You can watch the first trailer here

If you haven’t heard, The Social Network is a Columbia Pictures film based on Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal,” a story about the founding of Facebook.

The film, directed by Hollywood heavyweight (and personal favourite of mine) David Fincher, produced by Kevin Spacey &  features an ensemble cast which includes Justin Timberlake. Apparently, none of the Facebook staff, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, will be involved with the project.

The film’s tagline is (aptly) – “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”

It hits theaters in October 2010. See you there!

I wanted to share with you an inspirational post from a hero of mine, Seth Godin. He advocates a mantra of plan, launch, cowabunga, repeat to get things done in life, which I find really inspiring, and having been hooked on surfing since an amazing trip to Bali, Indonesia last summer I find it a particularly good metaphor.

I’ve taken the liberty of copying the post in full below, enjoy!

Three months ago I wrote about farming and hunting. It seems, though, that the growth industry of our generation is surfing.

Talk to surfers and they’ll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for that blissful moment that combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment.

This makes for a great sport (for some people, anyway) but until recently, it wasn’t much of a career path. (aside: Aimless web surfing is a waste of time, and that’s not the sort of surfing I’m referring to). That feeling of freedom and risk in equal measure was difficult to find at work, so we sought it out on the slopes or the ocean.

Once we figured out how to get thrills from waves, we could switch to snow, or to stand up paddling, or kiteboarding. Different terrain, same cycle.

More people, though, are finding a way to surf and get paid for it. Freelance projects, joint ventures, entrepreneurial startups are all paying off for people who are hooked on this feeling of plan, launch, cowabunga, repeat. Each time you do it, you get to take on a bigger project, a bigger wave. The cost of wiping out is low (if you plan for it) and so you can do it again and again. You don’t even have to be solo… now there are teams and corporations that seek out people who want to surf their way through fundraising or product development or customer delight.

We see successful musicians and writers do this all the time. Now, though, it’s not unusual to watch someone surf in their development of shareware, or in the videos they post online or risks they take in their personal blog.

So many of the conversations I have every day could easily be replaced with, “so, where’s the next wave? Tell me about your last one…”

You can subscribe to Seth’s Blog here

1. Determine the Return on Investment

What is the direct return to the business for the investment of time, resources and cash and the possibility of revenue back? This is simpler than it looks, you simply need to keep a record of what the investment costs are inputted against the outputs from the activity.
Some examples of what outputs you can track:

• Successful referrals from links seeded within social media, which leads to conversions or sales
• Uptake of exclusive promotions run off social networks
• Number of leads generated that converted via social media
• Tracked links from advertising creative hosted on social media hub/brand pages
• Trouble-shooting or customer service reduction costs via handling within social media

2. Be measurable yourself

What objective does your strategy aim to meet? Whether its lead generation, customer service, brand engagement or traffic acquisition, being accountable against what you set out to achieve with your social media strategy is key to providing a top-line summary of success.

If you have previously engaged in social media and are testing a new strategy it is good to also have a grasp of what you have done to date and what has worked and what hasn’t, to help shape these new objectives and move forward.

Be realistic with your goal-setting too- having a reachable target aligned with your investment makes more sense than chasing 1million friends or fans just because brand X has that many. The set objectives will help focus the mind on concentrating on only the tasks relevant to that goal too.

3. Resource Requirements

What was inputted in terms of time, budget and team resources to meet the objectives? What is the total cost of social media to the business?

Can you breakdown the activity into specific tasks such as responding to customers, number of content posts or identifying conversations about your brand? And what is the resource required to report on this activity and provide analysis?

Having a measurable metric for investment, to be compared with other areas of the business can help with the justification of activity.

4. What is the value to the business?

This goes beyond simply the ROI measured from the number of email addresses collected from an exclusive Facebook campaign you ran last week, and instead it measures social media against the wider business and its objectives. For example, are you seeing an increase in brand affinity or awareness over time, or extending the reach of a given campaign, or positive sentiment to a particular product.

Social media can also be used as a great medium for customer feedback and suggestions for improvement of service. Are you thinking about how social media can positively effect you brand over the long-term?

5. Testing and Optimisation

As with all areas of marketing, strategy and assumption can only take you so far, but where you can really hone a campaign is testing and optimising performance. Therefore, benchmarking at the start of any campaign is key to measuring the success of a campaign but more importantly to help optimise as you go.

Determining your KPI’s (Key Performance Metrics) will define what metrics you will be looking to study and move during a campaign but in order to optimise these it is important to have a contingency strategy in place if things don’t go according to plan based upon your analysis of these performance indicators.

Having a list of the possible variables you can move during the campaign, whether that is budget, creative testing or team resources, is also a good exercise to plan for acting upon any under-performance.

Remember that analysis paves the way for decision-making which in turn should lead to execution or the shaping of a new strategy. If your test has not met the objectives, why? What would you do differently? Then go do it differently!

So this is the five areas I would consider when assessing activity in social media, but it is by no means an exhaustive list. Please share your experiences and critique on this post…

On a monthly basis, Google searches are generating the equivalent of 260,000 Kg of CO2 – roughly equal to 626,506 miles worth of CO2 from driving.

Check out the infographic below on the search giants energy use taken from their blog.

In a recent interview with Business Insider, founder Jimmy Wales spells out the site’s SEO successes. He states that ‘simple urls, clear text and content people are happy to link to‘ is a recipe for success. Simple really.

You can also watch the full interview here

What is set to be the biggest sporting event this year, you’d expect a mass upsurge in football-related searches (and excuses to write blog posts on the subject), and it seems Yahoo is stating they are the search engine of choice (so far), no matter who you support. They’ve created the following ‘handy’ shortcuts for when a World-Cup related keyword search is inputted and you’ll see scores, schedules, photos, and videos in the shortcut. Try it here.

Once the tournament kicks off on June 11th (30 days from now in case you were wondering) Yahoo will also provide schedules and results from all the matches.

All in all a quite handy snap-shot for anyone looking for a quick answer to when, how & who that’s World Cup related. It’s great to see Yahoo taking a bit initative around this big event too, however there must be room for an offering which includes video highlights of games, what people are saying in social media about the talking points, and those ever-enjoyable world-cup songs.

Over to Bing and Google to see how they compete here…

Say Jack and Jill decide to go for lunch together. Both undecided on where to go today, Jack is fed up of sushi, Jill has had her one millionth chicken and avocado sandwich from Pret and feels today is time for change. Jack then remembers a great little Mexican place which does amazing burritos he discovered after lunching with Bill from finance last week. So they decide to head there. (i had a whole paragraph on the experience of ordering a burrito at the Mexican place, which didn’t make the final edit) Jack insists that Jill try’s the chicken burrito, with guac, sour cream, the works. And through this recommendation, Jill now has a new favourite place for lunch (how good does a burrito sound about now?).

But what would the Mexican place pay for Jack’s recommendation? What would they pay for Bill’s? They now have two further regular customers and profits are healthy.

In the digital world, affiliates who recommend another site can make 10% on-top of a successful purchase price, and if this was via an affiliate network a further commission is owed (10-30% of affiliate commission). So on a £100 product, a retailer would be prepared to pay £12-13 to get it sold.  However, this is not strictly a social recommendation.

Twitterer’s can earn money from clicks on adverts via services such as Sponsored Tweets & MyLikes, where a user’s influence is calculated and a given a suggested earning per click. However this is not a recommendation in the truest sense, and operates very much under the display model of advertising. Sites like this have also received some criticism.

Other social recommendations sites like GetGlue, Gigpark and Kiobo record your Web surfing history and shares it with the community, but currently don’t have a commercial element.

Recently launched mflow, a music recommendations site which positions itself between itunes and Twitter, operate on a model of users making commissions upon music download purchases successfully recommended to their peers. If a user buys a track on the recommendation of someone they follow, the recommender receives 20% of the price they pay in credit on mflow with which to buy more music.

But should marketers be prepared to pay more for an endorsement between friends? I’m predicting in the near future more and more budget will be assigned to identifying influencers within a given industry to participate in conversations with their audience or social graph, attempting to build wider ripples outwards.

But what is the right price or cost-per-acqusition for influence? Certainly higher than a recommendation is currently being priced.

But not forgetting the first important step; advertisers have to earn the right to be recommended…

The video itself is features a short clip of two chaps having fun in the shuttle and details on Inter-Casino’s website where you can enter. They have teamed up with Space Adventures to offer this once in a lifetime prize.

The campaign kicked off on 1st March, and the video has received 12K views on Youtube to date, and also have a Facebook and Twitter presence, which have room for growth.

It will be interesting to know how many have been driven to the Inter Casino site and subsequently taken part from their social media push.

I’m now off to try on space suits…

As of April 14th, 2010, the Blendtec series of videos had collected a total of 109,039,469 views on YouTube.