I’m just back from our one-day social media course with the extremely knowledgeable and experienced Will McInnes and Beth Granter from Nixon McInnes. I wanted to share a bit of what I learned. A few points really resonated with me and I think it’s worth-while to take stock of them and really try to understand what they mean and how I can use them. I have tried to summarize here what I learned and how it relates to our business. The course itself is a practical look at the steps to building a winning social media campaign complete with exercises, discussion and debate. This is where you really learn how to put ideas into actionable concepts.

Feel free to comment, agree or disagree with anything I have said. One vital learning curve is to listen, so I’m all ears. I’m also interested to hear any further learning points that other attendees grasped.

1. Respect the niche

You will get more value from your social media strategy if you target your niche market. I think this is a really important point. 200 followers on Twitter or Facebook who are genuinely interested in what you are saying and who take the time to interact with you can be more valuable than 1,000 followers with who you’re connected, but who don’t really listen to what you’re saying. Social media is not a game of numbers; it’s increasingly quality, not quantity, that matters now.

2. Break down your audience

There are three categories that you can use to help you think about the internet population and how they exist in your network.

1. 90% are Lurkers and Spectators. They consume your content including blog posts, videos, podcasts etc. They spectate and see everything but don’t necessarily interact with you.

2. 9% are Intermittent Contributors and Editors. They contribute now and again with comments but other priorities dominate their time. (partially engaged).

3. 1% are Heavy Contributors and Creators. They participate a lot and account for most contributions (fully engaged). These are the people Seth Godin refers to as The Tribe. The Tribe are your diehard fans.

Use this model to build up a persona profile of your target audience. And work at moving your audience from the 90% bracket into the 9% bracket and your all-time aspiration – the 1% bracket.

More about this theory here including a few interesting stats http://www.90-9-1.com/

3. Build the tribe – make it easy for people to interact with you

Take Facebook as an example of how to move people into the 9% category. A few months ago, they created the ingenious ‘Like’ button. This enables you to simply click a button and proclaim that you ‘like’ something, for example a photo, a video link, a comment or an event. This is ingenious because it is mobilising masses of people from the 90% bracket into the 9% in a single fell swoop. And it’s such a simple idea. This is making it easy for people to interact with each other.

Another school of thought says that it actually reduces interaction as the users are not putting much effort in, unlike when writing comments which require a bit more of an investment, but Will and Beth think that it encourages interaction. So my point is that if you can somehow make people work less in order to engage with you, then you will increase interaction. Look at how you can make your website more user-friendly and interactive. It might be something like setting up a blog and enabling people to comment. Or run competitions that are simple to enter.

4.  Reward the tribe

If someone comments on your blog, Facebook, or retweets something that you’ve said, they are precious. Nurture them, reward them and build relationships with them. Always say thanks, or add something else – make an effort to return the effort. Provide special offers and discounts to them, for example when I registered with mylunch.ie I was entered into a draw and won a food voucher for Tribeca restaurant in Ranelagh.  You could set up a loyalty scheme that they will benefit from, maybe surprise them with a gift. Sometimes we post a good book to the customer who has engaged with us the most that week.  You could even meet for a cup of tea or coffee. These are the people who are active in the social media space and they have the power to influence your reputation in a positive way or in a negative way – they will tell their friends and colleagues about you .

In the words of Will McInnes ’social media is like word of mouth on steroids’. You are guaranteed to generate more sales from recommendations on Twitter and Facebook. By rewarding this group you are starting your plan to move them into the 1% category.

5. When you make a mistake, apologise

If you make a mistake the best thing to do is throw your hands up and acknowledge your mistake, then move to fix it. This way you will turn something negative into something positive. If you try to cover it up, you will be found out and the mistake will be amplified. It can be a bit of a contentious issue and we had a really interesting discussion about it on the course. One worry was that if only a few people saw the mistake originally, are you bringing undue attention to your mistake by acknowledging it to all and sundry? But mistakes can even show the human side of the people behind the business.

Last week in a press statement, Apple boss Steve Jobs declared ‘We’re not perfect’ following a massive furore over antenna issues with the iphone 4. They are now offering a free iphone case to every owner of its iphone 4.

Everyone knows that mistakes happen; our theory is that you’re not judged on the mistakes you make but in how you deal with them. Here’s a brilliant example of how to apologise when you do something wrong http://tinyurl.com/37jaojx

On a smaller level, if you are dealing with an individual complaint, take the time to respond in the right platform. If someone slates you on a chat forum, or posts a negative comment on your blog, think about responding there in the first instance. You should also respond in language similar to that in which the complaint is made, but take care to be respectful. If Jim has spent €60,000 on a car that has broken down after a month, he probably won’t appreciate a ‘Hey Jim’.

Never attempt to censor negative comments about your brand. It will come back to bite you in the ass, and only exacerbate the negativity.

6.  Be a curator

Become a source of knowledge about many things that are useful to your audience rather than just a source of knowledge about your business. This way you will add value to what you’re giving to people and they will respect you for it. So retweet tweets that you think are interesting, share links, post reviews and offer opinions on subjects outside your specific area. This will help you build a bigger and broader audience. It could also mean talking about your competitors in a positive way. Don’t worry that you are giving them free publicity at your expense, rather look at it that you are giving a rounder view of the market and showing that you are aware of what’s going on outside your network. You should also share as much raw data with people as you can. The more they learn from you and like what they’re learning, the more they will match their needs to what you can offer them.

7. Create the flocking effect

This is what you want to achieve. There comes a tipping point when enough people are championing your brand that it starts to do the work itself. Facebook has value because it has the masses. In 2008 there were one hundred million people on Facebook. There are now five hundred million people on Facebook. In Ireland, nearly a million people are on Facebook. At a certain point it all just started avalanching for Facebook.  If you convince enough people, the rest will ‘flock’ to you. Any other ideas on how to do this are more than welcome.

8. Give social media its credit

Don’t just lob the job of ‘doing the social media stuff’ at someone in your office. Put it in their job description and make it official. The reason is two-fold: firstly you should reward and acknowledge work done: account for blog posts written and tweets tweeted, and secondly, someone needs to be officially responsible and answerable for what you’re putting out there. It’s your reputation after all and it needs to be taken seriously.

They are just some of the things I picked up on the course. The real learning happens when you’re discussing these ideas with peers and getting guidance from the experts about what is likely to work and what isn’t. Doing exercises and having debates is some of the ways that we did this.

We’re running the course again on 28th September and places are limited to 20 people.

Evelyn Cullen

Book here

Check out the Facebook pics here

Here are a few short clips of the day

What is Twitter?

What is a widget?

Twiiter – to follow or not to follow

Evelyn Cullen