Chapter 12

Week 5: Social Interactions

In the preceding three chapters I presented personal and business networks along with software platforms through which you can build your own social spaces. I’ve also discussed the content that people create on the social web, content ranging from casual conversations on Twitter and personal reflections like ratings and recommendations to more thoughtful blogs, reviews, and longer conversations.

You can think of all of these as the nouns of the social web: the people, places, and things of interest to both those who posted them and those who commented on them and shared them with friends. This chapter is about the verbs, the connective threads that tell you what’s happening.

Chapter Contents

• Connecting the Dots
• Managing Social Information
• The Main Points

Connecting the Dots

Social interactions—the third big collection of channels making up social media—consist of the messages, feeds, and emails that flow as social content is created, discovered, consumed, repurposed, and shared. I used the expression “connective threads” in the introduction. On the social web anyone can make something and put it out there. But if no one knows about it, how social is it? The updates, feeds, and emails—the connective threads—tell you to go look, that something new is waiting for you.

Taken together, these activity indicators become social content in and of themselves. They not only represent and carry information, but in many cases they are the information. For example, consider a music-sharing service like Grooveshark. When you create a new playlist or make a song a favorite, you can also push a notification of that activity to Twitter, where people following you see it as if it were a post like any other. This secondary notice tells the participants in communities outside of the one you are in right now—in this case, Grooveshark—what you are doing at this moment in a social network or setting apart from the one that they happen to be in. This kind of information is what increasingly powers the social web, pulling people together and driving conversations, including those with people who are interested in what you have to say as a marketer.

As a more general example of the tools that make it easy to follow what’s going on around you, consider FriendFeed, purchased by Facebook in 2009. Now largely in use outside the United States, it’s still a very important service and has influenced or been built into a number of social networks. FriendFeed simultaneously aggregates, organizes, and then directs information about social content from those who create it toward those who want to know about it. FriendFeed provides pointers to nearly all of the content that those around you create—Twitter posts, Flickr uploads, and more.

What’s the benefit of a tool like FriendFeed to you as a social web participant? Instead of visiting a dozen places to see what someone you may be interested in has done recently, you subscribe to them via services like FriendFeed. When you see something new that interests you in the feed, you can jump directly to that content. Otherwise, if you’re not interested, you just continue doing whatever you were doing,

Through tools such as FriendFeed, Ping.fm, and Lifestream, social web participants are able to manage very large amounts of information; the updates literally flow to them, as they happen. As a marketer, you can efficiently follow the influencers that matter to you. It’s a lot like fishing, but in this case the fish are jumping into your boat while you pay attention to more important things, as if there were more important things than fishing.

In the preceding paragraphs, I talked about using tools that make it easy for you to keep up with the diverse activities of others. Using these same tools, you can also make it easy for others to keep up with you. By creating a feed of your own social actions, you can make it easy for your friends and followers (read “customers”) to discover the content you are creating. Through social interactions and the messages that carry the information about what is going on across the social web, niche content percolates out through the social web and finds its way to the specific individuals who are interested in it.

Managing Social Information

The previous three chapters were dedicated to things—virtual social objects such as networks, communities, photos, and conversations. That’s the stuff that makes up the social web, right? Isn’t that social media? Yes, it sure is—but it’s only part of it. To be sure, social content matters—think for a minute about a post on a company blog relating to product safety. What matters as much or more than the post itself, however, is how that post comes to the attention of someone who needs or wants to know about it. The typical 20- or 25-year-old Millennial, no doubt an active member of multiple social networks, is also uploading pictures and videos, maintaining running conversations on Twitter, and monitoring a few dozen blogs and event sites for information on sports, music, films, and more. How do people keep track of this?

The common explanation is multitasking—the ability to perform multiple tasks or simultaneously divide one’s attention between seemingly disparate, parallel activities. Multitasking is part of it, and a lot of social web participants do exactly this as they hop from site to site—or window to window—to see what’s happened recently. Better, however, than brute-force techniques such as individually checking a dozen sites each day or even tracking the specific updates that each site sends out is the ability to manage social information effectively. This means simplifying and making sense of a dozen sources of information—each multiplied by the number of friends present, each of whom is also contributing their own content. That’s a lot to keep up with.

Think back to Chapter 4, “Week 1: Web 2.0, The Social Web.” Most people live in a town with one or perhaps two newspapers and probably some type of local entertainment publication. It used to be that when you wanted to know what happened yesterday—or was going to happen this weekend—you grabbed one of these papers and looked it up. Perhaps you checked with a local TV station or tuned in to the local news radio. The point is that you needed to check with only a relatively small number of information sources to get a complete picture (or, at the least, as complete as you could get) of what was going on. Now, in the technical vastness of the present, there are hundreds, thousands, millions of active blogs, a good number of which reference news, entertainment, sports, and so on. What if they’d been implemented as websites instead of blogs? The analogy here is that a newspaper, like most websites, is an isolated, unconnected document that assumes you will be visiting it. It would be literally impossible to go out and monitor a large number of sites—and difficult to do so for even a small subset—on a regular basis to see what’s new. So, you’d pick your favorites, and having done so you’d be limited to whatever they knew about and chose to share, just as you’d be influenced by their opinion regardless of the thinking of others around you. Blogs, thankfully, aren’t implemented like that.

Instead, blogs are built around the idea of conversation, and they use RSS to make publication and consumption efficient. As a result, you can subscribe to a lot of them; instead of 1 or 2 sources of information, you have 5, 10, 50, 100, 1,000 sources—it doesn’t matter. When their authors post something new, RSS will see to it that you know about it. All you do is follow your subscriptions. RSS-aware tools like Google Reader make it a snap to keep up with lots of blogs and the hundreds of individual posts they contain.

The same concept applies on the social web. Instead of running about and checking each individual site of interest, savvy social participants set up feeds and then aggregate those into cohesive streams. Figure 12-1 shows how someone aggregates the social content of three friends and their activities across separate social sites into one easy-to-follow feed, in this example using FriendFeed. The same thing—scaled up—lets people aggregate hundreds of friends with activities spanning dozens of sites. Some take it one step further: They route subscriptions to their phone or handheld, reading and then tapping out a quick reply while on the go when something interesting comes their way.

What does this have to do with marketing? A lot, actually. To begin with, what you create on the social web competes with what everyone else is creating. If you think TV is crowded, consider that when you buy a spot, you at least have some degree of certainty that your audience will actually see it. With social media, there is no such guarantee. To be seen, your content has to be chosen, and that in turn means it has to be visible and that your audience has to know it exists. Beyond that, a lot of what you create is going to be modified or repurposed for presentation in some content form other than what you originally posted. Your awesome 30-second spot, repurposed for the Web, is going to come across Twitter as a simple text message that says “Check this out.” That short message—limited to 140 characters in all—is what connects the rest of your potential audience to what one influencer has found worth sharing. Keep in mind that it is arriving with hundreds of other items, so the recipient really needs to have a reason to notice it in the first place.

Social standing—reputation—plays a role here. When your branded content is effectively wrapped in plain brown paper, the social standing of the person who sent that content is the only basis that the recipient can use to decide whether or not to check out that content. Think about your well-meaning friends who routinely send emails with jokes; how often do you skip opening anything they send? On the social web, reputation is everything. It’s not just the clutter you’re fighting. On the social web, everyone, loosely speaking, is more or less equal. You’ll find yourself competing with babies laughing and mispronouncing words like spaghetti, or appearing to wield drumsticks to the beat, or talking in a deep voice with a Hungarian accent about world domination. Sometimes the babies win big, too, racking up a thousand times the views of your million-dollar spot. This is why building your own social credibility is so important.

All of this further suggests not using social media by itself. Social media is, in a larger strategic sense, a direct reflection of your business. Viewed this way, you might say it is your business. At a tactical level—where you are working day to day—the social media–based techniques that you decide to use are just one part of what is available to you for use in your overall, integrated marketing effort.

The illustration in Figure 12-2 speaks to the holistic nature of social media and the importance of the marketing-plus-operations linkage. Social media is simultaneously a central element of marketing and indeed business, and—think Facebook advertising here—it’s one component of many in your overall marketing toolbox. Throughout this book, social media marketing has been presented as a set of tools that taken together can amplify, drive, and help others share your message—for example, to help build awareness or to move a potential customer through the funnel toward purchase.

Looked at this way, social media is an accompaniment to your existing awareness and point-of-purchase campaigns, not a replacement for them. The best practice remains to continue using TV, radio, direct mail, sports, event marketing, and more to seed the conversations, to set the expectations, and to create the beginnings of a demand. Social media–based marketing wraps around and through this, connecting people and forming a core of collaborative feedback.

Underlying the direct marketing applications, social media is also based in the shared activities of people—the activity streams that are the central focus of this chapter. Beyond the tools—beyond Facebook or Twitter or the addition of ratings to your commerce site—there is the reality that most markets are now fundamentally organized around social activities involving large numbers of people. In my book Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement (Sybex, 2010), I dive more deeply into the social constructs and techniques of socially aware businesses. For our purposes here, understand that using social media as a way reaching out to customers—or the basic techniques like advertising in social networks—is a starting point. Orienting your business or organizational objectives around the community you serve—moving social to the center, so to speak—is your end goal.

Referring back to Figure 12-2, looked at from this perspective, social is at the core (now) of everything, whether it’s customers, employees, or your supply chain. Contemporary businesses exist in the context of the community they serve, and social media marketing is like the outer layer of an onion; it forms the more visible elements of the way in which a company goes to market. That said, the most successful implementations of social media marketing are undertaken by organizations that are in fact social at their core, organizations that have made collaborative practices part of the their internal organizational culture.

Understanding and using the social information flow that underlies this shift from push marketing to collaborative, customer-driven processes is becoming a fundamental marketing skill. Tap the social web and listen. Use social media to encourage and empower your evangelists so that they are more effective. Managing the information flows—for your own consumption—and understanding how others do the same to serve their own needs is key to fully engaging with your audience and their friends on the social web and in the process to getting the most from your investment in social media. This where monitoring relevant social feeds can really pay off. By using feeds to focus on influencers while at the same time paying attention to the larger conversation using tools like BlogPulse, Radian6, Alterian, or Sysomos, you will stay in the loop. As a result you will find it relatively easy to build and implement your campaigns in ways that meet with approval rather than rejection.

In earlier chapters I presented social media tools, tips, channels, techniques, and other things that you can pick up and use in marketing. This week’s work has a lot of that too, but it includes several survey topics as well—things that may or may not be directly applicable to marketing but that you should know about nonetheless. The objective in presenting social interactions as a set of channels is to show you how the social content created through what I presented in the prior chapters increasingly finds its way to the recipients who will consider it when evaluating your offer. Some of this may not appear to tie directly to marketing, at least not at first. This is, however, an important matter—in particular for marketers who may be used to being able to direct the message, for example, through a paid channel and ultimately an interruptive experience. The social web doesn’t work that way. This week’s discussions and exercises show you why it doesn’t and instead how it does work.

Monday: Events and Calendars

The information in event listings and calendars is generally made up of discrete data—dates, times, places, prices, and similar—along with a description and detailed information about the event itself. The core information—who, what, where, and when—lends itself to a feed, to a stream to which people interested in specific events would subscribe. Turning back to the purchase funnel, there is an important distinction to note here between awareness and consideration: Building awareness often requires more than the facts. The name of an artist and the performance date are generally not sufficient to pique interest in a new act that no one has heard of. A catchy name is as easy to come by as picking a character out of Dickens. A photo of the band is marginally better, a sound clip much better, and live video posted by a friend from prior shows is the best. Note the progression in the social components of the content and the way in which that social factor helps drives real interest. Social content bridges awareness into the consideration phase, where social media is most effective. Combine this now with other information streams—for example, FriendFeed or Twitter—or a social calendar such as Eventful. If you know that your friends have a strong interest in seeing this new act, you may need little more than the date and the ticket price to make a decision. In this case, you are tapping your friends’ collective knowledge, provided to you through the flow of social information, to support your own decision-making process.

In the consideration phase, the marketing challenge is often reduced in part to spreading the word based on what a small number of influencers in a social group may have stumbled onto. Subscriptions to what these influential friends are planning play an important role because they can make it much easier for an extended group to keep up. The trick becomes getting people to talk about—in the digital sense—what they are doing. In fact, this too can be automated using socially aware applications, since listings of likes and dislikes can be generated automatically based on individual preferences as evidenced by choices and selections made through social sites. For example, Last.fm, a self-directed music service that itself integrates with applications like Grooveshark, will convey (with your permission) your recent musical selections and purchases to Eventful, where this information can be used to guide what is presented to you and therefore what is shared between you and your friends.

Shown in Figure 12-3, the Eventful service imports information about artists from popular listening services and then sends subscribers notices when those artists come to town. Because services like Last.fm themselves import—or “scrob,” as they call it—music that you listen to through other services (iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Grooveshark, as examples) in addition to the music you listen to via Last.fm directly—your wider preferences in music become the basis for what Eventful is able to recommend. As a result, Eventful can quickly figure out what you like and make recommendations based on that. It may seem a bit weird or even scary at first; however, over time as you recognize that you and your friends are seeing more shows that you actually like, the benefit of these social tools becomes clear. At the same time, your decisions—and things you blog about as a result—make sharing your tastes and interests with friends as well as those who follow you online easier and therefore more likely. This is the collective at work (and at play!) through the social feedback cycle. This is a great example of individual preferences driving social content and ultimately commerce and therefore an example of how important being able to manage social information really is to marketers.

As a subscriber, event promoter, or artist, event feeds help you. Because feeds allow people to collect and manage information from a wide variety of sources, feeds can be of great benefit when you’re trying to find specific information or when you’re trying to make others aware of it. This illustrates one of the challenges that marketers face transitioning from traditional or Web 1.0 online media to Web 2.0 and social media.

At the core of services like Eventful and Yelp is an information flow that potential customers can use when thinking about what to do, where to spend their time, and where to spend their money. As the amount of information in circulation on the social web rises, managing it and keeping abreast of what’s happening gets harder. As noted, feeds summarize, consolidate, and carry an implicit social ranking (the events in many cases would not be included if you or a friend hadn’t put them there) and in the process bring order to the social information flow.

You can benefit from event-posting services as a marketer. You can use these services directly; make sure that your events are listed and that the listing is accurate. You can also use these services to plan or schedule your events. Eventful features a demand service, as shown in Figure 12-4. Eventful members interested in specific types of events can demand that a performer, show, or any other event come to their locale. You can use this to help sort out where the demand for your planned event might be highest and then build your event schedule around that.

Use the services you’ve seen here yourself. By signing up and using Eventful, or any of the other tools and services mentioned in this book for that matter, you can quickly gain experience. Participating will give you a first-hand perspective on what social media is all about and thereby make you better able to evaluate the tools likely to work for your business applications. Using what you’ve now seen—especially in a personal context—adds to your knowledge and gives you a jump start.

Monday’s One-Hour Exercise

Today you’re going to look at a cross-section of event and calendar services. Some feature a basic listing of events; this means you need to visit the site in order to see new listings. Others offer subscriptions to a feed or an email alert along with tools that generally help site visitors do more by more efficiently managing their information flow.

Spend the next hour visiting each of the following sites and answering the questions presented. Think of an artist or type of event that you’d like to see or go to, and then try to find information about it on each of the following sites. You are, of course, free to look for whatever you want; make the exercise interesting and relevant to you.

For the next hour, visit the following sites:

• Citysearch (http://www.citysearch.com)
• Eventful (http://www.eventful.com)
• Yelp (http://www.yelp.com)
• The website for your local arts-and-events guide
• Any other event or calendar site you’d like to visit

As you visit these sites, consider and answer the following:

• How quickly were you able to find events?
• Was sponsored content presented? If so, how relevant was it to what you were actually looking for?
• How many pages did you look at in total? Was all of the information you needed presented on a single page?
• Which sites encouraged you to add your own ratings and reviews? Were the ratings and reviews of ordinary people presented more or less prominently than those of professional or celebrity critics?
• Which sites offered feeds or alerts?
• Which sites offered the ability to import your existing preferences related to the type of event you were looking for?
• How could you use the services you visited today to promote marketing events that you may be planning?

Monday’s Wrap-Up

Having worked through the exercise today, you should see clearly that social commentary—reviews and supporting insight into the people who created it—is worth a lot when it comes to evaluating a choice. As well, being able to subscribe rather than having to come back and check makes it easier to keep up with what is going on. At Eventful, for example, if you search for “The Subways,” you may or may not find information. The Subways may not be playing near you anytime soon. However, you’d be able to subscribe to your search. Even if nothing was found in your area today, when a listing for The Subways is added later, you’ll be notified automatically, without having to come back and do the search again.

Today you saw examples of the way in which an individual’s interests can be used to pull relevant information from the social web. This enables people to keep up with numerous, diverse content sources and therefore find the content that relates directly to the specific interests that they have. It is through the tools you used today and similar others that social content ultimately connects with the people—in this case, at live events—who really want it and who make purchase decisions based on it.

Tuesday: Mobile and Location-Based Media

Yesterday you looked at events and calendars—services that tell you about things going on in the community around you. Today you’ll turn it around. You’ll be looking at services that operate primarily on mobile devices and let you tell others what you are doing—and where you are doing it—right now. As the notion of community increasingly shifts toward an inclusion of virtual—for example, the virtual community comprising someone’s friends at Facebook—it’s a natural extension to combine the online and offline experiences. To be sure, you can always ask your real friends who also happen to be members of your favorite social network what they are doing this weekend. That is one way of linking online and offline activities and relationships. But what about people you know less well, or with whom you have only limited if any actual contact even though they may be nearby and may share many of the same interests that you have? What about people you want to meet?

New mobile social services are emerging that combine location-aware devices such as mobile phones with online social networking concepts like friending and privacy. The result is a network that combines online as well as offline behaviors. This happens informally on Twitter, a service you saw in Chapter 9, “Week 2: Social Platforms,” where I regularly see posts from the people I follow—for example, “Just landed in New York. Anybody want to get a coffee?” I’ve met more than a few friends from Twitter for the first time in person at ad:tech conferences this way.

Social interactions arising in a mobile context range from the ordinary—quick notes, like a new friend request, for example—to on-the-go activity updates or invitations to happening-right-now events. As a marketer, you can use social applications in this group to build your business. If you have a club, museum, or similar venue, think about using location-based services as a part of your social marketing effort. Make sure you’ve claimed you location or venue within the location-based services and networks your customers use, for example in Foursquare or Google+. Then, create a promotional offer or other incentive and make it available for those people who visit your business and whose acceptance of the offer is itself a shareable event. Here’s an example: Using Foursquare, Lucy’s Retired Surfers Bar & Restaurant in Austin, Texas, provides the equivalent of a coupon—a free appetizer—that is earned by checking in to Lucy’s a certain number of times. Because Foursquare encourages activity-sharing—telling friends where you are, what you’re doing, and where you are going to be doing it—Lucy’s Foursquare-using patrons tend to bring a party with them.

Tuesday’s One-Hour Exercise

Today you’re going to see how people use location-based information services. Although you can obviously spend a lot more than one hour doing this, the exercise focuses on exploring a few of the basic features of two representative services. Today’s exercise uses Foursquare as an example: You can also use Google’s “Check-In Offers” feature, which combines Google Places and Google+, or any other location service you’d like to try.

Exercise 1: Check in

Exercise 2: Add your venue

Tuesday’s Wrap-Up

Today’s was a survey exercise. You took a very brief look at location-based services that connect people and link online and offline activities. If you added and claimed your venue, you also moved one step closer to using social media marketing in business. The objective today, like in all of the “Hour a Day” exercises, was simply to experience social media—to participate, however briefly, in the kinds of services that people spending time in social applications are using to meet up with each other, share information, and build more durable relationships. Now that you are signed up, look for other ways to use these services. Again, the best way to understand the social web and social media is to participate.

Today you also got to see where location-based online marketing is heading. Rather than requiring you to click through pages with sponsored locations that someone else wanted you to see, the services like those you looked at today allow you to quickly request the nearest location of the places you want to go and to quickly and easily arrange to meet up with your friends once you’re there. As these kinds of services become more common—to be sure, they are still a bit new—creating an excellent experience so that your customers will take the few extra seconds to look you up rather than making do with whatever competitive service is nearby will become more important than ever. Read that last sentence again; as more complete information about competing options becomes easier to gather for purposes of making purchase decisions, the quality of the experience will gain in importance as the convenience of “I have a favorite, but this other place is nearby” ebbs.

Wednesday: Status Notices and Activity Streams

On the social web, questions like “What are you doing?” are conversation starters—they get people talking. Whatever it is that people are doing right now, they post it and send it to their friends, through feeds or status updates. The thinking is that if you see a friend doing something that interests you, you’ll respond with something like “Hey, I’m doing that right now, too.” The result is a conversation. When someone makes a change to their account or adds a new application or makes a product recommendation, the fact that they just did that is often sent to their friends, who can then act on this information, joining in the process and further spreading the underlying message.

Status notices are useful in a social context, especially so when they reflect things relating to what you have done—for example, posting new content, sending invitations to friends, or installing new Facebook applications. Like the whole notion of feeds and the consolidation and management of social information that they allow, status notices help you keep tabs on what is going on. Consider LinkedIn: A member gets LinkedIn requests—“so and so wants to join your network”—on an irregular basis because they are driven by the actions not of that member but by those of people who want to connect to that member. By sending these notices, members are made aware of these requests so they can deal with them in a timely and convenient manner, improving the membership experience for everyone.

So what do updates and activity streams have to do with marketing? For starters, the increasing number of status notices—many of which arrive via email—raises everyone’s awareness of the increasing burden of email. Outright spam is, of course, dealt with largely at the door—for example, through a personal, enterprise, or ISP-based spam filter. Spam filters reduce the level of incoming email to a manageable level automatically. With the increasing use of subscription services, networks, and similar—many of which send regular updates as activities occur—the number of inbound emails is creeping back up. As a direct result, all of your email communication—sales notices, order tracking, new product announcements—will come under increasing scrutiny as the number of status notices coming from everyplace increases. Given the impact of status notices and other forms of bacn (bland automated community notification), it’s evident that everything you do needs to be more relevant, more impactful, and in general more about the recipient and less about you.

Wednesday’s One-Hour Exercise

The exercise today is about awareness—specifically, your awareness of the role of status updates and activity streams. As you raise your social activity level while working through this book, you will gain an appreciation for today’s exercise.

Using your own inbox, look through all of the email you received last week. Using a tally sheet, mark off each item according to one of the following:

• Urgent: Read right away and acted on to the extent possible
• Important: Read, acknowledged, either completed or resulted in a new to-do list item
• Not important: Filed; perhaps read, perhaps tossed
• Spam: Anything routed to your Junk folder or trash that you never actually saw

When you have completed your tally sheet, add up the totals in each group. Then divide each of the subtotals into the total and compute the share of email in each group. For example, 87 spam emails out of 146 emails is about 60 percent. You may want to repeat this exercise once a month. As you become more active on the social web, the group marked “not important” will grow relative to the others. As a further extension of this exercise, repeat it, but this time do it at home using your personal email. Compare the results.

Wednesday’s Wrap-Up

Today you looked at the number of status notices, alerts, and similar emails that you have asked for in relation to the email that you know you must act on. Compare the percentages and think about the implications; chances are, the not-important emails account for the biggest share, even after the spam has been removed. As your days get more demanding—as your need to be ever more efficient about how you manage your information grows—what are you going to cut out? Chances are it won’t be the urgent/important email.

This same situation exists for your customers and potential customers. They too are swamped with information, and they too will need to prioritize what gets attention—and what doesn’t—if they aren’t doing this already.

Thursday: Activity Feeds

As you’ve been working through the exercises this week, it should be clear that in addition to creating and posting content—even to the extent that this is done by only a minority of social web participants—the task of keeping up with it all is significant. Further, this is a task that falls to everyone with more than a few friends. Quite seriously, dealing with bacn—simply knowing what to look at or what your friends have recently done—is a real challenge. Perhaps ironically, people are looking for ways to streamline the information that is being sent their way even as they simultaneously choose to expand their social circles.

FriendFeed, shown in Figure 12-5, builds on this concept to make it easy for your friends to keep up with you. Rather than aggregating the content created and placed by others, FriendFeed aggregates your content—across the social sites that you participate in—and then makes it available to those who have subscribed to you. Through FriendFeed, people can publish a single stream that contains pointers to their content as it changes. Social media (specifically, content and actions) is thereby diffused through the social web, always being pulled in the direction of relatively more interest.

Thursday’s One-Hour Exercise

Today you’ll spend time with FriendFeed. Beginning in Chapter 9 and continuing in Chapter 10, “Week 3: Social Content—Text, Photos, Audio, and Video,” and Chapter 11, “Week 4: Social Content—Ratings, Reviews, and Recommendations,” you’ve been signing up for and using social sites. You probably have accounts now at places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, or Foursquare along with a half-dozen blogs and support sites. Using FriendFeed, you’re going to create a single feed that consolidates your activities across many of these sites. With that done, people who are interested in what you have posted can subscribe to a single feed and be notified when you post anything new on any of the sites you’ve added to FriendFeed.

If you have accounts and have content posted to sites that you can use for this exercise, then proceed with the exercise. If you have or are about to set up personal accounts at the sites suggested, go ahead and do that now and then come back to this exercise.

If you’d rather subscribe to my feed, then complete steps 1 through 3 of the following exercise and then check my FriendFeed feed periodically to see what I am up to. When you have ultimately set up your accounts, come back to this exercise and connect them to your FriendFeed account as well.

For the next hour, do the following:

Thursday’s Wrap-Up

Today you set up an account at FriendFeed. The objective was for you to see how people can easily manage the diverse activities of others on the social web and how you can make your own activities easily accessible to others. From a marketer’s perspective, the takeaways from today’s exercise are the following:

• It’s relatively easy to keep track of the activities of a large number of friends using services like FriendFeed. You can use this to track competitors or other content sites that interest you. Using FriendFeed’s Imaginary Friend service, you can track the activities associated with profiles that are not members of FriendFeed.
• You can make it very easy for your customers to track what you are doing; simply offer a link to your FriendFeed profile and encourage them to subscribe to it.

Between these two applications of FriendFeed and similar services, you can significantly reduce the amount of effort required to keep up with what’s going on the social web and in the process make it easier for your customers, vendors, and suppliers to keep up with you.

Friday: Social Information and Marketing

In addition to social platforms and content, both of which are likely now finding an application within your marketing program, you have an additional set of capabilities that will help you track and manage social information. This week you worked through calendars and event listings along with mobile services through which you can connect virtual communities with things going on in real places. You looked at the issues around bacn and what it means for your current email programs, and finally at the use of feeds that allow you and others to consolidate large amounts of social data into very manageable streams. Taken together, the sources of information that define the happenings on the social web are as integral to social media as the content and networks that make up the more visible aspects of the social web.

As you’re thinking through the application of social media in your marketing program, the challenge is to think beyond the photo or community or campaign; the challenge is to think through the entire life cycle of what you are putting in place. At its core, the social web is all about relationships, and relationships take time—and information—to build.

By participating, by using feeds, by connecting your virtual events to the real world and involving the people who make up your audience, you can build strong meaningful relationships over time, relationships that will in turn help you build your business.

Friday’s One-Hour Exercise

Today you’re going to go back through the services you looked at this week, sort out which fit, and see how you can use them. The same caveat applies here as in earlier exercises: If you’re reading through the book or aren’t actually working with a real brand product, then you’ll have to tackle this last exercise theoretically. Otherwise, work through the following and note the results in your developing social media marketing plan:

• What events have you planned that could be listed and promoted through a service like Eventful? If you added a link to Eventful’s Demand It page, could you build a schedule around that?
• How can you use location-based services? You’ve probably seen the Wi-Fi warchalking signs shown in Figure 12-6. Look at the symbol at the bottom of Figure 12-6: That one doesn’t actually exist, but it should. What if you owned a café and posted that symbol on your door or on table tents, next to your Wi-Fi markers? Would more people remember to use their mobile phones to tell others to come and join them? You’ll never know until you try.
• Finally, how can you apply feeds? As you look across the channels you are considering, how many of them have frequent updates? What if you create a feed and promote it on your website so that people can easily follow all of the things you are doing as they go and look at what interests them?

Friday’s Wrap-Up

Three things should come out of your work this week. First, a lot of content is floating around the social web. You’ve seen some of the tools and services that help people manage it. By making the information about the content (the update notices, for example) more accessible, the content itself becomes more accessible. Second, mobile access to the social web is changing the way that people use online and offline communities. Someone can be sitting in a coffee shop, in the physical context of one community (the other people sitting around), and be equally present in a virtual community (those connected by virtue of the network). This happens frequently at conferences. Twitter, used as what social media and Web 2.0 change agent Ynema Mangum calls the “visible back channel,” can beneficially shape or outright interfere with the actual conversation happening on stage by merging—very visibly—the conversation of the audience with the conversation of the panelists. Finally, the amount of information coming off the social web—update notices and status reports—is putting increased pressure on your existing communication programs, and especially email; the more email that comes in, the more likely people are to filter aggressively.

What all of these have in common—especially when you consider the idea of creating a feed to represent or point people to your social content—is that the way in which marketers must now approach messages and creative elements has changed. The typical TV or print ad is not meant to be manipulated by the recipient, nor is it intended to be shown in any form other than its original. On the social web, both of these presumptions fail. Social media belongs to the recipients the minute it leaves your hand. In the case of the feed data, while your content (for example, a product shot uploaded to Flickr) won’t necessarily change, the description in the feed—which certainly will change—may be all that the recipient ever sees. How do you get your message across in that case? By creating a delightful and durable experience.

You’ve worked through each of the elements of the social media starfish model. Thinking back to my opening question in Chapter 8, “Week 1: Build a Social Media Campaign”—“If you couldn’t interrupt people, how would you reach them?”—the answer ought to be getting clear.

The Main Points

Chapter 12 was all about the verbs of the social web—the status updates and event notices that let people know what is happening. By subscribing to status updates, people can keep track of large numbers of people and thereby truly keep up with all of those online friends! Chapter 12 covered the following points:

• By combining social knowledge with real-time presence, mobile social applications are changing the way people interact in real-world settings.
• Feeds make it possible for you to manage large amounts of information. You can use feeds to keep up with customers, competitors, partners, and suppliers.
• Feeds make it possible for your customers to keep up with you. As you create social content, consider adding a feed to make it easy to track and discover.
• Social media forces a rethinking of branded content: What does it mean when recipients have a hand in the creative process and when the content itself is reduced to its purely informational state?