Chapter 3. Gain Social Trust

The Circle of Trust

Every Social Business has to generate trust in its brand, employees, and products. I still remember the movie Meet the Parents, in which the father explained the concept of the “circle of trust” to his future son-in-law where trust in his family revolves from person to person. While we can laugh at the situations of this funny movie, the context of the message is one that is very real and very important. Trust, while often overlooked, is crucial in the Social Business world. People want to do business with someone they trust, and with the social tools, all relationships depend on this concept. Our common sense tells us that trust is earned and not easily given. How do we survive in today’s business world in relation to trust? “Who do we trust” and “Who trusts our company” become critical questions to answer.

Trust Is a Protector for a Social Business

Trust guards your Social Business digital reputation. That digital reputation is how people view your company from the online content available in the blogosphere. This trust varies with the relationship, whether for employees, customers, and partners. For example:

• Employees build social capital through interactions that can happen naturally through work. The social environment can be provided by the company and built into work processes (hence the power of social enablement of business processes).

• Building trust and a reputation with customers and prospects requires a different kind of thought and focus. There is no shared “platform” (although LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and so forth, are shared by all) that guarantees interaction. Targeting, use of analytics, and engaging with honesty and value are key. It’s not enough to simply focus on the customer’s interests, but trust is built by understanding where they spend time and their motivations. Trust and a digital reputation are built by making the customer successful.

• Partners and channels have aspects of customers and employees. A business partner who has more than 50% of their business with your company might be deeply integrated into your core processes and have a social interaction pattern somewhat like a customer. Other partners, however, can also be hybrids—a bit of a competitor and customer. Their business relationship is not integrated into your business processes as deeply, so it takes on a different type of relationship.

Building Social Business relationships is not very different from building relationships in real life. The interactions build trust over time. As you build more positive relationships, you create a positive reputation. In the digital world (both inside and outside the organization), these relationships can connect to people and places previously impossible. Social Business retains shared opinions of friends and trust, resulting in a digital reputation that extends to a personal and even organizational brand. It’s establishing this individual and organizational digital reputation that creates an environment to truly “engage” others.

A Social Business is about people and relationships, not about the latest social tool. Because people are at the core, relationships come front and center and all relationships are built on trust. People want to buy from sellers who act more like friends. They want to call someone in product support who really cares about them and wants to help them. They want to trust the advice that you give them on solving a problem. In short, your clients are seeking a relationship with you that is not one-sided.

With time, consistent positive interactions, value, and a demonstration of commitment, your company will be on its way to creating strong digital reputation with trust.

Why Is Trust So Important?

The Edelman Trust Barometer (www.edelman.com/trust/2011/), an 11-year running study that touches more than 5,000 people on five continents, measures the significance of trust. In their recent study, they found that when a company is distrusted, 57% of people will believe negative information about them after hearing it one or two times. When a company is trusted, only 25% of people will believe negative information about them after hearing it one or two times. By contrast, if a company is trusted, more positive messages will be repeated and believed.

In a business setting, above all, trust enables people to do business with each other. Trust is contagious and exponential growth can occur when your loyal customers, partners, and employees are advocates on your behalf to their friends. In return, this will help your company’s probability of gaining new clients. Trust among friends helped catapult Facebook to more than 600 million users and LinkedIn to more than 100 million users. Eighty percent of sales for more than $20,000 are impacted by five or more influencers, according to Nick Hayes, President of Influencer50 Inc. Influencer50 is the foremost influencer identification and engagement management firm that serves the Fortune 100 companies. And the data continues on the value of trust.

comScore is a highly regarded Internet marketing research company that tracks Internet data in order to study online behavior. From comScore’s report “The Social Media Phenomenon,” you can see why trust is so important:

• 81% of people check online comments before purchasing.

• 56.3% of users said they “got to know” brands through online channels.

• 58.7% made purchase decisions based on user-generated online info.

• 89.9% of users still pay attention to online comments even when not making a purchase.

People trust their friends before making purchase decisions and therefore that relationship is a valuable item. With the world being so interconnected, one of the most valuable currencies is your company’s trust shown in your reputation both on- and offline. The trust economy is often on a global scale and mostly traded among friends. Compare that to the past. In the past, people outsourced trust to a few people who filtered the news and information. They censored what was important and what was not. In the social era there is a loss of this “blind” trust. The trust economy rewards those who have a personal relationship with their clients. These relationships—or in Social terms, your friends, followers, and fans—are a key success factor in developing trust. Social Business uses social networks and social tools that serve as a new set of eyes and ears to generate trust. Companies will be able to not only deepen their existing trust, but leverage that trust to introduce new products and explore new markets. From seeing comes belief-changing insights, which then spur trust and action.

Developing Your Trust Plan

Part of your Social Business AGENDA is the workstream to develop a plan for actively creating and guarding your social trust. Building social trust is one of the most important things your company will do, and it is achievable when you pay attention to the three components necessary for developing social trust in the Social Business AGENDA:

• Expertise and thought leadership

• Responsiveness and consistency

• Transparent and open conversation

As you develop your trust plan with these three components in mind, you will need to consider your trust creators (an ecosystem of friends and followers) and your tippers, as illustrated in Figure 3.1. A tipper is a person who influences the rest of the clients and potential clients online and offline; usually about 5%–10% of your product or category’s population.

Figure 3.1 Gain social trust

Expertise and Thought Leadership

One of the top keys in trust building is your subject matter expertise. In fact, in the Edelman Trust Barometer study, an “expert” was the number one credible source of information. This year’s study showed that trust in experts is higher than ever. In fact, 70% agreed that an expert or a member of the academic community were of the highest valued sources. Sixty-four percent said the same about a technical expert from within the company and 53% vouched for the credibility of a financial or industry analyst. If you provide this access to experts in your company, you give your clients or potential clients the ability to learn and trust your company.

For example, a dry cleaner in a crowded marketplace could differentiate himself by avoiding the temptation of tweeting endlessly about his own specials and values. Instead, if he focused on offering helpful content to those with issues of stains on their clothes, he could become a subject matter expert (SME). This SME creates a sense of trust about the dry cleaner, making them more likely to be enticing to clients. True story or great example? Actually, it is a true story about a dry cleaner in New York (Jerry Pozniak @TheDryCleaner) who leverages Twitter in just this way to generate more business and a great ROI.

SMEs will offer their authoritative opinions on things happening in their area of the business. They are not afraid to take a stand and sometimes create controversy. This aspect of thought leadership is essential in establishing trust. Thought leadership is showcasing a future trend, direction, innovation, or idea. By constantly producing content that is genuine, up-to-date, thoughtful, and insightful, you can develop a leadership base that will follow your lead and generate trust.

For example, at IBM we created a blog on a new technology area. We invited our IBM top SMEs to blog and share their expertise. One of those SMEs is Jerry Cuomo, who discusses and dishes on IBM’s vision on public, private, and hybrid cloud computing. He is definitely an expert, earning the title of IBM Fellow, one of the highest technical distinctions, and writes about his vision for the market. The stir of opinions on his videos and original ideas is generating trust in the community on behalf of IBM.

Yes, content is important—most people would say it is still king! Your knowledge and content are what provide value and instill trust in your company and brand. There is no substitute! You might be familiar with the popular phrase “knowledge is power.” In my opinion, “knowledge is power, only when shared by a trusted person.”

Key to Trust: Responsiveness and Consistency

There is a direct correlation between your responsiveness and consistency in dialogue and your trust. If a potential customer asks you a question online, requesting more information, and you either don’t get back to the person or you take a week to respond, it is sending the wrong signal to your potential customer. In governments, e-government is used as a way to increase citizen trust by improving interactions with citizens and perceptions of responsiveness. Time is of the essence and lack of responsiveness sends a signal of lack of importance, and lack of trust. I followed the United States presidential elections in 2008 and it came to me as no surprise when I discovered that all of the candidates had started their own LinkedIn page. I decided to send a request to join a candidate’s network and within minutes it was accepted. I don’t suspect that the presidential candidate was the one who accepted it, but the quick response from the candidate or staff was impressive.

Another recent example is when hackers cracked into Amazon.com and caused all books written by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) authors to disappear, Amazon reacted quickly to assure everyone that they had not done this. While there was a hashtag created on Twitter about the incident, because the company was responsive, most people believed that they did not deliberately remove GLBT materials from their site.

Cordero, a web hosting company, experienced a power outage that affected their servers, leaving their clients’ websites down. On Twitter, Cordero directly responded to their clients. While they did get negative comments, there were referrals because of the way the situation was handled so quickly. The bottom line is that you need a great way to listen to the conversation of your friends (clients) so that you are responsive to their needs to build great trust.

Trust results from building and maintaining a relationship. It takes time and dedication as both parties need to mutually benefit over a period of time. Once you finally “get it,” you must continue to dedicate the time and energy to keep it. This process is not easy but is well worth the investment.

So, what does this all boil down to as a best practice? Dedicate the time and commit to long-term relationships. I recommend setting standards in terms of a “promise” as to how long it will take your company to respond online to your clients and potential clients. The biggest excuse people make about not wanting to engage in the social world is that they do not have the time. I dedicate a portion of my day to engage with my friends and followers to ensure that I provide them appropriate responses in a timely fashion to sustain my trust with them.

A Social Business will have clarity about who in the organization owns the responsiveness. It does not have to be everyone; however, your goals and strategy should guide your decision on your company’s expectations. Google CEO Larry Page believes that Google needs to go “social” to compete. To that end, he sent out a company-wide memo alerting employees that up to 25% of their annual bonus will be tied to the success or failure of Google’s social strategy and their contributions to it. If you want to build trust through subject matter expertise, you need to ensure that you have an active and consistent commitment from your experts to blog, tweet, or participate in communities. If your goals are to have the best customer satisfaction, your client service team had better be online listening and participating in the conversation.

When one of IBM’s internal data centers went offline due to a networking issue in 2011, email (among other applications) went down and affected thousands of users. Employees heard about the outage through IBM’s internal micro-blogging system within minutes and continued to collaborate on their internal social networking solution. This was made possible by IBM’s responsiveness to their employees, empowering them with alternative methods of collaboration. Communications on this situation continued until it was resolved.

The bottom line is that Social Business responsiveness should be measured not in days, but in minutes. That responsiveness and consistency is around all constituents—employees, customers, and partners. Businesses must push the leaders and the individual personalities of the company to be accessible and trustworthy. People trust individuals more than a corporate image. At the end of the day, people like to buy from people. Being available and responsive to customer comments, questions, or complaints is an essential element for creating a relevant, authentic online presence, one of the key factors affecting whether your followers trust you and your brand.

Transparent and Open Conversation

Because there is no longer privacy, especially online, everything you do or say is essentially out in the open; every mistake, every decision, every action, every response, every success. To establish trust around your brand, your company needs to be completely transparent. Trust has never been more important than in today’s economy.

Openness and transparency will disarm negative news or discussions and enable you to get in front of problems before they grow too large. A couple things that can crush trust in the realm of Social Business is ignoring the voice of the customer, not genuinely wanting to engage and listen but trying to use a social channel like other channels (one-way communication), and using social media only for marketing and sales purposes while turning a deaf ear to customer concerns and conversation. Communication that is deceptive and not transparent will ultimately be turned against your company until they can learn to embrace the broad conversation and use it as an opportunity to listen, engage, and improve.

Remember that this transparency goes beyond your clients into the inward processes in your company. Your employees will embrace the transparency that a Social Business provides. Sometimes this is a little scary to management when the flow of information and ideas is not hierarchical; however, in the long run, this is part of the positive value of being open.

One Social Business example of transparency in internal processes is CEMEX of Mexico. CEMEX is truly a brick-and-mortar company—they are part of the cement market. Not only are they a highlight of leveraging the Social Business AGENDA, but they won a Forrester Groundswell Award for their focus on driving trust throughout their internal employee networks and driving their business into new markets for their premixed cement product. The leadership and culture came from the very top, Chairman and CEO L. H. Zambrano, who led the effort on becoming a Social Business:

“A quiet revolution is underway. It started with new ways of creating and sharing information on the Internet. It continued with the emergence of smart phones that enabled anytime, anywhere mobile communications. Now, the revolution is linking people in social networks that enrich how they connect, share, and live. Welcome to the Collaboration Revolution.”

CEMEX has worked to leverage the knowledge and dialogue of its people with internal social networking and tools to capture, codify, and quantify this dialogue. CEMEX wanted to set up the community such that the members would build it, populate it, and fine-tune it themselves, with a new level of transparency in sharing of corporate information.

CEMEX deployed an internal social platform called Shift. Shift was created to help the company become more efficient and agile, but also to enable employees with similar objectives to share opinions, thoughts, information, experience, knowledge, and best practices. CEMEX designed Shift as a social network with a business focus. When employees use Shift, ideas, suggestions, and recommendations bubble up across the global network. Communities of interest are formed to tackle challenges common to their locations, markets, and skill sets. Projects can move forward without the barriers posed by traditional hurdles, such as overreliance on email and live meetings. And trust is built and grown through the system.

Shift was ultimately designed for a new kind of workforce, one that is mobile, global, empowered, and very transparent! CEMEX is empowering employees in new and important ways that go beyond traditional titles and roles. The payoff of Shift is lower cycle times, faster time to market, and real-time process improvement. These have driven the company’s innovation initiative from five projects to nine in a short time. Because there are no boundaries to this Social Business, Cemex is always learning. There are no boundaries between experts inside the company and experts in the marketplace. The business embraces the tools and leadership models that support capturing knowledge and insight from many sources, allowing it to quickly sense changes in customer mood, employee sentiment, or process efficiencies.

Transparency needs to occur with your entire ecosystem, and it cannot be delegated. You cannot fake it. Your senior team needs to either embrace it or find that Social Business Champion who will do so on behalf of the company. I follow Gini Dietrich’s blog on Spin Sucks, a blog dedicated to marketing and public relations professionals. In her blog on transparency, she wrote, “Why is this [social media] different...than writing a speech for the President, ghost-writing a column for your CEO, or writing a review about a product you received, free-of-charge? The difference is this: All of those examples have an approval process. They all have ‘canned’ PR messages. The person whose name goes on each of the pieces has the opportunity to review, make changes to fit their own voice, and post as their own. Social media is instant. It’s immediate and there isn’t an approval process. There isn’t time. It happens in real-time. That being said, the person (or people) handling social media doesn’t necessarily have to be the CEO. But it has to be someone who has the ability to speak on behalf of the organization without having to get approvals.”

Make sure that openness and transparency enable your company to learn. This learning spirit that occurs from the transparency and openness will help your company solve business problems and capture new business opportunities.

Your Ecosystem Expands to Include Friends and Followers!

When companies talk about their ecosystem, they often are referring to their partners, contractors, independent consultants, and suppliers who help them deliver new and updated products or services. A Social Business expands the typical definition of a company’s ecosystem to now include friends and followers. While your friends and followers might not directly produce a good or service, they act as expanded members of your team! They might or might not be a client of your product, but you do need to earn their trust as well. In essence, these friends and followers become brand advocates for your company, meaning that because of their trust in your company and because they like your brand, they advocate on your behalf.

In the online world, there are differences in friends and followers.

On Facebook, friends connect from other relationships—direct and indirect. If you and I are both friends of Mark or of a company, then there is a higher chance that you and I can become friends.

On LinkedIn, a lot of relationships are more business-to-business related and therefore references and background are very important.

On Twitter, a follower could be added without any thought at all—in fact, there are programs, or as some call them, “robots,” that accept followers from anyone who makes a request.

In communities, those who belong to your community, which is an online group of people who share and interact around a common interest area, are considered friends as well.

It is very important to understand how to make a friend or follower in the different tools that are prevalent in your region. The rest of this chapter helps your company develop those friends and followers.

Does a Company Have Friends?

Many people ask me, “How can a company have friends?!” Companies are like people. The actions that make people great friends are the same that make companies great friends. In the social world, friends and followers are your clients and potential clients. In essence, they are a group that has self-segmented and therefore is highly valuable.

Does it matter if your company has friends? Syncapse Corporation is a global leader in the areas of community building, technology solutions, and digital measurement. They published a report on the value of these relationships over a two-year period. For example, 68% of Facebook fans (of a company) are “very likely” to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of nonfans). Eighty-one percent of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of nonfans). People can be friends with companies!

As social networks mature, the relationships we forge within each one reflect our interests and aspirations. With this maturity people become friends with companies, objects, and ideas. Trust is earned and its stature is representative of our collaboration and contribution over time. Business success depends on people, people making connections, people sharing ideas, and people building trust. An employee thinks of a new way to streamline a process and tells his or her supervisor. A product developer gathers feedback from customers and passes it on to the design team. A consumer identifies with a brand and purchases the product.

One by one, relationships are established and nurtured, laying the foundation for continued growth and profitability through trust. The bottom line is that friends are advocates for your company. These advocates recommend you to their friends, who buy your products, usually with a lower cost of acquisition to your company.

For example, Larry Carvalho formed RobustCloud as an entrepreneur focused on advisory consulting services in the cloud computing field. Larry started first with evaluating various directions for his business. Once he decided on cloud computing, he put his effort into educating others about this new technology. This gave him an early understanding and feedback from attendees. Attending relevant conferences helped build a network in the field. Working toward this goal, Larry grew his connections on LinkedIn to more than 900 connections by sharing his insights, knowledge, and expertise—not by promoting his company.

Gaining trust depends on how you build contacts. Sharing insightful information is a good way to get contacts to see value in the information you provide. Using contacts you already know as an intermediary to introduce you to new contacts helps remove the risk of the “unknown commodity” syndrome that tends to plague new relationships. Points you make through blogs and tweets need to be fair and relevant to the domain you cover. They need to be posted with a sense of urgency that covers current topics.

Take, for instance, Cars.com. Cars.com is a top destination within the automotive industry that delivers a comprehensive suite of tools and information to help buyers form opinions on what to buy, where to buy, and how much to pay for a car, and to help sellers connect with in-market car shoppers. They are a $400 million business that began their Social Business journey a few years ago.

At Cars.com, they focused on social trust in a few ways with their ecosystem. They focused on understanding their clients and partners. And they turned their attention to friends of the industry—selling cars! They learned that all of them wanted someone to advise them on what to buy through both trusted editorial experts and peer opinions. This understanding led to a focus on a set of expert “friends” who wrote professional reviews, blogs, and consumer vehicle reviews. Because their goal was to engage in the world of word of mouth, which is one of the top influencers of automotive purchase decisions, their trust strategy was built on forming relationships with the entire ecosystem, rather than on promotion. In addition, they listened and responded quickly to their ecosystem by enabling clients to leverage social networks at the same time they’re using Cars.com, building trust through every relationship.

The important part of planning will be determining how your company builds their relationships, converts them to friends, and leverages them to become brand advocates:

1. Go where your ecosystem hangs out.

2. Have your friends come to you.

3. Determine who your tippers are.

For example, if your company is selling dog food, you would know that Dogster is the number one online community for dog lovers. Your strategy could be to befriend those in Dogster and determine the tippers in that context. How you build trust with those influencers will be critical for your digital reputation.

If your company is selling biotechnology, you could create a private community and invite those you think are interested to meet you there. This “expert” community could be leveraged as the tippers to drive a point of view in the industry.

Let’s go through each of these three approaches as your company determines the best approach for your goals, culture, and trust model.

Go Where Your Ecosystem Hangs Out

Your corporate goal in creating trust online begins with your company finding out where those who are interested in your product, brand, or category hang out online. To think it through, imagine a personal example. Suppose you had moved to a new city and you liked books. To meet new friends, you might join a book club.

The same is true online, where people form communities or participate in blogs. You need to go where your community hangs out and talks. Because you are joining them, not building the community, you want to start out by listening to the conversations and adding value. If your Social Business has friends already there, reach out to them. If you don’t, ask the community why. Your participation should be transparent, always keeping your brand promise and overall corporate objectives in mind. Add value from the beginning.

For example, as an author, I wanted to learn from the best. I found a great and active author group in LinkedIn and joined. I then spent time adding value by sharing my experiences on my first two best-selling books. That sharing of expertise and experiences enabled me to ask advice and counsel from the community. If I had just jumped in and started asking questions, I would not have gotten the great support that I received from that community.

So how do you decide whether to jump into an established group or create one? The simple advice I would give is to determine whether your company is sought for its advice and point of view (that is, people seek out the advice). If that is the case, form your own community. However, if you are in the first steps of outreach and have defined your target audience, focus on placing your messages where the target audience will find them—which means that you would join the right communities. Some companies will do both! For instance, Ray Wang is sought after for his knowledge of gamification. His level of expertise is so high in this new area that people approach him and his company, but his company still participates in established communities.

In the B2B world, a great example is IBM. IBM wanted to engage chief financial officers (CFOs). The challenge? How does IBM engage with a senior-level, tightly knit community whose members are highly selective about interacting with peers and other professionals? IBM needed a space where CFOs were comfortable and that they went to naturally. Because the goal was to gain trust of the other CFOs, IBM wanted to share its subject matter expertise and thought leadership but also learn from other best practices.

The choice of community was LinkedIn, as it was a platform familiar to most CFOs (for instance, in India, there are more than 2,500 CFOs on LinkedIn). As a pilot, IBM worked with India and our CFO of IBM India. At the beginning, he had fewer than 10 connections. In the first six months, his connections grew to 385 CFOs, representing firms with over $3 billion in IT spending. As the IBM CFO engaged in more consistent thought-leadership conversations, he grew his connections 30% month on month, and now he hosts the largest single CFO community on LinkedIn. He gets regular requests for peer meetings and business discussions, as well as invitations for public speaking engagements. Also, popular blog topics have yielded immense and surprisingly candid insights on key issues for CFOs in India. A true success for leveraging communities that exist!

Take a look at your core competencies and consider whether your ecosystem views your company as the expert in a given topic area. This will help you understand whether your company should consider creating a community on your domain versus joining a public community like Facebook or LinkedIn.

As an example, the Practicing Law Institute (PLI) is a nonprofit organization and premier provider of continuing legal education in the United States. Its core competency is providing guidance and helping lawyers to grow their professional careers. PLI launched a website called PLI XChange. It is managed by invitation only and is offered to all registrants and faculty of PLI seminars, among others. PLI XChange encourages comfortable collaboration, allowing users to choose how they participate, what they want to display in their profile, whether they want to be contacted via email or instant message, and more.

The top sites on the market (like Facebook and Twitter) are likely places for your friends to go. In February 2011, IBM built a supercomputer called Watson™ to play Jeopardy against the two greatest champions of all time. After the three-day mach concluded and IBM’s Watson was the champion, IBM wanted to capitalize on this market opportunity. IBM posted lots of rich media on www.ibm.com, but where they really attracted new markets was in the Watson Facebook and Twitter stream that they created. Watson’s Facebook page now has many fans and its Twitter stream has followers.

But you will also determine that the most prevalent social media sites are not the only place your ecosystem hangs out. For example, if you love Java because of your technical work interest and post about it on your wall all day, are you going to drive your friends to tears on Facebook? Finding these like-minded souls will be important to your success but will require some digging to find related online communities. Chapter 7, “Analyze Your Data,” covers the right analytic tools to determine where potential communities of interest are.

Finding these communities is a great way to get started. Take, for instance, gDiapers, a company that makes environmentally friendly disposable diapers. Co-founder Jason Graham-Nye did not set a goal to create a community but first went to where his ecosystem was. He discovered a community already discussing his topic in a Yahoo! Group. Then he found ways to add value and help his friends “channel their passion” and become “gMums.” Joining communities of interest is a great strategy for companies of all sizes.

A common question that companies striving to be Social Businesses ask is “What are the topics that my company should focus on?” This is an important question because determining these key areas determines where you go. These should be chosen with thought and tweaked through time.

Tools such as the Google Keyword Tool can be helpful for those refinements. The tool is geared toward helping you determine the right words to focus on based on your website, find negative words for tracking, and overall refine the appropriate choices for your comprehensive analysis. If you type in a term, the Google Keyword Tool will show you the other terms that people are using when they are also searching for your term. For instance, if I type in “Sandra Carter,” it suggests “Sandy Carter.” If I type in “flowers,” it suggests “garden” or “fresh cut.”

Have Your Friends Come to You

Building a community is a great way to have that engagement with your ecosystem and “friends” coming to you; however, building a community is very different from joining a community.

Building a community involves getting people to come to your watering hole because of a shared interest in a trusted environment. As such, consider where you want to build your community. Do you want to own the community on your own domain or should you build a community on a consumer site like Yahoo! Groups or Facebook? Consider the pros and cons of these locations.

Just having clients coming into a place (like a blog) to comment isn’t a community. A community is one where the members interact with each other. It dialogues. For example, for our Social Business Partner Community, we had a community come together online to brainstorm on key best practices. With our community manager, we began with discussion groups and issues to debate. Our community leveraged videos, case studies, and even virtual gifts of thank-you to community members who greatly helped others. Our community now trusts and interacts with others who could be considered “competitors” because of the value in the shared subject matter expertise.

A great community manager can make all the difference in the world, and in my mind is a requirement of success. A community manager’s responsibility is to keep the community members active and engaged. It is one of the fastest-growing professions today and even managed to get a “Community Manager Appreciation Day” dedicated to it! In 2011, more than 2,000 tweets globally celebrated and thanked this new professional. If you are hiring someone to build a community or maintain an existing community, the skills that you would look for are slightly different. I know that building a community is somewhat harder than maintaining a community. To create a community requires unique skills with an emphasis on sharing a vision that your company buys into, and a great relationship builder.

People in this position are working to build, grow, and manage communities around a brand or cause. It fact, you can consider them change agents. They foster communication as an ongoing task. Internally, they help to eliminate the silos, and encourage and enable teams to work together. They are bold, as working cross-functionally across an organization is not for the faint of heart.

Lee Odden, in his TopRank blog covering Social Business topics, outlined an hour of a typical community manager’s day:

6:45 am Check and reply to company blog(s) comments.

6:55 am Scan news feeds for interesting articles, blog posts, media to share. Write tweets, updates, etc., with short URLs. Schedule messages for sharing throughout the day.

7:10 am Check Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn comments, Retweets, messages, and reply as necessary.

7:20 am Scan persistent search for topics, keywords, and brand terms to reveal commenting opportunities on industry news websites and blogs. Make comments, take notes for future blog posts.

7:30 am Revisit company blog comment management tool for new replies.

7:35 am Revisit Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for specific follow-ups.

7:40 am Scan social media monitoring tool for mentions, links (alternatively, alerts can be used to surface events as they happen).

7:45 am Review Social Dashboard and web analytics for the company blog for notable links, trending traffic sources, and relevant conversion metrics (RSS subscribers, email subscribers, downloads, webinar signups, sales inquires).

Your community manager should focus on a few areas for success. First, set the strategy for the community, and define its direction and content activation plan. Next, recruit and be a cheerleader for the community by attracting new members to join but also forming relationships with those in the community. Based on those relationships, they need to encourage a great dialogue, and debate. For instance, the Jimmy Choo community manager often uses polling to get the debates going! These dialogues and debates could be online and maybe offline events, and activities. And finally, they need to be providing feedback from the community in a structured way through the Social Business governance process (outlined in Chapter 2, “Align Organizational Goals and Culture”). In essence, the community manager is the engine of the community who keeps it alive and active.

So, since a community manager is a mandate, what else is important in creating an active and valued community? The following list outlines my top recommendations for creating a community and generating/maintaining activity:

Seven simple rules for building a community:

1. Make your goals clear. Explain what you’re trying to achieve when you engage your community.

2. Hire a great community manager who embeds himself or herself into the community.

3. Attract or invite the right members for the group.

4. Encourage and stay close to engaged discussions, and acknowledge the feedback from the participants in your dialogue.

5. Reward contribution in the community to help it grow and thrive. It could even be something as simple as showing a great contributor with a “scoop” of new content!

6. Ensure that you add real value. Focus on the content, not in making sales.

7. Follow the trust rules. Be consistent and responsive, open and transparent. Community members need to know that there is someone at the other end of the online community who’s listening, and who will respond and engage with them.

Teach for America enlists the most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate educational inequality. As the United States’ largest provider of teachers for low-income communities, they enlist members to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools. They have a large alumni community made up of professionals who completed their two-year teaching assignment and moved on to other professions. The vast majority of members are just starting their two-year teaching assignments, and are just out of college or university.

In an effort to connect these new tech-savvy teachers with other new teachers and alumni from around the United States, they have created a community to allow members to easily search, find, evaluate, tag, and recommend teaching tools and resources. The goal is simply the sharing of resources that are valuable to teachers. The community manager actively engages this community to leverage the collective knowledge of alumni, members, and staff experts.

Another great community outside the United States is in Latin America. Camilo Esteban Rojas Lopez, the IBM Spanish South America (SSA) Social Business Leader, started a business partner community in March of 2011. Less than three months later, there are 120 active members from BPs in the following countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. The value of the community is the sharing of subject matter expertise, in particular in a set of reusable tools for the partners. This includes presentations, point of views, whitepapers, and collateral in Spanish.

Currently there are many active discussions in the community (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 The SSA BP community

The community is shaping the direction of IBM’s SSA region. The community requested more video in which a subject matter expert (SME) brings a discussion or a presentation and the community establishes a dialog. The community now hosts two webcasts a month, and participation has gone through the roof! In addition, the community is used to request help from IBM and its partners.

For instance, just last week a partner in Uruguay needed help with a client, and when he was successful, shared all the best practices with the community.

IBM’s developerWorks site is a good example of a B2B community. With more than eight million people registered on developerWorks, IBM has created a set of communities and social networking capabilities to allow people to connect with business, and business to connect with businesses. With a great community manager energizing the members, this community makes it easy for a customer or even a partner to locate technical experts through developerWorks. It also allows partners to work together, bringing together complementary skills to create added solutions based on IBM technology. I didn’t realize the true value of this until last year when I was participating in an IBM business partner roundtable and one of the partners informed me that he subcontracted and later hired an eclipse programmer after locating that individual through his developerWorks profile.

Determine Who Your Tippers Are

You could have many friends; however, the key to competitive advantage is not the quantity. It truly is about influencing the influencers. Seth Godwin, the marketing expert who created the concept of permission-based marketing, wrote:

“Many brands and idea promoters are in a hurry to rack up as many Facebook fans and Twitter followers as they possibly can. Hundreds of thousands if possible. A lot of these fans and followers are faux. Sunny day friends. A better idea defeats a much bigger but disconnected user base every time. The lesson: spend your time coming up with better ideas, not with more (faux) followers.”

In essence, what you are looking for are those who will invest time in your brand, product, or category. Those people are the ones who influence others with their point of view and opinions. In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell described how a small subset of society has a dramatic influence on the beliefs and behaviors of large social networks. He called these people who create “tipping points” “sales-people” and “Mavens.” For simplicity, we’ll just call them “tippers.”

In the analysis of external social networks, a vast majority of the content is created by this very small group of tippers (5% as measured in the IBM Business Value Assessment). They provide the foundation for the casual participants (75%) who occasionally comment or post ideas. The tippers accelerate building friendships and a digital reputation.

Meteor Solutions, a provider of word-of-mouth analytics and optimization, collected data from a cross section of their clients. The analysis showed that the type of ecosystem a brand amasses on social sites matters more than the number. On average, approximately 1% of a site’s audience generates 20% of all its traffic through sharing of the brand’s content or site links with others. And these “tippers” drive an even higher share of conversion.

The tippers directly impact 30% or more of overall end actions just through their recommendations alone. According to a recent Forrester Research report, “Peer Influence Analysis,” by Augie Ray and Josh Bernoff, a minority (about 6% of U.S. online adults) generates 80% of all influence impressions and roughly 14% of online adults generate 80% of the influence posts (source: Forrester Research, Inc., “Peer Influence Analysis: Mass Influencers Are the Key to Achieving Scale in Social Media Marketing,” by Augie Ray and Josh Bernoff with Jennifer Wise, April 20, 2010). Knowing your “tippers” will be important for your strategy.

How do you find these influential people? Using social analytics tools helps you to identify who these people are, what type of content they like to share about your company, and where they go to share. Chapter 7 takes a detailed look at the tools themselves. For instance, if your most influential conversations for your company and brand are shared on Facebook, take your email lists and determine who on your company’s list has a Facebook account.

For example, Sharpie, a division of Rubbermaid, wanted to build a community of their tippers to dialogue, listen, and learn. How did they find their ecosystem of friends? They identified Sharpie groups on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr and determined those with the most influence. Some were even celebrities like the Zappos CEO. He tweeted this one day: “zappos was just admiring the stainless steel sharpie the other day, someone sent me a pic of it.”

Sharpie joined the conversation and learned a lot about their clients and friends. Based on what they heard, they created on their website a section called “Sharpies Uncapped.” This section celebrates the different uses of the Sharpie, like drawing Elvis, or honoring moms through a Sharpie Pen.

For the tippers, Sharpie wanted to showcase their innovations so they created the “Sharpie Squad.” The Sharpie Squad is a separate place showcasing their tippers’ Twitter, Facebook, and other social pages. Sharpie really focuses on their innovation and unique talent. Through many touch points, they form trust relationships with those who then become an influential army for them online.

The most important thing to do, once you find out who your tippers are, is to make them feel special. For instance, at IBM we seek their opinions on new product releases, and preview our announcements to them. We provide them with information that is the root of their becoming even more influential through knowledge and thought leadership. We also treat them as special and make them heroes, sometimes featuring them on our virtual events. And at our conferences like our Social Business Forum, we have a special blogger VIP seating, and a meet and greet with key executives.

The same logic holds true for internal social networking as well. Sogeti, a Capgemini subsidiary that specializes in technology services, needed to connect its more than 20,000 employees spread across 200 offices in 14 countries. When they decided to introduce an internal social networking tool called TeamPark, they wanted to find the right participants to get the environment growing before the official launch. Sogeti turned to Facebook for the answer. They took a look at the organically grown Sogeti Facebook page and found a list of employees. Figuring these users were socially savvy, Sogeti invited all of them into the soft launch of TeamPark to get their feedback and have them prepopulate content and communities.

I build my network as if I were building my own small business. Who would I want on my team? I carefully select those in my inner circle by their interest alignment and shared values. What skills do they bring to the table? Instintively, I want people in my network who have knowledge and skills that I need to learn. I will then leverage this important group to apply their collective knowledge to a particular problem. In a small business, loyalty is very important so I share information that is of value to my network, helping them reach their goals. I focus on the people and my relationship to them, trying to motivate them and help them where I can.

For example, when we were building a community around a new technology area, I sought out experts on the development of the technology and the use of the technology. We leveraged an IBM internal tool called Atlas for advanced social network analysis. Atlas uses automated expertise modeling and network analysis to identify the right people and the shortest paths to reach them—who knows who and who knows what. Visual diagrams help IBM understand who are the most connected hubs among the network, who are the important bridges linking groups, and who are the tippers that can influence your organization.

In addition, as we grew the community of tippers in this area, we wanted to make sure we shared a common interest of helping each company achieve its goals. It was not at all about IBM’s products but about building intelligence about our community’s common needs. Our community had first insight into directions, and was even opened up to competitors. In the end, the community became the authoritative source on this new technology, all were winners, and the group still continues today as we tackle new challenges in the fast-paced new technology development.

What About Your Enemies?

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. I was recently presenting at a high-level CMO conference, and I was asked this question: “I fully agree on your friend and trust model. But what do you do about your enemies?”

Chapter 7 discusses social analytics tools. These tools can be used to determine those with negative sentiment about you. It will be as important to keep your eyes on these people as it is to keep your eyes on your “friends.”

If your enemies try to lie about you online, they will be found out. The community itself is self-policing and will find out the truth. If the content is incorrect, you can correct the perception. If the statements about your company are truthful but not complimentary, you can fix and apologize. This strategy is part of an overall Risk Mitigation plan, covered in more detail in Chapter 6, “Design for Reputation and Risk Management.”

Conclusion

A Social Business AGENDA has a plan for developing social trust with its ecosystem, including friends and followers. This chapter defined the concept of how to develop that trust. Trust is built through subject matter expertise and content but also through transparency and openness. Responsiveness and consistency also play critical roles. Tippers add additional associations that further drive trust in your network. Your focus should be placed on developing a “friending” strategy, and engaging in a social trust plan. Trust is a protective characteristic that leads to tangible benefits. Lack of trust in your company is a barrier to change. Let’s now proceed on to Chapter 4, “Engage Through Experiences.”