When we first started managing online communities for our clients we were often confronted with the question; "But how many customers will want to come online and have a conversation about _____ (insert your category here)?" mmmmm.... 'There must be some, you have customers right?" The authors at Copernicus came to our rescue in their book Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head when they point out that in every category of product / service there are a group of interested and engaged customers happy to discuss and recommend.

This makes the seeding challenge not  (just)  'find participants' but 'make advocates aware there is a place where people with similar interests will gather'. The challenge with social media marketing is to find and attract the minority of customers highly engaged in your category. Then expose their passion and expertise to an audience that may be curious but is not really energised enough to make up their own mind from scratch - that is they are looking for recommendations from people like them, even if they are not close personal friends. This is a quite rational strategy for dealing with the overwhelming volume of information we now have available; Social networking as a consumer information processing strategy A recent report has tied this thought together nicely - Fluent Razorfish Social Influence Report. They report on the categories most likely to invoke interaction in a social context; the % of people who score the category 5 (in a 1-5 Likert scale).

1. Music&Entertainment - 21%
2. Technology & Electronics - 16%
3. Retail & Apparel - 10%
4. Travel - 9%
5. Auto - 8%
6. Home & Garden - 8%
7. Financial Services (Banks) - 5%

So in all categories, with differing proportions, we have a sub-set of customer interested and willing to discuss their interest with others. These are the raw ingredients of social marketing, (engaged customers + trust + competitive offering + WOM) = a social marketing strategy with legs. The Fluent report comments on trust, listing the sources most trusted for recommendations;  % giving 5 on a 1-5 scale for trust -

1. Offline friend - 29%  (consistent with the findings quoted in a previous post on P&G's Tremor research, confirming that 90% of influence occurs mouth to mouth).
2. TV Commercial (!) - 12%
3. Expert online review - 11%
4. Online friend - 9%
5. Social network ad - 7%
6. Online video ad - 6%
7. Online banner - 6%
8. Anonymous consumer review - 5%
9. Search engine result - 5%

What percentage of your customers are interested in having an online conversation with you / your category of products and services? Have you ever measured this percentage? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaJu89iyEhw&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]