Ad Agencies and Social Media Marketing

The Value of Limerence: Community Precedes Commerce

What we know from our very short history of living online is that community precedes commerce; there’s no commerce without community. ~Kevin Kelley

LIMERENCE: Communities fostering “limerence” with their members in digital networks have discovered this simple truth: a desire for interconnection and interaction with other sentient beings drives a majority of searches and relationships in social networks. Investing FIRST in relationship and community leads to positive dividends in terms of customer equity AND market share. The time of the CIRCLE has arrived.

Limerence is the ethos of the Greek god Eros, who arrives where beings need freedom. And need it bad! Eros is a very important figure as related to social networks, which are characterized by the feminine principle of “circling” during crisis. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, writes, “Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.” “Psychic relatedness” is a critical factor in the growing of communities within social networks and an important concept to deeply understand for anyone involved in social business.

WHAT IS CIRCLE THINKING? At the core of true circle (social) ethos is the practice of speaking and listening from the heart. When humans are compassionate, heartfelt and empathic, and listen without judgement…when humans engage in non-hierarchical forms of deep communication, a group’s vision and purpose emerges naturally and beautifully.

Circles offer effective means of resolving conflict and for discovering deeper, often unexpressed needs within the hearts of individuals and organizations. Circles foster co-visioning born out of our personal and collaborative stories. Social story-telling is a more accurate method of solving real problems than the political games humans play to survive within strict hierarchies.

Social networks have introduced the global community to collective psychic experiences on an unprecedented scale. The logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough (James Hillman). The entire fabric of human culture, it’s very dimensionality, has undergone a profound shift into an experience of depth and the outcome of such a shift is connection between individuals and communities like never before. It’s a shift toward collaboration and connection.

COLLABORATION: Peter Economides, one of the world’s greatest brand strategists, writes, “Strategy is nothing without a universally compelling, and individually enchanting big idea that engages and aligns people inside and outside the corporation.” We live in times when social strategy teams must lead agencies, brands and entire organizations into new territory of collaboration…territory that binds staff together within through threads of common passion. Such organizations move out into social networks united in a single “heart-ethos” and this is felt in the emotionally-tactile comment-threads and newsfeeds within social networks. As social business teams, we engage in programs that effect the exact same culture change WITHIN the enterprise that we seek in our customer base, in our community, in our customer-facing programs.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THROUGH COMMUNITY CREATION:

Brands hire Social Agencies to train Community Managers, establish social media policies and then go to the races together for a 1-year period. The GOAL for The Brand is independence from The Agency. It’s time to shift the focus away from “How can we do this fast and cheap?” TO “We’re committed long-term to growing the Brand’s community!”

Every major brand in large markets launching a social campaign should seriously consider performing the following steps:

1. INTEL: Social Intelligence to gather initial insights on what customers are saying, where key influencers locate (and what they are saying) and what content is sticky NOW.
2. STRATEGY: Strategy for a Community Manager built upon Recommendations derived from Insights found through Social Intelligence gathering. Scripting of initial content, creation of a campaign or two, and clever content development are ALL actions to be created at this stage.
3. HR: Hiring of the Community Manager. Agreement on policies.
4. GO: Action! On-going training and deepening of the content and community. Target specific user-groups, such as Mommy Bloggers, through organic community growth via your Community Manager. You need to think of the social networks as parties/gatherings that your Community Manager is walking into and conversing within.

COMMUNITY MANAGER TRAITS AND ACTIONS: The BEST Community Managers are a combo of a Journalist (who writes on the fly, does excellent research and is an investigator) AND a Socializer. Your content-marketing strategy is critical here.

a. Sequence a chronology of content-marketing that makes sense and follows a kind of story.

b. Be a story-teller. Involve people in the story of an employee’s climb to manager, for instance. Or a love story between patrons. Or in the value of having a “third-space” at retail outlets for students OR businessmen. This is where you get creative and give your Community Manager some wings to fly. Sticky content is passed on.

c. Your Community Manager should be involved in conversations, watching for trends in Twitter using monitoring tools and producing attractive content. The result will be an engaged following getting to know one another and forming a positive community around The Brand. Quality Content IN a Quality Context!

On a final note, hierarchies are being replaced by circles EVERYWHERE!!! Start within…you’ve got a hierarchy WITHIN yearning for a circle’s embrace right NOW!! Bring the gift of that inner circle to yourself, your loved ones, your social circles, your work!

Falling volumes and budget cuts. What is the role of marketing during a recession?

Question by Dimitris Mavros of PRC GROUP Athens: Falling volumes and budget cuts. What is the role of marketing during a recession?

Nathaniel Hansen, CEO, The Socializers answer: Motivation, Customer Service, Education, Culture-change, Leadership. But most of all, to be Heretics vs. Fundamentalists.

Step 1: Evaluate typical local messaging and methods of communication around recession. Gain Insights through Social Intelligence Projects and on-going social media monitoring.

Step 2: Compose “culture-changing” messaging, campaign strategy and brand orientation. A good heretic and thought-leader will be able to pump out vast material around this within a solid 7-10 days. Focused creative project.

Step 3: Segment your market and “culture-change” packages and start selling. Informed by insights and data analysis.

Step 4: Identify critics ahead of time and chart how their critiques may fuel the fire of your creatives. Give your creatives license to be on-fire Heretics through culture-changing activities. Study the Eleftherians in Greek myth, like the god Eros for basic archetypal material to inform the ethos here.

Step 5: See PR as a vacuum-cleaner. Uphold Assange-types (Wikileaks) as internal cleaners, preparing the enterprise to go social. Have a plan regarding external gossip and internal junk.

Step 6: Crowdsource the entire economic and political landscape. Big and great project! The customer will decide next year’s (a) product line and design (b) distribution channels (c) campaign style.

The Value of Audience Intelligence

Gathering intelligence to inspire meaningful and actionable social programs is priceless. ~Brian Solis

To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation. ~ Chinese Proverb

The best salespeople are great listeners – that’s how you find out what the buyer wants. ~ Spencer Johnson and Larry Wilson

TARGETED RESEARCH + CREATIVE STRATEGIES = SUCCESSFUL ONLINE MARKETING AND SELLING!

Web monitoring tools offer business developers and marketers CRITICAL INTELLIGENCE on where the major audience(s) for a product/service reside in cyberspace and in the physical world. Audiencecounts.com is a website where a 3-tiered competitive intelligence solution is offered. The solution provides online intelligence in regards to where a client’s major audience (major conversations, major communities and key influencers) currently resides in social media/web properties in an accessible format for the non-technical user.

Whereas there currently exist numerous web monitoring solutions available that offer access to this information, there are few services that offer a SIMPLIFIED version of the intelligence ALONG WITH TARGETED STRATEGIES on how to use the intelligence. We offer a simple final format that has TWO sections:

YOUR AUDIENCE: Where your Audience is (based on keywords submitted by the client). This is presented in a Top 25 format in each category:

In blogs
In social media properties
Web Communities
Key influencers
Largest dicusssions
Largest communities

YOUR STRATEGIES: Strategies for the social web that offer basic preliminary strategy/tactics on: (a) establishing a presence, (b) entering the conversation, (c) becoming a leader in the conversation and (d) monetizing tips. Advanced strategies for specific needs related to your organization.

How does this work?

1. Using keywords and keyphrases, we use a combination of sophisticated social monitoring tools to discover the key influencers, major online communities and highest populated conversations about your product/service/brand.

2. We compile a report of these top audiences for your product/service/brand AND give you strategies for accessing and monetizing these relationships and conversations. Remember, a conversation IS a community AND a selling opportunity. Read more here on the Top 10 Reasons to Listen from Radian6, one of the world’s premier social intelligence solutions.

3. We deliver this report to you for your use.

What do I do with the report and strategies?

The key influencers, major discussions and largest groups/networks identified around your brand/product/service indicate fabulous starting points for getting the word out/participating in the conversation about your offering. The strategies tell you how to do it.

Transmedia, OnDemand and the power of listening to audiences

By Nathaniel Hansen, CEO, The Socializers

If more Marketing Managers at Fortune 500 companies/major media companies truly understood the potential of future media delivery channels like GoogleTV PAIRED WITH “content-informing-intelligence”, there would be a mass re-organization of dinosaur-age ad/marketing agencies whose teams have yet to even train in social monitoring/intelligence tools AND have none of the talent-identification capabilities that a CAA or William Morris has. Those same Marketing Managers would then turn to social business agencies for the following process:

(a) pre-product dev intelligence gathering/listening,
(b) demographic-savvy content/product design RELATED TO what is discovered/analyzed from conversations in the social fabric of the internet,
(c) Relationship Architecting with related Social Strategy to identify ideal Key Influencers (and their content), thus paving the way for seamless and swift introduction of said content into the fabric of communities hungry for it,
(d) on-going listening that creates a virtuous cycle of this process.

The future leaders of transmedia will use the process above as just one of their approaches in expanding possibility for those who interact with media, advertisers, media/content producers AND communications entities. Transmedia and the associated processes that will bring this fabulous new way of interactive relationship to programming IS the future of CONTENT IDENTIFICATION AND PRODUCTION.

Colin Donald of FUTURESCAPE.TV says it best in the following comment on an article entitled Struggling for control: The humble channel-zapper is evolving in ways that will shape television’s futurein a recent edition of The Economist magazine:

“Internet-connected TVs lead to massively increased choice and require next-generation EPGs to help viewers navigate the wealth of content.

One solution backed by many in the industry, like Rovi, is to develop social EPGs that let friends recommend TV shows and videos to each other, via social networks or via systems which use data from social networks.
However, the implications are even more radical than your article suggests.

When Futurescape.TV recently researched this nascent social TV sector, we concluded that Facebook and Twitter are already battling for key roles in the TV industry as Internet-connected televisions transform TV into a social medium.

The two social networks have an actual or potential commercial role across the entire TV value chain.

For instance:
Global pay-TV, estimated at $250bn in 2014, needs social recommendation and discovery services because these encourage viewers to subscribe to more expensive packages and buy more video-on-demand – Facebook and Twitter are both major providers of social data.

Facebook in particular has a highly developed social graph of people’s relationship with entertainment content, from the ubiquitous Like button, integrated into many broadcasters’ Web sites. Both it and Twitter own considerable, detailed data about people’s behaviour, such as discussing TV shows and sharing links to videos.

As your article described, set-top box middleware and EPG providers similarly need social network data for recommendation and discovery – the European EPG market alone will be worth $555m by 2014.

TV manufacturers’ strategy to provide video-on-demand direct to viewers also requires social recommendation, while their connected TV apps enable viewers to interact with Facebook and Twitter on home TV sets. Facebook aims to tap the $180bn worldwide TV ad market, competing with broadcasters for brand advertising – Google TV and similar Web-on-TV systems will put Facebook and Twitter targeted ads on TV screens.

Facebook and Twitter buzz affects TV ratings, while broadcasters that use the social networks for viewer engagement are effectively sharing their audiences with them.

The social networks know in real time how people react to TV programming – this is an essential supplement to Nielsen-type viewing data.

Integrating social networks with EPGs is only one manifestation of a profound and permanent change in the television industry, a change through which Facebook and Twitter are positioning themselves as major industry players.”

The teams working on Oprah’s new cable channel and on eBook sales strategy at Bertelsmann’s Random House are contending with issues related to the new possibilities in transmedia and how to make content delivery platforms lucrative for their shareholders WHILE giving users the most flexibility in interacting with their portfolios of content. Those media publishers who acknowledge the value in being customer-centric vs. product-centric in their offering AND develop platforms that allow maximum interactivity WILL win!

To quote Ali Valdez, a senior Microsoft sales leader, “Their customers will be their marketers. Their customers’ social network friends will be their new customers. Full transparency, good and bad, will drive innovation and competitive pricing. The consumer will win. Those brands that enable consumer victory will share in the bounty.”

TO SUM UP: Combining research from tools like Recorded Future, the world’s first temporal analytics engine (a video intro to Recorded Future here), and Radian6, a leading social media/network monitoring solution, media companies now have the opportunity to LISTEN to audiences that have OPTED OUT of traditional marketing channels and are OPTING INTO new, socially chosen/recommended channels. They then are able to match valuable information from conversations within the social fabric of the internet WITH market trends and probable future events to create product/service/content offerings with previously un-paralleled precision. Existing portfolios of content may be re-purposed into countless monetizable and USER-GENERATED interactive communities.

Understanding the future requires observation and listening and it is a Chief Customer Officer who will teach this to marketing staff, brand managers and community managers.