Sociogram, Social Signals and Social Network Analysis (SNA)

With so much hap­pen­ing around in the world of mar­ket­ing and advert­ising, one thing has become pretty obvi­ous and I bet most con­sumer ori­ented sales experts will agree on this. The pro­cess of estab­lish­ing and lever­aging a brand has changed…DRASTICALLY.

It’s just not about plainly “get­ting your name out there” anymore.

The first major shift from tra­di­tional brand enhance­ment is that you need to start enga­ging prob­able cus­tom­ers online. The next shift is in the prac­tice of find­ing highly engaged indi­vidu­als around the world across a wide vari­ety of interests, WITHOUT need­ing to push your brand onto anyone.

Then how do you engage them?

Well simple — as they’re doing their activ­ity of interest over the web.

What’s been observed is that the new act­ive buy­ers will spend a huge chunk of their qual­ity time online (time in which they are RECEPTIVE). And inform­a­tion about build­ing product launches and cur­rent web-properties/services is more likely to get absorbed and respon­ded to, if people see it as they do what they enjoy.

So, here’s the golden part. If you can lever­age some easy-going and man­age­able game mech­an­ics across social media plat­forms, to get rav­ing fans, and build value-driven prof­it­able rela­tion­ships with them, you can build an empire! The atmo­sphere of treat­ing it as a simple com­pet­ing ground makes it inter­est­ing and smoother to work with.

Meet Empire Avenue — if you havent already!

The ser­vices at EmpireAvenue.com help a busi­ness owner do exactly that. Build an over­whelm­ing online pres­ence that attracts cus­tom­ers round the clock as they’re doing what they love, all based on the idea of a game plat­form. This is what leads me to say that you must increase audi­ence engage­ment with Empire Avenue.

It can help cut short what a brand has to go through to estab­lish rap­port with a pro­spect (while they’re hav­ing fun) and at the same time fil­ter your pro­spects so that you only get traffic to your launches that are rel­ev­ant and spe­cific in what is being talked about i.e. trans­fer­ring con­tacts from one mobile phone to another.

Here’s a quick over­view of how Empire Avenue integ­rates with major social net­works like Face­book, twit­ter, foursquare, blogs, linkedin and instagram:

• Your activ­ity on a social net­work gets meas­ured and a value is assigned to your social engage­ment. This is known as a “net­work score”
•  As people buy into what you say and the more con­tent you cre­ate which they find valu­able and action worthy, the higher your net­work value and “share price” gets. Share price is what people would have to invest into your social activ­ity, in the form of vir­tual cur­rency, to get asso­ci­ated with your activ­ity and mar­ket­ing efforts. They can trade it just like real stocks are traded.
• Your share prices improv­ing could give you a source of online rev­enue right from your social activ­ity, as well as tell you and your investors where you social media mar­ket­ing expert­ise lies…so that you can draw ideas, improve on weak spots and even engage with each other for joint pro­mo­tional strategies. All pos­sible with the game kind of envir­on­ment in a single dash­board, as you compete.
• At the same time, you’re only doing what you always did — inter­act with oth­ers! Now you have a incent­ive to do it bet­ter and deliver more value to your traffic too, while hav­ing fun connecting.
• The net out­come is that you get to earn vir­tual cur­rency, expand your audi­ence and drive more qual­ity engage­ment to your brand.

Now let me give you a brief out­line of how it works tech­nic­ally over some of the social networks…

FACEBOOK

This is by far the best net­work to increase audi­ence engage­ment with Empire Avenue. From your Empire Avenue account, you allow data over your social activ­ity to get col­lec­ted in your off­line time by allow­ing off­line token access. This goes for most other net­works as well.

For face­book pro­files and pages, post a fre­quent num­ber of valu­able posts and statuses, The more like and com­ments they gen­er­ate, the better.

TWITTER

Post fre­quent tweets. The more people re-tweet you the bet­ter — simple that one !

FOURSQUARE

Check in to loc­a­tions. Busier and veri­fied loc­a­tions with spe­cials are worth way more than the simple low inter­ac­tion ones for just per­sonal or friend use. Write tips and get oth­ers to com­plete them.

INSTAGRAM

Post pho­tos and statuses, The more likes and com­ments they gen­er­ate, the better.

BLOGS AND LINKEDIN

Since the activ­ity rebound on these ven­ues is low key and gen­er­ally not vis­ible to all due to pro­fes­sional and work related reas­ons (espe­cially linkedin), the earn­ings on these are low. But, if your blog is the place most of your busi­ness con­tacts are check­ing out and your linkedin pro­file gen­er­ates enough interest to catch employ­ers and asso­ci­ates to inter­act reg­u­larly, then these two could end up in your top five centres of activ­ity. That raises your share value and earnings.

Click for more inform­a­tion and details on other net­works like You­Tube and Flickr.

Alright, now lets get down to the ground level and I’ll share with you some tac­tics that will incentiv­ise your audi­ences to engage with your con­tent on the above lis­ted as well as other social net­works. But before I do, I want you to know this is more about hav­ing a mar­ket­ing mind­set than an atten­tion seek­ing mindset.

So Why Empire Avenue?

Because most atten­tion seek­ing social activ­ity tends to turn into end­less attempts at get­ting people to see your brand and can account for spam­ming. We want to avoid that at all costs! Here are the tactics:

# 1 — Blaz­ing Re-tweet

Be sure to install twit­ter but­tons on your web­site or blog to have them retweet dir­ectly in a no-rules, no-pressure envir­on­ment you own.

Go ahead, mes­sage your friends and ask them to retweet your posts if they feel someone can get value out of them. Also, if there’a blog post that deserves spe­cial atten­tion for the hard work you put in, retweet your own tweets for it. But re-word and reor­gan­ize your tweet. Every dif­fer­ent set of words will appeal to dif­fer­ent groups of fol­low­ers, without get­ting into spam territory!

Say thanks to retweeters of busi­ness posts and build strong rela­tion­ships with them through per­sonal mes­sages and con­tact. Give them some spe­cial atten­tion to solve their con­fu­sions and prob­lems in your busi­ness’ area of expert­ise. They’ll rap­idly build into your per­sonal team of re-tweeting affiliates!

Include men­tions of those referneced in the post. They’ll be sure to return the favour back when they use your work, thus get­ting you more engage­ment. Also, sched­ule your import­ant tweets, so that fol­low­ers know exactly when to check in. They’ll come in hoards and spread your tweets because they already know you’re provid­ing value that deserves to be spoken of and shared.

And always, go ahead and request votes and retweets if you have a decision mak­ing ques­tion in your tweet. When you request and include the word “please”, the engage­ment rate goes up three-fold!

# 2 — The Pic­ture Cure

This tac­tic involves photo shares and com­ments on dif­fer­ent net­works that people are likely to find inter­est­ing. here’s a quick tip — google out rare pho­tos that intrigue the mind. it was never neces­sary that the con­tent has to BE your own when shar­ing, as long as it’s not copyrighted.

Intriguing pic­tures can include out of the ordin­ary design con­cepts, human arts and even out­right comedy!

Per­sonal stuff should be set to a limit when shar­ing for busi­ness pur­poses as it’ll turn off your friends, but you can always share per­sonal pho­tos every now and then that have REAL people tagged who’d wish to express views over it. that’ll add authen­tic­ally to your net­work score.

# 3 — Shar­ing Premium Access Reports

Does your busi­ness provide a ser­vice that has a high pay­ment asso­ci­ated to it?

Great!

Make a short boiled down intro­duct­ory report to it. And make sure there’s atleast one reveal­at­ory fact or game-changing fea­ture of your ser­vice that you’re will­ing to give out for free in or with this report.

Next, upload it to your blog. But just keep the pre­con­di­tion that they must share about your blog before they get to down­load the report. This does two things — gets people really inter­ested in your brand to share it and fil­ters the traffic you get so only those inter­ested in your brand will come for an entire report.

# 4 — Brand Networking

Do you have com­pet­it­ors? Or other brands who’re into a busi­ness related to yours?

Build friend­ships with them across all your social net­work pro­files and pages. When there’s activ­ity on a high in your circle of friendly and com­pet­ing brands, there’s a high degree of cir­cu­la­tion and shar­ing that goes with it.

Of course this shar­ing can be both pos­it­ive and neg­at­ive in nature. If you’re deliv­er­ing value to your friends, fol­low­ers and read­ers, you’re covered.

But, if your com­pet­i­tion does bother you, go a step fur­ther and com­ment next to their remarks to rec­tify your case. That cre­ates dis­cus­sions and raises your score. people fall in and like to see what’s going on to get involved. It’s not that bad pub­li­city is good. But rec­ti­fied pub­li­city is excel­lent for brand leverage!

# 5 — Viral Videos

Pick up that cam­era and RECORD your shares, tweets, statuses. It’s like put­ting your sales­man­ship skills to the test over social media. But keep your record­ing fun and enter­tain­ing, along with a call to action at the end, ask­ing for a com­ment and share!

Videos that spell F.U.N. for the viewer get shared over face­book, you­tube, foursquare and oth­ers at light­ning paces!

And finally…

That said, once your net­work score does go up, you’ll find more and more people will­ing to pro­mote your brand as well as more and more con­sumers com­ing to your sales fun­nel to buy because you increase audi­ence engage­ment with Empire Avenue. At the same time, there will be more vir­tual cur­rency for you and more people will­ing to invest in your brand’s social activity!