As many of you know, last week was Social Media Week in Atlanta. Unfortunately for me, it happened to coincide with a particularly hectic workweek—but I was able to attend one of the most anticipated panels: Social Media Innovations.

The Social Media Innovations panel consisted of an impressive group of folks:

Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe – event coordinator and representing PlacePunch
Scott Lockhart, Co-Founder – Regator
Yvett Evans, Business Development – Vitrue
John Beisner, EVP, Client Services – Twitpay
David Rollo, SVP/Director of Digital Strategy – 22 Squared
Aaron Strout, CMO – Powered, Inc.

Each of the panelists discussed their company’s approaches to innovative social media practices. The event represented a great combination of brands and concepts, all of which had inspiring case studies, statistics, and success stories to share.

Scott Lockhart of Regator opened the session and explained how Regator, a small Atlanta start-up, functions. Essentially, Regator makes it possible for people to locate quality blog content. Regator addresses issues of information overload—in other words, how does one wade through all of the online blogs and publications and find truly relevant and useful information?

Regator uses editorial curators, who go out and find great blogs to feature on the Regator site. The blogs are presented on Regator in a very accessible, user-friendly way, and divided by topics of interest, ranging from beekeeping to social media to politics, technology, or even knitting. Regator offers additional tools for tracking and sharing content with friends, creating a truly social user experience.

Interestingly, Regator has an 85-90% rejection rate for submitted blogs, which serves to maintain the integrity of the content. Regator innovates through offering capabilities such as widgets and iphone apps to users.

Yvett Evans of Vitrue was next to take the floor. She opened by explaining that Vitrue is a SMMP—a Social Media Management Platform, and primarily a technology company that builds a platform of solutions for brands and companies to better leverage the power of Facebook and Twitter.
Featured products of the company include Vitrue tabs—a solution that allows you to leverage content management, and Vitrue publisher—a publishing tool that allows you to publish posts on Facebook more effectively. Vitrue Apps is another feature that they’re currently tapping into.
Yvett covered a few hard-hitting social media stats, including:

- Global time spent on social media increased 82% from 2008 to 2009
- 90% of respondents trust recommendations from their friends
- 60% of “Tell A Friend” widget shares come from social media sites, as opposed to 31% from email
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world (currently 500 million + users)
- Average user- 130 friends; 50% of average users visit the site once a day, and spend an average of 55 minutes on the site
- Over 20 million people become fans of Facebook pages each day

She then delved into the subject of couponing, and referenced the recent BBDO study that asked participants what their primary recommendation would be to brands on Facebook. 83% of respondents suggested that brands offer exclusives or benefits. In a 2010 study, participants in were asked what their number one motivation was in “liking” a brand or company on Facebook. Similarly, 40% replied: coupons, benefits, or promotions.

While these statistics weren’t completely surprising to me, I was impressed by the high percentages of folks that simply want to be incentivized to follow a brand.

Yvett continued by presenting a solid case study with Buffalo Wild Wings, a project that Vitrue partnered on with 22 Squared. The agency approached Vitrue to leverage their Facebook couponing technology. Their main objective was to increase sales during an off-peak time period, test the rate of prints and redemptions within a digital medium, and to reward the Buffalo Wild Wings fan base.

Through leveraging paid, owned, and earned media, 22 Squared launched their campaign. It began with a series of wall posts in the form of a coupon, which resulted in a staggering 1900 shares and 67,000 printouts. Virtue’s technology features an easy-to-use interface that allows you to build apps quickly, a deals tab, serving as a landing tab for non-fans, and a coupon creator.

The results:

- 55% of total printouts for the campaign came from Facebook
- 38% were from wall posts
- 63% redemption rate of coupons were from Facebook

Yvette closed by presenting tips on ways to build your own strategy from Facebook, which included:
- define metrics up front
- ensure that you have the proper tools to measure the metrics
- make sure that offer is compelling
- encourage fans to share the promotion
- ensure process is in place for users to redeem

Twitpay’s John Beisner was next up to present, and he opened by describing Twitpay as the first and largest payment service built for Twitter utilization.

Twitpay is primarily focused on nonprofits, and their goal is to allow these nonprofit brands to monetize their investment in social media. It allows them to send out tweets with a call to action, i.e., “please retweet this to make a donation”. Twitpay is facilitating the exponential spread of a message through requests for donations.

John pointed out that when nonprofits feature a call to action on their site that simply requests that users make a donation, it’s just a one-to-one action—there’s nothing social about it. However, through Twitpay, you spread the message or announcement of donation to your donor’s followers. This forces a social interaction, and people like to share the fact that they’ve made a donation. The donation confirmation happens through DM (direct message), and the donor replies yes.

Twitpay focuses on the larger nonprofits, such as the Children’s Miracle Network, United Way, Care, and water.org. Their focus is to bring in the right kind of audience, access new audiences, and train them to make donations. Twitpay’s technology allows nonprofit brands to quickly create donation campaigns. Their process is designed to lower the barriers to donation.

John referenced a powerful case study featuring Malaria No More, who launched a donation campaign that generated 3,969 retweets (one of which was from Bill Gates). Malaria No More’s campaign was implemented for World Malaria Day, and the purpose was to raise money for mosquito nets.

The campaign rivaled the text-to-give activity by bringing in 40% of the funding, while text-to-give brought in 60% –very noteworthy considering that text technology has been around significantly longer.

Caleb Clark from Mobilization Labs, a software company out of Buckhead, described the Wildfire Platform—technology that originated 5 years ago in the political space. However, today they’re in the brand and nonprofit space. They’re focused on mobilizing groups of people behind a brand, and enabling the brand to better understand their behavior, which contributes to their overall ROI.

Wildfire’s technology measures and tracks everything that brands do, analyzes the behavior of their fans, and motivates them to do more. The Wildfire platform takes the list of fans and helps brands to “improve the ask”. One example of this methodology was with the Jonas Brothers brand, which called on Wildfire to solicit help from their fans to help promote the upcoming tour. The top 3 fans that helped promote the band were flown to New York to spend the day with the band.

Another great case study of Wildfire’s technology was with the Spicy Chicken Chick-Fil-A promotion that took place over the summer. Chick-Fil-A is known for their wildly successful giveaways and promotions; however, they were looking for more insight into their fan behavior, in order to pinpoint what and who exactly was driving fans into the door for the giveaway campaigns.

The Spicy Chicken sandwich giveaway was the largest product launch in Chick-Fil-A’s history, so the brand used the Wildfire platform to communicate the promotion to their 2 million + fans. They tied the platform into the reservation system—so fans would print their reservation and pick up their free sandwich. Ultimately, Wildfire was able to capture information on every fan and analyze where they came from, whether it was from Facebook, Twitter, etc., and uncover which fans notified the most people.

In one week’s time, Chick-Fil-A increased their email subscriber list by 50%, and gave away over 1 million sandwiches. Additionally, overall sales increased chain-wide by 50%–and this was with no radio, TV, or other forms of traditional advertising. More importantly, they were able to analyze and understand the behavior behind the fans that took advantage of the offer. By examining the behavioral analytics behind their fans, Chick-Fil-A was able to better understand them, which will undoubtedly aid them in future campaigns and promotions.

Caleb pointed out that while social conversation is important, it’s not as critical as fan actions.

Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe stepped in to discuss PlacePunch, a location based marketing platform that enables businesses to drive more customers to their venues, build customer loyalty, and gain new insights with their customer base. Their tools and technology integrate with Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and other location based social networks.

PlacePunch helps brands with customer engagement, and assists them in building customer loyalty programs.

Dorothea referenced a PlacePunch case study with IHG Hotel Group, who wanted to create a unique, engaging experience for customers when they checked into the hotel via Foursquare. IHG used Placepunch technology to begin a messaging program, in which Twitter replies were sent to customers when they checked into one of 3100 domestic IHG locations. The messages varied from good will to promotional, and customer response was strong.

Another strong case study was with Concentrics Restaurant, who engaged all customers who were checking into their locations via Foursquare, Facebook, Gowalla, etc., and rewarded them at the point of sale with a free appetizer or dessert.

Both brands understand the importance of contacting and rewarding customers at the point of engagement, which undoubtedly drives more customer loyalty.

David Rollo of 22 Squared was last to present—he described several important relationships and strategic partnerships that the agency has developed with companies like Vitrue, Blinq Media, and Looxii. By leveraging these outside resources, 22 Squared has been able to enhance their client offerings significantly.

David went on to describe some client social media success stories that were achieved with the help of these partnerships. For instance, they increased Baskin Robbins Facebook fanbase from 458,000 to 1.2 million in just a short amount of time.

Through Vitrue’s technology, 22 Squared is able to better monitor fan conversation and activity through one management platform that offers optimal visibility into fan bases for their clients. It’s crucial to be moderating and monitoring these conversations, especially as spam becomes more of an issue.

Blinq Media is another strong partnership for 22 Squared—Blinq assists them with increasing visibility and fan bases on Facebook, and supports them with building out apps, such as Baskin Robbins Group Scoop app, which offers free scoops of ice cream. Blinq is also able to stretch Facebook advertising budgets much farther than if you were to go directly through Facebook. Blinq also determines CPF, or Cost Per Fan, which helps to pinpoint run rates and ROI, and runs multivariate testing.

Last, David introduced Looxii, a social media monitoring engine that he stated was ”simple, useful and affordable.” He compared them to Radian6, but pointed out that Looxii is well suited for clients on tighter budgets. The platform is comprehensive, customizable, and cross-platform. It measures trends, conversations, and human sentiment. You’re also able to create a customized, branded dashboard for clients for listening.

It was a rare treat to be able to be among some of the greatest Atlanta minds in social media technology and innovation, and I left the session feeling inspired and full of ideas for putting some of the concepts I learned into practice. I think my biggest takeaway was inspired by the thought of pursuing more strategic partnerships with some of the talented companies I was introduced to. I feel that social media is best served as a collaborative effort—certainly, such efforts achieve the best results for clients, which is what we’re all ultimately striving for.

Were you able to make it to the Social Innovations Panel? If so, what stood out for you?

I recently had the pleasure of attending the SoCon10 event at Kennesaw State University. Now, I’m itching to share ideas, inspiration, and put what I’ve learned into practice– which assures me that I had a worthwhile experience. Granted, it’s virtually impossible not to be inspired with a line-up of speakers that included Carol Kruse (VP of Global Interactive Marketing for Coke) and Dan Siroker (Founder of Carrotsticks and former Deputy New Media Director for the Obama Presidential Transition).

Here are some highlights from their presentations:

Carol Kruse: Inventing new social media strategies to put your brand on the map

• Social Media Marketing is a tactic and should support brand objectives.
• New media platforms and tools change frequently, and can be very disruptive to a campaign/ strategy. (Case in point: Facebook’s ever-changing guidelines.)
• Use the KISS methodology; just because you can use a particular tool, doesn’t mean you should.
• “Viral” is not a strategy.
• Don’t create extra work for yourself– many make the mistake of continually starting over from zero, rather than building from past efforts.
• Clear any potential legal hurdles within your organization first. Legitimate legal questions will arise, and need to be dealt with prior to rolling out social media initiatives.
• Regarding the question of ROI: within this topic, a double standard of sorts exists. One could ask, ‘What’s the ROI of a billboard? How many cases did the billboard move?’
• Repeat visits to a site, or page drive more brand affinity.
• Each new community is an entirely new market, and should be treated as such– what works for some may not work for others. For example, Bebo is popular in China; Brazil uses Orkut.
• Moderation is key– too many try to be everywhere at once.
• Listen first. Identify where the influencers are– then reach them.
• Create sustainable relationships. The ‘everyone loves a puppy’ analogy: Social media is like a puppy. In the beginning, everyone loves a puppy. They’re cute, cuddly, fun, and new– but then the puppy grows up, and it still needs constant care, exercise, and nurturing. The same is true for social media–it’s work. Social media is like a reality show; it’s 24-7/ 365 days a year.
• Interaction is crucial– when you get people interacting, you no longer have to stimulate every conversation.
• Case studies: Expedition 206. Filming Happiness– three ‘happiness ambassadors’ travel the world to visit all 206 countries where Coca-cola is sold. Their mission: to discover what makes people happy around the world. The ambassadors blog, tweet, and post videos of their adventures for viewers.
• My Coke Rewards: Combines customer loyalty and social media.
• Simple, yet true: fish where the fish are. Do the due diligence to discover where your customers and major influencers are online. And– collect (readers), connect (with your audience), and perfect (your message).
• Optimize the existing functionality that social media platforms offer; don’t try to reinvent the wheel. For example, ‘events’ is a great Facebook tab/category that is fairly underutilized.

Dan Siroker: How to raise $300 million using social media and online tactics

Dan Siroker was a product manager for Google Chrome when Obama came to Google to speak. At the time, he was so moved by Obama’s speech that he decided to move to Washington DC to volunteer for the campaign. Eventually he became the Deputy New Media Director, and handled strategic planning for the administration’s internet and technology use throughout the election. Recently, the administration called upon Dan’s team again– this time to optimize the Clinton/Bush Haiti fundraising campaign. (I think it’s fair to say that Dan is kind of a big deal.)

Here is a breakdown of his presentation:

How data won the Obama election:
Mind-blowing statistics: $656 million was raised for the Obama campaign. $500 million of it was raised online.

Dan’s ‘lessons learned’ throughout his experiences:
• Lesson 1:
  Define success and generate quantifiable success metrics.
  Obama campaign example–metrics involved: website>email signup>raise money
• Lesson 2:
  Question Assumptions
  Add a multivariate touch; experiment. Dan shared variations of splash pages and videos his team used during the election and asked us to vote and attempt to guess which models received the best results. Interestingly, very few of us guessed correctly, which emphasized his point: never assume that one model will be the most effective. Always test.
• Lesson 3:
  Divide and Conquer
  To demonstrate this point, Dan shared additional multivariate examples through various fundraising call to actions he experimented with, such as ‘donate now’, ‘please donate’, ‘why donate’, ‘donate and get a gift’, and ‘contribute’. He asked the audience to vote on which call-to-action we felt was most effective, and once again, the majority of us got it wrong. However, he then pointed out that his team took the testing and step further and divided the results into groups of first time visitors, first time donators, and past donators in order to accurately analyze the call-to-action clicks.
• Lesson 4:
  Take advantage of circumstances
  Here, Dan showed a clip of Sarah Palin’s speech that mocked ‘community organizers’. (Palin’s quote: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities.”) His team immediately leveraged this opportunity by sending out a mass email to enraged Obama supporters, asking them to retaliate by donating at least $100 to the campaign. The email blast raised an additional $10 million in funds for Obama’s campaign, and undoubtedly serves as rock solid argument for taking advantage of circumstances.
• Lesson 5:
  Always be Optimizing
  This one is fairly self-explanatory: always be experimenting; always be optimizing– when it comes to analytics, don’t ’set it and forget it.’

This was my first SoCon experience, and I’ll definitely be returning next year. To sum up, here’s a great video that Amani Channel from Visual Eye Media produced for the event:

For my next post, I’ll discuss highlights from my latest adventure: the Social Fresh conference in Tampa.