Source: CXO

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking in New Orleans at the First Data conference. It was a fantastic event and the other speaker was Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, who said something that struck me deeply. He put a sentence up on screen, which said, “Change is not the triumph of technology, but the triumph of humanity.” I completely agree, and while I have talked and written a lot about this through the We First lens, when it comes from someone like Biz who has shaped the social media world, it is that much more persuasive.

Too often, companies make the mistake of seeing social media as an end in itself, when in fact it is really just another channel through which to emotionally connect with your customer. As Biz explained, the Arab Spring revolutions and the Occupy Wall Street movement are driven by human nature and emotion, and the technology simply provides the connective tissue to give people with shared values a voice. The same is true of your company and brand, and the benefits can be enormous.

When you frame the role of social media in terms of humanity and the emotional connections that unite us, you can have a profound impact on your customers, employees and the world at large. With your customers, you can bring your corporate purpose to life in a way that makes your brand more meaningful to them, inspiring loyalty, goodwill and ultimately profits. You’ll also motivate them to become partners in telling the brand story, co-creating the products and services that will drive your bottom line success.

With employees there are just as many benefits when the role of social media is framed in terms of humanity rather than technology. When you bring your purpose to life inside a company, you’ll connect with your employees on an emotional level. This will give you the ability to attract top talent, to maximize employee retention and productivity, and to inspire your employees to use their own social media channels to be ambassadors for the brand.

Finally, by framing the role of social media in terms of humanity, you can impact the world at large. By taking actions to bring your company’s purpose to life and demonstrating your commitment to your core values by supporting causes such as the environment, education or healthcare, you can not only shape the future of your company, but the future of the world at large.

So this perspective on social media offers both professional and personal benefits. On a professional level, you will be able to build a community of brand ambassadors with your customers and employees and have a positive impact on the society and economy on which your company’s success depends. On a personal level, you will find deep satisfaction that will inform your relationships at home and at work, allowing you to enjoy a better quality of life.

Do you believe most brands do a good job of using social media to celebrate humanity, or do you think they still apply an old mindset that is only concerned with the bottom line?

Facebook, for example, is launching a new set of premium ad units that differ from traditional advertising in two important ways. Firstly, the new ads automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser, so a social dimension in baked in. Secondly, the content of these ads comes only from posts to brands’ Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently. As such traditional advertising is being written out of the content creation process and distributed exclusively across social media channels. For Facebook’s full description of Premium ads, click here.

Facebook is not alone in its belief that recommendations from friends or family carry more weight than independent advertisers. Yesterday, Twitter announced it will be rolling out its full complement of mobile ad options. What’s more both are reaching out to Madison Avenue to entice them to invest in social ads with Facebook holding an event in New York today for 1000 ad execs to make their case.

Meanwhile aggressive newcomers like Pinterest have already garnered 21.5 million visits (1.21% of the market) nudging out well-established players like Linked In (20.1 million visits or 1.13% of the visits share not including mobile traffic), and demonstrating that the social network marketplace with remain fluid and competitive for a long time to come.

Meanwhile social aggregators continue to proliferate as well as advertisers seek to systematize and automate their growing demand for relentless content creation, curation and sharing. While Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are well-known, newcomers like Percolate make the prospect of social advertising even more attractive for brands by serving as online virtual community managers. In essence, percolate conducts a calibration workshop to target the brands content needs, distills that information down to a content “Brew” and then continuously updates the brand’s social channels with fresh content.

In short dominant and new social networks, as well as social aggregators and content distribution platforms are making an aggressive and compelling case for using social advertising to capitalize on the goldmine of personal data that users volunteer each day. And as brands continue to seek more specific targets and to become more social themselves within an increasingly crowded marketplace, the future of social branding and marketing looks very bright.

Do you think the future of marketing will be predominantly social? Or that traditional media will continue to drive the greater proportion of brand awareness and sales?

•  Facebook captures over 90% of all social media visits and 3/4 are outside the U.S.
• Newcomer Pinterest just outstripped LinkedIn for traffic despite the recent surge.
• The absolute explosion of mobile advertising revenue expected by 2016 (144.2 billion).
• China and India boast the most vocal critics including those that protest against brands, services and products.
• The average person now spends around 100 hours a year on social networks.
• What else jumps out to you?

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

Last week I had the pleasure of joining other guests on This Week in Social Media with host, Robert Tercek. As always, it was a lively discussion ranging from the rise of Google+, to citizen and consumer activism, to the future of journalism. I hope you enjoy it.

The simplification turns on five simple tabs – Home, Connect, Discover, Me, and Tweet – that each provides a different way for customers to tell companies what they think of a company, its services or products, and its social responsibility. The Home tab features are familiar in that they allow customers to tweet, follow trends, see recommended people, and send direct messages, but the @Connect tab is broken out into Interactions and Mentions. Interactions lets customers watch conversations and retweets, so that if you’re talking about a brand, you’ll be able to connect with others who are doing the same, and then also see who is retweeting those conversations. The Mentions tab highlights mentions of your name in the context of these conversations and the #Discover tab takes it one step further, allowing you to see related stories and trends based on their recent popularity as well as your connections, location, and language. So if you happen to be discussing a brand, either in a positive or negative sense, conversations in and around that topic will readily appear. You can also search for them by using hashtags.

The reach of such conversations is further expanded as tweets are now embeddable, which means that you can take a tweet and embed it as fully functional content on another platform that others can then reply to, retweet, favorite, or follow. Additionally, the new hashtag button tells visitors if a relevant conversation is going on, allowing you to follow that conversation or join in with a simple click. On the brand’s side of the conversation, Twitter has redesigned its platform to ensure that brands don’t lose touch with their customers because they are directed to leave Twitter itself. Instead, Twitter has introduced Brand Pages that allow companies to promote their products and services within Twitter itself. Obviously this gives brands more cause to advertise on Twitter and customers more reason to stay there. These brand pages can be customized by the company in question so they are consistent the brand’s identity, while also giving them some flexibility to shape the visitor’s experience. Included here are three examples that showcase this new flexibility: @CocaCola and @Intel.

The net effect of this most recent Twitter redesign is that it will further enhance brand/customer conversations by making the brand experience more customized and customer feedback more social. Such sophistication is good for brands but it also brings with it heightened responsibility as customers look to the brands they support through their purchases to be more authentic, transparent and socially responsible if they want to be the success stories of 2012.

Do you like the Twitter redesign? How do you think it will change the way brands engage to their customers?

Last week I shared Part 1 of my interview with Sherry Turkle on the ‘Human Cost of Social Technology.’ Here is Part 2 where we discussed the impact of social media on our own sense of identity.

SM:  Hi, I’m Simon Mainwaring and I’m here at IVOH in the Catskills, and I’m here with Sherry Turkle, who is the Professor for the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. I was so enjoying our conversation earlier on that I have to have more of you.  What I’d love to talk to you about is the reality we all find ourselves in now, which is that we all have multiple versions of ourselves. For example, we have the version of our self we present to our friends and even our families in real life, then we have the version of ourselves we have in our private moments with ourselves, we have the version of our self online like on Facebook or Twitter, and we may have secret accounts where we have another version of our self that we prefer to hide from others. Do you see this sort of simultaneous, multiple versions of ourselves as a common problem? What are the dangers?

ST:  Well, it’s a common state of being. I think we have to refrain, for the moment, from calling it a problem because it is how we live now. I think it’s become the norm, and each of us are keeping the fact that it is our norm a secret, almost like a dirty little secret, and when we reveal it to someone else, like saying “I really have five accounts or six accounts,” and people reveal they are having trouble keeping them strait.

The problem is that we perform ourselves somewhat differently in each of these spaces.  There’s good news and bad news. Each time we perform ourselves in each of these spaces, we actually learn something new about ourselves because each of these places is a place where we are performing a different aspect of ourselves, and thus it’s a kind of self-reflective exercise in a way. We get to see different aspects of ourselves in these different spaces.

The downside is that, particularly for adolescents who are just forming their sense of self, it becomes hard to keep things strait. They get a kind of performance anxiety in that sense and performance exhaustion because they’re constantly on. They don’t have a place to go that’s offline. They almost don’t have permission in their life to shut it down, to get off those Facebook accounts, to get off those internet accounts. They don’t have a place to go where they’re not performing themselves and that becomes a problem.

SM:  Let me ask you a question. I can see how that can clearly become a problem.  Is it, in a sense, a new definition of what the self is today, in that our sense of self is now an aggregate of all these different versions of ourselves, or are we just fractured or splintered in different ways and we are losing a sense of self altogether?

ST:  I think we now have a sense of self as multiple. That is becoming the norm, to think of ourselves as a self that is a multiplicity of selves. We are no longer thinking of that as fractured, that’s why I was very careful not to define that as a problem, because actually, there is a truth about the self that the internet is revealing. Rather than seeing it as a problem, I think it’s something we need to learn to embrace and the new goal of living is to move fluidly among these different aspects of self.

SM:  When you say fluidly do you mean authentically and consistently?

ST:  Fluidly will mean different things for different people, but it means that you don’t feel a stress, you feel that when you move in these different spaces you are learning about different aspects of yourself with which you are comfortable, but you also feel a sense of centeredness that you’re embracing these multiple aspects of yourself joyfully and authentically. You’re not saying, “Oh my god, how am I going to put it on and perform here.”

SM:  Is that hard to do when you consider that we’re effectively being led every day by media outlets that train us to perform, in a sense, to present a doctored version of ourselves out there? So the way we’re coming to this is, as media savvy consumers, in a sense, rather than centered beings that want to be consistent and authentic.

ST:  Yes, well now you’re putting your finger on the problem. I tried to put the best face [referring to earlier hesitation to call it a ‘problem’]…well the reason I did that was quite serious. Because I think that when you have a way of being in the world that is becoming the norm, you don’t want to get right out there and say, “We’re all pathological.”

Let me just say again, the positive is that moving fluidly and authentically among these different aspects of self can be a positive experience of living in the world we now live in. But, as you say, people are learning that on different outlets, they have to be a certain way. I met a young person today who said, “When I’m on Twitter, Twitter has trained me that I have to be ironic and witty, and that’s hard for me because I’m not an ironic and witty person, but I can’t get followers on Twitter unless I’m a certain kind of ironic and witty person.

SM:  So you’re saying that the media is the messenger?

ST:  Yes. The way I put it in Alone Together is: Technology is the architect of our intimacies.  Technology is the architect, in this case for this young man, of the self.  If he wants to be popular on Twitter, he has to be an appealing Twitter personality.  Similarly, the people I interview about Facebook, many adolescents will say to me, “I won’t even say on Facebook that my dog died because I want to be, on Facebook, the kind of positive, popular, wonderful person. I doctor the photographs. I doctor my life.” So we’re learning adolescents and young people learn how to be on Facebook, the Facebook way to be, and that starts to be a problem.

SM:  This addiction to what might be called faux celebrity or personal brand management, what will cause a change? Is it a function of age, or is it a function of our integration and sophistication on how we use these tools? We realize later on a better way to use them.

ST:  I think both things happen. I think, as people get older, they start to say, “Ironic?Witty? Okay, that’s my Twitter self, but I’m going to invest less and know that I’m doing that for professional reasons, but that’s not me.” That’s hard if you’re a young person and you begin to be confused because you’re thinking, “I really care about that Twitter self.”

As you get older and more differentiated from your Twitter self, you begin to see that as an other, it’s not really you. So the age thing kicks in, but I also think we are going to get better at dealing with this technology in more mature and sophisticated ways. We are smitten right now.

The trouble with this technology… or I shouldn’t say trouble… I should say, the most powerful thing about this technology, and the reason we’re so vulnerable to it is that it’s an identity technology. It’s a technology that offers us identity. It says, “You can be this.  You can have these friends. You can have these connections. You can have this love and appreciation, followers, people who want to be with you.” Things that people want.  People want this connection.

SM:  So what would be your advice to anyone, young or old, on Facebook or Twitter, as to how to garner the most integrity between who they are as a person in real life (which is hard enough to know in itself) and how they represent themselves online? Any sort of guide from all your research, thinking and Alone Together?

ST:  Yes. The first thing is that, if you’re a young person, a healthy sense of distance that being on Facebook is not being you. When I’m interviewing you, you know that if I’m interviewing you about this, you’re going to be telling me that. Make sure you remind yourself of that regularly. Keep a little bit of distance between that Facebook self and your sense of your own self so you can have a sense of distance and irony that things that happen to you on Facebook, slights, hurts, they’re not really happening to you, they’re happening to that you that you perform. I think that is a healthy use of this medium.  In every aspect that the people we are online… it’s not who we are. Separating the friends from the friended is a very important thing to do.

SM:  I’m here speaking with Sherry Turkle, who has written this wonderful book called Alone Together.  Where can we find you online?  Where can we find the book?

ST: AloneTogetherBook.com, and google Sherry Turkle MIT and all of my webpage with all my writings and research will appear.

Today the world’s top tweeters are sacrificing their digital lives to give real life to others affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. The list is a who’s who’s of social media heavy hitters including Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Jennifer Hudson, Khloe Karshasian, Jay Sean, Swizz Beatz, Serena Williams, The Buried Life, Elijah Wood, Janelle Monae, Kimberly Cole, Daphne Guinness and Bronson, each of whom are signing off from all social networking platforms including Twitter and Facebook in support of those in Africa & India affected by HIV/AIDS. They’ll come back online once $1 million has been collectively raised for KCA.

The campaign is a great example of the powerful role that brands can play in social transformation. In this case the brands are celebrities who are today directing fans to their personal page at www.buylife.org, where their “last tweet & testament” video is posted. From there, fans can either donate directly online or text the first name of the celebrity they wish to support (example ALICIA) to 90999 in order to donate $10 to KCA.

Alicia, her fellow celebrity “fatalities,” and the KCA brand are not alone in their support of World AIDS Day. Yesterday HP announced that it will partner with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to provide critical HIV treatement to infants in Kenya with a goal of cutting diagnosis response times from several months to just one or two days.

In a world of corporate mistrust and finger-pointing, brands often don’t get the credit they deserve for such meaningful work. The same is true of partner ad agencies. Many commentators, myself included, have been critical of the sluggish adoption and application of social media by advertising agencies in service of their clients. But there are inspiring exceptions to the rule. The DIGITAL DEATH campaign was conceived by TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York and Lisa Topol, the agency’s Group Creative Director, explains the thinking behind it:

Image: Buy Life campaign

This week Alicia Keys launched an ingenuous campaign, conceived with TBWA/Chiat/Day New York, that leverages her celebrity to fund her charity, Keep A Child Alive. Like actor, Edward Norton, and his fund-raising platform Crowdrise, Alicia has enlisted the power of her celebrity to help improve the lives of children affected by AIDS in Africa and India. In her case, the campaign is especially daring in that each of the participating celebrities is dying digitally, meaning they will no longer post or tweet on Facebook or Twitter, until their fans raise $1 million to revive them and improve the lives of countless children.

This campaign is a powerful demonstration of social networking on three levels. First, Alicia has embraced her commodification as a celebrity and is leveraging her fan base to help her achieve social change. Second, the campaign is given breadth and power through her ability to reach out to her real life network of other celebrities including Kim Kadashian, Justin Timberlake, Serena Williams, Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest and Elijah Wood, who have also volunteered to “die” for the cause. Third, the campaign relies on the dynamics at play between celebrities and their fans, and between the fans themselves, in order to revive them.

The campaign demonstrates the transformative potential of social media on four levels:

1. We see brands (in this case celebrities) that benefit from social media using that exposure in meaningful ways.

2. We see fans coordinating their own actions in service of a cause based on shared values.

3. We see a powerful merger of pop culture and social transformation.

4. We see the power of social media technology at work to drive immediate change. (Take note, Malcolm Gladwell)

The campaign also demonstrates a powerful complicity by all players. The celebrities clearly recognize they have been taken to market as products (often for better or worse). The fans know they are being held to ransom (of sorts). All parties realize that the good fortune they enjoy comes with a responsibility to think of others.  In short, media savvy celebrities and consumers alike are putting that media awareness to good use.

But Keep A Child Alive is far more than a smart social media campaign. It is literally a new lease on life for children affected by AIDS. It provides them with shelter, nutrition and education to make sure the anti-retroviral medication they receive is taken properly and effectively. So on Wednesday, World AIDS day, I encourage all of us to embrace our inner fan and donate to revive the digital lives of these celebrities and the real world lives of so many more.

Do you think it’s ok for celebrities to use their appeal in this way? Do you believe that social media can become a force for good?