The use of electronic tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with others…

Why Social Media

• 93% say a company should have presence in social media
• 85% say a company should use it to interact with them
• Almost 60% of Americans interact with a brand on a social media site
• 56% feel a stronger connection to brands when use social media
• It’s About Relationships, Not Pitches
• Monitor your brand and reputation online
• Social Media Exposure: Better Than Traditional Ads and Cheaper
• Monitor others brands/reputations
• Interact with your consumers
• Track ROI better
• Men/Women 18-34 yrs
• &nsbp;&nsbp;&nsbp; – 33% want companies to market to them via social media

Fashion Industry & Social Media

• The hottest trend in fashion right now is Social Media. Social media has become the hottest trend since skinny jeans and stiletto heels
• Journalists, fashion incubators, retail gurus and people who were just plain interested in the industry are weighing in on a topic via social media that has notoriously shut its doors to anyone deemed an outsider.
• In the past six months, the amount of fashion insiders embracing social media has skyrocketed. The Fashion Industry has adopted social media as a marketing platform to reach their customers online & reignite brand passion and customer loyalty.
• By letting the public behind the fashion influencer curtain, stalwarts and luminaries have created and connected to an entirely new audience, and capitalized on the 400 million Facebook users and more than 22 million Twitter users.
• Von Furstenberg is one of the most beloved and popular designers on Twitter having over 22,000 followers. The viral marketing capabilities of re-tweeting by this targeted group is something an advertising budget cannot buy. Within the last year of having a major online and social media presence, von Furstenberg’s online traffic has increased by 13% and sales “have been great” according to a source in the corporate offices of DvF.
• Victoria’s Secret, has 2.63 million fans on Facebook and 1.7 million for Pink – thorough which the brand is able to connect with their customers and monetize on it through awareness, loyalty and engagement.

Fashion Industry Uses Location-Based Marketing

Marc Jacobs partnership with Foursquare

• Fashion giant Marc Jacobs used location-based services Foursquare to deliver its brand messages to its customers.
• For Fashion Week 2010, the brand decided to go beyond just digitally streaming their runway shows. It took the online interactions offline through Foursquare.
• Marc Jacobs and Foursquare created the “Fashion Victim” badge, which allowed Fashion Week attendees (and others) to “check-in” at any Marc by Marc Jacobs stores in New York and around the country to unlock the badge. Four people who unlocked the badge in New York were randomly chosen to receive tickets to the Marc Jacobs show. The partnership provided both Marc Jacobs and Foursquare with word of mouth marketing.
• Foursquare and other location-based services like Loopt and Gowalla offer retailers the opportunity to increase in-store visits and foot traffic. If executed well, these location-enhanced shopping experiences can translate into improved customer loyalty, referrals, and sales, both online and offline.
• Tasti D-Lite the frozen dessert chain popular in New York ,rolledout TastiRewards a rewards program that incentivizes customers to associate their Twitter and Foursquare accounts with their Tasti D-Lite membership cards. By syncing their loyalty programs with Foursquare, they’re enabling frequent shoppers to share their recent purchases with their communities. When a user posts shopping tips or deals at a particular location, that post is essentially an advertising impression on Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook.

Getting Cozy in Communities – Social Media Strategies

The majority of the industry thought this would tarnish brand image if they engaged in social media. Now almost every brand or retailer, from American Apparel, Sears and JCPenney, to Oscar De La Renta and Louis Vuitton, have created a presence in several social communities.

Creating Niche Communities – Social Media Strategies

• Fashion Brands are experimenting with development of their own social networks or even invitation-only communities. Luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel and Burberry have launched their own social networks or added social components to their existing web sites
• niche communities such as Weardrobe (recently purchased by Like.com), Modepass, and Lookbook.Nu,have yielded impressive ROI, as their audiences are more likely to become loyal customers

Embracing Mobile Applications – Social Media Strategies

• Fashion Brands have taken to developing apps via iPhone in a big way.
• Chanel shows its runway collections via iPhone app, and the Gilt Groupe app allows users to shop sample sales and receive alerts as to when sales are starting.
• StyleCaster’s app lets users access style tips, individually customize news feeds and fashion trends, and houses a large online retail catalog of brand-name clothing.
• JustLuxe is a digital global concierge company whose extremely interactive app comes with over 1,000 member benefits. Utilizing GPS, the app will recommend participating restaurants and hotels in the user’s area. It’s the first style-oriented app that leverages location-based mobile marketing

The Rise of Style Bloggers – Social Media Strategies

In 2009, bloggers had an enormous impact on fashion, affecting everything from print publishing to how brands market themselves online. There are thousands of style-related blogs on the web these days, and those dedicated to their craft have earned industry recognition.

The Impact of User-Generated Content – Social Media Strategies

• User-generated content is key to social media and fashion. From blogs to Facebook photo contributions to product reviews – user-generated content is where it’s at.
• More brands are realizing the collective power of their customers’ networks by encouraging fan contributions.
• One of the most notable and consistent campaigns built around user-generated content and social engagement has been from the brand Charlotte Russe. The brand’s weekly trivia contest on Twitter drives followers to the web site or YouTube channel with the hope of snagging some excellent prizes (the brand recently gave away a jacket worn on Gossip Girl).
• Charlotte Russe is running “Be The Next Charlotte Russe Design Star” a t-shirt design contest where the winner will have his or her shirt produced and sold online. A fashion-filled trip to NYC is also included
• Another great example of user-generated content used in conjunction with a niche network is Burberry’s Art of the Trench site.

The Impact of Bloggers on New York Fashion Week

New York Fashion Week Feb10 Social Conversations

• In past 30 days leading to the NY fashion week , there have been 15,996 online articles, blog posts, tweets and discussions on New York Fashion Week 2010.
• Fashion Week Trends In Real-Time: 45% of NYFW participants used Twitter to discuss events. From models to designers, PR gurus to celebrities, people tweeted and twitpic’d their experiences.
• Fashion Week Is Written In-Real Time : 53% of the coverage came from online articles and blog posts occurring between 2/13/2010 to 2/20/2010. As magazines posted photos and commentary of shows, bloggers were hot on the heels, reblogging, writing and linking to photos and trend information as they were released.
• Established news outlets led real-time coverage: Bloggers used the CUT blog, New York magazine and Coutorture as their main fashion week news sources. NY Mag and Coutorture are established, mainstream fashion resources.

I recently spoke at a regional event organized to decipher social media marketing. The address dealth with variety of topics and touched various aspects of going social, ranging from how to get started, tracking tools, history, pros and cons and how to measure the impact.

I discussed some tactics to get your company better engaged with social media. To start with I have assembled this list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways.

If you have other examples of corporate social media engagement, please share them in the comments.

Blendtec is famous for its bevy of inexpensive “Will It Blend” videos posted on YouTube and shared by millions.

Adobe maintains a list of interesting company related websites and conversations on the social bookmarking site Delicious.

Best Western sponsors a blog,”On the Go with Amy,” where the author travels the country writing about her experiences.

Cadence recently relaunched its website that now prominently promotes the company’s community.

Cisco hosts 12 blogs addressing a variety of audiences for their global business.

Coca-Cola Conversations is a blog written by company historian Phil Mooney that focuses on Coke collectibles.

Dell leverages a variety of social media platforms for customer engagement, including an island in the virtual world of Second Life.

Ford publishes news releases with lots of multimedia content and employs a social media news release format to display them in their newsroom.

Fujifilm recently launched a social network to build a community of photo enthusiasts around its newest camera.

GM uses blogs to communicate directly with its customers around topics ranging from design to green tech.

H&R Block created a Facebook fan site to aggregate its social media activities, engage customers and offer tax advice/resources.

HP used Twitter to power a scavenger hunt at a recent conference.

HSBC built the HSBC Business Network to connect entrepreneurs using blogs, videos and forums.

IBM was the first large enterprise to embrace employee blogging and now boasts thousands of blogs related to every facet of its business.

Intel has also developed many social media touch points with its software communities, which includes blogs, Twitter and virtual worlds.

Intuit sponsors the Tax Almanac wiki, where anyone can find and contribute to this resource for tax information.

Jeep connects with customers via a community page with links to photos on Flickr, the company’s MySpace and Facebook pages and a list enthusiast groups.

JetBlue employs social media as part of its training for JetBlue University, as this video explains.

Johnson & Johnson uses this blog to show another side of the company, with frequent video posts and interviews.

Lenovo launched “Voices of the Olympics Games” to aggregate posts from the athletes competing in Beijing.

Marriott CEO Bill Marriott posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world to fuel the content for this entertaining blog.

McDonalds maintains a blog to highlight the company’s corporate social responsibility efforts.

National Geographic uses Google’s new virtual world, Lively, to bring people together around its new show, LA Hard Hats.

New York Times is beta testing a Firefox add-on that allows users to share and comment on stories through a decentralized social network.

Nike started a social community on Loopd to connect athletes interested in surfing, BMX bike racing and similar activities with the brand.

SAP sponsored a global survey of social media professionals to learn more about social media worldwide.

Sears partnered with MTV to create a social network around Back to School shopping.

Southwest Airlines employees share their stories and communicate directly with customers through the “Nuts About Southwest” blog.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is the example most often cited for what the CEO blog can be.

Starbucks started MyStarbucksIdea so that customers can submit ideas for the company which are then voted on by other users, the best of which will be implemented by the company.

Toyota started its own virtual world to promote its products in Japan (site is in Japanese).

Visa launched The Visa Business Network application on Facebook to connect small business users and to help them promote their businesses to a larger community.

Wells-Fargo blogs target two audiences; one examines the company’s history and the other is for students interested in getting their finances in order.

WWE has a Facebook application, among other social networking tools and widgets, to bring fans closer to the action.

Xerox blogs address several of the company’s core B2B constituencies.

Zappos uses Twitter for employees to communicate with Zappos customers about their shared love of footwear.

Marketing is growing by leap and bounds. Looking into marketplace I see 50,000 Internet Marketing Freelancers and Companies trying to create a listening that they are the messiah of Online Marketing. Seemingly we have all but figured out Internet Marketing. But I don’t find a single dot.com, Ad Agency, Ad Network, or Freelancer who can guarantee me ROI [Return on Investment] forehand. Human mind and emotions is too complex for greatest of the scientists of our times to be captured in a magical equation.

SEO, zillions of Experts have their theory on Optimizing content on Google. Adwords experts claim to have figured of innovative ways to figure our Google Adwords Gaps and Quality Score. We know Rich Media Banners get better click through rates. Facebook application Marketing which came up in late 2008 is already a figured out technology. And when I talk to Social Media listening I am not talking about Facebook and Orkut, Youtube, MySpace Advertising. 

Social Media Listening via Collecting Data, Connecting Sources, Converging them into Information.

Let me linger on hindsight behind the background of ROI. ROI depends a lot on how Human Beings react to a messaging and information flow. We are still figuring out innovative ways to capture what Human Behavior and Perception would be to a particular messaging. In my experience of working on campaigns for most of my clients, I always grapple with the infinitesimal know-how of what messaging people need in the market. Marketing has been mostly a PUSH activity for online marketing rather than Listen to the Market and then create a messaging for Online Audience. Yes I do get analysis from the PR Agencies and Research Papers, but unfortunately its overtly influenced by the traditional media [newspapers and magazines], the specialists and critiques that the end result after spending 50 million odd Dollars we get to hear is we were not able to connect to the masses. The masses and population unfortunately don’t speak in the same tone as critiques and specialists.

The normal online user lives on Social Media. There is where I feel the listening should be. If somehow a tool could capture an actual listening for the voices on Social media, brand perceptions we have a game changer and +20% on ROI on day zero, before even conceptualizing the campaigns.

Yes there are syndication networks and online tools which capture conversations through RSS and API’s. But, the million conversations don’t make much information and perception. I have come across tools who tend to make some information out of Social Conversations by generating Heat Maps and Graphs and NLP [Natural Language Processing], but Artifial Intelligence demonstrated by most of these tools is unfortunately less than 50% accurate. Let me explain how this is being handled.

Its a 3C’s [Collect, Connect, Converge] process,

1. Collect massive amount of data via RSS feeds, API’s from gargantuan resources like twitter, forums, board trackers, blogs, pings, news, del.ic.our, diggs etc and place it into funnels and categories. Also, tracking how many times the conversation has occurred over a period on how active the topic is.
2. Connect i.e. rate the source of conversation and how much buzz it can create on social sphere. If user then rating him via the number of connects he has on twitter, del.ic.ous bookmarks, DIGG profile. If the source is website then basing the rating on the Google Page Rank, Traffic from Alexa and Quantcast, presence in DMoz, Google News, regular visitors etc. New technologies like FOAF Projects and Google Social API’s have slowly crept in showcasing how well a user is connected in online social sphere and providing another dimension to this technology.
3. Converging the data into information is the most critical element. Based on the weight-age of connects each tweet, or story has, the conversation is given a particular weight-age. Couple the same with the number of conversations collected in particular period give a bubble or heat map of a conversation. The once above the threshold are given a particular score and are filtered for being passed on to client. This process is fairly automated with minuscule human interference. And here is the gap.

Most of the filtering sources there are rely on automated rules and filters. Human Emotions are hard to quantify and 50% of results from this kinda Convergence are way off the mark. Currently working on developing a Social Media Listening Project. The idea is to capture listening in social media with 3C’s but add very active manual moderation layer to at-least the last two phases, i.e. Connects and Convergence. Manual interface to me sounds indispensable for Convergence. Converging and selecting the pieces of Listening from crap to in-valuable is critical for businesses. Once this Listening can be filtered out, marketing can be easily be created around what people want  to listen to giving boost to ROI.