“Active members using our community to interact and engage with us controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period.

Active partners of NetApp engaging in the community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue over the same time period.”

- Navneet Grewal, Director Digital Marketing

Introduction: NetApp launched its first online community in early 2008 to help executives engage and gain a stronger understanding of the products and solutions offered by NetApp as well as to build awareness for the growing storage industry among IT professionals. The initial community, built on Jive Software, was growing in size but engagement behavior and value derived from the community was low. Beginning in August of 2008, NetApp hired Impact Interactions to rebuild their strategy, help the company better meet the needs of its community, and align reporting to real world business goals that demonstrate the value of their community.

Addressing the Issues: After a review of the community, a competitive analysis, and review of appropriate metrics, the Impact Interactions’ team identified several areas which were limiting NetApp’s business results. The main areas of focus for our work included:

1. Restructuring the community’s offerings and forums to meet member needs and provide a clear path to engagement and value (Products and Services categories were redefined to meet member expectations and to provide a stronger focus, changed the community’s architecture to allow member measurement using the Jive Software analytics, and reduced the categories of available forums in order to concentrate conversations in appropriate areas to reduce the cost and time of moderation)
2. Redefining processes of managing the community using our best practices (Engagement and escalation processes, internal subject matter expert recruitment)
3. External member recognition process
4. Alignment of content strategy to NetApp’s business goals (Increased percentage of thought leadership content to attract influencers & decision makers, added partner focused forum & content to recruit NetApp partners into the community as subject matter experts, refocused outreach to concentrate less on technical information and more on business results  like TCO, ROI, Customer Success Stories)
5. Internal team education (Training on B2B focused approach using Impact Interactions’ best practices and experience, reduced B2C tactics that focused on awareness and pushing information rather than building engagement and relationships with members)
6. Understanding key metrics to report to build a health index for the community while also setting achievable KPIs (key performance indicators)
7. Developed measurement framework utilizing Jive Software, Omniture, and Business Objects to deliver focused reports (Traffic – baseline metrics, Behavior – engagement metrics, Value – business metrics with an economic value $ assigned)

The team at NetApp realigned their community using Impact Interactions’ recommendations. One of the main changes was moving forum categories into distinct sub-communities on the Jive platform in order to increase visibility into how members were using each area of the community. Initially, all areas had been under a single community architecture which due to Jive Software analytic limitations reduced visibility significantly into how individual areas of the community were performing.

Social Media Supports Community to Engage Members: As part of Impact Interactions’ ongoing engagement with NetApp, we performed a full social media audit to understand how audiences outside of the community had their information needs met. Having the social media run by their Public Relations firm for the previous two years had achieved minimal results. This was due to poor alignment, execution, and messaging using social tactics such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and Facebook were simply used as RSS fed message repeaters without a clear goal or objective for each entity. This caused the same exact message to be placed in multiple places despite different audiences. The result was that there was no integration of effort to utilize the strong results of the community with the marketing efforts of the PR firm’s actions. This wasted effort resulted in many lost opportunities for valuable engagement.

To correct this, as part of our strategy work, Impact Interactions recommended the following tactical changes to NetApp’s current strategy. First, the team needed to refocus social away from press release based activities to deliver integrated marketing, digitally relevant content, video, and thought leadership which was missing in action. In conjunction with this refocusing, there also needed to be a realignment of social effort to integrate community, NetApp.com, and digital marketing assets to better meet the information needs of multiple audiences using social tools. While the audiences are similar, there are differences in how segments like to gather information and interact with companies. This requires a stronger focus on each platform’s unique audience to meet their needs properly.  We also recommended that NetApp develop a social listening program to expand the influencers’ network and cultivate stronger relationships outside of existing channels.

For internal teams, we recommended that NetApp align internal efforts through social media guidelines and processes including the use of a social media and community playbook to educate multiple stakeholder teams throughout the organization. To allow for self-service reporting and measurement, it was recommended that NetApp develop a social media dashboard to report results across the enterprise, including CRM data as the value point to prove the importance of the social and community projects in meeting specific business objectives (and KPIs).

Business Results Achieved: Over the last three years, NetApp continued to focus on meeting members’ needs in order to build engagement. This focus increased engagement significantly over time allowing Impact Interactions to implement its value framework methodology to demonstrate the economic value of the community to senior management. This framework was built using data from multiple sources including Jive Software, Omniture, and NetApp’s CRM system and was completed in 2011.

The measured results were impressive. As detailed in a presentation at iStrategy’s San Francisco meeting by Navneet Grewal, active members (defined as those who contribute more than 10 items in a six month period) using NetApp’s marketing community to interact and engage controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period. During the same time period, active partners of NetApp engaging in the marketing community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue to NetApp.

Summary and Takeaways: By realigning its community to focus strongly on influencers and business decision makers, NetApp has realized significant economic value from its community.

1. Lesson One: Don’t allow the limitations of your software platform mislead you into believing that value cannot be measured
2. Lesson Two: Use an architectural scheme that provides the most insight into member activities while providing a clear path for engagement to members
3. Lesson Three: Identify your audience clearly and provide content that meets their needs in order to build engagement both in controlled sites (community) and non-controlled (social)
4. Lesson Four: Be wary of using press releases as a major component of your social content strategy
5. Lesson Five: Each social site has a slightly different audience that is linked to your organization for a slightly different reason. Utilize a content focus that aligns to those needs rather than shot-gunning the same content everywhere
6. Lesson Six: Getting to the value is hard work. It requires relationships, strong data analysis, and the ability to combine your CRM data with your community and/or social data.

When organizations meet the needs of their audiences, the value realized can be substantial as the results of NetApp clearly show. To learn how your organization can benefit from our expertise, please contact us.

SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPORTS EVENT MARKETING CAMPAIGN

“Harnessing Social Media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, with thought-leadership content in the form of videos and blogs, has helped endorse our position as leaders in the field of BI.” – Adrianne Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager

Key Learnings

Although familiar with the many available avenues of social media communication, SAP Partner DSCallards was using social media primarily for brand awareness and didn’t consider it a key marketing tool prior to the pilot project supported by Impact Interactions. This project taught DSCallards how it could use its existing social media accounts to promote itself as a thought leader to generate valuable sales contacts and to nurture leads. As a result of its social media campaign work, DSCallards saw a 161% increase in referrals from its social media accounts to its two websites. In fact, the number of social media referrals to DSCallards’ websites during the pilot was equivalent to the total number of referrals the company had seen during the previous ten months. All of these results were realized during a six week pilot to implement a comprehensive plan of social media curation, creation, and promotion.

Pilot Program

DSCallards is a full service business intelligence solution provider offering both consulting services and customized development.  Based out of Ashburton, UK, DSCallards has established itself as one of the best business intelligence solution providers in the UK and has a robust business surrounding its partnership with SAP. According to Adriane Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager:

“When combined with our fully accredited professional services and methodologies, DSCallards provides solutions that offer the most complete, open and integrated BI systems on the market today.  Our goal is to ensure that every business, regardless of size, can understand and use information without technical expertise or knowledge of underlying data sources or structure, empowering them to get answers to imperative business questions and to make more effective, better informed, decisions.”

Despite their win as the UK Champion of the SAP Social Media Program 2010 and again as UK Champion of the SAP Best Performance Challenge 2011, DSCallards continued to utilize its social media accounts as a secondary tactic for awareness. DSCallards maintained accounts with LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. but wasn’t entirely focused on using these venues for lead generation. For the most part, DSCallards used their corporate accounts to retweet posts from the Twitter account of Lee Grogan, DSCallards Sales Manager, and to promote videos entered for the SAP Best Performance Challenge. DSCallards was utilizing social media as a way to increase brand awareness instead of relying on it as a means of building contacts and leads:

“Although happy with output from our efforts, we were not convinced that social media was an effective channel for driving forward demand generation and was more of an awareness and brand building exercise.”  – Adriane Gillies

While brand awareness is important, Philip Roylance, UK Enablement manager for SAP, saw an opportunity for its partner to look at social media as much more than an internet billboard.  Through its two SAP wins, DSCallards demonstrated it was savvy enough to take on the task of creating a social media campaign. In selecting DSCallards for this pilot, Philip stated:

“DSCallards has worked closely with SAP on projects in the past and were an excellent candidate for us to run a social media campaign with. Social media has become a very important part of SAPs marketing strategy and we need to work with partners who are able to demonstrate the agility and tenacity needed to make campaigns successful. DSCallards has shown this in abundance.”

To get DSCallards off on the right foot, Philip turned to U.S. based social media consulting firm Impact Interactions for help in assisting DSCallards with the implementation of a robust social media marketing campaign that would address the business objectives of thought leadership, contact generation, contact nurturing, brand awareness, and the promotion of SAP solutions. With over ten years of experience with SAP, Impact Interactions has a proven record of assisting companies increase their online presence. With two of DSCallards’ popular breakfast marketing meetings approaching, the time was right to launch a comprehensive campaign.

Tactical Planning for a Social Media Campaign

At the beginning of a social media campaign, both Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and initial metric benchmarks must be determined.  For DSCallards, there were several measurable KPIs:

• Increased registration for morning meetings
• Increased reach
• Increased blog visits
• Increased website visibility

The following DSCallards’ social media accounts were analyzed before the pilot kick-off to create the projects initial benchmarks:

• YouTube:
• Channel Views
• Individual video views
• Number of referrals from YouTube to website
• Twitter
• Followers
• Number of referrals from Twitter to website
• LinkedIn
• Connections
• Number of referrals from LinkedIn to website
• Blog
• Visits
• Number of referrals  from blog to website

Additionally, benchmarks were taken for the number of registrations DSCallards had acquired for their two upcoming meetings utilizing email lists, web site contact us submissions, and in-house contact lists.

Once the KPIs and benchmarks were determined, DSCallards orchestrated an effort to integrate all marketing accounts in order to meet their KPIs.  Previously, DSCallards had viewed their social media accounts as separate, stand-alone entities. Rather than each account being an item in its social media marketing menu, each was looked at as a stand-alone item in and of itself.  This approach had the unfortunate effect of fragmenting its social and online audiences.  DSCallards’ blog readers weren’t readily aware of its Twitter account.  The Twitter followers didn’t know DSCallards had valuable content on its YouTube site, etc.  In addition to these tactics, DSCallards relied heavily on email lists to send out SAP content based newsletters and to announce its popular breakfast meeting series. However, it did little to utilize social media to advertise those meetings or tie the content of the email newsletters into other interactive outlets which again left much of its online audience unaware of the benefits of attending these important meetings.

Impact Interactions introduced DSCallards to the concept of “Beacon Strategy Marketing.” Using this method, every form of social media is used to link back to the main form of communication for DSCallards, its website. YouTube videos linked back to relevant meeting registration information through descriptions and annotations. Twitter activity transitioned from being primarily retweets of Lee Grogan’s tweets to advertisements of new additions to their blog, LinkedIn groups, and upcoming meetings. LinkedIn activity increased with the initiation of more discussions and, again, consistently linked readers back to DSCallards’ website. Blog posts were skillfully mentioned across several platforms. Over the six weeks of the pilot, DSCallards learned how to tailor each message to the platform they were using.  Instead of repeating the same cookie cutter information across the different platforms, the message was finessed and adjusted for each audience. Recipients were getting the same information without seeing a copy and paste of text from one social media interaction to the next.

Challenges During The Campaign

The pilot did not come without its challenges, however.  Several events occurred that impacted the overall results of the campaign.  First, the December meeting was scheduled to take place at a location further from London and less accessible to participants than made sense for a two hour breakfast meeting. Consequently, registrations remained low for the December meeting. That said, despite the fact that its December breakfast meeting was the original focus of the pilot project, DSCallards decided to cancel the meeting and reschedule it for a time when it could be hosted at a better location.

From that point on, DSCallards decided to instead focus on a November meeting which was taking place a better location and featured a more popular subject.  Second, DSCallards had invested in an email list for sending out information regarding their monthly meetings.  Unfortunately, the list hadn’t been properly scrubbed for accuracy. DSCallards found itself relying on a list that largely consisted of invalid email addresses. The team at DSCallards had to scramble mid-pilot to try to purchase another list and send out the meeting information again.  By that point, though, DSCallards had largely missed its window for giving people enough lead time to plan for the trip to the more distant SAP location in December.

A secondary issue which impacted expected results was the implementation of a new website and blog platform. While a positive from an information standpoint as well as from an improved user experience standpoint, the new site provided new challenges in the campaign. First, new links needed to be featured for the social media promotions while the older links took visitors to the older site information. While the visitor could then click to the event registration, the dual site issue may have caused some initial confusion among visitors reducing results.

Results

For DSCallards, the company achieved great success achieving the long-­term goals of increasing in their reach, generating important business contacts, and establishing itself as a thought leader. DSCallards proved that social media could be used for far more than simply creating awareness of the date and time of its training meetings. Looking at specific Social Media Channels to develop and connect with contacts, prospects, and leads, DSCallards did very well in adapting its approach to include social media into its marketing mix. Specific channel results are given below:

Twitter: 370% increase in Twitter Followers

During the pilot, groups of potential followers were identified and followed. By reaching out first, DSCallards was effectively holding out a laurel to their audience.  Following them first would hopefully peak their interest enough that the person on the other end would return the favor. The tactic worked.  Over the six week pilot, DSCallards saw its Twitter following quadruple with significant retweeting of their information through their followers’ networks. Not only did this give DSCallards the opportunity to present itself as a thought leader but it also presented the company as another option for a business intelligence solution provider. They established both brand awareness and their reputation as an experienced and knowledgeable organization.

LinkedIn: 120% increase in site visits from LinkedIn Group posts

By utilizing LinkedIn Groups focused on Business Intelligence, Manufacturers, and Analytics, the team at DSCallards was able to guide additional traffic to its own blogs and web site. Once on the site, visitors were presented with the opportunity to learn more as well as to gain an invitation to one of the DSCallards’ breakfast meetings.

YouTube: 10% increase in video views, 6% increase in Channel Visits over 6 week campaign

During the pilot project, DSCallards took time to nurture its YouTube account.  After the Best Performance Challenge, the YouTube account was not frequently updated as an avenue to push viewers back to its website.  Additionally, several of the videos DSCallards posted were simply reposts of SAP content.  As an SAP partner this content was acceptable and may have created some needed awareness for DSCallards’ audience, but it didn’t present DSCallards as a thought leader. Once DSCallards began using the “beacon strategy” the company took greater care to ensure the content on its site was both valuable and original.  DSCallards took SAP-­supplied videos and dubbed them over with its own script which had the effect of making the videos more “personal.” It literally gave a voice to DSCallards. It also gave viewers the sense that DSCallards, every bit as much as SAP, understood the subject matter and had valuable expertise to offer.  Now, when visitors to the DSCallards’ YouTube account look at videos, they are presented with content DSCallards has customized and tailored to its audience  rather than a small number of  DSCallards videos dwarfed by a large number of SAP provided videos that have no tie to DSCallards as a company.

Blog: 20 fold increase in reads of blog content

DSCallards’ use of other social media outlets to drive readers to its blog worked phenomenally well and resulted in 20 times more visits to the blog in November as compared to October.  DSCallards made great efforts to post blog content updates more frequently than in the past and tailored each post to the subject matter of its upcoming breakfast meetings. Both of these efforts created the opportunity to passively advertise DSCallards’ meetings to its readers on their social media accounts while also promoting thought leadership in the BI area. Through these blog posts DSCallards presented themselves as thought leaders offering valuable content worth reading and training sessions worth attending.

Overall Traffic

Thanks to the many improvements to their social media communications DSCallards saw a very important improvement to quite possibly its most important customer­-facing outlet: the company website. The impact of a well coordinated social media campaign to support marketing efforts can be seen by the dramatic increase in referrals to the DSCallards’ websites from their social media accounts.

The metrics clearly demonstrated that DSCallards was now driving interested parties back to its website, where they could find a wealth of information about the company’s offerings.  Referrals increased across the board, proving that DSCallards’ tactics in all areas were working together to improve the effectiveness of DSCallards’ marketing efforts.

“Having worked with Mike and his team at Impact Interactions, we now believe that cleverly combining traditional marketing techniques with the power of Social Media and becoming thought leaders in the field of BI is a winning strategy for DSCallards as we make inroads into our chosen markets in the coming years. 

Harnessing Social Media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, with thought-leadership content in the form of videos and blogs, has helped endorse our position as leaders in the field of BI. 

We are looking forward to transferring the skills learned throughout this pilot and putting the Social Media methodology that Mike and his team developed for us into practice during 2012.  By applying this methodology to our SAP Crystal solutions campaigns, where we believe we are already looked upon as thought-leaders, we are confident of our continued success.”

– Adrianne Gillies, DSCallards Marketing Manager

I read a very interesting report yesterday by the Columbia Business School called “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data.” It was all about measuring marketing ROI. Some of the stats in there were mind boggling and all in the wrong ways. For one thing, it seems that companies are playing a budgeting crapshoot:

“…but many managers aren’t measuring marketing ROI either consistently or effectively.
Only 43% of organizations are establishing their marketing budgets based on marketing ROI
analysis. By contrast, 68% base their marketing budgets in part on “historical spending,”
and 28% on “gut instincts.” When it comes to specific marketing spending decisions, 21%
are using financial metrics for little or none of those specific decisions, and 7% are making
all or most of those spending decisions with no metrics at all.”

Even worse, the people who are in charge think they know what they’re doing while those down in the trenches are shaking their heads:

“Satisfaction depends on your viewpoint: 54% of CMO’s are satisfied with their ability
to measure marketing ROI, but only 43% of those below the vice president level are satisfied –
perhaps because they are closer to the problem of determining how to most effectively
measure marketing ROI.”

The final stake in the heart was this one:

“In place of marketing ROI, many traditional measures are used. 37% of the respondents claimed that they used brand awareness as a universal metric to make marketing decisions. More troubling, of those using brand awareness, more than 60% said it was their only marketing ROI measure.”

Where do I begin?!

Get your ducks in a row

Well, let’s begin with KPIs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say people who say social media can’t be measured probably don’t have a good understanding of organizational KPIs and how to develop them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, everything can be measured. The key to understanding KPIs, though, is that you can’t use someone else’s KPIs. You need to understand where you want to go as an organization and how each piece of your marketing scheme fits into that. You can’t track Likes on Facebook because Joe Schmidt at URCompetitor does. First you have to ask yourself: “What are we trying to do with each of these pieces?” Brand awareness? Driving traffic back to the website? Conversion rates on offers? Those are what you need to determine first and then you use the analytics to back it up.

I’ve got all this data but it doesn’t amount to any ROI

Are you sure about that? Here’s where I might blow some minds. To me, there are two types of ROI: tangible and intangible. Both are vitally important. Tangible ROI is, of course, money. You had X number of hard leads, Y number of sales, Z number of people coming to your site and making a purchase. But then there are the intangible. Do visits alone make you money? Perhaps you don’t see the dollar signs in your account but that doesn’t mean you didn’t get a ROI. Content consumption is a good example of an intangible ROI. You didn’t get a lead this month from social media but you improved your reputation. You personally reached out to 80% of the posters on your Twitter account. You have more mentions this month than last month and 95% of those are positive. Can your competitors say that? No, that doesn’t bring in direct dollars but your good reputation eventually will.

Dashboards are your friends

The beauty of business analytics these days is that you aren’t limited to spreadsheets and simple charts. I wonder if some of the resistance to truly analyzing all that data comes from the inability to get it into a format that’s easy for people to look at. I do a dashboard for a client every month that pulls analytics from at least 4 sources. The set up of the dashboard itself was indeed complicated but the hardest part was learning how to write the formulas. Thankfully, there are tons of resources out there so that shouldn’t stop you.

This dashboard is effective because we can look at all of this data and easily understand it. There’s no scrolling through hundreds of data points trying to find the one you need and compare it against the past. We simply pick a month and the dashboard dynamically changes to show us all the data for that month. I did another dashboard that was far more complex looks wise but, again, it allowed us to pull data from multiple sources into one place that was easy for the non technical people to understand. You could show and hide multiple data sets. You could customize the data to show exactly what you were looking for. The important thing to note is that neither of these dashboards shows sales data. It is all marketing/communication data that gives the clients insight into how users are consuming their communications.

As I said, the set up times for these can be intense but it’s worth it in the end. If you think it isn’t then just listen for that voice of your superior asking you to explain all the mumbo jumbo numbers in your 12 sheet workbook. It’s worth it.

Learn to love analytics

The bottom line is if you’re concerned about ROI you need to get friendly with analytics. They aren’t your enemy. Analytics are like the force in Star Wars. They’re in the sales, the leads, the blogs, the likes, the traffic, and the comments. They’re in everything and they ALL have an effect on your ROI. Please do yourself a favor and don’t rely on your “gut instinct” because that will just give you an ulcer. Also do yourself a favor and read “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data.” It’s an eye opening report and well worth the read.

Last evening I was fortunate to attend the Chicago Social Club event hosted by Edelman’s Richard Edelman and David Armano. The topic was the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer and themes that it implies for business, governments, and NGOs.

One of the more interesting observations from this year’s study is the shift away from trusting government leaders and business leaders towards the average employee in an organization. I take that as a pretty strong signal that we’re starting to come out of the Great Recession of 2008-11. With the disaster of the past years playing such a large role in the average person’s life, it seems appropriate that looking to government leaders to lead us out of the mess would be strong. Trust that our elected leaders would help us find a path forward seemed like a good strategy at the time. However, looking back now, we see that in many ways our leadership in government failed us completely no matter which side of the aisle you support. That break down in trust pushed us back to what I would call our gut feelings. That is, I trust someone more like me than someone who is not like me. The statistics backing this up provided by Richard Edelman were interesting to say the least.  While Americans tend to be very parochial in viewing the world through an America first lens, the rest of the world experienced similar drops in trust for its leadership. For example, Brazil respondents reported a huge 50% drop in trust for their leaders despite their economy doing really well in comparison to the U.S. Europeans responded with a staggering 66% drop in trust of their leaders.

As Richard continued, a simple reason for this came through… there is a huge gap right now between actual performance by our government leaders and their words. The old adage “Words are cheap.” applies here.

So, you are probably thinking what does this have to do with Social Media and Online Communities. Well, in truth it has a lot to do with both.

 Let’s look at what was discussed in terms of corporate trust. CEOs are the second least trusted group following government leaders. In their place in the trust hierarchy, the trust in the “average employee” has risen significantly. To me, a compelling reason for this rise is due to the employees using social media to communicate with each other, customers, prospects, with their network effect spreading the information faster and better than traditional communications. Bloggers play an important role as an information resource, but so do content curators who help audiences skim through massive amounts of information quickly. When Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are used to then spread the information through a network, the message is amplified. With the right source, tone, and level of information, trust is built. We see this all the time in online communities. Those members who reply to others frequently, with good information are trusted more by members than those who don’t answer or engage. That applies to both company personnel and non-company members.

Along these same lines, what struck me as interesting was that of all the industries measured by Edelman technology was trusted the most by respondents. While this has been the case for many years, with the shift towards trusting average employees over CEOs, it makes sense. Companies like Cisco, SAP, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple have had open communication channels with their customers, prospects, partners, developers, and other stakeholders for years. We know that these communities are populated with employees who care about their community members and their information needs. When managed properly, communities build a lot of trust. The movement towards external communities using social media (LinkedIn Groups, Facebook fan pages, etc.) will continue to generate trust for the companies that execute them properly. But it begins with a dedicated group of employees who truly want to engage.

During one of the questions asked, Richard Edelman said “The rise in trust of the average employee to #4 in the survey is controversial to clients. Those who want top down communication not horizontal or peer-to-peer communications find this trend really hard to take. But in the end, you have to allow for the dispersion of ideas.” Unfortunately those companies see the risk as too great versus the potential reward.

In our experience over the past twelve years, we’ve seen those companies that keep their eye on the reward make gains that bring value to their organization using communities and social media. Those that focus on the risk not only don’t bring the value they could, but also make the social media mistakes that you read about in the media. So, which do you want to be?

Frank Reed, managing editor of Marketing Pilgrim, wrote an article in response to the report that I happen to agree wholeheartedly with. Frank’s opinion is basically that companies who are just doing Twitter and Facebook while ignoring the power of corporate blogging are taking the easy road out. As someone who blogs in my personal time, I can attest to the fact that blogging takes time, lots and lots of time. It’s not like Twitter. You can’t be Linda Richman and throw out a topic and hope people have a valuable conversation about you just because you gave them something to retweet. You have to think about what topic you want to write about, do your research, and then sit down and write it. Then, of course, you have to edit it, proof it, edit it some more, change the title three times, and then post it. That may seem overwhelming to most companies both in the effort needed to compose a blog and the money spent while that person is blogging. Twitter and Facebook are cheap and cost effective making them very popular in a tough economy. In ten seconds you can tweet a quip out to all of your followers and then tell all your corporate buddies you’re a social media mogul. However, what happens when they try to find out more about you? If all you have to show for your communication efforts are one sentence Facebook status updates and a hundred tweets about how you’re a leader in your industry they’re going to sniff out the shallow facade from a thousand yards away.

Yes, blogging is time consuming. Yes, it might open you up to people disagreeing with you. But, in the end, is that a bad thing? Is it bad to defend your stance? Is it bad to show you are so much more than a status update or a tweet? The idea of being cheap and cost effective works great when you’re trying to justify the business cost of mass producing, say, toys for a kid’s meal. But you can’t apply that same thinking to representing your brand’s leadership. Do you really want your leadership to seem cheap and cost effective? Gaining the trust of clients isn’t about efficiency. In the end, they don’t care just about the fact that you know 5 different programs and have X number of other clients. That information might be a hook to get them interested but it’s not going to keep them around. They want to know that you really and truly know what you’re doing. Can you prove that in 144 characters? Probably not.

This post was dedicated to Barbara.

My husband is a runner (I sometimes run…right before having an asthma attack). He’s big into 5K races and is working his way up to 10K races and half marathons. Last year he very eagerly registered for a popular run taking place in the Washington, DC area. He thought it would be a great event being that we could all fly in, see his family, and maybe even cheer him on as he crossed the finish line. Fun for everyone, right?!

As the race got closer, things got weirder. You couldn’t park close to the race event unless you were riding with other racers. If you wanted to go to the race as a spectator, you had to go to a public transit station far away from the race location and then take a shuttle. The course was planned along a narrow route, part of which was on a highway. It went on and on and on. But, this post isn’t about the race and the ensuing race day debacle. It’s the social media debacle after the race debacle that’s the real story.

Turns out the race was so poorly organized that a Facebook page was started DURING the race about how bad it was. Over 1,000 people have liked this page to date. It’s a small percentage of the 22,000 that showed up to race but anytime a Facebook page about something like a 5K race gets that much traction, you know it’s bad. Here’s where the fun begins. Angry racers began posting comment after comment on this page about how bad the race was. From alleged dangerous conditions to sub-par goodie bags, it was clear racers were incensed. They didn’t keep their rage contained to the fail page either. They also made sure that the organizers knew how they felt on the event’s Facebook page. They left hundreds of comments blasting the race. Some were even demanding a refund of their registration fee. And what was the response from the organizers? Nothing. Not one comment was responded to within the comments section. Going further, users began accusing the organizers of deleting comments and one user (who started the fail page) was supposedly blocked from the event Facebook page. The day after the event an official apology was posted and promptly met with angry comments from disappointed runners and silence from the organizers (although they did manage to update their rules about what kind of posts would be deleted). Three days after that a second apology was posted with the exact same response.

If you look at the race’s Facebook page now, there still has never been any acknowledgement of the problems that runners mentioned in their comments. Instead, organizers state in their About page that any complaints could be sent to their customer support email address or they could call the customer support hotline. Note that I said it’s on their “About” page. None of that was mentioned on their main Facebook page. This, friends, is what is called “playing ostrich.” If you pretend it isn’t there, it never really happened. Rather than taking the opportunity to use their Facebook page as a way to sincerely connect with the consumers who paid a good chunk of change to be in the “race” they ignored their criticisms. Their lack of response was so bad that even the event sponsor threw them under the bus by releasing a statement voicing their disappointment.

So what can be learned here? Personally, I think the lesson to be learned is that ignoring what your audience is saying is tantamount to brushing them off and no one likes being brushed off. More and more, people are foregoing the informational vacuums of hotlines and customer support email accounts and going straight to the source: your Facebook page. This is a change that cannot be ignored. Companies can’t pretend it’s not there. People are going to say bad things about your company and it’s easier than ever to do so very publicly. The other thing they can’t ignore is the idea that those negative comments will be contained to the comments section of the wall posting. With the recent changes in Facebook’s layout, users can readily see not only what their friends are saying but what the friends of their friends are saying by way of the scrolling feed on the right hand side of everyone’s profile. It’s like a Clairol commercial gone bad.

The answer to this situation is so simple. Respond. You can’t respond to everyone in a media crisis but you can do more than post and run. Take the time to reach out in a place where others can see you doing it. They need to see the olive branch being handed out. Even if you can’t offer compensation, the least you can do is spend some time responding to those comments. If you look at companies that have the highest customer satisfaction rates and loyalty, you will also see that they are masters at responding. There’s no posting and running. If they see a critical comment, they take notice and they make sure that everyone else who saw that comment sees their response.

By playing ostrich this company was met with a giant PR nightmare. Angry comments, a Facebook page dedicated to them dropping the ball, a petition with people vowing to boycott any future races, complaints to the BBB, and a slew of nasty articles in local papers. Ouch. Let this be an example to all those who think their social media pages are just there for information. They aren’t. They are a voice for your consumers and your consumers will let you know when they’re madder than a snake that’s just been stepped on. They WILL turn on you. The question is will you be able to stop them?

Now, the term psychographics might seem like some mumbo jumbo word that a marketing executive made up to sound smart. In reality, it’s far from some buzzword someone came up with on their way to a client meeting. Demographics represent what people are. They are finite and don’t change. You are the age you are even if your fake ID says otherwise. Nothing will change that. Psychographics, however, represent what people think and how they act. What kind of car do they drive? Do they drink soda? Do they like horror films or dramatic films? Are they calm and calculating or do they fly by the seat of their pants? All of these things are keys to understanding how media in all its forms affects people. That’s why psychographics are so much more powerful than demographics. A demographic doesn’t tell you much. Say you have two 30 year olds, Jim and Joe, from similar income households and who both hold advanced degrees. All of those are demographics. What do we know about these two people? Not much when you think about it. We know we can make generalizations about them because they are in the same groups. However, do we really know what makes them tick? Do we know what they like? Do we know what kind of communication they’re most likely to respond to? We can take a guess, but in the end, we really don’t know.

Now, let’s look at these two people using psychographics. Jim likes coffee in the morning, does the majority of his shopping online, is addicted to his smartphone, and currently drives a hybrid car. Joe has oatmeal for breakfast every morning while he reads his local newspaper. He also does the majority of shopping online but doesn’t use a smartphone and doesn’t like social media sites. He drives to work in a car with average gas mileage. Now what do we know about these two gentlemen? We now know a lot about them. Not to mention, the information we know about them is much more valuable. Demographically, they are equals. Psychographically, they are quite different.

This is why understanding your audience in BOTH areas is so important. Demographics will give you a more narrow audience. With demographics you are at least hitting the group of people the might be interested in you in the ways they may communicate the most. Using demographics, you get a good idea of where you can dig deeper with your information gathering. With psychographics, you have a target audience. You know how they communicate. You know they prefer Twitter over Facebook. You know they are on their smartphones and would potentially respond to an app or a Facebook interaction more than an email. You know that they are eco/health conscious based on the fact that they tend to buy more organic and fair trade products. These are the ever changing things that can make or break your social media campaign.

When planning any kind of interaction, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even in a community environment, you can’t forget the “social” part of social media planning. It goes without saying that by truly understanding your customers and users, you can better understand your business. You can understand where your business is going and what kinds of changes or interactions your customers will approve of and respond to. It’s not just about connecting with the right age group or the right gender. It’s about connecting with the people who truly have the potential to make a difference to your bottom line. That’s why psychographics will always be much more than another mumbo jumbo buzzword.

Communities.cisco.com, on the other hand, gets it. A platform that contains more than 50 communities for Cisco’s partners, customers and employees, communities.cisco.com, also known as Cisco Communities, has almost doubled its membership and has seen a 50% increase in overall traffic in the last year. Additionally, Cisco continues to see measurable savings and efficiencies as a result of the program. Allison Johnson, Social Media and Community Manager at Cisco, who has worked with Cisco for 5 years and communities.cisco.com for the past year and a half, discusses the ingredients that make up Cisco’s recipe for success and the challenges of managing a successful global community platform.

Q: What is your role at communities.cisco.com?

A:  At Cisco I manage the communities.cisco.com platform in addition to driving social media and digital marketing across the company.

When working on the communities platform I oversee the entire program at a macro level. My team and I work on everything from identifying technical problems and scheduling the bug fixes as well as onboarding new teams and setting up the overall program structure. We work closely with the community managers to help them reach their individual goals as well as goals we have for the program.

Sometimes we joke around that in my role I’m essentially a community manager of community managers. Every day is different and I never know what hat or situation I’ll find myself in. A main focus for us is our long-term strategy. People forget that communities are a long-term commitment and it’s essential to align your long-term plan with corporate strategies and initiatives. At the end of the day, the most important thing I can do is give the community managers the tools they need to be successful.

Q: What’s your vision for communities.cisco.com and its business purpose?

A: We set both short-term and long-terms goals for the program. Our 5-year vision is to sustain and create a global community program that deepens relationships with partners, customers and employees. Getting there involves building out some of our core areas to make them more engaging and relevant. We’re in the process of a study to learn more about behaviors. Currently we added a social share functionality to the platform to encourage conversations that are happening in the social web to interact and share with our communities.

Q: Tell us about some of the success you’ve seen as you’ve worked toward that vision.

A: This past year we saw tremendous growth in registrations (more than 50% to more than 110,000). Overall that is one of our largest success metrics. Monthly, we capture metrics and do analysis on our platform. This past year we’ve seen a lot of growth. Ways we hope to continue this growth are building out case studies and best practice sharing modules from these growth spikes.

A more specific example can be seen in our Partner Community. This private space was built for our Cisco partners and we have seen it contribute to reducing travel and increasing the productivity of Cisco experts. These experts travel most of the time and have little time for face-to face interactions with our partners. Now these experts broadcast training sessions for partners on communities, which achieves the goal of deepening relationships with our partners.

The common theme here is that the Web 2.0 technology that communities use can positively impact the business by encouraging innovation, reducing travel costs, opening communication and open up resources. Another way we’re positively impacting the business is that we are capturing and sharing frequently asked questions and conversations within the community. We have a wider reach and we’re able to answer more than one person’s question online. If someone else has the same question it’s all right there with a paper trail.  Communities.cisco.com have proven to be a very transparent, authentic way to communicate so more than one person is able to benefit.

Q: Those are impressive results. What are some recent milestones you’ve reached in terms of overall traffic and membership?

A: Our membership a year ago was at about 74K. We are now at about 113K. In 2011, we saw more than a  50% increase in overall membership and traffic. And, we’re also happy about the response time we’re seeing. Support questions usually get at least one or multiple responses within 24 hours.

Q: What are a few best practices you can outline that have helped achieve these results?

A: Open and frequent communications are a must when you are working with a group this large. We have an open bi-weekly Community Manager meeting to serve as a communication platform as well as a best practice share and overall time to update one another on the various projects we have in the works. We set the agenda in advance and we have an area in our own Community Managers Community, completely dedicated to presentations delivered and communications relayed in these meetings. We encourage CMs to bring up topics they want to cover as well as set the agenda for future facing meetings. Not limiting ourselves, we also bring in our external networks.  I think it’s really valuable that we’re always willing to learn from internal and experts about how to best manage the platform.

Additionally, every community has an established and committed community manager. You must always have one point of contact for each space. This way that person can drive communications about the community and content within their space. It is also imperative that they manage the editorial calendar. This is another best practice.

Overall the CM will coordinate with campaigns in different parts of the organization to drive awareness. Some may also work with hired moderators to make sure questions are escalated to appropriate subject matter experts. They should be focused on the communities health.

Q: What is the biggest challenge ahead of you?

A: I’d say it is taking the platform to next level. As I mentioned before we recently added social share into the platform, but what else is out there? It will be a challenge making communities an easy go-to Web 2.0 tool. There are so many different ways we communicate day-to-day whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or text messaging. It’s hard to make sure there’s one central place to go to. From a platform perspective, technology and communities will continue to evolve and it’s my job to monitor this space and help drive what will make communities a better platform and program, without losing sight of our goals.

 - Lauren Bittner, the author of this blog, is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their online community management efforts with their business goals.

Recently, the celebrated American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson teamed up with Reddit for a very special Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. For several hours Neil answered hundreds of questions about his thoughts on space, space science, and the future of scientific research and education in America. Neil is already known for his charismatic demeanor and it came through even in his text based responses.

So what does this have to do with social media? Neil’s AMA is an excellent example of using social media to not only engage but inspire a captive audience. While you have to be willing to deal with the unexpected, the opportunity for thought leadership is unprecedented. Putting yourself out there and advertising the idea that people are encouraged to come “pick your brain” for a few hours is a great way to make your mark on the social landscape as someone who not only is willing to offer your own thoughts and ideas but also entertain the thoughts and ideas of others. Take a few moments and read through the conversation at Reddit. Beware, though! Neil’s appearance garnered a whopping 11,000 comments!

About Neil deGrasse Tyson: Widely touted as the next Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a tireless and fearless advocate of space science. Currently the head of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and future host of the sequel to Carl Sagan’s epic Cosmos series, Neil has dedicated his life to once again making science an exciting and attainable field for the next generation. If you have time to get misty eyed, check out Neil’s account of meeting Carl Sagan for the first time.

Recent Gallup research shows that brands have very little influence on the decision of a consumer to purchase their product or service. Instead, they seek out the opinions of their spouse, children, friends, and others. At the very bottom of the totem pole are company sponsored Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. So does that mean that Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets are useless to brands when trying to cultivate their audience? Hardly. It simply means that brands cannot rely solely on putting up Facebook posts or sending out Tweets with quips about company information or the newest rebate. Brands must focus on truly engaging users if they want to build an audience that will, in turn, go out and spread the word. Brands have to put in the time and effort to create passionate engaged followers.

Source: Social Media: The Three Big Myths, Gallup

When brands don’t nurture these relationships they are opening the door for a larger audience to speak negatively or ambivalently about them. Look at the chart below that describes the different types of engaged users. What should stand out to you is the fact that an actively disengaged customer is just as likely to talk to others about your product as a fully engaged customer, just in all the ways you don’t want them to. When brands have Facebook pages that exist only to fill some percieved need to be on Facebook and don’t engage the people on those pages, they risk alienating their potential audience. The problem then becomes not only the fact that people aren’t giving you Facebook likes, but that they are also now talking poorly of you offline and that is something you won’t be able to track with metrics. Putting effort into truly engaging those who engage with you on social media sites and focusing on the quality of your interactions over the quanitity of your interactions will, in turn, have a greater reach and potentially be longer lasting over time.

Source: Making the Most of Social Media, Gallup