We’re looking for someone with lots and lots of social media experience, savvy, and passion. We want an extensive business and marketing background, coupled with the ability to initiate, develop, manage, measure, and analyze social programs for our Fortune 100 clients. Plus, you need to be able to recruit, train, oversee, and provide ongoing direction for a growing social media team of experienced Community Programming Managers and Engagement Specialists.

LiveWorld has a long and rich history of developing online communities. Some of us have been at this for over 25 years, and even the newest members of our community teams generally come with 5 or more years of experience. For this job, we’re looking for 8-10 years of relevant experience, as well as clear evidence of successful personal and professional social engagement. Ideally, this position would be located in the San Francisco Bay Area, but New York would be good too. Ultimately, what you bring to us is more important than the location, as long as travel isn’t a problem. If you fit the bill otherwise, we can discuss location.

What else is important? You must be an exceptionally strong and confident presenter, a clear-headed strategist, and a good writer. An engaging personality goes without saying

If you’re interested, here’s our link to the job. Then email your cover letter and resume to DirectorCP@liveworld.com.

Social commerce is offline or online shopping facilitated by or otherwise involved with social media. For centuries people have liked to shop with friends — or at least share their shopping intent, experience, or results with friends. Social commerce is the application of social media to that dynamic. Our experience has demonstrated that social media can drive substantial increase in transactions. We see 4 levels of social commerce hierarchy:

1) A simple post to coordinate or notify about a shopping experience. Examples include a simple tweet, Facebook status post, Foursquare location check-in, or even text messaging.

2) Product reviews. Though not always truly social in the sense of user-to-user dialogue, the intent to share is there, and sometimes a social thread develops. Examples include Amazon product reviews and Yelp.

3) A conversation. Message forums go here, along with sustained Wall post series, and other such venues, in which a real dialogue occurs related to shopping — before, during, or after the fact. Examples include travel forums, travel booking sites, or topical forums on retailer web sites, such as scrapbooking and cooking.

4) A society of relationships built on the fusion of social media and commerce together. Here, complex people-to-people relationships develop among shoppers, sellers, or both. The community, associated relationships, and in turn, the associated commerce experiences (online or offline) all become a core dynamic of the participants. Example: eBay (a LiveWorld client).

Like most aspects of social media, social commerce is less about the features, and less about the direct integration with something else — in this case, transactions. From a simple post on Facebook, to an entire multibillion-dollar social commerce society (eBay), it’s more about the underlying people-to-people dynamic.

New Timeline for user profiles now; similar features to follow for Pages

Facebook has completely revamped the profile page for individual users with the launch of Timeline. The new product features a visually compelling, scrapbook-like layout of your entire history on Facebook, from photos you’ve uploaded and friends you’ve added to the places you’ve checked into and the status updates you’ve shared.

You can also fill in Timeline with earlier moments from your (pre-Facebook) life, so expect to see a surge of baby pics and bad-hairstyle shots from your friends!

Facebook applications are getting prominent treatment in Timeline, too, making it easy to share actions around your media and lifestyle interests, such as meals you’ve cooked or music you’ve listened to. In a screenshot from my timeline below, the “News” section displays articles I’ve read in new Facebook social readers from The Guardian and Washington Post (more on the opportunities with rich applications below).

Pages, the brand companion to user profiles, isn’t undergoing a similar makeover just yet. But if past history is any indication, expect Facebook to launch a Timeline-style layout equivalent for Pages later this year. The most memorable status updates from brands, high-impact photos and videos, prominent conversation threads with and among fans, and activity around branded applications will mesh together in a single place, encouraging users to share and interact with more content from the page.

To get a visual sense of what these new-and-improved Pages might look like for brands, check out these Mashable mockups.

Open Graph expansion

Facebook is expanding its Open Graph in a big way. And if you’re a brand marketer, that’s very good news!

As mentioned above, new applications built on top of the Open Graph will integrate directly into users’ timelines, driving and brand awareness and affinity. Here’s how Spotify (one of several Facebook partners that launched a new app at f8) looks inside Timeline:

Also, applications will no longer be limited to a pre-defined set of Facebook objects and the verb “like.” Instead, Open Graph applications can incorporate any action verb and any object. Here are some potential action/object combinations:

• [Read] a [book]
• [Watch] a [show]/[movie]
• [Cook] a [meal]
• [Visit] a [city]/[store location]
• [Test drive] a [car]
• [Play] a [sport]/[game]
• [Want] a [piece of clothing]/[gadget]

This new ecosystem offers plenty of advertising opportunities, too. Brands can target users who have taken the specific actions or interacted with the specific objects built into applications. Hulu, say, could buy Facebook Sponsored Stories aimed at users who have [watched] a television show, while NBC could target fans who have watched a particular [show], such as Saturday Night Live.

Or a retailer like Best Buy could build an app that allows users to create and display a holiday wishlist in their timeline, and then advertise to those who [want] certain items.

Ticker + updated News Feed

Just before f8, Facebook also launched both Ticker and a refreshed News Feed. Ticker, as shown in the screenshot above, is a real-time firehose of all the activities taken by your Facebook friends, including the status updates they publish, photos they share and tag, and comments they make and like.

New posts from brand pages and actions taken on applications (“David is listening to Town Called Malice by Studio 99 on Spotify”) appear in Ticker as well, meaning additional content discovery and sharing from fans and brand advocates.

With the News Feed, the main layout now combines both “Top Stories” and “Recent Stories.”

“Top Stories” appear first for most users, and surface the most relevant and interesting posts to users since their last Facebook login; “Recent Stories” then feature updates from friends and pages in reverse chronological order (similar to Ticker).

But while the look and feel of News Feed have changed, creating compelling status updates essentially follows the same recipe. Posts still have to be interesting enough for fans to share, like, and comment on in the first place, so they can tap into the EdgeRank algorithm that powers “Top Stories.”  The timing of posts remains critical, too, especially since new status updates will pop into the News Feed and Ticker for fans almost immediately.

—

Ultimately, these new changes are all about encouraging users to share more of their identity, interests, and life moments inside Facebook.  And with continued publishing/engagement on Pages and the creation of interactive Open Graph applications, amplified by advertising, brands can tap into and benefit from this powered-up social sharing.

• Need for brand protection through timely interaction consistent with customer expectations and values
• Exponentially expanding customer inquiry
• Need to derive insight from massive social data coming from widely distributed sources
• Customers moving across social channels
• Inefficient, manual processes for monitoring and responding

Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group (disclosure: LiveWorld is a client) has a new report on Social Business Readiness that lays out what successful companies are doing to deal with such challenges. From the report (and keeping in mind that my quoting it doesn’t mean Jeremiah’s endorsing what I have to say next):

1. Foundation: First, develop a business plan and put governance in place.
2. Safety: Then, get organized by anointing a team and process to deal with crises.
3. Formation: Next, connect business units to increase coordination and reduce duplication.
4. Enablement: Grow by letting them prosper – give business units the support and flexibility to reach goals.
5. Enlightenment: Finally, weave real-time market response into business processes and planning.

The Altimeter report points out that fully 75% of recent social media crises might have been averted if companies had properly prepared by following the above blueprint (with lots of useful details provided  — read it!). Part of such preparation, the report notes, is to have a team of people monitoring social input during and beyond business hours (including nights, weekends, and holidays).

My intent here is blatantly pro-LiveWorld, in support of our moderation services: The LiveWorld virtual workforce can provide front-end screening for all the social input flooding into company processes. Human eyes, trained to the issues a company defines as critical to its goals, can assess meaning from customer input, triage judiciously, and send info and issues on to the appropriate business unit (or provide company approved responses) — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, around the globe, in dozens of languages.

We have technology to support that effort or we can use someone else’s, and business hours are all hours to us. It’s a service that can help with process and workflow issues associated with the today’s social media reality, and we can extend it even further by analyzing slices of the incoming activity and providing specific, actionable insights. Essentially, we can help fill in the blanks left by top-level, positive-negative reporting; provide centralized, leveraged, always-on, front-line troops; and productively route relevant issues and queries across the corporate organization.

If we can help with your social media monitoring or moderating needs, contact us online or call us at 1-800-301-9507.

Over on my personal blog, I’ve listed 23 of my favorite proposals, culled from three of the 17 categories in the Interactive PanelPicker: 1) Branding / Marketing / Advertising, 2) Social Media / Social Networks, and 3) Emerging Technology / Mobile.

You can see other panel recommendations from the LiveWorld team in our previous two posts:

• 2012 SXSW Interactive panels worth your vote
• More 2012 SXSW Interactive panel recommendations

We’re also publishing links to our favorite panels on our @LiveWorld Twitter account.

You can review, vote, and comment, on any of the proposed SXSW submissions up through this Friday, September 2, until 11:59pm CDT.

In today’s post, we share our recommendations from the Journalism and Content / Content Strategy categories.

You can vote for and comment on any of these sessions through the SXSW PanelPicker up through 11:59pm CDT on Friday, September 2, 2011.

Journalism

1) Is Aggregation Theft?
“Join top media writers and the trailblazers of aggregation for a conversation about the art of filtering and curating other organizations’ content, and where this editorial model fits into the new media landscape. Decide for yourself: aggregation—friend or foe?”
- Felix Salmon – Reuters, and panel

2) Has Twitter Made The Sports Reporter Obsolete?
“An NFL star live tweets his own traffic stop. An accidental DM reveals a shocking trade rumor. Instead of press releases, Tiger Woods breaks news about Tiger Woods by having @TigerWoods share a link to TigerWoods.com. These are just a few examples of sports stars bypassing traditional media outlets to tell their stories directly to fans….”
- Dashiell Bennett – Business Insider, and panel

3) No Office, No Problem: Running a Virtual News Team
“Discovery News was born online in 1998 and maintains a virtual newsroom kept afloat through emails, web chats, IMs and speakerphones. Editor-in-Chief Lori Cuthbert has developed a remote digital workforce that must come together as a team despite being in five different locations across four different time zones….”
- Lori Cuthbert and panel from Discovery Communications

4) Twitter to the Editor
“In the old days, a voicemail or a letter to the editor might be the only way to communicate with a newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet. But thanks to social media, average citizens can – and do – engage with local and national news organizations. As a matter of fact, many traditional news organizations have embraced it …”
- Terri Thornton – Thornton Communications

5) Online Commenting: Conversation Friend of Foe?
“Few issues vex newsrooms these days quite the way online story commenting does. On the one hand, allowing readers to comment on stories on news sites carries the potential of an engaged citizenry envisioned in Western democracies. In theory, comments provide a forum for citizens to converse with each other …”
- Doreen Marchionni – Pacific Lutheran University

6) Vetting in the Age of Social: Who do you trust?
“In the past, an editor, a professional trained to vet content for a publication decided what you consumed. Today, content is vetted by our friends, celebrities, and strangers we’ve ‘liked’, followed, or circled. Influence over who shares what, how often it is shared, and eventually what shows up in search is the holy Grail for anyone who wants …”
- Michael Pranikoff – PR Newswire – and panel

Content / Content Strategy

7) All Eyes on You–Visual Effects & Viewer Engagement
“Why do certain videos capture your attention, while others fall flat? Whether you realize it or not, visual effects touch over 80% of the minutes you see on television or in a movie theater today. Not to be confused with special effects (think big explosions), visual effects are more subtly …”
- Katherine Hays – GenArts, Inc.

8) Blogsurdity #1: “What __Teach Us About __” Posts
“What Happy Gilmore teaches us about blogging? What soccer teaches us about taxation? They’re comparison blog posts. When done right, they’re great….We’ve found the most absurd connections of all time and ranked them all on axis of ridiculous/sensible and popular/unpopular….”
- Jed Hallam, VCCP, and Jon Burkhart, iris Worldwide’s Urgent Genius HQ

9) Texas Content Massacre: Real-life Horrors & Heroes
“We’ve all been there. It’s a sunny day in Amityville, everything is going well. Your content audit is in place, you’ve completed a solid gap analysis, and your messaging architecture is gleaming. And then! Darkness falls and your seemingly perfect content strategy project starts to look like something out of a horror movie….”
- Michaela Hackner – Forum One Communications – and panel

10) Do You Speak Like Your Customers?
“Companies use social media to engage in two-way conversations with their customers. Despite valiant efforts, there are often disconnects. Why? A lack of “listening” is a well-known shortcoming. But another major cause is that the people inside companies (especially lawyers) often don’t talk in a manner that’s accessible to their customers….”
- Paul Walker – PulsePoint Group

11) Scrappy App Marketing
“Do you have a new app ready to launch or have an app in the app store but are a bit stumped on how to get traffic? This session on Scrappy App marketing will help you whether you are getting ready to launch, already have an app launched or are looking for more traction for your mobile application….”
- Lindsey Harper, Swayable, and Maya Bisineer, MemeTales

12) How To Win at YouTube
“Some of the best brands, agencies, and companies have tried their hand at YouTube with varying degrees of success. None have had much of any. The real triumphs have gone to new players in the digital broadcast game. This panel brings you face-to-face with these players …”
- Dan Demsky – BizMedia, and panel

13) Why locate your content? Because you can.
“In order to deliver relevant content to communities, knowing where is an essential piece of the puzzle, to keep visitors engaged and returning to sites. Being able to serve location-based content to visitors of your website or users of your app will help differentiate your material from others….”
- LaurieAnne Lassek – Quova

14) Mickey’s 10 Commandments of Interaction Design
“In 1987, Walt Disney’s Imagineering President, Marty Sklar, presented “Mickey’s 10 Commandments.” These commandments come from a combination of his work with Walt Disney and 30 years experience designing the Disney theme parks The commandments are an excellent set of guidelines for user experience professionals, whether they deal with an amusement park, or an interactive product….”
- Garth Braithwaite – Adobe Systems

15) Does Free Content Cannibalize Your Paid Consulting
“How much do you open your kimono? Does “thought leadership” imperil your ability to monetize what you know? Does giving away info snacks enable you to sell knowledge meals, or does your blogging and content program actually cost you paying customers? Do you publish everything you know, or hold something back?…”
- Jay Baer, Convince & Convert, and Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute

16) What Content Strategists Can Learn from the Movies
“Whether it’s Bridget Jones in pursuit of Mark Darcy or Luke Skywalker on a quest to find himself while defeating evil, film protagonists are on a journey inspired by the promise of adventure and reward. Real people are on a similar quest to solve problems–including the prospective customers you hope to attract with your content marketing strategy….”
- Carmen Hill, Babcock & Jenkins, and Katherine Gray, The New Civilization

17) Storytelling with URLs
“How do your friends introduce you to others at a party? On the web, your URL is your chance to make that first impression. Even in this post-Google, post-AJAX, post-URL-shortner era, your URLs speak volumes about who you are and how you think….”
- Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine – MIT

18) Rude Awakening: Content Strategy Is Super Hard
“Four of the brightest minds in content strategy will tackle some the toughest issues our companies are facing: cross-platform distribution, governance, legacy content, distributed publishing, and trying to prepare our content for future technologies we can’t possibly predict.”
- Kristina Halvorson – Brain Traffic, and panel

19) Humans + Robots: SEO & Social-Friendly Content
“In today’s digital landscape, both search engines and social activity play an important part in how people find and engage with content online. And, social signals now play a growing role in search algorithms, making social shares and engagement an important part of optimizing your content for search. This session will provide practical steps you can take to make sure your content is both SEO-friendly and engineered to boost social shares and engagement….”
- Tiffany Monhollon – ReachLocal, and panel

20) Entertain or Fail: Brands As the New Publishers
“Brands today have more consumers at their fingertips than any TV show or magazine could ever offer thanks to an abundance of multi-connected digital platforms. But entertaining those consumers on multiple platforms is a role that brands have never had to play before….”
- Anthony Batt – Katalyst, and panel

21) The Trend of Trending
“All around the web we’re seeing trending content. From Twitter’s trending topics to Mashable’s Trending list, from CNN’s NewsPulse to the NYT’s most emailed articles, trending topics are swarming the web. This trending content is giving us a new and exciting curation platform in which we’re seeing how the world is interacting with online content in real time….”
- Ryan Geyer, Trenspot, and Henry Mason, TrendWatching

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You can also check out the first post in our series; it included 27 of the best SXSW 2012 panel proposals.

To make things easier, we’re rolling out a series of posts over the next several days that highlights the top 100 70 or so proposals we think are most worthy of your attention, votes, and comments.

In this initial post, we’re sharing our favorites from four categories: 1) Health / Future of Medicine, 2) Branding / Marketing /Advertising, 3) Social Media / Social Networks, and 4) Greater Good / Charity / Nonprofit categories. We’re also including summaries of own two submissions — a presentation from Valerie Sprague about online identity, and my panel on Facebook customer service by brands.

According to SXSW, public voting accounts for 30% of the final decision on which panels are ultimately chosen, so your input does matter! Voting remains open until 11:59pm CDT on Friday, September 2, 2011.

LiveWorld panels

1) The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands
“Managing customer service on a Facebook Page is a messy proposition, particularly for large businesses and brands. Increasingly impatient customers and fans are flocking to the Facebook Wall to …”
- Bryan Person, Social Media Evangelist at LiveWorld
Confirmed panelists: David Berkowitz ‐ @DBerkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i; Molly DeMaagd ‐ @MollyD1, Customer Care Social Media Director, AT&T; Eric Ludwig ‐ @TheSEMninja, Sr. Director of Online Marketing at Rosetta Stone.

2) Handles, Vandals, and Online Scandals
“Social networks want to be the place where everybody knows your name, and the big ones require users to state their legal one, first and last. But is “authenticity” really about using the name your parents gave you everywhere online, or …”
- Valerie Sprague, Senior Community Programs Manager at LiveWorld.

Health / Future of Medicine

3) Spoonful of Sugar: A Digital Strategy
“While they might not have realized it in 1964, the Mary Poppins tune “Spoonful of Sugar” is the ideal interactive media strategy. You’ve probably been searching for the right combination of content and personality to make your healthcare interactive media …”
- Kristin Thompson – Franklin Street

4) Friending Pharma: Patients, Industry & New Media
“As more and more patients begin using social media as an information source and a support network, it’s inevitable that they’ll begin to interact with representatives of pharmaceutical companies looking to use new technologies to inform and educate….”
- Brian Reid – WCG

5) Irreconcilable Differences: Pharma & Social Media
“The pharmaceutical industry has struggled for years to find its way in the world of social media. While many initiatives have been attempted, they have mostly been in the shallow end of the digital networking pool …”
- Steve Woodruff – Impactiviti

6) Designing Effective Online Physician Communities
“The emergence of online communities dedicated to physician collaboration is the result of a need for new tools, mindsets and relationships. Yet physicians present one of the most challenging populations to mobilize around change in the practice of medicine….”
- Kenn Louis and panel from Within3

Branding / Marketing / Advertising

7) Community & Influence: How to not piss people off
“Marketing is social. We’re all sold. But how do you maximize your return in social without appearing like a douchebag? One the one hand, top influencers in the social space are the one …”
- Megan Berry – Klout, and panel

Just ‘Cus It’s an Infographic Doesn’t Make It True
“Data has … risen as a means to generate buzz & awareness, and none has been more buzz-worthy than the almighty infographic. But with the rise of flashy data, the old adage rings true – ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’ …”
- Gray Blue – FanBridge, and panel

9) Feeding the Social Media Content Machine
“In today’s social media environment it’s the brands that spark that draw engagement. What’s harder is sparking in such a way that’s authentic to who you are – generating retweets, replies or forwards around purpose…”
- Britton Upham – McGarrah Jessee

10) Unleashing Advertising’s Age of Engagement
“Technology, creative, media, communications, public relations, and product development have evolved to become parts of one another, yet advertising agencies and the companies that hire them remain siloed and organizationally unable to move as fast as they should….”
- Ian Schafer – Deep Focus

11) Using You Tube Channels to Tell Your Brand Story
“This presentation will cover the essentials in how to tell your brand story and reach your audience through various forms of YouTube Channels….As brands continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible and engage their audiences in completely new ways, choices for marketers on how to leverage YouTube Channels and video content abound….”
- Karen OBrien – Crimson Consulting

12) Customer Service and Web 3.0 at Business Scale
“As social technology moves beyond marketing and into core business disciplines the challenges of the social web (Web 2.0) give way to those of the semantic web (Web 3.0)….Making the challenge even harder, operating in the rapidly evolving area of customer service a mainstream brand may have to receive, prioritize and responds to thousands of posts every day….”
- Dave Evans – Social Dynamx

13) Facebook Stole My Site Traffic: How To Get It Back
“Like other brands in 2010, you jumped on the social media wagon with a Facebook page, gathered Fans with the usual promotional tactics, and waited for them to fall in love with everything you shared. Your Fans Like you, but they aren’t going to your site any longer….”
- Gina Rau – Janrain

14) How To Offer Customer Service That Doesn’t Suck
“Do you know anyone who enjoys speaking to an automated teller for customer service? If your customers are real people, then your customer service should be, too. Today’s modern consumers expect 24/7 service and the ability …”
- Kristin Smaby – Simple Finance Tech Corp (BankSimple)

15) Brands Need 3rd-Party Tools to Succeed on Facebook
“Facebook changes fast. The site’s functionality and interface are in constant flux, there are always new marketing strategies emerging, and the technology to execute marketing campaigns takes a long time to develop in house. Can brands succeed at Facebook marketing on their own?…”
- Josh Constine – Inside Facebook, and panel

Social Media / Social Networks

16) EdgeRank, Metrics & News Feed Optimization, Oh my!
“How do brands succeed on Facebook? It’s not magic that some brands’ Wall posts get visibility in the Facebook News Feed and others don’t. Every Wall post published by a brand competes with the Wwall posts of an average Facebook user’s 130 friends and 90+ Liked pages….”
- Helen Todd – Sociality Squared, and panel

17) Google+ Business: Plus, Minus or Something Else?
“Google+ and business will have only been together for a couple months. Is it an engagement, a wedding or a divorce? A look at the opportunities of Google+ for Business, as well as early initiatives that have been a success or failure. Is this just another social network?”
- Richard Binhammer – Dell, and panel

18) A Culture of Yes
“All too often, highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, insurance and others, feel as though their hands are tied when it comes to certain marketing tactics…. But while the majority sits firmly on the sidelines, a smart minority have ventured forward and found success engaging in social media. How have they done it?…”
- Carissa Caramanis O’Brien – Red Box Communications

19) Lessons from a Decade of Community Management
“In this session, I will riff on the past 10 years [of community management experience] and share some of the most important, enduring lessons that I have learned from being directly involved in the day-to-day management of these online communities…”
- Patrick O’Keefe – iFroggy Network

20) Do You Really Like Me? Acquire True Facebook Fans
“To ‘Like’ or not to ‘Like’ is a proposition we are faced with every day on Facebook. As a consumer, you ask yourself, ‘Why should I Like this brand?” and “What will I get in return for my Like?’ And as a brand, you aspire to get as many Likes as possible …”
- Jayson Merlino and panel from G2

21) Like This: Secrets of the Top Branded Fan Pages
“As marketers try to get the most out of their Facebook fan pages, they need data on how often to post, how many likes they should expect, how many comments, what percent of active fans should they strive for and much more. In this session, we’ll provide a data-driven analysis …”
- Jim Tobin – Ignite Social Media

22) The Community Revolving Door: Staying a Step Ahead
“Some say getting started is the hardest part – and it can be, but often this is a phase of excitement organizationally and time where everyone is focused on the shiny new toy. Year two, those internal stakeholders are on to the next new thing, your customers are back to their regular day jobs and you are stuck having to push that community rock up the steep hill of engagement….”
- Heather Strout – Farland Group, and panel

23) Inside Out: Internal Social Media & Big Business
“Social media has been the bright shiny object for marketers from the beginning. But, the fun doesn’t stop at the firewall. Businesses of all size are finding that the tools of social media help bring people together for collaboration and conversation inside a company …”
- Brad Mays – WCG, and panel

Greater Good / Charity / Nonprofit

24) Can growing a moustache change the world?
“Join Adam Garone, CEO/co-founder of Movember, as he discusses how Movember leveraged the support of a few daring partners and pockets of loyal fans to generate a global movement that saw 450,000 moustache growers in 2010. Learn how Movember captivated the attention of a demographic infamous for not discussing their health…”
- Adam Garone – Movember

25) Content As A Means for Social Change
“[W]hile social media has been the Internet’s buzzword for some time now, research shows that content consumption actually represents 53% of all time spent online. Given that content takes up most consumers’ time on the web, it’s time to harness it as the most effective way to drive social change in the real world.”
- Arianna Huffington and panel from Huffington Post

26) Kill the Follower Count & Embrace Your Mission
“So how do we move the social media measurement conversation away from ‘dumb’ metrics like the number of followers, beyond ‘smart’ metrics like the click-thru rate for links, and get to the heart of the matter: does social media support your goal for social good?…”
- Devon Smith and panel from Threespot

27) An Open Source Approach to Community Building
“Open source goes beyond code — it’s a philosophy founded in creating, sharing and modifying with an active community. In building our community with an open-source philosophy, we’ve found that the more an organization opens itself up, the more the potential of the community is unlocked….”
- Sean Connolly and panel from the Online News Association

I disagree. I think Facebook is actually expanding the concept of location in a more organic direction. The new Places is more user-friendly for the non-technorati  and fosters an emotional connection to Places, rather than promoting an incentive-laden game.

Once the changes roll out, you’ll still be able to “check in” from some mobile devices, just as you could before. But you’ll also have the option to attach specific city and location data to to all status updates and photos that you post from your desktop/laptop/tablet, including for places you visited in the past or are considering exploring in the future.

In other words, you won’t actually have to be at a location to share it. (Check out the video on the updated Facebook location page for a good walk-through of the new features.)

My quick hit is that this new concept of location fits totally within Facebook’s focus on personal identity. It’s a huge step forward for Facebook and more in line with how people conceive of a sense of place.

Less about gaming; more about a sense of place

Real-time check-ins are mostly about gaming, broadcasting, and garnering status/badges, and are often monetized by brands offering deals/discounts for playing. The beauty and limitation of real-time check-ins are that you must be physically at the location (or at least within shouting distance of it) to check in.

But if you forget to check in — it happens to me all the time — you can’t earn credit for having been to a place, including any special deals that might have come your way. Essentially, you have to keep playing the real-time check-in game to win, and you only keep playing if you keep getting rewards for doing so.

But while gaming appeals to some, a sense of place holds a much deeper meaning to most of us.

Our personal identity is significantly shaped by the places we’ve been. Go into any social gathering — online or off — and a guaranteed conversation starter is “where are you from?” or “where have you been?”. We define ourselves by the places we are connected to — places where we were raised, had a great vacation, created memories with friends, went to school, grew up or fell in love.

I haven’t lived in Seattle for 12 years now, but I love the city, and still consider myself more of a Seattle person than a Californian. There are many places in Seattle that are a part of my personal history that I would like to check into again and share with my friends. Partly for nostalgia reasons, and partly to feel closer to my friends who still live there.

With Foursquare or Gowalla, I can’t show my fondness for University Teriyaki on the Ave, or the Blue Moon tavern, Dick’s hamburgers, or any number of my favorite Seattle places because I currently live in California. I’m there in spirit, but not in person, so I’m left out of the game.

But as a proud UW alum, with the revamped Facebook location features, I can post status updates or old photos and tag them as Husky Stadium or the Glenn Hughes Playhouse, without actually being there! It’s not just a flight of fancy or nostalgia on my part, either, as I’ll be able to connect with other Husky football or theater fans who share my passion for those places and the events that happen there.

I can easily declare my public affinity to any number of restaurants, parks, favorite stores, etc., which will in turn give those brands the opportunity to connect with me through their latest Facebook Deals. To date, Deals have been based on actual, physical check-ins, but expect that to change. Soon, the University Book Store can start targeting me with discount offers because of my emotional check-in to the place, even though I’m not physically living in Seattle.

I like the move by Facebook. It makes location on Facebook even more valuable by fostering an emotional connection to places in our lives, rather than just making a game of it.

What do you think? Is Facebook Places a loser in the location-based services game — or will it develop deeper roots? What places are significant in your personal history, and would you like to ‘check-in’, even if you’re not physically there?

Is your central website community successful? Not from the point of view of the sometimes massive potential audience on Facebook, but from the point of view of the goals you have for your website community? Does your community produce loyal and engaged community members who are evangelists for your brand? Or, if leads are your goal, does it produce them? And do those reliably (or at least often) convert to sales? Or does your community provide people answers and assistance that reduces your overall customer support costs?

If your website community is successful…

If your website community meets the goals you set up for it, why shut it down?  A healthy website community is beneficial at minimum because the customers are on your site. You have the opportunity to get closer to them than you can on Facebook. You have their email addresses, and can send them news and offers that you’re pretty sure they’ll receive (without wondering about whether your news will survive the EdgeRank algorithm). It’s important not to get sidetracked by whether your community’s supporting technology is “old” or “new.” The main thing is whether, as a venue for interaction, it cranks out the results you planned for it in the first place — and that those results still support your current goals.

Can you make it even better?

On the other hand, you may have a lot more customers on Facebook — a potential pool from which you could acquire more website visitors and community members. So if your website community is working, you may be able to give the commuity a boost by starting a Facebook Page and/or integrating Facebook social plugins into it. Facebook touts examples of brands using an integrated strategy to successfully increase traffic, engagement, time on site, and even revenue. If you know your constituency is on Facebook and would likely engage with you there (remembering you can’t be anonymous on Facebook), and if you know you have the resources to run two venues, integrating the two may be the way to go.

If your website community isn’t successful…

If the community on your website has never really taken off, or if it’s past its prime and on the decline, why is that?

• Is it because the company hasn’t put appropriate resources into community management or marketing? (And can you be sure the company would put such resources into a Facebook Page?)
• Is the community run by an organization that has changed its priorities over time, so that the community no longer gets focus? (And would the group that runs a Facebook Page make it a big priority? Or just a side project?)
• For the people who still participate in the website community, why do they come? (And why would your customers on Facebook come to your Page? What are they looking for and what can you reliably provide? And what will you do about the people who still come to the website community? How will you encourage them to move with you to Facebook? Or will you just risk their disappointment?)

Remember, this isn’t about what’s old or new; it’s about business goals, strategic community interaction models, and consistent programming and management of a social environment. How will your Facebook Page differ from your failed website community?

Pursuing an integrated strategy

Whether you abandon your website community and put all your resources into Facebook, or you decide to keep both and work them together, you’ll do best with a strategic effort toward a consistent cultural model for meeting your customers, wherever they are.

If you keep both venues, and if they’re run by different groups (as they commonly are), can you agree on a common strategy for collaboration on a flow between the sites? For example, you might decide Facebook is primarily for acquisition, with an effort to move people closer toward the website for conversion and/or retention. Or perhaps you’ll make a push to bring a more intensely engaged conversational model from your website onto parts of your Facebook Page. Or encourage customers who provide support to other customers on your website to do the same on Facebook. No matter your goal, you’ll need to make content programming, voice, and interaction styles consistent across the two sites — so that customers who know you in one place still recognize you in the other. We’ve run across situations where the website voice and message was quite different on Facebook than on the website — with customers noticing and commenting on the mixed message. “Almost,” they said, “like people in the company aren’t talking to each other” (which they weren’t).

If, on the other hand, you decide to close a failing website community in favor of Facebook, make sure you don’t repeat the mistakes that doomed it. To create and support any online social venue, you’ve got to define a cultural interaction model, provide experienced and creative community management (including moderation), come up with a detailed content programming plan (with a conversation calendar), and integrate the whole program with your greater marketing strategy. No matter where you start your conversations with customers, the nature of the platform doesn’t make success a slam-dunk. Wherever you do it, you have to be serious about your social

As a start, these 10 questions help brands to think through how they are already set up to manage social media customer service, and what steps they will need to take to improve:

1) How are you scaling coverage for monitoring and brand response, including on nights and weekends?

2) Which customer service duties can/should be outsourced, and which should remain with the brand?

3) When should you respond to customer comments/questions and when should you stay silent, either because it would be overkill to chime in all the time or because your fans/brand ambassadors could jump in on your behalf?

4) Considering both customer expectations and what’s manageable/reasonable from the brand side, how quickly should you, and can you, respond?

5) What is the appropriate tone for your responses?

6) Are there any regulations or requirements (such as for pharma) that dictate how or whether you can respond?

7) When is it appropriate to respond publicly, such as on the Facebook Wall, versus moving the exchange to a more private venue (email, phone, 1:1 direct messaging)? How will the approach differ by channel? (For example, DMs work well on Twitter, but are more complicated on Facebook.)

8) Should customer service reps initially respond from a brand account or their own profile? Can they take a hybrid approach, as Southwest Airlines often does?

9) How will high-priority customer service issues be escalated within the organization?

10) Should a worst-case scenario or crisis erupt online, including on your Facebook Page, who is on your crisis management team? And does that team include stakeholders from across the organization?