Icaught a fair chunk of the Where 2.0 conference yesterday in Santa Clara, Calif., plus part of Tuesday's sessions. I think it's fair to say this is the best annual gathering of thought leaders in the mobile space -- people from the future who beam to bring us up to speed on where this whole mobile revolution is taking us.

Here's my modest Flickr photo set of 14 images.

I got to spend some time with two of the rock stars of the mobile world: Di-Ann Eisnor, VP Community of the cool beat-traffic-jams app Waze, and DJ Patil (another initial guy), chief product officer of the hot startup Color (and former chief scientist of LinkedIn). which recently raked in $41 million in venture backing.

I'm always impressed by the visual eye candy at Where 2.0 and this gathering was no exception. Check out the 90-second clip above, Waze Presents: An LA Traffic Story (music), which visually represents a 24-hour time lapse of traffic congestion, accidents, police activity and more in Los Angeles, based on the automatic GPS tracking in the Waze app as well as reports by Waze members. Fun!

Some other highlights from Where 2.0

Alexa Andrzejewski of Foodspotting, Jyri Engestrom of Ditto, Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze.

I didn't get to all the sessions I wanted to, but here are a few other highlights and takeaways:

• Good to meet the folks behind SeeClickFix, a site that lets people report community problems to local government, and one that I've admired for some time.

• My favorite new toy: the GroupMe app, a group messaging service for ad hoc groups of friends, family, co-workers, college buddies. Says co-founder Steve Martocci: "It's like a it's like a reply all chat room on your phone. … This is a very intimate tool that'll buzz everyone's pocket." Yowza!

• 40 percent of ratings on Yelp is coming in through mobile devices. Yelp now has 50 million unique visits per month in eight countries.

• One out of every 10 Israelis (not just drivers) uses Waze.

• Localmind is a new service that allows you to send questions and receive answers about what is going on — right now — at places you care about. If it scales, this would be an awesome service.

• Loved this quote from Jyri Engeström of Ditto (just downloaded the app: "Looking to hang out? Find out what your friends are up to, have a conversation, or get a group together. Ditto makes it easy to get recommendations about restaurants, movies and things to do."):

"A lot of the conversation that goes on at conferences like Where 2.0 is based on the assumption that we're talking about places and buildings. But the resolution of social objects is getting higher and higher so we're getting to the things scale and person scale, with almost everything being able to have a unique identifier associated with it -- even plants and animals. Then the whole conversation changes."

• Raffi Krikorian of Twitter: "People want to say 'I'm in Vegas, baby!' without giving away their exact location." His hourlong talk about the different tiers of "local" was fascinating. I was also digging terms like "geohash." And: "The holy grail of geo-location is to use some kind of GPS triangulation." Follow him on Twitter at @raffi.

• Jack Abraham, Director of Local at eBay: "Any product that can be digitally distributed, will be." He noted there were 465 million active IP addresses in 2009 and that number continues to balloon. Also: ecommerce still makes up only 5 percent of all commerce in the United States.

Continue reading »

Today a year ago, Facebook introduced its Like button. Such a simple yet genius idea enabling Facebook to learn what every user's interests are. In one year, more than 2.5 websites have integrated Facebook's like button on their websites, giving Facebook the ability to not only gather information about its users on its own site but also gather information about them from all over the Internet. In this manner, Facebook had conquered the Web.

People's behavior with the Like button is quite interesting to study and might not necessarily always be accurate, though, for a "like" can be given not because someone was actually interested in something but rather as a token of appreciation, or worse, peer pressure. Despite the fact that the like algorithm might be faulty in certain situations, overall the like algorithm seems to be working well, serving you information through your news feed that you have previously claimed to liking.

Some have complained about not having a dislike button as well, but I believe there is a reason for why the dislike button is not created. It's because, after all, Facebook is a social community and in order to survive there needs to be positivity in the air. Negative energy can only lead to negative content which in turn would harm such a network.

Continue reading »

A word of warning to brands looking to expand their Facebook footprint: There are no shortcuts

Editor's note: A lot of social media marketers discuss how to create a Facebook presence or manage walls and Pages. But few go into details about strategic use of advertising on Facebook. In this series, industry expert Dennis Yu outlines the mix of strategy and analytics that's required. Also see:
• Part 1: How to run an effective Facebook campaign for $5

Guest post by Dennis Yu
CEO, BlitzLocal

Should you "buy" Facebook fans from vendors that sell on a cost-per-fan basis? We have gotten this question a lot over the last couple of years, so let this article be your guide.

The short answer is: If it sounds too good to be true, then listen to your instincts. Whatever you decide, make sure the ads are being run in your own account, no matter what excuse they give you.

You've probably come across services that promise to deliver fans for just pennies each. (Or even cheaper!) That's like saying you can buy a brand new iPod for a dollar. What’s the catch? Most of them can’t deliver, and most of the ones that do are offering you what’s effectively poison. Some reputable social advertising agencies like Epic Social can deliver you quality, but they are rare.

The top varieties of Facebook flim-flam

Here are the main flavors of snake oil, why they’re dangerous, and how to spot them:

Get 10,000 fans!

If you see any variation of this, run. Often they have only a couple of hundred fans themselves. It’s no different than SEO vendors that promise links and yet have no Google PageRank or inbound links to show for themselves. Notice that you don’t see any customer testimonials — at least not real ones. And their fan page looks like something pulled out of an infomercial selling dietary supplements. They probably just switched the images out on that landing page to sell whatever is hot.

Fans for pennies!

If you see a self-checkout right on the page where you can send a PayPal payment or order fans in bulk, run. You’re getting bot traffic, international traffic, traffic rings and other so-called fans that will never result in engagement or sales of any kind. Now if you just want to be able to say you have 100,000 fans but don’t care beyond a single boasting metric, then go for it.

Link exchanges!

The idea here is: If you fan me, I’ll fan you. Often there’s a credit system in place where it’s not a one-to-one trade, as you find on Twitter. Some of these trades are automated fan exchanges. Not only is this against the Facebook Terms of Service, but these firms require you to give them administrative access to your page. Might as well give them your social security number while you’re at it.

Our 'proprietary' system!

These charlatans will try to sell you an ebook or software, promising the “secrets” to making millions. If you believe that, I’d like to sell you some oceanfront property in Colorado. Do they have real examples to share, or must you pay to see them?

The alternative: A marketing strategy for fan acquisition and valuation

In the end, there’s just no substitute for a clear marketing strategy for fan acquisition and valuation. On Facebook, three things are key when appealing to customers: Decide what your best customers look like, write ads that appeal to them, and send them to a landing page that makes good on that compelling value proposition. Then test like crazy to fine-tune your targeting, ad copy, and landing pages. Know what your fan costs and what a fan is worth -- hopefully, the former is greater than the latter.

The hucksters described above present you with a simple shopping cart check out to sell fans — select how many fans you want and then pay. Yet how could they possibly deliver on that promise if you don’t inform them of your unique selling proposition, which particular audiences to go after, and how you will engage or convert them? Are you trusting them to write whatever ad copy they want, buy traffic from underdeveloped countries, or make misleading promises about your brand to encourage users to click Like? We've seen some firms place a dozen Like buttons on a page and offer an incentive to users who click on all of them. Those users who are clicking on the Like buttons machine gun style -- have they had a chance to learn about your brand?

Using analytics to optimize your outreach and campaigns

No amount of software or gimmicks can substitute for not having a strategy in place. A key component of that strategy is analytics. You must be able to measure fan quality so that you can use this as a basis to optimize your campaigns. What is a fan worth to you? What are you doing with these folks once they become a fan? And how do you identify and reward your most loyal fans — the people who love your product or service in real life?

The idea of spending money on Facebook ads just because the CEO said to do it or because your competitor has more fans is ludicrous. You might be inviting derelicts to loiter in the lobby of your high-end hotel, which will discourage the very customers you want to serve. Your real fans will notice who is in your community and decide whether they want to spend time with you there.

Imagine your fan page now has a bunch of 13-year-olds from Indonesia and Turkey (no offense, folks). These could be people who clicked Like on your page because they wanted to earn some FarmVille dollars for a Facebook game. Not only do they not know about your product, but they don’t even speak English.

A simple litmus test for quality

Whether you’re evaluating your page, the agency you’re considering, or the clients they put forth as examples, just look at their wall. Is there a lot of user interaction relative to how many fans they have? Count up the number of Likes and comments for the most recent post, which is the number of interactions. Divide that by the number of fans they have. If it’s less than 1 in 200 (half a percent), then the engagement rate is low.

Your cost per fan depends upon the industry your company is in, how well you can capitalize on your brand's real-world awareness, and how effectively you run your Facebook campaigns. Of 11,000 Facebook campaigns we analyzed in a recent study, the cost per fan was $1.07. But that averages out entertainment categories that are half that cost, versus healthcare and financial companies that might be five times the cost. Just like in regular Pay Per Click marketing or even direct marketing as a whole, the cost to acquire a customer varies dramatically.

Continue reading »

In today's age, it's not enough for a brand to just have a Facebook business page. A brand needs to nurture its Facebook community and keep it excited and alive. A Facebook community needs to feel loved. Here are 5 ways to keep your community excited, happy and growing:

1) Run a creative contest. Think of a competition that would appeal to your community, that would mobilize them to get active with your brand. For example, on our HP page we celebrated HP's partnership with Warner Bros. and product placement in the movie "Sex and the City 2I" by running a competition on our Facebook page where we asked people to show us the Carrie Bradshaw in them. We asked individuals to write Carrie's column in the most creative manner possible. The entrant who would make us laugh, cry and feel the Carrie Bradshaw within would win a trip to NYC to visit all of Carrie's hangout places.

When doing a contest, make sure to give an adequate prize and make sure your contest is run via a Facebook application — it's against Facebook's rules to run a contest on the page itself.

2) Mix things up with offline events for the community. Get your community to be more cohesive by inviting members to offline events. For example, we invited folks from our Facebook page to the "Sex and the City 2" movie premiere:

3) Special privileges for community members. Give your community members special privileges that others don't have. Like a discount on products, first sneak peaks, free accessories. People love getting perks, and it reminds them why they liked your brand in the first place.

4) Use Facebook Questions. Facebook recently launched Facebook Questions. Activate the community by asking them interesting questions. Mashable wrote a good post with all kinds of tips for how brands can maximize this feature on Facebook.

5) Consistently upload interesting and relevant content. Engage with the community by uploading content that is valuable and appealing to your community members. If you're running a cosmetics page, write a note about your top 10 facial cosmetics. If you're running a restaurant page, give a special recipe for the holiday coming up. Provide your community members with value for being a part of your community.

With so many brands vying for our attention on Facebook, companies need to be very smart about the way they manage their social presence. A deserted or spammy community can really hurt a brand's reputation whereas a flourishing and live community can really raise a brand's positive awareness. Make sure to always keep up with the latest Facebook features, provide value and keep things on the move if you want to be the latter.

How to take advantage of the power of microtargeting on Facebook — at a crazy cheap price

Editor's note: Dennis Yu and his BlitzLocal team helped retool and optimize the Socialmedia.biz website two years ago. We met up again with Dennis at last month's Web 2.0 Expo, where he gave a preview of this Facebook microtargeting strategy. Today he's revealing its specifics for the first time. This is the first of a series about strategic use of Facebook.

Guest post by Dennis Yu
CEO, BlitzLocal

Last week there was a buzz in the CEO, Webtrends and CEO, BlitzLocal offices. One of our employees was trying to get my attention. He did so by creating a Facebook ad targeting anyone who lived in Portland, was between 30 and 40 years old and worked at either Webtrends or BlitzLocal. Of the nearly 600 million users on Facebook, only 80 people met that criteria.

It cost him only 6 cents to do it. And for that price, he was able to bombard our people with ads. The cost of that inventory is a 30 cent CPM, which means it costs 30 cents to show a thousand ads. So he was able to send 200 highly targeted messages, as he details in this post on the Facebook Microtargeting trick.

Sounds less like advertising and more like super-targeted email marketing, doesn't it?

And, in fact, it is, except for this:

• You can send these messages without needing someone's email address.
• You pay only when someone clicks it (yes, it's cost per click advertising).
• An impression is guaranteed when the person next opens Facebook (whereas in sending an email, you can only hope that someone will open it).

Now imagine that you're a software company like Webtrends, building relationships with other agencies that resell your social analytics software. The founders of the data visualization agency JESS3 come to visit and you'd like to strengthen that bond. Maybe you spend $5 on a micro-targeted campaign like the one above, but slice it up to put the ad image more compactly next to the stats. You absolutely bombard anyone who works at that firm with your message almost 3,000 times. If they have 50 people, that's 60 ads per person. Who cares that we got only 9 clicks (of which 4 happened to become fans)? The goal is not the click, but the awareness.

Total cost: $5.67 in Facebook ads

Create a specialty video with a customized message

But you could take it a step further, since those folks who do click through on the ad can come to your landing page. So imagine that we send all employees of the email marketing company ExactTarget to this Facebook landing page (warning: there is sound). And how much did this landing page cost? Only $5. We have a network of dozens of freelancers that will do voiceovers, take photos, sing songs or do whatever for a few dollars. More examples of specialty videos here.

While each of these examples might be clever or interesting, the question becomes: How do you scale this? Social media success is about pinpoint precision targets — ultimately, because we're simulating the one-on-one conversations that friends have among themselves. But if you want to have 1,000 conversations, you need 1,000 different ads and 1,000 different landing pages. Who has the infrastructure, staff, or the budget to do that?

Continue reading »

Frank Sesno of "Planet Forward."
 

One approach: Newsrooms could attract a crowdsourced pool of community advisers

At Sustainatopia -- the Caribbean-flavored conference in Miami that brought social entrepreneurs, VCs, journalists, artisans, celebrities, media activists and a fair number of Miami's beautiful people together for a celebration of sustainability -- an interesting discussion broke out Tuesday on this question: Should news articles offer calls to action?

Frank Sesno, the former CNN correspondent who now runs Planet Forward, and Tom Hudson of PBS's Nightly Business Report, led a conversation on "How New Media Can Engage the Public." A number of the conference-goers and I questioned why public broadcasting and traditional media don't do more to offer citizens a series of action items around issues that their newscasts cover -- a set of options that lets viewers connect with organizations offering possible solutions rather than letting them feel frustrated and powerless.

"Under the very strict set of PBS rules, you're not going to hear a call to action," Hudson said flatly. "There's a fundamental difference between an advocate message and a media message."

But there's a difference between advocacy and giving citizens the tools to participate in the democratic process. I sense that this is part of the ongoing cultural shift in values about the news media's role and responsibilities. Young people in the room seemed to think it should be a natural outgrowth of a story to be able to connect with sources or forces at play, while Hudson and Sesno -- who admitted they came of age during a different media era -- largely averred, saying that journalists shouldn't cross the line into anything that even resembles advocacy, even if that amounted to just offering a selection of vetted options for viewers to pursue on their own without the journalists taking sides.

PBS's "News Hour" and the Huffington Post offer a list of resources in a limited fashion, but few other news organizations do -- and, yes, I consider it a shortcoming in the way modern journalism is conducted. The end of the story should not be the end of the story. If newsrooms don't have the bandwidth to do this, use a deputized, crowdsourced pool of community advisers.

On the other hand, Sesno -- who was thoroughly engaging and forward-thinking throughout -- was effusive in his praise of the model being blazed by 350.org, not a news outfit but a climate change advocacy organization. "It's a great idea -- access to technology and the ability to reach young people and engage them with a call to action. That's a magical mix. It's the model of democratic media in many ways."

• More Sesno: "Studies show that the average American thinks 27% of the federal budget goes to foreign and humanitarian aid, when the true number is less than 1%. Of course, that kind of misinformation skews and distorts the debate in this country."

Continue reading »

One of the most packed sessions at this last's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was "Measuring the Future: New Metrics for New Media," a solo talk given by Margaret Francis, Vice President of Product at Lithium, one of our top 10 social media monitoring vendors.

"Social media is an effective way to create awareness of and interest in products and services," she told the 400 onlookers. So, how do you do that?

Those of us who do social media consulting for brands bump up against this all the time: The client -- properly, of course -- wants metrics to gauge the success of their social media or social marketing efforts and to shift course when they're not hitting their goals.

There are tons of things you could be measuring. David Berkowitz even listed 100 ways to measure social media, but that's the way to get lost in the weeds.

Instead, Francis said, "Measure strategy, not stuff." That is, focus entirely on what you're trying to accomplish with your social media program or campaign and then identify the Key Performance Indicators that will tell you, over time, whether you're getting there.

Four kinds of applied metrics

While companies want to talk about their social media ROI, they really need to focus on identifying KPIs that map to business objectives.

Francis laid out four kinds of applied metrics that you should be focusing on in your metrics program:

1. Brand perception: "It's why Visa sponsors the Olympics and why Coca-Cola sponsors the Special Olympics," she said. "It's why you're on Twitter." It's about maintaining or enhancing your brand's reputation, perception and visibility. So you measure KPIs that inform factors like customer satisfaction score or likeliness to buy.
2. Marketing efficiency: You should be look at your website, optimize for SEO and study where your traffic is coming from: Twitter, Facebook, blogs. (Twitter, I'll add, now drives more than 10 percent of the New York Times' traffic. Facebook drives at least 13 percent of MSN's and Yahoo's traffic.) Study your analytics. "You've got to have a web analytics tracking system on your website," she said. "It's all about reach." And that means you may need to track the "little ticky-tacky metrics" that add up to painting a fuller picture.

Continue reading »

Strategies to drive citizen engagement and social innovation

I'll be one of the speakers at Media2Movements, a gathering in Miami on Wednesday that will focus on the escalating changes in the mediasphere.

Put on by Ashoka and underwritten by the Knight Foundation, Media2Movements will bring together a number of new media luminaries, including old friends Kara Andrade, Karen Worcman of Brazil's Museum of the Person, Brian Conle of Small World News and Emily Jacobi of Digital Democracy. From the program:

We are at a catalytic moment: Rapid technological change and entrepreneurial innovation have brought us closer than ever to full information citizenship. Egypt, Libya, even Wisconsin testify to the growing capacity of media to catalyze movement; change happens when people know what's going on and can tell others.

But those same forces also threaten the public good by corroding the historical values of the information realm. In an everyone-a-content-creator-world, who can tell which information is trustworthy? It's easy to author and distribute news and commentary - and equally easy to monitor and censor that content. Amid these tensions, the risk is that, rather than engaging, people simply disconnect - and movements lose their mass.

The challenge: Can we imagine a new, self-correcting information marketplace - an ecosystem for news and knowledge that effectively responds to, or even anticipates, whatever change happens? That ensures sustainable full information citizenship?

Looks to be an exciting, invigorating event. Hope you can join us.

Sustainatopia and the Social Venture Capital conference

In addition to Media2Movements on Wednesday, I'll also be speaking at Sustainatopia twice on Monday:

• I'll be co-hosting the power-packed Move the Needle bootcamp Monday at 9 am with Sloane Berrent.

• I'll be moderating the Media Trends & Marketing Movements panel Monday at 1:15 pm with Clint O'Brien of Care2, Tamara Staus of Stanford's Social Innovation Review, Sloane Berrent and Nick Aster of Triple Pundit.

Continue reading »

I'll be attending Where 2.0, which focuses on mobile technologies.

Here's our roundup of social media, tech and marketing conferences and events for the month of April. Lots of cool gatherings on tap.

For the full year, see our full Calendar of 2011 social media, tech and marketing conferences. We've also published a roundup of nonprofit and social change conferences and events for the month and for the year on our sister site, Socialbrite.

Hope to see you at some of these! If you know of other must-attend events, please share by posting the info in the comments at the bottom.

Continue reading »

Conference	Date	Place
April
Sex::Tech 2011	April 1-2	San Francisco
Sex::Tech 2011 aims to bring health and technology professionals together with youths, parents and community leaders to advance sexual health for youths and young adults.
Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies	April 4-6	Boston
This fourth annual gathering focuses on the business value of social media for established brands, as well as entrepreneurial companies. It brings together community experts with lines of business leaders who are using social media strategically to drive their business.
We Media NYC	April 6	New York
In 2011 We Media will issue a We Media challenge to create the brilliant city of the future, award $50,000 to the best start-up ideas, hold a boot camp for would-be entrepreneurs and focus on new ways to think, create and change everything.
Beyond Books	April 6-7	Cambridge, Mass.
“Beyond Books: News, Literacy, Democracy and America’s Libraries” (shortlink: “BiblioNews”) is a one-and-one-half-day convention that aims to assess shared purpose -- and now shared channels and technologies -- among librarians and journalists to promote civic engagement and open access to information.
ad:tech San Francisco	April 11-13	San Francisco
ad:tech is the meeting place for the world's leading digital marketing and service companies as well as nearly 10,000 digital marketers, influential speakers and domestic and international press.
National Association of Broadcasters	April 11-15	Las Vegas, Nev.
The NAB Show is the world’s largest digital media industry event attended by leading media, entertainment and communications professionals who share a passion for the next generation of video and audio content across multiple platforms — from television, radios and computers to phones, the big screen and beyond.
Signal Chicago	April 12	Chicago
Signal: Chicago will focus on the theme of "Marketing in Real Time." From real-time bidding on new demand-side and exchange platforms to real-time messaging of location-based services, marketing has time-shifted into the present tense.
Sentiment Analysis Symposium	April 12	New York
The symposium bridges technology and business in one of the most exciting applications to emerge in recent years: software that discovers business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news and enterprise feedback.
MIX 10	April 12-14	Las Vegas, Nev.
A three-day conference for web designers and developers building the world's most innovative web sites.