We hope you’ll check it out and will pass the word onto your expectant friends.

As NYU professor and author Adam Penenberg described on one panel, when people engage with each other (tweeting, writing on their walls, checking in, blog commenting, gaming) the body releases the chemical Oxytocin, also known as the hormone of love. The same hormone that bonds mothers to their newborns also increases empathy 13 percent in males. So, you could think of all the networking that takes place at SXSWi as a love fest of sorts. Certainly, for Seth Priebatsch, the founder of next big thing SCVNGR and keynote speaker, the future is all about engaging with others through the “gamification” of social apps and sites. If we only transform all challenges of the modern era – education, the environment – into a game that we all solve together, the world will be a better place. And this is a theme I heard throughout the event — education is broken, work is broken, social media is broken — now lets change the rules and play some games!

I appreciated Jason Brown of Zynga’s sentiment that “games are becoming indistinguishable from real life communication” and as I watched all attendees staring at their screens throughout the show this truth became self evident. But the funny thing about “South By” (as you should call it if you want to demonstrate street cred), is that it’s a cul de sac of future thinking that will eventually hit Main Street once everyone catches up. So, while Location Based Services (LBS) are the rage at the show, the market of smartphone users that actually use them is still immature. And by immature I don’t mean that they wear bright orange tee shirts with matching orange frame sunglasses (love that Priebatsch style). Watch the mobile LBS/gaming market take off as brands aim to increase engagement with consumers through loyalty-creating games that encourage them to “level up.”

But, lest we believe that people will play games without incentives, consider the promotion that Jill Okawa Fletcher of Virgin America did with LBS provider Loopt to drive people to check in at taco stands to win flights to Mexico. On the “Go Here, Do This” panel she shared with LivingSocial, Foursquare and Yelp! everyone agreed that “you need a big carrot” and that Facebook Places will be the check in hub for LBS. In counterpoint, in a panel on the true value of a Facebook fan, everyone concluded that it’s important to not focus on your brand’s most influential fans, and that giving away free ice-cream dilutes the value of a fan base. What’s most important is what you do with the fan (engagement, again). But it was beneficial to hear from Paul Ollinger of Facebook that the average fan spends $77 more than non-fan customers.

So if engagement via gaming, LBS and social media is the key for brands relating to consumers, the bar is even higher to produce content (stories, videos) that will create better engagement. Social isn’t about just creating pass-along viral buzz, it’s about dialogue, and the dialogue should never be just about the brand. This was made even clearer when I met my personal hero Victor Pineiro of Big Spaceship who posts for Skittles and was on a panel with the guys who created Whopper Sacrifice and American Express Open Forum. Their advice: fail and fail often. This is a process of constant reinvention. Conversational posts are 8-10 times more likely to get responses. Stories are not about us (brands). Focus on the topics that brands share with consumers because that’s what forms dialogue. If Oreo’s fan page can out-do Lady Gaga’s fan page in engagement with posts to the community, it’s more than just celebrity fueling engagement.

The same thoughts were expressed by Robert Brunner of Ammunition Group in his solo session “Ideas not Objects.” Product designer Robert Brunner has played a role in designing some of the seminal devices of our time: the Kindle and Beats by Dre headphones to name two. His philosophy of design is that every product must tell a story. “It doesn’t help to wrap a story around a bad idea. We get our stories from the community. The creation myth can no longer be a myth. Designer and storyteller need to work together. You cannot control your brand, you can only influence what people feel. Today, not taking risks is risky.”

“Content is still king” was heard from several during the show, but one risk-taker in particular hit it home: artist and designer Marc Ecko. He outlined his mathematical formula for authenticity. Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, he took a dizzying Prezi.com-powered presentation trip inside his own mind to uncover what defined his personal brand, on a personal road of discovery that has lead him to promoting UnlimitedJustice.com a cause to stop the use of paddling in corporal punishment in the 20 states that still permit it. He’s using the tools of outsider art and protest tactics to use social media for good and benefit education. Check out the site to stop the dropout rate from climbing.

The SXSWi show ended with the news that Owsley Stanley, the “Acid King” who ushered in the psychedelic movement of the ’60s, had died. In many ways, his passing was a passing of the torch to a new generation of adventurers gathering in Austin to tune in, log on, and check out (the modern era’s version of “tune in, turn on and drop out”). Comedian Marc Maron closed the festival with a live podcast of his WTF Show and he called Austin “Hipster Alamo” as the last bastion of cool in Texas. I prefer to think that the “Love In” lives on at SXSWi.

The recession in 2009 drove a heightened focus on efficiency and increased digital display and paid search budgets at the expense of other channels. Yesterday content portals dominated consumer time online and ad revenue. Today, clearly, social media has completely changed the world – brands are targeting consumers demographically, behaviorally and with dynamic messaging and offers that pertain to their preferences. Hyper targeting through the fray of content directly to audiences via large ad impression aggregators called ad networks has increased considerably. But wait, publishers suddenly realized that this practice of selling their impressions was de-valuing their content and thus eventually going to be a no-revenue model.

Now, Time Inc, CondeNast and other premium publishers are selling their content exclusively across multiple devices – smartphones, iPads, PC, Print, Web TV – forcing content to remain just as important as audience targeting in the digital realm. Digital content consumption will continue to fragment as Web-enabled TV’s explode in the next couple years. Eventually, we will see more of what Turner and Sports Illustrated are already pioneering, and that is securing a certain content alignment across multiple devices with one transaction, one sales rep. Impressions will simply be divided across the delivery devices as appropriate based on demand.

Other trends to watch are:

• In-game advertising due to the explosion and high consumer penetration of Xbox and PS3 systems that can dynamically serve ads
• Agency trading desks to answer impression demand for direct marketers
• Mobile, as consumption increases and adoption of daily usage grows for all age groups
• How Web on TV and the iPad are going to change the print world and content distribution forever

Get ready!

New utilities from Facebook

At the F8 Developer Conference this week, Facebook didn’t just announce a few updates, they shared how their forward-thinking vision has come to life and forever changed the way people will share and become aware of information on the web.

In essence it’s all about connections. Facebook started this movement when they introduced the “like” button and allowed you to “like” a picture, posting or status update your friends listed. Next they announced they would be changing all “Become a Fan” buttons to “like” buttons. This week they revealed how through discontinuing Facebook Connect and launching their Open Graph API, “like” buttons would now be a permanent feature across thousands of sites on the web.

The Open Graph API allows developers to include numerous features such as Like, Recommendations feed and Activity feeds on their website. These features pull in info (like friends) from your FB profile. For example, on CNN you can see which of your friends have already recommended or “liked” an article in the Activity Feed (or on the article itself). You can also recommend an article by publishing it to your FB page with comments. This seamless linking between sites and Facebook will result in more pass along and organic views than ever before.

While specific advertising opportunities around this new type of sharing have yet to be determined, there are a few significant implications already evident.

The first is that Brand Pages on Facebook will no longer be a necessity. Once a user has “liked” something on a particular website, that brand can now update them via their newsfeed. This will eliminate the need for Brands to build followings on Facebook in order to message and converse with users. Their own sites will enable this.

Additionally, the Open Graph allows Facebook to not only infiltrate thousands of websites, but also to gather data based on your habits. Instead of relying on the limited data you provide when signing up, (and that you don’t update frequently) your profile will now be “connected” and updated based on your Likes. If done correctly, Facebook will be able to aggregate and sell targeting segments that are more granular, recent and relevant than any other company out there.

Another update is a Credit program called “App2User.” This allows companies to provide an option to its users to turn reward points into Facebook credits that can be spent in Apps.

Facebook launched the new Open Graph with about 30 partners. Check out Pandora where you can now see what stations your friends are listening to, Yelp where you can view your FB friends’ reviews or NHL where you can “like” and publish to FB who your favorite team, player, etc. is.

While some groups will certainly scream about privacy concerns, Facebook has taken a major leap forward in socializing the web and making the flow of information more relevant to all users.

Please let us know your take!

Twitter is like a more-manic version of Facebook networking – consumer interest only lasts as long as an item appears on their feed and users can remove followers from their list for any fickle reason:  they don’t get the user’s attention, they annoy the user or they just lose interest.

The trick is making Twitter more interactive for the user and spreading the brand name every step of the way. That’s where the new Twitter application TweetSwell comes in.

TweetSwell, still in beta form, is an engine for surveys, quizzes and polls that allows organizations a new way to engage with followers. We’ve been casually playing with TweetSwell for about a month and have been pleased with how interactive it is. We also appreciate the frequency with which the results are re-tweeted, spreading the brand name every step of the way.

How it works: Companies create a survey for the purpose of collecting consumer sentiment, sparking discussion or conducting product reviews. You write and manage the survey, then TweetSwell hosts it and uses your Twitter account’s design settings for a seamless brand experience. Once you publish the survey and promote it on Twitter, respondents can personalize their Twitter responses. TweetSwell collects all the metrics to show how successful the application is.

Other online survey and polling applications exist, including KwikSurveys and SurveyMonkey. For Twitter, however, TweetSwell founder Eric Chang saw an opening.

Chang acknowledges that Twitter-friendly applications already offer surveys and contests: TwtPoll allows you to create branded surveys on Twitter; PollDaddy offers easy, free polls that you can publish on your blog, Web site or social network; and CrowdCampaign allows users to create a contest while promoting a brand.

Where TweetSwell is different, Chang says, is that it focuses on creating customizable tweets from the surveys, so the survey is more engaging and has more marketing potential.

“Many companies have already been using Twitter to collect anecdotal feedback and address consumer questions and concerns,” Chang said. “What’s been missing is the ability to back this anecdotal feedback with some real analytics and do it in an automated way.”

Chang’s focus is twofold: to create deeper analytics for the clients, showing the “social reach” of the brand; and support better incentives for followers to engage companies through Twitter.

There are currently a handful of organizations testing the TweetSwell service. Chang hopes to use their feedback to better hone the design and metrics. One tester is the maker of men’s clothes, Bonobos, which is using TweetSwell to see what its customers want out of a good dress shirt: “Should cuffs have one button, or two?”

Once TweetSwell is officially up and running – sometime early next year – Chang says he’ll have a pricing system in place.

For now, he’s working on developing even more utilities for TweetSwell. He recently included a “roll your own tweets” feature that allows hosts to pre-populate the respondent’s “What’s happening?” box on Twitter, and the ability to add images to the surveys.

Marketers have been trying to depict consumers engaging with products since the first spear salesman scrawled images of the hunt in charcoal on a cave wall. Modern marketers rely on images of happy, healthy people running on the beach, or perhaps relaxing in side-by-side bathtubs. The goal is to hold the mirror up to us, the consumers, who will see ourselves in the images, and then (presumably) buy what’s most reflective of us.

Social media takes this traditional mirror marketing in powerful new directions, and we are just scraping the surface of its potential. Now, thanks to the online bits and bytes we trail wherever we go, it’s possible to aggregate word-of-mouth social chatter and turn it back on consumers so they see themselves reflected out from the brands they consume.

Consider what Sprint is doing with its Now Network that purports to show in real time what’s going on in the world, from the number of seconds until Doughnut Day to how many babies are being born from the moment you’ve clicked on the site. It’s hard not to feel that Sprint is dominating with a real-time, always-on positioning.

Audi also effectively took the social buzz about its e-Tron electric vehicle to the masses by aggregating all of the blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos and Flickr images in one place where it could be seen. Click on The Conversation to see its social footprint dynamically come to life.

For companies looking to selectively post tweets about specific on-brand topics, TweetRiver enables a real time customer testimonial tweet stream. So what happens when consumers see their thoughts and feelings about brands reflected back at them as marketing? Certainly they feel they are part of a like-minded community.

But visualizing what the masses think is only the beginning of mirror marketing. Facebook Connect puts your own profile photos and sometimes videos right into a digital scenario so you can literally see yourself reflected back at you. This twisted funhouse mirror has been well executed to promote a game in The Prototype Experience.

But at heart I think that social media marketing is really akin to a magic mirror, one that not only reflects you back to yourself, but also interacts with you, shares your dreams and aspirations. A Facebook fan page is probably the truest expression that marketers have now of a magic mirror. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that real world magic mirrors are emerging and revolutionizing the digital out of home experience with augmented reality where you can try on clothes in stores virtually.

Watching U2 perform on their 360 tour, where the stage was capped by a massive mirror disco ball spinning around to shine the light on adoring fans, it was clear that we’re all hoping to have our moment in the spotlight, to see ourselves as something better than we are today. And when our modern bard, Bono, had several fans join him onstage wearing masks with the face of Aung San Suu Kyi, he made them a mirror to multiply her voice.

One thing is for sure: we’ve come a long way as an industry from observing consumers via one-way-mirror focus groups, to traveling through the digital looking glass. I call this Mirror Marketing. As Alice would say in Wonderland, it’s only going to get curiouser and curiouser.

Social is everywhere

• Social networking users have doubled since 2007, representing 60% of the online population and users go to their favorite sites five days per week, four times per day for about an hour per day.
• Facebook and MySpace represent two of the top ten sites and provide similar scale to the big portals.
• Social is bigger than facebook, MySpace, twitter and LinkedIn. It has become so pervasive that it has seeped into all parts of our lives: Music (imeem), movies (flixster), parenting (cafemom) and even ethnic communities (BlackPlanet and AsianTown).
• Smart marketers are starting to replace click thrus to their own site with click thrus to facebook where they encourage you to fan their brand. They understand that if I click thru to their site, they have reached one person, but if I click thru and fan their brand, they have reached me and all of my friends via facebook’s News Feed. Absolut Vodka has started to use this execution.
• Facebook and twitter are starting to infiltrate TV as there will be a twitter and facebook app in the Verizon Fios Widget Bazaar. In the first iteration of the twitter app, Fios subscribers will see a spilt screen with the programming on the left and the tweets on the right based on the programming or genre they are currently watching.

Social is nowhere

Ad land tends to look at the world through a myopic lens vs. understanding what is happening in real America. And although social is huge and is growing, we are sometimes startled and receive a much needed dose of reality when we hear contrarian numbers:

• 69% of all adults 18+ have little knowledge of what twitter actually does.
• Social networks receive less than 7% of the overall digital investment.
• TNS recently polled 60 big brands and the consensus was that agencies don’t get it and one went as far to say that traditional agencies have very little contribution to make.
• Ask any major marketer if they feel they have search or OLA figured out and most of them will say yes, but ask them if they have social figured out and the majority will say no.

So there you have it. The next time a client asks you to opine about social, tell them social is everywhere but nowhere. And FYI, you don’t have to credit yours truly.

Facebook has an identity crisis on its hands. When the company opened up fan pages so you could have a customized name (facebook.com/YOURNAMEHERE) a torrent of URL name grabbing took place on a scale not unlike greedy Gold Rush prospectors grabbing land out West in 1849. Now fans could also make their page look even more official with a customized URL.

By releasing naming rights to the public Facebook compounded an already difficult challenge for companies trying to unify their official presence within the walls of a social network. Here’s what Facebook itself has written about its fan page policy:

Note: Fake Pages and unofficial “fan pages” are a violation of our Pages Guidelines. If you create an unauthorized Page or violate our Pages Guidelines in any way, your Facebook account may be disabled.

Now what if someone were to take your name, post content about you as though they were you, and then spread false information about you. When your friends visited Facebook, they might inadvertently friend the faux you. When your boss (new client, old flame, mom) looked you up on Facebook, they would see this “you” and then your false presence could interact with the people who are really important in your life. If they were an evil false version of you, they could deliberately request to be friends with your real friends, and wreak havoc with your reputation.

Would you stand for this? I don’t think so. So why should a brand stand for it? The plot seems to be pulled from an awful Michael Keaton movie, Multiplicity. Multiple versions of the same person is a running theme for Charlie Kaufman, the brilliant screenwriter of films Being John Malkovich (who has 3 profiles), Adaptation (in which Nicholas Cage has an identical twin – 4 profiles for him) and Synecdoche, New York (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman who has 6 profiles by the way, and many more doppelgangers in the movie).

Fan pages do not display their administrators or contact information in many instances. And if you write on the wall asking who they are and if they’re “official” expect to be ignored. The burden of proving falsehood of a fan page is on the company that wants to own its brand experience in Facebook.

Facebook should drop the “Welcome to the official Facebook Page” prefix they automatically tag onto all pages listed with search results. They’re not official unless a company has authorized them, per the policy. Also, make page administrators contact information a requirement for creating a page, and enable Facebook to contact them to determine whether they are authorized to speak on their behalf.

Rather than rely on having a brand take over a false page by starting a whole other page with the same name, let the brand import all existing fans automatically into the real authorized fan page. Seems it would be simple to do with some coding.

Let the fans remain in groups where different rules apply. This isn’t about being Big Brother; this is merely a form of reputation protection. If Twitter can have verified accounts why can’t Facebook?

Now it’s been reported that a woman and a man, both named Kelly Hildebrandt, met on Facebook and are now getting married. I wish them the best of luck with their nuptials. I’m so glad they found each other and hope they keep it real. For all of you walking the line between your personal and professional brand, and the brands of your clients, what’s the best resolution so we can all live happily ever after?

Recently Mullen had a wonderful experience working with Olympus to launch its new E-P1, the world’s smallest interchangeable lens camera.  This beautifully designed camera shoots great stills and HD video.  As a content creating machine, it seemed the perfect product to bring to life in the social media space.  After all, aren’t YouTube, Flickr and Facebook where we show off our photos and videos?

However, you don’t simply appear, announce your presence and hope people pay attention.  You start at the beginning.  So here’s what we did and what might work for you.

1.  Make a commitment to listen, engage and share

Seems obvious, but it’s important. Social media isn’t a campaign or a program, it’s an ongoing relationship.  Olympus understood this and made that commitment.

2.  Define your community

The more clearly you define your community and learn how they engage with a category, a brand, content and media, the more effective you’ll be. We weren’t trying to reach a mass audience, but rather to connect with digitally savvy photo enthusiasts who might enjoy learning and talking about the new camera.

3.  Determine objectives

True, Olympus signed up for the long term — to listen, learn, share, contribute — but our real objective was to launch the E-P1, generate buzz, get bloggers to pay attention, and have the press pick up the conversation.

4.  Engineer your presence

Essentially we constructed a social media brand platform, connecting Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube so we could take our questions, content and conversation to the community rather than ask them to come to us.  Of course, Olympus prominently displayed links on its website, too.

5.  Build a following

You can let it happen serendipitously, or you can develop a game plan.  We chose to follow key influencers, promote their content, contribute to their conversations, and offer them value in hopes they might follow back.

6.  Engage, share and inspire participation

Long before we were even ready to talk about the new camera we got fans and followers engaged in discussions.  We shared videos, product demos, invited them to submit content, and simply talked.

7.  Do something attention getting

Even in the social media space, you have to compete for attention and generate content worth talking about. We did it by partnering with Tom Dickson of Will it Blend fame.  We started with a teaser video that generated nearly 200,000 views in the first couple of days, then followed with a full blown product introduction. We didn’t create a viral video for the sake of creating a viral video; rather we came up with a fresh new way to demonstrate the totality of the camera’s features.  It worked, evident by this blurb in Wired.

8.  Mobilize your community

Ok, in this case we did something social outside the digital realm.  We invited bloggers and reporters to a product demo and photo shoot at Coney Island.  But we also provided our fans and followers with the full story and useful background about the camera.

9.  Measure results

As our head of analytics likes to say, “you can’t put up a weather station and measure yesterday’s weather.”  So early on we put in place systems to measure the conversation, sentiment, tweets, RTs, web traffic and impressions from both online and offline media coverage.  This gave us a base to compare the conversation at the start of the project with the buzz generated after the announcement.  It will also give us a baseline to use in determining actual sales and their relationship to the conversation.

10.  Keep on going

As we said, and as Olympus knows, this isn’t a program or a campaign, it’s a commitment.  So we’re still at it.  Listening, talking, sharing, responding.  Of course it’s too soon to see the sales numbers, but feedback from dealers has been very positive.   And we know based on previous experience that there is a correlation between buzz and sales.  So that’s a good thing, given that bloggers and press are writing, prospective customers are talking, and the videos are getting shout outs everywhere.

Can you think of anything we missed?   Are there best practices we didn’t consider? Have you introduced a new product this way?  Please share.