Social Media Friday is a time when we get together, share links, talk about recent trends, informative sites and current news about social media.

Here is a look at last week’s links:

Election Day Links:
Dominos Pizza Tracker Takes Political Poll (Republicans order specialty pizzas)

Celebrities work on viral video to “Get out the vote”

Twitter site we users can report voter lines, times, and snafus in real time

Social News:
Ever wish the headlines had a sense of humor? Fark news delivers the news with snarky glee and a forum to make your own comments on the day’s events

Delicious Popular offers the most popular items bookmarked today.  While it is a mix of different things, it’s a bit heavy on programming and design

Keeping track of the most tweeted Urls: Twitturly

Sphin, a social new site for the SEO and Search Marketing Crowd

Twingly, blog search that allows feeds of search terms, this one is for “social media”

Companies in social media:
Pepsi Launches a New Social Media Campaign a gets some constructive criticism

GM’s Social Media News Room shows off blog press release, high-res flickr photos and corporate tweets:

IBM’s Center for Social Software opens news doors for creating collaborate software and research

HP’s Social Computing Lab offers up their research on crowd sourcing, incentive design and other social media topics

Microsoft builds new interdisciplinary research center in New England

Converseon is proud to play a leading role in such a significant event with industry leaders tackling the important topic ‘Transforming Research, Are You Listening?’. Research and listening strike to the core of our business at Converseon through our Conversation Mining technology and our team looks forward to sharing and learning from such an intelligent group.

The event’s website does a great job of outlining the objectives of the forum:

On July 15, 2008, magic happened at the ARF.  A meeting of industry thought leaders was convened, rather innocently, to discuss a subject growing in importance for marketers. That subject was “listening” to the millions of organic online conversations that go on each day among consumers about brands, companies, products and services.

The 15 industry leaders that participated reflected the importance of the topic. They included leaders from P&G, General Mills, Nielsen, ESPN, Millward Brown, Unilever, Avenue A Razorfish, Digitas and others.

The day began with an exploration of new tools to enable intelligent listening and the application of the insights gleaned, but the group realized that they were onto something much bigger than a new toolkit. In fact, they were onto an organizational transformation built around the concept of listening – a new vision for the research function.

The group heard comments like “research as we know it will be on life support by 2012”…”80% of research is about testing and validation and much of that is wasted”…”research can code the meaning out of a response”…

This Industry Leader Forum will open up the discussion of this topic to another 100 invited industry leaders. The day will include a keynote address from Kim Dedeker of P&G; listening case histories from General Mills and Unilever; and breakout sessions focused on the how to leverage listening to build your brand including topics like:

• How to listen
• How to be sure that what you are hearing can be acted upon with confidence
• How to measure the impact of the action you take based on your listening insights.

Rob and Mike will be leading a breakout session entitled ‘Creating a Listening Organization’ in the afternoon, if you’re in attendance it should be a great one to attend. If you’re not an invited guest at the event you can follow both our Converseon and Mike Moran’s Twitter streams for updates.

Recently one of our own, Paull Young, turned his birthday into a social media experiment to raise money for charity:water a group working to provide clean water in Ethiopia.

The purpose of this experiment was not only to raise money for a good cause, but also to gauge the amount of leverage Paull could exert over his social network.

Why is this experiment important?

One of our biggest challenge in social media consulting and marketing is connecting conversation and relationships to action and ROI. The more we work to understand what types of relationships have the most potential for action, the better we can prove our impact.

Paull’s Method:

Tracking: By using Bit.ly Paull was able to track the number and sources of clicks to his charity page.
Communication: Paull used his Facebook status to make his friends aware of charity efforts when they came to his profile page to wish him happy birthday. Secondly, he used Twitter, on his birthday and the days following his birthday, to talk about the charity, his efforts and to spur greater action.

What were Paull’s Results?

Paull raised $1,240 for clean water in Ethiopia in the month of September. By looking at the statistics provided by bit.ly Paull was able to track how many people clicked on his link and where each of them came from.

Paull got:

• 101 clicks from Twitter
• 39 clicks from Facebook30 clicks from his blog

He received:

• $530 from his blog
• $325 from his personal contacts (i.e. people not on Twitter or Facebook)
• $302 from his Twitter friends
• $10 from a friend on Facebook (curiously, he met this person on Twitter)

If you do the math you can calculate the dollar amount Paull received per click:

• On his blog each click was worth $17.66
• On Twitter each click was worth (almost) $3
• On Facebook each click represented $0.25

Paull’s Takeaways

The greatest action comes from the people that you have the best relationships with.  These are people that you have relationships with in the real word, co-workers and close friends.

Although Facebook has a much great potential for visibility it has weaker relationships: 77 people left Paull a Facebook wall comments saying happy birthday, 39 of them clicked through to his charity page and only 1 donated.

Twitter allowed for a more active visibility.  On Facebook he could only change his status. Twitter allowed him to create a constant reminder updating his tweets nearly 20 times to remind people of the opportunity.
A bigger network = bigger results - Pete Cashmore of Mashable joined Paull in his charity efforts and was able to raise more than three times Paull’s amount.

For a more in depth look at Paull’s case study check out his blog posts. Importantly, you can support his efforts until the end of this month by visiting his page and making a donation.

Other related posts:

• A Geek’s Reflections on Personal Fundraising via Blog, Twitter, and Facebook
• The Well that Twitter Built

The second edition edition of Mike’s highly regarded book address some of the changes seen in the search industry in the last few years along with increased focus on social media. Already, the book is on the Top Ten List for retailing books by Amazon.com and has received good press and dozens of positive reviews

This week, our Fall intern, Lindsey Loughman, sat down with Mike to get his input on the book, the future of search and his role here at Converseon:

If you like to skip ahead to a particular question (although we recommend the entire interview), here are the show notes:

0:00 Intro
0:12 What is the Book About?
1:30 What Updates are in the New Book?
3:44 Who Will Get the Most Out of the Book?
5:00 Why is Search Important ?
6:35 What is the Future of Search Marketing?
8:51 How Are You Using Search at Converseon?

Connect 2008 is a conference that is near and dear to my heart. Connect is an annual event at the University of Georgia, that brings together professionals and educators under the banner of social media education.

A little background, Connect 2007 was a student campaign lead by Dr. Karen Russell. Dr. Russell and others at Grady College, UGA’s journalism school, realized that social media was changing PR and there was a growing gap between PR education and practice. Connect was one way that they could try to close that gap.

It provides an opportunity for industry to exchange notes. Educators bring with them emerging studies on the effects of social media and results of best practices, while practitioners bring the experience of case studies and social media techniques. But, at its core Connect, is about building relationships in the real world, boosting the plethora of online venues where students, practitioners and educators are connecting like PROpenmic.

Connect is also a big part of my story and how I came to Converseon. Last year I worked in a class under Dr. Kaye Sweetser to provide live coverage of Connect. There, I feel in love with social media and met Paull and Constantin for the first time. It was a perfect match; all at once I had found an incredible new field of PR and some of the most talented (and very cool) people who practiced it everyday.

My Connect story has played out, but I can’t wait to see what new stories and relationships that will be formed this year. And you can too if you follow their blog, Twitter, and Flickr accounts.

The Challenge
Connecting a 66 year old brand in a tightly-regulated environment with a highly-interconnected online community of influentials with a proven skepticism towards brands.

Graco needed to assess a complex and fragmented online conversation that occurred across multiple websites and environments including message boards/forums, hundreds of parenting blogs, numerous parenting social networks, Twitter, YouTube and many other social media venues.

The Concept

Graco first “listened” to the conversation to develop a clear understanding of the conversation landscape in the parenting category. This informed a strategy to:

- Make Graco an accepted and welcomed participant in the online parenting conversation.
- Humanize the Graco brand and build lasting relationships with the community by demonstrating that behind the brand are a group of concerned and engaged parents.

Implementation
Listening (“i.e. Conversation Mining”) activity found that there was a robust, active parenting conversation that was largely resistant to commercial efforts to engage them in conversation.

A core thrust of the strategy: Don’t force the brand into the conversations, but instead environments to facilitate relationships between influentials and be invited to the conversation.

A core component: A series of Graco blogger “Get-Together” events across the country t to allow Graco to engage in an acceptable manner. This laid the groundwork for the subsequent launch of a corporate Graco parenting blog authored by a multi-disciplinary team of Graco employees. The blog was carefully crafted to focus on “parent first” issues, stories, advice.

The blogging effort was supported with the complimentary use of other social media tools, including Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and more.

Successes

• Conversation Mining results showed the volume of the online conversation for the Graco Brand nearly doubled, while the polarity of online mentions rose from 68% positive in 2007 to 83% positive in 2008
• Amongst this shift, 100% of posts sparked by proactive outreach have been positive
• A significant increase in positive recommendations/reviews - this desirable topic became the most common discussion of the Graco brand
• Graco featured on the Today Show, Business Week and as a case study at BlogHer Business conference
• In just 6 months is ranked as the 59th top parenting blog in the hundreds strong Parent Power Index
• Thousands of monthly unique visitors to the Graco Blog, increased traffic and conversions at main Graco site
• Graco Blog ranks on the front page of Google for many relevant search terms
• Technorati Authority of 88 resulting from 224 blog reactions in 6 months (higher than many Fortune 500 blogs)
• 155 posts at the Graco blog garnering 530 comments

Hear What Others Have To Say

• Company Blog Check Up: Graco - Mack Collier (5th Best Score so far in Mack’s extensive series of corporate blog reviews)
• Graco Blog is Fantastic and Graco Continues to Rock Their Corporate Blogging Efforts - Jake Mckee (The Community Guy)
• Social Networking is Personal - Kelby Carr
• So You Want To Talk to Mommy Bloggers? - Erin Vest (Queen Of Spain)
• Rubbermaid Unit Gets Parents Talking Online - Atlanta Journal Constitution

To connect with Graco online subscribe to their corporate blog, see parenting blogger videos at the Ready For The Road Ahead car seat site, follow them on Twitter and see pictures from their blogger events on Flickr.

Converseon is a current member of the SNCR Vendor Council as well as a past winner of an excellence in communication SNCR award. In many ways, at Converseon, we share the Society for New Communication Research’s dedication and eagerness to bring the study of new media and its effects on traditional communication and business models closer to their implementation in these fields. This said, we would like to extend SNCR’s invitation to participate in the third annual excellence in communications awards to all of you.

These awards are designed to recognize corporations, government organization, not-for-profit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets and the individuals who are innovators in their use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities, virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications.

Awards are granted in six divisions:

Corporate
Government
Media
Nonprofit/NGO
Academic
Technology Innovation (for New Communications and Social Media Technology Vendors)

And there are seven categories this year:

1. Online Reputation Management
2. Behind the Firewall
3. Blogger Relations
4. External Communications & Communities
5. New Media Creation
6. Collaboration & Co-creation
7. Mobile Media

Click on the following links if you would like to learn more or submit an entry for an award.

Names are taken out of a hat. The two minute timer is set. And whoever shares the best social media related news or commentary will bask in the glory of having his or her entire two minute monologue transcribed in this very post. The most recent winner is our beloved Affiliate Account Manager, Robin (who is also celebrating her birthday today). See below for her insights, as well as links to what we were all chatting about today.

1. A cool viral video on YouTube.com called The Girl Effect.

2. The NYTimes article on Comcast and customer service

3. New Facebook design. Thumbs up or thumbs down?

4. The NYTimes article on HBO’s True Blood viral campaign

5. Cool new site called Social Vibe that combines corporate sponsorships with charitable causes

6. Get to know Google’s Knol
-What is its page rank on Google’s search engine?
-Knol, a challenge to media companies and has it gone too far?

7. Case study on how social networking saved New Orleans

8. Personal shopping engine, StyleFeeder, helps people shop

9. BlogHer ‘08 was amazing! http://blogher.org

10. Robin’s commentary on the downsides of social media:

I thought I’d pick my brain for some of the personal downsides I’ve found in my life resulting from social media. We all know the positive side effects for brands, companies and keeping friendships intact and updated, but what are the after effects and side effects that some of us may be experiencing and not discussing? I’m wondering if disorders or emotional defects will increase due to social media. Personally I’m finding phone phobia to be a new phenomenon in my world, as well as invite jealousy and increased paleness.

So I’m thinking, will there be:

*An increased number of online stalkers. I’m not talking about identity theft. I’m talking about my dentist finding me on Facebook and asking who has been cleaning my teeth. It’s great that he’s online, but that’s a little too much for me.

*I’m finding that there’s less to talk about when I finally do meet up with friends. They’ve already seen photos from the places I’ve been, they’ve read the status updates, they know I suck at online scrabble. What more can you possibly share in person except follow-up and see if they like the format of your RSS feed.

*Um, what about jealousy - I am way more nosy now than I have ever been. I question my boyfriend about comments on his MySpace from people I don’t know. He says they’re nobody, but they have a ton of MySpace contacts — so clearly they’re not “nobody”.

*Paleness - I used to be uniquely pale. Now everybody seems to be indoors more tweaking their wordpress plugins or creating a Ning network.

*Phone & camera phobia. I’ve become paranoid about friends w/cameras. I no longer care if a stranger takes a photo, it’s the friends that will tag you! It used to be that you’d be at a party, maybe someone had a camera. They’d take a group shot. Everyone would beg to borrow the negatives or they’d ask for you to get double prints at the drugstore. Chances are the lighting was bad and the flash bulb didn’t work or the negative didn’t advance or your friend would be so drunk that they’d expose the film .. and that’d be it. If it were an awful photo, you’d never see it again. If they wanted to tease you with it, they’d bring it to school and pass it around until you managed to snag it back and destroy it.

Nowadays I hang out with my sister, come home and see a million alerts in my email account that I’ve been tagged on Facebook. She also puts everything into flickr and snapfish. I can’t escape it. Friends know where I’ve been and how crappy I looked and there’s not much I can do about it.

*Along the same lines of being tagging too much is my paranoia about making sure to invite everyone to everything so that I don’t have to explain why I hosted a group hang and they weren’t invited. It’ s harder and harder to keep my groups of friends separate, too. This might warrant a new asterisk. Anyway, I liked having my HS bunch of friends, my college bunch, my ex-coworker bunch.. It’s weird for me to see them intermingle online and it crosses my mind that through social networks — I can be squeezed out. I just hope they fear social-media-karma and realize that I too can steal friends in return.

*False sense of being due to online extremes - Those who befriend every band, classmate and group think they’re very popular, while those with a close knit group online may think they haven’t enough friends. Social networks floss how many followers or friends you have and how large your extended network is. People are forgetting it’s not quantity but quality. That doesn’t keep us from sizing up our friends by their friends, though. Mine is bigger than yours. Speaking of flossing, I’m LinkedIn to Puff Daddy’s right-hand-man. That has to count for something.

We’re happy to announce that we will be hosting the second installment of the Social Media Measurement Roundtable at our New York City headquarters on Thursday August 7. This intimate event will feature a select crowd of leading social media measurement thinkers and doers and follows on from the success of the first such event in Toronto earlier this year.

Katie Paine, author of Measuring Public Relationships and CEO of KDPaine & Partners will be assisting in leading discussion at the roundtable. She will also be joined by Marshall Sponder, the Chair of the Web Analytics Association`s Community and Social Media committee and Converseon’s Director of Social Media Constantin Basturea. Social media professionals, PR practicioners and web analytics experts will be present to discuss the methodologies and resources available today in measuring PR and social media initiatives.

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday August 7, 2008

Time: 5:00 - 7:00pm

Location:
Converseon
53 West 36th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10018

We’d love for you to join us and throw your two cents on this topic. However, space is limited and it is essential to RSVP for this event, so if you’d like to attend please RSVP as soon as possible to Chrissie Hsu (chsu AT converseon.com)

In a very important announcement, Mike has agreed to come on board starting September 1, 2008 to help oversee continuing build out of our Conversation Mining technology working with our already stellar team and help expand our capabilities in providing enterprise level search and social media to some of the world’s leading brands.

An engineer at a social media marketing and communications agency? Mike and I have known each other for quite some time and the more we talked, the more we realized how his experience and vision of the world aligns with ours. It goes back to a theory I have that if you are indeed on the right path, serendipity is your friend. Adding Mike to the agency is an exclamation point to our “mashup” approach. The agency of the future, which we are helping to pioneer, is indeed a mashup and Mike will soon be rubbing his Distinguished Engineer elbows with PR/reputation management folks, creative types, computer scientists, direct marketers, Aussie bloggers, linguistic analyzers and at least one Romanian professorial type. Hopefully, our willingness to leap into the unknown and push the edges of communications, will serve as a fertile environment for Mike to help apply his experience and learnings into this social media realm. We expect a moment of culture shock in a transition from IBM to a (slightly) smaller Converseon, but with our newfangled coffee machine, we hope he’ll feel at home.

With all due apology to political punditry, it’s indeed our hope to have Converseon be a shining agency on the hill, a beacon to those from the seemingly very diverse, far reaches of agencies and companies who are really passionate about transforming communications and are looking for the right place to make it happen. In this particular case, we’re glad Mike and Converseon found each other and look forward to great things ahead.

Please join us in welcoming him on board.