As I write this, I am attending the Social Graph Symposium in Silicon Valley which I am super excited about. The event is centered around “the social graph and the implications of the social graph in business, technology, and the community.” I’ve been looking forward to it because I have been thinking a lot about social data lately, and in particular how marketers can leverage it with their communications.

Earlier this year at the Email Insiders Summit in Park City, UT, I was on a Social CRM panel with some great folks, where we were discussing in free form, the aspects of the effects of social data on customer relationship management (CRM). I wanted to expand on one of the interesting points that we only touched on in the panel, which was defining the types of social data that are available to marketers. As you can imagine, this could easily have been the focus of the entire panel. Since social data has been a focus of mine over the last few months, I wanted to put down some thoughts on how I view it’s relevance to marketers.

Social Data Defined

The idea of social data is relatively simple. With the growth of social mediums (social networks, micro-blogging, location based technologies, etc), individuals are generating out an incredible amount of activity, content and behavior on the web. This data is propagated and distributed through many channels (web, email, mobile, etc), and at the same time, a market has been evolving that aggregates this data, organizes it, and in some cases analyzes it. This type of data, albeit in some cases, data overload, can bring to bear some interesting opportunities for marketers. Lets look at the two types of social data that encompass the root of these opportunities.

Social Data Attributes

The first, is social data attributes. This is the broad aspect of defining the social graph within a given audience. Lets say for example that the audience is your customer base. Clearly, this is one of the most valuable assets to any business.

Social data attributes allow you to add specific data points to your given customer database, in particular the social graph layer. For example, maybe on average a marketer would have some basic data attributes on their customer list:

1. First & Last Name
2. Company
3. Email Address
4. etc… (the more sophisticated the marketer, the more data fields included in a customer database).

Social data attributes come into play when you can also identify where your subscribers are on the social web. What percentage of them are on Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.. ? Beyond where your customers are on the social web, there are also attributes like “influencer” data – this is where the number of “friends” or “followers” can be aggregated, and you can identify who in your customer base is a potential “influencer.” These data points can also be aggregated and appended to your database. This is the base foundation of adding the social graph layer to your customer file.

Social Data Activity

The next, and perhaps more challenging social data marketers now have at their fingertips is social activity data. What I mean by this is, what kind of conversations, interactions, posts, updates, check-in’s, etc, are your customers generating online?

This type of data, which is almost always in the public domain, truly is the “real time” heart and soul of your customer base. Aggregating, analyzing, and responding to some of this data has the potential to completely transform traditional CRM, and in many cases already has.

Just think of how much more relevant your customer interactions can be when you’ve read their latest blog post, tweet stream, viewed the flickr pix they posted from an industry event they just attended, etc. On the human level, this is social CRM. Deeper, more meaningful interactions.

From the sales & lead generation perspective, acting on social activity also helps fill the top of the sales funnel. Think about it, with the right approach, people are having more meaningful relevant conversations that start online with some kind of social activity, but are quickly brought offline for deeper discussion. I know many companies who are having great success leveraging this, mine is one of them. With these small examples, I am just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Socialize My Database

From my perspective, email and social are a beautiful marriage. When you think about where to start with all of this, your customer email database makes the most sense. Since email offers one of the most targeted, efficient and measurable mediums available to marketers today, it would make sense to build your social graph around the email address, hence why you always hear me and the folks at Blue Sky Factory touting email as “the digital glue.”

Think about it, if all of the other social mediums went away, there would still be the email address. Recent research data from Merkle’s “View from the Social Inbox 2010″ report also suggests that many people use the same email for permission-based emails as they do for social networks. This makes even more of a case to leverage your email database first.

I’ve Got the Data Now What?

Many marketers I speak with are not so much struggling with where to find this type of data, they are struggling with how to use it. This is the beginning of a new era of marketing strategy and tactics. When combined with email, some of the basic social data elements described above, the following are just some of the tactics a marketer can leverage:

1. Identify, and target influencer’s within your customer or subscriber file.
2. Create accelerated loyalty & retention campaigns.
3. Jump start a social media presence (cross pollinate your customers to your social properties).
4. Convert community into new email subscribers – build your list!
5. Build your sales pipeline by active social web participation & engagement.

Again, I am just scratching the surface of whats possible. I would love to spark some additional dialog on this topic. What are your thoughts on social data? What did I miss? Do you agree?

Feel free to comment and continue the conversation below. Thanks for reading.

This morning I was inspired to write about some tips for the business traveler, fittingly enough on my flight out to Dallas, TX. The question I asked myself was how does one stay sane with a business travel schedule that just won’t quit? I’m actually not sure that’s possible, but I can share with you the following 10 tips (In no particular order) that help me stay as close to a state of travel zen as I can. I hope these help you when you get ready to jet set again:

1. Show up ready to board. Always check-in and have your boarding pass in hand before you get to the airport. This allows you to skip the crowded counters, eliminates a potential delay, and allows you to head right for the security line when you get to the airport.

2. Never check luggage. I mean ever. As long as you can avoid it. I realize this can be tough for some people, but I can easily go 5 days on the road with a carry on suitcase and a separate carry on shoulder bag. This is key for travel flow, as it allows you to get right on the plane, and right off the plane then get on your way. More importantly, you never have to worry about losing your luggage, something that happens way too much these days.

3. Choose the right airline. Depending on where you are going you should give serious thought to which airline you choose. For business, Airtran & Southwest go almost everywhere for a decent fare, but if you are going cross country, Virgin America is the only way to go. They’ve got flying down.

4. Buy good luggage. Don’t take this one too lightly either. I have had a ton of luggage over the last few years and its all been beaten & broken. Nothing is worse than when the zipper on your suitcase breaks! If you travel a lot don’t skimp on the luggage. I finally upgraded to a nice set of Tumi luggage, a wheeled carry on and a shoulder bag. I can’t believe the difference its made in my travel experience and its only been a month.

5. Stay hydrated. Drink a LOT of water when you travel. Although you should drink water all of the time, drink it even more of it when you travel. Its easy to get dehydrated when you are at 30,000 ft. Stay hydrated it helps all around.

6. Boost your immune system. I try to stay healthy in general, but prior to flying I always go for that extra immune system boost of vitamins and nutrients with Airborne. Let’s face it, airplanes are pretty much germ central. Giving your body that extra boost can’t do you any harm at all. I try to do it before every flight, it’s easy and it doesn’t taste bad at all.

7. Always sleep in a good bed. This is probably one of the more important ones to me. Anytime business takes me away from home, I make sure I am comfortable. Fortunately, a lot of hotels these days have good beds and plenty of other amenities. I am personally a fan of Kimpton Hotels, they offer a good selection of hotels in almost every major market, and they have a great loyalty program (plus free wi-fi).

8. Make time to exercise. This is sometimes hard to do on the road, but I always bring work out clothes with me when I travel. I try to hit the gym at the hotel or hit a local yoga class if convenient. When you travel, sometimes a good sweat makes you feel great and completely rejuvenates you.

9. Pace yourself. Depending on your travel itinerary, you may, like I do, often find yourself faced with back-to-back activities day and night. Take it easy and find a pace. Watch your alcohol intake, and make sure you get enough sleep every night. You know what your body needs to be on point. Try to keep that balance (easier said than done, I know).

10. Eat well my friends. Yes, we all know it’s VERY easy to go off of your diet when you are constantly traveling. But it is possible to eat healthy and stay on track when on the road. I’m a pescatarian (I’m vegetarian but eat fish as well), so my diet is usually limited. I try to research decent restaurants and food establishments before I head out just to get a sense of what’s out there. This is hard with groups of people, etc, but do your best and try to eat well.

Have a tip you would like to add? Please do so in the comments, I’m always looking for more travel tips to streamline the process! What works for you?

I am really excited about Bootstrap Maryland. When Jared Goralnick first asked me to be a part of it I hadn’t even realized he had been working on such an interesting and important event. I’ve always thought an event that brought together similar entrepreneurs who have experience building businesses outside of the most common routes, (ie. raise friend and family money, raise angel investment, raise VC, etc) would be extremely valuable to the next generation of entrepreneurs. Our region is ripe with talent, ideas, and products that are already in “the lab” and just waiting to officially “launch.”

I look forward to sharing my story and advice around building businesses with little to no funding at all. It certainly isn’t easy, but it can be done with, as Jared states “drive, brains and little creativity.” Details on the event are below, or you can click here. If you are thinking of starting a company, or already are out of the gate and are looking for some additional inspiration. Hope to see you there on May 2nd.

Bootstrap Maryland brings together young entrepreneurs and the necessary tools for running a lean and successful technology business.

At the Bootstrap Maryland Conference on May 2, 2009 you will learn how to turn your web or technology idea into a business. The presentations will cover topics such as:

* What you need (and don’t need) to get your business off the ground.
* Most products fail due to lack of marketing, not failed technology. How to get the word out inexpensively with social media, events, and creative PR
* The most relevant technologies people are using today, and ways to get the technology right the first time
* Stories, lessons learned, and discussions from young people who have built successful businesses

I rarely do this, but somehow the stars aligned where I actually spoke to 3 entirely different groups of people, 3 days in a row about social marketing and macro level trends that are happening in the marketing communications space. The audiences were as follows:

1. Technology Council leaders of North America
2. A global provider of testing & certification centers.
3. A large law firm.

This proved to be very interesting for me, because 99.9% of the time I speak to marketers. So, taking essentially the same message and applying it to the non-profit, testing & education, and legal professions proved to be interesting, and it worked.

The one nugget that I found to be the most interesting of all was that EVERYONE GETS IT (for the most part). I started every presentation with 4 key MACRO trends, the first one being that marketers finally understand, and get the fact that we are now in a two way media landscape. The batch and blast mentality of one way media is so old school, and so foreign to the modern marketer. I feel people are starting to get this on a broader level, and they are embracing it.

Why do I feel this way? There wasn’t anyone in the room at ANY of the three talks I gave that challenged or countered some of the statements and trends that clearly outline a shifting landscape of communication for organizations and businesses. In the past someone always didn’t agree, or there was big push back on some level, once we got into the details. I actually always look forward to it, because a healthy debate / friction is always good. The closest we got on a debate was the whole personal vs. company profile, mixing the two together, or not, etc. Good one for sure.

Maybe it was just that the folks I spoke with were primed and ready to hear more. Either way, as a person who goes to a ton of events and speaks to a variety of audiences, in my mind companies are beginning to adapt. More and more marketers and organizations are applying more social marketing tactics and mediums to their outreach programs. Its not just marketers that get it either, the “organization” as a whole is starting to get it. This is good, because as many of you well know, it is happening. We are in a world of dialog marketing, so embrace it.

Would love to hear your thoughts below.

I can’t stress how much respect I have for Tony Hseih. I had the pleasure of watching him give the opening keynote at SXSW last week. His message is very powerful. Zappos “gets it.” Video highlights of the keynote and his slides are below. Enjoy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Zappos – SXSW – 3-14-09

View more presentations from zappos.

This Thursday, I am flying out to the live music capital of the world, a.k.a. city of Austin, TX, to attend SXSW for the first time in over a decade. The last time I attended was for the music conference back when I was in the biz. Those were good times, but wow have times changed. The interactive conference didn’t even exist back then. So, this year I am going to scope out the event that everyone seems to go to, and raves about. I promise though I will do my best not to pollute my twitter stream too much

The first stop in Austin for me is participating in New Marketing Lab’s Bootcamp. I will be joining Justin Levy & Chris Brogan along with representatives from Hubspot and Radian6, at AMD’s headquarters for a one day, hands on, keyboard level training bootcamp on social marketing. I will be covering “Email Marketing in the New Web.” If you are interested in attending there are still a few slots left, and as a presenter if you register and use the code “camper” it will drop the price from $395 to $99. You can sign up here.

Thursday night we will also be holding an event, taking advantage of the calm before the storm. For those of you who will be coming in town, make sure you stay tuned into my twitter stream for announcements on details. We will be holding an open bar, with appetizers courteousy of Blue Sky Factory, but details will be coming out shortly, and through twitter exclusively. I am www.twitter.com/gregcangialosi.

After Thursday, it’s non-stop action, sessions, events, parties, etc. I look forward to taking it all in. If you are going to be at SXSW, drop me a comment or shoot me an email at gcangialosi [at] gmail [dot] com. Lets link up. I look forward to it.

I just returned from the lovely city of Seattle where I attended Gnomedex 8.0, the incredible event put on by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo. Blue Sky Factory was a sponsor of the event and this time we set up a table, gave out our minty fresh email marketing gum and also sponsored the wifi. In short, we love Gnomedex, its a one of a kind event, and my favorite conference of the year.

Throughout the event, I broke out the Sanyo Xacti and asked a random sampling of the attendees why they come to Gnomedex, below is the video we cut of the responses. Check it out:

One of my speaking initiatives for 2008 was to branch out a bit from talking about email marketing exclusively, and to do some presentations around the overall changing media landscape, the social web, and my experiences around social marketing. As a result, I have developed a “working” presentation dubbed “From Inbox to iPod: Meshing Social Media into the Marketing Strategy.” I say working, because I have never given the exact same presentation twice. The landscape moves so quickly, things change, so I adapt the presentation usually on an almost “up until the time I get to the podium” basis. Sometimes, a thought will come to me right before starting my talk, and I will add a slide, a bullet, or an image to the deck. Its definitely one of the topics I have fun with, and it has been well received amongst the people who have seen it.

One of the key points that I make during the presentation is in regards to the concept of “Publishing is Marketing 2.0,” and I carry on the early mantra of “content is king,” no matter how many times we have heard it before, it has never been more relevant in its time than now. And it is this very point that presents one of the larger challenges for organizations to overcome, both now and into the future. That is one of the marketing department’s transformation into becoming a publishing organization.

Sure, its no mystery that marketers have always published information on behalf of their companies and organizations, but its the landscape that has changed, not the concept of publishing. It is the way that the content that we publish is consumed, the way that it moves around the social web, and is globally syndicated that is different. This landscape has also opened up other forms of content for organizations to produce, specifically you can now add audio and video content to the already rich mix of blog posts, articles, white papers, research and surveys, etc.. These are mediums that once had a very large barrier to entry and were commonly associated with heavy production budgets. Not anymore.

The Challenge:

In keeping relevant to every reader, I want to address the common challenges that any size organization may face when making the transition to becoming a truly next generation marketing operation. When it comes to producing content in the “publishing is marketing” realm, I am talking specifically about an organization that is committed to producing a continuous flow of blog posts, white papers, research briefs, surveys, webinars, and audio & video (new media). These are some of the core published products that any organization taking advantage of the new media landscape will be producing on a regular basis. Each one serves a key role to the overall marketing mix, and each can be seamlessly promoted using the tools of the social web.

Hence the question, how do you create a publishing machine that stays not only on schedule but also stays aligned with your marketing objectives?

One of the first and foremost considerations is your talent. It really all begins with your team. You have to find out if you have people in your organization who want to be heard, who want a voice, who want to become industry thought leaders, and be known for subject matter expertise and experience? If so, then you are in a very good position, and it is your job to foster that drive into great content for your company, while at the same time developing thought leadership within your organization. To get the content machine going at full speed organically and from within, I believe this is a critical ingredient.

If you are not as lucky, or are a one person show, or a small startup, do the best you can. Think about the medium you are best with and use it to your advantage. Can you write well? Then blog. Can you or your colleague talk intelligently about your product, service or industry? Then hit the record button and publish a regular podcast. The barriers to entry are just too low not to be taking advantage of these mediums. The best advice I can offer to anyone though is to be consistent no matter what.

All that said, content is key. No matter what size organization you are, at the very minimum is the desire for your team to want to be heard and share their expertise with the world, but the content has to be the real deal to make it work. You have to give people the goods, or as they say “give them something to talk about,” because if it is good, they will talk about it.

You certainly don’t have to be the best out of the gate, and for many I realize this in and of itself is the true content challenge, but so long as you are not putting out garbage, and are timely and relevant with your content and have your audience in mind, just keep on striving to get better.

Just remember, this isn’t a game for being just the sizzle, you have to be the steak at the same time, almost all of the time.

Common Scenarios:

No matter what size your organization is, you will find it challenging at first to organize your content creation processes, and even tougher to keep it on schedule when doing it to scale. Scale to me is publishing on a frequent basis, i.e. blog posts, podcasts, etc).

Publishing to scale merits the question of what to produce, and where to focus? Again, you can’t just be throwing out any old content. It makes a solid case for taking a hard look at just exactly what it is that we are producing as organizations. First, you need to ask yourself, how present, and how relevant are you within your industry? What are people saying about you or your brand? Is there a conversation happening?

First, listen to what is being said about your brand and your industry online. What is being said, who is saying it, how influential are they, what is your relation to them if any? Monitor and listen to the conversation. Then create your own marketing communications program around the conversation taking place, being relevant in as many ways as possible.

As more and more organizations become educated on the aspects of social media and begin to invest in the ways that they can engage their brand online, the eventual apparent need for any organization to produce good quality content will shine through. There is this need right now, and many companies are struggling to understand their role in the new media landscape.

Another scenario that I have seen lately is that there are those stuck on the other side of the equation, that of content excess and how to leverage all of it. These tend to be the larger organizations, with their dilemma being not one of content, but one of distribution and having a sound strategy to deploy the content in a meaningful and orchestrated way. To some of us this sounds like a luxury, and to many others it is a bear to manage such content flow in a meaningful way that also stays in line with the company’s marketing objectives, and generates results.

The Editorial Calendar:

After many years of envisioning a “publishing as marketing” organization in regards to my company’s marketing practices, only now are we just getting the company on rails from a publishing perspective, and we still have a way to go. After starting our blog, The Thinking Inbox, a few years back, and toying around with podcasting, and having gone through all of the challenges of infrequent posting, to zero posting, etc we are now beginning to hit our stride with buy in from all areas of the organization. Technology, account management, creative, sales and management are all blogging. This as you can imagine, is a good thing, and develops a broad range of topics that speak to the wide variety of readers who make up our audience.

One you achieve organizational buy in and active participation is in motion, your challenge then becomes the orchestration of the content. What is being produced, when will it publish, and what medium will it be published on, and most importantly, how do you control it?

We found that the development of an editorial calendar is becoming a key tool for us to be able to organize the content challenge within our organization. Although we are still working to get this implemented across the company, and make it a part of the content flow, conceptually we have buy in across the organization.

We moved in this direction at Blue Sky Factory once we began to frequently publish 2-3 blog posts on the same day, instead of spreading them out over time, etc. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that everyone has something to say and wants to contribute, but we also need to maximize that knowledge and spread it out over time so that our blog publishing is consistent over the course of each week.

Now that there is an active editorial calendar that is shared company wide, we all have insight into what topics we want to focus on, and more importantly know when we need to publish. Almost everyone in the company now blogs, and writing / producing / contributing has officially become part of the culture at Blue Sky Factory. We have also begun to release a series of podcasts and viral videos to help get our message out.

I guess you can say that our content train has officially left the station.

Final Thoughts:

In closing, I would like to repeat the key message that I outlined at the beginning of the post. The landscape has changed for marketers. In order to maximize the opportunity of amplifying your organizations signal in this shifting media landscape, you must think strategically about how publishing can help you achieve your goals and objectives.

Although challenging for any size organization, with some planning and organizational buy in, transforming into the “publishing is marketing” model is achievable for any company.

What do you think? Are you implementing a publishing is marketing model at your organization? Is it working? I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

If you would like any additional info or thoughts around this post, feel free to email me directly at gcangialosi [at] gmail [dot] com, or leave a comment.

Thanks for reading.

Gary Vaynerchuk and I sat down for a brief chat on his recent visit to BSF HQ in Baltimore. We chat about Wine Library’s use of email and Gary talks about his experience with our team at here Blue Sky Factory. Check it out:

Yesterday, I spoke at Podcamp Boston 3 up at Harvard Medical School in the beautiful Joesph B Martin Conference Center. The topic of my presentation was titled, “Email Marketing’s Role in New Media.” I have posted the slides below, feel free to download and share.

This presentation is the first of three times that I will be presenting on this topic. Thanks to the Podcamp team for allowing me to “beta” it at this weekends event. The central theme of the presentation is that email is the “digital glue” of the new media landscape, and a medium that is not to be overlooked. Email is the internet’s dominant application, and is where the attention is of our audiences on the most frequent basis. As companies move more towards a “publishing is marketing” model, email is more important than ever to tie your messaging together and cross-pollinate content.

I will blog more on this topic and perhaps record a podcast to expand on this. I received some valuable feedback from some of the audience, and look forward to tweaking the slides and presenting it again this Wednesday at the edu Web Conference in Atlantic City.