How To Humanise Campaigns

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Scott Gould

On Monday 15th November 2010, I’ll be in London speaking at the Social Not For Profit Summit, organised by the most excellent Barry Furby. It’s a part of the techMAP series of events, which is a community around technology, marketing, advertising and PR.

I did say to Barry at first that I didn’t think I was a good fit, but as he reminded me, I’ve worked in small non-profits for 10 years! My work at The River Church, as well as our offshoots, like Touch Conference, He Saved The Day, others that no longer have websites, and our upcoming project To-Get-Her, which aims to double the number of rooms available for those rescued from Human Trafficking.

In the true spirit of Scott Gould and Friends, I’d like to hear from you what you would share and what you think would add value to this summit.

Humanising Campaigns

Barry has asked me to speak on two things, the first of which is about making humanistic campaigns. For me this goes down to Social Authority. Anything campaign we do at church (and with Like Minds) always profiles people of various demographics, as the number one question people ask when it comes to community is “who here is like me?”

Converting Followers to Advocates

The second topic is one that we speak about a lot here through our conversations on participation. By inviting people to be involved, and putting the kids in the show, you increase people’s emotional investment and thus they become advocates with you. Of course, this only works if you genuinely believe in them. You can’t cheat your way to this.

Leadership expert John Maxwell always says that the strongest leadership is needed in church, where people are not paid to work and cannot be threatened to work. I agree – the non-profit realm is where really leadership is needed, so I’m sure there’s some debate to be had here.

Let’s Meet

If you’re in London on Monday 15th November, then I’d love to see you there. All directions and details are on their website. If you’re wondering if it’s for you, the type of things being look at are:

What about Charities and Not for Profits?
What about those with small or no budget to capitalise on the digital and social landscape?
What about those who struggle to achieve advocacy for their cause and look to Social for a source of inspiration?
How can Social Media turn supporters into advocates?
How do you bring together your community online?

Your Leading Thoughts

As I said, I’d like to take your insights and present them.

How would you suggest people humanize their campaigns?
How do you convert followers to advocates? How much is influence and leadership a part of this?
Also, what are the links between both?

Photo credit

Where are Foursquare and Gowalla going?

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Scott Gould

I read a great post a while ago from Jonathan Arehart on why he quit Foursquare and Gowalla. There’s privacy concerns, frustration with checkins, boredom with badges and more. Certainly, others are feeling the same. I haven’t used either since February, and I’m not into Facebook Places either.

Why Checkin? The Identity Issue

In talking to James Poulter and reading his exceptional work on The Recommendation Economy, we’ve come to understand that much of what we use Social Media for (and brands have thrived through) is expression of identity. James goes into details about it here, but I think it does quickly translate into location based games like Foursquare and Gowalla:

By checking into a location I am expressing my identity. I am saying “I’m the type of person who goes here.” or “This is what I do.”
By becoming a mayor (and retaining it) I am saying “This is very important to me, a key part of my identity.”

And this is fine. But it’s a very slow way of expressing my identity and a very clumsy way compared to a quick tweet, like, update, etc. Speed is of the essence today, hence the popularity of the like button.

So then what would be the other reason to checkin? – as it certainly is useless for social networking itself…

Checkin for Financial Benefit

So Foursquare now have promotions where, based on your location, a nearby service provider can tell you about their 10% off for Foursquare users or 25% off for Mayors, or whatever promotion they have.

This for me is now the only reason why I would use Foursquare, given that it’s a slow way to express my identity. And the issue there is that if it’s Mayors that only get discount, I’d not interested unless I’m already a regular.

If Gowalla doesn’t do this, it’s dead (well, it almost is anyway, despite being better designed), and if Facebook places doesn’t, I can’t see it being a popular feature. Fatigue sets in quickly.

This for me is a precise reason why we must get to the bottom line with what we do and MATTER.

Your Leading Thoughts

What future do you see for Foursquare, etc?
Are you using them? If not, were you and then fatigue set in?
How can businesses other than restaurants and retailers get benefit out of these services?

Audio: Scatter, Gather, Matter – A Marketing Lesson From The Bible

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’ve always maintained that you can find everything about marketing and social media in the bible. Why? Because it’s all about human behaviour at the end of the day and the bible is a fantastic documentation of human behaviour whether you agree with it’s conclusion or not!

My ultimate framework for Social is based on ‘Scatter, Gather, Matter’, a three step proces to becoming more and more social by socialising channels (scatter), then content (gather), and then culture (matter). These are the three social strategies that I consider exist today.

What you might not know is that this framework comes from Mark 4, something that I spoke about at The River Church, Exeter earlier this year. You can listen to the podcast episode on iTunes by following this link.

Scatter

In this podcast I go through the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4, which Jesus tells as an analogy for how the gospel message is spread and also received. Scattering is the act of spreading your message without discrimination. Some seed will be eaten up, some won’t take root, and other seed will be chocked by thorns, but some seed will take root and grow, and the point is that it is dangerous to custom pick which seed you sow in which location because you don’t know what will prosper.

Most people when it comes to spreading a message like to carefully plant their seeds. They narrowly define who they want and focus on a very small number of people (normally people just like them) but expecting their message to get mass attention. It’s like fishing with a fishing rod, carefully planning which fish you want and how you want them, but then expecting to pull in a boat load.

We’ve all had times when the ones we thought who would come through for us didn’t, and the ones we didn’t expect did. In fact, this isn’t just some of the time, it’s all of the time. We have to continually readjust our expectations.

Gather

Seed becomes wheat that needs to be harvested else it will dry up, and this the act of gathering. When, out of the seed that you’ve scattered, some begins to participate back with you and bare fruit, you have to draw it to yourself.

The key here very much is to participate at the level to which you are being participated with. This is where volume becomes value. The volume play is in scattering the seed, in not limiting who follows you, in posting your content in various places, in putting your marketing where people are, in getting your organisations message slogan to become a mantra that everyone shares. The value play is then participating with those who participate with you – gathering.

The trick of gathering is that you don’t draw them to you as much as you respond to their first step towards you. You must provide a place for people to gather.

Gathering means you know who you have, and provides a way for you to increase your relationship with those people. In church we have many “gathering points” and these serve to increase the involvement of someone in church and increase their spiritual life.

Matter

What do you do with the harvest? What happens with the seed that is planted in the ground? A harvest feeds people and a tree bear fruits that feeds poeple.

The whole aim of this is tied up in mattering to people, because people matter. It’s not enough to say “add value”, we must matter to people by helping them matter for others. This is the two folds of the point – mattering to people, in order for them to matter to others. Thus the crux of this third and final stage is empowerment.

I had a very valuable conversation with Catherine White and others over the weekend about social media campaigns. It appears the end of many is just awareness. They would get far more long term return if instead they focussed on empowerment. What use is an aware person if they do not build upon that awareness and become empowered? Then, they can help themselves and help others.

Listen to this

Again, You can listen to the podcast episode for FREE on iTunes by following this link.

Your Leading Thoughts

How can you apply the Scatter, Gather, Matter framework to your projects?

Photo courtesy of Pandiyan

London Blog Club October

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

On Tuesday 19th October, I’m speaking at London Blog Club on the subject of “How to consistently receive over a dozen comments with each post.”

The event is FREE, with drinks and venue sponsored by Talk Talk, so sign yourself up for a great evening of meeting new people, as well as you and I getting some quality time to hang out. You can sign up for free here.

How Do You Receive More Than A Dozen Comments Per Post?

Given that this is our blog that I’ll be talking about, I want to go with your feedback and suggestions on how to consistently receive over a dozen comments with each post.

For most of us, 12 comments a post seems a small number, but this was the title that I was asked to talk on and thus I deduce that most people don’t even have that many. Nurturing community is something a lot of bloggers can write about, but few seem to actually do.

Here’s a few things that I’ve done and I think work:

I’ve never been good at titles, not even first paragraphs, but I do write with a style that is with you, not down to you. I under bake the issue and leave room for discussion.
Foster ownership. Let people own the blog – mention contributors, invite feedback, post great comments as posts, call it “Scott Gould and Friends”, love on people. After all, it is their blog!
Make the value-based play by investing in relationships with people off of the blog, like Skype calls, Twitter discussion, tweetups, etc. Be on their sales team.
Don’t just ask “What do you think?”, provide conversation starters. Be specific. Then when people comment, ask them further questions. Facilitate discussion. Link people and ideas together.
Know what your top metrics are and stick to them, and refuse to be discouraged by others. Mine are comments and subscribers. Page views and retweets don’t concern me one bit (and I don’t get many of them.) Rankings mean nothing but vanity, and not even that unless you’re top 10 Power150.

Your Leading Thoughts

Your inputs as leaders and facilitators who generate meaningful discussion on a regular basis.

How do you consistently get over a dozen comments per post? Your top 3 tips please.
What is the underlying mindset required, without which you can do the above but not get those comments?

So in case you missed it, I am speaking on Tuesday 19th at the TalkTalk Centre in London at 7pm. You can sign up for FREE here (as well as get address details.)

Also, thanks to Filip Matous for inviting me after we briefly met last month.

What The New Facebook Groups Mean For Community

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Scott Gould

Yesterday Facebook released a new version of Groups. So what?

Well firstly, phew!, finally Groups and Pages are different again and groups appear to have functionality that would make you want to use them! I don’t know about you but as a marketer and community builder, I struggled between knowing which to use for what, based on the benefits of both.

However now these new Groups have been built from the ground up with a new resolution to facilitate real world groups and communities that already exist, something that gets back to the core of Facebook’s early mission of ‘helping you connect with the people you know.’ And within this, I think there is not only opportuniy, but also it acts as a confirmation about what we’re now thinking about communities in general.

Communities are made of micro-communities

Let me take church as an example, seeing as I used it recently already to illustrate community. A church meets every Sunday for their service, which is the macro community, where all the people come together, no matter what age, demographic, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. But it isn’t the virtue of Sunday in itself that brings this community together nor holds it together. In actual fact, we find subsets of communities within this community, micro community if you will, where people exchange life on a more frequent and deeper level.

Therefore, macro community is the product of micro communities. The strength of this macro community is the strength of these micro communities – the strength of the bonds between the people in them, and the strength of the bonds that link these micro communities together.

This isn’t just a church thing. Take #LikeMinds and you’ll find we have micro communities within our macro community. Take your school, your family, your friendship groups, and so on.

What this reminds me of is this slide below from “The Real Social Network“, an exquisite and mind-shifting, a-ha moment presentation from Paul Adams at Google. It basically says that we can’t approach social networks from the point of view that we have one community, because we don’t. We have different sets of friends who we might say totally different things to. In other words, micro communities that make up our own personal macro community.

Facebook isn’t a single community

Whilst Facebook isn’t a single community, we currently have to treat it like it is. I have to send my Church updates to everyone, and my work updates to everyone. It’s just one community. And when I do share any of this content, it is quite clearly owned by me, not by anyone else.

What Facebook now appear to be doing is giving us a way to groupalise content. Remove my made up word and you’d have ‘co-owned content’ or something similar. The groups allow you to have group photos, group tags, group emails, group documents – a space where no one is really the owner but where everything is shared.

This means, it I use the image above, I could now form a group for each of those 4 communities above, and govern or guide it accordingly.

Groups in the status feed

From my early testing, these new Groups insert the updates into the news feed for those who are following them, meaning I have a new way to keep track of information that relates to an area of my life. Previously, it was this ability that gave Facebook Pages a competitive advantage over Facebook groups. Facebook Social Plugins, however are currently still only with Pages or customised content, so Groups don’t have a weigh in there yet.

Groups are like contact groups in your email client

When I use Mail to send an email to certain teams, I can type the name of that group. Now, I can do the same with the new Facebook Groups, as well as see it in the news feed. This is a powerful move towards what The Real Social Network was talking about when it said that we don’t have one single community.

The way that I plan to use them is like I’d use this email contact group, a place to foster micro community through curation of people (not so much content.) The difference over the old format of groups is that I get notifications on all the activity. This is really lacking when it comes to Pages, but now means I can track everything in that group. Considering that for many Facebook has replaced email, and is their top communication method other than talking, it makes sense for me now to conduct work through a Facebook group that will automatically keep me up-to-date on all the activity.

The bigger changes

Facebook making this change tells me a lot about how we are changing in our knowledge economy. Facebook has become strikingly powerful at both reflecting and shaping how we think and interact. I’m interested to see how this changes us. ‘Friend’ was their first big thing, then ‘wall’, and then most powerfully with ‘like’. Whats the new verb or noun going to be now?

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you see a use for Facebook groups? Or is it effort that you just don’t have time or interest for?
Do you observe my same observations about macro and micro community? What has Facebook taught us about how we really approach community?