This blog post explains what social design means for your brand’s social media presence and why it is essential when you develop applications on Facebook to increase attention and engagement among people.

The value of trust and personal relevance
With technology today, we can get answers we’re looking for right away, everywhere, at any time. When it comes to subjective questions such as “Which film should I see?” or “Which restaurant should I go to?” we turn to our community of trusted friends for recommendations. Based on our community’s feedback and input, we make emotional decisions. Social design is to create personal value by enabling interactions between people in a community.

Social Design is about human needs
It is in people’s nature to be part of communities. It is where we feel love and belonging. Through interactions within our community, we build our own identity and are able to reach self-actualization. Social Design can be compared to Marslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We base our self-esteem on how the community sees us, which means that the community helps drive our identity. When creating a social experience, Facebook recommends in their Social Design Guidelines to take these three core elements into consideration:

• Community refers to the people we know, trust and who helps us make decisions.
• Conversations refers to the interactions we have with the people in our community.
• Identity refers to our own sense of self and how we are seen by our community.

Form your Community
Applications on Facebook aren’t social without other people. Introducting users’ friends into the application with help of social plugins automatically brings the pre established trust in a community. The more activity a user sees between the application and their friends, the more likely it is that they will interact. Further, the stronger associated emotion between the user and the community, stronger the bond and trust.

To build a community and a social product connected to your brand, you should create a clearly defined personality of your community; how it makes people feel and how it creates a sense of belonging. The personality of your community can be defined and communicated by some of the following elements:

• Values – All your content should be true to your values and believes. It is one of the core reason why people join your community.
• Benefits – People should be sure of what they gain by belonging to your community.
• Tone of Voice – People should recognise your community; the way you speak and act.

Enable Conversations
Interactions are what glue the identity and the community together. Interactions build trust. Our sense of belonging depends on how we express our identities to a community and how we receive feedback from it.

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In this post, we will look at ROI on social media with a different perspective, starting from the launch stage of a brand till it becomes matured in the industry.

According to him, around 50% of the business community is still in the Launch stage, about 40% is in the Management stage and about 10% is in the Optimization stage.

Stage 1: Launch

• The prime target at this stage is to create a social media presence.
• During the launch stage, almost all company’s focus on setting up the big four: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
• Depending on the business needs they may focus on Flickr, e-newsletters, blogs, SlideShare and other social media platforms.
• It may not be wise to look for returns in this stage because this works more like an introduction to social media, where consumers get the feel of the brand.

Stage 2: Management:

• During this stage, roughly 60% of a company’s efforts are focused on the big four (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn , YouTube and additional blogs, or newsletters, if present)
• About 10% of the focus is on creative and offer development, 20% on tracking quantitative metrics such as traffic, inbound links, Facebook “Likes,” etc., and about 10% on qualitative metrics such as brand sentiment, survey results and customer polls.
• The corporate objective at this stage is to engage prospects and customers in some way that gets them to connect with the brand.
• Ideally, this would mean buying something, but it can also mean downloading a white paper, liking a Facebook Page, responding to a survey, or any other measurable evidence that they’re connecting with your brand. This can be looked as a return on investment at this stage .

Stage 3: Optimization:

• About 25% of the focus at this stage is on the “big four plus more,” and about 30% is evenly split among creative and offer development, quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics.
• Another 25% of a company’s focus is on improving conversion and optimization of campaigns.
• This is the stage where companies analyse the customer life time values and actually start comparing it to the acquisition cost.

• Therefore, in every stage of your social media presence, it is possible to calculate returns, but these returns may not necessarily be quantitative. In the launch stage it is all about giving a feel of your brand, setting a tone of voice while in later stage it is important to indulge in customer acquisition and running campaigns.

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Of course the reasons for having a Page on Google+ are those that we already know from Facebook: To build relations and to connect with your network. Pages work almost similar to Google+ Profiles in the sense that you can add people to circles and mention them, share content, make +1 and comments and create hangouts.

The benefits of a Google+ presence

Google is of course difficult to overlook when it comes to their powerful search engine and the large array of services they provide. I guess many of these services will be integrated to a Google+ Page too. For instance, an integration with Google Analytics seems like an inevitable feature when it comes to measuring the performance of your page.

Most importantly, your Google+ Page will be included in search results. The feature called Direct Connect lets users to easily navigate to a Google+ Page when searching. Add a ‘+’ in front of your search query, for instance ‘+Pepsi’ or ‘+Burberry’ and you will be navigated directly to the page. However, Google is still working on this feature and so far, it only works for a limited number of pages and users.

What are the differences between pages and profiles?

It is possible to create pages within five different categories. Pages are recognized through a small icon and publishing is set to public as a default. Unlike profiles, pages can’t add people to circles until the page is added first or mentioned. This secures that you cannot push your page and content to people, but letting those interested come to you instead. Also, Pages have a +1 button to allow for people to easily follow you. Of course you don’t have the option to do stuff that you would normally do from a personal profile, such as playing games, hangout on mobile devices or +1 things on the web.

When you have created a page you can swap between posting as a profile or page. Posts, comments and notifications will then be from the page. The smart thing about Google+ is the ability to divide your network into circles, which gives you more control over your communication. For instance have customers, stakeholders and collaborators divided into circles, so that you can post information that are relevant to them. This way, instead of having a page for external communication and a group for internal communication as many have on Facebook, now you can have one page for everything.

On the other hand, it is not possible to geo-target your updates and if you want to post outside of your circles, the only option is to go public. Neither is it yet possible to assign admin rights to other profiles, and I really lack the ability to create a vanity URL too.

Create a page

1. Sign in to your Google profile and click create page: plus.google.com/pages/create. Create your page within a chosen category.

2. Upload a profile image and photos to be displayed on your page. Edit and fill out your information to show who you are and add contact details etc.

3. Distribute your page: Google+ has added a ‘spread the word’ functionality to encourage you to share your new page on your personal profile with an update to it. It is also possible to create a badge to place on your website. Finally, it is of course also possible to create an Adwords campaign.

4. Add people who follow you to your circles: Check the ‘people who’ve added you’ section in Circles. It however possible to add other pages to your circles before they have added you.

5. Maintain your page with relevant content

Checkout some of the Pages on Google+

· Angry Birds
· Burberry
· Dallas Cowboys
· H&M
· Macy’s
· Pepsi
· Save the Children
· Toyota
· Train
· X Games
· Zen Bikes

> Want to read more about Google+ Pages, go through Google’s Help Center

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Social apps explained

So far we have become familiar with Facebook’s social plugins, which meant that you can Like and Recommend content through buttons outside of Facebook. Your activity is then shared to your Facebook profile, so that your network for instance can see that you ‘liked’ a movie on imdb.com. This part of Facebook’s open graph standard reflects Facebook’s vision to make the entire web more social.

With the social apps, Facebook is expanding the open graph and throwing verbs in it, so that developers can create an app for more or less anything. This enables a developer to build an app for Facebook, where you no longer only ‘like’ a movie – but you can also ‘watch’ it. This is for instance what is already being done with Netflix, Spotify and The Guardian. Now, instead of only liking a song, a story is created real time telling that you are listening to a song, or you see your friends reading an article instead of liking it. With these social apps, real time stories are created that show what you and your friends are doing. This also allows you to pick up on the music your friends are listening to and be inspired from each other.

What does social apps mean for businesses

With Facebook’s new social apps, businesses have gained a great potential of getting more exposure.  In the future, we will see more and more stories being published to the feed from brands that have created apps – maybe you will see a friend who bought an iPad at the Apple Store, which creates positive exposure for Apple while at the same time allows for the user to share an online experience with friends.

With all of these new stories and activities constantly being created, one can only imagine how the news feed and ticker will look like. But like Facebook is already limiting the amount of stories in the news feed with updates, the same will happen for apps. An algorithm called GraphRank will determine how much exposure apps will get in the news feed and ticker. GraphRank is a subset of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm that determines which news stories to feature in the news feed. But whereas EdgeRank is more relevant for page owners, GraphRank is relevant for app developers. The basic idea of GraphRank is to assist users in finding the most relevant apps and content based on how the content is doing in the users’ social circles.

It will still take a while before we will be able to see the real effect of Facebooks social apps. But I guess that the news feed will only be more and more crowded along with more apps being created and more brands building a presence on Facebook in the future. My advice for companies is to continue doing quality content and adjust your efforts accordingly.

You can also read about Timeline, Social apps and GraphRank in Facebook’s blog post.

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The infographic called The Social Marketing Roadmap is compiled by Awareness Inc, one of the fastest growing tools to help companies organise, manage, engage and measure their social media activities. The experts here answer different questions like why social media, how to design your social media goals, how to design your social media tools and how much time should you spend on social media.

The infographic carries excerpts from the e-book “Social Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing” about which we wrote on our blog, last month. The infographic has opinions from the likes of Erik Qualman, Jason Falls, David Berkowitz and we at Mindjumpers, are also very happy to be a part of it. Take a look at the infographic here and do tell us what you liked the best :)

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According to a research done by comScore called “The Power of Like: How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing”, users on Facebook spend the majority of their time, more specifically 27% of their time, looking at news feeds and homepages. This is great news for companies, as it goes to show that their efforts on Facebook are not wasted! The engagement with branded content mostly happens through the news feed and not on pages. In fact, according to the comScore research results, users are 40-150 times more likely to consume branded content in the news feed than, visit the fan page itself. Keeping this statistic in mind, it is imperative that companies should put most of their effort into optimizing their news feed posts, in order to reach the greatest amount users.

However, each post a company publishes only reaches a small fraction of its total fan base via the news feed. We conclude this based on an algorithm called EdgeRank, as Facebook calls it. In the following, I will explain how the algorithm EdgeRank works, according to a white paper released by internet marketing research company comScore.

What is “EdgeRank”?

Today there are two different settings on the users’ Facebook page- “Most Recent,” which shows most of the content published by Facebook friends in chronological order and “Top News” which filters content based on Facebook’s news feed optimization called EdgeRank.

According to Facebook, 95% of users use the “Top News” exclusively.  Therefore, it is extremely important for companies to understand how EdgeRank works.

Facebook views everything published as “objects.” Every object receives a ranking, which determines if it will show in the users’ personal news feed. How high the content score on EdgeRank is depends on three things: the Affinity, the Weight and the Timing.

The algorithm looks like this:

Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm:

• First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the brand—if your fans or community members interact very frequently, comment regularly, tag photos of your brand then the affinity score of your brand will be higher, than any other brands they like and it will show up more frequently in their news feeds.

• Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge (or activity on the Facebook page). Activities that require higher levels of user engagement get a higher weight score than those that do not. For example, uploading a link or photo together with a comment takes more effort on the users’ part than clicking the “Like” button.

• And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes. You start out with a high timing score and the more time passes, the lower the score gets.

Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object’s EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user’s feed.

The way to get noticed

If companies post content every day can reach as much of 22% of their fan base each week, according to comScore. In order to reach this, companies should aim to:

• Post content often (3 -5 times a week).
• Post several pictures, videos and links as they will get a higher EdgeRank than plain text.
• Encourage interaction, for example by asking questions and trying to get fans to upload their own content so the interaction is mutual.
• Share content that is highly social – content that users want to re-share with their friends.
• And finally, obtain a high level of “Likes”, comments and re-shares.

Getting your content noticed is not difficult, but it requires some planning and work. Following these simple advices will help you increase the visibility of your company’s posts and maximize the exposure to both fans and their friends. So how about calculating the EdgeRank of your content now?

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Now organisations are designing social media policies to spread word of mouth through their employees and also to have a structure to regulate the social media behaviour of employees at workplace.

According to a survey conducted by Proskauer Rose, a law firm in US, 70.7 % of companies block social networking sites in the office, and 55% have some sort of social media policy in place. For 44 percent of companies, those policies cover use both inside and outside of the workplace.

Social media works to a company’s advantage if used strategically, but certain fallouts can quickly hamper the brand image and lead to serious PR disasters. Therefore, whether or not social media is part of your business’ marketing and communication efforts, there is a need to have a social media policy that defines the scope of use of social media by employees.

I have found an extract from 2011 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report by Marketingsherpa, which shows that most companies either sees the need for a policy or have already written it or is in the process of drafting one. So maybe you need to jump the wagon?

While browsing more on this topic I also found an interesting infographic ‘To Tweet or Not To Tweet’ complied by Mindflash and Column Five Media, that throws some light on how much companies are allowing employees to use social media during work. The infographic outlines two different approaches that a company can adopt to ensure that their social media policies are in place.

One is a more defensive approach where the company aims to protect its brand image whereas the other an offensive one, where the company sees its employers as part of creating brand awareness. Both these approaches will be reflected in a social media policy, but I tend to like positive thinking and seeing employees as resources and the best spokespersons for your brand.

See the infographic below and let us know what you think:

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On our blog we have already written about how to select the social media channels for your brand as well as social media trends in Asia. In this post I will try to highlight a few things, which can help a global brand become more local and connect with its target customers.

Social media is a people driven culture, so it is good to understand the buying behavior and internet usage patterns of your target customers before you start. Here are some suggestions you must keep in mind before jumping in or cross check if you are already there:

Compare social media channels across the world: The best way to succeed in establishing social media presence abroad is to do ample of research on the popular social media channels and what do people expect on them. It is always good to track the user behavior on the popular channels and target them accordingly.

Here is a map of dominant social media channels in the world for a ready reference :

One size doesn’t fit all: While working on establishing a media presence in a country, it is always important to keep the media and messaging relevant and in sync with cultural as well as regulatory environment. It is advisable to identify your target market in the country and the dominant media channel used by them. It is good to identify the social media behaviors and what people use media sites for. For example in Europe, the highest engagement is generated through blogs and pictures.

The linguistic and cultural differences have to be kept in mind while doing so. Its good to have content in the local language to enable better brand engagement. Sometimes, the translated content needs to be cross checked so as to encompass the cultural difference. It is best to understand that what may be acceptable in one country may not work in another and can portray a negative brand image.

Messaging: It is best to keep the message concise and relevant to the audience of your target country. As mentioned earlier, the more local the better. Also the maxims of quality have to be established. The content should not be too much or too little. Always the cultural and religious views of the audience should be kept in mind while creating any content. Another important part here, is to include a lot of visuals (images or videos) which give your brand a local feel. The best way to gain attention is to use pictures of locals using your product.

Regional team: In order to give a local feel to your brand, its best to have a regional marketing team or agency that understands what people want and which are the social media objects (games, videos and content ) that can trigger user attention and increase the engagement levels with the brand.

In such cases it is best to create a brand communication manual that defines the do’s and dont’s of the communication, tone of voice and the brand values, because even though the communication across countries may differ, the brand values which translate into communication remain the same.

These are things which I thought are important while creating a global brand presence, would love to know anything that I might have missed out here !

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In this social media universe where different tools and platforms are available, it is also a good idea to design different messaging on each of these channels to make the best use of the dynamics of each of them. With Twitter, Facebook, now Google+ and more, it is easy to confuse one with another and forget about the specific social strategy.

It would also work in your favour if your content distribution is in sync with the nature of business. We have also written about how to select the right social media platform earlier on our blog, meaning if the communication needs to be one to many audiences or you need to facilitate a conversation.

Mark Zuckerberg’s view of increase in social sharing
In order to communicate effectively on each platform and see that your content gets adequately distributed on Internet, it is good to understand the sharing habits of people. As clearly pointed out by Mark Zuckerberg in a recent press conference, it is interesting to notice the number of active users and the content they share. The amount of sharing per person is growing faster than the number of users. In 2004, users were sharing 1% of content (on Facebook). An aggregate of 4 billion things get shared every day, which is approximately twice as much as a year ago. And it is expected to increase in the coming years.

From this we can conclude that in the future, apps and content need to be designed to match and to make the best of this social sharing.

AOL and Nielsen Online content sharing report 2011
In their April 2011 report, “Content is the Fuel of the Social Web,” AOL and Nielsen Online gathered data from over 10,000 social media messages to analyze how people share content online.

A look at the findings:

From this, it’s clear to notice that most people share a URL to published content, in such cases a blog and Facebook combination works well. Also, Twitter can be used for sending out corporate news flash. When we look at the high sharability of embedded content, corporate blogs work to one’s advantage.

Infographic
I found an infographic by SocialCast.com which highlights the use of different platforms to communicate different forms of messaging followed by top form of communication for businesses. The infographic ends with the names of a new companies who have got it right and are adequately communicating through different social media channels.

Take a look here:

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However, great emphasis is laid on where they would like their business to be and how the revenue projections for it look like. Planning all of this is an extensive exercise with the basic focus on where their customers are and how the investment in each of these channels is going to prove to be value of their money plus expected profit margin.

While surfing through the internet, I came across an interesting infographic about the changing budget allocations. This infographic provides a great way to track customer migration from traditional channels like television and print to internet and especially social media. With them, the businesses are also spending more time, money and resources on non-traditional marketing media than ever before.

Evolving budget allocation
While the television spends are still the highest share, but with rapid growth of internet usage and the revenue generating opportunities through it, more and more funds are getting allocated to online activities. According to eMarketer Report in 2011, 10% of online spending is used for advertising on social networking sites.

Online ads are becoming more social and spending on lead generation and email marketing is shrinking. While planning a budget for 2011, most of the companies dedicated a big share of the pie to social media. Social media is no longer a support media, independent campaigns are designed for it and it’s counted as a separated revenue stream.

Survey by ECG group
ECG group conducted a survey in October 2010 (when most companies planned their budget for 2011) and asked companies: “What will you be including in your 2011 marketing plan that was not a big part of your 2010 plan?”

The results were as follows:

So clearly, more and more companies are leaning towards internet and per say social media marketing to reach out to their customers. Further, a great part of this cost is dedicated towards hiring the right people to do the job. The infographic does not talk about the PR opportunities and of course the revenue stream generated by it on social media, though we have written about it earlier on our blog.

Take a look at the infographic and if you are not there yet, now is the time :

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