Today kicks off Social Media Week 2012 aka #smw12. Thanks to my buddy @justinkistner, today also kicks off my new blog, self titled, BloggerChica (find me on Twitter – @bloggerchica).

I attended a jam packed day of sessions by a great line up of speakers from Adobe, Altimeter, Cisco, eBay, Intel, and SAP. The day’s events were hosted at Adobe’s San Jose headquarters.

First up, Jeremiah Owyang – Altimeter

Jeremiah talked about “Social Data in a Crystal Ball” and the 7 elements of social data:

1 – Demographics: Business strategies towards demographics becomes more powerful when combined with
2 – Product: Using product info is tried and true, but will be more valuable combined w/ behavioral
3 – Psychographics: With this data, brands should focus on higher level topics to better solve customer problems
4 – Behavioral: Leverage existing and external #socialdata to understand historical trends, and make better decisions
5 – Referrals: Referral data is a powerful way to understand consumer networks
6 – Location: Location data is highly context aware, and can serve up time and intent
7 – Intention: Data inaccurate, but could yield high value w/consumers indicating action

A Q&A session followed, here are two highlights:

Q – How is change in the social landscape changing business strategy?
A – People are social in the workforce all day long. Facebook has the strongest momentum we have ever seen. FB adoption has an extremely high penetration rate, but there are a lot of different social tools, even email. Business is social.

Q – How are companies preparing internally for social change
A – Companies that have >1000 employees have ~11 social media focused employees and will be looking to add more as the social landscape expands.

Next up, Ann Lewnes – Adobe

Theme: “Confessions of a Digital Marketer”

• Brand comes first
• Creative isn’t everything
• Marketing is the new finance – for the first time business can have a real effect on marketing via measurement and optimization tech. This allows the business to prove campaign roi, show performance against goals, then ask for more money

Ann also talked about Company Driven Social vs Community Driven Social. This was by far my favorite comparison of the day. For Company Driven Social, Anne used the example of Adobe “Sneaks” – sneak peaks at features in next version of the product put out there in the social environment. An overwhelming response to these sneaks enables the business to use this reaction to their advantage in marketing when the product launches.

On the other end of the scale is Community Driven Social. The example here is a recent YouTube sensation. See for yourself here:

Fotoshop by Adobé

Finishing off the morning sessions was John Yi from Facebook and Marianne Llewellyn of Adobe talking about “Measuring the Value of a Fan”

Key Points:

•    Build your presence
•    Engage your customers
•    Amplify their advocacy
•    Measure impact

The idea of combining the vast amount of social data and interactions that take place on Facebook with website data is to correlate social mentions with earned revenue. This can lead to pinpointing optimal lead time, best time and day to post, frequency, most influential posts, etc.

Fun Facebook facts:
Facebook ads are 90% on target – much higher than any other ad postings
Friends of fans are top customers too – Southwest.com saw 2.5x more visits from friends of fans over normal traffic

The day rounded out with a panel of Social Media marketers talking about “Social Measurement Best Practices in Tech,” moderated by Michael Brito of Edelman Digital, followed by the panelists of each company (eBay, Intel, SAP, and Adobe) deep diving into stories of social media successes and learnings. My favorite tidbits of wisdom from these sessions were:

• Common Theme #1 among panelists: Radian6 does not scale to Asia, doesn’t meet all listening needs, companies are looking elsewhere for a more comprehensive social solution and/or combining multiple solutions to meet their needs.
• Common Theme #2: Everyone is using Sprinkler for posts to Facebook and Twitter!
• “You need real-time #socialdata analysis, but you must analyze past trends as well to determine actions.” – Maria Poveromo of Adobe
• Social Media often gets outsourced because it’s not considered to be core to the business – is this trend reversing?
• In response to the last bullet: Agencies have value for social media- they work across industries w/many business and have experience to share – @sujamthe of eBay
• You have to customize your social & traditional content to the needs of the target market, it varies by region!- Jen Atkinson of Adobe

Overall this was a great day of learning and socializing with fellow social marketers. Though I can’t make the rest of the Bay Area Social Media Week sessions throughout the week, I’ll definitely be following the hashtags (#smw12, #smwsf) on Twitter with the hope of learning a few more insights during the week.

Check out the rest of Social Media Week activities, schedules, and locations: http://socialmediaweek.org/