Amid back-to-back interviews and panels with the leaders of Foursquare, Living Social, Thrillist, Gawker Media, Hulu, Yahoo!, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, News Corp., Conde Nast and CBS was a 10-minute gem of a presentation by Jonah Peretti, co-founder of The Huffington Post and now CEO of BuzzFeed.

Peretti has advised aspiring politicians and brands such as Procter & Gamble and Sony Pictures on their viral strategies, so he knows a little something about what is going viral and how.

The takeaways from his snack-sized presentation strike me as universally useful for marketers:

1. The biggest misconception about viral media is that quality is all that matters. Quality does not make your content popular! The best ideas do not always win. The quality of an idea and the way in which you spread it are equally important. You should spend an equal amount of time on the content as you do on the strategy for spreading it.
2. When thinking about how to spread an idea, focus on the “Big 3″ vehicles. Think through the viral principals of each channel. What kind of content will be attractive to what kind of people in what context?
3. Keep in mind that a person’s behavior can change based on the platform they are using.
   • Google: People use Google when they need to find what they want when nobody’s looking. Consider that when you’re buying search terms.
   • Facebook: Viewed by your closest friends and family, Facebook is where you show your friends that you like something — often humorous items, a particular political stance, social cause or charity. People post things that make them “look like a good guy.” In this environment, give people “badges” they will want to wear.
   • Twitter: The Twitterverse is comparatively smaller, smarter, techier, savvier and more culturally hip. Structure your tweets accordingly.

The bottom line? It pays to think about which network is the right one to maximize your promotional opportunities. You can double the return on investment of your promotion by figuring out where content will work best and move it there.

For more on Jonah Peretti’s smart (and entertaining!) approach to virality, check out this video.

Image credit: 3DStock, via iStockPhoto

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• Mark Story (pictured at center) is the director of new media at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulator in charge of what financial companies can say and how they say it — with billions of dollars in the balance.

• Wendy Harman (left), recently featured in Charlene Li’s new book, “Open Leadership,” is the social-media manager at the American Red Cross. As such, she empowers 700 local chapters to use social media to their advantage and monitors more than 1,000 social-media mentions from the public each day.

• Alexandra Levit (right) is a best-selling author and nationally syndicated career columnist with a wealth of expertise at the intersection of social media and workplace productivity.

A major theme that emerged during the event was what social-media evangelists can do to usher their organizations through the transformation period. To get everyone at your organization on board, our panelists suggested:

• Have a vision. Instead of getting mired in platforms, tactics and details, Story suggests communicating what your big-picture goal is by using the language of the higher-ups in your organization. Think of this as a reverse engineering of your social-media strategy, he says.

• Make sure everyone internally knows about it. Harman says the single thing that’s made the most difference in securing organizational buy-in and holding management’s attention at the Red Cross is a simple daily social-media update e-mail that includes 10 to 20 quotes of what people are saying about them — both positive and negative. Harman started this practice for her own discipline — to make sure she was listening to and reading everything folks were saying each day — and now the e-mail is read daily by 400 members of management, staff and volunteers each day.
  This kind of “ambient awareness” is a way for everyone across the Red Cross to know what’s going on. (I don’t know about you, but we’re starting this practice at SmartBrief today!)

• Renovate your top-down communications. Instead of laying down the law, offer positive guidance and encourage your employees to be out there on the social Web, saying the kids of things you hope they will say. Harman suggested messaging along the lines of, “We’d love it if you did these four things on a daily basis.”

• Deal with naysayers up front. Levit suggested sitting down with skeptics for proactive conversations with them, emphasizing how social media can make their lives easier and asking what you can do to help get their jobs done. Sometimes it’s necessary to hold people’s hands a bit through the transformation period.

• Host training sessions for your team. Our panelists delivered invaluable advice for educating your colleagues about social media. That will be the topic of my next Buzz2010 wrap-up post, so stay tuned.

One more breakfast is left in the Buzz2010 breakfast series. Join us on Aug. 18 when Olivier Blanchard tackles social-media measurement and return of investment. Register today!

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Today’s guest post is by Shel Israel, who consults companies on social-media strategy. Shel is a co-author of “Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers” and author of “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.”

Do you remember “The Wizard of Oz”? The first time you saw the actual Wizard, he was a talking head with this huge booming voice. If you were a kid, like I was, he may have intimidated you.

But it turned out that the Wizard of Oz was just a regular guy. He hid behind a curtain and used electronics to make his voice more authoritative. The twist is that once the Wizard got outed by the little dog, he solved people’s problems. He got them home. He let them discover their heart and their courage.

For about the last 60 years, most large enterprises have created their own wizards in the form of corporate voices. These voices were designed to be louder than the actual speakers. They also, like the Wizard of Oz, were part of an illusion — to make customers, prospects, partners and recruits think the company spoke with a single, powerful voice.

Behind the corporate curtain were small teams of ventriloquists, clever people who spoke well, who wished to give outsiders a sense of a Borg-like culture that thought and marched in unison. Like the Wizard, corporate branding and marketing people have used available electronic tools to amplify their corporate voice, refine it and have it resonate certain, carefully contrived messages.

For a very long time, this worked pretty well. People bought cars to appear more powerful, smoked cigarettes that would make them more attractive and drank beer because that’s what sports fans seemed to do — at least, that was what the corporate voices were telling them.

Increasingly, people have come to understand that messages delivered by corporate voices are generally a load of crap. The funny thing, though, is that behind the curtain, there are companies filled with good, dedicated, intelligent, hard-working people who speak in voices that sound very much like how customers actually speak.

Behind the curtain are many people who use many voices. Sometimes they disagree with each other. Some of these people are brilliant and dedicated; some could care less about quality and customers. These people also have ears, making them capable of something that corporate voices booming from behind curtains cannot contribute: They can listen and respond.

We live in a changing time. Social media has disrupted nearly all institutions. It accomplishes so very much for the modern organization. Of all the assets that it brings to the modern enterprise, the most important is the ability to listen and respond to customers.

The era of the big voice is rapidly coming to a close. The era of many voices is on the rapid ascent — or so it seems to me.

Image credit, lisegagne, iStock Photo

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How can businesses create a system-oriented process for generating word-of-mouth referrals?  Isn’t that inherently contradictory?

Well, yes, it might seem contradictory if it’s not done right. The first thing is to create a business that’s referable, one that people want to talk about. Without that, nothing really matters. With that, you can go to work on creating systems and processes that invite, motivate and activate your customer referral champions to do more and your strategic partners a reason to want to engage more fully.

Why is it important for businesses to identify their “core talkable difference”?

Nobody talks about boring businesses, and in order to get a significant amount of referrals, you have to be easy to refer. But it’s not enough to do something that people can talk about; you’ve also got to take the next step and teach them how to talk about your business, how to spot your ideal customer and how to know the perfect time to mention you just might be the perfect business for their friend or colleague.

You advise companies to create a portrait of their ideal target customer.  What does this accomplish?

First and foremost, if you take this notion of “ideal” to heart, you’ll start to understand that only a narrow segment or type of customer fits the ideal profile and when you acknowledge and embrace this idea you’ll start to use your ideal client as the filter for your language, promotion and content and suddenly you’ll start to attract more of the right kind of client. In addition, when you go out to activate and educate your strategic partners you’ll be able to easily paint the picture of the exact type of client or work that they should think of you for.

You maintain that highly referred companies create a culture of buzz among their staff. What does this mean?

A culture of buzz is the idea that people’s minds are free to seize opportunities to get customers talking by reacting to their requests or even demands in ways that they find remarkable. This is pretty tough to teach, so you’ve got to make it central to how you train and interact with your staff. You’ve got to make the business about this idea of a remarkable customer experience and then challenge, encourage and reward employees who find innovative ways to bring it to life.

How can social media enable conversion?

I think you should start to think about social media more as a behavior and less as a set of tools. In that vein, you can start to think of ways to communicate more often, more deeply and more personally than you might in a typical e-mail or letter. By using social media tools to quickly engage with someone you meet at a Chamber event or adding social media activity into a prospect or customer CRM record, you automatically give yourself a competitive advantage when it comes identifying opportunities and building deeper relationships.

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He led with stats that got the attention of the 300-plus brand representatives in the room:

• 71% of consumers are giving as much or more now as they were before the economic downturn.
• 87% of consumers would switch brands based on association with a good cause.
• 50% of consumers would pay more for products from brands that support causes.

As a preface to a fascinating discussion with BlogHer founder Jory Des Jardins and Quincy Jones Productions (think “We Are the World”) Vice President Adam Fell, Gilbreath offered this excellent, short list of cause marketing do’s:

1. Create a cause linked to your brand purpose. E.g. Pepsi Refresh Project. Beware of greenwashing, pinkwashing and jumping on irrelevant bandwagons.
2. Make sure it’s meaningful. E.g. the MAC Viva Glam initiative, which gives 100% of all purchases on an annual basis.
3. Invest in it for the long haul. E.g. Yoplait’s Save Lids to Save Lives, which is 11 years strong.
4. Create something employees can get engaged with. E.g. Innocent Brand’s The Big Knit project, which got employees learning knitting from elders and making hats to benefit Help for the Aged.
5. Act quickly. E.g. Tide’s Loads of Hope. Trucks filled with washers were sent to help Hurricane Katrina victims clean up.
6. Something that’s brand-relevant. E.g. Haagen-Dazs Help the Honeybees initiative, which sent lobbyists to Capitol Hill to participate in the honeybee shortage.

Rules to prosper by — and feel good about.

Image credit: DeVries Public Relations

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1. Add value. Bring value into every interaction.
2. Be transparent. Listen to what your brand owners are saying. You are not your brand owner. You are the steward of your brand.
3. Be consistent and follow through. Stay on brand strategy and stay true to who you are.  Make human connections, which we all share, better and more meaningful.
4. Be receptive to change. Mix things up to keep it fresh.
5. Surprise and delight your customers. Again, keep things interesting and fresh.  Here’s a great example of that.

The Q&A, however, delivered valuable takeaways:

Q: Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of IAB, asked one of the most “bedeviling” questions about social media:  Even within marketing, how do you organize it? There’s PR/advertising/consumer promotions/trade promotions.  How has Coke worked to integrate social media into the fabric of marketing?

A: We have created two Social Media Councils, one for national and one for global.  These groups include representatives from media, marketing, legal, PR and other functions across Coca-Cola. Once people are on a council, they start working together. Not only do they talk about best practices, ideas and programs they are struggling with, these groups become informal sounding boards where people feel comfortable working together and looking at things together.  It’s more than the actual council itself — it’s about connections made across disciplines.

Q: A representative from Meebo asked, What have social networks allowed you to do that Coke.com hasn’t in the past?

A: They have allowed us to join the conversation — to go where consumers are and add value there.

Q: A representative from Horizon Media asked, How do you leverage agencies to get the most out of them?

A: We work with an integrated marketing committee that brings traditional agency (Widener Kennedy) and PR agencies, two interactive agencies (360i, SMG), and our media agency of record. It’s critical to make sure the agencies work together in partnership.

Q: An unidentified attendee asked, How do you deal with negative sentiment?

A: When do you respond, when not respond? It’s tricky business. Generally, we allow social media to self-regulate. Luckily, our community is passionate; we have a lot of brand advocates that stand up for Coke against negative sentiment.  Beyond that, we rely on agency partners to help guide us. Especially when information being disseminated is inaccurate, it’s important to provide real information.

Q: Another anonymous attendee asked, Do you have any advice for marketers who don’t have as much money to spend on social media as Coke?  Say, a budget of $25,000?

A: Don’t enter this space without a strategic plan in place. Platforms. [It's] not that expensive to start the convo, just make sure you have the budget to keep it going.

For updates from IAB Social Media Marketplace throughout the day, follow us on Twitter.

Image credit, Katherine Welles, via Shutterstock

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That said, the discipline is still young, and everyone’s trying to gather as much intel as possible on what’s working for marketers and consumers in appville and what’s not.  I got shut out of the app-related sessions I was slated to cover at SXSW, but Shari Yoder Doherty, consumer marketing and communications guru and SmartBrief on Social Media reader, graciously agreed to share some of the best stuff she heard.

“You can’t be into social media if you aren’t into mobile as well,” said Shiv Singh, vp and global social media lead at Razorfish, during the session Extending Your Brand? There’s An App for That moderated by Adweek digital editor Brian Morrissey.

By now, most brands are aware of the powerful combination of social, mobile and local. The popularity and content of the standing-room only SXSW sessions I attended on mobile applications indicates, however, that many companies are still struggling to find the right mix of these elements.

Experts engaged in lively debate about what brands can learn from services such as Foursquare about the power of social status, reward systems and peer referral to inspire and curate local discovery and decision-making. One thing they agree on, however, is that some marketing apps are hot and some still have a ways to go.

Hot:

• Amazon Mobile for iPhone enables people to take pictures of products you see out in the real world, which are then identified and placed in your cart to buy later. –  Zeus Jones founder Adrian Ho.
• ShopSavvy, a bar-code scanner app similar to RedLaser, shows shoppers the cheapest product prices online or at nearby stores. — Artefact co-founder and principal designer Rob Girling.
• Vice Tracker proposes to keep people on top of their indulgences, “whether for health or for money.” Translation: it tries to change people’s spending behavior with social gaming and incentive features.  — Shiv Singh, Razorfish.

Not:

• The popular VW GTI Real Racing app got the thumbs-down from Ho because “it doesn’t drive additional brand interactions and sales.”
• In Girling’s opinion, many luxury brands, such as Mercedes-AMG, have a tendency to release branded microsites as apps and miss the opportunity to connect and interact with passionate owners and potential buyers.
• Singh singled out the New York Times app as one that could greatly benefit from the addition of location-aware and social features.

One to keep an eye on:

One of my personal favorites, StickyBits, launched during SXSW this year. StickyBits is an innovative app that bridges the digital world to the physical world via bar codes. Users can scan any bar code and easily attach digital content like photos, videos or text to real world products. Then when anyone else scans the bar code, a myriad of digital content is revealed. It’s not hard to think of the practical uses of an app like this.  Imagine viewing cooking videos as you scan foods in the grocery store or browsing styling advice and hearing new music as you decide which pair of jeans to buy. Keep an eye on this one as brands and consumers experiment with creative ways to bring digital content to life in the real world.

Which of your favorite apps should be on this list?

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Yes, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are blocked, but that doesn’t mean that social networking is not happening in China.  At a recent South by Southwest panel, entitled “Social Media and China: Different than You Think,” three experts — Jacqui Zhou, Dell’s Social Media Globalization Manager; Benjamin Joffe, CEO of Bejing-based social media research agency Plus Eight Star; and Sam Flemming of See i See, the first Chinese social media blog — revealed that quite the opposite is true and gave us a sense for the magnitude.

“Everything that happens in the West is happening on steroids in China,” Flemming declared.

Chinese social networking habits:

• 384 million Internet users in China, 75% of whom are under 34.
• 221 million bloggers.
• 222 million creators of online video.
• 272 million instant messaging users.
• 108 million online shoppers.
• 265 million online gamers.
• 321 million users who download music.
• 40% of Chinese Web users are creators, compared with 21% of Americans.
• China’s virtual goods were a $5 billion market last year, five times the U.S. Virtual currency is so ubiquitous that it’s actually taxed in China.

The major players:

• The largest Internet service portal is Tencent, with 1 billion accounts (485 million active users). In 2009, its revenues surpassed $1.5 billion, 90% of which came from digital goods and games and 10% from ads. Tencent is the most important Internet company in China and the third largest in world, after Google and Microsoft.
• Tencent’s social network Qzone has 310 million users.  Their IM service, QQ, has 50 million concurrent users.
• China’s answer to Facebook, Renren has 200 million users, 55 million of whom are mobile.
• Another popular social network, Kaixin001 has 75 million users
• 51.com has 160 million users
• Zhenai, the largest online dating site in the world, has 22 million accounts. Matches are made via 350 dating counselors who get direct feedback that improves users’ dating and success rates. At $450-600/month, the service is considered very valuable.

How social networking happens in China

• 221 million people have blogs, largely in a diary-style.
• 176 million Chinese connect via  social networking system (SNS) with their “real” friends and online networks.
• 117 million connect anonymously via bulletin board system (BBS). These interactive online message boards are the heart of social media in China. They’re where people go to find topic-based communities and where consumers talk about products and services.

According to Flemming, there’s a stark contrast in how the Chinese act in person, versus how they act online via anonymous BBS systems.  Word of mouth is especially influential, since the media is not open. For example, it’s common for users to group-up via BBS to purchase a car at the same time and get a discount. In the same vein, products are often defined by how  people talk about them online; Net-slang finds its way into product design and branding.  Novels in China are often published online first and then in print depending on popularity.

Clearly, free markets have made advances in China, which makes it hard to remember that the emergence of this behavior has not made the government more democratic.

What products are people talking about?

• Autos.
• Mobile phones.
• Sports.
• Computers.
• Babies.
• Cosmetics.
• Health care.

The takeaway? The Chinese market is absolutely something smart markers need to track and figure out how they can be a part of.  I commend this fantastic panel for jam-packing all this info into one highly enlightening session.

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That’s why we were not at all surprised by the results of a recent Forrester study that show brands reluctant to entrust either traditional or interactive agencies with their social-media activities.

There are strong opinions on this topic, ranging from those who believe firmly in DIY social media, to those who use agencies or consultants to get up to speed before taking over themselves, to companies who find social media bringing them closer to their agencies. Some of the biggest companies are even moving their agencies in-house.

In Sean Corcoran’s opinion, “marketers should own their social-media strategy, since it is about creating direct conversations with consumers, with agencies playing a supporting role helping develop strategy, identify influentials, build out communities and infrastructure and help with analytics (to name a few).”

What do you think? Do you handle all your social media in-house? Has your organization found the right balance with outside help? Do you feel like social media has the potential to change the relationship between companies and ad/creative agencies?

Image Credit, thesuperph, via istock

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At ER 2.0, Doug was captivated by FrontlineSMS:Medic, a content management system for mobile messaging that’s used worldwide to bring medical care to rural communities. Created by two Stanford grad students on only a few thousand dollars, the software turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub — no Internet required.  In Malawi, rural community leaders use Frontline to send texts to the nearest hospital 50-100 miles away.  Text in a drug name, and Frontline automatically texts back dosage and usage information.  Doctors report saving $5,000 per year in fuel costs and are able to care for twice as many patients. Bravo!

Handheld Awesome Detectors: World Changing Mobile Apps spotlighted a couple remarkable technologies making a difference. Ushahidi, a mobile platform born during the turmoil of the 2008 Kenyan presidential elections, crowdsources information during crises.  Kenyans who witnessed or experienced violence during the election sent SMS texts to Ushahidi’s central server.  The central platform then mapped the incident reports and posted them to the Web for viewing by the international community.  Since then, Ushahidi has been used in South Africa, Congo, Palestine, and Haiti to allow citizens to document and report violence in places where police can’t or won’t.

Also in that session, Doug was impressed by The Extraordinaries an on-demand volunteer service which matches willing helpers with small bits of extra time (think: 10-30 minutes) with charitable organizations.  Via their iPhone App, volunteers can sign-up for a variety of tasks such as translating a single Web page, mapping healthy eating places in a neighborhood, or tagging photos of disaster areas to find missing persons.  Recently volunteers applied 80,000 tags to 8000 photos from Haiti.  Those efforts located 700 missing persons and led to 24 family reunions.  That is awesome.

Rebecca was blown away by the presentation How Telemedicine is Healing Haiti by High Alert International Publisher John Hedtke.  Telemedicine is a collaborative mission, with doctors in the field teaching teams back home what to expect, and experts at home base doing legwork on research and analysis for field personnel.  The cameras they use are “whole telemedicine suites in your hand,” said Hedtke.  Although they require low bandwidth, the camera feature plug-ins that interface with medical equipment for monitoring vitals, touch-screen drawing, and two-way VOIP with built in speakers and mic for voice, messaging and videoconferencing. And if you can believe this, they also interface with digital records systems and are HIPAA compliant.

Truly inspiring mobile technology indeed.

Image Credit, Stephen VanHorn, via Shutterstock

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