Instead, Bernardo Huberman, HP Senior Fellow and director of HP Labs' Social Computing Research Group, says "we found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends. Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases."

The HP team collected data from Twitter's own search API over a period of 40 days in the fall of 2010. From the resulting sample of 16.32 million tweets, they identified 22 users who were the source of the most retweets when a topic was "trending." Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times, El Pais and the BBC.

The conclusion I draw from this research is that people value and reward a message of substance. Traditional media might not be as popular as it once was, but it still has infrastructure and revenue to support journalism and create topical professional content. And it's the quality of that content that determines the success of the message.

Yet, with the proof laid out, I still hesitate to ask, @nytimes or @KimKardashian?

Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay

Perhaps PHD should have listened to its own [good] advice and delivered the marketing industry a deeper conversive experience rather than relying on a pretentious lecturing spot from the past.

What are your thoughts?

Before there was jubilation in the classrooms of one Baltimore school, and before there were more than 65,000 visits to the website of one Baltimore roofing company, there was concern that something radically different needed to happen to regain market share for that 91-year-old, family-owned business.

Here's a brief overview of how.

The Challenge

Cole Roofing, founded in 1919 and now in its fourth generation of family ownership, "never advertised a day" prior to about 10 years ago, when it became impossible to ignore a steady erosion of its long-held market share, said Bill Cole, a co-owner and great-grandson of the founder. New competitors were advertising and marketing heavily, whereas Cole Roofing was accustomed to essentially taking orders.

As Cole told us for this December d5R Snapshots feature, "Bids would come across the fax machine, and we'd estimate and send them back out." When it became clear those days had ended, "we had to do something."

The Plan

In 2009, after exploring and abandoning options for radio and newspaper advertising -- the costs were unjustifiable, Cole thought -- he hooked up with a small digital marketing agency called Airplane Corporation. Airplane principal Christian Childs proposed an idea: to give away a green roof, and to leverage social media to spread the word and elicit interest.

"Are you nuts?" reacted Cole, who is also president and co-owner of Pfister Energy, the family's renewable energy company. He initially resisted the idea, as did older members of his management team, even though the company had been installing green roofs since 2004 and wanted to do more.

"I was very pessimistic in the beginning, but [Childs] was right," Cole told us earlier this week. "Every roofer can talk about their safety, their quality, their cost, but social media really gives you a chance to build brand awareness and engagement."

Plus, he figured that every time somebody heard about or engaged with the giveaway, "they would associate a nice thing with Cole Roofing. Anyting that helps people see their roof as more than just a capital annoyance is good for our business."

"We both sort of just realized that you can buy print ads and radio spots, but is anybody really listening?" explained Childs in a phone call yesterday. "We saw social media as the only way to really make a meaningful connection with potential customers."

The Strategy

Almost all of Cole Roofing's work is on commercial properties, many of them owned by nonprofit organizations. The Green Roof Giveaway, as the campaign was branded, set out to "give back to our community and along the way educate them on the opportunities that cutting-edge roof systems give us to be green," Cole told us.

Specifically, the campaign invited Baltimore-area nonprofits to write an essay, as well as to create and upload a video to the newly created GRG YouTube channel making the case "for why your organization deserves the new roof."

Nominations would be accepted from September 15 through November 15, and a public vote would be held from November 16 through December 17. The nonprofit with the most votes would win the $5,000, and a committee was selected to evaluate all entries and select one winner for the actual green roof. The committee's criteria would be:

• Power/ persuasiveness of argument
• Creativity
• Interest
• Quality of presentation
• Internet voting results
• Merit of the organization

To promote the contest, a cross-platform social media campaign would encompass Cole Roofing's regular website and Twitter feed, along with a newly created Facebook page and dedicated GRG website -- which would have an active and well-written blog. Every piece would link to every other -- blog to sites, sites to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, etc.

Nominees, it was hoped, would be sufficiently jazzed by the opportunity to promote GRG through their own social media as well.

Contest Results

By the time the window for nominations closed, there were 39 nominees. One was the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, which created this video.

Once the voting went live, "we thought things would take a while to catch on, but on the first day of voting we had 10,000 unique visitors to the website," Cole said. "Through the peak month of the contest we had 65,515 visits to our site with 319,785 page views and an average time on our site of nearly two and a half minutes."

Many of these visitors were from the Baltimore area, but collectively they came from all 50 states -- and 84 countries.

When the voting concluded, the most votes and $5,000 donation went to the Day's End Farm Horse Rescue (here is its nominating information). "I got a chance to tour the farm," Cole said. "What an awesome place. They told us they have over 1,600 volunteers! Talk about a loyal following."

For the actual green roof, the committee selected the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women. "Their ability to show us in the video that they took the time to learn about green roofs essentially hit the nail on the head for what we wanted the contest to do," Cole said.

Installation of the school's new green roof is likely to begin this summer, but "we are very early in the planning stages," Cole said. "The school has formed a green team to work on this as well as other environmentally programs they can do.... They have some pretty interesting ideas that may slow us down. It is a process and everyone involved is committed to finding the right solution for the school and their roof."

Business Results

Aside from those 65,000 website hits, and the immeasurable collective goodwill spawned by the nonprofits' own voting campaigns, "the city has embraced the contest, the school and us," Cole said. "City Council President Jack Young wrote about the contest in his newsletter, the Baltimore City School System has a piece on their website and the National Coalition of Girls' Schools also included a piece on their site," with more media coverage expected to follow.

The "like" factor is also huge. As of February 1, 950 people have used Facebook to say they "like" the Green Roof Giveaway -- status updates that are visible to every one of their Facebook friends -- Cole Roofing's own Facebook page had indicated that they liked the company, and interaction on that page had grown by nearly 300 percent.

From his perspective as marketing consultant on the campaign, Christian Childs says GRG achieved the goal "establishing Cole Roofing as the regional leader in the green roofing space."

Highly targeted blog posts also galvanized the company's search ratings. "My prediction for the future of online marketing will be a focus on content," Childs said.

"We ran a social media campaign with Cole but we never tweeted out asking people what movies they saw over the weekend. We stuck to the campaign messaging and mission of helping nonprofits and educating people about sustainable roofing. Customers must be given value to engage with a brand and that's what we tried to do with the Green Roof Giveaway," via "educational value in the blog posts, entertainment value in the submitted videos and financial value for the winners.

"I think that the traction the campaign gained proved that people found value in these things and rewarded the brand with their engagement."

Budget and Takeaway

Ah yes, the budget. Without sharing actual dollar amounts, Cole noted that spending on the campaign was slightly more than he had alloted for marketing in the fiscal year, in large part because of the $30,000 cost of the actual green roof the company is giving away. "But the number of people I'm touching and the brand awareness I'm getting I would have never gotten" using conventional marketing, he said.

One advantage of social marketing, Childs noted, is that there are none (or few) of the media "placement" costs that come with advertising in the traditional media. That leaves more money and time for creative work, concept development and actual brand-outreach. And done right, he added, social media does something that traditional ads rarely do -- engage people by getting them to comment or share with a friend or cast a vote, or simply "like."

As for Cole:

"I decided to cut our marketing budget this year due to the success we are having in the social networking world. We are a commercial roof and renewable energy company so it didn’t seem to fit at first, but everyone we touch goes to work somewhere -- and for us it’s really about brand awareness. We want everyone to know that we are the roofer you should tell your friends about," he said.

Over the short term, "we are focused on completing this contest and teaching everyone about what we are doing." Will there be another contest? I would think so. The challenge is in creating a unique opportunity that makes people want to jump in and interact with it. Once we get the BLSYW green roof finished, we will open up the idea chest and see what we can come up with.

In the meantime, he offered this to other business owners in the construction sector:

"The social networking world is an excellent place to grow your business if you are willing to 'keep it real' and put in the time."

**Update**

Here is a video of Bill Cole announcing to the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women that they are the winners of the Green Roof Giveaway.

Brands are turning to services such as Klout, a company that measures a persons online influence, to identify socially credible influencers. These influencers become the brands ideal customers in hopes that they will speak well of their experiences with the brand across their attentive social networks.

Great idea, right? In some cases, yes, let the consumer do the work. Treat your customers right and they will become brand ambassadors.

As I see it, the problem lies not with the social credibility model, but with the metrics used to identify who has credibility and who doesn't. Socially engaged people tend to engage with other socially engaged people. Heavy users of Facebook and Twitter spend the vast majority of their time engaging with other heavy users of Facebook and Twitter. Technology is becoming a huge part of advertising industry, and you can rely on an algorithm to tell you who has the most retweets and 'likes' but to rely on an algorithm to tell you who has developed the strongest real emotional human connections is a mistake.

Technology can't develop relationships, only genuine people and genuine brands can. I know it can be easy to look at numbers and make decisions, but we can't sacrifice great relationships for great metrics.

Could this game be a bellwether in the looming and yet uncharted ad spending shift? With numbers like this, it has to be acknowledged serious advertising platform.

Financial Services Miss Social Media Opportunities With B2B Clients.

America just celebrated Independence Day, a reminder of the rhetoric from one Thomas Paine. Paine was a revolutionary intellectual and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His pamphlet, "Common Sense," was the most circulated piece of writing of its time and presented the American colonists with powerful arguments for independence from the British.

Though published in 1776, the method of Paine's influence is still a modern phenomenon. The instant popularity of Paine's pamphlet as it was near instantaneously  circulated amongst the American colonists closely mirrors the way social media can spread ideas today.

Paine's pamphlet was essentially a political blog, which now proliferate. Politicians are using social media because it's a way to engage people. Some tech-savvy politicians have even adopted the growing social platform FourSquare, a location-based social network that allows users to "check in" at locations. Consider Patrick Kennedy, a 27-year-old Democrat from Arkansas, and his campaign for Congress. Kennedy "checked in" when visiting constituencies, giving supporters the ability to stop by and meet with him.

Because social media presents an opportunity to engage with the public, it is also a crucial tool for businesses. Kennedy was the first congressional candidate to embrace FourSquare, but many businesses beat Kennedy to it. For example, Starbucks is using Foursquare to encourage customer loyalty and offer customer rewards. People who frequent Starbucks and use FourSquare to check in at retail locations earn customer rewards. In fact, the user who checks in most frequently can even earn discounts or free drinks.

Local businesses in Baltimore are starting to embrace FourSquare as well. Miss Shirley's and Ben & Jerry's are among the businesses using FourSquare to reward customer check-ins. Starbucks, along with many other businesses, have found that FourSquare can bring a significant increase in traffic and sales to any brick-and-mortar business.

Thomas Paine was limited by his means centuries ago–but we are not today. With ever-evolving technology and social networking tools, the public is now online and interacting with politicians, companies, and whoever else is ready to sign on.

The company is using traditional outlets such as print ads and television spots, but has also adopted tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to spread their message. BP, which didn’t previously have a YouTube channel, now has one of the most subscribed channels with over 800,000 views.  BP also created a microsite dedicated to the oil spill cleanup operations, hosted on the company's main Web site. This is an important outlet to present up-to-date information on what viewers are interested in seeing.

BP was prudent to understand that the internet is a crucial part of spreading their message. However, the digital world is a transparent one – and BP is quickly learning this. Social media, although a great tool to convey content, is simply a tool. BP must still produce engaging content to communicate. Modern communication tools allow the message to spread easily, even if the message is that CEO Tony Hayward wants to get his life back.

BP had a very weak social media presence before the catastrophe and has been quick to adopt the tool as a means of communication. However, the effort certainly has its flaws. For example BP restricted the ability to comment on their Facebook page and disabled comments completely on their YouTube channel. These actions limit the effectiveness of social media, removing the conversational element that engages users. The company has improved their social media presence, but has made and continues to make mistakes in the process. Logging into the digital world, however, was not one of them.

Albeit a PR disaster, the situation does provide an interesting case study on how a company must adapt to the changing marketplace in order to communicate its message. Think your company may want to expand beyond the traditional outlets? It’s probably a good thought.

Read more about this campaign on Mashable