Last week I took to the podium again to discuss something I believe could be the single biggest difference between a mediocre social media programme and an excellent one – an effective community map.

At ISM we have been thinking about community maps a lot.  In fact it is becoming a bit of an obsession.  The reason being, is that done right, a community map could ensure that your social media programmes are efficient, effective and targeted and your communities are well managed.

So what are the benefits of using a community map in your social media programmes?

• Using it to define your audience universe will allow you to set meaningful and well thought out targets for community size and engagement
• It will improve the accuracy and speed of your community growth
• It will ensure your engagement with a community is effective, including in crisis situations
• It will help you to make content go viral
• It will enable you to measure success and plan strategically for the future.

So here are some of our thoughts on community mapping and the importance of the Social Cartographer, any questions or comments please get in touch. 

The Social Cartographer, Figaro social media seminar, 1st December 2011

Those clever chaps at Edelman Global in New York recently explored the difference between social media monitoring and listening by asking what would come after listening.

The answer is rather simple, conversation. But, the assumption is that social media monitoring works. Whether Search or Social, the market is awash with “monitoring” companies claiming to be able to identify the “authorities”, enabling brands to “listen” to the existing “conversation” and plan campaigns. Or, for the more advanced adjust campaign content in real-time.

But before we move off social media monitoring into how to build content that influences the chosen authorities and spreads to the widest possible audience, there are two problems with the core dataset that typically establishes the most important authorities. And, by the way, the scale of data necessitates the use of tools.

The first problem is that the majority of social media monitoring tools and techniques, at least for English speaking market, are North American based. As such, a genuine authority in the UK market may simply not have the audience to compete with their North American counterparts. At a keyword level this gives a false assessment of the location of authority. This problem is amplified if a client is operating in a niche market.

The second problem is that genuine authorities rarely operate on a single channel. So, unless the social media strategy was formed in 2008, the data Net needs to include the target brand, their competitors, the market, but also the relationship between different channels from the same source.

Here, at ISM, our solution is to define the market space for ourselves before blindly accepting one monitoring “authority map” over another. By establishing our own market space using both Search, Social and traditional media reference points we can add a qualitative brief to the available social media monitoring tools. While this means a variety of tools need to be bolted together, this approach has produced a number of tangible benefits.

By pre-defining the potential authorities we can monitor them as individual sources – identifying what they are talking about, rather than when they talk about a keyword we are interested in. Listening to them as individuals has enabled us to build our content around a genuine community map and offer content that resonates with the authority and their existing audience. Our focus on the audience doesn’t always match our client’s ambition for their messaging but overall we have improved reach and engagement across our client base.

So to the question of what comes after listening, the answer is definitely conversation. But we suggest that there is much more work to construct the context of the conversation. As with many things in Search and Social the tools are a very important part of the overall solution but there is no silver bullet.

Last week I took the podium at Figaro’s Digital Health Check social media conference to discuss the differences between crowds and communities.

On the one hand it was a brief exploration of the benefits of an engaged community to a brand, combined with a few primary rules and objectives of community management. On the other hand it was also a wake up call for brands that are choosing to ditch the hard graft of community management and engagement in favour of the quick hit of a competition or ad campaign on facebook.

That’s not real social media.

Now don’t get me wrong, acquisition is an important part of any social programme – and anyone that claims that great content alone will bring people flocking to your brand is, in my opinion, wrong or a celebrity – but acquisition must be equally balanced with engagement. They are Ying and Yang, Fred and Ginger, D&C (I could go on…) and at the moment that balance doesn’t seem to exist. Looking at more than 25 international brands running social programmes, 64% seemed to have no community management strategy, complaints are rife and anti-social behaviour is not uncommon (would you expect to find blatant racism on the Walls of 2 household brands, or demeaning sexual references on several others?).

But why comment on this now? Well for two reasons, firstly I think it’s getting worse and secondly because of predicted trends in social media. It seems that there has been a pendulum effect in the world of social media. Two years ago, brands were being very wary of getting involved in social because of the potential dangers of engaging with the customer, but that fear has been overtaken by envy – brands are now looking at their competitors rolling out social programmes and are determined to have a go themselves. Unfortunately we seem to be forgetting to think about community management – how we are going to effectively manage the crowds that are about to descend onto our facebook pages, blogs, twitter accounts and YouTube channels. So our new found friends and customers get sub-standard treatment or even ignored altogether. And the predicted social media trend I mentioned? It is time to start preparing for the phenomena of defriending and unfollowing. As people try to cut down on the noise and clutter on their social networks expect to see social crowds dispersing. Now more than ever community management is going to be vital if you want your community to have longevity.

So if you want to know more take a look at the presentation above, watch theSocial Media Engagement: Crowds and Communities video or find me on twitter or LinkedIn.