If, decades from now, I lie on my deathbed having flashbacks of some of the more humiliating moments of my life, then last week’s encounter at a 7-Eleven will be one of them. It was at such an establishment on East 23rd Street in Manhattan where a young, amiable staff member saw me working the Slurpee machine and asked, “Do you need help with that?”

The fact was, I did. I didn’t know how to get the Coke Slurpee to come out, nor did I know how to order an Oscar Mayer hot dog. I was juggling a handful of store-brand products as well, while surreptitiously reaching for my iPhone to document it all (see photos and screenshots on Flickr).

You might ask why I was playing the part of a convenience store anthropologist. No, I wasn’t trying to be the Jane Goodall of the Slurpee kingdom. Instead, I was there, still in my sport jacket following an Internet Week event, to arm my mafia. This mafia consists of nearly 300 friends and virtual associates in Mafia Wars, one of three of Zynga’s social games (along with FarmVille and YoVille) participating in a cross-promotional deal with 7-Eleven.

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I can’t wait to tell you about this new social network I just joined. The technology’s cutting-edge, and you have to pay to get in. For me, it cost $1.29, involved a trip to the grocery store, and included a 7.25-ounce box of macaroni and cheese with my purchase.

It didn’t have to be a box of macaroni. It could have been a carton of ice cream, a book, or the bottle of Magic Hat beer I’m drinking as I write this. I’ll show how it works, using the last example:

1) I opened the fridge and grabbed a beer, though anything with a standard barcode would work just as well.

2) I picked up my iPhone and opened the free Stickybits application that I downloaded earlier. It’s also available on Android.

3) I used the app to scan the barcode on the beer bottle.

4) The app brought up a 12-second video clip that a Stickybits user shot, showing that very brand of beer. There’s another clip by someone named Jefferson Burruss that shows someone drinking the beer. Erin Carney said in a note, “This is delicious!!” The scans came from Burlington, Vt., Watertown Mass., and Austin, Texas.

5) I took a picture of the bottle and uploaded it. My note and location joined the others.

Now I’m connected in some strange and fascinating way with these fellow consumers of a product I’m currently enjoying. I can leave my thoughts for anyone else who scans the barcode in the future. I can track the product as it’s virtually passed on from one person to the next. Want to buy the world a Coke? Now the world can scan it and send their thanks.

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If you were going to create a new application or tool to take advantage of the current trends in social media, what elements would you include? Add your thoughts in the comments, but I’ll share my wish list.

First, there should be some mobile component, or it should be entirely mobile. Much of the social media innovation currently is on the mobile front, and it dovetails with consumer media usage patterns.

Next, it should be tied to consumers’ locations. GPS is one of those so-called killer apps for mobile devices, and it’s almost a waste of the mobile device not to incorporate location in some way.

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If you look ahead at the agency business several years out, where will social media fit in, especially once some of the hype dies down?The question occurred to me after hearing a speech by someone I’ve worked with for over four years now: 360i CEO Bryan Wiener. When I saw how Bryan touched on social media in his “Agency of the Future” talk at the IAB Annual Leadership Summit last month, I was itching to go deeper, and I happened to know how to reach him. For full disclosure, the idea to interview him was mine alone. I rarely mention 360i at all in these columns, but this was a story I was excited to run.

You can read a few of Bryan’s broader thoughts about the coming evolution of agencies on 360i’s blog. In this exclusive interview, the focus is entirely on social media.

Social Media Insider: How does social marketing fit in with the agency of the future?

Bryan Wiener: The unfettered rise of digital, and of social media in particular, has brought about staggering shifts in consumer behavior — and this requires equally dramatic changes to the way agencies operate in order to help brands connect with consumers in this new dimension. The agency of the future must have digital expertise in its DNA, with search, social and mobility — three things that have completely transformed consumer behavior — as the three key legs of the stool.

Not surprisingly, social marketing serves as an indispensable leg to this stool for the simple reason that it provides a channel for developing a direct, unadulterated relationship between a consumer and a brand. And building relationships is becoming a more critical component of brand marketing as the media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented and cluttered.

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Lots of sports drink, but not so much social: Where was the social media in Superbowl ad spots? (Image via telegraph.co.uk)

If social media has finally gone mainstream, where was it during the Super Bowl? It wasn’t visible in many of the spots.With Facebook passing the 400 million user mark and so much of the buzz about the ads happening on Twitter, you’d expect more social media love from the ads. Instead, the Web site URLs at the end of the spots tended to go to the advertiser’s main site. Where were the callouts to become a fan, follower, or friend?

Here are ten reasons why social media wasn’t front and center during the Super Bowl ads:

1) Social belonged elsewhere in the architecture. Marketers must make decisions on where social media fits within their digital architecture. Frequently, their main site serves as the hub that links out to their social presence elsewhere, and those social properties link back to the site.

That doesn’t have to be the case; a social network, blog, or microsite could serve as a hub, or it may be a decentralized approach without a hub but with the pieces still connecting together. For Super Bowl advertisers, their hub tended to be either their homepage or a page within their main site. Brands with an active presence in social media had an opportunity to direct consumers to their social channels from their sites, yet that’s where a number of marketers fell short.

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Image by nicksayers via Flickr

Everything you need to know about social media measurement was covered in 45 minutes at MediaPost’s OMMA Social event in San Francisco last week.OK, that’s not entirely true, but the five panelists I had the honor of moderating covered a lot of ground. They probably could tell you everything that matters — if you gave them just a little more time to do so. There is a lot of ground to cover, as you might have inferred from my column on 100 ways to measure social media.

Instead of trying to rehash the session, I’m letting the panelists share their thoughts in their own words. Below are a series of questions that I either asked during the session, I planned on asking, or the audience asked. Note that I shortened this version somewhat for readability; the “director’s cut” is on my blog.

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Foursquare: The Ashton Kutcher of location-based apps?

I have a confession to make. On more than one occasion over the past several weeks, I’ve excused myself at several restaurants to go to the bathroom to indulge my guilty little habit. My wife tolerates it, but it’s taking a toll on my social life, and getting addicted once makes it all too easy for it to happen again.I’m referring, of course (ahem), to location-based mobile social networking applications. I’ve been playing with eight of them lately: Buzzd, CauseWorld, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, MyTown, Whrrl, and Yelp. These apps all offer ways to find friends, local hot spots, and often both, and they’re increasingly incorporating location-based advertising.

I have mixed feelings about the overall craze. I’ve discovered friends near me through these apps, and I’ve learned about local destinations. Yet it can get antisocial; I’ve discreetly checked in under restaurant tables across the country. And when I’ve really wanted to be discreet, yes, I’ve done it in the bathroom. It gets to be a problem when you start interacting with the apps so much that you’re not interacting with the people in front of you.

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