Like, Share, Retreat – Syncapse invites you to join us at SXSW Interactive’s most exclusive lounge space to recharge your batteries, get away from the madness of the Convention Center and hear some of the industry’s best speakers in a more intimate setting. The Syncapse Social Club will be open to the public between 12 noon – 6pm on Saturday March 10, Sunday March 11 and Monday March 12.

Syncapse Social Club

436 West 2nd Street (between Guadalupe and San Antonio), Austin, TX 78701

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Schedule of Events:

*Check back regularly for updates

 Saturday March 10, 2012 @ 12:30pm:

Use Content Marketing to Get Your Audience’s Attention: A talk and book signing with Rebecca Lieb, Altimeter Group

Link to Register: http://syncapsesocialclub.eventbrite.com/

Saturday March 10, 2012 @ 5:00pm:

Syncapse and Crimson Hexagon Cocktail Hour

*Registration link coming shortly

Sunday March 11, 2012 @ 12:00pm:

Listening Platforms, Grow Up! The Need For Advancement in Social Media Measurement with Zach Hofer-Shall, Forrester Research

Link to Register: http://syncapsesxsw.eventbrite.com/

Monday March 12, 2012 @ 9:00am:

The Rise of Social Content and its Impact on the Internet: A breakfast and panel discussion hosted by RBC Capital Markets

Link to Register: http://syncapserbc.eventbrite.com

Monday March 12, 2012 @ 5:00pm:

Syncapse and Big Fuel Cocktail Hour

*Registration link coming shortly

TORONTO, February 14, 2012 — Syncapse Corp., a global leader in enterprise social media management solutions, today announced the appointment of Patrick W. Gross, to its expanding board of directors. Gross’s term on the board is effective immediately as the company ramps up expansion for the 2012 fiscal year.

“Syncapse continues to seek partnerships with the brightest and most experienced minds in the industry as we rapidly expand our global client base,” said Syncapse founder and CEO, Michael Scissons. “Patrick Gross has an incredible track record building high value companies in the Internet industry. As Syncapse grows, bringing Patrick on board will further accelerate our success.”

Currently, Gross is Chairman of The Lovell Group, a private business and technology advisory and investment firm based in Washington, D.C. Previously, Gross was a founder and principal executive officer of American Management Systems, Inc. (AMS) in 1970 and spent three decades at AMS. Along with four founding colleagues, he built AMS into a $1 billion company with 8,000 professionals serving clients across the globe. He sits on a number of publicly trades companies: Capital One Financial Corporation, Taleo Corporation, Liquidity Services, Inc., Rosetta Stone, Waste Management, Inc., and Career Education Corporation.  He is also a director of several private technology-based companies including Motista, Inc., buySAFE, Inc., and Cloud Telecomputers, Inc.

“Michael Scissons and the Syncapse team have taken the lead in enterprise social media management solutions, and the proof is in the world-class client roster they have attracted and maintained.   With more and more investment in this space, I am always looking for the best of the best.  Syncapse’s top clients, top talent, and top technology are the ultimate hat trick for me,” said Mr. Gross.

Scissons noted that Gross’s expertise in the enterprise software and information technology sectors in the U.S. and abroad will stand Syncapse in good stead. Syncapse is set up for success with 175 people globally and a global client roster including BlackBerry and Nationwide Insurance, among others. Syncapse was recently named by Altimeter Group as the only company to achieve Strong Capability ranking in four out of five use cases for social media management.

Gross’s leadership positions at a number of nonprofit groups include:

• Advisory Board, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

• Trustee, Aspen Institute

• Founder and Past Chairman, World Affairs Council

• Trustee and Chairman, Research and Policy Committee, Committee for Economic Development

• Vice-Chairman, Council for Excellence in Government

• Vice Chairman of the Board, Georgetown University Hospital

• Director, All Kind of Minds Institute

• Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

• Chairman of the Intergovernmental Technology Leadership Consortium

• Member, International Institute for Strategic Studies

• Member, Economic Club of Washington

He holds an MBA degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an MSE degree from the University of Michigan, and a BES degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Many marketers have strong CRM databases that they use to target direct mail or email offers. A growing number of them also have robust Facebook or Twitter followings. But few marketers have figured out how to marry the two.

The idea of one grand database of consumer information, interests and intentions is the holy grail for managing marketer-customer relationships, and the idea of using social data from a network like Facebook to get there is hugely appealing. But when it comes to integrating this kind of social data, it’s easier said than done.

“Everybody says they understand, but nobody really knows,” said Michael Scissons, president-CEO at Syncapse, a social-media-management firm.

Often different teams — marketing, CRM, social — pore over different data, and unless those are married up, it’s difficult for marketers to truly be able to interact with customers on a personal and targeted level.

The technology already exists to create highly targeted and integrated CRM strategies. But the marketers haven’t caught up with it yet, said Rich Fleck, VP-general manager of Merkle Connect, the social-CRM arm at direct-marketing agency Merkle. Part of that is because of the complications of privacy issues, including the fact that laws vary country by country. Facebook, for instance, might be loath to find out its users felt like they’re being spammed. To mitigate that, marketers have to get permission from the users to access their data through a service like Facebook Connect, which allows users to export their profiles and connections to other sites.

For example, Merkle client Levi’s asks visitors to its Friends Store on its website to connect with Facebook — a deeper connection than simply “liking” Levi’s. That not only gives marketers more access to data than a simple like would, but in theory gives users more relevant clothing suggestions based on their interests and online habits.

Twitter has a much more lax privacy policy than Facebook because Twitter is inherently an open forum. The challenge from a CRM standpoint is figuring out exactly who the users are on Twitter, as there’s often little more than a real name. While Twitter may be a good resource to monitor conversations and assess the topics on a broad scale, the challenge can be connecting Twitter users to their profiles in a marketer’s CRM database.

Another hurdle is whether marketers can make it “scalable,” or get enough users to agree to hand over more data. According to Merkle, depending on the client, upwards of 50% to 70% of Facebook users agree to the terms once they click on a “connect with Facebook” or similar button.

But most marketers haven’t taken that next step and analyzed social data with their CRM data. In Levi’s case, for instance, to achieve a “grand vision” of social CRM, the marketer would want a combined database, with access to all data so it could, say, send a targeted email based on a person’s “likes,” or send a more personalized message with relevant products in a customer’s news feed.

Assuming marketers tackle the operations and privacy issues, the question will then be how to enact it. Even if there is one database for a marketer, how do you use it — and can you get rid of the organizational silos that inhibit its use? “If you reach scale, how do you begin to act on that — use those new insights to drive a better marketing program? Where we see marketers trip-up is that they still behave in silos,” said Mr. Fleck, viewing search, email, and social as separate disciplines.

“CRM platforms and processes are going to have to be able to support interactions across interactive channels” to further enhance CRM, said Scott Olrich, CMO at Responsys, a digital direct-marketing agency.

Click here to read the full article on Advertising Age.

Speaking at the Social Brands conference in London today (8 February), Debbie Weinstein, Senior Director, Social Media Innovation, at Unilever, revealed that the FMCG giant has shifted away from using social media simply for fan acquisition.

Weinstein said: “We are now looking to develop broader social CRM programmes and trigger advocacy through word of mouth.” Magnus Cormack, director of strategy and intelligence at Syncapse Corp, added that, far too often, corporations are too tied to mass acquisition of fans. He said: “We need to remember they aren’t actually fans, that is just what Facebook calls them, they are often just people that have been recruited by competitions and they aren’t really engaged.”

Clara Dennison, social media manager at More Th>n, claimed that to truly understand the value of social media engagement brands need to better focus on driving sales. She said: “The interplay between reach and engagement is key to discovering what really drives sales.” Despite concerns that the growing focus on measuring social media activity will lead to “analysis paralysis” panellists agreed that better metrics to understand long-term engagement are vital.

Looking ahead, Unilever’s Weinstein pointed to real-time social media marketing as a key area for growth, referring to the way in which film studios are using social feedback to power marketing on opening weekends. ”Now we are using social media to feed into innovation and research and development,” she said.

Click here to read the full article on Marketing Mag.

This article was originally posted on FastCompany.com Expert Leadership Blog by Syncapse President and CEO Michael Scissons. Click here to read the full article.

The convergence between marketing and technology is undeniable. In a recent Gartner Research webinar, analyst Laura McLellan noted that the next department to claim technology ownership will be marketing, predicting that by 2017 CMOs will spend more money on IT than their CIO counterparts
.

In the web 2.0 era, marketers that are set up to effectively leverage technology are realizing more success as they are able to strengthen governance associated with social media, manage consumer data with respect for privacy, and increase efficiencies in managing and deploying content on a global basis.

To achieve this, CMOs must form a strong partnership with CIOs, going beyond collaboration to co-create new cross-functional organizations and processes where both teams share ownership of goals and business outcomes. This is particularly relevant when it comes to social media. As new types of applications spring up on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, so does the complexity of managing risk, meeting compliance obligations, and collecting and deriving insights from these rich new data sources.

Here are a few topics on how marketing and IT professionals can work together and allow for more efficient workflows that facilitate better engagement between brands and consumers.

Mitigating Risks

Technology solutions have the ability to streamline processes and mitigate risks that global corporations face when managing multiple brand campaigns via social media. This is only achievable if the IT team understands the requirements needed: password protection for multiple social media channels and accounts, assigned controls with designated administrators, a workflow process that alerts the proper team members when a task is waiting for their approval, and both industry and country/regional compliance.

Responsible Data Management

The new social landscape has brought a wealth of data and meta data that brings opportunity as well as challenges. With the help of IT, marketing can manage the right data required to derive actionable insights, including tracking and comparing campaigns side-by-side to identify what works and doesn’t. Furthermore, IT can develop controls that keep the data safe and aligned with consumer privacy.

Efficient Content Deployment

Marketing is all about the perfect concoction of creativity, timeliness and engagement. To effectively take advantage of all the marketing assets, collateral and content, it’s paramount for marketing to have a centralized vehicle that helps manage, house and push assets so campaigns and messages align and interlock.  That way, marketers are not reinventing the wheel and are developing their own messages that potentially differ from the broader goals and messages from corporate. This will keep creativity and execution high and redundancy low while allowing for the creative process to flow more quickly.

Despite these simple topics to consider, relatively few companies are well positioned yet to develop strong IT and marketing partnerships. In 2008, Kimberly-Clark CMO Tony Palmer came to a similar realization and enlisted his counterpart, CIO Ramon Baez, to address some of the challenges that arose due to the evolution of consumer interactions with brands. “The bottom line was that marketing needed a technology partner to deliver the solutions to reach consumers and enable customer data integration analytics,” said Baez. Palmer and Baez’s solution was to develop the ‘Digital Center of Excellence’ where project teams were built with both marketers and IT professionals.

This is just one example, and I’m sure more and more are popping up every day. So, what do you plan on doing or have you done to bridge the gap between marketing and IT?

Opening up the Social Graph

Facebook has announced that Open Graph is now available, completing the feature rollout previously presented at f8. Starting today, developers—and marketers—can build apps that let people add any action to their Timelines — whether it is eating, traveling, shopping, running, or taking pictures.

As part of the launch, more than 60 apps from select Facebook partners are now live, spanning a whole host of domains, from food to fitness to travel. They are available to install immediately; see the Resources section, below, for a link to these apps.

Open Graph

In 2010, Facebook extended the social graph with the introduction of the Open Graph. The Open Graph enabled new links between users and 3rd party websites or pages through what ultimately became the ubiquitous Like button.

At the most recent f8, Facebook sought to push this extension further, asserting that a new class of social connections were required beyond basic endorsements. They announced an extension to the Open Graph that would allow arbitrary verbs and nouns to be created by 3rd parties.  This would enable app developers to define new actions and objects — such as cooking (action) a recipe (object), listening to a song, or reading a book — that extend the social graph, effectively codifying user behavior.

A New Class of Social Apps: New Capabilities, New Rules

Apps that take advantage of these new actions and objects are referred to as Open Graph apps, or Timeline apps.

These new apps are tightly integrated with the recently released Facebook features. Open Graph Apps can post custom content to your Timeline, expanding your digital scrapbook in ways that weren’t previously possible. As you interact with these apps, actions are posted to the Ticker for your friends to see. If the action is considered an important event — as vaguely defined by Facebook — it will also display in your friends’ News Feeds.

All in all, this gives Open Graph apps much greater visibility in the Facebook ecosystem than legacy apps. These apps create a perpetual opportunity for engagement. And they’re stickier, too. As people add apps to their Timelines to capture their activities, they will be much more hesitant to remove them out of fear of losing the connections/expressions they’ve made — like ripping a page out of a diary.

Open Graph apps also come with a very powerful new capability: frictionless sharing. After the initial authorization, apps can share your activity without explicit action on your behalf. You will have likely already seen this behavior in your Facebook Ticker with the Spotify app and The Washington Post social reading app.

Given the capabilities of Open Graph apps, Facebook is being cautious. These apps have the power to rapidly deteriorate the curated Facebook experience, destroy user trust, and weaken Facebook’s core IP — the social graph itself. While Facebook is launching with 60 carefully selected partners, they are now accepting apps from the broader development community. Taking a page from Apple’s playbook, some elements of Open Graph apps must be approved by Facebook prior to distribution. This was not the case with legacy apps. We expect more details to emerge around the approval process in the coming days.

What You Need to Know

With this announcement, Facebook has cemented itself as the social kingpin. As users diversify their online social media activities to meaningful second tier networks such as Pinterest or TripAdvisor, Facebook will remain the hub — keeper of the best, most comprehensive social graph in the world.

As a marketer, the natural question at this point is: should I build a Timeline app?

As with all things social, it depends. Would building an app help further your business objectives? Could you provide lasting entertainment or utility to your customers through an app? Do you already have an independent application that would benefit from a connection to the social graph? Many of the new apps cover media, entertainment and e-commerce; does your business fit this profile? If not, are there opportunities to bridge physical actions with social media? There are many more questions and considerations, and every brand is unique.

It is worth considering where Facebook is headed with this rich new social graph. Capturing user preferences, or Likes, has run its course. Capturing what you’re doing right now, whom you’re with, and where you are, is now Facebook’s primary objective. These Open Graph apps are how they will do it. By codifying reading habits, musical tastes, travel preferences, and gift purchases, Facebook will unlock incredibly powerful opportunities for marketers.

From an advertising perspective, Sponsored Story media buys will become increasingly critical as the volume of activity in Facebook grows with these new apps. Similar to Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s Graph Rank will weigh the importance of each connection in the social graph and determine what activity is ultimately displayed throughout the ecosystem. This is a ranking that will be increasingly influenced through purchase. Given that Sponsored Stories receive 46% higher click through rates, they will likely form the pillar of Facebook’s future advertising strategy.

The data analytics made possible by this new social graph are equally endless, though it remains to be seen how “available” the data will be. Facebook is unlikely to allow marketers to see beyond their individual connection with a user as a means of protecting privacy. It may not be too far a stretch, however, for Facebook to offer predictive media buying, based on correlations between anonymous users.

F.A.Q.

Will this impact my Facebook brand Page? 

No.

Does this announcement mean Timeline is coming to Facebook Pages? 

No. Facebook hasn’t released any details around this potential transition.

Are Like buttons going away? 

No. The changes to the Open Graph are in addition to the existing Like buttons.

Will my existing Facebook apps stop working?

No. While the Open Graph provides new opportunities for apps, existing apps are unaffected.

Will my existing Facebook app automatically “upgrade” to take advantage of the Open Graph? 

No. Open Graph apps are an entirely new class of app. Some existing Facebook apps may be modified to take advantage of these new capabilities.

Conclusion

In summary, it is worth mentioning that privacy concerns will undoubtedly take the stage as these new apps are adopted at scale. Features such as frictionless sharing, essentially a repackaging of the ill-fated Facebook Beacon, will likely draw ire from users. As a world-class marketer, you’re already well aware of the need to be sensitive to these potential issues.

Facebook’s Open Graph app strategy will evolve. Brands considering working in this part of the ecosystem will need a clear strategy, planning, and most importantly, analytics. Syncapse’s Client Services team is always available to advise on the best way to navigate the new Open Graph.

Welcome to the first edition of the Syncapse Social – Syncapse’s monthly newsletter. To start receiving the Syncapse Social in your inbox each month please send us an email at press@syncapse.com. Happy reading!

Happy New Year!

As we all make our way back into the office and engage in the friendly ”who had the most impressive holiday” banter – perfect weather at the beach, a foot of fresh powder on the slopes, or the more honest “I love my kids, but I’m glad they’re back at school” – it won’t take long for the reality of a new year, and for many, the new fiscal, to feel heavy on our shoulders.

It’s now 2012, Mark Zuckerberg will turn 28 this year, it’s almost 8 years since he launched Facebook – his little brainchild has taken as many years off the rest of our lives.  Ah, social media…you make TV seem easy.

Though the world does not need more social media pundits (nor political for that matter), we thought we’d have a go at what we are seeing as the four topics that will remain top of mind throughout 2012.

Measuring Social Media ROI

If you thought “MEASURING SOCIAL ROI” came up in 2011, you should think Rod Tidwell in 2012. CEOs, CMOs, CFOs – they’re all asking it, and truly “owning social media” requires an answer. It’s nearly impossible to obtain a global or regional cross-channel view of activity from the platforms themselves, especially when large corporations are now managing an average of 178 accounts across social media networks.

What is possible?
Customized measurement dashboards and data visualization can surface valuable information and insights, and allow marketers to integrate all channels on which they are active (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, etc.) into a single view.  Aligning KPIs and setting them up now is critical.

The new “normal”

Complete understanding of “owned” properties
 :

• Earned media value
• Consumer engagement
• Brand sentiment
• Campaign effectiveness
• 3rd party data integration to get “owned, earned, and paid”
• Listening platforms
• Paid media
• Scan and survey data

Social CRM

Social CRM (sCRM) the infamous buzzword of 2011, will become a real business driver this year.  According to Gartner, Inc, the sCRM market is forecasted to reach over $1 billion in revenue by the end of 2012.

What is it?
It’s what it sounds like – CRM as we’ve always known it, but now including social consumers and their data.  The issue is, brands can’t control CRM the way they did traditionally. But that’s the reality of social media – get used to it.  The nature of the open dialogue means a clear value exchange between the consumer and the brand is required.

How it works:

1. Facebook and Twitter know a significant amount about your ”Fans” and “Followers”, but you can’t access it without permission.
2. Fans and Followers “opt-in” to brand apps, granting brands permission to access their information. On Facebook alone, this happens more than 20 million times every day.
3. By responsibly collecting and processing user data, brands can understand key activities, which contribute to a consumer’s overall social value to the organization.
4. Understanding the social activity within a brand’s fan base allows organizations to create a strategic platform for engaging consumers, mapping it to your business value and driving clear action on your lifecycle management.

The result?


A more robust view of the consumer and a greater opportunity for personalization in your brand’s overall marketing strategy.

The Marriage of Marketing and IT

Social media is not just transforming the way brands communicate, but the way companies strategically organize and manage their businesses. #Winning in the new year will mean recognizing that social media can no longer be considered a separate Marketing or PR function, but rather a collaborative effort applied to all areas of business—increasingly IT.

According to Forrester Research, of the top social media pain points as reported by 99 US companies, three of them were directly related to IT:

• 10% reported concerns around technology and infrastructure development
• 8% revealed they were worried about data and security risks
• 4% indicated they were apprehensive about IT liability.

With the growth in popularity of social applications, consumer data continues to proliferate while managing scale, cost, consumer data, and privacy become ever more important to Marketers.

2012 will see a new set of services and offerings emerge to meet the social media needs of large enterprises.

The Social Media Platforms That Matter

Decisions, decisions… we understand, there are numerous social media platforms, and everyone wants to be ahead of the proverbial curve, but don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees – it’s not that complicated.  Do major brands buy TV media on the Hallmark Channel?

Must haves:

• Facebook is still, and for the foreseeable future, the largest social media network with 800 million users, more than half of which log on daily.
• Twitter has 100 million active users who send out 200 million tweets per day… and they just launched brand pages, let’s see where it goes.
• YouTube comes next with 161 million unique viewers.

On your radar to crack:

• Vkontakte 28 million users.

Observing:

• RenRen has 137 million users.
• Google+ – in beta for brands, only 40 million users.

There will always be internal pressure to be where the competition is or be on the cutting edge of new platforms – but budgets are not always increasing and often times it is more effective to apply resources to fewer channels that are proven to achieve your brand’s goals.  For now, we recommend fishing where the fish are.

Happy New Year from the team at Syncapse!

Today, the Altimeter Group released a report on the Social Media Management (SMMS) Industry titled, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation”.  This extensive piece of research is the result of input from over 61 ecosystem experts including Corporate Practitioners, Domain Experts, Social Business Services and Social Business Software Vendors. We are excited to have received Strong Capability rankings throughout this report, demonstrating our commitment to serving the world’s largest brands with the best SaaS technology infrastructure, analytics and data management.

Please see below for an excerpt from our press release:

Syncapse Corp., the leading enterprise-grade social marketing solution for the world’s leading brands, today announced the company received positive and strong rankings in a new report by Altimeter Group.  Specifically, the Altimeter report* gave Syncapse a strong capability ranking in the following social media management system use cases: Intense customer response, social broadcasting, distributed brand presence, and tailored service & support.  Authored by Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Syncapse also received an above average capability ranking in the platform campaign marketing use case.

Syncapse provides organizations with the ability to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their global and multichannel social media programs from a centralized social measurement dashboard.  As the first solution designed to bridge the gap between marketing and IT, the SaaS-based Syncapse Platform™ provides a secure infrastructure to build applications, publish, manage compliance and measure social marketing performance.

According to Altimeter analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, “Syncapse serves clients with Distributed Brand Presence, while placing a particular emphasis on service and support. It has 45 employees focused exclusively on services who offer delivery, strategy and intelligence, data services, platform services, onboard training and platform customization.”

“While large, global brands are deeply entwined with marketing technology, executives are still struggling to find a coordinated way to deliver messages and measure engagement to drive tangible results,” said Michael Scissons, president and CEO of Syncapse.  “The recent findings and rankings by Altimeter reinforce our customers request of receiving tailored technology solutions designed to better manage and control their social marketing programs across multiple markets, brands and channels through a single, turnkey SaaS platform. Based on our philosophy and go to market strategy, we believe we are the only social media company who truly understands and embraces social CRM for consumer facing brands.”

To determine these rankings, Altimeter surveyed 144 enterprise-class operations and conducted qualitative interviews with 60 industry experts to define the Five Use Cases of Social Media Management Systems.  In addition, 27 software vendors self-reported their capabilities in an online survey and Altimeter Group scored each vendor to address specific needs within each of the five use cases.

* “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” Altimeter Group (January 5, 2012)

As I jogged down Wall Street in New York in October through the barricades, police horses, and thousands of activists, something became clear. The masses had self-organized and social media had added yet another social movement to its résumé. At the same time, something else became clear to me. Much higher than street level, in the boardrooms of America’s largest companies, social media expertise was far from entering the résumés of most C-suites.

Why is there confusion inside these glass fortresses around the world? Senior executives are struggling to get a grasp of what to do about the social opportunity for their kingdom. But hey, it’s new, right? The kids only started signing up eight years ago. For lots of people, the biggest concern with technology is figuring out how to operate their BlackBerry in the post-trackwheel era.

But with 2012 and the New Year upon us, countless strategy and planning sessions are likely on the calendar. I’d like to take the liberty of answering the most recurring questions I hear from executives of the world’s leading brands and share my predictions, with the hope that doing so will reduce the need to answer these questions by 25% in 2012.

“Every department is telling me they own social media so it feels like it has 12 owners. How do I think about it?”

Thinking of social media as a separate effort will lead to failure and you’ll lose a year. Social media is simply an overlay that must be applied to existing business functions including marketing, customer care, e-commerce, search, HR, internal systems, legal, etc.  CEOs should understand this and ask to see specific plans to achieve business results through collaboration and smart planning. Being “good at social media” shouldn’t be your goal. Weaving social media into the fabric of your company and making your business truly social in nature will be much more valuable.

“I get pitched by 5 gurus a month. Do I need a social media leader for the business?”

Many companies have accelerated success by creating a funded internal group to lead social media across all business functions. Early adopters including Dell, Intel, and Coca-Cola are good examples. This group should be centrally funded for a minimum of 2-5 years depending on the size and complexity of the company. Part watchdog, part consultant, part teacher, and part project manager–the center of excellence should work with various business lines, bringing best in class partners to the table to ensure that all social media activities drive business results.

“My PR team is in my office constantly telling me that they own social media and wanted to be involved in everything–that doesn’t seem effective. Or does it?”

In the early days of social media, one perspective often takes hold. Usually it’s the strongest voice or presenter in the room from PR or marketing. Companies that want success will need to move past thinking about social media as solely a marketing discipline, and mandate a presence from other departments in a Social Media Center for Excellence. A multi-disciplinary approach is the key to success. The social leader for the company should have a solid business background, a strong handle on technology, a flair for engaging consumers, and must work across the business to build a killer team.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s any point in measuring results until we’ve figured out the basics. Should I even bother?”

Most companies wait too long before asking how each potential opportunity will be measured. Don’t be fooled into believing that social media “listening” is the same as program measurement. Ensure your CFO understands what is being spent, why, and what the benefits are. Different business functions, including marketing, PR, sales, and customer care, are all measured differently.

At the end of the day, the mass confusion is unwarranted. Social media doesn’t change the basics of running an organization or its functions. It simply provides a new (and often more efficient) way to deliver on objectives that are as old as mass demonstrations pitting the haves against the have-nots.

This column by Syncapse President and CEO Michael Scissons originally appeared on the AdAge DigitalNext blog. Click here to read the original version.

As marketers, we plan for the future based on what has worked well in the past. With traditional marketing levers like TV, radio, and print media, in-store promotion and the like, we often see spikes in sales as a direct result of these programs. Social media, and specifically Facebook, is a different beast. If you’re planning based on past results you’ll be behind before a campaign even launches.

As competition between Facebook, Google, and Twitter heats up, marketers can expect faster innovation and change. This presents opportunities for the agile and determined, and significant challenges for those less adaptable to new ways of working. Here are five things every marketer should be thinking about:

Facebook reinvents search as IPO nears. 
When is the best time to launch a powerful new feature that could drive billions in revenue? Right before an IPO, I reckon. Facebook can deliver an entirely new search experience never before possible without its social graph. Brands who have captured check-ins and fans, and who build relationships, will develop a stronghold in this brave new world.

Marketers will want objective, third party measurement. Facebook will not set the benchmarks.
CEOs only care about buzz and fan growth for so long. At the end of the day, their question remains “how many cases did we move.” Bringing social data to life and profiling the indicators of social marketing success in a real-time dashboard backed by quantitative research will become commonplace by year-end. And just as you should never ask if a new outfit makes you look fat, you should never ask Facebook if it is driving ROI. Facebook will be supportive and continue to provide research relating to media effectiveness, but an objective multi-channel environment should be used to measure social media ROI.

Facebook tabs will be murdered in broad daylight by social applications and the timeline. 
Facebook Timeline will allow brands to tell their stories in ways never before possible, presuming Facebook launches similar functionality for brand profiles. Facebook tab management tools will be commoditized and become redundant by years end. Social applications that deliver utility or entertainment to consumers will rule the day.

Managing scale, cost, and consistency of applications will be funded by leading marketers.
A social marketer’s new best friend will become IT, who will need to step in and help manage an app eco-system. Apps will move from a collection of cheap and cheerful tools created and managed by disparate individuals across the organization, to being measureable, efficient and secure through a managed global infrastructure.

Data, privacy, and compliance become larger issues
Local markets are cracking down and will continue to challenge the status quo on privacy, data storage, and user opt-in. Managing across multiple jurisdictions with varying practices will become commonplace. Lawsuits and regulatory investigations will drive Fortune 500 companies and Facebook to seek new practices that will ensure compliance.

What’s a Marketer to do?

1. Speak to the CMO, CDO, CIO or VP of digital. Make sure they are planning and budgeting globally for this brave new world. If they don’t understand what is coming, seek help – or alternative employment.
2. If you are trying to write social media technology, measurement or infrastructure plans on a “brand-by-brand” basis – you’ll have a tough decade.
3. Plan and budget a solid offense (creative ideas) and defense (measurement, efficiency, protection, compliance, infrastructure, security). Somebody has to fund it and IT is unlikely to have the budget for this in 2012.
4. Everything on Facebook is “always on.” Plan accordingly and ensure you’re staffed appropriately.
5. Align to KPIs regionally if not globally and measure them objectively.
6. Have a solid “transition plan” to move boldly forward to the new opportunities offered by Facebook. Execute for today while working toward the goals of tomorrow.

Facebook isn’t going to fall off a cliff and successful marketers will challenge themselves to embrace and integrate new marketing channels and commit to being agile to maximize their potential. Marketers who cut through the noise and focus efforts of social leading social platforms,will be rewarded.