Facing the Social Media Monster

Rightfully,many businesses are looking at Social Media with a wary eye, as if it were some giant monster that might drag them out into the bright daylight and leave them helpless and stricken. It has happened. The CEO of JetBlue lost his job after bloggers and consumers watched their every move following a crisis with customer wait times and they failed to live up to the promises made in the Social Mediasphere. There are a growing number of such stories. There are some successes as well. Dell computers built an effective strategy and have adopted Social Media tools, including using Microblogs like Twitter. They have improved customer service and brought their share price back.

In most of the cases we have seen companies fail with Social Media and the monster has become all to real, it is due to the approach that was taken. Our work with clients (some quite large) has shown one of two primary approaches in Social Media engagement; 1) aggressively pushing a marketing message in a one-way approach for a quick sales hit and 2) simply trying to gain a competitive edge. In some cases we’ve seen the Board of Directors making this push and senior management feeling forced into Social Media. These will inevitably end in failure.

Fortunately, Social Media can be tamed, and become a veritable ally in hard times. The core elements of succeeding with Social Media is understanding it first, preferrably through outside organizations (for perspective) and by listening carefully before building the plan. A smaller company can move faster and adapt quicker to changes in Social Media, but like a larger organization, should have a carefully planned strategy. Ideally, engaging with Social Media programs should not be a full on charge. Greater success will come from starting slow and small and progressing as corporate knowledge of the mediums, channels and feedback is integrated into existing Best Practices. Engaging in Social Media for marketing, customer and investor relations or recruiting can be highly rewarding, but will inevitably lead to corporate change as we’ve discussed before.

The Social Media monster is not so bad when approached the right way. Does a company have to engage in Social Media? Certainly not, and for some sectors and industries, Social Media is not necessarily a good move, or should be engaged in a very small way. Social Media is not right for every business or government department, but it is worth “listening” and understanding it. Down the road, it may be time to engage.

There Is No Technology In Social Media

Technology has absolutely nothing to do with Social Media. While you might use certain technology to access Social Media, it actually much the same as a car. You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. All you need to do is learn to turn the keys, shift the gears and steer. Cars were adopted by the mainstream public when they became very easy to use and required very little mechanical knowledge to operate.

Social Media has been so successful simply because the underlying technology has reached the same point as mass adoption of vehicles. Over the past twenty years, three whole generations have learned to use software applications and computers in general. The 35 and below demographic grew up with computers throughout their schooling and many use them in their daily jobs. The 35-45 bracket is a smaller component of Western demographics, falling into the post-Baby Boom and Pre-Echo generations, and even this group has a strong familiarity with computing applications. Now the Echo Generation is hitting the workforce and they’re using the Social Web with gusto.

If you look and Internet use and adoption, as the technical skills required to access and use the Web became less, adoption grew. Very rapidly. In conjunction with ease of use of software, more reliable software and better speeds of access, so did computer prices fall – including Apple computers. The advent of the BlackBerry and iPhone have driven this adoption of devices even more. Now WiFi and wireless Web access are driving the use of those devices and the applications are easier and easier to use.

As consumers, when we purchase a computer now, we don’t ask about the Linux kernel and lines of code. The marketers have taught us to look at size of hard drive (for all our videos and photo’s) processor speed (for games and apps) and wireless capability. Even these key points are not really “understood” from a technical perspective. We just know that an Intel Core Duo is faster than an old Pentium, but have no idea why. We’re just willing to pay for it. The failure of Vista as an OS was a good indicator of people understanding the technology they’re using. As Geoffrey Moore pointed out in Crossing the Chasm, adoption increases as the technology becomes buried. We are in the Mass Adoption phase with Social Media now because the underlying technology is not relevant.

Social Media and Web 2.0 applications are not about the technology, they are about sharing, conversing and ideas. In business Social Media applications, it is about improved processes and Best Practices. The learning curve on the applications is minimal. What we are learning with Social Media is a new set of conversation skills, for both consumers and companies. As business takes its first tentative steps into Social Media, they should not be turning to the IT department, they should be looking to the PR/Communications teams, HR, IR and marketing departments.

Laundry Soap, Social Media & Change

What could laundry soap possibly have to do with Social Media and change? Everything. It started back in the early 1920′s when advertising started to become a little more sophisticated. Then in the 1950′s, manufacturers woke up to the fact that women actually had more buying power than men. As TV adoption grew, manufacturers, like those making Laundry Soap, began to tailor their marketing at the buying audience. Business had begun to recognize consumer preference.

The more significant issue here is what this meant to the nature of business. Up until this point, issues like package design, market segmentation, demographics and psychographics meant little. A product was produced, sold by salesmen to distributors and off we went. Then along came Peter Drucker (management guru) and opened up the can of worms around marketing. It was highly controversial and many businesses resisted the deep impact corporate change this was causing. Large companies are all about processes and Best Practices – scalability to protect margins and shareholder value.

Social Media, beginning with Web 1.0 has been upsetting the apple cart. With the Social Web, this is even more so. Adopting and integrating Social Media into the enterprise will result in some profound change in the way the organization functions; and we don’t yet understand what all those changes are, or their economic impact on the enterprise.

Today we see that 100% of the Fortune 1000 have websites, as do 97% of businesses in the U.S., Canada and Europe. This process of implementing websites (Web 1.0) took about 8 years, and was a constant sea of change as technology kept progressing and consumers became more sophisticated. Add to the mix the easy transfer of money across the Web and changes in researched and established consumer behaviour and one can understand the challenges senior management faced in adopting the Web. The concept has been hard enough with Web 1.0 and essentially “static” websites.

Now consumers are engaging Social Media and suddenly they are saying to the Enterprise; “We want to talk with you. Not at you, but with you. We want you to talk with us, not at us.” Now consumers are saying they want eco-friendly laundry soap, long-lasting scented soap and so on. When the enterprise doesn’t respond, they shout, sometimes loudly and sometimes it has cost the CEO their job.

All of this represents a huge sea of changes in processes, Best Practices and communications procedures from previously well established channels of consumer communication. An additional challenge is that these commentaries by consumers are totally transparent to everyone – journalists, shareholders, board members, employees and competitors.

Some companies are embracing Social Media, some are dipping their toes (a great way to start) and some are completely shying away. Certain businesses will not really need to engage Social Media in the public sense, while others won’t and will suffer greatly a their competitors do. The “Tipping Point” has been reached however, there are enough people using Social Media services and enough traditional media picking up on Social Media stories that it is relevant. The challenge will be for companies to understand the impending changes and work to understand how to integrate a new set of best practices, policies and procedures into the organization.

(Excerpt from the eBook, “The Conversant Corporation“)

The Art of Listening & Ketchup in Social Media

Long before Social Media entered the mainstream, our parents and mentors told us to “listen”. We know that listening plays a key role in communicating with others. Effective listening is not just hearing either, it’s watching for visual cues given by the speaker. This fundamental of communication carries over to the “corporate entity”, which is striving to learn new “listening skills” as companies develop new conversation skills. How does Ketchup play a role in our listening outcomes?

So how does a company “listen”? While there are many tools such as Social Media monitoring services (there are over 40 and here’s a good list) and Business Intelligence applications, the concept of “Corporate Listening” goes beyond the available tools. You can have all the tools you want, but unless you know how to use them and have a philosophy around “listening” they will not serve very well. So how does a company develop these “Corporate Listening” skills?

It starts at the executive level with a concious decision to engage in “listening” as a whole; recognizing that your market is saying something (beyond the usual focus groups and surveys) and that what the company might learn may result in fundamental change. Take for example the Ketchup Conundrum as Malcolm Gladwell wrote about. You may discover that your market wants more. They may even be willing to pay for it and your revenues may increase. Do you want your competitor to know this before you? While Social Media may not immediately replace focus groups, it can give you insights you’d never uncover in a structured focus group.

When “listening” starts at this basic, philosophical level, then it is easier to decide, we argue, what you are listening for and where you need to be listening. Then you can decide on the appropriate tools to help you listen. Key to succeeding then, is deciding what you are going to do with what you learn. Once you connect to Social Media, you will hear about many aspects of your company; from HR issues to product usage. You also need a plan on how to manage, disseminate and integrate that commentary into the organization.

So “Corporate Listening” needs to be more than a marketing project and begins with a fundamental acknowledgement that your market is out there talking and you can benefit. So just as in real life, listening in the virtual world is critical to success in communicating with your market.

(Excerpt from eBook “Conversant Corporation“)

Social Media is Raw Feedback: How Do You Manage It?

Why do marketing and communications professionals struggle with the validity of Social Media? Perhaps because it is raw, unstructured, unfiltered and immediate. All of which is contrary to the marketing communications discipline. This post is inspired in part by Tony Steward following a recent Twebinar hosted by Radian6 (a leader in Social Media monitoring for PR and marketing) based around “listening”, which has fueled a lot of intense discussion amongst Social Media professionals.

Trained and/or experienced marketers and communicators have worked with a set of “listening” tools for many years; Focus Groups, Research (often done by 3rd parties), Telephone & Web surveys, spot surveys and customer support feeback. Often, the “listening” is done by contracted research houses and filtered back to the client. This has (and in many cases still does) work very well. Marketers work with promotions calendars and schedules all tied into budgets with projected ROI. Reports are given to senior management and campaigns measured and analysed for success and determining if they should be repeated. I suspect few consumers know the depth of work behind a “simple” ad campaign. Add into the fray marketing, PR and advertising agencies who execute (often very well) a lot of this work, and you have a complex set of rules and best practices.

Now toss in the ability of the consumer to immediately and instantly comment on their experience with a product and the ability for many others to also instantly provide feedback very openly and uncontrollably. This is raw, uninhibited feedback. There is no filtering and even the CEO or chairman of the board can see it. Regardless of whether it is negative or positive.

There are methodologies to deal with this collection and analysis of raw material, although few systems exist today. Mostly this can be somewhat filtered and organized through the use of monitoring tools (in marketing and PR there are approximately 60 monitoring products out there) but as Tony Steward aptly points out; what is the action that is taken? How does a company incorporate that feedback?

The implications run deep. They may also lead to entirely new ways of doing business. What do you think? How does a company, government department or non-profit learn to integrate such raw feedback alongside more structured “listening” tools?