I've addressed the 'what-it-is' and 'why-it's-important' of the semantic web in my last two posts, so today's post is going to get a little more concrete. While many developments of the semantic web have yet to be seen, there are still a plethora of great examples of marketers and companies who are already using semantic technology to their advantage. Here I'll take a look at examples of where social media is already coming together with the semantic web, and I'll also look a little bit at where this path could lead.

Much Ado About Places

Unless you've been hiding in your bat cave for the past couple of weeks, you likely noticed that Facebook rolled out another new feature to fill our newsfeeds. I won't get too much into the nitty gritty of Places, as Autumn already covered most of it in her recent Places post. But on a more opinionated note, I believe that this move could drastically speed up the geo-location aspect of the semantic web and result in handing even more of our data to a single company. By looping Foursquare and Gowalla into Places, Facebook may have squashed their "competition" without a fight.

In the next few months, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot of marketing campaigns that include or even demand the use of Places. How many Starbucks stores can you visit in your area? Can you check in at every Hard Rock Cafe in the U.S.? How many Boston bars can you visit in one weekend?

Any of these campaigns could have been done on Foursquare or Gowolla, but with around 2 million and 400,000 users respectively, compared with Facebook's 500 million, the reach of the average update on these networks wouldn't amount to nearly the buzz as the average Facebook post.  It will be interesting to see who will be the first to pull of a successful campaign with this app.

There's Something About Ottawa

If you're looking for the social media campaign of the future, you may need to go no farther than the Canadian capital. In 2009 the City of Ottawa launched a campaign called Picture it Downtown. Ottawaians (??) were asked to snap photos of their city and upload them to the contest's microsite.

When uploading their photos, not only were entrants asked to identify the neighborhood in which the photo was taken, but they were also required to choose at least one of fourteen descriptor options (i.e. tags), such as "coffee talk" or "family activities"  to label the content of the photo. In other words, by the end of the contest, the city had rights to hundreds of diverse and correctly tagged portraits of downtown Ottawa.

Now, though the contest is over, residents are still encouraged to submit their photos, and the site lives on as an evergreen tourism bureau. With the ability to sort by eight different neighborhoods and fourteen types of locations, Picture it Downtown is now a great little semantic database.

The folks behind Picture it Downtown realized that semantic tagging is a great way to allow contest entries that may have otherwise become lost in the sea of web content to become evergreen advertisements for the City of Ottawa.

Hunch - It's Halfway There

A third recent development in the world of semantic tagging comes in the form of a search engine. This is almost ironic, since I (and others) have argued that the semantic web will likely change "search" as we now know it. But Hunch.com is different.

Hunch is a search engine in the sense that there is a "search" box in which one types queries which are then matched with words, phrases and topics on the site in the form of "results." But Hunch is really an engine that's more interested in being your life coach than it is in providing every possible solution to your query.

To begin with, your registration for the site is not complete until you answer at least 20 questions about yourself, such as:

and

Based on your responses to these questions, Hunch claims the ability to recommend everything from good reads to ideas for future blog posts and even what religion your should adopt. The site even launched a local version this month, that recommend restaurants, bars and other local venues that it "thinks" you would like based on what the site "knows" about you.

Hunch doesn't really "know" anything. It organizes members in a database based on their responses. The site also allows members to input whether or not they actually like its recommendations. In this way, it's constantly "learning" more about you, and, in turn, more about others who are tagged as similar to you based on their responses.

In this way, Hunch is a quasi-semantic database. It takes the information that users give, sorts it, and gives it all meaning; meaning that gets more and more fleshed out every time a new user inputs data. The ideal semantic web would organize information in a similar fashion - using and tagging data that most users provide without even thinking about it.

The New Crowdsourcing?

So Facebook Places is pushing us further into the semantic web, campaigns like Picture it Downtown are showing how to incorporate the semantic web, and sites like Hunch are paving the way there. But these examples could still be considered semantic add-ons to the way that the social web currently works.

The interesting thing about the future of social media in the semantic web, however, is that it will enable this medium which has, for the most part, been used (at earliest) for product launch campaigns to work its way into the entire product-creation process. Remember the"Windows 7 was my idea" commercials? What if every product could boast such grassroots conception?

Imagine if, before designing its next top-of-the-line shoe, Nike not only interviewed and gave surveys with hundreds of focus groups, but if the corporation was also able to monitor, organize and sort everything that anyone has ever said, anywhere on the web about their current pair of athletic shoes. The good and the bad, the neutral and the new ideas. The information is already out there - monitoring programs such as Radian6 sweep through and pick it up all the time. But, as of yet, there's no simple way to organize this info.

Until the semantic web, that is. It's possible that a web that is readable by computers would be able to filter and sort and form their own sentiment analysis, digesting the plethora of information generated on the social web and providing it to marketers and corporations. Who needs a focus group when you have a Facebook page? Who needs "beta testers" when you have tweeters? In this way, almost any brand page, on almost any social network would be method of crowdsourcing a product. No longer left to the elites with a little extra time, "crowdsourcing" as we know it could become a standard for product development.

No matter where the future lies for social media, it's clear that a semantic web will enable marketers to monitor and interact with fans in ways we can currently only imagine.

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"Adam Schoenfeld is the President and co-founder of RowFeeder, data junky, and spreadsheet lover. RowFeeder is the world's simplest social media monitoring tool, used by businesses of all sizes to collect and analyze social media data from the comfort of an Excel Spreadsheet."

When Mashable posts, people listen. And not only do they listen, but they echo, in the form of Retweets. We recently experienced the awesome Mashable Retweet machine on an article covering RowFeeder’s new social media monitoring in Excel. The article saw 1,365 Re-Tweets in total. On top of that, we saw a 20% conversation to sign-ups on visits from the article. We were amazed watching the Retweet machine in action and decided to take a look at the data and how we might apply Mashable’s practices to our content and social media efforts.

We found 5 primary things that make Mashable the RT love generator that it is…

1. Mashable’s audience is comprised of influencers

Using a sample of 2 weeks, we found that over 25% of tweets of the whopping 173,00 tweets mentioning “Mashable” are from influential Tweeters – aka 1,000+ followers and/or a Klout score of 30 or higher. The average Mashable tweeter has ~1,300 followers. The following chart shows the influencer share of total Mashable tweets over the last 2 weeks.

2. The sun never sets on Mashable’s empire – RTs in every time zone

Only 54% of Tweets with “Mashable” come from the United States. That leaves almost half the tweets to be dispersed around the globe.  There’s rarely a time of day when the tweet-o-sphere is quiet for Mashable mentions.

3. Mashable’s audience is not just influential, but also engaged

Approximately 1/3 people mentioned Mashable more than once in 14 days. 6% of people mentioned Mashable more than 5 times in the two week period we analyzed.

4. Mashable’s tweets contain links – Retweet friendly content

Almost all of the tweets with “Mashable” in the tweet contain a link. That’s right, 96% have a link. Links bring traffic and increase SEO for the post. We might also assume that users feel more comfortable RT’ing something with a link – something with a cold, hard (ok, soft copy) document to back up the tweet.

5. Mashable’s content is structured and designed for Retweets

Mashable articles are perfectly designed for Retweets. Alongside all their posts is an easy “Retweet button,” enabling users to easily engage with the story and the brand by simply pushing a button.

In addition, Mashable’s tweets are typically short and sweet, leaving room for user to easily re-post. Looking across all mentions of Mashable in the period analyzed showed the average length of tweets at 101 characters. Often this counts the “RT @Mashable” so the original posts are leaving plenty of room for users to share and comment.

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In case you hadn't heard, Facebook launched yet another category-redefining feature last week. This time they shook up the still-emerging world of geo-location services, where buzz-worthy startups like Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah (MyTown) had been steadily and somewhat quietly testing models, adding features, and building user bases.

Not anymore. While the jury is still out on the long-term impact of Facebook Places, one thing is clear: in one shot, Places took the idea of "checking in" and made it both universal and effectively generic. With instant access to 500 million active users and near ubiquity on smartphones everywhere, Facebook Places has turned checking in from a cool and unique feature into a utility on par with sharing or liking.

Does that mean Foursquare and all the other pioneers who also offer geo-location check-ins are headed for Friendster status? Not necessarily, but it is clear that just offering a service to say  "hey I'm here!" or even "I was here more than anybody else!" is no longer sufficient to make users stand up and care enough to keep using your service.

They have to quickly differentiate themselves from Facebook places by providing unique value to their users.

Already we're seeing a second wave of geo-location companies doing just that. Companies such as SCVNGR, Shopkick, and TopGuest are narrowing their focus to provide unique and immediate value, in the form of coupons, rewards, or promotions. As a result, they are better positioned to weather the coming Facebook Places ubiquity.

So what's the key to survival for geo-location companies in the era of Places?

Focus on Coupons and Discounts

Coupons are hot, and no, I never thought I'd see myself type that phrase. Coupons for me evoke childhood memories of the large Tupperware box stuff with glossy clippings from the Sunday paper that my mom diligently sorted and maintained. But the "new" coupons - online, targeted locally, and offering social purchase incentives - are one of the fastest growing marketing tools on the Web today, thanks to startups like Groupon and Living Social.

Foursquare and others have had limited success in with targeted coupons and specials - in Foursquare's case, you see them if you happen to walk within 200 yards. All well and good, but the offerings so far seem sparse, particularly if you live outside heavily populated and tech savvy metro areas. Foursquare, Gowalla and others need to reinvent how coupons are targeted, shared, and pared with check-in data before Facebook does it first.

Embrace the Loyalty Programs

Who doesn't love accumulating points you can redeem for cool stuff? If you have a credit card, fly a lot, or shop at almost any major grocery chain, you're probably up to your eyeballs in loyalty program memberships. New services such as Shopkick and TopGuest are tailored specifically at working with companies to add a geo-location kick to their loyalty programs, rewarding the check-in with benefits most of us are already familiar with and value.

If anything, I expect this kind of geo-location benefit to become more common. Facebook itself is creating an enormous stream of user check-in data through Places, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it begin to partner with major brands to feed that data into their loyalty programs. The opportunity lies in doing it faster, and better, than Facebook.

Get Beyond the Mayor

Earlier this week Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, did an interview with the UK's Telegraph: 

"Crowley believes that Foursqaure’s gaming mechanics, such as the prospect of a user becoming the ‘mayor’ of a location they have visited the most frequently, will keep people far more enticed into using his service over the likes of Places."

Maybe that was true in the early goings, when becoming "mayor" of a hot location was both fun and achievable, and in some cases resulted in a reward (see: Starbucks). But as the service gains more users, becoming mayor of the places you actually care about can quickly become such a remote possibility that it's not worth caring about. Beyond the increasingly remote chance of becoming mayor, and some vaguely entertaining but otherwise useless badges, where's the fun?

Social gaming can be a huge draw for geo-location, but the rewards need to be both more tangible and accessible for the majority of users to make it matter in the battle for check-ins.

Make Privacy a Differentiator

When Places launched, I immediately started checking in around town to get a feel for it, then popped over to my Facebook profile page to see what that looked like to friends. It's then that it hit me: I have 400 friends on Facebook, and only a tiny portion of them do I want to have access to my whereabouts at any given time.

It's not that I don't trust them (seriously, I love ya all!), but I suspect many people are like me: Facebook is a hodgepodge of close and distant friends, high school buddies you haven't talk to in years, some business contacts you maybe mixed in before shunting them off to LinkedIn, and so on. My Facebook friend list has long since stopped being a small group of trusted contacts whom I feel comfortable knowing I'm not at home guarding the family and valuables.

Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, thanks to their relative newness, have an opportunity to address this problem and in turn make privacy a distinctive selling point. For example, allow for the creation of friend groups, and selectively share location info with each group.

Or create a simple way to share only with a small group on that service for most check-ins, and optionally push some that you want everyone to see ("I'm at a conference! Let's all meet up!") to Facebook Places. Facebook is notorious for putting user privacy second, which creates a massive opening for someone else to put it first.

Is the Success of Facebook Places Inevitable?

Despite everything else in this article, not necessarily. For any number of reasons Places could stall out after all this early buzz: privacy issues, a broken feature set, or even just a plain boring user experience that fails to excite their users (see: Questions). Success or not, the simple existence of Places is going a long way to validating geo-location as a key part of the social media mix, and as a legitimate tool for marketers to include in their programs and campaigns. That can only be good for all the geo-location players out there, assuming they can capitalize on it fast enough.

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Facebook is continually making progress toward developing itself into a marketer's dream. The social media giant continues to know more and more about its members through features including the Like button, Facebook Connect, and Facebook Questions. Now with Facebook Places, location based technology is added to its arsenal.

With the recent launch of Facebook Places, Facebook steps up as a threat/competitor to services (Foursquare and Gowalla) that previously dominated the location based applications. CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, says this threat comes primarily out of Facebook's sheer numbers in his article on CNN Tech. And that number - 500 million strong - is a big part of what should make Facebook so alluring to marketers of all types.

Facebook's Existing Knowledge of Consumers

Facebook's dominance over its smaller location-based counterparts extends even further because Facebook arguably "knows" you better than any other social media outlet. Isn't Facebook one of the ways you first judge acquaintances? From someone's profile, you can often determine exactly what kind of person someone is. Similarly, marketers can (and should) use information about a person's interests and activities based on the information freely shared by you, the consumer.

Facebook already provides marketers with a comprehensive list of your interests and favorite things with the integration of the Like button. Retailers, like Amazon, have already begun to leverage this information to create purchase suggestions for you and your Facebook friends. For more on the potential for this, check out Lisa's recent post explaining how Facebook and Amazon are taking social commerce to the next level.

The recent development of Facebook Questions adds yet another forum in which marketers can connect and learn about consumers based on questions and answers

Now, with Facebook Places, you are simply sharing one more element about you as a consumer. You have the ability to share where and when you shop, eat, and play. Marketers can (and should) use this invaluable information to direct promotions and advertisements to consumers. This, in turn, benefits the consumer by providing them with relevant and useful information from marketers so that your experience as a shopper can be enhanced.

Implications of Facebook Places and other Location-Based Services

I recently graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and was fortunate enough to take a new course in social media technology before leaving. My professor, Gary Kayye, used the following example when explaining the benefits of location based technology:

Imagine you are driving down the road and you pass by Starbucks. If you are carrying your phone with you, then services with location based technology have the potential to send you a coupon at the exact moment you are passing by that store. Would that be valuable to you as a consumer? Yes. Would that be valuable to you as a marketer? Absolutely. In both instances, the consumer and marketer are allowed communication at the most optimized moment - right before a potential purchase.

This information is highly valuable as social media once again allows businesses to gain access to the exact niche of consumers they are striving to reach. It will be interesting to see how businesses and consumers interact in this realm of real-time marketing.

Concerns for Privacy with Facebook Places

As with most new technology, there is always a backlash of privacy concerns. And I'll be the first to admit that these issues concern me as well. However, when used responsibly by Facebook users and advertisers, Facebook Places (along with other location based services) unlocks potential for creating communication between consumers and businesses that can provide great benefit to both parties.

As the old saying goes, "With great power comes great responsibility." With power to unleash personal information about yourself to virtually the entire world, you must use location based services responsibly with common sense and a bit of caution. A while back our CEO, Jim Tobin, provided a quick list of common sense guidelines about posting information online that remains relevant to this new technology.

However, if your privacy concerns still outweigh the benefits, you have the ability to manage your privacy settings or diable this feature.

The Future of Facebook Places

This most recent extension of Facebook offers the potential of a widespread adaptation of location based marketing as the threshhold for adoption is now lowered for the 500 million people using Facebook. With this application, a wealth of opportunites arise for marketers to strategically and effectively reach a widespread and optimal target of consumers. Another key benefit is the social nature of Facebook, which allows connections with individual consumers to spread to friends (who will likely have similar purchasing interests) via notifications and newsfeeds. 

Still, as with any new development, the success and implications are yet to be seen as we social media geeks await to see how this development plays out. How do you think Facebook Places will change the location based game?

*Thanks to Kevin Briody for his insights and thoughts into Facebook Places as I put together this post. Look for his upcoming post continuing to flesh out the implications of Facebook Places soon.

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Last week I attended BlogHer '10 in NYC. If you've never heard of the annual BlogHer conference and your target audience is of the female persuasion, look it up! You should know about this conference and about the BlogHer community. 

There were a lot of companies and organizations there, and by a lot I mean A LOT, so getting the attention of these women took more than having handouts and demos available.  While at the conference, I took a few notes of how these women interacted with the sponsors and exhibitors, and from these observations I left with four tips/takeaways that I'll share with you, so that when you do attend a BlogHer conference or any conference of this caliber, you'll be ready.

4 Tips for Getting Your Brand Noticed

1. It's all about the swag!  The attendees walked the exhibit halls gathering the fun items each company provided. For me, the swag I considered "valuable" made it into my luggage and into my home. Those that did not benefit me, never made it out of my hotel room.

Bottom line, your swag must be valuable to your audience. However,  valuable doesn't necessarily have to have a large price tag. For example, I received an Arm & Hammer coupon for a free bottle of the company's laundry detergent and to me that was valuable.

However, while we all know the attendees love the swag, to truly make an impact at BlogHer you must go above and beyond. The remaining tips will focus on how to do just that.

2. Do something unique! Because there are so many exhibitors and sponsors there, a company could easily get lost in the wave of other organizations. To stand out above the rest, try doing something unique. For instance, Chevy was a big sponsor at BlogHer and instead of handing out swag, they provided a valuable service to the bloggers and attendees with the Chevy Voltage Room which was your recharge station. Attendees were there blogging, tweeting and communicating through numerous social outlets which involved the use of their smart phones and computers. Eventually, every attendee needed a little charge to get through the day and the Voltage Room became that place.

Other unique ideas included onsite makeovers (CoverGirl and Pantene), shipping swag to attendees' homes free of charge so they didn't have to stuff it all into their luggage (Pepsi) and hosting a TV cooking show, onsite, using conference attendees as the audience (Jimmy Dean).

 3. Mingle and Make Yourself Available! I noticed very few of the sponsors and exhibitors left their booths or stations to actually spend time in sessions and with attendees. However, for those that did take the time to speak with many of the bloggers they accomplished more than expected by simply saying “hello.”  By getting involved these sponsors and exhibitors got to hear directly from the bloggers about how they’d like to be approached, what pushes their buttons and what makes them jump on an opportunity. Additionally, by doing so these bigger brands made the brand they were representing develop a human persona. This is an important connection to the consumers and one that will better help brands successfully approach the bloggers.

4. Make Your Presence Known - Ahead of Time! With all that is now available on the web, why would you not reach out to individuals prior to the event's start? You could be giving away high priced products and providing extras to bloggers to giveaway on their personal sites, but if no one is aware of what you're doing, that promotion will likely fall flat. Yes, no matter how cool.

It's so easy to do a simple blogger search to determine which bloggers will be attending. Try taking the time to identify 20-40 bloggers that will be at the conference, then send each blogger a personalized email to let them know what you'll be doing at BlogHer and that you hope to see them there. An act as simple as that could help drive awareness and draw an audience. 

Want to take it a step further? Start connecting with these bloggers now. Introduce your product(s) by offering them to influential bloggers for review. Provide them with the products to also give away on their blog. That way, when you reach out just to say hello and to let them know you'll be at BlogHer, they'll likely be more receptive. Additionally, this step could be imperative if you simply want to attend the conference to make connections. If you make these connections ahead of time, then you have a reason to approach those bloggers at the actual event. Lastly, once you get to the conference, be sure to follow-up with those bloggers that responded to your initial outreach. Can't find them in person? @reply them via Twitter. They were all over Twitter making their own connections so when I reached out, they quickly responded.

Wrap-up

In short, your mere presence at a BlogHer conference will get you nowhere. As a brand, if you want to leave an impression on the bloggers attending the conference then you must think outside the box. Who is your audience and what will drive them to think twice about your product? Whatever you think that may be, go with it and leave the branded frisbees back at the office.

I'd like to leave you with one small piece of advice. Bloggers are very powerful. They are the consumer, and therefore are highly trusted by their readers. Be nice, know what's important to them, and take into account what actions will make them happy versus which ones will result in a negative post about your organization.

Did you attend BlogHer? What were your takeaways?

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I need your help. We've got a panel under consideration for the next SxSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. If you're not familiar with SxSW (South by Southwest, or "South by") it's basically spring break for geeks--a mega conference.

Great event, but last year's breakout sessions could've used more meat, at least in my opinion.

You Like This

So this year, we've offered up our own panel. Called, "You Like This – Lessons from Top Facebook Brands," the session will put managers from the Top 50 Branded Facebook Fan Pages together on stage for the first time. That will allow me, as the moderator, to ask specific questions about how they grew their fan base, how they leverage their fan base and how they manage their fan base. 

It should be an interesting, very practical, very actionable session.

We Need Your Vote

30% of the selection process are user votes. Please go to our session, log in (sorry, that's a bit of a hassle, but it makes your vote count LOTS more), and give us the old Thumbs Up.

You will need to register for the site, get an email confirmation, click on that, and then give us the thumbs up. And a lot of people aren't going to do that. So if we can just get a few dozen readers of this blog to follow through on it, that would put us in a great place. Please help.

Why You'd Help

There are really two reasons you might consider helping us:

1. You really want to hear from the marketers running the world's top Facebook fan pages; or
2. You generally like what Ignite Social Media is doing and you have a minute to help us out.

I'm not proud. I'll take your help regardless of the reason you offer that. Thanks for voting.

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Understanding consumer behavior in a recession is important for every marketer, and should be considered within social media marketing efforts as well. However, this does not mean a marketer must always "consider the recession" by discounting or using heavy couponing within social efforts. 

In fact, the majority of our clients are requesting social strategies that allow them to react to the consumer changes during the recession without devaluing their brand through excessive deals or discounts.  To help you understand how you can learn the areas of the opportunity that currently exist, lets start by looking at the chart below from e-Marketer and PriceGrabber.com to see some of the current movements in consumer internet behavior from 2009 compared to 2010.

As you can see in the bullet points below, I have ranked the largest 5 movements according to percentage point increases.  Ranking these actions in this way helps distill which actions have most dramatically changed compared to last year.

• 29 percentage point increase in shopping/researching online
• 19 percentage point increase in price comparison shopping
• 13 percentage point increase in social networking
• 13 percentage point increase in watching videos/TV shows online
• 12 percentage point increase in obtaining news and information

What is most interesting from a marketing perspective is that finding and printing coupons is not in the top 5.  In fact, we see a much more drastic increase happening in the amount of shopping and researching products online, with a 29 percentage point increase from last year.

So what does this mean for your social media marketing efforts?  Based on these 5 movements, I've come up with three social media marketing tactics you should consider this year:

1. Blog/vlog outreach:  If more consumers are conducting their research online, you need to develop social tactics that will improve the search engine results of your products.  Blog or Vlog outreach is a great way to seed external reviews of your products, and build valuable 3rd party credibility that you can't create on your product site. Why have I also included vlog outreach?  Video content has been known to rank well organically, and with YouTube currently ranking as the third most popular search engine, it also can't hurt.
2. Video Tutorials: With consumers watching more content online, it is also important to consider how you can show someone how to use your product, rather than tell. If you have a company blog or even have an ongoing Facebook page - consider creating a mixture of content that includes video content. Like we mentioned before, this content is preferred within the search engines, and also tends to be served more frequently in news feed in Facebook.
3. Facebook Page Management: With more consumers engaging in social networks, it becomes more important to proactively manage your Facebook page.  If you are still letting the intern update your page every now and then, and are still putting off investing in ongoing page management - you are missing out on an opportunity.  More and more data is showing that updating frequently on behalf of your brand is the best way to increase news feed inclusions, engage your fans, and ultimately grow a fan base that you can activate.

These are just a few of the tactics that can be pulled from this data, but hopefully these shed light on how to use consumer behvior to develop not-so-obvious social tactics during the recession.  Do you have any other tactics you would suggest?  Please share in the comments below!

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