Lately, I have read status updates or heard friends say to me “I am going to ‘unfriend’ all these Facebook friends that I don’t really know or care about” or “I am tired of reading status updates that have no meaning or value for me.” This one was on one of my good friend’s status updates on Friday “…just spent the last 30 minutes “unfriend-ing” people from my Facebook & will continue doing so this weekend…I was getting tired of all the stupid status updates…The line had to be drawn somewhere .” This sentiment also holds true with “un-liking” brands.

According to a recent study by NM Incite, the top reason cited for friend-ing someone on Facebook is not surprising – it’s knowing them in real life (82%). The same applies for brands – people “like” Facebook pages of brands they are aware of. On the other hand, offensive comments are the main reason for unfriend-ing (55%). According to the study, here are a few things you might be doing that will leave you wondering if the apocalypse happened and captured all your social media connections: updating too often, updating less frequently, lack of originality, too many salesy posts, irrelevant, posting repetitive and boring content, just to name a few.

The study further indicates that men are more likely to use social media for careers/networking and dating while women use social media as a creative outlet, to get coupons/ promos or to give positive feedback.

So, this begs the question, how do we manage the number of social media ‘break ups’? I use the word “manage” because, truth be told, not all people will stick with you – in fact, an interesting statistic I recall hearing on TV went something like “25% of the people you meet won´t like you and never will; 25% won´t like you, but could be persuaded to; 25% will like you, but could be persuaded not to; and 25% will like you and stand by you no matter what.” With that in mind, how can we create a positively magnetic relationship and level of engagement with the people we value in social channels?

Whether this is for your personal brand, a.k.a. “YOU”, or a company brand, the following thoughts run true and are useful in getting you plugged in with those in your sphere of interest.

1. Who is your social audience?

While your entire target audience might not be actively engaged in social media, identify what your sub-targets and potentials are and determine their demographics, the social media channels they use and their interests. This can be achieved through a combination of some secondary research and if you want to really get to the core of your audience’s interests in social, performing a conversation scan using social media listening tools will provide you with a good picture of what is going on within your sphere of interest. Well-armed with the “who” you are looking to connect with, you can move on to the next step.

2. What is your brand’s intended social experience?

Determine the purpose that each social media channel will serve in reaching your audience. Along with that comes the underlying values of the brand, your brand’s voice—remember, social media is for sharing and engaging with others. Determine if your brand will be funny, serious or provocative. Overall, the motivations behind your social presence will be evident soon enough. If they serve the interest of your audience you will have a loyal following.

3. Win with your execution

Now that you have your audience and your social experience down pat, the content needs to captivate and match your audience needs. There are many articles that have been written on creating effective content, including on this blog. Do your research and package your brand with interesting content that will set up your social community for success.  A conversation calendar that is reviewed through the lens of the two steps above will help you get organized and ensure that you’re consistent and focused in your communication.

Keep in mind the best listeners make the best conversationalists. If you are looking to create and maintain a growing, fresh community in social media, you need to establish a listening framework to monitor your audience  and hopefully draw insights that would feed back into your social media strategy execution.

gov·ern·ance/ˈgəvərnəns/ Noun: 1. The action or manner of governing. 2. Sway; control.

But here’s the thing: it’s not really about control. It’s about persuasion, especially within large organizations, and especially as it relates to social media. With free platforms available in the cloud, all your people need is an Internet connection and a laptop to set up half a dozen accounts and add their voices to the proliferation of off-brand messaging screaming out on the web.

In other words, digital governance is often all carrot, no stick – you really can’t get people to do what you want, unless they want to.

So how do you?

1. Make it easy. Governance should be about creating an environment (that means tools, guidelines, resources, assets and a clear plan) that makes it really hard, almost foolish, to go off course. Clear the path and people will likely walk on it.

2. Think about why people are “going rogue”. I get that it’s bad, I get that it wastes resources and exposes the organization to risk. But the first question you need to ask yourself before issuing the big clampdown is, “Why?” Is there a problem with your infrastructure that makes creating social programs difficult? Is there not enough guidance? If you think you have set a clear path, but people are still not walking on it, you need to find out what’s in the way.

3. Culture eats strategy. This is now officially a cliche. It’s also true. Do you have an organizational culture that likes rules, or likes to break them? Have you truly gotten everyone on board who needs to be there? Are they on the path with you, or are you a lone voice, crying in the wilderness?

Trouble with digital governance? I challenge you think about how you’re approaching it; you can’t just issue a set of rules and expect people to follow them, especially if the rules don’t take their reality into account. Get curious.

I’d love to hear about your governance challenges in the comments below.

Many of our peers and colleagues have encountered the template, and their feedback has been fairly consistent: while valuable, the Social Media RFP template is too long, has too many questions, and many clients and purchasing departments are simply cutting and pasting the content with little or no thought about their actual needs. In other words, the Social Media RFP has in some ways become more of a hindrance than a help (SMG has also experienced this firsthand).

So, it’s time for a revision (available for free download here). We’ve also added an RFP “Bill of Rights” which is intended to encourage fairness, acknowledge the investment on the part of respondents and foster the mutual respect that should be observed in all business relationships. We’d love to hear what you think about v2.0!

RFP Bill of Rights
I will not issue an RFP “Cattle Call”. Issuing an RFP to more than six or seven agencies is overkill. Instead, identify agencies you would like to work with and be selective in whom you invite to respond. Fifteen or 20 responses are too many to be able to truly judge relative merit, and it’s wrong to ask agencies who are not a good fit to waste valuable resources on an RFP they are unlikely to win.

I will be thoughtful. This and other RFP templates are intended to provide guidance, but don’t simply cut and paste the contents. Think about what you actually need and edit accordingly. Information overload will only winnow out quality agencies that are too busy to wade through all the unnecessary details.

I will do my own homework. Asking agencies to identify their own competition is only going to get you two things: a list of second-tier competitors that is of dubious value and respondents annoyed that you essentially asked them to undermine their own competitive advantage. A thorough briefing on your needs at some point during the process is also essential for success (ever heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”?). Spend the time.

I will be flexible. Yes, we know you have a timeline. We also know (even though you might not) that it is going to slip. Don’t ask vendors to meet your timelines or else. There are significant cost savings in being able to book flights in advance (and you want an agency that keeps an eye on the pennies, right?). Give respondents at least a week’s notice and be flexible in your dates.

I will keep you updated. Nothing is worse than the “black hole”. A response is prepared at great effort, submitted and… crickets. Let respondents know that their RFP has been received, and what the next steps are. When the dates slip, let them know that, too. They put a lot into their submission – show them the respect that this effort deserves.

I will give you feedback. You can’t win ‘em all – any agency team who responds to RFPs knows this well. What they don’t know (magic crystal balls being in short supply) is why they didn’t make it to the next round or win the brass ring. Acknowledging vendors’ efforts and letting them know why their response didn’t meet your needs helps them improve, and is more than a fair trade for the cost and effort invested on their part. It also ensures good feelings – you never know what your needs might be next; maintaining good vendor relationships is good business.

We’d love YOUR feedback on this latest round (please leave us a comment), and big thanks to everyone who provided us with their thoughts on the first version, especially Jake McKee of Ant’s Eye View!

This year I decided to talk about privacy, and the fact that we think about it all wrong. My presentation was titled, “Privacy is a Commodity, Not a Place”. The basic premise is this: privacy laws in the U.S. are based on the 4th Amendment, which guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”. Note the language: it’s all about physical space. The Internet has dramatically changed that, and made the physical space analogy quite inaccurate. Finally, I examined what the real value of your private data is in the real world, and who wants it most.

Here’s the deck. Let me know what you think about your privacy and what it means online:

“It seems like just a short time ago that these location services were only used by a few hardcore web tech geeks. Now they’re so mainstream that they’re taking up a chunk of the New York skyline.”

Um. No.

Foursquare has just over three million users and you need a smartphone to use it. It is far, far from “mainstream”. And the article in Mashable feels like something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately – mistaking a brand using a niche and emerging web service (the “shiny object” in the title of this post) as a way of positioning themselves as cool and hep, for some sort of validation of something as “mainstream”.

From where I sit, Foursquare and other location-based applications will be mainstream when they have 500 million users globally. Even Twitter, with 87% of American consumers aware of it but only 7% using it, is not mainstream (see: Facebook, Google).

“Coca-Cola, with its 10.7 million Facebook fans, has three to four times… [the number of] Foursquare registered users. (There are at least 11 brands whose Facebook fan pages have quietly grown bigger than the biggest geo-location providers.) That certainly trumps U.S. unique visitors to Coke’s brand website, which fell by more than 40% to 242,000 in July compared to a year ago, per Compete.”

Of course the only problem is those eyeballs are not portable. They effectively belong to Facebook, no matter that Coke and others have spent millions in media dollars on the platform to drive membership (as they do to drive traffic to their branded sites) and the fact that those people have opted into membership on their brand page.

This of course leads to a very interesting concentration both in terms of audience (Facebook owns it) and media dollars (Facebook gets an increasing share since they deliver it to the right people – and measure the results). Pretty much a win-win for Facebook… but something that brands, accustomed to simply signing cheques, rather than helping shape the advertising platforms they’re using, need to start thinking about very seriously.

The article goes on to point out that Facebook is essentially morphing into a CRM solution – a “big list broker like Experian” – except that they are free. Of course the irony is that brands are subsidizing this new facet of the site, and if Facebook decides to change their revenue model, they could also end up paying for what they helped build.

Catching up on some reading this weekend, I consumed this article from AdWeek with interest. It was essentially a litany of agency bitching that location-based service Foursquare didn’t have the tools, manpower or know-how to cater to their needs.

“They’re not responsive and extremely hard to work with,” said a digital agency exec who asked not to be named. “It’s hard to bring campaigns to life. Nobody knows how to create a badge or ask [Foursquare how] to enable behavior. It’s black magic.” In general, he said, “it’s pretty much unworkable.”

Guess what, folks? Foursquare is a startup, not CNN, and they are figuring out their ad model in this emerging space in realtime. That’s called “innovation”, and in a nutshell? It’s not them – it’s YOU.

Agencies are accustomed to working a certain way (especially when it comes to media buying), and when you deviate from that, it does not compute. Emerging platforms like Twitter and Foursquare are opening their doors to advertisers, but one of the biggest issues is that many client agencies simply are not flexible enough nor do they have the expertise to do it right. They revert to their comfort zone, which results in below-average performance and all kinds of friction around actually getting the work underway. Just ask Digg and Twitter; we’ve seen it there firsthand.

So what’s the answer? It’s all in the right approach and attitude. Imagine this – as a participant in closed betas and other first-of-their-kind opportunities in the paid social space, advertisers often have the chance to co-create by providing meaningful feedback. The rewards of participating well can be significant (we’ve seen results of between ten and 40x that of “traditional” display advertising with our clients, never mind the value of the business intelligence gathered). In other words, you don’t just write cheques, you get to help influence direction in order to generate maximum value. I’m not sure where else an advertiser would have the chance to partner, learn and get a significant competitive advantage in quite the same way.

However, the catch is that if your agency isn’t adaptable or able to help you keep pace with innovation (and likes to prove it by bitching in print) you might have a problem.

[photo courtesy of Kathleen Leavitt]