Webjam Company Blog » Spectrum of online friendships

Social Media is word of mouth on steroids. In my article of the inverted brand I say that it can take years to build a brand, but you can lose your reputation in an instant. Knowing who you are talking to, who is talking about you and what are they saying is key in managing your online reputation. In this blog post I would like to explore the importance of understanding your audiences and the role they play in developing your social media strategy. This is not new in the marketing profession. Each marketing book starts with telling you that you should understand your market. Each sales man will learn that selling successfully is about clearly understanding the needs of your customer. In social media, the same rules apply. If you don't understand the people you want to engage with, how will you know what is relevant to them? How can you respond when you don't know what they are talking about. How can you select a social media network, if you don't know which channels your audiences are using?

In our strategy to manage the inverted brand, we use the following model from Mike Arauz as the basis:

It is a model that puts the different types of friends you can have online in the context of the different phases you go through in developing a relationship. It replaces the "ancient" AICDA formula (Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, Action) with SEEC (Search, Exposure, Engagement, Collaboration). Mike's blogpost explains the model in more detail but I would like to look at the model from the "SEEC" perspective.

Search: Search happens before you start befriending people. In your online search you meet people and the connected experiences you have turn your anonymous search in a passive interest.

Exposure: Once the publisher of content has triggered your interest, you will search for more content and read more about his/her ideas. That person is not your friend yet, but there is a basis for developing a friendship. The key trigger is when you start bookmarking the site. You are then close to changing your passive interest into an active interest.

Engagement: The key trigger for active interest is when you start leaving comments or do retweets on posts from your new friends. Then they know that you are interested in friendship. Once you have shown your interest, the relationship starts to develop which will manifest itself by increased engagement through sharing information. You make references to your new friend on your own site, he/she starts responding to your comments in public and later maybe via email or IM.

Collaboration: The relationship is becoming more and more intense. You actually start to promote each others content and the relationship can ultimately lead to a WIN WIN situation where both you and your friend will benefit from working together.

So why is understanding this model so important? It is the core of your engagement strategy. It will help you in listening to your audiences, defining your communities, deciding on the type of content you have to create, the type of social media channels you have to use and finally, the type of data you have to collect and tools to use to measure the success of your social media outreach.

Written by: Marc Campman - Webjam Director of Marketing