STEP EIGHT

Make It Personal—Get Customers to Love Your Business

Social networking systems offer opportunities to target and build profiles of prospective customers or fans for your product or service. Once you understand what drives your customers and/or their buying habits, personalization is the step to expand your client or customer base. Social networking offers even more potential when you consider the opportunity of exponentially increasing your sales force through viral (peer-to-peer) marketing.

Step 7 discussed techniques to grow your social network. This step shows you how to make the social networking experience more personalized for the user audience and how to cut through the clutter of all the other information constantly available to people. The first part of this step focuses on the ways social networking systems often enable end-user personalization, a key to adoption and use by your audience. The second part of the step focuses on examples of how some companies have successfully personalized social networking systems. The final part of this step offers ways the amazing personalization choices available to your customers or clients can help you drive business success.

Ways to Personalize the Experience

One of the core principles of social networking systems that is so appealing is the level of personalization that they enable. Both off-the-shelf and internally developed social networking systems offer multiple ways to personalize the user experience, from simple automatic updating emails to more extreme, high-tech capabilities. By design, the user experience is a unique and personalized experience. This is especially true for social networking systems that include the use of virtual worlds and avatars (a virtual you). Your virtual you can be created using a seemingly endless palette of shapes, sizes, hairstyles, and clothing. In addition, the virtual world that your avatar inhabits can be customized in any way to suit your virtual desires. Let's dive deeper into examples of personalization on these systems.

Notification Control

Once customers or clients become members of your social networking system, they can make conscious decisions about what level of access other members have to their information. Facebook, for example, offers members dozens of notification options that link to every possible aspect of the user experience, including who posts on the member's wall, tagging of content, and how friends are added and confirmed. Photos and video uploads have equally sophisticated customization options. Notifications on Facebook extend to how groups are joined and invitations made and how events are posted and offered to other users, as well as controls over various notes and links options. Finally, users have a wide range of privacy settings that control who has access to member information on the site. These are just some examples of the personalization that can occur in social networking systems.

Friends List

All social networking systems, including blogs, virtual worlds, and RSS feeds (as well as those systems used inside organizations) allow users to select friends. In addition, most systems have recommendation options that will recommend other friends in the system based on either preset criteria or on past “friending” choices made by the users.

This is important because the volume of messages you want to share through your social networking system is directly affected by the number of friends, followers, or recommendations your social networking system has. A member of the Ford Facebook or Twitter group might like the kind of communication he or she gets enough to recommend the group to one or more of his or her friends. In turn, these friends may recommend the group to their friends and so on. This viral marketing is key for businesses leveraging these technologies. Facebook, in particular, uses complex data analysis to make recommendations on potential interest groups based on the current friends an individual has. This is another way businesses benefit from the “friending” and recommendations aspect of these types of systems. It exposes people to areas of interest that they might not have actively sought otherwise.

Borders Magic Shelf

The bookseller Borders uses multiple social networking channels to connect with customers including blogs, podcasts, Facebook, and Twitter. The recommendation software Borders uses is called Magic Shelf, and it enables website users to receive book, music, and DVD recommendations based on reader preferences and personalize the shelf with the member's preferences. This level of personalization at Borders.com has provided tremendous benefit to the company. Since implementing the Magic Shelf, Borders.com has seen

62 percent higher conversion (a view of a book turning into actual sale)

41 percent more products viewed

11 percent greater likelihood to recommend (a viral sales and marketing plus).

Additionally, Borders gathers great data about their customers as a way to continuously improve the site and the customer experience.

Appearance Choices

Beyond information personalization, social networking systems enable the user to significantly customize layout of the social networking system. This can include the layout, color, and themes. Clearly, this feature provides users another reason to return to and interact with any social networking system. Pageflakes.com is a good example of a personalized portal (or home page) that can be used to aggregate RSS feeds and other social networking interactions. Even though Pageflakes is a free portal creator, it actually acts as a type of social network. New users are able to share the newly created page with all other Pageflakes members or specific groups. Users are also given the option of making Pageflakes.com their home browser page and to include any other home pages on the startup page, including Facebook or any other blog or social networking tool. Getting your social networking vehicle (Facebook fan page, blog, or other site) on your customer or client's Pageflakes startup page is a desirable outcome of your social networking efforts. The more your site is referenced on Pageflakes (and other similar applications or systems), the more your message is getting communicated, which in turn can drive new customers and more satisfied existing customers.

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Examples of Personalization

This section presents examples of how some companies enable their social networking system users to personalize their interaction and how you can apply what you learn to your own business needs.

Dell Computers Reiterates Brand in Second Life

Dell Computers has set up a sophisticated Second Life (SL) virtual world (http://yoshiweb.com/spiff/SecondLifeBenefits/images/image_dell.jpg) for their customers. Dell uses this creative interface to reiterate its brand in Second Life's expansive virtual environment. When SL residents teleport to this particular Dell location, there is no doubt where they are and that they can expect to learn more about Dell and its offerings. Some businesses or organizations create virtual environments that emulate the first world, while others develop more abstract environments.

However, not every business or enterprise has the resources or even the need to create such sophisticated ways for customers to personalize their social interaction. Nor will most companies delve into virtual worlds as an initial entry point into social networking. The more frequently used off-the-shelf social networking tools offer multiple ways to personalize the customer experience at a reasonable cost.

Customizing with Twitter

Twitter offers all account owners ways to customize the interface using some of its existing account settings. However, many third-party services and applications enable the account owner (business, organization, or individual) to customize the account page appearance even more. One way to do this is to create custom backgrounds for the Twitter account page. One service that enables anyone to get customized, professional-looking backgrounds for their Twitter account is Twitter Image (www.twitterimage.com). Individuals, small businesses, and even multinational companies use this service. These backgrounds can be done to establish or enhance the brand of a small company or they can be built to support large companies. In addition, if you or your organization has the internal media support, you can create your own custom graphics backgrounds for Twitter as well.

In addition to custom backgrounds for Twitter, some organizations create custom logos using tools such as Twitter Logo (see www.twitterlogo.com). Any name, word, phrase, or title can be customized with the fonts that are synonymous with Twitter. Also, Twitter's iconic bluebird can be customized to direct people on a website or other medium to the company's Twitter account page. You can get these types of images in many places on the Internet. Just enter “Twitter bird images” into your favorite search engine, and you will be directed to multiple sites with customized Twitter birds you can use to direct people to your Twitter page.

Customizing Facebook

Like Twitter, Facebook pages can be customized as well, including use of your logos on the group page and, if desired, even custom user interfaces for the bulk of the page. Increased customization helps make your Facebook group page stickier and helps differentiate your group from the thousands of others currently on Facebook. The key is to make it easy for your fans to want to stay connected with you and so pleased with the group that they recommend it to their friends, family, and colleagues.

Customizing YouTube

Like the aforementioned social networking systems, YouTube groups or channels can have a custom background added to them as well. This is especially important for businesses that want to continue to drive their brand consistently across all its channels. Go too www.youtube.com/user/BMW for an example of BMW's channel on YouTube.

Zappos Expands the Online Customer Experience

Zappos.com's use of social networking blogs, video sharing, Twitter, and other systems was highlighted in Step 2. The company is also committed to customer personalization options through the use of recommendation software that provides customers with recommendations tailored to their tastes and shopping habits. The company reported that when the option was first introduced in July 2009 the web section offering recommendations experienced nearly a 30-percent increase in page views per visit, a nearly 13-percent increase in recommendation click-through (previous recommendations were done by hand), and a nearly 3.5-percent increase in sales.

Elliott Masie's LearningTown

Elliott Masie, known in the workplace learning industry as an innovative and early adopter of technology, launched a social networking system called Learningtown.com that personalizes its use for workplace learning professionals. The system is powered by Ning.com, a widely used, commercially available social networking platform that is easy to use and launch. Members can create their own custom groups to network on multiple levels.

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How Businesses Can Leverage This Type of User Personalization

Driving users to your social network and having them interact with it and other members are key to establishing and sustaining value. LearningTown and other sites like it enable end users to customize their experiences. This immediately establishes a level of rapport and trust with the member that is not evident in other one-size-fits-all sites or applications. Happy members are more likely to participate actively in ongoing discussions, evangelize for new members, and help maintain the social network's cultural vision.

Targeted Advertising

Facebook ads take advantage of the personalization options available to users. You can choose specific demographics to target an audience on their user pages with your product or service offering, as well as on Facebook member pages. Given the large number of members on Facebook alone, these social networking systems offer rich environments to target specific users. If your company has invested in market research or studies and knows the typical buyer or user of its products or services, this information can be used to advertise to those people most likely to buy from your company. Some sample case studies follow.

CM-Photographics (www.cm-photographics.com) is a photographic services company focused on wedding photography. The owner wanted to focus on 24- to 30-year-old women whose relationship status indicated they were engaged. Over 12 months, CM-Photographics generated nearly $40,000 in revenue directly from a $600 investment in Facebook advertising. Of the Facebook users directed to CM-Photographics' website, 60 percent became qualified leads and actively expressed interest in more information.

StorQuest provides storage services and implemented a Facebook advertising campaign focused on targeting college students who might need to store their belongings for the summer break. A Facebook filter was established for age, college level, and location (21 campuses). The results for StorQuest were one of the highest performing online advertising efforts:

• more than a 50-percent increase in same-store rentals versus prior years

• 10-percent conversion rate from visits originating from Facebook Ads (approximately 2.5 percent is the industry norm)

• $100 average rentals; $600 average lifetime value per customer.

All Nippon Airways (ANA) wanted to identify people interested in Japanese culture to drive potential new customers to their service. Using Facebook ads and targeted keywords, ANA was able to drive its click-through rate from 12 percent to 25 percent. Conversions were much higher for ANA, which is unique as air travel to Japan is not typically an impulse buy, nor is Japan typically considered a leisure destination.

The key in leveraging targeted social networking advertising is to understand your buying audience. What does the typical buying profile look like? Are there specific age groups, gender, locations, education levels, marital status, hobbies, and such that are common in your buying audience? Work with your marketing and sales departments to help discern this kind of information. If you are not in marketing and you are considering using social networks for targeted advertising, you will want to work with them regardless to make sure your efforts align with corporate branding and marketing strategies. Another great way to gain more information is to review example ads posted on various social networking sites to see which elements are effective and which ones are not. Finally, many blogs focus on social networking advertising, which can provide additional real-time advice for social networking marketing and advertising.

Summary

This step focused on examples of social networking personalization and how you can use personalization options for business benefit. When developing your own personalization options for social networking systems, it is key to consider how the options you offer your customers are linked to all the other options available to your target audience. The end result you want is that your message, product, or service is part of the daily experience of an ever-increasing group of customers who have chosen to listen to what your company has to offer. Furthermore, you want those users to invite other users into the fold through social networking.

The next step will offer even more suggestions for connecting your business to the world through social networking.