Best Practices

We are so in the right business according to the Wall Street Journal. Lee Gomes interviews chief executive of Sparta Social Networks, who apparently is making big, big money from supplying dedicated social networks to companies. Don’t have plans to build your own? Better get on it:

“…social networks have become the Web site of this decade. Back in the ’90s if you didn’t have a Web site you were irrelevant; the same was true with having an e-commerce site in 2001. That is where social networks are right now.”

We’re helping clients now with specs and designs for their own private-branded social networks and it sounds like we are charging not nearly enough:

” A highly customized social network can run between six and seven figures. But those are ones with lots of bells and whistles.”

I say bullcookies to this. Almost all companies need a web site. A much smaller percentage need to provide a Facebook-style community to join. Harley Davidson fanatics are not the same as Clapper owners.

Given the open source solutions out there — seven figures as a relevant range figure seems outlandishly high to me, at least for the initial launch. I suspect you could push it to include the allocated overhead related to the time spent by marketing V.P.s and other high-level staffers required to make it take hold, and certainly maintaining servers dedicated to millions uploading videos etc. would require that kind of budget. A major marketing campaign could be a part the expense being considered here — but I doubt it.

For the vast majority of companies, a custom social network should run between four and five figures IMHO.

Launching a social network? Plan to spend seven figures? We want to have you speak at our next conference. Contact steve AT parnassusgroup DOT com.

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In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you know that many economists have been predicting an economic downturn — perhaps a recession — in the coming year.

A group of my favorite Forrester analysts, including Jeremiah Owyang, Josh Bernoff, and Charlene Li, got together to discuss how this potential recession might affect the work that Web-based and community marketers do. Their conclusion is that social marketing is uniquely suited to weather an economic storm.

They’ve put their conclusions together into a report that I highly recommend that you take the time to download and read. The main points:

•  ”Consumers in a down market pinch pennies. Brand advertising in mass media loses effectiveness because it’s harder for consumers to go from ‘I know about that product’ to ‘I’m going to buy that product.’”
• “Social applications like discussion forums are better than advertising at helping people in the consideration phase when they’re on the fence about purchasing. In a recession, improving consideration will be more cost-effective than blasting awareness messages at resistant consumers.”

They also make one very important recommendation: focus on results:

Many interactive marketers tell us they’re just ‘toe-dipping’ with social applications. Toe-dipping won’t survive recessionary cost cuts. Instead, concentrate on programs with clear objectives tied to metrics like increased sales conversions, measurable word-of-mouth, or improvements in online buzz…

Your CEO is warning your VP of advertising to prepare to cut spending. You should be whispering in her other ear with stats about how your email marketing, search marketing, or online advertising programs are paying off.

So whatever you do, be it Facebook application, a Drupal-supported online community, or a blog aimed at informing your customers, make sure to have some idea of your desired outcome and a way to measure it.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article about using online social networks as market research tools glossed over an important feature of these tools: community. The only mention of community:

Many of their efforts have fallen flat, because people typically join a social-networking venue not to talk about brands but to socialize with friends…The companies that set them up have to constantly add games and other features — as well as provide incentives such as coupons, giveaways and sneak peeks at new products — to keep members around.

Whatever happened to just creating a community? Yes, giveaways and incentives are all well and good. But the most authentic way to get your audience to stick around is by offering them real connections with one another.

The article cites Del Monte Foods, the makers of Snausages. They used their closed “I Love My Dog” network to figure out what the new flavor for their breakfast bites should be.

If you want to build a network of dog owners to bounce your product ideas off of, focus on connecting them with one another. How about mashing up Google’s Maps API with the locations of all the public off-leash areas nationwide? Let dog lovers connect with others who use their dog parks and arrange playdates for their pooches. You won’t have to work so hard with the giveaways if the users create their own connections and reasons for returning.

The cardinal rule: be useful.

Business Week reports that a number of oenophiles — read: lovers of wine — are starting their own online businesses to cater to the community.

Many of these “oen-trepreneurs” are putting online community building ahead of getting funded, even going into debt rather than sacrifice a community vision:

Sagi Solomon founded OpenBottles in 2005. An attorney in San Jose, Calif., Solomon hopes to make the wine review and social-networking site his only full-time job next year. He deliberately avoided outside investment, however, because he does not want his vision for the company diluted. “It’s costly to get venture financing, and you do give up not only equity in the company but overall control of strategy and where you want to take the business,” Solomon says.His model for growth is Craigslist: “He started it on his own with no financing, and it’s grown into this really vibrant community,” Solomon says.

Of course, this makes me wonder why Solomon and his cohort are worried that potential investors won’t embrace a community-driven business model. With all the VC money out there for smart social media startups, why wouldn’t investors in wine-driven sites be similarly community savvy?

Chris Brogan is one of my favorite thinkers in the social media space, and I’m very fortunate to have met him on a couple of occasions. Last week, he posted a great article entitled “Marketing is NOT Social Media-Social Media is NOT Marketing.”

In it — and I paraphrase here — Chris argues that marketers who screw up in the social media space are often confusing the medium with the practice. Marketing is a discipline that is all about shaping and controlling a message. Social media are tools that allow ordinary people — or at least geekier-than-average ordinary people — to create and distribute content themselves.

In short, social media enables the little guy to make his voice heard.

Marketers should turn to social media the same way the little guy does — to connect. Self-expression and connection with other human beings are the bedrock reason why people are drawn to YouTube and Facebook and WordPress.  If you use those tools as just another distribution channel for the same message you’ve been sending down a thousand other channels — radio, TV, print — they’ll fail to translate nine times out of ten.

The result is that you look ham-handed, desperate and spammy.

Working from Chris’ central thesis, these are my recommendations for marketers:

1. If you want to understand social media, start using it as an individual first before you use it on behalf of a client. Pick a passion that has nothing to do with work and explore its presence on the tools you’re curious about. Hint: try using Google’s search within a site function — type “keyword site:twitter.com” into Google — to seek keywords within Twitter.com. That’s a great way to find people to follow. You can do this for other sites as well, like YouTube.
2. Observe what people do, then jump in and try your hand at commenting, leaving a video response, tweeting a bit, etc.
3. Eventually, you’ll start to feel a sense of investment in whatever community you are participating in. Once you’ve reached that level, you have the necessary understanding to apply the practice to your marketing life.
4. Pick one of the social media tools you’ve explored and see if you can find either a community of your client’s stakeholders or conversations about your client. Now, think back to your personal online community and ask yourself, “if a marketer came into our community and wanted to talk about their client, what would I want from them?”

I was pretty darn excited when I read that Facebook is licensing its platform to Bebo. So was my good buddy Rodney Rumford, who promptly signed up for Bebo and sent me a friend request.

“Now is as good a time as any to sign up for Bebo,” I thought. So I clicked on Rodney’s request link and signed up.

A social network is no fun if you have only one friend — no offense to Rodney — so I decided to find out which people I already know. First, I entered my gmail username and password and looked through the list of my gmail contacts that are on Bebo. I sent invites to a select few.

Then I repeated the process with my AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account. I typed in my username and password and hit the button to authorize Bebo to access my information. The browser munched for 60 seconds and then I got an error message saying that the AOL server had timed out. I figured I’d try again later and moved on to monitoring my Twitter feed.

That’s when Andru Edwards Twittered at me to let me know that he’d received a spam message from my AIM account. This is what he saw:

I was pretty confused at first, but then I realized that somehow Bebo must have erred on the side of sending out the notification anyway, even though the server burped.

In any case, I hadn’t planned on sending out a notification to my entire buddy list, so I do apologize to those of you who received spammy messages from me. How irritating of Bebo.

In the past few months, I’ve become a lot more rigid in my friending behavior. Before then, if you wanted to be my Facebook friend, all you had to do was hit “add friend.” But as I got more into the social networking space and received more friend requests from random people I didn’t know, I started asking myself about what kinds of behaviors I found acceptable in an e-friend.

I’ve already written (and spoken) at some length about why I’ve stopped accepting friend requests from random people without an explanatory personal message. After all, if you can’t take the time to put your friend request in context, why would I want to take the time to get to know you?

A more recent item on my list of unacceptable behaviors is spamminess. I’ve had a couple of people friend me now, only to send me nothing but self-promotional messages and make self-promotional postings on my wall. I even had one friend who sucked my e-mail address out of Facebook and send me a completely self-promotional e-mail that started with the words “Dear Facebook Friend.”

Be forewarned, these kinds of behaviors are increasingly common on Facebook. And they will get you unfriended if you persist. If you request my friendship on Facebook I’m going to assume that you have an interest in me personally. If your behavior proves that assumption wrong, I’m not going to keep you around.

I’m starting a new rule: if I get more than two bulk messages from a group in the space of a week, I’m leaving the group.

It seems like people are responding to e-mail less and less frequently these days, and it can become very tempting to start using that “message all members” feature in a Facebook group to ping a couple hundred people every time you have a new post or a new quiz or a new thread somewhere you want people to follow.

That’s a great trick for making sure the big stuff gets noticed, but it works because it is not yet over-used. Save it for the stuff that’s really interesting, or when you really need the input (like our topic tables poll).

Now that a business can create pages on Facebook, I think we should create a distinction between how pages and groups are used and approached. It’s not a functionality thing; it’s a hands-on-the-table sort of thing.

When I become a fan of a page in Facebook, I understand that one of the primary reasons the page exists is to promote someone’s brand, or idea, or product, or web page. I’m following them because I’m either interested in or willing to support whatever it is they’re promoting. I’m also giving them permission to put their brand in my newsfeed and to message me with relatively commercial “updates.”

No, that doesn’t mean they can or should spam me, but these messages go into a separate tab in my inbox (Updates), where I can keep them separate from my regular “messages.” I like this system. I want to encourage people to send their promotional updates to my updates tab and personal messages to my messages tab. I think that distinction is good to have.

Radio is one of the most endangered of the traditional media. More and more, listeners are looking online for their news. So how’s a radio station to compete? NPR has done so quite successfully under the supervision of chief executive Ken Stern. He shared five great tips with the Wall Street Journal today:

1. Speed up. The pace of innovation has increased immeasurably.
2. While new times call for new products and new ways of doing business, remember that your values never change.
3. Invest in your employees: challenge them and train them for new opportunities.
4. Embrace new partnerships and new alliances.
5. Never forget your core business; for us, producing great radio programs for great radio stations.

Overall, I think tip three is the most important. A good company invests in making sure that its employees are responsive to and comfortable with change, rather than blindsided and scared by it.

Jake McKee asked a brilliant question on Linkedin: Answers yesterday. Well, ask a brilliant question, get a brilliant answer (or ten).

Jake’s inquiry:

What kinds of tools, processes, games, and anything else do you give to users and/or moderators to help check large amounts of content? What have you seen or heard about that’s a unique approach to online moderation?

Some of my favorite answers thus far: [click to continue...]

I sent out a mass event invitation to members of the Web Community Forum Facebook group last week. After this, I noticed a huge spike in my friend requests. At first, I didn’t put two and two together. But I did notice that not a single one of the people who friended me — none of whom I had ever met in the real world — felt the need to provide me with any context for how they knew me.

I sent back messages to the first two people who requested my friendship, politely asking, “how do I know you?” In both cases, the reply was, “you just invited me to your event.” Feeling silly, I responded to subsequent requests by checking through the list of Web Community Forum group members to see if there was a match. If so, I went ahead and approved the request.

This raises a few points of Fetiquette (etiquette in Facebook):

1. Is it acceptable to send out a mass event invitation via the “host” function that allows you to pair a group with an event, or should you invite people more sparingly as you get to know them?
2. If you’re an admin, shouldn’t you be able to recognize every single one of your group members by name and photo without having to look through the list? (And does this make me a bad admin?)
3. Is it acceptable to friend someone who sent you an event invitation via a group without providing context?

What do you guys think?

I think people are finding out that there’s a fine line between what’s pushy, dumb advertising and what’s smart, fun advertising. More and more often, I’m finding that people resent ads that are deceitful, and ads that are too overt.

What does that leave? Not much. But I think a sponsored gift of Facebook is a pretty good sweet spot.

Having a sponsored gift is a definite plus for Skittles from a branding perspective, and it’s plain as day that they’re promoting a new product. But I think the hook is that they’re letting people choose to promote it.

Sometimes having a choice is more important than what the choice is. In this case the choice is whether or not to give or accept a skittles icon in your Facebook profile.

One of our commenters — Derek Scruggs from Enthusiast Group — sent me a preview version of his company’s white paper yesterday. It’s a pretty neat piece of work with a lot of interesting case studies and some excellent tips. Here are some points of interest that stood out to me as I read through: [click to continue...]

The biggest value-add in the marketing world right now appears to be the fence-sitter: those people who straddle the line between all-out geekery and the world of marketing. Or as Steve Rubel calls them, the “geek marketers.”

These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media.

Rubel is on the right track. But I see a much larger and more diverse group than the one he singles out. Some of the people he describes started as geeks and moved toward marketing once we got into the professional sphere. I fit under this umbrella, but I built my first website in 1995 and have been known to attend Star Trek conventions. It wasn’t until college that the marketing profession even entered my field of vision.

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Since you are all reading Brian Solis already, there’s really no reason for me to point you to his gigantic(ly awesome) post from a few days ago about titled Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology.

He hits on some very key points. My Favorite one-liner is this:

Transparent and genuine participation is now a very effective form of marketing, without the snake oil.

but the most important note might be this:

Underestimating social networks is also very dangerous. I’ve already witnessed far too many companies attempting to spark conversations by “marketing” to “audiences” through “messages” within social networks, insulting everyone they try to reach along the way. It can have disastrous consequences to you and the brand your represent.

Social networks are often more tightly knit than blogging niches, and more easily offended by blundering, well-intentioned but poorly-informed marketers. I mean, there are Facebook groups (like this one) dedicated to hating on “internet marketers” in Facebook.

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