Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Pepsi tallied up the numbers and found it got more than 500,000 total views than Coke, according Shiv Singh, global head of digital for Pepsi. The figures are tallied below:

A decisive factor was “Behind the Scenes at #CokeChase,” a video that Pepsi created with Funny Or Die and released Sunday morning before the game. The video, shown below, featured the putative cast of Coke’s Super Bowl spot — actors dressed as cowboys, showgirls and Mad Max types — trying to get Pepsi Nexts out of a broken vending machine. When someone points out that a Coke machine is working, the actors think a second and then decide to keep trying the Pepsi machine.

Coke’s Super Bowl spot, which featured the three teams trying to get a Coke in the desert, got mixed results though the ad itself got more views than Coke’s 2012 “Polar Bears” Super Bowl spot.

Image courtesy of Pepsi, YouTube

Shortly before Facebook’s turbulent IP “uh oh”, GM announced that it was pulling its $10 million advertising budget from Facebook. Controversy erupted. Accusations ensued. Camps divided into three factions, those who support GM, those who support Facebook and those not yet ready to take a stance either way, but are paying attention.

It will forever be known as “the meeting” between Facebook sales executives and General Motors Global CMO Joel Ewanick and other GM senior marketing executives. In the end, Facebook and GM each walked away with less than they had walking into the meeting. Facebook lost a premier advertiser and also lost Ewanick as an advisor to its invitation-only client council. GM lost the ability to demonstrate leadership in a time where the advertising and automotive industries are flailing. All is not lost however as GM will continue to spend $30 million annually in managing its Facebook presence through earned and shared media strategies.

So what happened in that now infamous meeting? Perhaps one day, its premise will inspire an episode of AMC’s Mad Men…

It’s a dark, dimly lit room illuminated only by a projector. Cigarette smoke fills the only visible light. On the wall is an image of Facebook’s timeline. Don Draper leans forward. His words cut through the smoke. In a calm voice with menacing undertones, Draper asserts his one and only reason for staying in that room, “my client has requested a home page takeover. Now, before you respond, allow me to be clear. This, what it is you’re selling, your advertising products, they don’t work for us. We have deep pockets and we’re willing to invest in the right partner that shares our vision. Now, how about you play nice like all of the other media partners and give us what we want.”

Facebook responds, “no thank you.” The sales team then shuts their iPad and MacBook Air lids and proceeds to leave the room in what almost seems like a well-rehearsed exit. They must do this often. Draper sits back in his chair and exerts a simple, but telling response, “huh…”

While many speculated what actually took place in the meeting, Advertising Age’s Cotton Delo reported that the scenario above is probably not far from the truth. GM is interested in Facebook’s audience, but believes that the ad formats currently available are unattractive and ineffective. The automaker’s team desired bigger, higher-impact ad units. After all, GM and many other brands around the world have learned the art and science of advertising by investing in campaigns that stand out from others, literally and figuratively.

So why is Facebook steadfast in its position to not cash in? The answer is user experience. Facebook is home to over 900 million engaged users. U.S. users alone spend 441 and 391 minutes per month on average interacting on Facebook’s desktop and mobile platforms respectively. Mark Zuckerberg and the storied “build and ship” culture he’s created is passionately dedicated to improving and not compromising the user experience. For the time being, anything that disrupts that experience is off the negotiation table even it means the company must walk away from $10 million deals. As a publicly traded company however, it must now also improve investor experiences.

At some point, brands will need to see additional options for paid media. By design, advertisements should be engaging rather than distractions. But a large part of the problem has nothing to do with form, but instead function. Advertisers are still deploying uninspired digital ads on other platforms. Many bring that methodology to social media. Accordingly, the metrics traditional marketers use to measure success in social networks are limited to impressions, reach, clicks, and engagement.

“A bad ending follows a bad beginning.” – Euripides

Advertisers need to think about new end-to-end experiences that inspire and engage a far more connected and discerning audience. Home page takeovers are for Myspace and the digital nomads who roam elsewhere on the web. Facebook is a new type of co-created canvas that requires different strokes to attract a savvy clientele.

Even though GM remains committed to Facebook through earned, owned, and shared programs, it appears to carry a traditional philosophy and approach to its everyday community strategy. General Motors currently is home to 383,000 Likes. Chevrolet boasts just over 1.2 million. Changing lanes for a moment, its competitor Ford has more than 10 million fans globally with 4 million supporting Mustang, the single largest vehicle fan page on Facebook.

I reached out to Scott Monty who leads Ford’s Global Digital Communications for his thoughts on GM’s move. Ford sees Facebook as a new vehicle for storytelling where paid, earned, owned, shared, and promoted media converge to create a new story board that begets new rules. According to Monty, “Ford is accelerating our efforts in Facebook and other social platforms. It’s all down to execution. We’ve found Facebook ads to be very effective when strategically combined with engagement, great content and innovative ways of storytelling, rather than treating them as a straight media buy.”

One of Ford’s much touted successes on Facebook was its introduction of the 2011 Ford Explorer via its “Reveal” campaign. The company claims that the combination of advertising and creative storytelling helped it outperform a traditional Super Bowl advertisement for a fraction of the cost.

Monty emphasized support of Facebook, “We continue to have a strong, collaborative relationship with Facebook, which includes first-of-a-kind vehicle reveals, advertising and innovative ways of sharing content. Our engineers have also been working with Facebook engineers to develop unique and safer ways of integrating the car experience with Facebook.”

Ford’s Facebook strategy is also an extension of a more empathetic marketing and sales campaign that’s underway worldwide. I had the chance to interview Jim Farley, Ford’s first CMO during Blogworld Expo in Los Angeles. His mission as instructed by Ford President Alan Mulally was to, “get people to fall in love with the blue oval all over again.”

When brands approach marketing and advertising opportunities with a purpose, the results that follow are commensurate with an investment of both intention and execution. In other words, you get out of it what you put into it. And according to a report due this week, comScore has found that Facebook ads are effective. In a report by CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, she explained that comScore thinks Facebook ads are having a “statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchasing of a brand.”

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For years, advertising has made a business by thinking outside of the box. But when it comes to flat, consumerized networks such as Facebook, perhaps the industry needs to think outside of the box once again. Facebook is not without fault however. It too must help advertisers create and measure successful campaigns while enticing the community of active users to support the brands they love. Over the last few weeks alone, Facebook introduced new APIs to help advertisers design “clicks to action” within its marketing efforts to trigger what could be unconventional, but possibly more meaningful outcomes. It challenges marketers to think beyond the Like or traditional impressions for that matter.

In what seemed to be a direct response to GM’s adieu, Facebook also introduced a clever new tool that shows marketers just what they’re missing. Now within the timeline, marketers can see reach data for each post. Information includes the number of total fans who may have seen the post and the amount people who were reached through paid promotion.

Facebook is teaching marketers that it’s not just about whom you reach, the opportunity also lies among those you do not reach today.

The court of public opinion may be weighing in on the matter of Facebook vs. GM. But I think the real case is against the people in social networks vs. traditional marketing methodologies. What’s clear is that Facebook is intent on serving users first. Perhaps advertisers could take a cue from Zuckerberg to rethink experiences through advertising and marketing campaigns that consumers can’t help but click, share, and engage.

Conference Room: Shutterstock

Some of America’s most compelling brands are harnessing the conversational aspect of social media by setting up “listening command centers” to capture, monitor and utilize social media conversations. In doing so, they are monitoring online conversations about their brands, reacting instantly to viral buzz, and creating companies that consumers feel involved in–and in some cases, even bringing in bigger profits as a direct result.

One of the first to introduce this technology was Gatorade, which launched its mission control center in its Chicago offices in June 2010. The technology allows the company to monitor social media conversations about the company through a range of visualisations and data-streams.

It also enables fans to participate in the company on a new level. During the Super Bowl, Gatorade enabled fans to interact with NFL starts through Ustream, and they’re now running regular live social media events, such as having sports stars answer questions using Twitter and Ustream.

And this command center technology isn’t just for big companies–it can benefit public services and charities as well. The American Red Cross believes social media will play an increasing role in disaster response, as it can provide real-time information and give relief workers a direct line to affected individuals. Its new digital command center launched in March, just in time to respond to the thousands affected by dozens of tornadoes that ripped through 10 states.

Dell played a major part in helping the Red Cross launch its command center, modelling it after its own social media listening center and providing equipment and funding. Dell’s center launched in 2010 and has since been at the forefront of its marketing and customer response strategies. Said Dell’s VP of social media and community, Manish Mehta, “Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad … It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’–those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there, and deserve to be heard.”

Dell’s ground control center tracks around 22,000 daily posts about the company across a wide range of social media, and enables Dell to participate in online dialogue about their brand and use social media insights to improve their products and marketing.

The technologies that makes this listening possible come from multiple different monitoring platforms like Salesforce Radian6, Sysomos, Nielson BuzzMetrics, and others–the platforms capture millions of social media conversations from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, and presents them in a graphic display showing trend information, sentiment, geographical data, and share of voice.

Clemson University has also built a listening center with support from Dell and Radian6. Chief officer Jim Bottum believes Clemson may be the first academic environment to adapt listening command center technology. Students monitor the six large display screens and conduct research projects based on the data, including a recent project aimed at conversations about emergencies to help law enforcement agencies deliver better service in their communities.

Brands are not the only ones that realize the amazing benefits of command centers. Progressive agencies also get on board with the concept.

David Armano, executive VP of global innovation and integration at Edelman Digital, and his team just launched their first social intelligence command center (SICC) in its Chicago office. It combines four listening and engagement stations, a briefing workspace with cable television newsfeed, Polycom, and a content production section. The room is self contained and designed for real time monitoring, analytics, engagement and ultimately content production informed by the data coming in. It also has a full whiteboard wall where teams can actively work and plan.

“It’s essentially ground zero for real time communications,” says Armano. “Social intelligence or the insights we can gain from real time data is nothing without the ability to act upon it. Our SICC initiative is designed to not only master real time data, but act intelligently upon it.”

Taulbee Jackson, president and CEO of Radius and a member of the Super Bowl XLVI host committee, talked to me about the Super Bowl’s first-ever social media command center and his experience in managing the host committee’s interactive communications hub. “We had staff of about 50 people who worked two shifts for two weeks for fifteen hours a day. Our team was comprised of senior level social media managers, content developers, analysts, strategists and tech-savvy volunteers.”

Working out of a 2,800-square-foot space in downtown Indianapolis just blocks from the event, team’s objectives were clear. One: hospitality. “We are known for our friendliness, we wanted to make sure everyone had great experience at the Super Bowl coming from different parts of the country (whether it was on the aiplane, airport, street, cab, online)”, said Jackson. Two: safety. The team not only moderated conversations, it also was connected to other command centers in town that housed logistics and public safety teams so that in the event of the emergency their combined response would be instant. Three: create content and capture the experience to share with those who weren’t able to attend in person. Four: amplification. The team’s role was to amplify the positive experience fans had at the event.

The response rate of the command center staff was less than 3 minutes. Jackson says the event received over 64 million social impressions in one month from organic social amplification, which he estimates are worth $3.2 million. The main metric was the sentiment analysis, though. Real-time response and conversations moved the sentiment measure from 3.2 before the start of the event to 3.6 at the kick off (for every time someone said something negative online, 3.6 people said something positive).

Benefits of Listening Command Centers

So what benefits could a social media command center bring to a company or organization? The command centers enable brands to respond rapidly to trending topics in social media. For example, after Gatorade launched the “Gatorade has Evolved” campaign–which featured a song by rap artist David Banner–it was heavily talked up in social media, Gatorade was able to work with Banner to have a full-length version of the song ready to distribute to its Facebook and Twitter followers within 24 hours.

Listening command centers also allow consumers to participate in brand activities and shape their own experiences with the company. Thanks to its listening command center, Dell is able to provide almost instantaneous assistance to customers, and thanks to conversations and insights gained from social media, they’ve launched the (RED) line of products and FastTrack PC shipment, and redesigned the keyboard on their highest selling laptop after feedback that the apostrophe was positioned awkwardly.

The technology is being used for the more mundane day-to-day tasks of optimising landing pages and sending followers to the most high performing pages of the company’s website. Gatorade says it has been able to reduce exit rates from 25% to 9%, and has increased views of its product videos and other education material by 250%.

At Edelman, Armano says the company has used its SICC to train and act as a model to help several clients plan, design, and staff their own. “Not only that; internally for Edelman, the SICC initiative helps to break down traditional silos,” Armano says. “When analysts, strategists, content developers and media relations teams all see real time data in action–the silos melt away.”

Talking about companies and brands on social media is increasingly a two-way conversation, with listening command centers at the heart of marketing and customer interaction strategies. With application across a variety of industries, from Fortune 500 companies to the public service to education, it won’t be long before listening command centers are standard practice for engaging and monitoring customers.

Image: Flickr user Ludovic Bertron

The future of television is much more than social; much in the same way that the future of media is too, more than social. Social is a fabric; it connects the individual nodes that make up the human network. But, social however, is not a means to an end. And, as such, the same is true about the working theories driving Social TV. Understanding the role social plays in how viewers connect with programs and other people is essential to defining the future of television.

Over the years, I’ve written much about my vision for the long overdue convergence of not only web and TV, but also how the three screens (TV, mobile, and PC) and human relationships impact adoption and engagement between people and also between programming. So when I hear the term Social TV, I get it. I’ve certainly used it in the past. At the same time, I’ve also said however that the future of television is more than integrating Tweets or #hashtags into the programming to start a “global conversation” around the world’s largest digital water cooler.

This is a time when bringing to life what’s possible takes imagination, design, scripting, and innovation. We need to raise the bar. The future of TV won’t be driven by a social media strategy. Instead, the future of TV will be driven by innovation and a vision for more meaningful entertainment and engagement (no it won’t be called entergagement). This innovation will in turn inspire new programming, revenue opportunities and ultimately social media strategies.

Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of media partnerships, once said, “Twitter lets people feel plugged in to a real-time conversation. In the future, I can’t imagine a major event where the audience doesn’t become part of the story itself.”

She’s absolutely right. The program is the event. It’s the epicenter of engagement. The future of TV starts with defining how the event is alluring, captivating, and most importantly shareable.

Many of you don’t know, but I ran some very interesting social experiments with top networks and programs for several years. The driving questions at the time are still more than valid today. How do you expand the reach of a network, program or personality beyond the reach of the existing audience? And, how do you use social media to drive tune-in?

All too often, even the best examples of social media in entertainment are simply finding new ways to connect with those to whom they’re already connected. The goal, in every experiment, was always the same and it sparked creative thinking and innovation in both approach and technology. Marketers sought to use social media to drive tune in and also find new ways to measure social media’s effects.

I learned quite a bit about how engagement between and during events created a new communal experience that connected events and people together offline and online. I also learned more about the role each of the three screens play in consumption and engagement. Whereas TV, PC and mobile are all used for consumption of content, consumers have made it clear that they only wish to use the PC and/or mobile for real-time engagement…not the television.

It is in the context of each device and the context of the event that brings viewers together. The nature of the event also defines are engagement is triggered. We can’t assume that content and channels are agnostic. What we can assume is that audiences are already more fractured and distributed. Each channel (broadcast, online, and social) and each device serves a purpose. But no purpose will ever compensate for unengaging content or events.

If you think about it, some of the biggest events, such as the Super Bowl and the GRAMMYs, are only earning greater concentrations of live audiences. This is in part due to the content of the event, but it’s also driven by the conversations that make the event communal, a real-time exchange. Whether it’s driven by a fear of missing out (FOMO) or a desire to share in the experience, broadcast events are conduits to live participation and as such, can be designed to spark online engagement.

I refer to the connected class of consumers as Generation-C. It’s not just about Gen-Y, it’s about all consumers who live the digital lifestyle. And, they are not only connected, they’re incredibly discerning. Connected consumers don’t just expect online, on-demand streaming optimized for each device, they expect to engage in each screen differently and in a dynamic way. This is where you come in. The experience requires definition. The experience requires architecture. And, the supporting experiential infrastructure must be adaptive. It’s part programming, part mobile and social media, and part engagement. It’s also episodic and continual.

Today, we’re seeing experimentation across the screens with strategies that invite audience participation. Some live shows now run social media tickers during programs. Other live events feature tweets and also live statistics based on social media analytics. Some programs are integrating community participation into content. Others are using social media to tell supporting stories between seasons or airing special webisodes to keep interest and anticipation high between on air programs. Apps are also emerging to open new windows between programs and mobile audiences.

So what?

What we need to do for any of these initiatives to work is to align them with a higher purpose and a vision for what the new relationship looks like between viewer and the program, the viewer and the program’s elements, storyline and characters/roles, between the viewer and the screen, and between viewers and other viewers.

You must first answer these questions…

What is the objective and the purpose of your social TV initiative?

What kind of relationship are you striving for and how will you enliven it through each channel in a way that’s not only engaging, but also relevant?

What would the “Tweet heard around the world” look like and what is the social spark that would trigger activity?

What does the experience look like on a mobile phone, tablet, PC, and a TV? Meaning, what does the second and third screen experience look like? Design it and also design it back into the first screen programming.

Programming is just the beginning. Advertising also has a new opportunity to engage in a more meaningful way.

Rather than simply buying seconds and using spots to promote social media campaigns, visits to Facebook pages or rallies to Tweet a branded hashtag (brandtag), think about it as a way to tell a story that can live beyond the spot or beyond the campaign. Old Spice learned that its commercials were too successful to treat as traditional campaigns that would start and stop. Viewers don’t “turn off” so why wouldn’t a great story continue to live on across distributed platforms where consumers are more than willing to engage? Now, Old Spice hosts an ongoing experience where its campaign has become a transmedia experience that perseveres across online, broadcast and social channels. The story, the product, the series keeps viewers engaged. The series also strives to make consumers part of the story where custom videos are created based on input and participation.

Product placement is also open for reinvention. By making products or brands part of the story, advertisers have new opportunities for contextualized storytelling across multiple platforms and the ability to host new interactions, build communities or drive desired outcomes. Everything of course is based on the story advertisers wish to tell and the experience they wish to delivery. The point is that advertising doesn’t just have to end nor does it have to be limited to a finite engagement in new networks and platforms. Storytelling and consumer engagement are infinite if they’re compelling, delightful and shareable. But then again, it takes a different vision supported by an irresistible purpose or intention.

Through experimentation, we are seeing what’s possible. However, networks, advertisers, and producers, must think beyond technology and rethink experiences. By not focusing on the experience or defining the nature of relationships, we fall to mediumalism a condition where we place inordinate weight on the technology of any medium rather than amplifying platform strengths to deliver desired experiences, activity, and outcomes.

The future of Social TV is not yet written. It takes vision. It takes creativity and imagination. It takes innovation. Most importantly, it takes the architecture of experiences to engage, enchant and activate viewers.

Image Credit: Shutterstock