Corporate Social Media

Recently, I have been talking to a number of start-ups about building a business from the ground up marketed through social channels.  There is no question that it is easier to make two-way communications a part of the lifeblood of your organization if you are starting from scratch.  It is probably one of the reasons that we are seeing larger organizations who are having such a hard time figuring out governance and structure when it comes to utilizing social.

If you are looking to build a company that embraces social, and you do not have a current client set, I think there are a few steps that you can take to make the process of “going viral” a realistic possibility.

1. Listen to what people in your target pool are saying – Most new companies have identified a pretty large set of individuals who can use their products or services.  Understand who is actually using social channels first, and then figure out what resonates with that target audience. 

If you are a service that provides access to ”green” products, find out the largest set of people who are engaged on social media discussing similar topic areas.  Let’s say that there a lot of people in many different demographics discussing “green”.  Great, that’s an opportunity for future growth.  But maybe mothers with young children take up over 60% of the conversation related to “green”.  Well, start there, and see what they are looking for.  When they talk about products, are the products for themselves or their children?  Let’s say that they are talking about personal products for themselves (services, personal care, etc.)

2. Develop relationships/partnerships with companies who provide these items – If you want to reach mothers who are looking for “green” personal products, you want to have products and partnerships with your service that resonate with this group.  Perhaps, you go after local businesses in your region that provide these products.  Build up a portfolio of as many companies in perhaps Ohio who provide green products.  Most businesses are happy to be included as part of new channels to get their product to market, so work on creating this first.

3. Engage with your target audience - Once you have set up adequate relationships to make it worth the while of mothers to start talking about your product and how you can provide local “green” personal products to mothers, get the word out.  Tell bloggers that your service provides access to over X different companies in the Ohio area who deliver the products that their audience is looking for.  If you are providing value, these individuals will help to spread awareness of your service.

I think a lot of new businesses are thinking about social in the back of their minds, but they are not thinking about how they can build their business to strategically utilize social and current discussions.  In this example, if you simply build partnerships with all “green” businesses without focus (personal hygiene, solar equipment, restaurants, etc.), you may just not resonate with any specific group.  And then it can be a long hard road to readjusting your vision, as you subsequently see where the interest is coming from.

With the proliferation of spoofs on social media gurus and sites mocking the generalization that some social media professionals are offering to clients, I think there is a real need within the social media consulting community to actually figure out what can help clients today.  Too much advice is driven by hype, and a bit more rigor needs to be applied to the overall discussion around how to attack social media.  If you work in PR, marketing or sales, there is a sense that organizations need to do something to engage and monitor conversation happening around the brand.  But do we all need to start tweeting and figuring out our Foursquare strategy right away?  Probably not.  We may actually never need to look at those tools.  Never.

Lots of people have said it before, but the technology is secondary to the strategy.

Marketing - If you are a marketer, first look for the places where individuals are talking about your brand.  Don’t waste time trying to figure out how you are going to engage.  Too often organizations will spin their wheels thinking about engagement when they could just use forums as places to actually market their products and services.  So today, really understand who is talking about you, what they are saying, and where they are saying it.  Refine your message, and advertise based on what you learn.  Want to create an engaging social media widget?  Great.  That’s step two.

PR - If you work in public relations, you want to control the message around your brand.  First things first.  When someone says something that is blatantly false, help make corrections and provide simple transparent content that does that.  Whether it’s a paid monitoring tool or not that gives you insight to these conversations, focus on the negative.  As a PR professional, you want to keep the message clear.  Step two is creating a conversation with people who love you, people who are not sure how they feel… and driving more conversations that emphasis this message.  I think PR is a bit further along with social media, so being more proactive on listening and engaging is something that you can do.  But focus on the message, and address conversations that are off-message first.

Sales- Of all the functions that can suffer from analysis paralysis, there is no function that can fall into this trap more than the sales function.  Developing new business is usually high-touch and often a really difficult endeavour.  There are businesses who are making sales by looking on social media, but this can often be a long process.  If your Marketing and PR team focuses on advertising and message within social media, they have you generally covered.  After all, these groups, especially Marketing, are designed to drive sales.  So setup your monitoring tools to look specifically for individuals who are looking to buy now.  If you are up for the challenge, go ahead and engage those individuals.  Otherwise work in conjunction with Marketing and PR to be aware of the conversations that are occurring on social media.  While there are a few industries which may benefit from directly talking to individuals discussing an imminent purchase, this is an extremely difficult thing to do.  Wait for the tools (and the associated algorithms/processing) to get better, and then revisit using social media from the direct view of a sales function.

If you can attack these ideas first, there will be plenty of time to use other (much cooler) ways to get involved with social media.  Let’s get back to running a business!

There’s a real danger today as functional groups within organizations begin to take on social media.  Who will take ownership of social media, and what purpose will this technology serve for the organization as a whole?  Will it be marketing… or for that matter, PR, product, sales, or R&D… that takes the reigns of tackling this?  The reality is that no single group should be aligning itself with social media alone.

Social media is the definition of a method of communication. That’s it.

It means that individuals can now have conversations with their friends, companies and governments in a way that they never could before.  Everyone can talk to everyone.

It’s open and public dialogue, and people talk about what they want to talk about.

If you read between the lines, I am saying that people don’t talk about things that do not interest them.  And there lies the danger of aligning traditional marketing goals with social media.  A lot of people are not listening to the conversations that are currently taking place, and then going straight for what they know whether it be the fundamental principles of marketing, PR, etc.

I think it’s easier to see with an example (this is not from a specific client, but a generalization from what we see).

CASE STUDY

Imagine you work in Marketing for a large credit card company. 

Here’s what you know - We market our credit cards to college students, and they are highly profitable.  Typically, they stay loyal to credit card brands over the course of time.  In addition, they hold balances, but eventually pay them off in order to maintain good credit.  College students generally will have increasing salaries over the course of time, and will thus spend more money with us.  Bottom line – College students should be pursued to become new customers of our credit card.

Here’s what you find listening to social media – College students really don’t talk about credit cards with their friends on social networks.  On the other hand, there are a lot of other groups talking about credit cards in reference to your company and your competitors.

Here’s what you think - If we use the right marketing, we can figure out a way to reach college students through social media, if we make the content and tone engaging.  They are a profitable group, so we should probably attack that demographic first.  In addition, they are one of the most active demographics in social media, so it might be easier to engage this group.

Here’s what can happen- It turns out that college students actually do not care enough about credit card companies, APRs and annual fees, especially when it comes to sharing with their friends and communities.  The social media assets that we setup to engage this group begin to accumulate dust, and eventually we think that the social media does not provide adequate ROI.

What we could have done

If we think of social media more as communication method, then maybe we could have started first by listening to who is actually communicating about credit cards.  Are these positive conversations or negative ones?  Maybe it’s newly married couples, entrepreneurs or people starting new jobs. 

Then we need to understand what they are saying.  Consolidating credit cards between couples, financing a new project or increasing credit limits…

And then we need to find ways to answer their questions, and engage with them.  This may involve monitoring, engaging or building social media assets.

But I think we all need to go through this exercise whether we are Marketing, PR or Sales professionals.  Who is talking about us, what are they saying, and can we make that experience better by engaging more closely based on what we do?

Social media is not marketing, but a communication tool that can make some parts of marketing more effective for our business as well as our customers.

With the recent flurry of news and blog posts on mobile social networks like Foursquare, there is a sense that these networks really have a shot of taking this all the way.  On Thursday, Foursquare announced that they had over a quarter million people “check-in”to some physical location in a single day.  That’s pretty impressive, and while there has been hype around Loopt and Gowalla, there is a sense that Foursquare has the momentum to actually make something of this attention.

To take a quick step back, Foursquare and its competitors are services that allow people to broadcast out their location to their network.  When you go to a restaurant or store, you “check-in” to that location, and do two things.  One, you tell your friends that you at a specific place, and two, you let the store owner know that you are there.  Why would you do this?  Well, the most loyal person (most checked-in visits) can become the “mayor” of that establishment, and they get some bonus for being sucha great customer.  Maybe a free coffee or pitcher of beer, as well as the social capital of being the mayor.

When we think about this from a branding level, this is some amazing data to have at your fingertips as a marketer.  And all of this information is supplied by your customer, broadcast to his/her network and verified by GPS as being accurate.  Couple that with profile data and incentives, and you have an army of bonafide brand ambassadors.  And apparently, over a quarter million people are already putting their location onto the airwaves.  Scary but exciting stuff.

I think what’s unique about Foursquare is that they are actively taking advantage of the current attention to their service to forge relationships with major media companies as well as with retail stores like Starbucks.  In addition, as the Economist reports, there are a number of stars that have aligned to put Foursquare in the right place at the right time.  The prevalence of smart phones, unlimited data plans, GPS accurate devices and a slew of applications that can take advantage of this information have put companies like Foursquare in the sweet spot of winning the race.

While I don’t believe that mobile social networks are going to become fully mainstream anytime soon, I do think that consumer facing companies should start experimenting with how they can use these tools to drive revenue and increase customer loyalty.  According to the Economist article that I referenced earlier, “Juniper Research predicts that global revenues from location-based services could soar to $12.7 billion by 2014, up from $3 billion last year”.  Even if this is an exaggerated figure, there is surely a sense that it’s worth playing a game of peek-a-boo with your customers to see if they are up for it.  There’s a lot of money at stake here.

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.

New product releases are one of the hardest things to undertake from a marketing perspective.  On the one hand, you’re taking a huge risk on an innovative idea.  On the other, you have no idea how the market will react, what aspect of the product it will like and who the exact target demographic will be.  I recently met with a digital marketing manager at FMCG company about a recent product launch, and it made me think about how Social Media could help the company react quickly with its marketing message… at least from a digital perspective.

• Ask for comments – If you have a brand that is going to get people excited and coming straight to your website to learn more about the new product, come right out and ask for comments.  Put up a product blog and respond back to comments as they come in. 
• Setup channels – In addition to a product blog, setup a separate Facebook page and Twitter account for your product and direct people to create buzz.
• Look for conversations – People are going to be talking about the product launch on other channels as well, and it’s probably a good idea to listen in to what they are saying.  Here’s where you can get some really meaty information on what people like about your product and what they really think.
• Engage in conversations – Once you start listening to conversations, become a part of them.  Talk to your customers directly, and ask for suggestions.

And once you have all of this free flowing dialogue, use it!  Feed it back into the way your company markets and distributes the product over the upcoming weeks.  Digital marketing allows you to change things on the fly, so take new social insight and put it into action immediately.  Normally, you would only have one chance, but now you have the foresight of your customers.