With the considerable attention that Pinterest is getting these days, many individuals and companies are wondering whether and how they should be developing their “Pinterest strategy”.  Rather than thinking about a Pinterest strategy, I would challenge companies to use this time to figure out which types of interest-based social networks are optimal for engagement and participation for their particular brands.  Influence within interest graphs is often coveted by companies trying to reach their target customers through social technologies.  But if the interests of a specific network are not aligned with the products and services of the brand, then spending time defining a strategy for that network may not be the best use of anyone’s time.

To be sure, Pinterest is clearly showing some impressive numbers.  Last month, according to ComScore, the site had over 11.7M monthly unique visitors.  In addition, a Shareaholic study placed the percentage of referrals from Pinterest at a higher number than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.  But looking deeper into the metrics, we see that the most engaged users of the social network are upper-middle class women in middle America.  Referral traffic from the site is promising, but it is mainly to lifestyle-focused retailers and it is unlikely that anyone in the web metrics world thought that Google Plus, LinkedIn or YouTube were driving tons of traffic.

The point is that Pinterest is great for companies whose customers fall within the demographics and interest graph where people are having related exchanges.  If when you listen, your customers are not engaging on Pinterest conversations, then you can probably hold off on this specific social network.  Don’t pay attention to those who say you might miss the train.  If you have a strategy for current and future interest-based social networks, you should be fine.  But focus on what matters today.

We should also keep in mind that there are a number of interest-based social networks besides Pinterest which already exist: including Instagram, Foodspotting and Fitocracy.  In addition to these networks, there are clearly forums and web communities that target on specific interests from maternity to motorcycle racing.  If talk about Pinterest has raised awareness for being a part of communities that are not Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, this is a good opportunity to identify the types of communities which are directly to your business.

And it all inevitably comes back to listening.  It is a lot easier to be where your customers are talking than to force them to find you on networks that your company thinks are important.  Monitor conversations about your company and your competitors, figure out which communities have the biggest bulk of posts, and define your strategy based on this analysis.

If there’s all this great information in big data, why do we have such a hard time getting to the part with the deep business insights? One issue is related to getting a better handle on influence.  But it’s also about structuring and tagging data in a way that allows you to see connections not only between people, but also concepts, companies and innovation.  For a long time, companies have been conducting business intelligence on their internal data, but now a few start-ups are tackling the task of conducting external business intelligence using publicly available data (social media, PR reports, investment disclosures, etc.).

Quid and Recorded Future are two such companies, and they are raising money and building teams to tackle this very real problem of pulling insight out of all this digital data floating around in cyberspace.  Large corporations, especially those in the technology sector, are using their services to analyze competitor moves, trends in the sector, opportunities for growth and acquisition targets, while traders at financial firms are using these services to analyze events, media-flow, and market behavior to adjust their trading strategies.

It’s always easier to see these things with concrete examples, and there is a great example using Smart TVs on Recorded Future’s website to provide a glimpse into the possibilities.  Imagine you are a corporate strategist at Samsung trying to map out the Smart TV landscape.  You know that people are talking about Smart TVs, and you could probably use a social media or traditional PR listening tool to figure out which forums and which blogs are discussing the topic.  But then what?  What about all of the financial documents, analyst reports and predictions that exist across other channels.  And how do you figure out how it all maps out in terms of sources, relationships and timing?

These tools essentially take as much publicly available content as possible and apply complex natural language processing to identify specific references to ideas, people and events.   These references are then structured and organized by things like time, topics and concepts.  By visualizing this data onto a dashboard that can be played with and manipulated, a corporate strategist at Samsung can now quickly see which companies are currently investing in SmartTVs and where the largest sums of investment are going to.  If he or she wants to find out how soon Samsung needs to begin thinking about R&D or a possible acquisition target, that can be done as well.

As the volume of data and the speed of innovation increases, these types of services will become a necessary tool for any strategic minded professional who wants to get validated insight into the future.

While Quid is currently not available for trial, Recorded Future offers those who are curious, a 15 day trial of the service.  Even if this is not exactly your thing, it’s worth seeing where we are headed.  Pretty cool stuff.

With that level of investment for social network advertising alone, brands need to also start thinking about areas outside of Facebook and MySpace in which they can buy ad space.  Understanding where the bulk of conversation is coming from can help uncover new places to put up digital billboards.

For some clients, the thought of having to “engage” with customers on new channels outside of the comfort zone is scary.  It’s sometimes easier to focus on Facebook advertising and maybe some occassional Twitter engagement.  While this is an important first step, I think companies need to start marketing and advertising on mediums other than the usual suspects in order to have simple and easy access to their target audiences.   Finding the next tier of social media channels focused on your industry, products or services will be crucial to the next step in social media marketing.  And who knows, advertising on these channels may even provide better ROI!

If you are looking to build a company that embraces social, and you do not have a current client set, I think there are a few steps that you can take to make the process of “going viral” a realistic possibility.

1. Listen to what people in your target pool are saying – Most new companies have identified a pretty large set of individuals who can use their products or services.  Understand who is actually using social channels first, and then figure out what resonates with that target audience. 

If you are a service that provides access to ”green” products, find out the largest set of people who are engaged on social media discussing similar topic areas.  Let’s say that there a lot of people in many different demographics discussing “green”.  Great, that’s an opportunity for future growth.  But maybe mothers with young children take up over 60% of the conversation related to “green”.  Well, start there, and see what they are looking for.  When they talk about products, are the products for themselves or their children?  Let’s say that they are talking about personal products for themselves (services, personal care, etc.)

2. Develop relationships/partnerships with companies who provide these items – If you want to reach mothers who are looking for “green” personal products, you want to have products and partnerships with your service that resonate with this group.  Perhaps, you go after local businesses in your region that provide these products.  Build up a portfolio of as many companies in perhaps Ohio who provide green products.  Most businesses are happy to be included as part of new channels to get their product to market, so work on creating this first.

3. Engage with your target audience - Once you have set up adequate relationships to make it worth the while of mothers to start talking about your product and how you can provide local “green” personal products to mothers, get the word out.  Tell bloggers that your service provides access to over X different companies in the Ohio area who deliver the products that their audience is looking for.  If you are providing value, these individuals will help to spread awareness of your service.

I think a lot of new businesses are thinking about social in the back of their minds, but they are not thinking about how they can build their business to strategically utilize social and current discussions.  In this example, if you simply build partnerships with all “green” businesses without focus (personal hygiene, solar equipment, restaurants, etc.), you may just not resonate with any specific group.  And then it can be a long hard road to readjusting your vision, as you subsequently see where the interest is coming from.

Lots of people have said it before, but the technology is secondary to the strategy.

Marketing - If you are a marketer, first look for the places where individuals are talking about your brand.  Don’t waste time trying to figure out how you are going to engage.  Too often organizations will spin their wheels thinking about engagement when they could just use forums as places to actually market their products and services.  So today, really understand who is talking about you, what they are saying, and where they are saying it.  Refine your message, and advertise based on what you learn.  Want to create an engaging social media widget?  Great.  That’s step two.

PR - If you work in public relations, you want to control the message around your brand.  First things first.  When someone says something that is blatantly false, help make corrections and provide simple transparent content that does that.  Whether it’s a paid monitoring tool or not that gives you insight to these conversations, focus on the negative.  As a PR professional, you want to keep the message clear.  Step two is creating a conversation with people who love you, people who are not sure how they feel… and driving more conversations that emphasis this message.  I think PR is a bit further along with social media, so being more proactive on listening and engaging is something that you can do.  But focus on the message, and address conversations that are off-message first.

Sales- Of all the functions that can suffer from analysis paralysis, there is no function that can fall into this trap more than the sales function.  Developing new business is usually high-touch and often a really difficult endeavour.  There are businesses who are making sales by looking on social media, but this can often be a long process.  If your Marketing and PR team focuses on advertising and message within social media, they have you generally covered.  After all, these groups, especially Marketing, are designed to drive sales.  So setup your monitoring tools to look specifically for individuals who are looking to buy now.  If you are up for the challenge, go ahead and engage those individuals.  Otherwise work in conjunction with Marketing and PR to be aware of the conversations that are occurring on social media.  While there are a few industries which may benefit from directly talking to individuals discussing an imminent purchase, this is an extremely difficult thing to do.  Wait for the tools (and the associated algorithms/processing) to get better, and then revisit using social media from the direct view of a sales function.

If you can attack these ideas first, there will be plenty of time to use other (much cooler) ways to get involved with social media.  Let’s get back to running a business!

The more we dig into the numbers, non-profits just are not raising as much as the hype claims.  In 2008, $300 billion was raised by non-profits, $15 billion of that money came from online sources, and in the last 3 years only $21 million came from Facebook (Giving USA and Blackbaud).  Many of the non-profits that we talk to who have already experimented in this area are coming to similar conclusions.  But that shouldn’t be a reason to abandon social media.

Non-profits need to start thinking about how social media can help them cultivate the relationship between themselves, their patrons and their patrons’ friends.  Be wary of circulating content that asks for money without a specific cause.  Instead spread awareness around what your organization is helping with functionally.  Talk about what you do, why you’re good at it, and what people should pay attention to.  Only after you have developed a deep relationship and created an interest around the conversation, should you start the conversation around fundraising.

I think the key message here is that social media builds relationships and awareness of what you as an organization do really well.  Focus on that part first, and the money will follow.

With the recent (and somewhat flat) IPO of QuinStreet, it got me thinking about how our clients can start to use the concepts of vertical marketing and social media in conjunction with each other.  It’s a way to strategically think about how organizations can increase social media exposure, and in turn justify the expenditure through a measurable ROI channel.

To take a quick step back, what do I mean by vertical marketing?  Vertical marketing, in the way that QuinStreet does it, essentially means setting up websites  that don’t necessarily have your brand on it, and then providing a lot of information around that vertical(mortgages, loans, online learning, etc.).  When you fill out a form that says that you want to hear more, QuinStreet essentially sends the lead over to a single or multiple companies who pay for those warm/hot leads.  And it’s not just companies like QuinStreet and ValueClick who are doing this.  Companies are doing this on their own, and it drives SEM as well as sales.

So how is this similar to social media?  For those of you who may not be familiar, there is a story from the book Groundswell (video below) that talks about how P&G created a website called BeingGirl.com to engage with young girls about their feminine problems.  It was an unbranded website that had a forum where these girls could ask  Iris, a psychologist hired by P&G questions that they might not feel comfortable asking their parents.  Each of Iris’ answers was followed by the simple line: “Good luck from BeingGirl.com.  Brought to you by Always Pads and Pantyliners and Tampax Tampons.”  According to P&G, this was 4 times more effective per dollar spent than traditional advertising. 

So with these two examples in mind, I think that there is a huge opportunity for organizations to use their engagment strategies to drive strong lead generation.

If you are not already running vertical sites to drive traffic, start monitoring social media channels to find out what your consumers are looking for.  A lot of the marketing execs who I talk to are trying to understand the topic areas that are already occurring across the overall conversation (related to their brand) in social media.  Figure this out, and then start building a site that is aligned with your company’s overall goals.  Obviously, easier said than done.

Once you have a site up, add social components to it so that your consumers can talk to each other as well as to your company.  This is not really something that either QuinStreet or ValueClick has done, but I think companies who build their own vertical sites can make this a priority.  Of course, be transparent in who you are while trying to provide a non-biased forum for consumers to get and share information.  And then provide unobtrusive links to drive traffic back to the sales funnel.  I think this type of strategy to lead generation can really help companies begin to justify the costs of social media and see revenue generating results.  Which is what we all really want in the end anyway.

With the recent flurry of news and blog posts on mobile social networks like Foursquare, there is a sense that these networks really have a shot of taking this all the way.  On Thursday, Foursquare announced that they had over a quarter million people “check-in”to some physical location in a single day.  That’s pretty impressive, and while there has been hype around Loopt and Gowalla, there is a sense that Foursquare has the momentum to actually make something of this attention.

To take a quick step back, Foursquare and its competitors are services that allow people to broadcast out their location to their network.  When you go to a restaurant or store, you “check-in” to that location, and do two things.  One, you tell your friends that you at a specific place, and two, you let the store owner know that you are there.  Why would you do this?  Well, the most loyal person (most checked-in visits) can become the “mayor” of that establishment, and they get some bonus for being sucha great customer.  Maybe a free coffee or pitcher of beer, as well as the social capital of being the mayor.

When we think about this from a branding level, this is some amazing data to have at your fingertips as a marketer.  And all of this information is supplied by your customer, broadcast to his/her network and verified by GPS as being accurate.  Couple that with profile data and incentives, and you have an army of bonafide brand ambassadors.  And apparently, over a quarter million people are already putting their location onto the airwaves.  Scary but exciting stuff.

I think what’s unique about Foursquare is that they are actively taking advantage of the current attention to their service to forge relationships with major media companies as well as with retail stores like Starbucks.  In addition, as the Economist reports, there are a number of stars that have aligned to put Foursquare in the right place at the right time.  The prevalence of smart phones, unlimited data plans, GPS accurate devices and a slew of applications that can take advantage of this information have put companies like Foursquare in the sweet spot of winning the race.

While I don’t believe that mobile social networks are going to become fully mainstream anytime soon, I do think that consumer facing companies should start experimenting with how they can use these tools to drive revenue and increase customer loyalty.  According to the Economist article that I referenced earlier, “Juniper Research predicts that global revenues from location-based services could soar to $12.7 billion by 2014, up from $3 billion last year”.  Even if this is an exaggerated figure, there is surely a sense that it’s worth playing a game of peek-a-boo with your customers to see if they are up for it.  There’s a lot of money at stake here.

I spent tonight at the World Affairs Council here in San Franciso listening to Jay Walsh, Head of Communications at the Wikimedia Foundation, talk about his organization.  The talk was titled: “A New Model for Global Collaboration”, and it was a deep dive into the history and size of the Wikimedia Foundation.  What I really want to talk about is what brands can get from wikis in general, as well as from Wikipedia, but here are the basic numbers from his presentation:

• 275 languages
• 340M unique visitors in a month
• 100,000 volunteers (about 10% who contribute more than 100 edits a month)
• 5th largest site globally according to ComScore (after Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook)… and it’s a non-profit
• Over a 1B edits since Wikipedia got started in 2001

What I think is really interesting is the total number of languages that are covered across the various Wikipedia sites as well as the sheer volume of the articles and edits.  We are not talking about straight translations of the English site, but rather unique versions on the same topic area.  A simple search of “Nintendo” in both Spanish and English will show that there are differences in both entries, and as Nintendo there is a lot you could learn about cultural and political biases or preferences by looking through these entries.  Collaboration tools like wikis across languages can help brands get a very focused idea about what a “neutral” point-of-view believes.

For large global brands like Nintendo, Coca Cola or Sony, organizations can begin to make observations across countries, languages and cultures as they look to bring products or services to new markets.  Jay presented a number of studies where Wikipedia in certain languages were broken up based on the type of content that they searched as well as the countries that searched within specific languages.  Undoubtedly, a corporation like Procter & Gamble or Pepsi could conduct similar types of studies on a more granular level.  Here are a few of the examples that the Wikimedia Foundation have put together from a macro-persepctive.

To take my Nintendo example one step further, the organization could look at how the company and its competitors are percieved across continents and languages.  Differences in opinions across games, genres, etc. could result in better content development and marketing campaigns.  Console decisions and strategy could be tweaked based on what certain groups look for out of gaming.  We are talking about research for marketing, strategy, sales and product development all through wiki analysis.

While we typically advise clients to use Social Media and wikis to manage their brand, I think there are some other very big implications of using wikis specifically.  By analyzing this level of data across wikis (which happen to have the advantage of being user-generated and social, while being seen as “neutral” through their unique crowd sourcing style model), a company can take advantage of global brand data that can help them make decisions across a number of topic areas in a very focused manner.

Out of all of the stories that have come out about social media being successful at driving sales and traffic, I think the most impressive has come from the travel industry.  From Jet Blue’s All You Can Jet promotion to Travelzoo and Fly.com’s Real Time Flight Deals, there is tangible and proven way to make serious sales from micro-blogging.

I think there’s a lot that other companies can learn from this, but you also need to be prepared.

• Be ready- The scary thing about viral messages is that they can have a lot of impact in a very short amount of time.  You are hoping for a great deal of interest, so make sure that your organization and online channels have the capacity to take on a heavy burst of activity.  If there’s distribution or marketing dollars on the line, think about how you would react if your social media initiative has legs… or even wings.
• Be selective – Not every deal needs to be advertised, so only send out deals that are going to generate A LOT of buzz.  You don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf for every little thing that your company does, otherwise you will surely see a drop-off in interest.  But at the same time, keep your audience engaged by sending out deals regularly so that they remember to watch for specials.
• Be proactive – Don’t wait until everyone else in your industry is sending out deals through Twitter.  This is the time to show a little innovation and leadership.  Think of new ways to engage your customers and followers so that you are the one leading the conversation.

This is permission marketing at its best.  Your company’s fans and customers have given you permission to give them great deals, and their friends in turn have given them permission to send through ideas and information that they think is valuable.  But it could be a lot, so it’s not just a random exercise in new media marketing.  This is the new way to market.  They have asked for the sale, so now it simply up to you and organization to close it.