I can’t help but think that the majority of social media “gurus” and agencies are head faking their clients into thinking that they are running successful campaigns and programs.

This same thing used to happen in the early days of the web.  Remember when it was all about the page views?  Who cared if someone actually interacted with the site, bought the product, filled out the form, etc.  Look at how many people came to our website!

We’ve learned over time that traffic numbers aren’t the answer.  They are a part of the funnel, sure, but they aren’t the end result you should be striving for.

It’s the same thing with social media.  Fan/follower count is NOT the final result.  Increasing your Twitter followers is only worthwhile if you’re engaging with them and somehow your business is benefiting financially from that relationship.

Enough with the smoke, the mirrors, and the head fakes.  If you’re creating the strategy and/or executing on social media campaigns for a brand, you have a responsibility to measure the success of those campaigns against REAL metrics.

But its not the other way around.  History tells us that get-rich-quick schemes don’t last.  Throwing out an amazing deal to get people to sign up for an experience that sucks a$$ is lacking, that’s not a recipe for success.  That sucks and it doesn’t work.  So stop doing it.

If you have the engaging platform, if you’ve found a way to be genuine with your customers, then and only then it can be about the fan count.  Engagement first, fan count second.  Mix and repeat.

That’s all.

I’ve been spending time lately thinking about the next frontier in digital innovation.  What shift will happen to change the way people receive, interact with and produce content?  Will there be a new way that people connect with each other and share?  Will there be a new way for old school marketers to put ads in front of millions of new people?…just kidding on that one, you know I hate that crap.

So after social (which is happening today) and mobile (which is just really starting to get interesting), the next area that I believe is going to change everything is interactive TV.  The idea that the big screen in our living room is essentially a dumb terminal, broadcasting to us a limited amount of non-interactive content is absurd when you think about it.  That huge screen is connected to all the data and power you could ask for, meanwhile I’m sitting on the couch holding an iPad that isn’t connected to anything yet connects me to everything and everyone.  Anyone that doesn’t see those two mediums merging probably needs to keep working on saving newspapers and magazines.

There are many, many companies trying to get into this game.  But Google openly talking about it and the wide speculation that Apple will soon be moving into it, are making me believe this is a part of our very near future.

Check out the new Google TV coming…

And you know Apple will get into the game.  I was just reading this article last night on Slashgear about the possibility of an Apple HDTV.  Check it out.  I believe its coming very soon.

Once Google and Apple start really thinking about TVs, that medium is going to change forever, bet on that.

And I’ve been equally vocal about my current WeRewards obsession (go ahead and sign up and see what I mean, and yes I’m pimping the referral program, guilty).  I’ve made over $10 from using it so far.  I love it and if you’re interested in them, check out the podcast we did with their CEO, Ted Murphy.

Last week Stacy and I recorded a DIG:this podcast with Tungle CEO, Marc Gingras.  I’ve blogged about Tungle, along with some other apps/sites I am playing with, but essentially its a social calendar service.  I love it.

The podcast should be up soon, maybe next week, and I expected to hear about Marc’s entrepreneurial past and about Tungle’s startup story.  What I didn’t expect is to uncover a glimpse of the future of location-based apps.

I don’t want to give too much away because hey, I want you to listen to the podcast, but since its not up yet and I’m excited about this, I’ll start the conversation.

Marc pointed out that if you think about it, your true social network, your true friends, the people that you actually want to connect with, can most likely be found in your calendar.  These are people you are actually meeting with.  Novel idea, huh.  Your calendar is a rich source of your likes (where you eat, what you do), your friends and contacts (your real ones, not your phony/fake ones), and your future (where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing).

I’ve had a nagging problem with the current batch of check-in apps in that it only tells me where people are right now, not where they will be.  Most of the time it does me no good to find out where my friends were.  It’s a novelty to see that Josh went to Chick-fil-A for the 41st time this week, but I couldn’t really ever meet him there because I can’t be ready to go at a moment’s notice.

But, if his calendar was somehow attached to his social presence, I might have known that he was going to Chick-fil-A.  The connection of your calendar to your check-in activity holds a massive amount of rich data.  We’re just beginning to see how mobile can be relevant in people’s lives by messaging them when they are checking-in at places.  But imagine if we know where people are going, what they’ll be doing and who they’ll be doing it with… (and no I don’t mean this, sickos).

I’ll stop there and see if any of you want to continue that thought.  I have my ideas but I’d rather hear what other people think of the potential of unlocking someone’s calendar and making that part of their social graph.

So far we’ve interviewed some really interesting companies that we think are changing the landscape of social and mobile marketing.

Here’s what we’ve done so far.  We’d love to hear any feedback and/or suggestions on who we might interview next.

Podcast #1: Andrew Knight of Case-Mate

Podcast #2: Vivek Sodera of Rapleaf

Podcast #3: Group conversation (the all dude version)

Podcast #4: Pete Reilly of Retality

Podcast #5: Ryan Holmes of Hootsuite

Podcast #6: Ted Murphy of WeReward

Podcast #7: Brant Barton of Bazaarvoice

Podcast #8: Group conversation (all dude-ette version)

You have to earn 1,000 credits before you can “cash out” via PayPal.  I worked hard to get to that milestone!  Here’s what it looked like:

And sure enough, $10.09 immediately popped up in my PayPal account.  And now, I’m even more hooked.

Ted just rolled out some new stats which show that unlike most of the location-based apps, WeReward isn’t just for the young, uber techy males.

But I’ve been studying the “check-in” apps for quite a while now and some things are becoming clear to me.  I should make the point that I’m talking specifically about applications where the main feature is to check-in at a location.  For instance, I’m not talking about Yelp (which added checking-in but is still focused primarily on restaurant reviews and ratings).

The 3 reasons that check-in apps aren’t going to make it:

1. Checking-in a feature, not a product.  Startups face this dilemma constantly, striving to determine whether or not their company is a stand-alone business or if its better served being a part of another business.  We’ll see this play out when Facebook rolls out their check-in feature.  If they fail miserably only 10 million people will use it.  Foursquare only has 2 million users today.

2. They currently demand too much from their users.  As people get more and more comfortable lifestreaming – sharing their experiences with their friends via digital mediums – they become encumbered with too many applications required to share their experience.

Let’s say I go to a concert.  I need to check-in on Foursquare to let my friends know I got there.  I then take photos of the band on stage and I put them on Flickr.  All my friends get in a group shot and I quickly post that on Facebook and tag them.  I want to see what other people at the concert think about the playlist so far, and I need to search Twitter for that information.  So you see quickly I am opening up 3 or 4 apps to share this experience.  The first to go will be Foursquare as I can easily tell my friends I’m at the concert by updating my Facebook status.

3. Unlike the successful social networks, they become less useful with growth.  This to me is the most interesting phenomena and perhaps the most telling when looking at the long-term value of check-in applications.

When you first use Facebook or Twitter, before you’ve really connected to people, you have that moment of, “Ok, now what?”.  Then this amazing thing starts happening.  You start connecting with people and pretty soon you’re checking these networks throughout the day to share more stuff with your connections and see what is happening in their lives.  The more people you connect with, the better the network.

But with Foursquare, the exact opposite thing happens to most people.  You start by checking in, getting badges (which seem cool at first then you quickly start saying, “Ok, now what?”) and you’re high on the leaderboard.  But the more people you connect with the farther down the leaderboard you get.  And the more people that are on Foursquare, the harder it is to get a mayorship.  Foursquare was a lot more interesting to me when a few hundred thousand people were using it then today with almost 2 million.

So now what?

I’m in no way saying these companies don’t have a future.  But they’ll have to adapt as any successful startup has to.  Some things that I think will start happening in the space:

Checking-in to a location will morph to checking-in to an activity.  This will expand the experience dramatically, allowing people connect in new ways.  Hot Potato is one company doing this.  “I’m watching the Lost series finale” for instance.

The applications will become more useful to the end user.  Foursquare and Gowalla are starting to do a little of this by allowing deals/coupons/incentives through their platform.  But the one I like the most is WeReward which actually gives you money via paypal for checking-in or performing tasks.  I’ll open an additional app to get some cash money yo.

Some players will be snatched up and become a feature of a larger business.  We’ve seen talks in this area for a while including a supposed courtship of Foursquare by Yahoo.

Checking-in will be embedded (as a feature) in brand applications.  You go to Walmart, open up your Walmart app and check-in, unlocking coupons/deals/etc.  Similarly you attend a conference, open up the conference app and check-in to the sessions you’re attending, where you can also download the presentation, interact with people, give feedback, etc.

We’ll see where this space ends up.  Foursquare claims to want to be the 3rd major player in social networking, next to Facebook and Twitter.  At this point I just don’t see it.

Do you?

And I love how Chili’s is playing along.  On their Facebook page they have a response to Correll’s “decision” ala the same way the owner of the Cavs wrote his open letter to LeBron.

Thanks to @khollin for showing me this.

Looking at my News Feed as a barometer, I saw the following (and I bolded the “work”-related updates):

~ 7 minutes ago: Business contact posted about a marketing conference he was attending

~ 8 minutes ago: Mashable posted a new article

~ 12 minutes ago: My cousin posted something about Sea Turtles

~ 12 minutes ago: Business contact attending a social media conference

~ 13 minutes ago: Another Mashable article

~ 28 minutes ago: Family member pointing out how much they miss another family member

~ 30 minutes ago: Message from the American Heart Association

~ 32 minutes ago: Friend/Co-worker posted a Seinfeld video (Serenity Now)

~ 33 minutes ago: Co-worker just arrived in Atlanta

~ 45 minutes ago: Business contact just got to the gym

~ 46 minutes ago: Business contact again saying they are at a social media conference

~ 49 minutes ago: Friend excited about tomorrow night

~ 56 minutes ago: Business contact posting pics of some kind of airplane or something

That’s 9 out of 13 (69%) that were work-related Facebook updates.  If you had asked me before I did this exercise I would have guessed maybe 20% would have been work-related.  Granted, I could take this same snapshot at another point in time and probably get very different results, but this still shows a movement toward work and home/friends crossing over that I didn’t expect to happen.

I’m wondering if other people are experiencing this same thing?

As I was reading the Advertising Age article, “Social networks sink online-ad pricing”, I couldn’t help but recall the story of Chicken Little.  The article talks about how social networking sites, Facebook in particular, are dominating page views and ad impressions.  But a recent ComScore study shows that social networking sites are drawing an average CPM of $.56 vs. the Internet at large which is at $2.43.

This is my favorite part.  “Some industry executives are concerned that Facebook and its ilk may in fact be reducing the overall pricing of CPMs”. 

Well Boo F’ing Hoo.

If ads on social networking sites aren’t drawing high CPMs because they aren’t working, then maybe finally the online ad industry will realize its time to innovate and rethink the entire model.  Putting commercials in front of people during TV shows back when there were like 5 channels was a successful strategy.  Then people got VCRs.  Then they upgraded to DVRs.  And now commercials on TV are becoming less and less relevant.

So what are we seeing?  More creative content that might start with a TV commercial but then extends to the web in social channels.  Old Spice and Toyota’s Swagger Wagon are great examples of this. We’re also seeing product placement in shows such as the iPad in Modern Family and Cisco’s Teleconference in 30 Rock.  That’s called progress.

Newspapers and magazines are going through this process right now as they realize printed content is becoming less and less relevant.  Online digital magazines and iPad/tablet apps are the early attempts being sought to save this industry.  I’m not sure it will work, but at least there’s an effort going on to innovate.

So let’s stop belly-aching about how online ads are being hurt by social networking and start realizing that flashing up an online ad in front of someone, interrupting what they’re doing on the web, is a flawed model and hanging onto it for dear life is a sure way to find yourself hanging out with the dinosaurs of the past.

If you want to reach people on the web and specifically in social networking, you have to be relevant.  You have to be engaging.  You have to be honest and sincere.  You have to listen.  And you can’t interrupt what they’re doing with your own agenda.