See the infographic we created of the study on Mashable.

We conducted a survey of over 3000 consumers in the US and UK and asked them to share their online experience of researching products that they were intending to purchase. The research covered 12 categories of brands that could be grouped into High Involvement (typically higher priced goods including consumer electronics/travel/financial products) and Low Involvement (typically lower priced goods including health and beauty/baby products/music products.)

To put the research into context, it is now over 4 years since Forrester published its Social Technographics research which showed that 13% of population could be defined as Creators (upload their own content, for example a YouTube video), 19% were Critics (consumers who had written reviews of a product or service) and only 19% had used a social networking site.

The picture is very different today. The number of people who could be classified as Creators and Critics has gone up three-to-four fold, while the number of people on Facebook (THE social networking site), we can estimate at over 64%, using Facebook and US Census data combined.

Like it or not – the social consumer has arrived.

High Sharers vs. Low Sharers

Every day, consumers are creating and sharing millions and millions of pieces of content related to brands. One of the most fascinating pieces of the research was the fact that consumers are clearly divided into two different camps.

1. High Sharers: people who actively create and share brand content across a range of different channels

2. Low sharers, people who are more passive consumers of content.

High Sharers, who account for approximately 20% of the population, are more likely to be younger, more likely to be loyal to a brand and three times more likely to recommend products to their friends.

Low sharers on the other hand tend to be older, more concerned with brand quality than image alone, and are more likely to switch brands.

Influential Channels

Another facet we looked into as part of this research was the relative influence of owned and earned media channels as well as the influence of search. It turns out that there are some very important differences when we look at the influence of individual channels for High vs. Low Involvement brands.

For High Involvement brands, their own brand web site, as well as review sites and search have a much higher relative influence. However, for Low Involvement brands, Facebook and Twitter are relatively much more influential.

Even at a category level, there are some very important differences. For example, if we look at the consumer electronics category, review sites are the single most influential channels alongside the brand web site, which also has a very high relative influence. However, for these types of products, Facebook has a relatively low influence.

What Can Brands Learn From This Research?

This research is, we believe, the first study to show that people who share content about a brand are more likely (by a factor of three) to recommend that brand to a friend. These fascinating findings are what brands need to incorporate into the way they approach their digital social strategy. Using this research, brands may identify some very specific ways in which they can turbo charge their digital social strategies depending on the product category.

To cut to the chase, if there are three things to take away form the study, we can summarize them as follows:

1. Brands need to use the data they have to understand the relative influence that each of their digital channels have on different stages of the purchase and advocacy lifecycle. Then they should optimize each channel’s respective content.

2. Brands need to identify and nurture High Sharers as these sharers hold the keys to driving brand advocacy. (The result? Sales.)

3. Brands need to make sure that both their communications and marketing teams optimize everything they create in order to drive value in organic search.

Today heralds another change, as “e-mail” becomes “email.” My own relationship with the hyphen has been on-again/off-again ever since I learned how to break sentences in first grade, but I have to admit I’m a little on the fence about this new decision. To me, “e-mail” just looks nicer, whereas “email” looks like something that should be pronounced “eh-mayil.” But that is a matter of personal aesthetics, which can (and often does) change frequently as trends come and go.

The little inconsistencies and general fussiness of writing for social media follow us everywhere as we continue to circumnavigate the waters of the web. For example, currently giving credit in tweets has been a matter of personal preference. Where others stick the traditional RT, some desktop Twitter clients offer “</via @soandso>” or  ”cc @whatserface”  as the default attributions. People have become even more creative with the use of a “>” or, in my case, a double-forward slash like so //. When, if ever, will one method become the main standard practice? Will a day come when “via” is a laughable social faux pas made by parents who just don’t understand?

I was reminded of a slightly similar discussion from earlier in the week when Joshua Benton of Nielman Journalism Lab asked: “Should eBook titles be in quotes or italics?”

Note that the question wasn’t regarding turning the Harper Lee classic To Kill a Mockingbird into “To Kill a Mockingbird”, but rather the idea those rare exceptions when specific articles or pieces of editorial are available in eBook format. In essence, it became a discussion of the “book-ishness” of writing for the web and the synecdochic nature of long articles vs. eBooks. A good point was raised in a comment by Joseph Dowdy, director of the Global eBook Awards: “Italics are for titles where they CAN be used [...] I can’t type italics in this comment area so I would use quotation marks for book titles right here.”

Note: My vote was for underlining, but I was rebutted with a “HOW HIDEOUS!” (aesthetics strike again!)

In another vein, this constant evolution of web-writing makes it harder (or perhaps easier) for the pedants in us to point out mistakes when others fail to meet our grammar school expectations. (See this Quora post on whether it’s acceptable for bloggers to make minor typos. [Short answer: no.])

In the end, we suppose we can only hope that whatever further changes are made in the style and/or process of writing for social media will make things not only easier for readers, but easier for writers.

Am I wrong? Are you the King of Quotation Marks and we italicizers are your peons? Do you hate my use of parentheticals? Did you find a typo? Shout it out below.

Image from Flickr. No, it’s not the AP Stylebook.

Echoing from the halls of The Salt Palace Convention center as the RootsTech 2011 Conference kicks-off, this comment rings true.

In every corner of the expo hall, high-tech sponsorship booths provided by the likes of FamilySearch.org, Dell, BrightSolid.com and countless others, boast technological innovation, next-gen data-preservation solutions and, yes, plenty of Kinects to play at the Microsoft Playground.

The attendees? Genealogists, historians, experts and family history enthusiasts from around the world who have come to learn about the ground-breaking, game-changing innovations that are allowing the digitization, curation, and most importantly, preservation, of irreplaceable, historical documents.

RootsTech is a completely new conference focused on bringing technologists and genealogists together to synthesize new innovations and solutions for family history research.

“The purpose of RootsTech is to encourage innovative technology solutions in the fields that have a bearing on genealogists. Therefore attendees will find that the conference topics and discussions apply to a wide variety of disciplines,” Verkler said.

Keynote speakers at the conference include Shane Robinson, Hewlett Packard chief strategy and technology officer; Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and digital librarian; Jay L. Verkler, CEO of FamilySearch International; and Curt Witcher, Historical Genealogy Department manager for Allen County Public Library.

A particularly exciting upcoming element of the conference is the Developers Challenge, where participants can vie for money and prizes as they attempt to create the “next big innovation” through using the FamilySearch Research API.

Yes, you read that right: The real-time harmonization of genealogy and technological advancements.

Now what would your grandma think of all this?

By now you have probably seen a lot of the Superbowl commercials, but just in case you didn’t, take a look at YouTube Adblitz where you can see all the ads broadcast this year and then vote on your favorites.

For 2011, YouTube Adblitz was back even bigger and better! This year, Adblitz was YouTube’s first ever program to have optimized versions for both mobile and GoogleTV, as well as PC. The site was not only optimized for each device, but has a completely customized version for all three to create the optimal user experience for each.

Once you head to http://www.youtube.com/adblitz, depending on which device you’re on, you will be served the version made specifically for it.

Once a commercial aired on TV during the Super Bowl, it was added to the video gallery on AdBlitz. Users were able to see the video gallery grow dynamically in real-time, without having to refresh the page. When the game was over, voting was enabled so that users could vote on their favorite Super Bowl ads.

Beyond designed and developed a custom video gallery for desktop (Flash), Google TV (HTML5/JavaScript) and mobile (HTML/JavaScript) that included voting and sorting features, as well as a live chat module that allowed users to talk about their favorite ads in real-time using their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Mobile screenshots:

Users can search for commercials by browsing all videos or sorting by advertisers.

Original tweet from the @kennethcole account

An apology was issued relatively quickly, but as with all social media gaffes, the damage was already done, and both bloggers and mainstream news sources had picked up the story.

@kennethcole apology

Subsequently, in true Twitter-schadenfreude, an account, @kennethcolepr, was immediately set live, firing mocking missives such as, “Rolling through Germany? Gestapo by our new Berlin store! #KennethColeTweets.”

What a nightmare for the brand, huh?

This kind of mistake always offends me. Independently of my opinion on the content of the tweet, what is upsetting is that not only does this kind of public #fail scare other brands away from social media efforts, but it also underlines the still slow-to-adopt standard requisite that brand community management strategists should have both journalistic experience and ethics training.

The real-time web is a 24/7 conversation that is being moderated by the entire world. Allowing your brand to join this conversation is, of course, crucial to your marketing and business development efforts.

And while natural communication mistakes will be made — words will sometimes be misconstrued, audiences may not always share in all of your opinions, etc. — there is a level of intelligence, common-sense and intuition that cannot be allowed to fall off your list of imperatives.

We work with brands to create and communicate their voices. Part of this learning process also involves understanding that this commitment of resources to social media is no longer an “also-ran” in marketing budgets.

Allowing unsupervised interns and jr. associates to represent million-dollar companies as first-responders to your internet consumer base (also known as, “the world”), means that you get what you pay for: cheaper, inexperienced monitoring and very likely, the threat of ethical immaturity.

I’m not here to slam Kenneth Cole too hard (and when the dust clears, they are welcome to give us a call if they want to talk Community Management strategy!). If they are a smart company, they will use this public face-plant as a learning-tool (much in the legacy of Domino’s or BP) for carefully reviewing the resourcing, goals and key performance indicators of their social media presence.

“It has been talked about for a long time, but it seems that 2011 is the year when brands will embrace their role as a publisher in the age of conversation marketing.”

Measuring Influence by Seth Duncan

Part 1: Be Specific By What You Mean By Influence (Really, Really Specific)

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with using different definitions of influence in our industry, but it’s incredibly difficult to evaluate the usefulness of these definitions when they are vague.”

Part 2: The Forgotten Art of Market Segmentation and a Defense of Justin Bieber’s Influence

“Overlooking the importance of market segments is one large reason why popular metrics like reach, Twitter follower count or Klout scores aren’t particularly meaningful on their own—without the context of a community, audience, or market, popularity metrics will not predict whether a particular message is going to have any impact.”

Part 3: If Indirect Measurement is Good Enough for Science, It Is Good Enough for Marketing

“[...] if we only measured what could be directly observed, and never used metrics that correlated with the thing of interest (e.g., influence) we wouldn’t know much about our world.”

You can find David (@davidhargreaves) and Seth (@PRResearch) on Twitter.

It has been talked about for a long time, but it seems that 2011 is the year when brands will embrace their role as a publisher in the age of conversation marketing. This trend was perfectly illustrated at CES where both Best Buy and Sears threw themselves into the publishing role.

BestBuy launched its fully fledged multi-channel network “Best Buy On” as reported in AdAge which has been under development for well over a year. Sears, on the other hand, is dipping its toe into the water with the Sears Blue Blogger Crew publishing content from the show (interestingly this crew is in lieu of a stand presence, which is probably a whole lot cheaper!)

The case for a retailer to either create, commission, or curate its own content from a show like CES is clear cut. But it isn’t just retail that is embracing this new trend– the fashion industry has already set the pace for brands as publishers with sites, such as Nowness from Louis Vuitton, leading the way with a high end style editorial destination. (Mashable published a really good round up  of some of these this week.)

What will be really interesting to see over 2011 are the different approaches to generating this content using a combination of curated, created, and aggregated content. In Best Buy’s case, it has recruited an entire editorial team whereas Sears has essentially paid bloggers (in kind) to create content.

I am utterly convinced of the value of brands taking this approach, but I think it is early days in being able to demonstrate the true tangible value delivered. While we are only touching the tip of the iceberg with the work we are doing at Beyond, we definitely have some very interesting data for one client which shows that the number of inquiries generated from the brands’ “owned media” channels was seven times that from “earned media”.

While the B2C world has been the quickest to embrace their role as a publisher, I can’t help but feeling the real business  benefits will be most easy to quantify when B2B companies follow suit.

And though we’re fortunate to have offices in San Francisco, London and recently, New York — all cities currently celebrating serious booms in start-up innovation — staying on top of trends, iterations and “thenextbigthing” is still a full time job.

In the New Year, we’re going to be launching a new initiative to help ourselves and our clients stay even more connected to the individuals behind what’s current and happening in our expansive “tech” industry.

But until then, we start this second to last week of 2010 with some shout-outs to cool tools that seem to be leading the promise of great things in 2011.

1) GroupMe
NYC-based GroupMe allows you to create groups on your mobile device for you to text/conference call. Easy, addictive and real-time. (plus, photo sharing!)

2) Tungle.me
Scheduling app that syncs with just about any existing calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook, etc.). Web-based and mobile, you can publicly share your calendar availability, allow others to schedule meetings with you and our personal favorite — time zone auto-adjust. Phew.

3) Storify.com
We first learned about Storify at this fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt. To our delight, we realized it’s a journalist/PR rep’s dream app. You can add feeds of video, tweets, photos and more into interactive, multi-observational embeddable stories.

4) Trunk.ly
Sharing links is kind of like breathing these days, isn’t it? We like Trunk.ly because it indexes all the web sites you link to through your social networks and creates a search engine for them. DIY link library gives you back some productivity.

5) Momento
This is for the iPhone users only (so far) but we love this diary app. It pulls in feeds from just about everywhere — tweets, Facebook statuses, photos, RSS, YouTube, Foursquare and more — and fills out your calendar. You can add your own updates as well. Best part? It pulls history as well, so try it out and marvel at your 2008 updates. Seems like ages ago in Internet land, doesn’t it?

From "All is Fair in Love and Costume Parties"

• Is It Time to Turn Off Your Website?

David Hargreaves discusses the implications of the rise of social media and what it means for traditional brand web sites.

• The Me in Social Media: Why Selfishness is the New Helpfulness

Faith Chihil notes the emergence of the incentive-based location medium and why being badge-hungry can ultimately help business.

• Seth Duncan to Speak at e-Metrics Marketing Optimization Summit

We are pleased to announce that Seth Duncan, our Research and Development Director, will be participating in a discussion on social media metrics.

• Beyond the Gap

Senior research analyst Eric Persha’s observations on the recent logo change by Gap and its effects on the social media sphere.

• Our Biggest Audience Yet, The Global Fund’s “Born HIV Free” Campaign

Emma Downham, digital producer, relays the results for our recent work with The Global Fund. The channel received 5.5 million views in the first month, and has since accumulated an astounding 17.5 million, helping them to raise 11 billion dollars.

• 9 Sites for Design Inspiration

Troy Chafin shares a list of blogs, websites, and design magazines for those seeking creative inspiration.

• Sharing is The New Controlling

Sarah Wulfeck, Content and Commununity Director, recalls the day a TwitPic made breaking news and how news stories became property of the public.

• How to Stop Sweating The Latest Social Media Metric Trends

Seth Duncan writes about his experience on the eMetrics panel on social media measurement and the importance of channel-agnostic metrics.

• Crowd Accelerated Content

Nick Rappolt discusses what’s required for a great digital campaign.

• HTML5: Explanation and Relevance

Joann DeLanoy demystifies HTML5 and explains how it’s changing modern web design.

• Hungry For Data!

Chris Phillips writes about our London Creative and Development team’s visit to the Facebook Developer Garage monthly meet and learns about the potential use of government data.

• Two Into One Does Not Go: Welcome To The Chief Conversation Officer

David Hargreaves predicts that separate CCO and CMO roles will cease to exist in the future.

• BWE10, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The BlogWorld

Sarah Wulfeck visits Las Vegas for the 2010 BlogWorld Expo and learns a few things about the changing blogosphere.

• When Social Games Do Not Run Smoothly

Charlie Lyons answers the question: does the Nike Grid project live up to the hype?

• All is Fair in Love and Costume Parties

What does sibling rivalry, a pumpkin, and a unitard have to do with community? Faith Chihil discusses.

• The Connected Kingdom

Joann DeLanoy shares insights from our latest project with Google, which show that the UK is the second largest online advertising market in the world, and that for every £1 imported the UK exports goods and services worth £2.80. Created with Google Moderator.

Chris Phillips writes about our London Creative and Development team’s visit to the Facebook Developer Garage monthly meet and learns about the potential use of government data.

• Two Into One Does Not Go: Welcome To The Chief Conversation Officer

David Hargreaves predicts that separate CCO and CMO roles will cease to exist in the future.

• BWE10, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The BlogWorld

Sarah Wulfeck visits Las Vegas for the 2010 BlogWorld Expo and learns a few things about the changing blogosphere.