The answer is yes and no.

Social media is built on sentiment (positive, negative or indifferent) and many will argue that software can not measure how a person feels and expresses. I, for one, agree that a computer could easily create a false impression when having to deal with the complexities of human opinion (which includes emotion, sarcasm, regionalized dialects, slang, etc…– none of which is straightforward).

A post would have to directly correlate to the organization/company/brand/campaign with simple positive or negative words (i.e. good, bad, great, etc…), for there to be no room for interpretation. But as we all know, even a 140 character tweet can be subversive and laced with sarcasm and innuendo.

This is not to say that measurement is still as large of a detriment to social media as it has been. It has come an awfully long way, and eventually should evolve to the point where we can successfully manage our reputations in the digital world and measure ROI as we can offline ventures.

The Lost Art of Listening

Social Media’s lasting legacy on brands/companies/organizations might be that it finally forced them to listen instead of just selling. A lot of this might have to do with the fact that most social media forums are not their arena to preach about their brands. In actuality, conversations are taking place and they’ve realized that they have to monitor and participate before they try to market and sell.

A Voluntary Think Tank

If a brand approaches it right, throughout the online world, there exists an active think tank that is expressing their thoughts and desires, and whose opinions could provide dividends if properly harnessed. How much were companies paying for focus groups, where most people joined just to receive free giveaways or cash?

Real Time Research

Before we execute any tactic a solid foundation of research must be in place, and social media provides a constant stream of real time research. Of course, many argue that we can’t properly measure sentiment as it is subjective, but social media still provides a window for us to see how our brands and reputation are discussed in public forums.

Starting in the mid-1990’s, webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines. In the beginning, site owners only needed to submit the URL of their website to the various search engines which would send a spider to crawl the page and extract the meta tags and links to other pages. Links were in turn crawled by the spider to index the entire website. Meta tags provide list of keywords describing the content of the page. Early versions of search algorithms relied on these webmaster supplied keywords to provide the link between the searched term and the results page.

Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability in providing the most relevant results to any given search, using meta data tags was soon found to be less than reliable because the webmasters choice and density of keywords could be manipulated to provide an inaccurate representation of the sites actual content.  Soon search engines responded by developing smarter spiders and more complex ranking algorithms that were more difficult for the content providers to manipulate.   About this same time, content owners started to recognise the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, thus creating the ever evolving techniques for both white hat and black hat SEO practices.

White hat SEO can be classified as any technique that conforms to the search engine guidelines and involves no deception.  The search engine guidelines are not meant to be a series of rules or commandments, but a practice of good design. White hat SEO is about creating content for the users and not for the search engines, while providing content that is easily and properly indexed by the spiders. White hat SEO produces long lasting, relevant search results that bring intended traffic to your website.

Black hat SEO can be classified as any technique that attempts to improve rankings by deception or techniques that are disapproved by the search engines.  Black hat SEO usually involves content that is not seen by the user. Some examples are hidden text that is coloured the same as the background, positioned off screen or hidden in a special HTML tag. Cloaking is a term used for displaying one set of content for users and a different set of content to be indexed by the search engine. Search engines can, and do, penalize websites that practice black hat SEO. Penalties can be a lesser page rank or the removal from the search engine results altogether.

Proper design and content writing is the first step to ensure best practices and relevant results of referrals from search engines. Develop your website to be relevant to your industry and write engaging content that is informational and industry specific and the search engines will rank you accordingly.

Laliberte starts the event by claiming, “I am an artist not a scientist and that is the only way I can make a significant contribution to the mission and to raise awareness to water issues”. He then hooks our interest with a sobering statistic. A child dies every 8 seconds because of contaminated water. With the event now underway, we are welcomed into each of 14 cities (Montreal, Moscow, Santa Monica, New York City, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Sydney, Tokyo, Tampa, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Paris and London). Each city takes a unique approach to present the message artistically. One dances, one sings, Montreal showcases all that is Cirque and Mumbai takes a perfectly white set and lets adorable children hand-paint themselves blue. Some of the guests included former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Dr. David Suzuki, Peter Gabriel, Shakira, Mathew McConaughey and even U2.

The traditional definition of event marketing or experiential marketing is the face-to-face interaction between a brand and its audience via live events. The rationale is that when an attendee recalls the event experience they will make a positive association with the brand. This positive association will make them more inclined to take action, to make a purchase or to change behaviour. Did Guy Laliberte go to this expense and safety risk to selfishly promote his Cirque brand? Cirque is certainly quite visible during the event; including a spectacular acrobatic scene involving a wall of water and excerpts from the amazing Vegas performance of “O”. Or were his intentions genuinely to promote awareness of all things water? Watch it yourself on www.onedrop.org and make your own determination. I know that after my event experience, I’m committed to doing my part to make a difference. Thank you, Guy Laliberte for pushing the traditional boundaries of events. Who else would have ever thought of an event that included a clown in space?