Thanks to Social Media Club (@socialmediaclub) and my favorite gathering at each SXSW, Social Media Clubhouse for the innovation to talk about social advertising. Jennifer Navarrete (@epodcaster) interviewed my colleague Brian Kotlyar (@bkotlyar) and I in the 2012 IBM Social Lounge. In the interview I share my thoughts about the relationship of social engagement and social advertising on Facebook and Twitter.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It’s been a minute since my last post here. I have been busy balancing the demands of work, thought and life – like most of you. Although I have been silent here, I have been active building a practice at Dachis Group and sharing my thoughts on their Collaboratory – here is the archive of my posts. Please have a read and look for more posts here and there. As for the life part of my absence here – well, I have one less item on my to-do list.

[a repost from Dachis Group // Collaboratory // July 19, 2010]

This was an eventful week for brands in social media. Personalities representing brands were in the spotlight for entertaining us in Social Media Marketing and helping us in Social Media Servicing.

In the Social Media Marketing channel we were wooed by the new viral celebrity Isaiah Mustafa (@isaiahmustafa) in the role of Old Spice Man (@oldspice) delivered in the Old Spice brand campaign. This campaign bridged the connection to us in the social webs by connecting social media celebrities and influencers to the Old Spice brand. Brands are popular in social media but celebrities are HOT. Celebrities in social media share personality, are personal and thus popular – Musicians and Actors top the Facebook Pages rankings over brands. The Old Spice Man brought that personality to the campaign through near real-time YouTube video and Twitter replies to the questions that he invited us to ask. Engaging the community is the aspiration of all brands. Engaging with the community with personality is a rarer capability. The Old Spice campaign delivered on the brand promise through the well integrated creative, social and marketing teams to create, listen and respond to both social celebrities, influencers and the masses.

Brand Lessons Learned:

• Collaboration is essential to campaign and community management. Does your Social Media Servicing team have a view into your Social Media Marketing or Communications calendars? Are you anticipating responses to your messaging? Do you have a knowledge map of your organization to workflow your community communication?
• Community is forever, campaigns are transient. An integrated social media team is essential to deliver on both. Do your teams have access to the tools and information necessary to make decisions? Do they have the ability to listen, respond and measure?

In the Social Media Servicing channel we learned about the career transition of Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason) from Comcast. Frank and the cast on the Customer Service Team that emerged under the Twitter handle @ComcastCares. Over the past three years Frank and team have earned top mention on every Social Media Servicing case study. He and this passionate crew innovated the Social Media Servicing model by adding Twitter to their customer listening toolbox. Under this decentralized social media servicing model emerged @ComcastBill, @ComcastSteve, @ComcastDete, @ComcastMelissa, @ComcastBonnie, @ComcastSherri. These personalities were able to attract in some cases, larger Twitter followings than the brand they work for @Comcast. The service relationship they earned with the communities they interacted with are largely to attribute to this elective community behavior. In contrast, my experience as a Social Media Marketing Manager and Community Manager (@CocaCola), our community engagement was centralized. We engaged the community as the Coke bottle and with a tease of attribution to our personality through our CoTags or ^PF. This tweet signature helped to humanize the interaction with our community while maintaining brand identity and growing a centralized community. Brands that engaged and mature in social media face the challenge of social media identity management. As social media teams and channels grow so do the decisions brands must make to balance their identity and personalities that support them.

Identity Lessons Learned:

• Centralized communities build larger communities. Have you enabled an enterprise social media publishing and community management capability to support this approach? How are you able to publish, listen and respond with a large social media service team?
• Decentralized communities enable your brand knowledge to independently scale. Do you have a social media policy, certification and identity guidelines to support your social workforce? Can you aggregate your distributed conversations to facilitate a common social brand channel?

Managing your social media brand, supporting personalities and policy for social media identity are lessons being learned first by the largest brands and communities. As your Social Media Marketing and Servicing channels mature with resources and community expectations, so must your approach to the medium to find the balance right for your brand.

Snake Cube: Flickr - Groume

Clarity comes from interesting sources. My clarity comes from my tinkering with a snake cube – a simple 3x3x3 wooden cube chain. How are your puzzle skills?

I have been considering different approaches for capturing, filtering and modeling social media engagement data for some time. Like most other practitioners I talk with – we are generating more data than we can analyze. I have a stack of Short URL data, another with SEO data, another with Media data, another from Web Analytics, more from Social Media Analytics – Facebook or YouTube Insights, newly added Listening data, updates from CRM, with the newest and largest stack from Moderation. Certainly you may have more …. What do you do with your data stacks?

The burden of ownership of these stacks is that they are a combination of structured and unstructured data. We can neatly capture the structured data like time, date, profile name, network, location, browser type, tags, etc … The unstructured information is where many times the real insights exist. This is where we will find comments, blog posts, video responses, photos shared, etc … It is the balance of content with context that provides us with the real world relationships that describe the editorial measurement, community health or overall social engagement. This is the challenge of social media measurement as it is combines your web analytics standards with those of your social media data. O’Reilly Media (@oreillymedia)author, Sean Power (@seanpower) lead an Enterprise 2.0 Boston (@e2conf) session this week that aligned with my approach and offered a deep course in this integrated analytics or communilytics approach [see slide 95 to visualize this synthesis]. This brings the insights team off the sidelines and into the planning and delivery of the program goals.

Insights are in the eye of the beholder when it comes to measurement. The lens that I view these data stacks is very different than my colleagues that are observing from the lens of eCommerce, Marketing, Brand Manager, Public Relations, Customer Service, Investor Relations or Information Technology.  Each functional organization has different data elements that can be organized to model a possible solution set relevant for their insights. This dynamic is what drives the collection of these data stacks but the hoarding of data does not benefit the enterprise if it is not accessible and flexible. Your collection of  spreadsheets containing silos of data – only useful to the limited asynchronous owners. This model is single dimensional and focused on the structured data.

This brings me back to the snake cube. The view of this information reminds me of a project I worked on a project a few years ago where we modeled structured and unstructured video data to help inform a fantastic video search engine – dabble. The model we used was the OLAP cube to bring dimension to the data stacks we had maintained to develop new products with the core meta and search data. Capturing these data stacks as a cube offers as one of many forms of business intelligence to model your analytics. Bringing this agility to your data stacks to unlock insights will open the possibilities for you and other supporting organizations to develop formulas and benchmarks that bring the insights and evidence to fund, scale and better engage your communities. Embracing this flexible and business intelligence can move the social media efforts into the center of your brand planning rather than an after action review. Gatorade (@gatorade) and PepsiCo (@pepsico) has harnessed this approach to power the Zeitgeist and Mission Control center. Are you ready for your analytics and analysts to have a seat at your digital table?