Leveraging your social media strategy for maximum ROI  is boosted by your ability to create deep engagement and creative experience for your users, combined with understanding the lifecycles in your Social Media Ecology.

What is Social Media Ecology?

Social Media Ecology is the lifecycle of interaction that takes place within each social network you leverage, and seeing your social networks as global ecological cultures.

Ecology lifecycles in nature are usually defined in science class as the interactions between organisms and their natural environment.

Ecology lifecycles in Social Media include the total interactions (engagement) between you, your community members in the network and that engagement interaction lifecycle.

The interaction lifecycle between your business and the community is comprised of four actions:

  • Engage
  • Listen
  • Interact
  • Measure

Let’s take a closer look at engagement in the interaction lifecycle.

Engage

One of the challenges in social media marketing is the ability to leverage engagement effectively. First, you must develop value through content that is interesting, immersive, participatory and relevant to your story in order to earn your place in the ecological social web and join the conversations. If you want interactivity to work in your favor by deepening users emotional connection with your brand, then you must give them meaningful and engrossing experiences that register and are remembered.

The bottom line is that once you engage people, you must give to them, and the giving that happens upfront is proven to have the most powerful psychological effect in the community. Many marketers approach the “giving” to mean “free stuff”, and while we all know that the social value of free stuff works to grow your list and bring people on board, what keeps your community involved long-term is the engagement of giving real psychological and emotional value.

The deeper the psychological and emotional perceived value, the deeper your message and brand will anchor in the minds of your users.  How do you create a perceived psychological and emotional value? 

You create it through personal relationships.

Your engagement plan must get personal, building relationships with constant dialogue. Dialogue is a two-way street of communication, which  takes us to the next step in the interaction lifecycle: Listen.

Listen

Engaging and listening are closely related but there is a distinction between the two that give listening it’s own step in the lifecycle. Listening is an art, the art of being receptive to all the ways feedback and information comes to you from your communities.

While engagement and giving start the dialogue, asking questions, and then pausing and allowing the answers to happen will give you valuable social currency, and it’s a social currency that you can actually convert into market value. How?

By taking what you learn from skillful listening and applying it to your market intelligence knowledge, and then leveraging it to better target your audience.  Once you know what your audience needs, you can take the engagement to the next lifecycle step, interaction.

Interact

You have now successfully engaged your community, you have given meaningful value and taken the time to listen to what your users are saying through conversations, now it’s time to plan how you will interact with your communities by giving your users a unique meaningful and engrossing experience that is fully participatory. 

Interaction experiences are unique to the users you are engaging with, gone are the days of the “one size fits all” consumer experience and interaction with your brand.

In the web 2.0 world it’s more effective to base your interaction experience on the type of users who are engaging with you, and because you have listened you should now know who those users are, and can break down interaction experience into four main levels based on your users.

In the book “The Open Brand” by KellyMooney and Nita Rollins, recommended by Guy Kawasaki, the four types of interaction levels are based on the following user types:

On-Demand Experience and Interaction: These users want it all now, they seek knowledge, fast, and want full usability in your site or social profile’s features. Make sure your profiles clearly show your brand and make accessing all that great content you’ve uploaded easy to find.

Personal Experience and Interaction: The personal experience users crave relationship with you, and desire recognition and personalization. Give them human interaction, reward their loyalty and share targeted content with the feeling they are part of the “in” crowd by joining your network.

Engaging Experience and Interaction: Users who love engaging interaction are asking you to give them rich media, they want to be engrossed, enthralled, entertained and diverted from their normal routine. Make sure your social profile has media that is inspiring and emotional to your users. This might mean doing different videos for each social network, but if you have followed the lifecycle and listened to your audience you know what their needs are.

Networked Experience and Interaction: These users seek meaningful change and innovation, portability, self-expression and the power of community. Give them profile tools that are mashable, widgets and badges they can export to their own sites and interactive media.

Measure

Measuring your social networking effectiveness is a hot discussion topic in marketing circles. The bottom line is that there is an element of qualitative measurement that is more subtle and somewhat more difficult to measure.

You will want to combine both qualitative and quantitative measurement and analytics, monitoring social buzz, site and profile analytics, optimizing your widgets for the search engines and monitoring your conversions for effective ROI. I’ll be sharing more about social media monitoring in upcoming articles.

Putting it all together

You can be a great social networker, and a poor converter of social to market value if you do not understand how to put Social Media Ecology together into a workable strategy for your business.

If you are working way too hard on your social networking campaigns, and seeing few results, it’s time to step back and look at things from the ecological point of view and take the following actions:

1.  Zoom out to the big picture: Approach your global social network as a living ecology, a Social Media Ecology made up of many living cultures and social networks.

2.  Examine each culture closely and look at your interactions within that culture: Has it been effective? If not, how can you better fit the cultural community? Before you start a new community, make sure you know what you are getting into.

3.  Within each social network: Engage, Listen, Interact

4.  Measure: Measure each social network’s effectiveness in your marketing strategy, and measure your global effectiveness as well. This will help you identify where your engagement is having the most impact.

5.  Repeat the lifecycle: The interaction lifecycle is continuous, see it as a circle of life that cycles continuously in your Social Media Ecology.

In summary, your ROI can be improved in your social media marketing campaigns by seeing the big picture. Just as the Earth’s global ecology is a balance of life and elements, finding the correct ecological balance in your web 2.0 strategy will create an abundant and healthy business environment for your brand to grow.

Erika Preuss for Corp. Social Networking
and TechnologyGoddess.com