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.

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.

One of the big things that I see a lot of our clients doing these days after they start listening is engagging with their customers on a one-to-one basis.  Not surprisingly, a lot of the “engagement” on microblogs tends to be customer service related issues.  People are starting to realize that they can complain in a public space and get faster and often better responses through these channels.  And I guess that’s a good thing… but what happens when everyone decides to start using social media to complain and criticize companies for problems that they are having.  Are we sending the right message to say that it is okay to complain loudly (and maybe even unfairly) on social media, if you want to get what you want?

I recently talked to someone who manages Social Media at a US-based consumer company who told me that she sends unhappy customers on Social Media directly to the high-priority customer response team.  I think that’s great, and it works at this level, but is it sustainable over the long run as more and more people lay their grievances out in cyberspace?  I don’t really think it is.

And that to a degree is where Social CRM can have a place.  The example that I have heard Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group) give a couple times related to social CRM involves the case of Heather Armstrong who tweeted about her experience at Whirlpool to her million or so followers.  It ended up hitting the mainstream media, and turned out to be a bit of a disaster for the company.  In an ideal world, Social CRM could have prevented this incident by giving the customer service rep working with Nancy the ability to see the social power that she could wield over the company. 

It seems a bit unfair to give someone with a lot of followers the advantage of better customer service.  But then again, how is this different than providing service to a public figure or celebrity?  When I have status with an airline or a hotel group, I certainly expect a higher level of service as well.  Maybe it is okay and actually the right thing to do to give someone with a high level of influence an edge in customer service. 

So to answer my question: I think that more people will continue to complain on Social Media, and companies will have to expand the role of customer service into microblog channels to make sure that those complaints are not falling on deaf ears.  But at the same time, we should expect better integration of Social CRM which includes not only levels of influence on Social Media, but also customer loyalty statistics and other factors to drive varying levels of service.  To that end, companies should think about their current “appeasement” strategy, so that customers do not get too used to getting what they want for screaming at the top of their lungs.  And this of course, comes from a well thought out Social Media Policy.