The Jordan Rules

Social networks like Facebook & Twitter have massive participation figures. In this post, I offer some thoughts on why people become loyal to certain networks & what marketers can do to encourage community loyalty.

The Loyalty Cycle

The cycle of developing loyalty is pretty simple, you ask users to take action & for every action they take, they receive a reward. The reward doesn’t always have to be a monitory reward; in fact there’s substantial research that suggests intellectual or emotional rewards are more effective than monitory rewards.

It’s also important to understand The Cycle of Social Interaction when trying to build community loyalty.

The Cycle of Social Interaction

It might seem simple, but many marketers abandon this cycle and focus on marketing tactics while trying to build a community. I understand the importance of marketing & the value of building communities to market to.

Here’s the key: Show users you care about them before, during, and after interacting with them. This is best achieved through a deep understanding and empathy toward your customer.

There are several loyalty building strategies that can be exploited to deliver desired results.

Recognition

Description: Is one of the simplest and least-used methods of creating community loyalty. It’s also one of the most effective; which begs the question: why aren’t more marketers making use of this strategy?

All you have to do is single out a member of your community to say something nice about. For instance, if a member posts a movie review on your brands Facebook wall, you could comment on it.

Why it works: It’s human nature to seek approval. If your brand has an active community & a user perceives your brand as an authority in the space, recognizing that a user took the time to interact with you will act as positive reinforcement of their activity.

Badging

Description: Is a specific form of recognition. It involves awarding a ‘badge’ to users that complete pre-defined actions. Badges represent social-capital & can increase a users influence within the community; because of this, badges become coveted.

Why it works: In addition to the reasons recognition works to create loyalty in general, badging employs an effective gaming-mechanic thats easy to understand. If I do what they want, I can be part of an exclusive group.

Points

Description: Is a system that’s commonly used with loyalty programs. It’s one of the simplest reward systems. It involves awarding a specific number of points to users when they complete pre-defined actions.

Why it works: This employs the ‘collecting’ gaming-mechanic. It’s easy to understand because many societies economies are based on the same mechanic. If I collect enough points (or money) I’ll be able to get the stuff I want.

Exclusives

Description: Are most effective for niche communities. When you know what users want, you can offer things the general public can’t get. (i.e. If I manage a community site, offering back-stage, or sold-out tickets to users is a powerful incentive to get users to complete the action I want. Additionally, they’ll be more likely to participate in the community for the potential of more exclusive offers.)

Why it works: Unique or hard-to-find experiences are coveted by the most influential people in the world. For example, I might be able to afford a box-seat at a U2 concert, but if there are only 10 box-seats available, I probably don’t have the clout to get ahold of one.

Rewards

Description: Are so common, they’ve started to lose meaning. It’s a simple premise, if you complete an action you stand a chance of getting a reward. Many times, marketers offer rewards users don’t want in the first place. (example: a free sample, or a 2-for-1 coupon.) If you’re going to use rewards to build loyalty, you NEED to have a deep understanding of what your community wants.

Why it works: People like to get free stuff. If the TV show Hoarders has taught us anything, there’s a certain portion of the population who don’t even care about what kind of stuff they’re getting. The most effective way to use rewards to establish loyalty is to combine rewards with recognition, which would give you recognition rewards. These can be little token rewards given to ‘surprise-and-delight’ users for participating in the community.

Data Storage

Description: Is more of a byproduct of being a part of a community. Part of the reason I actively use Linkedin is because I’ve filled out all my information, have recommendations, and have a rolodex of people I consider valuable. If I were to migrate to another community, I’d have to re-enter all my information, and re-establish connections.

Why it works: Humans inherently look for the easiest way to get things done without sacrificing quality. If a community has successfully gotten a user to join & complete a profile, the user has a personal investment in that community. The more time a user spends contributing to the community, the harder it will be for the user to leave the community.

Summary

If you understand these two cycles & strategies, you can begin to build community loyalty. The more you exploit these strategies, the happier, and more active your community will become. Building a loyal user base for your community is very important. Loyal community members are much more likely to be brand ambassadors outside of the community.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback & comments. I encourage you to post comments, or tweet about this (@thejordanrules).

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There seems to be an emerging social media trend toward creating brand profile pages intended to have ‘conversations’ with customers. I feel like this is a horrible misuse of social networking & digital strategy. It also creates a poor user experience & is less effective than the strategy I’ll outline below.

THE PROBLEM

Treating social networks as a medium rather than a community. If you only see social networks as a distribution channel for your message, you’re missing the point.

More and more marketers are spending time crafting content & communications strategies that force un-unified conversation streams to interact with each other in ineffective ways.

Example: Red Bull has one of the largest fan bases on Facebook in a large part thanks to the multitude of contests & games it deploys. However, the content that the Red Bull fan page ‘shares’ with it’s fan base varies drastically.

They take the shotgun approach to content curation by offering up content that might appeal to many different segments within the RedBull fan base. The thinking is that “because you already have a lot of information coming through you’re news stream, you can ignore what isn’t relevant & pay attention to what is.”

The long term result are users who feel disengaged with your brand. Although seeing large numbers of updates improves brand recall, the end result still tends to be less effective than creating permeable communities & sympathetic social systems.

THE SOLUTION

Create permeable community strategies & sympathetic social systems.

Mastering the permeable community strategy

A permeable community strategy is special because it allows marketing & other communication messages to pass through without altering the fundamental social constructs of the community. (i.e. if I join the Nike Facebook fan base because they were supporting the Tour De France. I’ll eventually become a disenfranchised fan because they’ll eventually move to a new discussion. In fact, I might find all the other non-Tour-De-France updates annoying. If Nike created a community called “Enjoy the Ride” and encouraged people to share bike-riding related information, and provided curated content year-round, it could easily support the Tour De France sponsorship campaign.)

There are 3 steps to create a permeable community strategy.

1. Identify your customer: This isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Identifying your customer involves a market analysis that should tell you who your highest-value customers are, and what they think about you. It should also tell you where your customer tends to spend his time online.

2. Identify topics your customers find interesting: Once you know who you need to observe, begin observing them. This step can also take some time, but it shouldn’t prevent you from doing a preliminary topical analysis & begin to create a broad-topic community; it can be focused over time. Observing your high-value customers will help you identify topics they’re interested in.

3. Create topic-based communities: Once you’ve identified topics your high-value customers are interested in, you can craft a creative platform that can support the community.

Let’s say you’ve identified 3 trending topics amongst your high-value customers: Cars, Beer, & Hockey.

Logic might say: I should create 3 sponsored communities, one for cars, one for beer, and one for hockey. This could work. If these topics are ingrained into the fabric of who your customers are, these topics will remain relevant and can afford to have ongoing support.

Although this could work, creating three permeable communities is generally not enough to ensure success for campaigns. For this, we need to ensure we choose topics that appeal to the largest percent of high-value customers, but also can work sympathetically to support campaign-based initiatives.

Mastering the sympathetic social system

Creating a community that provides its users with a positive user experience is only 1/2 of the problem. We also need to ensure those communities can work together to support ongoing marketing campaigns. This requires a special kind of content strategy that maps out community synergies against a marketing calendar. A deep understanding of the brand & user will help determine the most relevant communities.

[This map shows how sympathetic social systems work together to integrate campaigns.]

[This map shows multiple communication streams within one social system.]

For our example, the best community platforms might be: A community focused on the value of team building within the sports area & a car-lovers community focused on life enhancement called “Pimp my life”.

The goal is to be able to map out how various types of campaigns can engage with the different communities and show how community response can be throttled to increase a campaigns effectiveness or mitigate a negative sentiment.

Guidelines for creating sympathetic social systems

1. Identify what makes popular topics popular within each community

2. Determine topics common to each community

3. Compare common topics to marketing objectives & craft a creative solution that can integrate with a common topic and achieve marketing objectives.

4. Share response assessment & community moderation for campaign-related communications between all communities. This allows a single moderator to connect cross-community communications to throttle response.

SUMMARY

Stop assuming your community will sift through feed-spam to locate relevant information & start showing you care about the members of your community.

Start figuring out what your high-value customers want & begin facilitating conversations, and curating content on the subject.

Start using networks to draw users into campaigns, rather than creating networks around temporary campaigns.

Start using multiple networks together to throttle response, engagement, & moderation.

If you liked this, let me know by leaving a comment or follow me on Twitter (@thejordanrules)

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Having just made the jump to full-time freelancing, I’ve been confronted recurring question: “What exactly do you do?”

I’ve primarily been focused on my existing clients, but am starting to get a number of new requests to work together; so I wanted to tell everyone what it is I do - and how you can start working with me.

There are three primary ways I’m engaged:

1. True Consulting: I have built several relationships with global marketers using this method. The marketer, or agency, hires me to review materials & provide an opinion on how to proceed based on experience, research, stakeholder interviews etc. I’ve generally begin a relationship consulting on an ad-hoc basis, invoicing the client on a project basis. I’ve recently been retained by a couple clients who wanted the flexibility to engage me anytime, on multiple projects, by paying for a number of yearly hours upfront.

2. Integrated Project Consulting: I’ve worked with several marketers & agencies in this method. This normally happens when the marketer, or agency, has a process & a team assembled, but is missing an element. I’m normally engaged to fill a missing strategic roll or to fill a missing user experience roll. I prefer to use this method, it allows me to engage with the team early, and stay engaged throughout the project. Getting the opportunity to review design & final development allows me to ensure the interpretation of strategy or UX doesn’t compromise any elements.

3. Document-Only Consulting: This is a low-impact, easy way to engage with me. The document-only method is generally used by marketers or agencies who have a very specific need on a project. For instance, if a marketer needs a second opinion on a set of wireframes, or social media governance document, he will engage me to create that specific document. I’ve also been engaged by agencies to simply create a site map, or conduct a forensic audit of an existing site. This is generally not the best method, unless we’ve done work in the past and I’m familiar with the client.

That said, I have been asked about what types of documents I generally create throughout a project. Although every project is different, and may require customizations, here are some documents I’m engaged to create often:

**Note: If you’re not sure which of these documents to use, or when to use them, skip this section.**

Strategic Models: Modelling is a visual way of strategic planning. Models without the right background research, context, or explanation can be good visual aids, but are poor investments. The point of modelling is to show why a strategy works, why some strategic elements were selected & others excluded. Complicated strategies may be governed by several models.

Strategic Road mapping: Mapping out a high-level strategic roadmap & detailed campaign-based roadmaps help avoid misunderstandings between stakeholders, and allow teams to have a unified view of upcoming activities.

User Personas: I was engaged by the Ontario government to create one of the largest sets of user personas I’ve ever created. It was 8 months in the making, and involved a 15 person team performing a month-long ethnographic study. Most persona development doesn’t take that long, but it is a substantial investment that pays off over time. Understanding who your users are, and what they want, allows you to customize your campaigns, strategies, and offerings to speak to the most interested audience at the most relevant time.

Mental Models: I generally like one-page mental models to identify gaps, opportunities, and cognitive processes. Creating mental models are useful throughout the project in multiple ways, from focusing creativity, to managing scope. If feature-creep begins to happen, the mental model can be used to eliminate irrelevant features.

eCRM Strategies: A strategy generally pulls together several documents into one cohesive deck. I have my own style & template for a eCRM deck, but can adapt it to match your internal style if required. An eCRM strategy is somewhat complex in the sense it deals with multiple platforms, content strategy, communications strategy, social media strategy, and data segmentation. That said, everyone has to start somewhere - if you don’t have an eCRM strategy, it’s time to get one ready. Even if it’s a 3 or 5 year plan, it’s better to be working toward a goal than not to have a goal to work toward.

Social Media Strategies: This is another strategic deck (see eCRM Strategies) that I can customize to match your internal template. This is a document where I’ll make recommendations on content, moderation, community management, platform selection, monitoring guidelines, integration opportunites etc.

Experience Maps: Is a broad term that refers to swim-lane-like documents that map out a unique campaign experience, platform experience, or an entire customer experience. This can be mapped back to business objectives, or to a mental model.

Site Maps/ IA’s: A good first step in any digital project is to create an information architecture or site map. This visually shows the parent-child-sibling relationships, as well as being an overview of all pages. In addition to standard labelling, site redesigns may append template letters to the site map which will indicate which template governs each page.

Navigation Design: It’s somewhat rare to be asked to do a navigation design without being engaged to do the entire site redesign, however it’s happened before. In this document, I propose a new or enhanced navigational system & structure. This might involve re-categorization, but might not. I’ll show how parent-child relationships are shown, where user-feedback is required, and how navigational buttons behave.

Forensic Audits/ Content Inventories: This is a must-have document for all site re-designs. If I’m being engaged to do a re-categorization, or any part of a site redesign, I will complete a forensic audit of the existing site (if one isn’t provided) & will deliver a content inventory of the proposed solution. This will generally be delivered as an Excel document, unless otherwise specified.

Wireframes/ Prototypes: There are many different programs & methods of creating wireframes & prototypes. Unless otherwise specified, I tend to either use Omnigraffle or Axure to create these. I have my own style, but can adapt it to mimic your internal style. I prefer to go through two rounds of wireframing, a preliminary-draft round and a detailed round. Sometimes these are delivered with additional supporting documents like a site-map, user flows, user stories, or a functional specification.

User Testing: User testing is always a good idea on every project. At least one round of user testing should be performed prior to handing off prototypes to design. Ideally, a second round of user testing will be performed after implementation; with a focus on iterative improvements. MVT should be an ongoing process in addition to qualitative user tests.

Re-categorization/ Card-sorting: When users are having a hard time finding what they’re looking for, you might need to re-examine your sites taxonomy. For smaller sites, this can be an easy exercise, but can be much bigger for e-commerce or informationally-heavy sites.

For those of you who are confused about these documents, don’t worry; there’s an easy way to figure out what you need. Ask me.

Again, these are just some of the most common documents. These certainly don’t speak to all the methods & documents I use to help define goals & objectives, or the documents I can create to help project teams document requirements.

Mixing and Matching

I know that deciding to hire a consultant can be challenging. No one wants to introduce an unknown element to a team dynamic. Although I’m generally a great team-member, there are certain atmospheres that I work better in. Setting up an initial interview is always a good way to begin to get to know each other.

I’m easy with regards to meeting in person, over the phone, or via email. An interview will give me the ability to find out what your goals are, what your customers goals are, and how I can help. It’ll also give you the opportunity to get to know me better.

I’m often engaged to perform a mashup of responsibilities. For instance, a number of clients engaged me for true consulting on an organizational level & document-only consulting on a couple projects. This worked out well. It allowed me to stay involved at a high-level on all ongoing projects, and allowed me to lead the UX design for the intranet-redesign. If any of these services sound like something you could use, the first step is to make contact & let me know three things:

1. Who you are: Both personally, and organizationally. Tell me as much as you can about you, your company, and your users.
2. What you’re doing: Tell me about what marketing & business activities, opportunities, and challenges you’re engaged in or have identified.
3. What you want to be doing: Tell me about how you’d like to see things change. Would you like to drive traffic, gain sign-ups, increase market-share, build awareness? Or do you just need help defining what you want to be doing?Hopefully, this clears-up what I do & helps you understand if you need someone like me to help you out.

Contact me anytime: thejordanrules@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: @thejordanrules
Follow my Blog: blog.thejordanrules.com
Subscribe to my Newsletter: The Jordan Bits

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I’ve created the digital ecosystem interaction map to answer the following questions:

1. How do I tie my different digital properties together?
2. How do I achieve successful community integration throughout my marketing & communications channels?
3. What type of content should I be focusing on creating?
4. What metrics should I be monitoring? How do I respond (if I need to respond)?
5. What can I expect from social networking channels?

The Digital Ecosystem Interaction Map

This worksheet is intended to visualize all digital marketing & communications efforts with their desired outcome. It can also align and draw synergies between online and offline marketing/communications. I encourage anyone with large international communication strategies to use a map like this to bring consistency and continuity to all levels of your customer communications. Although designed for large corporations, this map has proven valuable for the majority of clients I work with; from small regional marketers, to non-profits, to governmental organizations, to international marketing giants.

(view full size)     |     (download PDF)

Example/ Description

I was able to get this high-level information out of a 30 min workshop with a national retailer. Although high-level, this worksheet’s already beginning to show some insights & opportunities.

The first sections on the work sheet focus on publishing activities. Publishing is an interesting way to think about marketing communications, but more, and more people consume digital information everyday.

This area is used to define what content you plan to publish and where you plan to publish it. (Tip: Categorizing the “What” in this section is very important. A category called “marketing material” is generally not a good category. Ask yourself how you’d respond to “Would you like to hear about the latest _______?” where the blank is the category you plan to put into the “What” column.)

In this example we established 4 streams of content that would be published on a continuous basis: Sales information, New product information, Contesting information, and Category specific information defined by a greater business objectives (i.e. a business focus on Hockey, Running, Biking, or Golf). Those streams of content were published to the internet through several channels (note: I was only engaged to architect the social media component of their digital ecosystem, which is why owned properties aren’t in the list.) Facebook (Fb), Twitter (Tw), Email (E-m), & Mobile (Mob). Category specific information is aggregated on Facebook through several category-focused fan pages to prevent alienating subscribers when business focus’ change.

The remaining blocks within the publishing hemisphere of the worksheet serve to visualize how your content drives users to pre-defined “destinations”.

In this example we show that the CRM program can use data we collect through several channels to increase the chances of driving users directly to specific destinations (or goals). The next areas within this worksheet are only defined at a very high level. We’ve defined the ratio at which we’ll publish marketing-type content to the ratio of sharing “found” content. (Note: Sharing “found” content is a good way to show users that you care about more than yourself. You should always link directly to the original location of the “found” content and specifically cite who created it, if available. Always try to share content your audience finds compelling; try to offer a way to filter content or opt-out of certain content.)

Normally, this section describes how your content mix facilitates driving users to the pre-defined “destinations”. In this case, we did a deep-dive on this section & developed a complete content strategy. This notation is just intended to be a continuation point, referencing the content strategy document. For smaller ecosystems, you can define facilitation tactics right on the worksheet (i.e. digital coupons to drive people in-store, contest leaderboards published to Facebook to drive brand awareness)

The right-hand edge of the worksheet is the block allocated to “destination”. This area is a simple list of all places you want to drive users, and what you want them to do while there. (i.e. Go to the store & shop, Go to my site & subscribe, etc.)

The “destination” block connects the publishing “facilitation” strategy with the “affinity” listening strategy.

In this example, the listening strategy we use to build “affinity” was defined through another document called the “Response Assessment & Workflow Guidelines”. Again, you can define some “listening” guidelines directly in this section that build affinity.

The “affinity” section drives to listening funnel mix. The listening funnel, in this high-level example, simply defines the ratio of brand monitoring to industry monitoring. Again, this is because we have a document that defines additional details.

We also show that there are customer service channels & artifacts (i.e. a # tag) that can facilitate response times.

The listening funnel leads to the first blocks in the bottom “listen” hemisphere. This is where the channels we’re listening to get defined & mapped back to business goals (not shown).

In this example, we defined that we’d be monitoring Facebook, Twitter, an Email tracking & response system, a system configured for brand & industry alerts, and a customized dashboard that feed real-time analytics and ‘sentiment’ data.

Through these channels, we could configure the various systems to track the progress of certain business goals. (In this example, the retailer required that these goals be hidden from this post.) A good example would be monitoring multiple channels for insights on unmet customer needs an innovative product could fill.

There are many techniques you can use to get more value out of this worksheet. I’ve been working with several agencies & individuals across Canada on developing new ways to use this to visualize interactions within digital (and other) marketing & communications ecosystems.

P.S. I know there seems to be a lot of purples & pinks in my worksheet example. It looks a lot more masculine when you print it & mark it up with darker colours. (If you’re concerned about that.)

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