How should companies prioritize their social business efforts?

That’s the very question we’ve been asked to tackle at today’s conference at Bazaarvoice’s Social Commerce Summit (live stream) here in Austin, Texas.  This room of 600 web strategists and social strategists (on brand side) are making key decisions for how companies will interact with their customers.  My goal? To help these strategists at the world’s largest brands how companies must prioritize their social business efforts for the coming years.

We know through research that many companies are struggling to scale, the “1:1 customer conversations” do not scale, and the looming requests from business stakeholders only make the social business program more daunting as interest grows.

We recommend that companies quickly invest in these five scalable social business programs:

1. Get into Hub and Spoke and develop a Center of Excellence.
2. Leverage community for first tier marketing and support.
3. Integrate both in the customer lifecycle as well as your corporate website.
4. Launch a formalized advocacy program.
5. Invest in Social Media Management Systems before you lose control.

There are two Open Research (see Mark’s review on Open Research) reports you must read that back these findings, read The Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist, and How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Spending.

Related Read: Review by Kim

I’m writing from a Jetblue flight from Austin back to Silly Valley, it’s a great chance for me reflect on what happened in the last few days at SXSW and sober up both from last night’s party and the excess of stimuli –they both require some detox. First of all, this is the type of event people love talk about when they’re there, but those who aren’t there may find the noise excessive. I’ll try to boil down the key things I observed, caveat, this is just one person’s perspective, leave a comment with your experience.

SXSW, Bigger Than Ever
Attendance was up, many rumored that it was up around 30% over last year, which was also growing. There were so many events and panels that even spilled out of the traditional convention center to neighboring hotels some as far as 6+blocks up hill at the Sheraton. The attendees trend a similar look: often younger than older, stylish glasses, blinking device in hands, the occasional ironic tattoo, and glossy shimmer of sweat from last night’s drinking binge.

Panel Content: Hit or Miss
While I didn’t attend many panels, several folks mentioned to me the quality of content in panels was very hit and miss, often dependent on the quality of the moderator to draw out insights and guide the panel. Because SXSW deploys the scalable way of voting up panels to determine who will speak this leads to panels that have popular speakers (but that doesn’t guarantee the best speakers) or topics that are liked by the mainstream. Fortunately, given the vast assortment of panels, the opportunity to find niche topics is available, providing you can easily get to the physical location. Colleague Susan Etlinger blogs how Deb Schultz lead an insightful session on the ‘manners’ of the internet and social web. I think it was Robert Scoble who said that the best content at SXSW will just appear on blogs later, so Ill continue to keep a watch out for the panels that were a “hit”.

Yet Parties, Events, and Dinners Galore
There were many, many parties and events, even during the day. During the evening there were several events, parties, and dinners all happening consecutively. In particular, the Social Business crowd was assembled around the All Hat (pics) even held by David Armano and Richard Binhammer off campus, the Corporate Social Strategists and those that serve them were present, this was the market I serve, and was glad to see them all. To me this was the best event, as it was off campus, a mixture of dialog, meet and greeting, and good food and music, great mixer. I heard that the SocialMedia.org (formerly SMBC) event was a great mix for Corporate Social Strategists who glean a lot of value from peer to peer interactions.

Influencer Outreach: Samsung, Chevy, AMEX, Apple, Pepsi.
One of my mottos is to ABR (Always be Researching) and I did just that for clients. In fact, several brands were present, and sought to reach this influencer and early adopter crowd, notables include:

Samsung hosts bloggers, and showcases electronic products. I spent time in the Samsung blogger lounge, which was well attended by influencers, and featured product demos and their tweeting fridge. One nice treat was Guy Kawasaki was giving away signed books, Enchantment, (which I read and recommend) at the blogger lounge. Also, Samsung brought the social media space to their own devices and worked with Jess3 an information design firm to showcase hand-selected curated tweets in their large airport-styled screens for passerbys to see what the zeitgeist was of the event.  I even was a panelist in an impromptu “unpanel” on the topic of curation.

Chevy doubles down on this influencer market. Last year, Ford had a strong presence at the event, which likely drew the interest of General Motors, who I learned was the sole exclusive sponsor for the show, I’d estimate that buy out certainly be in the millions as they had integrated branding, product demos, charging stations, sponsors of the Techset party, and had inter-city rides available to anyone using their vehicles. Ford was not present this year, nor other auto-manufactures. See Twitter exchange between myself and Scott Monty who commented on spending, here, here, and here. (Update: Chevy’s Mary Henige has updated me that Chevy has a 3 year exclusive sponsorship with SXSW for the automotive category)

American Express seeks WOM. I learned from Jennifer van Grove of Mashable how American Express has launched a form of a loyalty program that encouraged users of their credit cards to receive money credited to their account after purchases after they shared it on foursquare. This form of social commerce initiates advocacy at point of sale –increasing spread of the service. Very smart integration.

Apple pops up a store in downtown. Apple assembled a “pop up” store in downtown where lines went around the block to purchase the iPad 2 and hours extended to the wee hours of the night. The store was a former Gold’s gym, and was assembled virtually overnight to serve this specific market. I saw several proud owners of this shiny device with colored covers touting their purchase at a variety of venues, it was the hot physical product (see friend David Berkowitz with his orange topped one). I experimented with it and believe the features to be evolutionary, but not a major upgrade, that being depending on new software to emerge to take advantage of the cameras such as augmented reality gaming, or new forms of video conferencing.

Pepsi tells their story. Other notable brand out-reach booths was Pepsi’s touchdown station that let people recharge and learn about the variety of products. Clearly an influence play, as Pepsi as a lifestyle brand isn’t directly related to ‘interactive’ that SXSW sports.

No Technology Winners –Although “Intimate” and “Hyper Local” are Trends to Watch. I was at SXSW when Twitter, Foursquare ‘broke out’ in previous years, yet this year there were no clear winners our ‘breakout technologies’ that I saw from the space. Why? There’s an over saturation of products due to low barriers to entry –while innovation certainly isn’t stifled the number similar or ‘like’ products is hard to swallow.

The closest to it was SMS chat tools with a small social group of friends like GroupMe and Beluga were being used by this early adopter crowd, even the press picked up on some of these trends (thanks Julie Viola for the link). Secondly, I asked my network what technologies to watch for and saw some adoption of local Q&A tool LocalMind (screenshot from iPhone). This tool allows you to ask very specific question “where are the cleanest restrooms in this hotel?” and it shows it on a localized map.

In both of these new toolsets, they are less about mass broadcasting to your network like Twitter and blogs, but are more about intimate discussions with your most immediate circle and localized content down to the building that you’re present at.

So that’s my perspective: This year, SXSW was great for networking. New technologies trend towards smaller personal networks and hyper localized content, but I didn’t see any clear winners, at least from my limited perspective.

Please leave a comment or link to your experience so we can share what we heard.

Left Image: The panel: Dick Costolo from Google, Paula Drum from H&R Block, Chris George from MySpace, and Tom Arrix of Facebook. See more pics on Picassa.

Did you know that Google has a social media team intent on reaching brands and agencies? I didn’t either, and it’s my job to know.

A few weeks ago I spoke at Google Chicago at an event for interactive agencies, Scuba Chris has the details, I presented my latest research The Best and Worst of Social Network Marketing followed by VP of Marketing Paula Drum of H&R Block. She was absolutely amazing as she toured the agencies through all the different social media programs that they’ve done over the past year, one amazing feat, at least to me was she was able to get several of her agencies to work together on projects –nicely done.

Perhaps what’s really interesting is that Google, often known for being a bit quiet on the PR front, invited MySpace, and Facebook to participate on a panel with us. I moderated a panel that included:

Chris George- VP of Ad Solutions, MySpace
Tom Arrix – VP of Sales, Facebook
Dick Costolo – Head of Product Management, Google Social Media (Twitter)
Paula Drum, VP of Marketing, Digital Tax Solutions, H&R Block (Twitter)

You see, Google has a story to tell about how they can help brands with social media, while most overlook YouTube, and Orkut as marketable social networks, there’s quite a few tools they offer such as iGoogle, Google Friend Connect, and the protocol they lead called OpenSocial.

To be successful, Google will absolutly need to open up and engage in the dialog that they want to participate in, being part of the social media conversation where agencies, brands and vendors are chatting and jockeying for every day. Why? I asked H&R’s Paula if she’d ever hire an agency that didn’t practice what they preach, and she said “no”. The interactive agencies, and Google know the importance of participating.

I then asked the agencies how many of them actually eat their own dogfood, a few sheepishly were bold enough to admit they do not –yet sell the social media services.

The panel was amazing, I had Facebook, MySpace, and Google there, and H&R Block to represent the demand side (the most important side), I asked a few hard questions, such as why Facebook hadn’t joined OpenSocial, the panelist punted and said: “That was a question for Mark Zuckerberg” MySpace talked about media and self-expression, and did a good job responding to my questions on why their CTRs were so low. Facebook jockeyed back and retorted that their community is for “real people” and not fake personas. The two were having a good time despite some casual coughing during each others questions –all in good fun.

Out of everyone I met, the person I was the most struck with was Dick Costello, who was the founder and CEO of Feedburner which is now part of the Google portfolio, also impressive is Yvette from the social media team as well as her colleagues, Sarah Hoople, Google is known to hire the cream of the crop.

Until that day, I didn’t know that Google had a ‘social media’ team, and if I didn’t know (as an industry analyst) then chances are many others don’t either –Google, is slowly coming out of it’s shell, so watch these folks.

Although many brands forget that what happens offline echoes online, Sony is using a combination of digital and in person evangelism for a powerful concoction. Last night, I had dinner with Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow and Top Blogger, Rick Clancy who publishes on the Sony Electronics Blog.

Head or Corp Comm spearheading Blogging Efforts
Rick, who is actually the head of Corporate Communications has decided to establish himself in the front (read his bio) as the lead blogger. This is unique, as in many cases corp comm folks find the product experts to come front and center in the blogs rather than themselves.

Outreach: Visiting 42 Stores in 40 Days
Now, in many cases, blogs created and run by corporation communications folks tend to be sterile rehashes of press releases, and feature pro-corporate content. While the Rick’s blog is certainly squarly on the party line, he’s doing something that many do not, he’s getting out in front of the browser and actually meeting customers. He’s on a cross country tour to visit 42 stores in 40 days, the goal? to learn from customers at Sony Style stores, and to evangelize their latest offerings such as PlayStation, HDNA, Vaio, DSLR cameras, Blu-ray players and whatever cutting technology leaps forth.

Taking a closer look at the blogging efforts
I’m not the only one to enjoy Rick’s blog, as Heart Interactive’s CTO Mike “Glemak” Dunn proclaims via Friendfeed: “i think he’s excellent – a great example of using a true voice as a corporate blogger – he was good from day 1, a natural – “.

I enjoyed how they have a flickr stream (but should embed flickr pics directly into the post) and have a Google Map Mashup to track his future locations.

While Rick is certainly heading the right way, I made a few suggestions to him over wine, since he’s incorporating this as live event, I recommended he use Twitter to help pre-announce where he’s going to be (for example, today he’ll be in Portland) to help encourage technology early adopters to show up and meet and greet. Although I didn’t mention it, uploading pics in real time with Sony Ericson phones as well live streaming from the Vaio line could only help draw the connective tissue.

Lastly, I just reviewed some of the incoming links to the Sony Blog on Technorati and see that their successful Mommy blogger event was covered by an influential mommy blogger –Rick should link back into the conversation.

A room full of journalists and one Twitter user
Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, but the room was filled with journalists from the top newspapers, (this was a press and analyst event) who were scribbling furiously during dinner. While the quality is by no means a comparison, I was live-tweeting the highlights in real-time, getting feedback from you all, in 140 characters or less on my twitter account. Is it game changing? Maybe if I took it more seriously, but then again, reporting isn’t my job.

Sony’s vitual/real blogging outreach a good model
Good wishes to Rick and the Sony team on their outreach, a good example of social media as an overlay to the real world –and important story for a company who captures these stories and displays them with digital devices.