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.

The action-packed agenda includes presentations by Emma Jenkins, Head of Interactive Marketing at Procter & Gamble UK, Ian Jindal, Editor in Chief of Internet Retailing, and Jessica Greenwood, Deputy Editor of Contagious Magazine.  Also catch sessions on increasing community participation, measuring the impact of social commerce, and the Bazaarvoice product roadmap hosted by our very own Bazaarvoice executive team.  View the full agenda.

With a day full of magic, educational sessions, research findings, industry networking, and ice-cold fun at ABSOLUT ICEBAR, Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit London is sure to be the only event to mix Social with Results.  So get your parkas and magic wands ready – we’re Revealing the Secrets of Social Commerce…in London!

Here is a 1.5 minute video showing some highlights from our U.S. Social Commerce Summit (with a Texas-theme).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

We started answering that question today with the launch of our newest feature, called ShareThis(tm). It is a FREE feature for our clients allowing their shoppers and customers to share a review, profile or product to their favorite social networking or bookmarking site. And because we’re already hosted in their site, we can turn this live within days without IT involvement.

Dow Jones covered the launch, including commentary from Dell. Here’s a snippet from the article:

The feature enables a person who is, say, excited about the Dell monitor he just bought to share the news by posting on his Facebook profile a link to a review that he or someone else wrote. The post, which can also include an image of the monitor or the Dell logo and brief comment from him, will show up on his profile mini feed and in the news feed his Facebook friends see. Bazaarvoice says no money will change hands; shoppers won't be paid for posting reviews and Facebook won't get fees.

"It's making (consumers) an advocate" for brands on sites where the audiences are highly desirable to marketers, yet tend to be skeptical of online marketing, says Greg Sterling, of Oakland, Calif., consulting firm Sterling Market Intelligence. "It's trying to leverage a more trusted environment" and a form of marketing — word-of-mouth — that is particularly trusted by consumers.

It is also an effort to engage people who online-marketers have come to call "influencers" — people who through their expertise and efforts to share that expertise in online forums have gained outsized influence over other consumers. Sites like Facebook, del.icio.us and Digg are places where these people, and other less-active Web users, love to express themselves and have access to large numbers of other people.

"Now, for the first time ever, whenever (consumers) see a product they like, they can post it as a representation of who they are and what they like," says Sam Decker, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice.

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can see it live on these sample product pages from Dell, Toshiba and Jewelry Television.

We have future plans for this functionality, plus other ideas on social network integration with user generated content. Drop me a note if you’re interested in discussing them (sam at bazaarvoice.com).

If you’re a client interested in adding this to your site, it just takes a call or email to your Community Manager…otherwise you’ll be hearing from them! Remember, it's free! I mean FREE!

 I recently wrote an article on “Social Commerce” for iMedia to highlight and help define the term that captures two important ‘centers of gravity’ that marketing professionals should orbit. Below is an adapted version

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Tired of the overused, ambiguously defined buzzwords?

•    viral
•    long tail
•    folksonomy
•    crowdsourcing
•    prosumerism
•    P2P marketing
•    C2C marketing
•    social media
•    social computing
•    social networking
•    social shopping
•    citizen marketing
•    open-source marketing
•    user-generated content
•    word-of-mouth marketing
•    customer-created content
•    consumer-generated media

Notwithstanding the ambiguity of these terms — or the authoritative positions from Wikipedia contributors – I believe there is a productive purpose of evolving definitions: to illuminate important marketing principles and strategies. Even the words themselves shed light on what marketers should think about and do, such as "Listenomics" and "C2C Marketing."

Some terms more than others capture important characteristics of today's customer and marketing opportunities.

"Word-of-mouth," for example, is a term that may have some authoritative foundation with the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (in full disclosure, to which I'm a board member). WOMMA defines word-of-mouth as "The act of consumers providing information to other consumers." They define word-of-mouth marketing as "Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place."

That's helpful because it reminds marketers that the purpose of word-of-mouth marketing is to create a reason for customers to talk about your products.  

There's another term I'd like to help define, or at least evolve, and that is "social commerce."

Social commerce is not a new term. Its brothers and sisters include social media, social networking, social media and social shopping. I don't know or care which sibling was born first. Each has a slightly different meaning, but they all share that prefix in common. However, social commerce, more than the others, helps underscore two important centers of gravity that CMOs and marketing professionals should orbit themselves around.

The term "social" reminds us that these new marketing strategies are about customer-to-customer interactions. Said another way, it's not about us! The beating heart in the definition of "social" is a relational connection that motivates customers to participate, contribute and create experiences. And the output of these interactions is the relevance, credibility and authority that the next customer is yearning for, or else they'll run away from traditional marketing.

When marketers develop a social strategy, they should consider the depth and degree of "socialness," which determines the level of participation. Freedom of expression, opportunities for relevant connections and utility of an interactive experience will accelerate usage and content. Examples of these experiences include users connecting on a MySpace page, interacting with users and brands in Second Life and sharing and reading customer reviews. Conceptually, you can grade the social connection opportunity on a scale of 1-10. The more interesting and useful the interaction, the more often users will participate.

Social is the key motivation that drives user-generated content, customer-created content and consumer-generated media (pick your term). And these are digital marketing assets that we as marketers want to use to let our customers speak for our product (word-of-mouth marketing).

This leads us to the second part of this term: "commerce"

Social commerce is an appropriate term for the strategy of connecting customers to customers online and leveraging those connections for commercial purpose. Why? Commerce broadly reminds us of both our objective and methods for extracting value from this new strategy. We're not after social networking, media, computing or shopping. Nor do any of these suffixes remind us that measurement is important.

These new marketing terms listed at the top of this article can confuse us into non-productive strategies. But commerce reminds us that the CFO sits around the corner. We should remember the CMO is a high turnover job lest he or she prove the impact of their strategies. Measurement and operational rigor cannot be forgotten or blinded by hype. Commerce, in my humble opinion, captures and reminds us that any social strategy must fit into the business and be for the business. It should be measurable, operationalized and optimized. Otherwise the strategy is as short lived as some of these terms will be.

Clients ask us if they should start a blog, an RSS feed, a MySpace page or get a Second Life character. As with anything, it depends. However, "commerce" reminds us that any social strategy should aim to meet the customer somewhere along the purchase path. Does your blog help customers in awareness, consideration or purchase decision? How many prospects and customers will actually see your blog? As there are degrees of socialness, there are degrees to its commerce. Put another way, there are degrees of proximity of user-generated content to customers' purchase process, its salience to their needs, its reach, and its measurability of impact.

At a recent tradeshow for online commerce, four panelists pointed to ratings and reviews as one of the top priorities of Web 2.0 strategies because of its impact on purchase behavior and measurability. While some have called this social shopping, it falls short and shallow of a broader strategy. As a former retailer at Dell.com, I'd suggest online businesses are not interested in driving shopping, but rather traffic, conversion, average order value, loyalty, satisfaction and competitive differentiation. Social commerce allows us to have a broader perspective of evolving our marketing strategy by leveraging our brand advocates and the content they create as digital marketing assets.

In the end, if you're still cynical about defining a term like this, forget the term and remember these two simple principles:

1) The online customer wants to control, connect and contribute. Our goal should be to let them do just that and connect ourselves to our advocates.

2) Ensure this strategy makes an impact to the P&L in the biggest and broadest way possible.

To me, that's "social commerce."

The simple fact of the matter is that not every strategy for user-generated content is going to be successful.  Partnering with a company that specializes in user-generated content is going to help you significantly because most companies don't have the needed experience in-house.  This is a very new field, after all.

However, I believe that Heinz is doing the right thing by at least trying.  The online dialogue has begun – starting with ratings and reviews, then blogging, then social networking, and now user-generated advertising.  Heinz is smart to dip their toe in the water, just as many (even earlier pioneers) are dipping their toe into the upcoming 3D Web, popularized by Second Life.  There is an opportunity cost to being too much of a laggard, just as there is an opportunity cost for being too early of a pioneer.  The balance is difficult to strike but great companies did not get great by being timid.

Perhaps instead of user-generated advertising, Heinz should have started with crowdsourcing.  Another consumer food company, Kettle Chips, selected several new user-generated flavors with their "People's Choice" campaign, as I wrote about last year around this time.

The NY Times article also reminds me of the "contrarian" (i.e., informed by decades of marketing experience) views of Dr. Peter Fader and Dr. David Reibstein of The Wharton School, as documented in my Word-of-Mouth Wisdom interview series.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this news.

I read about Caitlin just this afternoon as I was reading Boing Boing, my favorite blog.  Sorry Sam!  Xeni Jardin, one of BB's editors, links to a compelling story entitled "Say Everything" at New York Magazine.  I highly recommend you read the story, but the main gist is that the proverbial "younger generation" is shamelessly comfortable with revealing the details of their personal lives to the rest of the world in the form of TypePad posts, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and the agency of a thousand and one (and growing everyday) new social networking and community tools and websites.  The article provides a glimpse into the lives of several of the young people driving this trend, some of which have been burned by the limelight but others that can't seem to get enough of it.

If your time is scarce, save reading the article for later and just check out the spread on Caitlin, a teen that has thoroughly documented her life (and blast-off into adulthood) on Flickr, Facebook, Vimeo, MySpace, and her own personal website.  While Caitlin's portfolio of self-generated online content is impressive, she isn't an outlier.  There are thousands more like her and they have been generating content for all the online world to see since their first broadband connection. 

Thinking beyond the novelty of this, Caitlin is an archetype for the customer of tomorrow.  Consider your customers of today and the relationships you maintain with them, in the context of your target demographics.  Direct mail?  Email newsletters?  Loyalty programs?  Now fast forward just 5-10 years and imagine competing for the attention and loyalty and walletshare of someone like Caitlin.  Like her peers, she has an amazing ability to multi-task and juggle connections with real world friends, virtual IM and chat buddies, websites and online communities, brands, products, and the list goes on.  Where do you fit in? 

I wish I had a clear answer for you, but I don't.  I do believe, however, that the starting point to building a long-lasting relationship with customers like Caitlin is to start speaking their language.  They talk, they post, they share everything online.  Resistance is futile.  At some point, they will talk about you, your brand, your products, your services.  Will it be good or bad?  You can control this to a degree by striving to make every customer interaction the best it can be, with the full awareness that there is a new currency by which your success and desirability are measured.  Call it buzz or word of mouth or whatever you like, but the concept is pretty simple: Are you worth talking about?  

If the answer to the question above is no, the next 5-10 years and beyond won't be much fun.  But my question is a bit more complex than it reads.  What I really mean to ask is are you inviting consumers to talk about you?  Are you encouraging, enabling, and participating in the discussion?  Are you willing to take a little bit of constructive criticism along with the praise you believe you deserve?  Again, if the answer is no, you may very well lose all relevance in the next 5-10 years.  The customers of tomorrow, the thousands of Caitlins out there and the millions that will follow her, demand a voice.  If you give them a voice, they will talk and they may just talk directly to you!  If you don't, they will talk elsewhere and that may include talking to your competitors.  

Well, the answer to that question is something I have been thinking about ever since launching Bazaarvoice with Brant. Why do people take the time to write reviews? [We will announce next week that we served over 19 million reviews on Cyber Monday!] Why do people take the time (like I did this morning) to vote on community photos for JPG Magazine? Why do people take the time to label images Google has crawled? [Google's top contributor, "wordgirl", has labeled 1,335,500 images since they launched this only three months ago - that is a staggering 14,839 images per day since launch!]

The answer is actually more complex than you may think. It is a combination of ego, social connection, and good karma. Let me explain:

1. Ego – At Bazaarvoice, we know that a reviewer comes back to our client's site three times, on average, after submitting a review to see if it has posted yet. When people take the time to share their opinion, they want to know the world heard it. This fact alone gives our clients three opportunities to resell a customer. In a recent report, Patti Freeman-Evans researched these reviewers.

2. Social connection – Why do you share your favorite movie with an acquaintance? Do you care if they watch it? Why do we talk about our favorite music? The answer is linked to human nature. We all care about connecting with each other as humans. This is what drives the creation of culture.

3. Good karma – A universal truth is that if you help someone, it makes you feel good. When reviewers help each other shop, it saves time. Saving time is one of the most important things we can help each other do, especially in the manic, multitasking world we live in today.

Now, if you apply these three elements to JPG Magazine, it all begins to make sense.

Obviously, we are thinking about the power of photos in customer-generated content at Bazaarvoice. A while back, we added Photo Reviews to our feature set. Wayne blogged about this recently. If you think about the three elements above, photos are a very strong component. Experts believe that the advent of the digital camera is one of the keys to why MySpace took off versus its predecessors (Geocities, etc).

How should you leverage photo reviews? With contests and multichannel recognition. Don't just run a contest for a gift certificate give-away for customers that write a review and include a photo, post the winning photo on your home page! Use it in an email campaign. Use it in a circular. Use it in an in-store display. If your community of customers sees that all three elements – ego, social connection, and good karma – are maximized by you, then it will spark customer participation unlike anything you have seen before. Threadless' entire business model is based on this, and I think it is a brilliant application of the three.

For fun, here is a photo we recently moderated that you won't see on one of our client's site because it came from a rejected review. Alas, it added no obvious value, there was no text review associated with it, and I think this person was just bored (they were thinking about element #1 above only – ego). But, it does grab your attention!