“Central to our development has been an unwavering commitment to provide global customers with best-in-class solutions tailored to digital marketing needs, focused on their social media initiatives and enabling them to respond to new market complexities,” said Dr. Santanu Bhattacharya, CEO of Salorix, Inc.

Salorix works with the world’s largest brands and agencies to simplify and scale social media engagement. Their marketing platform enables multi-channel listening, social media campaign planning and engagement in a unified framework. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with offices in New York City and Bangalore, India. Customers include Blue Shield of California, AARP, United Online, HP/Palm and agencies including Mediacom, OMD and Universal McCann.

The industrial kitchen/event space was the scene of the cocktail reception following Vitrue’s first annual client summit, humorously titled “Vitrue School for the Socially Gifted.” Keynote speeches were given earlier in the day by Brian Solis, principle for the Altimeter Group and author of the book “The End of Business as Usual,” as well as Ekaterina Walter, social media strategist for Intel. Vitrue had plenty to talk about itself — the company acquired social gaming platform GamesThatGive in July before rolling out the initial upgrades for version 3.0 of its Vitrue Social Relationship Management platform in August.

But after the business talk was through, it was time for drinks and food — and Hudson Yards Kitchen had plenty to offer on both fronts. The venue featured four food and drink stations that not only served delectable edibles, but also offered workshops on mixology (the alcoholic variant, as opposed to the DJing kind), smoking meats and pasta production.

The smell of pulled pork lured me to the Southern-style (or Suddern-style) station, but it was the country fried chicken with spicy ketchup that made my tastebuds sing. In addition, succulent mac and cheese and green bean casserole made me wonder if I’d been magically transported to Atlanta  – which happens to be where Vitrue is headquartered.

Founder and CEO Reggie Bradford had been keeping tabs on the station as well, monitoring the progress made on the Boston Butt, a massive slab of pork from the upper part of the shoulder from the front leg. His interest led to some discussion about the roots of that name as the Northeast isn’t really regaled for its great smoked meats — turns out it’s a colonial phrase referencing the way the meat was cut in Boston and then packaged into barrels called “butts” for storage or shipment.

Bradford boasts a diversity of marketing experience, having served in marketing and management positions at Miller Brewing Company (before the merger with Coors) as well as WebMD CMO in the 90s. Vitrue is actually Bradford’s third startup, originally developed as a tool for helping brands build communities based on user-generated online video content. However, discussions with clients awakened the need for a more holistic social marketing system.

To that extent, Bradford sees (and Vitrue has been compared to) the social media marketer’s version of SalesForce.com. At its core, Vitrue is a technology company, he said, offering a white-label platform for branded social media efforts. But in addition to software-as-a-service, the company has broken into providing actual social marketing services rather than just the toolkit.

But Bradford is quite fun to chat with not just about social media, but also sports — he loves his University of Georgia Bulldogs. He also told me about living in the Upper East Side in the early Giuliani days — the transition period, when you were more likely to be mobbed in Time Square rather than run over by a mob of tourists. As a big beer fan, I told him he should really take a trip across the East River to sample the craft brews served at the Brooklyn Brewery.

Enjoy some snaps — I wish they could capture how delicious that country fried chicken was.

Pirillo has a massive audience across all his ventures, and consistently providing quality content for all those communities keeps him hopping. So he’s a great example of why the judo philosophy is so vital for companies that want to generate word-of-mouth buzz across the Internet.

By simply tapping into his vast audience and expertise, a company can spread its message to millions of potential customers at once. But no company will get through his virtual door without offering him something in return.

“They’re asking me for my time, my expertise, my audience,” he says. “You’re asking me to do a lot and most of it does nothing for my readers.”

We’ve worked on a few campaigns with Chris, including a couple we put together for HP. It’s hard to pass up an audience that large, and we know we need to bring something to the table to make it worth his while. But we can’t and don’t reserve this approach for big fish like Chris Pirillo or Xavier Lanier, who founded the Notebooks.com family of Web sites.

For a company that adopts the judo philosophy, this fundamental give-and-take becomes a key piece of any online marketing campaign. Successful companies will craft campaigns where the effort needed to participate produces results that are as valuable for the influencers as they are for the brand.

“Rarely does one size fit all,” Lanier says. “It’s kind of like herding cats with bloggers. They all have their own approach, and there’s not one way to approach an audience across different geographies and demographics. So instead of coming to us and saying, ‘We want you to promote our company,’ it’s important for companies to offer value to the whole community, not just the blogger as the community leader.”

Let’s be clear, though: None of this is meant to suggest a pay-per-post approach. Providing value to the entire community means giving influencers like Pirillo, Lanier and others the content they need to engage their communities and help them drive traffic. It means providing appropriate access to products and people so they can credibly and transparently talk about our clients’ brands. It means giving something that benefits them as much as it benefits the company.

And it means giving them the flexibility to present all that content – whether a giveaway, a review or a piece of technical analysis – in the way that best fits their audience. After all, the influencers have already proven their ability to reach your market and get its members to act or buy. Why would you want to get in the way of that and risk removing or losing their endorsement?

When we do it right, the influencers will promote our clients’ brands because doing so helps them drive traffic to their site. It’s why we go out of our way to build personal relationships with influencers across the Web. We try to help them as much as any of our clients, and in turn they help us.

In fact, taking an active interest in their success means that not only do we create an interpersonal relationship that we can lean on in the event it’s necessary to do so, but gaining access to companies and brands helps improve their influence, making both them and us that much more effective with each successive engagement. Take a minute to search for our names via your favorite search engine and you’ll see what other people say about us to see that this is true. We’re proud of the comments influencers have gone out of their way to post about us, and we built personal relationships with hundreds of key influencers to make that happen.

We also work hard to craft marketing campaigns that will benefit them as much as they benefit our clients. We came to them from the start with our hands and heads open, asking them to tell us what would work best. By approaching them as friends with a desire to help, instead of as targets that we intend to exploit, we’re able tap into their influence in a way that delivers maximum results for all, with a minimum of effort.

We place this judo philosophy at the core of everything we do. Instead of overpowering an opponent, the judo master will use his foe’s momentum against him. Rather than waste all our effort trying to force a client’s message out across the blogosphere, we work with site publishers to leverage their existing influence and reach the millions of potential customers they talk with every day.

We even took the same approach as we researched this book. Who better to educate us about the sport than Neil Ohlenkamp, an expert teacher in Southern California who founded and runs one of the most popular judo-related sites on the web. Do a search for the term “judo,” and Ohlenkamp’s site is perched among the top results, higher than the associations that govern the sport.

Ohlenkamp said he started the site on a lark, as a way to help teach more people about the sport he loved. In the years since, the site has become the perfect allegory for his passion. Ohlenkamp tapped the power of the Internet and social media, and did it in a way that allowed him to spread the word on judo further and to more people than most of the country’s top judo associations.

Just as a judo expert uses the momentum of his or her opponent, Ohlenkamp used the Internet and social media to reach a broader audience via less effort. We do the same. It’s possible for a social-media marketing campaign can to ride the existing flow already available online – one just has to understand the dynamic at its core to be able to do so. (The same is true of judo.) People are talking about your brand right now, today, and you can tap into that momentum to help amplify your message when done right.

Companies that learn how to best work with these key influential voices will produce consistently stronger results from their online marketing campaigns while consistently spending less. It takes a mindset focused on mutual benefit. It requires the right strategies, processes and tools.

And when it all comes together, it can produce spectacular results. But for all the right intentions, none of this works without an understanding how word-of-mouth is evolving, and how social media is taking it in new directions.

This is an excerpt from “Social Media Judo” by Ivy Worldwide’s Chris Aarons, Geoff Nelson and Nick White (with Dan Zehr). The book applies the ancient martial art of Judo to the practice of word-of-mouth marketing. Get your copy at Amazon.

“The beauty of social networks is that they are a place where nearly any marketing goal can be achieved, with nearly any marketing tactic,” according to Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Marketing on Social Networks: Branding, Buying and Beyond.”

In a MarketingSherpa survey, 92% of social media marketing respondents said social media marketing was effective at influencing brand reputation and 91% said it worked for increasing brand awareness. These executives found it far less effective for generating sales leads or increasing online sales.

According to eMarketer though, marketers are demonstrating the effectiveness of using social networks for direct marketing and lead generation with brand pages and applications being used to deliver coupons and offers to consumers to drive trials, store traffic and response.

According to Kara Swisher, Harris, who is president of New York- and Los Angeles-based media consultancy Media Link, will also remain at Media Link. The firm was hired by MySpace to advise on restructuring the social networking company’s salesforce.  Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing, is leaving MySpace. *(Millard later told Swisher she is still working for her dozens of other clients at Media Link as its president, but also has a big new gig helping MySpace get its advertising sales house in order, especially related to strategy and execution.)

Millard has been president of Media Link since April 2009. Previously, she served as Co-Chief Executive Officer and President of Media, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In addition, she served as the Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo and also was Executive Vice President and one of the founding members of DoubleClick.

Below is the internal memo obtained by Media Memo:

“Hi everyone,I want to share some thoughts about our advertising product strategy and give you an update on the structure of our sales organization.In the last three months we’ve focused our attention on restructuring the business, refocusing the MySpace user experience, and hiring some talented people particularly in the technology and product organization. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made in these areas and now want to focus on ensuring we have the best advertising product, sales strategy, and team in the market.MySpace has always been a leader in the social media advertising space. Maintaining our leadership position requires that we foster the perfect balance between content and commerce. With this in mind, I’m pleased to announce that we are bringing a new partner into our global organization. Please join me in welcoming to the MySpace team, Media Link – a top media representation and strategic advisory firm founded by Michael Kassan and whose clients have included Microsoft, AT&T, Unilever, Home Depot, and Colgate-Palmolive. Michael is an internationally recognized leader operating at the intersection of the media, advertising, and entertainment industries. He’s the founder and managing principal of Media Link and acts as an advisor to many of the Fortune 100’s best-of-breed global brands

More recently The Guardian, one of the UK’s most widely-read publications, also polled young readers around the world about how they get their daily news, with similar findings: young people are increasingly turning towards the Web as the primary source for their daily news. Both surveys highlight the fact that traditional newspaper outlets should be looking for new ways to build readership among younger audiences.

Social media can be one means of engaging younger readers. Online readers of thelondonpaper, a leading publication owned by News Corp. targeted at twenty-somethings in the UK, were recently presented with a new, socially-oriented site redesign. Readers have responded very enthusiastically, in part due to the social media tools which are now integrated into the news experience. Since giving its one million weekly readers the ability to comment on articles and author their own blog posts earlier this spring, thelondonpaper has witnessed more than 2,000 percent increase in community activity.

Readers also appreciate the fact that thelondonpaper is utilizing Facebook Connect, a capability which enables any website to establish a 2-way connection with Facebook. Thelondonpaper is leading the newspaper industry in the UK by integrating with Facebook at this level. Leveraging Facebook Connect is an example of “Social Unification,” a concept which refers to readers’ ability to unify social connections and community contributions across multiple social destinations.

Now on thelondonpaper website, readers can easily syndicate their contributions from thelondonpaper to their friends on Facebook, and can also invite their Facebook friends to join them on thelondonpaper community. Establishing a 2-way channel between thelondonpaper and Facebook has been very beneficial to the paper, resulting in a 40 percent uplift in traffic since implementation.

Thelondonpaper case serves as an example to all publishers: the key to engaging young readers is social media. Because thelondonpaper understood the interaction patterns of its young, technologically-savvy audience, the paper was able to achieve dramatic business benefits in a short period of time.

Thelondonpaper’s successful execution is an excellent example for other newspapers around the globe to follow as they contemplate a broad shift to social media, which for most publications today is becoming a strategic imperative. By not doing so, they risk disconnecting from their readers altogether.

The social media company was touting it’s new offering Twitter Management System. It allows brand advertisers to identify, analyze and engage based on Twitter trends and conversations versus their competitors. It will compliment Buddy Media’s recently launched offering, the Social Page Management System. (Techcrunch goes into a more detail)

I talked to David Honig about it and he was excited, saying systems like this are the next big opportunity in the social media space. Honig co-founded Media6° but quietly stopped actively working at the company weeks ago. He is now on the Board of Advisors and still has a piece of equity in the company. He didn’t want to elaborate any more about his departure, though he said he is looking for new opportunties. I’ll be watching to see what he does next.

Also at the event was newest member of the Buddy Media’s Board of Advisers, Gary Vaynerchuk, the Wine Library TV host and partner of VaynerMedia.com. Vaynerchuk got up and spoke a few minutes (video below) and said that these metrics will help brands to engage with customers. He also said that social media is not really that difficult to understand. He compared it with the butchers back in the 50s: if they gave you a little extra meat, you would come back. But brands, he said, have to scale their caring, and they’re going to need tools. He added that it would blow the mind of marketers 40 years ago if you told them that they had an opportunity to listen into conversations of their customers.

(His full talk is below. Forgive the poor lighting, camera holding and also the people yelling for him to be louder. They could have just moved closer to the stage like I did, but I guess that wouldn’t have looked cool.)

Truth is, it’s hard to keep up with the regular changes on the regular-time web, never mind the real-time one. And if you spend time thinking, and possibly over-thinking, the situation — especially when you’re overloaded on client projects, or pitching as much business as you possibly can in this economy — the prospect of shifting to a higher gear, full time, is a bit daunting.

Yes, the real time web is here, and in terms of work, it’s a lot. But as for creating and maintaining most brands, it’s also not enough on its own. To build lasting relationships, and solidify brand images that stand the test of time, you need more than 140 characters. You need 140 characters, now, to be sure. But you also need the other stuff — the things you layer those 140 characters on top of.

While everything we do in advertising of any kind is pretty transient, social media is uber-transient. A blog post lives forever, but people (mostly) only read it when it’s new. A Tweet is even more fleeting, especially if your followers follow lots of people. For this reason, social media — in real time — makes a great layer to add to a multi-platform brand effort. For pure long-term brand building, even a constant stream of tweets is somehow missing key elements. But combined with a steady stream of all the other stuff we as agencies can produce, those tweets wield some serious power. Sometimes the best brand images are born in real time, but live on when sustained efforts are applied.

As I am frequently wont to do, I’ll use a non-advertising example to illustrate my advertising point. Partly because I think it kind of fits, and partly because as I write this, we’re approaching July 20, 2009 — the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

When you think of Apollo 11, chances are, the images and sounds that come to mind have something to do with a combination of how old you are, and how much brand work — yes, brand work, whether intended as such or not — has been done for both NASA and Apollo over the years.

If you’re about my age, maybe you have (varyingly fuzzy) memories of watching live as Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. If you’re older than me, you likely conjure images not just of the moon landing, but of President Kennedy’s speech that set the course for the space race in the first place. Or, perhaps your man on the moon imagery has more to do with a guy with an MTV flag. Or a Tom Hanks movie about a different Apollo mission. Or, maybe, it’s a memorable side note from a grade-school lesson about the space shuttle.

Whatever your immediate image, it’s a product, not just of the real-time event — but of the countless images, films, videos, websites, books, patches, decals, visitor experiences, and all the other stuff we as advertising agencies get paid to produce for brands every day. Yes, the stuff created around Apollo 11 is there because it’s an historical event. But, tell the truth — aren’t you pretty much always attempting to turn that next product launch into some sort of historical event?

Now, let’s layer a real-time element over top of all of the above. Whether you heard it when it was first broadcast, or have only heard it in an historical perspective, the recorded transmissions between the lunar module and mission control add texture, and an emotional quality, that cannot be ignored. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It is the sound track to all the moon images you’ve ever seen. Without the imagery, the real-time audio has power, but not as much. Without the audio, the pictures — ditto.

When you think of social media as an ongoing, real-time, text-based soundtrack of sorts, it starts to become easy to see how much stronger it can make all your combined efforts in other media. By itself, it’s strong — but combined with everything else you’re doing, it can help produce something that could stick for forty years.

Most teens and tweens, 85 percent, believe that people will buy or use a specific product because it is mentioned on TV, according to a new study by Pangea Media, an online quiz and quiz technology company. The results of its latest “Pangea Pulse,” which tracked the attitudes and preferences of its tween and teen users towards brands, found that 77 percent of teens and tweens rely on friends to find out cool new brands, followed by seeing those brands in the store, 71 percent, or on a TV commercial, 51 percent.

When asked how they typically find out about new brands online, 26 percent said they see an ad when using a search engine and 24 percent said they learn about new brands on the social networking sites Facebook or Myspace. When asked to cite which social networking site had the “coolest” information about new products or brands, 46 percent said neither, followed by 23 percent who said Myspace. Most teens and tweens, 71 percent, responded that they are not “fans” of a brand on a social networking site.

With regard to technology, most respondents preferred the Google brand, 74 percent, to Yahoo, 21 percent, and Bing, 5 percent. Few teens and tweens listen to music on a Zune—91 percent of respondents said the iPod is cooler. Similarly, teens and tweens prefer YouTube, 94 percent, over other video services.