“[Social media is] a shift in how people discover, read, and share news
and information and content.
It’s a fusion of sociology and technology,
transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many).”

Brian Solis, FutureWorks

In preparing to engage your online community, you’ll want to collect lots of information. Here are some tips on how to do that.

Listen to the conversations inside your organization and in your real-world community. What kinds of things are the people you engage with on a daily basis talking about? What concerns do they face? Chances are very good that your online community will mirror these topics, but you may find they place the emphasis differently.

Make lists of topics of interest to your real-world community discusses — the things you, your staff, your volunteers, and your clients talk about every day. We suggest keeping a log for at least a couple of weeks. Determine what kinds of information your community seeks from you and start thinking about how you will provide it online.

If appropriate, create an outline indicating subtopics and different points of view on common subjects. Organizing the topics in some sort of framework will help:

• Guide you in constructing your own community framework
• Enable you to construct positions and responses on the issues you’ll face in building your community

Examine the framework you create and determine what your positions are on all the issues and questions, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to create the talking points that will form the basis of your social computing strategy. At the same time, you’ll want to extract the unwritten rules about how your community converses. Are there forbidden topics? Is there a preferred style of discourse? Do people avoid sensitive topics, or is there an accepted way to discuss them? Is there a line between too much info and just enough?

­In essence, you’re creating the first draft of the operating manual for your online community by understanding the communication styles, rules, and needs of your offline community.

Find online communities discussing your product category and/or your organization. But, in general, you’ll probably find interesting blogs and forums of interest via a simple Google search for the name of your product category. Twitter and Facebook searches can provide additional information.

Lurk for a while. (Lurking means reading the material, but not responding or calling attention to your­self.) Be a wallflower, but take notes and update your community manual based on the new information you discover. Note any differences in the way people communicate online versus offline. Modify your framework as necessary.

After awhile, you might consider reaching out to influential bloggers[1] or other community leaders and influencers and asking their advice. Cultivate good relationships with these folks because you may want their help in launching your community later on. Be helpful, but be careful. If you approach them in the wrong way you could do more harm than good.

During this period, you should be thinking about how and where you’re going to create your com­munity. Are you going to create it (or find it) on an existing social media site such as Facebook or MySpace? Will you create a private space on your Website?

Or will you use sites like Ning,[2] Grou.ps,[3] or Qlubb[4] to create a branded com­munity apart from your Website? Do you want an offline and online hybrid such as Meetup?[5] If you have lots of offline events, you’ll want a way for people to discover, sign up, and help promote them.

One thing you should definitely assess: Is your community so attached to their current online home that trying to entice them to yours will alienate or anger them? Do existing communities completely satisfy their needs, or is there an opening for you to fill? Can you achieve your social media goals by contributing on existing communities, or does your contribution require its own defined, sponsored space? If you created your own community, what would be unique about it? Can you identify and market this uniqueness to attract members?

This assessment is critical to your future community success. You can waste much time and money trying to muscle your way into a completely functioning and satisfying community. Many organizations fail to consider the possibility that everyone in their right mind may not naturally flock to their commun­ity offering.

By now, you know a lot about your community, offline and online. You may have, or can collect, other information on your community that can help you sharpen your approach, such as:

• Demographics — You may want to consider characteristics such as gender, age, race, income, marital status and so on and use them to design different approaches
• Psychographics — Data on values, attitudes and shared cultural experiences of the community can help you better understand your community’s mindset and better address their everyday issues and concerns
• Geographics — Your approach to your community may need to take into account their geographic location and how it informs members’ viewpoints

If you focus on this data, you’ll want to research the social media literature to see if others have develop­ed targeting and segmentation approaches you can adopt. There are great resources for finding out more about social media included in the Resources section starting on page 411.

Finally, you need to do an honest assessment of your organization and its commitment: Do you have the time, resources, and dedication to create or participate in a community? Can you be in it for the long run? Are you prepared to react if things get rocky?

If all is in order, you’re ready to start to engage.

Next up: Find Your Community

As we’ve seen in earlier posts, if you’re a company of any size with sufficient history, people are already talking about you.

Do you ignore the conversation?

Or join in?

Well, if you’ve read this far, we hope you’ve decided that ignoring is not smart, and joining in is a real possibility. Let’s talk about how you engage those who are talking about you or your enterprise.

Some rights reserved by Ed Yourdon

Social Media Performance Group Social Media Approach

You’ll find lots of prescriptions for social media success out there on the social Web, and many of them are known by snappy acronyms: The Five A’s, the Four C’s, 5×6, and so on. We couldn’t come up with a slick acronym; didn’t really try. What we have are five action verbs for execution (FAVEs? Oops. That one just sort of happened!) that you should keep in mind as you begin to engage with your community.

Here are the FAVEs in short, and we’ll detail each of these in subsequent posts.

Listen

This one’s first for a reason. Many businesses forget that you must listen before you speak. You must offer before you take. You must engage before you ask for action. Spend the first month or more of your social computing engagement process just listening to what people are saying. Restrain yourself from responding, even (especially!) if you see things you don’t like. Gauge the tenor of the conversation. What words do they use? How are they feeling? What gets them upset? What goads them to action?

During this phase, follow the old adage: It is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

While you’re listening, start sorting your community into segments. Who are the loudmouths? Who are respected? Who are emotional about your product? Who are skeptical?

You’ll want to devise different approaches to the groups you find. The beauty of social computing is it enables you to address different groups differently. Start planning your engagement strategy while you listen.

Find

OK this one logically comes first. How can you listen until you find who’s speaking? But we think you see why Listen has to come first.

Mark Zuckerberg, the young creator of Facebook, famously said, “Communities already exist. Instead, think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do.”

There’s a community out there talking about you or your busi­ness. You need to find it and engage with it. Help it do what it wants to do. You probably won’t have to look hard, but you should realize the community may exist only online, only off­line, or both. If it’s only offline, you’ve got a bit of convincing to do to get them online.

To find your community, ask around. Ask others in your field. Google your business, products, product category.

Engage

Engaging with your community means — at last! — joining the ongoing conversation. Don’t think that you can land like a ton of bricks and start dominating. Follow the 4-to-1 rule: Comment on four posts for every post that you write. Give — invest — in the relationship before you ask for anything.

A great personal example of the need for giving before getting came after we did a seminar for a job seekers’ group. After the presentation, an engineer came up to us and said, “LinkedIn doesn’t work for job search.” We asked why he thought this. “Well,” he said, “I did what you said and joined the same LinkedIn group as someone who worked at my target company. I sent her a connection request, and she accepted. So I sent her a message asking her to introduce me to the hiring manager. And she refused! When I asked why, she said, ‘I don’t know you.’ So LinkedIn doesn’t work.”

So what our engineer friend didn’t realize, and what you need to always keep in mind, is that it’s social networking. Ap­proach it as you would approach building a relationship in real life. You may be able to meet more people online, but they’re still people, and will develop a relationship with you over time, not immediately.

Once you have the hang of participating, you can begin to be more active — starting topics, offering more information about your business — but until your community is comfortable with you, don’t get too heavy. Your early aim is to get people to check out your Website.

Which means you’re probably going to need to renovate your Website. You need to make it social-media-aware and social-media-friendly.

Ask

After you’ve earned your stripes with your community, you can start asking for action. Your first Ask shouldn’t be as bold as, “By our product,” or “Give us your number and a sales person will call.” You’ve just met these people! It would be like arriving at a party in a beautiful mansion and asking, “So how much did you pay for this dump, anyway?” You could say that to your best friend, but you aren’t best friends with your community yet.

Make sure your Ask is appropriate to the reputation and amount of social capital you’ve amassed through your participation. By no means should you immediately set up your own community and ask everyone to join. That step comes later, much later, if ever, and you’ll probably know when it’s appropriate.

Nonetheless, there’s no harm in having lots of Asks on your existing site, and inviting your community to come by for a look. If people want to take an action, you need to make it easy for them.

Measure

You’ll read a lot about social computing measurement on the Web. It’s an obsession among certain people, many of whom swear it’s not possible to measure social media outcomes.

We think social media is the only medium where it is possible to measure outcomes exactly.

You’ll hear people claim, “I know exactly how much money I’ll raise if I do this direct mail campaign.” And they may be right. Through trial and error, they’ve discovered an approach that works. But can they tell you which of their messages go immediately into recycling? No, because if they could, they wouldn’t mail those pieces out in the first place.

It’s the same with TV and radio advertising. It’s an old saw in the advertising world: “I know half of what I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” Heh. Not really that funny considering you’re talking blithely about wasting more than $209 billion annually in the US alone.

Online you can connect your actions with the response. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. It may not be a snap to do, but it’s possible.

Joining the Conversation is the 16th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Media Operating Manual for Enterprises. The book (itself part of a series for different audiences), is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1

Next up: Listen to Your Community

Some rights reserved by jonny goldstein

How to Engage with Social Computing

“Audience Engagement is the proportion of visitors who participate in a
specific marketing initiative by contributing comments,
sharing or linking back”

Web Analytics DeMystified/Altimeter

The Holy Grail of social media is engagement. You’ll see lots of blogs, comments, studies, and other discussion on the Internet about social media engagement. Everyone assumes this is the highest goal one can achieve using social media, because an engaged community is more likely to hear your message, do what you request them to do, and in general hang around and say nice things about you. But what actually is this elusive thing: engagement?

Oddly, for a medium that talks a lot about improving engage­ment, there’s not a lot of consensus on exactly what the term means. We present one definition — by two analyst firms, Web Analytics DeMystified and Altimeter — in the quote that begins this chapter, but it, like many definitions out there, actually seems to be more about defining the ways you can measure engagement than engagement itself. In their excellent report, “The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?”^[1] Altimeter joins with fellow analyst firm Wetpaint to measure major brands’ level of social media engagement. Not once is the concept explained or defined. They obviously expect their audience of brand marketers to implicitly understand the term.

They’re not alone. Lots of other really smart social media folks also seem to think engagement is merely a way to measure success. Lee Odden, online marketing and search engine master at Top Rank Online Marketing, says:

Linking, bookmarking, blogging, referring, clicking, friending, connecting, subscribing, submitting inquiry forms and buying are all engagement measures at various points in the customer relationship.^[2]

With all due respect to Odden’s enormous expertise, blogging is a measure? We think it’s an activity. That engaged people do.

Others talk about the rewards enterprises can reap from the engaged. Social media guru Brian Solis points to statistics about engagement’s effects on sales: “An impressive 51 per­cent of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers indicated that they are more likely to buy since connecting online.”^[3]

Along these same lines, social media expert Jason Falls simp­lifies the definition, but perhaps a little too much: “Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better?”

Online community expert Amber Naslund gets a bit more specific, and a bit closer to an actual definition of engagement, saying^[4] it involves one or all of the following:

• Interaction with unselfish intent
• Conversation
• Acknowledgement that we’ve been heard
• Responsiveness
• Unique contributions
• Personalized connection

The rest of the definitions we’ve seen run from the simplistic, and not all that helpful (“Conversing with others online in public and branded spaces” for example)^[5] to lists of things to do to engage your community (provide high-quality content, answer questions, participate in conversations, provide great customer service to customers and potential customers, go off-line, meet in person).^[6]

We don’t really mean to tweak all these experts, but it is a sign of the new and maturing nature of social computing that so many talk about engagement, but so few attempt to define exactly what the term means. Apparently it’s like art: We can’t define it, but we know it when we see it.

We define social media engagement as interacting with a community that is:

• Listening
• Trusting
• Responding
• Communicating
• Acting

They are listening to you, maybe not all the time, but regularly or periodically. They trust what you say because you’ve built a rapport and a relationship with them. They respond to you, either by means of comments or other online participation, or by telling others about you. They are communicating their concerns, needs, passions, and interests to you; thus you can know them better. And, most importantly, they are acting. They may be buying your products, telling other about them, commenting, recommending, rating, or taking any of the myriad of actions you provide for them to get involved.

If your community is doing these things, they are engaged. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about that.

Next up: Joining the Conversation

Some rights reserved by Kei!

For best results, social networking relationships should translate into real world action of some kind. This action may be face-to-face (F2F) meetings, commitments to act on behalf of your cause, or some other action such as donation.

Social networking is a way to stay connected in between real world events. If your organization has periodic events, social networking can keep participants connected and top-of-mind in the intervals between real world community meetings.

Social networking is a dynamic way to quickly get the word out about real world events. Combine it with your normal online promotions, such as email lists, newsletters and online advertising.

If you put all your eggs in the social networking basket, you may one day realize that you’ve lost some of the real world connections you built up over the years.

As we’ve discussed, social media is about the community, not about you. And that implies that you have to give up some control in order to do social media. You may be used to thinking you’re in control of your brand, your message. Well, you never really were. What people think about you has always been your brand. Leroy Stick, the anonymous person behind the satirical, faux BP Twitter account, @BPGlobalPR, perhaps said it best:

So what is the point of all this? The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manu­facture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?^[1]

People have always talked about you (if you’re lucky), and sometimes they say bad things about you. Now their talk is visible on the social Web, and you can see, perhaps too vividly, what your brand is, and what messages your community produces about — you!

To engage the community, you’re going to need to give up control.

You won’t control the conversation. You won’t control the venue (close your site and they’ll go elsewhere and bad-mouth you). You won’t control how people react to you.

Giving up control is the toughest thing for all organizations — You’re not alone!

Social networking is dynamic; it belongs to the participants; it’s not about control, it’s about empowering people and energizing them to act on your behalf.

Social networking is about relationships, and relationships are based on a level of trust, not control.

But what if people are saying bad things about me, you ask?

Face it, if you act in the world, you’ll always have detractors. The difference social media brings is that now, for the first time in history, you can not only see what people are saying about you, you can react, in real time, and, by engaging them, perhaps change their minds.

This capability alone is worth giving up some control, isn’t it?

Not only can you find the naysayers online, you can also find your supporters.

Your goal should be to identify, cultivate, and empower these supporters to become your evangelists.

That requires training, teaching them how to use tools, and how to bring the message to others.

The goal of social networking is not to be a one-person show, but to create an army of people to take the message out.

According to Jeremiah Owyang, formerly of Forrester Research and now with Altimeter,^[2] “An evan­gelist’s role is to go beyond understanding and get others to believe in your product or service. This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human com­munications, building trust.”

People are many times more likely to take a friend’s recommendation than a stranger’s. Building an army of trusted friends will multiple your current efforts many fold.

Next up: How to Engage with Social Computing

Some rights reserved by dullhunk

Social networking is supposed to be fun; don’t make it all business. Don’t be ultra-serious all the time. Sure, your cause is serious, and important, but acknowledge that there are other sides to life, and don’t be afraid to have fun. Make a stupid pun. Link to the latest stupid LOLCat picture (bit.ly/dspJnq) or dumb YouTube video (bit.ly/9SQgex). It’s all about adding value, and sometimes that value is bringing a smile to your contacts’ faces.

Remember, you are competing with all sorts of entertainment, online and offline. You may find that a light and humorous tone may attract more followers or deepen existing relationships.

Be a Person! Be personal. Share things about yourself. Ask others for their opinions.

The more real you are, the better the online and offline relationship!

It’s not about your agenda — Talk about what’s important to your audience.

Sure you want to make your points about your cause, but do so in relation to your audience’s needs and interests.

One of the keys to social media success is providing what they want, not necessarily pushing what you want. Be relevant to their lives, even if it means straying off point. You want a relationship, a true, two-way understanding with your community. Think of the significant relationships in your life. How many of them are one-dimensional, built only upon a common interest in bowling, fishing, novels, disaster movies, or whatever?

Chances are in your best, most significant personal relationships, you connect on many levels. Ensure that you do that via social media as well.

Before you even start using social media to improve your relationship to your followers, be sure you know who they are, how they differ, and how they want to be addressed.

How can you find these things out? Ask them.

Take the example of Fiskars, the Finnish manufacturer you probably know, if you know of them at all, as a maker of scissors. Scissors. A pretty boring category. Who cares what brand of scissors you buy? How utterly, utterly dull.

Well, if that’s the way you feel, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Think about Fiskars’ audience. What are they doing with the scissors (and punches, shape cutters, stampers, craft trimmers, embossers, knives and multitools, edgers, and other craft tools)?

They’re scrapbooking and doing other crafts.

If you know any scrapbookers, you know they can be very passionate, even fanatical. And they are inherently social. They like to get together IRL (In Real Life) and swap ideas, and work on their projects together.

So Fiskars did a very smart thing, way back in 2006: They created the Fiskateers social media site.^[1]

How did they start their site? They found four women who were committed to scrapbooking and made them the heads of a nationwide campaign to create online and offline places (retail stores) for people bound by this common interest to gather and share ideas and community.

The site won awards. It generated results:

• 6,250 members in 50 states
• 1,000 certified volunteer demonstrators
• In craft stores where Fiskateers are involved Fiskars has three-times-higher sales growth than in non-member stores
• 13 new product ideas/month
• 85 percent of “Fiskateers” likely to recommend the product to a friend^[2]

And, by the way, Fiskars spent less than $500,000 on this effort.

So you need to understand the segments of your target market. And you need a strategy for dealing with each. For sure there are some you will not be able to reach online. But a surprising number will not only respond to you online, they’re already there and talking about you and your cause. Find their communities, listen, and tailor your approach to their needs.

So your question is: Can you find four women?
(Or eight men. 【ツ】 )

More Commandments

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The 10 Commandments of Social Computing

“I think our nature is to be active and engaged.
I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old
who’s not active and engaged.
That’s how we are out of the box.
And if you begin with this presumption,
you create much more open, flexible arrangements that
almost inevitably lead to greater satisfaction for individuals
and great innovation for organizations.”
Daniel Pink, media theorist

Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing — what­ever you call it, it’s big, it’s new, and it’s growing rapidly. We’ve collected several rules for using social media as the 10 Commandments of Social Computing.^[1]

Quick Tips

• Don’t push, push, push
• It’s a conversation, not a soapbox! (we’ll talk further about this)
• Avoid over-updating
• Example: being 1 of 200 friends on Facebook, but making up 25 percent of updates — You’re not that important!
• Constant nagging to join groups or causes
• Sending out multiple requests to join your cause — If they want to join, THEY WILL!
• Too many email blasts

Don’t Push, Push, Push

People who do marketing are used to pushing their message out indiscriminately, hoping to somehow connect with those who will respond. In the traditional marketing environment, there is little way to identify ready recipients of the message, and marketers spend billions each year trying to segment the market and deliver the right message to the right person.

Social Media is different in three important ways:

• You can have conversations with prospects
• You can know more about your prospects and under­stand better how they will respond
• You can actually more-directly measure the effect of your efforts to attract and inform them

Because the medium offers these advantages, social computing users do not respond as well to the traditional push style of marketing. They may even be insulted if you blindly push your message at them.

Increasingly, online users respond better to relationship marketing.

It’s a conversation, not a soapbox!

Avoid Over-Updating

If you’re constantly updating your status, posting to your blog or otherwise creating a high volume of messages in your social media venues, fellow users are likely to see you as annoying.

For example, if your Facebook activity comprises more than your fair share of the discussion, your friends may either tune you out or hide your updates.

It’s not all about you. It’s about the relationships and community that you build.

Similarly, if your messaging is one-note — join my cause, donate to my cause, write your congressperson about my cause — people will stop listening. You must balance your overt messaging with other messages of interest, either on or off topic. You’ll need to discover the exact proportions that work for your community for yourself, but a good rule of thumb is to contribute four times for every time you ask for something.

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party. You are making the rounds and you start to talk to someone who, although he’s talking about a topic you’re interested in, totally dominates the conversation and constantly asks you to come to his seminar and learn more.

Do you hang out with this person, or do you find an excuse to move on, and never re-engage with him?

Social media is like a big cocktail party. The boring monologists often end up speaking only to themselves.

How do you know if you’re over-sharing? Ask. Often. But not too often!   【ツ】

People join social networks to be a part of something bigger than themselves. So it follows that most of the time, that something bigger is not you (personally) or even your cause. Remember, no matter how successful your community or your Website is, people will spend 99 percent of their online time elsewhere. So be careful to give them what they expect, and what they want, while they’re at your place.

One of the main things people want online is for their voices to be heard, especially by others who are passionate about a cause, issue, or topic. Enable that. Support their desire to be heard, to be valued, and to connect. What you say is important; what they say is essential.

Everyone is looking for a group that accepts them for who they are. Your job in creating a social media space is to foster that acceptance by giving them the tools, the space, and the permission to become a cohesive, self-sustaining group. That’s the Holy Grail.

People want relationships that translate into the real world, not just online! Nobody spends all their time online (well, they’ve at least got to answer the door and pay the pizza guy). Many people look to make their online time and relationships meaningful in TRL (The Real World). There are many ways you can encourage these offline connections:

• Have real-world meetups^[2] where virtual friends can press the flesh
• Show your followers evidence of how their commitment to your cause benefits others by providing testimonials — written and via video or audio — from people you have helped
• Encourage your followers to share details from their own lives, and the positive effect their commitment to your cause has on those they interact with offline

Narcissus was so in love with his image that he gazed at it all day, to the exclusion of other activities. Sound like anyone you know online?

The Web is full of people who are full of themselves — the kind who might say, “Enough about me. What do you think about me?” Many organizations act the same way online, showing an alarming sense of self-absorption. They may be talking with you, but conversation is one way — all about them, their organization, their fund drive, their issues and obstacles, their successes.

One sign of social networking narcissism may be constantly updating your status on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social sites. This is like push advertising and your contacts will soon tire of hearing all about you, especially if your status is boring trivia such as, “The line at Starbucks is long” or “My cat just rolled over” or “Going up the stairs.” Yes, these are all real tweets!

Of course, you may be over-sharing about your cause as well. Remember, it’s not all about you, your group, your cause! People spend most of their time elsewhere. You need to be interesting first, and interested always. This means you comment on other people’s posts; you send them messages asking how they’re doing; you help develop and sustain a relationship with your contacts.

Narcissism, self-promotion, and boring/excessive status updates are often cited as the top reasons people “unfriend” or disconnect with others online.^[3]

Finally, the form of your communication also counts. Don’t just make statements; ask questions, and especially open-ended questions, even if they’re off-topic: What’s your favorite movie? What’s your best idea for promoting our cause? What could we be doing better?

 More Commandments