Social Times just published an article today titled, “The 4 P’s of Social Media“  It does such a great job of distilling social media down that I thought it was worth echoing here.

1. Presence
2. Personality
3. Patience
4. People

Seems easy enough.  But so many marketers just don’t understand these four things.  If you can’t get these four things right, you stand to have a social media campaign failure on your hands.

Presence - Anthony LaFauce, the author of the Social Times post, made this profound statement “Presence is more than just being on social media, you need to have an actual presence in social media.”  This means you can’t view this as a banner or PPC campaign.  You have to have a real presence.  It takes time, care, and feeding to make a successful social media campaign.  You can’t pay your insertion fee and forget about it while it runs.  You need to be engaged.

Personality - This one is simple.  You have to believe in your companies product.  You are an evangelist for the company.  If your attitude is artificial, like one of those guys in an infomercial, no one will believe you.  You will sound like a shady used car salesman.

Patience - I would go so far as to use the term Perseverance.  Community building is not a project, but an extension of your company.  A community is not built overnight, it takes time and lots of care.   If you aren’t dedicated to building a community from the start, then don’t waste your time and money.  You need to be in it for the long haul.

People - Basically this point is just building on the rest.  Engagement of real people can only happen from a real person.  Putting up a message board and then never posting to it yourself is not going to build a community that you want.  You need to be involved, honestly and passionately.  You might want to read about Participation Inequality to help you understand the type of people that get involved in a community.

I encourage everyone to read the article on the Social Times site for more perspective.

It’s interesting how a passing thought becomes a blog post. John Tropea microblogs about the 90-9-1 rule, which leads me to the idea of participation inequality, which in turn makes me remember Jason Calacanis blogging about creatives, contributors, and consumers. This finally leads to this post.

In a nutshell participation inequality, or the 1% rule, basically states that 1% of your community members will create the content, 9% are moderate producers, and a whopping 90% are lurkers. I don’t see a problem with this when building communities, but the interesting question is, “Do you know who the 1% are?”

I have a customer with a very active message board based community. We measure the normal variables: New subscribers and posts per month. The problem with this is, it doesn’t identify our 1%.

It’s important to identify who are the creatives (1%), contributors (9%), consumers (90%). Track these and find out is the community growing. If your total creatives are growing, that is a good sign. The top 10% are the people you need to get to know and they are who you spend your time and effort. It’s likely that these people are the ones with some social capital to expend and with a little care and feeding will do so for your brand.

Measuring the health of your community is important. Getting the right mix of creatives, contributors, and consumers is important. Getting the contributors (1%) to work on behalf of your brand is the ultimate goal.

I work with a number of B2B companies and hear this a lot: “We don’t need social marketing, we only sell to businesses.” It might be true that you don’t sell direct to consumers, but a business doesn’t use your product, people do.

I am a man of many hats. By day I am a technologist, community marketing evangelist, interactive marketer. When I leave my day job I am a second year psychology student. How does this matter to the topic at hand? Well it turns out that we all have an innate need to belong to groups. We search out groups in which to belong. Being in a group is how we define ourselves. We need what is called an ingroup, “a social group towards which an individual feels loyalty and respect, usually due to membership in the group.” It turns out that a brand tends to become an ingroup for us.

Certainly everyone knows of the Microsoft and Apple ingroups. In general, most of us fall into one of these two ingroups whether we have done so consciously or not. Being a member of an ingroup leads us to develop what is called an ingroup bias. Ingroup bias simply means that we favor our own group over another group. If you know of the Microsoft and Apple ingroup’s you certainly have seen how passionate members of each group can get.

By seeking out and fostering these natural ingroups that form around your brand you can develop a stronger ingroup bias. This causes the people actually using your products to recommend your brand more often to those making purchasing decisions. The more often your brand is recommend the more likely a business is to purchase.

B2B companies may not sell directly to consumers, but consumers are the one using, and more importantly recommending, your products. Using social media to strengthen your brand affinity is a fantastic way for a B2B company to market their products.