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’.

I took up boxing about six years ago. I used to play rugby until dragging my arse down to training on a Tuesday and Thursday night in the torrential rain became too much for me, so I thought what will provide a comparable amount of physical pain on a regular basis? Boxing it was. I decided I wanted to have a crack at the amateur circuit rather than just do it for the fitness so spent a significant amount of my spare time in boxing gyms. If you’ve never been in a ‘proper’ boxing gym then I can highly recommend it. The people are cool, the coaches always willing to help, they’re cheap compared to the mainstream gyms that have infiltrated most high streets and you will be left in no doubt that you have done some exercise. More people should box!

The one thing I have always loved is the inspirational quotes which are invariably scrawled on the walls and l think some of them can be applied to a social business.  See what you think of these three I’ve picked out:

Learn to Listen

This one is from my first club in Lambeth (South London). They have some of the best amateur coaches in the country and if you listen to them…you will stand a far better chance of staying upright! In social media, listening ( aka monitoring, research) should be the corner stone of any preparation before beginning your activity, and then form part of your tool kit for ongoing brand management and program evaluation.

Protect Yourself At All Times

As one of my favourite boxers, Ricky Hatton, likes to remind us – Boxing isn’t a tickling contest. The first lesson all new boxers get taught is to keep your hands up and your chin down (which is easier said than done after a few rounds, I assure you!). If you do that and nothing else for the whole fight, you may lose but its unlikely you will get badly hurt. In social media, we have seen plenty of examples of brands getting burnt because they have had no strategy in place for a social media crisis. They don’t have their staff trained to deal with negative posts, they are too slow to respond to a crisis or they go missing completely. One of the first things a business should do before launching themselves in social media is protect themselves against getting badly hurt. Too many of them wander in with their hands down and their chins’ in the air!

It Aint The Size Of The Dog In The Fight…

From my second gym in Eltham (South East London). We all know the second half of the quote …’It’s the size of the fight in the dog’. While boxing bouts are organized by weight, as you move up the weight classes it is possible to get some major disparities. When David Haye fought, and beat, Nicolai Valuev for the heavyweight title last year , he was giving away about a foot in height and seven or eight stones (about 100 pounds) in weight! For businesses, social media can be a great leveler and provide SME’s with the same opportunities as the big guys to become major players in their sector and spread their content to the widest possible audience. You don’t have to spend millions on traditional advertising or marketing to be successful (although it helps!). By putting the hours in and being passionate, dedicated and having a great product, service or team, you can compete with the big guys and punch above your weight!

Those are just three that I picked out but I am sure there are more from other sports that could apply. If you have any favourites, then drop them in the comments.

Bit of bad news…Social Media doesn’t scale. If you are successful company then you will have more customers than staff. Social media in its purest form should facilitate people to people communications and that means talking to your customers on a regular basis, so you don’t need a degree in mathematics to work out the disparity!

Jeremiah Owyang writes an excellent post on the process to create a customer advocacy program which can extend the available resources for companies active in social media. Coca Cola’s Facebook Fan Page is still run by two fans, BMW have just taken control of a Fan page set up by a fan (now with over 1m fans) and will now use it for customer engagement, so there is evidence of customers taking on the role of brand ambassador and organizing like minded individuals around consumer brands.

This applies to all organizations but I think is particularly apt for sports and entertainment brands, as for them the volume of interest and interaction is magnified. For example, Man Utd have about 600m fans worldwide…even smaller sports brands will have hundreds of thousands fans who are all potential customers and active participants on the official social channels.

What is their biggest asset can also be their undoing in social media. They have armies of people gagging to talk to them and wanting their content. This is great news but creates a massive issue if you are going to engage with them on a regular basis. The answer is…use them. Empower them. Consumer brands would pay a King’s ransom to have such loyal customers and sports brands can create advocacy programs much easier than their counterparts. Here are some simple steps to go about it

Find the influential voices in the community

They will already be active on the forums, unofficial networks and supporters’ club groups. Spend some time in these communities and see who looks like a good ‘signing’!

Bring them into the organization

Empower them. You won’t need to remunerate them…they love your brand and the value they will get is not a financial one. The ‘badge value’ they will attribute will, in most cases, be all the reward they need.

Let go of control

To make social communications scale, brands have to comfortable with customers doing their job for them. Make sure you have vetted them and they have signed up to the clubs’ social media policy (create one if you haven’t already) but the more freedom you give them, and others in the community to take the brand message and spread it in their own way…the better.

Run competitions

Once the brand advocacy program has got some legs, you can increase the activity and look for the next club Facebook admin, team tweeter, message board admin. By making this a competition you will be increasing engagement with the community.

Let the community self support

Apple’s support community is almost entirely self-supported. No one gets paid for moderating Wikipedia. People on the web like to contribute to projects which mean something to them. Sports fans will be up for this, so with regular content from the official sources coupled with an army of brand ambassadors…all of sudden you can have a social media ‘team’. Sure, they will need to be managed, but it is going to be a far more efficient use of your available resources.

What examples do you have of brand advocacy programs being successful. What do you think some barriers to this working might be? Would love to hear from you….

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

Last week I sat on a panel at the Social Media & Sport Summit in London. With my fellow panelists, we (hopefully) covered off some of the  strategy and planning questions that sports organizations should have a look at before choosing which social platforms to use. The keynotes were all delivered extremely well and there were some valuable case studies from the likes of Liverpool FC, Lotus Formula 1 team and Adam Vincenzini finished the day off with an indepth look at how the NBA have established themselves at the top of the tree in terms of fan engagement through social media. You can check out some of the presentations here .

Looking specifically at the case studies from the teams, Liverpool FC and Lotus F1, it was evident that some basic business rules had been applied that other organizations could certainly learn from when starting out in social media.

Objective #1 should be to engage with the fans (or customers)

There are loads of opportunities for sports teams in social media and the specific KPI’s over time may well be focused on selling more merchandise or offering deals and promotions but the underlying motivation for being active on social platforms should be to bring the club, team or organization closer to the customers – the fans. Without them, there won’t be a team. Liverpool know the value of their fans and Lotus know what its like to start from scratch with no fans! Both of them have realized that the fans are their biggest asset.

Think like a fan

Both Matt Owen from Liverpool and Tom Webb at Lotus are fans of their team…and that makes it a hell of a lot easier to come up with programs which other fans will buy into. Obviously not everyone in an organization is a fan of the brand or team, but putting yourself in your customers shoes at the strategy phase and asking “what do our fans or customers want” and “how can we improve our service to them” will set you on the right track.

Don’t marry a tool

Well, that’s just good advice, full stop! Seriously though, it’s a common mistake that many organistaions make with social media, when they decide all their communications will go through just Twitter, or just Facebook. That is focusing on the technology not the communications, and in most (major) sports teams’ cases they need to engage in more than one place. Their fans are diverse individuals brought together around a context (the team) but they will hang out in the myriad of social platforms available…so fish where the fish are.

Engage

Don’t just pay lip service to engagement…actually do it! Talk to the fans, answer their questions, raise them up on your platform so their voice is heard and amplifies the official team’s communications. There is no quick win here unfortunately and it will take man hours to pull it off but the authentic chat from both Liverpool and Lotus that undoubtedly makes the fans feel like they are part of the inner workings of the team is worth its weight in gold from a brand advocacy perspective.

If you can’t get your fans to engage with you on social media…you’ve got real problems!

That was a (rough) quote from Matt Owen at Liverpool FC and its a gem! I have to agree, sports teams are at a huge advantage over consumer brands when it comes to social media, they really want to hear from the team, be involved, be heard, get exclusive content and share the content. With such a willing pool of potential brand ambassadors, the onus is really on the teams to start putting the leg work in to get the most reward out of their social programs…and the rewards are certainly within reach.

Please share any other lessons you have learned about building successful social programs, for sports teams or any other brands, in the comments.