Mzingawp Social Media Marketers

8/3/2019 Mzingawp Social Media Marketers

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The first true collaborative learning

solution expressly designed to bridge

the gap between formal learning and

social knowledge sharing

Social Marketing & Online Communities:Getting Started

August 2008

Mzinga White Paper

www.mzinga.com l 888.MZINGA.8 l [email protected]



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About This White Paper

© 2008-2009 Mzinga, Inc.

All other brands and names may be trademarks of their respective owners and are used for

explanation without intent to infringe.



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Introduction

In just 15 years, the Web has connected nearly a billion people and changed the world so profoundly

that some historians liken the Internet Age to the Renaissance. That’s heady stuff for people around the

world. But for businesses, the potential of so much individual brainpower linked and amplified by

technology is almost unfathomable. This is the “we” factor, or the surprising superiority of mass

brainpower, and it goes far beyond the “social networking” exemplified by Facebook. Over and over,

we’ve seen collective intelligence outsmart individual intelligence, and it’s become a major turning point

in traditional ways of doing business.

Mass collaboration itself has long intrigued thoughtful people. In his monumental novel War and Peace,

for example, Tolstoy pits a brilliant military genius (Napoleon) against the clumsy, plodding resistance of

Russia’s ox-like peasant masses. Napoleon loses: A million simple minds outsmart the world’s smartest

general. Think of our fascination with beehives, ant colonies, barn raisings, or space shuttle lift-offs. In

such team phenomena, many collaborators join their individual talents in collective pursuit of a mutual

goal.

Consider Web 2.0, the current stage of the ever-evolving Internet. Web 2.0 grew out of the work of

free-minded software innovators who believed that knowledge expands as more people use and refine

it. Gone is the urge to keep secret the blueprints for one’s creation—the code behind a new software

program, for example. Rather, these architects of innovation welcome tinkerers and testers, confident

that additional eyeballs and brain cells will improve on the original design, thus benefitting all users—

including the product’s initial creators.

These changes, however, can be frightening to the leaders of businesses built on the past. In his 2005

article, “The Power of Us,” Robert D. Hof noted that, “Corporations, those citadels of command-and-

control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of

customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are

creating what they want themselves—designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and

declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters.”

In the same article, Hof quotes C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of

Business professor and co-author of the 2004 book, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique

Value with Customers: "It's the democratization of industry…We are seeing the emergence of an

economy of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Therein lies Web 2.0’s paradoxical appeal to business imaginations. By allowing open-access to your

operation, you wind up with a better product—one that costs relative pennies to develop while

attracting ever more customers. Looking to provide better support to your customers? Utilizing social

software to create radical transparency throughout your support initiatives allows your customers to

begin to help one another. Using blogs to open channels of communication between your executives

and the outside world can help you develop better brand awareness.



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A paradox, indeed, for traditional business minds, but as eBay CEO Meg Whitman once observed, “It is

far better to have an army of a million than a command-and-control system” (Hof).

The world’s largest brands believe it: They’re actively using social software and online communities to

build stronger businesses. Ford Motor Company launched a discussion forum to support owners of their

new Sync in-car system, dramatically reducing their support costs while simultaneously creating a

powerful market research channel. American Express utilized social software to support The Members

Project, increasing new American Express card memberships while tying their brand to a project to

develop and fund ideas to make a positive impact on the world. ESPN’s Conversations gives website

visitors a voice in the stories, resulting in significantly longer visits and higher ad revenue.

Indeed, even traditional business tasks typically performed by a few company specialists are being

thrown open to the global masses. Using the Internet as their hiring hall, Web-savvy companies are

beginning to farm out important jobs ranging from product development to customer service, sales,

marketing, and even basic research and design. These companies use collective-intelligence technology

such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, and social networking sites to support important initiatives. They’re

tapping the amazing range of expertise gladly offered by their customers and prospects. In summary,

they’re using the opportunities provided by marketplace communities to embrace conversations with

their customers.

Marketplace Communities

A marketplace community is, quite simply, a collection of social software applications, programs and

content designed to bring together customers, enthusiasts, and/or prospects for a certain purpose or

goal. Examples include communities for:

• Brand building

• Product innovation

• Event management

• Market research

Before exploring each of these in more detail, it’s important to define the building blocks of a successful

community. These are consistent regardless of the business process you’re planning to support.

Getting Started

Building a community should not be considered a technology implementation. While technology plays

an important role in the ultimate solution, it’s important to leave it on the sidelines at the outset.

Successful community implementations follow these steps:

1. Focus on your overall community strategy early on.



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2. Map that strategy to a specific set of social software applications.

3. Develop a moderation and member engagement plan.

4. Measure it.

Building a Community Strategy

The information superhighway is littered with failed community initiatives. They’re the “mom & pop”

restaurants of the online world—here today and gone tomorrow. Why is this and how can you learn

from their mistakes?

Begin by focusing on who you want to build community for and why you want to build it. This may seem

trivial, but many companies start with technology and a “build it and they will come” approach. Instead,

recognize that you already have community, whether they’re your customers, prospects, or enthusiasts,

but you simply haven’t enabled online social tools for them yet. Then, choose a specific businessprocess you want to support and begin to map the members’ needs to your community objectives.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research recently authored a compelling book on this topic

called Groundswell . In it, they put forth a community planning concept called “POST.” In their words:

“Take a step back and ask yourself, ‘What are my customers ready for?’ and then ‘What are my

objectives.’ Once you know that, then you can start planning. We created an acronym for the

four-step planning process, starting with these questions, that you should use to build your

groundswell strategy. We call it the POST method, for people, objective, strategy, and

technology. POST is the foundation of groundswell thinking – a systematic framework forassembling your plan.”

Focusing on people and objectives is not a new concept. Traditional marketing functions such as market

research, product innovation, and demand generation took this approach and were tremendously

successful. What’s new are the social software applications and their resulting organizational

transparency. Therein lies the rub: Traditional “command-and-control” organizations aren’t

comfortable with transparency and often fight against it. A major challenge you need to address during

the strategy phase is helping to prepare your culture for the coming transparency.

Finally, develop a consensus on a focused, measurable goal for your community early on. Too manycommunity initiatives start out in the right direction, but eventually spiral out of control as the scope of

the project expands. Keep it simple early on and grow organically over time.

Social Software Applications

The right mix of social software applications, programs, and content can have a dramatic impact on your

key business processes by facilitating more conversations, information sharing, communication, and



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transparency. Understanding the various social applications available to you is an important foundation

for discussing how community can support these business processes.

Common applications to consider for your Marketplace Community include:

Blogs – Blogs provide a mechanism for members to share their thoughts and ideaswhile also following the blogs of experts and thought leaders. The conversational

nature and flexibility of blogs make them ideal for communicating with your customers

and prospects, while also allowing them a channel to provide feedback to you via

commenting.

Discussion forums – Forums enable sharing of multiple perspectives on specific topics,

better connecting members both in terms of ideas and personal relationships. Helping

foster tighter personal relationships means greater participation and engagement.

Forums are also the “grandfather” of social software, having been in use for decades,

and provide a familiar jumping off point for many new members.

Video and audio sharing – If forums are the grandfather of social software, then

podcasts and video are the “new kids on the block.” They provide a compelling

alternative to text-based content and can add a new dimension to your community

initiative. They do, however, require an additional level of oversight and moderation.

Adding audio and video content can be a critical component to some marketplace

community initiatives.

Idea management – This application gives your customers and prospects a voice in

your innovation process. With simple idea creation, total transparency, and

straightforward voting mechanisms, idea management streamlines innovation andgives you immediate feedback on your initiatives. Companies such as Dell and

Starbucks have embraced the concept of idea management and have witnessed great

results: Starbucks saw more than 100,000 votes cast in their MyStarbucksIdea site’s

first week alone (Gillespie).

Social profiles – Social profiles provide a way for members to connect socially as well

as professionally, enabling new members to locate expertise within the community.

Social profiles also provide visibility into member challenges, giving your company

insights into potential pitfalls and opportunities before they arise. As with Facebook,

advanced social profiles allow members to post on each other’s “walls,” update their

status, and chat with one another, creating a more cohesive and personal communityexperience.

Ratings and rankings – Ratings and rankings are designed to enable members to

provide feedback to other members within the community. It’s also useful to have

member rankings (and status) corresponding to each member’s level of activity in the

community, creating a hierarchy of membership based on the criteria that’s important

to the sponsoring company.



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Shared file repository – It’s often necessary to share product documentation and other

files in Marketplace Communities. The shared file repository is built to support this

requirement. The file library is critical for communities built to support discrete events

where presentations, transcripts, and documentation are an important component of

success.

Event chat – This application is designed to provide a way for community members to

ask questions and receive answers from an industry expert or luminary. The event chat

provides multiple layers of filters and reviews to manage the high volume of questions

that typically flow in during live events. Event chat is also a fantastic way to gauge

member interest/sentiment around a certain topic.

Moderation and Engagement

Once you’ve assembled your strategy and applications into a cohesive community, it’s critical that you

formulate a plan for content moderation and member engagement. Moderation is both the

infrastructure and the actual human review of flagged content, while engagement is the active

scheduling and facilitation of activities designed to keep members involved in the community.

In moderation solutions, the infrastructure you select should allow for both pre- and post-moderation,

have a flexible member permission structure, and include reporting to keep you apprised of your

community’s health. You should also be able to establish automatic filters for certain keywords, bad

language, and rogue HTML. Additionally, the infrastructure should allow members of your community

to “self-police” the content, reporting violations through simple alerts built into the community content

management system.

On the human side of moderation, it’s important to understand the differences between pre- and post-

moderation and how each affects your community’s vitality.

Pre-moderation stipulates that all content submitted by members is reviewed by a moderator before it

goes live in the community. In some marketplace communities, this might be important for sponsoring

companies to maintain a sense of control over what’s being said. The downside of pre-moderation is

that users are becoming increasingly accustomed to their ideas and comments immediately going live;

pre-moderated communities may see slower growth and adoption than their post-moderated

counterparts. Also, depending on the volume of content of flowing into your community, pre-

moderation may require a significant investment to review all content before it goes live.

Post-moderation depends on moderators to quickly scan content posted to the community for

violations. While this carries the risk of some questionable content being live on your community, it

assumes members are trustworthy at the outset and establishes a more open, transparent environment

for your community. This approach tends to support fast growing, viral communities. It also relies on

members to report violations and encourages them to self-police the community, a hallmark of strong



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communities. In the end, you and your company have to balance your need for security and control

versus free and open conversations when choosing between a pre- and post-moderation strategy.

Member engagement is another important and challenging consideration for any community initiative.

If you assume you can just “build it and they will come,” you’re in for quite a surprise! Marketplace

communities depend on frequent activities and interactions to keep the momentum. You must build

programs such as webinars, conference calls, surveys, newsletters, face-to-face breakfasts, etc. into your

overall community strategy. In designing a programming strategy, it’s critical that you consider member

needs and develop program visibility several months out. Solicit feedback from members and begin to

design programs based on their suggestions, and you’ll build enthusiasm and thought leaders for those

sessions.

Transforming Business Processes with Social Software Solutions

Now that we’ve looked at what it takes to build and sustain a marketplace community, we’ll explore

four specific business processes and how they can be supported and/or radically evolved by social

software and community.

Brand Building

In their groundbreaking 2001 article, “Brand Community,” Albert Muniz, Jr. and Thomas C. O'Guinn

described a brand community as “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a

structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand.” For enterprises, the concept of a brand

community presents a compelling opportunity to build stronger relationships with their variousconstituents.

• Enthusiasts: Most enterprises are blessed with a core group of customers often referred to as

“enthusiasts.” Enthusiasts not only prefer this particular brand, but also will actively refer

others to the brand. Creating opportunities for these members to share stories (whether

through text, audio, or video) and build a better relationship with the enterprise is essential.

• Customers: These members actively utilize your products and services, but they are not yet

considered enthusiasts. Creating opportunities for them to converse with, and consume

information from, your enthusiasts will help you convert and create more viral/virtual brand

champions.

• Prospects: These members are interested in learning more about your brand and are heavilyinfluenced by existing customer testimonials. Providing exposure to enthusiasts and customers

is a great way to introduce prospects to your brand and begin moving them toward a stronger

(and potentially revenue-generating) relationship.

By utilizing social software and community to deepen relationships with these constituents, marketers

can realize several brand benefits:

• Support new initiatives and products with a viral brand communication channel



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• Increase the time consumers spend interacting with and enjoying your brand(s)

• Reduce advertising and marketing communication costs

Brand communities can take on many shapes and sizes depending on your goals. They can be campaign-

based or grow with your brand over time. Common applications used in brand communities include

blogs, forums, video sharing, and social profiles.

Product Innovation

Every business needs to innovate to stay competitive, but many rely on costly research and expensive

expertise to get there. By utilizing social software and community, enterprises can create an alternative

approach by leveraging the collective insight, wisdom, and creativity of their customers, prospects,

partners, and employees.

At the core of successful product innovation communities is the idea management application, whichenables community members to submit new ideas and then rate, rank, and comment on the

submissions. All ideas are captured and the highest rated suggestions rise to the top, making it easy for

enterprises to identify the most relevant and game-changing ideas.

As mentioned previously, Starbucks’ “My Starbucks Idea” and Dell’s “IdeaStorm” are examples of

product innovation communities in action. By asking their customers for ideas (and listening to them),

both companies are:

• Generating tremendous insights into how they can serve their constituents better

• Building a captive audience of highly motivated consumers

• Creating new ideas to fuel enterprise growth

According to Dawn Lacallade, Dell’s lead on IdeaStorm, building a product innovation solution is best

when you’ve already developed other social software and community solutions for your constituents. In

a podcast at the 2008 Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas, Lacallade noted the importance of

establishing a social footprint and actively listening to and answering clients’ questions and comments

via other social channels such as Twitter and Get Satisfaction before developing your own product

innovation community.

Event Management

Supporting specific events with social software applications is such a natural fit that it’s surprising the

concept has taken so long to gain broad support. Whether the event is a user group, sales meeting, or a

television program, a community helps to create bonds and share information that makes the live event

more successful.



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By utilizing social software applications, organizations can create an online meeting place designed to

complement events as they are happening and to provide a forum for people to discuss related topics

before and after the event. Some examples of event communities in action include:

• A live event chat preceding a user group conference to create a venue for customers to ask a

keynote presenter questions• A collection of blogs, discussion forums, and social profiles designed to share important

information and introduce constituents to each other before a sales meeting and then

disseminate key findings and approaches following the meeting

• A destination for television viewers to discuss/debate the latest twists and turns of their favorite

program (e.g., ABC’s “Lost” Theories discussion board).

Enterprises that build an event community may see them evolve into a brand community over time. This

is typically the case when the specific event is a product/service launch campaign or television show

launch, where the community naturally evolves to support needs of the product, service, or show.

Market Research

Many companies conduct formal market research programs, often at tremendous expense, to discover

what their customers want from them. Ultimately, these companies have one goal: They want to fine-

tune their products so prospects will buy from them. Social software applications support this goal at a

fraction of the cost.

Communities built for market research activities typically include applications such as blogs, forums,

social profiles, and surveys. Through a robust series of programs, members get to know one another

and the sponsoring company. Members see the community as a place to:

• Learn more about new products and services

• Share their experiences, likes, and dislikes about products and services

• Give feedback on logos and campaigns

• Deepen relationship with other community members and the sponsoring company

More than other marketplace communities, market research communities rely on consistent programs

and proactive engagement activities to ensure the ongoing conversations that are the hallmark of the

market research community.



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Summary

Marketers should examine social software and community solutions carefully to complement and

expand their existing activities. Marketing communities in particular represent a unique opportunity to

transform the staid, traditional approach to business processes, including market research, product

innovation, and brand building, by enabling companies to connect directly with target audiences

through interactive Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, discussion forums, and user profiles.

Prior to implementing social software and communities, marketers develop a strategy and identify

whom they want to spark a conversation with and why, focusing on supporting specific business

processes. Marketers must also allow the applications and tools in question to follow their strategy

(rather than dictating it) and then support their initiative with content moderation and member

engagement strategies.



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References

Gillespie, Elizabeth M. “Thousands of Posts Flood Starbucks Site.” Associated Press. April 8, 2008.

Retrieved August 19, 2008 fromhttp://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/04/08/thousands_of_posts_flood_st

arbucks_site/

Hof, Robert D. “The Power of Us.” BusinessWeek. June 20, 2005.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938601.htm

Li, Charlene and Josh Bernoff . Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social

Technologies. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008.

Muniz, Jr., Albert M. and Thomas C. O’Guinn. “Brand Community.” Journal of Consumer Research

Retrieved from:

27.4 (2001): 412-432.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/319618

http://nowisgone.com/2007/10/18/dells-incredible-turnaround/

“Dell’s Incredible Turnaround.” Nowisgone.com: (October 23, 2007). Retrieved August 19, 2008.

http://www.mzinga.com/en/Community/Blogs/Jim-Storer/C20-Conversations-Dawn-Lacallade/

Dawn Lacallade - C20 Conversations with Mzinga: (May 2008). Retrieved August 19, 2008.

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/04/08/thousands_of_posts_flood_starbucks_site/


















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Mzingawp Social Media Marketers