Eric Whitacre is a composer and conductor. In Lux Aurumque (Light and Gold) he conducts a choir singing his original composition. The choir, 185 strong,  never sang together. They never met each other. They live in 12 different countries. Whitacre posted a video of himself conducting the piece, and every one of those 185 members of the choir submitted their individual parts through YouTube. The 247 separate tracks were combined into a rather amazing work that has been seen almost 2 million times. One of the contributors lived in a cabin in the remote Alaskan wilderness, 400 miles from the nearest town. Her satellite link was her only connection to the world.

The Johnny Cash Project is an equally amazing collaborative effort. Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk took archival film footage of Johnny Cash, dissected it frame by frame, and asked artists from around the world to redraw each frame. The contributions were stitched back together with Cash’s song, “Ain’t No Grave” as the soundtrack. The result is mesmerizing.

But perhaps the must stunning example of digital collaboration came not from art, but the very real world of the middle east, Wadah Kanfar, the chief of Al Jazeera, told us how the voices of many, amplified through technology, are bringing democracy and new hope to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

These examples speak of something much broader and powerful than just the typical applications of social media. And, like social media’s less attractive side, the impact of these new connections on society is yet to be determined. There is a social experiment being conducted in real time but the results will only be fully realized through the lens of hindsight. Can true democracy be established in a place like Libya, even with the power of connection? Time alone will tell.

The new technology of connection releases things that are deeply human – the need to be part of the greater whole (i.e. the choir member from Alaska), the need to contribute something of ourselves to the world (i.e. the Johnny Cash Project) and the need for fairness and justice (i.e. protests in the Middle East). In the last example, these connections illuminate the human condition in the darkest corners of the world and force accountability. Since the beginnings of time, unfairness in the tribe has been punished. The difference now is that our human tribe extends around the world. Kanfar told an amazing story that unfolded during the height of one of the protests. The demonstrators pleaded with Al Jazeera to keep the cameras rolling through the night. “If you stop, we’re lost. But as long as you keep showing what’s happening, we have hope.”

Perhaps the true paradox of social media is not that we’re becoming less social, but that we’re becoming social in different ways. As we spend less time in our flesh and blood engagements, we spend more time establishing connections that were impossible before. Mark Granovetter, in the 70’s, found that our social networks are composed of two distinct types of linkages, which he called strong and weak ties. The strong ties are the family and friends bonds that generally require both proximity and significant time together. The weak ties are the extended bonds that we might call acquaintances. As Granovetter found, it’s the weak ties that carry the surprising power of a community, especially when they’re mobilized for a common purpose.  We rely on weak ties for referrals, favors and job offers. They extend beyond our immediate circle and provide important social capital when required.

Perhaps social media has had a negative impact on our strong ties, as I alluded to in my last column. But, as I was reminded today, it has dramatically increased our ability to form weak ties that align to concepts, interests and causes. And don’t let the name “weak ties” fool you. When they’re synchronized, they can be tremendously powerful. You might call them the harmonized voices of a global choir.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider Mar 3. 2011

Take shopping, for example. The big buzz around the office lately is all about Twongo.com. They entered our little local market with a big splash recently by associating themselves through a charity event. Here in Kelowna, the Rotary Centre for the Arts (RCA) is a public space for visual and performing arts (full disclaimer, I was on the Board of Directors there for five years). With big cutbacks in support from the provincial government, the RCA is scrambling even more than usual to secure funding and keep their programs running. For one week in September, Twongo, along with participating local businesses, donated revenue generated through Twongo to the RCA. The net result was over $9,000 raised in a week for the Centre, and a whole lot of great publicity for Twongo.

The next thing I know, people in the office have signed up on Twongo and are shopping like mad. They’re alerting friends to deals, sharing stories on their latest purchases, and they’re excited! This makes shopping social, even when you’re not out there shopping. Are sites like Twongo and Groupon a fad or are they, more importantly, a trend? Do these services mean that those small businesses that don’t have web sites can now skip that kind of marketing altogether and just build or expand their clientele through group discounting?

Have you used Groupon or Twongo? What are your thoughts? Is there a B2B play to be made?

There’s two types of conversations we can have about social media, and measurement in particular: strategic and tactical.

They need to happen in that order and you need to understand the difference. This post is a tactical one.

If you don’t already understand the need for a clear strategic understanding of your business, your online presence, customers and competitors both online and off, and what your businesses’ primary goals are across all units and departments, go take the time to figure that out. (Reading Groundswell might be a good start ).

Tactically speaking, how do you start measuring social media? Is there enough social stuff out there to make it worthwhile? What numbers do I show to our CMO and CFO to get any time or budget at all to be able to monitor, participate and grow a social media presence?

Here are some examples of ways to see right now, in any business, what impact social media might be having on your organization.

1. Traffic from Referring Sites

This might seem like a no-brainer, but see if you’re getting traffic (and links) from social networks, blogs, forums and other communities. See which sites are sending traffic (sometimes a proxy for buzz) and which are sending more engaged visitors than the site average or more conventional traffic sources (time on site and pages per view)

2. Conversions from Referring Sites

Again from the Referring Sites report, you should have conversions tracked through goals, events or e-commerce. See which sites are sending quality traffic. You can see #1, 2, 3 and 4 are all sending solid traffic which is doing a pretty good job of converting. (The #1 source is their own blog, which is just rocking out!)

3. Create a Custom Segment for Social Media

This will make your life much easier. Find the top 10 or so social media sites sending you good traffic, or which you’re targeting to participate in, and create a segment for them. Follow them, and you can start by using the conventional traffic metrics if you’re not measuring other social media metrics.

4. Check Google Blog Search

Just stick your head in once a month and see how many results show up. Try your branded terms, product names and the names of high profile individuals at your organization.

It’s not rocket science, just making better use of the data you already have.

There’s a number of different methods you can use when developing your social media strategy. One that we’re fond of at Enquiro is Forrester Research’s POST method. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. One of the benefits of this method is how it keeps the user, rather than the technology, at the centre of your strategy.

The first step in developing a social media strategy is to know who you need to reach – the People part of the POST method. And this is where Buyersphere insights, from Enquiro’s research on how business buys from business in the online marketplace, can be really useful. Remember that in B2B sales, you actually need to reach two very different types of people: people who use your products and services (the “doers”) and people who decide whether to purchase your products and services (the “buyers”). This can give you two different target audiences who you need to reach with your social media strategy. They can have differing demographics, visit different social networks, and have differing levels of participation online.

The doer will be interested in information on the latest news about your industry and best practices that they can use in their own work. If they aren’t using your product yet, they will be looking for more information about your services. If you are using social media as a customer support channel for past purchasers, it is the doer you are talking to.

The buyer is looking to ensure that you are a trustworthy vendor. They need to know that buying your product isn’t a financial risk to their organization. Reputation management will be important in successfully reaching this persona. This speaks to the need to listen to what people are saying about your brand online. And while you can’t control what people say about your business, you can demonstrate that you respond to your customers’ concerns. If you have a high risk product (very expensive or if you an unestablished brand in the marketplace), showcasing your company as a thought leader in the industry can be persuasive for the buyer.

Knowing that there are two different personas also means that you will develop different objectives and follow different strategies for each group. The reason why and how you engage a doer will be different than why and how you engage a buyer. A doer, for example, is more likely to become an evangelizer of your product than a buyer is. And only once you figure out who you are trying to reach and why you want to engage them can you then ask “Do I need to be on Facebook?”. If you know your target audience and your objectives, then you will be able to decide what technology and platforms will best help your social media strategy to succeed.

Twitterfeed – Twitterfeed integrates with your blog so that every time you publish a new blog post, your Twitter feed is updated automatically.

Tweetmeme – For finding new memes and top tweets on Twitter. Sort options include subject, media types (news, images or video), and period of time.

We Follow – A director of Twitter users if you are looking to find people to follow, sorted by topic of interest. Also a place to add yourself if you are hoping to gain users yourself.

Twellow – another director of Twitter users, plus Twellowhood, for finding people in a specific geographic location.

Bit.ly – A URL shortener with click-through information.

MyTweeple – Trying to decide whether to follow someone? Use this tool to check out a persons user stats, latest tweets, and to penalize spammers.

Hootsuite – A nice application for scheduling tweets for later dates. Also can track stats.

TweetDeck – A favorite of ours in the office. Everyone around me uses TweetDeck to display their tweets in customizable columns which can be sorted by groups and type of message (i.e. DMs, mentions). For desktop and iPhone.

Readtwit – Readtwit is a way to filter your Twitter feed so that redirects (such as URL shorteners) are resolved and you get an RSS feed of your content.

What the Trend – This site explains why certain topics are trending.

Do you have any other favorites?

-          Procrasdonate – Have you been wasting time surfing around the internet aimlessly? Need an incentive to be more productive online? Procrasdonate is an application that tracks when you are spending time online on time wasters rather than working – and if you spend too much time surfing or on Facebook, you have to make a donation. It gives you a reason to be more productive and if you are not, you are still supporting a worthy cause.

-          Nabuur – Nabuur is a site that allows for online volunteerism in your area of expertise. If you are an accountant, a lawyer, a marketer, or have some other specialized field of experience, Nabuur will match your talents with local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

-          Blog Action Day – Blog Action Day is a day in October where bloggers around the world write about one specific topic. In 2009, over 13,000 bloggers participated by writing about climate change. It’s a great way to bring visibility to critical issues by harnessing the crowd.

-          No Impact Man – This site arose out of the No Impact Experiment, where a journalist and his family tried to live without making any impact on the environment (no trash, carbon emissions, etc.) – while living in New York City. He has since launched No Impact Man, which allows anyone to tell stories about how they try to impact environmental change – no matter how big or how small – to inspire others.

-          Relay for Life – one of my favourites. Relay for life is a virtual walk-a-thon for cancer research. It takes place in Second Life. People raise money and walk their avatars in an online environment in the same way that is normally done in an offline one.

-          Avaaz – Avaaz.org tackles a wide range of social issues. This community has a bottoms-up approach when it comes to deciding just what issues to focus on. Members of the site get to vote on what they believe are the most critical issues, which is how they decide what to take action on.

Social location sharing is not the only location-based tool gaining attention. MyTown and other location-based, augmented reality games based on location are taking off. MyTown has been particularly successful – particularly in terms of user engagement. The average MyTown user in the U.S. spends 60 minutes per day using the app.

If you are a business looking at ways to incorporate geosocial networking into your social media mix, here are a few things to consider:

-          Know which social location network is the most important for you to target given your geographical location. For example, in Vancouver, Foursquare is the most popular location-sharing application while Gowalla is king in Austin, where it was created.

-          Claim and / or tag your business on social location sharing sites. Once you have this in place you can reward repeat visitors with various promotions.

-          Offer coupons or discounts to visitors who check in to your location and Tweet / announce their presence publicly – this will help spread your brand name.

People tend to be very enthusiastic about the subject of music. CBC Radio 3 is fortunate as they have a substantial base of online users currently using their web properties. The wiki is meant to harness their knowledge and enthusiasm. This provides an established base which will allow their project to succeed. There were some key takeaways from the session that you may want to consider if you are an organization considering accepting online contributions from the public – whether it be comments, forums, or wikis.

Key Takeaways

-          How can you introduce radically different technologies within an organization? Within your organization, you need to innovate at the edges, where there is less impact on your organization if things go wrong. As an organizational entity, CBC Radio 3 exists at the margins of the CBC as a whole. It is often referred to as the ‘Area 51’ of the CBC as it tries out new technologies and tries to reach new audiences. It is a place where it is okay to fail. The project was also developed in Vancouver, out of the way of the main Toronto headquarters of CBC – so physically on the fringes on the organization as well.

-          Minimize editorial risks in order to reduce liability.

-          The key benefit to crowdsourcing the creation of content is to minimize financial costs. With 700 people cut from the CBC last year and continual budget cuts, the only way for CBC Radio 3 to generate a mass of new content is to involve the public.

Lessons Learned: Creating Content

-          Balance openness with editorial checks.

-          Get a mass of contributors.

-          Use an existing base of power users.

Lessons Learned: Corporate Culture

-          Can your culture support the idea? Some organizations would not be willing to open up and host content that hasn’t gone through stringent guidelines or review. This type of approach to content generation would not work in a heavily top-down organization.

As a news organization, the CBC has learned that the softer the area of news, the more open the site can be. This is where the community can police itself. Once you move to hard news, where politics and other controversial issues come into play, openness to audience contributions is much harder to accomplish. There are some cases where the CBC will publish stories and keep the comments turned off as they know the quality of discussion will deteriorate – there are some topics that will be better for public contributions than others. As controversy increases, so does your organization’s liability and risk.

-          People get tied up with technology when they get into blogging. Remember: it’s writing.

-          A good blog post is about the story: whether this is a personal or for business, it doesn’t matter.

-          Sometimes voice is the issue; you may be using a personal or academic voice in your writing when a different voice is more appropriate for your readership.

-          Blogging, and practising blogging, is one of the best ways to finding your voice.

-          Privacy is always an issue. Remember that your blog is public and while you have made the choice to present information publically, the people around you have not made that same choice.

-          “Your blog is your living room”. It is fair to delete negative comments if that is not the type of content you want on your blog.

-          How long should your posts be? Write until you are done. This could be 2 sentences or 800,00 words. As long as you are telling a good story, people will keep reading. But if you are posting long posts, use subheadings for easy reading. Reading on a monitor is 30% slower and results in 50% less comprehension than reading on paper.

-          Short posts do not necessitate using Twitter. If your content is useful, then publish it using whatever medium you feel is appropriate for the audience you are trying to reach.

-          A good posting frequency is 3 – 5 times a week. It is rare to find anyone who is posting too much. There is a direct correlation between post frequency and blog traffic.

-          Is it not a problem to publish first and then edit later. Your post doesn’t need to be static once it is on the web, particularly if you are improving it.

-          Multiple blogs are not recommended for segmenting content unless you are going to update all of them. Use tags and categories to segment your content.

-          Do not duplicate content between blogs! This is an SEO faux pas.

-          “Blogs are like crack to search engines”. (My favorite quote of the whole session).

Technology Platforms

-          If you are tech agnostic, try Posterous or Tumblr. Posterous is like a hub to spokes model whereas Tumblr is the reverse and can both pull in and push out content.

-          WordPress is always recommended. For business, start with WordPress.org and host the service yourself. This gives you more control over the platform and gives you more potential to grow.

-          WordPress does not own your content – this is in the user license agreement.

-          There will be a new WordPress 3 platform launched shortly – possibly next week.

-          Woopra is a great WordPress plugin for stats.

-          You cannot have Adsense or Affiliate ads on WordPress.com – unless they are Amazon ads for your own books. Hosting yourself allows you to get away from this restriction.

-          Personal bloggers may want to start with WordPress.com, the hosted service. Less control, but easier for those who are not tech savvy.

-          Moving your blog is worse than moving your house. Files can end up in mysterious corners that are difficult to find.

-          There is nothing technically wrong with using Blogger, but it is not one of the products Google is focusing on. They have not been keeping up with the latest changes to blogging platforms.

-          Getting a domain host is like living in a condo – you mostly own it.

-          Using a hosted service is like living in a dorm – the basic elements are standardized and the same in each room (for each site).

-          GoDaddy is a poor hosting choice due to the poor interface.

You can find out more about Tris and his work on his website at http://trishussey.com/.