I picked this up from a tweet by Robert Scoble. This is an interview conducted by Shel Israel on a social media campaign run by SeaWorld.

I have explained this to my customers hundreds of times. It’s nice to see a large company that gets it. More companies should be conducting these types of social media campaigns as an integrated part of their marketing plans.

I really hate how spammy this sounds, but it’s a good use of Twitter to drive traffic to a product, in this case Mahalo.

Jason Calacanis, a master technology marketer, has announced that he will be giving away a MacBook Air to one of his twitter followers when he reaches 20,000 followers.

If you haven’t used Twitter before now is your chance to give it a try with a little incentive.  You might even want to check out Mahalo, a human powered search engine.  To follow Calacanis on Twitter just go here @JasonCalacanis

This is not an advertisement.  I just thought a clever idea deserves mention.  Besides who doesn’t want a MacBook Air?

It’s interesting how a passing thought becomes a blog post. John Tropea microblogs about the 90-9-1 rule, which leads me to the idea of participation inequality, which in turn makes me remember Jason Calacanis blogging about creatives, contributors, and consumers. This finally leads to this post.

In a nutshell participation inequality, or the 1% rule, basically states that 1% of your community members will create the content, 9% are moderate producers, and a whopping 90% are lurkers. I don’t see a problem with this when building communities, but the interesting question is, “Do you know who the 1% are?”

I have a customer with a very active message board based community. We measure the normal variables: New subscribers and posts per month. The problem with this is, it doesn’t identify our 1%.

It’s important to identify who are the creatives (1%), contributors (9%), consumers (90%). Track these and find out is the community growing. If your total creatives are growing, that is a good sign. The top 10% are the people you need to get to know and they are who you spend your time and effort. It’s likely that these people are the ones with some social capital to expend and with a little care and feeding will do so for your brand.

Measuring the health of your community is important. Getting the right mix of creatives, contributors, and consumers is important. Getting the contributors (1%) to work on behalf of your brand is the ultimate goal.

I work with a number of B2B companies and hear this a lot: “We don’t need social marketing, we only sell to businesses.” It might be true that you don’t sell direct to consumers, but a business doesn’t use your product, people do.

I am a man of many hats. By day I am a technologist, community marketing evangelist, interactive marketer. When I leave my day job I am a second year psychology student. How does this matter to the topic at hand? Well it turns out that we all have an innate need to belong to groups. We search out groups in which to belong. Being in a group is how we define ourselves. We need what is called an ingroup, “a social group towards which an individual feels loyalty and respect, usually due to membership in the group.” It turns out that a brand tends to become an ingroup for us.

Certainly everyone knows of the Microsoft and Apple ingroups. In general, most of us fall into one of these two ingroups whether we have done so consciously or not. Being a member of an ingroup leads us to develop what is called an ingroup bias. Ingroup bias simply means that we favor our own group over another group. If you know of the Microsoft and Apple ingroup’s you certainly have seen how passionate members of each group can get.

By seeking out and fostering these natural ingroups that form around your brand you can develop a stronger ingroup bias. This causes the people actually using your products to recommend your brand more often to those making purchasing decisions. The more often your brand is recommend the more likely a business is to purchase.

B2B companies may not sell directly to consumers, but consumers are the one using, and more importantly recommending, your products. Using social media to strengthen your brand affinity is a fantastic way for a B2B company to market their products.

This may or may not be a viral campaign by Starbucks. If it isn’t, shame on them for not figuring it out first. If it is, fantastic job. This video is funny, well done, and most of all - the Starbucks logo is in front of the camera the whole time.

Well almost!

Nielson will still track page views but will no longer formally rank them. Its a move in the right direction. Page views are a great way to quantify the ad inventory of a site but total time on site measures the content is compelling enough for an individual to stay. The longer an individual is on your site the longer he has to look at an ad, which in turn will increase clicks.

Page views have been going rapidly out of style lately as Ajax enabled pages and video content has increased. Total time on site will be a more accurate gauge of how a site is doing in light of wider spread embrace of these new technologies.