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.

I picked this up from a tweet by Robert Scoble. This is an interview conducted by Shel Israel on a social media campaign run by SeaWorld.

I have explained this to my customers hundreds of times. It’s nice to see a large company that gets it. More companies should be conducting these types of social media campaigns as an integrated part of their marketing plans.

Marketing is changing.  If you have missed the boat on this you might want to catch up.  Traditional marketing is a sinking ship and all that cash is bailing out to more fertile pastures of the online world.  So what is the key to interactive marketing?  I think a lot of people would say its PPC and I think they would be wrong.

Don’t get me wrong.  PPC is the cheapest form of online advertising you can get.  Cost per acquisition is minuscule. This makes it an important interactive tool, but the one you might be missing out on is social media.

Social media is a big change in the way we think about marketing.  Social media is about finding, and more importantly building, clusters of highly qualified potential customers.  Once you have a customer cluster you can drive home your marketing message in a personal way.

I have two great examples of this recently using Twitter.  The first example illustrates a way to build a customer cluster, the second illustrates how to push a customer cluster to your product.

A few days ago, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, announced on twitter that as soon as he reached 20,000 Twitter followers he would give away a free MacBook Air.  Watching his numbers grow is like watching a gas gauge in a SUV go down.   For the price of a MacBook Air he is going to have a customer cluster of 20,000 that he can now continually push to Mahalo.  Cost per acquisition is around 9 cents a person.

Today I read about (via a Scoble Tweet) a site named Wine Library TV.  This is a video site about, you guessed it, wine.  But the interesting thing they are doing with Twitter is offering Twitter exclusive deals.  Anyone following Santa GaryVee in Twitter will get the chance to receive free shipping, discount codes, and other deals on wine and wine related products.  Thus building his customer cluster and driving highly qualified traffic to his products.

Squarely in the dazed and confused column, AOL acquired Bebo today.  I find this acquisition to illustrate that a company can exhibit a psychological illness.  AOL is clearly, schizophrenic.

Everyone is trying to get their hands on a social news site like Digg.  AOL has one that is far superior to the Digg technology, Netscape…er…Propeller, and they are, without a doubt, going out of their way to kill it.  Here is a company that does not comprehend the social media landscape.  Frankly I would consider AOL a dying brand, maybe not dead today, but they are certainly fading.  Now they go and get themselves a social network.

Clearly this is a company in need of, well to be blunt, a clue.  I hope that Bebo can survive, but if AOL’s treatment of Netscape is any indication, Bebo will fade into irrelevancy within a year.

On the bright side, it’s nice to see the relevant social network space getting weeded out.

Research conducted by Duncan Watts and now CNET Networks would lead you to believe so.

Here’s the catch. Duncan Watts is an academic, a sociologist. Neither he nor I should ever come into contact with each other according to his theories. Yet I am now connected to him, albeit in an ancillary way, yet connected enough to have read his Fast Company article and his book Six Degree’s.

How is this possible? It turns out that Duncan Watts, in order to reach a greater audience, got published in an online magazine that is trusted and highly connected to the technology world. This in turn got him noticed by Guy Kawasaki. It turns out that Guy is also a trusted source of original content and he is highly connected to people via his blog. He is the very definition of an Influencer or to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology he is a connector.

Sure these connections are not strong ties as in a familial tie, but weak ties (the topic for another blog post). Enough of a connection exists that someone living in north eastern Wisconsin (virtually the middle of no where, serious it just down the road) is connected via a connector in California, to a Academic at a college in New York.

This very connection seems to imply that something may not be entirely correct about the interpretation of Duncan Watts’ work.

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.

Today we have access to a river of data bombarding us from all angles. I used to send coworkers links via AIM or e-mail if I thought it was something that was useful for their job, a project we were working on, or if it was something I knew was of particular personal interest to that individual. That is fine but it’s a time consuming interruption for me and for them.

I decided to use some of the tools I have hanging around to streamline this flow of good information. The bulk of the links I wanted to share come in primarily via RSS feeds. Since I use Google Reader for all my feeds, and it has the ability to share posts, I thought this would be sufficient.

But it turns out that this solution isn’t ideal. Although I can share posts through my shared feeds url, I can’t tailor them for the different individuals I want to share with. Everything is rolled into this one feed and it’s up to them to sift through it. If you make it difficult it loses it’s value.

Instead, I decided to use del.icio.us because it gives me the ability to tag each item. So I tag an item with my company name if it would be of interest to the company or to an individual if I think it will be of interest to a specific person. Now all that has to happen is each person subscribes to the feed for the tags with their name and the one for the company and they get a highly tailored stream of interesting articles. The added bonus to this method is that if they ever want to revisit a link later, they can just go back to del.icio.us with their tag and find the link.

This is a good solution but a better solution, which I have yet to find, would enable me to add my friends list (like FaceBook), it would be my feed reader (like Google Reader), it would let me tag (like del.icio.us), but would add the ability for us to comment in a threaded way. If I only had the time this would be a great product to build. Basically it is what I was hoping Spokeo would morph into and with the latest changes they have made, who knows they might get there.  Maybe Digg or Propeller are closer to this but nothing I have found is right on yet.

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.

By now everyone has some issue or another with Facebook.  I think applications are great but Facebook is killing me with kindness.  But this isn’t my big issue, or really issues since I have two that I just can’t get over.

First, we need levels of friendship.  Some people I am acquainted with others I am friends with.  Acquaintances want to follow me and sometimes I want to follow them.  But friends I want to keep in touch with much better than an acquaintance.  Give me a variety to choose from and allow me to tweak how much I want to follow the person.

Second, search.  Didn’t we figure this out in the 90’s?  If I search for George Jetson I don’t want to wade through a list of George Jone’s.  I want search to be relevant not filled with irrelevant people.

I guess I have these issues with nearly every social network.   Why does simple stuff like this seem so obvious, yet so ignored?

I found this via Web Strategy by Jeremiah. This is the best in depth look at utilizing community in a large company I have seen. This presentation details how much work it is to cut through the artificial barriers companies put up that hinder progress and growth.