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.

The figures are either daunting or exciting. We’re rapidly approaching an installed base of tablet users set to top 760 million around the world, a number that will no doubt spell the beginning of the end of PC dominance. Let me throw another figure at you: social commerce is forecasted to grow to a $30 billion market by the end of 2015. That’s less than three years away! Are you prepared for these seismic shifts in the business world, where the referral economy teams with the power of mobile computing to create tomorrow’s winners (and losers) in retail, publishing, marketing, communications, you name it?

Change is rapidly upon us. Mega-trends in the digital/mobile/social space are occurring so quickly that you may find your entire market has transformed itself in a matter of quarters. There is either a major business opportunity for you, or your company is vulnerable to swift irrelevance, and eventual obsolescence.

We at SMI saw this coming for a while now and that’s why we’ve planned for this year’s Social Media Influence 2012 conference in June to focus 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. Specifically, you’ll hear from GE, Unilever, Microsoft, Google, London 2012, Buddy Media, Dachis Group, Conde Nast and many more who will take you through the big innovations and trends that are transforming the business world today and will help you better compete tomorrow.

To say this is our most ambitious conference – now in its seventh year – would be an understatement. The theme is success stories. Simply put, you’ll learn invaluable and actionable best-practice strategy pointers for you and your team. We also have one extra goodie we’ll be giving to delegates: a free e-book of #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.

This is one of those questions that admittedly is being asked in just a handful of companies these days. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a pressing question for brands, publishers and organizations of all stripes who seek to reach a global audience on the device they prefer. A new forecast on tablet sales may just accelerate the conversation at the board level.

According to Forrester, the sale of tablets will hit 375 million per year by 2016, at which point the installed base of tablets will top 760 million. Here’s the growth story in chart form:

Here’s where it gets really interesting. It’s clear that there is a compelling business rationale on the enterprise side to consider the tablet-friendly interface. Forrester analyst Frank Gillette predicts, “one-third of these tablets will be purchased by businesses, and emerging markets will drive about 40% of sales.” He goes on to say that the tablet will challenge the PC or laptop as the preferred computing device many of us.

Now, we all know the tablets benefits and drawbacks. They are great for consuming media, but not great for creating, nor editing. It also follows that the tap and swish motion of the tablet isn’t ideal for executing certain specific functions found on today’s typical web sites. Try tapping a tiny “x” to cancel a pop-up or screen on your iPad or Kindle or Samsung Galaxy Note. But that drawback is expected to be ancient history as designers get together with apps specialists to create more touch-friendly interfaces. This “touch first” concept, as Gillette calls it, will drive tablet usage on the enterprise side.

When you start talking about an installed base of close nearing 1 billion you can envisage a sea change in design and interface that brands, publishers, games designers and more will have to implement to take advantage of this new on-the-go market.

Sure enough, a new corporate digital communications effectiveness survey, the FT Bowen Craggs & Co. Index, notes that one of the major new developments in digital corporate comms strategy is companies developing specific apps specifically to communicate with investors and the media. The survey also notes that 25 out of 100 companies analyzed now feature a tablet-friendly mobile site.

Editor’s Note: Join us on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012 for an in-depth discussion into the future of the tablet economy. We’ll be joined by a quartet of speakers – Conde Nast, Bigpoint, Recyclebank and The British Library, all of whom have made a highly successful transition to tablet publishing, gaming and development.

Smartphone users are, en masse, expected to download more than 32 billion applications and games this year, generating revenues of more than $26 billion. That’s good for a staggering 30% year-on-year growth rate and it’s bound to be good news for content publishers and games makers. But there’s a sector that appears to be even more bullish: mobile advertisers.

According to the latest market forecast by Strategy Analytics, amid all this go-go growth in the global mobile media spend is one particularly promising nugget: the out-of-nowhere surge in ad buys that occur inside apps and games. “The strength of the apps ecosystem,” says Strategy Analtyics, “is also demonstrated by advertiser spend For example, across the USA and major Western European markets as a whole, revenue from display ads on the mobile web ($934.5 million) has been overtaken by in-app advertising ($1.7 billion).”

The in-app ad revenue in both markets has more than doubled year-on-year as the chart below shows:

Adds David MacQueen, Strategy Analytics’ Director of Wireless Media Strategies: “In the eyes of many advertisers, web browsing on the smartphone is playing second fiddle to the app economy.”

The other big gainer is video, but it’s not quite the revenue-generator, the researchers add. And, we can’t let this round-up close without a word about social media, or mo-so-lo as some geo-followers call it.
According to Strategy Analytics, mobile social media revs is expected to increase by 16.1 percent to $17.6 billion – accounting for 11.8 percent of all mobile media revenues.

Editor’s Note: We’ll be covering this high-growth area in much more depth on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012. Come here some of the top thinkers and practitioners in the area of mobile, apps, gaming and tablets speak about what’s driving sales for their firms and what new innovations will drive the market tomorrow.

2012 was supposed to be the year of social commerce. Expectations grew immense as mega retail brands such as Target, The Gap and Ticketmaster opened up shop on Facebook, home to now 850 million users. Even big-time management consultants had an opinion as they talked of the “Facebook effect” on retail. Booz & Co. calculated the global take from social commerce will grow six-fold to $30 billion by 2015. We captured much of the rapid rise and bullishness of the nascent sector in our “History of F-Commerce” infographic.

But all of the sudden, the first grey clouds started to appear on the horizon. First, it was privacy concerns. Now, it’s retailers getting cold feet. As we recently reported, some of those pioneering social retailers decided the initial investment wasn’t worth it and have since abandoned their Facebook storefronts.

But is this the end of S- or even F-commerce? Hardly. We’re still seeing impressive success stories from the automotive sector, from the entertainment industry and even from sports gear brand Burton. From the successes and failures, a clearer picture is emerging that social commerce is a far cry from the notion of opening up another online store on Facebook. We can be thankful for that! The retailers who build an engaging, entertaining online shopping experience will be the ones to reap the rewards, and at SMI we’ll be chronicling the wins and losses as they happen.

…On a separate note, we have a full slate of events for your calendar. Firstly, we have just three slots left for our Feb. 29th Social Media Crisis Communications workshop. It’s a really valuable workshop in which you will learn how to get social in a crisis and defuse the next big #FAIL. Also, mark this down: As you may know, we are busy putting together the agenda for our 7th annual conference, Social Media Influence 2012 on June 12th. We have some great speakers lined up. But hurry. The earlybird offer expires March 1st.

- Bernhard Warner

editorial director, SMI

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

The Socialist braintrust Obama Administration in Washington has passed a series of protections for web consumers that looks eerily European: something closer to an opt-in regime that calls for greater transparency on how user data is used and a do-not-track-option.

This is an important development for consumer protection advocates, coming on the heels of the Path privacy debacle. The new rules mean the likes of Facebook, Apple and Google have to enforce more stringent privacy protections, particularly in the previously porous area of mobile apps.

Just how porous you ask?

Social networks’ cavalier approach to customer data has become a real trust issue. Some two-thirds of consumers “do not trust companies like Facebook, even though we all interact with them and we all share our personal information with them,” according to a new infographic designed by MDG Advertising.

Infographic by MDG Advertising

Editorial Note: The legal implications of social media marketing and customer data protection will be covered in our annual SMI conference to be held on June 12th. You can hear Jamie Barnard, global digital general counsel at Unilever, speak on this an other legal issues in a session entitled “Social media – navigating the legal landscape.” Come join us! And please note: the earlybird offer expires on March 1.

The biggest social media hiring coups of 2012 so far goes to Kraft Foods which managed to lure B. Bonin Bough, former head of social media at PepsiCo, away from cola giant. Bough, who was the face behind PepsiCo’s enormously successful Refresh Project, is expected to run digital comms/marketing at the food giant which is going through a big shakeup itself this year as the company splits into two parts. Bough has plenty of experience championing digital and social within a massive organization as he told us two years ago at our SMI 2010 conference.

His insights were particularly interesting when you consider his background is PR and marketing. Bough clearly sees social as a mechanism to improve an entire company’s operation, well beyond corporate comms and marketing. “How do you begin to integrate this because that is where the win is. When you integrate [digital and social] into other channels of activiation that is going to be the success,” he said on the sidelines of SMI 2010.

Here’s his video interview with us in which he tells us how the formula for getting big organizations to embrace social and make it work for their operation:

Who will be the next big newsmakers in the market? Come join us at Social Media Influence 2012.

There is plenty of promise and reason for pause when it comes to social commerce, predicted to be the fastest-growing segment of online retail. But the rush to throw up a storefront on Facebook or Twitter is not for the ill-prepared, as Richard Downs of  Infosys Europe tells us.

We caught up with Richard, the Business Director at Infosys Europe, on the sidelines of Social Media Influence 2011 a few weeks back where he told us about the new reality retailers must live up to in an age where consumers can use the same forum to discuss your product in depth, warts and all, before making a purchase decision.

Editor’s Note: Did you miss SMI 2011? No worries. The videos and presentations can be accessed here.

I have been thinking more and more about the various strands to Social Business Intelligence, which is a major area of focus for us here at Dachis Group in 2011. At our London summit earlier this year, I spoke about the way open data inside and outside organisations can uncover new sources of value and help drive performance improvement. Yesterday, at the lovely Social Media Influence Conference, I spoke about how the field of Social Media Monitoring will become more real-time, operational and valuable as it moves towards Social Business Intelligence.

In summary, I think social media monitoring will evolve towards real-time data-driven business improvement based on socialising customer insight within the firm as a whole, not just within marketing and outbound communications.

Here are the slides, and a longer summary follows below for those of you who were not there:

From Social Media Monitoring to Social Business Intelligence

Listening grows up; becomes more business-focused

We have all been to events where people (sometimes me!) reference the Cluetrain manifesto and say that markets are conversations, and therefore we need to get better at listening before we engage. But in reality, the fact that ‘listening’ is still seen as a new and novel activity just goes to show how alien this has been to the culture of large companies and brands for so long.

But, looking at Altimeter’s survey of social strategists, it seems that listening, customer dialogue and word of mouth are now high on most organisation’s spending priorities for 2011. This is a good sign. Listening tools and techniques have evolved rapidly in the past year or so, and the purchase of the market-leading Radian 6 by Salesforce suggests that listening platforms are now regarded as a key piece of the wider social business infrastructure.

However, current practice is still largely dominated by the ideas of brand monitoring and buzz – in other words, it is still more about the company or brand than the individual and their needs or interests. Brand monitoring is a slightly narcissistic way of engaging – ‘they love me … they love me not’ – and often tend to look at aggregate measures of sentiment (which is, by the way, extremely unreliable) and reach, rather than specific issues. But there are plenty of other ways to use listening platforms to get a better idea of customer needs, opportunities, etc. We are working on some quite specific listening campaigns to help refine clients’ service offerings, and this requires far more linguistic gymnastics than asking “does my brand look big in this?”

Brand perception is obviously important, but I think utility matters more to customers most of the time. This is why I love the way companies like Southwest Airlines and others use Twitter in a very down-to-earth way, responding honestly and openly to complaints, questions and issues.

A fun little story that I think exemplifies the way utility trumps “official” brand communications, and also illustrates the need to listen and engage rather than jump feet first into social media, is the tale of woe surrounding Tom Armitage’s Tower Bridge twitterbot.

I am sure our favourite bridge needs no introduction. We love it and watch it every day (as some of you will know, often from the window of our favourite local eaterie). It’s only downside is that when the bridge raises, we sometimes get stuck in traffic for 10 minutes or so on the way to meetings in the city. Luckily, whilst he worked here, the lovely Tom Armitage created a twitterbot for the bridge that would diligently tweet bridge openings and closings, and even tell you the name of the boat sailing through, all based on public data. Beyond its practical utility, the twitterbot gave the bridge a personality in the social web, and inspired other inanimate objects to do the same (incidentally, the SF writer Bruce Sterling coined the term spimes in 2004 for this very purpose).

At some point, the marketing people at the corporation of London, who run the Tower Bridge Exhibition, decided they had the right to the “official” twitter handle @towerbridge and applied to Twitter to have it handed over to them. After trying and failing to contact Tom, Twitter sadly complied with this request and what began as a public utility (that also did a great job of promoting the bridge) turned into a dull, series of weak marketing messages for the exhibition. Perhaps the Corporation of London thought it had ‘followed a process’ and so everything was ok.

To cut a long story short, a minor twitter storm ensued with over 1,250 tweets mentioning @towerbridge in just a few days (approx. 50% of the 3 year total), almost all of which were very critical of the Corporation of London’s disregard for both Tom, the Twittersphere and the users of the bridge. I would hate to be the one trawling through the sentiment analysis for their newly minted Twitter account. Finally, realising their mistake, and to their credit, the people involved contacted Tom and the bridge now tweets at the rather unmemorable @twrbrdg_itself, presumably to “protect” the brand equity of the exhibition.

Listening and analytics cannot, of course, undo stupidity like this, but there are many other situations in which earlier action in response to product or service problems or user issues could be possible thanks to real-time data.

Some pointers for data-driven business

There are several areas in which I think listening and analytics will grow up to become more business relevant, and if they do, then I think they can play a major role in helping businesses evolve in a more customer-centric way:

• Instead of studying a microcosm of online social activity, we should try to immerse ourselves in the ecosystem and be closer to the context of what is being said and shared.

• In addition to listening to opinion, it also makes sense to gather and connect behavioural data so that future social marketing efforts can build up a rounded picture of customers and their needs.

• Don’t just listen to external conversations – also point analytics at internal conversations and see if there are common themes or correlations between them (e.g. someone in product teams suggesting feature X might be buggy should ideally be picked up before customers begin complaining).

• Share streams of listening data internally as widely as possible to bring everybody closer to customers, and involve the whole company (not just marcomms) in making sense of the data and what actions it suggests.

• Think carefully about who should ideally action customer insight, and bring them into the listening loop. For example, efforts by Gatorade, Dell and others around social media command centres have shown great promise in immersing C-suite execs in the flow of customer insight, and that helps them understand what social media teams are trying to do and why.

• Move beyond reports and dashboards and find new ways to share real-time data ‘in the flow’ of peoples’ work. Reports have never been a particularly effective way of changing behaviour, but in this case their limited distribution and the time lag effect both limit their usefulness.

The “who owns social” question

In order to action some of the points above, the perennial question of how to organise for social cannot be ignored. Who “owns” social (if anybody)? How do different business functions come together to make it work? These are not easy questions to answer after decades of increasing specialisation and silo-building, but without at least an interim answer to this question (even if it is as simple as a co-ordination committee), there may be problems ahead.

Ideally, we would recommend the kind of podular structure that my colleague Dave Gray has written about recently. It is interesting to note how Amazon – a very data-driven business – uses small teams or pods to drive tiny features on each Amazon web page, and how they use he vast amount of behavioural data generated by the site to tweak, improve or remove these features in an approach dubbed ‘Data Darwinism.’

Actions speak louder than algorithms

Why do we listen? We listen to learn and inform action. But how do we act? This is the key question that can help us close the loop between insight and results. All the data in the world will not help if we do nothing with it. Right now, one of the problems we see with listening campaigns is that the insights go no further than the marketing department, but they are not able to pull the right levers within the company to act on them. This was one of the take-aways from Jaimie Punishill’s entertaining talk at the 2010 Social Business Summit in Austin, and from what I understand, it came up in his 2011 SXSW panel on the challenges of doing customer engagement using social media as well.

So how can we both improve the way we make sense of customer insight whilst also encouraging people to take ownership of the issues identified?

We are working on the application of social analytics to this problem for clients that want to take the next step beyond passive listening. The basic idea is this: start by surfacing a stream of potentially actionable events or insights within a social environment inside a client’s organisation, and give people the opportunity to easily flag items as actionable / non-actionable or to claim them as actions. Claiming actions in the open, we believe, encourages a culture of ownership but also helps others learn what sort of actions and resolutions work best. The logical next step is to reward those who are best at filtering, sharing, escalating or claiming actions, perhaps through simple game mechanics or visible rewards.

We believe that open data can encourage greater self-management from staff by giving them the real-time feedback on how their efforts are playing out in terms of results. This can play a vital role in creating the conditions for evolutionary improvement in companies interested in harnessing customer insight to drive performance.

Lee Bryant was a keynote speaker at Social Media Influence 2011. He Tweets at @leebryant.

We’ve just put the wrap on Social Media Influence 2011, our annual conference in which we bring together the top brands, thinkers and practitioners in the world of social business to discuss the big issues impacting the market today and what to expect tomorrow. The event drew speakers from Google, Dell, Unilever, LivingSocial, Orange, O2, Infosys, Viadeo and many more. Here’s some of the highlights and the first batch of photos too.

We do this every year, a morning-after run-through of our notes, pulling out some of the more interesting detail we heard during the day (in between running around, moderating panels, etc.). Here they are in, no particular order:

Benjamin Faes, head of YouTube and Google Display, EMEA

• brands and their agencies are no longer coming to them asking for “a viral,” but they are seeing the power of video in creating attention and even cutting down on sales costs.

• The power of mobile and video: just a few months old, Volkswagen’s “The Force” spot is the most viewed ad all-time on YouTube with, and here’s a twist, over 20% of the views occurring on mobile.

• Salesforce.com instructional videos are so effective in explaining to prospective customers the features and benefits of its software platforms. The company reckons the videos do the job of roughly 750 sales staff.

Stuart Handley, communications director at Dell

• 1/5 of journalists access Twitter at least once per day for story sourcing.
• by 2014, 20% of all business users will rely on social media rather than email for personal communications.
• Dell tracks 25,000 conversations about its products and brands daily. (It listens in 11 languages and engages over 1,000/week through Twitter.)

Richard Downs, business director for Infosys Europe

• By 2015, the average American will have 6 devices connected to the Net; 4.5 in the UK.

Selina Sykes, senior brand manager at Lynx, Unilever

• Emphasis now is on recurring conversation, not campaigns.
• Devise “conversation calendars” in which the team plans down to the daily/weekly Facebook update.
• have found that Facebook fans are 30% more loyal to the product than non-Facebook fans.
• Twitter and video are surprisingly strong traffic drivers.

Chris Reed, managing partner at Brew Digital

• At time of Eurostar Channel Tunnel breakdown and ensuing social media backlash, the company did not own any Twitter handles associated with the brand. Who owned the Eurostar Twitter handle? A Japanese boy band.

Neil Chapman, Alpha Voice Communications, formerly comms chief for BP

• Don’t blame the messenger: “your twitterfeed isn’t ruining your reputation. What happened is ruining it.”
• The art of surprise: learned about sensational, hoax BP Twitter feed during live press interview. Set the policy in response: will continue to monitor it for dis-information and will otherwise continue to keep the public informed. To make a big deal about the fake feed would have created yet further bad PR.
• As Matthew Yeomans, moderator, mentioned: Neil will be working with SMI on a series of social media crisis communications training courses. The first is set for 12 July.

Editor’s Note: Stay tuned here for further wrap-up, analysis and details on how to access the presentations.