Of course with thousands of brands competing for the attention of the hundreds of millions of social users it’s easy to get lost in the dust, or even worse, turn a good program into a disaster with a logistical problem. So before you start in on a contest of your own here are 5 tips to get you going in the right direction.

1. Contest frequency is as important as prize value.

While users love the big prizes these are your fans and they want to participate. Brands that understand this successfully capture a lot of attention and day to day growth by giving away something here and there rather than waiting months to do all inclusive, super expensive giveaways.

Alternate between the big giveaways and the simple ones. Depending on your brand a t-shirt can get nearly as much response as a premium product. And the more often you give, the more people look.

In the example above Hot Topic drives great fan response and keeps people logged in by handing out movie tickets and other small ticket items one at a time, randomly.

2. Keep your contest on facebook, use apps to extend it.

While it’s easy, and generally a good idea, to do a simple video, photo or even “like” contest you want people giving something back to you and you don’t want to force them to leave your page to do so (that would reduce the interest and buzz). Whether it’s a few pieces of data, a survey response or virally spreading the giveaway, the basic contests are limited and you have to go jump outside the box to get richer tools.

Wildfire is one of the more popular apps offering a variety of features from basic data capture through to a fully co-branded sharable experience. This comes at a cost but if you’re expecting a larger response you want the email optins, the fans, the branding space.

Just don’t try to force people through long forms or to share the contest, never works in the long term.

3. Spell out all the details in your head & then to the user.

Individually people tend to be forgiving but in mass they can be easily upset and downright underhanded. You want your contest to be airtight so everyone has a good experience… fans take these things very seriously and confusion leads to disgruntled response, emails and other unneeded negatives. Keep it all positive and airtight so no one feels cheated in the end…

To be sure you’re got think your contest through at length yourself and then share it with a half dozen co-workers to see what they think.

• Is it easy to enter? If so, is it easy to game?
• Is there a way to figure out who entered? If not how will you get an answer?
• Do people know who can enter and who cant?
• Are the rules easily found to clarify things? Are they broad enough to cover an issue? Fraud? Cheating?
• Do you have a way to contact the winner? That is an important one.

4. Take advantage of profile targeting & avoid upset users.

Since contests are rarely open to, or intended for everyone when it comes to ads or a post to your wall this feature is truly invaluable in facebook contests.

Use profile targeting (country / demographics) wisely and you can minimize upset fans who are not able to enter. This becomes essential as your page grows from country specific to global and fans feel left out.

You can also accelerate your growth finding well suited users and driving them over to your page. And since you’re fan page is where the contest takes place people can fan you in the same ad – double win.

5. Don’t “set it and forget it”

Your first few contests will have hiccups and users always have issues. Don’t leave your fans hanging and guessing… jump in and help. This not only solves problems but enables user to user assistance as fans find a solution and share it with others. There’s nothing worse than turning your computer on after a long weekend to discover the great promotion you did failed. Your users will be on 24×7, don’t forget that.

And remember to always K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid). Just like no one reads an entire web pages, users get bored with long posts, want to find a simple method and want a simple answer.

This is the golden rule of just about anything in social but even more so in contests. People’s attention spans online are short, as is their willingness to put up with barriers or issues. When you want to get people involved you want to get a lot involved and the easier it is for everyone to participate the more will.

As a final suggestion, never forget about the wall – that’s the most valuable real estate in social marketing and where you should be aiming to get. So in every giveaway be sure you’re aware of how your promo can, or can’t get you in that space.

Instead of waiting for people to come to them these organizations are sending their forces out into conversations to provide value and insights. While companies have been getting involved for years, the scale is changing. In just the past few weeks BestBuy announced their @Twelpforce program to empower an entire sales force to speak one to one with consumers. Hyatt has also made a similar move with @HyattConcierge to respond to travel questions from finding a restaurant to directions like any local Concierge would do. These companies are on the forefront of a powerful opportunity – the chance to influence customers with action, not offers.

This is not to say offer based programs have no value but rather that it’s limited by the interest in following the offers themselves. On the other hand when a company becomes engagement based it moves right into the conversation and whether it’s through twitter, Facebook or a topic based forum, there’s a tremendous opportunity to engage and provide value.

In a sense the entire concept of social solutions is a return to what retail once was. Companies are selling value not in terms of discounts or flashy displays but service. A polite answer to a question no one else solved. A helpful tip about where to go, what to do. It’s all welcomed and warranted so long as the source remains valuable. And while Twitter has introduced the concept on a mass scale it’s possible to extend into literally thousands of micro-communities where answers are always welcomed.

Of course engaging on a companywide level is not without risks and issues. Rogue employees can certainly harm a brand’s reputation intentionally or simply by accident. Plans can be leaked out prematurely and a whole list of other risks could certainly be written up if one was so inclined. But as with so many tactics the risk of inaction is even more worrisome. When a company fails to engage and fails to be open to communication the comments pile up, the questions go unanswered and the brand remains a faceless entity dedicated to selling only.

Opening the doors to mass interaction should be something every organization considers and evaluates. The opportunity for great results exists but must be thought through with careful attention to risks and potential challenges. BestBuy has done a solid job of foreseeing many of these issues and building a plan that works around them just as every organization should. After all the last thing any brand wants is its name getting associated with social spam or any other violations. But with a well executed effort there’s a wide open door to provide value that means something using the hands of people who know the customer and products best.

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.

Emotes, avatars, small pictures or whatever else you like to call them have been a part of the internet for almost as long as the internet has been open to the public. But by taking a mass of these icons and putting them into a single picture users are able to tag people in their network that they identify with each emote either seriously or as a joke. As more users participate the trend has grown exponentially as users pull more and more people in their network in. And while it may seem like a one time tool different icon sets, battles and jokes have kept people engaged with comments flying around.

The big question of course is can a business participate in this? While the simple anwer may seem to be a no as there’s no network, no place for an ad and no shortage of emote images I think there is a play for the right brand with the right team. As with most free imagery on the web there’s a struggle to find a truly good set of images and most of what’s circulating now while funny could be improved upon. I think that for a younger, fun brand there’s a great play in releasing a set of relevant images and personalities with a branded feel. Nothing too over the top in terms of ads, no product images and certainly no swapping personality titles with brand terms but a message at the top, a good color scheme and some well done images could be a huge hit and get very, very viral.

Of course the trend may be dead in days or weeks as users get sick of tagging each other but it’s big today and marks yet another example of something done in the confines of a network but without any revenue attached, any feature development or market research. It’s just pure viral. Had a brand figured this out before someone started using avaliable avatars this would have been one heck of a social marketing story…

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.

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.

The other day I came across a question on LinkedIn about the role of social networks in office productivity. The person asking the question seemed to be getting at the benefits of social networking by employees as a means of building the brand’s social campaign which is a great topic but what I’m going to talk about, and most of what I responded to, was the perception of social networking and its impact on productivity. Most of what follows is taken directly from my answer with a little further clarification.

So here goes… Keep in mind this is an answer to a question about an individual’s client and is written as such.

Question: I recently suggested to a client that to add value to his new website – he needs a Facebook and MySpace presence for his company … a recruitment and temporary staffing business. His reply was that he was turning off access to them because his staff waste[s] to[o] much time there. How do I convince him to balance the benefits with the distractions?

My response: Does your client forbid employees from talking? How about from using email? Does he expect them to spend their days in front of their monitors without pause? Is he looking to foster a culture of people that work to get paid or one in which people work as a part an organization they enjoy? Does he want his employees engaging people in their fields to learn and promote or to sit alone and isolated?

I ask these questions because whenever this comes up it’s important to realize that this discussion is not new, only the medium is. The simple reality is that our employees are human and as such, they crave interaction and distraction. This distraction can mean checking email, planning a vacation, messaging on FaceBook, taking a smoke break or chatting by the coffee machine. All of these appear to detract from productivity but can also boost it and all of these have been talked about for years. Before the internet it was the water cooler and smoking breaks, with the internet it was email and now social networking and interactivity. Like the offline examples, there’s a lot more to it that just getting people to focus more and slack less.

In my experience, employees who are denied the opportunity to communicate have less attachment to their employee and a whole lot less reason to stick around – which is a huge problem. As a blog posting at Web Ink Now mentioned the other day, restricting access can also limit a company’s ability to be in the market place (see link below). What if employees want to read blogs about their field? What if they want to discuss ideas? Where is the line between social (my friends) and networking (my business contacts… a la LinkedIn)? In some groups, FaceBook is used for business contacts as much as personal ones, should it still be banned?

There’s no doubt that employees spending time on other websites are not doing their work at that exact second. But let’s drive a level deeper… what do the employees actually do? Even if they do serve a function which is all about constant production, do we expect them to work without pause and even if we’d like them to do that, do we really think it’s reasonable to assume they can or could?

I like to look at my employees and teams as self-accountable individuals. This goes for high level professionals and call center employees, I’ve worked with both. If someone has 10 tasks to accomplish and has accomplished all 10 thoroughly, gone off and concepted something new without prompting, and started in on 11, 12 & 13 aren’t they ahead regardless? If my in-bound call center agent has no inbound calls to take and no notes to write up, do they really just need to sit there playing thumb war? My stance is no, they don’t. If people get things done and go above and beyond then they are great contributors to the team and if they want to post to a social site, talk to a coworker, check email, etc…, so be it because they will regardless and giving them freedom helps build our relationship while giving them another reason to value their position in the organization.

In my experience, if people are “slacking”, stopping them from using a website doesn’t fix anything. The problem isn’t that FaceBook takes all their time, it’s that they chose to put it above other things and can’t find a balance. The problem is a management one, not a social networking one. And let’s be honest here… no one really spends 8 or 10 hours stuck in front of their desk without distraction every day of the year, yet most of us are productive. Employees who aren’t being productive need to be worked with to understand issues, resolve challenges and be encouraged to succeed. Denying them access to websites is like telling a first grade bully not to beat up kids and then leaving them in class, you’re not fixing the issue. You may be helping to cut off their vice but you aren’t fixing the issue and unless they agree that they should be banned because they just can’t stop (which I’ve seen people ask for), what have you solved?

Your client is absolutely right to want to insure his team is productive but he also needs to consider what his team is accomplishing today and what is reasonable to expect from them. Furthermore, he needs to consider the implication of slapping wrists and limiting people… being told no can be deeming or insulting at the least and at some point it becomes a reason to leave for a place that sees your value and doesn’t worry about how you spend a few minutes of your day. Let’s not forget, people have iPhones these days so what you deny them through their web browser they can get elsewhere.

Of course many of us know this yet many of us are banned from websites or have to sell this idea to our executives and I think the only way is to outline the reality of the situation.

There are lots of management types out there and some don’t want to accept that people aren’t glued to their monitors… breaking them of that means presenting them with evidence. Discussing quotas and goals and helping them realize that things are being done and more then the basics are being covered. Reminding them that problems exist with or without social and interactive sites and that management has to play a role in addressing productivity is also key. Good employees in an open-market economy are ones who want to be product, not people who are forced to be.

For those managers who are more willing to accept the distraction argument and get that we aren’t all glued to our tasks 24×7 and that we expect some freedom in exchange for our hard work and getting the job done, there’s still a lot for be said about discussing true impact and reality of social networking, blogs and other websites on the company. It’s often overlooked but these sites connect employees much like conferences (but without the travel budgets and gas bills). Social connectivity allows us to learn, to answer, to exchange ideas and information and to improve our ability. The notion that it is all bad is simply wrong, if it was all about fun and slacking, this blog would have no visitors after all.

P.S. Last week I saw a great post over at Web Ink Now which addresses this issue and caused me to think a lot about it prior to this question being asked. I’ve clearly picked up a few ideas from that post and really suggest reading it as it talks not just about the productivity impact but in depth about the positive benefits and contributions employees make when they get social through networks, blogs and the likes. There’s some great examples in there and I clearly like it enough to plug it big time so please take a look.