Social media can help to make communication frictionless.  But what does that mean when we talk about its role helping a brand.  All too often, we forget that a brand should be using social media to drive business objectives.  Just because we like having conversations on Facebook or Twitter with our friends, it should not direct an organization to spend the bulk of its time trying to have conversations with it’s customers just because it is part of a social media strategy.

People get caught up talking about the warm and fuzzy feelings that customers will have towards a brand through social media.  And this can be a barrier to think about how this medium can really be helpful.  We need to refocus on the sales funnel, and think about how social can assist throughout.  A sales funnel typically consists of basic variations of the following five stages: awareness, interest, engagement, conversion and advocacy.  It is definitely easier to use social media to focus on engagement and advocacy, especially since that’s where people are talking, but often the interest and awareness part of the funnel gets neglected in the process.

Given the high percentage of people online researching and evaluating before making purchases, it would make sense for organizations to use social media to communicate and meet potential customers at the earlier stages as well.  This typically means content creation, and there is nothing wrong with putting together content that is branded and marketed to answer the questions and concerns of a buying public.

People know that you are a brand.  You are not going to fool them by being on Facebook.  So, act like one.  Listen to what people want to know, and provide them the information that can move them from awareness to interest to engagement.  Marketing and sales have not changed.  It’s just the medium and method, so don’t forget any of the steps along the way.

Outside of the typical Coca-Colas and Pizza Huts of the world, a lot of smaller brands are wondering what a couple postings a day can really do to impact their brand.  A lot of people say to me, “Sure it’s great that there is something being said about my company, but it’s not like there are 500 postings a day.  What’s the point of really looking at this stuff?  Isn’t it just going to take more time out an already busy day?”

Two answers.  First answer: yes, it is going to take time out of your day.  No question.  Especially, if you want to address this appropriately.  Second answer: this definitely has the potential to affect your brand in a material way.  So take the time

Let’s take a look at the Engagement Pyramid from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell (a great book about the impact that social media is having on businesses and what to do about it):

Without going too much into the pyramid, the point here is that there are significantly less people talking (or creating content) than those listening to what people are saying.  Even a few people talking about your brand a day can have an impact on your business.  And people generally write when they have something to say.  Usually it’s because they had a very positive or negative experience with your brand or company.  You should try to understand and maybe even turnaround the bad ones… and embrace and convert the good ones into your ambassadors.

If we go back to the point about small brands versus large brands, think about it this way.  If you’re an online company making t-shirts or a 50 chain restaurant across the Midwest, even 100 posts over a month can be more coverage than you’re going to get from a local newspaper and definitely cheaper than running a marketing campaign.  Start listening to what people are saying, and figure out how to make social media work for you.  It’s reaching a lot more people than you may first think.

With the recent social media uprising against Nestle and it use of palm oil from questionable sources, there has been another call to action for corporations to actively manage their social media presence.  There is obviously a lot of truth to what is being said by the activists, but there is also a good deal of hype involved.  A lot of the clients that I talk to are asking about the real value/threat that a few people twittering or blogging about their brand can bring, and the Wall Street Journal raises a similar question in the article cited above.  Will this outrage against palm oil practices materially affect the sales of Kit Kat bars?  Was the Domino’s pizza incident really that detrimental to the future sales and reputation of the company?  And what can you do as an organization to combat and avoid these incidents?

This week there was an article in the New York Times about how a portion of  the Republican backlash to the Obama administration’s policies, specifically around health reform, is driven sometimes more on faith than knowledge of the facts.  This is faith in what pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are saying rather than the actual merits of the health care bill.  A recent Pew Research Center poll found that while many people are strongly opposed to the new health care bill and the adminsitration’s policies, a good majority really did not know how the bill would affect their individual families.

To me, this points to a increased acceptance by the general population to trust sources for their ideas and beliefs without necessarily having the facts to back it up.  As we move further away from trusted reporters to a large multitude of content creators, people are making snap judgments and holding companies like Nestle to the fire, based on sources they consider trustworthy.  In this case, there is a significant level of truth to the claims of the activists, but my point is that companies need to start paying attention to what is being said about them… whether it is a columnist at the New York Times or a blogger in Indonesia.  We’re at a point where any idea can go viral given the right push.

So to my question about whether ideas and beliefs trump facts, I would say that companies and organizations need to be transparent and engage with clear facts that demonstrate their openness to the dialogue.  As a Nestle spokesperson remarked, this is not a time to get into an online shouting match.  It is the time to set the record straight by making sure that those creating hype are drowned out by truth rather than a one-sided approach.  By putting the straight facts out in as many channels as possible, a company can show that they understand the issues at hand and that they are working to resolve them.

It’s a new way to approach dialogue, and oftentimes a scary one.  But it’s the way forward for everyone who manages reputation in the social media landscape, whether it is a multinational company like Nestle or the current US administration.

I spent tonight at the World Affairs Council here in San Franciso listening to Jay Walsh, Head of Communications at the Wikimedia Foundation, talk about his organization.  The talk was titled: “A New Model for Global Collaboration”, and it was a deep dive into the history and size of the Wikimedia Foundation.  What I really want to talk about is what brands can get from wikis in general, as well as from Wikipedia, but here are the basic numbers from his presentation:

• 275 languages
• 340M unique visitors in a month
• 100,000 volunteers (about 10% who contribute more than 100 edits a month)
• 5th largest site globally according to ComScore (after Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook)… and it’s a non-profit
• Over a 1B edits since Wikipedia got started in 2001

What I think is really interesting is the total number of languages that are covered across the various Wikipedia sites as well as the sheer volume of the articles and edits.  We are not talking about straight translations of the English site, but rather unique versions on the same topic area.  A simple search of “Nintendo” in both Spanish and English will show that there are differences in both entries, and as Nintendo there is a lot you could learn about cultural and political biases or preferences by looking through these entries.  Collaboration tools like wikis across languages can help brands get a very focused idea about what a “neutral” point-of-view believes.

For large global brands like Nintendo, Coca Cola or Sony, organizations can begin to make observations across countries, languages and cultures as they look to bring products or services to new markets.  Jay presented a number of studies where Wikipedia in certain languages were broken up based on the type of content that they searched as well as the countries that searched within specific languages.  Undoubtedly, a corporation like Procter & Gamble or Pepsi could conduct similar types of studies on a more granular level.  Here are a few of the examples that the Wikimedia Foundation have put together from a macro-persepctive.

To take my Nintendo example one step further, the organization could look at how the company and its competitors are percieved across continents and languages.  Differences in opinions across games, genres, etc. could result in better content development and marketing campaigns.  Console decisions and strategy could be tweaked based on what certain groups look for out of gaming.  We are talking about research for marketing, strategy, sales and product development all through wiki analysis.

While we typically advise clients to use Social Media and wikis to manage their brand, I think there are some other very big implications of using wikis specifically.  By analyzing this level of data across wikis (which happen to have the advantage of being user-generated and social, while being seen as “neutral” through their unique crowd sourcing style model), a company can take advantage of global brand data that can help them make decisions across a number of topic areas in a very focused manner.

If there’s one thing that I learned working summers in resorts/hospitality, it’s that every customer is special.  Providing a unique and fulfilling experience to each and every customer can turn brand ambassadors out of a lot of people.  And that can result in repeat customers, great word of mouth reviews and overall success in your business.  With so many companies turning to Social Media (especially micro-blogs like Twitter) to monitor consumer sentiment and customer service issues, it’s important to think of this channel in the same way that Disney engages off-line in their parks and how Zappos engages online with shoe shoppers.

Employees need to be empowered to help frustrated or unhappy customers at the first point of contact.  This is a pretty scary thing to do, because there are so many points where the system can be gamed.  But ultimately, despite the inevitable gaming by a few, most of the brands that we respect and consider to be the most customer oriented offer immediate support.  I’ve now talked to a number of marketing directors who have taken this approach to Twitter, and I think it’s a great thing to do.  Granted that you may be rewarding some consumers for bad behavior, overall, most people complain on Social Media because they actually have a problem.  If you can help resolve their problem quickly and efficiently, that’s a lot of great PR and good faith value that you can take advantage of.

People love companies who listen, and I think this is the time to really put together a strategy for what type of empowerment you want to give your employees in the online world.  The reason that there has been so much talk about Zappos these days is that they have really made empowerment and customer service a part of their core cultural values.  And they have done it in an online forum.

So here it is.  Don’t say that you are going to respond to customer complaints on Social Media and leave it at that.  Think about how much empowerment you will give your front line to act upon issues that they see coming through the pipe.  Will it be a dollar value?  Will it be a level of service?  Will it be a phone call or email?  Spell these things out, put it on paper, and then your people can work to make your customers happier.

When it comes to brands and Social Media, what exactly does authenticity really mean?  In a recent podcast on Duct Tape Marketing, I heard Martin Lindstrom talk about how brands can have a similar neural response as the one that people have with their own religious faith.  If that’s the power that brands have on people, how transparent can or should a company become when they engage across Social Media.

I think everyone would agree that you cannot be overly transparent, but I would make the case that you need to make Social Media engagement a very deliberate approach.  Conversations should appear authentic, but they should be well grounded in the way that the brand aims to portray itself.  It sounds sinister or underhanded, but it really isn’t.  As more people enter the overall conversation, one-on-one engagement can still happen, but brands need to have well thought out strategies on how they will engage.  And there should be consistency.

Brands produce that neural response in people, because they represent something more.  Something beyond a simple company with a bunch of people working in it.  Social Media allows a company to open itself up so that their customers can take a peek in, and know that someone is listening and working to provide them the best possible product or service.  But at the same time, people want to keep brands to mean something more.  I think that you can only do that by tempering pure authenticity with strict brand guidelines that hold true not only for logos, documents, etc. but also for Social Media engagement.

Some of the more interesting conversations that I have had over the last couple weeks include talking to companies in the multi-level marketing (MLM) space with regards to social media.  On some level, MLM as a business model is the best example of how connected individuals and word of mouth marketing can be successful.  What has really been interesting is discovering that most of these organizations have not spent a great deal of attention trying to understand how they can utilize social media to build and bolster their businesses.

It’s an old business that has been run in a very conservative manner for as long as most people there can remember.  And the reason for it is simple.  They’re making a lot of money doing it the traditional way.

But as social media continues to grow in the mainstream, there is an increasing need to monitor, engage and strategically use those channels to think about brand and new business.  Here are a couple ways that MLMs can do this:

1. Managing corporate brand image – Until now, it has been very difficult to understand what it is that the field salesforce is doing outside of the overall corporate standards and perception.  Sure you can rent out huge convention halls and hold bi-annual meetings to ensure that culture and sales operations are in check, but how can you be sure that the brand is not being distorted.  MLM already has a lot of PR work on its hands, but with more and more people talking about it on the web, there needs to be a way to control the overall brand.  Using a monitoring tool to gauge sentiment and PR can help a MLM make sense of all of the information floating around.  As with any company in the new social media environment, the old PR system no longer applies, and it can make a huge difference to be on the cutting edge of what is effecting brand.
2. Product image and innovation – Besides the overall corporate image, it is also pretty important to understand what people think of their product and what they’d like to see.  At the end of the day, your salesforce can be great, but without a product that people like, there isn’t much point in having the salesforce.  Social media can be huge treasure trove of information detailing what people think about your products, the products of direct competitors and directions that they would like to see you go.  With products reaching consumers in so many non-traditional ways, this is great way to get insight about what they are actually want and think.
3. Growing the salesforce – This is an interesting area, but since a good deal of a company’s salesforce comes from other MLMs, there can be the added benefit here of looking for people in the business already.  Whether they are active on microblogs, message boards or blogs, salepeople are on the lookout for great opportunities.  If you could find great people in this way, there is a high likelihood that they will be easier to acquire and more successful in the overall business.

Traditionally, MLMs have focused on social networks to ensure consumers that their goods are the best out in the market.  As these networks shift to the web and social media, it will be necessary to think of the added benefits that this new medium can bring to an organization.  This will effect so many areas within a MLM organization that it will be imperative to start becoming a part of the social media framework today when companies can still experiment and discover what works best.