At the end of the election, I came out with the feeling that Twitter had generally been on my side, that is, supportive of either Liberal or Labour candidates and issues. And yet, when research was carried out, it turned out that Twitter had been like the election itself, just in favour of the Conservatives.

Why was my experience of Twitter different to the reality? The answer is simple, and obvious with hindsight: I had filtered my social media feeds and networks so that they were predominantly populated with people like me. This is what a recent book described as a filter bubble, and the effects of such filters are becoming more and more pronounced.

Such filters can be built or triggered by any number of things:

• Google builds filters based on your social graph and your click data, personalising results to such an extent that one +1 or tweet can bump a page from 40 to 40 in the SERPs.
• Facebook’s EdgeRank pushes content and people it doesn’t think you’ll be interested in to the ticker, leaving the feed free for the most “relevant” information.

All of this is done in the name of relevance, but it has major implications for our understanding of the world around us, not to mention how marketers connect with consumers going forward.

For a start, it’s likely to create a self-perpetuating echo-chamber where, like I did in the election, we surround ourselves with people and things that match our existing worldview and belief structure, not just because those are the people we know, but because those are the types of people and things that social networks and search engines recommend to us.

When you add this to the move in advertising whereby engagement is used as a success rate, and therefore a targeting tool, it could have massive implications for customer service and brand stature issues.

Imagine that I have a problem with brand X and spend some time complaining about it. Social network Y might decide that I am most likely to respond to similar status updates. And whilst it’s unlikely that a company like Twitter would purposefully push negative comments toward me because they match my own sentiment, it could certainly start allowing advertisers to target disgruntled customers of their competitors.

As Facebook and others start to build entirely personalised versions of the Web for us, based on our tweets, likes, clicks and friends, it could entirely strip the serendipity of discovery from our Web experience (and our wider lives, as everything we do becomes digital in some way), as advertising will almost certainly move in the same direction, as described above.

But despite all of this, there are still obvious opportunities for brands and advertisers to dare to speak from outside the echo chamber. As I described some time ago, in many ways what we need are social graphs that aren’t built around people we like, but people like us.

However, this won’t entirely remove the problem of the filter bubble. But if the net, so to speak, could be spread wide enough, it seems likely that an element of surprise could return.

Take Hunch; it’s a service that, after you have answered a load of seemingly random questions about yourself, can make predictions about your tastes and preferences with an almost spooky degree of accuracy. But what it can also do is predict that you’ll like things you’ve never heard of before. And as the data set, i.e. user base, it bases these on gets larger, the more likely it is that serendipity creeps back into our lives.

If advertisers are willing to be as brave, and dare to promote or suggest things that users aren’t 100% guaranteed to like or understand, then the role of curator, which is likely to be an important one as we enter the age of information overload, is available to them. And consumers are always likely to place more trust and value in people and brands that know them better than they do themselves, rather than in people who just parrot back things we already know.

It highlighted, for anyone who wasn’t already sure, that Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition for his company is huge: he want to be the glue that binds the Web together, in the same way that Google was the index that made it usable.

I’m writing this the day after the anouncements, and have just turned on Timeline, but whilst it’s hard to make accurate predictions about what the end result of these changes will be, it does strike me that they may not be good news for brands trying to use the platform to connect with consumers.

The broad thrust of the F8 announcements can be summarised as putting Facebook squarely at the centre of your life, both online and off: watching Netflix, reading The Guardian, cooking a recipe or hiking up a hill.

This should be fantastic for users (so long as it doesn’t become overwhelming); as MG Siegler points out on Techcrunch, no longer will people have to stop, whilst listening to music/watching a film/etc., in order to like something and share it with their friend – it will now be shared automatically.

It also means that Facebook will become a true 21st media company; not a media owner, but a media platform.

For The Guardian, Netflix, Spotify and the like this could be a huge moment, opening them up to massive new audiences (in the case of companies like Spotify) and building the power of social context and peer recommendation into everything that they do.

But for brands who don’t make this type of content, these developments could make it much harder to use Facebook to engage with consumers.

Firstly, if Facebook becomes the place where people actually consume content, rather than acting as a gateway to that content, it’s simply going to be harder to stand out from the crowd.

If I’m on Facebook watching a movie, or reading an article, why would I want to engage with a branded app, unless it’s absolutely amazing, and really adds something to my digital life?

To a certain extent, this is already true: bad apps sink, good apps don’t. But when you add the new content structure into (Timeline & the ticker) the mix, this is only going to become even more true.

Because these sorts of interactions, which currently help brands cut through the noise on Facebook (likes, comments, etc…) will be sidelined, and placed in the ticker.

The Timeline, which will replace profiles, is, at first glance at least, so fascinatingly beautiful, it could become the focus of a lot of users’ attention: the way it sucked me in, they might as well have called it Timesink.

Of course they may make a jump, based on Facebook’s algorithms, into the main newsfeed, but it seems likely that it’s going to take a lot more for this to happen that it does at the moment.

If people start automatically sharing every song they listen to, movie they watch, or recipe they make, the ticker could become so noisy, that it’s almost impossible to make that leap; already people are feeling ‘stream fatigue’.

Of course, this could end up forcing brands to work even harder on creating truly engaging content and reasons for people to connect with them, which would be a good thing.

It’s also likely to drive the use of Facebook’s ad products, particularly Sponsored Stories, as brands try to cut through the noise and make the all important jump sideways, from the ticker to the ‘important news’.

For years, you’d hear people say that ‘content is king’; as the social Web started to develop, this turned into ‘conversation is king, content is just something to talk about’.

Now, we could say that Facebook is king, because it owns content and conversation, and brands will need to bow to the king if they wish to be heard.

This led to politicians, including the British Prime Minister, and some of his most loyal followers, suggesting that at times such as these social networks should be censored or even closed down.

Leaving aside the fact that this would mean that Mr. Cameron had a similar view on this topic to the likes of the Arab dictators he’s so keen to see toppled, what it shows is a massive misunderstanding about what social networks, and indeed what the social Web in general, actually is.

In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the, now infamous, phrase:

The medium is the message

According to wikipedia, McLuhan had a broad definition of media, including light bulbs:

A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness.

Or, in the case of a news story:

Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself — the content — and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner

It strikes me that more and more, many people are mixing-up social media for the messages which they convey, and that whilst these media do play some part in shaping the messages they carry, as they become commonplace, this should cease to be of interest.

So, rioters used Twitter to organise riots (even though it would appear that they didn’t), means we should ban Twitter.

It’s lucky that these politicians weren’t around in the 19th Century, when riots abounded, or they might have tried to ban the nascent postal service. And of course if the politicians had got their way (they didn’t), it would have meant that the bottom-up, crowd-sourced community clean-ups, wouldn’t have been possible.

To avoid the danger of this becoming a rant about the risk of politicians who don’t understand technology seeking to legislate against it, let’s look at what can we take from this as marketers.

Firstly, it shows that, as an industry, we need to move away from the idea that social media is inherently new and exciting. With user data showing that, in many markets, Facebook is now the single biggest media platform (versus major newspapers, TV shows, etc…), and is, therefore, essentially the mainstream.

The fact that a news story breaks on a social network, or that people are using these platforms to communicate, is the 21st Century equivalent of dog bites man. If marketers, and anyone else, wishes to be taken seriously, they need to accept this and move on.

They also need to ensure that social is an integrated part of any communications plan, and isn’t siloed: activity on Facebook, Twitter etc., should be thought through and planned in conjunction with TV, press, even search. What this means for ‘social media agencies’, is a topic for a later date.

Secondly, building on this this, we need to start separating the ends from the means.

A perfect example of this is the hype that we’ve seen over the last year or so around location based services (LBS), such as Foursquare, compared to the recent news that Facebook is, to all intents and purposes, dropping ‘check-ins’. Because what Facebook have realised (I assume) is that check-ins, as a social object in and of themselves, have very little value.

Yes, if you’re out and about and want to know if any of your friends are nearby, the basic location data that Places brought was kind of useful. But for most people, it didn’t really add anything. Ditto for other marketing buzz-phrases such as QR codes.

Because we still sometimes confuse the medium with the message, and think that the (imagined) newness of social, mobile, and the like, will make our activities on these platforms exciting, we end up asking consumers to do something just for the sake of doing it.

What people really want is added-value. This can be provided by adding context (in the case of location, through services such as Songkick, now partnering with Foursquare), or utility (in the case of QR codes, by making it a way of taking the pain out of shopping, as in the video below).

Click here to view the embedded video.

So next time someone tells you that ‘this happened on Twitter’, or ‘Facebook caused that’, step back and think about what these platforms can really add, in terms of context or utility. Otherwise it’s not news, just tomorrow’s chip wrapper**.

*I’m very glad that the 9/11 app I mentioned in last month’s post has now hit its funding target.

**An old British phrase based on the fact that fish & chips used to be wrapped in newspapers: today’s news, tomorrow’s (fish &) chip wrapper.

• Facebook has over 750 million active monthly users
• Those users share over 4 billion pieces of content a day
• More than 24 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every day
• Someone joins LinkedIn every second
• If Wikipedia were a book, it would be over 2 million pages long*

It’s not just numbers, many of those writing about social media love to claim that it’s responsible for creating, or at least setting the news. Whether it’s the tragic death of a troubled, but hugely talented singer, an horrific massacre or even a revolution, these days, it seems that nothing happens that can’t be pinned to interactions on Facebook or Twitter.

But are these relatively new channels actually shaping these events, or merely channelling them? And what does this mean for brands?

To try to understand the true impact of social, let’s take a look at a rather wonderful project that’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, which is itself one of many poster children for the radical effect of the social web.

110 Stories is the name of an, as yet unbuilt, app that will commemorate the events of 911. In the words of the creator:

Activate the app on your iPhone and you’ll be guided towards the World Trade Center. Once properly oriented, augmented reality kicks in and renders their silhouette — in a pencil-like outline during the day and in shimmering light at night. Snap a picture, fine tune the image, add a personal story, and submit it to www.110stories.com.

Looking at the stats on the Facebook plug-in that is built-in to Kickstarter, nearly 1,200 people have liked 110 Stories. Which should mean, it would be reasonable to think, that it would be well on its way to meeting its target of raising $25,000.

And it is – as of July 29th, it had raised nearly $20,000. But that money had come from just 305 backers**. So, whilst, at first glance, the interaction rate with the project seems great, the number of people who actually engaged to the point that they were willing to part with cash, is really rather low.

So what can brands, and anyone involved in social take from this?

The most important thing to understand is that you should never mistake numbers for insight – as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Just because your brand has thousands of fans, that doesn’t mean that thousands of new customers will start buying your products.

Rather than obsess on the size of their fan-bases, it’s essential that brands map how those fans are truly engaging with the brand, and track how that engagement relates to sales.

Many people in the online world like to claim that TV is dead, and scoff at the suggestion that TV is a well researched medium with the power to drive real action. Yet, as the CMO of any major FMCG company will tell you, when ads go on air, product flies off the shelves. And there’s over half a century’s worth of data to back this up.

If social networks, particularly Facebook, hope to prove that interaction and engagement have a true value, it’s essential that they start turning stats and data into insights and proof.

The BrandLift product is certainly a large step in the right direction, and it is to be hoped that this will soon be rolled into Nielsen’s wider product portfolio, particularly their consumer panels, which track actual retail purchases.

There has undoubtedly been an improvement in the types of things that companies and agencies running social media campaigns are using as success metrics, but there’s still a lot more that can be done. Because as long as people are being bombarded with impressive, but meaningless stats, such as the fact that Facebook would be the 3rd biggest country in the world, it won’t matter a jot if we can’t prove that any of those inhabitants buy our clients’ products.

*So almost as long as a George R. Martin novel then.

**I am the 305th – I didn’t think it would be fair to criticise lack of engagement if I wasn’t engaged myself.

However, outside the reams of press about how it looks a bit like Facebook, or acts a bit like Friendfeed, or isn’t as good as Twitter, the one question that I haven’t seen asked, is exactly why Google would bother to launch a social network?

Let’s look at some numbers:

• $50 million – estimated Twitter ad revenue for 2010
• $150 million – estimated Twitter ad revenue for 2011
• $644 million – Groupon 2010 revenue, losses – $102 million
• $1.86 billion – estimated Facebook ad revenue for 2010, profits – $355 million
• $2.6 billion – estimated Groupon revenues for 2011, losses – $147 million in Q1
• $4 billion, estimated Facebook ad revenue for 2011, profits – $2 billion
• $29 billion, Google 2010 revenue, profits – $8.5 billion

Yep, Google’s profits for 2010 were more than the combined revenues of, arguably, the three biggest social brands (even without taking into account Groupon’s staggering losses).

So, considering that, why on earth would Google want to go to all the hassle of launching its own social network, when none of the existing ones are making that much money?

Well, because with everything Google, it all comes back to search.

Several reports have shown that things that do well on Facebook tend to do well on Google too. That’s not to say that Facebook impacts Google rankings – they can’t, as Facebook only shares that data with Bing. Rather, it’s proof of the fact that likes are the modern day link; that is, the sort of things that people used to link to (and still do), now tend to get liked.

In many ways, likes are a much better model for directing search results. Linking was always a bit of a niche activity – you had to have a web page, you probably had to know a bit of HTML. In other words, links were for geeks, likes are for everyone.

Therefore, if Google wants to maintain its hold on the search sector, it needs to develop its own social graph, or at least that’s how people at Google have described it to me.

The question of course, is whether they will be able to build their own social graph. After a day of playing with Google+, I like it. But will I like it enough to maintain it alongside, or even instead of, Twitter & Facebook, or will the tyranny of attention prevail? I’m not sure.

Google has hedged its bets with its Twitter deal**, but to put this deal into context, whilst many trumpeted Apple’s decision to integrate Twitter with its new iOS, it is worth highlighting the fact that the combined audience of Twitter users and Apple devices doesn’t match Facebook’s userbase. For once, Google isn’t the Goliath in this battle, and neither is the ally it has found to join it.

What is for sure is that whilst all the hype and attention surrounds Google+, Facebook and all things social, Google will carry on making bucket-loads of cash, at the same time as it continues its assault on the ever-more profitable display market, with its pincer movement of YouTube’s increased investment in professional content, and its own DSP. Of course, if Facebook decided to launch its own ad-network, then all bets will be off.

*™ belongs to the world’s press.

**Since originally writing this post, the Google-Twitter deal has suddenly come to an end, making the creation of its own social graph more important than ever.

Whilst I’m in no way qualified to answer that (though I tend to agree with the analysis by multi-media consultancy Broadsight that all of this activity suggest that we definitely are in a bubble), what I can say is that nearly all of these companies rely on marketing, if not direct advertising dollars, for their business models.

This worries me because at present all of them seem to be enabling, if not actively encouraging, incredibly uncreative communication strategies. As a colleague of mine, who had his doubts about social, once said to me, “Are there any great social marketing campaigns that don’t rely on bribing the user”. And, when you think about it, there aren’t that many.

Groupon is built on bribing, or buying, your customer’s attention (with all the dangers that brings of investing in acquisition with absolutely no guarantee of retention), whilst many other ‘famous’ campaigns are built on similar models: vouchers, competitions, etc…

If Facebook, Twitter and the like really want to meet their valuations they need to win TV budgets, and that means that agencies and marketers need to get much better at using social platforms and technologies to build lasting relationships with consumers, without resorting to financial rewards, and start creating truly innovative strategies.

So, rather than just rant about this, I thought it would be useful to give examples of brands that are doing exactly that, in the (almost certainly vein) hope that this might encourage others to do the same.

5 Examples Of Excellent Social Media Campaigns

1. Intel – Museum of Me

This was the campaign that made me decide to write this post. A stunningly simple mechanic (pulling data from people’s social graphs using Facebook’s API is hardly original).

But done in a truly beautiful way, that actually made me stop what I was doing and give my full attention to what was unfolding in front of me. And, in doing all of this, it subtly, but very definitely, hammers home the overarching brand message. This should win awards. Lots of them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. First Direct – Live

Marketers often dismiss social, saying that it only works for cool brands, ones where people will want to get involved. So it would be impossible to use it for, say, a bank, right? Well, First Direct, to highlight the fact that unlike most other UK banks, were trusted by their customers, used social technology to surface consumer opinion, and then published it, on their own site, and broadcast it, in offline marketing. Again, an old tricks (it’s what movie studios have always done) but given an innovative twist, that won awards, and hit business targets.

3. Heineken – Star Player

Sponsoring major sporting events is an expensive business, yet so many brands go no further than slapping their logos on the bilboards and the ads around the games. Heineken went one better, and created an app that not only appeals to the target audience (football/soccer fans), but is truly engaging and, creates and facilitates live conversations.

4. Metropolitan Police – Choose A Different Ending

If you can’t use social for boring sectors, surely it can’t make a serious point? Well, the (London) Metropolitan Police proved otherwise with this interactive video narrative that allows youngsters to see the dangers of carrying a knife through a ‘choose your own adventure’ style YouTube platform. Gripping, engaging and perfect for the target audience. Truly creative, and true social work.

5. Burberry - Art Of The Trench

Another industry that has, for the most part, steered clear of social, and indeed digital in general, is the luxury sector. But fashion brand Burberry decided to grasp it with both hands, and the result was the highly successful Art Of The Trench, which has been followed with the world’s first 3D livecast of a catwalk show, with real-time Facebook & Twitter commenting.

It actually took me a while to come up with these, as so many, admittedly creative uses of social, rely on giving something physical back to consumers, whether in the forms of discounts or competition prizes.

So, help me out. Help me prove my colleague wrong. Help us prove that social media can be used creatively, without recourse to competitions, vouchers and give-aways, by giving your own examples in the comments.

* Heineken & First Direct are both Mindshare clients, though Mindshare was not involved in the creation of the Star Player app. I have tried to use non-US examples on purpose, to prove that great work does exist outside of America.

However, for once, I found myself disagreeing with Rand on at least one point.

Towards the end of his deck, Rand showed the names of 15 different social platforms and said that every brand or company should be using, at a minimum. He felt that it was essential that brands create, maintain and use all of these in order to maximise the likely benefit to SEO. But I have to say that I think he’s wrong on this one.

In my recent post on how to plan & implement social strategies, one of the areas I said you need to cover is your approach. This encompasses a number of different topics, but one of the most important ones is the area of resource. Put simply, if you start implementing social marketing for whatever reason, who will do what?

Because if you decide to jump into Facebook, or YouTube, or wherever, but haven’t planned for how you will manage and continue the conversations that this is likely to create (if your strategy works), then you may as well not even start, as all you’ll be doing is wasting time and money.

Furthermore, if you happen to be a multinational brand (as many of our clients are) then jumping headlong into multiple platforms is basically a recipe for disaster. Trying to manage multiple profiles on one platform is difficult enough as it is (again, I looked at this in a previous post). Trying to keep up as your various business units start setting up, and most likely abandon, profiles on different networks, would give even an organisational wizard a headache.

Just as an example, once a company has been set up on LinkedIn, it is almost impossible to change it; what if one of your enthusiastic employees happens to get the details wrong?

Whilst there are undoubtedly some platforms that require little management, such as Slideshare or Scribd, others most definitely do. Quora, which is this year’s hyped platform of choice, is seriously unlikely to generate any value without some serious love and attention.

In fact, it’s arguable what value, other than the fact that Quora questions are starting to appear in the rankings, it generates anyway. And maybe this is why Rand and I disagree. In this instance, he’s looking at how social platforms can help generate links, whereas, now that I’ve moved away from SEO, I’m really only concerned with how they can engage consumers, and drive overall business objectives.

At the end of the day, you should do what’s right for you and your brand. If you’re in the consumer space, and working in most parts of the west, you should probably be on Facebook, as Danny Sullivan explains so well. If you’re in different regions, the same rule applies, only with your local variation. If you’re in B2B, think LinkedIn, or equivalent. And if you’re in a niche, well, to paraphrase a famous ad, there’s a social network for that.

The one thing you shouldn’t do is overstretch yourself; it may provide a short-term boost, but in the long-run, it’s only likely to lead to disillusioned or, worse, bored customers, and exhausted and confused staff. And there’s nothing social about that.

For years, Google crowed about the fact that Orkut outweighed Facebook in two of the most important developing markets (Brazil & India), but that is likely to change soon (Facebook is gaining in both), whilst Buzz hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, and Wave is now just a distant, confusing memory.

That said, Google’s new +1 is worthy of attention, even if it’s only because of what it tells us about the evolution of advertising.

For years, online marketers sold their products on the basis that there were entirely attributable, and could drive absolute ROI, with no  uncertainty about wastage or loss: no more would marketers be able to trot out the old cliché:

I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half.

Instead, we could tell clients exactly which pennies turned into pounds, or cents into dollars, and, helped Google get very, very rich in the process.

But the only problem with this is that many clients don’t have anything to sell online.

They can’t attribute value to clicks and visits.

And, most importantly, they know that TV, with its supposedly unattributable ads, shifts product, end of story.

Facebook discovered this when they started trying to move away from their self-service product and to start taking big TV budgets from FMCG clients.

In order to do so, they had to prove the value of digital beyond the click, and did so through their partnership with Nielsen and what was interesting about this is that it showed that social context improved ad effectiveness.

Since starting this research programme, Facebook has taken on hundreds of millions in ad revenue, from major TV brands including Nike, Unilever, P&G and Coke, and is predicted to top $2 billion in 2011. And the rest of the web giants, new and old, have been watching. Because of what Facebook has done to socialise advertising, they’ve added engagement into the dry mix of digital marketing, and it’s starting to pay.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, in which case Facebook should be feeling seriously flattered at the moment. Where Facebook has Engagement Ads, with social functionality including likes and comments, Twitter has Promoted Tweets.

With these, advertisers can only advertise with content that is inherently social because if an ad is not retweeted sufficiently, it comes off of the platform, and the cost model is implicitly linked to virality and engagement.

In a similar vein, YouTube’s new TrueView product allows viewers to turn off pre-roll ads and mean advertisers aren’t charged if the ad is played for less than 30 seconds/to completion (for ads under 30 seconds long).

Although this isn’t particularly social, it’s all about engagement. Whilst it doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere, I’ve been told by senior sources at YouTube that, in a similar vein to Promoted Tweets, ads that are clicked off too often will be taken down. This means that if ads aren’t engaging, they simply won’t be seen.

And now comes Google’s +1. For the moment, according to the launch information, receiving +1′s won’t result in a change in CPC, other than minor changes due to the increase in CTR it has tended to cause in beta tests, and the effect this will have on Quality Score.

It seems to me that if the system takes off, and it is a reasonably big if, it would make total sense for Google to include +1 data in its Quality Score algorithm, and reward more engaging ads, in the same way that Twitter does and YouTube seems likely to. In many ways, it would appear to be a natural, if not inevitable evolution of the product.

Of course, there’s also a risk in this insistence on ads being engaging: some products really aren’t that interesting, and many advertisers may not have the time, resource or skill-set to try to change this. But as Facebook continues its inexorable march into the land of big budget advertisers, it’s in everyone else’s interests to try to keep up.

Most months I already have a clear idea of what I want to cover, but some times I find myself staring at the screen, not sure where to start. And in many ways, that’s a similar situation to the one that marketers find themselves in when asked to start integrating social into the communications mix.

It’s for this reason that we at Mindshare developed a very simple process for planning, implementing and reviewing social marketing, with each step handily beginning with the letter A.

Aims

Before you start, it’s important to have total clarity on what you hope to achieve. This many sound obvious, but it still seems as if too many brands set up in Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/etc., because someone has told them that they ought to be on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/etc. And, if you don’t know why you’re doing something, you won’t be able to judge whether it’s gone well.

By setting out clear business objectives, whether that be driving awareness of a new product, increasing sales, improving SEO, or whatever, you are ensuring that everything you do from here on in can be easily measured. If we want to take a real-world example, when Mindshare UK were tasked with highlighting the fact that First Direct was unlike other banks (primarily because people trusted the brand, and even liked it), they did so by surfacing digital buzz, and then turning that into actual marketing.

Because there was a clear objective, there were also clear success criteria (which is probably why the work won a Gold Lion at the Oscars of advertising in Cannes).

Audience

Just as it’s essential that you understand why you are entering into social media, it’s equally important that you understand who you’re trying to reach. Are they online? If so, do they actually use social media? If yes, how do they use it?

Although I’ve long felt that Forrester’s Ladder is no longer an entirely valid model for judging how people interact with the social web, it’s still as good a place to start as any. If you have a target audience of women in their 50s, who would probably fall into the category of spectators, it’s probably not a great idea to launch a campaign which involves uploading video clips.

If possible, you should even try to look at exactly what type of social activities your target audience participate in: those over 50s women are, in the UK and US at least, likely to be into social gaming, so 7-11′s use of Farmville to reward real-world purchases was perfect for their core target.

Using tools like Global Web Index you can pinpoint whether an audience are more prone to taking photos, or writing blogs, and from there, plan your activity accordingly. When Ikea planned this piece of activity to raise awareness of opening a new store, it was built round the simple insight that their audience enjoyed tagging photos*.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Approach

With clear objectives, and an understanding of your target audience, you can set out how you will approach the activation – this will cover both logistics, semantics & activation.

For a start, you need to decide how social media will fit into your wider web strategy. If you’re building a Facebook page, will that sit at the centre of your web activity, or just act as a way of highlighting action happening on your main website?

You also need to plan who will run your profile, where the content needed will come from and what, if any, CMS you will use (we often recommend Buddy Media, particularly for clients grappling with the issues that come with trying to run global social media portfolios).

Moving away from logistics, you need to consider both the tone of your activity, and your choice architecture. Your tone will decide the way in which you communicate – is it friendly, authoritative, informative? Are you speaking as a brand, as an individual or as a group? Doing this will help you judge how individual communications should be sent out.

Setting out a choice architecture will help you decide how best to get consumers involved whilst minimising the risk of reputation issues. Essentially, you need to plan how to align the interests of the brand with those of the consumer, so that it’s easier for someone to positively interact than to do so negatively.

For an example of this at work, consider Skittles decision to change their homepage into a live Twitter feed. Because there was no reason for most people to say nice things about Skittles, many took the opportunity to fill the feed with bad jokes, swear words, and worse.

Compare this with crisp brand Walkers’ competition to find a new flavour: whilst many might have expected the flavours to be ridiculous, as people raced to send the most inappropriate suggestions, because the winner received a cut of profits from the new flavour, there was a powerful incentive to interact in a positive way.

Finally, whilst many people still hold with the Field of Dreams style approach to social marketing (build it and they will come), there is plenty of evidence to show that you need to have a plan of activation, that might include online or offline advertising, PR, or even good old fashioned SEO. When Nike wanted to use Facebook to launch its Write The Future ad, it did so by spending months building up a large and active Facebook page, with a mix of Facebook ads and frequent content updates.

Analyze

If you’ve followed this process all the way through, you’ll now need to analyse it. Many pieces of social marketing fall down because it’s impossible to judge success, but if you have clearly defined AIMS, that shouldn’t be a problem.

For those brands lucky enough to have decent activation budgets, you could look at using Facebook’s Nielsen partnership to commission a BrandLift study. For those on smaller budgets, there are still plenty of ways of analysing the success of your activity, and the IAB UK have come up with a nice way of doing exactly this.

By setting both hard and soft KPIs, and by tying these into the consumer journey, you can evaluate every stage of your social marketing which in turn helps you to test and learn as your activity becomes more mature.

As with any relatively new form of marketing, many people will still set out with no clear objectives, and will struggle their way to an inconclusive conclusion. But if you follow the 4As, you should be able to treat your social marketing like any other form of marketing – something that, if approached in a structured way, can always provide measurable effects and insights.

What the impact of such location based services will be is still hard to say, though the fact that two social discount sites placed ads in the Superbowl certainly shows how high the stakes are.

There’s obviously money in local/location. Groupon probably spent in the region of $6 million on their Superbowl slots, turned down a rumoured $6 billion offer from Google, and have $950 million in the bank.

The interesting thing about Facebook’s entry into this market — Deals –  is that it doesn’t cost advertisers, whereas Groupon generally take 50% of any revenue left after a discount has been promoted (something that Groupon’s investors might want to carefully consider).

So what does Facebook get from Deals & Places? Two things: engagement & data.

Every time someone checks into a Place, or makes use of a deal, they populate Facebook’s Social Graph, and provide further insights into their likes and interests. If you check in to the cinema several times in a month and take up a deal on eating out, Facebook can work out that you’re probably pretty active socially, in the true sense of the word.

Check into a café at 2 in the afternoon and claim a deal on kid’s clothes, and they’ll probably be able to build a profile of someone with children. All of this data goes to build a picture of the consumer that advertisers can use to better target their communications, but only on Facebook. At the moment.

Since its launch, Facebook’s Platform has been integrated into more than 2.5 million 3rd party sites, and over 250 million people interact with content on external sites through Facebook plugins every month.

At the moment, all of that data allows publishers and retailers to build a picture of what products/articles people like, and also helps Facebook build its internal ad product. But what would happen if that data was used to start powering ads off of Facebook?

Whilst not a patch on the $6 billion they were (supposedly) prepared to chuck at Groupon, one of Google’s other (relatively) recent purchases is as much of a sign of what the future of digital marketing is likely to look like: Invite Media is a demand-side platform, or DSP. These are basically networks that allow publishers/advertisers to build a strong profile of a user based on the sites he or she visits, and then allows those users to be targeted in real-time by maximising the value of remnant inventory, often using an auction model.

Essentially, this means that display moves from targeting based on context (people with kids are likely to visit the parenting section of MSN.com, so that’s where I’ll put my ads) to targeting actual audiences (this person has visited loads of parenting sites, so now I know what they’re interested in, I’ll put my ad on this really cheap blog).

Every media agency in the world (including the one I work for) is investing in DSPs and ad exchanges, as are the likes of Yahoo! and MSN. But what if the developed world’s most popular site, with reams of data on what its consumers like, watch, talk about, visit and want to redeem vouchers for, was to launch its own advertising network, based on the power of its social graph?

I’m guessing that it would be something that Facebook’s investors, and its advertisers, would like very much indeed.