I’m going to part of a great panel discussion at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica tomorrow. The panel is titled “Social Media as a Content, Advertising and Commerce Platform” and the overall focus of the panel is on how to build a successful user-generated media site or social network and how to leverage social media. I’m most interested in talking about how brands can leverage social media and debating the pros and cons of building your own destination social network versus building one inside of Facebook or leveraging Facebook Connect.

If you’re going to be at the show be sure to stop by the session and say hello. I’m lucky to be part of such a great group.

Mike

I was recently interviewed by Justin Smith of Inside Facebook.

Excerpt from the interview

As the Facebook Platform matures, an increasing number of social media agencies are bringing brands into the Facebook world by way of Facebook applications. Not just application developers, these agencies are increasingly working with clients directly to set strategy and design the rules of the campaign — and then manage the promotional spend inside Facebook once the application is launched.

Votigo is one such agency based in Emeryville, CA. The company has been doing social media campaigns since 2006, and since the Facebook Platform launched last year, has been building a big part of its business bringing brands into Facebook. We sat down with Jim Risner, Votigo’s President and CMO, to learn more about the company and the trends he is seeing in the marketplace.

Read the full interview.

We’re pleased to announce that Jim Risner, President & Co-founder of Votigo, has been nominated to the Board of Directors for the OpenSocial Foundation.   The OpenSocial Foundation is a non-profit corporation created to sustain the free and open development of OpenSocial specifications.  The Foundation helps facilitate the development of new specifications and ensures that the technical direction remains in the hands of the community.

Please go here to VOTE for Jim.

Here’s more information about the OpenSocial Foundation.

The (initial) Board of Directors (5 of the 7):

* Anil Dharni, hi5
* David Glazer, Google
* Joe Greenstein, Flixster
* Allen Hurff, MySpace
* Sam Pullara, Yahoo!
* TBD #1, Community Representative
* TBD #2, Community Representative
* TBD directors will be determined by the community (that’s you!)

For years, children have recited this classic schoolyard chant “Beans, Beans, the magical fruit….”. But that’s not quite right beans are actually a vegetable. Bush’s Beans along with their agency Empower MediaMarketing is working with Votigo to correct this long living error with the Magical Veggie Challenge Video Contest. Entrants are encouraged to rewrite the old tune correcting the wrong and pointing out that beans are actually a veggie.

One grand prize winner will be awarded $5,000 and a trip for four to perform the winning chant at a Times Square event on Feb. 18, 2009. The event will be hosted by Drew Lachey, multi-platinum recording artist, Broadway star, TV host, champion of “Dancing with the Stars,” bean fan and dad. You have until December 12th so put your creative caps on and get to work.

Votigo’s social media platform is powering the contest microsite including viral tools, widgets and entry pre-screening.

A report just release by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research states that one of the main reasons that 3/4 of US online adults now use the social web is due in large part to user ratings, reviews, voting and user-generated video.  Hey, that’s what WE do!  Nice to see it’s paying off.

Executive Summary
Social technology adoption increased tremendously this year. Three in four US online adults now use social tools to connect with each other compared with just 56% in 2007. What else changed? Ratings and reviews, “voting” for Web sites, and peer-generated video experienced the largest growth, while blogs and tagging closely followed. Older adults are now also more likely to participate socially as Spectators and Critics, placing them in the active rungs of our Social Technographics® ladder. Marketers have to get on board with social now — more advanced marketers will speed up customer-driven innovation, sharpen metrics, and improve customer experience. Those who wait to join in will find it increasingly hard to catch up.