Social Networks – the birth of the social advocate (if you know where to look)

Chris Underhill, CEO of smartFOCUS, explains how his company has combined its twin areas of expertise – digital messaging and analysis software – to give marketers a unique insight into the value of their customers’ social networks. Ignore these networks at your peril, he warns.

The boom in social networks and their rapid global adoption – from LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter - presents marketers with both a massive opportunity and challenge. We must think differently, shifting our focus from understanding and engaging just one individual (the customer), to seeing how that one individual interacts socially online – with friends, colleagues, like-minded peers... This social reach represents new customer opportunities and, potentially, the chance to form deeper relationships with a new breed of uber-champions for products or brands. This is the age of the social advocate.

Many leading marketers believe this is the greatest ever opportunity to deliver transformational business results. The new social advocate opens the door to their social network and drives positive brand and $ value through recommendation; forwarding a promotion, a newsletter, a link to an article... through a simple click. The digital reach of the words: “Share this” is breathtaking – as we’ve witnessed with Facebook.

Negative & positive opinions need to be understood & used

Marketers ignore this new world at their peril, not only because of the opportunities it presents. The counter-point to the social advocate is the social critic who can spread their negative view of a brand or product with equal social ease. Social networks have freed consumers to express every shade of view.

Marketers have always needed to identify, differentiate and measure negative opinion, establish ‘Why?’ and develop communications and strategies to address this. This is as important for brand and revenue development as developing the value and impact of positive social advocates.

Given that billions now use social networks, the landscape marketers need to survey has expanded exponentially – much as the age of steam and the railways opened up global markets. But it’s not enough to know that this extended market exists and is connected to your brand by your current customers’ social networks. If you can’t measure it (and them) how can you explore its potential value (and theirs)? You wouldn’t put goods (or even a box full of brochures) on a train without knowing the cost of the fare, final destination and delivery points en route.

This need to measure, track and value this new social terrain has driven the latest development to our analysis solution. We launched “Share to social” functionality as part of our digital product during the first half of 2009. This means that every email our digital clients send can not only be shared by recipients with their social networks but our clients can then target these most active sharers. You could for example, give them early sight of a new product, or invite them to take part in focus groups or previews.

But marketers must also recognise that the users of social networks are engaged in more than just social shopping. People, not consumers, use social networks. They want to be part of communities, using this new landscape to learn, have fun, socialise, express themselves, creating opinion, do business and, yes, shop.

The scope for getting social network marketing wrong and the potential impact of this could be catastrophic, making the uninformed use of this channel a dangerous and potentially expensive place to be creative – without the right insights.

Raising the game

We realised we could raise the game even further for customers who use both our email and our full analysis software as an integrated solution. Why stop at understanding and communicating with a single customer when you can extend and deepen that understanding to their social network?

We’ve always spoken about closing the loop, allowing organisations to manage their marketing communications end-to-end, and to close the loop so that the effectiveness of every communication can be measured, then optimised. Social networking has simply made this loop a whole lot bigger.

Information that traditional web analysis delivers, based on tracking the movement of individuals across a website, including browsing behaviour, transactions completed, abandoned and buying preferences, is now commonplace.

But integrating this data into the marketer’s view of the customer, combined with the insight and measurement of social advocacy and maximise the value of the social network, is not.

But such integration would allow you to:

• identify new customers as they arrive and transact on your website as a result of existing customers’ social networking
• understand who among your social advocates drove the traffic, what marketing delivered their behaviour and monetary value - the sales made, or leads generated
• treat customers differently based on their value as social advocates, their total potential and contribution from their social network
• profile customers’ social networks and use these insights to maximise the acquisition of new customers, grow value and retain customers for longer

Technology must access data gained from tracking consumers’ online activity and behaviour through the viral process of social networking, and place a value on individuals’ network of influence across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious and Digg... The technology must also make it simple and easy to create and measure this insight and to quantify the value of customers as social advocates.

Marketing must move from relevant, timely targeting of the individual, to a world where their insights have to support not just one-2-one communication but one-2-many - building knowledge about what makes them, as a collective of individuals, respond and react (in a way that marketers can understand and use to improve results).

Identifying and engaging these new customers as they transact over the web, recognising where they have come from, how they got to you, what stimulated the behaviour and, of course, who made it happen, will totally change the face of marketing.