I’ve received a series of inbound requests for comments based on a report from Gartner, an IT analyst firm, that estimates as many as 70-percent of social media campaigns will fail in 2011. There are a series of discussions hitting the blogosphere and the Twitterverse exploring this very topic, some elementary and others on the right path. I contacted Gartner earlier this week and the problem is, that this data isn’t new at all. In fact, these discussions are fueled by information originally published in 2008 and in early 2010. Yet another example of the importance of fact-checking in the era of real-time reporting yes, but, when I paused for a moment, I appreciated the timelessness of this discussion.

Are many of the social media programs in play yielding tangible results? No…

Are they designed to impact the bottom line or are they tied to meaningful business outcomes? No…

The truth is that you can’t fail in anything if success is never defined.

eMarketer recently published a report, “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Budgeting for 2011,” that documents the increase in social media spend we knew was imminent. However, in addition to showing us that companies are actively investing in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms and campaigns, eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson says that businesses are spending more money for all the wrong reasons.

Indeed, business are moving from experimentation or ready, aim, fire approaches to deeper phases of implementation.

Williamson shares a perspective long cautioned against here and in Engage, “many companies are expanding budgets for social media marketing not because they have been successful at it, but because they are relying on gut instinct—the feeling that ‘this is something important so I’m going to do it even if I don’t know why.’ Or worse, they have watched their competitors earn accolades in the press for their work in social media, and they are afraid of losing any more ground.”
#FAIL

Failing to plan is planning to fail and this is a lesson that strategists and practitioners will learn as they progress. If transparency and authenticity were prevailing maxims over the last several years, accountability, metrics, and outcomes serve as the foundation for social media success in the immediate years ahead. An effective social media plan must address business dynamics and it takes much more than a Facebook and Twitter presence. To keep things simple, social media are transformative…but essentially they’re channels, services, and networks used for intelligence, communication, and visibility. If we introduced email to the organization today, would it focus solely on marketing or customer service? Of course not. Email is not owned by any one department. It extends the reach, voice, and capabilities of every person from the inside out and the outside in.

Viewed this way, we see that a social media strategy must gain attention from the very top of the organization and see its integration across relevant business teams. Activating processes and engagement in business units is not tied to one switch either. It takes time to learn, to visualize new processes and systems, to open doors between departments. But, doing so sets the foundation for the social business, for an adaptive business. Switches will get introduced as their needs are defined and the electricity is tied to each one in order to perform specific actions.

The lens in which businesses must view social media is that through an integration aperture. Social extends and empowers every business facet that is affected by online activity. That includes marketing, communications, sales, CRM/sCRM, product development/R&D, HR, finance, legal, et al.

According to eMarketer’s report, integration is strongest in marketing and weakest in critical business functions. To envision the future of social media, we would see each of the grey bars slide from left to right, initially led by an internal team or business strategist to help with a change in culture, process, and overall goaling.
#WIN

Everything starts with defining the mission and purpose at the top so that respective business units can perform according to goals and tasks. By focusing only on one or two aspects of social media, we narrow an important view of the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers) and what the real needs and opportunities are the lie before us. The answers you seek are not limited to catch blog posts that promise “The Top 10 Ways to Master Social Media.” Your answers require research…not just listening.

Approach the search box of social networks or monitoring and research tools such as ReSearch.ly, Radian6, Spiral16, etc. as a blank slate. Fill in the blanks to enliven the 5W’s +H.E.

Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
To what extent

Then categorize the information you discover to make the case for each of the affected groups within your company. Success here requires more than one community manager or one team leading the social effort. It’s not an easy process. But then whoever said social media was easy…is wrong. Unearthing the intelligence that exists when we read between the lines, we become the experts in which we initially sought guidance and we open up individual career paths beyond the social media “help desk.”

We are not simply competing for the moment, we are competing for relevance now and in the future. The future of business is indeed social, but more importantly, it’s adaptive.

Originally published on briansolis.com

Flock, creator of the social web browser, sent WebProNews some interesting findings about the social media habits of consumers. One finding we found particularly interesting was that based on responses to a survey from the company, 74% say they feel pressure to respond to emails within a day, while only 52% feel the same about Facebook postings. Even more interesting is that only 26% feel that way about responding to personal tweets on Twitter.

Here are the findings the company shared:

• 93% feel their relationships with others have stayed the same or improved because of their interaction with friends and family through social media.
• The majority of respondents feel pressure to “keep up” with their online communications, particularly with email where 74% stated they should respond that day while 52% felt the need to reply immediately to Facebook postings. Surprisingly, only 26% saw any need to reply to personal tweets on Twitter.
• 64% of respondents feel stressed at some point to keep up with online social media
• 60% said they do most of their communicating on social sites from their home while just 17% accessed social media at work. Teachers do not have to worry as only 2% said they tweet or post from school.
• 89% have signed up to one-ten social networks/apps with 11% interacting with more than ten.
• 28% have over 500 contacts with 31% spending 11-20 hours a week communicating with their friends and family. 9% spend over 60 hours per week on social media.
• 49% of respondents use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and social applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Shopkick (excluding email) to communicate with others more than 50% of their time.
• Social media is on the rise in business with 72% stating that they use it for communications with business contacts.

What you do with this information is up to you, but it’s clear social media is becoming an increasingly popular avenue of communication, not just among consumers, but among businesses (not to mention between consumers and businesses). However, at this point, if you have messages that require timely responses, it’s looking like your best bet is still communicating through email.

Of course this will certainly depend on the person you’re communicating with. Still, I think it’s safe to say that most people, particularly in business, will still be checking their email fairly regularly. From a business perspective, I’d make a habit out of timely communication no matter what the channel.

I would suggest putting a little more emphasis on subject lines, whether you’re communicating by email, Facebook, or Twitter. People are more likely to open your message if the subject is enticing and/or relevant to them. If they open, they’re one step closer to responding.

Facebook made three major announcements today. These include: a way to download your Facebook info, a new dashboard for applications you use, and a new Groups feature. The theme each of these was presented under is that of giving users more control.

Download All Your Facebook Info in One File

Facebook announced the launch of a new feature that allows you to download all your Facebook data in one file. You can simply go to a page, click that you want to download your info, and Facebook will zip it and email it to you. This will apparently include all info, including wall posts, photos, videos, friend lists, events you’ve joined, etc.

Facebook says it is “taking security very seriously” because it contains personal information. It looks at if you’re coming from a computer you usually use, uses personalized CAPTCHAs, etc. It won’t include data you’ve deleted in the past.

This feature will begin rolling out today.

Applications You Use Dashboard

The new Applications You Use Dashboard looks at all the apps you use and shows the last time they accessed data that you allowed them to access. It also lets you change the permissions or revoke them from there if you want.

“As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it’s important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Groups

Once upon a time, Facebook launched friend lists, and they can certainly be useful for organization, but only 5% of people use them, according to Mark Zuckerberg. “In reality, almost no one wants to make lists,” he says. Now, they’ve launched new Groups (they won’t delete the old Groups, but they’re changing from here on out).

These Groups are designed to let you separate your different groups of friends in ways that make sense. Whether its your family around the dinner table, your team in the locker room, or your close friend at the bar, these groups each have their own histories and social norms, as the company puts it. These new groups bring that same kind of functionality to Facebook.

After a long explanation by Zuckerberg and other Facebook team members, it’s still a bit unclear why people will jump on this more than they did friend lists, but I guess we’ll see. It certainly has more functionality, but the company seems to think this is going to change how people use Facebook in general. I’m not saying it won’t, but it’s hard to say, if that few people even use lists.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other such sites are – in general, anyway – doing quite well on a global basis, according to new stats from Nielsen. Nielsen revealed this afternoon that people all over the world are dedicating a lot more time to social networks.

A report stated, “On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year.” Italians and Australians actually took the lead, too, beating the U.S. average of 6 hours and 3 minutes by 25 minutes and 22 minutes, respectively.

Then here are a couple more interesting findings: “Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009″ (which also works out to 30 percent).

Time Spent On Social Networks Up 60%

Facebook made Nielsen’s last points of comparison anything but close calls, though. It beat the other social networks by wide margins in terms of “% Reach of Active Social Users,” “Sessions per Person,” and “Time per Person.”

Facebook, then, would appear best positioned to find advertisers and generate revenue outside the U.S.

Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

It’s been a pretty big week for Facebook. Not only is there a lot of talk about Facebook’s potential for becoming the top news source on the web, but the company celebrated its sixth birthday, is passing the 400 million user mark, and began rolling out some new design changes. In addition, the company is said to be rewriting its messaging feature and preparing to launch a webmail product, but first things first.

The Birthday and 400 Million Users

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed it in a blog post last night. “Today we’re celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we’ve made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.”

“Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better.” he added. “We hoped Facebook would improve people’s lives in important ways. So it’s rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.”

Facebook hosted a celebration and announced some releases at the Facebook headquarters last night. This was followed by a hackathon where Facebook staff stayed up all night coding and building new ideas for products.

Design Changes

Facebook announced some new changes to the design of its homepage. Users can find their newest notifications, requests, and messages in the top menu. When a user receives a notification, they will see a red bubble appear in the left-hand corner by the search bar. When the icon is clicked, a drop-down menu appears with the most recent notifications. The Home/Profile links are in the top-right corner with the Account menu, which includes privacy settings and the log out link.

Facebook Notifications

The menu on the left-hand side of the screen has been completely reworked. “The left menu has been organized to make it easier for you to communicate with and discover content from your friends. You can now access your messages and other core features all in one place, to the left of your News Feed,” says Facebook’s Jing Chen. “With the Photos dashboard you can browse recent photos of your friends, and the Events dashboard lists your upcoming events along with events your friends are attending. The Friends dashboard will help you find friends, see which of your friends have recently updated their profiles and filter your News Feed by Friend Lists you may have already created.”

Chat has also been made more prominent with a list of online friends displayed on the left. The new apps and games dashboards, which have been discussed lately, can be accessed from the menu as well. The dashboards feature personalized updates from the apps, and they have launched with new privacy settings.

The changes are still rolling out, so it’s possible that you do not have them yet, but you will soon enough.

The Webmail Product

Michael Arrington is reporting that a “source with knowledge of the product” says Facebook is launching a webmail product. If MySpace can do it, surely Facebook can too. It’s being referred to right now as “Project Titan”, although the name will likely change.

Facebook’s messages as they stand right now, lend to email notifications. When you check your email, you find that someone has sent you a message on Facebook. If Facebook gets you using its own email service, it’s cutting out the middle man, and that means…you guessed it – more time spent on Facebook.

Facebook As the Web’s Top News Source?

I’ve already written on this topic this week, but basically, the more time people spend on Facebook, the more convenient they may find it to simply get their news feeds there. If Facebook enters the email game, that’s only going to get people using Facebook that much more, and even open up yet another way for them to get their news on Facebook, through email newsletters and news alerts.

Update: Microsoft has announced some changes to its partnership with Facebook. Facebook will now be taking over its own display advertising, and will get a more feature-rich version of Bing search for its web search.