Online social spaces are fascinating market research tools because they have taken the old, and very expensive focus group model, and made it super efficient.  Inside of social spaces we can hear real conversations about our companies products and services and our competitors.  We can hear conversations about trends in our industry, what people care about, and what they don’t.  Because all of this information is on the computer it is recorded and stored for later consumption.  Using search engines like Google helps uncover these conversations many of which happen hours or weeks before but all very valuable.

As new technologies are created to aggregate the collective statements of our markets we start to get an fascinating picture of who our customer is and what they want from us.  These technologies and monitoring tools do the hard part for us.  But that is just the beginning.  Many social communities can be tapped by marketers to increase the level of engagement with our audience.   Find the opinion leaders and ask them to evaluate your next product.  Ask community members to assist with your next idea or the next name for a new service you are putting together.  We can now get proactive and tap this crowd wisdom on a one on one, or one to many basis.

However, we need to be careful.  Like any good market research exercise the sample size is important.  Listening to a small sample could cause your results to be less accurate.  The lesson here is to apply standard market research best practices to this new medium to achieve the best results.

Social technologies have sharing attributes and features that have changed the way we architect our content. Now, all content can be distributed with the goal of a follow on sharing action. This sharing action accelerates the message distribution. Just last week we sent out a press release about a new partnership with InfoGroup. Within a few hours this announcement was being sent to thousands of people on Twitter who in turn sent the message to numerous others. We monitored the process closely and witnessed the distribution speed and efficiency that socially engineered content can bring to an organization. Since Twitter has limitations on characters, we had to engineer the message to fit and therefore we say that the content was socially engineered for Twitter.

The Iranian election is an interesting case study in socially engineered content distribution. The challenger in the election has many supporters who are using social spaces to push messages to others. Ask yourself: How does this content need to be created to encourage sharing? Keep in mind tone, word count and call to action. Social spaces provide powerful platforms for sharing and we need to create content with this in mind.

As with any set of tools we need to continually ask ourselves: Why would someone share? What is the value proposition for sharing? What is the reason? The latter is the question that matters most and the one that we often fail to answer. Let’s be honest – your content may seem great to you but will your customers, partners and community share it for you? The answer is probably not, unless of course there is a compelling reason. Find that reason, architect your content for sharing and place it in social spaces. Then let your message acceleration begin.

1. Reach out to an existing community.
2. Create your own community.
3. Accelerate your message using sharing tools.
4. Market research.

In the last post we talked about the first part of our social marketing framework.  Now we are going to talk about part two – creating your own community.

The first thing I want to talk about is creation of a community; you can’t just create your own community.  Communities take time to form and when we try to build a place on the web and then expect all our community members to show up, we usually come up empty.  All companies already have the building blocks for a community in their customers.  You may have an email database.  You may have a user group.   You may have an advisory board.  You may have a number of prospects that are thinking of using your product and are in the sales process.    All of these people are potential community members with the word potential being the key term.

In addition there are probably a number of already existing communities in your industry that may not be yours but still have a number of potential community members.  If you look at the first part of our framework, we talk about reaching out to existing communities.  The people in these communities can become part of your community if you use the right tactics and build real relationships with them.

So what is the approach to building your own community.  Here is an approach which we call the “social bridge.”  A social bridge is when you take someone, provide them with a high piece of value and have them interact with the value in your community.  The result is a new community member.

1. First, identify customers, influencers and prospects that already know you well and that you can access.
2. Then identify all the existing communities and the different access points you can use to reach them.
3. Create a compelling piece of value for the community.  This step is the hardest but also the one that determines success and failure.  Do not sell to them.  Examples of value may be free tools, content if it is really good, access to experts that are your friends (or on your payroll – did I just say that).  The key is the value has to be there.
4. Build a place on the web where community activity takes place and provide accessibility to this value.  Don’t send just an email, have the content on your product feedback portal and have people interact with it there and then let the community add to it.
5. Once users have interacted with your value in your social space, reach out and build a real relationship with them.  Do this slowly and bring more value to the table over time.  Grow their engagement.

What many of us missed in the early days of community speak is that the tools that allow a community to form are not the reason they form.  Being able to chat, share, tweet and comment are just things you can do.  And yes, your community space has to offer that type of interaction.  But that is not why people come.  They are there for the value proposition.

So in the end if you want to execute on part two of our model, identify your existing circle of potential community members and also find the already existing communities in your industry.  Reach out to them with real value and have them interact with that value in a “socially powered” place.  Then build on that interaction slowly and build a real relationship.  When they are ready to buy they will do so.

My last blog post outlined four major categories for a social media marketing plan.   Despite the many different social approaches to social media marketing, we argued that there are only four real categories:

1.    Reach out to an existing community
2.    Create your own community
3.    Accelerate your message through sharing tools
4.    Perform market research

My next set of posts will look at each category individually, examining a specific company and the tactics they utilize.   We will also review customer behavior.  If tactics are working, it is because they are inline with behavior.

Case Study – Boxtone
Category – Reaching out to an existing community

Boxtone is a dynamic software leader in the management of enterprise blackberry deployments.  Yes, all those mobile devices that companies are carrying around have big implications and risks to the enterprise; Boxtone is the leader in this area.

When deploying their overall marketing communications strategy, Boxtone CMO Brian Reed noticed his potential customers were extremely active in online communities.  As there is a learning cycle associated with making this type of software decision, much of the learning was taking place peer to peer in a number of vibrant online communities.  We are not talking about a few comments on a blog post but forums with over 100,000 entries.  Boxtone also saw very quickly that certain opinion leaders had risen up in these communities and people were listening.  These opinion leaders had become experts in the field and potential Boxtone customers were going to them for ideas and insight.

Using part one of our social marketing framework, Boxtone began a strategy of reaching out to these communities and opinion leaders.  The key point here is this:  they did not try to sell their product to these groups.  Instead, they spent time listening and discussing what was needed in the marketplace.  They engaged the opinion leaders and asked them to evaluate the product and suggest improvements.  They invited people to industry events and built long term relationships.  Yes, in the end, Boxtone’s goal is customer acquisition, but one lesson here is to be patient when reaching out to existing communities.

Another lesson deals with customer behavior.  In the case of Boxtone, the learning cycle behavior prevalent in the target customer base birthed a number of online communities.  Boxtone’s success in reaching them can be attributed to the fact that this behavior existed in the first place.  When working on part one of our framework, the first thing to do is focus on customer behavior and see if community trends are forming.   If not, part 1 may not work for you.

I agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to choose the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.”

OK that’s a bit overworked, but the gist is that an educated, well read populace is important to creating a functional democratic government. But the demise of newspapers, should it actually come to pass, will be felt even beyond our democracy – which given its lynch pin role is hard to imagine. Newspapers are not just the key to keeping the voting public informed, in a more fundamental way they have taken the place of story tellers in our tribes, weaving a cohesive thread of social narrative in a pluralistic country.

Clay Shirky in his recent post which was blogged and twittered about online ad nauseum (albeit completely worthy) http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/) talks about the new reality of walking in a forest of content  speaks to me a gluttony of riches, without only our personal world view for context. Newspapers as a mass media (with a flawed but necessary history and credo of being based in the pursuit of fact and truth) tell the big narrative while the Internet, more like magazines and channels on our cable, tell more niched narrative – allowing us to choose what most represents either who we are, who we want to be or what we believe.

One question has remained unanswered since I first asked it at a Screaming Content panel in 2000: Once we are all wandering in that forest of an abundance of online news, self selecting media that more than likely agrees with our individual world views, and there are no more “newspapers of record”, what will that do to our shared perspective any given day in terms of What Has Happened? What Does It Mean?  The entire forest of these web entities will each cover these events very differently, or choose to not at all. What would this have meant for Pearl Harbor, or D-Day or 9/11? What becomes of our shared societal narrative and understanding of who we are? Already, due to some erosion in journalism, every narrative is now considered questionable because every source is considered niched or written through left/right lens. In a post newspaper world, will we even be able to agree on historical record? Will all discussion of the facts be considered suspect? And what happens when our social narrative is no longer societal, but individual? What does it, will it do to what cleaves us together? More questions to which we have no answers. It may be that we may then live through even more interesting times.

This sentiment is captured best in a quote from blah from Mark Morford of the teetering San Francisco Chronicle:

“[online]…how the hell you’ll know which “truth” is actually the one you should listen to. Whom do you trust? How do you know? How the hell do you actually find anything resembling balance and context and through-line, when no one has an editor and anyone can say anything and the concept of ‘journalistic professionalism’ is nowhere to be found, because no one wants to pay for it?  This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy ‘a mature blogosphere will supplant old media’ argument. In the howling absence of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought news brand credibility — what’s the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.”

So am I anti-Internet? Absolutely not – it has its own virtues and role to play in our democracy. And it’s how I’ve made my living over the last 12 years.  No development has been so equalizing and exciting in over 150 years.

One of the most dynamic and valuable characteristics of the Internet is how diverse the content offerings are. In fact, content is no longer King; content is now Every Man. Though without newspapers to offer the universal context, it ends up being more cacophony than chorus and more diversifying than unifying.  That said, I do think the anger lobbed at the Internet (and blogs) by those in journalism is misplaced.  Neither the Web nor blogs is monolithic nor the cause.

Blogs are on their own evolutionary path. They can be a well-researched, well sourced column for a new style journalism – even breaking solid news once in a while. They can be a destination more like an ezine, and in many cases they are just the navel gazing meanderings of a guy in his dorm room. (Hey, who cares about the medium, at least he’s writing!) The fist shakers often warn that bloggers are no match and all they do is link to and comment on what’s in newspapers. Well, no they aren’t a match but they may be the mammal that’s left after the dinosaur is dead and as such they shouldn’t (and can’t) be dismissed as also rans or the cause of the extinction. The whining is symptomatic of the level of frustration and fear felt in the print business. It is sure to turn into howls of anguish as they fail in larger numbers. (Though some will successfully re-engineer themselves.) Stones will be thrown.

Make no mistake, though, we are treading on untried roads. In the past, media did not completely usurp any other – newspapers did not replace books, radio did not replace newspapers, cable did not replace radio and so on – we simply increased our capacity for information consumption. Replacement is not what’s happening now either. It’s just that after newspapers are a victim of commercial Darwinism, the Internet will simply be what’s left.

Images: HandsOn, Flickr osubeav

]]> http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/index.php/if-newspapers-are-so-over-whats-the-fall-out/feed/ 2 http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/index.php/the-day-of-the-newspaper-is-over-part-1-of-2/ http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/index.php/the-day-of-the-newspaper-is-over-part-1-of-2/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:53:09 +0000 BrookeWarner http://www.r2integrated.com/blog/?p=338 If you are judging by Chinese standards, the newspaper industry is now clearly under the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” At no other point in modern history have the storied institutions been so in flux; their future so uncertain. The recent move of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer to an online only status and the closing of the Rocky Mountain News (as well as several others less well publicized) is not only a milestone for the industry, but is also a harbinger of things to come.

If they are not the first of many dominoes, they are certainly among the first of the dinosaurs –
unable to figure out a survival strategy in the new landscape. The trend is not limited to the United States. Metro International, once the fastest growing newspaper publishing company in the world (70 daily editions in more than 100 major cities in 20 countries in 18 languages across Europe, North & South America and Asia for an audience of more than 20 million daily readers and 42 million weekly readers), has had to close its Polish, Finnish, Danish, Croatian and Spanish editions. Many more are expected to follow.

The list of newspapers under the threat of succumbing or scrambling to go completely online is beginning to pile up like body count after an unexpected invasion. The reasons for the decline are many fold; the threat the product of a perfect storm and a litany of sins and circumstance:

• Cost of reporting and journalism (it takes lots of people – reporters, editors, fact checkers, etc.)
• Cost of printing (one online issue of the LA Times costs as much as 10,000 print issues)
• Cost of distribution (which grows with population, sprawl and cost of energy)
• Content is ubiquitous (anyone can make it and sell it – or give it away)
• Moment to moment Internet news cycles means out date dailies or weeklies before they’re read
• Internet’s ability to constantly reinvent itself through innovation
• A fickle and economy-sensitive advertising market
• A down economy (several cycles within 20 year period)
• Leveraged debt among  survivors  gambling on getting ahead of the curve and have not

This all adds up to create a hyper-challenged business model with no immediate solution. The situation is also abundant with ironies: The number of people who read newspapers is up; while subscriptions are down (according to the twice annual independent National Readership Study, 2008). There is a rush to prop up the companies too big to fail, but not those too critical to fail. And, if the government were to prop up the newspaper industry, it would undermine the very role it’s meant to serve in the first place – an independent observer and provider of information.

But no one has any answers. No one. Why? Because the issue is unraveling in Internet time, which evolves so quickly it can almost not keep up with itself. For an industry, like newspapers, that has essentially stayed the same for the last 150 years, ten years is but a blip. While for the Internet, it’s its entire lifetime. In the time it took for the newspaper industry to see the Internet coming, consider the threat it brings and then devise a solution (or not), the Internet was miles ahead, its efficiencies acting as a big magnet for advertisers and content alike.

Images:  Flickr: Bostoncitywalk’s,  New York Times

Our social marketing framework attempts to answer the question: “What can I really do with social media?” There are many different approaches and tactics but what am I really doing with social media? And, based on the things I can do, well, do they make sense for my company? Will they work?

You might think there are countless things you can do in social marketing but I would argue that you can only do four. In fact, any social media tool or tactic touches one or all of these four areas. When we did our training with Microsoft last year we showed them these four parts. We then took a number of different social media tools and tactics and tried to see if we could find one that fell outside of the four. We could not.

For this blog post, we are going to list the four things you can do with social media. The only four things. Our Social Marketing Framework blog series will span the next 45 days; we will explore each one of the parts and try to break the model.

Here are the four things (drum roll):

1. You can use social media to reach an already existing community.
2. You can use social media to create your own community.
3. You can use social media to accelerate message distribution.
4. You can use social media for market research.

As an example on how the model works let’s take a few social marketing tactics and see how they work within the model:

- FaceBook ads – Applies to 1 above.
- Blogging – Applies to 2, 3, and 4 above.
- Widgets – Applies to 3 above and maybe 1, if placed in an existing community.

Take any social marketing tactic or tool and see if there is something other than the four things above; if you uncover something, let us know. It is going to be challenging to find one.

Don’t miss our next blog; we will examine each of the four areas in greater detail.