Over the last 25 years, Cirque du Soleil’s brand has been built largely on the power of word of mouth and the enthusiastic recommendations of their audiences. So when Cirque got started in social media, in many ways, it was like returning to their roots. Through social media listening, promotions, and online community development Cirque has built a more loyal following than ever before.

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

This week I was interviewed on the best ways to measure social media and the different applications for both PR and advertising professionals.

PRWeek wanted to know more about how Radian6 makes social media monitoring a user-friendly experience. My answer to this question touched on the fact that users often start off trying to manually monitor blogs using a collection of free online tools. However they quickly discover that they are missing user generated content from sources other than blogs and getting overwhelmed with what they do find with too little time to analyze and no way of knowing what they should be focused on from a priority point of view. I mentioned that a social media monitoring solution should allow for the ability to monitoring all forms of social media from blogs, video and image sharing sites, opinion sites and forums to new platforms like microblogging. The tool should track viral properties continually on every type of content so that it can be sorted and prioritized. It should be helpful in finding trends, influencers, and crisis’ and be a valuable tool for comparing relative buzz verses competitors and between known issues. Social media is high speed and so the solution used needs to be able to track in real-time and with a user-interface that turns the complex into the easy-to-use-and-understand.

PRWeek wanted to know some of the best ways to measure social media. I mentioned that a solution should help the user dynamically measure buzz, sentiment, influences and other conversational metrics. And it should measure by topics as defined by the user whether by brand, competition, industry, personality or corporation.

Finally, PRWeek wanted to know the different uses of social media monitoring in the PR and advertising fields. For PR professionals, the ability to track online conversations, uncover potential crisis’ as they happen and know which influential sites or individuals to engage with is invaluable. On the ad side, social media monitoring uncovers growing trends, shows the locations of on topic conversations for ad placements and provides a way to gauge the effectiveness and impact of a campaign over time.

Source: PRWeek Products & Tools Newsletter

At the Rising Stars Gala & Awards Ceremony last night at the Delta Beauséjour in Moncton, New Brunswick Radian6′s CTO, Chris Newton, was selected as one of this year’s Rising Stars from this year’s list of IT professionals nominated by peers for their superlative work and contribution to the industry and their community.

Congrats Chris!

We were honored to host Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer last week here in New Brunswick. Our paths first crossed in social media when we saw him tweet on Twitter about his search for a social media monitoring solution for a client of his at Doe Anderson. We reached out and the rest is history. During one of his messages he mentioned that he’d love to visit and after his successful Baja1000 and Robbie Gordon experiment it was suggested that a bit of maniac sledding take place while he was here. And it certainly did and thank goodness Jason wasn’t hurt in the process.

Jason also had a chance to interview Marcel about social media measurement which included a brief look at the product itself. I must apologize that I wasn’t much of a camera man so it can get a bit blurry in spots with the screen shots but it will give you an idea at least.

Also see the video at Social Media Explorer.While Jason was here he also agreed to be the guest speaker at our region’s very first Social Media Meetup – Third Tuesday New Brunswick. About 30 people showed up to hear a great talk from Jason including lots of examples of how social media can work. Organized by Lisa Rousseau of MeshEast, the attendees also passed the hat and helped to raise $163 for the Frozen Pea Fund to support Susan Reynolds.We thoroughly enjoyed our visit with Jason and hope he comes back to visit us in during the three other seasons of the year. We promise lots more adventure then as well.

Jason Falls is in our neck of the woods next week so we thought, why not have him speak at our region’s first Social Media Meetup. With the kind help of Lisa Rousseau of MeshEast the idea took shape and the meetup was born.

If you happen to be in the area we’d love to see you at the Meetup next Wednesday, January 10th at 7pm in Fredericton. If you aren’t from the area and you want your fill of 8ft high snow drifts and sub zero Fahrenheit temperatures just like Jason just let us know as I’m sure we can find space next to the fire to warm you up.

See you there.

We’ve all seen how ideas can spread with social media. The Frozen Pea Fund inspired by Susan Reynolds is a wonderful example. Just take a look at the number of posts generated so far on the topic. And because of the discussion try searching frozen peas on Google and see what you get. One post on the first page but pages two and on are dominated by the discussion.

It’s a great example of how real communities are in the virtual world of social media. It shows how powerful ideas and views can be quickly shared amongst communities and how real actions can be taken (see the money Connie Reece has been raising for Breast Cancer Research).

Let’s not appease cancer. Support the The Frozen Pea Fund.

Yesterday Google announced OpenSocial, and the social media landscape changed dramatically. OpenSocial is a set of common interfaces for developers to build applications that work across (almost!) all the major social networks, like MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, and so on.

Noticeably absent from the launch day announcement is Facebook, which until yesterday had the monopoly in the world of social network applications. Over 7000 applications have been developed on Facebook in the 5 months since they announced the developer platform. Anyway you cut it, 7000 applications developed to target your 50M users is an impressive achievement.

What a difference a day makes. With the announcement of OpenSocial, Google and their launch day partners are now offering application developers a single development platform to target a user base significantly larger than Facebook. The scope of the disruption yesterday points to the red hot nature of the social media landscape. Will Facebook join OpenSocial? Likely. Are we done seeing game changing moves? Not a chance.

We’re excited to see all the creative directions that developers may take this and what the landscape will look like 9 months from now. 9 months ago was Twitter’s coming out party, and in that time it has many wondering if it and services like it are the future of communications. It certainly will be part of that future.

Where will OpenSocial take us? Hard to say, but it’s bound to be exciting and generate a lot of new ways for people to work, play and converse. And of course, we’ll be working to make sure our monitoring solution finds it’s place here.

There is more new than just Google’s OpenSocial gauntlet drop on Facebook, as a new form of social media service launched as well. Called Utterz, it allows anyone using a cell phone to call in small MediaSnacks of audio, images or text. It’s too early to tell how popular Utterz will be at this point, but it has fired up many of the social media Illuminati… always a good sign.

How do you keep up?

Radian6 is the newest member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). We see our product as a perfect companion for those firms looking to better understand the their marketplaces online, the influencers in those marketplaces, and where the topic specific conversations are popping up in real-time.

Radian6 is also sponsoring the WOMMA Summit 2007 being held at the Rio in Las Vegas on November 13th and 14th, 2007. We will be showcasing our social media monitoring solution in the exhibit area on both days between speaking sessions. We are looking forward to connecting with other WOMMA members, the conference attendees and Summit speakers.

Radian6 will be demoing its social media monitoring solution at two events in New York City. Radian6 will be at booth 2303 in the Americas Hall at this year’s ad:tech talking place at the New York Hilton November 5th and 6th. For registration information please see the ad:tech website or contact us at info@radian6.com

The company is also demoing and is sponsor at this year’s Critical Issues Forum put on by The Council of Public Relations Firms. The theme of this year’s forum is “The Consumer’s in Control: Now What?” and will be held at the Bridgewater on November 8.

We invite all those attending these events and those considering to drop by and say hello and to see the Radian6 social media monitoring solution in action.

You don’t have to spend much time in the realm of social media measurement and metrics, before you hear the term ‘Influence’ bandied about. Various methods have been devised to measure the artifacts of influence, each with their unique formulas, and each useful in their own way. Typically these influencers are presented to you as some form of leader-board or Top100 list.

But, are these lists answering the questions you have today? In the realm of PR and marketing, there are a lot of reasons to need such lists. Are you looking for those who you have to watch the closest for crisis management? Or, are you looking for those who drive the most sustainable conversations about your brand or industry? With campaign management you may want to track the response you are getting, and find the top conversations around it. Who are the individuals you should get your message to, if you want to see it spread? You might want to know what the most important pieces of social media content are today… what fires need to be put out?

The point is, a single algorithm or point of view into the dynamic world of social media is going to answer a small subset of those questions, but certainly not all of them.

And since we’re talking about social media, it is important to note that every current discussion around ranking influence and generating a list is considering only a slice of social media… blogs. Social media is much more than just blogs.

What if your question needed Twitter in the answer? Has a client asked you about Facebook and Myspace? Google bought Jaiku last week. Clearly Google thinks Jaiku is important, despite the fact that I doubt you’ve seen a Jaiku (or Twitter) microblog influencer list.

Are you wondering how video is affecting your brand? How does a list of the most influential blogs help you find the YouTube video about your brand that is currently exploding with viewers?

The great folly is thinking that any one single measure can or should answer all the questions we have. If your clients’ needs are diverse, then your requirements for measurement are diverse as well. You need the ability to observe the situation from multiple angles to truly understand the landscape. That is what we believe at Radian6.

We have built a flexible platform for surfacing important content, where you as the PR expert can impart your unique expertise and have the system automatically generate a landscape model that will help you answer the question you have today. Be it blog posts, influencers, tweets, videos, images, or whatever comes tomorrow (Lifestreams are cool, it could be whats next!), we are enabling you to get to the information you need.

Be the Social Media Expert.

It’s been an interesting few days in the world of social media measurement. While much of the focus over the last few years in online influence measures has been dedicated to link analysis in the blogosphere… some are starting to question this technique. Steve Rubel and team at Edelman have gone so far as to say, “The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead“.

Indeed, if your definition of the term “social media” is interchangeable with the word blogosphere, and counting links is primarily your influence calculation, then you’re missing many pieces of the puzzle.

The word ‘media’ by it’s very definition implies various forms; the ‘social media’ landscape certainly illustrates this. From social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, rich media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, traditional blogging and it’s A-listers, social voting sites like Digg and del.icio.us, to the emerging micro-blogging phenomenons like Twitter and Pounce, social media takes on a lot of forms, only some of which I’ve mentioned here. Regardless of what the service is or the form it takes, the common and recurring theme is that they are all enabling people to communicate (the media part) and engage (the social part).

Determining who is influential in the entire realm of social media can’t simply be determined by counting inbound links in the blogosphere alone. How can you measure anything great if you consider only a piece of what makes it great?

Even what makes someone influential (or, maybe what sort of influencer we are looking for) is being called into question. Duncan Watts, a researcher from Columbia University claims that how far a message will spread has less to do with how important an influencer’s listeners are (think Tipping Point), but more so, how easy those listeners are to influence and how many there are (the reach).

In other words, if we look to where the crowds are actively engaging content, we’ll likely find those elusive influencers. And sometimes, it’s not who you’d expect.

As Edelman has started to describe, any attempt at determining the influence a person holds needs to cast a net across the various channels into which that person injects their message. Further, it should be based on the same metrics that differentiate social media from simply media. Friends, votes, followers, bookmarks, downloads, favorites, engagement, views, comments, etc… oh, and links. It is these displayed ‘badges’ of honor and how they change over time that help us as individuals determine who we listen to.

This is what our customers have asked us for, and what we’re building at Radian6; it’s good to see others are seeing things as we do.

Seth Godin talks about being truly remarkable in The Big Moo and Purple Cow, “You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.”. Seth’s idea is simple and his timing is perfect. While people increasingly tune out traditional advertising, Social Technologies have completely disrupted how ideas propagate. Power has shifted.

Take little-known innovator, Yves Rossy, a former Swiss military pilot with a passion for flying. Yves is truly remarkable. You must watch his Jet-Man video. It gets posted on YouTube and, 5 months later, there are 1 million combined views of Yves Rossy videos. The result? Mr. Rossy gets noticed and has consequently picked up a corporate sponsor: Swiss watch maker Hublot. He now goes by FusionMan to match Hublot’s theme, “the art of fusion”. Congratulations, Yves!. I can’t wait to see what he will do next.