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Late last month, I spoke at PodCamp Boston on designing an effective social media policy for your company. Among the audience were people representing B2B, B2C, education, and nonprofit organizations, all with different needs for getting their message out, different resources available to spread that message, and widely varying organizational structures determining where social media fits in to the mix.

A few things became clear, across all industries, though: social media is becoming more and more integrated into organizational operations, and less and less siloed within marketing. This makes it all the more imperative to develop a social media policy that makes sense across the organization. Throw the growing number of online communities into the mix, and there’s even more of a need for guidelines that cover how your team engages with prospects and clients online.

When you build an online community, it becomes a touchpoint between customers and every part of your organization. Technical support, product feedback, marketing, sales, and branding—all take place within your community. And the team members responsible for support, product development, marketing, sales, and billing all need to be on board to make the community a success. Although many companies employ a professional community manager, or roll that work into marketing, successful communities tap into the professional community within an organization. It’s truly all hands on deck.

Photo: Wayne Kurtzman

This creates opportunities to get ideas for new product features, reduce support costs, and conduct effective market research. It also creates challenges that you need to address with a good policy. The key thing to remember: a social media policy needs to tread a fine line between an “all hands on deck” spirit and the resources and privacy of teams within your organization, especially outside of marketing.

One takeaway from my talk is that you need to be cautious of how you mobilize team members on social media, so that personal brands stay personal, and any promotions team members engage in on the major social channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, remain voluntary and authentic. This doesn’t mean you lose control of your brand, just that you remain mindful of people’s need and right to control their personal brands on their personal social media accounts. In other words, don’t dictate personal use of social for the company, but by all means, activate, guide, and ask people to advocate for your brand.

In an online community you control, privacy and brand lessen as controls. Your team members are engaging using non-personal accounts as part of their work, and you control your brand through having built the community in the first place. Or do you? The reality is, brand, user experience, and customer experience are less about infrastructure and more about interaction. To that end, everything every one of your team members does in your online community reflects on your brand and is an integral part of your user experience. Setting goals and expectations, as well as clear policies and procedures, can assure a positive experience for customers. It can also help integrate your online community into operations with less friction. For “all hands on deck” to work, the impact on operations needs to be light, so that team members can work community responsibilities into their regular jobs.

Some tips for making community management work for all:

• Establish rules for support routines within the community. Generally, the goal of software/SaaS online communities is to provide user-to-user support, but it’s only a positive user experience if there’s professional support to back it up. Determine when a team member must step in to a support forum thread; for instance, if there’s an incorrect answer, or too much time has elapsed without an answer. If people receive poor quality replies or no replies at all to their support questions, it’s your responsibility to remedy that—not the community’s.
• Outline responsibilities for all tasks. Determine who on the team is responsible for monitoring forums, or answering basic questions, and roll that into their job descriptions. Back up every role. The ideal structure is for every vital task to have two backups.
• Determine standard operating procedures and stick with them. Normalize everything from approving pending members to escalating complaints. Just because it’s social media, doesn’t mean it should be disorganized. Team members will be happy to have basic tasks streamlined with SOPs, so they can focus on more strategic work.
• Prewrite stock posts. There’s only a limited number of ways to announce a 50% off special, scheduled downtime, or a webinar. Having stock posts on hand makes people’s lives easier, as long as there are options that suit differing communication styles.
• Offer regular training. New people come on board. New products come out. New questions arise. Training should be continuous, blending informal coaching with formal overview sessions. Lack of training is a main barrier to doing anything well, and social media/community management is no exception.

With careful planning, an online community can drive tremendous value for a brand, whether it’s in technology or consumer products. The key to effectiveness is structure and strategy. If team members who engage with customers in the community have a roadmap for success, the community can be part of a great user experience. 

In blog posts over the past month, Jason Smith has explored the concept of the engagement trajectory, the path that consumers take as they engage more with a brand. Starting out with low-level interactions, such as following on Twitter, interested consumers move along the trajectory until a percentage initiate a two-way conversation with a brand by registering on a social channel. This is the gold standard for marketers: starting the conversation with a customer, rather than simply broadcasting to them.
The key to starting that conversation is understanding the three top barriers that make customers hesitate before joining your community:

Time:

The Barrier: Consumers have limited time to engage with brands, and let’s face it, busy people don’t want to hang out online chatting about shirts.
How to Overcome It: Offer content on your website that is a good use of your customers’ time. Save them time by offering practical advice, important news, and valuable discounts. Structure your site so that information is easy to access—good information architecture is important.

Privacy: 

The Barrier: Increasing media scrutiny of targeted marketing practices and web analytics have made customers wary of providing companies with any information, based on the perception that companies know everything about the consumer and that targeting will be intrusive.
How to Overcome It: Educate the public on the real nature of the data most marketers collect, the uses we put it to, and the non-intrusive nature of most targeting. Create a clear, no-jargon privacy policy. Actively “push” that policy out through email, as well as having it as a link on your site.

Over-Commitment:

The Barrier: People are already registered for more social media services than they use. The abandonment rate for Twitter accounts is 80%; people have enough to do to keep up with the mainstream channels, let alone joining a niche channel devoted to a commercial enterprise.
How to Overcome It: Make interactions with your site simple: limit the number of questions in signup forms and use progressive profiling to gather more information from more engaged consumers over time. Use some push marketing, with members’ permission, to keep momentum going once people join. Groups within the community are a great way to segment audience interests; use group membership data to deliver targeted messages like email newsletters, special offers, and live events. Always have something new going on to give members reasons to visit your community. In the early stages, it will be up to community managers to provide that fresh content.

There's nothing more rewarding or productive than the two-way conversations that so many brands are now having with their customers. Getting customers to interact with your brand is not hard; they want to share with you. Making it obvious that your community is a place where that sharing becomes easier is the challenge. Overcoming the barriers that keep them from joining your branded community can pave the way for better, more effective marketing and customer relationships. 

Last week, we talked about the engagement trajectory, and how customers have a tendency to move along a predictable path from noticing your social media presence to becoming true advocates for your brand on social media, actively participating in your online community.

Let’s look some more at how to move folks along that trajectory. The first step is to determine whether your brand has enough potential advocates out there to make the time right to build a community. Although community can be a great driver of awareness, loyalty, and ROI, not every brand has the brand equity needed to build a community around it. If you do, community makes sense as a strategy. If you don’t, you’ll best spend you time and efforts on other, more fruitful web efforts.

Listening is the key in determining if your brand has enough folks out there passionate enough about your brand that, if you build an online community, not only will they flock to it, but they’ll use it as a platform to engage with your company and other consumers.

The first place to look is your existing social media efforts. Look on your Facebook page:

• Are customers enthusiastically responding to your posts, adding content of their own, and engaging with each other? If so, then you have levels of engagement that could translate well into a dedicated online community.
• Look at other voice of the customer data, such as responses to emails, web analytics, and surveys. Do customers forward your email newsletter to friends often or tweet their favorite articles?
• How about your blog—does it get a lot of shares? And is traffic coming in from those shares?
• Do you get good response rates to your surveys, and do respondents share rich data in free-response questions?

If you’re answering yes to a lot of these questions, your customers are already engaged richly with your brand.  

Of course, it’s a big step from having an engaged blog readership or Facebook fan page to having a fully-functioning online community. It’s fortunately feasible to test whether you can expand the boundaries of your existing levels of engagement to something more along the levels you’ll need to sustain community: ramp up the calls to engagement on existing channels:

• Add contests and quizzes to your Facebook page.
• Invite reader contributions to your blog and email newsletter.
• Create Twitter contests and polls

If consumers respond enthusiastically to this new level of engagement, chances are, your brand may be ready for a branded community.

Next: getting consumers over the engagement line.

Last week, I presented at a webinar hosted by Acquia: “B2C Branded Communities: Delivering ROI, Making Customers Happy.” In it, we looked at ways that consumer companies are using online communities to drive stronger engagement with their customers, leading to higher customer loyalty and, along the way, greater revenue. 
What we’ve seen when we build communities is that there’s a predictable trajectory that people follow when becoming more engaged with your brand:

• They start out with actions that are low in time commitment, such as following you on Twitter, liking you on Facebook, or just reading content on your social media channels.
• If they like what they see, and like your brand, they’ll move along quickly to more involved ways of interacting with your brand, such as rating products on your site and sharing or retweeting interesting posts.
• At some point, though, they cross the dividing line between lurker and member. Signing up for your online community signifies that they’re willing to engage more deeply with your brand, starting conversations that identify their needs as a consumer. From providing more contact information to giving you insights into their preferred product features, they’re articulating that they want to make themselves heard, and hear what your brand is saying.

A select few of these community members will grow into advocates for your brand, the final step on the engagement trajectory:

• Talking about your products or services with others
• Sharing ideas for new products
• Providing trusted feedback on products

One of the challenges we’ve seen for any community engagement strategy is getting customers over the “dividing line” between a lurker and a true community member. And it’s crucial to get people over that line, because that’s where you can start to really understand your customers, segment them for targeted, relevant messages, and build a solid relationship with your customer base.

Next Week: Part 2: Determining if customers are ready to move over the engagement line

Or, What Bikers and Coach Bag Collectors Now Have in Common....

Visitors were out in force around Newbury Street yesterday, and although tourists enjoying the (rare) sunny weather were gathering at sidewalk tables, the Hynes Convention Center was filled with digital professionals of all stripes, there for Enterprise 2.0, the biggest social business conference around. We were there to see Acquia launch the new version of their social platform Commons at their Commons and Cocktails party.

Luckily, I also got to sit in on some of the workshops on the show floor. Though they came from companies of all sizes, and they were selling everything from enterprise CRM platforms to collaboration software, the speakers all highlighted the ways that social has stopped being an add-on to marketing, and become an integral part of operations throughout business:

• Loni Kao of Adobe talked about the challenges of converting your loyal customers into brand advocates, and how many of these challenges boil down to infrastructure. Loni’s message really resonated with the marketers in the audience, since making it logistically simple for a loyal customer to become a true brand advocate can make all the difference. Customers may be enthusiastic about your product, but they don’t work for you, and they don’t have much time to help you out. Loni spelled out ways that building an infrastructure, from social media to your CRM, that includes ways for customers to interact and share ideas can make it easier, something that resonated over here with the announcement of BetaConnect. Though Adobe product centric, the talk was valuable.

• Hutch Carpenter of Spigit probably had the most research-heavy of all the presentations, and it was well worth listening to. He outlined the theoretical foundations for crowdsourcing better than I’ve heard it presented in a while. His points were the exact opposite in many ways from Malcolm Gladwell’s famous assertion that the weak ties associated with social media mean that real change can’t come from social platforms. Carpenter’s assertion? The resistance to new ideas advocated by those distant connections can be strengthened by new “markers of trust” such as online reputation—and the benefits of calling on far-flung networks are too real to ignore. Distance from a problem is positively correlated with the ability to solve it, so it’s precisely those on the edge of a social network who probably bring the challenging ideas that will solve a company’s next big business problem.

• Sandy Carter of IBM kept the crowd spellbound with some of the most glam case studies of the day, but her point couldn’t have been more substantive: social and crowsourcing make huge impacts on the bottom line for some major brands. She cited programs from Coach and Harley-Davidson, and the more humble Gatorade, that revealed some interesting insights: Gatorade found through listening to social media conversations about their brand that their best advocates are not the athletes they traditionally target, but gamers. Listening to what real customers are saying about them on Facebook & Twitter showed the way to new marketing programs, new branding—and as a result, higher sales. Harley-Davidson took the prestige of their brand and gave it a new twist in social media, making their online community exclusive to people who could provide VIN numbers for their Harleys. The result – people buying VIN numbers to join the community even before they buy their first bike, and more engagement with their brand, since the community structure emphasized a real community of users. Coach broke out of their traditional mold by crowdsourcing designs for their high-end bags online, reaching teens and college students. This novel social media approach helped them reach a demographic who seldom bought their products before, and the numbers tell the story: once a crowdsourced bag hits stores, it sells out, no small feat for accessories that range from $160 - $1,000+.

Also interesting was the almost-complete move to the cloud in this field: pretty much every application was offered primarily or exclusively as SaaS.
All told, the event is neatly encapsulating the changes going on in digital business, and providing great inspiration for change worldwide.

Tufts University in Boston, MA became the first selective university in the US to encourage prospective students to submit videos via YouTube as part of the admissions process.

According to report on Boston.com of the 15,436 applicants to Tufts this year, more than 6 percent submitted a video.

The videos provide an opportunity for students to personalize their admissions applications and highlight their unique abilities. While many schools have always encouraged supplemental material this is the first open call for YouTube videos.

Learn more about academic recruitment and social media.

Watch a selection of the videos submitted to Tufts.

Academic Recruitment 2.0

How are for-profit universities using social media, search engine optimzation, and online advertising to recruit students.

Watch the Presentation Now