This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

At the beginning of the week I wrote a piece about Letting Go of Your Ego. Not always the most popular of topics, that I admit. It’s a pretty tough pill to swallow for any C-Suite or senior level management to realize that in Social Media, it’s not all about their company or themselves. That being said, another tough pill to swallow is understanding that the next big idea about your company, it’s products, its services or even how it markets itself might not come from inside your company’s walls. It may very well come from your engagement within social media, that is if you are open to it.

Being Open to Your Audience

When you truly engage with your audience, interact with them, listen to them, ask them questions, the rewards can be plenty.  From ideas for product upgrades, to additions to your services that will make your customers buy more, listening and engaging can lead to so much more.  It can even lead to some really great ideas, even for marketing tactics that appeal to the audience that is really purchasing your products.

Some companies close themselves off to their customers, thinking that the next innovations have to come from their own brain trust.  They think that the people they hired for their marketing efforts will be the best people to know how to speak to the consumer.  While on many levels this still holds true, sometimes its the collaborative efforts of combining the best of your internal teams with those really engaged social community members that can lead to some of the best ways to propel your company forward.

Look At Dell

Dell could be the poster child for understanding that they just might not always have the best ideas, but they didn’t start out that way, it was a process over time.  From their blog where they posted about “Dell Hell” and the exploding batteries, to the Idea Storm community, Dell engages with it’s audience of very engaged consumers. This just isn’t just on their blog, and not just on Idea Storm, but in just about every social media channel they are active in.  By having people like @StefanieatDell engaging in Twitter and not just letting it be a constant RSS stream of their products, they added $6.5 million dollars to their bottom line last year.  Dell’s let go of their ego, Dell is open to listening and engaging with it’s audience and look at the rewards it reaps.

LOFT Listens Too

I can’t take credit for finding this wonderful example of listening, and understanding your community, it totally goes to Mashable, via Cindy Krum (@Suzzicks).  The marketing team at LOFT* really loves their new silk cargo pants.  They posted so on their Facebook Fanpage to all of their over 55k fans.  The problem though came when those photos of the pants they showed were of a rail thin model, who really didn’t look like she’d be the average person who’d shop at an LOFT store.

Thanks to platforms like Facebook, the consumer now has a voice.  Boy, did LOFT fans use it!  The women who were commenting on the new posting were not impressed, in fact many asked LOFT’s staff to actually show those pants on “real women”.  They were not at all convinced that these pants would look right on all women, whether they were tall, short, pear shaped or curvy.

Guess what happened?

LOFT was open enough to its audience it listened and engaged.  It commented back and then they got to work.  They got women of all shapes and sizes from 2 to 12, from sizes 5’3″ to 5’10″ to wear the pants and show the different styles and looks.  When they posted their employees wearing the cargo pants – real women, not models, they got a resounding feedback of “thank you”s and “you’re great”s.  Talk about understanding that sometimes your audience has the better idea!

At the end of the day, being open to new ideas, new concepts is great.  What’s even more valuable in social media and marketing in these communities is being open to the possibility that those ideas come from within the social media communities and not just your company’s four walls.

*Ann Taylor LOFT has changed their name to just LOFT, thanks to Julie from LOFT for stopping by and letting us know about that!

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

One of the major advantages of social media is that it can allow free and instant access to pre-built audiences in a wide variety of channels.  The real question is: how do you convert these audiences into brand loyal enthusiasts that will consume your products and services for years to come?

The answer is a 1-2 punch of active participation and opportunity for landing.

Reaching Out Through Participation

The concept of “joining the conversation” is one that’s well-worn in the social media landscape.  In order to become an industry thought leader, it’s important to engage in relevant forums, tweet ups, LinkedIn conversations, and influential blogs.

The Gift of Content

If the conversation is the honey, consider online content the flypaper.  Authoritative content is the gateway to your site.  Don’t feel shy about pointing the link to your content so long as:

1. It is extremely relevant to the conversation and
2. It will be of great service to the audience.

Otherwise, you run the risk of looking too self-serving which will severely hamper your ability to create a following.

Here just a few ways you can build a social media following through valuable content:

• Guest Contributions
  Reach out to well-respected bloggers and key influencers.  Tell them how much you admire their content and offer up your services to write a post or two—even feel free to pitch a couple ideas.  Not only will this allow you the opportunity to receive visibility from your target audience, but also the chance to drive the occasional incoming link or two (remember, rich anchor text and deep within the site).
• Multimedia
  Remember, content is so much more than just articles.  Don’t forget to post optimized video and image content on websites such as YouTube and Flickr.  It’s a great way to introduce your brand in a helpful and informative way.
• Press Releases
  Writing a press release is one of the most powerful ways to utilize offsite content.  A creative and headline grabbing press release is one of the quickest and most effective ways to stir social media interest around your brand.

Don’t Forget: Convert the Traffic!

You’re so close to actually converting social media visits into sales!  The final phase is the conversion—the call-to-action in which you allow the user to take the plunge from casual fan into paying customer.  Make sure your content has attractive offers that don’t impede the quality of the content. Also, be sure to offer at least two conversion points per page.  Additionally, experiment with both soft and hard conversions.  An example of a soft conversion might be “sign up for our free report” whereas a hard conversion is typically more along the lines of a sale.  Varying your conversion points will allow you to accommodate consumers along varying stages of the buy cycle.

This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

According to the Business.com Social Media Benchmarking Study in businesses who are implementing social media marketing strategies, in over 66% of these businesses it the marketing department driving the initiatives.  Most likely there’s been some word handed down from on high to the marketing department saying “we need this social media stuff” or “we need to be talking about ourselves out in social media, now!“  If it were only that simple right?

Of course companies want to talk about themselves, their brands, their services.  They want to push their very carefully crafted messages out to the social media communities because they think that’s what’s going to win them kudos in these communities that are talking about them that they’ve found through buzz monitoring tools.  Here’s the thing that marketers most of the time completely miss the mark on:

It’s Not About You.

Really, honestly, I’m not lying here – it’s not about you, your brand, your company’s product or services.  It’s about them.  It’s about the community member’s experience.  It’s about what the community member is sharing.  At the time they could be experiencing something with you or sharing something about you, but at the end of the day, it is purely about the experience the community member has had.  That’s why marketers need to check their egos at the proverbial door when they enter into the world of social media marketing.

That’s a pretty tall order to do, as marketers we want to promote our company, brand, product or service.  We want people to listen to us, we want people to “want us”.  That’s why we’re in social media marketing, that’s why we’re here, right?

Wrong.

Social media is about sharing and engaging.  Sharing experiences, engaging in conversations, giving knowledge, tips, information and items of value.  Value isn’t determined by the company or the marketer putting the information out there.  It’s determined by the person in the community who’s consume that content.  As much as you think there’s value in some piece of content that’s put out there on your blog or in your video channel, if the audience doesn’t find value in it, it really doesn’t matter what you (as the marketer) think.  That can bruise even the more sturdy egos out there.

Determining what a community is going to find of value requires engagement.  It also requires companies to let go of preconceived notions of what they think people view their products or services as.  Having an open mind and letting go of that death grip of control over your brand can help you immensely when you are engaging in social media.  By opening the doors to your customers to define value, you can open the doors to a much more successful social media marketing strategy.

I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.