Building legitimate social equity requires slowly shifting the perceptions of others. Building social equity, and understanding how to use it, is fundamental to maximizing revenue through social media.

Three phases to maximizing revenue through social media

These are not steps. When you’ve spent enough time focusing on awareness, your social equity will reach a level that will allow you to create engagement-type campaigns that will be successful. If you try launching engagement-type campaigns without building your social equity to a sufficient level, your campaigns will not be successful - and should be an indicator that you need to focus on awareness & build your social equity.

It’s also important to note that having enough social equity to successfully move to the next phase doesn’t mean that attention should be completely removed from the previous phase. (i.e. If you move from awareness to engagement; you should still continue awareness efforts. If you stop your awareness effort you risk decreasing your social equity.) 

Awareness (Social Equity Required: Low)

The first phase of maximizing revenue using social media is establishing a presence and earning a reputation. Before you get started you’ll need to define some goals, and define what groups of people you want to build a relationship with.

Once you’ve defined those things; you can decide what social media channels you’d like to participate in. Depending on your goals and your audience, you might end up choosing several channels. These posts can help you make your decision for companies or for individuals.

Many larger brands want to bypass this phase and jump into engagement; the reason usually is that they’ve built up substantial lists of users via other media. Often these brands blanket-invite anyone who’s interacted with them in the past to join them in their new campaign. The biggest problem with doing this is that you’re not qualifying your audience. Ideally, you’d target users who already participate in some social media channels & are informed about how to participate on the channels you’re inviting them to. These active users have the best chance of becoming advocates for you. (Adversely, if you invite users who aren’t interested in participating - you could end up with a bunch of ‘dead’ accounts following you. This can have negative repercussions for you and your community for several reasons. I’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming post called “Social Media Deadfall, Dangers of The Unfocused.”)

So once you have goals & defined the channels you want to create a presence on; you can begin establishing your presence and earning the reputation you want. There are two reasons people join communities - for value or for fun. (Usually some combination of the two; but it’s proven helpful if you plot where you’d like to be on the spectrum between value & fun.)

This might be helpful; here are some high-level social activities. They extend across value-providing users and fun-providing users because the actives are basically the same; it’s the intention that sways toward one or the other.

Value
Provide helpful links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content

Fun
Provide entertaining links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content

Once you’ve established your presence and have developed your reputation; you can begin engaging your community in a different way. (There are benchmarks that indicate when it’s time to begin engagement-type campaigns; but it’s often different for every community. The best option is to ask your community if they’re ready for an engagement campaign, and gauge the response.)

Engagement (Social Equity Required: Medium)

For engagement campaigns to be successful through social media, a social equity foundation is required. I realize ‘success’ is defined differently by different people; here’s my definition: To have a successful social media engagement campaign the campaign needs to be directed at qualified users, achieve predefined goals, and increase encourage long term communication.

I’ve been describing engagement campaigns as marketing roller-coasters. Done right, they can create a spike in community participation but once the campaign is over the participation level will likely fall back down to levels prior the campaign. — Of course, there are campaigns that show a spike in community participation which never go back to previous levels. There are also campaigns that cause community participation to fall well below pre-campaign levels after the campaign is done. — The hope is that community participation will permanently increase incrementally with each engagement campaign run. To achieve this; post-campaign analysis should always be comprehensive.

There are many tools and techniques for moving from engagement to social commerce. Determining when it’s appropriate to integrate social commerce into your community depends on the actions you want your community to do. If the cost of introducing social commerce to your community outweighs the potential revenue it can produce; you need to grow your community before investing.

Social Commerce     (Social Equity Required: High)

Reviews: A great way to begin to integrate an aspect of social commerce into your community is to provide a product/ service review tool that can integrate with your e-commerce or catalog site. Not only would this give your users the ability to actively endorse you; it would also allow those participants to connect to users who are interested in similar products/ services. (i.e. If I submit a review via Facebook on my new Mac laptop, people reading that review might contact me through my Facebook profile asking follow-up questions. These connections are often the point of joining communities.)

Shopping: The obvious integration option is allowing your community to preview products/ services through the site they’ve been participating on. Systems like Payvment mash-up the social network and the e-commerce website. (video demo) However, you can integrate shopping behavior with your community by making compelling exclusive offers to either visit your e-commerce site, or visit your store.

Sharing: An inherent benefit of social mediums is that sharing functionalities are usually built-in. Getting a qualified, engaged community to share products/ services they’re interested in is usually an easy task. The key to sharing is understanding how the user likes to share & how much control they like to have over sharing. Ensure they have the controls they need to share. (i.e. Many users like to select specific people to share with, rather than posting something to everyone. Many users like to include a personal message, rather than having a standard description included.)

Pricing: If you’re asking members of your community to leave the site and shop, whether it be on a different site, or in-store, exclusive pricing is a fantastic way to achieve it. In addition to getting users to shop through the channel you want; a byproduct of offering exclusive pricing is that you’ll get customers who aren’t yet members joining to get the exclusive pricing. Tip: A great way to ensure quality members is to identify social KPI and make exclusive pricing available to members who help achieve those metrics. (i.e. If you want guest blog posts, make an exclusive available to those who offer them. You can even make offers cumulative or loyalty-based.)

Registration: If you’re asking members to go to your e-commerce platform to do their shopping; offer an express registration to make things simpler for community members. Facebook Connect, and several OpenID methods are easy to integrate. Even if you don’t use a social media platform that allows easy registration; there are always innovative ideas to create an express registration. For instance a social application called Hippopost allows users to send customized postcards, greeting cards, playing cards, etc, to friends. This requires personal information, which can be collected and automatically transfered to an e-commerce platform for express registration.
Tip: Amazon, PayPal, and Google offer checkout options that might help community members checkout faster.

There’s been a lot of talk about social commerce taking over e-commerce. I don’t think that’ll happen; but I do think it represents a massive opportunity to increase revenue. This post represents a framework describing how to maximize revenue through social commerce.

I’m definitely open to elaborating on anything; and would appreciate any feedback or questions.

(Please comment here, or on Twitter & I’ll respond.)

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No one wants to have a blog that makes people uneasy about visiting & reading content. Over the past month, I conducted a survey across Canada/ US & reviewed several dozen blogs to find collective ‘pet-peeves’.

Here are 7 things to avoid:

Note: There are other content suggestions & UX suggestions I have when it comes to optimizing your blog; these tips are intended to make your users feel comfortable reading & sharing your content.

Don’t polish your information: Valuable content should be simple, and clear. If you have to encase your content in a widget, or have a bunch of sharing buttons surrounding your content, it might seem desperate & confusing. Some of my favorite blogs simply serve up the content without tricks to get users to share.

Remember banner blindness when using widgets: You remember banner blindness. It occurs when users ignore areas on a website that appear to be advertisements. I’m a big fan of having a right or left rail, with additional content; but for blogs that clutter up their rails with badges, and widgets - beware of banner blindness. I’ve actually seen some blogs that don’t have enough room using one rail, so they use 2 to house all their badges and widgets. Note to those users: you’re no longer in the cub-scouts - badges do not need to be displayed. Most people don’t care & it distracts from your content.

Over-the-top personal branding gets creepy: I often read blogs during lunch at work and find it really creepy when a huge smiling face greets me. I’d really like the ability to browse through blogs without feeling like I’m auditing real estate broker ads. Focus on delivering your content in a professional way, and leave the big photo’s of yourself on Facebook.

There are things you just shouldn’t say: I’m not the only one who reads blogs at work. I hate having to quickly scroll past a bad word or cover it with another window. Keep it clean, or notate that it’s not safe for work.

 

Comments should not be found, they should be posted: To everyone who pulls tweets or facebook shares into their comment stream: please stop. If you’re trying to encourage conversations on your blog; cluttering up your comment stream with ‘comments’ from people not participating is a really bad idea.

Moderation is mostly good: 80% of the blogs I’ve surveyed properly moderate their blogs. Meaning they either understand that comments should be directly posted; or they should be posted quickly - ideally with a follow-up. However, there were a few that use some crazy captcha; or still haven’t been posted yet.

Don’t post useless information just because it’s scheduled: Post useful, valuable content. Posting just because you have a schedule doesn’t make sense. Make your blog a place to come for great content; not a place to come because people remember you’re updating your content. Why else do we have RSS feeds, Alltop, and Twitter?

In the end, you don’t have to follow my advice; but if you’ve gotten this far, you can’t say you were unaware. Before you ask, I reviewed 43 blogs; and surveyed 280 people to get these common ‘pet-peeves’. I’ll be incorporating the advice into my own blogs too.  Good luck blogging, and you can check out my blog anytime: http://www.thejordanrules.com (should be updated soon).

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Getting a corporation with established marketing rules and complicated communications departments to adopt a new way to communicating to its audience can be difficult. With the rise of social media, corporations are beginning to listen; but still require a process to get everyone onboard. The following is a framework that reviews an ideal process a corporation will follow when adopting social media as a new communications tool.

Define Initial Parameters

Define how many resources you can devote to social media

Define which sites you want to monitor

Define which tools you’d like to test

Define sampling size benchmarks

Begin Listening

Once you’ve finished defining everything; you can begin listening. Many corporations successfully do this in ‘stealth mode’ - meaning the brand name or corporation name isn’t publicly available to the networks being listened to.While listening, you should also be recording what you hear. There are several easy ways to monitor your brand & turn the streams of activity into an RSS feed and store the RSS posts for future reference.

Analyze and Determine Integration Options

You should never stop listening; so when you have enough information to start analyzing how your brand, or brands, is being mentioned, it’s important to keep listening.

During this phase, you need to define what your brands reputation is. This can be considered the “laissez-faire reputation”, meaning the reputation that existed for your brand prior to active participation from the brand.

After you’ve defined the “laissez-faire reputation”, it’s time to define how you want to change that reputation. (If you’re happy with the “laissez-faire reputation” it can be a bit trickier to define how to begin to participate; but I’ll define the process later.) All activities should help move your brand in the direction of achieving your ideal social reputation.

Once you define the reputation you’d like, you need to define how the brand will appear when engaging in social media activities. This doesn’t just mean its visual appearance, but also means its sociological appearance. It’s important to define your avatar schema, and update your brand style guide to take social media into account, but equally important is to define how you want your brand to be viewed as a part of society, and the community. This has more to do with what you’ll be talking about and the content you invest in creating, than what your visual appearance is.

Perform Internal Response Assessment & Identify Ideal Content Curators

Many corporations have some kind of intranet. The proven best way to achieve corporate adoption of social media is to integrate social systems into corporation-wide systems. 2 ideal candidates for social system integration are email clients, and the intranet.

A great way to define your optimum response assessment policy is by testing responses in real situations. Let’s say you’ve integrated a social system into your intranet, and the entire corporation has the intranet open on their computers. The system is primarily used as a collaboration tool.

What would happen if you started routing the feed you set up in the listening phase into the system? Everyone would get to see what’s being said about the brand. You could encourage conversations through the company intranet, on the posts you’re routing in. If you disable 2 way communication, all the company responses to posts will remain private.

This a great initial test to identify potential content curators: the staff that have a natural ability to interact appropriately with people on social networks. Additionally this testing will identify those who might not understand the benefits of social media and give you the opportunity to schedule learning sessions.

Once you’ve identified potential content curators; you can run iterative live tests. Rotating curators through specific social media channels to figure out who’s the best at participating on each channel you want a presence on. This live testing will serve to further refine who will lead the content curator team for each channel.

Live Iterative Optimization (LIO)

Many corporations jump directly to this phase; skipping some of the most important steps in getting social media adopted by the entire company. Many companies that jump directly to this phase experience social media failure. The reason for this is often that a key individual in the organization doesn’t understand how social media will benefit his department.Once you’ve identified who will lead your content curators for each channel, you can begin moving past simply being present within social networks, and begin really engaging your audience. (In smaller organizations, you might have the need for a single content curator.)

Here are the three key steps in Live Iterative Optimization. Campaign Testing

I’ve recently written a post on iterative brand equity, which can be representative of a social campaign. I don’t suggest running campaigns that don’t fluidly integrate and feed into each other.

That being said, the key to LIO is campaign evaluation and optimization. After running a social campaign; whatever it might be, it’s important to evaluate how it was interpreted by your audience, how it affected your audience, and how you can improve. Regardless of how successful your last campaign was; finding at least one way to improve is crucial.

Synergies Across Networks

In addition to evaluating your campaign, you can examine your social platform & channel selection and find ways to synergize efforts across networks. If you’re running a campaign on Facebook and MySpace; how can you leverage responses of Facebook to amplify engagement of MySpace, and vice-versa?

Policy Correction & Optimization

You should constantly be re-examining your social media policy, and should set up formal post-campaign-evaluations to correct errors and optimize elements.

Ensure everyone has a voice; your audience, your employees, and all stakeholders. Make the social media policy as public as possible. Consider the impact of releasing the policy to the public. Weigh the options of releasing the policy with the repercussions of the policy being leaked.

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Model

Iterative Brand Equity changes. It doesn’t dispose of what existed before; it will update, hand-off, or reconfigure itself to become something new.

(pretty simple, but click here for a larger view)

Framework

Set expectations - It’s hard to set expectations when you’re uncertain how the next iteration of a campaign will unfold. That being said, it’s important to keep your users informed with what you know. If you’re uncertain what the next iteration will look like, it’s perfectly fine to tell that to your users, and ask them for input.

Extract key campaign elements - In every campaign, there are key themes, memes, and technology that can be carried forward in each iteration. For instance, if you ask your users to upload photo’s during a campaign, the next iteration could involve writing captions for the images; or turning the images into comic strips.

Provide a feedback mechanism - The biggest mistake any campaign can suffer from is not allowing customers to provide feedback. If you have a channel that allows customers to provide feedback, you’ll end up gaining some valuable insights. If you don’t have that channel available, the feedback will often be presented to the public via social media. Feedback should always be incorporated into the next iteration of a campaign.

Recap - Just like the beginning of a TV show, an iterative campaign requires a recap. This can take many forms; the best are integrated into drivers to the transformed campaign site. For example, if you have a media buy making people aware of your new campaign, you can include information about how the campaign started, and how its transformed.

Recognize loyalty - Users who stick with you from campaign to campaign should be recognized and rewarded. They don’t necessarily need a monetary reward, but they can be rewarded by offering pre-registration, or access to exclusive tools. The better you treat your loyal customers, the more likely it is they’ll continue being loyal.

Benefits

Increase reach - Many quarterly campaigns just aren’t alive long enough to reach the maximum number of users who’d want to participate. The benefit of having an iterative campaign is that you’ll be able to build on your foundation of users at the beginning of every iteration. Instead of asking users who’ve participated in a different campaign to participate in something new; you can ask those users to continue their participation in a new way.

Increase asset library - Every iteration of a campaign can provide you with new assets. Whether it’s user generated content, feedback, new leads, or new technology; new assets help to ensure the next iteration has more to offer.

Improve engagement - Rather than being engaged for one quarter and waiting for the next campaign, users can continue to engage with a brand throughout every iteration. Each iteration can engage users more and more.

Increase participation - Many users are unwilling to participate in a campaign that will only last a couple months, because they understand the campaign will be ending. A campaign that continues, and feeds into the next campaign can encourage user participation. If you continually use user generated content as the foundation for the next iteration; you’ll encourage even greater participation. Users enjoy having their work matter.

Improve integration - An iterative campaign has the benefit of being able to take its time to get accepted. Every iteration can act as new opportunities for integration. For instance, if your first campaign asks users for photos, the second campaign could include a photo album on flickr, and the third campaign could include a widget showing the photos on the corporate site.

Improve communication - The great thing about having engaged customers providing feedback over time is that you can learn from your communication mistakes and successes. If you find certain communication techniques work, you can carry then forward into the next campaign; and if you find out that certain techniques don’t work you can scrap them for the next iteration.

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Customer service has always been that business competency that either makes or breaks the customer experience. Over the past decade, many large organizations recognized this fact and have heavily invested in ensuring extraordinary customer service. In recent years, social customer service has become a necessity.

Social customer service can increase revenue in five ways:

Increased Awareness: Addressing customers issues via social media provides interesting content. The more you help, the better the chances customers will find you.

Increased Customer Satisfaction: The great thing about social customer service is that other customers, who are satisfied with you get the opportunity to observe & participate with other customers. This has the potential of increasing their satisfaction through education. I’ve seen a discussion board with customer service interactions between a software company and its customers; many of the posts indicated that the customers reading the posts discovered additional functionality they’d never have known about. Of course, simply solving a customers problem increases their satisfaction.

Public Customer Reviews: Each time provide customer service via social media is another opportunity to have a public customer review. It shows the issues customers have, and shows how your company deals with those issues. In public forums, an unsatisfied customer doesn’t necessarily mean a bad review. If the company does everything it can, but the customer is unreasonable; the public will often express it’s admiration of the company, and dismiss the customer as unreasonable.

Decreased Return-Rate: As with all good customer service, good social customer service can help turn a brand dissident into a brand advocate. Additionally, social customer service can act as a qualifier in the sense of making sure potential customers are buying the right thing. (i.e. If the Twelp Force informs a customer that the printer he purchased isn’t compatible with a Mac, it could help ensure other Mac owners don’t buy that printer.)

Increased Brand Loyalty: One of the best ways to create brand loyalty is by showing how a company deals with customers who’ve had issues. I recently saw a series of blog posts about a bad experience a lady had with a hotel chain. The post outlined her issues, and the email she sent to management. Subsequent posts outlined responses; and a credit issued for the cost of the stay. This type of story could have made me skeptical about staying at the hotel chain she stayed at; but the way the company handled the issues actually made me confident enough to try them. Additionally, the lady was satisfied with the outcome and probably would be willing to try them again.

How do I achieve the best results?

Step 1: Choose a customer service model

(If you don’t chose a model, your customers will resort to model A)

Model A: Customer seeks customer service
This model could be indirect; where customers are posting complaints about a company. Essentially, this model applies to any customer that requires customer service and is willing to engage in social media.

Model B: Brand seeks out customers in need of customer service
This model involves a brand, or a brand collective, searching out and responding to customer issues.

Model C: Brand encourages & supports a customer support community
This model often has an aggregation site where customer inquires are vetted or categorized and responded to by both brand employees and other customers. Sometimes, brands simply have an account on a particular site and encourage customers to respond to customers with issues.

Step 2: Communicate responses to questions customers need answered prior to engaging in social customer service

Question 1: “What can I get support with?”

Question 2: “How do I request support? How do I communicate after I’ve made the request?”

Question 3: “How long will it take to get service?” Question 4: “What quality of customer service can I expect?”

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The classic double-edged sword; giving things away for free.

I’ve compiled a few guidelines that might help you decide if you should be giving something away for free; or you should be charging for it.

Make a long term decisionThe biggest mistake is changing your pricing structure from free, or to free. People better understand and accept changes in price, rather than a move to or from free.

Example:Let’s say a newspaper that costs 50 cents increases its per issue price to 75 cents. It might lose customers, but many of the customers will continue buying.

Some reasons:

Customers see the newspaper as providing more value than the price
Customers already have established a method of payment, it’s just a matter of increasing the amount
Customers have an expectation of inflation

 
Now, lets say another newspaper decides to make the jump from being a free publication to charging 25 cents an issue. It’s the same discrete increase (25 cents) but many users will not pay.

Some reasons:

Free is easy. It doesn’t require you set up payment, or look in your pocket for change. You just pick it up and leave.
Publication value is suspect. If it was free yesterday, what are they adding that makes it worth 25 cents.
Comparative pricing can lead to churn. If I’m going to pay 25 cents for a ‘Free’ publication, why don’t I pay a little more for a nationally recognized one.

Lesson: Be very careful about offering something for free. Especially if you think you might have to start charging for it down the road.

Consider competitors

So you now know that you should carefully consider your business model before deciding to make something free; now you should consider your competitors.Ideally, you don’t want to be in a market where your product or service is being offered by a competitor for free. However, if you are - you have to start considering value.

Be aware of the nature of good-enough

This is where you’re offering something that costs something; but your competitor is offering something similar thats free. Even if what your offering is substantially better; if the customers needs are met by the free offering, it’s likely that he’ll take that offer.The reason is comparative thinking. Once a customer starts thinking in terms of components, elements, features, and specifications, you’ll have a hard time competing against a free offer.

How defeat a free competitor

Value: Offer something that the customer values more than the price.

Let’s say you’re an email marketing agency, and your client want to deploy e-mail through a free online service. You can offer the customer expert guidance, proven design standards, and valuable metrics analysis. This would likely be enough to convince a client to use your services.

Risks associated with using free: Another way is to inform the customer of the risk of using what the free competitor is offering.

Let’s say you’re Adobe Illustrator, and a major client doesn’t want to buy CS4 because they found a free alternative. Adobe can make the client aware of the standards they use, and the testing that’s required to create the product. They can show that the free product crashes, often losing work and increasing man-hours spend doing the same thing. They can also show that cut-corners can interact with other programs and leave a security hole in their system; potentially causing server failures.

Understand sociological factors

Ok, apart from the inconvenience of having to pay, and the risk of competitors monopolizing on free offers; there are sociological issues you should consider before making a decision to offer something for free. These relate more to the value you get from your pricing structure.

Reputation: There are essentially 3 basic pricing structures: 1. Free - read my blog 2. Paid - read my blog for a dollar 3. Employed - read my blog and I’ll pay you a dollar. Each of these have certain stigmas attached to them. Each will help you build a reputation. Consider online gaming: where Second LIfe is a free, Warcraft costs money to play, and many branded games a free to play and give you prizes or money for doing so.

The pricing decision those games made, well before launch, have dictated their reputation. Second Life is now seen by many as a game they like playing, but wouldn’t pay anything to play it. Warcraft is seen by those who play it, as a game worth the money. Now, branded games often need to have prizes or incentives to get users to play.

Belonging: People like being a part of something, and are often willing to pay to be included. It seems as though the internet really spread the idea of anyone can belong for free. You can sign up for a free account. Thinking back 10 years, many sites that requested registration were either for paid access, or to allow you to buy something. Both registration options entitled you to additional service, tools, and information. I’ve started feeling like much of the free stuff is free for a reason. I recently had an experience where a client was using a free online project management system which crashed. He wasn’t able to reach anyone from the company, and subsequently had to postpone the project by 2 months. Costing him well over 30 thousand dollars.

I think important stories like this helped encourage many agencies to use paid services like Basecamp; where you can reach tech support anytime; and you can have a reasonable amount of security. As clients and agencies started to subscribe to this service, it was almost a sign of having a good process if you had a Basecamp account. In fact, I was recently told by a large telecom client that they use Basecamp internally, and I needed to use it too. It was great!

Interaction: I’ve always thought this was a really big issue with events; but it’s becoming a bigger and bigger issue with social networking. People who are willing to pay to interact with each other, for a conference, or an event, are usually dedicated to exchanging information. They’re generally seeking value, and are willing to offer it. People that attend a free conference or event might be willing to exchange information, or might not be. Maybe they’re just there to blow time. Maybe they’re there to extract information and leave. Regardless, free often attracts those who offer very little. (They can also bring in people who appreciate a good event, and are more willing to share because it’s free.) - And don’t get me wrong, sometimes paid events attract the wrong people; but they have an additional filter in place to ensure only those who really want to be there attend.

Now, there’s also paid interactions, where a company pays you to interact with people. I’ve been seeing this more and more. Where a company offers an incentive, prize or money to promote interaction. It often has very good results, but the interactions are being paid for; therefore need to be examined for authenticity. For example, the recent success of Whopper Sacrifice; that required users to offer their facebook friends up for some food. This was deemed to be very successful; but how valuable are those facebook users? How valuable are the winners? How much did it cost to get them to interact, how much did it cost to feed them, and how many more burgers were sold because of the promotion? - I’m certainly not saying it wasn’t successful, but it’s a different kind of success. (The difference is between having 1,000,000 people talking about you for 3 months, and never again, and costing $100 to do it; or having an ongoing 50,000 people talking about you.)

Loyalty: In my experience, people are less loyal to brands that are free. This is an interesting topic, and I’m open to comments; but in my experience I’ve noticed that most customers have a closer relationship with brands that they pay for; in one way or another. Some brands are inherently free, like TV shows - but I’ve had experience with TV shows that offer entertainment; and shows that ask users for something in return - and those shows that ask for something end up developing a stronger following.

I’ve been going over a lot of research on this lately, and I’ve been finding a trend that customers develop a stronger relationship with brands they willingly pay for; and appreciate unexpected rewards more than expected ones. This seems to fly in the face of loyalty programs. Are people more loyal to Bank of Montreal because they offer Air Miles? or are they loyal to Air Miles because they offer customers prizes?

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Niche to Niche

Everyone knows that social media can help you create ‘tribes’; but not everyone knows how to get the most out of the social media niches.

The idea of ‘Niche to Niche’ marketing involves creating multiple tribes and allowing those tribes to interact in some meaningful way.

An example could be targeting 3 separate target niche markets and allowing each group to compete against each other group as a collective in some contest.

Local Affinity

Social media keeps coming out with more sophisticated ways to figure out where your audience lives. This information is invaluable when you want to create local affinity.

One great way to create local affinity is to target local groups, or use local social networks to requisition local supporters. These local supporters can help you with local research, understanding local memes, and defining a local voice.

Analyzing your audience based on geographic location, you can figure out where your biggest supporters are; and which areas you need to work on.Once you know where you should target, and how to talk to them; all you need to do is engage that market.

Social Media Pricing

Social media is made up of memberships in networks. These networks provide users the sense of exclusivity by allowing their members tools, and connections.

Providing social media exclusive pricing, or exclusive added value propositions, is a great way to get your brand messages passed around. There’s nothing users like more than being able to provide legitimate value to their friends.

The additional benefit of making offers through social media is that users will generally only pass offers on to friends they feel would appreciate knowing about the offer. (A free qualification system.)

Real Entertainment

Not everything you think is entertaining is something you should offer to your community as entertainment. There’s been a rash of ad agencies posting their TV commercials to YouTube because they think their audience might find them interesting.

Most of the time, they aren’t something anyone searches out to entertain themselves. However there are some brands that have come up with really entertaining content that people would search out.

In my opinion, real entertainment falls into one of 4 categories:

1. It tells a story worth listening to
2. It has interactive elements worth interacting with
3. It was published by me, or someone like me
4. It has information thats valuable to things I do

The more real and relevant entertainment is to a user, the further the message can potentially travel.

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One of the most pervasive social media tactics involves generating content. It’s very easy to do, but very easy to get wrong.

When you think about it, almost anyone can write status updates, add comments, create tweets, or upload photos. The fact that creating content can be done so easily, allows for it to be rushed into.

Here are my guidelines for creating content. Figure out who you know best

Know Yourself: Create content you know about. Be genuine & interesting. People will be responsive to your content, as long as it’s authentic.

Achilles Heel: Lack of focus. In the end, the content you create helps define how people perceive you; this is the essence of branding. If you don’t define how you’d like people to perceive you; you risk misperception.
So, treat yourself, and the content you create, as a brand would. Develop a voice, and focus your content toward achieving the perception you want from your audience.

Know your audience: Create content your audience finds interesting. If you’re able to figure out what you’re audience is interested in; you can find spokespeople to contribute content on your brands behalf. (e.g. If you find out that Toyota Prius owners like gardening, you could get a professional gardener to create a series of blog posts for the Toyota Prius blog.)

Achilles Heel: Creating phony content. The biggest offenders are people who engage in fake conversations. This often happens with brands that outsource social media management to those who aren’t familiar enough with the brand. (E.g. The person in charge of the Nike Plus Twitter account compliments someone on a great tennis win, but doesn’t actually know anything about tennis. If a follower reads the post and tries to engage in a conversation on the subject Nike Plus will have been exposed as not knowing anything about tennis, and might alienate some followers.)

Learn the social media channel you’re using

Know the medium – Content can take many forms, video, audio, images, presentations, motion graphics, or copy. Know what media work best to communicate your message to your audience.

Know the memes – Each social media channel is different, and may have very different memes. Things that are well understood on one social network might not be obvious on others. (i.e. if you try to use a hash tag outside of twitter, users will probably be confused.)

Know the warning signs – Every social media channel has elements you should keep an eye on that will alert you if the content you’re posting is achieving your goals, or working against you. It could be followers, or fans, or retweets, or length of engagement; the idea is to find out what you should be watching, and watch those things.

Know any interaction rules – Think of every site as a mini-social-ecosystem; complete with social rules and manners. What might be a good conversation on one site might be considered spam on another.

Know how/ what to track – Because every site & platform is different, there are many different ways you can track things. Certain sites will provide you with metrics, while others require you to embed tracking codes. Some sites won’t allow tracking code, so you might have to get monitoring software. Additionally, you need to know what metrics need to be tracked, and what metrics will just clutter & confuse your data.

Know how to analyze – Probably the hardest to learn, but if you don’t analyze your data properly you might end up changing your content strategy for no reason. (or you could end up keeping it the same when you should have changed it.) Try to answer questions like: Should I pay attention to averages or extremes? Should I consider positive and negative nature of comments? Should I place a higher value on users who engage with me on multiple channels?

Listen and adapt

Know what to listen for – In the same way you need to know what to track; you also need to know what to listen for. Listening is a skill that many marketers don’t have; they’re often really great at communicating a message, but often fall short when interpreting collective responses. If you can define some key performance indicators in terms of key-words, you’ll have a advantage over much of your peers.
KPI as key-words: a word or words that indicate if a mention is helping achieve business goals or helping to undermine efforts to achieve those goals.

Know what to do – Another important and often overlooked element of listening is knowing what to do with the information you’ve heard. How should you respond? Should you change the mind of a person who posted a negative comment? What if that person is a ‘troll’ who posts negative comments all over the place? That type of person wouldn’t ever change his mind. This is the best guide to evaluating comments and determining the appropriate response.

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I’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about social media management and it’s roll in overall social media ROI. There seems to be a lot of confusion about who should be in charge of communicating with the community once it’s created.

First, let me explain that the decision to begin a social media initiative needs to be well defined upfront.

I’ve walked through this Social Media Tactic Refinement Framework with several brand managers and account directors.

I’ve found it very useful in helping to define social media initiatives upfront. (read more about this framework)

As goals are being defined, it’s important to know that fundamental company competencies are required to ensure the success of the initiative.

Listen: Listening to the community helps a company understand issues its customers are experiencing in real time, which will help the company adapt and respond.

Agile: knowing issues customers are experiencing is great business intelligence, but a company needs to have a process in place that will allow it to effectively respond and incrementally release updates.

Cohesiveness: An agile company that listens, responds, and adapts itself to address customer concerns requires cohesive internal collaboration. This will ensure responsiveness isn’t inhibited by traditional bureaucracy.

Accountability: When you have a cohesive team, that’s listening responding, & adapting to its customers; each team member needs to be accountable for achieving specific business objectives.

And, those accountable team members should be responsible for listening for specific things from the community.

Consider a recent ladder of accountability I created for a CPG brand. I was able to convince the brand that one ‘community manager’ wasn’t the answer to their social media management issues.

They had asked a number of specific questions about who should be responsible for what; and how to set up an information vetting system. The interesting thing was that when I examined their organizational structure and external vendors; they already had a system created with individuals assigned to address who was responsible for what.

They just needed to recognize that social media can be used for many different things. So I categorized the initiatives the company was currently engaged in; and helped the company realize who should be accountable for each initiative.

Relationship Building: Considered the most important social media initiative by the majority of the company. The plan is to create brand advocates by allowing users to engage with the brand in a more personal way. It was decided that this initiative requires constant participation. Where the person accountable, would be the most active voice of the brand.

Assignment: Community Manager (via Digital AOR)

Locating The Community: Another important initiative; locating where the community is already talking about the brand requires substantial listening and searching. After locating the community, relationship building can begin.

Assignment: Brand Intern

Customer Service: Considered to be ‘insurance’ against a firememe. If an unhappy or unsatisfied customer engages the community; customer service would help ensure the customers issues are dealt with. Special training/ handling procedures were developed because the team is aware that social media customer service is not one-on-one; but is visible by everyone.

Assignment: Director of Customer Service (and a trained call center team)

Content Generation: A new initiative designed to drive repeat traffic to the brand website; as well as increase user engagement while on the site. This initiative asks users to discuss the brand in new ways; and allows the brand to pull that content into various marketing initiatives.

Assignment: Brand Manager & Account Director (via Digital AOR)

SEO: As part of ongoing SEO; all social media initiatives are frequently reviewed and adapted to include SEO suggestions.

Assignment: Search Analyst (Consultant)

Business Research: Collection and analysis of customer feedback for various purposes. Research initiatives are rare and occasionally get integrated into marketing initiatives. (i.e. fill out a survey to win)

Assignment: CMO, Business Strategist

Running through this exercise helped the company assign accountability. Now that specific individuals were accountable for specific initiatives; they were able to begin listening for what really mattered.

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Social Networking

Primary Goal: Creating connections & relationships

Social networking isn’t a new phenomena, & I’m not convinced that the model for social networking has changed that much.

The basic idea of social networking is making connections with people drawn together by a common interest.

 

So, here’s the scenario:

You walk into a Star Trek convention and want to get to know the people in the room, hear new ideas, share stories, and eventually be known as an expert Star Trek fan. What do you do?

Well, you’d start by interacting with someone. But before you begin, you scan the room and realize a couple things:

A. People are congregating into clusters. The larger clusters seem to be having more engaging conversations.

B. There seems to be 3 different kinds of connections available:

The strong connection: Occurs when you meet someone that shares your interest and engages in a valuable exchange of information.

The weak connection: Similar to a strong connection, but the person either isn’t as passionate as you about the subject; or there’s a one way transfer of information.

The preexisting connection: Occurs when a person enters having a preexisting relationship with someone.

So, now you have to come up with an interaction strategy to achieve your goals.

Here’s what you decide:

1. You target a member of larger group because the larger group seems to have more strong connections. Those connections will help you get introduced to the rest of the group.

2. You begin by listening to the conversation. Learning the structure of the group, and what the discussion rules seem to be.

3. You jump in by offering some valuable information. A discussion ensues. You continue adding to the discussion, and eventually get to know those people you’re talking to. You’re well on you’re way to achieving your goals.

Later in the day, people start coming up to you, asking about certain things they heard you talk about. You engage them on a personal, one-on-one, level. Before you know it, people are asking seeking you out to introduce themselves and have a conversation with you. You did it. You’ve successfully participated in social networking.

These principles are the basis for social media marketing, and social business.

Social Media Marketing Primary Goal: Creating customer advocates

Social media marketing is a relatively new phenomena, depending on how you look at it. Niche marketing and direct marketing has been around for ages; but they never had the open, online, social networks where members could engage in group discussions and create meaningful connections in real-time.Essentially, social media marketing works just like the social networking scenario I suggested earlier in the post; but instead of simply wanting to make connections to share information; you’d want to make connections for marketing reasons. (i.e. market research, marketing communications, crm, etc.)

Social Business

Primary Goal: Monetizing collective innovation & inventionSocial business is an emerging phenomena. Business, in general, works better when there’s open communication between colleagues. It works even better, when there’s a mechanism in place to assist with information overload. (i.e. My administrative assistant sorts through all the mail and only hands me the important stuff.)

A truly social business will focus the power of social media to achieve its business objectives. (Not to be confused with marketing objectives)Here’s the scenario:

You want to open a business that sells gift baskets, and you want it to be a social business. What would you do?Lets assume you’ve done all the legal work to get the business established. You’re now a business of 1. You need to create a business plan, with clear objectives. As a social business, you can begin including the community in your decision making. From business strategy, to branding, to marketing, to creating inventory, to distribution, to product development, to internal communication; you can engage multiple collectives and networks to help create & manage your business.

In game theory, a best response describes a players strategy that provides the best outcome to a set of conditions. In business, given the current market conditions, and evolution of online community communications; social business seems like the best response to business operations. (At least for new business, it seems to be the best response. For established business, the cost of changing would not make it the best response; but there are still integration options that make sense.)A pioneer in social business design is the Dachis Group and is full of thought leadership. Definitely some of the smartest guys in the room. Their visual description of social business design is a fantastically useful tool to describe a new, and complicated idea.

 

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