But the world changes. Existing in the digital realm, we must not only adapt to new scenarios but correctly anticipate changes to deliver timely solutions in this ever-changing landscape. This is the conundrum for all IT members: how to gaze into the crystal ball and forecast proper solutions in a world where nobody knows what’s coming up even 6 months from now.

Social Business Software is one of these rapidly evolving solutions that didn’t exist 2 years ago but may be one of the greatest pivotal tool impacts in recent years.  Where does it sit in the corporate culture and how does it accelerate growth or value for the organization? What’s the value in employees being social with one another?  Being responsible for implementing our SBS system I’ve come to appreciate SBS and can shed some light on social. The water-cooler for the 21st century.

But what IS SBS?  In general terms it’s an amalgam of wikis, blogs, discussions, areas, spaces, groups, and the better ones include profiling, twittering, built-in IM and project collaboration areas.  All of these functionalities are wrapped up under a single interface and can be shared out as widgets in various stages, or permissions, across the organization.  If you already have a wiki, blog, forum, some project collaboration, then you’re already social to a degree, but a SBS system integrates it all together to harness that data in a meaningful delivery mechanism.

Foremost in embracing SBS is to accept that social provides value to the company. Primarily, there is tangible ROI in absorbing legacy systems and indexing their content. If you’re an organization that leverages search, you’ll see how truly important this shift can be. Everything that has been mentioned, and you can begin to think about all those water-cooler discussions, is fully searchable and can be retained and mined by others. Secondly, social provides each employee with the ability and tools to contribute. This is advantageous on an efficiency level, might free up much-needed resources, and also streamline delivery of information both internally as well as with business partners. The big value that SBS provides within an organization is how it can relieve communication pressure and resolve questions.

Another feature of SBS to accept is that social is about business.  Today’s collaborative environments and project-centric workgroups have a predominant place inside SBS. Tweets, chat’s, IM’s and following colleagues in the organization are all tools to further communicate and embrace employees. Does SBS get your work done for you?  No, but it does allow you a centralized integrated environment for you to accelerate your work.

SwissRe recently introduced their Jive SBS system across their operation in more than 20 countries. Swiss Re took a community-centric approach to collaboration and provided a Jive Social Business Software platform for virtual client-facing teams, expert networks, projects, learning groups, and other special interest groups, called Ourspace. Seven weeks into a viral launch more than 61% of potential users were on board, over 375 groups had been formed, 600 people had created content, 1,000 people replied and commented on discussions, and 2,200 people had changed their profiles or joined a group. Very soon, use cases with clear positive business impact emerged. In addition, they have realized cost savings from decommissioning legacy systems and technologies as well as modest savings in travel budgets. After seven months approximately 12,000 users, 80% of all employees, engaged in a social system with over 300,000 clicks per month and 100% of it is business-related content.

But what about the risks? Sure you could be opening up a can of worms by allowing every employee to contribute.  Some cultures might not be as able to embrace a solution like SBS as easily as others.  Some companies might be far younger in their approach and communication missteps could be disastrous.  SBS might launch with lackluster engagement and low usage. Thankfully SBS provides mechanisms to mitigate those risks, moderate content, and provide for an extraordinary viral experience. Largely these are design issues and modern social business software is extremely flexible.  Some key design issues when introducing SBS within your organization: Executive sponsorship who actively participate, moderators and content creators who are seen internally as thought leaders, community managers to maximize new opportunities and processes of monitoring to ensure open issues get answered or escalated if necessary. An excellent interface doesn’t hurt either.

The end result of SBS will allow everyone the ability to contribute to the collective information for our organization.  This information can then be leveraged by the company to further align to strategy.  Once your information practices and corporate strategy are aligned, then you’ll be in an evolved position where SBS seems less like a tool and more of a pervasive method of communicating.  Yes, you’ll chat, tweet, IM, update profiles and update discussions but it’s a extraordinarily small price to pay while you get far more information back by being social. That advantage can help accelerate your company.

Doug Mackay is the Director of Information Systems out of our Calgary office.

As the long standing debate of online privacy policies rages on, consumers have become increasingly anxious about their personal information being shared with advertisers. As consumers voice their opinions, the leaders in the online space have to learn to manage a healthy balance of: sharing information with brands/advertisers to drive successful campaign performance vs. continuing to make consumers feel safe in their online behaviors.

In the social space, consumers trust their social networks and feel that the information they share should not leave the tight circle of friends that they have cultivated. In the specific case of Facebook, consumers have spoken out against the service sharing their personal information with advertisers, driving Facebook to create new privacy regulations to ensure its members feel safe and comfortable. But are these social networks actually doing anything wrong? As Mark Zuckerberg points out during his announcement a few months ago, Facebook isn’t sharing anyone’s personal information; all of the targeting used by brands is actually done by Facebook itself.  It seems that a lot of the concern by the Facebook consumers stems from their lack of knowledge about what advertiser targeting actual entails.

In the latest movement to increase privacy online, the IAB and the NAI released the CLEAR (Control Links for Education and Advertising Responsibly) technical specifications which will be a clickable icon, on or near an ad, that will provide the consumers with information on why they are being targeted and also giving consumers the option of opting out. The IAB states the goal of the CLEAR specifications are three fold:

• Meet the third-party requirements set forth in July 2009 as part of the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioural Advertising released in July 2009

• Provide flexibility for future expansion as the industry matures

• Be open such that publishers, browser developers, tool developers or any other party can easily take advantage of the information presented to the user and find new ways to communicate that information.

Clearly put, the near future will require each ad to have what is called the Power “i” icon. The icon has a lower case “i” encompassed by a circle. There are also plans to have content around the icon such as, “Why did I get this ad?” By combining these two elements the IAB is hoping to ease consumers minds about how they are targeted and why they get certain ads. From the information released about the Power “i” icon, it seems to be a very smart approach. The best way to get consumers to understand why this information is shared with advertisers is to provide them with the knowledge and education to understand the process.

The rising debate about the Power “i” icon is whether or not consumers will a) actually notice the icon and b) engage with the icon. My thoughts: Consumers will appreciate the mental satisfaction of knowing something has been done about privacy controls, but they by no means want to take more of their own time to investigate reasons why they’ve been targeted. They just want to know someone is looking out for them. Additionally, consumers are trained to accept the ads on the page and sometimes (unfortunately for us) even ignore those ads. Therefore, the likelihood of a consumer engaging with the icon is strongly correlated with the advertiser’s ability to grab the consumer’s attention with their ad.

Looking at this privacy issue from a marketer’s perspective, it’s hard to pinpoint why consumers are on such high alert about banner targeting. Isn’t it a good thing that brands can now target those consumers that are actually out searching for similar products? Doesn’t it make shopping easier for consumers when brands bring needed products/information out to them instead of having to search around for such products? A consumer’s personal information is not actually being seen by advertisers, but the knowledge is being used to make ads more relevant for the consumers … therefore, isn’t targeted a win-win situation for both the brands and the consumers?

Anna Mer is a Media Manager in our Chicago office.

I hearken back to when Aaron was an intern for me at a traditional media agency. If I had known he could rap like that, well, he still would have been an intern.

But get past the terrible rhythm and sideways visor and listen to the message. Great experiences happen anywhere and in order for brands to enable consumer interaction those experiences have to be easy to find. Isn’t that the most important lesson Google teaches? If the greatest piece of content in the world is never seen or shared, is it still the greatest piece of content in the world? Google built a model that ensures it can be found. A model, by the way, that means they are the gateway to the Internet regardless of how people enter. As such, they are friend to brand and consumer alike as they match content with consumer.

I think the best thing about Aaron’s book is how well he has constructed an in depth yet simple view of how digital marketing has evolved based in large part on Google as the foundation. With the web as hub, marketers have to fill in the spokes, exactly as Aaron white boards. Channel selection has never been more important than it is right now. Brands can’t simply produce tv spots and build websites and call themselves multi-channel. They must recognize that with the consumer in control, insights on their behavior are more important than ever. Without knowing where and when the customer will want to engage, brands are grasping at straws and risk minimal ROI.

Its a good thing we have the rapping author to help us.

Scott is the SVP, Experience Distribution on our global Executive Team. He’s located in our Chicago office.

With summer musical festivals there’s still a lot to look forward to on the music scene in 2010. But this isn’t a collection of up-and-coming artists or a rant about Ticketmaster. Instead, it’s a collection of upcoming developments that will how we obtain and consume music- coming soon to a digital device near you.

Sharing all of your music across the internet to any device

Earlier this year, Google acquired Simplify Media in a move that will open digital syncing services to the masses. Simplify Media provided a service that let you seamlessly share music and photo libraries through the web.

By running the service on two computers, each other’s music collections would appear as a local iTunes shared library, even if each machine was thousands of miles apart. The service also allowed you to connect to libraries of up to thirty friends to stream all of their collections too. The real game changer came when the company released its iPhone application, allowing you to pull down your entire library wherever there was an internet connection.

This signaled a fundamental shift in media consumption:  No longer was it the case that a device’s media capacity was limited by internal storage. As long as the device was online, it could pull down entire libraries of content. Storage space became irrevelant.

The service ceased in June and the software has been pulled from the website and Apple’s App store. It will certainly be interesting to see how Google, known for creating web-based solutions and shunning desktop programs, will implement this service. There’s speculation the company may incorporate the syncing technology into its own Android OS software but I’m hoping they maintain a presence across all platforms.

The next killer music application will be in the cloud

Google has been incorporating HTML5 to provide mobile and desktop experiences that mirror full desktop applications. Earlier this year, Google released a mobile-optimized version of their Google Voice service when the application was famously rejected from the App Store. New HTML5 features like Gmail drag-and-drop support demonstrate how close web experiences can mimic desktop apps.

In the music realm, it would be incredible if we saw a Google Music service sometime this year, allowing users to play and access entire music libraries, as well as libraries from all of their Gmail contacts, from within their browser window with no local media player required.

Similarly, Apple has been rumored to be working on a cloud-based iTunes service, signaled by the purchase of streaming service Lala earlier this year. Mixed with native iPhone support for streaming music through Dropbox and MobileMe, as well as a new billion dollar datacenter in North Carolina, Apple appears to be setting the stage for a new era of media streaming through the cloud.

Spotifiy looks to stream millions of tracks to your desktop and mobile- for free

Spotify will also be a big player once it debuts in the U.S. later this year. Tremendously popular in Europe, the service streams millions of songs to your desktop or mobile for free (although an ad-free premium service exists) was due to hit the U.S. at the beginning of 2010 but got held up due to licensing disputes with the big recording agencies.

Spotify’s site boasts millions of users, and its catalog of 8 million songs rivals that of iTunes. As with Simplify Media, Spotify’s service makes the need for local storage irrelevant. In the same fashion this generation sacrificed physical media, will the next wave of listeners forgo even digital copies in favor of free ad-supported streaming services? While it’s difficult to predict how the service will affect existing distribution channels, the service has been well-received in Europe since debuting in 2009. Demand is already increasing for the US version. Spotify-related forums and blog posts are inundated with workarounds to get the service operational by using a proxy service or UK-based credit card. While Spotify has taken measures to lock down these attempts, there may be 30,000 users in the US (although this is highly refuted by Spotify), including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg.

Revenue from Pirates in a Transformed Industry

As early adopters eagerly anticipate Spotify’s release, the biggest impact may be felt on those record companies responsible for delaying the service’s debut. A slick application and access to millions of songs already freely available could not only deter online piracy, but generate revenue based on the number of plays each song receives.  By providing the end user with a simpler way to access music than even piracy offers, Spotify has the potential to transform the music industry.

The record labels are forced to walk a tight rope. On one hand, they can sell Spotify as a means of generating revenue from casual listeners who may otherwise obtain an album illegally. But they’ll have to be careful that the service won’t cannibalize existing digital channels such as iTunes or Amazon.  While negotiations have stalled or outright failed, the service is long overdue for a U.S., it’s clear that incredible demand exists for legally streamed music.

A Facebook Music App Could Bring Streaming Mainstream

Not to be outdone, Facebook has also recently been rumored to be working on a similar music service. The company announced Spotify’s chief designer Rasmus Andersson will join Facebook this October, leading to speculation a music-based initiative may be the next thing the social media giant focuses on. With hundreds of millions of users, Facebook has potential to make a major play in the music industry, given the widespread adaption and user base that’s already comfortable sharing photos, interests and secret weddings. A Facebook music service could propel streaming music into the mainstream, much how iTunes transformed digital music in the early 2000’s.

Details from the big players in digital media are still developing but over the next year the way we interact with media will change in a big way. Streaming services will give access to millions of tracks without taking any space on your mobile phone or laptop. That cavernous hard drive sitting inside your computer might start to gather dust if you find it easier to stream albums and playlists (and soon videos and movies) instead of saving local copies. You could decide it’s easier to stream your entire iTunes library to your iPhone instead of picking and choosing what fits- although the need for a reliable data connection may make more than a few users hesitant to hope for this so soon.  Whether you’re going through Bieber fever or loved Gaga at Lolla it’s clear that we’re about to see a lot of interesting innovations in digital music- with or without the Beatles.

Alan is the Business Development and Marketing Coordinator in our Chicago office.

The quest for who should “control” a social media campaign seems never ending. This is a debate that I’ve had with friends working across the communications industry. And while this should never turn into a personal attack, it absolutely turns into a battle big enough for the WWE. Not only are is this power struggle happening internally between departments, but externally between digital agencies, PR firms and social boutiques all vying for the social slice of the client’s business.

The importance of figuring out this debate once and for all reminds me a lot of Duane “the Rock” Johnson’s eyebrow–they’re both on the rise. Think about the training, the tone and the niche audience. It’s a battle royale, locked in a cage with a ladder, and only one competitor is coming out alive. Maybe it’s not that extreme, but from where I sit, the stakes are pretty high.That’s why I’ve set out to moderate this discussion at SxSW 2011. Bringing in perspectives from Pizza Hut, Infiniti, and Mashable, we can look at all of these considerations and more to help us decide, once and for all… Who owns social?

The Training

Most professionals battling for control in the social space are veterans that hopped onto this train long before Ashton was tweeting. They’re working with years of experience and, often, a competitive streak. Without years of a regimented workout in social media, no resume length can guarantee the proper preparation for the digital ring. Social media is an evolving beast. To be successful, like any athlete, you’ve got to change your workout up, lest your game get tired. What would you put in a social media training regimen?

Setting the Tone

In the social media world your content must stand for something. The social agenda is going to be driven strongly by what department runs the platform. For example; if the IT department is running a social media channel a follower is, in theory, more likely to hear about new technology developments and other topics of IT interest.  Make sure that the voice set on these platforms is the one you want to stand out.

This is part of setting the tone for what a follower should expect in the future.  Throwing up cues to play along a specific type of content once a week gives fans something to look forward to. How do you devise your social media tone and how do you cue your fans to play along?

Niche Audience

As the social media platforms continue to grow, we’re looking at new possibilities for the web, including one prediction that slates Facebook to replace websites. There is still an audience learning to accept this new way of interacting, so for now social media practitioners can still hold a niche audience’s attention—albeit quite a large niche. Going back to our fun WWE reference, that’s one group who understands how to cater their content to their niche group of fans. With over 1,052,000 fans on Facebook and a cult following, they clearly know how to grow their audience.

Finding the strategy to tailor social media to a niche audience is a tough battle. Depending on the brand, this could be an internal group that knows intricate details, or this could be an external agency. The benefit of an agency is that it may not be inflicted with what the book Made to Stick terms as the, Curse of Knowledge, or knowing to much about a concept or brand to explain it to others.

So what do you think?

Marketers: Should a social media campaign be a shared project between departments or should one department own it and who?

Agencies: What’s the justification for a PR firm taking this ownership versus the full-service digital partner?

Share you thoughts with us below and please vote for my SXSW panel: Social Media Mud Wrestling: Who Owns Social? Let the mud-slinging begin!

Jessi is a Community Moderator for Nissan LEAF in our Chicago office.

SxSW is months away still, but the big ideas that make up the big weekend are already up and ready for votes! There are so many awesome ideas out there that sometimes it’s hard to choose which to vote for! Let me help you. Breaking News: Front Page or Top Tweet is a panel idea discussing the issue of how breaking news should be announced. For anyone who is intrigued about WikiLeaks, loves discussing breaking news on Twitter, or fancies themselves a “Citizen Journalist,” this panel will be right up your alley.

While many people are accustomed to their daily doses of CNN, New York Times or your local news source, the twitter-sphere seems to be finding it easier and more exciting to get it from social networks of choice. With the myriad digital channels that exist today, nearly every traditional consumption pattern has changed in some way. We’ve all grown quite satisfied with the complete control we have over information.

There are definitely two sides to every debate, and this one is no different.

Social Media Will Replace the Major News Vehicles’ Antiquated Methods

According to research done by the American Red Cross, one in five respondents to a survey said that they would use digital media (including social media) to find out about an emergency. In other words, many people are not willing to wait to find out about breaking news, and would have their news more quickly. Many feel that Twitter and Facebook accounts of government officials and different news sources are just as credible or more so than subjective news sources, in addition to being extremely timely. Also, Tweets and Facebook updates from these high profile users appear to be more personal than a news source, making people feel more at ease or excited about the news being released.

Social Chatter is just a Conversation, Not the News Itself

Many people find traditional news sources to be a more credible and reliable when it comes to getting their news. Traditional news sources are seasoned veterans when it comes to delivering breaking news. Social media sites leave it up to the masses, which sometimes can leave us lacking all the facts… or simply the right facts. Some individuals gripe about the offensive or even inappropriate “news” content coming from social networks. For example, a few months back, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, decided to Tweet about sentencing someone to the death penalty. This has raised the question of whether some materials may be too sensitive to find out about through Twitter.

There are endless debate points on this topic, but essentially the panel’s focus will be on these five core questions dealing with breaking news in social media.

1. What news is appropriate to release through social media networks?
2. Is there a limit to how much breaking news should be released with social media?
3. Is there any advantage to releasing breaking news through traditional media?
4. Should it matter who the source is when releasing breaking news through social media?
5. How do sites like WikiLeaks and Twitter affect this phenomenon?

“Breaking News: Front Page or Top Tweet?” will explore all of these ideas and help people sort out their feelings on the subject.

So as the moderator, I’ll be serving up the questions and guiding this conversation. Technically speaking, I should be the most objective one of the bunch. But where’s the fun in that? I figure you should at least know where I stand going into this thing if I’m asking for your votes. Personally, I think the reality is that the lines between PR and Marketing are more blurred then ever as a result of social media.  I believe it can and should be used in the “breaking news” mold as a means of sharing and distributing valuable information.  But the real question is how do we define what is and what is not valuable. Everyone over shares and social enables it.  Its what they share that will impact the long-term phenomenon of social media.

Scott is the SVP, Experience Distribution on our global Executive Team. He’s located in our Chicago office.

Trying to increase your Facebook fans, Twitter following or even charitable donation numbers? Give something away.

Brands make a habit of promising that if YOU follow or like they’ll give things away to a varying number of followers. Life as a Community Moderator has by no means made me immune to this. In the past year, I’ve become a fan of Einstein Bagels—even though I don’t eat bread. I’ve voted on my favorite feature of a Ford Explorer and “liked” the page—even though I have no use for a car in the city, and I’ve followed Chicago Food Critic Steve Dolinsky for the chance to go to dinner with him (and won)—even though (I’m sorry, Steve) I had no idea who he was. Why? Because these brands were all giving stuff away and even though I didn’t necessarily need this stuff, I did what these brands and people asked for a chance to win.  Was I bought or was I earned? Short answer: I was bought in all cases except for Steve Dolinksy, he’s great. I don’t fit the other brands’ profiles of a model community member, and I’m a useless fan.

Upon realizing my own affinity to follow the directions of those who will buy or give me things, I started to think through successful contests and giveaways for branded communities. Thus, my proposal for a SXSWi panel, Fans for Freebies, was born.

Aside from my own anecdotal evidence in Einstein Bros Bagels’ giveaway, the brand posted some solid fan numbers after it gave away coupons for free bagels to all who liked its page. In an interview with Spinsucks.com, the brand revealed that it increased its fan numbers from 4,700 to 613,703. Suspecting that many would have dropped off as fans after downloading their coupons, I checked the Facebook fan page’s current fan count: 613,413. That’s a 310 fan loss, out of 609,003 fans gained through the giveaway, that’s over a 99% retention rate. In college, we called that an A+. Because Einstein featured more deals and giveaways since their initial free-bagel offering, my conclusion is that these fans actually frequent Einstein Bagels enough to make use of the page’s coupons, thus they are valuable and active fans. Aside from those who gave their coupons away (me), these fans were earned.

A venture brought to life by a few Critical Mass employees, Babybot, facilitates discount days based on Facebook fans numbers. Babybot sells all things modern for babies and kids on its Web site, but the e-commerce site used its Facebook presence to both reward the loyal and increase brand knowledge. To get the page to 400 fans, BabyBot offered to give fans a coupon code that gave them 10% off for two days. With every 100 additional fans, that percentage increases by 5. They just hit the 900-fan mark and will be giving a 35% discount for 2 days. Because kids seem to grow and need a plethora of things to grow with them, this deal seems to work for parents living on the cheap and fans are sticking around.  These fans were earned, but I wonder how long this rewards structure can be sustained. It seems the hope is that once they reach 1000, enough of those fans will have purchased something and will stick with them for the quality of the goods and service, not the hope for constant discounts.

Non-profits have also been implementing these strategies successfully. LIVESTRONG encouraged new people to follow the non-profit to achieve a common goal: raising money for cancer. On several occasions, the moderator-facilitated fan drives with the end goal of receiving a donation from an outside party. LIVESTRONG once increased fans by an impossible number, around 15,000 in order to receive a $25,000 donation from a private donor. When it comes to seriously good causes like LIVESTRONG, buying or earning fans it’s really important to earn them because the end goal is continued donations and advocacy.

Facts: Currently, LIVESTRONG’s following of 76,569 is actively engaging with the brand. Approximately 11,028,000 people in the United States fighting some form of cancer. People are speaking positively about the brand in 9 instances out of 10 according to Social Mention. The facts are the facts. These followers were earned.

Because measurement and ROI comprise the takeaway I am most looking forward to from this panel, the brunt of my questions fall in the metrics category.

1. Einstein Bros Bagels saw a fairly large jump in fans after it asked its fans to simply like its page to gain access to their freebies. How much does that fan number go down when the barrier to enter goes up with contests like Gatorade’s Replay on Facebook?

2. The ease of calculating cost per fan is what makes contests so interesting to me: If the promotion runs for a week, simply subtract average organic fan growth per week from the fans or followers gained. Divide the promo cost by that number. But what about a promotion that awards something to everyone like Einstein Bros? How are sales and brand sentiment ultimately affected by social media freebies?

3. What types of fans come from these promotions? Is it ever detrimental to the brand’s community and its conversation to pull in fans that aren’t actually passionate about the brand already?

If these questions interest you as much as they interest me, please be sure to vote for my SXSW panel. If you have any additional questions that you’d like answered, please post to the comments.

Jeana is a Community Moderator for Nissan Cube and Juke brands in the Chicago office.

Critical Mass recently launched a redesigned website for United Mileage Plus®. The site features a new look and feel, and offers a more personalized, intuitive experience for members of the United Mileage Plus loyalty program.

The Ask

“There are a lot of loyalty programs out there. Our challenge for United Mileage Plus was to create a uniquely compelling experience that would help us drive acquisition and engagement,” said Dave Anderson, Managing Director of Product Development, United Mileage Plus. “If members can easily use their miles, they are more inclined to stay engaged with the program. Mileage Plus is the program that wants you to use your miles and we needed our new website to encourage that,” Anderson added.

The Insight

Drawing on segmentation studies, qualitative research and stakeholder interviews, the Critical Mass team isolated key customer pain points in the existing United Mileage Plus experience. Members often found it difficult to navigate the site and find relevant information on how they could optimize their membership, such as all the different ways they could earn and use their miles, as well as the benefits of elite status. The experience was frustrating for both savvy and new members alike.

The Strategy

Critical Mass worked with Siegel+Gale, United’s brand strategy partner agency, to develop a blueprint for the website that focused on the needs of the members. The web redesign centered on showing the breadth of opportunities in the program, encouraging members to stay engaged, helping them find relevant information and recognizing them for their achievements. An additional goal was to showcase all the new program features that allow members to easily use their miles, such as Hotel & Car Awards, One-Way Awards, Miles & Money Awards and the elimination of last-minute award booking fees.

Deep Dive Into The Solution

The redesign focused on two main areas: Online Account
Management and a Site Content overhaul.

Online Account Management
Critical Mass developed a personalized United Mileage Plus dashboard to give members one-stop access to information most relevant to them. The content is personalized based on the member’s activity level and clearly encourages various ways to earn and use miles. The member sees a personalized progress bar indicator that shows their current status level in addition to exactly how many Status Miles or Status Segments are needed before they can reach the next level. Members can also easily access all of their account details, upgrades and relevant offers.

Site Content
With the new design, Critical Mass also re-architected the content and improved the navigation to be clear and simple to understand, thereby improving customer satisfaction. The site also includes tips for how the member can best take advantage of the program. To show members the new improved site structure, a tutorial page was developed to guide members through the site elements that have changed with the launch.

To further encourage member engagement, an Interactive Tour highlighting the benefits of Mileage Plus membership was developed and implemented by Critical Mass and is featured on the United Mileage Plus homepage.

Delivering a Great Customer Experience

“By simplifying and personalizing members’ interaction with the website, we were able to work with the United Mileage Plus team to create an experience that truly serves their customer needs,” said Karolina Vieser, Vice President, Client Partner, Critical Mass. “The initial feedback from members has been extremely positive and we hope that translates into greater loyalty and new members for the United Mileage Plus program,” she added.

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to the Chicago Interactive Design and Development group (CIDD) about SEO.

The audience was made up of a wide variety of people with diverse knowledge and backgrounds, so tailoring the discussion towards one particular skill set was not possible. Instead I started by talking about the foundation of SEO and how the search engines work and a brief history of what the search engines algorithms are based upon.

The primary content of the presentation focused around the basics steps someone should take when trying to optimize their website, but the fun part came once we took at look at the future of SEO.

When it comes to site optimization there are 3 essential steps I discussed last night.

1)      Technical optimization – Ensuring that your site is free of roadblocks for search engines and is able to be crawled quickly and easily.

2)      Content Optimization – Once the site is fully crawlable, you want to present content in meaningful manner that includes keywords that users are looking for.

3)      Offsite Optimization – We want to drive traffic and spiders to the site from external sources. These sources would preferably be of high quality and related content to our website.

Now these steps are just a high level overview of what should be done to optimize your site for organic search, but they are the essential foundation of what has be shown to be an effective SEO strategy.

The closing portion of the presentation focused on the future of SEO and where it could be headed. The important thing to note about SEO is that it is constantly evolving and adapting to the changing world and new technology. It is critical to stay on top of the latest technology and web trends as there is a good chance that if it catches on, then Google will find a way to incorporate it in to its search results or algorithm in some way or another.  Two emerging trends that we looked at are:

Real-Time Search

Google is now incorporating up to the minute information pulled directly from sites like Twitter. This shows that the search engines are aware of the increasing demand for information on demand. The question is how can this be leveraged for your site? Does your site have consistently fresh, up-to-date content that could be a potential source of information that the search engines could pull in to their organic search results? Even if the content isn’t directly on your site, maintaining a social networking presence on a site like twitter can allow you to not only have your main site appear in search results, but also your twitter feed. Search engine optimization continues to expand well beyond the standard web page result. It’s a matter of optimizing all of your site assets to take advantage of these changes.

Mobile Search

Mobile devices are quickly over taking the PC as the primary computing platform in this country which means more people are now using their smart phone to access the web than ever before.  The algorithm for mobile search results is different from the standard algorithm with an increased focus on location based information. Does your business have a physical address? If so, are you making this information readily available to search engines so you can get the most of mobile search? Mobile search best practices will typically follow standard best practices with a heavy reliance on HTML text, but it’s the slight differences that are still being uncovered that can make all the difference in how your site performs in mobile search.

What other trends are you seeing? Or what SEO questions have you scratching your head lately? We had lots of question and a nice long conversation after presentations last night. Feel free to comment down below to turn this post into more of a discussion as well!

Richard is an SEO Manager working on Infiniti and Moen out of the Critical Mass Chicago office.

There’s an old statistic my dad used to say to me. “The Saturday edition of the Toronto Star contains more knowledge than a person living in the 16^th Century got in their entire lifetime.” It made no sense to me why anyone would want this much information. The funnies were about the only section useful to my sixth-grade self. Everything else just seemed to get in the way.

Today you can access the Saturday editions of every major newspaper in the world online. You can also get near-instantaneous Wikipedia entries, tweets, blogs, RSS updates, and tons more, all of which makes it even harder to separate information you want from information you don’t. Enter Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web.

Web info overload and why Web 3.0

This iteration of the web promises to better serve users with a smarter search system. In addition to 2.0’s content creation and 1.0’s system of content delivery, 3.0 aims to manage content as well.

What does Semantic Web mean?

The first version of the web was a means of delivering documents online through methods of download and display. The second, web 2.0, allowed users to generate their own content through tools such as blogger and youtube, flickr and myspace. 3.0 aims to have the web intelligently filter content for users.

One way of achieving this is OWL (Web Ontology Language), a language that both computers and laymen can easily understand. Another is through a universal sharing, linking and describing service such as XDI. Both allow computers to pick up on the context of what’s posted and categorize accordingly.

In this way, the results you get would be specific not so much to the terms you enter, but what you intend to find. The software wouldn’t just give you links that mention the term you’re searching for. It would also figure out why you’re searching for that term and rank results based on what you mean. Basically, it’s semantics.

A web without marketers?

When the web first began, it was possible for users to manually filter out the pages they didn’t intend to find. There would only be a few hundred relevant mentions and perhaps a dozen that were most pertinent. The rest you opened and closed relatively quickly or learned to avoid.

Today, despite the best attempts of aggregators, SEO, Google Ads, and other sorting techniques, advertisers frequently show up inappropriately or worse, don’t show up at all when they should.

The semantic web would help us avoid these problems. Ideally it would allow us to speak solely to those we targeted. With added filtration, we would also be able to author messages that were more target-specific. The web will get more personalized, and so will clients’ abilities to serve customers.

On the other hand, this could be the end of non-consensual advertising altogether. Computers that can return exactly what you want can also filter out everything you don’t. The software could be smart enough to know that even if the ad in question matches the users’ request exactly, because the user also requested not to receive any advertising, the ad is never seen. In effect, a safe search for ads.

A web without privacy?

Another aspect of a personalized, intelligent web is the erosion of anonymity. Users’ preferences could be stored online rather than in their computers as they increasingly access the net through multiple platforms and devices. We are already starting to see this. Email is slowly becoming the standard sign-up ID and multiple accounts are being merged (i.e. using facebook to blog, email or access flickr, etc.).

But in order for Web 3.0 to understand user intentions, it will need to glean more and more specific information from individual users. As the resulting ethical concerns become even more hotly debated, digital marketers will need to recognize the implications. For example, some people accept that their brands know everything about them while others want to believe in anonymity. For brands, recognizing these preferences and behaving accordingly will be crucial to whether they can retain customers.

Will it happen?
Whether all of the web can go semantic is up for debate. Computers have not historically been good at dealing with vagueness. Logic fails when confronted with inconsistencies. Computers accept nearly all human input as fact even though humans don’t always input the truth. Content in the form of images and videos are still not automatically recognizable to computers without human tagging. While a new version of the web is in the works, how long it will take to get up and running is pure conjecture.

Being ahead of the upgrade

Still, there are things we can do now to pave the way for a semantic web. As with much of interactive, Web 3.0 is primarily about anticipating people’s needs. By designing smarter sites that are both intuitive and comprehensible, we’ll stay relevant with the advent of smarter search. By providing value, creating services and delivering ads which users can opt into or out of with ease, we prevent pushback from privacy-conscious consumers.

Clay Shirky's newspaper would do nothing but aggregate

With content more plentiful and easily produced than ever, aggregation and delivery could actually become a more valuable service than production. Clay Shirky’s ideal newspaper has no original content whatsoever. We should remember this for clients who still think going viral is a matter of aping what’s hot on YouTube right now. If we do create content, keeping it 100% worthwhile, interesting and relevant will keep us from being filtered out of existence.

Summing up

We’ve gone from hard drive capacities smaller than a single comic panel to computer networks larger than our own memories. Web 3.0 is trying to help us retain only what we want to know. Aside from having far-reaching cultural and ethical consequences, it will also mean that, more than ever, brands have to be worth engaging with. We have to ensure our messages stay in the need-to-know. For soon clutter will not only be ignored, it won’t be seen at all. There may be more in the Saturday Star than in a Renaissance man’s head. But that’s not to say he’d find any of it worth reading.

Richard is a Copywriter in the CM Toronto office.