Buying friends vs. influencing people

There is a company that will sell you 5,000 friends on Facebook. It will cost you roughly $700. An Australian marketing firm can deliver the same number of Twitter followers for even less.

Body count is only one measure of social media success. It’s the easiest to grab onto because it’s the one that everyone can see. Here are 5 additional goals for brands that are looking to go beyond body count.

1. Shareable content.
Delivering a product message that will be used on Facebook, Twitter, or Meetup is different than writing package copy. Make it a goal to be associated with content that gets traction on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or Twitter. It may be a PR effort or a story pitched to a prominent blogger. Do it well and you’ll be gathering mind share — not just bodies.

2. Real-time conversations. Start offering more than a “contact us” link.
In social media, a customer can share a bad experience instantly with all of their 5,000 friends. There are some Twitter apps, such as Twittdom, that can be bought as a package, but they require staff to provide answers to tweeted customer problems. We like the Southwest Airlines approach: heading off the consumer at the pass. By capturing a cell phone number when passengers buy tickets, Southwest is able to call them before they . . .  pack the car, round up the kids, drop the dog at the sitter, turn off the gas, arm the alarm, and drive 40 minutes to the airport. We can only imagine how many complaints this system has warded off.

3. Being physically relevant.
It’s old school, but there is a reason why campaigning politicians physically touch as many people as they can. Tweetups got a lot of press a couple of years ago for bringing groups together in the physical world. We like Foursquare. It allows users to automatically associate themselves with physical locations at specific times. It has the potential for creative event activation. It could be as simple as creating a Foursquare account and having employees check in to their favorite brand-related locations — Foursquare can be set to deliver those check-ins as tweets — or as elaborate as creating an entire event around a specific popular Foursquare location.

4. Internal participation.
You can’t be part of the conversation if you don’t join it. Encourage employees to be active on the social networks. Your team members have the biggest stake in your success as a company. Ignoring that they have a POV on your business that they already share with their friends is willful ignorance. Embracing the platforms that your team members participate on, and giving them an opportunity to identify themselves as part of the organization, sends a positive message to the whole team.

5. Shifting the conversation.
Sentiment is key to understanding your social efforts. Make it a big goal within your organization to understand and change the conversation around your company. Get a baseline measurement from Social Mention or one of the other sentiment readers out there, then set a big goal to move the needle. Encourage everyone — employees and customers — to enroll in this task, and get everyone pulling in the same direction. Remeasure the sentiment after a month and celebrate the shift.