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I was interviewed by the folks over at Webmaster Radio on the sidelines of ad:tech where I spoke. The interview covered our perspective on Social Influence Marketing - what social media means for marketers and the principles of peer influence. I also touched upon our recent AdLife announcement in it. My panel on the Long Tail of Social Media was blogged about here too. A key question that I posed to the audience is what value can and should you place on a particular conversation? Can a dollar value be placed against views of video clips or comments at the end of a blog post?

Who'd have thought that MySpace's audience might be more lucrative than those of some of the other networks? A recent Ad Age story quoted a MySpace executive who said that the network has more of international rich adults as an audience than any other social network. According to the executive, 85% of MySpace's audience is over 18, 40% of all Moms are onMySpace and more people making $100,000 or more are on the network.

Back in December we posed the question: How will social media change the way we do business in 2008? We also went on to discuss 10 major social media trends that were going mainstream. Well, we’re in June now and it is time for a mid-year review of those trends. We discuss the trends and pass verdict on their progress.

 

1.      Social Influence Marketing becomes the third dimension of marketing  There’s no doubt that social media has given rise to a totally new form of marketing called Social Influence Marketing. Those brands that simply treat social media as another channel through which to push advertising are missing the point. Social Influence Marketing is about harnessing the peer and anonymous influencers and strategically leveraging social media to meet marketing and business objectives.

 

It’s not a channel but a new way of thinking recognizing how the web has gone completely social. And in fact contrary to what we earlier thought, social influence marketing is not just about extending conversations beyond campaigns, it is about leveraging social influencers to achieve broader marketing and business objectives.

 

Verdict: Trend is even larger than we thought.

Earlier this week I was on a panel at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley. Hosted by Charlene Li of Forrester, the panel discussed web 2.0 in the enterprise and how social media is changing collaboration behind the firewall. 

I'm going to take a chance and talk about a web service that I've just started playing with. Only because I think it has phenomenal potential. It is one of those web services that I've been waiting to use for a few years. Its called Blippr and its in private beta at the moment.

A few years back I was the lone Avenue A | Razorfish blogger with the Workplace blog. A lot has changed in a short while. Every second day we now have a new blogger in our midst. It is exciting to see so many more employees take to blogging and experiment with styles and formats. The latest entrants are Grant and Mary with the Headlight blog covering the auto industry on a monthly basis. It covers digital automative trends and insights and the first few posts focus on going green. Don't miss the article on Green Social Networking tools and topics which discusses Goloco.

There hasn't been too much social innovation in the financial services sector. Most large banks have taken hesitant steps into the social web. Their reluctance to do so is understandable. As a sector, they have a lot to worry about and the last thing that they'd want to do is take on more risk - especially when their brands are taking such a beating. As a result, the most innovation is happening among the startups. Two in particular really impress me and an internal email chain about social media and financial services got me thinking about them again.

There's one obvious area where Office Depot is definitely ahead of Staples and that's in recognizing the power of social influence. Take a look at the Office Depot Planner product page above. Notice the little Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us icons? Yes, I can easily share an image of the product I'm thinking of buying on my social network or add it to my bookmark list. On clicking on the Facebook icon, a window opens asking me whether I want to post the image of the Planner to my profile or send it to a friend. See below for how this looks.

Few e-retailers understand the power of social influence the way Amazon does. From its wildly successful customer reviews to the more recent customer images, Amazon tries hard to take advantage of the notion that when it comes to purchasing books we are heavily influenced by one another. Probably my favorite feature on Amazon has been the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" one. It tells me what other books I'd be interested in based on my interest in a specific book and what other customers bought. Those recommended books can be filtered by category and scroll horizontally like the Apple Album Cover Flow interface.

They're so close and yet so far. I watched with increasing interest the launch, promotion and growth of My Starbucks Idea. On the surface, I really like it. It is an enthusiastic effort by a social brand to be more social. If there's anyone who should be really embracing social media, its Starbucks because the brand is about community and people.

It's a simple concept - users are invited to tell Starbucks what they should be doing. Users publish their ideas and others comment and vote on them. Every now and then Starbucks takes an idea and moves it to the "See" section. Acknowledgment that the idea has legs and is being turned in to reality. I like it.

But its missing a few things. The first is best represented by this user comment in the Idea section.

I don't know how long this ideas website will be up for, but I hope this idea is reviewed soon by the ideas people in the company.

Starbucks doesn't participate in the conversation. It doesn't respond to comments directly rather it responds more broadly in the "See" section when they're making reality out of an idea. That's disappointing. If you expect your customers to help you, you should be willing to participate in their conversation. Not stand by silently or only speak from a pulpit.

What's also missing is there's no form of reward for ideas turned into reality. Imagine if every person who participated in the discussion around a frequency card, were added to a beta list for that card? That would be a great way to thank those customers for their thoughts. It would seed the concept with passionate consumers too. Opportunity missed.

On the whole though, I'm impressed. It borrows from the Dell Ideastorm concept and applies it to the Starbucks world. I believe that concepts like these are the future of the contact us page. Every site will need to have an area like this - a place where the brand solicits feedback from its customers and responds to their comments. If a brand doesn't want to be social in this manner, it shouldn't really be on the web at all.

Brian Morrissey discusses how social media is extending the life of ad campaigns in an Adweek article published today. As usual he's spot on and quotes me discussing what it means.

"The traditional campaign model doesn't work anymore," said Shiv Singh, director of strategic initiatives at Avenue A/Razorfish, owned by Microsoft. "If you have a social-media driven campaign, you can't stop it necessarily when you want to stop it. It's akin to having a dinner party and suddenly turning the lights off."

What are the implications of this? Its harder to budget for a social media driven ad campaign. While you can always turn the media spend off when you want to, you can't necessarily turn off the campaign. If a conversation has started and people are participating, linking and talking about your campaign you have to let that carry on. Problems may arise when the message gets tired or when the conversation degenerates into something you don't want but that can't be helped too.

That's why when you think about the social media in the context of a campaign, think carefully. The returns maybe awesome but the risks can be huge too.

The web of the future will allow any person, object, or piece of information to be intelligently linked to one another says Tim Berners Lee in the Times of London where he talks up the semantic web. For those of who aren't familiar with the semantic web, its the term used to describe how any piece of data and not just a web page will be structured so that it can communicate with other information by built in semantic relationships in the information itself.

Now we've all know about the semantic web for a while. And before web 2.0 we thought the semantic web would be the next big thing. Now we believe it will be the next thing after web 2.0. Is it really just round the corner? The problem with the whole semantic web story is easy to understand - somebody or something needs to create all those relationships between the various data elements that we interact with everyday through the Internet. To date, there hasn't been the right tools around to create those relationships.

Well now with the whole social networking phenomena we're connecting to data elements ourselves using the social networks and each other as starting points. Sure, the semantic web and applications like Twine will take this a lot further but I have to wonder how much they will be adopted. Do we need those relationships created automatically for us? Will we use them? We're depending upon each other to create those relationships and so far that's worked fine. I suppose only time will tell but in the meantime, the search engines are preparing for the future.

Here's a link to the Scientific American article where the Semantic Web was first discussed.