Thursday, September 26, 2013

Social Media Platforms



  • More and more large and small brands are investing in special purpose, internal or external, online community platforms that THEY control. These social media platforms can be custom designed to suit your unique brand attributes.
  • Maximize YOUR ROI by engaging your community with a social media solution that you control.
  • Create brand awareness, retain and attract new members and customers for your community, products and services.
  • Enhance your brand and drive performance objectives based on your decisions.
  • Control all of the content, including advertising, in your community’s platform.
  • Customize your community’s user profile requirements to extract the personal or behavioral information you need.
  • Control the valuable repository of information that you extract from your social media strategy.
  • Grow your social network your way.
Here are some specific examples of how Social Media Community Platforms Serve Real Business Needs and Deliver Real ROI:
Business Need
  • Harness the power of Social Media to contribute to the attainment of your internal and external objectives
Business Advantage
  • Maximize ROI by engaging your community with a social media solution that you control.
  • Reduce communication costs
  • Empower your organization through engagement
  • Create brand awareness, retain and attract new members and customers for your community, products and services
Business Need
  • Communicate with high efficiency and high productivity
  • Increase Employee / Customer Engagement and Retention
  • Measure Engagement
Business Advantage
  • By enabling your private workforce or public community with a proprietary structured communication channel, you are able to identify positive and negative conversations and respond to them accordingly. With this, an employee with an innovative idea can get reinforcement and feedback and an employee who has brought up or identified a negative rumor or misconception can also been attended quickly to and be corrected.
Business Need
Make well informed strategic decisions in all aspects of your business including:
  • Planning a future workforce strategy
  • Innovating your products and services
Business Advantage
  • Real-time measurable insights
  • Define rising organization issues
  • Identify influencers in your organization
  • Identify popular topics
  • Polarity – define the most positive and controversial issues within your organization
  • Velocity – identify the fastest growing issues
Business Need
  • Develop leadership and identify influencers
Business Advantage
  • By knowing who is leading the most and who is most followed, you gain insight beyond your standard hierarchy to see who your workforce thinks in the most influential
Business Need
  • Community Feedback
Business Advantage
  • Simple-to-use surveys, polls, and voting that will entice the most skeptical users to simply press a button and voila, before they know it they are engaging with the community
Business Need
  • Centralized media and document sharing
Business Advantage
  • Easily centralize, store, share and pull external media from an unlimited number of sources providing a more sophisticated way to communicate and share ideas

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Everyone talks about social media being a powerful marketing tactic, but without metrics proving ROI how can we be sure?
As a starting point the following 4 Key Performance Indicators or KPI should be closely monitored during the early stages of your social media campaign or web application launch for your best shot at success. The 4 areas are; User Engagement, Time on Site, Volume of New Content and Sponsorship ROI. There are separate reasons for each of these key metrics. They can be described as follows;
User Engagement – How many visitors to the site are actively gauged with an account and contributing content? To get the boat moving on this daunting hurdle, I recommend invitations be extended to “active” social networkers who show a particular affinity to your specific social media campaign or application. Since these “power users” will be responsible for the majority of the activity early on in the site’s life (thereby populating News Feeds and keeping the appearance of the site’s content fresh), it will be important to engage them in a two-way conversation directly from management. i.e. the Community Manager.
Time on Site / Pageviews– This is an important statistic that varies widely across the competition. There are often benchmarks available for your industry (which can be found in google analytics). 10 pages per visit for example translates to roughly 4 minutes on the site per visit. Upon launch of your site or campaign you should be pleased to see 50% of the set benchmarks (i.e. 5 pages per visit and 2 minutes on average per visit). The expectation will be that these numbers can be doubled by Version 2.0 of the site once more community and networking features can be introduced.
Volume of Content – Because social media puts the power of adding content, a post, a video or an event in the hands of any individual user, you should intend to closely monitor the number of, and speed with which new content is created. This will be an important determinant in deciding how much research effort to allocate when breaking into a new geography or market segment for your social media activity. For example, if you launch in City A and it takes roughly 30 days to make it to 100% thanks to user contributions, then in future cases you can launch in a new city with fewer listings under the assumption that completing the list will be done quickly thanks to our users.
Sponsorship ROI – This metric is unique in that it depends largely on the number of pageviews by your users. That being said, I believe that a higher CPM rate is acceptable based on the premise that all advertisements will be contextually relevant to the user base. In Version 1.0 of your social media site you should seek to migrate current sponsors on your competitor’s sites for free or for a very low price, but expect to watch the impressions in order to attain a growing CPM price. Surprisingly, niche sites can demand significantly higher CPM rates than larger web sites. This may be due to better targeting smaller niche markets that advertisers consider more valuable.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Defining Sustainable Competitive Advantages in Social Media

Michael Porter developed a PROFIT Model to outline sustainable competitive advantages for businesses. Two (2) Sustainable Advantages is typically the minimum requirement for success. As I applied to social media, the PROFIT Model looks as follows:
  • Physical Resources – Does not apply in the traditional sense since this is a web-based venture. However, with a powerful search rank for your targeted keyword and combinations of keywords, location on search result pages could (and will need to) become a sustainable competitive advantage.
  • Reputational Resources – Sites like that are held in high regard within the industry or interest you wish to launch your social media web venture in should have the backing of respected and integral professionals within that field and even sometimes celebrities as well. It is best for most social media ventures, since they are usually solving a specific need, to look to create a more niche reputation by participating at events in cities where you have good traction i.e. Huntington Beach, California would be a good place to launch a surfing social media site since they have the US Open of Surfing every year. This will allow you to secure a more powerful (one-to-one) reputation, which in many ways, has longer staying power than a superstar name.
  • Organizational Resources At the beginning of your social media venture is will most likely be comprised of a handful of individuals, make sure you are working with a good core group that you can trust. Although working in a small core group can pose some late nights and burning the candle both ends there are currently few advantages realized from robust tested organizational processes with the exception of agility which does in fact play a major role in creating successful web 2.0 businesses (the ability to change things on the fly based on user response).

  • Financial Resources – Until venture capital (or angel) investment is part of the picture, you will not have the ability to bury competitors by out-spending them. VC’s and angels seem to be contantly growing in this social media space so don’t be afraid to search your LinkedIn for investors you may be connected to if you have a great idea!

  • Intellectual Resources –Intellectual property is inherent with most social media web ventures. Make sure to have employee agreements that protect your and help avoid common pitfalls that many sites experience when building an online community. For example, building offshore to save money but not signing an NDA or IP rights agreement. While technical infrastructure is important, social infrastructure is of even greater significance as any foremost Web 2.0 entrepreneur will attest to.

  • Technological Resources – If your social media initiative decides to open up its API in the future to application builders (partners), there will be a technological advantage in becoming a platform – which is a significant step forward from being a website. Many large platforms have done this, for example Facebook and Google both have API’s.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Social Media Monetization Strategies & Revenue Models

In the past the revenue model for most websites including social media has primarily been advertising and affiliate marketing based. Some new school thinkers have completely foregone revenues as sponsors are invited onto the platform for free in order to get accurate measures on the CPM (cost per thousand) rates and the advertisers return on investment.
Beyond the CPM, there is opportunity for social media widget, microsite, facebook application or even your cutting edge iPad app to make money with a proven web monetization strategy. There are said to be 9 general models which are as follows:
· Brokerage
· Advertising
· Infomediary
· Merchant
· Manufacturer (Direct)
· Affiliate
· Community
· Subscription
· Utility
The top 4 which apply to most new social media ventures are listed and discussed below:
As an SaaS model
It has been described by some to be the holy grail of social media revenue models where you can make money while you sleep or even better while you’re on the beach letting recurring revenue waves crash into your bank account. Although it is hard to get there right away, there is potential (although moreso in the long-term) for your site to begin offering a free version of its site to all users, but with the option to subscribe to enhanced feature set and members only content that would be valued by select individuals who are willing to pay a monthly or yearly fee to have access to those features.
As a Brokerage
Brokers are market-makers: they bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions. Usually a broker charges a fee or commission for each transaction it enables. The formula for fees can vary. Your social media site and / or application can make headway in this model by handling a service for your community members such as event registration or processing payments.
As an Affiliate Platform
This strategy would arguably be more time consuming as the site would have to target brokers who sell into Community Relations Coordinators (CRC’s). Unless there is already a dedicated group of organizations assisting these people, then you are better off driving CRC’s directly to the site and converting their dollars there. Conversely, you may decide to become an affiliate of major good wholesalers or even manufacturers specifically related to your industry and the niche of your social media application or site.
As an Advertising Platform
This is the primary revenue driver of most social media ventures out there today, especially during the first 12 months. Advertisers will need to either be local to the communities in which the site operates or must have the ability to sell into those markets easily.
After you’ve chosen your model you should consider the following Web 2.0 Presence Recommendations to get started:
· Facebook.com – applications, fan page, group wall posts
· Meetup.com – event listings
· Twitter.com – possible application creation that filters for people interested in the need that your social media solution provides (easily built using search.twitter.com)
· Upcoming.org – leverage the subscription feature and find out how we can create listings automatically from your social media website.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Business Advantages of Social Media Platforms

More and more large and small brands are investing in special purpose, internal or external, online community platforms that THEY control. These social media platforms can be custom designed to suit your unique brand attributes.
· Maximize YOUR ROI by engaging your community with a social media solution that you control.
· Create brand awareness, retain and attract new members and customers for your community, products and services.
· Enhance your brand and drive performance objectives based on your decisions.
· Control all of the content, including advertising, in your community’s platform.
· Customize your community’s user profile requirements to extract the personal or behavioral information you need.
· Control the valuable repository of information that you extract from your social media strategy.
· Grow your social network your way.
Here are some specific examples of how Social Media Community Platforms Serve Real Business Needs and Deliver Real ROI:
Business Need
Harness the power of Social Media to contribute to the attainment of your internal and external objectives
Business Advantage
- Maximize ROI by engaging your community with a social media solution that you control.
- Reduce communication costs
- Empower your organization through engagement
- Create brand awareness, retain and attract new members and customers for your community, products and services
Business Need
- Communicate with high efficiency and high productivity
- Increase Employee / Customer Engagement and Retention
- Measure Engagement
Business Advantage
By enabling your private workforce or public community with a proprietary structured communication channel, you are able to identify positive and negative conversations and respond to them accordingly. With this, an employee with an innovative idea can get reinforcement and feedback and an employee who has brought up or identified a negative rumor or misconception can also been attended quickly to and be corrected.
Business Need
Make well informed strategic decisions in all aspects of your business including:
- Planning a future workforce strategy
- Innovating your products and services
Business Advantage
- Real-time measurable insights
- Define rising organization issues
- Identify influencers in your organization
- Identify popular topics
- Polarity – define the most positive and controversial issues within your organization
- Velocity – identify the fastest growing issues
Business Need
Develop leadership and identify influencers
Business Advantage
By knowing who is leading the most and who is most followed, you gain insight beyond your standard hierarchy to see who your workforce thinks in the most influential
Business Need
Community Feedback
Business Advantage
Simple-to-use surveys, polls, and voting that will entice the most skeptical users to simply press a button and voila, before they know it they are engaging with the community
Business Need
Centralized media and document sharing
Business Advantage
Easily centralize, store, share and pull external media from an unlimited number of sources providing a more sophisticated way to communicate and share ideas

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Social Media Monetization Strategies & Revenue Models

In the past the revenue model for most websites including social media has primarily been advertising and affiliate marketing based. Some new school thinkers have completely foregone revenues as sponsors are invited onto the platform for free in order to get accurate measures on the CPM (cost per thousand) rates and the advertisers return on investment.
Beyond the CPM, there is opportunity for social media widget, microsite, facebook application or even your cutting edge iPad app to make money with a proven web monetization strategie. There are said to be 9 general models which are as follows:
• Brokerage
• Advertising
• Infomediary
• Merchant
• Manufacturer (Direct)
• Affiliate
• Community
• Subscription
• Utility



The top 4 which apply to most new social media ventures are listed and discussed below:


As an SaaS model
It has been described by some to be the holy grail of social media revenue models where you can make money while you sleep or even better while you’re on the beach letting recurring revenue waves crash into your bank account. Although it is hard to get there right away, there is potential (although moreso in the long-term) for your site to begin offering a free version of its site to all users, but with the option to subscribe to enhanced feature set and members only content that would be valued by select individuals who are willing to pay a monthly or yearly fee to have access to those features.
As a Brokerage
Brokers are market-makers: they bring buyers and sellers together and facilitate transactions. Usually a broker charges a fee or commission for each transaction it enables. The formula for fees can vary. Your social media site and / or application can make headway in this model by handling a service for your community members such as event registration or processing payments.
As an Affiliate Platform
This strategy would arguably be more time consuming as the site would have to target brokers who sell into Community Relations Coordinators (CRC’s). Unless there is already a dedicated group of organizations assisting these people, then you are better off driving CRC’s directly to the site and converting their dollars there. Conversely, you may decide to become an affiliate of major good wholesalers or even manufacturers specifically related to your industry and the niche of your social media application or site.

As an Advertising Platform
This is the primary revenue driver of most social media ventures out there today, especially during the first 12 months. Advertisers will need to either be local to the communities in which the site operates or must have the ability to sell into those markets easily.
After you’ve chosen your model you should consider the following Web 2.0 Presence Recommendations to get started:
• Facebook.com – applications, fan page, group wall posts
• Meetup.com – event listings
• Twitter.com – possible application creation that filters for people interested in the need that your social media solution provides (easily built using search.twitter.com)
• Upcoming.org – leverage the subscription feature and find out how we can create listings automatically from your social media website.