The 5 Laws of Engagement

Law 1: We seek comfort in relationships: Surround us with community, which we’ve seen success with like Facebook, Twitter and 4chan. Most interestingly is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Law 2: We all have something to say. So give us tools to express ourselves. Tools include comments, notes, and all the fun things Facebook has given us with Timeline, etc.

Law 3: We need to feel important. Use rewards to make us feel special. How do you make people feel special? One way is through exclusivity like Gilt Group. One way is through badges on Foursquare.

Law 4: We are hypnotized by beauty. Give us something beautiful to look out. Flipboard puts the image first. Instagram is a series of beautiful images within a community.

Law 5: We are captivated by the unknown. So target our curiosity. Foursquare does this with points! Pinterest does with page after page of constant intrigue.

via thenextweb.com

 

Five Challenges Social Media Will Bring to Business - David Armano

1. Integration. Becoming a "social business" (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing) can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications--even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.

2. Governance. Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.

3. Culture. All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple, which can be notoriously secretive, is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history, they have legions of people developing applications that run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers and employees in new ways, but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.

4. Human Resources. In order to transform from a business to a social business, companies are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.

5. Measurement & ROI. Every organization will continue to struggle with measuring results and reporting ROI. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to realized revenue or savings becomes more of a challenge.

via blogs.hbr.org

 

The Brand Evangelist and Social Media

Evangelist

A Brand Evangelist is a person who promotes your brand without regard for compensation.  Their reward is the association with your brand.   Your brand becomes part of their identity.  The goal of any brand is to find and cultivate Brand Evangelists who can promote your brand everywhere without costing you a cent.  Social Media provides a great platform for you to grow some Brand Evangelists for yourself.

A Brand Evangelist:

  • Purchase and believe in your product or service
  • Passionately recommend you to friends, neighbours, colleagues
  • Purchase your products as gifts to others
  • Provide unsolicited feedback or praise
  • Forgive dips in service and quality
  • Are not bought; they extol your virtues freely
  • Feel part of something bigger than themselves

The place that Brand Evangelist congregate is online.  You can use Social Media to create a place where your Brand Evangelists can thrive by catering to their passions and needs.  Specifically Brand Evangelists:

  • Need to share experiences - Social Networks provide a place where they can publicly share their stories about your brand.  We all know the power a personal story can be to influence others to buy your brand.  The evangelists can become your ambassadors online.
  • Exhibit a high level of brand pride.  You can connect with your evangelists by providing images, logos, other branded paraphernalia that they can acquire, wear and share.
  • Want to know as much as there is to know about you.  You will need to provide intimate stories about your company online.  Share the CEO's personal blog.  Publish videos of how you get things done in house.   Your Brand Evangelists will be empowered by knowing all the minutia about your brand and company.
  • Are looking for a place to hang out with other evangelists.  You must provide online communities where they can congregate and share their stories.  Facebook has done a great job of providing a public space where brand fans can show themselves.  On the Fan Page you should take this opportunity to reward your evangelists in small ways and make them feel special.

Living at the nexus of Technology, Service, Marketing and Evangelism

Selling the Dream Using Social Media

Hummingbird_blue

An Evangelist is not a well known role but is experiencing a resurgence in the age of Social Media.  Guy Kawasaki was probably one of the first to popularize the roll of the evangelist working for Apple computer.    I was recently re-reading his book on evangelism called "Selling the Dream"  It is still inspiring.

 One of the jobs of a product evangelist is to consume, distill and disseminate vast amounts of information.  And like Guy says - an evangelist must "eat like a hummingbird and poop like an elephant" - meaning they must consume more information than most and then be able to spread it around in volumes.

So now that an evangelist has distilled this vast amount of data and has turned it into information that will help customers be successful - how can it be deseminated?   With Social Media we have many more options available to use than a decade ago.  Not only that - we can encourage others to create content and spread the word too.
  • Create video content and share.   Carry a Flip camera everywhere and do informal interviews.
  • Create webinars that can be repeated and shared
  • Make event presentations interesting by mixing media - using photos, video and text
  • Create engaging PR using non-traditional PR methods as PitchEngine.
  • Author e-Books on how to be successful using the companies products
  • Invite thought leaders to blog on your site
  • Use social media tools to find out where people are talking about your product and start to share in those spaces.  I like SM2, Radian6, PostRank, Google Alerts and SocialMention
  • Create a Facebook Fan page and funnel pertinent blog entries to the wall using RSS aggregators as xFruits.com.
  • Create a repository of quotes, videos, links, facts and other content to share with influential bloggers.  When you ask a blogger to do a review of one of your products - give them plenty of resources to use.
  • Video tape and share every presentation that someone does for your company.
  • Ask the engineers to talk about the product and give informal demos. 
  • Ask thought leaders and book authors who are using your products to write ebooks that you can promote on your site.
  • Create something viral and fun.  You might create a Facebook app using your product that gets shared easily.
  • Get all employees to be ambassadors for the company by giving them copywriting training and allowing them to respond to conversations about your company.   Train them to understand the brand and how that is shared.
  • Create Twitter lists of thought leaders in the industry.  This recognizes contributions but also helps others find solutions.
  • Engage openly with your community using forums, blogs, twitter, facebook etc - when you can.   If you offer solutions in a private email - then no one else can benefit.
Can you think of some other ideas?