Management

I decided to get out of the office to write today. Sometimes a change really is as good as a rest. Recently I have started a number of new projects, some collaborations with people I really respect, others solo projects that I hope to develop into something much larger in the coming months (YouAreHereApps) is an example.

In addition to that I just started submitting articles to Read Write Web, the first was published last week and I just became the Austin Twitter Correspondent for Examiner.com, where I will be writing stories about Austin people using Twitter in different ways.

All of this is in addition to running a successful Marketing Communications company (we just signed another Fortune 500 company last week) and volunteering as VP of Events for the Austin Chapter of the American Marketing Association.  If all of that wasn’t enough I am also doing an increasing number of speaking appearances.

So why am I sharing all this (other than to toot my own horn? – I thought I’d say it before the cynics out there did).  I’m sharing it because sometimes I get asked where do I find the time, and why do I bother trying to do so much at once. The simple answer to those questions is “I get bored easily”. The more complex one is that, I approach building a business the same way I was taught to cook pasta. If you are not sure its done, throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.

It might not be the way they teach it in B school, but I’d rather try things and see if they work than find a book on it and read someone else’s attempt. Business, like so much else in life is not a spectator sport. Either play or go home.

Out or Up?

So when do you build up and when do you build out? Lets take a look at what I am doing – a lot of what I do at a personal level revolves around writing, and sharing my thoughts. I’d call that building out. Establishing new footholds, new storefronts for my writing and for readers to find my writing.

Building the IncSlingers, and the associated activities that I engage in around that (upcoming conference, Youarehereapps etc.) is building up. Its taking an established plot and adding new floors to it, raising it above the existing skyline so that it becomes more visible.

Which direction are you building?

You can consider this a rant post if you like but my experience at Best Buy today got me thinking about customer service and how Social Media can sometimes be used to mask an organizations real customer service policy.

Yesterday my Blackberry Storm died on me. To be more accurate it suffered a software issue that is a known problem. The only fix is to replace the handset. So I went to Best Buy where I purchased the handset from four months ago. This seemed to me to be the obvious course of action.

We Only Help If You Pay

When I spoke to the assistant they told me that Best Buy were unable to help me because I had not purchased their additional insurance policy at the time of purchase. I was careful to explain to the sales associate that the insurance policy wasnt necessary as this fault was not caused by accidental damage but by a software flaw – a known issue and that the handset needed to be replaced. He recommended I send the handset to RIM. I asked him what I was supposed to do for a phone, he shrugged and asked did I not have an old handset lying around that I could use?

I asked to see the manager, what I was presented with was someone from the Geek Squad. Not THE manager but A manager. She told me the same thing, that unless I had purchased additional insurance Best Buy would do nothing for me as I was outside their 30 day policy.

Take Your Problem Somewhere Else

This struck me as strange. I could understand if I was taking in a broken handset, something I had damaged, but this was a service issue. I asked them to clarify their policy again, she said that I needed to take the handset to Verizon. I asked why I would do that, they are the airtime provider, not the hardware provider, she stated again it was not Best Buy’s problem.

Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am

So Best Buy only wants a relationship with me if I am prepared to pay for it. This sounds rather like another, much older profession to me. Best Buy entered Social Media with their warm and fuzzy TweepleForce on Twitter, setting the expectation that they wanted to”engage” with customers, seems that is only true if you want to pay for it.

What other brands make you pay for the relationship with them?

As an aside, I took the handset to Verizon who replaced it, backed up my data and made sure I left the store completely happy with an updated handset all for no charge. While I was waiting I was even able to pay my cell phone bill at their in-store kiosk.

Succession planning is a term perhaps more familiar to royal families, heads of state and top level executives. However, it is something that should be very familiar to who anyone that has oversight for an organizations Social Media effort.

In recent years there have been a few high profile Social Media “faces” moving from one company to another or going out on their own – whether it is Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft, Chris Brogan branching out from Cross Tech Media or more recently Julia Roy leaving Undercurrent to go to Coach. Each of these people were the high profile “face” of Social Media at their respective companies, when they left, that face went with them.

What Will Alan Do?

I have no doubt that there are companies and agencies drawing up wish lists of “faces” that they would like to hire away from their existing companies. Scott Monty at Ford I am sure is at the top of a lot of peoples lists. What will Alan Mulally, Ford’s cEO, do if Scott does leave? Considering that, according to those who say they know, Scott pretty much runs most of Ford’s Social Media effort single-handed, I would think he is going to panic! This is where succession planning comes in.

Having more than one person, even if one of them is only part-time, not only helps spread the burden, but helps the audience identify with more than one “face”. The downside of this strategy is that if the two people behind the “faces” are not in sync it can confuse the audience and muddy the message. Having only one person makes controlling the message easier but it comes with the higher risk of not having a ready replacement. So what is the best strategy? I recommend having more than one person behind the brand. This is a serious investment for most organizations, but it also reflects the seriousness of their intent to take part in Social Media. Having just one person try and manage all the communication that can result in engaging correctly in Social Media can actually lead to damage to the brand. After all, if only one person responds to the tweets/facebook posts/blog comments etc. someone somewhere is going to end up disappointed because they weren’t responded to.

Plan for “cewebrity status”

Succession planning has always been important for senior executives in any organization, but now it has become more important for the face behind the brand than it ever was. I believe it is mostly ignored because for some organizations the person chosen (whether self appointed or appointed by the organization) to take part in Social Media is rarely an executive. Often part of the communication team it is something else they do as a part of their normal role. The prospect that they might not only succeed in attracting attention to the brand but might become a “cewebrity” in their own right has not been given much thought.

Which “cewebrities” move do you think would impact a brand?

Austin, Texas, based company Genesis Today a company that provides nutritional drinks has partnered with Collective Bias a crowdsourcing/conversation starting agency that describes itself as the conjunction of Social Media and Shopper Marketing. The product of this partnership is a competition to submit ideas to the company that will form the basis of an online Social Media campaign.

Something For Nothing or Nothing For Something?

They are being generous with the prizes, 5 each of $1000 plus a trip to Austin and a $10,000 first prize for the winner. So a total of $15,000 for a new idea on how they can best interact with their customers and potential customers. This is likely what they would have spent with a small to mid-sized agency so they have stayed within the realms of reality and not tried to get something for nothing, but are they likely to get nothing for something?

I have several alarm bells ringing when I think about this competition, firstly, they are likely to be sent an awful lot of ideas that are either unimaginative reworks of other companies previous campaigns, run of the mill “use twitter” type suggestions or just those that are unworkable.  The rules, which I am not allowed to republish here without prior approval, specifically state that these types of entries will be eliminated.

Online Only?

So what does that leave them with? Mostly it leaves them with the hope that someone will care enough to provide them with an idea that is so original and uses Social Media in a unique way that they will get a return on their investment. I’m not saying that won’t happen, and I’m not saying crowdsourcing is a bad idea, I think if a company has a high tolerance for risk this is an interesting way to get your Social Media campaign rolling. However, the other alarm bell that rings for me is the fact that they are specifically stating that this is for the “online” Social Media. I think this limits their thinking, it limits their openess to the fact that Social Media takes place both on and offline and that a good Social Media campaign will include both elements.

Personally I say good luck to them, I hope this works out and I for one will be watching the story as it unfolds to see what happens and where they go with the idea.

Would you crowdsource your next campaign?

image from www.psfk.com

I wrote a post about journalism yesterday and why we need journalists. One of the things that interested me was the comments I received about it, both on the post and in places like Twitter. People were amazed that someone who actively promotes Social Media and makes a living from it would not take the position that Social Media is the future and we no longer need News media in the traditional sense.

This gave me a reason to pause and question the perception that a lot of marketers and others have of those involved in Social Media. Do most of them so actively, if not over, promote Social Media as the answer to all problems because they are evangelists or because they dont have an understanding of broader media or marketing?
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While I would love to give credit to the majority and say its because of their passion for Social Media that they come to the table with Social Media as the solution without even knowing what the problem is but really I can’t.  I know that the problem lies in the lack of depth that many of them have in understanding marketing.

Without the basics, as strong building blocks, how can someone hope to bring real answers to complex problems.  Only yesterday I watched a video posted to Facebook, mostly because it had the same attraction as a train wreck, on why the “expert” didnt want customers anymore, they only wanted clients because the difference was the relationship!

Hello! Welcome to the 21st century. While I understand some of this is still new to people, really if you are going to be a “thought leader” why are you regurgitating thoughts from 10 years ago?  True sales/marketing professionals already know that it is easier to retain customers than it is to acquire new ones, so obviously you want to build a relationship to retain them.

I congratulate the person for discovering this truth but, this is a great pointer to why so many who are selling themselves as “experts” can only come to the table with one solution – the latest trick that they have learned from another blog, facebook post, or marketing book they read from the library.

The age old adage Caveat Emptor holds true more today than it ever has. Just because the person pitching to you Social Media as a solution appears to know more about the subject than you, don’t be blinded to the bigger picture.

What do you/would you ask your Social Media partner?

image from horseracingsafety.com

Social Media, like so many other marketing activities is often criticized for its lack of real measures. “How do I know its working?”, “How do I measure ROI?” good questions to ask of any program, but with Social Media being so new to so many, how to measure ROI is still open for debate.

One area that can be measured and tracked over time and therefore show results is conversation. There are some great tools out there that will help with this process. Some are free, some available on a subscription basis, depending on your budget you can definitely find a tool to fit it. What is missing from all of these is the metrics that go beyond the counting.

While all of these methods will show you how many people have mentioned you, your brand, your product in a given timeframe and on given platforms, be they blogs, twitter, youtube or any of the other popular sites, what they miss is the importance of those mentions. Context is everything. Just because you find a blog that talks about nothing other than your brand, this doesn’t mean that anyone is reading it. So how important is it to you really?

All the marketing departments I have contact with have one thing in common, whether they are Fortune 500’s or startups, not enough resources. So focusing those resources on actionable items is paramount. If your tool shows that you have had 400 mentions in the Social Media world, are you really equipped to cope with responding to all of those? Probably not, in reality you have to decide how to focus, the simplest way to do that is to look at the reach of those mentions.

On platforms like Twitter this is fairly easy to achieve – a rough guide to a Twitter users reach is the number of followers they have. This isnt an absolute measure of reach but it is certainly a good starting point. With blogs it becomes a little harder, while there are numerous sites that will provide you with “webstats” for blogs they really only work well on unique domains, for example getting an accurate measure of traffic for a blogspot blog can be challenging, but that doesnt mean that because a blog resides on a free blog host it doesnt have a long reach.

Monitoring these results, and seeing how they change over time is a very good way of determining your impact on the world of Social Media. As the conversations about your organization, brand or product moves from low traffic sites to higher traffic sites so you can determine that those with a broader reach are talking about you and therefore more people are seeing your brand mentioned. Monitoring will also help to ensure that these mentions are for the right reasons.

What are you measuring in your Social Media activity?

image from Newton Math Tutors

Firstly, note that the title of this post includes the word “success”, its not enough to just have a plan in place for Social Media, it must include Success, otherwise its just a shopping list of things to do without the understanding of what the effects will be on your business.

I am making some assumptions with this post:
1. You have already decided that your or your organization will benefit from the use of Social Media
2. That you understand how you want to integrate Social Media into the conversations you are already having
3. That you have the organizational ability to have those conversations

Those assumptions aside here are the 5 things that your plan must include:
1. An assumption that the platforms that you are using now (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Youtube etc) are going to be replaced and what you will do when they are.
2. A “brand monitoring” element that will keep you up to date with conversations that you are not already a part of. This can be a software tool, google alerts, a combination of both, but you should be monitoring your brand 24/7.
3. A link to the broader organizational/personal growth plan that hooks in at various growth points in that plan to accommodate success.
4. A scaling element – who will do the work, what roles will you create as the plan succeeds?
5. A transition plan for the “personalities” in front of your brand – what will you do when they leave?

There are of course other elements that your plan should have, but any good plan should have all 5 of these elements. So many organizations jump in without a plan and then are overwhelmed at the speed at which people start to engage with them. The challenge for most brands is not to get customers or potential customers to engage, its what to do with all of them when they start engaging and expecting more from the brand than the brand is setup to deliver.

Does your organization have a Social Media Success plan?

image from the Association of Personal Assistants

One of the attractions of Social Media for a lot of organizations is the perception that it is a high yeild investment channel. What does that mean? It means that the returns from participating in it are perceived as being much higher than the investment to take part. After all it costs nothing to start a Twitter account, create a Facebook Fan page, post a video to YouTube.  So any returns from a zero investment will be high.

Don’t Focus On The Tools

This is unfortunately what has led to so many companies being attracted to it, especially by well meaning, or worse, unscrupulous marketers, both internal and external.  The truth is, good Social Media, like any other form of Marketing Communication is not free, nor is it particularly cheap. The problem is that the focus is all on the tools, the “Media”, not the process.

A strong social process is what makes the difference between a successful Social Media marketing effort and a poor one. Many companies are shocked at the discovery that Social Media doesn’t mean pushing their story out through another set of online channels. That it actually involves an set of changes internally as much as it does making decisions about where to have a presence.

I have sat through client meetings where the “Social Media” discussion centered on where online advertising would be most effective, how much of the marketing budget should be spent on placing these ads. There was no discussion of involving the customer, there was no discussion of the benefits of customer focus. When these ideas are raised they are rebuffed, the answer being a simple, “our job is about online marketing, not customer service – we don’t do that”.

Break Out of Silo Thinking

This is the center of the issue for most large organizations looking to conduct Social Media – they live in silo’s. Obviously I am not the first to discover this, nor is Social Media the first to throw a stark light on this approach, but Social Media more than any other has provided organizations with the opportunity to do something about it. After all the point of good Social Media is to create conversations, unfortunately as much as organizations might appear to want those conversations to happen they are not designed to deal with them.

Who “owns” Social in your organization?

As the week opens the FTC has finally issued its amendment to the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. This is a significant ruling for anyone in the blogging world, as well as others who take part in endorsements of any kind.

Disclosure is Key

The first clarification was completely expected and to some degree has already been implemented by bloggers themselves, at least the more credible ones. That of disclosure. The text of the amendment is as follows:

“that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed.”

What is significant about this is that it specifically covers in-kind payments, e.g. bloggers being given products or services to trial have to be disclosed. Why is this significant? In my opinion what this does is open the door for the IRS to view in-kind payments as exactly that, earned income. That is a significant detail for a lot of bloggers who may not actually be earning income, or at least not significant income from any other part of their blogging enterprise.  Receiving a few thousand dollars of in-kind payments could have serious implications for some bloggers.

Social Media – An Endorsement Channel

In the second clarification the FTC recognizes the use of Social Media by celebrities as an endorsement channel, so if a celebrity Twitter user posts that they are enjoying a particular product, they are now obligated to disclose any connection they have to the manufacturer/provider of that product or service – that could be difficult in 140 characters, perhaps we will see the use of new tags or definitions of tweets to encompass this.

It also means that any mention of a product or service can be considered an endorsement, whether that was the intention of the author or not and a failure to disclose a connection with the provider could be considered an infringement of the guidelines.  It is important to note that these are guidelines and not law, and as such form the basis only for cases that might be brought against a perceived offender, they do amend the FTC Act, but rather provide administrative interpretation of the Act.

What I find interesting is that there is no definition of Celebrity, I would imagine that the FTC considers celebrity to mean those that appear in the public eye on Television, in Print or in Movies. However, I find this to be a shortcoming of the guidelines in general and of course an indication that the FTC needs to update its understanding of how “influence” works in the age of Social Media.  Are Cewebrities equal to celebrities? True, having 1m followers on Twitter doesn’t equate to having a hit TV show, or a blockbuster movie, but as people move away from traditional media or at the very least blend their use of it with online media, there is a new category of celebrity appearing that are highly visible, extremely well known, all be it to a smaller sub-section of society.

The guidelines, do not clarify the issue of liability and whether it lies with the perceived endorsor or the seller, however, the past case law does show that both parties share liability. This means that bloggers, celebrities & cewebrities are all now liabile for prosecution under the Act.

See the press release here.

How do you think this will change blogging and Social Media use?

Everyone is into “relationship building” these days. It’s what we are told should be the aim of Social Media. This all sounds wonderful, but for most brands, especially large brands with multiple communication channels across multiple departments what does this really mean?

Firstly, large brands employ large numbers of people, not all of whom are focused on or empowered to build relationships. Those that are empowered are usually being chased from above to achieve bottom line improvement. Simply telling their SVP that they have improved the number of positive comments on the company blog, or been “retweeted” five times this week won’t really cut it.

Chris Brogan has a great position on this, “if your activity doesn’t move a needle with dollar signs attached to it – STOP!” I have to agree with him. Brands are not, despite claims to the contrary, altruistic. Sure they might leverage their position to make some impact for social good, but that isn’t the business they are in.  They are in the business of making money.

Managing Expectations

So how does this impact us as consumers. Brand relationship is, like any other relationship, both a personal and complex thing. What moves me in a brand, will leave another cold. Same with people, I might find someone very attractive, interesting and want to spend time with them, someone else would not see the attraction.  Where this becomes problematic, in our new Social Media age is in expectation management.

I like you, I want to spend time with you, but you give me mixed signals, you send me mailings, you send me emails, you want me to “Friend” you on Facebook, but when I try and talk to you by phone or even on Twitter, you just ignore me. Our relationship has developed over time but it seems like you are just not that into me.

This is the problem that brands in Social Media are facing. How to meet the expectation of the single customer. They have become caught up in the “popularity” metrics, if we have more followers, fans, friends, readers, then we must be popular. They have lost sight of what those numbers mean. Each number – with the exception of the bots, spammers & MLM types, is a human being. Someone who wants to develop some type of relationship with them. Each person will want a different type of relationship, some will want regular contact, some will want less. Some will want the brand to be there for them when they need them.

No Win/Win

As consumers we have created a situation in which neither the brand or us, as consumers can win. Our expectations of the relationship is too high, in some cases beyond reasonable. The ugly truth is, they are just not that into us. Its not them, its us, we expected too much. How does a brand with a million followers communicate at a 1:1 level with each of those people? Think about that for a moment, a 1:1 relationship would require exactly that, a million employees! How can a brand scale that relationship to a reasonable level? There are tools, services and techniques, but at the end of the day, how many of your followers do you communicate with on a daily basis, how many of them do you have a “real” relationship with? I would hazard a guess that it is probably a very small percentage of your total Friends & Followers base. So, if we, as individuals can’t do it why do we have the expectation that brands have the resources to do it?

The solution is that we both need to reset our expectations. Brands need to realize that acquiring a huge following in Social Media doesn’t equate to instant sales increases & increased brand advocacy or brand loyalty. Equally as consumers we need to realize that as much as we love our brand, there is only so much they can do for us, that we are just one of many, that we don’t and never will have a 1:1 relationship with them, that they are into us, just not as much as we are into them.

Is your brand into you?