This week I attended one of the more inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions around brands’ use of social media that I’ve taken in dur­ing the past year.

Your Brand, Their World at Razorfish’s cor­po­rate head­quar­ters in San Fran­cisco brought together a highly engaged audi­ence of 100 social media and mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists dur­ing an open­ing pre­sen­ta­tion by Gar­rick Schmitt, GVP Expe­ri­ence Plan­ning for Razor­fish (@gschmitt on Twit­ter) fol­lowed by an inter­est­ing panel with Megan O’Connor, Levi’s; Michael Brito, Intel; Marisa Gal­lagher, Razor­fish; Sam Fail­lace, Shut­ter­fly, and Jon Swartz, USA Today (moderator).

“We’re all intu­itively going through these changes and we’re all intu­itively inter­act­ing with [brands and media com­pa­nies] in dif­fer­ent ways with­out fully under­stand­ing what it all means,” Schmitt said.

Slide high­lights: social media spending

• Schmitt offered met­rics to back up the excite­ment around the explo­sion of inter­est in social media. For instance, in slide 3 of the deck above, you’ll see that in Inter­ac­tive mar­ket­ing spend­ing (US), search mar­ket­ing and dis­play adver­tis­ing far sur­pass email mar­ket­ing, social media and mobile mar­ket­ing social media in terms of dol­lars spent today. Social media spend­ing will grow from $716 mil­lion this year to $3.113 bil­lion by 2014, accord­ing to Forrester’s projection.

• Adver­tis­ing dol­lars haven’t fol­lowed the audience’s migra­tion online yet — but it will. Amer­i­cans spend about an equal amount of time watch­ing TV and going online today, but ad spend­ing remains at 31 per­cent for tele­vi­sion vs. only 12 per­cent for the online medium. (slide 5)

• Bad news for news­pa­pers: Indi­vid­u­als spend 7 per­cent of their media con­sump­tion with print news­pa­pers but the ad spend for news­pa­pers is 14 per­cent today.

• You’ll find richly tex­tured analy­sis of the trends in social influ­ence mar­ket­ing in Razorfish’s recent flu­ent pub­li­ca­tion (free download).

Panel high­lights: rock stars and the 80–20 Rule

• I love those new Intel com­mer­cials (“Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars”) on PBS’s New­sHour and else­where, espe­cially the ones fea­tur­ing Ajay Bhatt, one of the inven­tors of the USB. I guessed that it wasn’t really him (Wikipedia is silent on his age), but thought those were real Intel employ­ees. How­ever, it’s an actor play­ing Bhatt, Michael Brito said, and indeed, all the employ­ees por­trayed in the ads are actors.

• Brito (@Britopian on Twit­ter) uses the 80–20 Rule in his tweet­ing: 80 per­cent is per­sonal, 20 per­cent is busi­ness — an excel­lent frame of ref­er­ence for com­pa­nies just jump­ing into the game. He talked about the impor­tance of reach­ing out to the com­mu­nity “in an authen­tic man­ner” through their social media efforts, such as the Intel Insid­ers (dis­clo­sure: I’m part of that team). “I’d rather have 100 peo­ple I have an authen­tic rela­tion­ship than 5,000 fol­low­ers” and an arti­fi­cial rela­tion­ship or no real nexus to you or your brand.

• “Social media is not the be all and end all,” Brito added. “Not every com­pany needs a Twit­ter account or a Face­book app.”

• More Brito: “Most cor­po­rate blogs suck. They really do.” Across indus­tries, most cor­po­rate blogs aver­age one com­ment per post. Intel’s blogs aver­age about four com­ments per post, he said.

• Robert Scoble (@scobleizer on Twit­ter), who has more than 94,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, has recently begun cut­ting back on fol­low­ing peo­ple back. “It’s not a good goal for busi­nesses to have more fol­low­ers. It’s a good goal to have par­tic­i­pants or enthu­si­asts,” he said. “The best brands cre­ate conversations.”

• Lots of dis­cus­sion about mea­sur­ing return on invest­ment, but Gal­lagher came up with the best met­ric: sales. Dur­ing Barbie’s 50-year-anniversary cam­paign, Mat­tel decided to do no tra­di­tional media push, focus­ing 100 per­cent of its efforts on social media. The effort resulted in 35 mil­lion impres­sions on Face­book and an 18 per­cent increase in sales that quar­ter in a down market.

• In his years at Intel, Brito said, “I’ve never seen an ROI report, and we’ve spent mil­lions of dol­lars in search adver­tis­ing. We’re not sell­ing direct to the con­sumer. … ROI is not what you think. You can’t mea­sure ROI of a billboard.”

• Jacob Mor­gan asked a num­ber of spot-on ques­tions and talked about ROI as “part brand aware­ness, part friend equity. It’s not just a number.”

• Some­one from the audi­ence offered a con­cise syn­op­sis of inbound vs. out­bound mar­ket­ing. Out­bound is the tra­di­tional form of inter­rup­tion adver­tis­ing (com­mer­cials on TV, a bill­board inter­rupt­ing your thought process), while inbound mar­ket­ing is about peo­ple opt­ing in or get­ting rec­om­men­da­tions from friends.

• Tom Forem­ski noted that Apple doesn’t directly engage in social media, but oth­ers pointed out that its iPhone has become a key device enabling social media (Twit­ter apps, etc.) and the com­pany has inge­nious brand­ing approaches that make us want to talk about its prod­ucts. “They don’t need a blog or a social media plan, their prod­ucts kick ass,” Brito said.

• Some­one on the panel com­pared where we are with social media in the enter­prise today with “where we were 10 years ago with web­sites.” So true.

• Deb Schultz (one of four Trav­el­ing Geeks in the room) asked about com­pa­nies scal­ing resources and sug­gested that per­haps it was time to rede­ploy “all the 20somethings” charged with fig­ur­ing out place­ment of ads on web­sites and instead make them begin to use social influ­ence marketing.

• Razorfish’s Gal­lagher said the auto com­pa­nies don’t have as much fear jump­ing into social media as some of the other incum­bents because it’s do or die for them.

• A woman from the Cal­i­for­nia Acad­emy of Sci­ences said of the steady spread of Face­book Con­nect through the inter­webs: “It’s insid­i­ous and evil and really very inter­est­ing.” (“Face­book in essence is cre­at­ing its own web browser,” Brito remarked. Inter­est­ing!) She observed that social media is becom­ing more con­nected to real life inter­ac­tions at the din­ner table, in the park and at church. (“You can’t track the din­ner table” for ROI, some­one snarked.)

The ses­sion was video­taped and pre­sum­ably will be released on video at some point. You can read tweets about the ses­sion at #brsm.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.