Corporate Social Media

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.

Talking to clients over the last few weeks, I am convinced that the best social media strategies can only be driven by an initial in-depth listening activity.  This means using a social media monitoring tool like Radian 6 or SM2 and taking the time to understand where conversations are coming from.  Not just the domains or websites that are making the most impact but rather the overall tone, topics and trigger points for social media chatter.

Who is talking about you, and do the rest even care? – Most large corporations have a varied set of target demographics, and those demographics have different needs and desires.  With such hype around social media, companies today are quickly developing social media assets that look cool and take advantage of new technologies. 

One of the big problems with this approach is that not every demographic who is interested in cool stuff is interested in your company.  It’s heartbreaking I know, but the 15-25 demographic is probably not actively on social media to talk about insurance, healthcare or banking.  If you’re in one of these sectors, spending cash on developing assets in an area where people don’t really care to have active conversations may result in a channel that under-utilized.  And that can be a big waste of money.

Focus on the conversation not the tools  - Of course, this is something that every person in social media will tell you, but will you have the presence of mind to make sure that you are not misled by the allure of shiny new toys?  Really understand what topics people are talking about, and think about how you can make the experience better through social media.  If it’s not going to make the experience better, then don’t invest money in developing social media assets just yet.  Wait until there is significant traffic around what can have an impact on your business, and then make the leap.

There are far too many companies spending money on social media initiatives without actually taking the time to analyze the data that is floating out there.  Pay a little extra on the front-end for tools and strategy, and make sure that your actions around social media realize results that you can be proud of.

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.

The latest issue of the Economist has done a thorough job (14 pages) in its Special Report of looking at the implications of the massive amounts of data floating around the internet and data warhouse around the globe, and how we’re all going to be able to handle it.  Given the fact that Cisco estimates the amount of traffic to increase to 667 exabytes (equivalent to 10M copies of the Economist)  by 2013, it’s a pretty good bet that business professionals involved with consumer generated media should be paying attention.

“In recent years, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15B on buying software firms specializing in data management and analytics.”  While not all organizations need to be making this level of investment, I can clearly see with our clients that dedicated and effective analysis of Social Media data is necessary to get the most out of listening and engagement tools.  When you don’t take the time to dig deep into the data they are receiving, there is a tendency to more confused by the additional information.  As one of the authors states, instead of finding a needle in a haystack, you’re just creating more hay.

While business intelligence is still a developing field, I think the next step is really going to be merging data from sales touch points with the data that is coming from Social Media.  “Wal-Mart handles more than 1M customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes”.  Using that data, Wal-Mart was able to make a correlation between approaching hurricanes and Pop-Tart buying (while people obviously buy flashlights and batteries, it also turns out that people buy Pop-Tarts as a storm approaches and they buckle down in their homes).  Imagine then, if Wal-Mart could take the large amounts of consumer generated media to make further correlations on what items sell under which market conditions.

In addition, “the IT industry is piling into business intelligence.  Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM and SAP are investing heavily in their consulting practices.  IBM has invested $12B in the past four years and is opening six analytics centers with 4,000 employees worldwide.”  We are seeing both management and technology consulting firms moving into Social Media mainly because Social Media is now becoming a bigger bear in terms of data overload than most large consumer facing organizations can handle and effectively analyze on their own.

The report also references a Swiss telecom operator (Cablecom) who reduced churn from 20% to 5% by looking at the volume of customer service calls.  If companies can make such significant achievements by evaluating such calls, there is an even greater opportuntity to look into the requests, complaints and observations being made by customers on microblogs and blogs on a constant cycle. 

When Best Buy identified the 7% of customers who made up the majority of buying (43%) through business intelligence analysis, they tailored their stores to meet the needs of those specific customers.  Tapping into the most influential content generators across the web related to your brand or that of your competitor has the potential to uncover even greater insights.

Through word clouds and theme graphs, many Social Media tools are already making insights easier to view.  Drilling down into these visual devices can help make the job of discovering and isolating certain areas of more interest easier.  As I talked about in my previous post about wikis and their role in gaining more understanding of the global view on products or organization, the report provides an example of a visualization across the edits made on Wikipedia.  The picture below is a visualization of the entry for “chocolate” and assigns “different colors to different users and shows how much of their contribution remains by the thickness of the line that represents it.”  While not all visualizations provide business critical information, we can start to use these techniques to understand better what a consumer may want or need from an organization.

As more and more Social Media is generated across various platforms, I think there is a valid business case to be made to evaluate what is being said on a much deeper level than simple engagement.  A thorough evaluation of this data can help your organization do two things.  One, to become better at evaluating where and why you are engaging.  And two, to uncover insights that will help you grow your business in ways that you could not see before.

As we move towards a flatter organization with distributed and transparent communications, there is a real conflict growing between those who would have us believe that management hierarchy is a necessity and those who do not.  With more collaborative teams forming through informal networks and groups, companies need to start thinking about how they will manage output while maintaining an open structure. 

The current influx of Social Media technologies both inside and out of the organization is still very peripheral (in that it is not truly effecting the structure of an organization), but these technologies will become a stronger and integral part of many companies in the upcoming years.  Maintaining a balance between a management structure and open communication platforms will be necessary to avoid projects from becoming chaotic. 

This new level of communication will require companies to think about how information that flows through these new channels will be integrated into business.  There is a reason why hierarchy works.  It sets a clear decision maker, and as groups get larger, it is a necessity to define an individual or body to make the final call on what information to use and what to ignore.  This is one of the main reasons that I believe governance is such a huge issue with respect to Social Media.  Without a strong leader at the top making decisions and delegating based on new information through user generated media, I believe that companies risk falling into analysis paralysis.