Ryan MacMillan

In response to the demands of planning and evaluating social media campaigns we’ve developed a framework for managing this. KUDOS is an acronym that reminds us of what attributes a piece of social media activity should display if it is to be successful. It should be Knowledgeable, Useful, Desirable, Open and Sharable. And it needs to achieve this for both the audience and the brand. By using this framework a brand will be able to plan so that it deploys the right activity. It can check and balance the needs of both brand and audience. It can also establish what it is going to measure so that it can assess the success or otherwise of the activity.

When planning a piece of social media we need to ask ourselves if it is going to be;

Knowledgeable

Does this activity demonstrate knowledge on the part of the brand? Is it something that you know about our product category that your competitors don’t? Is it knowledge that is unique to your brand, product or service? From the audience’s point of view you need to consider if its something they need or want to know. Are you increasing their knowledge or just telling them something they already know or could have gained elsewhere?

Useful

Not all of social media activity is useful to the brand’s audience. Not all dissemination of knowledge is actually useful to the brand. It might be commercially sensitive. It might promote an out of stock product or a discontinued service. The best-case scenario is when an activity is useful to both the brand and the audience such as with Amazon’s product ratings; the audience benefits by having unbiased reviews to help them make their decisions. Amazon benefits from the free content and additional product information for its audience. I’d add here that providing entertainment is actually useful. Ask any bored office worker, student or house bound parent – a good laugh has plenty of use.

Desirable

Thinking through the desirability of an activity can be a great check against what is assumed to be useful. By desirable we mean that both the brand and the audience actively want it. This is a step on from useful. Think of eating your greens; useful but not that desirable. Conversely, consider for a moment the joys of unlimited self saucing sticky date pudding – desirable – oh yes, but no, not actually that useful. If something is desirable, really tasty-can’t-get-enough-of-it desirable to your audience you’ll know it. The servers will fall over. Your hosting bill will go through the roof and you’ll get calls from the IT department over the weekend screaming about terabytes of data. Desirable is a can be a challenge because making something truly desirable is actually quite tricky.

Open

Used to the impression of control that broadcast media had previously afforded them, open is a concept that some brands have been struggling with. Open means honest and transparent. Not just about the parts of the message that are desirable to the brand, but about the whole lot, warts and all. An audience will respond very actively and negatively when they believe a brand has been dishonest with them. There are lost of examples of where brands have been dishonest and been caught. Don’t be one of them. It doesn’t even require active dishonesty – just a lack of intent to be completely open can come across badly.

Sharable

Another degree further of open is making the activity sharable. Are the materials easily downloadable? Can it be linked to or have you gone and wrapped them up in a big Flash movie that no one can link to? If it’s a Flash movie then there’s less material that can be shared in social book-marking sites like del.icio.us, Digg and Stumbleupon. It is as important as being open that the brand then follow that up by making the activity sharable by acknowledging standard protocols that enable sharing and by actively promoting sharing with a simple “Digg this” button or a downloadable Zip file of assets.

Measuring

This process of thinking through the KUDOS attributes will help a brand decide on what channel they are going to use and how they are going to use it. That decision making process can also result in deciding what the brand is going to measure to determine if those attributes have been met.