I think @RicDragon did it. Ric has unique insights grounded in marketing, process methodologies (such as Lean), Social Media and traditional web know-how. This is a process that is repeatable, improvable and documented in his new book, Social Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get Customers to Stay Forever.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ric through Social Media before he wrote his book. This guy talked different. He talked about getting the fundamentals right; he talked about knowing where you were headed before you started and how to get there. But most of all it was simply explained, which caught my eye, a mark that is common to experts in a field.
An excerpt from the upcoming podcast.
Joe: What you’re saying is that we really have to understand who we are.
Ric: Exactly. This is beautiful; we go from desired outcomes; we go to understanding who we are. Then we look outwards, and who is our audience? We do a piece of work that we call “micro?segmentation.” Now, micro?segmentation, we’re not just looking at the old-fashioned segments of yesterday’s marketing. “Gee, soccer moms in Westchester who have a master’s degree.” We’re going even deeper than that.
If we look at people, for instance, who like animals, perhaps I’m selling animal figurines. I’ll go into the world of people who like wild animals, African animals, people who support elephant preserves. We go into domestic animals, and all the different types. We get into dogs, and we can get into breeds.
Finally, we reach a point of granularity that we’re talking about the Airedale Terrier Kennel Club of greater Duluth, Minnesota, that type of granularity.
This piece of work is brainstorming. It results in an indented document which becomes a framework for all of our social media work because we can iterate through these various micro?segments to find out where we can start to get engagement within their communities.
We can then research our micro?segments to find out where their communities are, and in fact, research those communities doing what we might call “on-line ethnography,” or it’s been termed “net?nography,” analyzing and studying on-line communities.
Joe: And this is not rocket science to do, is it?
Ric: Absolutely not. Of course, as we study these communities, we start to see what these people are talking about. We can start to engage that community or become part of that community, perhaps even becoming influential in that community. That’s the whole community stage of the process framework. After the community stage, we’ve done the study, we can identify who’s influential within these communities or outside of these communities. Then we can focus on the influencer piece of work, where we identify let’s say a set portfolio of influencers.
We really work hard to engage those people. We follow their blogs. We comment on their blogs. We do what we call the “influencer project,” where we can really get involved with those people.
For some organizations, particularly in B to B, you might totally put all of your social media energy into that type of influence or project.
Because, let’s say if you sell antibiotics for poultry. Well, there’re only five people in the world that you really need to talk to, or maybe 10 or 20. It’s a pretty small audience. So you can really find out who’s influential in that world and try to speak with them directly.
After you’ve gone through this process, you’ve looked at your desired outcomes, you’ve done your brand voice and personality, you’ve done the micro?segmentation, you’ve studied the communities, and you’ve studied the influencers. At that point, you can put together an action plan.
Your action plan can be based on a lot of different elements of what your marketing objectives are, different types of plans that you can put together. Then, of course, measure, study, reiterate, and come back around and do it again.
Ric’s organization is DragonSearch, one of the best boutique SMM (social media marketing) and SEO agencies in New York. They help companies use existing internal resources to monetize their investment in social. And we have extensive resources if you wish to outsource certain activities.