Now that so many people have jumped into the socialsphere some may have realised that they’ve unwittingly opened up their brand and unleashed a co-creative platform.

Take facebook pages for example, many have now mirrored what all the cool kids were doing and created a page for their business or organisation. In doing so some have opened themselves up to not only great community generated ideas but also slander and ridicule. This openness has definitely freaked some peeps out.

There are varying levels of co-creation and all have reasonable amount of openness.   One of the biggest decisions anyone will face when entering the social space is the trade-off between providing an awesome open platform for your consumers/enthusiasts or opening up to be destroyed by people who hate you.

My advice on this is: “If people hate you figure out why and fix it fast” – if you’re not sure whether people hate you open up and find out – but be willing to change.

So what are the right tools and how open do you make them?

There are so many social tools out there and they all have various setting. The truth of the matter is that there’s no one size fits all cookie cutter lot of tools and settings to use.

So how on earth are you or anyone else supposed to choose the right ones and what sort of questions should you be asking your self when fine tuning your setting? Some of the questions below might be useful as a starting point for making the tough decisions about how to attack your social media efforts. Enjoy!

Basics – why would people follow you?

• What is your business good at? – Are you good enough at what you do to have fans and followers?
• Why are you getting into social media? If the answer isn’t to do with adding value to your customers experience – then don’t bother.

What platforms to use

• What is the clear and measurable purpose behind each platform you’re using? – how are you going to use each platform to achieve it?
• Where are the social spaces that your enthusiasts hang out?
• What are the people you’re engaging with excited about?
• Do you have extra value-add to bring to each social media platform?
• What are you excited about?
• What are you good at? (writing, story telling, conversing)
• How much time are you prepared to give it?
• Are you willing to change the way you operate?What do you want out of it ? – it’s an ugly question but it needs to be asked, if you’re doing it for fun you’re unlikely to take the steps necessary to create the extra value-add needed to be truly outstanding

Fine Tuning Your Settings

• What would your enthusiasts want to be involved in?
• What’s the incentive for people to engage with your organisation?
• What value do you want to add & then receive back from your community?
• What are the benefits for you and your community?
• What are the risks for you and your community?
• What do you people to be able to do on your social platform (fan page/account etc)?
• What’s your strategy for dealing with slander and hatred
• What is the potential impact of slander and hatred? – it could be a positive learning experience?

Would love to hear what uThnk about social media strategy and settings!

The Paradox of Choice in Social Media is a post from: iThnk.com - Your Freestyle Social Media Resource

Consider two different ice-cream shops, one that allows you to mix the flavours of ice cream, add whatever treats you want and one that sells you stock standard ice cream.

“Custom Made”                         VS                           “Stock Standard”

How much prouder are you of how good that ice cream tastes?

How much more did you enjoy the interactive of experience buying ice cream?

How much more likely are you to tell a friend about the mixture you created?

The interesting thing about this is that the ‘platform’ for the co-created ice cream, wasn’t a website that allows you to upload photo’s or even a forum that you could project your unique opinions on to, instead it started with the simplest of questions….

“What would you like?”

The only thing that changed with the co-created ice-cream is that the person on the other end of the counter now actually listens and has put in place a system where they can give you exactly what you want! Imagine how powerful this could be if all businesses could sincerely asked those four magic words.

Co-created Ice Cream is a post from: iThnk.com - Your Freestyle Social Media Resource

Now that every man and his dog are well and truly in the socialspace how much further does it have to go? Can companies become fully integrated social enterprises?

The first hurdle has already been passed

So far the biggest challenge in social media consultancy is reassuring potential clients that they can gain more than they stand to loose by ‘opening up their brand’.

But, this is less of a challenge than it was even six months ago now that so many more businesses are experimenting with the socialweb. So many of us have become a fan of something on facebook or followed a company or two on twitter and the real freaks amongst us will even be the occasional reader of a corporate blog.

So even if your business isn’t in engaging in the social revolution it’s likely that you’ve had some exposure to the successes and failures that other companies are having in their social exploration. So now that we’ve all got some sort of understanding of what social success and failure is & most have gotten over their fear just how far can we take it?

The Next Step In Social Evolution (is also here…)

One of the things that is emerging from my research into corporate blogs is that people like transparency. Peeps didn’t seem to enjoy corporate blogs had unnecessarily invisible control.  For example many of my participants prefered comment systems where they were able to have some control moderation, e.g. using digs/votes. Most people also seemed to enjoy being able to give feedback to companies as long as those companies were open and responsive.

Combining open and responsive listening with feedback seems to be a winning combo, but surprise surprise it already exists. UserVoice (which is now 100% free) and Get Satisfaction are two of the most well known consumer feedback forums, all sorts of techy and web based companies are using them to help make ’wiser’ decisions…(as shown).

Now we’re just waiting for the masses who saw the potential for growth and embraced Facebook and Twitter to realise that it’s just as  important to make informed, open and transparent decisions.

What Does The ‘Marketing Renaissance’ Really Look Like

Once again…it might just be here already. I’ve already written one post on how amazing threadless.com is and for the life of me I can’t understand why more business peeps haven’t made moves towards the Threadless.com model…it just seems so perfect.

Business by the community for the community. Tiz a beautiful thang…what do you think?

Becoming A Fully Integrated Social Business is a post from: iThnk.com - Your Freestyle Social Media Resource

It gained a number of answers, but unfortunately the post was closed for any further comments (ironic?). The best comment of the lot is below:

“When commenting on a blog, article or video it is usually to add to the educational contribution of the author. To add a perspective to their writing, to confirm their viewpoint or to include my own experience to the mix of comments.

There have been a few instances where I have disagreed with the author or another person that commented, however, this is rare.

A reason that many people, marketers for example, will comment is to add their company information like website address in the comments; for Search Engine Optimization reasons.

I do not agree with this technique because it ruins the real reason for comments – to share experiences or perspectives. But that strategy is effective in driving traffic to one’s site.

Also, it can be very important for brand management. For example, if someone blogs about a company, perhaps their dissatisfaction with the quality or service of a company – it is important that the company have folks monitoring the internet to ensure that brand-bashing for the sake of it does not go unnoticed. A compelling argument can be created in the comment of a blog or article that defends the company or their brand.

Knowing that a company monitors their brand online is sometimes a good deterrent, but also can influence others that read the blog/article and the comments before posting their own. If I see that a company rep has posted that their product has undergone changes that addressed the issues being complained about, then I may feel less likely to post my complaints OR my complaints may become mitigated by the new information.

Engaging in blog comments can be used for many purposes. They are an important facet to the entire social networking trend and should be taken seriously by customers, marketers, corporations”.

So I thought I’d throw it open to you…why do you comment? is it…

• For Back Links
• For Traffic
• For Branding
• For Networking
• To Add Value

Oh course if you don’t feel the 5 options above are enough you’re more than welcome to comment…

Why Businesses Should Comment On Blogs! is a post from: iThnk.com - Your Freestyle Social Media Resource