Social media is a tool to meet business goals. It’s here to stay but it’s a tool that we all need to know. Social media experts role ought to be to consult in organizations (and marketing departments) how to incorporate it in the way proper to their unique business goals. A social media guru is a marketing manager, customer service director, PR director, etc. It won’t (and shouldn’t) stay a role in its own right.
Unfortunately, 8 years after Facebook’s launch, 16 years after ICQ, and 20 years after the birth of the web, this is still what the “social media industry” looks like.
Frequently, marketing teams don’t eat their own dogfood when it comes to social media.
And the result is often bad strategy.
Everyone now seems to be clamoring for “Social media.” “Open up a Facebook page,” they say … even if they don’t know why. Go Viral … even though they are lacking positioning.
Social media strategy frequently requires a Groundswell strategy, including:
Breaking down silos: operating across all touchpoints, including marketing, sales, customer service, R&D, etc.
Letting go of control: user-generated content
Realistic goals: it’s not viral but expectations aren’t realistic
Frequent, quality content. It’s not a montly newsletter or static website.
Data & Analytics Focus, on a short-term and long-term basis
Technological Literacy: These tools are digital and need computer literacy
Corporate rules that allow for information gathering and social media access
However, this is not how traditional marketing, with its origin in brand management and reliance on one-way, static print, operated.
Therefore, traditional marketing, with its silos and technophobia, is often unable and unprepared to make working Web 2.0 marketing strategy that drives realistic business results (including, simply staying in business).
Marketing Profs also writes about why eating your own dog food is important.
Creating a great online community or social-marketing program has just as much to do with the philosophy behind the effort as it does with the tools that facilitate such offerings.
Just as the field of email marketing adopted best-practices like opt-outs and truthful subject lines, the discipline of community building and social marketing has best-practices that should be upheld. Anger your customers by posting fake comments in your own blog posts or talking trash about your competitors, and you’ll pay through negative PR, or worse—customer attrition.
In such a transparent environment, there is little room for error. (Just ask global PR firm Edelman how its “Wal-Marting Across America” campaign for Wal-Mart turned out a couple of years back.) You also need to make a lot of decisions on the fly, so having an experienced “pilot” can make for a much smoother ride.
One of the reasons that companies use their own products first is to test them in real situations. With social media, too often your executives and marketing strategists are building strategy without understanding what the social media channels can and can not due and their cultural “language”.
We still have people talking about MySpace.
On the other hand, we also have some who throw in vocabulary which doesn’t actually make sense to anyone who is actively engaged. And others who are quick to berate their team for not being on the newest fad (when they don’t know how it’s going to work), begging companies to get a company page on Google+ (which don’t exist yet) when Google’s senior management isn’t even eating their own dog food, ignoring social strategy like the POST Methodology.
But you must eat your own dog food.
If not, your clients, customer, and community know.
According to David Armano, EVP of Global Integration at Edelman Digital:
you’d better show an intimate grasp of the space. Because, we’re all out there—Googling, Digging, looking for signs that you know what you’re talking about. Take a page out of Marcy’s book if you are in one of these roles. Engage people in relevant, meaningful ways and add a few notches of credibility to your belt.
If you’re not eating your own dogfood, it’s clear. You’re not credible. You don’t know what is going on with your customers, and your community, and you are probably also making bad strategy, causing significant damage to your business.
If you’re looking for an agency or hiring, ask the following questions (from Marketing Profs):
If you’re a brand looking for a company to build your online community or create your social-marketing program, ask that company the following questions:
Does it philosophically embrace the concepts that it’s asking you to adopt (e.g., transparency, authenticity, and a “give before you get” approach to value)?
Is it practicing what it preaches by blogging, engaging customers through its own customer-support community, commenting on other industry blogs, and engaging the public in places like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter?
Does it have “community” or “social” experience working with brands like yours?
If you don’t like dogfood, it’s time to get a taste for the Kibbles.
Gary Vaynerchuk has been a social media superstar. Certainly no Luddite, he’s used social media — and most important useful content and real expertise — to real business success, both for his wine business and personal businesses. I first discovered Gary Vaynerchuk three or four years ago, when he was in the early days of Wine Library TV and reviewed some Israeli wine for the first time.
Yet, Gary has said that there is a social media bubble. 99.5% of those who call themselves social media gurus (a terminology I’ve long rejected) are “clowns.”
On a recent TechCrunch TV, Gary Vaynerchuk said: “we are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.”
According to Gary, 99.5% of “social media gurus” (A term I would get insulted if anyone calls me that) don’t know how to define real business value. It’s not about “likes” or “fans” but rather about business value. This doesn’t happen at once. It’s not viral. It’s hard work – Gary is known for being online at all hours and answering emails at 3 in the morning.
Social media performs business functions: it’s not a function in itself.
Social media is a tool, like a telephone. He’s repeating a message that I’ve advised clients for years and longed believed: There is a Social Media Bubble.
Social media is a tool to create business value. It’s a tool to show appreciation to your customers, help them with customer service, and provide real business roles.
I hate the word social media. I hate the concept ‘social’ media. I’ve consistently refused to incorporate the word ‘social’ in my job titles.
I’m not a social media strategist. I’m a strategist. On this, I disagree with analysts like Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang.
I also don’t say that I do social media marketing. I don’t. I do marketing and today, media is social. (Today? When I was 15, half my lifetime ago, I started a nonprofit as a website, which I handcoded in HTML, and an email listserv).
OK, maybe I do social media.
… And telephone media.
… And print media.
… And radio media.
… And mobile media
… And spoken media.
… And email. And tradeshows.
Ok. I’ll be honest. I’ve never (yet) created a trade show booth (but I’ve reached mass audiences and niche audiences without it). I’ve also never worked with a printer to create direct mail (which is probably good since printed snail mail volume is declining (no wonder, since it’s called ‘snail’ mail)). Is it that I’m really an online marketing strategist?
How does marketing to a trade group in LinkedIn or Meetup differ from doing it over the telephone or via the postal service and in person?
How is social media different from online media, in general?
The platform isn’t the most important thing. First choose your goal and objective, and then choose the platform.
The only ones talking about social are the ones not being social. If you’re singularly focused on the magical, wondrous world of ‘social media’ I promise it’s going to disappoint you. On the other hand, if you can use the appropriate tool for the appropriate time (both online and offline), I promise things will be much better.
My point is, with over 2 billion people online, including most of the developed world, marketers just need to be where their target audience is. Much of the time, it doesn’t matter (at least to digital natives like me that learned to use a computer at the same time that we learned how to use a telephone or write a letter). Do you care that I’m writing this post on my cellphone and not on paper? I didn’t think so.
The point is: for digital natives (the oldest of whom are now managers in their 30s… Don’t remind me) – equally comfortable online as off – differentiating media as social makes no sense.
Gary Vaynerchuk discusses branding and marketing in today’s new age. Pay attention – he hates the word ‘social media’ because media implies broadcasting — but today’s age is conversation!
The social media and networking phenomenon is growing extremely fast in the UK. 85 percent of the population is online; they spend over 6 hours on social media sites every month, nearly 60 percent of them read blogs and 64% have their own profile on a social network.
Mad Men may depict the ad world of the 1960s, but the lessons of this successful AMC show depicting the Madison Avenue world of 50 years ago still has a lot of relevance in today’s digital environment of 2010 and beyond.
While Don Draper barely respected the world of the television commercial and certainly couldn’t have imagined Wikipedia or Facebook, there is still a lot we can learn — including the mistakes — from the Sterling Cooper team.
Apologies but I can’t embed most clips that are on YouTube, so check out the links.
The phrase was introduced in Marshall McLuhan’s most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. For example, McLuhan claimed in Understanding Media that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. So the medium through which a person encounters a particular piece of content would have an effect on the individual’s understanding of it.
This is true today as well. Different social networks should be utilized differently. Content appropriate for Twitter may not be appropriate for Facebook. Different people use and create material differently, as well – what Forrester calls the Social Technographics Profile. McLuhan’s research is just as relevant today.
6. Strategy is the strength. The core of marketing is still key — branding and positioning rule. Strategy matters. Social media requires more than just an ability to update a Facebook status or send a tweet. It requires an understanding of branding and strategy. The message still matters. Knowing your target audience is key — as clearly Don Draper gets it when he convinces a client that the ad agency gets it and Sterling Cooper’s strategy will lead to success – instead of the company’s initial ideas- in the clip here.
5. Write Well – Copy and creativity matter. The Sterling Cooper team turned the drab idea of the Kodak Slideshow – which defined a generation – into the iconic Kodak Carousel. The product was the same: a common slide projector. But would people have bought the Kodak Wheel? Probably not. The same product, but different branding and a different story: a product that defined a generation.
There will be a difference in the number of fans and attractors depending on what your brand’s name is, depending on what your website’s URL is, what your Facebook page is named or your twitter handle. What content you send out matters. Good writing matters and, yes, content is still king — just the definion of good content takes many more factors into account. It’s not about the product, it’s about the experience.
Don Draper turned a slide projector into an iconic moment in this clip.
4. Efficiency Matters because an Upstart is Around the Corner — While the Sterling Cooper is drinking all day, taking expensive vacations, and going to the upper-crust parties, someone is just around the corner, being more efficient, and out to get your business. Today that kind of waste doesn’t cut it. And while you were out drinking, someone else is coding today and developing the next startup. Do you want to remain relevant? Then stay on your toes.
3. It’s about feeling, not feature – Social is the first word in “social media.” The job title of the person in charge of implementing your brand’s presence on social networks is frequently referred to as “community management.” People need to feel a part of a community. They need to feel good about your brand. Your customers don’t care about your latest engineering feat or that your classes use video and audio. These are important things that may be needed in order to the end result but it won’t sell. Instead, people care about how it makes them feel. Peggy is right: “What we are selling is confidence, a better you.” It’s about feeling, not feature.
2. Change is Inevitable – It’s not by accident that Mad Men begins in the 1960s. The sexual revolution. The move from print to radio to television. The iconic role that television played during that generation in people’s experiences – from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War and the rise of feminism was a dramatic change. Bert Cooper started Sterling Cooper but he needed the younger Don Draper and Roger Sterling, Jr. (son of the co-founder, along with Bert, of Sterling Cooper) to continue it. Draper and Sterling then needed the younger team of Peggy and Pete and Harry to remain relevant and implement for the future. Draper and Sterling’s business acumen was much higher but they needed their younger and more inexperienced team to keep them relevant. Embrace change because it is today.
1. Embrace New Technology – Today’s social media is yesterday’s TV. Yesterday’s TV is last week’s radio and newspaper.
Today’s new technology is tomorrow’s old technology. When Harry Crane decides that television is important, the team laughs at him. In the end, they make him the TV department — because they didn’t value TV. In the end, Harry is one of the most important members of the team. Do you have an intern or recent grad in charge of social media? What does that say about your priorities? Are you putting Harry Crane in charge of your most important department? In a few years, they’ll be the entire organization and the only one left.
Don Draper has descended – but still plays a role and is still the figurehead. But Harry Crane is the one that does the work and gets the job done.
The following is a guest post from Natan Gesher and was first posted on his blog Lines Writing Lines and is reprinted with permission of the author. The views expressed are entirely his own.
If you’re in the habit of following these things, you’ve by no doubt now read Dan Yoder’s 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. I’ve seen it posted in six or seven places in just the past few hours. Unfortunately, it makes less and less sense every time I skim it. For the following reasons and for many others, I am not planning to delete my Facebook account:
Keeping in touch with Facebook
10. I moved from America to Israel in 2004, leaving behind my entire family and almost every friend I’d ever known. Though I didn’t get a Facebook account until 2005, I’ve been using it daily for the past five years to stay in touch with friends and relatives. Facebook makes it extremely inexpensive and highly efficient to get out important news about myself and to find out important news about other people with whom I never was very close. At the same time, it has never replaced traditional means of communication like telephone calls; nor should it.
Business networking with Facebook
9. LinkedIn is there and it does a fine job, but work is only one part of my life and there’s no chance for a prospective employer or client to get to know me by my LinkedIn page. I add my coworkers as Facebook friends and I’ll do the same for my clients. If they don’t accept me, I don’t mind at all, but I think they’ll want to get a better understanding of who I am and what I like, to the extent that information on Facebook supplements my real personality.
Photo sharing on Facebook
8. I understand that Facebook is now the world’s biggest photo-sharing site. There are others, like Flickr and Picasa, that have lots of features and are more professional, and more serious solutions like installing Gallery on your own domain. But for ease of tagging, getting photos to lots and lots of people – but not to random strangers – and sheer simplicity, sharing photos with Facebook makes perfect sense.
Connecting with new friends on Facebook
7. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been out and met someone or a few people, but only gotten first names. In the old days, meeting someone and speaking for a few minutes meant that I’d either have to ask for a telephone number to continue the conversation, with might seem a little too forward (and I don’t enjoy talking on the telephone very much) or attempting to follow up through a friend-of-a-friend, which could be cumbersome (I’ve never been comfortable meeting someone and then asking for an email address). It’s now extremely handy to use Facebook to connect with a new contact, even given just a first name and a mutual friend. This might be to continue a discussion about some interesting issue, to finish tagging a photo, to pass along information about a job or an apartment or just to stay in touch in the future. It’s clean, it’s easy and it works.
Using Facebook ads
6. Recently, while looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv, I used Facebook ads to get the word out and drive people to read my message that I was willing to pay a NIS 3500 finder’s fee for information leading to me renting an apartment. A very large percentage of the site’s traffic was generated by these Facebook ads, leading to several actionable tips. My somewhat creative use of Facebook ads was profiled in an article in TheMarker, the business section of Haaretz, but in fact I believe that I was using Facebook’s advertising platform in exactly the way it was designed and for exactly its purpose. Gone are the days when ad campaigns cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just to plan and start. I set $10 daily limits for my ads and didn’t have any knowledge of the system beyond what’s available in Facebook’s own FAQs. It’s so easy to use Facebook ads, I could almost train my dog to use them.
Facebook’s privacy settings
5. Complaints about how Facebook sets up its privacy settings are a dime a dozen, but I challenge anyone to come up with another comparable web service that gives its users more powerful, granular control over their information than Facebook does. You can choose exactly who gets to see every little thing you do on Facebook or set global settings and just stick with them. True, they change their privacy options all the time and true, it gets pretty confusing, but it’s getting confusing because it’s getting more detailed and more complex, which is a good thing. And the bottom line is that no information is available about you that you don’t put on Facebook in the first place: if you want to have a profile with just your first name, last initial and favorite television shows, you can do that. This isn’t to say that privacy isn’t a big concern. It is, but it’s also crazy to complain that Facebook is spreading your information every which way if you don’t use Facebook’s own options to control who sees your information.
Remembering people’s details with Facebook
4. Whenever someone I know travels, I always ask for a postcard to add to my collection. “But what’s your address?” they always ask. And I always say: “It’s on my Facebook page.” When I meet someone who asks for my phone number, I could recite the ten digits or write them down, but it’s a hell of a lot easier just to give my Facebook username – which, conveniently, is the same as my first name. When someone wants to know my birthday to wish me a happy birthday – it’s there, and it even reminds my friends and family on Facebook when my birthday is approaching. I have a Birthdays calendar in iCal too, so I can see when important birthdays are coming… but there are hundreds more birthdays in my Facebook account.
Everyone is on Facebook
3. As often happens, Farhad Manjoo said it best: “There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook… it is now so widely trafficked that it’s fast becoming a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant [and mobile phones]… Facebook is now at that same point – whether or not you intend it, you’re saying something by staying away.” What does it say to me when I meet someone who doesn’t have Facebook? Something like: I don’t want to stay in touch with you. Or perhaps: Please leave me alone. Or even: Community is not important to me. These are perfectly valid sentiments, but if you do want to stay in touch, if you don’t want to be left alone, if communitydoes matter to you, then you’ll find a way to use the tool that’s expected of you.
Facebook gets better all the time
2. I’m actually ambivalent about Facebook’s progress and I include this one even though, while I think it’s true that Facebook does get better all the time, it also gets worse. I miss the days when Facebook was mainly about networks (and then groups) and I think becoming a “fan” of a “page” is lame, which is why I’ve never done it. I think most Facebook applications like the Farmville thing and the Mafia Wars thing are complete crap, which is why I’ve never used them (and why I’ve blocked them from spamming me). At the same time, Facebook’s integration with the wider web is very cool and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities – who knows, maybe one day Facebook will be the next Google, the first stop for people who want to find something on the internet. And where else on the internet do people join a site with their real names (first and last) and real pictures, one account per person? Facebook could be the long sought source for online micropayments, one-click identity verification without credit cards, etc, etc.
It’s a pain in the ass to quit Facebook
1. This is in response to Dan Yoder’s point three: “Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account.” It seems circular to me that it’s hard to close your Facebook account would be an argument for why you should close your Facebook account, but I understand that many people see it that way. Just ask yourself: is it really worth it? Facebook is entertaining, useful, efficient, free, generally a good idea to use and possibly will be even more essential in the future. If you don’t like making your information public, limit the amount of information you share. You don’t even have to give a real last name to use Facebook; you don’t have to use your normal email address; you don’t have to join your company’s network or accept your boss’s friend request. Is it really worth canceling your account for the vaguest and lamest reasons? Nope. Do yourself and everyone around you a favor and keep the damn account open.
The current disaster in the Gulf states, with the BP oil spill (you know it’s bad when a disaster is named after your company) shows the importance of incorporating social media in your crisis communications plan, and the importance that social media plays in your communication strategy.
For the past month, millions of gallons of oil have been flooding into the Gulf as an oil drilling rig, owned by Transocean Ltd on behalf of bp plc, exploded, killed eleven crew members, and is now threatening the coasts of Louisiana, Mississipi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida.
Ultimately, while BP is in a horrible position, how they respond matters. And the appropriate response today is far different than what was accepted just a few years ago. Today, social media is part of the story – and you don’t control the message.
One of the core issues today is that people demand transparency and immediate news. Social and online media can provide it. According to Ellen Rossano, who used to be the Coast Guard’s public information officer during the Exxon Valdez oil spill:
“I advise my clients that they have to get the truth out as quickly as possible. One of my common-sense rules is you just can’t lie about what’s going on,” she told me. “You’re going to be found out. You can’t say ‘no comment’ anymore. It implies guilt. It implies you’re hiding something. You can always say to the media and the public, ‘Here’s what I can tell you.'”
She also notes:
“I’m thrilled beyond imagining at how the Joint Information Center has been transparent,” she says. “They’re posting situation reports everyday; there’s not much more they could be doing to be transparent, and I think that’s a phenomenal shift. The fact that anybody from the media and public can go to the sites and download video and audio … it’s just a huge improvement.”
Of course, you can’t always control the message. For example, Facebook recently introduced “community pages” which aggregates discussion about a specific topic. One of the important things for companies to be aware of, is that marketers do not control it. For example, bp’s community page has a lot of negative conversation about the bp oil spill.
bp plc’s Facebook presence is hard to find (I only found it by tweeting their account and asking for it), which means that they aren’t being heard or responding to the litany of complaints. Their Facebook page only has 741 fans. Hence, when someone goes on Facebook and looks for info on bp, instead of an official bp statement, they are more likely to find a group like this:
In fact, on Twitter, someone has created a fake account (@BPGlobalPR) with over 37,000 followers, compared to bp America’s real account (@BP_America) with under 6,000.
