Today, Altimeter announced our Open Leadership Awards.  If you think you’re doing something extraordinary with social technologies, or your organization has gone through a transformation of becoming more open, submit an entry!

We’re taking entries in 10 categories: consumer electronics, consumer-packaged goods, financial services, health care, manufacturing/auto, media & communications, professional services, technology, and small/medium businesses (<$500M in revenue). The deadline is coming up quickly on September 10th and the winners will be announced at our Rise of Social Commerce conference October 6th.  For more information, visit: http://awards2010.openleadership.spigit.com

Last year, Alvenda created the 1-800-Flowers Facebook store, widely covered by press and self-billed as the first e-commerce store inside Facebook. This week, they’re showing off their partnership with Hallmark.

Visitors to Hallmark’s fan page who click on the Shop tab will see this:

Once inside, visitors can shop for physical cards – yes, real-not-virtual, made-from-trees cards!

Select a card, and personalize it with a message like so:

Then, enter shipping information, pay with credit card – and wait to hear the delight in your friend’s voice when they call to thank you for a real-not-virtual card.

The presumed benefit of such an app is that fans can now make purchases without ever having to leave Facebook, where they spend most of their online hours anyway. If you read the report in my last post, you’ll know that this meets one of our Success Criteria for Facebook page marketing: Call to Action.

Personally, I didn’t find the user experience very friendly, and would assume that a Facebook app has less inventory than their actual site.  I’d probably just as well visit the brand’s website for an optimal shopping experience. But hey, that’s just me.

I also couldn’t actually make an order, so I don’t know if an order would publish to my news feed. Though if it did, that would fulfill another Success Criteria for Facebook page marketing: Advocacy, or in this case: spreading word of mouth through news feeds (fyi, the average user has 130 friends).

In any case, the idea of bringing shopping experiences into Facebook is important because there’s not just value in the transaction, but in the relationship building between fan and brand, and word of mouth from fan to friend.

Something to keep an eye out on.

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

As a sneak peak, here’s the 8 Success Criteria below.  Within the paper, we define each criteria, describe how we measure brands, and give an example or two that we found.

We evaluated 30 major brands, selected to represent a cross section of industries.  Using the criteria above, and a custom 5-point score card we developed, we ranked these brands as follows (click on the image to view a larger size):

• Serendipitous meetings with friends nearby: I will know when a friend is down the street, at a bar next door, or shopping in the same grocery store, and what have you – and can now arrange to meet.
• Find out where the crowd is: I will know where everybody is checking in, so I can find or avoid the hottest parties.
• Get deals from businesses within my proximity: Exclusive deals will be pushed to my phone when I walk by a local business that has signed up with the service.
• Earn badges or titles to get deals from businesses: I can check in frequently at my favorite business in order to earn the title of “Mayor” or something comparable, and possible deals.
• Earn badges or titles to compete with friends: I can participate in a friendly game of “Who has the most check ins at X, Y, Z place.”
• Learn about nearby sites and destinations: I can access useful tips and information about my surrounding areas, for example, read about a historical monument, learn the name of a structure, or see tips people have left behind about two competing restaurants.
• Take a pre-designed tour: I can take a tour (in a city, a theme park, a museum, etc.), go on a scavenger hunt, or otherwise visit a list of pre-determined sites and receive badges, answer quiz questions, and possibly earn deals along the way.
• Create a “life path” using all my check ins: I can download and analyze all my check ins to create my “life path.”

Of all the reasons to check in above, I’m most inclined to use and see the benefit of learning about nearby sites and destinations, or taking a pre-designed tour at a travel destination. As for the other reasons, they’re just not compelling enough to me yet.

Here’s, why I don’t check in:

• I’m lazy, and there are too many steps required to launch the app, find my location, check in, and write a pithy post to share with friends.
• I forget.
• I don’t actually have more than 10 friends regularly checking in.
• Too many services to check into and friends are spread across the apps.
• I don’t want to be rude and check in in front of friends who don’t “get” check ins.
• I don’t really care about badges or titles.
• I don’t think I’ll ever check in enough to become a “Mayor”.
• I don’t need to be bombarded with more ads than I already am.
• I like having truly serendipitous meetings.
• I don’t mind not knowing or “missing out.”
• I don’t know what I’d do with a “life path.”

Note that privacy is not on this list.  I’m happy sharing my location data with carefully selected friends and contacts, and set my privacy controls accordingly.

Call me when check ins stop being check ins. Location data is powerful, but check ins? Not so much.

For the record, I do check in from time to time. At least when laziness and forgetfulness don’t get in the way. I’m still hoping to see what the fuss is all about.

Here’s another take on check ins from ReadWriteWeb: Why We Check In

Let’s take a look at a few simple ideas that demonstrate traditional word of mouth, yet are amplified by social technologies.

1. Make it easy for customers to recommend your product if they like it

TurboTax knows that when you finish your taxes, you feel good. “A moment of real delight,” was how Christine Morrison described it in a presentation this year. TurboTax saw an opportunity to enable customers to share this “delight” with friends. After finishing their taxes using TurboTax, customers have the option of posting a comment to Facebook that they’re “DONE.” According to Christine, this led to 10 million free impressions and a four times greater click through rate than banner ads – resulting in a 33% higher conversion rate.

Here’s what it looks like after you’ve finished your taxes:

Here’s what it looks like after you’ve written a review:

2. Enable prospects to find product reviews by friends or customers with similar profiles

TurboTax recognized that product reviews are more relevant when they’re from people we trust or people like us.  A TurboTax prospect can filter product reviews by friends, using their Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter log-ins. If no friends have written reviews, prospects can filter recommendations by “people like me.”  This is done through a short questionnaire with questions such as “I had a job change this year,” “I rent my home/own my home,” or “I have kids/I don’t have kids.” TurboTax’s Friendlyzer technology pulls reviews from people that have submitted reviews matching similar profiles.

Here’s a sample of the questionnaire:

Here’s the Friendlyzer technology searching for product reviews based on similar profiles:

3. Help customers with the product by serving up contextual community discussions

TurboTax integrates its community forums into their product by serving up contextual information. As customers use the TurboTax product, every page viewed by the customer has a window pane of relevant questions/answered driven by its LiveCommunity. Not only does this help customers with difficult tax questions as they use TurboTax, it highlights a vibrant community and encourages customers to participate. TurboTax has at least 100 super users. Their top super user – a retired CPA – answered 50,000 questions in one year and had 5 million views. TurboTax knows how to leverage its super users to scale and improve the product experience for customers.

4. Embrace customers and their feedback into improving the product

TurboTax created an Inner Circle community to intake customer insights, which today boasts 25,000 members. Similar to My Starbucks Idea or Dell’s Ideastorm, customers can share and vote for ways to improve TurboTax.  Recently the Inner Circle even asked members what “feature customers could do without.” (You have to log in to see the post). Beyond customer co-creation, the Inner Circle is a community of customer advocates who are more engaged with TurboTax than their average customer. TurboTax has recognized top Inner Circle members, hosting membership appreciation nights or webinars on customer-driven product changes.

5.  Use social technologies and integrate customer relations across the organization, not just in marketing

TurboTax is a pioneer in using social technologies, but it didn’t happen overnight. And, using social technologies is not just an outgrowth of Marketing at TurboTax. Christine Morrison, who started as a Product Manager for the Inner Circle program, and now serves as Senior Manager of Social Media and Corp Comm, told me that using social technologies has always “been part of Intuit’s DNA.”

Know of other companies I should profile like this? Please add your suggestions below. Thanks!

In advance of this event, I’ll be spending time researching relevant case examples. What could be more fun than marrying two topics I love: Technology and shopping?!

So how are companies using social technologies to improve the customer shopping experience? Here are 7 examples I’ve found recently:

1. Recommendations, Reviews, and Ratings

Recommendations, Reviews, and Ratings are standard for any e-commerce site.  But using our social log-ins to access friend recommendations makes this information more powerful. Imagine shopping for a laptop at a Best Buy store, using one of the display computers to read reviews on a particular model, then filtering and finding a friend’s review. Next step: Call your friend for more information. Powerful.

Example: TurboTax’s microsite friendslikeyou.com relies on Gigya’s social brokering technology to allow customers and prospects to log in using their Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter IDs and search for product reviews by  friends. Below, the site is scanning its database for my Twitter contacts.  It turns out none of my friends have written a review, so TurboTax refers me to complete a short questionnaire so it can find reviews by “people like me.”

2. Facebook Likes

The Facebook Like button is similar to recommendations, reviews, and ratings, in that its a form of social proof. I’m identifying it separately because it has the potential for much greater reach. Liking a product or brand is an extremely lightweight activity, lending itself to greater usage. And, every Like publishes to an average of 130 friends’ news feed, igniting word of mouth through layers of extended networks.

Example: Levi’s shoppers can Like any item and add a comment when it publishes to their news feed.

3. Wish Lists

Having a public wish list is like having a wedding registry, except year round. Imagine signing up for a public wish list on your favorite retail site, say Powell’s or DSW, and publishing this on a Facebook app for all your friend’s to see. You’ll never have to exchange a birthday gift again! I haven’t seen such an app yet, but here’s the public wish list feature from Urban Outfitters.

Example: Urban Outfitters shoppers create public wish lists and share these with their friends, as well as search for their friends’ wishlists.

4. Group Buying

When Groupon first launched, I’d send deals to all my friends to make sure there’d be enough people buying the deals. The idea was that a minimum number of purchases were required for the deal to “tip”,” usually at least a couple hundred. These days, that doesn’t ever seem to be a problem – at least in San Francisco – as Groupon has become wildly successful. It’s a great business model which offers a triple win for Groupon, local business, and consumers. Naturally, Groupon has spawned imitators like LivingSocial, SocialBuy, Poggled – and now Yipit is aggregating them all.

Example: Group buying and a-deal-a-day rolled into one with Groupon. It’s also added Facebook Connect so you can share, purchase, and experience Groupon deals with friends.

5. Purchase History

Remember when Facebook launched their Beacon social advertising program? Seems like they still haven’t learned to let users opt in, not opt out. Blippy is like Beacon without being jammed down your throat. Shoppers opt in and share their purchase history with friends, or publicly. Public purchase histories have the same social impact as friend recommendations and reviews. Imagine iTunes having a purchase history pane within its application window. What a great way to discover, and buy, new music.

Example: Blippy users share what they’ve purchased, for how much, and where.

6. Loyalty Check-Ins

Foursquare is picking up a lot of steam, though I admit I’m not one of their early adopters. My circle of friends tends to loathe the habit of checking smartphones during dinner. For those without this problem, checking in to a favorite cafe, bar, restaurant, etc. means potentially being recognized with reward points. Businesses can learn more about their customers, identify and reward customer advocates, and promote word of mouth. Location based services (LBS) include Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Google Latitude, Yelp, and possibly Facebook later.

Example: First, Starbucks teamed up with Foursquare to offer Barista badges and discounts to Starbucks “mayors.” Now, The Standard Hotel has reportedly launched a campaign to offer reward points to people who check in at their hotels via Topguest.

Photo credit: johnhaydon

7. Real-time co-shopping

Finally, here’s an example Charlene Li tweeted about yesterday. Mattel is using Decision Step’s ShopTogether technology on its  e-commerce site Shop.Mattel.com. Two or more customers can browse and chat together, making shopping decisions in real time. Charlotte Russe has been using ShopTogether for years to help teens co-shop for prom dresses.

Example: On Shop.Mattel.com, customers can invite their friends or family to shop together, browsing and chatting with each other in real time.

Of course there are more examples of how e-commerce sites are using social technologies to improve the shopping experience. I’ll follow up again with more examples in a later post. In the meantime, please feel free to share examples you’ve spotted.

A quiet storm is slowly brewing against Facebook and my hope is that it gets more attention from mainstream users. Not because I don’t like Facebook or want to see it fail, in fact I value the connections I’m able to make and keep up on Facebook. I only want people to be more educated about what they share on Facebook – and how this evolves in Facebook’s quest to compete with Google and Twitter, and their public feeds of data.

For now, it seems most users just don’t know or don’t care.

Fortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on the case, advocating for our digital rights. In a series of articles, they’ve shed important light on recent Facebook changes. I strongly urge you to read the following articles, listed here in the order they were published:

Facebook further reduces your control over personal information

How to opt out of Facebook’s instant personalization

Facebook’s eroding privacy policy: A timeline

Facebook’s “evil interfaces”

EFF seeks to protect innovation for social network users

6 things you need to know about Facebook Connections

It’s fine, I suppose, if Facebook wants to become more open in order to be competitive.  I just wonder if 1) this openness will decrease Facebook’s utility as users become more cautious about what they post and 2) there isn’t room for another social network that respects users’ privacy and be profitable.

In the meantime, here’s a great analogy from a Hacker News discussion:

It’s akin to the lobster-in-a-boiling-pot scenario.

Put a lobster in already boiling water and it screams, stick it in room-temp water and heat to boiling and the lobster won’t notice it’s being cooked until it’s too late…

To stay up to date on Facebook and other digital rights issues, follow EFF on Twitter. If you’re in San Francisco, register for PrivacyCamp this Friday (it’s free).

Facebook, I’ve got a funny feeling about you. There are plenty of companies I don’t trust, but Facebook – you’re in a unique position to know a lot about me. Yes, Google too – and I’ll say more on that in a minute.

On the one hand, you tempt me with the promise of a truly social web, extending my social graph across the internets like tentacles stretching far and wide. A web where I can meet my friends online wherever I go – start discussions, compare purchases – generally share activities, links, resources, sentiments – and benefit from recommendations which help me filter some of the noise.

On the other hand, I’m fearful that you’ll distribute all those connections, activities, behaviors, and patterns all over the web. I’m not the only one who’s worried. Look see:

Facebook’s eroding privacy policy timeline

Why it is too late to regulate Facebook

Facebook’s evil, genius plan to own your life

Facebook’s great betrayal

Okay, I get it. You went into it a$$ backwards. You started with a closed platform and have been backtracking ever since, to make (y)our UGC more public. You’re jealous of Twitter. Heck, your data isn’t being archived by the National Library of Congress!

I’m not naive. You have to make money to be a sustainable business. And, you’re going to make a lot of money with all our data. Why wouldn’t you? But that doesn’t mean I have to go along with all of this without a fight. Because ultimately, I just don’t trust you.

The simple thing that irks me to no end, and is the most obvious indication of a disingenuous approach:

I was looking through my privacy settings, recalling articles written in the past week about how to opt out of your new “instant personalization” feature. Examples are here, here and here. It’s such a maze of settings, confusing language, and opt in defaults – that all evidence indicates you’re purposely trying to disorient me – in order to get me to share more than I want to.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation shared similar thoughts this weekend. It asked its fans for a new term to describe “the act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to.”

Some of these were really good: “bait-and-click” (my favorite), “bait-and-phish,” “confuser-interface-design,” and “Facebaiting.”  They’re going with “evil interfaces.”

In their words, “Design is difficult, and accidents do happen. But when an accident coincidentally bolsters a company’s business model at the expense of its users’ rights, it begins to look suspicious.”  An evil interface “trick[s] users into doing things they don’t want to.

Now, on to Google. Google may have more data on me than the NSA, and there’s plenty of debate around its lofty claim: Don’t be evil. For example:

Debating the vices and virtues of Google

Is Google evil?

And wow, look at this commentary first published when Google launched Gmail: In Google we Trust? When the subject is email, maybe not.

But what did Google ever do to me? Aside from the Google Buzz debacle, which yes – I was admittedly miffed about but have been willing to overlook since they’ve got a pretty good track record.

It goes without saying that Google has made the web better. It’s made it faster, more relevant, and more useful. And no, Google doesn’t confuse me.

Others have already expounded on Google’s virtues. Like Louis Gray who trusts Google implicitly (Still waiting for an evil Google?). Or Chris Messina, who works for Google, extolling the virtues of an open web. Heck, Jeff Jarvis wrote an entire book about why he trusts Google (What Would Google Do?).

I dug up an old Wired article (Google v. Evil) in which the author interviews Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

One thing Brin is sure of: On the side of evil lies trickery. I ask Brin to imagine, for a moment, running his company’s evil twin, a sort of anti-Google. “We would be doing things like having advertising that wasn’t marked as being paid for. Stuff that violates the trust of the users.”

And finally, this final paragraph in the same Wired article especially resonates today in the context of Facebook’s privacy erosions:

It’s inevitable that a company of Google’s size and influence will have to compromise on purity. There’s a chance that, in five years, Google will end up looking like a slightly cleaner version of what Yahoo! has become. There’s also a chance that the site will be able to make a convincing case to investors that long-term user satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin’s to lose. For now, at least, in Google we trust.

So, when it comes down to my relationship with the two most dominant sites on the web? I trust Google a whole lot more in making decisions that are in the best interests of its users – and the internets at large.

For now, at least, in Google I trust.

Time to update this old Time magazine cover:

Basically, Promoted Tweets are “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”  For example, a Promoted Tweet will be displayed at the top of the Twitter search page when people search for key words. Like Google Adsense, the most relevant Promoted Tweets will be displayed based on a metric Twitter is calling Resonance.

This new marketing tool will be especially good for situations when brands need a particular tweet to stick, for example, to promote a campaign or to combat negative PR.

I really like the idea of Resonance, which for me has a combined connotation of relevancy, reach, and engagement. In Twitter’s own words: “If users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.”

If Twitter sees success with Promoted Tweets on its search page, expect to see Twitter using Resonance as a justification to drop Promoted Tweets into our own Twitter streams.  That is, if this line from today’s New York Times is true: “Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.”

Though I’m happy to accept a few relevant tweets a day in my Twitter stream from companies I don’t follow, expect user backlash when Twitter ads are unveiled.

Finally, think about this: In today’s BITS blog, this article portrays a Twitter that is looking more and more like Google everyday. Instead of the chronological, real-time tweet delivery that we’re all used to, imagine a Twitter stream that serves up tweets based on Resonance.

“’The timeline itself is not going to be a static product,’” said Sean Garrett, who heads communications at Twitter. ‘There might be different ways that people see and receive what’s relevant to them.’”

Expect to see more convergence between Twitter and Google, Resonance and PageRank, and ad-based search on both networks.

I don’t use Facebook Connect myself, since I’m careful about my Facebook privacy. (Good luck though!). I prefer using my Twitter ID to log in wherever I can. My profile and tweets are public anyway – and doing so makes the registration process frictionless. If I can connect with Twitter friends, all the better. Twitter Connect, imho, is their killer feature.

I love Disqus, the commenting system that integrates my online ID across nearly all the blogs I visit. It seems like every blog is using Disqus now – enabling blog readers to comment with one identity across the web.

Expected moves by Facebook and Twitter will continue to socialize the web.

A couple weeks ago, Twitter announced @anywhere, which will allow us to connect with anyone on Twitter from anywhere on the web. You’ll soon be able to hover over a reference to a person or brand – and see their latest tweets or follow them with one click.

It’s rumored that Facebook will soon announce the ability to “Like” content on any page, making a seemingly trivial online action both universal and significant.

So not only are we growing more comfortable being ourselves on the web, which personalizes and socializes our experiences online – we’re now inheriting a common set of actions and behaviors on the web – where every site you go to allows you to interact with it in a similar way.

While I’m cautious in some ways and know that the continuing socialization of the web is inevitable, I’m still excited about the evolution. Less friction, and more context and interoperability make for a web experience that many of us can’t fully fathom but can definitely appreciate.

If you’re interested in these ideas, read Chris Messina’s 5-part series on the social web, The Social Agent. Warning: Messina admits it’s tl;dr, or “too long; didn’t read.” Put it on your Instapaper and read it later.