Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Three Steps to Social Media WIN RT @Econsultancy

Sound Advice !

Amplify’d from econsultancy.com

Three steps to social media win

You’ve formulated a strategy and set up
tools and processes, and you’re proudly showing off your amazing product
with a variety of exciting and innovative campaigns.

Not all social media campaigns will be successful, and the hardest part of any campaign is
actual engagement. Creating long-term relationships with customers,
creating brand evangelists for your business.

WinSo, you’ve set up a Facebook page, you have a fully automated Twitter
account, and your LinkedIn profile is a shining example of professional
wonderment for all to behold.

True interaction is the biggest stumbling block on the path to social
media success, but by instigating the right policy, it’s also one of the
easiest to overcome...

One of the big problems for brands engaging in social media, or indeed any campaign, is the tendency to create campaign silos. To be effective, you need to reconsider your online approach.

For example, you aren’t here to engage existing Facebook users. You are here to make people fans of you and your product, the networks themselves are merely access points to your brand. In order to really succeed, you need to create your own brand community.

No one will sign up to twitter just to follow you, but if they are already there they’ll be excited that you are as well. “Hey – Acme Road Cleaning Machinery is one of my best friends on Facebook, I’m so happy to find they’re on Twitter as well!”

Take time to study any online community. Not the tool itself. As an example, let’s look briefly at Digg.

The tool is the site itself, a basic content sharing set-up. Users submit material they like, and other users up or down vote it accordingly. The most popular content makes Digg’s frontpage and receives a corresponding traffic boost.

The community however, is the interlinked groups of friends on Digg that support and share each other’s content. Your social media strategy should not be to engage these existing communities, but rather to make them part of your own community.

In order to do so, you’ll need to have a full understanding of each point of contact within a network, points that can be identified by following a simple three-step procedure.

Find a bigger audience.

If you post a tweet with a link to your page, or create a #hashtag for an event, you have left a mark. Every time you @reply you are seen by everyone that follows you and the person you are talking to.

The more often you talk to people, the greater your footprint on Twitter. Your search ranking will increase correspondingly, as will your traffic, and the number of users willing to join your community.  Monitor all of these. In order to succeed you need to be constantly working to increase the size of your digital footprint.

Take things further.

Once you have people responding to public conversations, you need to strengthen your relationship. By privately contacting a user (for example by messaging them on Facebook or DM on Twitter), you’ll accomplish two things


  • You’ll be able to work out mutually beneficial collaborations with that user.


  • You’ll make them feel special.

This sounds facetious but is actually an invaluable method of recruiting people to your cause.

Imagine that you are a fifteen year old music fan. Your favourite singer sends you a direct, private email. How special does that make you feel? Not to mention well-disposed towards that person. Use the fan effect.

You’ll also want to attract popular users, who may well ignore direct messages as they’ll be receiving a lot of spam.

Instead follow their digital trail; find their URL from their Twitter page, follow that to their blog and leave a comment there. If there’s an email available then use it.

Make individuals realize that you’ve gone to the effort of researching their background before you contacted them and they’ll be far more likely to listen to you and respond positively.

Study popular sections and past successful campaigns launched on the digital network.

Take time out as often as possible to check items like Twitter’s trending topics. Install an Alexa toolbar or similar so you can keep an eye on hot web topics on a daily basis and start your day by reading the Digg and reddit frontpages.

Study the most popular items and see if you can create or adapt your content to fit those criteria.

Study popular group interests and see what kind of promotions have been popular with those groups in the past. Use aspects of those campaigns as a basis for your own promotions.

Combine these with steps one and two to inform your nascent audience of your campaign.

Laid out this way, you can see that the theory behind creating a community is fairly straightforward.

Study the rules of engagement for each separate network you utilize and engage existing user groups accordingly, and you can develop your own community and give your campaign a massive, lasting boost.

Read more at econsultancy.com
 

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Social Media's Critical Path: Relevance to Resonance to Significance RT @briansolis & @HarvardBiz

I agree with Brian ... "social media's critical path of RRS serves as a blueprint for companies to construct a successful social media legacy."

And you?

Would love to hear your take ... "Engage" ... Join the Conversation

Amplify’d from blogs.hbr.org

9:07 AM Monday July 19, 2010
by Brian Solis  | Comments (13)

If social media warranted a mantra, it would sound something like this, "Always pay it forward and never forget to pay it back...it's how you got here and it defines where you're going."

This intentional form of alternative giving is referred to as "generalized reciprocity" or "generalized exchange." The capital of this social economy is measured in these productive relationships and those relationships are earned through the acts of reciprocity, recognition, respect and benevolence.

So how can businesses, which, one could argue, typically represent a "pay it backward" approach (ie, "pay me for my goods and services"), thrive in this environment? In my experience as a longtime social media observer who advises companies on how to successfully navigate the new media landscape, the key lies in embracing the linear concept of Relevance, Resonance, and Significance. This approach begins with establishing relevance for your brand and messages, which can then achieve resonance, and finally, attain significance and help to build your company's social media legacy and augment your other, more traditional, brand-building efforts.

To understand this model, it's important we define the base unit for social media: the "social object." What are social objects? They take the form of our tweets, posts, updates, videos, pictures, etc. that are introduced into social streams. The social objects serve as the catalyst for conversations and engagement.

Relevance

The first (and perhaps most important) step on this path to social media success is to make sure your social objects are relevant to your constituencies. And how do you do that? Just as in any offline conversation, you have to listen. Listen to the conversations that are already taking place, either directly around your brand, or in other affiliated areas. Pay attention to the nuances of these conversations. Play the role of anthropologist here — what cultural components do you observe in these exchanges? What do you see the participants valuing in these exchanges? Until you understand what kinds of conversations are taking place, who is in them, and what they value, it will be hard for you to attain this first critical step of producing relevant, shareable social objects.

Once you feel you've done a good amount of initial "field studies" and are ready to engage, it's important to join the conversation as a person, not some platitude-spewing automaton. Your community will see right through that. Companies have attempted to humanize their brands and products over the decades through mediums and spokespersons, of course. The difference now is that the act of humanizing a brand through a static avatar, compelling bio, and pat participation in social networks is not enough to earn the attention and trust of desirable consumers, who themselves have become influential in these channels.

The good news? Online behavior already indicates that consumers willfully follow the brands they support and admire. And their responses are consistent when introduced to valuable opportunities that encourage sharing, response, and action. Like email marketing however, every update within social networks either maintains or strengthens the relationship or it breaks it.

Before creating or distributing any social object, ask yourself a few important questions:


  • "What value am I introducing into the mix?"

  • "What makes this object worthy of attention?"

  • "What action do I want to inspire?"

  • "How does this contribute to our standing within each community?"

  • "How can I make this shareable?"

Resonance

Sharing is an important element in any mutually beneficial relationship and it's a critical component of successful social objects. Successful sharing of these objects leads to the second step on the path, Resonance. Resonance is measured through the speed and degree at which social objects change hands. To increase the resonance of your social objects, you first have to insure their relevance to your communities. Naturally, the more relevant and compelling the social object is, the greater the likelihood for triggering reactions across the entire social graph, while also creating valuable touchpoints back to the source.

The popular concept of KISS, which once stood for Keep it Simple, Stupid, can be shifted here to Keep it Significant and Shareable. Social objects rich with recognition and reward resonate with individuals and encourage sharing from person to person. Each exchange increases the lifespan and reach of an object.

Sometimes strong resonance is referred to as something "going viral." It's a perfectly fine term, but not a good motivation for companies. In my experience, the social objects created solely with the goal of "going viral" will consistently underperform and reduce the likelihood for earning relevance and resonance. Those objects incentivized by thoughtfulness, value, and perhaps even empathy, will gain traction and encourage response and sharing, transitioning from relevance to resonance. And, the ingredients for resonance are readily available for those businesses that pay close attention to the recurring themes in customer conversations, actions, and reactions.

Starbucks has done a good job creating resonant social objects by identifying what communities it had in what channels, and crafting targeted, valuable objects for those respective communities. On Facebook, Starbucks saw an opportunity to reinforce service and personalization by sharing customer stories and experiences, providing personal control of loyalty programs, and introducing discounts in exchange for participation. On Twitter, Starbucks took a different approach, combining service, humor, incentives, customer recognition, and exclusive opportunities. Via Twitter's new Promoted Tweets, Starbucks offers free coffee for those who promote reusable tumblers to promote recycling. Promoted Tweets are a great way to see if you've crossed the bridge to resonance. As Twitter COO Dick Costolo recently emphasized, "Promoted Tweets that don't resonate with users will disappear."

Speaking at Mashable's Media Summit in New York, Starbucks's Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo claimed that social media helped propel last year's Free Pastry Day, driving more than one million people locations nationwide.

It is intention and commitment that breathes relevance into social objects. When we intertwine individual focus with purpose, functionality and benefits we inspire the necessary resonance that prolongs the lifespan of an object.

Significance

If we were to break down the concept of RRS into a simple formula, Relevance + Resonance would equate to the overall significance of a brand in these digital communities (R+R=S). Online significance is the earned stature we merit as measured by our actions and words. It is the culmination of reputation, trust, influence, accessibility, value, and capital within each social network. Significance is not measured by size and shape, but instead by affinity and through the collective influence of the actions and reactions that follow every interaction.

Consistently demonstrating relevance over time and continually striving to earn resonance will contribute to the level of significance of any businesses in the long run. In the social economy, businesses that "pay it forward" and actively employ generalized reciprocity as part of baseline engagement and communication strategies increase the value and social capital of the brand in each network. Businesses can essentially mitigate their "pay it backward" approach by investing in the communities where conversations are commodities, but reward, insight and information are rare.

Loyalty, advocacy, and action inspire the online/offline behavior that serves as the hallmark of Significance. As such, social media's critical path of RRS serves as a blueprint for companies to construct a successful social media legacy.

Brian Solis is the Principal of FutureWorks and the author of Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web. He can be found on Twitter at @briansolis.

Read more at blogs.hbr.org
 

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

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You haven’t heard about Amplify yet, have you? RT @TNWsocialmedia & @egoldstein http://bit.ly/b3zS87

Posted via email from maxOz's posterous

You haven’t heard about Amplify yet, have you? RT @TNWsocialmedia & @egoldstein

WELL DONE ERIC ET AL!!!

Amplify’d from thenextweb.com

Amplify might very well become my new number one service for driving conversations.

Back in August 2009, when Facebook acquired FriendFeed, the blogosphere was abuzz. Many technology geeks had been using FriendFeed as a tool to aggregate their social media sources and share with their entourage.

As far as we know, Amplify has not been covered elsewhere, yet.

The primary reason for this: The great team grouped around Amplify’s CEO Eric Goldstein has deliberately chosen to stay beyond the radar for a while and solely focus on product quality. No start-up rallies, no coolest-geek-in-silicon-valley shows.

We think the New York guys made the right decision. Here we are, roughly a year after they started working on the service and what we’ve got is pretty intriguing:

In short, Amplify let’s you clip content from anywhere on the web and start a conversation with a community interested in the topic. While many services already exist, that aggregate whatever you shared elsewhere, Amplify is not an aggregator. In fact it’s the other way around: You start a conversation on Amplify.

And the conversation is really what’s at the heart of the service.

Starting an Amp is a straight-forward experience: Ready-made bookmarklets for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, Android Smartphones, iPhone and the iPad let you clip, share and add your take on specific parts of articles and blogs you read – as opposed to just creating non-speaking short URLs.

The service doesn’t mix in photo albums or social gaming, just because it’s currently en vogue to do so. It doesn’t limit its users to 140 characters, because an engaging dialog might require more than a few words.

I particularly like, that it doesn’t blindly grab everything I post from my Twitter or Facebook account because frankly, the majority of my tweets were never meant to spark a dialog (that’s maybe, why they’ve once been called status updates). Amplify literally puts me back into control.

Once you’ve created content inside Amplify, the service does a perfect job of distributing it out into many services, should you so wish. Amplify currently integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Ping.fm, Tumblr, Posterous, Plurk, Diigo, Friendfeed, Delicious, Clipmarks.com and just today announced additional support for WordPress and Blogger.

Your personal Newsfeed consolidates all conversations going on within your community. And yes, Amplify supports public and private groups, too. A feature, which makes it a perfect tool for collaborating with your team mates or business peers.

If you really haven’t heard about Amplify before, go check it out now! You needn’t go through complex signup, simply use your existing Twitter or Facebook account to start amplifying your ideas.

Read more at thenextweb.com
 

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Untitled

22% of Online Time Spent With Social Media @smexaminer & @AmyPorterfield *http://bit.ly/bSmaBK

Posted via email from maxOz's posterous

Monday, July 5, 2010

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The Last Mile: The Socialization of Business RT @briansolis http://bit.ly/almeEw

Posted via email from maxOz's posterous

Sociofluid