By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist

Traditionally, marketers have researched their customers’ demographics to have a clear idea of their age, gender, income, location, and other traits.

Marketers added psychographics to the mix, allowing them to take into account customer’s interests, values, and attitudes. A step up from the very general information that demographics provide, psychographics enable marketers to speak to customers in a way that resonates with them. Now, in the age of social media and behavioral ad targeting, we have to add another type of data to our arsenal: socialgraphics.

Socialgraphics capture the attitudes, characteristics, behavior, and, most important, motivations of customers online. Understanding an audience’s socialgraphics allows marketers to design internet marketing strategies that attract and retain customers in different online venues.

Socialgraphics helps move your message

The new world of digital marketing requires the kind of research that user experience teams routinely do, but marketers have not always accessed.  Yet, it’s critical information for companies looking to deeply engage consumers and really motivate them to take the online actions crucial to the brand.

Demographics and pyschographics may have been enough when marketers were focused simply on online advertising — finding the right keywords to target an audience was enough.

But in the complex digital world of social media, content marketing, email, reviews, etc., marketers need to find ways to get online users to take specific actions, what I call social actions, such as sharing the organization’s content, recommending it to others, opening emails, writing reviews, etc. To motivate users to take action, you first have to understand what motivates them. That requires a much deeper level of knowledge about user’s psyches.

Levels of socialgraphics

To be most effective, marketers need to understand the socialgraphics of their audience at a minimum of two levels:

Audience segmentation.  If your demographic segment is “college-educated working mothers of elementary-aged children,” you need to understand the general socialgraphics of this segment, too.

Platform segmentation.  An audience segment may behave differently or have varying motivations in different online communities. For example, working mothers may look for emotional support and practical suggestions for balancing work and life in one forum, but be focused on career growth and networking with other professional mothers in another forum. It’s important to understand the user’s motivations within different communities in order to share the right content and engagement opportunities in each community.

The hunt for socialgraphic data

It is possible to find available data to leverage, but chances are, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and dig deep and make your own observations through focus groups or simply immersing yourself in different groups and platforms to understand what is going on there.  Some of the socialgraphic data to focus on are:

• Internet use data—Where do these users congregate online? What sites do they use? What online media do they consume? What times do they use different websites and media? How internet savvy are they?
• Mobile use data—Similarly, what are this segment’s mobile usage traits? Smartphone or not? What activities do they do on their phones? What times are they active?
• Goals and motivations—For different venues, what is the audience segment’s interest or goal in participating? What need does the community fill for this user? What does the user hope to gain?
• Behavior—How does this audience behave online, particularly in different venues? Do they create content or just consume it? Are they frequent sharers or posters? How do their patterns of creating, commenting, or sharing differ and what triggers the differences?
• Emotional and pyschological needs–What emotional needs does a given community fill? What emotional needs is the user filling by participating online? How does the user want to be perceived online or in different communities?

Socialgraphics as competitive advantage

At this point, it appears that few companies do the kind of research necessary to understand user’s socialgraphics. In fact, in a November 2011 McKinsey report surveying marketers, 38% of respondents said that their company had basic demographic data on each customer. But only 18% reported having psychographic data, such as interests or attitudes. It’s probably safe to conclude that even less had socialgraphic data.

In a noisy online world increasingly cluttered with content, understanding your customers this deeply may be the only way to create a point of differentiation for your brand in the long-term.

Does this make sense to you?  Are you starting to think about customer online behaviors in your strategies?

Neicole Crepeau a blogger at Coherent Social Media and the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, website design, mobile apps, & marketing. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec

By Robert Dempsey, Contributing {grow} Columnist

Internet marketing as we once knew it is dead. Gone are the days when a sales page was enough of a relationship to sell a product. Gone are the days when claims of riches tugged enough at the emotions to persuade a sale. Gone are the days when bloated claims could pass as truth and lies went unpunished. Now is the time of social SEO. And this time has already begun. Are you ready for it? Let’s find out.

The Web Has Always Been Social

From the time the Internet was called the World Wide Web people have been using it to send communications back and forth. There was Arpanet (1969), bulletin board services aka BBS (1978), Usenet (1980) and then the email system Listserve (1986). The Internet was created as a communication medium not only between computers but between the users of those computers – us. And since those early days we’ve been trying to connect with each other more and more.

Then Came SEO

With advances in computing technology came the ability to create and post web pages. As more and more people connected to the Internet the need arose to help people find those websites. You may remember getting in your (physical) inbox an AOL cd, or perhaps 10-20 of them. AOL provided a human-filtered gateway to the Internet. Then came Yahoo! and other search engines and web portals. It was during the mid-1990s that search engine optimization came about.

In the beginning people used to try all sorts of things to get their sites to rank higher – stuffing keywords into a page, hiding keywords using white text on a white background, buying links and more. Today these other assorted tactics will get you banned from Google or at the very least ensure that you never show up in the search results. Then in the late 1990s the next shift came about.

Blogging Hits The Social Scene

What began as a way to tell the rest of the world about what was going on in yours, blogging turned into an SEOs happiest dream. Now it was easy to create a metric ton of pages all optimized for search. But unlike static sites people could comment on blogs. No longer the domain of chat channels, instant messenger and walled gardens, websites became a two-way communication channel. In 1998 Open Diary was the first website where readers could add comments to someone’s blog entry.

And the web was forever changed.

And Then Social Media Hit The Fan

Fast forward to early 2000. Social media came into it’s own and really started to take off. Here’s a brief timeline with a few you may recognize:

• 2002 – Friendster
• 2003 – Myspace
• 2003 – LinkedIn
• 2004 – Facebook
• 2006 – Twitter
• 2011 – Google+

For a time SEO and social media were separate. As I alluded to in the introduction, that time is over.

The Rise Of Social SEO

Social SEO is the combination of social media and search engine optimization. The term itself is an acknowledgment that the two are no longer separate. In a recent post of mine – Google Proves Not Being On Social Media Will Kill Your SEO - I discuss the changes already in progress at Google. In a recent video with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson of Google mention in a rather off-handed way that Google is working to incorporate social signals into search engine rankings. This isn’t anything new. Google has been personalizing search results for quite some time. Now it’s going to an entirely new level.

In today’s world of social SEO you must be publishing content that is optimized for the search engines AND is shared within social networks such as Twitter and Google+.  In Google’s eyes which already measure authority using somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 factors, social shares from others are another indication that you know what you’re talking about. In addition, they are now supporting the rel=“author” and rel=“me” tags which allow you to indicate if a piece of content is authored or about you.

Already in progress, the content you create everywhere is being linked to directly to you. In addition, people’s reactions to that content is also being measured and noted. It has been said that every person is a content producer. Now every person is an authority, or can be.

This is where the death of traditional Internet Marketing comes into play.

The Fall Of Internet Marketing

When I say “traditional Internet Marketing” what I’m talking about is a certain set of tactics used to sell products online, specifically:

• Sales pages with big red headlines that insult our intelligence
• Outrageous claims of instant or close-to-instant riches with very little work
• Hard-sell sales tactics
• Ups-ellathons mixed in with cross-sell-athons
• A bombardment of swiped affiliate emails that are impersonal and arrive by the dozens

On the social web it takes more than well crafted paragraphs to create enough trust and authority to make a sale. Now I’m not hailing the death of e-commerce, far from it. But the way products and services are sold online by non-e-commerce businesses has changed. A relationship built on trust and authority is now what makes the sale.

Embrace The Change

15 years ago businesses were told they needed a website. Many didn’t listen.

10 years ago businesses were told they needed to use SEO. Many didn’t listen.

5 years ago businesses were told they needed to blog. Many didn’t listen.

2 years ago businesses were told they needed to be on social media. Many didn’t listen.

But many did.

The companies that blog, that use SEO, that use social media continue to thrive despite uncertain economies. The businesses that embraced stronger relationships with their customers continue to thrive. The businesses that acknowledge the upward trend of social seo will be the companies that continue into the future.

Will yours be one?

Robert Dempsey specializes in direct response social media and blogs at http://DempseyMarketing.com/journal/.

By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist

Google + Circles has finally provided sharing in the way that most people want. Even Google may not realize the avalanche of changes it has started, though. Google’s implementation of Circles will usher in a new paradigm for sharing: one where we no longer focus on where we want to share but instead focus on who we want to share with.

The current state

Right now, when you share content you pick the network you want to share to. You click a Tweet or Retweet button to share to Twitter, click a Facebook Like, etc. This is because social sharing began with social networks–locations where people congregate online.

Some of your contacts operate mainly in one location, say Facebook or Twitter but you’re probably connected with other contacts across multiple locations. And still other contacts are mainly accessible via email or text messaging. To reach all of the people you’d like to reach with a piece of content, you have to make the effort to go to each network and share or use a tool such as Hootsuite or ping.fm to share across multiple sites.  If you want to share selectively within each site, such as to only certain LinkedIn groups and Facebook friends, it becomes even more time-consuming and difficult. Even in the third-party tools, there is poor support for sharing to select Lists, pages, or groups.

Circles and Lists will let you focus on people

Now, Facebook, Twitter, and others will be forced to catch up with the Google + model (though Facebook could have been leading the change). Facebook will follow suit and add Circle-like capabilities. (Breaking news–Between drafting this post and publishing, Facebook announced changes in their Lists and sharing features to begin matching Google Plus.) Expect Twitter to enhance their List feature in response, as well.

As each social network implements a rich user experience and feature set equivalent to Google + Circles, it will be easier to focus on who you want to share with. While you will still need to go to each social network to share, you will be able to more easily select groups of people within each network that you want to share with.

Instead of having a choice of sharing publically or to friends-only on Facebook, you’ll easily be able to share to selected groups, such as Work Colleagues or Gamer Friends. Similarly, you’ll be able to tweet at your list of Gamers in order to share selected tweets and content just to the people most likely to be interested in that information.

Thus, at first, you will have two-step process of choosing where you want to share and then who you want to share with.

What we need are Enhanced Share buttons

Google Plus will likely lead the way in providing a Share button for websites that lets you select the Circle you want to share with right from the button. (Breaking news–Google Plus just announced on 8/24 that they are enabling sharing via the +1 button–and the ability to select the Circles you want to share with.)

Shortly after that, I predict Facebook, Twitter, and others will add the ability, so that you can target your sharing to specific groups of people in their network, as well.

Evolution – Third party tools consolidate circles across platforms

Before long, though, third party tools will enable you to consolidate your Circles/Lists across platforms. (And if you’re a VC, contact me and we can talk about being the first of these tools!)  You’ll be able to create meta-circles that let you define your different social groups, ala Google + Circles. However, you won’t have to worry about whether your contacts are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Using these third-party tools (unless Google, itself, decides to build it), you’ll be able to authenticate with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., and then assign your contacts from across these networks into Circles or groups. You can build your Professional contacts, your Best Friends and Family group, your Gamers group, etc. People may reside in more than one circle, of course, so that Joe is in both your Best Friends and your Gamers group.

Similarly, you’ll be able to use Circles to segment your audience. If you have followers on Twitter or fan of your Facebook page, you’ll be able to group them into segments, such as Product Managers or Marketers, Small Business CEOs, Bloggers or Consultants, and so on. Again, people may reside in more than one Circle and you may have contact with them via more than one social network.

Retweet, Like, and other buttons are replaced

At first, people will use these third-party tools to share to their meta-Circles. Instead of going to each social network and sharing a piece of content within it, you will be able to simply use the third-party application. For example, Feedly might build in this ability and you can share content to your meta-Circles from it. You’ll select the Gamers or Bloggers circle to share your content to. The application will then use the Facebook, Google +, Twitter and other APIs to find the appropriate Lists or Circle in each social network and share your content just to those audiences within each network.

You won’t have to think about where your audience and contacts are. You will only have to think about who you want to share with.

Then, one or the other of these third-party tools will create a single Share button that publishers can put on their website. With this button, you can share to your contacts just by clicking the button and selecting the circle of people you want to share with.

Your content will then be shared with the correct groups of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and whatever other networks you’re active in. You won’t ever have to think about where your audience lives. All you’ll have to think about is who you are targeting with this content or status update.

And that’s the paradigm shift we can expect in the next one to two years!

Neicole Crepeau a blogger at Coherent Social Media and the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, website design, mobile apps, & marketing. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec

By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist

As content marketing grows up one thing is becoming apparent: the real gold is in getting your post to the inner circle. Back in March, I blogged about the value of the content curator as a way to reach the smaller networks where friends share with friends. Recent research only validates the importance of getting your content into those smaller, close networks of friends and family.

Let’s look at the facts.

A recent AOL-Nielsen study showed that 23% of social media messages include content.  60% of that content is shared as a link back to a published piece. Another 36% is embedded in the share. In other words, people share content a lot, and the majority of the time they share it as a link.

What may surprise you, though, is that “overwhelmingly, people prefer to share content with friends and family.” Most of the sharing that people do isn’t to the public at large, but to their own smaller network of family and friends. (Though, a good quarter of people do share with colleagues regularly.)

In other words, most of the sharing that average folk do involves sharing to a limited set of relatively close friends and family.

Another study of sharing via apps on Facebook showed that auto-generated “broadcast” messages that appear in users’ social streams massively drive up user adoption of the application. When users added a personal message (like “Check out this cool app I found!”), adoption increased by another 98%. Messages in the users’ stream are 10 times more effective than banner ads for gaining adoption.

Again, content shared in the inner circle carries greater influence, especially if accompanied by a personal message.

The challenge is how to get your content into that inner circle? Most of us share our content with as large an audience as we can garner, or we share with influencers who have large audiences. We hope that enough of the audience will pass our content on so that, eventually, it gets shared by individuals with their close friends, family, or colleagues, increasing the chances that the content will actually be seen by our target customers.

It’s a pretty inefficient approach.

There are a couple of other factors, though, that change the picture.

People want to share information from people they trust.  38% of people say that this is the type of content they want to share the most. (That’s true of industry-specific content, too, by the way.) People are also more likely to click on links shared by someone they know. If that link is reshared to people who don’t know the original sharer, the click-through rate drops.

At the same time, when established influencers share links, they get far higher clickthrough rates than average users do (400% higher). If these influencers add a personal message, the rate is another 20% greater. These perceived experts are trusted, and garner results because of it.

People tend to share and click links in specific categories or genres, too.  This study of Facebook sharing showed that “frequent linkers on Facebook have distinctive genre, topic and source patterns particular to their interests.”  TechCrunch reports on another study that indicated, “When it comes to sharing, 80 percent of people share only one category of links and more than 70 percent will only ever click on one category, whether that is business, politics, or entertainment.“

So, the real strategy to get content into those valuable inner circles? Become a trusted source for content on specific topics, i.e., a content curator. Being a good content curator gives you a better chance of buying entry into the inner circles of large numbers of your target customers—and increases the likelihood that users will read the content that you share.

Neicole Crepeau is a partner in Coherent Interactive, which specializes in web, mobile, and social media design and implementation for small and mid-size businesses.  You can read more of her original material at her blog, Coherent Social Media or on Twitter where she is @neicolec.  This month, Neicole’s company will be releasing a new tool to help you become a better content curator. Called CurateXpress, our product will help you share better content, and get more value and a larger audience from it. So, follow @CurateXpress on Twitter or sign-up on our CurateXpress website to be notified when we launch the beta!

Illustration courtesy http://designmoo.com/

By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist

Facebook is seeing a decline in use. Studies show that users are un-Liking business pages. Consumers are getting savvy and more jaded about businesses use of social media—and they’re responding negatively. The thing is, it’s our own fault.

Social media consultants and bloggers have long urged companies to create Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and start a conversation with their customers. So, lots of companies have done just that. The problem is, most customers don’t want a conversation with a company or its representatives.

Sure, there are exceptions. There are customers who are genuinely passionate about a restaurant, a hotel, a clothing line, or shoe company. Those customers are a minority, though.

It may be worth engaging that minority deeply, as brand advocates. But companies aren’t focusing on deeply engaging with the few people who deeply want to engage with them. Most companies either aren’t doing social media, or they are in a race to acquire as many fans and followers as possible and then get likes and comments from as many as possible.

As I noted in my recent post, If You Want to Engage Me, Make Me Look Good, the conversation approach ISN’T customer-centric. It’s the business, the marketer that wants to engage in conversation with the customer. Just as marketers want blog and newsletter subscribers, and want customer email addresses, they want Facebook fans. They want to be able to regularly contact and message leads and customers—even if they do it in a less promotional, more sociable manner.

Customers aren’t beating down the doors of businesses begging them, “engage with me, please!”

Customers want to engage with their friends. They want to engage with content that amuses, teaches, or inspires them. They may want to engage with their friends about said content.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t listen to customers and respond to them. Good companies have been listening to their customers for years, in the ways available at the time. Good companies will continue to monitor, respond, answer questions, address concerns, elicit suggestions, all through social media as well as other means.

It’s the inane and sometimes manipulative attempts to converse and engage people that I’m decrying. With all the competition for our attention, the flood of content and news and status updates, I think consumers increasingly resent attempts to draw their attention with questions, content, contests, and conversations that aren’t valuable, relevant, fun, or interesting. It’s just more noise.

We’ve created a monster, by telling every company that they NEED a Facebook page and Twitter account and that they need to converse and engage. I’m hoping we can slay that monster by taking a truly customer-centric approach.  I hope we begin to tell companies that they need to identify the specific consumers of value to them as a company, and then find a way to be OF SERVICE to those consumers. I hope companies will find ways to serve the customer’s goals online. Find ways to facilitate the conversations those consumers want to be having with their friends. Find ways to entertain and inspire them. Find ways to let consumers take the actions that help them personally or professionally and that enrich their online lives.

So many businesses now are out on the social web expending resources and money trying to get a conversation started on their page and blog. What if they were all spending the same resources and money trying to find valuable ways to serve consumers through their Facebook pages and blogs, ways to help consumers meet their own online goals and enrich their own relationships with one another.  If a company did that for me, I’d be a loyal fan and I’d be visiting their Facebook page more often.

Do you agree?

Neicole Crepeau is a partner in Coherent Interactive, which specializes in web, mobile, and social media design and implementation for small and mid-size businesses. You can read more of her original material at her blog, Coherent Social Media or onTwitter where she is @neicolec.

You’ve probably heard the term “content marketing.” You’ve certainly heard of social media. How do these two trends fit together in your sales and marketing plan?

Here’s a method you can use to determine where content and social media fit into your online sales strategy.  Let’s start with your good ol’ sales funnel.  These vary somewhat by company, but here’s a typical B2B sales funnel showing the steps a customer typically experiences:

Once you’ve documented your sales funnel, look at the customer touchpoints where your website is important. Your website is usually the hub of your online strategy. Determine where the user is likely to interact with your website.

Next, look at where content can provide a good touchpoint. Remember that content can be distributed allowing the customer to discover it in their own online contexts. Assuming you can reach customers at the various points in the sales funnel, where can content add value?

In this case, content could be valuable in the early stages of the sales funnel, to make customers aware that there are solutions to their business problem. It can also be useful when customers are trying to get buy-in for a purchase, doing detailed research, and during the demo or trial process.

Now, let’s see where social media/social interaction can play a role in the sales process.

Online social contact, not surprisingly, can be helpful at all stages of the sales funnel.

Now you know where the different elements can contribute to the sales process. Let’s look at how they can contribute–keeping in mind the basics:

Compared with content and websites, social engagement is obviously the most personal type of online contact with a customer. It often takes the form of a conversation. Your website, on the other hand, is the least personal form of contact.

At the same time, social media tends to be the least self-promotional. It’s generally frowned upon when companies promote themselves strongly on social media. It’s perfectly acceptable to promote your business and your products on your website, however. It’s both expected and accepted.

Given these caveats, here’s how you might try to leverage content and social engagement in your sales process:

Awareness. At the top of the funnel, you can be present in communities where customers are talking about their business problems, and use social media and content to make them aware that products and services exist. Of course, that means walking the line of self-promotion. You need to be a little more hands-off and neutral when informing customers through social media and content.

Early research. At these early stages, you can try to move the customer to your website through both social communications and content. You use both social contact and content to give basic information about your products and services, the kind of information a customer at this stage of awareness can best benefit from.

Buy-in and short-listing. When the customer is getting buy-in to make a purchase, you can provide support and information. You can develop content that provides data, arguments, case studies, or executive summaries the customer can share with decision-makers. The idea is to specifically target the decision-maker and provide content developed for that person, who may not be the same as the person who discovered the content. On the social side, you can be present and responsive, answering questions that arise.

Likewise, at the short-list stage, you can be available to answer questions, direct the user to appropriate information, and otherwise assist in that decision.

Research and demo. Obviously, the research stage is one that can benefit from a rich set of content and strong social connections. One goal may be to encourage the customer to try the product. If the user demos or downloads a trial version, you can be available to answer questions, provide support, and address any problems. You might want to develop supporting demo content or data sets for specific verticals or roles.

Purchase. Of course, you want to be available before and during the purchase process to make sure it goes smoothly.

That’s how you can use the sales funnel as a way to evaluate the role of content and social media in your sales process.

Of course, there are other tools to use as well, and lots of work to do after this. You’ll need to research your audience and segment them, in order to develop targeted content and social offers. You’ll need to update the website to support these touchpoints, at a minimum creating landing pages to support your content and social strategy. Ads and email may be added to the mix. Etc.  However, identifying these customer touchpoints and the methods you’ll use to integrate content and social media can provide a solid start to your planning and form the basis for your work.

P.S. If you prefer to consume your content via video, here’s a video tutorial of this post:

Neicole Crepeau is a partner in Coherent Interactive, which specializes in web, mobile, and social media design and implementation for small and mid-size businesses. You can read more of her original material at her blog, Coherent Social Media or on Twitter where she is @neicolec.

The blogosphere is buzzing about the new social media measurement platform SAS Institute Inc. announced yesterday.   Is there a place for yet ANOTHER social web monitoring tool in a crowded market? And what is so special about this announcement?

The answer is yes, there is a place for this new entry, and here are four reasons why I think SAS will be successful in this competitive space.

Text-sensitive analysis — I had the opportunity to review several social media measurement platforms over the past few months including market leader Radian6.  Everyone is struggling with accurate textual analysis for “sentiment” reports and are loading up on costly human resources to examine tweets for tone and emotion.  Most don’t think computers can do it.  If SAS has started to crack this code — and some say they have done this by leveraging their other existing technologies — this will be of immense value to customers.  And hey, they claim they can understand and classify conversations in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish).

Experience — I can say from my corporate days that SAS has a superb reputation in the analytical space and has expert resources that small competitors simply cannot match. During the Internet press conference, Katie Paine (a presenter) said, “Can you imagine the design of experiments we can run with these capabilities?”  Now we’re talking!  Putting the SAS computer power and analytical experience to the test in the social media market will produce incredibly powerful, breakthrough insights. We can only hope they make some of the new marketing innovations available to us little guys!

Market access — This move just makes so much business sense for SAS. They are already providing powerful analytical software to many of the most important companies in the world.  They are already embedded in the corporate cultures.  They speak the language. This is a perfect market extension for them.  They already own these customers and this is way to gather in the social media monitoring revenue as well.

Integration with traditional systems — SAS already provides their customers with services such as marketing campaign management, customer experience analytics, marketing performance management and web analytics. Add the social web on top of this and you are looking for some powerhouse combinations, some potentially breath-taking insights.

So that’s why SAS is going to kick social media butt.  And notice I didn’t even mention the basic analytical capabilities or user interface.  I’ll leave that to the tech writers. Besides it doesn’t really matter.   Nobody will really leverage technology in this space for competitive advantage when all the underlying data is already available.  Making the technology do tricks is the easy part. Having the market presence, integration capabilities, and customer access — now that’s something that SAS can take to the bank.

Is there still room for the other players?  Of course.  First, SAS is going for the large enterprise market. Bring $60,000 in annual fees just to get a seat with the basic platform and $180,000/year for the deluxe model.  That leaves 90 percent of the market for the other guys to squabble over.

Who does this impact the most? Probably Radian6. They’ve been working the large enterprises like Dell and Pepsi so this will be a tough new competitor on the enterprise scene.  But hey, this is a white-hot, still-emerging market. I would expect to see consolidation and players dropping out on the lower end of the market before the higher end, and even that is going to take some time.

What do you think?  Who are the big winners and losers out of this?  How will the market be impacted?

I’m often asked to explain the social web … in three minutes or less.  Difficult!   But I’ve come up with a simple way to describe the importance of social media in my presentations that might be useful to you when you meet those people who want you to explain all this stuff like “Tweeter and Facebox.”

And it’s easy to remember:  Evolution, revolution, contribution.

EVOLUTION

Here is a brief history of communications:

• Men on fast horses
• Town squares
• Printing press
• Mail
• Telephone
• Radio
• Television
• Internet
• Email
• Mobile
• Social web

If you break it down like this, it makes an impression that this is really the next stage in how people communicate.  Now pay attention!

REVOLUTION

So what makes this unique?  What pushes the social web into the same rarefied category as the printing press or television?  Two things:

1) This is two-way communication. Everything else on the list above is one-way.  The message isn’t being controlled by an author or a news anchor or an advertising executive. People are talking back. That’s intense.

2) For the first time in human history, we have access to free, global, real-time communication. There is no other word to characterize the implication of this development but “profound.”

CONTRIBUTION

The distinguishing characteristic of the social web that most resonates with people is “contribution.” People are the publishers.  If the content is coming from common people it’s the social web. What are people publishing?

• Ideas
• Videos
• Opinions
• Criticisms
• Commentary
• Entertainment
• Everybody publishes … including folks vitally important to you like employees, customers, competitors, partners, suppliers, people who love you, and people who hate you.

… so don’t you think you should be out there listening to these people?  Learning from them? Serving them?  And in the case of your competitor, pummeling them?

So this is the easiest way I’ve found to describe the power, importance and uniqueness of the social web in three minutes or less.   What do you think? What did I miss?

Jay Baer is one of the few bloggers I’ve found who consistently provides business-based, practical marketing advice.  I usually agree with him.  But he made a reference to social media marketing on a post this week that struck me as odd:

“… unlike every other marketing tool for the past 200 years, it’s a meritocracy, and that benefits us all.”

I’m only picking on Jay because this is the most recent iteration of a theme I’ve observed countless times — the opinion that somehow the social web is in a special new category where you actually have to EARN the trust of your customers.  Another variation is that the social web has “changed everything” about business and marketing.

No, it hasn’t.

The free market economy has ALWAYS been a meritocracy and always will be. If you don’t provide a quality product or service and you don’t represent it in an honest and compelling way, you won’t earn your way into the hearts and wallets of the world’s consumers.

Pre-social media, pre-Internet, even pre-mass communications, the fundamental tenet of marketing was this: Establish a brand promise based on consumer trust and never, ever break that trust. The concept is simple, the execution is extremely difficult.

Marketing is a continuous war to promote and protect your brand, whether it is a company, hospital, university, sports team or individual.  Social media offers an exciting new way to connect, but the marketing fundamentals are truly still the same.

The social web is just a new battlefield, not a new war.

How is the social web affecting your battle plan?

The Economist is one of my favorite magazines. I usually read it cover to cover. So imagine my excitement when I saw their special report this week, Social Networking: A World of Connections.

After I read the report, I concluded — to my surprise — that there was really not much new in the report. This is not a negative reflection on The Economist. I believe it’s a positive reflection on the efficiency of Twitter to stream the most important news and trends my way before they get summarized by a business periodical.

Nevertheless, there were a few interesting nuggets I wanted to pass along:

>>Follow me on Twitter signs are appearing on the doors and windows of small businesses around the world. Asurvey found that 17 percent of Britain’s small businesses were using Twitter. They saved an average of $8,000 a year by cutting out other forms of advertising.

>>  A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only 10 percent of them gave employees full access to social media networksduring the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The  executives’  biggest  concern was that social networking would lead to “social not-working.”  Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

>> An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks.  One study estimated that personal use of social networks during the working day was costing the British economy almost $2.3 billion a year in lost productivity. Another concluded that if companies banned employees from using Facebook while at work, their productivity would improve by 1.5%.

>> The magazine described Facebook’s “hacker culture.”  Their head of engineering’s motto is “move fast and break stuff.”  What matters is getting fresh products out to users quickly, even if they do not always work as intended. To generate new  ideas, they hold all-night hack-a-thons to at which engineers work on their pet projects. This Red Bull culture maybe why Facebook has just one engineer for every 1.2 million users.

>> Survey of 300,000 Twitters users showed more than half tweeted less than once every 74 days and 10 percent of all users account for 90 percent of all tweets.

>> Facebook’s audience is bigger than any TV network that has ever existed on  the  face  of  the  earth.

>>In Asia several social media companies such as Japan’s GREE, South Korea’s Cyworld and China’s Tencent, are already making healthy profits from sales of games, premium personalization options, virtual goods, and custom backgrounds.

>>Salesforce.com predicts that demand for corporate internal social networking services will riseas managers realize that they now know more about strangers on Twitter and Facebook than they do about the people in their own companies.

>>Intel estimates it has saved millions of dollars a year in fees by recruiting senior managers through LinkedIn rather  than using headhunters. US Cellular said it saved more than $1 mm last year by using a LinkedIn system that produced good candidates faster than traditional recruitment channels.

>> Social networks have made the labor market more transparentin another way too. A survey by CareerBuilder.com of  2,700 executives last year found that 45 percent of them looked at job candidates’ social network pages as part of their research, and more than a third of those had unearthed information that put them out of contention. Time to turn up those privacy settings?

Some interesting stuff!  Of these facts and trends, which jumps out for you as having an impact on the way you do business?

Illustrations: Part of The Economist report.