Communities

Rating 13 pragmatic social media marketing approaches

March 9, 2009 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

Last week I talked with another smart company that got sucked into what I call “stupid social media tricks,” those one-off tactics that have a “cool and wow” feel, but don’t actually provide any business value. Sort of like stupid pet tricks on Letterman, fun but not really valuable entertainment in the way say U2 is.

Here are 13 pragmatic social media marketing ideas, and the associated cost and business value of each. I welcome any additional ideas you may have!

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1. Social tagging: add social media bookmarks/functionality on every page of your site. This will increase your keyword relevancy and organic search rankings, reducing paid search costs. Value: High/Cost: Low

2. Social mediafy your campaigns: create content people want to share; tap into right social media rigger points, places and people. This will increase viral effect, getting greater reach for less than paid media, traditional PR. Value: High/Cost: Moderate

3. Badges, widgets, ringtones: make it easy for people to promote your company “wearing” badges, sharing branded music. Value: Low/Cost: Low

4. Embed customer reviews/recommendations in your site. Online reviews are second only to personal advice from a friend as the driver of purchase decisions. So why not make it easy for people to decide when they come by your site? Value: High/Cost: Moderate

5. Create a YouTube channel, strategy: We live in a video world. Marketing needs to, too. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate to High

6. Take blogging to the next level: move from corporate mouthpiece to more of an online media property with high value to customers and prospects. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate

7. Use social sharing sites: Got great content? Share it and tag it where people can find it. Like on Slideshare.net. Value: Low/Cost: Low

Engaging

8. Create a Twitter channel, strategy: There’s a reason why Twitter, which has grown from 4 million 54 million users ini the past year, is disrupting Facebook, email and blogging. Head on over to Pistachio to get all the stats and good business cases on this trend. And then just get on so you experience what it’s all about. Value: Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

9. Create ambassador programs: So many of your employees and customers want to help your company by commenting on blogs, Twittering, facilitating communities. Figure out a way to make it easy for people who love you to share the love. That’s word of mouth at its best and social media makes it easy to activate. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

Insights/Ideas

10. Create a system to monitor social media conversations: Track issues and trends good and bad to be able to react; “see” how campaigns working or not and adjust; get competitive insights, nip problems before they’re big problems; inject Web 2.0 into customer service function. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Low to Moderate

11. Tap into the wisdom of your crowds: hold webstorm brainstorming sessions and online raves to get ideas from employees, customers, partners on how to solve problems small and big, how to do things better, how to stop doing things that aren’t so valuable. You’ll be able to cut costs, prioritize more easily, find new ideas. Plus when people participate and feel heard they’re more likely to share positive word of mouth about your company. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Moderate to High

12. Map your social media ecosystem: use social analytics to understand what’s being talked about in your industry about your company; your social media hot spots; who your advocates and detractors are, and what content your audience likes. Value: Low to Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

13. Bring people together: develop specialized communities for like-minded people to share advice, get help, offer help, learn, solve problems, be entertained, create new business models, or change the world. One of the secrets to community success: tapping into deeply-felt and/or widely-felt issues. Check out The Tribalization of Business site, with results from last year’s study and the 2009 survey to learn more about communities. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

One last note, if you can’t see the value in a new social media idea, talk to a few more people for their take. If it still sounds irrelevant to your business, rely on your good common sense.

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Filed Under: Communities, Conversational Marketing, Innovation, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: Beelinelabs, blogging, blogs, Facebook, Marketingtwo, online communities, social marketing, Social media, social media ecosytems, social sharing, social tagging, tagging, Twitter, YouTube

Social media lessons from union organizers

January 10, 2009 By Lois Kelly 2 Comments

We marketers can learn a lot from union organizers in our quest to get people more involved in our companies, especially as part of the Marketing 2.0 collaboration/participation movement. Here are some organizing lessons that I’ve gleaned from different unions’ “tool kits” — many of which could be useful when developing customer communities or employee social networks.

Organize around issues people really care about: to get people involved you need to identify the things that people really want to change. The more important and emotional the issue, the more likely people will overcome their apathy and get involved to do something about it. Ideal organizing issues are:

Be widely felt

Be deeply felt

Be winnable

Result in real improvement

Give people a sense of their own power

Be easy to understand

Increase the visibility of the organization

Be non-divisive among members

Send a message

Build solidarity

2. To uncover issues, ask good question, focusing on how people feel: Sometimes it’s easy to know what to organize around. Usually, it takes asking good questions to surface issues and find out if others feel the same way. The more comfortable you make people feel about expressing anger or frustration, the more people will tell you. Questions include:

What things make it hard doing this job?

What would you change if you could?

Do you think other people feel that way?

Do you think people would be willing to try to do something to change that?

3. Overcome obstacles to getting people involved. Most people prefer to sit on the sidelines because they don’t think there’s value in getting involved or they fear getting involved. Union organizers overcome these obstacles with a techniques called Anger, Hope, Action:

Anger overcomes fear: encouraging people to be angry about their own injustice helps them overcome their fears.

Hope overcomes apathy: anger without hope creates frustration. Educating members is the way to create hope — sharing how things are done in other organizations shows that the goals are realistic.

Action creates change: To get people to act, you have to show them how their action will change what they’re looking to change. Then, give people things to do as part of the cause so that they feel a sense of ownership. Start by asking people to contribute in small ways and then ask them to do more as their confidence builds.

4. Keep people motivated and involved:

Inclusion: give people a sense of being part of what’s going on

Control: allow people to control the pace of their invovlement and have influence over decision makeing

Appreciation: recognize people for their efforts

While the anger, outrage and injustice strategy of unions may have little relevance to business communities, having a purpose that people feel strongly about certainly does. Why else get involved?

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Filed Under: Activating change, Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: Beelinelabs, Communities, Marketingtwo, Social media, social media participation

10 ideas for creating community guidelines

November 30, 2008 By Lois Kelly 4 Comments

Setting up clear, concrete guidelines for online communities is crucial. Doing so:

Helps members understand community expectations and culture
Makes it easier for your team — and other community members– to manage the community
Helps get legal buy-in as together you’re addressing many known risk areas

In his book Managing Online Forums, Patrick O’Keefe provides thoughtful, detailed recommendations on developing and enforcing guidelines based on running several thriving communities. Here are just 10 of his many guidelines; check out his book for more, as well as real world examples and nitty gritty advice on running a communities.

10 community guideline ideas

Advertising and spamming: beware the many, many sneaky advertising methods people try to use. Patrick provides several examples, which are also helpful to bloggers trying to understand whether some comments are legit or a backdoor spam strategy.
Copyright: guidelines should help members understand what they can and can’t do within copyright and intellectual property laws.
Personal, real-life information and privacy: don’t allow home addresses and phone numbers.
Vulgar language and offensive material: Not allowed.
Freedom of speech: Communities are intended to be places where people with like interests can share ideas, debate views and give and get help. But they;re not places where anyone can say anything. “You have no obligation to allow people to say whatever they want, whenever they want. It is your site and it is your responsibility to set the guidelines that all users must adhere to.”
Respect: Inflammatory or disrespectful comments not allowed, including slanderous information. Related, “Do not allow your site to become a soapbox for someone you believe has some sort of agenda.”
Deleting accounts and/or posts in the future: put guidelines in place that will respect someone’s request to have his/her posts removed, without removing valuable content from the community. (Patrick’s advice: change user name to something non-descriptive like username85673.
Hotlinking: No posting and linking to images, videos, fies on servers that you don’t have permsission to link to as the person paying for the server is paying for this. “The result is badnwidth theft.”
Caution on advice: “Your policies should make it clear that any advice given on your site is for informational and educational purposes only, that it is not verified by you or anyone else for accuracy and as such, it can be inaccurate.” He notes this is especially important if the community conversations get into highly sensitive — and often regulated — issues like healthcare and financial advice.
Who’s the boss? Make it clear who has the final say on enforcing guidelines, and be clear about who people should contact with a complaint and how the complaint should be lodged, e.g., via private email vs. on the community site.

Note: Chapter 6 of Patrick’s book, “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos,” addresses issues that every corporate legal eagle worries about when it comes to social media and that not enough marketers think through before launching. Showing legal that you have anticipated these types of possibilities and have detailed plans in place for dealing with them will help you more quickly overcome legal’s concerns and get them working with you vs. finding reasons why NOT to have a community.

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Filed Under: Books, Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: " social media legal issues, "Managing Online Forums, Beelinelabs, managing online communities, Patrick O'Keefe, social media guidelines

Management 2.0: Nurses unionize "to be heard"

October 26, 2008 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

The greatest impact of Web 2.0 on our culture is that people expect to have a voice and input into company and organizational decisions. Sure, this has always been true to some extent, but today people are taking action when they feel that management is ignoring them. (Note to executives: while you may feel like you are communicating, that’s different from making people feel heard. How they feel is often more important than all the usual rational communications strategies.)

One example: last week nurses at a local hospital — Kent Hospital in Rhode Island — voted 290 to 214 to join the United Nurses and Allied Professionals union. The reason? The nurses said that didn’t feel like they were being heard.

In a story in the Providence Journal psychiatric nurse Debbie Almeida said, “Over the years the whole climate has changed here. We felt we no longer had a voice in things.”

Nurse Rose Desnoyers added, “The reason I wanted to see a union here was basically for respect. Money is not the issue.”

With the community and social networking tools available, it’s much easier to open up discussions and invite employees to engage in a genuine way and in a large scale. The only obstacle is management mindset.

We’re working on one project where the senior management initially poo-poo’d our recommendation to set up an online community for employees to talk about the issues. “They hardly use email.” “They won’t participate.” ” What if someone starts trouble.” “This is more of a working class crowd, they’re not into that Web stuff.”

Instead of taking no, we created a private community using Ning, put up some discussion forums, showed it to management and suggested we invite employees in and try it. Worse case, we close it. The response from employees has been quite good. People are offering insightful ideas in the community. Others are talking to their friends at work not in the community and telling them that management is really trying and the community shows it.

Our only obstacle: the company’s corporate parent blocked employees from being able to access the community at work. So people have to access the community from home and use their personal emails to register. And, due to hourly employee regulations, we have had to explain to folks that the community is optional. If they felt it was mandatory for their jobs and could only access it at home, the lawyers felt that we would be liable; employees might think, they warned, that looking at the community at home was part of work and demand to be paid overtime.

Fortunately, the CEO we’re working with is a risk-taker, squarely focused on his employees and his customers. The lawyers and corporate naysayers are secondary.

We’re working with another client who has yet to embrace social media but whose employees are also being courted by unions. This company’s lawyers, too, block employees from being able to access the corporate intranet at home due to the same fears about hourly workers. And senior management and the lawyers worry about what might happen if they open up discussions and forums. What if someone starts trouble?

Seems to me that be trouble is already in the works. The risk of not opening up and really listening to employees — and acting on their often very good suggestions or helping them understand why their thoughtful ideas can’t be implemented — is unionization. And with unionization comes management issues of another magnitude.

In reading about the nurses at Kent Hospital it’s clear to me that they love their jobs and have a passion about the hospital. Same with our clients’ employees. Most people want to work for successful organizations and most willing to share ideas have good ideas.

So why not learn how to really listen so that people are heard?

PS — If anyone has examples of how to get around legal issues, and open up employee communities and corporate Intranets so people can access from home, please share!

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Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Communities, Leadership Tagged With: Beelinelabs, employee communications, Listening, Mangement 2.0, unions

Savvy Auntie, First Wives World communities get it

September 9, 2008 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

New online communities SavvyAuntie and FirstWivesWorld are good examples of successful communities. Each:

Focuses on a niche group of people who share a passionate bond: women who love children and relish their roles as “aunties,” and women who have gone through a divorce or are in the throes.
Allows people to connect with other people and ask questions, share stories, and just be social.
Provides lots of helpful advice, resources, and experts on topics related to the community’s theme.
Adds some fun: both have entertainment sections and some celebrity angle. (Did you know Hulk Hogan and his ex have just added a 5th team of lawyers to their divorce proceedings?)
Has a fairly simple technology platform with an easy-to-use interface and lots of easy ways for people to get involved, from creating a profile and uploading photos to starting a blog or creating a group. Then again, just reading these rich, content-filled would be fulfilling for many.

In any cateogry there are always niches of opportunity. Many businesses are approaching communities too broadly, trying to serve everyone about everything, and ending up with rather bland communities that have no real community. Auntie and First Wives show the power of going narrow.

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Filed Under: Communities, Smart company stories Tagged With: Beelinelabs, First Wives World, online communities, Savvy Auntie

Communities and market segmentation

August 19, 2008 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

Understanding segmentation as it relates to online communities can help us gain insights from our most loyal users and influencers; prioritize community features, content and functionality; and possibly create ways to help customers become more loyal.

Back in 1999 Professor Rob Kozinets published a much-cited academic paper, “E-Tribalized Marketing?” The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption,” that provides some insights that are highly relevant today.

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Community involvement: two factors

Two non-independent factor influence how involved a person will become with a community, says Rob in the article.

1. The more central the consumption activity is to the person’s psychological self-concept, the more likely the person will pursue and value membership in the community.

2. The intensity of the social relationships the person has in the community.

Segmenting four types of community members

Community members can then be segmented into four types; two of which matter most to marketers, believes Rob.

1. Tourists: lack strong social ties, maintain only a superficial or passing interest in the consumption activity.

2. Minglers: have strong social ties, but aren’t all that interested in the consumption activity.

3. Devotees: maintain strong interest for consumption activity, but have few social attachments to the group .

4. Insiders: have strong social ties and strong personal ties to consumption activity.

Implications to marketers

Insights: Primary research shows that heavy users and loyal customers are represented in communities by the insiders and devotees. Invaluable business insights from these influencers can be gained from observing community.

Brand relationship development: Tourists and minglers can sometimes be “upgraded” to insiders and devotees as they become involved in the community. The community itself may propagate the development of loyalty and heavy usage, says Rob, by culturally and socially reinforcing consumption. To do this it’s important that the visitor find value and spend time in the community to see ways the consumption activity may be more relevant than she or he had realized.

Different content, activities: Different community member segments want to get different things from the community, which helps guide the community management strategy. In Rob’s view tourists and devotees want to get factual information from the community, while minglers and insiders tend to be much more social and relational, answering people’s questions, adding content. Since insiders are the most loyal customers, it’s important that the community appeal to what they want in information and how they want to socialize in the community.

Do you need a community? This point is mine, not Rob’s. If the business consumption activity is not central to your customers’ “psychological self concept,” do you need a community? To what percentage of your customers is the consumption activity central — and is that percentage large enough to justify the investment required in managing a community? I’ve been collecting communities that are largely abandoned, despite being beautifully designed with great functionality. The reason? People just aren’t into the issue/topic/business category all that much — it’s not central to who they are or what they need to be successful in their job. Sometimes all that’s needed is a souped-up Web site where people can get and share more kinds of information more easily.

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Filed Under: Communities, Social media strategy Tagged With: Beeline Labs, online communties, Rob Kozinets, social media segmentation

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