dangerouslyawesome

I’ve identified three distinct phases to a community marketing plan. As much as I hate speaking in absolutes, I’m confident that they need to go in this order to be truly effective.

• Listen – Turn the bullhorn around. Social Media isn’t traditional marketing with a new set of tools. Despite the fact that these tools are effective for broadcast, they’re even more effective for monitoring and listening. You need to do that first.
• Engage – First contact. This one is critical. The line to be walked is a fine one, between jumping into conversation uninvited and actually introducing yourself. Again, it’s not the fault of the tools that they are designed to encourage brief messages. Most importantly, you need first contact to come from a human, not a robot.
• Share – Now that you’ve built up some social capital by listening and then reaching out in a relevant manner, your chance to help, share, or otherwise help the community member totally kick ass comes. Don’t blow it by sharing nothing but marketing material, share things that are truly helpful. Don’t be afraid to link off site, or even better, off topic. Continue to engage as a human, while sharing an experience with a community member.

Following these three steps will help you build honest, valuable relationships with your community members, customers, and frankly…make new friends.

This process isn’t just for business, it’s for real life.

Are two words that have been bastardized into near meaninglessness (or at least misunderstanding) by marketing drones. Thank goodness Tara Hunt, in her brand new book (just released today!) “The Whuffie Factor“, has this to say:

“Openness and transparency is a great first step, often beyond what your competitors are doing, but it is equally important to take the results of that openness – the feedback and the market research – and integrate it into your product itself. This is more difficult than opening yourself in the first place because there will be a great number of conversations to respond to.”

Via http://zygote.egg-co.com/social-media-roi/

I snagged this slide from one of the most valuable presentations about social media I’ve read online. Read it. Right now. It’s long-ish, but worth it. Thanks to Dave McClure for sharing it.

Here’s the deal: teaching people how to tweet on twitter.com, blog on blogger.com, or belch on belcher.com, makes not an effective social media campaign.

There is no silver bullet.

You need to evaluate business problems.

You have to know the right solutions to solve those problems, relevantly to the business in question.

And you need to design and execute against metrics to measure the success of your decisions.

It’s not simple. It’s not quick.

Which is why I find it so hard to believe how many “social media experts” are out there.

My sincere hope it that people read at this really well constructed deck and presentation content, and take it to heart, and put their “social media consultant” cards in a drawer for a day when you actually can provide value to the people paying them money. (And maybe use those spare “SEO consultant” cards you’ve got laying around in the mean time so you don’t have to waste money on new ones).