Social Media Strategies 2020
Understanding Social Media
In talking with executives throughout the world, there are several characteristics of social which are misunderstood. By clarifying these misconceptions, you will be better able to see the potential of social to grow your organizations and develop strategies which are effective.
- Social Is Deeper Than You Think
As we studied social strategies, there were many “AH HA” moments. One of the most important came from discussions with Steve Dodd of Boardreader. Boardreader is a major player in social monitoring. They are an organization which deep dives into social media sites to extract the data social monitoring systems use to analyze social chatter.
When we first talked to Steve, he overviewed the types of social media sites from which they extract data. When he discussed bloggers, news sites, and other social media, networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were not among them. When we asked why they were omitted, his response revealed the first misconception we had about social media.
Steve said that Boardreader is after the deep conversations being held in social media. Deep conversations to him meant discussions of significant length and depth to reveal the individual’s thoughts and feelings about a topic. While Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites are big in terms of the number of members, the conversations within them are short in content and in duration. While people on social networking sites might be discussing a topic like cancer, the real discussions are on forums, blogs, news, and other media. While networks are great at covering trending topics, the deep, long-lasting, and significant conversations are deeper within the social cloud.
Based on our education by Steve and other social experts, we developed this Social Media Pyramid. It is made up of six distinct types of social media sites. They are ranked from top to bottom, not based on the size of the sites, but rather on the nature of the social conversations. At the top, conversations are, for the most part, short and shallow. As we move towards the bottom of the pyramid, the conversations are more long-term and substantial. By better understanding the social pyramid, you will be able to find your high value audiences within the social cloud. The six levels of the Social Media Pyramid are:
Social Networking Sites: Social networks exist worldwide and let individuals connect with each other and organizations that interest them. These sites are large and consist of individuals of every age, income bracket, and interest. Every conceivable topic is being discussed on social networks. We will use social networking sites to reach our target audiences but, in most of the strategies, we will take them to other social levels to make a more significant engagement with them.
News Aggregator Sites: These are news sites, e-journals, and e-newsletters designed to present text, video, and audio content to their targeted readers. Some of these aggregator sites, like MSNBC or Huffington Post, address a myriad of issues, and serve a diverse readership base. Others have extremely homogeneous, targeted readerships — often just a few or a few hundred people. News aggregator sites are sought out by individuals if they address their interests and passions.
Passion Connection Sites: These sites are designed to allow us to meet with others who support our passions and interests. Sites like Pinterest allow people to meet around topics of their passion. Other sites, like Reddit, allow users to discuss interesting topics and engage with people of a variety of interests. Passion connection sites work if they can make it easy for us to connect with others with similar passions. Unlike a social network on which a discussion of your passions is broadcast to everyone in your network (except for Google+), a discussion on a passion-connection site is more likely to be with others with the exact same interest.
Video Connection Sites: It’s amazing to think that today over sixty hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.i From a marketing standpoint, it’s important to note that YouTube is now the second largest search site, second only to Google.ii Why is this important? More and more, your markets are communicating using video rather than text. It fits better into their multi-tasking day, quickly conveys ideas and thoughts, is more engaging, and easily remembered.iii Today, video sites from YouTube to Vine are changing the way information is being communicated to younger people raised on television and computers.
Thought Leader Sites: The fifth level in the social pyramid consists of bloggers. While business executives are aware of blogs, many don’t realize how big, influential, and pervasive they are. Today, there are over 18.7 million blogs in existence on every conceivable topic. The largest blog has over forty-six million unique visitors each month, and 77 percent of all Internet users read blogs each month.iv Your organization’s social marketing strategy needs to incorporate bloggers and blog articles to effectively reach and engage any target market. One influential blogger may be talking to a sizable percentage of a high value market you are seeking. Using them, and generating your own blog content are great ways to cut through the clutter and go directly to the target markets you want to impact.
Virtual Community Sites: This is the largest and least understood part of social media. Every day, virtual communities are being formed by engaged individuals who want to address an issue confronting them or a passion they have. These communities become a horizontal discussion among individuals with similar interests, as they attempt to address the challenges they’re confronting.v Virtual communities are very different from social networks because they’re extremely focused. Virtual communities can range from a few members to millions, and are formed to address both business and personal needs and passions. While individual communities may be small, groups of them — all focused on the same issue or need — become massive collections of homogeneous individuals. If they’re your target market, virtual communities become an effective way to connect.
In developing our social strategies, we will treat these levels holistically. If your target audience uses a social level, you will want to engage them there. As we build the three social strategies, we will use social monitoring and our knowledge of social developed in this chapter, to determine the best way to engage, empower and acquire your high value audiences.
2. Social Networks and Virtual Communities Behave Differently
As we develop our social marketing strategies, the value of private virtual communities will become clearer. They are the places where deep discussions are occurring among people who are talking about the challenges your products and services address. One of the keys to success is to become a part of these virtual communities in a way that benefits them and your organization.
Social networking sites are created by entrepreneurs to allow people to connect with each other. To use them, you need to go through a registration process in which you establish log-in information and a profile other users can find to connect with you. The goal of these sites is to allow you to link with friends, relatives, and businesses. Once on the site, you can begin discussing any topic, passion, or area of interest. At any point in time, there are conversations about every conceivable topic (and many you can’t conceive of). The conversation tends be relatively shallow and quick.
Virtual communities are at the opposite end of the social spectrum. They’re formed by individuals to address a key topic or area of great importance to them. While they have a registration process like social networks, they’re used for very different reasons. While a few virtual communities are public, most allow you to view their site but you must register to participate in it. These are called private virtual communities.
In a private virtual community, your registration information is used for three purposes. First, because the virtual community consists of people addressing their needs, they want to ensure that new members are also dedicated to their community mission. For many exclusive sites, admission occurs only after you pass the vetting process.
Second, virtual communities are managed by members, and the registration process is important to this function. In a later chapter, we will examine virtual sites where members can black ball other members who are not positively contributing to the site, and promote others whose information is useful in achieving the community mission. Finally, virtual communities use detailed registration information to determine the interests of their users to create content of high relevance to them. Unlike social networking sites, virtual communities are formed to help people address their passions and needs. If they become irrelevant, the virtual community will shrink and vanish. Knowing their member’s needs is critical to the community’s success.
The most important difference is that private virtual communities are on a very specific mission and are not there to discuss every possible topic. Go to Circle of Moms (http://www.circleofmoms.com/) and you can see mothers and family experts addressing every stage in the raising of children and creating a strong family. Want to discuss restoring Plymouth Roadrunner muscle cars from the 1960s? Try the Plymouth Roadrunner Forum (http://www.69roadrunner.net/mopar/forum.php). There are thousands and thousands of virtual community sites on every conceivable topic, and each is dedicated to a specific mission. Right now, there are virtual communities discussing issues and topics related to your organization. In your social marketing strategy, you need to find them in order to link up with prospects and customers actively discussing the subjects that are important to your organization. Find these communities and you can link to huge percentages of your high-value target markets. They’re out there and talking in detail and can be accessed if you know how to find and approach them.
3. Virtual Communities Form For Different Reasons
In traditional marketing channels, we tend to segment based on the demographic and lifestyle characteristics of the businesses or individuals. While your high value audiences in social also have these same types of descriptive characteristics, they are less important in building your social strategy. This is because virtual communities and other user controlled social sites develop for reasons beyond their demographic characteristics.
For your organization to find and engage with private virtual communities, you need to understand why they form. It could be something innately important to the individual — what we call a passion — or it can be to address an event created by some external force — which we call a trigger event. External forces could be a life stage or some event happening in your personal life or a planned or unplanned event at work that impacts your professional life.
The Passion Community
Passion communities are formed because people are driven to engage with others about things important to them. There are passion communities focused on raising kids, fashion trends, politics of all types, sports teams, and every other topic you can think of. As individuals, we have feelings about many things, and if it resonates with us, we have the potential to seek a passion community to discuss our interests.
While passion communities may not seem to apply to business professionals, nothing could be further from the truth. There are business passion communities where CEOs talk management, CMOs talk marketing, or internal auditors discuss their craft. There are engineering and programming sites where passionate professionals discuss and improve their skills. Regardless of the industry or the job, there are passion communities where business professionals network and engage.
In building our marketing strategies to engage passion markets, it’s important to note that they’re always seeking the new and the current. As Heidi Klum says, “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.”vi When we develop a social site to engage with any passion market, the focus will be on trendy, up-to-date, and relevant information. In the second part of the book, we will consider using gamification and other engagement devices to make the social site a place where members can express and explore their passions with others.
When you build a passion community support site, you will need to continually create new events and add new information to keep the passionate members engaged. For example, if you are using webinars with experts central to the community’s interests, you will need to host them several times each year to keep the passionate members talking and coming back. You will also need to be on the lookout for new experts to keep the conversation lively. For passion communities, the focus is on new and different.
The Trigger Event Community
Trigger Event Communities are very different. This type of community forms because there is an external need to engage with others. In our personal lives, we have trigger events every time we move to a new life stage or something happens in our personal or family lives. Having a baby, getting married, graduating from college, becoming ill, getting a new car, retiring, and millions more events, will move us to seek expertise and engagement using social media.
Businesses, too, have trigger events that create communities. Business changes and new technologies often move business professionals to seek out their peers on social media. Once the trigger event happens, or is about to happen, and we know we need to learn more about how to handle it, many of us will attempt to find answers through social engagement.
Strategically, trigger-event communities have very different social structures. In a trigger event community, members seek out experts who have traveled the road they are about to travel. They want content to educate them on how best to travel it. For trigger event communities, the focus is on proven and reliable, not on the new and trendy. Everyone in a trigger event community is on a journey, and your goal should be twofold. First, identify where they are in their journey. Second, use your trigger event community site to get them the information they need to accomplish it. Your goal should be to help them move from where they are today to the destination they want to reach. If your site helps them on their journey, they will keep coming back.
When teaching community identification at Northwestern, we stress to the graduate students that passion communities contain permanent members who are always seeking insider insights and updated information. Give them an edge and they will keep coming back. Triggerevent communities are permanent sites with temporary members. The member thinks, “Help me address my needs as I move through the trigger event, and I will stay with you until the event is handled.” However, as one travels the trigger-event journey, others are joining every day to start on their journeys. Help them along the way, and you will have an effective site.
Regardless of the type of community you’re engaging, your best role is to be a trusted expert within the community. To accomplish this goal, you need to provide content, information, and guidance highly relevant to the community. Give the members tools and information to help them accomplish their mission and they’ll seek you out in the social conversation.
Source: Social IMC Social Strategies with Bottom-Line ROI by Randy HIavac
