Top 10 Wedding Dance Videos on YouTube

In the old days, getting married was simple: Get a white dress, make sure the groom shows up on time, and order enough cake to go round. Nowadays however, there are some expectations when it comes to choreography.

We’ve scoured Youtube for the creme de la creme of entertaining wedding dance routines for your viewing pleasure. Below you’ll find celebratory entrances, surprise first dances, and a great “girls vs. boys” dance-off.

The list incorporates some old favorites as well as some more recent efforts from a new generation of beautiful brides and gorgeous grooms. Have a look-see, and let us and other readers know in the comments if we missed any other worthy dances.

1. JK Wedding Entrance Dance

2. Mammothian Surprise Group Wedding Reception Dance

3. Rina & Nick’s Wedding – CRAZY First Dance

4. Crazy Wedding Ceremony!

5. Dirty Dancing UK – Julia and James First Dance

6. Best First Dance Brubaker

7. Best First Dance EVER!

8. First Dance with Surprise Jack Johnson Michael Jackson

9. Wedding Thriller Dance

10. Wedding Dance – Hilarious!!!

This wedding dance is bonkers — a full-on girls versus boys dance-off. We have to say we think the boys might be victorious here, but everyone’s a winner when you’re having that much fun.

BONUS: Surprise wedding first dance by Clay Family!

Technically, this isn’t a wedding dance as it’s a 10th anniversary celebration, hence the bonus status. Be sure to keep watching until the kids join in, at which point it goes from good to great.

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The Ultimate March Madness Social Media Guide

As far as we’re concerned, March means Madness of the basketball variety, and keeping up with all aspects of the NCAA tournament is an absolute must. If you feel the same way, then we think you’ll find our complete guide to all things college basketball on the social web indispensable.

A recent survey revealed that this year, more Americans than ever are going to be turning to the web and social media for their NCAA fix. Although traditional TV comes out on top, 54% of those quizzed are planning to catch the action live online, 10% via a mobile device, and 18% through various social networks. If you’re one of the many participating online this year, check out these resources.

Facebook Fast Break

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Facebook is a popular destination for NCAA fans. Not only can you catch up on the latest news, but you can get your fellow basketball-loving buddies involved too — whether it’s for some trash talking, or to celebrate the win of a mutually fave team.

The Official NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Facebook Fan Pages will allow you to connect with nearly 10,000 others (4,000 on the Women’s page) on the social networking site.

As well as having info on the NCAA with links to sites of interest, the Pages offer informal commentary from the NCAA teams, fan comments and insight, ticketing info, and comprehensive events data.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a bracket system that’s available within Facebook, then Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports is a popular option. The free Facebook app will get you making your picks in no time at all, and offers the chance at a $5,000 grand prize. Bracket Challenge also has the option to create pools with your friends.

Mobile Madness

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Citizen Sports also offers a free companion app (to their aforementioned Facebook application) for the iPhone or iPod touch with customizable push notifications for your favorite teams.

More mobile options include the 99 cent Pocket Bracket for the iPhone () and Android () devices that allows you to create unlimited brackets and organize pools from your phone. You can compete against thousands of users on the PocketBracket Network, as well as your friends, family, and coworkers.

The Baseline Fan series of apps, available for the iPhone and iPod touch, offer basic team-specific data for 99 cents a pop, while fans of free should take a look at Talk Hoops, another dual-platform app, offering aggregated news in one place.

Web-based Winners

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Facebook and phones certainly aren’t the only places to get your bracket challenge fix. There is a wealth of online options, many offering larges cash prizes, should you be astute enough to pick the perfect bracket. Of course, the odds of that happening are a whopping 9.2 quintillion to 1. Still, the contests below are all great places to make your picks and each (excluding Applebee’s) come from sites that offer a dearth of tournament news, scores, opinions, and analysis, as well.

The 2010 Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game offers a whopping million dollar prize for a perfect bracket, while having the next highest scoring bracket will nab you $10,000. This gives you the option to join the masses or create a private group with invites that can be sent via e-mail, Facebook () or Twitter ().

If you don’t have a Yahoo! ID or care to create one, there’s also ESPN’s 2010 Tournament Challenge, as well as another chance at a $1 million prize from restaurant chain Applebee’s.

Also getting in on the online action is Fox Sports with their bracket challenge, and CBS, which is offering the enticing grand prize of a 2011 Infiniti M for the top bracket champ.

The biggest prize this year, though, has to be from AOL’s Fanhouse, with the SoBe Lifewater Zero Inhibitions Bracket Challenge that boasts a $9 million jackpot for anyone with a perfect bracket. (Again, though, good luck with that.)

Video Slam Dunk

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With your bracket picked, you need to find somewhere to watch the action, and while the NCAA’s official YouTube channel offers a good overview of the organization, the better destination for live coverage is the NCAA March Madness on Demand website.

Powered by CBS, this website offers free live streaming video of every game in the 2010 championship. That means, the only things you’ll need to watch the entire tournament is your computer and an Internet connection. In addition to the live streams, there will be game highlights for those that need to catch up in a hurry, and full game archives for any poor sucker that missed a must-see match. A “High Quality” player option offers a widescreen view with a better quality feed.

If you can’t get yourself in front on a computer in time for tip-off, then the CBS Sports NCAA March Madness On-Demand app for the iPhone and iPod touch is a great option. It’s also perfect for those who don’t want to be tied to their desk or television screen during the tournament.

For $10, this app will give you live streaming video of all 63 games via either Wi-Fi or a cellular connection, from the first round through the finals. The app also offers game previews, a real-time tournament bracket, scores and headlines, and the option to comment and trash talk via Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter Tip-Offs

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As with any other topic you could possibly name, Twitter offers a great way to keep up with what’s happening in the world of NCAA basketball, and there are a few Twitter accounts you should follow if you want to stay in the hoop… sorry — loop.

The main NCAA Twitter account offers all sorts of official news from the world of college sports. But if you’re only after hoop-specific NCAA news, the basketball account is where it’s at.

Elsewhere, you can grab news snippets from the Twitter home of the “ubiquitous college basketblog” Rush the Court.

If you like getting your basketball news from sources who can add a bit of commentary to the game, then there’s a ton of sports journos tweeting who can offer just that.

Tweeple that cover the NCAA basketball championship for various media outlets include 12 New York Times reporters and editors at The Quad, and a team of Sports Illustrated writers and photographers as well.

ESPN fans can follow longtime college basketball analyst Dick Vitale, senior writer and college basketball reporter Andy Katz, college hoops reporter Dana O’Neil, and Jimmy Dykes, who works for ESPN and also offers analysis on ABC.

CBS meanwhile comes in with Seth Davis, as well as columnist Gary Parrish, who should offer you some good insight into the Big Dance.

Conclusion

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If we’ve overlooked a service you use, be sure to shout it out in the comments. Or, if you have an idea for an even better way to use social media to keep up-to-date with the March Madness, then Coke Zero wants to hear from you as part of their clever, basketball-themed social media promotion.

The fizzy drink company is currently asking for ideas to improve the NCAA fan experience. A winning idea could net you $10,000 and tickets to the 2011 Final Four. So get your thinking caps on!

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6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime

From felons on Facebook to tips through Twitter, social media is being used more and more by law enforcement agencies, and not just to fight Internet-related crimes. We’re talking about solving crimes that are happening on the street and in your community.

According to Lauri Stevens, founder of LAwS Communications and organizer of the SMILE (Social Media In Law Enforcement) Conference being held in Washington D.C. this April, adoption of social media is still in the “very, very, early stages,” but she sees it making an upward turn. “I expect 2010 will be a monumental year,” she said.

But many police departments that have embraced social media are still trying to figure it out.

“Most agencies … are not significantly proactive with keeping up with content and updates,” said Terry Halsch from CitizenObserver.com, developers of the tip411 system for police agencies. “There are some limitations because of uncertainty of how secure information is, how can it be efficiently maintained, [and] the risks and liabilities of entering the world of social media.”

Below are six different ways law enforcement is utilizing social media and real-time search to enhance tactics, disseminate public information, and ultimately prevent criminal activity.

1. Police Blotter Blogs

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A police blotter is the record of events at a police station. Traditionally, a desk sergeant kept a register of these events. Nowadays, Twitter () feeds, blogs, YouTube (), and Facebook () Fan Pages are being used by captains and chiefs to put out the digital equivalent of the police blotter in real-time.

Publishing a register of crimes and arrests in an area has been an online activity for a while now, especially through local newspaper websites. But social media is allowing many police officers on the scene to report the publicly available details of a crime for themselves. Reporters are getting their facts directly from a stream of real time-data and blog posts coming from the department.

Individual cops aren’t about to turn into citizen journalists anytime soon, but the police are able, through social media and real-time updates, to provide essential information that the public and news gathering agencies need to know. Journalists today often use the web for their first line of research, and rely on web-based police reports for many of the details they need for a story.

“We don’t just release the police report; we write our own story and post it to our website,” said Mark Economou, the Public Information Manager for the Boca Raton Police Department in Boca Raton, Florida in a post on ConnectedCops.com. “Even more interesting, we are finding the media is just cutting and pasting our stories to their sites, both in television and print.”

The Boca Raton Police Department has developed their own branded web platform that they call Viper. Social media is a very important part of their strategy, and like anyone adopting social media into a plan, they use it to support and enhance the work they already do.

2. The Digital “Wanted Poster”

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In the vein of an Old West “Wanted” poster, displayed in the most trafficked area of town, modern-day law enforcement agencies are posting descriptions of criminals on today’s most trafficked spots — namely the social web.

With millions of users, extraordinary reach, and the lightning-fast exchange of text, photos, and video, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are ideal for getting the word out about wanted persons with up-to-the-minute updates.

The Boynton Beach Police Department is a good example. On their Facebook Fan Page, the department put up a post with the headline, “Police need help identifying motorcyclist who robbed man at ATM.” In the post there was a photo from the ATM machine of the crime in progress. The department also cross-posted the information to their Twitter page.

In the UK, the Leicestershire Constabulary is one of a number of police departments focusing on being hyper-local and involved with the community through social media. Their website has a section titled “Can you help?” which is formatted like a blog, and contains posts about ongoing criminal investigations, and a “Wanted Poster” and “Missing Persons” area with photos and requests for residents to respond with any leads they might have.

The stories are also fed to a Facebook Page that is very interactive and updated constantly. They also maintain a Twitter profile, a YouTube account, and the department offers the ability to subscribe to their news feed via RSS. It’s an impressive mixture of social media tools that seems to work fluidly and update automatically.

3. Anonymous E-Tipsters

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Tips from the community have been a time-honored way that citizens have worked with the public to fight crime.

Consulting companies are developing very sophisticated ways for the public and the police to interact online. The tip411 program developed by the CitizenObserver Corporation is marketed to law enforcement as a web-based notification toolset. Citizen participation has always been a big part of fighting crime, and the people at tip411 stress that social media “acts as a ‘force multiplier’ by empowering your community to get involved.”

“Anonymous text tip systems are gaining significant traction because they enable young people to provide information without fear of retribution, i.e. ‘Snitches get Snitches,’” said CitizenObserver’s Terry Halsch.

The program allows tipsters to send information anonymously through a variety of means including “anonymous web chat, text tips and secure social media publishing.” Filtered alerts can then be pushed out through a police department’s central location to other web mediums. Bundled with other offerings, tip411 can then be published with Google Maps to create a clickable, interactive crime “heat map” of sorts where others can click on links directly to add more information and tips based on location. This program is meant to encourage increased interaction between the police and the community through real-time web tools.

“It doesn’t matter to us where the information comes from,” said Detroit’s Chief of Police, Warren Evans, a tip411 user. “We just want the information so we can act on it. I want people to know that they can feel safe using this system to communicate with us directly.”

4. Social Media Stakeout

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Social media advocates stress listening as a part of any brand’s online marketing strategy. Listening to the bad guys doing bad things has always been a part of police work. It’s important for police to search the real-time web to target particular keywords and phrases being passed around on social media. Use of social media monitoring has a strategic, tactical and operational application for law enforcement.

Boston Police Department Superintendent John Daly spoke about using Twitter search to monitor chatter around the Boston area in real-time. He’s very sensitive to the implications of engaging in this type of search, as many police departments are.

We have to be very careful because there’s a Big Brother aspect to this,” Daly said.

He stressed that they were not looking at “everyday messages,” as he put it, but specific tweets that signaled something they should be looking into.

“But when people start saying, ‘What’s that smoke coming from the Hancock Tower?’ or ‘Why is everybody running around Copley Place –- is something going on?’ — if two or three things come in we look at patterns, trends, something maybe we should be paying attention [to]. So it’s sort of an early warning system.”

5. Thwarting Thugs in the Social Space

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Myspace , Facebook and Twitter are popular with gang members, and police use this to their advantage. Law enforcement has been able to infiltrate street gangs by posing as fellow gang members online, making connections, and intercepting criminal communications as they happen. Information like photos, videos, and friend links help law enforcement understand the dynamics of gangs when investigating their activities.

“Investigators build phony profiles to ‘friend’ gang members either within YouTube, Facebook or Bebo (), and then may migrate that friendship to another platform and gain trust and get their ‘friends’ to share useful information,” said SMILE conference organizer Lauri Stevens.

According to an article in 219magazine, police in Cincinnati used Facebook and MySpace to follow more than 20 members of a local gang, the “Northside Taliband.” The evidence they gathered helped law enforcement connect members to a multitude of crimes, including a possible homicide.

Other agencies have employed these tactics as well. The NYPD is using the Internet to monitor gang activity, as well, and in a story reported in the Daily News, cops said that gangs have been communicating on Twitter. They think that one Twitter exchange between gang members may even have resulted in the shooting of a youth. The police seek out code words and slang used by individual members to follow gang members online who are organizing illegal activities.

“It is another tool … just like old phone records,” a police source said in the article.

6. Tracking and Informing with Twitter

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As we all know, Twitter has plenty of uses for individuals and companies. Law enforcement also uses the service to communicate with the public.

Stevens told us that she follows at least 700 law enforcement agencies worldwide on Twitter alone. Not all of them are active, but some have found unique ways to incorporate Twitter into their police tactics. “The LAPD used Twitter to monitor crowds during the Michael Jackson funeral,” for example, said Stevens, and the Boston Police have been using Twitter to alert followers of evolving situations in real time.

Sergeant Tim Burrows does media relations for the traffic services unit in the Toronto Police Service. Tim saw his traffic safety messaging hampered by the mainstream media’s editing time lines, so he started using Twitter to talk to the local media about ongoing situations and inform the public. He considers his tweets about traffic safety information a valuable public service.

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office took things a step further. When the police wanted to utilize social media they, like many agencies, felt that existing public sites were too unsecured and vulnerable for a system-wide roll out within the department. So inspired by Twitter, the department took things into their own hands.

“CyberVisor was my vision of Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s own controlled Twitter,” said Lynne Martzall, External Affairs Manager, who worked with webmaster Tony Petruzzi to create it.

Since it was rolled out, CyberVisor has been used to broadcast information about unfolding situations, such as crimes in progress, to put out information after a bank robbery and when the Sheriff’s Office was looking for an escaped convict. For now, the public can’t respond to CyberVisor — it’s broadcast only — but it has still be effective.

In one instance, they alerted followers to someone in South Broward County impersonating an officer. In another, they sent out a missing child alert from a local elementary school with a detailed description of the child’s physical appearance and where the child was last seen.

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Our Social Media Obsession by the Numbers

From the time we wake up in the morning to the moment we call it a day, and every moment in between (think bedroom, bathroom and dinner table), we’re checking in on our favorite social media sites.

This conclusion comes from data gathered by an independent study (commissioned by Retrevo), which surveyed 1,000 online individuals.

Per the report, our Facebook and Twitter () activities continue even after we’ve hit the hay, with 48% of respondents checking in on activity when they wake up in the middle of the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Unsurprisingly, these night owl social media behaviors skew heavily toward those under the age of 25.

iPhone users are the most social of the respondent pool and were significantly more likely to check or update Twitter or Facebook from bed — many before turning on the TV in the morning. Several also use these sites to consume their morning news. The iPhone’s app and web experience is clearly making it even easier for the young socialites to maintain their Internet presence regardless of their physical station in life.

The study also found that 56% of social media users check Facebook () once a day, 32% don’t mind being interrupted by an electronic message while eating and 24% of respondents under the age of the 25 have no problem with digital communication while on the pot.

A few other interesting data points from the study include:

- 12% of respondents check/use Facebook every couple of hours

- 62% of individuals over the age of 25 see electronic communications during a meeting, meal, sex or bathroom act as unwanted interruptions

- 23% of iPhone owners primarily get their morning news from Twitter and Facebook

While we can’t verify that the data is representative of the entire population, most of these stats — which might be surprising on first look — should be expected. Now that smartphones with apps are ubiquitous, it’s quite logical that these devices would accompany their owners even in the most private or intimate of scenarios.

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3 Ways Tradespeople Can Use Social Media To Boost Credibility and Business

I’m always trying to give manufacturers ideas on how to reach the professional tradesman by using social media. I’ve asked a friend of mine and fellow B-to-B  blogger Nicky Jameson to offer her comments and insights on how the tradespeople can utilize social to build their business. I think you will enjoy her comments in this 2-part series. Enjoy.

Many tradespeople feel they don’t really need to have anything to do with social media. Perhaps because their business comes mostly through referrals, or they don’t see immediate value in social media, or they feel it may take up too much time and they need to be out getting new business. And many tradespeople feel intimidated by social media.

Getting business is important and should never take a back seat to your marketing activities. Social media tools are exactly that – tools. However social media is an opportunity you don’t want to miss because it can actually help you target local business more effectively. More importantly, it can help establish you as a trusted person to do business with. Trust, engagement and relationships are the building blocks of business – and social media.

If you’re a tradesperson, you rely on word of mouth to spread the word about your business and services. Did you know social media can help you take this to a new level?

Here are 3 ways Tradespeople can use social media to benefit their customers and business:

1. Use social media to establish trust with consumers

Did you know that one of the top concerns consumers have with regard to allowing tradespeople into their homes is trust? Put yourselves in your customer’s shoes for a moment. As a customer, you’re alone in an emergency. You need a plumber or an electrician… or another tradesperson to fix something you can’t do yourself. You’ve never met the tradesperson, yet there you are about to let a complete stranger into your home for an unspecified time. Most people are uncomfortable about allowing strangers into their homes at any time and they usually have no way of knowing who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.

According to Hattie Hasan of UK plumbing company Stopcocks, trust has never been more important and consumers are becoming increasingly cautious when hiring tradespeople. They also want to ensure they spend their money wisely… on jobs well done.

When you join a social network that operates on a trust basis with other tradespeople, it helps you establish trust with consumers. When they search for you online and see you are in a trust-based social network, it helps build confidence in potential customers.

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7 Ideas For Social Media And Business

Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent has invited me to contribute to a string of posts dedicated to businesses measuring the ROI and success from social media efforts. If you haven’t already you should check out Valeria’s site - I think much of my audience would find her content very useful and engaging!

I’ve been asked my thoughts on companies measuring social media efforts many times. In fact, I’ve gone through the process of justifying the effort and definitely have a strong opinion. If you’re a marketing manager wanting to jump into social media, but your superiors are hesitant to give budget for the effort, you really need to think out how to position the medium.

I don’t think you can put a dollar figure on social media to prove ROI. You’ll have a hard time showing what the revenue increases were from your blogging or other social media efforts. The medium has not advanced far enough for that. I also don’t think that the medium is wide-spread enough that you can justify ROI with only subscriber count and number of comments. Many senior executives wouldn’t know what an RSS subscriber even means.

With that said, I think this is a very viable form of corporate marketing and there are a number of ways the medium can be sold up the chain and measured throughout the year:

• Don’t Isolate Social Media: Position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

• Sales Tool: When is the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a social media medium could be considered along the same lines. With every piece of content we create for our company blog, we make sure our sales people are aware they can share that content with interested customers. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

• Feedback: We’re also finding success in using blogging as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your products. We’ve already received valuable feedback that rivals that of an individual order placed.

• Promote Realistic Expectations: I think many marketers who are into social media and blogging are a bit misguided as to the affect blogging will have on marketing efforts. In the marketing blog community, you can start a blog, link out to 50 other bloggers in your first week and pick up traffic and subscribers that are fun to measure. Not all niches have that opportunity. Many communities lack a large enough niche in which to socialize. What then? I encourage people in less sociable niches not to pump the benefits of thousands of subscribers, millions of page views, or hundreds of comments. It could take years to develop that following in some online communities as the medium matures. Focus less on expected statistics and more on how social media will be integrated with the rest of your product marketing efforts.

• Multipurpose Content: As a small business marketing manager, it’s always music to my ears when someone says that we can use content we’ve created for multiple purposes. If you’re blogging, you should be creating valuable content. Have you thought about using portions of that content for an eNewsletter creation or the beginning of a white paper? Make sure you have a plan to have multiple purposes for your efforts.

• Go Find Your Customer: One easy case I was able to make for blogging was the ability for our company to more easily go meet our audience where they begin most online searches that lead to our website - Google. Most of our website traffic originates on Google so it only makes sense for us to continue our efforts to get in their search results. Blogging platforms are very solid ways to optimize content for search engines - especially if you’re updating often and using the right methods.

• Stats: I know, I know - stats are important. I just didn’t want them to be the focus of this post because not all social media efforts should be measured with analytics. Believe me, I do follow our stats, but I pay more attention to subscribers, comments, and from where the visits originate. These are important statistics to gauge how well your audience is receiving your content.

In two years, I’ll guarantee that there will be measurements in place that prove ROI from businesses engaging in social media. This method of conversing with your audience is growing by the day. But right now we need to focus on social media as a tool in our marketing toolbox that supports all the other tools we’re using in our marketing plans.

I’m supposed to tag some people to also contribute to this conversation, but there are so many people I’d like to hear from that I don’t know where I’d begin. For starters I’d like to see what Marty, Matt, Pat and Stoney have to say. But, if you have opinions and want to chime in, please do - and send me the link to your post and I’ll add it this one.

Reader Responses:

• Measuring ROI on social media investments (Francois Gossieaux - Emergence Marketing)
• Social Media Measurement (Tom O’Brien - A Human Voice)

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How Social Media is Changing the 2010 Grammys

How Social Media is Changing the 2010 Grammys

On Sunday January 31, 2010, the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards will air live on CBS. Mashable founder Pete Cashmore will be at the ceremony (lucky dog!) but even for those of us watching at home, the Recording Academy has taken great strides to make this year’s ceremony more interactive and fan-centric than ever before.

The Academy has also embraced social media for the 2010 Grammys, big time. We had a chance to talk to the RA about the move toward social media, the challenges associated with the transition and the response from the fans, artists and other Academy members.

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Why Social Media, Why Now

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The Recording Academy — which was founded in 1957 and is dedicated to improving the quality of life and the cultural condition for music and the people who make it — is your typical well established organization that is reticent to change. For instance, an award for Best Rap Album wasn’t even added to the Grammy ceremony until 1996 (a Best Rap Performance award was first issued in 1989, the Academy’s first official recognition of the genre). If it can take that long to fully recognize one of the most popular music genres (Best Rap Song wasn’t awarded until 2004), you can imagine how difficult it would be for the organization to embrace social media.

Social media introduces an entire paradigm shift into how the Academy can both connect with music lovers and with how its message is consumed and presented. That said, the Academy is aware that the paradigm shift is happening, not just to the industry, but to our culture as a whole. In order to stay relevant and connected, the Academy would have to embrace this new way of communicating. I spoke with Evan Greene, the Chief Marketing Officer of the Recording Academy about how the Grammys are embracing social media this year and how and why that decision was made.

Evan told me that the Academy established a social media task force in 2008 and did a lot of outreach in 2009, basically assessing the climate, the places where the fans were spending their time, and evaluating the decision to jump in full force. Evan made it very clear that the Academy didn’t want to just haphazardly get involved, if the organization was going to do social media, it was going to do it correctly.

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Biggest Challenges

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When I asked Evan what the most challenging aspect of adopting a social media strategy was, he told me that it was making the decision to actually embrace social media at all. He explained that the Academy has always tried to manage and keep very careful control over its message and brand. By embracing social media, that means giving up that control. Because while the Academy can connect directly with fans, fans can also connect back. That means accepting criticism and engaging in a discussion in a public way, something that just isn’t the norm for the Academy.

I was struck by just how common this fear is, not just with older and more established brands, but even with smaller and newer companies. Social media does inherently mean that you are giving up the ability to centrally control the message. However, what is interesting is that the companies that embrace and accept that grain of truth are usually those that are most successful with social media.

After making the decision to fully engage, Grammy.com was completely rebuilt and official presences were made on Twitter (@theGrammys), Facebook () and YouTube (). Interaction and fan-generated content from these platforms and others all contributed to what has become the centerpiece for the Grammys 2010 campaign: We’re All Fans.

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We’re All Fans

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Fans are the core of popular music. And unlike industry executives (and sometimes even the artists themselves), fans are often the first to embrace new technologies and social networks to share and remix content by their favorites artists. So with that in mind, TBWAChiatDay, the agency of record for the Grammy awards, created a multi-format multimedia campaign related to Grammy-nominated artists, curated entirely from fan-generated content.

If you visit WereAllFans.com, you’ll see portraits of some of the nominated artists composed entirely of real-time content from Twitter (), Flickr (), Facebook and YouTube. The content is refreshed and fed in and users can click on aspects of the content to view or play it back all on the page. It’s a pretty cool way to show stuff off.

Also cool is the television campaign for We’re All Fans. Comprised of YouTube performances that real fans made covering the nominated artist’s song. Not only is it a cool visualization of the campaign, but for the fans that made those videos themselves, it must be amazing to see something you made and created airing on CBS and on the Internet for the whole world to see. To be clear, these weren’t performances done specifically for an advertising spot, this was a clip composed of stuff that real fans made just because they’re fans and they wanted to share their respective talents on YouTube.

The first spot was for Lady Gaga, who has an extremely active social media following, check it out:
After less than three weeks it has gathered more than 1.1 million views and is currently the 19th most viewed video in the music category for the month of January on YouTube.

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Artist Feedback

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At this point, most major music artists are embracing social media to some extent, be it Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (), or personal blogs. Connecting directly with fans is extremely valuable, especially in an area like music that is such an inherently collective experience. To that end, the artists themselves have taken the lead on some of the promotions for the campaign.

Lady Gaga tweeted a link to her “We’re All Fans” video as soon as it went live (a day before it first aired on CBS) and embedded it on both her official website and her YouTube channel. Likewise, Beyonce () has also embedded her spot on her official website.

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Fan Feedback

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Fans, especially those featured in some of the TV spots, have responded really positively to the campaign — as you would expect. However, an interesting component to the We’re All Fans website is the FanBuzz Visualizer.

The visualizer (embedded at the right) is powered by Visible Technologies and it is a real-time visualization of fan activity across the web. Basically the widget (which is interactive — feel free to play with it and move it around) searches various social channels for comments, conversations and mentions of Grammy-nominated artists. This is then aggregated and you can see who has the most mentions within a certain window or overall.

Real-time visualizations are still new enough to be unique in and of itself, but what we find really interesting is that the information is available and shareable. For observers, this is insight into the online popularity of some of the nominated artists, for fans, it might be a way to push engagement.

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The Awards

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The Grammy Awards themselves will not be broadcast online (that’s a decision that is as much in the hands of CBS as it is The Recording Academy), but the Academy is making a conscious effort to keep fans engaged online before and during the show.

For 72-hours before the Grammy Awards air on CBS, Grammy.com will be streaming live performances on its website that are ancillary to the awards themselves. Plus, the now almost normative tradition of online red-carpet streamings will take place. During the themselves, Grammy.com will feature backstage interviews with winning artists, which is pretty cool. Even if Grammy isn’t ready to embrace online streaming of the award ceremony, they are at least aware that fans are likely to be online Tweeting or posting to Facebook during the broadcast. That’s a start.

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The Future

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When I asked Evan about the Academy’s plans for the future, he made it clear that social media is something the RA intends to continue to invest in. Internally the organization has been pleased with the results of the campaign and of the actual consequences of embracing social media. Fears about not being able to control the message seem to be largely assuaged when caution is thrown to the wind and engagement actually takes place.

True engagement is a major component of any successful social media endeavor. If the Recording Academy continues to embrace the shifting realities and engage with fans, the net result just might be that viewers and fans take a more active interest in the Grammy Awards.

What do you think about how established organizations are embracing social media? What do you think of the “We’re All Fans” campaign? Let us know!

Disclosure: Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Twitter’s Ev Williams and Biz Stone, MySpace’s Owen Van Natta and other notable social media influencers will attend the Social Media Rockstars panel this week, discussing the intersection of social media and music. Execs from all the companies will also attend the Grammys.

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What Social Followers Want

Brand marketers want consumers to follow them to build buzz and engagement, but social media users often desire something in return. What they’ve come to expect is a good deal, but many consumers—including the most active users of social sites—are also interested in deeper engagement.

A December 2009 MarketingSherpa survey indicated that learning about specials and sales was the top motivation of those who friended or followed a brand online, supporting the results of earlier surveys. But looking for savings was followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.

Users described as “max connectors”—those with at least 500 social connections—were less interested than average in getting deals. Instead, they cared about new products and company culture, demonstrating the deeper engagement expected by social media power users.

An earlier study, by Razorfish, also found that exclusive deals and offers were the primary motivation of US Internet users following brands on Twitter.

Respondents who friended a brand on Facebook or MySpace responded similarly, though they were more likely to become a fan because they were a current customer (32.9%) than were users of Twitter.

Sharing interesting content that users care about, along with the deals and discounts they have come to expect, will both keep them engaged and spur them to pass along marketing messages.

By: eMarketer Inc.
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Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

One word - WOW

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Facebook Grabs Social Networking Share

MySpace, Twitter fall behind

Not only has Facebook surpassed MySpace as the leading social network in the US, it has moved far ahead in terms of market share of US social networking site visits.

According to September 2009 data from Experian Hitwise, almost 59% of all social network category visits were at Facebook, compared with just over 30% for second-place MySpace.

That amounted almost to a tripling in share for Facebook year over year, while MySpace dropped 55%.

Twitter, in fourth place with 1.84% of social networking site visits in September 2009, posted a huge increase over September 2008. But reports of a Twitter slowdown are bolstered by the fact that the site actually lost share since August 2009, down 0.11 percentage points.

Time spent on Twitter was down year over year, by 56%. Average time spent on Facebook was up while MySpace dropped, but MySpace remained in the lead. Users surfed the site for an average of nearly 26 minutes in September 2009, as opposed to the 23 minutes spent on Facebook.

Experian Hitwise also reported that overall, US Internet users decreased their time spent on social networks by 20% in September 2009 compared with September 2008.