Registration for Social Media Week San Francisco, taking place from Feb 13th to 17th, is officially open! And though the weeklong conference is titled Social Media Week San Francisco, we’ve expanded our sessions into Silicon Valley throughout the week as well.

Be sure to check out Beyond’s sessions:

Social Insights Shoot-Out
A Wild West-style competition between four social insight heavyweights to find whose tools, methodology, and analysis is the best in the west!

The Future of Sharing
Using an approach that mixes statistical analysis and industry insight, Beyond will be developing a study for Social Media Week that offers a unique and substantiated perspective on the changes that lie ahead for the nature of online sharing. This engaged discussion will uncover the findings of this study and expose different views about how the trends in sharing will shape the way brands reach their desired audiences.

Space is filling up fast, sign up today!

Being able to share everything you are doing from eating to cooking to knitting does create huge potential for your Facebook page to get incredibly cluttered with mindless trivia. If this does happen it could create a huge backlash about what people will actually share.

While I do see the value of some of the social reading apps from publishers such as The Guardian, I also do see “Josh is reading xyz…” adding very little value to my life. That being said, one of the apps I read about in AllThingsD was from Ticketmaster which, if you are listening to music via the Spotify App, automatically detects and tells you when those artists are next playing in your town. To me this is where the power of sharing comes into its own by creating incremental value in the user experience.

Facebook has clearly considered this very carefully because they have made significant improvements in making it easier to share content from different apps with different people, as well as thinking through how and where the actions appear. This article in VentureBeat is the best article I have seen yet that explains it all in detail. However, sharing content with only a select few relevant friends is a long way from being quick and easy.

At the end of last year we published a study about the Science of Sharing, looking at where and what type of things people share. Given Facebook’s latest move we are now going to be doing a study on the Future of Sharing to try to understand:

- Will people share more and more things online or will there be a backlash?
- Do people use different platforms for sharing different types of content?
- Are people aware of oversharing?
- Are people frustrated that it is difficult to share things with a unique group of friends?

Beyond will be sharing (it would be rude not too!) the findings of this follow up study at Social Media Week in London, San Francisco and New York where we will be discussing the Future Of Sharing and what it means for brands.

The Future of Sharing is taking place on Thursday, February 16th from 12:30pm to 1:50pm at San Francisco State University. Visit the event page for more details on this Social Media Week event.

For instance, on Twitter, various journalists, mainstream media, brands, political figures, etc. as well as ordinary people are connected to each other, which enables them to facilitate the circulation of the information across this well-connected network. Knowing this will make a curious mind think: ‘is it possible for one to use the well-established techniques of neuroscience in the analysis of social networks/media and vice versa?’ The answer is YES!

Brain connectivity refers to a pattern of anatomical links (“anatomical connectivity”), statistical dependencies (“functional connectivity”) or causal interactions (“effective connectivity”) between distinct units within the nervous system. The units of such a network (also known as “nodes”, from graph theory jargon) correspond to individual neurons, neuronal populations, or anatomically segregated brain regions. The connectivity pattern is formed by structural links such as synapses or fibre pathways, or it represents statistical or causal relationships measured as cross-correlations, information flow, etc. Brain connectivity is crucial to explaining how neural networks process and propagate information.

For instance, let’s assume that you want to find key influencers on Twitter, which is often done by measuring the reach of a Twitter handle. One simple approach for finding a given handle’s (i.e., a node in the social graph) reach is to calculate the number of followers it has, which in essence is similar to structural-connectivity-based metrics in neuroscience. On the other hand, however, one can employ methods that accommodate the context in their reach calculations, as a musician for instance, might be the source of influence on his followers on topics such as music, whereas his tweets might be ignored on topics such electronics goods (even by his followers). This class of reach metrics are similar to the analyses that are known in neuroscience as functional/effective connectivity.

Inspired by such facts, Beyond’s influencer scoring (such as our TIE score) incorporates both such structural and functional measures simultaneously in order to find the influence over certain periods on certain subjects.

Structural, functional and causal influence models/metrics are being investigated in various fields such as computer science, neuroscience, social sciences, statistics, and so on. However, there are not many examples of their usage in social network/media analytics. Beyond’s approach in employing ideas from other (seemingly-unrelated) fields and customising them for social media analytics is a good example of a promising approach for the future.

The infographic was launched alongside Amadeus’ latest industry report and highlights current frustrations with travel and how social and technological innovations will help create a stress free more collaborative travel experience in the future.

Users can share the statistics on twitter and Facebook so check it out here and share the travel frustrations and desires you agree with.

Beyond is proud to be organizing Social Media Week San Francisco 2012. This bi-annual global conference is only five weeks away, February 13th – February 17th.

A little background if you’re unfamiliar:

Social Media Week first launched in New York City in 2009, and has remained one of the most important cities as the conference has expanded internationally. In 2011, the organizers hosted 220 events and 8,000 attendees.

Social Media Week is open to the public and free to attend and register.

This is the first year that Beyond is hosting the San Francisco event, and we’re working hard to make this year the best yet. We have already expanded the conference to include programming in Silicon Valley, thus opening the conference to the entire Bay Area.

We’re looking forward to an incredible week with fascinating content hosted by companies such as Adobe, AOL, Cisco, eBay, IBM, SAP, ThisMoment, Trulia, with even more to be announced.

Click here to visit our Content Hubs.

The event submission period is still open. If you have an idea for an event or session, or would like to participate as a speaker at a SMWSF event, visit the Social Media Week SF website now and submit your ideas.

Creative, out-of-the-box, “unconference” thinking is welcome and encouraged!

Let us know if you have any questions by commenting below or shooting us an email at sanfran@socialmediaweek.org

For more info:

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To better understand social consumers, we asked 1,500 participants about the products and services they had most recently researched online and how they went about it. We found that depending on the product or service, a channel may have more or less influence on a social consumer’s decision to purchase. Influence was measured as the degree to which each channel has impacted the consumers view of the product or service as part of the buying process.

Below you can find our new Science of Sharing infographic. For more information about the social consumer please check out our white paper, or our first infographic. UK specific data can be found in a white paper and infographic as well. What channels do you use most to research products? Let us know in the comments below!

Beyond is proud to announce the launch of Google Gives Back, a site designed and built collaboratively with Google and our friends at Across the Pond.  This year Google gave more than $100 million to nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world — including $40 million in grants to organizations working in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education; girls’ education; technology for social good; and fighting human trafficking and modern-day slavery.  We feel lucky to have been a part of this charitable effort to change lives for the better.

Our conclusion being that if brands could find a way to recruit more high sharers more people would recommend the brand to their friends and sales would almost certainly increase.

Over the past couple of weeks, two brands have caught my eye for running campaigns designed to increase the number of high sharers interacting with the brand.

The first is Samsung which has launched Samsung Nation. This is a social loyalty program where people can earn badges (and rewards) for reviewing products, tweeting, sharing links, contributing to Samsung communities and, of course, buying a product!

It is a fantastic execution designed to tap into the exact finding of our study using a combination of gamification techniques and monetary rewards to not just recruit high sharers for the brand but to get existing sharers to start sharing even more.

The second example is right at the other end of the spectrum because it is a niche online small business: http://tirechaindealer.com/. (You guessed what they sell).

I discovered them last weekend. It was raining in San Francisco so I got excited at the prospect of going skiing again in Tahoe so I thought I would get prepared.

I purchased some chains and then on Monday morning when I got in to the office there was an email waiting for me which offered me $3 for recommending them on Google by clicking +1 and a $10 refund for taking part and dropping a link in a discussion forum (nice crowdsourced SEO) or writing a blog post.

What they are doing is really smart. Their program is definitely SEO lead but the principles are exactly the same for recruiting and activating high sharers.  After all, I did find them searching on Google so it is clearly working.

Having mentioned both of these examples at a recent company meeting lots of people had experienced similar programs. One such program mentioned by @Codyelam was from a vacation rental firm Holiday Velvet, which was offering 35 Euros for Liking them on Facebook and 50 Euros to a customer who created a video of the apartment. I know the Euro isn’t in great shape right now but 35 Euros for a Facebook like seems a bit pricey!

I am sure you have examples of other brands creating programs to incentivize sharing content so it would be great to hear about them so we can start to collate them.

If you are interested in learning more about High Sharers and how brands can identify and activate them we are holding an event in San Francisco on 13^th December to discuss this study in more detail.

How has social media changed the way consumers make purchase decisions? We asked 1,500 UK consumers in two surveys what most influenced them online, as well as how and why they influenced others. What we found was that the consumer is an increasingly influential part of the conversation.

Today’s social consumer is one that can either be categorised as a high or low sharer, who utilises various digital channels differently depending on whether he or she is researching and interacting with high or low involvement products. High sharers prove to be the most valuable to brands as they recommend products 3x more often and influence others’ purchases. By identifying high sharers, their preferred channels, and the reasons why they share, marketers can engage them with sharable content, thereby increasing the dynamic of sharing. This acts as a positive amplifier leading towards a virtuous cycle of recommendation, loyalty and purchase.

Our white paper report can be found here. The UK version of our infographic is below. The research design and analysis was performed by Beyond and Lexis, and the surveys were fielded by Redshift using its consumer panels to conduct over 3,000 online interviews in the UK and US.

What type of sharer are you? Let us know in the comments below!

To better understand social consumers, we asked 3,000 US and UK consumers about the two products and services they had most recently researched online and how they went about it. Today’s social consumer is one that can either be categorized as a high or low sharer, who utilizes various digital channels differently depending on whether he or she is researching and interacting with high or low involvement products. High sharers prove to be the most valuable to brands as they recommend products 3x more often and influence others’ purchases.

All digital channels play a role in a brand’s marketing strategy; looking at the channel your social consumer is most influenced by will lead to an increase in your digital return on investment. With search acting as the gateway to influence on today’s consumer, creative content creation is essential within earned and owned media channels to boost a brand’s organic search relevancy. By identifying high sharers in the most effective digital location and engaging them with sharable content, marketers can increase the dynamic of sharing, which acts as a positive amplifier leading towards a virtuous cycle of recommendation, loyalty and purchase.

A white paper research report can be found here. More data insights are in the slideshow below, as well as our infographic. Please note: our infographic only illustrates US consumer data. What channels influence you the most? Let us know in the comments below!