It was no accident that all of the speakers from the seminar last Wednesday, were responsible for formulating and overseeing highly successful social media initiatives – in fact the day after the seminar, Ovation TV & KickApps won the SAMMY award for Best Social Community in New York City. And in thinking about all of our speakers, I was reminded of the common threads that I’ve seen over the years that make a difference in successful social media initiatives.

I’m often asked what it is that our clients do that make them successful – what it is that truly creates an engaging site and really moves the needle when it comes to the business case for social media.

There are (in my opinion) three things that determine this. Of course I’m making the assumption that the product or service that you’re selling or the general concept of your website is something that appeals to some (hopefully large) group of people out there.

First and foremost, you need to have a strategy and a business case around why you’re trying to foster deeper engagement amongst your constituents. Our most successful customers have smart people that work on these types of projects. They spend time thinking about why they’re involved in social media, what it is that’s going to entice users to participate in their concepts and how they can grow their audience through contests, campaigns and other marketing initiatives that will affect revenue streams within their business.

Second and equally as important, you need the right technology. This could be as simple as identifying the right message board provider or video provider, or it could be identifying the need for a full suite of social applications like those that we provide at KickApps. But in any case, it will not matter how smart you are or how brilliant your ideas are if you don’t have technology in place that can support your initiative. The technology needs to always work, it needs to scale to handle large growth, it needs to be deployed easily but in a way that’s highly customizable and most importantly, it needs to be flexible so you can always go back and tweak it. As you probably know – the minute you launch a web initiative is the minute you want to start to make changes to it.

Finally, you need to MANAGE this initiative. Too many companies think that the launch is the thing. Fortunately, the launch is just the beginning of the fun! That is when it’s time to listen, to observe and to change things accordingly. This is the time to get to know your technology even more intimately and to truly understand how you can leverage the technology to grow your experience even further. We like to tell our clients that a community without a curator is like a party without a host.

The bottom line though – and the common thread amongst all our speakers last week – is that they all focused on these three elements. It’s virtually impossible in my opinion to be successful unless you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these concepts. Even if you’ve got 2 out of 3 in place, you’re likely to fall short of your goals – and we don’t want this to happen!

So please feel free to reach out to us at any time if we can help you with these concepts and any others that will help you and your businesses become more successful.

Joining us and making some terrific presentations were:

Alan Wolk, creative strategist at Toad Stool Consultants. Alan is a good friend of KickApps and also has very interesting insight and ideas about how brands can use social media in their marketing mix. His presentation presented some very creative ways brands could utilize Facebook, Twitter and online communities, to engage customers and drive sales.

Jeramie McPeek, VP, interactive services at the Phoenix Suns, is a true pioneer of social media in the professional sports industry. Under his leadership, PlanetOrange.net, the fan community for the Phoenix Suns has become extremely successful and has even won an EMMY Award. One of my favorite stories was how fans from Australia and New Zealand that met on Planet Orange traveled to the U.S. on a trip to see Suns games (spending over $15k each!).

Allison Kingsley, director of digital media, and Megan Smith, community manager, at Ovation TV, talked about best practices for growing and managing a vibrant community of people that are passionate about art & creativity. It was very interesting to learn how after launching their KickApps powered online community, Ovation TV’s pageviews grew by over 300 percent and time spent on the website quadrupled! Oh…and, Ovation TV/KickApps won the SAMMY Award for Best Social Community!

Finally, Dylan Boyd, VP at eROI, a very creative agency based in Portland, OR, talked about some best practices and lessons learned from creating and launching social media websites for clients like Wacom. He talked about a phased approach for creating an online community and strategies they undertook to grow and engage artists and creative professionals.

We’ll be posting the slides from the day and also video shortly.

Sandy shares a story about how the IBM development team listened and collaborated with customers on a new product – sMash. As a result, they were able to deliver one of IBM’s most successful product releases.

Jeremiah breaks down the future of the social web into five eras:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

He talks about what’s happening or will likely happen in each of these eras. This is a great way of thinking about the social web and is a great guide for anyone looking at this space. Here’s a clip of his presentation where he previews the five eras.

Whether you’re a brand, media & entertainment company, are large or medium-sized enterprise, small business or non-profit, the social web has transformed the way you engage and communicate with your customers, partners and employees. We see this everyday inside KickApps as we develop and bring great new applications to the market, and we see it in the way our clients are implementing and deploying these applications on their websites.

That said, it’s a new world and we’re all learning a lot each day about what it means and how it works best. Engage@KickApps is a place where we, our clients and the industry as a whole can come together to share best practices, ask questions and learn from each other. We’ll keep the conversation going and would love you to join us.

We’re starting with extending the great conversations that we had in San Francisco last week during our Social Media in the Enterprise Seminar. During our half day session, over 100 people engaged in a great conversation led by Alex Blum, our CEO, Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester’s highly regarded analyst covering the social web, Sandy Carter, VP at IBM and a true pioneer in B2B social media, Dylan Boyd, VP of strategy at eROI, an extremely creative marketing agency in Portland, Oregon, and James Mastan, founder of Blue Rain Marketing, in Seattle, who has done some amazing work on a off-brand online community for Microsoft Office’s OneNote product.

So, come on in and join the conversation. Sign up, create your profile and join the conversation.