Pioneering the Socialscape

PIONEERING THE SOCIALSCAPE

The Right Path For Reaching Socialpaths

The successful deployment and exploitation of the social media landscape, perhaps, is a leading motivational force for today’s brand managers. There are available, however, relevant new theories and tools to gain an advantage in this chariot race. Let’s start by euthanizing the over-syllabic namespace “social media landscape” and simply call it the Socialscape.

The Socialscape is a boundless, techno-evolutionary rift inhabited by our target audience: what we are calling the Socialpath – those who chart new territory in the emerging technology space for others to follow. Socialpaths are overtly curious/loyal/stubborn beings with access to more people and more pure information every day. Fortunately for us, they do follow predictable courses through the Socialscape and offer tangible data on how they process the contents of its massive data feedbag.

Info-consumptive traits are fairly new to brand managers, and charting the Socialpath requires way more the skills of Charles Darwin than Stanley Livingstone. Remember the stone age when everyone was still in lust with plain old e-mail and cell phones? Now consider some recent events that ripped through the Socialscape; events available to, observed by and reacted to by countless regular folk:

• Socialpath wins vacation in Coca-Cola contest. Has trouble collecting. Tweets about it and is quickly compensated. Changes his Facebook avatar to a can of Coke Zero.
• Twitter’s entire system goes down. Socialpaths suffer tweet-withdrawal and panic before the system is restored at day’s end. Cause of the crash? Some twit in Russia didn’t like the politics of another twit in Soviet Georgia and launches a killer DOS (denial-of-service) attack shuttering Twitter’s single-server operation.
• Socialpath opens can of Diet Pepsi and ends up drinking an actual dead frog. Pepsi takes a spin/denial posture citing FDA clearance of bottling plant. Bad response; Socialpath blasts the Socialscape with anger toward Pepsi, mounts lawsuit and now everyone is following the case.
• Citing daily deadtime for commuters traveling the New Haven and Hudson train lines, Cablevision sees gold in spooning with the MTA to provide free WiFi access throughout both routes.
• Having shoved the ubiquitous iPhone into nearly every pocket(book) in the world, Apple’s star dims as app-jockeys watch concerts get sold out while they wait for TicketMaster to load.

SOCIALSCAPE PHILOSOPHY

Clearly the Socialscape is equal parts wonderful and dangerous; and our target, the Socialpath is an in-demand brand evangelizer. There have never been so many ways for so many people to say so much about your company, brand and products, or even to make an “expert” comparison to your competition.

Marketers need to find out who’s talking about their company or product, what they’re saying, where they’re saying it and gather insights to identify new opportunities. They must be able to seamlessly join the conversation, reward loyal customers and inspire them to spread the word, and quickly address customer concerns in a way that prevents negative backlash. When you understand your customers, it’s easy to speak their language. That starts by listening to what’s being said.

Navigating the Socialscape demands the use of new, breakthrough tools designed to deliver a wide variety of data from deep inside the territory. In the same fashion that tools were developed to track, rank and somewhat evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising, we need a new set of tools to monitor brands in the Socialscape.

The benefits of plotting a well-calculated course through the Socialscape are plentiful. Using such data, for example, can help with product development; creating new or tailored products that represent exactly what a majority of consumers say they want from a brand. It can mean faster, more effective rollouts of special promotions or even entire marketing campaigns. Solid analysis of electronic chatter might lead to new or re-worked applications able to deliver an entirely new customer base. As boundless as the Socialscape itself, the ways in which it can be exploited are virtually limitless. And all of this careful plotting will lead both to new and incremental revenue breakthroughs.
FOUR TOOLS FOR SOCIALSCAPE SUCCESS

When it comes to the right tools for social media success there are four distinct areas you’ll need to address.

• Brand Monitor: This tool is designed to follow your brand perception in-depth and provide more real-time insight as to its health and social media well-being. Additionally, through trending analysis, we track whether consumers are trumpeting the key messages that your advertising and marketing efforts are trying to deliver.
• A Product Monitor lets you focus on individual products to track their social media presence with weekly and quarterly updates. Combine this with real-time alerts to keep a close eye on specific trends or issues.
• An issue management tool should be used to identify and resolve customer care issues and improve the customer experience in ways that can help strengthen your brand. As soon as Brands/Products offer to listen to their customers – people will engage. Be prepared with a good fast-reacting automated/ad hoc response system as well.
• Competitive analysis: Remember, everything you track about your brand you can track about your competition. Do this to learn their strengths, take advantage of weaknesses and define opportunities to make your brand or product better.

There are many tools in the marketplace today but it’s not about the tool itself, but how it is used to provide analysis. What is important is having a social media tool that enables marketers to follow, monitor and interpret what is being said about client brands – or any brand – in the social media arena. Using a variety of monitoring and analysis tools, services can provide a sophisticated window into how social media participants feel about your brand, your products and your competition.

And we’re just getting started; progressive uses of the Socialscape include the ability to sift through the gene pool and gather rich individual profiles. Profiles that allow for corporate customer segmentations to be applied against individuals in the Socialscape. Additionally, rich trending analysis is now available to quantifiably measure change over time of not only your Socialscape activities, but as noted above, your marketing activities in general.

The bottom-line: It’s not enough to just have a presence in social media. To truly make a brand shine it’s requisite to approach the Socialscape with concise goals and well-defined methodology. Use the tools, engage carefully, react swiftly and get the Socialpath to actually work for you. Then enjoy some of that ultra-rare black ink from a revenue stream based on social media. In fact, I suggest you blog or tweet about it immediately.

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