(Side Note: If you are a communications professional using social media or are responsible for developing a company’s strategic social media plan, I highly recommend this unconference series which occurs each Tuesday at 9:00 am Pacific Time.)

During the discussion, Ken raised several questions, and made several points, about how it’s important to understand who influences your audience and how and why they influence them. To this, I responded: It’s vital for a company to know how an Influencer’s influence manifests itself in the market conversation and engage with them appropriately to ultimately reach the Influencers’ audiences. (Of course this was stated in 140 characters.) Marc Meyer, one of my most favorite people to follow on Twitter, responded saying, “There’s a nice hidden question in there: How does influence manifest itself in market conversations?”

First, as a marketing/communications professional you want to identify the influencers in your market space. That’s another topic for another blog post, but I will say that in your research to identify the influencers you’ll essentially be viewing how their influence manifests itself! To answer Marc’s question, I’ll go ahead and use him as our Influencer—hope you don’t mind, Marc!

With Marc as our Influencer, how does Marc’s influence manifest itself in the greater marketing industry’s market conversation?

1. Twitter: @marc_meyer
2. Marc’s Blog: Direct Marketing Observations
3. Marc’s Consulting Services Company: Digital Response Marketing Group
4. SocialMediaToday.com: Contributed Articles
5. Team member: hashtagsocialmedia.com unconference
6. Marc is ranked on multiple Top-Blog lists including, Best of Alltop, Junta42 Top Blogs, AdAge Power150, PostRank
7. Marc’s Presentations: SlideShare
8. LinkedIn Profile: Connections and Group Membership
9. Marc often speaks at industry events on marketing and social media topics, is a marketing and social media consultant and is often interviewed and quoted on his knowledge of these topics. He is asked to be a guest writer on other blogs and publications and is a member/participant of social media, marketing and technology groups.

These are great to know if you’re a company who considers Marc to be an Influencer to your target audience (maybe you’re a social media monitoring company, for example). You’d want to read his blog and comment with quality information. You might want to hire him as a consultant or ask him to speak at an event. You may wish to invite him to be on a panel with your VP of Social Media. You’d certainly want to have the appropriate person follow him on Twitter and participate in his online unconference discussions.

Marc’s influence does not manifest itself in any published books (as near as I could tell) or marketing industry research reports. Other ways an individual’s influence may manifest itself is by having a highly recognizable position or they are an event host/organizer. A traditional journalist’s influence is manifested through their print column or TV segment, but may also come out through their blog.

It’s important to identify individuals who are influential in your market space and then drill down into how their influence manifests itself and how you can engage with them through those avenues to build a relationship and thus get in front of their audiences.

Thanks, Marc, for raising the question and being my test subject!

I had several great conversations over the past couple of weeks with Ooga Labs‘ people. Very interesting company. They are:

… a group of software engineers and designers developing several consumer Internet businesses at the same time. We come up with the ideas ourselves, and once a company finds its product/market fit, we might raise outside capital for it. We like to build digital consumer services that have a chance to touch tens of millions of users and make the world a little better than it was.

They have several cool properties already (PlacePop, MedPedia and WonderHill) and are about to launch a new one soon. I’ll leave it to them to announce what their new property is, but I’ll add my 2 cents–it’s going to be very cool.

Anyway… After meeting with them, I doubt they’ll mind my putting these words in their mouth–they probably define marketing in the 4-letter word sense. I can’t blame them. There is a lot of reasons why marketing has gained this reputation, even though there are a lot of great things that marketing professionals have done to positively increase their customer view of them.

What do you do when your profession starts to be viewed this way? What all do people with this view see as “marketing”? Do they realize that marketing is more than advertising? Many don’t. Many think that marketing is trickery–a plot to get people to buy stuff they don’t want or need. Unfortunately, there are companies that operate that way. But we marketing professionals have a choice. You can step up and say, “Marketing (as a 4-letter word) is dead. The conversation, the customer and audience engagement, the honest interaction, the straight-forward information, and the genuine listening and caring about what people need and want is King. Long live the conversation!”

As a marketer, to adopt this mind set and make it effective as an approach for your company/clients it may mean going back to your business and marketing plans. You may need to alter, adapt or amend your brand identity and certainly you’ll need to embrace some new technologies to allow your customers to freely communicate with you (2-directional conversation). You’ll need to release some control over your message and embrace what your audiences say, both good and bad, and face them head on.

The best advice I can give you is to jump in and start listening to the marketing industries market conversation. There you’ll find out the disappointing news of diminishing Return on Investments for many activities, but also the incredible upside of emerging tactics. As a starting place here is my Twitter Marketing Conversation List. Check it out. You don’t need to spend oodles of time participating if you don’t want to, but listening to what people are talking about, sharing and exchanging of ideas will jump start you into a new way of approaching your profession.

This post is about writing communications that help people feel as if your engaging them in conversation. For sure, you need to be understood–the lessons from Eats, Shoots & Leaves shouldn’t be forgotten–but nothing says you have to sound like an automated phone tree system in everything you communicate. By now, most people on earth know that the first thing you do when you reach an automated voice is to press “0″ if you’d rather talk to a person. What do you suppose people do with written communications that sound that way? What do you do with them? Uh, delete? File under important in the trash can?

Let’s say you just signed up for some online service and you’re getting the auto email with important details about your account. Which of these statements would more likely keep you reading long enough to realize you should keep track of this information rather than quickly clicking delete?

1. Dear Ms. ‘Whomever’,
   Thank you for registering at ‘Company Whatever’. We are very pleased to have you as a customer. Our services are meeting the needs of companies all over the world, with more features and options being added regularly. Please make note of the following account information in your records so that our customer support team can better assist you should you have any questions.
2. Hello Jennifer,
   Your registration is complete–thanks for joining! Your account details for ‘Product Whatever’ are listed here, they’ll help you save time if you need assistance from us or our global community of users.

I’m sure you get the point I’m trying to make here. Of course, you want to be respectful of your audience, so this exact example may not be appropriate depending on what type of product you offer. But… food for thought–try considering all your communications and how they might be edited for easier reading, to make your company more approachable, to engage your audience, to illustrate that you care about them, etc.

Your communication pieces have a goal/purpose, right? (If they don’t, why are you sending them?) So, start by reviewing the goal and determine if a conversational approach would help you reach that goal. Staying with the example above, check to see how often customer support encounters people who don’t know their account details. Change the wording on the account details message and see if that number improves.

With the explosion of social media use, companies been moving toward a conversational tone, often by accident. The nature of social media is being “social”. Sounding like a dictionary or grammar book is far from being social. We don’t speak that way, so we don’t always need to write that way. Again, you can be understood, even if you’re writing is informal or doesn’t meet every grammatical rule.

• Listening
• Speaking
• Caring
• Sharing
• Building relationships

Lately, I’ve been talking with a number of engineers from startups who are in Alpha stages with their products, thus they don’t currently need to generate leads/awareness/purchases, etc. They’ve got great ideas for new software and some smart engineers on board. They’ve done enough market research to know there’s a market for the type of product they’re developing, enough to convince funders. But they’re still putting the marketing horse before the cart wanting to zero in on how to do lead-gen programs.

My advice to anyone in this situation is to do a solid dive into Listening first.

1. Use online web and social media monitoring tools (many free as well as paid for options out there) and do some basic Googling and blog searching to hear what people are saying about potential competitors products. What do they like or not like about features, etc.
2. What are experts and other industry influencers saying about the best solutions for fulfilling the need or want you expect your product to fulfill?
3. Really dive into what people are talking about, outside of mentioning current brands, about the need or want they have.
4. Start figuring out who the Influencers and market conversation Participants are, how that influence manifests itself and how they like to share information and receive information. What networks and online tools do they use to communicate?

This research will start to show you who to build relationships with as you work toward having a beta to show them–these are the people you’ll want to invite into your beta initially. They’ll give you the best feedback and help you generate awareness later on if your product meets there needs and you’re good to them. The optimal marketing mix that will ultimately achieve the best lead-gen results, generate the most awareness and trials of your product and sustain you for the long-run as you tweek and add to your product come out of the initial research. So start by listening and don’t forget to hear what is being said. Oh yeah, then be sure to internalize the info you deem important.

“Conversation: the informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy.”

But notice that the dictionary hasn’t caught up with the times. It’s 2010, Dictionary People! This definition specifically says “spoken” and “oral” and leaves out all other forms of communication available for the 2010s and beyond. With all the killer Web2.0 and social media networks, apps and tools, the “interchange of thoughts, information, etc.” can now be done via typed discussions (Twitter and forums for example), imagery (Flickr comes to mind) and multi-media (such as videos on YouTube with spoken and written words paired with music, graphics and other imagery.)

What is poignant in this definition is “the information interchange of thoughts, information, etc. … between persons.” A blogger and Tweeter I regularly follow, John Cass, wrote a post today titled Is Content Taking Marketers Down The Wrong Rabbit Hole? This struck a chord with me because I’d planned on writing about Making Conversation 2010 Style today. As John points out, companies need to consider the “social element” of social media rather than using it as just another outlet for their self-serving content.

Their are practically endless options now for where to converse with your target audiences, but the point is to have a two-way conversation that helps you build relationships with those individuals. Social media platforms, networks and tools are brilliant for this. They give your company the ability to listen (and then internalize) what people are saying not only about your products, but about their wants and needs. And you can respond to those individuals in a public forum so that others can read and benefit from the conversation (most people are Listeners–they don’t participate in the conversation but they listen and hear what others say.)

Also, these social media tools currently out, and coming soon, can help you be more efficient in conversing so that you aren’t trying to talk to all 1 million (or more) of your target audience by phone or in person. 2010 conversation style allows you to be much more efficient while reaching many more people. Sure, use these tools to tell people about your great content you’ve created, but also use the tools to get to know people and listen to what they want and need. We all know that the point of business is to sell your products, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be pals with your customers too. You listen to them, you help them fulfill their wants and needs with free, helpful advice, as well as with your products, and they’ll be more likely to buy from you and influence others to buy from you too.

Happy New Year and happy conversing!

5 Suggestions to Help You Be Successful with Social Media (with little money and/or few resources)

1. You don’t need to boil the ocean–it’s not necessary to have an account or fan page or profile on every single social network. Figure out where your customers and potential customers are. Often the best place for you to engage in the online conversation is in smaller niche networks/communities. This site might help you research. http://sites.google.com/site/socialmedialistproject/networks
2. You don’t need to spend a lot, but you’ll want to spend some money to create a plan on how to participate. Social networks and online communities are usually free to sign up, but you don’t want to waste a lot of time figuring out which network or community to get involved with if you aren’t familiar with them and once you’re set up, you need a plan for what to say, when to say it, who to listen to, how to respond to questions and mentions, etc. so that it actually benefits your business. I recommend hiring a consultant to help you do this.
3. You don’t need to spend a fortune on social media applications or tools. There are many free social media management, engagement and research tools available. Check out my Delicious bookmarks for Free SM Monitoring tools, SM research tools, and see the Social Media Project wiki for other 3rd party tools and social media locations.
4. Be sure to keep the 5 keys to conversation participation in mind:
   • Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize what you hear to improve your business.
   • Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
   • Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs.
   • Share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
   • Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
5. Spread the work out among more than one person. As a small company or non-profit, you don’t need a full-time person to make social media efforts work. Many of the social media management tools, even free ones, will allow you to create logins for multiple people and assign tasks to different people. Encourage your staff to help spread your word. Talk about guidelines for speaking out so that you’re all on the same page. I’ve set up CoTweet for a couple of small companies and non-profits. It works great for them to manage their Twitter stream.

Through a FB application, a charity who meets the eligibility requirements just needed to connect their FB page to the Chase Community Giving application so that individuals with a Facebook profile could locate the charity and vote for them. (A great win for FB too, to get more FB users!) The basics of Chase’s program include the corporation donating a total of $5million: via a first round of voting, the 100 charities to receive the top amount of votes all receive $25k. In a second round of voting, those top 100 vote recipients have a chance to explain how they would use the top prize funds and individuals with FB accounts then vote again. The organization to receive the most votes in round 2 will receive $1million and the top 5 runners up will receive $100k each. Finally, Chase Community Giving Advisory Board will select one or more nominated Charities to receive donations with a combined total of $1,000,000.

The Brilliance of the Campaign

1. Chase has received incredible exposure both in online communities and networks (FB, Twitter, blog posts, etc.) as well as traditional media coverage. As of this posting, the Chase Community Giving FB page has more than 853,000 Fans (to vote, you needed to become a Fan of their page.)
2. Chase has racked up lots of good will. Even if you weren’t a Chase customer, you probably think more highly of Chase once you saw that they were giving this money away. Most people don’t realize that many of the nations major corporations have philanthropic arms and continually donate funds to charities. With this campaign, not only do they just do what they’ve been doing–donating money to increase good will–but they’re getting exposure that is incredible. And they’re putting the decision-making power of where that money should go in the hands of regular people–even people who aren’t their customers. Now, when you’re looking at changing banks or opening a new account, won’t you be more likely to seriously consider Chase?
3. By allowing charities to sign up for participation in the contest and allowing anyone with a FB account to vote, as well as adding other outreach tools to the bottom of each page (like Tweet about this, etc.) they encouraged people to spread the word for them and made it easy for them to do so with the added social links.

I could go on about the benefits they’re receiving, but if you’re a marketing communications professional, you can probably figure out many others. So I have just one thought for Chase–What could they have done better?

Unfortunately, non-profits are probably one of the slowest groups to embrace social media. Maybe they made a Facebook page already, but they aren’t updating it and they don’t know how to reach out to others in their audience to tell them to go to FB and vote. It’s like the issue “just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.” What Chase might have done that could have extended this campaign a bit more was to offer Charities (perhaps in an offline way) help in how to do some outreach, build online profiles, tell their audiences about participating, etc. They could have teamed with a social media company to develop a few how-to guides that charities could use or even get some interns employed through Chase to help charities set up their FB account and connect them to participate in the contest. I searched for a number of charities to vote for that weren’t participating and found many, many charities that figured out how to participate, but had only a couple votes–they didn’t get their audiences to vote for them.

Social media programs may seem “free” but to do it right and make it work, for non-profits and for-profit companies, you need someone who can give real guidance. Maybe some of the Chase winners will use some of the funds to help build their social programs so that they can sustain their own awareness and increase donations and program participation far into the future.

Politicians are stereo-typed as “baby-kissers” for the media cameras and back-room deal makers with individuals and companies who carry a lot of influence, but President Obama is the first presidential candidate who really took relationship building to the extreme and out into the general public. As a marketing case study, his campaign will be written in the history books as brilliant–even those who don’t agree with his political opinions can’t argue against that. So what did he do during the campaign, and now into his presidency, that epitomized what companies should be doing to build relationships?

What Does it Mean to Build Relationships? Who Do I Want to Get to? How Do I Do that?

1. Identify who the Influencers in your market space are. These are individuals and entities (organizations, conferences, groups, etc.) that most often raise new conversation topics and have their own audiences who listen and respond. Influencers can be press, bloggers, trade groups, business executives, vendors, customers, regulatory bodies, analysts and many others. By starting some simple research into what type of product/service you offer, what want/need your offering solves for people and basic brand name and competitor searching, particularly in social media outlets, will quickly show individuals or entities who appear over and over. They’ll have multiple ways in which they’re influence manifests itself (i.e. they write a popular blog, they’re a book author, they often speak at events, they hold a prestigious position, etc.)
2. Once you’ve identified the major Influencers in your space and made note of all the ways in which they’re influence manifests itself, then put your company in a position to get to know those individuals or get involved with those organizations. Consider all the ways in which you can find mutually beneficial opportunities to work together, speak on the same panel, hold joint events, etc. It could even be as simple as inviting the person for drinks after a conference to talk about your industry and discuss what opportunities you may have together. If they write a blog, read it regularly and offer constructive comments or questions–but resist the urge to advertise your company in those comments. Start referencing the Influencers by pointing other people to their articles, presentations, Twitter streams, etc. Be visible about it, too, by recommending their articles on your Twitter account or blogging a response to an article they wrote or writing a public review of their books.
3. Ultimately, your goal as a company is to build a relationship with the Influencers so that they will in turn talk about your and your company to others and so that you can get in front of their audience. Their audiences are the market conversation Participants and Listeners, which are essentially your target audience and potential customers. Participants include the Influencers, but in large are individuals who are responding to the topics raised by the Influencers. These individuals may be your customers, prospects, industry experts, competitors or anyone else with an interest in your industry. Listeners comprise the vast majority of the population—they are the individuals who look to Influencers and Participants to help them make purchase decisions and formulate their own opinions. Items 1 and 2 above are how you start to get noticed by these two groups and start to build relationships with them.
4. Keep in mind that your market conversation Participants and Listeners include your current customers, so look for ways to stay in touch with your customers beyond trying to up-sell them or get them to renew their subscription. And don’t just talk at them through email campaigns and newsletters when you have a new product or a sale. Use those mediums, as well as blogs and Twitter, etc., to give them helpful information about fulfilling their wants/needs. Don’t just sell to them and leave it at that. Provide tips and tricks, links to articles that may be of relevance to their want/need and ask for their feedback on how to improve your product. Watch for mentions by Participants and Listeners and reach out to them to thank them for their comments or to show that you care about their want/need and helping them fulfill that want/need when their mentions of your product are negative. You have a bigger opportunity to make yourself look good and gain more awareness when you properly respond to someone’s negative comments. If the person blogged that they purchased your product and it sucked, contact them or comment back offering to make amends or invite them at your expense to visit your company and be part of a focus group on improving the product. These are just some ideas, but I’m sure you’re starting to see how this works.
5. Finally, provide as many ways as possible for Influencers, Participants and Listeners to voice their thoughts and opinions back to you. A generic email address or form on your website doesn’t cut it. Have someone monitor social media and web content and respond accordingly in real-time. Give your company a human personality–give real names and email addresses of someone, anyone, so people feel like they have a person to talk to about their product issues. Follow other people on Twitter and invite your customers to follow your company–but give it as much personality as possible. If you don’t want to have a single person as the face/voice of the company, than at least have those people who are adding content be personable.

The Market Conversation: People, Locations and Tools

Came across an interesting blog post today: The Evolving Face of Social Networks. A bit more science-ish than I normally would be interested in, but as it pertains to social networking I was intrigued. The blog post raised two interesting thoughts (and I am paraphrasing): 1) If social networks are so popular/widely being adopted, why haven’t the social network companies figured out how to monetize better? and 2) The use of social networks by companies to create positive externalities for consumers and influence network members may have in choosing to pass along a stimulus created by a company that will increase purchases (or other actions) for that company.

Here’s a bit from the article that will shed some light:

Evolutionary graph theory provides a quantitative language for describing how replicators behave on networks – and may lead to new ways of quantifying the value of influence on the web.

The Gist: “Replicators” being the people who seem to get other people to join the social networks, thus growing the networks’ size. So, in the conversation marketing lingo, these are mostly the Influencers (individuals or organizations that wield enough influence in some way to attract the interest of others to join their “club” (i.e. social network).

“When a company pollutes, it is often the case that they don’t have to pay for the pollution they generate. By destroying a collective resource without paying for it, the company does us all a disservice. Economists call this a ‘negative externality.’ But companies can create ‘positive externalities,’ too, and social networking sites might be one example. They create all this wonderful collective resource, without really getting paid much to do it.”

The Gist: Hmmmm? Did the social network itself “create” the positive externality or did the Replicators/Influencers (and anyone else who adds content that people want to view onto the network) actually “create” the wonderfulness that inspires people to join in droves? If you know me, you know how I see it. The medium does not create the draw. People (people as reps for their company or organization) joining and creating groups and fan pages, etc., on these networks is what has created the “everyone join” factor. So what does that mean for the social networks and the fact that they aren’t making much money? I don’t really know. That’s up to brilliant business people to figure out. As a marketing professional, though, it’s clear that selling ad space for more companies to advertise at people within this new space of social media/networks isn’t the answer. Let’s think about that? Print newspapers and magazines, radio and TV have been struggling for a good number of years now because they can’t sell enough ad space. Why can’t they sell it? Because it doesn’t seem to give companies the return on investment (in other words, people tune out the ads so they aren’t buying stuff from those companies because of an ad, thus companies are realizing that traditional advertisements don’t work well anymore.)

What is the likelihood of people forwarding on items that they receive in a social network such as Facebook (news items, links, video clips)? What is the likelihood of people responding to messages, or re-tweeting other people’s tweets on Twitter? “The idea we need to explore is this: what is the likelihood that a particular stimulus within a social network leads to a particular response?” says Lieberman.

The Gist: Now this is what I’d like to see scientists and research experts look into further. Social networks aren’t a new concepts. Oh sure, as we know them today, to be these online locations where people can communicate and companies can build fan pages, haven’t been around long, but only the medium, the technology, is new. People have been gathering together to build relationships and exchange ideas since the beginning of time (ok, the beginning of modern man’s time.) Online social networks are simply a fantastic new way for people to “gather”. Just because they gather there, though, doesn’t mean they want advertisements in the way. The more interesting aspect mentioned here is “influence”. In the market conversations happening on and offline there are 3 groups: Influencers, Participants and Listeners. Influencers are the ones who raise topics, invite discussion, pass on information, and more. Participants comment on what Influencers do or pass along the info to others. Listeners really join in the conversation–they prefer to read the conversation and just Be.

“In my opinion, as we get better at measuring what happens within social networks, I predict a lot more organised marketing efforts on social networks as well as systematic influence campaigns.”

The Gist: The post ends with this statement. This is the real crux of what inspired me to write this post. Marketing professionals have known for years now that traditional advertising activities were not yielding the return on investment that they once did. They also know that social networks and other types of social media have made a major impact, but many can’t seem to figure out how to make use of that to benefit their companies. As the science of measuring what happens on social networks and what drives human nature to share information with others within the social networks companies will have a better idea of how to participate in their market conversations.

A few months ago I purchased Giants tickets through MLB.com to take my mom, nephew and boyfriend to a game. It was the first time I’d personally purchased tickets to a Giants game, so understandable that I would now be on their email list. Right away I started receiving emails from MLB.com. I like baseball, but not enough to want emails about it, so I scrolled to the bottom of the email and clicked to unsubscribe. A confirmation page came up confirming that I had indeed unsubscribed. But apparently, it didn’t take on their end.

For three months now I have been receiving emails from MLB.com and have now tried to unsubscribe about 5 times. Each time receiving the confirmation that it went through. Yesterday I received yet another email from them and decided to yell about it. I tweeted about this annoyance and even tweeted directly to @mlb to ask to be removed from their list. I also took the time to express my frustration on Facebook and sent an email directly to the website support address for MLB.com.

I did not receive any response from @MLB on Twitter, but I did get this generic email response. Generic, but at least I’m off the list now, right?

Yeah, right! Today I received another MLB.com email. Marketers, if you are in a position where you do email marketing, please make sure you never let this happen to one of your customers. And to MLB.com, what do I have to do to stop receiving your emails?