On Fridays, the Atlantic Wire takes a look at weekly top movers in the Dachis Group Social Business Index. Each Monday, we dig a bit deeper to into ranking changes.

This week The Atlantic Wire discussed shifts in the SBI score from NBC Universal, Nike, and BMW. However, a number of other big brands were also on the move. Let’s take a closer look at the fall in score of two major retail companies.

Best Buy

Best Buy moved up seven places over the course of the last week, from 71 to 64 because consumers are still up in arms over a “holiday shipping snafu” that resulted in many last-minute online order cancellations. Many of said orders were placed during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when Best Buy offered aggressive promotions in an attempt to “lure customers back from rivals such as Amazon.” Unfortunately, the pricing strategy resulted in more online orders than the retailer was prepared to handle, and many consumers involved in the shipping drama did not receive their orders in time for Christmas.

In response, consumers made their dissatisfaction known on the brand’s social presences. A Facebook post from Christmas Day asked “What was the best gift you received this Christmas?” On December 28, the post was still getting comments along the lines of, “It would have been the Asus Transformer Prime however you morons have not shipped it to me yet,” and “A ASUS Tablet…OH wait I have not gotten it yet and don’t know if or when I will.” Many @Twelpforce responses during this period were in reference to shipping issues. Although the company issued a public apology, it appears that Best Buy continued with their regularly scheduled Facebook posts, never outright addressing the issue on its Facebook wall. As such, many of the comments from December 28-January 4 are from consumers still waiting on their items. Luckily for Best Buy, buzz around the shipping snafu is dying down and will soon be “so 2011.”

Kohl’s

Kohl’s fell 39 spots this week to #205 as the all-important shopping month of December came to a close. Kohl’s finished out the month with a flurry of content that has since slowed down significantly. Starting on Christmas Day, Kohl’s launched the Early Bird sale for their after Christmas Blitz & Clearance. While most companies went quiet for the day, Kohl’s decided to try and beat the after-Christmas sale rush and cut through the subsequent messaging clutter by brands on Facebook and Twitter.

Kohl’s stepped up their promotion of the After Christmas Blitz starting December 26th with persistent messages on the brand’s main social presences about the sale. In that same time period, Kohl’s offered a Twitter, Facebook, and email exclusive 20% off promotion, which was heavily reverberated in the social sphere. New Year’s Eve and onwards saw the retailer slow their content push as it’s messaging turned from promotional offers and links to less weighty content and community interaction. This drop-off in content and related buzz about Kohl’s led to the brand’s slide in the rankings this week.

The Social Business Index analyzes signals from over one hundred million social sources globally and measures effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ within social channels. To learn more, visit SocialBusinessIndex.com and follow @DGSBI on Twitter.

October

• YouTube Launches Politics (10/6): Looking for politicians’ platforms, blunders, and defining moments? Look no further than YouTube Politics, launched in the first week of October. Everything you need to keep track of who’s in the lead and who’s falling flat leading up to next year’s election.
• Foursquare Launches Radar (10/12): Radar is a sign of maturation rather than just an app update, and it includes several logical and useful mechanics for Foursquare users. The app will now notify you if you are near a To-Do, or if a place on a List that you follow is around the corner, or if several of your friends have just checked into the same place only minutes away. Makes sense, right? Oh, and they changed the dodgeball from purple to green; don’t freak out.
• Facebook for iPad (10/10): The Facebook iPad app was a long time coming, and it lives up to the billing. Chat, scroll through bigger photos, discover new messages, events, and more on the left-hand navigation bar, and find out what you need to know now with the new notification tray. That said, Facebook applications still aren’t functional through the app; updates to come, no doubt.
• X-Factor Enables Voting on Twitter (10/25): This award show certainly made social a key element in the voting aspect of the show. Fans could vote via DM to @TheXFactorUSA or through their Twitter social microsite, and they could join the conversation using the hashtag #XFactor. Another award show, the People’s Choice Awards 2012, would incorporate Twitter into their social activation on a larger-scale, as users simply had to tweet or retweet a nominee with their category hashtag. As live TV gets more interactive in social, the fans win.

November

• Twitter Launches Stories (11/1): On the first of November, Twitter launched their first installment of a new series called Stories, where they highlight different tales of Twitter helping people accomplish things in life, from saving a bookstore to selling a fish moments after it’s caught. Stories big and small can be submitted to Stories, and anyone can do it, simply by mentioning @twitterstories or including #twitterstories in a tweet. A nice way for Twitter to both humanize the brand and highlight real stories that showcase Twitter’s value.
• Groupon IPO (11/4): Groupon finally IPO’d early in November, following other players earlier in 2011, and initially was met with positive market reaction, followed by a slow decline. We’ll be following this one throughout 2012.
• Google+ Launches Pages (11/7): As most predicted, Google+ launched Pages in the middle of Q4, and they seem to borrow best practices from Facebook Pages, Twitter Profiles, and YouTube Channels. Anyone can create a Page, and businesses can put their best customers into circles and levels, host hangouts to launch new products or answer questions, and share new content with followers. As we said earlier this year, it will be really interesting to see how businesses leverage Google+ for B2B and intraB.
• Foursquare Launches Expertise Badges (11/14): Whether you see this move as a gimmick to keep folks interested in badges, or as a legitimate evolution of the badge system that Foursquare has perfected, there is no doubt that it’s fun to unlock badges. With the update, certain badges will display expertise levels as you visit more and more of those venue types. Get your badge game up!
• Foursquare Expands Deal Partnerships (11/29): Specials have given Foursquare an edge in 2011, as they continue to add new partners, this time with Scoutmob, and throughout the year with AmEx in June, Groupon in July, and others. Foursquare will continue to stay relevant and gain users as both Specials and consumers’ mobile buying habits mature in 2012.

December

• YouTube Gets a G+ and Facebook Facelift (12/1): YouTube gave itself a facelift in December, rolling out a Facebook-esque left-hand navigation, along with incorporating a newsfeed of Google+ +1′s and shares, in addition to YouTube uploads and likes. Twitter, Facebook, and Orkut integrations make the new YouTube a social video hub.
• Facebook Acquires Gowalla (12/2): Early in December, rumor had it that Facebook had acquired the location-sharing service, Gowalla. It seems that the Gowalla developer team will now work on Facebook’s Timeline feature, with some moving to the Palo Alto office and others moving to Facebook’s Austin office. A nice acquisition that certainly brings talented minds to Facebook so that it can further incorporate location in future updates.
• Twitter Announces Brand Pages (12/8): In the second week of the month, Twitter announced that they would be rolling out brand pages, similar to those on Facebook and now Google+. This seems almost like ‘too little, too late’ as Twitter feeds are easy to leverage and deploy elsewhere on more robust digital brand properties. That said, it seems like a good investment on their part and should give them more to offer to their advertising partners. More to come…
• Zynga IPO (12/15): Zynga opened mid-month with a very poor performance, as compared to the other tech company IPOs from 2011. Zynga’s business model is sound, and the poor showing may be more tech IPO exhaustion than anything else; however, we will definitely be watching this one closely throughout 2012.
• Facebook Timeline Rolls Out (12/15): One of the biggest changes during the quarter was saved until the last few weeks of the year, as Facebook unveiled Timeline to users’ profiles globally, followed quickly on 12/18 with the mobile roll-out. A massive change not just for users, but for agencies and developers, as ideas began swirling around on how best to leverage the new Timeline for brand integrations. Additionally, and more importantly, this was my birthday.

There you have it; the fourth quarter of 2011 in all it’s glory. Let’s wrap up with links to all of the major players’ summaries; take a look at the hot topics, watch some of the top videos from the year, and get cracking on your New Year’s resolutions.

• Facebook Memeology 2011
• Google Zeitgeist 2011
• YouTube 2011 Rewind
• Twitter 2011 #YearInReview
• 2011 Holiday Travels on Foursquare

Mobilizing Advocates
The key to being able to mobilize your most loyal community members is knowing who they are.  Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, or a private label community, one needs to be able to quantify who the most boisterous and influential members are, have the ability to segment and contact them, and mobilize them through programs that they find engaging and rewarding. At the current state of the industry, this is easier said than done, however, I’m confident that 2012 will bring with it new tools to further define and mobilize social influencers. But, the tools are only half of the equation. A company needs to have internal systems, processes, and programs in place to harness the power of its advocates.

Mobilizing Employees
Getting employees involved in driving company wide social efforts and amplifying social programs is a must for every company. As mentioned above, employees are a company’s most valuable resource, but how many global companies do you know that are truly mobilizing their employees to amplify their social programs? The reason is that most companies are not organized to do this. Companies are lacking the infrastructure and protocols to pull off a coordinated effort in mobilizing their workforce. For starters, every employee in the company should be aware of the company’s social efforts with access to a global calender of all upcoming programs, including program-specific asks of the employee. Moreover, employees need to be made aware and educated of the impact that the company’s social efforts have on the company’s bottom line and therefore their job and career opportunities as the company drives towards its objectives. I could go on and on with high level advice here, but I think you get the point. Imagine if a company such as Bank of America that has 100,000 active employees on Linkedin gets each employee to promote the launch of a new social program through their Linkedin feed. Or, what if every employee Likes the company’s official Facebook page. The reverberations of these two actions would be profound for a company with the scale of Bank of America.

The common thread in the above is that most companies are not organized in a way where they are able to take advantage of their most prized assets. At Dachis Group we’re organized as a social business and pour every ounce of our energy into helping the world’s leading companies become social businesses. Look to these two activations strategies to become starting points and table stakes for Fortune 500 and Global 1000 brands in 2012.

Now that we’ve had some time to absorb the changes in the space during Q3, let’s take a look back at the big announcements, compare the new landscape to the changes from the second quarter, and project what will have the most impact for Q4 of 2011. In a sentence, Facebook’s f8 developer conference contained more sweeping changes to the largest social platform (now 800 million users) since its launch in 2004.

July

• Twitter Town Hall @ White House (7/5): In July, the first ever Twitter Town Hall was hosted at the White House by President Obama, and tweeters could send in their questions using the hashtag #AskObama. Our President has always done a good job using social media to connect with and converse with voters – he and his staff were widely acclaimed for their use of social during their campaign three years ago – and this was another great example of the flattening effect that technology has on society, all the way up to the highest office in the land.
• Facebook Video Calling (7/6): When Facebook and Skype joined forces, we knew it was only a matter of time before regular text chat would turn into video chat, especially with Google+ Hangouts launching a month earlier. Usage numbers aren’t public, but the feature itself is quick to install, easy to use, and sleek in integration.
• Foursquare Redesign and Notification Tray (7/15): Foursquare made a couple plays during Q3, both to their web interface and to their mobile app. In this update, a new notification tray is unrolled to users, and is met with positive feedback. The tray simplifies and rolls up many of the processes that foursquare users had become accustom to, providing an experience with less friction and a smoother overall experience for surfacing relevant content.

August

• Foursquare Brand Pages Now Self-Serve (8/2): In early August, foursquare opened up the Brand Page creation process to businesses, making the process infinitely more scalable and increasing the value (via Page control) for businesses on the platform. To get started with your brand page, check out Foursquare: Create Page.
• Facebook Messenger (8/9): With the acquisition of Beluga, Facebook made a strong play into mobile messaging and released a stand-alone mobile app called Messenger. It integrates directly into your Facebook Messages, syncing conversations and surfacing the friends with whom you message the most. With over 350 million active users accessing Facebook via mobile, expect to see more attention given to the distribution channel from the largest social platform during Q4.
• Linkedin Launches New Mobile App (8/15): Linkedin launched a massive update to their mobile app that has people flocking to their respective app stores. The new UI has been met with praise, and it should result in a renewed interest in keeping abreast of your In network, at least for now.
• Targeting Your Sharing on Facebook (8/23): In an effort to make sharing and privacy more transparent with its 800 million users, Facebook began rolling out targeted sharing at the end of August. This allows users to post updates and content in three tiers, Public, Friends, and Custom (where you can target by List group), in addition to being able to pre-approve tags in photos and updates before they go live. Also, Facebook surfaced the View Profile As button, making it easier to see how your profile appears to any other user on Facebook. Overall, these changes are another step forward in gaining the trust of the masses.
• Mixi Launches Brand Pages (8/31): Japan’s largest social network, Mixi, with 23 million users, launched their version of brand pages at the tail end of August. Mixi isn’t Facebook, but it will be interesting to see how brands decide to leverage programs and campaigns back and forth between the two platforms.

September

• Facebook Subscribe and Changes to Newsfeed (9/20): Pre-f8, Facebook rolled out several important structural changes that took aim at some nice functionality that already existed outside of the platform. The Subscribe button was introduced, which essentially allows you to receive a person’s status updates in your newsfeed, like and comment on them, without being connected to them as friends. Take that, Twitter. Then Facebook rolled out Smart Lists, which segments your friends into groups, which then allows you to dictate both what you share with them and what gets shared with you, and upgraded the ticker to display a real-time stream of activity across your social graph. Take that, Google+.
• Share Photos on Twitter via SMS (9/21): Right before f8, Twitter introduced SMS photo sharing. Some may ask, why are upgrades being rolled out for SMS in Q3 of 2011? The significance is that there is still much of the world where smart phones aren’t as pervasive, but where users still need to connect and share. A picture is worth a thousand words, and as global new sources like CNN increasingly source the ‘public journalist,’ photos take center stage when breaking global events, be they natural disasters or political upheavals.
• Facebook Timeline (9/22): In September, Facebook began unleashing feature changes and upgrades, and everything came to a head at f8 with the introduction of Timeline, which represents a new lens on the user profile page, largely unchanged since it’s inception. Timeline also represents an enormous opportunity for brands, as they now have the ability to weave themselves into the fabric of consumers lives with utility and entertainment like never before. For more on this, check out Paradigm Shift for Brands on Facebook.
• Google+ Membership Climbs (9/26): Reported in late September was the continued growth of the nacent social network, Google+, and how it was primed to take over significant market share from other players and, most importantly, Facebook. Then people seemed to realize that nobody else was there. Hindsight is 20/20 so we’ll see what happens with Google+ in Q4, especially with the roll out of brand pages and functionality.
• Foursquare Global Hackathon Winners Announced (9/28): On the heels of f8 was the announcement of the foursquare global hackathon winners. The winning applications were focused on utility and social good and, if anything, show that there are still rich developer communities outside of Facebook. That said, with the advent of tagging locations and new apps that allow for User, Action, Object functionality, will folks continue to use foursquare when it means they can only checkin to a place, when on Facebook, you can checkin to a place, be reading a book, be hiking a trail, and be cooking a dish (hopefully not all at the same time)?

f8 truly changed the direction of all players in the space, from Google+ privacy advantages, to foursquare checkins, to Twitter follower functionality. Now that Facebook has surpassed the number of users that the entire Internet had in 2004, and with the fact that they are dictating the structure of the landscape with such sweeping changes, should we consider the Facebook Platform the ‘new’ web?

Did we miss any major updates from Q3? Link us to them in the comments!

1. The stats

• Twitter has 100 million active users. Over 600,000 new accounts are added daily.
• Not everyone tweets; 40% of users just listen. They’re seeing one billion tweets produced every 4.5 days.
• Over half of Twitter’s active user base is on mobile. Enhancements like the upcoming iOS5 integration will drive further mobile usage along with overall user base growth. It’s a bit premature to think that Facebook will become the web.

2. You need to plan.

Twitter offers three paid products: Promoted Tweets, Trends, and Accounts. Using these effectively requires a bit more than throwing some budget out there to see what clicks. Campaign integration is key to making spend work and brands need to plan ahead to maximize value.

For example, let’s say you sponsor a big sporting event and assume you already have a Twitter account.

Preparing for your event, you’ll want to build your follower base – this number constitutes your initial reach, the bigger the better. Promoted Accounts help build your base and Twitter’s research shows that these followers are stickier than organic follows. Offline, you should be promoting your Twitter handle in stores and on packaging and other portable materials that consumers can take with them and look you up later.

Leading up to your event, you should be engaging with your ecosystem on an ad-hoc basis to drive organic impressions. In addition, your content calendar should drive conversation topics and you can use Promoted Tweets to target messages to specific demographics, driving customer acquisition. Although consumers always love to hate advertising, research shows that Promoted Tweets don’t spur higher unfollow rates than other tweet types. You should be tracking and optimizing message efficacy, monitoring elements like content and daypart.

On the day of your event, you’ll want to use a Promoted Trend to drive traffic. The text of that tweet should contain a link leading to a monetizable consumer action. Brands need to plan ahead on this one, as inventory is limited and can sell out. The last thing you want is a competitor purchasing a key hashtag that diverts attention away from you – think about how Pizza Hut generated massive social media attention during the last Super Bowl despite Papa John’s position as official sponsor.

The infrastructure to support all of this includes a communications workflow and trained staff to support consumer engagement before, during, and after your event. Links that you include in messages should facilitate tracking, whether through URL shortener, landing page, or other method, ideally integrated with your existing analytics platform.

This advice might seem familiar, even too simple for some. But many brands still approach Twitter as a domain limited to 1-1 direct engagement, missing opportunities for valuable one-to-many reach. Increasing brand awareness on Twitter takes more than “let’s get retweeted by someone with a lot of followers.” Instead, brands should plan on channel integration to maximize advertising investments.

Technology of any kind isn’t very useful to us unless it’s put to work. This is where one of the most interesting new parts of the social media landscape has been forming, namely in the new field of social business intelligence. This is the discipline of monitoring the whole of the social media world while continuously deriving insight from the aspects of it that matter to you, strategically or tactically, depending on your needs. I say aspects instead of conversations, because while analytics will give us useful metrics, it’s only until we apply the lens of business intelligence to the data itself can we clearly see the deeper and larger scale implications for our businesses.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of blur between social analytics and social business intelligence. They’re both relatively nascent fields that have plenty of overlap. So where social analytics is about the measurement and data mining of the social universe for any reason, social business intelligence is concerned with a more holistic process aimed at specific business outcomes, depicted conceptually in the visual below.

To be sure, there are many different flavors of social business intelligence just as there are many reasons why organizations will want to create business processes around the feedback loop that forms. Currently, many of the processes involved are manual and ad hoc as the industry has felt its way forward and learned how to engage more meaningfully with social media. A few companies on the leading edge have increasingly formal social business intelligence processes based on sets of capabilities they’ve acquired or built. Other firms have hardly any technology at all, other than perhaps some reports and spreadsheets.

They are all seeking the same thing however: To pinpoint the opportunities and identify the events that matter most to them so they can engage. The actual response to social business intelligence insights will vary entirely based on what is learned. It can be strategic and affect how the companies evolves its products and services or the way it engages in entirely new and innovative ways with customers. Or just as likely, it’s on-the-ground insight that drives individual interaction or collaboration with prospects, customers, business partners, and others whose current and past activities social media have been identified as important.

Developing your social business intelligence capability will be a journey that will have stages, like any other process of development. For most organizations, it’s just a set of experiments at the moment. But over time, with hard-won lessons learned, it will become more formal and institutionalized. Usually too soon, the question of centralization will come up, since it’s often one of the experiments in a particular corner of the organization or another that will have significant success. It almost certainly will be asked if it makes sense to share this best practice and locate it in the social business unit or other centralized social media management capability. For now, encouraging decentralized experimentation is more important than achieved the economies of scale, since local successes are rarely likely to meet the whole organization’s needs. What’s most important is making as many discoveries as possible about what works and what doesn’t.

Right now we are tracking a rapidly growing and expanding set of providers of social business intelligence. Products like Radian6, Kontagent, and SAS Social Media Analytics are just three examples out of many of social analytics tools that also provide some level of deeper social business intelligence features. Over the next few years, there will be numerous entrants into this space, as well as additions to existing social media services, as the industry as a whole learns the ways that companies can turn their social engagement with the world into real opportunity and value.

Often starting as a secondary requirement of early social media monitoring and listening efforts, for now, these are the leading drivers behind social business intelligence capabilities:

Drivers of Social Business Intelligence

• Marketing Optimization. Marketing has long been an early adopter of social media, and it’s no different with social business intelligence. Now instead of reports and dashboards that merely show the what, marketers can find out the why. With social business intelligence, companies can craft much more detailed yet fully integrated qualitative pictures of the inbound funnel, identify why engagement strategies are working or not, and organize systematic, yet mass-customized responses in scale.
• Capturing Ideas and Unmet Needs. Going beyond the trend analysis of analytics allows the processing and isolation of the deeper implications of social media activity. Social business intelligence can capture innovation, new ideas from the marketplace, identify customer wants and desires, and identify the gaps in your organization’s services.
• Situational Awareness. Identifying and tracking the top trends, understanding when critical situations arise to protect customer experience or brand, and much more. Going well beyond low-level analytics, social business intelligence can help make sense of more data than any manual or raw analytic process ever could.
• Customer Care Opportunities. Fully empowering Social CRM, social business intelligence can augment the interaction with customers in social media by improving the triage, prioritization, and resolution process of customer care.
• Sentiment Analysis. While social analytics can provide some basic insight into a customer’s state of mind, only more sophisticated methods can semantically process and assess the actual meaning of the social media conversations involving your company or its products in order to derive actionable insight.

As I pointed out recently, the focus of your social business intelligence efforts will be rooted deeply in business-specific motivations, thus these are just a small sample of the ways organizations will employ the capability. To give you a better sense of the possibilities I will explore specific examples of companies employing the strategies above successfully in upcoming posts.

What does all this mean for you now? In my opinion, it’s virtually certain at this point that social business intelligence will become a vital component of the way that companies derive bottom-line benefits from social media including revenue growth, innovation, cost reduction, and more successful line-of-business operations. So connect to the world, start your experiments, and start learning how to make it work for you.

This week I’ve spent a lot of time looking at one of the next frontiers of social business, the intersection of application software and social networks. As I examined on ebizQ, the next app you use is increasingly likely to be inside a consumer social network such as Facebook or LinkedIn (no solid word yet on how Google+ apps will work.) This trend is also moving into the enterprise as social apps have started becoming available in Enterprise 2.0 platforms, as I recently looked at in detail with Jive Software’s Apps Market for their popular social business platform.

Social applications are increasingly proving to be an effective way to direct community-based activity into useful directions and social networks are a natural home for them. By providing application experiences within the users current social context, applications can lightly structure or orchestrate collaborative behavior at useful outcomes. Driving outcomes like this have proven effective across virtually all the departments and functions of the modern organization.

However, as ripe with potential to reap meaningful ROI from social networking, social apps are just one intriguing examples of the overall evolution of social business. The big picture has been growing clearer in the recent years, even as the landscape keeps moving, as companies have learned to update their digital strategies with social business and begin to genuinely apply what we now understand as the truly transformative power of social media to how they run their businesses.

A Four Step View of Social Business Maturity

The social business ladder, when dealing with the connection of an organization to the broader external marketplace, can be said to have four major steps. Organizations typically start by trying to drive the world to their online presence, a clear extension of their Web sites and typically consists of the addition of blogs, customer discussion forums, and other basic social features. This is effective and useful, to a point, but it’s limited to basic information discovery, high-level awareness, brand messaging, and communication. It is also typically the purview of just one part of an organization, usually corporate communications and/or marketing.

However, companies typically realize there is much more to the social business story than basic social media. They then reach for the second rung of the ladder: Going to the world. This was made easier by large global social networks like Facebook and Twitter — as well as regional social networks in countries where these two market leaders have stiff competition. Driving the market to a social media presence on a corporate Web site is hard work, expensive, and limited in effectiveness compared to just going directly to where the world already is. The second rung is about building reach, establishing network effects, and connecting within the social channels that almost everyone already uses. This is a much more scalable and effective approach and is exemplified by Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and decentralized badges and Like buttons that connect an organization’s content and experiences that are elsewhere on the Web back into the world’s main social ecosystems.

Going to the world is powerful expansion in the way of thinking about and applying social business, but it’s just halfway there. More mature organizations have figured out how to more deeply engage the world via social business by greatly “turning the knob to the right” in how they listen, analyze, and engage. Scale is the name of the game when companies progress to the third rung of social business maturity. Listening to and understanding where all the important conversations are, tapping into them in a timely fashion, systematically understanding their implications to the organization, and ensure that appropriate responses, from simple information returns to complex marketplace collaboration, take place. All of this drives better decisions and results across all lines of business. The list of areas that benefit from engaging with the world including sales, marketing, innovation, hiring, support, operations, supply chain, and more.

Most companies are on the first two rungs and some companies are now on the third rung of this social business ladder. A few companies however, are progressing to what appears to be the next and most advanced level. This stage of social business is the most transformative of all and the natural outcome of the relentless blur that I hear about from more and more C-level executives as they witness the boundaries of their organization changing under the relentless pressure of the new, often highly social, ways that workers and customers use technology to connect with each other. The broad changes that businesses are experiencing are extensive yet they are also looking to be one of the most rewarding ways that we have to enlist the creative and productive output of the global population in rebuilding and growing our businesses. Businesses are asking “What will power next-generation enterprises?” A large part of the answer lies with mature social business approaches on the right side of the chart above. I’ll be looking at some of the more significant implications in the fourth rung in upcoming posts.

How Do Organizations Get There?

To get there, the enterprises of the very near future will have to be more visionary in an on-the-ground and effective way than they are today. As IBM’s Sandy Carter pointed out recently, based on her many conversations, there’s still work to do to communicate that social business involves far more than just PR or marketing. It requires engagement by the entire organization. McKinsey also recently underscored the inverse point, that “we’re all marketers now“, just further proving the point that we’re all much more involved in everything now as business activities become far more connected. In the end, the companies that can manage risk well while enabling their own disruption by climbing the social business maturity curve will be best situated to take advantage of the very significant and measurable benefits.

Where are you on the frontier of social business and why?

While the majority of notable first quarter 2011 changes in the social space originated from Facebook – from the launch of Facebook Deals and Questions to the shift from FBML to iFrame – this past quarter’s shifts were more balanced across the landscape, and as the months progressed from Spring to Summer, the changes got more dramatic, with the climax occurring in the final days of June. Let’s take a look back at the social landscape from Q2 2011 so we can paint a picture of what Q3 has in store.

April

• YouTube Live (4/8): While YouTube is the largest source of video on the web, live streaming was not in the repertoire until April, when YouTube Live launched. Initially open to only a few beta partners, YTL hasn’t seemed to pick up much traction, and in competing with already well established players like Ustream, Justin.tv, and Livestream, they will need to make a big push in the second half of 2011 if YouTube Live wants to be relevant in the streaming space.
• Facebook Safety Tools Upgrade (4/19): In mid-April Facebook released an upgrade of their safety toolset which contained two main improvements. For one, new Two Factor Authentication would, if enabled, ask a user for a code any time they access their account from a new device, to prevent unauthorized access to the account. The second improvement deals with HTTPS and third-party applications; now whenever a user exits a non-HTTPS certified application, they will revert to HTTPS as soon as they leave the experience.
• Facebook Deals (4/26): Unlike Checkin Deals, regular Deals are akin to Groupon or LivingSocial in that you’re offered up local specials that are easily shared with friends; and because the user is already within Facebook, the idea is that sharing and planning of the experience among friends will be much more seamless than doing it on a third-party site. Deals was released in beta in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco, with plans to launch nationally.

May

• Foursquare and Starwood Hotels (5/10): In early May, Starwood Hotels partnered with foursquare to plug checkins into their existing Starwood Preferred Guest program so that users could earn points, participate in giveaways, and unlock rewards like extended stays. This was one of the first executions of incorporating an existing loyalty program with foursquare, and others like Heineken, Vons, American Express have followed suite since. Look for more legacy reward programs to integrate geo-location, either with foursquare or with Facebook Places.
• Twitter Permissions Process Update (5/17): Twitter took steps in the middle of the month to make the permissions process for third-party applications a bit more transparent for users. The specific changes included removing existing apps’ ability to DM users (permission was revoked and the apps had to request again), all new apps having to specifically ask for DM permissions, and a more detailed permissions screen that spells out each item that the app will have access to and each ability that will be enabled. These changes shouldn’t have a huge impact on the user or brands on Twitter, but it does boost the security and goodwill of the platform.
• Twitter TweetDeck acquisition (5/25): In the last week of May, Twitter acquired London-based TweetDeck from Iain Dodsworth, allowing them to provide an in-house power tool for their super users. It’s not uncommon for social platforms to purchase small third-party technology shops to build out their core services; sometimes, it’s just more cost effective than allocating the internal resources.
• Twitter Follow Button (5/31): Twitter’s biggest new feature of Q2 was the Follow Button, a response to the Facebook like button, and was initially released on 51 partner sites including MTV, IMDB, Sports Illustrated, Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Adding the follow button to your site is now very easy, and no brand with a Twitter presence should be without several across their digital properties (brand site, ecomm site, Facebook page, etc.). The more that Twitter can engrain itself across the web, as Facebook has done, the more likely it will be around for years to come.

June

• Twitter Search+Photos (6/1): Hours after the Twitter button was released, Twitter also announced an innovation in photos; users are now able to attached photos to tweets from Twitter.com and from the official mobile app, and are able to search for photos either via hashtag or via username. An example of a third method of innovation – rather than acquiring a tech shop or fully developing the capability in-house – Twitter partnered with Photobucket for media hosting, and has given TwitPic and yFrog something to think about, going forward. That said, Instagram has given everyone something to think about when it comes to creativity in photosharing.
• YouTube Creative Commons (6/2): YouTube hasn’t been a frequent innovator over the past number of quarters, but this update is subtle in its significance. Users are now able to add Creative Commons video clips (think B-roll) to their own videos to make them more robust. This goes with the true spirit of the social web, and it’s great that YouTube is embracing the Creative Commons the same way that Flickr has in the past.
• Foursquare and AmEx (6/23): Toward the end of June, foursquare and AmEx announced a massive partnership on a scale seemingly larger than the aforementioned Starwood Hotels Preferred Guest program. With AmEx foursquare specials, users simply link their credit card and foursquare accounts, checkin at a participating national chain – of which H&M and Sports Authority were the trailblazers – and click “load to card” and the special will appear on your next statement. This will present a massive opportunity for brands for the remainder of 2011, both on foursquare and using Facebook Places. The name of the game is seamless user interaction, and foursquare and AmEx have nailed it here.
• Google and Google+ Rollout (6/28): The biggest announcement, perhaps of the year thus far, and most certainly of Q2 was the rollout of Google’s new social network, Google+. Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts are some of the first features rolled out, and definitely address some of the issues that have plagued other social networks, namely Facebook, specifically in regards to privacy. Google has taken steps to re-examine privacy, collaboration, and sharing, and has put out a product that should have true staying power, unlike some of their other extinct ventures like Wave and the Nexus phone. The most exciting part about G+ is going to be the rollout in the second half of the year for business accounts and profiles.

Looking forward to a Q3 jam-packed with updates and new features from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the top players in the social landscape. Did we miss any major updates from Q2? Link us to them in the comments!

It pays in the long run to think strategically about how you think your organisation, service or product will go about getting, maintaining and ultimately amplifying the attention of the individuals who choose to engage with you. Even brands or services that command widespread recognition in their own right still need to work creatively on maintaining the attention of their followers (for example, look at these case studies from Archrival | Dachis Group and Stuzo | Dachis Group).

While the cost of entry and experimentation with social media is considered to be low, nothing is ever completely free – failed attempts at customer engagement online take their toil in wasted effort and political goodwill from internal sponsors. In some cases you might have even gone as far as engaging a contractor or digital agency to implement your social media channel. But all this will be wasted if you don’t have the attention of the right people. I use the word ‘attention’ in a tactical sense. People can’t follow or like you if they don’t know you exist. But they won’t continue to follow you if you don’t maintain that attention.

Getting, maintaining and amplifying attention in a business-to-business context is different again, because organisations don’t follow other organisations; the people in those organisations have to make this choice on behalf of their organisation.

You may not even realise that you have lost someone’s attention – if you are lucky, they will post negative feedback or even stop following you. But they might also just filter you out – they’ve stopped reading the news or following the links you post. They are effectively disengaged, but still apparently following you.

However, attention also comes in many forms. For some the need is pure utility, others a sense of membership or community, it could be the chance of an offer or a deal, or even the chance to participate in something bigger than themselves. Sometimes it might just be for fun. For some brands, attention means attracting hundreds of thousands of followers; for other organisation it may be enough to attract the attention of the media or other key stakeholders. For example, we expect a global brand to gain widespread attention, but a small boutique brand only needs to nurture the attention of a loyal group of discerning customers. But in all cases understanding the reason for attention is critical, as is making sure your call for attention is in the right place.

To quote Clay Shirky, you need to offer:

a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users.

Of course, this may still not be enough to get what everyone desires: viral attention. Its quite likely you will need to integrate with other promotional, advertising and marketing channels. At the other end of the customer participation chain, also don’t forget to integrate other aspects of the customer experience, such as customer service and sales. Remember, this isn’t just your conversation – don’t be surprised if people talk back or ask unexpected questions. Drop the ball in any aspect of your online engagement and you risk losing the attention credibility you’ve worked so hard to earn and maybe a loyal customer or supporter.

There are many different reasons why someone will follow or your like you organisation. Make sure you understand exactly:

• Why you deserve their attention.
• How you will maintain it.
• What needs to be done to integrate the customer experience, including advertising, sales and customer service.

This post originally appeared on the Dachis Group | Headshift blog.

By: Nicole On Yoo Chung @NicoleOYChung

Due to the downturn in the economy and the rippling shifts in consumer priorities, companies must be more aware of the multiple primary forces that influence a brand’s power. Business is rapidly changing, but the principles of powerful brands still stay the same. Interbrand is the world’s largest brand consultancy that annually ranks brands according to the financial performance of the branded products or services, the role of brand in the purchase decision process, and the strength of the brand. Interbrand’s brand strength components have undergone an update for 2010 to better reflect the factors that are reshaping the marketplace. These factors now include proliferation of social media, which underlines the growth of social media over the last couple years. The rise of social media gives brands new opportunities to promote their presence, and establish their brands in the market. Due to the growth of the technology, most of the communications happen on the web now.  Companies listen to consumers to better understand their needs, advertise their new products, and host events or contests to effectively stay engaged with their fans. Consumers share their thoughts about a company or a product, ask questions, gain access to discounts or offers, and share their love for a company. By using multiple platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and mobile applications, brands are able to create a strong and consistent online presence.

Best Global Brands is Interbrand’s annual report on the world’s top 100 most valuable brands. It offers insights into how the top 100 global organizations create and manage brand value. Every company that is on the list for 2010 deserves that spot due to outstanding financial performance, the role the brand plays in its industry, overall brand strength, and principles such as responsiveness and presence that play into each of the factors. There is no single factor that alone determines a brand’s worth. Every brand has a unique strategy of appealing to its fans and each sector shares commonalities while maintaining its own way of attracting customers.

It is extremely important for a brand to have a strong presence on social channels nowadays. A brand must be responsive, authentic, and innovative in order to attract new fans and maintain existing fans. Coca-Cola embodies these principles which explains why the company is ranked number one and has maintained that spot for the past eleven consecutive years. It seems as though Coca-Cola is doing everything right. Coca-Cola has been around since 1886, and its brand is continuously evolving while maintaining its original fun and fresh image. Coca-Cola’s fans have a deep connection to the brand due to its long history and deep social platforms where customers can actively engage with the brand. For such a large brand, Coca-Cola has been flexible and has quickly adapted to the rapidly changing market, including a quick adoption of social media. The Coca-Cola company has over 31 million fans on Facebook and 307,000 followers on Twitter as of June 2011. It has one of the most active and engaging fan pages, and Coca-Cola maintains the pages by interacting with its fans through events and innovative applications. Since Coca-Cola is an everyday consumption product, I believe staying outwardly social is critical for the company’s success and it is doing a phenomenal job sustaining its external social presence.

A brand’s online social presence can be shown both externally and internally. Depending on the readiness of a company, it can work to have social aspects woven internally into the company, while maintaining external social presences. A company doing this well, IBM, has second place on the Best Global Brands list. In 2010, IBM began to introduce and implement social media strategies into its infrastructure. Since it belongs to the “business services” sector, it is important for the company to maintain the business to business relationships and build a strong community within the company, leading it to be internally social. Its corporate blog serves an important role in establishing and maintaining a strong community. It encourages peer-to-peer interactions through active interest groups and communities. Topics are organized into categories making them easy to find, provides compelling content, and the company hosts events to engage new and existing fans. The social nature of this blog help IBM communicate more effectively with both employees and customers.

Due to the fast growth of technology and shifting trends, one of the most important principles a company should follow is to think ahead and learn to tailor itself to the changing market. If a company fails to do so, without a doubt, it is going to fall behind quickly. Last year’s biggest victim, according to Interbrand’s list, was Harley-Davidson. Harley-Davidson showed a rapid decline in brand value over the past three years. From 2009 to 2010, its brand value fell 24%, and its ranking fell from 73 to 98. The decline was caused by a myriad of factors, one being the recession, another being the negative press and social buzz from fans due to the fact that the new CEO does not ride a Harley. This is an instance that proves how social media can deeply influence a huge company like Harley-Davidson.

The rankings of the Best Global Brands have been showing significant changes over the past couple years. These changes are important, as they indicate what critical shifts have occurred in the market. In order to better reflect new market influencers, the rankings factor in the proliferation of social media. It is significant for a company to realize that its success must now incorporate online presences as exemplified by Coca-Cola and IBM, and ideally, a company’s presences should be both external and internal. Most of the top 100 companies are doing a great job already, but in order for them to stay on top, they need to leverage social platforms to increase brand awareness and establish themselves as trusted experts in the industry. It is significant to realize the consequences of shortsighted decision-making and strive to conquer challenges while thinking ahead of the game. Only companies that are able to operate innovatively, have an inherent social ingredient, and learn to tailor themselves to rapidly changing market trends will survive.

Attached link is the spreadsheet of Interbrand’s 100 Best Global Brands and their online presences on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. How will these rankings change in 2011? Which brands do you think will still remain on this list? Which new brands will enter, and which brands will be eliminated?

http://www.dachisgroup.com/PDFs/best-global-brands.pdf ]]> http://www.dachisgroup.com/2011/07/social-media%e2%80%99s-growing-impact-on-the-top-global-brands/feed/ 1