SugarCon 2010
San Francisco, CA
April 12th-14th, 2010

Ryan Strynatka, Senior Product Manager here at Radian6 will be heading to the west coast to present at SugarCon’s CRM & developer conference this April.  If you’re in the area you can catch his presentation on Wedesday, April 14th at 3pm on the ‘Getting Social’ speaker track.  His presentation titled ‘Social Media for Business: Listen. Measure. Engage.’ will cover everything from setting up a listening grid to all the various considerations, methods, and metrics for an enterprise engagement strategy.   For more details about SugarCon and the rest of the speaker lineup, visit  http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/events/sugarcon.

Blogwell
Cincinnati, OH
April 7th, 2009

As a proud sponsor of the Blogwell series, Radian6 is once again going to be in full effect this time in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 7th.  If you can make it or are already set to attend, we’ll be there like always waiting to greet you and chat about social media.  The blogwell series are known for putting on a relaxed one day event, usually an afternoon filled with great case study presentations from top notch brands discussing word of mouth marketing and social media best practices.  This is definitely an event to put on your calendar.  Hope to see you there!     

For more information, please visit http://gaspedal.com/blogwell/cincinnati/

We’ve spent the month of February chatting with you about how to build community, from giving you tips on how to find where your community is hanging out, to identifying some tactics for showing your community members appreciation. Heck, we’ve even written a (e)book on the subject.

But sometimes, the best breakdowns are not in explanations, but in examples, and the folks at eROI have offered to share a great example of a community they built from the ground, up, for Wacom Technology Corporation, a leading creative technology firm whose products are renowned throughout the design industry.

To give you an idea of eROI’s community building clout, the Portland-based interactive agency has been building and launching communities since 2004 for iconic brands and products including Konami (think Dance Dance Revolution) the Seattle Seahawks, and the Justin Timberlake-HBO concert series.

For the Wacom Community specifically, the eROI team took a multi-phase approach, releasing three preliminary communities before launching the final community in beta in spring of 2009. Through multiple iterations, they were able to see what features and content community members responded most strongly to, how they interacted with that content (both created by the brand and by other members), and compile insights from each successive community that directly contributed to the final Wacom Community offering.

Dylan Boyd, Vice President of Sales & Strategy for eROI, says there are a few key truths to building and maintaining a successful, thriving community:

1. Your community must be owned. Often, a community is launched without any set definitions of who owns what. In beginning talks with clients, Boyd makes sure to address the issue of ownership and find out who within the company will have command of various community pieces. He adds that communities can benefit from promoting community members into management-type roles, removing some of the internal workload and solidifying trust within the community.
2. You must let your community go. Pay attention to what’s happening in your community and monitor member interactions, but don’t strive to control the conversations and activity that are happening. The more you control, the less people participate. It all goes back to trust.
3. Figure out how to mobilize your community. Boyd drives home the point that a community doesn’t just exist within the confines of your online community, and can’t thrive in a silo. Find opportunities outside your community, and offline, even, to continue driving community participation.

Want to learn more about eROI’s work with Wacom? Take a look at the case study they put together (link at the end of this post) detailing the ins and outs of each particular Wacom community they built, statistics and results demonstrating the success of those communities, and some great information about how the achievements of each community directly linked back to the goals Wacom had set for its community building efforts.

Have examples of awesome brand communities you’d like to share? Please do! The comments are yours.

eROI Case Study: Wacom Community: Mastering the 5 C’s
What goes into building the most engaging and successful online communities?

Follow along as we take you through the journey and progression of the communities built by eROI for Wacom Technology Corp. Learn all about how to harness the power of your audience to create a successful online community.

OMMA Global
San Francisco, CA
March 17th – 18th

If you’re going to San Francisco, join us on March 17th for the show that addresses the biggest problems and greatest opportunities in the world of online, media, marketing and advertising – OMMA Global – San Francisco.

Rob Begg (@rbegg) and Barry Pope (@barrypope) from Radian6 will be there working the exhibit floor and showing off the power of Radian6.  Shoot them a message or feel free to stop by the booth and say hello!

When a devastating earthquake hit the country of Haiti in early January, it was no surprise that the American Red Cross was one of the first emergency response organizations to jump to its aid. Since the quake, the ARC has allocated more than $80 million to help survivors, and has been supplying much-needed food, water, and shelter items to quake victims. In addition, countless volunteer teams from the worldwide Red Cross movement have been sent to Haiti to provide frontline assistance.

The Red Cross’ involvement in social media seems to be a natural progression for a non-profit centered around outreach and community, and the unprecedented response from people on the organization’s multiple social media channels after the quake is proof the Red Cross is doing something very right on the social web.

The First 24 Hours

“The first 24 hours [after the quake] were about getting information out there,” said Gloria Huang, social media specialist for the ARC. Huang is half of the Red Cross’ social media team, which also includes social media manager Wendy Harman. The ARC was able to release a short video providing detailed information about the state of the island and its residents on the organization’s YouTube channel just five hours after the quake.

During the days immediately following the quake, Huang and Harman monitored activity on the ARC’s various social media outlets – which include the ARC’s Disaster Online Newsroom, the Red Cross blog, its Twitter stream, multiple Facebook pages and groups, and a YouTube channel – to make sure the information being circulated and discussed was accurate and as up-to-date as possible.

“We provided the latest facts and figures from the ground and just tried to make sure that what we had across our social media platforms was consistent across the board,” said Huang.

Different Networks Have Different Needs

One of the more interesting developments on the Red Cross’ various social media outlets has been the clear distinction of user needs on each platform. “On Facebook, we have tons of fans, and a lot of them have previous experience with us,” Huang said. “So there’s a lot of discussion on Facebook. It’s a lot like a forum, where people are helping each other.”

Specifically, volunteers from previous campaigns were offering tips and advice to and answering the questions of those interested in volunteering for the Haiti relief efforts.

On the Red Cross’ main blog, firsthand accounts, photos, and videos have been posted with unerring regularity, and the Twitter account remains a source of news, links to donation pages, and updates from the ground.

Findings, Lessons Learned, and Next Steps

The Red Cross’ social media team has never seen the kind of traffic on its social media sites as it has for this relief campaign. While Red Cross aid to Haiti is ongoing, Harman and Huang are planning to take a big-picture look at the results of their work during those first few weeks after the earthquake to see what worked and where there’s room for improvement.

From an observational standpoint, Huang said it was interesting to see which topics received the most attention. “It’s interesting to see what peoples’ minds first jump to, what they want to know immediately. In this case, it’s been ‘How can I help?’” she said.

Huang added that the key to this particular campaign was making sure they were consistently spreading the information people were looking for across their social networks, and that that same information was easy to find on the Red Cross website.

“We’re excited to work into future exploration of how we can use social media and crowdsourcing to improve communication during these times,” Huang said. Along with reviewing the details of this campaign, Harman and Huang are looking at the social media efforts of other emergency aid organizations to gather additional ideas for bolstering their communication efforts during crises.

One fact that was reinforced for the Red Cross social media team during the weeks following the Haiti earthquake: social media is incredibly powerful.

SXSWi
Austin, TX
March 12th – 16th

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology.  That’s why we’re sending some of our brightest minds to check it out.  Company CEO Marcel LeBrun (@lebrun) will be on the scene with some of the gang from Radian6 to take it all in and spread the message about listening and engaging in social media.  Also planning to be there are David Alston (@davidalston), Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra), Richard McInnis (@tweetrich), Katie Morse (@misskatiemo), Ed Sullivan (@ed_sullivan) and even company founder Chris Newton (@cdnewt).  Hope to see you in Austin this year!

Radian6 is happy to announce that Tien Tzuo, former SalesForce.com CMO and current CEO of Zuora, Inc., has joined the Radian6 board of directors.

Tzuo joined SalesForce.com in 1999 as one of the driving forces behind the company’s development. He held a variety of executive roles during his nine years with the company and eventually served as its chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer. Tzuo personally oversaw the vision, direction, and design of Salesforce’s award-winning product line, helping to grow the firm into a multi-billion-dollar company and one of the most successful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies to date.

Currently, Tzuo is founder and CEO at Zuora, a subscription billing leader that helps companies of all sizes build, manage, and grow their subscription businesses. Backed by Benchmark and Mark Bernioff, Zuora was built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from organizations such as SalesForce.com, WebEx, Postini (now Google), and Oracle.

Tzuo’s experience building highly successful companies and his enthusiasm for helping expand Radian6′s innovation and leadership within the social media monitoring and measurement industry make him an invaluable addition to the Radian6 board.

Please see the full press release for more information about Tzuo and Radian6.

Executing Social Media
Toronto, Canada
March 10th – 11th

They say that attending the Executing Social Media event Toronto will be the most important thing you can do for your organization this year, so we’re sending our very own Chris Ramsey (@chrisramsey) to check it out.  The “buzz” about your business is now online, measurable, searchable, and permanent. Come to learn how you can and why you must participate in the conversations that influence your market.

As always, we’re grateful for the feedback we get from our customers and community. Why? Because they form the foundation for the updates, enhancements, and feature additions we make to the Radian6 platform.

Many of our users love the power and  flexibility of the Radian6 dashboard, and how much you can customize. But we also realize that getting started can be daunting if you’re new to the platform and all of it’s capabilities. Today, Radian6 has rolled out some key new features available in the dashboard to make it easier to dive into the data, and we’re excited to share them with you.

The Topic Profile QuickStart Tool

What it is:

A quick easy method for users to create new Topic Profiles and set up a Radian6 dashboard. If you’re a first-time user of Radian6, the QuickStart tool will launch automatically, and you can launch it anytime thereafter by clicking the QuickStart icon in your dashboard toolbar. And you can still configure topic profiles in the Configuration section of your dashboard, too.

The Radian6 Quickstart Menu

A series of guiding prompts in the QuickStart will help you set up your topic profile, including easily grouping  your keywords by brand, competitor, or industry. We will also auto-configure your sentiment settings to look for sentiment around the things you identified as “your brand” specifically (company name, product brands, etc.). You can always change those in the Configuration screen as well.

Radian6 Quickstart Tool - Brand Monitoring

Quickly filter by region, media type, or language, then get a snapshot summary of your estimated monthly result volume so you can tweak and refine your topic.

Radian6 Quickstart - Monthly Estimate Summary

Why It’s Useful:

The QuickStart feature makes generating topic profiles in Radian6 a quick and simple process from start to finish, which is helpful for a new Radian6 user, or users who aren’t particularly technical.  New users will be able to get started with their monitoring faster and easier than ever before. And in conjunction with our new Widget Gallery (read on), you’ll have a completely new, streamlined experience for getting started with Radian6.

The Widget Gallery

What It Is:

Also launchable from the Quickstart menu on the Radian6 dashboard, our new Widget Gallery gives you the ability to add any of  44 preconfigured Radian6 analysis widgets to your dashboard with just a few clicks. Simply select your topic profile and date range, and you can choose from our  basic analysis widgets, or more specialized widgets in social media metrics, twitter analysis, brand analysis, competitive intelligence, and workflow and engagement.

Radian6 Widget Gallery

Why It’s Useful:

We’ve reduced the legwork by placing 44 powerful pre-configured widgets at your fingertips without having to learn how to configure them, so all you have to do is point and shoot and get working on the part that you do best: pulling insights from your data that are important to your business.

And of course, the Widget Gallery is just a few of the  hundreds of possible widgets you can build in Radian6, but they’re bound to give you a few ideas of your own. Users can still customize and build widgets as always from the dashboard, from scratch. And we’ll continue to add more and more turn key configurations to the Widget Gallery in the future, so if you have suggestions for widget configurations that you use often, let us know in the comments or with an email to community@radian6.com.

Influencer Widget Enhancements

What It Is:

Our Influencer Analysis widget has gotten a significant upgrade, thanks to your continued input and feedback. Our unique real-time tracking of social media metrics across the web and our ability to set the weightings to calculate influence has been a user favorite.  But all media types were previously mixed together, and weightings would often apply to one media type and not necessarily another.

So we’ve pulled together an enhanced approach to uncovering influencers. We’ve added a handful of new capabilities and views, including the ability to break out all of your influencer data by media type and make use of additional social media metrics only applicable to certain media types (ex: thread size on forums, follower count on twitter, views on videos, etc.)..

We’ve also given you the option to display your influencer results in a few different ways, including new bar graph and conversation cloud options in addition to the traditional grid display.

Radian6 Influencer Widget - Summary View

The new Summary Mode gives you a snapshot of the top 5 influencers in each media type, while the media specific tabs will show you the top 250 influencers for each media type. In bar mode, you’ll see the Influencer Score for each source next to their relevant results.

Hovering over the bar or a term in your Conversation Cloud gives you key influence metrics, and clicking on the source will open a River of News widget displaying the on-topic posts for that Influencer.

We’ve also refined the Influencer EQ area of your Topic Profile configuration to allow you to weight your influencer criteria by media type and make use of new social metrics unique to that media type, for more detailed and customized influence scoring on your on-topic results.

Radian6 Influencer EQ

Note: we’ve also updated the Influencer CSV report to reflect the breakdown by media type. If you’re using this report, you’ll want to update your references accordingly.

Why It’s Useful:

Influence is at the heart of many social media endeavors, and as always, we’re dedicated to helping you view influence through the lens that’s right for your business. That means uncovering the well-known voices as well as the ones that might not be on your radar so that you can better understand who’s driving awareness and engagement for your brand.

Our new slate of influencer views and breakdowns will allow you to do deeper analysis of the entire influencer landscape around your business, and help you see both the high level snapshot of who might be important to you, and the drill down into details on metrics and specific results.

By looking at influencers in a number of ways and through the perspective of several types of data, you’ll be able to conduct more efficient outreach, understand which social media channels are making the biggest impact for you, and strategize about

Need More?

True to what we believe, we’re always listening. Our product enhancements and expansions are based on your feedback, and the way you’re telling us that you need Radian6 to work for you.

If you’d like some deeper overview and training on the new features, we’ve set up some open sessions for you to attend. Sign up for one of the dates below with your Radian6 login info:

• Thu, Feb 25, 2010 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST
• Fri, Feb 26, 2010 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM EST
• Tue, Mar 2, 2010 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM EST
• Wed, Mar 3, 2010 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM EST

And please keep the feedback coming; you can leave a comment, send us email at community@radian6.com with your suggestions, or reach out directly to your account and support teams to give them your input. Help us continue to shape Radian6 into the social media monitoring and engagement tool you need it to be.

If you’re new to the platform or just getting your arms around monitoring and measurement, give a look over some of the Radian6 use cases and product applications we’ve outlined over here. From lead generation to crisis management, community engagement and competitive intelligence, there’s more opportunity in listening than you might think.

We’re eager to hear your thoughts. Share with us in the comments and let’s keep the dialogue going.  And there’s more to come, so stay tuned…

We are very excited about the response received so far about the Radian6 Higher Ed Trial Program for the Spring 2010 semester! Though Session 2 candidates have already been selected and are in the middle of their trial program access now, faculty members (on behalf of their undergraduate classes) and graduate students can still apply to use the Radian6 platform for four weeks at no cost for the next three available sessions.

Each Radian6 Higher Education Trial Program session is for a period of thirty days only. To be considered as a candidate for this trial program, you must be a faculty member representing one undergraduate class or a graduate student currently enrolled in an accredited college/university. Each candidate will receive a training webinar. A webinar is mandatory before having access to the platform. We host them live via web conference, and they’re super easy. They take about 30 minutes, and are designed to help answer your questions and give you a solid walk-through of our platform. Up to two additional hours of training will be be given to each candidate throughout the trial session to assist with their area of research.

Currently, we are only accepting three candidates (two undergraduate classes and one graduate student) per session throughout the Spring 2010 semester. The submission deadline for Session 3 is 24 February. Candidates will be notified of selection 26 February. If you are not immediately selected, we will keep your information handy for the next month’s selection.

Please email the following information to Lauren Vargas at lauren.vargas@radian6.com:

First Name:
Last Name:
College/University:
City, State, Country:
Work Phone:
Email Address:

If a student, what is your class standing?:

• Freshman
• Sophomore
• Junior
• Senior
• Graduate Study

If a faculty member, what are your research specialties or teaching interests using the Radian6 platform?

If a graduate student, what are your research specialties using the Radian6 platform?

Please select trial session of interest in order of preference:

• Session 3: 1 March – 2 April
• Session 4: 5-30 April

Along the way, we will share our findings and feedback with you about how students are experiencing and using the platform. So, apply today to become a part of the trial program or please pass along to educators and other relevant college/university programs.

Digital Strategies Conference
Toronto, ON
March 10th, 2010

Digital Strategies Conference is a one day event focused on what you need to know to effectively market your products and services in the Digital Age. This is an event that you can’t afford to miss.  Join Chris Ramsey (@chrisramsey) from Radian6 and others from 5pm-5:45pm for a panel discussion called Data is King: Gain a Competitive Advantage using Online Analytics Tools.

Measure UP
Chicago, IL
March 10th-12th, 2010

Come and meet Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra), Director of Community for Radian6 in her own backyard during this 2-day event in the windy city.  Measure Up is the world’s most comprehensive cross-dimensional view of marketing measurement best practices.  It’s time for marketers to embrace numbers and prove their worth by quantifying the financial benefits of their efforts to the business’ bottom line.

Every day at lululemon athletica is completely different. To succeed, I need to know our brand inside and out, so I can understand our online guests and create a strong and meaningful social media strategy. To help build a plan based on feedback, insights, and ideas from our guests, we have an amazing online community team that works endlessly to make connections and build relationships. We enjoy experimenting to find fun and educational ways to execute our ideas.

Let’s take a typical Monday morning. I begin by checking the online buzz from the night before. Giving and receiving feedback is one of the most important things we do at lululemon in order to innovate in everything we do, especially our product. Once I have noted all of our guest comments, I send them to our design, store development, or other relevant teams. We can then make decisions based on our guests’ thoughts. The conversations and updates I analyze (just to name a few!) cover Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, the lululemon blog, external blog posts, as well as product reviews. Using Radian6 as an analytical tool makes the process of listening to feedback and identifying trends faster, to break them down for our weekly reports. I listen not only to take action with major trends and send these issues to the appropriate department, but I take an in-depth look to make recommendations for the following week. How can we excite and engage our guests beyond what we have done? How can we go above and beyond?

Part of my day is spent writing emails and participating in phone conferences, engaging with everyone from social media representatives to other members of our online community team. Communication and knowledge are key. I make sure that I know not only updates from our team, but updates from various departments so that I can make sure we’re effectively pumping up our social media sites. I align everyone’s capabilities to make actionable goals and initiate new technologies. This is my favorite part of the job! I am a geek at heart and find pride in innovation. At lululemon, our team is able to experiment with new concepts and ideas which help us to get really creative with our approaches.

Our online community team finds ways to create an experience which is similar to what we offer in our stores: a resource for product education and a hub for health and wellness. Social media and guest experience are closely linked at lululemon! Focusing on the social media efforts of our individual stores creates a sense of community.

When I’m done, I wind down the day with all the fun, intelligent, and motivated people on our Online Community team. Even though we work hard, we manage to find laughter and humor in everything we do!

* Kristina Simmons is the Online Community Trainer and Coordinator at lululemon athletica.

Thanks to those of you who joined us for our twebinar with Josh Reynolds, Head of Sun Microsystem’s North American MidMarket Initiative. Josh shared all kinds of great info with us today…  from some of the surprises they found when they started listening to who makes up Sun’s online community to what kind of content their community responds to best. Be sure to download the podcast if you didn’t get the chance to attend.

Josh also shared some of Sun’s challenges and successes while using social media.

Challenges:

• Finding the right technical people within the organization to get involved in Sun’s online community engagement
• Finding the right balance of content that appeals to the readership and doesn’t over-promote while still creating leads

Successes:

• Social media has helped them reach an incremental market/ audience that wasn’t being reached through traditional means
• Being able to respond to negative comments and turn the situation around

Be sure to follow Josh on twitter @JoshRey and check out his personal blog – http://convergence-sm.com on the convergence of traditional marketing and social media.

Thanks so much for listening and participating today. Check out some of the questions and great tweets below:

Less than a week ago Google launched Google Buzz. We have been tracking its adoption this past week, and we believe it has already become an important platform for brands to use to listen and engage with their constituency.

Just two days after the launch, Google reported on their blog that there were over nine million buzz updates posted from mobile devices alone – that’s a rate of 200 mobile posts per minute. In addition, Google reported, “…tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out”. The launch has not been without criticism, but Google is responding rapidly to feedback and introducing changes to address user concerns.

One of the notable characteristics of Google Buzz is the high level of engagement it inspires in users. For example, Mashable’s blog post on the Windows Phone 7 launch received more than twice the engagement on its Buzz profile as it did on the main Mashable site, garnering 64 comments on Buzz compared with the original post’s 27 comments.

While Google Buzz allows users to push content from other sources connected to their Google Profile (i.e., tweets, blog posts from Google Reader, etc.), it also allows them to generate unique updates both from the web and mobile Buzz applications. This means, in order for our customers to continue receiving a complete view of the discussions about their brands, our social media coverage needed to quickly expand to include the Google Buzz platform. We are proud to say that, as of today, Radian6 monitors Google Buzz.

Public content on Google Buzz is flowing into the Radian6 system as we speak. To avoid polluting content in the system with duplicates automatically shared from other social networks, we are indexing only original content posted on Buzz either from the mobile or web interfaces. Re-posted items from Twitter or blogs will not be indexed since our platform already captures this content from the original sources. In the Radian6 platform, Buzz updates are classified as blogs since they resemble this media type the most with their support of long-form commentary and threaded comments. And, if Google Buzz continues to grow in popularity, we may assign it a media type of its own.

We now cover approximately 4.5 million Google profiles and our system is automatically and rapidly building on this number, prioritizing the most active profiles. As Radian6 users already know, we index comments from blogs, videos, forums, pictures, and online mainstream news, and we will be looking to extend this coverage to include Buzz comments as well in the coming weeks.

The social web is growing at a rapid rate, and Radian6 is poised to keep pace with that growth and continue providing holistic views of the conversations happening around brands. It will be fascinating to see how Google Buzz evolves in the future, and we’ll be closely observing that evolution and adapting our platform to make sure the social media monitoring needs of our customers and community are met.

Historically, Sun Microsystems* has been largely known as an enterprise-focused technology solutions firm. In recent months, though, the organization has expanded into the small- and mid-sized business solutions market, and they’ve done some of that through the use of social media channels.

On next week’s Twebinar, we’ll be talking with Josh Reynolds, head of Sun’s North American MidMarket Initiative, about some of the work he’s been doing in social media to grow Sun’s share of conversation and discover what’s being said about the brand and what important topics are emerging in the conversation around the SMB market.

So, join us next Thursday, February 18th, at 2pm EST for our latest Twebinar with Sun.

If you’ve never experienced a Radian6 Twebinar, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

What is a Twebinar?

A Twebinar is a podcast/audio broadcast doubled up with Twitter so listeners can participate on a more interactive level. You can pose questions to guests by tagging tweets with the hashtag #radian6 and ending them with a “?”. We’ve built the Twebinar interface so you can listen, ask questions, and watch the discussion all from the Twebinar page.

Some Tips:

• Once the Twebinar has started, log in and you should hear music or the live broadcast. If you don’t hear the audio immediately, refresh your browser.
• If you log in before the Twebinar starts, refresh your browser at the scheduled start of the show and the BlogTalkRadio (BTR) interface will show up and start playing.
• To ask a question, use the #radian6 hashtag and end your tweet with a “?”.
• @DavidAlston and @MissKatieMo will be your hosts for this Twebinar. Feel free to send them questions in advance on Twitter if you’d like. We’ll also have the backchannel monitored the day of the show to make sure your day-of questions are seen.
• The audio by itself is available on our BlogTalkRadio channel, if you just want to listen.
• A recap and full broadcast of the show will be posted to our blog shortly after the event is wrapped up. You can also listen to the archive on BTR.

If you’ve got questions in the mean time, leave ‘em here and we’ll do our best to answer. We’re looking forward to next week’s Twebinar and we hope you are, too, so mark your calendars and we’ll see you then!

* Sun Microsystems was recently acquired by Oracle, but Josh has been kind enough to join us and chat about Sun’s social media involvement leading up to the acquisition.

**In the spirit of community, David Alston and Teresa Basich collaborated on this post. Enjoy!

In many ways, a healthy relationship between your brand and its community parallels that of a healthy relationship between two people. Both relationships rest on simple tenets like respect, and both should be celebrated whenever possible. When thinking about the connection you’ve built with your community and its members, remember these 10 truths of a healthy relationship to keep your community feeling loved and appreciated.

1. Remember to say ‘Thank you’ – People generally enjoy saying or doing nice things for others and tend to do it without expecting to be thanked for it. However, we all know how great it makes us feel when we are recognized for our efforts. When your community says something nice about you, it’s always a wonderful idea to say ‘thank you’.
2. Celebrate their successes – This is the age-old principle of thinking of others before yourself. If you do so, then you will probably notice the great things members of your community are accomplishing. Congratulate them and share their successes with others whenever you can.
3. Be a good listener – This is probably some advice we all received at least once from a parent in our lives. Like Stephen R. Covey points out in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Great relationships are also built on the idea of give and then, perhaps, get. Invest in your community by listening and understanding their needs.
4. Ask for their opinion – There probably isn’t a person alive who doesn’t like being asked for their opinion. Collaboration on a project almost always produces a better end result. Social media has given brands an amazingly simple and effective way to engage with those who have thoughts and ideas about them and their products and services. Remember to ask your community for its opinion.
5. Don’t forget about the little things – Sometimes it is the smallest of gestures that can mean the most to someone. Focusing on the little things that matter can show a person that they are indeed worth your time. When approaching relationships from a long-term frame of mind, it is very possible to make the time along the way for those important details without getting overwhelmed by the idea. Look out for the little touches to help each community member.
6. Be patient – In any relationship, making things work means working through the occasional misunderstanding or frustration with one another. Life is not supposed to be simple; if it were, it wouldn’t be all that exciting. It’s important that you take a step back and look at every challenge from the other’s point of view. Your patience and willingness to try to understand will be appreciated. Be known for your abundant patience and caring approach with your community.
7. Admit your mistakes – Nobody is perfect, and holding onto your pride will never do you any favors. When you invest in building relationships within your community, members get to know your brand’s human side. You will make errors but, while members may be disappointed, your community generally has the ability and willingness to forgive. Be quick to admit your mistakes and be genuine in asking for forgiveness.
8. Share a common passion – Brands and people are more than capable of setting up daily routines to get things accomplished based on things that need to be done. And while working side by side on something does create a bond, it’s usually not a bond that is sustainable over a very long period of time. Finding a common passion, something you both enjoy doing and talking about, creates the strongest bonds. If you are passionate about what you do, then no doubt there are others out there that feel the same way you do. Find them, invite them to your community, and enjoy learning and sharing together.
9. Show respect and gain trust – The strongest relationships are built on mutual respect and trust. But getting to that point should ideally start with you. Be willing to respect the views of your community even though you may not entirely agree with them. Community members have reasons for their views and it is up to you to understand, or at least accept, them. And, when making commitments to your community, make sure you meet or exceed their expectations. Being willing to compromise, or give and take, will help your brand demonstrate respect and earn a community’s trust.
10. Celebrate Valentine’s Day everyday – Giving your community a Valentine once a year is definitely a nice gesture, but finding ways to show them how much you love them on a regular basis should be what you strive for. Apply your creative energy to think of new ways to accomplish goals 1-9. Most companies are still just awakening to this idea of focusing on their community, so anything you do to show appreciation for your community now can help your brand stand out in the crowd. And, heck, who doesn’t enjoy making someone smile with an unexpected gift?

Although it’s not Valentine’s Day yet, we wanted to get you thinking about the holiday and how love and appreciation can be translated into your community work. How do you celebrate the relationship your brand has with its community?

And, because you’re part of our community, we wish you a very happy, if early, Valentine’s Day!

We have reached the end of our change management journey. This process takes time, commitment and passion. While there may be times when you become so overwhelmed or stuck in a rut, do not waiver. Keep your vision in sight. Your drive will encourage and inspire others to take up your mantle and assist you in making changes endure for the better.

When getting started in social media, you cannot dismiss and ignore an organization’s fears about social media engagement. Social media success is dependant upon a drastic change in corporate culture’s thinking and execution process. Already we have addressed seven out of eight steps as defined by leading change management thinker, John Kotter – increasing the level of urgency, building the guiding team, establishing a relevant vision, communicating for buy-in, empowering action, creating short-term wins and keeping the drive alive.

Now that urgency has been established, a team in place to lead, a relevant vision is established to guide the way, you are communicating for buy-in, empowered action, identified and created short-term wins, and keeping the momentum going, how do you make the change stick?

1. Create Tradition: Change may falter if the steps established along the way to make the vision happen are not ingrained in the current culture. Remember you are changing habits. Establish processes to support the vision and create routine.
2. Establish Support Structure: Go beyond your typical employee orientation and find fun and innovative ways to communicate steps required for change. Create internal evangelists to help promote new vision instead of relying on boring video or dry handbook material.
3. Reinforce Vision: The last two steps have emphasized this…and third time is the charm to establish this new behavior - Share the feel-good stories and relationship-building that is occurring. Keep the momentum building by demonstrating the change in action! Highlight the quick and big wins.

Thank you for joining us as we have highlighted the steps needed to catalyze change in your organization. Stay tuned and we’ll package up all eight steps for you so you can bring them to the rest of your organization.

Community – a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars.

There are a lot of opinions floating around about how to define an online community, but a much smaller amount of chatter online about how to find it.

Online communities aren’t necessarily fenced in by the boundaries of a website, a message board, or a blog.  Communities can exist across multiple sites and time zones, making the act of finding a community seem akin to trying to pin down a cloud.

The difficulty for many organizations begins right there, with that first step of finding their community. After all, how does one go about finding something that is amorphous and constantly evolving?

Search – For many, the process of finding their community starts with a basic Google or Social Mention search to uncover websites, forums and blogs dedicated to their topic of interest.

Facebook – Facebook Fan Pages are a great way to find like-minded people who are already talking about a topic a company may be interested in.  Plus, it’s easy to jump right into the conversation.

Twitter – Twitter has quickly become the go-to network for companies, people, and news organizations alike.  A basic search can reveal a plethora of talk about a subject, and perhaps a few hashtags or users to get in contact with or follow. Much the same as Facebook, Twitter makes it easy to jump into the conversation.

Water Cooler – Don’t overlook the power of the water cooler! If organizations already know people interested in their products or passions, they should start by asking them where they go online to connect with like-minded people – they may have some great information to share.

We just released an eBook about this topic (and more). You can download it here.

Do you have tips to share about how to find your community? I’m interested in hearing what has worked for you, so share them in the comments!

Forty ads, nearly 100,000 tweets, and over 50,000 participants later and BrandBowl2010 is a wrap. It was a lot of fun to work on, and hopefully you found it interesting to participate in or just watch from the sidelines. Our partners at Mullen have posted the detailed results and some great analysis over here, but these are the highlights:

BRANDBOWL TOP THREE
1. Doritos
2. Google
3. Focus on the Family

TOP NET SENTIMENT*
1. McDonald’s
2. Dr Pepper
3. Universal

TOP TWEET VOLUME
1. Doritos
2. Google
3. Focus on the Family

LOWEST SCORER
Budweiser Select55

There were some clear leaders in volume and conversation ramping up to the game that held on to the end. Doritos and Focus On Family had momentum going in and stayed in the top ten throughout to land in the first and second spots.

Brands that garnered solid pre-game buzz, like Audi, didn’t make the final ten, but still placed respectably as runners up. Others came out of nowhere to capture top spots, including Google, which you could almost see coming through pack. Google’s ascent to the top started with speculation and a growing amount of mentions, and ended with the tech giant jumping to second place and holding it once its spot aired. Vizio also came on strong at the end to secure a top-twenty mention.

If you’re wondering how the data was collected and ranked, here’s some background: the brand mentions were gathered on the Radian6 platform using sets of keywords. The keywords were selected to pull as much of the conversation as possible without bringing in a lot of unrelated discussion. As the ads aired, the keywords were tweaked to reflect the major elements of the ads and pick up as much of the conversation surrounding them as possible.

Results were based mainly on volume, but sentiment was also applied to help calculate ranking. The feeds of brand mentions were passed along via the Radian6 API and turned into the visuals and charts you saw on the BrandBowl2010 site. On the site, sentiment scores were calculated after filtering out the neutral posts. The wrap-up stats were provided via the Radian6 platform.

The most outstanding players of the big game are the smart folks at Mullen, who lead and conceived this whole project. We’re thrilled to have been a part of it. Thanks to everyone who tweeted, visited the site, or participated via the #brandbowl hashtag. BrandBowl2010 was a team effort that worked because everyone showed up and played hard on game day.

*This ranking doesn’t represent brands with the highest volume of positive sentiment, but rather those that received the highest ratio of positive to negative sentiment.

Communities are bigger than “social networks” like Facebook. Social Networks are just one type of community, albeit, one of the most recognizable ones on the web today. Every community, big and small, relies on 5 types of roles to be successful. The communities that have all 5 working together are the ones that tend to succeed and become desirable destinations.

1. The Host: Somebody has to be willing to entertain all these guests, put on a great event, maintain the peace, and clean up after the party is over. On top of that, the host has to make sure everybody is having a good time. The host keeps your glass full, the food coming, the music playing, and the entertainment fun. Without the host you wouldn’t have a place to kick back, hang up your coat, and pass the time. The host’s job isn’t all fun though. The host has to be willing to set some rules, enforce them, and when in doubt kick some people out. Perhaps most importantly, the host needs to be trustworthy. After all, you aren’t going to just hand over your car keys to a complete stranger.
2. The Facilitator: They’re often confused with the host because they seem like a do-gooder who wants to ensure everyone is having a good time. However, they play a different and very important role. The facilitator genuinely wants to make sure everyone is happy. They have a curious nature about them and truly enjoy a good conversation. Without the facilitator conversations would grow quiet and stagnant. If you will, people would stop moving about and meeting other people. On some levels the facilitator is a matchmaker. Their grasp about all the things taking place in the community is amazing. But, unlike the voyeur, the facilitator is willing to share that information with people.
3. The Popular One: This is the most important person in the community. Yes, the popular one makes it all about them, but they also bring a whole bunch of people with them. Some people show up to see them. Some people show up to be able to say they saw them. Some people show up because they might see them. The popular one has a tight knit set of friends and a large group of pseudo-friends that show up at the same places they do. If you don’t get the popular one (s) to show up you’re going to have a tiny, boring, and listless community.
4. The Instigator: Somebody needs to stir the pot. Somebody needs to be willing to say the things others won’t and do the things that make people shake their head. That’s what’s great about the instigator, they keep things interesting. People love and hate the instigator. They love watching what comes next, but they hate all the attention he/she gets. But, here’s the thing, everybody loves controversy. It’s the reason the news outlets exist. If everyday was 72, sunny, without a chance of rain, and everybody was happy, no one would tune in or read the paper. The instigator engages in conversations just to take the other position. They are pure entertainment.
5. The Voyeur: I love the voyeur. They don’t cause problems, usually lend a hand to the host, never overstay their welcome, and always tell everyone what a GREAT time they had. Some times they’re known as wallflowers, but that’s not really giving them their fair due. Wallflowers, don’t interact and seldom even show up. The voyeur shows up. It’s that showing up that helps the community out tremendously. Even without actively participating they make an impact, because they can be counted. The host can say/claim 500 people showed up, even though 420 of them were voyeurs. The voyeur can be taxed, even though he/she contributes less than many other community members. Yes, without the voyeur we’d all be in trouble.

I’m sure you can identify with one of these roles. Often I’m the instigator, but on this site, I’m the host. Read my tweets, check out my posts on forums, and look at my comments on other people’s blogs to see the type of investigator I am

Knowing the roles and being able to spot the people playing them is critical to making sure your community finds success.

What would some advice be with out a visual and some weights? Exactly! The following image outlines the 5 roles and my belief on their importance. You may find that for your community the weights differ slightly. That’s ok, each community is different.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for today’s Engaged Brand Twebinar with Lisa and Chelsa from Kiva.org!

Kiva.org is a website that lets people lend money to entrepreneurs around the world who need loans. Individual loans can be as small as $25 and will be combined with other micro-loans to make up the total loan for the entrepreneur. Kiva is raising about $1 million in loans every 9 days.

If you missed out on today’s twebinar where they shared some of their social media strategies, be sure to download the Kiva podcast now.

Since Kiva is a non-profit organization they have a limited marketing budget. One of the ways they are able to make that budget stretch as far as possible is to engage with their community. Recently they were involved in the Chase Community Giving contest where they won $25,000 to help them continue on with their cause.

In order to win the contest they needed to get votes. And the way they got votes was by asking their community for help through social media.

Some of their social media strategies for the contest:

• Used their newsletter to ask for votes;
• Added small ads about the contest to their website;
• Lenders received a message to please vote within their Thank You for Your Loan letter;
• Posted contest info on their blog;
• Encouraged staff members to spread the word through their own personal online communities;
• Twitter – in addition to tweeting about the contest, they also sent personal DMs to some of their followers who had large followings (influencers) and asked them to spread the word;
• FaceBook – they created an event on FaceBook, plus they reached out to their sub-groups to share the information on how to vote;
• LinkedIn – sent out an announcement to all of their followers;
• Recruited other bloggers to share the word on the contest;
• Posted to their community, KivaFriends.org;
• And they approached their top 50 lending teams on Kiva.org.

Their biggest learnings while using social media are to sit back and listen to your community and engage with them in their conversations. Plus, don’t be afraid to experiment. Just put yourself out there and start out small in one area until you get a feel for it.

If you want to keep up with Kiva and see what they are doing next, be sure to follow them on Twitter @Kiva

Thanks again for listening and asking some great questions. To hear the answers to the questions below, be sure to listen to the podcast.

Nothing says “Community” more than sporting events, and no sporting event fosters community more than the Super Bowl. Not only do sports lovers get to have a field day (pun intended) during the Super Bowl, but the rest of us not-so-sports-lovers get to join the party and critique the ads like it’s our job.

To make the Super Bowl even more fun and engaging, Radian6 and Mullen have partnered to create BrandBowl2010, an interactive site that tracks, scores, and ranks all the good, bad, and ugly comments you make on Twitter about the Super Bowl’s famous ads and the brands that have produced them.

At any given time, the site will feature the top 10 most popular brands, as ranked by a composite score based on volume of tweets and sentiment. “Second-tier” brands will be hanging out in a sub-section of the site called the Locker Room. If you roll your cursor over a particular brand, you’ll be able to view its composite score, the number of tweets about the brand, and the overall popularity of the brand, as well as in-depth details including a spark line, sentiment index, and a word cloud of the most popular words used in talking about that brand.

To participate in BrandBowl2010, just log in on Sunday using your Twitter ID and tweet directly from the site. Join the stream of conversation by using the hashtag #brandbowl. Even if you don’t have a Twitter account, you can still check out the site and see what people are saying. When all is said and done, we’ll be sharing the final results and a pile of additional data goodness from BrandBowl2010.

Community means coming together around a common passion point, be it sports, advertising, or anything else that suits your fancy. Creating interactive experiences like BrandBowl2010 that allow people to share their opinions, expertise, and interests with each other is an important piece of the community pie.

Have fun with BrandBowl2010 and get your friends and family involved, too. Then come back after the game and let us know what you thought of the experience, would you? And while you’re here, share with us how interactive experiences like this one have benefited your community building efforts.

David Alston, VP of Marketing and Community at Radian6, recently did a twebinar with AwarenessInc called “Answering the Social Phone”. In the twebinar, David discussed how social media is not really media but a two-way communications channel and that all of the conversations going on out on the web are like phone calls. The phone could be ringing off the hook with mentions of your brand and if you aren’t involved in social media who is answering those calls?

Some brands think that if they don’t have a FaceBook page or a Twitter account then they aren’t involved in social media. This isn’t true. People are using social media to talk about everything… including your brand.

If you missed out on David’s twebinar, be sure to take the time to listen to it. He shares all kinds of great insights on marketing in the age of social media. And if you don’t have the time to listen right now, bookmark this page and come back later.

Some of the highlights:

David talked about how marketing was traditionally about the 4 P’s:

• Place
• Promotion
• Product
• Price

But social media has changed marketing. Now that everyone is connected the place no longer matters, people don’t like to be promoted to and the product has become the whole customer experience and not just what you are selling.

He tells us how the 4 P’s should be replaced by the 5 C’s.

• Content – offer content that has value and can be shared.
• Community – join the community and get interactive. By being involved you can offer help and discover needs and trends.
• Conversation – listen, learn, converse and engage. Be open and accessible.
• Collaboration – once you engage with your community you’ll discover that there are great ideas and feedback out there.
• Connections – reach out to people that are passionate about the things that you are passionate about.

There are plenty of roadblocks to keep you from using the 5 C’s:

• Policy
• Culture
• Bureaucracy
• Momentum (in the another direction)
• Window Dressing
• Misinformation
• Lack of Top Level Support
• Lack of a Plan
• Lack of Commitment
• Lack of Resources

David addresses all of these topics and more during the twebinar so take the time to listen to it. And follow David on Twitter where he shares lots of great info with everyone.

In closing, David explains how brands should look at communities as an investment. If you learn from and engage with your communities they will be an asset that grows. Community members will be your biggest fans and a source of feedback and inspiration.

And in case you don’t know, AwarenessInc is a social media platform provider that helps organizations engage with their audience through the use of communities.

Whew! We are almost at the end of the eight steps for successful change management. Can you begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel? The title of this next step sounds more like something that would be nominated for a Grammy Song of the Year, but is fundamental to achieving long term success in your organization.

When getting started in social media, you cannot dismiss and ignore an organization’s fears about social media engagement. Social media success is dependant upon a drastic change in corporate culture’s thinking and execution process. Already we have addressed six out of eight steps as defined by leading change management thinker, John Kotter – increasing the level of urgency, building the guiding team, establishing a relevant vision, communicating for buy-in, empowering action and creating short-term wins.

Now that urgency has been established, a team in place to lead, a relevant vision is established to guide the way, you are communicating for buy-in, empowered action, identified and created short-term wins, how do you keep the drive going and not let up?

1. Eliminate Non-Essential Work: The easiest way to defeat change within your organization is to hamper the development with meaningless tasks. Use this period of change as a springboard to reevaluate processes and routines for better streamlining of time and resources.
2. Share Stories: Stats may communicate to the C-Suite, but you want change to seep into every fiber of your organization. Do this by sharing the feel-good stories and relationship-building that is occurring. Keep the momentum building!
3. Identify and Capitalize on New Opportunities: There are golden nuggets of opportunity lying in wait amongst those stories and lessons learned throughout the change management process. Keep you eye out for these opportunities to seek new ways of implementing your change vision.

How do you keep the momentum building until the change management process is ingrained throughout the organization? Please share your lessons learned.

Click Here to Download

In January you got all your social media resolutions in place, right? From convincing your executive suite that social media is a valuable investment to improving your social media monitoring plan, we covered all sorts of bases to help get you organized and ready to tackle 2010.

And now that you’ve got your feet on the ground, we’re taking on community building. The Radian6 community management team has put together a comprehensive ebook this month about building, managing and sustaining brand communities. In this ebook, Amber Naslund and Lauren Vargas have covered:

• What makes up a community;
• How you make the case for community to your internal teams;
• What sorts of resources you’ll need to build out, maintain, and grow your community;
• What roles you’ll need to hire for and what attributes and expertise you’ll need to keep an eye out for – and avoid – when hiring for those roles;
• Best practices for building a thriving community;
• How to measure the impact of your community;
• And looking toward the future at a mature community model

If you’re ready to address the idea of building a community within your organization, download this PDF and let us know what you think, and be sure to take a look at the additional resources around here to get a better feel for what community is all about.

We’ll be talking about all things community throughout February, so stop by when you can and share your successes, concerns, and comments with us. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.