By Julie Blaustein

Chris Heuer, Founder of the Social Media Club and Panel

The Social Media Club of San Francisco had its first event of the year on Tuesday, January 25, 2010 at the newly opened shared office space, RocketSpace.  A panel consisting of industry thought leaders, known as Influencers in Social media circles, included Sol Lipman, Director of Mobile at AOL and formerly of 12Seconds, Harry McCracken of Technologizer and Time.com, Augie Ray of Forrester and Shel Israel, a Social Media Consultant and co-author of the book Naked Conversations.

It was a full house and it was quite apparent that this was the Social Media Club by the name-tags featuring just one’s Twitter Handle. Chris Heuer, Founder of the Social Media Club started off the event with a video featuring Social Media professionals from Adobe, Facebook, Research in Motion, Intel and Sony Electronics at CES who spoke about what they thought was in store for 2011. The common themes that emerged were the hopes for more content creation, scaling, community and more, oh please, more attention to Social Media to get consumers to use their products.

Shel Israel

Israel spoke first about the trends of social media in 2011. He talked of normalizing social media so that success isn’t measured by the number of people that follow you. He feels the question of ROI will be all about good business and using the right tools to get the job done well. He sees a future where the ability to easily translate and communicate around the world will become a reality along with the Internet becoming truly ubiquitous. He also summed up his thoughts regarding 2011 trends in his blog, Global Neighborhoods.

Harry McCracken

McCracken sees the social mobile web as the new frontier similar to how it was for the web back in 2005. “The social mobile network is doing well now and will continue to do so in the future.” He sees Facebook as something that people will use without even thinking about it as a social network. He is seeking clarity in the future of the dominance of the mobile social network, the dominance of Facebook and how companies will control the social aspects of the web. His blog Technologizer features his thoughts about the mobile social network in-depth too.

Augie Ray

ROI to Ray will no longer be the focus of social media. ”Its not the year of the ROI obsession where one needs to provide it in order to get financing. It is also not the year of Facebook or Four Square.” He sees FourSquare as limited by handsets carried and not all have location-based services needed to use them. Proving his point, he conducted a survey of the audience asking how many are on FourSquare and most raised their hand. When asked how many check-in as frequently as they did when first on the service, less than a third raised their hands. Additional great insights are found in his blog, Augie Ray’s Blog.

Sol Lipman

Last to speak and also most entertaining was Lipman, who talked of trends in terms of what the new and hip AOL is seeking when hiring a Social Media guru. They are interested in someone who is all about niche social networks, personalization and building social connections, about content that appeals to all audiences and one who will focus on iPad devices. If you have what it takes, you should contact The Solster.

If you have not already joined the Social Media Club, you can do so here and connect with others who are passionate about learning and sharing what social media can provide to your organization and community. You can also join the conversation about this event at #SMCSFO

Sourced from PR 2.0

Today, Jeremiah Owyang is officially announcing that he’s joining Charlene at Altimeter. However, he’s not alone in this endeavor. Deb Schultz and Ray Wang are also joining the Altimeter team.

The Altimeter Group creates a bridge between businesses and emerging technologies.

The theme of the all star team is captured in the following statement, “The future of business requires a holistic approach to adapting and integrating emerging technologies.”

According to Charlene Li, “Ray, Jeremiah and Deborah are among the top experts in their respective fields,” said Charlene Li, founding partner of Altimeter Group. “Individually, they bring unmatched expertise to their roles with the firm, and collectively they are unstoppable professionals with the passion and prowess to advance entire industries through the innovative application of technologies to achieve business goals. Altimeter Group’s clients will benefit tremendously from their guidance and counsel.”

Altimeter will focus on the following four sectors, orbiting each client:

Leadership and Management – Charlene Li

Enterprise Strategy – Ray Wang

Innovation & Best Practices – Deb Schultz

Customer Strategy – Jeremiah Owyang

Companies often implement technologies without a clear view of how they fit into and support corporate goals. They thus end up with a bunch of point solutions, but no strategy — and worse, no results. Altimeter Group helps companies focus on the strategic goals they want to achieve, and then figure out which technologies can help them achieve those goals.

Essentially, the team is building a strategy consulting firm, which serves as a veritable Justice League for emerging technologies and not necessarily traditional research. In fact, the company maintains a steadfast policy and position that it will continue to recommend clients to Forrester for research and analysis.

Jeremiah shared his enthusiasm with me recently, “Altimeter is a small agile strategy consulting company that can bridge the gap between what the cool kids are doing and where brands know they need to be. As an analyst, I spent two years surveying the landscape. This is a clear opportunity and I’m going for it.”

Indeed the company is focused on helping companies adapt to compete not only for today, but also for the future.

The problem they’re addressing is common. Companies don’t necessarily have an integrated process for integrating and adopting new technology.  While this term is technically utilized when describing the integration of a person onto a team, Altimeter facilitates seamless “onboarding” of technology, solutions and services into the mix in order to achieve a desired result while rallying the team and processes in order to do so without the usual friction.

Altimeter creates a pragmatic process for companies.

The company also built a physical lab, dubbed the Hanger, in San Mateo where clients can safely learn about and experiment with new technologies prior to official adoption. It is at The Hanger, where Altimeter Group will host community events, training, and “unconferences” that provide experimentation, learning, and sharing around emerging technologies.

Perhaps most interesting is the team’s approach. Jeremiah compared Altimeter to a general contractor who lays out the blueprints and then find and assembles the best, most efficient contractors to do the work. Therefore the group is also implementing an innovation network to unite technology and marketing experts to participate with clients to collaborate, education, and execute.

Deb Schultz

I gave Deb a quick phone call to congratulate her while she’s traveling. Deb and I have collaborated over the years on helping shape and launch significant startups in Silicon Valley and Israel. She shared a few thoughts, “I’m passionate about emerging technology on the Web and its affect and impact on business processes and culture. I intend to help see these technologies flourish and in doing so, connect them to the businesses that can most benefit in an environment conducive for active and practical learning. This is about innovating on all sides of the equation.”

For more, please read the press release.

Update:

The Altimeter group is hosting an upcoming Webinar and discussion on “The Future Of Business.” Each partner will provide their unique perspective on how business needs to adapt to the challenges presented by emerging technologies, followed by an open discussion within the Webinar as well as on Twitter.

When: Thursday, September 10, 2009 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT

Register here.

For more pictures from the event, please visit my set on Flickr.

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Now available! (click below to purchase the new book or poster):

by Brian Solis

BuzzLogic partnered with Jupiter Research, which is owned by Forrester, to spotlight evolving consumer behavior and decision making processes and how blogs influence and factor into consumer purchases. The companies polled over 2,000 online consumers in the U.S. and results suggest that blog readers use blogs as the top solution for discovering other blog content in order to research and guide decisions – ranking higher than Web search.

Additional findings include:

Links more powerful than search: For frequent readers, links beat search as a navigation tool: 38 percent said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content as compared to 34 percent who voted for Web search.

Links signal trust: For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39 percent of survey participants).

Blog search not yet mainstream: Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6 percent of general readers and 11 percent of frequent readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.

Buying Behavior: The Nature of Blog Influence

Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.

Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites.

Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.

Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31 percent of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15 percent); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14 percent); travel (12 percent); automotive (11 percent); and health (10 percent).

Now if you wanted to know how and when blogs factor into the purchase cycle, the study also offers insight for us:

Blogs indeed factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) said blogs played a role as they decided to move forward with a purchase.

Blog readers also replied around blogging influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:

Decide on a product or service – 21 percent
Refine choices – 9 percent
Get support and answers – 19 percent
Discover products and services – 17 percent
Assure – 14 percent
Inspire a purchase – 13 percent
Execute a purchase – 7 percent

According to BuzzLogic CEO, Rob Crumpler, “For a portion of Web users, blogs rival search as a navigation tool, which has really interesting implications for advertisers. Blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online. Being able to identify where this is taking place across the blogosphere gives us a window into user intent and a means to better target advertising to a qualified audience.”

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