Ther’s a ton of content from pundits out there screaming to “get as many followers as you can” or “face the Facebook reality or your business will die.” Getting massive amounts of traffic is well, just sooo 2001. You needed volume then just to convert. Ecommerce sites were but a few years old and well, Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist.
Forget Big. Find The Right Size.
For all the Twitter fans out there, don’t forget there are well over 80 similar services like Twitter. There’s Identi.ca and Plurk and then there’s others. Your target market may not be anywhere near Twitter. So why bother?
Let’s talk Social Networks. While Facebook may be the largest, it is not the only. If your target market is people who own or crew on sail boats, then find one of the several Social Networks for sailors. Nurses? They too have their own social networks.
Increasingly, we are seeing that people may have a Facebook acccount, but will tend to spend more time in an online network where their interests lie. Facebook, Bebo, NetLog…they aren’t good at that. Ning is. So have a peek around Ning, see if that’s where your audience is hanging out. That’s where to engage.
Size does matter. Most importantly it’s the right size. Having a gazillion fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter is pointless if that’s not where your audience is. From finding where they are, listen to what they’re saying, then start developing the strategy.
There’s three ways to look at adopting new digital media and social media channels for your marketing and communications efforts.
A) Bleeding Edge: Get in before the service becomes super hot to build presence and traction (i.e. getting into Twitter in 2007.) The upside can be getting to shape the tone and manner and building a strong brand presence. The downside is knowing it will be a winner and that it won’t shut down for lack of service. If you picked Plurk as microblog platform, well, sorry about that.
B) Leading Edge: This is when, it would seem, mainstream media first starts to report on a service. A good example would be blogging. You can better pick which service is likely to be around in a few years (even through acquisitions or mergers) and you can still play a role in shaping the channel and building a strong presence.
C) Laggard: Shareholders of pharmacy chain Walgreen’s kept pushing senior management to build an online presence fast and start an eCommerce site. Management resisted and waiting until 2000, watching and learning from others who failed. Smart move on Walgreen’s part. Sometimes this can be a safe bet, but you’ll expend more human resource time and money in social media channels the later you enter.
In large part, when you choose to use a social media service depends mostly on senior management’s comfort with that level of engagement, expenditure and how it can relate to ROI for the business. Other factors include time, brand values, market size etc. As always with social media, do some listening first. A service may not always live up to the hype or may not even be right for your organization.
Some companies have a culture of being “bleeding edge” and want to be at the visionary stage of product adoption (i.e. Moores Law of technology adoption)
Griping about problems in your city or community? Traffic fixes like roundabouts? Oversized city council or political budgets and spending…the list goes on. So you write a blog post, fire off a “tweet” and maybe start a Facebook group to rally folks…and you wonder why your community has all these issues. You’re not alone.
In our research, we cover a lot of communities in Canada, the U.S. and UK. Sometimes at a bigger city level, sometimes within smaller urban centres. What we’ve come to find is…these problems we think are in just our community, aren’t. In fact, they’re often common, systemic issues. Issues all areas are coming to grips with as they grow, populations change and generational gaps ensue.
Next time you’re about to post a rant on why just your town, city or region is facing issue “A” or “X” take a moment and do some research on similar sized communities within your region or on the other side of the country. I suspect you’ll quickly find you’re not alone. Citizens and governments are looking at solutions to problems everywhere, everyday.
Social Media tools can be an excellent way to connect similar communities to engage in dialog. If a similar town to yours finds a solution, that may help your community. These solutions or forums for discussion, can be shared in Social Media. Imagine, two towns on opposite sides of the country working together on a similar problem…twice the brain power finding a solution.
(Author: G. Crouch)
Can you be too noisy as a company engaged in Social Media? What happens when you go from nothing to leaky faucet to a firehose of information spewing madly at your “audience”? People shut you off.
We see enough discussion around Social Media companies and in-house marketers getting C-suite approval to just get engaged, a least a little, with Social Media marketing. Over the past few months we’ve seen a few companies become, well, let’s say a little over-enthusiastic. That can backfire just as much.
It’s one thing to let your “brand” have a presence and communicate. It’s another altogether to be overly pushy and engage too much. After all, sometimes a little mystery around a “brand” (i.e. company or product) is a good thing.
If you’re a company looking to engage in Social Media, be sure not to get a little too cutesy with prospects and customers. Because one power (among others) consumer have with Social Media channels – they can turn you off in an instant, and get their friends to turn you off. Then you’ve lost them. Possibly for good, since they don’t want your message anymore. We consume media in snippets today. That won’t change for a while. Don’t let those snippets become a downpour.
So not only is relevance important, so is volume. What’s your thought?
(Author: G. Crouch)
No, I doubt it. That’s the short answer. Yes, nearly a million people have “quit” Facenook recently with the new privacy rules and the advent of the “I like it” button being added to the service. But they have over 400 million active users worldwide. Losing a few million, and likely they will, is just not enough to worry about at that size. A few hundred thousand is a blip on the “churn rate” for a month. That’s it. If that even.
One group of aspiring entrepreneurs has raised over $100K to build a more “private” alternative to Facebook and will likely see some business if they can execute. Diaspora says they’ll launch in late summer or early fall. This is the democracy of the Web at work – if you don’t like something, there’s a way to build the alternative.
If reports start to come out that 10, then 20, then 50 million are leaving, I suspect they’ll start to be concerned. But the fact is, we’ve heard these privacy and usage fear stories before. As the Internet began to see popularity in the mid-90’s and the .com bubble started to expand bigger than a Hubba Bubba bubble gum bubble, news stories ran constantly about all kinds of dangers; fraud, luring, lurking. We warned against so many different societal threats. Today, we’ve all learned to delete those emails from some poor sod in Upper Rubber Boot Africa who needs to get to their dead uncle’s millions and only you can help…well, hopefully you’ve figured that out.
Here we are, 15 or so years later. The Web keeps growing and more people keep signing on. This I think, says at a broader social level – people want to connect, create and communicate. Despite the dangers.
Chat rooms, IM services, newsgroups, forums…those early “Web 2.0″ tools, still exist and are as popular as ever. Privacy commissioners may write letters of concern to Facebook…but people still log on. Daily. By the many millions.
If governments step in in a larger way, Facebook may be forced to make changes. But at the end of the day, Facebook has also enabled people to clamp down their profiles. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. Like many things in life, we sometimes have to take responsibility for our own actions and work at things.
Just like the Web is not going away, quite the opposite, so Facebook isn’t going away. Services like Diaspora will come into being, people will learn to better manage their privacy. These are new social rules we’re writing as a society. In the meantime, Facebook is not about to collapse.
Here’s a great 2 min video by Huffington Post on managing your privacy settings.
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
One of the advantages, often overlooked, of marketing in Social Media channels is that you can be highly local or regional in your efforts. Some small businesses understand this well and are taking advantage of it, but we see few regional, national or global brands that understand, or leverage this fact.
The Global Going Local Conundrum
Unfortunately for global brands like Nike, McDonald’s or Home Depot, they can’t think to such a small scale. Because everything is done on a cost-savings massive scale. The perception comes from the days of mass media and wanting to hit the largest target, versus the right, perhaps sometimes smaller, target.
With so much information available to be mined from the Social Web, an effort to start with regionalization for Social Media activities could be done. This may enable brands to have a more “local” connection to their communities. At a lower cost.
Can these large brands get more local?
The Local Going Regional Conundrum
And so the reverse is almost true for the small business that operates locally and wants to go more regional. They too can leverage the information on the Web to source regional connections, find market mavens for their product or service and expand more regionally.
Social Media is a Means of Scale
Whether it’s getting to more local markets or expanding to more regional or national markets, leveraging the information available on the Social Web may provide highly cost-effective routes. As with any effort to engage in Social Media or online channels, a little listening up front can save a lot of wasted effort.
But tying in CRM solutions and leveraging the power of these databases and the new social CRM tools can help make this possible.
Understand your scale and where you’re trying to go, along with the resources. it’s a start.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
Or perhaps, second. First before you engage in a Social Media marketing effort, you need to “listen” to the conversations, to understand them and what channels they are taking place in. Secondly, you need to understand the “culture” of that channel; the way it is used, the “tribe leaders”, the expectations from engagement, the beliefs of the participants and the form of the content.
Understanding this Channel Culture is as important as listening. It’s one thing to know the desired destination, it’s another to know how to engage. Going to England? Are you ready to drive on the left hand side of the road?
Here’s how we define the elements of Channel Culture from our research;
1. How It’s Used: Twitter is used essentially as a news push. Whether you’re expressing what your doing or sharing breaking or interesting stories.The nature and types of content may change as well, based on time of year or week and more.
2. Behaviours: How one “behaves” in Facebook versus a more closed environment such as Instant Messaging is crucial to developing your brands “tone of voice” in that channel. Listening helps to understand the way your marketing team can engage in the chosen mediums.
3. Tribe Leaders: In Twitter and in the blogosphere, there are those seen as “leaders” by the way they engage and how respected they are by their peers in that channel. There are always leaders. Always. How they lead varies. Some may be obvious, others simply through sheer presence and subsequent influence.
4. Beliefs or Values: In Social Media channels, people develop sets of values and beliefs that are evolved as the channel evolves. These may be the type of content encouraged or discouraged, the length of the content, acceptable responses and an understandable link to the nature of the channel with your product. Trying to sell freezers at a golf course is not a smart marketing move.
5. Rules of Conduct: Yes, they exist. Always. They may be established “rules” by the administrator of a chat room or forum (i.e. the moderator) or they may be very informal. But breaking them can get you banished and instantly dropped causing reputation management issues and a potential crisis leaking over into other channels; kind of like Facebook and Nestle.
These elements come together and form the nature of the culture of the channel. Understanding them can help mitigare failure, guide content development, creative opportunities and process of engagement for marketers.
(Author: Giles Crouch, MD)
A co-worker or friend sends you a link to a blog post. Someone’s ranting about your company, or maybe about you. There it is. In digital print. For all the world to see. It’s on the Web. That means at that very moment, thousands upon thousands of eyes are reading it, laughing at you, gloating and preparing witty responses to the comment section. You simply must respond, jump to defend your brand, your personal image…you start to type. Stop. Stop it right now.
I’ve seen this reaction more than a few times in the past year. It usually comes with a phone call or email “I need help” because suddenly, it is a crisis. But if you hadn’t responded, hadn’t typed out that long-winded and certainly well justified response, it wouldn’t have escalated.
This response I think, is an inheritance of the days when all we had really was newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. And if something bad was said about you, then it probably was seen by a lot of people and a response was pretty much a necessity – since you’d likely get a call from a reporter, eager to pour some more wood on the fire.
Yes, anyone can publish anything they want to the Web today in moments. Without fact checking. But that doesn’t mean many have seen that smarmy tidbit of nastiness. In fact, only a few may see it.
So before you’re tempted to start madly typing, stop. It’s time for an assessment. The blogger in question may have little or no audience. The audience they may have may also be sycophants with little further influence. Do some queries on a search engine, see what pops up. Try to assess the circle of influence of the blogger and if the “story” has spread to other Social Media channels or if it may be newsworthy. Call your PR agency or a Social Media research/consulting firm and ask them to take a quick look. You’ll have a response fairly quickly on how to proceed.
But first, assess the story and the spread. If it’s minimal, don’t engage. As soon as you do, you’ve given them power and the cats out of the bag…hissing and ready to go. A whiff of controversy and the story will spread in moments.
Keep in mind, just cause it’s out there, doesn’t mean anyone’s reading it. Millions of blogs rarely get much traffic, ever. The upside may be instant publishing, the downside is it’s also harder to get noticed.
Or what would you recommend?
(Author: Giles Crouch)
Newsgroups, forums and bulletin boards. They go back rather a long way in the ancient history of the Web…some as far back as the late 70’s and early 80’s, like the WELL (born out of the Whole Earth Catalog days.) And they remain a key place of conversation and opportunity for engagement.
Yet marketers often overlook them. Likely because those using them have guarded them well as a place for people, not companies. Although some companies have done well. For fans of Anne of Green Gables, production company Sullivan Entertainment has done very well providing forums for Anne fans. Mostly because they clearly understand the value of the newsgroups. While they may monitor them, they stay away from always trying to upsell – but rather wrap the forums access with merchandise. They built a brand following, long before blogs, Social Networks and Twitter popped onto the scene.
Forums, newsgroups and bulletin boards can be excellent sources of information. Sources that 98% of “reputation monitoring” services don’t cover. Gaining access in an automated fashion (i.e. through an API) is not always easy either.
But these social media channels are very active to this day and perhaps the least untouched and least touchable, by marketers. If you’re a marketer looking to push your product, tread gently. Protocols are strong in newsgroups and aggressively enforced.
As we do research into Social Media use, we spend a fair bit of time in these channels. There’s three key things I’ve taken away from spending many an hour validating our search results in them;
1. They are a channel that marketers have had little true success in. They are a place to truly have a conversation with your potential or current prospects. To do otherwise will end up in tears.
2. They are a very rich source of insights for public relations practitioners, product managers, researchers, sociologists an marketers. Perhaps a much undervalued one.
3. Not all online spaces are susceptible to marketing and public relations activities. When people just want to socialize, they can and will, make a place of their own.
A fairly decent free monitoring tool is BoardTracker; although not comprehensive, it does a pretty good job of digging into these channels. No reputation management tool has yet been able to conduct an automatic crawl however, and due to the technology, it may be a while yet. Our mediasphere360 is about as good, but manual validation and review remains vital.
So next time you’re planning for Social Media engagement, having a look around newsgroups and forums; you may be quite surprised at what you uncover. Good and bad.
(Author: G. Crouch)
Best Practices, Research•
on January 28th, 2010•
A trend we’re noticing in Social Networking services (i.e. Facebook or Bebo) and how people are behaving is a move to more specifically focused social networks. Perhaps the first to start this was Ning a few years ago, and Ning has steadily increased. We’ve seen the addition of services like Ning, such as Qlubb, Flux, Grouply and well, here’s a list.
When you compare this to real-world social behaviour, it’s not at all surprising. We all have our hobbies and activities; sports, travel, photography, community service. A number of social technology companies have seen this, it’s nothing new from an availability standpoint.
What is new as a trend we’re seeing is that these services are expanding. It’s changing how broad social networks like Facebook, are being used. We call social networking services like Facebook “Open Loop Social Networks” – meaning they are more open. You can form groups in Facebook, with group and fan pages. There are millions of them, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the activist.
In our analysis of these communities and social group behaviours online though, we’ve seen a 42% increase in use of “Closed Loop Social Networks” over the past 6 months from a sample size of 54,000 profiles. Facebook will always see such group and fan pages being built; but we note that 96% of Facebook groups that are formed are active for only 3 weeks on average. Highly active group pages in places like Facebook tend to be those that are more focused; such as kayakers or mountain bikers.
Specialty group social networking service like Grouply or Ning however, are much more active since the participants are all like-minded. For those looking to market to those groups, look beyond just Facebook and look at other Closed Loop Networks to truly reach your target.
