http://ow.ly/eYvWs, The Second Generation of Social Engagement Is Here Savvy companies are already launching second-generation social strategies that respect new, online social norms and leverage branded customer communities to foster authentic consumer engagement — the key to driving revenue and retention. These strategies will leverage social networks as a place to “meet” new and current consumers and invite people into a branded customer community where consumers willingly engage with brands and people with similar interests.

1. Customer Community as
Word-of-Mouth Marketing Engine
The Second Generation of Social Engagement Is Here
Savvy companies are already launching second-generation social strategies that
respect new, online social norms and leverage branded customer communities to
foster authentic consumer engagement — the key to driving revenue and retention.
These strategies will leverage social networks as a place to “meet” new and current
consumers and invite people into a branded customer community where consumers
willingly engage with brands and people with similar interests.
Table of Contents
¢¢ First-Generation Social Media: Inserting Brands into Consumer Conversations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
New Social Norms and Spaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
¢¢ The Second-Generation of Social: Driving Revenue by Building Authentic Engagement with Consumers . . . . . . 3
Traditional Customer Engagement Put Brands in Control — But Kept Consumers at a Distance. . . . . . . . . . . 4
Social Media Changed Everything by Leveraging Word-of-Mouth Marketing at Every Stage of the Customer
Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Customer Communities Enable Deeper, Authentic Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
¢¢ Communities Are Engines for Rich, Customer-Generated Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
¢¢ Learn More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Sponsored by

2. Customer Community as
Word-of-Mouth Marketing Engine
The Second Generation of Social Engagement Is Here
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have taken the world by
storm — and for consumers and companies, nothing will ever be the same. By creating
platforms for consumers to connect and interact with each other and with brands, these
innovations have created an entirely new channel that holds the promise of personal,
one-to-one relationships that build trust and loyalty between marketers and consumers
— which leads to higher revenue.
1
You’re probably already doing social to some A recent consumer study conducted by The Incyte
degree — for example, by: Group unveils why. This study, which analyzed sur-
vey responses from 1,897 qualified consumers who
• Building an audience in existing social networks actively use the Internet and represent adults from
like Facebook
all age, socio-economic, and geographic groups in
• Listening to consumer mentions the U.S., shows that consumers have clear prefer-
ences regarding how they want to engage with brands
• Responding to customers in social networks online. And most companies’ social marketing strate-
• Experimenting with social advertising gies — part of the first generation of social engage-
ment — are out of sync with them.
If so, your company is not alone. According to Gartner,
companies are expected to spend $8.8 billion in social
advertisement in 2012 alone. The Web is now filled ¢¢First-Generation Social
with Facebook and LinkedIn ads and apps, Twitter ads, Media: Inserting Brands into
contests, and gamification efforts all designed to keep Consumer Conversations
customers engaged in brand-related conversations.
The problem is, many companies haven’t fully realized Over the past few years, we’ve all been a part of the
expected returns on their investment. According to first generation of social engagement. It started when
eMarketer, U.S. companies spent more than $2.16 bil- consumers began to share and interact in social
lion last year on Facebook brand pages and social me- networks with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances
dia advertisements alone — and for many, the return — a new way to truly engage with one another about
has been universally abysmal. 1” For example, Forbes what’s important to them, including their opinions and
noted that, “Just days before Facebook’s historic experiences with brands and products. Companies
stock offering, General Motors said it plans to stop watched, learned, and came to accept this new level
advertising on the social media site, concluding that of transparency — but were afraid of losing control
its paid ads don’t have a big impact on consumers.”2 over their brand. Marketers also saw the opportunity
to engage with their customers in a new way, inserting
If this is the case for your business, it’s time to ask, themselves into these social networks to establish
“Why aren’t we getting the returns we expected?” a presence and an audience—creating traditional
broadcast campaigns and deploying them using new
social marketing software such as Buddy Media and
1 http://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/tag/facebook/
Vitrue.
2 GM Says Facebook Ads Don’t Work, Pulls $10 Million Account.
Forbes. By Joann Miller. 5/15/2012.

3. What resulted from these efforts? Companies suc- So what do consumers want when interacting with
cessfully built long list of fans, “friends,” and followers brands online? As summarized in Figure 1, Incyte’s
on social media. research revealed that:
The problem is, according to Incyte’s research, • When making purchase decisions, Websites — not
consumers don’t participate in social networks to re- social networks — are the primary place
search products and services of a company or brand. consumers go to research products of a specific
Social networks, such as Facebook, are where con- company.
sumers primarily go to interact with individuals — their
friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and professional • Over 50% of consumers show a strong preference
for “Branded Customer Communities,” which are
networks — not brands. In fact, the research identified
managed by companies and run separately from
a big gap between how consumers want to interact
social networks (but have strong linkages to them).
with brands on social networks and how companies
are using social. (For a closer look at the study’s find- • Social media is the preferred way of learning about
ings, view the full research paper here). a brand’s customer community — for example,
through a referral by friends on Facebook.
2
Consumers show a Social Media is Websites, not social
strong preference for the door into networks, are the primary
“Branded Customer Brand’s Customer place consumers go
Communities” Community to make purchase decisions
50% 58% 81 %
of participants show a of consumers have joined of consumers use
preference for relevant an internet community company website
content vetted by other based on a friend’s to research products
consumers Facebook post
Figure 1: Key Findings from Incyte Research
New Social Norms and Spaces social norms in the physical world — but have real-
world application in the virtual world as well. Relevant
One way of looking at these findings is that first-gen- examples of “social appropriateness” with corollaries
eration social marketing strategies under-delivered on in social media might include:
ROI because they broke unspoken but developing on-
line social rules when they invaded the “social spaces” • “Don’t stand too close to someone when
of consumers. These rules, which are being defined you talk with them.” In the world of social
and shaped by consumers themselves, are based on media, companies should make sure they
don’t intrude too much into their customers’

4. online lives — for example, with unrelated showed a preference for content that was vetted as
advertisements. One of the keys to not intruding is “high quality” by other consumers. This is what com-
staying relevant. munities create, so it’s no surprise that consumers in-
dicated a preference for customer communities. What
• “Listen and maintain eye contact.” In social attracts them to these communities is the relevancy
media, if someone reaches out to a company, then
of the content, both at the point of sale and post-sale.
the company should maintain a human connection
with that customer. This means avoiding canned Customer communities are:
responses — and helping customers connect to
an existing conversation about topics that the • Proactively managed by companies
consumer sees as important. • Have strong linkages to social networks, so they
can easily share information with like-minded
• “Don’t monopolize the conversation.” friends
First-generation social was mostly about brands
broadcasting messages to their audience. But • Full of relevant, accurate content provided by
one-sided conversations do little to build authentic people like them, vetted for accuracy by the
relationships — especially if the conversation brand, and easily accessed so that it’s relevant to 3
is always trying to get the consumer to buy members’ changing context (shopper, new user
something. Companies need to let customers drive seeking service or technical assistance, etc.)
the conversation. This will lead to a more authentic
and transparent relationship that builds loyalty • Designed to help them assess the trustworthiness
of peer answers and comments
and trust.
• “If you meet someone new and want to get • Tightly integrated with the company’s website, so
shoppers can easily view social conversations and
to know someone better, invite them to do
opinions as they research products on the brand’s
something.” If a consumer shows interest in your
website
company’s products and services by “liking” your
brand’s Facebook page, invite them to a company Consumers choose to join branded customer com-
site where they can engage in open conversation munities, where they want and expect to engage in
with your existing customers — people who know deeper ways with brands and fellow consumers about
your products well, share objective opinions, and relevant products and services. And because this level
are happy to answer questions. of engagement is socially acceptable within branded
customer communities, it’s here that you have the
If first-generation social marketing strategies inad-
greatest opportunity to build trust and loyalty, which
vertently crossed these invisible but significant lines
leads to revenue.
(which in any social situation, real or virtual, inhibits
people’s desire to engage fully), then the good news is,
companies now have the insights needed to develop ¢¢The Second-Generation
second-generation social marketing strategies. These of Social: Driving Revenue
strategies, which will respect consumers’ online social by Building Authentic
spaces and rules of engagement, have the potential to
deliver higher revenue and greater business value. Engagement with Consumers
But second-generation social will require new social Savvy companies are already launching second-
spaces where true consumer–brand engagement generation social strategies that respect these social
is both appropriate and desired. The Inctye Group’s norms and leverage branded customer communities
research shows that consumers seek deeper connec- to foster authentic consumer engagement — the key
tions with brands — but social networks are not where to driving revenue and retention. These strategies will
they want to build these connections. leverage social networks as a place to “meet” new and
current consumers and invite people into a branded
Customer communities are the place where consum-
customer community where consumers willingly
ers seek to establish deeper connections with brands.
engage with brands and people with similar interests.
Over 50% of participants in the research clearly

5. What makes branded customer communities power-
ful is the fact that they can facilitate authentic custom-
Discover
er engagement — which is the primary distinguishing
characteristic of the next generation of social. Let’s
take a closer look at what this evolution from tradi-
tional customer engagement to second-generation of
social will look like — and the opportunities it creates
for your business.
Traditional Customer Engagement
Put Brands in Control — But Kept
Consumers at a Distance
Figure 2: Marketing Across the Customer Lifecycle Before
Figure 2 shows the stages of the typical customer life-
Social Media
cycle familiar to marketers before the advent of social
media. The orange arrows represent the programs
4 Social Media Changed Everything
and tactics marketers engaged in before social media
existed. by Leveraging Word-of-Mouth
Marketing at Every Stage of the
The first phase is discovery — the first time customers
are introduced to your brand, products, and services.
Customer Lifecycle
Absent social media, they typically find out about you But social media amplifies these word-of-mouth
from ads and branding campaigns. If they are inter- conversations for many people to see, hear, and
ested in learning more, they evaluate your products be influenced by. As illustrated in Figure 3, it allows
and services. To get them to the next stage — the consumers to connect with other people at any stage
“buy” stage — many companies use promotions. of lifecycle — instantly. The volume and amplitude of
From this point on, you are dealing with prospects, these conversations has grown — first and foremost
or potential customers — and once they buy, you are for advocates, who not only influence uninitiated
dealing with customers who start to “experience” your consumers in the process of discovery, but also touch
product or service. They may seek out help content every other part of the lifecycle with their words and
to get started. And if they have positive experiences actions online.
with your services and products, they begin to form a
bond — and hopefully become repeat customers. This
is also where customer service becomes a marketing
channel for your company. Discover
Ideally, your customers will get to the next stage:
advocacy. Customer advocates provide you with free,
word-of-mouth advertising by telling their friends
and business colleagues about your company and
introducing you to new customers. But without social
media, your brand typically isn’t involved in these
“backyard” and “water cooler” discussions. And
advocates have a relatively limited sphere of influence
confined primarily to their own social circle.
Figure 3: Conversations Accelerate the Customer Lifecycle
At the same time, other consumers in the lifecycle
— especially existing consumers — have engaged in
unprecedented volumes of conversations because
of social media. This is the reality of our digital age,

6. where consumers are talking around the traditional, Facebook, Twitter, and others help catalyze these
inner-directed tactics of brands, products, and ser- conversations, enabling them to occur at unprec-
vices. And as a result, these conversations are having edented volumes. Using monitoring and listening
a powerful influence on the speed and nature of the tools like Radian6 and social marketing tools such as
lifecycle, driving sales and new customer acquisition Buddy Media and Vitrue, companies strived to be an
in completely unprecedented ways. For example: active participant in these conversations happening
on social networks. They successfully monitored and
• Advocates can introduce friends and colleagues inserted themselves into these dialogues — but as
to your products and services, prompting them to
Incyte’s research reveals, not in a way that consumers
evaluate and buy your products and services.
necessarily embrace.
• Customers with multiple positive experiences with Furthermore, these interactions, if left un-nurtured
your brand can introduce people to your company
and trapped within the bounds of Facebook and Twit-
and prompt evaluation and buy decisions, turning
ter, tend to be fleeting — vanishing as quickly as they
into your brand advocates.
started. This is true even if you use social marketing
• Customers that experience just one interaction tools such as Buddy Media and Vitrue. Figure 4 — a
with your company can introduce friends and post on the Pampers Facebook page – is an excellent 5
colleagues to your company, prompt evaluation example of a brand-driven tactic powered by Vitrue. It
and buying decisions, also turning into brand sparked a large number of interactions among Pam-
advocates. pers consumers, but these interactions had a shelf life
of 15 to 30 minutes at most.
Comments per Quarter-Hour
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0.25 1.25 2.25 3.25 4.25
Hours Since Post
Cummulative Comments
140
130
120
110
100
90
80
70
0.25 1.25 2.25 3.25 4.25
Figure 4: Social Content Has a Short Half-Life
664 people liked the post and 140 commented on it. minute. And within just 30 minutes of the post being
That’s a lot of interaction! But when we look closer published, there was a precipitous fall-off in interac-
at the timestamps associated with the comments, tion volume.The chart in Figure 4 shows how quickly
we see that a flurry of activity took place within a

7. people stopped commenting, and how fast the cumu- about, and how they can help advocate for your brand.
lative comments flattened out. For example, you get a 360-degree view of conversa-
tions throughout the entire customer lifecycle that are
This is a problem for marketers. Left unattended and
long-standing, easy to find, and relevant.
uncultivated, this high volume of otherwise valuable
interactions evaporates into the digital ether. They fail At the same time, you can:
to translate into engagement, and ultimately, revenue.
This is why marketers need a new kind of tool for • Build trust with customers and prospects
capturing and cultivating these interactions — a cus- • Establish long-lasting connections
tomer community that transforms them into relevant,
“evergreen,” customer-generated content. • Facilitate engagement
• Create entry points anywhere your customers are
Customer Communities Enable • Build social content that is optimized for search
Deeper, Authentic Engagement
What makes all this possible is the way communi-
Customer communities are the enabler of the second ties enable content persistence, discoverability, and
6 generation of consumer engagement, which is all relevance.
about driving real engagement with consumers and
truly understanding who these fans, followers, and Content Persistence: Establish Content
friends are — what do they care about, what influences Longevity and Business Value
their behavior, and what insights and value can they
bring to companies and their fellow customers. A community is a destination for long-lasting content
and relationships. Fleeting conversations from social
But this requires true community, which isn’t some- channels become a persistent part of your com-
thing you rent from Facebook in the form of “fan munity. Customer communities enable persistence
pages.” It’s something you create within branded because they transform fleeting social interactions
customer communities where you can connect and (such as the Pampers post) into long-lasting market-
personally engage with consumers in relevant, mean- ing content by capturing and cataloging it within a per-
ingful ways across the entire customer lifecycle (see manent, active customer community. When someone
Figure 5). raises a problem with a product or service in a cus-
tomer community, the issue can be addressed by the
What’s the difference between
I love Brand X! Make sure you Brand X and Brand Y? community itself or employees of the company. The
get the extra spicy version.
content created during this exchange then becomes
Discover
new community content — an “answer” for others that
is easily discovered by search engines. (With a Get
Where can I buy it?
Which version? Satisfaction community, you can even respond back
to the person in whatever social channel they used
to raise the issue – all at the push of a button. Your
answer can be searched, found, and consumed by
Here’s the best way to set
up the product other consumers.)
Organizing unstructured conversations by topic type,
Figure 5: There Are Opportunities to Engage Socially such as problems or praise, and encouraging ad-
Across the Customer Lifecycle ditional activity around them, enables the growth of
In a community, your brand can participate in mem- customer-generated content in a branded community.
ber conversations — usually responding publicly Each interaction generates new conversations, which
because the goal is to facilitate meaningful conversa- are also cataloged and re-published back onto the
tion and dialogue that helps everyone. Customers social web for further visibility. This virtuous circle
generally drive the conversation, and you can partici- makes otherwise fleeting social content much more
pate, as appropriate. At the same time, you can get persistent.
deeper insight into who people are, what they care

8. Furthermore, these topics generate more activity over is optimized for interaction, not searchability). Once
time, which can: customers discover content, they can easily see
popular topics and community activity. Ideally, topics
• Be used for word-of-mouth testimonials in have a “me too” function; customers can share topics
marketing campaigns and ecommerce sites
via social channels, helping the community become
• Become part of your knowledge base to support part of their social networks.
customers
To better understand the importance of discoverabil-
• Help drive product direction by crowdsourcing ity, let’s consider a real-world example of a company
development that runs its customer community on Get Satisfac-
tion’s community platform (accessible at www.getsat-
Discoverability: SEO Content Lets isfaction.com/pampers). Imagine that a new mother
Customers Find You — and Relevant does a Google search on one of the “Frequently Asked
Conversations Questions” in the Pampers community. In this exam-
ple, she asks, “How can my child model for Pampers?”
Customer communities are highly indexed by search
Of the 7.9 million results Google reports, the com-
engines, making the content SEO optimized and 7
munity topic page for this question is at the top of the
much more discoverable using channels consumers
list – ahead of Pampers’ own blog post on the subject,
prefer (compared to platforms like Facebook, which
which is result #2.
Optimized URL Structure
Social Sharing
Community Activity
Figure 6: Content Discovery and SEO Are Keys to Success
The branded look and feel of the Pampers Get Satis- for social sharing of the topic outside the community
faction site is important, since it dovetails nicely with that optimizes its page rank. These topic pages are
the aesthetic of the official Pampers Website. But it’s discoverable by design, which is why they rank so well
really the optimized URL structure of this page, com- in Google and Bing searches; and once people land
bined with opportunities for topic activity within the on the page, they engage with it, further improving
community (like stars and me-too’s), and the ability the page rank. This same topic page content can also

9. be embedded directly into a brand’s Website, which uct reviews right next to a product on your Website
ensures content relevance for shoppers. and eCommerce site. Once these conversations are
embedded in your Website, they can be found faster
Relevance: Expose Relevant Content to using search engines. In addition, you can use conver-
Drive Conversion sations as testimonials on your Website — a powerful
way to market your company, products, and services.
Relevance means that conversations are in context
When used as “advocate content,” these conversa-
and provide assistance and answers to customers
tions also establish trust.
about the topics they are interested in — exactly when
they want them. For example, in the evaluation stage For instance, consider the following product page on
of the customer lifecycle, social conversations help the Kiddicare.com Website, which is complemented
consumers determine if a product is the right choice by embedded community content just below the buy
for them. And during buying decisions, they provide button (see Figure 7). When you look at this content,
contextual content to reduce cart abandonment. note the questions that are most commonly asked
about this product within the community. They start
One important way of leveraging community-
rather generic (for instance, “Will this fit in my car?”
8 generated content is by inserting relevant customer
and then they get extremely specific (for example,
conversations about a product into appropriate brand
“Will this fit in the middle position in an Audi Q7
Web pages. For example, you can put relevant prod-
2009?”).
Figure 7: Relevant Content Drives Conversion
This kind of specificity enables the product page to ¢¢Communities Are
anticipate consumer questions and answer them
before customers even need to ask. At Get Satisfac-
Engines for Rich, Customer-
tion, we’ve conducted research that indicates that Generated Content
answering questions measurably improves consumer
satisfaction and purchase intent by 30-50%. So we Ultimately, branded customer communities fuel a
know that anticipating consumer questions with em- powerful engine of conversation creation, capture,
bedded, relevant content doesn’t just make for a more discovery, and cultivation for brands — and in a way
satisfying Web experience, but it leads to more sales that consumers embrace because it respects social
transactions with more satisfied consumers. media norms for brands (see Figure 8).

10. • It starts by making fleeting social content But these are just the consumer-facing aspects of
more persistent by capturing it, organizing customer communities. Communities also plug in
it by topic type and product, and adding it to seamlessly to the existing activities and systems used
branded customer community content so it by brand managers and consumer relations already
has an “evergreen” life (compared to fleeting managing the brand’s social media presence and site
conversations in social networks). content. For example, this engine can be used to bring
social conversations from Facebook and Twitter into
• A customer community then makes those your community where they can be captured and
conversations highly discoverable by design, as
brought into your CRM system. Once here, this con-
communities are highly indexed by search engines
tent enhances your customer information to support
and can be easily found using organic search.
better marketing, lead management, and case man-
• It culminates on brand Websites themselves where agement. In essence, customer communities, such
you can easily embed relevant conversations next as those build on Get Satisfaction’s platform, are the
to each product on the Website or eCommerce bridge between social networks and corporate CRM
site. This, in turn improves your website SEO and systems. And when coupled with easy-to-use tools for
helps drive sales. community management and moderation, the engine 9
is further fueled, driving more engagement across all
consumer-facing experiences.
Organic Search
Company Website
Social Networks
& Product
Consumer-facing
experiences
Customer Communities Internal
Social Media processes
Management CRM /
Marketing
Community
Moderation
Your Employees
Figure 8: Community as a Social Engagement Engine
¢¢Learn More
Get Satisfaction is an engine for
Branded customer communities are the connective
generating “long-tail marketing tissue that enables brands to align social strategy,
content,” and its SEO power makes organic search, and brand site content with consumer
it a magnet for customer acquisition. activities and internal processes — and do so in a way
that is socially accepted by consumers. When sup-

11. ported by branded customer communities, brands such as Gilt, Intuit, Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble,
can improve service experiences, create better prod- Microsoft, and Sonos for social marketing, support,
ucts, foster meaningful conversations, and ultimately product feedback, and commerce solutions. Engage
generate more sales. with your customers anywhere they are: on your web-
site, social media, via organic search, and on mobile
Get Satisfaction is the leading customer engagement
devices.
platform powering 70,000 customer communities to
help companies build better relationships with their For a free trial, visit www.getsatisfaction.com.
customers. Get Satisfaction is used by leading brands
To learn more, call (877) 339-3997 or visit us online at www.getsatisfaction.com.
10