The generation now known pretty much everywhere as millennials are tech-savvy, educated people who are driving the social media shift in markets and politics all over the globe.

Studies show that millennials are more aware of brands using social media, but they are also suspicious of brands who use social media, so reaching them can be a tricky proposition.

Last year, Spiral16 attended ShareLikeBuy in San Francisco and contributed a case study about Livestrong called Reaching Millennials By Building Engaged Communities. We’re also looking forward to this year’s ShareLikeBuy in October in New York.

Recently, Online Graduate Programs created this infographic about millennials — a hugely important demographic for digital marketers to reach — from studies by Pew Research. Check it out:

Cool Travel Industry Social Media Infographic

The travel industry has been closely linked with social media ever since smart phones have given everybody and their mother an outlet to complain about their flight. (Just ask American Airlines and Alec Baldwin.)

Two of the biggest questions for companies in the travel industry are:

1. How are travelers driving the industry’s ever-evolving business goals?

2. Are companies are able to calculate social media ROI?

Simpliflying, in partnership with Eyefortravel, created this infographic with those questions in mind. It seems like the adoption rate for social media is unusually high in the travel industry. One statistic shows that over 70% of travel marketers are using social media to “build their brands. In addition, 45% of travel marketers are confident of having unlocked useful data to measure ROI on their social media strategies.

This number is even higher for mobile, and almost half of all the airlines surveyed said they plan to increase their presence in location-based social networks in 2012. Check out this cool infographic about social media in the travel industry:

Via SimpliFlying

When starting up a social media account for your company, the most important thing is to match the tool with the goal. Lots of companies have a presence on Twitter, but what are they really getting out of it from a business perspective?

Often times, the overwhelming amount of pitfalls inherent in the Twitter platform may even keep some from ever logging in in the first place. It’s a very specific kind of communication device with its own unique limits and strengths.

(Here at Spiral16, we allow you to measure Twitter separately, away from the rest of social media sites for that same reason.)

Jean-Christophe Barré and Dr. Andreas Schroeter have written a 32-page ebook called  Twitter Business Guide: Communication and Marketing, and its shared below.

This Twitter guide helps you with setting up the account properly, Twitter slang, and tons of communication and marketing tips.

Check it out:

Twitter Business Guide

Thanks to Scott Monty for the tip!

Is your boss suffering from an anti-social media bias?

Convincing the higher-ups that your company needs to be involved in social media still isn’t easy, even though social networks and blogs reach nearly 80% of active web users — and interacting with social media represents the majority of Americans’ time online.

If they aren’t just downright dismissive, the social media skeptics will often hand you the keys as a “trial run” and ask you to prove how social media works.

(This is a mission that’s specially destined to fail, especially if you have been given no clear goals or business objectives.)

Scott Stratten from the Unmarketing blog made a pretty funny (and useful, frankly) video of a typical conversation you might have with your boss when that fateful time comes:

I believe that there are plenty of ways to link a social strategy to ROI, however, especially if you have benchmarked your online presence and can compare web metrics and traditional business metrics. But that’s a more advanced deal for sure.

I posted the simplest thing I could think of to help somebody out in this situation — two tips that will help you bring something awesome to the table once this discussion starts. Be armed. (And it doesn’t really matter in what order you do these…)

• Start listening online. This will inform every other decision you make in developing your social media campaign.
• Integrate social media into your business model. Start thinking creatively about what it is that your company does and how you can provide additional value for your customers online.

And now, thanks to Scott, you can start role-playing scenarios! What other responses have you gotten from higher-ups at your job about social media?

We want to thank host Brian Solis and the folks at this week’s Pivot Conference for inviting Spiral16 to participate. There were tons of great speakers and opportunities for learning and networking. Not mention, it all happened in New York, which can’t be beat.

Two members of the Spiral16 team were there, but I was sitting in front of my computer (where data nerds belong, I suppose) watching many of the presentations from the #PivotCon livestream. As kind of a Friday wrap-up, though, I wanted to point people in the direction of some of the resources currently available on the web that came from the 2011 Pivot Conference.

Charlene Li presented a compelling speech on how companies can prepare for the new landscape of business. Disruptive technologies are hard to keep up with and if companies create a culture of sharing and prioritize these technologies by their value to the company, they can stay on top of things. As usual with the meticulous research of the Altimeter Group, Charlene offered a framework to help companies succeed in this area:

She also published a quick overview/review of Solis’ new book, The End of Business As Usual, which covers similar territory, but in a much broader sense:

“I found the most valuable insights in the second half of the book where Brian becomes prescriptive about how businesses need to approach business differently. In particular, Brian makes the case that you must evolve your business to become “adaptive” to the connected consumer. He’s evolved his call to action from “Engage or Die!” to “Adapt or Die!”

Scott Brinker author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, made the case for companies needing a CMT (chief marketing technologist, duh). This is someone who translates the strategy into technology and back again for the company’s CMO, and who makes new technologies functional across the organization.

Another important step — and a result hopefully of the steps before it — is that new technologies should be fused into the DNA of the marketing. Here’s Scott’s presentation:

Megan Cunningham, CEO of Magnet Media, shared some of her thoughts from various panels at her blog. As she pointed out, it was pretty hard to miss the fact that most everything revolved around a sense of collective emergence. Everything’s changing and that means businesses have to keep up.

One interesting quote about buyer’s intent that she pulled out was from Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus, during the “Where’s the $%$# Money?” panel. It reminded me of a recent study that showed that organic searches and links from other websites are still driving more traffic to blogs than anything else:

Schafer: (roughly) “The keyword for social media is ‘discovery,’ and that’s what developing brands are about. Direct response is about intent—responding to a problem. Can you solve this? Yes. Buy this and we’ll fix it. When people have intent they don’t turn to social media, they search.”

For all of the talk of disruptive technologies, it’s kind of funny that when it comes right down to it, people are still going to do an old-fashioned search when they are looking for something valuable online. For businesses, it’s more important than ever to be able to utilize new technologies to encourage loyalty, but getting them to the right web destination still involves using the right keywords and getting the right links.

The funeral for Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is today, according to the Wall Street Journal.  The newspaper reported that the funeral will be a “small private gathering”.  The Mac changed my career path and my life, so I am one of the millions who expressed sadness at the passing of  Steve Jobs.

Guy Kawasaki, who worked with Steve Jobs, wrote an excellent post “What I Learned from Steve Jobs.”

Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford is one of my favorite speeches by a public figure. The text of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement address, with his message to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” is on my bulletin board so I am reminded daily. Here is the link to the text and video of the speech.

One of the best quotes attributed to the Apple co-founder sums up his vision for a company as well as his philosophy on how to approach life:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Another technology visionary passed away just yesterday. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C programming language and Unix, and a true pioneer of the digital era, was 70.

He may not have had the publicly acknowledged impact of Jobs, but without Ritchie, much of what Jobs did would never have been possible. To put this into perspective, every computer runs at least a layer of C code in its internal operating system. Many microcontrollers (which contain a processor core, memory, and programmable peripherals) also run C, such as your phone, computer, watch, mp3 player, etc.

Also, C gave way for new programming languages like C++, Java and C#. Everyone uses this trailblazing technology, but few realize it. Linux, a popular open-source OS, was built on the concepts of Unix. Many server-side computers run either Unix or Linux because it’s a very stable OS and can run for years without having to reboot. Apple’s OS X OS is built on BSD, which is a Unix platform.

Steve Lohr from the New York Times put Ritchie’s contribution into perspective, and this tribute from Wired goes even further.

Lastly, Gaping Void by Hugh MacLeod created a nice tribute to Steve Jobs, In Memoriam:

In March, when Salesforce.com purchased one of our competitors, Radian6, the online media monitoring category suddenly appeared more legitimate on the radar of many CEOs and businesses. Because of the headlines generated by the Salesforce-Radian6 deal, my family no longer has the “deer in the headlights” look when I tell them what I do for a living.

Spiral16 is research-driven

This is great for Spiral16, because now more people want to know what online data means for their business.

Spiral16 is Research Driven

When online and social media monitoring began, significant focus was given to blogs and new sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit, where users were actively sharing information and commenting on it. The majority of credible online sources (news sites, reference sites, etc.) were left out of the picture completely with many who had just started monitoring the digital space.

In the early days of social media monitoring, “simple and pretty” ruled the day.

However, Spiral16 built our technology and services around established research principles and flexibility. Since our tool was focused on the research, we weren’t as “sexy” as other tools. But as more people want to know how web research can alter and inspire business decisions, Spiral16′s passion (obsession?) for research and data is gaining ground.

Megan Leap wrote a great post onMarketingProfsBlog about social media monitoring:

Effective social media marketing isn’t easy, but it is rewarding. Just because you acquired 500 Facebook friends without lifting a finger and your little sister is on Twitter, doesn’t mean you can drive real, measurable business results with social media marketing.

Leap’s post is about the “myths of social media marketing”and it contains some excellent advice.

A few of the popular myths about social media marketing include:

• Interns can do your social media marketing.
• Marketing in social media is easy.
• EVERYONE should be using social media marketing.

Read the rest of Megan’s post over on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog.

Have you noticed a shift in the social media marketing space? Have you noticed a trend toward substance over style? Talk to me!

Charlene Li from the Altimeter group calls it “the future of sharing.”

David Armano says, “I have to wonder of the developers and designers at Facebook had [a Google Super Bowl ad] in mind as they worked on Timeline in their effort to beat Google on Web domination.”

Greg Kumparack from TechCrunch calls it “a crazy (and kind of creepy) omnibus look at everything that has ever happened in your Facebook lifespan.  It’s like a story book of your life — or at least the online, documented parts.”

It’s Facebook Timeline. If you haven’t yet enabled some of the individual apps that will work with it by going in through the developer’s side of Facebook, Timeline will roll out automatically in a couple of weeks.

Here’s what Facebook says about it:

The way your profile works today, 99% of the stories you share vanish. The only way to find the posts that matter is to click “Older Posts” at the bottom of the page. Again. And again. With Timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

Brian Solis had some insight to how this timeline will be populated:

At f8, Facebook announced that it is giving apps a voice, your voice, to contribute contextual activity to the Timeline automatically through action verbs. Yes, you read that right. Facebook apps will populate your storybook, based on the permissions you set of course, further pushing (or inspiring…you choose) to live more and more in public. Smart apps are another product of the company’s news machine at f8 and are the latest incarnation of Facebook’s Open Graph development platform.

For users, it’s the chance to curate your entire life online. For brands, this should make it way easier to figure out taste and buying patterns of Facebook users. (The amount of information the site encourages users to share keeps increasing while the only way for businesses to access it will be through Facebook.)

What do you think of these changes? Are you eager to get a hold of it right now?

I’m thinking, like any change, this will take some getting used to, but if it truly makes sharing easier to do as Facebook claims, ultimately it can’t fail. (Not to mention the fact that nobody reads the fine print when enabling an app, and privacy settings can still be tricky.)

Charlene Li‘s point about what we are willing to share struck a chord:

How far are we willing to share our information and activities? Look no further than to our real lives because we do it all the time. Our credit card transactions are captured and resold to direct marketers. Our Caller IDs – which used to be private – are shared.

From a graphics standpoint, Timeline looks like a Tumblr blog, which is clean and visually-oriented. Good move on Facebook’s part, I believe.

Timeline will also encourage oversharing, and make it very easy to do so. Everything you’ve ever shared will be accessible. It doesn’t just disappear like before. The possibilities for what the company will do with all this personal information are enormous.

If you can’t wait, sign up for the beta test at the Timeline Facebook page. Or CNET tells you How to turn on your Facebook Timeline right now.

It’s no secret that web and social media monitoring can be useful for any business looking to monitor their brand or competitors, but how does this game-changing form of communication relate to politics and government agencies?

Spiral16 will be at the Cool Social Gravity Summit on Nov 8 – 9 in Orange County, CA (registration here). The conference will focus on the rise of social media in governance and politics, and we’re looking forward to meeting everybody in person and seeing speakers like Ted Nguyen , Simon Mainwaring, and Adriel Hampton, among others.

I will be presenting on Day Two of the conference. During How Online Intelligence Impacts Government and Politics Today (1:30pm-2:00pm, Nov. 9), I’ll explore:

• How crucial social media monitoring is for tracking political campaigns
• How social media can be leveraged at all levels of government

If you are a political strategist, knowing exactly how information spreads on the Web is vital. Your campaign must be adaptive because messages get distorted and can turn on a dime as new stories break every day.

Spiral16 has been tracking many of the current Senate races, such as Whitman/Brown in California and Blunt/Carnahan in Missouri. By correlating semantic analysis and web influence with breaking news stories and debate appearances, we have been able to get a clearer picture of how campaign information spreads online.

Social media is already being used across different departments of the government. On the local level, some DMV offices are taking online reservations and many more have Twitter accounts to handle customer service questions. State transportation departments like MODOT are blogging and building social media campaigns to spread helpful information and give their constituents constant updates about road construction and road conditions.

On the federal level, the CDC used social media to find out where people are talking about a nationwide issue, such as the H1N1virus vaccine, and mounted a successful campaign to target misinformation. NASA has engaged citizens to get more interested in science through the use of steam games and NASA-sponsored Tweetups.

The governmental and political applications for social media are still in their infancy and the opportunities for tracking online intelligence are limitless. Harnessing the power of the Web is an important must-do for anyone in either field.

Image from Gov Gab.

Last week, several members of the Spiral16 team attended the monthly meeting of the KAIROS Analytics Group. I was outnumbered by our resident technology and analytics geeks, but being on the marketing side of things, I was particularly interested in the presentation, which focused on social media strategy.

Mike Brown from strategy consulting firm Brainzooming was the speaker, and his reasonably titled talk, “Social Media Will Neither Save Nor End the World As We Know It,” was very different from others I had seen before. (Plus, the title had kind of an old-school R.E.M. feel to it, which I’m totally down with.)

First off, due to the venue, Mike had to present without a computer at all. No powerpoint, no video, nothing. He adapted rather creatively with a big tablet of cartoon drawings on an easel, to which he kept drawing on top of to make his point.

Second of all, it was easy to remember. It seemed like common sense.

One section, it turns out, has already been shared on his blog, and its a chart that I really enjoyed that lays out a method for getting your social media strategy closer to that elusive ROI. By planning for and capturing both the easy-to-measure quantitative (“left-brain”) metrics and the more slippery qualitative (“right-brain”) returns, you can get a more “whole-brain” picture of your strategy.

See the full-sized chart at Brainzooming.com.

What I like about this is the fact that its easy to conceptualize and relate to. There’s no complicated formula to gum up the works. (If there’s anything I hate more than Nickelback, it’s math.)

In your campaign, either you are 1) Initiating Activity, 2) Interacting with your customers, or 3) Receiving Returns based on your efforts. It’s as simple as that. Separate those into left-brain/right-brain and you’ve got a complete picture.

Common sense, right?

When planning your social media strategy, you’ll be able to see how comprehensive it is by looking at how you are or aren’t filling the chart out. Saying this is kind of the big buzz right now, but this makes it even more clear:

Social media without strategy is like shooting in the dark.

Do you have an easy way to lay out your social media strategy? What helps you organize your plan?