According to a much quoted study of reasons why people follow a brand (that is Like or subscribe to a brand on a social media property), it is discounts and promotions (36% on Facebook / 43% on Twitter).   While I do not question the accuracy of the survey, I do think that it should not be used as the primary determinant of how your organization develops its approach to social media.

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.

———–

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.

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.

———————–

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:

• Site URL
• Community audience (who is this site serving?  Give your community the most recognizable name.  If it is focused on a product name it by the product name and so on)
• Platform (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc.)
• Size (followers, subscribers, fans etc.)
• Brand engagement (i.e. when was the last time the community manager was actively engaged with the community through posting of new content or facilitating a dialogue, etc.) This last piece of data is critical to understand if the community is still being served by an active moderator.

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.

Related articles

• The Widow – Coming to terms with the Social Media Mystery House (opposableplanets.com)

This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture.   You can download the entire book here.

————————————————————-
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:

• Utility – it should be useful and function well for the people using it
• Beauty – it should delight people and raise their spirits
• Durability – it should stand up robustly and remain in good condition

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.

————–

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:

———————

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:

• Improve customer experience and gain the benefit of network effects by consolidating your customers into larger, more focused communities

• Increase operational effectiveness by aligning brand initiatives (reduce wasted effort)
• Stabilize brand equity by presenting a unified sense of the brand across social media
• Drive focus towards meeting business objectives

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:

• What is our current footprint in social media?
• Which communities will we serve?
• What needs will we focus on satisfying?
• What is the connection between our various social media properties?
• How do we design for durability?

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

Related articles

• The Widow – Coming to terms with the Social Media Mystery House (opposableplanets.com)
• 3 Ways to Improve Your Company’s Social Media Architecture (mashable.com)

Image via CrunchBase

The media is framing Google Plus as a direct competitor to Facebook – either Google Plus or Facebook.   After a few hours with it – I think this is the wrong framing.

Despite the fact that Google Plus and Facebook share of the same core functions their marketing approach and their native bias (Facebook is driven by social insight, Google engineering ) leads to a totally different pattern of adoption and utility in the market.

In social networks it is all about adoption… and in getting adoption narrow-and-deep beats shallow-and-wide.   Google generally launches shallow-and-wide (to a wide group – even in beta – with no clear audience  in particular) and hopes the resulting PR will provide traction.   Social networks grow best by developing and saturating the niches of actual users  first (epitomized by Facebook starting off at Harvard then moving on to other colleges before expanding wider…).    Actual users provide the PR through direct engagement with the tool.   At bottom this is a marketing insight.   Social tools need saturation within a community (people with shared interests) to really gain such traction.   I don’t see this happening with Google Plus in the broadest market where Facebook dominates.

Second,  most of the tools that achieve critical mass begin by doing one thing well and making it dead-simple.   Think Twitter, Foursquare or Instagram and so on.    For the average user I think Google Plus is over-engineered; designed to force choices that people don’t explicitly make in real life (see Google Wave for previous demonstration of this principle).   One of the front and center features of Google Plus is Circles, which prompts  you to make many decisions about the types of social circles you will have.  This is essentially taking the Facebook lists feature and putting it on steroids.   Lists haven’t taken off on Facebook or Twitter because human beings don’t set up fixed (read explicit) category structures as they move through their social world.   You are my co-worker, then become my acquaintance, then a former-coworker and friend, then back to an acquaintance and then a business contact.   Do I want to keep shifting my lists?  Does it matter?   Putting circles as  a priority in the interface assumes that  privacy and the reification of the delicate divisions in the social graph has an equivalent central place for users.    I think this is a mistake.

Finally, the analysis of Google Plus has largely focused on functionality rather than utility.   Reviewers (generally tech savvy)  do not reflect the use case of normal people who will give Google Plus one minute of their time to provide value before abandoning it and heading back to Facebook (or Twitter for that matter).    Thus most reviews make the  mistake of expressing the possibilities of the tool but not its real potential for adoption.

In the either/or scenario, mass adoption of Google Plus would require an exodus from Facebook.   The switching costs are high indeed and Google Plus doesn’t provide the surplus value to warrant it.     While it makes for good copy  we are not looking at an either/or here.

Time will tell.

Related articles

• Turn Google+ Into Facebook (techcrunch.com)
• What you should Know about Google’s new social network (theinformativereport.com)
• Google Plus as Google’s glue (charman-anderson.com)

It was just before 9AM  GMT +2 on Friday and I was working in a client’s conference room.   I happened to look at my Twitter feed and saw this – “Japanese Tsunami is live on Al Jazeera English”  Japanese tsunami?  I hit the link and there it was – live images of automobiles bobbing like bottle-tops upon the sea – then of an airport being flooded.

Doing the math:  When I clicked on the link at 8:52AM my time – it was 3:52 PM Tokyo time.  The earthquake hit at 2:46PM and the tsunami roughly 15 minutes later.  This means that in less than an hour I was watching live coverage – and not from a television set – but from my  laptop.

There are many milestones in the annals of communications; moments when things seem to irreversibly shift into a new present age.   This was another one for me.   An event thousands of miles away triggers a flurry of people sharing information and within seconds I am watching a live broadcast on my laptop.   This last part is what feels so new.    We have had live video feeds to the Internet for some time but usually they have been planned ahead of time – a simulcast.   But the speed at work here is different;  without any planning we were able to be patched into various sites to watch an event unfold in real-time.   As more connected cameras cover the globe this will become more the norm than the exception.  And as mobility takes over – where most of us carry highly connected portable computers with video-streaming the norm – this information will be brought to you wherever you are – the television being the least convenient option.

Paradoxically the milestone is thrilling while the event itself is tragic.

Related articles

• 5 Raw Videos Of Japanese Earthquake And Tsunami (buzzfeed.com)

Twitter, on occasions, delivers something poetic; extremely brief yet worthy of deep consideration.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

There, summarized in a jaunty, single sentence is a sentiment I have lived by for the past five years.

Culture is the sina qua non of executing strategy.    Without a ready and aligned culture any strategy will languish.  This is even more pronounced in digital where the shift in customer expectations and technological platforms carry an inherent call for organizations to behave differently in order to get it right.

Digital business – whether ecommerce, marketing, communications, HR, innovation or customer service – privileges that which is open, collaborative and connected.

Why?  Because this is the way of networks where connections and sharing create abundance – the more open the network, the more connections, the more value is created.   Think of Amazon’s open platform to empower thousands of merchants, Google’s connecting of every user click to enhance the search experience of the next user,  Wikipedia’s open (but structured) means of enabling anyone to serve as an editor.   These are all old examples but they are still canonical and relevant.

As we humans progress towards having every communication (voice, TV, video, images, text and so on…) intermediated through the Internet those that abide by the rules of the network will thrive disproportionate to those that don’t.   That was one of the big (and still unlearned among large corporates) lessons of Web 2.0.

Yet the critical insight in all of this is that “Digital” is not an economic reconfiguration as much as it is a social reconfiguration. And the characteristics of networks are also cultural traits – open, connected, always-on and so on.  Each one carries a challenge to organizations that first they must address their value systems and beliefs before getting on the bus and winning in the digital economy.

Strategy is hard stuff – but people are the harder stuff and Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast.

Note: I am not clear if @Hasse_Ericksson coined this phrase or is attributing it to @martenmickos in the above citation.

Reading the Fast Company article on how Twitter is being used now as an accurate means of predicting sales or behavior.  In this case movies.  While the application of Twitter as an effective prediction engine is limited at this point – it yet again points to a positive reading of the “law of unintended consquences.” Twitter has proved itself useful in functions that its creators could not have imagined.   From the article:

We’ve all got the vague intuition that Twitter allows you track, in real-time, what people are concerned about or obsessed with. But this is a little freaky: Two researchers at HP Labs, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, have discovered that you can actually use Twitter mentions to predict how well a movie will do in it’s first couple weekends of release. What’s more, the method works even better than the most accurate method currently in use, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX)….

Twitter might be more than just a mirror of mass sentiment–the service might also influence it. In other words, could you actually make a product launch far more successful with a really smart Twitter strategy?