A great infographic from Fast Company, based on data from a report on social currency from Vivaldi Partners:

I was lucky enough to be invited to the brand-e conference ‘Brands, Bands and Social Media Savvy’, hosted at the IAB last week. Music and the social web have always enjoyed a strong and healthy relationship with each other (music is ‘social’ by nature), and with record sales on the decline, and music sharing platforms increasing in popularity, it makes sense that brands and bands will increasingly look at ways to marry their marketing efforts.

Some insightful commentary came from Jakob Lusensky (CEO of Heartbeats International) who explored the changing role of marketing. He pertinently pointed to the fact that the four Ps of traditional marketing – price, product, promotion and placement – are now being replaced with the four Es; emotions, experiences, engagement and exclusivity. This new model he defines as “The DNA of community branding”. This was supported by findings from Nokia’s Global Youth Exploration Study, highlighting the fact that young audiences are both “hungry for experiences” and “expect just rewards for their attentions”, presented by the panel’s opening speaker, Thinktanks’s Nick Roberts. He went on to reveal that, in return, young audiences are prepared to repay brands with “loyalty, advocacy and purchase.”

The formula is simple: you have to provide something of value to your audience in order to get value in return.

But what this means is a shift not only away from the traditional model of marketing, but also the traditional forms of measurement. A question we come up against time and time again as social practitioners; how do you measure the value of engagement? According to Simon Daglish, VP Commercial Director at MySpace, you need to “go beyond the click” and start instead to see success as “putting your brand at the heart of the experience.” You need to get creative with your brand.

Which leads me onto another formula… as defined by Fred Bolza from Sony Music UK. Creative marketing, he points out, is the product of two crucial inputs: insight into your audience and basic, human instinct (or to quote his muso reference: the “this is gonna be a hit!” factor). And I couldn’t agree more. You can’t offer something of true value until you understand the person you are trying to reach. While conversely, you have to layer this with an understanding that there will always be an element of uncertainty with any creative marketing experience. You have to be willing to take a risk with your brand and “let go”. Scary stuff for some, but the basis of stellar audience engagement practice for others. One such example was the Kasabian Football Hero case study Bolza presented:

And to summarise in an oh-so-social fashion, I leave you with one of my tweets from the event:

Six Five degrees of Twitter
Sysomos have released some fascinating research from crawling Twitter’s social graph – much like the theory that most people in the world are kept apart by just six degrees of separation, their research shows that just under 98% of the 5.2 billion friendships on Twitter are 6 degrees apart or fewer. Perhaps more surprising is how high the numbers are in certain ranges – there are lots of five- and four-degree relationships than expected. Further details in the research dig out more clues – it only takes an average of 3 steps for a person to find someone else following you. It begins to paint a picture of Twitter as a series of well-interconnected social clusters, perhaps explaining how easy it is for something to get retweeted far and wide.

Author caught reviewing own book
The author and academic Orlando Figes last week confessed to positively reviewing his own books on Amazon, while badmouthing those of his rivals; Figes has since apologised for what he calls ‘foolish errors’. Fake reviews of products by the people selling them are not only unethical but illegal, but it is interesting to see something which is normally the provenance of black-hat so-called social media professionals entering the ivory towers of academia. And it raises more interesting issues of trust in review sites – Figes chose the easy to guess username of “orlando-birkbeck”, but more devious fakers and sockpuppeteers are bound to have been more cunning.

LinkedIn follows Facebook, Facebook follows microsites…
As LinkedIn announce you can now follow companies on the network, you could perhaps accuse it of looking more and more like Facebook. But then perhaps Facebook is starting to look more like corporate microsites now – in this excellent post critiquing the design and layout of corporate Facebook pages, Shiv Singh points out many companies are shutting walls, using the default tabs, getting into banner campaign mindsets and ignoring the social graph. Perhaps this uniformity is an undesired side-effect of mass adoption.

The lesson from history has been that as platforms mature and stop innovating, users might start looking for more interesting and social alternatives on the edge rather than on the platform; the most interesting Facebook developments will start happening off-site – perhaps one reason why Open Graph came about was to outsource that innovation to others. While Facebook will probably not succeed in “owning the entire Internet”, maybe it doesn’t need to own it if it can ride the back of this external innovation. The “Like” button has already been implemented by over 50,000 sites and the opening up of this data has led to some interesting proposals on the future of web advertising. Hooking personal likes and preferences in with real-time updates and location data offer a lot of opportunities to marketers – something even the New York Times has picked up in this excellent layperson’s guide.

Spotify goes social
Spotify announced a major upgrade last week, itself an example of Facebook innovation happening off-site, as it uses Facebook Connect to find friends. It has been so popular that the initial demand for downloads crashed the server, and now Spotify are having to ration the upgrade software. But not before much of the We Are Social office managed to get the upgrade, so some of us have started playing a little music-discovery game. If you send me a song to my Spotify inbox, I send you back the last one I received, no matter how random or unrelated it is. If you fancy a game, feel free to send me a song and you’ll get one back.

Twitter announces embeddable Tweets
It’s traditionally been difficult to quote individual Tweets – although you can of course just quote the 140 characters within blog post text, they lose their impact. Alternatively, you could make a screengrab of it and display that in the post – but that’s always been a bit of a faff. So for those frustrated by this limitation, the new Embeddable Tweet functionality can’t have come soon enough. The embedded Tweets will look something like this and should be here by the end of the day today according to the Twitter Media team.