Best Practices

When I introduce myself as a social media strategist, the second most common question people ask me is “How do I know if social media would help my business?” (the most common is “what exactly does that mean you do?”).

The truth is that social media is not the best strategy for every company in the world. But it can be useful in a surprisingly large number of businesses.

Why? Because the web is a long tail of niche markets, and owning that niche effectively can be as powerful as being the most well-known store in town.

There are three important questions you can ask about your business to find out if using social media makes sense for you. Let’s look at an example.

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I’m almost finished reading Groundswell (yes, I know, I can be a slow reader), and one of the themes that I see consistently popping up throughout the book is what they call the POST method, which stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology.

I’ll let you grab the book or check out the groundswell blog to learn more about the POST method in detail, but the gist of it is this: you need to figure everything else out before you decide on what technology you’re going to use.

They’re absolutely right. Not only do different social technologies appeal to different audiences (which one is yours?), but the technology is changing so quickly that if you pick the technology first and try to build from that, by the time you have a complete project, you could be outdated.

It’s a good rule of thumb in social media to think of the community first.

The two most common pieces of advice you’ll hear about developing a Facebook app are probably:

1. Viral ideas are like half-cooked spaghetti; some of the stick to the wall, but you have to throw a bunch of noodles to find out which
2. Launch you app before it’s “finished,” and develop it over time as new features occur to you

I call this strategy of developing apps over time “baby step development,” because it relies significantly on incrementalism, or taking baby steps with your product.

Why is this important in social media?

Because what you’re looking for is engagement. Facebook highlighted this when they introduced the idea of “daily active users” for an app, instead of just counting the number of people who have installed an app.

And what better way to keep people coming back to your app than to keep adding new features and responding to user requests?

From that standpoint, it’s important that you look at any Facebook or OpenSocial app spec as something to provide a trajectory, not just a product.

When we build Facebook applications we always start with a spec.

A spec is a document that details the complete application user flow and provides the technical details necessary to put together a functional back end and stay with Facebook’s ever-morphing application terms of service. Basically it’s like a blueprint for your house.

We’ve talked with some clients who want to work from another Facebook application instead of first doing a spec.

I get the logic: “Here is a complete application that is already on Facebook. We know it conforms to the terms of service (or is not yet shut down) and we know how popular it already is. Why do I need to pay money to have someone write out the functionality when they can just look at it in action?”

Aside from the obvious possible pitfalls of simply cloning someone else’s application, ranging from possible copyright issues to opening yourself up to getting bashed the reviews, you’re only looking at half the picture when you’re using an application.

While the user flow is important to every application, it’s equally (if not more) important to have a complete framework for what the app requires technically. The plumbing, if you’ll allow me to continue the construction metaphor, needs to be planned out before you start nailing planks of wood together.

A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

Earlier today, I posted about how Barack Obama’s website allows users to build their own fundraising campaigns and community blogs. To be sure, it’s a great way to encourage grassroots participation — but it can also be a recipe for disaster if you don’t execute properly.

It was revealed today that a user on the Obama site — ostensibly a supporter of his rival Hillary Clinton — used a JavaScript exploit to redirect the entire community section of his site to Clinton’s campaign website. Apparently, users can drop code — completely unfettered — into their own personal sites, giving them the ability to create any number of malicious behaviors. Already, people have suggested how to deposit malware and spyware onto the site.

I think the Obama campaign should pester their staffer, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to help them fix this problem and to anticipate other exploits. After all, Facebook has built a whole suite of code restrictions around its platform in order to prevent just these sorts of attacks.

Earlier this month, I wrote about how the presidential campaigns were using online social networks to give the appearance of listening to stakeholders. Baratunde Thurston wrote a great response — complete with diagrams — and brought up many important points.

One of those points outlined how candidates “listen” to constituents online by raising money:

Again, politicians are at the top of the heap, this time tapping into millions of small donors. Obama is the king of this right now. At this phase, politicians enable donors to solicit from other donors with their own mini-campaigns and donation widgets. This is significant, as it threatens the big time financial interests who’ve long held the ear (and balls) of our elected officials.

Here’s his diagram:

But both of our posts overlooked a key piece of this fundraising phenomenon, which might look something like this:

As Baratunde noted, Obama is dominating in the small donations category. He’s had a record-breaking 1 million individual donors to his campaign. His website is also ideally poised to enable his supporters to raise money for him, creating their own portals at MyBarackObama.com and rolling their own fundraising campaigns.

New York filmmaker and photographer Scott Cohen decided to use this capability to build something innovative: An Obama Minute. The idea was to encourage 10,000 people to give $100 each to the campaign at an appointed hour. The movement was picked up by other Obama supporters online, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which has been pimping the initiative on its website.

The jury is still out on just how much this campaign will raise. But no matter the outcome, the Obama campaign is to be congratulated for creating the fertile soil in which these kinds of grassroots efforts can grow. In my first post on this subject, I wrote about the five major goals of online community building as outlined by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in Groundswell:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

The fundraising tools at MyBarackObama.com are a great example of #4: helping your community members to support one another, and help you in the process.

Mashable posted yesterday about Flickr Code, the new — and rainbow-colored — site for Flickr developers. From there, you can easily access the Dev blog, monitor new Flickr deployments, discuss the API, work on the open-source Flickr Uploadr, or as Mashable put it, “snoop in on the Flickr dev team and see what tricky business they’ve been involved in.”

If you’ve clicked over to the site, you’ve probably noticed by now that this community site isn’t even a proper social network in and of itself. It relies on links to existing message and chat boards within Flickr, posts from an existing developer blog, and a random stream of photos from Flickr headquarters.  It’s not new content, but it’s presented in a new way, at a destination that’s just for the truly geeky coder types who build stuff around Flickr.

If your organization has a community of geeks or developers that work around your product, and you want to show them how much you care, it’s as easy as repurposing content from other sources — like your developer blog, or from certain threads in your forums — and putting it in one easy-to-find portal. If you don’t happen to have a fully-fledged social networking tool onboard like Flickr does, it’s pretty easy to build one with the free, open-source forum software known as Vanilla.

We got an RFP and a Facebook Application Spec in the inbox this morning that highlights one of typical pitfalls we find that people run into when they’re developing a concept and a spec for their app: they’re missing a social metaphor.

We find that one of they key factors in how much pickup a Facebook Application gets is how well it taps into the social connections that people have created. The “social metaphor” I’m talking about is this: how can some action in your application be equated to a real social interaction between friends?

If people can use your application to connect with others, they will do so. If they feel that their interaction with other people through your application is meaningless, they will probably abandon it.

Basically, setting up invites and plunking something into the feed is not enough to make it work.

Scrabulous for example allows you to “nudge” players that aren’t making their moves quickly enough for your taste. It’s a very simple feature, but it’s one that instantly conjures up the image of sitting around a scrabble board and going “hey, Jimmy, it’s your turn.”

I know that’s not a feature that has a lot to do with gaining users, but you bet your underoos it keeps their daily active users count nice and high.

Facebook, like the desktop and the web, is a platform. But it has a different set of features and rules, and if you take something designed for the desktop or the web, and just plug it into Facebook without taking advantage of the rich relationship information available there, it’s far less likely to work.

Not sure about your idea? We’re happy to build you a spec that works.

Educated professionals are a key constituency for every successful campaign, as they tend to be both civic-minded and have the disposable income necessary to make campaign contributions. This constituency is building an online community on Linkedin, and all three major presidential candidates are using the site’s Answers feature to ask those constituents questions.

Seven months ago, Senator Obama asked, “How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” Yesterday, Senator McCain joined the conversation by asking, “What is the biggest challenge America faces?”

In their new book, Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff outline five major objectives in online community building:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

If I had to wager, I’d say that the candidates’ efforts on Linkedin fall neatly into the second category. [click to continue...]

The Gang over at techPresident has astutely observed that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is geotargeting her site’s content. Depending on where users are located, they might see campaign content about seating delegates from Michigan and Florida, supporting Senator Clinton in Pennsylvania, or how to help the campaign in Indiana.

If your business goals include outreach to location-based communities, geotargeting is a cheap and effective way present them with the content most relevant and useful to them. Users might not notice that they’re being geotargeted, but they’ll certainly find your site more helpful and relevant than that of your competition.

Well, she is when it comes to you. Scoble’s still pretty darn influential, to be sure. But a recent study by Canadian research firm Pollara demonstrates that when it comes to key purchasing decisions, people trust friends and family more than they trust famous bloggers:

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

This seems to back up the model advocated by Duncan Watts:

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

It may be that we need to shift away from the “influencer-focused” model when it comes to online social marketing. It may be more productive to assist passionate users — be they bloggers with a PageRank of 8 or your grandpa — to connect with the people that trust them in a way that is relevant to the core value of the product.

In short, you need to engage with your user community and provide them with tools they find useful. This can be as simple as blogging about an issue of core interest to your community and making it easy for them to share your content with their friend when they see fit. It may be more complex — an organization targeting busy commuters could build an interactive map of public transit options in major metropolitan areas.

It might be that — as the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives recently decided — you’ll need to build a full-featured social network for your users to help them support one another.

But if engaging with the most widely read bloggers is your only strategy for using leveraging the social Web as a marketing tool, you may want to rethink things a bit.

Microsoft has produced a hilarious ad that perfectly encapsulates the major issues facing advertisers and consumers:

One of the five possible goals of online community building covered in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s new book Groundswell is listening, which is not something some advertisers are doing very well these days.

[Via Ken Burbary.]

Aspiring iPhone developers are getting rejection letters by the thousands. Meanwhile, developers who have made it into the beta program are reporting that the shallow integration leaves next to no opportunity to build anything meaningful. Update: Developer Craig Hockenberry has a very interesting perspective on one of the major issues at stake in the debate.

A few months ago at Community Next, Mitch Kapor was bemoaning a similar problem with regard to the Facebook platform. It appears that at first pass, most developers are going to be dissatisfied with the options available to them on any platform.

This is symptomatic of one of the fundamental tensions Kapor described in his talk: platforms want to open up slowly and test the waters. Developers want to do everything right away. In the end, smart people usually find a way to work around platform limitations and go on to build cool stuff.

That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with developer communities, and it’s safe to say that Apple isn’t doing a great job. At the risk of driving everyone nuts with another Mark Zuckerberg / SXSW post, I’d like to hold the Facebook team up as an example of how to start doing things right.

After his much-lambasted keynote interview, Zuckerberg made the decision to appear at the Facebook developer garage the following afternoon. During the Q&A, I noticed that he was more at ease onstage than we’ve ever seen him. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was in his element chatting informally with geeks.

Whatever the cause, he was positively ebullient — by Zuckerbergian standards, anyway. Afterwards, he made himself extremely accessible. And since then, he’s been giving out interviews left and right, which has earned him some — IMHO, undeserved — scorn from Valleywag.

If Facebook keeps this up, they’re going to become a poster child for how to interact with developers. Of course, I don’t expect Zuckerberg to pull a Steve Ballmer anytime soon. Running up and down a stage screaming “Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!” doesn’t really strike me as his style.

But as we watched his eyes light up while answering our questions about the site he has built from the ground up, many of us in the room gained a deeper understanding of his passion for and commitment to the platform. As I told him afterwards, that was the moment when a many of us decided, “this Zuckerberg guy isn’t evil.”

At base, what this really means it that for platform owners to maximize developer engagement and productivity, they need to overcommunicate, demonstrate passion, and offer inspiration. That doesn’t mean that they need to tell developers what to do.

Zuckerberg — rightly, I think — demonstrated great reluctance to tell people what kinds of applications to build. But platform owners need to say, “Together, we are going to build something amazing! What’s more, it’s going to be fun! Developers of the world, to me! Now, here’s how this is going to work…”

Apple has every right to take baby steps with the nascent developer community forming around the iPhone. But in the process, they can make the road less bumpy for themselves by offering an unprecedented opening of the kimono.

I’m not holding my breath — it is Apple, after all. But even a statement as simple as, “we want to take it slowly because of x, y, and z,” would be sufficient.