Here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in seven short steps:

1. The biggest risk with social media is in not engaging in public conversations about your brand. So, do engage yourself and encourage your employees to engage. Ask them not to do things that will embarrass themselves or you, but expect them to. All of us have embarrassed ourselves in public, more than once, so will they. It’s okay.

2. The only solution for negative conversations is more positive conversations. Responding to and resolving negative conversations is table stakes. The only way to win at social is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. So, put in place a process to track and resolve negative conversations, then focus on energizing your evangelists.

3. So, start by asking: Who are our present and potential evangelists? Who do they talk to? Who talks to them? What else do they talk about? What are their triggers to talk? Why do we want them to talk about us? In effect, you are creating a persona for your evangelists, except that instead of using it to design a website, you would use it to design a web of talkworthy touchpoints.

4. Then, ask: How can we create a compelling social object (that is unique to us) that will inspire our evangelists to talk about us? Usually, your organization, brand or advertising campaign aren’t good social objects, but a lifestyle, interest or cause are.

5. Then, ask: How can we organize our evangelists around our chosen social object using one of the 5Cs of social: consumer generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence?

6. Only then, use social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to help your evangelists share their passion. Each social network appeals to a different type of users for a different purpose. Each social network has a different soul and, therefore, a different role. So, the content and conversations for each social network should be customized for its users the specific purpose for which they use the social network.

7. The real value lies in asking and answering the questions in steps 3-4-5. Step 6, without steps 3-4-5, will end up looking like spam. Step 7, then, is to remind yourself that you don’t want to be in the spam business.

So, that was everything you needed to know about social media marketing in seven short steps.

If seven steps were too much for you, here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in three simpler (and shorter) steps –

- Step 1: Identify Passion — Select a BIG lifestyle, interest, or cause.
- Step 2: Ignite Passion — Build a focused community around it.
- Step 3: Scale Passion — Build scale by leveraging existing social platforms.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• My NASSCOM Emerge Workshop on Social Media For B2B Marketers
• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Campaign India Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• afaqs Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Writing on the Wall: Every Single Talk at GoaFest 2010 Was About Social Media

I recently wrote a book chapter for a book published by Empodera for the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action. You can download the PDF version of the book here.

Here’s the full text of the book chapter is titled “A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework” –

Social Technologies and Power Structures

The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.

According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

According to the second, status quo, narrative, power structures are ingrained into our society’s institutions and internet and mobile technologies don’t really change these institutions, or create new ones. The case studies compiled by the utopians constitute anecdotal evidence, at best, and the influence of networked technologies will always be limited because of issues related to access or ability. So, internet and mobile technologies are a minor influence on political power structures, at best.

According to the third, dystopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies are, in fact, enabling traditional institutions to further consolidate their power through censorship, surveillance and propaganda. So, even though they give us the illusion of greater power, they have, indeed, compromised our ability to protect our privacy, have access to diverse views, and build real institutions.
It’s not easy to conclusively argue for one narrative or the other, unless we outline the entire range of possibilities that social technologies open up for citizens and activists.

The 5Cs Framework

Social technologies encompass many different types of tools, such as blogging (Wordpress, http://wordpress.com), microblogging (Twitter, http://twitter.com), video-sharing (YouTube, http://youtube.com), photo-sharing (Flickr, http://flickr.com), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio, http://blogtalkradio.com), mapping (Google Maps, http://maps.google.com), social networking (Facebook, http://facebook.com), social voting (Digg, http://digg.com), social bookmarking (Delicious, http://delicious.com), lifestreaming (FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com), wikis (Wikipedia, http://wikipedia.com), virtual worlds (Second Life http://secondlife.com), and several new and hybrid tools.

Cutting across these tools, there are five underlying dynamics in social technologies, the 5Cs of social media: Content, Conversation, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these five dynamics constitute the value system of social technologies. The tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 5Cs is here to stay.

If we wish to understand whether and how social technologies can empower citizens, it’s useful to explore how citizens and activists can leverage these five dynamics.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social technologies allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.
User generated content is the driver of the citizen journalism phenomenon, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms like CNN iReport (http://ireport.com) Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org), NowPublic (http://nowpublic.com) and AllVoices (http://allvoices.com) have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Researchers have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

At the Content level, the design challenge is to create or harness focused content creation platforms that scale even if only 1% of the users create content.

So far, most initiatives in India have struggled in this respect. Platforms like MeriNews (http://merinews.com) are too entertainment focused to be called citizen journalism platforms and individual or group blogs like Kafila (http://kafila.org) don’t have the scale to make a meaningful impact.

The Second C: Conversation

The second C, Conversation, refers to the idea that social technologies enable two-way dialogues between citizens that sometimes take the form of viral memes and tip into the mainstream consciousness.

One to one conversations tip into viral memes as consumers and curators congregate around compelling content. Natural disasters like the China earthquake and South East Asia tsunami and crisis situations like the Israel-Gaza war and the Mumbai terrorist attacks often lead to viral memes, sometimes misleading ones.

Sometimes, activism campaigns also tip into viral memes. The 2009 Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi campaign (http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com) that protested against the right wing political party Sri Ram Sena by sending them pink panties as Valentine’s Day gifts became viral when more than 50,000 people joined in on Facebook.

At the Conversation level, the design challenge is to create compelling content that demands to be shared and seed conversations around it that can tip into a viral meme.

Evidence suggests that the art of designing viral activism campaigns hasn’t been perfected yet and most campaigns that to go viral happen to tip and find it difficult to replicate their own success later.

The Third C: Collaboration

The third C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social technologies facilitate the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at two levels: co-creation and collective action.

In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

At the Collaboration level, the design challenge is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism).

In 2009, I co-founded a crowdsourced election monitoring platform Vote Report India (http://votereport.in) that is a good example of a platform designed for co-creation. The Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.org) based platform presented an aggregated visual view of irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections by plotting text messages sent from polling booths on a Google Map. However, we realized that the platform couldn’t scale without tapping into an offline volunteer network. Kiirti (http://kiirti.org) is a more evolved co-creation platform that factors in the need for such an offline support ecosystem.

The Pink Chaddi campaign resulted in more than 2000 pink panties being sent to Sri Ram Sena and is a good example of collective action in India.

The Fourth C, Community

The fourth C, Community, refers to the idea that social technologies can facilitate sustained engagement around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object. Often, lifestyles, passions and causes make for more compelling social objects than people, organizations, or campaigns.

At the Community level, the design challenge is to identify a compelling social object and build a large and vibrant community around it.

I am currently working on iJanaagraha (http://ijanaagraha.org), a community platform built around the notion that real change begins in the neighborhood. It’s a new type of citizen platform, with strong location, community and activation layers, designed to promote proactive citizenship by providing citizens the information, tools and networks to drive real change in their neighborhoods and cities.

The Fifth C, Collective Intelligence

The fifth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google (http://google.com) extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon (http://amazon.com) and Netflix (http://netflix.com) are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us.

It becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

At the Collective Intelligence level, the design challenge is to aggregate our individual and collective actions in databases, and run sophisticated algorithms on them to build reputation and recommendation systems.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign (http://my.barackobama.com) and some of the work done by the Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com) are good examples of citizen initiatives that tap into collective intelligence. I haven’t seen any good examples of such initiatives in India, but we are building such capabilities in the iJanaagraha platform.

In Summary

So, the 5Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social technologies.

As we move from Content to Conversation to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them.

Each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for conversation memes and meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

The 5Cs framework can also be used to design and measure specific social technologies initiatives. The best social technologies initiatives leverage all these five layers, but most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social technologies initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between.

I want to emphasize that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Conversation layers. It’s important to note, however, that institution-building kicks in only at the Collaboration and Community layers, and real change happens only when we build new institutions.

Finally, evidence has shown us that all these five underlying dynamics can be used for both good and evil. Misleading or inflammatory content can be used to drive propaganda and spread rumors. Communities can easily become cabals and collaboration and collective intelligence can be used to profile and persecute minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

Social technologies open up possibilities for new behaviors and new power structures. It’s up to us, as individuals and societies, to choose how we use these possibilities. The question is: how well will we choose?

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics Blog: Social Media and Social Change

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• TOI Article on How Social Activists in India Are Using Social Networking Platforms
• The making of a Social Organization
• How to leverage Social Technologies to Build Online Talent Communities
• How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit

I was quoted recently in a TOI article on how activists are using social networking platforms.

I like how Indian social activists are using social networking platforms for fundraising, or creating awareness for their causes.

Isha Foundation’s $100K win in the Chase Community Giving Contest is a good example of non-profits using social platforms to get support for a cause for fundraising. A very persuasive lady from Isha Foundation even called me to ask me to write a post supporting their bid.

The Wall Project, Batti Bandh, The Bicycle Project and The Sapling Project have all got attention recently for using Twitter and Facebook for promoting their programs. The Pink Chaddi Campaign, Grassroutes, NGOPost, Bell Bajao and Blank Noise are some of my favorite examples of Indian digital activism campaigns.

However, using Facebook and Twitter to spread a brand-related or cause-related message doesn’t excite me anymore. I would be excited if activists used social platforms to enable collaboration, like Vote Report India did, or build a long-term community, like iJanaagraha is trying to do. I have earlier written about the need for activists to go beyond content and conversations, to tap into the collaboration, community and collective intelligence layers. Ellen Miller’s Sunlight Foundation is showing us how in the area of government transparency and accountability.

Here’s the full text of the TOI story –

Social networking sites are new age activist’s handiest tools
Mahafreed Irani, TNN

Facebookers had a new distraction last week: a request from 100 US based charities to vote for them so that they could mop up a cool one million dollars to pursue their ‘big idea’ to change the world. Thousands of users from India logged on to vote for their favourites like Give India and Isha Foundation in the Chase Community Giving race. For them, it was the easiest way to contribute to the cause.

Social networking sites have clearly moved beyond frivolous chatter and self-aggrandisement to a worthier cause: they’ve become the new age activist’s handiest tools. From bringing people together to beautify walls in the city (The Wall Project) and encouraging them to save electricity (Batti Bandh) to getting them to donate their old cycles to rural children (The Bicycle Project) and engaging them in sapling plantation drives (The Sapling Project), these sites have built up successful online movements and then dexterously steered them into real life.

The benefits of building a movement using the Internet are self-evident : no capital costs and speedier-thanspeedy responses. Every time Batti Bandh organiser Keith Menon has to make an announcement , he simply posts an update and the over 6,000 members and fans of the Batti Bandh community on Facebook get the news delivered to their inbox. Netizens from countries as far away as Czechoslovakia, New Zealand, Netherlands and Pakistan have joined the group and posted their views on the campaign.

Like Batti Bandh, the other three movements too were initiated in Mumbai and then went national thanks to the online momentum. Take the Wall Project—what started as a touch-up for a Bandra home has now become a movement with over 2,000 volunteers to beautify cities across India. After photographs of paint jobs of walls along Senapati Bapat Marg were uploaded, members from Bengaluru, Pune and Kolkata started discussing their own city walls on the forum. Parag Gandhi, one of the facilitating members , spends a few minutes giving direction to the conversation—the rest of the content, including photos, news and updates are user-generated.

A user in Pune who wants to paint walls asked, “We are a group of 50 people and very enthusiastic about painting. There is no doubt that we have many walls dying for a dash of colour but the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) won’t permit.’’ In response, a member was quick to post, “Forget the PMC, when they see the value you are creating they will automatically come to you. Find private walls, educational institutes, schools or hospital walls instead.’’

Catalysts for change are using Web 2.0 platforms to engage people and spread the word using already existing social networks. Some prefer using technology to initiate the campaign too. Just last month, two Mumbai techies Satish Vijaykumar and Ranjeet Walunj created a website, a Twitter profile to make sure their city could breathe easy. The internet was used as a propaganda tool for their initiative The Sapling Project. A few tweets and Facebook statuses later, over a hundred people had signed up for the sapling plantation drive. They met at Shivaji Park, collected saplings and now post updates about their saplings’ progress on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Impromptu acts of kindness have sprouted on Twitter too. Last week, tweeple from India started the T4H (Twitteristan for Haiti) by posting links to the Google Crisis Response page and the American Red Cross page to encourage their followers to donate. Popular tweeple like user ‘@b 50/Bombay Addict’ on Twitter posted updates like, “India gives $1m aid to Haiti. What? Rs 4.6 crore? That’s all we got? The daily turnover on BSE+NSE is Rs 80,000 crore.’’ and “The BMC will spend Rs 15 crore to clean Mumbai’s beaches. And that’s all we got?’’ to provoke his following of over 2,500 to donate.

On Diwali day last year, Twitter member Anaggh Desai decided to use the power of online networking to raise some money for charity. The 46-year-old Mumbai-based entrepreneur asked people to send him a Deepwish (Diwali greeting on Twitter) and pledged 25 paise for every wish that he received to Goonj, an NGO. Excited by the idea, 41 other tweeple decided to donate amounts ranging from 50 p to Rs 5 for every greeting tweeted at them. After 36 hours, Rs 55,000 was collected from tweeple all over India and even the US and Saudi Arabia towards educating the girl child.

The city also participated in two twestivals (offline meets organised and promoted online to collect funds for charity). The Mumbai chapter of the twestival last September collected Rs 40,000 for the NGO Help A Child.

Menon from Batti Bandh wants to leverage the power of the community on Twitter to facilitate car and taxi pooling . He is in the process of building an application that will let tweeple tweet their starting point and destination , show the route on Google Maps and allow other tweeters to join in.

However, there are dissidents. Social media researcher Gaurav Mishra thinks that online communities need to take their activities to the next level. “After a person has switched off electricity for an hour or planted one sapling, what next?’’ he asks. “Organisers have to decide on how they want to create sustained involvement .’’

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• Are Indian News, Media and Entertainment Companies Social Media Savvy?
• Business is Social: Here are Five Reasons Why
• My Empodera/ e-STAS Book Chapter — A New Approach to Citizen Activism: The 5Cs Framework
• Social Community Efforts From Banks & Financial Institutions

Banking and Finance Industry is very competitive. Customers are becoming impatient and loyalty for brands is decreasing. Slowly brands are realizing that they can no longer appear monolithic, imposing and they need to find new ways to engage customers to retain and build relationships.

Web in its new avatar (Social Media)  facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration, has given consumers the power to make or break reputations, enhance or damage brands, create winners and losers in the marketplace, and do so with lightning speed. At the same time, social media offer unparalleled access to unfiltered customer opinion, opportunity to understand  the real influencers,  and opportunities to leverage user-generated content.

Note: There are many popular blogs, forums, and review sites around Banking and Finance. But in this post I am focusing on how large banks and financial institutions are adopting social media to reach out to customers, prospectus and Influencers.

Community efforts from Banks and Financial Institutions.

HSBC Community for SMB

This online community HSBC Business Network is for SMB and entrepreneurs. The focus is to empower new start-up companies to succeed by enabling them to network and form relationships with each other, as well as leveraging the expertise and support of HSBC’s business specialists

Common Wealth Credit Union (Groundswell Award Winner, 2008)

To positioned itself as a progressive and transparent financial institution with heart, Common Wealth Credit Union launched an online community for Alberta’s Generation “Y”. A lifestyle platform for youth to self express and support called Young & Free. Its a fully integrated marketing campaign combined with a spokesperson search to find the voice of Alberta’s under 25 crowd.

Common Wealth embraced the power of the social web by tapping into popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter to create an immersive experience where compelling user-generated content takes centre stage. To position it as a democratic, transparent organisation they launched a yearly campaign to find  “Young & Free Alberta Spokesperson”.

The winner from the contest became a paid employee of the credit union, working full time with the job description: talk, type and tell good stories – essentially a full time blogger for the credit union for one year.

American Express – Open Forum

The Open forum is a very interesting way that American Express is using to share information and start conversation with small business owners.  Some of the key highlights of the OPEN Forum initiative are: building brand equity, acquiring new customers, and building loyalty of existing customers.

It’s a excellent example of how to develop a vibrant social media community around a target segment.

Schwab Listening community (Groundswell Award Winner, 2007)

Charles Schwab launch a private online community “Money and More” made up of 350 25-to-40 year old Generation X non-Schwab clients. Idea was to listen to a focused group of Gen-Xers that was brought together on a community platform to better understand – how to become their investment service provider of choice 10 or 15 years down the road. What they learned was so powerful that they were able to create new products and services to meet the needs of this target group— resulting in a 56% increase in GenX customers vs. a year ago Based on insights from the community, Schwab lowered account minimums to $1,000, introduced Schwab’s high-yield Investor checking account with a high yield, and developing an online landing page specifically for the Gen X target.

Barclays Bank – 100 Voice Community

The 100 Voice community is student focused community where students can share their opinions on money management and student finances. Its a marketing driven program to create visibility and conversation around the benefits of the Barclays Student account and enable students to share their experiences with others.

Bank of America : Small Business Online Community

This Small Business Online Community includes a ‘Forums’ section, where SMEs can post questions and seek help and advice from others in the community. Registered users can also post their stories of business success and share tips for overcoming business challenges. The community-generated content will be supplemented by a range of expert articles.

Vancity – ChangeEverything.ca

Change Everything is a project of Vancity, Canada’s largest credit union. The Change Everything web site was spurred by the spirit behind Vancity’s new campaign. ChangeEverything.ca is an online community targeted (but not limited) to residents of Vancouver, Victoria and B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

Once Registered, the user start blogging about his progress toward making that change. But the real substance of the site happens when someone comes across the user blog and gets inspired; they can join it. Now both of them are blogging, discussing, and potentially collaborating on making the change happen. Its one of the best community engagement program I have come across.

I intend to update regularly this list of Banks and Financial Institutions on social media. So, if you know of any other Bank or FI with social media presence, do send me an e-mail or leave a comment below.

Cross-posted at Mohitvermablog.com

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Business is Social: Here are Five Reasons Why
• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• The making of a Social Organization
• Are Indian News, Media and Entertainment Companies Social Media Savvy?
• My NASSCOM Emerge Workshop on Social Media For B2B Marketers

I’m delighted to announce that Kaushal Sarda has joined the 2020 Social team as a consultant.

Kaushal will head the Bangalore office for 2020 Social and focus on B2B, technology and startup clients. He will also work with Gautam to develop our collaboration/ innovation practice, where we connect employees and partners to help clients achieve their business objectives. Finally, he will work with Upasana to strengthen our “build” practice, where we build online communities using white label or open source platforms.

Previously, Kaushal has worked as a CRM consultant at Capgemini Consulting and founded SaaS based enterprise collaboration platform Uhuroo. He writes about collaboration and innovation at his Creating Connections blog and is a regular speaker on these topics. Kaushal holds an MS in information systems from George Mason University.

Do connect with Kaushal on email, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• The making of a Social Organization
• Business is Social: Here are Five Reasons Why
• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• Exchange4Media Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010
• Campaign India Story on Our Social Media Panel at GoaFest 2010

At 2020 Social one of the things we believe is that we are a our own petri-dish. We experiment with technology and processes to convert ourselves into the kind of organization we think is suitable to be called social.

So not only do we have a blog, a Facebook page, a twitter account, a twitter list showcasing all our tweets – we’ve also now started a wiki to focus on building a repository of social media successes in India – and will invite participation from like minded folks soon.

On the other side of the seriousness spectrum we have started a Fun page where we publicly talk on the lighter side of life at 2020 Social

Internally we are driving online collaboration using three tools, Google Apps for mail, document sharing and calendering - Socialtextfor internal conversations and collaboration on a wiki – and Basecamp for project management.

As social media enthusiasts we have noticed that internally even we need to see a business/behavioral benefit to using a tool – and we understand that more traditional businesses would need to see it more.

One of the way to showcase this is look for external cases where ROI has been calculated – but we believe that using the tools showcases a greater commitment and a better story for any client.

What do you think?

If you’re in the advisory business how many times do you apply your advice on yourself?

(Cross posted from Gautam on Organizations 2.0)

If you liked this post, you should also read:

• Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build Our Organizational Collaboration Practice
• Business is Social: Here are Five Reasons Why
• Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies
• Thinking about Social-ERM
• Using social technologies to build Organizational Culture

The Experience Ecosystem

Companies are beginning to realize that their brand is now realized on the Social Web, in conversations between strangers, who amplify, quash, or otherwise reshape each others’ opinion on the product or service, often based on first-hand experiences. These messages play off against marketing messages pushed by advertising agencies in the mind of the customer, and increasingly, customers are listening to their peers, instead of marketing messages.

The Social Web exposes any misalignment between implicit or explicit expectations set by the CMO in marketing messages and the actual experience delivered by the organization run by the COO. It is therefore critical that the CMO and COO be in absolute alignment, so that the organization (over-)delivers on what the brand has promised, leading to customer delight, loyalty and advocacy.

At the core of this approach is the idea that conversations are driven by experiences. If you want to drive positive conversations about your brands, you should start by creating an experience that is worth talking about.

The Experience Ecosystem provides the framework for creating talk-worthy experiences. It consists of all the touchpoints between the organization and the customer, including products, services and partners, sales and support channels and interactions, and the values for which the organization and its individual brands stand for.

At 2020 Social, it is our belief that the best way to create an experience worth talking about is to design it collaboratively, with your customers, employees and partners.

Deconstructing the Experience Ecosystem

So, the obvious question arises: How do you collaboratively design an Experience Ecosystem that drives conversations and results in close-knit communities?

You start by listening. Your customers, partners, and employees are talking to each other about you, often in public, and their conversations include a treasure trove of feedback about your Experience Ecosystem, along with ideas to improve it. In short, they offer clear signals as to how they will take ownership for the experiences and conversations that will drive your brand.

However, listening is only the first step. You also need to respond to these people and participate in these conversations, not with the intent to direct them in one direction or another, but with the intent to engage them and learn more. Over time, as you track these conversation threads, you should seek ways to build profiles for the people who are participating in these conversations, and identify which conversations, and which people specifically, are the most valuable to you.

Some of these conversation threads will involve responding to and converting prospects who are considering your products or services. Other conversation threads will relate to supporting existing customers seeking an explanation or a solution. Still other conversation threads will be about customers, prospects, partners or employees giving you feedback on your Experience Ecosystem.

In each of these cases, you should try to tie together related conversation threads to unleash the power of collaboration. A prospect considering your offering may benefit from the reviews and experiences of other customers. An existing customer might find that other customers have already shared useful tips on how to solve common problems. Finally, your customers, partners and employees can collaborate to find the best ideas to improve your products, services, and sales and support processes, or design entirely new ones.

Once you have collaboratively designed a talkworthy Experience Ecosystem, you should build community platforms to catalyze the formation of communities, and transform customers, partners and employees into evangelists.

The Social CRM Toolkit is Still Evolving

The toolkit to create an integrated talkworthy Experience Ecosystem is still evolving, but it’s already possible to connect the various activities described above, as my colleague Dave Evans recently pointed out in his October 2009 ClickZ column.

Social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Visible Technologies already incorporate workstream elements. Not only that, Radian6 connects with Salesforce CRM, apart from Twitter. New tools like Buzzstream are designed for profiling and responding to influencers, and not just listening.

With Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial and now LinkedIn offering robust APIs, it’s now possible to find or build powerful social applications that connect with other solutions in the toolkit and make sharing easier than ever before.

Collaboration solution vendors are an integral part of the mix because they enable your customers, partners and employees to collaborate and co-create innovative products and processes. I expect enterprise collaboration solutions like SocialText and Cynapse and ideation platforms like Accept Ideas and WebStorm to start offering integration with other applications.

Social commerce solutions like Bazaarvoice play an important role in the ecosystem by converting and cross-selling to customers and we should see such solutions offering more integration too.

CRM tool vendors are also expanding in both directions and introducing social media analytics and community features. Salesforce and RightNow now offer a full suite of community features including ideation, support and knowledge sharing and even connect with Twitter and Facebook. Apart from the integration with Radian6, Salesforce also supports integration with the Lithium community platform and customer support applications like Helpstream.

At the other end, community platform vendors like Jive, Lithium and Neighborhood America are also aggressively introducing social media analytics and social CRM features.

Update: Social CRM Resources

Since I wrote this post in October 2009, I have come across several interesting conversation threads about Social CRM. Here is a selection of some of the most useful resources I have found so far:

- Paul Greenberg puts a stake in the ground on Social CRM.

- Jeremiah Owyang starts a list of Social CRM vendors.

- Fabio Kipriani explains the benefits of social CRM.

- Lithium’s Chief Community Officer Joe Cothrel gives a great overview of the evolution of Social CRM.

I’ll be grateful if you will help me understand the Social CRM space better by sharing your favorite Social CRM resources in the comments.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

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Most companies see social media as a part of communications, sales and marketing. Some, with a little help from us, realize that social technologies have implications for diverse business functions beyond these functions: from market research and product innovation to customer support and process redesign and even to partner relations and organizationsal development.

However, social technologies are a part of the core product for few companies, apart from the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, standalone social networking firms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and social tool vendors like Jive, Lithium and Salesforce.

I believe that social technologies are becoming a part of the core product for news, media and entertainment companies, because an increasing amount of the content available online is now consumer generated content. As the boundary between content companies and technology companies blur even more, all news, media and entertainment companies will need to become technology companies.

In the US, the ubiquity of the internet has forced news, media and entertainment companies to become early adopters of social technologies and experiment with all the five underlying drivers of consumer generated content (CNN iReport), conversations (NPR Community), collaboration (Al Jazeera War on Gaja), community (NYT Times People) and collective intelligence (CNN News Pulse).

In India too, news, media and entertainment companies are increasingly becoming social media savvy.

NDTV is ahead of the pack with NDTV Social and the video player Tubaah. CNN-IBN has blogs, podcasts, conversations and a citizen journalism program. Star TV is slowly catching up with the Star Player.

The Times Group is persisting with its social network iTimes and experimenting with niche social network iDiva and aggregator Hotklix. Hindustan Times has started Talk to HT, an ideation platform. Hindustan Times, Live Mint, DNA, Economic Times, Business Standard, India Today and Outlook also have journalist blogs, while Indian Express has user blogs.

Everyone has links to Twitter profiles and Facebook pages proudly displayed on their homepages. All the entertainment focused TV channels and movie production houses have done consumer generated content contests.

Elsewhere, Bollywood group blog Passion for Cinema is doing well and Bollywood focused talent search community Desitara is shaping up well. Several Indian celebrities have their own blogs now and so many celebrities are on Twitter now that there is now a Twitter app called Bollytweet for tracking them.

So, yes, Indian news, media and entertainment companies are indeed experimenting with social technologies. The jury is still out on how strategic and successful these experiment have been, and they are two different things.

In a series of posts in December, I’ll explore how Indian and international news, media and entertainment companies and individual celebrities are using social technologies. I’ll then separate out the wheat from the chaff and identify best practices. Expect case studies of successful and unsuccessful campaigns and communities, graphs that give context on what is really happening and scenarios for how Indian companies and celebrities can really become social media savvy. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

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At 2020 Social, we believe that business is social. Here are five reasons why.

1. Consumer Generated Content: Your consumers are authors, photographers and filmmakers, all rolled into one. Tap into their creativity, ask them to interpret your brand.

2. Conversations: Your customers, partners and employees are talking about you, in public. Listen to them, reach out to them, engage them in a two-way conversation.

3. Collaboration: People work together in flow when they connect with each other as people. Create rich profiles and shared workspaces to enable people to help each other.

4. Community: Communities come together around a shared social object: a lifestyle, cause or passion. Build and nurture a community around a social object that is bigger than your brand.

5. Collective Intelligence: Customers, employees and partners can give you new ideas and insights. Observe their behavior, ask them for their ideas, recognize and reward them for their contribution.

While social platforms like Twitter, SMSGupShup, Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and YouTube are transient, the underlying value system consisting of these five archetypes, or 5Cs, is here to stay.

Ask us how you can leverage these 5Cs to catalyze innovation and drive engagement, trial and advocacy amongst your customers, partners and employees.

Cross-posted on Gauravonomics Blog on Social Media and Social Change.

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• Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
• Are Indian News, Media and Entertainment Companies Social Media Savvy?
• TOI Article on How Social Activists in India Are Using Social Networking Platforms