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!

“Hello, My Name is Erica and I Am a Twitter and Facebook Junkie”

The key I have found for really understanding Twitter or Facebook (when to use it, how to use it and why to use it) as marketer is simple: You MUST be a fan and consumer of the medium.

In the hilarious article “Are You a ‘Twitter Quitter’” by Michelle Godall, she points out that “the fact remains that personal experimentation of social media is a key prerequisite to helping businesses understand, embrace and use social media effectively.”

The best social media marketers are those that are able to understand it’s workhorses, Twitter and Facebook, from more than a strategic research based perspective.  To join in a conversation with your clients, brands and consumers you need to really understand the ways in which people interact in the social networking landscape from a practical standpoint.  The nature Twitter and Facebook is dynamic and constantly changing; if you haven’t logged in to your Twitter or Facebook account in the past 60 days, you have missed out on how the changes you are simply reading about are affecting the very audience you are attempting to engage.

I have a few ideas for those marketers who want to be better about being advocates as well as consumers of Twitter and Facebook:

1. Why are you here?

Define why you are on Twitter/Facebook.  What is it you want to accomplish? Are you looking for new friends or customers? Are you looking for a way to interact with current fans? Are you attempting to brand yourself?  Once you define a clear reason for being in social media, it can better direct how you use it to accomplish your goals.

2. Be authentic.

Make sure you are who you say you are and what you represent.  If you chose to use an alias make sure that the accurately represents who you ACTUALLY are and the goals you have already defined for yourself within the social media context.

3. Be timely.

Update and engage frequently.  This means checking in to your accounts daily, and sometimes multiple times a day.  Update your Twitter status frequently with information that is relevant to who you have defined yourself to be and the reasons why you are in the space. Remember, “you have to be in it to win it.”  If you aren’t logging in to your social media accounts 3+ times a week you can’t call yourself an expert, your are merely a passive user.

4. Join the conversation in a relevant way.

Interact with other users in a relevant way.  Offer some unique perspective, don’t just rehash (or in the case of twitter re-tweet) news without some perspective attached to it.  Share intellectually stimulating content.  A good barometer of this is to share and interact on things which ignite a passion in you; this includes things that you’d discuss with your friends at the end of the day. The conversations you chose to join should be timely, authentic and true to the reasons for your existence in the space.

Still not sure what types of things will engage your audience? Take a look at the science behind the New York Times most e-mailed posts here.

5. Give back and give “props.”

Stop with the pitches and begging people to re-tweet your content.  Social media is about getting things from people, but much more about what you give.

Are you a retailer? Give away discounts or coupons.  Are you trying to develop your personal brand? Give away advice, inspiration or perspective on your industry.  No one wants to follow someone or engage with a brand that is about one-way communication.  If you are getting something out of the social media space, remember to give back as well. Give people something that will uplift, enlighten, cause them to think, or stimulate conversation.

Another way of giving back is to give “props.”  Acknowledge those fans and experts that inspire you or have something relevant to say.  If a piece of news or content comes your way make sure to give credit to the person or persons that inspired you.

Of course, there are many other ways to effectively engage the Twitter and Facebook  landscape; these are simply a few ideas to initially get the savvy marketer on the bandwagon as not only an expert, but a fan.   Join me in my addiction, become a fan, not just a spectator.

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.

The primary change is that a majority of the page is now taken up with the “wall”, which consists of status updates and comments by fans. This is obviously a direct response to Twitter and the success it has given brands in engaging their followers in direct communication.

The biggest drawback is that pages now have the exact same layout as user profiles. Previously, many brands were able to highly customize the content and look of their pages using the large area available for images and multiple large application boxes. Now, there is only a small image on the upper left corner and a few small application boxes down the left column. As on a profile, the rest of the applications have been relegated to a boxes tab that many fans probably won’t take the time to explore. While it is possible to change settings to have new users start on this tab, once someone becomes a fan of a page, they will always start on the main wall.

The consequences are clear. Brands will not be able to rely on rich graphics or flashy widgets to create engagement and reinforce identity; the focus in now on the conversation. Brands that update their status will have it appear just like friends’ updates on their fans home pages where they will be able to “like” and comment on it. With the imminent redesign of the home page, this conversation will only gain prominence and become the primary way for brands to engage fans and grow virally through the social graph.

The challenge will be for brands to use these new touch points for communication effectively. People will not accept passively receiving broadcast information like an RSS feed of blog posts; they require real engagement and two-way conversation. Brands will need to find real people to convey their voices and identity. There have already been successful examples of this on Twitter such as Zappos and Comcast.

It will only become more complex maintaining and managing a brand’s conversation as it moves away from a brand’s own site to the distributed web. As more sites and services open APIs, new tools and meta-services will be created to facilitate this for brands as FriendFeed and TweetDeck have only begun to demonstrate for consumers.

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!

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.

The main issue I hold with this discussion is the misconception of what a conversation is.  A conversation by definition is an exchange of information.  If there’s no exchange, it isn’t a conversation.  If a TV ad tells me to buy a car, I didn’t have a conversation with that ad.  The ad spoke at me and i probably didn’t listen because I’m not in the market to buy a car.  Referring to a brand whose strategy includes broadcasting marketing messages through social media channels as a brand attempting to ‘join the conversation’ seems inaccurate.  It isn’t a conversation at all.  I might follow @reuters on Twitter.  The account “tweets” Reuters stories.  It doesn’t follow, it doesn’t respond.  This isn’t a conversation between me and Reuters, and I don’t think that just because it’s on Twitter, a social networking service,  makes it any more of an attempt at a conversation.

I don’t necessarily believe you can equate an offline conversation to an online conversation, either.  An offline conversation is generally one to one or one to a few.  Online conversations are often defined as one-to-many but that isn’t exactly accurate either, it implies broadcasting from one person to many people.  The unique aspect of an online conversation is that it is possible to have a one-on-one conversation that is then seen and read by many.

This doesn’t dilute the value of a one-on-one conversation, it just make it public.  This is a huge opportunity for a brand as it allows the success of a meaningful one-on-one conversation to potentially influence the majority who are just listening.

Take, for example, a presidential candidate who travels to small town Iowa to have dinner with a family of four.  It seems like that candidate’s time could be better spent holding a rally with far more people, but then the media picks it up and now millions of people hear about how a candidate took time out of their busy campaign to sit down and have dinner with 4 people in rural Iowa.  They must care!  It’s a similar strategy.

Which brings me to my next point, social media is a stage.  People create and critique as a form of expression and to be seen and heard.  A recent eMarketer study shows that 85% of social media users think companies should interact with their consumers through social media.  Users want to know that brands are hearing what they have to say.  They don’t necessarily need a brand to interact with them specifically, but they want to know they are there and interacting with others.  Conversing with just one customer can show countless others that a brand is listening.

And it is listening that seems to be lost in this mix.   One of the most important traits of a good conversationalist is the ability to listen.  How can you exchange information if one or both of the participants are not listening?  It doesn’t work and that’s not a conversation.  What’s great about social media is a brand has the ability to listen in on all kinds of conversations.  Listen for questions, calls for help, complaints on forums, social networks and blogs.  Customers aren’t afraid to voice their opinions.  Identify who’s talking about you, where they’re at, and what they’re talking about.  Then get in there and exchange some information.  Continue your approach in an organized way, be responsive, be transparent, and most importantly LISTEN.  Remember that a conversation is an exchange.

With media moving to more non-traditional means, it was only a matter of time before the idea of the product placement hit the web. Last month, Sprint PCS launched a consumer promotion on YouTube where they ask you to make a family or summer video that features their new Sprint Instinct phone, as a product placement. Shill their product in your home vid and you will get $20 for your efforts. Their name of the promotion “Sell Out” would indicate that perhaps this all is just some joke, meant to combat the edge and wittiness of Apple’s marketing, owners of the iPhone, which this phone was made to directly compete with.

The idea of this type of placement has had mixed reactions across the board. To me, there are several key questions that have come up from the consumer and brand perspectives that leave gaping holes in a promotion like this that could ultimately note bode well for Sprint’s credibility within non-traditional online channels. A few of these questions being: Is a measly $20 a strong enough value proposition? Will any viewer of this video see it as a genuine endorsement? Is this just some publicity stunt by agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to try out the social media space and perhaps garner some blogosphere buzz? And perhaps most importantly (and most unanswered) will this really translate to any sales of the Instinct?

With reference to the latter, only time will tell, but as someone who prides themselves on working for a company who builds Word-of-Mouth the genuine way, I feel as though the distinction between a genuine brand reference within a social media channel and one of placement must be made. There is a vast and incomparable difference between Word-of Mouth that is cultivated by simply giving your product to a consumer and allowing them to experience it, engage with it, and then let you know how they feel, the natural, raw, organic way that is based on opening up a dialog versus these paid placement promotions that don’t come from any basis other than people willing to shill if the price is right without any passion or affinity towards the brand.

At Affinitive, we pride ourselves on building programs that result in user generated content as a by product of an engagement strategy, where consumers participate because they are interested in learning about the product or because they already have a passion for or relationship with the brand. We could not have the quality or quantity within our library of content for each program that we have by shelling out a few twenties for some videos.

We love to reward consumers for their willingness to engage and create content, but doing so in a way that is about the consumer and not about the creation of a tool for the brand makes a world of difference.

The engagement model is based on Discovery, Evaluation, Use and Affinity for products and can be used offline and online to measure the interaction that consumers have with brands. It’s based on a study Forrester released back in August:

Executive Summary: The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers’ trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers’ actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.

Their framework outlines four “I” concepts:

• Involvement tracks site visitors, time spent, page views and more (old-school stuff)
• Interaction measures the contributions to blogs, photo and video creation and uploads, and purchases
• Intimacy tries to understand consumer attitudes, perception, and feelings about a brand through surveys or monitoring technology as well as applications providing an interactive environment between brand and consumers
• Influence measures the likelihood that consumers will recommend or advocate products or brands

What’s interesting is that we have been using “engagement” as a primary metric used to measure the success our programs since back in 2003 – while our methodologies have evolved, the principles remain the same. Nice to see our friends at Forrester finally pick up on and validate it (just kidding, we love you Forrester folks! )

via MediaPost

This is very good news for application developers as a whole, but individual developers are primarily interested in their own applications. A critical factor that Compete neglected is the exponential increase in the number of applications from less than 100 at the platform’s launch to almost 17,000 now. The exact historical number of apps over time is difficult to determine, but simply assuming a linear growth rate to 15,000 in January, it’s possible to do a “back of the envelope” calculation of the engagement of the average application.

The average app now receives about 1,000 visits and 100,000 views. While visits/app have declined, there has been a steady increase in views/visit which has offset some of the decline in visits/app and actually slightly increased it in the last few months.

It is intuitive that as the space becomes more crowded, every new application is fighting over an increasingly smaller portion of the pie. The distribution is also likely very skewed with a few huge successes and many apps that hardly anyone uses.

However, the Facebook platform still represents an amazing opportunity to engage a high number of users with relatively low effort (as opposed to developing other interactive media such as web sites.) It just now requires a thorough understanding of the characteristics of the platform and its users.