A key question when developing social media strategy or a website is “Who do we target?”. “Who will be the most effective individuals to reach with our message?” Often these target audiences break down into two groups. Advocates for your organization, people who are invested in you and your offering, and the public, customers or end users - the ultimate recipients of your offering. A typical website design or social media strategy will try to reach these two groups in varying proportions.

But there is a third group, a group as important as either and one that can have a disproportionate effect on reaching end users. We call this group “Messengers.” Unlike your advocates, messengers are an audience that you don’t have direct contact with on a regular basis. They don’t follow your every word but they do share an affinity for your ideas, your topics and your issues. They might already be talking about your issues without mentioning your organization. Sometimes messengers talk about your topic on a regular basis, sometimes more sporadically as events or seasonality dictates.

HOW TO IDENTIFY AND MODEL MESSENGERS
Market segmentation is one of the primary ways to identify end user audiences for products and messages, but identifying messengers requires different tactics. Segmentation gives us average demographics across wide swaths of population. With messengers we want to identify the small percentage of individuals talking about our topic, especially those that are having a disproportionate influence on the conversation.

We identify these individuals by looking at trends in online conversation. Social media analytics makes it possible to track these trends through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. We look for people talking about our topics (via keyword analysis) and then track down their influence by looking for how often they are followed, cited and linked to over time.

For example, working with a non-profit trying to increase usable green space in urban areas, we might look for bloggers and tweeters that are not only talking about gardening and CSAs, but also have a large following and are linked to and retweeted by their audiences.

Tools like Radian 6 and Morningside Analytics can help us achieve this through keyword analysis and social media monitoring.

WHAT DO MESSENGERS WANT?
Once we identify our messengers, how do we know what they want? User personas are one of the best tools we can use to understand the mindset and goals of this important audience. User personas are profiles of archetypal users based on qualitative research: interviews and focus groups. The personas themselves not only capture the demographics and mindset of an individual messenger, but also explicitly lay out goals that this person wants to achieve in relation to our content and message.

User personas give us a basis on which to design a social media strategy and a website presence that will serve messenger goals while moving our content into their channels.

Most often we find messengers are looking for three things:

• RELEVANCY - Messengers want content and information that matches their own needs and interest.
• EXCLUSIVITY - Messengers want to be the first and only one on their block with fresh content.
• RECOGNITION - Messengers want to know that they are being heard. Giving them a shoutout on your social media channels or on your website can boost your message beyond a simple broadcast.

Sometimes user research can yield surprising results. In a recent project we found that a client’s archive of older content had even more relevance to it’s key messengers than the new content that it was producing weekly. Indexing this archive of older content and developing an easy-to-use search UX then became one of the priorities of our work.

Tools like user personas, market segmentation and social media analytics are essential tools that we use at Corey to ensure that we are achieving the most for our clients. Understanding your audiences, be they advocate, messenger or the public, holds the key to ensuring the success of your online messaging efforts across a wide range of groups.

Internal applications - intranets, knowledge management sites, workflow management systems, etc. - drive an organization by keeping employees informed, creating quality and consistency across an organization, and positively influencing the bottom line. In this post, I review 4 ways to make these internal workhorses really shine.

Social Tools
Social media tools have advanced how people communicate and shape and share information. We need not look further than the resounding adoption of Wikipedia, Twitter, and Delicious to understand this phenomena. Internal applications can take advantage of these concepts by integrating social tools such as wikis, tagging, and short messages that make communicating and sharing information as quick and easy as sending a Tweet. Usability expert Jakob Nielson has done some in depth research on how to make implementations successful

Consider (strongly) the User Experience
Studies have shown that improving usability on corporate intranets improves productivity. Clearly, this isn’t a surprise. Organizations need to take the time to design internal applications well to make sure employees perform necessary tasks quickly. Barebones usability testing can be done with wireframes early in the application development process to suss out poor navigation and labeling. Discovering problems with usability up front allows issues to be addressed well before coding begins.

Only Build What You Can Support
One clear lesson of the recent financial crisis in the US is to only buy what you can afford. Internal application development should follow this same rule. Internal sites risk getting stale and outdated if they aren’t kept up to date. To prevent content antiquation, internal applications should be built according to the organization’s capacity for support. If the application requires someone to review 100 documents a week and the staffing doesn’t exist for this, the system will be out of date very quickly. Applications must align to the staffing reality.

Mobile
Remember the good old days when being out of the office meant you were relieved of work responsibility? Yeah, well, those days are over. Just in case you needed some statistical persuasion - according to Morgan Stanley Research, global mobile internet usage is trending upward and will surpass desktop internet usage within the next 5 years.

Companies need to provide employees with work related information in mobile friendly formats. To do so, organizations first need to determine what information is most in demand by their workforce on the go. Second, they must build websites or applications dedicated to providing this information on mobile devices.

At Corey, we follow these guidelines when designing internal applications.  But, since technology moves quickly we are constantly adding and adjusting to meet our client’s needs. 

A funny thing happened at the office this morning. I was in the midst of composing a blog about the brilliance of the Web-based Old Spice “Thank You” ads, when Forbes.com broke my heart: “Old Spice Man Ends Victorious Campaign To Conquer Twitter, YouTube”.

It was a tragic scene. I almost began sobbing when I took to my Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry with the words, “Plug pulled on Old Spice Man as I’m writing blog about him.” (“Write fast, with an epilogue,” one response said.) I watched my seemingly witty sentences rot like parsley in a microwave: “I’m on efforts to receive a mention like Old Spice on desperate men everywhere” would be unseen by the world and, most devastating, by Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa.

Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland, OR-based advertising agency behind the Emmy-nominated campaign, has been heralded for its execution of the advertisements; social media guide Mashable called the agency “the future of marketing” for having “set the standards all marketing experts will worship and follow in the years to come.” But what I want to know is, who’s emerged from the campaign as his own brand: Isaiah Mustafa, or just the Old Spice Man?

Prior to landing the Old Spice gig, Mustafa was just another nameless-yet washboard-abdominal-laden actor. He played in the NFL for three years, unbeknownst to anyone who didn’t religiously follow football, and his résumé was scattered with one-time appearances on canceled television series, soap operas and made-for-TV movies. Today, he’s being interviewed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and ABC News correspondent John Berman.

But it’s really Mustafa’s alter ego who’s receiving the most attention, largely from women. When I surveyed a handful of my male and female peers about it, no one recognized the actor’s name (but immediately knew who I was referring to when I said, “You know, the Old Spice Man”), nor did any of them believe that more men would buy Old Spice products as a result of the campaign. In fact, BrandWeek announced this week that sales have dropped 7%.

“I just don’t see a man rushing out to buy something because another man in a towel told him to,” said one male friend. “But I’m sure the desired result was for [women] to persuade their men to get some Old Spice.”

Which leaves the future of Mustafa’s acting career in question. While he may have initially escaped the curse of typecasting after being booked for a role in an upcoming Tyler Perry drama, many think that audiences won’t take him seriously outside of his iconic spokesman engagement. Old Spice Man as a serious actor? It’s almost like asking Costco to carry Aston Martin.

Of course, the opposite could be true: Mustafa might be so talented or well-received that his past as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like is forgotten, only to be recalled when he receives his first Oscar and someone asks, “Wasn’t that guy in deodorant commercials?” After all, Brad Pitt got his start in a Pringles ad.

For now, the masses are mourning the loss of the Old Spice Man, some even willing his valiant return. What can’t be denied is the legacy he will leave behind: He’s still trending on Twitter and making headlines in the Celebrity Truth and the Wall Street Journal alike.

Keynote presentation by Chris Klaehn in Nashville at the 2010 UCDA Design Summit

What is the value of social media to your organization and to your brand? There are many types of brands–personal brands, commercial brands, experiential brands. Every brand makes a promise and sometimes a brand is severely damaged when the promise is an over promise (insert Tiger Woods). And sometimes, with much advice and diligence and patience, a brand, over time, rebounds and regains trust and admiration from its audiences (insert Martha Stewart). These brands, however, are made of one voice. An educational institution is made up of a chorus of voices.

We challenge the timidity that exists around social media and explore the nature of an educational brand — its strengths, challenges, and opportunities. The goal will be to create new ideas and approaches to create something much richer than communication: engagement.

We’ve mentioned here before that women comprise 51 percent of the population and control at least 85 percent of consumer purchasing power. Couple that with statistics from BlogHer that 42 million women in the United States (roughly 53 percent of the 79 million adult women in the United States who use the Internet) participate in social media at least weekly. These online women are spending less time with traditional media like television, newspapers and magazines.

According to the “Annual Social Media Study” conducted by SheSpeaks, a community of women who share opinions online, 72 percent of female Internet users had learned about a new product or brand online and 50 percent had purchased a product because of a social network.

Those are significant numbers. So it behooves brands to think about this audience, not just when marketing online, but offline too. That’s because women are turning to social media to share their experiences of brands too.

Consider mommy-blogging celebrity Dooce, named one of the top 30 most influential women in media by Forbes magazine along with Oprah Winfrey, Diane Sawyer and others. Dooce, or Heather Armstrong, has 1,622,591 followers on Twitter. Last year, her new Maytag washer broke down and the repairmen showed up with the wrong parts. Calls to the customer service line weren’t helping so Armstrong vented on Twitter. Her Tweets included all cap comments like, “DO NOT EVER BUY A MAYTAG.” Maytag responded and Armstrong got service but not before the brand name was dragged though a wild online frenzy that certainly didn’t support its brand position, “Better Built.”

Popular pain reliever Motrin, experienced some online pain of their own, when an ad they ran about babyslings angered women who felt it was condescending and insulting. And most recently, Apple launched the $499 iPad only to see the Internet explode with iTampon analogies across twitter, YouTube and the blogosphere.

Marketers must consider women in their branding efforts. And they need to remember, that their offline branding efforts, WILL be discussed online by this influential, powerful group.