I was pretty popular in high school. Not Justin Beiber popular, but everyone seemed to know my name and remembered me. I was even voted Vice President of my senior class. It’s amazing what a name like Frantz in upstate New York can do for you. Well that, and throwing the biggest non-parent sanctioned party my high school had ever seen. But I never could turn that popularity into a sustained movement or the ability to make money or get free stuff.

In 2012, there is a way to leverage your social popularity to do just that. That process is by improving your Klout score and using your social capital on your followers. Companies like Klout use a mechanism that ascertains your social “Klout” score based on an algorithm that incorporates the number of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, Foursquare posts, Blog followers, Google+ friends, and LinkedIn connections you have. Klout puts all of this information into a magic pot and comes out with an assigned number from 0-100 that tells you how socially popular you are in the digital world. Other factors like your Youtube page and video views, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram followers will also be used to get a more accurate number on the breadth of your social influence.

Klout can also get more granular, and gauge how influential you are in Klout topics through a +K mechanism. Based on this score, companies are willing to give you free stuff, pay you to push their products, and if you work in marketing or advertising it may influence whether or not you will get a job. It is the credit rating score for the web and the world of social. I am waiting for the FreeKloutScore.com commercials to be produced. And just like a credit score you can do specific things to try and improve it, even though most regular people have no idea how that number is ascertained.

This brings up some morally ambiguous questions to be posed: Should I build my twitter following, get more readers to my blog, collect a huge number of Facebook fans or make a provocative YouTube video that gets a lot of shares and comments to drive up my Klout score? And after you build this score what do you use this social capital on? When I build my credit score I am able to cash in and get a great rate on a car loan or get the Black Visa card and its privileges. Now I can use my social influence and cash in on my reach for companies in order to get free stuff. For this reason I am considering building my Klout score so I can be considered an influencer in things I am interested in like: comic book movies, sports, and media (add +K right here: http://klout.com/#/roicayo). I would love to parlay my influence into free tickets to events at the Barclay Center, a free trip to Comicon or tickets to the @Avengers premiere at the TriBeCa film festival.

I have a decent Klout score (53 as of this writing) mainly due to my over 1,000 Facebook friends, but just like in high school, I have my doubts that I can truly mobilize my minions to make a significant impact on a brand or product launch. So what exactly can this Klout score get me and more importantly for Brands, what does it buy them? As Brand X, if I’m basing your influence on a Klout score, I want to ensure that you are not just collecting fans or followers but that these people actually care about what you have to say and will take action because of it (purchase cellular service, go to a movie, buy an energy drink). At the end of the day brands are more interested in your actionable influence as opposed to how popular you are. And this is one of the flaws in Klout. It does not truly gauge your true social influence but more your social popularity. And being popular does not necessarily mean you are influential. Yes, I know who Dwayne “@TheRock” Johnson is and I follow him on Twitter and will watch his movies (have you seen Fast 5? It’s wonderful!) but it does not mean that I will purchase a product he endorses. I am more likely to listen to my good friends from college than a celebrity endorser or influencer. But brands are betting on influencers to do this job for them and they want to find the right influencer for their brand.

When I worked at @RedBull one of my mandates was to collect influencers who would become “friends” of the brand and then talk about us amongst their circles of influence. The old mantra that it is better to have others talks about you then to talk about yourself was paramount. We wanted athletes, musicians and artists that embodied the attributes of the brand in our program. People who loved the product. This program went beyond just their social influence but centered on their overall real world influence. The 21st century expansion of this concept has gone social as Red Bull is the first brand to set up a brand page on Klout (nice one @Adnys to be a thought leader) and collect people who are +K influential about Red Bull (as reported by Mashable). They hope to use these people’s social currency to promote the Red Bull lifestyle and products socially. In exchange they receive the Red Bulletin for free and free Red Bull Zero as a Perk. But what is Red Bull getting from this play? Are these people truly influencers who can engage people with Red Bull or are they simply popular and/or have learned how to game the social graph system and collected tons of fans the same way I used to collect comic books and baseball cards (the ROI on these investments did not turn out the way I had planned and thus I am writing this blog)? And that is the question that all brands need to ask themselves as they use @Klout or @PeerIndex or @TwtMob to gather their influencers. Are these people simply socially popular or do they carry a certain amount of influence to actually sell your products and create actionable decisions? Because if they can’t then the money you spend to activate these people will never correspond to the return you will receive.

When we used Klout to promote the #4GTweets Twitter race our goal was to provide a Perk to engage tech and mobile influencers with over a 50 Klout score to not only enter the contest but also to also drive traffic to a hubsite that promoted T-mobiles 4G network. The ROI for this program was impressions and page views and I believe Klout (and Twitter for that matter) could provide that solution. I will need to re-examine how we would engage with Klout influencers if the KPI was phone sales. That is the next step for these companies, to help ascertain numbers beyond popularity but a true influence score. So I will reserve judgement on these services until I can test their effect on program ROI or until I am able to finagle my free trip to Comicon and meet Joss Whedon.

Does mom ageism exist? Damn right it exists. For most brands, the focus is on younger moms of infants and toddlers. Moms with teenagers are written off. Boomer moms, despite all of their disposable income, are virtually ignored.

But look at this statistic: there are 12 million moms of teenagers (ages 14-17) and 25 million moms of young adults (ages 18-29).

So what started me on this subject? I was recently rejected from appearing on a TV show with other moms because “my children were too old”– I have two teenagers. I’m a mom reject. Wow! I no longer count as a mom. And what does the age of my kids have to do with being a fashionable mom?

Brands don’t want us. They want the younger moms.

Do moms of teens spend less? I don’t think so. Teens want clothing, laptops, iPods, music and concerts. They get driver’s licenses and want cars. They go to college and need dorm rooms stocked and decorated. Teens and young adults eat more–the food budget seems to have doubled. And teen girls? Don’t get me started, with prom dresses, shoes, hair, make-up and manicures.

If motherhood is what triggers social media usage with moms seeking information, camaraderie, and support, then the teenage years are all the more the reason for social media. The teenage years are challenging years for moms with drugs, alcohol, sex, and bullying and just plain growing up questions. Motherhood doesn’t get easier as the children grow up. Motherhood evolves and is just different.

I like to say motherhood is a life sentence. My mom, who is 83 years old, still e-mails me every day to make sure I eat my lunch. I will always be her child, even though age-wise I’m a fully developed adult. We still look to each other for advice on purchases, recipes, financial issues – all the same things younger moms discuss.

And as a mom of older children, I’ve been there and done that. So hey, brands, don’t write off the older, experienced mom. We’re out there giving advice to the younger mom. We also have advanced in our careers and are often making more money than when we were younger moms. And our children think of us as human ATM machines. There’s money in them there older hills!

When I got into this business, a friend suggested I read Ogilvy on Advertising, the industry insights of a man who had been described as “the most sought after wizard in today’s advertising.” I don’t know who called him that, it could have been his uncle or the publisher of his book for all I care, but my friend spoke so convincingly of how engaging and educational the book is, that 3 years later I acted on his advice (big backorder from Amazon). For those of you who haven’t read it, I can honestly say that I am blown away by how relevant the insights are, some 30 years after it was written, despite advertising changing so drastically over that time period. My only pseudo-complaint would be that every photo contains an annoyingly redundant caption (trust me, everyone who’s read the book is nodding along to this; you should just follow suit and assume that I’m incredibly insightful). That aside, it’s one of my all time favorites reads, and I have read over 4 books.

Enter Kim Reyes, Big Fuel’s communications manager, reminding me that I promised her a blog post. So I started to think about how David Ogilvy himself would view social media. After all, while Ogilvy was known for his creative genius, he never hid that his success was a result of a deep understanding of his audience. No doubt Facebook would prompt Ogilvy to do… whatever half Irish/half Scottish people from England do out of excitement. Social media has allowed for a depth of audience research like never before. Demographic information on Facebook is over 95% accurate, and (even more valuably) users group themselves into passion point buckets with every move they make. Social allows us to target consumers based on what they LOVE, not just where they are.

That being said, I believe that social media has contributed to an advertising landscape that’s actually contrast with David Ogilvy’s mindset. For example, Ogilvy calls word of mouth marketing “manna from heaven,” and admits he had no idea how to capture it. Social media has provided a platform for marketing messages, characters and the products they endorse to develop fame of their own. Allstate’s Mayhem has over 1.2mm Facebook fans and Progressive’s Flo has over 4mm. Social Media has given advertisers a relevant, consistent platform through which to enter the cultural conversation with branded content.

David Ogilvy also praised the value of long copy, assuming one has writers who can create entertaining advertising stories. While he referenced time after time when his word-heavy advertisements proved to be effective, we now live in a world when attention spans are at an all time low. If you’ve read this far into this article, you should apply to be a professor at Cambridge. 140 characters have the power to change the world, and 200 have the power to bore us to death.

Finally, the most important difference between social media marketing and David Ogilvy’s approach to advertising is the end result. David Ogilvy was stern in his belief that good advertising wasn’t about entertainment, or buzz, or even brand recognition; it should be measured by sales impact. He even went as far as to say every advertiser should spend two years in Direct Response to reinforce that notion. But as is said so often, social media isn’t about direct sales. Brands can distribute social-channel-exclusive promotion codes that can be tracked to in-store/online sales, but generally speaking social is about becoming part of your consumer’s lifestyle…actually being your consumer’s “friend.” For a brand like Coca-Cola or Kraft, which depends on a high volume of repeat, low value purchases, what’s more important? Selling a snack or being top of mind every time consumers get hungry? Social is a platform that has the potential to transform the way a brand is perceived, given the brand has the patience and confidence to let that process develop.

I should be clear – David Ogilvy was a creative genius rooted in analytical research and I have no doubt that he would have been a visionary in social media as he was in every advertising platform he ever saw. The way social media challenges his tried and true beliefs is just further proof that social is like nothing we’ve ever seen. The challenge to master and define social media marketing is out, and this generation’s David Ogilvy is being defined as we speak. I urge that person, whoever they may be, to think of better captions for the images in their inevitable best-selling book (once again, if you haven’t read the book and don’t know what I’m talking about, just save yourself some time, smirk, and make the assumption that I’m a genius).

For brands, marketers, C-level executives, entrepreneurs and even venture capitalists this creates business challenges:

• Identifying what each product does and how they work and then classifying the platform accordingly is like walking a dark underground maze. Many platform features overlap multiple product categories making the maze a complete nightmare.

• Confusion is multiplied by global enterprises trying to move to a more unified model of paid, earned and owned. This move comes as a response to the social technology fragmentation around them.

• It gets worse: Brands are jumping into social networks left, right and center. The playing grounds used to be only Facebook and Twitter. Now they invest in YouTube, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and Tumblr. This means multiple logins, passwords, dashboards and vendors and with all that comes social media security risks.

Inspired by Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post, A New Category Defined: Social Performance Software I have created the social product stack. The stack is based on my countless hours of emerging technology research, product development and evaluating hundreds of social platforms for global enterprise brands at Big Fuel. The stack aims to “turn the lights on” – that is, provide clarity when navigating the social media technology landscape and thus effectively deploy the best solution.

The Social Media Stack

The stack outlines the primary social media product categories. The length of each bar represents the industry maturity within a category, and interestingly is inversely correlated with its potential growth. Note – there are additional categories that can exist as a standalone or easily melt into one of the existing.

The stack manifests fragmentation, shouts the need for cohesiveness (and if it does not then eat this) and above all highlights the importance of product classification.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the stack is the very peak. As more enterprises rush to social media as a marketing channel, a market is emerging between the areas of traditional enterprise Web security and online social media management. Can I predict an article by Jeremiah, “A New Category Defined: Social Security Software.” I will stay away from treading in his waters but let me say this:

The social security software category will take home the gold medal and smart investors will put their eggs in this basket. It is not a stack that exists independently, but rather as the technology develops and enterprises awaken to the need it will permeate every other product category protecting social infrastructure and optimization. You can learn more about social security on my blog and in an upcoming webinar by Social iQ Networks.

Taking a step backwards and looking at the stack there are two larger questions:

1. 1. How does one classify a platform?
2. 2. In the myriad of categories and platforms within each, how does one marry the technology to a brand’s specific needs?

I can’t reveal all my secrets!

Michoel – @Twabbi

Follow Michoel @ MountainClimber.me

Prior to coming to Big Fuel as a Content Director, I used to work on social video for two major brands, ESPN and Red Bull Media House. During my time there we used to push our video content online and hope that it would be pushed virally through SEO techniques, posting on Facebook pages and tweeting from various related accounts. We would also pitch our content to various other distributors who were hungry for our content and wanted to put it on their platforms to entertain their constituents and drive viewers/clicks.

I knew that if certain criteria was met then a video would go successful:

• It contained an athlete or celebrity saying something controversial or socially trending at the time
• It contained a great play  or achievement that was now water cooler talk
• It contained a fight or physical violence
• It was funny and also included a celebrity/athlete
• It received either website or linear support

I also made sure that these videos were less than 30 seconds each whenever possible. We called these videos “Essence Videos” and they gave people just enough, the essence of what they needed to feel a part of the conversation.

Not everything I put out did well, especially if it did not adhere to my five rules I laid out. Some videos languished while others brought in a modest 30-50K videos views. But my goal was always 100,000 or more. I was very ambitious. I did not fully grasp that getting these kind of numbers without additional pushes was almost impossible. I depended on other distributors to pick up our content and push it to their constituents who may not have been searching for ESPN or Red Bull. One thing I never considered, however was to actually purchase views to expand our reach. What did I need to do that for, I worked at two of the largest, most recognizable content brands in the United States. It was not until I started at a Big Fuel and worked on clients that were: 1. Not known for their content , 2. did not have natural linear platforms to push their content, and 3. did not have a celebrity spokesperson with a large social graph, did I realize the importance of paid media. This new found reality of limited platform access caused me to rethink the strategy of strictly organic social video growth. For those clients that have:

1. Compelling creative content that is linked to a music act or celebrity attachment that has a large social network
2. A linear platform associated with it that allows water cooler conversation to spark around it like an ESPN or The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live
3. A larger linear advertising budget that centers on a trailer or a short piece of shareable content surrounding the product
4. A large event budget that pushes a spectacular event like the Dove soap initiative., Red Bull Air Race or the launch of a Nike shoe (which also has the celebrity factor built in)

a paid media strategy may not be necessary. But for the remaining 95% of the brands out there a paid media strategy is something to consider. With the magnitude of content on the internet and social media channels, it is very hard to cut across the clutter. Especially those brands which do not have a natural connection to entertainment or have not cultivated a lifestyle brand. At the end of the day paid media can be used just to seed a video until it reaches critical mass and then can be shared more organically or used extensively to push out the message entirely. There are companies who are able to pinpont those people who maybe interested in the content you are peddling. The more you pay per viewer the more attuned these ads are. Companies like Stumbledupon, Grabnetworks and Adaptly  allow companies to be more precise in the people they are trying to engage with. In the end these networks allow your branded content to be pushed and seen by a large group of people.

But if you are only interested in being totally USDA certified organic, I suggest adjusting your budget and spending the money you would have put into paid media into hiring that celebrity or music act to be a part of your content. It will probably be more expensive and cause more hassles along the way, but either way, you are going to pay for distribution.

Celebrities and causes already make strange bedfellows – but when social media is the bed, it gets even more complicated. How much would you pay a Top 20 music artist for a tweet? What kind of endorsement video would you ask an Academy Award-winning actor to upload to YouTube? Charitable organizations have been leveraging star power for decades, but social media has certainly changed the rules of engagement.

First, let’s decode why celebrities are so attractive to charities and non-profits. Celebrities are the original influencers and tastemakers, adored by so many that their likes and dislikes are often adopted by a critical mass. Furthermore, their messages receive high-profile exposure. Celebrities are equipped with “the power to promote whatever they support to millions of people through talk shows, weekly magazines, and ever-growing social media followings,” observes Laura Giangiulio in her Huffington Post article entitled Courting Hollywood: Building Successful Celebrity-Cause Partnerships.

Tapping a huge fanbase to spread a message of goodwill is a no-brainer. But a deeper look into how to properly leverage star power reveals the multitude of risks and complications.

What’s in a Name?

In other words: what do you define as a “celebrity?” Simply put, a celebrity is someone famous. Our brains (and Google Search, apparently) tend to default to pop culture when we think of famous people: the actors, musicians, athletes, and socialites that frequent the covers of gossip rags. However, the proliferation of online communities has raised a new class of celebrity: the Internet celebrity. These are people who have achieved fame with a large community of people through any number of online media, from blogs to Twitter. When aligning your cause with a celebrity, “You may want to consider partnering with an online celebrity, particularly one who champions a very powerful grassroots movement,” suggests Kate Olsen and Geoff Livingston in their online paper Cause Marketing Through Social Media,  “the network they bring is even more valuable than their brand name.”

Understand the risks.

Celebrity endorsements are expensive, and often force non-profits with limited budgets to put all their eggs in one basket. But what about when a charity puts all their faith in a single person and that person ends up being unreliable? There are a few undesirable outcomes: for one, the celebrity could fail to deliver on his/her promise. Probably the least desirable outcome is that the celebrity fall from grace: a cheating scandal, a substance addiction, a lapse in sanity – these are all major threats to your organization. Celebrities, whether they’re in entertainment or another industry, come with context. “You have to be ready for anything,” Malaria No More’s Erica Lichtenberger says in a 2011 Mashable article, “You’re sort of in a backseat position.” Before investing in a celebrity spokesperson, an extensive amount of research needs to be conducted. Is the celebrity often spotted at wild parties? Has the celebrity said something offensive or inappropriate in the past? Does the celebrity have a negative reputation?

Send the Right Message

Back in March, MTV’s Senior Director of Public Affairs, Noopur Agarwal, moderated a SXSWi panel entitled “Celebs & Causes: A Thin Line btwn #winning & #fail,” wich began with an audit of several high-profile charity campaigns involving celebrities. One of the most memorable efforts in the past few years was the 2010 World AIDS Day “Digital Death” campaign, in which Alicia Keys, Kim Kardashian, and a number of other stars went silent on social media until the Keep a Child Alive organization reached $1 million in donations. While the campaign did indeed leverage fan dependence on social media for celebrity engagement to reach the intended milestone, Agarwal pointed out that the approach could have had more impact. “Social Media is how celebrities reach people and spread messages,” Agarwal explains, “therefore, celebrities going silent may not have been an effective way to raise awareness for an issue.”

Who’s doing it right?

Okay, so you’ve taken all the necessary precautions – and you’re still convinced that hiring a celebrity spokesperson fits in with your cause strategy. Now let’s take a look at who’s succeeded so far, and what we can learn from their approaches.

Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project

This campaign demonstrates the effectiveness of social media for social good. It took a simple, yet powerful message (“It gets better.”) and unfolded it into over 40,000 deeply personal, honest, and moving stories of empathy and support for the world’s LGBT youth in the face of harassment. Everyone from President Barack Obama, to entertainers such as Anne Hathaway and Colin Farrell, to major corporations such as Google and Facebook, have contributed online videos to the It Gets Better movement. To a struggling youth experiencing loneliness and self-defeat, the videos represent a vast and powerful network of positivity and support from people they admire, and people just like them.

Angelina Jolie, Goodwill Ambassador

The best thing that can happen from recruiting celebrity support is that she devotes her entire life to serving your cause, as is the case with Angelina Jolie and the UN. As a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie has dedicated her on-screen and off-screen life to solving global human rights issues. From her high-profile (and often photographed) visits to war-torn countries, to her lead role in Beyond Borders, to her directorial debut in the gruesome In the Land of Blood and Honey, Jolie has become the universal poster girl for survivors of political conflict and natural disasters. Her infamous family with fellow A-Lister Brad Pitt has also become symbolic of her humanitarian work: oldest son Maddox was adopted from Cambodia, Zahara was adopted from Ethiopia, and Pax was adopted from Vietnam.

Lady Gaga for the MAC AIDS Fund

Live with passion. Love with protection. This is the message from Lady Gaga on behalf of the MAC AIDS Fund, helping contribute to the more than $202 million raised to support HIV/AIDS programs around the world. Charities don’t choose Lady Gaga; Lady Gaga chooses them, with laser-like precision. Known for having one of the most focused personal brands among celebrities, Lady Gaga has dedicated her enormous popularity to gender and sexuality issues. The special-edition lipsticks represent Lady Gaga’s influence as a fashion tastemaker, but are also meant to empower women to think before they have unprotected sex. Every cent from a purchase of Lady Gaga’s Viva Glam lipstick and lipglass goes directly to the MAC AIDS Fund.

What’s TwitChange?

One of the most remarkable things about Twitter is that not only can users follow real-time updates from their favorite celebrities, but that users can also interact with the stars. The excitement of getting a mention from teen heartthrob Justin Bieber, or getting a retweet from basketball legend Shaquille O’Neill is almost exciting as a real-life sighting.

Twitchange is the much-debated platform that “brings together celebrities, fans, and brands for social good.” Celebrities auction off their attention in the form of a follow. Fans bid to have the celebrity follow them, and the proceeds from the auction go to the celebrity’s charity of choice. The first-ever celebrity Twitter auction was able to raise over $500,000 for Doctors Without Borders, with the help of Eva Longoria and over 100 other celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Demi Moore, Ryan Seacrest, and Demi Lovato. You can read more about the campaign here.

What about KONY?

During Noopur Agarwal’s SXSWi panel, it was only a matter of time before the viral sensation of the KONY 2012 movie was mentioned. KONY 2012 is an excellent case study on something we here at Big Fuel have made the core of our business: that great content drives action.

One audience member asked, in light of KONY’s stunning power to drive an enthusiastic youth movement, if the effect can be replicated. Panelist Kenna Zemedkun, musician and philanthropist, replied:

“Models are built by innovators and copied by everyone else. If you do something because it means something to you, because it matters, because it resonates with your spirit, it will be successful. Remember that #KONY2012 took 9 years. They poured their heart and soul into it for 9 years. That’s passion & authenticity.”

For more information on celebrity alignments with charities, check out http://www.looktothestars.org/category.

There is a lot of talk about the War for Talent, again. This happens now and then, typically post-recession or economic struggle. It is my firm belief that the War will never end and you must have a strategy for the War, not the battle. Most companies right now are fighting the battle – using a very old method of open job and close job strategy. We must stop thinking like recruiters and start thinking like marketers. What I am saying is that I suggest a push in the talent industry for a less process focused solution and more of talent relationship management.

Historically, applicant-tracking systems helped to develop strict processes around the system of recruiting, though they have failed to help in building talent relationships. This is why here at Big Fuel our recruiting strategy is called Talent Marketing.

Talent acquisition strategy is no different than marketing strategy.  In marketing, a company is trying to attain new customers, while building loyalty, advocates, and brand awareness, plus manage customer relationships.  You should approach your talent in the same way you approach your marketing – create communities, build content, drive engagement through digital properties and ensure that you continue relevant and specific messaging to the community.

Right now, there is NO strategy or solution to help you think or execute on Talent Marketing in this manner.  There are solutions out there to help you do this from a customer perspective, but none that focuses on marketing to acquiring talent. So my solution?  Take your current marketing solutions/technology repurpose them for talent marketing.  This is how:

• CRM Tool – use this for your talent relationship management.  The same solutions that manage your customers could be used to manage your talent or potential talent.
• Social Media and Community – build communities focused on talent.  Use social media to engage with potential candidates through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.  Build groups, communities and drive engaging content that gets people excited about your employer brand.
• Email Marketing Solution – take the tool that you use to market to your customers with creative content, relevant information, specific call to actions, etc, and  focus it on your potential talent pool or community that have “opted in”.  Share great content, discounts, candidate referral programs, and then have a call to action to an event, program or learning opportunity.
• Web/Mobile – create properties that focus on talent acquisition.  No, not your jobs page, but a page that has great content about your company, videos, the work you have done, “a day in the life” – specific content that gives your potential employees an idea about your culture.  You can even connect them to your company blog, which probably has pretty good content already.  In terms of mobile, most of these folks will be away from their desks when they engage with your brand, for employment purchases, make sure you have a mobile presence.  You also want to think about creating specific apps that help potential candidates or employees engage with your brand.
• Traditional/Print – invite your community for tours of your office.  Use them for testing of a new corporate site or client product.  Send out cards, notes, letters, etc.  Get them engaged, that if they decide to move from their current position,  your company is already in their head.

I have no doubt that more and more companies will invest more resources and dollars into Human Capital Management, especially when we start seeing a turn in the economy, but the time is now to prepare the right strategy in the War for Talent.

As alluded to in a recent tweet:

From a technology perspective: OWNED is nailed. PAID has taken off. The future lies in EARNED. Whoever FUSES all three will be CROWNED. #in

— Michoel Ogince (@Twabbi) May 2, 2012

This article is purely from the perspective of technology; specifically, the emerging platforms that are used to deploy and manage campaigns across these three buckets.

Owned

Two years ago the owned social landscape was completely fragmented. Social media management systems (SMMS) were purely built for content publishing and/or listening with associated measurement capabilities. Not only that – some were directed at managing only Facebook or Twitter!

Today, the owned media technology playground is far more cohesive. Platforms that originated as Facebook interactive app solutions such as Involver and Wildfire have built out social media management modules. Likewise, those that started out as pure-play SMMS have created Facebook (and in some cases YouTube) app management features. Platform management features have also advanced significantly – examples include: Open Graph Object publishing and integration with third party API’s such as Engage 121 did with Social Flow to enable optimized engagement.

Social Customer Service is another product offering that SMMS and social listening platforms have jumped on. Sprinklr, Trac.x, and Radian6 all come to mind.

The owned space is nailed. There is little room for breakthrough technology innovation and the market is relatively consolidated.

Paid

Paid is on fire. There are a fortune of official Facebook API ad partners and every week I have a new vendor come through the door to present social paid capabilities. To add the social media empires – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Tumblr are continuously advancing their ad solutions and API’s. Others like Pinterest and Google+ are yet to come to the table, but I can assure you they will.

This week Tumblr launched its paid platform and Social Flow jumped on board too . The owned technology vendors also want a piece of the pie – Buddy Media acquired Brighter Option, Wildfire partnered with (the awesome) Adaptly, and Engage 121 built their own paid power house.

Earned

Here lies the problem. The earned space is needlessly fragmented.

At a macro-level the earned social media marketing process involves: influencer identification, storage and relationship management, outreach, activation and tracking (ROI). The process is summarized in the diagram below:

The Earned Marketing Process – Image (Adapted and) Courtesy of SocialChorus

Here lies the challenge: each step in the chain requires a different technology solution. For example (the awesome) SocMetrics for influencer identification and measurement, Salesforce, Batchbook or Nimble for CRM, MailChimp for outreach and SocialChorus for activation and measurement.

This means multiple vendors, logins, dashboards, KPI’s and even monitors. Add owned and paid and you have the remains of a social media war zone.

It needs maturity and I am confident we will see a few mergers and acquisitions in the earned space over the coming year.

Conclusion

Above all, I predict we will see a fusion of paid, owned, and earned social technologies. This will mean the SMMS will move from a platform to an operating system.

The brand and agency value will be tremendous. Imagine implementing, managing and measuring paid, owned, and earned in one platform?

Owned Is NAILED. Paid Is FLYING. Earned Is the FUTURE. Whoever Fuses All 3 will be CROWNED.

If I were a VC and you were tackling this – I would hand you a blank check!

Michoel – @Twabbi

Follow Michoel @ MountainClimber.me

A dad disciplines his daughter for her disrespect by shooting her laptop to death and sharing it with the world via video. A mom in Ohio posts a photo of her daughter with a red X over her mouth and tells her she has to answer everyone who asks why she is no longer allowed to use Facebook. Both parents have gotten much press over their unusual disciplinary actions. I wonder whether they chose to social media as punishment, or for the media attention…

But should children be publicly disciplined? To me, it’s a bit reminiscent of days long ago where there were public floggings and people were put in stocks in front of the whole town. Does the world need to know your child has done something worthy of punishment? Does public embarrassment and humiliation take the place now of course correcting your child in lieu of the good old-fashioned idea of taking away a favorite like the computer or Internet access?

I must admit I’ve threatened public humiliation. Twice I’ve said I would post a YouTube video of my daughter’s messy room, a video where I take a popular song like Brittany Spears’ Toxic and change the words to reflect the state of her bedroom. The mere threat worked…and I didn’t have to subject the world to my off key singing.

Just once did I take a situation online. My daughter also drives me crazy, first and foremost, by borrowing my clothes. It’s not a huge infraction, but something my Twitter mom friends and I talk about it a lot as it is a real sore spot for moms of teenagers. One day, we came up with a plan: I should change the doorknob on my closet to one that I can lock with a key. It was a huge undertaking, as the shoe rack on the door had to be removed to replace the knob. But when it was all done, I was so happy thinking this would thwart her efforts. I didn’t say a word to her, but I tweeted about it to some of my friends on Twitter–publicly outing her in the hope this would end. Together, we all waited to see how long it would take for her to notice. I never got to find out. On Day 1, I got a call from the managing agent of my apartment building telling me my dog had been barking all day. I had forgotten that my dog had chosen my closet as his dog cave and sleeps in there all day long. My closet would never be mine as neither the daughter or the dog will leave it alone. My daughter got the last laugh.

So what do you think? Would you ever do something like shoot your child’s laptop?

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou

It’s as old as the spoken language – the irresistible draw of a good story.  One that pulls you in makes you laugh or cry or sigh or take that sharp intake of breath in disbelief.  Cavemen told stories with pictures on caves and around campfires, we tell them a little differently today.

Today that story may be told in 140 characters, a picture, a Facebook post, a short-form video, a short story, a novel or a film.   And some of those stories impact us enough to be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube or Vimeo. We all know them – those videos our friends share on Facebook that we then watch and share or that tweet that gets passed around from feed to feed or a quote that you begin to see on every Pinterest board – those are the stories that make us feel.   Sometimes the story is told in a short film that breaks all the rules of social media brevity but circumnavigates the social network at an astounding speed such as the Kony 2012 video.  Released on March 5^th, Kony 2012 was soon being posted on friends’ walls and celebrities were tweeting about it.  By the end of March over 86 million views on YouTube and 16 million on Vimeo had ensured Kony 2012 its place in history.  People had felt something.  Has the Best Job video shown up in your Facebook feed yet?  This two minute story by P&G weaves a global connection between Moms, their children and the Olympics with a subtle nod to the brands that make the job of being Mom a little easier.  The video is beautifully executed drawing you in with visuals that are authentic, very little dialogue and lyrics that carry you along the journey from Mom supporting her child on the way to becoming an Olympic athlete.  A global story told by a global brand.   The video has garnered over 2 million views since being posted on YouTube on April 17^th.

Pinterest tells the story in pictures.  The pictures we pin are the ones that make us feel.  Pinterest boards have become the virtual window into our hopes and dreams, our passions and longings, our everyday desires and whims.  Retailers are now beginning to share their story on Pinterest.  General Electric, Nordstrom and Whole Foods are active pinners.  Focusing on a broad range of topics and not solely on product allows these brands to tell a broader story and connect with other pinners who now feel a connection to them in this story of pictures.

Twitter requires the story to be told in 140 characters or at least in that 140 characters make you feel enough to explore more (those tiny urls)!   Twitter played a key role in the Egyptian crisis in January 2011 telling the story that mattered to the world.  And while Twitter can play a very serious role it can also provide a more comedic story. ‘Sh*t My Dad Says’ was such a popular Twitter feed that it spawned a TV show and soon a book.  Twitter provides a democratic platform for storytelling giving everyone the opportunity to tell a story.

We tell our story (to varying degrees) on Facebook.  All the elements of good storytelling can be told in a post – drama, intrigue, humor, love unrequited, love fulfilled, heartbreak, happiness and joy, loneliness and pain, anger, frustration and denial – all played out on the virtual stage for our hundreds of ‘friends’.  Sometimes shared thru a network of social media and finding a life of its’ own our stories become part of a larger story – the human story.

Social media has tremendous power when it is used to weave a tale that pulls us in, makes us feel and creates that irresistible urge to share it with everyone we know.  For those of us creating those sharable moments – we have the opportunity to embrace this responsibility with integrity and enthusiasm, to create social media content that makes all of us feel.

Recently this evocative video popped up as a post in my Facebook feed, you can see it here.  I liked that the video started in one place and unexpectedly took me somewhere I didn’t expect.  Tell me – what story made you feel like you just had to share it.