Why bother with social media. For TurboTax, "We want to get more consumers, and we want to keep the ones we got," says Christine Morrison, Social Media Marketing Manager for TurboTax. "It took us a while to get to that [idea] crystallized," she said. Don't think of TurboTax as a particularly social brand? Well, "We are known for our online communities," insists Morrison. Believe it or not, the brand's social efforts are actually "organized around sales," Nick Collier, SVP, Interactive Creative Director at Dailey, TurboTax's creative agency. The brand's first campaign – featuring Vanilla Ice doing a little "tax …

Tim Schigel of ShareThis.com, not surprisingly, believes “sharing” is the new, most important metric of ROI in social media. That’s not the stretch. The example he gave at OMMA Social was – literally. It was for Mederma, a brand that is a remedy for people suffering from scar tissue or stretch marks. Schigel’s team did some research and figured out that there are 12.5 million people actively sharing information about those skin ailments on the Web, so they developed a campaign explicitly targeting them and directing them to a page where they could download a coupon for the pharmaceutical …

Asked what the current industry "threshold" is for a corporate video to be deemed "viral," Feed Co.'s Josh Warner responded that it might be time to retire the term altogether. "Viral is a myth," he told an attendee at OMMA Social in New York. "I'm over viral completely and utterly." Instead of planning for a viral result, Warner said he tells Feed Co.'s clients to "dig deep to get quality engagements." "You can go out and pound views through a [media] buy," he said, adding that ultimately that will just get you a paid media campaign. He …

Troja, founder of Social Symphony said the new dirty word in social media marketing may be "free." No, not free in the sense that Wired's Chris Anderson might mean it, but in the sense that budget-conscious marketers and PR agencies do. Speaking during a panel on "paid" vs. "earned" strategies at OMMA Social in New York, Troja said the whole nomenclature comes out of the PR industry, which was first to begin using the concept of "earned media" long before social media emerged. Heck, he said they began using it before the Internet emerged - about 20 to 30 …

That's what Feed Co. President Josh Warner said is happening on the social graph, where the viral nature of brand news seems to be dissipating at faster rates than it used to. Warner, whose company "seeds" branded videos to social users, says that a typical campaign used to have a half life of about "four weeks." "Now it's a week. Next year, it is going to be several days," he predicted during the morning session of OMMA Social in New York, adding, "It gets harder and harder." Warner didn't explain the phenomenon, but it could be that users …

PepsiCo. Social media marketing guru Bonin Bough spend a lot of time talking about what's been good about the soft drink marketer's social media efforts to date, but asked by an OMMA Social attendee to share what has gone wrong, Bough put his former PR hat on and did a masterful job of spin control. "We faced our share of bumps," he said, quickly shifting his response to something that has universally been viewed as a success: Pepsi's ground-breaking "Refresh" campaign. On the first day of the campaign, Bough said PepsiCo's social marketing team was aghast to see …

The big change taking place in media and society isn't the breakthrough of a new technological platform, so much as it is the simplification of well-established ones. That's the view of B. Bonin Bough, global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, and opening keynoter at OMMA Social in New York. Bough, who is one of the "pioneers" of social media, says the transformational technologies have been around since the early days of the Internet. What makes them different now, and why they are gaining critical mass, is that the "interfaces" for using them have grown simpler. …

Okay, this is just great. BabyCenter has created a smartphone app called BootyCaller which allows women to automatically notify their husbands when they're ovulating, for purposes I hope I don't have to explain here.

Asked about the threshhold for viral video or other content, Feed's Josh Warner declared that "Viral is a myth. What we like to do is dig deep and work hard to get quality engagement." He said agencies and brands use viral as an excuse to underbudget for campaigns. "You have to go out and earn it whether it's earned or paid media," he said, emphasizing that advertisers can't skimp on the creative execution. "It really does come down to the creative," said Warner, who prophecied that in a year no one will even be talking about viral. It's a mirage …

In the panel on paid and earned media, one of the questions arising is whether a brand has to be considered cool in th first place to launch a successful social media campaign, with Pepsi brands as an example. Would Pepsi's paid or earned media projects have taken off if they were pushing plumbing parts? Kristine Shine of PopSugar Media suggested Pepsi wasn't that cool to begin with, but by attaching the brand to environmental causes or people doing good, the company has been able to boost the brand's cachet. Technorati's Richard Jalichandra said ads for any product or …