Connecting the dots is always easiest in hindsight, so let’s take a look at everything that shook out in Q1 of 2012 across the major social channels and between the relevant players in the space. Foursquare makes a fundamental shift in their value-prop, Facebook holds a marketing conference and changes everything for 850 million users, Pinterest continues its take-over, Google consolidates and rebrands a slew of services, and now everyone can take washed out photos right from their phone. Without further ado:

January

• Foursquare Launches Explore (1/12): The launch of Explore at the beginning of the year was actually a bigger deal than most sources made of it. Foursquare is actually making a large shift to Explore because of the potential value it delivers to users. Traditionally, the location-based service has been about points, badges, and gamifying the places you go and the content you share while there. Explore now offers a ton of useful, relevant information to the user – what around me is the best for drip coffee, which restaurant do my friends like the best in this neighborhood, show me  places that I’ve never checked into before but are trending today, etc. – and, combined with Radar, offers a huge value-prop; functionality with far more of an upside after people get over points and badges.
• Facebook Launches Timeline Applications (1/18): This announcement was big and is a precursor to the fMC later in the quarter. The new type of applications that launched here are in relation to the user’s personal Timeline; applications like Nike+, which allow the user to track progress and allow the application to bubble up aggregations of activity, will change the way that users interact with Facebook, the web, and their increasing number of devices.
• YouTube Hits 4 Billion Views Per Day (1/23): Some quick math lands us at roughly 1.5 trillion views per year, assuming no further growth, and this really emphasizes the maturation of both the channel and the audience. YouTube revolutionized the way that people on the web consume video, and Facebook changed the method and rate that people share content online; this has led to a co-evolution of media publishing, consumption, and sharing, and we may not even be at leveling off point, as more and more users globally are transitioning to smart phones and other media consuming devices. Google, through the YouTube platform, has changed the way people consume TV, movies, music, educational clips, news, and the numbers show it.
• Pinterest Becomes Top Traffic Driver (1/29): Pinterest exploded onto the scene in Q4 of 2011, and became the darling of our space virtually over night. Cut to January, and we start to see tangible results from the new social platform, reportedly having a major impact on traffic and referral numbers to retail sites and other verticals. New numbers would come out right as the quarter ended that amazingly paints Pinterest as the number three social network on the web.

February

• Twitter Voting for NBA Slam Dunk Contest (2/23): During awards season, we saw the ubiquity of social channels, both as a consumption medium and an engagement method. The NBA All-Star Weekend Slam Dunk contest is probably the most anticipated and holy events in professional basketball since its inception in 1976. Every year, the fans in the arena are given score cards to hold up to ‘judge’ each dunk, but the panel of expert dunkers has always had the final say on who progresses and eventually who takes home the trophy. This year, fans on Twitter voted Jeremy Evans into the throne by tweeting over 4 million times with hashtags, and he was crowned in real time, with no expert judges needed. Dunking by the people, for the people.
• Promoted Tweets Go Mobile (2/28): Twitter is making a big push in the ad space in 2012, and they took a big step by introducing distribution of sponsored tweets into users’ mobile interfaces. This seems like a natural extension, and should allow the social network to gain additional traction in the ad media space with big brands. That said, price points seem to still be too high for businesses outside of the top tier.
• Facebook Marketing Conference (2/29): Mark Zuckerberg, in reference to the new Timeline, stated at f8 last year that “If the original Facebook was the first five minutes [of a conversation] and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you today is the rest – the next few hours of a deep engaging conversation.” At fMC, this became the reality for brands as well, as the announcement came that all brand pages would be transitioning to the Timeline format…and quickly. Brands scrambled to transition and take advantage of some of the new functionality – cover photo, milestones, messages, pinned posts, new application widths, etc. – and a new age of Facebook dawned.

March

• Google Launches Play (3/6): Google pulled off a beautiful rebranding early in March when it launched Google Play, a new grouping of their Android Market, Google Books, Google Music, and a set of video services, and incorporated it into the ‘sandbar’ at the top of Google properties. The Android Market name was retired, and the services are now known as Google Play Apps, Play Books, Play Music, and Play Movies. The truth is that between search, Gmail, G+, and YouTube, Google is much closer to Facebook in engagement and time spent than most think, and the flexibility and breadth of devices make the (former) Android Market a real force in comparison to the iTunes Store, which means that the more Google can consolidate these services and properties, the greater share of mind they have with users in comparison to the other giants in the space.
• Instagram Announces Android Launch (3/11): Much was made of the launch of Instagram for Android – everything from the overjoyed ‘droid users to the nay sayers who instantly predicted the demise of Android because “look! if it takes Instagram this long to release an Android version, what does that say about the platform!” Essentially, yes it is easier to gain mass distribution by launching your new app in the iTunes Store, but using that statement as the sole guiding factor behind your go-to-market would be shortsighted. Also, some people were just being snobs. Let’s just mark March as the month when a wildly popular mobile application finally was made available to the other half.
• Twitter Acquires Posterous (3/21): The Posterous team migrated over to Twitter at the end of Q1; an interesting shift in the landscape, but Posterous is more widely considered to be a personal lifecasting socnet, rather than a channel for brands to connect with consumers. In the end, it means that Twitter acquires some fresh talent who may be able to help come up with creative solutions, present and future, at Twitter.
• Zynga Acquires OMGPOP (3/21): Another acquisition, this time in the gaming space, results in the hottest new game, Draw Something, now falling under the umbrella of the incumbent. Some question whether the acquisition was a smart move, as the Draw Something user activity seems to have peaked and leveled off. That said, Zynga is known for their brilliant cross-game user acquisition (i.e. using the current hot game interface to drive users to the next hot game), so there may be more to this story next quarter…

“If the original Facebook was the first five minutes [of a conversation] and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you today is the rest–the next few hours of a deep engaging conversation.” – Mark Zuckerberg, f8 2011

On September 22, 2011 we were presented with some groundbreaking platform updates and partnerships, which would shape the way we engage in social channels as end users, technical solution providers and marketers. Notably, a major release at the time was Timeline for Facebook users.

Working in the area of brand marketing, I find this quote from that release rings just as true with the announcement of the the brand Timeline and new products at fMC (Facebook Marketing Conference) in New York on February 29th.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, opened the event by sharing some moments in which connections through the Facebook Platform have had a dramatic impact on government, family and institutions.

Chris Cox, VP of Product, echoed Mark’s original sentiments in his keynote today – this time expanding from the f8 presentations, discussing how the Facebook evolution more directly relates to brands and marketers.

Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business Marketing at Facebook, delivered a compelling keynote, which gave a deeper overview of the platform changes and clearly marking Facebook’s positioning going forward from today. His delivery addressed the major announcement that Timeline is now available for brands and is “the richest, most customized marketing canvas we’ve ever built.” The point he clearly presented is that more and more Pages are going to become “mission control” for businesses to engage with consumers across all areas of the platform. We also received an overview of the new advertiser solutions to help brands achieve scale across the platform being offered from Facebook which we will provide an overview of later in this post.

Brand Pages Product and Timeline Updates

Below are some of the updates being released as part of the new brand pages product. This includes an entire page redesign and functionality updates, giving brands Timelines.

• Friend Activity is now surfaced on a brand’s Timeline. If someone likes or comments, stories of how your friends engage with the brand are surfaced. A more relevant and personal experiences can be delivered for each user of the page by being able to see how their friends are engaging.

• A new views and apps section helps users navigate to other parts of your page. “Tabs” which were formerly on the left hand side of the page have been replaced with the ability to select “views” across the top of the page. The photo application always shows as the first app option, and the page owner can control which other 3 immediately show to users in the same row with a custom designed icon. In total, through an expanded list option, up to 12 views can be surfaced to the users.

• The composer now provides the ability for brands to “pin” a story. These pin anchors posts at the top of the page by default for 7 days, unless refreshed. Marketers are still encouraged post frequently through their content strategy, while having one main story featured throughout the course of the content calendar.

• Page posts can be “starred.” Starring makes a post go full width across the Timeline to prominently feature the story. Posts can also be “hidden” from the public view, but still visible in the admins Activity Log.

• Milestones are now an option in the composer. Page owners can add an event, with a mandatory photo to feature relevant or key moments in the brands history. These have a larger story format and help highlight defining moments.

• Page owners can now change dates on posts to populate and manage timeline.

Brands can now assign a Cover Photo to show at the top of their Timeline. This large creative canvas area, set at 851×315 pixels provides an opportunity to create an immediate visual impact. It’s important to note that there are policies for brands related to how to use the platform and the Cover Photo, which includes limitations on using this creative area for promotional messaging and certain calls to action. The profile picture still exists, and is the consistent representation that is used when the brand icon is shown throughout the platform.

There are also a handful of updates when it comes to administering a page as an owner. These include the “Activity Log,” which can be used to manage Timeline and posts to control Timeline content. Also announced is a new “messaging” option for users to connect directly, and privately, with page owners to create a one-on-one dialogue. User Insights management and notifications options are also enhanced in the administration area.

As a page owner, you can preview and push your Timeline live at anytime. Note that your page will automatically roll over to Timeline, if not performed manually, on March 30, 2012.

New Advertising Products

“This is where marketing on Facebook is going to feel like the rest of Facebook.” – Mike Hoefflinger, Facebook’s Director of Global Business Marketing

Facebook also announced their new advertising solutions for marketers on the platform. Their key point through connecting Pages to the new distribution opportunities is that we are no longer creating ad messaging but providing the opportunity to deliver stories at scale and the amplification to drive a return on investment.

The new advertising (or I guess I should say, “story”) distribution offerings include Reach Generator, Premium on Facebook and Offers.

Reach Generator is an offering from Facebook to increase distribution and provide more visibility and ultimately brand favorability for brands. This enables brands to take stories they post from their page (“mission control”) and gain distribution by being featured on the right hand side of the home screen. Facebook reported on average, brands reach about 16% of their fans on a typical week through stories. The distribution and placement of stories through Reach Generator provides the opportunity to push this reach to 50% (and beyond) on a weekly basis and increase engagement levels. This has been in beta for a few months, and Facebook reported this story placement is providing double the engagement levels than posts not being featured on the home screen.

Premium on Facebook is Facebook’s premier offering for marketers on the platform and what they are stating is “the most impactful way to distribute your content.”

Starting at the Page level again, this product allows a story, which is created once to be distributed in multiple areas of the site for maximum reach. These placements include:

• Right hand side of the home page (as noted above.)
• Eligibility for sponsored distribution in the Facebook Newsfeed.
• Facebook’s logout screen will now show stories and become another area of distribution.
• Distribution to mobile devices.

Sponsored stories in the newfeed are showing a 5-10x CTR over placement in other areas of the site. Currently Facebook serves up over 100 billion impressions daily through the newsfeed and it is where people are expecting the stories in their life to be surfaced.

37 million Facebook users log out of the site every day (believe it or not, people do log out) and this has traditionally been an untapped area of real estate. Expect logout screen story distribution to be available in April ’11, while newsfeed and mobile distribution is already available. This announcement solidifies Facebook’s mobile positioning as they distribute these stories at scale to the over 425 million mobile users.

Offers provide a way for brands to get promotions in front of their more important customers. Offers can be distributed through a story, featured and give users the opportunity to claim the offer through 1 click, where it is then sent to their email and mobile device. Along with this there is frictionless distribution when you engage with an Offer.

As brand marketers, we all need to be master storytellers to drive word of mouth at scale. It is also becoming critical to optimize your business to coordinate content with the media teams. From a content strategy perspective, marketers need to monitor and understand what does and does not work to optimize their new Timelines and scale opportunities. Equally important to drive this distribution, there needs to be an awareness and a connection to when content reaches a certain level of engagement with the media team so they can amplify the best performing content through Facebook’s new products in a timely matter.

To sum up Facebook’s positioning… now is the time for brand marketers (whether they have before or not), to focus on leveraging the power of the platform to engage in two-way conversations and deliver rich social experiences that drive engagement and curate stories over time. This can be done through the the various Timeline story types, custom experiences and a multitude of other ways. Facebook on their end, has put a stake in the ground to be the command center for businesses looking to engage consumers in a social manner at scale. With 800+ million active users and the most advanced owned, earned and paid media products on the market, Facebook is bar none becoming more and more critical for brands. Throughout the day, Facebook and its key clients touched on the complexity of social business efforts and the need for trusted partners that can deliver the strategy, management, technologies and services in this ever-evolving ecosystem.

“We are going to find our voice, learn how to use it, listen and learn how to adapt… in small and powerful ways every single day.” – Sheryl Sandberg at fMC as she discussed the evolution of brands and marketers with today’s announcements.

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.