Successful Social Marketing – Integrating Content and Community

The ultimate social marketing success is having a platform that stands out as the go to place for your target audience. If your product/service aims to capture an audience with special interests, you should consider a social strategy and plan that integrates content and community. Special interests groups could include fitness minded, wines enthusiasts, tech innovation, pet lovers, executive peer groups and many more.

As I have stated many times, content is the core of social. So brands should think of themselves as publishers. Every brand should have a digital platform where they produce and curate industry related content of great value to their target audience. Do not think of this as product or service literature. Produce content that addresses the needs and interests of people within your brand’s industry.

Launch your own brand’s digital blog, magazine, or journal.

Be committed to continuous production and updates so that your audience is inspired to keep on returning and builds strong affinity for your “Brand Digital Media” platform. You want to build a reputation as being the go to place for your industries information, insights, and entertainment.

In order to accomplish a “go-to reputation” you should consider a number of different types of content, which include original content, curated content, and UGC (user generated content).

As example, consider the slide below as the “BRAND Digital Media” content hub for your brand…

Determine a finite set of topics you will cover. Use the navigation bar to list these topics and allow your audience to click through directly. Build frames to pop in various content types. Try to keep a set template for these content frames so you can condition your audience to access information they desire and know how to easily obtain it. Update at least one frame a day. Include social sharing and follow buttons.

Once you have established a “BRAND Digital Media” platform, use your social channels to proliferate the content. Include content reference updates on these social channels.

And make sure you are tracking how well the BRAND Digital Media content hub is performing. Consider metrics as follows …

Once you have built a successful BRAND Digital Media platform, now you are in the position to launch an industry community platform.

Assuming you have an audience coming to your content hub for information, why not give that audience a place to engage with your brand and one and other.

As people come to your BRAND Digital Media site for information, give an opportunity to sign up and sign in to your community.

The BRAND Network is an extension of your BRAND Digital Media hub. It is a place for people to connect, converse, and network.

While anyone can get content at the BRAND Digital Media site, only members can comment on content, engage with other users, set up meetings, and network with peers. For starters, consider the following BRAND Network feature set.

The power of having your brand serve as an industry related community is that your brand delivers great value to the target audience. Strive to be the industry digital leading member’s forum. Avoid overt product push. Just aim to be an extremely valued industry information and networking source.

And like any other marketing effort, you need to track success metrics. Consider the following for your BRAND Network …

So think about what you can do to deliver a BRAND Digital Media hub and BRAND Network. If you deliver stellar content and a networking platform your target will truly value your brand.

Yes, building an industry leading content and community front takes much effort, time, resources, and budget. But do you want to be a recognized industry leader or is just being part of the pack good enough? If you want to be a leader, demonstrate leadership. Building the industry best BRAND Digital Media platform and BRAND Network demonstrates leadership.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Why I Am Thankful for Social Media – A Personal Story

This weekend marks the passing of Thanksgiving 2012. It was great spending time with my precious family. I am most thankful we were all together. I hope you and yours had a special time together as well.

Those who know me well, know I am a reflective person. While it does not take Thanksgiving to make me reflect on lessons of life and all I am thankful for, the timing is prime for me to share my emergence into social media with you.

In 2007, I was the VP of Product Marketing for an international tech company with marketing headquarters in NJ. The CMO decided to leave the company and the marketing efforts were pulled back to the company’s corporate headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel. At the same time, Facebook was beginning to make traction beyond universities to the general public and I saw a major marketing shift about to occur. Not just Facebook’s platform, but a stronger and more influential voice from consumers having direct impact on brands’ position and reputation.

As my position was winding down at the international company I saw the timing was right for my first entrance into the world of what would become known as social media. I had this vision that brands could engage with their target audience much the way friends engaged with each other on Facebook. I began to plug along on my start-up, “Opt-In.”

By definition, Opt-In was a platform that allowed users to indicate their interests and preferences and invite brands within specific categories to engage with them. The main points of differentiation were that users had complete control of brand engagement and communication and brands had the highest target market (literally people that “opted-in” for correspondence in their brand category).

To make a long story short, Opt-In really could not run as a start-up. It had to scale big quickly in order to become profitable as transaction fees were small. It was a platform that required a large company’s backing with a significant investment. Given the fact that the economy was bottoming out, it was very difficult to find interested backers at such a large investment.

While I was not seeing an immediate future for Opt-In, I did need to pay the mortgage and other expenses. I was lucky enough to be contacted by a couple of small businesses who said, “you understand social media, can you help us.” Thus my start-up transition from a company with a platform to a consulting business.

As I was making progress in my social media marketing consulting business, I was looking for a permanent position because I felt I was working two full time jobs at once – consulting for billable hours and marketing for the next gig. Once again I was lucky … I landed a position at a magazine publisher running the internal social media group that supported all the different magazines. This was a perfect next move for me. Working at a publisher helped me realize the importance of great content as a key element to provoke social sharing and advocacy.

We all know the challenges in print publishing these days and too many publishers continue to live in their print legacy world without fast enough adoption of innovative digital technologies.

I then moved to MediaWhiz and then transferred to its sister agency Ryan Partnership. Once again, these were fortunate moves as now I work with pinnacle brands on their social strategies and integration with other marketing efforts.

I love what I do. I am most thankful for having a job that I truly enjoy. My path in social marketing has been most rewarding. Social marketing has opened such great opportunities for me and a number of other marketers that focus on the target audience as opposed to being myopic looking at what the company offers.

Throughout this post I have stated a number of times that I have been lucky. A friend of mine always said, “Luck is the residue of design.” For me, my emergence into social media has been designed. Throughout my 20+ years in marketing, I’ve had an intense focus on the wants, needs, motivations, and turn-offs of the target market served. This is what led me to the social media marketing world. My message to you – focus on consumer and culture evolution; trust your intuition; dabble and experiment. While things may not work out as planned, they lead to a rewarding place.

I am thankful to be SocialSteve. What is your plight?

Make It Happen,
Social Steve

4 Posting Considerations to Optimize Social Media Engagement

If you are doing social postings for a brand, do you ever stop to think about what your target audience values or are you just posting a product-push? I am still surprised at the amount of pure and blatant product push brands post on their Facebook and other social channels.

Just stop and think of your own personal use … you are catching up with friends, looking at photos of their night out on town, their family, or something of that nature, and then you see a post in your newsfeed that reads “Doctors report that ___ deodorant keeps you 90% dryer.” That will really motivate you to take action and buy the product, right?

And the sad reality is that “Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 12% Of Your Friends.” But all is not that bleak. You can post compelling content AND increase the number of likes that see your posts. Facebook uses edge ranking to determine what posts are seen by what users. One of the key factors of post visibility is whether or not particular users engage with the brand. Engagement is such actions as liking posts, commenting, or posting on the brands page.

Engagement is key to social success – both from a strategy and empirical approach. I have stated this numerous times. But three things happened this week that motivated me to hit this topic again.

First, I read a pretty straightforward article on digiday.com titled, “5 Most-Liked Brand Posts on Facebook.” Second, my article last week about my sister’s strong motivation coming from social engagement as she fights cancer, “Tell Me You Don’t Think Social Connections Matter After Reading This” was read far greater in a week’s time than any other post in the same time period. And the clincher was that someone I work with asked me for examples of compelling posts as we prepare to help one of our existing clients.

There is no “known” formula for good posting (although the edge rank site referenced above does provide strong guidance). But there are things to consider to optimize your audience engagement. Here are four considerations:

1) An inspirational human story – everyone loves a story of the underdog winning. Highlight a customer that deserves kudos.
2) Tap the passion of your target audience – whether it is a sports team, music group, charitable organization, or some other aspect of your market’s passion. Talk about them. Highlight them. Tie your company values or product position to something they stand for.
3) Nostalgia – everyone likes to be taken back to the “good old days” when they remember a show, concert, moment in history. Something that stirs a strong positive feeling. Go back in your history and tie it to an important date.
4) Breaking news – CNN is not the only source for breaking news. You can be too. Try to align it with the interest related to your offerings or your audiences’ interests. Curate pop culture events.

Think about the posts that interest you the most. Are they human interest stories? One that captures your emotions and passions? Something that takes you back in time or gets you in the know first? Think beyond product promotion … social marketing is best for socializing, not promoting.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

How You Can Execute Social Media Successfully

You know you need social media to connect with customers. You are beginning to hear more success stories. But connecting the dots and defining how YOU can leverage social initiatives to win over customers has been elusive thus far. You are not alone – I hear this from so many. So let me help.

Almost one year ago, I wrote an article “Executable Game Plan for Winning Ultimate Customers with Social Media.”. I wanted to give some real examples and direction of how you could use the A-Path to deliver social media results. I made some simple suggestions defining how to find the right keywords to use; tweeting; reinforcing your position; using RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn and enewsletters; and establishing key one-to-one relationships with influencers. While all these examples are still applicable, generating positive results with them is a little more difficult than a year ago when I suggested them. Why? – The social space is more crowded now with more noise. You’re focus and objective must be to rise above the noise. Thus, this is kind of a re-look and a revamp a year later.

The way to rise above the noise is to have a kick @$$ marketing campaign using social media. Now I know there are many comments that social media is not a campaign; that it needs to be a continuous way of life for corporations, and I totally agree. It’s just that it should START the way marketers define campaigns, but run perpetually by having on going elements that always focus on relationships with your audience and delivering them value. The initial campaign definition should address solutions for accomplishing the sequential elements of the A-Path. How will I get someone’s Attention? Attraction? Affinity? How will I get them to be part of my Audience? And then turn some audience members into Advocates? Recognize that once you have advocates, they refuel the A-Path. They do crowd sourcing for you and get attention and attraction to your brand. This is what Jeff Hazylett often refers to as having others doing your marketing work.

So let’s take a quick look at ways to execute on the A-Path. Certainly not an exhaustive execution plan, but hopefully enough guidance that should put you on your execution path specific to your brand and its position …

Attention
First recognize the difference between being a known brand versus a start up. If you are a known brand, your “attention” efforts should be focused on endeavors that are likely to provoke sharing. Use your existing audience to tell their friends and network about your value. Put incentives in place. This could be as simple as bartering mentions (blogroll and tweet mentions). If you have a Facebook fan page, your members’ likes and comments show on their friends’ news feed. Getting them to “Like” the post makes your post show up on their friends’ news feed. This is a form of sharing and getting attention.

If you are not an established brand, you need to do something to stick out. DO NOT think, oh we’ll create something that will go viral. As Jay Baer says, “It is not viral unless it is.” Many have set out to accomplish this and failed … far, far more than those that have succeeded. Restating what I wrote in an article a year ago … understand how your target might capture information. Understand the keywords they use. Compare related keywords using Google Trends. Tag these keywords to your content. Define a plan for your content distribution looking at all the possible channels. Where is the target audience already congregating? Go there for starters and engage. Join the conversation.

Consider use of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and other niche platforms, communities, and forums specific to your industry focus.

Attract
Gaining attraction is really just a continuation of getting attention. You’re activities and channels and really pretty much the same. But, once you get someone’s attention, you need to add two things to move them forward to attraction. First, you need to continue providing valuable information to them and reinforce both your brand position and the reason why you got their attention in the first place. Second, you need to engage with them. Not just broadcast. Think about what customer service really means and how you feel when someone at a company gives you the time of day, stops to respond to you, or simply says, “Thank you.” Continue to use the same social channels you used getting attention and engage there.

Affinity
You move to affinity from attraction by having a greater focus on relationships. This will be accomplished by continuous engagement. To quote Mike Lazerow of Buddy Media, “the only way to scale social is with people.” People want to do business with those that they feel comfortable with. It takes people to build relationships – not an automated process. Affinity means people are latching on to your brand. You want to increase the number of Twitter followers, RSS subscribers for your blog, followers on a Tumblr blog, Facebook fans, bookmarking of your content, etc. You need to set (continuous) campaigns to increase “opting-in” at these channels. There are three ways you increase these numbers: 1) define incentive promotions for signing up and friend-sharing, 2) continue to deliver valuable and/or entertaining content, and 3) cross promote your socials channels.

Audience
From an entertainment perspective, an audience is usual a group of people that have paid to see a movie, show, or concert. They are one step deeper than an affinity group because they have invested some equity. In social space, personal information is equity. It usually starts with a login name and password or could be as simple as an email address. Ultimately, you want customer information so you can segment them appropriately and interact with them. Recognize you don’t get this from your Facebook fans. I am not knocking Facebook – it is an awesome platform to engage with your audience, but I would argue that you can only go so far as gaining affinity with your target market on Facebook. If you really want to take this one step further and have a true social audience, you need to define where you bring together your audience and be able to collect information about them over time. Some examples include email newsletters and social networks platforms (OneSite, Ripple6, KickApps, Elgg, etc), (You should have an information collection strategy that aims at getting more data, slowly over time, as your participants get deeper into brand loyalty and usage. You do not want to turn them off by asking for too much early on. Normal relationship building principles apply similar to building your personal relationships.)

Advocates
Once you have established an audience you will notice some power users. These are the people that are on the platform on a regular basis, peruse most sections, and often are the most vocal. This subset of your audience represents potential advocates. The way to persuade them from being power users to becoming advocates is to acknowledge them and give them things that are special and unique. Recognition might be the most valued attribute as discussed in “The Power of Generosity” by Josh Bernoff.

So just a couple more things here. I realize this is long, but my wife has been bugging me to put some more useful information in my blog.

1) When I address the brands I work with, I often say one slide shows our social strategy. Here it is …

What I want you to take away from this is what I covered about the various A-Path steps described above. You start the early stages of the A-Path offsite. Then there is a cross over to your site or your platforms. You have the strongest success of the A-Path steps offsite in the beginning and the greatest success of the A-Path steps in the later stages on your platforms.

2) Many people ask me which social platforms are best. I have said numerous times, there is more to social media than Facebook and Twitter and even wrote an article “In Social Media, Twitter is Just the Start.” When selecting the most appropriate you should consider Brain Solis’ Conversation Prism. It was introduced in 2008, and an update was provided in 2009.

While new platforms continue to be introduced and gain popularity, the categories of social channels have not really changed. You should look at the bullet list of types social outlets, understand your target market preferences and plan appropriate places to get attention and attraction, build affinity and audience, and acquire advocates. I do really like the mind map method Solis recommends in the Conversation Prism V2.0.

This is a game plan to drive success, but no game plan ensures success. Winners take some calculated risk – they are not followers. Are you ready to be a winner and willing to create something new and innovative?

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Social Media Success: Creation or Participation? Creative or Effective?

Okay, so you are planning your social media activities. What does a successful outcome look like? Is it important that you create something or inspire participation? Is it important that you are creative or effective?

Yes, creation and participation, creative and effective, often go hand and hand. But this is not always the case and when setting successful objectives for social media activities, metrics should be defined around quantifiable variables of participation and effectives.

This past week, Forrester released a study that concluded that social media content creation is waning. Forrester Research Consumer Insights Analyst Jacqueline Anderson stated that “a lack of growth in social creation translates into a lack of fresh ideas, content, and perspectives … The traits required to create social content are unique, and at this moment, the consumer market interested in these behaviors has plateaued.”

(Note: social content that is created … it can be any form of media – articles/blogs, video, audio, pictures, carousel slide show, events, broadcasts … don’t be limited by the definition of “content”.)

Also this week, I attended a panel session at the OMMA Global New York Conference titled, “Social Distribution Channels Part of the Creative Strategy.” The problem statement for the panel was that few if any campaigns that appear in social media are as memorable as any number of those seen in print or on TV. (Maybe the one recent exception was the Old Spice man, because it went viral.) There were some interesting comments made – the best one coming from the audience. The discussion was centered on “creative campaigns” and someone in the audience questioned whether the objective is “creativeness” or “effectiveness.” Ding, Ding, Ding – JACKPOT! There is too much confusion around creativeness/effectiveness. I would much rather have a noncreative campaign that was highly effective than the reverse. Additional comments were made (from the panel) that the Old Spice campaign was one similar to others that had been pitched to many companies recently, but Proctor & Gamble were the ones that had the chutzpah to implement it.

So back to the Forrester Study and Creation versus Participation … a number of things come to mind:

1) I think there are still a number of fresh ideas out there but the barrier for creation are corporate risk aversive nature and individuals not knowing how to go about rising above all the noise.
2) Borrowing a line from @johnhutson, “Content is NOT king. Conversation around content is king.” It is the participation that should be sought.
3) I work for a content company, Hachette Filipacchi Media. (www.hfmus.com) We DO provide great creative content! As the social media lead there, I would never tell our brands (Elle, Woman’s Day, Car and Driver, etc.) how to create content. But I do recommend ways to provoke conversation and participation around their content. This is a new objective for media companies as an engaged audience is more likely to be loyal and advocates.
4) Often, creation does not need to come from the brand. Remember, participation is what we seek. Therefore, UGC (user generated content) is an excellent campaign to get your audience participating, engaged, and more loyal to your brand. Instead of “creation” maybe a more effective campaign is sourcing a crowd to provide UGC and get involved. Think of the sharing and viral possibilities.
5) Social media can not be thought of as a campaign. Yes there are campaign elements – limited time messages and programs. But social media should be a continuous symphony composed with numerous movements. You need to be continuously engaged with your audience and seek their participation to be effective.

So start by planning for participation and effectiveness. The creation and creative will come out, but should not be the initial objective.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Social Media and Business Continuance

“We’re down and we’ll get back to you soon.” Would anyone be comfortable allowing this to be a communication coming from their business?

This past Thursday (9/23/10), Facebook was down for about 2.5 hours and called it the worst outage in four years. It was the second consecutive day of outage for Facebook. It won’t be the last time.

Have you ever read this from your favorite blog platform: “_____ is currently experiencing a network outage? We’re working on getting things back up ASAP.”

Do you know the airborne whale? If you have used Twitter for more than an afternoon, you know what I am talking about.

These are examples of platform/network outages. Add to this scenario, hijacked and hacked accounts. While the usage and dependency of social media is clearly on the rise, companies are doing a poor job of social media integration and business continuance. If you are using social media and one of your channels goes down, do you know what you need to do? Do you have a plan in place?

A number of years ago, I ran the product line for mainframe computers at a large technology company. Our “STAR” (Secure, Transaction intensive, highest Availability, Recovery) capabilities were tailored for mission critical environments (financial services, government, military, police, commerce sites, travel and air traffic control) because downtime and system outage had significant ramifications either financially or potential loss of life.

Now I am not saying that usage and dependency of social media has this potential for such a catastrophe, but business operational interruption needs to be addressed proactively. Let’s use business continuance for mission critical environments as a guide. Business continuance is defined as everything you need to do to recover from a business system interruption or even a disaster. Typically three specific areas are addressed:

1) Restoring platforms or business applications
2) Back up to offsite locations
3) Expertise in place to implement the recovery

If you are running social media implementations, you should take some cues. Understand the criticality of the social activity. Is it supporting a time sensitive event? Is it an element of your customer support environment? Is it part of an active dialog with your audience? Or simply providing valuable information to continually support your brand position? The answer here should help define your recovery time objective – days, hours, or moments.

If you know the necessity of recovery, it should indicate a direction of your plan. As an example, say you are using Facebook to promote a very near term upcoming event. Facebook goes down, or your account is hacked. How will you reach your audience? You should understand other channels your audience may or may not be using to connect with you. Use appropriate alternate channels to provide event information as well as a vehicle to provide status on the platform that is down. Secondarily, do you have a database of customer information? Have you asked your customers to opt-in for email communication and segmented communication preferences? Maybe specific individuals have not opted in for partner information or your weekly newsletter, but would opt in for information in the event of an outage.

Until such time that Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms provide a “high availability” offering and committed SLAs (service level agreements) *, companies will need to assume that these communication channels they depend on will go down and need to have contingency plans in place. I’ve preached this many times before – social media needs to be an integrated process in the rest of your business strategy and operations. Thus, add business continuance as another area to address in your social media plans. Plan ahead! Live, learn, and correct!

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

* Note: predict this will be an offering for enterprises in the near future for social platforms. A no brainer – revenue opportunity for the platforms, enterprise level of service that has been missing thus far.

Practicing What I Preach in Social Media

It is not a question of “to be or not to be.” Rather “how to be.” My emphasis lately is highlighting the “how” of social media more so than the “if”. I lived through a number of “how to go about social media” preparations this week as I have been preparing for three presentations on social media strategy for three different brands. Two of the presentations are for brands at Hachette Filipacchi Media (www.hfmus.com), where I work, and the other is to kickoff a film festival, WilliFest. Each offering (and thus each social game plan) were very different. Even the two at Hachette – different industries, audiences and objectives. One size does not fit all!

I went through the same process and approach for each. Maybe you can benefit from me sharing my take and some good reference points to help you develop your social media strategy and plan …

No matter what the product or content offering is, you want to provide something compelling and of value to your audience via your social media activities. You do not want to be selling to your audience but rather traversing them through a loyalty path as suggested in my A-Path approach. If you think in terms of achieving Attention-Attraction-Affinity-Audience-Advocates as a sequential process and design execution stages to accomplish this, while being sensitive to building relationships as opposed to selling, you’ll begin to appreciate the difference of social media implementations for any brand or person. The use and selection of onsite and offsite social channels will vary. (I’ll probably write an article about this shortly.)

For starters, think about what you need to decide before starting with your social media initiative. Well over a year ago, I provided a high level primer to help you structure these prerequisites. Also, recognize that your emphasis is on building relationships, not sales. People like to buy things from people (or brands) they feel comfortable with. This requires what I have termed the LCR Mentality – Listen-Conversations-Relationships.

Now at the end of the day, we all need to be accountable to driving revenue. After all, we’re not going to get a pay check if there is no revenue. And while I continually evangelize that social media is about awareness and lead generation as opposed to sales, I am not foolish enough to ignore sales. Social media needs to be INTEGRATED into as sales function. Social media is NOT a stand-alone thing. I like to use the traditional sales/marketing funnel approach. Know where the hand-offs are between sales, marketing, and social media.

So while it has been a challenging couple of weeks pulling together social media strategy and plans for numerous brands, the guidelines that I have been sharing with you for the past two years are really what I use myself. I thought it was important to review, re-emphasize, and share these foundations with you.

Try it out. Let me know if it works for you or not.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

PS – If you are still questioning if social media is good for some business and not others, read “Is Social Media Right for Every Business” by Mitch Joel … great stuff.

Reality Check: Social Media Integration and Measurement

I am pretty sure the go/no-go debate of using social media is behind us as many companies are adopting social initiatives. Now the debate shifts to ROI and measurement of social media.

I see the same banter and arguments going on that have plagued all of marketing for a hell of a long time. Case in point: When I ran the marketing for a mainframe computer brand, there were a handful of marketing programs that had specific package solutions. Each of the leads of these programs would claim that their solution attributed $50 million to sales. So we have a total of 5 program leads each claiming $50 million of sales for a total of $250 million, and the entire brand is only generating $100 million of sales. Sound like a familiar scenario to you?

So how does this happen? An obvious reason is that marketing people (I will proudly include myself in this group) have a tendency to over state their impact and relevance. Let’s face it :). The second less obvious point is that marketing is a combination and integration of numerous efforts, solution sets, and events. Not to mention that you have to have a product or service of value to market in the beginning. This value is the most important attribute of success even before you start any marketing plan or execution. It is extremely difficult to isolate one marketing effort as being the sole cause for success. Combined and integrated marketing efforts should produce synergy – the some of the parts is greater than the individual parts. Not the reverse where the some of the parts is less than the total (as in the mainframe marketing example above).

Social media is another piece of marketing. (Note: social media is not just marketing – consider customer support and operations.) Is your social media an integrated piece of the entire go-to-market or is it an isolated piece you use just to communicate your product or service? The bottom line is that social media MUST be part of an entire integrated marketing strategy and not just the piece for some sharp, young social media manager to use by tweeting and posting on Facebook.

And when (and if) social media is holistically integrated, how can you measure its success. Ahhhh – the never ending debate. Not sure if we ever even solved this question for marketing in general. BUT – there are elements that can be measured and should be used as KPIs (key performance indicators).

Successful social media produces awareness, generates buzz (lead generation), and produces advocates. I covered social media measurement in an article “Measuring the Value of Social Media” well over a year ago and I still stand by my recommendations from back then. Generally speaking, there are three categories of parameters to measure: 1) mentions, 2) comments, and 3) members.

Mentions: everyone wants their content to go viral. The more mentions, the greater awareness is created. You should use some tools to measure the number of mentions. A good list is provided at “A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions”.

Comments: it is highly desirable to have an engaged audience. Comments are a good indicator. Comments are especially interesting in the context of Forrester’s Social Technographics. The Social Technographics describe a segmentation of online creators, critics (commenters), collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives as percentage breakdown based on demographics. Something to think about using this model … if this model is data driven as a function of percentages of a group demographic, what happens when the number of commenters rises. Do the number of collectors, joiners, and spectators rise also? Commenters increase awareness so, yes.

Members: when someone elects, opts-in to follow, friend, or join a network of your brand, they are indicating some degree of loyalty. Do note that membership numbers are important, but not the complete picture as mentioned in the article “Quantity vs. Quality: What Gets You Ahead in Social Media?”.

So now we have 3 categories of things to measure success of social media. There are the metrics, but be careful to get into discussions of social media ROI. I’ll outline why …

Look at the chart above. The take away is that like all marketing lead generation efforts, there is a gestation period or lag between awareness and conversion. So six months down the road or so, social media awareness will be some input to your brand sales conversion parameters. It is not an immediate result. Some momentum and inertia needs to be built. And when you are seeing an uplift of conversion, is this attributable to social media? Tricky question here and I would refer you back to the mainframe computer example at the start of this piece. Yes, there is some correlation, but the relationship of social mention and conversion is not entirely related, but rather partially related. Conversion is a function of a number of parameters and marketing efforts.

In summary, here are some musts for your social media initiatives:

1) Integrate social media into your business and marketing strategy and execution. Don’t look at it as a mere broadcasting mechanism on Twitter and Facebook.
2) Define parameters that truly indicate a degree of success on your efforts.
3) Expect some lag of time between some media measured success and increased business.
4) Be careful to solely attribute social media to sales conversion.

And as always …

Have Fun!
Make It Happen!

Social Steve

31 Great Social Media Reads

Most people put out a summer reading list at the beginning of the summer. I’m putting mine out at the end. (I always pride myself on being different.) Actually, the list below captures some of the best articles on social media from the summer. Each has a great perspective, information, and/or data. If you really want to learn about being successful deploying social initiatives, take time to check out each of these (or at least many of them).

• Is Your Social Media Project Failing? Maybe it’s Your Strategy (Key – must read)
• The 2010 Social Business Landscape (very nice mapping of social media evolution to maturity)
• What Does a Social Media Strategy Look Like? (so much useful info here – don’t just wing it!)
• No, You Shouldn’t Wait To Start Using Social Media For Your Business (great look at why Forrester is wrong about LBS)
• How Social Media Has Radically Altered Advertising (maybe the best article I’ve read on Mashable)
• Social Media #6 – Friends Help Friends, Keep Friends (some good info here on customer bounding)
• Why you need a social media strategy, not a Facebook strategy (amen!!!)
• Social Media is all about the LISTENING…Does YOUR Co. get it? (great info from an interview with Jeff Hayzlett)
• “the object-idea”: the future of what used to be called advertising (some real thought leadership here)
• Don’t Do Social Media (read before you jump to a conclusion)
• Six Ways Brands Should Think of Social Media as a Party (I like this approach – very rational)
• The Social Media Imperative (so spot on!)
• Six core tactics for social media managers (really like this list)
• Social Sites Get People Talking, but Marketers Must Earn Trust (need substance and credibility too, not just a loud voice)
• “Social Media Art” in the Expanded Field (unique perspective)
• Awesome group of visuals on social media by David Armano. (some of the best slide work I’ve seen)
• 4 Ways to Master Social Media Marketing (very good one!)
• Five-step social media risk management plan (been said before, but on target)
• Once More, with Feeling: Making Sense of Social Media (love most of Brian Solis pieces, including this one)
• The clash of the social media know-nothings (Got Marketing Fundamentals?)
• 27 Social Media Marketing Stats and Facts (numbers tell a story)
• How Social Media Drives New Business: Six Case Studies (nice examples of wins with social media)
• Top Execs Dish About Social Media Strategies (good perspectives)
• When the Conversation Goes on With or Without You (why it is important to be in the conversation)
• Ten Corporate Social Media Mistakes (very good list)
• Rethinking the Value of Social Media (yep! – value = relationship level)
• There’s a difference between disagreement, and being disagreeable. (some excellent stuff on personal positioning)
• 7 Responsibilities of the Enterprise Social Media ‘Center’ (helps define who should be involved in social media)
• Top ten ways social media is teaching us to be human again (title says it)
• Forgive and Remember: How a Good Boss Responds to Mistakes (important in the context of doing social initiatives)
• The Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns (“social media campaign requires creativity, a clear message and needs to make a splash at the right time”)

What do you think? Were there any particular stand outs here for you? Any others you would like to add to the list?

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

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Social Steve

PS – Facebook may be the leader for a long, long, long time, but I do see their market share shrinking over that time period.