Yet in the last week there’s been a flurry of social chatter about the importance of unplugging and the irrelevance of market research. Thank you very much, Gizmodo and Anna Wintour, respectively.

Sensational as these news bits might be, they do have some account planners wondering, “are we allocating our means appropriately?”  But where to start? ROI forecasting has led many businesses to rely heavily on intelligence results. We often see companies leveraging social listening and digital analytics dashboards while simultaneously measuring other key data points like traffic, content and path analysis reports.

But not to worry, business intelligence is likely trending in your favor. According to a survey conducted earlier this year by Richard Herschel, Chair of the Department of Decision & System Sciences at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, about a third of respondents think it is very important that their organization have a business-centric view of the data model to provide a framework for prioritizing and guiding the development of BI (business intelligence) activities.

The intersection of BI and account planning is rich with opportunities to observe consumer behavior on a scale that was just a decade ago considered impossible. Now, researchers and planners are able to access global data points via social listening to deliver not only better services, but also better products, experiences and ideas.  Take for instance, the spirit of holiday giving and our intrinsic love of samples.  Denver based gluten-free foods maker Udi’s capitalized on this insight with their Udi’s Joy Mission campaign to spread both free food and joy for the holidays. Via Facebook, users could log-in and send real Udi’s food to their friends through the tailored application. To ensure everyone was able to enjoy the holiday cheer, Udi’s donated a meal to local food banks for every new person who liked the page.

Although the idea was simple, based on the human desire to gift and give back, the campaign effectively leveraged fostering an undeniable emotional connection, as some of the best campaigns usually do.

(Full disclosure, Udi’s is part of the current client roster of Room 214)

To mine insights, innovators and ideators alike need simply to log on to a site such as Facebook or  Twitter, (never mind Hootsuite or Co-Tweet or any of the other sometimes difficult to navigate and costly tools) to see what the chatter is all about. With a few more clicks, metrics like geo-location, net sentiment and brand passion are easily accessible.  With just a few more clicks in your data gathering process, you’ll be armed with export and tracking APIs.

But what does all of this intelligence-mining really amount to?

Although technology and campaign planning have recently undergone seismic shifts, consumer fundamentals have not. Success, in the case of being able to effectively leverage BI, manifests as the ultimate data-driven understanding of consumers: who they are, where they are, what they’re saying and how they’ll change.

And just this week, Gizmodo published an article staking the claim that “Facebook is Making Us Miserable,” honing in on that je ne sais quoi that most of us are clamoring for. And of course, that level of venerable cool can’t certainly be achieved by unplugging, can it?

It’s a great idea and all, plush with nostalgia and a sense of the good ol’ days, but simply put, we just can’t disconnect. In the era of mandated transparency driven by the two-way 24-hour news cycle, when we encounter an “unplugged” brand that isn’t fully vested in digital communications and social media properties, we can’t help but wonder why they aren’t? Is it because they have something to hide? Something to be ashamed of? Take for example big banks. As of this writing, you won’t find many of them active on Facebook (but that doesn’t mean they’re not listening).

From my point-of-view, at the cross-roads of all of the above, the key to is to rely on every bit of research and the marketing mix available to you. The best brands and the most successful campaigns yield seamless, integrated experiences that blend right in with your life, without you even being aware of it.  And whether or not we’re cognizant of it, we’re watching, listening and waiting for that sweet inspiration to share, just because it really is that cool.

• YouTube videos are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google results than a text page
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the U.S.
• As of February 2011, visitors were spending around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube per month

When you look at the facts, YouTube optimization makes a whole lot of sense. To get you started, here is a great video series that covers everything you need to know about YouTube SEO.

Content Optimization:

• Start Building Content: You should be creating a portfolio of content on YouTube. Plan to build in video with your normal campaigns. But video production is so costly, right? Wrong. All you need is iMovie and an iPhone to start creating content. If that’s too much to handle you can try one of the many screen share tools, an online slideshow creator, or a text-to-video service like xtranormal.

• Keep It Relevant: As you begin creating content, ask yourself this question: “Will this be useful in three months?” If the answer is no, it’s unlikely that your video has real replay value. Try to create content that will be relevant in the future… think long shelf life.

• Do Your Research: Before you begin making videos, do some keyword research using YouTube’s keyword tool. This will give you an idea of which videos will be successful. As an example, if you search “NBA” in Google, you’ll get results on players, news, and game scores, etc. If you search “NBA” in YouTube, many of the top videos will be about dunks, brawls, and highlights. This is a clue that a dunk compilation will likely do much better than a player profile video.

• Competitive Research: Do a normal YouTube search for some videos that are similar to the content you want to create. What is already working? What do people seem to like? What is most popular?

Metadata Optimization:

• Optimize Metadata for Video Search: Your metadata can help you appear in searches and gain traffic, but your content has to be good to experience true success (surprise). However, a well optimized video can help your visibility. Optimize your video title, tags, description, and category to appear in searches. Remember, YouTube search works differently than normal search engine results. If you need some clues, go back to your competitive and keyword research and see which video titles are performing the best. There is a great explanation of metadata here.

• Thumbnails: YouTube thumbnails are automatically chosen near the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. As you create content, plan to have something visually interesting happening at one of these points. Most people will only have a choice between these three thumbnails, so pick the most visually interesting one. In the case that you are a YouTube partner, you can upload whatever thumbnail image you would like.

Video Promotion:

• Leverage Existing Networks: The obvious thing to do is promote your videos on your website, email newsletter, and social networks. Take advantage of any platform where you have the ability to post a video.

• YouTube Promoted Videos: YouTube promoted video ads allow you to target your videos to specific keywords and pay for views. As a bonus, when you run promoted video ads, YouTube allows you to create a call-to-action link on your video, which can be used to drive traffic to another site. There is a great tutorial on how to do this here.

• Annotations: Use annotations on your other popular videos to drive traffic to newer videos. This can easily be done through the YouTube Annotations tool.

• Link building: In many cases, over 40% of views on your videos will come from sites outside of YouTube. Create a plan to reach out to bloggers and other sites, and build embeds of your YouTube videos.

YouTube Community:

• Channel Design: Spend some time on your YouTube channel. A blank YouTube channel is much like a blank Facebook page. Create a color scheme, upload a background, and organize your playlists, subscriptions and other modules.

• Moderation and Response: Keep a close watch on the comments that happen on your videos and your channel. Be sure to answer questions and respond to comments quickly. Treat these folks like you would treat visitors to your other social pages.

• Engage Fans: Videos with more ratings and comments will appear higher in YouTube search results. Within your content, you should encourage fans to rate, comment, and subscribe to your channel.

Room 214 works with a local non-profit called iEmpathize to help put an end to child sex trafficking. When we created a new welcome tab for their Facebook fan page, we challenged ourselves to emotionally connect visitors with the cause.

Here are a few quick tips on how non-profits can make the most out of their Facebook page:

Create an Emotional Tie

If you want your Facebook visitors to emotionally connect with your cause, make your cause relatable. Big stats scare folks away and allow them to compartmentalize the problem as something too big to change.

However, when you break down the statistics and present the issue in a digestible manner, it becomes easier for a visitor to connect.

Our simple ticker communicates the issue in a very understandable form: time. For every 30 seconds you spend on the iEmpathize Facebook page, another child is forced into sex slavery. You can watch the clock tick down as more and more children are forced into this nightmare. This helps visitors realize the urgency of the issue, and allows them to emotionally connect with the problem we’ve presented.

Tell a Story
Human beings love to have information presented in the form of a story. Call it psychology or biology, but it’s something you always need to consider when you communicate with people. Through the use of video and images we were able to effectively tell the story behind iEmpathize and their cause.

This quick brand essence video tells the story of a child who did not end up in the sex trade thanks to the work of iEmpathize.

These photos of real artifacts from the sex trade tell the hauntingly real stories behind the lives of children in the sex trade.

Offer Small and Big Ways to Show Support

Most visitors will not choose to donate, but many will want to show their support. Give the casual visitors a simple way align themselves with your cause, and at the same time make it easy for potential donors to make a contribution.

What we’d like to focus on is a point made by Tech Crunch. In their haste to split these two entities, the folks at Netflix neglected to acquire the social network properties before their big launch. TechCrunch highlights the user who owns the @Qwikster handle on Twitter, who is currently trying to sell this handle to Netflix.

After a look into the top social networking sites, it seems that they have not created an official page on Facebook or YouTube. There are however 7 unofficial fan-created Qwikster pages, all aggregating negative comments about this change.

So why is this oversight so bad? Why is it important to lock these online real estates down before you launch a new brand, company etc?

Control

Because Netflix did not secure these, they are not in control of what their critics and customers say about them. Had they obtained official accounts prior to the announcement, they could give customers and their company an official forum to comment and respond. The messages are out there, and it seems they are doing very little to respond or explain, which is not going to endear them to their customers.

Random Squatters

They now have to deal with people who are holding onto these properties, and will potentially have to pay them in order to acquire (some speculate in the six figure arena). People can get mighty greedy when they have the whip-hand over a corporation. This cost could have been avoided had they handled this in advance, or gotten a similar handle i.e. @QwiksterOfficial. In addition to the cost, they could have avoided a very public discussion about what kind of deal this yoo-hoo was after.

Confusion for Customers

Not having official outlets for your customers to comment, complain or ask legitimate questions can be very confusing. If they comment on an unofficial forum and never get a response, they may feel negatively about your brand.

Embarrassment

Netflix is a revolutionary company; nothing that they have done can change their impact on the digital-media landscape. However, it’s kind of embarrassing that an Internet-oriented company did not think of this in advance. It seems they don’t really even have a cohesive branded presence on YouTube as Netflix.

Four Easy Steps to Avoid This

1. Determine which social networking sites are the best fits for your company. It is usually smart to incorporate more incase you need them, or at least protect them.
2. Research what is already out there, if there is someone who already owns your brand name, what variation could you use across all of the social networks (i.e. if @MyersCorporation is taken, consider @MyersCorporationOfficial), consistency is key.
3. Grab them! (it will probably take less than an hour)
4. Figure out how you are going to consistently leverage these accounts, so that they become synonymous with your official brand.

Main Passfinder State

As you can see with the live app, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes with the Passfinder app. Probably the biggest hurdle to getting this app live was getting the pass logic dialed in, as there are five different passes with different price points and geography restrictions.

For example, the Epic Local Pass provides unlimited skiing or riding at Breckenridge, Keystone and Arapahoe Basin with limited restrictions at Heavenly and Northstar, and also includes 10 restricted days at Vail or Beaver Creek.

In the end, the Passfinder logic was developed to offer the user the lowest price pass based on how many days they might ski at each resort. Based on this logic, each pass moves up or down to reflect which pass options are better than others. Additionally, the user is shown how much it would cost each day they planned to ski based on their selected criteria.

While the goal of the main state was to be visually appealing and light on copy, the more info buttons are customizable modals that give users all the important information about each pass. These modals are integrated so that when pass prices are updated through the backend interface, the prices are adjusted in these more info modals as well.

Facebook Integration

The backend interface is probably my favorite part about this app. As you can see in the screenshot above, you can easily adjust pass prices through a custom backend interface (they change a few times each season). When you change the pass prices, the changes are reflected across all versions of the app, meaning that if the Passfinder is live on five different Facebook pages, the prices will adjust across all five. Whenever a price is updated, the logic automatically adjusts to still give users the cheapest pass for their criteria. Everything adjusts on the fly. Any price changes also update on each passes more info modal, as well as on the existing season passes Facebook app. This seamless integration allows for easy price adjustments that propagate across all live versions of our Passes apps.

Moreover, any price change will also reflect on the web iframe version.

Web Integration

The new iframe web version of our Passfinder also utilizes the pricing database from our Facebook iteration so that when prices are updated through the Facebook backend interface, they are reflected here as well. Similar to the Facebook versions, the logic will adjust to any pricing changes to give user the lowest price pass to suit their needs.

Analytics and Tracking

Outside of common metrics provided by Facebook Insights, we also worked with Vail Resorts to implement custom tracking codes that track clicks from the Passfinder apps to the purchase confirmation page, so when the season is over we’ll be able to determine exactly how much money these apps contributed to 2011-2012 season pass sales. Talk about measuring ROI.

As you can see, you can utilize the social space to achieve your clients goals. Just make sure to know explicitly what those goals are and how they can tie into social channels. Lastly, I wanted to give props to our designers and developers for putting this all together. I’m really happy with how everything turned out.

Post below if you have any questions or comments!

At Room 214, we have been searching for a better wat to tell the world about the great work we do. We found that video is a great way to creatively illustrate the stories and strategy behind our work.

In the video case study above, we walk you through our creative development of a store locator application for the Sanrio and Hello Kitty Facebook pages. So far, we’ve had some great response.

The Store Locator tab (and this video) were recently featured on Facebook Studio, a site which highlights great examples of marketing on Facebook from around the world.

For those of you who would like more details, you can also grab a PDF of the case study from our Slideshare account.

What do you think? Is video a good way of telling the stories behind our work?

We’d love to hear your thoughts!

What Attribute is Your Brand Looking for?

One of the first steps is to understand the method of influence people can have. After reviewing these, you can better identify which segment you’d like to pursue, culling down the numbers significantly. For instance, Ed Keller and Jon Berry, authors of the ‘The Influentials’ identify five key attributes:

Activists (Specialized): these are the active members of a topic/brand/community who entice people to take a certain action or get involved. If you need this person to incite action in others, activists will help drive response.

Connected (Broad Stroke): influencers who have sizable numbers of connections across the social networks. If you are looking for sheer volume of brand impressions this can be a powerful attribute.

Impact (Trust and Aspiration): these people influence others by being reputable by many and are trusted. If you are looking to build brand goodwill or trust with your customers, this validation from a trusted source can help.

Active Minds (Professional Dilettantes): these people are jack-of-all trades because they have influence across many different topics. These influencers can be helpful if you have many products and the audiences are segmented differently.

Trend Setters (Early Adoption): these people are ahead-of-the game and can influence others before an idea/product is popular. This can help build early excitement and credibility for your brand or product.

After reviewing these, which do you believe will have the greatest impact on your customers?  Looking at the attributes should help you start to understand who you need to pursue and the impact that they will have.

Where Does Your Target Audience Hangout?

Selecting one or multiple channels is another big factor in the social influence equation.  This is where your demographics and existing research comes in. Using this information will help you determine the best method to reach your customer.

For instance say you own a company that makes products geared toward boys aged 13-17.  Based on those demographics, what channel is best to reach them? Where do they hang out online? Where is it likely that an influencer could reach them? You can probably have a gut feeling about this, but make sure to double check the statistics of the channel to confirm your assumption.

Selecting the best channel to reach your target audience will help you identify the major players in that space.

Which Numbers Matter for Social Influence?

This depends on each social channel you have selected, so let’s give you a breakdown of the numbers to look for on the top three most popular social networking sites (in terms of size):

Facebook & Twitter: Fortunately, there is a handy-dandy tool called Klout that will calculate several variables of influence for you, on a rating of 1-100. Best practice dictates that a score above 50 is usually a good influencer. When you are searching for particular topics within Facebook and Twitter, note certain people and double-check their Klout.

YouTube: While many people don’t think about this as a Social Network, it actually is ranked #2 in terms of size and activity. Look for activity in a influencer’s channel:  comments on a video, responses to comments, subscribers vs. subscribe ratio.  This will show you how this person’s content is received, whether they are popular and if they engage with their community.

Other Social Networking Sites: Look for engagement factors, not just sheer size of community: discussions, comments, sharing. Look at how an influencer responds to commentary; are they helpful and problem-solution oriented? Do they suggest further action? What kind of information do they share? (Links, suggestions, products).

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This process can feel like an extremely overwhelming funnel: taking hundreds of millions of people and figuring out who is a best fit for you. Using these guidelines should help you understand how to take the top of this funnel and scale it down in order to find the best influential fits for your company.

Honestly, initial engagement around this news leads me to believe people are not understanding how significant it actually is. Time (and search results) will certainly tell – but in the spirit of helping companies do all the right things to get and keep high search engine visibility – here’s some quick insight:

What’s Schema and Why Should We Care
Schema is a collection of new HTML tags that help search engines more accurately index relevant content within web pages.

Since the collaboration and roll-out of this new tagging system was coordinated by the three leading search engines, everyone should be looking at Schema (schema.org) as a new standard for making web pages as search engine friendly as possible.

Note: I appreciate the arguments about how The Big Three have dictated this change, essentially skipping organizational/open review processes often associated with creating “standards.” But what’s done is done – so in the spirit of Heartbreak Ridge, it’s now time to improvise, adapt and overcome.

What You Should Do
Start by making sure your webmaster or whomever is handling SEO/search engine visibility for your web properties is on this. I’d recommend proceeding as follows:

1. Get oriented on why and how: The Schema site FAQ is a good overview of the purpose and reasoning behind the big change – but the real meat of what and how to implement the new markup language resides within the Getting Started documentation.
2. Get familiar with the Schema vocabulary applicable to your web pages: This begins to get technical, but the Getting Started document provides a good understanding of how information within your web page can be structured through “types” and “properties.”Even without being technically-minded, you can look at the full list of item types to get a quick idea of the kind of web page attributes which can now be indexed via the new standard.
3. Create a Schema plan: Conduct an audit of your web pages/sites to match applicable content with the Schema item types. You have numerous options for documenting how you will go about making changes, depending on how detailed you want to get. A spreadsheet might be the most helpful for organizing items types and properties by page, content sections, etc.
4. Make the Changes and Test Your Results: Google promises the Rich Snippets Testing Tool will soon support testing of the new Schema tags to ensure you have an opportunity to see how your content is parsed/displayed in the search results. I would recommend implementing your schema plan regardless of how long it takes for this tool to be ready for prime time. As always, keep an eye on your analytics to see the results of your changes.

A couple of other thoughts that come to mind with this change pertain to how we’ll begin seeing search results adjust due to those taking advantage of Schema vs. those who are not. Other than our own clients’ search results, we’ll of course be watching organizations like SEOMoz to see what they come up with in terms of research to validate the predicted significance.

I’m also curious about how the use of Schema might effect quality scores on landing pages used in conjunction with pay per click marketing. I can only guess that search engine ads driving traffic to pages that leverage schema will have a greater likelihood of higher placement and lower cost per click.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick stated yesterday, “This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.” I agree. How bout’ you?

Create and Drive Traffic to Custom Applications

One easy thing to do is create a lead gen funnel through your Facebook page. Create a custom tab that consists of contact us creative with a simple contact form. You’ll need to get your developers on it, but since everything can be done in iFrames it shouldn’t be too much of an ordeal. You likely can just re-purpose your current contact page and form (you have one, right?) within an iFrame.

If you have some additional budget, considering running a small Facebook ad buy targeting decision makers, specific organizations or friends of your current fans driving clicks to this tab. You can make this new tab the page users land on when they click your ad, and you’ll likely see higher click-through-rates considering you’re keeping users in Facebook instead of taking them to your website.

Utilize Facebook Plugins on your Website

Facebook social plugins are little widgets you can embed into your website. These plugins are really easy to get up and running, they are pre-built with provided code and all you need to do is slap the code onto a page on your site.

What I recommend for B2B is to place the Like Box, which consists of a Like button (to get more fans) and a stream of your wall on your homepage or other prominent page. Assuming you’re posting helpful status updates, this will help compel users to click the Like button and become a fan. You can also do some light customization, but not a whole lot as Facebook wants to maintain its own branding. The Like Box is also a good way to have new, useful content show up consistently on your homepage.

Additionally, you should consider adding sharing elements to your interior pages. What will often happen is someone who isn’t necessarily a decision maker, but an influencer, will do some initial research on your brand and your competitors before making a purchasing decision. As such, you want to give them an easy way to share your content with other influencers and decision makers. You’ll want to carefully consider what social platforms are relevant to include, but for B2B we typically recommend the Facebook Send Button, which allows users to send content to their friends (or decision makers) as well as LinkedIn, Twitter and email. Sounds like an endeavor, but thankfully there are free tools out there like ShareThis that will let you pick which platforms to include sharing functionality for.

Analytics Tracking

Whatever it is you’re doing with your brand on Facebook, you’ll want to see exactly what links on your Facebook fan page are driving traffic to your website. If you’re using Google Analytics as your tracking platform, just use the free URL builder tool. If you’re using some other Analytics software, you’ll be able to do something similar.

If you do decide to implement any Facebook social plugins, be sure to check out the possible analytics that ties with Facebook Insights. You can get detailed analytics about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your website with a little more effort. It’s pretty useful and something we recommend if social plugins are implemented.

Hopefully this post helps you see how it is possible to leverage social networks like Facebook for B2B. If you have any other ideas you want to share, I’d love to hear them.

To illustrate this concept, I’m going to use a fictitious brand along with real social media research. My fictitious company, Brand X, sells popsicles and is interested in running a summer social media campaign. The goal for this campaign is to keep the brand top-of-mind for moms and ultimately sell product.

Step 1: Understand The Target’s Mindset Using Themes

First, I want to know what mom’s mindset is during the summer. Using Netbase, I can see what moms like and dislike about this time of year based on their online conversation in blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and forums.

Step 2: Read The Personal Narratives

Next, I want to read actual personal narratives to better understand emotions expressed by my target audience. Simply looking at key themes, tag clouds, or top phrases won’t give you the full picture.

Step 3: Identify Consumer Problems and Brand Solutions

After looking through a significant number of personal narratives (such as the two listed above), it’s clear that moms have three strong emotions around summer break.

1.     They enjoy spending time with their family.

2.     They have a hard time keeping their kids entertained the entire summer.

3.     They feel like the dreaded back-to-school time period comes too quickly.

These last two emotions are consumer “problems”. Brand X can potentially create solutions for these two areas via a social media strategy.

Step 4: Know Where Your Target Is Online

There are a number of consumer research tools out there that can tell you which social media platforms your target uses. Some of these tools (MRI or @Plan) can cost a pretty penny. I use Google Ad Planner, because it’s easy and free. Not surprisingly, Facebook has the largest reach against moms versus other social platforms.

Step 5: Create Your Strategy

Given the problems identified in Step 3, I would recommend creating a custom Facebook application called “Savoring Summer”. This application would provide moms with useful content to help keep their kids entertained and allow them to savor each day via an online summer journal.

Let’s not forget our initial campaign goal of keeping the brand top-of-mind and ultimately driving product sales:

• Keep moms engaged with the brand by providing useful content and a journal they can use every day
• Drive trial by providing a coupon within the application or suggestions for incorporating popsicles into daily activities

While this example is simplified and not completely fleshed out, the bottom line is this: Social media research can help you make strategic, sound decisions for your social media efforts.

Do you have other examples of how using social media research can help shape strategy? Comment below.