Social Marketing Conversations

An online presence needs to be tailored to your audience and, if your audience rapidly migrates from one demographic characteristic to another, you may need to create a presence that has many faces to it.  Scott Chappell at Sessions College of Design has mastered the tactic.

Sessions has a year-round (3 semesters) enrollment model, graduation certificates that are presented monthly and classes that can be enrolled in anytime for enrolled students.  So his use is everyday for the various tools Session employs (blog, micro-blog and social networks) to connection to the audience.

What’s the biggest obstacles for the growth of social media presence for Sessions?  Scott says ‘patience’, he sees the the education product characteristics is not the commodity of a fast moving consumer good with a low price point.  His effort is to get subscribers to engage in all areas in a way that they appreciate and have a value associated with the Sessions brand.

Scott has determined that for Sessions, there is a way to use social media to establish a lifetime value with the audience – education is pretty much a one-shot sale in most cases.  The maturation of the relationship allows a prospect for Session.edu to become a student, attend classes and graduate into the business community.  At some point he can trust alumni to evangelize the Sessions.edu product and he does not find that they need to scrub or moderate content.

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The behaviors in social media are broad, but not so broad they cannot be identified.  When you visit a blog, you can only do so many things –

These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite. 

Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so.  Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article.  Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.

The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.

Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic.  The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.

Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table.  My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me.  From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.

I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.

The first post on this topic, the Trinity of Social Media, connected three basic components of a social media strategy – the blog, and microblog and a social network.  Each has been the subject of a separate post expanding on why they are connected and this post explores the social network and how it fits into the overall strategy.

This post is about the third and final element of the Trinity – a social network.

The idea of social networking is not new.  It’s actually pretty ancient – think back to the time when when people gathered around commonly-held or agreed upon beliefs, ideas or tenets.  Among the myriad possibilities, you could choose to align yourself with civic, faith-based, or business-based networks.   People actively networked with one another, promoted one another’s reputation, shared in one another’s prosperity, and stood together to be counted for whatever reason.

Fast forward to today; this same kind of network is migrating to online communities.  We, as a culture, are tearing down the barriers of time and distance using online tools and technology.

People without any technical skills can now use the technology to communicate with one another regardless of location or time of day.  They are too; with housewives in Gilbert, Arizona, Middle School kids with cell phones and brands with global reach are all discovering what they have in common.  Whether you see it as a virtual water cooler, the neighborhood corner, a cocktail party or night club, you are right. 

Online is fast becoming the place people gather to share their ideas, photos, video and more.  It’s also getting easier to find out where people you like, and are like you are hanging out – try searching for almost any topic that interests you in a search engine and you will likely be presented with a variety of online communities.

Audience and Strategy -  The audience you want to connect to and the purpose for the communication will guide your selection of how to best deploy or involve your company in a social networking platform.  You may find a private network will meet you needs best, but likewise a large pre-existing network with a global reach might better serve you efforts to connect to your audience.

Are My Prospects or Customers Online in Social Networks?  Yes, The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in January of 2009 that “The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now”.  They categorize adults as 18+.  The fastest growing segment has recently been an older demographic (25+), but the 18-25 demographic is still the dominate age band.

Nielsen in March 2009 reported that social networks / blogs now 4th most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail.  Does that make it important? Only if you want to actually connect with people and engage in a real conversation.

What Should I Expect? People – lots of people and variety – lots of variety.  When referring to online community involvement and participation, a popular statistic running around is 90-9-1.  90 percent of the visitors to the site will visit and not interact – they are only there to consume whatever content you are posting.  9 percent will interact periodically and if the subject is something compelling to them.  1 percent is the number you can count on to drive the conversation and to be regularly involved in the discussion.

What About The Security of My Information? Public or private community?  Open or closed?  The answer to this concern is yes; you can be as open or protective of your online presence as you pretty much wish to be.  Some of the controls and the settings are not intuitive as they might be, but in most cases you can restrict or manage how your profile and information appears and to whom the information is available to.

Why Would I Do This For My Business? For any one of a myriad of reasons.  The top three departments or functions in a company that seem to benefit most from the use of social media are -

• Customer Service
• Sales
• Marketing

It is emerging that there are other departments that might benefit from the implementation of social media tools, but these are the ones that will get the most immediate return on the investment of time and resources.

Engagement becomes an effort to blend content in the proper context so that the audience will hear about you, discover you are engaging and opt-in to create a meaningful dialog. 

Summary - The ability to craft a strategy that is both compelling and meaningful does require regular attention and you will spend a lot of time and effort until you hit on an effective strategy by yourself. 

It would be an error and a social media faux pax to use social media to broadcast a message one-way; that’s the model of traditional media that is unsustainable and unwelcome in a most social communities.  Businesses, nonprofits and individuals are exploring the change and the most forward looking of them are aggressively pursuing online strategies that listen to the community and engage them – that’s the way to do it.

I earlier posted about the Trinity of Social Media and in it I laid out three fundamental components in the strategy – a blog, a microblog and a social network. 

We get a lot of questions at TSMB Media about social media in general and blogs in particular.  This is a foundational post in a series about The Trinity of Social Media and blogs in particular that I hope you use, enjoy and reference often.

Lets start at the beginning - 

What is a blog?  A blog is a collection of articles, often by the same author or company, that is presented on the Internet, often for public consumption and comment.  It can contain any type of electronic or online content – audio, video or text.  I suspect that when we can transmit smell or touch over the Internet, it’ll contain them as well!  So a blog is not just the sharing of text for everyone, it is a sharing mechanism for whatever kind of content you might have.  I like text on a blog most, but that is because of the way the search engines index content – they work best on text right now. The tools are coming into play that will better index image and video content, but the technology is just not there yet or widely used by the audience – text is easiest to index right now.

What do you talk about on a blog?  Your blog is where you, as the individual or as a company, will create posts (or articles) of 200 or so words that showcase your company, your product, and your business philosophy.  Whatever you feel would be relevant to communicate to your audience of customers, prospects and stakeholders.  I have clients that have not one blog, but three!  One is targeted at their core business audience, one is more personal and one is a place they post industry observance.  Each of them draws a particular type of visitor or reader.  Likewise, I have clients that only have one blog and there, they post just video files with some text for consumption.

The content on a business blog then is primarily about the organization and why you are the company your customer deal with and prospective customers should deal with.  That is not all your blog should contain though – endeavor to share a bit about the company picnic, pictures and posts of internal events, videos of subjects that relate to your products, links to other blogs that support your comments or suppliers and places your products are being used or demonstrated. 

How often do you use or post to a blog?  Frequency of posts is relative to where you are in the life of the blog and the number of current visitors and subscribers.  Early on in the life of your blog you may want to post more often.  Frequent posting leads the search engines to make a determination that the posting source is a relevant news source and should be visited often.  More frequent updates = more frequent search engine visits, more search engine visits = higher authority, higher authority = better placement in search engine ranking.

So just post to a blog and I get readers right? Nope – not quite how it works.  In the Trinity of Social Media under the ‘Platform’ leg of the model, we point out two items; a ‘Posting / Publishing’ leg and one under ‘Reading / Commenting’. 

The reading of complementary and competitive content blogs is a very important step.  Participating in blogsphere will drive readers and comments / links about your blog elsewhere on the web – all good relative to your search engine ranking.

Your blog should be positioned as the foundational element in a social media strategy.  It should be the place you refer people to in your microblog post for more info, it becomes a place you connect to your off-line marketing, and it is where you always link your social network profile.

Why am I blogging? Passion… blogging gives you the control over what you are able to say about your passion, how often you want to say it and the context of how your message is presented.  If you are not passionate about your topic, it will show.  Your audience will not manifest and people will not come back to read your posts.  Zig Ziglar always said “fake it ’til you make it”, referring to being happy or successful.  This tactic will also work in social media… but only for a while.  If you do not find your passion, your voice will waiver and fail.  Find your passion and stick to it. 

What if your passion wanders?  No problem – the underpinning here is that you have to be true to yourself and you have to let it resonate in your blog content.

Are there pros and cons of one platform over another?  Sure, that question is beyond the scope of this post however.  I know I have the WordPress logo in the bubble, but it can be any blog platform you wish – important is to get the content out there and iterate on the message. 

What else do I need to consider relative to my blog? There are a few more parts of what makes a blog work for you.  My perspective is that unless you have a blog presence, the other aspects of the social media trinity lack the ability to create traction for your brand – without that blog there is just no where stable and consistent to point them.