As a kick-off post, lets look at some of the most basic aspects of understanding lead generation in the context of social media.

The Three C’s: Content, Conversation and Community
I’m sure you already know this by know, but it still bears repeating: social media signifies a shift in marketing that is no longer driven by your carefully crafted and broadcast message. It’s about content, conversation and community. It’s not about blasting messages relentlessly through a series of channels to gather your 1.5% response. It’s about listening to the conversation taking place in your market community and engaging. Your market is now a networked community of customers, and technology has amplified the conversation to the point where people see more value in learning about your product from others like themselves than from your marketing campaigns. That means instead of blasting the market with pick-up lines, you need to listen to, engage and catalyze your customer community. If you do it well, your market will spread your message for you.

Find Your Hot Spots
The best place to begin is by finding out where your customer community is already gathering to talk about your market, and who is influencing the conversation. You can begin the process online by using some of the many new tools focused on searching through social content. You can search for real time conversations on Twitter. You can search for keyword concepts related to your market on some of the many social bookmarking sites and indexes, likeDel.icio.us, StumbleUpon or AllTop. You can search for news items related to your market that were highly rated by Web users at Reddit, Digg or Sphere. And when you’re ready to start seriously tracking the flow of conversation and the impact of key influencers, you can leverage Google Alerts, or one of the growing number of social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Techrigy, or the system we use, SocialRep.

Listen Before You Launch
The point of all these tools is to find and track the influential hotspots where market conversations are percolating. Once you know who’s driving the conversation and where, you can start to participate more effectively by listening first. What are people talking about? What issues are driving the discussion? If you have something meaningful to say, then jump in. But get engaged as an interested participant, not as a product shill. Imagine yourself being at a dinner party with friends. How would you feel about a salesman butting into your conversation to promote a product, or defend his brand against something you said, and then walking away to butt into the next group?

Design Your Campaign to Fit Your Community
Once your team is engaged with one or more of your market communities, lead-generation programs can be a lot more focused. You’ll have a much better sense of which community hot spots are attracting traffic and driving conversations. A lead-gen campaign for a bike company at Facebook, for example, might focus on leveraging a big personality like Lance Armstrong to attract friends and drive links. A campaign at Mountain Bike Review Forum, with 60,000 dedicated cyclists, would be more product-focused, maybe organizing a demo ride. The program you put together should be designed to fit the community, and you’ll only know how to do that well if you’re engaged.

With any lead-generation campaign that engages an existing community, it’s also important to connect with the facilitators of that community before you do any serious program. You should understand and respect any policies they might have about commercial campaigns on their networks. Some communities will have additional opportunities for sponsorship, or co-branded content, which might help you create a more effective campaign. If you’re just interested in testing the waters to see how a community—particularly a large community—might pull in a broader campaign, you can often buy banner ads or adword campaigns that focus on particular sites so you can test the interest in program concepts.

Offer Opportunities for More Conversation
Finally, there’s always the potential to use community development as a lead-generation program, rather than tapping into an existing community. Starbucks, for example, has launched a number of word-of-mouth campaigns, including their “Let’s Meet At Starbucks: Invite a Friend” campaign, while Dell has pushed a lot of product through dedicated product profiles on Twitter, used to announce hot deals. Initiatives like this make the campaign offer a socializing opportunity, and the possibilities are endless, for both retail and B2B companies.

Once you are oriented to your market community, campaign execution will look surprisingly familiar. It’s still important as ever to have a compelling offer, a clear message and to test everything you can to continually improve effectiveness. The difference today is that you need to be much more transparent, honest and accountable in the ways you engage your market. Prospects aren’t just individual “targets” to pick off like sitting ducks. They’re members of a community where word travels fast.

Public Relations firm’s inability to understand this paradigm shift was highlighted at the 3rd Annual Society for New Communications Research Symposium where Don Middleberg, CEO of the public relations agency, Middleberg Communications, and Jen McClure, executive director, Society for New Communications Research made the following statement to attendees,

“Managing social media belongs with public relations practitioners since PR professionals are story tellers who understand how to build relationships, collaborate, engage in conversations, understand changing influence patterns, and how to communicate with journalists in the channel of their choice.”

Framing social media as “communicating with journalists in the channel of their choice” is exactly why public relations practitioners are failing to provide leadership in the social media space.

Public relations is organized to maintain relationships with reporters and analysts not with customers directly. Influencing the influencers is so deeply rooted in the DNA of PR firms that it is difficult for them to hear what their own research is telling them. Perhaps that’s why only 5% of the 1850 companies surveyed by MotiveLab last summer trusted their PR firms to help them implement social media programs.

We separated the data gathered in the first six months from the data gathered in the second six months. Interesting trends are discernable even in this short of a time period suggesting that the pace of adoption and the level of social media integration among corporations are increasing. We also discovered a lack of confidence in PR and Advertising agency’s ability to deliver social media strategies despite a considerable effort by these traditional media players to add social media to their service offering.

Occasionally we are asked to design social media programs that alter behavior so that a new service or product becomes desirable. Creating new product categories is not new but it is very difficult because you have to get analysts and the media to agree that we need a new category.

In social media the analysts and traditional media are less important. Changing behavior is about getting a large community of people to agree that a change is necessary or desirable. If you want to see this process unfolding, check out the PickensPlan. It’s a five minute idea for moving away from our dependence on foreign oil and toward natural gas and wind. Energy solution aside, this is one of the most well-integrated and thought through social media sites I’ve seen lately. There are no Hollywood-style movies, t-shirts to make or games to play just solid community building. Click around the web site and you’ll notice two things straight away. The content is just under five minutes – that’s it. I hope more substance will follow but at this point participation is much more important than pushing content. The second thing you’ll see is a host of opportunities to participate. From Twitter to forums they make it easy to link T. Boon into your community.

Granted, T. Boon is not creating a new product category but at the end of the day there is not much difference between convincing people they need to drive natural gas cars and convincing them they need a walkman.

Transportation and communication technology has been “shrinking” the world for hundreds of years. Social media dramatically accelerates this process through the intimacy of the information, the size of the audience reached and judgment that inevitably follows. It’s impossible to say what the long-term effects of the assault rifle give-away will be for the Windsor Hills Baptist Church. But I guarantee the Windsor Hills board will be asking that question from now until the end of the internet — that alone will change their brand.

“Many mums-to-be say posting ultrasound photos is an easy way to announce an exciting piece of information to lots of people all at once. But some warn that sharing foetal pictures could be oversharing”

I think this discussion is done. Sharing fetal images on the web is widespread and ironically considered less personal than images of children at play. Even my own 20-something daughters agree they’d share ultrasound images of their children but not photos of their first birthday. A good company to look at for this service is MyPhotoBaby.

What interests me though is where this is going. For an insight I spoke with Steve Corey, an IT executive working with a group of physicians and ultrasound technicians to deliver 3D and 4D images from the Doctor’s office right to your personal web site — without necessitating a non-medical ultrasound procedure.

Steve sees this as just the beginning; “Right now we are giving families the ability to create keepsakes and get to know their child in utero. But in the near future we see people sharing all sorts of medical imaging”

Where does this lead? You guessed it – MyInnerSpace. It won’t be long before people with serious medical conditions are sharing their MRI’s , X-ray’s and other scans with a non-medical network who have experienced similar ailments.

If doctor’s aren’t already jumping off of rooftops out of frustration with patients who know as much (or more) than they do about their diagnosis – they will now. I predict that patients will be showing up to their appointment with problem areas notated on images they provide. Many doctors have been trained in ultrasound diagnoses by the equipment sales reps – who have no medical degree. It won’t be hard for the determined novice (motivated by a life threatening illness) to become an expert.

Some bad behavior is bound to follow but for the most part, the more we know about our own health the healthier we’ll be.

ReadWriteWeb has a great story on the impressive mashup of social media tools the RedCross is using to engage with flood victims in the midwest.

The newsroom site runs off of Wordpress, and it’s being used to push out press releases, media, and information about shelters. The Red Cross is using Utterz to post from the field, Flickr for photos and for videos, as well as a Slide-powered slideshow widget that allows anyone to upload photos of disaster areas. The site also features a Google Maps mashup that depicts the surprisingly large number of relief operations currently being run by the American Red Cross (hint: click the "view larger map" link, because viewing the informative popups inside the widget on site is next to impossible).

I find this a particularly poignant trend marker. When lives are in the balance, social media shines as a more effective way to connect people than traditional tools like print, radio and television. Social Media enables many-to-many communication that allows citizens to notify each other and authorities of danger zones, people in need of help, and available resources. It’s simply a far more efficient and effective means of communication. It’s only when budgets, rather than lives, are in the balance that the usefulness of social media comes into question. 

Another social media trend I’m following:

I mentioned in my last post that certain conversational trends emerge in the first few days of tracking any particular market, but that deeper and often more significant trends only appear when you follow a market over many different channels over a longer period of time. The deeper trend I discussed last time was the globalization of market conversations, and how that’s impacting consumer awareness and preference. There’s another closely related trend that is also having a big impact on consumers, and that’s the broadening of participation in openly accessible discussions, which I believe will make the market increasingly smarter.

Off the Internet, there are a lot of dividing lines between different groups of people that might converse about a given product or market. Market insiders have their associations and professional networks where they talk shop; enthusiasts have their clubs and conferences; general consumers have their friends and family, and sales associates. As these conversations have moved online, the biggest change has been in the consumer category, where people can vastly extend their research beyond friends, family and sales associates to talk with like-minded consumers who have experience with every conceivable product. Market insiders and enthusiasts have mostly just recreated their existing networks online.

When you track market conversations over many channels and over a sufficient amount of time, it becomes apparent that these previously well segmented groups are beginning to blur in places, aided primarily by the power of search. It often isn’t obvious at first–you simply notice that there are many people engaged in the broader dialog with different levels of knowledge and understanding about a given product or market. You find people who are obviously new to the dialog, people who are informed, people who are know-it-alls.

It’s often difficult when you first start tracking the conversation to distinguish between people who are really well-informed and people who just like to spout what they think they know. But if you follow the dialog over time, you realize that right alongside the newbies and know-it-alls, there are often people weighing in with substantial insights, including industry executives, market analysts, economists and engineers. I’m not talking here about the vaunted blogs of industry experts–but about insiders who join the fray, hobnobing right alongside consumers on some of the broader discussions without trumpeting their status.

Most often you find this broad mix of participants in discussions that focus on industry news and trends, while technical product discussions tend to segment into the traditionally stratified groups. But the impact of this mixing in the broader dialog is an obvious increase in the sophistication of conversation. When a consumer Googles a product they want to purchase, along with the focused discussions on features and benefits they’ll also find discussions about the latest product and market news. And when they tap into those discussions they start reading dialog in which experts often drop substantial insights about what’s shaping the market–from technological advances to impending regulation.

For some consumers that might just be noise, but the more complex or expensive the purchase decision, the more likely that added information will be influential. I first saw this play out in the automotive market, where I found automotive engineers engaged in conversation right alongside consumers about the implications of the next generation of hybrid vehicles and when they might be expected to roll out. For a consumer considering a $25-30k purchase, knowing that an improved hybrid technology might be only a few months away can make a huge impact on when and what they buy. But it turns out you’ll find similar conversations happening all the way down the line to a $300 cell phone/PDA.

Why, exactly, apparently high level market insiders are sometimes anonymously engaging in dialog on broad discussion boards is an interesting question–you often can’t even tell they’re insiders until you follow the dialog long enough to pick up on something that gives them away. It may be they find the broad dialog about market trends compelling to engage in but don’t want to be known, it may be they want to demonstrate their expertise, it may be they are motivated to be a knowledge provider, it may be they want to engage with a broader swath of the market beyond their professional echo chambers, it may even be they want to seed the market with information beneficial to their business interests.

Whatever the reason, you can find them if you look, and they’re often quietly adding information far beyond product features and benefits that can shape consumer attitudes and purchasing behavior. The result is a greater likelihood that your customers and prospects are going to have access to more information about the market than ever before. It’s hard to imagine that kind of trend leveling off any time soon, as social media continues to grow and as indexing of content penetrates more types of social content.

The obvious counterpoint to the notion that consumers are becoming more informed is the increasing noise factor of superfluous dialog, misinformation and shilling, which some say will even dampen participation in social media. That’s a long post on it’s own, but I’ll say that from what I’ve seen I think the evolution of online dialog is quite Darwinian. Consumers are learning quickly from direct experience what level of trust to put into what they read online, and they’re developing skills to read more effectively between the lines. Again, I think this points to the long-term development of a more sophisticated and more informed consumer.

What do you think? Will a smarter breed of consumer affect your market?