I followed a link that said “26 social media marketing sins,” and as I clicked through, I was thinking “yet another bogus list.” However the blog post that I found, “We Have Sinned” by David Berkowitz, is quite good, very clueful. I’m feeling a bit holier than thou because I haven’t committed many of these sins, mainly because I’m not coming to social media from a marketing background, but as an Internet maven/web developer/online community proponent who was jazzed about “social media” before the marketing world gave it that name. I was part of the brew club that was cooking up the next generation web in the early 90s and 2000s, and most of us weren’t thinking about marketing applications at the time. We were thinking about virtual communities and online social networks and social software – various labels we used for the social web that we were weaving.

But as our business is more and more about marketing, and our clients tend to be marketing groups, I’m getting how easy it can be to make these mistakes. Social media marketing – and marketing in general – isn’t easy to do well and do right. Berkowitz’ list is valuable. Some examples:

We have failed to monitor social channels for discussions of our brands and competitors.

We have guessed at our target audience’s interests and activities rather than conducting research that could have provided real answers.

We have lost consumers by organizing social architectures that were impossible to navigate coherently.

We have repurposed creative and messaging from other channels when we should have adapted or created it for these social spaces.

We have shortchanged social marketing by planning campaigns instead of ongoing programs.

You get the idea. Read the whole post, it’s insightful.

Sam Decker of BazaarVoice posts about “Ghost Town” Brand Communities, and his post makes good points, beginning with an acknowledgment (via Gartner) that 50% of brand communities will fail. Within the remaining 50%, degree of success isn’t clear. “These failures don’t mean that online community-building is a waste of time,” Sam writes, “or that it can’t be done.”

But it’s complex, and the appropriate strategy could be markedly different from one brand to the next. Before beginning the virtual barn-raising in a new community initiative, tread carefully and consider what success means to you.

He goes on to say that

From a marketer’s perspective, the idea of a brand community sounds great. The expectation is that it will be a petri dish which will virally grow customer engagement, and this type of engagement will lead to sales. The problem is, few customers jump into that petri dish, fewer still will stick around, and the community interaction usually has no contextual bridge to purchasing. That’s three strikes. Most brand communities serve a very, very small set of customers (in relation to their customer base or market size) with either a lot of passion or a lot of time on their hands. And let’s face it, not every brand has the potential to inspire lasting passion and sustain a Facebook-type community. Exceptions are cult brands that have passion and community built into their product ethos, such as Harley Davidson or Apple. But you can’t create that by putting up a community. That starts way upstream, with the product and the brand.

I wouldn’t call Facebook a community – it’s a crowd within which communities can emerge. I would define community (following Cliff Figallo, former director of the seminal online community, the WELL, as shared relationships that persist and gain a history of interaction. Social network systems like Facebook are more fragmented. Facebook has a group-forming facility which can work as a platform for intentional community, but many of those groups don’t get a great level of adoption and participation. I say all this to make the point that Sam and I probably don’t agree about what constitutes community, and how or whether community can scale. The most successful online communities (e.g. the WELL) have scaled through the emergence of smaller subcommunities as the number of active participants grows, and that’s a good thing if you can meet the community management challenge it presents.

He says “when the community audience is small and unfamiliar with one another, a prospective visitor’s motivation to build social capital or help others dissolves.”

If visitors are not passionate about the topic, they are less likely to jump in. And for both reasons the vibrance and participation in the community are next to go. Which causes the next visitor not to join. This is the domino effect that leads most brand communities to turn into a ghost town.

I don’t disagree here, but there’s a solution to this problem. From my comment on his post: “seed the community early with members who will commit and persist, who care about the subject(s) of the community, and who are articulate.”

I think the thrust of Sam’s post here is that the Bazaarvoice social commerce model – which “creates interactions and contributions around the product or service they’re trying to sell” – is the most effective solution – but I don’t know that it’s a community solution. This model “fosters opportunities for the creation of content that helps others make purchasing decisions, driving more sales and resulting in a quicker ROI.” He goes on to say this:

This type of strategy needn’t require a person to register or become a full-fledged member — they should be able to write a product review, ask or answer a question, or write a story without feeling like they have to make a commitment. Whether that contributor feels like they’ve joined a community by participating is not the point. Their contribution is useful for the visitors to the site, who came to learn more about the brand and get their questions answered — not to “friend” people or help others. And yet, once a critical mass of content is shared, a community of shared interest will start to form. People will write the 101st review because there’s a community around a product! This “accidental community” starts to form, which amplifies the engagement to the content and profiles.

I don’t see much chance of persistence or relationship in this context – this is more of an interactive audience than a community. This is not to diminish the proven value of the Bazaarvoice product – the growth of the company suggests they’re creating real value with their approach.

This leaves the question whether “brand community” is desirable and worth the effort required to make it happen, and I would say that depends on the brand and the goals for the community. You might want to create a community of advocates – or critics – to work as something like a focus group, and that community would not necessarily have to scale large to be effective. You might want to support a very active affinity group – an example is the platform for its community of riders created by Specialized Bikes, where you could find other Specialized writers and set up rides.

If you think community is a good fit for your business, you should pursue a well-considered strategic conversation – make sure your goals are clear and that they would be served by a community solution, and how that would work.

Ran across this helpful video (embedded below) wherein several clueful people talk about the importance of listening as a first step into social media. In the earliest days of online community, the best participants would hang out quietly and listen before they would engage in conversation. By listening they would get an understanding of the conversation and its cultural context, and they would have a clear sense how to communicate most effectively in that context.

In the contemporary world of social media, we advise clients to start with what we call a listening platform to track and understand online conversations, determine who has influence within those conversations that are most relevant, and create a strategic analysis to drive a smart social media strategy.

Here’s the video, just listen:

Jeffrey Pfeffer at The Corner Office:

With the number of airline-issued credit cards, grocery-store club cards, department-store credit cards, and reward accounts with hotels, airlines, and car-rental agencies, companies have tons of information about their customers and their purchase patterns. But almost no companies use that data strategically. By “strategically” I mean using information to identify their most profitable customers and figure out, by running experiments, what to do to capture a larger share of the customers’ expenditures on a given category of product or service.

I suspect companies don’t do more with customer data because rigorous analysis and experimentation can be costly. Is there an efficient and less expensive way to “know your customer”? Perhaps through informed and strategic use and assessment of social media?

Jason Baer considers the pros and cons of Facebook as a dominant part of a social media strategy. Good points to ponder, but as with every strategy, it depends who you are, what you do, what you’re after, and who you’re trying to reach. I most readily agree with Baer’s #1: “Fish where the fish are.” There are many people on Facebook, for sure – given its size and escalating growth curve, Facebook has, per Reed’s Law and in terms of social capital, significant potential value. How that value is realized is a bigger question. Posting a fan page for your business on Facebook won’t necessarily have an effect – you have to understand how to leverage the page, and the community that will potentially form around it, and you have to be offering real value. And if somebody signs up for your page and never comes back, you’ve captured no more than a few seconds of attention, however positive, and the value of that brief encounter is questionable. As anywhere in the social media ecology, you’re competing with myriad other demands, from zombies and vampires to the most compelling of social causes.

Don’t be in a hurry. Many months ago we started thinking about the Social Web Strategies page at Facebook, and it’s not there yet – because we had several criteria for starting the page. Some were about having clear messaging and collateral for the page, but we also knew that we’d have to take some time with the page to make it viable and valuable. Until we can block that time and meet some of our other criteria, we can and should wait. And we’d advise anyone to do the same, wait until strategy is clear and you can muster focus and engagement. Especially if Facebook is going to “dominate your social media strategy,” as Baer says.

Great post at the Society of Word of Mouth by our strategic partner Brian Massey. This post echoes some of what Brian and I have discussed recently (and what SWS has been saying as well) about traditional marketing:

The culture, the strategies, and the beliefs that your business has relied on for the past 20 years are being actively dismantled. We have identified the load-bearing walls of your ideology. We know which screws anchor your most contrived messaging, and we are now loosening them.

The Internet is not causing this change in culture. We are changing culture. The Internet is just our weapon of choice, an interconnected wrecking ball being wielded with one purpose: to bring down the false, calculated, posing communication that assaults our sensibilities and clutters our world.

Your skill at communicating powerfully will fail you. Say something powerful, or shut up. Create your logos, but we will decide what they mean. Tell us you’re the leader, the innovator and we will make you a liar no matter how good you are.

I love this:

Here are some clues that will help you along.

TV is not an effective way to communicate, video is.

Radio is not an effective way to communicate, the human voice is.

Print is not an effective way to communicate, words and images are.

Web sites are not an effective way to communicate, solving problems is.

Read the whole post here. You can also listen to Brian read the post here.

Giovanni and whurley have a new site, called MarCom, a place to aggregate news and information about the marketing world. Good writeup in TechCrunch (with a few comments complaining about the site, which appears to be built on Drupal). Since I like Drupal, I think the site itself is fine, and it’s a pretty rich resource for people who want to think and talk about contemporary marketing, which is very broken and changing fast.

In today’s Austin American-Statesman, Michael Barnes says “second generation social media” – referring to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – “encourage civility, congeniality and respect.”

Increasingly, I’m encountering just that sort of social chemistry at openings, parties and clubs. And this brand of socialilzing often begins with announcements such as “Hey, I follow your tweets!” or “Oh yeah, I know you from Facebook! How did that heart surgery go.”

Yes, indeed – the line between social media and socializing face-to-face seems blurred – because it doesn’t really have to exist. Increasingly people are building positive and productive networks of relationship online that reflect and enhance their offline social networks, and that’s really not new, but it’s new for many people, and we’re getting away from some issues that Barnes addresses, with some inaccuracy, in today’s column:

First-generation social media – e-mail, discussion boards, chat rooms – often spread social poison. The main reasons are obvious: anonymity and pseudonymity. One could “flame” with impunity as long as nobody knew who you really were. Combine that with an inability to ascertain precise emotional tones in digital exchanges, and one could be forgiven for avoiding all chat rooms and keeping e-mail conversations short and to the point.

I say this is inaccurate for a couple of reasons. First of all, the online anonymity/pseudonymity Barnes refers to here was not necessarily the rule. For example, the WELL, a seminal online community that has existed since 1985, has always verified the identity of community members and insisted that they make their real names available (though they also have pseudonyms by which they’re commonly known within the community).

Second, pseudonymous presences can establish clear and persistent identities even where identity isn’t published, and completely civil communities can exist where “real identities” are masked. It is better to require some kind of identity verification, if only clear association with a verifiable email address, to establish at least the possibility of accountability and reference, but you don’t necessarily have to share that with other users. Some have found the ability to create and play with alternative identities in online social spaces very powerful and helpful.

In systems like the WELL, where identity is verified and shared, you still see massive flame wars, just as you see, in physical networks and communities, minor and major arguments and wars. And while I acknowledge that it’s easier to “‘flame’ with impunity” in a context where no one connects your online identity with the identity you and most people think is real – the one you use “in real life” – anonymous flames have little weight. They’re no big deal. Those of us who’ve been online for years have learned to ignore them, just as we ignore traffic noise, smog, billboards (an early version of spam) and other forms of pollution.

All that said, it is interesting to see the effect of mainstreaming on social media, and the concurrent commitment to work out best social practices so that online experiences are most fruitful and productive, and minimally stressful and bothersome. We all have an interest in promoting civility and sane communication. It’s insightful for Barnes to note that this is being reflected in all of our communications and gatherings, online and off. Maybe this Internet thing will lead to a better world, after all?

Seth Godin defines viral marketing… not everything viral is marketing. Common sense? Many folks don’t get it.

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

To be successful at marketing online, you have to lose all your traditional marketing baggage, that’s one thing. Then you have to make sure you didn’t also lose the mission. I just looked it up, Webster’s has a succinct definition of marketing: to expose for sale in a market.

Viral marketing, Godin says, “is getting a bad name, largely from clueless marketing agencies and clueless marketers.”

Here’s what they do: they get a lame product, or a semi-lame product, and they don’t have enough time or money to run a nationwide ad campaign. So, instead, they slap some goofy viral thing on top of it and wait for it to spread. And if it doesn’t spread, they create a faux controversy or engage a PR firm or some bloggers and then it still doesn’t work.

(Thanks to the Person who tweeted the Godin piece.)

My latest post at Worldchanging is about the future of the web.

All business is moving to the web – not just sales and marketing, but all business processes. Many businesses will drop expensive internal IT in favor of cloud solutions, and they’ll focus more on cultivating internal value networks or knowledge networks. They’ll start thinking more about how to assess the value of intangibles – knowledge transactions – and how to leverage and demonstrate that value. They’ll use social technologies to find efficiencies and control costs, not just for sales. Those of us who do web consulting will be challenged to produce strategy and results for the whole business, not just sales and marketing.