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

Written on a Friday but posted on a Saturday, here are six posts from around the blogosphere that caught our eye this week. As always, if you have any thoughts on these posts or would like to point us at some of your favourites then let us know in the comments.

1. Remarkable Stats on the State of the Internet [VIDEO] – Jennifer Van Grove

Thought we would start off with a video (made by Jesse Thomas) – mainly because we are too lazy to write the stats out plus we all prefer to watch a video than read on a Friday.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

2. The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute – Olivier Blanchard

An excellent post from the Brand Builder on how there is a huge amount of focus on strategy and not enough on implementation which means that the customers never get the experience that was laid out in a strategy. Brands need to plan their social media programs from start to finish and look for additional value propositions outside of talking to customers on Facebook and Twitter in an authentic way.

3. Ten of the World’s Strangest Social Networks – Kristin Burnham

This slideshow of some of the most niche social networks you can think of is, A – fun to look at and B – a good example of how like minds are finding eachother online and defining their own communities. Expect this to continue and for brands to seek them out more and more as a more efficient alternative to the major networks.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Social Media Marketing - John Jantsch

Read the quote in the post by Douglas Adams, it’s a good philosophical thought on the perception of new technologies depending how old you are. A sweeping generalization, yes…but nice none the less!

5. Do websites even matter any more? – MARK W. SCHAEFER

Of course they do. A good post highlighting the need to make use of your ‘homebase’. It is probably possible, for the first time to be engaged with your customers online and not have a website. But the website is still the best place for registrations, transactions and ‘official contact’.

6. 3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age - Dallas Lawrence

There has been a number of high profile brand social media implosions in the last couple of years and this post looks at the new rules for crisis management and response. Walls of silence, advertising your way out of a crisis or being slow to respond are not viable tactics brand protection tactics anymore. Social media loves spreading bad news and people have got each other to get the ‘truth’ from.

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!