On Sept. 21, 2009, Zappos.com CEOTony Hsieh tweeted,“Embarking on a social media strategy to help with marketing is like embarking on a facial muscle strategy to help w/ smiling.”

In many ways, he's right. The beauty of the social landscape is its ability to empower consumers everywhere to connect with one another in a way that is meaningful, immediate and, above all, honest. And just like all branding initiatives, if an organization puts out a communication that isn't reflective of the company's true product offering or actual brand experience, the results are sure to be damaging.

But here's where Hsieh is wrong. When a company does have a solid, competitive product offering (i.e. strong facial muscles), there are strategic moves that you can make to use the social universe to your advantage.

From a consumer standpoint, social media is arguably the greatest example of how the overall marketplace is shifting to be controlled by the consumer. Thanks to brands like Tivo, Netflix, Hulu, the iPhone and countless others, consumers are becoming accustomed to demanding the media they want, and when they want it. By engaging in social media, consumers deliberately choose which brands they want to hear from. And they can voice their opinions with complete free reign.

I don't know if it's accurate to say that social media is bigger than all of us — because it quite literally IS all of us.

The social landscape is all-encompassing; marketing is merely one of the purposes it can serve to a company, including customer service, human resources, etc. Before you can start implementing strategies, it's important to be aware of and understand the concept of true Social Engagement.

Social Engagement is using the appropriate social channels to achieve true dialogue and a meaningful relationship with your audience. Different audiences should be spoken to through different social channels and with slightly different messaging. Just like any other targeted marketing initiative, with social media, a“one size fits all”strategy will not work.

In achieving Social Engagement, generally, the end goals are simple:

• Give your existing loyalists an outlet to express their passion for your brand.

• Get every-day consumers interested in you enough to genuinely want to hear what you're saying.

• Further delight consumers so they want to say positive things about you.

• Effectively distribute offers to increase sales/traffic.

If you choose to use social media for more of a business-to-business or recruitment strategy, these goals might also include acquiring talent or focusing on potential customers/business partners. From a branding and awareness perspective, however, they remain generally the same. Social media should be used for communicating your brand personality and announcing relevant information your readers will want to hear.

In a nutshell, here's how to do it.

Make the commitment. First of all, you have to understand that social media is a commitment. Probably the most misunderstood aspect of social media as a marketing tool is the idea of the social media“campaign.”While social media tactics can be effectively used to support marketing campaigns — by serving as a valuable extension of them — social media is not a campaign in and of itself, but an ongoing conversation. To invest in social media solely on a promotional level is selling yourself short and could make you look unprofessional.

To achieve Social Engagement, it is important that you identify and commit a resource — whether it is an employee, agency, consultant, etc. — to take ownership of all social media efforts to ensure that all announcements are effectively communicated and all social“chatter”is closely monitored.

Be there when they look for you. If a loyalist of your company seeks out your brand on a social network and it isn't there, it is just as much a wasted opportunity if he or she had gone to the store looking for your product and it wasn't on the shelves, if not more so. For example, when Engauge began working with Sonny's Bar-B-Q, the company didn't have an official Facebook fan page in place. By simply setting it up, the fan page instantly attracted hundreds of fans. By filling the void, existing supporters of the brand could now be engaged.

The very first basic step you have to take is establishing a presence on the appropriate, popular avenues of social media such as Facebook, Twitter account, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.

Make concerted efforts to build your social following. Facebook has more than 400 million users. Twitter had its 10 billionth tweet last month. The popularity of social media is astounding, and it's only going to continue to grow. From a numbers standpoint alone, it would be remiss of your organization to invest in marketing efforts but not specifically address the social universe. Whether you run a promotion to gain Twitter followers or use traditional media to promote your Facebook page, building your social following should be an important part of your marketing plan.

Once you've got them, keep them engaged. If you decide to provide an incentive to increase your social following, it is important to keep followers engaged with valuable information or continued special offers. Otherwise, there's no reason for them to stick around. For our client International Delight, we chose to give coupons for a free creamer in exchange for becoming a fan. At the height of the program, we were accumulating fans at up to 1,000 per hour. To prevent drop-off, we continue to engage in meaningful conversations with our fans pertaining to the product and keep them updated regarding special promotions.

It's also important to remember that you can't entirely control social media. People are going to have their opinions, and they're not always going to be positive. Yet, as long as the facial muscles are there, social media can help you give people a reason to smile about your product.

Editor's note: Barb Scherer is president of Engauge, a full service-marketing agency in Orlando. Scherer has more than 22 years of experience in providing clients with expertise in research/planning, account management, creative, public relations, media and interactive.

Food for Thought

Here are examples of how Engauge has driven results for client Chik-Fil-A:

It's Linner time Microsite

• Encouraged consumers to stop by Chik-Fil-A to enjoy a milkshake for“Linner”to increase store traffic during the hours of 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

• Used various social channels to support the effort

Cow Appreciation Day Web site

• Promoted the concept of“Cow Appreciation Day,”when consumers are encouraged to dress as a cow to receive a complimentary chicken sandwich

• Used various social channels to support the effort

The economic meltdown coupled with advances in technology has birthed a new species of businesses classified as Social Enterprises. Companies of all sizes that adopt this New Normal are winning with their customers as well as their balance sheets.

WHAT IS A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

An organization with a transparent leader who fuses strategically chosen social technologies into the corporate culture, business model and systems. The result is improved economic value for employees, customers, partners and community.

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE QUOTIENT (SEQ)

Your SEQ pinpoints your location on the social enterprise spectrum. That location becomes your starting point to develop your strategic playbook. The higher your score is the greater the propensity for economic success. There are seven elements of the SEQ, including ecosystem, business model, culture, brand, customers, partners and competitors.

(1) ECOSYSTEM

Measuring the health of your ecosystem is the first step to SEQ. Let’s take, for example, the movie “Avatar.” Pandora, the moon on which the movie took place, was the environment where the Na’vi lived and worked. Similar to how we overlooked the last few decades of irresponsible fiscal policy, the Na’vi did not stop the RDA Corp. — a mining company from Earth — in time to prevent their ecosystem from collapse.

(2) BUSINESS MODEL

Does your current model work in the New Normal? Where are the bottlenecks? What metrics are you tracking?  The Na’vi’s business model included the main ingredient in any social enterprise, the “Tree of Souls.” James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” referred to it as “a big input-output station.” The Na’vi were connected to this web of information all the time. Social enterprise companies have comparative systems. They tie data from the Internet and their internal databases, and mine new data from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other sources to touch their customers where they are located.

(3) BRAND

How do you leverage your brand with social technologies to reach new customers? The Na’vi were known for being great warriors who cared greatly for their ecosystem. They had high influence and respect. Their brand was well defined and easy to follow because they were connected to all their constituents in real time.

(4) CULTURE

Is your CEO transparent and does he or she foster an environment of collaboration, plus have a project-management mentality? The Na’vi were open, trusting and collaborated on everything, and even with competitors.

(5) CUSTOMERS

Do you who and where your raving fans are? How do you nurture and sustain them? A segment from the SEQ asks a simple question: Are you for us or against us? The objective is to move as many bystanders to the Raving For and Influencer For columns.

(6) PARTNERS

Do you know which of your vendors, investors, friends, affiliates and others are prominent online, and with whom you could be leveraging your relationships? Since the Na’vi were connected to their network, they were able to draw on those relationships and defeat their arch rival, the RDA Corp.

(7) COMPETITORS

Which of your competitors are influential, and how are they using social technologies? What are they saying, and how successful are they?

Editor’s note: Mark A. Carbone is FirstMonday’s resident “technology catalyst.” Follow him on Twitter @MarkACarbone or e-mail mark@marksnewnormal.com.

The ability for Google and Bing to now show an angry tweet or Facebook comment that a customer posted minutes ago can rank higher on search engines than your company’s Web site. This is a game-changer for all who want to thrive in the emerging Conversation Economy.

Take the Tiger Woods Test: Even though it’s been nearly two months since the story broke, his online reputation and sentiment is bogeying in real-time. The adjacent screenshot lists posts and comments made within a 20-second time span — 20. They range from claims of steroid use and total conquests to pleas of forgiveness.

This is an extreme example. Yet, only weeks ago he was regarded as one of the most respected public figures on the planet and the biggest human brand in history, worth more than $1 billion in marketing dollars.

Celebrities have a lot of laundry aired out regularly, but in this new normal, you may soon have your share of “transgressions” aired on the Internet.

There are free as well as paid tools online that measure sentiment and what you and others are saying.  Go to www.SocialMention.com and give it a try. A key component of reputation is your "Sentiment Score" — the measure of positive, neutral and negative conversations about you.  To see this in action, go to www.TweetFeel.com, a fun Twitter tool to watch sentiment in real time about any topic, person or company. Another site, www.NewsSift.com, is better for business.

Why does reputation matter now more than ever? As social technologies continue to disrupt the status quo and we move from producer-controlled messaging to consumer-truth finding, our business models need disruptive overhauls. Case in point: I went to a new restaurant recently and asked the owner what he thought about www.yelp.com.  After he finished cursing me and anyone who’s ever used Yelp, I realized he was stuck in old-business-model thinking.  He’s been receiving poor reviews based on his prices and is choosing to ignore his real-time negative reputation.

Instead, he could be engaging those users, learning from them and encouraging his raving fans to post positive reviews to combat the negative.

We need a new model, one that can adapt to real-time reputation issues and much more. That new model is “Social Enterprise.”

In future articles, I’ll share how to become a social enterprise.

What Can You Start Doing?

1. Gather your personal tools.

• Fortitude. This is not easy.  Becoming cyber savvy takes discipline and time.
• Smart Phone. iPhone, Blackberry, Nexus One or Droid.
• Browser.  FireFox is the best because of the powerful plug-ins.
• Twitter account. Use www.TweetDeck.com for greater ease.

2. Get strategic. Conduct a Social Enterprise Assessment of your company.  What is your SEQ — Social Enterprise Quotient? Come back in February to download your free SEQ.

3. Review your current business model. Incorporate a new communication strategy internally and externally into the new model.  Also, include a way to find and sustain raving fans to propel your message. Revisit your companies compelling story and improve and condense it to a one-minute video.

4. Become a blog reader. Being able to gather and read a lot of information quickly is key to success. (Google Reader is a great tool for this at www.google.com/reader.)

5. Start tracking your reputation and the reputation of others. There are hundreds of tools available.  You only need a few:

• www.google.com/alerts (basic alerts)
• www.newssift.com (great business tool)
• socialmention.com (holistic listening tool)
• www.ubervu.com (general listening tool)
• www.blogpulse.com (blog specific)
• www.peoplebrowsr.com (paid service that’s well worth the $5 a month)
• www.twendz.com (measures Twitter Trends)
• www.twitalyzer.com (Twitter specific)

Editor’s note: Mark A. Carbone is First Monday’s resident “Social Technology Strategist.”  Follow him on Twitter @MarkACarbone for the latest or email mark@marksnewnormal.com.

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