social network analysis

Relationship and Experience Marketing Plan

SUMMARY: The central themes of this document are relationship and experience. It is the express opinion of the author that SEO and advertising are broken models in need of transformation. The way to create awareness in today’s world is through relationships and experiences. Enterprises should consider focusing solely on creating the right relationships and creating experiences in the context of these relationships.

HOW TO DO THIS: The sequence of steps related to this method of going to market are as follows. Note that this is a summary document related to a master document filled with actual personas, suggested content and suggested experiences.

1. Identify the ideal willing prospect as related to your brand. This means that you write out on paper who this person is. Ideally, these people are micro-influencers, with regional popularity and super-engaged networks. Action: write out and refine over time this profile. As your community grows, you will notice the various strata of your desired types, from beginner to elite. Be inclusive to this spectrum and become THE experts in how one traverses from beginner to expert.

2. Use social network analysis tools, such as Brandwatch, PeoplePattern, Musefind and Audiense to aggregate large groups of these prospects. Understand more about these prospects using psychological technologies similar to CrystalKnows and Watson (IBM). Such solutions will give you lists of people (along with detailed bio info) exactly similar to your ideal willing prospect. You will also discover the content these people are posting, the events they are attending and the experiences they are having. Absorb this on a daily basis. The value of this intelligence is that you will have inspiration for content, for events to attend, and for experiences to participate in (and feature). Your community is found using these tools.

3. Employ humans (flesh and blood) to reach out to these prospects and meet with them in person. Invest your dollars in outgoing, intelligent flesh, who love connecting online and offline. Ideally, these humans you pay are also your ideal types themselves. Again, invest your dollars in charismatic, intelligent humans vs. outdated SEO and advertising approaches. The former is a love affair and gains you access to real dynamic community. The latter is a shotgun shot into the dark and is temporary, requiring increased investment for less reliable results.

4. Plan on a 12 month program (at minimum) of getting to know the community you found using the network analysis tools.

5. Plan on investing in content that follows the Content Grid approach from Jess3 and Eloqua. https://thesocializers.com/the-content-grid/

6. Create content pieces for every stage along the consumer journey described in the Content Grid. Invest in research where you discover the best contexts for placing and socializing this content. Increasingly involve your community in creating this content with you, through their stories, quotes and experiences. https://thesocializers.com/the-content-grid/

7. Plan on running campaigns that award specific, meaningful items from strategic partners, such as plane tickets for two to anywhere, to members of your community. Show your growing community that you understand them through what you award them. Be a giving brand. Plan on becoming known as THE place to make one’s adventure happen.Through your brand, consumers realized their adventure.

A Network Analysis Process

A Network Analysis Process:

1. Subscribe to a social media monitoring service with a very hefty set of data (i.e.- Brandwatch)

2. Create an accurate query within this monitoring solution related to your marketplace. Date this query back 24 months. The goal with this step is to discover the largest networks (pages, groups, authors) related to a marketplace.

3. Go to the Export function within the monitoring solution and export the entire data set related to your 24 month query. Every row.

4. Isolate ONLY the Twitter results in an Excel document. In addition, isolate ONLY the Facebook results (in Excel).

5. Subscribe to Full Contact API ( https://www.fullcontact.com/developer/ ) at the highest level you can afford.

6. Download the Full Contact Person Enrichment Template (FCPET) from Full Contact API.

7. Set the Seed at 3 or above (in the FCPET document). Set the source to either Twitter Handle or Facebook ID.

8. Ensure you have a rock solid Internet connection.

9. Paste all Twitter handles from the data export into the first column of the FCPET document. Run the append.

10. Paste all FB handles from the data export into the first column of a second fresh FCPET document. Run the append.

11. Keep the results in the FCPET in exact order from the Brandwatch data export. This is so you can paste in a few columns from the Brandwatch export, such as sample mentions, account type (Individual or Organization), gender, etc.

12. Hire an analyst to meticulously go over the resulting spreadsheets and clean out the junk and spam authors. Use other tools, such as Melissa Data ( http://www.melissadata.com/ ) and Intelius ( https://www.intelius.com/ ) to append more data in additional columns.

13. Organize by Impact score (Brandwatch) or by Region or by any other criteria important to you (use the Data sort function in Excel to do this).

You can use the final sheet to plan content-marketing, derive insights on markets, and understand competitor activity. You can also determine the “real people” talking about your brand using this approach.

THE LINKEDIN LEAD-BUILDER MACHINE v1.0

The machine searches an Interest within LinkedIn. The machine discovers the largest locked group within this Interest group and gains access. The machine segments the members of this group by nation. The machine then creates a spreadsheet with Name, Bio, Email, Phone, Location, Company URL, Social Link 1, Social Link 2. The machine fills the name from individual LinkedIn profiles using the semi-automated functionality of LeadGrabber Pro. The machine fills the Bio from the brief description underneath the name in LinkedIn. The machine identifies the Company URL from the current place of employment of the individual. The machine uses eMail Verifier to match the Company URL with the name on the LinkedIn profile in various iterations until eMail Verifier states “Address is Valid”. The machine pulls the company phone number from the Contact page at the Company URL. The machine pulls the individual’s public LinkedIn profile. The machine searches within the Contact Info in LinkedIn for other URLs and social links associated with the individual. The machine then places a social link or URL in the Social Link 2 column.

Insights into problems and opportunities in your competitive marketplace: a process

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Your entity owns an existing community of customers and stakeholders. OR, your entity wants to build such a community. In addition, a core aspect of your business model appears to be up-selling these stakeholders to a variety of solutions your organization also owns. The challenge before you is to refine this model where it currently functions and then expand the model across the world. The following document outlines the exact process to be performed by The Socializers for you in achieving this goal.

RESULTS:
The most immediate action we can take for your organization: Audit and Analysis phases. The result of these phases will be:

1. Insights into problems and opportunities in your competitive marketplace AND in your current customer base.
2. Activation of further community building efforts, up-sell strategies and “how to make this thing run more efficiently” would emerge from these insights.

EXAMPLES:

As an example, let us say that your goal is to up-sell 100% of the stakeholders in your communities into one of your alternative offerings. Our work would show you where this is not happening, why it is not happening and how to make it happen. In addition, we can work with you to realize this 100%.

As a second example, let us say your goal is to discover alternative opportunities for up-selling your current stakeholders and want an audit of their public conversations as part of a planning process. We would deliver to you a system for staying on top of “the conversation” in your communities. The insights from these conversations would point towards add’l up-sell opportunities.

A PROCESS FOR COMPETITIVE RESEARCH, CUSTOMER RESEARCH AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT:
An ideal sequence for discovering a community of influencers around a specific market niche and developing a related editorial calendar & media plan is as follows:

1. Gather the latest industry trade publications for your niche(s) and read these cover to cover. Discover these trade publications by interviewing a leader in the industry and through research.

2. Note down vendors, service providers, advertisers, authors, journalists, and products currently targeting your niche(s).

3. Look within these publications for a Top 100 list of companies, individuals and products/services (specifically targeting your niche(s), again).

4. Create a spreadsheet of these trade publications and Top 100 lists.

5. Discover the Twitter accounts of these Top 100 and other thought-leaders discovered in the trade publications. An easy way to do this is to type the name of the influencer + Twitter into Google. Or search in the Twitter search field. You can also go the websites of these entities and see if there is a Twitter link at the website.

6. Use a solution that delivers a spreadsheet of all followers of a specific Twitter user, such as Simply Measured or Social Bro. We will download the followers of every influencer we have identified in this initial research phase.

7. Use the Sort function in Excel to sort the list of followers by Klout or Kred.

8. Create a 2nd copy and sort by Listed.

9. Use the Filter function in Excel to further narrow these sheets by specific industry-related keywords within the Description (Bio) column.

10. Use the Filter function in Excel to narrow by Location.

11. Combine the filtered results from whatever setting is important to your research question from each sheet into one “Master” Excel workbook.

12. Rank the entities in this workbook by Klout/Kred AND by Listed to indicate global awareness and influence scoring.

13. Ideally, we will narrow this massive Master list to 1000 core influencers. Now, we will download the Simply Measured Klout Audience Analysis for every single one of these influencers (thought-leaders). Go through the exact same Sorting and Filtering process and combine into a second Master list (this will be much larger). Now we will have two concentric rings of influence we are able to connect to through content-marketing, direct-marketing or other selling strategies.

14. Take this work further by creating a data-set called “The Core List” in which we reveal core information for each of the 1000 core influencers: their bio from LinkedIn, all of their social links (find these through their Klout profile and further research, their top 100 influential followers within that specific market niche and their contact info (phone, email, address).

15. Now we are ready to study this core list and know who is leading the conversation in our market niche. Take the time we need to listen to each influencer and jot down observations on what they are saying and working on. Use a leading social monitoring tool, such as Brandwatch, Radian6 or Sysomos to augment your listening. Also, use SpotRight and Reunify technology to glean deep insight AND flesh out the very large prospect lists we develop.

16. Create a list of 10-20 questions for the top 1000 influencers in “The Core List” and send this to them via email. This is our focus group/survey for the market niche and will give you invaluable insight. (Ideally, we are looking for the key products, hooks and trends in what is guiding the stakeholders’ buying habits. We want to hook every single one of these stakeholders who HAVE NOT bought from us yet).

17. Create a two-page executive summary for leadership on our observations. Add, as an appendix, all of the data organized by location, relevant social links discovered via listening, and metrics/statistics for the industry. This report, if concisely written and properly documented using best-practice research techniques, will be THE most comprehensive ever done on social influencers guiding the buying choices of your niche(s). NOTE: numerous studies show that 70% of the buyer’s decision process is done through online and peer-to-peer research currently. We are studying what these stakeholders are looking at and where they are congregating…who is influencing them.

18. Upon discussing this report with leadership, create an Editorial Calendar with channel-specific ideas related to the industry. This Editorial Calendar ought to include specific marketing actions, online & offline channels for marketing and industry-specific publications in which to publish material.

19. In addition, create a Media Plan for targeting regions, online channels and audience sizes. This plan will inform our media spend.

20. Create ALL of the recommended content pieces (these content pieces are delivered into the social streams of our influencers and by direct contact on a daily and even hourly basis, so as to saturate our market with smart, insightful content “hooks”. We want to rule the content space. NOTE: many of these pieces will come through our brand ambassadors and influential allies).

21. Metrics on performance will be secured through online metric measurement tools.

22. Our success in the process above will inform how we utilize more sophisticated social graph technologies that we have access to. These technologies hover over complete national databases rich with data on our customer. We want to only use these tools AFTER performing the steps above so that our costs are kept down and so that efficiency is forefront.

Share Your Experiences and Story with the World

“Social-networking sites, blogs, online discussion forums and online journals represent modern arenas for individuals to write themselves into being.” ~Theresa Sauter

YOUR JOURNEY IS A GIFT: Your unique journey through the world of human soul work has tremendous value. You’ve seen life in a way no-one else has. And, at the same time, you’ve had an experience that many others will identify with. Share this!

Your first step is to train a video camera upon yourself today and begin filming 60 second segments of your experience. Here are the best camcorders for this year: http://bit.ly/Camcorders_2013

Write down 20-30 questions that your life experience answers or speaks to. Design 20-30 short pieces about these questions. Write a few paragraphs on each. Here’s a great book of questions to jump start this process: http://bit.ly/big_book_of_questions

Then film these over the course of the day. Consider visiting a location and dressing in a way that communicates the flavor of this specific piece. Two cool sites about film locations: http://search.reel-scout.com/ AND http://www.movie-locations.com/

Look straight into the camera and speak to your audience. Imagine your best friend or your child. Speak to your audience with this level of care and love.

Review and edit the pieces.

Over the course of the following week, expand the initial paragraphs into a blog piece for each one.

Tweet lines from each blog piece with trackable bit.ly links back to your blog and the video pieces on Vimeo or YouTube.

Discover an audience for these pieces through the use of social monitoring tools and audience discovery tools.

a. http://datasift.com/
b. http://www.netvibes.com/en
c. http://www.ubervu.com/
d. http://www.brandwatch.com/
e. http://www.mutualmind.com/
f. http://attentio.com/
g. http://www.sysomos.com/
h. http://www.visibletechnologies.com/
i. http://engagor.com/
j. http://www.ethority.net/
k. http://simplymeasured.com/
l. http://www.semrush.com/
m. http://www.egrabber.com/leadgrabberpro/
n. https://www.recordedfuture.com/

Get these video pieces in front of audiences who are already talking about this topic.

As they respond, engage with each person individual and speak with them. Connect in social networks and meet up with these people in person, if possible.

Some will want to work with you in a variety of ways. Do it. Work with them.

Expand your circle of influence, share what you have to share. The world needs you in 2013.