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Did you watch 60 Minutes this past Sunday? Charlie Rose did a segment on Design Thinking and David Kelley, CEO of IDEO, the Silicon Valley design firm.

You are probably wondering what design thinking has to do with social media.
It’s simple, design thinking is listening and observing users to design/create products and services that will work the way users use them. What a novel idea… creating products people want to buy because they are intuitive.

Now back to social media. Social media, in many ways is the art of listening to and engaging with your audience in a way they feel comfortable with, resulting in positive and constructive relationships, increased goodwill and awareness and ultimately a decision to purchase and recommend your product to their friends.

If you have an opportunity, I highly recommend you watch the segment.

In the mean time, here is the article: How to design breakthrough inventions

If your brand’s social media strategy includes only Twitter and Facebook, you’re falling behind. Newer sites, such as Pinterest and Instagram, are growing rapidly and consumers are pushing the accelerator.

Instagram, for example, has grown from 5 million users to more than 30 million since its launch in October 2010. More than 1 billion photos are uploaded daily on the site. The mobile-centric, photo sharing platform has generated so much interest, Facebook dropped $1 billion for its acquisition in April.

What’s the appeal? According to Brian Zuercher, founder of social media photo aggregation company VenueSeen, people are visual, so consumers are naturally gravitating toward the image-based platform. Simply put, he says, Instagram provides a way for a brand to share its story through a series of photos, and for customers to directly connect with a brand.

“Text is simply not engaging, and that’s why Facebook went to Timeline, to add more imagery. A photo has four times as much influence as a comment because it’s visual; it sticks in people’s minds,” he said. “Brands are using this to tell their real story through photographs in which consumers are the curators.”

Instagram, he adds, has hit a critical mass of users. Sixty-percent of restaurant photos uploaded to the site are of food or drink, and restaurants are increasingly using those images as part of their digital marketing strategies.

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Automating tech support and customer service with canned responses angering customers was not enough, some corporations and brand are considering a similar approach with… yes, social media

The following article from Jeremiah Owyang brings up new questions.  Aren’t corporations learning from their past mistakes? Is it better to anger a large portion of your constituency or not respond to every question or post?

What has happened, as Jeremiah mentions, to customer service and tech support in the pre-social media era is likely to generate a substantial backlash and some brands and corporations are willing to take the chance.

That’s right, surprisingly. in the next phase of the social web, brands are applying analysis and digital intelligence to better reach us. Here’s how it’s gonna go down…

Companies are struggling to keep up with social media conversations, the growth in this channel has exploded, and will soon automate their responses, for better or for worse. Expect industries that have intense customer support woes like airlines like United Airlines and telecommunications like Comcast to be overwhelmed with angry customers spilling to social media sites to complain and demand fixes, and consumer companies like Coke, Pepsi, hospitality like Hyatt and Retailers like Best Buy to want to reach out and entice potential customers.

What does social media automation look like? First of all, recognize it’s a subset of Social Performance Software, which takes cues from existing optimized channels in text based chat bots you see on websites, automated IVR systems (ya know the automated phone systems you call for 1800 numbers) and optimization software we see in digital advertising targeting.

What? Bots in social media blasphemy you say?  Before we light the torches and take to the pitchforks, we already know that reports suggest that 40% of social networking accounts are spam, (much from bots) so automatic technology in social isn’t anything new –it just hasn’t been formally introduced as a valid channel for corporations to use.

There are at least four types of Social Media Performance examples which we can expect, among them include:

1. Content Publishing on Timer:
2. Social Content Optimization
3. Proactive Response
4. Human-like Relationships

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When potential dates, employers and friends glance at your online social profiles, what do they see? EyeTrackShop, a startup that runs eye-tracking studies for advertisers, helped Mashable find out by applying its technology to the profile pages of popular social networks.

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U.S. Navy’s Captain, Director- Defense Media Activity Anacostia, David Werner, shares how the U.S. Navy approached several recent, high-profile episodes where public debate manifested itself on Navy social media properties.