I was fortunate enough to hear Mitch Joel of twist image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation, speak at a lunch session in Burlington, Vermont this afternoon. The intriguing hour & a half opened up a lot more questions in my mind than I had anticipated. Here’s what my search marketer brain is trying to process currently:

1. Segmentation – Rich Nadworny of Digalicious raised a timely & relevant question – “ should all brands do social media”?  According to Mitch-  "All brands should share”. What remained unanswered was – What channels & audiences should these brands engage with? Should all brands share on every digital channel that they can lay their hands on while engaging their entire audience during all times?

If not , then how do the brands segregate the audience or the channel? How to determine if the Facebook audience for a brand  is tolerant of  higher interaction frequency  or more forgiving than perhaps the twitter audience? Somewhat similar to how we deal with direct traffic vs. search traffic in search marketing world. Or is there no such norm?  Will segmenting social media channels cannibalize any other medium? How does YouTube, which adds another layer of interactivity, fit into this engagement strategy? How do you draw the line between sharing too much vs. too little?

2. HIPPO factor- Discussions revolved around what should be the sharing “guidelines” vs. “policy” for employees at workplace. But who decides on those guidelines? What is the HIPPO’s role here? Unfortunately, still today, a lot of them have rigid unidirectional mental model.  How does the fluid social strategy accommodate a HIPPO?

3. Metrics and benchmark – Justin Cutroni, the author of Analytics Talk pointed out the need for establishing benchmarks and metrics in the social media arena. Sadly, a bulk of the brands and their digitized social strategy, still does not involve metrics or measurements. One might argue that there is an overload of data available for social media tracking but how about identifying and establishing key performance indicators? Is there any action on that front? Not much from what I hear.

4. Chris Brogran’s Math- In a post earlier today, Chris Brogan predicts “Social Crash”. According to him 100 small Twitter conversations+120 emails a day+10 phone calls=13 hours of work per day. It’s true that most of us are not as connected as Chris Brogan and have less than an average of 150 connections to engage with. I somehow tend to agree on his hyper-connectivity theory. Regardless of our volume of connection, some of us are seriously hyper-connected. Is that a problem? Are we heading towards a social crash?

I hope this post doesn’t exude any cynicism because that’s exactly what it’s not supposed to do. Some of my digital beliefs and thought process were overhauled during the lunch session this afternoon. Kudos to the #btvsmb team , Rich Nadworny and Mitch Joel . Mission Accomplished!