The thematic meme running through the social marketing world of late is that we’re about to move beyond social media marketing as a primary practice to thinking more broadly about our marketing and our business. Social is part of a greater whole and social-only thinking won’t get you very far for much longer.

Part of this is driven by the social consultants threatened by those of lesser breadth of experience. Part of it is the reality that the industry is maturing. Social is now part of marketing. Marketing is almost impossible today without social.

But will this assumption that social is just part of what we do turn social into something we forget about?

I can attest that immersing yourself in a vertical or business like, say, online retail, means you start thinking about driving sales, moving the needles on the top- or bottom-line and looking for partnerships and revenue streams and cost savings. You start looking at the resources you’re pouring into social and expecting an immediate financial return for those. Sometimes social is about more than (or other than) direct revenue.

You’ll start expecting an immediate financial return for social

For many businesses, that means they’ll either go through the motions of social without really, genuinely investing the time and energy or they’ll forego social altogether and take the safe, proven routes of search engine marketing, ad spend and other acquisition and sales strategies.

It is true that social needs to be a part of greater thinking about business and marketing if you want to have a mature, optimal approach to contributing to your business’s success. But in doing so, I worry that the “More, Now!” mentality of today’s business will dictate we just forget about being social in lieu of selling more stuff.

What do you think?

Is it possible to monetize your blog, website or digital presence without advertising? Certainly it is, but only in certain contexts. Consultants or businesses can focus their energies on providing thought leadership and educational posts with the thought that interested parties will reach out to them to hire if and when they need the help. The organic content leads to search engine results which leads to traffic which leads to leads, and so on.

Put yourself in the shoes of the professional blogger or writer who doesn’t make ends meet with consulting or free-lance services for a moment, though. They almost have to depend on either online sales of what they write, often in the form of e-books and paid email subscriptions, or some sort of advertising as revenue. Affiliate advertising is enormously popular among this set and has proven a lucrative career for many online entrepreneurs.

But as audiences become desensitized to advertising, perhaps even antithetical to it, and the all-important conversion and click-through rates dwindle, what can individuals do to continue to drive revenue?

These are the questions we asked ourselves at CafePress a few months ago. (Disclosure – I’m an executive at CafePress. This post is about something we’ve launched. It’s cool, though. Keep reading.) Certainly, CafePress offers an opportunity for anyone to monetize their content — image or written — by placing it on any number of products. You can upload a picture you took of your family, a pet or sunset and turn it into a mouse pad, shower curtain, canvas wall art, wall clock and more. You can pull that funny Tweet you posted yesterday and make it a bumper sticker, poster or T-shirt, too.

So as we asked that question — how can we make it easier for people to monetize their content without just asking them to slap an affiliate ad on their blog — we landed on what we think might be a pretty neat idea: The PressIt Button.

The PressIt button allows you to apply a class to any image you have on your website and make any text on your blog or website active to be placed on CafePress products. When you set an image to be “Press-able” a little, green “PressIt” button appears in the upper corner of the image. You click it and a carosel of products with that image appears. Your audience can then buy something with the image if they so choose.

Photographers and graphic artists now have an easy way to productize their content!

But the button also appears when anyone visiting your website highlights any text on your site. The button appears in the upper corner of the highlight. If clicked, the carosel loads with products containing that word or phrase on them.

Here’s a little introductory video to show you what it looks like.

The WordPress plugin is available here. The JavaScript and other information can be found at the PressIt info page. We’d love for you to give it a try, of course.

But now back to the meat of the discussion: How can bloggers and non-profits and other companies monetize their online content in creative ways? Not everyone will want or need print-on-demand solutions to allow their content to be productized. But not everyone is a consultant or free-lancer either. How are you monetizing your online presence?

As always, the comments are yours.

Think for a moment about the communities you’re a part of. Typically, our minds begin with geographic qualifiers and branch out. I’m a member of my local community, which can be described in the context of my city or my neighborhood. Distilling down to the neighborhood association sickens me — mine is run by rabid former hall monitors — but it certainly applies.

From there, we extend thoughts to groups with whom we share some common interest. Perhaps you consider your church/temple/synagogue, a professional association or even an alumni group or informal collection of high school or college friends a community to which you belong. For many of us, our next step is into the world of online communities. Maybe you join others on an online game from time to time, or have a collection of Facebook friends that don’t meet some pre-existing standard.

Whatever your definition of community, and those to which you belong, think about why you belong and what makes it a community. There’s a good chance you feel a part of your church, not because of the church, but because of the behavior of its members. You feel more like them than other communities of worship you considered. If you enjoy your neighborhood, it’s likely not because of the location or the local services you can access, but because your neighbors behave like you, look like you, and act like you. Or at least like you’d like to behave, look and act.

Now extend that analysis to the online world. Do you consider yourself a part of community here at Social Media Explorer? What about Mashable? Reddit? Wikipedia? If so, it’s not because of SME or those other sites and what the offer. It’s probably because you appreciate the behavior of those websites in empowering you to be a part of something more than you could build on your own.

I had the honor of welcoming participants to Social Slam last week in Knoxville. That event is an in-real-life extension of Mark Schaefer’s {grow} community — a real community of people gathered together to contribute to an overall goal or good for reasons beyond personal benefit. Mark is a genuine contributor among genuine contributors. He has welcomed and valued each and every person who has commented, guest posted, linked, Tweeted and more to his content or that of his guest authors. That sense of belonging — of appreciating Mark’s behavior and mirroring it — has brought together a unique group of people focused on a certain worldview and thriving off of giving and receiving from one another.

Community only happens when the brand’s behavior is that which its audience wants to embrace and emulate themselves

When I think of brands that foster community — Maker’s Mark Bourbon, Harley Davidson, Fiskars, Southwest Airlines and more — I keep landing on that guiding principle: These are great brands with great products, yes. But community only happens when the brand’s behavior is that which its audience wants to embrace and emulate themselves.

Why do people love Zappos? Because they think that’s how an online retailer should embrace them, give them free returns and shipping, cater to their need to feel catered to. It’s how they would do it. Why do people love Southwest Airlines? Because they think flying should be quick, easy, fair and without pretense.

If you ask the question, “Why do people love our brand?” and you answer with something that is about your brand, you’re not fostering community. The answer will lie in your behavior. Until it does, the only community you’ll ever have is servers full of wireframes and profiles — hollow containers of what could be.

People will flock to you when you behave in a way that makes them want to. Get that, and you have your community.

They may not be talked about much, but forums are a driving force in true social media success. Social Media Explorer has experienced the prevalence of forums first hand. When we begin working with a client we create a Conversation Report, which uncovers research on where online conversations are happening around their brand, competitors and industry. More often than not, we find the majority of conversations are happening in forums. In fact, the publicly available Social Media Explorer Conversation Report, “What Consumers are Saying About Banking” showed that 90% of conversations about banking and banking products happen on FORUMS and less than 1% happen on social networks. It’s funny. Despite how much forums dominate the share of conversation for brands, rarely, will you find someone talking about their “sexy” forum strategy. That’s probably because forums are viewed as “old-school” and less relevant. I’m not scared to admit it. We create some truly stellar forum strategies and they can be immensely powerful in driving relevant conversation with the right target market.

Social Media Explorer isn’t the only group who understands the power forums hold. Recently, I flew down to Orlando to participate in the Hewlett Packard Social Support Summit. (Disclaimer: HP covered my traveling expenses in exchange for my expertise.) In Florida, I came to experience a whole new perspective on the power forums can have on an organization.

HP has offered online support forums since 2009. In the HP forums, consumers ask questions about products, get help for technical issues, and even support related to interface changes with the release of Windows 8. The value of being able to ask a question and get a response is powerful for customers. However, the real power lies in something else entirely; building a culture of helping others and creating a positive customer experience.

Forums are Manned by Real Customers

HP has created an environment where they have empowered customers to answer questions and solve customer problems requiring little to no HP “official” intervention. They bring their most active customer experts to the Support Summit each year as a thank you. Out of the 150 HP expert attendees, 26% were customers who have been designated as HP Experts.

The truly amazing part of the story is how customers come to participate. Frank Silvia, an electrician and lasvegaswiremen in the forums, said he went to the forums to post a question and while he was waiting for a response, he started to browse through the other questions. “I found several really easy questions that I knew the answer to so I answered. Then I got addicted. Barring technical difficulties, I spend anywhere from 1-3 hours a day answering questions now.” Several other customers including Steve, WB2001 in the forums, stated they spend 30-40 hours a week in the forums answering questions. For me, I was overwhelmed by the amount of time these customers spend time helping other customers, so I had to ask, “why do they do it?” The response was simple. The overwhelming majority of customers I talked to said they do it because they enjoy helping other people.

That’s powerful. Are their opportunities you could provide your customers to help each other? As companies, I think we get so wrapped up in our own views we think customers would “never” spend that kind of time helping us for FREE. But have you ever really asked them or given them the opportunity? What would happen if you empowered your customers to start helping each other?

HP Employees Volunteer Time in the Forums

Customers aren’t the only ones addicted to the forums. While HP has a small team that is responsible for answering difficult questions and ensuring posts don’t get missed, the large majority of employees who attended the summit have no formal responsibility for participating in the forums. These employees aren’t skipping out on their job to answer questions either. They are responding when they get off work.

I talked to employees from all areas of the company, from product development, engineering, and website development.  The interesting part is that the employees are responding for the same reasons. Every person I talked to passionately told stories of how they were able to help others and solve complex problems. The company has created a culture that rewards employees for helping customers in the community. Managers are extremely supportive of employees. Employees who are active participants in the forum get a monthly email thanking them for participation and their achievements that is copied to their manager, so their managers are very aware of their activity level. They support participation and achievement in the forums so much that they pay for their employees who earn an invite to the Summit to attend out of their own budgets.

Participation is Fueled by Gamification

So how does HP do it? Simple. They turned it into a competition. HP’s Support Forums are powered by Lithium’s community platform which has several virtual rewards customers and employees are competing to achieve.

One of the biggest honors is the HP Expert badge, which displays a badge on every one of the user’s posts in a community. This was a program that was officially launched in 2012 and includes training and support meet-ups in cities all over the country. This badge is achieved when the users gets a certain amount of “Solutions”. A solution is achieved when the person who asked the question marks your response as a solution.  “The best thing that can happen is to get a solution and a kudos from the customer”, Steve (WB2001). The customer can also opt to click the kudos button on the response which is a virtual hi-five or thank you to the person who answered their question. Kudos provide points that feed into something really important; the leaderboard.

Both customers and employees talked about striving to get to the top spot in the forums they respond to the most. I got a chuckle as I was walking through the hall and one of the top experts was literally bombarded with paparazzi as people wanted to meet him. Inside the community there are different categories including notebooks, desktops, monitors, and printers.  Each of these categories has its own leaderboard and it’s a fierce competition to the top. Perhaps that’s what inspires customers to spend 30+ hours a week working so hard to get solutions and kudos for their responses. This has also created a community inside of a community. The HP Experts are very supportive of each other and will step in and give another expert a kudos if they think they deserved it, but the customer didn’t provide one.

What are these customers and employees battling it out for? Perks for HP Experts includes invitations to the Summit, free products, early announcements on new releases, and other real and virtual swag. It’s amazing the lengths we’ll go to for a little reward, isn’t it. It goes to show that gamification is a powerful motivator.

The Future of HP Support

So what’s next for the HP? Enrique Lores, Senior Vice President, Customer Support & Services, Printing  and Personal Systems, says he has two primary objectives; to have an industry leading operations workforce and to provide a differentiated customer experience. He said, “customers don’t only buy products because of the product itself, they also buy because of the experience. We want to differentiate the experience and make it the best in the industry. We are investing in people and technology to make sure this happens.” He doesn’t deny there is a cost benefit for HP to drive customers to the web for support. He said, “the intent is to maximize cases managed through the web and minimize phone support. However, we will do it by showing that the web is a great experience, not by shutting down our call center. As long as our customers want support over the phone we will keep providing it.” One of the key metrics HP will use to measure the customer support experience is “Time to Answer”, however they recognize this must be balanced between the customer’s need for a fast answer and the benefit of having the answer come from another customer.

Enrique also recognizes that today they have a reactive model to responding to customer issues and he is working diligently to turning that into a proactive model that is able to anticipate problems. Patricia Graca, Director of Social Support, discussed the vision for the customer experience, “I want to make sure people who need help have a good experience and I want to make sure those who answer get rewarded. There is value in being in this together. It solidifies relationships on both sides.”

Do you have a forums strategy for your company? What do you think about empowering customers to provide social support? Do you think HP’s focus on customer experience will be a differentiator? Leave a comment and join the discussion. 

Most businesses don’t have tens of thousands of Facebook fans. Most don’t have hundreds of thousands of website visitors. So it’s easy for the social media expert in your neighborhood to follow the hippie’s and tree-hugger’s version of social media and say Facebook advertising and promotions are bad.

In the end, though, it’s all a numbers game. The more fans you have, the more potential click throughs you can get on a Sponsored Post. The more your audience is incented to share a coupon or a deal with their networks, the more conversions you’ll see. The more numbers, the less inclination you’ll have toward the purist’s way of thinking.

We ran a little experiment during my first week on the job at CafePress. I wanted to see what a simple promotion via social media would do. How many fans would it reach? How many click throughs would we get? Could we possibly derive revenue from social media?

The Level Set

Our promotion was a Share-And-Win construct. Our website visitors were offered a small layover banner that asked them to share CafePress.com with their networks (Facebook, Twitter or Email) and they would be entered to win an iPad Mini. The winner was a random drawing of all entries. The contest lasted one week, from Friday, Dec. 7 until Friday, Dec. 14.

Keep in mind that this is peak season for online retailers, so we knew we were biased in that we had more people on our site shopping for the holidays than are normally there during other times of the year. But we were not promoting the contest at all – just hanging the layover on the site and if you saw it, you saw it. If you didn’t, we didn’t tell you about it.

The only promotion of any kind we did was when we, ourselves, entered the contest (certainly recusing ourselves from winning) and, thus, shared CafePress and the contest with our networks. You can see mine here.

It’s also fair to know that, according to Compete.com, CafePress.com registered six million unique visitors in November. If you’ve ever tested your on-site analytics versus third party ones like Compete, you know they are far from accurate. While I’m not at liberty to share specific analytics numbers from our efforts, let’s just say they are significantly higher than published estimates. But we’ll use six million as a baseline.

The Metrics

Our promotion attracted 2,900 shares … or entries in the contest.  (I’m rounding off numbers for convenience sake.) Keep in mind those shares were people who saw the overlay on the site, clicked and entered. We didn’t drive anyone to the contest through other means. Those 2,900 shares drove an additional 3,000 contest entries from their fans/networks. The circulation of the promotion drove roughly 9,500 additional visits to the site.

But what those visitors did while on the site is what’s interesting. Our number of transactions and revenue from social channels jumped 21 percent over the week before. The conversion rate and per-visit-value jumped in the mid-teens percent. And even if you want to say that we should have expected a lift as peak holiday shopping rises, we went back and corrected based on the same week last year and still saw an 11 percent lift in the week’s revenue from social channels, seven percent lift in visits and 10 percent lift in transactions.

So we can reasonably conclude that one small, non-promoted promotion gave our bottom line from social channels a boost of around 11 percent over the same week the year before.  Certainly, there are some other factors involved, but no specific Facebook or Twitter promotions were interfering with our numbers during that week. So, as contained as our measurement was, we’re comfortable with that number.

We saw more shares of the contest on Twitter, but a higher click through and conversion rate on Facebook. We saw a decidedly higher click through and conversion rate with email shares than the other two options. In fact, transactions generated from an email share were more than double in value on average than those generated from Twitter. Email was about 25% more effective in driving order value than Facebook.

The Takeaways

The point of this experiment was to find out what we could do naturally, with no promotional strength behind a given promotion. Certainly, our success with something like this will fluctuate based on time of year, economic conditions and the like. But it gives us a benchmark from which to work.

For you and your business, I hope you can now see that in the great numbers game that is advertising in all of its forms, even a soft promotion on Facebook can turn a handsome profit. And you can also emulate experiments like this to level-set your social efforts.

Before you go out and recruit a bunch of fans and run a bunch of promotions remember this:

• You’ll see better numbers per order and better volume in orders if you have quality fans or followers. Don’t just add fans to add fans. Go for quality over quantity. (We’re going to work on that in the coming year to improve our numbers!)
• Promos and deals will drive visits and conversions, but only a portion of your audience is interested in them. Vary your content to ensure you’re feeding the value for your audience, as well as offering them value in purchase opportunities. (We’re going to work on our content mix, too.)
• Know that Facebook users are mainstream and mainstream isn’t stuck on some utopian notion that brands and advertising have no place on social networks. It’s a balance you have to strike, but sometimes people just want a deal, a coupon or a prize.
• Twitter is a lower value network, but we think this is because Twitter is used by most as a broadcast mechanism. Therefore, users are accustomed to tuning out promotions and much of what companies will post. That, coupled with the “follow everybody” mentality of the platform and you’ve got depreciating returns compared to more manicured networks like Facebook and Email.

What are your thoughts? What would you do to improve a share-and-win promotion like this? Have you tried one with your company? If so, share some metrics or concerns with us in the comments.

For many companies the barrier to adopting social media or expanding their digital marketing strategy is risk. These are not small risks; these companies have come face to face with a reality that many of us can’t even fathom. Social media could literally destroy their companies, it could lead to huge regulatory fines, compliance issues and a variety of other issues that can put a choke hold on how many marketers would consider approaching a social media strategy. But the reality is that all risks can be managed if we look them straight in the eye.

While it may not be sexy, social media risk management is a necessary part of every social media strategy. It is important to understand the potential risks social media can bring to any company and put together a plan that mitigates that risk. There are a few common types of risk that need to be considered.

The PR Disaster

Every company has the potential for a PR disaster.  Social media can essentially take a PR issue and basically feed it steroids. It’s the equivalent of putting a Gremlin into a bath of water and triggering the spawning effect. This fear can cause companies who have tremendous opportunities for social media to literally refuse to even have a conversation about it. Social media becomes the evil gremlin that can destroy our company. And there are case studies to prove it’s not only possible, it’s a real risk. Netflix has become the poster-child for a PR Disaster that was fueled by social media. The results weren’t just a lot of negative publicity and outrage from their customers. It hit the company’s bottom line. The company’s stock price was $291.27 on July 12, 2011 which the company should call D-Day, the Day the company announced their over 60% price increase and their customers went to social media channels by the thousands to complain. On September 19, 2011 Reed Hastings published a video on YouTube apologizing that only made matters worse. By September 21^st the company’s stock price had dropped to $128.50. Since then the stock price has dropped as low as $52.81 and is still struggling to get anywhere close to its original pre-disaster value, currently creeping its way up towards $95. While marketers may be thinking their executives teams are behind the times and “just don’t get it”, the reality is that this is REAL risk and something that can’t be taken lightly.

PR Disasters Can Be Managed

A Crisis Management Plan is Essential for Every Company

While Netflix pretty much did everything wrong in managing their PR disaster, other companies have shown that you can manage a PR disaster in social media channels. There have been great examples from companies like the Red Cross, FedEx, and Domino’s. The key is that companies need to have a crisis management plan in place that includes how to respond in social channels when there is a disaster brewing. This should include what types of crisis are possible, what types of content will be used to respond, what type of tone should be used in messaging, who will be involved in the response and timing around an appropriate response. To be done well this should be laid out in a decision tree style response plan so when people are in the moment and tensions are high, it’s as simple as following a clearly defined response path. In the moment, there will need to be adjustments but the key elements should be clear.

And the best way to get executives and compliance comfortable that a crisis can be averted is to actually test your plans. Companies should run crisis simulations and actually test out how well their team responds, whether or not the tone of their messaging will produce the intended result, and better understand what needs to be adjusted before an actual crisis hits. To be clear, this isn’t creating a “social media crisis plan” it is about integration of social media into the company’s existing crisis management plan. If your company doesn’t have a crisis management plan at all, it’s time to get serious about protecting the company’s bottom line and get one. Remember, the risk is real and while it can be managed it requires the up-front effort to be prepared before the crisis hits.

The Compliance Disaster

On the other side of the fence we have companies who face regulatory risk with social media. These are regulated companies who have to follow very specific rules for how information is handled. Financial industry has to follow FINRA regulations and SEC regulations; the Healthcare industry has to follow FDA and FTC regulations; the insurance industry is subject to state and federal regulatory law and looks to the NAIC for standards; and every publicly traded company is subject to SEC requirements for dissemination of public information.

I bet you wouldn’t consider Netflix a regulated company, but this just hit them square between the eyes as the SEC recently raised questions and may seek legal action over whether or not a Facebook post by CEO Reed Hastings contained “material” investor information that must be disclosed in a regulatory filing or press release to meet regulations for public disclosure requirements.

Every message that gets posted on a social media channel can raise compliance risk. And for pharmaceutical companies it’s even worse. If ANYONE posts a message directed to one of their social media accounts that mentions a negative side effect of a drug, they are required to report it to the FDA which could result in their drugs being pulled from the shelves.

Compliance and Regulatory Risk Can Be Managed

Compliance and Regulatory Risks are Easy to Manage. They’re Known.

This risk is actually far easier to manage because it is a known risk. While a PR crisis is a bit of an unknown entity that requires a vast amount of flexibility to respond to the crisis at hand, compliance and regulatory risk is clear. There are regulations that must be followed and companies will have to create clear policies for how to ensure that social media content follows them.

I think a lot of companies get caught in the conundrum of trying to use social media channels as an advertising and marketing “channel” which raises the highest amount of regulatory risk. This tunnel vision can prevent taking advantage of the real opportunity that social media channels provide; the opportunity to disseminate helpful content and build a robust content strategy that serves both customer and prospective customer needs. This requires an understanding of regulations to ensure that certain rules are followed, but it doesn’t have to be as big and scary as a lot of people think.

Once you sit down and look risk straight in the face, it’s easy to develop a plan to manage it. Don’t let the fear of the unknown stop your company from taking advantage of the opportunities social media represents. While the risks are real, the rewards can be very high, when managed well.

Are regulations and compliance concerns preventing your company from using social media channels? Social Media Explorer | SME Digital can help. Schedule a meeting with our team to discuss how we can help make innovation safe for your company.

Is your company facing regulatory risk? How are you managing it? Is your company terrified of a PR crisis? What tips do you have for companies that have real risk? Share your thoughts and concerns in the comments.  

You don’t hear a lot of ballyhoo or trumpeting of Google+ these days, at least from Google. So when someone from the mothership speaks, it’s interesting to see what they say. CNET’s Casey Newton did a nice job of pulling some fantastic insights about Google+ out of its VP of Product, Bradley Horowitz during his talk at a Business Insider Conference recently.

The key insight: Google+ is not the focal point of the company’s efforts. It’s a fabric that ties many of Google’s products together.

You’ve likely heard the terminology batted around by thought leaders and analysts. “Social is the glue that binds the company together,” or “You become a social business when you stop focusing on social and realize it connects the business together and to your customers.” These have become popular battle cries for the consultant set, especially those trying to sell “social business” to big corporations.

But it’s seldom introduced as a concept in action as it is by Horowitz.

My favorite part of Newton’s report:

“Google+ plays a second role, as a product that improves other products. Google tends to talk about this in abstract terms — it’s a ‘social spine;’ it’s a ‘fabric;’ it ‘weaves’ Google products together.”

What social is for Google, is what it should be for us: Connective tissue, not the heart or soul of our efforts. What this means is this:

Your job as a marketer is not to devise a social media strategy, it’s to socialize your business strategy

• Your job as a marketer is not to devise a social media strategy, it’s to socialize your business strategy
• Social interactions may give you a chance to say, “Buy my stuff!” But they also give you an opportunity to know your audience better, either by direct interaction and learning or by tapping into their social graph to understand their likes, dislikes, interests and friends.
• This better understanding of your audience can help you deliver better returns on more traditional methods of reaching your audience like social advertising, pay-per-click advertising and even direct mail.
• There’s a fairly good chance your “return” on a social “investment” might be as intangible as consumer insights, awareness or even just the warm and fuzzy feeling those you touch have as a takeaway. But there is great value in that.

For a big search company that has had failure after failure in the social space and has taken hit upon hit from those wanting to compare it’s latest attempt at a social network to Facebook, Google certainly is teaching us a bit about what being social really means.

Are you leveraging social networks for more than just communications platforms? Tell us how. The comments are yours.

Pinterest was of keen interest as we formulated questions for the first quarterly execution of The Social Habit. And for very good reason: 2012 was the year Pinterest exploded and became not just big, but relevant in the digital marketing mix.

How relevant has been somewhat of a mystery until now. Our survey of 3,000+ Americans 12 and over shows that Pinterest is the third most popular social network for women aged 18-44. That’s significant.

The Pinterest-specific information was far too informative for us to not set it aside, so following the lead of Edison Research’s Tom Webster, I’m happy to tell you we’ve packaged Pinterest data in a new report you can purchase separately from the main Social Habit research. Jump over to purchase at The Social Habit.

In addition to the impact of pinning on a critical demographic for many, a significant number of Pinterest users say they have purchased a product as the result of seeing it on someone else’s pin board. For retailers — online or off — this means opportunity. But will retailers capitalize?

Remember, Pinterest is about compelling visual content, not just your silly products. Instead of uploading a picture of whatever it is you sell — in its fake, studio back drop beauty — think of potential Pinterest content like this:

If I see this picture floating by in a sea of other pictures, is it beautiful/funny/compelling enough for me to stop and share it?

If not, don’t. If so, tap into the Power of the Pin.

Enjoy the report. And if you like, you can check out my pin boards, which I hope are fairly useful for ya.

In February, Facebook announced to the world that, on average, only 16 percent of a brand’s fans actually see each post. The company then conveniently introduced a way to increase the number: By purchasing sponsored stories and ads. And at that point, the last bastion of reasonable people not skeptical that Facebook was evil, came over to the good side.

Okay, not the last bastion … Mashable and Techcrunch still suck up to the Zuck, but can you blame them? They think journalism is reprinting whatever the Facebook PR folks tell them to be true.

It was clear to those of us in the logic-thinking world that Facebook had a massive profitability problem and needed a quick revenue strike so Wall Street wouldn’t devalue the company any more than investors did on opening day.

Fast-forward several months and some who had been testing the reach of their Facebook posts declared the network’s brand pages the greatest bait-and-switch ever, claiming they’d have to spend over half a million dollars per year to have their posts seen at pre-sponsored post rates.

What gets lost in the back and forth over whether or not Facebook’s reach generator advertising mechanism is fair or right, is a simple fact I think changes the dynamic of the conversation altogether.

When someone clicks “like” they are, in effect, saying, “I want this brand’s content in my news stream.”

For whatever reason, people like Robert Scoble, seem to disagree with my assertion. Ironically, Robert is 100% wrong, according to the technology. When you click “like” on a brand’s page, you send a signal to Facebook’s algorithm that says it’s okay to insert that brand’s content in your news stream. To what degree you see the brand’s content is dependent upon dozens of algorithmic factors, including how often you interact with the brand’s content, how many other people interact with it, how many friends you have and how much content Facebook may want to present from them in your news stream and more.

But the point is, a “Like” means, “Give me this brand’s content. I am opting in.”

(You’re welcome to debate the philosophical issue of clicking “Like” on a brand page just because you actually like them and not because you want to see their content, right along with Mr. Scoble. But again, the technology proves my point.)

So you have 10,000 fans and they have opted into seeing your content on Facebook. But Facebook’s algorithm — which has to take content from all your friends, other brands you like and so on, then present it in your timeline in some semblance of order — only puts your content in front of 1,600 of those fans. It’s not intentional (at least I don’t believe it is), it’s algorithmic.

From the brand side of things, we should say to Facebook, “Hey!? They opted in. Make sure our fans see our stuff.” Facebook’s answer is, “Okay. If you pay us.”

Of course, there’s the organic way to “game the system” if you will. You could always produce content so awesome that the 16 percent like, share and comment so much that the content organically is delivered to more fans. Activity around the post is one factor in the algorithm that can make that content elevate to the top.

But let’s face it: Brand’s suck at good content and are always on the lookout for an Easy button. Actually working to create good content isn’t good enough for many.

So Facebook has given you the option of buying your way.

But should they?

If you buy the premise that your “Likes” or fans have opted into your content and Facebook is saying to beat 16 percent you have to pay us, then Facebook is blackmailing brands. The audience wants the content. The brand is creating it. Facebook is holding it back — intentionally or not — unless you give them money.

That’s blackmail, my friends. Plain and simple.

Facebook has always promoted itself as a utility. If it has indeed become one, and governments and bureaucrats think this pay-to-play model is disadvantageous to their brand pages, Zuckerberg and crew are going to have a hard time swallowing this fact: Utilities get regulated.

That’s my take on the Facebook ad platform and sponsored stories situation. Tomorrow, Kat French will offer a counter-point to try and show that I’ve lost my mind. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, what do you think? Is Facebook blackmailing brands? The comments are yours.

There’s an easy way to know if someone really understands social media marketing. Listen to them talk for a while and see if they ever mention the underside of it. Most everyone can walk through blogging, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the various tactical executions of social media. “This is how you can use these channels to connect with your audience in more compelling ways,” is typically the conclusion of their talk.

If they go no further, they’ve only gone half way.

The other side of social media marketing involves data and how you access, understand and use it. If you’ve ever heard someone trying to sell social CRM software or beginning the sentence with, “Tapping into the Facebook API, you can …” then you’ve probably heard the spiel, though you may not have understood it.

Tapping the social graph for your company (through the various APIs of the social platforms you use) and understanding more about your customers and connections on the social web is what we’ll call “advanced social media marketing.” And it’s not just about leveraging targeting information for Facebook ads, either. With the right developer and CRM system, you can identify common interests in your social connections, segment and filter by those interests and serve up more relevant content to groups and subgroups based on the interest and demographic information they provide to the social network in question.

This is why marketing alone will probably never be awesome at driving social for organizations. You’ll always need a fair amount of development and engineering capability at hand in order to harvest, filter and analyze the data at hand.

Think about that as you build your social media marketing team. Are you hiring community managers, content providers, analysts and strategists? Cool. So is everyone else. But are you also hiring social technologists and engineers who can help you understand not just what messages you can send to these audiences, but how you can send them?

The companies that are doing so are winning faster.

On Friday, Nov. 16, on day two of the upcoming Explore Portland event, I will interview and debate B.J. Mendelson on the merits of social media. The good-natured discussion will feature me, co-author of No Bullshit Social Media and social media marketing evangelist, and Mendelson, author of the new book Social Media is Bullshit. So, the bullshit will hit the fan.

Mendelson’s book is chock full of generalizations and assumptions. He proclaims that all social media marketing is geared toward enterprise level clients, that no marketing works unless you have a multi-million dollar budget and a healthy media presence, that all marketing authors/consultants are scam artists making money while not offering anything of value and the like. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to the social media marketing wave from someone who appears to have tried to be a marketer and failed, so this book will show ‘em!

He calls out Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan, Malcolm Gladwell and others as selling nothing but bullshit. Mendelson aims his canons at Altimeter Group and Brian Solis a fair amount as well. He takes a nice swipe at me in there, too. If you want someone to name names and point fingers about the social media world, B.J. is your man, even if his accusations are misdirected, sometimes unfounded and come off as if the nerd who didn’t get a seat at the cool kids table is finally delivering comeuppance to the bullies and pricks. (Not a great analogy as I don’t think of any of the aforementioned as cool kids at any table, nor do I think B.J. would have ever wanted to sit with them … or me, but you get the point.)

All that said, there does exist an undertow of good in this book. Mendelson does bring some realism to the social media hype, though in a polarizing, reverse-hype way. His essay on the practicality of marketing of Facebook is full of spot-on observations. His questioning of the validity of YouTube sensations and the cautionary tales for small businesses thinking they can easily replicate big-brand success is admirable.

However, he continually seems to claim he’s looking after the small business, no-budget, hopeful professional, seeming to insinuate they’re the poor, stupid schmucks who believe the nonsense social media gurus are peddling, yet debunks social media “myths” by attacking the following case studies: Zappos, Dell, Old Spice, Blendtec and Kia. There were no small business case studies to be found and if there was research done to show how small businesses are falling victim to social media guru-ness, I’m assuming they didn’t illustrate his point and were thus omitted.

Mendelson’s Apples-To-Oranges comparisons left me unsettled, especially when it would have been easy for him to find a dozen or so case studies to attack in dozens of books, even mine (which he apparently read). But I guess Miss Shirley’s driving 18% sales in three months by only adding Foursquare and incentivization to their marketing mix isn’t all that easy to debunk.

The fact is B.J. Mendelson can easily destroy social media case studies of companies smart enough to approach marketing with an integrated mix of channels and tactics. Just give all the credit to TV or some other variable. He wasn’t the first to claim Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Can Smell Like” campaign of 2010 was not a “social media” success story. Many of us pointed out during the campaign that couponing, television support and public relations showed smart campaign integration. And because of the relative youth of social media marketing, it’s very easy for Mendelson or others to show example after example of social media failures.

But it’s also easy to find examples of social media successes. (Do I have to pepper the post with links? Well, here’s one, two, three … all found in a 30-second Google search.)

The main problem I have with Mendelson’s book is that while he terms himself a “humorist” and seems to approach the topic from a, “I’m kinda half kidding,” approach, he’s very absolutist and seemingly non-apologetic in interviews I’ve seen thus far. He claims in the book to be telling “the truth” and that it’s important because so many people are being fleeced by the gurus and the experts who are only in it to make a buck.

The marketing of the book is also very serious, not light-hearted. The book jacket language exemplifies the problem:

“If you listen to the pundits, internet gurus, marketing consultants and even the mainstream media, you might think that social media was the second coming. They declare that it’s revolutionizing advertising, PR, customer relations — everything. And they all agree on one thing: Social media is here to stay. In this practical and insightful guide, journalist and social critic B.J. Mendelson skillfully debunks the myths of social media.”

It goes on to say, “Social media is bullshit. This book gives the knowledge and tools you really need to connect with customers and grow your brand.”

So he’s a humorist and all this is in good fun, but he’s also a journalist who skillfully debunks myths? The mixed messages are as confusing as the, “you small folks can’t be like big companies,” argument.

The crux of Mendelson’s approach is that he is trying to say that people who claim expertise, write books and speak about a subject do so to line their pockets and aren’t working in your best interests. Yet, in writing this book, B.J. Mendelson is claiming expertise, has written a book and now speaks and appears about the subject to sell books. He tries to cover his ass a bit by saying he’s doing it to tell the truth and that you really don’t get rich writing books (he’s right). He claims he is not a consultant, doesn’t do workshops and doesn’t invest in companies he talks about. (There is a nifty “click on Brandon to book him as a speaker” link on the book site. One might assume you can do so, but not for free. Heh.) Even so, he is using a sensational stance to further his name and career, even if it is as a humorist. He has become that which he warns against.

Mendelson says he wrote the book to prevent good people from getting screwed. In my opinion, by selling a bill of goods that offers a blanket generalization that social media is bullshit without fully offering a balanced view of businesses who use and don’t use social media marketing, Mr. Mendleson is unfortunately screwing just as many people as he’s protecting.

But B.J. will have his say at Explore. And I will, out of respect for him and in the interest of intelligent discourse, give him the last word during our little debate. I’m guessing you might want to be there. If so, just join us. Register below and use the code ILOVESME to get $200 off the full ticket price, just for being a reader. And there’s a ton more value in the event than our little debate. Check out the lineup, which features Scott Stratten, Jay Baer, Michael Brito, Nichole Kelly, Tamsen Webster and more over at GoToExplore.co.