remarkable communication

Social Media Workshop: The Imaginary Friends Who Live in Your Typewriter

By Sonia Simone

"Imaginary friends who live in my typewriter" is my friend Gavin's term for people he knows from online. I met Gavin on The WELL and he's a classic example of the friends I've made in online communities--smart, accomplished, and interesting.

The WELL has a long tradition of supplementing online community with offline get-togethers. That might be why it's known for the amazing depth of connections that were made there.

Yes, there were exceptions, but for the most part, people who were delightful online like Mr. Jalopy and Howard Rheingold were also delightful offline. Each realm showed you stuff you wouldn't have seen from the other. Online community was a way to get to know someone in a different way. It didn't replace face-to-face relationship, it deepened it. (keep reading »)

The Three Bears of Social Media Marketing: Part 3 (Baby Bear)

By Sonia Simone

OK, if Mama Bear is about conversation and connection, and Papa Bear is about listening more than you talk (sometimes known as lurking), what's Baby Bear?

Baby Bear makes friends easily, and he always has a lot to say. He can be awfully cute—even adorable, if you do it right. So I hope you'll forgive him for not really being a bear at all. (keep reading »)

 

The Three Bears of Social Media Marketing: Part 2 (Papa Bear)

By Sonia Simone

OK, the Mama Bear of social media marketing is the customer conversation model. It's about connection, warm fuzzies, community, all that good stuff.

The Papa Bear model isn't quite so fuzzy. I call it Papa Bear because it's the model that makes the most sense for gigantic organizations, but it can also be an important social media strategy for individuals or smaller companies. It has a common sense side and a potentially creepy side. So let's get into it. (keep reading »)

Flickr Creative Commons image by thelearnr

The Three Bears of Social Media Marketing: Part 1 (Mama Bear)

By Sonia Simone

The Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, who can always be counted on to spice things up, wrote a thought-provoking post for Copyblogger last week about the lack of real interactivity for the huge majority of Web users.

Bob has long held that the idealistic social media model of a rich, layered conversation replacing traditional advertising doesn't scale, and makes no sense for products like frozen chicken, floor wax, etc. Actually, I believe the expression "complete bullshit" may have come into play. (keep reading »)

Monkeys and Bloggers and Tribes (oh, my!)

By Sonia Simone

Have the past couple of days been driving you nuts (here and on some other blogs you might be following)? All this inside baseball from SOBCon--lots of us Twittering like crazy, mostly for the benefit of the other 130-odd bloggers who were there.

The worst part is, most of us are so exhausted that our notes are terrible. "Brogan said we should care about people! OMG he is such a freaking genius. BRB, I have to go schmooze Brian Clark."

(Note: this is in no way to suggest that Brogan is not a genius.)

There were exceptions, but I'm afraid I wasn't one of them! I hope my fragments held some value for some of you, at least.

But I did pick up a lot of ideas to riff on, and the heart of SOBCon itself is one of them:

Community Is Fundamental
Community, along with ego and family and mortality, is one of those primal driving forces. If you want to tap into something deep and fundamental in order to deliver your message, community is one of the options.

When we were just starting out as upright monkeys, you kept your tribe solid or you all died. Finding stuff to eat was not so easy, and finding stuff that wanted to eat you was way too easy. We needed an intense bond that kept us connected, even when we wanted to kill each other. Connection was not optional. It's why we, as a species, are still here.

Creating a community around what you do is still a great way to survive in a hostile landscape. If your customers can form a tribe around your product or service (or church or nonprofit or whatever your particular gig might be), you win. Their loyalty to your tribe can become completely disproportional to the merits of what you have to offer. (cough Apple cough cough).

Tribes Aren't Indestructible
They can be wrecked by cluelessness, carelessness, shifting priorities. Back in the day, there was a rich collection of tribes on GE's online forum (GEnie). Gardeners, romance writers, gamers, Forth geeks--you name it, there was a GEnie RoundTable for it. Then one day, GE decided to sell its weirdo little project to a company that couldn't handle it. Chains were yanked, prices skyrocketed, and eventually GEnie was killed off by a failure to patch it up for Y2K. Bye-bye tribes.

Those of us who were there can tell you that the tribes didn't die because they weren't real. They died because tribes are fragile, and (assuming you're not an Inuit on an ice floe trying to survive the winter) we have other options.

Inside/Outside
As powerful as community can be, it hurts to be on the outside looking in. Inclusion feels safe and natural. We find our little monkey place in the community, and that feels right. Exclusion feels dangerous and wrong. There is no hatred like the hatred of the monkey who feels she's been shut out.

If you build a community for any reason, you owe it to them to figure out how you will keep the infrastucture going. And you owe it to yourself to figure out--early--who you'll bring in and who you will keep out. There are many excellent reasons to put up some boundaries (ever been in an AOL chat room?), but you also have to realize it's going to be acutely painful to someone.

While I've been monkeying around with my blogger pal tribe, I hope I haven't done so to the exclusion of the community that's grown up around this blog. I've just been on vacation one tribe over.

They're nice folks, thank you all for indulging my postcards. The weather was beautiful, wish you'd been there.

How to Build Stronger Customer Relationships

By Sonia Simone

For those who don't read Copyblogger, I have another post there this week on using conversation to create more remarkable connections with customers. Come by and say hi!

Relationship Marketing or Social Media?

I met a woman recently who's a relationship marketing expert. Her expertise lies with big, household name companies--she uses different tactics, but most of them are various flavors of "frequent flyer" programs that reward ongoing customer relationships.

She says that she gets the question all the time, "We only have budget for one thing this year--should we do relationship marketing or social media?"

She works with giant companies and I work with small organizations, but this question drives us equally nuts. So here's the answer.

You do both.

Most forms of social media are great for attracting attention
A YouTube video, a Squidoo lens, a Facebook app, a Digg or Del.icio.us or Stumble strategy--all of these do one thing particularly well. They capture attention.

The proliferation of advertising messages is starting to approach something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. The thicker the stream of messages, the better we get at tuning them out. In marketing jargon, this is known as "clutter" and it's a serious problem if you're trying to get the word out about what you do.

Social media is particularly handy at "flipping the funnel" to cut through information clutter. It works by convincing people who like you (a lot) to tell their friends about you.

The idea is, advertising messages are basically wallpaper, especially for the "most desirable" demographics (young people & rich people). Traditional advertising is invisible to the people it most wants to convince. But recommendations from friends are inherently relevant and interesting. So when you convince your customers to talk about you, you can capture the attention of potential new customers in a very quick and very vivid way.

There's one downside: capturing attention for attention's sake gets annoying in a hurry. Once you have someone's attention, you need to build on that and start creating a relationship.

Some forms of social media are great for building relationships
Blogs and customer forums will help your company create a relationship with the people you attract. Rather than bungee-ing in and out based on price or where you're ranking on Google today, your customers get to hang out and form tribes based on what you have to offer.

These tribal relationships can create a powerful bond, but they're also demanding. As the "social object" at the center of that particular tribe, you need to participate in that messy, complicated conversation in order to keep your own credibility.

Forums and interactive spaces give customers a handy platform to talk you up. Of course, you may have figured out the scary part already--the same platform is just as handy to knock you down.

But if you're good (and you have to be good to survive any more, there are too many businesses and services and products and organizations that are scary good), your fans are going to douse any flames started by your detractors. An army of rabid fans is the best crisis plan there is. When you can convince someone who isn't you to defend you from the slings & arrows, you've officially moved your game to a whole new level.

There are plenty of relationship tactics that don't involve social media (you can find some of those described in my relationship marketing series). There are hundreds of ways to create better connection with your customers, and lots of them fit into a more traditional marketing & communication framework.

So there's your answer. If your culture can adapt to it (you're highly flexible, comfortable with radical transparency, and willing to be insanely responsive), social media can be extremely effective. But don't bother "doing social media" unless you have some solid ideas about how to build on the relationships you start.

You can have the cleverest YouTube video ever shot, but if you have no way to create a relationship based on the attraction you create, that cleverness will evaporate when the next motorcycle-riding monkey comes along.

Can Social Media Be Analyzed?

There are a lot of questions floating around about whether or not it's possible to apply methodical analysis to business uses of social media, including buzzword-rich realms like content strategy, permission marketing, social media marketing, online community, virtual reality, PR 2.0, and whatever the hipster term of the week might be.

The diehard old school will tell you that conversation can't be measured, that information wants to be free, and p.s. take poison and die.

(See Bill Hicks' hilariously bitter and profane riff on advertising, Twittered by DoshDosh and not remotely safe for work unless your boss has a very good sense of humor.)

There is a traditional belief among social media oldsters (some of us have been doing this since the late 80s, god help us) that normal business ideas like ROI have nothing to do with the brave new world. It's too weird, it's too chaotic, and it changes too fast.

This view basically holds that online community is like a vast, 24/7/365 Burning Man, each participant vying with the next to be less predictable, less ordinary, and less interested in any conceivable commercial engagement.

Here's my take
There is some truth to the oldster view. You can think of social media as a kind of hopped-up primal ooze, with various critters evolving out of it in no predictable order.

Trying to run predictive quantitative analysis on a MySpace or Facebook or Twitter campaign is a sucker bet. And a blog or content/community strategy isn't like direct mail--the results aren't linear. You can't build a mathematical model and start plugging numbers in, unless your spreadsheet has a way to quantify "8th dimension," "monkeys" and "naked girls riding bicycles."

Taken as a whole, the social media world is not manageable or predictable. It's a swirling ocean of chaos. The fashionable 5% of social media is in love with the weird, the disturbing, and the radically new.

Consider Boing Boing
Once you get the sensibility, it's not hard at all to predict a Boing Boing story. But it's impossible to manufacture a Boing Boing story (there is nothing on earth that shines brighter than faked weirdness). And it's impossible to know how getting onto Boing Boing would affect your business.

Other than a brief but massive traffic spike, none of us knows what a Boing Boing hit would bring. "Make something Boing Boing likes" is a strategy for dopes, unless you're doing it for the pure fun of doing it.

But, you know, there's a lot of social media that is not Boing Boing. There are stay-at-home parents who blog about air freshener. (Really.) There are a whole bunch of normal people with day jobs who blog about their commute, or the jeans they like best, or who they're thinking about voting for.

The great secret of social media is that most of its participants don't have much desire to drop acid and wander the desert wearing only a feather boa.

Because social media is vast (and growing at a breathtaking pace) and populated by human beings, it's inherently unpredictable. It's a classic chaotic system. The weirdness of social media, on the other hand, has been overstated.

Sure, you can still find magnificent weirdness if you know where to look, (and some of us dig that) but you can also find rather nice, normal people who just want some good advice, some useful tools, and a place to hold a conversation. Possibly even about air freshener.

Additional reading:

Ranching Butterflies

Flickr Creative Commons image by MikeLove

Social Media Workshop: Ranching Butterflies

By Sonia Simone

There is one highly predictable aspect to social media.

Your best results will come from the least predictable part.

An interview with Seth Godin revealed all of the smart, sensible biz dev deals he cut to promote Squidoo, and how miserably they all failed. Smart deals with media companies and major magazines, with celebrities and major sites, pfffft.

What worked, massively, was individual people picking up a useful tool and doing something unpredictable with it, then talking with their friends about how cool the experience was.

Not unpredictable like a Fellini movie, but unpredictable like breastfeeding, banana bread recipes, and American Idol.

If you make something in the social media world that is highly useful to a bunch of folks, whether it's a great content series or a fantastic new tool, you can guess you'll do well, but you probably won't be able to predict exactly how. That part isn't up to you, it's up to your community. Your part is to avoid getting in the way and to make yourself helpful at the right points.

The social media universe is an intensely chaotic system that's highly susceptible to the butterfly effect. A butterfly flits its wings in North Texas and ten days later you get a hurricane in Singapore.

There's some question about whether you can analyze social media at all. I know from experience that you can, but it calls for a special skill set.

Social media analysis calls for an exceptional ability to filter out irrelevant BS, an acute ability to sniff out patterns and undercurrents, and a thorough knowledge of butterfly ranching. The more butterflies you can get flittering, the better your odds of a hurricane down the line.

Photo courtesy of aussiegall on Flickr Creative Commons.

The Ten Commandments of New Social Media

By Sonia Simone

A lot of people new to social media wonder if there are any rules, and if so, what are they? You'll be glad to know that yes, this frontier isn't quite as wild as it looks. Even in these relatively early days, there's a healthy set of conventions, laws and norms. Just like the original ten, these won't keep you out of every kind of trouble, but they cover the big stuff pretty well.

Commandment #1: Thou Shalt Participate in the Conversation
The conversation is going to take place with you or without you. The 21st century has no patience with cowards. Opting out is not an option, so get in there and participate.

Commandment #2: Thou Shalt Not Lie
Nothing will sink you faster in the wired world than lying and all its variants. It's too easy to compare stories, and too easy for your attempted coverups to get leaked. Don't tell two conflicting stories in two different media. Don't say you're one thing when you know that your actions tell an entirely different story. Don't tell lies of omission. And . . .

Commandment #3: Thou Shalt Not Astroturf
See Commandment #2. Don't try to engineer conversation or use fake characters to advocate for you. I guarantee you will get caught, and your credibility will take a beating you may never get over. Creating a space for conversation is good. Creating sock puppets is bad.

Commandment # 4: Thou Shalt Talk Like a Human Being
Corporations don't hold conversations. Enterprises don't hold conversations. Entities don't hold conversations. Conversations take place among people. Be a person.

Commandment #5: Remember Thy Community and Keep It Holy
It's not an audience of passive recipients of your message. It's a community made up of a complicated mix of personalities. The community has its own needs and its own imperatives. Take care of your community.

Commandment #6: Thou Shalt Not Be a Wimp
Bullies have been a factor in every social group that has ever existed. The anonymity of the Internet gives bullies an extra measure of courage. You must face bullies down every time you encounter them, clearly and forcefully.

Don't let bully-wrangling turn you into an aggressive butthead yourself. And don't be a hall monitor, waggling your finger and quoting rules. (Or commandments!) Instead, see #5: be a citizen who values civility and defends it on behalf of your community.

Commandment #7: Thou Shalt Not Snivel
You're going to get beat up every once in awhile. Never, ever whine about it.

Commandment #8: Thou Shalt Write What Is Worth Reading
Typos aren't necessarily a big problem, although you notice you never see one on Copyblogger, Problogger or Seth's Blog. Vague, weak, insipid or meaningless writing are a big problem. Write clearly and with vigor. Cut out every line of corporate doublespeak. If you don't know how to do that, subscribe to Copyblogger, read it faithfully, and put their advice into practice daily.

Commandment #9: Thou Shalt Not Pontificate About Shit Thou Knowest Nothing About
You will get caught and mocked and that's just embarrassing.

Commandment #10: Thou Shalt Have a Sense of Humor
It's just people, and people are pretty much the funniest thing ever. Nothing will serve you online as well as a sense of humor, especially about yourself.

If you found this post useful, I would be honored if you were to Digg, Sphinn and Stumble it!

Related Reading:

• 4 Reasons You Should Encourage, Foster and Harness Dissent on Your Blog with very useful clarifying graphic
• New Media Workshop: What to Do When the Conversation Gets Ugly
• Transparency and the Meatball Sundae