There seems to be an emerging social media trend toward creating brand profile pages intended to have 'conversations' with customers. I feel like this is a horrible misuse of social networking & digital strategy. It also creates a poor user experience & is less effective than the strategy I'll outline below.

THE PROBLEM

Treating social networks as a medium rather than a community. If you only see social networks as a distribution channel for your message, you're missing the point.

More and more marketers are spending time crafting content & communications strategies that force un-unified conversation streams to interact with each other in ineffective ways.

Example: Red Bull has one of the largest fan bases on Facebook in a large part thanks to the multitude of contests & games it deploys. However, the content that the Red Bull fan page 'shares' with it's fan base varies drastically.

They take the shotgun approach to content curation by offering up content that might appeal to many different segments within the RedBull fan base. The thinking is that "because you already have a lot of information coming through you're news stream, you can ignore what isn't relevant & pay attention to what is."

The long term result are users who feel disengaged with your brand. Although seeing large numbers of updates improves brand recall, the end result still tends to be less effective than creating permeable communities & sympathetic social systems.

THE SOLUTION

Create permeable community strategies & sympathetic social systems.

Mastering the permeable community strategy

A permeable community strategy is special because it allows marketing & other communication messages to pass through without altering the fundamental social constructs of the community. (i.e. if I join the Nike Facebook fan base because they were supporting the Tour De France. I'll eventually become a disenfranchised fan because they'll eventually move to a new discussion. In fact, I might find all the other non-Tour-De-France updates annoying. If Nike created a community called "Enjoy the Ride" and encouraged people to share bike-riding related information, and provided curated content year-round, it could easily support the Tour De France sponsorship campaign.)

There are 3 steps to create a permeable community strategy.

1. Identify your customer: This isn't always as easy as it sounds. Identifying your customer involves a market analysis that should tell you who your highest-value customers are, and what they think about you. It should also tell you where your customer tends to spend his time online.

2. Identify topics your customers find interesting: Once you know who you need to observe, begin observing them. This step can also take some time, but it shouldn't prevent you from doing a preliminary topical analysis & begin to create a broad-topic community; it can be focused over time. Observing your high-value customers will help you identify topics they're interested in.

3. Create topic-based communities: Once you've identified topics your high-value customers are interested in, you can craft a creative platform that can support the community.

Let's say you've identified 3 trending topics amongst your high-value customers: Cars, Beer, & Hockey.

Logic might say: I should create 3 sponsored communities, one for cars, one for beer, and one for hockey. This could work. If these topics are ingrained into the fabric of who your customers are, these topics will remain relevant and can afford to have ongoing support.

Although this could work, creating three permeable communities is generally not enough to ensure success for campaigns. For this, we need to ensure we choose topics that appeal to the largest percent of high-value customers, but also can work sympathetically to support campaign-based initiatives.

Mastering the sympathetic social system

Creating a community that provides its users with a positive user experience is only 1/2 of the problem. We also need to ensure those communities can work together to support ongoing marketing campaigns. This requires a special kind of content strategy that maps out community synergies against a marketing calendar. A deep understanding of the brand & user will help determine the most relevant communities.

[This map shows how sympathetic social systems work together to integrate campaigns.]

[This map shows multiple communication streams within one social system.]

For our example, the best community platforms might be: A community focused on the value of team building within the sports area & a car-lovers community focused on life enhancement called "Pimp my life".

The goal is to be able to map out how various types of campaigns can engage with the different communities and show how community response can be throttled to increase a campaigns effectiveness or mitigate a negative sentiment.

Guidelines for creating sympathetic social systems

1. Identify what makes popular topics popular within each community

2. Determine topics common to each community

3. Compare common topics to marketing objectives & craft a creative solution that can integrate with a common topic and achieve marketing objectives.

4. Share response assessment & community moderation for campaign-related communications between all communities. This allows a single moderator to connect cross-community communications to throttle response.

SUMMARY

Stop assuming your community will sift through feed-spam to locate relevant information & start showing you care about the members of your community.

Start figuring out what your high-value customers want & begin facilitating conversations, and curating content on the subject.

Start using networks to draw users into campaigns, rather than creating networks around temporary campaigns.

Start using multiple networks together to throttle response, engagement, & moderation.

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