Step in the Social Reward Program – a Reward program that is developed from the ground up to be a fun and engaging experience for consumers.  Basic asks of social marketing programs such as Liking, Sharing and Friending should be core components of every Reward program.  Moreover, Reward programs are a natural fit for game mechanics – points, levels, rewards, and leaderboards – which, when combined with the social graph and social actions, can be turned into a fun experience that consumers want to engage with.  Add to the mix standard Reward program purchase asks and mobile actions such as check-ins and you have yourself a powerful Social Reward Program.  Just as Facebook is prevalently becoming the hub and is outperforming as a channel for digital marketing campaigns, so should Facebook become the hub of Social Reward Programs.

For organizations such as Coca-Cola that have a legacy Rewards program–My Coke Rewards–making the move to a Social Reward Program presents challenges and benefits similar to moving legacy IT infrastructure into the cloud.  For companies that are considering developing a Reward program from the ground up, a Social Reward Program with Facebook serving as the hub of the program is the way to go.  Like sugar adds sweetness to strawberries, the social graph and game mechanics add goodness to Reward programs.

Peter Fasano is a Dachis Group engagement manager with deep experience in making social business work for big brands. Like The Coca-Cola Company.

Peter’s panel proposal is In the Hive – Activating Business Social Graphs. Let me know if this sounds familiar:

The state of now for you is a game of whack-a-mole. You are looking for a future state of scalability for you, your team and your business. Social Media Marketing, Servicing or Communications has matured through your enterprise and so must your integrated approach to becoming a socially calibrated business. Your internal band of rockstar marketers, service agents or PR teams have risen from the early days of passionate workers and social media hobbyists to the formal or informal social media leadership of your organization.

You have engaged your community on nights and weekends to meet their growing demands and growing numbers. Your social outposts have grown to include private or public communities, social networking sites, blogs and the works. Your communities are diverse and have moved from self-policed to moderated. Communities have moved beyond your “official outposts” to Twitter posts, blogs, or YouTube channels about your business – to keep up with the growing voices you have now activated Listening Services to keep track of conversation on your “owned” social outlets and then to the “outside” voices. Your efforts have earned additional resources and the attention of the Marketing or PR teams that want to push messages through status updates.

Has the organic collection of people, process and technology reached its limits?

Peter’s panel will address these questions:

1. Does your org chart map to your knowledge chart?
2. How to identify and map your knowledge centers?
3. What are the incentives needed to activate your business graph?
4. How do you optimize information flow through the enterprise?
5. What is the business justification for this resource shift?

To learn more, give a thumbs up to In the Hive – Activating Business Social Graphs.

Like kids with full bags of Halloween candy, we’re impulsively reacting to what can be measured without thinking about what should be measured and how. Our obstacle is our gut. We rely on it at the cost of validity… enduring value for a business.

As far as I can tell, there are three major opportunities that could improve the situation, unlocking the value of conversations and other social interactions. But first, we have to overcome some very basic human tendencies:

1. The ease of counts
We’re human, so ease and simplicity reign. This leads us to prioritize basic counts, things like the volume of tweets and re-tweets. Counts are often good shortcuts, but they masquerade as much as they reveal. We so easily feel pride when our own Tweets rake in the love without realizing the incestuous network centrality: we’re all telling each other the same news. The beckoning opportunity is to analyze the structural patterns now at our fingertips with massive and varied social graphs. Simply put, patterns are better indicators than counts.

2. The shine of the surface
We’re attracted to shiny, superficial objects. For example, when measuring blogs, we think about ‘brand mentions’ or how many comments there are. Our focal point is what’s vivid. The opportunity is the depth: the style with which people discuss brands, the memes that emerge through unique semantic associations. Simple tricks, focusing analysis on slightly more invisible cues like pronoun use tell us how intimate someone is with a brand. Looking at correlations and clusters of words based on frequency and uniqueness reveal the guts of a text: the themes that are really being discussed.

3. The convenience of snapshots
We’re obsessed with snapshots. We fixate on how things are, not how they’re changing or where they’re going. Rarely do we take the time to appreciate time; time series, trends, in-the-moment measurement. Aggregates are typically not as revealing as precise peaks and valleys; asking someone to report what they’ve accomplished at the end of the day will never be as nuanced (or accurate) as asking them in the moment, throughout the day, not to mention collecting the data without asking. Opportunity knocks with real-time, in-situ measures. Measuring momentum and identifying cycles will better highlight the social dynamic. Interactions aren’t static, so their measurements shouldn’t be either.

To move beyond what we’re doing today and embrace what can be done, we need to agree there are wholly different types of data available and measurement techniques involved. We need to abandon some traditional standards and stop forcing social data into shapes and sizes that work for other media measurement. Tomorrow is about patterns, depth, and dynamic metrics.

Speak up if you’re having trouble quantifying the value of social interactions. We’re here to provide solutions to all these gaps so that more meaningful measurement can help our clients capture the value of social business. Tell us about your challenges below and subscribe to this feed to keep the conversation going.

If you’re at Enterprise 2.0 today, stop by my panel on Social Analytics, moderated by my colleague, Jevon MacDonald. Margaret Francis of Scout Labs, Timo Elliott of SAP, and Tim Young of Socialcast will be talking through themes similar to the above (Twitter #e2conf-31).