I’ve always loved the phrase “Grandmother Research.” It’s a casual approach to gathering input about a topic of interest. The person conducting the survey asks everyone they know about the topic and then forms a point of view that reflects common wisdom. Not very scientific, but probably a good indicator of opinion trends among people you know and trust.

My personal Grandmother Research today is around the topic of social marketing and its adoption among major corporations. I’ve formed an opinion based upon experience in the marketplace and numerous conversations with other practitioners of the art. The common wisdom among this group is this: the sophistication of social marketing is rapidly evolving as the market becomes less experimental and more strategic and integrated in their approach.

Here are five emerging topics that we find interesting and encouraging:

• Engagement. Marketers understand today that engagement is a faceted process that gets better and richer over time. The old one size fits all model is giving way to more personal interaction that is based upon profile information, actions, participation patterns and feedback.
• Community Without Walls. Some organizations are firm believers in engaging in branded community sites while others stick solely to Facebook and other mass social media outlets. Some do both with very little integration between the two, although our research shows that this is starting to change. The best practice is to do both with tight integration between all social assets.
• Reputation Management. The art of rewards and recognition is following the community without walls model. Companies are beginning to understand that they need to aggregate reputation of their members and fans across the cloud. Badges should be present across the full engagement lifecycle; not just on a single property. Likewise, rewards should be tied to activities and contributions throughout the cloud, not as separate programs for each point of engagement. This integrated approach is in the seedling stage, but adoption is growing.
• Advocate Segmentation. All brand advocates are not created equal. Many organizations have forwarded a segmentation model for advocates; the most recognized is probably the one created by Forrester. A few years ago, we did a study for a client where we overlaid nearly 100 of these models and surfaced the four most common advocate types. The four (creators, critics, connectors and collectors) work well as a basic segmentation model for engagement. The trick is to understand your business objectives and aligned social engagement strategy, and then actively recruit the type of advocates who will most constantly help you achieve your goals. Your RepMan system and measurement approach should track levels of engagement by advocate type and provide insights for ongoing recruitment, engagement and campaign strategies.
• Metrics ≠ ROI. Marketers have lots of metrics, but do not know how to efficiently mash-up suites of them so they tell a story. Social engagement has three distinct pillars: feedback, advocacy and support. Each has its own associated set of metrics that come from multiple sources. The industry is starting to “get this” and approach ROI in a way that matters. For example, knowing engagement levels is a metric, but is not necessarily an indication of ROI. When combined with five or six other metrics, however, a story begins to emerge that shows how engagement can lead to revenue growth or to adoption of a more efficient business process that leads to cost savings. Many organizations are still stuck at the metric level, but the conversation is definitely focusing on true ROI.

At ComBlu, we’re excited about this new level of discussion. In fact, much of it coincides with the current work that we’re doing. Part of my Grandmother Research indicates that our growth will come in these very areas. To handle this, we’re always looking for smart people and feel blessed to have just added one such professional, Dawn Lacallade, to the ComBlu team.

As an expert in community strategy, advocate activation, social engagement and social media, Dawn brings added firepower to ComBlu. Her forte is building healthy, thriving on-line communities and integrating social media into the marketing mix.

Before joining ComBlu, Dawn was head of Social Media and Community at Solar Winds, a Network Management Software Company. In that role, she was instrumental in embedding community experience throughout the product lifecycle from innovation to support. Prior to Solar Winds, Dawn held several community positions at Dell, including Manager-Dell Ideastorm and Manager–Dell Community Forums, where she led the evolution from the focus on support forums to a broader integrated community strategy.

As a recognized thought leader in the on-line community space, Dawn is a frequent speaker at industry conferences including Community 2.0 conferences (3 times), WOMMA Summit, Microsoft High Tech Summit, Google Product Management Leadership Summit, Social Media Breakfast, e-Business Conference and guest speaker on multiple webinars. Dawn is one of the founding members of the Community Roundtable and a member of the Social Media Breakfast and the Social Media Club.

Dawn is great; I even think my grandmother will like her!

I sometimes feel like Diogenes searching for an honest man. Only I’m looking for an honest benchmark. What’s that? A yard stick for social marketing performance that tells me if a program is doing really well or only relatively well. For example, if a community has 10,000 members and another geared to the same group with pretty much the same objectives has 25,000 members, I might be high fiving all around if I’m the community manager for the latter. BUT! Does the larger community look great only in relationship to the smaller one or are they both underperforming? If I look at the engagement levels of the 10,000 and find they are much more prolific than the 25,000, then is the smaller community actually the high performer? We could go on and on.

Social marketing is an industry in search of benchmarks that will give organizations meaningful insights about the health and wellness of their initiatives. To a degree, I agree with a recent post by Matt Rhodes about the growth of a healthy online community.. He makes the point that performance is relative to the type and purpose of a community. This is true, but benchmarks apply when we are trying to measure against peer groups. I think to get beyond the sophomoric comparison of page views as a metric to something truly meaningful, we need to use an algorithm-based approach to measurement. We need to filter multiple data points to create performances indexes. These should give us the insights we need to make surgical adjustments to community engagement and drive growth and vitality. In turn, these indexes provide a foundation for measuring performance against a peer group.

For example, we recently completed some research that looked at the differences in rewards and recognition preferences between consumer, IT Pro and developer communities. Not surprisingly, software developers have very different motivations for returning to a community and using it frequently than consumers do. Before this research, we knew this intuitively. But now my client knows very specifically, how to design reputation management systems that will resonate with the audiences it wants to engage. It also informs the selection of data points that can lead to some meaningful performance indicators. We can for example look at engagement KPIs such as UCG volume, views, posts, comments, click-throughs, peer support, etc in correlation to specific reputation management approaches. The same algorithm could be applied across a community peer group and yield benchmarks that give insights into not only what to adjust but also how to make changes.

If my score is low, I can surgically tinker to deepen engagement by changing three things about the way I reward community members. This type of approach helps me know both if my community is relatively good in a meaningful way AND if I am also really good! High fives all around.

The social marketing industry needs benchmarks to catapult it to the next stage of professionalism. I don’t think we can continue to gauge how we’re doing only in relation to our own objectives or by using metrics that are interesting, but not useful. ComBlu is looking for some smart folks who would like to collaborate on a benchmarking study for social marketing. We’re calling it the Diogenes Project. If you’re interested, contact me .In the meantime, we’ll keep searching.