Social Everywhere: We May Not Have a Choice

Jeremiah Owyang did a session at BlogWorldExpo this week on social media trends beyond single platforms and how and where convergence is going to happen. In other words, social everywhere.

And btw, social everywhere can be and is taken to extremes at blogging conferences. A well known photography blogger was telling me that someone tried to shoot a picture of him in a bathroom stall doing his thing.

Are you kidding? That's taking sensationalism and tackiness to another level and it's definitely not a very social or friendly way to build fans or friends.

Says Jeremiah on the social everywhere theme: corporate websites are becoming irrelevant. As we know, research indicates that customers trust each other far more than they do company information.

Now, with available social technologies, customers can communicate directly with each other, cutting companies out of the middle.

How can you evolve your corporate website? Jeremiah quotes Brogan: Fish where the fish are. In other words, go where your customers are hanging out. It will become less and less important to drive them back to your corporate site. Is it really all that necessary as long as the conversations are happening, the impressions are high and as a result, brand awareness and love goes through the roof?

It's important to integrate social technologies within your corporate website, such as aggregating customer opinions into a product page. In the future, your product pages are going to look like a comments page, integrating community support with products in places that matter and will get read.

The way to think about it is an aggregation play which is different than how we measure success today, i.e., direct traffic and impressions to your site. VCs often ask startups for those numbers before they're willing to invest.

Think about it in a continuous thread rather than back to the corporate site again and again. It's irrelevant where....what's relevant is how many times your product was mentioned positively and in how many conversations.

You can no longer just focus on driving them back to your corporate site but everywhere and anywhere the conversations are.

We're asked: WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO TO MOVE AHEAD IN THE REAL TIME WEB? Jeremiah takes the audience through step-by-step.

1. Anticipate customer needs

2. Implement a really robust and active listening program – respond to what people are doing. Only 10% of companies apparently have a listening strategy. Companies are building disparate CRM systems and not integrating or connecting them to their support center.

3. Empower a customer advocacy program. It's amazing how few companies do this.

Objectives with Listening:

*Tracking brand mentions

*Identifying market risks and opps

*Improving campaign efficiency

*Measuring support efforts

*Responding to customer inquiry

*Better understand customers

*Being proactive and anticipating customers needs

He encourages people to build a platform so customers' voices can be featured and heard, i.e., Intel Insiders, Microsoft MVP, WalMart Mom Bloggers, i.e., give a badge if they have helped others or T-shirts, something people can have on their email signature and their business cards.

As for the below tips, can someone send this list in loud, aggressive bold letters to every airline, hotel and telco company?

*Customers don’t care what department you’re in

*Customer supports issues become PR issues

*Listening cascades to every department

*Customer experiences are often fragmented

Social Personalization is where we're heading. Profiles are already portable and through services like Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Twitter Connect and Open ID, we'll soon be able to consolidate everything under one umbrella.

As a result, websites of the future can:

*Provide personalized content

*Provide personalized advertising

*Personalized experiences

What that means that a Sony customer can sign into a Sony page without having to fill out a long form. You'll be able to give Sony access to your Facebook profile in exchange for a better experience.

If you want to increase your marketing funnel, it's going to be necessary to do this, but it has its risks. We don't know what the future of a lot of these services hold nor do we know who will own what in 3 years, but it’s an incredibly connected world so if we're going to be smart about the branding and marketing game, we have to be everywhere.

We dive into augmented reality for a stint - a future world where you can see live video, internet content and the physical world intersect with augmented reality on a mobile device for example.

You'll be able to point your phone to a Hilton you’re passing and information about its restaurant or entertainment will show up on your phone.