Bernoff presented a quick outtake from his recent book “Empowered”

The ratio between customer generated brand mentions and brand generated impressions is about one to four.

Roll in a believability factor – Who ya gonna trust? Your friend or the advertiser? – and you pretty much get the idea: In today's social landscape the customer is clearly a voice that is heard. And it might justs be louder than the brand..

But the good news from a brand managers POV is that of all the customers speaking up, Bernoff estimates between 6 to 7 percent are the primary influencers - those who are making the biggest and widest spreading ripples in the pond.

Find them, listen in and mine their insight as well as their influence and your brand have a better chance at success…

The fundamentals are surely the same – the need to connect emotionally to the consumer, the need to provide utility and relevance to satisfy the consumers “WIIFM” factor. And effective consumer engagement and dialog has always impacted the bottom line - not matter the age.

Dani Nadel, of Publicis Modem USA points out that the B2C conversation today is now “always on,” happens at a speed and with connections between the physical and digital world probably not imagined just a few years ago.

And the consumer has more influence over the discussion that ever before. And dialog is across all channels and all processes that the customer encounters in their journey.

So what are the key things a brand can do to be effective? Dani points out that the pillars to success for digital dialog today are:

1.Listen First. Talk later.
Successful businesses are targeting their conversations where they will be most effective. And this means listening in first to what is being said, and who is saying it.

2. Help your Friends.
Once a brand has connected to the heart of one, the brand can encourage that “friend” to connect to their herd – and facilitate that connection by making it easy to share information and social currency.

3. Be inclusive and accepting
Allowing co-creation and crowd sourcing – provided the brand is actually present and active in the conversation. Don’t “launch it a forget it.” Consumers are providing feedback – good, bad, ugly and otherwise. Don’t ignore it.

4. Be useful
Provide utility to extend your brand.

5 Walk the talk
Successful brands empower their employees and unleash them to participate in the conversation

6. Be social
Don’t be a brand that goes social – shift from “campaign think” to live connection, real time sharing.

And one final tip Dani provides – measure, test, rinse and repeat. Do holistic analytics, measure impact, and learni from the analytics to improve your brand's dialog skill set.

Rather, it's now all about influence. The audience was presented with two case studies, one "earned" and one "bought" campaign -- but both with impressive results. Some of the more helpful figures was Bob Gilbreath's examination of the comparative impact of various social media channels. For instance, Twitter is the most effective at rapid idea-sharing because of the ease of the retweet, though he does point out that much of it lacks depth. After all, how many people retweet a link without even clicking on it? (Red, guilty faces all around.)

Email, for instance, was shown in the case study to be on par with Facebook in terms of sharing -- but it had a significantly higher engagement metric.

Perhaps the most interesting part, however, was when Joel Lunenfeld of Moxie Interactive ditched the case-study-with-ROI-charts model and just told the story of social media, tracing its beginnings to the first set of criteria: You had to be shamelessly self-promotional; you had to have a pretty face; and you had to have a complete disregard for safety. (Flash a YouTube video of a bunch of kids about to do something hilariously harmful to themselves.)

It helped that his story involved superheroes, too. He laid out a comparison of social media strategy to that of the makers of video games:

1. You need a mission. In this case, it's positive sentiment, buzz, sharing, influence, and the final purchase.
2. Show people their game controller. Guess what -- it's in your pocket. That's right, your phone. It used to be that we asked people to share content, and it took effort. We also wanted to know why they shared it. What were they thinking? Now we don't have to care; just make it compelling and easy and they'll share without thinking too hard about it. It's the same idea of empowering a video game avatar with special powers.
3. Stats are everything. In video games, it's all about points and games won. Same here, with a twist. Be sure that you recognize the leader and promote their stats -- much like the top five listed winners on an old-school style Pac Man -- and make them the celebrities. In the online advertising world, that might mean selecting your top influencers and actually displaying them in your ads.

End result? You won't have a successful campaign, you'll have a completed mission. Sounds rad, huh.

We're in a pretty fascinating time right now because companies are just now figuring out how to divvy up social audiences online, and determine how to reach them and what they're worth. There have certainly been some successes (social games and offer systems) and failures (Facebook Beacon), but the whole space is just beginning to take shape and some exciting things are beginning to emerge – namely using information about people's activity online in order to take the guess work out of tapping into social behavior.

On Tuesday, I am thrilled to take the stage with Bob Gilbreath (Bridge Worldwide), Jim Price (Empower MediaMarketing), and Joel Lunenfeld (Moxie Interactive) to talk about these new strategies – how to use a tried-and-true concept in Word of Mouth – Influence – to re-think the impression. Word of mouth was always a powerful force, but the raw speed at which information – and recommendation – flies around social media channels has increased that power exponentially. In the digital age, advertisers need to know how to get a handle on word of mouth, and at the heart of all that chatter is sharing.

Consumers now control the flow of digital information and directly influence those who matter most to them at high volume. So, how do marketers direct the social megaphone that is today's word of mouth? First, they need to completely re-think how they approach word of mouth marketing, to include more channels, opportunities and metrics, and assign it a whole new importance. They also need to get a grasp on the “what”, not only the “who”. Lastly, they need to figure out how digital word of mouth fits into their larger strategies, ultimately changing the way they think about silo’s such as Social, Display, and Search.

Join us on Tuesday to hear from our amazing group of marketers on: tapping word of mouth, changing how we think about the impression, and connecting brands to influence in a whole new way. We're at the beginning of a brave new era in identifying and building audiences, and it's going to be an exciting to see how it evolves. Audience is everything, but knowing what your consumers are saying is really where it's at.

Tim Schigel
tim@sharethis.com
Follow all our speakers on twitter here -> http://tweepml.org/?t=386668