The last post here looked at why it is important to engage in the existing communities which have been built around your industry or context. Community outreach should be the starting point for brands getting into social media before they begin building their own communities on social networks as communication channels with the customer.

Some more research has come out over the last few weeks, looking at why people visit or engage on a brand’s Facebook page. and again here . Facebook is a personal network. But even on a personal level, the interaction isn’t as widespread as the overall numbers and posts suggest. The average person has around 130 friends on Facebook . I know many Gen Y-ers have thousands but this is more of  a product of collecting ‘weak ties’ over time at school and college. Sure you can acquire meaningless ties with thousands of people over time but they aren’t what you would call engaged. So, ask yourself…of my 100-200 friends that you actually know in real life, how many do you chat to, post to, interact with on a daily basis? 1? 2? I bet no more than 5. So, that’s 5 people of your close friends!! What chance to brands have of getting people to actually talk to them? Especially if they buy into the “build it and they will come” myth.There are a few exceptions such as sports teams, celebs, bands etc but even then I think it’s a case of fans joining but actually engaging? And by that I mean offering useful product or service feedback and ideas…not a chance. Why?  Its still far too early for all brands to understand the space.

Many social media success stories are still old, broadcast media dressed up as social (Old Spice). The ones that have worked on an operational level are the innovators like Dell, Starbucks, or the ones using it provide customer service and integrating it into the enterprise.

Most are still setting up presences to then do exactly what they have done for years. The opportunities ARE most definitely there in social for brands, but you’ve got to look deeper than the current biggest, personal network to generate the kind of interaction and intelligence to form meaningful business decisions.

The velocity of social media adoption and the ease with which brands can create ‘outposts’ in the major social networks often leads to them ignoring the existing communities that have been built around their industry, product or service. Sometimes you don’t need to create that Facebook Fan Page or build that bespoke social network to interact with your customers and ultimately create brand advocacy…for most industries and niches, these communities already exist and are extremely active.

There are some free tools which can help you find them:

For Blogs: Google Blog Search and Alltop

For Social Networks: Go to your search engine of choice and search for “Niche Social Networks” (there are some good lists in various posts)

For Groups in the Major Social Networks: Facebook and LinkedIn Search

For Forums: Boardreader

For all social media: Socialmention and IceRocket

And then of course, there is the enterprise social media monitoring solutions such as Radian6, ScoutLabs, ViralHeat, Brandwatch, Sysomos (and many more). They will all give you a more structured breakdown of the influential communities around your industry and the influencers themselves, although I recommend some manual research for quality control.

Hang out in these forums, blogs, and networks. Listen, join in, comment, chat to people. Then you can get a feel for their propensity to join a new network and the kind of user experience and content you will need to provide to get them to migrate to a new one and keep their attention long enough to get some actionable insights.

Don’t get me wrong, there are significant, long term, benefits of ‘owning’ the community in terms of data capture and the depth of the insights that can be gleaned from the interaction. But community outreach should be part of any social media program as the starting point. There are also some nice SEO benefits from participating and backlinking from high page rank blogs and communities.

‘Unofficial’ pages, blogs and networks have been built from the ground up and show none of the negative characteristics we see from many official ones such as, shameless promotion, push messaging, discounts or coupons as the only unique content, rigid moderation etc. Spending time in these networks is not only an important part of social communications outreach, but will also help set tactical guidelines for when an official channel becomes viable.

image from ccleadville.org

Each day, more and more sports teams, organizations and athletes are launching social media programs, joining social networks and starting to jump on the social media bandwagon. The reasons are obvious – Their fans have shifted their media habits towards social platforms over official websites and want greater interaction with their team. The social tools allow a greater level of interaction and richer user experience and there is measurable commercial value to be realized by being active.

However, just setting up a Facebook Fan Page or Twitter account without an understanding of the rules of social engagement can result in missed opportunities or worse, the alienation and general pissing off of the people you want to engage with. So with that in mind, here are five, broad, best practices to kick things off.

1. Don’t be scared!

The main barrier seems to be a fear that getting into social media will open up a wave of regular and uncalled for criticism by the fans. In the same way that the fans vent, with furious anger, each time the team loses down the pub, on the forums and phone ins, this will now happen tenfold on Facebook or Twitter. Truth is, it probably will…for a while! Your fans love your team, so when they lose they aren’t rational but most of them are doing it because they care, with all their body parts they care and this should be embraced. Sure, there are the ones who will be unnecessarily negative, but with the correct engagement plan, they can be minimised and your social channel can become a valuable area to engage. Alongside the abuse will be valid points on how to improve the service at the game, the outlets in the ground and the customer service.

A clever dude (Aristotle) once said – “To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” If you aren’t involved in these conversations, it doesn’t mean they won’t be happening. You can’t control the community anymore but you can manage, learn and use the insights from it. Plus, it won’t all be negative!

2. Dedicate the resources.

Social isn’t as expensive as other media in terms of creation…but the cost is in the time your staff have to dedicate to do it properly. There really isn’t any hiding from this. You will get out what you put in and the more of your staff (and that includes the players) that you can get interacting with the customers in a way that is valuable to them…then the returns can be exponential. Hire a £20,000 per year intern and you will get what you pay for. In the same way that most of your staff have email and a telephone, social can become another communication tool for them to provide a better service to the fans.

3. Do your research

You know your customers (or you should do!) and what they want based on historical research. You need to do the same in social. This means spending time in the communities that already exist and listening to what works, what doesn’t, who’s influential, what media they like to consume. There is also software (free and paid) which can help with this and will give you a full picture of the type of tactics and the tools you need to be successful when you start to engage.

4. Integrate social with your other channels

Social isn’t a silver bullet. It needs to work in conjunction with your other media channels, online and offline. Your website is your official online home and will still be the place to convert sales and to make official statements but the conversations, UGC  and interaction will happen off site (for now). Make sure your social presences are designed properly, the content is engaging and integrates with the official site and that there are clear calls to action on your other marketing materials and programs.

5. View the engagement as your marketing and customer service

Your fans (or customers) are already active on the social web on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs or the multitude of forums and unofficial fan sites. By engaging with them on these platforms and your own official channels in the correct way, you can turbo charge your marketing, customer service and research programs. The fans are talking and exchanging opinions and ideas about your brand on a regular basis whether you are there or not. You can use these channels as a cost effective way to listen, learn and engage with them.

This popped up in my Twitter stream yesterday via @Christinekorda , ‘A list of the 10 most bizarre social networks’ and I think it highlights, if we didn’t already know, how niche and contextual the social web is. This is extremely important to remember for brands looking to engage with potential customers.

It is so easy to focus on the latest ‘shiny tool’ or the biggest network, as we are constantly being bombarded with eye watering usage stats that lead to a ‘everyone else is doing it, so we must’ mindset, when the sensible strategy should be ‘a lot of my customers are doing it, so we must’. Yes, half the universe is on Facebook and however many billion tweets per month are about brands (exaggerating for effect!), and these shouldn’t be ignored but the challenge as a marketer is to figure out what is the best community for your customers,  where  can we have the most impact, what will provide the best context for your product.

If you sell mustache combs then wouldn’t http://www.stachepassions.com/ be better than a Facebook group?

If you are launching a new vampire show (and that is every network and channel in the known World right now) then maybe http://vampirefreaks.com/ would be better than MySpace?

If you have a product aimed at Christians then you should have a presence on http://lineforheaven.com/

Of course, it shouldn’t be mutually exclusive and presences with the major social networks won’t do you any harm, but some cost benefit analysis on where you will get the most value for your time is a major factor for SME’s. The value in your marketing efforts are going to be diluted big time if you are just part of the noise and unless you have a solid value proposition and offering, it would be naive to assume that customers will come and seek you out on Facebook or start enaging with you on Twitter.

There are tools (free and paid) to help you find where the fish are, and who the fish are. This should be the corner stone of any social media strategy and implementation plan, otherwise you run the risk of ‘fondling the hammer’ as Jeremiah Owyang put it. Some proper research and social profiling of your customers online behavior will be worth its weight in gold when it comes to ROI time…

Oh yeah, and once you have found where to fish, please don’t dynamite fish…Spearfishing is so much better!

Not an original post by any stretch, but I wanted to give me two pence worth to the Facebook-Privacy debate.

I read the post by Marshall Kirkpatrick for ReadWriteWeb , the interview with Michael Arrington is embedded but you can check it out on UStream here as well. At no point does Mark Zuckerberg  say the age of privacy is over but does say that “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

I would agree 100% with that if he had put ‘Some’ in front of People. Making the call that you are going to dictate the default privacy preferences of 350m people is a huge gamble in my opinion. I think if you force everyone to share everything, then a lot of people will share nothing. The value in networks is that the users will disclose far more about themselves and connect deeper with eachother if they think they are in control of their personal information. Humans want security in their envirnoment, offline and online – that’s a base need and why I think Facebook was initially so successful. There was a sense among college students that this was ‘their thing’ and certainly back then, Facebook was privacy mad and even as recently as 2008 .

We can’t undersestimate the impact Twitter and real time in general has had on Facebook and from a business perspective, it is certainly favourable to have everyone’s ‘everything’ in the domain but to assume we all want to be ‘famous’ is a totally different thing. We want intimate connections with our friends, family and loved ones, and strong, secure connections with businesses providing us services  but all of that has to take place on OUR terms. Assuming people want to publish personal details to the world is misunderstanding that as individuals, we are all different in our ‘outgoingness’.

Where’s the line?

Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” Yes, but sharing it on their terms and as Marshall Kirkpatrick  states, there are a fraction of bloggers to the  350m on Facebook . I think  they have a duty to be data hosts and that means you don’t decide for your users what is going to happen with their data and information, you facilitate their decisions. Don’t you? Or am I missing something?

So, where do we draw the line? Should we open up our emails to everyone? What if we are secretly gay and participating in a Facebook about that? What if we are planning to propose and are chatting with our future spouse’s friends? What if you are unhappy in your job and want to research other opportunites but don’t want to risk getting fired? There are thousands of examples where it probably isn’t best to assume we want to share everything with everyone.

Are we all culturally the same?

There may also be a cultural thing going on here. I am going to write another blog post about this later, but assuming everyone wants to share their personal information is to assume that everyone has the same personal need to put their stuff in the public domain? We all know that isn’t the case. No one  human is the same, some are shy, some are secretive, some are media whores, some are confident and out going…you get the picture. And I think you can take that further and look at the different cultures of the US vs Europe vs Asia for example.

I know you can control your privacy settings on Facebook and if the users understand this then there shouldn’t be a problem. But that again is an assumption that isn’t always the case. My girlfriend for example, has only been on Facebook  for around 6 months and didn’t even know there was privacy controls! Luckliy she isn’t into too much weird stuff so when her current employer checked her profile out…she passed the test but there are countless others that have fallen foul to Facebook’s openness.

Chill out or change things?

Michael Arrington posted on Tuesday that the luddites should chill out. He wrote “Howard Lindzon nailed it the other day when he said Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy,” and then “Honestly, a picture of you taking a bong hit in college is mice nuts compared to the mountain of data that is gathered and exploited about every single one of us every single day,” Funny and true (or funny because its true? – never mind) …but that is going on in spite of what users want. Given the choice, I am sure most people wouldn’t want these corporations controlling our data and deciding who gets to see it and when. I think, ideally, most people want to control their own data and let businesses, individuals and organizations interface with it only when they choose.

Please take a look at VRM, if you are not already familiar with it, for an approach that I believe is more in line with what MOST people ultimately want. I am planning on attending a VRM hub meet in London at the end of the month for the first time. I am not sure I will bring much to the party but it is a theory and practice I believe in and hope that, one day will become a reality, and that I am alive to see it!