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!

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.

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.

Out of all of the stories that have come out about social media being successful at driving sales and traffic, I think the most impressive has come from the travel industry.  From Jet Blue’s All You Can Jet promotion to Travelzoo and Fly.com’s Real Time Flight Deals, there is tangible and proven way to make serious sales from micro-blogging.

I think there’s a lot that other companies can learn from this, but you also need to be prepared.

• Be ready- The scary thing about viral messages is that they can have a lot of impact in a very short amount of time.  You are hoping for a great deal of interest, so make sure that your organization and online channels have the capacity to take on a heavy burst of activity.  If there’s distribution or marketing dollars on the line, think about how you would react if your social media initiative has legs… or even wings.
• Be selective – Not every deal needs to be advertised, so only send out deals that are going to generate A LOT of buzz.  You don’t want to be the boy who cried wolf for every little thing that your company does, otherwise you will surely see a drop-off in interest.  But at the same time, keep your audience engaged by sending out deals regularly so that they remember to watch for specials.
• Be proactive – Don’t wait until everyone else in your industry is sending out deals through Twitter.  This is the time to show a little innovation and leadership.  Think of new ways to engage your customers and followers so that you are the one leading the conversation.

This is permission marketing at its best.  Your company’s fans and customers have given you permission to give them great deals, and their friends in turn have given them permission to send through ideas and information that they think is valuable.  But it could be a lot, so it’s not just a random exercise in new media marketing.  This is the new way to market.  They have asked for the sale, so now it simply up to you and organization to close it.

It’s now pretty standard for most consumer brands to have an official Twitter and Facebook account up and running.  At the very least, every company should have an account on the two platforms as strategy is slowly put into place.  But I think, on some level, these accounts are gathering dust or not working to their full potential when they could be out having and sparking conversations across the web today.

Why is that?  I think that fundamentally, it’s still not understood what social media can do from a business development  or sales perspective.  And so, people tend to put less weight into social media channels as a real marketing conduit.

Here’s a quick example of how I think Social Media needs to be framed for consumer companies:

Imagine that you are a marketing director for a large fashion retail brand, let’s say Express.  Then imagine that you have just stumbled on a group of girls in the mall who are talking about the new styles at Express and the other stores where they typically find the coolest and newest clothes.  Would you want to start a conversation with those girls?  Would you want to find out what they liked and didn’t like?  And most importantly, wouldn’t you offer them an incentive to come into Express and buy a couple items?

This is exactly what Social Media can help you do.  From a business development perspective, you can find consumers talking about your brand, and offer them incentives to check out your online store or get discounts on new purchases.  You can keep the conversation going by allowing them to become fans of your pages, and you can continue to incentivize them through additional discounts.  It’s more immediate and gratifying than mailers, and it allows you to really understand your customer.

Now you can approach that group of girls or guys in the mall and hundreds of groups just like theirs to drive traffic into your stores, both online and off.

I talked last week with the Marketing Director of chain of restaurants here on the West Coast in relation to the role of social media and how it can contribute to the bottom line.  The restaurants are not all branded the same, and I think that’s what makes this more applicable in the case of banquet halls, conferences, etc.

He told me that he had been able to increase the year’s sales by 32% simply by monitoring and engaging with social media.  For me, that’s pretty impressive.

He would simply look online for people looking to host weddings or bandquets in the general vicinity, and see if they wanted to come and take a look.  It almost seems like a no-brainer, and yet he was able to capture the market.  Consider how much a single additional sale can bring in, and it becomes evident that a bit of engagement for high revenue activities is completely justifiable.

Imagine knowing that there is a room full of people.  Your business is offering a great venue to hold a conference, have a wedding or through a banquet.  If you knew that there were a few people asking for a good place to hold their event, would you stay quiet?  We all know that the answer is “no”.  What if that room was full of event planners?  Then the answer would be a resounding “no”.  So why do people think it’s okay not to listen and engage with the conversations that are taking place online?

It’s not enough to say that there is no value in listening to the conversation.  Money is being left on the table, so put your ear to the ground and start listening today.

I had a great conversation today with the Director of Marketing at a major US attraction, and I stumbled on an idea to determine ROI across social media.

Traditionally, fliers and brochures are handed out throughout major cities to entice tourists and families to get a small percentage off their ticket purchase when they mention the ad that they have just seen.  Oftentimes, these attractions may also include those coupon codes on their fliers which the attractions will use to track ROI.

Using similar coupon codes for social media is a great way to not only increase sales, but to effectively monitor how well social media contributes to the bottom line.  There are hundreds of blogs and web pages that talk about the “Top 10 things to do in City X”, “The attractions you must see while you’re in City X”, etc.  Given the fact that the place where most families to research a trip before they fly is online, it makes a lot of sense to get exposure on all of these channels.

A simple, “Coming to New York City?  Make sure you visit our attraction which is one of the other great things to see and spend time. Be sure to book your tickets online or mention the following coupon code SOCIAL15 for 15% off“, is a great way to get exposure and increase sales.  The conversation of where to go in New York City for example is already happening.  Join the conversation, and see the results come through.

How do you find these blogs, forums and message boards?  Use a social media monitoring tool and learn the most impactable and influential places where you should start your focus.  Once you have the top blogs, slowly move yourself into the “magic middle” (blogs with at least 20 to 1000 active incoming links), and you will be set.  Does it take some time?  Initially, yes.  But once you have identified where you have the most impact, you can really start driving traffic.  It’s cheap and simple, and everyone should be doing it.