advergirl

Social Manifesto: What will change in the future

The Death of MySpace
The use of “macro” communities — like Facebook and MySpace — will decrease as adoption of semi-private “gated” communities grows. These smaller communities will allow:

• Deeper sharing
• More relevant conversations
• More personal experiences

Bridging Social and the Store
Mobile technologies will bring social media to physical experiences.

• Scanning any bar code with your cell phone will pull up consumer reviews
• Friends will broadly co-shop using tools as widely varied as wired dressing rooms and interactive mirrors attached to online stores

Polarized, Passionate People
Social media will make it easier and easier for us to self-select into groups filled with “people like us.” Savvy leaders will energize these “microsegments” and create powerful emotional connections.

“Main Street” Customer Service
Consumers will increasingly expect personal, relevant experiences with the brands they choose to do business with. The hallmarks of these experiences will be proactive problem solving and dedicated points of connect — across multiple media.

Social Manifesto: What's changing right now

The single biggest change is the end of the 1% rule. The 1% rule is a widely shared behavioral theory that states that the number of people who really create content on the Web represent only 1% of the people actually viewing the content. It suggests that 99% of Internet users are just reading and watching. But the latest from Forrester Research paints a very different picture of participation:

What else?

Bloggers are beating out friends. New research from Jupiter and BuzzLogic shows that people who read blogs are more likely to take buying advice from their favorite bloggers than from their friends.

Mass adoption of mass communities. Facebook has 120 million active users, adding now at a rate of about 10 million per month. And no longer is it just more of the same — the fastest-growing population is 35 and over.

Social Manifesto: Social Media Etiquette (by Miss Advergirl)

Technology changes our expectations for behavior, our standards for etiquette. Social media is no exception. The things that are important here are vastly different than the broadcast Web. A few live-by rules:

• Be real: Be honest about your identity. Speak with your true voice. Share your personality.


• Be responsive. Engage in conversation. Reply quickly. Answer questions.


• Be a good host. Thank your community. Make people feel comfortable. Translate new terms, insider references, etc.


• Set expectations and deliver on them. Try to be consistent. Focus on a topic. Let people know when things change.


• Be personal, don’t broadcast. Don’t be one sided. Don’t be overly promotional. Don’t repeat, repeat, repeat.


• Listen, then talk. Know your community. Be relevant. Hear other opinions.


• Edit. Don’t overwhelm with frequency. Be brief. Be compelling.

Social Manifesto: How brands SHOULD use social meda

There’s really just one essential thing to keep in mind: It should provide value to the customer and to the brand. Looking at it another way, the circles could read: true to the core of your brand and new or unexpected.

Landing in that happy middle is tough to do. And, it often has more to do with a commitment than a campaign.

Too far to the left/Just information: Most corporate Web sites (after all, they were designed to communicate specific information, not to be part of a social conversation).

Too far to the right/Just buzz: The Office Max elves. Remember those delightful holiday dancers? People made over 100 million of those custom elves, helping Office Max win the distinction of being the #2 holiday greeting site two years in a row.

The problem? It had nothing to do with the brand. Despite the enormous number of impressions, same store sales dropped 7%.

In the happy middle/Real social: Zappos. You can’t talk about social media and not talk about Zappos.

CEO Tony Hiesh has set out to do nothing less than create personal 1:1 relationships between his team and people who use the social Web (and wear shoes). His thesis is that people want to interact with people — not call scripts or advertisements. They want to feel a connection to the places they spend their money and the people who help them do it.

So hundreds of Zappos customer services employees are on Twitter. Some solve real service problems. Some just build relationships. Thirty to forty more are writing blogs. Getting the Zappos culture out to the people who want to connect to it.

Social manifesto - How companies are using social media. Part 4 of 4

#4 Give people something they need

The toughest way to use social media is also one of the best: give people something they need. Fill a gap, provide a bridge, be the tool people can’t live without.

Pros:

• Tends to create significant conversation / word-of-mouth
• Builds brand perceptions / attachments rather than acting as direct marketing

Cons:

• Hard to do. It’s finding the idea that will challenge you
• Tends to be a long-term commitment; not a campaign

Make sure you:

• Test the concept with users of social media before you go live. This is one area where being a little tone deaf to the medium can have very negative results.

An Example: FexEx Launches a Package

FedEx wanted to participate in social media, but needed a relevant way to do it. So, they studied how people use the various tools, looking for a gap.

They found it on Facebook.

One of the limitations of Facebook is that you can’t attach a document or image to a message they way you can in email.

So, FedEx built an application called “Launch a Package” that met that need AND fit their core brand perfectly. The results were immediate: 100,000 installs in 48 hours, 1st branded app to make #1 on Facebook’s Most Active page, and 0ver 50% of users returning more than 10 times after install.

Social manifesto - How companies are using social media. Part 3 of 4

#3 Listen for new insights

Imagine if you could get the very best development or marketing ideas you’d never thought of from people who actually use your product? 

This is the killer “listening” app of the social Web. It works lots of ways:

• Finding conversations that are already happening and pulling ideas from them
• Creating opportunities for vast communities to offer and edit their own ideas 
• Using captive marketing groups to deeply understand human behavior and test new concepts and products.

Pros:

• Connects you to the best ideas inside your own company and in your larger community
• Often very cost effective, leveraging resources you already have

Cons:

• Can generate overwhelming amounts of content
• Can take your brand in inauthentic directions. Need to make sure you balance what the market wants with what’s true to who you are or what your product does

Make sure you:

• Have a very savvy filter for the input. Either by letting the community vote OR by finding someone who can translate ideas into insights

An example: Bell Canada
The CEO of Bell Canada believes in getting feedback from the frontlines.

It started as small meetings, one-on-one interactions. But, that quickly became unscalable, particularly as employees came to the table with more and more ideas.

To bridge the gap, Bell Canada created a suggestion / ideas system internally. Any employee can submit an idea. And, all employees are encouraged to logon and evaluate ideas.

Those that get the best community feedback are taken directly to the executive team.

Social manifesto - How companies are using social media. Part 1 of 4

CNET recently reported that 75% of Fortune 1000 companies will launch a social media campaign this year. They also noted that 50% of those campaigns will fail.

To stay in the right 50% of those campaigns, marketers, customer service advocates and brand czars follow one of four proven models:

#1: Let your customers or employees support each other. Build a central hub where they can ask questions, collect ideas and celebrate the brand.

Pros:

• Very authentic way to use the social Web
• Inexpensive to operate AND can reduce customer service/HR costs 

Cons:

• Takes a lot of work to seed and build
• The crowd CAN turn on you if support or product development are unresponsive

Make sure you:

• Set expectations: What does success look like?

An example: Blue Shirt Nation

Best Buy’s Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt had a fundamentally simple idea: Use technology to enable employees to talk to and help each other.

In their quest they developed Blue Shirt Nation: an internal communications platform that generates thousands of conversations across the company. The result, more information, more issues, more solutions, more ideas, more impact — and a corporate culture that is beginning to appreciate that buy-in brings out the best in employees.

Social manifesto: What is social media?

I’m a member of the generation straddling the eras of imagination and innovation.

A generation that grew up playing outside – racing down gravel roads on banana seated bikes, coveting neighbors' rope swings and making wishes on the fuzzy white remains of dandelion flowers – and transitioned relatively seamlessly into a digital world, reaping the benefits of nearly unlimited access to a vast network of experience and ideas.

We are not native to this new landscape, but we are comfortable navigators in it.

And, honestly, we need to define things. Make the new stuff understandable. Make it fit within concepts that are part of our larger experience.

So, let’s start at the beginning.

What is social media?

As a trend, it’s how people use decentralized, people-based networks to get the things they need from one another rather than from traditional institutions, like business or media.  

What they need could be a sold-out game system, advice on what can be substituted for Canola oil in broccoli slaw, or the latest news on the Obama cabinet. It can all come from social media.

As technology, it’s just the tools and services that power those networks. Generally free- or low-cost platforms that can be customized for each person who uses them. To match the examples above, it could be eBay, wikis or blogs.

How do people use social media?

Seems like a lot, right? I mean you could be customizing a Dogster page to pimp your favorite pooch OR co-building a new Internet browser with a few hundred like minds and still comfortably be in the category of social media.

Even given these vast differences in mission, the ways people use social media fall into three basic categories:

• Create: Someone (My Google is failing me) once famously asked if social media allows more amateurs to act like professionals OR if it really just gives us ACCESS to more true professionals. Whether it’s writing a blog about knitting, creating the next great viral video or building a virtual world, social media meets the human desire to create things – things that will be saved, read and – if we’re lucky – remembered.

• Recommend: Where once we trusted the opinion of 4 out of 5 dentists, today, we want the opinions of their patients. Social media has elevated both the value of individual reviews and recommendations and the ability of networks of people to elevate the very best content or ideas with little more than the vote of their mouse.

• Interact: People to people. Asking questions, hanging out, trading stuff. Interacting. It’s the foundation of social media. And, often, just the best thing about it.

If you have questions about specific tools, leave a note in the comments or visit the Common Craft Show for simple, smart 2-minute tutorials on a lot of the tech behind the networks.

Social manifesto: A new Advergirl series

I invest a lot of time in the offline world talking about social media - ways people use it, the business case for investing in it, how to get started.

I have a strong point of view - parts of which sync with the (new) conventional wisdom and parts of which are more disruptive, or, maybe just future-thinking.

Over the next few weeks, I'll share my social manifesto. From how I define social to how it defines us; from what to try to where we're going.

Watch this space for more. Or, leave a comment if there's something specific you want to talk about.