The first campaign was by Squarespace. They asked people to use the hash tag #squarespace in their tweets. People could do this randomly and were encouraged to do it as often as possible. Squarespace would select a lucky winner every day and give that person a gift voucher for the Apple Store.

The second campaign was by Moonfruit. It was a similar campaign where, during a week, people could enter a competition to win one Apple MacBook Pro each day. People were automatically entered into the competition if they used the hash tag #moonfruit in their tweets and again, people were stimulated to do it as often as possible.

These brands have succeeded in getting their brand names into the social media space, but it’s been done in a dubious way. Moreover, they haven’t performed any true form of consumer engagement, which just means that they let people flood Twitter with their brand name without any proper context.

Don’t use social media as a cheap promotional tool. Use social media to genuine build relationships.

1. Preparation: Before embarking on social media activities, you should have scouted out your audience. How social media savvy are they? How large is the audience? What is the level their clout? What typical conversations (about your brand) are already taking place? Et cetera. Finding the answers to these questions helps you determine whether the audience is willing and able to embrace you within the social media space. It helps you fine-tune your expectations, priorities and going-in position.
2. Policy: Create a social media policy for those who will be involved. This creates clarity on what can and what cannot be done while engaging in social media. Prepare not only general guidelines for everyday social media activities but also prepare specific guidelines for special occasions such as publicity dramas and compromised accounts (hackers).

Know what to do when going in. Know what to do once you’re in.

However, the importance is focus. By focusing your content on a handful of platforms that meet your content distribution criteria, you take (back) control of your content. Understand how each platform contributes to your social media goals and objectives and select the appropriate ones. The power of social media is that your users will spread your content to other platforms for you.

Focus on the most valuable tools. Take control of your content. Let social media do your work.

The conversation requires proper preparation. Set clear objectives on what you’d like achieve with the conversation. Document the required and invested resources. Measure the outcomes. Evaluate your outcomes versus your objectives and determine your return.

If the return is positive, then that’s great. Continue to engage in the conversation, look where you can improve your return and execute those ideas. If the return is negative, reevaluate your approach by changing variables like tone, content and frequency. Don’t be afraid to pull the plug if results aren’t positive but aim for improvement first.

Plan the conversation you intend to have. Turn conversation into conversion.

There is risk involved though. One recent case involved Belkin’s representative of Amazon.com. Mr Bayard not only offered to pay customers $0.65 per positive review of Belkin, he also wrote positive reviews himself using pseudonyms.

Social media can make a lot of a company’s marketing more transparent, but cases like these make it a false sense of transparency. I hope that companies take an ethical point of view when dealing with customer reviews, but there will be exceptions unfortunately.

There might be more than meets the eye. Be critical.

Circuit City basically dominated the stock market—beating average performance by 22 times at its height—for a 15+ year period. However, one of the key traits of a “great” company is that it’s able to withstand setbacks, whether personnel-wise, economic or other. This hasn’t been the case with Circuit City as it closed its doors last week after filing for bankruptcy in late 2008. This obviously baffled me and I’ve tried to find answers to how this happened. In the end, it boiled down to losing the competitive advantage:

• Their branding model didn’t work anymore. The goal of Circuit City was to become the best at service, selection, savings and satisfaction. However, other market players had mastered one or multiple of these categories in a better way than Circuit City: Best Buy (service and selection), WalMart (savings) and Amazon.com (satisfaction). As a result, Circuit City failed to gain a competitive edge.
• Circuit City had a tradition of paying their employees well and training them to deliver the best possible service, but cost cutting procedures led to stripping sales commissions from sales staff and eventually to layoffs of these well-paid and knowledgeable employees. This also hurt their competitive advantage.
• The economic recession wasn’t a key driver but it does magnify the effects and was strong enough to push Circuit City over the edge.

In essence, Circuit City destroyed its business by destroying the underlying foundation on which it was built and failing to reinvent itself.

• Awareness: When a consumer is first exposed to your product. Examples are reading a review or seeing an ad.
• Interest: When a consumer becomes interested in purchasing your product/service. Examples are visiting the shop or trying out the product.
• Purchase: When a consumer buys your product/service.
• Service / Re-Purchase / Renewal: When a consumer comes back with a problem or with an intention to re-purchase/renew.

Social media provides new opportunities to enhance the customer contact cycle with new customer touch points. Using tools like Facebook and Twitter, it’s possible to have a continuously open channel with customers. Leverage social media as customer touch points to increase interaction with current and prospective customers, create an open brand image and enable cross-selling and up-selling.

Take advantage of social media to enhance your customer contact cycle.

In the same way, social media can be seen as a blend of various diverse technologies, such as publishing platforms, social networks, web applications and search. Being a proficient social media practitioner requires mastery of multiple disciplines.

Are you a black belt? Go through the various social media disciplines. See where you can sharpen your skills to improve overall performance.

• Content: Rewrite the content to be more about them than about you. While messages should cover what you’re promoting, they should also emphasize the benefits to users. Scrutinize your content and check whether its relevance is high enough for your audience.
• Form: Experiment with different types of headlines to different audiences. The headline of a press release should catch the attention of a journalist, but at the same time, it might not be enticing enough for a consumer. Play with the layout and the use of images to make your message more attractive or reader-friendly. Make use of consumer (eye-tracking) studies to see what areas should be focused.

Don’t be afraid to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.

Traditional media, such as TV stations and print publishers, are seeing consumption decline as consumers choose consume their content from a more diverse set of channels. Traditional media agencies, such as advertising agencies and PR agencies, are scrambling to keep up and justify their value/existence/involvement. Sometimes, the old business models won’t work in this new day and age, sometimes the talent isn’t available to deal with new media forms or the current regime is reluctant to change or in denial about the consequences. None of these are good reasons to continue “business as usual”. The world is changing and it requires a new approach.

Start preparing yourself to cope with the evolution of content.