Yesterday precisely at 5:30pm all of the Starbucks in the US closed their doors for a 3 hour training session. Taking the national chain offline during business hours would be enough to create some serious buzz online for those counting the minutes until they could get their Starbucks caffeine fix again. But it also had people speculating on whether the outage would be good for their competitors or if the timing of the outage was part of an ingenius publicity stunt.

ABC TV news also covered the story yesterday where it interviewed Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing. Lee used the Radian6 social media monitoring solution to highlight the impact the closure had online in terms of generating significant buzz for Starbucks.

Click here to view the news story found in the video player in the top right hand corner.

A review of the top items that we’ve pertained from listening and participating in the social media sphere.

Creating Social Media Content
Geoff Livingston broke down the social media content creation process in a simple way so that anyone from the ground up could have a quick overview of how they can get started on social media. From understanding what Social Media is for the corporation to measuring and bringing it back full circle in how content and community creates relationships and builds rapport.

Connected Agency Compilation
Then taking that a step further with Peter Kim in a great link compilation of the reaction to the Forester publisher Connected Agency discussion between digital and traditional PR/Marketing that has been ensuing for the last few weeks.

Canada’s One Degree Marketing blog also touched on personal branding this week. Eden Spodek asked members of the social media community how they managed their personal brand and offered her input on the importance of personal branding.

“We no longer just need to worry about what people see and hear about us in person — we also need to consider our digital footprints. It’s one thing to control how we portray ourselves online and offline. It’s another when we can’t control what others do and say about us. What gets posted online is easily found and lives on forever in the Google age. Cutting through the clutter is more challenging than ever.”

Valeria Maltoni (ConversationAgent) summarizes well an important aspect of personal branding and how you own your brand:

“Revealing yourself to others is an important part of the process we call “building relationships,” from which we build credibility, trust and loyalty.”

Social Media discussion happenings
And of course the hot topic on twitter these last few days is PodCamp Toronto! Chris Brogan original founder of PodCamp and currently in TO for the event blogged 5 things to do at a Social Networking Meetup that will be useful for anyone attending the event.

These are just touching some of the topics in Social Media from the last week that have been surfacing in discussion through blogs and twitter.

Today Doe Anderson announced that they will be using Radian6’s social media monitoring solution to help discover and create brand enthusiasts for their clients. Their process starts with research or listening and moves to the development of effective plans to convert ordinary customers into brand enthusiasts.

Doe Anderson’s Social Media Explorer, Jason Falls, states “By using the Radian6 social media monitoring solution, Doe Anderson can hone in on what customers are saying about the brands we work with. This detailed knowledge, the ability to see trends and the ease of discovering who the influencers are online makes our job of finding and engaging with brand enthusiasts in social media so much easier.”

Marcel LeBrun, Radian6’s CEO, explains “By using Radian6′s social media monitoring solution, Doe Anderson not only has the ability to decide where to engage but it also has the ability to track the results of its efforts and provide clients with valuable ROI data.”

Jason Falls also visited Radian6 in January and interviewed Marcel on Radian6 which we covered in an earlier post on PowerShift.

Voce Communications’ launch of the addition of social media monitoring as part of their practice today is an excellent example of the use of social media itself. They issued their own version of a social media press release (SMPR) which included their definitions of social media monitoring and mining, a screencast series of videos on how they use Radian6′s social media monitoring solution, as well as an audio clip from Radian6′s VP Marketing, David Alston, on the solutions’ differentiators. They also then used Marketwire to distribute a short version of the release for pickup by search engines and various publications.

Bant Breen, President, Interpublic Futures Marketing Group and Director of Strategic Development and Innovation of the Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG), one of the world’s leading organizations of advertising agencies and marketing services companies, recently interviewed Chris Ramsey of Radian6, to talk about Social Media Monitoring and the emerging interest in the social media space.

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Radian6 has sponsored the Aberdeen Report: Social Media Monitoring and Analysis: Generating Consumer Insights from Online Conversation which is now available for download. The report, written by Jeff Zabin and Alex Jefferies, spells out a roadmap for those companies looking to adopt Best-in-Class practices around the use of social media monitoring and analysis. Aberdeen surveyed over 250 organizations and combined this with in depth interviews to come up with the report’s findings and recommendations. Download a free copy of the report by clicking here.

There is a very productive conversation underway (with lots of debate) about the measurement of distributed influence in Social Media. Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media added to the discussion this week. My comment on his post is quoted below. If you are interested, the discussion was started by Jonny Bentwood who introduced a concept called the Social Media Index. It widened the concept of influence beyond that of “only” blogs and its corresponding traditional measure of influence: links. He then published a whitepaper on distributed influence which Jim was responding to. If you like this discussion, you might also want to check out other thoughtful contributions on the subject from Kami Huyse, Jason Falls, Chris Newton, Clive Thompson.

My comment on Jim’s post:

Hey Jim,

You make excellent points. I think your point about context and topic is very central to this whole discussion. This is exactly how we approach influence at Radian6. Influence is context specific and topic specific, as you say. That is why our measurement of influence needs to be context-based (by topic) and not only personality-based. Now, there is a factor (let’s call it popularity instead of influence), where “by their nature” someone has a greater potential to become an on-topic influencer, but this potential does not make them an influencer (yet) until they become active in that topic and they begin to generate the conversational dynamics that demonstrate their influence (i.e. posts/memes, comments, unique commenter, on-topic links, engagement, etc.).

In terms of your proposed ideas, I would love to see this “white pages” directory materialize. There are several attempts underway (Spock, lifestreams/Tumblr, etc.), but none of them have tipped yet. In our monitoring tool, we already analyze contribution levels from multiple sources and measure topic/context-based influence down to a user level but each of your online personas would be identified and ranked independently. If we had such a directory, we could unify them in a snap. We are thinking through various ways extract these persona linkages, but a directory would be great, even if it was just a simple lookup.

Marcel LeBrun
CEO, Radian6