Sophisticated marketers that want real, meaningful, and measurable engagement don’t want an assembly line, “any color, as long as its black” solution, rather, they seek engagement mechanics that are specifically crafted and designed to meet the value proposition of engaging with their audiences.

However, the problem with those experiences is that most of those have not been developed with the proper thinking. The performance of custom social experiences over the past several years is more an observation on the maturity state of the industry, rather than the effectiveness of the type of solution. Carrying through the automobile industry analogy, the auto, itself, isn’t the failure, simply the lack of proper method.

Most custom social experiences to date have been designed without a rigorous process that marries business objectives with consumer desires and the appropriate deployment channels with the appropriate mechanics and functionality. In an effort to help marketers design better custom social experiences, we’ve codified our learnings from the design and development of over 500+ custom social experiences since 2007 into a holistic framework that provides validation and a roadmap for the execution of social programs.

A social page management and publishing tool, on its own, is fine for beginners who are just learning to understand social on Facebook, and it is needed to drive streamlined publishing and ongoing page management across markets; however, meaningful engagement comes across the engagement spectrum and needs to be customized to have any tangible benefit. Custom social experiences, one example being those that provide utility, do, and will, always have a place in the toolbox of marketers, so long as they are designed and executed to deliver business results.

We can all agree that success in marketing is set up by a well crafted and articulated social strategy and that social programs are more effective when supported by media. Furthermore, there is no silver activation bullet. Rather, there are various ways to successfully activate consumers through social channels. But, let’s move away from the discussion of activation tactics and put the focus on business results because this is the conversation that industry leaders need to converge on in 2012.

To move forward as an industry we all need to face the music and substantiate to executive teams the value of online social engagement spend beyond the superficial metrics of likes and followers. Whether a marketer is activating in social via a custom social experience, rich video content, or a crafty message that is deployed through a platform such as Buddy, Vitrue, Spreadfast et al, there is a need for a standardized way to measure social performance. Just as there are standards in the field of performance marketing, we need holistic measures and answers to questions such as:

• What does success in Social mean to the CMO and what does her measurement dashboard look like?
• How can an executive team correlate business outcomes to a brand’s activities in social channels?
• And the holy grail: what is the ROI on the company’s overall spend in Social?

These are the challenges facing all of us in 2012. As with the automobile industry, there are numerous companies with different hypotheses and approaches, each building out separate models and platforms. It is the companies that deliver solutions to answer the above questions that will stand the test of time and win in the long run. However, this is not a zero sum game. This year will see more leading companies working together to set standards and bring best-of-breed solutions to market. As this New Year kicks into high gear, let’s challenge ourselves to, as an industry, elevate the discussion in 2012 to focus more on the metrics that matter.

1. Business Objective(s): What is your brand looking to accomplish in 2012? Are we expanding into a new market? Are we launching new products? Business objectives at this level tend to fall into only several categories - Awareness, Revenue, Engagement, Acquisition, Traffic (digital or foot) - and you can drill down into program-level objectives from there. We put the ‘s’ of ‘Objective(s)’ in parenthesis because we want to emphasize a focused approach, but there will no doubt be a few secondary objectives.
2. How Objective(s) Translate to Social: Now that we’ve decided on our objective(s), determine how they translate into social. What does it mean that, more than anything in 2012, we want to ‘drive revenue?’ In that case, your social objectives may be to 1) get more consumers into your conversion funnel via social channels, 2) increase the average order value (AOV) via social channels, and/or 3) increase the number of opportunities for a social consumer to be exposed to your product or service. These social ‘translations’ of the objective(s) will help to crystalize the over-arching action items for the year.
3. Past Social Programs: Take the major (and perhaps minor) initiatives in social for the last year or two, categorize them, and build your social program database. Make this database as thorough as necessary (try to lean towards ‘As Thorough As Possible’), attempting to get a complete picture of your brand’s experience in social over the last 12 to 24. If you have aunified interface for analyzing all of your social programs, fantastic; otherwise, you’ll have to manually compile and aggregate XLS data into a master set. Then, Approach//Solution//Results works well as a framework when compiling a slide deck of program snapshots. Having both the master social program database and the slide deck will set you up nicely for analyzing what worked and what didn’t.
4. Wild Successes and Abominable Failures: Now, with that program database, analyze your KPIs based on the previous business objectives for the brand in social. This is when your Excel junkies (aka analysts) really come in handy – hopefully you’ve treated them well all year. Which programs were similar, and how did they perform program-over-program (POP)? Did your optimizations work, or were they ‘floptimizations’ (or did we continue to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results)? Take the highlights and lowlights, determine the ‘whys’ and the ‘why nots’, and with the now-updated social program master slide deck you’ll be fully armed to begin the actual concepting of your 2012 social programs.
5. Use Program Analysis for Concept Calendar: And now for the fun part. Begin your program concepting, and sculpt a social program calendar based on those objectives we identified in a. For this, we use a framework called Program Identity Design (PID), which results in a PID Map – a fully-developed and packaged-up program concept that can be distributed to the entire team, from CMO down to the individual engineers, so that the purpose of the program is crystal clear across the business units. From here, you can plug several PID Maps into your social program calendar and know that what you’ve developed has integrity with your objectives and the overall direction of the business.

The above framework can take a few days, a week, a month, or longer, depending on your brand, rigor, and desired results. The take-away, though, is to not start at the end and simply throw a few concepts together in a slide deck; start at the beginning (that is, after all, usually the best place to start), so that your program concepts have integrity across your entire business. Anything else is just making the same old donuts.

October

• YouTube Launches Politics (10/6): Looking for politicians’ platforms, blunders, and defining moments? Look no further than YouTube Politics, launched in the first week of October. Everything you need to keep track of who’s in the lead and who’s falling flat leading up to next year’s election.
• Foursquare Launches Radar (10/12): Radar is a sign of maturation rather than just an app update, and it includes several logical and useful mechanics for Foursquare users. The app will now notify you if you are near a To-Do, or if a place on a List that you follow is around the corner, or if several of your friends have just checked into the same place only minutes away. Makes sense, right? Oh, and they changed the dodgeball from purple to green; don’t freak out.
• Facebook for iPad (10/10): The Facebook iPad app was a long time coming, and it lives up to the billing. Chat, scroll through bigger photos, discover new messages, events, and more on the left-hand navigation bar, and find out what you need to know now with the new notification tray. That said, Facebook applications still aren’t functional through the app; updates to come, no doubt.
• X-Factor Enables Voting on Twitter (10/25): This award show certainly made social a key element in the voting aspect of the show. Fans could vote via DM to @TheXFactorUSA or through their Twitter social microsite, and they could join the conversation using the hashtag #XFactor. Another award show, the People’s Choice Awards 2012, would incorporate Twitter into their social activation on a larger-scale, as users simply had to tweet or retweet a nominee with their category hashtag. As live TV gets more interactive in social, the fans win.

November

• Twitter Launches Stories (11/1): On the first of November, Twitter launched their first installment of a new series called Stories, where they highlight different tales of Twitter helping people accomplish things in life, from saving a bookstore to selling a fish moments after it’s caught. Stories big and small can be submitted to Stories, and anyone can do it, simply by mentioning @twitterstories or including #twitterstories in a tweet. A nice way for Twitter to both humanize the brand and highlight real stories that showcase Twitter’s value.
• Groupon IPO (11/4): Groupon finally IPO’d early in November, following other players earlier in 2011, and initially was met with positive market reaction, followed by a slow decline. We’ll be following this one throughout 2012.
• Google+ Launches Pages (11/7): As most predicted, Google+ launched Pages in the middle of Q4, and they seem to borrow best practices from Facebook Pages, Twitter Profiles, and YouTube Channels. Anyone can create a Page, and businesses can put their best customers into circles and levels, host hangouts to launch new products or answer questions, and share new content with followers. As we said earlier this year, it will be really interesting to see how businesses leverage Google+ for B2B and intraB.
• Foursquare Launches Expertise Badges (11/14): Whether you see this move as a gimmick to keep folks interested in badges, or as a legitimate evolution of the badge system that Foursquare has perfected, there is no doubt that it’s fun to unlock badges. With the update, certain badges will display expertise levels as you visit more and more of those venue types. Get your badge game up!
• Foursquare Expands Deal Partnerships (11/29): Specials have given Foursquare an edge in 2011, as they continue to add new partners, this time with Scoutmob, and throughout the year with AmEx in June, Groupon in July, and others. Foursquare will continue to stay relevant and gain users as both Specials and consumers’ mobile buying habits mature in 2012.

December

• YouTube Gets a G+ and Facebook Facelift (12/1): YouTube gave itself a facelift in December, rolling out a Facebook-esque left-hand navigation, along with incorporating a newsfeed of Google+ +1′s and shares, in addition to YouTube uploads and likes. Twitter, Facebook, and Orkut integrations make the new YouTube a social video hub.
• Facebook Acquires Gowalla (12/2): Early in December, rumor had it that Facebook had acquired the location-sharing service, Gowalla. It seems that the Gowalla developer team will now work on Facebook’s Timeline feature, with some moving to the Palo Alto office and others moving to Facebook’s Austin office. A nice acquisition that certainly brings talented minds to Facebook so that it can further incorporate location in future updates.
• Twitter Announces Brand Pages (12/8): In the second week of the month, Twitter announced that they would be rolling out brand pages, similar to those on Facebook and now Google+. This seems almost like ‘too little, too late’ as Twitter feeds are easy to leverage and deploy elsewhere on more robust digital brand properties. That said, it seems like a good investment on their part and should give them more to offer to their advertising partners. More to come…
• Zynga IPO (12/15): Zynga opened mid-month with a very poor performance, as compared to the other tech company IPOs from 2011. Zynga’s business model is sound, and the poor showing may be more tech IPO exhaustion than anything else; however, we will definitely be watching this one closely throughout 2012.
• Facebook Timeline Rolls Out (12/15): One of the biggest changes during the quarter was saved until the last few weeks of the year, as Facebook unveiled Timeline to users’ profiles globally, followed quickly on 12/18 with the mobile roll-out. A massive change not just for users, but for agencies and developers, as ideas began swirling around on how best to leverage the new Timeline for brand integrations. Additionally, and more importantly, this was my birthday.

There you have it; the fourth quarter of 2011 in all it’s glory. Let’s wrap up with links to all of the major players’ summaries; take a look at the hot topics, watch some of the top videos from the year, and get cracking on your New Year’s resolutions.

• Facebook Memeology 2011
• Google Zeitgeist 2011
• YouTube 2011 Rewind
• Twitter 2011 #YearInReview
• 2011 Holiday Travels on Foursquare

I’m sure you’ve heard the line that the best customer is an existing customer. Well it’s true and this logic can be extended to your employees and/or your most loyal followers within social communities when it comes to amplifying your social programs. Think about it, for a company, employees are family and rabid customers are advocates. The two groups, when leveraged in the proper manner, can have an amazing impact on the amplification of any social program. The thing is that most companies aren’t yet in a position where they can mobilize their most valuable assets. Let’s look at the common barriers of each.

Mobilizing Advocates
The key to being able to mobilize your most loyal community members is knowing who they are.  Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, or a private label community, one needs to be able to quantify who the most boisterous and influential members are, have the ability to segment and contact them, and mobilize them through programs that they find engaging and rewarding. At the current state of the industry, this is easier said than done, however, I’m confident that 2012 will bring with it new tools to further define and mobilize social influencers. But, the tools are only half of the equation. A company needs to have internal systems, processes, and programs in place to harness the power of its advocates.

Mobilizing Employees
Getting employees involved in driving company wide social efforts and amplifying social programs is a must for every company. As mentioned above, employees are a company’s most valuable resource, but how many global companies do you know that are truly mobilizing their employees to amplify their social programs? The reason is that most companies are not organized to do this. Companies are lacking the infrastructure and protocols to pull off a coordinated effort in mobilizing their workforce. For starters, every employee in the company should be aware of the company’s social efforts with access to a global calender of all upcoming programs, including program-specific asks of the employee. Moreover, employees need to be made aware and educated of the impact that the company’s social efforts have on the company’s bottom line and therefore their job and career opportunities as the company drives towards its objectives. I could go on and on with high level advice here, but I think you get the point. Imagine if a company such as Bank of America that has 100,000 active employees on Linkedin gets each employee to promote the launch of a new social program through their Linkedin feed. Or, what if every employee Likes the company’s official Facebook page. The reverberations of these two actions would be profound for a company with the scale of Bank of America.

The common thread in the above is that most companies are not organized in a way where they are able to take advantage of their most prized assets. At Dachis Group we’re organized as a social business and pour every ounce of our energy into helping the world’s leading companies become social businesses. Look to these two activations strategies to become starting points and table stakes for Fortune 500 and Global 1000 brands in 2012.

This post originally appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.

So, how do we leverage similar modeling and incorporate it for brand marketing initiatives? In this post we are going to explore the strategic approach and thinking which takes place to make proper Social Design decisions for a social branded experience.

Marketers now have a tremendous and evolving opportunity to leverage communities such as Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms from the outside in. By developing experiences with this strategy users are still at the epicenter, however, marketers can now tap into the existing community users have already built to provide experiences on these platforms which nurtures the users identities even further through a social experience. When executed appropriately, this approach provides a valuable experience to the user, brands they engage with and the related social platforms.

Have you used Spotify, Nike+, Flipboard or TripAdvisor? If so, you have engaged with a product leveraging this model. Here’s a quick reason why:

Spotify is connecting friends around music. But why is it so successful? One of the key tenets to their product model is allowing users to feel more open to share and provide the tools to do so by connecting the experience directly to a user’s Facebook network. Immediately upon registration, as a user, you are surrounded by your friends and can engage immediately around your common musical interests. This all happens instantly based on the user’s existing social identity. Connections with the Facebook real-time ticker affords the application the opportunity to share users’ musical interests in a frictionless manner and further curate their identity and connections.

Nike+ has likely popped up in your news feed as you see a friend complete a staggering 7-mile run before (some of us) have even had our first coffee. In Nike’s product strategy there is a focus on providing users the opportunity to easily tell their story, aggregate and share experiences over time. Through charting, mapping and connecting users around their shared interest of exercise, it allows the user to continue to build their identity, share, and engage around a common activity.

At Stuzo | Dachis Group, when we engage on branded social experiences, we identify which projects will benefit from this outside in approach. Be sure to check out our post on Program Identify Design for more behind the scenes information on how we make some of these key decisions along the way.

Let’s take a look at a recent launch for the upcoming People’s Choice Awards where we can see in action the Program Identity Design framework. This will provide a tangible demonstration on how we executed on a Social Design plan. For this program, we engaged early on during the show’s planning to concept, design, develop and manage the social experience.

The Program Identity Design process began on day one during the discovery phase of this program. The ultimate goal was to provide an authentic user experience which would generate conversation, brand amplification and personalized engagements by incorporating key elements of social platforms. This frame and the strategic thinking helped us ensure we were meeting business metrics, one of them being driving total votes and engagements via social.

What took place during this phase included multiple sessions reviewing the Program Identity Design framework with our team, client and related stakeholders to ensure we executed an approach, which was social at the core. At the same time, it included detailed data and market analysis to make the critical decisions which would enable the program to succeed. This was done first and foremost, before proceeding on our deep dive into information architecture with our creative team. We often do this, because we understand a social approach requires a set framework, clear objectives and requirements collaboratively developed before we begin churning out creatives. You should be able to tell the story of this experience with your colleagues and client using this lens before opening Visio, PhotoShop or touching a line of code.

Let’s take a dive into some of these notable Social Design elements which were incorporated as part of the end product through this process…

Personalization that provides value – If users are going to authorize an application or take the time to connect the experience with their account on a social platform, give them a clear reason to. Ask yourself “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” If you know the movie I am referencing, it’s also a key question you can take into many aspects of your decision making criteria.

Personalization elements include:

• Facebook Interest Mapping: By connecting their account via Facebook, the application queries related content the user has associated with their identity on Facebook. This includes graph items such as celebrities, movies, music and related interests. Through the personalization lens into the experience, users are immediately able associate themselves with the brand and seamlessly cast votes for their favorites. We instantly help make the program identifiable to the user based on the social account they have already curated over time.

• Connected Relevance: Through their interactions users can see related interests and their friends’ activity in the experience. This provides the user an associated connection with the nominees and provides a transparent view into how this nominee may be connected through their network. It also provides validation and connection to the program by surfacing relevant friend activity. At times, this may give them the edge to place a vote for a particular nominee, perceive value, engage deeper or use the available social tools to introduce their friends to the experience.

Distribution and Conversation – Facebook is a key piece of the outside in approach in this example. Scale is further enabled by successfully connecting the experience across the web. Implementing the appropriate user options and connection points provides the link to transcend multiple communities, build conversation and drive engagement.

• Facebook Graph: The majority of users engaging on Facebook are able to see the deep connectedness they have with the nominees and the brand. Multiple streams of distribution are included through the Facebook platform to allow users to tell their story and drive activation from their network. This is performed through generating conversation around similar interests and sharing stories to the users and relevant friends’ walls. Private invitations are also an available sharing option.

• Increasing Stream Engagement (In-Stream App): We know from our identity mapping and related research during the discover phase, that many of the core users who personalize are vocal and open to sharing their brand experience. We wanted to give them the opportunity to broadcast their support even further. An in-stream application is included as part of the experience to allow brand page owners and Facebook users to syndicate the main voting experience for engagement directly in the stream.

• Twitter Voting and Conversation Drivers: Users are provided the option to tweet or retweet a vote on the Twitter platform to show their support for their favorite nominee. Directly in the Facebook experience they can also “Like” and “Follow” a nominee to connect with the artist.  This extension also provides a valuable opportunity to leverage the star power of nominees and branded hashtags as they drive interactions from their own networks to support their nomination.

• Branded Extensions: People’s Choice Awards is a Procter & Gamble Production. Through a partnership with their portfolio of brands, the experience was customized and deployed for partnered brands on their Facebook pages. This provided all the same opportunities of the flagship experience with a branded tie-in to drive further engagement and conversation with their specific audience. Measurement and analytics were provided in a dashboard segmented by brands.

This article is a snapshot of some of the defining elements incorporated into the experience through Program Identity Design. To drive recurring engagement and tap into the users desire to be a part of the show, a few other notable additions were presented during the experience.

• Each vote by a user connected via Facebook and opted into the promotion contributes an additional entry to a sweepstakes, which includes tickets to the show. This is also connected to a Facebook Event which provides additional entries to win. This creates a compelling reason for sustained engagement and brand distribution.
• A user “Fan Awards” (UGC) contest is included to allow users to submit themselves or a friend who should be nominated for a special award called “Favorite Profile Pic.” Users can share their entry, post as their profile picture and drum up votes within the PCA experience to win special red carpet treatment at the show.
• Subsequent releases to the application (not shown in this post) are included to sustain engagement around the Award Show season and to drive viewership.
• Contextual prompts were shown to the user to allow them to opt-in to be a part of the on air broadcast. Secrecy is being kept with this feature, so tune in on January 11th!

To engage consumers effectively within social platforms, it requires a shift in the way we have traditionally thought about marketing and communications. A handy resource along the way of thinking outside in (and inside out) is the Facebook Developer video series which provides a library of videos and presentations on Facebook Platform engagement (drill down to the video on Social Design: A Definition). To learn more about Program Identity Design, check out the Stuzo | Dachis Group Program Identity Design Framework and feel free to contact me on Twitter @mark_spangler.

When it comes to these local experiences, building and deploying an application or social microsite should be focused on the platforms that are most effective. For example:

• When working with clients with a strong presence in Japan or China, Mixi and Ren Ren, respectively, need to be involved in the program build from the very beginning, as the functionality and mechanics of each platform vary and must be accounted for.
• If the brand is popular in Brazil, then Orkut (60% Brazilian) and the brand’s .br site should be involved in the build.
• When working in Canada, should the program be localized for Quebec and have a French language option (the Régie requires this if the program is a promotion)? Or do you build out a completely separate experience because the quebecoise don’t really like the whole “translation” thing; they’re a distinct people with their own culture and deserve their own separate experience, which must be accounted for.

However, when a campaign is global, and encompasses many nations and cultures, then how do we localize that experience so that it feels natural across each instance? Now we must understand business capabilities and restrictions.

For some clients, localizing an experience simply means translation of copy and creative within an experience and displaying the appropriate version to the appropriate user based on that user’s Facebook language settings. For others, we include language toggle options for the user, who may have a preference different than their default Facebook language settings, or we’ll verify via IP (which is less reliable).

Some clients have localized social content teams, whom we leverage when building out experiences that must be custom localized on a market-to-market basis. This creates added flexibility and requires a much more dynamic build to accommodate for multiple CMS back-end administration permissions and functionality. For retailers and service providers, for example, messaging and functionality may have to change based on region because shipping or service may not be available in all areas, but the brand will still want to message those folks for added awareness and viral spread through the Graph.

There are many ways to handle localization, but the good news is that we don’t have to guess at our solutions. In every case, the answer becomes apparent after we do a deep analysis of our client’s business requirements, business objectives, operational capabilities, and their consumer preferences.

This post originally appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.

Now that we’ve had some time to absorb the changes in the space during Q3, let’s take a look back at the big announcements, compare the new landscape to the changes from the second quarter, and project what will have the most impact for Q4 of 2011. In a sentence, Facebook’s f8 developer conference contained more sweeping changes to the largest social platform (now 800 million users) since its launch in 2004.

July

• Twitter Town Hall @ White House (7/5): In July, the first ever Twitter Town Hall was hosted at the White House by President Obama, and tweeters could send in their questions using the hashtag #AskObama. Our President has always done a good job using social media to connect with and converse with voters – he and his staff were widely acclaimed for their use of social during their campaign three years ago – and this was another great example of the flattening effect that technology has on society, all the way up to the highest office in the land.
• Facebook Video Calling (7/6): When Facebook and Skype joined forces, we knew it was only a matter of time before regular text chat would turn into video chat, especially with Google+ Hangouts launching a month earlier. Usage numbers aren’t public, but the feature itself is quick to install, easy to use, and sleek in integration.
• Foursquare Redesign and Notification Tray (7/15): Foursquare made a couple plays during Q3, both to their web interface and to their mobile app. In this update, a new notification tray is unrolled to users, and is met with positive feedback. The tray simplifies and rolls up many of the processes that foursquare users had become accustom to, providing an experience with less friction and a smoother overall experience for surfacing relevant content.

August

• Foursquare Brand Pages Now Self-Serve (8/2): In early August, foursquare opened up the Brand Page creation process to businesses, making the process infinitely more scalable and increasing the value (via Page control) for businesses on the platform. To get started with your brand page, check out Foursquare: Create Page.
• Facebook Messenger (8/9): With the acquisition of Beluga, Facebook made a strong play into mobile messaging and released a stand-alone mobile app called Messenger. It integrates directly into your Facebook Messages, syncing conversations and surfacing the friends with whom you message the most. With over 350 million active users accessing Facebook via mobile, expect to see more attention given to the distribution channel from the largest social platform during Q4.
• Targeting Your Sharing on Facebook (8/23): In an effort to make sharing and privacy more transparent with its 800 million users, Facebook began rolling out targeted sharing at the end of August. This allows users to post updates and content in three tiers, Public, Friends, and Custom (where you can target by List group), in addition to being able to pre-approve tags in photos and updates before they go live. Also, Facebook surfaced the View Profile As button, making it easier to see how your profile appears to any other user on Facebook. Overall, these changes are another step forward in gaining the trust of the masses.

September

• Facebook Subscribe and Changes to Newsfeed (9/20): Pre-f8, Facebook rolled out several important structural changes that took aim at some nice functionality that already existed outside of the platform. The Subscribe button was introduced, which essentially allows you to receive a person’s status updates in your newsfeed, like and comment on them, without being connected to them as friends. Take that, Twitter. Then Facebook rolled out Smart Lists, which segments your friends into groups, which then allows you to dictate both what you share with them and what gets shared with you, and upgraded the ticker to display a real-time stream of activity across your social graph. Take that, Google+.
• Share Photos on Twitter via SMS (9/21): Right before f8, Twitter introduced SMS photo sharing. Some may ask, why are upgrades being rolled out for SMS in Q3 of 2011? The significance is that there is still much of the world where smart phones aren’t as pervasive, but where users still need to connect and share. A picture is worth a thousand words, and as global new sources like CNN increasingly source the ‘public journalist,’ photos take center stage when breaking global events, be they natural disasters or political upheavals.
• Facebook Timeline (9/22): In September, Facebook began unleashing feature changes and upgrades, and everything came to a head at f8 with the introduction of Timeline, which represents a new lens on the user profile page, largely unchanged since it’s inception. Timeline also represents an enormous opportunity for brands, as they now have the ability to weave themselves into the fabric of consumers lives with utility and entertainment like never before. For more on this, check out Paradigm Shift for Brands on Facebook.
• Google+ Membership Climbs (9/26): Reported in late September was the continued growth of the nacent social network, Google+, and how it was primed to take over significant market share from other players and, most importantly, Facebook. Then people seemed to realize that nobody else was there. Hindsight is 20/20 so we’ll see what happens with Google+ in Q4, especially with the roll out of brand pages and functionality.
• Foursquare Global Hackathon Winners Announced (9/28): On the heels of f8 was the announcement of the foursquare global hackathon winners. The winning applications were focused on utility and social good and, if anything, show that there are still rich developer communities outside of Facebook. That said, with the advent of tagging locations and new apps that allow for User, Action, Object functionality, will folks continue to use foursquare when it means they can only checkin to a place, when on Facebook, you can checkin to a place, be reading a book, be hiking a trail, and be cooking a dish (hopefully not all at the same time)?

f8 truly changed the direction of all players in the space, from Google+ privacy advantages, to foursquare checkins, to Twitter follower functionality. Now that Facebook has surpassed the number of users that the entire Internet had in 2004, and with the fact that they are dictating the structure of the landscape with such sweeping changes, should we consider the Facebook Platform the ‘new’ web?

Did we miss any major updates from Q3? Link us to them in the comments!

1. Determine the business requirements:
   1. What are the business objectives?
   2. What are the social metrics?
   3. What are the social goals?
2. Pinpoint the interaction driver(s) for the consumer:
   • Emotional connection
   • Fame and/or fortune
   • Fun and entertainment
   • Utility
3. Focus on the building blocks of social:
   1. Identity
   2. Conversation
   3. Community

When branded social concepts are created using this process, they can win, but it’s not a guarantee; the process only allows you to see the exercise through the proper lens. As a matter of fact, even if you use the above framework, the program can still flop. When this happens, it’s normally due to the miscalibration of one of the three steps. I.e. you didn’t understand the business requirements clearly enough, or you didn’t have an accurate enough picture of your consumer’s interaction drivers, or you didn’t incorporate 3.A, 3.B. or 3.C effectively, naturally, and in the correct order. Nobody said coming up with large-scale social experiences was easy.

Layer onto this straightforward, but challenging, framework the fact that landscape and technologies of this space change not by the decade, or year, or even quarter, but literally by the minute (a fascination that has resulted in the ritual of live blogging a conference). When there are so many shiny new tactics coming at you from all angles, it isn’t easy to see through the clutter when trying to incorporate social technologies, features, and functionality into a digital branded experience.

That said, there is one ‘easy’ way to tell if your social concept and its associated feature set will be a hit with your consumers, or if it will be met with crickets. I say ‘easy’ because for some folks, this is much easier than for others. It’s call The Sniff Test, and it’s certainly not new. The act of stepping out of your skin and asking, “would anyone actually participate in this?” It’s the gut-check of experience concepting.

We can get very caught up in the movement of the space, and we can get excited about all of the new functionality that may now be at our fingertips, as digital marketers, but without taking a step outside of the theoretical (or physical) whiteboarding room, nearly all of your concepts may seem like heaters. It’s only when you ask questions like, “would I/my friends/my parents/my kids do this?” that you can be confident in a social concept.

There are so many radical changes happening in this space each day, making it even more important to apply The Sniff Test during concepting so as not to go down the veritable rabbit hole of social app functionality. That’s not to say you can make due without a mastery of those new social app functions, or at least someone in your corner who has; you certainly do. Simply that once you’ve equipped yourself with the latest and greatest in the social functionality toolbox, and you’ve established a concept or three using the above framework for developing branded experiences that are social by design, don’t let those concepts out the door without ensuring that they’ve all passed The Sniff Test.

This post originally appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.