At a company event last month, I had the great opportunity to hear a speech by Jeffrey Rayport, chairman of MarketspaceLLC and a former distinguished Harvard Business School professor. He talked about “Customers 3.0,” and about how consumers are creating their own channels through which they decide what to purchase. Increasingly, the “channels” they are creating are through blogs, social networks and online communities.
Consumers are joining social networks of various stripes at a pace that so far is unabated. Last month, Nielsen reported Twitter’s growth at over 1,300% and that the average Facebook user is spending 170% more time on the network than a year ago. Plus, eMarketer recently estimated that nearly 80 million Americans, or nearly 40% of the U.S. Internet population, will update their social network pages or use it to communicate at least once a month.
These networks are filled with people they trust, which is why they rely as much (or more) on each other to get information they need on products and services than on traditional sources like the media or companies’ Web sites.
In most cases individual customers’ social networks are small, but this doesn’t mean that it’s not worth integrating social media into your program. The smaller an individual’s social network—for example, their number of Twitter followers—the better.
This is a clear indication that those folks in one’s network of followers are true friends and the peer influence factor is high. It is important to note, however, that many of these individuals—particularly ones that are using Twitter or other social networks as part of their jobs—would love to connect with more peers in order to learn from them, showcase themselves and gain more trusted opinions on products or services they should use.
The essence in thinking about social media in this context lies in three things:
1. Finding where these individuals are: There are plenty of tools, both free and ones available for a nominal monthly subscription (my preferred tool is Radian6), which you can use to create searches using your company name, product or service name and market/product category as keywords.
These tools monitor blogs, micromedia (Twitter, for example) and key social networks for instances where consumers are discussing their experiences, sharing their knowledge and posing questions.
The trick here is to filter these discussions and determine those that present a high-value opportunity to engage in those discussions in various ways.
2. Determining how they are using their social networks: The most basic thing to determine is the extent to which individuals are using their social networks for either personal reasons or as part of doing their job.
Either way, since you’ve filtered the discussions and individuals using the tools described above, you’ll be in a better position to determine if they are talking about their experiences with your products, bringing up problems they are having or asking for advice.
3. Determining how you can add value to them: A primary way to add value is to help consumers connect. This means joining and using the social networks where these consumers are active. For the most part, it also means not talking about your organization. When you do, it should be in response to a problem they’ve expressed, and it should either be an offer to help or a practical solution.
More specifically:
• Show them you’re listening. If a blogger offers a tip or best practice on using a product or service, or on how they’ve solved a particular problem, post a comment complimenting it, or share it through your Twitter channel or blog. If it’s feedback (positive or negative) on your company’s product or service, tell them that you’ll use the feedback in a future offering.
• Utilize your blog for more than discussing your company and your products. In fact, a majority of the content should be focused on topics other than your company itself. The blog should be used to “talk” to these individuals identified (as described above) through their blogs by linking to and commenting on their insights (again in an authentic way). The potential influencers will welcome the attention. If you are blogging in the right way and have a strong brand, you have a good audience with interests similar to the audiences of others out there blogging about you. This will help them connect.
• Offer content they can use. Produce a customer interview-based podcast, create an animated tutorial on your product, post graphics and images to Flickr, post a YouTube video or create a widget. In other words, put content where bloggers or individuals on social networks are looking for it and in a form they can easily use.
• Use a company Twitter channel for more networking than broadcasting. “Retweet” interesting information from users so you’re seen as helping them connect with peers. Reply to questions users ask or offer to help with information they are seeking.
• When putting out content, give people the tools to share it easily. This can be done through coded “Tweet This” links or buttons. Ask people to share the content if they find it interesting.
This approach demonstrates that PR professionals can and should leverage the principles of word-of-mouth marketing. It also rolls together the concepts of one-to-one communications and many-to-many communications and it complements the one-to-many communications model of traditional media. The bottom line: This approach requires a different mentality among communicators and marketers but pays off in cumulative returns in the medium and long term. PRN
CONTACT:
Ted Weismann is SVP of Lois Paul & Partners. He can be reached at [email protected], and seen as a presenter at the June 3 PR News Measurement Summit in D.C.