This blog series, featuring interviews with speakers from the SES Conference & Expo, scheduled Aug. 15 to 19 in San Francisco,  is brought to you by Incisive Media.

The following Q-and-A is with Technorati Media President and Chief Strategy Officer Charles Black. 

Is automation (in whole or in part) a reasonable solution to the problem of social media scalability?

Absolutely — automation, and more importantly, distribution. One of the biggest challenges in social media is that it can require a tremendous amount of resources to start these conversations, engage, and react or effect change when needed. So you have all of this incredible value happening, but many times it’s happening in some small corner of the Web.

Are there apps, clients or other Web tools you’d recommend to users looking to make their social networking more efficient and effective?

There’s a wealth of tools out there: Seesmic, TweetDeck, HootSuite, that are fantastic in terms of bringing efficiency to social media efforts.

We’re most interested in bringing scale.

We are working with a number of clients on Social Rich Media ads. We’re putting everything from blogosphere feeds; clients’ own social media streams from their own blogs, Facebook and Twitter; and apps to video and image galleries — you get the idea — and we’re serving them to their target audiences all over the Internet. They’re performing very well, anywhere from 2 times to 10 times our clients’ standard media, whether our client’s goals are to gain a wider audience for their conversations, or to bring more people to their conversations. Interestingly, we’re finding that harnessing social media efforts in this way can drive other goals such as direct response.

What’s the best strategy for identifying and targeting influencers? How do you get the attention of figures who can increase the reach of your message?

There are as many approaches and methodologies to influencing and targeting as there are definitions of “influencer.” Semantics notwithstanding, at Technorati, we have massive reach in the blogosphere — where the influencers (by anyone’s definition) are most concentrated.

Reach at scale into pools of influence is great, but alone it is not enough. How do you ascertain quality and depth of influence? Our approach is to assess the blog landscape overall and in key verticals and then allow the influencer ecosystem to illuminate influence categories and depth of influence.

The Technorati Authority is driven primarily by the opinions of other influencers. In other words, we utilize peer review heavily — after all, who better to know whose authority is real and respected? This creates a vital and constantly evolving mass of highly engaged thought leaders and also creates gravity for other influencers into our universe. Finally, we have a team that keeps their eyes open and ears to the ground so we can, and do, reach out to taste makers on a regular basis.

Do you favor targeting a few of biggest names in your field? A huge number of mildly influential people? What approach gets the best results?

Both. The top bloggers have huge followings, but the middle segment (often called the mid-tail, or the magic middle — for good reason) will typically have a closer relationship with their audiences, so while the reach is smaller the influence is greater. The biggest names are on everyone’s list, some of our bloggers tell us they receive 500 to 1000 pitches a day, so it can be challenging for a brand to break through amidst all of the noise. Some of the most successful approaches we see are from brands that build relationships with up-and-coming bloggers, and amplify that content via social networks and media distribution.

How do you approach the question of measuring social media success? What tools and processes can companies use to make that process a little easier?

We might be the only partner on a particular campaign, or we might be one of several. For this reason, as standard practice, we track everything. Every single interaction and share that happens in our Social Rich Media ads is captured. On the blogger outreach side, we track both blogosphere coverage and social sharing.

On the tools side, there are a lot of services out there, both free and paid (qualitative measurement on a large scale is a tougher challenge), and the most important thing is what happens after the measurement. For example, we worked with a client on reviews of a technology product. Generally, our bloggers will send a product back rather than publish a negative review. In this case, several very well known technology bloggers sent back the product with very detailed feedback. So does a client view that campaign as a failure, or as valuable strategic feedback they can take back to their product designers?

On the process side, many of our campaigns involve custom social rich media, blogger outreach and display media. So we may start with the media agency, but the creative agency and the PR agency will be heavily involved. The most successful campaigns we see are those with the most cohesion among all of the different teams working with a brand.

Image Credit: Kativ, via iStock Photo

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At the recent Corporate Social Media Summit in New York City, Richard Binhammer, Dell’s head of social media and corporate-reputation management, said the equation is a little more complicated than simply calculating money in and out. As social media programs evolve, they require a more sophisticated understanding of their benefits, he said.

A few lessons from his talk:

ROI is about more than sales. From many other companies, that would sound like a dodge, but Dell is one of the few companies that’s able to say it uses Twitter as a direct-sales tool. The company hasn’t announced an update to that sales figure in many months because it is thinking about ROI differently, Binhammer said. It’s not only one number because it isn’t only about sales; it’s also about increasing business value, he said.

Remember that social media are only another tool. The problem of social media scalability becomes apparent once you realize that businesses can’t win over a fan one time and then move on, thinking that they’ve made a fan for life. Social media aren’t a channel for pushing communications; they’re a tool for managing relationships. “Control is not as successful as influence,” Binhammer said.

Social media can transform your business. If you aren’t taking into account a network’s ability to affect your brand’s communication strategy, product development and customer service, as well as its sales and marketing potential, you’re not seeing the full ROI of social media. Done properly, social media can increase the value of every part of your organization that affects customers. Organizations shouldn’t be asking how social media are making them money; they should be asking how social media make an organization better. That means social media shouldn’t be run by any one division; they need to be part of every aspect of an organization, Binhammer said.

How are you using social media to increase your organization’s value?

Image credit: jpa1999, via iStockphoto

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Last week’s poll question: How do you expect your company’s social-media presence to change during the next year?

• We’ll expand our presence to include a larger number of social networks — 38.35%
• We’ll be using the exact same networks we’re using now –  27.07%
• We don’t know — 18.80%
• We’ll be using a different mix of social networks, but our total number of networks won’t change — 11.28%
• We’ll contract our presence to a smaller number of social networks — 3.01%
• We plan to exit the social-media space during the next year –  1.50%

More than 75%  of 135 SmartBrief on Social Media readers say the plan to either maintain or increase the number of social networks they’re using over the next year. At the same time, fewer than 5% say they’re going to reduce the number of networks they use or even quit using social tools.

At first glance, these results sound like a real vote of confidence in the long-term future of social media — and yes, anything over three months counts as “long-term” when you’re talking about the Internet.

But I hope that the 38% of readers who said they plan to increase the number of social networks they use during the next year are looking to increase for the right reasons. If you see your customers are using a platform you aren’t on, that’s a reason to add a network. If you think members of a given network would respond positively to your brand, that’s a good reason to sign up. Even just wanting to be part of a conversation that’s relevant to what your company does can make a lot of sense.

But you shouldn’t join a network just because it has good buzz right now, or because you want to visible in every space. The truth is that a deeper, more engaged presence on a few networks is going to trump a placeholder presence on dozens of networks every time. A smaller number of networks is also going to be easier to scale as you become more popular. If you’re spreading your social operations too thin, you’re just making it harder to see a real return on your investment.

So if you’re among the people who said they’re staying put or even shrinking in the next 12 months, don’t be ashamed of it. Sound off in the comments and let us know how you’re planning to focus your social-media strategy over the next year and see some real results.

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A few takeaways from my discussion with Gilvar:

• Marketers need to find ways to meet users on their own terms. Brands need to work to make themselves accessible.
• “The more you do [social media] the more work there is to do.”
• Storytelling is a kind of currency in social media. Seeing your story being shared is one of the surest signs that your efforts are succeeding.

Check out our full interview with Ted.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award-winning social media publisher and author of “Duct Tape Marketing – The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide” He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small-business marketing system and Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coach Network. SmartBrief on Social Media Lead Editor Jesse Stanchak caught up with John to talk about some of the challenges small businesses face in getting their social presence off the ground.

How soon should a young company start thinking about social marketing?

Well, the answer to that depends on business and marketing objectives. Developing a strategy that incorporates any form of social media rests on what you’re trying to do, but I think more small businesses need to look at social media not solely as a set of tactics and perhaps more of a behavior. Your entire universe of prospects, customers, suppliers, advisers, partners and competitors can be served employing social media behavior.

Does a small company really need a dedicated social media employee? Should it fall in with the rest of the communication departments’ duties? Should it be everyone’s job?

Social media participation, when viewed as described above, should be orchestrated, but integrated throughout. Every employee should learn and teach social media practices and I would certainly include past social media participation in the hiring process.

Scalability is one of the biggest challenges facing a small business that’s figured out how to build a social media following. What advice do you have for socially savvy companies that want to avoid becoming victims of their own success?

Create systems and processes for all social media activity, just like you would for any function. Don’t hang out on twitter, check in. Create real benchmarks and goals to analyze ROI.

A lot of small businesses feel pressured to maintain a presence across several different networks, even if they’re a little short staffed. Is is it better to have a light presence in several networks or invest heavily in one?

I think there is a balance. Part of what’s accomplished by creating brand optimized profiles on lots of networks is a real estate play where you control all the content. Search engines seem to like social media content so it’s a good idea to give them lots of it.

On the other hand, it’s also a good idea to pick one or two network and go much deeper so you can create some real momentum and real engagement.

Do small business-to-business companies need to use social networks differently than small consumer-focused businesses? Is it a strategic or a tactical difference? How so?

Sure, just like traditional marketing strategies and tactics differ for those types of organizations. Social media is a tool to help meet objectives and the two kinds of businesses certainly have different objectives.

A typical B2B company might want to use social media primarily as a way to demonstrate expertise and create awareness for content that might start sales conversations.

A consumer business might want to focus on networks and platforms that can create word of mouth buzz for various product launches or campaigns.

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Image credit, Maica via iStock

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