I recently interviewed both Clark Kokich, the Chairman  and Shiv Singh, Vice President & Global Social Media Lead of Razorfish on DishyMix.

Image of Shiv Singh

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Image of Clark Kokich

Clark Kokich, Razorfish on Social Influence Marketing and the 2009 Digital Outlook

Today Razorfish unveiled “Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report.”

Based on how much I enjoyed their Digital Outlook 2009 report, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into this too. I find Razorfish’s reports to be very high quality and they always give me a better perspective on what I’m seeing in the market. I’ve taken to calling Social Media Marketing, Social Influence Marketing now that Clark and Shiv have gotten ahold of me.

David Deal, VP Marketing at Razorfish says, “we believe Fluent dispels some common myths about social media and influencers, such as:

·         Myth 1: Companies are finally figuring out how to build their brands through social media and influencers.  In fact, consumers surveyed by Razorfish reveal widespread indifference to brands in the social world.  Six out of 10 consumers don’t bother to seek out opinions of brands via social media.  We believe the problem is that marketers still treat social like any other channel for spreading their messages when in fact they should be taking advantage of its participatory nature.

·         Myth 2: Television is dead.  Our survey shows that consumers view TV ads as more trustworthy than ads on social networks when purchasing decisions are made.  Our take: Social Influence Marketing complements, but does not replace, television.   Moreover, marketers can increase levels of trust in social by developing a credible social voice and engaging with consumers instead of treating social like a one-way broadcast mechanism.

·         Myth 3: you cannot correlate consumer perceptions of your brand in the online and offline worlds.  With the help of TNS Cymfony and The Keller Group, Razorfish has created a mechanism – the SIM Score – that can help brands understand the relationship between what consumers say about you across the online and offline social worlds.   The SIM Score (introduced in Fluent) measures how much consumers talk about your brand and how positive or negative those discussions are.  In Fluent, Razorfish applies the SIM Score to companies ranging from GM to Capital One.  Although the SIM Score focuses on the online world, in two industries we correlate SIM Score to the offline world.  We’ve found that a brand’s online share of voice corresponds closely to offline.  The correlation is important because offline friends remain the single most trustworthy sources that influence consumer purchasing decisions.”

Let me know your thoughts on this report and I’ll be posting mine as well.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Razorfish Cuts CEO, Promotes Bob Lord to Stop the Bleeding (readwriteweb.com)
• Microsoft to sell Razorfish (guardian.co.uk)
• Microsoft To Sell Razorfish; Publicis Groupe Possible Bidder (paidcontent.org)
• Razorfish publishes 2009 Digital Outlook Report (superhypeblog.com)
• Social Media Marketing Spend to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2014 (mashable.com)

Two of the things I’m tracking right now are social media meta tools and social media data mining for marketers.

uberVU, a European start up from Romania has created a clever social media meta tool that solves a real problem for content creators in the social sphere.  With uberVU, you can track conversations that happen anywhere on the web and see the responses in a single interface.

For example, this blog post is posted to my DishyMix blog, but will also automatically be Twittered and will get syndicated to my Facebook page. Anyone can reply to the blog post, reply to me @SusanBratton or comment on Facebook. uberVU lets me see all the comments in a single location and then allows me to comment from that UI.

Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca of uberVU are in private beta now and public beta soon on their comment tracking and reply system.

Vladimir Oane, co-founder, uberVu

Here are some screen shots I got while meeting them at the Seedcamp US/UK Speed Dating event last week in London at part of my Traveling Geeks trip.

UberVu Single Conversation

You can track your own work or track stories from other sources. Select a blog post or Tweet for example and uberVU compiles the reactions to the story from where ever that story appears – blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Disqus, YouTube and many more.

You can see all the responses to a story as a threaded conversation. And you can respond from the uberVU interface to any or all of the comments across myriad sites.

In my interview with @DaveTaylor at SXSW, he says the often overlooked but most important activity he recommends is posting blog comments around your key areas of expertise to stay active in the blogosphere. With uberVU, you can see what’s being said AND COMMENT ON IT from a single interface.

Susan Bratton & Dave Taylor on Social Media Commenting Strategies

uberVu is a web app that uses the ContextVoice API to track what’s being said across social graphs, using sentiment analysis, search and filtering, giving you near real time results.

UberVu Conversation Tracker

As a Traveling Geek in London, I participated in a Round Table Discussion event with some of Econsultancy’s clients.

See the TG2009 Econsultancy Flickr Set Here

As a follow up to the event, I was given a copy of their very well done Innovation Report.

Econsultancy Innovation Report for Digital Marketing

If you want a high level overview of some of the hottest technology companies in the digital media and marketing space, this report does a great job with highlighting best practices in the following disciplines:

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Online advertising
• Multichannel marketing
• Online customer service
• Online PR
• Social media and communities
• Search marketing
• Usability and user experience
• Web analytics and optimization

One of the most interesting sections to me was on using video to drive affiliate traffic, written by Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit. (Most of the companies featured are European, but this example of a “best practice” was from Shawn, a US affiliate champion.)

For more free and in-depth coverage on video, I interview Bruce Clay about Video SEO on DishyMix airing today:

Bruce Clay on Video SEO, Page Rank Sculpting and Search Siloing Strategies

From Econsultancy’s Innovation Report

Video as a channel to drive direct traffic to affiliate links
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Company: http://blog.affiliatetip.com/
Many affiliates use video as a channel to drive traffic, but one innovative tactic to drive through higher volumes is to include the URL of the affiliate site and embed it within the video itself.  According to Shawn Collins, few affiliates are making use of video to either drive traffic to their
own sites or to affiliate links directly. Shawn Collins tested various online video engagement strategies, trialling videos through a number of popular sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Revver and Yahoo Video.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkX7xHvTIe0

http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

Per Shawn Collins, co-founder, Affiliate Summit

―I have tested various methods over the past year… and found that the following format works best:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/product-name – I then create a redirect via an .htaccess file, so that /product-name
points to the affiliate link. The URL is featured for the duration of the video uploaded to the video sites.

―Conventional wisdom may be that people do not type in URLs in videos – I‘d like to share a secret that the
conventional wisdom is incorrect!

I recently met Neil Dodd of Skype in London and go the low down on Skype’s new 4.1 release. Neil says Skype now supports the following contact mangement and email systems and address books so you can easily grow your Skype address book.

Here’s the list of supported services:

Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, 163.com, Daum, FastMail, Indiatimes, Interia, Libero, mail.com, mail.ru, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, mynet, Rambler, rediff, SINA, Wirtualna Polska and Yandex.

We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball of SeedCamp.  SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.

By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.

Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox; Huddle, which bills itself as the collaboration tool for the MySpace generation (I will do a separate post on Huddle for you as I know you will want to try it) and Moo.com, the on-demand printing company with a smart solution for mass-customized printed products like business cards, stickers and “moo cards” which are their own smaller, clever creation that’s become a standard with the social set.

Other companies that stood out for me were SkimLinks not only because Alicia Navarro was the only female CEO, but also because she’s in a very hot category – website monetization infrastructure. More on SkimLinks arresting start up story and how it works in a very smart way in another post.

The one person with whom I didn’t get to meet but still was very impressed with their initial presentation was Stupeflix. Perhaps the name doesn’t translate well in the US – why would someone want to start the beginning of their company name with a word that sounds like stupid? Nonetheless, this is beyond a cute video creation tool like Animoto, Stupeflix allows you to use XML to slightly change the assets within any video to create multiple unique versions of a video. Best explained by example, they showed a weather video where the location and temperature were automatically changed for various locations on the fly. You could master one video and then have unlimited versions automatically customized by city.

Andraz Tori of Zemanta gave me a quick and helpful demo of his blog writing suggestion tool. This authoring suggestion tool provides related links, images, related stories and more which make every blog post have more robust content and links. I’ve been using it so far this week and can tell you I would not give this tool up now that I’ve used it.

Another tool I have not yet tried but know will be addictive is UberVu. This is one of a new breed of social meta tools, like MobyPicture (recent post about MobyPicture) that aggregates comments from across one’s social sites into a single interface where you can see comments from your followers to your posts, all threaded together in a single application. You can reply to those threads within UberVu and it will place your replies back out in context without requiring you to do so much webpage traveling.  UberVu’s idea of providing reporting for rollup data will significantly help the social media managers and social listening companies keep track of all their conversations in a single UI. There’s a business model in this one, though it may take a few attempts to right-size the offering and prices.

I have to run off to The Guardian – we’re doing a podcast round table there. It’s pouring rain like hell and I wish I could just keep telling you about the companies we met today. I promise to write more to you about some of the individual companies, many of whom are in early or private beta.

The most exciting new area (to me) of social media marketing, or as @ShivSingh, my latest guest on DishyMix from Razorfish likes to call it, “Social Influence Marketing,” is mining the clusters of connections to identify new prospects for products and services.

Similar to the concept of behavioral targeting, marketers and researchers believe that if they target the friends of an existing customer, they will find “birds of a feather” prospects for their goods.

There are a number of companies using social graph data including Lookery (my interview with Scott Rafer, CEO), Media6Degrees and UNBOUND Technologies . These data mining and ad targeting companies are leveraging your data: the things you “fan” on Facebook,  your personal profile information, your network of connected friends (and god knows what else!) to find new prospective consumers connected socially to you so they can market products to your friends if you are a customer.

UNBOUND Technolgies can take a marketer’s existing customer list, compare it to their database of all known LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users and come up with a rank order list of who, among their existing customers, are the most influential. If a brand has a Facebook “Page” (Fan Page), they can map the most to least influential fans, based on number of social connections.

Here’s an article from Business Week that gives you some idea of how important this data mining of social graphs is to the social net companies and marketers.

Learning and Profiting from Online Friendships

These next two images are very telling. These are my Affiinty Map and my Influencer List from UNBOUND Technologies.

First you can see, of my 3,200 Facebook friends, what the top Celebrities/Public Figures, Brands, Bands, Services et cetera are of the people to whom I’m most connected.

If I were a brand (I’m certainly trying to be!) doing co-marketing promotions, it would be brilliant to partner with Guy or Seth or Arianna or the IAB or 212 in NY.  My friends and friendsters (virtual friends) would be more likely to pay attention to my messaging if I were to co-create something with other public figures, associations or brands about which they care most.

In this list from UNBOUND Technologies, you can see who in my network are the most influential. If Joe Jaffe, Charlene Li or Mike Webb were to promote DishyMix, for example, their followers would be most likely to be interested in my work and they have the biggest reach.

If I give Unbound Technologies my professional contact database, they can also match it up with the premier social networks to give me an even better rank order of those people I know who are most connected in the social sphere. Even if I’m not directly connected to them now, I’d know who I should approach to friend to continue to widen my network more proactively.

Just replace Susan Bratton with your brand and think of the efficiencies and implications. What comes to your mind?

And here is this week’s DishyMix. Perfectly timed to talk about Social Influence Marketing with Shiv Singh of Razorfish who has been thinking about social network theory since grad school at the London  School of Economics & Political Science.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

I’ll be in London/Cambridge as a “Traveling Geek” and we’re having a TweetUp, sponsored by The Conversation Group and NESTA.org, to which I’d like to invite you.
Here is the invitation:http://www.eventbrite.com/event/366118069

The half price “friend of geek” (that would be me) discount is good until the 26th June.

More here about the Traveling Geeks.
http://travelinggeeks.com

Please let me know if you are coming. I’d love to see you there!

Twitter bird photo credit- Creative Commons MatteoPenzo.

Bernie interviewed me today for his terrific show, Find & Convert.

Bernie’s Show       Bernie’s Blog        Find and Convert in iTunes

He asked me a number of questions in advance of the interview and I thought I’d blog the answers here.

Who is Susan Bratton and what does she have her hands in now?

I’m a CEO, Publisher, Blogger, Podcaster, Speaker and Author.

DishyMix is my weekly podcast and companion blog. My coverages ranges from brain science to new gadgets to landing page conversion to the future of the social graph.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Personal Life Media, an aspirational company and next-generation publisher focused on providing virtual, fully downloadable content experiences.

Our mantra is “frank talk and deep discussion for your personal life.”

We publish 40 podcasts, companion blogs and are launching 15 new information products I call “ebooks with benefits.”

Our first info products to market are, Talk Show Tips, Speak Up with Power and Influence, Masterful Techniques to Overcome Anxiety and Fear, Naturally Slender Quickstart and a 21 Day Lovemaking Program for Couples. We have another 10+ info products in production.

Top shows on Personal Life Media include:
DishyMix, Inside Out Weight Loss, Expanded Lovemaking, Buddhist Geeks, Living Dialogues, 3 Digital Photography Shows, The Diva Cast, The New Man, Just for Women, Philosopher’s Notes, Tantra & Kama Sutra and Sex, Love & Intimacy.

What is my high level view of social media marketing?

I view social media as being in three categories, Listening, Appvertising and Participation. Shiv Singh of Razorfish really helped me gel my concept of these buckets and his DishyMix interview is coming in June.

Listening is getting the most traction with Participation second and Appvertising third.

Listening: New companies like Unbound Technologies, a next generation Neilsen Buzz Metrics, is focused on opportunities around the social graph and social influence marketing. They create a list of the most influential individuals for any given brand and then provide an “affinity map” of the other most-influential people and brands related to that single, key influencer. This is fantastic for outreach, prioritization of influencers and joint promotions to important clustered audiences.

Taking behaviorial targeting to a new high with the inclusion of social graphing is Media6Degrees. They offer ad targeted based on social graphing. I also need an update on Lookery who is aggregating social media data across social networks to use for ad targeting. My interview with Scott Rafer of Lookery is here.

Appvertising is being well handled by ClearSpring, Gigya and RockYou! as well as SocialMedia.com and ContextOptional. Brands who create useful aps or sponsor useful aps for their target consumers are brilliant players at a high-level of sophistication in the social influence marketing sphere.

Participation is certainly evident in Facebook Pages. Here’s my DishyMix Fan Club where I give away all kinds of goodies to my listeners.  Also popular and smart are consumer generated content experiences like HP on YouTube described here in my interview with Daina Middleton and the darling of the moment, corporate Twitter accounts like this one.
What is the biggest difficulty in Social Media Marketing?

I believe in larger organizations, it is around internal ownership. Should social marketing be part of marketing, corp comm, where? In smaller organizations, I see the problem being one of overwhelming choice. Where do I start as a small business with limited resources?

Also, tracking and ROI still being figured out. Here is a great presentation on social media ROI.
http://www.slideshare.net/yongfook/social-media-roi

Lee Odden (the wonderful soul who connected Bernie and I in the first place through his superlative Top Rank Online Marketing Blog  and I talk about integration of web analytics and social media analytics in this interview I did with Lee at SXSW for the #Community Powered project. Emphasis on real time data. The data that you can collect through something like a social media monitoring tool, like Buzz Logic, Collective Intellect, Radian6, married with web analytics, like Google Analytics, Omniture, Web Trends.

Lee Odden and Susan Bratton on Web and Social Media Analytics

Podcasting? How did you get into it? What is the current state of podcasting and consulting your crystal ball on podcasting’s future.

Podcasting is still a nascent market.

The beauty of it is that anyone can create an audience of raving fans. (and in my ebook with benefits, called Talk Show Tips, I teach you how to empower your raving fans with the tools they need to help you grow your audience.)

If you are articulate and like to talk more than you like to write, audio may be better for you than blogging. And with transcripts, you can have the best of both worlds.

For video, the bar is very high on production quality. Make sure you are adequately resourced before pursuing.

Commercial podcasting is a very smart solution for brands who have deep knowledge to share with their customers and prospects.

The ADM (Association for Downloadable Media) is working on ad models, audience measurement and consumer attitudes toward sponsorships of podcasts.

It’s a greenfield opportunity for sponsors. Integrated social media programs are key. You must leverage the hosts’ social media influence.

There are two excellent video clips on Volomedia’s blog about Podcasting Metrics and Podcast Advertising and Sponsorship that Jeff Karnes and I just presented at the eMetrics Summit.

My presentation is at Slideshare.com about some of my best programs from TrustedID, Holosync’s MeditateFree.com, Better Sex Institute, Lensbaby, Accuquote and Audible.

http://www.volomedia.com/blog/2009/05/shows-on-the-go-with-jeff-karn.php

http://www.slideshare.net/SusanBratton/podcasting-metrics-and-sponsorship-ideas

Finally, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret ‘Master Host’ Techniques will teach anyone how to land big name guests, prepare for their show, ask killer questions with my easy question-generator mini-course, create and manage a facile show flow, conduct professional in-interview techniques and learn a dozen ideas for using social media to radiate your show and help your fans promote your show for you.

What is your DishyMix podcast and blog business model?

I’m very fortunate to have sponsors who underwrite my show to reach my valuable, sophisticated audience of marketers, agency pros and digital media mavens. DishyMix is sponsored by Isobar US Carat, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits, adtech conferences, Trusted ID, Upstream Habitat and Audible.

Who are some of the most memorable guests on DishyMix?

I’ve created a blog post to wrap up my Top 10 Favorite DishyMix Guests.

DishyMix: Success Secrets from Famous Media and Internet Business Executives

And Coming Soon! Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock on his newest tome, Revolutionary Wealth and Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone on his newest angle, Who’s Got Your Back?

In preparation for my blogger junket to London and Cambridge with the Traveling Geeks in July, we met with Nokia this week. They are outfitting us with N79 phones and all the new Ovi Maps 3.0 technologies.

Maria and Jorg, the Berlin-based team working on both Ovi Maps for the phone and OviMaps online portal maps.ovi.com showed us the next generation of mapping.
If you’ve been impressed with Google Maps, Ovi will blow you away.

Ovi Maps has 3D, satellite and terrain views as well as weather info and more. You can go to the Ovi Maps portal site and map out your routes and then sync that to your phone. The ability to use web-based software first and then sync to your phone makes this mapping experience extra powerful.

You can find an place or search for restaurants or any business in a particular area. You can get driving and walking maps. The Tom Tom and other nav systems are definitely threatened by Ovi Map’s real-time directions via the speaker in your phone. Your Nokia phone becomes a Tom Tom, with real time, turn by turn directions for your car or for walking. There is traffic information and a speed-limit voice warning system, in case you don’t have a wife. The GPS positioning is FAST. The phone records your real time walking path to make sure you stay on the route.

You can save all your personalized searches too. The only thing you need to know to use Ovi maps that’s different than Google is that you have to put in your macro location first, then go granular in your searches. You can’t type Malmaison Hotel, London. First you have to choose London, then drill down to Malmaison Hotel. That being said, Ovi has mapped the globe – 231 cities and even better, an average of 30 landmarks per city.

The 3D Landmarks Ovi has created are gorgeous – like this image of the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. The mapping graphics are a next generation of design. Pop into a new city and pick a walking route near the 3D landmarks and you’ll see the best of that town. Nokia has also done a content deal with Lonely Planet and Michelin and is building out more content.

I’m looking forward to trying this phone and all the mapping capabilities out for my trip to Amsterdam in June and the #Traveling Geeks UK trip in July.

I’ll report back my real usage experience instead of my demo notes soon.