Consumer demand for social customer service is soaring. A recent study by Sitel revealed that social media is no longer an ‘opt in’ for customer service but essential, with 15% of consumers aged 16-25 year olds now using social media to resolve an issue rather than any other method.
For Generation Y, social media is now the primary communication channel and ultimately a need rather than a must.
Those organisations with insight are beginning to realise the benefits of social and creating specific communities to start engaging with their customers. 
A few days ago, Microsoft announced that Bing would be adding a social search bar to its search results. In January, Google rolled out Search Plus Your World, a feature that integrates social sharing popularity into search results.
Why would the big search engines welcome social into their territory? One reason is that social search tactics have been around since the early days of search engines.
As search becomes social, what will you do with the power it offers? 
Microsoft expert Steve Clayton presents a vision of the future where gesture, sound and artificial-intuition create a world that extends the possibilities of our creativity. 
Seth Godin writes:
* The first step is to stop Googling things like, "how to make money online." Not because you shouldn't want to make money online, but because the stuff you're going to find by doing that is going to help you lose money online. Sort of like asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas...
[AS: Like a 'Best of Seth Godin' in one blog post. Great.] 
More than 100 international tech companies have registered their interest in floating geek city Blueseed, to be launched next year in international waters. 
Web 1.0 companies never got social. Web 2.0 companies will never get mobile. Mobile companies will never get what's coming next. 
Andrew Spong (@andrewspong) presents a simple method to test and tune the strength of the connection between your professional keywords and your LinkedIn profile, and explains why it is important to do so. 
Social media may have revolutionized communication, but it threatens our ability to communicate. Without the benefit of body language, we are operating with a major deficit.
[AS: I appreciate this piece has been written to provoke a response, but what constitutes 'real' communication is defined in restrictive terms here. If the call is to imbue our communications in social media with more honest, emotion and human sentiment, then yes, let's.
All technologies have the potential to alienate; however they also have the power to connect. It's up to us which we choose.] 
Dr. Bertalan Meskó (@berci) writes:
'TIME magazine published again its list of most influental people globally and running through the list I only found one scientist, Hans Rosling, the statistics guru and public health expert. He has a perfect place in the list but where are the other amazing and innovative physicians and scientists?' 
Hayley Devlin writes:
'Many businesses are tasking employees with "fronting" social media campaigns on their behalves and encouraging staff to "link" with existing and new clients via LinkedIn, to enhance and generate relationships. What happens then when the employee leaves? Who owns the social media account and, more importantly, its followers?' 
Matt Webb (@genmon) writes:
What is labour encoded in Instagram? It's easy to see. Every "user" of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos -- this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or "likes".
Implications:
* There is a way of identifying the various value exchanges, which means there should be a way to calculate the aggregate value.
I will say that it's simple to make money out of Instagram. People are already producing and consuming, so it's a small step to introduce the dollar into this.
The question is: what will the exchange rate be?
The situation of Instagram is that of an isolated island economy, separate from the outside world, being linked to the global economy. How do we figure out what it's worth to the global economy? How do you value a closed system? 
Debra Donston-Miller (@debdonston) writes:
'As businesses get more sophisticated in their use of social networking, so too are the metrics by which they measure social business ROI:
* Quality of fans/followers * Social demographics * Most popular pages, posts and tweets * Page views and click-throughs * Conversion 
Almost from the moment we are born and conscious of our surroundings, we embrace games. From peek-a-boo to sports to hours immersed in a digital world battling elves, humans love games. |
"In the old days, Keith explained, marketers created buzz by engaging consumers with "brand extensions" -- sales promotion, direct marketing and free publicity.
"The internet now allows us to do those three things with amazing efficiency and creativity," Keith said. "But none of those activities substitute for creating and sustaining the brand itself.
"The point is we need both -- the brand-building skills we learned in the past, combined with the brand-extension tools technology offers today. The danger is that in our mad dash to be digital, we lose sight of the former, and a brand's core values begin to disintegrate."
[AS: and when your 'brand's core values begin [or (my POV) continue] to disintegrate', will you then accede to the possibility that marketing as you understood/understand it has *no place* on the social web, and never has?
This piece really made me boggle. We have already entered the postmarketing age. Wake up.] 
1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts 2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions 3. Shift in buzz over time 4. Buzz by time of day / daypart 5. Seasonality of buzz 6. Competitive buzz 7. Buzz by category / topic 8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc) 9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase) 10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more) 11. Mainstream media mentions 12. Fans 13. Followers 14. Friends 15. Growth rate of fans, followers, and friends 16. Rate of virality / pass-along 17. Change in virality rates over time 18. Second-degree reach (connections to fans, followers, and friends exposed - by people or impressions) 19. Embeds / Installs 20. Downloads 21. Uploads 22. User-initiated views (e.g., for videos) 23. Ratio of embeds or favoriting to views 24. Likes / favorites 25. Comments 26. Ratings 27. Social bookmarks 28. Subscriptions (RSS, podcasts, video series) 29. Pageviews (for blogs, microsites, etc) 30. Effective CPM based on spend per impressions received 31. Change in search engine rankings for the site linked to through social media 32. Change in search engine share of voice for all social sites promoting the brand 33. Increase in searches due to social activity 34. Percentage of buzz containing links 35. Links ranked by influence of publishers 36. Percentage of buzz containing multimedia (images, video, audio) 37. Share of voice on social sites when running earned and paid media in same environment 38. Influence of consumers reached 39. Influence of publishers reached (e.g., blogs) 40. Influence of brands participating in social channels 41. Demographics of target audience engaged with social channels 42. Demographics of audience reached through social media 43. Social media habits/interests of target audience 44. Geography of participating consumers 45. Sentiment by volume of posts 46. Sentiment by volume of impressions 47. Shift in sentiment before, during, and after social marketing programs 48. Languages spoken by participating consumers 49. Time spent with distributed content 50. Time spent on site through social media referrals 51. Method of content discovery (search, pass-along, discovery engines, etc) 52. Clicks 53. Percentage of traffic generated from earned media 54. View-throughs 55. Number of interactions 56. Interaction/engagement rate 57. Frequency of social interactions per consumer 58. Percentage of videos viewed 59. Polls taken / votes received 60. Brand association 61. Purchase consideration 62. Number of user-generated submissions received 63. Exposures of virtual gifts 64. Number of virtual gifts given 65. Relative popularity of content 66. Tags added 67. Attributes of tags (e.g., how well they match the brand's perception of itself) 68. Registrations from third-party social logins (e.g., Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth) 69. Registrations by channel (e.g., Web, desktop application, mobile application, SMS, etc) 70. Contest entries 71. Number of chat room participants 72. Wiki contributors 73. Impact of offline marketing/events on social marketing programs or buzz 74. User-generated content created that can be used by the marketer in other channels 75. Customers assisted 76. Savings per customer assisted through direct social media interactions compared to other channels (e.g., call centers, in-store) 77. Savings generated by enabling customers to connect with each other 78. Impact on first contact resolution (FCR) (hat tip to Forrester Research for that one) 79. Customer satisfaction 80. Volume of customer feedback generated 81. Research & development time saved based on feedback from social media 82. Suggestions implemented from social feedback 83. Costs saved from not spending on traditional research 84. Impact on online sales 85. Impact on offline sales 86. Discount redemption rate 87. Impact on other offline behavior (e.g., TV tune-in) 88. Leads generated 89. Products sampled 90. Visits to store locator pages 91. Conversion change due to user ratings, reviews 92. Rate of customer/visitor retention 93. Impact on customer lifetime value 94. Customer acquisition / retention costs through social media 95. Change in market share 96. Earned media's impact on results from paid media 97. Responses to socially posted events 98. Attendance generated at in-person events 99. Employees reached (for internal programs) 100. Job applications received
[AS: What's changed since 2009? How many of these are valid to healthcare? What would you swap out / reorient?] 
"This extraordinary revolution in digital media has been driven by young (software) engineers, many of whom are not parents, many of whom are somewhat socially awkward and many of whom have not really thought through the social and emotional consequences" of their product 
More companies are applying game mechanics to internal and external apps and processes. But why gaming? And why now? 
A look back to look forward for the May 12th #ideachat: "What is the Future for Twitter Chats?" Come and share your ideas for the future, this Saturday at 9 am ET! 
Human behavior can be a lot harder to change than we think. 
Leslie Campisi (@lesliecampisi) writes:
'If you've agreed on Klout as a screening tool for a social media campaign, what happens if, two weeks in, your client's influencers just can't be found on Twitter?
You'll be forced to scrape the bottom of the Klout barrel for low-score influencers and – if you're an honest PR person – forced to return sheepishly to your client to have the conversation you should have had to begin with: The one where you explain that Klout isn't the definitive social media influence metric of our time.'
[AS: An enjoyable piece, marred by the author's land-grabbing claim that 'how influence is measured should be the domain of the PR pro, not a tech startup', which made me chuckle.] 
How does healthcare social media effect a healthcare conference? Can we measure the quality of the twitter stream by quantitative means? 
What does social search mean for marketers and those tasked with SEO?
In short: be circled, be seen.
How?
* Create valuable content * Use shared circles * Profile promotion * Interaction * Circle experts * Use hashtags 
From the Klout blog:
'It goes like this: We’ll put a pair of users you know head-to-head and you simply let us know who you think is more influential. Bam! We’ll take that feedback to optimize Klout Scores.' 
Krystal Peak writes:
'As technology and tech user processes evolve, the business environment will be adapting to make the working process much like a preferred consumer experience – fast and simple.' |
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