Social media understanding seems to be splintering if last week’s Conference Board seminar on “Branding in the Social Media World” is anything to go by.  Let’s face it – social media is such an enormous ‘bucket’ that it’s difficult to know what level to pitch it, and this seminar had everything from absolute beginners to accomplished players in its audience.  I’m wondering if conference organizers need to start pitching their events in ‘levels’ that are more specifically defined for would-be delegates.  That said, there was something for everyone and here’s a summary of what I learned or found entertaining, or what I think could be most useful for those not yet in-the-know.

Mark Mulcahy of Vivaldi Partners talked about ‘social currency’ as being the extent to which people share brand information as part of their social lives, and he presented what he called ‘the social six of building strong brands’, namely:  conversation, information, advocacy, identity, affiliation and utility.

Evan Kraus of APCO Worldwide had some of his own rules for social media engagement:
• Create the movement – align your interests, be aspirational and emotional, feature real people
• Optimize the content – package creativity, make it easy to share, be entertaining
• Embrace traditional media coverage
• Make it easy to engage

I particularly liked his case studies which brought it to life around the Smart Car “Dumb Manifesto” and Microsoft small business accounting software which was kicked off with the ‘anti shirt’.  APCO should enter both in the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.

Chris Barger of Voce Communications (and author of “The Social Media Strategist”) had lots of lists.  His ‘Lucky Seven’ essential elements included:
1. An executive champion
2. Clear lines of authority
3. A social media evangelist (to sell inside the company)
4. Sensible metrics and measurement
5. Partnership with legal
6. A solid social media policy
7. Employee education and training

And he had 10 lessons:
1. You are a publisher
2. The ‘social’ is more important than the ‘media’
3. The social web is a ‘listening’ tool
4. Learn to accept – even embrace – lack of control
5. Whenever possible, develop an offline element too
6. Always begin with the audience’s needs first; start by providing value, then worry about branding
7. You need to redefine ‘influence’
8. Think long term – the greatest value of social is the relationship, not the initial reaction
9. The social web is a huge customer service opportunity
10. You have to spread the virus

While all this talk of do’s and don’ts provided useful commentary, my favorite presentation of the day was delivered by Eileen Gaffen of Hallmark Cards because it took the principles and put them into practice with some excellent examples of blogger interactions and social media campaigns supporting its new brand campaign launched last year:  Life is a Special Occasion.  I daresay that this was a favorite by many at the seminar since it demonstrated true creativity and integration, backed up by market mix results declaring that PR and social media rank at the top in terms of ROI for Hallmark.

Carmine Porco of Prescient Digital rounded out the day by providing a lot of useful data points and the BEST entertainment of the day including a send-up on ‘what is social media’, “Pink Ponies” – an analogy on how best to use social media, and of course the Social Media Definition by peeing.

In the last quarter of 2011, I worked with TNS on a project to generate a “voice of the CMO” report, providing qualitative feedback from CMOs to the key themes from TNS’ annual Digital Life Study.  The Study itself is a robust quantitative piece of work based on conversations with over 72,000 people in 60 countries – it is the most comprehensive view of consumer attitudes and behavior online on a global and local level.

The 13 CMOs who participated in the interviews were remarkably aligned on several aspects – despite the fact that they came from a mixture of B2C and B2B brands, and a variety of business sizes.  And the report – “The Impact of Digital on Growth Strategies – CMO Imperatives” – was just released by TNS.

For me, one of the key insights emerging was a new set of brand-building priorities:

• Shareable content: content and experience development that has “share-ability” and is designed to enable and encourage advocacy.  This applies to both B2C and B2B businesses, as well as PR or Corporate Comms influencer outreach.
  
• Co-creation and experience marketing: encouraging and welcoming consumer input to brand marketing campaigns.
  
• Brands as enablers: the Digital Life Study shows us that consumers are looking to express themselves online and welcome brands who act as enablers.  This can take almost as many forms as the self-expression itself, for example, brands being entertaining, informative, playful, collaborative or helpful.

As an overlay to these priorities, CMOs have renewed faith in the central ‘brand idea’ or the ‘big idea’ because:

• Today’s more empowered digital consumer has more influence on a brand’s digital manifestation and reputation.  With a stronger central idea, there is more likelihood the brand will be able to maintain the key essence or message they wish to convey, as it is remixed and shared by consumers.
  
• The proliferation of digital touch points means it’s rarely feasible to create a different idea for every aspect so ideas need to be prioritized.  Using the ‘idea’ as the rationale for planning, each touch point or channel is now selected on its ability to effectively deliver the idea; a great balancing force to the temptations offered to marketers by new technologies.
  

And growth in transmedia planning – story-telling across multiple platforms and formats – is helping the brand idea land more readily through digital as well.  One of our interviewees was Wendy Clark, SVP Integrated Marketing and Capabilities at Coca-Cola, and I love how they have approached the story-telling and content creation aspect in a video entitled Coca-Cola Content 2020 Part One.

Other interviewees included, in alpha order:  Barry Judge, Best Buy; Hugh Chambers, British Olympic Association; Mike Hogan, GameStop; Douwe Bergsma, Georgia Pacific; Jim Gurke, Getty Images; Lauri Kien Kotcher, Godiva; Lisa Macpherson, Hallmark Cards; Larry Bruck, Kellogg’s; Jean Foster, Neustar; Simon Sproule, Nissan; Hope Frank, Webtrends; and Christa Carone, Xerox.

Yesterday’s release of Sociagility’s study of social media performance of the Republican primary candidates correlates strongly with Iowa voting intention in the lead-up to today’s Iowa caucus, as compared to the most recent polling data from Public Policy Polling.  The study shows the importance of an effective social media profile for political brands as much as for products or services, and provides further credibility for Sociagility’s PRINT™ methodology as one of the best KPIs for judging the ROI from social media marketing.

What I like about the PRINT methodology is the analysis behind not just one social media channel, but how the social media channels interact and integrate with each other.  PRINT provides a single number that shows overall performance compared to a defined set of competitors – in this case, the GOP primary candidates.  So far, PRINT has been proven to correlate strongly with brand value and growth, as defined by the Interbrand Brand Value and WPP BrandZ studies, and it therefore provides a KPI for social media performance that can be used to set and track targets.

For GOP candidates, Sociagility analyzed the popularity, receptiveness, interaction, network reach and trust (aka PRINT) of candidates across different social media channels.  Ron Paul’s campaign website and YouTube channel, and Newt Gingrich’s Twitter and Facebook profiles, proved the most effective.  Paul achieved the best interaction, network and trust scores, while Gingrich’s social media presence demonstrated the highest level of receptiveness.

Individual results are detailed in this chart.

Another study released yesterday from Socialbakers (and Infographic) revealed the most engaging and influential US presidential candidates on Facebook, but the study is limited to the one social media channel and there’s no correlation with polling data to demonstrate how social media is driving voting preference.  Its findings seem to be more one-dimensional than those of Sociagility, which makes its scores less actionable for the social media strategists among us.

eMarketer recently published a piece entitled “When Will Social Media Measurement Mature?” about metrics that matter, in other words, effectiveness.  Perhaps 2012 will be the defining year.  

In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to today’s results in Iowa in terms of which “brand” wins.