I wanted to hear all sides, so I posed the question on LinkedIn – which city is the “capital” of social media? I got a lot of great responses, but the answers left me with more questions.

What makes a city the “capital”?

“…I guess you'd have to set the context around what makes a city the capital.”
Alicia Benjamin, Social Media Manager at MeYou Health (LinkedIn)

“You'd have as many capitals as definitions of social media.”
Daniel Alfon, trilingual online marketing specialist seeking a new challenge (website, Twitter)

Biggest SM user base? Most integration of social into daily life? Most Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare users per capita? A hub of social-centered startups? Is there even a rubric we can all agree on to evaluate this question?  Based on the varied definitions respondents seemed to create for “social media capital”, probably not.

“Las Vegas, of course. We enable the most social interactions- online and off. C'mon.”
Michael Perhaes, Assistant Vice President, Marketing, MGM Grand Hotel (LinkedIn, Twitter)

“LA is the capital of social media. It's the center of entertainment-oriented content, a seat of innovation, a denizen of app-crazy dining aficionados and ground-zero for a great deal of lifestyle-oriented communications.”
Barry Berkowitz, VP, Digital Mktg. Solutions @ infogroup Interactive (website, Twitter)

“San Francisco. Since it's social media, it's all about the people, and the Bay Area has literally thousands of very plugged-in people, most of whom work for extremely innovative organizations. Don't just take my word for it…attend a conference or a Tweetup there and see for yourself!”
Todd Castor, Area Director, eCommerce at Marriott International (LinkedIn)

“According to Chris Brogan, Pittsburgh is number one, based on the entire community and tribes crossing over to foster a cohesive community. If you judge by SXSW standards, Minneapolis is number one with the largest chapter in the world of the Social Media Breakfast groups, with Boston and San Francisco rounding out the top 3. Austin may host SXSW but that doesn't mean that Social Media is practiced there more.”
Christopher Lower, Co-Owner Sterling Cross Communications (website, Twitter)

Can there be a capital at all? Should there be?

My favorite comment challenged the question altogether.

“I thought the point of social media, the internet, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, et cetera was that there isn't a capital?”
Matt McCoy, Online Strategy Manager at Volt (Twitter)

The fact that our answers come from all over the country and globe begs the question:  If social media is a borderless world, can there even be a single capital? Maybe there can be multiple capitals, or perhaps social media should never have a capital in the first place. After all, traditional capitals are nodes of centralized power and top-down governance, ideas that seem contrary to the ideas behind social media.

So you tell us: What’s the capital of social media? Can (and should) there be one at all?

See who you know at Bazaarvoice.

Connect with BV employees on LinkedIn, and participate in discussions like this one.

When voting moves online, as it undoubtedly will (just think about all of the tax money we would save if we did not have to set up temporary voting centers everywhere), the marriage of social media and election campaigns will be that much more profound.

To be frank, I do realize that the title of my post is too far reaching.  The reality is that Obama is a truly great man and therefore a good subject for word of mouth to flourish about.  Andy Sernovitz, the founder of WOMMA and Bazaarvoice Advisory Board member, has taught us – great subjects (products, people, services, etc.) easily generate word of mouth by just asking people to help and share.

On a personal note, I took a short vacation this weekend in Laguna Beach to recharge after my week in Amsterdam to speak at Shop.org's first Global E-Commerce Summit, then back to Austin for Halloween (I couldn't miss it with our 4-year old daughter), followed by a week in London for our own sold-out Summit (recap here).  I'm here for the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit kicking off on Monday night.  And vacation allowed me catch up on reading some great opinion pieces in the NY Times.  This is a truly historic period that we are living in, and I encourage you to read a few of these if you have the time – they are well worth it:

• It Still Felt Good the Morning After by Frank Rich
• Show Me the Money by The World Is Flat author Tom Friedman
• Obama and the War on Brains by Nicholas Kristof
• The Climate for Change by Al Gore

This is the third in our series of key takeaways from some of the presentations and panel discussions offered at the Social Commerce Summit in May 2008.

Andy Sernovitz, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and author of the book Word of Mouth Marketing, keynoted at our Social Commerce Summit, encouraging brands to give customers a reason to talk about your stuff. As Andy highlighted, marketing is what you do, not what you say.

To jump-start those word of mouth conversations on your site and beyond, Andy recommends the following 5 steps:

1. Talkers – find the people who will talk
   For each brand and product, your talkers will be different people. For the launch of the renowned Wynn in Las Vegas, the hotel invited the city’s cab drivers to stay free of charge for a weekend in order to spur conversations amongst Vegas’ most evangelical workforce.
2. Topics – give people a reason to talk
   Ask yourself: “Would anybody tell a friend?” It is your job to make customers happy, and remember that happy customers are the best ads.
3. Tools – allow your talkers to share
   Whether you deploy Ratings & Reviews, Ask & Answer, Stories, or some other social media tool, be sure to equip your customers with an easy way to share ideas and collaborate.
4. Taking Part – join the conversation
   Reach out to your community, and participate and respond when necessary.
5. Tracking
   No word of mouth campaign is worthwhile unless it can be measured and improved. Understand to what extent you are engaging your customers, and critically evaluate how you can continue to amplify those conversations.

I was happy to see Andy leverage the valuable community we assembled at our first-ever and sold-out Summit in May by recording five video interviews. It was truly an amazing group of individuals, charged with word of mouth marketing at many of the largest companies in the world, from Bank of America to Wal-Mart. It was humbling to be in the presence of so many smart industry leaders, sharing best practices with each other in our rapidly emerging field. Because of them (as well as the hard work by our team), we have set a very high bar for our Summit next year.

Andy recently published his interview of me. We discussed how user-generated content is changing the merchandising culture at companies, helping them become more customer-centric and successful as a result.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read on to see more interviews by Andy.

Andy previously published an interview of Ze Frank, another one of our keynotes and one of the funniest but smartest online personalities you will ever meet. Ze's interview at our Summit by Kelly Mooney (a Summit keynote speaker, author of The Open Brand, and President of Resource Interactive) was a personal mental highlight for me, probing into some very deep issues. Andy covers topics like viral marketing with Ze. By the way, that gong behind Ze in the interview is a very important part of Bazaarvoice's culture, and has been since the beginning. You can thank my co-founder, Brant Barton, for that, and you can find multiple gongs in our Austin office and one in our London office (so far).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andy also previously published an interview of Steve Leveen, the founder and CEO of Levenger. Steve is a very smart leader, and brought his son to our event. Steve gave me some great tips on raising our daughter, Rachel, and is a very kind person (as is his son, by the way).  In Andy's interview of Steve, they talk about the use of video reviews and Flickr as a natural medium for Levenger's sophisticated customers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have not subscribed to Andy's blog yet, do it today. Incredibly useful tips are published on an almost daily basis. I found myself recently evangelizing on why to follow it to the founder of Hey Cupcake, a local joint in Austin. I connected with the founder, Wes Hurt, recently after reading about him in Tribeza because we may be related (it is a long story). You must try these cupcakes the next time you are in Austin – they are unreal. But I'm off topic – I was telling Wes to read Andy's book and subscribe to his blog because he will quickly learn how to build his business as a result. I also found myself telling Wes the story of how Krispy Kreme lost its "specialness", parroting Andy telling me the same story.

On Andy's blog, he will soon be publishing the remaining two interviews he did at our Summit: Bryan Eisenberg (highly respected industry consultant, co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, keynote speaker at our Summit and several other conferences, prominent author [ClickZ, Call To Action, and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?], and Bazaarvoice Advisory Board member) and Seth Greenberg (former CEO of eHobbies.com – one of the online pioneers, former Shop.org Board peer, and leader at Intuit).

* Note: we are proud members of WOMMA and our own Sam Decker serves on the Board of Directors while WOMMA's President is my fellow Board Director at Bazaarvoice, Ed Keller (keynote speaker at our Summit, author of The Influentials, former CEO of Roper, and co-founder and CEO of The Keller Fay Group).

117 days and counting to the opening night of the first annual Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit. Questions you have will get answered: Where is Social Commerce going. How do I maximize return. What am I missing that others have discovered? What are the pitfalls. How to I evolve my strategy? There will be la lot of learning, networking and fun (and yes, free stuff and the best BBQ in Central Texas!). We're capping attendance at a max of 200 spots, and we're already starting to fill up! Strategic sponsors are signed up, including Cheetahmail, Endeca, ATG, Omniture, Aggregate Knowledge, Coremetrics, and others.

And the agenda is now posted at www.socialcommercesummit.com. Below are some of our topics and speakers for our 2.5 day summit in Austin TX, May 28-30…

• How to Grow Your Social Commerce Strategy
• Strategies for Opening Your Brand
• Word of Mouth Marketing:  Increase Visitors and Buyers By Creating Conversations
• 10 "Must Do" User-Generated Tactics (How Do You Score?)
• Is Your Ecommerce System Anti-Social?
• Case Study: Customer-to-Customer Answers with Answer Depot
• Turning Negative and Rejected Reviews into Assets
• Research & Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Influencers
• Insights for Driving the Highest ROI from User Content
• Feeding the Voice: How to Increase Participation
• Dell UGC Case Study: Culture, Organization & Metrics
• Social Commerce Analytics: How to Measure ROI and More
• How to Scale Up Search Visits with UGC
• Turning the Social Technology Groundswell to Your Advantage
• Ze Frank Q&A: How Do We Interact?
• Bazaarvoice Product Roadmap Lightning Round
• Real-World Tips to Evolve into a Customer-Centric Culture
• 10 Ideas for Online Advertising "2.0" 
• Beyond the Web: UGC Goes Multi-Channel
• Social Networking and Web 2.0: Practical Ideas that Work for Retailers
• The "Just Ask" Session
• and more…

Speakers include:

• Andy Sernovitz, author, Word of Mouth Marketing
• Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder, FutureNow and author, Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark
• Ed Keller, CEO, The Keller Fay Group and author, The Influentials
• Ethan Holland, E-marketing Manager, Jewelry Television
• Jim Osborne, VP eCommerce & Online Marketing for Loblaw
• Josh Bernoff, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Kelly Mooney, President, Resource Interactive and author, The Open Brand
• Matt Corey, VP Marketing for Golfsmith
• Paul Miller, SVP Direct Commerce for Sears
• Sean McDonald, Director, Communities and Conversations, Dell Inc.
• Seth Greenberg, Director, Online Advertising and Internet Media for Intuit
• Simon Rodrigue, Sr. Manager eCommerce, The Home Depot Canada
• Stuart Wallock, Sr. Mgr, Global Consumer Online Marketing, Dell Inc.
• Ze Frank of zefrank.com (Video Blogger)
• and more…

Online registration is available now for clients and invited prospects. If you do not know your registration code, email summit@bazaarvoice.com. The cap is 200 registrants and we're getting signups every day, so register now!

Andy Sernovitz, a Bazaarvoice advisor and founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), likes to say (I'm paraphrasing here) that advertising is the price brands have to pay for being uninteresting.  But occasionally some interesting advertising comes along that makes you laugh hysterically, possibly cry, and swear to tell your friends.  That's the goal.

I'm not really a customer of Burger King's (my parents were McDonald's franchisees for over 15 years, so that would be blasphemy!), but I do applaud their advertising creativity in recent years.  Subservient Chicken was a word of mouth sensation and the NFL replays that feature a cameo by the King had me laughing aloud.  Whopper Freakout extends the streak.  Well done, Burger King, well done.  Pun intended.   

Tuesday we hosted a great webinar with Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. As one of the pioneers of "word of mouth marketing", it was especially interesting to hear him define the term. As Andy says, word of mouth marketing is "giving people a reason to talk about your stuff and making it easier for the conversation to take place". We all know that word of mouth is not a new concept, but it has historically been generated by "experts" or celebrities in a very controlled way. Peoples' buying habits have evolved, and the "experts" are now simply "people like me". Companies today must re-focus their marketing strategies to promote good products, evolve them in a way that is most useful to customers, and give customers the tools to spread the word about their experiences. As Brett said, "The barrier to converse has been significantly reduced." The permanent record that your customers create can make or break your product and brand.

We also talked with Andy about the "5 T's" that he suggests companies think about when implementing or improving their word of mouth strategy. There were two points that really stuck with me:

1. The first step is to find "Talkers"; people who will talk about your product. As Andy points out, this is not generally your regular customer that interacts with your brand/products all the time. This is often your new customer. This is someone who has just experienced what you have to offer and is excited to share their opinions. Of course, it can also be your regular customer experiencing something new about your product. If so, you want to make sure it's something they have asked for and that further supports all the reasons why they're already one of your loyal customers.
2. Negative reviews provide many opportunities for a very positive user experience. This is something Sam wrote about a couple weeks ago. Negative reviews can help another customer make a more satisfactory purchase decision, can help a manufacturer improve a product in a very distinct and focused way, or can provide the opportunity for a company to "Take Part" and simply say "we hear you and we're going to try to improve". 

Check out all of the webinar slides on Slideshare. We're also happy to share the full webinar with audio if you email lisa @ bazaarvoice.com for the download link, username, and password.

Andy also covered this on his blog.

We had the pleasure of hosting Andy Sernovitz, the founder of WOMMA and a Bazaarvoice Advisory Board member, at our office a few weeks ago. Andy gave a lunch presentation to our team, and something he said really struck me: “Advertising is the tax companies pay to sell poor products”. Google, Starbucks, and many other brave companies decided to buck the formula and invest in the product instead of “brand imagery” (i.e., advertising). Andy has countless examples, and wrote a fantastic book on the subject that has been endorsed by the likes of Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, two of my favorite authors.

And then I met with a large apparel company a week later that is afraid of reviews. Prospect: “We tell the consumer how they should think about our products”. Prospect: “A hip woman in NYC may be turned off by a woman in Topeka, Kansas writing a review on a trendy fashion”. I’ll save you my lengthy and impassioned response.

As I write this, I'm on my flight back from London after spending a week in our UK office, speaking at the e-consultancy conference and meeting with prospects, partners, and press. And tomorrow is the 4th, so I'm feeling kind of revolutionary. So, here is my take on how advertising will evolve.

First, I would modify Andy’s quote: “At its best, advertising is a reinforcement for positive word of mouth, and it reminds a customer to buy”. Think about it for a moment. Do you remember most ads? Of course not. We all selectively filter information based on relevance to us at that point in time. But if you are shopping for a new phone-PDA, like I was recently when my phone broke, you are likely to call an expert. In this case, I called Michael Osborne, who is a gadget nut (check out his Bazaarblog post on the iPhone). He recommended the BlackBerry 8800 for a number of reasons: 1. call quality, 2. ease of use, 3. sexiness, and 4. built-in GPS. The last one really mattered to me, as I have always wanted a GPS when walking around a large city like NYC or driving a rental car. I bought one four hours later, after doing a bit more research (like talking to the sales rep in the store). Michael’s recommendation meant more to me than any amount of advertising ever could. And I can already say that the BlackBerry 8800 is the best phone-PDA I have ever owned. Built-in GPS navigation is a break-through in mobile phone technology (it will leave you thinking “how did I live without this?”, just like when you bought your first mobile phone).

Now let’s introduce advertising into this. Let’s say I wanted a new digital camera, and I had a longer lead time to look for one. I speak with the experts in my network. I read reviews online (both expert and consumer). I receive a range of different opinions. For my price range, I center on a Canon ABC or Nikon XYZ for different reasons. The Nikon has a slightly faster shutter speed and a better construction, but the Canon has slightly better software and is easier to use with more accessories. If I have multiple weeks to make this decision, advertising can now play an important role:

1. It can introduce me to retailers that carry these products (although I am already aware of the better ones since I read reviews online).

2. It can reinforce the positives that I already learned about via word of mouth and remind me to buy.

The best advertising is that which does a great job of highlighting real benefits in a concise and entertaining way. How many advertisements have you watched for cars driving fast on twisty roads? [Yawn!] We all know that very few cars are actually known for that. A Porsche, yes. That is real. But the majority of this advertising is almost completely useless. At its worst, it’s fraudulent. In this age of overabundance of media, it insults our intelligence and makes us want to tune out. We don’t like being lied to and the truth is more accessible than it has ever been before, due to the Internet. The best advertising is that which listens to real word of mouth and highlights real benefits.

This is easier than it sounds, again due to the Internet. Here’s the three-step formula:

1. Find a product that has a high velocity of positive word of mouth. No need to advertise a product that no one cares about. You are fooling yourself if you think you can get consumers to start talking about a boring, or poor, product. Better to put that money into better product development or invest it in your stores than waste it. But a product that a lot of people are talking about – that’s the sweet-spot. Wii ads everywhere – and highlight the revolutionary controller, please.

2. Research what people are saying in reviews, blogs, forums, and social networks. Word of mouth is now digitally archived, globally accessible, and available at the speed of your fingertips. Learn what the real benefits are. There are probably only three key benefits that everyone is passionately agreeing on. Don’t waste your money on a focus group; that isn’t a real conversation. That’s old school – it honors the days when marketers had to guess at word of mouth (i.e., when it wasn’t digitally captured for analysis). Today, nothing is more real than tapping into a C2C conversation – where there is no reason to share anything but the truth. No agenda – just social connection, good karma, and a little ego. If you haven’t searched your brand on Technorati, try it now – it’s a start and it's free.

3. Highlight these three authentic benefits in your advertising in an entertaining and concise way. Have you seen the recent Apple vs. PC ads (see above)? Pure brilliance. Entertaining, real, clever, memorable, and emotional.

Now, assuming you do a good job of placing the ad where potential buyers will see it, you will remind them of the positives they have already learned about and therefore increase the chance that they will buy it from you. That ad will drive the behavior that you are ultimately accountable for (i.e., sales).

Although this form of advertising is currently rare (i.e., most ads rarely highlight authentic benefits), I am convinced that this is how advertising will evolve. The Internet has made it mandatory. Everyone online now has near-immediate access to the real positives and negatives. It is becoming increasingly difficult to advertise to consumers in an inauthentic way because they are now hyper-educated. And as advertising evolves, advertisers and merchandisers will work more closely together (they have to) and we will tune back in.

Products will get better, too, but that is a subject for another time.