Social Media – ROI, Value, Etc – It’s some sort of glue

I’ve been stepping back and looking at social media in a bigger picture context, and I think that is where you can prove value and ROI. As a stand alone project, social media’s ROI/Value can be difficult to prove to a CMO. “So, let me get this straight, by blogging you will increase my sales?” Now this in the thick of social media do have charts and graphs that can prove this… but it takes some digestion to get it (and having CMO’s actually participate to really get it). But if social media is part of a larger web presence for a brand/product – the value of why do it makes a lot of sense.

Organic Search/Search + Social Media
Reach + Social Media
Impressions + Social Media

In any of those contexts it gets much easier to explain the value/ROI of why you need social media involved in your web presence strategy.

This thing called the Web – No mom, that’s not just “another link”

Explaining what I do for work to anyone can at times be challenging. Explaining it to my mother is an art. One I have not completely mastered. But I will say, if you need to test any of your web ideas out…always run them past my mother. She will break your experience design without even trying. She’s brilliant like that and doesn’t even know it. Same with my father. May be the best usability testing team on the planet. But I digress ( I love saying that).

When I was trying to explain what I do the last time something really stuck with me. That the web is all activity or search, and that Web 2.0 is really about the activities we can do with the web. I know, I know…this is obvious to most of us. But not to my mother. And when you have to slow it down and explain it…that when we go to the web we are looking to “do something”, it makes a lot of sense that your web presence should be about an activity design, what do you what consumers to do where.

Leading by example – or, get out of the way

I’ve be dormant on the web presence/social media front for awhile. And I think the echo chamber has hit a point…put up or shut up. I sat down and looked at the projects I’ve done over the last 2 years. Some pretty cool stuff that I’m guessing nobody knows about. And some pretty cool things that never got done. It’s time to fail forward, fast.

Just a couple of things, rolling around in my head…

Now my water cooler discussions were more centered around the lofty ‘what is social media’ discussion…which I’m currently boiling down to – social media is just content and should be treated as such (I do think it is more than that, but for space/arguement on the blog…running with that this morning). After reading through several of the linking posts on the best practices meme, ended up with a couple of favorites that I think are related to what I think is a best practice for social media…or a starting place for a social media game plan.

When I first started advising team members and clients on social media I recommended a strategy to do one of two things for consumers in social media land. We needed to either 1) give consumers something to talk about or 2) a place for consumers to say something (ok, you could/should do both).

I felt that running with this strategy would lead brand stakeholders to a wide range of tactics…with the key being that they would now be at least participating with consumers in some form/function, which to me was key.

So after wading through some of the best practices posts, found a couple that I think relate to my thinking and either add to, evolve, or compliment it.

Jason Falls leads off with ‘embrace your audience‘. Which I twist to – know your audience (embracing to means know that you know your audience to a certain degree). This is a key foundation point…know who you are going to be participating with and what they want/like/feel/etc.

Beth Harte raises the point of ‘provide a platform‘. Give you consumers a place to chat, get them going. And I really like that she cuts to the chase and adds, “Why wait for those limited occasions?”. Lead your consumers with a place to chat if they don’t have one. And if they do, give them extensions there to help them talk.

And if they are well cemented with there own places to chat, then follow Kipp Bodnar advice and create value for your consumers. I would evolve that a tad and say, create value with them. Play the curator role and serve information/content for the discussions happening out there. Respond to issues that people are having and know when to peel back the certain and let your brand story out.

All these points I think can lead to a strong foundation strategy which then we can modify from client to client. To me, that is what leads to some of the social media best practices.

I know I need to embellish more on my initial thoughts that I think all social media is just content. I’ll try to get back to that soon…maybe after I’ve had my coffee this morning.

Ok, While I haven’t read the report yet…I will…my first gut reaction is that the ‘people will be buying experiences’ isn’t new. I’ve seen that in a couple of different places for awhile. What puzzles me is when/why did this become new? Of course it is about the experiences…but then again, it is how you define experiences.

Is experience -

1) I want to make sure I am cool, so if I buy a red piece of gum because everyone else is I will have the experience of feeling ‘in’

2) I actually need some decent gum, umm, red gum, it was a good product, i had a pleasant experience, it met my needs to chew and flavor

3) I’m buying red gum because MTV told me to. Which could be just like #1…but in my mind they are kind of different. One is because you experience others around you, the other is a manufactured brand.

Now getting past the experience thing for a bit…I’ve talked about it before, how people are defining themselves by their media and experiences, not their tangible goods. So where does a brand experience fit into that? Have a good product, tell that product’s story.

I think what we really are experiencing is the death of manufactured brand experience.

With that said, here is my Chatback badge…give it a chat…because hey, it’s not like I don’t need another distraction at work.

Thanks to the peeps for the heads up. Though I do have a question, why doesn’t Seth allow comments on his blog?

There has been some good thinking on the subject already. Noah weaves some thinking around engagement, or participation, of what is being spread and how Strong vs. Weak ties within social networks drive viral. I’ve been doing some of my own work on the idea of Strong vs. Weak ties and have found that yes ,you can identify the spreaders or influentials within networks. For me, they are the weak ties across networks. The reason a weak tie is the influential is that they are the ones that have the best opportunity to continue the spread of a message to a wide range of individuals. Now while they are easy to identify on paper, much more difficult in reality for a couple of reasons. But there are a couple of problems with this thinking. First, just because on paper someone is a weak tie, i.e. has multiple social points they participate in, doesn’t mean they are an ‘active’ membrane for messages/ideas/trends. They could just be by-standers in different groups. The other problem is, and you could say it is the human factor, the ties (Weak or Strong) are in a constant state of flux. And I think this is the point that Mike Arauz is getting to. That influence and influentials are part of a very complex relationship system.

Scott Monty is right that really to make influential marketing work the right pieces need to be in the right place at the right time. But it wasn’t until I read Armano’s post that it clicked in for me. Armano pointed out that influentials must work because he didn’t read the article against influentials (even though he saw the Fact Company headline) until an influential pointed it out to him. That’s when it clicked – context and relevance.

So the influential equation might look something like this – the message needs to be context and relevant, delivered by someone who has access to multiple audiences and is a participator within their multiple audiences. When identifying an influential strategy we need not just to identify influentials, but the audiences to which the influentials will interact/engage with and apply that learning/insight to the message/idea/trend we want to spread.

Update: Have you noticed the number of articles/post of influentials lately? Just saw this one on automotive influentials.

In my own observations, I think we have hit the tipping point within the general masses of people feeling comfortable blogging. For the sake or argument, I’m staying in the blogging world…I think this trend actually holds true across all consumer created content. I say this because the same girl who said that quote has just started blogging more on a regular basis. Her friends are the same way. I’ve noticed that co-workers who have teased me in the past about having a blog…have now started their own. They post fairly regularly – pics, videos, etc.

Fueling this I believe is the combination of several trends;

• Adoption of reading blogs has tipped – from journalist to my office mate who read 15 craft blogs a day
• Blogging is becoming accepted and is shedding the ‘only early adopters do that’ attitude
• Tools to blog, post pics, post video are now very simple
• People feel comfortable publishing

In an interesting spin, I think Facebook became the Trojan horse and catalyst for people to get into blogging. For the sake of argument lets say that Facebook is basically a personal content aggregator to all your friends. It opened the door to let a group of people know that you’ve been tagged in a photo. Mentally, this helps people get over the hump of having themselves published on the internet…and actually they think it is not that bad. But while Facebook is great for aggregating content, it doesn’t really have the ability to create content, allowing for people to express themselves beyond just a photo tag. Creating a simple blog does. For the 80% of 18-42 year olds who have broadband (rough summary/estimate from this emarketer report), blogging is now just another simple login. With news stories of people micro-publishing, a la twitter, the masses also get comfortable with the idea that they don’t have to publish the next great novel on their blog.

Given, this trend is all from the observation of space 967 on the 9th floor of 110 North 5th Street. But if my co-workers who just gotten into blog stick with it…we just might be on to something. We might be able to ladder this up and say this is part of a larger trend and that ‘08 will be about mass adoption of people creating their own content, growing the content creators past the 1-10% range…but that’s another blog post.

Update: Thank you Heather for the edits. 

While co-host Sarah and I had throw out the topic of discussing trends/predictions of ‘08, the conversation quickly wandered in its own direction. Check the likemind.min twitter to get a quick idea what we were chatting about…but with some many different conversations, it was hard to twitter any centralized them.

Next month we will be celebrating out 1 year anniversary of likemind.min. Reflecting back over the last year they have been several nice surprises that have come out of this group. Now I can trade emails with likemind around the world. Hopefully in ‘08 will do some traveling to meet some of them. Was able to pull a conference panel together through likemind connections (how I got to meet Noah). But what I like the most about our group is that it has stayed true to the main idea – a non-agenda meet up of people who are likeminded.

Stay tuned for likemind.min celebration details…don’t worry, it won’t be at 8am.