Today's New York Times has a great story on Aardvark and how it uses your social graph to help you find answers to questions. It works rather simply - you pose a question via email or IM and Aardvark channels the question to people in your social graph (currently that's just your social graph on Facebook) and then brings back the answers to you. Users who don't respond aren't exposed so there's no discomfort created. As a result no social capital is expended either.

Currently, Aardvark works only with Facebook and pings your friends and their friends for volunteers to answer the question. So it take the question to ties that are once removed from you. But it just doesn't ping everyone automatically, using its proprietary technology it pings only those friends who are most likely to have the answer and to respond to the question. It also organizes the responses and determines when it has received enough feedback. If no one in your network answers, the question is extended to second and third generation ties.

Why is this special? Because it leverages human capital and algorithms to determine who are the most likely people to be able to answer a question as well as who will be most willing to do so. It makes your social influencers work for you. It's built fundamentally around the concept of strength in weak ties recognizing that people in your network (and maybe the weakest ties) are most likely to be able to answer the question and will probably bring back the most trusted answers.

Is it more of a decision engine than Bing? Time will tell but what is certain is that by applying an intelligent filter on my social graph it is making it far more meaningful to me  beyond the obvious social, entertainment and networking purposes that the social graph serves. Check out Aardvark and ask yourself what else would you like filtered through your social graphs. Or ask Aardvark to ask that. Maybe which ads to watch....33Across and Media6Degrees are already exploring that territory. It is just a matter of time before we see the world through the lens of our social graphs. It'll make life easier but here's a warning - it may limit our outlook on everything too.

If you're wondering why my posts to Going Social Now have been a little infrequent of late here's the reason why. I'm writing a book for the Dummies series tentatively titled, "Social Influence Marketing for Dummies." It is available for pre-order on Amazon already. I'm in the last throes of writing it with barely two or three chapters left go now.

Ok, so maybe I'm a little miffed that I wasn't one of the chosen few who got to register a Facebook username before everyone else did. I'm not a journalist and nor am I a Facebook employee. Nor am I personally an advertiser on Facebook so maybe I don't deserve to have been given the opportunity to register a username before anyone else. Still I think there's something wrong with this process.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau just published Social Advertising Best Practices.  I'm glad the spotlight is being shone on social advertising and I think the best practices are a worthy effort. However, I'd love to see a little more out of these best practices. Here's what I'm looking for:

Here's a great deck on social measurement. Each time someone asks me whether social media can be measured I ask them whether the Internet can be measured. You can't talk about this in general terms - it has to be specific to the experience, platform or campaign. This wonderful ROI presentation makes that point quite nicely.

Here's the presentation that I gave at our 9th Annual Client Summit. This was presented to 600 odd senior marketers from industry leading companies. My key messages were that in the social realm one big idea is not enough, you need many little ideas that work in harmony with each other. I also pushed for the reorganization of the marketing department, a focus on what I referred to as Social CRM and the necessity in innovating with others. Take a look at the presentation and let me know your thoughts.

Paula Drum, an innovative marketer at H&R Block (which has really been at the forefront of social influence marketing) is moving onto a new job. She posted some pearls of wisdom on her blog which I feel are an absolute must read. What makes her opinion matter is that its expressed from the first hand perspective in trying to make a large, consumer facing brand more social online. Here's an excerpt:

Companies can spend a lot of money trying to launch a social media program.  For the most part, I would really classify those efforts as an integrated marketing campaign. Your approach and funding of an integrated marketing campaign needs to be in line with the size and scope of your overall marketing budget.  Social media programs can be a lot more cost efficient from a media budget standpoint, but, you still need human capital to run them.  In many cases you may be trading media $ for the human capital needed to run a program.

And when talking about selling social influence marketing to the C suite she chooses to use a phrase that I first heard from her a year and a half ago and still love. She explains it in this excerpt.

One of the most popular questions that I get asked is how to build support at the C-level.  Having a clearly defined objective is critically important to gain support of any initiative.  However, everyone is always focused on the ROI or return on the investment.  I have defined ROI a little differently in this new and emerging space as Risk Of Ignoring.  There is an absolute change occurring in how we communicate and seek information as a society.  The millennial generation is the first digital native generation with very different expectations of companies and marketing.  In the not so distant future the millennials will be a larger purchasing demographic than the boomers.  Not understanding this segment will be detrimental for future marketers. 

Read the 10 tips in their entirety on her blog, Positively Paula. Full disclosure - H&R Block has been a client of ours. We've done a lot of digital and social influence marketing work for them in the last year both directly and in partnership with other firms too. Best of luck with your new job, Paula!

At our 9th Annual Client Summit, Joe Crump a VP of Strategy & Planning asked an important question. How do you escape innovation hell? He explained that we recognize innovation when we see it but when it comes to innovating ourselves we fail 80% of the time. His reasons for the failure were:

• We mistakenly equate innovation with creativity, which makes innovation feel more like serendipity


• We don't really try to innovate. Most of us are just content making incremental improvements to our work


• We measure the wrong things. We obsess with click-through rates instead of wowing the consumer with brilliant engagement.


• We use the wrong tools. Focus groups are the enemy of innovation.


• We rely on processes that kill innovation.


• We equate innovation with advertising. As Joe put it, "If I were in the television ad business, I would assume the crash position."

His solution? "Stop obsessing on marketing messages, and start obsessing on better product experiences," Joe said. Then he gave a preview of the Razorfish Experience Wheel, a new process that Razorfish is developing to create fresh consumer experiences. In other words he believes (as I do) that it comes down to the experience.

While that may not be a new concept, what is continuously missing is the attention that's given to it. Everyone wants an Apple like experience for their product but don't have the guts to invest the time and resources to get one. And not just that we often aren't stubborn enough about the product vision. Without that, the product is destined not to be innovative. Watch the presentation and few coverage by David Deal as well.

Now before you start slamming me for selling out, let me explain what I mean (and yes, I was inspired by this cartoon). As I've been discussing on this blog and in a series of papers over the last two years, social influence marketing is going mainstream. It is becoming fundamentally intertwined with the core of all things digital. As such it is getting more difficult to separate social media and social influence marketing from other digital activities. 

I quite enjoyed reading the 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips post at Online Marketing Blog over this weekend. My favorite responses were those of Rohit Bhargava who when discussing ROI said,

If you don't have a clear picture of what you are aiming for, you're definitely not going to be able to measure it or track results against it. Once you have an answer to that question, then there are a whole host of specific metrics that you can align against it. For example, you can measure volume or tonality of conversation. Or link frequency and actual clicks. Or content generation and influencer engagement. We have been building a model that has dozens of these types of metrics, that we can customize for each client engagement.  

And also Jim Cuene, Director of General Mills who on being asked what some of the issues that large organizations face with social media said,

Efficiency is elusive/It's hard to execute social media efficiently- Large companies have made a science out of finding efficiencies in media, and have been pretty successful squeezing most of the fat out of production budgets. But, social media, in a lot of ways, is the exact opposite of mass: Labor intensive, highly involved, non-standardized.

By it's nature, social media is slower than Mass. The Blendtec guys were at it for a while, before "Will it Blend" went big. Viral hits like "elf-yourself" don't just happen overnight in most cases, even if it seems like it to us. Tv-centric companies are used to turning on the ad (or dropping the FSI, or starting the promotion) and seeing the results immediately. For companies that are used to the velocity of impact that comes from "mass" media, the slow, steady approach may be frustrating

It seems to be the week of PR for me. I was also recently quoted in an Associated Press article picked up by Businessweek discussing MySpace and its music strategy as a way to be more profitable. 

I was on Chicago radio earlier this week talking about the uses of Twitter for businesses in America. This was one of my first radio interviews and it was fun doing. I dialed into a special phone number and within seconds I was live on air. And then it was over in a matter of minutes. Short and sweet. Keeping my sentences short and pithy is a bit of a challenge but I suppose that only gets better in time. Check it out here.

Aaron Strout has been conducting interviews with social media practitioners over the last two months. This week he interviewed me for the series. He was generous in his praise. You can find the interview here. Below is an excerpt.

I've actually known Shiv for a few years now as he was kind enough to come and speak at some of the events for Shared Insights (now part of IIR USA) on portal technology. Since then, I've bumped into Shiv at other events like Office 2.0 and try and keep in touch with him semi-regularly on Twitter and e-mail. Given how long he's been involved in Web 2.0 and social media and the level of clients he gets to talk to on an ongoing basis, why wouldn't I want to stay in contact with such a bright guy?

There are several great interviews. A few that I've especially liked include those of Dave Evans, Chris Brogan and Sean O'Driscoll.