When you look at this rather frightening infographic of social media landscape from Buddy Media/Luma, it’s easy to feel lost and overwhelmed. And it’s true that each day presents new opportunities and complexities for social media engagement and management. Yet this infographic also provides a rare chance to see the largers social media landscape and examine where your business or brand fits in.

Here are several key questions to ask:

1. Which of the categories, strategies or tools listed above are you not using and why?

2. What platforms, tools or apps could you use to unlock new customers or engagement around your product and services?

3. Is your business and its strategies well-suited to benefit from the broader landscape of social media?

4. What platforms or tools could you use to lighten your load or establish systems to help you manage real-time engagement with your community?

5. How engaged are you with the latest in social media or are you falling behind the technology and your customers?

It’s true that social technology is a hard and tireless master but each new platform or tool unlocks new business opportunities for those that apply them to your business. So take a seat, take a tour, and take a few minutes to identify technologies, platforms or tools that might be just what your business needs.

It’s beta form was just showcased at DEMO Spring 2012 in California and it provides brands and customers with new challenges and opportunities including:

- Creating customizable avatars that can try on clothes, chat with others, and buy both virtual and real goods using real and virtual currencies such as Facebook credits.

- New coupons, incentives and rewards specific to engagement within the virtual worlds.

- The ability for brands to build customized stores within the virtual world itself.

This is a far cry from simply having a presence within a social game like Farmville using virtual goods that represent your brand. This requires companies to have a deep understanding of virtual life engagement and the ability to layer e-commerce on top of it.

Yogurtistan’s CEO Cemil Turun put it this way:

We are creating a new experience by mimicking real-life engagement by going from store to store without changing a tab, or entering the web site address of the store. This is one centralized system. I can run into a promotion, a friend, or simply begin to chat with a stranger in the street, all of which is accessible on any browser or even an iPad.

It is yet to be seen whether we see the emergence of a virtual shopping world as comprehensive and compelling as the tactile real world, but its plans are being drawn and built. As such brands would be wise to add virtual worlds to their ‘To Do’ skills sets so they can capitalize on all the worlds that their customers choose to inhabit

Do you think 3D shopping will take off? What advantages does it offer brands?

The release of this video from Google gives us a glimpse of what life might look like through the lens of Google’s augmented reality glasses. It poses as many questions as it answers but as you watch the video, you quickly realize the powerful ways that your own reality can become a shared and social experience. Naturally, that has enormous impact on social media.

Perhaps the most compelling implication for brands is the potential to scale social shopping. Someone like yourself can walk into a store, “check in” to that location with their friends, receive a bonus or discount as a reward, show somebody else in real time what they’re considering buying, then share that purchase across all social channels. Voice activation makes this even simpler as you seamlessly might from audio to text among a social spectacle of your location, preferred brand, and ultimate purchase.

This combination of location based services, augmented reality and social networking transforms every urban, suburban or rural landscape into an almost infinite branding and lead-gen opportunity. Companies will find themselves rushing to provide engagement cues within their physical stores to motivate real time social shopping. What’s more, they can incentivize such sharing with real world, in store rewards.

Tools such as Googles glasses further transform the real and online worlds into effortless and borderless shopping territories. What’s more, all that information and everyone you know will be right there with you all the time making almost every facet of living a shared experience.

Do you think people will adopt such technologies and wear these glasses? Do you believe that such constant social engagement is a good thing?

Source: V3

Last week I wrote about how important timing is to the success of your brand from a macro and micro point of view. Well, this is thrown into even starker relief when you consider what happens on the web in 60 seconds. Here are a few staggering facts:

- 30 hours of video uploaded and 1.3 million video clips watched on YouTube

- 639,800 GB of global IP data transferred

- 204 million emails sent

- Amazon rings up 83,000 in sales (yes, in one minute)

- 320 new Twitter accounts are created and 100,000 new tweets are generated

- 3,000 photos are uploaded and there are some 20 million photo views

- 100+ new LinkedIn accounts are created

- 1,300 new mobile device users

- 277,000 Facebook logins and 6 million Facebook

- 2 million search queries

Taken together this post and the last paint a telling portrait of how much information overlaid your customer faces. From a branding perspective this making the requirement to be singular and consistent even more pressing, while from a user interface perspective it requires us to make the customer experience effortless and simple. Not small feats, but necessary when you consider everything else that is going on competing for their attention.

What fact shocks you most? How do you think brands should change to serve customers better in this environment?

I was so thrilled when Robert Tercek kindly agreed to speak at the We First seminar.

His talk was inspiring, confronting, educational, and rousing in equal measure. Everyone loved it and got so much out of it. For those that missed the We First Social Branding Seminar, Robert has kindly let us share it here. Enjoy.

You can follow Robert on twitter @Superplex, read his blog here, and watch his great show ‘This Week in Social Media’ here. Obviously he’s also an amazing speaker and you’ll find his contact details on his blog.

If you’re interested in the next We First Social Branding seminar and want to receive the information first, click here.

The first is a chart for Linked In Analytics that breaks out the growing and shrinking industries as defined by the volume of jobs added or lost. Of particular interest is the relative position of each industry. I would encourage you to examine the list and consider what place your brand occupies as defined by the specific mix of skills, services and technologies you offer.

Clearly it’s far better to find yourself in the upper right hand corner with a sizable circle indicating growth industries. If you find yourself in the lower right, it is worthwhile considering the prospects on your company in terms of larger macro-economic forces at work and the way technology is changing business. As any entrepreneur (billionaire or otherwise) will tell you, timing is everything in terms of what companies and industries explode and charts such as these give us a window into shifts that shape our success and futures.

The second chart from U.S. Net habits data illustrates in simple terms how the seconds that a web page takes to load impacts customer abandonment. A few facts jump out:

- 1 in 4 Americans abandon a page takes longer than 4 seconds to load.

- 4 in 10 Americans abandon a mobile shopping site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

- 5 in 10 mobile users abandon a web page if it doesn’t load in under 10 seconds.

As Fast Company notes, this means just one extra second in page load time could cost Amazon $1.6 billion in sales a year. Or for Google, by slowing search results by just 1/4 of a second they could lose the ad revenue on 8 million searches a day.

So no matter what your industry is, what your brand stands for, or how smart your marketing is, never lose site of the fact that capturing your customer’s attention is hard, but losing it can be even more costly.

Infographic by OnlineGraduatePrograms.com

Who Cares Wins explains in detail the drivers and best practices of this new dynamic. Jones does a masterful job of explaining in very clear terms, why business success in the future will be driven by the authenticity, transparency, and accountability of brands and their ability to react quickly and consistently with these three qualities. In fact, he makes a compelling case for why the successful brands of the future will be those that are most meaningful in the lives of their media-savvy and socially connected customers.

On the flipside, Jones explains why those brands that ignore the impact of social media and these new customer expectations do so at their peril.  In only the last few months we’ve seen the consumer push-back against Netflix and Qwikster, against the Bank of America Debit Card Fee, on Bank Transfer Day, against the Verizon Online 2$ payment charge, and most recently the backdown of Congress over SOPA in the face of online activism.

So what Jones is talking about in this book is not conjuncture, wishful thinking, or projection, but rather a business reality that is already here. As such, he rightly positions social responsibility as an invaluable opportunity for brands to build their bottom lines while also becoming a force for good in the world. In order for this shift to gain traction and pace, large brands and entrepreneurs need case studies and proof points to justify their shift in priorities and practices. Who Cares Wins provides this in spades, and rightly positions this shift in the marketplace as one of great opportunity, rather than cause for concern. No doubt this is an educated risk that every business leader must take, and that spirit is captured in the title “Who Cares (rather than ‘Dares’) Wins.” But the risk of not engaging with this shift in business practices is far greater. Who Cares Wins is your guidebook on how to negotiate the social business marketplace in a way that builds your business and a better world for all.

To order your copy of Who Cares Wins click here, and you can follow David Jones on Twitter at @davidjoneshavas.

Image: Absolut/Fader

I had the pleasure of speaking at the San Diego Ad Club last week after Dan Burrier, the Chief Innovation Officer at Ogilvy and my former boss on the Motorola account. Not only is Dan a friend and someone I greatly admire, but he said something that evening that struck me very deeply. He said that branding is now more about the “doing” than the “telling.”

I think Dan is absolutely right. For too long, branding as practiced by advertising agencies has been focused on the Big Idea that, well told, will connect emotionally with a customer and motivate them to buy a product or service. But in this new era of transparency, characterized by Wiki Leaks, the activities of Anonymous, and the revelations about corporate practices that have filled the newspapers over recent months, a brand can no longer afford to simply trade on an idea of what it stands for. Instead, in this era of radical transparency, a brand must be willing to tell the story of what it’s actually doing.

That’s why the purpose of a brand is so critical to its bottom line success in the social business marketplace. That purpose not only informs how leadership steers the company and the satisfaction of its employees, but it also defines what actions the brand takes to improve the lives of its customers. For if a company wants their customers to grow their business by buying its products and services, that company must be meaningful to its customers lives. Such meaningfulness is found in the concrete actions a brand is taking to better the lives of its customers and the world at large in alignment with its core values.

On the one hand this is a burden on companies, in that brands must work out what they stand for, communicating it with employees, and bring it to life through their actions. This is not a simple or quick process. Yet at the same time, once you’ve done it, storytelling becomes much easier. A brand simply needs to share the story of what it’s doing with its employees, products, services, and cause work to improve the well being of others. It will enable the brand to build a community of customers aligned around shared values and connected by social media that will be happy to amplify the brand’s message using their own social media channels.

So instead of fabricating the Big Idea, and living in fear of the rise of transparency, a brand can put its shoulder behind its purpose and simply tell the story of what it’s doing in the marketplace. It’s this connection between the “doing” and “telling” of a brand’s story that defines success in the new social media marketplace. So if brands want to capitalize on social media to build their bottom line, take Dan’s advice by focusing on what your brand is doing in alignment with its purpose and values and simply tell that story.

If you’re interested in your brand storytelling, I invite you to join us at the We First Social Branding Seminar on the 1st and 2nd of February in Los Angeles at the Marina Del Rey Marriott hotel. Every attendee will be walking through a Social Branding Blueprint that takes them from the definition of their brand purpose through to its social media expression, so you walk out with a Blueprint that offers real value to your business that you can act on. Plus, every attendee gets an extra ticket free to invite their favorite non-profit. This is the last week to register, so visit www.WeFirstSeminar.com now.

The idea behind the seminar is to make sure your brand (whether they’re a non-profit, a start up, a social entrepreneur, social enterprise, mid-size company or Fortune 500 brand) doesn’t get left behind in this fast changing marketplace by learning to use social media in a way that truly builds your business. Too often brands are rushing to social technology but overlooking the importance of storytelling. Or they have a solid understanding of their brand and its story, but they don’t deeply understand how to make social media work for them. Both alternatives are incredibly dangerous to your business and future.

Getting this balancing act between storytelling and social technology right is really hard to do. Most brands are so caught up in the day-to-day of running their business, and so overwhelmed by the pace of change in social technology, that they don’t get the luxury of time or resources to focus on it. So the seminar, and the Social Branding Blueprint created specifically for it, were designed to make this possible in a condensed time frame of two days with the support of three world-class experts.

So imagine an 70-page Blueprint that distills the learning of the speakers into actionable choices, that builds in the most effective strategic and tactical options based on the best practices of the smartest marketers in the world, that leads your through the eight critical steps that every brand must walk through to build and maintain a customer community that builds its business with them – that’s what the Social Branding Blueprint does so that you spend the two days working on creating a plan specific to your business rather than just taking notes you put on the shelf that don’t translate to real value to your business.

So the real value of the two-day seminar includes:

1. Two days focused on creating a specific plan for your business rather than a series of talks.

2. That plan is built around the best practices, cases studies and ROI of the smartest marketers in the world so it mitigates the risks you take for your business.

3. An intimate environment limited to 80 people so that we can work directly on your business.

4. World class support including myself, Robert Tercek, (former President of Digital Media at Oprah’s network OWN), and Carol Cone, (Global Practice Chair of Edelman Business + Social Purpose).

5. 1 on 1 time with the experts and additional mentors to ensure you get the personal attention your deserve.

6. Networking with the experts, sponsors (including UN Foundation, HP, Causecast, SocialVibe, Radian6, CSRWire, PRNewswire, Social Media Monthly and GOOD magazine), and fellow attendees from some of the biggest brands in the world, the smartest social enterprises and start-ups, and most progressive non-profits.

7. You get an extra ticket to invite a non profit for free. So you get to make an important contribution just by attending.

8. Taking action by investing time in yourself, your business and building a better world is the thing that will set you apart from your competitors and give your the greatest fulfillment.

We have around ten spots left and obviously registrations have to close this week as it only a week away. We’re super excited to work on your business together so register now.

I wanted to share this video with you that features David Kirkpatrick, the author of The Facebook Effect, talking about the impact of social tools and technology on the way consumers and citizens around the world are demanding change. He does a wonderful job of articulating how the internet has heightened awareness around the world of economic inequality, and how social media has given citizens and customers all around the world an unprecedented platform to have those grievances heard. Specifically, David does a very effective job of framing a series of questions that every brand must answer today if they want to survive and succeed in the future. Those questions include:

- What is the purpose, mission, and vision of your company that could make it meaningful to distrusting citizens and customers?

- As citizens and customers around the world vent their grievances over economic inequality and demand greater social responsibility from brands, how do those companies respond using the very same tools?

- Given this inequality, how do companies themselves not only build their bottom lines, but shore up the well being of the society on which their own survival depends?

We find ourselves at a very interesting intersection between economy, which is why David’s film is aptly named “Techonomy.” For social technology is not only empowering citizens and consumers to have their grievances heard, but it also provides brands with an unprecedented opportunity to scale their messaging and play a meaningful role in social transformation. Ultimately, those that adapt and play a role in this shift will not only be the bottom-line success stories of the future, but will be the social architects of change.

It is these very questions that we’ll be addressing and answering specific to your business at the We First Social Branding Seminar being held at the Marina Del Rey Marriott on February 1-2. It’s a two day deep-dive into the specific challenges your brand faces, exploring how it should define its purpose, and tell that story in a community-facing way, that will be meaningful to its customer community and drive social change.

The seminar will be led be myself and Carol Cone (Global Practice Chair of Edelman Business + Social Purpose), and Robert Tercek (former President of Digital Media at OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network). What’s more, anyone who attends will receive an extra ticket to invite their favorite non-profit for free.

The We First Social Branding Seminar is an intensive workshop in which you get world-class support to answer the very questions that will determine those brands that succeed and leverage social media to build their business and positive impact. This is the last week to register, so register now at www.WeFirstSeminar.com