As a marketer, you probably daydream about impressing your CEO with unforgettable statistics from your social media campaigns that clearly articulate the ROI. There is a budding business discipline around social analytics, which aggregates and analyzes online conversations and social activity generated across social channels and enables organizations to act on the derived intelligence to drive business results. But how does one get to the ultimate state of social media bliss? To achieve social analytics Zen, you have to marry the yin and yang of social media analytics. Here’s how you can do that.

Learning from External Data: Social Analytics Yin

The path to achieving social analytics Zen begins by analyzing external data. Marketers must analyze industry, competitive and consumer conversations to have a solid understanding of the industry landscape. To properly understand your Yin:

1. Identify key data sources and determine the frequency with which you’ll collect data: Create a benchmark of what’s currently being discussed at an industry and competitive level.
2. Separate the information by audience type: You may have several different key buyer segments and corresponding influencers. Identify your keyword set by audience type and perform social listening to determine where digital conversations are happening.
3. Develop goals by audience: Define what action you want each audience segment to take (e.g. gain awareness of your company, influence others, purchase your product/service, engage with you). Your audience goals should be driven by your overall business goals.
4. Monitor by audience type: At this point, you’ll have a sense of whom you want to monitor. Create lists of top targets, influencers, and new customers to quickly scan for conversations that may require your participation. Create triggers for specific user intent that is tied to business goals.

While having a finger on the pulse of your industry enables you to understand key industry trends and drivers, this is only part of the story. You also need to analyze data from your own social campaigns.

Learning from Internal Data: Social Analytics Yang

Analyzing internal campaigns allows marketers to continually get smarter, more effective and more productive. As we learned from Travis Unwin, director of media strategies for Awareness partner agency Sitewire, a full service digital marketing and interactive advertising agency you can’t ‘set-it-and-forget-it” when it comes to social media (LINK to Travis’s post). It’s important to learn from your own content. To arrive at your Yang:

1. Determine your content and platform mix: Test on various platforms to find the right marketing mix for your company. Remember, the goal is to drive new customers to your marketing funnel.
2. 2.     Measure your successes and failures – Get Granular: Which campaigns performed the best? On which platforms? Which posts or tweets stood out from the highest-performing campaign? Allow these learnings to guide future campaign development.
3. 3.     Develop benchmarks: Ideally, you’ll want to invest in a toolset that helps you gain intelligence over time. You’ll want a social analytics platform that’s a one-stop destination for social intelligence.
4. 4.     Incorporate Social Media into your Marketing Mix: Social media shouldn’t be performing alone in a silo. Make your marketing efforts more effective at driving business results by integrating all available channels (email, website, mobile, ads, and social).

Achieving Social Analytics Zen

With the knowledge gained from your social analytics yin and yang, you now have a solid understanding of your landscape. The marriage of the yin and yang (or Zen) is where your external and internal intelligence meets. This happens when you can identify and act on specific sales opportunities. The ultimate measure of Zen occurs in the Social Marketing Funnel, a sales framework we developed to help marketers monitor, identify, classify and respond to prospects and customers in social channels. Research consistently shows that the likelihood of purchase increases when people have a social connection with a brand or product – for example, fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy. With 90 percent of all purchases subject to social influence, and 90 percent of consumers trusting recommendations from people they know, marketers need to recognize the social marketing funnel is vital to overall prospecting activity.

In our latest white paper, Actionable Social Analytics: From Social Media Metrics to Business Insights we unveiled the Social Analytics Framework for Marketing and Sales Effectiveness. Use this framework to determine KPI’s according to marketing objective.

There is a new economic model – one that rewards the consumer for behaving a certain way that has far-reaching repercussions for your brand online. Companies that understand this new method of currency, value, and reward can reap the benefits of higher recall and increased consumer loyalty. Liz Crawford provides an analysis of this new model in The Shopper Economy: The New Way to Achieve Marketplace Success by Turning Behavior into Currency. With 20 years of experience as a brand manager and consultant focused on strategic innovation, Liz is uniquely qualified to identify this new shopper behavior-driven economic phenomenon. In anticipation of our Shopper Economy webinar next week, we sat down with Liz for some Q and A.

Your book, The Shopper Economy, describes an emerging economy where behavior is currency. What led you to investigate this topic?
I thought it was fascinating that digital technology, especially mobile technology, was enabling new kinds of transactions between buyers and sellers.  In addition to shoppers purchasing brands, brands were purchasing shopper behavior.  I believe this is a relatively new phenomenon.

In the book, I try to make clear that I am not referring to a conventional buy-more-get-more promotion.  And I don’t mean a deferred discount, like a cents-off-next-purchase.

Instead, I am pointing out a new dynamic where a shopper can actually earn value in exchange for one of four behaviors: paying attention, participating, advocating, or committing.  None of these behaviors directly involve purchase. The shopper can earn value by simply behaving.

This earned value can come in various forms – Shopkick Kicks, Facebook Credits, miles, points, etc. You will notice that this value is digital scrip (not straightforward fiat currency in most cases). The digital scrip is currency in that it is – 1. recorded,  2. stored and banked, and 3. redeemable at the discretion of the shopper, across channels. Shoppers can aggregate all manner of scrip in a clearinghouse website like www.points.com. This website allows shoppers to exchange hundreds of forms of scrip for fiat currency (dollars and cents), which may be deposited into a Paypal account.

Which industries are leading the way in understanding this new activity-based marketplace?
At this point, I believe that retailers are leading the way, along with financial services.

Retailers who are rewarding behavior are reaping the benefits.  There are various platforms which effectively use shopper participation to drive traffic and conversion.  These platforms include: http://www.scvngr.com/ , www.checkpoints.com/ , http://shopkick.com/ among others. These are platforms, which shoppers download onto their smartphones as apps.

American Express, of course, is a leader in the area. Their points system is both the granddaddy of digital scrip, as well as the continued frontrunner. One of the big reasons for their massive success is their extensive network of partners.  Shoppers who acquire points can redeem them in virtually any way they please, including simply using points to supplement/replace payments at a digital point of sale (www.americanexpress.com). I believe that with Google Wallet or ISIS type technologies, we will see frictionless, fungible exchanges of scrip with fiat currency, for everything. This really opens the door to the Shopper Economy.

How can small businesses take advantage of the concepts in The Shopper Economy?
Many smaller or independent retailers can begin to experiment with incenting behaviors by signing up with one of the platforms already mentioned (Checkpoints, Shopkick, SCVNGR, etc).  These mechanisms are used by hundreds of local merchants to drive traffic. In some cases the rewards are simply deferred discounts, like Foursquare rewards (“free coffee next visit” for example).  In other cases, the earned value is scrip which is redeemable at the discretion of the shopper.

For small business, advocacy is an important behavior to reward. Groupon and Living Social both reward shopper-to-shopper advocacy, and of course are used extensively by local merchants, like salons and restaurants.

In this new economy where shopper behaviors create units of value, how can marketers quantify a specific value to a shopper behavior?
This is a detailed subject.  The book devotes a chapter on valuation for each of the four shopper behaviors.  Some behaviors like Attention and Participation should be evaluated in comparison to more traditional communication and promotional expenditures, respectively.  So, if a shopper is watching an ad in exchange for scrip, does that shopper score higher on recall and persuasion scores?  It is the effectiveness of these efforts that need to be assessed. It is a trade-off of investment dollars.

The same evaluation process can be used to assess Participation programs.  For example, how effective is a SCVNGR game at driving store traffic, in comparison to other efforts?  This will help a business owner optimize marketing investments.  Participation also usually has a conversion component. That will help with understanding the financial return of the program.

The book also cites specific formulae to quantify some behaviors such as Advocacy.

What does the future look like in the shopper economy?
Shoppers will become increasingly sophisticated in understanding the worth of their labor.  This means that they will evaluate transactions with brands and retailers with a sharper eye to their own advantage.

For more insights from Liz Crawford, be sure to attend next week’s free Awareness webinar: The Shopper Economy. You can also download chapter 1 of The Shopper Economy: The New Way to Achieve Marketplace Success by Turning Behavior into Currency.

It’s time marketers stop collecting data for data’s sake and start it for culling insights. That’s where social analytics comes in. Social analytics is the evolving business discipline that studies social media metrics to help marketers use the findings to drive business intelligence. If you’re new to this, have no fear. Look to the 15 influencers listed below for guidance on the topic. They can help you get started or finesse your approach. Here are the Top Social and Web Analytics Experts to follow (in alphabetical order):

Gary Angel, president of Semphonic.  Recipient of the Digital Analytics Association’s Award for Excellence as the Most Influential Industry Contributor.

Don’t miss: 3 Paths to Digital Optimization: Zen and the Art of Enterprise Analytics

Key Takeaway: To get the greatest value from analytics, you need an integrated approach.

Connie Bensen, Senior digital strategist at Dell

Don’t miss: Best Practices for Social Media Monitoring ROI

Key Takeaway: Great tips on how to avoid spam and noise: add exclusion criteria to your searches.

Keith Burtis, co-founder of MeasureMob

Don’t miss: Getting Started in Analytics From Tape Measure to #Measure

Key Takeaway: Three resources to get you started with analytics.

Alistair Croll, principal analyst for Bitcurrent, contributing author to Web Operations, Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth.

Don’t miss: Writings: December 2011/January 2012

Key Takeaway: A sampling of Alistair’s thinking, including 2012 trends and how companies should think about big data.

Susan Etlinger, industry analyst at Altimeter Group

Don’t miss: Research Report: A Framework for Social Analytics

Key Takeaway: Measure your company’s performance against the Social Media Measurement Compass.

Nathan Gilliatt, principal at Social Target, co-founder at AnalyticsCamp, founder at SocialMediaAnalysis.com

Don’t miss: Applying Intelligence and Analytics to Online Statements

Key Takeaway: Insightful matrix of Intelligence/Analytics plotted against Fact/ Opinion

Taulbee Jackson, CEO and president of Raidious

Don’t miss: Social Media Analytics – AMA Michiana

Key Takeaway: At the end of the day, you are trying to determine ‘how good is the content?’

Avinash Kaushik, digital marketing evangelist at Google and author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day

Don’t miss: Beginner’s Guide to Web Data Analysis: Ten Steps to Love & Success

Key Takeaway: An excellent getting started guide to web analytics.

John Lovett, senior partner at Web Analytics Demystified Inc, author of Social Media Metrics Secrets

Don’t miss: You’re Using the Wrong Social Media Metrics

Key Takeaway: Understand corporate goals, align business objectives, tie metrics to measures of success and then define operational tactics.

Jonas Klit Nielsen, CEO and founder of Mindjumpers

Don’t miss: Executive Series: Listening on Social Media is about Insight Management and Analyzing Data

Key Takeaway: Listen first to relevant conversations, then break down the data to relevant insights.

Katie D. Paine, CEO & founder of KD Paine & Partners; author of Measure What Matters

Don’t miss: KDPaine’s How-To-Get-Good-Data Checklist

Key Takeaways: Both humans and computers make mistakes, so check your data regularly.

Eric Peterson, CEO and founder of Web Analytics Demystified Inc., author of Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators

Don’t miss: Finally! Standards Come to Web Analytics

Key Takeaway: Google Analytics has become the de facto standard for web analytics.

Sean Power, data scientist at Cheezburger; contributing author to Web Operations, and Complete Web Monitoring

Don’t miss: Complete Web Monitoring, (O’Reilly, 2009)

Key Takeaway: Learn everything from why, what and how to implement measurement in your organization.

Jim Sterne, founder of eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and the Digital Analytics Association and author of Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment

Don’t miss: eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits

Takeaway: Learn from Jim in person at a summit near you.

Marshall Sponder, senior analyst and founder of WebmetricsGuru.com and author of Social Media Analytics: Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics

Don’t miss: Lack of Processes (or the Wrong Processes) biggest problem in Social Media Reporting and ROI

Key Takeaway: You need a standard process for measurement.

To learn more about what social analytics and how you can approach it, consult with our new position paper Social Analytics for Marketing and Sales Effectiveness.

Let’s hear it from you, marketers: Did we list all your top analytics gurus? Did we miss anyone who deserves to be included? Sound off on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and on Pinterest.

The Super Bowl XLVI was a social media success thanks to the Indianapolis Super Bowl XLVI Host Committee and team at Raidious, who created and managed the first ever Super Bowl Social Media Command Center. Using the Awareness Social Marketing Hub, our on-demand social marketing management software (SMMS) as the exclusive backbone to their operation, the Host Committee was able to capture the game’s excitement via social channels and extend the value of the game online. Forty-six avid social media experts from Indiana worked side-by-side with a staff of 50, including student interns from nearby universities, to make the Super Bowl XLVI a memorable and safe experience. As a result, the Social Media Command Center generated over $3.2 million in value – through amplified social reach and engagement, estimated at 64 million impressions at kickoff alone. Thanks to our friends at Raidious, we bring you the social side of the Super Bowl XLVI as a fun infographic:

If you are interested to learn more about the social muscle behind one of the largest sports events, join us our free webinar “Championship Social Media: Lessons From The Super Bowl XLVI Host Committee Social Media Command Center“ on Feb 23 at 2PM EST.  Also, stay tuned for an in-depth case study on the Super Bowl XLVI lessons learned and best practices in March.

We are excited to share our annual report on the State of Social Media Marketing – Top Areas For Social Marketing Investment and Biggest Social Marketing Challenges in 2012. The team at Awareness connected with 320 marketers from a cross-section of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing experience.  Our annual State of Social Media Marketing report comes with insights from those leading the efforts at the C-level and those who manage the social marketing function within their organizations, as well as a number of business leaders who are helping to bridge the social gap within their enterprises.

Here are some interesting findings and insights that are contained in this report from our CEO, Brian Zanghi.

2012: The Year of Growing Social Marketing Maturity

Social marketing is entering a stage of maturity and with it, savvy, socially-oriented businesses are starting to embrace social as part of their companies’ DNA.  This transition comes with an understanding that siloed approaches to social marketing are not effective, and a realization that scale with social marketing comes with the adoption of new organizational structures, processes and technology infrastructure that can help the enterprise scale and optimize in a continuous fashion. Expect that in 2012 focus will shift to active social media management for increased lead generation and sales.

C-level Involvement with Social Marketing

We were excited with the response levels from C-level executives (39% of respondents) and the information they shared.  Top-of-mind for executives and senior managers is ROI, integration of social with lead generation and sales, and expansion of social presence and reach. It is clear that the C-level wants more proof before they allocate additional organizational resources to social marketing.  This is why only 8% of our respondents reported 2011 budgets of over $50,000 per year, with 12% of the organizations reporting teams of 5+ social marketers.  At the same time, executives need to realize that to give their social marketing initiatives a chance, they need to invest accordingly in the effort.  Our prediction is that to resolve the cost-benefit conundrum in 2012, executives will start to adopt new processes and technologies that will not only help them scale the effort, but get the data that clearly links to ROI.

The Right Social Marketing Infrastructure

Social marketing maturity will increasingly be defined next year as the practice of adopting new processes and technologies that will help the enterprise scale their initiatives.  2012 will see savvy social businesses moving beyond the “let’s allocate a few people resources to social” mentality to incorporating robust social media management platforms. These platform will provide the ability to monitor and analyze social conversations, while creating effective response and content mechanisms to increase customer engagement and ultimately sales. Our industry is reaching this maturity tipping point – 78% of marketers reported monitoring social media channels for mentions of their brand at least a few times a week, while 62% reported monitoring industry conversations with the same frequency. Although 19% of surveyed marketers reported using a social media management platform, these are the leaders who will be reaping the most benefit from their efforts.

Expanded Use of New Social Marketing Platforms

Experienced social marketers report that they plan increased usage of social marketing platforms beyond the Big Three (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) to include: Blogs (91%) YouTube (86%), foursquare (59%), SlideShare (43%), Flickr (50%), and Tumblr (30%). Driven by increasingly fragmented user consumption habits, companies clearly see the need to expanded social presence that will allow them to follow and engage their prospects and customers on multiple channels and networks.  This proliferation of channels and the corresponding need to successfully engage in all of them will make the job of social marketers increasingly more complex. This, in turn, will necessitate the adoption of robust tools to manage presence, monitor and report on activity, and tie efforts to the organizational bottom line.

The State of Social Media Marketing report contains additional insights on top social marketing investment areas, top challenges for 2012, top social media platforms used today, the role of LinkedIn in reaching the C-suite, along with a fun section on the top news and analysis resources marketers use to stay on top of the latest and greatest in our industry. For full, free access to the State of Social Media Marketing report, click here. If you would like to be included in the survey for next year’s report, click here. You can also access the 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions, to hear from marketing strategists David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis, Erik Qualman, Paul Gillin, CC Chapman, and Steve Rubel what 2012 has in store for us.

We welcome your thoughts, reactions and feedback.  Let us know how the insights and findings presented in the State of Social Media Marketing report will help shape your thinking in 2012.  Don’t hesitate to ask us the tough questions – as we embark on 2012, we promise to continue to provide deeper dives into best practices, successes, and notable trends to help you, social marketers, do more and do better.

As we embark on 2012, the team at Awareness, Inc. consulted with the best and the brightest in marketing, strategy, technology, business and social media marketing to help us identify the top news, analysis and trends resources for social marketing and social technology.  Our industry is among the most dynamic, with many voices reporting, analyzing and advising on social technology, social media developments, successes, and best practices. To help you navigate the active social news space, we compiled this Ultimate Guide to the Top Marketing, Technology and Social Media Resources.  This guide aggregates resources quoted by leading strategists such as David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis, Erik Qualman, Jason Falls, and Jay Bear, top analysts and influencers Jeremiah Owyang, Debi Kleiman, Laura Fitton, David Berkowitz, brand leaders such as Ekaterina Walter, Michael Pace, and Pam Johnston, and agency visionaries Steve Rubel, Mike Troiano, and Jonas Klit Nielsen in our free report on 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions, to name just a few.  The Ultimate News Resource Guide also contains the collective input from over 300 marketers from a cross-section of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing experience (we recently polled these marketers for our upcoming annual report on the State of Social Media Marketing to be published in mid January) and asked them about their top information resources and their sources of inspiration.

Here it is – the 55 Top Marketing, Technology and Social Media Marketing News, Analysis and Trends Resources in alphabetical order:

1.   AdAge @adage

2.   AgencySpy @agencyspy

3.   All Things Digital @allthingsd 

4.   Altimeter Group @altimetergroup

5.   Around the Net in Online Media

6.   Around the Net @aroundthedotnet

7.   Awareness, Inc. @awarenessinc

8.   Big Think @bigthink

9.   BoingBoing @BoingBoing

10.  Brian Solis’ Blog @briansolis

11.  Bull Dog Daily Reporter @BulldogReporter

12.  Business Insider @SAI

13.  Chris Brogan’s Blog @chrisbrogan

14.  Convince & Convert @jaybaer

15.  Customer Collective @yourcustomers

16.  Darwin Awareness Engine Blog @darwineco

17.  Direct Marketing Association @DMASocialMedia

18.  Editors and Publishers @EditorPublisher

19.  eMarketer @eMarketer

20.  Exploring Social Media @JasonFalls

21.  FastCompany @FastCompany

22.  Forrester @Forrester

23.  Gartner @Gartner_inc

24.  Harvard Business Review @HarvardBiz

25.  Jeremiah Oywang  @jowyang

26.  Lifehacker @lifehacker

27.  Mari Smith @MariSmith

28.  MarketingProfs @MarketingProfs

29.  MarketingSherpa @MarketingSherpa

30.  Mashable  @mashsocialmedia

31.  Media Post @MediaPost

32.  MediaGazer @mediagazer

33.  Newsmap @Newsmap

34.  Pulse @pulsepad

35.  ReadWriteWeb @RWW 

36.  Robert Scroble @Scobleizer

37.  SmartBlog on Social Media @SBoSM

38.  SmartBrief on Social Media @SmartBrief

39.  Social Commerce Today @marsattacks

40.  Social Media & Marketing Daily

41.  Social Media Examiner @smexaminer

42.  Social Media Times @socialtimes

43.  Social Media Today @socialmedia2day

44.  SocialMediaMakerting.com @socialROI

45.  Socialnomics @equalman

46.  Summify @summify

47.  TechCrunch.com @techcrunch

48.  Techmeme @Techmeme

49.  The Next Web @TheNextWeb

50.  Trendsmap @Trendsmap

51.  Venture Beat @VentureBeat

52.  WSJ Media Marketing @WSJMedia

53.  WSJ Tech @WSJTech

54.  Wired @wired

55.  Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) @womma

Besides these top resources, today’s marketers heavily rely on their Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook feeds to get to the top news and developments in our industry.  You can follow these Twitter lists to easily get the latest from some of the top experts, and from our top resources, listed here. If you are looking for the top CMOs using Twitter, then look no further than this list of Top CMOs on Twitter.  You can also read about how CMOs are engaging with Twitter. And one final Twitter tip – if you want to know when your top journalists are tweeting about your brand or relevant industry terms, use this new handy tool from Muck Rack.

And as David Meerman Scott reminds us, some marketers also get their insights from their peers – they make it a conscious effort to attend industry events and conferences where they get first -hands insights from their colleagues on what works and what’s in store next.

Don’t be shy – let us know if we missed some of your favorite resources. Experts and marketing leaders you follow not on this list? You have our word – we will update this top list based on your feedback. You can also download our free report 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions, containing insights and predictions from 34 business strategy and marketing experts. Connect with us on Twitter #AwarenessSMM on Facebook at Social Media Marketing Best Practices and Social Media Marketing Mavens Pages or LinkedIn at the Social Media Marketing Mavens Group.

Photo Credit: webtreats  154 Blue Chrome Rain Social Media Icons Used Under a Creative Commons License

On our quest to understand the state of social marketing dynamics, we invited author and marketing strategist Adam Mertz (@theMetz) to share his insights about what’s at the heart of social marketing – the social customer.  In his book The Social Customer: How Brands Can Use Social CRM to Acquire, Monetize, and Retain Fans, Friends, and Followers, Adam explains the advantages of socially-minded companies, which proactively manage the social customer. We were excited to have Adam offer an hour-long webinar on the principals covered in his book – watch the webinar here.

Let’s start with who the social customer is. Adam defines the social customer as anyone who uses social media at least once a month. Others like Michael Brito (@Britopian) have gone as far as defining six types of social customers.  And if you’ve read Brian Solis’ (@briansolis) recent blogpost The State of Social Marketing 2011-2012, then you know he talks about the social customer as “someone who first goes to their social networks of relevance to learn about products and services”.  If you are wondering how many of your current customers are social customers, follow Adam’s recommendation and use this free Social Technographics Profile Tool from Forrester Research. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff (@jbernoff) and Ted Schadler (@TedSchadler), using methodology they developed in Empowered, have created this free tool to helps brands classify their consumers into seven levels of social technology participation. Brands can easily add demographic data to determine the percentage of social customers they service, along with their customers’ corresponding levels of social engagement.

Once you have established the size of your social customer pie, you can then tackle the next step – that of determining if your company is well suited to play the role of a “social object”. A “social object” status for a brand is the brand’s ability to create content and messages that people can actively discuss, interact with, and share via social media channels. A Lady Gaga song, for example, is viewed as a social object once it’s mimicked, re-recorded, and posted to YouTube by thousands of fans.  Brands need to be willing and open to be ogled, “liked” or disliked, or else they may as well stick with their traditional toolset. Here are a few of the “social object” qualifiers brands need to embrace to engage successfully with their social customers (For those interested to learn how to position their company or brand to achieve the social object status, download the first two chapters of The Social Customer for free):

1. Your company wants to talk directly to your customers one to one

2. Your company wants to talk to customers on a day-to-day basis

3. Your company is willing to monitor social conversations and is able to turn them into actionable items, pronto.

If you believe that these qualifiers align with your company and brand, then consider the following use cases that help give your brand the social spark. Adam’s work is based closely on the research by Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) and Constellation Research CEO R “Ray” Wang (@rwang0) first published in Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.  Building on their work, Adam defines 23 use cases for social customer relationship management. Here’s a peak at Adam’s social marketing use cases that will help you to enhance your social customer engagement efforts:

1. Social Marketing Insight – Build your customer social profile; know where your customers are spending time online.  When integrated into your marketing strategy, this knowledge is invaluable. It allows your marketing team to be incredibly effective by delivering highly targeted messages.

2. Rapid Social Response – Monitor real-time conversations; make sure that you know what people are saying about your brand. Thanks to social monitoring technology, marketers can monitor the social landscape for hiccups about their brand and triage accordingly.  Adam uses the example of the Bank of America’s Google + brand jack incident this past November, where someone created a phony Bank of America account and was posting about “freezing all assets.”  This is a great example of why you should be monitoring your brand. Give yourself the opportunity to act quickly and save face.

3. Social Campaign Tracking – Use social media to test your marketing campaigns or product enhancements. The social customer is often a prosumer – part producer and part consumer, who will offer feedback for free! Polling your Facebook fans could save your company time and money. For instance, marketing agency 360i advised their client Velveeta to poll their customers on two different packaging designs.  The poll generated significantly more activity than their typical posts and ultimately affected Velveeta’s design decision

4. Social Event Management – Enhance attendees experience; by leveraging social technology and platforms, you can help attendees make more connections. Adam’s example is Google’s Cloud Conference, Atmosphere 2011. This event attracted over 350 CIOs including Flint Waters, CIO of the state of Wyoming, Bryson Koehler, SVP of Global Revenue and Guest Technology at IHG, Michael O’Brien, CIO of Journal Communications, and Christine Atkins, VP of Group IT at Ahold, among others.  These CIOs came together to share business strategies and efficiencies for collaboration in cloud.  The attendees kicked off the conference by downloading an app, which asked a few questions around specific connection preferences. The app then matched people and let them connect with each other on-premise. Be useful by focusing on the needs of your customers, use face time most effectively to make lasting connections.

5. Social “Pull-Through” – Empower your customers to fight for your brand; it’s all about supply and demand and a happy social customer will become your brand ambassador, influencing your partners, suppliers and prospects.

To get the full advantage of Adam’s insights, watch the webinar here.  You can also visit Adam’s blog, where he provides tools and offers free classes, audio chapters, and more. To add to your understanding of the social customer and get additional insights on how to best engage them, you may also consider the following resources: Here’s What People are Looking at on Facebook Brand Pages for insight on how consumers look at brand pages; How to Turn Fans into Brand Ambassadors to learn techniques on how to empower your social customer to promote your brand, and The Rise of the Social Consumer and the State of Social Marketing 2011-12 to learn about the current state of the social consumer and their decision making styles.

How do you engage your social customer? Do you have a prosumer success story?  Have you caught a phony in real time? Has your social following paved the way for a product? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments below, on Twitter at hashtag #EngageAwareness, on Facebook at Social Media Marketing Best Practices, or LinkedIn at the Social Media Marketing Mavens Group.

I recently connected with Karen Rose, Social Media Strategist for the National Home Office of the American Cancer Society (ACS), based in Atlanta, GA, as part of our interview series on effective use of social media in driving thought leadership, awareness and lead generation. Awareness could not be more excited to be the social media marketing platform partner of choice for ACS – there are a few national brands that have elevated their social media presence and engagement to the ACS levels.  It was great to get a deeper perspective on ACS’ approach to Social Reach (read about key social marketing success metrics in our free eBook The Social Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing), their take on the increasing importance of social marketing, and ACS’ unique ability to listen, engage and educate their passionate followers.

A bit of social media overview for ACS first.  Besides their National Home Office, there are 12 regional divisions of ACS, each managing their social marketing independently, with social media agendas and strategies of their own. At the National Home Office level, ACS uses primarily Facebook, with its Fan Page counting close to 250,000 members, and Twitter approaching 200,000 followers. ACS can be found on MySpace and LinkedIn too. The ACS team actively publishes content which includes supporting multiple blogs such as Dr. Len’s Cancer Blog, authored by Dr. Lichtenfeld, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the National Office of the ACS, Expert Voices, authored by experts who discuss timely cancer topics, and the Choose You blog, encouraging women  to put their own health first.

I started by asking Karen about ACS’ social philosophy and the role social plays in the organization’s overall marketing mix. ACS has embraced the social web as one of their most impactful marketing channels – “we really just need to be where the people are”, Karen put it simply. Karen and her team started to track conversations about cancer in the “early” days of social media. They quickly realized there was a lot of inaccurate information and misconceptions about cancer being published and shared on a daily basis. “Our team had to intervene”, Karen shares with passion, “we needed to provide sound medical advice and offer ACS’s vetted resources to help patients and their loved one cope with the disease”.

It is not surprising that Karen and her team are maniacally focused on responsiveness. “We use the Awareness social marketing hub and have incorporated our national call center with the Hub now”, comments Karen. ACS monitors discussions on their Facebook and Twitter channels 24/7- yes, including nights, weekends, and holidays. By listening to conversations and responding to people in real time, ACS can influence discussions and direct people to the variety of ACS web resources where information and advice are vetted and clinically sound.

“We want to inform people about the many ACS resources we have so they can stay well and get well “, continues Karen. ACS’s goal is to inform and educate about screenings, guidelines, support groups, and medical resources. “ACS uses social as the spokes of our hub to pull people back to our web properties”, comments Karen.

It was quite revealing to hear Karen talk about ACS’ selection of social media platforms and their strategy for building presence on social networks such as Facebook.  The ACS main Facebook Fan page –  American Cancer Society, focuses on cancer, cancer-related topics, survivorship, and care giving, and serves primarily as an information and educational resource.  Other nationally managed Facebook Fan pages, such as Making Strides Against Breast Cancer and Relay For Life, are event-based. The Relay For Life Fan page, backed by over 110,000 passionate followers, exists in support of a fun-filled overnight event, celebrating survivorship, and to raise money for research and various programs coordinated by ACS. The ACS More Birthdays Facebook page, with over 300,000 Fans, was created to celebrate birthdays and  survivorship. The Choose You Fan page is directed towards women, who want to have their own conversation about prevention. ACS’ approach to building multiple targeted pages on social networks such as Facebook based on users’ needs and passions was validated as a best practice in our recent analysis of over 100 customers using the Awareness social marketing publishing platform. Our analysis showed that best-in-class companies have at least 13 Facebook Fan pages and 10+ Twitter accounts, allowing them to better target the needs of niche communities (you can download our free eBook The Social Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing for more details).

With such deep and engaging presence, I asked Karen to share some of ACS’ social successes.  One of the most impactful campaigns for them is a  More Birthdays campaign, which started a few months ago. ACS had several artists and musicians create special art pieces, music and videos, to help ACS followers celebrate birthdays. The artists’ collective body of work was then used to create “Happy Birthday” messages delivered to cell phones and as e-cards. The campaign became so popular that a number of fans responded by submitting their own “Happy Birthday” video responses. “The reaction and sharing of these video messages is phenomenal”, comments Karen. This viral response prompted the More Birthdays team to launch a user-generated artwork contest, including song and video submissions, with the winner to be featured on the More Birthdays Facebook page next to the established artists. At the time of the interview, the contest was still underway, but based on the initial response and number of submissions, I can tell this campaign is off to an amazing start. Karen attributes the success of the campaign to the fact that ACS has given their audience a great outlet to share their stories. “The More Birthdays campaign opened it up for people to allow them to honor a loved one or tell their story”. And in the process, every video and artwork was connected to an aspect of work being done by the American Cancer Society, tying birthday songs to important cancer facts. “In a sense, we have empowered our followers to help us tell our organizational story”, continues Karen. “This can be truly powerful and long-lasting”.

Karen’s advice to today’s hesitant Chief Marketing Officers who are still not sure social is relevant for their organization? “Do it”, she says,” People are out there, they are talking about your brand, they want to interact with you,” she adds. “It’s important to be there to represent yourself and your organization the way you want to be represented.”

So to any of your marketing skeptics, we join Karen and her team in saying: do it, embrace social to its full potential.  Empower your customers to share their stories and see how they weave your own brand DNA into them.  And for those of you who actively use social in your marketing – please don’t be shy.  Share your successes with us and our community of savvy social marketers by commenting on this blog, on Twitter, Facebook at Social Media Marketing Best Practices and in our LinkedIn Social Media Marketing Mavens Group.