Social Media Marketing

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c h a p t e r

7:

FIVE E

SSENTIAL T

IPS

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Taking these steps together, collaboration occurs—or at the least is facili-

tated—in the fourth step; Engagement is a direct result of the preceding three steps.

Collaboration, in this context, requires the active participation of both the customers

and the employees—of the marketplace and the organization itself.

It’s About Me...and Us

Referring back to the process leading to collaboration—content consumption, curation,

creation, and then collaboration—compare “content consumption” as applied to tra-

ditional marketing and business processes with its social counterpart. Consumption—

whether of your mass market communication or the video assets you’ve placed on your

website—is often described in terms of “engagement.” Look more closely, though, and

what’s happening is actually a relatively passive and in most cases solo activity. Call

this “traditional consumption” for lack of a better term: Whatever the term, this type

of engagement is a relatively low-involvement form.

Now move to the social sense of engagement: What does it really mean for cus-

tomers to be engaged in ways that engender conversation or sharing or the creation of

new content? As people become more connected, their desire to be part of something

larger only increases. When someone posts “I am standing in line at Starbucks...” or

“Waking up to a beautiful day in Austin” on Twitter, the motivation is not sharing the

fact that some particular activity is happening right now. Instead, it’s all about telling

yourself that you are part of a larger community, and telling that community that you

appreciate it being around you.

This is the kind of attachment that manifests itself in the relatively higher levels

of socially inspired engagement—and in collaboration between community members,

for example. If you see Twitter (and social media in general) as a big, meaningless,

narcissism-fest think about that last point again: Participants truly value their com-

munities and the tangible expressions of belonging. When one belongs to something,

one takes personal ownership for it: This shows up in member-to-member curation, in

solutions posted in help forums, in the entries developed over time in Wikipedia, and

through many other similar expressions on the Social Web. This sense of participa-

tion and belonging is more encompassing it may seem: It’s not just “my own needs”

expressed through “my own activities.”

In reality, yes, it’s “all about me,” but this includes “my knowing who’s (also)

in line at Starbucks.” Whether connected through SMS, Twitter, Foursquare, or what-

ever, it’s about my knowing what is happening around me, and in particular with and

among the people I am connected to through my entire (meaning, “across networks”)

social graph. It’s about a larger, social view of what’s around, and the participant’s spe-

cific role within it. In a resounding setback, Facebook was called out when it botched

its privacy changes in mid-2010: That said, the fact is that people willingly and know-

ingly share a lot more personal information than ever before, precisely so that they