Creative Concepts

The Buzz Bin’s Mike Mulvihill kicks off the new year with an excellent observation about social media: the way companies obsess over “controlling the message” is strangling the industry.  In Mulvihill’s own words (emphasis mine):

I’d love to see a survey of how many of the 91 percent of companies using social media are failing miserably because they still just don’t get the fact that every employee is an ambassador, whether at the supermarket, a cocktail party, the kids soccer match or when active on a social media site. They trust their salesmen to represent the company unsupervised, but can’t trust their employees to use social media responsibly. Seems like there’s still a lot of growing up to be done in 2010.

Social media agencies have lamented clients’ unrealistic focus on “controlling the message” for years now.  (We’ve even chimed in on the topic ourselves, including a quote from Scott Monty that puts it all in appropriately absurd perspective.)  But no matter how many times companies are told that a free-flowing discussion about their business is the best thing that could happen to them, they still seem more comfortable spending money on ad campaigns designed to plant specific messages in the audience’s mind, rather than allowing their customers (and employees) to speak freely.

But what are companies so afraid of?

What could possibly be divulged by your employees that could give the public a worse impression of your business than the knowledge that you refuse to grant your employees the freedom to discuss your company?

On the other hand, when the public sees that you, the employer, value your team’s insights and trust them to behave responsibly, you set a standard that consumers (and other companies) appreciate.  The world is comprised of people, not facades.  And people like doing business with people, not images.

This year, why not grant your customers — and your employees — the freedom to speak openly about your brand?  At worst, you’ll discover some flaws worth correcting.  At best, you’ll learn what you really are doing right — and where to build for the future.

In Andrew Cherwenka’s recent case study, he explains how AT&T used Facebook to defend themselves against Verizon’s claims of a better 3G network,  and how that plan backfired when the very customers AT&T expected to rally to their defense instead fell silent while the conversation was dominated by Verizon fans.  (At one point, 89% of the sentiment on the forum was pro-Verizon, prompting one poster to comment, “You’re basically maintaining a fan page for Verizon.”)

Whoops.

Yet while Cherwenka is correct in surmising that the 2-way nature of the web has eroded a company’s ability to control the messaging surrounding their brand, there is one positive that AT&T should be taking away from this experience:

Now they know what their biggest problems are.

Granted, those problems may be technological in nature (like spotty cell coverage) or they may be matters of negative consumer perception.  That’s up to AT&T to decide (or admit).  But because AT&T has a record of what the public really thinks about its service, they can now choose to fix those problems head-on, OR they can choose to ignore them and hope the public eventually loses interest, which often happens.

Regardless of what AT&T chooses to do, your company can embrace this same lesson.  Yes, your social efforts may occasionally backfire.  Yes, the public may sometimes provide you with opinions and suggestions you’d rather not have to hear.  But this feedback is actually the most important information that you could hope to receive, because this is what helps you understand what you need to improve in order to grow as a company.

The better your product actually is, the more loyalty and evangelism you’ll see from your customers — and the more money you’ll be able to save on advertising to convince people you really are that remarkable.

Your social media presence is only as useful as the change it triggers in your business. To that end, here are 3 recent case studies we’ve found, along with the lessons explained (or implied) by each:

• The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) called in its bloggers to head off a potential PR disaster stemming from one blogger’s (misinformation-driven?) post about her baby being seized during airport screening.  (Lesson: Companies large and small are realizing that web-driven PR fires need to be addressed immediately.)
• Michael Bissell gives a blow-by-blow account of how an offhanded web comment resulted in LinkedIn considering a change to the way they process information.  (Lesson: Consumers, speak up; you never know who’s listening.)
• Network Solutions assigned one employee to manage a wave of customer dissatisfaction on Twitter.  The result?  A flip from 58% negative commentary to 18%, and several positive blog mentions of individual outreach.  (Lesson: Even a small effort toward improving your customers’ experience can help turn the tide of dissatisfaction.)

In each example, companies are proving that engaging dissatisfied (or downright angry) customers directly can mitigate the potential PR damage caused by consumer aggravation.  And while those concerns are normally specific to a time, place and incident, the goodwill engendered by such outreach is a long-standing example that reminds customers at large how much your company does care about their experience — and it shows them that you’re not afraid to use the same tools they do to ensure that their needs are met.

Last week, Amy Mengel brilliantly summarized 5 Reasons Corporations Fail at Social Media.  Those lessons (which she gleaned at the 2009 Inbound Marketing Summit) are entirely valid concerns for any company that’s navigating its way through the mostly uncharted waters of social media.  But, in our experience, there are five other equally dangerous pitfalls that can dash your company’s messaging and branding hopes before its ship even leaves the shore:

• You don’t really care what your customers think. Sure, you monitor what they’re saying about your brand, but not only do you not take action on their suggestions, you never had any intention of actually listening.  Your interest in “understanding your customers’ concerns” was just a shell game; your actual goal was merely to verify that people were already talking about you.  (And if they are, then your existing products and services must be working perfectly, right?)
• You confuse social media with a static advertisement. Instead of embracing the tools for what they are — real-time connections to the endlessly-changing sentiments of the consumer landscape — you establish profiles full of content borrowed from other media and then you stubbornly refuse to update, adapt or interact with your audience. By failing to engage with your customers in the manner they’ve come to expect, you prove that you cannot be bothered with their own interests because you’ve pre-determined your own.
• Your company is exclusively reactive. Rather than working to intuit your customers’ needs, you rely solely on consumer praise and complaints to inform your next plan of action. This ensures that you’ll never be able to use social media as anything more than a validation (or repudiation) of other people’s hunches, or as baseline damage control — so don’t be surprised when your company’s decision-makers come to view social media as a bellwether of mostly bad news.
• You refuse to be interesting. The concept of innovation is deemed (at best) too risky or (at worst) an unnecessary allocation of funds better spent on actions proven to produce results.  As such, the “information” you make available via social media channels is the same retreaded copy that consumers can already find on billboards, magazine ads and product labels.  In an age where audiences are increasingly interested in how products are made, who’s making them and why, your company has opted to remain as impersonal and inscrutable as possible — and your results have predictably flatlined.
• Your voice lacks passion. Maybe you have one employee dedicated to “evangelizing your brand.”  Maybe you have an entire agency.  Or maybe you have an in-house team, ready to pounce on audience feedback at a moment’s notice… except there’s never any pouncing taking place, because there’s never any passion in the message.  The individuals you’ve made responsible for ensuring that others care about your brand haven’t been sufficiently energized by your brand in the first place. Instead of projecting a personality that shows your customers how much you do care about their experience, your telegraphed disinterest provides them with an escape clause and a mandate to find another company whose values and attitude more closely resemble their own.

Social media “isn’t rocket surgery,” as Mengel’s article wryly notes.  The tools that comprise this medium are deceptively simple, and can be mastered by anyone who takes the time and effort to understand how (and why) they work.  But even a rowboat can be scuttled if everyone aboard isn’t working together.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether or not an external agency should (or even can) manage the social media efforts for a client’s company.  Debates abound over efficiency, ethics, customer service and business strategy.  To us, the answers are simple: yes, no and maybe.

Let’s say there’s a company — we’ll call it Goldilocks, Inc. — that wants to incorporate social media into their marketing process.  But how?  Goldilocks knows it has three options:

• Manage social media internally
• Outsource social media externally
• Collaborate with an external agency

And, unlike the fable, all three of these options have rewards — and complications.

• If Goldilocks wants to handle all social media internally, it needs to either hire someone to manage those duties, or it needs to find the most socially adept of its existing employees and train them on using SM tools.  The upside for personal interaction with customers is huge, but the learning curve can be time-consuming and expensive.
• If Goldilocks wants to outsource its entire social media strategy, it won’t have to invest in a new internal culture.  On the other hand, it’ll be forced to rely on the expertise and social skill of contractors it doesn’t directly control — which means customers may or may not be receiving the information and experience they expect.
• If Goldilocks works hand-in-hand with an external agency, Goldilocks can oversee and direct the outgoing communication, while the agency can provide guidance and tackle the technical aspects.  While this arrangement ensures the proper expertise is allocated to the proper roles, it also requires the greatest investment of time and understanding to facilitate communication among all three participants: Goldilocks, the agency and the customers.

To say there’s only one way to structure your company’s social media strategy is to say that there’s only one way to interact with your customers.  The needs of every company — and every consumer — are different.  What’s more important than insisting on one strategy is finding the strategy that best suits your particular situation.  And the more bowls of digital porridge you taste-test along the way, the more educated you’ll be when making your next decision.

A recent survey from eMarketer outlines both the perceived benefits and the primary concerns that business executives have about social media.  Chief among their reservations: information security and employee productivity.

Considering that 51% of the survey’s non-social media-using respondents said they “don’t know enough about” social media, their concerns about security and productivity are understandable.  From the outside, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other tools might seem like a waste of time when compared to what executives already know works.  And without exposure to the way these tools are commonly used, it’s easy to presume that these mysterious new services can somehow derail your business if they’re used improperly.

To calm these fears, Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty, often cites an anecdote related to him by Tactical Transparency author Shel Holtz*:

“A friend sent me a PDF of an article from a business journal in which a company expressed reservations about this new technology over which everyone seemed to be abuzz. They decided that they would restrict employees’ use of it, because of the fear of corporate secrets getting out, of insider information making its way to Wall Street, and of employees wasting their time on it. For that reason, they set up the hardware on a single station in the middle of everyone’s desks so that everyone could see how people were using it.

“That PDF was an article from a 1930s business journal and the technology was the telephone.”

Concerns about information security and lost productivity are ultimately corporate fears about control (or lack thereof).  But employees’ actions within social media channels are nothing new.  People have already been talking about their jobs for generations; all these new tools do is make that discussion easier to join, share and track.  The fear of losing control is unfounded.

Or, as Monty himself likes to add: If you don’t trust your employees enough to not damage your brand with their online actions… why did you hire them in the first place?

* Incidentally, Monty has spoken at our biennial Business Smart Tools conferences; the next BST event will take place in 2011.

In a recent post for Social Media Today (SMT), Tactical Transparency author Shel Holtz makes the case that traditional PR can still be just as effective of a marketing resource as the hot new grassroots options like “trusted peers” and word-of-mouth.  The catch?  In Shel’s view, traditional PR needs to start operating a little more… non-traditionally.

Holtz advocates newly-popular concepts like acting transparently, forsaking astroturfed messaging, etc.  Common sense, really.  It should go without saying that PR agencies ought to engage people in ways the people themselves find meaningful, rather than using new tools to reinforce old, erroneous and ineffective messages.  And yet… why have Holtz and countless others had to go out of their way to say it?

The popularity — and, in some ways, the mere existence — of books like Holtz & John C. Havens‘s Tactical Transparency and Chris Brogan & Julien Smith‘s Trust Agents would seem to signal that audiences now crave a return to authenticity in media.  But how did the practice — or the perception — of PR ever stray so far from these principles to begin with?  Why is social media heralded as an antidote to unsavory, top-down control of a company’s messaging?  And how have common sense observations about the need for honesty become so resonant?

It’s flattering to believe that social media is somehow immune from the excesses (or improprieties) that have become associated with the black hats of PR.  But that’s a false sense of entitlement.  If we’re all smart, the next stage of social media’s integration into mainstream messaging will focus less on how new messages are spread and more on what those messages are actually saying in the first place.

Yes everyone is writing about social media…millions of articles about how you as a business should be utilizing the social networks…linkedin, facebook, blogging….so now you have heard it, you read it every day, you have tried to get on board but how does it all really begin?

There are many “social media experts” out there…those who know just enough of the verbiage to get the new account, those who might know a little something more to create an online conversation but not enough to keep it coming, and then there are the true experts who are in the thick of it all and understand how to build an online community for themselves and their clients…they have believed in social media for years, not just months.   They are the true social media experts who don’t call themselves experts because they are forever learning and then share the wealth with their clients.

These social media enthusiasts have a very good idea of your short and long term communication and marketing strategies!  They are very clear about your branding whether you are using words and/or images!  They have studied what each social media channel demands and what your particular community wishes which means they know how to  listen first!  And then they combine all of these skills and communicate effectively!  These experts are clever and empathetic…good listeners with entertaining and knowledge-filled comments, and they know how to engage and build a community one person at a time.

Does this sound hard?  Something to be afraid of?  Maybe just a little, but knowing you have lead your business to where it is today, how can this one step be that much different than putting on an event, writing a press release or creating an ad?  As I say in this article in the Illinois CPA society magazine, Insight, “in every channel, you can find your next consumer, an individual who is interested in hearing your brand’s message!”  Now if that isn’t motivating enough to jump into social media (with a true expert by your side to relieve the anxiety), then I don’t know what is!

The recent increase in conversations about the pros and cons of blogola — AKA the “grey area” practice of bloggers getting paid by sponsors to write blog posts about those sponsors — highlights the issue at the heart of social media: trust.

Blogs exploded in popularity due to ease of use, but it was the growth of an audience that led each blogger to feel that his or her blog was valid.  Yet the mere existence of an audience is enough for some people to believe that audience is aching to be marketed to.  This has inspired bloggers around the world to consider using their newfound clout to suggest how their audiences should spend their dollars — preferably at a profit to the bloggers themselves.

Which is fine, as long as those suggestions are independent opinions.  No one is advocating that bloggers starve.

But when a sponsor pays a blogger to positively review that sponsor’s products and services AND when that blogger fails to mention that they’re being paid to do so, that author risks losing their credibility. No one likes being misled, even over something as simple as which dish soap or bubble gum their favorite blogger claims to use daily.  What bloggers lack in credentials, they make up for in the implied trust of their readership; actions that erode that trust will drain all credibility from that blogger’s reputation over time — and acquiring a reputation in the blogosphere is a hard-won goal that’s worth protecting.

Marketers: Bloggers — and their audiences — are valuable resources who deserve to be respected, not manipulated.  You wouldn’t expect a mainstream magazine or TV news outlet to run your commercial as a news story, so don’t provide bloggers with an opportunity to sabotage their (and your) reputations.

Bloggers: respect your audiences (and yourselves) enough to be forthright about your sponsorships. Your audience wants you to succeed; they just don’t appreciate being lied to in the process.