Corporate Social Media

One of the reasons that I like reading white papers by the Altimeter Group is that the papers typically have a concise and implentable method to the madness.  For most of the clients that I work with, we are seeing an often chaotic approach to diving into Social Media.  Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett recently published a paper titled: Social Marketing Analytics – A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media.  I’ve included the paper from Slideshare below this post.

The thesis of the paper really is that “organizations that develop social media measurement strategies which align key success metrics with business objectives will evolve more quickly.”  Maybe this is something that is obvious, but it’s easier to say than to actually put into practice.  Sometimes a bit of structure can go along way, and the paper urges organizations first to think of their foray into Social Media as a learning experience that will build for the future.  I’ve said it before, but companies need to think about what their business objectives and requirements are before selecting a vendor or product.  Social Media is a tool.  Don’t start swinging that hammer until you know what it’s going to help you achieve.

Take the time to really map out what parts of your individual business unit (or entire corporate strategy) can benefit from two-way conversations.  For starters, the paper addresses four large business objectives: Foster Dialogue, Promote Advocacy, Facilitate Support and Spur Innovation.  From my perspective, these are successive objectives that can be addressed more fully as your organization takes action on each of the ones prior.

Most of our clients use monitoring tools to Foster Dialogue and Promote Advocacy, so it’s something that’s easier for me to talk about.  If you’re just starting out with Social Media, I would concentrate on really creating solid metrics around these two objectives first.  However, map out how you can use Social Media for the other two as well.  Having a plan and a clear sense of direction can help your organization ensure that your efforts are aligned with the proper growth of Social Media as it relates to your business.

Within Foster Dialogue, the paper points to three measurable KPIs: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement and Conversation Reach.  Conversation Reach is a bit harder to define, but probably the most important with respect to demonstrating ROI.  While they have created a general framework, it is imperative that you define relevant conversations first.  Which of your competitors do you want to track, and what aspects of the conversations around those competitors can actually affect your own business?  Based on experience, the hazy noise cloud of a thousand conversations can often lead to analysis paralysis.  Be concrete in what you are looking for today, and what you want to look for in the future.

Within Promote Advocacy, the paper points to three other KPIs: Active Advocates, Influential Advocates and Advocate Impact.  Again the last KPI (Advocate Impact) drives the most ROI, but right now this an extremely difficult piece to track.  Getting influencers highly tied into your sales and marketing efforts is the goal, but for most of our clients, that’s a long way away.  For the time being, I would stay focused on understanding where advocates both for your own organization as well as those of competitors are coming from.  Listen to their conversations, and try to discover where opportunities lie for high impact individuals to help drive campaign and product messages without injecting too much of a sales pitch into your own interactions with them.

Overall, the paper is relatively brief, and I would suggest taking a look for yourself.  The more metrics you can put in place from the beginning, the easier it will be to demonstrate the value of your future efforts.

Having gone to the panel, Stories from the Frontline - Building a Social Media Business, more than a couple weeks ago, and only recently having taken a read through the notes from my friend, Tan Lam who manages Social Media at Specialized Bikes, this is a post probably a bit late in the making.  But there are a lot of relevant ideas that I think are worth sharing.  The panel consisted of Benn Parr, Co-Editor, Mashable; Blake Cahill, Senior VP of Marketing, Visible Technologies; Louis Gray, Managing Director, New Media, Paladin Advisors Group; Emely Melton, Partner, Mayfield Fund;Augie Ray, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research; and Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp, Inc.

While it’s no surprise that the main topics touched upon hovered around localization, the focus of the panel centered on how companies can leverage social media to actually make money.  One of the major points, which I have made a number of times in this blog, is that there is going to be an ever increasing need for companies to take advantage of tools to parse the conversations happening out there.  Monitoring effectively and then taking action on those conversations that will have an impact on the bottom line is going to get harder and more important over time.

Social media is not a one size fits all.  It requires creativity and attention (in real-time), and for many local businesses, this is a pretty hard thing to do… or least get a handle on.  But for those smaller businesses who have been able to do it well, there are monetary rewards.  They are more nimble to react to what their customers want, and they are able to leverage the personality and culture of the company to make the conversation around their business more interesting.  Whether it’s the Koji BBQ truck in LA or even a Seattle based bag manufacturer like Tom Bihn, these are really the companies that are seeing results from engaging on social media.

In addition, shopping for a good number of people is a very social activity.  Mobile makes things local, and local makes things more personal.  It makes sense that social media can play a significant role in e-commerce especially when merged with technologies that are blurring the line between the virtual world and the physical world.  Whether it is the Monocle feature of the Yelp iPhone app or a check-in through Foursquare, we are beginning to see how companies can take advantage of social media to drive sales. 

I think there are two important points here. 

• If you’re a local business, you need to start experimenting with these new technologies today.  Especially if you want to stay ahead of the curve. 
• If you’re an entrepreneur, there are a lot of opportunities to make money by facilitating the transaction that can happen in social e-commerce.

But the final thought should always be that social media is a tool.  It is not the end goal, so think first about how you wish you could engage with your customers, and then see how these tools can help you achieve those goals more effectively and efficiently.

For a while now, most content creators have been relatively easy  to identify.  You know or can find out who writes news stories about things that you are interested in.  There are plenty of tools out there to help brands identify press sources and PR professionals who will write favorable content with respect to what you and your company are currently looking to launch.  But as our clients look to really engage across social media, sometimes it is hard to tell if a few key influencers who may or may not have a large following are worth investing the time and energy to engage.

What we are finding is that there is a real leap of faith and practice to make here.  For some brands, especially those with a technology focus or a passionate base of customers, it’s pretty simple to pinpoint the indivudals in a large bucket of content creators who can help push along the message.  But for most brands or even niche campaigns launched by larger brands, it can often feel like there isn’t enough out there to warrant the investment.

As marketers in a digital world, we need to start looking at this in a different way.  Whether you are a large behemoth of an organization or a much smaller one, the line between the NY Times and a blogger is quickly being blurred.  Everyone who tweets, blogs, etc. is putting up a sign post about your company or product that can be found through a search engine.  It’s a permanent record that is not going anywhere, and for every post or influencer that goes up, there are many more who are paying attention than those who are writing.

This is why a strong social media strategy is so important.  Set real goals everyday that have pointed achievable results over the long run.  Don’t waste too much time sifting through the chatter, but take a few minutes out of each day looking at what is being said about your company.  You don’t have to contribute a novel to each post, but thank people for good feedback and work to correct anything that may not be on point.  If you have planned out what you think is important, and how you will respond, I think that the often monumental task of engaging on social media can be a lot more manageable.

It’s a bit of a paradox.  On some level, we are still waiting for a greater percentage of the population to start generating new media content that will give companies further insight and direction on future product launches and opportunities.  On the other hand, many people think there is already too much noise floating around on the web.  What are we really waiting for, and will tools exist in the market to enable companies to quickly identify relevant posts, ignore the useless and act on the urgent?

I think between social media monitoring, social CRM and community tools, we are beginning to build the toolset necessary to cut through the noise.  This is why companies should start paying attention today.  This is not a one-size fits all type of approach.  Organizations need to understand what they are listening for before they can fine-tune these tools to help them take the appropriate actions.  In addition, this is a good starting point for companies to find out which types of conversations will affect their various business units.

When I talk to clients, I think they are still trying to figure out which parts of their organization will be able to use social media.  This is good, but clients also need to start thinking about social media as the communication channel that it is.  Ask each of the major functions in your organization which areas they think would benefit from two-way communications with the consumer, vendor or competitor.  This is a very different question than asking which function would benefit from social media.  By asking the first question, your organization can really begin to understand the value of the new medium, and thus can focus on using it to drive their businesses in a way that makes sense.

As the market matures, data volume increases, and enterprises ask for more out of social media, new products will emerge that have components of monitoring, CRM and community engagement.  If you have already had the experience and battle scars of working with these tools, I think your organization can be well ahead of the curve.

Today, I had the opportunity to hear John Ragsdale of TSIA talk a bit about the role that social media is playing and will continue to play in the customer service industry.  It’s interesting to note that while CRM took about 10 years to achieve adoption, we are seeing a pretty strong adoption of social media as a customer support tool within about 2 years.  Obviously, it’s still in a chaotic stage, but it’s quite significant to just have organizations embracing a new communication tool at such an early stage.  Based on some of the areas which John is currently researching, there is going to be huge push this year from corporate America to invest in social support systems.

When we talk about social support systems, we’re mainly talking about wikis, communities and forums.  This is the kind of stuff that companies like Lithium have been doing for their clients for a while now.  On some level, this type of support also includes Twitter posts and general questions coming through the social media ecosystem, but we’re mainly talking about these defined channels setup by the company to accept and answer questions.  Ideally those questions will be addressed by the community, but often a moderator will be required.

This is something that we tell our clients everyday as a basic use case for social media, and it’s great to see that companies are actively planning on investing money in social media as a real channel for helping their customers.  However, John did point out that there is no conclusive study that shows call volume to phone centers dropping in any material way (often not at all) as a result of these support systems.  However, based on my interactions with community managers in consumer facing business (non-enterprise), they are seeing increases in queries that would typically be routed to a call center.  Personally, I think that consumer facing companies will begin to achieve a savings on calls being replaced with social media inquiries, but it is going to take some time for the volume to increase and demonstrate a significant effect.

For this year, I agree with John that companies will look to find new ways for their customers to essentially help themselves.  While there is a strong interest in social media, there is a mismatch across the board with respect to the human resources dedicated to the space.  Until those resources are allocated, the emphasis will remain on building up a community that can support itself.

Slides from his presentation are below:

With the recent (and somewhat flat) IPO of QuinStreet, it got me thinking about how our clients can start to use the concepts of vertical marketing and social media in conjunction with each other.  It’s a way to strategically think about how organizations can increase social media exposure, and in turn justify the expenditure through a measurable ROI channel.

To take a quick step back, what do I mean by vertical marketing?  Vertical marketing, in the way that QuinStreet does it, essentially means setting up websites  that don’t necessarily have your brand on it, and then providing a lot of information around that vertical(mortgages, loans, online learning, etc.).  When you fill out a form that says that you want to hear more, QuinStreet essentially sends the lead over to a single or multiple companies who pay for those warm/hot leads.  And it’s not just companies like QuinStreet and ValueClick who are doing this.  Companies are doing this on their own, and it drives SEM as well as sales.

So how is this similar to social media?  For those of you who may not be familiar, there is a story from the book Groundswell (video below) that talks about how P&G created a website called BeingGirl.com to engage with young girls about their feminine problems.  It was an unbranded website that had a forum where these girls could ask  Iris, a psychologist hired by P&G questions that they might not feel comfortable asking their parents.  Each of Iris’ answers was followed by the simple line: “Good luck from BeingGirl.com.  Brought to you by Always Pads and Pantyliners and Tampax Tampons.”  According to P&G, this was 4 times more effective per dollar spent than traditional advertising. 

So with these two examples in mind, I think that there is a huge opportunity for organizations to use their engagment strategies to drive strong lead generation.

If you are not already running vertical sites to drive traffic, start monitoring social media channels to find out what your consumers are looking for.  A lot of the marketing execs who I talk to are trying to understand the topic areas that are already occurring across the overall conversation (related to their brand) in social media.  Figure this out, and then start building a site that is aligned with your company’s overall goals.  Obviously, easier said than done.

Once you have a site up, add social components to it so that your consumers can talk to each other as well as to your company.  This is not really something that either QuinStreet or ValueClick has done, but I think companies who build their own vertical sites can make this a priority.  Of course, be transparent in who you are while trying to provide a non-biased forum for consumers to get and share information.  And then provide unobtrusive links to drive traffic back to the sales funnel.  I think this type of strategy to lead generation can really help companies begin to justify the costs of social media and see revenue generating results.  Which is what we all really want in the end anyway.

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.

A few days ago, I was talking to a client about what the future of social media interactions might look like, and she remarked that it would be great if the Customer Service department could start telling Marketing what to do.  This, of course, was followed by a bit of laughter, because the chance of that happening today rarely happens in a very structured manner.  It’s actually a bit of a disconnect.  Marketers are looking to understand their customer better, Customer Service happens to actually know the customer better, and yet Marketing tends to largely ignore this huge channel of customer data.

With corporate social media channels funneling more inquiries to Customer Service in a written and historical record, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the relationship between Customer Service and Marketing… and probably with other business functions like Product Development and Sales as well.  When strategy consultants talk about changing processes and organizations to fit this new channel of communication, this is one area that we are specifically talking about. 

Rather than a few inaccurate or incomplete call logs, we now have full text details on the actual conversation that is taking place between customers and the folks in Customer Service who are helping them and listening to their issues.  What was the problem, what was the resolution, how did the customer react, and what did the customer ask for?  Based on this insight, we can drill down to the tiniest detail and make large scale improvements in the way we approach Marketing, Sales and Product Development. 

And the only way that organizations can do this is by paying close attention to what is happening within their Customer Service department.  The time is near for Customer Service to play a much larger role than it has in the past.  It is imperative that organizations begin to think about how they will channel the right information to the right groups.  I think it will involve three broad steps:

1. Define the type of information that each group (whether Marketing, Sales or Product Development) can benefit from knowing through the interactions that Customer Service has with your customers, and start pushing it out.

2. Provide guidancefrom the top to make sure that the information flowing from these channels is a high priority.  As your business units demonstrate to each other how they are using new insights, you will continue to see collaboration both inside and out of the organization.  Without the proper governance structure and leadership around social media, this can easily become a piece of insight that gets lost.  Start making it part of the lifeblood of your organization as Starbucks or Zappos has done.

3. Demand accountability from the executive team to provide metrics around how social media insight from the customer service function are being used.  Social media as a channel for growth can only work, if you set achievable metrics that are monitored and reported on often.

What do you think?  How can we begin bridging the gap between what Customer Service knows and what everyone else wants to (or should want to) know?

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.

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.