Eric Jensen

“Cus­tomers trust each other more than they trust brands.” — Jere­miah Owyang, Altime­ter Group ana­lyst — I just caught a highly infor­ma­tive webi­nar hosted by Jere­miah Owyang, indus­try ana­lyst at Altime­ter Group and the folks at jan­rain and Badgeville. It is a bit long so here are few take­aways… In a sur­vey of 140 global-national cor­po­ra­tions the Altime­ter Group found that the num­ber one ‘go to mar­ket’ goal for 2011 is the effec­tive inte­gra­tion of social media into cor­po­rate web­sites. In this webi­nar Owyang describes a hier­ar­chy of Use Cases each with sev­eral real world exam­ples. No Inte­gra­tion — Your web­site is irrel­e­vant. You are not con­nected to the trusted dis­cus­sion hap­pen­ing in social net­works. Your invest­ments are not work­ing together well. Social Link­ing — This send users off of your site, and while it has made Face­book tons of money, it is not the best strat­egy for your brand. Owyang rec­om­mends skip­ping this step all together and mov­ing directly to… Social Aggre­ga­tion — This comes in Basic, Curated, and Con­tex­tual vari­eties. Some exam­ples: The increas­ing use of social sign-ins Samsung’s inte­gra­tion of live social feeds into their event screens at the recent SXSW con­fer­ence Huff­in­g­ton Post’s aggre­ga­tion of real­time user com­ments into arti­cle pages Social Pub­lish­ing — Encour­ag­ing cus­tomers to share infor­ma­tion, push­ing it back out to the social web. Social Con­text — The prac­tice of con­tin­u­ally updat­ing cus­tomer per­sonas based on con­nec­tions and con­text. A good exam­ple is Amazon’s con­tent rec­om­men­da­tions dri­ven by friends’ reviews and buy­ing choices. Seam­less Inte­gra­tion — The future… URLs…