The World’s First Condom Specialty Shop, Condomerie, has a fantastic video up on YouTube of an HIV Awareness PSA they executed on Chatroulette back in April. In the video, an almost nude woman sits back holding a sign that says BINGO in front of her chest.  As though she’s about to give a peep show to her audience, she moves closer to the camera until the smaller message on her sign is legible, “You’re now in touch with an HIV infected person. Don’t play Russian roulette in real life.”

While the message and execution of this guerrilla effort are definitely smart and powerful, please be forwarned that this video contains risqué, albeit censored, imagery.

Social media strategy and metrics are difficult pure and simple. Much of the time, a brand’s social media presence is initiated as an afterthought, an add-on to the brand’s overall marketing strategy. Traditional marketing strategies are more often than not, too shallow for social media because broadcast voices are impersonal and closed. Staking a claim on the social web and then tossing out brand messages from that platform does not make for effective social media marketing.

To create a truly relevant presence through social media, brands need to find out where their target is living online, who is leading them (you always gotta find those popular kids/social influencers/trust agents/what have you), and then figure out how to engage these influencers. This cannot be done without doing LOTS of initial research and continuing to develop post launch ad to custom tailor our communication in real time, in accordance with both the insights we gather while “live” and the data patterns we notice over time.

Last night Marshall Sponder, a SEO and web analytics expert, spoke at the 140 Characters Conference MeetUp in NYC about using real time analytics for real time communication. Marshall referred to a high number of missed opportunities he’s seen for brands that have ignored real time data and that have neglected to continually analyze and customize their methods for gathering and interpreting the data. Additionally, Marshall honed in on, well, honing in, stating that to truly understand how their real time engagement works, brands must TAKE….. THEIR….. TIME…… and customize. Marshall reminded everyone that even though trustworthy real time communication is (seemingly) off-the-cuff, over time and the patterns we record when pulling regular data will point to distinctive insights about how to optimize our engagement methods.

Marshall discusses this in detail (with a focus on geo-location tools) and with a case study on his blog.

Jump to Brian Solis’s recent post about Behaviorgraphics. Brian describes a long list of types of communication styles and he also argues for enhanced engagement with and customization of our data.

“Genuine engagement is inspired by the research and data we accumulate as we analyze the social web and the specific activity and people who define our markets and audiences. We are now required to tailor our stories and distribute them specifically in the channels that cater to the technographics and socialgraphics of our customers. In order to truly earn relevance and prominence within our communities, we also need to connect information and objects dictated by the personality traits of those influencers who in turn activate and move markets.”
Read the rest of his post here.

That said, we need to spend more time listening to our consumers as we develop (and redevelop) our social media strategies and stop treating the concept like an afterthought. The more data we gather and the more time we spend analyzing data from this sphere of communication, the better our brands will engage with it and the more effective our communications will become.

Testing the expedition marketing waters for itself, Tropicana set its sights on the arctic circle, where people live for WEEKS without sunlight. To make a “Brighter Morning for a Brighter Day” in the small town of Inuvik, Canada, Tropicana erected for them a replacement sun on their 31st day of darkness.  The result is a beautiful commercial (airing March 1st) showing the town’s surprised and delighted reaction to this gift on a “day” they probably hadn’t expected to remember.

Check it out:

Thanks to Agency Spy for tweeting the link!

As a community manager, I often wonder why companies won’t just accept that they need to engage their customers with social media, and why they can’t see that consumers (not just ad people) are using and consuming social media at an astounding pace. Realistically, there are a lot of good reasons for this, chiefly that they don’t see any empirical evidence that the times are changing. This presents a real big challenge to social media enthusiasts like myself, as we are so consumed by trying to keep up with “it” – “it” being The State of NOW, as Jeff Pulver so aptly puts it – that we have a hard time stepping back and seeing it with “client eyes.”

Enter Gary Hayes of Personalize Media, @GaryPHayes on Twitter. He has created this amazing app (below) that is tracking the rapidly advancing rate of people using the social web. Notice this app is updating itself in real time. Could it provide enough evidence of this crazy media revolution that’s so difficult to quantify?

Thanks goes to Chris Voss for blogging it before me and tweeting the link.
UPDATE: 2/22/2010: Just realized I only mentioned the social media counter and not the tabs for mobile and games. Check out those categories with this counter, too!

Just found a great live feed of Union Square, 3 blocks north of Renegade’s office. Today we watch it fill up with snow, in July with sun bathers.  Thanks for the feed goes to Blue Fountain Media!