Herein lies the beauty of social networking—it’s connecting strangers and making our world smaller than ever before.

I’m not an advocate of living out your life and relationships online—we’re probably all a little guilty of lazy communication (texts, emails, Facebook messages, etc.) and need to come up for air from our laptops once in a while. Face-to-face interaction with both friends and clients still trumps digital connection. However, complete strangers are becoming a thing of the past. We meet so many people online and in our social networks now that it makes meeting them in person that much warmer and easier to interact. There’s a predetermined connection.

On a local or a global scale, if you want to know something about a brand or an individual, the opportunity is right at your fingertips. Since I’m not really a small talk kind of person and I like getting to the heart of a conversation quickly, I love that we have social media to get us past the initial “Hi, I’m Bryan” stage. In my mind, social sets us up to connect and converge in real life in a more meaningful way.

Here are 5 things you can do online to give your future relationships a jumpstart:

1) Share authentically. Whether on your blog, in a tweet or in your LinkedIn profile, be who you be. Drop the false pretense and speak authentically. People will get a better sense of who you are if you’re writing about yourself and your passions with honesty and conviction. Anything predetermined or over-thought is going against the law of attraction.

2) Don’t be afraid to share. You have thoughts every day, right? And somebody will benefit from them—so don’t keep them to yourself. Share them. In spurts on Twitter or at length on your blog. Think of what we could accomplish if we didn’t let fear of others’ reactions keep us from putting our stuff out there. Create warmth in your future relationships by being willing to share your thoughts and your passions, even before that first handshake. People will feel like they already know you even before they do.

3) Develop rapport. Conversations are meant for two or more people. If you are just shouting out from your own Facebook page, expecting likes and comments but not instigating conversation (and thus, developing relationships), then you might as well talk to a mirror. It’ll be fun for a while, but it’s a bit narcissistic and the end result won’t get you far. LinkedIn has all the information you need to know before you meet someone face-to-face. If you do your homework, it could make your real life interaction that much more meaningful.

4) Listen. Too much talking and not enough listening makes for unbalanced relationships, take it from a Libra. The same applies in social networks, with both companies and individuals. If you think about it, the same listening strategies in life apply to those online. Build a listening strategy that gives you insights, and you will probably get more out of it than what your current engagement strategy is providing.

5) Have fun. Seriously. Have some fun. Life is too short to be serious all the time, plus social media is not the place to get too corporate and uptight. People do business with people. It’s about engaging, not selling. It’s about connecting, not simply self-promoting. If you aren’t happy with your personal brand, ask yourself why, then lighten up a bit and have some fun with it. Maybe a rebranding is in order. People like to connect with interesting individuals, and they certainly appreciate a company that shows it has a fun human side.

Key Takeaway: Remember that thanks to social media, there are no strangers in this world… only future friends, colleagues and clients. Contribute to global warming (the good kind) and be your fearless, sharing authentic self in every place you communicate.

Recently someone asked me if I’ve interpreted data to benefit myself. It’s an interesting question and made me think…. any one of us can pull data—but how are we all interpreting it? That’s the question. Ultimately we want the data to head marketers in the right direction. Data and interpretation have to go hand in hand. The most important thing to remember is great data is important, but how we interpret that data and turn it into an effective marketing initiative is even more so.

There are more tools that can help us pull data faster, and some could argue that the easier it will be to create actionable instances in our somewhat un-curated world, the easier our jobs will be. And Social CRM is the up-and-coming movement that just might help us all meet some of these challenges. At the end of the day, what we are all trying to achieve is a true 360-degree view including hyper-curation, marketing automation, analytics, reporting, listening, engagement and reporting. It’s a tall order when you are dealing as a marketer in a “big data” world.

Bottom line, true SocialCRM will happen—it’s actually almost there. The new marketer is connected to data, analysis, all lines of business and the output. And the most outstanding marketer is the one that connects the data on the front end to the eventual output (campaign).

All social data has to be interpreted. And a 360-view of all the data is coming. However, whether it’s with tools or a person (or both), the data has to translate into results through a well-executed campaign. Here are 5 ways to do that.

1. Compile the numbers from all sources. Integrate your numbers. Social media data becomes more valuable when you can match it up to and compare it with other data, like open rates, website traffic data and external audience measurement data. Also, do comments, Tweets and/or posts suggest that your messaging around a particular message or campaign is resonating? See if the numbers correlate, you’ll learn a lot about a campaign’s effectiveness.

2. Create high-level objectives. This sounds obvious, but figure out what you want to do and be sure that your social CRM efforts are linked to your high-level business objectives. Remember, social is just one tactic in the marketing sphere. Use tools to listen, like tracking mentioned and sentiment values for your company, product and competition. But more importantly, identify how the data fits into the broader goal of increasing sales.

3. Develop the KPIs. It’s important to identify long-term data you want to implement to report as a metric or KPI. You will feel a lot better if you put a stake in the ground. Your KPI process is no different than a reporting process. You want a certain level of increase. The biggest question you have to ask yourself is whether it will track engagement or quantity. Depends on the phase your brand or product is at. However, in most cases, I’d suggest quality over quantity.

4. Develop your messaging and listen carefully - data never lies. Procter & Gamble’s Pepto-Bismol sales were declining a few years ago when the company discovered that consumers were discussing the hangover “helper” medicine on the weekends after a night of imbibing a bit too much. P&G began luring hung-over P&G Facebook Fans. The result? An 11% market-share gain in the 12 months through fall 2011.

5. Build measurement strategy. The social consumer may Tweet a question, complain about customer service on a user forum, post a shout-out on Facebook or run to Yelp with a review. How you measure all this activity and results will largely determine on your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information. More importantly, it will help drive your next campaign.

Key takeaway: Use SocialCRM to inform key takeaways of your own in order to build more reach and create better campaigns that find new customers, keep existing customers and keep improving your overall customer experience.

I am a strong advocate for viewing social media as more than just statistics and measurement. I’ve written about this before—listening to our social media channels is about engaging with customers, and it gives us more than just sales or leads.

However, in our social campaign discovery, it is important to remember that social media engagement is no different any other marketing tactic. It’s just one piece of the pie, and in the end, what we learn should be measurable or quantifiable on some level. It’s the only way to know if you are achieving your company objectives and goals. You have to measure your results to know what’s working what’s not, and where you have opportunities for growth.

Here are 7 areas that must be covered when working with measurement strategies:

1)  Marketing optimization. Social listening can help you adjust your marketing efforts to better identify your audience. For many businesses, everything from Google Analytics to enterprise level IBM Coremetrics are great tools. You want to determine what terms people are searching and what sites they’re originating from. There are so many things to optimize in your approach including campaigns, content, channels, timing and influencers. It’s crucial that you understand the key terms to follow for your business.

2)  Action-oriented. In August 2011, the top method used to measure the success of social media campaigns was tracking the numbers of people linking as friends, followers and “likes,” according to a Chief Marketer survey. But social marketing will not work if all you’re going to do is just sit back and watch your likes and followers add up. You need to contribute valuable content and stimulate conversation within your social community.

Plus, marketers can focus more on hard metrics to gauge digital and social marketing ROI. An equation was applied to SeaWorld San Antonio’s Journey to Atlantis social media campaign. Using this formula they measured their actual costs at $44,000 to determine their cost per impression. The same was applied in each category (television, etc). Overall, they spent $0.22 on social media vs $1.00 for television. Using the same formula via surveys for each visitor to the park they determined the revenue for the online group represented more than $2.6 million in revenue. Not too shabby!

3)  Timely. You know the saying, “A day late, a dollar short?” This applies perfectly to social media. You can’t check in with your social channels once a week, or even just once a day. You’ll be too late and the impressions won’t be as high. You need to listen and measure consistently and respond accordingly. Timeliness is critical to getting a good read of what’s happening in your social networks and for responding in an appropriate manner. Negative sentiment can spread like wildfire in social media as well, and if you’re late, it can get out of control.

4)  Tools. There are many great tools for measuring social media results. Export.ly helps you analyze your Facebook fan page, Twitter audience and more through downloading customizable Excel spreadsheets. RowFeeder is an inexpensive way to monitor what people are saying about your brand. If you want to figure out how often your tweets are being shared and by whom, check out TweetReach. Other tools include Facebook Insights, Klout, Social Mention, Hootsuite and social media metric plugins for Google Analytics. Remember that the tools have to meet the objective of the campaign, not the other way around.

5)  Engage. This word might be over-used, but it’s really what your social media efforts are all about—engaging with your audience. Ultimately you want sales, of course, but in social media, engagement is the means to increasing reach. By posting content that resonates with your target audience (and this assumes that you know who that is), you will get better response, and therefore better engagement and in turn share it out to their friends. If you’re not engaging with your audience and getting the conversation going, you’re simply not going to have much to measure.

6)  Revenue. Here’s the ultimate goal, right? Increased revenue. Business that used social media increased their revenue and growth by 60% versus 8% for business that did not use social media, according to a report by Marketo. So while brand awareness and customer engagement are obviously terrific goals for your social media efforts, don’t be fooled into thinking of them as your end results. Measuring your social media results may, in time, help you begin to see some correlation between your social efforts and increases in revenue, especially as tools and measurement strategies improve.

7)  Strategy. While this may be the last measurement area on my list, it should be the first thing you consider—your social efforts should be based on a clear strategy to achieve certain business objectives. An Altimeter Group report found that 70% of businesses believed social media could meet business objectives, but only 43% had a formalized strategy for how social would meet their specific business goals. Don’t just go spin your wheels on Facebook and Twitter. Be clear about what you are trying to achieve.

Key Takeaway: While social media is about learning, listening, and building your marketing strategy in real time, you CAN’T ignore the analytics—measuring results must be a part of your social media strategy in order for it to matter at all.

Let’s be honest, when we hire a social strategist, we want that person to be everything for everybody. It’s a new position in most companies and hasn’t been succinctly and accurately defined in most cases. PR and marketing play tug-of-war with this position, both vying to get this highly valuable person on their team. Meanwhile, HR, Product Development, Customer Service and Legal are all invested because this position touches all of their departments.

So what’s a social strategist to do? This ever-expanding position engages with so many people and on so many levels of the company, it’s almost overwhelming.

In a nutshell, a social media strategist must wear a lot of hats. This position is basically about cultivating the relationships between a business and its customers online. But it’s much more than just posting on Facebook or Twitter. He or she needs to be able to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities and multitask like a mother (literally). Look at it this way—if you’ve had a challenge with integrated marketing, this job is not for you. It’s beyond integrated and crosses over many lines of business.

Here are five important roles of a social media strategist:

Risk-taker. Social media is all about innovation, so the ability to take calculated risks is essential. Most social strategists have a degree in marketing/communications, and many have some seniority in the company. This person is responsible for speaking to the public about your company and maintaining the brand, all within the realm of constant changes in technology and evolving networks. The challenge is to remain personable, consistent and engaging. Without those elements in communication, the social media strategy fails.

Relationship builder. The beauty of social media is that it’s the perfect arena for building relationships with customers short of flying them to your office. It’s where your company can form a bond with consumers through conversation on a number of appropriate topics. The danger is that these relationships can become strained, flat or negative, depending on who is at the helm of your social strategy. Your strategist must be able build and maintain positive relationships with strangers. Not an easy task.

Evangelist.Can your social strategist get people to drink your company’s Kool-Aid? Do they have what it takes to get consumers on your side and fall in love with your brand? They need to be able to speak about your company or product with passion and authenticity. If your strategist is not an evangelist, you need to find one who has what it takes to be engaging.

Policy maker. Without rules and guidelines, you can’t move forward. Every company needs to have communication standards that allow for authenticity with boundaries. You want your social strategist to be real and personable, but not without constraints and necessary brand guidelines that adhere to company policies and procedures. In other words, you need a strategist who can engage with limits and evangelize within brand boundaries.

Analytics. Bottom line—without analytics, you can’t prove that any of this works. So, in addition to the previous four roles, your social media strategist must have a knack for analysis, as well. I think what makes this position so interesting is that you can measure the impact and tie together all the programs, customer service models, employee communication, and research into one plan that helps drive efforts across the board.

Key takeaway: Buy a lot of hats. You’re going to need them all for your social media strategist to wear because he or she plays a key, multi-functional role in your company that should never be underestimated. 

It’s peer-to-peer, popularly called “collaborative consumption.” Definitely check out Rachel Botsman & Roo Rogers’s book called “What’s Mine is Yours” and Rachel Botsman who did presentation at  TED called ‘The Case for Collaborative Consumption.”

Sharing is not just something we teach on the playground anymore—it’s infiltrating both the workplace and the marketplace, and it’s happening all around us. In fact, in 2010, collaborative consumption was named one of TIME Magazine’s 10 ideas that will change the world.

I wrote a while ago about “social cocooning”—how we can find all the information and social interaction we need without even leaving the house. However, even as we cocoon ourselves with information in both our personal and professional lives, information is growing beyond us and pushing communities into a unification to bring about the dawn of social collaboration. The more we can give and build within our communities and workplaces, the faster we will innovate.

It’s human nature to hoard and hold on to information, forcing most of us to play a constant tug-of-war with what we feel we “own” and don’t want to part with. To that point I say, part with it. The tools and approach we use at PureMatter allow us to pull information together as a team and curate content within industries or by interest. There’s a reason that Pinterest has grown to become the third largest social player in such a short time. It’s because it allows us to curate and share our interests together. It’s the ultimate collaborative consumption tool.

Here are three top ways that collaborative consumption is impacting our lives:

Product or service sharing. This is all about paying for the benefit of using a product or service without having to actually own it. Think car-sharing services, like Zipcar or Autoshare, or fashion rental companies like Bag, Borrow & Steal or Renttherunway.com. These types of companies allow you to rent everything from ball gowns to designer bags, luxury cars to children’s toys, without the commitment of ownership. You can use what you need, when you need it, then give it back.

Redistribution. Craigslist, eBay and Freecycle are the big players in this space where the idea is to pass (or sell) something that you don’t want any longer to someone who does. This supports the whole “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” sentiment, and it’s both making and saving money for a lot of people.

Collaborative lifestyles. Couch surfing, anyone? This is all about individuals or communities who want to share in “the experience” and exchange time, space, skills or money. People are renting or loaning out their own homes and cars to travelers who want to skip hotel and rental company costs. Also, social collaboration is important right now as people try to pull information together and build methodologies or approaches toward this new experience we are calling “social media.”

Key takeaway: Let go, collaborate and share. What goes around, will come back around….making us more creative, innovative and less wasteful.

The National ADDY finalists are:

ECS Refining/ecollective – Regional Pandora radio spot and mobile website

LiveSV.com “Discover the Unexpected” VTA train wrap

IBM Coremetrics “Voice of Reason” microsite

Plantronics SMB “Be Free to Succeed” Flash Banner

The ADDYs are the largest creative competition in the country with over 40,000 local entries competing in 200 markets coast to coast. Winning an ADDY at the district level is the second step in competing for a National ADDY Award. Winning at the district level is significant, competing against winners from Northern California and Northern Nevada.

Over 1,500 national finalists will compete in the National ADDY awards. The illustrious panel of judges will choose winners from across the country May 4-5 in Washington, D.C. National winners will be presented at the National ADDY Awards Show in Austin, TX June 5, 2012 at the Hilton Austin held in conjunction with the AAF National Conference.

PureMatter was awarded seven ADDYs at the local Silicon Valley competition held in San Jose in March. Read full story >

For more information about the Silicon Valley ADDYs, visit www.aafsv.org. For more information about the AAF, visit www.aaf.org.

About PureMatter
Established in 2002, PureMatter is Silicon Valley’s leading new media agency that delivers strategic integrated marketing for its clients. The agency works with innovative companies to combine social media, interactive platforms and offline channels to deliver highly-targeted campaigns for their clients. For more information, please visit www.purematter.com.

Listening in social media is all about monitoring, reading and understanding these online conversations. You have to “listen” in order to engage. There are conversations happening everywhere—some are brand direct, while others are indirect (they may be specific to the industry or a competitor). But both are equally important. Here are six steps to listening and engaging effectively.

1)    Identify your audience. Once you know who your audience is, you need to know where they are. A common misperception is that everyone is hanging out on the same social network. But that’s not true. For example, according to a study by Anderson Analytics, Generation Z (13- to 14-year-old) social network users are slightly more active on MySpace than Facebook, only 9% use Twitter and none are active on LinkedIn. If you tried to listen to Gen Z on Twitter, you wouldn’t hear much. They’re not there.

2)    Create a listening strategy. Once you know which social networks are relevant to your audience, you need to identify what words they’re likely to use in conversations. Create a list of keywords to listen for, including your brand, products, events, personnel and any topics relevant to your customers. You may also want to include your competitors and industry influencers as listening keywords.

3)    Choose your technology. There are so many social media monitoring tools for both desktop and mobile. Google Alerts is a free Google service that monitors keywords and sends you aggregated notifications. Social Mention, also free, allows you to monitor social media, blogs and blog comments and get e-mail alerts and “sentiment” analysis (an indication of whether the content is positive, negative or neutral to your brand). Ice Rocket helps you discover trends, top keyword phrases and mentions in the blogosphere, and search your keywords across thousands of blogs—and it’s free, too. Radian6 and HootSuite are a few others. Do your research and determine what works best for you.

4)    Appoint a savvy social media guru to be your designated listener. This is an important job. Big companies create teams of people to fulfill this role. You’ll also want to create a daily plan and regular schedule for monitoring. Ideally, you want to check your alerts and real-time tools every hour so you catch opportunities that are relatively fresh.

5)    Create a response strategy. What are acceptable responses for different types of comments? Make a list. Ideally, your designated listener is authorized to respond so you don’t waste time with review and approval processes. One thing to remember—be human in your responses. Stiff and corporate don’t cut it in social media. It’s Facebook and Twitter, not the boardroom.

6)    Be accountable. Be sure the execs know what’s happening on social media. Give them a report, yes, but also advise them on how the company may need to adapt. Things can spiral out of control quickly in social networks. Remember the latest brouhaha with Susan G. Komen For the Cure and Planned Parenthood? With social media, you need to be proactive. You’re not only trying to enhance your brand, you’re protecting it, as well.

Key Takeaway: Don’t just talk to your audience. Listen. Pay attention. How will you engage effectively with them if you don’t know what they’re saying?

PureMatter was awarded two Gold ADDYs for outstanding creative work in the interactive media and outdoor transit divisions. Four Silver ADDY awards were earned for work in the Radio, 3-D mailer and microsite divisions. One Bronze was earned in the mobile website division. Clients sharing the honors for PureMatter’s award-winning work include ECS Refining/ecollective, Plantronics, IBM Coremetrics and LiveSV.com.

This year’s competition solicited entries from creative professionals in Silicon Valley, from the Peninsula down to Santa Cruz. The winners now advance to compete at the regional level against winners from San Francisco, Reno, Oakland, and Fresno.

The ADDY winners gala awards ceremony took place in San Jose on March 22 at the newly opened San Pedro Square Market in downtown. Former CTO of HP and innovation guru Phil McKinney, who started the evening with insights on creativity and innovation taken from his new best-selling book, “Beyond the Obvious”, hosted the event. PureMatter also calls Phil McKinney a client, having produced his personal website www.philmckinney.com and his book website www.beyondtheobvious.com.

With over 40,000 entries annually, the ADDY Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels. The American Advertising Federation, a not-for-profit trade association, conducts the ADDY Awards through its 200 advertising grassroots affiliates within 15 districts nationwide. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry, for the industry. For more information about the Silicon Valley ADDYs, visit www.aafsv.org. For more information about the AAF, visit www.aaf.org.

About PureMatter
Established in 2002, PureMatter is Silicon Valley’s leading new media agency that delivers strategic integrated marketing for its clients. The agency works with innovative companies to combine social media, interactive platforms and offline channels to deliver highly-targeted campaigns for their clients. For more information, please visit www.purematter.com.

Curiosity is a sense that’s triggered when people feel there is a gap between what they know and what they want to know—that’s defined by George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Melon University. This “knowledge gap” causes a mental irritation, like a mosquito bite on your brain. Like any other irritation, we’re motivated to alleviate it, in this case by filling the gap with information. Loewenstein calls this “the information gap theory of curiosity.” He goes on to explain how this gap influences people to take action (such as, buy your products, subscribe to your list or share your blog with their friends).

Einstein even said, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” And look what curiosity did for him.

Think about this in terms of the Hollywood gossip scene. It’s human to get curious when tabloids throw out just enough dirt to make people wonder. Scientists have found that curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped curve, so that we’re most curious when we know a little about a subject (our curiosity has been piqued) but not too much (we’re still uncertain about the answer).

But the “information gap theory of curiosity” applies to more than Hollywood—in fact, it has huge implications in the marketing world. As a marketer, you tell a story. How that story is told and the gaps you leave to instill curiosity in your audience are hugely important. You want to tell enough to create interest, but not so much that you leave them disinterested.

How can you do that? Here are three ways:

1) Tell your story—but not all of it. You must have a starting point to capture your audience’s attention—a compelling intro. And maybe a few important details. But you don’t have to say everything. A creative headline and engaging image grabs attention; curiosity helps you keep it.

The need to satisfy curiosity is a powerful motivator. There are five words in particular that will help you create curiosity in your next headline: How, These, Which, Why and What. These words all tell readers that a story is involved, and a compelling story is one way to keep your prospects engaged.

In the early 1900s, Maxwell Sackheim wrote the famous headline Do You Make These Mistakes in English? to promote an English mail-order course. The ad ran for 40 years without any changes. The headline was brilliant, but take out the word “these,” and it becomes much less compelling: Do You Make Mistakes in English?

What? That doesn’t scream “compelling story.” The word “these” makes all the difference and piques your interest—what mistakes is he talking about and am I guilty?

Here’s another example: Increase Sales by Making More Calls. That leaves little to your imagination, right? A better headline would be, How to Boost Your Sales in 15 Minutes a Day. The word “how” says you have a story, and if I keep reading, I’ll learn more about something I already know a little about. It’s a hook that piques my curiosity.

2) Mind the gap. The size of the information gap that you create is important. Think about it like this: When you come across something new that’s not defined by your previous knowledge or experience, an information gap is formed. You need to fill in the blanks, right? If that gap is too narrow—if that “something new” is too similar to what you already know, disinterest forms. You get a sort of “been there, done that” sense. If the gap is too wide and so far removed from what you know, it can make you walk the opposite direction.

If I know eight of ten items, I’m more curious about the remaining two than if I only know two of ten things. The key is to create medium gaps so that’s there is familiarity but still a sense of the unknown. That’s the sweet spot for curiosity.

3) Know the difference between interested and interesting. Your story and your messaging need to be interesting to your audience. However, all too often, especially in social media, the content that’s put out there is more self-interested. If all you’re going to do is talk about yourself and your wonderful product, curiosity has no room to grow—you kill it right away. You need to appeal to what’s interesting to your audience—themselves. Keep your messaging customer-focused, not company-focused, and pique their curiosity with what they want they want to know. Just not all of it. 

Key Takeaway: Curiosity is important in crafting your story and your messaging—you need to give your audience just enough information that they can’t help but want more. Engage them with a compelling hook, then let curiosity keep their attention.

Out of curiosity, how do you see the “gap theory” applying to you or any stories you have heard/written recently?

Last week I posted Part 1 of our conversation. Here’s Part 2.

Me: What do you think social media will look like in just another one to two years? How will it change?

Mark: I think it will mature. There will be more adoption in the B2B space. People are using Facebook as their email engine now. They can group things according to the different areas of their lives. It’s changing how consumers engage with technology.

Also, there will be a more seamless integration of app platforms—the people who engage with multiple apps on Facebook are growing 5 times faster than on their own website. Mobile is where growth is happening! To that point, there are more mobile devices than there are TV sets now.

Me: How have companies had to change and evolve their own structure to support social marketing and service?

Mark: When I first talked to Proctor and Gamble about social media, it scared the crap out of them—they were very concerned about their brand and how social might affect it. What if they were positioned next to a brand that wasn’t at their level, or involved in a conversation that tarnished their image? That conversation doesn’t exist today. P&G, along with a lot of other companies, has done a 180, and they are now big players in the social arena.

Let’s face it, social is big and pervasive and touches every part of businesses today. Two years ago, people said social media was a PR thing and it belongs in a sub-component of marketing. Now they see it as something that touches all facets of the organization and they weave it into all parts of what they do. Customer support, marketing, sales, HR—there is not just one area that owns social, it cuts across everything. You can no longer use a siloed approach to mange customer experience.

Me: How do you think social has changed the role of the CMO?

Mark: In a huge way! CMOs have gone from a “we tell people what our brand is and broadcast it” approach to, “we tell people and then engage and interact.” This completely changes marketing strategies. We aren’t just telling now, we’re also listening and learning. It’s forced CMOs to have a new definition of what marketing means in a social world.

Me: What does a proper measurement strategy look like for a marketer?

Mark: There are multiple components. It’s a continued evolution to how the company is measured. Net Promoter Scoring and Spark score is important because it incorporates the whole social piece. Our council to our clients is to focus on consumer behavior and economics of consumer behavior. What drives the right behavior? That’s where we should focus.

Me: What brands are doing great social marketing?

Mark: American Express is doing a great job with Open. Clearly Coca Cola is doing a fantastic job. Gucci and Burberry have done an incredible job. Starbucks is great. What we’re starting to see now is, goods are jumping on board, from consumer packaged goods to higher priced products. For example, Kraft is doing a great job with social. Automobile companies are starting to do some great things—like Mini Cooper, great job.

Me: What’s the biggest challenge in any social marketing campaign?

Mark: Letting go of the fear and just doing it.

Related Article:
Part I: CMO Interview With Mark Grindeland of Teletech, on Social Business