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I will leave the arguments about PIPA and SOPA to others (particularly Tim O’Reilly’s response). What I found particularly interesting in this dispatch on how PIPA met it’s end is how the politicians chose to release their information – directly via social networks. Rubio and Cornyn via Facebook… And Orrin Hatch using Twitter.
PIPA and SOPA Co-Sponsors Abandon Bills.
First, rewards and discounts may already be a part of how customers have been trained to “Like” a page or follow a brand. In other words, ”reasons” as a data point says more about how brands have engaged on Facebook and Twitter and are not an insight into what people actually need/want from a brand. Second, on Facebook, rewards/discounts are often constructed to force a like in return for the offer – which therefore totally skews the figures: ”the reason I followed this brand was because I had to in order to get the 10% off coupon”
Finally, not every brand is in a situation where discounts/promotions make any sense. Consider that discounts and rewards may be unsuitable if you run a luxury brand, or that if your brand promise is based on flawless customer service you may choose to focus on this customer need (or perhaps as a brand your reputation for poor customer service needs to be repaired). If you are trying to build a community of price-insensitive enthusiasts (usually a bit older and well-heeled) then running discounts may appeal to the wrong type of people and will drive down the affinity (and EdgeRank) of your group (I have lived through this scenario personally). The point is – statistics on what fan’s want can be misleading and aren’t the only question to ask when developing an approach on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. In the end you should develop an approach that satisfies identified needs of your community. Nice infographics with catchy data be damned.
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2011/06/29/what-makes-people-follow-brands/?view=socialstudies
This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture; a Field Guide to Unifying your Social Media Presence. You can download the entire book here.
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The Internet has revealed that there is no limit to the number of communities to be found online. For every obscure passion, hobby or interest there is a thriving online community. Yet while communities vary, needs do not. There are a finite number of need states that exist within any community. I will put forward and define five here. Feel free to disagree. Put together your own list, get agreement in your organization and then stick with it. The point is to realize that communities have needs, and organizations should prioritize which of them they will serve. If you look at nearly any successful social media presence out there, it has a clear focus. Whether that is Dell’s discount and promotional use of Twitter, Maria Sharpova’s (@brainpicker) use of Twitter as a source of constant inspiration, Best Buy’s focus on Customer Support using Twitter (Twelpforce) or Red Bull’s use of Facebook for delivering entertainment.
The Five Need States:
To be Inspired, Entertained
At its most basic, people still want to be entertained. There is no end to the possibilities in this arena of creating entertainment or inspirational content that connects to your brand and an audience – from nutrition to farming, to science, green living, technology, personal beauty, social justice, financial well being and on and on. TED is a great example of a community that is brought together around “big ideas” and the future. Philips (disclosure: client) has used Youku (Chinese equivalent of YouTube) to deliver a series where products and storyline are intertwined to provide entertainment value to consumers.
To Earn Status
Recognition and reputation within a community is a great glue to nurture power-users or brand advocates. Much of the “gamification” concepts that are currently in vogue trade off of this notion, where the previously intangible assets of reputation are formalized and expressed through badges (“top poster” etc.) and ranking systems. Making this visible encourages participation by conferring status.
To Learn
Communities are great places to find information you can’t get elsewhere. The value in finding information from social media is that it comes from peers. Exemplars in this category include The Carphone Warehouse, which uses its YouTube channel, “Eye Openers” to deliver tech tips.
To Get Support
Many of those coming to a community are seeking answers to basic questions, “should I buy a BMW?” “is this product reliable?” “how do I fix this problem?” AT&T (disclosure: an FH client) for example has created rich integration with customer support directly from its Facebook page.
To be Rewarded
Especially when a community surrounds a product or product line customers appreciate getting discounts, promotions or being rewarded for their loyalty. Product manufacturers often find this the simplest path to take by providing coupons, sweepstakes and other promotions to their fans. Product brands tend to head down the rewards path. Nokia (disclosure: client) frequently runs interesting programs to reward its users and reinforce perception of the brand as an object of style and fashion.
When a brand launches a “community” without clearly addressing the unique qualities of the community and without understanding need states they will focus on, you can see the trouble right away. What is the consistent source of conversation? Should a community be devoted to advancing thought leadership (to be inspired/entertained), giving discounts on products (to be rewarded) or providing customer care (to get support)?
The decision you reach should take into account both your brand (what you say you stand for) and your reputation (how the public actually sees you). For instance, a company whose brand is built upon innovation might wish to focus on providing inspiring content. If that same brand has a reputation for poor customer service, however, then focusing on support might make more sense. The point here is to balance what say you stand for (your brand) versus how you are actually perceived (your reputation). Choosing your focus does not mean that you should not have an operational capacity to provide customer support. If social media has taught the corporate world anything, it is that the terms of the conversation are no longer under their control. Even if you wish to focus on entertainment/inspiration – be sure to have a means to handle service/support issues.
Image via Wikipedia
While traditional marketing, communications, R&D and the like revolve around the notion of “audiences,” social media is centered on communities. Radically compressed here, the difference is that the value derived from audiences tends to be one-dimensional; their shared interest makes them amenable to messaging, products and services that they consume.
Communities, by contrast generate value by increasing the connectedness of their members with one another.
Communities benefit from network effects, that is the larger they are, the more value they create (This in contrast to audiences, whose size is not a measure of value-creation but of conversion-to-sale potential). Therefore it is in your interest to nurture fewer, larger communities rather than the fragmentation we see being created with the social media mystery house.
This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture; a Field Guide to Unifying your Social Media Presence. You can download the entire book here
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The proliferation of the social media mystery house is fracturing people with potential like interest into dozens of smaller social properties. In order to bring your social media footprint under some semblance of control an organization must share a common definition of what constitutes a community – and more specifically what defines a “unique” community. It is only through acknowledging what is unique that an organization can come to terms with the limits of how many true communities with which they should engage.
At the risk of stating the obvious, a community is not unique by virtue of the fact that you wish to market to them. They are unique through sharing common interests and a desire for connection. This last part, the desire for connection, is crucial because it is what distinguishes an “audience” from a community. Communities form, stick together and generate value based on this desire for connectedness. They often develop shared cultural norms regarding behavior and vernacular that allows them to cohere and identify fellow community members or exclude those that do not belong.
Gaining shared agreement on what constitutes a unique community is crucial because communities benefit from network effects; that is, the larger a community is, the more value that the community provides to its own members.
Finally, getting liftoff for new communities takes more energy than maintaining (or tapping into) an already existing, healthy community. If you can reduce the number of communities you serve to a few, larger entities, the more effective you will be.
It is best to define uniqueness in a workshop setting. This builds agreements within the group and the will to move forward in consolidating like-communities. However, in my experience there are only four possible criteria that can define uniqueness within a community:
1. A common passion: describes a practice that brings out personal devotion – stamp collectors, watch enthusiasts, pre-code cinema buffs and on and on. Common passion can also revolve around the veneration of a product – most often luxury goods. Rolex, BMW, Gucci, and Apple are examples of this category where the product serves as a proxy for our identity. This, however, is the exception. Many companies make the mistake of assuming a natural community revolves around a passion for their product. There may indeed be an audience for your product but not necessarily a community.
2. A shared goal: A shared goal is a powerful stimulus for community. “I am a mother responsible for the well-being of my family.” “I am a bargain shopper and the deals I find are a badge of honor.” The connections between these groups is what creates energy and value.
3. Language: obviously human beings use language to communicate. Our community for bargain hunters in English can’t likely extend to speakers of Urdu. For this, you would need to create a separate community.
4. Locality or culture: Some communities are predicated upon being local. It is interesting to see The Quantified Self, a community for people interested in self-tracking and monitoring of personal behavior [link: http://thequantifiedself.com] gathering in multiple cities across the world. While there is one meta-community online (and in English) there are local chapters that are being self-organized to bring the experience offline and gather a local community of people passionate about self-tracking. Additionally there are times when cultural norms might warrant creating a unique community despite users speaking the same language. One thinks of India where English is nearly universally understood but the sensibilities are quite different. Or of the differences between British cultural norms and Irish or American. The defining factor here of course is what the community needs, not your corporate structure. You don’t necessarily need separate English Facebook profiles, just because you have a presence in the US and in Europe.
The first two (passion and shared goals) govern whether or not a community is justified in being created. The second two (language, locality and culture) describe whether or not the community warrants being duplicated (with tweaks) to serve people with unique attributes that would restrict them from belonging to the original community.
If you take a look at your social media footprint, how many social accounts are truly communities? Which of them deserve to continue? Which should be consolidated?
This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture; a Field Guide to Unifying your Social Media Presence. You can download the entire book here.
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Most organizations have no clear means of communicating what their social media presence actually looks like. Excel sheets with lists of dozens (or hundreds) of sites cannot convey a clear sense of the issue. This is where a simple visualization can be enormously powerful. If there is a single step I would urge you to take, it is to create a visualization of your footprint in social media. In my experience it is the most important tool in building the corporate will to recognize the problem and begin organizing for change. The minimum data set you will need for this exercise:
The goal here is not completeness of data, but collecting enough data to portray an accurate-enough picture of where you stand. Gathering this data can be achieved via a survey (as long as you can get good response rates), persistent phone calls, some investigatory research or an assignment to the agencies that service your social media needs (or some combination of all four of course!). If you find this task daunting, consider this question: how are you ever going to define an effective structure for social media if you can’t accurately define your current state?
Option One: visualize your footprint by platform:
The Footprint Visualization above allow you to take your data and place it in a powerful context for communicating the current state of your social media presence.
The figure above represents a sample visualization of an organization’s Facebook presence. This same visualization will work for each platform (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) that you would like to analyze. Note that you can adjust this visualization in a number of ways to make it the most effective for your purposes.
Here is how to read this particular visualization: each band of concentric circles represents a set range of community members. In this case the outer band represents 1 to 1,000 members, followed by 1,001 to 10,000 and finally, at the center, 10,001 and up. The dot size represents how large the community is relative to the range of the band it resides within. Thus, the largest dot in the outer band expresses the maximum of its band range, 1,000. Yet this largest dot in the outer band (1,000), is still smaller than the smallest dot in the next interior band since that band range begins at 1,001. Below each dot is the name of the audience it is serving. The color of the dots relate to the recency of brand engagement: green means the site has had moderator activity within the past 30 days, orange means no activity in past 60 days, and red means no activity in more than90 days – a dead site. In simplest terms then, a big green dot in the center is good – a large community with active brand engagement. A red dot anywhere signifies no recent moderator activity – customers that have been abandoned by the community manager. At first glance any spread of red dots lets you know that you have a problem with brand engagement or with having sites that have long been abandoned. The names of audiences can be lined up to quickly see where it is that you are fragmenting the same audience into multiple communities.
This exercise can have a powerful impact in bringing people toward a shared point of view on the issues your organization faces. Any spread of red dots creates a conversation: are we abandoning our customers with on/off campaigns? Are we fragmenting the same communities across multiple resource-intensive efforts? Are there big green dots in the center that can represent best-practice or serve as great places for valuable content from other parts of the organization? Are there any patterns to the successful sites? And so on.
Once you have developed a clear visualization, the problems are usually quite apparent. The next step then, is to clarify what constitutes a unique community. That will be in the next post.
This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture. You can download the entire book here.
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The Architect
The earliest surviving written work on the subject of architecture is De Architectura, by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the early 1st century CE. According to Vitruvius, architecture should satisfy three core principles: utilitas, venustas and firmitas, which translate roughly as:
With very slight upgrades to the vernacular, these three core principles seem perfectly suited as operating principles within Social Media Architecture.
Utility – ensuring that your social media presence provides functional value and is designed around customer needs.
Beauty is self-evident; there should be something “remarkable” in how the user experiences the space they find themselves within. Remarkability speaks to the need to transcend functional requirements alone, and consider the emotional and spiritual lives of those that come to inhabit our social media spaces availing them of delight, meaning and connection.
Finally, durability in social media may seem like an oxymoron when designing for such a young medium. Yet durability is about considering how to maintain the principles of utility and beauty over time. This is particularly crucial when attempting to bring some semblance of planning to a decentralized force such as social media, and also moving from on/off communications to an ongoing dialogue.
Taking a cue from Vitruvius then, our working definition for a Social Media Architecture is as follows:
“A structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence”
A proper Social Media Architecture should, at a minimum, answer these questions:
1. What is my current footprint in social media?
If you are going to plan a Social Media Architecture, understanding the current state of affairs is the starting point. A proper footprint that renders your social media presence as a powerful visualization (more on this in detail later) will allow your organization to come to terms with the specific issues that you need to address.
2. What constitutes a unique community?
This section explores what defines a community as unique. Doing so allows an organization to stop seeing social media as a reflection of marketing campaign structure (i.e. for every campaign there is a new Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc.) and to bring like communities together in larger, more powerful interest groups.
3. What community needs will I focus on?
While the potential for distinct communities is nearly endless, this section proposes five need states that are common in any community. In order to be successful your organization should choose the needs on which you will focus (hint – “all five” is not an appropriate answer).
4. What is our link and like structure?
At the heart of a Social Media Architecture is defining how people navigate (link) these various properties to find the community(ies) where they belong (like). Thus a proper link and like structure helps define how people find their way and how valuable content flows through these properties.
5. How do I design for durability?
Durability in social media is about establishing the rules governing creation (what conditions warrant creating a new social media presence?), consolidation (when to bring two like communities together) and closure of social media properties.
An organization’s Social Media Architecture is always personal, tied to its brand identity, responsive to its reputation and bound by its organizational structure. The next posts will go into more detail on each step in that journey.
This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture; a Field Guide to Unifying your Social Media Presence. You can download the entire book here.
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Tucked in the heart of Silicon Valley, amidst the headquarters of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter lies the Winchester Mystery House, a sprawling six- acre monument to it’s owner, Sarah Winchester. As the heir to the Winchester Rifle company’s fortune, Sarah was one of the wealthiest people in 19th century America, with a fortune totaling some 22 million dollars.
She was also haunted.
With the death of her daughter and subsequently, her young husband, William Wirt Winchester, Sarah came to believe that she was cursed by the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifle, the “Gun that Won the West.”
After William’s death, Sarah moved out West to San Jose, then a sleepy valley full of plum and apricot orchards and, in an effort to elude the spirits of the dead, she began building the Winchester house in 1884. For the next thirty years, the remainder of her life, the mansion was continuously built and extended. It is a sprawling mess. There are roughly 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms. he house has 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys, two basements and three elevators. It is rumored that she never spent more than a single, consecutive night in any bedroom, always in motion to avoid her ghosts.
Being built without any master plan, the house is a veritable maze; stairways lead to dead ends, doors open into walls, skylights are placed into floors, a chimney ends inches below the ceiling and so on. The tour covers a full 1.5 kilometers end to end and, as any visitor can tell you, you can’t go there without a guide. You get lost from the moment you enter.
Located at the center of Internet innovation (no irony intended), Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House is an ideal metaphor for corporate use of social technologies. Organizations are frantically building without any master plan. And the bigger the organization, the bigger the problem. The result is a social media mystery house with campaigns leading nowhere, a maze of branded sites with no connection to one another, and abandoned “rooms” haunted by ghosts of customer’s past.
The social media mystery house is the result of two countervailing forces. First, the business pressure to get in the game. Every executive is being asked to define their social media strategy (or just “do something”) and the drumbeat is relentless. Second, creating a social media presence and getting content online requires zero technical proficiency and has none of the gating factors (such as internal IT involvement) that traditionally accompanied marketing and communications efforts. Each product line gets a Facebook page. Each marketing campaign deserves a Twitter account - or a new YouTube channel. Each local office establishes accounts and so on. As a result, an organization’s social media presence becomes a mirror into the structural divisions of the organization itself.
If, like Sarah Winchester, organizations are looking to elude and mystify their customers, they are doing a good job. However, as we move from social media as a novel new means of building relationships, to a mission critical part of the business infrastructure the terms of success will move from isolated pages and campaigns to connectedness and coordination .
If the metaphor for the problem comes from architecture – The Social Media Mystery House – then architecture can also provide a useful metaphor for the solution. That will be the subject of the next post.
I have recently published an eBook on ”social media architecture.” I will be posting much of the content serially on this blog over the coming weeks. However the best way to read it is to download the free book here:
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Take one look at the social media footprint of any large brand and you find dozens of social sites that lie abandoned with no active engagement. Many are redundant, fracturing the same potential audience into separate, so-called “communities.” Further, the majority of these sites are product-centric and isolated, without any formal linkage to a brands’ other sites where customers might find value. And the bigger the organization, the bigger the problem. In one recent project we found our client had close to 150 Facebook pages, over 65 YouTube channels and 100 Twitter feeds. Recent data from the Altimeter Group confirms the issue – with the average organization maintaining 178 social accounts.
This is unsupportable and counterproductive. The solution is a Social Media Architecture, defined as “a structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence.”
The benefits of establishing a Social Media Architecture are clear:
How each organization gets there is a personal journey since, like people, no two organizations are alike. However the questions an organization must ask are very similar:
These are the questions that a Social Media Architecture is designed to answer. The result are fewer social media pages, more clearly defined goals and roles for each platform (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and a structure for maintaining what you have put in place.
I have chosen to tell this story in three parts: The Widow, The Architect and The Engineer. The Widow provides a useful metaphor for seeing the problems inherent in corporate use of social media today. The Architect allows us to take this metaphor and begin seeing a possible solution to these problems. Finally, The Engineer illuminates a dynamic (a law, if you will) that forces us to consider the implications social media has on corporate culture and organizational design.
Next post: The Widow – defining the Social Media Mystery House
This is how I have framed a social business in previous writing. I thought it worth reproducing again here:
The story of the social web is a story about how people, when given the ability to freely communicate – do so in great numbers. And when they do they abide by social rules (be yourself, listen, build relationships through give and take etc.). Put succinctly, Social Tools Follow Social Rules. When people are allowed to exercise their innate drive to be social they expect the companies they interact with (and work for) to get social as well. Thus social rules become the new rules of doing business.
A “Social Business” must master social media and its many technical challenges (how to monitor the online environment, create an always-on publishing model, how to optimize for search and EdgeRank etc.). But more importantly a social business seeks to create a human-scale organization – one with more points of contact with the outside world, one where information flows more freely in more directions, one that builds community, one that inherently cares about those it engages in business with; one that deals honestly and constructively with the world around it because it is part of (and depends upon) the same social group.
A social business builds awesome products, designs awesome services because (1) it actively seeks to know and care about its customers and (2) it relies on customer communities to carry the flag. In a world dominated by networked communications where a laptop or mobile device is a broadcast tower and we are all in constant contact, I believe that businesses will need to adhere to social norms or face being ostracized. This selection pressure is irreversible.
You may have a brilliant marketing campaign but if the product is a loser – you are lost. You may have a brilliant product but if your customer support is appalling, your potential buyers will be forewarned. You might have a fantastic brand proposition but if your products don’t add up to the promise – the proposition is hollow. You may have a content strategy built to drive engagement but if that content doesn’t have a meaningful attachment to your products – all the brand preference in the world won’t amount to sales.
The gap between message (brand and communications) and delivery (product/service quality) is the distance any organization now needs to bridge in their planning efforts.
You begin to do this by:
I am a digital strategist focused on how technology opens new possibilities for social transformation and innovation within business. I am SVP and Director of Digital, Europe for Fleishman Hillard. I blog here, on O’Reilly Radar, and am a contributor for Forbes.com.
