Social + Marketing

Putting Marketing (and Campaigns) at the Center of Your Social Business Strategy

I hope everyone had a restful Holiday Season, and as I emerge from the launch of Offerpop for Facebook (see some of our press coverage here) I wanted to share a few thoughts and a snazzy new graphic on where I see social marketing headed in 2011.  In a way, after a couple years of hype and experimentation, I see 2011 as the year when the rubber hits the road so to speak.  Where social channels not only become mainstream and part of the everyday marketing toolbox - but also where campaigns on Twitter or Facebook need to have clear ROI, and consumers become more savvy about 'playing along.'  I look forward to your thoughts and feedback!

If there are any remaining doubts about social media marketing moving into the mainstream, consider:

• 56% of the F500 are now on Facebook, and 60% have a corporate Twitter account according to the UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research
• Facebook accounts for nearly 1 in 4 of online display ads in the US according to comScore
• Twitter added 100 million accounts, and Facebook added 250 million new users in 2010 (these and other cool stats here)
• Facebook simplified/loosened its rules for running promotions - you no longer need prior written approval or a minimum ad spend
  

Yet, while some brilliant social campaigns like Old Spice Man (see more of the best campaigns of 2010, and vote for your fave here) delivered the goods, how many more looked good on paper yet fell flat because of poor execution?  And while vendors like Jive and Spiceworks (client) and even TripAdvisor show the incredible potential of business and specialty-consumer communities, many others are starved for traffic and even more have only started to tap the volumes of discussions - and potential contributors - on public social nets.

What is missing?  Jeremiah Owyang has called 2011 the Year of Integration - and I agree that is part of it.  He also talks about investing in scalable programs, which, along with tapping shared experiences and working 'with the grain of social channels,' has become one of the themes we've been promoting at Offerpop (see here and here).

Social media marketing is growing up.  And it's about time.  But beyond better integration and coordination, marketers and strategists need to focus on creating real business value in 2011.  We already have a lot of the pieces in place, and some terrific resources to help guide the way, from oneforty.com in the Twitter sphere (Offerpop partner, who is re-orienting around social business), to the Community Roundtable - where I speak next week, to consultancies like Dachis Group and boutiques like Convertiv (Offerpop partner) who are reinventing the digital agency model and bridging the gap between the worlds of technology and media.

There are a lot of moving parts in play, yet as a marketer and observer of a lot of social media adventures over the past several years, I see a lot of value in going back to basics and starting with marketing (and campaigns) when considering how to best enable scalable, sustainable social business.  And then looking at how to drive efficiency via repeatable campaigns and methods (and tools) so they become the foundation for programs, which can be broadened into overall social business initiatives.  Yes, I'm arguing that marketing is the beachhead for social business.  Or at least that it should be.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, here's what this looks like:

 

If you're not buying it so far, my reasoning goes like this: isn't the real purpose of social marketing to have conversations, and listen and (hopefully) encourage your audience to engage and share your story?  That's why a focus on shared experiences and finding your audience's passion is so important.  And why launching campaigns that motivate your community to spread the word, and foster natural, self-sustaining Viral Loops needs to be front and center.

Furthermore, success - or failure - with social media starts not only with each interaction (just like CRM!), but with each and every campaign you run.  A social business strategy is only as good as your execution.  And while a lot of this execution is happening via individual interactions on social channels and communities, a lot more of it is and will happen in the campaigns brands, retailers and other companies are running on Facebook and Twitter and other public social networks. 

 

As illustrated above, how you target, create, promote and monitor each campaign is essential.  Along with how you integrate these campaigns into programs and the other parts of your overall marketing mix like email, mobile, advertising etc. At the same time, at scale, your social business efforts will (and must) have a growing number of touch points with e-commerce, social CRM and community efforts as well.

What do you think?  Are you ensuring that your campaigns are hitting the mark and making marketing the center of your social business strategy?

 

B2B marketing – BI and analytics vendors (surprisingly) active on social channels

update (Oct 13): I just evaluated a few addtional vendors.  For now see those scores in the comments below and I hope to do an updated graphic shortly.  Additional suggestions and feedback welcome!

 

As a follow-up to my previous post on how socially active the leading CRM and SBS vendors are (are they walking the walk?), I recently did a similar analysis of the business intelligence (BI), analytics and search vendors.  Unlike many CRM, community and social software providers whose business actually is selling the value of social channels and interaction, the connection between BI and social is less established.  Yet, as the results show, as a group BI and analytics vendors are surprisingly active on social channels - even more so than many of the CRM vendors I examined.

 

Why should vendors care?  It's where the buyers are!  In fact, 91% of B2B technology buyer decision makers now use social media to gather information according to Forrester.  And in high-tech software sales, where the channels for delivering and supporting products are increasingly the same as those used for marketing and selling them, the growing importance of social channels should not be ignored.

The methodology I used was the same as before to measure each vendor's ‘social activity.’  I evaluated the primary corporate Twitter accounts and blogs listed on the main homepage for each company.   To evaluate social content, I looked at 3 months of blog posts (May-July) and total number of tweets from the corporate Twitter account.  The score for this part was = number of posts + 0.05 x the number tweets (rule of thumb: 20 tweets = content value of 1 post).

 

To evaluate social discussions, I looked at blog comments during the same period (again, I counted trackbacks/pingbacks, but also did my best to take out clear spam comments) and level of ‘engagement’ on Twitter.  The score for this part was = number of comments + Tweetlevel engage score as of mid-Sept.  I combined and scaled these scores (in a couple cases capping sub-scores that were ‘off the charts’) so the top ranked vendor = 100.  As before, I didn’t judge the quality of posts or tweets or comments, and view these 4 components as a decent proxy for the amount of content and level of discussions (activity) the vendors are generating overall on their social channels.

 

Finally, I again excluded vendors with no blog or one I could easily find.  This excluded Autonomy and Information Builders from the analysis.   And for disclosure, Evoke CRM/I have had relationships with a couple of the vendors included in this analysis – Actuate and Business Objects, and my prior company eVergance had a partner relationship with Endeca.  However, no vendor sponsored this work or was aware I was conducting this research prior to the collection of data used in the analysis.

 

The results

 

Overall the 15 BI and analytics vendors in this round have generated an average of 763 tweets from their corporate account and nearly 20 blog posts (CRM/SBS vendors averaged 13.5 posts) during May/June/July.  BI and analytics vendors also averaged a LOT more comments - 18 vs. 5 by the CRM/SBS vendors.  Using the same tiers from before – ‘Mavens’ (7 companies) ‘Climbers’ (7 companies) and ‘Late Arrivals’ (only 1 company) here's how the vendors stack up (in alphabetical order in each group): 

 

Early Movers & Mavens (>60 pts):

Business Objects, Cognos, Kalido, QlikView, SAS, Tableau, Teradata

 

Social Climbers (>30 pts):

Actuate, Endeca, GoodData, JasperSoft, MicroStrategy, Netezza, Vivisimo

 

Late Arrivals (<30 pts): Arcplan

 

And here’s how all the scaled scores stack up:

 

 

 

As mentioned, its interesting to note that the BI and analytics vendors seem more engaged on social channels vs. the CRM/SBS vendors - but if you dig into the data a bit more it's really the CRM and KM subcategory that has most of the 'late arrivals' in the last analysis.  A few other highlights: 

 

• SAS, Teradata and QlikView had the most blog posts from May-July, while SAS, Tableau and Kalido had the most comments.
  
• Tableau also had the highest Tweetlevel engagement score (an impressive 62), while 5 other vendors had engagement scores over 40: Actuate, Business Objects, Jaspersoft, MicroStrategy and QlikView.

 

 

The bottom line

As a group, BI and analytics vendors are doing a good job not only pushing out content on their corporate blogs and Twitter accounts, but also listening and engaging in real discussions.  In fact, compared to what many of the CRM, KM and even SBS vendors are doing, this group is surprisingly active on their social channels.

My last analysis generated some great feedback and requests to evalute additonal vendors, so if you are in the BI/analytics/search space but not in this initial cut, and want me to take a look at your company, I'm happy to do so.  Or if you are one of the companies I evaluated and feel like I missed something - there's a good chance I did, but it's unlikely it would have changed the rankings a whole lot!  In either case feel free to add a comment below or contact me here.  I also encourage you to follow me on Twitter (@abonde) for updates to this analysis as well as frequent commentary on social marketing trends, news and events.

670 tweets

B2B social marketing – how active are the leading CRM and SBS vendors?

I’ve focused a lot of my attention over the past year on the emergence of B2C social media marketing, how various social channels compare, and what capabilities are needed to evolve from simple outreach to engagement and ultimately conversion (selling more stuff) via social campaigns – see my recent guest piece in Social Times and prior blog posts.

Consumers and business-to-consumer marketing have certainly been at the leading edge of social media (and social marketing and business software) adoption, but what about business-to-business (B2B) marketing?  As an analyst, consultant and former CMO in this space I’d say that there are 3 key differences in how social applies in B2B vs. B2C (yes, there are many others as well):

• B2B sales cycles tend to be much longer, and require a continuous marketing approach and extension of corporate assets to social channels – promoting case studies on Twitter, advertising and integrating events with Facebook or LinkedIn groups etc.
• B2B purchases are typically complex decisions involving multiple parties at the buying and selling side – social tools for collaboration, and the use of blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. for reaching/engaging with influencers is key.
• B2C has many more impulse (non-considered) purchases: books, gifts, food etc. that lend themselves to coupons, social/group buying, event-marketing etc.  It’s an open question how this model applies to B2B beyond office supplies or events, training and other ‘small-ticket’ items.

Interestingly, according to a March 2010 White Horse (http://www.whitehorse.com) study, slightly more B2B firms (86%) are using social media compared to B2C (82%), but while over half of B2C firms are engaging daily, only 32% of B2B firms are.  Perhaps this makes sense given the timeframe of B2B sales vs. B2C marketing as noted above.  There are many other excellent stats on B2B social media here.

Looking at the dynamics outline above, the evolution of B2B in social has been mostly about establishing trust, content strategy, thought leadership and ongoing discussions as Ogilvy points out. And while not all social channels apply to most B2B marketing, it should be clear that a businesses’ social media presence and use of tools like blogging and Twitter can have a material impact on the buying process.

In fact, 91% of B2B technology buyer decision makers now use social media to gather information according to Forrester.  And in high-tech software sales, where the channels for delivering and supporting products are increasingly the same as those uses for marketing and selling them, the growing importance of social channels should not be ignored.

How social are the leading CRM and SBS vendors?

As a follow on to my first look at how some of the top CRM vendors were engaging on Twitter back in March, I recently took another look, this time expanding the list of vendors to include some SBS/Social CRM platform providers and tweaking my methodology as well.  Given my general belief that the foundations for B2B social media and community marketing are 1) frequent publication of useful, trusted content and 2) participation in relevant discussions, I again focused on how each of the vendors are using Twitter and blogging as a measure of their ‘social activity.’

As for methodology, I evaluated the primary corporate Twitter accounts and blogs listed on the main homepage for each company.  14 of the 21 vendors I looked at feature a link to their Twitter feed on their home page, 5 link from their press or product page, and 2 didn’t have a visible link.

 

To evaluate social content, I looked at the last 3 months of blog posts (May-July) and total number of tweets from the corporate Twitter account.  The score for this part was = number of posts + 0.05 x the number tweets (rule of thumb: 20 tweets = content value of 1 post).

 

To evaluate social discussions, I looked at the last 3 months of blog comments (May-July; yes, I count trackbacks/pingbacks, as they show cross-channel links) and level of ‘engagement’ on Twitter.  The score for this part was = number of comments + Tweetlevel engage score as of Aug 15.

 

I combined and scaled these scores (in a couple cases capping sub-scores that were ‘off the charts’) so the top ranked vendor = 100.  I didn’t try to judge quality of posts or tweets or comments, and favored these 4 components since they are quantitative/measurable AND also a decent proxy for the amount of content and level of discussions (activity) the vendors are having via Twitter and their corporate blog.  And before I show the scores, I don’t think the actual numbers are as interesting as the relative rankings/groupings.

 

Finally, if there was no blog (I could find) like on the eGain or CDC sites, I didn’t include the vendor in the analysis.  And for disclosure, Evoke CRM/I have current or prior relationships with 5 of the vendors included in this analysis – Jive, KANA, nGenera CIM, OutStart, and RightNow - although none of them sponsored or was aware I was conducting this research prior to this post.

The results

Overall the vendors in the study have generated an average of 670 tweets from their corporate account, 13.5 blog posts during the past 3 months (interestingly my rule of thumb of 1 post a week is almost exactly what this group does), and 5 comments.  We can tier the scaled total social activity scores I computed into three groupings – ‘Mavens,’ ‘Climbers’ and ‘Late Arrivals.’   Note the vendors are in alphabetical order in each group:

 

Early Movers & Mavens (>60 pts):

CRM vendors: Amdocs, OracleCRM, Parature, Sage, SugarCRM

SBS vendors: Awareness, Jive, Lithium

Social Climbers (>30 pts):

CRM vendors: Convergys, nGeneraCIM, NetSuite, Pega, RightNow

SBS vendors: KickApps, mZinga, OutStart

Late Arrivals (<30 pts): CRM vendors: Aplicor, Astute Solutions, Consona, Ciboodle, KANA

 

And here’s how all the scaled scores stack up:

 

 

 

Some other highlights and observations: 

 

• The top ranked vendor, Parature, has some great use of multimedia on its blog, some active discussions in the comments, and lots of Twitter promotion to drive traffic.  Also, a cool vibe on their site – but I did NOT give them extra credit for this ;-).
• OracleCRM had the most blog posts, while the CRMOutsiders blog (SugarCRM) had the most blog comments – and likely the most guest bloggers as well.
• Jive and Lithium, the leading vendors in the recent Gartner Social CRM Magic Quadrant (see great commentary on this analysis by x-Gartner analyst and friend of Evoke CRM Esteban Kolsky here) both have active communities and fall in the ‘Maven’ camp – showing they are walking the walk.
• Awareness has the highest Tweetlevel engage score, and Aplicor the lowest.
• Astute Solutions has some great blog content and 23 posts…but not a single comment.

 

The bottom line

If you are a B2B marketer, how would your company stack up using this scorecard?  And if you are with one of the vendors I looked at I’d love to hear what you think (or hear what I missed).  I didn’t reach out to vendors prior to this post so my analysis could have a bit of a ‘mystery shopper’ approach.  Because of this I’ll admit I may have missed some stuff – but I don’t think it would have changed the results significantly in any case.

 

Also, I know I am rewarding vendors who got started earlier with social media, and perhaps punishing those that are late to the party.  But in a way these late adopters are in a great position to learn from first movers, apply emerging best practices for social engagement and even use some of the new tools for marketing on Facebook and Twitter.

 

I am happy to share my thoughts on how companies might use a similar approach to benchmark their efforts to date, along with our Social Marketing Maturity Model to plot a path forward.  I am applying the same techniques and perspectives in my CMO role at Offerpop currently.  Which for those who are interested, scores a 33 – ‘Social Climber’ – 8 weeks after our launch.

 

I look forward to your comments and feedback and encourage you to follow me on Twitter (@abonde) for updates to this analysis and commentary on other social marketing trends.

Three Social KM Use Cases

Last time I looked at the role of Collective Intelligence in Social CRM, and the relationship of these models to managing the growing volumes of user-generated content - and delivering more relevant and timely information at the point of service interaction, or purchasing decision or search.  In a way that perspective is a top-down approach, is influenced by the Wisdom of Crowds idea and powered by some of the excellent work and solutions from vendors like Baynote.

As mentioned in that post, I've also been looking at various Social KM use cases and how support organizations can take an alternative 'bottom-up' approach to socialize their online support and evolve their KM programs.  The goal here is looking at the various flavors of blending social models with online knowledge delivery.  This work like the previous exercise was helped along by one of my clients, in this case nGenera.  In fact, if you like the ideas here, there is a much more complete discussion of the trends, requirements, use cases, and a nifty self-assessment in a White Paper we just completed.  You can download a copy here (requires short registration).

Starting with an assumption that basic company support or product forums are currently in place, along with a customer-facing knowledge base, I've mapped out three (initial) social KM use cases.  The first involves adding simple collaboration (via chat), and targets online help, assistance and even proactive offers based on what a visitor is doing on the site.

The second uses social channels to promote and socialize the KB (and forum) content, 'push' out solutions and updates on Twitter, and recruit users in public forums to visit the corporate support portal or community (maybe this is actually two separate use cases, but for simplicity let's say it's one).

Finally, the third aims to overlay rules and structure to steer and harvest (largely unstructured) community interactions, add some structure, and provide guidance and federated search so all content is available and more useful to customers and agents.

The following illustration summarizes each of these use cases along with some of the key activities and outcomes.  What do you think?  What would you add?

Collective Intelligence and Social CRM – why they need each other

The topic of Social CRM – what it is, how it differs from Web 2.0, how to get stated etc – remains a hot topic (see here and here and here).  Yet, from my viewpoint, there has been a lot less discussion about one of the core mechanisms that puts the “Social” in Social CRM: Collective Intelligence (CI).

As defined by McKinsey in their excellent 2007 survey on Internet Technology,

“Collective Intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions.”

This certainly has its roots in Crowd Sourcing and the Wisdom of Crowds idea.  But I’d also argue that Collective Intelligence goes back further to Knowledge Management and early forms of AI – with a social twist of course.  In fact if you look at the rest of McKinsey’s definition, the firm adds that “Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and a common database for sharing knowledge.”  Sounds like KM to me!

So what does this mean for Social CRM?  First, at the most general level Social CRM proposes a new model for engaging, interacting with, and delivering service to customers.  In a way, the vision of Social CRM turns traditional customer support models “inside out” as:

• Everyone (not just reps or account managers) is a contributor as well as a user,
• User-generated content like blogs, tagging and mash-ups becomes a primary source of new solutions, reviews and insight vs. content written in-house by support or marketing,
• Processes are profile and context-driven vs. contact driven in traditional CRM,
• Service becomes the new marketing – and communities spread the word about good/bad experiences, and
• Companies focus on customer experience vs. (solely) the cost of service.

When you lay out these key aspects of Social CRM, it’s clear that there needs to be a focus on how to best handle the increasing volumes of user-generated content, interactions and other artifacts produced by Social CRM – and the Social Web in general.  At the same time, Social CRM at the point of delivery needs to provide personal, relevant information/answers/solutions to drive adoption.   This is where the Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Intelligence come into the equation:

 

Like early self-service adoption, the key here is making Social CRM user-centric, relevant and convenient for end users, as well as economical for the business.  THIS to me is what is missing in a lot of the Social CRM discourse: how to get users to use it, and businesses to make money from it!

My latest White Paper developed with Baynote, a pioneer in social search and applying Collective Intelligence in online retail, media and support, has a much deeper discussion of this topic, along with a historical perspective on balancing content quantity vs. customer experience and how to get started with CI in support environments.  You can download a copy here (requires short registration). I think it turned out pretty well.

I am also starting an effort to look at various Social KM use cases and how support organizations can’t neglect KM and online support best practices when scaling their customer communities.  And I’ve been busy with beta customers and launch plans for Offerpop, our social marketing apps start-up, so I’ve been gathering lots of great use cases and success stories for the marketing side of Social CRM as well.  And will be able to share more in the weeks ahead.

So LOTS to talk about and share real soon.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts, feedback and ideas!

Proposing a Twitter marketing maturity model

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at Twitter as a customer service and marketing channel (see my latest SearchCRM column here).  Especially since I recently joined the founding team of a new social marketing apps start-up, Offerpop, to extend and leverage the work I have been doing at Evoke CRM over the past 8 months.

As discussed in prior posts and my SearchCRM piece, Twitter can be a very effective alert and listening channel, and with the right offer, creative and positioning, can be a great viral and word-of-mouth channel as well.  But Twitter is not for everyone, and needs to be part of a well-thought-out multi-channel marketing program.  It also has certain dependencies, e.g., you can’t really use viral coupons at scale until you have a sufficient base of followers.  And while Twitter can be great for starting discussions and sending out links to a special event or offer, you still need to create the assets for followers to register, distribute the coupon code, track retweets and response rates etc.

 

While Offerpop aims to provide the apps needed to streamline some of these tasks, I also continue to focus on the trends, best practices and frameworks to help organizations prioritize and scale up their overall social media and business initiatives.  One framework that I’ve been playing with is a Twitter marketing maturity model.  While still evolving, I think it could be a useful tool for looking at the stages of social marketing on Twitter, extending some of the CMM ideas I started last summer (see that here), and also calling out specific activities and metrics (and apps) needed to best leverage this channel.

Here's what it looks like currently:

 

I’d love your input, comments and ideas.  And also would be happy to share more details about Offerpop as we continue our private beta.

Slides from Social Media Roundtable at HP

It was great to see a number of old and new friends at our Social Media Roundtable at HP this week.  Thanks again to Gautam (check out Actute's BIRT community here) and Esteban (see his blog and slides here) for sharing their excellent perspectives and experiences as well.  Below are my slides, and for those who were interested in learning more about the Social Channel Personal model, I actually blogged on this idea previously here and also wrote a column on the concept here.  If you have questions about this material or how some of these frameworks are being applied in various organizations feel free to comment below or contact me here.

There is also a LinkedIn group for Roundtable attendees (Social Media Roundtable) where I am hoping we can continue some of our discussions and even start new threads that might be good themes/topics for future events.  I look forward to your comments and feedback!

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Social media roundtable at HP next week - speakers and topics

Next week I'll be moderating the latest in our series of "Social Media for Business" executive roundtable events in Cupertino CA on April 21.  We have a great venue / host in HP, and I'm pleased that OutStart will be again be sponsoring and helping to organize the session.  Since we have a few seats left and a terrific group of companies already signed up I thought I'd share a few highlights on the speakers and topics so far.  So here's some of what we have lined up:

• After our opening discussion of hot topics/key questions, I'll be presenting "From social networking to social business" based on some of my research and engagements over the past 6 months and a lecture I recently gave at the WPI B-school.  Specifically I'll aim to pose (and partially answer!) three questions: Where are we in the growth and evolution of social media?  How can we best apply social in mainstream marketing?  What is needed to drive business adoption more broadly?  I'll review the channel persona idea I talk about here and my checklist for social business I introduced here.  But mostly I'll try to provide some background and tee up the rest of the day. 

• Next up will be a couple of mini-case studies, including a very interesting one from Gautam Goswami at Actuate (long time client of mine) who will be sharing some of his experiences using social media to engage with a large open source developer community, their results with initial Facebook campaigns vs. Google and also how they are looking at Twitter and LinkedIn as social marketing channels.

• I am also very pleased to have long-time industry watcher, former colleague and social CRM guru Esteban Kolsky join us after the case studies to share ideas for "Building a Social Business."  He'll include his perspectives on social business models, components, rules and organizational models, and should do a great job teeing up our group discussion as well.

If you'd be interested in attending or possibly hosting a future session, please contact me, but do so quickly since space is very limit (to 30).  Looking forward to seeing folks next week!

Brands, blogs and iPads

Much has been written about the top brands and how they are using social channels to engage with customers - and in the case of the Altimeter/Wetpaint study from last summer - how "deep engagement" through social channels correlates with financial performance.  Putting aside whether this relationship is causal or not (I don't believe it is in most cases), I DO believe that a well-thought-out social business strategy is critical, and that most companies will want to participate on most social media channels.  Or risk the opportunity to observe customer discussions, and ideally even steer the community and gather feedback to improve products/services/brand...and of course generate leads as I have discussed here.

Of course which channels are most important for a particular market, audience, etc. needs to also be part of your social media strategy (a persona model can also help).  As discussed here, and reinforced by Debbie Weil in her excellent blog when she notes that "blogs are the home base of your social media strategy," corporations have many reasons to focus and invest in blogging.  Especially in highly dynamic, competitive, even fad-driven consumer markets like consumer electronics.  Dell (Interbrand #35; 74 blog posts, 100+ comments YTD) understood this early on, and has been singled out as an innovator and even was ranked #2 in the Altimeter study.

Eventually Microsoft (Interbrand #3) and HP (Interbrand #12, over 50 separate company blogs) did as well, and even Sony (Interbrand #29) electronics jumped on board, and now has a very slick social "portal" for all their community and social offerings (see screenshot below) and an active blog with 39 posts and 78 comments since the beginning of the year.

But what about Apple?  They certainly are doing something right.  And as outlined in Prem Kumar's excellent blog and discussion thread (motivation for getting this post written today), they may be following the social media/CRM "playbook" - but just not in obvious ways.  How else to explain how a product launch (A PRODUCT LAUNCH!) can get customers lining up overnight or 100's of media reviews or TV news coverage from coast to coast.

Yet Apple has no corporate blog, no obvious link on its Website to its (modestly followed) "appleincnews" Twitter account and there's no Apple related group on LinkedIn managed by a current employee.  At least none that I could find.  And Apple is not alone.  Neither Canon, Nintendo nor Philips - also all top 50 brands - have corporate blogs either.  And Philips ("royal_philips") has a pretty weak Twitter presence as well, with a ho-hum 94 score on Twittergrader.

As I noted in my comment on Prem's thread maybe Apple has reasons for how they are approaching social media.  For the rest of the players above (not including Dell, HP, MSFT, Sony) it looks like they are missing the boat.

Engaging “Connectors” to build successful customer communities

Building and managing successful customer communities is both an art and a science.  For starters, there has to be a natural need, or common interest among members – and value in both sharing content or experiences or expertise as a “contributor” and showing up to read or apply some of what is posted by other members or the host as a “consumer.”  So good content is one ingredient.

But if all you have is content (and consumers and contributors), you don’t really have a community.  You have a portal!  A second necessary ingredient is good connections.  This is where social networking comes in.  Think about it.  You may go to LinkedIn to research companies and read presentations on slideshare.  Or review profiles.  But you likely learned about LinkedIn from a current member who invited you to their network, and certainly as much if not more of the value is in the links and “who knows who.”  So content and connections are the currency for communities, as I pointed out here.

The role that is needed to build, and promote, and follow/extend connections is that of the “collaborator” or “connector” – in the Tipping Point sense.  It may seem obvious that connectors are key to the growth and vitality of social networking sites.  But they are also the “glue” in successful customer communities.  They are critical to spreading the word about new resources, invite their colleagues, and may not know the answer, but know who does.

So who are these connectors?  And how can we spot them to engage and offer them incentives if necessary to help us spread the word when we launch or want to expand our communities?

I was recently part of a couple engagements where we started to define the three groups above, inspired a bit by Forrester’s Technographics “ladder” groups (latest addition here), but also based on some real-world analysis of a few use cases (both internal and external facing).  For external, support-oriented communities (see my last Webcast on the topic here), we can generalize our three user groups/segments and their social media consumption as follows:

• Consumers – the largest group of almost all communities, these users read blogs, forums and review sites, and use Twitter, but are mostly following vs. posting or being followed.  They also have active accounts on social sites, but within the community they are readers not posters.

• Contributors – usually the smallest group, but most vocal, they are likely to answer questions, post reviews, author support solutions, and comment on forums.  They are typically bloggers and known as experts – and may have a large following on Twitter but frequently little interaction with followers.

• Connectors – these users like to share and connect with peers on social networking sites, value the social interaction of forums (unlike some contributors), and actively respond, retweet and follow many others on Twitter.  Within a community they can help to promote new content or experts, and tend to participate in others' blogs as much a blogging on their own.

Connectors are the bridge between consumers and contributors, often influence and draw in participants from outside of the community, and can be the “go-to” users for new members and even encourage or locate new contributors.

How are you identifying, recruiting and engaging with connectors in your community?