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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello, My Name is Erica and I Am a Twitter and Facebook Junkie”

The key I have found for really understanding Twitter or Facebook (when to use it, how to use it and why to use it) as marketer is simple: You MUST be a fan and consumer of the medium.

In the hilarious article “Are You a ‘Twitter Quitter’” by Michelle Godall, she points out that “the fact remains that personal experimentation of social media is a key prerequisite to helping businesses understand, embrace and use social media effectively.”

The best social media marketers are those that are able to understand it’s workhorses, Twitter and Facebook, from more than a strategic research based perspective.  To join in a conversation with your clients, brands and consumers you need to really understand the ways in which people interact in the social networking landscape from a practical standpoint.  The nature Twitter and Facebook is dynamic and constantly changing; if you haven’t logged in to your Twitter or Facebook account in the past 60 days, you have missed out on how the changes you are simply reading about are affecting the very audience you are attempting to engage.

I have a few ideas for those marketers who want to be better about being advocates as well as consumers of Twitter and Facebook:

1. Why are you here?

Define why you are on Twitter/Facebook.  What is it you want to accomplish? Are you looking for new friends or customers? Are you looking for a way to interact with current fans? Are you attempting to brand yourself?  Once you define a clear reason for being in social media, it can better direct how you use it to accomplish your goals.

2. Be authentic.

Make sure you are who you say you are and what you represent.  If you chose to use an alias make sure that the accurately represents who you ACTUALLY are and the goals you have already defined for yourself within the social media context.

3. Be timely.

Update and engage frequently.  This means checking in to your accounts daily, and sometimes multiple times a day.  Update your Twitter status frequently with information that is relevant to who you have defined yourself to be and the reasons why you are in the space. Remember, “you have to be in it to win it.”  If you aren’t logging in to your social media accounts 3+ times a week you can’t call yourself an expert, your are merely a passive user.

4. Join the conversation in a relevant way.

Interact with other users in a relevant way.  Offer some unique perspective, don’t just rehash (or in the case of twitter re-tweet) news without some perspective attached to it.  Share intellectually stimulating content.  A good barometer of this is to share and interact on things which ignite a passion in you; this includes things that you’d discuss with your friends at the end of the day. The conversations you chose to join should be timely, authentic and true to the reasons for your existence in the space.

Still not sure what types of things will engage your audience? Take a look at the science behind the New York Times most e-mailed posts here.

5. Give back and give “props.”

Stop with the pitches and begging people to re-tweet your content.  Social media is about getting things from people, but much more about what you give.

Are you a retailer? Give away discounts or coupons.  Are you trying to develop your personal brand? Give away advice, inspiration or perspective on your industry.  No one wants to follow someone or engage with a brand that is about one-way communication.  If you are getting something out of the social media space, remember to give back as well. Give people something that will uplift, enlighten, cause them to think, or stimulate conversation.

Another way of giving back is to give “props.”  Acknowledge those fans and experts that inspire you or have something relevant to say.  If a piece of news or content comes your way make sure to give credit to the person or persons that inspired you.

Of course, there are many other ways to effectively engage the Twitter and Facebook  landscape; these are simply a few ideas to initially get the savvy marketer on the bandwagon as not only an expert, but a fan.   Join me in my addiction, become a fan, not just a spectator.

Quite an interesting question indeed. With Social Media being a super hyped little pair of buzz words, every agency, self-promoting fameball, or major brand who follows trendy little buzz words has jumped on the tweeting, wall-posting, super-poking bandwagon.

While they are most definitely right to be on the wagon, the deployment of a Social Media initiative is not something one embarks upon without any planning or experience. It is one thing to be a celebrity building your own online brand, but even then you have to be wary. The room for interpretation on the context of your tweets, blog posts, or status updates is a pretty big room and the elephant in it is that whether you are a brand or Demi Moore, the online world of snark just wants to see you stumble.  Just like that photograph of you on Page Six in your unflattering sweats or that consumer complaint about an experience with your brand or one of your employees that now has 50,000 views on Consumerist, dipping your toes into Social Media has to be done clearly and with purpose.

Even without the fear or risk of negative backlash, in order to make a lasting impression that positively supports your brand and that has a trajectory for growth and “viral” legs, one must have a firm foundation based on knowledge and experience, on what works and what doesn’t.

Which is why, as with every other marketing tactic or medium, having a strategy is important.  Your Social Media initiatives should be integrated with your overall brand strategy, whether you are trying to peddle a product, fameball, celebrity, or brand.  There should be goals, objectives, benchmarks, and a thought out approach that makes sense for what it is that you want to communicate and how you wish to communicate it.

In this Marketing Sherpa study, they concluded that ” Two-thirds of marketers who work for organizations that have not used any form of social media marketing or PR consider themselves “very knowledgeable” or “somewhat knowledgeable” about this emerging strategy. Their overconfidence in unproven ability can doom social media initiatives to failure.”

It is a mistake to believe that if you build it, they will come.

To believe that you can set up a YouTube channel, upload a few videos, and boom, there you have viral video is about as logical as believing that people with a video camera can create a Super Bowl commercial. Although in some cases, the former does happen, more often than not  it doesn’t and won’t.

In the same manner, it is foolish to believe that just because you create a Facebook or iPhone application and put it out in the universe, people will use it. The application directory on Facebook is flooded with applications, most of which (the most recent stat I heard was 99%) are basically inactive. Even the top Facebook applications that were previously deemed “successful” have seen a decrease in usage that averages between 15-24% with the new Facebook redesign.

While I do believe that it is possible for some brands to embark upon a Social Media plan “in house”, it is increasingly important to do so with someone taking the reigns who has Social Media experience and expertise. If you want to cut through the clutter, ward off any potential viral embarrassment, and most importantly, have a successful initiative having someone on board who knows the space – not as a user, but as a marketer, is key.

As an employee of an agency that dipped its own toes into Social Media before it was so totally trendy and part of a majority of Fortune 1000 marketing budgets, I can say that the overzealous nature of marketers to believe they fully understand Social Media is partially exciting. It is nice to have these mediums & tactics that we believe (and have for quite some time) to be viable be recognized and appreciated by the more traditional marketers.

I just urge you to remember that just like other traditional and existing non-traditional tactics, strategy is key. While a rogue effort by someone with no experience could prove to be successful, lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice.

It is best to consult with, hire, or bring to the team, someone(s) with a true passion for and expertise and experience in Social Media.

These two buzz words are best buzzed about by someone who knows how to properly buzz them.

Keller Fay Group released research showing that 90% of WOM conversations occur offline and only 7% occur online. For marketers targeting the online space, this was a hard finding to swallow as it suggested that opportunities were being missed in a space where WOM is difficult to measure.

Our solutions at Affinitive focus mostly online, so at first glance it seems perhaps we were focusing on the wrong space. In our programs, we ask participants to self-report the number of times they are involved in conversations related to the product or brand of interest and whether those conversations occurred online or offline. I gathered results from 8 of our past programs in the video game industry. The results showed that only 37% of WOM happened offline for participants of the program, a marked difference from the 90% presented earlier:

So, what is happening here? I think there are three Ps in play:

• Person (Who is being targeted?)
• Place (How are they being targeted?)
• Product (What is being talked about?).

Depending on how and where a program is executed has effects on where the WOM happens. We found an online-rich personality is often a major psychographic trait of video game consumers. Noting this, we were able to to augment their natural social engagements with product-related WOM encompassing specialized strategies designed to keep participants online.

If you want to target people who feel more comfortable in the online space, then use that to your advantage. Offer tools and ideas to spread the word online. Integrate your program into the environment with which your consumers are most comfortable. Tactics developed for a program must complement both audience and product.