I just completed an integrated social media plan for a client. The plan will engage and activate their customers on social networks.

Customers that are engaged with the brand are more likely to buy products and services.

And they are more likely to refer.

This helps to establish the business case for social media.

A non-social media example underscoring this point is the way universities interact with their alumni. Check out your latest alumni magazine.

In mine I found 7 examples you can use right now to build a customer community:

1. User generated content. Alumni wrote 75% of the content in the magazine. In what ways can you incorporate customer content into your blog?

2. Icons. Images of new buildings, professors and innovations fill the pages of the magazine making me proud to associate with the community. What images are you sharing with customers in your coorespondence with them: clip art or photos that evoke a sense of identification with your company?

3. Context. On every page the alumni magazine reminds us of the history of the university, which is greater than any individual member. Reading through the magazine I feel a sense of being apart of something greater than me. What values does your company promote, which are bigger than it? Are you sharing those values with your customers?

4. Ceremony. Birth, death, marriage and accomplishments are ceremonies celebrated within the pages of the alumni magazine. What are the ceremonies you celebrate with your customers? (i.e., 1-800-Flowers is celebrating their customer’s birthdays on Facebook).

5. Featured members. The alumni magazine spotlights new alumni each month by honoring them with an interview. How do you honor your customers?

6. Togetherness. The alumni magazine invites fellow alumni to travel together. It encourages those who do to send pictures and features them in the magazine. This creates a sense of belonging that is real. How are you creating a sense of “togetherness” with your customers?

7. The Ask. A purpose of the alumni magazine is to raise money for the university. It does this in direct and indirect ways. Directly, it asks for contribution only once. Indirectly, the more you read the magazine, the more you identify with the community increasing the likeihood of donation. How are you asking customers for their business? And what value are you delivering before they do?

If you work in midtown Manhattan, you’re likely to know the food cart I’m talking about. It’s the one on 53rd and 6th with 30 people waiting in line. They’re waiting to eat middle eastern food sold from a cart the size of a mini-copper. And they wait at all hours. When I passed by at 10 pm at least 50 people were in line. When I asked them if the food was “that good” to merit the line, they responded, “well, I saw the line, so it must be.”

I believe the same psychology of lines applies to Twitter. So often people use following / follower ratio to determine who they want to follow before actually “trying the food.”

There are many ways to cause lines to form, yet far fewer to cook a great meal.

Vans is a brand that keeps true to its culture through social media.
The brand actively blogs, tweets and shares on social networks.

I recently interviewed Nikki Scoggins, the online communities development manager, to discuss Vans’ blog and participation in social networks.
Her fun, candid answers below give us an insight under the hood of Vans.

1. Why does Vans blog?

We blog to give us another way to connect on a casual level with our customers & fans. It’s a way to tell people about Vans-related phenomena (like sneaker customization) or random happenings that Vans actually has nothing to do with, but we find interesting. People do it on their own. Also, through the blog, Facebook, MySpace, & Twitter people can talk directly with us about their likes & dislikes….events & happenings in their world. I mean, people are online all the time anyway in social networks. Why not go where the people are, right? And anyway, of course, blogs are a great way to further our knowledge of how our products are being used. If a guy builds a giant chair made out of our sneakers I wouldn’t exactly put it on the front page of vans.com. It’s not the place for it. However, posting it on The Vans Blog and asking the artist why he felt he needed to make a giant chair out of Vans- getting the story about the person- is what I find most interesting and makes the best material to write about. (Is there really a giant Vans Chair? No, not yet. I am seeding. I need to see one. Haha!)

2. Who reads the Vans blog and why?

As far as I can gather, there’s not any particular type of person who reads the blog regularly.  I’ve connected it through all of our other networks so the range of person isn’t targeted at one audience. Certainly the majority of traffic is US, followed by Canada, the UK & France, but hey, I gotta give a big holler at my one reader in Azerbaijan, too. (I know where you are. What up, Google maps!) Some people could think that writing a blog about Vans would be boring and too restricting. You’d run out of content. In fact there’s so much out there, when you consider how many people wear Vans and have an emotional attachment to them, oftentimes I can’t keep up with all the material. Also, picking one topic & elaborating on it for more than a year certainly helps to understand the nuances of the culture behind it. I guess that’s why people keep coming back to it. It’s like looking under the hood of Vans.

3. How do you measure whether the blog is a success?

Ah! That’s a perfect follow up to the last question. I measure the success from two perspectives: connecting the people at Vans with the public & providing a conduit for the public to us. When people in my office learn something new about what one of our fans is doing with our product, they get excited.  When a fan feels more connected to us because we blog about DIY projects or something going on in their town, they get excited. That’s a success. That’s not supposed to sound all crazy altruistic, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

4. What’s your favorite Vans blog post?

Well, they aren’t terribly popular ones, but I really love finding the homemade commercials by kids on YouTube. They’re so sincere. They make up songs about Vans. They write bitchy skits about how nerds wear Sketchers and cool girls wear Vans and by wearing Vans you magically become Cinderella-awesome. Haha! I know I’m a sucker, but I used to make videos like that when I was little. It’s nostalgic.

As far as ones that readers like?

The Alexander Hamilton Vans

This one here where rapper Gata makes up his own slang

and the Coachella poloaROID RAGE! Study

5. In your “about” section on the blog you show a lot of personality. Do you feel free to be yourself on the blog?

Absolutely. The only things I stay away from are politics and religion. (I’m a Southern girl. That’s just not proper. Haha) Other than that, I am pretty down for whatever. Like I mentioned before, blogs are casual places. I can’t claim that I’m a versatile writer. I’m not about to win a national book award in my spare time. I write how I speak, but sans F-bombs as constant placeholders. Most people get my humor. Come on, I literally wrote about waffles this week. Occasionally, some people take me seriously. A while back I wrote about how a guy in a Facebook commercial for iPhone wouldn’t be my friend. Over the top sarcasm all over the place, right? After I’d written the post, I ended up exchanging emails with the guy in question. He works at an ad agency in Santa Monica, CA. We were quipping back and forth in the comments section, joking about adding each other on FB. Seriously, I wrote, “OMG LOL LMAO MAO ZEDONG” in the comments, so I figured it was pretty obvious that we were joking. Anyway this woman writes me back a long, “you need to respect yourself, honey” comment. It was hilarious! The moral of the story? Some people just don’t get it.

6. Have you used the Vans blog in any of your marketing efforts? If so, how?

Oh sure. Like I mentioned, it’s all part of our relationship marketing. When I post something, it goes on all of our networks. The Vans Blog is just one arm of the social networking program that I’m helping to build at Vans. No, I’m not making an ad, but I think the blog is something that rings true with our consumers. It comes from a sincere place.

7. What are a few blogs you personally enjoy?

For skate news: Skate Daily

Fecal Face’s NYC blog – Bryan Derbally & Todd Seelie are fantastic photographers. It lets me know what I’m missing and makes me want to move back east.

Design Sponge - Hooray to making things

Inspiration Resource

Music blogs: ah yes, the walrus & day trotter.

refinery 29’s blog

and of course I love the biggies like Gawker, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Cool Hunting is def a favorite.

Connect with Nikki on twitter.

What does the phrase “social media community” actually mean?

There are thousands of communities on many different platforms within social media, yet the single phrase persists.

Being apart of the social media community means several things to me:

Listening. To what your customers are saying about you and to see if your brand promise matches the brand experience.
Responding. There’s what you say and where you are saying it: whether it’s in a social media press release, your corporate blog, your Facebook page or bloggers’ comments.
Showing up. Attending events,  being visible in search with a social media footprint and paying attention.
Giving back. As Guy Kawasaki mentions, an important part of the social media community is helping others who cannot help you.

I recently asked my community on Twitter whether using Twitter is synonymous to being apart of the social media community. Here’s what they offered:

Robert Scoble wrote: “Do you say you are part of the telephone community cause you use a phone? So, why do that with social media? I’m just a human, not a SM’er.”

He raises an interesting point—just because someone uses a technology does not necessarily make them a part of a community. However, if the telephone were used only by 1/3 of 1% of the US population (like Twitter) and those who used it shared similar political and social ideas, and they often met up and celebrated the way they were using the telephone, I would call them a part of a community. Would you?