Don't let this opportunity to be a part of something incredibly special go by. Pangea Day is a special, global event to bring the world together through film on one day. The idea is to help people see themselves in others and in their stories. Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Participate online or better still through one of the community events. You won't regret it. You can also show your support on Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. I'm proud to say that Avenue A | Razorfish played a small role in the Pangea Day effort by designing and building the website. We talk a lot about social media and online communities, well there's nothing more special than showing we're part of a global community that cares.

Here's my latest article on Social Influence Marketing where I delve into how those peer influences actually. Let me know what you think of this one.

At the root of Social Influence Marketing™ is how peer influences work. With the digital world going social, we recognize that peer influence is having a greater affect on brand affinity and purchasing decisions than any traditional form of marketing. Customers are excited about doing the marketing themselves if the product is strong. We also know that with the proliferation of social technologies from mainstream social networks like MySpace and Facebook to niche social tools like del.icio.us (bookmarking) and FriendFeed (personal content aggregation), the peer influence may take many different forms.

It is nice to see some actual Twitter numbers. According to Techcrunch, in March Twitter had 1+million users of which 200,000 were active each week. The active users send an average of 15 tweets a day. That's well above my average. And finally, there are 4 million connections between Twitter usres. You do the math to find out how many connections per user. Now I wish I knew who these actual users are. What are their demographic and psychographics?

On a loosely related note, LinkedIn told Silicon Alley Insider that its earning $75 CPMs (cost paid per thousand viewers) for advertising in the US and $50 CPMs in the U.K. Now, LinkedIn certainly has a more targeted and potentially valuable audience than Facebook and MySpace but those CPM numbers sound really high. Still its a sign that niche networks with more focused audiences matter. LinkedIn has 17 million users in comparison to Facebook's 70 million and MySpace's 200 million. CPMs on Facebook and MySpace are much lower.

While at South by South West I was interviewed on Social Media by Relevantly Speaking. They have some great interviews on their website too.

A few years back I was the lone Avenue A | Razorfish blogger with the Workplace blog. A lot has changed in a short while. Every second day we now have a new blogger in our midst. It is exciting to see so many more employees take to blogging and experiment with styles and formats. The latest entrants are Grant and Mary with the Headlight blog covering the auto industry on a monthly basis. It covers digital automative trends and insights and the first few posts focus on going green. Don't miss the article on Green Social Networking tools and topics which discusses Goloco.

There hasn't been too much social innovation in the financial services sector. Most large banks have taken hesitant steps into the social web. Their reluctance to do so is understandable. As a sector, they have a lot to worry about and the last thing that they'd want to do is take on more risk - especially when their brands are taking such a beating. As a result, the most innovation is happening among the startups. Two in particular really impress me and an internal email chain about social media and financial services got me thinking about them again.

Last night I addressed the New York Chapter of the Usability Professional's Association in our Avenue A | Razorfish New York offices. The subject of my presentation was Social Influence: Social Media and the Enterprise. The event was sold out with over a 150 people in attendance. 

There's one obvious area where Office Depot is definitely ahead of Staples and that's in recognizing the power of social influence. Take a look at the Office Depot Planner product page above. Notice the little Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us icons? Yes, I can easily share an image of the product I'm thinking of buying on my social network or add it to my bookmark list. On clicking on the Facebook icon, a window opens asking me whether I want to post the image of the Planner to my profile or send it to a friend. See below for how this looks.

Few e-retailers understand the power of social influence the way Amazon does. From its wildly successful customer reviews to the more recent customer images, Amazon tries hard to take advantage of the notion that when it comes to purchasing books we are heavily influenced by one another. Probably my favorite feature on Amazon has been the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" one. It tells me what other books I'd be interested in based on my interest in a specific book and what other customers bought. Those recommended books can be filtered by category and scroll horizontally like the Apple Album Cover Flow interface.

They're so close and yet so far. I watched with increasing interest the launch, promotion and growth of My Starbucks Idea. On the surface, I really like it. It is an enthusiastic effort by a social brand to be more social. If there's anyone who should be really embracing social media, its Starbucks because the brand is about community and people.

It's a simple concept - users are invited to tell Starbucks what they should be doing. Users publish their ideas and others comment and vote on them. Every now and then Starbucks takes an idea and moves it to the "See" section. Acknowledgment that the idea has legs and is being turned in to reality. I like it.

But its missing a few things. The first is best represented by this user comment in the Idea section.

I don't know how long this ideas website will be up for, but I hope this idea is reviewed soon by the ideas people in the company.

Starbucks doesn't participate in the conversation. It doesn't respond to comments directly rather it responds more broadly in the "See" section when they're making reality out of an idea. That's disappointing. If you expect your customers to help you, you should be willing to participate in their conversation. Not stand by silently or only speak from a pulpit.

What's also missing is there's no form of reward for ideas turned into reality. Imagine if every person who participated in the discussion around a frequency card, were added to a beta list for that card? That would be a great way to thank those customers for their thoughts. It would seed the concept with passionate consumers too. Opportunity missed.

On the whole though, I'm impressed. It borrows from the Dell Ideastorm concept and applies it to the Starbucks world. I believe that concepts like these are the future of the contact us page. Every site will need to have an area like this - a place where the brand solicits feedback from its customers and responds to their comments. If a brand doesn't want to be social in this manner, it shouldn't really be on the web at all.

Since my SXSW presentation where I introduced Social Influence Marketing (SIM) more broadly, I've fielded lots thought provoking questions and comments. Most interesting have been the questions about the relationship between SIM, Social Shopping and Word of Mouth Marketing. Here are a few clarifying thoughts.

Firstly, social influence marketing includes social shopping but extends beyond it. Social Shopping is primarily concerned with group purchasing behavior at the point of purchase. It is tied more into sales leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to affect purchasing. And it focuses directly on driving consumers to a purchase as quickly as possible.

Social Influence Marketing is about  social shopping but not just that. At its heart, it is about recognizing the importance of influence - influence at every point point in the marketing funnel. And SIM is concerned with the brand as much as it is with the sales. We know that a person's perception of a given brand is heavily influenced by his or her peer group - the known peer group and the anonymous one too. SIM deals with furthering a brand's image in the online domain by taking advantage of social influence. This may not drive directly towards sales.

The other question that comes up is whether social influence marketing is just another form of word of mouth.  And if it is word of mouth, then what's so special and different about it. For this one must first understand that  word of mouth is primarily about consumers giving information to other consumers. It is about spreading a message not necessarily allowing for the natural influencing of a decision making process. In fact, Word of mouth marketing is defined as giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.

SIM certainly does borrow from those concepts but it uses social media in all its forms to influence. Unlike word of mouth marketing, it is centered in social media and social relationships within the digital domain. SIM also targets anonymous interactions in a non campaign sense. But most importantly, social influence is about recognizing that any purchasing decision (or brand opinion) is made with various social influences playing a significant role. SIM is about deploying strategies and accompanying tactics to take advantage of those social influences - to account for them in the customer life cycle and design and integrate experiences that map to how they affect consumer behavior.

At the end of the day, SIM is about recognizing that no opinion formed is completely devoid of external influence and therefore any online experience must accommodate and support the social nature of decision making. It'll make for happier and more loyal customers. For more on social influence marketing, read the reports published by Avenue A | Razorfish.

Pictured above is an image taken from Secret Prices. It shows how social influence on a network can play a significant role in purchasing decisions.

And this time it includes reporters from Advertising Age which I'm reading with increasing frequency. Matthew Creamer discusses the question in a thought provoking article titled, "Think Different: Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads". He questions some of the fundamental premises that drive the display ad business - do we really care to click on those advertisements and is that they best way for a brand to reach its prospective customers? Using Apple with its small online advertising budget as an example, he emphasizes that there are lots of other ways to market online too.(To the right is HP's viral marketing campaign from 2006 - a great example of non linear marketing.)

Talking of which, Creamer also discusses some social influence marketing themes. He argues that in the not to distant future consumers won't be "treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked". He believes that the world isn't about hidden persuasion but transparency and dialogue at its center allowing people to influence each other's decision making. I couldn't agree more with him but I believe we're in that not to distant future already.

The most successful brands are the ones that have been engaging with their audiences in more direct, meaningful and personal ways. Display advertising still matters but its just one component of the marketing mix. The audiences aren't passive and they're absorbing, critiquing and sharing their perspectives on the major brands more quickly and with more people than ever before. Figuring out how to take advantage of that is a challenge but that's at the heart of all of this. It's not something new either, its been happening since the dawn of the Internet and its rooted in our innate desires to share and communicate with one another.

And while providing "utility" maybe new to the advertising industry, its old hat for those of us who grew up in the web design business. You have to provide something useful if you want to attract, convert and retain customers via the web. You've gotten more choices in terms of where you provide that usefulness (it just doesn't have to be on your own website), and you can use it to influence purchasing decisions but providing it shouldn't be treated as something new. Just go ask your web product teams about usefulness.

In a sense, its not that utility is entering the marketing domain but rather marketing is getting broader.

Brian Morrissey discusses how social media is extending the life of ad campaigns in an Adweek article published today. As usual he's spot on and quotes me discussing what it means.

"The traditional campaign model doesn't work anymore," said Shiv Singh, director of strategic initiatives at Avenue A/Razorfish, owned by Microsoft. "If you have a social-media driven campaign, you can't stop it necessarily when you want to stop it. It's akin to having a dinner party and suddenly turning the lights off."

What are the implications of this? Its harder to budget for a social media driven ad campaign. While you can always turn the media spend off when you want to, you can't necessarily turn off the campaign. If a conversation has started and people are participating, linking and talking about your campaign you have to let that carry on. Problems may arise when the message gets tired or when the conversation degenerates into something you don't want but that can't be helped too.

That's why when you think about the social media in the context of a campaign, think carefully. The returns maybe awesome but the risks can be huge too.

The web of the future will allow any person, object, or piece of information to be intelligently linked to one another says Tim Berners Lee in the Times of London where he talks up the semantic web. For those of who aren't familiar with the semantic web, its the term used to describe how any piece of data and not just a web page will be structured so that it can communicate with other information by built in semantic relationships in the information itself.

Now we've all know about the semantic web for a while. And before web 2.0 we thought the semantic web would be the next big thing. Now we believe it will be the next thing after web 2.0. Is it really just round the corner? The problem with the whole semantic web story is easy to understand - somebody or something needs to create all those relationships between the various data elements that we interact with everyday through the Internet. To date, there hasn't been the right tools around to create those relationships.

Well now with the whole social networking phenomena we're connecting to data elements ourselves using the social networks and each other as starting points. Sure, the semantic web and applications like Twine will take this a lot further but I have to wonder how much they will be adopted. Do we need those relationships created automatically for us? Will we use them? We're depending upon each other to create those relationships and so far that's worked fine. I suppose only time will tell but in the meantime, the search engines are preparing for the future.

Here's a link to the Scientific American article where the Semantic Web was first discussed.