We live in a world where data is big. And everywhere. Can you go about your workday today without saying “data”? For fun, put a quarter in a data jar for every time it comes out of your mouth.

Out there in the cloud, a storm of big data is brewin’. When it rains back down on earth, this data shower nourishes the seeds of life for us marketers. We harvest fields of comments that sprout and reactions that bloom.  We mine the goodness beneath the surface—bust out your picks and shovels, boys, there’s data in them there hills!

Data is 0s and 1s, right? Wrong. When data is in the form of a conversation, data is HUMAN. A conversation describes what human beings love or hate. What they are going to do, or feel, and why. By definition, this is very personal. People and their conversations are truly amazing, full of color, texture, and energy. We actually imagine it looks kinda like this:

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, once we get our hands on this lovely data we have a tendency to literally process the life out of it. We “clean data” and “purge data” and “scrub data”. This might make it orderly and neatly packaged, but it might also critically take away the part that is human:

So how do we make sure the data stays colorful and full of personality? Lucky for us, the latest social media tools and technologies now allow us to experience how our customers—human beings—are really “being” in the social realm. We can understand them better, in all their colorful glory. We no longer have to strip the person bare, down to the basics of their demographic data of age, gender, residence, etc. And because we understand them, we have a greater opportunity to respond in a highly personalized way. We can add back the layers of what each person is wearing today—and engage in a way that make them feel individual and special.

Human conversation is a wonderful thing—the very essence of our society. Embrace social conversation in all its color and texture at Internet scale, and you will really start to make it personal:

(Data was used 17 times in this post. I’ll donate $4.25 into the data jar.)

Mark Redgrave founded OpenAmplify in 2008. You’re most likely to spot this new California resident in the heart of downtown SF or catching a wave in Santa Cruz. Follow Mark and his OpenAmplify team: @openamplify.

Ever wonder about the faces on the Radian6 materials and website? Who are they? Are they modeled after real people? Do they bear a striking resemblance to someone you know? Well, now you can get to know them. We’re continuing a series that looks into their lives, experiences and challenges. They will share their personal insights on what works (and doesn’t work) when it comes to the social world. Did you miss meeting Karen? Today we introduce Steve!

Hi, my name’s Steve and I’m a marketing manager with a company that provides strategic business advice to companies looking to improve efficiency and business practices. I’m a big sports fan and avid skier. I am always connected to either my computer or phone and love engaging through social media although I sometimes find myself lost in a sea of emails. The team I work with daily is a group of smart and savvy individuals and right now I’m enjoying making work my number one priority.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social connections lately and especially on the best ways to develop these for B2B. I came up with a few ideas of my own, but I always like to get feedback from the experts. I thought I would share some of my thoughts as well as a few tips I learned from Jeff Cohen and then also ask for your input so I can incorporate it into the social strategy for our business.

One of the main things I’ve realized in my work is that social connections for B2C and for B2B are very similar. Radian6 has talked about it a bit before, especially in the eBook Social Media for B2B: It’s Not as Different as You Think, which really made me realize that the same rules apply. It’s about nurturing and building relationships.

From a very basic tactical standpoint there are a few things I wanted to get our team thinking about and actively doing to build these relationships:

• · We have developed fairly active Facebook and Twitter accounts and we are going to make a point of going out and liking those companies we have relationships with and those we wish to through our corporate page.
• · I will be encouraging all employees on my team to seek out the person at prospective companies who has a role most similar to their own. They will use things such as LinkedIn to find these people. My thought process is that those are people they can build strong connections with and can potentially have more in common with when it comes to work.
• · Making a point of taking offline connections and migrating them online will also be something we will work on as a team. Instead of following up purely by email when we have phone conversation or meet in person, we will also make a point of connecting with people through social channels in the hope that they will be interested in connecting as well which will provide another avenue of getting our information to them.

After speaking with Jeff Cohen about some more strategic ideas, our team is also planning on implementing some of the following:

• · We would like to reach out to industry leaders or emerging leaders and ask them to participate in our video series for our corporate blog. We won’t be focusing on self-promotion here, but rather seeking to help share some best-practices and lifting up potential clients to strengthen that relationship.
• · We are really looking forward to trying out some informational interviews with potential clients. The purpose would not be selling to them, but rather as an exercise in learning from them what methods, information and resources they would like to receive if we were to sell to them.
• · As a team we are also going to make a point of not only spending time providing resources online through social media, but also asking experts for their valuable input. People like to be asked questions and they enjoy talking about “what they know”. We want to help give them the opportunity to do so in hopes that it will build a relationship.

What do you think? What other tactical and strategic ideas can we implement to build these connections? Have your tried any of the above ways to make social connections and how have they worked?

Note: Characters are in fact fictional; any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental.

I’m only a fan of measurement sometimes.

When it comes to things like gauging the effectiveness of a digital campaign, figuring out if the content on a website is actually engaging people and compelling them to act, or figuring out why I’ve dropped two spots in my Fantasy Football pool overnight, I want to peer deeply into the numbers and figure out what I can do to increase my success… or just rescue myself from the bottom of the heap.

So when don’t I like to measure? First of all, when I cook.

There’s something about following a recipe down to the last grain of salt that makes me feel terribly uncreative. Like the dish I’ve created isn’t my own, but rather a Xerox copy of something the recipe writer made. I like to cook by feel and taste, and see where I end up.

I used to think this was kind of wacky and interesting, until a friend pointed out that my “creativity” was mitigated by years of experience and knowledge of what was “too much” of something, and how much of another something might improve the taste.

I wasn’t flying blind – I’d just doled out ingredients often enough and tasted enough results that I’d become instinctive about what worked. Oh, and all that tasting that was still happening? I was applying the “MMM metric.” Well, fine.

I also don’t like to measure in the US.

After my move last year to Boston from Vancouver, I’ve been trying to convert everything from the imperial system to the metric system (without Google’s help). I’ve done the math to break down gallons into litres (1 = 4) and to make sense of how tall a foot actually is (roughly 30 cm) or how long a mile really is (1.6 km.) I can think in Fahrenheit now, but that’s not much of a step forward after 16 months.

Finally, I don’t have too much fun measuring when I’m told that my efforts don’t matter… mostly because they’re not understood.

I once worked with a guy I’ll call “Rick”. Rick was a big proponent of digital advertising, from paid search to banner ads to pop-ups and pop-unders (I’m sure he’d measure a popover if he could figure out how.) He liked the way his beloved ads were “measurable”, in a way that “nothing else you do online is.”

Rick was not a fan of social media for business (did you see that coming?) because he felt that the efficacy of social was “impossible to measure.”

Try as we might to dissuade him, he refused to budge… until he was given the task of integrating measurement and tracking for the entire company digital strategy – including social media. He wasn’t allowed to scrap the program (even if he was dying to.) No, he would have to work with the “Twitter people” (!)

And the Twitter people weren’t going to pass up an opportunity to get a little respect.

We chose four overall areas to measure, each of which had metrics beneath them, all of which would be based on numbers (even if they weren’t quite that simple) – all with the goal of bringing Rick onside:

• Community growth: Members added to our Facebook group, more subscribers to our blog, more (non-spam) Twitter followers, etc. Sheer counts that weren’t terribly meaningful until we considered…
• Community engagement: Facebook “likes”, Facebook comments, Facebook “Shares”, blog comments, Twitter “@ replies” and retweets – we clocked all of them. Did (what we defined as) engagement increase with greater numbers across the board? Where did growth actually generate response? More meaningful to Rick, in terms of gauging just how much interaction we were seeing, and learning about what our customers liked and wanted and responded to. To his credit, it didn’t take him long to see that gathering sentiment and feedback could inform his advertising plans. But here’s where he started to get excited…
• Clicks through to our website: Ah, the first step of conversion. Did people actually click on our product links from social channels? Which ones garnered the most response? On which platforms? What times of day yielded the most clicks? And, yes…
• Conversions: Rick loved conversions more than most things in life. If he did something that made you act the way he wanted you to act (giving us your email address, requesting more information, making a purchase), Rick would send you a digital hug across the tubes. Now Rick was seeing conversions from social traffic, and suddenly we were getting real hugs at work (awkward!) And just like that, social media had gone from being a unicorns-and-marshmallows bastion of vague hope to becoming a valued, measurable part of our digital strategy.Now we could talk about what social could do for our customer service and customer loyalty… without watching Rick make faces in the corner.

There are two sides to the power of measurement for achieving social media success: first, the way it helps you track, tweak, and re-jig your social efforts to ensure you’re meeting goals. It’s up to you to define what success looks like, and what your goals are, but by actually paying attention, you’re already headed in the right direction.

Second, measurement makes social “real” for people in your organization who think you’re spending your whole day in a chat room. People like Rick, for example, who told us daily that “conversations weren’t sales.”

Maybe not (although he saw quite a few quick conversions once we made him look!) – but by showing them your place in the sales funnel and your impact on customer behavior and response, you get the buy-in you deserve (and the accountability they desire.)

So – all things considered – I guess I really do like measurement.

Still couldn’t tell you how much a quart is, though.

Meg Fowler provides social and integrated marketing strategy for clients at Sametz Blackstone Associates, a brand-focused strategy, design, and digital media firm in Boston’s South End. Sametz Blackstone has collaborated with nonprofit and for-profit organizations in Boston and beyond for more than 30 years. Meg also writes for private clients, primarily within the startup, digital, and nonprofit spaces.

The foundational element of successful digital programs is listening. For the last several years, this blog and others have espoused the value of listening. It’s a proactive engagement mechanism to be sure, but at its roots, listening is a method for us to gain valuable market intelligence and benchmark our success. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before. Wait, you have? Guess what? We were saying it a few years ago and it still holds true. The listening we are doing has become more sophisticated, and has begun to expand beyond the realm of PR and marketing.

If you were assuming I was going to say the same thing about measurement, you would be right. Now, it’s worth noting that measuring social media hasn’t nearly evolved at the same rate of speed as listening. There is still a lot of discussion about metrics, processes and challenges to the traditional ROI model. The latter is beginning to fade as the social space becomes more sophisticated, but it’s still prevalent in some circles. Despite not advancing at the same rate of speed as listening, measurement has made some advances. We’re now starting to see measurement approaches that incorporate more than just what you can find in Facebook Insights. We’re also starting to reconcile in our heads that the social media measurement process is not anything different than what we’ve done in traditional PR for years (maybe that’s the problem…for another blog post, perhaps). Again, the line is moving…albeit slowly.

If we can agree that listening and measurement are foundational elements of social programs, and that they’ve advanced significantly over the last several years, how do we take it to the next level? Here are some ideas:

1. Integrated listening – When Ken Burbary and I developed the Social Analytics Lifecycle two years ago, we thought it was time for listening to go beyond PR and marketing. And it still is. We’re starting to move the needle a bit with listening command centers popping up at various brands, but the ability to extend listening beyond our traditional communications functions is still a viable initiative. In fact, you should be doing it in some capacity.
2. Listening resources – It’s about time that more brands realized the strategic value listening holds and invest in human resources. The ideal location for listening falls within the market research function, but that likely requires additional headcount at a brand where market research professionals are still largely skeptical of social data. However, bringing the disparate data sources together can tell a very powerful story.
3. Integrated measurement – I’ve been beating this drum for a couple of years, and I’m hoping if I continue to do it people will see their measurement strategy like they see their communications…INTEGRATED! Companies may be in silos, but the world doesn’t work that way. What happens in traditional, impacts social and what happens in social impacts search. Communications is a cycle, not a stepladder. Stop treating your measurement approach like that.
4. Surveys, surveys, surveys – There’s only so much listening data can tell you. It can help you answer the who, what, when and where, but really only scratches the surface of why. If you’re measuring the impact your social activities are having, you should be surveying your online communities. No, they may not be statistically significant in the truest sense of the word, but the feedback is valuable nonetheless.

Whatever innovations come to social media analytics, it will still be at the foundation of every social program build for the foreseeable future. Here’s hoping some innovation happens so I’m not here two years from now saying the same thing. Go forth, and measure!

Chuck Hemann is currently the Vice President of Digital Analytics for Edelman Digital in Chicago. Over the last seven years, Chuck has provided strategic counsel to clients on a variety of topics including digital analytics, measurement, online reputation, social media, investor relations and crisis communications. Prior to joining Edelman Digital, he was VP of Digital Strategy and Analytics for Ogilvy Public Relations.  He’s also the co-organizer of the Social Media Business Summit Track at BlogWorld Expo and a frequent speaker on the topics of influence, measurement and digital analytics. Chuck can be found online on Twitter and on his blog.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and chief executive officer of Arment Dietrich, Inc. and Spin Sucks Pro. She is the author of Spin Sucks, the 2010 and 2011 Readers Choice Blog of the Year, a top 10 social media blog from Social Media Examiner, and an AdAge Power 150 blog.

In the introduction to his great book, Little Bets, Peter Sims tells about how Chris Rock spends months perfecting his comedy act. He starts by trying out lots of joke ideas in front of small audiences at a variety of locales. Most of the ideas fall flat, but Rock’s objective for these performances isn’t just to entertain. He’s out there measuring his material and using the analytics of audience feedback to find the kernels of material that will succeed. From jokes that seemed sure fire to ideas that came up on a whim, all are measured in front of the toughest critics, a real audience. Those that show promise are reworked, adjusted and retested until they either make it into the final act or remain on the cutting room floor.

It may seem like a long distance from a Chris Rock comedy special to social media, but social media analytics provides us with one of the best opportunities to measure, learn and act on valuable insight, insight that comes from a real audience: The customers in our community.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned when I first started learning about analytics was to measure actionable information. After all, measurement is really all about improvement and if you can’t change what you’re measuring, what’s the point of measuring in the first place? This is where I first learned about the idea of feedback loops. A feedback loop is created when information about an event or activity can be fed back to influence behavior. The traffic speed alert, is a great example. When you drive by it you get instant feedback about your driving and, hopefully, the feedback influences your actions. Instant analytics about your behavior give you the opportunity to change that behavior and most people actually do.

Social media analytics is sometimes seen as disadvantaged because it measures “soft” numbers such as engagement or “likes” instead of “hard” KPI’s such as sales or acquisition. But social media analytics has one great advantage over other measurement sets: Access to a community of loyal, engaged followers. By setting up feedback loops to test and measure response within our community we have a great opportunity, just like Chris Rock, to test the “little bets” we have, learn more about our audience, and ultimately feed this information the campaigns, tools and platforms that could lead to improvement in those “hard” KPI’s.

So how can we make this happen?

First, start with a test. Get a hunch. Think about a “what-if” situation. Lets say you are stuck trying to find the best way to talk to customers about a new product or service. Try putting out alternate versions of a product statement to your community, measure the response and learn what resonates. Or use split or A/B testing to drive interested community members to two different versions of landing pages. The pages could differ in terms of copy, design or even offer, but they should test your assumptions and ideas about what you think might drive your community to action.

Second, measure the results. Does one page get more clicks than the other? Does one statement get more comments, likes or even +1’s? Does one approach generate more engagement, deeper involvement or buzz? Keying in on these metrics can help you gauge the effectiveness of your ideas with a community who often represents your most engaged customers.

Finally, and most importantly, develop the ideas quickly, tests quickly, measure quickly and learn quickly. Make the painful decisions to drop that idea that you really loved that bombed with your customers while being open to seeing your community embrace ideas that you never would have imagined working. After a few rounds you might find that you’ve got come up with some great ideas that could influence your larger communications and even impact your KPI’s, and you’ll have the numbers to back them up.

What do you think? Have you ever tried setting up tests and feedback loops to learn about your community? Do you have a hard time deciding what to measure? Share your ideas here.

Dan Weingrod is a digital strategist and consultant who helps brands and businesses participate on the internet. He blogs at www.danweingrod.com. You can find him on twitter at @dweingrod and on Google+ at gplus.to/dweingrod.

Do you love sharing links on Twitter? Content and link sharing on social sites has skyrocketed in recent years. According to a recent eMarketer report, “60% of all messages on social sites are links to published content.” On Twitter alone, this is almost 60 million links to published content everyday!

Undoubtedly, as Twitter matures we will understand who in our community shares quality content and who is essentially, spamming Twitter. If you are new to Twitter you may wonder how to get more followers. Well, this is a bit confusing because most Twitter spammers often have over 25,000 followers despite their lack of quality content. It may be an attractive option to setup automated twitter feeds for content, however I believe that Twitter spamming links isn’t a great long-term strategy.

Linking to Bad Content

Linking to content that was written by a ghost writer in 10 minutes isn’t providing anything for your followers. The term “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” can apply here because it may only take once for you to lose the trust of your followers. Half the battle is attracting your followers to actually click your link, you don’t want to mess it up by giving them content filled with fluff. Make your content exciting, emotional, and informational. Any less, may cause you to actually lose Twitter followers.

Linking to Crappy Looking Landing Pages

We all know this guy. The guy who shares his, “Make Money Now” landing pages on Twitter. This guy is usually great at getting people to click on his links with actionable questions, facts or strong opinions in the headlines. What does this do? It drives traffic short term, but cannibalizes his long term social media strategy. I know of at least 20 people I follow that push me to the same landing page with every link. Subsequently, I don’t click their links anymore, and unfollow the people who send me there.

Self Promotion

Every social media guru will tell you social media channels, especially Twitter, are not for blatant self promotion. Self promoting products or services on Twitter will cause you to lose your community, fast. Say for instance you are linking to product pages with a tagline “check this out.” It may work the first 50 times, but you will lose credibility as a thought leader in your space. You are “That Guy,” the one who isn’t afraid to give a sales pitch to the father of a girl you are dating.

Now I’m not saying that you can’t promote yourself, if you are tactical and PR savvy, you can word your tweets to actually give your followers something of value. For example a great way to cross promote would be, “Today’s a hot one here in sunny SoCal, check out our blog post on how to beat the heat.” You then would write a blog post which hints at one of your products helping beat the heat. Perfect? I think so.

There is definitely a fine line you must walk operating business on Twitter. To be completely safe, stay away from trying to “show off” your company. You can humanize your brand, give industry news, and chat with your community but please don’t try to sell me anything!

Radian6 adds: What do you think? Have you ever link baited anyone on Twitter? Or felt a backlash when you retweeted content that you didn’t actually read, and found out it was spam? Have you found that magic way to both self promote, yet provide compelling and interesting information to your followers? We would love your thoughts on this subject!

Matt Krautstrunk is a writer who specializes in startups and social media. A native of Chicago, he moved to California for a new experience in the world of search engine marketing. His work has appeared on Search Engine Journal, Smart Blogs, and Convince and Convert. He also delves into topics ranging from social media marketing to SMB consulting for Resource Nation; an online resource that provides advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs. You can find him on Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

Image Credit: Switched.com

The great potential of the digital world is that we can build and maintain relationships with more people, more efficiently. The general thought is that those good at relationship building in the real world are also good at relationship building online and vise versa. However, the mechanisms of online relationships are different than real world social mechanisms and that does results in different social cues. Some individuals are better adept at understanding the cues in one environment than in the other so relationship-building skills in one environment does not necessarily translate to the other. Online, I call these cues digital body language.

We are all familiar with face-to-face social cues:

• Eye contact
• Smiles, frowns, quizzical looks, passive facial expressions
• Leaning in or out, straight or slumped
• Type of handshake
• Where someone sits or stands in relation to you

What are the social cues online?

• Silence, especially after you respond to them directly in a comment thread or on Twitter
• How quickly someone replies to a direct request (this is obviously influenced by many things but over time you can get a sense of how important others feel it is to respond to you)
• How often someone replies to a post/update that is not specifically directed at them
• Reciprocation of follows or acceptance of friend requests in various networks
• Placement of others on public Twitter lists or blog rolls
• Mentions of others in blog posts, discussion referrals, or status updates

These cues are critical to understand if you want to effectively build relationships. Positive cues tell you that you can escalate and develop the relationship further. Negative cues tell you that you should step back, assess, and rethink your approach or expectations if the relationship is important to you.

Good relationships require equality of interest from both parties and it is critical to match the other person’s interest level – too little attention and they back away, too much and they feel stalked. All too often we try to build good relationships too quickly, peppering people with information and communication long before they have ever shown any reciprocal interest. But constant contact, if unsolicited, turns from neutral to harassment to stalking very quickly. No one likes to feel trapped into a relationship in which they have no interest and we have laws both online and off to prevent this in the most drastic circumstances.

The lesson for social media and community managers working to build relationships is this: Start slowly, gauge interest levels from digital body language, and move forward together with the other party. A relationship takes initiative on the part of two parties and it is impossible to force. The hard truth is that not everyone that you want to have a relationship with will want one with you. Use your time to invest in those people that do want to move forward together.

Rachel Happe is a Co-Founder and Principal at The Community Roundtable, a peer network for social media, community, and social business leaders. She has over fifteen years of experience working with emerging technologies including enterprise social networking, e-commerce, and enterprise software applications. Rachel has served as a product executive at Mzinga, Bitpass, & IDe, and as IDC’s first analyst covering social technologies.

Radian6 Adds: Stay tuned later this month for a yet another – different – take on digital body language!

As human beings we all need to “shut down” once in a while. Everyone deserves a nice, restful vacation. But our brand never sleeps. Customers use our products and services all the time, even when we go on vacation. The simple solution to this problem would be to have a colleague fill in for you while you are out. And this is perfectly fine. Some of the most successful companies in social media have more than one person handling the load (Zappos and Comcast).

But sometimes, a brand in the early stages of developing their social media program has limited resources and is not prepared for their community manager or social media person to take leave. Allowing themselves vacation means putting social media on hold.

How this Situation Came About

What is fascinating about social media is that it has brought a human element to marketing, which was previously lacking. Customers have begun to appreciate and value the human element, however they still relate to brands as, well…. a brand.

There was an InformationWeek study which said, one-fourth of users who complain on Facebook or Twitter expect a reply within 60 minutes (6% of those expected one within 10 minutes).

By creating a human element in social media, we have complicated things. Now, if we can’t respond fast enough, we could be doing more damage.

I would hate for social media to be the reason vacation disappears, but the question is still valid, what do you do with social media conversations when you aren’t there? Can we afford to leave our social media presence idle for any amount of time?

But We All Take Vacation, Right?

You’re right, it is your vacation, and you should enjoy it. But at the same time, don’t forget, “Your Brand Never Sleeps.” You can’t leave your social media idle. There is no excuse for ditching your social identity completely for vacation.

This is not to say that your level of engagement has to be the same. Personally, when the weekend hits, I usually make family time and go ‘quiet’ on Twitter. However, just because I am not speaking, doesn’t mean I am not listening. I see every single tweet that comes in. Smart phones have made it so easy even a monkey could use it. With some of the tools available, browsing messages is as simple as opening a text message, maybe even easier.

Social Media Triage

This is where social media triage comes in (I thought I coined that term, but I should have known better. See this awesome flow chart for more info). Nearly every tweet deserves a response, but not necessarily right away. Determine what the message is about – Is it a playful, fun message? The urgency for this will be less and can typically go ignored for a while. If not, start to determine what the problem is.

1. Are they angry? Did something happen in your store? This type of feedback becomes more serious and requires a deeper, more urgent look.
2. How big is their problem? More often than not, it’s going to be a bump or a scratch, nothing a little ice and a Band-Aid can’t fix. Sometimes of course, these do have the potential to turn into a larger problem. The best thing to do is to have them email their concern, and assure them you will get back to them as soon as possible. Other than that, these are not necessarily the people that you need to respond to right away.

But sometimes, someone has a real, legitimate complaint. These are the situations that, as a brand, you will be thankful you were listening for.

1. Is their problem time sensitive? If you think they have a legitimate complaint, if it can wait until you get back to the office, then tell them you will look into the situation and get back to them on a given date. They will understand. That’s the human element. They just want to know that someone is listening and is there to help.

That being said, if the situation is something that needs immediate attention, again, you will be thankful you were listening and able to deal with it immediately.

So Yes, Use your Vacation

But don’t completely disappear. This should be every company’s biggest problem. It’s usually a sign that you are doing something right during office hours. Ignoring your customers, especially during their time of need, sends a distasteful message. But providing a response is a small and simple level of engagement that will make all the difference to your customers.

What are your social media habits when on vacation? How do you prepare before the trip? Share your ideas.

Aaron Friedman is a member of the Content Solutions team at Resolution Media where he is experienced in SEO ranging from local, Digital Marketing, to National and Global Search Marketing. Aaron specializes in content creation including Social Media Strategy, Image and Video Optimization. He blogs at Digitalhighrise.com. Follow him on Twitter and connect with him on Linkedin.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

~Mark Twain

If you’ve ever stopped by any of my online imprints (Twitter, Facebook, my blog – RedheadWriting), it’s evident from the get-go that I have a certain affection for blue language. Grandmothers and god-fearing folk the world over blush and click away when they land in the Danger Zone, and occasionally the hate mail flows (more on that in a bit). When Radian6 reached out to me to pen a guest blog on the use of profanity on the interwebz, I knew two things right off the bat:

I was going to have a s**tload of fun writing this post.

and

My branding message was clear to those who watch me do whatever it is I do on any given day.

A simple glance at my Twitter bio will tell you what I do for a living – I work with companies to help them develop clear and distinct personalities. When companies meet me, they’ve usually stopped by my online presences and blog and either love what they see or want to run screaming – and that’s exactly what I want them to do. Love me, hate me…just don’t be indifferent. And whether you decide to use profanity in your online communications is a choice only you can make, but in this post, what I hope to do is show you how we can:

1)    Talk about profanity without using it.

2)    Explore reasonable considerations (and consequences) as you ponder the linguistic line in the sand.

3)    Have tools to make better decisions about your brand’s personality, whether you’re an army of one or 1,000.

Know Who You Are

Strangely enough, I remember the day I dropped my first f-bomb on Twitter. I expected crickets. I watched the screen for a potential backlash. But the opposite happened: I got retweeted. Four times, even! I’ve never been one for saying things in conventional ways and what I’d inadvertently done is built an audience who appreciated my true vernacular.

No matter what the size of your brand, understanding who you are as you enter the social web is imperative. I’m frequently asked by clients whether I’m going to drop the f-bomb on their blogs, Facebook pages or in their Twitter streams. My answer? It depends. Does that fit who you are? Every brand has a personality. If we admit that from the get go, we understand why we don’t expect headlines about Berkshire Hathaway to mention the shizzle in your nizzle and on the contrary, why Slim Jims aren’t being hawked by an iconic Clorox mom.

This is, quite possibly, the most important consideration as you determine whether profanity has a place in your communication repertoire.  Know who you are and know before you go. That makes the process of building your audience and understanding them a boatload easier.

Know Your Audience

It’s the part B of the equation: whom are you trying to reach? I’m looking for other upbeat, short-fused, irreverent souls like myself who are out to make a difference on this big blue sphere. If you ask yourself about your ideal audience (and honestly), the question of using profanity will pretty much answer itself. Brands looking to build community have to be a part of the community they wish to create. That means adopting a vernacular that those people will find familiar. And yes, sometimes that means dropping a word or two that others might find uncomfortable.

Embrace Offense

Words have incredible force, no matter how few letters they contain. I spoke at the onset about hate mail, something I’ve come to love and cherish. Here’s the bottom line: no matter whether you use profanity or not, people are going to take offense at something you have to say. What brands have to understand is that not everyone is their target customer and if you tick a few people off along the way, that’s okay!

There are few things in this world that have the ability to polarize an audience like politics and profanity. In your personal life, you have your views. Brands should have views and voices as well. Don’t be hypocritical – we think it’s jazzy when we hear bleeped-out lyrics slip through our car speakers as the latest pop ditty plays from the radio. In my opinion, radio stations do a half-baked job of walking that middle-of-the-road line: we all know what the lyrics are, and bleeping just makes them seem more taboo. I’m sure radio stations get more hate mail than anyone, but here’s where there’s a lesson to be learned: you’re never going to please everyone and there’s always the option to (gasp) change the channel.

The Consequences

A public relations colleague of mine has consequences down-pat. During media training with new clients, she talks about roadkill. You’re safe on the left shoulder…the right shoulder. Wander out into the middle of the road? You’re going to get killed. Successful brands pick a ditch to die in. This applies not just to the decision to use profanity in your communications, but to communications in general. Middle of the road voices fade into the ether while outspoken ones – ones with distinct personalities – shine brightly. Profanity is a character trait of a more comprehensive branding strategy, not a defining characteristic.

Sure, you might find some prospective audience members peeved about your choice of words. That’s fine – they’ll go elsewhere. But along with this exodus, you’ll find an influx of advocates who are picking up what you’re putting down. For brands that have to justify messaging to a larger internal audience, it goes back to personality. The voice you use online might not be how your CEO sounds in the boardroom, but if it’s true to the personality of your brand and product, no one is going to argue with the results that a powerful online presence can create.

Go Bleeping Be Something, Would You?

While profanity can be clever, using it as a tool to get to where you need a brand to go is even smarter. There will always be the people who want to tune you out. Heck, I’m irritated that every time I get to partake in an In-N-Out Burger delight, there’s a Bible verse on the bottom of their cups. And while that’s not profanity, I consider it pretty ballsy. Yet, it doesn’t keep me from going back for something I dig – and perhaps your decision (or not) to use profanity in your brand will ultimately attract the right audience – and deter those who will be better served elsewhere.

Radian6 adds: What do you think? Agree or disagree? Is there a place for periodic profanity in your brand’s online profile? Please leave your thoughts and comments below!