Connie Bensen

Dave Evans joined me to discuss his book, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day

Dave shares the challenges of integrating social media into an organization:

• Someone in the organization to champion social media
• Organizational dynamics
• Challenge is space is moving so fast

Building a map -how the purchase funnel related to the social web

• social media connects us in many ways
• connecting the customers to various departments internally

Dave talks about how to integrate the info from the social web into the business needs. He uses the analogy of walking into a party & starting with a listening strategy.

Dave explains how you can use his book in ‘hour a day’ aspect to create their plan.There are templates available in the book & also online at ReadThis.com

This is the first in a two part series. The second part is on measurement & monitoring.

You can listen to the interview here.

Download mp3

Community Strategist Live

Connie Interviews Community Experts

The title I started with was ‘Does your web designer know you?’, but people will find it easier with the reference to Tweetbacks.

If you’re like me then you know how it is to depend on someone else for the maintenance & improvements on your website. There are many web designers out there. My suggestion is that you choose one that will take the time to get to know you & your needs.

This past week I had the opportunity to ‘meet’ Kate Niederhoffer,. Her specialty is social psychology & you’ll get insights into community & social behavior from a new direction. Her post on Learning, Organizing, Anticipating: Better reminded me of my web designer.

Kate’s post made me smile because my web designer has come to anticipate what I’d like on my site (and adds it without my asking!). As many of you know, my sister is the caretaker  of my site. But she is intuitive in the way Kate suggests. She also uses my site as a testing ground for items for her other clients.

Usually I will see something & ask her to add it to my site. She enjoys the challenge of finding it & making it work. (We have been working together like this since January of 2007). So she is quite adept at anticipating what I’d like.

I’m excited to show you Heidi’s latest addition to my blog. On the right she has added tabs that show my Most Tweeted posts & ones that were Tweeted Lately

And then Heidi redid my comments section so it separate the comments into ‘written ones’, Tweetbacks for that post, and finally trackbacks. You can see it best on my post: Making a Business Case for Twitter. It also nicely pulls in the avatars from Twitter.

What do you think? Does it provide value to interlace the conversation from Twitter into my blog? The fragmentation of conversations presents a challenge. Not too long ago Heidi added the option for people to add their Twitter id when they comment. I’m glad to help my readers to connect with each other. Heidi can be found at SolutionsByHeidi.com

So, how well does your web designer know your needs? Are they keeping up with the trends in order to help your blog/site evolve with your community’s needs?

further reading: (from Pete Cashmore’s article on Mashable)

10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 – Rachel Cunliffe on TweetBacks, BlogTweet feeds and TwitterRolls.

10 of the Best WordPress 2.7 Compatible Themes

The much anticipated Forrester Wave Report was released today. Jeremiah Owyang has invested much time in gathering, evaluating & reporting on companies that offer community platforms.

I appreciate that the focus was on more than just technology. Building a community requires a strategy combined with an integration of resources (including people!).

… applied over 60% of our weighted criteria based on what our clients tell us they want, a solutions partner that delivers strategy, education, services, community management, analytics and support.

Nine companies were chosen for the Wave Report. They are Jive Software, Telligent Systems, KickApps, Pluck, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, Mzinga, LiveWorld & Leverage Software.

Over the past year I’ve gotten to know people from these companies. How? Many of them are providing great resources.

Lithium has some great whitepapers. And Scott Dodds commented on my blog enough times so that I sought him out in person at Defrag & we had a great chat!

Awareness offers great webinars & whitepapers! Check out their archive of webinars . Dave Carter, CTO has been a great friend & mentor. He gave me insight into the vendor’s side of this process. Robin Hopper is another great resource there.

I met Mzinga folks at the Social Media Strategies & DeFrag conferences. I have their book here. And I met Mike Walsh from Leverage at Social Media Strategies conference too. Lawrence Liu of Telligent & I had a great chat at DeFrag! (His intensity reminded me of Jeremiah’s!). And George Dearing, also from Telligent & I have crossed paths online.

And last but certainly not least, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know Bryan Person, Community Evangelist, for Live World. In my opinion every community platform company should have one – so take note guys! Bryan is doing a great job of defining that role.

Tom Humbarger had asked if these companies are – Walking the “Social Media Walk”.? I spent time outlining all of the ways that these companies are contributing to establishing community best practices. I’m a huge proponent of education & many of these companies are contributing to the conversations in addition to participating on social networking sites.

Thanks to these companies for setting the bar for community building & I look forward to your contributions in 2009!

(I’ll let each company link to their resources in the comments & I’ll put them in the post. Thanks!)

I’m blogging on a regular basis on the Techrigy blog  I put this post up today:

Every business wants to know how engaging in social media can increase their bottom line.

There are a number of challenges in explaining the value of social media:

• How do you show a direct benefit?
• How do you show an immediate return?

Answering those two questions is challenging because we also know that:

• much education needs to take place
• customer engagement is a long term commitment, not a short-range campaign

Social Media Monitoring Provides the Answers

Does the business have competitors? of course they do!

1. My suggestion is to set up keyword searches for the brand & it’s competitors. Then there is a two step process:

Depending on the results the discussion is indicated:

• If the brand has more conversation around it, then:
  • Doesn’t the brand want to maintain their lead online?
• If a competitor has more conversations around it, then:
  • Shouldn’t the brand get busy & consider their strategy?
• If neither the brand or competitors have any conversations around them, then:
  • Shouldn’t the brand get a head start on their competition? Seth Godin suggests that whoever is first will get a lead that’s difficult to overcome.

The next question is how to show an immediate ROI.

2. Use the results from Step One you now have a benchmark. This will provide a basis for setting goals.

Using Techrigy SM2 for social media monitoring offers many ways of analyzing the conversation. It offers an efficient way to measure brand presence, brand perception, opinion & tone. And it also identifies the conversations that the brand should be engaging with.

What will provide value to the customer?

• Is it improving customer service on the web at large?
• Is it identifying the influencers & engaging with them? 
• Is it increasing sentiment around their product?
• Does the business want to gather product development information & feedback?
• Will knowing where the conversations are taking place geographically be valuable?
• Is increased brand visibility important?
• What is the brand perception?

Once you have established what will be measured then goals can be set. What percentage improvement would the business like to achieve? That provides direction for the strategy.

I would also suggest incorporating web analytics into the strategy because those will most likely increase & are generally already a part of a business plan.

3. Finally what will be the ROI? The business needs to know what value the various points in Step 2 have. Using the goals & the cost of implementing the social media strategy then the ROI can be calculated.

Examples: each customer service call is worth $8 or each new customer signup is worth $5

The exciting part is that the conversations are benchmarked before you start. So moving through the engagement, SM2 facilitates the engagement, tracks it, analyzes the conversations & offers reporting at whatever level is needed.

Imagine if you could show your client the following chart. The blue line represents the benchline of the two previous months with no social media efforts. And the red line depicts the amount of conversation in the past two months surrounding their brand & products. With the tool you can help the client translate the ROI based on the value realized from their goals.

After reading his article on ROI vs Value, I’m going to call out Lewis Green for his input on this.

And what do you think?

Update: I’m doing a webinar on Business Cases of Monitoring Social Media on Thurs Jan 15 at 2 pm est

More info here & sign up.

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