It’s official: the International Olympic Committee now has a Foursquare page, adding a badge to go with its aggressively trademark-protected rings. It’s picked up an impressive 14,500 followers in just a few hours, proving that even the tradition-bound IOC can eventually come around to the  social+mobile+local draw of an international sporting event. There’s hope for other similarly skeptical organizations.

I’m being a bit harsh as I remember full well when the dinosaurs roaming the IOC lakeside HQ in Lausanne, Switzerland wanted nothing to do with mobile technology, dot-com journalists and the like. That was back in 2000 during the Sydney Summer Games. Fast-forward 12 years and the London Games are being called the first-ever “Social media Olympics.” As part of the preparations, the IOC this year has launched a new social media hub that aggregates social media conversations by and about the athletes taking part in the London Games.

This isn’t the first time Foursquare has played such a big role in a major sporting event. Last year, it was chosen by the NFL to create a virtual Super Bowl party in an effort to take the appeal of the American-dominated sporting event to a global audience. No small feat, but it did an admirable job.

With the Olympics, the task should be a much easier assignment. It helps that the IOC is dangling free tickets to one lucky follower. Here’s how it works, Foursquare explains on its blog.

The Summer Olympics hit London in less than ten weeks and the International Olympic Committee wants to reward the foursquare community with a trip to London 2012! All you have to do is get out and celebrate Olympic Day (June 23) by playing sports, in the spirit of the Olympics. Here are the two simple steps to your chance to win:

• Follow the IOC on foursquare.
• Check in twice before June 25 when you play sports or exercise to unlock the Olympic Day badge. Checking in at any two athletic sites will work (think yoga studios, beaches, gyms, tracks, stadiums, or hiking trails!). The lucky winner will be sent to London to check out the Games.

The IOC has obviously been following closely the boom in smartphone – and in particular, mobile gaming – usage, which has really taken off impressively even since the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. As we noted last month, there are now more than 46 million avid “gadget” gamers in Western Europe, and Britons, this year’s hosts, leads the league table by a surprising margin.

Editor’s Note: Got Olympics fever? Then put on your calendar June 12th in London. Hear Alex Balfour, head of new media at London 2012, deliver a keynote presentation at this year’s Social Media Influence conference.

How confusing can the advertising picture on Facebook get? You know all about General Motor’s $10 million pull-out last week. That move, and the dud underwhelming Facebook IPO, prompted WPP chief Martin Sorrell to declare on Friday that Facebook is “one of the most powerful branding mechanisms in the world, but it’s not an advertising mechanism.” Fast-forward to this week and WPP’s Group M ad-buying unit has struck an extensive licensing deal with Buddy Media to “make it easier for clients to spend money there.” Confused?

Well, it shouldn’t be all that confusing if you know the short, but eventful history between Sorrell, WPP and social ad-serving specialists Buddy Media. WPP was an early investor in Buddy Media, dating back to 2010. And, despite Sorrell’s current misgivings about Facebook, his agencies are looking to double in 2012 their Facebook ad buy outlay for clients from $200 million to $400 million. With so much money on the line, it’s good to have a little skin in the game, the thinking goes.

This is isn’t the first time WPP and Buddy Media got together on the business side. Back in February, Buddy Media acquired London-based Brighter Option, a Facebook ad serving specialist, and on the same day it announced Brighter Option’s social ad management software would be used to power Facebook ads for WPP’s 24/7 Real Media clients worldwide.

This time round, WPP’s GroupM has selected the company’s BuyBuddy social ad product as “its preferred social ad management partner” to place and track ads placed on Facebook and other social networking sites. The deal doesn’t end there. In addition to rolling out Buddy Media’s BuyBuddy to its agencies – including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, Mindshare, M80 and others – GroupM will “also begin training on how to maximize the benefits of Buddy Media’s unified social marketing software solution across paid, owned and earned media.”

But where does this leave the future of Facebook marketing? Will it be the GM model where big brands maintain a vibrant fanpage presence, but little else. In other words, is Facebook an “earned” media channel or can you get some return on a display ad buy here?

Buddy Media’s CEO Michael Lazerow has an interesting view. He says that the earned element (content) + paid element (ads) work together. Here’s how he explained it to Ad Age:

Every ad that you run starts as a post to your Facebook page…You post to your page and then buy the distribution of that post. They are tied together. Our bet with this is that a publishing system and an advertising system on social has to be together.

Editorial Note: If you want to hear more about the future of social media marketing, join us for Social Media Influence 2012. Buddy Media’s Luca Benini, MD of Buddy Media Europe, will speaking on this very topic.

The two biggest stories in digital right now are Facebook… and Facebook. On the eve of an IPO that could value Facebook at $100 billion we get word that automotive giant General Motors is pulling its $10 million Facebook ad budget on account of diminished returns. Is GM telling us something, that Facebook is a waste of money as a marketing opportunity? The answer: not so fast.

Firstly, we should get something clear. GM is not abandoning Facebook. It will keep its fanpages for GM and for its various brands such as Chevy Camaro and Cadillac alive. And, it will continue to invest in a social media team to keep them current, fresh and engaging. Community management doesn’t come cheap, marketers! It just won’t be paying Facebook (in the form of display ads) to drive extra traffic to these pages, nor off Facebook to its suite of brand or corporate sites.

To be sure, its decision to pull display ads from the world’s largest social network appears to be an indictment of Facebook as a marketing tool, but what it clearly is is a reassessment of its digital ad-buying priorities. GM might figure, heck, we’ve got 6 million-plus fans on our network of brand pages whom we can reach every day for free, why pay? After GM’s surprise move, you might be thinking the same thing. Let me explain then why it would be unwise to “pull a GM.”

1. Abandon a good thing at your peril.

Facebook is the world’s biggest ever media property with 901 million active users; 500 million of them log on daily to interact with their networks. That’s unprecedented potential reach and frequency. Plus, Facebook skews higher in all the relevant categories: its users are younger, wealthier and better educated. No wonder than that 89% of ad agencies in the U.S. plan to spend their social ad bucks with Facebook.

2. We’re only just beginning to see the true potential here.

A recent study showed that click-through rates for Facebook display ads were up 18% year-on-year in 2011. Not bad in an otherwise tough economic climate. Automotive isn’t the best-performing category, it should be noted, but it’s still in positive territory, as this study from TBG Digital shows.

Also to consider: the addition of Sponsored Stories and the new Facebook Timeline earlier this year are also boosting engagement rates and will do so for some time to come.

3. It’s where your competitors are…and where they are beating you.

As we’ve said recently, engagement is the new Holy Grail for digital marketers. Conversations beget conversions, which beget sales. No single sector is performing better in the fan engagement category than automotive. Why are the car-makers doing so well? The auto brands are good story-tellers. They produce some of the best creative, and their products hold immense interest for the public. Always have. (If only an FMCG marketer, pushing a brand of cleaning product or stock cooking cubes, had it so easy). But that’s not all. Auto brands do a better job of getting the consumer involved. Just think what Ford has done with the Focus, and, more recently, Chevrolet’s multi-channel effort around the Super Bowl this year.

One brand that is lagging here is General Motors. A quick glance of the auto leader board on Facebook, and you can see that GM and its brands land just four in the top 50, one of the worst performances of all auto brands. Who are the brands doing the best? The ones who can keep fans engaged with fresh content.

It should be noted, that not all of those in the Top 5 are prolific Facebook display-ad buyers. Certainly, Ferrari isn’t. It clearly gets by thanks to an avid fan base of drooling Ferrari fans.

But GM doesn’t have such a fan base. Never has. It needs to build excitement on Facebook (and elsewhere) for its models otherwise it will sink in to irrelevance.I predict it will be back on Facebook, perhaps as soon as next year’s auto shows.

The online press is filled with Pinterest success stories on a seemingly hourly basis. Retailers are using their pinboards to drive traffic, others are using it to drive higher revenues per click, marketers are using it to create buzz for their new launches and lastly publishers are seeing it drive eyeballs.Turns out though that while the Pinterest pioneers have shown us a vital new tool to build engagement, we’ve yet to see the best of what this platform can offer, says Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp.

Sharp, speaking at Digital Economy Forum in Venice, told today of how Pinterest, the scrapbook-style social network, is still very much a work in progress. For starters, there are no revenues. Sharp, a former architect, shrugs and says he’s not the business mind behind Pinterest. Instead, he’s more focused on designing the perfect platform. “But there are plenty of things we can do in the area of advertising or retailing that would make sense,” he offers.

Still, there are plenty of urgent matters to consider when it comes to that platform. Firstly, there’s the language problem. For a global phenomenon (though, admittedly, Pinterest is not so well known here in Italy as evidenced by the few hands raised at the start of Sharp’s presentation), it’s available only in English. That will change soon, says Sharp. The other big shortcomings: Pinterest’s lone app presence is on the iPhone. There is is nothing yet for Android, nor iPad. Pinterest hopes to address these shortcomings shortly, though he didn’t give specifics on a timetable. It had better come soon: Android owners, for one, are falling prey to scam Pinterest apps.

“We’re less focused on demographics, and more focused on the platform,” Sharp says to reinforce the company’s commitment to evolving Pinterest for mobile users. And, if you’re curious about that demographic, this is what it looks like. Yes, a lot of mommy bloggers and collectors of various objects.

Sharp was asked the question all marketers want to know: what’s the secret formula to ensuring your pinning drives traffic, eyeballs and sales? Sharp said he’s been impressed by the usage of Pinterest by museums, some of which have used Pinterest to pin select images of, say, a exhibition as a way to get the public to discover great pieces of art. An alluring front door, if you will. But, he says in all candor, we’ve yet to see the best there is to offer on Pinterest. Pinning that inspires others to start their own collections, for example, have enormous potential, he added.

The big take-away point comes from Sharp’s rather elegant way of summing up what Pinterest means to him, and, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, to its avid user base. Pinterest represents a sea change in how we create, share and connect. Whereas Facebook is a walled garden, Pinterest is a curated catalog, curated by creative people whom you trust.

Sharp’s belief in the power of curation is a powerful one. To him, it is curation = creation. Curation in the hands of everyone is the future, he believes.

So get out there and start pinning!

Goldman Sachs needs you. Well, one of you at least. The Wall Street juggernaut, the investment bank everyone loves to hate, is searching for a social media engagement specialist, we learned this week. To be sure, it’s a recruitment first for Goldman, which has seen public opinion around its brand hit new lows in recent months.

Much of it, as we’ve detailed in the past, is due to its complete ignorance for and neglect of social media. Case in point, Goldman has a Twitter channel it’s never used and a Facebook fan page that’s long been overrun by haters. No wonder it found itself completely incapable of adequately defending itself, despite its well-paid PR team, when a manager quit in March and penned the now infamously viral “Why I left Goldman Sachs” resignation letter.

When it comes to social smarts – by which, we mean transparency, responsiveness, accountability; all of the traits that the public values and will reward in the brands of the future – Goldman is a bunch of “muppets,” to use the favorite lingo of GS traders. So, it’s no stretch to say this new recruitment effort, started by former press secretary to President Bill Clinton – Richard L. “Jake” Siewert Jr., Goldman’s new head of global communications – may be the most important hire the company has made in decades.

We’re following their Twitter feed for word, any update really. But we’re not holding our breath. As of the time of this writing, the Tweet count sat at zero.

Turning now from the least social savvy of companies to the real innovators now… Just a reminder that registration is open and the agenda is set for this year’s Social Media Influence 2012 conference in June. We’ll be again focusing squarely on best-practice social/mobile/digital strategy in the business world. You’ll hear from the companies, brands and organizations that are innovating in the area of social gaming, social commerce, social media marketing and social business design. You’ll hear how companies have increased sales, amplified their message and harnessed better ideas from within their organizations using the latest digital and social media tools and strategies. If you register by May 15th, you’ll get a free copy of our e-book: #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups and How to Avoid Being the Next One.

Come join us on June 12th!

- Bernhard Warner

editorial director, SMI

Follow us on Twitter at: @socialinfluence… And on Facebook.

Photo credit.

This could be the toughest job yet in social media: running Goldman Sachs’ largely neglected social media communities. That’s right, the world’s most reviled investment bank – a.k.a. “the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” – is looking to hire a social media community manager. Interested? 

The salary and benefits, no doubt, are top-notch. And it’s not as if you’d have to set up from scratch the bank’s social presence. Though, as the New York Times‘ Dealbook blog points out, they appear to have a Twitter channel that has  never been used and a Facebook fan page that’s long been overrun by haters.Worse still, as we noted in the middle of the “Why I left Goldman Sachs” PR nightmare, the bank has been savaged by still active anti-Goldman groups on Facebook over the years.

So, the ideal candidate had better have thick skin, and the tactfulness of an expert hostage negotiator. I assume that’s what it means when it writes in the qualifications section: “Ability to work well under pressure.”

What else is Goldman looking for a social media manager? The job description it’s posted on its recruitment page sounds straightforward enough:

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is looking for a Community Manager/Social Media Strategist to serve as the administrator for Goldman Sachs social media communities.  In addition to the management of these communities, this person would play a strategic role as initial point of contact for our relationships with representatives of the various social platforms.  The Community Manager/ Social Media Strategist will be responsible for ensuring active and engaged communities around a defined topic or topics by managing long-lead editorial calendars, monitoring online conversations and participating in those conversations to build brand visibility and thought leadership. The goal is to establish a positive online presence for Goldman Sachs as well as to integrate our messaging into the online community in a compelling and valuable way for participants. In this role, the Community Manager/ Social Media Strategist will be part of our Brand Management Group.

Note to Goldman: find the Twitter password and at least post this job offer on your Twitter page to begin to claw back some respectability here and get the new hire on the right footing from Day 1.

We’ll be eager to see the first Tweet.

Engagement is the new currency for social marketing effectiveness, particularly for brands who are seeing renewed life on their Facebook fan pages ever since the new Timeline was introduced earlier this year. A new study out this week looks at which industry sectors are getting the most mileage (there’s one hint) out of their social engagement strategy.

The most engaging industry, as measured by Socialbakers, is… yes, automotive. Interestingly, the auto brands that are seeing the highest level of engagement – as measured by interactions on the brand’s Facebook page – are not the top-selling autos. They are luxury brands: BMW, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Audi (in the top four, in that order), which probably means a lot of people are commenting there who are not customers; they’re wannabe’s.  They are seeing an impressive surge in engagement, again since Facebook introduced the new Timeline.

Before we get into why automotive is doing so well, let’s take a look at how the other sectors stack up:

Interestingly, the spirits industry, despite all the general marketing restrictions placed upon them by regulators, is also doing surprisingly well, engagement-wise. At the low end is telecoms, a surprise considering digital and social is such a hotbed for techy conversation.

Back to autos… why are they doing so well? The auto brands are good story-tellers. They produce some of the best creative, and their products hold immense interest for the public. Always have. (If only an FMCG marketer, pushing a brand of cleaning product or stock cooking cubes, had it so easy). But that’s not all. Auto brands do a better job of getting the consumer involved. Just think what Ford has done with the Focus, and, more recently, Chevrolet’s multi-channel effort around the Super Bowl this year.

Much of the sector’s success comes down to the way it views the calendar year. Auto makers are news-makers. They launch new models at the same point every year and have a slow build-up to the public launch with a series of auto shows, held around the world. They do a masterful job of keeping the public up-to-date.

Here’s a few pointers that we have then to boost social engagement with strong editorial. This is partly inspired by the new research here, and it’s a riff off our Think Like an Editor courses that we run.

1) Sketch out a year-long editorial plan that involves a calendar of events and actual reporting around the big dates in your manufacturing/marketing cycle.

2) Garbage-in-garbage-out. Don’t post rehashed press releases on your Timeline. Show clever creative!

3) Get your fans involved. Giving your fans a platform to share. It builds interest, loyalty.

4) Inspire your fans to think big. This is a collaborative effort. Get their input.

5) Show off your tech chops. This is a digital savvy forum. You have to walk the walk and talk the talk here.

6) Highlight the local flavor of your base. Brand pages are really global forums, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect the local differences of your fan base. Highlighting your activities in another part of the world will deliver the message of an all-inclusive community.

7) Celebrate your heritage. Fans are nostalgic by nature. They want to know more about your history.

Entertain them. This is an extension of Number 7. You have a treasure trove of old ads, for example. Dust them off and post them!

Editor’s Note: Join us on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012 for in-depth discussion into the social media strategies that are working for today’s biggest brands. We’ll hear from Unilever, Google, GE, London 2012, Conde Nast and many others.

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, believes data – yes, data – can save the planet. Of course this comes with a big BUT, and here it is: by harnessing our personal data we can “usher in a new era of highly personalised computer services ‘with tremendous potential to help humanity,’” but only if we can get access to it, he told the Guardian this week. The vexing point Berners-Lee pointed out is that a few companies hold all this accumulated data on us that we currently have little to no access to. If we were to make the most of this data, it could better help us make decisions about our health and safety, where we invest, who we elect and what path we take to protect the planet and even get ourselves out of this global economic mess we’re in.

Berners-Lee’s observations come at an opportune time for me. I have been talking to organizations and journalists too lately about this treasure trove of data they sit on and usually ignore, or at least neglect. At the same time they admit that their biggest fear is that they feel the modern world is moving so quickly, they risk falling behind and becoming irrelevant. And yet they have all this data on the very people they don’t understand. It is the holders of data, I argue, who are actually in position to know and understand fully their public, even to the point of making smart predictions about the future. Even to the point of helping them make smart decisions about improving their lives and the planet around them.

Now, we spend a lot of time on SMI sifting through data and research that shows the value of social interactions, particularly in the areas of retail and communications and entertainment. But this is only scratching the surface. Companies that are able to harness and make sense of data (the ultimate goal is to do so in near real-time) are the ones who will innovate and thrive in the business world. My prediction: today’s big companies who cannot will not be around in ten year’s time.

There is a lot to grasp here, admittedly. But we have you covered on the topic of the big innovations that will transform the business world this year and next at Social Media Influence 2012, our annual conference in June. Dynamic leaders from GE, Unilever, Microsoft, Google, London 2012, Conde Nast and many more will take you through the big innovations and trends that are transforming the business world today and will help you better compete tomorrow. Come join us!

- Bernhard Warner

editorial director, SMI

Follow us on Twitter at: @socialinfluence… And on Facebook.

I’ve been speaking to a lot of communications professionals lately about how to update their crisis communications strategy for the Twitter age. It’s true that social media has completely changed the game for crisis comms pros as now the crowd informs the crowd about how a disaster, natural or corporate-made, is likely to impact their community. But smart companies can use this technology as well to improve their communications strategy with the public. Here’s another reason why.

Firstly, it makes sense to pre-plan your social media crisis comms strategy in advance. A plan of attack will be of a huge help as you try to pull in your organization’s social media monitoring firepower to help defuse a smoldering crisis. (Note: I’ll be talking more about how to get social in a crisis at a Social Media Influence 2012.)

Secondly, it’s imperative you bring that advanced training back to your team. Implement rules for how they should respond (or not!) to a possible crisis as it first appears online. Here are two handy guides we put together with Neil Chapman, who headed up crisis comms for BP during the Deepwater Horizon spill:

• The Social Media Crisis Communications Decision Tree, a kind of corporate schematic to help you and your team think through and respond to potentially reputation-damaging posts made by the public.
• And the Social Media Crisis Response Plan, a handy guide to help you better organize your internal processes and thinking to keep your brand from being the next big #Fail.

Now that the crisis has hit, which channels will you use to keep the public informed, and how will you use these new powerful social tools at your disposal? For example, do you have an emergency hashtag strategy? Why is this important? Smart disaster response agencies all around the world have used Twitter to great effect to inform the public about developments surrounding natural disasters before, during and after they happen. Here’s a few ideas pulled from one of my crisis comms presentation slides:

The American Red Cross has been perhaps one of the most sophisticated agencies in the world deploying social media and mobile technologies in the time of a crisis. Here’s what they learned from the way the public uses these new technologies to communicate among themselves when their lives are turned upside down. Americans (and I believe this could be extended to people across the developed world) are turning to social media to quickly tell their contacts how they are surviving a disaster, their recent survey found:

• Followed by television and local radio, the internet is the third most popular way for people to gather emergency information with 18 percent of both the general and the online population specifically using Facebook for that purpose
• Nearly a fourth (24 percent) of the general population and a third (31 percent) of the online population would use social media to let loved ones know they are safe;
• Four of five (80 percent) of the general and 69 percent of the online populations surveyed believe that national emergency response organizations should regularly monitor social media sites in order to respond promptly.
• For those who would post a request for help through social media, 39 percent of those polled online and 35 of those polled via telephone said they would expect help to arrive in less than one hour.

The findings are handily summarized in this infographic, courtesy of MSNBC’s technology blog:

What is so fascinating to me is that the public, in terms of its sensibilities, preferences and expectations for using social media at a time of distress and crisis, has much more faith in these technologies than companies, many of which prefer to battle a blaze using old technologies and old-school crisis comms methods.

Editor’s Note: Learn from the digital pioneers, brands like Coca-Cola, Carnival Cruises, Whole Foods, Vodafone and scores of others. Their social media blunders – in the areas of crap customer service, plain dumb marketing or simply being caught short in a crisis – provide valuable lessons from which to shape future corporate comms policy. It all can be found in our new e-book, #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups and How to Avoid Being the Next One. Buy the book today on Amazon UK, Amazon or on Lulu where you can find it in paperback and epub.

A few weeks ago we wrote about the “mission-critical” importance of Tweeting business leaders. Why is that? Put simply, CEOs who communicate freely using social media are held in higher regard – not just by employees, but by customers too, study after study shows. An organization where the boss Tweets is an organization where internal communications is more dynamic and transparent. That then has an impact on external comms, or the brand image portrayed to the public.

Let’s head to another end of the organization now, to the developers, engineers and coders where some of the best ideas and brightest innovations are emerging in the business world, as evidenced by the run-away success of Instagram. I’ve professed my fandom for Instagram in this column before. In under 18 months, it has amassed a user base of 35 million people who swap photos on the go. What’s almost as impressive is the number of employees at Instagram: 13.

No wonder Facebook this week acquired it on the cheap for a cool $1 billion. Why cheap? That’s about $30-a-user acquisition price, historically low by tech M&A standards. And these aren’t just any old users. They are younger, more mobile and more tech savvy than Facebook’s core audience (though there’s plenty of overlap, to be sure). In short, these are the kinds of customers that the companies of the future will be courting. Yes, they are demanding, but they are generally more loyal and just meeting the demands of their usage patterns creates a built-in innovation loop in any organization.

This then brings us to the importance of coders, designers and engineers who have the room and buy-in to innovate. Given the opportunity they will be developing tomorrow’s Instagram and the new markets that go along with it. This is the formula for successful innovation in today’s business world. We’re reminded of it by 13 newly minted mega-millionaires. A powerful message.

Speaking of powerful messages… We have you covered on the topic of the big innovations that will transform the business world this year and next. Where? At Social Media Influence 2012, our annual conference in June. Dynamic leaders from GE, Unilever, Microsoft, Google, London 2012, Conde Nast and many more will take you through the big innovations and trends that are transforming the business world today and will help you cash in tomorrow. Come join us!

- Bernhard Warner

editorial director, SMI

Follow us on Twitter at: @socialinfluence… And on Facebook.