Today’s world has become more connected and more accessible then ever before. Long gone are the days when distance made communications a challenge or struggle. We now live in a world where millions of people carry the Internet in their pocket and staying in touch is as simple as the click of a button. And with this privilege comes the power and the responsibility to help create positive change. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) believes that by working together we can help to eliminate poverty and end hunger, that if we all take one action, we can be a force for change. From this idea their campaign “Take One Action Against Poverty” was born.

The team at the UNDP saw the power and opportunity that social media offered their organization; it was a chance to reach citizens in the over 177 countries and territories. It was a chance to engage citizens, mobilize their supporters and volunteers, and take real steps towards change. Take One Action is a simple concept: if each person were to take one action against poverty, against hunger, against suffering, we could help make a dramatic difference in the lives of so many. The goal was to document these efforts and share them across various social media channels, the hope was that these images would inspire and motivate others.

The results have been remarkable – watch as Silke Von Brockhausen, Social Media Manager for the UNDP, explains the project and how they are using Radian6 to help track their efforts and engage with their supporters around the globe.

And with that, I would like to wish everyone a very happy holidays and as we look towards 2012, consider what is possible for the coming year – what are you capable of achieving this year? What will your one action be? 

Chase knows that when it comes to allocating charitable dollars, no one knows better than people who are using the services. That’s why Chase Community Giving (CCG) uses social media and relies on its nearly 3 million Facebook fans to help decide which non-profits should receive grant money.

This year, they’ve made the project even better with the American Giving Awards, a televised celebration of community heroes. Chase is encouraging everyone to go online between December 1 – 8, and like their Facebook page in order to vote in the competition.  Chase is also encouraging voters to discuss their favorite charities online using the #chasegiving hashtag on Twitter.

One of the five competitors for the American Giving Awards is Let’s Get Ready! This organization aims to expand college access for motivated, low-income high school students by providing them with free SAT preparation, as well as college admission counseling.

In order to reach more potential voters, Let’s Get Ready! has teamed up with Viral Technologies, a market intelligence company, to find out what people are saying about their charity online. Viral Technologies will be using Radian6 to uncover conversations, track and engage with influencers through the duration of the contest.

We’re excited to lend a helping hand to organizations that work so hard to improve our communities, and can’t wait to tune into the American Giving Awards when they air live on NBC, on December 10^th.

Want to learn more about how Viral Technologies is helping Let’s Get Ready! track online conversations? Check out our case study.

Sarah Carver is Public Relations Manager at Radian6. She is always inspired by great customer stories. Find her on Twitter at @sarahcarver12.

“When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town, down around San Antone’….” ahhhh, who doesn’t love the Doobie Brothers? Their hit “China Grove” still kills it to this day, almost 40 years after its release. Take a quick dance break, and watch it here – you know you want to!

What’s interesting about the tune is this – singer/guitarist Tom Johnston wasn’t completely aware that he knew a “China Grove” when he so named his sleepy little town. He said this in an interview: “The funny thing was that I found out in 1975 in a cab in Houston that there really was a China Grove…..in 1972 we were touring in Winnebagos, and we were driving into San Antonio. And there is a China Grove, Texas, right outside of San Antonio. I must have seen the sign and forgotten about it.” A case of subliminal messaging perhaps? If China Grove had been a brand instead of a town, its marketers would have died and gone to heaven.

San Antonio, Texas is where we start our tour today, and where the annual Eduweb Conference is held – this year on August 1st to the 3rd. This internationally recognized event for the higher education community attracts those who are involved in online strategy, marketing and technology. So, it makes sense that Radian6′s Director of Community Lauren Vargas will be there, as well as Account Manager, Business Development, Barry Pope, and Salesforce.com Account Executive Joseph Kogut. Radian6 is proud to be among an incredible lineup of sponsors for this important event.

Continuing our music theme, we keep spreading the news, and on August 8th Radian6 VP of Strategic Alliances Ed Sullivan, and Manager, Strategic Alliances Bob Faigel head to the Big Apple for CRM Evolution. If you’re attending also, you will come away with strategies that will help you streamline business processes, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, prepare for customer trends that are reshaping the marketplace and leverage the latest technologies that will change customer relationships. And heck, you get to do all that in one of the greatest cities in the world.

And what would a little music/event roundup be without a hat tip to the city that started a revolution in contemporary music? The birthplace of grunge, Seattle spawned such talents as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, to name just a few. And Seattle is where you’ll find Blogwell, on August 9th. You’ll also find Tom Hasselman, Product Marketing Manager at Radian 6, and Shannon Hofmeister Sr. CSM, Strategic Accounts. We’re thrilled to be able to help sponsor an event that, according to some past event attendees, is “A great forum for social media professionals to collaborate and learn from each other’s lessons and successes.” and “The most valuable source for staying current on B2C and B2B social marketing techniques in Fortune 500 companies.”

So that wraps it up for this edition of Where in the World is Radian6. In the spirit of all that is great in music, as well as the astounding pace of change and innovation that those of us in the social media world live in daily, we leave you with this quote:

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.  ~Lily Tomlin

Digital. Engagement. Social. Proactive Customer Service. The list goes on. Many buzz words are circulating at the moment, and companies are under pressure, more so than ever, to be present on social networks. Have you caught yourself in the last little while saying or at least thinking ‘Well I tweeted insert brand an hour ago and they STILL haven’t replied’. Exactly. There’s no question about it, online engagement is important. However, how much presence and engagement strikes the right balance? When is the right time to bow out gracefully or exit a conversation? These questions are important because you could quite literally be at it for hours thanking, double thanking, and triple thanking everyone for every mention and @ reply.

@ The Whole Organization

Online engagement could be the result of a whole host of reasons with benefits that will cut across the enterprise. Whether you are launching a social media campaign and tracking its performance, handling a PR disaster, building a community or just simply providing another avenue for customer service a subject Guy Stephens a resident expert on Social Customer Service blogs about extensively, some of the basics will remain constant. You will likely want to encourage promoters and on the other hand address detractors, setbacks or complaints. However, when do you stop and is there such a thing as over-engaging?

Let’s start with vocal detractors. Regardless of whether in our personal or our professional lives we’ve most likely all had a disagreement or two at some point. The same goes for brands, and while we may well feel that the customer is always right, or within their right, there are numerous ways addressing a particular issue can play out. The last thing a company wants is bad press or for something to go viral. In some instances a helpful brand might simply never satisfy a disgruntled customer and every attempt made at a resolution remains futile. These cases occur but they are usually not the norm and Jason Falls has some great thoughts on the subject as well.

Before you turn your back you want to ensure that if someone has a concern which they have voiced online, that first and foremost you have acknowledged the issue and explored the issue fully. Taking the high road will almost certainly only be appropriate as a last resort, so in the first instance you’ll need to ensure that you are listening to online conversations and following up with any inquiries or complaints. In many cases a simple usability question can be resolved, in other cases it may take a little bit longer and require some internal changes and realignment. For the latter it tends to be more fruitful to steer the conversation offline to allow for a more comprehensive exchange on the issue. This does not mean that you neglect any online engagement however, and similarly as you wouldn’t simply hang up the phone, you don’t want to leave someone hanging online. Finally, as is always the case with service issues ultimately they can help make your company or organization better so addressing and taking action on prompted or unprompted feedback is key.

Think It Through

When it comes to engagement, action and speaking (tweeting/ blogging etc) can be interchangeable. Corporate social media in its infancy has been the stage for some quite appalling examples of companies lashing out at their customers online. As a result, even satisfied customers may witness such behavior and think twice about doing business with the company. In some cases lashing out may not be vocal but take on different forms, censorship, for example. Some companies have attempted to mute negative conversations about them by attempting to delete posts or comments. Again this is counterproductive and a proper outreach strategy should be explored and implemented rather than a counterproductive quick fix. If an incident does go viral, the most appropriate solution may not be to engage with each individual but rather posting a public letter of acknowledgment/or apology may help to pacify the crowds.

Guidelines and policies can be a helpful way for companies to set the standard for engagement, and equally important, when not to engage. Training similarly is key, as well as ensuring that staff are well equipped to represent the company publicly. However, and possibly above all, the same professionalism, courtesy and manners which apply in the ‘real world’ should apply to the online world. Ultimately, over-engagement likely isn’t a problem, it is more about routing conversations appropriately, ticking the right boxes as and when appropriate and ensuring you’ve crossed all of your T’s before you close off any conversation.

How do you deal with promoters and detractors online? Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with us, we’d love to hear them.

It used to be considered a violation of etiquette to cut your salad with a knife, because vinegar would discolor pewter blades. Now that knives are made of stainless steel, that rule has gone by the wayside.

Twelve years ago, when I was marketing communications manager for a small software company, I suggested we all add our booth information for an upcoming trade show to our email signatures. One of our IT guys (who rocked a wolf shirt long before it was cool) complained; he said it was a violation of “netiquette” to have an email signature longer than four lines. When I asked why, he said it was a holdover from the early days of limited bandwidth. We did it anyway, and as far as I know, he was the only person who minded.

Etiquette evolves, as does online etiquette. But if you’re a social media practitioner for an enterprise company, you probably already know the basic rules of social media etiquette; at the core, they’re the same basic rules we know from face-to-face interaction. (Jim Tobin summarized this concept nicely in his book Social Media is a Cocktail Party).

Unless you’re a really rude person in real life too, in which case you’re hosed.

I asked my networks, using Twitter, Facebook and Google+, to share with me their examples of the most egregious violations of social media etiquette they see perpetrated by companies. I’ve incorporated their answers in this list of:

Top 10 Enterprise Social Media Etiquette Fails

10. Not following back

You want people to follow your company on Twitter, right? Then how do you respond when they do? Don’t just leave them hanging. If a customer takes the time to follow you, thank them by following them back.

9. Being faceless

We all know that companies are made up of people. We all know that your corporate social media presence is handled by hard-working, smart (and often especially good-looking) people inside your company. Don’t hide them. Tell us the names and show us the faces of the people with whom we’re engaging.

8. Clueless cross-posting

Corporate social media practitioners are often overworked and trying to add social media to a long list of other duties. It can be tempting to link all your social accounts so you can post one update and have it appear on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. That can be a dangerous practice. People engage differently in each channel. Plus, when you see a hashtag in a company’s Facebook status update, you know they’re phoning it in.

7. Being a robot

It’s easy to automate replies in channels like Twitter, or pull from a list of canned responses. Doing that sends the message that engagement is not a high enough priority for your company to put a human being on it.

6. Not keeping your comments house in order

When you put something out there and invite people to respond, you’re in essence inviting them into your social media “home.” Is it a nice place to visit, or are your social media channels overrun with spam, profanity or worse? Are people asking questions that vanish in the void? It takes work to moderate the comments section of your corporate blog, your Facebook comments, your LinkedIn groups, but it’s the mark of a good host.

5. Acting like you know me

Engaging in a personal way can be a tricky task. Some people say it doesn’t scale, and there’s a point to that. If you’re a corporate social media practitioner, you can engage one-on-one with only so many people. Some companies take a tone in their social media communications that is too familiar, too intimate. If the relationship doesn’t exist, don’t pretend it does.

4. Inconsistency

One day you’re all over my Facebook stream, then I don’t see you for two weeks. What message does that send about your company? Make thoughtful decisions about your bandwidth and resources and create a posting routine you can stick to. A content calendar that ties all your communications (social media and otherwise) to your quarterly business activities and objectives is a great way to do that.

And there’s another element to inconsistency, which I would call Not Walking the Talk (but then this would become a Top 11 list): if your company is in the social space, or makes products for it, or is attempting to create a social media niche to market to, you had better get your own social presence ready. Do you have social sharing enabled on your blog? Are you posting regularly and engaging? If you claim social media expertise, you’d better be showing it as well.

3. Engaging and ignoring

A cousin of inconsistency, this occurs when companies ask a question or make a comment in their social media channels, then fail to follow up. If 20 of your fans respond to a post, show them you heard them. Even if you can’t respond to each person individually, “Thank you all for your feedback” is better than the ghost town many corporate social presences become.

2. Talking like a marketroid

One of the challenges of enterprise social media is learning how to communicate in an authentic voice, while still representing your company in a professional manner. It takes practice, and there are lots of good examples out there. Many people go wrong by falling back on their PR or marketing habits. What might sound good in a press release is going to sound stilted and silly in a status update.

And the number one enterprise social media etiquette fail:

1. Being pushy

It probably comes as no surprise that this still sits on the top of the list. More people mentioned it that any other issue. For many companies, social media engagement still means a weekly tweet with a link to a press release. Your fans want content that addresses their needs and makes their lives easier. Give them a lot of that, and they’ll accept a little of your own messaging. Give them nothing but your message, and they’ll go elsewhere.

Are there any we missed? Let us know your enterprise social media pet peeves.

Thanks very much to everyone who shared their thoughts in preparation for this post, including Morgan Siem, Chris Barger, John Doyle, Greg de Lima, Keith Burtis, Will Staves, Colin Dodd, Michelle Ton, Selden Smith, Tammy Young Heck, Rebecca Law Stone and Andrea Zimmerman.

There’s been a lot of talk and very smart posts this month about social media etiquette, but much of it has revolved around B2B, B2C or personal online etiquette, like when trying to make new friends on the various social media platforms. But what about when you are engaging with your colleagues? Those of us who work directly in the social media realm understand the idea of an almost 24/7 world. Raise your hands, community managers and the like, if you’re checking your smartphone for possible community issues, even while out having drinks with friends, or sitting on the back deck with your kids on a sunny Saturday. Yup. Just as I thought. A sea of raised arms. But what about those colleagues of ours who don’t work on your community or social strategy team? Ever wonder what that email or DM sent at 11:36 p.m. says to them?

While researching this topic, I came across a blog by Radian6’s Online Marketing Manager Greg Poirier. He had written on this very subject, from his own personal perspective, and he graciously allowed us to share some of what he wrote here, on the Social Strategy Blog.

As he says, none of us are perfect, there will be times when we send out that late night email or Saturday morning DM and wonder later “Couldn’t that have waited until Monday?” His point is to start thinking about it. How that buzzing smartphone will undoubtedly make a colleague feel obligated to check in, even during down time. And if you become more conscious of your actions, step back and think “Do I really need to send this now?”, you will be showing your colleagues and coworkers some seriously karmic social media etiquette, as well as respect.

Here are a few rules to try and live by:

EMAIL

If you read emails late at night or during the weekend (most of us check in periodically), don’t automatically respond, unless it is an emergency or something you promised you would get out before the beginning of the next work day.

CELLPHONE CALLS

Don’t call someone’s cell during down time unless it’s an urgent matter, or they are on the road and you know this is their preferred way of being contacted. Don’t call the cell if it’s something that can wait until the next day – leave a voice mail on your colleague’s office phone instead.

RETURNING VOICE MAIL AND EMAIL

Try and return (work related) phone messages and email within 24 hours (except on weekends). But if you have sent an urgent email or voice mail during off hours, remember that the person on the other end might not check them as often, and/or might be doing something (wedding, funeral, beach?) where computers or cell phones are out of reach. Don’t bombard with continuous, more panicked calls and emails. Wait patiently for them to get back to you.

URGENT REQUESTS

Try and be considerate of your colleagues’ valuable down time, and don’t drop last minute things on them that a) can really, if you’re honest, wait another day and b) are only urgent and last minute because you yourself have been a bit lax and contributed to the ‘lateness’ of a project. Maybe that’s the time to go to your boss and say “hey, I messed up and now the project is going to be a day late. I can’t ask Stan to work all weekend because I dropped the ball.” Bets are that your boss will respect your honesty (though you might get a dressing down!) and your colleague will appreciate you stepping up and not dropping your ball in his lap for the weekend.

We’re all human beings. And sometimes we mess up. But non-urgent emails, DMs or cell phone calls during your co-workers’ down time helps create a culture, as Greg noted, where it’s assumed that people should work every night and on the weekend. And that is not a fair expectation.

What do you think? Can you share some “Social Etiquette Among Colleagues” tips that we’ve missed? Have you experienced any of the above? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

It must have been an amazing thing for the young British sailor aboard The Endeavour on April 19th, 1770. After a fitful night on the storm tossed seas, he awoke to a miraculous sight – an uncharted country of wooded hills and gentle valleys. It was, of course, Australia. And in no time at all Captain James Cook set about populating this strange land with boat loads of Brits, and doing to the indigenous people what conquerors world wide have been doing for centuries. But that’s another blog post for another day.

This blog post is about history and journeys of another sort, though it does begin in that amazing land down under, where I’ve been told there are scary spiders the size of dinner plates. Thankfully, we have a dedicated and fearless team of Radian6‘ers in Australia, and they do the Southern Hemisphere event hopping for us scaredy cat northerners.

The Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Sydney, June 23rd to 26th was where you found Radian6’s Vice President – Asia Pacific Business Development, Charlie Wood. With him was Salesforce.com’s Matt Loop, Vice President, Corporate Sales to Drive Customer Success in Australia and New Zealand. They were attending the Photo Marketing Association International conference and co-presented a talk about, what else? Cloud computing.

Speaking of Salesforce, two Cloudforce Essentials events blew by us this week in Brisbane (July 12th) and Melbourne (July 13th). At each event there were leading sales professionals, customers, and the opportunity to have your toughest questions about cloud computing answered by their team of experts.

Back in North America now, the San Francisco Bay area played host to Digital Pharma West (June 27th – 30th) and Radian6 was happy to be a sponsor. A mashup of leading pharma marketers and the most cutting edge topics in digital communications, the event was attended by our own Director, Agency Relations Craig Comeau and Manager, Business Development, Mike McGinn.

Radian6‘s Senior Partner Relationship Manager Robin Seidner was in Park City, Utah shortly after the Fourth of July for EVO 2011 – The Evolution of Women in Media (July 7th – 9th). Self described as “a conference that blends workshops, networking, parties and the wind-in-your-hair relaxation that can only be found by spending summertime in the mountains” it sounds like a great spot for an annual event.

And finally, to wrap up July, Rob Begg, Director of Sales Support for Radian6 will be attending the  Masco’s Digital Media Conference, July 26th in Michigan.

Watch for another “Where in the World…” update in two weeks. Happy travels for the rest of the summer, and try not to do any conquering while you’re out there. Oh, and watch out for spiders.

Note: I might have made up the part about the dinner plate sized spiders. But I’m not going to go down under to find out.

Paul Greenberg is what you might call a renaissance man. His blog says it all: CRM, Philosophy, Baseball & Universal Metaphors. And by baseball, he’s talking about his beloved Yankees, in whose honour each season he reduces the fingernails on both hands to mere nubs. President at The 56 Group and author of the hugely successful business bible CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategy, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers, Greenberg is, quite simply, the real deal.

At his keynote during Social 2011 he owned the room. A relaxed, real speaker without pretense, he spoke about how social media has absolutely and without precedent changed our world. And during our recent webinar with him, he hammered that point home again in classic New York style, taking us from hype to depression in one short sentence. Hype can be a killer. But Greenberg is clear on one thing – Social CRM is no hype. It is a communications revolution, and one that has impacted every single institution that we, as people – not ‘customers’ or ‘employees’ but people – interact with every single day. People communicate now, from PCs to mobile devices, around the world and 24/7 if they so desire, in places that the business no longer owns, nor has any control over. This is a game changer. From a business perspective it means one very clear thing: the customer now controls the business ecosystem.

According to Greenberg, quoting the Edelman Trust Barometer, the most trusted brand advocate or spokesperson is ‘a person like me’. Not a person known for years and years, but one that you might have never met face to face, yet who shares similar thoughts, ideas, belief systems, hobbies, etc.. People ‘like me’ have become major influencers to potentially thousands of others through these new communications channels. And because of this seismic change in how people communicate today, their expectations as consumers have changed as well. Here are the top three things that consumers are looking for from companies these days:

• High quality products and services. That’s a given. But read on.

• Transparent – and honest – business practices.

• And a company that they can trust.

Trust is the new barometer. Consumers, people ‘like me’, want companies that are ‘like them’ also. This is key. Greenberg has one incredible example of a company doing just that, being transparent and borderline crazy about how much they share about the inner workings of their organization with their customers. And no surprise, they are consistently the top ranked company in their part of the world, and sailed through the last few years of economic downturn unscathed. He also cites other companies who are killing it at frontline customer engagement, P&G for one, and others who, well, aren’t.

One point he made clear is that companies need to get the heart of the company onboard when it comes to social CRM. It must be a mission statement, almost. Because if one part of your organization excels at it, but the rest doesn’t, guess what? You will ultimately fail.

There is so much take away in this webinar, I could write for days. But hey, I’m no Paul Greenberg. If you missed the webinar, please watch it. If you were there yesterday, watch it again. And again. Each time something new and powerful will resonate. Trust me.

We woud love your feedback on this webinar. Please leave your comments below.

Ahhhh the halcyon days of summer! G&Ts on the dock (make it a large one!), bar-b-ques, and kids with too much time on their hands. Halcyon is actually a Greek term, derived from a bird of legend that calmed the surface of the sea in order to brood her eggs on a floating nest. The halcyon days of lore generally began around the 14th or the 15th each December, and the phrase is a personal favourite, as it conjures up warm fuzzy feelings of the ‘good old days’. For example, remember the halcyon days of online privacy? We’ve written about online privacy in the past, and while it’s difficult to control the amount of information that can be gathered about you while surfing the web, one way to throw a wrench into the data gathering machine is to refrain from using your real name. But what happens when you cloak yourself in anonymity? Does it impact the way you function online? One New York blogger found out the hard way when she used anonymous posts to tar and feather a rather high profile NY personality. She was sued after a game changing court order forced her provider to reveal her identity. Would she have said the same character damaging things if face to face with her victim? Who knows. But chances are she would have thought twice. As social media is all about personal engagement, how ‘personal’ can you really be when you’re functioning as @supergirlXOX? Josh Mackey from Peek You knows a thing or two about social media, and has an interesting take on the etiquette – or lack thereof – of hiding behind the username.

Hi Josh, thanks for chatting with us today. Can you tell our community about yourself for those who don’t know you?

Hi Lindsay, thanks for the offer. Well, I am an Australian living in New York with my Canadian wife and our 7 month old American son. My youth was spent in hospitality management by day and Internet startups by night, and currently I am GM of Product at PeekYou a New York-based search company focused on indexing the public web around people. In my role I have a specific focus on developing social audience measurement solutions for the listening and analytics industry. By leveraging our unique data we are able to deliver deeper audience insights to follower counts, “influence” scores and engagement metrics.

You’ve written in the past about the ‘death of the username’, and I loved your thoughts on it. For everyone else, what does “Death of the Username” mean to you?

I believe that soon a transparent online identity will become the norm, and lurking behind anonymous usernames, the exception. More and more people put a premium on interactions with other people whom they can identify, and who can be held accountable for their online actions. One’s Internet reputation will become almost as valuable as one’s offline reputation. Even today, we’d all rather know who left that comment, wrote that article, sent that email, or is selling this car.

What explains people’s change in behavior when they interact anonymously online?

I think it comes down to a simple lack of accountability. My post referenced the Rebecca Black saga, where so many people seemed to be unable to refrain from publicly ridiculing this 13-year-old girl trying to be a singer-songwriter. If she sang at a school talent show in the ‘real accountable world’ the reaction would be very different. Why? Because of the negative consequences of behaving uncivilly—to one’s reputation and even to one’s standing in the community.

Our theme this month is “Social Media Etiquette” – has the online sensibility changed in the last ten years? Is it perceived as ‘rude’ these days to hide behind an anonymous username? And if so, why?

No, I don’t think being anonymous is “rude”, but the choice is a personal one. Saying that, I believe people are more likely to use proper etiquette and act accordingly online if their offline reputation is at stake. What has changed over the last 10 years is peoples’ concept of online identity; more and more people are starting to realize the positive value that can be driven from having a robust and respected online presence.

There are clearly pros and cons to staying anonymous. Using a username instead of one’s real name is attractive to what type of online user?

There are many reasons people may want to remain anonymous, in the post I covered four:

1) Value privacy above all else

There are legitimate concerns over privacy, I don’t deny it, but ultimately people need to understand that public identity and privacy are two different notions, and that you can declare who you are without violating your own privacy. Simple steps go a long way; steps such as thinking twice before posting personal details, and keeping details off the record like, birthdays, phone numbers, street addresses, medical and financial records, and SSNs. Disseminating this kind of information on the Internet can be disastrous to your privacy. Divulging what your favorite music bands or movies are? Not so much.

2) Seek free speech for political reasons

Free speech is another catch cry on behalf of the anonymous web, and sure, if you live in Iran, and wish to speak out against the government, then you have a case. But if you yearn for “free speech” as nothing more than a cover for bad-mouthing people while not exposing your identity, then you don’t garner much sympathy from me.

3) Wish to live vicariously

Some people need the web to be a fantasy land, a valve of release. I get it, I also understand some people not divulging their real identity on sites like IMVU or Second Life. Doing otherwise would defeat the purpose of such virtual worlds premised on escaping reality. But should we commiserate with someone who wants to live vicariously as a bully on YouTube, or as a jerk on TechCrunch or the WSJ? I think not.

4) Are bad players

Simply put, some people are straight up bad players who are planning to do illegal or immoral things online, which can’t possibly be done without the use of an anonymous username or fake identity. Think “How to Catch a Predator.”

To sum up, do you believe that the web will evolve to be a place where users will expect – maybe even demand – that the people they communicate with be transparent?

Yes, I think in the not-too-distant future, a deep chasm will open throughout the Internet. On one side of it will be a transparent market of people and ideas, where people network and transact with their cards on the table and virtual name tags on. And on the other side will be the black market, so to speak, of shady dealings, casual encounters, cyber bullying, and other unsavory activities, all of which thrive only under the shade of the anonymous username. Unfortunately if you choose to be anonymous, even if you have the best intentions, you’ll be left in the company of the BigDog69’s and hotdude2000’s of the web, untrusted and ignored, like spam.

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We would like to send out a hearty thanks to Josh for chatting with us. Hopefully we’ve inspired a bit of critical thinking around online anonymity. What do you think? Is the Internet evolving into an ‘us and them’ place, where some of us are transparent, while the (possibly) more nefarious among us operate under anonymity? Would you follow or friend someone whose real name you didn’t know? What about doing business with them? Have you yourself ever left a comment or posted a criticism under a username, or said things that you might not have said if you were face to face with someone? This is where we ask you to please add your thoughts and comments below!

Note: PeekYou is an official partner to Radian6 via the Insights Platform.

This post was co-authored by Community Analyst Melanie Thompson

To swear or not to swear? It’s an interesting debate that many of us may have with ourselves when it comes to our professional and personal voices. We heard from @RedheadWriting earlier about how swearing can be beneficial if your brand fits the mold, if your brand is cheeky and straddles that side of the road, but we also wanted to share how swearing can have a negative impact.

Negative Connotation
As children we are taught how “bad” it is to swear, a feeling that we oftentimes pull through into adulthood. That’s why many times we feel jarred when we hear someone shoot out a profanity in frustration, it’s upsetting because we’re taught that it’s taboo. Even if we don’t necessarily have a problem with swearing, it often perks our ears.  If we get this upset in person when we hear these strong words, why do we accept them in the social space? Should we be accepting them in the social space? In a space that is very focused on being short and concise with responses to the point where context can be misconstrued, why are we adding to that by incorporating language that naturally brings a sense of urgency, frustration and often times anger?

Brand: Impact
If you were meeting with a customer face to face, or on the phone, how would you feel dropping a swear word in front of them. Comfortable? Like you crossed a line? For most brands, swearing in a corporate business structure is unacceptable and would probably lose more clients than gain. Like we’ve said many times, always be yourself in the social space which means that if swearing to your clients isn’t readily accepted in the boardroom, you probably steer clear from the corporate handle.

Employees: Being the Potty Mouth
In the age of employees being the brand, the impact of an employee using a swear word can have as much impact as the corporate handle. Put yourself in your client’s shoes, if this person is who they are supposed to engage with and their feed is filled with profane language, they may not be as interested in engaging in a professional conversation with them. Be upfront with your employees and be clear as to what you accept and don’t accept in their personal twitter feeds. At Radian6, we recommend people keep their language friendly and clear of words with negative connotation or harsh swear words. This is to ensure they can benefit from a welcoming, engaging side of social media. If a mistake happens, and since we’re all human we know they’re bound to, don’t hide from it. Apologize for the profanity or misuse use of language. People always appreciate when you are willing to accept your mistakes and learn from them.

Clients: Would you swear in the lobby?
We know that as a consumer or client there are times when we all get frustrated with a product or service, but before we start spouting the harsh language stop and think. Ask yourself, “Would I walk in to the crowded lobby of this company’s office and say this out loud?” The social space does give us an amazing arena to voice our opinion but at the same time, don’t forget that not all those accounts are spammers or bots and the majority are connected to real life people who are reading your posts and reacting to them. They are often not the person that you are having frustration with. If you wouldn’t say that in front of the smiling face at the desk, then why is it alright to do from behind a computer screen? Also, back to the employee side of things, make sure your employees aren’t sending loaded tweets to other companies that you wouldn’t want out there. Brand to brand relationship can be damaged by a few rogue tweets written in haste.

What if I DO swear often?
Maybe you are thinking to yourself, “But I would say that in person!” Swearing is part of my personality. Remember that the social web is forever. Those profanities will be there during future job interviews and for your children to see. Would you also tattoo them to yourself? Or wear a t-shirt with them on it for a job interview? When we say something, it’s out there and although we can’t take it back, we also don’t have to wear it around all the time, the same is not true for the social web. What might be beneficial in times of stress and anger could have negative consequences in the future. Keep this in mind.

Of course the choice is yours, how you interpret and display your personal brand is different for everyone. What works for some may not work for others and vice versa. What do you think? Where do you fall on the swearing spectrum?

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

~Mark Twain

If you’ve ever stopped by any of my online imprints (Twitter, Facebook, my blog – RedheadWriting), it’s evident from the get-go that I have a certain affection for blue language. Grandmothers and god-fearing folk the world over blush and click away when they land in the Danger Zone, and occasionally the hate mail flows (more on that in a bit). When Radian6 reached out to me to pen a guest blog on the use of profanity on the interwebz, I knew two things right off the bat:

I was going to have a s**tload of fun writing this post.

and

My branding message was clear to those who watch me do whatever it is I do on any given day.

A simple glance at my Twitter bio will tell you what I do for a living – I work with companies to help them develop clear and distinct personalities. When companies meet me, they’ve usually stopped by my online presences and blog and either love what they see or want to run screaming – and that’s exactly what I want them to do. Love me, hate me…just don’t be indifferent. And whether you decide to use profanity in your online communications is a choice only you can make, but in this post, what I hope to do is show you how we can:

1)    Talk about profanity without using it.

2)    Explore reasonable considerations (and consequences) as you ponder the linguistic line in the sand.

3)    Have tools to make better decisions about your brand’s personality, whether you’re an army of one or 1,000.

Know Who You Are

Strangely enough, I remember the day I dropped my first f-bomb on Twitter. I expected crickets. I watched the screen for a potential backlash. But the opposite happened: I got retweeted. Four times, even! I’ve never been one for saying things in conventional ways and what I’d inadvertently done is built an audience who appreciated my true vernacular.

No matter what the size of your brand, understanding who you are as you enter the social web is imperative. I’m frequently asked by clients whether I’m going to drop the f-bomb on their blogs, Facebook pages or in their Twitter streams. My answer? It depends. Does that fit who you are? Every brand has a personality. If we admit that from the get go, we understand why we don’t expect headlines about Berkshire Hathaway to mention the shizzle in your nizzle and on the contrary, why Slim Jims aren’t being hawked by an iconic Clorox mom.

This is, quite possibly, the most important consideration as you determine whether profanity has a place in your communication repertoire.  Know who you are and know before you go. That makes the process of building your audience and understanding them a boatload easier.

Know Your Audience

It’s the part B of the equation: whom are you trying to reach? I’m looking for other upbeat, short-fused, irreverent souls like myself who are out to make a difference on this big blue sphere. If you ask yourself about your ideal audience (and honestly), the question of using profanity will pretty much answer itself. Brands looking to build community have to be a part of the community they wish to create. That means adopting a vernacular that those people will find familiar. And yes, sometimes that means dropping a word or two that others might find uncomfortable.

Embrace Offense

Words have incredible force, no matter how few letters they contain. I spoke at the onset about hate mail, something I’ve come to love and cherish. Here’s the bottom line: no matter whether you use profanity or not, people are going to take offense at something you have to say. What brands have to understand is that not everyone is their target customer and if you tick a few people off along the way, that’s okay!

There are few things in this world that have the ability to polarize an audience like politics and profanity. In your personal life, you have your views. Brands should have views and voices as well. Don’t be hypocritical – we think it’s jazzy when we hear bleeped-out lyrics slip through our car speakers as the latest pop ditty plays from the radio. In my opinion, radio stations do a half-baked job of walking that middle-of-the-road line: we all know what the lyrics are, and bleeping just makes them seem more taboo. I’m sure radio stations get more hate mail than anyone, but here’s where there’s a lesson to be learned: you’re never going to please everyone and there’s always the option to (gasp) change the channel.

The Consequences

A public relations colleague of mine has consequences down-pat. During media training with new clients, she talks about roadkill. You’re safe on the left shoulder…the right shoulder. Wander out into the middle of the road? You’re going to get killed. Successful brands pick a ditch to die in. This applies not just to the decision to use profanity in your communications, but to communications in general. Middle of the road voices fade into the ether while outspoken ones – ones with distinct personalities – shine brightly. Profanity is a character trait of a more comprehensive branding strategy, not a defining characteristic.

Sure, you might find some prospective audience members peeved about your choice of words. That’s fine – they’ll go elsewhere. But along with this exodus, you’ll find an influx of advocates who are picking up what you’re putting down. For brands that have to justify messaging to a larger internal audience, it goes back to personality. The voice you use online might not be how your CEO sounds in the boardroom, but if it’s true to the personality of your brand and product, no one is going to argue with the results that a powerful online presence can create.

Go Bleeping Be Something, Would You?

While profanity can be clever, using it as a tool to get to where you need a brand to go is even smarter. There will always be the people who want to tune you out. Heck, I’m irritated that every time I get to partake in an In-N-Out Burger delight, there’s a Bible verse on the bottom of their cups. And while that’s not profanity, I consider it pretty ballsy. Yet, it doesn’t keep me from going back for something I dig – and perhaps your decision (or not) to use profanity in your brand will ultimately attract the right audience – and deter those who will be better served elsewhere.

Radian6 adds: What do you think? Agree or disagree? Is there a place for periodic profanity in your brand’s online profile? Please leave your thoughts and comments below!

Merriam-Webster tells us that the definition of diplomacy is “skill in handling affairs without arousing hostility”, and that the definition of diplomatic is “employing tact and conciliation especially in situations of stress”. By now I’m sure that a couple of fellow community managers out there will be nodding their heads, it sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Diplomacy is a skill that you typically employ on a daily basis, especially at work, but for those navigating and curating a community and social content it has all the more relevancy because you will be dealing with promoters and detractors alike.

Diplomacy is not something that you are born with, in most cases, nor is it something that is the same across cultures, countries or communities. Actions you take including how you speak, when you speak and why you speak all feed into diplomacy and yet it is something that you learn with time especially when engaging in social media. We were not born community managers. Moreover as the face of our brand we’ve had to realize that there is a fine line between being helpful and being intrusive, between being encouraging and overbearing, and being trustworthy and just well connected. So why is diplomacy so important, specifically when engaging online and within your community?

Tact is Everything

Diplomacy is important because it exhibits a certain level of respect, understanding and problem solving that is so crucial when you operate online in the public domain. More importantly as a community manager you will be seen wearing many hats and engaging at various levels. In many cases acting diplomatically is a gut instinct, a personal barometer of when something is appropriate and when it isn’t. But it’s a trained bar, and with training comes learning, both from your personal experiences and that which you gain on the job engaging and conversing with stakeholders day in and day out. In a hyper connected industry like that of social media, you need to be quick to learn the ropes because your community will be equally fast to tell you, either directly or indirectly that actually what you’ve done is wrong.

Now, when they do tell you that you have done something wrong, that your approach was inappropriate or that actually they rather you just back off, don’t lash out online. Why, because if you’re professional, you wouldn’t do that offline either. It’s about identifying the problem, the root cause and finding a solution. Acknowledge the issue and don’t ignore it. In social, community managers are there not just to encourage, guide and participate in discussion, they are the face of the organization – you ARE the organization – so acknowledgement is the first step to resolution or turning a detractor into a promoter. In most cases acknowledgement and identifying the root cause will lead to resolution. However, when this isn’t the case make sure you provide an explanation, not a blanket statement, as to why you are not able to assist. Diplomacy is eloquent and articulate problem solving.

Diplomatically Boring

One thing which diplomacy is not, and shouldn’t be, is bland and void of personality. Add some flavour to your profile and how you approach and speak to those around you. Be creative in how you solve problems and source solutions. Trust that you’ll be remembered that way and you might even make a friend. You’ll be well thought of and as a result approached whenever an issue arises, and your brand will thank you for it. Moreover, you can count on being singled out for going the extra mile, again, your brand will thank you for it. Community management is a relatively new role, but what we’ve learned can be summarized as (though not exclusively): diplomacy is key to social media engagement and part and parcel of that is to think before you respond, ask yourself whether you are being constructive and always wonder: would I stand behind what I have just said if my grandmother/boss/colleague read this?

What is diplomacy to you? How have you exercised your diplomatic muscles online? We’re always keen to learn and hear others’ experiences so please share!

For the last few years, the hottest debates in social media have centered around metrics, and how to prove the value of your activities. Two years ago, we were debating whether or not we should even bother trying to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of our social media activities. Some people argued it was impossible, others that ROI wasn’t the point.

We’ve come a long way in the last two years, and people like Katie Paine, Keith Burtis, Olivier Blanchard and Christopher S. Penn have shown us not only that we can measure the value of our social media activities, but how.

Even so, as with many business buzzwords, there’s still some confusion about what we mean when we use the terms listening, monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI. Some people, I fear, use them more or less interchangeably. At the MarketingProfs B2B Summit in Boston two weeks ago, ROI was a pervasive topic. I was asked to contribute two imperatives to a list of 10 that would be presented at the final session. One of mine was, “Understand the difference between monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI.”

(Two things: I’ve since added “listening” to the list of terms, so there’s a bonus for you, dear reader. Second, as an English major, I have a niggling doubt that, grammatically, it should be “Understand the differences among…” But I’ve been in marketing for 20 years, so I’ve learned to quash any qualms about mangling the mother tongue. Extensible. Actionable. Feature-rich. Cross-platform.)

Listening

Listening is the first step in the ladder. I think of listening in social media as the process of learning what people are saying about you and where. People and companies may use free tools like Google and Bing, Twitter search and Google Blog Search to find mentions of themselves, their companies, competitors and topics of interest. If you’re just looking for information, setting up free listening tools may be enough for you. The danger lies in allowing your listening to be passive and inconsistent; especially if your company doesn’t get a high volume of mentions, you might miss the one you most needed to see.

Monitoring

I see monitoring as one step beyond listening. Monitoring adds the 24/7 component to listening and attempts to make sure you capture all relevant mentions. There are free tools like Google Alerts that can help, as well as any number of paid tools that feature monitoring as an essential component. Monitoring solutions can also include alerting as a key function; if something happens at 3:00 a.m. or while you’re on vacation, how are you going to find out about it?

Measurement

Measurement is the first step toward integrating the results of your social media activities into your larger business processes. In my experience, companies set up listening and monitoring first, then inevitably someone wants to know, “How are we doing?” Are we improving, are we ahead of our competitors, are we doing enough? In order to be able to quantify (and justify) your social media activities, you need measurement. That can be as simple as establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks that are relevant to your business. Are we getting more comments on our blog than this time last year? How quickly are we adding Twitter followers?

The danger here comes in getting stalled at this stage and seeing measurement and KPIs as an end in themselves. So, 10,000 people have liked your Facebook page. But what good is that? This leads us to…

Analytics

How are your social media activities supporting your bottom-line business objectives? Does having 20,000 Twitter followers translate into more awareness, more leads, more sales? What’s the value of a Facebook fan? These are not easy questions to answer, despite what some might lead you to believe. Understanding the analytics of your social media activities is no different than understanding the value of your PR or marketing activities; you have to do the hard work to tie your activities to conversions, whatever that means for your business. Then you can see how your social media metrics tie to your business goals. In other words…

ROI

Frankly, I got tired of the ROI debate a long time ago. For the people I’ve had to influence in my career, ROI has only ever meant one thing: how much we spent compared to how much we made. It’s no different in social media. ROI in social media is thorny, in part because some people expect it should be easy to track because it’s online. You can, but only if you do the work of building the connections. That’s why lots of smart marketers are having more luck tracking the ROI of campaigns, rather than their social media activities as a whole.

Suppose, for instance, you wanted to increase attendance at your next event and use social media to help. You could tweet about it, create a Facebook event and write about it on your blog and in your LinkedIn group. But how will you know if anyone signed up as a result? Create a landing page where people can sign up for the event. Create a shortened link to the page. Add a call to action to all your social media mentions driving traffic to that site. Your web analytics will tell you how many people came to that page from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From that point, calculating the ROI of that campaign is a matter of understanding how much time you spent creating it, how much you increased attendance as a result of the campaign, what the dollar value was of the increase, and how that compares to the value of your time spent creating the campaign.

Trivial? No. Easy? Not necessarily. But in the long run, you’ll probably spend less time building the process to track your ROI than you would otherwise spend trying to justify why you haven’t.

So, what do you think? Have you mastered the metrics muddle? Please leave your thoughts and comments below. And for more nuts-and-bolts information you can put to use right away, check out our Resource Library.

Geoff Livingston is an artist. He’s a writer, a photographer, and an advocate of change for the social good. He’s also a night owl. With this social media enterprise founder and public relations strategist recently releasing his latest book on shelves, sites, Nooks and Kindles across the nation, now was the perfect time to reach him in his native habitat. So, we drank our espressos, power napped and asked all the questions we thought you would love answered – about Geoff and his latest book, Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Hi Geoff! Thanks for your time today (or should we say tonight?). For those of us who aren’t following you on Twitter or avid readers of your blog, would you share a bit about yourself?

Hmmm. I never really enjoy doing this. I started Zoetica, a social enterprise that provides communications services to companies engaged in social good and nonprofits. I love baseball. My 7-month old daughter Soleil rocks my world everyday. I love photography, but have not done much of it since Soleil came into the world. When she gets bigger… And I love to write.

What prompted you to write this book?

I think most of today’s books on social media are using outdated theory from four or five years ago. My experience helping dozens of clients with actual social media work tells me that there is more to community management and grassroots development than what we are seeing. I decided to put those ideas out into the marketplace. So far the latter half of the book, strategy through sustainability, is being met with nods to flat out acknowledgement of new social media theories.

How has social media strategy influenced you?

I am not sure social media strategy has influenced me. Brand strategy influences me. I got taught strategy by a guy named Ellis Pines at TMP Worldwide. He in turn learned it at the Leo Burnett agency.  Folks like David Ogilvy were the originators of this type of strategy.  Later on, I came to appreciate the classic, like the Art of War and The Book of Five Rings. The strategy we practice at Zoetica is a direct descendant of these influences, and can be applied to any medium.

Your first book, Now Is Gone, was recognized as one of the first books depicting the social media revolution. How do you top yourself with this second book?

That’s easy: Experience. We had hopes and dreams and thoughts about conversations and what it would mean for businesses and nonprofits. Five years later there is experience. I’ve had a great run with a lot of fantastic brands, including work with Google, PayPal, the United Way of America, the Case Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund, Godsmack Lead Singer Sully Erna (back when Myspace was cool), and on and on. These experiences have provided a pretty good sense of what works and what is hyperbole. Hopefully, the book communicates both.

You have a wealth of great examples of successful media strategies in your book. How did you go about selecting those cases?

Some of the case studies are familiar names like Dell and charity: water (both with new wrinkles); others are relatively unknowns like Miriam’s Kitchen and Samuel Gordons Jewelers. I intentionally chose one nonprofit and one corporate case study for each chapter. There is a balance of large and small brands. The purpose was dual-fold, highlighting the universal themes of social across organization types, and to expose people to new experiences regardless of which side of the fence they sit on.

You talk a lot about community. Can you give an example of what community means to you?

A community is a group of people who share a common interest. Those people may or may not be in a company or organization. Most are not; however those brands certainly have a role in the larger ecosystem usually providing some sort of service or product that seeks to benefit that community. My favorite community in that sense – and it has been for a couple of years – is the LIVESTRONG community. It is amazing. People come to that Facebook page and web site and convene, help each other, fundraise and advocate all in the name of conquering cancer. LIVESTRONG does a great job of facilitating (not dominating) that community and is also a supportive and active participant. In essence, they are a gracious host. The community members  are blood loyal, and they number well over a million people. They stick together through the hard times, including personal trials and some of the more recent stories about Lance Armstrong.

LIVESTRONG is an amazing example of a successful community. In a few words, what are the key ingredients to crafting a community like this?

The secret sauce includes real authentic interaction that includes several voices across the organization. Further, they empower their community to do things, from uploading photos on the Facebook page to participating in bike rices via Gowalla to grassroots fundraising. They let people be people, and be a part of the LIVESTRONG brand.

Final question: In addition to community managers, who do you feel would benefit most from your book?

Their bosses. Seriously, social doesn’t work without executive buy in. Hopefully this book helps get those executives over the hump.  It does provide more business language and sense than the typical finger wagging “this is the way social is” type of book.

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We want to send a hearty thank you out to Geoff for sharing his time with us. Those are some inspirational words around creating community and a strong social strategy. Geoff’s blog encourages reader questions, disagreements, and dialogue to push the envelope and think. In that spirit, we wanted to encourage the same approach. Please share your favorite community best practice with us in the comments section. We will be choosing three winners from our comments, and sending them a free copy of Welcome to the Fifth Estate. Ready, set, go!

Note: Photos used with permission

There have been some great posts published here in addition to this month’s Radian6 ebook on gaining a competitive edge with social media.

Free and paid tools provide any number of reports to help benchmark and measure competitive intel – share of voice, brand sentiment, distribution of voice, and more. In my experience, though, the most valuable intelligence comes from reading the data behind the reports.

Take word clouds, for example – a visual representation of text, based on themes in which the size of the word illustrates how often it was used (the larger the word appears, the more often it was mentioned). Social tools can run a word cloud based on the themes of conversation around your brand or your competitor’s. These might seem like a lot of visual eye candy at first glance, but if you stack them up against each other and dig deeper into them, they can reveal some interesting intelligence about online reputation that will shape what you know about your competition and guide your strategic initiatives.

For instance, in working with a university recently, we ran conversation clouds for the client and its competitors. One of the competitors was selected based on its national reputation for academic excellence. In reading the themes, however, we learned that the client actually has a stronger edge with regard to online brand messaging:

Client’s Conversation Cloud: (names have been blacked out for privacy purposes)

In looking at the themes of conversation about the client, we saw that the word “music” was fairly prominent, reinforcing the university’s well-known fine arts program. However, we saw no mention of their study abroad program, another area this university felt it was known for.

Additionally, we looked at the adjectives used in conjunction with the client as compared to its competition:

Competitor’s Conversation Cloud: (names have been blacked out for privacy purposes)

We saw conversations that were positive in tone with words like: peace, hope, heart, time, family, life – an excellent atmosphere for the client to join the conversation (which they had not, at the time of this research.)

In the competition’s themes, however, we saw a strong focus on sports teams and terms: team, won, game, field, women (in reference to sports teams). So, despite their offline reputation as a school known and widely regarded as strong in academic excellence and international studies, online conversations were not reinforcing that sentiment. In this regard, our client had a competitive edge on brand messaging.

Now, each of these words must be taken in context – another reason it’s so important to read and understand the context from which they came. For example, the word “love,” when seen prominently in a content cloud dropped into a report for the C-suite can easily be interpreted as, “People love us.” Or, “People love our competition a lot more.” However, without reading the content behind it (most clouds allow you to click on each word to reveal the stream of content that contributed to it), you cannot accurately make that assumption.

The word “love,” used as a verb as in, “I love this university” means something different than, “I fell in love at this university,” (which could just as easily make its way into a content theme if a past student, on her wedding day, blogged about falling in love at the university which was then shared by hundreds of her friends and fellow sorority sisters across the country.)

Taking the time to analyze and interpret the data that goes into reports can completely alter or reinforce not only the report, but also the assumptions you form based on competitive intelligence, and the strategies and tactics you develop in response.

What do you think? Do you believe that context is a key value marker when it comes to deciphering data? Do you make use of word clouds in your social media listening strategy? As always, we love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Kary Delaria is a digital communications strategist and social media research analyst for Kane Consulting, a communications firm specializing in integrating social media into marketing and communications processes. She can be reached via email or on Twitter.

Note: Kane Consulting uses the Radian6 Social Media Listening and Engagement Platform.

What time is it? It’s time to find out where in the world we are going to be in the next couple of weeks! As any social media enthusiast knows, being a practitioner is not just about sitting behind a desk – it’s about sharing, meeting, talking and learning. Guaranteed that if someone took the time to crunch the numbers, travel woes would be the number one tweet topic on any given day. But events and conferences are always important and usually more fun than a barrel of monkeys, so on that note, read on:

Next week sees Radian6′s Jon McGinley, Director of Marketing, and Rob Begg, Director of Sales Support shuffling off to Ottawa for MARCOM. An annual look at the trends and topics that matter most to public sector and not-for-profit marketers and communicators, it’s a chance to mix and mingle and catch some great talks by social media thought leaders like Brian Solis, Christopher S. Penn, and the aforementioned Rob Begg himself.

Next up is Measure Up, focusing this year on The New World of Marketing Analytics: The Integration of Traditional & Social Media. Held in Boston, June 6th – 8th, the event bills itself as ‘the world’s most comprehensive cross-dimensional view of marketing measurement best practices’ and says that ‘…the event is structured around integrating many fractured pieces of measurement analytics into one effective marketing strategy. The event will focus on return on investment (ROI) as it relates to online activities; specifically, Social Media.’ Social media ROI is a hotly debated topic, and one that’s of particular interest to our own Director of Community, Lauren Vargas, who will most certainly be there!

No sooner has Radian6′s Rob Begg (Director of Sales Support) unpacked his suitcase after Marcom, he’s packing it up again and heading to – I’m not going to lie, I’m jealous – New Orleans. The home of Mardi Gras and the famous French Quarter hosts The Enterprise Council on Small Business from June 6th to 8th. This is an annual gathering of senior marketing and sales executives who specifically target the small business segment, and will provide attendees with an understanding of the new digital technologies at their disposal, how small business owners are using them, and how marketers can use the technologies most effectively.

Around mid-month it’s back to Boston, and a chance to connect with Radian6′s Director of Social Strategy, David B. Thomas, at the MarketingProfs B2B Summit June 14th and 15th. What is interesting about this event is that it’s geared literally for everyone, from the newbie to the pro, with their sessions grouped in easy to follow, colour coded blocks. For example, if you’re new to a marketing discipline, or need to get back to the basics, attend the Explorer sessions (green); looking to discover new ways to improve your current campaigns? Then the Adventurer sessions (blue) are the way to go. And if you’re an advanced marketer whose campaigns have already been across the sea and back, then you might want to focus on the Globetrotter series of presentations (orange). Radian6 is a proud sponsor, and we’re certain you’ll enjoy meeting and listening to David, as well as everything else this conference has to offer.

It’s been a busy last couple of months here at Radian6. The first few weeks of April were consumed with our inaugural Social 2011, immediately after which the focus turned to wrapping up the Salesforce/Radian6 union. But there are events to be at and conferences to attend – producing our own event and sweeping up after a little acquisition deal was not going to hold us back!

The end of April saw our Director of Community, Lauren Vargas, flying off to Seattle, where she attended the PSRF Spring Conference. Held at the Museum of Flight - one of the largest air and space museums in the world – the Puget Sound Research Foundation’s spring educational conference covered topics such as “Tracking Research in the New Age of Influence” and “Lessons Learned in the use of Mobile Apps for Market Research.” Vargas’ presentation – Socializing the Enterprise – explored the importance of training your employees, top to bottom, so they can deftly handle the tools needed to implement social media objectives and strategies. As she said,”The path to social media integration won’t always be smooth, and it definitely won’t be immediate, but the key to making the transition as easy as possible is setting reasonable and realistic expectations.”

Before we knew it, May was here, bringing not May flowers (for the most part), but more places to be and people to see.

We all know that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but surely not when you’re attending the SOCAP Spring Symposium! With a tip of the hat to industries like Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Healthcare, Travel & Hospitality and Financial Services, the event also held ‘hot-topic’ workshops on Social Media, Contact Center Operations, Crisis Training and Regulatory Issues Impacting Customer Care. Toss in a featured talk by Radian6′s Vice President of Social Strategy Amber Naslund and a couple of tickets to the jaw-dropping Cirque du Soleil, and we dare you to try and keep the details under wraps.

Radian6 headed north after that, and landed in Washington, D.C., just in time for BlogWell DC. We were a proud sponsor of this event, which featured in depth case studies from groups as diverse as USA TODAY is to the U.S. Navy. The Internal Revenue Service, ConAgra Foods, Discovery Communications, UnitedHealth Group, Delta Air Lines, and the National Association of REALTORS were also featured, and event goers could learn important lessons in how to use Twitter to drive web traffic and engagement for events, how to move social media forward in a sensitive environment, and the social media recruiting process.

This coming weekend has Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun attending Mashable Connect in Orlando, Florida, along with other heavy hitters and thought leaders from the social media world. An invite only affair, this gathering is billed as “an intimate conference experience that will bring together leaders from the digital world for three days away to share and connect offline in a unique setting.” In between presentations, key influencers from American Express to CNN, Fidelity Investments to PepsiCo, Tumblr to Unilever will have more down time than usual to network and share ideas. Expect to cover new territory and hear about the lastest breaking news at an event by Mashable.

A lot of you will be familier with Jason Falls, and if not, look him up. The man behind Social Media Explorer, he’s an educator, public speaker and thinker in the world of digital marketing and social media. Falls is bringing his first-ever Exploring Social Media Business Summit to Toledo, Ohio on May 18, and Radian6, who is also an event sponsor, will be there. The lineup of speakers at this one day summit will talk about social media strategy and content marketing for the communications and business professional, and include Joe Pulizzi, Allen Mireles, Erik Deckers, Chris Baggott and – who’s this? Our own Cory Hartlen!  You can catch a preview of the event, Cory’s interview with Jason Falls, right here.

And we couldn’t round out the month without mentioning Salesforce’s rolling Cloudforce tour, landing in Atlanta, Georgia May 19th. It’s the biggest-ever cloud computing event to hit Atlanta, but that’s not the best part. The best part is – it’s FREE! Swing by for the day and meet Radian6′s Director of Product Marketing Rob Begg, and experience all the social, mobile, and open innovations driving success in the Cloud 2 world.

Radian6 does indeed get around. And we do this because we understand the immeasurable gains achieved in meeting people face to face, and engaging in real time communication and conversation. Social media is about bringing people together. Online and off.

You heard it here first! On March 30th, Radian6 CEO Marcel Lebrun announced the big news that Radian6 had entered into an agreement to be acquired by salesforce.com. Well, we are extremely proud and not a little bit excited to announce that it’s official, Radian6 and salesforce.com have tied the knot.

“We talk about how transformative social is, well, salesforce.com also sees that, both in the enterprise and with customers.” Marcel Lebrun, CEO, Radian6

Social media has really been a game changer – it has forever altered the way we live, play, and most importantly, work. As Lebrun mentioned a few months back, Radian6 and salesforce.com share the belief that social media has changed the playing field, and that the way companies engage with their customers and promote their brand is more and more social – open, honest and with integrity and transparency. Today, the medium really is the message, the village is becoming more global than ever, faster than we ever could have imagined, and life truly IS happening in the cloud. That is why industry leaders like Radian6 and salesforce.com can integrate so seamlessly.

“Radian6 adds huge value to salesforce.com by delivering the public, social web across all our products,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Giving customers the social intelligence they want with the business context they need will further differentiate our products and accelerate our growth.”

So what does this mean for you? Over the past 5 years Radian6’s unique technology has captured hundreds of millions of conversations daily across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities. The intelligence gained has helped you to better market and sell to prospects, serve your customers and understand what’s being said about your brands, products and competitors. That product innovation and progress will continue.

“Radian6 brings the voice of the customer into the enterprise, helping to transform the way a business operates,” said Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6. “We look forward to working with salesforce.com’s customers to show them the power of listening to, and engaging with, the social web.”

Community and collaboration will remain at the core of what we do. But now we will be doing it as part of Salesforce, an incredible company – one who pioneered the concept of ‘software as a service’, who transformed the ways that companies communicate and share customer information, and who revolutionized cloud computing. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

Clouds aside, the future’s looking pretty bright these days.

Imagine for a second you’re on a date. It’s the first one and you’re nervous. You meet in a coffee shop and the conversation begins. Well, sort of. You see, every time you ask your date a question you get a rather generic response, or no response at all. Chalk it up to shyness. So you try again a few days later, and the same thing happens, more generic substance-less answers. Needless to say, the conversation is boring and this relationship isn’t going very far.

So what happened to send this potential match off the rails?

The communication – or lack thereof – is the disconnect. It should come as no surprise to anyone just how crucial dialogue is to make any relationship work. There has to be active involvement to keep people interested and make the relationship worth anything.

Now, in the above example, take out coffee shop dating and replace with social media – the analogy remains the same. I see it all the time, as I am sure you do as well. Company ABC hears about social media. The CEO exclaims, “We must get involved. This is the key to making our business successful!” They source an employee who is computer savvy, and set about setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts.

More often than not, the extent of this involvement typically consists of creating a Facebook fan page, racking up as many followers as possible, signing up a twitter handle and leaving both relatively idle. Or worse yet, tweeting out only press releases and articles, and never logging into Facebook to join the conversation around their posts.

Do you know what this does to your brand? It certainly isn’t adding any real value, that much can be said for sure. And potentially, it could do your brand real harm. Why? Because you’ve become the boring date sitting across the table. Social media should always be about driving meaningful conversations first, and not just being the pretty face in the room. That is why it’s important to understand the image and approach your brand wants to portray, as well as have the proper training program in place before getting your organization and social media team wrapped up in social media engagement.

I heard Mitch Joel for the first time at Social 2011, and I can’t get the mantra, which he quoted from Chris Anderson, out of my head. “Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is” (and then he added Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – if you haven’t already, watch his keynote here). But what if these networks add nothing substantial about your brand? Sure, they might be filled with links back to your social media accounts, or your web site, but if you’ve never once responded to a customer who asked a question about a product, never proactively reached out to your community, or never posted anything beyond a company press release, they simply add no value to your brand. And where is the value in that?

Before getting involved in social media, it’s important that you ask yourself the following:

• Do we have clearly defined engagement goals in place? And if not, then hold it right there. How will you know if you are showing success? How will you track if your audience is responding well to your efforts, ignoring you – or worse, mocking you – because of something you said? You won’t, which is why it would behoove you to take a step back and set real achievable goals before starting anything.

• What resources do we have? Do we have the resources to handle communication? Do we have the funds to hire someone new, train existing employees or invest in technologies? Social media is all about open, transparent, and real-time communication -  so if your current and/or potential customers want conversation, you better be able to provide it for them. They expect – and deserve – to have that level of engagement, and if you nail it, if you develop real relationships, you will also develop some serious and committed brand ambassadors for your company and products. Make sure you have the proper resources in place, so you don’t short-change your customers.

• How committed are we? Right now, who isn’t excited about social media? You look around, and everybody’s doing it – what’s not to love? Well maybe the level of commitment that you will be required to adhere to. Trust that as your community grows, so will the time that is needed to provide top level engagement. So stay committed to your goals and stay committed to your resources. If you are starting a social media training program for your company, that’s absolutely terrific. But make sure it doesn’t fade away. Make sure training is ongoing and make sure you demonstrate to your company your true commitment. They will feed off your excitement and in turn show dedication. And that excitement and dedication will reflect on your social media community.

Focus on these things and you will have a solid starting point for your company’s social media strategy. Start at the bottom, create a good foundation, and start building. The rest will come after, but without a solid foundation, cracks are sure to appear.

And who knows, you might even end up being a better date because of it.

What about you? Have you recently re-evaluated a social media strategy that had gone a little stale? What steps did your company take to freshen it up? Or if you’re just starting out, what are your thoughts on staff time allotment? How will you track your team’s level of engagement? As always we love to hear your comments and feedback.

Aaron Friedman is a member of the Content Solutions team at Resolution Media where he is experienced in SEO ranging from local, Digital Marketing, to National and Global Search Marketing. Aaron specializes in content creation including Social Media Strategy, Image and Video Optimization. He blogs at Digitalhighrise.com. Follow him on Twitter and connect with him on Linkedin.

Let’s time travel a little bit this morning. Everyone think back to your first summer job. Whether it was working the cash at a fast food restaurant, chasing after kids at a summer camp or maybe saving lives at the local pool, you can probably remember going through some form of training. Extensive or short, your attitude towards it might not have been that enthusiastic. We’ve all been there, not asked the questions we should have and also not been told as much under the banner of being “just the summer workers”. Now imagine your current workplace having that atmosphere as you are trying to teach and learn the massive new area of Social Media. Suddenly the lifeguard chair looks pretty good.

Before you start building out your training strategy, before the evaluation of where your staff members fall and before the words “Social Media” cross people’s lips around the water cooler, there’s one thing that you need to make clear straight out of the gate. There is no stupid question.

It’s a common phrase that we all say multiple times a day, while most of us are secretly thinking I wonder how stupid the question I’m about to hear is. But here’s the thing, thinking that is part of the problem. For those of us that live and breathe social media everyday, it might seem like common sense to not post your weekend exploits on your twitter feed, but maybe that Service Manager’s brother’s band was playing at that bar and he really did want everyone to come and get all the way down with their bad selves. In a personal and brand reputation sense, it might not be the best tweet in the world but currently we don’t teach that type of etiquette in our regular K – 12 education system.

Common sense is not common in a new developing industry. Why? Because nothing in social media is yet to be common. It takes us years as children to learn what is and isn’t appropriate in our own culture, so don’t expect others to join the social media culture and know exactly what fork to use the first meal in.

Training your staff is as much about training yourself to accept that there are different levels of awareness. It’s our privilege to learn from the entire world and share what we learn with others. So trainers, really listen to what your staff is saying and don’t roll your eyes at anything that comes out of their mouths. And staff make sure you ask what a hashtag is, ask where to click to send a tweet, ask if telling the world what color underwear you’re wearing is a valid contribution to a discussion on emerging apparel trends in Europe. Just ask. If both sides of your training equation keep an open and honest attitude, than the training itself will end up going a lot smoother.

What questions have you always wanted to ask about social media but have been too afraid to be labeled as the newbie? What attitudes do you think your organization will have to overcome in order to build an open, accepting of questions culture? Let us know in the comments below or better yet ask someone you work with and a start a conversation!

Generally speaking, the arrival of spring heralds the end of a long suffering winter. The air softens, the ground beneath us begins to open up as daffodils and hyacinths awaken, and the trees are a’burst with plump buds. Sadly, for many of us this year, that hasn’t necessarily been the case. But whether warm and wet or feisty and frosty, spring never fails to inspire in us a feeling of renewal. Of change. And, depending on how far north you live, a feeling almost of rebirth – once again you can safely emerge from hibernation, and take on the world!

Spring also brings with it funny rituals. We spring ahead and gain an extra hour of daylight. The more industrious among us embark on a flurry of spring cleaning. And if you’re a baseball fan, the advent of spring training each year has you giddier than a schoolgirl. Well, spring training is our focus for the month of May. Not the grapefruit league. We’re talking team social media.

Have you been thinking about embracing social media engagement for your brand, but have been unsure of where to start? Do you think it’s simply too high a mountain for your organization to climb? That it’s going to be too complicated? Too expensive? Or that your core staff members will be hard to convince and/or train? We are here to show you how you can accomplish your goal, and not break your back – or the bank – doing it. Our latest eBook, “Training Your Company for Social Media” is out (you can download it here), and in it, you will find a comprehensive guide that will help your company – and your staff – learn the fine points and protocols of social media use.

Also, for the next month, the Social Strategy blog will be diving deeper into how you can get your company’s social media arm up and running, and keep it healthy and happy. We’ll be talking to industry thought leaders about why internal training is the first – and maybe most important – step you need to take. Should you hire a social media consultant, or not? And if you do, what should you be on the lookout for? How can you effectively motivate your team and turn even the most diehard naysayer into a skilled social media user? Plus, if you’re in the thick of social media, chances are good that at some point you’ll hit the odd pothole. Nothing is ever non-stop sunshine, roses, and unicorns. So we will illustrate steps you can take to protect yourself from PR nightmares, and how to recover if that rogue tweet has already hit the cloud. The heart of social media engagement is its people. And people sometimes make mistakes. But forewarned is forearmed, and with best practices in place and the right employees at the helm, a few small bumps in the road will not be of concern.

Now, this is where you come in. We want to hear from you, and get your thoughts and ideas about what you would like covered for the next month. Is there one particular issue that you are dealing with internally that cannot get resolved? Have you explored social media but stepped back because you felt it was too complicated? Are you getting push-back from employees? Or are you an eager employee, getting push-back from the C-Suite? Please let us know in the comments section what you would like covered, and how we can help.

Social media engagement isn’t a walk in the park. But it shouldn’t be so intimidating that you ignore all that it can bring to your organization. Just as you would deal with a lamentably late spring that is still roaring like a lion, get your sou’wester and your wellies on, pick up that glove and play ball. Before you know it, the sun will be shining, and you and your company team of social media experts will be rounding third and sliding headfirst into home, while reaping the benefits of all your hard work.

It never fails to stun when an event that takes months to build goes by in what feels like a blink of an eye. It’s hard to believe that only a week ago we were hours away from wrapping up Social 2011. Here we are, a week later, some of us still reeling from the experience (I will admit to being a conference newbie), and still digesting the immeasurable benefits that come from attending such an event. Whether it’s meeting your online-friends face to face for the first time, learning from the best in the trade or being part of the indefatigable ‘behind the scenes’ team pulling the whole thing together – or a combination of all three – you can’t help but come away with your DNA slightly altered.

On Monday, Lauren Vargas promised you a round up of some of what was published by you – your thoughts on our conference - so buckle up, cause here we go!

Jim Tobin, President at Ignite Social Media, recapped Day 1 of Social 2011, which featured an opening keynote by Dell’s Senior Vice President and CMO Karen Quintos, and their Executive Director of Social Media, Adam Brown. Tobin also wrote in detail on Paul Greenberg’s keynote from Day 2. His breakdown is clear and concise, so if you missed the event or were too wrapped up in Paul’s speech to take notes, print this out and tack it to your cork board.

Chuck Hemann and Ken Burbary both wrote great overviews of, and their personal opinions on, the latest Radian6 product announcements, and brilliantly recapped the overall feel for the event. Blake Cahill, principal at Banyan Branch told the story of the Evolution of The Agency “Mad Men”, which – from a ‘poke fun at ourselves’ perspective – was a highlight of the event. Blake included in his post a selection of tweets on the panel, as well as some telling pictures. Go have a look, and decide for yourselves what you think is in those tumblers! And Rebecca Denison from Edelman Digital, Chicago, breaks Social 2011 down concisely as five lessons learned. Find out her thoughts on the social enterprise, empowering evangelists, and fish. Yes, we said fish.

We had a great turn out of students from Boston University at out event, and don’t have to remind you that at times it is incredibly refreshing to see the world – our world – through the eyes of those just getting started. Some of those students guest blogged for us here on our site over the last week, detailing the panels and keynotes they were able to attend, so please take a walk through and read their musings. One student did a bang up job of reporting for BU Now, Boston University’s blog. A senior at the College of Communications, Samantha Kops’ post is chock a block with video and pictures, as well as her thoughts on Day 1 of Social 2011.

Ottawa based Marketing Research Specialist Lucas Powell produced a detailed look at the event called Radian6 Social2011 Hashtag Report. Using conversation clouds, topic trends and influencer widgets, he provides a creative breakdown of the event in numbers, graphs, quotes and pictures. Well done and worth a look. Then click on over to No Sweat Social, where you’ll find a neat lineup titled Top 5 Quotes and Themes From Radian6 Social 2011.

And what’s an event without pictures? Internet Marketing Consultant and Boston Tweetup founder Joselin Mane took some great candid shots from Social 2011. Social Media Strategist Jim Storer, one of the founders of Boston’s The Community Roundtable, did as well. And the Radian6 Flickr stream is full to bursting with snaps. A picture’s worth a thousand words, as the old saying goes, so be sure to check them all out.

Last, but certainly not least, a special treat. A special thank you, to everyone who attended. This video says it all really. Fair warning though – it goes by so fast that you will find yourself watching it again and again. So crank up your speakers, and enjoy this fast paced look at what was a fast paced, super fun 48 hours. Hours that went by in the blink of an eye.

ROI. Return on Investment.

As a business student at Boston University’s School of Management, I’ve had this performance measurement drilled into me. We use it to analyze the efficiencies of a variety of investments in order to help pick the best investment. ROI makes sense in any business and I always wondered how ROI was intertwined with marketing efforts. More specifically, how to measure the ROI of social media marketing.

Last week, I had the honor of going to Radian6’s Social2011 User Conference where I found the beginning to my answer. The event was filled with very influential people/speakers within the social media industry and even some star power such as Isaiah Mustafa. Besides being blown away by the people and the topics covered, what really struck a chord was on the last day when Social Media ROI was covered. Here are some key things that stuck:

“Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.”-KD Paine

I feel like this quote really sums up the fact that there has been a lot of confusion (and even panic) regarding measuring social media ROI. What the guest panelists were getting at is that yes, social media is a new platform and “unknown”. But, that doesn’t mean we need to throw every marketing ROI out the window because it may seem irrelevant now. That also doesn’t mean we need to make everything seem impossibly complex. And it especially does not mean we should quit on social media. Every component is still pretty much the same with just a few new little twists when calculating ROI. There is no need to reinvent that wheel.

ROI Will Be Different For Everyone

It will be hard to compare ROIs across companies simply because each business has different objectives. Some companies may just want to use social media to complement their promotional campaign and drive short-term sales. Other companies may have already engaged the consumer and want to encourage word of mouth. So really there doesn’t seem to be a standard ROI measurement that applies to everyone for comparison evaluation. There only exists the right ROI performance measurement for an individual company and its individual objectives.

Listen To The Data

Programs such as Radian6 gives marketers a platform to help measure, listen and engage with the entire social web accurately. It is important to have such programs because marketers do not want to set themselves up for failure from the start. What I mean to say is that it makes sense that if the metrics, the data, or the lack of data are unclear and unreliable, whatever objective you have for your ROI will end up seeming ineffective and failing. With a quantifiable ability to measure effectiveness, it will allow marketers to measure and adjust to the needs of the consumers.

Lastly…

I think firms need to remember why they are using social media. Don’t use social media for the sake of using social media. Social media isn’t like traditional media where all you do is push marketing initiatives onto the consumer. Social media very much a consumer controlled world and they can, and will, weed irrelevant information, brands, and even people out. A marketers job is to provide a place for consumers to become aware of a brand, connect and engage with the brand, and then talk about the brand with others. And at the end of the day, this really is no different from addressing the original Consumer Purchasing Process we all know.

Dianna Zheng is a Senior at Boston University studying marketing and advertising, she blogs at http://adbinge.wordpress.com and you can find her on Twitter.

Paul Greenberg was a keynote speaker on Friday morning at Radian6’s #Social2011 giving his presentation, Is Social CRM for real? He began with some pretty strong words – “This is a SOCIAL communications revolution that impacts all institutions – business among them.” He explained that the way we communicate has changed forever and will continue to trend this way.

The underlying reason? Trust.

“People trust differently. You trust your peers more than you trust any company,” he claimed. To solidify this he asked the audience to raise their hands if they used social sites to determine what kind of restaurants they go to or products they buy. He might as well have asked how many people eat every day.

He cited the Edelman Trust Barometer 2011 to explain that customers want businesses to produce high quality products and services, conduct honest business practices and be authentic.

When engaging a customer you want to generate information in their own environment. In the customer ecosystem you are engaging in real-time with customer centric updates.

If you want people to trust your brand you should be instigating conversation around it. Don’t be the only ones talking about how awesome your product it, get your consumers to do it. They may not trust Coca-Cola saying they’re better than Pepsi, but they will trust Joe from Maryland.

Generate buzz around your products and watch as your customers build your brand. Continue engaging them and eventually they’ll do your job for you.

Paul used the example of Proctor and Gamble asking customers to develop some of their new products. It was a bold maneuver, but actually turned out very successfully. Such products like the Swiffer or The Magic Eraser wouldn’t have been invented if it wasn’t for customer insight.

Give it a shot. Talk to some people. See what happens. Marketing was your father’s job, engagement is ours.

Paul Hlatky studies Marketing and Management Information Systems at Boston University with a minor in Philosophy. One of the few comedians interested in technology, media, marketing and entrepreneurship. Follow him on twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

My daily diet consists of traditional media with a side of social, but more and more, social media has taken over the entree portion of the menu. This is the way advertising is changing for all of us and at the Radian6 Social 2011 User Conference, the discussion of integration was more rampant than a Friday night at the Cheesecake Factory. After all, mixing media is all about reaching your audience in all facets. And that includes social.

But back to the moment.

One of the breakout sessions at the conference – Build a Better Campaign: Research, Plan and Integrate – was all over this topic. The panel of marketing meccas from Ogilvy, Weber Shandwick and more presented a smorgasbord of award-winning campaigns that integrate traditional with social (i.e. OscarMayer’s @wienermobile and American Airlines’ wifi notifications).

The insights from this panel were magnificent and I was eating it up. Campaign strategies nowadays need to merge new media with the old – social with traditional. That’s how you best reach your audience. Here’s why:

• Old – Enable your audience to get in touch via a strong call to action.
• New – Push multiple touch points.

• Old – Respond to customer requests after they send them.
• New – Be there before something happens.

• Old – Traditional media is a campaign.
• New – Social media is a commitment.

• Old – Ensure paid/owned/earned media interconnects.
• New – Ensure paid/owned/earned media interconnects.

Like that last one? See, what I learned is we’re not saying everything is changing. In fact, a lot is staying the same. Community, communication, ROI, etc. are things we’ve lived by as marketers for many, many, many years (way before I was even a thought). There is a shift happening and we need to be smart about it. Then and now.

Hungry? Let’s go.

Amanda Nelson has been a New York and Connecticut advertising campaign manager for over eight years. She’s worked on all facets of advertising from interactive (her personal favorite area) to traditional media. She enjoys creating unique, on-strategy campaigns. She also enjoys her border collies, tap dancing and her husband Tom. She blogs at a-media-mix.com. @mileigh13

I’m a business school student. I haven’t been to many conferences and didn’t really know what to expect from Radian6’s #Social2011. But I had at least heard of the concept. The “un-conference” however, was completely new to me. So naturally, I decided to go check it out.

I entered a small room as Kary Delaria from Kane Consulting began her presentation explaining the real world application of the Radian6 technology in her work. She went through a case analysis of an anonymous company with us and explained the four steps she took in developing her report.

Competitive advantage

She looked at her client’s social presence and compared it to their competitors. She examined every bit of information to determine what they should stop, start and continue doing.

Where to establish presence

Looking at the competitive landscape, Kary went through it using her own methods aided by Radian6 to determine where to establish the presence. Unfortunately, she couldn’t cite specific examples without giving away too much information about the client.

Optimal keyword phrase and content

Now that the client knows what they should be doing and where they should be doing it it’s time for them to learn how to engage their customers. She combed through data piles to determine which keywords were most recognized and what content appealed to customers. Of course this may be a bit tedious, but necessary if you want satisfied clients.

Benchmarks for measuring goals and success

Finally she leaves her customers with goals and benchmarks that they should strive for. I asked her if there were any particular ones that she usually recommended but she said that it all depended on the company.

I felt as if I was in a class lecture going over a Harvard Business School case study, expect this time I was actually interested. This wasn’t a case about a company decision 10 years ago that I would never be involved with, this was something that just took place where I could ask for insights from the people that actually conducted the research and made the decisions. I felt like I was a freshman in college again. I was interested in the material and surrounded by a room full of very smart people sharing very smart ideas. Unconferences? Yea, I could get used to this.

Paul Hlatky studies Marketing and Management Information Systems at Boston University with a minor in Philosophy. One of the few comedians interested in technology, media, marketing and entrepreneurship. Follow him on twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Since last Wednesday, I’ve been sick with a sore throat, which slowly morphed into rampant sneezes and a headache. But that didn’t stop me from jumping at the chance to check out the social media conference happening at the waterside hotel.

Lured by the promises of seeing (and smelling) what ‘my man could look like’, my peeps and I attended the tweetup party on Thursday night. I happily tottered away that night with a precious picture with Isaiah Mustafa, along with a blue glitter party hat and dead glow sticks – all signifying a night well done.

Eight hours later, I was back at the hotel, listening to Weber Shandwick’s Natalie Petouhoff, Bank of America’s Kevin Cole, and Sword Ciboodle’s Mitch Lieberman’s experiences and expertise on social media strategy in terms of integrating the voice of the customer beyond the call center (that was the name of the breakout session, by the way).

They discussed the use of live tools for data and research for customer service and social media strategy, instead of reading monthly reports. The timeliness of the former actually helps mobilize the whole organization into acting on the data and feedback they received, as compared to reading a report, putting it down and possibly just forgetting about it – hearing, but not listening.

However, they did warn against the shadows of such speedy communication on platforms, such as Twitter. They asked the audience: “Are we encouraging negativity since people know we’re listening?” If consumers know they’re listening, will they always expect answers in seconds to questions that may take a day to answer? Perhaps that is the time to differentiate between questions that may be answered via Twitter and ones that may be answered via e-mail, they said. So let the customer know what your next actions are.

Caroline Fong is a senior studying Advertising at Boston University. She’s on the board of BU’s Ad Club and is an active volunteer for a non-profit called ASPIRE. Follow her on Twitter

I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable guy on all things “social.” I follow Mashable, stay active on Twitter and try to squeeze in a networking event every once in a while. But until I went to the Radian6’s #Social2011 panel Integrating the Voice of the Customer Beyond the Call Center I could never have told you the difference between business and social business.

Businesses are already familiar with external communities. All too often companies tweet into cyberspace about updates and product promotions hoping to engage customers. All these companies, new and old, have also developed cultures in which they understand their own etiquette on communication within the organization.

A social business is when the two meet, marry and create a hybrid community that helps the bottom line. “A social business happens when you use external and internal communication,” said Mitch Lieberman of Sword Ciboodle, “Pat them on the back. Appreciate them. Engage within the organization as well as outside.”

Kevin Cole of Bank of America agreed and suggested that companies should be careful about choosing their customer service representatives. He suggests looking for someone in the organization that can be classified as a “connector.” They shouldn’t be the tech people within the company, but rather the people with intensive networks within the organization. Why? Because they get it. He explains “Online can be personal. Many people using social media are self-service customers. Social Media is an opportunity to reestablish brand.” So why not have your best communicators and networkers engaging your organization’s valued customers?

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff of Weber Shandwick explained the 1-9-90 principle.

• 1% are super- users, customers that generate content and interact.

• 9% respond to super-users.

• 90% are passive but still read the content.

The goal, she said, is to engage the super-users.

Dr. Petouhoff also cited a real-world example where DirectTV found customers that were passionate about their remotes and DVR’s. She explained that DirecTV brought these guys in and had them deal directly with customer complaints. Did they accidentally convince a customer to blow up their home theater? No. They were actually very successful at dealing with the customers.

What does this mean for your business?

Only you can answer that. I wouldn’t suggest grabbing customers with high Klout scores and making them VP of Marketing just yet. But as you seek to engage your customer always keep in mind that it’s meant to be a conversation and not another status report.

Paul Hlatky studies Marketing and Management Information Systems at Boston University with a minor in Philosophy. One of the few comedians interested in technology, media, marketing and entrepreneurship. Follow him on twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

The year 2011 will go down as the year I begin to let Twitter drive my social life. It seems fitting that I would find out about Radian6 and the #Social2011 conference via a friend’s tweet. What was unexpected though was the absolute inspiration shown from the staff at Radian6 towards our group of Boston University students. We arrived as a crowd, but knew we had to network. So we walked around the party, trying to make ourselves available to anyone who would talk to us by travelling in smaller groups to make it less awkward. Radian6′s Geoff Anderson – the self-described Cloud Computing Evangelist, Mad Scientist and Product Manager for the company – took notice of how we were mingling and was impressed enough to invite us back for the second day of events. In return, we were offered a chance to guest blog on the company website. Free conference, an education, chance to gain exposure and permission to play hookey? Something I couldn’t pass up!

The #Social2011 experience for me started off last Thursday night when we were put into awkward situations (some call in networking) in which we were introducing ourselves to others and talking (or bragging) about what we do. That night I saw the power of social media. Meeting with other students and chatting with people I followed on twitter, but never met, was an eye opening experience. Eager to forge on with my newly discovered super awesome networking skills I was halted by the man of the hour, Isaiah Mustafa. His presence in the room that night could be felt instantly, everywhere. I patiently waited in line to shake his hand and ask him how he was doing. Let’s be real though, I just wanted some tips for the gym. How does he do it?! P90X?, hours in the gym? He wouldn’t budge.

The real education began early the next morning with the day’s opening keynote. The topic of Paul Greenberg’s speech was Is Social CRM For Real? He laid the framework for conversation by showing how we are going through a communications revolution. Mobile business has become critical to the environment we are in. He emphasized that businesses need to start paying attention to this and create content that is “mobile friendly.” Paul then discussed the Trust Barometer, which is a product of a global PR firm called Edelman. This Edelman Trust Barometer listens, questions, and evaluates the consumers trust in various businesses based on certain metrics. By using credible sources along with relevant experiences, Edelman can measure the depth of relationships that help brands build credibility. The Edelman 2011 conclusion: “you trust your peers far more than you trust a company.” It was important to understand how important influential consumers are compared to the reputation of a company. This new trust architecture is heavy on transparency and engagement, which hopefully sets new expectations for corporate leadership. Paul left us with some encouraging words before concluding; “…the fear of what might happen, is the power of the social consumer.” Start listening.

Next, I had a chance to sit in on some of the breakout sessions. Define the ROI of Social & What’s the Value of Influence? were the two I chose. The discussion on ROI left me with a sour taste, apparently “it depends” is the answer used a lot in how to measure in certain situations. I understand that you may have to create different standards from business to business, but some factors must be consistent, right? Lauren Vargas did a great job moderating and not letting the social media “smack down” get out of control. The key takeaway for me was from Joe Thornley “It’s easy to have a score, but better to know what needs to be improved upon.” I understand we can come up with metrics to represent what we are trying to measure, but what happens when it boils down to making a hard decision? We are left with your understanding and experience of what those numbers mean that lead you to making smarter decisions.

The breakout session on the value of influence was a huge hit for me. It helped me to be aware of the notion that we need to study and analyze human behavior in order to maximize value. Chuck Hemann mentioned “Influence does not equal reach, but when you combine relevance AND reach, you’ve got a powerful equation.” What I learned most from Chuck was that we have many influencers on various social sites as well as in our daily encounters. Being able to identify these influencers and understand what kind of communications platforms they get most excited about will turn into a big win. In closing the session, Philip Sheldrake encouraged us to, “focus on the people who are already influenced, they will ultimately do the influencing for you.

My experience over these quick 24 hours truly heightened my excitement for the future of social media programs in business. As a soon-to-be college graduate, the education gained will help give me a leg up on competition.

Overall, what was your favorite part of #Social2011? Your key takeaways? Are you more prepared to defend your ROI numbers?

Trent is a BU student studying Organizational Behavior and Business. He consults for the BU school of management on their social media strategy. Trent enjoys playing racquetball and cycling around Boston!  An avid twitter user, but still an emerging blogger, you can learn more about him here, and follow him on twitter.

Radian6 Social 2011 was a constant 48-hour flurry of people buzzing from room to room, conversation to conversation and screen to screen. Conversations would subside as keynotes took the mics and panelists shared their stories. Once the lights came on and the sessions closed, the doors would open and out would pour the attendees speaking louder and with new knowledge to share. The third floor of the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel was a nonstop conversation between nearly 800 people. Each hour this scenario would repeat and I was in amongst it all.

To say the least, Social 2011 was more than a conference. By definition, a conference is an act of conferring or consulting together, but that is only a small piece of what occurred. Sure, in the two-day event there were multiple keynotes, breakout sessions, panelists and product announcements from significant movers and shakers in the social media world. But on top of that, conversations were happening in person and online from like-minded individuals seeking to quench their thirst of social media knowledge. And so, we learned from each other through conversations. I found myself just as excited to meet and talk to people as I was to sit down with my laptop before a session. I knew I was learning at all times.

From the agency perspective, the learnings were immense and I’m still thinking through the key nuggets. Here’s a taste.

• No one is saying that traditional media is going away and social is taking over. This is about integration and finding smart ways to reach your audience through multiple mediums. Social needs to be a part of the strategy but it is not the only strategy. Neither is traditional. Make them work together.

• Listen to the conversations about your brand and respond. It can be as easy as searching on Twitter or utilizing your Radian6 dashboard. From there, act. Like American Airlines found, responding to a small yet frequent question (i.e. which planes have wifi?) can turn stressed travellers into loyal customers because you were there when consumers needed you.

• Ensure your team is part of the conversation. Employees are the brand. They are communicators. Use this to your advantage and embark on social evangelism as a company. Chief Listening Officer can be the title of each and every employee at your company. We all have that role.

Looking back on the event, I can safely say I was amazed at how much I crammed in my brain. It took a while to digest and I believe I’m still doing so. I have at least five Google docs of notes jumbled around to cull through and re-read. Then there’s the 10,000+ tweets in the #social2011 Twitterstream. Not to mention the nearly 10 videos from the keynotes. But those are all signs that point to one thing – a good experience. By the time I’m done reflecting and implementing what I’ve learned, it will be time for Social 2012. I’ll be ready.

You’ll find a selection of photos from Day 1 of Social 2011 here.

Amanda Nelson is a New York and Connecticut advertising campaign manager for over eight years. She’s worked on all facets of advertising from interactive (her personal favorite area) to traditional media. She enjoys creating unique, on-strategy campaigns. She also enjoys her border collies, tap dancing and her husband Tom. She blogs at a-media-mix.com. @mileigh13

Day 2 of Social 2011 dawned in Boston with sunshine and blue skies. And fatigue and bleary eyes. Let’s face it, with so many incredible attendees at the event, Day 1 definitely did not end at 5:00 p.m.. As happens at all conferences, people were meeting ‘old friends’ from Twitter and Facebook often face to face for the first time. Or connecting with bloggers and agency people from around the world they normally would not get a chance to connect with. But everyone was a trouper, and as much as the day dawned bright and sunny, it also dawned with a packed auditorium for the first keynote address of the day. *Note: It was also opening day for the Red Sox. Against the Yankees. The city was literally vibrating with excitement!

Radian6′s CEO Marcel Lebrun opened up with some personal thoughts from the day before. What a pleasure it had been meeting so many new people. And how thrilled he was with all of the feedback. He highlighted tweets from the day before, and, a la Bruce Springsteen from his “Born in the U.S.A.” days, he pulled from the audience and spoke directly to the author of his favourite tweet, one which may or may not have started the rumour that Radian6 will be launching it’s own beer soon! It was a fun, genuine moment that clearly highlighted the power of what social media is all about – person to person communication.

Wasting no time, Lebrun introduced speaker Paul Greenberg. President at The 56 Group and author of the hugely successful business bible CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategy, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers, Greenberg quite simply owned the room. A relaxed, real speaker without pretense, he spoke about how social media has absolutely and without precedent changed our world. It hasn’t only changed how we communicate, but has fundamentally changed how we trust. And he asked a powerful question: can we strip away the hype, without killing the buzz? Watch his keynote for that answer and much more.

The day moved on with more product announcements. The new Managed Accounts feature provides centralized management and sharing of your corporate social media accounts for collaborative workflow. We will be rolling out support for Twitter Managed Accounts in the next few weeks. And the Engagement Console Extensions Gallery will provide a bagful of useful utilities and third party integrations to make your engagement more efficient and easy. Customers and third party developers will be able to create custom extensions for the Extensions Gallery and optionally, share them with the community. Watch for more information on these new products coming soon on the Platform blog.

Attendees then faced an almost Sophie’s Choice’esque dilemma of choosing which of the next two rounds of Breakout Sessions to attend. There were lessons on ensuring the voice of your customer reaches your employees at Integrating the Voice of the Customer Beyond the Call Center. Plus the always hot topics of influence and ROI in social media were debated – sometimes hotly – in Can You Define the ROI of Social? and What’s the Value of Influence?.

The afternoon’s Breakout Sessions began by exploring the trust that keynote speaker Paul Greenberg spoke about earlier, with the panel How to Scale ‘A Person Like Me’. The power of real-time engagement was looked at during High Performance Participation Brands. But what really lit up the twitter stream was the group of agency “Mad Men” who took the stage, scotch in hand (a prop, surely!), to discuss The Evolution of the Agency. Panel participant Blake Cahill crafted a great post about it, complete with a series of panel related tweets and pictures. And as we mentioned yesterday, search the Twittersphere with #social2011 for tons of takeaway and people’s thoughts and impressions from all of the event panels.

In between coffee breaks, training sessions and product demonstrations, people also could attend Friday’s line-up of Un-Conference sessions:

• From Web Montitoring to Data Driven Strategic Management
• From Strategy to Engagement: How Omaha Steaks is Riding the Social Media Wave
• A Foundation for Strategic Success
• THRiVE: A Product Built by the Savers, for Savers

All of these sessions were well crafted, presented and well received. We have included links to some of the Un-Conference participants slides and video, and will be including many more in the next few days.

The closing keynote panel was exceptional and deftly handled by Radian6‘s Chief Marketing Officer, David Alston. Wendy Harmen, the Social Media Director for the American Red Cross, summed up the theme of Social 2011 when she spoke about how every single ARC employee and volunteer are seen as spokespeople for the organization. And she provided a clear case study on building a robust community, a community with one goal – helping people. Then B. Bonin Bough, Global Director of Digital and Social Media, PepsiCo, bounded onstage with characteristic energy, and shared an amusing anecdote involving newsrooms, Barack Obama, and their groundbreaking Mission Control listening and engagement centre. Lastly, Old Spice’s ‘man your man could smell like’ Isaiah Mustafa took the stage. Ever wonder how much CGI is actually used in the making of those iconic spots? Less than you would imagine. Think harnesses, ice cold water, and a props team beyond compare. Mustafa was a warm and self-deprecating “every man”, and managed to squeeze in time for photos with people, even though he was rushing to catch a flight.

And then there were none. Which brings us – brought us – sadly to the end. Turns out that old nugget is true: time really does fly when you’re having fun.

We welcome your comments and feedback about everything you’ve seen here. If you were at the event, what was your favourite part? Suggestions to make next year even better? And we encourage you to keep your eyes peeled for a lot more Social 2011 content in the next few weeks.

Whew! Last week was exhausting, but exciting! Everyone home safely? Luckily, Boston graced us with great weather and friendly faces during our conference.

Thanks to all of you (Radian6 team, panelists, speakers and attendees) for making our inaugural user conference a success! Over this next week, our team will be sharing the slide decks from our panels and speakers, as well as posts written by our extraordinary team of guest bloggers. As you digest the post-conference materials, check out the brilliant pictures of #Social2011 captured by Jim Storer and Joselin Mane.

And to answer the question, all of you have been asking…what music was playing during the conference? We have built a playlist on YouTube, so you can rock to all the cool tunes as you relive the conference in the content we post later this week. Also, the catchiest tune of the entire conference was Viola, Popsicle Summer. Good luck getting this song out of your head!

At the close of the week, we will round up a list of those posts published by you about your thoughts on our conference. Please share in the comment section below the link to posts, pictures, videos and any other content from the conference you would like added to this post.

Also, as always we love your feedback. What did you take away from the event? If you weren’t there, did you manage to follow along via Twitter and/or our livestreaming? Who was your favourite speaker? And which panel provided you with the most food for thought?

We’ve created a Frankenstein known as real time business. In today’s world, social media has changed the landscape of how consumers interact with and affect companies. Amber Naslund, author of the book “The NOW Revolution,” helped explain how a business can adapt to this new world by becoming faster, smarter and more social.  Here’s a breakdown of how to do so:

Objective I: Faster

Amber explained that everybody on the web feels the demand of speed and that demand is amplified thousands of times now. We don’t wait around for information like we used to. In order to deal with this dilemma, companies need to build a new bedrock – a cultural foundation within the corporation that is shared and believed by all employees. Having a larger force of your employees out there helps customers get the answers they want and need quicker. She explained how some companies are scared to put the power of social media in their employees hands because they don’t trust what they will say. But according to Naslund, this means that the company has a hiring problem, not a social media problem.

Objective II: Smarter

Amber explained how although some companies are doing social media, they only respond to positive sentiment and ignore the negative complaints.  As an analogy, she brought up the idea of customer service centers and explained that in those situations, we wouldn’t hang up on someone for complaining – an idea that should be transferred to the world of social media.

Smart companies, she stated, have to make these complaints work for them. An example of this is @DellCares, who created a Twitter account that takes customer complaints and responds to them via social media.

Objective III: More Social

Even if a company transitions to just answering complaints and apologizing, they’d be making progress in social media. However, companies that really want to be a part of the NOW revolution need to engage in and create conversations.

Amber posted a picture of what she called the Humanization Highway.  This highway showed the transitions that a company needs to take to really own their brand in the social space:

Ignoring →  Listening → Responding → Participating → Storytelling

Companies need to also communicate in helpful, interesting, and human ways. An example of this is Subway and their spokesperson Jared. The brand created a memorable story that stood out in viewers’ minds and left a lasting impression on customers – far more than any $5 footlong could.

To conclude the breakout session, Amber emphasized that social media is a hard skill, and with more companies demanding employees know how to use social sites like Facebook and Twitter, it’s a job that can’t be handed off to the intern or tacked onto someone else’s job.

Maurice Rahmey is a student at Boston University studying public relations and business. He’s a member of BU’s Public Relations Student Society of America, an avid blogger at mrahmey.wordpress.com and a prolific tweeter (@mrahmey).

When Dell’s Chief Marketing Officer, Karen Quintos, stood up in front of hundreds of social media gurus to tell her admirable, successful social media journey with Radian6, I was ready to listen. If such a big corporation could realize the opportunity of social, implement it and succeed at it, then there was increased opportunity for other brands to follow suit.

But let’s go back.

Dell came to a realization that seemed to spawn their entire culture shift – social media is real. It plays a huge role in infinity and loyalty to customers and runs deep into cultural beliefs. So Dell made a move.

On day one at Social 2011, these facts were spewed all over the #social2011 twitter stream:

• 9,000 Dell employees are trained on social media
• 25,000 conversations about Dell are happening each month (which Dell rightfully refers to as “25,000 opportunities”)
• One woman with big ideas came forward to Dell and was soon hired as the Chief Listening Officer (@SusanBeebe)

Dell has clearly woven social into the fabric of their brand. They treat customer communications as a dialog versus a monologue. With tracking in their command center, they have demonstrable ROI. They understand their homepage is not Dell.com. It’s google.com, youtube.com, twitter.com, qq.com and so on.

This session was inspiring, but not because of the story. I knew the story. I’ve read the articles. The way Karen Quintos told the story is what got to me. She truly understands today’s media mindset and was engaged in spreading her solution.

As I work on the agency side of things, I help clients “get it” and be engaged and excited about their solutions. But it’s a journey. Hearing experiences like these should motivate marketers like me to work even harder.

You’ll find more awesome photos from Day 1 of Social 2011 here.

Amanda Nelson is a New York and Connecticut advertising campaign manager for over eight years. She’s worked on all facets of advertising from interactive (her personal favorite area) to traditional media. She enjoys creating unique, on-strategy campaigns. She also enjoys her border collies, tap dancing and her husband Tom. She blogs at a-media-mix.com. @mileigh13

“A very merry unbirthday to you, to you! It’s great to drink to someone and I guess that you will do, a very merry unbirthday to you!”  - Mad Hatter and the March Hare

When the enigmatic Lewis Carroll penned his fantastical Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, telecommunication was still the pipe dream of a few Mad Hatter style inventors. Our everyday normal of GPS, smart phones, the internet and social media would have been the stuff of science fiction. But Carroll was nothing if not a fantasist, and if you look closely at Alice’s world, and the world of social media, you could almost imagine that Carroll used his famous looking glass as a window into our future.

Social media can get a bit crazy, and the wily and smily Cheshire Cat couldn’t have said it any better when he said “We’re all mad, so you must be, or you wouldn’t have come here.” Our lives are populated with a multitude of gadgets, all of which tell the time. But like the skittery White Rabbit, who even with his ever present timepiece was always late for some important date or another, we find ourselves forever racing to catch the clock and with never enough time in the day. There’s Alice, a newbie if there ever was one, who sometimes makes the wrong remarks and upsets the rest of the creatures in Wonderland. And of course the festivities! Anyone who’s been to a social media function or two will recognize the similarities, from the royal court to the mad tea parties to the shouts of “off with his head!”.

Which brings us to Radian 6’s inaugural Social 2011, happening this week in Boston. Yes, there will be tea parties (we are in Boston). And while we’ve spent this last month giving you a good overview of the many panels and the amazing roster of guest speakers we have scheduled for April 7th and 8th, we couldn’t wrap it up without a look at our very own ‘unbirthdays’ – the unconferences sessions!

Our unconferences lineup is truly an impressive bunch, and includes presentations from corporations as diverse as Dell and Caterpillar. Industry thought leaders will explore the importance of measuring the real-time conversation happening in reaction to broadcast content, and why the social back channel has become such an important part of our TV experience. You will learn first hand the importance of conducting listening audits for clients, and how curating and analyzing statistical and ethnographic data can be used to position clients for strategic social media success.

Large corporations like the above mentioned Dell and Caterpillar will be sharing how a world wide social media presence is listened to, analyzed, controlled and acted upon, as well as how critical those actions are when you’re dealing with billion dollar brands. You will also hear how implementing new governance structures and training programs helped one company turn social media from a misunderstood/overhyped experiment (in the eyes of the naysayers) to an accepted business tool used and understood by employees and management across the board. Another session will walk you through why it is critically important to have a digital crisis communications team in place, especially if your company has employees, customers or partners located in countries outside of the U.S..

Frankly, there is just too much happening in our Social 2011 unconference sessions to write about it all here. And yes, we’re having a little bit of Alice in Wonderland fun here, mainly because we’re giddy with excitement that Social 2011 is right around the corner, but also because the Royal Court and Kings and Queens of social media have well honed senses of humour and love to poke fun at themselves and those around them. Which is exactly what the great Lewis Carroll was doing with his crowd when he wrote his classic stories.

Are you attending Social 2011? Will you be checking out our unconferences? Maybe you are a presenter. Which social media Alice in Wonderland character do you most relate to? As always we appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Powerful campaigns deliver a message that resonates with your audience – they inspire, motivate and influence people to take action. Campaigns help you raise the profile of everything you do, from launching an application, promoting a product, driving donations to your charity or bringing a community together on your website. Today, a strong social media strategy can help you achieve almost overnight what used to take months in the good ol’ days. And, the tools you use can help place your campaign head and shoulders above the rest – think Facebook, FourSquare, Digg, Twitter, and YouTube.

But it’s not enough to just create an amazing campaign, not anymore. You need to do things that haven’t been done before or even take an old idea and put a new spin on it. Good strategy is born from research and insights – but how do you get there? Where do you begin?

One of the most important social media skills to exercise is listening – but you know that listening isn’t enough when it comes to social media. Let your brand’s customers, fans and influencers drive the conversation. Don’t ignore detractors or the competition either. If you want to build a better campaign, you’re going to need to take what you’ve learned from your community and put it into action. Your campaign should be a thoroughly researched and carefully crafted plan based on what you have learned – good and bad – from your community and it must be fully integrated throughout your organization.

During our panel Build a Better Campaign: Research, Plan, and Integrate, industry thought leaders Adam Keats, Senior Vice President, Interactive, Emerging and Social Media Marketing at Weber Shandwick; Cat Lincoln, Founder & Principal at Clever Girls Collective; David Wickenden, Executive VP & Senior Partner, Managing Director, Digital Integration at Fleishman-Hillard and Gemma Craven, Senior Vice President, Digital Influence at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide will be sharing their experience on successful campaigns.

You’ll also learn what social tools have helped shape successful campaigns and how communications professionals integrate listening data into their communications strategy. Plus, they’ll answer questions like “How do I identify the right influencers and audience for campaign outreach?” and “What data and metrics are useful, and what could be misleading?”

What else would you like to learn? What challenges are you facing when it comes to creating your campaigns? What questions would you ask these thought leaders?

You can find Adam Keats blogging at Dad-o-Matic http://dadomatic.com/author/adamkeats and Cat Lincoln sharing all things clever at: http://clevergirlscollective.com/blog and you can read Gemma Craven insights at http://blog.ogilvypr.com.

Canada’s Industry Minister Tony Clement is a bit of a social media pioneer, at least among most government members at his level. The House of Commons’ very own ‘Millhouse’ (with all due respect, the resemblance has been well reported) has a Twitter following of over 14,000 people, and many of those followers are as opposed to him politically as chalk and cheese. They follow because, quite simply, his tweets are hilarious. He’s found the magic recipe and manages to disseminate equal parts government information with equal parts pop-culture references. Toss in a couple of tablespoons of wonderfully dry wit for good measure, and you end up with tweets like this one: “This morning: announcing $$ for university research infrastructure. Included: human-robot interaction lab! Not The Borg, I trust…”

But, before you think Canadian politicians are social media’s version of the ’24 Hour Party People’, keep this in mind. The House of Commons just gave MPs and political staffers the official thumbs up to use official (i.e. not web based) Twitter and Facebook apps on their government-issued BlackBerrys this past February. And, prior to adopting twitter, Mr. Clement was never known publicly as anything other than a staid and sober MP.

And that’s an important point, because what he did was lift the veil. Government agencies and those that run them tend to be inclusive, private, and mired in bureaucracy. And frankly, one wouldn’t want it any other way. Whether running a nation’s military or keeping the day to day machinations of a small city running smoothly, their role is to ensure that issues are handled with tact and diplomacy – and often with high levels of privacy and security. But their role is also to be at the forefront of world trends and advancements. Plus,it couldn’t hurt government departments and agencies at any level to appear a bit more human.

That’s just what we are going to talk about at our Social 2011 panel Cutting Through the Red Tape. Speakers Leah Miller, Community Relations Manager Army and Air Force Exchange Service; Chris Keevill, President at Colour; Dan Soschin, Director of Interactive Marketing with American Public University System; and Jack Holt, Georgetown University Lecturer/former DoD Sr Strategist for Emerging Media, Communication Strategist & Adjunct Lecturer, are going to explore how government departments and agencies are breaking the stereotypes of government communications by leveraging the power of the social web to increase awareness.

Canada’s Industry Minister Tony Clement certainly broke the stereotype. He also angered opposition MP’s when he tweeted recently about a change to government policy. His response to their criticism was indicative of how government agencies moving forward need to be thinking: “There is nothing different from articulating government policy via social media as compared to a news release, or a press conference or other means that have been traditionally available to politicians.”

Ultimately, government departments and agencies, and those within them, have a responsibility to stay relevant and connected to the people. Social media engagement can help governments at all levels accomplish that.

What do you think? Should politicians or government departments and agencies be actively engaged in social media. Could the public’s perception of government as being ‘more human’ through the use of social media be a bad thing? And do you have any questions or comments you would like to leave for our panelists?

Jack Holt blogs at http://www.jackholtlive.com/

Dan Soschin can be found at http://www.dansoschin.com/

Recently, a grand old brand set about to reinvent itself. Not only did they invest in an extremely creative and winking’ly tongue in cheek advertising campaign, they more than firmly embraced social media. In fact they gave it a big ol’ bear hug! And guess what? They saw remarkable results. Their Twitter followers increased by an astounding 2700%. There was an 800% increase in Facebook fan page visits, 300% increase in traffic to the brand website and countless YouTube parodies. Most importantly sales of its body wash more than doubled! Of course, we’re talking about Old Spice, and yes, in this case, that elusive social media ROI was clearly visible.

Old Spice had always been ‘your dad’s brand’, and while their reinvention was – and still is – a great marketing success story, most companies will not be able to gauge their social media ROI quite so clearly. Social media is all about relationships, and relationships take time to build. It is, quite simply, organic. And while marketers are faced with clients who want to see immediate results – and to be fair it’s their cold hard cash that’s at stake – social media strategy and engagement has to be approached with long-term thinking. Asking a corporation to go quietly into that good night is understandably a daunting proposition.

So how does one define the ROI of social? Is it through increased site traffic and fan page numbers? Or reduced returns and call center volume? At Social 2011’s panel Can You Define the ROI of Social? we are going to let the experts do the talking. Joseph Thornley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Thornley Fallis; Marshall Sponder, Analytics Associate, WCG; KD Paine, Chief Executive Officer, KD Paine and Partners; and Ken Burbary, Vice President Group Director, Strategy & Analysis, Digitas are going to look at how to manage social expectations, whether ROI is actually what you’re looking for, and, bottom line, if you really can measure and define the ROI of social media engagement?

The truth is that tracking whether your increase in Twitter followers or that spike in your brand’s Facebook fan numbers is having a direct impact on your bottom line is difficult. But remember, there are many ways to measure success. A well run – and well staffed – social media campaign will create passionate product users and fiercely loyal brand advocates who feel respected and valued by your company. And that, my friends, is priceless.

What do you think? What do you consider when measuring your social ROI? Is it even possible to define and measure the returns of a social media strategy? Do you have any questions or comments for our panelists? As always, we love hearing from you.

Caveat: While actor Isaiah Mustafa, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” from the above mentioned Old Spice ad campaign, is one of our keynote speakers at Social 2011, that is not why we used the campaign in this post. We used it because it’s an awesome example of a super successful social media campaign!

All of our guest panelists are thought leaders in their respective fields. For more from Joseph Thornley, visit ProPR; Marshall Sponder can be found at Webmetricsguru.com; KD Paine’s PR Measurement blog is at kdpaine.blogs.com, and read Ken Burbary’s thoughts on web business at kenburbary.com.

“The best community managers are like a good party host mixed with a fine restaurant host.” Author/blogger Chris Brogan

Community managers are sort of like tonsils. No one quite knows the role they play in your day to day health, but we know they’re important and we don’t rip them out at the first sign of a sore throat anymore. Ok, we’re having a little fun here (community managers are notoriously good humoured – fact). It’s also fact that if you Google “Community Manager” you will find a never ending number of definitions and descriptions for who they are and what they do.

Author Chris Brogan nailed it with his quote above. Party = personal. Restaurant = business. He breaks it down like this – a great party host is the glue that connects, the person who warmly welcomes their guests and makes sure they’re having an amazing time. When the party’s over, said host sends them safely off into the night with a smile and a wave. The restaurant host does much of the same, but since their guests are paying customers, they have a couple of added responsibilities. They must keep an eye on the kitchen to ensure valued guests are getting what they ordered, how they ordered it, and in a timely fashion. Plus, they have to be ready to roll up their sleeves and pitch in with the rest of the staff (waiters, bar staff, busboys) for the greater good of the restaurant. As Brogan says, community managers need “…both skill sets in equal space.”

At Social 2011, we are bringing some of the best community managers together to talk about what they do and how they do it in even greater depth. Rachel Happe, Principal & founder of The Community Roundtable; Jennifer Hughes, Social Listening Manager at Ant’s Eye View; D.J. Waldow, Director of Community, Blue Sky Factory; and Pierre Abraham, Social Media Producer with Beachbody will be digging into how the social web has helped create and define the role of community as an important part of connecting with customers and building business. They are also going to examine how the role of the community manager is evolving, and how you can change up a business strategy to include social media and community.

Whether your goal is retention, awareness, acquisition, or all three, one thing is for certain – your community manager/community team will be a vitally important piece of your social media strategy puzzle.

Do you have anything you would like to add? Do you agree that community managers are key? If not, tell us why. And let us know if you have any questions or comments for our crack team of panelists. As always, we value your feedback.

D.J Waldow muses on all things social at www.socialbutterflyguy.com. Rachel Happe’s thoughts on same can be found here www.thesocialorganization.com. And Jennifer Hughes writes about social media listening on the Ant’s Eye View web site.

Advertising and marketing, in some form or another, has been around for a very long time. In fact, the first newspaper advertisement, an announcement seeking a buyer for an estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, was published in the Boston News-Letter back in 1704. I’’m sure the folks at the helm of the Boston News-Letter never imagined a time when advertising would become as omnipresent as it is today.

So, on that note, we thought we would give you a very brief – and admittedly jumpy - history of some key events in its evolution:

1867 – James Walter Thompson buys Carlton & Smith from William J. Carlton, paying $500 for the business and $800 for the office furniture. He renames it after himself and moves into general magazine advertising. Later, he invents the position of account executive.

1911 – For the first time in its history, P&G pays an outside agency, J. Walter Thompson Co., to launch Crisco, its new vegetable shortening.

1929 – American Tobacco Co. spends $12.3 million to advertise Lucky Strikes, the most any company has ever spent on single-product advertising.

1947 – JWT becomes the first agency to surpass $100 million in billings.

1963 – “The Pepsi Generation” kicks off the cola wars.

1976 – The Supreme Court grants advertising First Amendment protection.

1981 – MTV debuts with frenetic video images that change the nature of commercials.

1993 – The Internet becomes a reality as 5 million users worldwide get online.

There’’s no need to point out that that last one was a game changer. And from the 2000′s onward the brave new world of the internet fundamentally changed the way advertisers worked and what tools they used on the ““get my product/service/company to the most eyeballs first – and keep it there!”” playing field.

Which brings us to social media. Clearly, based on advertising’’s long history, agencies and ad execs are extremely adaptable. Marketers and advertisers need to be at the forefront of what’’s trending and what isn’’t – and why. And they’ve been eager and early adopters of social media engagement and listening.

At Social 2011′’s panel “The Evolution of the Agency”, we’’re going to look at why social media, in all its forms, has become such a key element of agency strategy. Panelists Blake Cahill, Principal at Banyan Branch; David Armano, SVP, Social Business Planning & Integration at Edelman Digital; Jim Tobin, President of Ignite Social Media; Sean McDonald, Colony Master at Ant’s Eye View; and Slavisa Samardzija, Executive Vice President, Market Intelligence at Wunderman will be exploring how they use social strategies and integrated planning to reach key targets and deliver real value to their clients. How do agencies handle the unique challenges that social media brings on a global level? And what, if any, changes have to be made at the agency level itself, to integrate and successfully adopt social media strategies?

Social media has changed forever how we all do business. It has also changed the way customers view and respond to products and branding. It has, in some ways, made a smarter consumer, smarter than anyone back in 1704 could ever have imagined.

What do you think? Has social media impacted your work as a marketer, as a PR professional? Have you seen your clients change? And what does that mean to an agency? Has social media blurred the lines between traditional agencies? We appreciate your comments and questions.

Jim Tobin shares his views at http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/blog/, David Armano shares his views over at http://darmano.typepad.com/ and Sean McDonald can be found sharing his views at http://www.antseyeview.com/blog/.

Social media can give you tons of information, including some uninhibited comments from clients that can give you invaluable insights on your products and services. The problem is, with so many voices out there how do you correctly and quickly determine the flow of that information within your organization, decide how best to act on it, and then fully make use of it all? Our upcoming panel at Social 2011 – Integrating the Voice of the Customer Beyond the Call Center – will tackle just that question.

Joining us on this panel to give us their opinions will be Mitch Lieberman, Vice President of Marketing of Sword Ciboodle, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Chief Strategist, Digital Media, Social Media and ROI for Weber Shandwick and Kevin Cole SVP, Social Media Manager for Bank of America. With the amount of expertise and hands on customer relations experience on this panel, you will be sure to hear some leading methods of how to improve your skills when listening to your customers. What will these minds be tossing around for ideas?

• Who’s getting the information from clients, where does it really need to go and how do you make that happen?
• How do you move from just sharing the voice of your customers internally to integrating the voice of your customers into your procedures and actions?
• How do you use your social media monitoring and engagement platforms to engage with customers and use the knowledge gleaned to impact your competitive edge?

Does this topic interest you? How so and why? What would you like to hear about in relation to this topic? Check out www.social2011.com and then let us know in the comments!

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff shares her views at http://www.drnatalienews.com/dr-natalies-blog and Mitch Lieberman can be found sharing his thoughts on http://mjayliebs.wordpress.com

Imagine this: a customer walks into your national retail clothing store looking for a particular pair of shoes. Your salesclerk realizes the store doesn’t have them, and neither do any of your satellite stores. Your competitor, however, does. So, she purchases them for her customer, and has them delivered to her house on your dime.

Or this: a customer has scoured most of North America for an Armani tux to no avail. Your salesman sources said suit within a day, dispatches someone to haul it off a delivery truck, and even has it altered for the understandably elated customer. The kicker? While you are a high end clothing store, you don’t sell Armani.

The company we’re talking about actually exists – the American clothing store Nordstrom’s. It’s well known in the business world that Nordstrom’s employs some killer customer service, and has for decades, including thank you cards (before anyone else was doing it) and free home delivery. These anecdotes about Nordstrom’s are legendary, and since the company prides itself on discretion, we’ll never *really* know for sure if they actually occurred. What we do know however, is that over the years the chain has become 100% synonymous with customer service. And most of that reputation has been built through word of mouth.

Top notch customer service is rapidly becoming the key thing that separates the men from the boys in organizations large and small. And with social media platforms playing a key role these days in every aspect of marketing, sales, customer service and community growth, it pays to remember that customers are individuals. So how do you scale the power of the social web to ensure better results and a more ‘human’ response that reflects the people who make up your community?

At Radian6‘s inaugural user conference, Social 2011, the panel How to Scale ‘A Person like Me’ will explore just that. Featuring Brent Leary, co-founder and partner at CRM Essentials; Tara Roberts, Vice President, Social CRM Applications at Oracle; Esteban Kolsky, Principal and Founder of ThinkJar LLC; and Tom Divittorio, Director, Platform Solutions Architecture with Salesforce, these four customer service leaders are going to address some simple yet important ways your company can be a good citizen of your community, such as:

• How to really listen to your customers and quickly address problems while providing feedback.
• Why hiring the best people or sourcing those within your company with the appropriate skill set for social media is so vitally important.
• And what you can do to keep engagement natural and effective, even while employing the latest in social media analysis technology.

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review might have said it best, “…companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.”

What do you think? Are you making your online community a key facet of your business strategy? What questions would you like to ask our panelists? As always, we value your contributions.

“Influence – the power to sway or affect based on prestige, wealth, ability, or position”

Social media is all abuzz these days with talk about influencers – the social media rockstars with tens of thousands of followers and friends. Word of mouth marketing isn’t new, but today with social media its reach is out of this world. Smart, socially savvy corporations are hitching their wagons to these people, in order to spread their gospel. But – as with every trend – it pays to stop and think for a minute, before hopping on the train.

There are a few things businesses need to think about before reaching out to an online company advocate:

• How will you measure the influence of your influencer?
• What do those big follower numbers really mean?
• How do you track whether sales are directly related to an influencer’s positive blog post or great tweet?
• And with the rapidly changing tides of public opinion these days, should you invest heavily in an influencer who might have a short shelf life?

Our Social 2011 panel What’s the Value of Influence? is set up to tackle those questions and more. Panelists Chuck Hemann, Vice President, Digital Strategy & Analytics, Ogilvy PR Worldwide; author Philip Sheldrake; and Andrea Werdling, Director of Online Experience for Beachbody will be exploring the differences between influence and popularity, best practices for identifying key influencers, as well as looking at how businesses are measuring the impact influencers are having on their community.

At the end of the day though, no matter who spreads the word about your product or service, that product or service had better deliver.

Author Geoff Livingston nailed it not long ago with this: “A tow boat can only take a freighter out to sea, but if the actual ship is not sea-worthy it will sink with or without the tow. Similarly, influencers can only draw attention to something, but they can’t make a business, cause or idea succeed over the long term.”

What are your thoughts on influencers, good and bad? Are they just the latest thing, or an important part of your business strategy? And what other questions would you like our panelists to speak to? As always we value your input, so feel free to leave suggestions and comments below.

Statistics and statisticians have been around for a very long time. In fact, some scholars believe data analysis began as far back as 1662, the year a curious – if slightly macabre – Brit named John Graunt published Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. Statistics are a science, and they’re important for corporations for a number of reasons. They measure historical performance and forecast future targets. And for CEOs and investors, they provide insight into how areas of their business are performing, and help to predict and track trends to get a bead on what’s working, and what isn’t.

Social media engagement for business is definitely trending at the moment, and here’s an interesting statistic about it: in a 2010 study of the 100 largest Fortune 500 companies, 79% of them were found to be using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and corporate blogs to engage with customers and communicate with other stakeholders.

While those percentages are pretty impressive, many of those top 100 companies are what you would think of as social media givens. Big box electronics, department stores, gas, oil, car and communications companies are all represented. But what’s really interesting about the study is this: among those top 100 companies heavily invested in social media are major banks, insurance and health care corporations, and other such highly regulated and very sensitive industries.

Social media and ‘sensitive industries’ sounds like an oxymoron. But it isn’t. And while executives in these fields might be a slightly harder sell than, say, those in the music industry, statistics show they are buying it – and succeeding. So how do they do it?

Our upcoming panel at Social 2011 Staying Private in an Increasingly Public World is going to explore just that. Panelists Ellen Diebold, Social Media Consultant at Humana; Janie Graziani, Manager, New Media & Technology for AAA; and Forest Kenney, Manager, External Communications at Molson Coors Canada are experts at, as they call it, One To One To Many. Help one person privately via email and direct messaging, yet ensure that the lessons learned are used to help the rest of the community at a more public level.

One of the key elements of social engagement in heavily regulated industries is leaving a large digital footprint. While most of the magic might be happening offline, make sure your community knows you definitely are listening, responding and helping.

The bottom line is there are plenty of things to talk about on Twitter and Facebook, without having to compromise private information. And a crisis won’t occur if you share a little.

What do you think? Is it appropriate for industries that deal with highly sensitive personal information to have a presence in the social media world? Do you trust social media experts with your personal health or financial data? How does your organization deal with private dealings in a very public online world? And what questions would you like our panel to answer?

Once upon a time the majority of your brand’s customer interaction was a reactive process. Someone called or wrote in to your company with an issue and your customer service team responded to help with that issue. Often, a response or resolution could take days. Then things changed. Real-time engagement took center stage.

Now, through social media, your brand’s interaction with your customers is a more proactive process. Your brand uses social media platforms to reach out to customers and hold conversations, ask their opinions, look to them for ideas on new products and provide content that they’ll value based on what you’ve learned from them. Of course, you still have to deal with your share of issues but now you’re balancing them with interactions and engagement, too.

This is where your brand was meant to be. But what if your brand isn’t quite there yet?

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our Social 2011 panel High Performance Participation Brands. We’re going to explore how brands are going beyond passive listening and are becoming adaptive businesses, recognizing and responding with real-time engagement.

Our panelists, Barry Dalton: Senior Vice President Technology at Telerx, Claire Spinti: Global Community Engagement Specialist at 3M, Stephanie Marx: Social Media Marketing Manager at Cisco Systems and Wendy Kritt: Senior Director of Global Consumer Relations at Kraft, will share their experiences and answer the questions you’ve been wanting to ask. They’ll share what engagement means to their respective brands, how your brand can achieve a more proactive role and how you might balance the challenges of reacting while moving toward a proactive model.

Sure, there may be missteps along the way toward becoming a fully engaged brand, we’ve all had them, but with proper preparation and insight from our panelists, your brand can overcome these minor bumps in the road. After all, the benefits far outweigh the risks.

So, what do you think? Is this where your brand was meant to be? Is it risky to go beyond passive listening and engage or is it much more perilous not to?  We’re interested in what you’ve got to say, you’re the driving force. What would you’d like to learn from this panel? Let us know.

Not everything that is possible with the Radian6 platform comes packaged in our Dashboard or Engagement Console. Many of the coolest projects we’ve been a part of have been built using our API. Take Brandbowl for example. With Brandbowl, we partnered with Mullen and Boston.com and measured the online brand lift from a Super Bowl ad. This included total brand mentions and sentiment. In all, over 300,000 Tweets were analyzed during the course of the big game.

As social media develops further, more and more boundaries are being pushed with innovative projects like Brandbowl and others, projects that go outside the box and test the limits of what is possible. At our upcoming Social2011 panel Behind the Curtain: The Wizards of API we are going straight to the experts to find out more about it.

Joining us on our road to understanding what is possible we’ll have Edward Boches, Chief Innovation Officer from Mullen, Alex Brasil Analytical Lead at Google, Tony MacDonell, Chief Technology Officer of Teknision Inc. and Sean Greenlaw President/Project Manager of Lashpoint. These panelists have a wonderful split of marketing and technically geared thoughts that will give us a well balanced panel ready to answer any and all questions you may have. Each of them have very unique experiences dealing with API with some great use cases war stories of how the space has evolved.

What can you expect from this panel? We’ll touch on areas like how API can be used for extending functionality, improving automation and of course discuss the visualization that is possible for campaigns. And as always, we would like your input. What would you like to see in this panel? What burning API questions are bouncing around in your heads? Let us know in the comments section so that we can make sure we cover what you would like to see!

Last week we shared our tools of the trade on sampling data for effective analysis when dealing with large data samples. Gathering the right data, and using the right tools can save you time and precious resource in the long run. To do this we’re launching a range of webinars to help you make sure that you are getting the most out of Radian6. Understand key features of the system, how to use them and in return maximize the benefits.

Whether you are undertaking social media on an ad hoc basis or monitoring and engaging daily there are several ways in which you can optimize your use of the system. Our webinars are designed to help you make the most of the investment you have made. The 30 minute sessions will assist new users, provide best practice for existing users and present the latest upgrades and development for Radian6. Our weekly webinars will cover: (more…)

Ahh the Super Bowl. The greatest sports spectacle in the world. Gridiron monsters facing off to determine football supremacy. This year’s game features two great old-school franchises. It’s gonna be great.

Of course, it’s an event that goes beyond sports. It is a cultural touchstone, a community gathering, a reason to eat too much chili and wings.

And then there’s the advertising. The Super Bowl is the, well, Super Bowl of advertising. It is where brands spend big bucks to unveil their most creative spots.

Last year Radian6 partnered with our friends at Mullen to measure the online brand lift resulting from Super Bowl ads. We called it the Brand Bowl.

This year the Brand Bowl is back and it is bigger than ever with direct feeds from Hulu and hosting at Boston.com. We’ll use the Radian6 platform to determine which ads are creating the most online buzz. Last year Doritos came out on top. This year…who knows?

As we get ready for the Brand Bowl, let’s revisit some of the best Super Bowl ads of all time. Better yet, why don’t you pick your favorites out of the top 20 we’ve picked (see below) and we’ll rank your top five of all time. Just leave your picks in the comments and we’ll collect them and report back after the big game.

Take a look and get voting!

Apple: 1984 (1984)

Reebok: Terry Tate Office Linebacker (2003)

McDonalds: Jordan vs. Bird (1993)

Snickers: Betty White (2010)

Budweiser: Respect (2002)

McDonalds: Big Mac Song (1975)

Etrade: Baby (2008)

EDS: Cat Herding (2005)

Coke: Mean Joe Green – Have a Coke and a Smile (1980)

Noxema: I’m Gonna Get Creamed (1973)

Pepsi: Just One Look (1992)

Google: Parisian Love (2010)

Monster.com: When I Grow Up (1999)

Budweiser: Little Clydesdale (2006)

Wendys: Where’s the Beef? (1984)

Budweiser: Wassup (2000)

FedEx: Castaway (2003)

Budweiser: Frogs (1995)

Ameriquest: Don’t Judge Too Quickly (2003)

Michelob Ultra Amber: Touch Football (2006

As 2010 comes to a close we’d be remiss not to look back and recognize just how much the social media listening space has matured this year. It’s incredibly rewarding for us as a company to see the widespread adoption and acceptance of social media listening and engagement in so many organizations. And seeing those that are really building social media communication into the foundations of their businesses makes us even more proud of the work we and you have been doing, and excited for what’s next.

We’ve achieved quite a bit this year at Radian6 and we wanted to share some of the highlights with you all.

• Radian6’s revenue in 2010 tripled over that of 2009.
• More than 1,000 new customers representing thousands of brands adopted the Radian6 solution in 2010.
• More than half of the Fortune: 100 are now using Radian6 to reach their social media listening, measurement, and engagement goals, including Dell, Microsoft, and PepsiCo.
• Our employee base grew by 150% to 220 employees in 2010, and we’ve got plans to double that in 2011.
• We were named a “leader” in independent research firm Forrester, Inc.’s “The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3, 2010” report.

None of what we accomplished this past year could’ve been done without the unwavering support of our customers and community. We are beyond grateful for the loyalty, feedback, and engagement of everyone who’s invested a piece of their business and/or themselves into Radian6 — this success of ours shows just how powerful social media can be, and just how important strong, reciprocal relationships are to the success of a company.

We have some incredible things planned for 2011 and can’t wait to share them with you. But for now, let us take a minute to say a heartfelt and humble “THANK YOU!” to all our customers, fans, and the greater social media listening and engagement community for putting your faith in us as we uncover new ground. 2010 has been an incredible one thanks to you all, and we’re looking forward to making 2011 even better.

Cheers, and happy holidays!

Many of you heard about the launch of Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center, which happened yesterday at the global technology company’s Austin headquarters. For those of you who didn’t hear, go ahead and click on that link up there to get the scoop — go ahead, we’ll wait — and/or take a peek at the video above.

Dell‘s Social Media Listening Command Center is not the first of its kind — Gatorade’s Mission Control Center kicked off the development of these enterprise-wide-yet-centralized social media listening stations. For organizations the size and caliber of Gatorade and Dell, social media listening centers make absolute sense, and we’ll see them continue to pop up in the future as more companies adapt their internal cultures to really embrace listening.

These command centers are living, breathing listening grids and they’re vital to the health of the brands that install them. Why? Because social media adoption, on both individual and organizational levels, is fundamentally changing the way we share our thoughts and opinions with each other, and companies must adapt to that change.

Dell and Gatorade have tangibly demonstrated that they understand online social communication channels are here to stay, and that those channels will only become more engrained in our day-to-day lives as technology continues to develop. Their adaptation to people’s growing propensity for digital sharing and chat is to develop enterprise-wide workflow systems to harness that chatter, put it in the hands of the right internal stakeholders, and use it to improve products, customer service, and even entire business models.

This is where social media — and social business — is headed. The depth of web-based listening necessary to improve the global marketplace will only increase as more people lean on their social networks and online communities to connect, share ideas and feedback, and, essentially, live their lives. And it will be imperative that organizations of every size integrate social media listening into their business strategies, create efficient workflows to process social media data, and develop strategies for company-wide engagement.

We’re proud to be working with such forward-thinking companies as Dell and PepsiCo (owner of Gatorade) to help them weave social media into the fibers of their businesses, and we’d like to congratulate them on leading the way with social innovation. Keep an eye out for more social media listening command centers in the months to come, as we’re sure we’ll be seeing more of them.

Last Tuesday marked the first of a series of thematic half day seminars that 6Consulting will be hosting on a quarterly basis. Customer Service 2.0 Proactive and Social looked at what impact social media was having on the customer service landscape and how perceptions around service related interactions were fundamentally changing.

“Social Customer Service is generating considerable interest across major businesses in the UK. 6Consulting’s Customer Service 2.0 event provided a rounded picture of the tools that help facilitate online engagement, the business impact to anticipate customer needs, as well as best practise models and the importance of understanding the enterprise-wide implications and benefits of doing so.“

– Guy Stephens, Senior Consultant at Foviance and guest speaker at Customer Service 2.0 (more…)

It’s of utmost importance to us as a company to provide the best and most comprehensive information we can about social media listening, measurement, and engagement. That information often takes the form of blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and more. And while we’re thrilled to be able to provide those resources to you, many of our customers and folks in the greater marketplace have asked for more content about the Radian6 platform and its application.

To those of you who’ve asked, we’ve heard you and this is our answer. The new Radian6 Platform Blog we’re launching today has been a long time coming, and if you swing by as it develops, you’ll notice that it’s a culmination of a few different kinds of topic coverage.

You’ll see that we talk directly to key specifics of the Radian6 platform, but also spend a good chunk of our word count on demonstrating how it’s applied in countless business scenarios. We’ll be sharing details about some of the most often asked-about features in the Radian6 dashboard, and you’ll also see some stuff from our awesome Customer Support and Product teams.

So, is your interest piqued? Well, if it isn’t piqued yet, the announcements we’ve posted over there regarding our newest product updates to the dashboard and Engagement Console might get you clicking through.

Some of these new features in the Radian6 dashboard include a Google Analytics integration, enhanced query support, expanded account management capabilities, and increased platform security. And the Engagement Console now features functions like Macro sorting and sharing, multiple Topic Profile support, and enterprise extensibiity.

Rather than keep you waiting any longer, we’re just going to stop here and let you go check out the new blog and the details on our newest platform features. We’ll see you over there!

Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the hottest topics of conversation around social media, and an increasingly important part of social media in business.

A couple of years ago, it was an upstart social network for college students. Then it was the everyman’s social network, spreading like wildfire to teenagers and grandparents alike. And today, Facebook has taken