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A pioneering social-media agency based in Center City is independent once again and is looking to grow.

Stuzo, which was bought by Dachis Group in late 2010, separated from the Austin, Texas-based company in November and announced the split on its blog eight days ago. Neither it nor Dachis Group disclosed the terms of either deal.

Stuzo employs 40 at its Philadelphia headquarters and in Europe, but has about seven openings, according to Gunter Pfau, who has resumed his position as CEO.

The separation from Dachis left Pfau and Mark Spangler, Stuzo’s vice president of operations, as Stuzo’s owners.

Get the full online article at: http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/print-edition/2013/01/18/nearly-2-years-after-being-bought-by.html

A: Consumer driven conversations reinforcing your brand.

Over the past few years, we have had the opportunity to shape hundreds of consumer engagement marketing programs together with our clients in this evolving space of social marketing. We’ve created some big wins and also learned together along the way. The services delivered started with strategy, page and community building, and the development of consumer-centric experiences, apps, and campaigns, which were all measured and iterated on. These are all things brands will need to continue to embrace; however, it’s time to evolve and recognize how all of these help drive one key thing – stories in the social ecosystem.

People rely on their friends to make decisions. You already know that and the numbers show it. A Like, Tweet, +1, Share, and Comment all generate a rich library of social distribution about your brand, known as earned media. Social experiences and apps that are designed around a brand’s products and services give consumers the opportunity to share these valuable stories with their friends and give the brand more control over the messaging and distribution of the earned media.

So how do social apps, websites, mobile and .com approaches evolve to take advantage of this opportunity?

The answer sounds simple, but bears emphasizing. It is to create marketing experiences with stories as a core component of your strategy and optimized for the mobile customer at the beginning of the program concept (not when you are reviewing the first round of design comps).

With mobile usage skyrocketing and platforms such as Facebook recently reporting over 600 million mobile monthly active users (that’s over half of their user base) adapting to a mobile-centric world is not optional to succeed – it’s required. On top of this, comScore recently reported that over 40% of a user’s time is spent in the news feed. Social platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter also provide a platform where the stream and stories are of paramount important to scale. As mobile usage continues to rise, getting distribution in this area of the social ecosystem is where marketers need to focus when planning a majority of their social executions.

All too often, we have seen experiences developed that come from the traditional ‘big idea’ creative approach. Let’s throw a group of creatives in a room and see what happens. At times, this create home runs for the brand, but most often they do not generate the measurable results and impact they should to achieve the business objectives with the opportunities available in social. [*disclaimer: I am a (partial) creative and work with creatives so I humbly face this reality.]

The main reason this approach does not often succeed in social is usually related to…

• These experiences are not constructed with social at the core. While the pitch-deck leads you to perceive it that way, they often are not based on your social best practices, are not tailored to your particular brand advocates, and/or do not consider the appropriate technical and UX opportunities.

• Story generation and social distribution strategy is often talked about to late in the game. Usually after the program is signed-off on, designed or in review rounds. You need to have a clear focus on the required business objectives and how the targeted audience engages with the brand and the space to craft the key story points a user can share with their friends. Story generation opportunities need to be tailored based on this customer and in a parallel fashion iterated on while conceiving a social experience that can also be scaled to the mobile audience. This starts towards the beginning of your process, not the end.

• The User Experience bolts-on mobile or includes it in a way to please someone or check a box. Don’t get me wrong there are some great example of work produced which effectively engages users on desktop and across the mobile devices… but it’s 2013 – why isn’t this table stakes? The UX needs to consider mobile on Day 1 because it will affect many decisions. Team buy-in, budgeting, and support needs to be behind this. Why? Because when you neglect or bolt-on the mobile experience, your customers do indeed notice. From our experience, that may just be 40% of your possible clicks that could come in from a news feed share, tweet, or other social action, which drives to your program.

• Programs are built in silos to achieve only a campaign, department or specific time based objective. Additionally, decisions made often are not backed by data. Successful social marketing needs to be data-driven and crafted with an inclusive internal team approach. The silos must be removed to ensure programs are crafted to build equity over time and are not just one-offs.

The fact that some or all of the gaps above still exist for many companies is understandable. Crafting a best-in-class interactive experience to engage the social, mobile, local customer requires more disciplines than ever. Ensuring that a program is integrated and it is a seamless experience for the consumer is challenging enough, and on top of this, many of these skills are relatively new.

We do it differently at Stuzo. Developing frameworks, learning over time, integrating departments and instituting what we have learned over each and every program is an extreme focus at our company. We have a creative background at our organization (meaning yes, we used to do the ‘big idea’ approach), and together with our creative, technology, analytics, and strategy teams, began to evolve by facing reality and shifting our own perceptions. This allows us, collectively, to lead in the face of this changing reality to ensure our brands get consistent wins with their social marketing efforts.

We set out to create disciplined and iterative frameworks that ensures we go through the proper approach when crafting social programs. This provides us and or clients the rigor and inclusion needed to ultimately deliver a successful program. Together, we iterated, measured, leveraged big data, collected client feedback, got into many heated (and healthy) debates to bring to market packaged offerings which can help clients cut through the noise and bring opportunities to life in social which meet their business objectives across all devices and platform. Our creative team is still in the room, we’ve (to put it simply), decided to develop process-driven frameworks that invite other departments to the table.

Some of our frameworks which address the pain points described include:

Program Identity Design - An engaging, data and user experience driven discovery process infused with creativity. The result is the creation of socially optimized digital experiences that meet business objectives and can quickly be taken to market. This is not a one-pager creative brief, but a meticulous and strategic social approach that brings ideas (across social, mobile, web) to life with our clients. Yes, it does include the creative flair you deserve on top of our data driven insights and not only architects a program but ensures senior leadership and partner understanding and buy-in. Read more aboutStuzo’s Program Identity Design.

Social Story Architecture - As part of Program Identity Design we incorporate a detailed analysis and presentation of how to address social story generation, with a focus on your end user personas, business objectives, the user experiences, social publishing opportunities, and quality. Social Story Architecture results in a deliverable which drives through to your organization and our team – to ensure that story architecture is closely at the heart of the concept and incorporated at the start across the appropriate devices and platforms.

Social Engagement Platform – Whereas the previous frameworks we noted above are focused on strategy and approaches to ensure successful program development and alignment, we also complement these frames with a best-in-class technical platform for the efficient delivery of social experiences. This flexible technology, which is supported by our product team, enables us to bring innovative and dependable technology solutions (and ideas) to the table.

From our perspective, taking the necessary steps today to ensure you are delivering solutions that address the pain points listed here is a requirement going forward to appropriately engage customers across all platforms and devices. Sure, it will continue to be iterative over time as the space changes – but you can no longer neglect (or bolt-on) how you are going to address the mobile customer and engage them through story-driven social design.

The customer does notice.

This post was written by me and originally appeared on the Stuzo Insights Blog.

Certainly a marketing driven promotion, and I don’t expect a new logo to be incorporated (a la eBay).

Usually, you don’t change what is working. Take a look at Pepsi and Coke branding over the years. You’ll see how history has proven for Coke to keep the logo relatively unchanged for the past 100 years and remain on track with what works. Of course, with the exception of New Coke (but that’s a whole different story.)

My favorite part of this will be reading the design communities backlash on Coke for their decision on promoting crowd-sourced spec work. It happens every time, but unfortunately for those stuck in the past, times are a-changing.

The problem faced by the largest global marketers in the social space is how to effectively leverage their global footprint, consisting of tens or hundreds of millions of consumers across markets and platforms, to successfully roll out an impactful and measurable campaign at scale. Smart marketers are addressing this problem head on by blending three separate disciplines – Social Program Design, Social Story and UX Architecture, and Social Technology Delivery – into one unified approach, by working with only with best-of-breed partners that can deliver end-to-end solutions at scale.

To get into the spirit of this year’s program, take two minutes and watch this amazing video, which touches on Procter & Gamble’s theme of calling the world to take the simple action of saying “Thank you, Mom.”

For those of you who watched the video – take a few moments to dry your eyes. You need those Puff’s tissues because of this emotional connection that is innate in most of us based on the role parents, specifically mothers, play in the development of us as human beings. The spirit of this video is what is being translated into Procter & Gamble’s social initiatives; to let individuals be the ones creating their stories of thanks for their mothers, and for mothers as a whole around the world.

One of the solutions for this year’s “Thank you, Mom” initiative involved providing each Procter & Gamble local market around the world the opportunity to engage their consumers in a lightweight manner through social channels. The ask on the consumer is easy – simply open your heart, provide a message thanking your mother and share this message across your network. It’s these opportunities for lightweight interactions that will create countless conversations in social to get the big marketing message across for Procter & Gamble this year. The “big idea” is now deeply rooted in sustained, simple interactions around stories. To deliver optimal results, social programs and experiences can no longer be designed without marketers having an intricate understanding of how to leverage social technologies and the art & science of storytelling through the Open Graph. The social experiences that deliver business results are those that are framed so that the interactions that happen within the experience result in lightweight stories that propagate widely and deeply throughout the social graph. Never before was this possible at such a massive scale, but Facebook, through its brilliant marriage of owned, earned, and paid media, now enables us to deliver engagement at scale in a measurable manner.

Stuzo | Dachis Group was there from day one, working hand-in-hand with Proctor & Gamble, Facebook and a variety of leading agency partners to bring the program to life. A set of managed services from codified UX guidance, to Open Graph Object and Story architecture, to the development of a scale-advantaged technology solution, with real-time optimizations and ongoing measurement dashboard build and analysis were provided by our dedicated team to deliver optimal business outcomes. The result was an experience that lived on Facebook, with data integrated on a social microsite, and connected with various YouTube channels. The experience enabled consumers to engage with the program across social channels so that they could include their very own ‘thank you’ to the important mothers in their lives. Consumers can create their ‘thank you’ using text, photo, video, or their computer’s webcam, and then post it simultaneously to mom’s Timeline and into a public gallery to be shared with the world.

Organic “thank you” stories flowing throughout the social graph, resulting in earned media turning to paid media and vice-versa, generating outsized amplification and business results for Procter & Gamble. Localized versions of the Thank You, Mom experience were deployed to dozens of individual markets’ Facebook pages, from the US to the UK, from Russia to India, to Japan and Latin America , and virtually everywhere in between – delivering a heartwarming scale-advantaged, global social activation for the largest global marketer during the worlds biggest sporting event. This is Engagement @ Scale.

This post was originally published for the Dachis Group Collaboratory.

“If the original Facebook was the first five minutes [of a conversation] and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you today is the rest –- the next few hours of a deep engaging conversation.” – Mark Zuckerberg, f8 2011

On September 22, 2011 we were presented with some groundbreaking platform updates and partnerships, which would shape the way we engage in social channels as end users, technical solution providers and marketers. Notably, a major release at the time was Timeline for Facebook users.

Working in the area of brand marketing, I find this quote from that release rings just as true with the announcement of the the brand Timeline and new products at fMC (Facebook Marketing Conference) in New York on February 29th.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, opened the event by sharing some moments in which connections through the Facebook Platform have had a dramatic impact on government, family and institutions.

Chris Cox, VP of Product, echoed Mark’s original sentiments in his keynote today – this time expanding from the f8 presentations, discussing how the Facebook evolution more directly relates to brands and marketers.

Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business Marketing at Facebook, delivered a compelling keynote, which gave a deeper overview of the platform changes and clearly marking Facebook’s positioning going forward from today. His delivery addressed the major announcement that Timeline is now available for brands and is “the richest, most customized marketing canvas we’ve ever built.” The point he clearly presented is that more and more Pages are going to become “mission control” for businesses to engage with consumers across all areas of the platform. We also received an overview of the new advertiser solutions to help brands achieve scale across the platform being offered from Facebook which we will provide an overview of later in this post.

Brand Pages Product and Timeline Updates

Below are some of the updates being released as part of the new brand pages product. This includes an entire page redesign and functionality updates, giving brands Timelines.

- Friend Activity is now surfaced on a brand’s Timeline. If someone likes or comments, stories of how your friends engage with the brand are surfaced. A more relevant and personal experiences can be delivered for each user of the page by being able to see how their friends are engaging.

- A new views and apps section helps users navigate to other parts of your page. “Tabs” which were formerly on the left hand side of the page have been replaced with the ability to select “views” across the top of the page. The photo application always shows as the first app option, and the page owner can control which other 3 immediately show to users in the same row with a custom designed icon. In total, through an expanded list option, up to 12 views can be surfaced to the users.

- The composer now provides the ability for brands to “pin” a story. These pin anchors posts at the top of the page by default for 7 days, unless refreshed. Marketers are still encouraged post frequently through their content strategy, while having one main story featured throughout the course of the content calendar.

- Page posts can be “starred.” Starring makes a post go full width across the Timeline to prominently feature the story. Posts can also be “hidden” from the public view, but still visible in the admins Activity Log.

- Milestones are now an option in the composer. Page owners can add an event, with a mandatory photo to feature relevant or key moments in the brands history. These have a larger story format and help highlight defining moments.

- Page owners can now change dates on posts to populate and manage timeline.

Brands can now assign a Cover Photo to show at the top of their Timeline. This large creative canvas area, set at 851×315 pixels provides an opportunity to create an immediate visual impact. It’s important to note that there are policies for brands related to how to use the platform and the Cover Photo, which includes limitations on using this creative area for promotional messaging and certain calls to action. The profile picture still exists, and is the consistent representation that is used when the brand icon is shown throughout the platform.

There are also a handful of updates when it comes to administering a page as an owner. These include the “Activity Log,” which can be used to manage Timeline and posts to control Timeline content. Also announced is a new “messaging” option for users to connect directly, and privately, with page owners to create a one-on-one dialogue. User Insights management and notifications options are also enhanced in the administration area.

As a page owner, you can preview and push your Timeline live at anytime. Note that your page will automatically roll over to Timeline, if not performed manually, on March 30, 2012.

New Advertising Products

“This is where marketing on Facebook is going to feel like the rest of Facebook.” – Mike Hoefflinger, Facebook’s Director of Global Business Marketing

Facebook also announced their new advertising solutions for marketers on the platform. Their key point through connecting Pages to the new distribution opportunities is that we are no longer creating ad messaging but providing the opportunity to deliver stories at scale and the amplification to drive a return on investment.

The new advertising (or I guess I should say, “story”) distribution offerings include Reach Generator, Premium on Facebook and Offers.

Reach Generator is an offering from Facebook to increase distribution and provide more visibility and ultimately brand favorability for brands. This enables brands to take stories they post from their page (“mission control”) and gain distribution by being featured on the right hand side of the home screen. Facebook reported on average, brands reach about 16% of their fans on a typical week through stories. The distribution and placement of stories through Reach Generator provides the opportunity to push this reach to 50% (and beyond) on a weekly basis and increase engagement levels. This has been in beta for a few months, and Facebook reported this story placement is providing double the engagement levels than posts not being featured on the home screen.

Premium on Facebook is Facebook’s premier offering for marketers on the platform and what they are stating is “the most impactful way to distribute your content.”

Starting at the Page level again, this product allows a story, which is created once to be distributed in multiple areas of the site for maximum reach. These placements include:

- Right hand side of the home page (as noted above.)

- Eligibility for sponsored distribution in the Facebook Newsfeed.

- Facebook’s logout screen will now show stories and become another area of distribution.

- Distribution to mobile devices.

Sponsored stories in the newfeed are showing a 5-10x CTR over placement in other areas of the site. Currently Facebook serves up over 100 billion impressions daily through the newsfeed and it is where people are expecting the stories in their life to be surfaced.

37 million Facebook users log out of the site every day (believe it or not, people do log out) and this has traditionally been an untapped area of real estate. Expect logout screen story distribution to be available in April ’11, while newsfeed and mobile distribution is already available. This announcement solidifies Facebook’s mobile positioning as they distribute these stories at scale to the over 425 million mobile users.

Offers provide a way for brands to get promotions in front of their more important customers. Offers can be distributed through a story, featured and give users the opportunity to claim the offer through 1 click, where it is then sent to their email and mobile device. Along with this there is frictionless distribution when you engage with an Offer.

As brand marketers, we all need to be master storytellers to drive word of mouth at scale. It is also becoming critical to optimize your business to coordinate content with the media teams. From a content strategy perspective, marketers need to monitor and understand what does and does not work to optimize their new Timelines and scale opportunities. Equally important to drive this distribution, there needs to be an awareness and a connection to when content reaches a certain level of engagement with the media team so they can amplify the best performing content through Facebook’s new products in a timely matter.

To sum up Facebook’s positioning… now is the time for brand marketers (whether they have before or not), to focus on leveraging the power of the platform to engage in two-way conversations and deliver rich social experiences that drive engagement and curate stories over time. This can be done through the the various Timeline story types, custom experiences and a multitude of other ways. Facebook on their end, has put a stake in the ground to be the command center for businesses looking to engage consumers in a social manner at scale. With 800+ million active users and the most advanced owned, earned and paid media products on the market, Facebook is bar none becoming more and more critical for brands. Throughout the day, Facebook and its key clients touched on the complexity of social business efforts and the need for trusted partners that can deliver the strategy, management, technologies and services in this ever-evolving ecosystem.

“We are going to find our voice, learn how to use it, listen and learn how to adapt… in small and powerful ways every single day.” – Sheryl Sandberg at fMC as she discussed the evolution of brands and marketers with today’s announcements.

She might not always agree.

Download the Timeline template to make your own cover image and have some fun.

It’s easy to rattle of the great examples and social engagements in the B2C space. B2B marketing in social requires a slightly different lens on Social Business to engage your prospects and retain (and grow) your existing customer base. It carries over many of the same tenets and methods of engagement as seen in B2C social web marketing, but with an extremely strong focus on first understanding who your prospects are, identifying the target audience and analyzing how they are leveraging social at their organization (both as an individual and an employee).

Implementing also requires training and in some cases retraining of existing internal sales staff to shift they way in which they create a sale over time. Sales organizations need to use social to capture long tail opportunities – enabling their employees to become marketers, listen (facilitated with the use of the right tools), and implement strategies in which they engage their prospects. Today, it is easier than ever to find a lead as many prospective customers have begun signaling their social accounts for business purposes and using platforms and the web to help make purchase decisions. An implementation could be as simple as a sales organization listening in and engaging on LinkedIn Answers. It can also be as a comprehensive integration including staff training, toolkit roll out and a shift in overall sales strategy identified from an internal social media center of excellence.

Below is a list of some quick hits worth checking out to see how different organizations are working within this space.

a.  AMEX Open Forum focuses on content and connections for small business owners: http://www.openforum.com/
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/fmsignal/case-study-open-forum-scott-roan

b. FedEx Brown Bailout takes an aggressive stance on legislation and their competitors: http://www.brownbailout.com/
Read More: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2009/db2009068_154641.htm
Presentation on how UPS manages and their responding communication strategy: http://www.slideshare.net/GasPedal/blog-well-atlanta-ups-presented-by-debbie-curtismagley-2699339

c. IBM Sales Team taps in with a comprehensive strategy including using social as a means to “listen for leads” and enabling their sales force to spend a few hours per week on social. Empowering their biggest assets to be tuned in was a minor expenditure to drive sales growth via social.
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/delphRB/social-media-is-dead-ibm-prez-paris-28-march-2011

d. Cisco saves 100k by using social to reach their target customers during a product launch.
Read More: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/cisco-social-media-product-launch/

What you can do today? As stated above, it’s critical to begin understanding who your audience is and how they are using social in a B2B scenario. Hit up LinkedIn, and see how 10 of your prospects and how 10 of your best customers are using the platform. Try the same for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other related services which, depending on your industry, your prospects may be engaging in. This initial dive into your audience, will begin surfacing relevant information on how they are engaging in the space (look to see if they are sharing content, asking questions, contributing media, etc). Along with this, review Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder (shown below) and begin classifying how both your prospects and existing consumers fit within this ladder. It may require a deeper dive and analytical assessment and can provide the first steps to understanding your audience and how you may be able to strategically engage with them to drive sales via social efforts. Forrester’s also provides an easy to use tool to get a high-level snapshot on the behavior of consumers from their surveys to help you see how the data can be broken down and analyzed.