• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 31, 2011

According to FanAppz Founder-CEO Jon Siegal it's about getting consumers to do stuff, and ideally stuff with a marketers products or brands.

All the social interaction, and data gathering are nice, he said, but the bottom line is, well marketing. And marketing he said, is about getting a consumer to convert to some kind of marketing intended behavior.

"At the end of the day we're trying to get the fan to do something, open an account, convert," he said, adding that an obsession with getting consumers to simply interact may be nice, but it may not move the needle. "We try to make it so social that the results suffer at the end of the day," Siegal asserted.

Well, he may be a bit extreme, and there certainly are a lot of brand goals that have nothing to do with actually converting an action or behavior, but he does have a point too. And it reminds me of the column Erik Sass wrote in todays "SocialGraf" column in MediaPost's Social Media and Marketing Daily, which reflects on the Pepsi Refresh Project. That column points out that Pepsi was extremely successful in all the right social measures, but sales of its soda pop actually declined nearly 9%. Duh.