Flack's Revenge

Some of my recent posts offered seemingly contradictory advice regarding getting started with social media at the organization level.

My post Is ROI Overrated? questioned the need to prove ROI and advised against getting caught up in planning paralysis. In Don’t Become Social Media Roadkill in Your Organization, I said that one needs to take a methodical approach and set the right expectations.

I truly believe that it is possible to accomplish both goals; to proceed decisively and without lots of fanfare yet do so in a rational way that boosts the odds of success.

Defining Success

First, what does it mean to be successful in term of implementing a social media program?

At the most basic level I suggest that worthy goals are to help spread the good word about an organization’s products, services, and to defend the brand and build corporate image. I know these are the kind of things that many of my clients are looking for.

They are all very fuzzy concepts. PR has struggled for years with measurement and social media adds a few new wrinkles.

Suffice it to say, there are ways to do this. I suggest not getting too caught up with measurement and ROI tracking in the early stages. You can help set expectations while taking some of the pressure off to prove results by starting out on a small scale that does not threaten to “break the bank.”

Defining Scope

Social media is not just another IT project or corporate initiative that needs to be managed and controlled with a vice-like grip. It involves new ways and styles of communicating. Success, to an extent, means letting go.

This means letting your employees know that is OK to blog and Tweet (my wife works for a large company that runs tight control over all PCs, prohibiting use of Facebook and other social networking applications – I think this is incredibly shortsighted).

It means equipping them with tools and education and letting them know what the company is doing in the social media realm. It means setting and informing about policies but not making these too restrictive or onerous.

Where to Start

There is a myth hat social media is free. While it is true that you won’t need to make major investment on par with the cost of significant ad buys or technology acquisition, there is a cost in terms of time, whether incurred by internal staff or in working with external agencies/consultants.

Here are some quick tips.

Look for low cost, high return areas, such as:

• • Brand and reputation monitoring
  • Customer service

Using social media to be a better listener is a no-brainer, and there are a range of free tools (some covered in an earlier post) that can keep you up-to-date in near-real-time about topics that are relevant to your brand, customer service and PR efforts.

The next level of commitment involves becoming active in using social media tools to engage. This means getting involved with online conversations and responding to relevant Twitter streams, blog posts, online articles, chatter found in social networks, etc. Doing this can either be an overwhelming or trivial task depending the amount of buzz in your space. We work with clients to determine the types of forums, mentions and situations that should merit a response – the conversations that count – and an agile process for engaging.

Influencing the Conversation and Setting the Pace

The next level is to develop a process and platform for marshaling your content and intellectual capital (meaning experts) and using social media to increase your digital footprint, educate and in general communicate with customers, potential customers and other influencers.

The same general approaches can be used to drive a content marketing effort that could augment demand generation and result in very real payback (as much as I had admonished to put ROI aside in the early stages, it is not a four letter word and does not hurt of course).

This can become involved and tends to take the most time. But tools such as blogging and Twitter are very well understood and in general not difficult to put to work.

If you are part of a large company that has many products and divisions, it could help to choose one area as a starting point. Do not think about your organizational or product management grid – think of the audiences you are trying to communicate with and topical areas that they should find compelling. Launching one or more blogs that focus on these areas would be a good way to get started. Add Twitter into the mix (see my post Blogging and Twitter: A Powerful Combination) and you will be off to the proverbial races.

Then, you can go on to build from early successes.

In my post Is ROI Overrated?, I advised against getting caught up in planning paralysis when it comes to social media

If you have just started to contemplate a social media strategy, you may well be part of a big company.

Perhaps it has become a political football of sorts. Some wonder where on the organizational chart social media should belong. Who should “own” the social media effort? The communications department would seem to be an obvious home for it. Then again, social media involves technology, so shouldn’t IT have a say too?

If you have been charged with trying to help your organization get its collective arms around social media, I advise a word or two of caution that might seem at odds with my earlier post, but really isn’t.

This advice is based on my experiences with social media and my long history helping companies adopt and implement technologies, including marketing systems and what could arguably be called the first social media platform, Lotus Notes. Before I got into PR I cut my tech teeth on IT consulting.

The caution can help you avoid having a great big target painted on your back that could arise from social media not being well understood. Political footballs and investments come with risk.

Even when it is understood social media can be amorphous. Like a Rorschach test, people see different things in it based on their perch in the organization and might have divergent expectations, as examples:

C Suite: We must do it now! Everyone’s on Twitter! The CEO at X company has a blog! Where are we?
Legal team: What about the risks?
Marketing: Great! One more place to plaster our messages!
Everyone else: Don’t bother me with this now, I already have too much on my plate.

Without taking this into account, and setting the right expectations, you could wind up at the center of an effort doomed to failure because it was not properly conceived, budgeted and implemented.

So how do you reconcile my advice to not get caught up in planning paralysis with these words that urge you to go forward in some kind of methodical and rational way?

Stay tuned for my next post, I will share some practical tips.

There has been  a number of posts and articles recently questioning the continuing relevance of blogs, and the staying power of Twitter and social networks.

Handshake 2.0 blogger Anne Giles Clelland called my attention to this post (inactive), which predicted that people would tire of social networks like they have of blogging.  The same post linked to this article in the NY Times, which highlighted an apparent decline in blogging.

Some have suggested that Twitter will suffer the same fate as Second Life – which was all the rage not long ago but not buzzed about quite as much today.

Which leaves one with the question – how do you handicap the social media horse race and decide which tools to bet on?

In ClickZ Experts, Robin Niefield recently wrote in her story Social Media: Seduced by the New?:

We’ve been privileged and challenged by a steady stream of new and
hot technologies and communication channels in digital marketing. Each
new star garners outsize attention from the media as marketers,
educators, and agencies desperately try to stay abreast or get ahead of
yet another new opportunity.

For that brief shining moment, both fads and legitimate strategies
and tactics can take on celebrity status while other, equally
legitimate strategies and tactics are temporarily displaced. But “hot”
shouldn’t be a factor in rationale decision making or budget allocation
unless it’s the kind of hot that creates audience momentum and true
marketing opportunity.

….Admittedly, making rational decisions amid the hype and without
experience to guide efforts is difficult. Each brand’s case is unique,
requiring a customized analysis of opportunity, environment, resources,
competition, and a host of other factors. New tactics are often missing
the guidance of relevant history and example.

On the topic of Twitter (Hot) and blogging (some say decidedly Not), I have offered this advice.

Above and beyond, I think it helps to heed a few tips:

Whatever communications mechanisms you use, tell a good story – This almost goes without saying.  It is like a kind of info Darwinism – the fittest, or most interesting stories will climb the buzz heap and survive; the rest will whither on the vine and be ignored.

Some hear the advice “Tell a good story” and immediately think of the old adage “content is king.”

Content
is no longer king.  Amidst an explosion of content choices, attention (or the ability to capture and keep it) is king.  Which leads us to the next point.

Think “pull” not push – Where
are the eyeballs of your customers today – and how can you get in front of them? How is this changing?  E.g.,
while Twitter was formerly the fun toy of the techies, it is now becoming
much more mainstream.  Facebook was once for the college set.  This is
obviously no longer true.

Know your stuff – Today the market quickly separates clueless shills from their credibility.  People are called out and shamed with brutal efficiency – and this info lives forever online.  Stand behind your pitch, understand your space, and seek to have intelligent dialog.

Study how information flows online – How doe information flow and get discovered online?  This is constantly evolving and you need to become a student.  E.g., see my earlier post, in which I discussed the growing role of social networks for content discovery.

Blogging still counts – It may no longer be the cool new social media plaything but does enable easy Web publishing and can be a core component of a content marketing platform (I described this in last week’s post.  Also, see my post on Fusion PR Forum: Crossing the Blogging Chasm).

As long as people go to blogs and read them they are still relevant.  The above tip regarding your audiences should be a caveat for this rule.

There can be good reasons for diving headlong into a social media strategy and arguments for hedging bets and proceeding carefully.  I would venture to say that the greater danger is to sit on the sidelines and be too deliberative.

I attended a session at the Conference Board’s Corporate Communications and Web 2.0 event several weeks and was amazed to hear how the social media effort has grown organically at IBM (a company that many might assume is slow and bureaucratic), without lots of of fanfare or centralized planning.  Moderator and IBM social media manager Adam Christensen mentioned that the company’s blogging policy was launched long after the company encouraged people to blog (there is now a veritable army of IBM bloggers).

People cite good reasons for delaying.  They want to avoid risks and see that there will be a business benefit, and some path to ROI for time and money spent.  A post that ran on the Comet Branding blog implores people to first have their proverbial ducks in a row.  Here’s an excerpt:

Before you break your back doing the heavy lifting of researching and planning out your social media strategy, save yourself some heartache and hassle by first doing a posture check to gauge your organization’s social media readiness. Here are 8 questions to consider as you prepare to dive into the social mediasphere…

Far be it from me to say that things like metrics, ROI, and preparation are unimportant.  At the same time, I am reminded of my early days in tech, doing missionary selling work for some of the first CRM systems (called sales force automation then, back in the day of DOS and 24 pound luggable laptops).

Customers pushed for ROI, and we had some equations which seemed to do the trick as far as reassuring sales prospects that there was a road to payback.  More often than not, companies proceeded on faith – the common sense that maintaining an electronic customer database that is shared is just better than a stack of index cards or Rolodex.  You could also say the same thing for desktop productivity tools.  Is there ROI in word processing or spreadsheet software?

So, for all the well-intentioned and reasonable efforts to measure social media, control it and tie it back to business results, consider some simple facts:

• People are buzzing about your brand right now, online as we speak.  Don’t you want to be part of the conversation?
• If you are not monitoring your brand and engaging in online dialog, can you afford to wait much longer?
• Do you really need a study to tell you that the ways people get the information they need for purchasing decisions is much different today than it was even just a few years ago?

As I have said, and as the IBM example validates, social media can blossom without lots of central control or planning and to a large extent success means letting go.  There are typically many people who will gladly help in your extended community – your loyal customers, employees and their networks – if you give them what they need, encourage them and then just get out of the way.