[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?

Serendipity is the only word to describe my +10 years of listening, creating and sharing as a business consultant in the age of social technology.

Serendipity brought me to a brilliant technologist Robert Occhialini (@bump) and his intriguing use of software from UserLand Software and Pyra Labs that challenged my perception about web development, publishing and enterprise software. Serendipity exposed me to visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) via his Semantic Web keynote at XML World ’00, Doc Searls (@dsearls) via the many readings of Cluetrain Manifesto since ‘oo and Jaron Lanier as his UPS driver at VPL Research in the late 80′s and experiencing virtual worlds for the first time. Reflecting on my journey and the network of friends, colleagues and clients – most moving from one lifecycle to the other – so many have seeded my sense of design, systems and social computing.

In reflection of my digital and social journey this decision to join The Dachis Group comes with great clarity. Chance reconnected me with Peter Kim (@peterkim) again from our first interactions in his early Forrester days and his current venture with Jeff Dachis (@jeffdachis) and team. It was the serendipity of SXSWi ’09 that introduced me to Jeff and his nascent business vision of The Dachis Group (@dachisgroup). Shortly after, collaboration with extended Dachis team offered a better understanding of true capabilities and definition of Social Business Design. This brings us to SXSWi ’10 and the anniversary of that first meeting but under much different circumstances – a year of client wins for The Dachis Group and my year of collaborating with “the biggest brand In the world” to launch its social media strategy. We found this intersecting point to be the common alignment of leading enterprise transformation and social business design.

It is with great respect and honor that I leave my current consulting role as a Social Media Marketing Manager at The Coca-Cola Company. I am privileged to have lead global discovery, strategy and delivery of social media product and marketing programs for this amazing organization. With the support of Michael Donnelly (@michaeldonnelly) the executive team, my collaboration with global and regional marketing communities, my wingman Brad Ruffkess (@ruffkess) and a small team of believers – we moved mountains. Over +18 months we went from a social media volume of three to nine worldwide (on a scale of one to eleven). Leading product management and community management of Twitter and YouTube platforms along with strategic input to global and regional social media marketing is the dream job for any social media consultant. This has been a truly unique opportunity to contribute to the operation and execution of the nascent business transformation of this global brand leader. Where does one go from here?

I have accepted this unique opportunity to contribute to the success of The Dachis Group as an Engagement Manager. It is my curiosity for seeking patterns of design within the complexity of the enterprise that drive me. It is the experience I can offer to provide holistic perspective to social computing, business and consumer interaction. It is the reality of preparing business for real-time engagement. It is the right time to join this culture of equally seasoned and passionate people. These factors and many more lead me to alter my course to push greater limits. It is my belief that this group will turn the social business volume to a new level – eleven.

Thanks to all of those that have been part of my journey and to Jeff and Pete for being ready to start our venture. Stay tuned for the chapters to come …

Meet Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava), author and social media expert, and join other local social media gurus on April 26th at Midtown’s newest hot spot, HobNob Neighborhood Tavern, for an evening of offline social networking and drinks. Bring along your friends and colleagues.

We have a special guest joining us – Lon Safco (@lonsafco), author of The Social Media Bible, at our Tweetup.

Please join us and share.: http://bit.ly/aSaeqS

When: Monday, April 26th from 6-8 PM
Where: HobNob Neighborhood Tavern.
Who: Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included
Why: Networking and Social Media conversation.
Cash bar available. HobNob is located at the corner of Piedmont Avenue and Monroe Drive 1551 Piedmont Ave NE Atlanta, GA 30324 404-968-2288