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Here's another example of Social Influence Marketing. Over in the UK, McDonalds has launched a national advertising campaign to convince parents that the Happy Meals are healthy. The TV campaign is aimed at reassuring parents that only high quality beef, chicken and potatoes are used in the Happy Meals. 

Earlier this week I was at the O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns East Conference where I hosted a panel on Advertising versus Appvertising. Joining me on the panel were Michael Lazerow (Buddy Media), Kevin Barenblat ([context]), Eddie Smith (SocialMedia Networks) and Chris Cunningham (appssavvy). It was a provocative 45 minutes with some great questions from the audience at the end. Here are my takeaways -

1. Join the conversation is dead. It is not enough to encourage marketers to find ways to join the conversation. That is an oversimplification of what is happening in the social media space. Anything that anyone does has to provide a return more specific and more tangible than joining the conversation. No marketer can justify investments in social media by simply saying that the brand needs to join the conversation. We've moved beyond that today.

2. Social Media needs to talk the language of marketing. While all the media buzz and the successes of specific blogs and social networks have propelled social media into the mainstream (not to mention the usage numbers), from a marketing standpoint this domain is still very fresh. Brands are still trying to figure out what will work and why. The vendors (and especially the new social media specific ones) are trying to figure that out too. 

3. Engagement metrics are still a blur too. I'm still waiting to see a vendor, a consulting firm or a brand introduce a strong metrics framework. The simpler answer is that the metrics depend on the campaign and the specific social media program. For some it maybe impressions, fans, downloads or contributions but for others it can be the number of visitors that get driven to a brand microsite. No one is tracking whether social media programs have direct brand lifts or directly influence conversions.

4. Brand monitoring needs to evolve. Sure, the Umbria's, Cymfony's and Visible Technologies of the world provide a lot of business value. But they can do more to push the industry forward. For example,  I wish these firms would publish reports showing engagement by industry and then for the major brands in each industry. A comparative look would help us begin to understand if there's a co-relation between engagement and company performance.

5. Applications are huge and will only get bigger. Why? Simply because they are profitable and viral tapping into how we actually use the web. More than that, they're also measurable and portable. Applications can also serve as the link between the walled garden social networks and the brand websites. For an example of a major brand playing around with applications, read about Coke's. Remember, the application is the new ad unit.

I strongly recommend attending the next O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns Conference. Dave McClure and his team did an awesome job. The photograph above is courtesy Duncan Davidson.

Is this what marketers wonder about when they try to identify those influencers? We've all been excited about influencer marketing for a long time, but we often forget that social influence marketing is slightly different. It is about recognizing that depending upon the context and the specific purchasing decisions, the influencers may differ.

You can be connected to 500 people a mix of family, college friends, peers at work, acquaintances and neighbors. Who influences you the most depends upon what you're purchasing and how important or new that purchase is to you. For each of their products, marketers must understand who those local influencers are (if there are indeed generalizable patterns) and then find ways to reach them too. Otherwise, you'll just know that your customers are hyper-connected through the social networks and nothing more. This cartoon is from Hugh McLeod over at gapingvoid.

Here's my latest article on Social Influence Marketing where I delve into how those peer influences actually. Let me know what you think of this one.

At the root of Social Influence Marketing™ is how peer influences work. With the digital world going social, we recognize that peer influence is having a greater affect on brand affinity and purchasing decisions than any traditional form of marketing. Customers are excited about doing the marketing themselves if the product is strong. We also know that with the proliferation of social technologies from mainstream social networks like MySpace and Facebook to niche social tools like del.icio.us (bookmarking) and FriendFeed (personal content aggregation), the peer influence may take many different forms.

While at South by South West I was interviewed on Social Media by Relevantly Speaking. They have some great interviews on their website too.

Last night I addressed the New York Chapter of the Usability Professional's Association in our Avenue A | Razorfish New York offices. The subject of my presentation was Social Influence: Social Media and the Enterprise. The event was sold out with over a 150 people in attendance. 

And this time it includes reporters from Advertising Age which I'm reading with increasing frequency. Matthew Creamer discusses the question in a thought provoking article titled, "Think Different: Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads". He questions some of the fundamental premises that drive the display ad business - do we really care to click on those advertisements and is that they best way for a brand to reach its prospective customers? Using Apple with its small online advertising budget as an example, he emphasizes that there are lots of other ways to market online too.(To the right is HP's viral marketing campaign from 2006 - a great example of non linear marketing.)

Talking of which, Creamer also discusses some social influence marketing themes. He argues that in the not to distant future consumers won't be "treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked". He believes that the world isn't about hidden persuasion but transparency and dialogue at its center allowing people to influence each other's decision making. I couldn't agree more with him but I believe we're in that not to distant future already.

The most successful brands are the ones that have been engaging with their audiences in more direct, meaningful and personal ways. Display advertising still matters but its just one component of the marketing mix. The audiences aren't passive and they're absorbing, critiquing and sharing their perspectives on the major brands more quickly and with more people than ever before. Figuring out how to take advantage of that is a challenge but that's at the heart of all of this. It's not something new either, its been happening since the dawn of the Internet and its rooted in our innate desires to share and communicate with one another.

And while providing "utility" maybe new to the advertising industry, its old hat for those of us who grew up in the web design business. You have to provide something useful if you want to attract, convert and retain customers via the web. You've gotten more choices in terms of where you provide that usefulness (it just doesn't have to be on your own website), and you can use it to influence purchasing decisions but providing it shouldn't be treated as something new. Just go ask your web product teams about usefulness.

In a sense, its not that utility is entering the marketing domain but rather marketing is getting broader.

Adweek had a thoughtful article on word of mouth marketing last month that I bookmarked and re-read this weekend. Notable were the comments by Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics who said, "Most brands do a pathetic job listening to consumers vis-a-vis existing tools, whether it's through 800 numbers, call centers, 'contact us' feedback forms." He then added "The reason I say 'pathetic' is those listening tools aren't terribly assimilated into the new Web 2.0 culture, where people talk with audios, photos, videos. Most companies assume consumers speak in one language and that language is text, when consumers actually speak in a much more robust language."

Blackshaw is spot on with those comments. Too many companies think of web based interactions as text driven sales or customer service channels. But customers want to engage with the the brands on a more personal level earlier in the marketing funnel before they are ready to make purchases. They want to draw the brand into their own conversations and decision making processes. They want the companies to participate on their terms. The current tools simply don't allow for that. Few websites are defined to put the conversations at the epicenter. Most focus on the product. That worked for a long time but not anymore.

Blackshaw also said, "there is such a viral effect being created by what brands do -- whether it's through products that work, customer service, the way employees behave -- that we also need to listen to understand the cause and effect between brand experience and consumer conversation." That's really the million dollar question. We're all trying to understand the relationship. Making it harder is the fact that the brand determines the type of conversation too.

I know I'll be spending a lot of time thinking about the relationship between brand experience and consumer conversation in the next few months.

I'll be speaking at South by Southwest on Monday in Austin. My talk starts at 10:00am in room 5. I hope you can join. Here's the official description.

If you think social media is all about clever corporate marketing on Facebook or quirky videos on YouTube, you're missing an opportunity to change your company's entire culture and operations. In fact, social media can affect how companies innovate, test ideas, recruit talent, measure performance, and interact with all their stakeholders. In his discussion "Going Social Now," Shiv Singh, head of the Avenue A | Razorfish social media practice, will show you how the enterprise can use social media to improve your business practices.

As part of his discussion, Shiv will discuss how the rise of social media has created a new form of marketing altogether, social influence marketing. Social influence marketing is about employing social media as part of the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign, even beyond a campaign. You will walk away from this engaging discussion with ideas you can take back to the workplace based on real-world research and case studies.

I'll be speaking on a social networking panel at the Direct Marketing Association's Leader's Forum in Florida on Tuesday. I'll be debating the effectiveness and viability of social networks. If you have  insightful statistics that I should tell the audience, please share them. Thank you.