Consistency. Be consistent. In everything that you do. (The article link above will take you to Mitch’s specifics.)

Mitch is collecting best-practice ideas from folks in the industry.  He happened to tag me.

So here’s my take on what companies involved in Social Media Marketing should be considering.

In the recent past, companies have been using multi-channel social media – primarily blogs and podcasts – as a way to market.  What they typically haven’t figured out is how to use these channels effectively.  At FutureNow, we hesitate to call these best practices, because, for each company, tactics will differ depending on the business itself; and the appropriate tactics will change over time as audiences shift and tools/websites evolve.  So what critical guiding principles should companies pay attention to when employing social media?

1.    Disclosure, also called transparency, is probably the most important principle that should inform your outreach through social media.  Give it to your audience straight.  Let them know the upside.  And the downside (it happens).  If you don’t, they’ll figure it out through other sources, which will leave them thinking less, not more, of you.

2.    Understand the relationship you are building with your audience.  Social media is, well, social.  In social situations, the nature of the relationship defines how two people interact with each other.  Deliver your message accordingly, for communication is always about the message received and perceived. Good communication is also about listening.

3.    Identify and communicate your values.  These are part of your identity, and in social media, communicating your identity is part of the exchange.

I totally agree with Mitch:  Consistency is important!  But you can only be consistent once you’ve adopted the necessary level of disclosure, understood the relationship and defined your values.

“Fox News Channel wants more friends. But instead of reaching out on the News Corporation’s own social network, MySpace, the cable news channel is choosing to network on the site’s chief rival, Facebook.

Think it has anything to do with MySpace’s existing partnership with MSNBC? Fox says it has more to do with audience.”

This is a sign of the maturity of social media, but even more so of News Corporation’s new media sophistication.

Many of our readers are big fans of social networking sites so I want to find out your opinions. If you were in charge, would you have done the same? Would you have used both or perhaps even other sites? Do people want to find and consume news in a social network? Inquiring minds want to know.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And 2008 also looks to be another sweet year for Apple. Stephen Coleman, CIO at Daedalus Capital, which is invested heavily in Apple, told Bloomberg News, “There’s so much growth to look forward to for the iPhone.” Coleman predicts the stock will reach $600 by the summer of 2009.

How Does Apple Do It?

Simply put, Apple understands people. It knows that people make emotional decisions, then use intellect to justify those decisions. Dancing shadow people with iPods aren’t an intellectual argument for buying an iPod, they’re raw emotional appeal.

At the heart of every successful Apple product, you’ll find a deep understanding of what moves people emotionally at many different levels.

It makes sense. When you want to sell things nobody really needs, you have to know what they want. Apple doesn’t create desire; nobody can do that. What it does better than any modern company is pour fuel on our desire with a frothy mix of surprise and delight to get our attention, then provides a simple, meaty, unique, and consistent experience whenever we engage with it or its products. And, of course, it delivers on its brand promise: “It just works.”

Unexpected Marketing

While Apple uses traditional means and media to promote itself, it also markets itself in unexpected places and ways. Steve Chazin, former marketing exec at Apple, reveals that those little white earbuds are not white by accident. In MarketingApple, Chazin writes, “Those white iPod headphones were not designed by engineers — they are a pure Apple marketing trick designed to make the visible part of their product a status symbol. Wear white headphones and you are a member of the club.”

This goes beyond packaging and slapping a good-looking logo all over a product. This is finding an unexpected place or way to set yourself apart without interfering with the customer experience.

People Attract People

People are at the heart of Apple’s marketing, not technology or features. The iPod commercials are a perfect example. The audience is first attracted to the people, not the device.

The iTunes music store is another example. While the iTunes store itself has some conversion and customer focus barriers, it rarely fails to persuade people to click in a little further, to listen to a few more samples. It’s a reason other online music stores still struggle. Here, Apple takes advantage of reviews and other customer-generated content.

In the iTunes music store, you’re bombarded with input from other people, not music or video marketing. The reviews are front and center when you look at an individual artist or album, but you’re also sucked in by “Listeners Also Bought” and the user iMixes and Top Songs. You can view celebrity playlists, even Apple staff picks. In iTunes, you’re simply and easily persuaded by others, not by marketers or flash or some social networking technology.

Delight the Customer Consistently

Everything from Apple is designed with intent. Even the product packaging makes the product feel that much more valuable. From neatly packed cords to velvet lining, each step of the unpack is delightful.

Compare that experience with one from Dell: a plain brown box, typical Styrofoam, plastic bags in all sorts of colors, and so on. The experience feels messy. How does that affect how you feel about the product inside the packaging?

Apple is consistent along every touch point, from a Steve Jobs presentation to the website to the product itself. The brand feels neatly organized and clean. In technology this is a delight. How many of us have wrestled with devices, have read clunky manuals, or are just sick of beige? The recently redesigned Apple site has the look, feel, and elements people will find in the operating system.

Love Is Blind

For now, Apple’s brand strength is unmatched among its competitors. Because it pays attention to people’s needs, people return that attention with money and emotional (sometimes illogical) devotion. This emotional brand connection helps the company overcome some of its problems. That emotion helps customers forgive Apple when it screws up and buy anyway.

Consider some of Apple’s flubs last year, none of which seemed to hurt sales:

• Only a few months after the iPhone went on sale, the price dropped $200. Early adopters were livid, but the feeling didn’t seem to stick.
• The Leopard operating system went on sale later than promised (almost a year), shipped with several bugs, crashed and killed many Macs. Did you see these stories stick like the initial problems Microsoft had with Vista?
• Apple stirred controversy with its options backdating.
• Universal Music pulled out from iTunes store.
• NBC shows were yanked from iTunes.

In our recent “Retail Customer Experience Study,” Apple’s online store scored a wimpy 39 out of 100. But in the online shopping equation, the tactics we measured only accounted for the objective features online retailers offered. If we were to account for subjective measures like brand strength or loyalty, Apple would have a much higher score.

In other words, people trust Apple, so they buy from the store without questioning its credibility and customer focus when buying online.

Our persuasion analyst Melissa Burdon demonstrates this in recent blog post. She was shopping for an iPod on Apple.com and had a question. Her question wasn’t answered on the site. She was frustrated, but she still bought an iPod. (After her post, though, you could find the answer on the Apple site.)

Apple stock may not grow 600 percent in 2008, but it will continue to climb dramatically. Will the day come when Apple becomes too big and loses its focus on people, rendering it an evil behemoth like Microsoft or Wal-Mart?

It may, but not likely anytime soon.

[Reprinted from my ClickZ column this week.]

Tucked away as part of the new Open Social initiative launched last week, Google engineers offered an interesting best practices document of social design dos and don’ts.

Social Design Best Practices

The list of best practices are as follows:

1. Engage Quickly – (my interpretation: provide value within 30 seconds)
2. Mimic Look and Feel - (make your widget look like the page it is in)
3. Enable Self Expression – (let people personalize their widgets)
4. Make it Dynamic - (keep showing new stuff)
5. Expose Friend Activity – (show what friends are doing)
6. Browse the Graph - (let people explore their friends and friends of friends)
7. Drive Communication – (provide commenting features)
8. Build Communities – (expose different axes of similarity)
9. Solve Real World Tasks – (leverage people’s social connections to solve real problems)

This list is interesting for several reasons…[read the rest of his post about social design]

Facebook has done so much of this right. That is why you can see from Bryan’s and my Facebook profile that we’re engaged and active within the community. Neither of us felt this way about MySpace or LinkedIn. (Oh, and by the way, if you are a regular reader of GrokDotCom or our books, please feel free to friend either or both of us.)

If you’re active in a social network, what are the key features you use or would like in a social network? If you aren’t active is it because certain features are missing?

I’m always thrilled when additional evidence surfaces.

The majority of abandonment issues can be fixed if you focus on answering visitors’ questions earlier in the “funnel” or purchase consideration process. Persuasion Architecture™ (define) is designed to anticipate the questions people have and facilitate the momentum required for them to accomplish their goals.

We’ve been solving this problem reliably for years. Do you still have a form abandonment problem?

It’s a sad day in social media when Facebook deletes Ranger Rick, the National Wildlife Federation’s beloved spokes-raccoon.

On Facebook, networks grow organically — often slowly — and by deleting Ranger Rick, the NWF’s entire 500-person network was brutally poached.

Sure, this public relations gaff seems more to do with a flawed policy and/or housekeeping algorithm than contempt for nature conservation, but it’s still absurd. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so scandalicious if it weren’t for the fact that Paris Hilton and Hillary Clinton fakes roam wild:

. . . Anyone think the actual Hillary Clinton is checking who tagged her wall today? And for nonprofits like the NWF, creating a group or mascot profile protects the privacy of the staffers who work to reach out to members through social networking sites. Does Hillary’s Facebook staffer wants to have his/her personal info out there for 35,000 supporters to see?

But here’s the bottom line — of all the fake profiles on Facebook, why has Facebook targeted the beloved Ranger Rick? A quick search shows six fake Paris Hilton profiles. Why kill off Ranger Rick? Would it really have torn a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum to look the other way while Ranger Rick spread cuteness across the Internet?

Are non-profits an endangered species on Facebook?

If so, it seems dubious that sponsored (read: billable) groups like Wal-Mart are welcome to market themselves despite intense community backlash. I’m not saying it’s wrong for Wal-Mart to be on Facebook, but can an eco-journalist raccoon get a break?

After speaking with the NWF’s Online Advocacy Manager, David Pierpoint, the group emailed GrokDotCom the following exclusive statement:

National Wildlife Federation’s concern about having Ranger Rick’s profile deleted is centered on having the same opportunity and level of interaction with the Facebook community that candidates’ campaigns are given. If the door of political discourse is opened, then it is important that all voices have the opportunity to be heard.

We believe Ranger Rick (40th birthday this year) is not a senseless character, but a fully realized representative and educator of millions of our constituents’ voices who care passionately about important issues. We put our resources into creating that profile as a way to put a personal touch to those issues as 500 “real” people on his friends list. We received nothing but positive feedback from friends who received a “Happy Birthday” message from Ranger Rick or were told about an important event NWF was putting on. All of that is important to the relationships we want to have with those who care about wildlife and the environment.

Isn’t that what social networking is all about?

It is also important that not only NWF but many other non-profits are given the opportunity to work with Facebook and its community in a positive way, and we are open to those possibilities. But let the people decide who they want to be friends with, not Facebook.

Guess it’s back to reaching fans — “ages 7 and up” — in the trusty ol’ magazine for Ranger Rick. Looks like lip gloss beats recycled glossy once again.

What now for everyone’s second (third?) favorite Harvard dropout? Will Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg step up and free Ranger Rick, or will fans have to rely on the NWF’s MySpace profile instead? Care to email Facebook and tell them what you think?

Maybe Zuckerberg’s too good smart to sell for billions of dollars, but Facebook doesn’t seem to have a problem selling out for free.

We spent most of the session on the “Ben & Jerry’s” island. During the session, we were able to fly around, look at a wall of the history of B&J, and chat with other people. Wait, that was one person during the entire 30 minute session. I asked what it cost to create the island and Don nodded when I suggested $50k.

Don also noted that we are only in the first inning of virtual worlds. I agree with his statement. It reminds me a bit of when the Web first started to commercialize. “Who would use the Web to buy insurance” is a statement I heard several times from an executive at an insurance company.

Technovia’s Ian Batteridge has a similar take, writing that:

. . . the approach that most corporates have taken with Second Life has been the same as they took with the early web “We must have a Second Life presence! Build it and people will come!”

But SL isn’t static media, and that, unfortunately, means that the static media approaches you can take with a web page won’t work. SL isn’t a medium which is suitable for researching information unless that information is best communicated via 3D models. A museum might profit from simply building an island and waiting for people to come – a corporate won’t.

On face value, I agree with both Stern and Batteridge. But they raise an interesting point: If those marketing on Second Life are using prehistoric Web tactics — i.e., stuff from the broadcast or “push” marketing playbook, left over from the old media days – why in the proverbial world might they work in a virtual one? This is uncharted territory to be sure, but wouldn’t product placement and viral promotions among Second Life, er, citizens make more sense than paying $50k to setup shop just to say that you’re kinda, almost, virtually there?

Ah-ha… the plot thickens! Over at WebInkNow, David Meerman Scott* tells us of a staffing company that’s paying real money to Second Life temps. Might these virtual folks end up staffing the virtual islands, thus creating a real economy? And does virtual ice cream taste any good? Like “astronaut ice cream” perhaps?

For now, I’m skeptical. But there’s a lesson here for all of us: Before pushing a new online presence, make sure you know what success really means in advance. Otherwise, those virtual islands might leave your company a bit… shipwrecked.

[*For those who missed it, don't forget to check out my recent interview with David Meerman Scott on his fantastic book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR.]

We’ve all been there.

As business owners, these are not the customers we’re typically looking for. Picture the Comcast phone rep who answers the phone when this person comes home to no digital TV service during the big game, or the Amtrak phone rep who has to explain why the Friday train service is running four hours delayed–again.

These experiences start off behind the proverbial 8 ball before they ever get going. They’re also experiences where the right attitude, great energy, and a good listener who actually communicates relevant information (i.e., delightful service) can generate oodles and oodles of positive Word of Mouth, and rivers of referral revenue.

On my way home from the office last night, I discovered something curiously missing from my laptop bag–my car keys. I hadn’t actually driven to the office, because the car was blocked in by an age-old Brooklyn tradition of double parking during street cleaning. (Don’t ask, really, it’s a topic for another blog .)

Somewhere between the coffee shop, the cab, and the office, the single set of car keys we own were gone. Oops. Long story short, AAA to the rescue! They’ve heard this song-and-dance before, and without judgment (something the Ms. can’t claim this AM), they found a 24-hour automotive locksmith, setup the appointment, got him to call us on a cell phone when he was in the neighborhood so we didn’t have to wait in the rain, AND kicked in $50 off the outrageous-stupidity-fee the locksmith charges to boot. AMAZING.

They were with us all the way, calling on several occasions to check the status of the locksmith and to make sure we were delighted once the service was rendered.

I’d happily take the time to write a letter exclaiming my adulation for all things AAA and end with a strong Call to Action urging people not to wait until they’re stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire in the snow; rather, to sign up today while their car is still running strong. I’d send an email they could use as a testimonial, I’d even talk to the rep’s superior and share my delight… if they’d only ask.

Why are we so afraid to ask for our customers to share their wonderful stories? Are we afraid they may tell us mostly good news, with some sprinkles of less positive mixed in? Great. Too bad we can’t fix what we don’t know.

Are we afraid people only do what they’re incentivized to do? True, to an extent, but don’t underestimate the power of the Delight Factor. Ask for feedback. Facilitate sharing among customers. Embrace the transparency of today’s environment. And run, don’t walk, to your nearest AAA website and sign-up for a year of their service!! You won’t regret it.

“Well, almost. The Economist (via Computers.net) has pulled up the Hitwise stats to show that social networks are about to overtake sex sites in the US any day now. The metric being measured is percentage share of site visits, with % visits to sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook on the increase, and % visits to porn sites going down (no pun intended). “

The post offers more information and a nice chart, but it still left me wondering.

It’s not quite as provocative as it sounds. The John Edwards campaign is working hard to connect and start discussions with people through technology. Whoever is in charge of the Edwards online presidential campaign has a firm grip on the effect of social media and is workin’ it hard.

Visit Edwards’ website and prepare to be amazed. On the home page, there’s a large section titled, “Connect With the Campaign,” which gives visitors a choice of plugging in via MySpace, Gather, Flickr, eAssembly, and more. The site’s blog doesn’t just report campaign news; it’s an interactive tool where anyone can write and post.

Then there’s Twitter, the latest social media platform that’s taken the Internet by storm. Allowing for only 140 characters per post, it’s a cool combination of mini-blog and IM. Almost every day, I receive a text message directly from Edwards:

3/8/07: Interviews, airplanes, and just arrived in Houston.

3/9/07: Left Houston this morning. Holding a community meeting on healthcare in Council Bluffs, Iowa today. Des Moines tonight.

3/10/07: Community meeting on healthcare in Newton, IA. Then 1 hr 1/2 drive to Burlington for a similar meeting. Later tonight, back in NC.

Suddenly, watching Edwards on the evening news, I can connect with where he is and what he’s doing. I am in-the-know. When I joined Twitter last week, I became Friend #256 on the John Edwards Twitter list. As I write this less than a week later, the number of friends has reached 738.

How cool would it be if John Edwards promised to keep Twittering if he were elected? Can you imagine how hooked into the White House we’d feel if we got a daily Twitter from the President?

2/1/09: Lunch today with Kim Jong Il. He wants to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” afterward. Hope there’s popcorn.

4/12/09: Calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this afternoon. We’ll talk uranium, religion and peace.

10/23/09: Today is the vote on universal healthcare. Have you called your congressman to register your vote?

I don’t even know if John Edwards is my personal choice for president, but already I feel I know him better than any of the other candidates. His Second Life headquarters may have been trashed by insurgents, but his real life on the campaign and his attempts to reach out via social media are fascinating.

Could this be the election that hinges on connection… and winning… through technology?

“An innocuous question can hit you where you live. I should have expected one day someone would ask me, “How do you measure your ROI for that?”

If I’m conducting client training on measuring, testing, and optimizing performance, clients have a right to ask about my own practices. The “that” she referred to is nearly 300,000 words we’ve published online for free over the past two years. I promised her I’d discuss it in this column.

How does someone who writes “ROI Marketing” justify publishing so much content for free? Do we charge for advertising, rent our list, or bombard those names with commercial offers? No. In fact, Jeffrey, my brother and partner who handles such things, estimates we’ve invested about $100,000 developing free content for our newsletter, free whitepapers and other publications. How do we measure its ROI?

We know one side of the equation: the investment. The money has been spent. What did we get in return?” keep reading…

That was from Bryan’s June 2002 ClickZ column, The ROI of Free, where he explained how we calculate the return on all the free content we create. He even said we would double down and did we ever. Since 1999 we’ve published almost two million words for free.

What made me think of this subject today is Chris Garrett’s interview with my friend Sean D’Souza. Sean sums up his response to a similar question with: “Give the ideas. Sell the System.”

I like Chris’s blog. Want proof? You may notice that mine was the first comment. Chris has the interview and links to Sean’s Psychotactics.com.

So, when we find The Washington Post–where Buffett’s majority shareholder–covering his very public proclamation that newspapers are a bad investment, one has to wonder: are traditional publishers reaching a breaking point or a tipping point?

When Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman] and I were young, the newspaper business was as easy a way to make huge returns as existed in America,” Buffett wrote in the letter, which was released Thursday.

…In today’s economy, Buffett wrote: “Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.”

Not exactly what you’d call “irrational exuberance,” is it? What now of the Post’s “follow the money” credo? Forget following the money; the Post will be lucky if Buffett bothers to help them find it–and he always does.

How fitting, then, that the other big newspapers news this week came from USA Today, whose social media-driven redesign launch broke the first rule of journalism: it became the news. Or has journalism–that quaint pursuit of factual, topical, news-related storytelling–been so worn down by new media that “become the news” has itself become the first rule of Whateverism 2.0? (And, please, folks, don’t use that one until, at the very least, it’s properly anointed by Stephen Colbert. See also: “Truthiness“)

Lately, we’ve written about how new media is changing the rules of book publishing and online publishing. But will USA Today create a community worth having you as a member? And if they’ll have you, is it worth joining such a club, anyway? (If you think so, you might want to first check out their privacy policy. “How is this information used?” may be of interest.)

Long before YouTube and Paris Hilton, Andy Warhol predicted that, one day, everyone would enjoy 15 minutes of fame. Maybe it’s time we all fully grokked this statement for what it’s become: our era’s most profound inside joke.

Laugh it up, Andy… Laugh it up.

As meaningless as the word is (and as much fun as it is to toss around mockingly), it’s being furthered under the guise of a seemingly simpler word: community. I’m always in favor of true simplification, but this one has been bugging a bunch of us around the office for some time now. I have to ask (in my best Carrie Bradshaw imitation), is a bunch of overweight, balding, 40 year olds, banging away at their keyboards from their mother’s basement a community?

I know that’s an unfair stereotype of fans of America’s third most popular sport (you intentionally clicked the link above, didn’t you?) but, if it were accurate, perhaps it would better fit a textbook definition of community:

com·mu·ni·ty [kuh-myoo-ni-tee] Pronunciation Key: noun, plural -ties.

1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists

Why is it that every major corporation is trying desperately to jump onto the consumer-generated content / social networking bandwagon without stopping to consider if they really have something that facilitates a real community? They’re so focused on trying to build it, they’ve yet to fully consider what it actually is, and where it is actually found.

This little rant is just the tip of the iceberg, and we’ll certainly be weighing in more on the topic in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from any “citizen journalists” out there with stories of communities that aren’t