Social media framework for discussion

I’ve had countless conversations with companies and interactive agencies on the significance of social media and the impact it will have on businesses’ marketing, PR and product development activities and processes. From these conversations and from my own experience using, teaching, consulting and working with companies and non-profits on social media initiatives and programs, I’ve developed an approach to frame the conversation, as described below. Please see footnotes for credit to Tara Hunt and Yvette Ferry. [1. Credit is due to Tara Hunt, who seeded my thinking on this, although this post is not necessarily reflective of her views. Please read her excellent blog for more on Social Media Strategy and community management.] [2. Yvette Ferry deserves credit for helping me organize these thoughts and motivating me to put pen to paper. She is a freelance writer you should consider hiring for your projects.]

The Premise for Social Media

An increasing number of companies are now dipping their toes into social media, but many are still unsure what it is and how to implement it for their customer base and profitability.

Social media sets itself apart from previous types of media in terms of the engagement and commitment of people. In mainstream media and advertising, people were relegated to the role of an anonymous and passive audience. This paradigm is no longer working. Today, the community is everything, and more and more companies are recognizing their need to change with the times.

In a social media setting, people become active and interactive by expressing their opinion on what they’re viewing, by having the ability to alter content, and by creating their own content to be viewed by others. The means of production, distribution, and story-telling are multiplied while costs are lowered, granting millions of people the possibility to produce their own individualistic content. The result is a new, more engaged type of user. This engagement is further increased when the user may create an identity and make explicit their social connections. All of this translates into increased efficiency, use and, ultimately, volume of business for appropriately engaged companies.

A Framework for Social Media Integration

Integrating new media into companies’ business practices and culture involves concentrating on three areas: communication, user experience, and product development. In large part, each area depends upon the others for resonance, coherence and reinforcement. You can increase conversion and retention from advertising and marketing (and viral) campaigns by developing and enhancing your communications, website usability, and product features, by selecting and integrating the appropriate social media for your markets and by optimizing the use of these media.

Communication

Effective communication entails developing a holistic marketing approach that works with and not against community-building efforts. Successful online companies are generally those that listen and respond to their customers, a simple premise that can be remarkably difficult to execute. Most companies struggle to listen to and “hear” what their customers are saying, and this unintentional deafness affects their bottom lines. You can create communication strategies for user engagement, as well as internal communication and implementation processes that both reflect and impact community and product development. In addition, you can develop social-network outreach strategies, integrate new media into corporate outreach efforts and optimize search-engine results in order to be more findable by your customer base. This effort involves developing an outreach strategy to identify and establish relationships with your users and also to create spaces in which your communities may interact, using new media.

User Experience

The ways in which your company interacts with your website users is critical to their experience. The cohesiveness of the community you build is largely dependent on the quality of the interaction your users have at your websites, and the community management resources you make available. This means creating websites with social attributes and affordances that encourage users to come back, because they can interact with your company and also with each other. It also implies creating dashboards, business processes and empowering (or hiring) employees to perform community management, ombudsman and relationship-building activities. You can lay the foundation for growth and optimize the results from advertising, direct marketing, and viral campaigns by developing optimized user experiences, using new media and social networks.

Product Development

Product development entails creating services and products based on the use and desires of users and customers. Using specific metrics and baselines for measuring user engagement and growth, you can hear what your customers are saying and assess the ways in which they are using your products, services and websites. You can use data and develop internal business processes to prototype, test and create products and services that are responsive to the stated and implicit needs of your customers and user bases.

Finally, monitoring your products, brands and reputations is important to your own ongoing success and you can track and manage the reputation of companies, brands, and products, using new media.

Overall, you may find that social media is more timely, efficient, and cost-effective than other approaches.

What do you think? How do you approach social media issues with your company or clients? What frameworks do you use for discussion?

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Tagged: communication, framework, marketing, pr, pr 2.0, product development, social media, strategy, user experience

Published:

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 – 11:29 am

Author:

By Alex de Carvalho

Categories:

Social media

Comments:

freerangemom

Keeping the client focusing back on what is the bottom line for their business is the key, I think. Lots of people think social media is a good idea, but it's also an investment in time and money. Keeping clear objectives for what you are trying to accomplish is critical. It's easy to get blown about the social media landscape and suck up a lot of time with no results to your bottom line. Does everyone need a blog or a facebook site? I'd say, no, until you can prove otherwise.

Alex de Carvalho

Right. It's useful to make an "audit" of where the client is, in order to establish a baseline from which to measure quantitative as well qualitative results. If the bottom line is the only concern, though, there's a risk the social media initiatives get axed before they've had a chance to make a difference. Results are hardly ever immediate and programs require continuous tweaking and improvement.

Henriette Weber Andersen

awesome post Alex I love when people put it all into framework - I will definetly be able to work around it at ToothlessTiger =)

Michael Tangeman

Alex, nice post! Especially like your emphasis on "engagement" and "appropriateness" ... appropriate social media strategies for engaging your community.

Social media is certainly not a "hard science" and as it evolves taking the time to find the right social media platform or channel does seem critical to success.

I'm glad somebody with your experience in community building is emphasizing this, inviting discussion as well as providing guideposts to others moving along the same path.

Linda Margaret

There are some really nice tips in your post. I like how you link social media and product development. Many companies do not take full advantage of the wealth of wisdom that their customers have to offer about potential markets--and many customers don't even recognise the wisdom that they offer so brilliantly. It takes uniting both customer and producer online to create some really innovative markets.
I've also blogged about this for my company, which offers some social media consulting to aid in the use of our software.

Ed Toro

This was difficult to read. It lacks the passion you convey when presenting this type of information live. A video or slide show with audio might be better.

Language, how you talk to your customers, is an important part of social media as well.

Maybe a narrative would help. Talk specifically about how your "countless conversations" and experience informed this post. I get the impression that you've had some difficulty selling social media to an "unsure" audience. Isn't that why we need a framework like this? Instead of just saying they're unsure, say, "So I was talking to the public relations guy at a company recently and he asked me, 'So what's up with all this social media stuff.' So I asked him to describe it and he said, 'I don't know, like blogs?'" And then you make up some imaginary exchange between you and him during which you describe your framework.

One of the most salient points I've heard you make was during a recent presentation at UM. You showed a screenshot of an unscrupulous website selling social media tools for ridiculous amounts. "We'll make you a blog for $2000" and stuff like that. That says a lot. It's one thing to be unsure, but quite another to be a naive target for hucksters. The assurance that comes from understanding what social media is gets your foot in the door. The benefits to your bottom-line come soon after.

That slide was memorable. From that specific example I can infer your general point (or imagine a good one and attribute it to you). This post is missing the "$2000 blog".

Alex de Carvalho

Thanks, Linda, I had checked out your site about brand monitoring services and I'd like to talk to you at some point about that.

Michael, Henriette, I've been so busy this past month; thanks for you comments.

Ed, thanks for stopping by and for your comments. This post is not necessarily written for the layman, and is more directed at the interactive agencies with whom I've been having conversations. Many times the focus is on "how do we create viral campaigns", whereas social media is really fundamentally about something else. In my post, I create a framework for discussing how to use social media beyond just the viral campaign.

However, the agency-client relationship is so often about the next "campaign," and agencies feel the pressure to bring back charts that show website visits are spiking up with each campaign. Clients are looking to go beyond advertising, and agencies are trying to crack the code of social media in order to present something new to the client. Because they are in campaign mode, they naturally want to create viral stuff. This is how companies and agencies get targeted by the hucksters you mention. For example, check out this TechCrunch post about questionable techniques for seeding viral campaigns:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret...

Ed Toro

That's an interesting narrative. There's tension between the premise of social media and the agencies who try to profit from it.

It sounds like agencies are interested in one-night stands whereas companies should be more interested in long-term relationships. (A metaphor that shines new light on the word "viral".)

Is the agency focus on virulence hurting the social web?

I would say yes. And your experiences point to storm clouds on the horizon for Web 2.0. Automatic viral campaign blocking will become a feature.

Alex de Carvalho

Ed, remember how we used to get viral emails, with photos and powerpoint attachments of funny stuff? Well, that's mostly gone for me (but my parents still get viral email from their friends), now that I'm on Facebook. Those viral videos now get sent through FunWall and SuperWall. But I think that even there some of the novelty is gone and I'm seeing less volume of viral stuff being sent.

Viral blocking? Interesting. I think that as lifestreaming services like SocialThing, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Tumblr and Facebook's own mini-feed catch on, there's less need to "push" stuff to your friends. Discovery occurs as you login and browse what your friends have been up to. I think this will slow down the viral uptake on most content, while extraordinary viral stuff will always be pushed. So over the long run, lifestreams raise the bar higher for viral content. That, plus the fact that we know how to find viral stuff: just look at what's being most viewed on YouTube and you've quickly caught up about what's popular for your watercooler talks with coworkers.

Michael Tangeman

I would only add to Ed's comments re the agencies "wanting to profit" out of social media, first that "agencies" is a very broad brushtroke ... there are large global agencies and there are three-person boutique agencies, and among them all there are some very savvy social media practitioners and PR bloggers who are sensitive to the need not to do with Web 2.0 what was previously done with Web 1.0.

Secondly, if we can put aside the dirty word "profit" for a moment, it would be helpful to consider that agencies and their clients -- precisely because they function in the world of business in our western market economies (which we may or may not like, but it's what we have to work with!) -- have to be concerned that they get a return for their investment of energy and resources on social media. Ultimately for clients, this means that social media has to contribute to their ability to stay in the black while doing business ... otherwise they would go broke and everyone is out of a job, right? To stay in the black, they have to have transactions with buyers of their goods and services. So, ultimately, they are always concerned that their investment of time and resources in social media helps to generate those transactions. And, the clients' concerns have to be the agency's concerns, as well. It's not all about the transaction ... but a lot of it is!

To further the discussion, I would point you to my friend Joel Postman's blog post on the subject at: http://blogs.eastwick.com/mediaartifacts/2007/0...

Alex de Carvalho

Michael,

Indeed. I think conditions are different enough from the web 1.0 to avoid a similar fate. More people are online; more have broadband; people have climbed up the experience ladder; websites are developed according to standards and best pratices; and technology, hosting, and hiring costs have gone down. Nonetheless, some very big threats remain on the horizon that could invalidate the above (including ending Net Neutrality).

I agree with your points about the agency-client relationship with respect to social media. Agencies need to show results in order to justify budgets. I also agree with Joel's conclusions, as evidenced by his "enlightening moments." I don't dispute any of that, and I think part of the solution is talking about social media without referring to social media. I often use new media, when talking to news organizations and colleges.

That being said, I think part of it is also creating a new framework for discussion, to escape the "campaign" and short-term results mentality. This is a new budget item. Perhaps resources need to be shifted from elsewhere to fill this budget. Perhaps a reorganization needs to happen done, to better align the organization with the new processes inherent to participating in social media. Either way, this is not business as usual, and acting like it is could lead to some unwanted (and sometimes well-publicized) consequences.

Finally, there is some cost in not participating in new media, which could be more clearly described to clients.

alex de carvalho