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

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!

Sports teams and athletes are at an enormous advantage to corporate or consumer brands. They have a huge amount of content, they have an exisiting, passionate offline community who want their rpoduct. On top of that, sports fans are one of the most brand loyal groups of people I can think of and sport itself is inherently social. It brings people together around the game itself, in bars and pubs, in people’s homes…and online can help augment the game experience by bringing the fans into the inner workings of the clubs on a daily basis.

A sports team’s product isn’t just the game each week that the fans will pay to come and watch and broadcasters will pay to distribute. Fans want interaction with the team and players and not through the traditional methods of the press and staged TV interviews. In the UK, Football is going through a rough time financially and we may see more clubs going the same way Portsmouth and Crystal Palace have recently -  into administration. I am not saying for a minute that a social media program will solve these structural problems, far from it, but it can keep the fans,  from feeling like the clubs don’t care about them and keep them coming through the turnstyles or buying their favourite players shirt – wanting to stay loyal, wanting to be brand advocates. Long term, that’s surely the game.

A team’s ‘customers’ want to be as close as they possibly can to the club and the players…this is in stark contrast to consumer brands. If you sell mobile phones, insurance or detergent, do your customers really want to be your friend? They will take any freebies or decent offers but its no small ask to keep them engaged on a regular basis and enjoying every bit of content, they just aren’t that interested. Not so in sport.

So, what can a club or team do to harness this opportunity?

Make sure you have a ‘fan engagement’ strategy – This is different to an online marketing and PR strategy. It needs to provide an experience the fans can’t get through traditional channels.

Have at least one community where conversations can take place – An interactive area of the clubs website,  An official Facebook fan page, a private social network. Be active and conversational here, don’t treat it as another PR vehicle.

Think what ‘exclusive’ content you can reward your fans or members with. There is boat loads of this! Exclusive footage from training, locker room interviews (within reason!), injury news from the physios, community projects….

Bring the fans into the fold. Consider empowering the fans, if you check your Facebook groups and forums I bet there are plenty of unofficial communities already thriving – harness that. Why not create Fan reporters, team tweeters, a fan zone that has some clout with the club. In Spain, Barcelona are ‘owned’ by the fans…other teams would do well to adopt a similar mindset.

Consider what Mobile can offer. Mobile is going to be big for entertainment – The devices are getting better and the teams already have a glut of content which can be distributed to people’s pockets. Think, what can we get to the fans via mobile? Arsenal and Chelsea both have iphone applications at around the £2.99 mark which is a good start. Sure they are the big fish, but the same will be true for clubs of all sizes, just on a different scale…the same principles apply.

Another key difference is that sports fans will pay for this type of content and level of interaction. Not huge amounts, as some fans will testify that it is expensive enough supporting their team but this is a question of value rather than pounds or dollars. Anything that provides a level of joy and touches the tribal part of our brains, a few quid here and there to make me feel it’s MY club is fine by me.

New Revenue

I think clubs have genuine untapped revenue streams here, not only through online advertising, sponsorship and merchandise sales but in streaming and distributing their games and content to much, much bigger audience than they currently do through TV broadcasting contracts. For the clubs with international audiences (especially Asia and Africa who have a lot of growth in terms of intenet access ahead of them), if and when the devices and connectivity improve, they can have millions more people watch their games and additional content and pay micro payments for the privilege. We aren’t there yet but it is coming.

Youtube have begun streaming live sports events.  We have seen England football matches being streamed live, admittedly not very well yet but that is to do with the devices and the connectivity, Virgin are trailing 100mb broadband, Conservatives have said they will make high speed connectivity priority if they win the election this year, smart phone penetration is on the up…and that is just for the games, what about news, updates, promoting community and charity work?

Players

For the athletes and players there is also the opportunity to build a huge amount of brand equity. This can be used a positive platform for a media career, raise awareness for good causes they are involved with, create a more authentic and trusted voice for the individual than old school press releases. Some are doing it well, (more in the US but we are seeing signs of it this side of the pond). Chad Ochocinco has his OCNN channel, Shaq has been a Twitter exponent for a few years now. Having the players active on these channels does come with its own set of potential pitfalls, but ignoring the new communication channels and opportunities isn’t going to make them go away. The clubs, agents and athlete’s representatives need to find a balance where the players can be treated like adults and decide the type of relationship they want with their fans…they may need them after they retire!

Organisations, brands and sports clubs are all in the same boat with needing to be more trusted and that takes time and comes with authenticity and engagement. Its all people to people communications, after all!

Update: A good example of exactly what I was talking about is Manchester City. Read this excellent post by Ash Read covering similar lines of thought.