Here are a few of the most compelling such initiatives:

IPaidABribe.Com: Launched by Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan of the Janaagraha non-profit organization in Bangalore, the website allows citizens to anonymously post reports about the bribes that they have paid to government and company officials. So far, 22,493 bribe posts worth 833,033,890 rupees have been reported in India. The project has also “gone global,” already boasting partner websites in Kenya, Greece, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Morocco, Kosovo, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

The latest launch – just this week in Azerbaijan – should prove interesting. Although there is a demonstrated need for the project, which gathered 100 likes on Facebook in roughly half a day without any ads, initially the public seems a bit fearful of posting on the website. Let’s hope the project quickly gains traction. Partner websites will also open in South Africa, Tunisia, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Syria and Liberia.

OpenMinistry.Info: Launched by the Finnish government, the website allows registered voters in Finland to propose new laws and legislative initiatives. If any submitted proposal is backed by 50,000 citizens or more within six months, the Finnish parliament must review the initiative.

Stjórnlagaráð: In 2011, a group of Icelandic citizens decided to compile a new constitution after the financial collapse in 2008 – one that would create greater checks and balances in the system. The document was posted on Facebook and Twitter, where citizens offered suggestions and comments. The crowdsourced constitution was later
presented to the Icelandic parliament.

Challenge.Gov: Launched by the U.S. government, the website features “challenges,” or difficult tasks, facing any specific sector. Interested citizens can log on, propose their solutions, discuss tabled issues, and show their support. Rewards are offered to contributors when a task is solved.

These are just a few of the crowdsourcing initiatives that aim to reshape the government-citizen dynamic. And this is just the beginning.

Not only are governments across the world discovering that they need to ensure a greater presence online to keep up with their constituents, but the public itself is beginning to demand from their governments the greater interactivity, the more streamlined civic services, and the more rapid and open dialogue that is afforded by this new media space.

Copious, which will compete with eBay, Craiglist and Etsy in the saturated online marketplace arena, requires its buyers and sellers to connect their accounts to Facebook and be transparent in their onsite actions — purchases, shares and comments on for-sale items included.

The site eradicates anonymity from its ecommerce experience. Here, privacy is replaced with trust and transparency, or so the startup contends.

“Building around real identity means no more anonymous transactions between aliases, no more sifting through reviews from equally anonymous third-parties, and no more recommendations based solely on what you’ve bought in the past,” says Copious co-founder and COO Jonathan Ehrlich.

Ehrlich, previously head of marketing at Facebook, seems keen on building for the same audience. “We’re creating a marketplace for the Facebook era, with an experience that’s organized around people first, products second,” he says.

Ideally, buyers get a better idea of who they’re buying from. They’ll also get more insight on what their social network friends are buying, sharing and commenting on.

Sellers, meanwhile, will have the opportunity to showcase their expertise on Copious and across the web. Eventually, a seller’s Twitter account, blog or presence in product forums will factor into his “Copious signal,” a set of five bars, similar in appearance to a carrier’s network signal, included alongside his profile.

Sellers can also price their wares to reward social behaviors. A seller could, for instance, offer buyers a discounted price for sharing a listing with Facebook contacts, or a reduced charge for following the seller on Copious. Sellers, in addition to being subject to the mandatory identity clause, are charged a flat 10% transaction fee per sale.

At launch, Copious will start with handpicked sellers in the handbags category. Additional categories will be opened in the days ahead.

Founded in January 2011, San Francisco-based Copious has raised $2 million in funding from Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, BlackBerry Partners Fund and several Facebook Angels.

Social media and online games have the potential to convey 21st century skills that aren’t necessarily part of school curricula — things like time management, leadership, teamwork and creative problem solving that will prepare teens for success in college and beyond. Making the transition between a highly structured environment in high school to a self-driven, unstructured environment in college can prove a huge challenge for many kids.

Educators spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix this problem. The solution doesn’t lie solely with games, but a lot of the psychology that motivates teens to play games holds potential. We need to figure out how to tap in.

The Status Update and Checkins

In a similar way, checkins don’t necessarily have to be location-based. People check in because they’re driven toward some kind of status or reward. Teachers, parents, and students can start using checkins to monitor time management skills, show the progress of a student over time, and drive toward very specific goals (or rewards). Think of a network where a teen could check in to a certain class or subject. Updates like “Christina just checked into quadratic equations” could show her peers what she’s working on, encourage participation, and allow others working on a similar subject matter to pitch in.

Leaderboards

Many students are motivated by friendly competition. They are also driven by the need to compare themselves to others. Leaderboards can foster this in a healthy way and encourage people to try harder with little incentive other than positive recognition. Why not set up a school-wide, inter-school or even nationwide leaderboard, similar to what Nike+ did to make an otherwise potentially mundane activity (running) fun?

Leveling Up

Games are great for delivering relevant feedback in the form of a mission, level, quest or objective. The best games are just hard enough to keep users interested but offer enough frequent and positive feedback to make sure participants are having fun.

Want to see how influential you are on Twitter? A new app called Sneak Peek not only does that; it also tells you how influential everyone else is.

Visibli, a web analytics firm, aims to be a “Compete for social sharing” with the app, which went live on May 17. Sneak Peek makes a couple of metrics publicly available: clicks on links and clicks on reshared links. The former are original links, while the latter are retweets, though Visibli CEO Saif Ajani says he avoided that term since many users don’t use the “RT” designation when they retweet.

For instance, a look at Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter stream over the past two weeks shows a big bump on May 11, when he retweeted Amazon’s announcement that the movie No Strings Attached (which he stars in) was available on Blu-ray and DVD. That retweet yielded 2,402 clicks.

compliments of Mashable photo clip

A person’s Twitter stats can be found by typing in his or her handle. Ajani hopes to get ad agencies and marketers to sign up for the paid version of Visibli, which provides data from a much longer period. Right now, a look at the past 14 days is free without registration. Users must register to see stats from the past 30 days — or what’s happening in real time.

The app uses information compiled from Twitter’s API as well as APIs from Twitter apps like Bit.ly and TweetDeck, among others. Visibli is not the only firm to measure Twitter influence, of course. Klout, for one, does the same thing.

But Ajani’s plan is to offer the same visibility that Compete offers for website traffic (even though many dispute Compete’s numbers) for sharing in all of social media, including Facebook. “We’ve got some kickass analytics that track in real-time everything you share,” he says.

There are times when you just have to tell your friends about something — but not necessarily your Facebook friends.

Just ask Becca Akroyd. When Ms. Akroyd, a 29-year-old lawyer in Sacramento, Calif., wanted to share a picture of her new vegetable garden, she didn’t turn to Facebook. Instead she posted it on Path, a service that lets people share pictures, videos and messages with a small group.

“The people I have on my Path are the people who are going to care about the day-to-day random events in my life, or if my dog does something funny,” Ms. Akroyd said. “On Facebook, I have colleagues or family members who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in those things — and also that I wouldn’t necessarily want to have view those things.”

Path, which limits friend groups to 50, is among a new crop of Web services that allow people to connect with a handful of friends in a private group. Users get the benefits of sharing without the strangeness that can result when social worlds collide on Facebook. Other start-ups in this anti-oversharing crowd include GroupMe, Frenzy, Rally Up, Shizzlr, Huddl and Bubbla.

Even Facebook recognizes that people don’t want to share everything with every “friend.” It has privacy settings that control who can see what, but many people find these challenging to set up. So last fall, Facebook introduced Groups, for sharing with subsets of Facebook friends. And in March, it acquired Beluga, a start-up that allows sharing photos and messages with small groups privately.

Last month, Facebook said its users had created 50 million groups with a median of just eight members. It also introduced the Send button, which Web sites can use to let people share things with Facebook groups.

“We realized there wasn’t a way to share with these groups of people that were already established in your real life — family, book club members, a sports team,” said Peter Deng, director of product for Facebook Groups. “It’s one of the fastest-growing products within Facebook. Usage has been pretty phenomenal.”

Google is also working on tools for sharing with limited groups of people, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans who was not authorized to speak publicly. Slide, a maker of social networking apps that was bought by Google, recently released an iPhone app called Disco, for texting with small groups.

Google may discuss its plans in this area at a conference for developers this week. A spokeswoman, Katie Watson, declined to comment.

No one expects the start-ups in this field — most of which are new and have relatively few users — to replace Facebook or Twitter. Instead, their creators say that they do a better job of mimicking offline social relationships, and that they represent a new wave of social networking that revolves around specific tasks, like sharing photos or coordinating plans for the evening.

Shizzlr, for example, was created by two graduate business students at the University of Connecticut after they realized it was impossible to organize plans on Facebook.

“You put out a status about weekend plans and, all of a sudden, you get your uncle commenting that he wants to go hiking with you and your friends,” said Nick Jaensch, who created Shizzlr with Keith Bessette.

After users invite a few friends into a group on Shizzlr, the service grabs a list of coming events from Yelp, Google and Facebook and lets members discuss their options. The groups reach capacity at 20 people.

In the last three months, about 3,600 people have downloaded the application — a tiny number compared with Facebook’s 600 million members. But Mr. Jaensch says he is not interested in competing with Facebook.

“The people that you’ve called in the past two to three weeks are the people you actually do stuff with,” he said.

Shizzlr is just getting off the ground, but some of the other services in this field have attracted the attention of prominent investors. Path has raised $11 million from venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. GroupMe, which says it is handling 100 million messages a month, raised $10.6 million from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and First Sound, and others. AOL acquired Rally Up late last summer.

Some common mistakes are listed with regard to how pitches miss the base:

• Relying on getting others to talk up clients.
• The pitch is dripping with gobbledygook. (Our client has innovative, cutting-edge, mission-critical applications to improve business process!)
• The pitch prattles on about the client’s product or service. (Features! Benefits!)
• The pitch includes superlative laden quotes from third parties, such as customers, analysts, and experts. (Hey, don’t take our word for it – check this out.)
• The pitch usually includes “an invitation to speak with the CEO.” (I always find it weird that only the CEO talks. What about offering up a customer of the client to talk about how they use the company’s products or services?)
• Big budget.

We pride ourselves on an effective combination of traditional media relations with autonomous content creation and social media.

I personally accredit David with years ago helping teach me the role I have in helping clients create such original content, disseminated appropriately to”get them noticed”.

As David concludes, “that valuable online information — YouTube videos, blogs, photographs, ebooks, Twitter feeds, Webinars, and the like – is a better approach in the long run than generating a handful of clips from bloggers.”

Market research for new product development has a problem. How do you establish if there is market demand for your new product? Typically, you put the product in front of your target markets, ask them what they think and prepare your strategic marketing plan accordingly. But it’s a slow process and open to error. People are fickle after all; sometimes they don’t know what they think; sometimes they say what you want to hear. It’s only later, when the product is launched, that you find out that nobody loves it.

To help with this challenge, market researchers have developed facial tracking that examines how people react to your ads. Are they happy? Sad? Angry? Bored? It’s more effective, but it is slower.

Now, a company, ThirdSight, has taken marketing research a step further and automated the software (called EmoVision) so that facial expressions are quickly decoded by a computer. What’s interesting is that people can be watching the ad on a smartphone – they don’t need to be sitting in a lab.

You could circulate your new product concept to a mass audience of, say, Facebook users and get immediate, unbiased, feedback on what people really think when they look at it for the first time.

The Marketing thought

The potential for product development is quite exciting. It takes away some of the guesswork in market research – that final leap of faith when you are 90-95% sure that something will fly.

Watch the BBC video clip here, Market research and the primitive mind of the consumer.

Just a thought.

Tim

Dave Williams in AdAge Digital writes that there is a reason Facebook is valued at $41 billion, and it’s not just the fact that it has 600 million registered users.

“It’s that fact that those people willingly share personal information about themselves, opening the door to uniquely targeted advertisements based on age, gender, interests, location, occupation and even friends’ interests. That’s what makes Facebook a marketer’s dream come true.”

Continued, as excerpted from AdAge Digital:

Yet critics still propagate the myth that Facebook display ads offer no return on investment. A study from research firm Webtrends last month found that Facebook’s click-through rate declined to 0.051% in 2010, about half the industry average and down from 0.063% in 2009. This means that just one out every 2,000 ads is clicked, even though Facebook’s CPM actually increased during that period.

But the study doesn’t tell the whole story. It fails to differentiate between targeted and untargeted ads on the social network, and that is a huge distinction. Remember the value proposition of Facebook: Users share their data. That sharing creates unprecedented targeting opportunities. Dating sites can target single users and ignore the rest. Small bands can use their tour itinerary to target local music lovers. Domino’s can target people who say they like pizza, but even better, it can serve ads to people who “like” Papa John’s, telling them about a new recipe or a lower price.

Our own study of more than three billion impressions over a seven-month period showed that while the click-through rate of untargeted ads averaged 0.02%, the CTR for targeted ads averaged 0.15%. That’s higher than the industry average for display units across the entire web, and three times the CTR described in the Webtrends study. Targeted ads were also off the charts when it came to engagement metrics, scoring 150 percent, compared to only 22.5 percent for non-targeted.

When you take this into account, Facebook is really the best social media platform for delivering relevant messages with both reach and frequency. The targeting capabilities allow advertisers to use Facebook as both a broadcast and narrow-cast channel. The best targeting strategy is to make use of member interests on national and/or local levels. Then divide these targets into sub-segments by splitting demographics and genders. Most brands don’t utilize enough interest segments — they restrict their options to demographic and gender targeting too early in the process. Facebook serves a massive amount of display inventory, and most of the advertisers are small local businesses. National advertisers can easily follow this targeting strategy to find success on a local level.

But targeted click-through rates are just one indicator of success, and as we know from regular display, CTRs aren’t the end-all metric for measuring a campaign’s success. Marketers need to view Facebook advertising the way they view visiting a cocktail party — where the goal isn’t to close a deal, but to come away with a business card. Getting a user to “like” a brand or engage with it is like getting that business card. Trying to get a user to buy when you first meet them is a mistake too many marketers make, and it makes them look like an overeager insurance salesman, cornering people at a party.

With this in mind, your ads should only drive consumers off of the Facebook domain if you absolutely must. Once they leave the page, you lose the ability to take advantage of the social graph to target friends and friends of friends, as well as the ability to include social relevance in the ad creative (that is, the names of friends who also like the brand). Conversions are a lot lower when you drive consumers off the network. It’s far better to use display ads to drive users to a custom tab on your page. You can then use this as a landing page before driving to your brand site.

At the same time, make sure you have a strong engagement and page strategy once you get users to “like” the brand. You don’t want to shuttle them to a useless Facebook page before bringing them to your brand site. Your Facebook page should offer value, functioning as a gateway to conversations and transactions, either online or offline. In addition to clicks, page comments, likes, and consumer-provided testimonials provide powerful ways to measure your social media success.

Facebook has massive value as an advertising channel, but using it right requires a sound strategy, and a thorough understanding of its unusual metrics. Simply buying ad space and hoping for the best is a practice of a bygone era, not only in social media, but online in general. Use Facebook’s full potential to find the right consumers, and then use your marketing smarts to keep them engaged. That’s how you can make social media work.