Corporate Social Media

When it comes to social networks and social media channels in general, a lot of social media champions are using words like “enagagement” and “influence” to describe best practices.  While these are certainly areas that a brand should aspire to become better at, I think businesses outside of the Fortune 100 need to start looking at the low hanging fruit: advertising.  A recent eMarketer report expects global spending on social networks to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011… and this is only on social networks.

With that level of investment for social network advertising alone, brands need to also start thinking about areas outside of Facebook and MySpace in which they can buy ad space.  Understanding where the bulk of conversation is coming from can help uncover new places to put up digital billboards.

For some clients, the thought of having to “engage” with customers on new channels outside of the comfort zone is scary.  It’s sometimes easier to focus on Facebook advertising and maybe some occassional Twitter engagement.  While this is an important first step, I think companies need to start marketing and advertising on mediums other than the usual suspects in order to have simple and easy access to their target audiences.   Finding the next tier of social media channels focused on your industry, products or services will be crucial to the next step in social media marketing.  And who knows, advertising on these channels may even provide better ROI!

You know that something is becoming huge when both the New York Times and the Economist are writing stories about a relatively new technology during the same week.  Include that with the huge sums of money and hype being dumped on Foursqare and other location based social networks, and you really have to wonder if this is the real deal.  And then of course, Facebook unveils “Places” on US mobile applications, and the pundits are talking as if this will be an unstoppable new marketing channel.  But then you tie that in with the Forrester Report which says that only 4% of Americans have tried a similar service and only 1% are using the service at least once a week, and you have to start wondering if it’s all just hype.

When I talk to clients these days, everyone who is new, cool and innovative wants to talk about creating Foursqare badges, and super engaging ways to get people excited about their companies.  It’s like the whole mantra of using social media to help enhance what you already do to drive business and revenue is thrown out of the window. 

This is the next wave, people will tell you.  This is when you think outside of the box.  Of course, ask around that corporate office, and the only people who are using location based social networks are the social media people.  Who’s in the box?

Money has been and will continue to be made on these networks.  This is why Facebook is getting in on the game.  There is a value in having this physical/virtual world tie-in for some businesses.  But this, out of all of the other social media channels, is not for every business.  In fact, it’s probably not for the masses either, and I think Facebook will soon find that out. 

Look into your business from a marketing, PR and sales perspective.  Can you really add to the experience that your customer has by adding a new level of engagement on mobile?  If it is, then by all means, get to work.  On the other hand, if you are a tanning salon, and you want to create a confusing game where people collect badges from Walmart, Target and Jamba Juice to win a free month of tanning, it’s time to walk away from the hype.

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.

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?

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.

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.