The Jordan Rules

I recently learned that inbetweening, in animation, is adding additional states of motion to increase the fluidity of a sequence.

Flight reference drawings by Jennifer Hager

I suggest ‘strategic inbetweening’ can add fluidity, and increase the ROI of social media initiatives.Guidelines to ‘strategic inbetweening’

Recognizing when it’s necessary

Here are 4 key indicators that suggest you should consider some strategic inbetweening:

1. If your audience is confused.
2. If you see a dramatic increase or decrease in sales.
3. If you have many social initiatives running concurrently.
4. If you focus all your efforts on one initiative at a time.

Remember, the goal of inbetweening is to increase fluidity. So if you recognize any sign of discontinuity between initiatives; inbetweening can be helpful.

Adding strategic states

Since strategic inbetweening is a term I just made up; I’ll explain the process I use.

Step 1: Identify all social initiatives you’re currently engaged in, and all initiatives that are planned. (Social marketing, business development, research, branding etc.)
Step 2: Preform a strategic card-sorting exercise; writing all initiatives on cards, and grouping them into piles that make use of the same strategy.
Step 3: Consider how each group of initiatives support each other. Find key commonalities between the initiatives and decide how to connect them.

Here are some examples:

Strategic Recycling: Designing for re-use

Regardless of what you’re doing, design the initiative to be reusable. Whether it be the data you collect, the technology, or the people you touch; plan to reuse. (e.g. Let’s say you create a cool way to visualize data superimposed over a map. You could design it specifically for one initiative, or design it using a bunch of variables, so that it can be used for many initiatives.)

Making the rounds: Designing for multiple sites, iterating as you release

Lets say you figure out that the most effective way to reach your audience is through myspace. You could design a bunch of initiatives that live on your my space page; or you could design each initiative so that it could work on multiple sites. You could start my running it on myspace, then when you replace that initiative with the next one, move the old one to Facebook, then to Youtube, then to Twitter. All it takes is figuring out how to adapt the initiative to work on each site.

Simplifying by accepting complexity: Designing a user-generated content layer & integrating key content creation sites.

Lets say you have a Facebook page, and your fans are engaged with you. You talk to them every day to help add personality to your brand. You know that if you engage fans on other social media sites, you might not have as much time to spend with your Facebook fans. Why not encourage users to communicate with you using other social media sites to create the content. Inspire your users by asking them something abstract but relevant to your brand. (e.g. How would you cure the common cold?) Ask users to submit multimedia responses as Youtube embeds, or Flickr photo links, or a screen grab of a Twitter conversation. Making it easier for the customer by asking them to create content in a way they are used to, but making it a little bit harder for you to track.

Creating a Chimera: Designing component releases

A really great way to extend brand equity is by making it better over time. Lets say you create a game and host it on your Myspace page. Your users play it, like it, and share it with their friends. You could leave it up, take it down and replace it, or add something to it. Maybe you add a leaderboard where users can compete for the high score. Next, maybe you add the ability to sign in with OpenID. Next, maybe you suggest having a contest to see who can create the best ‘new level’ and make the code for the game open source.

Ensuring Continuity

As any animator will tell you, inbetweening done wrong makes the final product much worse. It’s important that you check your strategic inbetweening before you implement anything. I’ve created a checklist of strategic heuristics that help me to ensure continuity on several levels. It’s similar to a recent post outlining a framework to tie social media marketing tactics across several channels but is more of a checklist. I can make it available to those interested.

Regardless of how you go about ensuring continuity, it’s something that’s important to do.

Learning

As with any initiative, inbetweening should be tracked, analyzed and refined. As you continue, you should develop documentation that shows what worked and why; and what didn’t work and how to avoid it. This process will eventually lead to not having to do inbetweening anymore. You’ll stop noticing the 4 key indicators that suggest you should do it.

Sharing

The final guideline is simple; don’t hoard knowledge. Share what you know, what you learn, how you learned it, and what your going to do with your new knowledge. Remember, these are guidelines for helping with social initiatives; success shouldn’t stop you from being social. Transparency can be VERY helpful.

During one recent project, a brand manager sent a message to the community telling them that she planned on migrating a site to a new platform - something most brand managers wouldn’t normally do. A member of the community responded by telling her about a technology that would allow her to distribute her content across multiple platforms without having to migrate her site. Just an example of how transparency can lead to unexpected results.

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