Altitude Branding - Social Hunter-Gatherer ProgramsToday’s is a guest post from Matt Ridings, a friend of mine who has a sharp mind, even sharper wit, and a refreshingly pragmatic and holistic approach to all this social stuff. You can find Matt on Twitter at @techguerilla (but don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Lately I’ve been thinking in evolution metaphors, such as this post, and recently I saw Amber Naslund had this post. We appear to see the world through similar lenses, so I asked her if she would be interested in me writing a guest post.I have yet to figure out why, but she graciously agreed.

The aspects of Social Media that interest me the most tend to revolve around social and psychological structures. Why do people behave in the way they do? What triggers are associated with those behaviors? What societal changes are brought about through those behaviors? And most important to me, how have similar systems been created and evolved throughout history? Anthropological aspects, for the most part.

The Social Hunter-Gatherer

I’d like to reach once more into the evolutionary terminology bag, the socio-economic one this time, and bring out the metaphor of a Hunter-Gatherer Program as it applies to social media. In Social Media circles we like to talk strategically about relationships and the importance of them. Their formation, how they are nurtured, how they are leveraged, and how the parties benefit.

Thanks to Amber and those like her screaming from the mountaintop, most companies today are beginning to understand the nuances of this conversation. They already understood customer relationships were important; they just didn’t conceptually grasp what that really means in social media. Where things still seem to get tricky is in execution. How do I create those new relationships? How do I find where my customers and prospects are? How do I mitigate risks in the process?

These answers vary of course, both in terms of the individual company as well as across the various individual platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. In my particular work, I educate and design execution programs for organizations to answer those questions, and I have yet to come across one that needed exactly the same plan as another. Because of this I tend to keep most of my public writing at a conceptual level rather than explicit case study style material.

I don’t intend on changing that philosophy, but as this is a guest post and because it’s the blog of someone involved with Radian6 {a fantastic tool for collecting and deriving insights from information scattered across social media}, I thought I’d make an exception and give one very specific example of how we gather and utilize that type of information.

The Hunter

The short answer as to what the Hunter does is “Listen”. This process is all about uncovering where those customers and prospects are and listening to what they have to say. The primary way we use the term internally is that of the search for your customer, and more importantly in our view, your prospective customer.

Brand mentions certainly play a part in that, and their importance varies depending upon your specific objectives (customer service, marketing, competitive intelligence, etc.). But there are many, many other things to be listening for that can be of equal if not greater importance. At a recent client, for example, we initially focused on brand mentions in twitter to build our ‘focus pool’, but then began running ongoing analysis to determine common interests that those customers held that had nothing to do with the clients product.

Let’s say that we uncovered a large percentage of people who use this brands product and who also tend to like playing Tennis and are Foodies. We then built expanded pools based on who the Tennis loving product users interacted with, and the same with those who were Foodies. Now we have two new large pools of people with only one true common denominator (e.g. Tennis), and a potential common denominator (the product).

We then want to narrow this large pool down further and increase the odds that the members will find our product useful. To do this we analyzed each of the expanded pools to see if there was a second tier of common interests that the product users in that pool and those in the expanded set had with one another. Naturally, there were.

Let’s review what just happened here: we took analysis to build known information about our customers (Tennis, Foodie) to arrive at unknown information while building a pool of targeted prospects. We could have easily stopped right there and simply provided these insights to the client. Their marketing department was already blown away at what had been uncovered in 3 months that they hadn’t been able to learn in 20 years. They could have used those insights (and did) to vary their marketing materials, their copy, their sponsorships of events, etc, etc. But this is called a “Social Hunter-Gatherer” not just a Social Hunter.

The Gatherer

The key word here is “Gather”. Not “push”, not “grab”, not “attack”. The way we describe it to clients is that they want to create their own gravity. They need outside objects to be attracted to their gravity and be pulled in. Push marketing doesn’t build relationships in social media, Pull marketing does.

The second point we make is that a Gatherer is focused on the long term. A Gatherer who simply goes and collects what crops are available at that moment and then stops will soon starve. It is an ongoing, never ending process. In this particular case what we first did was listen some more, but this time instead of all these automated tools we put real people in place who were directed to follow a very specific list of people in twitter (the various interest pools made up the lists) and simply “be social”.

There was no selling, no marketing, and no unsolicited mentions of the product. We just wanted our people to get to know their list of people and interact as they would normally; the only thing they were prohibited from doing was trying to sell to someone. Otherwise, they could talk about their jobs if they liked. They could say that they came into the group initially through a research exercise if they wanted. If they had something of value to offer, however inane or obscure, they were to do so. Essentially, be themselves.

They did this for 2 months. At the end of this time our people ‘understood’ their associated pool at a very personal level. They related to them. They had real, actual relationships with them. I want you to think about the power of that for a moment. You now have a handful of people within your company that understand your customers and prospects at a very core level, but more importantly who have trusted relationships with them.

The main thing to understand, although not really critical to the success of the program, is that in most of the cases our people completely exposed themselves and their motives during those 2 months. You know who cared? No one. Not one single person.

And while not originally a part of our strategy, those individuals were kept on at the client to continue engaging with their pools. It turned out that people were more than willing to now answer questions if we had one. “What do you think about x idea?” “How about this other product we’re working on?” Through the simple act of building those relationships we built pools of advocates that we never expected.

People want to feel respected, and a part of something, and to feel special. The fact that we valued their opinion, or rather; that someone they now knew and liked valued their opinion was great to them. In addition, another unintended consequence of the program was that our people over time became de-facto customer service agents. Since everyone in their pool knew what they did and who they worked for, they invariably started getting questions. “Who should I call for x?”, “Where can I buy…”, etc. These people now work on the customer service team at that client by the way.

As for the marketing side of things? Using our analytics, they now knew how to find and target seemingly unrelated people in social media that would have a high likelihood of being interested in their product. They now knew pools of advocates that they could “recognize & incentivize” (another mantra we use in discussing advocate programs). Information is great, but knowledge is better….and wisdom? Well, that’s priceless.

Evolving Your Program

So what’s next? In addition to the constant organic growth of these programs we also add on new pool sectors by repeating the cycle with variations we’ve gleaned from the previous round of research. The stage we’re at now is trying to consolidate our knowledge of all the platforms these pools of people interact on (is this Twitter user also on Facebook?

If so, is there additional information available there we can gather that would improve our insights or build new pools?). And what’s really cool is we’re trying to….oh, perhaps I shouldn’t give *all* our secrets away. What I will say is that this methodology is not restricted to large enterprises with piles of cash, it works just as well for the solo basement entrepreneur. Hunter-Gatherer Programs, it’s what’s for dinner.

Cheers, Matt Ridings –