For demand-driven services, use the Brand RAMP as your guide. You need buyers to...

• Recognize you and your firm.
• Articulate what you do and how you help people like them solve problems like theirs.
• Memorize what you do so you have top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) at the elusive time of need (ETON).
• Prefer to get help from you rather than other sources.

Brand Monitoring Questions

1. What tool(s) do you use to monitor brand mentions?
2. Do you monitor sentiment and if so, how?
3. How will you report on brand mentions? Can you provide a sample report?
4. How often will we receive a report or will we have access to the reports?
5. How do you assess which brand mentions require an immediate response and which do not?
6. How soon will we be notified of brand mentions that need a response and how will we be notified?
7. What is your approach to responding to mentions, positive or negative?
8. If you respond, who do you leave a comment as and how do you determine what to say?
9. If you don’t respond, will you provide us with a template for how to effectively respond to brand mentions?
10. Do you just monitor existing mentions or will you help us to build new ones?

Reputation Management Questions

1. What services do you provide as part of an online reputation management campaign?
2. What is your typical process for handling online reputation management issues?
3. Can you completely get rid of the negative result(s)?
4. What responsibilities will your team handle and what will you need us to manage in-house?
5. Do you write content/press releases/guest posts for us or will we have to hire someone else to do that?
6. What information/access will you need from us before you get started?
7. How much information do you need regarding the cause of the ORM issue?
8. How will you determine if reputation management is successful?
9. How much time could it take to displace negative search results?
10. Can you make a 3-month projection of how the search results will look for target phrases?

Social Media Measurement Questions

1. What social media marketing channels do you have the most expertise in?
2. Will you work with us to create a social plan/strategy or do you just create the initial presence?
3. What tools do you use to measure social media metrics? Do you have your own tools or do you use existing ones?
4. Can you pull archived data with those tools to establish a baseline or are we starting from present day?
5. How should we define success/conversions?
6. Can we use our analytics with your tools when reporting on conversions or will we have to switch to something else?
7. How do you the measure the effectiveness of each social media channel?
8. How should we define ROI? Do you measure the cost per lead/ cost per acquisition?
9. What methods will you use to grow the accounts and measure success?
10. Do you have 3-month projection of what we can expect from this investment?
11. How long will it take to see results?

Community Questions

1. Will you help us build satellite communities within social media or focus strictly on our Web site?
2. How will you help us determine our community influencers? If not, can we keep the list that you’ve created?
3. Will you reach out to the influencers on our behalf or will we? If it’s on you, how transparent will you be about our relationship with us? How do you keep it authentic?
4. Will you give us a strategy for how to connect with influencers in a way that doesn’t appear spammy? Small talk makes us nervous, but we want people to know we’re real.
5. What methods will you use to grow our audience? Will they get us in trouble or turn people off?
6. How do you measure community ROI? We hear follower numbers are so 2008, but what else is there?
7. What about the new FTC guidelines for sponsored advertising? How do we know when or what to disclose?
8. How can integrate our online community with our offline community and into our traditional marketing efforts?
9. Will you give us any guidelines for how to talk to people and how to be a good social media citizen so we don’t look foolish?
10. Will you teach us how to sustain what you’ve started? We will be taught how to use the tools, identify people, and essentially do what you did?

The Right Fit Questions ( to ask yourself)

1. Do their core values match my own?
2. Are my customers on social media? Do I even need these services?
3. If I’m the one who will be tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, am I social enough for this?
4. Am I being offer a social media presence or an outlined strategy?
5. Do they seem excited to work with me? Am I excited to work with them?
6. Do they understand our point of difference?
7. How customized does their strategy feel?
8. Do they take time to answer our questions and explain rationale or do they seem fearful of going into specifics of what they’re doing?
9. What does this company’s reputation appear to be in the community? Are they practicing what they preach and tracking/responding to their own mentions?
10. Do I trust the people behind this company? Do they seem to care about my brand?
11. How will the strategy they outline complement your larger objectives?

Organization:   IBM

Social Media Stats:

• No IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
• 17,000 internal blogs
• 100,000 employees using internal blogs
• 53,000 members on SocialBlue (like Facebook for employees)
• A few thousand “IBMers” on Twitter
• Thousands of external bloggers,
• Almost 200,000 on LinkedIn
• As many as 500,000 participants in company crowd-sourcing “jams”
• 50,000 in alum networks on Facebook and LinkedIn

Results:

• Crowd-sourcing identified 10 best incubator businesses, which IBM funded with $100 million
• $100 billion in total revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008

Step 1: Craft a Concept
Step 2: Establish a Name
Step 3: Obtain Venture Capital
Step 4: Hire Some Employees
Step 5: Program Your Site
Step 6: Launch Your Site
Step 7: Sit Back and Profit
Step 8: Sell Your Site
Step 9: Retire

Types of Online Communities

• Direct Community: These are communities owned and managed by a company typically running proprietary community and enterprise collaboration software solutions.
• Managed Community: These are communities started and managed by the organization, but run on consumer-facing social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
• Participating Community: These are communities started and managed by individuals or groups of users, typically on consumer-facing social networking sites, but sometimes also with proprietary software.

Strategies for Leveraging These Communities

What most businesses desire is a strategy for how to use new technologies to do one of three things –- increase awareness (marketing), increase revenue (sales), or decrease expenses (efficiency and execution).

• What is your objective?
• Who is your audience?
• What are you measuring?

Ultimately, a brand strategy solely focusing on social networking is a near-impossible task but, coupled with social media, is the ideal approach for authentic brand voice. Social media provides a point of directed engagement, not an experience that depends on continuous focus. Just like butting in on a conversation, lurking in the corner of a social network without context is inauthentic. Brands want to be the subject of conversation, not peripheral stalkers. To do that, social media needs to exist as a distinct entity in your media plan.

What Determines Leadership in the Creative Economy

Employees with these traits are best positioned to help their companies - and themselves - in the Creative Economy:

Initiative: Seeing opportunities to try something new, and actually following up on them. This is a marked contrast to the obedience trait.

Creativity: Designing something different than what exists currently, be it business, product or process. Contrast creativity with intellect. Creativity is less bound to the rigors of logic and proof, more responsive to our individual yearning for things that are new.

Passion: Our internal engines provide the fuel that spurs us to action. We pursue something because it answers an internal calling. Contrast this with diligence, which is the application of one's mind and efforts to a task or project. Diligence is a more mechanical effort, passion is an emotional one.

Well, among the seven most common formats, sponsored content ads -- in which consumers viewed a page that was "brought to you by" a leading brand -- were the most engaging, yet produced the least purchase intent, according to a new study conducted by research firm Psychster, and commissioned by cooking/recipe hub Allrecipes.com.

56% of online shoppers frequented Facebook, followed by YouTube at 22%. MySpace, believe it or not, ranked third with 15% and actually edged out Twitter by 4%.

What motivates online shoppers?

Affinity and allegiance are of course among reasons for following brands, but as documented late last year, consumers are also motivated by receiving invitations for events, special offers or promotions.

For those skeptics who have yet to allocate funds and resources to engaging customers and prospects in social networks, perhaps this information will erode suspicion.

Your customers ultimately will engage with their favorite brands where and when possible, but eventually, your absence will eventually contribute to the insignificance of the brand as competitors will ultimately step in and capture the attention and loyalty of the very people you need to reach.

Some important preparations before you launch an open idea platform:

• Set a clear framing for ideas and suggestions
• Allocate a good moderator
• Secure that moderator or key employees/managers welcome and comment on ideas
• Make incoming ideas and feedback visible within company
• Integrate ideas and feedback in strategic priorities and product development priorities
• Launch new products and improvement and remember to thank users