Who doesn't love being entertained? We all do. And if you're in the business of creating branded entertainment, that must be the ultimate goal, right? Not so fast!

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When I was a kid, one of the big things my mom would always try to drill into my head was not to tell lies. Or as she would put it, “Don’t tell stories!”

The irony that I grew up to make a living from telling stories is not lost on me.

And as I now work in a company that is on the bleeding edge of the transformation of our entertainment industry, I find such comfort in the one constant, unshakable truth about this business. Read more…

From Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Social Media Metrics PDF
(http://www.iab.net/media/file/SocialMediaMetricsDefinitionsFinal.pdf)
«…targeting value can also be derived by mapping campaigns to common (online)
“conversations” through the form of shared links, referencing each-other’s content. The social
connection of publisher-to-publisher relationships through these content links aggregates
engaged consumers into a desirable and topic-engaged audience. Read more…

Neuroscience (oooh! ahhh!) is the hot topic these days amongst those who seek yet another behaviour to influence to make folks buy more stuff. Will studying brain interactivities expose new means of persuasion?

Oh, probably. Will it make for lasting brand value? Doubtful.
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One thing's for sure: nothing actually happens until...it happens.  That truism oughta be carved on every social influence marketer's forehead...because it's far too easy to lose sight of the purpose of the exercise---we want people to interact with us and with each other about our client brands.

But why?

Here's why: we want to listen to the metadata. We want not simply the raw unstructured data ('Holy cow, Madge, our Klout's at 84 today!') but the interactivities that can sometimes only be inferred by the human eye and the human hand.
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What would you call an operation that tells stories about human events and interactions as soon as practicable after they happen, with accountability and context as part of the daily grind---a kind of history-on-the-run?

I'd call it a newsroom. And that's how the folks who've evolved killer social influence best practices operate. Here's my top three:

Gary Vaynerchuk
Guardian Online Read more…

Here's how we help our clients grasp the real value of social media.

A view is the beginning of a dialogue, not the end of a monologue.

Like any human relationship that matters, social influence marketing takes time, care, compassion...and a huge set of ears.

Y'gotta listen.

And relating this to hesitant clients, this honest appraisal---dedicated to de-mystifying what we do---might help: the word-of-mouth universe hasn't change.

What has changed is that word-of-mouth networking is now frictionless and global.
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