What results often times is either: 1) shoving traditional campaign structures into social networks, or 2) a big bowl of tactics that are stand alone gimmicks, giving neither the creators or brand managers a fair way to evaluate whether integrated campaign tactics actually do integrate. And when they do integrate, how do you create consistency without droning sameness?

To make sense of it all, to give teams a structure by which they can create ideas that build on each other, I made a bit of a simple, strategic mashup: First, take the 3-act storytelling structure that humans have been using for a few thousand years to relate and process information. Then, blend with Nielsen’s Participation Inequality Law, the rule of thumb that describes digital participation behaviors at scale.

What comes out is a way to look at campaigns where the launch / event / purchase isn’t the end of the story, or the beginning. It should be where it belongs: at the climax of the story. That allows the ending of your arc to be the resolution of your audience members succeeding: the behavioral outcome that could not have occurred without the brand having facilitated it.

But that only gets us as far as campaign content, and campaigns in social aren’t enough.

To truly model out and encourage positive behaviors, you need to be actively facilitating the community. The Participation Framework makes sure that your brand’s declarative statements are balanced as part of a mix that balances content and conversation.

Because people engaging with the brand is a means to an end: people using the brand as a setting to strengthen relationships with each other. Again, positive community behaviors are what you’re shooting for. It’s these behaviors that will ultimately determine the social success of a brand.

For more detail on how Behavioral Storytelling works, check out the presentation delivered at ContentCamp:

If you’re wondering how you can use structures like this to make the difference for your brand, join me at General Assembly in NYC for a class on June 4, or I can work with a number of different teams in your organization: as a speaker or consultant.

What’s your take on social content strategy? Drop a note below in the comments or on twitter @mleis.

Alone, Together

What separates great brands and marketing from good, or even bad ones can be boiled down to this one thought I first heard at sxsw 2011:

Make The Customer The Hero

Seems obvious today, right? Look at our most disruptive brands today and you’ll see it as a common theme. From Apple to Coke to Facebook and Instagram. It’s more than Millennial cultural attribute, although they demand it more vocally than other consumer segments. What I see across the board is that products that position themselves as tools to make their customers more heroic in the eyes of their peers, wins.

This may be a result of the social media era, as it’s more important than ever that people have content to represent their small triumphs to friends and family. Brands, more and more, are valued by how their content works effectively as social currency. But it could also be that in these economic times, what makes global corporations unique or special is what we as individuals can do with it.

This is a marked difference from almost all effective brand building and communications of the past, and especially during the heyday of the Mad Men era, when a brand established value not from being the tool that makes the customer the hero, but the hero that potential customers aspire to be like.

Take a look through the Advertising Age Favorite Ads of the 60’s and you’ll see barely any people at all. Most ads focus on the product alone, what it would be like to live the life that uses that product, or the Fear / Uncertainty / Doubt strategy of what could go wrong if you don’t get the telephone extension in your kitchen. Look around today and you’ll see these sparingly in use — mostly for older audiences.

Today’s successful brands focus on what the audience wants to do, and how the brand can help them to achieve that hero moment.

What do you think? Leave a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis…

In practice, though, it’s usually a shortcut that lacks a real content strategy for social media, leaving the brand open to all kinds of liability instead. How? Because of a simple turn of phrase used on the phone all the time: starting out by saying your sorry.

On the phone it makes total sense, it’s a conversational response that puts someone complaining at ease, makes them feel like they’re being listened to.

The issue is that social media is conversational, not conversation.

When your customer service representatives or community managers write “sorry,” what they’re saying is we “express regret at a mistake or wrongdoing; to accept responsibility for a misdeed.” That’s not what they mean, is it?

So how do you effectively respond to complaining customers in social media? Here’s a few A’s to think about it without opening up a can of liability:

Acknowledgement

Say thanks. Seriously, you have no idea how effective simply telling someone thanks for taking the time to let you know there’s an issue modifies their behavior, and the behavior of people who are looking at your very public community. Usually people just poke the brand through social to see if some person is paying attention. Let them know someone is.

Ask a few simple questions

Very rarely is a complaint in social the beginning of a customers’ conversation with a brand. More likely it’s the result of a long line of frustrations boiling over onto your account. The best thing brands can do quickly is gain more context: Is this really about your brand or the community? Have they already talked to someone at the call center, or emailed?

Advocate

Really, more than an apology, people usually want to know that you’re on their side. They want to know that a human is there to help them solve what’s wrong as fast as possible. Taking this, “how can I help you,” approach is often the best way to weed out jokers, spammers and trolls from people who really want, or are open to, a solution.

After taking this tact, you may find out that you do owe someone an apology. If that’s the case, over deliver on it. Again, think about all of this unfolding in public, and the behavior you want to encourage across a large scale community: as a brand that is human and reasonable, or one that is afraid and quick to cover. The decisions you make with your content are the people you’ll invite to be vocal.

What’s your take on a good, responsive content strategy for brand communities at scale? Drop your idea in the comments or continue the conversation @mleis.

Influential bloggers in the category write stories with comment giveaways
Influencer Satellite Media Tour interviews (like an interview on Today)
Facebook application with badges for people to post on their timeline
Marketplace and sponsored stories ad buys

And it reminds me of a question a friend posed at sxsw: would you rather run an influencer campaign like this, or directly engage many people who have relatively low influence?

My answer was yes.

The campaign described above is neat and tidy for driving what I’d call Top-down social marketing. Brands at scale need to do all of the above because first they need to drive awareness at scale over the top. People who influence at scale give great metrics, because unlike close friends, their whole social discourse with their connections happens over measurable media.

All of this is great to drive awareness at scale with a of findable, search-friendly natural language media. But this kind of campaign stops short of affecting behavior because it doesn’t facilitate conversation. And conversation between friends is what creates consensus to change behavior.

I’m sure the people that conceived the above campaign feel like they have that covered. But the only place where conversation between friends is possible is with the badge. The problem with badges is they’re not for friends, they’re for the user.

Badges are great at making you feel good about your achievement within a system, but they’re not great at starting conversation. If you’re a foursquare user you know what I mean, as every new badge is initially fun, until it dawns on you that the Porky’s Badge just got posted on Facebook.

This is where constant communications with your social audience and creating content they want to pass becomes important. Everyone wants to have something to talk about in social: something that represents their best self to their friends and opens a discussion about what to do.

While your top-down strategy is creating awareness, the content and conversation help people make decisions together. That’s where social is least measurable, because you have lots of conversations with friends that aren’t online. Social is many times just referencing those interactions, and that makes the hard metrics softer. But the mix is where social campaigns make a difference in the everyday lives of the people who really matter. At scale.

WAY too much of the same content in the cirriculum

Don’t know if it is the normalizing factor of people voting on panels for years, or just the byproduct of opening every venue possible to house panels, but the content was just OK. Well, the content I got to see what just OK. Too often, after trekking across downtown austin, I’d find out that a talk (or an entire venue) was full. The problem is, now that you’re at the full omni or intercontinental, by the time you’d get to your second venue of choice, that one’s also probably full if you get there in time at all.

Too many marginal panels

Outside of our Own Kevin Hartman’s insightful look at the London riots through cultural contexts, and maybe the panel on mixed-reality gaming, there was no stand out speaker or presentation for me. Not only that, but running around town also made me miss all of the great panels my friends were on. Typically I don’t make a point going to those, as I usually just try to catch up with all my favorite folks personally, but this year the scale and sprawl of it all made either impossible.

Music Tuesday?

Every last day at sxswi, you have that wednesday getaway day where you scrape yourself up, slide onto a plane, and see all the fresh troops walking out of the airport ready for music. This year music started a day early, with a few showcases starting Tuesday. Huge mistake. SXSW Monday and Tuesday are typically the best days of the conference. Like Florida, the snowbirds head back sunday night and Monday, leaving a nice empty austin for the rest of us grinding out the few last days of the conference. With music starting tuesday, it meant that Austin was even more crowded with people and beer / grip trucks. With many of the public lots taken over by massive outdoor branded structures, parking this year was a nightmare that took hours out of the experience.

See you next year!

Even with all the logistical and content pain, sxsw is still the single best place to meet many of the smartest people in the industry, and getting a feel for what’s coming down the technology pipe over the next year. I just hope they sell fewer badges, and condense the curriculum to the confines of the convention center. If not, really embrace the way music week goes, and have sponsors buy out bars, with presentations all day on that theme. But this inbetween can’t keep going without something breaking.

Why has epic mealtime been so successful? Seems because they had experience with video production, and just liked the ideas of creating and eating these meals.

Every single tuesday, they produce an episode, no matter what. Any particular episode lags in views over the week, so it’s important that they keep that cadence going with production.

How do you make an epic meal?

Basically, whatever you find at the grocery store and a fast-food restaurant day of filming. Even when an episode is completely written, they start with a theme and keep evolving it all the way through production and editing.

It takes about 40 hours from concept through edit.

The idea of constant releasing is a major theme.

This is an interesting topic because societies love of large structures remains largely untouched by technology specific to that physical space. You can post that you are somewhere, like an airport, but you don’t get any help in terms of finding where you need to go, or making decisions when you’re there.

We spend 80% of our time indoors, yet we have no digital context there. As you expand from the “I’m here now” to “where I’m going,” the usefullness expands exponentially.

Where is this content coming from? Right now there are tons of cad drawings that could help, but they’re too heavy as files and too detailed for general people use. So the issue is really about how o process all the information that exists, that is currently unstructured as well, and make that people friendly.

Hardware and infrastructure is really a big barrier right now, but the big companies who will provide this access to signal and pinpoint locations are getting there. Companies like Qualcomm, google, Motorola, are closing in on making phones and infrastructure work inside better.

One of the exciting trends in the last year is 15-18 person Startups live in Europe or the bay area are also trying to solve this gps indoors problem. Mapping companies know how many floors there are in a building, but internal technologies can give you the z-axis, what floor you’re on.

Think it will evolve like gps. A first there will be separate chip sets and API services to sift through, which will make it cumbersome, but we need to think of compliance, including HTML5, sooner than later.

How about beyond navigation? What are the applications? It’s about micro location. Meijer has been using this technology in store to help people navigate to product. Hospitals have also been using them as well. Looking forward o sonar solutions, because hat will help people find each other as well.

University campus maps has been a focus of google, and what useful assets those people, and right now, more like campus shuttles create through activity?

But it’s not just about the phone, in hospitals they’re using this technology to quickly print out custom maps for visitors.

Shop kick uses devices plugged into ceilings for proximity, but that’s not the same precision. Fusing compass data with accelerometers and gyroscopes in smart phones is incredibly accurate and interesting as a technical platform, but the systems aren’t there yet. There is a new technology that uses the frequency from LED lights to transmit signal.

There are 19 sensors in a smartphone. But there are other things we can use for id’ing so caption, like RFID.

Got to see an excellent talk this weekend called Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is a feeling of creepyness you get when a computer created person gets between 96% and 99% indistinguishably real.

While we can project empathy and emotion on a simpler figure (think stick figure), and marvel at something like the creatures in Shrek, if they get just a little more real, it’s terribly disturbing. It seems the best way right now to mitigate this feeling is with context and writing.

In a movie like avatar, the filmmaker has the ability to create a completely artificial environment, suspending our disbelief of reality and then playing in that realm with figures we forgive. The writing helps us develop emotional connections to the characters, and then we overlook flaws that might otherwise make us uncomfortable.

What’s interesting is how much we deal with the concept of the uncanny valley in social communications right now. We’re at a point in society where brands can understand more about people’s habits than they know about themselves. A recent example of this is where we see social data that tells us the majority of people in an audience love Kid Rock. If we write a status update about Kid Rock it feels coincidental. If we post on one person’s wall that we see they like Kid Rock, it’s super creepy.

Luckily, simple, sound storytelling and personification without personalization are the order of the day. In CGI, we can tell that it’s not a person because the eyes reflect too much light, or an eyebrow furrows without the lower eyelid moving up just a millimeter.

The difference between a glass of milk and a glass of paint is a subtle translucence. The difference between facilitating conversation, making people feel welcome in a community and feeling like you’re being watched is a subtle but crucial four percent.

What do you think? Please continue the conversation in the comments below or on Twitter @mleis.

When a person likes a brand page, it only heavily weights the appearance of that page content for a short amount of time in the persons top news feed. During this window, if that person or their friends doesn’t engage in that content in any way (expanding comments or likes, liking, commenting, visiting the page, looking at a picture), the page content stops appearing.

The upside is that you do have a window in which to present content that your audience cares about. This is where content strategy, and having a participation framework to continue conversations (interactions to the system) mean so much.

It’s also where we start to see facebook’s separation between likes, which is quickly becoming a paid and app development metric, and active users / impressions as measures of retention. Based on what I’ve seen among clients over the past year is that the cost per like has risen dramatically: from an average of $1/like to $2.50 or so recently. And the window to retain attention lasts about a week.

If you’re ready for that week with updates that matter to the audience, not only will you retain and engage them, you’ll start showing up in the top news of their friends, actually using the system to help propel the brand to exponential exposure (ComScore / Facebook study says a multiplier between 32 and 81 friends of fans), and provide a compounding return on the paid media.

What do you think? Add your perspective in the comments or @mleis!