An interesting report on social marketing to the Hispanic market care of friends at Hispanic PR Blog, Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and Hispanic Public Relations Association (HPRA). The guide features best practices and some great discussions for leading voices about current and upcoming trends related to Hispanic social media and marketing.

I know most of the clients that we work with are continuing to optimize and expand their best practices for listening and scaling engagement for English Social Business initiatives but adding Spanish to the mix is a key based on US  demographics and an important ingredient for most Fortune 1000 brands that operate in the US.

Download the report here.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies

Sometimes instead of talking it pays to step back and listen to what’s going on in your business and industry, especially when you work in the consumer listening space. That’s what I did for awhile and I learned a lot over the past several months by paying close attention to what our clients and other companies are looking to accomplish in social media in the near future.

One of the things that continues to surprise me is how much has changed in the last 12 months in this business and how much more I think it will change over the next 12 or so months. I’m not going to try to predict the future like so many people a lot smarter than me have done since the start of the year. That said, I don’t need to be The Amazing Kreskin to spot some emerging trends that are moving up the ladder in importance as the new year unfolds. Here are a few gaining some real traction in my opinion;

Organizational Design: Without a doubt, one of the most overlooked components of the entire social media business today is the development of a strategic organizational roadmap for brands to implement. One of the biggest corporate takeaways in 2009 was the natural migration of social media listening from one group to multiple groups. While not yet at a full-scale enterprise level, this evolution of more widespread listening will continue this year, and it is already spreading at a pace that strains the capabilities of many listening providers.

Any discussion about social media listening, measurement, and the now white-hot ‘customer engagement’ area without a full blown (global) organizational strategy is pretty much fruitless. This will continue to be a major issue in 2010 because, by and large, many companies haven’t yet recognized they have the need for it.

If I was running an agency or consultancy practice today, this is where I’d be aligning my thinking and resources for the immediate future. There’s been some work in this area by other firms besides ours, but nothing that I’ve seen that would make a Fortune 500 brand stand up and take notice.

Integrated Insights: Social media listening as a standalone data set has a life expectancy of less than 24 months, in my opinion. It may live longer in non-strategic or measurement adverse areas of a company, but it has no long-term lifespan with the real corporate decision-makers, internal brand strategists and research insights leaders.

I’m convinced more than ever that social media will grow in importance within the corporate environment, but just not the way it looks and feels today without a strategic facelift. This type of change will take place in the yet-to-be tapped world of social media data integration with other forms of traditional research and exploratory data mining. The recent Millward Brown, Dynamic Logic and Cymfony partnership is a step in this direction.

When this becomes more commonplace, listening and measurement will really begin to provide brands with a more robust level of actionable business insights and ROI measurement. Companies will demand that and those who don’t provide it will not be around for the long haul. Most people would be shocked how much more you can get from social media when you view it through the prism of other data sources. I expect companies to step up work in this area in 2010.

Brand Activation Analysis: Over the past couple of years it seems like everyone has been enamored with online customer outreach and pushing brands to get out there and address customer problems and issues on the Web. Call it the “Twitter Effect” if you like, but the focus has been more on the need to do something, especially if your competitor is already actively participating in social networks.

For brands already in the second and third generations of their social media strategy, the honeymoon period for brand activation is starting to wear off and fast. The novelty of “participating” is giving way to an increasing demand to understand the impact of this new generation of B-to-C (brand to consumer) communications. Like listening, brand activation is also starting to spread across companies with a real plan. The concept of the single Community Manager is starting to give way to integrated teams activated across different disciplines, such as customer service, marketing, crisis communications, sales, and other departments. It’s not widespread yet but the handwriting is already on the wall.

This new level of corporate engagement is also putting pressure on the development of new models of brand activation metrics and analysis. That may not sound so hard when you have one corporate responder on Twitter, but meaningful outcome analysis gets a lot more difficult when there is a global cross-functional team online. Measuring the impact on the brand gets a lot trickier. Dial-up your local social media listening provider and ask which button in their application will spit out that type of report. Good luck. Again, I have seen some work in this area, luckily some by our own company, but we all have a long way to go in this area.

The calendar has turned the page to another interesting and challenging decade, and as usual, I welcome your feedback, ideas and experiences in these areas.

Mike Spataro
Visible Technologies

Proposed changes on the horizon to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines could further impact social media marketing while radically altering some marketers practices of using third-party spokespeople for online brand marketing. Michael Lasky, a senior partner at Davis & Gilbert LLP, a New York law firm that specializes in advertising and communications law says “Agencies and clients, especially those working in the social media space, must understand that the FTC’s efforts to address deceptive practices can create liability and exposure.”

Additions and modifications now under consideration by the FTC are, “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials.” It is expected that a final ruling on the Guides will occur sometime later this summer or early fall. Behind the proposed changes is what Lasky terms, “The 10 Commandments of commercial marketing as found in Section 5 of the FTC Act — summed up as — thou shall not commit a false or deceptive practice.” The FTC is working to address this: A blogger or spokesperson’s failure to disclose a fact or event that could alter the consumer’s decision regarding a product or service.

Now, I know some agencies and marketers may have tried this approach of non-disclosure but most cases have been very unsuccessful and actually created more bad that good for the brand in question. The practice of full disclosure for social marketing is really the only way to really operate otherwise it just rooted out as not genuine and in many cases deceptive. I think part of the great value of the social graph is that it self-polices on much of this. Also, organizations like WOMMA publish guidelines and best practices for agencies and marketers in addition to have formal process for grievance filing when tactics are in question.

Brands and agencies should examine the FTC’s efforts understand their meanings and interpretations and to avoid problems down the road. A clear liability can and will arise when and if marketers pay bloggers or provide other “consideration” such as free products and services in return for a favorable post. Disclosure is necessary.

Agencies and clients, if they haven’t already, should adopt written guidelines that come into play when any “consideration” is involved. The guidelines must work explicitly to “make it clear the company wants the blogger to disclose whether any compensation or any other item of tangible value, such as free product, has been received in return for a favorable post or review,” said Allison Fitzpatrick, associate counsel at Davis & Gilbert LLP.

I would encourage agencies and marketer to go the WOMMA site to familiarize themselves with the organization and much of the guidelines and best practices they have organized around this topic.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Marketers are finally moving into Social Media. It’s been taking a while. Even though millions of users are flocking to social media sites every day, most marketers have stayed away or only been experimenting. Twitter year over year grow exceeded 1300% in a recently published article on site and user growth. Many marketers and organizations either didn’t understand the opportunities inherent in this channel or the how to’s required to join the conversations–without sounding like product/brand pushers.

Things are finally starting to change. Companies are learning how to leverage social media and tap into the rising tide of consumers participating in social network sites, blogs, wikis and Twitter.

According to the “The ROI on Social Media Marketing” report from the Aberdeen Group, that we (Visible Technologies) sponsored, marketers have developed the tools and methodologies to drive marketing ROI by listening to and learning from customers and prospects. As so, the dollars are following this rising tide.

The Aberdeen report found that 63% of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.

“Companies use multiple approaches to identify the individuals who wield the greatest amount of influence in any given topic area and to track changes in their influence over time,” said Jeff Zabin of Aberdeen. “Best-in-class companies engage these top influencers as brand evangelists, and then track the impact of their words and actions in terms of return on marketing investment.”

eMarketer estimated that social network advertising alone will rise over 17% this year to $2.35 billion, up from $2 billion in 2008.

But simply because companies are increasing their spending on social media doesn’t mean all the drawbacks have disappeared. Measurement, in particular, is a sticking point.

The Aberdeen research showed that 39% of companies found it somewhat difficult to measure social media, and 20% said it was very difficult.

Please feel free to download the entire report here.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Join me tomorrow as I participate with Chris Heuer on a podcast with a couple of other thought leaders in social media space about investment in social media products.

We’ll be chatting about our top three pieces of advice for organizations and individuals responsible for buying social media solutions and the top three questions we recommend asking any social media vendor or solutions provider.

The live show will also be open for callers to share their own insights into buying social media products and services. You can listen in on the web at 9:00 AM (PST). Get more details here.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies