Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Social Media is celebrated for its power to cultivate influential relationships and foster viral conversations. As consumer attention shifts away from traditional mediums and migrates to the golden triangle of mobile, PC, and next generation Web appliances, businesses are racing to engage in the hopes of capturing fleeting awareness and igniting affinity.

Social media, as practiced today however, largely represents a means, not a means to an end, or said another way, social media is missing actions where the purpose is to achieve something significant. Social media marketers must learn to introduce clicks to action and also study from the book of conversion science in order convert engagement into measurable and meaningful activity now and over time.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The socialization of online media is forcing brands and publishers to migrate from a state of business as usual to new paradigms of business unusual. As social networks are rooted in valuable conversations and connections, it’s inviting companies to participate as long as thy do so authentically and transparently. Talk is cheap however, and actions speak louder than words. As such, the opportunity to convert attention into impact is largely untapped. Many of the celebrated examples in commercial social media have yet to define what it is that they hope to cause and measure beyond conversations, share of voice, and the population of their tribe.

Engagement through conversation is trivial. But, to reach people where their attention is focused and compel them to take an action that goes beyond response and sharing is artful and powerful. And, it’s attainable. Goals, clearly defined objectives and milestones, combined with conversion science emerge as imperative sources for engaging and driving desired outcomes in these uncharted networks.

Conversion Science

If we do not compete for attention, we are then absent from hearts, minds and decisions of our customers and the individuals who influence their decisions and actions.

Once attention is captivated, the real question is, what are you going to do with it?

The answer is to introduce a “call to action” in new media to intentionally define experiences and outcomes so that we can measure the corresponding results and activities to learn and improve. And, conversion science is at the heart of the best digital campaigns today.

Conversion science is essentially the study of converting impressions into actions and how to then improve engagement and conversion rates over time.

While conversations are helpful, they are not in of themselves, catalysts to action. It’s the conversion of conversations to transactions that leads to organizational relevance and transformation. This idea is something that is readily absent from many social media programs today, but it is through the introduction of conversion events that we can measure reactions and thus improve experiences. As such, metrics and the ever-elusive ROI in social media is not only measurable, it is perfectible, and this is why conversion science is critical to success.

In order to convert attention into desirable outcomes however, we must:

- Create programs with an “end” in mind (What do you want to cause, change, inspire, sell, build, organize, etc.)

- Introduce conversion opportunities through existing and emerging touchpoints

- Measure performance

- Increase conversions

Conversion science isn’t new. It is exactly how many of the best web professionals in search, e-commerce, design, analytics, advertising, and direct marketing achieve astounding results. Brian Massey, “The Conversion Scientist,” believes that most marketing departments use conversion is a metric and he’s right, if they’re even capturing conversion rates at all. Conversion science is just that, it’s a science and, as he says, “It is about understanding your visitors, knowing their stories, and creating content and experiences to deliver what they are in need of.”

And it is through the study of conversions and corresponding behavior that we learn to perfect the:

- Definition of the actions we wish to trigger

- Mechanisms to capture activity

- Systems and channels we use to attract attention

- Focus and caliber of the individuals who help us carry our intent and value across relevant social graphs

- The relevance of the social objects we create and distribute online

Data is a Fountain of Inspiration for Social Marketers

Conversion science is the fusion of left and right brain activity to foster creativity, and innovation through analysis. When combined with initial listening and research, conversion science ensures that digital programs rise above the noise from beginning to end. Social media programs that are data driven are inspired by insight, not guesswork, and as such, will outperform any program driven only by great ideas.

Imagination supported by data leads to educated experimentation where the results are intentional and examinable. Analyzing, ideating, researching, and learning create a virtuous digital cycle with value, relevance, resonance and business performance as beneficiaries.

Perhaps one of the most profound results of introducing science and data into the mix is that they inherently speak the language of executive management and the decision makers that green light our programs. When captured and organized accordingly, they can be presented to merit support and justify budgets and resources. Demonstrated consistently over time, data and interpretation also makes the case to expand programs and budgets.

Studying what fuels or inhibits social media conversions is a rich source of insight that is necessary to demonstrate market attentiveness while also sharpening our marketing prowess. Through the gathering and interpretation of data, we can unlock imagination to inspire artistry and innovation. It is this marriage of data and creativity that saves time, resources, and energy in the design of social objects that are relevant with outcomes that are simplified and literally, scientifically engineered to work. As attention is scarce, conversion science helps us tell our story in a way that is consumable, shareable and actionable. As Elvis Presley once famously sang, “a little less conversation, a little more action.”

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Lanyrd

Quick Pitch: Lanyrd helps you get more out of conferences.

Genius Idea: Via Twitter, track event sessions and keep up with favorite speakers — at all stages in the conference lifecycle.

Some newlywed couples work to produce an offspring on their honeymoon. Most don’t labor towards birthing a startup. But that’s exactly what British entrepreneurs Natalie Downe and Simon Willison did on their post-nuptial adventure. After traveling in Europe and Africa, the couple caught ill in Casablanca and extended their stay and booked an apartment to recover.

The pair have a shared love for building projects in their spare time — which is why, with all that extra time in a bedroom, they managed to create and release an early build of Lanyrd. Within two hours of its launch, Downe and Willison saw the site generate more than 14,000 visits.

After finding immediate success with social media denizens, the couple applied to Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Lanyrd was accepted and has since relocated to Mountain View, California to complete it. The site remains a largely bootstrapped effort, though the couple did accept the $150,000 in convertible debt offered up by Start Fund.

Willinson calls Lanyrd “the IMDb of conferences” — except that its content is crowdsourced. The site asks its users to do the heavy lifting for them by filling in the blanks on each conference: sessions, speakers and content. The incentive? The same as at any conference: self-aggrandizement. Organizers will go to any lengths to promote their events. Speakers want to flesh out their profiles by adding past, present and future engagements. And everyone wants to see useful conference content.

“Conferences are traditionally insufficient for transferring knowledge,” says Willinson. “Longer term, this is about capturing the value of what’s shared.”

Lanyrd’s tie-in with Twitter is ingenious — and almost spooky. Sign in with your Twitter handle, and you’ll automatically be greeted with a smorgasbord of contacts and upcoming conferences, drawn from your Twitter relationships. You may see that Lanyrd knows you spoke at a trade show last month, or that you’re on a panel this fall. The site already lists 6,000 crowdsourced conferences and 30,000 user profiles.

Downe and Willison opted to use Twitter’s social graph — rather than Facebook’s, say — because they believe the “follow” has more aspirational value than the “friend.” You likely already follow the people you’d like to know, the speakers you’d like to see talk. According to Lanyrd, you’ve already composed a list of the thought leaders you’d like to bump into at an upcoming conference. So Lanyard is well positioned to find the sessions of social relevance to you.

Since users are encouraged to add speakers and their Twitter names to sessions, the speaker need not be a Lanyrd user to have a Lanyrd presence. On signing up, you may notice your conference history has already been charted for you by your Twitter followers, organizers or fellow attendees.

Next up, Lanyrd has its sights set on South by Southwest, held in Austin next month. The startup launched its unofficial guide to the show Tuesday to help users find which sessions their Twitter friends are attending, and stay current on slides, videos and notes.

The SXSW tool marks Lanyrd’s first real test at a major conference. At worst, the event will provide a trove of data and real-world experiences that Downe and Willison can use to better determine how to serve users while they’re attending conferences.

Downe and Willison describe the chain of events following their June 2010 nuptials to their present day found status as an unexpected, whirlwind affair. Their story, and their startup, are still in their nascent stages. The couple will graduate from the Y Combinator program in March, and may be forced to return to the UK when their visas expire. But location may matter little to a startup that has successfully leveraged the power of an international hit like Twitter.

Image courtesy of SimonWillison.net

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Try donating to a different charity every day for an entire year. Sounds hard, right? Well, it is, but that’s the exact goal that Carlo Garcia set for himself when he started Living Philanthropic, a one-year, one-man project to donate money 365 days in a row.

Every day, Garcia chooses a new charity and donates a small sum of money — usually around $10, but never less than $5. He then documents that day’s charity in a blog post on his Tumblr, where he describes the cause and provides some insights or personal stories to highlight its mission. Garcia, a Chicago-based actor and director, has minimal experience with blogging and social media but now relies on a suite of digital tools to spread his message, including a Twitter account, @deusexrockina, the hashtag #GiveEveryday, Facebook Page, and crowdrise profile.

Garcia admitted on his site that he doesn’t come from money, nor does he have an especially large bank account. The project was built on the belief that any support can make a difference. To make room for the donations, Garcia gave up some daily frills, like a cup of coffee or indulgent purchases like extra plaid shirts. Now on day 306, Garcia has given more than $3,500.

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But Living Philanthropic is more than just a way for Garcia to feel good about himself. The project is as much about raising awareness as it is about the individual donations. Garcia’s daily blog posts serve to highlight and provide exposure for smaller non-profits like a Portland animal rescue or a school-building expedition in Mexico.

Garcia acknowledges that 365 days of disparate micro-donations won’t make as much of an impact as if he focused his attention (and money) on just a couple causes. Instead, the project acts as a kind of local charity tasting menu: By no means exhaustive but certainly expansive. Garcia hopes that in the different charities he features and supports, his users will find at least one charity that they love and will continue the chain of giving.

The outreach and positive messages have worked. According to his site, readers have donated more than $8,500 in support of Living Philanthropic’s mission. “The awareness and the power of the community that has built up around this grassroots idea is worth more than the actual money I can give,” Garcia said.

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How To Do It

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There are ways to donate even if you don’t have a ton of cash. Garcia’s tips for the everyday micro-philanthropist are:

• Start Locally: create a list of non-profits you want to support in your community.
• Start Small: You don’t need to go broke, donate what you can.
• Jar-to-jar: Set up a jar for loose change. At the end of the week, month or year, donate that amount to your chosen charity.
• Vetting: Make sure the non-profits are properly registered. You can use sites like Guidestar.org to do a quick, free search.
• Money Isn’t Everything: If you don’t have disposable cash, consider volunteering, raising awareness, or donating gently-used clothing and toys to local drives.
• The Great Opt-Out: After donating, ask to receive updates by e-mail rather than snail mail. You’ll keep your mailbox clean and save some trees while you’re at it.
• Give Anything: It doesn’t matter how small, every donation helps. If you miss a day, don’t give up.

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What’s next? After this year is up, Garcia is launching YEAR TWO, a similar project for which he’ll donate all those daily savings to a different charity every month. The aim is to give those charities more time and ultimately more money.

What do you think of Garcia’s project? Can one person really hope to make a difference? Sound off in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, CarbonNYC

Hipmunk, the trendy Y Combinator travel startup that simplifies the flight search process, is out with an iOS application for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad .

The Hipmunk mobile application iTunes link experience is the perfect complement to the web experience and allows for fast sorting and filtering of flights. The app includes Hipmunk’s characteristic “Agony” filter for automatically sorting flights by a combination of annoyance factors — stops and travel duration, for instance.

“Like any good iPhone app, Hipmunk does its best to be fun,” says developer Danilo Campos. “You can zoom and scale your search results just like the Maps and Photos apps.”

Booking flights through the Hipmunk application has its pros and cons. Should you find a suitable flight, you can buy the ticket through a third-party vendor like Orbitz on your mobile phone, but it’s not an in-app experience.

One nice convenience, however, is that should you wish to abort the mobile booking process and book online instead, Hipmunk essentially bookmarks the saved flight for you. You can then visit Hipmunk’s website and enter a secret word to continue booking the flight online.

The newly released application offers travelers a more convenient alternative to flight search via mobile devices, and it’s the product of Campos’s passion for great user experience design.

Campos gives a “damn” about user experience design; he penned a blog post back in October commending the Hipmunk team for a job well done in that department. Campos’s impassioned stance on design caught the attention of Hipmunk co-founder Adam Goldstein and landed him a full-time position with the startup, where his first order of duty was to build the iPhone application.

Hipmunk is still a very young startup, but it’s managed to raise more than $5 million in back-to-back seed and Series A funding rounds. The mobile app will likely help the startup reach a larger, more mainstream audience, and allow it to find its footing amongst more traditional flight search tools.

Plastic shopping bags are, of course, made of plastic, which is made from petroleum. A Japanese inventor has figured out how to convert them into fuel.

The gadget essentially melts plastic bags and bottles and condenses the vapors into crude oil that can be used for home heating, according to PhysOrg.com. The process takes about an hour and emits water vapor and CO2.

A power plant in the Washington, D.C., area is testing similar technology but on a far larger scale. The machine offered by Blest Corp. is believed to be the first developed for home use. The company offers it in three sizes, from a small desktop model (shown) to a 5,000-pounder capable of producing 5 kilos of oil an hour.

The machine works with polypropylene, polyethylene and polystyrene. Blest says it can convert two pounds of plastic into one quart of oil using one kilowatt-hour of energy. The crude oil can be further refined into gasoline, but you’ll need another machine — sold by Blest, of course.

At $10,000, the machine certainly isn’t cost effective, but the company hopes to bring costs down as demand rises.

Via PhysOrg.com

Photo: Blest Corp.

Rolls-Royce will roll silently into the Geneva auto show with an electric concept car based on the Phantom, but don’t expect to see them prowling the streets of Beverly Hills or Monaco anytime soon. This e-Rolls is strictly a one-off to test the technology.

The illustrious British automaker says the 102EX, or Phantom Experimental Electric, will be used to “gather a bank of research data which will be crucial in informing future decisions on alternative drivetrains.”

“We have engineered the world’s first battery electric vehicle for the ultra-luxury segment,” company CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös said in a statement. “With this vehicle, we begin an exploration into alternative drivetrains, seeking clarity on which alternative technologies may be suitable to drive Rolls-Royce motor cars of the future.”

The company has been teasing us with rumors for awhile, and we were supposed to see an e-Phantom late last year. Company brass say the car “will tour during 2011″ so the country club set can see what they think.

“I must be convinced that any alternative drive-train we choose for the future delivers an authentic Rolls-Royce experience,” Müller-Ötvös said. “It must be a technology that is right for our customers, our brand and which sets us on a sound footing for a sustainable future.”

Still, the odds probably are good an electric Rolls will see production eventually. The company is owned by BMW, which just launched the “i” sub-brand specifically for EVs. The company is making a big push into the arena, with electrics coming from Mini as well. An electric Rolls will allow BMW to achieve further economies of scale to bring down the costs of batteries and other components.

An electric Rolls Royce makes more sense than you might think. Most owners simply tool around town, so range isn’t a big issue. It could save owners some serious coin on emissions and road taxes in cities like London. And electric motors provide boatloads of torque and they’re quiet — two hallmarks of a Rolls-Royce.

Rolls Royce is keeping mum on the specs until the car makes its debut March 1.

Photo: Rolls-Royce

Volumes of professional photography have long been reserved for the coffee table, but Fotopedia, the maker of an online collaborative photo encyclopedia, is bringing this type of content to the iPad and iPhone. The company’s third photo app launches Tuesday and contains 1,300 photos of 40 unique cultures by professional photographer Jaime Ocampo-Rangel.

The app is one part of Ocampo-Rangel’s 12-year-long project, Memory of Colors, which also includes a book, a movie and an exhibit. The project was first on display at UNESCO’s headquarters in 2010. Ocampo-Rangel says he hopes the app will bring his work to new audiences.

“Fotopedia has allowed me to introduce these civilizations to an unprecedented audience that would otherwise have no idea of their existence,” said Ocampo-Real in a statement.

The new app allows users to browse photos by country, culture or color (“In my photography, I associate them with the dominant color of clothes, their skin, their spirituality or their way to perceive beauty,” Ocampo-Rangel explains in a video about the project). Each photo can be shared to social networks or set as wallpaper. For a limited time, the app is available for $0.99.

Memory of Colors is Fotopedia’s third app. The free app Fotopedia Heritage launched in October and has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times, and the first paid app, National Parks, launched in December.

“We don’t think of our apps as books and we don’t think of our job as about perfecting books,” says Fotopedia CEO Jean-Marie Hullot. “…Our job is to help people explore and discover the beauty of the world.”

If Best Buy’s $800 price for Motorola’s Xoom — the company’s powerful Android 3.0 tablet — seems too big a pill to swallow, maybe you’ll find it a bit easier with Verizon’s 24-month data plan, which lowers the price of the device to $600.

Of course, it means you’ll have to pay at least $20 per month for 1G of 3G data, which increases the overall cost considerably. But if you planned to purchase a data plan for the Xoom anyway, this deal might not be too shabby.

Verizon also reminds potential customers that the Xoom will be upgradable to 4G LTE service for free in the second quarter of 2011.

Besides the 3G (and, later on, 4G), the Motorola Xoom sports a 10.1” widescreen HD display, a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, a 5-megapixel camera on the rear and a 2-megapixel one on the front, Wi-Fi support, an accelerometer and a HDMI output.

Graphic.ly, a startup centered around comic books and graphic novels, has at long last rolled out its Android app.

Android users have had to watch green-eyed from the sidelines as the company released web, desktop, iPhone and iPad apps. Now the company’s vast library of 2,000 comics will be available to the 22 million Android users around the world, as well.

In a release, Graphic.ly CEO Micah Baldwin said, “Like our community, we are firm believers in the explosion of the Android market. Being the first to provide Marvel Comics on the Android platform is a perfect example of that belief. This application is only the beginning of the expansion of our relationship with Google.”

We can’t wait to see what Baldwin and Graphic.ly have in the wings — perhaps something special for Android-powered tablets as more of those hit the market.

For the time being, the new Android application features a full store front for your digital-comic-collecting pleasure. If you’ve already bought comics via the iOS, web or other apps, you can sync your library with your Android device.

The app supports “Graphic.ly View,” which means that on a smaller screen, you can read comics frame by frame rather than page by page. And users can also download comics for later, unconnected reading.

Android users, if you’re also comic fans, you can head to the Market and download the app starting right now. Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

In the meantime, here are some screenshots to whet your appetite:

I think about work often. I have been both an employee and a deep thinker about work since my first jobs. Even before I was of legal age to work, I had little business ideas and plans, and some of my beliefs, once thought to be pipe dreams, are a lot more common place. With that in mind, here are some thoughts about the future of work. Note: A good deal of my thoughts on work are very Western-hemisphere centered, but one might be able to extrapolate for other countries, or at least see how their ideas will fit into what I think might be happening here.

Work Will Be Modular

Many of us will start using “project” as the unit of measurement of work. Meaning, a job won’t be a job any more, but a collection of projects, sometimes with the same employer and sometimes not. We will all work a bit more like Hollywood’s film industry, gathering the right team for the right project, and having more than one “picture” in the works at all time. This will require a lot more self-organizing and a lot more self-discipline, but people who define work around the unit of “project” instead of the unit of “job” will definitely have a better chance of succeeding.

Work Will Be Mobile

Anything that doesn’t have to be tied down to a desk won’t be. We are already nearly there. More and more people are issued laptops, and yet, management styles are still based around “butt in chair” metrics. I’ve used tools like GoToMeeting, Skype, Yammer, and mobile technologies to keep attached to a team for years. More and more businesses are catching up. Apple, for instance, has no cash registers in their stores. Other retail outlets are trying out the same technology. More and more of our technology is enabling us to work wherever we can find the net. This trend shifts a lot of other things, such as the future of where we live, the future of transportation, the future of family structures. It’s the most powerful of the future of work trends.

Work Will Be Cause-Balanced

More and more social causes are finding their way into our day jobs. Business models like that held by Toms Shoes will be more the norm than the exception. We will seek relationships with companies based on their social giving profiles as much as we do their value and their product offerings. We’re already hearing that about PepsiCo, who has been building more and more brand power with their Refresh project and other social giving initiatives, and who is getting higher and higher ratings (in some measures) with people who care about social good. Many more businesses will seek this out.

Work Will Be Smaller and Bigger

This sounds like bet-hedging, but it’s not. Work will be pushed to two extremes: tiny cottage businesses of never more than 5 employees, some smaller-but-big-feeling companies of 100 employees, and huge conglomerates of 20,000 or so employees. The mid-sized business will become less and less attractive, and will act more like the “interface” between big companies, instead of feeling as much like a standalone business of its own. This might be my most “out on a limb” prediction, but I have some reasoning, based partially on how social tools and Internet sales and marketing have changed the power structure of small businesses. The more we can grow and market small businesses, the more other company size benefits won’t be useful. So, either we’ll be huge, or we won’t want that at all.

Work Will Be More Goal-Aligned

This is more of a wish than a prediction, but I see little signs that people care about it. At least, I tend to surround myself with people who work for goals instead of working towards a retirement. Maybe because the banking systems have failed, maybe because no one will ever retire at the company where they started (unless they built the company), and maybe because the world has changed in too many ways, but I feel that people work with their own goals in mind now instead of working towards someone else’s. (You’re welcome to disagree.)

And You?

How do YOU view the future of work? What have I missed out on? What would you add? Are you living this future today?