The Social Mediasphere is an Emotional Place

A point of challenge for business looking to engage in Social Media, whether for marketing, sales or customer service, is one word; emtions. Having read an excellent post today on the Collective Thoughts blog about “empathy” in Social Media engagement, this brought to light the emotional element of Social Media.

As marketers and communicators in business know, sadness, death and misery are not great value propositions or call-outs to promote a company or service. Marketing and communications is about creating positive energy and showing a beneficial outcome. Rightfully, you want people to feel good about buying your products or services. Even a funeral home sells comfort, a more positive emotion, to families of the deceased.

People engaged in Social Media, consumers, artists, just plain potential prospects, engage in Social Media because they can say/write/show whatever they want. Many channels in Social Media can be a barometer on how people “feel” about themselves, others, products, services or their world around them.

This certainly does lead to a need to have true “empathy” when engaging in Social Media as a company as Shana Albert points out in her blog. This represents a challenge for a company, as it means by being empathetic the “organizational whole” must then develop an emotional engagement with their market. Does “emotion” then become a key component in a company’s brand strategy? Certainly a customer service department worker has to develop empathy when speaking with a customer. But how do you translate that into your overall Social Media strategy?

If you are a small or large company, people will talk about you. It may not always be positive and it may reach a very wide audience. How you respond requires empathy and an understanding of the emotional graph of the Social Mediasphere. We’re not suggesting weeping alongside your customers. But simply being aware of Social Media as a medium primarily driven by emotions, can help in the formulation and management of ones Social Media engagement.

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.

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“)

PR Crises and Social Media; What’s Your Plan?

A bad news story for your company hits traditional media. You kick in the standard damage control processes and try to move beyond the issue; it’s always worked before. Except this time a prominent or even not so prominent blogger picks it up…and it spreads. Have the rules changed? Can you move beyond the story like before?

Certainly, except it may take a little longer than before, and there may be “aftershocks”. When the Blogosphere picks up on a story it can suddenly take on a life of its own. Sometimes there’s no real need to respond, other times you must respond. There are ways to manage a crisis point with Social Media, but the issue can stay hot in the Social Media world a little longer.

In most bad news incidents, the best strategy is to acknowledge the issue, state your proposed resolution and then move on to more positive stories, knowing that in traditional media, the story will blow over fairly quickly. Bloggers and microbloggers however, can add their own opinions and what was a small issue spirals out of control. Not responding can make the perceived issue worse and carry on for weeks or months.

Deciding whether or not to respond is something you need to determine with your PR team or Social Media agency. Deciding how you respond is key, along with follow up. Once you’ve said something in the Social Media sphere, it will live on. This means you may be held accountable at a later date as someone may inquire in a few months to see if you’ve lived up to the proposed solution. If not, you’ll suddenly have another crisis, this is what we call “aftershocks.” Developing a good plan for a PR crisis should always include the Social Media angle today.

With Social Media, the vital point to remember is that a story can live on far longer and resurface at any time. Sometimes you can take the high road and not respond, deflection is still very much possible, but going about it is very different in Social Media.

Social Media, Kids Toys and Corporate Strategy? Yup.

Marketers want to maximize revenue from Social Media. Companies are struggling to learn new conversation skills in the Social Media realm. Perhaps we can garner some perspective from childrens’ toys. Not the ones parents buy in a store. We’re talking the ones that get made of cardboard boxes, string, tape, markers and craft paper. The toys kids really play with. Continue reading »