Though our wide-ranging crepe-based discussion panel on Saturday morning was a highlight, I’m seated in the cavernous ballroom A for Brynn “No relation to Will or Bob” Evans is sitting on this panel, so I really wanted to hear it.

Brynn is kicking things off. She is concerned with the interaction design of search and how to integrate social networks and search.

We want to frame this problem as not making search as relying on google, but how can our friends help us? You have to think of search as a process over time. If you can reframe how you think of search is done, you could make use of friends at any time during that path, it’s not just google.

There is no one definition of social search but three distinct types:

1) collective
gathering trends from a crowd. Looking at many people’s activities and how can we make sense of that
2) friend-filtered
3) Collaborative
Like aardvark does.

What are people’s social strategies? How do people want to interact with friends when they search?

Two main strategies: ask the network, or embark alone. People ask their networks first, they’re kind of scared of venturing into google without help from their network.

People sometimes want to embark alone on google first, can’t find what they want or get confused, and then go back to their social networks for help.

Now it’s Max Ventilla from Aardvark.

They started Aardvard from a opp they saw in queries — subjective questions about how people spend their time and money — this is the biggest source of searches.

People are still turning to friends and co-workers for info, but it’s generally unreliable. It’s hard to keep up with what they know about, and unreliable to tap all your friends. There’s also a social cost to it. Generally, you don’t want to bother someone by asking.

At Aardvark, you ask a question, Aardvark identifies the people in your network that can best answer that question, and connects you to them. It connects you with information that isn’t published anywhere.

Social intimacy makes information actionable. They now answer 85% of questions asked to the system in the last year. 45% of questions lead to crosstalk.

About 50% of users answer a question at some point. This is incredible participation rate.

Intimacy is more valuable than trust

Social context is more important than social graph

Speakers know who they’re addressing

You don’t need a leaderboard or metric counts — people continue to participate regardless.

Ash Rust now up from OneRiot — ranks and delivers search results from social networks

Realtime search – they help people find what people are talking about now

Realtime ads

Realtime API – to make it movable

Now Scott Pridle from CPB who leads innovation talking about the money side of the equation.

Everything that CPB does factors in social. Now a few cases showing work that uses aardvark and one riot models.

Give customers something good to talk about in social media and they will talk.

Right now with Old Navy, you go online and create a mannequin like yourself, get people to vote on it. The winner gets 100,000 and a mannequin that looks like them.

What happens is that people pass it on Twitter, then picked up by One Riot. If you search OR for Old Navy, you won’t get the store site, you’ll see all the conversation. And that seeds the virality. Also has a facebook app/page.

Where it related to aarvark model, large brands are trying to figure out how they talk to people. With Best Buy, they made a platform for in-store experts to communicate with people. There was an opportunoity to pull all 2000 blueshirts together and give people responses customized, and quickly.

It used to be that agencies would create TV and then create interactive around that. With Best Buy, it was create the interactive platform first and then develop TV around that ability as a brand value add with consumers — even if they’re not on Twitter. They using it as social proof.

Now going to discussion time….

Brynn going after Rust to try and understand how they look at social graphs, relevance, and their methodologies to evaluate value, and he did a good job of stepping around it. But he did say that they’re breaking it down into smaller groups of value to try and return value.

Brynn has found that it’s not about retraining people on querying, but about how to include their friends. They pick the experts in their community to turn to. But how do you index that? How do you return good information?

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Working in the infancy of ecommerce slightly more than a decade ago, the only survivors of the first bust were the companies who had developed their own common engine: effectively allowing for attrition among storefront brands while maintaining a behind-the-scenes hub that could add new sites faster and easier with every installation. If one site needs customization, now that improvement is available to every other site being driven by the engine.

What results from common-engine thinking is a distinct advantage for every team that touches it:

Strategy

With every campaign and distributed presence sending back metrics, strategists can deconstruct and re-synthesize all kinds of trends specific to the history of the brand-audience relationship. This singular perspective would be awesome to only spend time improving strategies that work and completely new ideas.

Interaction Design

Within the digital channels outlined in the strategy, Information Architects, User Experience professionals, and Interaction Designers can quickly see the interaction paths that the intended audience feels most comfortable with. Comment boxes or Twitter integration? Ratings like Digg or ratings like YouTube? Common-engine intelligence should be able to provide these answers immediately and conclusively; reducing all those highly ambiguous, political meetings to just a few less ambiguous political meetings.

Visual Design and Copy

What visual designer or copywriter wouldn’t love this set of components and quantitative looks at what has worked? Common engines allow them to focus only on bringing those elements through the specific context of the interaction and brand voice.

Programmers

If there’s anything programmers hate, it’s having to start all over again with ambiguous (at best) direction. Working from a common-engine architecture using Web services means a lot more iterating and improving on components that have already been tested and used in a live environment.

Brand Management

Last but not least, brand managers will love the ability to quickly mobilize digital initiatives across the platforms that make the most sense. Even better, brand management can quickly kill anything that doesn’t work, and continue adding niches with contextually focused content — without a heavy lift every single time.

As a practical example of what I’m talking about, while at Emerge we had a great integrated effort with Upshot using the common-engine framework for Miller, allowing the brand to quickly create new educational video sites for bartenders.

First, the conceptual model of how Miller Lite ServerSpeak works:
Here’s a short video showing how we got from user flow through architecture and interface:

Have you used a common engine for your marketing efforts? What do you think? Leave a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis.

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Forget the metaphors. What is your brand actually doing to literally get on that list? How are you helping people and being a utility in a way where you’ve made the brand easily convenient at the place structured in time to make trial and habits easy to build?

Last Friday at PhillyChi’s DesignSlam, I was reminded of this all over again. For those who don’t know, DesignSlam is a geeky gathering of professionals across the interaction design spectrum. Split into teams, a faux-client presents business challenges, and the teams have 45 minutes to conceptualize and then pitch their solutions.

This year’s DesignSlam challenge was to help a family Supermarket chain gain traction against the giant regionals. One of the concepts the winning team presented was dynamic shopping lists based on frequent shopper club data. It’s an idea we explored at Emerge, along with Paul Marran (interactive creative director) and Scott Wagner (Interactive Art Director) for Kraft. To prove out and prototype the concept, we used the Kraft and Publix Game Day Greats campaign.

The microsite was initially just a way for people to enter the ticket giveaway they found out about at the in-store promo (don’t get me started about why CPGs need to start sending out networked kiosks). But we wanted to deliver more than an ending, but a beginning to the second half of the cycle: coming back to the store to buy.

Adding recipes to every microsite is a staple of Kraft’s, and for good reason: they’re giving you new ideas on what to cook (which people are always looking for), and how to use the product. We all know there’s one more step to the process, though: making it onto the shopping list. So in this microsite, we created the way for Kraft and Publix to alleviate that tedium: automatically generating printable shopping lists based on user-selected recipes.

Since then, Kraft has rolled out the iPhone app that takes list-making to the next level, and been paid well by consumers for it. Without revealing metrics, I can say it was one of the most successful efforts they’ve had in microsites to date. Because we’re extending the usefulness all the way through the narrative of the target instead of serving up more BrandCandy for good-looking presentations in meetings, but doesn’t help the relationship.

What is the shopping list of your audience?

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Application Programming Interfaces are what drives much of the integration and mobility in data that people call Web 2.0. For about the last year, I’ve been writing about using the API push model, and especially for industries like newspapers, APIs are today’s honor boxes: putting information in the places your audience is most likely to be.

The real beauty of APIs though is when you can use them to make your site a social object in social networks. In the simplest sense, what if someone is visiting your microsite, and when they get to the third click, you give them a virtual gift to post on their Facebook page? It’s a quick operation, which leads directly to:

• More use of your site: How much more time will someone spend on that site looking for more virtual gifts, engaging in your messaging, and achieving the goals you want them to (like filling out a form and entering the brand’s database) along the way.
• Instant promotion: Even in a worst case scenario of only one person saying yes to a virtual gift, it’s providing the brand with about 120 exposures, including links to click back to the microsite. If only 2000 people accept the gift, the brand has just inked 240,000 invitations to find out more.

With the most simple API implementation, the brand is gaining an effective presence on Facebook without ever having created a fan page. The more involved you get with APIs like facebook connect, the more you can integrate social techniques, like pictures of friends and their earned media — putting the brand at the center of the social discourse in a larger context the brand controls, instead of in the context of Facebook or Twitter’s brand.

Really, it keeps coming back to the fact that digital content is at least as important to brands as the product they sell — and the model companies use for logistics is being matched in consumer-facing technology. No brand would entertain the idea of keeping their products at the factory and insisting that every customer find a way there to buy. Why treat your communications this way? APIs are the logistical fleet carrying the brand message to the places where people already go.

What do you think? Continue the conversation in the comments below, or on Twitter @mleis.

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To a chorus of rousing applause, more and more large brands are discontinuing the practice of creating microsites and instead create campaigns that exist solely on Facebook.

This is a hideous, awful idea spawned from the same lazy thinking that made microsites so bad in the first place. So let me play the role of the Lorax here and take a minute to speak for the Microsites, for the Microsites have no voice:

What’s Facebook’s Business Model Again?

If you can answer this question, more power to you. I can’t. Why would I invest all of my digital development dollars into a company or a platform without clear direction? Will they shift all their features tomorrow in a way that drastically affects how your fan page acts, or is visible, or gains traction with the target audience? Will some VC pull all their money out of Facebook on Monday and shut it down? As someone with fiduciary responsibility to invest client money well, this is a huge bet that the brand equity coming back in the short term is worth dropping cash on a site who’s future I can’t reliably predict into next month.

Can I Haz Database?

The other trade brands make with social platforms is their database. Anytime a brand makes its own microsite, the secondary goal (if not the primary goal) should be retention: always providing a value exchange for contact information that helps build a database helping marketers to continue streamlining and creating future offers that delight potential customers. It’s a compounding investment in making better products, experiences, and relationships with your audience. There are lots of takeaways from any experience on a social platform, but almost no tangible effect on building a database that you own. Again, taking the “Facebook gets hit by a bus tomorrow,” scenario in effect, what is a brand left with?

Thanks For All the Metrics

Can you imagine the kind of insight you could get if as a fan page creator, Facebook returned even 10% of the metrics they collect regarding that fan page? Heck, even 1% would be a boon. Right now, Facebook gives you what amounts to eye candy. And eye candy is actually significantly more than what they gave back before. When you make your own site, 100% of the metrics you collect are owned by you (well, in most cases today it’s you and Google, and Google is another atrocious offender, but that’s a whole other story).

The Answer Lies in APIs

Since I’m already past 400 words, I’ll have to dedicate another post in exploring this answer a little more fully, but continuing to build microsites using social network APIs are the the solution for a myriad reasons, most of all because they keep the real ROI of digital marketing and PR with the enterprise that pays for it. What do you think? Continue the conversation in the comments section below or on Twitter @mleis.

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In both cases, the rationale drives some mythical achievement. Who are these customers? What is the next level? Engaging in social and distributed channels, to be truly effective for the brand, has to be brought back to the brand’s home site. Right now, brands are spending budget sending people running out to these outposts of communication, but they’re running out of gas, unable to make it home.

The next level may actually be refining the budget so you can not only communicate the brand in channels like Twitter, Facebook, Hi5, iTunes, but also to integrate the technology with the home site of the brand, and curate the best parts.

Ken Burbary does a great job collecting and analyzing current examples (read the comments, too. Lots of good ones) as this concept of integration is dawning on larger consumer-facing brands. I’ve talked about it a few times before as well, specifically about bringing Twitter back home, and pivoting off Dirk Shaw’s concept of integrating earned media.

Why should you invest incrementally in a digital strategy that integrates those presences with your main branded site? A few concepts that I hope will underline its importance:

Ownership

Literally. Taking the content that you or your customers create about you in social media is not owned by you. You’ve sunk the money, you’re generating the on-the-record goodwill. Why isn’t it on a server and a site that you own, too? Curate the best content that you’re monitoring or engaging in at the brand level and get

1. Return on your investment. Technology investments are immediately obsolete. At least retain the brand equity you’ve built.
2. Protection in experimental media. Who knows when the next Fail Whale or DOS attack or even a service going out of business will happen? What’s your backup?
3. Compounding Returns. Curating at the home site means you’re getting twice the niche exposure for an incremental cost increase.

Simply, contextually, the logo that appears at the top of the page wins. Have a place where your logo is at the top. Own the agenda somewhere.

Proof

Both brand proof “look at what we’re doing” and social proof “look at the people at our company and among our customers who are taking part in the cause of our brand.” Now the brand site can really be a living reflection of the work. And isn’t this a big part of why you’re engaging in social and distributed strategy in the first place? Integrating this is walking the walk at home and afar.

What’s next

A big problem in many campaigns is that they only allow for so much interaction. With a hub, you can give a user in any social or distributed network an easy “next step” into discovering (and you can’t underestimate the power of discovery), what other content you have to offer, and where else they can have access to it.

SEO

For most brands, the site where most people will begin forming opinions online is Google or some other search engine. People search using common phrases that come naturally to them. People also use social networks with common phrases that come naturally to them. See a pattern here? Integrating distributed content makes it easier for people using search engines to find you.

Acknowledging the brand as software developer

It’s all really about the fact that the old addage of “We’re not in the [enter technology here] business.” Which continues to linger in brands that need to start really taking on and developing software solutions, online or on the desktop. But that’s like saying that coke isn’t in the vending machine business, or the trucking business.

Software design and development is a logistical expense for communicating effectively and evocatively with an audience. It’s not going away, and I don’t think it’s an expense that can be carried forever from marketing or PR: two industries not known for taking on these deeper kinds of endeavors.

But since marketing and PR are the places most looked towards to carry the torch of integration, please plan your strategy to include the run back home. Your audience and your bottom line with thank you for it.

What do you think? Please continue the conversation here or on Twitter @mleis.

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Where I start with clients is breaking down the communications into report, reply, reflect, curate, and share. Here’s a quick sketch of what each one means:

Report

In the state of social and distributed content as it stands now, basic reporting is the foundational building block for creating an effective presence. Observe what is happening around you. What are you listening to, working on, or thinking about that provides a positive peek into your daily life?

From the perspective of the creator, this activity sometimes feels like wading in a mixture of narcissism and banality. But if you’re talking with people who are interested enough to friend or follow you, these are the pings of personality.

Most detractors immediately cite the notion of someone “tweeting what they ate for lunch.” The reality is that the lunches are what they remember most, and they’re surprised to have such a visceral response to a seemingly trivial message. Of course, if you tweeted what you have for lunch every day, it will get tedious and tuned out. Just like any over-repeated message.

Reply

When people talk to you, about your brand or products, or just say something interesting in your community, reply. This seems self evident, but the existential weight of the position holding the brand out for everyone to see sometimes outweighs the tendency to send out a response.

In social media, there’s a kind of moral obligation to respond as much as possible, within appropriate boundaries (and there’s a whole framework for creating these boundaries, but that’s another article).

Even when people are bashing your brand, at least reply that you hear them, and are working on it. Even though the corporate in you says, “take this into email or private messaging,” resist. Reply to people as publicly as you can, for as long as you can. Demonstrate that you are a person, too.

If people in your network post a funny picture of their cat, say so. People really like getting replies. They know you’re in the network. You shouldn’t lurk, waiting for the perfect business scenario, like FAQs come to life. It doesn’t exist.

Reflect

Reflecting is a little more abstract. In the most basic sense, it’s a ReTweet on Twitter, or a “Links of the week” on your blog. It’s featuring the parts of that public you find valuable, and reflecting them back into the community. Reflecting does the work of both providing the social proof that you’re paying attention to the platform which you are a part, and the social object that strengthens your one-to-one relationship with those authors.

At a more granular level as a creator yourself, reflecting provides you the opportunity to learn how the people in that network structure communication, turn a phrase, set up a link. This exercise should be training you on how those people in that public want you to communicate with them.

Curate

As you see all these incredibly valuable updates and posts come down your activity streams, don’t just aggregate, curate. Curation is the act of cataloging, categorizing, as well as adding context and insight to the information you receive. Not only the content created by your marketing department, but of the community, where it fits with your brand cause.

By curating the information you get from social networks in social bookmark communities, your blog, and wherever else your audience is, you’re helping your own organization’s knowledge base, finding new valuable relationships and related content on those platforms: Everyone wins.

Share

While the concept of sharing encompasses everything a social media presence is about, in this practical framework we’re specifically talking about sharing content from within the organization and between networked publics.

First, it’s really common to take for granted that the information you see in the course of your job is the same as the information your audience knows about. Any time you run a survey, or have an R&D effort, bring what you can back to the places you engage. Create a graphic to express the information visually if you can.

You will be surprised at how much people appreciate the knowledge, the sneak peak at what’s coming next, or insights on the future of your industry. Just keep it casual and usable. Make it easy for people to scan and find value. In the case of surveys, release interesting data points in related groups over a few days.

By the same token, the information you see in the different publics is not the same perspective the people in those networks have. If there’s a hot topic on Twitter, share those links in your StumbleUpon, blog, Facebook, and MySpace. You’ll have to contextualize them differently depending on how the group works (see reflecting), but you’re most likely sharing content that group hasn’t seen before, and will find worthwhile.

Of course this isn’t the be-all, end-all. Hopefully it spurs you to think in a more practical sense about how to apply social media strategy.

What do you think? Do you use any similar frameworks? Let’s continue the conversation below in the comments, or on Twitter @mleis.

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For example, watching a juggling act alone is entertaining. Adding a fire-eater who performs in a ring next to the juggling ring creates a new experience of watching both acts, but also adds meaning between the two acts. When you have three rings of acts performing at once, the viewer takes even more meaning, gets even more entertainment, and simply can’t take their eyes off the action for a moment.

Today, this approach is so pervasive it’s cliche. Think of the shot sequence for almost any product in a television commercial: a master shot that sets the scene, pleasant expressions of people who can relate to the target audience, and product shot. Juxtaposing smiling faces and products along with light/dark color values engages audiences and sells products.

Applying this idea to the user experience through social networking platforms draws some interesting parallels. People are spending exponentially more time on social media sites. If you think of the visual elements of these sites, there is a ton of contrast and meaning built through the typical browsing experience. Lots of faces of people you know, set against each other in various combinations. Between pages, each of the big three social networks also offer varying degrees of contrast between page states in design choices available to the creator of that profile: both in user interface control placement and color.

MySpace: Overwhelming Contrast

MySpace offers users the highest degree of customization: users can affect not only the colors, fonts, and sounds as part of their page presentation, but also rearrange the user interface controls. To tweens and teens, this is appealing as a creator: you can build, tear down, and rebuild your online persona as it relates to your peer group online and off. It also presents a browsing experience akin to what MTV was to television when it first began: rapid-fire, high contrast, and unexpected pairings of visual elements to keep kids engaged.

The problem is when this contrast extends itself to the interface controls. TV takes you through the experience. On the Web, you need to have consistency in the way you control the experience, so the user can effortlessly gain value from the entire experience and not get stuck on confused on any particular page.

This has led to is what I call the “hollowing out” of MySpace as a social experience. It’s just difficult to visit multiple users in one sitting. It gets tiresome, annoying, and overwhelming. To me, this inconsistency will ultimately lead MySpace to fulfill the destiny of Yahoo’s recently defunct Geocities. When the collection of pages becomes an array of mini-sites each with it’s own rules on how to shape a one-page experience, what you end up with is ultimately valueless to any audience. The value is only in the vanity and satisfaction of the individual creator.

Facebook: low contrast, high structure

On the opposite extreme is the freight train of Facebook. Here, the user controls are completely locked down from one page state to the other. Going from one page to the next, the majority of the visual contrast and meaning come from pictures of people. Here we are back to the meaning inherent in collections of faces of people you know. The most dominant visual aspects in the experience are the Facebook logo, and pictures of people.

As applications became popular, they started to create a lot of the visual noise, and meaning that MySpace is (in)famous for. Recent redesigns of the user experience have buried the 15-ring circus of the old mini-feed. I think this is what has vaulted applications like Living Social to be most popular: it provides the feed with a short burst of five contrasting images next to the profile avatar: adding color and meaning to the individual and the page without overwhelming the experience. The same goes for how many photos are posted. The way Facebook presents these photos in the stream is similar to Living Social, and draws the attention of the viewer because it stands out with contrasting color and size, without dominating.

It’s also interesting to me that Facebook’s tight control over contrast and UI control finds a great affinity with suburban people here in the US, versus the mostly urban and artistic members of MySpace. Is social media a reflection of the contrasts in the daily life of its users?

Twitter: finding the balance

What’s interesting about Twitter is how it has found a visual balance between MySpace and Facebook in terms of the browsing experience. Users can express themselves within a range of color settings: image backgrounds, font colors, and avatar pictures. Where information and controls are presented, however, never changes.

What results is contrast and subtextual meaning through the experience between page states, but the controls from page to page are always in the same place, using the same hierarchy (organization in the order of the main functions of the site) and with the same font. So even when someone goes as far as to make their type a color that is virtually unreadable, users can continue down the path of discovery without getting stuck. It keeps the experience moving and interesting without bogging someone down in the blaring auto-play sounds of MySpace, or boring them over a few browsed pages outside of the photo books of Facebook.

This is also the same principal currently driving Tumblr: the quick-blogging platform that resides somewhere between Twitter and blog platforms. Whether Tumblr will ultimately become a major player is still up for debate, but using a similar user experience template to Twitter seems a good bet for the future of Web-based social networks that need to find a balance between personal expression and engaging user experiences.

How much of this will bleed into brand sites?

Also interesting is how corporate and promotional hubs take these lessons of visual contrast and engagement back to their own online presences. As part of my own practice when helping develop strategy to redesign or create a new presence for brands, it’s a valuable lesson to understand: much of a brand’s equity is in the controls and context of the experience. Contrasting image and color choices can help make a brand’s presence more meaningful, engaging, and ultimately valuable to the people who mean the most to that company’s bottom line.

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She is taking the tens of millions of people who watch her shows, avidly read magazines, create comment strings on Facebook — and giving them ambient awareness of celebrities with conversation in real time. When this wave of moms sees Ashton Kutcher and Oprah amongst the tweets of her and her friends, there is a social glue there that may be never be broken.

Oprah, understanding the power of context, is getting ahead of the pack and putting this dynamic within her own context. These new Twitter users will always remember Oprah for introducing Twitter to them, for being their first “friend” on the network. This is a tremendous broadcasting opportunity for her, and the Oprah brand family will only leap in equity as a result.

The biggest winner in all of this is, as always, the brand logo at the top of the Web page fostering the experience: Twitter. For Oprah-watching moms, Twitter will feel like People, Us Weekly, Perez, Oprah, and her friends; all the time and in one place: their networked public. The group of friends that appear in their desktops, laptops, and smartphones.

Everything a CPG marketer could want… and more

This is why consumer packaged good brands of all stripes need to get a grip on Twitter immediately. Oprah’s audience is called many things: Soccer Moms, Multi-Dimensional Moms, Mom CFOs. They are the opinion shapers and spending-approvers of our country. CPG marketers try to keep themselves in the top of these mom’s minds across DVD inserts, print, radio, TV, supermarket floors, and wherever they can ping a value prop.

Now, in Twitter, they can actually add value to the discourse by being a part of it on Twitter. Having ambient awareness of a brand is far more valuable than all the coupons in the world combined. Tweets are so easy to share and discuss, every day a brand is absent from the stream is a day they’re losing ground. All the disparate (or non-existent) metrics from the aforementioned sources springs to vibrant, highly trackable life. Most importantly, brands will be able to see what’s actually on the minds of their audience, have a thriving intelligence environment where they can shape the product while they market it.

So will Oprah’s big announcement today mean to impending death of niche magazines now that Twitter will be providing a superior celebrities and friends service, accessed through the Web and Blackberry screens of our country’s most important purchaser segment? How much print budget will get moved over to social media efforts?

Don’t just buy ad space on accouts

This seems more feasable than ever: Brands trying to buy a tweet schedule across celebrities or programmers like Oprah or CNN. Please people. Understand that you can participate in this channel at a very low cost. You have a great ability here to make the whole experience better, by programming and funding new technologies in the ecosystem to attract users that care, rather than disrupting the experience to pile on another exposure.

What do you think? Add your perspective below, or continue the conversation with me on Twitter.

Need help mapping out a Twitter strategy for your brand? I can help you.

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