The “Now What” Syndrom: Retaining and Engaging Fans/Followers

In Chase McMichael’s upcoming talk at INTEGRATING EMAIL MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA, we're addressing the challenges brands are having with their social sites once they get one rolling. The question is “NOW WHAT” with regards to retaining and engaging their fans/followers.


Brand managers are challenged with managing and making their social presences engaging; what should I post to my audience over just product update after product update, or special discounts, over and over again. Social is not about force feeding a one way message to your audience but more about starting conversations, becoming a leader in information discovery and content creator. Even the company blog needs content that’s highly relevant and meaning full, overall providing value to your consumers.


How brands obtains a greater following which produces high social density (people with same or similar in common connections to the same brand) is based directly on connected consumers with similar interests. The higher the social density is around a brand the higher the social resonance a brand has among a community; therefore creating greater conversation and sharing.

Fig 1 and 2 illustrate high and low social density around one topic.

Low social density results in low social resonance. The top image has zero in common connections therefore the probability to cause social resonance is approaching zero where as the lower image has high social density around a specific vertical topic causing retweets, sharing and people commenting.


When consumers share, go to and make comments on content; these actions create the Content Consumption Graph (CCG). Billions of views on content are happening right now and a fraction is being shared or interactive with to expand that content reach. The word “Viral” is a word used to describe a small set of consumers who send out content to enough people in turn sending to others and so on, hence, Viral spreading. What’s great about all this behavior is Brands can leverage this with desire to share and create content discovery with content that’s highly relevant to their brand and resonates with their target audience.

The ability to do continuous social insight management of my many social points is vital to leverage the CCG. With recent advancements in social technologies brands have access to real time recommendations of content that’s important to their audience. Being in the stream and being relevant is a big deal. There are 100,000’s of social sites that are dead because no one is fuelling the jet and providing ongoing lead nurturing and content discovery around their social presence.

Do you know what your brands social density is and who is engaging your posts? How are you sourcing content that’s relevant to your customers? Tell us what steps you’re taking to engage with content.

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph
sales@infinigraph.com

Pursuing the Content Sharers

My first ADOTAS – Every day consumers are interacting with content — from location-based services to content creators to digital content sharing. Currently there are millions of highly motivated consumers sharing content daily.

The Content Consumption Graph (CCG) forms a social currency ecosystem based on how often and who shares content. This drive and desire to obtain a nugget of information and be the first to seed such an information discovery among ones followers/friends (give them something to talk about) is a major opportunity for brands to intelligently source and feed their feeds.

Content worthy of being shared is passed, retweeted (RT) or pushed in a Facebook stream as status updates or posts starting the conversation tsunami; however, brands are not taking advantage of this viral conversation. This highly desired sharing behavior is prompted by consumers using shared information to drive discovery within specific networks which is an amazing conduit for
brands.

Every brand has a set of prolific content sharers who are directly connected to the brand on many levels. These hyper-sharers may never mention or post directly on your brand, exposing a major flaw in keyword-based social monitoring platforms.

Mashups and infographs such as recently launched Facebook Stories are hot because they drive more sharing and conversation around the same set of topics. A great example of this CCG interaction was spawned from the Fast Company Influencer Project.

Here we show the interaction breakdown putting Amber Naslund at the very top of the CCG and other sites gaining less share reach.



Today’s brand managers face the challenge of what they should post to their audience versus just product update or special discount offers over and over. Social is not about force-feeding a one-way message, rather more about leading in information discovery.

Information about information - Seth Godin

I had to put this up and full cred to Seth Godin http://bit.ly/a5uHNg


Information about information

The first revolution hit when people who made stuff started to discover that information was often as valuable as the stuff itself. Knowing where something was or how it performed or how it interacted with you can be worth more than the item itself.

Frito Lay dominates the snack business because of the information infrastructure they built on top of their delivery model. 7 Eleven in Japan dominated for a decade or more because they used information to change their inventory. Zara in Europe is an information business that happens to sell clothes.

You've probably already guessed what's now: information about information. That's what Facebook and Google and Bloomberg do for a living. They create a meta-layer, a world of information about the information itself.

And why is this so valuable? Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage in the stock market. Or in marketing. Or in fundraising.

Many people and organizations are contributing to this mass of data, but few are taking advantage of the opportunity to collate it and present it to people who desperately need it. Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it.

The race to deliver this essential scalable asset isn't over, it's just beginning.

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph

A/B Testing Social Media @ Social Media Marketing 2010

A/B Testing in Social Media please see InfiniGraphs YouTube channel for the rest of the program.

In this clip I talk about what InfiniGraph is doing on the social graph and the great innovation we have coming out soon.



Full length is here

Social Media Marketing 2010 - A/B Testing for Social Media from InfiniGraph Chase McMichael on Vimeo.

@ChaseMcMichael
@infinigraph

A/B Testing for Social Media July 8th

Exciting next week I will be speaking at #SSMSF A/B Testing for Social Media July 8th. Will be talking directly about how to drive and measure target traffice to your site while optimizing the content for increased relevance. Using Social Intelligence in this context is a big deal and will be our first showing of what we have been doing recently. Get over to Hotel Nikko starts at 9am.


Social Media Marketing 2010 - San Francisco - July 8th, 2010

A/B Testing for Social Media

Panelist: Hiten Shah ( @hnshah) – KISSmetrics, Dan Martell – FlowTown and Chase McMichael (@chasemcmichel) - @InfiniGraph

Overview: Over the past decade or more, A/B testing has proven an invaluable method of marketing testing to optimize landing pages, emails, ads, and text. Learn how to apply the A/B testing methodology to your marketing campaigns for increased social media engagement. Find out what the experts are currently using as engagement metrics, learn major pitfalls to avoid, and hear their take on everything from optimizing blog post lengths to optimizing websites for most searched keywords

Register with this link and use discount code: 10smmsf1 to save 10%

Come and join us in the conversation!

@chasemcmichael
@InfiniGraph

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Social Intelligence and Social CRM – a powerful combination

Re-post from InfiniGraph blog


In our last blog we talked about Social Relevancy and the fact that your customer are connected and interacting with many brands and content types that all have to be considered when developing a strategy to engage and ignite your audience.

Social CRM (SCRM) is the new big buzz word for now, however, there is a great deal of definitions and interpretation to what SCRM really is (see Social CRM Pioneers). Several recent studies (link) on what a Facebook Fans “LIKER” is worth brings light to Social Media is serious business when it comes to the companies CRM strategy when your customers on Facebook are more valuable.

A fraction of your online customer base moves your brand or insight community interaction around your brand enabling social crowd sourcing. If the brand engages with right set of people the crowd wins. Social Intelligence is a key to understanding your audience and the best engagement points. The flaw in social listening or monitoring platforms is not all customers are talking about you. Being keyword base also poses another challenge in that what keywords your customer are using are not the obvious ones such as your brand name.

Customer interaction in the social web is one key mechanism to dive the crowd to participate. This quote from Seth Godin “you don’t manage your customers, your customers manage you” really sums up the truth about what the dynamics are between consumer to brand relationship in the social web.

Beyond understand your customers’ interaction with your brand and connecting the dots of your customers numerous social personas, accessing the Content Consumption Graph (CCG) becomes another critical step to harnessing intelligent crowd sourcing.

Enhance your knowledge of your customer by developing strong SocialCRM foundations;

· customer-controlled

· integrated

· interactive

· connected

· lifecycle-based

· value-focused

· community-driven

· cross-divisional

· marketing-driven

What does all this have to do with Social CRM and the relevant impact? The entire organization needs to socialize and optimize in order to affect decisions and earn relevance.

Social CRM takes a different view on your customer base to enable empowerment and crowd sourcing beyond traditional customer support and put it on its head.

1. Employees and Customers contribute to this echo system

2. Customers have reach and meaning in their own micro communities

3. User generated content like videos, blogs, reviews, forums etc all become the source of consumer ownership.

4. Customer Service becomes a central theme because customers have an amazing broadcast capability and the ones super connect can start a grown swell

5. Marketing is a function of service and who is being engaged is extremely important

Brands now have new opportunities for building customer relationships like never before and are 1 degree separated for a massive collective that operate in real-time. Understanding your customer and what motivates them is a key attribute to finding those who are moving your brand.

According to Solis, 'the ability to identify active communities of relevance, tracing influential people and channels, and the dissection of all phases of the process of decision making, all in real-time, are crucial aspects of social media marketing.”

Using Social Intelligence enables this Identification and involving these ‘influencers’ and communities. Linking a company CRM to interactive marketing actions are some of the core elements of an integrated, Social CRM solution. Interactive marketing, customer interactions based on real-time data, and customer actions should be linked with one and another. That’s the technical and tactical aspect: you communicate with the customer in a way that he wants to, based on the digital signals and ‘triggers’ they give you.

If we define influence as the ability to inspire action and measure the corresponding activity, the socialization of influence now expands beyond the strategies and software that organize and optimize customer relations and the management processes that govern it.

@infinigraph
@chasemcmichael
@stephaneosmont

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Ready for Social Relevancy & Facebook Open Graph?

With all the hype over on Facebook launch of Like and Open Graph, it is time for me to highlight areas that marketers have to consider besides just dropping in a widget or a plug-in on their pages. Facebook has opened big opportunities in information discovery, consumer opt-in, expanding Social CRM (SCRM) and increasing Social Density around your brand. SCRM has now expanded beyond social listening and seeing your consumer overlaps with vertical products to a whole new level. Below is a great example of how to identify consumers that match other brand preferences and expand reach through loyalty.

With Open Graph, users now don't just become a "fan" of a brand, band, sport, or style of music. They will simply decide whether they "Like" something. By using the "Like" button or making a “comment” on a site, users automatically authorize Facebook to publish this information on their profiles or their friend's news feeds. Below are examples of categories listed in the Facebook Open Graph API. Plug-ins provided by Facebook allow the segmenting of friends who "Like" something by publisher.




Facebook Object types currently supported:

This provides much greater access to user information, but the majority of companies don’t really know what to do to enhance the social velocity of their brands. Since greater access carries greater responsibility in consumer privacy protection, brands must offer a level of transparency to assure integrity.

As of last check, Facebook has added nearly 300 website "Like" buttons per hour and now over 100K. Marketers are salivating over Facebook's 500+ million users but without a clear way to comprehend what is information is available and how to maximize their conversational presence. The publishers are organized by top level categories enabling network based content interaction across many publishers.

The vision here is to build a network of discovery tools and information that operates at a higher level than search. The goals are to answer questions for users. What are my friends doing? Where are they eating? What do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search, but it does represent an alternative way in which to discover information. For This will make it easier for marketing professionals, who will have yet another set of content connections to manage, to make sense of the new services.


The mountain of data that Facebook will gain is going to improve the site's search capabilities as well as integration of Bing. For example, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” Caribbean restaurants in Miami and my friends like these same restaurants, the site can show that information in my search results. This hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social, turning the site into more of a "recommendation engine” than Google in its current state.

This is all speculation for the moment. Since Facebook doesn’t have a really good search experience, it remains less useful than Google. However, it is possible to imagine much improved Bing integration combined with data and metadata gleaned from millions of profiles and “Likes” across the internet — making Facebook a more personal, more social and much better “discovery engine” than it is today.
This social discovery also applies to Brands and consumers sharing links about where they are or what they are Twittering about is a bonanza for smart marketers who want to be more in tuned to the audience they service.

Viral link sharing in the context of social density of who is sharing what provides a MUCH better discovery experience for Brands that want to understand their social ecosystem and the relationship between consumers who want to find people interested in the same topics. This radically different approach disrupts old ways of searching over a massive web-based indexes welded to link structure. By zeroing in on collective group movement, viral link sharing provides greater relevance to all parties. Twitter and Facebook reflect what’s resonating among the community affinity matrix right now.

I’m working on this real-time aspect of leveraging brand ranking and social preferences to understand social resonance and relevancy of a particular fan page and linked content that a key audience is collectively resonating around. We now have the ability to determine relevance of a page beyond the number of links it has.

Influencers are interacting with content and sharing links all the time. The Social Syndication Acceleration is based on the number of shared and the influence Rank of the person sharing the links. Google-style search is based on web links and document content where as real-time search is linked to what people are talking about now and provides radically different search results for users who are linked to brands/tribes.

Also see Trend: Social CRM Consolidation

@ChaseMcMichael

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