Many companies define a Social Media Optimization Strategy as a list of technologies, applications or marketing strategies to be implemented as needed — corporate blogs, facebook pages, RSS, podcasting, etc, etc, etc. — in order to achieve a digital marketing goal.
But a more coherent approach is to start with your company’s target audience and determine what kind of relationship your company wants to build with them, mainly based on what they are ready for.
Charlene Li Principal Analyst at Forrester Research categorizes Social Computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels according to their degree of participation in any one or more of these levels.
Brands, Web sites, and any other companies pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ level of participation first and then create a Social Media Optimization Strategy based on the profiles of their target audience.
“The Participation Ladder” in Social Networking of US adult online consumers in Q4 2006.
You can use “The Participation Ladder” to help figure out which social strategies to implement first – and also how to encourage users to “climb up”, so to speak, from being Spectators to becoming more engaged. Not everyone is cut out from the start to be a Creator; nor is everyone inclined to jump with both feet into social networking. If your Company is seeking to engage its current customers or any potential customers with these new tools, you need to understand where its audiences are within this categorization.
A better way to think about this is looking at the level of participation, why do people participate ? how do they participate ?
This ladder is not a segmentation but a categorization of people in different areas, because one person can be categorized in one, two or more categories depending on the field, industry or discipline, for example, I can be a “Creator” in the marketing field because I write and maintain a blog on that topic, but I can also be an “Spectator” because I read environmental topic blogs but don’t actively generate content on that topic.
The other important thing is that this categorization is not static, people are moving up and down the ladder, so as we have said above, your Social Media Optimization Strategy should also include ways in which you can motivate people to move up and down the ladder.
Let’s start analyzing the different levels of participation from the top down:
Creators
These people are actively contributing content, they are publishing web pages, publishing and maintaining a blog or uploading videos on YouTube and on many of the other video websites.
The reason why people create and do these things is because they have something important they want to share, they have a voice that they want to express and now they have a way to do it, so they write blogs, upload videos, create articles, etc. There is a lot of contribution coming from this group.
Critics
People who are in joining the existing conversation at the very top of the creators, they are commenting on blogs (but are not necessarily bloggers), they are posting ratings and reviews on web 2.0 enabled websites like amazon.com or tripadvisor.com for example.
They are not as active as the Creators, so they are not going to go out and create things but they love to be able to add to the conversation so they are posting on forums, writing on blogs and they are giving their opinion thumbs up and thumbs down.
Collectors
People who are the editors of the social web, people who are organizing the information, they are browsing and surfing the internet, they are normally using RSS feeds and tagging web pages.
They are organizing things, they are for example picking up stories on Digg tagging them on del.icio.us, and what they are doing is making lists for other people to try to understand and find information that is out there.
Joiners
People who are joining the social networks, and become more involved with the use of social technologies mainly to socialize but they can also become either Spectators, Collectors or Creators.
They are online to go out and socialize with their friends, their friends are there so they want to be there too, and they are very active on the social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Meebo and Hi5 to name a few.
Spectators
People who are actively reading blogs, listening to podcasts, watching peer-generated videos on YouTube or other video sites.
They are reading blogs and listening to podcasts primarily to feed a passion of theirs, for me it is marketing and environmental issues, for other people it might be politics or sports.
Inactives
These are the people who are not active in social technologies, they haven’t gotten around to using them and are really not participating in the online conversation.
They are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean they will not be there tomorrow. In fact they will go into the space in the very near future, almost 65% of them have broadband access and almost 50% are technology optimists. They are not there yet partly because they are busy or because they haven’t found the content or friends on the social networks or social technologies to help them bring them on board.
The reason why people are grouped into these different categories is because it can apply to any group of consumers, you can use “The Participation Ladder” to categorize the people who are visiting your website or the people who are just using your products or services offline.
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The POST Methodology
In one of her conferences Charlene Li talked about the following example where she utilized the POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) methodology:
So let’s for example try and create a Social Media Optimization Strategy for the “Alpha Moms” group. The “Alpha Moms” typically have a child under the age of 18 at home, they have a household income of $55k or more, they have some college education and they are technology optimists.
So let’s suppose your initial idea to target this group with social media technologies is to let these moms create their own blogs and podcasts, because these are people who have something to share. The other thing you want to do is to have wikis on the website, so you can share best practices, for example how to discipline a toddler. And the third thing you want to do with the site was to have a social network so the moms could connect with each other and support each other.
So these seemed like very interesting and useful ideas, but it is recommended that before implementing any of these ideas, the best thing to do is to go and collect some relevant data about the “Alpha Moms”.
The POST Methodology is: Start with the people, define the objectives, then the strategies and then the social media technologies.
So, we will start by looking at the people first and we will try to clearly understand what the level of social media participation for the “Alpha Moms” segment is, and then we will have to look at the objectives, strategies and social media technologies that we will make available to them.
Once the data has been collected, we need to determine whether the “Alpha Moms” indexed higher or lower in “The Participation Ladder” that the US Online Adults. In this particular example they indexed significantly higher for critics and for collectors.
In this particular example these was the collected data:
- Creators 13% US Adults vs 6% Alpha Moms
- Critics 19% US Adults vs 24% Alpha Moms
- Collectors 15% US Adults vs 21% Alpha Moms
- Joiners 19% US Adults vs 12% Alpha Moms
- Spectators 33% US Adults vs 53% Alpha Moms
- Inactives 52% US Adults vs 36% Alpha Moms
* Some of them were in two or more categories (That is why they both don’t add up to 100%)
Now once we know what these people are doing, does it match with the Social Media Optimization Strategy that we previously determined above before having this data ?
As you will see, the recommendations will be very different after analyzing and understanding the collected data.
The first recommendation in this case will be to go after that very strong group of Critics that are the “Alpha Moms” so the technologies that need to be implemented are to give them the opportunity of creating ratings and reviews that “Alpha Moms” are using quite often.
More than half of the “Alpha Moms” were Spectators and we want to be able to serve them too, so the second recommendation would be to create great and useful content in a very well organized contextual environment.
The results also showed a great group of Collectors, so we recommend giving them the ability to be able to organize the content for themselves so that content for toddler moms doesn’t end up with content for moms of teenagers for example.
And the last thing is that instead of having a very really rich and tight social network where people are befriending each other, what we recommend to do is utilize and implement a social network that focuses primarily on profiles, so they can provide context to when people are commenting and making reviews of the products.
The way to do this is to embrace your customers, but that can be very very hard when your customers are revolting, in terms of being not very attracted to want to want to go and give them a big embrace.
There might be people who are writing very negative comments or spreading a lot of negative karma about your company across the internet, so one thing you can do is go and find your “mavens” who are your company or brand advocates and loyalists and go ahead and give these “mavens” the ability to answer to these negative comments on your behalf.
Another thing that might be happening is that people are complaining about your poor products or poor service, so one of the things you can do is ask them how to improve by getting involved in the conversation they are having online about your company or your brand.
A one very successful example of this is GM’s FastlLane blog which is a forum for GM executives to talk about GM’s current and future products and services, so what GM Digital Marketing Strategists did, was to go to the blog and find the people who were commenting most intelligently and most frequently on that blog, and then created this special group called “GM Insiders” and brought them into the GM campus to meet the engineers and the marketing people, they took and harnessed some of these complaints that people had, made them constructive and started changing the way the organization even designed their next products based on customer feedback, they have recently launched a website called GMNext that has blogs, videos, podcasts, RSS feeds, stories, photos, events, chats, press room and is now a big enabler of the conversation between GM and its customers, that is “reaffirmation”.
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The Customers are Revolting
It could also be that your customers are revolting against you by complete ignoring your messages, no matter what you do, or they are twisting your marketing messages into satirical YouTube videos that are virally propagating through the internet, but what about if you gave them some of that control and give them the ability to create their own advertising messages ? What would happen if you created a place where you could moderate all of that UGC (User Generated Content) ?
Will you be standing at your window of your corporate castle and seeing from the inside how your customers are revolting ? or will you be lowering that drawbridge and letting them come in and then you will be happily embracing them no matter how wacky and weird and obnoxious these customers of yours are ?
Embrace the customer to turn back the revolt – turn revolt into reform. Share the power, and have the strength to tap into the revolutionary power.
Are you participating in the conversation ? Are you in control of your brand ? I recently posted about this, and as Doc Searls has already said in his famous book The Cluetrain Manifesto:
“Markets are conversations”
