I don’t care that your Twitter profile has thousands of followers or if your Facebook fan page has thousands of fans. Until you can show the value of those users they are just meaningless numbers.

Social media marketing is full of metrics that can impress clients such as follower count, but until they are put in context they mean absolutely nothing. If your Twitter account has 1000 followers that may seem good, but when you some research and find that all of your competitors have at least 3,000 followers, the sheen wears off.

These numbers are used to agencies to show their work as being successful. It’s largely a runoff from the social media industry being co-opted by the PR world, obsessed with hollow figures such as opportunities to see. They see the number of followers a brand has a direct translation to opportunity to see brand messages. They promise that they can get a Facebook fan page X number of followers in X amount of time, and because it’s relatively easy to do so, they can deliver. And so they give the impression they’ve been successful because they’ve delivered what they told you they would. This does not mean that it’s been a successful social media campaign though, far from it.

If they aren’t engaging with users, having conversations, learning what consumers think and want then ultimately it’s a failure. So what if every time you put out a message 1000 people have the opportunity to see it, if no one cares about, understands or wants to see the message, then it’s pointless. Just as pointless (and potentially dangerous) as getting PR coverage about a new burger in a vegetarian magazine would be.

Social media isn’t just about reach, it’s about engagement. Until you start putting follower numbers into context, and showing the value of these followers then they’re just meaningless numbers.

Social currency is a term that is gaining popularity in the social media community, but as a concept it is not a new idea. Social currency simply refers to the value that information has when it is shared between individuals, something has a good social currency if people want to continue to share it.

A good example of social currency is gossip, people will share rumours with their friends, who in turn will share with their friends, which is why rumours can spread like wildfire. But the key to understanding social currency is to understand the psychology behind sharing, why do people want to share? Ultimately people share when it benefits them, when they get some personal value out of sharing. The single most important component of social currency is personal value.

Basic human needs

Personal value itself is typified by fulfilling two basic human needs, the need to belong and the need to feel significant.

Humans are social beings; we are compelled to identify ourselves as belonging to groups of similar people. This need to belong is the most important element of personal value – people share content to show that they belong to a certain group of people. People will join groups on Facebook to show that they belong, quite literally, to that group of people. Just as people will tend to dress themselves according to quite specific social groups, the things we share and advocate are just another way of identifying ourselves with a group.

Within these groups individuals want to feel valued in that group; they want a feeling of significance. People who share content do so to get recognition from others in that group and in doing so give themselves significance. An offline analogy is an individual in a group of friends who always wants to be the one telling jokes; they gain significance by sharing jokes with their friends.

Social currency therefore not only provides value to the end users, but also provide additional personal value as a form of currency when shared.

Four further types of Value

Personal value can be broken down into four further types of value: Utility, Knowledge, Entertainment and Monetary.

Utility

This is literally something useful, be it a piece of useful content such as a “how to” guide or a fully fledged branded utility. Branded utilities are where brands create something that provides a tangible, useful benefit to users, such as banks providing applications that allow users to compare the various interest rates

Knowledge

A different kind of value can be gained when people share knowledge within their group. This can start from people who remind their friends that a mutual friend’s birthday is approaching right through to thought leaders in industry, who produce white papers and innovative new methods of working. The personal value is a reward for individuals who share their knowledge; they are valuable members of that community.

Entertainment

Probably the oldest and certainly one of the most common, types of social currency that provides personal value from entertainment is the joke. People tell each other jokes to make members of their group laugh, just as they share funny videos with their social networks and email each other funny pictures. Providing entertaining social currency to your peers gives you significance within your peer group.

Monetary

The final type of value a user can receive from social currency is monetary or financial value. A good example is the online coupons that brands encourage their customers to share with their friends, entitling them to a discount. It is of value not only to the end user, but also to the sharer, as their community gives them kudos for sharing the discount.

Multiplying the effect

These values are not delivered in isolation however, the types of value can be combined to provide stronger social currency, with common examples including useful financial knowledge in the form of “How to live on a budget” guides or entertaining information, which explains why infographics are so widely popular.

At the end of the day, if your brand doesn’t have social currency, if the content it produces isn’t entertaining or useful, if it doesn’t share knowledge or provide a monetary benefit to users then people won’t share it. So what social currency does your brand have?

Social media is no longer new territory. Gone are the days where we are impressed by a brand interacting with users in social spaces. Social Media is tried and tested, with case studies from Starbucks, Dell, Wallmart and many other huge brand names.

Now attempting to create a social media campaign is outdated. Now is the age of integration. Creating any element of a campaign in isolation is not only the sign of a poor strategy, but it’s a wasted opportunity.

Social media should now be considered in the brainstorming sessions of fully integrated campaigns, and no longer reserved just for seeding or tacked on to the end of a larger campaign.

Just like any other medium, social media works better as part of a fully integrated offline and online strategic approach to campaigns, with each element complimenting and amplifying each other.

Just having a Twitter a page doesn’t cut it anymore. Having an isolated social media campaign is a stupid idea.

A handy set of guidelines to help to navigate the social media ocean without being a dick

Contrary to popular belief it is not a good idea just to jump in to social media. It’s not important to “just be there” – you need to know why you are there. You need to have a clear understanding of what you want to put into your online presence, and what you want to get out. In other words you need to have a clear strategy for your online activity.

Having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile isn’t a means to an end. And simply stating that you want to “engage with your community” doesn’t count as a strategy. Engagement isn’t a strategy. It’s barely even an objective.

You wouldn’t just create a website for your brand. You wouldn’t start an advertising campaign without knowing first why you are advertising, who you are advertising to and what effect you want your adverts to cause. And you certainly shouldn’t start an advertising campaign as a silo; it needs to belong to a wider strategy that considers brand, tone of voice and long term goal. The same needs to be true of your ventures into social media, you need to plan for success.

Facebook and Twitter are channels, tactics, and you need to understand their role and place these tactics in your broader communications strategy. Until you are ready to do this, you probably should not set up a Facebook page or a Twitter profile

One of the biggest problems to face social media marketing is that due to it being a relatively new area there is little in the way of “text book” theories. That’s not to say that there aren’t books on the subject, there are hundreds. But, whilst many share similar ideas, the field just isn’t as developed as traditional marketing.

As such, the industry tends to suffer from buzzword mentality, jumping from one buzzword theory to the next. One term in particular that has stuck is community marketing, upon which many other loosely developed theories have been built. In fact, the term has become fundamental to how many in the social media industry think about their work and sells it in to clients. “You need to engage your community!” self pronounced social media experts (read social media douchebags) decry, probably because someone writing for Mashable has told them so.

The problem is most brands don’t have communities. Some brands have amassed large numbers of fans on Facebook, but the mere act of becoming a fan of a brand on Facebook does not mean that the user wishes to participate in any community or join in with any conversation about that brand. A Sausage Roll fan page with 10,000 fans does not mean there is a Sausage Roll community; it simply means that 10,000 people are saying they like Sausage Rolls.

Regardless of how many fans it has, a simple Facebook page is not a community; a community is made by its members and the sense of belonging they create for themselves. The real problem, of course, lies with marketers. They have taken the term, raped and abused it so much that they have stripped it of the connotations that first attracted us in the first place: a group of likeminded individuals brought together by their shared interests connecting with each other, and, hopefully, with the brand.

Marketers are using this watered down term and using it to raise the hopes of their clients, telling them that community engagement is the key to success. Clients need to have their reality checked. The problem with clients is they are their brands’ own biggest fans. They think their brand of toilet cleaner is the best, and are willing to shout it from the rooftops. And that’s great; they need to be that enthusiastic in order to sell the product. But as marketers we have to manage their expectations, make them realise that no one else is going to give a crap about their toilet cleaner, even less want to join an online StainBeGone community. They but the product because they want their stains gone, not because they want a relationship with the brand. Sure, they may become a fan on Facebook, (probably more for novelty value than anything else) but don’t misinterpret the signals like a socially awkward teenage male thinking that’s there’s a relationship just because the girl you’re into acknowledged your existence.

This is not to say that online communities don’t exist, or that a Facebook fan page cannot be home to a community, just that as marketers we need to more realistically manage the expectations of our client. Community marketing is not a one size fits all, saviour for brands. There are some great examples of organically grown communities being improved by the brand carefully entering into and becoming a part of the community, such as the Harley Davidson fan club. In these cases the communities already existed before the brand joined them, and so the leg work was already done for the brand.

There are also great examples of brands developing their own communities by facilitating the communication between fans, and with the brand itself, such as the work done with the Guitar Hero community.

The moral of the story is not that it is impossible to create, or join an engaged brand community, but rather that when the social media come knocking at the door telling brands you that “you need to engage with your communities” take it with a pinch of salt.

Marketing underwent a massive shift in the last half century, with traditional methods of mass marketing moving to more niche strategies, targeting small groups or even individuals. The change came about as companies were able to learn more about their customers; improvements in technology meant they were able to gather huge amounts of transactional data and use this information to target relevant marketing material to their customers.

The information allowed companies and brands to build relationships with their customers, no longer just pushing out one message to all with huge mass marketing campaigns, but rather target their core customers with messages directed to their habits, wants and desires. A new field of marketing was born, Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short.

However, marketing is undergoing another shift and it is again driven by technology. In recent years improvements in availability of broadband communications has allowed Internet access to become ubiquitous and improvements in technology have provided customers with access to more information about companies and brands than ever before. Knowledge of the information being sought by customers can also provide essential data to the companies in terms of honing their messages.

It used to be that information flowed one way, from the company to the consumer. Companies were very careful about the message they sent out, they spent huge amounts of money on slogans, jingles and advertising campaigns, all to provide the company mantra to the consumer. The conversation with the consumer was one way.

Professor Urban of MIT’s School of Management argues that “marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.” (Urban 2004)

The Internet has allowed people to share their experiences and opinions of brands online. The role of consumers online has definitely changed. The Internet is not just a tool for finding information; it is also a tool for communication.

Jake Hird, (2009) referencing a recent study by Netpop Research argues that that with the increase in popularity of sites such as Digg, Twitter and Facebook, users are discussing their brand experiences online with their friends and other contacts. This kind of communication obviously happened offline before the Internet, but talking about a brand with 2 or 3 people around the water cooler or with the family over dinner is a vastly different scale to posting a message that is then available to several hundred contacts.

The power of the individual has never been greater, with almost immediate access to their entire network “consumers can openly challenge brands in an environment where there is scope to make a massive amount of noise.” Hird (2009) argues that brands cannot simply ignore these users, nor can they gag them. The users have taken a large chunk of power, and they aren’t likely to want to give it up any time soon.

It is this shift in power that is driving the revolution in branding and marketing. Companies are no longer able to control fully the message of their brands; the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm (Moore 2005) is forcing companies to change tactics.

We see brands doing this with varying degrees of success, with Dell famously responding to a slew of customer complaints, most notably blogger Jeff Jarvis, by creating a dedicated a dedicated corporate blogger to engage directly with customers. They were pioneering engagement in a new era of socially networked communications. And they learnt a lot in the process, speaking at a Lionel Menchaca described how the game has changed:

• Customers are in control. Work with them and learn from them.
• Real conversations are two-way.
• Think before you talk—but always be yourself.
• Address any form of dissatisfaction head on.
• Be aware that any conversation can become global at any time.
• Size doesn’t matter—relevance does. Just as one journalist can trigger a newscycle, one blogger can do the same.
• Don’t be afraid to apologize.
• Develop direct links to customer community (IdeaStorm for Dell), listen for how we can improve.
• One customer is part of many communities.
• Teamwork, transparency and frequent consistent communication are key in this new world.
• No shortcuts are possible. Implementing business change requires much effort across departments.

David Armano describes the process of moving towards a Social Business Strategy as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.” In other words, companies now must learn to engage with their customers and enter into the conversations they are having. By doing this, they eliminate the middleman of advertising and can enhance their business by actually listening to, and engaging with their customers’ conversations in the social sphere.

Not a day goes past without some mainstream media post about Twitter. It really is the poster child for social media. But, how many people in mainstream media really get it? As in enough to know the difference between the number of people a user follower, and the number or people that follow that user? Apparently not. The Express today has an article today arguing that the BBC is wasting time updating accounts that no one is following UPDATE: The Express used to have an article, but they have since removed it. And in true old school style, they’ve not admitted they made a mistake. The Google cache is still available here. (thanks to Keely for spotting this)

The BBC Radio 2 site, which gathers messages, or “tweets”, from presenters such as Chris Evans, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr, has no followers. The BBC Radio 5 Live site, run by presenter Victoria Derbyshire, has just two.

The mistake they made was to confuse followers with following. Both accounts have follower counts in the thousands. It’s a really bad mistake that a major newspaper should have noticed. Especially when the article was written by TWO journalists. This fundamental lack of knowledge is concering. Two journalists writing for a newspaper clearly don’t have enough knowledge of Twitter to know the difference, which is concerning in and of itself. But the fact they didn’t even bother to research it properly? Unforgivable. UPDATE: What’s even worse is that whilst they clearly recognise that they have made a mistake, instead of admitting this and apologising they have simply removed the article, showing a fundamental lack of knowledge about social media. You can’t just make a mistake and try to ignore it by deleting things any more. Especially not in the era of Google Cache. Thankfully it is not indicative of all mainstream media. The BBC, which, contrary the Expresses clearly bias article, actually uses Twitter very well, with different accounts for different types of content. What do you think, do you know of any of cases of the mainstream media just not getting it?

Marketing Sherpa has released a report titled “2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark report” which details the importance of strategy in social media marketing.

It demonstrates that we are shifting phase in the social media marketing roll out, from the trial phase, where companies dip their toes in the social media ocean, to the strategic phase, where companies begin to integrate social media into to their core business. It is important to note that in the trial phase, companies are concerned with learning what works, largely by trial and error. As we move in to the strategic phase the focus shifts to proving the value of social media activity through quantifiable ROI, among other success measures.

The report shows that the success measure that marketers were most concerned about was simply an increase in web traffic, followed by increased lead generation and sales revenue:

What was interesting is that improving brand reputation and awareness were much lower on the list, coming in 5th and 6th respectively. Even lower on the list were improving public relations and customer support.

The reason for this is obvious, these objectives are much harder to track and measure, as the report points out, when selecting objectives it is essential to be able to ties them to metrics:

Defining specific objectives for a social marketing initiative is only half the battle. The other half is aligning those objectives with corresponding metrics. This alignment is important because it enables an organization to measure its progress in achieving the objectives and proving ROI.

Sources: eMarketer and Marketing Sherpa

In their increasing attempt to dominate the social space Facebook has announced drastic changes to the privacy controls of a person’s profile and content. In short, Facebook wants you to share your content with everyone.

One of the reasons that Facebook has proved popular was that it was a walled community. It was a place for you and your friends, not the strange guy who lives down the road. Facebook has been continually opening itself up, and in the process been alienating users.

The problem is that even if you follow someone of Twitter, no real information is given away. People don’t tend to add much personal detail to their Twitter profile, largely because they can’t. But Facebook is different. People share photos of their friends and family, they share personal information about their lives.

Sure, there are people on Twitter who post the intimate details of their toilet habits, but, the key difference is the atmosphere in which the content is published. Unlike Twitter, which is designed to be a public life streaming tool, and is used as such by the vast majority of users, Facebook has always tended to be more personal, there is a veil of personal security that you have when you upload to Facebook – you are sharing with your friends, not the world. By changing the default options, Facebook is eroding this sense of security. Whilst before you had to manually open your profile up to let other people see it, you now have to jump through hoops to stop complete strangers seeing what you’ve posted.

Facebook says that the reason they have decided to encourage users to make their content public is to encourage sharing, searching, and learning about people you don’t know. The problem with this is that people do not join Facebook to learn about people they don’t know, they join to keep in contact with the people they do know, and find the people they used to know.

It’s obvious why Facebook has decided to take this action. By opening up content to the public, they also open it up to search engines, and they can begin to play an important part in real time social search. And secondly, they become more like Twitter, which, in my opinion, they’ve been trying to do ever since they failed to acquire them back in 2008. In fact, to date, I’ve not seen a single major change in Facebook that hasn’t suggested they are trying to be more like Twitter. You just have to look at the massive shift in design to emphasize status update to recognise it.

The problem with Facebook trying to become more like Twitter is, most Facebook users never wanted to use Twitter in the first place.