DISQUS

Thanks for the article.

One point I would add is that the Unique Value proposition is usually specific to a target in other words, "the audience your business is centered around reaching" is multiple.

As an example, if you're selling green cars, you have a different value proposition to the people in the "car industry" (where you compete with non green cars and other green cars) and to the people in the green industry ("where you compete with other way of spending money the green way - on the house, biking ...). These are two different "virtual communities" on the web.

This is to me essential. Any social marketing effort should start with strategy, targeting, identification of UVP and then execution. It's not easy but it's a key success factor in social marketing.

Best

Thanks for this excellent article.

I really enjoy your stress on strategy, focus on communities and blogs that matter and the discussion around twitter and facebook.

Best

Thanks for this article.

It's to me the most practical post I have read since... a long time, and we do follow 1000+ social marketing blogs ;-) . I specially enjoy:
- the need for strategy, targeting and the illustration on how you can use blogs
- the discussion around twitter and facebook.

Best

Great article and great approach: strategy , game plan, tactics.
I have a question so... I zoomed on the influencer list (a large version would be great)

Can you please tell me what audience, topic and community this list is about ?

I see green and auto blogs but also Engadget and blogs that come from the Personal Finance community like GetRichSlowly. I also see sites like Digg, Youtube, Autopia and AOL.

How did you build this list and how would you use such a list ?

I have the impression that you had a keywords focus too early in the process. (step 2).
We offer a different approach to influencer identification. Here is an example of our influencer list for "social media" http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/02/09/top-150-socia... and we may be able to help you build a relevant list of influencers if you tell us more about the audience you want to reach.

Best
Thanks

These big media have still brand recognition and "link juice" to offer.

If they would see themselves as "in the center of an influence network" and not as a portal , they could exchange this link juice against control over the exposition of their content, ad placement opportunity.

Best

dominique's last blog post..Social Media Campaign: A non sense?

Very interesting. Two ideas...

I believe that serendipity can be enabled thu "social relevance" instead or in addition to "search relevance". Amazon could extend its recommendation to what your friend have read/ liked and could probably help you discover things you were not searching for.

So it's possible to create this effect by replacing "behavioral suggestions" by "social suggestions"


Also more and more people consume information thru RSS readers . I read 1000+ blogs on social marketing. I read almost everything that's published by the top influencers and as an example, I read a story from R Scoble blog relative to "online life after death" I was not searching for.
It's not that different from finding an article you were not looking for in a newspaper.

So there is room for surprise and for hope.

Very interesting article.

- On the coordination: I don't know how you build a strategy using self organized group. It seems to me as these organizations are better for "response" type of action and "counter power".
Opensource has shown some interesting things with this regards but I'm not sure we're at a point where a self organised group could come up with let's say the new iPod.

I also think that so far, self organized group has not shown much ability to deal with money, IP and power to name a few.... but banks have not been very good at this either.

Thanks for the story. It's really funny !

Quick note: aren't other govt already using or about to get similar capabilities ?

dominique's last blog post..Fighting Social Media Fear

Great Post.

One risk I see in the "Ideastorm type of solution" is that if you don't build a strategy before and decide WHAT community you want to listen to, WHICH one you want to engage, and WHICH ONE you want to ignore, you may get a strongly biaised view of the market ...

The net on Ideastorm is that a vast majority of the idea is Linux/Ubuntu related (not exactly representative of the current market) or take the same implementation at Obama's site, you end up having "legalisation of marijuana" as the top issue in the US.

I posted on our blog on this topic: http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/01/22/dell-ideastor...

Thanks

Sure he is ! ... specially outisde of the US.

I'd like to contribute three links:

1- One post we wrote on team versus personal branding : http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/02/04/teams-bring-t...

2- an Rss feed about Personal Branding. We monitor 1000+ blogs about social media and these are the conversation about personal brandings in these blogs: http://conversation.ecairn.com/post/feed?key=ET...
(there is a significant level of duplicate information since people repurpose other people conversations... sometimes with value add).

Best

Loic,

I like the overall post, but your #4 is (to me) is just plainly wrong.

web2.0 or not, strategy is still key to build a product or a company. what if the people who react never would spend a $ for what you offer? or there are just not enough of them to support your infrastructure investment ?

Thanks for the list

Let me try a "positive demythification" ;-)

"Social Media doesn't scale": false, any sizable company has 1000's of people engaged in blogs, forums, social groups with work related conversations.
The challenge for companies is to leverage this time already spent and make its people productive.

I like the "everyone loves my brand". As a matter of fact, unless you're a really big name, people don't talk much about your brand or even don't talk about it at all. What discussions are about is "customer challenges" that you may solve, issues that are waiting for you to provide an answer to !

Thanks for the list

Let me try a "positive demythification" ;-)

"Social Media doesn't scale": false, any sizable company has 1000's of people engaged in blogs, forums, social groups with work related conversations.
The challenge for companies is to leverage this time already spent and make its people productive.

I like the "everyone loves my brand". As a matter of fact, unless you're a really big name, people don't talk much about your brand or even don't talk about it at all. What discussions are about is "customer challenges" that you may solve, issues that are waiting for you to provide an answer to !

Yes, these are great features.

On the other end... I strongly believe that communities span multiple infrastructures (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, forums, twitter...) and I would prefer for LinkedIn (and Plurk, and Facebook) to make it easier for everybody - specially for us - to get the valuable content that is developed in its groups and Q&A.

For example with the same type of RSS that twitter is providing ! Like this one:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=li...

;-)

As an entrepreneur, I'll stick to the "what does not kill you makes you stronger", instead of thinking about it once a day, we'll do it 3 times :-).. and focus.

That's a very interesting article. And I'm counting on the crisis to grow my business !

We sell a social marketing solution that enable marketers to extract customer insights, buzz & influence in blogs and social media .

Up to know, clients/prospects didn't feel the urgency of doing that. Most of them rely on consultants, agencies that provide market studies, use the phone to build focus group and PR .

Since last week, I sold a few licenses to people who had a second look at it and want to leverage the activity of their employees (marketing, analysts that read blogs and participate in social networks) to extract the value from social media and dramatically cut their marketing budget.

I'm changing my sales pitch towards " marketing with zero dollars !"

Chris, Thanks for the great article.

One point on "better have operators standing by".

I think there are already tons of operators standing by in any company.

Many of the 20+ M people in LinkedIn and the 150+M in Facebook and Myspace are employees and most of them listen and engage in conversations that are work related.

I would also argue that people know how to pick up the phone and use it. ( Frank at Comcast seems to do a very good job at using the Tweeter phone :-) ) Actually, generation Y may have learned before we noticed it existed.

Take any sizable company and ask these 3 questions:

- how many of your employees are engaged in social media?
- how many man days are they spending on work related topics in social media ?
- what is the current benefit for your company ( do they learn ?, increase your brand recognition ?, do they sell ? make your customers happy ? or worse...)

So to me the issue is not to teach social media to individuals but for companies to figure out how they leverage it.

Thanks

@ Adrian,

Fully agreed. I think much more value in people empowered to deliver value add messages, like the Zappos example you mentioned rather than "spamming campaigns".

I just think it cannot be chaos.

Take the example of customer support, a company can empower its employees to help consumer and to engage in conversations. But this requires a lot of education on what to say to whom, when . Let's imagine a Microsoft employee telling my mum how to patch her OS :-), this could be something !

I really liked your article.

I'm just out of an investor event where it seems like the focus has shifted towards cleantech and biotech and the internet is dead !

In my view, the social web and its potential impact on behavior is where to look for solutions to the most critical challenges our world is facing . To name a few: terrorism, climate change , survival of capitalism as we know it.

So it's good to know some investors still find interest in that space !

Great points.

When you say ... "doesn't matter how much money you through", I'm not so sure. It really depends on what you do with the money.

Imagine you're a big brand about to launch a new product that is highly differentiated on customer pain point A and B. ( i.e you've done it the Seth Godin's way).

You could build a strategy to make your points in social media and line up your PR, marketing teams along this objective.

This means figuring where your purple cows are hanging out in social media, capturing each and every conversation related to the pain point you just brilliantly solved and empower your people to collectively join the conversation and make yout company point.

Not thru "spam like" or irrelevant sales pitch but just participating to the conversations with strategic intent, metrics, listening to potential objections and learning along the process.

This makes a difference and the ability of Large companies to line up 10's of highly skilled people to do that would make that difference.

One of the pb (which I think is a maturity pb) is that, as you said, many marketing teams have the mindset of influencing in one click, and they then leave it to few early adopters in their team (like R Scoble) to fill the void.

No wonder all the discussions about personal branding versus employer branding that we see growing these recent weeks.

By the way, what's this rumor about the US adopting French as its official language ?

Here are a couple of thoughts..

One pb is that hyper targeting currently means hypertargeting the user (i.e a genre, a zip code) not a community. The issue on advertising are the issue of behavioral targeting not those of social targeting.

For me social hypertargeted advertising does not equate behavioral and social search and hypertargeted advertising are two aspects of the same issues.

My theory: we're moving from a world where people were publishing towards universal audience (the web) towards a world where people publish towards communities ( spread in multiple infrastructures).

Within communities people use "codes" to discriminate who's in and who's not. Can be style, icons, shared references, language register.

This goes way beyond keywords.

Unless technology and an entire infrastructure comes up that discover and expose these codes, style and register along with advertising platforms that allow targeting against them, there will not be any social search nor social hypertargeted advertising.

On our end, we've done experiment in social hypertargeted advertising and what we find difficult is to "engineer" landing page that match the social ads. But the results are quite interesting.

So, I think the opportunity will be realized, but there is still a long way to go.

Very interesting post.

What strikes me in these analysis is that everything is said as if the "consumer" was something static, solid and not a variable !

In other words, if social media changes the way consumer behaves towards " we don't know what", then both mimetic and long tail questions are irrelevant.

As an illustration, Karp's point" people want to read what other people are reading"

a) Most of the teen I know do not read. Period. Or they read "things" that do not have names like a book or a magazine but Myspace and SkyBlog entries.
b)Also, how do you know what other people are reading? in a pre web2.0 model, thru big TV ads and newspaper articles. In a web2.0, thru amazon recommendation engine... if the engine is biaised towards big titles, you'll got the same effect, if it's more fine grain in its suggestion algorithm, then you're DRIVING the consumer to diversity.

The later is interesting since it could blend mimetic and long tail :-)

Very interesting post.

What strikes me in these analysis is that everything is said as if the "consumer" was something static, solid and not a variable !

In other words, if social media changes the way consumer behaves towards " we don't know what", then both mimetic and long tail questions are irrelevant.

As an illustration, Karp's point" people want to read what other people are reading"

a) Most of the teen I know do not read. Period. Or they read "things" that do not have names like a book or a magazine but Myspace and SkyBlog entries.
b)How do you know what other people are reading? in a pre web2.0 model, thru big TV ads and newspaper articles. In a web2.0, thru amazon recommandation engine... if the engine is biaises towards big title, you'll got the same effect, if it's more fine grain in its suggestion algorithm, then you're DRIVING the consumer to diversity.

The later is interesting since it could blend mimetic and long tail :-)

On your point relative to business use of social media. One analogy I like is the one of open source software where communities created product.

Maybe the business use of social media is to opensourced their marketing department ?