It has little to do with how many followers, friends of fans you have. And more to do with how you treat your customers and potential customers and ultimately how they value you as a business or commodity. The more advocates you have and the more vocal or influential they are, the greater your social currency.

Why You Should Care

It allows brands to stay on top of fluidity in the marketplace. This helps determining what a brand needs to change in order to stay on top and helps with longer-term customer relationship management (CRM).

How to Do it Right

FastCompany does a fine job of highlighting a few things to think about when planning to maximize your social currency.

Basically:

1. Determine whether you need to be in the socialscape. It really comes down to your product and where your customers are.

2. Figure out when and where. There’s something to be said for being in the right place at the right time. Learn your audience’s consumption habits to help with this.

3. Make it sincere. Humor is good – if it’s believable. Remember, you want credibility. If you can find a way to make it both entertaining and honest, you’re golden.

4. Make it useful. Give me tools or information that will help me do something faster, better, easier, etc. and I’m more likely to keep listening and maybe even share those tips on your behalf.

5. Get the right people to like you. It only takes a few — sometimes one — influential fans or non-fans to make or break you. If that fan has a lot of clout with her own followers and is vocal about you, you’ll get extended reach through her.

If you’re a brand participating in social media, you have a social currency. Question is: are you doing the right things to keep the currency flowing?

Here are some questions to ask when determining the right person to work with your company.

How would you handle:

1. An obscene comment on our blog?
2. A negative comment about our organization?
3. A bad experience with our product/service?
4. Questions about our product/service?
5. Low engagement?

It’s important to set-up diverse scenarios and think about risk planning before you launch your social media plan. What-if scenarios can be scary and hopefully they’ll never happen. But with the speed and domino effect of social media, you’ll be thankful you have them if something should occur.

Your ideal candidate needs to know your products/service and company well. And she needs to know who she can call upon in the company when she doesn’t know the answer.

You’ll also want this person to help you develop concrete content plans, including engagement activities. Plans should also include integration into and collaboration with other digital – and sometimes traditional — media. That means looking at the entire marketing and communications plan as a whole. It also involves understanding target audiences beyond demographics. What is going to interest your audience enough to cause them to take action?

These are just a few critical questions to think about when determining whether to budget for an intern or someone with real-world marketing experience.

What questions are you asking candidates?

Before setting up your blog you need to answer these questions:

1. What’s your schtick?

Clearly define what your blog is about and what it is not. Think of topics and subtopics. Do you have enough material to keep it going?

2. Have you done your research?

Who else is doing a blog on the same thing? What can you learn from them? How can you differentiate yourself?

3. Who do you want to read it?

You need a primary audience and a secondary audience. Of course there will always be unexpected guests. If you’re worried about those unintended targets reading your material, you need to rethink your blog.

4. What’s your goal?

It could be to educate, create awareness, increase sales/volunteers/participation/consideration, receive feedback or build community. It can have a combination of objectives, but I would limit it to not more than three. And make sure they are clearly defined.

5. Who will manage it?

You’ll need writers and an Editor(s) at a minimum. The more writers you have, the easier it’ll be to populate your blog. Your Editor should be passionate about the blog enough to keep it going. She’ll manage the content calendar, secure writers and posts, brainstorm article ideas, edit and write posts when necessary.

6. How often will you post?

If you want to attract readers and keep them coming back you need good content, but you also need consistent content. Set a cadence and maintain it or exceed it, but try not to fall below that. Once you lose a reader, chances are, you won’t get them back.

7. How will you get the word out?

Once you have a blog, you need to get readers. Use your existing social media profiles if your fans/followers are part of your target. If they are not, consider setting up new profiles that tie to your blog. Note that you’ll need to manage these new profiles just as you would your blog, though. They take attention and content strategy as well. Of course, these are just a few ways to build awareness and clicks. There are many other ways worth considering.

Once you answer these questions, you’ll be on your way to a better blog.

1. The creator did his homework — socially. In a recent Oprah interview, Ryan Murphy (one of the creators) stated how he combed the web for inspiration. He watched tons of YouTube show choir videos to see real life talent.

2. They do social right. Glee is not the first show to create social profiles for their fictional characters (read: Mad Men). Still, they stick to character and make it worthwhile to follow. Fan their Facebook page or follow the show on Twitter and you’ll get cool extras, such as premiere party pics, preview clips and more. Follow one of the characters (like Rachel Berry or Sue Sylvester) and you’ll get a daily dose of your favorite personalities. Each character even has his own Facebook page.

3. They build community. Gleeks everywhere have created profiles on Fox’s site to show their love of Glee. The community spotlights members, bubbles up recent activity and most active members and encourages members to contribute and interact with each other. You’ll also find a plethora of fans on YouTube posting tribute videos.

4. They involve fans. First with a wiki. That fans can edit. Second with an open call for auditions. That’s right. If you want to appear on the show’s second season, record one of Glee’s top tunes and upload it to MySpace.

When you want to keep your theme, tone and enthusiasm for your brand (in this case Glee) going strong online, remember all that Glee has done right.

Let me tackle the logo question first. Logos are, well, boring. If anyone wants to fan or follow your brand, I can bet they are already familiar with your logo. Give them an interesting icon that re-indentifies your brand with something they want to be a part of.

Here’s where a real person can make an impact. When the right person is enlisted, they can connect the brand with causes, personality, passion and captivating content.

Here are three companies that have embraced people as their brand’s voice:
1. Ford was smart when they picked Scott Monty. He’s helped build their social presence and allowed them to continue to introduce new ways to connect that are person-agnostic.

2. Zappos‘ CEO Tony Hsieh has done a tremendous job at giving followers an insight to what both he and the company are up to. A good mix of real life and interestingness.

3. Kodak enlisted blogger and design aficionado Jennifer Cisney to interact on Twitter. Too bad they didn’t do the same for their Facebook Fan page.

If you must forgo the real person, here are some examples of brands using their product to identify themselves:
1. Mad Men. I love that they’ve used a picture of Don Draper. I would take it even farther by rotating pictures of the cast and lose the “Mad Men” type. It’s not crisp and  doesn’t look polished.

2. Vitamin Water. They embrace what’s current. The NCAA basketball tells me they support the tournament in some way and I get it right away.

3. Seventeen (and on Twitter), Elle, Glamour. All (and I’m sure other magazines are doing this as well) tell me what I can find inside the most current issue. In a round about way, this is connecting the brand with a person.

4. Panera Bread. Yum. Yum. Need I say more?

So back to the question about letting your social community bond with your brand evangelist only to have the ambassador give you two weeks notice down the road. The key is to maintain your community and be transparent with them. Here’s how:

1. If there’s time, allow the brand evangelist to inform the community of the change about to happen. This should be done with a plan in mind.
2. If someone new will be taking over, allow the current evangelist to introduce the new person.
3. If 1 and 2 are not options, a brand representative should engage with the community and identify themselves as such.
4. If sentiment and metrics show that the community is healthy with a brand evangelist, it’s best to maintain that humanistic approach.
5. Consider your biggest advocates inside the community as possible candidates. But note their (in)experience in actual community management.

Remember, it takes time for fans and followers to connect with a real person. While you’ll want your brand evangelists to evoke the same passion for the brand, they shouldn’t be doppelgangers. Therefore, your community dynamic may evolve. And that’s just part of real community.

NOTE: This post originally appeared on Threeminds.

A Social Network
If you consider the definition of a blog from Wikipedia, most of us would agree that a blog it is not. Look at their social network definition. It connects individuals by “one or more specific types of interdependency.” Think friends, family, colleagues, beliefs, interests…

Neither a Blog Nor A Social Network
While some of us at Organic argured that Twitter is a social network, David Lewis pointed out that it lacks one crucial element of what most of them offer: the ability to see the whole conversation. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone use an obscure hashtag. If the tweet is intriguing enough I may search the hashtag and try to sift through the conversation to figure out what they’re really talking about. The majority of the time this doesn’t work. I leave the page just as confused as when I entered. Just like in the real world it’s not always easy to edge your way into conversations.

To add to the social confusion, it’s tough to follow complete conversations. I haven’t found one place that displays the complete thread of a conversation between two or more people on Twitter. You see @so&so respond to @her and you wonder what it is that @her asked in the first place. Because of all of this Lori Laurent Smith feels the company should coin a completely “new phrase to define itself.”

Marta Strickland thinks “platform” best categorizes it. And that might be the closest as it’s the tool people are using in three distinct ways. It’s the people who use it most often who are really defining it.

For One-Way Blasts
Clearly everyone has a different view of what twitter is [to them]. It is what you make it. It’s no more than an entertainment channel to some. They might be simply reading for enjoyment or posting into the abyss. Others are onboard to stay informed or absorb learnings from experts in their industry. In both cases, it acts as a distribution channel.

For Two-Way Dialogues
Direct Messages allow two people to carry on a completely closed conversation. I’ve seen a couple brands use this as a way to send their RSS feeds. Okay, so I see the blast more readily, but why wouldn’t you want to include the rest of the Twitter Universe in on the news? Not the most effect use of two-way conversation.

For Multi-Way Conversations
Twitter is also good at facilitating the exchange of ideas. More people are accessing Twitter via various channels (think Seesmic, TweetDeck and TweekGrid, just to name a few) in order to do this more effectively. Organized Twitter Parties use the platform as a kind of live chat, so even if you’re not following someone, you can join in the conversation using a predetermined hashtag. Usually a moderator presents questions or thought-starters in an attempt to keep the conversation on track. Still, it can be tough to keep up. Read a transcript and you’ll see what I mean.

Twitter Now
Twitter is evolving. It’s not the same today as it was when it was started back in 2006. So, it’s not surprising that we have so much trouble defining it. Craig Ritchie claims, “Twitter owns the now.” For some, true. If you’re interested in the conversation right now, then it has you.

But I can bet that your definition of twitter has even changed now that you’ve read this. What was Twitter to you one year ago? What is Twitter to you now?

NOTE: This post originally appeared on Threeminds. Thanks to David, Lori, Marta and Craig for their viewpoints on this subject.

How often do you visit a museum alone? Me? I honestly can’t recall if I ever have. I usually find someone I can talk into seeing the latest art exhibit or science exhibit with me. And that’s part of the joy of seeing the exhibit — being able to talk about it with someone.

I was at Cranbrook Institute of Science Friday evening. It was the first time I had been there in probably close to 10 years and not much had changed…except I noticed a seemingly small addition to one of the text descriptions. A phone number with a call to action to use your mobile and hear more about the exhibit. I didn’t take advantage of this because I was trying to keep a rambunctious 2-year-old from running too far out of my sight. But it was very intriguing.

For The Pre-Planners
There’s been a growing trend for museums to offer audio guides as free podcasts. MoMa has a pretty comprehensive, growing collection of both audio and video guides via iTunes. Not sure when I’ll see the collection in person, but I’m tempted to listen to the podcast nonetheless. That poses a problem for spontaneous visitors (as was my case with the science museum trip with my son).

For the Spontaneous
I often get sucked into renting the laborious, sometimes over-priced audio guides. However, I’d love to ditch those for something more portable, personal and… spontaneous.

Say you are browsing a museum and stumble upon a piece that truly intrigues you and the write up just doesn’t do it justice. You don’t want to know everything about every piece in the museum. But maybe it’s just that one piece. Your mobile phone is resting quietly in your pocket. Bingo.

If the information on the mobile recording is comprehensive, I would love to see this in more museums that you only visit once in an eon. It would have especially come in handy on my recent trip to Rome and Florence. Before I left, I downloaded Rick Steve’s podcasts on The Roman Forum, The Sistine Chapel, The Academia and The Uffizi Gallery. We visited even more museums than that and more than once I was left wondering what significance the piece I was looking at held.

What’s Missing
Still, whatever happened to unguided immersions? Degas said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” I realize that guides are meant to entice more people to visit and understand what’s being shown at a museum. Why stop there? Instead of only education, museums should be encouraging immersion, conversation.

Here are some ways they could prompt conversation about your visit:
1. With tickets, give visitors a conversation starter. Something like, “What’s your favorite piece and why?” You could even have them text their answer to display on the museum’s website.
2. Create an app that uses the GPS on your phone track your route thru the museum. It then updates your Facebook status telling your friends what you’re looking at with picture of a main piece in that area. It also asks them what they think of the piece.
3. Allow visitors to text their thoughts about key pieces from their phone. Reviews are displayed on a video monitor in the lobby or cafe of the museum and also on the museum’s website and social properties.

Increasing Awareness
Talking about the exhibits increases awareness, leads to exposure. This is good for the museums, curators and artists. Aren’t you more likely to make it to a special exhibit if someone you know is talking about it?

When you’re visiting a museum this weekend — yes, please step away from your screen and get out there and take in an exhibit or two — take a look at how many people are actually talking with someone else about the work.

What are more ways curators could make their exhibits more social?

NOTE: This post originally appeared on Threeminds.