What makes a message go viral? More importantly, how can you position your marketing messages to go viral?

Here at MECLABS, we recently had a front-row seat to just how easy it can be for a message to go viral. Senior Marketing Manager Justin Bridegan attended a rally at one of Mitt Romney’s events here in Jacksonville. During a break in Mitt’s stump speech, in which the former governor was attacking Newt, Justin yelled out, “Send him to the moon.”

With that comment, Justin changed the course of history. Or at least had a big impact on the latest message to go viral in the 24-hour news cycle.

Mitt started on to his next point, but then spun on his heels and asked, “What did you say?”

Justin, ever the marketer, sold the line even better the second time, “Send him to the moon.”

With that, Mitt changed the course of his speech to talk about Newt’s moon colonies, and within just a few hours, this interaction appeared on sites from New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and 7,131 other related articles.

Click to enlarge

“I never thought what I said would be repeated or shape some of the political discussion or landscape for the day,” Justin said. “Only after posting my video did I realize my comment had been used across the country in many of the major news affiliates.”

“It really comes down to being at the right place, at the right time, and then seizing the moment. Today I witnessed firsthand what real-time marketing means.”

Of course, we were eating it up here in the office every time the quote was picked up in another major news source. (One of our favorites was a comment on a New York Times article claiming Justin was a plant for the Romney campaign.)

Click to enlarge

How can you position your marketing messages for virality?

Just like that, with a quick spur-of-the-moment shout, Justin’s message went viral. And that’s just how easy it is.

Deceptively easy. Because, unlike, say, crafting a message in paid media, you have little control over how to get that exposure to your message.

So, I’m not going to tell you how to make your messages go viral. I simply haven’t seen anyone that can force virality. However, here are a few tips to help you at least prepare for that possibility. To remix Seneca … virality is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Get involved in the conversation

If there is anything we can learn from Justin’s experience, it’s that it never would have happened if he weren’t at the rally.

So what does that mean to marketers? As Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” You should be present and engaged anywhere your audience and customers are engaged in a conversation. For some, that is Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. For others, that may be online forums. For a local business, it may mean joining local civic organizations.

Being an upstanding member of these offline and online communities, and being a legitimate part of the conversation, increases the likelihood that the early adopters and influencers will start to spread your message.

But, don’t be a faker and try to force it. Or it could blow up in your face.

Understand the zeitgeist of your audience

That’s a fancy word for saying the “defining spirit or mood.” Being present in the community will help you keep a finger on this pulse. Genuinely serving your audience and responding to their needs don’t hurt either.

And, if you’re really engaged, it will pay off in myriad ways in your marketing. In this case, understanding the hot-button issues to push when creating a message you’re trying to spread virally.

Don’t be salesy

It sure is exciting that your winter whites are on sale for 20% off … but highly unlikely that it is a message that will go viral.

In testing conducted for “Can viral video clips drive targeted traffic to your web site?,” we found that although the 28 video clips we experimented with had no promotional message or content, 1.49% of viewers went on to become newsletter subscribers. In just 60 days, our videos were viewed more than 324,000 times at no cost to us.

The research goes on to recommend, “Be cautious about including commercial or promotional content. The most powerful short videos are those that are purely entertaining. It’s when people click through to your site that the time is right to add your sales message.”

Don’t overlook direct media outreach to help germinate your message

While there is nothing I detest more than the traditional spam press release that jams up my inbox, don’t forget that including digital and mainstream media in your viral campaign can be a helpful tipping point to virality (and, of course, the inverse is true as well – a viral idea can help lead to earned media mentions).

For example, Sunflower Market, an organic foods retail brand, sent branded flower pots to key media contacts six weeks before a store opening (the amount of time it takes a sunflower to germinate, natch) to support a downloadable desktop plant application they were trying to spread virally to promote a store opening.

As a result, they received 1,631,862 media impressions in the Indianapolis area, and beat the opening week store sales forecast by 24%.

Related Resources:

Romney urges sending Gingrich to the moon (good video here of how it all went down … starts about 1 minute into the video)

What do great viral videos have in common?

Social Media Marketing: Viral sweepstakes targeting moms grows Facebook audience 4,488%

Content Marketing: Microsoft crowdsources content ideas with a viral contest for new Windows Phone 7 platform

It’s the latest trend in print ads and TV commercials – drive customers to a landing page on Facebook instead of the brand’s own website or microsite. So, for example, a Toyota print ad with a contest might include Facebook.com/Toyota as the call-to-action this year when last year it was likely Toyota.com/contest.

So I can see the benefit to Mark Zuckerberg for you paying good money to drive all of your traffic to his site, but is a Facebook landing page the right call-to-action for your campaigns?

As with many marketing questions, there is no one correct answer, no one-size-fits-all solution. However, if you are thinking of using a Facebook landing page in your marketing, here are some factors to consider.

THE BENEFITS OF A FACEBOOK LANDING PAGE

Build your Facebook presence

This first one is a no-brainer. Every marketer and every unpopular guy you went to high school with who is now filthy rich and wants everyone to know is trying to build their Facebook presence and get those likes. While there are plugins to do that on your own landing page, it’s probably much more likely to, well, capture a like on Facebook’s own site.

Social proof

The basic idea behind social proof is that if others do something, you’re more likely to do it too (an apt time to mention that I read the MarketingExperiments blog quite often).

This is an idea pioneered by Robert Cialdini. And, really, the very reason for Facebook’s existence. (Well, this, and to help Zuck get into some Harvard club where the parties are just craaaaaazy, if you believe Justin Timberlake’s movie).

No IT support needed

This is probably a bigger benefit if you work for a small company where resources are tight (and, in fairness, those looking to avoid zombie discussions). With a good CMS, making a landing page on your own site could be easier, but since Facebook is aimed at the lowest common denominator … um, I mean, the average consumer … it is pretty darn easy to use.

It’s not a buy or bounce landing page

At the end of the day, Facebook is really a community. So even if you don’t get the conversion right away, at least you can get a new friend and nurture that relationship until she either comes to her senses and understands that you were “the one” all along … or decides to buy.

“It is easy to start a relationship with them at that moment,” said Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting and author of The Conversation Manager. “If they click the ‘like’ button, we have the opportunity to maintain a conversation with them.”

SERP domination …

That search engine results page (SERP) real estate is valuable. And nowadays, you can take it up with more than just your homepage. Facebook can be one ally in that homesteading claim.

“For big brands, Facebook can be a powerful tool for asserting a little extra force on branded searches,” Herndon Hasty, Associate Director, SEO, iProspect said.

“Facebook pages tend to rank especially high for brand names and, with the right management, can expand to take up two-to-three positions on the first few pages of results. This allows brands to own more natural search real estate around their name, and to push any sites – such as affiliates or less-than-stellar reviews – further out of view of potential customers.”

To really help dominate that SERP, Herndon has a few tips…

“We know that the degree to which a brand is shared and engaged in social media can affect its search rankings, and over time that will become an even more significant factor. Brands should always make sure to take care of the basics:

• Fill in every ‘about us’ section
• Secure the brand in the URL
• Include links back to the main website wherever possible

Additionally, they should promote through:

• Frequent postings
• Link-sharing
• Encourage sharing directly from their website

All in all, Facebook can provide at minimum, good person-to-person exposure of the brand, and can potentially drive ranking higher.”

THE DRAWBACKS OF A FACEBOOK LANDING PAGE

… but a hit to SEO

Herndon also pointed out that, while links to a Facebook page can help you dominate a branded keyword SERP, any links you send to Facebook landing pages aren’t going to (and sending link juice to) your own pages.

No LPO

While there are A/B testing capabilities for Facebook advertising, I don’t know of any for actual Facebook pages and walls and the like that essentially make up your Facebook landing page. And without split testing, it’s very hard to perform landing page optimization, which can drive significant conversion gains.

On your own site, your abilities to test and optimize are only limited by your imagination … and IT budget.

Terms and conditions

You’re playing in Facebook’s house, and if they don’t like what you’ve done, they can just take their ball and go home thank you very much. If you run afoul of their guidelines, Facebook can tear down your wall.

Command and control

As with testing, what you display on your landing pages is only limited by your own imagination (and, again, your willingness to listen to zombie stories while you tell IT what you’d like your page to do). While Facebook is quite flexible and even has its own language (Facebook Markup Language), you are still limited by what this platform will allow.

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Social Media Marketing Tool Kit

347 million Europeans use social networks (results of Insites Consulting’s global social media study)

Social Signals Are Here to Stay: Google+1 and its Influence on SEO

A value proposition is the one thing that sets your company apart from your competitors in the eyes of your ideal customer. At MarketingExperiments, we define the core value proposition as the fundamental answer to the question: “If I am your ideal customer, why should I buy from you rather than your competitors?”

It’s a simple question. But many marketers find it almost impossible to answer. Articulating it clearly is hard enough, but internal political battles and highly opinionated superiors make it even harder for the average marketer in the trenches.

And yet, with all these challenges, it’s easy to overlook the person that can actually help you the most in determining what sets you apart from your competitors…

The customer.

Now to truly hear the opinion of the customer you need to test. Measuring actual behavior is the only way you can be absolutely sure you are effectively capturing the minds and hearts of your customers.

And while the act of running tests on your website and in your marketing campaigns is certainly hard, what’s even harder is figuring out how to design your tests so you get a learning about your customers. To do that (specifically as it relates to value proposition) you need to start with some qualitative research on your customers to get ideas about what they value and don’t value about your business.

Once you’ve got those ideas, you can start testing potential value propositions.

While you’re certainly not limited to the Internet for conducting that research, mainstream social networks are a great place to start.

But you must widen your gaze. Even on the Internet, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are only a fraction of the places you could potentially scour for your testing ideas.

Forums and business/product review sites (i.e. Yelp, CNET, Amazon) can be just as helpful (if not more so) and can also be mined for insight into the minds of your customers.

Where ever you decide to look, you must ask two main questions before you can generate value proposition testing ideas:

1. Are there any patterns in these results?
2. Why?

When you’ve asked those questions, you likely have enough to start testing.

Of course that’s very easy for me to say and another thing entirely for you to do it. So to illustrate what I mean, I took the liberty of doing some research for an audience member of a past Web clinic. That audience member, Todd of Venus Bodywork, Inc., submitted the following page to be reviewed by our researchers for the Live Testing Strategy Session we held at the end of the clinic:

click to enlarge

Our researchers didn’t get a chance to review this site during the Web clinic, so I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to illustrate how to go about finding test ideas using a review site.

From what I gathered on the site, Venus Bodywork is a fairly specialized day spa that offers cutting edge spa treatments that actually generate “aesthetic benefits,” in their words.

Now there are some weaknesses in this page. While the page does do a good job of quickly getting to the form, one of the things this page (and the site in general) suffers from is a lack of clarity in the value proposition. Don’t get me wrong, this site still does a better job than most I’ve seen in stating a value proposition, but it’s not quite there yet. Fortunately for Todd, what the spa doesn’t suffer from is a lack of great reviews on Yelp.

So using those reviews I started to generate ideas for testing different value propositions. Here’s how I did it.

Look for patterns in the reviews

As any good statistician knows, patterns are the first thing to look for in any set of data. This is because, as Daniel Burstein put it, “patterns indicate potential learning.” By simply scanning the reviews I found two main patterns:

1.  Many of the reviewers actually saw results.

• “For a noticeable change in body appearance, I usually notice a difference after the third session.” – D.T.
• “After a year, I am wearing a bikini proudly around the pool.  Every one notices the change.  My shape is better but most importantly, the cottage cheese lumpiness that was building on my thighs is improving with every session.” – Susan W.
• “…the heccus+dermosonic package has helped a few of my problem areas and made me look and feel amazing!”  – Rodelander S.
• “…they gave me an amazing hydrating treatment that made my skin look fabulous all for free!  Fantastic business practices!” – Maya K.

2.  Most of the reviewers mentioned a specific individual in their review.

• “Genevieve is really good! I’d go back!” – Anna B.
• “I had one of the best facials EVER with Francesca at Venus Bodywork.” – Kira K.
• “Genevieve was wonderful.” – Laura K.
• “Marcia, the manager of this place, is an ANGEL!” – Phoebe B.

Ask “Why?”

Once you’ve identified some of the patterns in the reviews, all you need to do is sit back and wonder about why those patterns showed up.

Easy right? I wonder about things all the time.

This is one of the first steps to learning something. And since “the goal of a test is not to get a lift, but rather to get a learning,” we know we’re on the right track.

So in this case, the first thing I would want to learn is whether or not the value communicated by reviewers on Yelp reflects the value the website’s visitors are actually searching for.

To do that, I would develop some treatments that clearly communicate the fact that most of the customers that come through the door get results.

• Taking testimonials straight from Yelp might be a good strategy here.
• A clear headline stating the percentage of women that see results might also be a good idea.
• Adding in the individual stories and pictures of the women who work at the spa could help as well.

After that, assuming you found a value that resonated better than the control, I’d want to know which of the value propositions resonated better. To test that, I might create two treatments:

• One that focused on the results
• One that focused on the individuals

I could go on, but you get the idea. The testing possibilities are endless and if you design your tests correctly, with each test you learn a little more about your customers until you can easily craft a value proposition.

Related Resources:

Negative Lifts: How a 24% loss produced a 141% increase in conversion

Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online.

Value Proposition: How to use social media to help discover why customers buy from you

Bad Data: The 3 validity threats that make your tests look conclusive (when they are deeply flawed) – Wednesday’s Web Clinic

Along with 45,000-plus attendees, I’m at Dreamforce ’11 in San Francisco this week as a guest of HubSpot. On Wednesday afternoon, I caught a session by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot about “engineering contagious ideas” using social media. You may be familiar with Dan from his personal website, his very popular HubSpot webinar series (including the recent Guinness Book recognized largest webinar ever) or his books such as the recently published, “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness.”

Dan’s talk at Dreamforce was based on his new book and his hierarchy of contagiousness:

• Exposure
• Attention
• Motivation

He broke down each of the three areas with a series of “best practices” myths, and presented the reality based on his research using publicly available information, or metrics on his own online real estate.

For this post I’m pulling one example from each of Dan’s hierarchy zones.

Exposure

The myth: “engaging in the conversation” is the most important thing in social media.

Essentially, the idea is that before you can join the conversation and get your ideas spread, people have to be exposed to your ideas. The way to accomplish this is to have a large Twitter following, have many “likes” for your Facebook page and a large opted-in email list.

How can you increase your exposure? One way is to regularly tweet quality links:

click to enlarge

Dan’s takeaway from this is, “Engaging in the conversation doesn’t work, but publishing interesting content does.”

And also, influencers exist, but they’re not always who you expect. Getting a large social media following increases your exposure, and the likelihood you’ll reach an influencer who will help spread your message.

Attention

You may have the exposure numbers, but your social followers are hit with a huge amount of ideas each day. They don’t see every tweet that passes through their timeline, read every post on their Facebook wall or open every email they receive. You want to cut that clutter.

To do that, Dan’s research busts the myth of, “Friday, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to publish.”

Here’s Twitter:

click to enlarge

And Facebook:

click to enlarge

As you can see, retweets on Twitter spike on Friday and Facebook shares spike on Saturday.

Dan’s takeaway? “Use contra-competitive timing.”

If you want a message shared on social media, the weekend is a good time to put it out there. He speculated that one reason was there are fewer stories out on the weekend to distract readers and compete with your message.

Motivation

The exposure numbers are in place, you actually grabbed the attention of your audience, now they need to be motivated enough to actually share your message.

Dan said one thing that motivates people is scarcity. How many times have you read a blog post and found the initial comment is simply, “first!” The response might not be all that useful, but the scarcity of that top spot motived at least one audience member to take the time and add a comment.

To test scarcity, Dan used his own blog and manually tweaked the tweet counter. Here’s the results:

click to enlarge

Let’s throw out experiment #2 and which did not result in a statistically significant difference between the variables tested at a high confidence level, but take a look at experiment #1 where there was a significant difference. When Dan’s readers thought no one had tweeted the blog post compared to 776 tweets, the relative difference in clickthrough rate was 127%.

I doubt that Dan thinks you should artificially create the illusion of scarcity (unless, of course, you’re running a test of your own), but his takeaway from this experiment is, “information is valuable when it is scarce.”

Related Resources

Headbanging with Hubspot, social networking with Salesforce

Marketing Testing and Optimization: The value of being wrong

Social Media Chart: Which channels are the most effective for inbound marketing?

Inbound Marketing: Social media strategy planning tool

“What is the most effective copy for my buttons?” That is one of the most frequent questions we receive at MarketingExperiments. And for good reason. As our testing shows, simple changes to the copy on your call-to-action buttons can generate impressive results.

Yet even though we know that, we don’t always optimize our button copy. And in this case, I’m not using the royal “we” to try to refer to all marketers. Right here on the MarketingExperiments blog, where all we do is write about testing, optimization, and messaging, we had an unoptimized button.

But, fortunately, we also have an audience of savvy optimizers that constantly keeps us on our toes. In fact, on a recent post – Live Experiment (Part 1): How many marketers does it take to optimize a webpage? – Thomas Strunk made a comment on the post that rightly called us to task…

Also just another thing I just noticed is that your little green button below says “Submit Comment” and I thought that the word “Submit” was a BAD word Maybe you could do an A/B test on it with a button that says “Share Your Thoughts” or something like that… Who knows you might get more responses to your posts?

Good point, Thomas. To the splitter!

CONTROL

The control button was something you’ve seen a million times before, and probably the most popular button on the Internet – the Submit button. Or more specifically, “Submit Comment.”

As we’ve found in test after test, the default “Submit” button tends to underperform. So we wanted to create a treatment for this blog, as well at the MarketingSherpa blog, that better implied the value of commenting.

TREATMENT

Frankly, this was easier said than done. One of the biggest points of value many people see in commenting on a blog is getting a link back to their site. Our audience is made up of marketers and, frankly, I think marketers are even worse about this than the average Joe.

However, spam comments that say “great post” add no real value for you, the reader. That’s why we delete many of the comments we get on our blogs. If it doesn’t add value to the reader, it doesn’t make the cut.

So we certainly didn’t want a button that played up value some in our audience would like, but that we don’t want to give them at the expense of the majority of our audience.

So which words accurately describe the value you can expect to receive from commenting on our blogs?

As Senior Editorial Analyst, Austin McCraw, replied to Thomas…

“‘Share your thoughts’ is better, but still seems like it is too ‘action-centric’ rather than ‘value-centric.’ What does the reader get from sharing their thoughts? Why did you comment? What was in it for you?”

Even Thomas was perplexed…

“I am not really sure what was in it for me? I guess I am just thankful for all the info you guys let us in on and I know that it is nice to get feedback on all your hard work. I am anxious to see what a ‘value-centric’ wording will be on a ‘submit your comment’ button. Because I could totally use something better for my site too. Looking forward to see what you come up with.”

Frankly, it took a little soul searching on our part. Why do we even want you to comment in the first place?

And then it hit me. It goes back to the line I use to sign off on every issue of the MarketingExperiments Journal that we send, “Our job is to help you do your job better. Let us know how we can help.”

We’re optimizers. Frankly, we’re constantly trying to make everything we do better. And that’s where your feedback, from a community of professional marketers, is so helpful to us.

But to help you do your job better, we also want you to interact with each other. Sometimes you can learn more from your peers than you can from us. It’s why we encourage you to tweet on #webclinic during Web clinics. It’s why we invite you to present your case studies to your peers at marketing Summits.

Essentially, we want you to “Join the conversation.” Yes, I know there is nothing shockingly new about that phrase. But, it just seemed to fit the bill…

RESULTS

We found a significant difference on the MarketingExperiments blog at an 82.9% level of confidence, a 34.0% lift to be exact. The results are above.

We did not find a significant difference on the MarketingSherpa blog at even an 80% level of confidence.

What can you learn from this test?

• At a very base level, it’s worth testing your buttons. Compared to, say, an entire shopping cart process, it’s an easy test to run. Yet, because it’s so close to the point of conversion, it may have a significant impact. After all, think about all of the money, time, and resources you invest driving people to that button.

• Think about the messaging on your buttons. Every action you expect your audience to take should have a value. While, admittedly, there is only a small value in joining a conversation for some (and perhaps no value for many), there is certainly more value than simply saying, “Submit Comment.” Besides, what are you really telling your audience when you ask them to submit? What is their expected response? As Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MarketingExperiments likes to say, “I SUBMIT TO THE GODS OF MARKETING!”

• No significant difference is valuable. As you can see at the bottom of this blog post, we changed the button to “Join the conversation” on our blogs even though we did not find a significant difference at the 95% level of confidence (the level we usually look require to make a business decision).

That no significant difference finding is valuable. “Join the conversation” better ties into the message we try to send our audience, but we didn’t want to hurt conversion. Knowing that the more consistent messaging will not hurt conversion gave us the confidence to make the change.

Related Resources

The Business Case for Testing: How one marketer convinced her business leaders to start testing and drove a 201% gain in the process

Email Marketing Optimization: How you can create a testing environment to improve your email results

Marketing Testing and Optimization: How to begin testing and drive towards triple-digit ROI gains

Fundamentals of Online Testing: Online testing course

Hey buddy, why should I buy anything from you? OK, that’s a harsh way to start a blog post, but, essentially, what value do your products or offerings have to your buyers? Unless you nail that down, any marketing you do is just puffery (and ineffective puffery at that), not really communications.

As we continue to dive deeper into value proposition for an upcoming book we’re working on, we see an increased need to help marketers discover what value they truly offer customers. That word – discover – is key. You simply cannot dictate your value to your customers. You have to determine what truly works for them.

One of the biggest untapped resources for making that discovery is social media.

So in today’s blog post, let’s take a quick look at a few ways you can use social media to help discover your value proposition. And by help, I mean social media will not give you THE answer. But it will help you come up with a few ideas that you can then test which will ultimately lead to your most effective value proposition.

First, while social media can essentially be a huge and cheap focus group, let’s be clear on its limitations. As a marketer, you can basically do three things using social media:

1. Listen
2. Engage
3. Respond

The first two can help you discover your value proposition. The third one is basically customer service.

Next, let’s get on the same page about exactly what we mean by value proposition. The way MarketingExperiments defines value proposition is – the primary reason why your ideal prospect should buy from you rather than any of your competitors.

Now, to the Twitterverse…

How to listen

The great thing about social media is that you can be what message board aficionados derisively call a “lurker.” You can passively observe the way your potential customers talk about your categories and products behind your back.

Before social media, most of this information was secret. Someone bragging over a new way to use your product (and thus a new value that you never thought of) over beer at a barbecue. A dissatisfied customer complaining that your competitor doesn’t serve a niche that you fill so well but rarely communicate. Social media has brought all of these conversations out into the open.

Here’s a few ideas about how to listen for value proposition triggers using social media:

• Set up searches for your brand and product names on Twitter, the same for your competitors, as well as searches about key hashtags and words customers might use to describe a problem your product solves or category your product is in. You can do this manually in Twitter, but more easily in free programs like Tweetdeck or HootSuite. And, of course, paid programs like Radian6 offer even more advanced options.

• Also note, you might want to try a few variations if your company or product name is commonly misspelled. There are no copy editors on Twitter. For example, the search query I have set up in Tweetdeck for MarketingExperiments is – “Marketing Experiments OR MktgExperiments OR MarketingExperiments” (@MktgExperiments is our Twitter handle, which explains the abbreviation).

• Join LinkedIn Groups and/or Facebook Groups that your ideal customers might use. How can you find these groups? Start by asking current customers what groups they are members of. And don’t forget to join your competitors’ groups or “like” their fan pages to see what their customers are saying. (Really, the same could be said for old-school forums or message boards, but I don’t think they really count as social media.)

• Don’t overlook Google Alerts. You can set up alerts using the same type of keywords as you did for Twitter in step #1. Pay special attention to the “Type” field. Blogs, video, and discussions can be especially helpful. But the realtime search will likely be of limited value since Google dropped Twitter from that search – which is why the first bullet point is important.

How to engage

Once you’ve lurked enough, you’ve probably got some pretty good ideas for important elements of your value proposition. Yet this is where it can get tricky. By engaging your audience, and this includes everything from actively sending a message out on social media to even just having a social media profile, you can’t help but influence their response. This is known as priming in psychology. You can’t avoid it, but it helps to be cognizant of this effect.

In fact, I’ll take it one level deeper. You are essentially engaging in what social scientists call ethnography. Our resident anthropologist and research analyst, Stonie Clark, gave me a book on the subject entitled “The Professional Stranger.”

From talking to Stonie and reading the book…title, I can tell you the biggest challenge in such research. You must be enough of an outsider not to influence your research yet get in well enough with your subjects to learn what’s really going on. So it helps to engage with your potential customers as from a (clearly labeled) personal account as well as a brand account as you will likely get different results. [Think: Jane Goodall and the apes. Although, in this case the apes would be people with opposable thumbs constantly tweeting from their iPhone.]

So how can you engage…without being overly engaging so to speak? I’ll mention some general tactics in just a moment, but first let’s consider the two-edged sword that is incentives.

Freebies, sweepstakes, contests, and the like are an excellent way to increase the amount of feedback you get. Just take the results with a grain of salt. Your respondents may be more interested in the incentive than the offer they’re discussing.

A few ideas on how to engage your audience to flesh out value proposition triggers using social media:

At a very base level, do something. Anything. And see what response you get. For example, Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe, Research Manager, MECLABS, found this interaction on a Facebook fan page where Happy Cup Frozen Yogurt Bar was able to check people’s favorite flavors without influencing the outcome too heavily by asking a leading question. They simply announced what flavors they were offering in a given week:

The above example shows some passive engagement and the response. But what about active engagement? Zuzia recommends simply asking customers what you want to know.

• You can do this on your Facebook fan page specifically about your brand. Or, if you’re a B2B marketer, you can use LinkedIn’s Answers feature to ask broader, industry-related questions.

• Remember, the more active you get, the more you’re priming your audience, and the more skewed your response will be. But at this point, you’re only engaging in qualitative research to get some ideas you wouldn’t have thought of in the four corners of your office. Later, you should test with quantitative research.

Here’s an example from The Veggie Bin:

How to use this information

So what should you do with all of this information? Mandi Frishman, Marketing Manager, Make Me Social, recommends that you structure it around the customer first.

Build a comprehensive customer profile that includes data like:

• Tips about their sense of humor
• Information about their lifestyle
• What they value in life, their struggles
• Their concerns
• Their expectations

She also suggests you document influencers in each market and note suggested conversation topics and tactics.

Following the social market analysis of the target market, Mandi suggests you begin a competitive analysis using similar tactics. Listen for:

• Missed opportunities and niche topics that your company may be overlooking
• Identify what messaging is resonating with the audiences
• What is driving engagement
• What questions people are asking and searching for

Now analyze and test

Now that you have all of this market data, Mandi suggests you, “Identify whether the existing messaging and stated value proposition align with what the market has shown.”

Hopefully, you’ve learned something to improve your value prop. So sit down with a whiteboard and your team and begin to craft some new value propositions. You’re not looking for the perfect phrase. You’re looking for some general ideas that you can further analyze and test.

You can begin your analysis of them at a very high level by broadcasting these potential value propositions into the marketplace using social media. “You can use social media intentionally to test the appeal,” according to Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS. “Good value propositions have a viral component and those with the strongest viral component are very, very promising.”

Mandi Frishman agrees. “Social represents an excellent opportunity for anyone who wants a better understanding of whether their value proposition is on target,” she said. “Build campaigns that test the strength of the value proposition by gauging engagement, awareness and purchases related to different types of messaging.”

Finally, it’s time to get scientific. Wave goodbye to social media, and use PPC ads and landing pages to actually test your value propositions and get some hard data and quantitative results.

Related Resources

Make Me Social – a social media strategy company

The 2^nd annual CMO’s guide to the social landscape

New Marketing Research: 3 profitable traffic sources most marketers are ignoring

Social Media Marketing: To tweet or to convert, that is the question