** Social Email Marketing – SAN FRANCISCO (17th Sept) **
Join Brian Solis and friends for insights into how to integrate social media and email. Including Constant Contact and Strongmail.
Book tickets here: http://socialmediamarketing.co.uk/socialemail/

** Social Media Advertising – LONDON (20th Sept) **
Includes Facebook ads, mobile ads, social gaming, promoted tweets and b2b social ads. With speakers from Mindshare, Unruly Media, RockYou and Techlightenment, it’s the ultimate social media advertising conference.
Book tickets here: http://socialmediamarketing.co.uk/socialadvertisinglondon/

** Social Media Marketing & Advertising – MIAMI (30th Sept) **
Includes location marketing (Gowalla/Foursquare) and social graph optimisation, plus blogger outreach and networking.
Book tickets here: http://socialmediamarketing.co.uk/socialmarketing&advertisingmiami/

** Monitoring Social Media – BOSTON (5th Oct) **
Includes Radian6, Brandwatch and how to gauge the ROI of social media, with speakers from Forrester and Compete.com
Book here: http://www.monitoringsocialmedia.co.uk/boston/

** Monitoring Social Media – SAN FRANCISCO (21st Oct) **
Marcel LeBrun (CEO, Radian6) and friends discuss social media monitoring, including sentiment analysis and ROI.
Book here: http://www.monitoringsocialmedia.co.uk/sanfrancisco/

** Monitoring Bootcamp – SAN FRANCISCO (22nd Oct) **
Social media monitoring training with some of the world’s leading experts
Book via Monitoring Social Media San Francisco

** Monitoring Social Media – NEW YORK (4th Nov) **
Seth Grimes, Marshall Sponder and friends explore social media monitoring, with a great pharma industry case study and more.
Book tickets here: http://www.monitoringsocialmedia.co.uk/newyork

** Monitoring Bootcamp – NEW YORK (5th Nov) **
Social media monitoring training with some of the world’s leading experts
Book via Monitoring Social Media New York

** Monitoring Social Media – LONDON (22nd Nov) **
Join me, Giles Palmer (Brandwatch), Philip Sheldrake, Synthesio and friends to explore the latest monitoring techniques.
Book tickets here: http://www.monitoringsocialmedia.co.uk/london/

** Monitoring Social Media – PARIS (7th Dec) **
The day before Le Web, we are inviting French and European monitoring experts to join us for a day of case studies and discussion. Email info@influencepeople.com if you’re interested in taking part.
Website: to be launched.

Shigero Miyamoto - One of the Time's 100 most influential people of the year

I just spotted the bit in LinkedIn Groups that identifies “Top Influencers this week”. In the Connected Marketing Network Group I’m apparently the Top Influencer this week. The fact is though, I’m the Manager for that Group so I add lots of comments and generally hang out there a lot. On the other hand, there are members who post much more insightful comments and who are certainly (in real life) far more influential than me.

At our Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp in London in March, Philip Sheldrake ridiculed the influence calculations of Twitter monitoring solution Klout – highlighting how they were calculating influence based on what they could, not what actually reflected the real nature and complexity of “influence”. The same seems to be the case for LinkedIn: the number of posts you make is no reflection of how influential you are.  It might indicate how committed, networked or bored a person is, but not how much they are influencing people.

This raises the obvious question, is a flawed measurement better than no measurement? Or are we just trying to ascribe value to something far too nebulous, fuelled perhaps by the personal vanity of people (like me) who love to be defined as “influential”.

We’ll be talking about this more at Monitoring Social Media Boston, San Francisco, New York, London and Paris. Hope you can make one of them!

A recent project I ran for one of the UK’s leading product development companies involved training them up to use Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs effectively over a period of months – and I’m pleased to say they’re now getting results (i.e. customers) naturally on the strength of their own content and engagement.

Who’s to say though, that they wouldn’t have been better spending a couple of thousand pounds on LinkedIn advertising? They’ve spent far more than that on my time and theirs, and even when they get a lead – there’s always the issue of tracking. Did it genuinely come from their social media engagement?  (I often talk about a “spiral sales path” in social media). The question is: do high-value customers respond to ads?  Even highly-targeted ads pushed to them by popular sites like LinkedIn or Viadeo?

Next month I’m going to be confronting these questions – along with 200 other marketers – at Social Media Advertising (London), but I’m already pretty sure where I sit on they key issues. In fact, I’ll probably just refer to a 2008 post from Dana Lason from PostRank in which she sets out the 4 things you need to do to integrate social media advertising into your social media marketing:

1. Understand your targeted social media channel
2. Target the correct users with your message
3. Ensure the advertisements are supplementing the present content on the social site
4. Have a social networking presence

This covers the two obvious targeting issues: get the right network and target the right users; and then tackles the issue of integration: connect your adverts to your social media presence and engage with the people visiting/connecting with you. I’ve heard of social media consultants running Facebook ads that, instead of linking to their landing page, links directly to a Facebook Page (or Group). This chimes with Dana’s last two points and also makes a lot of sense – the ad-clicker is already signed into Facebook so they can take action simply by clicking that they “Like” the page. No landing page could get that result in fewer clicks.

Nielsen and Facebook recently teamed up to create an “independent” report which highlighted the value of combining “social” with advertising. Unsurprisingly, people responded better to adverts that told them which of their connections “Liked” the company whose advert they were viewing (see the ads they were shown, above).

These are all pretty obvious points, but the integration of social media and advertising is only just starting and there’s a long, long way to go. Trials of promoted Tweets – which have a genuine “social dimension” to them – are taking place in the US, and companies like SkimLinks in the UK are blurring the boundaries between what Brian Solis calls “paid” and “earned” media. I look forward to digging further into this on 20th Sept. and, rest assured, I’ll be posting the outcomes here.

Join me at Social Media Advertising (London) – 20th Sept. 2010