Creative Concepts

Business means sales. Without sales, you have no business. We get that.

As its root, social media is just another spoke on the sales wheel, driving revenue alongside everything else your business does. It’s not sexy, but it’s true. In business, everything is supplemental to sales.

But here’s a question.

Let’s say you never had to worry about sales again.

Let’s say your company was guaranteed to grow profitably for a century.

In that hypothetical universe, what else would you use social media for?

Maybe you’d focus on customer service.

Maybe you’d focus on shared knowledge.

Maybe you’d focus on efficiency.

No matter what you decide, your options would all have one thing in common: they’d be customer-centric.

Once you no longer need to obsess over sales, you’re free to make your customer’s (and your employees’) lives easier. Because the more your customers and your employees appreciate you, the more loyal they’ll become, and the more they’ll share your brand with the people they value.

Tony Hsieh believed so strongly in the proactive culture he’d built at Zappos that he realized the only way to save his company from the quick trigger finger of his recession-strapped investors was to sell it to Amazon — a move that enabled him to keep his customer-centric culture intact.

He was concerned that his employees would jump ship after the announcement. Instead, they rejoiced, because they knew their livelihoods and their values would be preserved. And, in the aftermath of the sale, Zappos remains just as profitable as it’s always been.

You don’t delight customers by obsessing over sales. But sometimes you do get sales by obsessing over your customers.

So… how is your company making your customers’ lives better?

Image by Iain Browne.

Last month, Ecover (our client) had an unusual problem. A UK consumer magazine named Which? alleged that several “green” household cleaners were fabricating (or “greenwashing”) their claims. Ecover was one of the brands named in the report, which was published in The Guardian, creating a maelstrom of public opinion.

But there was one problem with the article: in Ecover’s eyes, the methodology that Which? used to create the report was flawed, erroneous and misinformed — and now it was being reported as a verifiable truth.

Ecover responded with a full rebuttal of Which?’s claims, including a direct statement from Ecover’s CEO, Mick Bremans. And while the tempest appeared to subside, we at Creative Concepts helped Ecover remain vigilant for continued mentions of the report across all of its web channels.

When one Twitter user, Jane C Woods, tweeted a link to the Guardian’s article, Ecover’s Kipling Wagner noticed and responded by sending Jane a link to Ecover’s rebuttal. Afterward, Jane — who’s an Ecover customer in the UK — took the opportunity to ask Kipling a question about a problem she was having with her dishwasher, which she believed may have been caused by Ecover’s dishwashing products. Kipling and Jane each researched the issue — Kipling within Ecover, and Jane with her repairman — and each came to a similar conclusion, with steps to remedy the situation.

We (CC) asked Kipling and Jane about their discussion on Twitter, and here’s what they had to say.

Kipling Wagner, Assistant Marketing Manager and Brand Activator at Ecover, Inc

CC: How did you first discover Jane’s tweet re: the Which? article?

KW: I saw Jane’s tweet through my monitoring alerts on Tweetdeck.

CC: Why did you feel compelled to share Ecover’s rebuttal with her directly?

KW: I felt compelled to share it with her directly because of a combination of details. I looked at her other tweets to gauge what type of twitterer she is (was she sending out quality messages? Interacting with people positively? Was she influencing others? All of which she seemed to be). I also noticed that someone had thanked her for sharing the original Which? article, and this alarmed me because I knew this article was gaining momentum virally. If people were looking to her tweets for trustworthy information, I knew I had to share our side.

CC: How did you go about investigating her question re: her dishwashing issue?

KW: She replied to me, thanking me for the Which? article clarification, and then followed it with a product question. I was reluctant to answer because she is in the UK and we’re in the US, and I was worried about the invisible boundaries and crossing lines within our own company. Now I was interacting with a UK consumer, not just a UK tweeter. First, I let her know I had seen her question, and then I sent an email to our communications department to confirm with them my suspicions on why she was having said issue. Once they got back to me, I let her know the verdict.

CC: How do you feel about the exchange thus far? How has it been beneficial to you / Ecover?

KW: Absolutely beneficial. Although she’s way over in the UK, the boundaries on the web are non-existent. It’s important that we’re able to take a potentially negative situation – spreading of an inaccurate depiction of Ecover through questionable journalism – and turn it into an informed and positive exchange. Also, Ecover is very focused on being honest and transparent, so having the (new) ability, thanks to Twitter, to talk to someone about their concerns (like the Which? article) and then wind up resolving a product issue is priceless. I value that Twitter allows us to do all of this with our audience. It’s like “super practice” for those of us in marketing to be able to work out issues with our consumers, all under the watchful eye of others; we learn more about our own company and products and our consumers at the same time. It’s very rewarding.

Jane C Woods, Personal Development Specialist for Women

CC: How did you originally come across the Which? report?

JW: I am a regular subscriber to Which?.

CC: Were you surprised when Kipling contacted you with Ecover’s response?

JW: Very surprised. Initially, it ‘freaked’ me a bit, as it felt a tad ‘big brotherish;’ but then I realised that all big companies keep an eye out for discussion of their products.

CC: How did Ecover’s rebuttal change your opinion of the Which? report (if at all)?

JW: It didn’t really. Although I guess I would agree that the Which? report hadn’t gone into huge amounts of detail. I had had a problem with Ecover for a while in that my machine does get gummed up. Repairman said it’s a common problem with Ecover type products, and I also had to put some cleaning fluid through my machine… which kind of defeats the object doesn’t it?

CC: Was Kipling’s advice about your dishwasher problem helpful?

JW: Yes, in that it was the same advice as given by the repairman, i.e., run a very hot wash now and again, and run it empty. I do leave the drawer open, but I’m not convinced that will help.

CC: Do you frequently engage with businesses on Twitter? Do you find these kinds of digital interactions beneficial?

JW: Yes, often. I also tend to use Twitter to promote my business. It’s very helpful and it encourages me to buy from companies I have tweeted!

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Considering Jane’s ongoing concerns about her dishwasher, we expect more discussions between Kipling and Jane — and between Ecover and their growing international customer base — in the future.

After all, every problem has a solution, and those solutions almost always involve a conversation.

Is your business talking — and listening — to customers?

Is social media a sales driver and a marketing aid?  Absolutely.

But we also encourage our clients to think outside the box, and find innovative ways to surprise and delight their customers by using these tools in unconventional ways.  One way we do this is by studying how other sectors use these same tools in non-marketing ways, and then innovating in reverse.

For example, the folks at OnlineUniversities recently compiled a list of 100 Inspiring Ways to Use Social Media in the Classroom.  Their tips include:

• Study geography. Use a combination of Twitter and Google Earth to help teach geography-based lessons. This teacher used his network of Twitter followers to create an interactive lesson for his young students. Use her idea to spark your creativity for ways to use these two resources.
• Connect with other classrooms. Collaborate with another classroom, no matter where they are in the world, to expand learning opportunities.
• Window to daily life at school. Create a website like the one at University of Chicago Law School. that allows visitors to hear from students and professors about their daily life at law school.

Which made us wonder… if these approaches work in the classroom, how might they also work in the boardroom?  Or in R&D?  Or sales?

Such as…

• Get a global snapshot of your customers’ realities. Twitter makes it easy to follow users from around the world and receive their updates in real time.  By following your customers in different markets / time zones / continents, you’ll have a constant stream of incoming data that describes their lives and their needs.  And when they share breaking news in their region, your company has the opportunity to act on immediate information and stay ahead of the news cycle.
• Connect with brand evangelists. If consumers love your brand, they’ll want to know about new products and services ASAP.  You could send your top 100 customers the same email blast that you send to your other 99,000 customers… or you could invite those loyalists to take part in Twitter conversations, Facebook discussions and even Skype conferences.  Reward their support by offering them increased access and they’ll reward you with feedback, leads and sales, not because they have to, because your personalized outreach has made them a partner in your company’s growth.
• Provide a window on your company’s culture. To the consumer, every brand is a nameless, faceless corporation by default.  The more personalized and transparent a company becomes, the more a casual customer comes to think of that company as being familiar, rather than generic.  Find the best internal observers of what makes your company tick, and empower those employees to post descriptive, informative or witty updates about your day-to-day operations on Twitter and Facebook.  Catching a daily glimpse of life in your office helps your customers feel like they’re in the cubicles and manufacturing lines with you — and it gives them another reason to care about your success.

How else can you innovate with the same tools everyone else is using?

By using them to demonstrate your commitment to your customers, you’ll really give your audience something to talk about.

Politics — and political correctness — are tricky things.  Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, but when a business becomes associated with a political sound bite, those beliefs can create a PR problem.  (See our previous post about what PR can’t help you do in a crisis.)

Back in 2007, Don Imus made a now-infamous remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.  As the news media swirled around the controversy, his sponsors (including our client, Bigelow Tea), were caught in the middle.  They each had to make a choice: continue to sponsor Imus’s show, or retract their sponsorship as an ethical statement?

After considering all possibilities, Bigelow did something all too rare in the business world: they led with their gut.

They publicly denounced Imus’s statement and disagreed with its sentiment, but they also continued to support him.  It was a fine line to walk, supporting an individual while disagreeing with a particular choice he’d made.

Needless to say, the public took aim at Bigelow.  Their blog became a clearing house for all kinds of opinions, from people who admired Bigelow’s judgment to those who vowed to never buy Bigelow again.  The noise got so loud, even mainstream press, like CNN and others, visited the blog to research Bigelow’s position so they could then interview Cindi Bigelow, President of Bigelow Tea, about the company’s decision.

Had Bigelow acted differently in this case, they might not have needed to make a public statement.  They might not even have needed to mention their choice at all.  But with our support and guidance, they opted to use the two-way channel of their blog to speak directly with the people most concerned about the incident, and to understand exactly why their choice may or may not have upset their potential (and existing customers).

In the end, like most tempests in a teapot, the Imus issue was resolved and the public turned their attention to newer, shinier controversies.  Meanwhile, Bigelow Tea’s own market share continued to grow, with the exposure — both positive and negative — from the incident doing little to curb their long-term sales.

And when Imus landed a new radio show, Bigelow was there to sponsor him again.  In fact, Cindi Bigelow herself was part of the Imus Radiothon this past week, helping to raise money for children battling cancer.

So… do we all make mistakes?  Absolutely.  But we also make good choices, too.

When judging a person — or a brand — it helps to take the whole of their actions into account.  And with the reach and permanence of social media, it’s easier than ever for discerning consumers to research the brands they’re interested in and decide for themselves which companies are worth supporting.

This week, the mainstream media has been blanketed by news coverage of BP’s oil spill off the US gulf coast.

With ecological, economic and political repercussions being hotly debated, Erik Sass at MediaPost capitalized on the zeitgeist by turning it into a social media case study — namely, how BP failed to manage to the overwhelmingly negative coverage of the disaster.

Really?

Let’s be honest: we’re a social media agency.  We love social media, and we make a living at it.

But we also have some perspective.

And when a massive oil spill may or may not threaten the ecology and economy of a huge swath of the United States, we understand a few implicit truths about the situation:

• Containing the spill and minimizing potential damage is everyone’s top priority.
• Issuing accurate & honest information is always more important than spin.
• No amount of spin can absolve a company from an eco-disaster as it’s happening.

Sure, Sass admits that PR may seem trivial compared to the tangible challenges presented by the spill.  But he also believes that BP should have had a pro-active spin team in place long before the incident, so that negative news and perception about the spill didn’t spiral out of control.

On paper, that makes sense.

In reality, Sass greatly overestimates PR’s ability to save the day.

Let’s Not Overinflate PR’s Role, Shall We?

Public relations exists to manage the public’s perception of a brand’s reputation.

The key word here?

Manage.

Public relations doesn’t create the public’s perception of your brand.

Public relations doesn’t save the public’s perception of your brand.

Your actions dictate the public’s long-term perception of your brand.

Yes, good PR can blunt the short-term effects of a bad decision.  And yes, good PR can ensure that your brand’s upside isn’t lost amid a swirling sea of negative publicity.

But does anybody truly believe that BP’s reputation would be any better today if they’d better managed their Facebook page last week?

Nonsense.

Why Does Everybody Forget the “Relations” Part of Public Relations?

Olivier Blanchard recently blogged an excellent 2-part piece on Nestle’s public tussle with Greenpeace on Facebook.

His key point?  Nestle botched its response to Greenpeace’s “invasion” of the Nestle Facebook page.  If they’d had a proper social media plan in place, Blanchard reckons, they could have contained the negative sentiment spurred by Greenpeace and capitalized on an opportunity for proactive engagement with a passionate, if skeptical, public.

See, like BP, Exxon and most other multinational conglomerates, Nestle is “too big to fail” in PR terms.  No matter what they do wrong, they have the experience, reach and resources to rebound politically and economically in the long run.

A failure to engage the public proactively is the real missed opportunity in Blanchard’s example.  Sass echoes this sentiment when he admonishes BP for not making use of this catastrophe to directly engage the people who are most enraged (and, therefore, engaged) by the spill.

But here’s the kicker: engaging the public only works when a company wants to engage the public, and is prepared to assimilate the public’s feedback.  Otherwise, it’s just spin, and spin amounts to white noise.

Even the Best PR Can’t Save You from Yourself

Good PR can make your company seem like the greatest brand on the planet.

Good PR can also rescue your company from the depths of public hate.

But no amount of PR will trump the actions you take during a crisis, or the actions you take on a daily basis.

Actions ALWAYS trump spin.

Dan Zarrella spends more time crunching the numbers on social media than anyone else we know. He recently proposed something he calls Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, which breaks down thusly:

• First, someone must be able to receive your message
• Then, they must be interested in your message
• And then they must be motivated to take action

Zarrella’s analysis makes sense to us. But, as he admits, that means there are pitfalls every step of the way.

If you want someone to see your message, they have to know you exist.

If you want someone to pay attention, you have to give them a reason to care.

And if you want someone to take action, you have to provide a value or solve a problem that they recognize as a problem in the first place.

Yes, you can work diligently to improve your message’s odds of being noticed, cared about or acted upon. But in order to do that most effectively, you need to understand your audience. Otherwise, you’re shooting in the dark.

Lead Generation Isn’t Customer Retention

In a guest post for Lauren Fernandez’s blog, Mack Collier makes 6 great points about how to build a successful online community.  But Mack’s definition of “success” is fairly altruistic: he champions values like interaction, engagement, loyalty and respect.

Do you?

Social media makes it easy to share your message with millions.  But broadcasting to numbers is different than broadcasting to people.

You may have an email list with 20,000 names on it… but how many of those names do you know?

How many of those names know you?

If you’re marketing to strangers, you’re forever playing catch-up.  But the more aware you are of who’s listening to you, what they like and what they need, the better the chances that the solutions you provide them with will stand out.

And when you prove that you care about your customers, your actions invite them to care about your business the same way you care about your business.

You do care about your business… don’t you?

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So, what happens when your company wants to use social media, but everybody’s worried about what’s “okay” for them to say?

It can be daunting (and expensive) to determine which employees should be allowed to engage the public, speak candidly or answer questions.  And explaining which kinds of employee behaviors and proprietary information are strictly off-limits can be downright awkward.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that helps ease the friction: PolicyTool.

Simply enter your company’s name and some relevant information, and PolicyTool will generate your very own customizable social media policy in twelve short clicks!

Although PolicyTool’s service is not intended as legal advice, the policy it generates does provide a good starting point for your company’s continued embellishment.  Your HR department, tech experts and legal team can add or revise sections as desired, or you can simply opt to implement the generated policy as-is.

Here at Creative Concepts, we instituted our own social media policy prior to the creation of PolicyTool.  But if we’d had a useful template to start from, it would have helped shape our own internal discussions about best practices.

And really, that’s the whole point: PolicyTool may not solve every problem, but if it gets your company talking about the best ways to govern and maximize your social media channels, it’s worth every penny.  (Oh, and it’s free.)

Image by Gregory James Walsh via Flickr.

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1. Let’s make this more effective.
2. Let’s make this more entertaining.
3. Let’s make this easier to understand.
4. Let’s solve someone’s problem.
5. Let’s eliminate our redundancies.
6. Let’s thank someone who deserves it.
7. Let’s learn more about our customers.
8. Let’s learn more about ourselves.
9. Let’s ask “why?”
10. Let’s listen.

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Do you hear that panicked murmur rumbling up from the masses?  It’s worse than fear — it’s failure!  It’s catastrophe!  It’s the absolute Armageddon of social media business strategy!

According to Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey, no one trusts anyone!

(Which is ironic, considering Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents was a bestseller during the same year this survey was conducted.  But I digress…)

Here’s what happened:

Last year, 47 percent of respondents to the survey claimed to trust information from their peers (aka “people like me”), fueling the tendencies of social media gurus to target peers (and especially “influencers”) as a way to gain visibility for the brands they represent.  This year?  Only 27 percent made that same claim.

So much for social media, right?

Wrong.

According to Edelman, trust in TV is down 20 points as well.  Radio and newspapers also dropped.  Across the U.S., faith in media as a whole is in the basement.  Media and insurance were tied as the two least-trusted industries in America.

(Ironically, of the sources mentioned above, newspapers actually ranked highest in terms of respondents’ trust, at a scant 32 percent.  Surely that’ll make hundreds of downsized reporters feel better this winter…)

So… so much for media itself, right?

Still wrong.

Keep in mind that we’ve just survived one of the most tempestuous political years in American history, one in which our ruling parties have become ever more ideologically opposed.  Town halls and tea parties have proven that we’re increasingly incapable of having rational debates about even the most basic elements of our social fabric.  No wonder trust in “people like me” is down — trust in everyone, across all facets of the system, is down.  The only people we seem comfortable trusting anymore are ourselves.

And that explains why a book like Trust Agents can find an audience: because people are desperate to connect.  People want to trust each other, and they want to be able to trust the media that feeds them their information.  They’re just skeptical of everyone’s motives and transparencies, including that of their peers, whom (we’ve all finally realized) have access to the same unreliable media as everyone else.

Instead of seeing this report as a death blow to the legitimacy of the media empires, those same empires should be taking this study as an opportunity to refocus on what their audience actually wants: clear, unbiased, reliable information.

As for the social media campaigns of the world, congratulations: now you don’t have to worry about “going viral” or targeting those pesky influencers anymore.  Now you just have to appeal to every human being, one at a time, and treat them like valuable individuals.  Now you have to earn their trust.

And in that case, maybe there’s a silver lining to all this skepticism after all.

If there’s one recurring reason companies are reluctant to embrace social media, it’s that “something could go wrong.”  But when something else goes wrong in your company, are you prepared to use social media as a way to steady the ship?

Eileen O’Brien has an excellent summary of Johnson & Johnson’s recent use of social media to help manage the information flow surrounding their recall of Tylenol and other medications.  And while Twitter and blogs aren’t the only resources a company should turn to in times of crisis, savvy communicators realize that their customers sometimes rely on social media for real-time news.

Consider Wyclef Jean’s response to doubts about the financial clarity of his charity, YELE, after an article in The Smoking Gun called its accounting practices into question.  Instead of ignoring the mounting firestorm, Wyclef issued an official statement at a formal press conference (which may not necessarily have helped alleviate concerns).  But he also posted a video to YouTube regarding his feelings about the situation, which, at the time of this post, has been viewed over 300,00 times — and that’s not counting the numerous duplicates spread around the web.

The lesson?  People love to share information, and in times of crisis, you’d like that information to be coming from you.

These days, being able to deliver pertinent, accurate information to people when and where they expect to see it is safer than expecting them to be herded to a single focal point.  Twitter moves at the speed of misinformation, and the last thing your company needs during a potential crisis is to lose control of the facts due to rapidly spreading inaccuracies.  Better to have a contingency plan in place to mitigate misinformation in advance than to cobble together a response after the story’s already been told.

No business is immune to mistakes, because businesses are made of people, and human beings are notoriously imperfect.  Disasters strike.  Accidents happen.  But not being prepared for the unknown is no one’s idea of a smart business plan.