With so many people coming up with fancy acronyms for social media methodologies, I figured it was time to write about where I see social’s major areas of focus in a few circles and call it a day.

From my side of the table, I’m seeing clients needing to understand these three areas to effectively map a social strategy that works for their brand: social, distributed, and integrated.

Social

This is the circle most people think of first when considering social media: people talking with brands and other people in social networks. Think Twitter or Facebook groups, forums. Places where you need to be fairly active in listening and participating to do any kind of work facilitating or leading a segment of that community.

Social is also the most deceptive. Brands are eager to jump in because it feels easy. It’s just about telling someone to open an account and do some tweets, right? But if that person or people can’t carry the brand strategy through the lenses of casual, persistent social interaction and maintain ambient awareness while they do the rest of their work — all while being empowered to keep people happy and route requests to the right people, the dollars and brand equity start sinking fast.

That’s why it is so important to spend the the time upfront creating a brand / participation framework and choosing the right people to operate it.

Distributed

Content distribution and curation is where the action seems to be right now for brands testing out the space, and it’s a great way to start wrapping top-down corporate hierarchies around the notion of the mobile Web. Rapid publishing platforms (you know them best as blogs), and distributing content to what I would call semi-social sites like YouTube, delicious or slideshare.

These are great places to start as any truly social effort will fail without a combination of good people and good content that is easily sharable. Brands need to budget for both, and start understanding not only what it takes to make the jump from marketer to publisher, but what platforms and what content their audience is most interested in. It’s a context economy, and smart brands are already realizing it.

Note: Please do not engage in any social or distributed platform before having a solid strategic foundation for interaction design and search. There’s no point in having a Twitter strategy for a possible pool of 20-some million registered users when just about everyone in the world starts some decision-making process at a Google search box. You’ll also find that most tools for social media right now are extensions of SEO tools / methods, so having a keyword-based framework is a good start.

Integrated

Integration between the enterprise, the audience, and social networks is where every brand needs to be directing the rudder. In agencies right now it’s as much about demystifying working with APIs as it is developing models that bring social networks back through traditional brand properties using social experience design.

In brands, integration needs to start with communication tools that work with social networks to bring back worthwhile intelligence, flatten the hierarchical communications structure and deliver answers from the back of the house to the audience as needed.

What do you think? You should add a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis.

Filed under: Social Media

Like other loyal Gmail users, I was intrigued when a curious little icon appeared in the service's left-hand column yesterday. I knew it was coming, but here is was: Gmail's answer to Facebook.

Google Buzz is no half-baked scheme -- Google lives up to its track record there. The Buzz auto-follow function eliminates the need to track down your friends as you do on Facebook, and the photo- and video-sharing functionalities are rich, automated experiences. The service wisely integrates with Picasa, Google Reader, and Twitter, and the platform is already mobile, with location-based posting capabilities rolling out right along with the rest of it.

Nice work, Google. So -- why don't I care?

The fact of the matter is, I'm exhausted. I'm already overwhelmed trying to keep up with the constant stream of activity on Facebook. Once my friends and colleagues started assuming that everyone was constantly checking their Facebook accounts, they ceased broadcasting invites and life updates via email or, heaven forbid, phone calls. Thus, Facebook became a duty, not a time-wasting pleasure. So when that Google Buzz icon appeared in my Gmail, the first thought running through my head wasn't, "Oh, neat-o!" It was, "Arrrrgh. Another social network to keep up with. And with this one, I don't even have a choice. I'm already a member."

I'm curious to hear from the rest of you, though: What's your initial take on Buzz? Will it find a place in our day-to-day lives and, thus, eventually become another playground for marketers as well?

To hear more about which platforms are winning (and which platforms are losing) in the social marketing arena, attend the iMedia Breakthrough Summit, March 21-24. Request your invite today.

Our generation loves their toys -- and as the first generation that could make electronics go beep, we have seen our devices get smaller, thinner, lighter, brighter, flashier, and most with more buttons than the average consumer knows what to do with. But more than the physical transformations, it’s the inner beauty of our electronics we really love.

The code running through our electronics even made it to the big screen (the Matrix anybody?) but our passion for this code is directly related to the cool things we can do with it. I’ve heard programmers wax rhapsodic about the beauty of a program while maintaining complete ignorance about the most well known artistic masterpieces. However, let’s not lie to ourselves, it’s people like this that make all of our lives better.

When these people had the idea of mobile search, it just seemed like another obscure option similar to the pseudo craze that was Ubuntu (don’t know what that is – point made). Sure it would be popular, among certain people in some unforeseen future, but what did it have to do with me? However, when the prophetic demigod otherwise known as Google started making serious investments in mobile search, opinions changed.

What was once unreasonable due to poor infrastructure, ugly phones, and slow search speed has been revamped, and the new model is looking pretty sexy. Mobile search has been rewired, with smartphones created specifically to make it easier (e.g. Google’s Nexus One).

Also thanks to our Google gods, we now have the option of one-touch search with “Near Me Now”.  How, you might ask, does this nifty feature work? Why simply by taking your geographical information and displaying the options near you. And of course the best way to take advantage of mobile search is by using Local Targeting in PPC campaigns offered by none other than… good ol' Google of course. What’d you think I was going to say, Yahoo?
For years, while mobile search was put on the back burner, Google was quietly yet heavily investing in mobile search, ensuring their infrastructure, browsers, and mobile indexing would be up to the task of serving the eventual market 4 billion cell phone users offers (view presentation full of fun facts). Now, with the optimal mobile search machine (Nexus One), Google is unleashing the full power of their internet domination to make 2010 THE year of mobile search.   

I don't know about you, but when Google speaks, I listen.

In a world of continuous, always-on media consumption and endless media hype, most marketers think they know what consumers like, what consumers use most and how often consumers are engaged with different media channels. Yet every-so-often new data challenges our assumptions.

That’s case with L.E.K. Consulting’s 2009 Media Consumption Survey, an online survey of 2000+ households, conducted in December 2009, that addressed media use in 28 media types. This study sought to identify changes in media consumption habits, find opportunities in new media and cast light on how the recession has affected media consumption. The data and the implications weren’t what I expected and made me think.

Here’s quick summary:

Channels Cross-Pollinate. Thirty-eight percent of consumers said they’d pay an extra fee to get content from cable channels on their computers or on their smart phones. This data validates the “content is king” notion and supports the business strategies driving Yahoo, Google and others. It also implies that marketers should orchestrate and integrate campaigns across channels and that video-to-go will soon become a common expectation which will dramatically increase demand for portable bandwidth.

Radio isn’t Dead It’s Gone Online. One third of respondents listen to Internet radio services for 5.8 hours each week; a third more than listen to satellite radio. Interestingly 83 percent still listen to traditional radio for an average of 8.1 hours each week. Neither TV, cable nor the Web killed the radio star which is a testament to its portability and targeted content offerings. Fifty-two percent of survey respondents listen to the radio and listening to music is second only to TV, ahead of the Internet, in terms of time allocated to media. Americans craft individual soundtracks to their lives and use music as a mood elevator.

E-Readers Are Heavy New Media Users. Not only do E-Reader owners drive the market for books but they consume significantly more new media than iPod owners and the general public. It’s probably not much of a stretch for educated literate readers to invest more disposable time and discretionary income using emerging media. E-Readers are four times more likely to see movies online, play more Web-based games and listen to more Internet radio than iPod Users, Facebook fanatics or the general public. Think of E-Readers as the vanguard of the digital proletariat.

50+ is the New Black. Don’t forget or ignore the power of the Boomers who still wield great numbers, great enthusiasm for new or revolutionary ideas and great wealth even as they age. The 50-64 year old age group uses new media almost twenty percent more than 25-39 year olds. Boomers do the most e-mail, play the most online games and pace every other age group in doing online tasks.

Everyone Multi-tasks. It’s no longer just teenagers who text and play online games with opponents in China while watching TV. One-third of consumers responding to the survey, watch TV and go online simultaneously. Nineteen percent listen to the radio while surfing the Web and eleven percent talk on the phone. Look for smart marketers to design campaigns to leverage and capitalize on this behavior in real time.

TV is Still Our Mass Medium. Online TV is just starting and in spite of the growth of DVRs and time shifting, TV represents the biggest gross audiences and the most time spent with media. The margin is big – 38 hours per week for TV versus 7.6 hours online. TV is still the place to launch new ideas and revitalize brands.