Brands depended on a publisher’s ability to reach those communities and paid to have their content delivered to those groups. The role of the brand was passive and non-participatory.

Enter the Internet age, where the roles and appearances of publishers and brands are not so distinct. The online world is fragmented. Internet search technology has not only empowered consumers to seek data and opinions from multiple sources, but also to share and voice their own. Instead of being served or organized by publishers, communities of interest are self-organizing, appearing all over the Internet on social networks, blogs, discussion boards, et al.

For this reason, brands no longer need to rely on publishers as the primary communication conduit to communities. Brands are now developing their own Web content and experience-rich places where they have direct access to and can control interaction with consumers. The Internet as a research and buying engine—and changes in consumer behavior—has turned brands into publishers.

Bearing in mind the need for a complete and well-designed strategy, there are a few simple actions brands can take to help start this transition.  

First, brands need a way to publish. Brands should identify and establish platforms for the delivery of community-oriented content. This would include a CMS and other tools that can simplify regular content updates and customer interaction as well as other community-centric functions such as blogs, discussions, wikis, membership, etc. Third-party networks must also utilized Facebook and Twitter are the most familiar examples of existing social platforms with little barrier to entry that brands can leverage to publish their message.

Once the platforms have been established, brands must fill them with engaging content that focuses on the interest of the community, not solely on brand products or services. Editorial objectivity is often the toughest new challenge for brands as publishers. The content must be useful and unbiased to avoid appearing promotional and self-serving, while still conveying, or relating to, the brand values.  

Next, brands must connect with communities by facilitating dialogue and sharing within them. For instance, discussion forums should be places where people may share freely, leave readable comments, view comments from others, and exchange information. Brands must also be active participants, not merely moderators. They should respond quickly to issues and requests, demonstrating to the individuals and the community at large that they are responsive and involved.

Lastly, brands must understand what is happening in their community and responding accordingly. By doing so, brands are able to make adjustments to their offerings and image that will keep the community involved, while simultaneously attracting new members.

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.

While the majority of my talk was spent discussing the various social media tool families (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, online video, and so on) I was surprised when the conversation turned toward how do you take these tools inside the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0) and what are some of the challenges. 

So what are some of the challenges of taking Web-based tools inside the enterprise?

1.    The ROI debate. What is the return on these tools particularly when orgs have a significant investment in email?

2.    Security. Are the tools secure?  What about the content that travels the wire?  Do we need to control it or at least know what it is?

3.    Leadership perspectives.  The CEO seeks increased productivity via blogs and wikis. But management is scared someone will publish valuable IP accidentally.  And IT thinks PHP is a security risk.

One of the things that I wanted to get across is that people are inherently social and want to share—even at work. We satisfy this need by making runs to Starbucks, attending happy hour, and hosting potluck dinners.  During these outings, we’re not always talking about business.  We talk about relationships, our families, vacations, and embellish stories about our fishing trips. At least I do.

Inside the firewall, the Web plays a role in enabling this behavior, too. And this is one of the areas (besides security) where people get scared.  What if someone posts a photo from their baby shower or an unflattering photo from a “non work” related event?  This is a question that came up yesterday.

This sounds like a policy matter more so than a tools and technology problem.  What happens when I say something regrettable in an email?  It’s on me.  I’d like to know what questions were asked when email vendors tried to get in the door 15-20 years ago.  I bet they are similar, if not the same, as the ones being asked now about enterprise 2.0 tools.

History rhymes and people don’t change that much.

I have some more thoughts about this and I’m interested to hear your opinions in the comments.  I’ll either chime in or write up another post about it.

Many thanks to Bill and Patrick from CSO Breakfast Club.  Looking forward to more on this topic in Baltimore and DC in the next few weeks.

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.

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.