Just because you have data doesn’t mean you know the full story

Since the banner first hit the web marketers have been stuck in the same paradigm – the data is there so measure it. And why not, with data coming in seconds rather than days or even weeks, the temptation to assume it’s all right there is great. Yet we’ve started to learn that people are using multiple ads, are narrowing in with many searches over time and conversions are taking longer and longer as the web becomes a corner stone of shopping. Single metrics are dangerous.

The opportunity cost of using social media only to acquire

Instead digital marketing, and even more so social media, must be looked at as holistic program that is as much a necessity as creating brand awareness and consideration is.

Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase, according to an October 2008 survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates

One could look at driving user reviews as an acquisition effort. There’s an audience to target, an expense to drive, host and promote reviews and a lift associated with a product that has them over one that does not. But it’s deeper than that.

When the majority of your customers are seeking reviews it’s not just about what you can increment, it’s about what you stand to lose. If you opted not to push for reviews because you couldn’t justify the cost on new sales, you risk all sales, not just new ones as people turn to other sites or product lines that offer the support they’ve come to expect. That’s not captured in lift metrics.

There are no longer channels, even tactics outside of marketing, must complement to earn a sale

Your investments into all forms of media drive people back to you or your partner’s digital properties for research.  Just like with reviews, if someone who uses Twitter sends a message for pre-sales questions and gets nothing… not a customer support message, not a suggestion of a peer to peer area, just silence. That speaks volumes about what your brand will be like after they buy.

This extends to all channels… after being intrigued by a radio spot and going a company’s website a user who discovers a blog about the culture and expertise becomes a great choice, even a premium value, while the other company that just promotes their tradeshow booth feels empty, or “salesy”. Customers don’t care which channel gets attribution for the sale, they simply look for validation – a good buy or a bad one.

Let’s not forget the brand awareness opportunity either

This isn’t just about tactics that support a product purchase on the front end either. Just like TV is run on a negative upfront ROI basis to produce over the long haul, a social campaign can have the same value.

750 million people on Facebook outrank major sports events, dramas or reality tv, and they’re around just about every day. So if a customer goes knocking on your Facebook page and it isn’t there, or isn’t doing a good job of holding their attention when they “fan” up, that’s a wasted opportunity. But with social this isn’t just prospective awareness, this is true engagement opportunity where a good program can have that person showing affinity and even spreading it. How does that factor in to upfront sales?

Measure but measure the right picture

By no means do I advocate stopping or backing off on measuring your campaigns but instead it’s about making sure you understand their full impact and measure that. The problem with data is that we tend to focus on what we have easily available, and that’s new customers who come in directly or old ones who stay attached… but engagement, validation, cross-channel sales, and many of the other components of social are not easily studied and thus they are skipped and that not only short changes your programs but opens the door to cutting something that’s far more important than you may realize.

Social media, while powerful, authentic and important only works if people see what you’re doing and that’s where advertising comes in as a symbiotic partner

The problem we see today is that people expect everything to just go viral. We’ve all be asked [told?] to make a viral video; to make a product get “out there” with sharing alone. The reality is that very few products even have a chance to “go viral”. For every blendtec or old spice is a thousand more brands with a good product that simply isn’t what people want to share around the web. That’s why on any given day the top 50 YouTube videos include one product related videos. Yup, one.

Advertising is the dependable version of viral

Instead of asking “how do I make this ‘go viral’”, which is something you can’t control or guarantee, you need to ask yourself: “how do I take something that is credible, authentic and trustworthy and make it get exposed”. This is why advertising becomes remains so important in an era of social media – advertising is your guaranteed source of visibility that insures success whether or not a viral pickup takes place.

Social Media changes how you advertise

Google AdWords, Targeted Banners, Lead Generation Campaigns, Facebook Ads. Advertising has been used to sell your brand’s value under your voice, with your credibility attached. Social integrates into this chain to make your ads authentic and stand out [at least until everyone gets on board].

Rather than saying “50% off on the Amazing Widget” say “50% off on the 5-star rated Widget” with quotes from reviews visible around the ad unit. Rather than a stock photo of actors enjoying their new RV pull in a video from your Facebook campaign of a real family talking about their experience with a link to read more stories. Bring the same transparency you have on your reviews, Facebook page, user community and other social features right out and into your advertising – the more real time and authentic, the better.

Product packaging is another great place to bring social to life and get in front of the customer. Think about two boxes with nearly the same product, one has a summary rating, an expert rating and a QR / RFID / short url link to read more reviews while the other doesn’t even have a mobile friendly site. Even at a higher price the brand willing to put it all out there is worth a closer look. Mobile has become far too prevalent to think you can hide or out impulse research, so instead beat the customer too it.

Don’t assume that simply because you have UGC on your website or social channels people are going to find it. You need to tell them it’s there.

By keeping the issue quite companies have tried to suppress it, avoid having their consumers know there’s anything amiss, anything wrong out there and as a result, we’ve left our customers unaware and easily fooled. We have made it easier for the counterfeiters to get ahead. It’s time to talk about what we can do as marketers. We can stop the demand and make this an unprofitable business to be in. 

During my time at Monster we were aggressive against counterfeits taking down thousands of auctions and sites daily but we also weren’t afraid to talk about the problem to insure our customers were protected. If your brand is ready to step up and fight to stop the confusion, reduce the demand, and hit the counterfeiters square in the wallet here’s the tips from what we learned to get serious. 

Monster Cable puts a warning message on every page alerting consumers about fakes, showing them the top offenders and offering alternative dealers to shop safely with.

Step 1: Remove the veil, admit the issue. 

If you do nothing you will continue to lose up to 10% (and in some fields much more) of your sales. Period. 

If you do nothing, 10% of your customers will not know they bought a fake product so when the poor quality replica fails they will take to social to trash your premium brand. You will see more bad reviews. 

If you do nothing the counterfeiters will evolve and improve leveraging their nimble, profitable model until they have a better SEO, SEM, Social and Media strategy that you do. Counterfeiters are even buying social ads these days… anything you we do they can try faster. 

If you do nothing you are continuing to build an uneducated customer and partner base. Every day you say nothing the counterfeiters profit allowing them to fine tune, expand, and make it that much harder to stop them. 

Telling our customers something is wrong is exactly how we fix the problem. Doing nothing to inform does nothing to stop that demand and that loses sales, hurts brand credibility and gives the counterfeiters a chance to equal up to you in product quality before you even see the issue – there goes profitability and share prices. 

Every day thousands of consumers search around trying to find out how to buy authentic products, if your brand isn't providing education, it's anyone's guess what they will learn.

Step 2: Warning customers = protecting customers. 

Once your organization is willing to tell the world about its problem it’s time to do just that. Think about the issue like you would any other marketing campaign and you can find an ROI to justify the time and resources (true fact, educating consumers will not only reduce fake sales but it also makes for great brand marketing and is extremely viral bringing new customers in). 

It may not be pretty but Rolex is one of only a few watch companies to reinforce the problem with knockoffs front & center on their website.

You’ll want to educate in ways that help solve the problem, that is to say, you don’t want to just say there are fakes, you want to tell people how to avoid them and why. 

I suggest you look at this as a multi-channel initiative. Online is certainly the place to be seen and heard, especially since so many sales take place through the web, but the same rules apply to a press release, retail storefront, or even an event: 

Have your facts lined up. You don’t have to share every detail or trick; just enough to get people to understand that buying fake is no good. 

1. What is being faked, how it hurts (safety, quality, performance implications)
2. How customers can avoid fakes (spotting tips, serial number registration)
3. The really bad guys that you can’t get rid of (your bad dealer / site blacklist)
4. The good guys people they should buy from (your site, retailers, partners)

With your facts in hand it’s just another marketing campaign to slot in. 

Step 3: Put your message where people are looking  

In writing this post I did dozens of posts about top brands who are known for having huge counterfeit issues and in just about every case when I searched for “brand + avoid fake” or “brand + buy online” what I got was user guides, forums and comments about fakes. How can you stop people from buying something they don’t even know exists? 

1. Buy up search terms from people looking to avoid fakes or to buy authorized.
2. Try swapping in counterfeit messages to general brand terms to see if that attracts attention over more general marketing terms.
3. Push the same messages back to your site with the same urgency that there is business impact. If the issue is big, the warnings should be big, if it’s smaller, they can be relegated to a navigation item or footer.
4. Spread the issue out to marketing partners, authorized dealers, microsites or anywhere else that has your product and brand.

eBay Sellers and Third Party sites are providing their own opinion on authorized products. With SEM they can easily be replaced with official education.

Wherever you place the message remember to keep it simple and interesting… I’ve see a lot of sites with warnings that are so long & boring a contract lawyer would give up. Give customers the facts and give it to them in a way that represents your brand as well as any other educational effort you put out there. That’s all they need. 

Step 4: Leverage the customer to become the educator. 

Your loyal customers are the most potent source of education you can possibly have in addressing counterfeits. Their action as advocates can turn the issue from boring, corporate education and make it real and important. Through social it’s easy to spread the message, identify bad sites, and even create a culture of customers who call out the bad guys and people buying from them. 

In the end quality only goes so far, especially when the savings are 50, 60 or 70% but if it’s not socially acceptable to have the knockoff, you’ve got a big advantage. Just look at the purse industry: while everyone knows where they can buy a similar-but-different knockoff, no one wants to be caught dead with an imitation version. In luxury goods that is essential to surviving. 

In the consumer audio space, Beats by Dr. Dre has become a household name to youth and the counterfeits have followed. From photo galleries and posts about fakes to made-for-web videos [contains profanity], Beats has used social media channels from twitter to facebook to youtube to engage with loyal customers and build a negative stigma around “#FakeBeats”. This authentic conversation has in turn created a class of brand advocates so passionate that when someone buys or even asks about a fake site on a blog, forum or social network, they jump in and respond fiercely to warn them away, often before a community manager or brand employee has to get involved. Their advocates bring credibility to the problem and make it uncool.   

This single post on fake headphones from the Beats by Dr. Dre facebook page has over 1,800 engagements from fans.

Leveraging the power of the fans to spread the word and defend the brand trumps any other strategy. People will dispute a brand’s message on quality, warranty or other advantages but just like a user review is trusted, a post back about a bad experience goes miles. Enough posts and you’ve got a trend that influences purchases online and off. 

1. Leverage social channels to educate your followers about the issue.
2. Empower them with examples, bad sites, and one-to-one responses on the inevitable questions so they know what’s bad and what’s good.
3. Allow them to dialogue with other fans, calling out sightings of fakes and making it something advocates are looking to attack. Put reporting right into social channels.
4. Encourage customers who buy a fake and come to support or legal for help to share their experience back to your social channels as well as other blogs and channels they use to build the network effect. your own educational center so it’s not just your brand speaking, it’s real customers with real stories and faces explaining why it’s just not ok to make the purchase.

Educated customers will spread the message. This user went to Craigslist and posted against fake products because they saw and wanted to help others avoid a problem.

Putting it all together 

As marketers we can’t individually stop an issue that spans the globe and brings in billions but when you look at the issues facing enforcement for both government and our brands, it’s clear that there won’t be a short term end but there can be short term wins by curtailing demand. 

In the long term, educated customers avoid buying fakes, turn into advocates and, if that spreads enough it will disrupt the flow putting your brand on the list of companies not to bother with. Offense up front is a whole lot more effective than relying on your last line of defense when this much is at stake.

Van Veen’s comment, while just a single remark in a much broader interview, pries into an ongoing dilemma that marketing is facing – who influences consumers?

In the “old days” brand marketing became almost formulaic: Take a compelling message, put a compelling plot behind it and pair it up with an icon to really drive results. Browse old TV or Print ad archives and its clear: this worked. Fast forward into the modern age and celebrity visibility has not gone away, in fact thanks to inventions like reality TV, twitter and just the simple amount of information consumers are able to access, celebrities have likely become even bigger.

But the role of the celebrity has changed.

Today’s celebrity is important and visible making them an ideal cornerstone to whip up attention. Attention however is not, as any direct marketer will tell you, sales. Today’s consumer is informed; right or wrong there is more information out there than anyone wants to read, a significant shift from when John Wayne put his name behind Camel cigarettes.  A celebrity is an icon.

“Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase” – Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – October 2008 via Business Week

On the other hand, if you take a look at the Social Commerce Stats page BazaarVoice maintains and you’ll find literally hundreds more quotes about the power, demand and use of ratings and reviews like the one above. When it gets down to brass tax, it is the everyday user who, through a good post, a bad post, or even no post, makes or breaks the sale.

One conversation between a group of friends; one pseudo-anonymous 5 star review on Amazon; one rant on a Facebook wall. It all adds up to trust, credibility and authentic support. Technology has made people aware of what other people think. The user is now the influencer.

The right celebrity still has value, but relevancy matters.

When Eminem paired up with Chrysler for the Super Bowl / Detroit ad the first comments were surprise and after a few minutes the conversation became very positive (10 million views later it’s still rolling with 32,000 thumbs-up to just  1,600 down). Eminem wasn’t saying this was the best car ever – he was an icon of the location bringing attention back to it and the brand that is represented by it. An endorsement of the brand and where it’s going was something authentic and it worked.  

Similarly there are many celebrities who have built their brand in social channels. Ashton Kutcher is probably the most common example, and why not, he has over 6.5 million twitter followers and while the vast majority of these individuals are likely not even using Twitter anymore, have little “Klout”, he’s spent enormous time setting up his personality as someone accessible and connected. If you can get @aplusk to talk about a brand that’s relevant to who is as a persona, you can find success.

Flip it around and unfortunately there’s a lot more bad than good. Look at the 10 Strangest Celebrity Endorsements  blog and you’ve got the former U.S.S.R. president positioned next to one of the flagships of consumerism: Louis Vuitton. Flip on TV and you’ve had the outspoken A-Team member, “Mr. T”, talking about cooking products. These are ads that draw visibility, perhaps get the person’s attention, but are not going to close a sale [unless it’s a practical joke].

It’s not a black and white subject… brands will not, cannot just drop celebrities, too much visibility is at stake; but the icons that they use must be the right partner to support their brand, and frankly, the icon’s as well.

So what is a marketer to do?

In my career I’ve had the chance to work on a number of celebrity driven marketing campaigns and without giving away any specific on which ones or at which role, I’m quite certain that they create noise, attention and awareness which are all good things. Sales however require something more – visibility paired with believability.

In a world with social media nothing is more important than the authenticity that user generated content can bring, except perhaps for people wanting to see if the product is really that good in the first place. You can’t do a good job in convincing people to buy when no one is looking at you, so while I wouldn’t rely on a random celebrity to sell my products any more than I would believe their ad as a consumer, their voice can bring the right attention to push people to take that next look.

Just imagine an ad where a major celebrity, someone with a family, in the spotlight talked about their first trip to Disneyland and told you to read a million “real” experiences on the new Disney stories page. Or an ad with a musician telling you that they went to iTunes for the best new songs, rated by you, the users. Attention getting, believable and relevant.

Celebrity marketing can work. It just works best when you understand that an icon doesn’t influence, we do.

Earlier this week Bing introduced Twitter content into search results and for select individuals is even including Tweets directly. This is likely just the first step in what will become a much larger change in how search works. Twitter’s open, searchable network offers a whole new opportunity for search to remain relevant and real time. Even Facebook, the site which excelled because of it’s ample availability of controls and privacy options is moving towards open content and real time information as it pushes users to share pieces of their interactions more publicly.

While Bing may be the only engine to use social natively, consumers are already asking for others to do so. The Realtime Twitter Search Results FireFox plugin pulls tweets right into a search result, which as the screenshot below shows, puts social media front and center for a searcher.

As social becomes more categorized and even more utilized it’s completely possible that we will see social discussions start to replace webpages to answer questions and seek information. Users may have the option to view matching sites, tweets or simply post their own question which, thanks to real time networks, will likely be addressed in a matter of minutes if not faster.

All of this means that brands who are not participating in social are missing the opportunity to be seen well outside of the traditional social walls. Looking at the example above there is a clear opportunity to reach right into what a consumer needs and route them back to your business. Whether you’re a national chain looking to add to the conversation about your deals or an individual store talking to a local consumer about a question they had, when it starts showing up in search results not being found isn’t an option.

Frequency. People bookmark and feed blogs so yours needs to be updated on a fairly regular basis if you want it to gain any long term traction. While daily updates would be great most of us don’t read all of our favorites every day and wouldn’t be able to consume all that content. I suggest getting a post up once a week unless you’re writing extremely informative articles in which case people will wait a few weeks before dropping you from their list.

For example Avinash Kaushik’s analytics blog updates every other week or so but each post is filled with screenshots and actionable resources that takes some serious time to digest so even if I have to wait for an update it’s worth it.

On the other hand GrokDotCom by Future Now updates several times a week and while each post is generally informative, they tend to be shorter in length and something I’ll skim through every few days to catch up on.

If life gets too busy to post for a few weeks it’s always advisable to put up something, even if it’s brief so people know that your blog isn’t dead but really if you suspect you’ll be away or slammed try and craft something in advance and stick to the two week rule.

Relevancy. If all you needed to do to have success was to post something blogging would be easy but with millions of blogs out there (really there’s millions) relevancy and utility is as important as frequency of not more so. This is especially true for corporate blogs where there’s often a lot of “information” to post but very little actual “content” that people want to read. Without relevant content people won’t follow your blog and certainly won’t share it with anyone else thus defeating the purpose. To truly grow your blog needs to go beyond corporate speak or rehashing other people’s content and create.

My thought is that product launches, demos and other promotional items are interesting but really just noise and you should work to maintain that one quality post a week even if you’re adding additional information for marketing purposes far more often.

Starting up. The last thing to consider is actually the first thing in blogging – a new blog. While you can get away with weekly or bi-weekly updates when you start out you need enough information for people to get your message. This means creating a series of articles to either launch immediately or frequently over a few day period.

Next time: Finding inspiration for content when there are no new products or announcements and when creativity starts to dry up.

Launching a branded forum opens up a lot of doors but also requires a lot of decisions and upfront work. The first step in the process is solidifying your focus, identifying necessary resources, picking your technology and setting up the basic controls. In this part of my blog post I’ll walk through the full range of software, the options you’ll want to use (and the ones to lose) as well as help you put together a response plan and policy.

Deciding on your focus:

Chances are you’ve already identified a purpose for your forum but if not it’s important to do so before going any further in the process. While some communities combine different areas it’s more common for a company forum either to be all about support or all about product & discussion. Depending on the primary goal you’ll need different tools, technology and resources and of course will be measuring value differently. If you do decide to put both sides under one roof that’s ok too — just be prepared for more resource requirements and a larger project.

Identifying your internal resources:

Before you start any setup or customization it’s essential you know just who will be on your site and how you plan to make it work. I often see branded communities where marketing is the only one tasked with looking at things (and the only one with keys to do anything) resulting in huge gaps in support and unanswered issues.

The simple fact is your community will take time and resources. If you’re thinking you can turn your branded community into some wonderful peer to peer discussion you’re probably wrong. Very few brand communities ever end up becoming huge discussion sites and those that do are generally in very specific niches (like for a video game). Instead think about your community as a place for topical discussions where customers may come for help, to give input and to see what’s up, not somewhere they idle for hours a day waiting to talk more (although it does happen now and then).

Instead you need to be responsible for your own feedback when users aren’t around to do it. This means putting together a list of the major topics you expect to be talked about and working with people in your company to “own” them. Sometimes these people will need to post directly, other times they may just relay comments through another (like in the case of a product manager wanting to get comments on a new item or possible idea).

Often times the best resources come from your customer support department that’s already use to getting a wide range of common questions, dealing with customers individually and talking to them in an appropriate way. And while it’s good to have higher level visibility of the community don’t confuse a desire for actionable visibility with the realities of an executive who likely doesn’t have a whole lot of time to jump into discussions and may not be the best one to do so even if they do. A combination of “ground troops” and higher ups is almost always ideal.

Over time as your site grows and you do foster a discussion base it may be possible to recruit members into the system either as power users who just respond and help or potentially as moderators to handle some of the issues that face any community like abusive members, spam, etc…

Creating a response plan:

Once you have a list of resources you’ll need to develop a response plan. Response plans are basically a document or set of documents that covers exactly how you’ll respond and who will respond to issues of varying types and scale. Without a response plan all you have is resources who are support to work together on a completely virtual and very fast past system and who are unlikely to know what to do n every issue. This opens the door to areas going unanswered or getting answered by the wrong person.

With a response plan it’s clear who needs to own what and how they’ll handle it. This is an extremely important step as it’s rare that your community will be managed by enough internal people to go running around and collect answers from each resource when a question comes up (although if you drive hard enough you may just be able to get to that point). This way if an area is going unanswered you know who to point to and can figure out if there’s been a failure in the process or if resources need to be reselected based on other commitments.

Finally a response plan should cover crisis issues like a product blow up, a spam attack or a large rant. It’s important that in each scenario you know whose responsible for responding and how so that instead of trying to craft a message about a problem with that product PR knows to make one after they do their main release and post it. If there’s one things forums really require is speed and having to figure out who tackles a bunch of complaints after a long weekend isn’t acceptable in your turn around time. People will give you a little breathing room but not much,

Selecting the technology:

The first part of any branded forum is of course the forum system running it. While developing your own technology is always an option it’s probably not necessary given the number of robust products at just about every price point.

Self Service (Low Price) Providers:

On the lower end of the spectrum there’s a wide array of self-service tools designed to be installed and customized by an in-house IT team or consultant. Most of these are written by small firms or individuals to be highly flexible but are intended for more hands-on types who will be hands on in setting up features and changing layout styles. Self-service tools generally offer little customization or support from their developing companies although they come at a very cheap price point which may leave budget room for hiring outside expertise.

Self service tools are also generally backed by large and open development sites where free addons can be found to extend their core functionality adding everything from post rating modules to advanced moderation systems, surveys and much more.

Providers:

vBulletin – Likely the most popular and feature rich tool in its class. vBulletin has been in business since 2000 and offers a rich featureset of forum tools including unlimited forums, user profiles, avatars, basic polling, paid membership options, on-site private messaging and much more. vBulletin is widely selected for it’s well known interface and ease of customization.
vBulletin’s runs $180 for a lifetime license with a $60 yearly update fee.

phpBB – Another well known player in the category, phpBB is a free application released under the GNU license. phpBB offers a slightly different style and set of options but for the most part provides the same toolset as vBulletin but with an open development group rather than a company behind the product.
phpBB is offered as freeware at no cost.

Invision Power – While a direct competitor to vBulletin and phpBB, Invision Board positions its self with a slightly different service offering professional support and modification services. Out of the box Invision Power is slightly underpowered compared to phpBB or vBulletin but still provides just about every tool needed for a branded community.
Invision Power licenses start at $149 ($299 for business premium package)

Other providers: In addition to the companies I’ve specifically mentioned you may also want to look at MyBB, Yabb,SMF, and others.

Full Service (Mid-Tier & Enterprise) Providers:

While it may seem smart to pick a solution by your own company size (i.e. enterprise for enterprise) there are times where crossing into the lower (or higher segment) products may make more sense. The features you’ll find between self-service programs and the high end enterprise tools are surprisingly similar and in many cases, self-service outweighs enterprise. The real advantage of higher end tools comes from reporting, data capture options, integration, and professional support & services.

Reporting with self-service tools tends to be limited to bar graphics of posts, threads and users while enterprise tools may offer detailed analysis of activity flows, contributions, visits, time on site and more traditional web analytics. And of course the more you can see about your community, what people are doing and what they’re using, the better informed decisions will be and the more you can do to grow it rather than spending time going in the wrong direction.

Data capture (surveying and profiles) is probably the most actionable advantage of the enterprise tools and are used to bring customer data back into a single place where it can be evaluated and reviewed. For some enterprise platforms data capture includes robust surveying as well as detailed user profiles while a few providers going even further and combining micro-profiling techniques to build a user profile that grows over time.

Integration support can also be a substantial advantage for your community depending on your launch plans. By combining other data sources (profiles, purchase history, etc…) customers can be verified and identified enabling for more reliable comments and even advanced permission tools to grant access to certain members while excluding unknowns. The more data you can bring in or out of your forum the more actionable information becomes down the road and for responses.

The most noticeable difference between the self service and enterprise tools is in their support and that’s not just IT support. Enterprise packages are often backed by thought leaders and community strategists who can help your brand craft an approach for engaging customers. For a business just getting into social this can be a crucial as launching without a good understanding can lead to a complete failure and waste of time or a huge blacklash as your community becomes a place for critique rather than discussion, support and sharing. Enterprise providers can help identify these issues up front and may even have moderator staff available to help manage your community as it grows.

Finally you’ll find that enterprise providers tend to be more professionally focused on developing features that a business needs rather than ones that are peer to peer specific. You’ll also find more attention to data, usability and the customer experience on the site.

Providers:
Lithium – Providing a full range of tools from forums to blogs and chat, Lithium has been in the community space for many years and offers an enterprise version of the self service tools with a look and feel that you may find on a peer to peer community (that’s a good thing).

Clearspace Community by Jive – Perhaps the most enterprise looking tool, Jive’s platform works as a social networking platform with an approach on centricity and bringing together tools from forums to wikis in one place for the user and admin. As with Lithium, Jive is backed by an expert company with traditional type account and strategy teams available for support.

Groupee – Originally a self-service provider, Groupee has evolved into an enterprise platform that centers around forums but also offers many additional features including photo sharing and sophisticated profiling. Groupee is sold on a CPM model rather than a post volume or support engagement Groupee is much like its former self-service competitors but also extends to offer a simple API and more professional services.

Satmetrix – Less known than the other companies, Satmetrix is an enterprise provider with a less competitive looking tool and set of features but with some very powerful profiling tools. Because Satmetrix is often used for “closed” customer-only communities there’s not a lot of feature details known.

There are a lot of advantages for enterprise tools but they come at a cost, a technology dependency and sometimes don’t make sense. If you are a “larger” sized company and end up using a self service tool don’t worry, you won’t be alone.

Features to look for:

As a branded community your feature needs will be different than with a typical peer to peer community. While you may have some out of the box needs to address your particular customer segment be sure to look for this core set of features with any solution you pick or build:

- Unlimited forums, threads and posts for discussion to take place on
- User profiles that can be extended through a control panel interface to add fields & options
- User selected avatars, badges and other basic display options
- Personality options including images, smilies, and font/colors for posting
- Access to private messaging between users and site administrators
- The ability to highlight announcements and stick posts with key information
- A Permission system that allows you to identify what tools and areas users may access
- A moderation and reporting tool to control content and close or remove threads
- The ability to set alerts using email or other tools for incident reports
- Basic polling within threads to capture data (ideally sophisticated surveying as well)
- Simple access to account data to review, export and email users
- The ability to integrate with your CRM system or external database
- At least basic analytics on activity and growth of social media metrics
- Advanced controls to turn on and off features and customize options without code changes

Setting things up just right

Every forum program out there will offer you more features than you know what to do with so when it comes time to configure it all it’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed. My suggestion is to start thinking about how you want your community used and what you’ll be ok with and build around that goal at all times as you review tab after tab of options.

Starting at the core it’s pretty obvious you’ll want different forum categories for different topics and sub-topics. For a support forum this may take the shape of different types of products, customer levels or issues. For a more general discussion community breaking things into the topics you want discussions to be centered around will encourage activity to grow in a certain direction. All forums should generally start with a category and sub-forums for announcements (site updates & happenings), product or service information (new launches), support (getting help) and possibly introductions.

Along with the forum structure there’s a good deal of access settings in most software packages to go over. Most forums can be left fairly open while others like announcements may be locked down entirely for just administrators and feedback ones may have a hybrid where users can respond to posts but not start threads. Access for editing threads is also something to look at as you consider how each internal resource should be utilized in your community and who you want to be able to make changes in the event of an issue.

Finally consider how each forum needs to look and operate. If you’re asking for support inquiries in one forum consider using a thread prefix option to make it easy for identifying types of problems and responding to them. If you’re trying to create an expert content section see if you can make your first post stick to the topic while subsequent posts show up more like comments than a threaded discussion.

Next you need to decide how users join and what information they must provide or can provide. Lock things down too far and you’ll find no one participates, ask too little and it’s hard to know who you’re speaking with. An ideal arrangement is generally to get a few basics (username, password, email, first name, customer type) as required upfront basics and then prod for additional details afterwords (post alerts until someone fills out a profile, send an email reminder, etc…). If your forum supports micro-profiling to use polls and other one off questions to add to a user’s profile be sure to consider that as well.

After you have users able to register you have to decide how much freedom to give them. Do you want everything to be about straight posts and answers or do you want some personality. This can be as simple as picking fonts and colors to be used or adding graphical badges under user profiles to denote seniority in the community, contributions and a professional role. If you’re validating customer identities be sure to acknowledge this with a badge or colored username.

Graphical options like smilies, post icons, and any other image can (and should) be tailored to fit your brand. Using your color scheme for a new post icon is great… having a smilie with a machine gun isn’t. Thankfully most forums come pretty simple out of the box so it’s more a matter of reviewing what’s been set rather than trying to remove stuff that doesn’t belong.

There’s probably also a host of control focused tools in your software package to focus on from censor options to moderating new users and threads to banning options. Review each of these to insure they’re fair (no banning all your competitor’s names unless they become an issue) but also cover you (no swearing should be tolerated or show up).

Ultimately your goal should be to make a friendly community that that has enough flexibility and personality to feel like a forum but that stops short of anything you’d find in a peer to peer community. Each customizable element should be thought of in terms of the audience, the possible benefit and abuse.

For example, avatars are a very common feature on forums and may make great sense for a branded community focused on younger consumers who are discussing a themepark business. However open access to avatars in a b2b community may make less sense and instead providing company reps with access to their logo could be a better fit. Similarly do you want to allow users to upload photos which could be used in product samples or not? Should they have access to posting links to other sites? The ability to start polls? Just about any feature can make sense for the right branded community but there’s a wide difference in what a very open, discussion oriented consumer forum can use versus a b2b or tightly focused support one.

The forum rules

After everything is setup and ready your final configuration step is to put in place a set of rules that govern what users may do, how the site works and the ownership of it all.

If you’re familiar with the recent FaceBook debates over privacy than you may be a bit worried about backlash for your rules but relax, changes are your community will have a lot less emotion tied to it than a 175+ Million user system. Still you want your rules to be clear but also fair. Users should be able to expect to be treated properly and as humans. That means not removing content just because it isn’t positive, not banning people who aren’t the biggest fans and not trying to own their thought process. On the other side you want to be clear that SPAM, swearing, flames, personal attacks and anything fraudulent or fake isn’t acceptable and will be removed. You also may want to claim use to provided content for marketing purposes (remember, people are coming to your community to interact with you – not because they want to share photos with their friends).

Remember, your rules aren’t something people will follow like a service agreement so only exclude things you plan to enforce. It’s not a fun process to ban a user from breaking one rule when half your community is breaking another one.

Your legal department may also have a thing (or 5) to say about what to include here.

Coming up next

Look back for part II of this series next week where I’ll discuss getting your community started with seed content, attracting customers and prospects and building discussions and relationships. I’ll also be diving into the bottom line results of a community and ways to measure the success in dollars earned and saved.

There’s no doubt that the current economic climate requires certain cuts and pull backs especially as customers tighten their own wallets but does that mean you should be cutting your online budgets in marketing or optimization? While many out there have jumped up and say yes, stating that less consumer dollars necessitates less spending and less project development to save cash I’m not in agreement, and certainly not when it comes to taking big cuts and drastic steps.

Online marketing tends to be about direct response with branding as a secondary goal thus no matter how the market is doing, budgets can still be managed to profit and there’s no reason to change that. So instead of rushing to cut budgets for the sake of cutting budgets how about reviewing the efficiency of your campaigns? If you’re not already doing so, start tying your orders to each campaign, bring in discounts, shipping costs, gross AND net profits to your analytics and optimize your campaigns cutting what fails but investing in what makes a good return. And don’t be afraid to challenge your idea of a good return either; the 50% margin you made last year may seem mandatory but what does the business really need to cover overhead and turn a profit? Will 40% do? How about 35%? Be realistic, be data driven and watching things, there’s plenty of places to find results and probably a few to find more results than before.

Project work and “optimization” also seem like good areas to throttle back on at first glance. It saves money, reduces resources and allows the organization to become more profitable – but not only in the shortest of timeframes. With a concerned consumer comes a lot of shopping around and that necessitates having the very best experience; hiccups and UI issues will hurt more than ever. You don’t see major retail stores skimping on signage and displays for the holidays so why should your website? If anything now is the time to be putting money into making improvements. Now is the time when consultants are available at better rates, when developers and agencies likely have less on their plates and when you can improve things for less. Skimping out to save a few bucks may seem prudent in the short term but all you’re doing is lowering the odds that you capture what sales will take place. And let’s be honest here while there will be sharp declines in some verticals, most categories are seeing a few percent drop which means most of the orders from last year will happen again. You want those orders.

Of course this isn’t absolute. If you’re seeing the same spend but conversion rates are dropping on an optimized page while traffic remains the same it may be wise to throttle back just like you may want to hold off on building the very coolest dynamic checkout process in favor of something sleek, easy to use but a little more cost effective. Just don’t make the mistake of cutting back on profitable campaigns, analytics or optimization efforts. Research needs to take place, changes have to be made and campaigns that turn a profit should grow. It’s easy to blame the economy, scale back and call it “smart planning” but if you aren’t putting your best foot out there to pick up the sales that will come I don’t call it smart, I call it missing opportunity.

So what gives? Why are marketers having trouble optimizing their campaigns and adding features? Click in to keep reading…

So I’m browsing around some of my favorite blogs tonight I’m seeing a lot of the same suggestions from site to site… FutureNow is talking about common shopping cart mistakes, BeRelevant is linking to a post on using analytics to drive email, LunchPail is explaining the basics of using cookies, and Bazaar Blog is hyping up the perks of social media for increasing sales and decreasing returns thanks to relevancy. What’s interesting here isn’t what the suggestions are but that they keep coming up, month after money, year after year. One week I’ll see a topic covered by one blog, a few weeks later by another and I don’t think it’s a result of sites ripping content ideas.

So what gives? Why are marketers having trouble optimizing their campaigns and adding features?

Working with a lot of companies I use to discount a lack of change to a lack of IT resources but I don’t think that’s the challenge most of us face, even if we’d like to write it off as the big issue. The truth is most sites are adding features and tweaking tools. Most are expanding and while resources may be limited, the IT world isn’t saying no, the marketers are through their priorities.

Acquisition has always been the focus of the marketing world and generally that makes sense… but only to a degree. However online marketing isn’t just about driving people in. Traffic volume only means something if you sell ad views and even then it benefits from focus and relevancy. Brand awareness is a great metric but it doesn’t make profit and in this economy it’s the goal for only a few businesses out there.

What matters is sales and results but still most marketers seem to prioritize based on expanding their campaigns. What I see and hear is an old dilemma — push more money into SEM, build a few new landing pages and improve reporting to drive traffic or improve the checkout process. Spend time emailing customers with discounts or to encourage reviews. For whatever reason growing the top of the funnel seems to win time after time so the optimization experts continue to end up frustrated as marketers ignore the backend and ignore the customer’s experience.

Why not focus on acquisition first and foremost? I’m not suggesting that you don’t focus on it but I would strongly urge every online marketer to focus on optimization just as much. Sure your site may convert an acceptable rate, maybe even above the rate you think your competitors get so adding traffic makes more sales but does it make more profit? With a little optimization and knocking off some of those easy wins you’ll boost your conversation rates and maybe your average order size and repeat buy rates as well. That’s no laughing matter either — a simple 5 or 10% increase in conversions on a decent or large scale site can mean enough revenue to exceed company goals or to add in a better promotion campaign to drive some serious volume.

And face it, its difficult making things grow and work when your conversion rate isn’t going up. Adding more traffic to the pipe to get less revenue makes no sense yet it continues to happen over and over.

It’s not just about doing major initiatives too. Most of the posts I’ve referenced apply so sites that come off as state of the art. Often times best practices are applied — to the big picture. A new shopping cart is rolled out, better product pages or new image tools get added in but the basics are often looked as too simple to matter. The truth of course is that the basics are what make the experience and unlike with branding or interest marketing, when you’re trying to drive sales online, the customer experience is what matters, it’s all that matters.

With a tough holiday season already started I challenge every marketer to spend just a couple of hours reviewing their site for those common issues be it UI hiccups, bad error messages or missed easy wins like sending an email when someone bails in checkout and prioritize just a few resources to address them. If you haven’t don’t this already I assure you, the results can and will astound you and may just make you hit your net rev. numbers for the period.

Last week I put up an article about ways to get your brand into user generated content and social networking websites in which I mentioned that if you aren’t willing to move fast, you shouldn’t move at all. This morning’s release by EA of a Scrabble Game on FaceBook serves as a great example of just why you have to be ready, willing and able to move quicker than quick to play in the current market.

So EA released scrabble, what’s the big deal? The deal is there’s been a scrabble “knock off” (Scrabulous) for over a year on Facebook with more than 450,000 daily users (putting it in the top 10 apps on FaceBook). Now the official version could potentially have a better feature set, interface or just plain work better but Scrabulous is a huge success and knocking it off it’s block would be just about impossible short of getting it legally removed (which has a whole set of brand implications). EA may very well see traction and pick up with its game, but let’s be honest, when something has over 10% of a network using it daily EA would have to have something many times better to get even a moderate drop off from one to the other.

On the flip side, had EA, Hasbro games or anyone else involved in the official scrabble game made a move earlier to develop their own game or strike up a partnership/ buyout of Scrabulous, all bets would have been off. Suing an app into oblivion can certainly get the dice reset but at what cost to the brand and it’s long term reputation?

However, while this topic has been covered six ways to sunday with just about the same analysis everywhere, I do see a potential move for EA here — get their app working really, really well in the mobile world. We’ve got the iphone, the iphone knock offs, smart phones and later this week (can’t wait) the new iphone. There’s a big door opening to getting more games working on mobile devices so if EA can spin out that way they still won’t get huge numbers immediately and are unlikely to ever unseat Scrabulous but for the networks with strong mobile adoption, it’s a pretty compeling arguement to be able to post & play from anywhere your phone works. Having a better offering almost always gives you a play, how big of one, well… let’s just say the real moral of the story here is to move fast or pay the price, and I don’t see any technology, branding or advertising changing that.

That all said, whose up for a game (with either app).