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Location based social networking at New York Fashion Week was all the rage, with more than 100,000 fashionistas checking-in, indicating clear winners and losers with respect to where the action and excitement was.

Joost van Dreunen of SuperData Research (acquired by Nielsen) analyzed the check-in data and shares his findings.  

Smart communications strategies embrace location based social networks as tools to drive customer retention, repeat visits and foot traffic, according to van Dreunen, who also did a second geo social networking study comparing Whole Foods to Trader Joe's, revealing significant insights about how each grocer’s customer base differs.

Joost van Dreunen PhD is managing director of SuperData Research, a research firm focusing on interactive entertainment and technology industries.

Prior to founding SuperData, he held senior analyst positions at Nielsen Online and DFC Intelligence.

SHOW NOTES

01:05 Joost’s describes the experience that led to him to look for location-based social networking traffic patterns among the crowd attending Fashion’s Night Out, a promotional event held during New York Fashion Week 2010.

4:06 A closer look was taken at total Foursquare check-ins in the Village and Soho. Which fashion house had the biggest crowd and some of the opportunities location based networks present to event planners and communicators.

8:24 The Foursquare analysis reveals that 31% of geo-based check-ins by Fashion’s Night Out participants continued into the wee hours of the morning, long after the participating retailers had closed, indicating further opportunity for event planners. Top-ranking retailers from Fashion’s Night Out are listed, and a discussion of why prominent fashion designer Marc Jacobs did not rank.

11:35 What promoters, event planners and participating vendors can learn about from the numbers behind the use of location based social networking apps on smart phones on Fashion’s Night Out. Why were certain retailers successful while others were not? Joost discusses the benefits of location based social networking to local businesses.

14:48 A seprate study of grocery store check-ins within a five-mile radius of a Whole Foods store. When were customers checking in? Were they at Whole Foods or at a competitor? Foursquare’s location based app allows Whole Foods to see who’s getting the lunch crowd, the after-work crowd, etc. and see where the opportunities are for the store to do better. Location based networking gives a point of comparison and a sense of market share.

19:53 The quantity of raw geo data generated by location based apps can be immense and that creates a barrier to meaningful analysis. Research firms like SuperData have the infrastructure to deal with the high data volume, however companies that aren’t in a position to hire a professional research firm to crunch the number can work directly with Foursquare.

24:57 End

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at Mayo Clinic

Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash

Communicating in status updates and tweets, the skills required to build an effective communications strategy and avoiding the confirmation bias trap with former PRSA CEO Cheryl Procter-Rogers, vice president, office of public relations and communications at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university.

Prior to joining DePaul University, Cheryl was on the corporate affairs team at HBO and before that, she was director of public relations and advertising at Nielsen Media Research.

On October 19, 2010, she presents “A Winning Approach to Advocacy Campaigns” at the upcoming PRSA International Conference in Washington DC.

SHOW NOTES

2:15 – An effective communications strategy hinges on five key communications skills.

3:19 – How she balances a successful business career with a healthy home life.

4:17 -- The benefits of knowing who and where your resources are.

6:39 -- Tips for achieving work-life balance and the organizational systems that can help.

8:18 -- Can chess help you become a master of communications strategy?

10:21 – Cheryl shares her “Four Cs” of successful career development and the benefits of improving your listening skills.

12:52 -- She introduces the concept of confirmation bias and why diversity is a prudent business strategy.

15:19 -- End

ABOUT THE PODCASTER

@EricSchwartzman provides online communication training, strategy and social media governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.

His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.

Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media and emerging treads training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.

His book "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" with Paul Gillin about B2B applications of social media communications is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by @SandraBurrowes.

Communicating in status updates and tweets, the skills required to build an effective communications strategy and avoiding the confirmation bias trap with former PRSA CEO Cheryl Procter-Rogers, vice president, office of public relations and communications at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university.  

Prior to joining DePaul University, Cheryl was on the corporate affairs team at HBO and before that, she was director of public relations and advertising at Nielsen Media Research.  

She presented “A Winning Approach to Advocacy Campaigns” at the upcoming PRSA International Conference in Washington DC.

Why Is Diversity Important?

2:15 – An effective communications strategy hinges on five key communications skills.

3:19 – Balancing a successful business career with a healthy home life.

4:17 -- The benefits of knowing who and where your resources are.       

6:39 -- Tips for achieving work-life balance and the organizational systems that can help.

8:18 -- Can chess help you become a master of communications strategy?

10:21 – The 4 Cs of successful career development and the benefits of improving your listening skills.

12:52 -- She introduces the concept of confirmation bias and why understanding diversity is a prudent business strategy.

15:19 -- End 

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes, Senior Public Affairs Specialist at Mayo Clinic.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

One of the most commonly asked questions these days at my Social Media Boot Camps is how do you measure the ROI of a Facebook marketing campaign? With 500,000 million users and 11 percent of all time spent online, the potential of Facebook for public relations and public affairs professionals is huge. But given how basic the measurement options are at Facebook Insights, if you do hit it out of the park, how do you prove the impact of a Facebook marketing campaigns on the bottom line?

In this episode, Jeff Jordan, product manager, social media and video measurement and Tim Waddell, director of product marketing for the Omniture business unit of Adobe talk about audience segmentation, sentiment analysis and having your Facebook page brandjacked.

Through a global partnership with Facebook, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Discover and Search Center Plus report the ROI of Facebook marketing campaigns by monitoring activity on Facebook Pages, inside Facebook Apps, from Facebook Ads and activity through Facebook Connect/Open-Graph, which extends Facebook functionality to destination websites.

SHOW NOTES

05:11 -- Omniture Discover, an advanced segmentation tool, which can be used to discover which of your Facebook audience segments generate the most revenue.

08:37 -- Omniture intends to launch an analytics component for monitoring sentiment by keyword.

10:38 -- In previous episode of this podcast with Rob Key of Converseon, he said beware of any listening provider that claims 90% accuracy with computers. A discussion of just how far off accurate sentiment analysis is, and using it as directional data and for spotting potential trends.

13:36 -- Earlier this year, Nestle had their Facebook page brand jacked by Greenpeace. People where flocking to their Facebook page in droves, posting their disapproval of the company’s use of palm oil, which they believe is helping to push orangutans into extinction. A discussion of how, if at all, Omniture might help a company protect its Facebook page from being brandjacked by grassroots activists.

16:11 -- In a previous podcast with US Navy public affairs officer Jim Hoeft, we learned that Operation Deepwater Horizon’s Facebook Page was literally overwhelmed with thousands of comments during the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf, which the page administrators had no practical way to export or analyze globally. How do communicators mitigate the risks associated with launching a social networking presence that can be impossible to manage in the event of a crisis?

18:43 -- Using analytics software to determine influence and analytics package rankings.

21:51 -- End

RECOMMENDED EPISODES

*

Earn Facebook “Likes” and Twitter Followers While You Sleep with Janrain

*

Social Media PR using Facebook Company Pages with CC Chapman

*

Selling Social Media Strategy to Leadership with Charlene Li

ABOUT THE PODCASTER

@EricSchwartzman provides online communication training, strategy and social media governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.

His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.

Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media and emerging treads training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.

His book "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" with Paul Gillin about B2B applications of social media communications is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

A commonly asked questions in my Social Media Marketing Seminars is how do you measure the ROI of a Facebook marketing campaign?  

With 500,000 million users and 11 percent of all time spent online, the potential of Facebook for public relations and public affairs professionals is huge. But given how basic the measurement options are at Facebook Insights, if you do hit it out of the park,  how do you prove the impact of a Facebook marketing campaigns on the bottom line?

In this episode, Jeff Jordan, product manager, social media and video measurement and Tim Waddell, director of product marketing for the Omniture business unit of Adobe talk about audience segmentation, sentiment analysis and having your Facebook page brandjacked.

Through a global partnership with Facebook, Omniture SiteCatalyst (acquired by Adobe) and Search Center Plus report the ROI of Facebook marketing campaigns by monitoring activity on Facebook Pages, inside Facebook Apps, from Facebook Ads and activity through Facebook Connect/Open-Graph, which extends Facebook functionality to destination websites.  

SHOW NOTES

05:11 -- Omniture Discover, an advanced segmentation tool, which can be used to discover which of your Facebook audience segments generate the most revenue.

08:37 -- Omniture intends to launch an analytics component for monitoring sentiment by keyword.

10:38 -- In previous episode of this podcast with Rob Key of Converseon, he said beware of any listening provider that claims 90% accuracy with computers.  A discussion of just how far off accurate sentiment analysis is, and using it as directional data and for spotting potential trends.

13:36 -- Earlier this year, Nestle had their Facebook page brand jacked by Greenpeace. People where flocking to their Facebook page in droves, posting their disapproval of the company’s use of palm oil, which they believe is helping to push orangutans into extinction.  A discussion of how, if at all, Omniture might help a company protect its Facebook page from being brandjacked by grassroots activists.

16:11 --  In a previous podcast with US Navy public affairs officer Jim Hoeft, we learned that Operation Deepwater Horizon’s Facebook Page was literally overwhelmed with thousands of comments during the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf, which the page administrators had no practical way to export or analyze globally.  How do communicators mitigate the risks associated with launching a social networking presence that can be impossible to manage in the event of a crisis?

18:43 -- Using analytics software to determine influence and analytics package rankings.

21:51 -- End

Photo by Mikaela Shannon on Unsplash

Media relations skills are what employers want most from PR professionals, according to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report. But it takes a lot more than luck to land on the front page of a major print newspapers or the interview chair on broadcast television. It takes solid PR skills, communications skills and media relations strategies, and that’s what this podcast is about: building your media relations skills.

The trouble is, newspaper and network TV audiences have been declining steadily for the last 7 years. And with lay-offs hitting newsrooms around the globe, the news hole has shrunk and there are fewer reporters to pitch. Those that remain are working longer hours and under more pressure than ever before. What communications skills are needed to capture their attention?

Enter, Michael Smart, who specializes in teaching media relations to skills to PR professioanls. Michael is National News Director at Brigham Young University (BYU) and, in this episode, he shares his media relations skills top tips in an effort to help public realtions practioners adapt to the dramatic changes in today’s news media landscape, and the challenge and opportunities those changes require us to make to our media relations techniques. He outlines specific communication skills and techniques that can be used to build greater publicity exposure in a competitive news environment.

In addition to his work with BYU, Michael is an independent media relations trainer and coach and a top-rated speaker at the PR-industry’s biggest conferences. He will present a session at the PRSA International Conference in Washington DC on Tuesday, October 19, 2010. His 2:15pm session is “New Rules of Media Relations: Pitch Overworked Journalists and PR-averse Bloggers and Come Out Unscathed.”

SHOW NOTES

01:26 Dramatic changes in the media landscape can make it harder to connect with mainstream journalists than in the past, but once that barrier is cleared, it can actually be easier to place positive news than it used to be. But the basics, like press release writing skills, are still critically important.

02:18 Michael shares media relations techniques for landing positive media placements, including researching the five most meaningful media outlets, searching the archives of those publications for related stories and providing a journalist with credible third-party sources.

05:51 Today’s high media turnover can make it difficult to develop relationships with journalists, especially for PR professionals with clients across a range of industries. Michael shares tactics that can increase the chances for success.

07:50 PR research is done and you’ve identified the right journalist for a story. How do you decide how best to approach the journalist (phone call, email, tweet, Facebook post, etc.?) Michael shares his specific strategies as well as a few mistakes that drive journalists up the wall.

13:47 Media relations techniques to employ when a client announcement isn’t newsworthy—two strategies to employ.

17:41 The three variables that media relations experts can control (creativity, media relationships and perseverance) and a few they can’t. Which PR skills matter most.

21:26 Despite the decline of the traditional news media, there has been a sharp rise in the readership of newspaper content through the internet and mobile phones. Media relations skills will continue to be important to employers and clients.

23:44 Media relations are important to today’s PR professionals, yet the best communication strategies rely on sound social media skills, public affairs skills and even advertising skills.

27:25 End

OTHER RECOMMENDED EPISODES

*

PR Measurement Standards Declared by Global PR Industry Delegation

* Selling Social Media Strategy to Leadership with Charlene Li

* Corporate Social Media Policy Development

ABOUT THE PODCASTER

@EricSchwartzman provides online communication training, strategy and social media governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.

His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.

Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media and emerging treads training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.

His book "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" with Paul Gillin about B2B applications of social media communications is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by @SandraBurrowes.

Media relations skills are what employers want most from PR professionals, according to the Digital Readiness Report.

But it takes a lot more than luck to land on the front page of a major print newspapers or the interview chair on broadcast television.

It takes solid PR skills, communications skills and media relations strategies, and that’s what this podcast is about: building your media relations skills.

The trouble is, newspaper and network TV audiences have been declining steadily for the last 7 years. And with lay-offs hitting newsrooms around the globe, the news hole has shrunk and there are fewer reporters to pitch.  

Those that remain are working longer hours and under more pressure than ever before. What communications skills are needed to capture their attention?

Enter Michael Smart, a media relations coach who specializes in teaching those skills to PR professionals.

Michael is National News Director at Brigham Young University (BYU) and, in this episode, he shares his media relations skills top tips in an effort to help public relations specialists adapt to the dramatic changes in today’s news media landscape, and the challenge and opportunities those changes require us to make to our media relations techniques.

He outlines specific communication skills and techniques that can be used to build greater publicity exposure in a competitive news environment. In addition to his work with BYU, Michael is an independent media relations trainer and coach and a top-rated speaker at the PR-industry’s biggest conferences.

SHOW NOTES  

01:26 Dramatic changes in the media landscape can make it harder to connect with mainstream journalists than in the past, but once that barrier is cleared, it can actually be easier to place positive news than it used to be. But the basics, like press release writing skills, are still critically important.

02:18 Michael shares media relations techniques for landing positive media placements, including researching the five most meaningful media outlets, searching the archives of those publications for related stories and providing a journalist with credible third-party sources.

05:51 Today’s high media turnover can make it difficult to develop relationships with journalists, especially for PR professionals with clients across a range of industries. Michael shares tactics that can increase the chances for success.

07:50 PR research is done and you’ve identified the right journalist for a story. How do you decide how best to approach the journalist (phone call, email, tweet, Facebook post, etc.?) Michael shares his specific strategies as well as a few mistakes that drive journalists up the wall.

13:47 Media relations techniques to employ when a client announcement isn’t newsworthy—two strategies to employ.

17:41 The three variables that media relations experts can control (creativity, media relationships and perseverance) and a few they can’t. Which PR skills matter most.

21:26 Despite the decline of the traditional news media, there has been a sharp rise in the readership of newspaper content through the internet and mobile phones. Media relations skills will continue to be important to employers and clients.

23:44 Media relations are important to today’s PR professionals, yet the best communication strategies rely on sound social media skills, public affairs skills and even advertising skills.

27:25 End

These podcast show notes were written and optimized by Sandra Burrowes,

Marketing Flight of the Conchords online, a new user management platform for the social web and how to build the right website for any organization with Dave Fletcher, founder and executive creative director, The Mechanism a multi-disciplinary design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

He presented a session titled “Compelling Social Media Strategies: Soaring With ‘Flight of the Conchords’” at the PRSA International Conference in DC.

SHOW NOTES  

01:15 -- Flight of the Conchords website design and development process, managing the band’s online reputation and trying to maintain a direct connection with their fans while HBO was marketing their reality-based television show online as well.    

02:24 -- Rationale for gathering all your various social media marketing efforts together in one easy-to-access place.  

03:17 -- Janrain user management platform for the social web, which is used by the Lady Gaga website to allow fans to sign in.  Accordingly to Janrain, the platform double the registration rate of the Lady Gaga website.  The Janrain platform also capture and stores registration data locally, so marketers are not reliant on Facebook for access their customer data.    

06:20 -- How to pick a content management system based on specific requirements.  

08:11 -- What makes a great interface and tailoring the design to the needs of your particular users.  What does your audience need and how can you give it to them in as few clicks as possible?  

09:57 -- The level of ease that users have come to expect from websites, whether Facebook has set the bar for ease-of-use and what the growth of social networking sites means for corporate web design.  

12:29 -- Dangers associated with relying too heavily on any one social network like Facebook or Twitter for PR, marketing or corporate communications.  

14:18 -- Dangers of relying on social networks as mobile devices, ipads and apps take off.   1

4:52 -- Steve Rubel’s comment on For Immediate Release Live #18 about approaching social media communications with a homeland/embassy strategy, whereas the homeland is the organization’s destination site and the embassies are its profiles on social networking sites.  

17:58 -- Hicksdesign.co.uk has built a website that’s a single bit of CSS which is meant to work well on computers, mobile devices and ipad. The goal in the web design community is to develop ways to design single sites that operate effectively on different devices.   1

9:52 -- Tools that help us focus our attention or “apps”, as opposed to tools that help us hunt and peck, are driving the future of online communications.  Wired’s proclamation “The Web is Dead.”  

22:23 -- A bad customer experience in the mid-90s with AT&T that has kept Eric from giving them a nickle ever since, Apple’s anti-competitive business practices and the iPhone vs. Driod platform development strategies.  

24:11 -- Risks of managing an unregulated platform that is truly open, from poor coding to malware, and Apple’s decision not to use Flash on ipad, because of concerns that poorly designed Flash files that crash a device reflect badly on the device developers, rather than the Flash programmer, who in fact IS responsible for the failure.  

27:05 -- AT&T’s network can’t live up to the iPhone’s network demands, and other wireless carriers may soon encounter their own performance issues as smart phones become more popular and available on their networks.  

29:03 -- End  

Finally, there’s a way to grow your social network, increase engagement and site registrations without having to Tweet and Facebook 24/7. Through a relatively new type of service called a user management platform for the social web, you can invite visitors to your destination website to use their Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace or Open ID credentials to register or log in when they visit.

So rather than have to fill out some lengthy form, they can log in with one click. When they do, you get the opportunity to capture and keep much of their profile data and check out their social graph. The result is a huge increase in site registrations, a much more engaged community and nine times the referral traffic.

In this episode, Tore Steen, VP, Marketing and Business Development at Janrain and former VP of Business and Corporate Development for WebTrends explains the concept of a user management platform for the social web on non-technical terms, makes the business case for implementing the service and the future of marketing on the social web.

SHOW NOTES

01:24 -- An explanation of the Janrain user management platform for the social media, which offers a way for visitors to your website to use their Facebook, Twitter and 14 other social networking credentials to register for your website.

03:03 -- The benefit of having visitors use Facebook or Twitter credentials to register when they visit an organization’s destination website.

04:14 -- The top three preferred identity providers today in order of importance are Google, Facebook and Yahoo, but business-oriented sites tend to draw more Linkedin registrations and visitors to consumer oriented-sites tend to use their Facebook identity to login.

05:24 -- The richest profile and social graph data that a website can receive is from a Facebook user, because Facebook has the most information because of their “like” button and the information user’s store on theirs profile page. Other identity providers are currently jockeying to find a way to capture and provide a more detailed portrait of their users.

06:43 -- There are ways to determine who the most influential people who’ve “liked” your organization on Facebook are. You can see what other brands they’ve liked and when they publish to your Facebook Page. On average, for every Facebook Page post that someone makes on your Wall, there are an average of nine inbound referrals generated to your Facebook Page from that person’s network of friends. Looking at whoever brings the most referrals to your website is a great way to see who your most influential Facebook friends are.

08:02 -- If you’re using a user management platform for the social web, every time someone uses their Facebook credentials to sign into your site, you get a list of their friends so you get an understanding of their social graph. On the Mahalo site, if you use Google to authenticate, you can bring your address book and invite your friends through an automated pick list.

09:18 -- Given that Facebook is known for random terms of service changes, organizations can mitigate the risk of relying solely on Facebook for access to their constituents by capturing and storing the registration data in their own contact management database as well.

11:48 -- Making it easy to share web pages or content was the rage a couple of years ago, but today, it’s about making it easy for users to share activities or the ways they participate online. CitySearch uses Janrain to allow visitors to post a link to the restaurant reviews they write to their Facebook newsfeed, driving richer engagement. Other activities that could become advocacy or public relations opportunities through integrated sharing include e-commerce transactions, white paper downloads, charitable donations or any other online activity that someone might want to share with their friends and followers online.

12:48 -- Responding to the growing interest of their customers in fortifying their presence in the mobile environment, Janrain optimized their user experience for a variety of mobile browers first, so smart phone users would have a positive experience logging in with a handheld device. They also released a software developer’s kit to embed the Janrain user management platform for identity management into custom apps. zoday, Janrain supports iPhone and will release support for Droid in the fourth quarter of 2010.

13:57 -- Because they’ve seen greater adoption of apps by Droid users, Janrain decided to offer Droid support next, though they intend to eventually support Blackberry as well.

15:24 -- The old metrics were quantity of site traffic, time spent on site and passive page views. But the new metrics on the social web are about quality of site traffic, interactions that occur and active sharing. it’s a shift from measuring traffic, to measuring actions. The easiest way to calculate the ROI of a user management platform for the social web is to compare the number of unique visitors that registered prior to deployment, to the number of registrations that occur after deployment.

16:25 -- The second new metric to monitor is the referral traffic from the social sharing feature and see how many of those referred visits result in some sort of transaction, be it a CPM, e-commerce or lead generation.

17:49 -- User management platforms do require a web developer to get up and running, but the products have thus far been largely embraced by web development community, because it solves a very specific need for marketers, and insulates developers from having to innovate a solution from scratch.

19:06 -- Janrain does have WordPress and Drupal plugins available, but they require some coding to get up and running. They’ve also partnered with Kick Apps and integrated their user management platform into that solution as well.

21:24 -- End

RECOMMENDED EPISODES

*

B2B Social Networking: Lead Generation on SlideShare

*

B2B Social Networks: Driving Commerce with Imperfection and Surrender

*

Activity Streams Will Change Your Business

ABOUT THE PODCASTER

@EricSchwartzman provides online communication training, strategy and social media governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.

His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.

Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media and emerging treads training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.

His book "Social Marketing to the Business Customer" with Paul Gillin about B2B applications of social media communications is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Finally, there's a way to grow your social network, increase engagement and site registrations without having to Tweet and Facebook 24/7.

Through a relatively new type of service called a user management platform for the social web, you can invite visitors to your destination website to use their Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace or Open ID credentials to register or log in when they visit. So rather than have to fill out some lengthy form, they can log in with one click.

When they do, you get the opportunity to capture and keep much of their profile data and check out their social graph.

The result is a huge increase in site registrations, a much more engaged community and nine times the referral traffic.

In this episode, Tore Steen, VP, Marketing and Business Development at Janrain (acquired by Akamai) and former VP of Business and Corporate Development for WebTrends explains the concept of a user management platform for the social web on non-technical terms, makes the business case for implementing the service and the future of marketing on the social web.

SHOW NOTES

01:24 -- An explanation of the Janrain user management platform for the social media, which offers a way for visitors to your website to use their Facebook, Twitter and 14 other social networking credentials to register for your website.

03:03 -- The benefit of having visitors use Facebook or Twitter credentials to register when they visit an organization's destination website.

04:14 -- The top three preferred identity providers today in order of importance are Google, Facebook and Yahoo, but business-oriented sites tend to draw more Linkedin registrations and visitors to consumer oriented-sites tend to use their Facebook identity to login.

05:24 -- The richest profile and social graph data that a website can receive is from a Facebook user, because Facebook has the most information because of their "Like" button and the information user's store on theirs profile page.

Other identity providers are currently jockeying to find a way to capture and provide a more detailed portrait of their users.

06:43 -- There are ways to determine who the most influential people who've "Liked" your organization on Facebook are. You can see what other brands they've liked and when they publish to your Facebook Page. Â On average, for every Facebook Page post that someone makes on your Wall, there are an average of nine inbound referrals generated to your Facebook Page from that person's network of friends.

Looking at whoever brings the most referrals to your website is a great way to see who your most influential Facebook friends are.

08:02 -- If you're using a user management platform for the social web, every time someone uses their Facebook credentials to sign into your site, you get a list of their friends so you get an understanding of their social graph. On the Mahalo site, if you use Google to authenticate, you can bring your address book and invite your friends through an automated pick list.

09:18 -- Given that Facebook is known for random terms of service changes, organizations can mitigate the risk of relying solely on Facebook for access to their constituents by capturing and storing the registration data in their own contact management database as well.

11:48 -- Making it easy to share web pages or content was the rage a couple of years ago, but today, it's about making it easy for users to share activities or the ways they participate online. CitySearch uses Janrain to allow visitors to post a link to the restaurant reviews they write to their Facebook n...