Social media offers direct relationships with customers and potential customers. So the question for global brands is what are you going to do with that?

It seems like we’re still in the sales funnel stage with most social media. Given analytics and CRM the temptation to move a prospect down the funnel and convert to a sale overrides branding goals. But are company’s diminishing their brand in pursuit of an immediate sale?

Owen Media is getting more social marketing requests this year. Our challenge is to counsel our clients to foster customer involvement that extends the brand 100% of the time and converting sales most of the time.

We spent the last few months helping Bay Area startup Ucan launch its composting bins and bags. While we focus on enterprise IT, we also work with new energy and sustainability-minded clients, such as Intel’s smart grid initiative, Aerovironment’s electric car charging technology and now Ucan.

Ucan is the hot new entry in a rapidly expanding market. Curbside food waste recycling is growing by more than 50% per year. This is probably the fastest transformation in the history of solid waste. Economics and sustainability are prompting the change. Composting is two-thirds less expensive than landfilling (depending on where you live), produces a valuable agricultural product and produces clean electricity as a byproduct.

What’s not to like? Ucan figured out that plenty of consumers don’t like the act of putting scraps in a bin and made the job substantially easier. Owen Media helped Ucan by getting placements with dozens of publications including the LA Times.

If lowering your garbage bill and saving the planet resonate with you, get your can at www.ucanproducts.com

Google announced its cloud music service last week. Normally we don’t care about frothy consumer stories, but we are knee-deep in Android market validation this month and have to chime in on the iTunes v Google Music debate.

iTunes has its fans, but don’t underestimate the newcomer. Android handsets and personal computers can download and purchase music easily. According to Larry Magid at HuffPo:

“In a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes Store, Google now lets you purchase music from the Android Market from an Android device or a personal computer.”

Why does this mattert? Android represents 53% of the smartphone OS market and growing rapidly. Apple is about 25% and shrinking. In China, the smartphone market is just taking off and it favors Android substantially. Smartphone app downloads have increased 870% in China between January and October 2011.

Maybe you’ve had your iPhone for a few years. Billions of people are getting their first smartphone in the next few years and it will almost certainly be an Android phone.

Not that iPhone isn’t a better device, it’s just economics. You can get a premium Android smartphone in India for $160 (USD) without a contract. That will sell a lot of phones. And maybe music, too.

AWS landed on the Top 500 list today. There are 8+ Seattle area companies exhibiting at Supercomputing this week. The move to commodity clusters and more recently cloud services for HPC favors Seattle companies. You can read more at my post today at GeekWire, the leading Seattle tech site.

I’m sure I’ll get some blowback from semanticists who parse Supercomputing from HPC. IDC recently said SC is a $1.1 billion subset of the $5 billion HPC market, so I guess SC needs HPC and vice versa.

To all my friends at SC’11 in Seattle this week, enjoy the unusually sunny weather here (at least today). If you need something to do while you’re here, check out my previous “Welcome” post.

Supercomputing 2011 returns to Seattle November 12-18. Owen Media has sent clients to SC every fall since 1997 (Cray, CAPS Entreprise, ClearSpeed, IBM, InfiniBand, Intel, HP and others). For the 250 exhibitors coming to the conference, here are local resources to pull off a successful event. Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t include a few shameless promotions.

Messaging and strategy: Do you have your cloud story locked down? Owen Media works with global HPC brands on marketing strategy and messaging. We help our clients demonstrate thought leadership. We believe people are more loyal when they are inspired, not incented to act.

PR: This is what we do best. We know the editors and analysts at SC and can schedule interviews. Do you have a good story to tell? See bullet one, above.

Collateral:  We integrate design with subject matter experts to speed delivery of high production value collateral on complex subjects.

Hospitality:  There are still great venues available adjacent to the convention center if you know who to call. We’ve secured a discount from one of Seattle’s leading sushi restaurants for our SC’11 clients. We can coordinate private, VIP or all conference events to elevate your brand or engage your target audience.

Booth property:  The two leading booth property vendors in Seattle are Exhibits Northwest and Exhibit Design. If you’ve made it this far without booth property you need to hurry. There’s still time to order a pop up booth with graphics for the event. Exhibit Design offers Owen Media clients a discount if you order early.

Signage:  Supergraphics is the largest signage vendor in Seattle. Banners, booth signage, even street light banners are available. In fact, there are 500 street light poles near the Convention Center available for your banners during the month of Nov. Owen Media clients receive a discounts from Supergraphics. Ask for Zac Thorpe.

Printing: Alpha Graphics is one of the city’s largest commercial printers and has a location adjacent to the Convention Center. Ask for Timmy Brewer, the convention sales lead. No discounts but free delivery to the Convention Center.

Photocopies:  There is an on-premise FedEx Kinkos at the Convention Center. Sonya Tracey is the FedEx Kinkos contact for convention related print jobs. You will probably get better, more responsive service from Brenda Galang, owner of Golem Copies, 3 blocks from the Convention Center. She’ll provide a discount to Owen Media clients who submit their print orders three days prior to deadline.

Owen Media has been involved in every IDF since the conference started in 1997. Given all that has changed in the last 14 years, innovation is still the premise for conference success. Last week’s installation didn’t disappoint with Google’s commitment to x86 on Android, the coming Ultrabooks and the new 22 nanometer process technology, Ivy Bridge.

The Owen team flew in 17 global technology leaders for special events for the conference. These guys were impressed with the announcements, but also enjoyed world class hospitality in SF. All hoped to return next cycle. If so, they’ll see Owen Media there, too.

Take your mobile app and design stories to Mobile Marketer. The 38k circ. trade is looking for news and innovation stories on how you’re engaging customers with mobile apps and campaigns.

Given mobile’s confluence around marketing objectives, it’s surprising there aren’t more mobile marketing outlets. Mashable and Techcrunch cover the category, but ostensibly from a technology perspective. The bulk of mobile development is for marketing purposes.

If you need editor contact info, send us a note and we’ll connect you.

Americans average more than 11 hours per month on Facebook. But news, not social, is the top traffic driver. Websites report that the leading source of inbound traffic is news. See the report today from Outbrain that confirms what we’ve been hearing from our clients for the past four years: Social and search are good, but good press coverage drives more traffic.

Tell a story.

Blogs have lost their luster among marketing strategists. Five years ago clients were falling over themselves to start blogs. Then reality set in. Today, when I suggest adding a blog feature to a site, clients react with visible discomfort.

It’s not that blogs don’t dominate the landscape. WordPress, the most popular CMS and blogging tool, comprises more than 10% of all sites on the web. Blogs in general represent more than a third of all web pages.

I still recommend blogs to clients, not because they’re popular or free, but because they communicate a lot about a company, product and brand that static sites fail to do. The top four reasons you need a blog feature:

1. Search engine optimization: Google, Bing and Yahoo love fresh meat. Improve your search results with a regularly updated and relevant blog.
2. Easiest way to post, distribute updated info: CMS tools are getting easier, including the blogging features embedded in Joomla, WordPress and other PHP-based services. Why pay a webmaster at $100 per hour to post a new product announcement when you can do it yourself in a few minutes?
3. Raise your social media influence: Your blog can drive content into your FB, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts instantly and easily. You can also use Technorati (ZN36TGJGMK4G) and feed services to syndicate your content deep into the web.
4. Fog the mirror: Investors, partners, customers, potential employees and others are visiting your site to qualify your organization. Show a pulse. An updated blog demonstrates a dynamic, intelligent, thought leader that is engaged in the industry. It’s part of a larger strategy to take ownership of the conversation in your category.

So why the heartburn among clients? They don’t have the time, desire or skills to post regularly. While blogging is free, the time and capacity to write isn’t. There are easy fixes for this. Find the leading news outlets for your category and simply respond to the hot topics of the moment. Confab with your PR manager and gin up a list of the top 5 industry topics. You don’t need a white paper, you just need a point of view.

Last Month NYT reported a million digital subscribers for its paid digital service. The NYT went from 100,000 to a million subscribers in three months, an impressive growth rate. The model succeeded despite hand wringing from news freeloaders and industry analysts (paidContent.com predicted the model would fail). There are still a lot of questions about the economics, but the elephant in the room has been addressed. People will pay for quality content.

Yesterday, America’s second greatest news outlet, The Onion, instituted a paywall. The Onion has a lot of influence among 18-35 year old, college educated Internet power users. Combined with the NYT, the Onion paywall further sets expectations that quality content is not free in the Internet.

The final threshold for paid content is the daily newspaper carrying wire services like Associated Press.

I’ll hold off on the “I told you so” for a year or two, but last March no one expected such a wave of support for paid content so quickly.