Chapter 6

Social Media

You’re at a party. You don’t know many people because they’re friends of friends or friends of someone you just started dating. They’ve heard of you through the grapevine. Maybe a few already have opinions. It’s a little intimidating.

There are a few antisocial things you could do in this situation. You could sit quietly with your face to the corner and refuse to speak to anyone. You could start shouting loudly in the middle of the room about your endearing qualities and fascinating hobbies. When someone asks you where you live, you could tell them your SAT score and other academic qualifications.

Chapter Contents

• Social Media Listening
• Exploiting Your Resources
• Social Engagement

The cocktail party is a constant metaphor for joining social media because there are a lot of similarities between the awkwardness, etiquette, and exuberance of both. Social media technology imperfectly replicates the interaction, and ultimately the trust, that two people can establish quickly. Along with this capacity to share an instant connection, you also find the capacity to overthrow governments or to waste an incredible amount of time.

Then there’s the B2B context. At the beginning, companies kept something of an unspoken agreement to ignore social media until it went away. Sure, the B2B realm tolerated some “experimentation” and curiosity, but despite that 20 percent of conversations were about brands, it was still deemed a passing fancy.

Just as everyone was settling in to wait and see what would happen with social media, a few B2B people went over the top with customer service. Following B2C examples, technical evangelists and support teams responded to broken or confusing things in social media. With journalism on its last leg, PR adapted and extended its reach. PR professionals started by working with industry blogs as a new form of specialty publication. Some moved from industry bloggers to customer bloggers. Then marketing jumped in with promotions and outreach in the social media context. And sales found they could sell directly based on criteria like affinity and location.

In just a few short years, B2B marketers established the business cases for social media. Now, more B2B companies maintain profiles on social networking sites than their B2C counterparts. B2B marketers understand that while marketing to one consumer for a product is reasonable, marketing to a batch of complexity-loving researchers and decision makers is necessary.

If you have communication, analysis, and research skills, then the activities you do to succeed with social media are fairly practical. Much of the skill set for social media mirrors the skills you need to thrive in marketing, sales, PR, product development, and customer service. You will, however, notice major differences in social media as a form of eavesdropping, in the time-driven needs for resourcing, and in how you engage individuals en masse.

Social Media Listening

Let’s go back to the cocktail party metaphor for a minute. In the range of normal behavior, you might join a group in conversation by introducing yourself. Or maybe someone else has already introduced you. Either way, in most civil interaction you then listen to the current topic of conversation and find a relevant way to join in.

You apply the same courtesy in social media. Even if you never decide to participate in active conversations, listening is of enormous value to any business. It is one of the most important ways to understand what a large sample of your customers thinks about everything your business does.

Look Who’s Talking

The benefit of eavesdropping is fairly obvious. We start learning what our customers think by considering who we listen to. We all pay for focus groups. Or we pamper the same set of favorite customers, telling them they’re pretty and hoping their ideas actually represent the typical user case. But we have no way of knowing that any information they give us is unbiased. We want to know how these customers might express themselves differently to people they trust or, even more curiously, to people who likely trust them.

Where Your Customers Talk

We find the next compelling bit of findings about social listening in where we go to listen. While most of us tend to care only about what’s happening on our own company’s sites, the customer may not even consider the corporate website when they search for information. They prefer third-party sites or anything that even hints of independence or peer review. Across all cultures, customers also tend to use search engines to find information, such as for product research. Thus, search engines are increasingly putting weight on social factors for both higher ranking and personal behavior analysis.

Through social media listening, you can find out exactly where conversations about your products, industry, or category are clustering. You can analyze price expectations and trends. You can investigate conversations about gaps in how products address business pain points. You can see who customers view as your competitors and why. But most importantly, you can see exactly where customers share these points of view.

Knowing where your customers talk about you has several implications, even if you never respond to comments or engage directly on a third-party site. Though if you do, it’s critical that you follow the host party’s rules and sustain a regular contribution to that site.

Social Media Resourcing

Knowing your customers’ social hive allows you to triage the right resources to that site on a regular basis, whether those resources are in the form of advice dispensed via product technicians, sales managers, or customer service contacts. Smart resourcing is crucial because social media tolerates a much lower threshold for content staleness, and your business may still be somewhat uncertain about investing in social media.

If you allocate some of your resources to a short list of high-conversation sites, you can do the following:

• Share relevant or early-notice content with the site owners
• Explore strategic alliances
• Develop new business partnerships
• Aim for targeted advertising
• Create advertorial content
• Consider link-building work

You can explore all of these options with a few targeted sites without committing a community manager to checking and responding to customer posts every day.

Setting Up Listening

Keywords are the cornerstone of any social media listening setup; with the right keywords, you set boundaries around what you want to hear. These must be words that are normal for human conversation yet descriptive enough to fit a business activity and filter out excess noise. These are the keywords that you’ll need to set up a simple topic alert system in Google Alerts, to include and exclude constraints of a topic in Scoutlabs, or to define an entire industry in a specific language in Radian6.

Ideally, a clear set of keywords will describe the topic you want to follow. The topic can be a range of subjects—product brand attributes, the customer description of the product, the company’s description of the product, the target audience, the target market, a target market activity, an adjacent activity, an adjacent company, or a competitor.

At Autodesk, we set listening against software cost discussions, customer service terms, software commands, potential product names, and sales prospects. Salesforce has revolutionized its company to allow for social listening for everything from prospecting to nurturing to service and support issues to finding feedback on products.

Much of the research about social media keywords overlaps with research about search keywords. You have a great starting point for social media listening in Chapter 4, “Using Paid Online Media in the B2B Marketplace.” However, there are some important differences:

• Search keywords are filtered only through volume, competition, and geography, while you can filter social keywords through traits such as site affinity (what sites the conversations are happening on) and related comment sentiment (whether a comment is positive, negative or neutral).
• Search keywords are seasonal while social keywords trend hourly.
• Search keywords do not reflect how people speak, so you must use modifiers; social keywords can align more closely with normal speech.

The platforms for social media listening sort through large volumes of word data as quickly as possible. The trick for you and your company is to get the words right as you interpret relationships, volumes, velocity, and sentiment in real time. Social listening technologies perform a phenomenal magic of sleuthing, filtering, and aligning. However, none of them is yet perfect.

Refining Your Terms

When you start with social media listening, many of the topics you choose will have large volumes of conversation, unless you are pursuing a very niche market. You must constantly refine and evolve your keywords because the sludge of irrelevant conversations will continue to pass through. Your product launch may share the name of a sports technique, a rap style, and a medical device. A week later, a car with the same name may debut. When this sludge comes through, off-topic comments are left in your platform’s sieve.

Note: salesforce.com had an issue with off-topic conversations when listening for its Jigsaw product. To counter the sludge, negative keywords were an extremely important strategy for our filters. As a result, the topics of puzzles and horror movie characters were strained out of the analysis.

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So, to keep your listening room scrubbed clean, you must always stay on top of your keywords. You must have some flexibility, and you need to keep the net a little bit wide. If you aim for a sterile environment—that is, for a very limited set of keywords—you may miss some relevant conversations because you are being too conservative. Because any single conversation can get millions of impressions in a few short hours, it’s better to scrub, to constantly adapt your keywords, than to miss something.

On the other hand, if you have no constraints, you risk overspending. Currently, most social listening platforms charge for their services as a subscription. The subscription is based on how many topics and how much volume hits against those topics.

All of these topics should be set against business criteria and actionable use. See Chapter 7, “Optimizing with Metrics,” for more details on social media measurement.

Feedback Loops: Product, Marketing, and Strategy

When you listen to online conversations and tune your keywords for topic accuracy, you start to get expected and unexpected product feedback, brand feedback, and marketing feedback. You have two choices here: act on the information now as part of the community conversation or evaluate it as long-term contributing input.

Companies get the most benefit by responding immediately to the following types of content:

• Misinformation
• Business-halting service or product issues
• High-impression exchanges
• High-volume exchanges

For short-term responses, anyone in any department should be empowered to respond, as we’ll review in the “Exploiting Your Resources” section. However, even with all content-savvy hands on deck, you still need to enlist the technical group for social media. Your technical group needs to be exposed to the unexpected ways that customers use the product, and they can gain insight for training, documentation, feature design, and so on.

Yet few things in B2B happen quickly. While the absence of instant responses eventually has an insidious effect on brand and loyalty, many companies simply choose to ignore social media because they don’t have the resources for lightning-fast turnaround. This is unfortunate because social data can potentially contribute to marketing intelligence.

Note: Social data is a great way to measure brand awareness through share of conversation and sentiment analysis. You can gain social intelligence by monitoring real-time conversations over the long term. In this context, you should stay alert to the following topics:

• Benefit statements
• Product comparisons
• Supply chain issues
• Customer-driven summaries
• Competitive/industry placement
• Brand reputation/sentiment
• Bug fixes
• Use case scenarios
• Product research themes
• Purchase decision confidence building

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Exploiting Your Resources

Some managers cringe at the thought of widespread participation in social media, as though they can actually hear the sound of all that lost productivity. They don’t see the ROI. They don’t like the idea of people freely, publicly, and sometimes irrationally criticizing.

On the other hand, some employees, from clerical to C-level, think that social media will magically solve all the woes of their world. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in between. Plus, the value of social engagement may change radically from one type of company to the next.

On top of all that, many social media applications are still growing, and their business value is still unproven, yet businesses still pay a high price for late entry. For example, it can take weeks or months to reclaim and verify the trademarked brand name of an account handle in Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook.

Expectations grow quickly, with more than 60 percent of users now expecting to be able to sign onto a corporate website or community using a social media account as their login and password. Your Facebook account is quickly becoming your login for everything, and B2B customers may expect the same for their professional networks. The long-awaited growth of mobile device use could completely change how B2B product researchers approach the information channels as well as the devices they use to access them.

Note: Encourage your community to become brand advocates. Their recommendations are incredibly powerful in the social world.

One marketing fundamental remains the same: peer-to-peer recommendations are still the most trusted. Customers trust the voice of independence much more than they trust the corporate voice. And the first response in a discussion makes a huge impression on everyone participating and anyone listening. Not all PR is good PR. Hence, it’s good to have a few wordsmiths at the ready for when your listening or analysis reveals that you need a voice in the online conversation. At the end of the chapter, we discuss how to encourage customer advocates.

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Capacity Planning

How many people do you need? Who owns social media? How do we continue to control the brand? These are bracing questions for businesses that are still considering how to dip their toes into the pool of social media. We all want one answer, but no one answer suits all situations.

The number of people, or resources, you direct toward social media work depends on several factors:

• Openness of your research and development team to new input streams
• Depth of your company’s investment in brand/level of recognition for your brand
• Level of sophistication of your competitors
• Your management of both PR and customer service
• Dependence of your products and services on web functionality
• Size of your customer and prospect base

Let’s assume for a moment that you are starting with a test budget, variable spend, and no more than one full-time employee dedicated to social media, if that. Even without a team, you can also assume that a contingent of curious or enthusiastic social mavens within your company will help you out.

You should first provide verified answers to common questions to anyone participating in social media. A sane, legal-approved policy and ground rules for social engagement should spell out how to not be stupid and how to reinforce brand, legal, and ethical integrity. With these rules and policies, you have the tools to bring in as many employees as possible and from there assess exactly how many people you’ll need to truly do exemplary work.

Note: Need help building your social media policy? Check online—all companies from IBM to Intel to salesforce.com to EMC publish and share their versions via social media.

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Organization and Ownership

You will likely start experimenting in social media through a small, trained cohort of the willing. Organize your teams as best you can to maximize the sharing of publishing, responding, ferreting for technical answers, and staying consistently vocal wherever you choose to participate. Because the social community outnumbers you, your teams must drop territorial affiliations to gain any momentum.

If you’re very lucky, you will avoid the debates about ownership that delay the actual start of social activity. These debates are an easy ploy to deflect participation through fear, either of lost control or of criticism. A less obvious diversion is the scramble for ownership before anything can start.

Social media can live in PR, customer service, corporate marketing, the web team, the product team, or just about anywhere. Either way, for social media to work optimally, you must strike a balance between proactive publishing and reactive publishing. You need as many appropriate participants as possible. Where social media lives is not as important as how quickly the company allows questions and content syndication to jump across silos and how rapidly the company responds to customer needs.

Placing Your Team

To place your social media team, you can choose from several organizational approaches. The Altimeter Group outlined and tracked several organizational types and explained the pros and cons of each type (see Figure 6-1). Note that a centralized approach allows more control in situations with high industry regulation, while an approach with multiple hubs and spokes addresses multinational outposts. Dell and Zappos use a holistic model, which is ideal but not easy to achieve. Altimeter is also starting to correlate organizational models with other factors as a sign of maturity.

Figure 6-1: Though there are different degrees of centralization, all participants benefit through a core lead on common policies, scalable technologies, proactive road maps, and lightweight processes. (Photo credit: Altimeter Group)

The Cases for Spending

The business cases for social media include every marketing activity from brand awareness through purchase to customer retention. However, creative marketing campaigns or one-off but well-executed pilots are more likely to pave the way for increased spending on less sexy aspects of social media, such as account auditing and infrastructure spend. Getting spend from one-off funding of small, tentative social media pilots and turning that into a consistent, uncontested line item of the department’s regular budget is its own battle of persuasion.

Brand awareness and reputation are major business drivers, and marketing awareness campaigns play a big role in maintaining these drivers. Search engines are rabidly integrating social signals as a main ingredient of their ranking algorithms. But the main business case for social media is that the spending is still comparatively low; so like other forms of inbound marketing, it provides a fairly low cost per lead (see Figure 6-2).

Figure 6-2: Low cost per lead. (Photo credit: Altimeter Group)

While many organizations choose some level of centralization for social media, all struggle with funding at some point or another. Studies on social media—especially when paired with projections for how social media will expand as mobile technology grows—predict rapid growth in both funding and hiring over the next few years. Training, advertising costs, product integration, app development, campaign creative, and agency and vendor support all figure into budget projections.

A prime directive of spend is in Facebook, especially to gather fans. In-house staff and agency support for campaigns and ongoing activity are also high-price ticket elements that most companies will support in the shinier business cases. However, training tends to be on the lower spend side, possibly because decision makers assume that the centralized role(s) will lead the program. They expect that one person who became the first full-time social media manager will essentially engage in an endless road show of evangelism and best practices training.

Training and References

Your company may build training programs based on internal policies derived from code of conduct, ground rules for community engagement, and existing PR or customer service scripts. Someone must make key decisions on how to integrate social media into the company’s existing processes, such as crisis management. Policies will naturally shift over time, and like all other guidance, there must be a standard timeline for regularly updating training materials along with the glorious and never-ending internal training sessions.

Training for Buy-In

Aside from establishing and teaching policies, you must train a few audience types. One type is the audience for buy-in training. For this audience, your goal is to clear the path to get more employees involved in social media and to include social media as part of regular business activities. You are basically selling social media as a concept.

For the buy-in audience, you highlight the sheer volume of social media traffic, show proof of low-cost lead generation, and demonstrate the peer influence in a channel not yet prone to banner blindness to establish that there are few reasons to deny a pilot social media experiment. Torn between economy-ravaged budgets and acquiring customers for free, marketers often need more confidence and analysis to back social media.

Thus, another function of buy-in training is to soothe the nerves of traditional marketers. Many traditionalists still must be coaxed past a fear of message domination: the premise seems untested, while the risk seems high. In the early days, social media was a multifaceted communication program that mutated unpredictably, that was difficult to scale, and that didn’t offer common measures of success. Traditional marketers may cringe at the thought of unleashing dozens or hundreds of unequipped but chatty employees into the digital wild.

Another tribe of traditional marketers exists, however, who love social media. They think it liberates them from the data-driven constraints of the new digital world order. They extol the magical qualities of social media. They believe any approach is feasible, and they may let high-cost coolness overrule marketing pragmatism in the pilot era. You need to corral these well-meaning marketers into better practices of overall online marketing, including analytics, testing, and predictive modeling.

Moving Past the Social Media Middle Ground

When your social program matures, then you no longer sell why others should care about social media but when and how they can include it. Few companies currently think their social media programs are integrated. The integration stage becomes the middle ground—or the afterthought approach—where they use social media to put a veneer of innovation on a campaign, save a doomed idea, or otherwise serve as a convenient but misunderstood appendage.

To combat social media as an afterthought or as the custodian of a half-baked idea, you must train your social media participants early and often. This audience needs to learn the fundamentals and use cases for every major platform. Your social media publishers must learn individual or group social media content systems as well as the tenets of hyperconcise web writing. Your analysts must learn to interpret social media data to drive action and interpret failures, corrections, and successes. You need to set up workflows for customer service, PR, and marketing so you have a widely trained crew that can shrink reaction time. Your generalists must learn some of all these areas; such knowledge might be transferred from an internal hub or an external agency.

Getting to Know Your Social Platform

Each type of social platform has its own benefits and eccentricities. With any platform, you lose control in 100 ways, design and UI being just two of them. Web marketers accustomed to controlling their own destinies, or at least their own pages, will abhor the loss of advance notice. Many a thorough marketing campaign has been spoiled by the sudden removal, rejiggering, or mere relocation of a social platform feature. At least you’ll never be bored. Cataloging and distributing changes to an enterprise-size business can be a huge endeavor, so most social media companies provide extensive documentation. This is part of the lure of hosted communities that companies build, launch, and maintain on their own websites. They retain structural control of the community site’s design and functionality, despite the risk of failure and the high cost of developing a self-sustaining user base to generate content.

You must use publishing and listening or customer relationship management (CRM) systems to push and pull the appropriate data and content into the platforms. Publishing tools like HootSuite, TweetDeck, or CoTweet allow users to publish on multiple platforms or accounts. You can manage links and simple metrics.

Social media handles managed by groups currently face a more limited set of options. While small companies might enter social media conversations through an evangelist, larger enterprises might have several employees working as the face of a brand. Like social platforms, these tools usually provide most of their own documentation, though you must do internal training so you can uniformly carry out tasks such as creating branded URL shorteners or scheduling posts.

Training for Listening

The cornerstone for cross-departmental insight is extensive listening training. You must determine the appropriate levels of access so you can create a limited barrier to entry throughout the organization. Listening must then be part of everyone’s job, everywhere in the company. When anyone in the company can listen, customer service issues become visible to all participating employees. You can then start to incorporate prepared responses for predictable questions. Only a percentage of answers will be that easy. For other questions, your listeners will need to get clarification and deeper knowledge from an expert. You must establish solid workflows to move an ongoing conversation from company representative A to company expert B in real time. You must share this detailed workflow throughout the wider range of participants.

A recent CMO survey from Duke University and the American Marketing Association found that more than half of social media employees call the marketing department home. While training often starts from within marketing, you must modify and adapt your training to the charter of each internal group and its aligned social strategies. For example, teaching the customer service department how to monitor the performance of a promotional offer will not help them adopt best practices, but teaching them how to set up notifications for specific product issues might be very valuable.

The death of journalism means that the role of the PR team is in flux. Reliable trade publications loved by spin masters are now dissolved. Blogs written by industry groups and customer groups have taken their place. Even those lines are blurring. Because blogs are now the biggest source of leads, you must carefully manage the outreach to these authors.

After you equip larger groups to manage most conversations, with the workflows to direct specialized topics to specialists, you must put into operation ongoing training and references like style guides. One of the most efficient methods is to add social media listening and best practices onboarding to new employee training for a group where social interaction is part of their regular job. Advanced levels or office hours should be an option for more experienced team members. With a percentage of marketing spend dedicated to improving marketing knowledge, social media should be a key innovative part of any curriculum.

Social Engagement

Let’s imagine you’re now in a lovely world where you have enough listening data to know where and how to find your customers. You have a trained horde (or at least a tight-knit crew) of conversationalists ready to react with charm and common sense. Time to hit those radar screens and see where those people are who need your help, right?

You might find hundreds of mentions per day of your company if you work for a known brand, and thousands of mentions of your industry or audience type. Even with the regular scrubbing of your keywords, you may not completely tame the volume of data. That means you have to start looking at other criteria to decide which conversations to approach and which ones to leave alone.

When to Let Comments Go

There are a few clear-cut situations where “leave it alone” is the right call. Lots of ranters are approachable, and you shouldn’t hesitate to reach out to someone who is simply frustrated. Just acknowledging their plight can change the entire tone of the conversation. Venting is reasonable, and when you put a human face on the marketing screen, you can ease some tension. The ranter might be overjoyed if they’re used to working through a channel and they happen to find a helpful human at the source. However, abuse should always be ignored.

Worse than a single angry person is a swarm of angry people with a political bent—regardless of whether their anger is founded or unfounded. Intel faced a coordinated attack from a group who objected to their participation in certain mineral trades. It took several days to respond while PR and social media teams aligned their efforts and eventually waited out the storm.

Brand catastrophes can hit any company at any time. When a crisis hits, your company crisis plan should include social media outreach. All of your blog authors, Twitter publishers, and Facebook page managers should know who to reach when their brand-stamped handles are hit with crisis-related questions. This scenario is a key part of your ongoing training.

As you approach the angry and the bitter, keep in mind that they are not in the mood to be educated. They don’t want to hear why their problem is their own fault. If someone is borderline or even blatantly rude to you, you must take the high road. Going swing for swing is still highly public and damages both your name and the company’s brand. If someone veers toward abuse, then they are really asking to be left alone. Bring their focus back to how you can help solve their problem.

Do these sound like the basic tenets of customer service? They should. Even if you’re discussing a marketing promotion, an event, or a new product feature, your social profile demands skills in customer service. And there’s a big payoff when a visible conversation ends with a very publicly satisfied customer.

Keeping Pace with Velocity

Another context where you need to react quickly and thoughtfully is when a conversation hits a point of velocity. A point of velocity is where a topic suddenly gathers a significant point of interest, like an unusually high number of comments on a blog, Facebook page, or YouTube video. It’s the same principle of motion applied to conversation: if a topic reaches a larger distance (more people involved) over time (quick engagement translating to peaked interest), then this conversation resonates with your audience. You gain an advantage by jumping right in at the beginning, if you can enter the conversation gracefully and meaningfully.

You may want to apply some other business rules to triage the incoming social media posts and comments you see. Many of these are active customers or even top prospects and therefore are the priority for response and active outreach. The people who start or participate in these conversations are sales targets, but the conversation could start in any and all phases of B2B sales cycle. And in any of these phases, cultivating a long-term relationship should be the main goal. Because B2B decisions often involve teams of people to thoroughly analyze the best purchase option, it’s worthwhile to pay attention to teammates across a wide swath of job titles, not just those with decision-maker titles.

Depending on company size, you might seek entire departments or companies to cultivate, to address with priority, or at least to monitor for activity trends. Some industry or audience types may be more suited to a well-placed product or service social campaign. Since several of these attributes—individual title, department, company, business size—are most accurately self-reported in LinkedIn, it’s easy to see how that platform and its global parallels are a B2B favorite.

Trend Watching and Automation

Since we’ve already mentioned Jersey Shore, let’s turn to a Britney Spears example for a moment. One of our software product managers was so frustrated at the prospect of word changes on his pages for SEO that he asked if we would like to add Britney Spears in the page title. Naturally we said yes. While we weren’t serious about adding Britney Spears, some people actually aim for an unrelated celebrity tie-in to get more impressions from high-follower accounts. This might be a little ridiculous. However, joining a conversation about the building of the new San Francisco Bay Bridge might be the right intersection of trending news and business relevance.

The next step in searching for trending, relevant terms is to create a system of automated social response. Some early tools are available, but this functionality is still in its infancy. So while you can autorespond to a mention with Britney Spears, you can assess sentiment only with a moderate degree of accuracy. As Guy Kawasaki points out, you’re still at risk of responding to someone sarcastically commenting on a performance; you miss the mark in trying to sell them tickets.

With all of your monitoring, you may know exactly who, where, and what the prospect is, so it can be tempting to sell the living daylights out of them. For the sake of those of us on the Do Not Call list: please don’t. Appropriate context is the safest approach. Giving a prospect the creepy details of what you’ve discovered about them through monitoring may not be the best way to introduce yourself. You must consider your tone and style as part of each manner of engagement. All resources should be trained on the appropriate style.

You can help each member of your social engagement team remember the appropriate style by plotting out how to communicate to each funnel stage, perhaps even across other personal factors like company size and role. For example, if someone with a technical title asks about the difference between two products, you want to explain the difference between them in an appropriately technical manner, ideally from a technical evangelist. You don’t want to hit them up with awareness-stage, broad statements about company value that you might present to an early prospect. A frustrated customer struggling with installation should never receive a sales-targeted automated response.

The question of style also applies to the potential risks and rewards you face with competitive play. You may be tempted to post on a competitor’s wall or invade their hashtag, but consider such action very carefully or it can devolve into something childish and ridiculous. Social media gives you plenty of fair, rational ways to outperform, along with obvious missteps.

Tone, style, and approach to competitors are just a few of the choices to make as you define the social brand both for each personal brand and for the brand of the overall business.

The Value of Social Brand

All companies develop some sort of character based on their founders, their mission, or the value proposition of their work. Zappos’ attention to nuances of customer relationships, Google’s proclamations about evil, and Apple’s obsession with design are all early style choices that evolved into brand identifiers. As companies reach age, global reach, or enterprise-level employment, for example, brand documentation becomes institutionalized in brand identifiers and messaging documentation.

While these are fine starting points for social brand development, they tend to be a bit too institutionalized for most people to relate to in an informal, day-to-day manner. Traditional brand documents often enshrine brand meaning in color choices and emblems of the company flag. While this is all well and good, it’s really only the outfit that your company is wearing to the cocktail party. In a conversation, your tone and style carry more meaning than your clothes. It’s one thing to wear the Southwest Airlines uniform and another to sing dorky tunes and guffaw jokes through flight instructions.

However you choose to distinguish your brand, you must be flexible enough to carry a voice in social media that shows the following:

• Authenticity
• Transparent associations
• Respect for existing communities
• Adherence to the rules of a third-party site
• Awareness of local and global interpretations
• Mindful appreciation of the very public context
• Respect for both internal policies and competitors

However, you’re not convincing an individual in B2B; you’re convincing a team of individuals. That means you must have an authentic approach where your tone, characteristics, and opinions do not vary widely between a conversation with one person and the next. If you take personal profiling to an extreme and then use it to alienate one person (“Hey, I see you just got in a car accident this morning; if I pick you up at the auto shop, can we talk through your hosting service options?”), you alienate an entire team.

There will likely be unexpected celebrities in your social media squad. They may not be as coiffed as your PR representatives, but their distinct quirkiness and ubergeek helpfulness might shine in the blogosphere and Twitterverse. This brings up the curious dilemma of company brand vs. personal brand. Personal brands can be seen as threatening to the viable social brand of the company. Good evangelists are limited by a faceless brand stamp—it’s that human side of the business that is most appealing in social.

At the time of this writing, decent systems are emerging for alerts and business rules to deliver certain social commentary to a specific role within your company. For example, these systems will send spikes for customer service on a particular product to that product manager or to the right geographic customer service group. One of the most important rules that you can set up is to identify and address comments and conversations with your most important external group: the loyal user base of customers who act as the most impactful proponents of your company.

Fortifying Your Customer Advocates

The principles of the net promoter score (NPS) and the lifetime value of the customer (LVC) are at the core of the social advocacy program. The core concept is that most customers are neutral to your company. Some customers have a negative experience or distaste for your company; these are the net detractors. Other customers are self-qualified as the most likely to recommend your company to someone else. These net promoters are your strongest allies—the ones you want to equip with advance information from the PR team, with special discounts and promotions, or with unique content for their repurposing.

Outfitting your net promoters goes a step beyond the best practice of having customers be your best defenders in a company-bashing incident in a community. When you target your net promoters, you gain a directable group of fanboys and fangirls who can and should be rewarded for their effort on your behalf, even if that is simply in forms of recognition for their advocacy.

Without a formal program, you can use social listening to identify authors who speak about your brand positively. You can filter to find who mentions a product or service most frequently or whose answers get positive reviews in third-party communities. Or you can identify who has the largest audience or who has the most active back-and-forth within a community, which can be very different than volume.

With a formal program, you can vet prospective advocates and set up publishing systems and rewards, similar to an affiliate program. This can tie in performance metrics for online activity of any of these advocates in common public spaces. Some platforms can tie in other activity channels, such as email, for a more integrated approach. While advocacy and cultivating of fans into high-value lifetime customers is the ultimate goal of social media, many other marketing goals are more immediate. Without advanced and coordinated analytics, it can be hard to pull together a view of customer value, much less agree and share it throughout a company.

All that you can hope for in social media is to be helpful to your customers and to your company. You may not be treated like the glorious company hero or the discoverer of rivers of untapped revenue potential. But you’re exploring uncharted territory in marketing, customer service, analytics, and research in a way that keeps both employees and customers more highly engaged.