On the heels of my recent SXSW panel moderated by Jeremiah Owyang with Chris Saad at Echo, we wanted to continue the dialog in a deeper way around the vision for a more real time, connected future.

This white paper reviews the evolution of social media experiences, and builds a model of how these experiences will continue to evolve as the tools for social media experiences become better understood and more widely available.

We also discuss how the role of social is shifting to become more integrated into the overall marketing strategy, accelerating growth of all marketing initiatives.

What do you think the future of social will be? Let me know in the comments.

One of my key points was that users increasingly expect a consumer-grade experience, even while companies expect an enterprise-class solution. That means that companies have to keep up with fast-moving consumer websites, like Facebook and Pinterest, and offer social engagement that is just as valuable.

There are a lot of other nuggets, including how I see corporations wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants.

The Next Web livestreamed the event, and you can catch the video here:

I had a great time talking with Jay and Tristan Handy about how Janrain collects social data from users, and makes it available to other systems in the marketing technology stack.

Even though I’ve known Jay for years, it’s always great to find a chance to catch up with what is the latest thinking in the social space. I remember the first episode of Social Pros I listened to, where the hot topic was releasing your Super Bowl commercial online before the actual Super Bowl – remember when that was considered a risky move?

Our conversation was wide ranging, from the privacy implications of social sign-in; what marketers must offer users in order to be willing to share more of their identities (hint: it’s not all about free stuff); and the changing notion of identity online. I hope you have a chance to listen, and please join the conversation in the comments here, on the Convince and Convert website, over Twitter, or by skywriting over the beautiful Portland skyline. Really, there are so many ways to participate, you don’t have an excuse not to!

Check it out here, or download to listen when you are not connected.

In those cases, incentivizing your website visitors to share with others by offering refer-a-friend participation bonuses can concentrate many users into sharing all at once. This creates momentum in social channels that can drive awareness within those channels, and create a virtuous circle of interactions. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, for example, uses interactions on posts to determine what to show in a user’s feed. If more people interact with a post, it is more likely to be shown higher in the feed.

So, when considering how and when to use a refer-a-friend program, keep these best practices in mind. 

Create value for both the user and their friend

Giving incentives to users for their advocacy is a no-brainer. People love to get something for their ability to influence. But, their friends and other relationships will not participate solely because someone they like asked them. Those second-degree connections need something more compelling than social pressure to engage with your brand on your timeline.

Daily deals sites employ this model effectively. LivingSocial gives a credit to the user if their social connections respond to a deal. That’s great motivation to share in the first place. What makes the program successful is that the second-degree connection gets an outstanding bargain – 50% off a massage, with a fast expiration, prompts those new customers to convert quickly.

Make the incentive relevant

Discounting your product is the first thing that comes to mind when considering potential rewards for refer-a-friend program participants. But, discounting hurts the long-term value of the customer, who comes to expect discounts as a normal part of the buying experience.

There are times when discounting makes sense, of course, for refer-a-friend programs. When the purchase is for a group activity, the discount provides a way for more friends to participate. This aligns your first customer – the referrer – with all of their referrals. The goal is for everyone to have a shared experience, and the discount becomes a mechanism to catalyze group action. Some examples include golf tee times, theater tickets, or books for a reading club.

If your product is not group-oriented, consider other types of incentives, such as increased reputation or status within your community context. These separate the quest for participation from the transactional element, and help customers feel like they are not trading on their personal relationships.

Decide what comes next, first

Combining both a discount and a strong word of mouth recommendation is a marketing one-two punch. These are two of the most powerful, and most widely exploited, marketing tactics. But, they are only good for a short-term boost unless you have a plan in place to turn the new customer into a repeat customer quickly, to cement the emerging relationship with your business.

A refer-a-friend program is not a marketing strategy, it is a new customer acquisition tactic. In order to use it effectively, you must plan out the next several customer touchpoints. This could include inserts into the delivery packaging to encourage repeat visits around a specific product category; a multi-touch email campaign to continue building mindshare; or a personal follow up from the referrer to thank the new customer.

Regardless of the specific next steps, you must determine them as part of the launch of a refer-a-friend effort. Once a campaign begins, you will be busy with the tactical elements of running the campaign, and won’t have time to build out the ongoing strategy. Advance planning is the only way to capitalize on success.

Janrain’s Strategic Services team offers Refer-a-Friend programs with these best practices in mind, and with easy tracking and reporting to keep you focused on program success.

Have you set up a similar program? What type of incentives did you use to increase shares?

Did you attend SXSW, and want to share some highlights? Did you miss Austin this year, and want to hear the key takeaways?

Join us on Monday, April 9 to hear about what the scuttlebutt was throughout the Interactive festival. SXSW continues to get bigger every year, and to do the event justice, we’re bringing together a number of disciplines to discuss the scene from several angles.

Panelists include:

Brian Unflat, Creative Director, The New Group
Brad Cohen, Strategist, JESS3
Carmen Hill, Content Strategist, Babcock and Jenkins
Marshall Kirkpatrick, Founder, Plexus Engine
Jamie Beckland, Digital Strategist, Janrain

Happy Hour: 6:00
Panel Discussion: 6:30
The Art Institute of Portland  (Open Space on the 2nd Floor)

Let us know to save you a spot here at Plancast.

1. Know who you will know, before you go

With more than 20,000 attendees, you probably know a few people who will be there. The worst thing about such a huge, sprawling conference is that you only find out about all your contacts you didn’t see after the conference is over. Connecting with your network before you arrive is a critical first step to a productive time in Austin.

Post out to your social networks to learn who is coming into town, when, and where they will be partying. Look to meet up with them during the casual get togethers that happen throughout the week. Don’t let them sway which sessions you attend – there is more than enough mental stimulation to go around, and it gives you something to review with friends when you re-connect later.

In fact, Janrain wants to make sure you have an inspirational late night conversation at SXSW on Sunday night, as sponsors of Fyrebash with our partner, Livefyre. Check out the details and get yourself on the list here.

2. Make a plan, but prepare for serendipity

It’s always a good idea to have a plan in mind to get the most out of a conference. Spend some time reviewing the must-attend sessions and workshops for yourself. Get to know the schedule, and keep some critical sessions sacred.

But, inspiration comes from unexpected places, too. So, if you are a marketer, attend one or two sessions led by developers working on new open standards. If you are a gamer, attend a session about the emerging social justice work happening on social media. Allow yourself to see the technology space, which you work in every day, from another perspective.

Of course, some of the most compelling reasons to attend a live conference are that casual conversation that you strike up in the hallway, or that late night brainstorm for a new product that comes to life on your fourth beer. Don’t be so beholden to your agenda that you cut short the opportunities for serendipity to strike. Pad your schedule knowing that you will want to take advantage of those odd moments where a spark of a new idea is starting to form.

3. Come healthy, leave healthy

South By can feel a little bit like ten weeks of summer camp crammed into ten days. Long days, late nights, open bars, breakfast meetings, no breaks for lunch, crashing in a friend’s hotel, waiting an hour for dinner, and even the bright sun of Austin (at least for us Portlanders) can all take its toll on your stamina and your immune system.

Make sure you are feeling rested and ready for long days before you arrive. And while you are hoofing between 6th Street and the Convention Center, make sure you stay hydrated with water. Go easy on the caffeine (including those free Monsters from the promo truck), and pace yourself with alcohol. If you are staying close enough, consider even taking a nap one afternoon.

4. Plan time to follow up after

There are lots of talkers, and few doers. You want to be a doer, and that means taking all those interesting conversations, introductions, chance encounters, high fives, and inspired late night philosophical banter from the conference, and translating it into meaningful relationships afterward.

Set aside 2-3 hours per day for the rest of the week after you get back home to follow up with the people that you have met, and find ways to keep the dialog that you started in Austin, continuing until SXSW 2013. You’ll come back next year with deeper relationships, a better finger on the pulse of technology, and the appetite for even more great experiences.

Sometimes that is a great feeling, because it shows that the company knows you, and wants to deliver something that is just right for you.

Other times, it can feel like a violation because you may not understand why the company is making that recommendation. You might wonder just how much they know about you…

The truth is that customer data can give us the ability to create even more personalized experiences than ever before. But, that means we must be careful to show users personalized information in ways that are sensitive to their needs, and make the experience better – not scarier.

I’ll be hosting a webinar about just this topic: Minority Report Marketing – Creating Personalized Experiences without Being Creepy. Please join me next Wednesday, 10 AM PST/1 PM EST where we will review examples of personalized experiences that run the gamut from delightful to disturbing, and also show you how to identify the opportunities for personalization of your own brand communications.

Digiday holds this conference twice a year because the amount of user and customer data is exploding, and the industry is changing so quickly that a traditional annual conference would be outdated by the time they finished programming the agenda.

Instead, speakers covered a wide range of topics in a discussion-heavy format. This allowed for everyone to share case studies and success stories that were hot off the presses. The format created one of the most engaging and innovative conferences of the year.

One of the key conversations was the challenge of both advertisers and publishers to unify multiple third parties who provide data into a single, unified view of campaign performance. The challenge continues with multiple definitions of a user’s interests; challenges tracking and deduping; and concerns about validation. Some compared the complexity of disentangling digital metrics to the simplicity of “just buying 300 more GRPs.”

But, many expressed optimism and excitement that the power of one-to-one marketing was now within sight. The industry is getting a better understanding of how to target messaging to a receptive audience, and using social profile data is becoming an important part of the story.

Jamie Christner of Definition6 discussed the ability for social media conversations to start determining messaging for larger campaigns. Winston Birch of Deutsch LA talked about how audience and customer data is starting to drive the creative process. And our own VP of Business Development, Tore Steen, discussed the very credible possibility that Facebook may know more about your customers than you do – then laid out the path to start leveraging that customer data held in their social identities to build a holistic view of the customer for the first time ever.

Here’s Tore’s presentation at the summit:

The potential of social profile data sparked a number of conversations about how, where, and why to incorporate these powerful opt-in indicators into an audience segment, and how often the quality of data, as well as the quantity, was superior from these collection methods.

Have you used social profile data to target users? Let us know in the comments.

Our Digital and Social Media Strategist, Jamie Beckland spoke at the Innovation in Motion event this month in Portland on this very topic and offers his perspectives in this short video on how marketers can empower brand advocates to spark that zero moment of truth within their own social networks.

The role of A/B testing and optimization is not often discussed in social media. With so much focus on content, timeliness, and channel management, it’s often difficult to articulate a clear testing strategy, and most of the time, social media managers don’t have any ability to test messaging because they don’t control the channel – it’s impossible to measure the impact when you can’t see behind the curtain to understand what’s going on.

But, the social elements of your website are an area where multivariate testing is possible. And the results can be applied across your entire social media strategy. Testing should be a fundamental part of the on-site social media plan.

Of course, there are a number of best practices that we already know about social login and other social interactions. However, the specific ways in which your users interact with your brand and the experiences you have created on your website will vary dramatically. Best practices help deployments go smoothly and efficiently, but they can’t maximize performance – only your users can tell you what works best for them. That means that testing and optimization of the social elements on your site is critical.

At Janrain, we have seen simple A/B testing improve performance of social elements by 2-3x in just a matter of weeks. The reason that testing is so effective is that it allows users to make the decisions, and sometimes the preferences of the user are a surprise, even to marketing teams who know their customers well.

In considering how to structure a series of multivariate tests for social components, it’s important to start with a clear vision of what metrics you are trying to impact. Frequently, we see that deploying Janrain Engage has an immediate impact on the number of registrations on a website. If driving registrations is a clear goal, testing variables in the registration process is a natural next step after deployment.

Consider testing elements in the social login process like:

Identity providers: This is one of the easiest elements to test. Consider both the identities you offer, and also the placement and prioritization of identity providers. You will want to align with your overall business goals, of course, so some identity providers may not be relevant, but you may be surprised where you find pockets of interest and activity with focused identity providers.

Here we see two typical setups of identity providers for different sites. The first is for a retail site, and the second is for a community site. Notice how the identity providers are prioritized differently.

Size and emphasis: Social login can be prioritized strongly, or weakly; it can sit alongside traditional registration, or it can roadblock access to traditional registration. These considerations can dramatically impact the number of users who log in through social means, and, perhaps surprisingly, the total number of logins. Placement and framing options can drive substantial lift in performance.

Data permissions: The data that you are requesting from the social network can also impact the usage of social login. While this is mostly at the margin, it is important to consider testing different levels of permissions, and also the messaging attached to the information request. Giving users a clear reason for requesting data can dramatically increase opt-in.

There are many other elements that could be tested, depending on your website and the experience associated with login. Testing should be part of every social media endeavor where possible, and having the ability to test and learn on your site is unique in the social media landscape. Janrain offers social media testing and optimization services for all of our solutions.

Have you had success testing in social media? Let us know in the comments.