IBM surveyed 1,000 customers around the world (including 350 executives) to understand what drives consumers to engage with companies via social media channels. The results show there is a major perception gap between what brands think consumers want versus what consumers really want:

• When asked what they do when they interact with businesses or brands via social media, consumers rank “getting discounts or coupons” and “purchasing products and services” at the top two activities
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, executives ranked getting discounts and purchasing products as the two activities consumers were least interested in doing (the exact opposite of consumers’ rankings!)

• Businesses are three times more likely to think consumers are interested in interacting with them to feel part of a community or engaged with their brand
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, those two actives were among the least interesting among consumers. Consumers are seeking value, whether it be information, advice, or a coupon. So while engaging with a company via social media may *result* in connectedness, the wish for intimacy with a brand is not what drives most of them.

The study advises (rightly so) that brands should not look at social media as an isolated program, but needs to be integrated across all other customer-facing initiatives. If you know your customer in one channel, you need to know them in other channels as well.

A successful Social CRM strategy is one that facilitates collaborative experiences and dialogue that customers value. But brands must understand consumers’ motivation for engaging with them.

I refer to these concepts as Social Referrals and Social SEO – two related, but very different concepts that any social marketer needs to understand:

Social Referrals:

Traffic to your site via content and/or links posted on social outposts such as Facebook and Twitter by yourself and others.

Social Referrals are driven by a combination of brand-driven referrals (posting a link to your Twitter/Facebook accounts), amplified sharing (consumer retweets), and via built-in sharing tools tied to content on your site.

For many companies (especially those with constantly fresh/dynamic content such as news sites and blogs), social referral traffic has risen to probably the #2 or #3 source of referral traffic (behind organic search and any online advertising).

Types of Social Referral Content:

• Breaking News (people share this quickly because they want to be the first to ‘break’ this to their friends)
• Viral Content, such as a funny video or photo (sharing this via Facebook/Twitter is considered ok/non-intrusive versus through email)
• Online Coupons/Sales/Offers (what can I say, people love free/discounted stuff!)
• Interesting/Informative Stories/Blog Posts (again, this content acts as social currency for the person sharing it, making them look good/in-the-know – the reality is, many people share this sort of content without even fully-reading the article! I’m as guilty as anyone else)

Social referrals tend to have a very short shelf life, and while true, some of the major search engines are starting to index them, their “relevancy” value in the eyes of search engines diminishes quickly.

Social SEO:

Traffic to your site via search engines, based on consumer-generated content relevancy to keywords.

Social SEO is a side benefit of facilitating user-generated content on your company’s website. For example, consumers aren’t necessarily seeking out information on, let’s say, a bottle of Redwood Creek wine. But, what if the brand has a thriving consumer community of outdoor enthusiasts who love to post/share BBQ and campfire recipes? Over time, the relevancy of that content trickles up the search engine ranks, and eventually can work it’s way to the top! We refer to this valuable, relevant, organic, indexable content as “Google Juice“.

Next, you’ve connected with this consumer based on their interest, while introducing your brand to them in the context of that interest. Not only will they find the user-generated content they discovered as relevant and informative, but they may in turn go on to become a part of your community to connect with other like-minded folks.

(note: Social SEO only truly works if you have also implemented proper search engine optimization techniques into your website, i.e., title, meta tags, <h1>/<h2> html tags, etc.)

Types of Social SEO Content

• User-Submitted reviews, recipes, photos/videos (with proper meta info)
• Forum Posts/Discussions/Knowledge Bases
• Comments
• User Profiles

The value of Social SEO builds over time, since this content acts as a permanent archive/repository. It also creates a “long-tail” of relevant content, as each piece of UGC becomes in itself an SEO landing page. This makes it easy to measure/learn  what types of content drive the most search engine referral traffic.

Measuring the Impact of Social Referrals and Social SEO

If you are not measuring (both quantitatively and qualitatively) the impact of Social Referrals and Social SEO , you are leaving out a large component of the Social ROI equation! Some examples include:

• Short term traffic bumps (Social Referrals), long term traffic growth trend (Social SEO)
• Increase in engagement metrics, time on site, etc.
• Community registrations, email signups, fan/follower acquisition
• Coupon redemption/conversion to sales/transactions
• CRM insights (do social referrals result in larger/more frequent purchases? Are community members who joined via Social SEO more active/engaged than others?)
• Insights into consumer interests/needs and where your brand is resonating/standing out (i.e., wine + campfire/BBQ recipes = brand positioning)
• Customer support savings (consumers solving own problems via locating answers provided by other consumers on your community/knowledge base)

Let’s me finish by asking you a question – how did you come across this blog post? Was it via a link someone tweeted or a Google search result? Drop me a line or leave a comment below if you’d like to discuss/debate further!

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.]

(click the image for an easier-to-read version. Note that this a ‘living’ chart that I have been soliciting feedback/input on – if you have any suggestions/additions/changes, just post a comment below or at the SlideShare page!)

I’ve already noted how social media is not the same as Word of Mouth. And as the social landscape broadens, it’s simply causing more confusion as the term “social” gets slapped on just about anything to make it sound cool and relevant.

Above is a chart I’ve been working on that tries to illustrate the “social” landscape in terms of tactics and goals. You should be able to take any social touchpoint/tactic/business model (brand community, Twitter profile, blogger outreach, CGM sweepstakes) and plot them on this chart.

Essentially, this chart segments the social landscape into four quadrants… as a function of:

• CRM (social CRM or sCRM)
• Marketing (social MARKETING)
• PR (social PR)
• Media (social MEDIA)

The horizontal axis represents “owned” social channels (that you own/control) versus “leased” ones (i.e., paying a company for access to their network of consumers willing to try and/or talk about your product). The “partially owned” area represents social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook where yes, you can establish a brand presence but you don’t own any underlying data and are at the whim of the service provider in terms of metrics or even having your account suspended. The vertical axis represents the depth of engagement from very 1-to-1/personal to impersonal/3rd-person – i.e., “engagement” vs. “reach”:

In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with leveraging the social web to facilitate high-impact, quick hit consumer promotions, but at the end of the day was your goal to “reach” 1,000,000 consumers with a message about your product, or simply “acquire” a 10,000 email addresses into your company’s email database? As the social landscape broadens, marketers need to ensure that their success metrics are in line with the tactics they are leveraging. And that unfortunately can’t happen until you have properly educated the folks holding the pursestrings.

OK, so you’ve identified your relevant social media channels and now have several  outposts within social media.   Your initiatives have proven successful at generating awareness, engaging in conversations and acquiring new relationships.  The next logical step becomes how to evolve and connect these various pieces of your social media puzzle so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of the individual parts.

You may also be interested in creating paths where light touch consumer engagement can migrate into deeper relationships, in an atmosphere that the brand owns and controls.   (See interesting advertising agency executive roundtable discussion on this very topic at Beet.TV)

Integration can have many definitions; and it’s not until you take that deep dive
that you start to achieve the ultimate end goal – improved marketing efficiency.  For example, am I using an integrated approach to social media if I create a brand site that links off to my Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels?  Short answer – no, you’re not.

To illustrate several potential integration opportunities we’ve broken the puzzle into 4 main pieces which move from light to heavy engagement:

• Social Media Channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
• Brand Website or Microsites
• Customer Community or Blog (established in this example as the hub of social )
• CRM Database

Integration Opportunity #1

Customer Community or Blog with CRM – connecting consumer registration data from a customer community with a proprietary CRM database.

Getting Started – Customer data submitted in a community gets securely transferred to brand’s proprietary database.
Up a notch – Consumer behavior and interests within community get transferred to brand’s proprietary database.

Integration Opportunity #2

Customer Community or Blog with Brand Website – passing blog posts or user-generated content to a brand website

Getting Started – Enable one dataset of community content to dynamically flow into one area of brand site.
Up a notch – Enable multiple datasets into multiple areas of brand site.

Integration Opportunity #3

Social Media Channels with Customer Community or Blog (two way) -  passing content dynamically between channels and creating paths for consumers to reach deeper engagement platforms

Getting Started – Utilize xml feeds or social network apis to syndicate content between your platforms.
Up a notch – Utilize Facebook Connect to lower the barrier of engagement.

Unfortunately, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ scenario and every brand will have different business objectives, hopefully working through these opportunities will assist in identifying a logical starting point.  If a brand marketer was able to achieve all three of these opportunities you’d end up with an ecosystem that looks like this:

The roadblocks to achieving an integrated strategy are many; first and foremost it’s difficult because it often involves achieving consensus between parties or corporate functions.   Additional roadblocks could include technology platforms, agency opinions and AOR obligations, and corporate structure.  At the end of the day it takes conviction, hard word and leadership but hey, nobody said innovation and competitive advantage come easy.