Embracing social media is like speaking in public.  Technically any company can do it.  But doing it well is a different story.  On December 8, my employer Razorfish announced the development of new offerings for those marketers who want to employ social media and influencers effectively.

The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing strategy offerings help clients create approaches for employing social media and influencers to meet their business and marketing needs.  The offerings build on experiences gained during the past several years with clients ranging from Carnival Cruise Lines to Levi Strauss & Co.

Although Razorfish helps companies employ social in many ways, our latest set of offerings focus on formulating strategies to use social in a measurable manner.  Why?  Because too many companies have told us they have been pushed into building Facebook pages and Twitter accounts without even knowing why or to what benefit.  They tell us they wish they had created a coherent strategy for linking social to their real business needs instead of implementing a bunch of tactics and asking questions later.

So, here are a few things Razorfish is not doing through our offerings:

• Promising to increase your Twitter followers by 900 percent.

• Using stories about Motrin moms to scare you into adopting Social Influence Marketing.

Rather, we are:

• Helping clients formulate sustainable and measurable approaches to social.

• Ensuring that our clients’ social strategies break free of the vast social media echo chamber.  Razorfish helps clients connect social to their larger marketing and business needs.

To be clear, Razorfish has been actively involved in Social Influence Marketing for quite some time.  What we are doing now is formally packaging our intellectual property around social strategy in a more repeatable way.  My colleagues such as Shiv Singh can tell you even more about our new offerings.

If you’re trying to build a brand through social media or influencers, chances are you’ve experienced a steep learning curve.  Well, don’t feel so bad — you have plenty of company according to a new report launched by my employer Razorfish.

According to Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, companies still have a long way to go in order to build their brands effectively through social.  Consumers surveyed by Razorfish report widespread indifference to brands in the social world.  For instance, about 60 percent of consumers don’t bother to seek out opinions of brands via social media.

The notion that brands are finally learning the social ropes is among the Social Influence Marketing myths that Fluent dispels, as discussed by my colleague Shiv Singh, the report’s principal author and editor.  Another interesting finding: consumers believe television is more trustworthy than social media advertising when purchase decisions are made:

So what gives?

The problem is actually not all that complicated: marketers are treating social just like TV, as a broadcast mechanism.  So actually we should not be surprised that consumers trust TV more than social ads.  TV has been around for decades.  Consumers are more comfortable with TV in many respects.

We believe the answer is for companies to take advantage of the participatory nature of social and to develop an authentic social voice built on humility and genuine interest in consumers.  Comcast is trying to do so through its responsive Comcast Cares account in Twitter.  (Speaking as a consumer, I’ve used Comcast Cares to address problems with my bill, and Comcast really does care.)  Comcast doesn’t use Twitter to tell you how great it is but to participate in the conversation we’re having about Comcast. Comcast is acting like a brand that does instead of a brand that just talks.

Razorfish works with a number of companies that also demonstrate the right way to build a brand in the social world. I’ve blogged about a number of them, such as Intel, Levi’s, and Mattel.  For instance, to build brand awareness among gamers and designers, in 2008 Intel worked with Razorfish to launch the Digital Drag Race.  The Digital Drag Race challenged designers to create short films using the Intel Core i7 microprocessor.  Intel employed social media influencers (including Intel’s own Michael Brito) and media (including contest entries posted on YouTube) to generate buzz among the design and gaming community.

Fluent is also significant for introducing the SIM Score, designed to help marketers measure the effectiveness of your brand in a world where social influencers hold sway.  The SIM Score, created with the help of TNS Cymfony and The Keller Group, measures how much consumers talk about your brand and how positive or negative those discussions are.  In Fluent, Razorfish applies the SIM Score to companies ranging from GM to Capital One.  Although the SIM Score focuses on the online world, in two industries we correlate the SIM score to the offline world, too.

Check out what Advertising Age says about the SIM Score.  For other outside perspectives, blog posts from Guy Kawasaki and Dave Knox are also informative.

Let me know what you think of Fluent.  Please also visit Shiv Singh’s blog, Going Social Now, where periodically Shiv will provide deeper commentary on Fluent.

How would you like to make a difference in the lives of at-risk youth?

All you need to do is take a moment to contribute to the Give Them Hope Now campaign, launched by Levi’s®, a client of my employer Razorfish.

By participating in Give Them Hope Now, you’ll be supporting the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which provides services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.  The institute, home of the Harvey Milk School, provides a safe haven (including counseling and many other services) for LGBTQ youth who have suffered abuse and violence because of their sexual orientation.  The goal of the Give Them Hope Now campaign is to raise $500,000 for the institute.  Here is how you can help:

Donate

Donating is easy. Go here: http://www.givethemhopenow.org

Spread the word

Follow @givethemhopenow on Twitter and mention the cause (please use the #gthn hashtag).

Pass along the givethemhopenow.org site to your friends and colleagues.

Share these testimonials from the Give Them Hope Now YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/givethemhopenow

The Give Them Hope Now campaign includes a fundraiser hosted by Dustin Lance Black, the Academy Award® winning screenwriter for Milk; actress Heather Matarazzo  (The L Word), and Paul Colichman, CEO of Regent Media, owner of The Advocate and Out Magazine.  Razorfish support includes creation of the Give Them Hope Now donation site, YouTube channel, media buying, and Social Influence Marketing.

Let’s see how quickly we can raise $500,000 to help at-risk youth.

On May 14-15, I helped my employer Avenue A | Razorfish organize its 8th annual Client Summit in New York. Each year at this event, company executives, guest speakers, and clients discuss the state of the art in digital marketing. The theme of the 2008 event was “Rock the Digital World” (an homage to guest keynote speaker Sir George Martin, the fifth Beatle, who gave the audience an inside glimpse at the making of the seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). At this year’s Client Summit, Avenue A | Razorfish wanted to challenge the audience of digital marketing executives to think of their roles differently — more as leaders, not just developers of successful digital marketing programs. Here are two take-aways for me now that I’ve had a moment to reflect on those hectic two days:

1. Social media hits the mainstream. More than once, our guests noticed the number of times our agenda speakers discussed social media. I was asked whether Avenue A | Razorfish was trying to make a statement about its importance. Well, yes and no. On the surface, there certainly was an impressive line-up from the social media realm: Charlene Li of Forrester Research drew upon her book The Groundswell to deliver an insightful keynote about the ways social media are changing the conversation between the consumer and marketer. My colleague Shiv Singh hosted a panel on applying social media as part of Social Influence Marketing. Megan O’Connor of Levi’s demonstrated how the Levi’s 501 Design Challenge used a social community to build brand with female consumers. Ted Cannis and Olivier Pierini of Ford Motor Company showed how Ford embraces social media inside and outside the company through efforts like the Ford blikinet and the Ford Global Auto Shows blog. And Andy England, CMO of Coors, touched upon social media several times (e.g., the Coors Light MySpace page) as he described the ways that Coors has embraced digital in its marketing. But here’s the thing: we did not deliberately set out to pack the agenda with social media. All we wanted to do was find some cutting-edge content to make marketers think of new ways of embracing the digital world, and the social media examples like Levi’s and Ford bubbled to the surface organically. This story just goes to show how social media is becoming a natural part of our lives, regardless of our intentions.

2. The importance of marketing as an experience. Avenue A | Razorfish CEO Clark Kokich discussed how the future of marketing is creating experiences that engage the consumer, not plastering marketing messages across the digital world. (Example: the Post Cereals Postopia website doesn’t push messages about Post Cereal; it’s an immersive world, hosted by Post Cereals, that families can enjoy.) Two Client Summit speakers showed what Clark meant. John McVay, the Avenue A | Razorfish client partner for AT&T, performed a live demonstration of how Microsoft Surface table technology can make the purchase of mobile devices fun through a touch-screen experience. (By the way, to pull off the demo, our production team needed to mount a camera in the ceiling of the ballroom of the Sheraton New York.) Then Terri Walter, Avenue A | Razorfish vice president of Emerging Media, and David Polinchock of the Brand Experience Lab performed an audience participation game that’s best described through this blog post by my colleague Iain McDonald of our Sydney office (which operates locally under the name Amnesia). Basically Terri and David made us think about how an an advertiser can create a branded game experience for any large gathering people — say a theater full movie goers waiting for a movie to start. Why sit around watching cheesy ads in a theater when we can interact with the movie screen and each other through a game that employs a webcam? I would happily do that if an advertiser will participate.

So, to summarize both ideas from the 2008 Client Summit in one sentence: the future of marketing is tapping into the social and immersive nature of the digital world to create engaging experiences, not to push messages.

By the way, many thanks to Deidre Everdij and the team at Highlight Event Design for producing our most demanding Client Summit ever. Deidre and her team saved our butts many times throughout the show. Talk about rocking the digital world! You can read more about the Client Summit here and here.

This blog post comes to you live from the 2008 Forrester Marketing Forum, held April 8-9, 2008, in Los Angeles. The purpose of the event is to take a snapshot of the state of the art in successful marketing. The theme of the 2008 event is building great brands through effective engagement — or experiences that captivate your audience.

In an afternoon session April 8, Forrester Senior Analyst Mary Beth Kemp asks, What does engagement really look like? How do you measure engagement?

Patrice Varni, vice president, eCommerce, for Levi’s®, discusses work her company did with my employer, Avenue A | Razorfish, to create the 501® Design Challenge community site. The purpose of the Design Challenge, which ran over a five-week period in 2008, was to build engagement with a female demographic aged 18-34. Levi’s® announced the launch of the challenge on an episode of “Project Runway.” On the community site, anyone could submit an original fashion design using Levi’s® products for an online community to judge throughout the course of the campaign. The first-place winner, selected in late February, will have a design produced and sold on levi.com. According to Patrice, enthusiasts provided more than 2,000 design submissions, and the community saw more than 134,000 unique visitors and 19,000 registrants, two thirds of which were women in the 18-34 age range. The site generated scores of blogs, each of which generated more brand awareness.

Sean Belka, senior vice president at Fidelity, worries about engaging a customer thoughout her lifetime — literally. His challenge is to create services relevant to consumers through their life stages, such as investing for short-term financial gain or saving for retirement. In short, he wants Fidelity customers to work with Fidelity to meet today’s financial needs while planning for tomorrow.

Fidelity uses a multi-channel educational approach, ranging from the use of interactive video on Fidelity.com, to interactions with phone representatives, in order to “own” the lifetime customer experience. Fidelity also knows when to ramp up the level of engagement at critical times in one’s life. Example: he discusses Fidelity’s Retirement Readiness Index to help customers understand whether they are on track for retirement. What happens if a consumer is not on track? Fidelity has what can best be described (my words) as an “engagement intervention,” through which Fidelity reps reach out to customers and let them know they need to adjust their savings habits to plan more carefully for retirement.

The Fidelity engagement porfolio also includes social media tactics, too, like blogs and widgets.

Mary Beth asks Sean and Patrice what marketers should measure to track engagement effectively.

Patrice suggests using behaviorial targeting tools to measure the quality of engagement and brand perception. Sean discusses the use of tools to measure how well people are planning for retirement, like its Retirement Readiness Index.

Fidelity and Levi’s® might seem like completely different companies, but they share a passion for engagment and an ability to make engagement succeed, online and offline.

Levi’s and Kraft Crystal Light recently launched efforts that show how two major brands use online communities to listen to consumers instead of toss messages at them.

Levi’s: Project 501 Design Challenge

On January 23, viewers of the TV show “Project Runway” learned about the launch of the Levi’s Project 501 Design Challenge, where anyone can submit a fashion design for an online community to judge. The first-place winner will have his or her design produced and sold on levi.com. If you don’t want to be a designer, you can join the judging panel, vote for a winner, and enter to win a $501 levi.com gift certificate.

So why is this noteworthy? After all, promotions relying on user-generated content are not new, and companies like Lego’s have involved consumers in product design. What sets apart the Design Challenge is the convergence of user-generated product design, a contest, a well-known brand, and the tie-in with a popular television show.

My employer Avenue A | Razorfish conceived the idea, built the site and design box, and worked with another agency to produce the TV spot that ran on “Project Runway.” Next step: on February 21, Project 501 Design Judges will narrow the design candidates to the top 20 list.

A consumer submitted this design for the Levi’s 501 Challenge

Kraft Crystal Light: uPumpItUp

The Kraft Crystal Light beverage brand has launched uPumpItUp, a social networking site that fosters wellness among women. One of the Avenue A | Razorfish team members who helped create the site describes it as “MySpace meets Nike+.” uPumpItUp is partly an information site about wellness. For instance, Jennifer Aniston’s yoga instructor Mandy Ingber gives you yoga tips. But uPumpItUp community members can also challenge each other to to complete wellness-related tasks like “add yoga to your workout routine.” uPumpItUp members (once logged on) keep track of all their challenges and check off milestones completed. You can also comment on the challenges through community message boards.

uPumpItUp, hosted by actress Mandy Moore, launched with online advertising on February 18. The site URL will start showing up on Crystal Light television advertisements.

Experience yoga on uPumpItUp

In both those instances, the companies are not creating community sites just because it’s a cool thing to do. Rather, the experiences are true to each company’s brand, in this case Crystal Light’s connection to wellness and the reputation for authentic fashion design that we associate with Levi’s.

There’s also something else going on here: the willingess to listen to the consumer. Crystal Light has placed uPumpItUp at the center of its entire 2008 marketing program because the community site gives the company a mechanism to hear what’s on the minds of consumers. Similarly, Levi’s is using the online community as a consumer sounding board for new product design (Levi’s can learn from even also-ran concepts) leading to creation of new product direct from the consumer.

Nice to know that big brands are figuring out ways to listen to us instead of shout at us.