John S. Wolfe

This is another in a series of reports about the Social Media Marketing 2010 conference, held June 17 in London.

Continuing the theoretical discussion of the ultimate effectiveness of social media, speakers Brian Solis and Mat Morrison emphasized that the amount of “noise” is rising, so marketers need to know how to more strongly get their messages across.

Solis, a principal of FutureWorks, a digital and social media agency, focused his talk on “nicheworks.”

From his perspective, each individual today through social media is creating his own audience. Because the audience involves friends and acquaintances, it is actually quite influential, he said.

Brian Solis, the San Francisco-based thought leader and author of Engage!, speaks to the conference via Skype from Copenhagen.

“The challenge is that we are competing for mind share,” he said. “So what content is worth sharing with that person?”

In this way, marketers are not so much product pushers but audience builders.

“We need to connect with people on themes and interests,” Solis said.

One person’s influence now has even more reach, as networks are expanded to include people who may never meet in person.

“Nicheworks” attempts to cut through the noise by analyzing the decision-making processes of individuals, to determine the best way to reach them.

More often these days, that involves identifying key influencers on a topic, or “people with a large reach.”

Starbucks used this approach by identifying coffee bloggers, sending them coupons and inviting them to share comments on the company’s product initiatives.

Solis’s firm can rank experts, find influencers on a topic and use them to tell stories to others, all the while creating social databases on users.

“The idea is to introduce value into the stream,” he said.

The approach is also designed to build more engagement with customers, through interesting and relevant content.

“You can measure things like re-tweeting but is it engaging?” Solis asked. “Our goal is to make it live longer.”

Mat Morrison, “media czar” at the Magic Beans Laboratory, said there is a difference between volume and effectiveness.

Morrison – who said the Magic Beans moniker allows for a failure rate, which “so far this year is 100 percent,” he quipped – provided an example.

Mat Morrison describes how friends, not media editors, are becoming prominent filters of information.

Last year organizers looked to publicize the London Twitter Festival – “Twestival” – and publicized close to the event’s conclusion a fictitious clash at the scene between Twitterers and Facebookers. (This writeup describes it.)

“While it was amplified by the people who Tweeted it, it didn’t go viral,” Morrison said. “Most people didn’t pass it on beyond the first generation.”

In his opinion, the users hadn’t been groomed how to pass along the story.

Social networks are essentially creating filters among friends, he said. Instead of a Guardian editor telling you what’s interesting, now a friend will be sharing a story or a video clip.

How do you bypass filters? “Good storytelling,” Morrison said.

Morrison encourages businesses to use a third-party source that will collect social network data of customers, enrich that data by removing overlaps, and then break out the data into segments for more effective targeting. Then the company should identify the influencers in each segment in its network.

But stay alert. Influencers and contexts can change, he said.