Monthly Archives: April 2012

In our previous post, Creating Social Media Connection, we talked about creating the third of our Social Media 4 C’s, social media connection. Next we consider our last and perhaps the most important C – Community.

Social Media Community

Community is one of those things that everybody knows in their bones, but which defies being tied to specifics. You know what community means in your offline life — neighbors, town or city, worship partners, your golf league, your book club. It’s easy to call them communities.

But when we talk about the insubstantialities of community online, even — or especially — the pundits can’t agree. They use too many or too few words to describe the phenomenon, and spend more time ruling examples in and out based on their definitions than actually creating a useful definition. Notice how the following list from well-respected social media gurus range from definitions that emphasize the tools the community uses to broad descriptions that encompass online and offline communities:

• Jeremiah Owyang: “Where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools.”
• Shel Israel: “Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest.”
• Howard Rheingold: “[Virtual communities are] social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.”
• Jake McKee (the Community Guy): “A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.”
• Tim Jackson: “A strong community will be built around that shared experience or interest and passion will be at the heart of it — for a healthy community to survive anyway.”
• Ann Michael: “Communities are groups of people that actively support each other.”
• Deb Schultz: “Don’t forget TRUST and a sense of commitment. To me it is not a community without the feeling (perceived? real) that other members have my back.”

We like parts of all of these definitions. In particular, we like a key concept in Rheingold’s quote: “sufficient human feeling.” That’s what makes the connection, the gut, not the brain, the Homer, not the Spock.

To create a community, you must foster the human feeling. This means in your messaging about your business, statistics may inform, but human stories will engage, and create the connection between your organization (Be a Person) and your community members. Make sure your staff and your supporters or evangelists tell their stories using social media.

We definitely need to add Ann Michael’s and Deb Shultz’s ideas about support and having each other’s backs.

We also think there are important concepts in the dictionary definition of community: “A social, re­ligious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (e.g. ‘The Business Community’).”[1] Common characteristics — having cancer, for example — and common interests — wanting to save the world, for example — are what attracts people to form a group and helps define them as distinct from other individuals or groups.

Also important are the following basic community characteristics.

• Organized Around a Shared Purpose
  Communities need a reason for existing, and that typically is a shared interest or purpose. Community members generally have a common reason for joining.While some communities may be more general — YouTube, for example, or Facebook — these broader communities generally are hosts for sub-communities comprised, for example, by you and your friends on Facebook, people who like stupid human tricks videos on YouTube,[2] fans of a band on MySpace,[3] or members of your family tree on Ancient Faces.[4]Within these larger communities made up of members with weak attractions for one another (like viewing funny videos online, or having a lot of followers on Twitter), your community will be organized around your business or perhaps the problem it solves, and will include people who are interested — hopefully passionate — about it.Your community won’t necessarily, or optimally, be organized around your business. It generally is not the content (videos, tweets, blogs) or the tools (blogs, messaging, friending) that create the bonds that tie the community together. It’s the people, and their relationships.
• Interactive
  Interactivity is the whole point of community online: the ability to easily find kindred souls and interact with them. The job of the community organizer is to remove as much friction as possible to allow people to interact, while maintaining agreed-upon levels of privacy and confidentiality. The conversation is many to many, not top down to the crowd — two-way not one-way. Members support one another and defend each other if necessary.The basic interactive tool of a social media community is the contact, or friending, capability. By friending, people identify each other as connected in some way. Friending can be weak, as in Twitter followers, or strong, as in Facebook friends, who are allowed to see each other’s more-personal information. Another basic community tool is commenting, which allows community members to react and respond to each others’ posts.
• Everyone Can Contribute
  Contribution is fundamental to a successful community: the creation of a system that supports and encourages all members to contribute, not just the organizers. Although lurkers may comprise the majority, all have permission to contribute.In your community, you should seek a balance between helping enable the dialog, and guiding it. Too much in one direction and the community degenerates into lawlessness. Too much in the other, and the community becomes just another place for you to push your messages. Remember that you don’t need to be involved in every conversation, and you don’t need to correct every misconception or misinterpretation yourself. Your community will often take care of that.On the other hand, your community will likely expect you to be present, and involved. You may be expected to respond to direct requests for answers or information within a particular timeframe. Make sure your community understands the service level they can expect in this regard. And be sure you have the resources to consistently deliver that level of service.
• Evolving and Growing
  You may start out with a goal and a plan for your community. Things may change as your community members evolve their relationships. However, members determine how the conversation and the community develop and grow, or die. Since one of the main principles of community is that the community is in charge, you may need to hold the reins very loosely. Remember, a mob is also a type of community. Online, passions can spike instantly, and people have the tools to express themselves immediately. See a good example of what can happen on the influential Techcrunch blog.[5] Co-Founder Michael Arrington provoked an angry response when he questioned a journalist on a video blog, resulting in a mob of angry people wishing him ill on the social site FriendFeed.Depending on your community, and how it evolves, you may need to worry about mob rule. Anonymous blog commenting is one of the ways social media can get out of control. We classify the people who comment on a blog post as a form of community, although others disagree. The posters often comment on each others’ posts, and things can get out of hand and way off topic. What is your responsibility in this case? If you are too heavy-handed in ensuring posts are on-topic and polite, users can revolt, or simply leave.Another problem with blog commenting is the automated bots (short for robots) that look for blogs that don’t require registration in order to post. The bots can slam one or a hundred spam posts into the comments, polluting the commentary, and turning off the community. You need to think about how you will implement specific features like this, and how you will react as your community evolves.

  In fact, the various bits of functionality your community offers, from commenting to friending to blogging or video uploading, can have an effect on the direction and vitality of your community. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” We definitely see this concept at work in online communities where the technology — be it YouTube’s video or Foursquare’s GPS tech — shapes the interactions and the arc of the community.

• Multi-Threaded
  Community is not a monologue. There are multiple speakers, multiple topics, and multiple ways community members can interact. One aspect of community management is to set policy regarding off-topic posting. Some community managers delete off-topic threads, move them out of the main flow, or otherwise discourage them. We feel that a good amount of the attraction f a good community is the ability for its members to express themselves as they see fit. We recommend that you ask your community how they want to police off-topic posting, and enable them to solve such problems themselves.But there are other types of undesirable activity you’ll need to deal with: trolls. The term troll refers to someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.[6] Trolls deliberately create messages to foster responses of outrage or indignation. These are the people with an axe to grind, or who just enjoy stirring the pot. They may hijack threads and bend them to their agenda. We talk about trolls in a post in our What CIOs Need to Know About Social Media series.
• Leaderless/Many Leaders
  By this we mean there is usually no single leader in a community. You may think you’d like to be the leader, but what you’ll find is that many leaders will emerge. And they may fight for dominance. To use your community properly, learn how to nurture these leaders and turn them into evangelists so they can spread their influence — and your messages — beyond your community. You may find, however, that some of the leaders are leading dissent. We talk more about handling negatives in the post CIOs: Techniques for Handling Social Media Negatives.In general, however, you need to govern your community with a light hand. Community members will expect to be involved in major decisions about your community, so you should clearly lay out your policies regarding the actions you can take unilaterally, and respond to community comments about them. You’ll find that most community members will expect you to exert a certain amount of control, but be very careful about actions that could be construed as censorship.
• Continuity
  Generally, a community is a longer-term entity. However, some communities are quite ephemeral, coalescing around events or short-lived causes (for example, disasters like the Haiti earthquake in early 2010) or fads. To benefit, members may require a sense of continuity — the feeling that by investing in the community it will be there when they need it.Most communities generally have a core membership that interacts over a long period of time, and it’s often the quality of their interaction that attracts and holds the rest of the membership together. A good example of this is the long-running Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (the Well) that started in the San Francisco Bay area in the mid-80s (as a bulletin board for Grateful Dead fans) and is still running strong today. When I first joined the Well in 1993, all the leading lights of the Internet movement made their home there, including Howard Rheingold (previously mentioned in this section), Whole Earth Catalog creator (and Well cofounder) Stewart Brand, writer Bruce Sterling, usability pioneer Brenda Laurel, Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of the Creative Commons Copyleft movement, and Caterina Fake, creator of Flickr and Hunch.This is not to imply you need stars to keep your community going, but it doesn’t hurt. Surely there are stars in your field. See if you can get them to participate.

Why are we going on and on about the definition of community? Well, to state the obvious, if you’re going to build a community, it would certainly be helpful to know when you’ve achieved one. But also we feel a definition of community that states the characteristics of good, sustainable efforts will be the most useful in guiding your efforts to architect your community.

So to put all this into one definition, we’d say an online community is:

A group of people with a shared purpose in a longer-term relationship in which all voices can be heard, members support one another, and which evolves over time based on where its members want it to go.

Does that sound good to you? OK, we’ve defined what community is. Let’s take a quick look at what it isn’t.

What isn’t Community?

• An audience
  • Chris Brogan says, “The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.”
  • Do you want an audience to speak at, or a community to support and converse with you?
  • The community is not there to consume your messages
• Leaderless
  • You as a sponsor can lead, but in the best communities, leaders emerge
  • Those leaders can be your evangelists, but even if they aren’t, they are critical to the community’s success

• A Place Requiring Equal Participation
  • Many more will lurk than contribute, and that’s OK
  • A small percentage will contribute the majority of content and interaction — cultivate them!
  • It’s just important that everyone have the same opportunity to contribute even if they don’t take advantage of it

Here are some quick tips about community:

[1] Dictionary.com: bit.ly/aaqRyf

[2] YouTube search: bit.ly/9gK0zH

[3] For example: mysp.ac/blxYxr

[4] Ancient Faces: bit.ly/dxXclW

[5] Techcrunch mob: tcrn.ch/cgKxr0

[6] Wikipedia definition of a troll: bit.ly/bhHq1m

In our previous post, Creating Social Media Context, we talked about creating the second of our Social Media 4 C’s, social media context. Next we consider creating social media connection.

Social Media Connection

Of course connection has to be one of the Cs — it’s really what social computing is all about: connecting with other people online. The key in this phrase is “people.” People connect with people, not with corporations, or products, or even with causes. To create connection that is real, strong, and sustainable, you need to Be a Person, and that means getting your people involved.

People involved in social media people are looking online for opportunities to connect and exchange information with people who share their interests, not with brands or organizations or products.

It’s not about me, me, me, the business with something to sell. It’s about us, the folks who are connected because we like the product or service, or care about the problem you’re solving. The community. Which probably already exists, so you need to connect to it first, before you can create relationships with its members.

Of course, a big thing to figure out is what will you do with the connections you foster? We’ve talked a lot about that so far in this series, and there’ll be more later.

You do need to think beyond the one-to-one connections we’ve been talking about. Look at it from the community member’s perspective. They go from site to site, and may have various relationships on various social media islands in the stream of the Web. But many of these connections are discrete — limited to the venue, such as Facebook, or Twitter, and not portable across all the places they roam.

There’s a recent movement to offer context across these isolated connections. Facebook recently changed the way members can share the experiences they have on other sites. It used to be a site could offer a Share on Facebook button that would allow a Facebook member to click and comment on the site. It was generally a one-time thing. You see a site you like; you comment on it; it shows up in your timeline, and that was the end of it.

Facebook has changed this to a Like button[1] that does a lot more, and introduced the Open Graph[2] protocol, which is a fancy way of saying a standardized method for members of one site can share their experiences, enthusiasms and recommendations on another site. The site that offers the button can set up a lasting connection between the member’s experience on the site and their Facebook experience.

Facebook explains it[3] this way:

You can publish content from your site into the social graph to reach your users’ friends. The Like button enables users to share your site’s content back to their Facebook stream with one click. In addition, you can integrate pages deeply into the social graph via the Open Graph protocol.

So if content changes on Site A, it is pushed out to all Facebook members who have connected their Site A experience to their Facebook experience, and will show up in their Facebook timeline, and in their friends’ timelines.

This is a very powerful way to connect the wide-ranging social media experiences of Facebook members, and serves to make Facebook the center of members’ worlds, which is obviously great for Facebook.

But think of the implications for your enterprise. We talked about creating evangelists in the series that starts with Identifying Social Media Evangelists. The new Open Graph process makes every user a potential evangelist, as their friends can discover information about their interests, leading to an interest in your site.

Several large social media sites have signed on to the idea, including the Web radio station Pandora, and as a result, Pandora users can:

• See all friends who use Pandora
• See the artists and songs that are liked by friends
• Import their Facebook pictures into their Pandora profiles, a key way to promote personal brand
• Listen to friends’ stations (thanks, Andrew Eklund, for the great Medeski, Martin & Wood station!)

Pandora makes it easy to make the connection, as you can see in the next two figures. Simply click a button, answer some questions, and it’s done.

The Open Graph initiative represents a very strong way to connect the social media experiences of your community, creating a vast interconnected web (really) of information, recommendations, and discovery that you can use to communicate with potential new community members. Try putting the Facebook Like button on your site and see what happens.

Here are some tips about making connections.

[1] Facebook Like button: bit.ly/bQMIff

[2] Facebook Open Graph: bit.ly/aMUWV8

[3] Facebook on the Open Graph: bit.ly/b2uYU3

In our previous post, Creating Social Media Content, we talked about creating social media content. But content can be useless without context. This post explores creating social media context.

Social Media Context

In that big list of C words we gave in the post How Will You Speak on Social Media? you may have noticed that context wasn’t exactly way up there in the standings. It’s puzzling how many social media list-makers leave out context. We think it’s very important, perhaps even paramount, and certainly one of the things that makes social networking a unique medium.

In fact, in contrast to the old saw that content is king, we think context is actually king, or at least a duke.

Context is when you check out user reviews before buying something. Context is when you Google a current event and pass up CNN or the New York Times to get a blogger’s perspective. And context is something you can’t reliably count on getting from traditional media, hooked as it is on the 24-hour news cycle and reality shows.

So what is context? Context is when you surround and connect the unfamiliar with familiar touch points, thus enabling the user to better understand. It’s providing a frame of reference, like the frame of a picture that adds to the enjoyment and understanding of the painting. It’s the difference between seeing Jeff Smith’s LinkedIn professional headline and seeing in his profile that he went to the same high school you went to and graduated when you did — chances are he’s your old buddy!

More and more applications are adding social media context to their bag of tricks. For example, if you have a Gmail account, you can get a free Firefox or Chrome plug-in from Rapportive[1] that will show you the social media activity of the people you correspond with. Here’s an example of what viewing an email in Gmail with the Rapportive plug-in providing social media context.

The sidebar material in includes information from Mike’s LinkedIn account as well as links to his tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. To check up on what he’s doing, we just need to click on one of the links.

Large online software vendors such as Salesforce.com are rapidly adding this type of context to their applications.

But context is definitely not only about apps. The human element online provides context for your community. LinkedIn provides a good example. Which of these connection offers would you be more likely to accept: one that uses the default “I’d like to add you to my LinkedIn network” or one that says, “I ran into a friend of yours recently and he said we both share an interest in racquetball. I see you also used to work at XYZ Corp. I’d like to connect and talk about old times at XYZ”?

The choice is pretty simple, isn’t it?

Context is becoming so important on the Web that many thinkers are claiming sites will deemphasize Search Engine Optimization (SEO — a way to get your site highly placed on Google) and pay more at­tention to Social Graph Optimization (SGO — optimizing the people and their content that will refer traffic to your site).

According to Ryan Spoon[2] of Polaris Venture Partners, “The consensus was that context drives rele­vancy… and thus virality… and thus efficacy.” To decode this, Spoon is saying that giving context for a referral to a Website is more relevant to the user, and thus makes the user more likely to tell his or her friends, thus improving the ability of people to find your site.

Content that is more relevant (more contextual) is more likely to be forwarded on, tweeted about, and otherwise more likely to go viral (passed from person to person just like a cold).

So when you are dialoging with your community, be sure you understand their context and provide your content based on what they want.

Here are some tips to improve the context of your content:

[1] Rapportive social plug-in: bit.ly/b7GGE6

[2] Ryan Spoon is a principal at Polaris Venture Partners: bit.ly/aNA2vc

In our previous post, How Will You Speak on Social Media?, we talked about how to  communicate on social media by Being a Person. This post we talk about creating social media content.

Some rights reserved by Eloqua

Content

At the risk of you thinking we’re getting too carried away with numbers of letters, we’d like to mention just one more set, concerning content: Paul Dunay’s list of the Four S’s of Social Media (oddly, in a post entitled The 4 P’s to Social Media Marketing). It pulls ideas from four influential books on online marketing:[1]

• Tell Good Stories — think Unleashing the Idea Virus[2] by Seth Godin
• Make them Sticky — think Made to Stick[3] by Chip and Dan Heath
• Package them to be Shareable — think World Wide Rave[4] by David Meerman Scott
• Launch them using all available Social Media — think Inbound Marketing[5] by Brian Halligan,  Dharmesh Shah and David Meerman Scott

Telling stories is what we do all the time, offline. This may take the form of gossipy tale-telling, “Can you believe what she said?” or “Did you hear about what happened to Jim?” or more well-developed yarns like “When we finally stopped the car we realized not only was the engine smoking, but we had two flat tires.”

The best way to begin to engage with your community is to tell stories. Stories humanize us, and can set listeners at ease. But stories are just the beginning. You want to establish a dialog — to get your com­munity involved.

Discussion vs. Dialog

Many people call what happens online a discussion. You’ll see terms like “discussion group” used to describe places online where people congregate to talk. But discussion may not be the best term for the kind of interaction you want to foster. You may want something a bit more intimate.

The physicist David Bohm developed an approach to conversation which he called dialogue. Bohm compared dialogue (derived from Greek words implying “a flow of meaning”) with discussion (derived from Latin words implying, “a shaking apart”).

The former is creative and collaborative, the latter analytical and often competitive. Bohm says:

Dialogue is not discussion, a word that shares its root meaning with ‘percussion’ and ‘con­cussion,’ both of which involve breaking things up. Nor is it debate. These forms of conversation contain an implicit tendency to point toward a goal, to hammer out an agreement, to try to solve a problem or have one’s opinion prevail.[6]

The following table, from a paper by Richard Seel[7] indicates some of the differences between the dialogue and discussion:

Do you notice anything about the characteristics listed in the right column? They all have a lot in com­mon with traditional push marketing — talking to, adversarial, encourages quick thinking, encourages lock in: This pretty aptly describes the modern television commercial.

In your content, and in your community spaces, you’ll want to target the elements in the left column: listen­ing, speaking with, collaborative, generates ideas.

To do so, make sure your content draws the reader in, rather than aims to make your points. Your con­tent should encourage collaboration and idea generation, rather than focusing on differences or being adversarial. Think of your community spaces as your living room, where, as Chris Brogan says, all the chairs face each other, not your lecture hall, where the chairs all face you.

In addition to these qualities, you’ll want your content to be:

In our previous post, Who Will Speak for You on Social Media?, we talked about talking, and who in your enterprise will speak on social media. In this post, we talk about how to actually communicate on social media.

How to Do It

To the First Rule, Be a Person that we added in the post, Think About Your Approach to Social Media: Be A Person, we add a few others, most of which are actually just variations of the First Rule:

• Be authentic
• Be transparent
• Be consistent
• Be patient
• Be careful

This last one requires a little explanation. The use of any powerful communication tool such as social com­puting carries with it certain risks. As Spider-Man says, “With great power comes great responsibility.” When we say to get your staff involved, we don’t mean encourage them to engage without rules of engagement.

To this section, we add just two anecdotes:

• A judge was reprimanded after friending a lawyer in a case, and engaged in ex parte communications about the case
• A schoolteacher faced being fired after posting derogatory comments about her students on Facebook

If you deal in an area with regulations, ensure that all social media participants understand the limits on what they say and how.

You’ll for sure want to craft an acceptable use policy governing your enterprise’s use of social media. We talk more about this in the section Create Your Policies on page 408.

Online, Think Four C’s

You’ll find a lot of Four C’s on the Web. Most have a few of the C’s in common:

• Content
• Conversation
• Community
• Connection
• Collaboration
• Communication

But there are lots of other C’s out there:

All of these C’s are important to the use of social media. For some reason, social networking pundits are drawn to the letter. Some have proposed Five C’s, and we even found one over-achiever promoting Seven C’s![1] And the guy doesn’t even appear to be a sailor.   ???

But snarkiness aside, there’s a long history of coming up with a set of alliterative words to describe market­ing and media concepts. You may be familiar, for example, with the Four P’s of Marketing, introduced by Neil H. Borden in his seminal 1964 article, Concept of the Marketing Mix:[2]

• Product
• Price
• Placement
• Promotion

Internet marketing company Eyeflow came up with a way to add Five C’s to these Four P’s via a Fifth P in the diagram[3] on the next page.

Figure 11 — The 5 P’s of Marketing, After Adding Participation

We’d put the participation between product and place, where a community may have more of an impact. It seems unlikely that a community could change price or promotion, although they could affect the product design and its distribution.

Despite the profusion of C’s and P’s out there, we kind of like the alliterative list approach, although our favorite Four C’s are:

• Content — Yes, social media is all about content, and pretty much all of the Four C’s include this one
• Context— This is not one of the more popular C’s in our survey, but we feel it is essential. The Web is awash in Content. Making sense of it requires Context, and we feel that’s what social media does.
• Connection — This is one of the most powerful drivers of human civilization — the need to connect with others. We’re all connected to something larger than ourselves, and social media is very good at fostering Connection, primarily through our final C, Community.
• Community — We stated earlier in the section  Engage Your Community on page 113 that community is one of the hardest things to create online, yet, paradoxically, social media allows communities to spontaneously form in the blink of an eye

In the posts that follow, we examine each of our Four C’s in turn.

[1] 7 Cs of Social Media for Participation: bit.ly/c3UQO1

[2] Borden’s Concept of the Marketing Mix: bit.ly/cmJD5D

[3] Eyeflow’s The 5 C’s and The Marketing Mix in the Social Media Era: bit.ly/aU6Hmk

In our previous post, Think About Your Approach to Social Media: Be A Person, we took a look at some considerations and tactics for approaching social media. This post we talk about talking, and who in your enterprise will speak on social media.

Who’s Going to Do It?

There’s a social science theoretical concept called Dunbar’s number[1] that posits a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. The generally accepted value for Dunbar’s number is 150. This means the average human can maintain up to 150 stable social relationships.

But you want to have relationships online with many more. So how are you going to do that?

Well, if you accept the concept of Dunbar’s number, and you want to maintain relationships with thousands of supporters, you’re going to need lots of people, like:

• You
• Your staff, management, customers
• Your boosters and evangelists

Kind of scary, eh? Letting your staff represent your business without a filter or editor is an obstacle many organizations can never get over. Some enterprises worry about confidential material getting out via social media. Um, hello? Everyone in your enterprise has email, both business and personal, and probably several social media accounts. If they wanted to let cats out of the bag, they’d already be doing it.

The difference between what’s happening now, and what we’re encouraging you to let happen is you’ll support your staff’s online interactions, giving them policy guidelines, talking points and a schedule of initiatives. You get to plan it. Today you’re not at all in control. You don’t know what they’re saying, and you have no real way of stopping them from saying it.

Don’t believe us? Google your staff. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

What did you find out? Hopefully nothing terrible . . .

We’re betting you found that your staff is pretty engaged in social media. Great! You’ve got some expertise you can leverage. Now give them some action items, and guidelines, as they engage with your community. And begin leveraging the power of their commitment to your business.

[1] Dunbar’s Number: bit.ly/bgZ4jh

In our previous post, Executing Your Social Computing Strategy, we discussed starting to execute your social media strategy. But first, you need to determine how you’re going to approach social media. This post takes a look at some considerations and tactics for approaching social media.

The first rule, the title of our books, and the most important tenet in your social media approach is simple to say, but hard for many enterprises to actually do:

This means many things, but in general, people prefer relationships with people, not organ­izations, not brands, and certainly not with marketers. And it is called social media, after all.

Let your people speak; speak as yourself, as a real person.

Not a fake person, as in the ill-fated Wal-Marting Across America campaign[1] way back in 2006 (Wal-Mart is an anchor tenant in our Social Media Hall of Shame).

Wal-Marting Across America purported to be a blog about a couple’s journey across America in an RV, during which they encountered many Wal-Marts along the way. The blog was exposed as a Wal-Mart marketing gimmick, one that is called sock-puppetry.

Both Wal-Mart and famous marketing house Edelman took a hit due to the duplicity. They forgot the first rule: Be a Person, not a Brand.

Interestingly, the campaign was in direct violation of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Code of Ethics,[2] which Edelman helped create, and whose major tenets are:

Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Code of Ethics

The lesson here is: Don’t try to put one over on your community. You’ll get found out, and it will hurt you. It’s better to just be honest. And Be a Person.

Being a person also involves a few realizations about your community, such as how they really make decisions.

There’s a great free e-book[3] from Network for Good and Sea Change Strategies called Homer Simpson for Non-profits: The Truth About How People Really Think & What It Means for Promoting Your Cause by Katya Andresen, Alia McKee, and Mark Rovner. In it, the authors assert a bit of common sense that many folks may not know they know:

Real people make decisions like Homer Simpson, not Spock.

Now although that book is geared toward non-profits, enterprises can learn a lot from it and the Simpson/Spock dichotomy. Just as giving or supporting a cause is not influenced by cold rationality — the Spock side of us — neither are many purchasing decisions. For all kinds of decisions, we are more motivated by our gut, like Homer.

So to achieve your business’s goals, do what people do when they’re just sitting around: yack. Tell each other stories. Connect on a visceral level. And form relationships. That’s what social media is all about.

Rather than present all the rational reasons why someone should take an action such as buying your product or telling their friends, engage with them on a personal level. Get people to care:

• About you
• Then about your business

Rather than pursuing supporters, in the traditional media way, online you need to attract supporters by offering Content, Context, Connection, and Community.

We talk a lot about these Four C’s in just a bit, but before we do, we need to talk about who is going to do all this yacking.

[1] Wal-Marting Across America: bit.ly/cicIJi and bit.ly/HwEDE

[2] Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Code of Ethics: bit.ly/MzH5T

[3] Network for Good and Sea Change Strategies’ free ebook — Homer Simpson for Non-profits: The Truth About How People Really Think & What It Means for Promoting Your Cause: bit.ly/905R9y

In our previous post, Assign a Social Media Monitor, we took a look at an important keystone of your social media strategy: social media listening. If you’ve followed all the advice in our previous posts, you’re finally ready to start executing your social media strategy.

Executing Your Social Media Strategy

“You’ve heard it said again and again, but I’ll say it again.
Companies don’t fail because their strategy is flawed.
They fail because their strategy execution is flawed.”

Jennifer Johnston Canfield

“Your social media strategy execution should be in line with the company innovation, future direction, reputation management, campaigns, customer satisfaction improvements, and social CRM.”

Debajyoti Banerjee

Yes, it’s true. The best strategy in the world is only as good as its execution, and that’s where many enterprises fall down. They may spend lots of resources creating a strategy only to have it sit in a binder, gathering dust on an executive’s credenza.

If you’ve been following along with these posts, by this time you’ve created your strategy or at least sketched it out. You may have begun listening, and perhaps measuring. Now it’s time for the rubber to meet the road. You’re ready to get started. But before you do, there’s one more task you need to complete: integrating your social media strategy and tactics with your other marketing and public relations efforts.

Some organizations get the mistaken idea that using social media means they should stop doing what they’re already doing. Far from it. You need to look at how your social computing efforts support your existing efforts.

The following are some suggestions for how you can integrate your social media efforts with your existing offline marketing and promotion efforts.

• If you send out direct mail, continue, and:
  • Add social media URLs to your materials along with a call to action such as: Follow us on Facebook; Watch our videos on YouTube; Get the latest info on Twitter
  • Create events to entice recipients to join you online
  • Invite your offline followers to a Tweetup,[1] where online followers can meet one another in person
• If you send out newsletters, continue, and:
  • Add social media URLs and enticements
  • Enable immediate action by making URLs clickable
• If you do real-world events, continue, and:
  • Add a real-time social media component
  • Allow virtual attendance
  • Webcams
  • Live tweeting and blogging
  • Use TweetWally[2] to project on a wall a live Twitter feed based on a hashtag

[1] HOW TO: Organize a Successful Tweetup: bit.ly/dpWPpx

[2] TweetWally: bit.ly/cdS1oM

In our previous post, Establish Key Performance Indicators for Social Media, we took a brief look at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you should consider to help measure social media performance. In this post, we turn to an important keystone of your social media strategy: social media listening.

As you’ve probably gathered from the preceding, monitoring and measuring your social media effort can be a lot of work. You may be tempted to give these activities short shrift, and concentrate on getting your message out via social media.

Obviously we think that’s a risky plan. Social computing can have a huge upside for your organization, if used correctly. If used incorrectly, it can have a huge downside. And if you plan on minimizing the effort you put into monitoring and measuring, you risk making it into our Social Media Hall of Shame.

The rogue’s gallery of organizations in the Hall of Shame includes some of the most-savvy marketers in the world. Yet one of the things that all the members of the Hall have in common (in addition to not understanding the difference between push marketing and social media conversation building) is they didn’t take monitoring and measuring social media seriously.

Using the various social media monitoring tools we’ve discussed you can automate much of the monitoring tasks. But you need someone to follow the conversations and report on significant ones. You also need someone to follow up with your community. They’ll expect that, once you engage them.

We recommend that you:

• Assign a person or team to regularly review the monitoring services
• Assign staff to follow up:
  • Post comments on blogs, Facebook
  • Tweet
  • Follow groups on LinkedIn

The good news is that social media experts estimate that fewer than five percent of tweets and posts require a response. But you need to respond to those that need a response; that requires someone who is paying attention.

A good example of effective use of social media metrics in creating community is The Inner Circle customer community from tax preparation software company Intuit. Developed over a period of six years, The Inner Circle now boasts more than 25,000-members.[1]

After its first year, the Inner Circle community featured many social channels for customers to interact with, including a blog, user forums, an idea exchange center, and poll and survey questions scattered about the site. Like many enterprises, Intuit was a bit wary at first of having an unfettered conversation and kept a tight rein on community members and managers.  Initially posts had to be approved by PR and a number of managers before going live. Once the Intuit team became more comfortable with the community, however, the approval process disappeared.

Intuit gave Inner Circle members special perks, including front-of-the-line support privileges through a special 1-800 number assigned just to them. The result of the developing relationship between Intuit and its community was a passionate group of evangelists who were willing to go above and beyond on behalf of TurboTax and Intuit.

Social media monitoring has played a large role in the growth and vitality of the community. The Inner Circle team created a series of alerts using social media monitoring software by vendor Radian6. The team tracks company mentions, comments, and customer passion, and regularly identifies and reaches out to non-members to invite them to the community. They also use Radian6 to keep tabs on regular commenters on Twitter.

Intuit’s Ali McCourt says one of the key things she’s learned is to strike a balance between serving the needs of your company and those of your community.

Based on input from the community, and the monitoring of social conversations within it and outside it, Intuit now performs annual product updates and regular improvements to its TurboTax product based on comments and suggestions from its highly-engaged community members.

From this we can see that effective social media monitoring is a key to creating and maintaining your community, whether you create your own branded space, or create a presence on a public social networking site.

[1] Intuit/Radian6 Social Media Case Study: slidesha.re/oqVAnc