1. Sharing

Social media is built on the foundation of exchanging information. Or, as Wikipedia defines it:

And sharing is instinctively social. Whether it’s sharing advice, a funny joke or the latest gossip, people want to come across to others as helpful, knowledgeable or simply the first to know about something.

see: viral videos, chain emails, gossip, social currency

2. Status

A double meaning! It can indicate “What am I doing right now” (as in Facebook status), or represent a person’s prestige within their personal and professional circles. A person’s online status could range from informational, to too much information (“our baby just threw up the rug – how cute!”), to outright bragging (“I’m poolside at some tropical resort in January while you are all back home buried in 3 feet of snow – suckers!”). This has evolved into the realm of game mechanics, where users are motivated to gain “status” (or some embodiment of how influential or special they are) based on the social actions they take and achievements they reach.

see: status updates, tweets, Badges, Mayorships, Klout scores, “social capital”

3. Support

Another “S” with more than 1 definition. On a consumer level, it means real-time customer service conducted in public view, or consumer-to-consumer support via support forums where others have already found a solution . On a personal level, it means seeking the support or encouragement of others in times of need (loss of a loved one or job, motivation to stay on diet, or simply seeking sympathy because one woke up with a sore throat this morning). Social media has made people realize that the social web is one giant support group.

see: Twitter, customer support forums, Get Satisfaction, insight panels, Wikis

4. Shopping (and Savings!)

Social media relates to shopping in 2 ways – leveraging research and recommendations to make purchase decisions, and the emergence of new commerce models.

Social media has shifted consumer behavior from the traditional “sales funnel” to what McKinsey refers to as the “Consumer Decision Journey”, where once a consumer decides they are going to buy a product, they move into a stage called “active evaluation”, where the number of brands they are considering *increases* (the opposite of the premise of the original funnel). This is the stage when the consumer is intent on purchasing and they are actively researching the product, and begin to rely on reviews and ratings, comparing prices and tapping into their social circles for advice.

Shopping in itself has become more ‘social’, with a number of copycat Flash sales, group buying, location-based “deals” and coupon code aggregation/sharing sites popping up over the past few years. Who pays retail anymore?

see: Online reviews, Groupon, Gilt, group buying, flash sales, Foursquare deals

5. Search (and SEO)

A secondary benefit of UGC (user generated content) is that social media driven content is weighing more and more heavily in search result rankings. Social SEO is defined as traffic to your website via search engines, based on the relevancy of consumer-generated content on your site to keywords. You can apply all sorts of SEO to a product page on your ecommerce site, but all of the “likes”, shares, and consumer-submitted reviews and ratings will play a big factor in your content’s relevancy. And the relevancy of that content can be short-lived as trends/memes come and go and your content isn’t dynamic and gets “stale.”

see: Google +1, social seo, Facebook Likes, twitter trends, reviews and ratings, Social Mention

6. Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like winning stuff? In the social landscape (especially on more light-touch touchpoints such as Facebook and Twitter), an easy way to quickly amass lots of fans/followers is to conduct a social media-driven promotion. Brands are running contests and product giveaways, and those entries in turn virally promote the promotion to others (as well as increase exposure the brand). For other brands, they are seeing the opportunity to leverage social promotions as way to begin developing larger scale CRM and loyalty initiatives.

see: Facebook contests, Twitter giveaways, product samples

The final four “S’s” deal with the darker side of social media…

7. Scandals

It’s not that people’s behavior has changed much over the past 100 years so much as technology has brought into the public eye what has traditionally happened behind closed doors. And more often these days, social media has been the medium in which the scandals occurred. Politicians and athletes have always had affairs. Band groupies have always been around. But with the prevalence of camera-enabled smartphones, the public has become a mass paparazzi who can snap a compromising photo and post in real-time.

Also, social media has provided a direct way for celebrities/public figures to engage directly with the public, which has historically been a tightly controlled PR machine. Many of these forms of social media scandals are the result of spur of the moment actions – an insensitive tweet or a public message meant to be private. These public figures need to be given social media training in the same way they are trained to handle press conferences and interviews. Imagine if Joe DiMaggio, Bill Clinton, Robert Plant or John F. Kennedy had Twitter or Facebook around during their heydays?

But at the end of the day, the biggest social media “scandals” really didn’t become such until they were picked up by more mainstream media. How many actual consumers actually got worked up about the whole “Motrin Moms” controversy?

see: Wikileaks, Anthony Weiner, Brett Favre, Kenneth Cole, TMZ

8. Stalking (and over-Sharing)

Doesn’t it seem like just yesterday that most people were afraid to use their real name or even post a real photo of themselves online? The social web has lifted the guise of online anonymity, as people have shifted from using online personas/usernames to their real identities. By connecting a user’s online profiles and social media-based actions with other data, companies can mesh your social data with online behavioral data so they could, for example, better target ads based on your gender, age, number of children, or interests you have shared through any number of social media touchpoints.

Law enforcement, collection agencies and prospective employers are now using this information as well to track people down, conduct background checks and catch people lying (“I can’t pay my credit card bill, but here are photos of me on a luxury vacation!”)

For minors, there are legitimate concerns for parents about their children’s use of social media, what information they reveal and who they interact with.

see: Facebook privacy, Spokeo, Rapportive, PleaseRobMe, check-ins, online bullying, online predators

9. Sex

The adult industry has always been on the bleeding edge of technical innovation because, quite simply, they’ve had to be. They pioneered anti-credit card fraud checks in the 90′s, online subscription models, online dating, video delivery (including secure video, video chat systems, etc.), anti-piracy and even were a key player in the success of the Blu-Ray DVD format winning out over HD DVD. Any new innovation that gains wide adoption was most likely pioneered in the adult space first. While the “old” guard adult publishers are fading out of existence, the online industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry. “Innovate, or die” indeed.

see: chatroulette, webcams, online dating

10. Scams (and Snake Oil Salesmen)

Not to end on a downer, but it was only a matter of time before unsavory types would jump on the social bandwagon and figure out ways to make a quick buck off of others.

While historically online scams involving Nigerian princes looking to share their wealth or phishing scams that would trick people into sharing their banking info were done my mass-emailing people and playing a numbers game (assuming that even 1/100th of 1% of people were fooled, that would still translate into millions of dollars), scams can now spread at scale by leveraging the social web and the trust of users among their social media peers (from “Free iPads” to fake Japan charity scams).

In marketing circles, an entire cottage industry of social media ‘experts’ have emerged who have little previous experience other than reading Mashable or some presentations on SlideShare (what the heck is a “Twitter coach”, anyway? Were there “email coaches” 20 years ago?). “Books! Speaking engagements! Consulting gigs!” Don’t buy into the hype. Check their CV and see what they were were going 5 years ago (most likely flipping real estate). Ask to see actual work and case studies, and less jargon and hand waving.

At the end of the day, if you come across something that is too good to be true, then it most likely is. Caveat Emptor.

see: social media scams, phishing, botnets, fake charities, consultants, Twitter coaches

What does social media mean to you? Do you have any additions to this list? Leave a comment below or drop me a tweet!

In this post, Haque discusses the relationships that are created through all of these social mediums, medias, platforms, networks, and spheres. Are they all super-thin and riddled with layers of doubt? Are they sustainable as long term connections?

His hypothesis:

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

Interesting.

He continues on through his “thin relationship” rationale (some I agree with, some I don’t) and then closes with:

The social isn’t about beauty contests and popularity contests. They’re a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It’s about trust, connection, and community. That’s what there’s too little of in today’s mediascape, despite all the hoopla surrounding social tools. The promise of the Internet wasn’t merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That’s where the future of media lies.

While his argument is seemingly about personal relationships forged in the social sphere and not the relationships between brands and consumers in the social space, I think the same rules of engagement and long term evolutionary objectives could apply. In fact, I believe it applies even MORE SO to brands than to people. To me, people connect online socially for varying reasons. To find other people who like to play soccer. To learn how to properly curl their hair. To find a French tutor via Craigslist. Some of these manifest themselves into deep relationships but most are thin just like they would be in real life. These types of relationships simply have a backbone in a “shared interest” or an immediate “need” which usually is more superficial and immediate than not.

However, by nature brands NEED to retain connections. They need loyalty. They need longevity. They need “thick” relationships. The future of media (and of communication) does lie (in my humble opinion) in “thick, strong, more meaningful” relationships.

They need… well… in three letters? C-R-M.

Rather than offer up any analysis or insight, I’d like to point you to the 213 (at press time) and counting comments on his blog post that I spent a good hour digging through. If you have a moment, take a peek at them. Very interesting, indeed.

[image via Wendy Bailey's blog here.]

This lack of integrated strategy is largely a result of two factors:

• the experimentation encouraged in Steve Rubel’s Digital Embassy strategy
• the relative ease involved with launching a presence

On the surface an integrated approach seems ideal but ultimately it must be driven by the key objective.  An Embassy strategy works well if you’re building up natural search results or brand awareness but not so well if you’re objective is customer acquisition and deeper relationships with customers.  Without integration, there’s no clear path for the consumer to take the casual relationship to a deeper one.

As I started writing I realized there was a good amount to cover, so instead of tackling this topic all in one go, I figured I’d break it into three manageable chunks.  Next up will be working through the various integration opportunities and reviewing the potential road blocks.

Total spending on WoM marketing is expected to increase 10.2% to $1.70 billion in 2009 and grow at a CAGR of 14.5% during the 2008-2013 period, reaching $3.04 billion as more brands include WoM in their media mix and ROI metrics improve.

Other Key Highlights:

• “Spending on U.S. word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing increased 14.2% to $1.54 billion in 2008, as brands recognized the need to get involved in consumer and business conversations and allocate resources to WoM. Spending increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.6% from 2003 to 2008. “

• “Spending on WoM content and services increased 13.0% to $1.26 billion in 2008, as major marketers integrated WoM into the media mix and shifted to specialized WoM firms that help drive long-term campaigns. Spending rose at a 37.3% CAGR of 37.3% from 2003 to 2008. “

• “Spending on WoM ancillary products increased 19.7% to $286 million in 2008, due to growing demand for return-on-investment (ROI) data and the impact of WoM campaigns on consumer purchasing behavior. Growth can also be attributed to the increasing sophistication of WoM tools that are being used to monitor online and offline conversations. Spending grew at a CAGR of 39.1% from 2003 to 2008. “

Who’s Investing in WOM?

According to the study, consumer product goods (CPGs) companies are the major adopters of WoM, accounting for 17.4% of spending in 2008. Other top categories include food & drink, finance & business-to-business services, electronics & telecommunications, and retail (they note that auto & transportation would have been in the top five if not for their industry’s recent financial woes and cuts in spending).

Shift in Consumer Behavior

Not really a surprise here, but the study notes/validates that consumers are abandoning traditional and ad-supported media, migrating to digital and consumer-supported media.

For more information (or to purchase the report), click here.

Tip #1: Motivation

If you are truly starting “from scratch,” with no existing customers (let alone an existing CRM system or even an email list), you’ll need to think about what will motivate a group of consumers to want to learn about your new product or service. Consider the use of an incentive to attract a group of prospective consumers. An incentive could be tangible (free T-shirt, entry into a sweepstakes), or intangible (the chance to help test out a new product, the opportunity to interact directly with product developers and like-minded consumers). Think about the type of consumer you are trying to attract and what they would value (what would wealthy middle-aged men care about more – a free T-shirt, or some frequent-flier miles?) You can build an experience around your product or service by providing an exclusive online community to allow these like-minded consumers to interact and share in the experience.

(Note that at this point you are not “rewarding” word of mouth; the up-front incentive is simply a way to get consumers to “hear you out.” They shouldn’t be obligated to do anything beyond this step. The consumers who stick around are the ones who truly want to learn more, be engaged and become product experts.)

Tip #2: Education

Discovery is a key element in triggering conversations. People want to be “in the know” – education provides them with “social currency,” since they will have valuable information/knowledge that their peers do not. Education also allows you to articulate your key selling points and better ensure that they are accurately passed along. Quizzes are a great way to engage and interactively educate your consumers. If you have a prototype/beta version of your product, provide a set of testing instructions and solicit feedback through the use of surveys.

Tip #3: Co-creation

The best way to develop an emotional bond between consumers and your brand is to involve them in the process as early as possible. Activities such as providing feedback on packaging and marketing materials, helping come up with names and taglines, or submitting photos documenting brand interaction or product use are just a few examples. Provide ways for consumers to show off (and share) their creativity and newfound passion, and gain recognition for their work. Encourage them to make it “their” product. Consumer-generated content is a valuable by-product of co-creation and can build awareness for your product or service months in advance of any traditional advertising initiatives.

Tip #4: Anticipation

As you approach product/brand launch, you should have a group of passionate consumers who have developed a strong emotional connection to your product (in some cases, without having actually used or experienced it!). Continue to feed their passion – continue to involve them in product testing, chats with product managers and developers, first-look sneak peeks and insider information. The trick is to release information in “bite-size chunks” – enough to feed their enthusiasm over a period of time and reinforce your selling points, but not so much as to overwhelm them.

Tip #5: Recommendation

Congratulations – your new product or service has launched! This passionate group of people you have fostered are no longer “consumers” – they are your customers. Treat them well; they are your early adopters and evangelists. They will be the ones sharing their enthusiasm for your new product or service (chances are they have already been doing so for quite some time).

Publicly acknowledge and provide these customers with special status in your customer community since they have been with you from the beginning. Be on a first-name basis with these customers. Invite them to special events. Send them birthday cards.

Lastly, don’t consider this the end of your WOM “campaign” – consider it the beginning of your long-lasting WOM program!

A participant in this discussion made the following comment at the end of the conference when asked what they learned that day, “I learned a lot about ROI.  I learned that no one knows what ROI is for communities so I get to make up whatever i want.”

As humorous as it was at the time, that comment defines an ever-present struggle of proving the worth of enterprise social networks.  An online community is a living, dynamic strategy that can produce many valuable returns on your investment, not all of which will have direct financial impact.  It’s difficult to quantify (simply) the returns on a strategy with so many moving parts.  While a community initiative might end up being a marketing spend, the returns are cross-departmental, which makes measurement difficult when companies are silo-like in structure.

A few key takeaways emerged from our ROI discussion that I wanted to share:

Define the R -  It’s a good idea to define your goals and the appropriate strategy to achieve them before trying to justify the investment.  There are a lot of shiny new social networking tools and resources that are well suited for achieving business objectives but believe it or not, not all of them are going to work for your business.  Are you shooting for short term financial returns or more long term, value based returns?  Do you intend to build your CRM system, lower support costs, raise brand awareness, increase brand loyalty, glean marketing insights, increase sales, generate word of mouth, all of the above? If you dive in without clearly defining your purpose, you run the risk of botching the execution and potentially causing damage to your brand.

Quantify the R - After you know what you want and what you’re going to do, figure out how you’re going to measure it.  Peter Kim wrote a much talked about post back in December boldly stating that ROI is strictly a financial ratio and if social media marketing can’t be measured by ROI, then there’s no place for social media marketing; a sentiment often echoed by C-level executives.  Others believe the traditional metric of ROI is less applicable because of the complex nature of social media and the return is no longer as clear cut as a direct bottom line impact.  Methodologies such as Net Promoter, ASCI, Engagement Loyalty, ROBI ROCI and ROP, among others, are growing in popularity for measuring returns on social network marketing strategies.

Wait for It…- Online communities take time to produce results.  You’re probably not going to see them on Day 1, and you may not see them on Day 31, but if you have the correct measurement methodologies in place you can be confident that sooner or later that needle will start to move; how well you’ve executed your strategy will determine which way.

I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on the ROI debate, and how you measure the returns on your community investments.

Some suggested reading for understanding ROI in Social Media:
Do We Need To Shift The ROI Conversation: Crash Course on ROCI and ROBI
Don’t Say ROI Unless You Mean It
What Is The ROI For Social Media?
Social Media Study: Most Effective Tactics Are the Most Difficult to Measure Quantitatively Online Community ROI Models and Reporting Research Study
Engage or Die! ROI vs ROP in Social Media

UPDATE: Facebook has returned to their prior Terms of Use until they can work out issues people have raised. Read more about it on their blog.

Below is a simple social media “gut check” that any organization (or even individual!) should find helpful…

Own Your Presence.

With the proliferation of online social platforms, tools, and services, how can you keep up and maintain your presence in all of these places at once? Aside from unscrupulous third-parties (or just pranksters) claiming, or “brandjacking” a brand’s presence/username/vanity url, some sites actually create one for you, whether you want it or not. Consumer review sites like Yelp!, and customer service platforms like Get Satisfaction are launching thousands of automated brand profiles to build (typically consumer-generated) content around. Some of these services are allowing brands to “claim” their pages/ids through verification… or a price.

Fortunately, some sites such as Facebook have policies in place to allow brands to report/take down fraudulent profiles/pages or reclaim a brandjacked profile.

So, what to do? You can either focus your efforts on the more popular sites/services out there, or use one of several services that will notify you when a new social network/tool launches so you can quickly claim your profile (or you can just read Mashable

Own Your Relationships.

Just to be clear – “presence” is not the same thing as engagement!

Perhaps you are thinking of “outsourcing” your word of mouth efforts to a third party word of mouth “network” consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of consumers. If all you care about is getting your product into a bunch of people’s hands and (hopefully) generate some “amplified” (versus organic) word of mouth, these types of services can be effective…

Are these really your consumers or your target market? Is the word of mouth authentic or are these just a bunch of folks who want free stuff? Are you even directly engaging/communicating/sharing with these consumers? Do you care if competitors are able to access/engage the same users?

Big brands (especially CPG ones) are starting to realize this distinction, and have begun developing their own dedicated consumer engagement programs. While they may still rely on the help of word of mouth marketing companies to launch their programs, they want to own the relationships.

Own Your Data.

What’s the point of creating relationships if you can’t get closer to your customers and integrate your social platform touchpoints into your larger CRM initiative? (you have a CRM system, don’t you??

Given Facebook’s enormous user base (they just reached 150 million users), it’s a no-brainer for brands to “set up shop” by creating a Facebook “page”.

Here’s the rub – when you create a presence on most stand-alone, third-party social platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, “white label” social networks such as Ning, etc.) you are in control of your relationships but not your data! It’s the network effect, which these services have built their business models upon – as more people use a given service, it increases the utility and value of said service. In other words, every person you engage with via a platform must in turn create an account, thus adding to that platform’s user base (and increasing it’s value). Those 10,000 customers you got to join – you’ve just handed them over to someone else!

It’s ok to play on their turf, but maintain your own – at the very least, make sure to hook your CRM tentacles into all of your social media and word of mouth initiatives.

Hopefully, this spurs some dialog, or at the very least makes you think a bit more as you ramp up your word of mouth/social media/consumer engagement strategies for 2009 and beyond.

Hmmm…What does this mean? I’m interpreting it as they are trying to help coach small business owners to utilize their technology in the best way to provide an optimum consumer experience for their customers yielding maximum profitability and hopefully, if they’re lucky, an increase in consumer retention.

While I appreciate Microsoft’s entrepreneurial economic resurgence desire, I am not convinced that this 20,000 square foot facility located conveniently (ahem) in Redmond, Washington at Microsoft’s HQ was the way to really reach out to the American people.

You would think that during these “challenging economic times” people would be shutting down stores not opening them, and I can’t help but be pessimistic about the self-promotional nature of this endeavor.  While many services that are provided to help people are certainly self gratuitous in some shape or form, it seems like Microsoft could have taken the show on the road, setting up a moving exhibit showcasing their services in multiple markets that would have reached a much larger (and much more representative) demographic.

If the show wasn’t made for the road and if the objective really is to help their average consumer, creating a “store experience” that would best help people “cut costs, create efficiencies, streamline operations, and drive customer loyalty through connected experiences” shouldn’t they have setup shop somewhere on 5th Avenue here in the NYC, in the Mall of America, Union Square in San Francisco, Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, Tyson’s Corner in Virgina, or perhaps in the Grove in Los Angeles, all prominent (and highly trafficked) consumer retail markets?

Instead of taking their “showcase of new and emerging technologies” to the average consumer, they are keeping it homeward, which seems to clearly decrease the reach and magnitude of this endeavor.

How much of an impact that this “Retail Experience Center” has on Microsoft’s image, sales, and how helpful it is for the average consumer within this target demographic remains to be seen.

One thing that resonates with me from Microsoft’s press release is how important consumer loyalty is.

I’m not certain what Microsoft’s tactics are for addressing that need, but I hope to make it over to the National Retail Federation 98th Annual Convention and Expo here in NYC where Microsoft says it will be showcasing this center at booth no. 637, so I can find out.

What are the best ways to utilize technology to hang on to your consumers while concurrently generating new ones?

Now this is the million (multi-million?) dollar question, one that I constantly work to address as I build relevant CRM tactics, programs, and initiatives for many of my clients that integrate with their overall CRM strategy.  Obviously there is no clear-cut answer, but there is a resounding theme that echos through: you absolutely have to talk to your consumers.

(Photo courtesy of Microsoft)

The Groundswell authors break down the opportunities within social media to mirror corporate structures, providing an easy way for people in research, marketing/PR, customer support, product development to find their path into social media initiatives.

This is a solid approach because it brings clarity and structure, leading to actionable initiatives. It’s also a good approach for a brand that is making their first foray into the space so they can clearly define objectives and measurable goals and ultimately come away with a success story to justify additional investment.

But what about the brand that has experience and is ready to take a more holistic approach? Or what about the brand that wants to leapfrog their competitors who have already been experimenting for the past year?

Social media and word-of-mouth are not about corporate “silos” – the most effective and sustainable programs cut through silos and have touch points across departments. Does this approach make getting a program off the ground more challenging? Absolutely, but it also accelerates corporate learning, improves results and sustainability of the program.

When did you say the Groundswell 2.0 bus was arriving?

Most everyone we talk to understands the need and importance for word of mouth but since it’s still a relatively new marketing tactic there is a learning curve to tackle. Some of the first issues a marketer is faced with are:

• Should it be a long-term or short-term strategy?
• Should it involve influencers or average consumers from an internal database?
• Should the execution occur online, offline or both?
• How should success be measured? (Sales, conversations, conversation reach, change in Net Promoter Score?)

A recent Forrester report does a good job in helping brands understand what tactics and metrics are best utilized by individual departments (marketing, sales, research, etc.). Approaching it from the brand’s point of view makes it much easier to digest and see the opportunities.

In the same vein I wanted to share my view of the WOM industry, specific to the agencies segment. WOM agencies typically follow one of the following models:

• WOM Agency – Media Model: Brand leases access to the agency’s network of influencers, delivers quick hit, typically short term duration.
• WOM Agency – Influencer Model: Agency specializes in identifying and sourcing influencers, typically short term duration.
• WOM Agency – CRM Model: Agency specializes in sourcing participants from client database, delivers more organic word of mouth, typically long term duration.

One of the tenets of facilitating WOM with consumers is to ‘make it easy’; we in the industry should take that same principal in helping brands understand the various options available within WOM marketing.