Sparkpeople.com is a free social network that supports its users in their weight loss journey and relies on its users to sustain the community and the site. With obesity, health and wellness being at the forefront for everyone—First Lady Michelle Obama had chosen this as one of her key mandates for this year—Sparkpeople.com is a great universal cost free tool and a way for many to get support, encouragement and education to stay on track and attain success with meeting their weight loss and fitness goals. CNN contributor and writer Ashley Fantz has written a great article about the value and success that many have found by participating in the Sparkpeople.com community.

The excitement of knowing that there is a free place where you can receive support, education and build relationships that extend beyond the virtual borders into real life, adds a dimension not just to businesses but for anyone looking for ways to connect and engage with others—who have like minded interests, passions and goals. Amazing!

Best Nicole

Spark friends Rebecca Coats and Eve Rasmussen run in the Surf City marathon in Huntington Beach, California, February 7

CNN) — Becki Coats was embarrassed, so embarrassed that she didn’t want to show pictures of herself with her new grandchild.

“I couldn’t stand thinking about people saying, ‘Oh, my, what happened to you,’” she said. “Well, I’d become a fat, cuddly grandmother who cannot play with her own grandbaby, that’s what.”

Coats weighed 230 pounds. At 49, she was too heavy — and sidelined with herniated disks and a bum knee — to do her job as a firefighter, so her bosses gave her a desk job. But her physical pain was no match for the anguish to come when over the next year and a half her teenage son died in a car wreck, her mother died and she lost a friend to cancer.

“It was just constant bad news. I was told that if I didn’t lose weight, I was going to lose my job entirely,” she said.

Required to attend a work fitness program, Coats learned about Sparkpeople.com, a free fitness social networking site that, like Facebook, relies on its users to sustain it. They provide basic biographical information and weight loss goals and are automatically transferred to Spark Teams, small chat groups bound by similar shape-up goals.

The ad-supported site lets users build their own Sparkpages — which can be linked to Facebook — and have access to the lively written Sparkblog, which offers advice from certified trainers, the latest health articles and studies and recipes.

When Coats logged on she was connected with seven other women in a “40-something with 25 to 49 pounds to lose” message board. She quickly felt a kinship with these women she’d never met.

“They were talking about life — jobs, husbands, their kids, traveling, getting to know each other like they were your girlfriends sitting at your kitchen table having coffee,” she said. “It’s not like you sign on and it’s all about ‘Drop that weight!’

“Here were women who are going to encourage me to get off my butt but weren’t going to judge me if I didn’t look like a swimsuit model in six months,” she said.

Coats and several of the other women in her chat group met for the first time earlier this month to run the Surf City Marathon in Huntington Beach, California. Each ran a different distance, and they met at the finish line.

“It meant a lot to us to do this together, something that each of us never considered that we’d ever do,” she said.

Spark was launched 10 years ago by a wealthy early eBay investor. It is among the best known secrets in the weight-loss world. According to Comscore, it’s the most visited fitness site with 7 million users (162 million page views in January), but Spark has taken a low-key, word-of-mouth approach compared to its big bucks advertising competitors like Weight Watchers.

“Spark is built on a truth that people love feeling like they’re needed on a team,” said founder Chris Downie who, along with two business partners, sold his late 1990s online auction site to eBay for a reported $72 million and started Spark.

Downie spends much of his day in his Silicon Valley home messaging back and forth with Spark users or reading what people are talking about in the Sparkcafe. (On February 3, among the 798,784 cafe chatters, nearly 10,000 people were involved in a “Should you eat breakfast?” thread.)

“I always had shyness and anxiety as a kid, and I wanted to create something that would allow users to remain comfortably anonymous if they wanted but still connect,” Downie said.

“The key to me is that I felt supported and not judged,” said Jennifer Lang, an upstate New York psychotherapist who is part of the group. After having her fourth child at 41, Lang weighed 228 pounds.

“I had not exercised in 20 years,” she said. “Really. In 20 years. It just wasn’t a part of my life until it had to become my life or else.”

She found Spark while surfing the Internet and joined other Spark groups, including the pointedly named “Mothers with 2-year-olds.” She faithfully filled in her nutrition tracker every day, a function that not only automates calories but tells you when you type in “Dannon yogurt” what the heck’s really in that container and whether it’s really good for you. It also provides ideas for substitute meals. Spark’s software won’t allow someone to program a diet less than 1,200 calories a day.

A year later, Lang is 50 pounds lighter.

Stories like Lang’s and Coats’ are ubiquitous on Spark. CNN.com signed on to the site and messaged with several users who said they’d shed 5 to 100 pounds.

Many said they didn’t even mind being sent the flurry of Spark e-mails they say didn’t strike them as spam. A few examples: “Where to find the nearest running trail near your home” and “5 Ways to Avoid Hitting the Snooze.” A hip and glute stretch video was short and direct, and another e-mail containing a low-cal recipe did not, like so many in its genre, produce food that tastes like cardboard.

As Lang got healthier, Tammy Rhones signed onto the women’s chat group as “Marathon Mom,” even though the 49-year-old’s problems with weight and a clubbed foot sidelined her from most sports over the past few years.

“I never got past being that little girl who thought she couldn’t run,” she said, describing how she would watch Ironman competitions with amazement at the monster triathlon. A trainer told her about Sparkpeople.

Shortly after registering, Spark “woggers” (runners who walk) began sending her instant messages, motivating her to join a real-life running club to work on her foot. Months later, in a burst of extra motivation, Rhones completed a 2.4 mile ocean swimming competition and 150-mile bike ride. She also started competing in Spark’s online 5K and 10K races where users post their real-life mileage. It might take a week, but in the virtual races, the first one to complete the total distance wins.

“I’ve always had a competitive side, but Spark has given me the chance to appreciate my successes as opposed to comparing myself to everyone else,” Rhones said after running the half portion of the Surf City marathon. “I don’t need to look at a magazine anymore and say, ‘Oh I need to strive for that.’ I’m a size 12, not a size 6, and I’m happy with that, that’s OK.”

Today’s article comes from Mashable.com, written by freelance CNN entertainment correspondent, Melissa Jun Rowley. Her article shows several examples of how businesses are now leveraging social media as a vital resource and tool “to trigger a viral chain reaction and interest to the socially responsible work they are doing.”

Engaging with your customers to find out what matters to them and sharing with them by supporting the causes that they believe is most important. And it’s a sure fire way to build an ongoing transparent relationship that is going to keep that customer coming back!

Best Nicole

A cultural and corporate shift is taking place in the world. The result of things like the current economic climate and recognition of global climate change, society is starting to push past awareness and into action. As this transition takes hold, companies are evolving from their reactive states, and moving toward more pro-active approaches. Social media has begun to play a key role in how companies shape their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and present themselves as good corporate citizens.

Corporate Social Responsibility

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Until recently, corporate social responsibility among businesses has revolved around risk mitigation and self-regulation. Instilled to make sure companies would abide by the law and perform ethically, CSR has focused predominantly on issues of overtime in factories and sexual harassment.Today, CSR functions as more than just a set of guidelines to keep companies out of trouble. Because the end goal for corporations has risen above simply selling a product or service, the standard for CSR is being redefined and is evolving as a driver of innovation. The bottom line is now three-fold, and is centered around people, planet, and profit. As business leaders strive to build more sustainable and socially responsible entities, formal social media strategies are becoming paramount.Panelists at the Justmeans Social Media for Sustainability conference, which was held in San Francisco last month, offered some insights on how social media can aid companies in being more socially responsible.Social Media & Sustainability from melissajunrowley.com on Vimeo.

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1. Getting to Know Your Constituents

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There was a time when companies issued press releases, and operated under the impression that they controlled the message of their brand. Those days are gone. Today, the brand image is linked to the thoughts and conversations of a company’s consumers. Therefore, businesses must get to know their constituents.By sparking authentic and transparent conversations via social media, companies are can learn what their stakeholders expect of them. Absolute transparency, no holds barred, is key.Entrepreneur, Jeffrey Hollender, the Executive Chairperson of the green products company Seventh Generation, says most corporations are not nearly transparent enough. “It’s a mistake for companies to think that they cannot tell the truth and hide anything they do,” said Hollender. “Whether it’s a customer, or an employee, or a reporter, someone will disclose a corporation’s dirty little secrets.”

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2. Influencing Customers as Citizens

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In this age of digital democracy, social media allows companies to influence and view the behavior of their customers after a product or service is bought. In the same vein, more and more consumers are self-identifying themselves as individuals who want to continue ongoing relationships with a business or brand.The dialogue exchanged between customers and companies can be highly beneficial for both sides, and build and strengthen a sense of community, which is the fundamental purpose of social media. When consumers are treated as citizens, they can do everything from helping a company amplify its voice, to voting on the style of a new product, to improving a service.

Hollender says Seventh Generation uses social media to involve the company’s community members with the creation and branding of new products. “We communicate with our people about everything from how they can help us magnify our green message, to what scent we should choose for our next eco-friendly laundry detergent,” said Hollender.

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3. Getting Your Good Work Out There

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A growing number of businesses are leveraging social media to trigger a viral chain reaction of interest around the socially responsible work they’re doing. More and more companies are talking with customers and stakeholders about causes of interest to them, and about how they can work together to have a positive impact on the world.

Chip giant Intel is using social media to improve its earth-friendly consciousness, and to engage with other parts of the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector and consumers. Intel’s Director of Corporate Responsibility, Michael Jacobson, says his department takes advantage of social media by marketing the positive ways Intel is working to minimize its global carbon emissions, as well as the entire industry’s.“There was a time when we only focused on reducing own environmental footprint,” said Jacobson. “Today, we look for ways to help reduce CO2 emissions across the board, and we do that by talking with our stakeholders individually through social media.

Online networking can help significantly improve a brand’s image externally, as well as boost company morale, which is what Nike is focusing on currently. The shoe giant recently launched an internal social media network called the We Portal, which serves as a platform for employees to discuss ways they can socially engage with one another, and how the company can be more sustainable.

Nike’s Digital Advocacy Director Laura Adams says social media has become instrumental in Nike’s evolution as a brand and as a socially responsible and more sustainable enterprise. “At the end of the day, it’s the people out doing work that are going to get us to achieve our goals,” said Adams.

Now there are no excuses. What are you waiting for? Get social!

Best Nicole

I just finished recognizing 13 highly effective social applications in the Forrester Groundswell Awards.

What hit me about this year’s winners were that they prove that excellence in social media can come from anywhere.

The consumer and employee winners sell car races, yarn, security software, credit scores, books, and shipping. The B2B winners sell computer products, marketing services, online services, regulatory compliance services, environmental services and enterprise risk services.

The finalists came from a diverse set of industries including travel, education, retail, financial services, auto, media, wine, weight-loss help, insurance and steel manufacturing. Not to mention a product that lets women go the bathroom standing up.

The methods are diverse, too. The winners included online market-research communities, blogs, podcasts, a word-of-mouth campaign and online communities. Finalists used YouTube, widgets, avatars, idea communities, Facebook and online events. And a number of successful entrants created campaigns that spanned multiple social channels.

The geographic diversity wasn’t as great, but one winner was from Australia and one finalist came from Brazil. In the past we’ve gotten some fantastic European entries.

Look, people, the message is this: Do not tell me you cannot do this. People in every country and in every industry, with all sorts of customers and all sorts of management and all sorts of objectives are creating not only innovative but incredibly effective social applications. I’ve worked with six insurance companies in the last two years. I just talked to a bunch of milk-processing executives (”got social?”). I have yet to find a company, an industry or a geography that can’t benefit from connecting its customers with each other through social.

There are no excuses left. Just do it.

I can’t stress enough the value that is waiting  for all of you who are hesitant to dive in. Connecting and engaging with your customer is only going to enhance your relationship—which in turn will turn into increased sales, repeat sales and additional sales to your customer’s friends. Are you  ready to gain the sales you have lost and build upon that to get more sales in this new economy? Let us know. We want to hear from you.

Best Nicole

In a post at the Viral Garden blog, Mack Collier discusses why so many companies struggle to launch and maintain active online communities. To find success, you’ll need more than a message board and good intentions, he says. Here’s some of his advice:

• Communities grow and thrive when you offer members something of value. “[They] do not form around the idea of being monetized,” he says. “Want to make money off your community? Fine, but you can’t monetize something that doesn’t exist.”
• They don’t materialize out of thin air. “One of the biggest myths about online community building is ‘if you build it, they will come,’” says Collier. He suggests reaching out to your target audience and explaining why they’ll benefit from participation.
• They benefit from the enthusiastic support of key participants. Some members will take a natural lead—identify these evangelists and show your appreciation. “Empower them to promote your community to others,” he says. “Showcase their contributions. And above all else, say thank you.”

The Po!nt: Don’t take anything for granted, and have a clear purpose. “[B]efore you start your online community-building effort,” advises Collier, “think about where you are, and where you want to be. Is the goal to make money, or is the goal to create a group of happy people?”

Source: Viral Garden. Click here for the full post.

We say all the time we don’t want to make them think, we want to engage them! What are you saying?

Best Nicole

Marketers today understand that consumers think, feel and react differently than June Cleaver did 50 years ago. We use descriptors like fickle, indecisive and disloyal to describe the modern consumer because consumers have too many choices — multiple brands, brand extensions and sub-brands — and too much stimulation, especially online, making it nearly impossible to predict their next move.

Yet despite their fickle nature, millions of marketing dollars are spent trying to understand and predict consumer behavior. It’s as though they’re still chasing June Cleaver when neither her modern counterparts nor today’s consumerism as a whole bear any resemblance to the past.

So what can marketers do? They can start by grasping the profound societal and technological changes that define today’s new consumerism. Rather than predicting a consumer’s next move, marketers should focus on forming meaningful brand relationships by listening to and actively engaging consumers.

Identity Crisis
The fact that no two consumers are exactly alike is a given in marketing. And now, marketers are starting to realize that individual consumers bring with them a whole new set of complexities; individuals themselves have identities that shift with context.

Consumers may represent themselves one way in the LinkedIn business network, and another on Facebook with friends. Each of these unique identities has its own idiosyncrasies, so when they are in one context — e.g., a busy mom chatting on onechicmama.com — they’re more receptive to some brands, perhaps recipes from Kraft, and totally closed to others.

In order to understand the busy June Cleaver, marketers need to listen to her. Listening is critical for a more meaningful relationship between brands and consumers. Before this happens, however, brands must embrace today’s cultural shift toward more open and adaptive communications across the social Web.

What Won’t Work
Traditional research is no longer well-suited to understanding and engaging consumers on the open, flexible Web. In order to build relationships with ever-evolving, persona-shifting consumers, marketers need new strategies and approaches that are built around continuous and programmatic listening.

For companies getting started, it is important to determine how to sustain continuous connections to customers. Would a purpose-built social network or public online community work? What about an integrated marketing campaign that uses state-of the-art Web and site analytics along with newsletters and customized email? While these approaches can be part of a larger marketing effort, they can’t help brands truly understand, engage and sustain long-term relationships with today’s multi-contextual consumer.

What Does Work
If you want to understand, engage and sustain, you’ll need to embrace three tenets of new consumerism: listening, relationship-building and empowerment.

Marketers too often confuse willingness to buy as evidence of a relationship; it’s not. Brands must earn the right to have meaningful relationships with their consumers, and this isn’t accomplished by special offers and personalization alone. Like personal relationships, brand relationships are built upon trust that is earned over multiple exchanges and eventually feels natural instead of contrived. If you establish intimacy with your customers — providing an ongoing, intimate forum to dig deeper and share the many facets of their different personas — you’re entitled to ask more of the relationship. You’ve earned that.

Listening — real listening — is one of the most powerful and often misunderstood “disciplines” of marketing. Social media monitoring, for example, is a great early warning system, but it isn’t really listening. Effective listening can’t be keyword-driven alone; it must be done with sensitivity to nuances and with a finely tuned ear for discovering unexpected insights.

One way to effectively listen to customers is through private online communities where brands can begin to understand how customers negotiate changes in their lives. Through communities, brands – like never before – have the means to be with consumers over time, building relationships and isolating the multidimensional voices of the consumer and being present so that they can really listen.

Empowerment is the final misunderstood tenet of new consumerism. Giving consumers a public forum to voice, vent or vindicate — perhaps a public social network or your blog — seems like empowerment, but it’s not. When you master listening and build a relationship with a consumer, you owe them something in return. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, what they want isn’t coupons or free stuff; they want to impact your brand. That’s real empowerment for today’s consumer.

In the end, consumers are most engaged when they realize a brand — perhaps yours — is actively helping them negotiate the changes in their complex lives, from how and where they communicate to what they consume. Give them this, and they’ll be empowered to dig deeper and explore more on your behalf. This also means that eventually you’ll offer more than simply a product or service to them; you’ll become “their brand.”

 It is for all of you who know that you must enter this new world of engagement that I post the article below. It provides you with 5 great ways to ensure that the social media strategy you implement will bring you the success that you are aiming to attain.

Best Nicole

Last October, Gartner unveiled a study that stated that by 2010, 60 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies with a web site will be involved in some form of online community that is utilized for customer relationship purposes. What the research also goes on to state is that 50 percent of those that set out and establish or become involved in these communities will fail in their efforts. That’s about 300 Fortune 1000 companies that will fail at social media: a striking number, especially in light of recent economic pitfalls.

If half of these Fortune 1000 companies — with all of their resources — will fail, does that give any hope to the smaller businesses who venture into the social media realm? To be fair, smaller companies tend to have some advantages, such as being able to act faster in their social media efforts due to the fact of less “red tape” to deal with. However, in this area of online marketing, what it basically comes down to for any size company is understanding what is really involved in launching a social media strategy.

A lot of companies hear the buzz word “social media” and think “oh I’ve got to have some of that,” or they see that their competitor is doing something in social media, so they think they need to match that without fully understanding what they want to do. These are recipes for failure in social media.

Success in social media requires some advance planning on your part, as well as some fundamental shifts in marketers’ attitudes toward online marketing. By following a few simple steps, you can avoid the fate of those 300 Fortune 1000 companies that will fail at social media over the next couple of years.

1. Identify Your Audience

Before you set off down the road of social media, it’s best to take the time and do some research into where your audience is holding conversations about you, your brand, or your industry. Your audience may be busy discussing your industry through a photo group on Flickr, and if you spend your time trying to get articles ranking on Digg because you read a cool article on a blog about Digg’s power to drive traffic, you’re really just wasting your resources.

By taking the time to identify where your audience is active in the social media sphere, you can save yourself a lot in both time and aggravation. Going to where the conversation is being held is one of the fundamental elements to social media success. If you don’t do the research to find out where your audience is engaged, you have no chance of connecting with them.

2. Define Your Success Measurements

How will you decide whether your social media efforts are truly successful? Unlike PPC (pay per click) and SEO (search engine optimization), the majority of social media efforts do not have a direct ROI measurement through traditional analytics. So how do companies determine if their efforts are worth the return?

The area of social media you are focusing on will determine the types of metrics you’ll need to look at. Let’s take an example of looking at video sharing. Most video sharing sites do not allow direct linking from the actual video into your site, they usually allow that in the description of the video, so how do you measure success if you can’t correlate links to clicks and purchases while viewers are watching a video? Companies have to step back from gauging success of social media with the amount of traffic generated or products bought in this case.

With video sharing you must look at other key factors such as the number of views, number of comments, how many links to the video are generated and even how many times the video has been favorited or how many stars it gets in ratings. There’s also the matter of how many subscribers to the channel the video generates to factor in as well. In essence, all of these factors are measuring the success of brand/product/company exposure, which are elements that can be measured.

3. Plan a Strategy that Includes All Stakeholders

Launching a big offline marketing campaign requires a strategy that involves marketing, sales, and other departments within an organization, and likely some outside vendors. Why should social media be any different? A social media strategy helps you plan for both the expected and unexpected. A social media strategy also helps to get all the key players on the same page, it brings all of your resources together and helps to make sure they are working with each other, rather than operating as separate silos.

Without an overall social media strategy, the potential for failure rises even higher. If one department is responsible for the social media efforts and they are just operating on the directions of “get us out there in the community,” failure is right around the corner. Anyone engaging customers in any medium needs to understand the company’s overall marketing goals, messaging, and customer service strategies.

In addition, if different stakeholders in your company are not communicating, you will eventually run into trouble when your social media efforts bear fruit. For example, if your strategy involves Digg and you manage to hit the front page, but you didn’t have IT involved, it’s possible that the onslaught of traffic Digg will send you will crash your site. If your Public Relations department promotes a special event for online participants and your SEO team wasn’t involved, your efforts may not rank well in the search engines.

Without a cohesive strategy, major blunders like these are more likely to happen, and the risk of your social media efforts failing increases tenfold.

4. Be Transparent

One of the quickest ways to fail in social media is to not be transparent about who you are and why you are “here.” Social media is really about building relationships in communities and the conversations you have. Relationships are built upon trust, and if that trust is broken in any way, your efforts are wasted.

When you become involved in a community, make sure from the start to share who you are, your relationship to the company, and your contact information. This tells the community you are “for real” and that you aren’t there to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.

If you plan on masquerading as a customer who uses your products and just loves them, you might want to think twice before employing this tactic. If you are found out to be an employee of the company by a community member, all trust is lost and your reputation within the community is destroyed. It usually goes downhill from there, with the possibility of a bigger PR nightmare once the mainstream media becomes involved.

5. Recognize that It’s Not About You

Companies can be very egotistical when it comes to marketing. For years, it’s been all about getting your message out there so the customer will buy your product or service. With social media, this kind of thinking will get you ignored, or could even cause a backlash against your company.

Social media is about building relationships, and it’s about conversations. Conversations involve more than just you pushing your carefully crafted message onto the consumer. Social media is about a community sharing experiences, and companies listening to that.

The old adage “God gave us two ears and only one mouth for a reason” speaks volumes for social media. Companies should be out there listening to end users, asking questions, looking for feedback, embracing new ways end users are utilizing their products and services. Forcing your prefabricated marketing message upon a social media community will only generate resentment and ultimately failure in social media.

Perhaps if companies take the time to work on some of these elements with their efforts in social media, fewer failures will be seen in 2010 than what Gartner has predicted. Social media can be a very effective way to get instant feedback that’s more “true” than even a focus group could give. Social media can also be a very effective and successful marketing tool, but only if companies take the time to strategically plan for it and not just rush into it head on.