Social Media Lifecycle Framework
Many of the clients I’ve been consulting for have interesting notions about social media. One common idea is that social media is an ongoing effort and doesn’t conform to normal lifecycle rules.
The Social Media Lifecycle Framework
I would agree that social media initiatives are different than many other campaign models, but I do think most initiatives deliver a higher ROI when the following lifecycle framework is considered & followed.
Conversion Funnel
Monologue: A broadcast form of communication that works well for creating initial awareness. Before broadcasting your message, be sure to craft your message by listening to what people are already saying about you.
Conversion A: Converts users who have simply heard of you, to users who want to have a conversation with you.
Conversation: A participatory form of communication that works well after you’ve created a community. Not everyone in you’re community will feel comfortable engaging in conversations, which means your community needs to be large enough to support multiple levels of participation.
Conversion B: Converts users who are participating in conversations, to those who will take your message & use it to influence others.
Influence: An extended form of conversation that works well when influential community members believe your message. Influential communication is effective at achieving perfect conversion.
Perfect Conversion
Conversion C: Fulfilment of the end objective. This is where the user is converted to customer.
Advocacy: Customer advocacy may occur if users expectations have consistently been met or exceeded. This refers to the entire customer experience; not just through social media. At this stage, customer advocacy can occur at any time.
Amplification Funnel
Customer Service/ Support: A system that ensures customers are satisfied with their purchase.
Conversion D: Converts users who are satisfied, to users who are engaged with your comity & are actively seeking further engagement.
Community Engagement: A system that allows users to interact & share information about being your customer. (i.e. A Burger King campaign connecting personal trainers with Burger King customers. This type of campaign could be used to connect frequent customers with the resources necessary to ‘burn-off’ their favourite Burger King meals.)
Conversion E: Converts engaged community members to participants within the conversion funnel of a product extension.
Extensions: This can be considered the beginning of a new conversion funnel or the end of the current amplification funnel. This is where customers learn about something else you sell. (i.e. A digital agency that also offers search strategy.)
You can now begin the life cycle again.
In an unrelated note, I’ve been engaged to write a handbook on various social media & enterprise 2.0 topics. I would like to encourage anyone who reads my blog to submit topic suggestions. I’m totally open to all ideas & if a submitted topic makes it to the book, I’ll acknowledge your contribution within & will send you a complimentary copy. You can send ideas to me via Twitter (@thejordanrules) - or via email (thejordanrules@gmail.com).
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
Does Social Media Make Sense for Me?
Jumping into social media marketing before you’re ready can be devastating to your business. The argument that people are already talking about you through social media channels has been used to push brands into social media marketing before they’re ready.
It’s a myth that you’d be better off participating than not participating. The voice you create for your brand can have echoing repercussions.
There are 3 questions you need to ask yourself before you ‘take-the-plunge’ into social media marketing. If you can’t answer yes to these 3 questions you need to do some work before participating & engaging with your audience through social media channels.1. Do you have social media balance?
2. Do you have the right corporate structure?
3. Does your T.V. know what your computer’s doing?
Question #1: Do you have social media balance?
This refers to your understanding of the social media space, and what kind of goals you need to define. There are 4 things participating in social media will affect:
Brand Awareness
Even if you’re brand is ubiquitous and everyone’s aware of it; social media connects a human face with your brand. Take Nike, for example; visiting their Facebook page, I was able to find out which of my friends like their brand. This brings a new level of brand-awareness into play.
Of course, the traditional level of brand awareness should be a consideration too. With video’s like the Twilight trailer receiving an estimated 300 Million collective views, social media is quickly becoming a mass awareness tool.
Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will affect awareness. If you’re social media goals don’t define how you want brand awareness to be affected; you do not have social media balance.
Brand Image
Brands can be very effectively defined using social media, but even if you’re not defining your brand using social media, you need to define how you want your brand to be perceived within the channels your participating in.
Social media allows users to connect with your brand in a more intimate way than through traditional channels. This brand intimacy can be a double-edged sword: Wielded properly it can create brand advocates who will evangelize your brand identity & protect you from social media trolls. Wielded incorrectly can create brand dissidents who will actively damage your brand image & encourage users to find alternatives to your brand. These two extremes have always existed; but have never been more prominent than with the rise of social media.
Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will affect brand image. If you’re social media goals don’t define the brand image you want to create & support, you do not have social media balance.
Conversion
Getting users to do things has long been the goal of online marketing initiatives. Social media marketing will affect your conversion funnel. Because conversion goals can range from awareness, to repeat purchase it’s important to note that every level of your conversion funnel can be affected by social media marketing.
A Facebook ecommerce solution can convert engaged users to actual customers. A Facebook Connect-enabled website can convert brand-aware users to engaged users who you’re able to communicate with in the future. A well curated Twitter stream can convert a dissatisfied customer to a satisfied one.
Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will affect your conversion rate. Conversion goals are important to set on a channel-by-channel basis; in many cases several conversion goals will be set for a specific channel. If you’re social media goals don’t define these goals, you don’t have social media balance.
eCRM
Slightly different than the other 3 elements, eCRM is affected by social media marketing by changing the users expectations of the brand/customer relationship. Social media gives brands the ability to collect very insightful user information. If that information isn’t properly collected, analyzed, and used to influence ongoing marketing initiatives users will consider that brand a poor listener.
Take Away: Participating in social media marketing will give you eCRM data. If you will not collect this information, analyze it, and use it to influence marketing campaigns, you do not have social media balance.
Question #2: Do you have the right corporate structure?
Even if you have social media balance, you might be setting yourself up for failure by not having the proper corporate structure. Many brands have delegated community management to specialists. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there should be a response assessment & escalation procedure. I’m currently adapting a process brand call-centers use for contact assessment & escalation to be used for social media response assessment.
The important thing to note, is that a community manager with properly established goals can be a valuable addition to your corporate structure, but social media participation & monitoring should be infused throughout the organization. It should be noted that different members of your team will have different levels of responsibility for participation & monitoring - if a team member has 0% involvement with social media marketing initiatives (and 0% of his time is allocated to participation & monitoring) you need to consider defining a system where participation & monitoring is available to those employees who want it.
Note: In addition to having an enabled & empowered corporate team, you need to ensure the right tools are available. Tools like Tweetdeck, CoTweet, Sysomos, & Radian 6 can help enable your teams to get the most out of your social media marketing activities.
Question #3: Does your T.V. know what your computer’s doing?
Many brands have a ‘zone’ strategy, where brand experts divide duties. The might be one person in charge of marketing communications, one person in charge of business communications, and one person in charge of in-store; authority over these areas may even be further delegated to sub-brand specific, medium-specific, or campaign-specific managers.
If these zones don’t have a good collaborative process; it’s probably not a good idea to throw social media into the mix. As outlined in question #1, social media will affect 4 key areas of your business & should be integrated across the entire business. If you’re marketing, business, and in-store communications are being created for what-works-best; you might be missing out on synergies across communication channels. (i.e. Providing a Facebook url as a tag line at the end of a broadcast campaign might seem like it works best for both the broadcast & social media campaigns; but understanding that users often use the search box when looking for things on Facebook might suggest that you ask users to search for a keyword instead. The extra time it takes for users to listen to this message might not make the most out of the broadcast time, but might provide a better net conversion rate, providing a higher ROI across media.)
I understand that if a brand never participates in social media, it won’t ever be able to perfect things. There is a theory that it might be better to jump in and make corrections as needed. If you’re transparent about the fact you’re learning, you’re audience might respect that. — From a cognitive perspective, it makes sense. People generally understand the learning process and can be gracious about certain mistakes. I’m not suggesting that brands avoid social media in fear of failure; but know the game before you start making big bets.
I appreciate all comments & questions. I encourage you to respond to this post here, or on Twitter to @thejordanrules.
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
Reputation & Social Media: Understanding the Fundamentals
Reputation is an element of what makes up a brand & can help define a brand within a particular medium.
Branding - Primarily about what you say. The message you communicate to your audience.
Reputation - Primarily about what you do. The actions you take and the activities you participate in determine your reputation.
4 elements that contribute to reputation 
Identity: The way the brand wishes to be seen. AKA - Brand Identity
Image: The way the brand is perceived. AKA - Brand Image
Performance: Track-record of interactions between the brand and it’s audience.
Reputation: The evaluation of Id & Im with relation to P. Meaning, if identity & image align with a brands performance; it’ll develop a positive reputation. (or at least the reputation it wants)The better you define these elements & the clearer you communicate them to your audience; the greater your chances of achieving your ideal reputation.
Reputation Management via Social Media
Responding
There are lots of really GREAT response assessment guidelines specifically designed to help manage reputation though social media. However, many of these guidelines don’t consider which reputation element your responding to.
Although timeliness of response is an important element; the content of the response is generally more important.
Finding the Conversation
There are several great tools available to track conversations & locate conversations that are taking place outside of the channels your currently participating in.
Keeping Track of Your Conversations
CoTweet
Tweet Deck
Yammer
RSS
CoComment
Finding Other Conversations
BackType
One Riot
Whos Talkin
The implications of social media on brand reputation are substantial. It’s important that brands actively participate in reputation management through social media channels. The act of not managing your reputation within the social media universe might not result in any negative conversations; but won’t help enforce your reputation.
Although lack of participation within social media probably won’t ‘break’ your reputation; it does represent a missed opportunity to substantially improve your reputation. Creating & maintaining a brands ideal reputation through traditional broadcast/ mass media marketing can be effective, but costly.
How do you manage your reputation? What tools do you use?
Feel free to answer these questions, post comments, or ask questions here or on Twitter. Make sure to @ me when requesting a response - @thejordanrules. Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
Data Ownership - the bullet that can kill a social media strategy
What’s the big deal with companies mandating data ownership for online marketing campaigns? I understand the importance of CRM, and understand that owning data makes ongoing communication easier; but is there really any good reason to alienate potential customers? The way I see it; any marketing campaign that mandates data ownership needs to reevaluate its conversion funnel.
Example: Scenario:
Nike runs a campaign asking for users to upload photo’s of themselves wearing a pair of Nikes. The business idea is to show versatility of different Nike shoes, and show the variety of Nike shoe owners. Additionally, the users tag their photos indicating the specific model of Nike that their wearing; this allows shoe enthusiasts to communicate on care requirements, purchasing locations etc.
Nike creates an online community and requires users register to their community prior to uploading their photos or being able to communicate with other users.
Problem:
Nike wants to own the user data of all users who participate in their campaign.
Solution:
Reexamine where the conversion funnel begins. Nike could give users multiple ways to engage with the campaign without having to register. It would increase participation, and could act as the beginning of the purchasing funnel. Perhaps instead of asking for a full registration, you allow users to interact via Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or simply by entering an email address. If you have a presence on all of those social media channels, you have the opportunity to communicate with those users within a channel they’re familiar with.
2 main goals:
1. To convert to customer (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Trial)
Let’s say at the top of the conversion funnel, we require users to register. This will make it easier for us to effectively communicate with them and convert them from awareness down to trial.
However, let’s say we don’t require registration at the top of the conversion funnel. We’ll end up reaching and being able to communicate with more users than if we required registration. However, it might make personalized messaging a bit harder. This could cause lower ratio of conversions from awareness down to trial. That being said, in many cases both approaches will end up with the same NET conversions; but not requiring registration will allow us to continue communication with those users who didn’t convert. This is a benefit for 2 reasons: 1, those users might convert given enough time; and 2, those users could influence other users to convert. (i.e. I might never buy Nike shoes, but my participation in their campaign might get me to refer a friend who does buy.)
2. To increase customer spending (Recognition, Preference, Loyalty, Advocacy)
Here, we’d like to increase a users brand preference to stimulate spending. A great way to do this is by engaging with users by providing value. Let’s say we offer a series of how-to video’s to our customers, but only offer them on our own website. This is a great way to track who’s interested in them & can be tied into an eCRM program to help create even more valuable videos in the future. In fact, we can enhance our communications plan with this data and offer alerts to users who might be interested in new how-to videos. This is a great way to build brand loyalty & eventually create brand advocates.
However, lets say we offer our videos on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and other video sharing sites in addition to our own site. This could make things trickier for creating a great eCRM program, but would allow users to view and share our videos in an environment they’re already using. This has 2 benefits: 1, users have access to the communities they’ve built and belong to. This would allow our users to instantly share videos with their friends. 2, bringing value to the user (rather than having the user come to you for value) generally gets more attention. In the end the idea is to increase brand preference; making things easy for the user is a great way to achieve that goal.
The Analogy:
This is a Sheep
Lets say you have a herd of sheep you want to move to the ‘X’
One way to do this is to put some sheep food around the ‘X’ - (Some brands still have trouble figuring out what type of sheep food attracts their type of sheep)
Is it better to leave the path to the ‘X’ open?
or is it better to put a fence in the path of the sheep?
Do you really only want sheep that have the desire to jump the fence?
Let me know your thoughts @thejordanrules
B4JS3GYWHTNM
T7P5A6TKHYSV
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
Is your website costing you money?
A website can cost its owner money in two ways: It can cause you to actually spend more money to maintain, or it can limit the amount of potential revenue your company can make.
Realizing your site is costing you money is the first step in putting an end to it. Coming to this realization can be a difficult process; it takes reexamining fundamental, and often long-held, beliefs about your company, brand, site, audience, and technology. The English author Samuel Johnson said it best: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken”; it’s important not to allow yourself to be chained to beliefs, technologies, or memes. Reexamination is key to innovation.
So, I’ve given you two ways in which your website might be costing you money; let me break these down further:
It causes you to spend more money
Time suck: Time suck sites require their owners to spend more time than necessary to take care of them. Sites that require you to make weekly updates or don’t make use of scheduled content can be an indication of time suck sites.
Solutions:
- CMS scheduling software
- User generated content publishing
- Aggregated content from social media
Inconvenient: The inconvenient site requires special passwords or limits access based on location. The inconvenient site requires its owner to spend more time, or spend time in a prescribed manner. It also costs its owner money by putting constraints on its users.
Solutions:
- Open ID (RPX NOW)
- VPN Access
- Cloud-based services
Wrong Technology: The site built on wrong technology causes most of the upfront over-spending. Building systems from scratch can be good for the developer, but bad for the owner; often, proprietary solutions are hard to update and cost a lot upfront. Additionally, using wrong technology can cause a site to become a time suck site down the road; requiring its owner to compensate for distributed content systems, CMS rules, and social networking tools.
Solutions:
- Open Source Tools - wordpress, posterous, twitter, Dot Net Nuke
- Google Checkout
- Google Analytics
It limits your revenue
Hard to use: Usability is considered by many to deliver the highest ROI on existing sites. Ensuring a site is easy to use can make the difference between being an industry leader and scraping the bottom of the barrel. Usability & user experience should extend past the borders of your site into all digital touchpoints.
Solutions:
- Tree Testing
- Card Sorts
- Persona Development
- Usability Testing
- Ethnographic Studies
- User Flows
Hard to find: You can have the easiest to use site, but if your users can’t find it you’re in trouble. Not ranking in search engines is one of the biggest indications you need to reexamine how people are finding your site.
Solutions:
- SEO
- SEM
- Media Buy
- Social Media Marketing
Irrelevant: Seemingly obvious, sites that are irrelevant should be discontinued. The idea of keeping sites around because they represent brand equity is a great argument, but when those sites damage the brand, confuse the user, or cannibalize search terms it’s no longer worth keeping alive.
Solutions:
- Create a communications plan that updates stale content on a regular basis
- Integrate with social media
- Create a platform for users to communicate with each other
Disassociated: Disassociated websites often happen when branding agencies and digital agencies are disconnected. Disassociated branding, messaging, or offerings can cause confusion, frustration, or dissidence.
Solutions:
- Encourage user feedback and provide multiple channels to receive feedback
- Schedule quarterly reviews of campaigns across all mediums and look for inconsistencies
I’ve audited 74 sites over the past 3 months, and 67 of them are costing their owners money in obvious ways. All of these sites I was given unrestricted access to their metrics, administration systems, and database configurations. I was also provided with information on social media management processes and guidelines. It’s unfortunate that approximately 90% of the site’s I gained access to are costing their owners serious amounts of money; but I think it shows progress that they are willing to reexamine their sites. The fact that they’re open to being audited makes me think “the chains of habit” aren’t yet too strong to be broken.
Are you open to making more money?
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
How to maximize revenue through social media
Building legitimate social equity requires slowly shifting the perceptions of others. Building social equity, and understanding how to use it, is fundamental to maximizing revenue through social media.
Three phases to maximizing revenue through social media
These are not steps. When you’ve spent enough time focusing on awareness, your social equity will reach a level that will allow you to create engagement-type campaigns that will be successful. If you try launching engagement-type campaigns without building your social equity to a sufficient level, your campaigns will not be successful - and should be an indicator that you need to focus on awareness & build your social equity.
It’s also important to note that having enough social equity to successfully move to the next phase doesn’t mean that attention should be completely removed from the previous phase. (i.e. If you move from awareness to engagement; you should still continue awareness efforts. If you stop your awareness effort you risk decreasing your social equity.)
Awareness (Social Equity Required: Low)
The first phase of maximizing revenue using social media is establishing a presence and earning a reputation. Before you get started you’ll need to define some goals, and define what groups of people you want to build a relationship with.
Once you’ve defined those things; you can decide what social media channels you’d like to participate in. Depending on your goals and your audience, you might end up choosing several channels. These posts can help you make your decision for companies or for individuals.
Many larger brands want to bypass this phase and jump into engagement; the reason usually is that they’ve built up substantial lists of users via other media. Often these brands blanket-invite anyone who’s interacted with them in the past to join them in their new campaign. The biggest problem with doing this is that you’re not qualifying your audience. Ideally, you’d target users who already participate in some social media channels & are informed about how to participate on the channels you’re inviting them to. These active users have the best chance of becoming advocates for you. (Adversely, if you invite users who aren’t interested in participating - you could end up with a bunch of ‘dead’ accounts following you. This can have negative repercussions for you and your community for several reasons. I’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming post called “Social Media Deadfall, Dangers of The Unfocused.”)
So once you have goals & defined the channels you want to create a presence on; you can begin establishing your presence and earning the reputation you want. There are two reasons people join communities - for value or for fun. (Usually some combination of the two; but it’s proven helpful if you plot where you’d like to be on the spectrum between value & fun.)
This might be helpful; here are some high-level social activities. They extend across value-providing users and fun-providing users because the actives are basically the same; it’s the intention that sways toward one or the other.
Value
Provide helpful links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content
Fun
Provide entertaining links/ information/ assets/ tools
Spark insightful/ relevant conversations
Create targeted original content
Once you’ve established your presence and have developed your reputation; you can begin engaging your community in a different way. (There are benchmarks that indicate when it’s time to begin engagement-type campaigns; but it’s often different for every community. The best option is to ask your community if they’re ready for an engagement campaign, and gauge the response.)
Engagement (Social Equity Required: Medium)
For engagement campaigns to be successful through social media, a social equity foundation is required. I realize ‘success’ is defined differently by different people; here’s my definition: To have a successful social media engagement campaign the campaign needs to be directed at qualified users, achieve predefined goals, and increase encourage long term communication.
I’ve been describing engagement campaigns as marketing roller-coasters. Done right, they can create a spike in community participation but once the campaign is over the participation level will likely fall back down to levels prior the campaign. — Of course, there are campaigns that show a spike in community participation which never go back to previous levels. There are also campaigns that cause community participation to fall well below pre-campaign levels after the campaign is done. — The hope is that community participation will permanently increase incrementally with each engagement campaign run. To achieve this; post-campaign analysis should always be comprehensive.
There are many tools and techniques for moving from engagement to social commerce. Determining when it’s appropriate to integrate social commerce into your community depends on the actions you want your community to do. If the cost of introducing social commerce to your community outweighs the potential revenue it can produce; you need to grow your community before investing.
Social Commerce (Social Equity Required: High)
Reviews: A great way to begin to integrate an aspect of social commerce into your community is to provide a product/ service review tool that can integrate with your e-commerce or catalog site. Not only would this give your users the ability to actively endorse you; it would also allow those participants to connect to users who are interested in similar products/ services. (i.e. If I submit a review via Facebook on my new Mac laptop, people reading that review might contact me through my Facebook profile asking follow-up questions. These connections are often the point of joining communities.)
Shopping: The obvious integration option is allowing your community to preview products/ services through the site they’ve been participating on. Systems like Payvment mash-up the social network and the e-commerce website. (video demo) However, you can integrate shopping behavior with your community by making compelling exclusive offers to either visit your e-commerce site, or visit your store.
Sharing: An inherent benefit of social mediums is that sharing functionalities are usually built-in. Getting a qualified, engaged community to share products/ services they’re interested in is usually an easy task. The key to sharing is understanding how the user likes to share & how much control they like to have over sharing. Ensure they have the controls they need to share. (i.e. Many users like to select specific people to share with, rather than posting something to everyone. Many users like to include a personal message, rather than having a standard description included.)
Pricing: If you’re asking members of your community to leave the site and shop, whether it be on a different site, or in-store, exclusive pricing is a fantastic way to achieve it. In addition to getting users to shop through the channel you want; a byproduct of offering exclusive pricing is that you’ll get customers who aren’t yet members joining to get the exclusive pricing. Tip: A great way to ensure quality members is to identify social KPI and make exclusive pricing available to members who help achieve those metrics. (i.e. If you want guest blog posts, make an exclusive available to those who offer them. You can even make offers cumulative or loyalty-based.)
Registration: If you’re asking members to go to your e-commerce platform to do their shopping; offer an express registration to make things simpler for community members. Facebook Connect, and several OpenID methods are easy to integrate. Even if you don’t use a social media platform that allows easy registration; there are always innovative ideas to create an express registration. For instance a social application called Hippopost allows users to send customized postcards, greeting cards, playing cards, etc, to friends. This requires personal information, which can be collected and automatically transfered to an e-commerce platform for express registration.
Tip: Amazon, PayPal, and Google offer checkout options that might help community members checkout faster.
There’s been a lot of talk about social commerce taking over e-commerce. I don’t think that’ll happen; but I do think it represents a massive opportunity to increase revenue. This post represents a framework describing how to maximize revenue through social commerce.
I’m definitely open to elaborating on anything; and would appreciate any feedback or questions.
(Please comment here, or on Twitter & I’ll respond.) Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
How to avoid the used-car salesman blog
No one wants to have a blog that makes people uneasy about visiting & reading content. Over the past month, I conducted a survey across Canada/ US & reviewed several dozen blogs to find collective ‘pet-peeves’.
Here are 7 things to avoid:
Note: There are other content suggestions & UX suggestions I have when it comes to optimizing your blog; these tips are intended to make your users feel comfortable reading & sharing your content.
Don’t polish your information: Valuable content should be simple, and clear. If you have to encase your content in a widget, or have a bunch of sharing buttons surrounding your content, it might seem desperate & confusing. Some of my favorite blogs simply serve up the content without tricks to get users to share.
Remember banner blindness when using widgets: You remember banner blindness. It occurs when users ignore areas on a website that appear to be advertisements. I’m a big fan of having a right or left rail, with additional content; but for blogs that clutter up their rails with badges, and widgets - beware of banner blindness. I’ve actually seen some blogs that don’t have enough room using one rail, so they use 2 to house all their badges and widgets. Note to those users: you’re no longer in the cub-scouts - badges do not need to be displayed. Most people don’t care & it distracts from your content.
Over-the-top personal branding gets creepy: I often read blogs during lunch at work and find it really creepy when a huge smiling face greets me. I’d really like the ability to browse through blogs without feeling like I’m auditing real estate broker ads. Focus on delivering your content in a professional way, and leave the big photo’s of yourself on Facebook.
There are things you just shouldn’t say: I’m not the only one who reads blogs at work. I hate having to quickly scroll past a bad word or cover it with another window. Keep it clean, or notate that it’s not safe for work.
Comments should not be found, they should be posted: To everyone who pulls tweets or facebook shares into their comment stream: please stop. If you’re trying to encourage conversations on your blog; cluttering up your comment stream with ‘comments’ from people not participating is a really bad idea.
Moderation is mostly good: 80% of the blogs I’ve surveyed properly moderate their blogs. Meaning they either understand that comments should be directly posted; or they should be posted quickly - ideally with a follow-up. However, there were a few that use some crazy captcha; or still haven’t been posted yet.
Don’t post useless information just because it’s scheduled: Post useful, valuable content. Posting just because you have a schedule doesn’t make sense. Make your blog a place to come for great content; not a place to come because people remember you’re updating your content. Why else do we have RSS feeds, Alltop, and Twitter?
In the end, you don’t have to follow my advice; but if you’ve gotten this far, you can’t say you were unaware. Before you ask, I reviewed 43 blogs; and surveyed 280 people to get these common ‘pet-peeves’. I’ll be incorporating the advice into my own blogs too. Good luck blogging, and you can check out my blog anytime: http://www.thejordanrules.com (should be updated soon).
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
Corporate Adoption of Social Media
Getting a corporation with established marketing rules and complicated communications departments to adopt a new way to communicating to its audience can be difficult. With the rise of social media, corporations are beginning to listen; but still require a process to get everyone onboard. The following is a framework that reviews an ideal process a corporation will follow when adopting social media as a new communications tool.
Define Initial Parameters
Define how many resources you can devote to social media 
Define which sites you want to monitor
Define which tools you’d like to test
Define sampling size benchmarks
Begin Listening 
Once you’ve finished defining everything; you can begin listening. Many corporations successfully do this in ‘stealth mode’ - meaning the brand name or corporation name isn’t publicly available to the networks being listened to.While listening, you should also be recording what you hear. There are several easy ways to monitor your brand & turn the streams of activity into an RSS feed and store the RSS posts for future reference.
Analyze and Determine Integration Options 
You should never stop listening; so when you have enough information to start analyzing how your brand, or brands, is being mentioned, it’s important to keep listening.
During this phase, you need to define what your brands reputation is. This can be considered the “laissez-faire reputation”, meaning the reputation that existed for your brand prior to active participation from the brand.
After you’ve defined the “laissez-faire reputation”, it’s time to define how you want to change that reputation. (If you’re happy with the “laissez-faire reputation” it can be a bit trickier to define how to begin to participate; but I’ll define the process later.) All activities should help move your brand in the direction of achieving your ideal social reputation.
Once you define the reputation you’d like, you need to define how the brand will appear when engaging in social media activities. This doesn’t just mean its visual appearance, but also means its sociological appearance. It’s important to define your avatar schema, and update your brand style guide to take social media into account, but equally important is to define how you want your brand to be viewed as a part of society, and the community. This has more to do with what you’ll be talking about and the content you invest in creating, than what your visual appearance is.
Perform Internal Response Assessment & Identify Ideal Content Curators
Many corporations have some kind of intranet. The proven best way to achieve corporate adoption of social media is to integrate social systems into corporation-wide systems. 2 ideal candidates for social system integration are email clients, and the intranet.
A great way to define your optimum response assessment policy is by testing responses in real situations. Let’s say you’ve integrated a social system into your intranet, and the entire corporation has the intranet open on their computers. The system is primarily used as a collaboration tool.
What would happen if you started routing the feed you set up in the listening phase into the system? Everyone would get to see what’s being said about the brand. You could encourage conversations through the company intranet, on the posts you’re routing in. If you disable 2 way communication, all the company responses to posts will remain private.
This a great initial test to identify potential content curators: the staff that have a natural ability to interact appropriately with people on social networks. Additionally this testing will identify those who might not understand the benefits of social media and give you the opportunity to schedule learning sessions.
Once you’ve identified potential content curators; you can run iterative live tests. Rotating curators through specific social media channels to figure out who’s the best at participating on each channel you want a presence on. This live testing will serve to further refine who will lead the content curator team for each channel.
Live Iterative Optimization (LIO)
Many corporations jump directly to this phase; skipping some of the most important steps in getting social media adopted by the entire company. Many companies that jump directly to this phase experience social media failure. The reason for this is often that a key individual in the organization doesn’t understand how social media will benefit his department.Once you’ve identified who will lead your content curators for each channel, you can begin moving past simply being present within social networks, and begin really engaging your audience. (In smaller organizations, you might have the need for a single content curator.)
Here are the three key steps in Live Iterative Optimization.
Campaign Testing 
I’ve recently written a post on iterative brand equity, which can be representative of a social campaign. I don’t suggest running campaigns that don’t fluidly integrate and feed into each other.
That being said, the key to LIO is campaign evaluation and optimization. After running a social campaign; whatever it might be, it’s important to evaluate how it was interpreted by your audience, how it affected your audience, and how you can improve. Regardless of how successful your last campaign was; finding at least one way to improve is crucial.
Synergies Across Networks 
In addition to evaluating your campaign, you can examine your social platform & channel selection and find ways to synergize efforts across networks. If you’re running a campaign on Facebook and MySpace; how can you leverage responses of Facebook to amplify engagement of MySpace, and vice-versa?
Policy Correction & Optimization 
You should constantly be re-examining your social media policy, and should set up formal post-campaign-evaluations to correct errors and optimize elements.
Ensure everyone has a voice; your audience, your employees, and all stakeholders. Make the social media policy as public as possible. Consider the impact of releasing the policy to the public. Weigh the options of releasing the policy with the repercussions of the policy being leaked.
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
Iterative Brand Equity - Model, Framework & Benefits
Model
Iterative Brand Equity changes. It doesn’t dispose of what existed before; it will update, hand-off, or reconfigure itself to become something new.
(pretty simple, but click here for a larger view)
Framework
Set expectations - It’s hard to set expectations when you’re uncertain how the next iteration of a campaign will unfold. That being said, it’s important to keep your users informed with what you know. If you’re uncertain what the next iteration will look like, it’s perfectly fine to tell that to your users, and ask them for input.
Extract key campaign elements - In every campaign, there are key themes, memes, and technology that can be carried forward in each iteration. For instance, if you ask your users to upload photo’s during a campaign, the next iteration could involve writing captions for the images; or turning the images into comic strips.
Provide a feedback mechanism - The biggest mistake any campaign can suffer from is not allowing customers to provide feedback. If you have a channel that allows customers to provide feedback, you’ll end up gaining some valuable insights. If you don’t have that channel available, the feedback will often be presented to the public via social media. Feedback should always be incorporated into the next iteration of a campaign.
Recap - Just like the beginning of a TV show, an iterative campaign requires a recap. This can take many forms; the best are integrated into drivers to the transformed campaign site. For example, if you have a media buy making people aware of your new campaign, you can include information about how the campaign started, and how its transformed.
Recognize loyalty - Users who stick with you from campaign to campaign should be recognized and rewarded. They don’t necessarily need a monetary reward, but they can be rewarded by offering pre-registration, or access to exclusive tools. The better you treat your loyal customers, the more likely it is they’ll continue being loyal.
Benefits
Increase reach - Many quarterly campaigns just aren’t alive long enough to reach the maximum number of users who’d want to participate. The benefit of having an iterative campaign is that you’ll be able to build on your foundation of users at the beginning of every iteration. Instead of asking users who’ve participated in a different campaign to participate in something new; you can ask those users to continue their participation in a new way.
Increase asset library - Every iteration of a campaign can provide you with new assets. Whether it’s user generated content, feedback, new leads, or new technology; new assets help to ensure the next iteration has more to offer.
Improve engagement - Rather than being engaged for one quarter and waiting for the next campaign, users can continue to engage with a brand throughout every iteration. Each iteration can engage users more and more.
Increase participation - Many users are unwilling to participate in a campaign that will only last a couple months, because they understand the campaign will be ending. A campaign that continues, and feeds into the next campaign can encourage user participation. If you continually use user generated content as the foundation for the next iteration; you’ll encourage even greater participation. Users enjoy having their work matter.
Improve integration - An iterative campaign has the benefit of being able to take its time to get accepted. Every iteration can act as new opportunities for integration. For instance, if your first campaign asks users for photos, the second campaign could include a photo album on flickr, and the third campaign could include a widget showing the photos on the corporate site.
Improve communication - The great thing about having engaged customers providing feedback over time is that you can learn from your communication mistakes and successes. If you find certain communication techniques work, you can carry then forward into the next campaign; and if you find out that certain techniques don’t work you can scrap them for the next iteration.
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
How Social Customer Service Can Make You Money
Customer service has always been that business competency that either makes or breaks the customer experience. Over the past decade, many large organizations recognized this fact and have heavily invested in ensuring extraordinary customer service. In recent years, social customer service has become a necessity.
Social customer service can increase revenue in five ways:
Increased Awareness: Addressing customers issues via social media provides interesting content. The more you help, the better the chances customers will find you.
Increased Customer Satisfaction: The great thing about social customer service is that other customers, who are satisfied with you get the opportunity to observe & participate with other customers. This has the potential of increasing their satisfaction through education. I’ve seen a discussion board with customer service interactions between a software company and its customers; many of the posts indicated that the customers reading the posts discovered additional functionality they’d never have known about. Of course, simply solving a customers problem increases their satisfaction.
Public Customer Reviews: Each time provide customer service via social media is another opportunity to have a public customer review. It shows the issues customers have, and shows how your company deals with those issues. In public forums, an unsatisfied customer doesn’t necessarily mean a bad review. If the company does everything it can, but the customer is unreasonable; the public will often express it’s admiration of the company, and dismiss the customer as unreasonable.
Decreased Return-Rate: As with all good customer service, good social customer service can help turn a brand dissident into a brand advocate. Additionally, social customer service can act as a qualifier in the sense of making sure potential customers are buying the right thing. (i.e. If the Twelp Force informs a customer that the printer he purchased isn’t compatible with a Mac, it could help ensure other Mac owners don’t buy that printer.)
Increased Brand Loyalty: One of the best ways to create brand loyalty is by showing how a company deals with customers who’ve had issues. I recently saw a series of blog posts about a bad experience a lady had with a hotel chain. The post outlined her issues, and the email she sent to management. Subsequent posts outlined responses; and a credit issued for the cost of the stay. This type of story could have made me skeptical about staying at the hotel chain she stayed at; but the way the company handled the issues actually made me confident enough to try them. Additionally, the lady was satisfied with the outcome and probably would be willing to try them again.
How do I achieve the best results?
Step 1: Choose a customer service model
(If you don’t chose a model, your customers will resort to model A)
Model A: Customer seeks customer service
This model could be indirect; where customers are posting complaints about a company. Essentially, this model applies to any customer that requires customer service and is willing to engage in social media.
Model B: Brand seeks out customers in need of customer service
This model involves a brand, or a brand collective, searching out and responding to customer issues.
Model C: Brand encourages & supports a customer support community
This model often has an aggregation site where customer inquires are vetted or categorized and responded to by both brand employees and other customers. Sometimes, brands simply have an account on a particular site and encourage customers to respond to customers with issues.
Step 2: Communicate responses to questions customers need answered prior to engaging in social customer service
Question 1: “What can I get support with?”
Question 2: “How do I request support? How do I communicate after I’ve made the request?”
Question 3: “How long will it take to get service?”
Question 4: “What quality of customer service can I expect?”
Posted via web from The Jordan Rules | Comment »
