Weber Shandwick partnered with Forbes Insights to survey nearly 1,900 senior marketing/communications executives with digital responsibility in 50 countries worldwide to identify what makes brands social — and how.

Why brand sociability matters?

• Global brand executives attribute 52% of their brand’s reputation to how social it is today. They project it to be 65% in three years
• Global brand executives think the rewards of social media outweigh the risks by more than a 2-to-1 margin.
• One-third say quality of online presence or engagement is a prime driver of corporate reputation.
• A large majority of global executives believe their brand’s sociability is not yet “world class.”

9 Drivers of World Class Brand Sociability

1. It’s not the medium — and it’s more than the message. World class brands are much more likely than the average brand to create original content. 45% of them create content specifically for social media purposes, compared to 28% of all global companies. World class brands depend upon much more than just the medium to make themselves social.
2. Put your brands in motion. World class companies do more than experiment with social media tools. They apply their tools in more social ways than the average global company. For example, they are 44% more likely to offer brand-related mobile content, 43% more likely to participate in “check-in” apps, 41% more likely to do proximity marketing and 40% more likely to have their own branded YouTube channel.
3. Integrate or die. World class organizations are much better integrators of brand personality — they are nearly twice as likely as other organizations to have a consistent brand personality across all social and traditional media channels and are much more likely to include a social media element to their traditional print or broadcast messaging.
4. Make social central. 61% of world class brands have a dedicated social media strategist or manager, vs. 41% of all global brands. “The most important thing we can do is to centrally plan social media activities across all channels to amplify key messages.” — Global Executive.
5. Listen more than you talk. World class companies fine-tune their messages to customers and integrate what is on their fans’ minds into their brand stories. Nearly twice as many world class brands have changed a product or service based on fan recommendations compared to the average global brand.
6. Count what matters — meaningful engagement. World class brands place more weight than other brands on their number of contributors when measuring social media effectiveness. Social contributors are ranked #1 by world class companies but #6 by other companies as a key metric.
7. Think global. Executives managing world class brands consider global reach as important as customer service as a driver of corporate reputation while the average global executive ranks global reach last. “Our social branding goals involve a very firm commitment to increase the recognition of the company’s globalization.”— Global Executive.
8. Go outside to get inside. World class companies are nearly twice as likely as average global companies to engage outside support to enhance and measure their brand’s social performance.
9. Be vigilant. To protect their social brand integrity, world class brands are always on high alert. Compared to the average global company, they are 85% more vigilant since Wikileaks has been in the news and are 58% more likely to be concerned about privacy violations.

Close the sale with calls to action

Google Adwords Small Business Center states that “ads work better when you tell the reader what they can expect to do (or what you want them to do) when they reach your site. Phrases like “Buy Now,” “Save More,” “Sign Up Today,” or “Learn More” are called “call to action” terms, because they tell the reader plainly what you want them to do next.”

Rich media ads have been around for several years, and have provided a powerful canvas for creative expression, driving greater interaction and response. Until now, rich media ads were small portion of total display ad impressions, but last year they grew by 66%. And now, HTML5 ads bring the same interactivity to people who browse the web from mobile devices such as iOS and Android devices. By 2015, we expect that 50% of all display ads will be rich media ads.

The answer is dynamic advertising.

A dynamic ad is a single ad that runs everywhere but each impression is customized to the viewer. It displays the best combination of visuals for each viewer, including the best headline, copy, images, featured products, shopping locales to buy from, and more. Our data show, dynamic ads get twice the clicks and triple the ROI.

Imagine you own a popular coffee chain in Denver that you want to promote. On Monday afternoon, it’s warm and 80 degrees in the city. You run a display ad campaign online that offers Denverites a discount coupon for an iced cold latte, with a searchable map embedded in the ad to show local branches, and a real-time feed from people who have tweeted publicly about your newest flavor. That evening, a cold front rolls over the Rockies. Your ad automatically and dynamically adjusts to present a photo of a hot, steaming cup of hot chocolate in front of a warm fireplace, together with a home delivery number and an offer for free marshmallows.

Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days. 99 percent of our top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network and YouTube. And last year, they increased their spending on display advertising by over 75 percent. Over 66% of ads on the Ad Exchange are now bought in real-time. On the mobile front, AdMob network now receives more than 2 billion ad requests per day, having quadrupled over the last 12 months. As you know by now, we’re investing significantly to make this better for users, advertisers and publishers

These innovations are happening in 2 major areas:

1. Media solutions: websites, videos or mobile, no matter where your consumers are, you can build a comprehensive plan to reach them with Google.

2. Platform solutions: Agencies and enterprise class buyers can build a comprehensive display ads operation with our exchange, demand side platform and ad serving solutions.

Once you click through to Google’s landing page on creating more engaging dynamic ads, the stats from Dynamic logic prove it’s place in advertising budgets for a long time to come. With the largest global network on the planet, Google reaches 80 percent of Internet users worldwide. Google claims that, “there’s a perfect ad for everyone.” I’m interested in hearing your comments on how you currently are or plan to leverage Google’s display advertising offerings to target and optimize your marketing message.

Google – the multinational Internet search technologies corporation, hosts and develops numerous Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising has responded to the EU’s antitrust investigation.

In short, Google says it focuses on users, not websites. So whatever is best for the user is what it does.

Here’s Google’s full blog post on the EU investigation, written by top search execs Udi Manber and Susan Wojcicki:

At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first by providing the best possible answers as quickly as possible – and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. However, given our success and the disruptive nature of our business, it’s entirely understandable that we’ve caused unease among other companies and caught the attention of regulators. Today, the European Commission has announced that they will continue to review complaints about Google’s search and search advertising. We respect their process and will continue to work closely with the Commission to answer their questions.

So that everyone understands how we approach search and ads ranking, we thought it would be helpful to state clearly the principles that guide our business:

• Answering users’ queries accurately and quickly is our number one goal. Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our traditional “ten blue links”, and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in “weather in London” or “15 grams in ounces” you get the answers directly (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more complex questions just as fast and as clearly. We believe ads are information too, which is why we work so hard to ensure that the advertisements you see are directly relevant to what you are looking for;

• We built Google for users, not websites. It may seem obvious, but people sometimes forget this — not every website can come out on top, or even appear on the first page of our results, so there will almost always be website owners who are unhappy about their rankings. The most important thing is that we satisfy our users.

• We are always clear when we have been paid for promoting a product or service. Before we launched Google, many search engines took money for inclusion in their results without making that clear to users. We have never done that and we always distinguished advertising content from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and types of content, we promise to continue to be transparent about payments.

• We aim to be as transparent as possible. We provide more information about how our ranking works than any other major search engine, through our webmaster central site, blog, diagnostic tools, support forum, and YouTube channel. We give our advertisers information about the ad auction, tips on how to improve their ad quality scores, and the ability to simulate their bids to give them more transparency. And we’re committed to increasing that transparency going forward. At the same time, we don’t want to help people game our system. We do everything we can to ensure that the integrity of our results isn’t compromised.

Our final principle: the only constant is change. We’ve been working on this stuff for well over a decade, and in that time our search technology has improved by leaps and bounds. Our results are continuing to evolve from a list of websites to something far more dynamic. Today there’s real-time content, automatically translated content, local content (especially important for mobile devices), images, videos, books, and a whole lot more. Users can search by voice — and in a variety of languages. And we’ve developed new ad formats such as product listing ads and new pricing models such as cost-per-action. We cannot predict where search and online advertising will be headed, but we know for sure that they won’t stay the same. By staying focused on innovation we can continue to make search even better — for the benefit of users everywhere.

Building off their immense success of  2010′s Social Media Success Summit – Guy Kawasaki Keynote and 2009′s Gary Vaynerchuck’s Keynote, SocialMediaExaminer.com presents The Facebook Success Summit 2010: The Web’s Largest Online Facebook Marketing Conference, where marketers can discover how to use Facebook to attract and engage quality customers, and quickly grow your business.

Brian is the author of Engage: The Complete Guide to Building, Cultivating and Measuring Success in the Social Web. He is globally recognized as a leading thought leader in new media. Brian is also principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning new media agency in Silicon Valley, and has led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and web 2.0 startups.

TOPIC: The Case for Facebook and What Your Biz Needs to Know

By this time next year, more businesses will be vested into Facebook than any other social network (yes even more than Twitter). With more than 500 million active users, Facebook has become the world’s largest social gathering spot. In this session, Brian Solis, author of the book Engage! will show you why Facebook is so essential to businesses of all sizes and what you need to do to benefit from the Facebook explosion.

Tonight’s keynote by Solis: “By This Time Next Year…” was engaging on many levels. Here are some of my favorite tweets from the stream during the call, I tried to keep them in chronological order. If you attended I would love to her your thoughts on the presentation.

If you are new to social media marketing, make sure to follow the rest of this conference hashtag here: http://wthashtag.com/FBSS10

With the growth of social media it’s easy to forget that social media marketing campaigns stretch far beyond the boarders of the United States. Twitter documented its growth as a “global information network” with a user base that’s geographically diverse. With 60% of registered Twitter accounts living outside the United States, we tend to think of campaigns only for the USA.

Social Media is a Global Phenomenon

It’s a People-Driven economy and The U.S. and Canada are great areas to look at to see what is and isn’t working and apply appropriately. While it’s a good practice to look at the more progressive countries, be careful, as it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

With more then 70% of all Facebook users living outside of the US – Keep in mind International users in your next social media strategy brainstorm-sessions.

I recently had the pleasure to interview Adeel Raza – who is without a doubt, a very impressive entrepreneur! Founder of Donut Chat,  a very exciting media-enabled chat room for fun, work and collaboration. Beautifully embeds into your Facebook Page, Website, Blog, Bulletin Board or CMS and also integrates with all popular applications. Donut lets chatters share files and media from YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc within the chat room. And it also works on iPhone and iPod touch devices.

9 Reasons Why You’ll Love Donut Chat

1. Takes seconds, and costs nada.
2. Nothing to download or install.
3. Website, Blog or Facebook Page.
4. Connects with Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc.
5. It’s your chat, you’re in control.
6. iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch compatible.
7. Share files, photos, videos and documents.
8. Firewall friendly.
9. Speaks your language.

How did you get started in this business?

Our team has always been passionate about software, internet and the web. So we combined the three, and decided to provide simple web services to people

Is this your first business? Were you exposed to entrepreneurship as a child?

We have been in the consulting business for over 5 years with satisfied clients all over the globe. We decided to get into the products bandwagon in order to achieve a higher growth rate. I was exposed to entrepreneurship by friends and mentors, and it’s been a never-ending journey since then.

How did you finance your business?

We started the consulting business boot-strapped. The products division is self-funded.

How many employees do you have? Full- or part-time? What is an average workday like for you?

We are a team of 3 people working full-time. An average workday includes consulting work in the morning, lunch break and discussion/evaluation of new ideas, and the product development. During busy days, an average day could consist of 18 hours.

Who are your potential customers?

For Donut Chat, the potential customers are people with online communities who want to give their members a live chat system.

For our consulting business, the potential customers are firms who want to get things done efficiently. We love technology, and try to design every project with the best yet.

What are the most crucial things you have done to grow your business? What plans do you have now to expand your business further?

It’s a never-ending process. We just got into the products business. In future, we plan to build and offer more exciting products. We’re also in talks with some VCs for funding.

What systems have you used to automate your business to give you more time for business planning and development?

There’s always space for automation. For starters, we’ve automated our complete billing and licensing process. In future, we’re working on automating the customer support system.

What outsiders have been most important to your business success?

Customer. We love them.

How do you market your product?

Reaching out to targetted consumers is a hard task to do. Mostly, we use social media to market it.

What has been your most effective marketing tactic or technique? What’s the worst business advice you’ve ever received

The thing that works the best for startups is to get featured in blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, WebWorkerDaily, etc. That works the best for us too.

What three pieces of advice would you offer entrepreneurs starting out today?

1. Have lots and lots of patience. It’s not just about good products, but good relationships.
2. Launching something on time is more important than development of new features.
3. Think in terms of business, not in terms of products.

If you were to start another business, what might it be?

It’ll be something related to technology for sure.

Do you believe business has any obligation to make the world a better place?

Yes, not only a business but every act we do as individuals also has an obligation to make this world a better place.

How does your business “give back” to the community or to society?

We love open source. Whenever we build something for internal use, we want other developers to benefit from it too. Whether it’s just a jQuery plugin or a rails gem that we’re using internally, we release it for the community.

Thanks Adeel for your answers, and I look forward to watching your success in the coming years ahead.

Do you replace twitter updates for your morning news and information over TV broadcasts? Do you update your status before you crawl into bed, and again once you wake up in the morning? It’s okay – you’re not alone. The latest Retrevo Gadgetology study asked social media users questions such as when, where, and how much time they spend on sites and services like FaceBook and Twitter.

What is it about social media that causes people to spend so much of their precious time trading information with friends, family and even giant corporations? Of course, we already know the answer; it’s fun and can be rewarding both socially and financially.

Not only do social media fanatics check Facebook and Twitter throughout the day, almost half of the respondents said they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Naturally, younger social media users said they tweet by night more than those over 25.

Among social media users, it appears almost half are so involved with FaceBook and Twitter that they check in the first thing in the morning. With 16% of social media users saying this is how they get their morning “news,” could we be witnessing the first signs of social media services beginning to replace “Good Morning America” as the source for what’s going on in the world?

Need more evidence that social media can be habit forming? How about the fact that 56% of social media users need to check FaceBook at least once a day? Even more impressive are the 12% who check in every couple of hours.

What are your thoughts? Are we becoming a society addicted to status updates and @anywhere check-ins?

This past year Apple managed to get their product placed in over 40% of the movies that enjoyed at least one weekend atop the box office, Abe Sauer at The Awl reports in a great piece about Apple’s product placement success.

Down from the year prior when it was in 50% of the top movies, but it was good enough to make it the brand with the most product placements. What’s more impressive is the brands Apple beat out such as Ford or Pepsi, which have been atop the list in many recent years. As Abe points out, it’s especially impressive to beat Ford, since it’s easy to put a taxi cab with a Ford logo in a movie.

More impressive than all those product placements over its rivals is the price Apple pays, which would be ZERO. According to the Abe,“Apple does not pay for any of this exposure.” Set decorators want their sets to look realistic, so they need computers.

The problem here: 12% of the homes in the U.S. have Apple computers, says Abe. So, there’s clearly a bias. What’s more, Apple computers managed to find their way into places that just don’t have Apple computers normally, like hospitals and government offices.

These numbers also don’t include the mountain of other films and TV shows, from Macs on Regis and Kelly and Jimmy Fallon’s desks to the Mac grotesquerie of The Office and 30 Rock. Fruity logo out front, advertisement aglow.

For one month in 2009, product placement tracking service Nielsen IAG noted 62 total “occurrences” of Apple products, more than any other brand, including AT&T (59), Coca-Cola (55) or Ford (41). Playboy, even with a whole show crafted around its brand name, logged a comparatively paltry 21 occurrences.

Apple is essentially like Hollywood itself, beautiful, expensive and not at all representative of reality. And just like disbelief is suspended when Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt portray normal people, Apple product placement is dismissed as creative license.

I’m a PC.

With the economy and spending in decline small businesses are flocking to adopt social media marketing strategies to level the playing field in the local markets. With SMB’s social media usage increasing from 12% last year to 24% this year, common usage of social media among small business was a company page on a social networking site, followed by posting status updates.

As eMarketer explains: Most small businesses say they are just breaking even with their current usage of social media, but a solid one-fifth find it profitable already. Businesses are positive about the potential as well: Nearly one-half believe it will make them money in the next 12 months, and another 39% think they will break even on it. Just 9% think social marketing will continue to be a losing proposition.

Social media levels the playing field for small businesses by helping them deliver customer service.

Overall, more than half of all respondents felt that social media lived up to their expectations. One-half felt it took up more time than they realized, but only 6% claimed negative comments on social media had hurt their business.

How has social media affected your small business?

Using Plain Language to Increase Profits

“Plain language is the use of proven writing and design strategies that make it easy for your intended audience to understand and use your information.” – Deborah S. Bosley

After attending a recent Big Council meeting, Deborah S. Bosley, Ph.D., and Principal in The Plain Language Group, presented a variety of strategies for decreasing “communication confusion” by creating/displaying written information in plain language. This concept, basic at its core, is ever-so important in this socially responsible era where brands need to be clear in their messaging. Plain language makes it easy for people to do business with you — directly resulting in increased profits and trust in your company.

Using Plain Language in your Marketing Message

How does language affect your bottom line? Stated plainly: people are 84% more likely to trust companies that use jargon-free language. In the world of Internet Marketing acronyms are common jargon. From CPC to PPC to SMM to SEO, we sometimes forget that our readers do not always know what you know (content), understand words/vocabulary (define), know what to do (process), or feel comfortable (emotionally) especially with new information.

Direct Benefits for your Marketing Materials:

• improves communication
• builds trust
• saves time & money
• more likely to be read / responded to
• clarifies issues / fewer questions
• tells readers what they want to know

Memorable quotes:

Complex writing makes smart people look dumb.

No one ever complained that a company’s information was too easy to understand!

Sell customers what they need, not what you want them to buy.

Communicate unto others as they would communicate to themselves.

As Stuart Foster states; established and recognized brands have pre-existing beliefs, feelings and ideas around them. After all, they’ve spent millions of dollars pushing their message on consumers to think a certain way about their company.

What makes you think you can change perception without a conversation strategy and creative concepts acting on behaviors?

Solution: Simplify your messaging, offerings and marketing. If someone can’t grasp the basic concept of what your brand stands for in 140 characters? It’s time to get out some scissors.

Expect your content to be remixed, just make sure it doesn’t lose its meaning and power.

How do you use language in your marketing materials? What businesses use plain language well?

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil – Truman Capote