Today I stumbled upon a very interesting infographic and related blog article published by the young Mexican social media marketing expert Rosaura Ochoa ^[1] who lives in Minneapolis. Rosaura wrote an important checklist, also supported by the stunning infographic below, for all those brands who want to succeed when engaging with their target audience through social media network: the Six Basic Principles for Social Brands.

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The article from Rosaura is so good that I decided to use it as a case of the month, simply “passing on” Rosaura’s fine social media thinking and insight to my English readers and followers. I strongly advice to those who speak Spanish to check out Rosaura’s social media blog ^[3] in search of other social media inspirations. She got it totally right with the blog design, and also with her editorial and content strategies. Her articles about, for example, 5 tools to understand Twitter ^[4],  Instagram’s data ^[5], Starting small is the best social media strategy ^[6], Who likes what: demography of social media networks ^[7] or The influence of Foursquare ^[8], just to name a few, have been interesting and inspiring readings for me last weekend. Rosaura also likes infographics (me too! and I guess every marketer does…) and she loves to create new ones when she’s not blogging about the latest cool infographics around in social media marketing. In brief, the RSS subscription to her blog is strongly suggested.

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Now on with the topic and task of this blog article, which is to translate in English the information contained in the cool infographic about the Six Basic Principles for Social Brands (”Seis Principios Para Socializar Tu Marca ^[12]“). The Six Basic Principles for Social Brands are: Characterization, Democratization, Vocalization, Systematization, Harmonization and Visualization. Let’s give all six principle a closer look with the translation of the processes described by Rosaura’s infographic – I will add some comments at the end of each point. I will start with Democratization, even if the infographic tempt me to consider Characterization as a first step – perhaps a 40° clockwise rotation of the elements of the infographic would help.

^[13]DEMOCRATIZATION

Good advice from Rosaura: fluid, fresh and frank communication is key in social media networking, specially from a brand. And social, as we know, it’s not “about me” but “about them”, so listen to your users instead of pushing content their way. I would have included the last bit with the next principle, as I see this being covered by the release of a social media policy, but it’s a good fit also here in terms of democratization of the brand. By the way, my advice to avoid potential brand crisis via comment is “The Good, The Bad, but not The Ugly” – meaning that I always advice to accept good comments (of course!) but also bad ones, if on topic with the conversation and politely expressed by the user. Ugly comments, such as defamatory, trolls provocations or offensive language directed to a brand or to other users, get canceled straight away and flagged as abusive / spam.

^[14]CHARACTERIZATION

Rosaura here put the foundations for setting the entire social media marketing infrastructure. Define your social image (including eventual avatars) and tone and voice of communication and issue a social media policy ^[15] not only to define rules of engagement, but also to protect your brand, your brand representatives / social media operations team and last but not least your target audience.

^[16]VOCALIZATION

New channels need new tone of voice, and social networks need a social attitude, beside of a socially acceptable tone and voice of communication. After all your users know that they are interacting with a brand, but they also know that there are human behind such interaction, so let them feel that human voice and touch. So reinvent your brand for the social media space – both visually, verbally and socially. And don’t forget that keywords are always the key to get found, also in social media marketing (here I could open a big thread on social media optimization ^[17], but I prefer to give you a link to a previous blog post on the topic).

^[18]SYSTEMATIZATION

Here we go, gearing up for operations: editorial plans, content, social media optimization and content viralization – plus  social media marketing dashboards and monitoring/publishing tools. Rosaura got it all covered under the definition of channels, content strategies and media asset optimization, with a focus on the tools that your media marketing operation team will have to use to manage your social brand.

^[19]HARMONIZATION

Internal awareness on the social media relevance, strategics and company commitment, alongside with the coordination among company departments to unify (and optimize) the content of the communication, before of its tone and voice, has always been the hardest work for a brand social media marketer. This is why Rosaura suggests that all social media efforts should be concentrated to one single department. By doing so it will be easier to provide a solid and ongoing training support to your social media marketing operation, publishing and front end team, and it will be easier also in terms of having one focal point for all company communications to converge (by simply adopting a few organizational policies that define processes and internal fluxes) before “going social”.

^[20]VISUALIZATION

As I said at the beginning of this post, Rosaura obviously love infographics, and in this case she is even more on the spot with it. Because analytics its not only the way to measure the success of your online activities, it is also the key to management buy in for your social media marketing strategies, plans and budgets. Nobody, specially at executive levels, want to spend hours checking infinite spreadsheets full of data (unless you are not an analytics geek), and the powerful bird-eye representation and immediate focus on the most relevant insights can definitely save time when presenting campaign / channel results for budgeting or quarterly review purposes – specially if your company still invest massively on traditional media so the time dedicated in a meeting to the online/social could be sometimes chopped down to a bare elevator’s pitch.

^[21]Good job, Rosaura! Before closing this article, let me share with you a little “gem” from Rosaura’s  production, a video on “How to build a company using social media” that she produced with nice visuals and animations out of a classic infographic from 2009 that I still use today in my presentations, as it is actual today as it was two years ago (the image here on the right – click on it to enlarge it). Rosaura’s video is from the same year (2009), and it must have been a big production effort from her, as she didn’t just retweeted/linked to/published the original infographic, or simply translated it into Spanish – she extracted and isolated all key insights, adding capturing animations (like those made by Jess3 ^[22]) to educate to social media strategies the Spanish speaking world of marketing, a mission she is pursuing also through her activity as radio show host ^[23] on social media marketing topics, or through her busy Twitter ^[24] and YouTube ^[25] accounts. Kudos again to Rosaura Ochoa!

Enjoy her animated infographic video! (infovideo? infomotiongraphic?)