social sphere.

Kicking down the new year’s door into the “year of Social Marketing” is a likely (and savvy) player, Pepsi, who has announced (to little surprise those familiar with their great marketing team) that they are going to forgo Super Bowl ads and instead utilize funds within the social space with their cause-oriented “Refresh” initiative. They know what we here at Affinitive believe – developing relationships with your consumers, your real consumers,  while providing them with a unique consumer value is what the landscape is dictating to be the strategy that is resonating.

We’re a fickle bunch of consumers. We want the best deal.  We want our voices to be heard. We want answers to our questions shortly after asking them. We expect to be engaged. The rules of acquiring our attention (and business) have quite simply, changed. We aren’t wowed by a Pepsi commercial starring Britney Spears, we’re wowed by a tweeting Britney Spears, sharing her behind the scenes tour photos with us directly (well, maybe it’s actually her, some of the time?) We want the information, straight from the source, we want to be on the inside.

While many have a hard time quite classifying exactly where social marketing starts and stops both from an execution stand point (who does what internally? is it PR? is it digital?) and from a platform perspective (no, Social Marketing isn’t just Facebook and Twitter) – it is hard to argue that it is truly a marketing REVOLUTION. The biggest strategic and tactical trend to emerge in quite some time.

So what does all this mean? This means that in 2010 -Social Marketing will continue to grow, and take a new shape – The REVOLUTION will be Socialized. Cheesy? Yes. But true nonetheless.

Social Marketing will stop being limited by many brands’ fear of execution or by traditional boundaries -  it will evolve beyond its current bucketed limitation (i.e., all videos should be on YouTube, you develop your own branded community under a navigational tab that says  “community”). It will head more mobile, the ever present question of ROI will begin to be answered and standards will be set, unethical players will be eliminated, and CRM will take center stage. This amongst many other things.

Ravit Lichtenberg from UStrategy.com over at Read Write Web already articulated all of this in his blog post “10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010“ far better than I ever could.

I suggest anyone looking to get a grasp of where “Social Media” could head in 2010 – head that way. Although I’m of the camp that believes it’s Social Marketing not Social Media, Social is the operative word and essentially it’s the same meat & potatoes.

Key takeaways from his post that I believe will ring true in Twenty-Ten:

• Mobile Mobile Mobile MOBILE (and not those pesky SMS to win campaigns…)
• Brands will establish a social marketing footprint (cohesive = key)
• It’s all about the ladies  (my mom has a lot of time on her hands, does yours?)
• Offline and online will continue to be integrated (and Ravit thinks in some bizarre ways, I’m not totally sold on that)
• Social Marketing will no longer be constricted by existing platforms & technology (think hybrids, emerging mediums/tools, augmented reality, anyone?)
• ROI ROI ROI ( the first question any marketer gets asked always ladders back to this. While I’m unsure a universal metric will magically emerge, I think key WAYS to measure some of them will)
• Your brand can’t afford NOT to join the Social Revolution (everyone else is already a few steps ahead of you, if you haven’t)

So there you had it. Bravo, Ravit. A fantastic read.

Social Marketing – although still two very buzzworthy words – is a true marketing revolution.  It is changing the way consumers discover new brands, learn impactful information about brands, and ultimately, how they determine which brand to purchase.

The best way to develop true relationships with your consumers that will foster loyalty and retention is to Socialize.