I was impressed by their use of social media. It’s good to see social media doing some good things for the world. She sent me a link to their social media news release that was chock full of ways to learn about the project.

In short the project goal is saving the lives of malnourished children.  And they need your vote to help them increase the amount of funding they can get for the project.

“Saving the Lives of Malnourished Children” is now guaranteed a share of $2.5 million in prize money. The project with the most votes receives $1.5 million, 2nd receives $500,000, 3rd $300,000, and 4th and 5th $100,000. The funding – made possible by your votes – would bring a vital lifeline to hungry and malnourished children around the world.

But we need your help between now and October 13. Voting is easy and doesn’t cost a thing! In just a click, you can save the lives of thousands of malnourished children. Click here to vote:

For severely malnourished children, we offer a step-by-step treatment program that gives them what they need to recover, including nutrient-dense food supplements like the peanut-based product, Plumpy’Nut. Our comprehensive monitoring system saves more than 90 percent of children being treated in our feeding centers. Being one of the Top 5 would mean our nutrition could reach more children around the world who need our help.

Save Some Kids — Vote Now

Time is short – so Vote NOW!

This is a great example of how social media can be used to increase awareness and do good in the world. These kids need our help, so GO VOTE NOW.

Ben Grossman, Editor in Chief, for Broadcasting & Cable led this panel discussion.

Danny Kastner is founder of Fan Rocket. Fan Rocket provides services to media companies that help promote media via viral videos.

Stephen Andrade is General Manager of NBC.com with a mission to promote TV shows, provide online advertising opportunities and create content for NBC.com. He shows a clip of what he calls creative social media that shows how The Office’s Dunder Mifflin Infinity website provides tools for fans to build content. The goal was to create a really deep community for fans of the show. The site presents creative tasks to “branches”( user groups) each week.

David Glover is CEO of Or Die Networks. The company is a online creative company that partners with celebrities to build new shows, such as Funny Or Die, and combines that with user generated content and social network tools to build community. He views it as a pyramid of content with the celebrity partner at the top, advanced users producing high quality content and then the mass user generated content.

EriK Flannigan, EVP of Digital Media at MTV Networks, runs Comedy Central and a few other sites. He says that consumers will form groups with or without you, so you need to decide if you want to participate. MTV is trying to embrace the social web using things like the Facebook activity feed.

How does an aspiring producer play in this? Stephen says that it’s important to understand the economics first. He says there are no barriers to entry so it doesn’t make a great area for investment. It doesn’t work to make things with TV type budgets. TV is a hit business where 1 hit can pay for 10 failures. On the web, there is a much lower cost of failure and therefore many more people trying.

Erik says that the industry has come a long way in the past few years understanding how users want to and will mash up content. The biggest stumbling block is letting go and letting users make their own choices. You don’t really have much choice because you can’t control what happens. He says you occasionally get into trouble with copyright issues, but you keep on going.

Dick says he met last week with one of the premier writer producers in comedy television. They were working on a concept and the writer said it would only work if there were no comments allowed. Dick says they walked away. You can’t fight reality.

Dick says they have less issue with copyright problems because their content is short and some what self contained.

Danny says this is really an area of opportunity as TV shows start hiring people dedicated to making extra content and making it viral. Stephen calls it a writer producer in training role, where when they go on to write/produce TV shows they will get the online side of this. Erik and Dick concur saying that new jobs are being created to re-purpose existing content for the digital space and new marketing jobs are requiring digital experience.

Does every new show need a social component as well as a digital component? Stephen says he’s not sure what “digital” means. He says it probably means both, but it really depends on the content.

Erik says that the social component depends upon the show. He describes the difference between The Daily Show and The Colbert Show. One is about presenting content, the other is really social.

The panel had some interesting advice to people in the audience who are interested in the space. In short, think beyond video. Erik pointed to an example on the Huffington Post that was an interactive view of how a conservative views the NY Times. Stephen concurred saying they want interactive ideas beyond video because they can really drive page views. Dick closes by saying think about what the technology can do, and video is just one of the things the technology can do.

They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out.

This is an excellent example of a simple, highly focused campaign and a well orchestrated effort to measure the results.

This type of campaign shows that social media can be woven into your marketing efforts with practical and relatively straightforward methods. I’ve captured some screen shots below and a sample of a YouTube video to help provide some perspective on the project.

Here’s what the blog looked like:

And a video from YouTube.

And some of pictures from Flickr.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, FastCompany.tv, SeaWorld, Journey to Atlantis, Shel Israel[/tags]

It’s a management approach that applies a metrics philosophy to product development, product marketing, and business planning, so that resources can be focused and success can be repeated. The metrics philosophy that’s employed typically needs to be consistent with the performance criteria of broadcast media, but incorporates the interactive dynamics of social media.

The approach aligns management around success strategies and shared goals to provide your staff with the guide posts for making decisions consistent with the interest of the business. Done well, it will create or reinforce a culture of continuous improvement in new content, function, and initiative development.

If you would like to receive “Conquering the Social Media Blues: Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management” please sign up to receive our white papers.

There is no cost or obligation. Just fill out and submit the form. To make sure you want this white paper, you will receive a confirmation email from us confirming you are making this request. We respect your privacy and will not share any information beyond our organization.

Subscribing is free and you can opt out of receiving further information at any time by going to the link at the bottom of our emails to you.

[tags]social media, social media performance management, ebook, whitepaper, report[/tags]

The hype and growth surrounding the space means that everyone is rushing in to connect with the huge audiences that are possible with successful social networks. Budweiser, Coke, Fast Company and many other brands have been deploying big new social networking initiatives. Facebook applications are being built right and left. Open Social means that even more social applications will be built for the other big networks as well.

However, while social networks like Flickr and cool Facebook apps are fun and social they may not generate significant commercial returns. Leading media and brand marketers know they need to be embracing social media, but risk falling into the same trap if they don’t focus on success and doing it in a way that makes sense for the social web.

My conversations with digital media executives lead me to believe that forward thinkers know they need to be managing distributed media across the social web and that they need more than just embeddable video players. They tell me they need guidance about what works beyond the BS they hear from vendors, how to measure performance and how to embed that into development processes so that future projects benefit from what’s already been learned.

There is lots of good thinking going on about how to measure performance on the web and some are even thinking about measurement in the social web. However, many are still stuck using traditional broadcasting or Web 1.0 models to define success and those measurement models are not going to be adequate for defining success and driving performance on the social web.

We need to rethink performance measures and the way we collect data from the social web.

I thought it would be useful to provide some opening thoughts about how measures for the social web might be different and appreciate any feedback. To start, we need to identify what’s different about the social web.

From a long list of things that are different a few stand out to me as really important.

• User Contributions – On the social web, we have users producing content right and left. In addition, they are providing insight. Insight into themselves and insight into what is popular. This means that content with potential can, with some skill, be filtered and identified much more effectively.
• Distributed social media – The paradigm has changed from users seeking content to content seeking users. We see this new paradigm everywhere with downloadable media, embeddable videos and widgets that deliver content, services and more to users in a highly distributed way.
• Expectations that everything is free – The huge surge of low cost content supply means that users are willing to pay less and expect more to be free.
• Shifting business models – We are seeing the beginning of a major shift in business models from those that are based upon the economics of impressions to ones based upon the economics of community.

I believe that these changes shift performance measurement from being rather linear in nature to something that is more recursive in nature. By recursive, I mean that we are measuring a repetitious cycle where a change in one measure drives changes in other measures and is thus much more difficult to pin down. If we are not careful and discrete about measuring this kind of process the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies as well – the mere act of observing a phenomenon changes its nature.

Below is a simple illustration of what I’m talking about (note this is just illustrative and not all inclusive). In the impression based business model of broadcast, revenue was driven by linear function of reach multiplied by frequency and by CPM (cost per thousand impressions). That same business model was largely the model that drove Web 1.0 business models which were based upon uniques, page views and CPM models. This same model can be extended to commerce based businesses as well by adding click through rates, conversion rates and price per purchase.

In the social web, I think there is a recursive process of users, engagement, user contribution, viral impact, visitors, and conversion spawning more users as the cycle continues over and over again in a recursive manner. In addition, I think that the units of revenue measurement will shift from CPM to RPU (revenue per user) because we are now not just getting paid for advertising, but also for lead generation, potential direct sales and other ways of monetizing users.

Some of these measures are new so here’s the short argument for each measure:

• Visitors – Without new visitors there is no growth. Separating visitors into new and returning and identifying where they come from is still important.
• Conversion – if we are shifting from impression based business models to community based business models then we need people to become users or members. This can be a simple measure and extended to capture how much information the new user provides.
• Users – Users do more than visitors. They consume and they produce – which is essential for scaling on the social web. Tracking users usage by signup cohort to understand how sticky the user experience is can provide insight into the durability and scalability of the site. You want to know if people will return and increase their usage over time.
• Engagement – The experience needs to be compelling enough for users to produce good stuff and to return to do it again. Simple measures like time on site, page views and loyalty still matter, but getting deeper into understanding how much of the capability you are providing (both on and offsite) get used and which parts drive engagement becomes important as well.
• User Contribution – The more users contribute, the more the content scales and that drives the potential for viral impact and if they provide insight into themselves or into attractive content that can be leveraged into RPU. There are lots of interesting measures that could be developed her fro both measuring the content the produce and the insight users provide.
• Viral Impact – Who can doubt the ability of viral content to drive trial and traffic. Measures for this are probably different depending up on the nature of the business and include bookmarks, email forwards, trackbacks and the spread of embedded widgets
• RPU – Revenue per User is what matters in a community. We want to look at total revenue whether it comes from impressions, clicks, actions, leads or any other source and the how much we can drive per user will determine how much cost we can absorb to attract and convert visitors into users and realize an attractive ROI.

The list could go on to look at cost drivers and how they are different on the social web, but that will be another discussion.

I believe that once we embrace these kinds of measures and embed them into our management processes we will see social media marketing shift from being a stream of fun (and maybe expensive) experiments into a community based business model that will result in more deeply committed fans, increased brand strength, better sell through, new revenue sources and higher ROI.

If you see good posts about measuring performance, have suggestions or feedback please leave a comment.

[tags]social media, social web, online performance measurement, measures, measurement, online measures, social media measures[/tags]

The USC Marshall School of Business is an important part of the University with programs that run the gamut from undergraduate to graduate business programs. USC Marshall has over 5,700 students, numerous graduate programs and 70,000 alumni. The University has been very active in using social media to enhance their communication programs and we thought the world ought to know more about how large organizations can use these new tools to engage and activate their respective community’s.

David was kind enough to spend about an hour with us describing how USC Marshall is using social media, how they manage the process and decide what to pursue. USC Marshall is on YouTube with USCMarshall channel, it’s on iTunes with it’s own podcast channel and it’s adding social networking capabilities to it’s website. We discuss some of the ways they are coordinating communications across the channels to maximize the returns from the long tail of PR. We also have a great discussion about objectives and the decision making processes as it relates to social media.

David’s experience with communications for both businesses and universities provides a unique perspective on the opportunities and the challenges of using social media for communicating and building communities. If you are interested in using social media for corporate or not-for-profit communications and PR this is the podcast for you.

[tags]USC, Marshall School of Business, social media, David Bloom[/tags]

Dean was able to provide us with some excellent perspective on these new advertising opportunities. He is part of a group that looks at opportunities to advertise via the Xbox, Media Center, Zune and mobile platforms. We go into depth on in game advertising and how important this new segment will be. He walked us through case studies of Domino’s Pizza and P&G that describe how a well designed campaign can add to the realism of the game experience and yield results for the advertiser.

This is a must listen podcast for advertisers who are struggling to break through on television and are looking for new ways to market their products using these rapidly growing platforms.

[tags]Dean Carignan, Microsoft, in game advertising, gaming, social media, super fans[/tags]

Jason’s discussion of his experience at MySpace illustrates the importance of operational optimization to drive monetization of super fans. In his new company, Jason is putting a lot of what he’s learned to use in creating a new and fun social site. SodaHead has mastered the art of lowering the difficulty and barriers to user generated content. It leads to an experience where its much easier to join in the social mix in a more meaningful way than just asking someone to be your friend. SodaHead is definitely an experience everyone should try.

Jason Feffer has an exciting eight-year history of Internet startup experience leading up to his most recent startup, SodaHead.com. Mr. Feffer helped start MySpace in 2003, which sold to News Corp for $580M. During his three years at MySpace, Jason served on the executive committee and as Vice President of Operations as the membership grew to 100 million. Mr. Feffer oversaw advertising operations, revenue reporting, policy enforcement, government relations and several other departments at MySpace.

[tags]Jason Feffer, MySpace, SodaHead, social media, social networking, social media optimization, super fans[/tags]

If you want to see more you can go to SnackStrongProductions.com to watch behind the scenes footage and download Kina’s winning song. And you can buy her winning single on iTunes.

Congratulations to Kina!

Here’s her video

[tags]Kina Grannis, Super Bowl, social media[/tags]

Combining two companies that DO NOT GET IT is NOT a recipe for competing with one that does. So let me get specific about what I mean by NOT GETTING IT as it relates to Microsoft and Yahoo. Anyone who has used Google Adwords as an advertiser and Google Adsense as a publisher and done the tests on the competitive products from Microsoft and Yahoo knows what I’m about to describe.

When I set up a campaign at Google Adwords, it is an automated process that is rich with interaction and feedback. I can test a campaign, keywords and ads in a very responsive manner that allows me to set it up, test it and optimize it quickly. Yahoo’s equivalent service was a captive to the belief that permeated Overture/Goto that only human editors could screen ads to make sure that they were relevant. It would take days under that process to do what Google did in minutes As a result, I advertise at Google and do so with Yahoo when I get around to it, if ever. (BTW I told this to the senior team at Yahoo’s search marketing group, but they either didn’t want to hear it or could not change the business process that had been set in place 4-5 years before) Since then, Yahoo has tried to reinvent its ad platform and Microsoft has launched their own version, but both still lag way, way behind Google.

How will Microsoft be able to merge two hugely expensive computer platforms when neither is yet good enough to compete with Google’s ad platform? And the same problem exists when you look at it from the publisher side. Google’s Adsense delivers better ads than does the equivalent Yahoo product despite huge investment by Yahoo. What will Microsoft do, scrap one deficient set of systems for another or try to make both work? Either way, the path leads to doom and gloom for both Microsoft and Yahoo.

There is obviously much more to both Microsoft and Yahoo than search and search advertising, but let’s be clear. Search based advertising is the engine that powers Google and everything it does. Social networking/media, a la MySpace and Facebook, has huge potential and Yahoo should have been the king of that domain given all their acquisitions in that arena over the years, but if Yahoo can’t turn My Yahoo, Flickr, GeoCities, De.licio.us etc. into a Social Media powerhouse how can we expect Microsoft to do so.

I can only hope Yahoo turns down Microsoft and they come to their senses. Yahoo can still do great things with the audience and assets it owns by changing its focus to become the queen of social, instead of the king of search. Microsoft should stop listening to bankers and get back to making products that work well and can out perform the competition.

[tags]Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, social networking, social media, search[/tags]

We have a great discussion about the Big Ten Network and how the Super Fans can be more like tribes than traditional segments. These Super Fans cover the entire demographic spectrum and building communities that work for them requires understanding the different use case these fans have and how to build sites, tools and conversations that recognize these different needs.

We also explore some of the organizational challenges of coordinating across the different channels, and the importance of creating complimentary experiences across channels.

Here’s a bit more about Will and his responsibilities at Fox:

Will Flannery is Vice President, Advanced Services for Fox Cable Networks (FCN). He is responsible for the day-to-day distribution activities for advanced television services including high-definition, interactivity and video-on-demand services involving Fox Cable Networks, a portfolio of networks including FX, FX HD, FSN and its 19 owned-and-operated regional sports networks, National Geographic Channel, National Geographic Channel HD, SPEED, SPEED HD, FUEL TV, Fox College Sports, Fox Soccer Channel, Fox Sports en Español, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Reality Channel and the Big Ten Network. In addition, Flannery also works closely with sister units such as Fox Networks Engineering & Operations, Fox Digital Entertainment, Fox Interactive Media and Fox Mobile Entertainment on new product offerings, copyright protection, inventory sales and technical solutions.

[tags]Will Flannery, Super Fans, Social Media, Fox Cable Networks[/tags]

In this podcast, Chris provides some great perspective on the organizational and personnel challenges these companies face in the transition to new business models. He describes the role that social marketing and super fans played in helping properties like Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth break out and build audiences. This podcast interview provides a behind the scenes view into where things are now and some of the major changes to come.

Chris is founder and president of Orbit Media Group, where he consults with media and internet companies creating partnerships, programming and relationships between and to the benefit of media, entertainment and online brands. His current clients range from Facebook.com, one of the fastest-growing internet companies on earth, for which he helped to create and produce “Facebook Diaries,” the first-ever hybrid user-generated video/reality TV show to be distributed on Facebook.com, Ziddio.com, Comcast VOD and linear television and the IFC Channel, to HBO to Comcast, the largest cable and broadband company in the US to HBO to Glam.com, the number one site for women to film icons, to Born4Sports, a social network, marketplace and ecommerce platform for sports and sports lifestyle with presence in Europe, Asia and soon, the US.

Prior to launching his own consulting company, Chris co-founded Participant Productions in 2004 with Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first President. Participant’s vision is to create entertainment that inspires audiences to make social change. In this capacity, Chris developed and executed on the business plan, was intimately involved in finding and hiring initial executive personnel and managed the company overall. Participant’s first slate of movies — Syriana, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon; North Country, starring Charlize Theron; Good Night and Good Luck, starring David Strathairn and George Clooney, and the documentary Murderball – were nominated for an unprecedented 11 Academy Awards. Chris is also proud to have identified and helped to develop former Vice President Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth which won the Oscar for Best Documentary and Gore’s work participated in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition to the above-mentioned films, Chris developed and Executive Produced Participant’s first feature: American Gun starring Marcia Gay-Harden, Forrest Whittaker, Donald Sutherland, Linda Cardelini and Tony Goldwyn.

[tags]Chris Adams, Super Fans, social marketing, social media, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

Here’s a new video from Kina. Do what you should VOTE FOR KINA to Crash the Super Bowl.

[tags]Kina Grannis, Crash the Super Bowl, music, social media[/tags]

Kina is trying to win a contest and NEEDS YOUR VOTE. The contest is called Crash the Superbowl and the winner gets a recording contract and their video played on the Super Bowl broadcast. Kina was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone discussing her career, the contest and the impact of her most recent experience with social media.

If you want to hear more of Kina’s music you can visit her YouTube page, KinaGrannis.com or sign up for voting reminders at a site she set up for video blogging about the contest called Two Weeks for Kina.

Kina also has some CDs for sale on iTunes including One More in the Attic, sincerely, me and In Memory of the Singing Bridge

Gotta Digg Video

The Myspace Video

So GO VOTE FOR KINA.

[tags]Crash the Super Bowl, Kina Grannis, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, social media, social media marketing[/tags]

About Outside Voice:

Chey’s show delves into the hot-button social and political issues of the week, Outside Voice delivers a fresh perspective, and a chance for anyone to participate in the discussion. You can chat with public figures, analysts, and entertainers as Chey conducts a virtual town hall meeting that is smart, timely, and interactive. Add your voice every Wednesday, 7pm- 8pm PST.

[tags]Chey Bell, NowLive, podcasting, podcast promotion, social media, super fans, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

About NowLive in their own words

NowLive is a social broadcasting network that lets anyone create a live, interactive talk shows, take callers, share media, syndicate podcasts, and more. NowLive empowers you to connect any time with peers, fans, friends, and new and interesting people. Communicate and promote the things that matter to you most! Who uses NowLive? Celebrities! Join Adrianne Curry, Christopher Knight, Bobbi Billard, Christine Dolce (ForBiddeN), Somaya Reece, and more! Bloggers (sport, political, travel, fashion, music…) – take your blog to the next level and host a weekly call in show at your blog site. MySpacers: create an interactive party line with all your friends. As one of our members said, “It’s like MySpace on Crack”. Bands: Start an international live concert from your garage. YahooGroups: add live teleconferencing to the group. Fantasy Sport: Have the commissioner of your league host a weekly get together so teams can negotiate real time trades and brag about last weeks standings. Businesses: invite your customers to an online Q&A session; Friends & Family! – this is a great way for your friends or family to share great conversation and experiences from different locations, all within a rich-media environment.

[tags]Digital Hollywood, NowLive, social broadcasting, social media, online video, Kevin Bromber, Chey Bell[/tags]

Kina Grannis, one of the 10 artists still in the running, is working hard to win. She has her blog, Two Weeks for Kina, going full steam and she has made a play to get out the tech vote using social media marketing. With the help of Digg, TechCrunch and Robert Scoble she seems to be breaking out with the tech fans. The Cute Girls Sing Awesome Song About Digg post at Digg has over 4000 votes as I write this and is the top post of the day. TechCrunch has picked up the story, Scoble has added the post to his shared feeds and Kina should get a lot more support from the tech fans. In the time it took to write these few lines the post at Digg has climbed to 4,185. The views at YouTube have climbed to over 36,000.

Here’s the video Gotta Digg

And the lyrics:

When I’m feeling lazy, at school or when I work
I sneak to my computer, and then I like to shirk
I don’t go online shopping, I don’t email with my mom
I open up my browser, and go to digg-dot-com

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

I always dig up Apple, and I bury Microsoft
But when I said I was a girl, all the diggers scoffed
And when I see those stories about Senator Ron Paul
I don’t even RTFA; I just digg them all!

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

The fanboys can be tiresome, they always are outspoken
And if you’re listening Kevin Rose, the comment system’s broken!
I know digg isn’t perfect, but be thankful for what we’ve got
It’s just like daddy always says: “At least it’s not Slashdot!!!”

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

So why not, vote for Kina.

[tags]Kina Grannis, social media, digg, social media marketing, crash the super bowl, discovery, music[/tags]