This is copyright material extracted from Paid Attention, published by Kogan Page Ltd, 2015. www.koganpage.com/PaidAttention

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1. Listen

People are talking about every brand. They provide conversational focal points among the loosely connected. Free tools like Google Alerts and Twitter searches show you what they are saying. Paid services like radian6, Expion, Sysomos offer a larger set of functions. Like any conversation, it begins with listening.

2. Respond

On the internet, conversations about you are often directed to you. It is expected that you are listening, and should you encounter people reaching out, someone should be responding to complaints and questions: 70 per cent of brands still ignore customer complaints on Twitter,21 which, by this stage, seems rude.

3. Nurture

The fi rst corporate response to social media was: get me one. Wal-Mart attempted to build its own social network. This didn’t work because there was no social object tying the network together, no reason for it to exist. As Mark Zuckerberg has pointed out: ‘You don’t start communities. Communities already exist... think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do.’22

If people are already out there discussing your brand, nurture them.

4. Create social objects

‘The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives

them something to do’HENRY JENKINS23

People like to socialize and they like to do things together – the highest hope for a social marketing effort is that it becomes a social object itself. When launching the Nikon D40, the agency gave 200 cameras to a small town – PictureTown – and let them fi nd out for themselves how easy they were to use, creating reams of social content in the process.

TOOLKIT Six steps to being social

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This is copyright material extracted from Paid Attention, published by Kogan Page Ltd, 2015. www.koganpage.com/PaidAttention

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5. Be transparent

Let’s be very clear about this – lying is wrong.Back in the early days of the social web there was a lot of shady work

creating fake grass-roots movements (digital astroturfi ng, if you will). I had assumed that this was a thing of the past. However, people are always tempted. One particularly silly example came from a marketing manager at Belkin, a company that makes routers, who was caught offering to pay people to write positive reviews of the products on Amazon. This is quite staggeringly foolish. On the social web, when someone knows something, everyone knows something. The fact that he was offering the payment on Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace that is part of Amazon, beggars belief. Pranks, or faked reportage, are also dangerous territory as they can precipitate a backlash. Instead of playing a joke on your consumers, let them in on the joke.

6. Join the conversation

This can take innumerable forms. This is when the brand begins the shift from acting like a faceless corporation and makes the transition to an appropriate grammar for the space. It is here that content strategy begins to emerge as a crucial new discipline. Once you have joined the conversation, you will want to go back to listening to understand how people respond. And so, instead of a list, it is really a cycle.

Social communication is fundamentally different. It requires a different behavioural grammar, different skills and different staffi ng. To fi nish with a line from Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford: ‘it is not about campaigns; it is about commitment’.24

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