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

Knowing who your audience is, is pretty easy. All businesses know who their products or services are aimed at. They key question for any company’s marketing team is, Why would they want to talk to us? This is especially important when trying to get your customers to engage with you through social media. You need to find the common denominator for your customers – what are their common interests that they might form around online?

For B2C social media, this is tough as there is very little that “people who like corn flakes” or “people who use anti dandruff shampoo” have in common other than using the product. For B2B social media marketers, it’s sometimes easier to find the common ground, as the context is already defined and it’s easier to segment the target audience.  If you sell photo copiers, then you know you are looking at the office managers or if you sell CRM software, you are looking at the CTO or systems admin. However, that is only the first part of the battle. The next challenge is to find out what unites them on a personal level, because for the most part, it won’t be the love of photo copiers or CRM solutions!

Last week I was out an event where Matt Rhodes of Fresh Networks, gave a talk on this subject and had a case study which highlights this very well. They have a client who sells paper to offices. Who buys the paper in an office? The office manager or office administrator. So, creating an online community where office managers/admins can discuss procurement of office supplies seemed like the obvious solution, right? Apparently not…as surprise, surprise, buying paper and office supplies wasn’t of massive interest to these people and they didn’t want to spend time in a community about it!

So, back to the drawing board to find out what was important to them. What were they interested in? What would get them engaging in an online community? Organizing office parties. Now, that’s far more fun and while slightly off topic in terms of the long term play of flogging more paper, getting these people hooked in with something that actually interests them means there is the opportunity to build relationships, capture rich data and insights…and ultimately make sales.

If you are going to build an online community as part of your B2B marketing, build it around the most interesting or fun part of your audience’s professional life. Make it about them. Give them a reason to want to be there, not just because it vaguely relates to one aspect of their job (that they probably don’t like that much anyway!)

Please visit our new German site: Social Media Agentur

Most businesses are familiar with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems and will be using them in one form or another to give them insights on their customers, their purchasing and contact preferences and helping them maintain the relationship. As social media and social networking activity steams ahead with no sign of slowing, Social CRM has been getting an increasing amount of airtime.

Jermiah Owyang has compiled a good list of Social CRM (sCrm) vendors and I would expect to see this list grow over the next 12 months. As social media monitoring has matured and the ability to pull insights from the myriad of online conversations and UGC is now established, the next step is to overlay that data onto existing CRM systems. People are disclosing more and more information in their public social profiles and business can use this to provide more personal customer service and build deeper relationships with them.

CRM & Social Media Monitoring Convergence

It should be a natural step for the incumbent CRM vendors to look at integrating a robust listening tool to their current offerings. We are already seeing it in action, Radian6 integrates with Salesforce for example and I wonder how much longer before an Oracle or SAP buy up one of the monitoring vendors. We have seen community platforms like Lithium acquire Scoutlabs to form a social CRM offering, email marketing firm ExactTarget scooped up Filtrbox and Attensity bought Biz360. Jacob Morgan has a good take on it here and has a great diagram showing the SCRM process, check it out.

I think we will see social media monitoring augment existing CRM platforms and in that respect, all CRM systems will or can become social CRM. So, if I was in the CRM business I would definitely be looking to integrate and/or acquire a monitoring vendor to add a layer of ‘social’ to my software. I would then look to build, borrow or steal an engagement platform on top of that to produce an all encompassing social media management system. Again, we are already seeing this develop with the likes of Spredfast, Attensity, Involver and Radian6’s engagement console (which I haven’t yet seen in action).

Culture over Technology

But…is the software really the point? For a business to get the benefit out of a sCRM or even a current CRM system, they need to care about the customer and not just about mining their data for push marketing initiatives. If a business understands that the customer has become increasingly empowered and now demands to be in control over how they interact with an organization and vice versa then they are already using socialCRM! If they don’t understand this and don’t move to ‘operationalise’ their business accordingly to act upon the insights gained through social media…then no amount of cool technology will change that. It’s a cultural thing that most businesses aren’t yet ready for.

As a business, make sure you understand the ‘why’ behind all of this. There is some sweet software on the way and if you are set up internally to exploit it to the full then there are huge advantages to be gained. But it needs to start from within a business’ culture…they need to begin by being in the ‘give a shit about my customers’ business!

Social Media doesn’t work as a silo. Nothing new there. When we talk about this, I think the assumption is from a marketing perspective and its true, Social Media Marketing rarely works unless its integrated with other marketing activity or an ongoing engagement program to fuel the initial awareness. However, the issue is wider than that. Businesses need to integrate all their communications and make sure it translates into the day to day operations for social to truly work and have a financial impact.

Many brands and agencies are pushing campaigns for social media marketing, this post from Forrester Research looked at this last week,  rather than using social media to improve the business operations. The ‘snakes on a plane’ anecdote is a great example – the interaction on social channels drove the entire movie and the WOM and interaction was unprecedented- social media marketing win. But ultimately it lead to the movie getting a higher certificate rating which negatively affected sales – social business fail.

Another good example here from NMA highlighting the need to make your operations more ‘social’ before setting up social media channels. Otherwise, all you are doing is creating a lightning fast channel for people to amplify the fact that your core service is sub standard! It’s no use hiring a social media strategist-ninja-guru or having a few dudes or girls engaging with customers on Twitter and uploading ‘cool’ content on your Facebook page every day, if it doesn’t translate to the customer service or user experience.

Social media can be a dynamite marketing tool but businesses need to get their house in order, and by that I mean their website, their SEO, their customer research, their customer service (online and offline) and their systems integration,  before using it drive awareness and interactivity through individual ‘campaigns’.

There are different disciplines of social media. Broadly they can be broken down into - Listening, Talking, Supporting and  Innovating. I think all organizations can (and should) do the  listening piece,  if for nothing else than as a planning tool for future activity or simply seeing what is being said about them, their competitors and their industry –basic research.

However, maybe the time actually isn’t right for your organization to start ENGAGING. The social media echo chamber is noisy at the moment and some companies have done their brand more harm than good by getting into it when they shouldn’t have. So, even though it may seem that every man and his dog is now ‘doing’ social media, if any of the following sound familiar then maybe your business isn’t quite ready to jump on the engagement bandwagon.

1. You don’t have the resources

Plain and simple, if you don’t have the money, the time or the man power to dedicate to social communications then you won’t be able to execute it properly. In spite of what you may have heard, social media isn’t free. It takes the same level of resource as any other marketing or communications initiative and so you need to find budget from other areas of the business that maybe aren’t performing, you need to include social in staff’s job role’s or hire the skills you need and you need to put in the ‘hard yards’ in terms of time. There are real, financial benefits from implementing social programs into your organization, but it won’t happen by magic and doing anything ‘half arsed’ is going to fail in the long run.

2. Your customers aren’t using social media

I know its hard to imagine that anyone in the known World isn’t on social media but, while the numbers seem impressive, the fact is not everyone is! You need to do the research before any program to determine if your customers are using social technologies and if so, which ones. You can throw up a Facebook fan page, create a Twitter account, jump on Foursquare and upload videos to your YouTube channel until the cows come home, but if your customers aren’t there then it’s a waste of time. Fish where the fish are, otherwise you are just creating noise.

3. You have no idea why you are doing it!

As with any marketing and communications program, you need a clear strategy and execution plan. Going through the planning stage will help determine whether social is going to be effective for your business, will make sure your business objectives are aligned with the activity and help determine what measurement metrics need to be applied. If you luck out and manage to create a thriving, engaged community by simply creating an account and ‘joining the conversation’ (I am hating that phrase a lot as well!) then …High 5, but you are in the minority! Some sports brands, celebs, fashion labels etc might, might be able to pull it off but I would advise spending the time doing the planning.

4. Your staff aren’t trained how to use social communications

Unless you are planning on outsourcing all the engagement (which I highly advise against and could actually be another point all of its own) then your staff are going to be on the front line, talking with your current and future customers…so they better be ready! There are countless social media shockers to draw upon where the underlying reason for the ‘fail’ is lack of training and understanding of how to use the technology or the rules of engagement in a given community. You wouldn’t let an untrained intern lead your marketing programs, so don’t let them do so with social. There is a world of difference between using Facebook, LinkedIn or a blog for personal use and running a successful social program for a business.

5. You’re not seeing this as a long term initiative

If you are from a marketing or advertising background, then you will be comfortable with campaigns. Campaigns are planned, executed, measured and then they end. Social is a continuum. It’s an ongoing process of interaction with your customers (or at least it should be). If you manage to create a community around your brand, product or industry then you need to keep fuelling it to get to the real gold nuggets of business intelligence and advocacy, the last thing you want to do is lose contact with the people who can help sustain and innovate your business with you.

What have I missed? What other reasons are there for a business to not start engaging with their customers through social media? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The Old Spice campaign is the latest social media case study held up as a shining light of how to conduct an integrated social program that uses all medium available to delight its audience.

The original ad  launched back in Feb and was followed up by another 30 sec ad (both are embedded below for you viewing pleasure) before this month, when they began a social media engagement push by making personalized videos which were sent to influencers like Ashton Kutcher, Kevin Rose, Alyssa Milano and Evan Williams, so a good mix of tech and celebrity, plus a bunch to other ‘normal people’ who had posted or tweeted comments.

Personally, (and I know I am not alone here) I think it was one of the best campaigns I have seen in a long time that uses social at its core. The original message was funny, engaging and appealed to both sexes, it was placed well, they assigned the correct budget, they targeted the correct mix of ‘influencers’ (subjective I know, but humour me) and used the social channels to continue the engagement. What is even more impressive is their attempt to totally rebrand an outdated product and pitch it at totally new audience of under 40’s females compared to over 50’s males!

The results seemed equally awesome. The original ad received over 12m views on YouTube and won various awards, the YouTube channel was the most viewed last month, the follow up videos garnered a ridiculous amount of online buzz…but guess what?

….sales are down…wait…or are they? It seems that sales for all Old Spice products took a dive from Feb until June but have seen resurgence this month off the back of the fan engagement push (the response videos). The numbers aren’t 100% clear at the moment and we need a few more months of sales data to make an accurate call.

What is clear is that the social media spend from this point on, should be on trying to build a community that can help define future product and maybe that is what the Old Spice crew are planning…I hope so!! They have captured a huge amount of attention and are now well placed to activate the 5^th P in Brian Solis’ new marketing rules – People.

The long term value of social for a business lies in research, intelligence, support and innovation rather than ‘campaigns’. Using traditional marketing techniques are still vital to build awareness but the new marketing techniques need to be activated to keep the brand live and relevant to the customers.

Original

Follow Up

The World Cup in South Africa has dominated the airwaves (social and traditional) for the past month and much of the recent conversation has been around the ‘ambush marketing’ tactics we have seen from non official sponsors like Nike and Pepsi and how they stole a march on their official sponsor competitors, Adidas and Coca-Cola. While the balance seems to have now been addressed it was interesting to see how the media landscape has shifted in the last four years (since the last tournament) to such an extent that sponsorship of a major event is no longer enough, on its own, to command the lions’ share of audience attention and WOM.

This is the first World Cup that we have had established, organized social media channels  and they have moved the goalposts in terms of what is needed to be covered in corporate marketing mixes to own the airwaves and conversations between fans. Sponsorship used to be all you needed to do to ‘own’ the conversation and dominate WOM. You now need a fully integrated program that covers all the channels and that includes social media along with TV, offline and exposure in the stadiums.

Nike showed, with their ‘write the future’ video, that you don’t need to be a sponsor to create viral content around a context and get the same or increased return…plus they bought well placed 30 sec ad slots in the key games encouraging viewers to head online to see the full version. In contrast, Adidas focused far more on social media at the expense of heavy TV ads…and this may be why Nike were able to steal the jump on them so early in the tournament.

Commercial partners of sporting events, or any other event for that matter need to cover all the bases. Use the exclusive relationship they have with the event to generate exclusive content that they can give to their online audience as well as realizing the traditional channels should not be ignored but rather weaved into the overall communication strategy. Being a major sponsor for an event is a huge advantage and one that can provide significant value over the competition…but it isn’t enough on its own anymore.

This is a Guest Post by Chris Hughes. Chris is Head of PR and Communications at Sine Qua Non and has extensive experience in the motorsport arena. You can follow him on Twitter @chrishughespr .

There is an increasingly common misconception about ‘social media’. It is a phenomenon that is still rather loosely interpreted and with sufficient uncertainty surrounding its true meaning to warrant the need by some firms to segregate it into a separate box within its annual marketing and PR plans.

This has led to an influx in recent years of specialist digital PR firms, experts and social media strategists, all of whom are – quite legitimately – finding new business with brands or companies who are not truly au fait with all that social media entails. But sometimes even the most expert of experts cannot fully capitalise on the various social media opportunities that arise hour by hour, day by day.

In Formula 1 circles, there has been a notable increase in the use of Twitter as a communications platform this year, which has been a huge step forward in bringing Formula 1 fans closer to the action on track and behind the scenes. This revolution has been sparked by the need for journalists to satiate the immense hunger of the F1 fanbase who are always after the next morsel by laying claim to the next big story or the most insightful backstage feature.

It has also been helped in no small part by the openness of the new teams and their drivers who have embraced social media unreservedly. While the new teams have adopted social media as their communications tool of choice, it is unlikely that they have a specific strategy on how it should or should not be used. And that is no bad thing. In my own experience of social media, the moment you start to stifle it is the moment you start to go wrong. With anything as open and engaging as, say, Twitter, there comes an unwritten invitation for the public to criticise, to deride and to attack the brand, but in equal measure there is the opportunity to praise, commend and – most importantly – recommend.  Ah, yes, the power of an endorsement.

An excellent example of an organic social media success story in recent weeks was with the tongue-in-cheek GrandPrixDiary.com and German race driver Timo Glock. Below is a brief background to the story and how Glock’s team Virgin Racing used an out-of-the-blue social media opportunity to bolster its own reputation online. GrandPrixDiary looks at the world of F1 from a very sarcastic viewpoint. Its founder has made no qualms about the site’s sincerity, but instead offers a light-hearted and comical look at Formula 1.

When Virgin Racing driver Timo Glock started to use Twitter, there was an overwhelming culinary feel to his content. From a quick coffee to lunch in the motorhome to dinner in a restaurant, Timo would always tweet a photo. GrandPrixDiary pounced on the subject and quickly developed a column called Ready, Steady, Glock! (for those not familiar with the TV show Ready, Steady, Cook! its premise was to challenge chefs to cook a meal from an unknown bag of ingredients in under 20 minutes).

The column reproduced Timo’s Twitter images and presented them as if from his own German recipe book. Cue meals such as ‘Pizza mit der ham und mushrooms und olives’ to ‘Double chocolate cake mit Ice Cream’. After the Turkish GP, GrandPrixDiary challenged Timo (via Twitter) to participate in F1’s first ever online cookery show, Ready Steady Glock, offering Twitter followers the chance to submit recipes for Timo and his girlfriend Isabella to cook during the weekend.

Succumbing to a barrage of online pressure, Timo agreed. In fact from here on in, it was Timo’s own enthusiasm for the challenge that really propelled it forwards. The winning recipe was selected and announced on Twitter through the @grandprixdiary page, as well as through @realtimoglock, with suitable fanfare, and thus the shopping trip was set.

The winning entry, submitted by Kathryn Bird, was Marinated Chicken with Virgin Olive Oil followed by Timo’s Truffle Chocolate Puddings. Timo promised to tweet photos of the shopping trip as well as images from the cooking challenge itself, which he duly did. Credit also to @VirginRacing who recognised the growing stature of this online competition and agreed to supply a prize to the competition winner. The team has agreed to cook the winning recipe in its hospitality area for team members and guests at the weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix.

As Rob Sinfield of GrandPrixDiary.com explains: “Ready, Steady, Glock! would not have happened were it not for a combination of Virgin’s laid back style and Timo Glock’s now obvious sense of humour. We never set out to be cruel but we do like to prick the precious F1 bubble. So, referring to Glock as ‘the 5th best German in F1′ and then writing the cookery column in an ‘Allo ‘Allo style could have easily offended him but once he got into the idea it was he that drove it. The photo diary of the day is hilarious, he even decorated the fridge.

Once Virgin saw the fans response they too embraced it. The feedback I have had about Glock has been immense; he has scored a hit here. Now he has turned the tables, organising his own competition via Facebook where I have to cook a meal of HIS choosing with the winning recipe provider getting the cap he wears at the Canadian Grand Prix. A whole lot of fun has been had by all.

F1 must encourage this sort of participation with its fan base.” The outcome has been a hit for all concerned: – The GrandPrixDiary site has a heightened profile with endorsement from Timo Glock and Virgin Racing – Timo Glock has engaged directly with a website who were portraying him in a comical light and turned potentially negative comments into a massive positive – Virgin Racing has used an impromptu social media competition between one of its drivers and a Formula 1 fanbase to derive positives for its team – Formula 1 fans have been able to gain a closer connection to both team and driver via a social media portal and to have a bit of a laugh along the way.

So it doesn’t always need a carefully honed social media strategy to enhance a brand’s reputation online. Sometimes, it just takes a sense of humour and a willingness to engage socially.

The UFC ‘do’ social media as well as any sporting organization in the world. There was a good post from Greg Ferenstein at Techcrunch today explaining that, when the mainstream media were shunning the sport as being too violent or not something they wished to associate with, UFC president, Dana White turned to grass roots, word of mouth and social media to harness a following for his organization and made MMA the fastest growing sport in the World.

You can read more about UFC’s strategies for building their brand on social media here and here . Sure, they partnered up with Digital Royalty who have a good track record when it comes to building fan engagement programs, but the secret (if you can call it that) seems to be two-fold…

1. The CEO is championing social media. This is a huge one as most brands are still looking for the concrete evidence that social media will improve their bottom line before assigning the appropriate resources to make it effective, whereas Dana White is telling the fighters to “Tweet their asses off”

2. The athletes are given the freedom to express themselves and engage with the fans. Again, huge if you want to be successful in social media and the very thing that is scaring the shit out of most mainstream sports. They are terrified of an athlete or employee breaking ranks and going ‘off message’ that may impact their perceived brand. What Dana White has cottoned on to here, is that every one of his fighters that promotes themselves, their fights, MMA, the UFC brand or any sponsors is adding to his marketing clout.

It would be great to see more teams, athletes and CEO’s being as frank with the media and fans as Dana White is in the below video. It is probably an unfair comparison as he is clearly an outgoing, fan centric guy who loves his job and the sport, and they are rare…but it is a good example of what can be done by letting go of control and allowing authentic, un-spun communications with your fans or customers.

Any up and coming, developing sports or organizations should take note!