Today’s is a guest post from Matt Ridings, a friend of mine who has a sharp mind, even sharper wit, and a refreshingly pragmatic and holistic approach to all this social stuff. You can find Matt on Twitter at @techguerilla (but don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Lately I’ve been thinking in evolution metaphors, such as this post, and recently I saw Amber Naslund had this post. We appear to see the world through similar lenses, so I asked her if she would be interested in me writing a guest post. I have yet to figure out why, but she graciously agreed.

The aspects of Social Media that interest me the most tend to revolve around social and psychological structures. Why do people behave in the way they do? What triggers are associated with those behaviors? What societal changes are brought about through those behaviors? And most important to me, how have similar systems been created and evolved throughout history? Anthropological aspects, for the most part.

The Social Hunter-Gatherer

I’d like to reach once more into the evolutionary terminology bag, the socio-economic one this time, and bring out the metaphor of a Hunter-Gatherer Program as it applies to social media.

In Social Media circles we like to talk strategically about relationships and the importance of them. Their formation, how they are nurtured, how they are leveraged, and how the parties benefit. Thanks to Amber and those like her screaming from the mountaintop, most companies today are beginning to understand the nuances of this conversation. They already understood customer relationships were important; they just didn’t conceptually grasp what that really means in social media.

Where things still seem to get tricky is in execution. How do I create those new relationships? How do I find where my customers and prospects are? How do I mitigate risks in the process? These answers vary of course, both in terms of the individual company as well as across the various individual platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

In my particular work, I educate and design execution programs for organizations to answer those questions, and I have yet to come across one that needed exactly the same plan as another. Because of this I tend to keep most of my public writing at a conceptual level rather than explicit case study style material. I don’t intend on changing that philosophy, but as this is a guest post and because it’s the blog of someone involved with Radian6 {a fantastic tool for collecting and deriving insights from information scattered across social media}, I thought I’d make an exception and give one very specific example of how we gather and utilize that type of information.

The Hunter

The short answer as to what the Hunter does is “Listen”. This process is all about uncovering where those customers and prospects are and listening to what they have to say.

The primary way we use the term internally is that of the search for your customer, and more importantly in our view, your prospective customer. Brand mentions certainly play a part in that, and their importance varies depending upon your specific objectives (customer service, marketing, competitive intelligence, etc.). But there are many, many other things to be listening for that can be of equal if not greater importance. At a recent client, for example, we initially focused on brand mentions in twitter to build our ‘focus pool’, but then began running ongoing analysis to determine common interests that those customers held that had nothing to do with the clients product.

Let’s say that we uncovered a large percentage of people who use this brands product and who also tend to like playing Tennis and are Foodies. We then built expanded pools based on who the Tennis loving product users interacted with, and the same with those who were Foodies. Now we have two new large pools of people with only one true common denominator (e.g. Tennis), and a potential common denominator (the product). We then want to narrow this large pool down further and increase the odds that the members will find our product useful.

To do this we analyzed each of the expanded pools to see if there was a second tier of common interests that the product users in that pool and those in the expanded set had with one another. Naturally, there were. Let’s review what just happened here: we took analysis to build known information about our customers (Tennis, Foodie) to arrive at unknown information while building a pool of targeted prospects.

We could have easily stopped right there and simply provided these insights to the client. Their marketing department was already blown away at what had been uncovered in 3 months that they hadn’t been able to learn in 20 years. They could have used those insights (and did) to vary their marketing materials, their copy, their sponsorships of events, etc, etc. But this is called a “Social Hunter-Gatherer” not just a Social Hunter.

The Gatherer

The key word here is “Gather”. Not “push”, not “grab”, not “attack”. The way we describe it to clients is that they want to create their own gravity. They need outside objects to be attracted to their gravity and be pulled in. Push marketing doesn’t build relationships in social media, Pull marketing does. The second point we make is that a Gatherer is focused on the long term. A Gatherer who simply goes and collects what crops are available at that moment and then stops will soon starve. It is an ongoing, never ending process.

In this particular case what we first did was listen some more, but this time instead of all these automated tools we put real people in place who were directed to follow a very specific list of people in twitter (the various interest pools made up the lists) and simply “be social”. There was no selling, no marketing, and no unsolicited mentions of the product. We just wanted our people to get to know their list of people and interact as they would normally; the only thing they were prohibited from doing was trying to sell to someone. Otherwise, they could talk about their jobs if they liked. They could say that they came into the group initially through a research exercise if they wanted. If they had something of value to offer, however inane or obscure, they were to do so. Essentially, be themselves.

They did this for 2 months. At the end of this time our people ‘understood’ their associated pool at a very personal level. They related to them. They had real, actual relationships with them. I want you to think about the power of that for a moment. You now have a handful of people within your company that understand your customers and prospects at a very core level, but more importantly who have trusted relationships with them.

The main thing to understand, although not really critical to the success of the program, is that in most of the cases our people completely exposed themselves and their motives during those 2 months. You know who cared? No one. Not one single person. And while not originally a part of our strategy, those individuals were kept on at the client to continue engaging with their pools. It turned out that people were more than willing to now answer questions if we had one. “What do you think about x idea?” “How about this other product we’re working on?” Through the simple act of building those relationships we built pools of advocates that we never expected.

People want to feel respected, and a part of something, and to feel special. The fact that we valued their opinion, or rather; that someone they now knew and liked valued their opinion was great to them.

In addition, another unintended consequence of the program was that our people over time became de-facto customer service agents. Since everyone in their pool knew what they did and who they worked for, they invariably started getting questions. “Who should I call for x?”, “Where can I buy…”, etc. These people now work on the customer service team at that client by the way.

As for the marketing side of things? Using our analytics, they now knew how to find and target seemingly unrelated people in social media that would have a high likelihood of being interested in their product. They now knew pools of advocates that they could “recognize & incentivize” (another mantra we use in discussing advocate programs). Information is great, but knowledge is better….and wisdom? Well, that’s priceless.

Evolving Your Program

So what’s next? In addition to the constant organic growth of these programs we also add on new pool sectors by repeating the cycle with variations we’ve gleaned from the previous round of research.

The stage we’re at now is trying to consolidate our knowledge of all the platforms these pools of people interact on (is this Twitter user also on Facebook? If so, is there additional information available there we can gather that would improve our insights or build new pools?).

And what’s really cool is we’re trying to….oh, perhaps I shouldn’t give *all* our secrets away. What I will say is that this methodology is not restricted to large enterprises with piles of cash, it works just as well for the solo basement entrepreneur.

Hunter-Gatherer Programs, it’s what’s for dinner.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings – @techguerilla

You cannot be all things to all people, especially in business.

We know this, right? We say it often. We talk about the fact that you can only please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time and most of the people much of the time or something.

So why on earth are we so resistant to the notion of letting go of an opportunity that’s not a fit for our business?

We scramble to write out “positioning” statements to illustrate why we’re the right choice for a person or company in a given situation. We mash up what we already have to spin it just the right way, in hopes that it will look like we can do the job. Even if it’s not our strength.

If we’re trying to provide solutions for small business owners, why would we waste hours putting together a mammoth proposal for Wal*Mart? One that would most likely send our business into an operational tailspin because if we were to win the contract, we’d have to scramble to find capacity for it operationally (because you certainly don’t buy the team and the infrastructure before you land the deal, right?).

But it happens all the time.

And the real kicker? We are absolutely resistant to the idea that handing off that ill-fitting piece of business to a competitor would be a good business move.

Why? Because we see the short term lost opportunity cost. We see it as driving the engine of the competition rather than fine-tuning our own. We see the trees instead of the forest, thinking that if we’ve lost that customer today, we won’t ever be able to have them.

The problem is that they weren’t going to be our customer. Not today, anyway. If we have to force-fit our company with their needs in order to capture a short term win, what have we done? We’ve put ourselves in the unfortunate position to have to cram a round peg into a square hole, and fulfill a promise we weren’t really qualified to fill in the first place. And that’s likely going to end with a customer who’s not very satisfied, which means not only might we lose the business, but we might lose their trust and respect as well – and those might be irreplaceable.

There’s a fine line between stretching your capabilities to capture a new market when the right opportunity is there, and stubbornly refusing to pick a rock and stand on it.

The backside to listening to the customer community at large is that there will always be someone for whom you are not a fit. You’ll be too big. Too small. Too expensive. Too cheap. Too traditional. Too renegade. Too something.

And if you listen to all of them and try to accommodate their needs, you’ll do nothing well.

But if you’re willing to be honest with yourself and the customer and admit that you might not be a fit for their needs – even send them to someone who would instead – you might just earn their respect and admiration. And down the road, if their needs change or your focus does, you’ve established a basis of credibility and trust that might just win you that business back.

image credit: wwarby

You want to uncover influencers, right?

Find those people that can carry your message, get heard, cut through the noise and get people’s attention? The ones with the most eyeballs, the most leverage, the strongest voice, the most accumulated “social capital”?

Let me tell you a story about Emily.

Emily was a donor to a non-profit organization I used to work for. She wasn’t an especially notable donor, but she was a consistently, quietly loyal one. She sent precisely $100, twice a year, to our annual giving campaign. By most fundraising “standards”, that put her neatly in a “nice but not major” camp.

Emily was also quite unassuming, but she was incredibly passionate about our work. She came to the events, but never stayed for the fancy-dancy reception. She talked with the kids. She was sweet, approachable, and kind. I talked to her often about music, books, and her grandkids who lived across the country. She taught me a bit of Gaelic. I taught her a bit of Spanish, and introduced her to comics (no I’m not joking).

We had a conversation once about the idea of “major donors” and she chided me a bit about how we development folks were so focused on the big gifts. But she mentioned that in her years supporting our organization, she’d always felt like her contribution – however small – made a difference, and that we valued her. We did.

Late one year, Emily died. She was mourned, and missed.

About a month later, I got a call from an attorney representing Emily’s estate. She had made some provisions in her will, one of which was that my organization was to be the recipient of a $5 million dollar endowment gift.

$5 million. That amount made an enormous difference to my organization in one shot.

In the traditional sense, Emily was never the person we would have identified as “influential”. Ever. She was a routine donor that didn’t make a lot of noise, insist on a board seat, volunteer on committees, or throw big money at capital campaigns. She cared nothing for having her name on plaques or lists. By our standards today, her social graph would have been rather paltry.

But she felt like she made a difference to us, and we cared about what that meant. We treated her in a way befitting her emotional commitment, not her financial one. And in the end, she made a more powerful difference to our organization than we ever could have imagined.

Your “influencers” are right there. In your customer database. They’re buying from you already, which means they have the ultimate currency of influence that should matter to you: their business.

They don’t have scads of followers. They might not spend tons of money. Some of them don’t give a rip if you have a fan page, and even if they’ve “fanned” you, they may never be back. They don’t have legions of fans commenting on their blogs, if they have one at all.

Yet they are the ones whose trust and evangelism you need. You’re much better off getting all of your own customers to love what you’re doing than try to convince a Jason Falls or a Tara Hunt or a Chris Brogan that they should care if they don’t already.

Deliver the best goods to the people that hold the keys to your kingdom, regardless of their social graph. Because if you are putting too many of your eggs in the fragile, fleeting basket of influence that’s based simply on today’s notions of popularity and visibility, you just might be overlooking an Emily.

Special thanks to Jim Long for sharing his post, which reminded me of this story and reinforces the need for perspective when it comes to influence.

image credit: Randy Son Of Robert