Professional Documents
Culture Documents
All of these articles in this guide were originally published at Wall Street
Journal India by Chief Mentor: Pradeep Chopra
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COMMUNITY
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There are frequent debates in our workshops about whether the time and effort
spent on building a Facebook marketing or brand experience is worth it. Is it really
positive when it comes to return on investment?
According to Ajaay Gupta, chairman and managing director of Capital Foods Ltd.,
the brand owner of Ching’s Secret, Smith and Jones and Raji brands, this is how he
compares the ROI of its community on Facebook with the ROI of advertising in
print:
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theoretical and will never happen. However, to whatever fraction you may want to
discount this number, the final number of people who will see the message will still
be much larger than the reach of an advertisement in print.
But the real ROI of the Facebook community, based on the parameters below, is
extremely positive when compared to other competing advertising media:
–Recurring Cost: To reach out to the same readers they reached earlier through
print, they will need to pay for every new advertisement. In the case of Facebook,
it doesn’t cost them any money for a new message.
–Visibility: In the case of Facebook, they have complete visibility of their audience’s
profiles while they get negligible visibility through print.
–Virality: Finally, the opportunity of their existing Facebook fans bringing new fans
or influencing other people’s decisions toward their brand almost doesn’t exist in the
case of print but is exponential on Facebook.
These are smart rules of thumb that can be applied to any business, small or large,
while measuring or planning a Facebook presence in a marketing plan. I look
forward to hearing about any arguments or models of evaluating Facebook
effectiveness for business growth.
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It’s a question that most firms, large and small, encounter today. While the question
highlights how powerful Facebook has become as an online marketing strategy, it
also signals a herd mentality: you must have it if your competitors do.
A community can serve multiple purposes and can be very powerful provided you
have a clear objective. Some of the objectives for you to consider include:
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(Ching’s Secret, a packaged food company uses its Facebook page to target the young, tech-
savvy consumer)
A packaged food brand, Ching’s Secret, is one of the few Indian consumer brands
to cross 100,000 fans on Facebook. It considers the community to be the most
effective customer relationship management tool. Its seriousness about leveraging
value from its online community is obvious from the fact that its upcoming product
packaging will have links to its Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Having clarity around the business objective for launching a community doesn’t
mean that you become rigid about it. You should be open to changing your
objectives as you witness what works and what doesn’t in the community-building
process. Also, your business objectives will define the metrics by which you
measure and optimize the success of your community.
Depending on your business objectives and the customer segment you plan to
serve, you will decide on the channel or channels to pursue – whether Facebook,
LinkedIn, Twitter or another - to engage with them. For example, Ching’s Secret
participated in a bootcamp that we had organized in the past, and wanted to build a
direct relationship with youth and technology savvy folks. Its key target segment
was digitally inclined. Accordingly, building a community on Facebook turned out to
be their natural choice.
On the other hand, large communities such as Commonwealth Games 2010, which
we launched while I was running my previous business, have every Indian as their
target audience.
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This is the most important question you need to answer if you want to capitalize on
the true potential of the online community for your brand. However, in my
experience, this is also the least understood and appreciated question about
building a successful community. Obviously, the people in your organization who
are talking to your customers can best answer this “need fulfillment” question.
There are two basic questions: Why will a person join our community? And why will
that person participate in the community on an ongoing basis?
If your audience consists of a variety of members, you will have to answer these
separately for each of those segments. While you may not have the perfect answer
to begin with, the extent to which you are able to define these objectives will
determine the effectiveness of the community.
Well thought out answers to the questions above will help you lay the strategy for
launching your brand. However, it is the execution of the strategy, which will
ultimately give you the business results you want out of building an online
community.
In the next part of this article, I will examine the key elements of execution -
channels, content, promotion and measurement - and also look at one of the most
interesting and critical elements: What causes engagement in an online
community?
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(Ching’s has a strong community that returns to learn recipes by watching videos
that the company puts up)
Communicating the presence of your company Facebook page and keeping users
or readers engaged is a second important part of building a company page on
Facebook. I had written last week about developing a strategy and an execution
plan as a first step.
After you’ve identified your community-building objectives and the target audience,
the key question to answer is: “What’s in it for them?” The success of your efforts to
promote your Facebook page resides in having answers for these questions: Why
will a person join your community? And why will that person participate in the
community on an ongoing basis?
Which brings us to the fundamental question: “What causes engagement on
Facebook?”
The answer is central to the phenomenon of community-building across social
media platforms.
To answer this question, I thought of using the power of community, by posing this
question to people in my Facebook network. The result was some valuable
consumer insights into the content that users look forward to.
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Chip and Dan Heath have captured all of the above distinctions very well in the
“SUCCESs” model in their highly popular book “Made to Stick.” According to the
“SUCCESs” model, any idea (or content) which has the following traits in it causes
stickiness (or engagement): Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional,
Stories.
I’ve seen this model working amazingly well for any form of communication
(Facebook wall post, Tweet, post, a proposal, or a business presentation) on any
medium (online as well offline.) Interestingly, you don’t need to create all of the
content you would want to publish in your community. For almost every business
vertical, there is an abundant amount of free and readily available content across
various digital avenues such as search engines, blogs, video channels (e.g.
YouTube), document channels (e.g. SlideShare), photo channels (e.g. Flickr),
discussion groups (e.g. Google Groups), Twitter search, Wikipedia etc., which you
can aggregate in a useful and copyright friendly way for your audience.
The best part is you don’t need to search for this content. It can come to your
mailbox if you use smart tools such as Google Alerts or SocialOomph (a keyword
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alert tool.) Further, using tools and applications (such as SocialRSS), you can
automatically republish your content from other channels (e.g. a blog post or a
tweet) to your Facebook fan page.
The process so far will ensure that you’ve laid an extremely solid foundation to build
a live and engaging community. Your job then is to scale up and you can use some
of the promotional opportunities below:
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Monitoring it continuously and making sure it occupies the right position in the
consumer’s mind, though, will require you to use the right analytics.
Your business objectives for launching a community on Facebook will define the
metrics you use to measure and optimize the success of your community.
For example, if you are building a community to promote your brand, you may want
to measure the number of relevant target users that are part of your community and
the quality of interactions with those users.
Similarly, if your objective is to generate leads for your business, you may want to
track the number of relevant queries you receive through your efforts to build a
community on Facebook.
How will you know that you are on the right track?
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–With around 400 page views per day (out of which half were from unique visitors),
this community had a high proportion of repeat visits –With over 250 photo views
per day, it is evident that pictures of unique places are one of the most popular
pieces of content offered –Also, with a gender ratio of 70:30 (male to female), it is
clear that this community is currently used more by men
Practically, this gets translated into the following trends on Facebook Insights (a
free metrics dashboard available to all Facebook users):
1. Fan Growth: The number of fans (as well as unsubscribed fans) on your page
over a period of time. In the latest version of Facebook Insights, you can also
see where fans came from.
At a macro level, there are a few interesting tools which help you assess the value
of your community on Facebook and allow you to do a thorough competitive
analysis as well:
1. Facebook Grader: A tool designed by HubSpot to help you assess the ranking of
your company’s Facebook page among other pages.
2. Social Page Evaluator: A tool designed by Vitrue to help marketers get a better
understanding of a Facebook page’s ”value.” Although it is not a perfectly scientific
tool, it can be used as a good indicator to compare two Facebook pages. Here
is another study by Vitrue to help you gauge the dollar value of each fan on your
company’s Facebook page.
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COMMUNITY
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I would like to end this series by encouraging you to continuously experiment and
evolve your strategy as you move along in the community-building process on
Facebook. I will be writing next on “Online Reputation Management.”
Do let me know the topics in digital marketing you would like me to write about.
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