From where I sit everything in “new” social media is applicable to forums… it just hasn’t been prompted. What forums need is the same centralization other sites have been built around, what forums need is a feed to connect a user to their contributions, to their buddies and to the information that makes sense to them.

Whatever forum technology you have now or are thinking about bringing in down the road be sure it offers a portal, a way to collapse information and to get users from point A to the point B they want without surfing through dozens of sub-categories and hundreds of links. I’ve recently come up with my own interface for the vBulletin forum system which provides an a feed with elements including posts, profile updates, social group requests and much more. While it’s too early to talk about the impact it had, the initial comments from the sites using it and their users has been positive. I suspect those that really embrace taking their forum from a list of categories to a feed will see more activity and more visits as their users are able to sort through the noise quicker.

Now that you’ve identified your resources, technology and got a head start on setting up your community’s options it’s time to get it launched, growing and turn it into something your business can benefit from at the bottom line.

Seeding the community

Communities with no activity, no content and no members fall flat on their faces no matter how strong the brand behind them may be as visitors end up without anything to participate in and all alone. Thus before any emails go out, announcements are released or the world gets to see your community it’s absolutely essential that there be some level of seeding to provide a foundation and work out the kinks.

Seeding a community doesn’t necessarily mean faking discussions or users but rather is about strategically building content. Content starts

Once there’s a small base of users, FAQs, and other resource relevant content it’s time to bring in an “alpha” group. For a peer-to-peer forum this generally means a group of known associates who are already interested in the topic. Brands of course don’t tend to have any such group so customers have to be used and ideally those customers are ones with a high affinity and loyalty for the brand (segment “A”). Getting the seed group started is all about identifying a short list of customers (a few hundred ideally) and preparing an email to invite them into the beta site.

For many people being invited to the “prelaunch” is an impressive feat and something that makes them rally behind the site & brand and contribute heavily. Of course not everyone will end up sticking around or even show up in the first place which is why it’s important to ask enough people to join, have enough staff involvement to make it clear that your commitment to the community and introduce enough topics through your internal seeding process to give them somewhere to start.

Once your seed group has had some time on the community it’s time to bring people in before they run out of discussion topics or interest.

Launching to the world

An ideal launch is fast, heavy and hard driving as much activity as is possible. While it’s possible to launch with just a new link on the navigation bar or bit in a newsletter email small launches tend to lead to small membership numbers and therefore limited growth potential as visitors see little going on to compel them to join the branded community versus a peer to peer one in the same space.

Launch tactics start with traditional promotional changes like adding the community link to navigation elements and email templates, sending out a dedicated announcement email. The opportunity for real growth however is in pushing to other sources – including community relevant information on packaging (“for support see www.oursite.com/support) , in instore materials, directly in ad campaigns (“get comments from real customers”) and of course social networking channels (networks, tools and even other communities).

Launching also means morphing existing community related campaigns to include or point to the new forum. For some brands this is as simple as directing keywords like “discuss XYZ”, “XYZ reviews” or “XYZ forums” to the forums while for those with more robust community tools it may mean a new blog post and link on the blog structure, an updated twitter profile, an announcement to facebook fans and so on.

The more distribution points brought into the initial launch the more successful it will be. For some companies even going so far as to buy media to promote the community makes sense but often times a community can get started without any real marketing or ad costs although it’s always a good idea.

Develop a strategy for long-term growth

Like a gym or any subscription based business, forums have a natural growth and attrition pattern that, despite all the effort in the world, never goes away. For branded communities these retention rates can be very, very short with the majority of new signups joining the site, posting one or two questions and then bailing. Even those users who stick around and become active participants will eventually drop off whether it’s months or years later. This is normal but requires that there be a constant influx of new visitors to the community to refill both the short term and long term membership rates.

This of course means continuing to visibly drive traffic far into the future and well beyond the initial seed and launch efforts. For the most part a long term strategy can look much like the initial launch strategy but with a clear path for continuing to build engagement. Setting objectives for monthly member acquisitions, a list of forums and social networking tools to be involved in, and offline or product standards to continue to highlight the community help to insure that membership doesn’t stagnate.

Beyond direct promotion long term growth can also be achieved by building a word of mouth campaign behind the community. Communities that make it easy for members to bring in their own contacts and social networks to show photos, have their peers get answers and so forth lend well to social media sharing. Being responsive and proactive can also draw in mass social media attention on blogs and larger networks or PR all of which helps keep people aware and coming in.

Keeping long term growth also means long term moderation and response. While it’s tempting to put effort into the initial launch and then pass the day to day off to volunteer moderators or a lone customer service agent that won’t cut it. Keeping the “brand” involved with engagement from more senior roles and the marketing team is a long term part of a community and without engagement the community will suffer while much of the opportunity for value will be lost.

Keeping up with questions

Just as involvement is essential for growth it’s also essential for getting a positive vibe on the community. Forums that leave their users without answers for days on end tend to find hostile members who consider the brand old, slow and not good. Equally damaging if there is not a constant level of involvement from the brand users may begin to feel complete ownership of the community as it has become “theirs” instead of

Keeping up is as important as launching in the first place and to do so it’s important to be active in bringing forum content to the resources assigned to manage it (see part I for more on resources allocation). Luckily most forums allow members to receive updates when topics are started or responded to and some can even be extended to send SMS updates. Larger communities may require moving away from email and following RSS feeds which easily showcase active topics.

User alerts can also be helpful in responding to issues like spam, abuse and misplaced threads and should be farmed out to a number of resources such that someone is available to deal with them as often as possible. If a community has volunteer moderators they will likely take care of most of these issues but since the community ultimately reflects on the brand it’s important that their actions are followed up on to insure fair and equitable treatment of all members.

Of course email alerts are only as good as the response given to them which is why it’s essential that someone manage the greater view of the community and check into subforums and issues to insure answers are coming, are satisfactory and fit in with the direction of the community.

Aside from alerts and administrative checks, having resources review the forum at large is by far the best way to keep up with the pulse of it. Successful branded communities exist beyond Q&A type questions and by having brand resources respond in forums from welcome areas to general topical discussion helps show knowledge, expertise and fosters a better relationship between the brand and the user base.

Some moderation required.

Eventually all forums require moderation be it removing of blatant SPAM, discussions of a competitor, inappropriate users or flagrant trolling. For the most part moderation is a straight forward process that is more about timeliness than thought (removing spam is a matter of getting there quickly to hit delete) however there are times where it becomes much more about politics and user relationships. Whenever a user crosses the line attacking another member, flaming the brand or doing anything else that would get their post removed or pulled the process becomes much more delicate and requires a step back. Users and posts will have to be removed from time to time although often times merely engaging with them to point out the issue can be enough to stop future problems.

When a user does end up past the line and needs to be removed the process should be done so much like a termination with documentation gathered and stored, the user notified and their account immediately removed. Comments and questions about the ban are ideally responded to once without diving into specifics and closed. Sometimes users are happy to see the user removed, other times there is backlash but so long as the decision was made fairly and appropriately it will generally be forgotten in time.

Following and enforcing the community rules put in place during the setup phase of the process is the single most important step in moderation and in the event that the rules don’t cover an action they must be expanded before action is taken.

Growth through features

While expertise, responses and visibility all help get people interested in the community it’s almost always features that separate a community. For branded communities featuresets tend to be pretty straight toward and basic but they can and should be thought of as expansion areas. A brand trying to encourage customers to share photos would do well to add a more robust photo gallery if they don’t have one. A dating company looking to bring their users together in telling stories about their matches may add a tool to let users crate individual blogs rather than full threaded discussions. A manufacturer may build a simple interface to let customers comment on the service, value or deals they got at different retail points.

By finding innovative ways to show products, stories, experiences and get users interacting the community becomes more useful and people have more reason to share it and stick around themselves.

Finding real bottom line ($) value from the community

Ultimately communities aren’t about following trends or being social (hopefully). They’re about measurable results for the business. Like most social networking measurement and bottom line results aren’t a simple item to report on and understand. Conversions are generally not immediate, may not use a preferred tracking link and are often not even part of the discussion.

In fact the measurement process begins before any posts are made, reports are opened or data is gathered. The first step isn’t about data, it’s about goals. While many executives will point to a community as a source for conversions and ask that reporting prove how many such actions took place, that’s not the way to measure community value. Conversions are ultimately just one piece of the puzzle and generally a difficult one to track. Instead communities must be measured on a variety of metrics from awareness & positive impact to reductions in support and eventually conversions. Each of these elements will of course have a different weight for every brand which is why they have to be discussed before a community is launched or measured. For some businesses merely reducing support can “prove” the tactic while others will aim for a combination of sales lift and brand impact.

Measuring these elements is a difficult challenge as most of anything “concrete” takes place down the road and long after the community visit meaning no tracking links, few cookies and a lot of soft value in awareness. Even support issues are hard to measure as having a forum may bring more people forward solving issues that plague repurchase rates and satisfaction but which would have never been asked with a phone only support system making it hard to determine cost savings to support vs lift in customer loyalty.

To discover into community impact which can take time and also have immediate analytics companies generally divide reporting into two areas – community metrics and business metrics.

Community metrics refer to actions on the community which can often be correlated to a business value. For example, if user registration grows 20% a month for 2 years it’s clear that there is more value from the community. If posts in the support forum are made by 20 unique customers a month there’s much lower support reduction than if they’re made by 2,000 unique customers. If the average visitor remains active to the community for 120 days versus 30 days it’s likely the community has improved their brand loyalty.

Each community metric can be further delved into by profiling customers, using survey or segmentation data to understand who they are and for some businesses even correlating it against sales.

For example, a subscription business selling online may look to have each community member tagged to a customer ID and then compare the length of stay of users who visit the community frequently versus those who visit infrequently vs those who have never visited.

For a more traditional etailer, measuring future sales for community members by looking at email addresses and possibly even data captured in the community profile may help to explain a lift in sales rates.

This sort of analysis leads into the second and most sought after data – business metrics. Business metrics are reports or data points that indicate a direct business impact. While these are hard to fully vet (you’ll never know every conversion that was related to your community) there are a few simple ones that are a good starting place. Tagging forum links for conversions will give some picture of conversion rates; giving users tracked referral links can even further extend this. Community specific promotions and coupons also add to the conversion picture. For support looking at customer calls versus support forum tickets can show the number of inquiries and the potential reduction in costs that meant. Feedback and surveys can be correlated to money saved from conducting formal research and testing.

These insights only start to scratch the surface and real digging, profiling and correlating is required to really understand lift. Since most brands ultimately turn back to conversions as a measure of success most research focuses around this. Asking customers in a generalized way how they heard about the business and if they were referred or if they used the forum is one way to pick up on larger conversion trends. Looking at regional or time specific sales in relation to community membership or promotions is another. But again, conversions are only a small part of the forum picture and evaluating awareness, positive social comments (to other sites) and community participation can show results that are far more beneficial than a few direct sales.

Ultimately every branded community should strive to create a comprehensive report showing known (certain) impact to support, awareness and sales as well as inferred value (surveyed referrals, reductions to call volume since launch, improvement social comments, better brand interest in measurement studies, etc…). Only through a comprehensive report can a brand really start to understand the overall value being brought in from the community.

Long term success & the “dream” goal of communities

While most branded communities remain functional sites there are some that start small and end up growing into much larger discussion portals home to diverse topic arrays and a whole lot of search engine listings, viral buzz and opportunity. This is the ultimate result for any branded community and while rare it is something that can be marched towards. Having a sticky and wide topic is certainly important (a tv show or video game has a lot more discussion possibility than a screw or computer mouse) but beyond that there’s no single tip that will take your community to this point. However by listening to the requests of users, finding features to expand and offer and by understanding that ultimately even your branded community is owned in great part by your users (without them you have no community) you can take the steps appropriate to bring your community down that road and perhaps to mass market success.

But even without a huge audience just having engagement is a huge opportunity to improve relationships, gather insights and even drive some sales for any company.

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Missed part one of this series? Find out more about setting up your community including software selection, configuration and resource allocation.

If you run a big, or even just an older brand’s online presence you’ve probably had the “viral” conversation at least once and are downright sick of executives asking you how the company can get more “social”. While a lot of companies have put a great foot forward in building their own communities, this is a difficult proposition and even if it succeeds, it’s only going to reach a small slice of the viral world. The truth is, most user’s live on big networks (social networking sites) and niche sites (the independent forums, blogs, etc…) so let’s talk about some ways to reach out in someone else’s field.

Before I start with specific tactics I’ll begin with a single rule which I consider to be the guiding principle of involving your brand in a community. At all times the community and the user will be in control, not you and not your brand. This goes for external communities and generally for your own as well. Not willing to swallow that reality? Don’t bother trying to get into the space… it will end bad (either a wasted effort or a very bad PR outcome). Why do I say this? Because many, many, many good companies have gone in foolishly thinking they can control the consumer. I don’t care if the consumer is using “your” site or a third party site… if you come in and crash their parade in a way they see offensive (censoring, deleting, spamming, etc…) you’ll have more bad posts going out there than you’ll have time to read and even if there was something erroneously said about you, you’ll have given the poster enough ammo to drive a nail into your name overnight. There’s too many ways for consumers to talk today for you to control them, so don’t bother.

If you’re willing to accept the potential bashing and have a good air conditioner in your building (plus a few sleeping pills), there’s a ton of opportunity to be had to bring people into your customer for the first time, for a repeat purchase, to keep them engaged and simply to grow the reach and awareness of your overall offering.

User Reviews: These days most sites have user reviews if they offer products, so let’s forget on-site reviews for a second and talk about reviews that live off site. Getting involved here is tricky to say the least. You should never be in the business of “seeding” or “faking” reviews but that doesn’t mean you can’t throw some weight in. Got a new product offering?

• Why not having some of your past customer or early adopters get a free sample in exchange for a review. This is an old PR tactic but it works wonders online and even translates out into the blog and forum worlds. Most people never expect a company will notice them and just talking to them can give you a huge response and build a very loyal following.

• Another popular interaction with reviews is to post responses. Some sites clearly allow this (i.e. BizRate) and others may not do so yet, but if there’s a lot of discussion about your offering, now may be the time to ask and/or suggest they do it. When you’re responding to reviews you gain the chance to show that your organization does deliver service and is there for the consumer in the event of a bad review but good reviews are where you can really shine. Use good reviews as a place to respond thanking the consumer, offering ideas and involving them in the brand. When someone reads a good review it’s a positive tick for your business versus the competitors but what if they see you encouraging and supporting that user proactively… what if you suggest more ways for them to use your products that resonate with the reader? Boom. You’ve increased the power of the review.

• Harvest reviews (with permission of course) from sites and include them in your own materials. This works with all types of reviews and is really amazing when taken offline as Walmart has recently done. Harvesting reviews can also be very helpful in building up your own review library initially or just as a means of showing your consumer feedback on truly “independent sites”. You don’t even have to take the reviews to accomplish this… if you have a 5 star product on Amazon say so. They’re independent enough to the consumer and hold great brand weight so why not use that to your advantage?

User submitted video: Again I want to start this tactic with a rule. Video is not applicable to every company, period. Let me clarify that because it’s not accurate perhaps, user generated video is not acceptable in every context but it may be overall. If you’re Boeing airlines, video could be a great way to attract potential employees but that would likely need to come from verified employees, trying to use YouTube to get videos about working at Boeing from the public – not as smart a move.

• Open the doors to video submissions that will make it somewhere. The weight loss industry has used real clients for decades as a means of proving efficiency; online video has made this applicable to everyone. If you have a strong tv brand using video to recruit talent can be an amazing way to build a campaign and save a few bucks on casting. Just think about it, you get the chance to have thousands of people “audition” (with exposure) and the result is that they get to become your star, or one of your stars, or just a star you push over to PR for coverage. Either way it’s the best contest I can think of.

• Not every brand can put people on tv or the front of their catalogue but you can always run a traditional contest promotion. At this year’s eTail I heard someone from Ice.com talking about a few campaigns. His comments indicated that some promotions worked better than others at driving ROI but that most had good impression rates. For a jewelry company, something about posting your love story or why you deserve the perfect ring which people can vote on. For an online dating site, user submitted stories and experiences that let you win a romantic trip. For a software vendor, an example of art or a module created. For a show or movie, reactions from fans. And so forth. There’s an endless number of options of how to get these going and get them viral but the idea is to get people posting their own thoughts and expressions which they’ll want to share through any means available (email, social profiles, blogs, everything) and then let people vote or rate things to bring more activity and more involvement into the mix from the “fans”.

• Create your own videos and post them. It goes without saying that your videos need to be interesting, unique and posted to the right site but for a lot of companies that’s not a problem. Years ago I remember a dive business I worked with had an issue where their website got turned off for using too much bandwidth – people were viewing their video too much. At the time no one thought much of video and there wasn’t even an inkling of YouTube – bandwidth was at a premium too — but man, just think about that; too many views? Too much traffic? All this company did was posted an interested video on their site and the word spread all over dive forums and inboxes. What if they took that same (or a new video of a similar nature) and threw it onto a Dive Video site or YouTube or both? Put up a little profile, a link at the end and wrap the product in a bit and suddenly you’ve got a ton of exposure from something with a very low production cost. Even if only a minute fraction were to become customers that’s still a great branding opportunity and as was the case for this business, they were already shooting video so just about any sales would have made it profitable.

  If you can’t afford to shoot new footage but shoot for other mediums, consider repurposing or creating “b roll” footage. Repurposed video doesn’t tend to get as far although I’ve seen it get a few eyeballs but “b roll” can do really well, especially if it’s slightly humorous, shows a celebrity or is just unexpected. Coming from a world of “managed” brands it’s hard to think about showing your company’s goof ups, interactions or side remarks but that’s part of your face, your voice, and can lend great credibility to showing that you’re not just about overly priced commercials.

Forum communities: Involving yourself in most forms of social media is tricky but forums often take the cake. Successful forums are generally home to deeply attached members, long standing leaders and may be founded entirely without commercial goals making them difficult to approach both from a user and owner side. That’s probably why the best results come from companies that take the time to engage the forum owners/ leaders before they step in. Some promotion tactics may not require any formal discussions as many won’t require financial contribution but it’s always a good idea to introduce yourself, to find the lines and to get ideas from the leaders… asking them lets them know that you’re not here to push your name, you’re here to participate.

• The best way to get buzz on a forum is to participate and I do mean participate. The deeper the participation, the better the relationship, but even a casual conversation is a start. Just bare in mind that if your brand has a negative reputation, even if it’s mostly positive, you may open yourself up to a lot of bashing and will want to have a response strategy in place before you jump in. This shouldn’t scare you away from participating however – people are already talking about your brand and while responding may draw a few more flames, it’s also an opportunity to set the record straight, much like issuing a press release about an issue. When you participate by name you get the chance to explain your policies and offerings, your benefits and the reality of your business.

  But when you participate in a forum don’t limit yourself to just talking about your brand (unless requested by the site owners of course). Most companies have experts who know their fields and if you’re on a forum it’s because people are talking about the topics your brand knows about, so help others, respond and show your expertise. It’s amazing how positive this sort of interaction can be and chances are you don’t even have to mention your own url to get a benefit out of it. Just by having a username and signature that refers to your company gets you noticed but when you show that you’re an expert and valued resource willing to interact with customers, you’re showing them that you relate to their needs and aren’t just about keeping to the old-world relationship of customer and store. Chances are not everything you do is perfect but when you open up your brand to communicate with your customers, they tend to be grateful for it, and even if there’s some negativity, there’s generally a lot more positive reactions going on, even if they aren’t all stated.

  If you’ve got the resources, kick this up a notch and see if you can get your own forum, moderators or other means of being a fixture of the community if not a pillar. This ultimately means tying your brand to the community (you don’t have to be exclusive but if they go down in flames, you’ll have an issue) and it also means you have to get into the promotion side of things to get people using your area… luckily that generally means being active and useful rather than doing anything considered typical promotion.

• Supporting a forum in a visible way is a great way to get recognized and be seen as a positive influence rather than a negative one. Of course this can mean traditional banners but those are far less interesting than a deeper dive… say sponsoring contest by providing a trip or one of your products or building/ sponsoring a tool with your branded logo that powers it as opposed to just having a banner on the top of the page. This opens the door to you being seen as a part of the community rather than a logo on the top and extends your participation, if you are indeed participating.

• Many communities have a lot of photos, videos and other posted going on and if you’re working with these for other purposes, social or brand, they can be wonderful to repurpose on a forum. Pushing out photos of new product offerings, b-roll video from a shoot or extra shots of a item at a tradeshow or around the office is all great stuff to do on any viral site but when you do it on a forum, there’s a lot of chance for consumers to respond, to throw in their feedback and to start getting hyped up about the offering. You can tie in these postings with initial notification lists, find beta testers and get the word out quickly and easily.

• No matter what you do, even if it’s running banners, relate them to the forum and its needs from the message & creative to the landing page and the offer. Your forum campaign is likely going to be a whole lot different than the banners you may be running on portals or your AdWords campaign so don’t kill the experience when the user clicks off to your site. Instead build out messages that extend the experience and keep it obvious that you’re specifically working with this community so they feel like there’s a shared relationship when they hit your site. And that helps push them to convert.

On a final note about forums, while it is important to be willing to take some criticism and negative backlash, you also need to be careful about the community you chose to stick your neck out in. By their nature some communities are more apt to bash than others and some end up creating cultures that almost encourage ripping on companies. Unless there’s a serious shift that you want to get across, spending your time in a community that hates your company, or just likes to rip on all commercial entities isn’t the best use of time so do some evaluations before you reach out.

Social networking sites: They’re hot, super popular and according to the media, somewhere your company has to be. While the first two are definitely true, the third is something that really depends. To be crystal clear, I say this as an avid user of FaceBook, formerly of MySpace and a few other smaller social networks. While most of these sites have done a good job of branding into older demographics they still are not for every company and for many companies, getting into other social sites that fit a specified niche just makes more sense, even if the consumer base is larger on the top networks. However, if your brand is applicable, wow… the reach potential is amazing. The difficulty is finding ways to get people to you.

• Applications and widgets have become the hottest part of the social networking world in recent time but again, proceed with caution. This isn’t field of dreams… build it and they may come, or they may not, it needs to be interesting and that often means very little in the way of commercial. If you look at the top applications on FaceBook this is perfectly evident – there are no retail brands running top 10 apps. Sure these apps are almost all commercially developed but they’re developed for use and engagement which drive ad revenue, not brand recognition or sales.

  If you do decide to build your own application, be sure to do your homework first. There’s a lot of tools out there so it’s fairly rare to see something truly unique and if there’s already an app in your space that’s failing, ask yourself why (is it a bad app, poorly marketed or something great but there just isn’t interest). If you’re developing something new, get some feelers out there to see if there’s truly a marketplace and look at similar apps to help gauge how big it is. When it comes down to actually developing remember that apps do well when they’re subject to sharing and have a lot of collaborative elements. Building the coolest game in the world is great, if it centers around your value proposition that’s even better but if there’s no way for people to tell each other about it, it’s a lot less useful to you.

• If you can’t find the IT resources or don’t have a good pitch to create your own application, renting space or advertising in an existing application can be a great way to get exposure and unlike with your own app, you don’t have to attract the users. With so many applications out there, you want to be sure your partnership is actually beneficial so be sure to look at the number of people using a program as well as the pageview and unique visitor metrics. Unfortunately for advertisers, many of the apps on the market do very well at driving in revenue and may want CPMs that just can’t be justified but there are gems out there and with the right type of promotion, you can get some nice traffic out of the partnership. After all, who wouldn’t use a Victoria’s Secret sponsored superpoke or gift for Valentines?

• Applications aside, there’s a lot of content posting and information being exchanged on social networking sites. Be it questions on LinkedIn, Videos on MySpace & FaceBook, news articles, or whatever, if you have something that people want to share, you can drum up a lot of branded response. Video is especially good for this and if it’s popular, people will push it within their own networks. Of course the trick is to extend engagement to having your video link into your own micro-community (preferably on a social site) can help keep the conversation going.

• Applications, video, it’s all good for sharing but doesn’t tend to sell the brand enough. To really get people engaged, build your own profile/ micro-community and use your other social and viral techniques to drive people to it. Whether its friends on MySpace or Fans on FaceBook, when people join up you gain access to talk to them through updates to your page and messaging. You can also build out lists of key influencers who are willing to promote your page and brand and often come in as early adopters. Your page doesn’t have to be sponsored or amazingly fancy, although that may help if you can add the right tools, but it does need to fit the nature of the community. Provide information and elements people like as well as a reason for them to come back. This means updating your page with new content, photos, videos and other items that make your site useful… just like a personal profile and people will be more likely to come back or even better, to link up.

Whatever you do bare in mind that on most social networks, the new news feeds reigns supreme and is somewhere you have to be to get noticed. The great thing about news feeds is that you get in front of a second level of users and not just those who participate in your applications or feeds. Often times we forget to include enough updates in the news feed when releasing tools… not that you want every event to trigger a posting as that will drive your users and their networks nuts… but it’s a good idea to have major events show up.

Finally keep in mind that a lot of social networks and users on them have a strong emphasis on being more cooperative and helpful. If your brand is going green, volunteering or doing anything else to help the world, be involved in political issues or the community you really want to share that on your social networking presence. This isn’t about exploiting your good actions but rather about sharing them so people understand your brand’s true identity and possibly dive in themselves. If you can tap in to the pay it forward mentality you and your good cause will benefit.

The Infamous Blogs: When blogs first hit the market and I’d refer to blog communities I got a lot of puzzled looks, now it makes more sense. Blogs are not only an amazing force to be respected but they’ve developed a very strong community of their own. Some of this community is tied to a specific site and some of it to the blogging world as a whole. The more webmaster focused blogs take this even further and really have evolved into a world where people know each other across blogs and into other online communities so while getting into a blog may seem like just getting onto another content site, there’s really a lot more two it.

• Much like a pr campaign, what you really want out of blogs is people talking about you (preferably in a positive way). This can mean talking about your new products, your special campaign or your corporation. You could be on blogs about your niche, about new products, about the stock market, or even about how you treat your customers and their experience (you could even be included here). All if these blog topics have different, although often overlapping, audiences and communities to reach into, it’s just a matter of finding as many relevant ones as possible and making sure that information on you. Much like with a classic press campaign, this can mean courting bloggers, sending out product samples or just giving people the heads up so they can do their own research. You can meet bloggers at shows, invite them to the office for a tour or just let them know how to reach you if they have questions. Often times the best and most visible posts will come from people you didn’t talk to and may never have followed, that’s just the nature of being in the public, but these posts aren’t something you can count on so keeping up a relationship is key to maintaining a stream of information. Just don’t push to be blogged about too often… the blog writer isn’t likely to be happy about being harassed and even if they don’t mention it, you don’t want a third party blog turning into your defacto media source.

• If you can’t get enough free postings about you, there’s always the option of paying people to post in cold hard cash. While there are a lot of commercial blogs, there’s also a big reaction to paid posts so don’t try and mask your efforts, that’s been done and blown up in the face of many companies. Instead if you want to pay people to blog about you, pay them to review your products, pay them for their honesty. Being paid makes it difficult to be truly honest but if you create a policy (and let it become public) that limits your editorial rights and influence, people tend to be much more apt to trust the postings.

• Running your own blog is a great way to get into other blogs as well. Why? Because much of blogging is about reading other sites and talking about them, sharing items from them, even linking to them if they make sense. Writing a corporate blog takes a couple of jumps through legal and you have to be willing to act quickly as you can’t spend weeks formulating every post but if you’re willing to get good information out there and talk about what’s going on, the new, the good, and sometimes the ugly, it has a great way of finding its way onto other sites, into blog comments and even picked up on by the media.

A lot more (a whole lot more) could be said about blogs but this post is already way too long so I’ll leave that for another day.

I opened with a rule so it’s fitting that I close with a rule as well. When you go viral you really need to think about how the internet world perceives your brand. I don’t know the exact details but I remember hearing about a Chevy or GM campaign (it may have been another American car company) that let people compile a video using clips from one of its commercials. The problem – the video was for a big truck and many of the users were, well, to put it in a “pc” way, environmentally friendly. This may seem like a no-brainer in 2008 with $4++++ gas prices but a few years ago trucks were still selling hard. The problem was they also had a strong resentment from a base that is very well connected online and found a great opportunity to voice it’s opinion… right on the car’s front page as I recall. The lesion here, know how people will respond before you let them go out and do as they please otherwise you may be really embarrassed.

As a final note I’m sure you noticed a few missing types of communities/ social sites but rest assured, I’ll address them soon enough.