social computing

In our previous post, Enable Social Tagging, we looked at using social tagging sites to raise your site’s profile. In this post, we enlarge on our theme from Social Media is the Megaphone and talk about social media as a conversation among equals.

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Don’t Sweat the Hierarchy

We’ve been quoting social media pundit Seth Godin in the last couple of posts and continue here, on the topic of modes of social media communication. Godin stresses that, since the nature of social media is distributed, non-hierarchical, and definitely not top-down, command-and-control, this have can implications for how your business is organized. He states that the huge non-profit United Way has underperformed in the last decade, and looks to the way they are organized as one of the keys.

The United Way is a classic top-down approach. By creating arrangements with the Fortune 500, they were able to do payroll deduction on millions of paychecks. That, all by itself, was key to their scale. But what happens when those relationships aren’t as important? Because people rarely talk about the United way and its work, the word of their great efforts doesn’t spread as far and as fast as it might. As a result, it’s hard for them to catch up when the payroll-deduction approach loses juice.

Compare this to the brilliant peer-to-peer gimmick embraced by Nike and Lance Armstrong. […] [T]he Armstrong LiveStrong idea spread so far, so fast precisely because of their side-to-side, not top down approach. In our ever faster, ever more selfish world, the chances of growing a non-profit with a top down approach are tiny. It’s just too hard, we’re to busy and you don’t have enough time or money.

Consider Godin’s recommendations along with ours as you prepare to engage with your community.

Give the Megaphone

Ask your supporters to commit. This goes beyond the kind of commitment represented by merely buying your product. Make it easy for your supporters to pick up the megaphone and tag your site, blog about it, “Like It” on Facebook,[1] +1 it via Google, tweet it on Twitter, and so on.

You’d be surprised how effective committed supporters can be:

• Dell estimates[2] that a Dell detractor costs the company $57, and a promoter generates $328
• A study across 20 brands by analyst firm Syncapse[3]found:
  • The average annualized value of an individual fan on Facebook is $136.38; the range is from $270.77 in the best case to $0 in the worst
  • On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
    • McDonald’s saw the largest variability, with Fans reporting spending $159.79 more per year than non-fans
    • Oreo saw the lowest value with a difference of $28.52
• Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand
• Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends
• An average fan may participate with a brand ten times a year and will make one recommendation. But, an active fan may participate thirty times and make ten recommendations.
• On the other hand, social media management firm Vitrue found that a Facebook Fan is worth $3.60 of media value
  • Vitrue determined[4] that on average, a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year at a $5 CPM (meaning, that a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month)

Of course, there are lots of ways to give your supporters the megaphone, and we cover many more techniques in the chapters that follow.

The key is to give the megaphone, not hog it.

Next up: Measure Social Media Results

Don’t Sweat the Social Hierarchy is the 36th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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

[4] Real Time Marketer’s A Facebook Fan is Worth $3.60. Really? bit.ly/pNPe9K A dissenting view from The Future Buzz’s More Absurd Social Media Analysis – The Value Of A Fan bit.ly/oi6QD7

In our previous post, Social Media is the Megaphone, we took a look at enabling your community to speak. In this post, we examine using social tagging sites such as Digg and delicious to enable your community to find you.

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Enable Social Tagging

A good way to enable your community involves social tagging.

There are lots of social tagging sites, but three of the most popular are Digg[1], del.icio.us[2] and Reddit.[3] Social taggers who find an interesting Webpage can easily tag it — mark it as interesting for other site members to see. Only a minority of people actually tag pages, while a much larger number cruise the tagging aggregator sites looking for interesting topics and pages. This gives the taggers an enormous influence for their size.

Encouraging your community to tag your information and media can dramatically improve your visibility, even if your site does not perform well in Google searches. Seth Godin did a search on “diabetes” on Delicious. The search led him to a site filled with white papers on diabetes.

While this site would likely not show up on the first page of Google results, because eight people had tagged that page, Godin was able to easily find it through social bookmarking. Therefore, instead of spending vast amounts of time and resources on SEO techniques to influence Google search results, if an organization can manage to get even a handful of their advocates and supporters to tag their pages, their visibility on the net would increase dramatically.

Godin puts it like this:

The Acumen Fund [a non-profit global venture fund working to solve the problems of global poverty] has hundreds of pages on its site — yet most of them are essentially invisible. If the organization made it easy for donors and supporters to start tagging pages, the most important messages would rise to the top. The same thing is true for art museums, religious groups and the ACLU. In every case, there are pages, buried and doomed to decay into obscurity. But if a few surfers tagged the pages appropriately, though, other surfers would find it. And the word would spread. The big secret of del.icio.us is that the percentage of users who do the tagging is tiny. Most of the traffic to the site is looking for the tagging done by a tiny minority. This is the essence of online leverage.

Think about how you can leverage your supporters by encouraging social tagging. It’s a great way to drastically improve the impact of a small group of supporters.

Next up: Don’t Sweat the Social Hierarchy

Enable Social Tagging is the 35th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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

In our previous post, Social Media Relationship Stages, we took a look at the process of drawing your audience into a closer relationship. In this post, we talk about enabling your community to speak.

Social Media is the Megaphone

And your supporters are the speakers. Encourage them to:

• Tag you on delicious.com, digg.com
• Upload relevant photos to flickr.com
• Blog about you
• Tweet about you

Seth Godin describes the power of the Internet, and of giving your supporters the megaphone:

The Internet changes everything. Now, one person armed with a keyboard can reach millions. One person with a video camera can tell a story that travels around the world. And one person with a blog can sell a lot of computers.

The trick is this: you need to give your fan club some leverage, an amplifier — a megaphone.

Your former patrons, the aggrieved ones, the critics — they’ve already found the web. They’re the ones who have managed to post play-by-play accounts of your misdeeds and missteps. They’re motivated and they’re already embracing the medium.

A diligent marketer, however, can make it easy for your fan club to get the word out as well. And to do it in an authentic, uncontrolled, honesty way.

This is why you don’t censor comments about you online: There are supporters as well as detractors out there. If you get all paranoid about nasty things the haters (or trolls) say, and feel tempted to remove them, it helps to remember that your supporters see these posts as well. And if you’ve enabled them — handed them the megaphone — you may find they’ll rush to your defense.

This won’t work, however, if you insist on approving all posts on sites you control.

Doing so stifles the ability for your supporters to quickly respond to negativity. It also breaches the trust you hope to establish with your community. If community members feel they must think twice before posting — taking into account whether Big Brother will approve their posts — you lose the ability to find out what they really think, and violate the implicit contract you established with your community when you decided to engage with them.

Next up: Enable Social Tagging

Social Media is the Megaphone is the 34th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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

In our previous post, Ask for the Commitment on Social Media, we discussed asking your community for a commitment. In this post, we examine the process of drawing your audience into an ever-closer relationship.

Social Media Relationship Stages

To encourage a relationship with your customers and prospects through social media, it will take more than placing a simple “Buy” or even a “Like” button on your home page or social media site. As we’ve discussed, one of your online goals should be to draw existing and potential customers into a relationship that will be productive for both parties. The basic steps, to paraphrase online marketer Seth Godin, are to:

• Turn strangers into friends
• Turn friends into customers
• And then… do the most important job: Turn your customers into evangelists

The trick is to do this without resorting to traditional marketing tactics that may turn off your online community.

Traditional marketers refer to the gradual process of enticing the public to become buyers as the marketing funnel. Lots of folks go in the top; only a few fall out the bottom as customers. Godin thinks this metaphor is all wrong for online marketing. In his free e-book targeted at non-profits Flipping the Funnel — Give Your Fans the Power to Speak Up,[1] Godin gives advice that enterprises can benefit from as well:

The math is compelling. Most of the people in the world are not your donors [customers]. They haven’t even heard of you, actually. And while many of these people are not qualified buyers or aren’t interested in supporting your organization, many of them might—if they only knew you existed, if they could only be persuaded that your offering is worth investing time and energy and passion and money into.

But how on earth are you going to get them to know about you?

We’re living in the most cluttered marketplace in history. Whether you are curing cancer, encouraging faith or educating people in need, people are better at ignoring you than ever before. You don’t have enough time to get your message out.

Godin goes on to say that most organizations have underused assets: your friends and your supporters.

Godin’s idea is to flip the marketing funnel and turn it into a megaphone. You give the megaphone to your fan club: the people who like and respect you, and who have a vested interest in your success.

Next up: Social Media is the Megaphone

Social Media Relationship Stages is the 33rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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

In our previous post, Your First Social Media Contributions, we discussed how to make your first contributions on social. In this post, we get into a serious subject: asking your community for a commitment.

Ask for the Commitment

“Social Networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals.
Do it reliably and repeatedly — so that over time people
have an interest in helping you achieve your goals”

Seth Godin

You’re using social media for a reason. You want something. It may be attention; it may be sales; it may be brand awareness. The best-designed social media sites feature calls to action — click to get our newsletter; click to find out more; click to buy.

Your site should ensure that your audience knows what it can do to help, and can take a positive action online. “Click to email a salesperson” isn’t going to cut it. “Click to chat with a live person” is much better. “Click to buy” is even better. “Click to recommend this site to your friends,” however, may be the best outcome.

Based on the goals you identified in your engagement plan, design interactions that explain the participation options, and entice people to get involved, right now.

The old saw that salespeople must practice ABC — Always Be Closing — is applicable to online as well. But what it means to close may be different. If you’re that obnoxious sales guy always asking, “Are you ready to buy now? How about now? Now?” you’re not going to be successful online.

While it doesn’t pay to be obnoxious, you also don’t want to be shy. It’s best online to give before asking, and it’s also best to gradually draw your audience in to a more intimate relationship.

Perhaps you start off by offering information on your business, and then ask for a small commitment, like entering an email address to receive a white paper, or a newsletter, or a bumper sticker. Then perhaps you ask them to email their friends about your social site. Later you may ask them to sign up for a newsletter, or come to an event, or take action in some other small way. It’s a conversation. It’s relationship building, and you don’t want to go too fast, yet at the same time you want to enable those who are really excited to proceed at a faster pace.

How you ask and what you ask for at what time is more art than science. You can take your learning from offline efforts and try to apply it online. Just be sure you keep your ears open. Ask those you’re involving how they’d like the relationship to progress, and don’t fall into the offline ways of constantly pushing messages as a passive audience.

Regardless of your other online goals, most businesses share a common goal: Increase sales. Buying online now has a long history, and is rather sophisticated and well-developed. Social media definitely offers new ways to reach and inform prospective customers while drawing them into an ever-more-intimate relationship with your business. We take a look at this topic in the following post.

Next up: Social Media Relationship Stages

Ask for the Commitment on Social Media is the 32nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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

In our previous post, Social Media Engagement Plan Contents, we laid out a suggested outline for your engagement plan. In this post, we talk about your first social media contributions.

Before considering a large undertaking such as modifying your site with social media features or creating a do-it-yourself standalone social media site, dip your toe in the water and gauge the tenor of your community. After you’ve listened for an extended period, you can start engaging by posting on existing communities. Here are a few suggestions for your first contributions:

• Be low-risk, for example, by posting interesting, non-controversial news, comments, or events
• Know who the champions are in your community and acknowledge them visibly, perhaps by commenting on their posts
• Share professional/personal information
• Share a professional problem and ask if somebody has the same problems/interests
• Highlight content from well-established community members more often than content you create. You’ll build good will.
• Refresh your content often, but not TOO often: Performing A/B split content analysis using Google Analytics can help you figure out how often

Once you’re a familiar face, consider asking the community to help you design your enterprise’s social media presence. If appropriate (and your legal counsel approves), you can conduct contests that invite ideas and let other members help judge them. This is a technique called crowdsourcing (see bit.ly/cpyFhG for more information), and it is an effective way to encourage people to not only contribute ideas, but to take a stake in them.

Change the content on your social media sites regularly. How you define regularly depends on your community, but you should shoot for at least weekly updates. The surest way to ensure the death of a community site is to let it get stale. This goes for the content you generate, and the discussion and other material your members generate. Mix it up. Give people a reason to come back, or to follow your feed, or to seek you out wherever you are.

Social media should not exist in a vacuum, or even only online. Feature your social media presence in your newsletter, in your advertising, at your events, anywhere you’re doing public relations or marketing.

Even if you decide to focus on social features of your enterprise’s Website, or on a standalone social networking site that you build, also engage members and donors where they are (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube)

And of course, don’t forget to promote your social media activities on traditional media.

Synergistic Promotion Activities

We’ve said previously that you shouldn’t stop doing anything you’re currently doing just because you’ve started to use social media. Even more important: Fold your social media efforts into your other efforts so they reinforce one another. Here are some ideas along those lines.

• Social network outreach— If you have your own community or are sponsoring online events,  use social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to promote your activities and gather feedback
  • Blog outreach — Create a plan to involve influential bloggers and get them to write about your organization. Be sure to designate someone to follow and engage bloggers. Read Fanscape and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s white paper, Pitching to Bloggers.^[1]
  • Email — Identify e-mail lists you can encourage to pass your message on. Ask staff, managers, and board to consider informing their personal contacts about your social computing efforts.
  • Personal networks — Ask staff, managers, community members and supporters to tell their personal networks (online and offline) about your social media activities
• Traditional media outreach — Fold in links to your social media presence and promote your online events along with your offline events. Ensure that your current media personnel are well-versed in what you’re doing online.
  • Online ads — Although online advertising is no longer as effective as it once was, you may still want to leverage it. Consider buying ads on search engines, such as Google AdWords, and ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites. Determine whether you will you hire professionals to produce the creative and manage the ad buy.
  • Offline ads — How will you promote via broadcast advertising? Will you do print ads — even if it’s just including your URL in another ad for your enterprise or brand?
  • Direct mail — If you do regular mailings, integrate your online messaging and URLs
  • Collateral — If you produce written materials or trinkets, be sure to promote your social media presence
• Partnerships — Ask partners to spread the word to their customers, members, or constituencies
• Other established channels — Consider telling your social media story wherever you communicate with people, for example, your telephone hold music

Next up: Ask for the Commitment on Social Media

Your First Social Media Contributions is the 31st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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

In our previous post, Social Media Engagement on Your Site, we took a look getting our Website ready for launch your engagement plan. In this post, we detail the contents of your engagement planning document.

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Engagement Plan Contents

After doing the thinking and your preliminary goal and audience identification, you’re ready to create the engagement plan. The following are questions you should ask, as well as other recommended elements your engagement plan should include:

• Reasons for Using Social Media
  • What do you have to offer?
  • What problem are you trying to solve (reaching an audience, encouraging evangelism, improving sales)?
  • Why are you using social media to accomplish your goal?
• Social Media Approach
  • There are three basic approaches to using social media. Lay out how you’ll use them, singly, in combination, or simultaneously:
    • Participate where conversations are already happening (for example on Facebook, Google+, YouTube, or Twitter)
    • Use, enhance, or create social media aspects of your existing Website
    • Create new a social network that stands alone — using, for example, Ning or other white-box social network software to create an online venue that you control
• Content Plan
  • What kind of content will you publish?
  • What are the style guidelines for content creation?
  • What are the rules of engagement with community members?
  • Will you syndicate content from/to other sites? If so, where, how, and why?
• Design Plan
  • Determine your design parameters
    • How will the site look?
    • How will it work?
    • What features will it have?
  • Create a usability test plan
• Release Plan
  • Avoid a single big-bang release; release incrementally
  • Start small
  • Coordinate final release with marketing efforts
• Resource Plan
  • Identify/assign resources, including writers and a community manager
  • Create the required internal processes for ensuring adequate staffing
  • Create a budget for start up and the first two years
  • Indicate supporters and what they will contribute
• Training Plan
  • Do a social media readiness assessment
  • Create a plan to fill the gaps
  • Ensure advanced social media training for staff assigned
  • Assess the amount of culture change involved in using social media and create change management plans to address
  • Recruit real users and have a professional do a test
  • Start with low-risk contributions, for example, by posting to existing social networking sites
• Metrics Plan
  • What does success look like?
  • What measures will tell you your progress toward your goals?
  • What success factors are the most important?
  • What metrics assess those factors best?
  • How will you collect these metrics?
  • What metrics are related and should be analyzed together?
  • What kind of analyses are valid for the metrics?
  • How reliable are the metrics?
  • How reliable is the analysis? What specific tools will you use to measure activity and community engagement?
  • What corrective actions are triggered when metrics are bad?
• Outreach/Promotion Plan
  • How will you promote online?
  • What bloggers/online influentials will you target for cross promotion?
  • How will you fold the social media message into your traditional marketing efforts?
• Listening Strategy
  • How will you monitor what others are saying about you?
  • How will you engage them?
  • What will you do about negatives?
• Community Management Plan
  • Communities require care and feeding. Determine who is responsible, their duties, and the support they’ll need.
  • Develop contingency plans for foreseeable problems such as dealing with trolls (excessively disruptive, negative, or argumentative community members)

These sections should get you started on your plan.

Next up: Your First Social Media Contributions

Create Your Social Media Engagement Plan is the 30th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can 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