Editorial Articles

We as consumers are integrating social-media into how we communicate with friends and family. But the challenge of being on the "strategic" side of social marketing means that we sometimes lose sight of how real people use those outlets.

You may have a professional network on LinkedIn, or a personal network on Facebook. You may use Twitter to “tweet” for fun or business, or for both. But regardless of how you use social media, you are using it, and those you socialise with are usually like-minded people.

What does all that have to do with “socialising” your email? Everything.

Why you post information to social sites, what you post, and how frequently you post has everything to do with your motivation behind it. If, as a marketer, you can understand and apply those motivations to your audience and couple that with a content-development strategy to tickle those motivators—you will have a successful social-email programme.

Motivating Influencers
Marketers must understand that successful social marketing is based on getting your identified influencers to promote your message within their personal networks or social graphs. This is very different than traditional marketing communications; instead of a one-way conversation, the brand is now attempting to establish a dialogue between its consumers.

Brands must motivate their influencers to invest their time and reputation (their “social capital”) in having a dialogue on the brand’s behalf. To do this, organisations must do more than insert social sharing opportunities into existing programmes. They must create new communication strategies that get consumers to engage in conversations with their friends – and become influencers.

There are four basic motivators for social influencing:

1. Self-expression
The highest form of social motivator, self expression motivates influencers to share because the content they are sharing supports or reinforces their vision of themselves to their peer group. Self-expression comes down to displaying or conveying information that expresses your personality or feelings.

You will be able to collect detailed consumer preferences with this method, which allows for greatly enhanced, individually targeted campaigns in the future.

2. Status achievement
Influencers often enjoy sharing personal achievement with their social network. One way to way to tap into that motivator is to offer promotions that allow consumers to create status and communicate it with peers.

For example, in support of a new film, the studio promoting it might create a campaign that encourages fans to share the movie trailer with their friends. As fans share the trailer with more and more people, the studio can then award the high-achieving fan with advanced access to the next trailer, which they can share again with his network, reinforcing their status even further.

3. Altruism
Influencers are often motivated to share content online that benefits the broader community and not necessarily themselves. Whether it’s an article about a new medical breakthrough or a free concert, influencers will share information if they think it will be valuable to their network.

One terrific example is an airline that sent an email encouraging its best loyalty-programme members to invite their friends to join the programme. Given the current trend toward going green, the company offered carbon offsets. For every flight the referrer took, the airline would contribute to offsetting the carbon the environment would endure as a result of the flight by planting a tree (or a portion of a tree). How about that for altruistic motivation!

4. Self-interest
An example of self-interest motivation would be a telephone company that sends an email to its customers offering them an opportunity to get two years' worth of free service by referring friends to the company. Recipients post the email to their social networks with the hope that enough of their friends will convert so the recipients can save on two years' worth of telephone expenses.

So as you begin building out, or revising, your social-email strategy, consider what motivates your subscriber base and how your brand can capitalise on that motivation to really socialise your email content.

Paul Bates
UK Managing Director, StrongMail