While more and more companies are trying to break the ’social media code’, many seem to understand that consumers no longer find it exciting to friend a brand with just a single click of the mouse on the brand’s Facebook page. If that is the case, why are there so many companies trying to increase spending on social media in 2010? Probably because it’s easier to follow the crowd than redefine marketing around consumer’s touchpoint.

Nathaniel Perez provided some guiding principles to help us get beyond the tactical earned social media generation and enable you to create a richer and more successful ’social movement’ around your brand.

You can shape the outcome, but can’t prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.

From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial. Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.

Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don’t limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.

Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.

Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won’t scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.

It is nicely put. I would also add that getting people to talk about your brand is NO LONGER enough. Ultimately, you have to convert prospects in to customers and show your management that your social media strategy works (ROI). With all these said, you will still need social media as an intelligence tool and to have a channel for customer feedback.

Like what you read? Subscribe to our insider newsletter now!

Related posts:

1. Customer Service in the Digital Age
2. Vitamin Water to Crowdsource their Flavored Drink on Facebook
3. Create Stories for People to Talk About
4. 4 Big Reasons Why People Share Content Online
5. ‘Traditional Media is Dying’ – Ballmer Warned