Great infographic:

Link – http://www.briansolis.com/2011/01/exploring-the-twitterverse/

This is ‘The Conversation Prism’ – created by media guru Brian Solis and the agency JESS3 (you can find it at www.theconversationprism.com). What we have here is a great visual representation of the many tools available across 28 different ‘flavours’ of conversation. This is a guide to help people find tools for helping listen, interact and engage people online.

The BRAND is central but most often the ‘me too’ marketers within organizations – both large and small – start with a chosen social media channel as the basis for a strategy that attempts to sell a product, incentivize a group of people to undertake an action or just getting a conversation going about their brand.

…but looking at a social media is not the right place to start thinking about engagement for a campaign or movement.

The channels and online applications in the ‘Conversation Prism’ achieve nothing without the creation of a strategy to use them and no strategy should be formulated with an execution channel in mind. That kind of strategy would lack integrity and not create what we at voxdialog call MOMENTUM and IMPACT.

What is MOMENTUM?

Dictionary.com defines this as ‘Force or speed of movement; impetus; or course of events’.  More simply put, it is the amount of activity by a group of people towards a common goal.

We actually see MOMENTUM coming from the creation of a movement.  Think of Obama’s campaign, the end of Apartheid, Movember, and also – closer to home – The Zombie Walk and Critical Mass here in Vancouver, BC.

We think that to create a movement is to create momentum by engaging people in a 4-step process:

1. Create a ‘reason to believe’
2. Identify a target or objective to focus messaging and actions
3. Introduce and foster a shared belief system and strategy to engage
4. …then continuously rally the movement of people to reach the target

Integral to this as well is that you need to listen to what people have to say, create a peer-to-peer conversation and fuel the movement with content, events and online and offline media.

What is IMPACT?

It’s an effect or the undertaking of an action that changes the current situation. This could be a vote, a download, sharing link to content on a brand site or even a purchase. Overall we believe that IMPACT only comes from creating MOMENTUM.

Once, we have defined how we will create MOMENTUM and what IMPACT we want then we can start to tap the hyper-connected community both online and offline. The potential is huge:

• Over 36 billion web pages with over 2 billion internet users
• 500m+ people on Facebook, with average of 133 friends each (and we know that figure is low on average – just look at your friends)
• 190m+ people on twitter posting 65 million tweets a day
• 5 billion people will use cell phones in 2010

Great successes in MOMENTUM and IMPACT come from creating an execution across multiple media and channels. Social media can be part of that but should never provide the entire platform. Following is a great example…

STARBUCKS(RED)

This was a campaign created for launch in Christmas 2008. STARBUCKS partnering with (RED) to come up with STARBUCKS(RED) Campaign, which collaborates with global brands to produce Red-branded products and donates a percentage of sales on each product to Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. During this holiday promotion, Starbucks will contribute 5c to the Global Fund for every payment made with the special Red loyalty card.

How did they create MOMENTUM?

The ‘reason to believe’

• Every coffee purchase during the period of the campaign resulted in a certain amount of antiretroviral drugs being purchased

The target

• People that believe in change and like to drink coffee in Starbucks (that is a lot of people)
• About 161m people drink coffee in the US with 108m people consuming it daily – Starbucks has a 10% market share

The shared belief system and strategy to engage

• Do something good today!
• Buy a coffee make a difference – 5c on every coffee is donated
• Interact online and make even more of a difference
• Tell your friends and get them to make a difference as well

…then continuously rally the movement of people to reach the target

• NY Times front-page takeover
• Celebrity events – http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=6
• Online community portal – red.starbucks.com
• Facebook event – http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=46477936578
• Video content distributed across channels -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkC5qYH0ln0

IMPACT

• It became the most successful Facebook campaign ever
• It took the Starbucks fan page from 500K fans to over 3m during the course of this campaign – and now it is over 16m fans from running subsequent campaigns! Take a look here – http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks
• Millions of syndicated news feeds across multiple digital channels and devices
• A significant amount of $$$s raised (actual numbers not shared)
• Starbucks is now the most recognized and strongest brands online – http://w3bkitten.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/starbucks-are-super/
• It can create IMPACT through this connected group for reduced cost i.e. promoting new product to good causes

A great analysis is here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/25528036/IMC-STarbucks-red

It was a strategy based not on what channels to execute on but rather a great idea…Social media was not the basis to the campaign but part of the overall media mix and enabled the amplification of the message.

(Did you know that the great local digital agency Blast Radius built the online engagement parts of this campaign?)

So remember…

1. Start with a great idea not that you want to do something in social media
2. Plan with MOMENTUM and IMPACT in mind without thinking of channels for execution. If the fundamental idea of the message sticks with people (and you need to do research to qualify this) and there is potential for action then you are onto a winner
3. Then think about execution:

• Who or what is your TARGET?
• What CONTENT are you going to share and through what channel?
• How will you ENGAGE OFTEN AND WITH RELEVANCY?
• What is your plan for LEARNING AND ADJUSTMENT

…and then work out whether social media, and maybe some of the tools in ‘The Conversation Prism’ can be used to help create MOMENTUM and drive IMPACT.

• http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Here are some online resources that really help:

• The Facebook Help Centre (via Facebook)
• Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference? (via MASHABLE)
• Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide (via All Facebook)
• Facebook Pages, Groups and Profiles Explained (via WebWorkerDaily)
• Facebook: Fan Page vs Group (via CompuKol)