Thoughts have of late been percolating in my mind. Thoughts about how the internet has impacted society, what it’s meant so far and where all of this may be heading. The social web has had enormous impact on everything from our social lives, to our professional lives, to how we discover, purchase and discuss products and services. Personally, I love the impact the social web has had on my life, my career and the personal and professional interactions I have. I feel like as a society, prior to the social web, we tended to compartmentalize our lives. There was the “work me” the “social me” the “parent me” and so on. The social web has broken down barriers and given us permission to be human. Yeah, it’s possible there are one or two pictures of me up on Facebook, or Flickr somewhere that are a bit less than professional. But they demonstrate the nature of my character and give context to what would otherwise be just the “work Jackie.” I am a believer in, for lack of a better term, personal brand, I think personal brand can sometimes have as much influence on company brand as anything else. But what is my personal brand if it’s not, well, personal. I use the social web to interact with friends, clients, potential clients and colleagues. I have established countless relationships online that have been the basis for offline interactions, and also use the social web to reinforce relationships that were established offline.

Brands on the Social Web
Let’s think of this in terms of brand, of product, of company, and of the people who in one way or another stand behind those things. I’ve blogged before about brand, and how the social web has altered the way that brands are built; it’s no longer singularly a top-down phenomenon, brands are defined and built by people via association, communication, recommendation and declaration. Word of mouth is nothing new, but the social web has provided an infrastructure through which word of mouth travels infinitely faster and farther than ever before. In order to take advantage of this, companies and organizations need to begin to redefine the way they perceive the structure and definition of their brand. The social web has become about people interacting with people. People don’t interact with companies.

So how do you market in this environment?
I think for one, we have to look at how marketing needs to evolve within the social web. It’s got to be one part PR, one part branding, and one part something totally new. In fact, I think we need a new term for it. Is there a place for advertising on the social web? Yes and no. I’m not totally anti-ad, I’m just anti- ineffective ad. I think the best use of advertising in terms of the social web is to drive awareness of the truly social initiatives that emanate from a brand.

There are five strategic pillars that I have identified to marketing successfully on the social web. I think to be successful all five need to be considered:

[edit: 6/23 - gave this some more thought and made a couple of edits, re-ordered items below]

1. Listen
You can gain valuable insights by listening to conversations that occur on the web about your brand. By using social media monitoring tools, or contracting with an outside firm to help with the process you can gather data that far exceeds market research and surveys. You can tap into sentiment, semantics and context. Hear not only what people are saying, but whom they are saying it to and why. This is all information that you can use to help guide everything from product development to a social media marketing strategy that will resonate with your audience.

2. People interact with people, where are your people?
The social web is about interpersonal relationships and interactions. People are out there having conversations about your brand. Where is your voice in all of these conversations? Who within your company is out there actively engaging in conversations with people? What are they saying? You can use a combination of social media monitoring tools and good old human poking around to pick up on the majority of these conversations. These conversations are opportunities, open invitations for you to interact with the people you value most; your customers. As far as I’m concerned every company should have either a dedicated internal resource or work with an outside firm to monitor conversations and identify opportunities to participate.

3. Initiate the conversation and invite people to join in.
You don’t just need to go out and find conversations, you can invite them to come to you. In the age of conversation, blogs can do wonders to allow your company’s personality to shine through, establish a channel for PR and they have the additional benefit of doing wonders for natural search engine results. The people who take the time to read your blog are also the ones most likely to share it!

4. Give your content “social lube.”
The social web is about conversations and it’s also about sharing. Sharing is a natural by-product of conversation. It’s the logical next step. You can encourage people to share your content by giving them access to the tools they use to do so directly from your content. They still, of course have to decide if they like it enough to pass on, but once that decision is made, it makes sense to remove as many hurdles as possible. This means adding social bookmarking links to sites like digg and del.icio.us and making sure videos and other multimedia content are easily shared by including links to embed and share them. Make it effortless!

5. Allow your brand to act as a conduit; place it a the crux for interactions between people online.
Examples of this type of marketing include social networking applications, community sites, UGC submission sites, mashup and remix type tools, discovery and sharing platforms. Allowing people to preform the interactions they naturally tend to engage in via your brand just makes sense. And offering something unique and relevant that they don’t get elsewhere adds value for the user.

Above all else, in all of this, be open and transparent.

I’m planning a follow up post with examples of companies who have demonstrated success using the five approaches outlined in this post. I’d like to get feedback from you on brands that are thriving on the social web and ones that have tanked. I will measure their success against their approach and let you know what the result is. Let me know which brands you’d like to see included.