Keeping Social Media Going

2010 has really started off in being “The Year of the Social” as I predicted in late 2009. It’s amazing, the interest level about learning what’s possible in this crazy communication environment. Of course there still is push back from some companies and there still is a lot of “what would happen if…” however there are some who are running forward without permission and asking for forgiveness later. But, even these leaders in the space are facing a consistent issue… Now that we have it started, how do we keep it going?

This question will rear its ugly face more than once as we move through our social world. With social media in its infancy, we are still trying to define an answer. The only tips I can give you right now is:

• Keep responding and answering fans, followers, friends
• Continue to share content of affinity organizations and information relevant to your brand message
• Cultivate relationships with your most loyal followers and your loudest influencers
• Build mini conversational campaigns around company milestones or important company dates
• Continue to scan the ecosystem for opportunities, discussion topics, etc.

What are your thoughts? How do you keep your social program going?

Screw Social Media Passivity

Courtesy of Flickr - notsogoodphotography

I see a pretty scary trend that’s going on in social media right now. As we’ve discussed in the past, in order to engage customers and stakeholders in the social environment, our company needs to either have a social personality or create a personality for our brands. This is true however what are the duties of personalities and brands? Seth Godin discusses the launch of “Brands in Public” for his company Squidoo in which he says:

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

Looking at this small paragraph, this is what we, as social personalities, are expected to do; calm the negatives and thank the positives. This is the scary trend that I’m seeing… By simply doing the above, we are seeing brands keep the “status quo” of no emotion. Calming and thanking allows us to communicate with no emotion with our followers and friends that allow us to keep everyone at bay, ensuring we are still in “control” of our brand.

With this disturbing trend of emotionless communication, we are seeing more and more passivity in the communications between brands and consumers… simply trying to not piss anyone off and cause a negative viral storm. We are afraid of what could happen negatively, more than what’s positively possible in the social world. So afraid, we sit on the fence and play it safe by calming and thanking. I say, screw that. To really make a splash in the social world we need to have BIG personalities. Look at the top “social minds”… @scobleizer, @guykawasaki… two regular guys, BIG social personalities… and it has paid off for them. Sure they’ve pissed people off and have had negative comments about them, but they’ve made it through and have developed even stronger bonds with their true supporters, followers, friends, and customers.

When entering social media, I challenge you to go big… Have that big personality. Have emotion. Be active. Go to the extreme.

For negative comments, remember some famous lyrics from 311: “F*%& the naysayers cause they don’t mean a thing.”

For positive comments treat them like Rock Stars. Put them on a pedestal and go above and beyond to praise them and get to know them on a personal level.

What are your thoughts?

Question Everything in Social Media

After my discussion yesterday about real people or brands participating on social media, I realized something… We don’t really know what we have here with social media. We are in a transition period where consumers are realizing they have a voice. A transition where word of mouth and customer reviews are taking over every aspect of our lives and becoming gospel during our purchase decision process. There are people out there who want to tell you they have, as Seth Godin calls them, Magic Beans for social media. It’s too early to tell. We don’t know what we have yet.

So as we move forward with our social strategies and discussions, I challenge you to question everything.

Social Media Champion or Lost Relationships

Courtesy of Flickr - www.YoVenice.com

Are you putting too much in one person’s hand in social media? As we scour the interwebs to identify the best practices for social media for business, we see a lot of people saying that you need a social media champion that is either in charge of social communications in the company or leads the way for different individuals in the organization to adopt social media communications. Not a bad idea on the surface. It gives your brand that personal flair which is embraced by consumers and builds that trust and loyalty we’re looking for. The thought, “the more human personality you have on social media the better” reigns true throughout this time of strategy. After all we see this working well for Ford and @scottmonty on Twitter.

One question comes to mind… Where does the loyalty actually lie in this type of strategy? Is it with the company the individual is from, or is it with the individual herself?

With that being said I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate. What if…something happens with your social media champion or your social media personality? What would happen if they left your company? What would that do to your social media strategies? If the followers are, in fact, loyal to the company, it won’t make that big of a difference. They will just begin a new relationship with your next social media champion or personality. But what if their loyalty was with the social champion or personality? They have no real connection to your brand, but rather a connection to that individual and will continue to follow them, regardless of their next venture or the relationship will defect.

For example, Ford’s @scottmonty has a shade under 30,000 followers on Twitter. He talks a lot about Ford which is the main reason for people to follow him. He builds the brand, answers questions, and puts out fires all around the social realm. A highly valuable individual in the Ford organization. What would happen if he left Ford? Do you think Ford would continue to engage these 30,000 individuals the way Scott has? I highly doubt it.

All-in-all, we have to be careful of where we put our social media control in our organization. We need to make sure that we are not only creating a social personality for our brand, but also building loyalty for our BRAND. It’s human nature to change and grow. If we put all our social media control into one person’s or a handful of people’s hands, we run the risk of building loyalty in the wrong aspect of our company as well as losing these valuable relationships of followers and friends upon employee departure.

Definitely something to think about… What are your thoughts?

Marketing Ecosystem: User Personas

Courtesy of Flickr - leroycommunitychapel

Last time, we left off with mounds and mounds of information that we’ve gathered about our business environment. We looked internally, externally, backwards, forwards, up and down and compiled all the relevant, useful information that we could possibly find. Now, let’s put some of that to work. I want to take this post to focus on our target audience. With all the information we found about our community, customers, prospects, competitors customers, etc. we can begin to define certain aspects about their behavior, begin making [small] assumptions, and develop “personas” around our best customers, allowing us to understand their communication methods, likes, dislikes, daily routines, behavior patterns, etc. But first off, what the hell is a persona?

persona.

According to our wonderful friends over at Wikipedia.com, Personas can be defined as:

Personas are fictitious characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), however they are also used in industrial design.

A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a real group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design.

Basically what we want to do is define a few, highly targeted, highly defined personas to identify what our marketing ecosystem might entail and how each persona group will interact within it.

build a persona, one person at a time.

During the Gather Information section of this series, began to understand our target segments through our various research methodologies:

• Usability Testing – How the different customers use your brand/product
• Contextual Interviews – Face to face, individual interviews in their environment documenting behaviors, surroundings, self-reported experiences, attitudes, etc.
• General Surveys – gather general demographic/psychographic information
• Focus Groups – Understand similarities within groups and niche segments, identify the group communication aspects, and document interactions between members

Armed with this information, we can identify certain characteristics of people that can be categorized together and identify where communities and commonalities are forming. These characteristics can be demographic, psychographic, behavioral, usability, geographic, etc. With these groups taking form, we can then begin to drill down to identify more and more common characteristics and identify a typical lifestyle and daily routine of these individuals. With this we can then concretely define these individuals and base our personas off of these characteristics.

As I mentioned before, personas need to be highly defined and highly translatable, you may even want to build an entire life around the characteristics with a name, occupation, hobbies, etc.  For a great example of a persona, visit Chopsticker. Robert also has some great ideas when developing your personas.

persona at work.

With these personas highly defined, we can now put our little friends to work. Our intimate understanding of these individuals allow us to understand, identify and test certain behaviors in our marketing ecosystem. By putting our personas to work, we can:

• Understand our persona’s communication methods
• Identify how they use certain media
• Begin to track their marketing ecosystem behaviors
• Fully understand their purchase behaviors

conclusion.

Gathering information about your customer and prospect base is only the first step. We need to use this amazing information and begin to segment into highly definable, highly targeted segments to create personas. With the persona we can then put them to work to begin to understand how they would/should/could react in our marketing ecosystem to, not only drive them towards a purchase decision, but also integrate our brand into their individual lifestyles.

communication.

What are your thoughts? Have you used personas in Marketing Strategy at any point? If so, what were your experiences?

up next.

Next we are going to identify the best communication strings for our personas and how we can exploit these strings to deliver our personas down a predefined communication path.