I’ve been on an intentional hiatus the last week or so (yes, it was also Chinese New Year here in Singapore so it’s been busy with public holidays and visiting and all that), but also to take some down time to think.
Something that I keep thinking about (partially influenced by Seth Godin’s Linchpin) is wondering who matters.
Why do we chase digital business from the huge corporations who say they want digital but time and time again the end result is “go peddle your social media stuff somewhere else” and buy a TV ad.
Because the big organisations look better on a company portfolio than the mom and pop shop who really does want to embrace digital and probably will pay you less?
Why do we spend hours on decks and creative for an audience that isn’t receptive?
Aren’t they the equivalent of your whining customers that we always tell ourselves (or our clients) to sacrifice and go after those who love you, your business, your service instead?
I’m currently reading Here Comes Everybody by the brilliant Clay Shirky and in one chapter he writes:
“The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolution cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society.
As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed.
The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional structures is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration…”
Let’s make no mistake about it. We’re currently living in a time of revolution.
Perhaps it’s not the same kind of revolution as the printing press or the Industrial Revolution, but it is one that is more subtle and yet pervasive. It is one that is increasingly changing our perceptions of what is “normal”.
And existing organisations are not ready for that. Look at the Toyota fiasco this year or Dominos last year (or any other brand in between). They only reacted to the revolution when they needed to – and by then, arguably it could be too late. What if Toyota embraced the need for communication and transparency and had acted from the first defect instead of waiting for it to kill someone before acting? Would that have mitigated some of the PR nightmare that they’re facing now? I think so.
So here’s the question: Are you embracing the revolution or are you going to be caught unaware – and maybe destroyed – by it?
I don’t think there’s a middle ground. The way we live, interact and communicate as individuals and businesses is fundamentally changing and every day you delay the choice to embrace this new (and scary) way of life, is a day you’re heading towards extinction.
So you hear the good news that your boss/client wants to get started with a social media strategy. Before you start jumping for joy, does the conversation sound anything like this?
Boss: Let’s get on social media – let’s start with Twitter
You: Why? What’s the objective?
Boss: We’ll think about that later, just do it
If that’s what it sounds like, I can almost guarantee in 6 to 12 months that very person is going to be asking you “so how have we done on Twitter?” and you’re going to say “err but we didn’t specify any goals” and it’s going to bea one way ticket to hell. And you know what? In all likelihood if you’re doing it for the sake of “just doing it”, it’s probably not going to be work you’re going to be proud of anyway.
Instead, the conversation should go something like this:
Boss: Let’s get on social media – let’s start with Twitter
You: Why? What’s the objective?
Boss: I want to use it to improve customer service
You: So we’re going to monitor all mentions of our brand and respond to complaints and rectify them?
Boss: Yes
Replace “Twitter” with “Facebook” or “blog”, replace “improve customer service” with “increase lead generation” or “decrease costs’ and you get the gist.
Ideally it should go even further than this to identify whose time will be allocated to this, how much time and how the initiative will be measured.
You need to do this from the get go. Set the expectation early that social media efforts – while free/cheap – take time. Don’t let your desire to do some social media work/please your boss/please your client get in the way of this. It’ll save you a world of hurt later.
How do you deal with “just do it” requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
This isn’t new advice. I learned this just over a year ago from Keith Ferrazzi in his awesome book “Never Eat Alone“. And this doesn’t just apply to you as an individual when you need help with a problem, some advice, or in my case a job search – this applies to your organisation if you’re even thinking of engaging in social media.
Something that happens all too often is a company realises it has a new product launch coming up, doesn’t have bloggers to seed to (what a dirty word) and begins the “relationship” process at that point.
That’s too late.
If you do that, don’t be surprised that no “advocates” leap to the defense of your brand when a crisis happens and blame social media.
If you start a blog before you built relationships with other blogs and then get no traffic when you post something, don’t blame the blog.
If you want to push a press release and follow the “best practices” and tweet it at the magical hour on Friday afternoon but no one in your network retweets it because you never engaged with them, don’t blame Twitter.
You need to build that network and goodwill way in advance, so that when you need it, it’s there for you. If you’re thinking about building it because you need it – you’re already too late.
I’d love to hear from either side of the coin: great stories where you invested in a network/community and reaped the benefits or stories as a blogger/influencer where you knew the other party had its back against the wall and was grasping at straws to just get anyone possible for their press event/product launch. The comments are yours!
Sometimes, being involved in socia media, it seems everyone is talking about the same thing and that it’s being amplified over many people and over time.
It’s even scarier if you’re an organisation and you wake up to see 10, 20, 50, 100 tweets about you one morning and rush to come up with some sort of response by the afternoon.
But how “sticky” really are these conversations – or are they actually rather transient?
Let’s look at two relatively “big” occurences this year: United Breaks Guitars and the JK Wedding Dance and their search trends on Google (click for larger image):
JK Wedding Dance - United Breaks Guitars
Though there was certainly a surge, they both lasted for about six weeks each and given that they happened at about the same time, it could have been possible to miss one or the other due to noise.
Kanye’s search volume – while through the roof, is also shorter than any other story, lasting less than a month (looks like two weeks from the scale). And let’s face it, without the comment from President Obama, it would have been even shorter.
Kanye’s search volume immediately dwarfs that of JK Wedding Dance and United Breaks Guitars – again this comes back to noise. How long can your story (positive or negative) hold the attention of the social media sphere?
Google Wave doesn’t create a spike but does have the longest sustained interest over time – obviously good news for a product launch, bad news if this is a PR fiasco.
It peaks as high as Kanye but has sustained itself pretty well. Bad news for Tiger – or any brand that finds itself in that unfortunate position.
So what’s the takeaway?
I generally wouldn’t encourage it, but there might be certain situations where it’s okay to keep quiet and not respond. Take Kanye for example. If he kept silent and didn’t go on numerous talk shows – it’d be over in a week or two. Erased (or at least embedded pretty deep) in our collective consciousness. To some extent same for Tiger. If another “Kanye” happened two days after Tiger, I think both stories would have fizzled out.
The social media eco system is fickle and riddled with attention-deficit disorder. Everyone want someone to bash but that could change from one day to the next. It’s easy to say that in retrospect of course, but the next time you get that feeling you absolutely need to reply or your company will lose millions – think about whether that story will really be around in two weeks, of if the pirahnas would have moved on to new meat.
About a month ago, I noticed that an optical store here in Singapore called The Lens Men was active on Twitter (@thelensmen) and took the opportunity to ask them about contact lenses and prices. Unlike a few other shops, they were straightforward and transparent and told me that the prices for those particular lenses were set by the manufacturer and thus was the same no matter where I went. They also said they treated customers more like “patients” because eyes are important and should get proper examinations and care.
Based on no other factor other that I would support a local business using digital media in Singapore, I decided to check them out. By the time I had a free evening to head down to their store at Centrepoint it was two weeks later, and even though I didn’t let them know ahead of time I was going down, I was probably treated more carefully than any other optician I’d been to before and it was a good experience.
But let’s get back to the title. What’s the financial ROI here? I bought six boxes of contact lenses for $280. Strictly speaking even if they calculated my value over a year it’d probably hit $840. How many customers like me do they have to reach via social media in Singapore to justify adding “monitor Twitter” as an additional scope of work? Singapore’s too small for such an effort to scale with any noticeable impact.
But how about the non-financial ROI? My net promoter score just went way up, they’ll get a link (and numerous tweets) with this post, engagement with many other people online, more top of mind recall and brand awareness among a subset of digital users, and an authentic, transparent personality to add to their brand equity among other things. This is a great example of a company in Singapore using social media for small business use.
Does that matter? Some managers concerned only about the bottom line will probably say no. Can you put a monetary value to it? Probably not in any objective sense. Should you do it anyway? Probably.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have all the answers to ROI when it comes to social media. Tracking KPIs is easy, but it’s not the same as ROI. So do you think it matters to consider the non-financial, less tangible benefits, or do you think looking at cold hard ROI is the answer?
[note: I paid the full consumer price for my lenses and did not receive any form of compensation/discounts for this whatsoever. The Lens Men did not conduct any form of outreach towards this blog post at all]
Today the BLUE blog is finally going live after about two months of planning and preparation. It was literally handed to me on my first day of work and I was told to make it a reality. I gotta say, it has got to be the hardest blog I’ve ever set up, compared to signing up with Wordpress with a click.
But one thing I really enjoyed about working on the blog was that I was never told to look at company X or firm Y. It was really built on the belief that we’d get it started and it’ll evolve organically as time goes by. And when you aren’t thinking within the “box” that competitors or other firms have set, then you have much more room to grow.
Maybe you notice one competitor is on Facebook and another is on Twitter so you decide to go on both just to “keep up”, when that money could have been spent on paid search or SEO and doubled your conversion rate, but you didn’t because your “competitor wasn’t doing it”.
Where would the iPhone be if Apple looked at the existing competitors in the market at the time? How about the Wii if all Nintendo did was look at what was in existence in the form of the Playstation and the Xbox? How much money would then-presidential candidate Obama have raised if he chose to do it the same, “tried and tested” way every presidential candidate had before him, through fund raising parties intead of going straight to the voters via new media? Where will your company end up if all you’re doing is looking over your shoulder?
I’m not saying scoping out the competition is a waste of time, definitely not. But you’ll have strengths that they won’t have and they’ll have weaknesses that you don’t. So whatever they’re doing may not work for you and vice versa.
Take my limited real world “experience” with a bucket of salt, but give me the choice and I’d choose to cut my own blazing path than be a follower. Innovation is key.
Thanks to recent “inspirations” like the badly executed Singapore Writers Festival and numerous bad PR pitches that really drive the point home. – you really need to be careful who you put behind social media initiatives or they the risk of it blowing up in your face increases exponentially.
Agree? Disagree? Would you prefer to hire someone with the “technical” skills and re-purpose them for the web, or hire someone familiar with the web and polish their craft?
Something I’ve been conscious of since joining BLUE is how I’m officially a representative of the company, and that’s not necessarily easily separated from being an individual. Add that to being the typical Generation Y demographic active on social media channels like Facebook, and the potential for saying something damaging to myself, my colleagues, my clients or the company increases exponentially. Brian just posted a similar post saying that a blog perhaps never really feels like yours when you’re on someone else’s payroll.
One of the best social media business books, Groundswell, talks about how blogs threaten institutional power. While most points under this section are references to external effects (ignoring copyright, inaccurate blogging etc), one point is inappropriate content from employees. As if there isn’t enough to worry about in social media’s murky, piranha-and-shark-infested waters.
Unless you have a social media policy, your employees are at best half-enlightened about what they can and cannot do. So the answer to the question is yes, you do need one. The logical next question is then: What goes into it?
Not revealing trade secrets (including financials, exclusive partnerships etc)
Not badmouthing co-workers, clients, bosses and the like
Not giving the appearance of being a spokesperson for the company (unless that’s the intention)
Not taking potshots at competitors
This is far from an exhaustive list and these will vary by your industry vertical, and there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all policy. It will require some thinking and work, but the simple payback is maintaining a squeaky clean reputation (or at least, cleaner than your competitor’s!). For more thoughts check out Scott Hepburn’s post: How to create a corporate social media policy.
A social media policy isn’t about being restrictive or keeping employees on a tight leash. It’s about empowering them within guidelines to be active ambassadors of your brand on public platforms that could be viewed by existing customers, potential customers and even your competition.
Shouldn’t that be reason enough to participate responsibly?
What guidelines does your company have in place to ensure responsible participation by its’ employees?
Today I happened to glance at a “statistic” that says a certain online internal application/platform has attracted a certain number of users (something like 30,000) and is a “huge success”. Now it’s not that 30,000 is a bad number, because if the company is 35,000 strong they’ve got an 86% uptake rate, which isn’t too bad by any means.
No, the problem I have with reporting on number of users (as all our favourite social networking/microblogging sites do), is that it doesn’t really tell us anything.
Take for example you’re a brand. You’re doing some research on social network A and social network B. Social network A boasts 200 million users, social network B boasts 100 million users. Which do you buy an ad with? Well if your answer is social network A just based on that one figure, and you assume that 200 million people around the world is pretty good “reach”, you might be making the wrong decision.
Let’s drill a little deeper. Let’s hypothetically say social network A has 200 million users, but only 1 million access the network more than once a month, and the average time on site is 2 minutes.
Now our hypothetical social network B has 100 users, but 50 million access their profiles once a week, spending an average of 10 minutes per visit.
Now which sounds better?
Of course there are many other things to consider like the demographics of the group and whether the social network even has certain languages available, but the point here is not to point at the newest shiny object and say “wow it has the MOST number of users, let’s plonk our money there”.
What considerations do you keep in mind other than number of users?
I’ve been on an intentional hiatus the last week or so (yes, it was also Chinese New Year here in Singapore so it’s been busy with public holidays and visiting and all that), but also to take some down time to think.
Something I’ve been conscious of since joining BLUE is how I’m officially a representative of the company, and that’s not necessarily easily separated from being an individual. Add that to being the typical Generation Y demographic active on social media channels like Facebook, and the potential for saying something damaging to myself, my colleagues, my clients or the company increases exponentially. Brian just 
