Social media is upon us.
It is a fact of life and consumers have made it part of their daily lives.
In other news, brands are still investing small and not so small fortunes creating amazing content for their websites and nobody cares to visit them. On paper, one great solution for this problem is search marketing. You buy keywords, optimize the content on your site for organic search placement, things get better.

Social media can boost a brand even further. And here’s the kicker: it has little to do with the brand website.

The root of the issue is in the following fact: The brand has a website; search marketing looks to drive traffic to that website. If the brand places content in social media, it takes content from brand site and actually puts it, well, away from your website. While you can still link to the brand site, isn’t social media harmful in actually reducing the need to visit that site? If you can get the content on Facebook, where you hang out with your near, far but always dear friends – is it really necessary to go to the brand’s site to get what you are looking for? While intriguing, the answer lies in thinking about what really matters. Skittles, for example, gave up on its website altogether. But three years later, can anyone point out measurable sales increases as a result? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) a brand would care about? While I personally want the website to be stellar, is it as relevant or important as it was, say, four years ago?

Branding is about searing the name, message or logo of a product or manufacturer deep into your head. Whether the brand achieves consumer impressions on its owned web property or not is immaterial. It is even more important to be able to measure if the brand placement, and the consumer impression it caused, increased the likelihood of a transaction or a purchase. While a brand site can help inform about and portray products really well, social media trumps it on this account. Consumers today trust each other more than they trust their brands. Reviews matter, ratings influence, and if a brand does not track them, it may lose the initiative in controlling its message (Toyota, anyone?). I can probably think up a variety of KPIs but overall the bottom line is this: if you can get the brand online, anywhere, it’s a good thing – and if you get it anywhere other than your own brand website, it’s a very good thing.

So where does search marketing figure out into this? Search marketing at its finest does not just drive traffic to a website, it increases brand impressions. It also reinforces positive brand messages and matches the terms a brand looks to associate itself with, to search keywords. Search engines do not care about your brand website if it has no redeeming quality; it must have content to be interesting and useful to the search engine’s users. Social media has value and content, both searchable and private. Search engines want in and try to extract as much as possible out of social media. If your brand is engaged, search engines will find your content. And by connecting users to the relevant content coming from your brand, marketers get the impressions they so desire.

By now you should be sold. Social media is great. Search marketing helps no matter where your brand is. But how do you measure performance for assets distributed far and wide across social media? One big strength of a brand site comes from the control a marketer has on obtaining performance data about it. Social media sites have no interest in letting you shove Omniture tags into their code. You’re a guest. And in reality, the jury is still deliberating. Snake oil merchants and real scientists claim to have the answer for this need for proof and measurement (eMarketer proves this point). We are getting close to definitive solutions. Due to the resources necessary to successfully measure and track vast amounts of traffic and content, marketers may have to patiently wait or accept less definitive conclusions and research. Until then, there’s always the brand website.

I recently caught up on some interesting IxDA threads highlighted below that may interest you as well. Wishing everyone a wonderful and happy new year!

o1. Firefox Home Tab Challenge

IxDA has partnered with Mozilla Labs and Johnny Holland for a design challenge. The submission deadline is February 14 for a concept video explaining how the new Firefox home tab should work. Anyone interested in forming a Molecular team to tackle this??

• The Home Tab Design Challenge Winter ’09 website: http://design-challenge.mozillalabs.com/winter09/
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=48090

02. GLIDE ’10 Call for Papers

This is a biennial virtual conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation and AIGA UP ST NY dedicated to research on topics related to interaction between designers and global communities. The theme this year is cross-cultural collaboration with indigenous and underserved communities. Abstract submissions are due February 15. Conference takes place on October 27.

• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=48057

03. Google’s Above-the-Fold App

This new app let’s you see in a transparent gradient kind of way which parts of your site is viewable by percentile.

• Enter any URL into Browser Size to see the map: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=48056

04. Shopping/ecommerce trends

Someone asked the group about what trends people were seeing with online shopping and here were the recommended resources:

• Pew Internet research topic of “Shopping”: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/Shopping.aspx
• Webinars and resources on www.shop.org (requires membership)
• A recent book called Shoptimism by Lee Eisenberg
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=47953

o5. Andrew Daniels on uxSEARS

A virtual meeting featuring the UX director of Sears hosted by IxDA Chicago called “The $50 Billion Startup Revolution and How UX Leads the Way”:

• Video, also embedded below: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2588473 (7:50 to skip past housekeeping stuff)
• Presentation slides in PDF: http://tinyurl.com/ykkn6vn
• More details from this IxDA thread: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=47718

Co-authored by Yuval Zukerman, Sr. Consultant, Emerging Interactions, Molecular

Social media has come to play a key role in brand messaging, with the strong two-year climb of microblogging service Twitter adding a new twist: a 140-character limit. This restriction has pushed adoption of a few common ways to cram more message into less space. Apart from heavily leveraging the new language of texting shorthand born of the mobile SMS, the biggest trend in use is employing short URLs to save space while linking to other online content.

Short URLs are hinged on service providers like tr.im and TinyURL that allow people to generate unique links, usually formed of a small domain name followed by a hash and a series of apparently random characters that the service provider responds to with a redirect to the longer target link. For example, the provider tr.im may provide a link of the form http://tr.im/zpBD that points visitors to http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/category/data-and-analytics/, saving us 48 characters to talk about how insightful the latest blog post is.

The advantages to end users are clear enough, but the disadvantages to content providers are not. Cautionary tales of short URL service collapse have been floating around for years, but the message doesn’t mean much to the people socializing those millions of YouTube videos and Flickr photos. The people contributing all that traffic to your site aren’t as concerned as the marketing department with how long the link stays around; the internet zeitgeist waits for no one. As marketing professionals, here are a few things you should know to help you better understand short URLs and why you should consider owning your own short URLs to power your brand.

1. Find short domains that evoke your brand
Your brand is your company’s face in the market, and the more exposure it gets, the bigger your potential audience. With social media, you’re focusing on name recognition for you and your offerings. Much the same way you may come up with a smaller version of your logo for different ads to fit the space and medium, URL shortening provides you with a short link that drives users to the page with the full, long URL. For example, instead of using long URLs with user-friendly information, like http://www.amazon.com/User-Always-Right-Practical-Creating/dp/0321434536, you will be providing a short link such as http://amzn.com/0321434536

If you’re familiar with traditional vanity URLs, the concept should ring a bell. In many cases, the domain will be your only branding opportunity, so you want a link that contains or reminds people of your brand. Readers will see it in tweets, blog posts, wall comments, you name it, so your short URLs should provide something that both connects users to the original brand, and is short enough for them to re-use. For example, Flickr has set up http://flic.kr/, a shorter alias that still evokes the brand.

Tips: First, find a good, as-short-as-possible URL. Make use of the long list of new generic and country-specific top-level domains. A good starting point is iWantMyName.com. The site searches dozens of domain providers worldwide. (While .com is global, .es for example is controlled by Spain.) Costs vary from country to country, and almost all are in the sub-$300 range, with the majority being around $50. Get creative. Think initials, stock tickers, you name it. Leverage domain name suggestion tools like Domainr. Set up the software to create short URLS automatically (those auto-generated random-looking bits at the end like http://tr.im/zpBD). Make your own short URLs readily available on every page of your site. Get them out there, and they’ll be used. Every time they’re republished as the content spreads, your exposure grows.

2. Third-party short URLs can short-change your measurement efforts
The problem with attributing traffic from third-party short URLs is that most take away the referrer — the part of the request that tells your metric platform how the visitor got to your site. Depending on the vendor, you’ll see either the redirection service or where they clicked the short URL, but not both, providing an incomplete picture. While they may offer the ability for you to view several measurements on their own websites, you do not have access to raw incoming traffic information, and aggregating the data from the mass of vendors out there can prove to be a challenge. What does this all mean? You can’t tell where the bulk of your social organic traffic is coming from. For example, a report showing you top referring blogs is far more actionable than a report showing you the top short URL sites people used. The visitor paths — that piece of the web analytics puzzle that shows traffic sources and behavior — is too valuable to lose.

Tips: Consider implementing your own short URL feature on your site. This approach ensures you get that referrer information back. Once the feature is added, extend your analytics implementation to capture traffic on your short URLs. Although some third-party short URL providers share this data, you will have a more complete picture of user behavior on your site when you start tracking them at first contact (when they click the short URL), through to when they leave your site.

3. Keep your earned media
I doubt you have a service level agreement with a hundred different short URL providers. When the next one goes bust, there’s a strong chance its redirects will stop working entirely, and all of that earned media will evaporate. According to Carat, earned media assets are “consumer driven. They include all word of mouth communications, social media, viral, organic search, fan sites and shared content. To some extent, these communications are Earned through doing Bought and Owned well, but they reflect on the brand’s entire behavior.”

The recent news about tr.im, a service initially slated to disappear, has taken a happy turn, and it is giving the service to the community to maintain and develop. I’d like to think the service’s spirit was universal, but I doubt it. The service Cligs is currently dealing with similar business woes. Why find out how much of your traffic was coming through the next service to go bust?

Tips: Utilize your new branded short URLs in every social media channel. Make them so easy to use that it’d be more work to go elsewhere to generate them. Add an element to your site where users can copy a page’s short URL to their clipboards with one click. For product or campaign pages, try out vanity short URLs like http://molecu.lr/Analytics to increase recognition.

4. Do it yourself
The most straightforward way to reap the benefits and data from URL shortening is to set up such a service yourself. Technically, URL shortening is a low-hanging fruit; it will take an average lone developer about a week to get a basic service programmed from scratch. Simpler yet, there is a variety of off-the-shelf open-source applications that can get you up and running even quicker. Free applications like Yourls, Shorty, or lilurl can be set up in a couple of hours on your server. There are also software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors who can use your domain and give you, for a fee, a variety of statistics and logs. One example is budurl.com’s enterprise edition.

Tips: When setting up a URL shortening services yourself, there are several factors you will need to consider:

1. Think of your audience. Is it going to be used company-wide, by specific team members, or provided as a service to anyone on the web? Normally, smaller audiences will require a simpler and thus cheaper setup, while larger audiences may require multiple servers and continuous feature development. Workflow is another aspect you might wish to explore. Think of how often the tool will be used and whether there will be a need to provision its use and associated approval chains. Also, be aware that it is critical for URL shortening services to act as a springboard to the destination page, imposing minimal delay. Test how well the server performs on your expected load levels.
2. Create a bookmarklet. To simplify the creation of short URLs and increase the adoption of your service, the creation of a bookmarklet is recommended. Bookmarklets are browser bookmarks that will send the URL of the page currently being viewed in the browser and open a window and tab to your URL-shortening service. The page that will open will present you with the shortened URL. This way, a single click of a button can generate the shortened URL. You can also add a “Copy to Clipboard” widget on your pages (check out the lower left side: http://is.gd/4fPnx). Make it so easy to use your short URLs that it’d actually be more work to use a third-party provider.
3. Redirect broken links. One more elegant feature offered by some services that could be of special value to marketers is the ability to edit and monitor the content that you are linking to. If a page on your website is removed, you can point an existing shortened URL to a new version of the content or to an alternative page  . If the shortened URL points to an external site where the page is no longer available, you can detect that and react. Be sure to provide alternative content or present messaging to explain what happened. When you own your short URLs, you have a variety of ways to retain your earned media.

One organization that is already taking this approach is Coca-Cola, which set up a hosted short URL service called CokeURL.com. The service is at marketers’ disposal and gives them the ability to share content on or off Coca-Cola web assets using short URLs. The URLs can be short (CokeURL.com/s) or descriptive (CokeURL.com/fizzyVideo).

We hope the choice here is an easy one. Providing your own short URLs that tell readers your brand is awaiting them after the click increases your visibility. Implementing a short URL service on your own site increases your web analytics value and guards your earned media against third-party failure. Social media is a deep and fast moving channel, so keep your head up.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

When you live in the middle of the digital marketing and media revolution, it is sometimes easy to overlook the problems and changes that many industries are experiencing. Not long ago, Public Relations (PR) was considered the most cost-effective way of getting an organization’s name out to the masses. Here in Boston, there are a myriad of PR organizations, and they are fighting tooth and nail to retain business. I wonder, however, if they don’t see the change that is happening around them. Or perhaps, similar to print media, they see it, but are not quite sure what to do about it.

As I pondered this dilemma, a few possibilities occurred to me. I segmented my thinking in the three ways- short, medium and long term. I also realize that painting in broad strokes affords me liberties that are not true in business.  Oh, the beauty of blogging!

I strongly believe that the goal of public relations has a great deal of value. It is not the value proposition that needs to change, but rather the mechanism/tactics through which it is delivered. Therefore, in the short term, the tactics employed by a classic PR agency must evolve to embrace and leverage social media elements. If you consider the capabilities being offered by many PR agencies today, they still tout old school capabilities like press releases, media tours, messaging, highlighting executives, by-lines etc. These are all well and good, but how many of us read a press release? And if I wanted to learn about an executive, I expect to hear what that person has to say on YouTube or perhaps read it on their blog. A PR agency does not have to change the overall strategy, It simply has to  incorporate these social media elements and tactics.

In the medium term, there may be opportunities for intersection of PR and digital marketing. To this point, digital marketing has been focused around traditional marketing through digital media. The skills and approach that PR experts bring to the table might be key to understand what drives people to organically and virally consume content. Communication strategy has not been the strong suit of digital agencies, but by virtue of being a rapidly evolving space, it may be time for the digital team to drive this strategy. In other words, leverage the experience, approach and thinking that is the corner stone of PR , but apply it to the digital medium and realize that the sum of these parts will be greater than the whole (i.e. PR + digital agency = future)

The long term approach is far more radical. It is anyone’s guess as to where the quickly changing environment will settle. The good people in the print media are having one summit after another to morph their operational and profit models to return to viable businesses. These media outlets have been the main stay of PR – not to mention the bane of their existence. My belief is that the trade of PR relations will begin to focus on experts and consumers. The middle ground of journalists and print publications as we know it will seize to exist. They will be replaced by centers of interest (i.e., think communities or groups), who create and maintain their own ecosystem content creation, commerce, reviews, communities – specific to that interest. This would not only impacts PR, but digital marketing and business in general.

There is a future for PR, but it is irrevocably coupled with the digital medium and digital marketing. The scary consideration is that these PR agencies must act now so that they do not face the same predicament as the print industry.

Following up on my recent post about Facebook pages, AdAge has an interesting article about TGI Friday’s efforts. TGI Friday’s set a public goal – to get 500,000 people to fan their spokesperson, Woody, on the site. Supported by a freebie (free hamburgers for Facebook fans), television and online advertising campaign, the campaign was locked and loaded. It’s just that before they even really went out and started spending their media, they had 80,000 fans. It’s just that instead of taking a month, it took them 13 days to reach the target. Half a million free burgers leave a dent on any company’s budget ($2.5 million retail value, assuming the $5 burger price). Now the TV and banners ads are running, increasing exposure.

According to the article frantic calls and discussions ensued on how to handle the explosive success. TGI Friday’s did the right thing, though. Until the end of the month, apparently, they are going to honor their promise and give away free burgers to fans of Woody (who apparently, by proxy, seem to like red and white with articles of flair). What can we learn from this: overall – TGI Friday’s set out right. Getting fans by giving away stuff is the right thing to gain traction quickly. Maybe dipping the toes and seeing if fans need the extra media boost would have made sense. At the very least, it would help to plan for a good outcome, and apparently budget for it. At least they avoided the scorn of what are now tens of thousands of fans who would have been left out in the cold, burgerlss. I am keen to see what they are going to do with Woody and how they are going to sustain interest in absence of freebies. In the meantime, I am going to get my coupon.

I had been an active user of account aggregation services for years before switching to Mint.com several months ago. I could not have been happier with the services, ease of use and functionality provided by Mint. From my first login, I knew it would not be long before Mint.com was acquired. Their business model, the value of its customer information and the level of customer loyalty they have generated could not go unnoticed.  My only hope was that it was not acquired by a bank that would turn its services into its own marketing platform (you know there were several suitors).  My wish was granted when Intuit announced it would purchase Mint this week.  But what does this mean for how banks manage and measure customer relationships going forward?

The level of engagement banks have with their customers has been continuously decreasing. As in-branch transactions continue to diminish, banks try to engage customers through other channels such as online banking and mobile. Unfortunately, these channels are primarily transactional, which makes it difficult for banks to engage customers in higher value interactions (cross-selling, etc.). 

Mint.com and Quicken were already negatively impacting the banking industry’s level of customer engagement. With the merger, that impact will only grow. Once Mint utilizes Quicken’s technology and implements bill pay and transfer functionality, banks will begin to lose ALL direct contact with their customers.  Customers will no longer have to log into their institution’s online banking system. As customers get tired of paying for ATM fees, high interest rates, etc. they will use Mint’s “Ways to Save” feature to find a better solution or product. Banking products will become completely commoditized and banks will compete only on price.

Unfortunately, most banks won’t realize the extent of this impact until it is too late. “Engagement” is not a primary measurement for most banks.  They calculate success of a customer relationship based on the number of products owned, average balances, net interest income, tenure, satisfaction and cost to serve.  In some cases, Mint will actually increase the value of customer to a bank. As a customer reduces their use of their bank’s channels, the bank’s cost of service will decrease. Although that customer is more profitable, their propensity to attrite and switch banks increases because they longer have a relationship with their bank beyond fees, interest rates, etc.

Banks need to quickly realize the impact of the merger between Intuit and Mint and develop new and innovative ways to engage their customers (online and offline) or risk becoming a faceless institution that competes only on price.

To demonstrate social network success, savvy brand marketers must identify what success means, and then understand how it can be tracked.

To justify spending and ensure budget for future projects, it is crucial that marketers can demonstrably prove the success of a given campaign. As the economy sputters, and the struggle for budget becomes increasingly more challenging, it becomes even more important. While the majority of digital marketing can provide highly quantifiable results, social media can prove challenging. These networks are nebulous webs of people friending one another and sharing select information, and they frequently can’t be measured in clickthroughs or conversions. This article will explore how to create a metrics program to track the success of a campaign, using examples from major brands to illustrate different approaches.

1. Determine what to measure
The first step is determining what to measure. Start by considering why social media is being used in a particular campaign, and then look for ways to measure the results. It is important to set the campaign up for success. Don’t track data that is hard to gather, but do set your sights on the low-hanging fruit that will yield meaningful results. For example, many sites offer a tool enabling users to post content to their Facebook or MySpace pages. By using a tool such as Omniture, it is possible to track the frequency with which users are posting, and which networks they are using. By tracking this information, meaningful insights into the resonance and value of material on the site can be gauged.

2. Take advantage of existing tools
Social networking sites recognize that they live or die by their user base, and they understand that advertisers on these sites want specific insights into who they are talking to and how the message is being received. By using Facebook’s sophisticated tool kit, it is possible to track specifically who is engaging, and what they are doing there.

Even if the numbers aren’t hard, it is still possible to use social networking to track brand perception and better service the consumer. Twitter is a platform where users post 140 character updates on what they are doing, either through a mobile interface or via the web. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, it’s not a forum for emailing or playing games and, as such, provides fewer hooks to a brand marketer seeking to promote a message unless they have a decent amount of followers. Yet, there are ways to integrate the platform onto the site (take a look at the Betty Crocker clip below, as an example). Using tools like TweetScan, it is possible to see how frequently the brand name is being referenced on the site, and to react to any kind of coverage.

3. Track how social networking impacts other channels
Tracking the number of daily users is a no-brainer, but mapping in-network interaction to external behaviors becomes much harder. There are, however, a few ways to skin the cat, given creativity and tenacity. If a brand creates its own social network, using a pre-existing platform such as Ning, in conjunction with metrics tools, it’s possible to track entry and exit points on the site. If a clear destination has been identified as a project goal, it’s possible to drive the user there and track the volume. If a social networking campaign launches, look outside the web to see if there is a correlation between sales and the viral growth on the networks. Bacon Salt, a purveyor of foods, launched on Facebook and MySpace. Within a few days, it had sold out of product.

Conclusion
Social networking is more than just a profile page on Facebook. The power of the consumer’s voice can be harnessed in multiple ways, to serve many goals. The information can be incredibly valuable to judge the value of content, track user opinion, and propagate a brand message.

But in order to demonstrate success, the savvy brand marketer will create a thorough metrics campaign to measure the effort. The first key step is to identify what success means, and then understand how it can be tracked successfully.

Take advantage of the tools provided by the networks that are out there, see how the brand is fairing, and what can be done to get involved with the conversation. Try to track how the social networking campaign impacts other channels. Even if the numbers are not rock solid, there can be definite trends.

In our worsening economy, the concept of leapfrogging is very applicable in the marketing space today. Marketers must adapt, in some cases quite abruptly. But funds dry up, and dollars are scarce. This is where innovative thought becomes especially crucial to survival. The bad news is that the stakes are higher, the resources are scarce, and some will find themselves burdened with implacable constraints.

The good news is that innovative output is driven by creative thought, and leapfrogging is doable even in challenging circumstances. By exploring the creative process, marketers can use the tools they have at hand to succeed under even the most challenging circumstances.

Think small, in a big way
Often, consumers and marketers alike have trouble seeing beyond their current world, or adapting to things which are totally foreign. It’s not always about the epic change that blows their mind, but more about the smaller tweaks that can change everything. Think about online social networking. Social graphs are not new phenomena — they have been around for ages — and the Web has been commonplace for a decade. But new combinations of existing technologies and functionalities provided consumers with new opportunities to communicate, and new ways for brands to reach their constituencies.

Another example is rich internet applications; revolutionary applications like GoogleMaps leverage technologies that have een around for some time. But how does this translate for a marketer with a limited budget and a stressed executive team? In a few different ways.

For example, leveraging best practices from other fields can provide a competitive advantage when upgrading a web site or other digital promotion. Consider that insurance companies don’t have the best brand perception among consumers. People find them intimidating, and think that the service provider is out to get them. By adopting a rich interface more commonly seen in a retail site, insurance provider HumanaOne  surmounted these challenges and created an award winning experience.

Don’t win the game, change it
Innovation isn’t always about finding a solution to a particular challenge so much as changing the context of the problem. In this economic environment, risking a new approach may well prove to be more successful than embracing a known challenge. Think of gaming, for example.

Forced to compete with the consumer electronics giant Sony and the software behemoth Microsoft, Nintendo was faced with a costly, grueling deathmatch with no guarantee of success. Instead of running a risky approach to create costlier machines with better graphics and compelling gameplay for the typical console audience, it developed a platform with a different, kinetic style of play — the Nintendo Wii. By promoting console gaming in a whole new way, Nintendo managed to dominate market share and create a growing niche for itself.

Cut costs, not corners — track and react to digital users for free
In today’s environment, metrics become increasingly important to justify scarce resources. But in the perfect Catch-22, companies are spending less on marketing budgets, making it harder to track the success of their digital channel.   However, free tools are available that enable marketers to keep tabs on how their site is performing, and on the sorts of things that are being said about them across other digital media for free.

For example, Google Analytics provides tools for site owners to tag and track traffic, referrals, and segmentation data. A valuable tool for tracking competitors, Alexa provides demographic information on the end users visiting any site. Keep in mind though that these solutions aren’t perfect. While the suite is comprehensive and the price is unbeatable, Google has its shortcomings. It is important to note that Alexa relies on a subset of the Web’s user base, as the system relies on a voluntary end user install.

Gleaning free insights from the digital channel does not stop at the Web. It is possible to get a feel for how a brand is performing in blogger buzz through tools like Technorati or Blogpulse. While this isn’t the same as having a fully trained staff and all the tools in place, it is better than nothing and provides vital information that can frequently be actionable, or create better touchpoints with the client.

As Twitter gains in popularity, brands are beginning to use the tool to gauge consumer sentiment and respond quickly on an individual basis. Take JetBlue, which uses Tweetscan to keep an eye on when its name pops up in the streams, so they can interact with clients on an as-needed basis. This innovative tool helps JetBlue reinforce their friendly, approachable brand persona, and helps them leapfrog from the traditional image of a monolithic, unresponsive airline.

Analyze your approach
All too often, stakeholders focus on the end results — without thinking of the means to get there — or rigorously apply a strict methodolodgy with no analysis or forethought. Stop for a moment and think about the team, the goals, and the constraints. Chances are there are ways to inject creativity into the process, and inspire the team to foster ideas ranging from the very tactical to the highly strategic.

One useful tactic is to have participants in a brainstorming session write ideas instead of blurting them out. This approach not only encourages a greater number of responses, but minimizes the likelihood of stale groupthink. On a strategic level, changes can be made to the entire project process, to add more collaboration or open thinking into the process. At Molecular, we perform creative imagining sessions with key stakeholders and larger audiences to inspire great ideas and drive enthusiasm for a project. Carefully timed to coincide with the completion of data gathering, the output from this work leads clients to identify new opportunities and means to achieve success.

Conclusion
Economic times are rough, and marketers must respond to this situation quickly and decisively to stay on top of the challenges and changes. Innovation is core to survival, but funds are scarce. Fortunately, there are ways to make substantial progress without dropping a bundle of cash. Think about what innovation truly is — there is room for big change without redoing everything from the start. Look past the current business constraints and think about how to apply strengths in new places. Search for ways to lower overhead, such as free tools to track digital performance. Finally, remember that innovation happens from the very start to the very end of the project. Imbue the fabric of every day with room for creative thought, and plan the project to remove constraints and encourage creativity.

(After all, what goes around should come around, right ?)

So, I happen to believe we’re all social. In some way shape or form, both offline and online, and whether we like it or not. Simple put, the things we do and don’t do account for our ‘social-ness’.

The questions I’m specifically putting out there are around the virtual or online world:

HOW social are we?

HOW ARE we being social? And most importantly,

WHAT CAN WE ALL BE DOING using today’s Social Media tools to manage the relationships in our lives in ways that make it stronger, evolve, and compound to pay off over time?

No doubt, real life human-to-human interactions go a long way, but in our busy lives, there is only so much time to be able to meet, greet and interact with all the people in our lives. Plus there’s the geographic and financial factor. *sigh*

Enter – Social Media.

Remember the time when someone you hadn’t met in 20 years sent you a ‘gift’ on Facebook, commented positively on your status, or complimented your flickr collection? When a colleague or client started following you on twitter, or friended you on Facebook? For that matter, you probably also recall asking someone forgetting to send you a Linked-in recommendation after promising to do so, or when your blog content got republished word for word without any attribution whatsoever? Depending on the relationship and the type of social touch point you had, you were probably touched, elated, humbled, unhappy or disappointed even.

By following some of the basic tenets of Social Media—listening, connecting, sharing—and combining them with real world common sense and courtesy, we can take that personal or professional relationship to the next level. That’s the power of this social ether I think. Here are:

15 ways to up the ante on our online ‘social-ness’ and build better relationships

1. Always respond comments and invitations. Never dis-engage
2. Comment on status messages, it’s easiest to engage them in their current frame of mind
3. Take the time to rate or review something you tried or used (remember how someone else’s rating helped you make a purchase decision?)
4. Recommend people you vouch for on Linked-in before they ask you
5. Share a job opening as your status message
6. Comment and praise the blogs you admire and follow
7. Go beyond just wishing them Happy Birthday on FB. Do at least 2 more things
8. Ask to follow a client or a colleague, whom you look up to as a thought leader
9. Initiate connecting like-minded people on your social networks
10. Comment on a colleague’s post you’ve read, even a simple acknowledgement goes a long way
11. Add something positive that is centered around the needs of the person you are interacting with
12. Let your Thank-you messages become public (it only compounds the effect)
13. Every so often reach out to a bunch of people you’ve interacted with the least
14. When you don’t have anything positive to share about a friend or colleague’s blog, a simple acknowledgment for their effort goes a long way too
15. Compliment a well executed offline deed and echo it online

Some Questions:

What are other ways you’ve improved the quality of a relationship using Social Media?
Do you believe in Social Karma?
Is SRM (Social Relationship Management) going to be key for organizations going forward?

Share your comments and thoughts, you know – be social….and excuse me if you will, as I brush up on my ‘social-ness’ and go offer up some ‘thumbs ups’ on Facebook and praise Chris Brogan and Mike Troiano whose blogs provided inspiration and insight for this post.

…Uhmmm, call me a bit karmic, but it does feel good. And that’s never a bad thing.

Thought this was a very interesting statistic even though it is not very surprising. The most popular camera on Flickr these days is being challenged by the simple photo abilities on the iPhone. I am sure it is a reflection of many things including mobility, and even audience type. It does in the end become the most versatile tool for capturing life’s moments and Flickr may be more popular now with casual photo enthusiasts and not serious hobbyists or pros.

Lot of other great information here as well. Check it out when you get a chance  -  http://www.flickr.com/cameras/