Blog Posts

The best content is genuine, not automated. It is posted with the intention of not only being viewed but talked about. The question is, how do we get readers to talk about our content? And how do we get readers to share that conversation with us so that we can participate and further engage?

As patrons of the social web, we now have access to an endless amount of interesting and FREE content, so much so that content quickly becomes nothing more than a commodity. Content is shared, copied, altered, and distributed through an endless number of channels.  This mass distribution ultimately removes any sense of exclusivity of intellectual assets as well as the ability to track a reader’s allegiance to any one source for content, if they have a preference at all.  Great content alone becomes not enough to keep people coming back; it now must be combined and interlaced with an alluring, value-adding user experience that is appealing to the audience.

A great deal of businesses spend a significant amount of time and resources creating content to share and engage their audience with, but many don’t know how to turn that content into an all out experience.   At our agency we see many companies using sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, as distribution channels for their content, integrating and linking their accounts to automatically redistribute information with little thought as to how it could be used to create a worthwhile experience for their reader.  While open social sites can be a valuable platform for increasing visibility, they should also be seen as a platform for interaction and an extension to a user’s experience with that company or brand.   As dicussed in a previous post, content should be designed to travel to the social web.

I like to compare this online interaction to meeting someone for the first time.  After all, that’s what you’re doing with your content, meeting a reader with the hopes that you will hit it off and meet again another time, whether with further content or at the point of purchase.  To engage in a meaningful introductory conversation, you might ask the other person questions about themselves, invite them to share their opinions, or even increase your likeability by sharing a weakness and asking for their advice.   After engaging in this initial conversation, you would promptly respond to the other person’s comments and questions, creating a TWO WAY conversation and a personal experience for your cohort.   After the initial conversation (or visit to your website, blog, or profile), you would hope to keep in touch, and would make it easy to do so by exchanging phone numbers or email addresses.  In terms of content, easily keeping in touch could take the form of a prominently displayed signup page for your RSS feed, or links to your Facebook and Twitter pages.

That being said, we are extending our hand for a virtual shake.  Please provide a comment telling us how you create an experience surrounding your content for your readers, or possibly choose to keep in touch via subscribing to our RSS or visiting and interacting with us on our other social sites, as we would love to learn more about you, our valued reader.  It is very nice to meet you.

Today while trying to order my lunch at a local fast food vendor, I couldn’t help but squint and take issue with their menu layout. A combination of unbalanced background colors, photography and fonts completely threw me as I was trying to quickly scan my options and make a selection. Anyone who’s been to In-and-Out Burger or Five Guys will appreciate how a simple, easy to read streamlined menu can aid you in your dining selection.

This dining dilemma reminds me of an increasing number of recent conversations with our clients and prospects. We are seeing a growing number of on-domain communities that suffer from lackluster adoption, limited engagement, or even worse, ghost towns with no activity at all.

While there are many factors that play into launching and sustaining a viable and flourishing community, one very important focus should be on the User Experience (UX). In our assessment, part of these failing communities can be attributed to a poor User Experience design. A community is no different than a website with respect to striving for balance in the User Interface (UI). Calls to actions need to be clear, and content, design and functionality should be balanced so as not to overwhelm a user. Consideration around UI elements, including their size, placement and hierarchy is also critical. Structure and depth should be clear, and the user must be able to self-identify where they are and that while interacting and engaging in the community they are deriving value at every step.

When deploying a community social software solution, it is tempting to cut corners to save time and money and meet a deadline through bypassing UX and using a default template with just the standard UI elements. In our experience, this is a mistake, as no two communities and their respective requirements are the same. Often most of the project budget is allocated to software purchase, technical integration and install. In our view, making an investment in a solid content strategy and user experience as well as items like user adoption/activation strategy can go a long way in alleviating the possibility of creating an expensive ghost town community (that does not return on its investment). At 7Summits, we are definitely of the mindset that getting  a concept out into the wild and in front of real users is the best way to test, validate and refine your community. However while you’re evaluating or scoping your community project, consider that allocating part of your time and resources to focus on the user experience first is a sound investment in a viable community.

It’s been over a week now since we wrapped up our time with Jive Software as part of their national “Get Social Tour.”  The tour launched April 21st in Los Angeles, with scheduled stops in Houston, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. We supported Jive’s tour as the Premier Partner in both Chicago (May 25th) and Philadelphia (June 17th). Jive continues to impress us with stellar people, real client case studies, and mini-seminars geared toward beginner, intermediate and advanced thinking on the application and activation of Social Business Software (SBS) both inside and outside the enterprise.

The coolness of Get Social Chicago only got better as the day ended when we had a chance to chat with David Armano of Edelman after he saw some of our work on display at the event.  David is a true thought leader in this space and it was great to share thoughts on where all of this is headed.

Paul Stillmank - CEO, 7Summits

The role of an online community moderator is a relatively new one. And like any new role, it's going through its developmental stage right now. It is most often confused with the role of Community Manger which has more to do with the overall direction that the community is taking in terms of content and features rather than moderation. I took a quick look for this role on simplyhired.com and there are currently a wide range of job titles that overlap in this area (http://www.wordle.net) pointing to bit of confusion in the market:

Dawn Foster did a nice job of distinguishing roles (and by community size) in her blog post Community Roles: Manager, Moderator, and Administrator. I also like the slideshare Best Practices For Moderating Your Online Community by mZinga. We find more mature thinking like this published every week; however, we still  a lot of questions about community moderation and what to look for in a good community moderator.

One question that companies are asking prospective community moderators is “what online communities are you an active member of?” We like this one because it gets after both experience and passion for online community. Online community participation is an important attribute in a solid community moderator. Active community

participation provides insights into successful use of Web 2.0 effects, facet-based browsing designs, and helpful techniques being employed by other leading professional network communities.This has ramifications to 1) enhancing the feel of the community that they are moderating, 2) positioning the community for ongoing activation, and 3) supporting member retention. The community moderator needs to be on the pulse of what is going on in the online community space – what works and what doesn’t work. Here is a sample of the type of participation that is needed in a single individual:

• Active participation in LinkedIn including various groups for professional networking
• Facebook fan-page and business-page participant for both personal networking and professional brand affinity
• Knowledge and use of vertical or niche search engines
• Presence and participation in popular, topical social media outlets like Slideshare, Delicious, Digg, Vimeo, etc.
• Professional and/or personal blogger
• Active membership in professional and/or personal communities that are aligned with their interests
• Personal Facebook account with rampant, ongoing use
• Personal and professional twitter accounts with active participation
• Youtube channel with follower-ship
• You get the idea...

Finding and hiring the right Community Moderator is important. In addition, there are other moderation strategies that important once that individual is on board:

• Create a community overview that summarizes the community’s purpose and tone. Include a list of goals for members that can be realized by joining your community. Then, moderate the community in a fashion that keeps the tone and direction on par with the community’s intended use. Some communities audit moderator contributions against that community summary, providing the moderator with useful feedback that helps them stay on track.
• Moderation should be moderate (pun intended!). Some communities launch with the presupposition that they can hypo-activate the community. They presume that all they have to do is “get members” – assuming that once members show up, things will start to happen. Do not assume the members will do all the work from the start and that they don't need assistance after they have joined. On the other end of the spectrum, do not excessively moderate all user generated content (UGC) either – that is a major turn-off as well.
• Get an experienced moderator. We see many communities launch where the moderator is chosen based on who just happens to be available. Under-utilized employees do not make good moderators! Here are some important items to consider so that you are enabling your moderator while managing the outcome as well:
  • Provide a certain level of autonomy. This is not a science yet and there will be specific learning that happens with your community. Don’t jump on the moderator when something goes wrong. Let them experiment, fall down, get up and move on.
  • Have a clear job description.
  • Create community moderation guidelines so that expectations are clear. And then don’t forget that they are guidelines.
  • Afford your community moderator and other community leaders opportunities to stay abreast of the latest trends in their role/space by encouraging them to join other communities.
  • Plan to sponsor a couple of key events per year where they can flock together with others in similar roles.
  • Provide time and avenues for them to accelerate their subject matter expertise in your topical community. Do this before the community launches and then keep it going during the beta period and after launch.
• Membership is a good measure of successful community activation. Engagement is a good measure of effective moderation. This is a very community-specific measurement. The focus is on the conversations or discussions that people are having in your community. The moderator can help make some of these connections.
• Monitor your community for both key participants and content. Then feature popular content and contributors on a regular basis. Look for the number and type of interactions that people are having with other community members to find members to feature. For content, typical measures would include the number of views, sharing, ratings, comments, replies, and more.

Paul Stillmank
7Summits

We’ve talked (and we’ll keep talking) about the need for a strategy to apply social media to your business.  The islands of Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, Youtube Channels, and one-off blogs need to be reigned in and managed. A strategy integrating them into an overall marketing and execution plan is needed.  These new media components can become important to how your organization grows its business, or they can become paid hobbies for fervent employees leaving you to ask later on whether any value was gleaned from their activities.  Even after your strategy is developed, even after HR and Marketing have aligned your brand with your employees’ online behaviors, even after you’ve figured out how to reach a relevant target audience in their media; you need one last item to activate your social media strategy.  You need to find your social spark.

Time and again, we see overzealous companies trying to ignite a fire, but with no real spark. They’re trying to build a bonfire that can be seen all across the social web. They want to attract as many people as possible to their brand, their product, their service.  They’ve amassed their best content and product information (the wood for that bonfire); they’ve even stacked the cards in their favor and dumped a little kerosene into the mix with some blogger outreach and paid blogger programs; yet things just aren’t igniting as they’ve planned. They still don’t have any fire. So what’s your spark? 

We’re finding that the answer can be different for different organizations. For Zappos, it was a Twitter aggregation model. For Siemens it was a focused Info-Center for employees to channel their social power. Dell lit a fire with IdeaStorm and @DellOutlet. Starbucks lit several raging fires starting with mystarbucksidea.com and then adding a blazing hot Starbucks Fan-page. Blendtec lit their fire with a viral youtube series Will It Blend? It takes a little creativity to find your spark, but it starts with a mindset change.

We see traditional corporations that move into Social Media adopting a defensive posture.  They take the standard PR position of trying to manage the message.  They might hire a PR Social Media Agency. This is the mindset change that needs to occur.  You don’t want to manage the message, but engage the conversation.  Think of it as a party with a room full of people.  Don’t worry about the two people in the corner talking trash about you.  Get the rest of the room to look to you as the conversation catalyst.  Have everyone else want to get into your conversation. There will always be negative noise in the digital world.  Don’t focus on snuffing it out.   Focus on building the positive, collective voice so big that any negativity gets drowned out.

Sure moderation needs to occur, but it’s not the focus.  Every time I see a job posting for a ‘Social Media Moderator’, I wonder how much different that organization would be if they hired a ‘Social Media Catalyst’ or a ‘Social Media Evangelist’ instead.

In the book, Groundswell by Charlene Li, Charlene lays out the requirements for sustaining a social networking site.  She suggests that to be successful the site must:

• Enable people to connect in a new way
• Be effortless to sign up for
• Shift power from institutions to people
• Provide an open platform that facilitates partnerships

These points are all true, but they alone are not enough. Twitter had everyone one of these, but that fire smoldered along for over a year before igniting when Ashton Kutcher competed with CNN for the most followers.  That event brought Twitter’s bonfire to life. Of course, the answer isn’t to go out and engage a movie star for your strategy, but asking these questions may help find your spark:

• How do you monetize all of the user-generated content out there about your products/services?
• What will spark the conversation?
• What’s your ‘pick up’ line?  What do you hope the response to be?
• How will people even know about your conversation to begin with?

In your quest for the answer to these questions, you will hopefully discover your Social Spark.

Paul S.

7Summits

There is an art and science behind designing your content to travel on the social web. Anyone who has seen the conversation prism by Brian Solis is well aware of the many distribution channels and outlets in the social media ecosystem. But what are the ingredients needed to seed your content?

• Reference the Strategy of Giving and you will find a business framework that encourages offering things (including content)
  for free: http://www.strategyofgiving.com/
• Social Media Press Releases offers us a new way to think about and distribute PR: http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/smr_v1.5.pdf
• Setting Content Free at Ford - http://www.slideshare.net/scottmonty/setting-content-free-at-ford-web-20-expo

In the social web, content is being generated about our companies,products and people everyday whether we are apart of the conversation or not. And therein lies the difference between the social web and its previous iterations. Conversation is now key. Content may still be king, however conversation can amplify its effect whether having positive or negative connotations for a business. Dell's Ideastorm is a textbook example of how a brand can take negative content and energy surrounding their business and products and channel it into a positive dialog with its consumers now creating positive UGC.

Create great content

Best stuff for social media has:

• No registration
• Valuable information
• Minimal promotional aspects

Break content into bite-sized, digestible chunks.

Optimized Content is King

• Optimize your titles
• Optimize your content for SEO and Social pickup
• Use Tagging, Metadata and Hashtags
• Enable user-tagging of your content (folksonomy)
• Categorize Your content (Taxonony)
• Optimize Your Digital Assets Video, Photos, Audio
• Give your users tools to seed your content on the social web - Re-tweet buttons and social bookmarking apps.

Key takeaways -

• Content is still king, become a publisher!
• Conversation is queen, inspired by content
• Design your content to scale
• Create content that adds value
• Design your content to spark conversation
• Allow your content to be easily shared and distributed (de-centralized)
• Mine your data - there is good content here
• Empower your audience whether consumer or stakeholder to spread the
  word with the right set of tools
• Mashing up different content can create compelling widgets/apps
• Content comes in many forms (conversations, comments, text, images, video etc)

Paul Stillmank

7Summits

We are now meeting with dozens of prospective clients and we are seeing a pretty wide range of approaches being taken when it comes to Social Media. Many companies feel somewhat behind and they are tryin to "catch up" by throwing up fan-pages, twitter accounts and Youtube channels hoping that something positive will happen. We also see some companies starting to “listen” online by using online tools like SocialSense and Radian6. That’s good. Online listening should be one of the first Discovery steps when planning your Social Business Strategy. Overall though, one theme stands out more than any other: companies are applying social media without a solid plan for doing so. Even those companies listening online aren't sure what to do next. Here is a sample of what we see every day:

• Facebook pages that are virtual islands with no integration to other marketing efforts and no links into or out of the pages.
• Youtube videos shot by high-end ad agencies (that’s expensive) with no more than 40 or 50 views over 6  months.
• Companies with fan-pages for every sub-brand, but with no plans to moderate them and no forethought on how to handle an irate comment.
• Twitter accounts launched without a full understanding of the range of tools available, without knowledge of how to drive a relevant follower-ship, without a hash-tag plan, and/or without understanding how to really leverage this channel to reach consumers.
• Solid product reviews on sites like ePinions, Yelp, InsiderPages, ViewPoints, and MerchantCircle that are not being pulled into the parent website, fan-page or other web property.

This is standard fare out there. However, it does not (should not) have to be that way. Our last few posts resonate with one theme: social media should be integrated with your other marketing efforts. Our Strategic Framework for Applied Social Media illustrates how social media has taken its place in all phases of consumer engagement: awareness, relevance, conversion, involvement and ongoing engagement. Offline marketing, online/web marketing, social and ecommerce all come together here. An integrated approach simply garners the best results. Interactive Marketing has matured to the point that it has its own department in some larger organizations. Perhaps the word “integrated” should be substituted for “interactive” – it is a more powerful concept.

Another way of thinking about integrated marketing is to think about connections. Here, we mean connections that consumers perceive among your marketing efforts.

• ATTRACT prospective buyers and make them aware of your products or services.
• INFLUENCE the prospective buyer by using both search and social to establish relevancy for your product or service.
• ENGAGE your prospective buyer by directing them to the appropriate channel for conversion including the possibility to transacting in their desired media.
• RECRUIT new customers to get involved with your product, service, company and brand. Encourage ongoing engagement by inviting them to join your own community or relevant social venue.

To illustrate this point, we’ve tipped our Strategic Framework on its side.

In this model, you can see how all of the consumer touch-points across the social web come together around your product or service, from the initial search or word-of-mouth reference to the satisfied customer advocate.

At the beginning of this cycle, a consumer becomes aware of your product or service. They may have been struck by a need and then gone online in search for a solution. Or your may have worked to ATTRACT them. Yes, you can drive awareness by using both search and social to attract prospects. They might have been prompted by any number of stimuli including an offline ad, a radio spot, a TV commercial, a press release, a referral from a friend, or a host of other motivators in a range of appropriate venues.  A well-integrated plan begins with these earliest stimuli in mind. A product, its genre and targeted key-words are strongly correlated from the very beginning. The connection is planned from the start. Now when your audience moves online, the initial behavior is biased –they will be searching with a specific genre or terminology in mind. Those companies with savvy SEO and SEM execution will affect their product being presented near the top of the search results.

From this point onward, a prospective customer will be comparing the results of their search. Your product’s relevancy is established through combinations of ratings, reviews, blogs, discussion forums, and other user-generated content (UGC). They may also consult their “social graph” meaning the fans, friends and followers across their own networks. This is what we refer to as Social Commerce: using your social graph to INFLUENCE your buying decision.

To help perpetuate the cycle, one more connection is made. RECRUIT new customers by asking them to join a community, fan page or other venue and submit a product review when they are ready. These product reviews are an important step toward getting your new customers involved, but they also represent fresh content that will influence the purchase of other prospective buyers. In time, some of these customers may become advocates for your brand, lauding its attributes, products and innovation. Consumer advocacy is a much sought after aspect of the social web and an entire science is springing up around Social Influence Marketing. Mining for this information and elevating it through social venues sways future customers. This is what we mean by “connected”. Now we are back to online listening and making sure that all of this is working as planned – and this is making more sense.

I’ll close this post by pointing out one remaining aspect of this model: measure and refine. Social Media has made it easier to measure online consumer behavior. This allows us to create models that connect both conversations and activity on the web to business results. The right data can be collected and analyzed to provide insights on the value of your content as well as your products and brand. Consumer behavior is monitored and refinements are made throughout the cycle. This helps to get prospective buyers the right information at the right time to speed the process along. It also helps determine which venues and user-generated content are the most relevant toward affecting that transaction.

Social Media can be a powerful accelerator when properly integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts. Think about Connected Social Campaigns^SM as the outcome of a well orchestrated Integrated Marketing Strategy.

Paul Stillmank - 7Summits

We talk regularly to brands about where to begin with social media. As we shared in our last blog post, eMarketer recently published a survey touting the many benefits of social media presence for brands: 

• Influence brand reputation
• Increase brand awareness
• Improve search engine rankings (SEO)
• Increased Website Traffic
• Lead Generation
• Improved Internal Commuication
• Increase Online Sales

Well, the inverse also is true. Especially for brands that have no effective or coordinated social media presence. All too often, we see the situation where a negative blog or discussion thread is ranking higher than a brand’s corporate website – or at least in the top 10 results in Google. We see negative user comments, ratings and reviews on social sites like Facebook, YouTube, Glassdoor or business listing sites like CitySearch or Yellow pages. Again, with no response from the brand involved. Most marketers remember the scramble in the late 90’s to register a domain name and get a web presence in the Web 1.0 brochure-ware days. By early 2000, marketers started to realize that they needed search engines (specifically Google) to help online audiences find them. The craft of SEO was born. Next, there was an emphasis on brand protection. Everyone started to compete for search real-estate by using paid ads (Adwords) to better position their brand, their company, and their products or services. New practices evolved like registering variations of domain names, including misspellings, so that competitors couldn’t hijack a brand. These same concepts apply to social media, but with a twist. By its very nature social media is a two-way conversation. Simply setting up a Facebook page or parking a Twitter account with no monitoring or moderation only amplifies your issues. A business that doesn’t invest here risks dilution of their brand, hijacking of new and existing customers by competitors, and a truly negative perception by consumers that expect their favorite brand or product to accessible and enabled via the social web – in their media.

Whether you’re a small or big brand, B2C or B2B, you can’t afford to delay developing a social media strategy for business. Just like the last two iterations of the web (web 1.0 and 2.0), you can’t do everything at once, but you also can’t afford to sit still. The bottom line here is that Social Media is now an important part of the mix. Investing the time and effort to create a proper social media strategy helps avoid poorly executed social campaigns with little or no positive impact. Set the right objectives, create the strategies to support delivering on them, and then prioritize your efforts to reach that overall outcome. There is a craft here. A well-planned approach to social media integrates your other marketing efforts, amplifying the overall effect. That’s how you gain ground on your competitors with the social web.

Paul Stillmank

7Summits