"A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm"

Don’t tell my boss but appointing a strategist to create a “social” company is not a sustainable model. It takes the entire community. Henrik Ibsen says "A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm"

The social media maturity model proposed by Destination CRM does a great job at showing all the customer touches companies have. But the way the chart is visualized reinforces organizational silos – the very principle that social media combats. Instead, as Michael Idinopulos asserted, I believe that businesses will begin to organize around capabilities like thought leadership, technical expertise and relationship management.

In order for this to happen, businesses must rely on organization-wide teams and skills to own and support these functions. This is the community that promotes social media maturity. From my own experience in trying to make social media a capability not a campaign, I can tell you that this is not easy.

Social media maturity happens when we no longer need a social media specialist, when social media becomes a part of everyone’s DNA – not just a job owned by appointed individuals.

Here are some lessons learned from my journey in trying to build a “social” business to generate new leads, manage reputation, support customers and build brand awareness’ in new markets.

• Listening To The Conversation Is As Important As Participating
• It’s More Than Just Launching A Page
• A Participation strategy should be informed by what you learn from listening
• Only Success That Can Be Repeated Is Really Success

Social media has only accelerated the idea that companies need to shift behavior to be more transparent, communicative and responsive. This is not the job of one person, it is the responsibility of everyone. We will know when organizations have matured when being “social” becomes part of everyone’s job and a way companies do business. It is not the job of a specialist.

Optimize earned media in branded experiences

In some previous post I explored concepts on ways marketers can aggregate earned media and re-use in the context of a purchase path or branded experience. The question this brings up for me is which pieces of earned media are the most effective.

Everyone talks about the power of word of mouth and there is plenty of research to prove positive comments or reviews affect people’s purchase. However there's not much research showing how blog post, tweets or user generated content from third party sites influence user behavior when integrated into a purchase path.

One way to test the impact earned media can have on behavior is to use it a test element in a multivariate or A/B test. Assuming you have enough content from different social sources (tweets, flickr, facebook connections etc) you could begin to asses which source(s) of earned media influence behavior by customer segment. This would help you answer questions like "Will people who don’t use twitter be influenced by tweets?" If not then you can make sure to filter their experience.

Knowing which sources of social media are the most influential to customers is also tremendous insight for refining how and where you engage in social media.



Is anyone doing this? If so what kinds of results if any are you seeing.

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What would you do if Twitter closed?

According to Techcrunch “Facebook’s systematic attack on Twitter is scheduled for beta testing: the Everyone Button.“ There have been several comments floating around on whether or not Twitter can survive. If a business is not making money and does not have a clear path to profitability then I would not be surprised. Perhaps a little saddened.

The most valuable parts of Twitter is not the technology, it is in the connections and conversations it manages. Many of us have spent countless hours cultivating our networks, sharing ideas and even making new friends. The insights for market research are endless. Perhaps Twitter could have monetized by making research available on consumer trends.

Regardless if Twitter goes away it has shifted the way information is shared in real time, how people connect with one another and the way brands must listen and respond. This way of using updates has already become a key feature of many packaged community and enterprise 2.0 applications.

The idea Twitter could shut down makes me realize how quickly we need solutions for social network and data portability. Loosing my contacts on Twitter would be like going to summer camp when I was little and not being able to stay in touch with the people I had shared the experience with. There are tools available that allow you to download your contact names and backup your tweets. This data would likely not be very useful for reconnected since it does not share any of the real contact information.

The risk of investing time and energy in social network only to have them go away is not just an issue for Twitter but any social network. How would you re-connect with your Twitter network if it shut down tomorrow? Would losing your data be an issue? Would you even care?

Are the fish taking the bait?

Jeremiah Owyang put together a great presentation where he describes the importance for brands to scan the landscape and understand the fish they are trying to catch. For most marketers doing this sort of customer research and segmentation has always been part of our approach for reaching the right audience.

Social media however has changed the landscape when it comes to reaching customer segments. Which is perhaps this is why we have seen such an emphasis on things like influencer marketing and word of mouth recently. These ideas are not new, however it has never been easier to identify who is talking about your products, make an assessment of their ability to influence others and engage directly in a conversation with them.

Marketers are trying to dip their bait in the middle of Facebook and Twitter streams with the assumption that if one "fish" in the school takes the bait others will follow. Therefore increasing things like sales, leads or brand engagement.

A couple of questions come to mind with all this talk of marketers fighting to get in to the stream. Will the "fish" begin to ignore the bait? or Will dipping your line into the stream catch only the fish you want?

I am interested to hear thoughts on how word of mouth marketing will evolve beyond simply appearing in a Facebook or twitter stream?

Checkout abandonment issues? Add a concierge.

According to MarketLive research cart abandonment rate was up 2.1% year over year to 56.8%, consumers exiting a site after viewing just one page went up 2.6% to 34.7% and the percentage of visitors making it to the shopping cart declined 3.0% to 9.6%.

Online marketers can reduce these numbers by using video, user generated content and multivariate testing to drive higher levels of engagement and move customers thru the purchase path. In a recent post "How to inspire & engage consumers in down times" these ideas are discussed these in greater detail.

There will be one more tactic added to this list after checking out upgrade prices on the new iPhone for existing AT&T customers. I started on the Apple site and selected the option to reserve a phone. They started me thru a fairly straight forward check out process, once reaching the pricing page (and being disappointed) I abandoned. Later that day an email was sent to me from concierge@apple.com saying "Your on your way to your new iPhone". It showed where I was in the process and provided a direct link to continue my checkout.

There have been many times when I was actually interested in buying something but after filling my cart I either walked away or the browser crashed and the transaction was never completed. This was a great way to keep a customer engaged in the check out process and seems like it should be a common practice for online retailers.

Has anyone used tactics like this? Is so what percentage of customers who abandoned completed purchase.

Litter in the stream

A recent post from Brian Morrissey on how marketers are trying to get into peoples social stream via promotions like #squarespace, a daily giveaway of iPhones if you add the hashtag #squarespace to your tweet.

His post got me thinking about the right ways for brand to earn media. Clearly this is about as earned as filling out a register to win ballot for a new motorcycle while walking thru the airport. The problem with a quick fix like this hashtag or any facebook app is that it quickly becomes viral junk mail.

We all know word of mouth is a powerful forms of marketing. According to a recent study done by Facebook it determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. This shows that people don’t pay that much attention to the majority of their “friends” online.

Why does this study matter for marketers?

It matters because it shows that getting into the stream is not enough. Brands still need to cultivate “real”ationships by engaging with customer’s and delivering amazing experiences. If you do this people will talk in authentically in their streams. As Brian points out these approaches are a fast way into the stream but not a sustainable one.

It is not sustainable because peoples motivation to share has very little to do with the product you are offering. This reminds me of how peoples place so much value on getting to the home page of Digg. Just because you make it to the homepage does not mean you are reaching people who are actually interested in what you are offering.

While Square space has certainly increased the awareness of its offering. I wonder how many people have converted to new customers since the launch of this promotion.

Concept: Integrating earned media in the b2b purchase path

In my previous post I shared a concept for integrating earned media in the purchase for a b2c transaction. For most of us b2c is a fairly straightforward concept to understand and as Michael Leis points out “we'll be looking on this concept as passe in a few short years.”

Jeremiah Owyang also commented that he gets the question from some of his clients that aren't as cool as high-end road bikes "What do we do if our product isn't cool?" This is likely to challenge for many in the b2b space. Most don’t think of things like enterprise software, construction or even health care as cool.

No matter how cool your product is or isn’t, you still have customers or else you would not be in business. As I have pointed out in previous post listening and identifying where your customers are is the first step when getting started with social media.

If you find there are not many conversations happening across social networks, perhaps you build your own. A place for your customers to interact with one another, share ideas and get support from your company. Mike Slone made a great comment when he said “Facilitating access to discussions and conversations about a product seem much more relevant in the future than aggregating positive comments that could be outdated.”

He is absolutely right, especially for a large transaction like enterprise software. In this concept I blended the experience to bring together a hosted brand community with what is happening in public social networks. This allows prospect to interact with your customers and the market as a whole.

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Concept: Integrating earned media into b2c purchase path

One of the challenges marketers are faced with is tapping into existing social networks to leverage the power of word of mouth. How do you leverage word of mouth when it does not reside on your site but in places like tweets, comments and status updates? One way to leverage earned media is to aggregate and re-use in the context of a customers purchase path.

I have started to write a white paper on how to integrate earned media (eg: tweets with brand mentions) in the context of a branded experience. My plan is to work backwards from the user experience to the mechanics of how it might happen and how to "earn" media thru conversational marketing.

What I would love to hear from you all is: Who is doing a good job delivering experiences like this? What are some challenges you see in evolving corporate sites?

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"Real"ationships are the new outbound

As I mentioned in my last post, replicating social media success is essential for scaling across your organization. One hypothesis @gerardodada and I formed when beginning to experiment with social media is that we could generate new leads.

We proved this hypothesis with the launch of our social media product. By actively listening for certain phrases and engaging with people who made mention of the new offering we were able to register 5 new leads. Now that we proved social media could generate leads it is time to transfer this knowledge to our lead generation team.

Just registering the leads is not enough; they must be nurtured and not only in an automated fashion, Dear "Customer name". Insides sales teams who have primarily been an outbound channel must shift their mindset to work on building relationships thru social media.

We just started training our lead gen team on using social media. One of the questions that popped up was around geography and who gets credit if a lead generated from social media is converted. To address in the short term we will assign the manager of the group with responsibility for doing the listening and interacting. Once a lead moves into an offline state it can then be handled by the person in the geo.

The long-term vision once we refine the process and get more of the team connected is to use the work flow function in radian6 to assign people to respond. The challenge is that geo is not always obvious. What really needs to happen is re-thinking comp models for these teams, perhaps once success is shown that will be a possibility. If you have the flexibility to do this I would encourage you to think about how you can eliminate any barriers.

Assigning a single person is not the best long-term solution, but avoiding overlap is the main goal. Recently I made mention of a brand and within an hour received two email from sales people asking me if I was taken care of. There clearly was a lack of orchestration and it felt very spammy. This is an experience I do not want our prospect to have.

If anyone else has started doing this I would love to hear some of the concerns from your teams.