If you are reading blogs and articles about social media, you have probably come across what brands are calling the next evolution of social media, Social CRM (SCRM).  Even within our Trone blog, Doug Barton wrote a post entitled “Social Media and CRM: Which Will Survive” , where he discussed Dove’s Ambassador program that combined both social and CRM initiatives to drive brand experience and loyalty.

At the LiNC 2010 Conference in May, experts discussed Social CRM and where it’s going.  Paul Greenburg, a leading CRM expert, was interviewed to  discuss the changing dynamics.

He quickly points out that companies are not yet aligned for the changes that this marketing shift can cause within their organizations.  Very few companies deliver a consistent experience across all of their social media touchpoints. Do you know any companies that are poised for each employee to embrace every single customer touchpoint?   As we emerge into the 2011 planning period, all companies should be thinking about what they are doing to deliver one-to-one, relationship-building experiences with their customers.

We recently conducted a study of internet use among 1800 members of our opinions@trone consumer panel. Among the key findings was the projected increase in the number of internet-enabled phones. With their next phone purchase, consumers will more than double the collective penetration of iphone, itouch, Android-based and other smart phones. Once this purchase cycle completes itself, we’ll have the majority of adults with mobile internet access for the first time. This certainly bodes well for the continued success of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and suggests an increasing opportunity for many other internet-based services.

Having internet access does not necessarily mean that consumers will be engaged. The behavior of those who currently have internet access, however, suggests use will be significant. Measured by a top 2 box response to frequency of use, 65% are currently checking email, 39% are doing local-based searches and 31% are updating their status on social media sites.

There is no way to judge what the full impact of that many internet enabled users might be on brands and products but certainly the venues to which they’ll have access are affecting both brands and products today. An example is Saturday Night Live acquiescing to the 1,000,000 plus fans who utilized Facebook to lobby for Betty White as the guest host.

White as the host was a big win for SNL with over 12.5M households tuning in. This represents about a 35% lift over a typical SNL audience. While NBC was undoubtedly appreciative of Facebook and its many fans, White conveyed her old, immutable self with her remarks.

“I have to thank Facebook. I didn’t know what Facebook was before this, and I have to tell you, it seems like a waste of time”  

A waste of time? Maybe. But, a popular one with nearly 2/3 of the adult internet enabled population spending a portion of their time on social networks. With that type of penetration, the ease of access provided by new technology and the power demonstrated by the SNL example this is a medium that marketers need take some risk to stay ahead of. 

Just as people are beginning to learn about location-based tools, Foursquare announces that it has reached 40 million checkins. Within five weeks, Foursquare’s checkins have doubled showing its increased popularity. But is the quick growth about to come to an abrupt end?

Facebook has announced that later this month, it will launch its own location-based features.  Leveraging all of Facebook’s users, this might be enough to crush the growth of Foursquare and the other emerging location-based tools such as Gowalla, Whrrl and TriOut. In late April, Trone launched an online usage study that  measured the popularity of these tools. The study showed that the tools mentioned above each had 6% top two box response when asked “how often do you use the following location-based tools on your mobile phone”.  The data will serve as a great benchmark when understanding the impact of the Facebook features launch.

As the penetration of internet-based phones increases, one thing that we can expect is that the popularity of location-based tools will grow.  In the upcoming months, it will be interesting to see how each fights for its own niche market position in combating the Facebook giant.

I recently participated in a compelling conference on social media. One of the most interesting dialogues centered on the importance of Wingmen — those brand advocates who will support your brand in the dogfight that social media has become.

Before we can define the value of Wingmen in the social media environment, we must first agree on a definition of the form. Unfortunately, due to the category’s lack of maturity, there are nearly as many definitions of social media as there are tools to leverage it. Among the most concise is Wikipedia’s:

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Unfortunately, democratization gives everyone a voice, advocate and detractor alike.  In this environment every brand issue, real or imagined, can surface at any time and in nearly any place. Once an issue is in the fore, conversation runs rampant and the battle is on. Literally before an organization is aware they can be the target of a brand slam.

When it comes to such situations, many companies decide to come to their own defense. Unfortunately, as one might expect, the explanations tend to sound… well, defensive or worse yet arrogant. In these cases, the brand detractors gain momentum so, rather than winning the battle, the brand is just providing ammunition to their opponent. For a good example of brand detraction, go to youtube.com and view the United Airlines Taylor Guitar Video.

Third party support in the form of a Wingman delivers a brand message more effectively than a company ever could. No brand is devoid of advocates or they wouldn’t be in business. These advocates are your best friends, they speak the language of your brand more credibly than you could dream of and they are your best allies in any brand battle.

Of course, you will always face brand detractors, but the advocates have every bit as good a chance to dispel negative conversation and positively influence other consumers. The key is identifying the potential Wingman, engaging them to defend and grow the brand and properly arming them for the battles to come. And, remember all your Wingmen don’t have to come from your customer ranks there are many other potential sources of support on so large and dynamic a battleground.

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“Good dog! That’s a good boy,” you shout as your dog has managed to successfully catch the bright red Frisbee in his mouth and bring it back to you in his daily ritual of fetch with not only his very favorite toy, but with his very favorite human. You tousle the fur on his head, you rub his belly, you love him and he knows it. As he looks up at you with those big round eyes, what is he thinking? What would he say to you if he could share his appreciation? We like to think that he might throw back a “good human. That’s a good human!”

The most successful social media campaigns focus on a greater cause and movement. They provide something bigger than a brand or a product. They pull you in and make you feel. The emotional impact of a successful social media campaign should leave you wanting to spread the word and come back for more. Once developing the Good Human campaign for VPI Pet Insurance, Trone was able to take the campaign components, which focus around commending owners nationwide for providing the best care for their pet, and turn it into a captivating social movement.

By visiting ThatsAGoodHuman.com, pet owners across America can make a vow to be a good human to their pets by scratching behind their ears or brushing their teeth more often. They can vow to trim their pet’s nails or find something new that they and their pet can do together. They can even personalize their vow like Eileen from Liberty, MO did when she vowed to “let Shepherd go outside whenever he sees a squirrel.” Once a vow has been made, pet owners are asked to upload a picture of their pet and vote for one of four charities before seeing their vow up on the wall of thousands of pet owners that share in the love and devotion to their pets.  Once each charity hits 5,000 votes, VPI will donate $1,000 to that charity and from that point on, every 5,000 votes a charity receives, VPI will continue to donate. So inevitably, not only are pet owners taking a vow for their pets, but they are contributing to a charity that helps thousands of pets across the country.

Companies that use databases and name lists to target their message are at risk of getting a negative reaction from consumers. Well, that’s a pretty broad statement; what exactly does that mean? It means that if you are pushing out communications using a database, whether online or via direct mail, your list had better be up to date. The older the list becomes, the more likely that some of the names are no longer viable as targets.

This may sound obvious, but what you may have missed is consumer expectations of getting the message right has significantly increased over the past 12 months. You may have gotten away with an intrusive and poorly timed communication in the past, but not anymore. In fact, from a recent Trone Online Consumer survey, 4 out of 5 moms said advertisers don’t understand me.

Let’s say you are a pregnant woman and you receive an email for infant products. Perfect targeting. The email is relevant to your life, and likely you will have a positive impression of the product or company reaching out to you. And if it’s a deal, you might even pass it along to a friend in a similar life stage.

Now, four years later, your child is now three years old. If now you get a message from that same company, telling you about deals on diapers, what reaction would you have? If it were me, I would react a couple of ways. First, I would think, “This company knows me, don’t they know I have a 3-year-old? Are they just not paying attention?” Second, I would get annoyed, maybe even mad, at the obviously uninformed intrusion.

We assumed there would be intrusions in the old model of advertising. But today, marketers that intrude, and do it with ignorance, don’t simply get ignored. They get a negative reaction. A simple but telling example, if a friend on Facebook asks me to be a fan of a company or brand, the natural assumption these days is that the friend is on their payroll somehow, or is at least getting something out of it. I’ll immediately say no, and if the friend continues such behavior, might un-friend them.

So, back to the formerly pregnant woman. It’s six years later and she’s expecting again. But that company with the infant products was crossed off her list. They annoyed her just enough, and some other marketer got there with a relevant, engaging and timely offer, and she switched to that brand instead. And it was more like a divorce with the old brand, because she will never go back. This scenario happens all the time, because marketers let their lists grow old and outdated.
Don’t let your customer’s un-friend or divorce you, because at the end of the day, the brand with the most friends wins!

As if there’s not enough guilt out there for us working moms — you know, the stretched thin (but not thin) moms whose only formal exercise is running through parking lots because we are always late for something. Apparently, it’s not enough to feel guilty about the lack of quality time we are able to invest in our children or the guilt over their college funds being reduced by half due to the economy. The new guilt is information guilt — there’s so much access to information but so little time to actually look for it and process it. Somehow a mother’s all-knowingness must now extend from the sock drawer and cluttered closets to all of cyberspace.

Take the recent infant/children’s Tylenol recall http://www.tylenol.com/page.jhtml?id=tylenol/news/subpchildinfantnews.inc. How terrible would a mother feel administering Tylenol to a sick child and having another mom inform her of the recall? Then there are all the ins and outs of H1N1 and the Tami flu given to our children. My friend’s son recently was given Tami flu by his doctor and experienced hallucinations. Did any one know this was a side effect? Not me, for sure.

Now these two examples are health-related and Tylenol (and the viral armies of moms) did a great job of spreading the information. But just think of all the many things lurking out there that we moms should know about and don’t.

It’s daunting to think of a new mom being held accountable for all information great and small. As an older mom, I confess to have given up all but the health ramifications information. I network the best I can with the moms I know. In the social arena, I am not an influencer or even a contributor. I am a spectator. But Gen Y, the generation of contributors pride themselves on their knowingness and their ability to find things out in seconds. As moms, Gen Y will have a huge information burden to bear. Am I alone in the phenomenon or are some of you experiencing information guilt?

Before we begin, it should be said that the author, his employer, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America do not advocate circumventing copyright laws with file sharing software.

So. If you’ve ever heard of Guns N’ Roses, you’ve probably heard of Chinese Democracy, the album it took the band 13 years to write. The band passed the time in between records by starting side projects and taking each other to court over the G N’ R name. Fans got tired of this about five years ago and since have been steadily grumbling about release dates. Enter Kevin Cogill: music journalist by trade, he wrote for AntiQuiet, a music review blog, and posted nine tracks from the unreleased album.

In one of the few cases of this nature, and surely the most visible, Cogill was sentenced this week to a year of probation and forfeiture of his computer. He lost his job at AntiQuiet as a result of the leak but continues to write elsewhere. He stated that he was trying to promote the band because he is a fan, that he didn’t think posting the tracks would hurt G N’ R, and that he was trying to make a point about distribution in the digital age.

Kevin Cogill is old enough to remember when TLC declared bankruptcy in the 90s due to legal trouble with their label and when Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fought TicketMaster’s seemingly exorbitant service charges. He should remember paying upwards of $40 per import CD that had one or two songs that weren’t on American CDs, even though a band’s CD had the same title as its American release. Before Napster came along, the RIAA dictated how much access to your favorite bands’ music was going to cost you, and the price rose wildly the deeper you wanted to go into a discography. Fans got tired of intermediaries, and somewhere along the way they figured out that bands get most of their money from touring and live performances instead of CD sales. No one but the RIAA has looked back on that time fondly.

It’s an imperfect analogy, but it’s almost as if everyone suddenly realized that movie theaters charge you for the cup your drink is in, not for the product you intend to pay for.

Compare Cogill’s situation to that of Jammie Thomas, who was fined $1.92 million for sharing files (since 1,700 files were mentioned in the trial, it comes out to ~$1,100 per song). She’s going to have to declare bankruptcy, and, while she has the sympathy of the internet at large, the negative press isn’t going to help her career any. Popular sentiment says that Cogill got off easy compared to Thomas. Especially so since Thomas is representative of the thousands of illegal file sharers (except, of course, the author, his employer and its subsidiaries).

So Cogill is seen as the Fredo Corleone of the file-sharing community. His failure to garner sympathy comes from the fact that he leaked the tracks from an established blog, in plain daylight, with his name on it. He didn’t cast the files off anonymously into the ether of torrent hosts — he was looking to become The Guy Who Leaked Chinese Democracy instead of a guy who simply leaked Chinese Democracy. If message boards are any indication, he’s seen to have acted in bad faith, as if a journalist leaked an unfinished Billy Collins poem in The New Yorker instead of going to Plagiarist.

This is all well and good until you look at one of any various studies [author: sorry for the PDF] that says those guilty of file sharing spend more on traditional legal media than people who don’t use this kind of software. If the RIAA is “send[ing] a strong message” to Cogill and his ilk, they need to re-evaluate their marketing model. In an industry where fan = customer, marketers need to realize most people who took the tracks Cogill offered were going to buy the final version of the album anyway, and you can be certain they are the people who filled stadiums for the Chinese Democracy tour. From a strict marketing perspective, everyone else should be considered the white noise you can’t filter out of modern commerce.

So little of advertising is still advertising. But fortunately ideas are still ideas. I’ve collected a few examples here that show off some creative ways that ambient and social media have been used. These are brands that have gone beyond the standard Facebook product page or the CEO Twitter account to bring some creativity back to marketing.

Coffee Company PowerPoint Slide

This coffee company in the Netherlands offered a free cup of coffee to students who slipped a Coffee Company slide into their PowerPoint presentations. Pretty cool to have a word from your sponsor in the middle of your slideshow.

Terminator Salvation Twitter game

This nicely executed movie promotion enticed Twitter users to watch for tweets from @resistance2018 which contained fill-in-the-blank puzzles, word jumbles, and trivia. Players could rack up points by “decoding these transmissions” in a reply tweet.

Papa John’s Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is one of the most notable new media tricks around. It’s a way of getting a users webcam to trigger a 3-D animation on screen. It really gives you the illusion of a hologram. (Is that redundant?) Papa John’s, GE, and Mini are some of the brands who are already making use of it.

Green Works Reverse Graffiti

This eco-friendly mural was created for the launch of Green Works, a 99% plant-based cleaner. San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel was the filthy backdrop for the artwork of indigenous plant life, which was cleaned with the product. Pretty amazing product demo.

Milky Way Movie Theater Line Barrier

Although it’s questionable whether or not this was produced, it’s still a really fun idea—a great example of why it pays to think about where your target spends time.

Flea Spray Mall Floor Graphic

This giant floor decal lets the foot traffic on the ground floor of an Indonesian mall become the fleas on the dog. I do wish they had rotated the dog image 180 degrees so he wouldn’t look like a pork chop. And the line could be better. But still-great idea.

Iams Frisbee

While we’re on the topic of dogs, take a look at this cool giveaway from Iams dog food. To promote the healthy and strong dogs message, they created these plastic frisbees to look like 10kg weights to be distributed at dog parks.

STA Travel Facebook Page

Few brands with Facebook pages support their fanbase the way this student-focused travel agency does. They give their page a human voice with lots of interaction, contests, giveaways, etc. Plus, they constantly create incentives for users to become fans, which, when they do, ripples through the networks of Facebook friends.

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There’s still so much discussion around marketing through social media and making the most of limited media budgets. We will have to not only master these media options, but continually find new touchpoints as well.

Let’s remember to send a postcard to our old friends Print and Television—let them know we’ll still visit from time to time.