Well, now that we’ve got the “what’s after Google?” bugbear out in the open, let’s drill down and take a look at what this might mean to marketers.

First off, marketers live and die in media. Media literally means “in the middle”: media is that which exists between us, the communications, intelligence and wisdom that give our lives (both solo and social) context and meaning.
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Did you know that one of the most important factors in Google search rankings has nothing to do with content relevance or even content itself?

Doesn’t that strike you as kinda dumb?

Does me. Google regards page load time as very important in its rankings. That means rich rich sites that take a few seconds more to load go to the back of the bus, behind the flyweight stuff.
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It’s official: the “Google is getting killed by social search” meme is now latté-worthy. Last time I checked, there were over 300 blogposts in the past month alone edging around this topic.

To recap: the meme runs like this. Google’s page-rank search algorithm is being “gamed” by content farms and other bottom-feeding cybercrap. Google of course has responded by tightening the screws on content farms but the search giant has a much bigger problem.
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A simple example of the power of listening to audience interactivity…even if learned the hard way, courtesy Social Media Examiner, Nov 30 2010. 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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Two years ago, when Fresh Baked was in its infancy and there were only a handful of branded web shows online, our conversations with marketers were sparked by a mix of curiosity and naivety. “What the heck is branded entertainment?” was how they typically started. At the time, those brave enough to wade into these waters ahead of others were largely doing so because it felt like the right thing to do. The case for branded entertainment, for them, would come from trial and error. Read more…

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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