Tools Can Be Strategic

No, it’s not all about the tools. If, by “it”, you mean the Big Ultimate Goal of All of This Stuff and Why We’re Doing It In the First Place. I don’t think we need to debate that point any further, do we?

But it’s important to point out, as a bookend, that tools can be strategic, or at least part of developing sound strategy.

Blogging can be a strategy that helps you reach a larger goal of awareness or reach or idea testing or personal exploration or whatever. Twitter can be a viable part of a distribution network strategy or engaging the community you have in other places. You can vet its adoption or value for your audience, test ideas, track its usefulness as a traffic driver for your website.

For many companies, forays into social media include testing and experimenting with the mechanisms that are available, and let’s face it, familiar and comfortable. And it’s hard to ask an established business to commit to a full-blown social media strategic plan if they can’t kick the tires on a few of the tools to see how they might work (or not).

What’s important is that the company take the approach of testing and seeking tangible experiences that might relate to larger goals. That help provide some experience, some evidence, some immersion. A starting point.

As my friend Tamsen says, it’s the why that matters, not the what. If the mechanical experiments help shed some light on what the bigger strategy should look like – the why – I think that’s an okay thing indeed.

The trouble starts when we forget to connect the dots, make presence on a tool the goal in itself, and stop at “hey, look, Facebook!”

Having a strategy isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about mapping a process to try and find them, and constantly checking progress and adjusting along the way. Sometimes, tinkering with a tool or two can be just the way to do that.

See the difference?

image by comedy_nose

Driving Social Media From Behind the Firewall

This is a guest post from Michael Brito, and the fourth and final installment in the Internal Social Media series. Michael is here to share with us some of his actual, real-life experiences with implementing social media inside organizations.  Special thanks to Michael for sharing his experiences from the trenches. You can follow Michael on Twitter or check out his social media blog.

Most of my professional career, I have been fortunate enough to work for some fantastic global brands; Hewlett Packard, Yahoo! and Intel. Within these organizations, my core focus has been driving consumer engagement using tools and strategies of the social web. And even though HP, Yahoo! and Intel are completely different organizations, many of the same challenges and conversations have arisen quite consistently.

Here are some things I have learned a long that way that I hope you can start thinking about within your organizations or small business:

Measuring Social ROI

A few years ago, it was the standard to measure growth rates in Twitter followers, Facebook fans and RSS subscribers.  Couple that data with a few slides from Omniture and management was all good; they rarely asked any questions. Even today, these are still very important metrics to analyze and report on but the bar has been raised.

The question we need to start asking ourselves is “how do we go about quantifying these numbers to show how they drive true business value and/or revenue?” Some have done a really good job, like Dell and the Dell Outlet Twitter account; but even then, there are several unknowns like the whether or not the sales from that program cannibalized higher margin sales on Dell.com or elsewhere.

I have read post after post that talks about “100 ways to measure social media”; and while these may be really good ideas, I think that having 100 ways to measure social media is contributing to the problem.  There is a lack of focus and specificity; like having metrics A-D-D.  If I am leading a marketing organization, all I have time to look at is 2- 3 metrics max.

So, these metrics should give me the insight to determine if the amount of financial investment I contribute to social media is actually driving sales, retaining customers or cutting costs. I don’t have the magic formula because there isn’t one. It will be different for every organization. And driving brand awareness won’t cut it anymore.

Research

There was a time in my life when I hated research; especially since I spent three years in grad school, yes three.  But research is a valuable asset if you do more than just talk about it.

The Forrester Social Technographic Latter of Participation is a great resource that allows marketers to understand how their users interact and behave on the social web. At Intel, we hired Forrester to map our internal audience segments to the technographic profile and the insights we learned were eye opening.  Since then and during my tenure at Intel, we used that data (which was not public) to drive many of our social media engagements; some of which are still in existent.

For example, last year at Intel we launched Digital Drag Race as a part of the Core i7 product launch. Digital Drag Race was a contest that focused on user generated video. We knew from the research that a high percentage of our segment was considered content creators (i.e. those who create content and share it on the web) so we built the entire program around that specific behavior.  The results were fantastic and we exceeded the metrics goals we decided upon prior to launch.

Top-Down Organizational Support

If an organization is not ready to embrace social media 100% internally from their leaders, they will not succeed in driving effective customer relationships externally. Embracing social media is more than simply saying “we want to join the conversation” and then investing a couple hundred thousand on a Facebook app promoting the next product. It’s a cultural shift that starts at the core of the organization; with the very people who represent the brand.

It is critical that management empower their organizations to work collaboratively. Building communities from behind the firewall is no easy task. There are a lot of things to consider; and collaboration across the organization (marketing, legal, PR, business units, customer support) is imperative. Decisions can take months and sometime years. Having adequate support and empowerment from senior management is important, especially during the budget planning process.

Full scale integration with other marketing channels: launching a blog, twitter account and Facebook page is useless unless there is tight integration across the board with retail, online, search, channel partners, resellers, paid media and the list goes on.  I don’t think it’s realistic that every piece of external communication has “social” built into it but it should at least be explored. In my experience, social media is usually an afterthought and this needs to change. Social media is an excellent way to humanize a brand; and adoption of it is growing exponentially across the globe. It’s important that brands think about integration from the beginning to prevent themselves from having disjointed, irrelevant communications.

Seeking Participation Across the Organization

A blog is good, but a blog without a solid editorial calendar, a human voice and a subject matter expert is not good.  Too many times, marketing and PR departments launch blogs and expect for people to actually read them.  I am sure it happens in some cases, but the true value in social media is when you have subject matter experts engaged with consumers on the social web answering product relates questions and/or offering customer support.

This brings up a whole new set of challenges, especially if the organizational culture has not fully embraced social media.  Usually marketing and PR departments have to seek out “volunteers” in the organizations or find the employees that are already active in the space. And even then, most employees who are interested in volunteering and are passionate about their products have other responsibilities so bandwidth becomes an issue.

The last thing you want to happen is for an employee to build up a solid reputation online and become a “trusted advisor”; to then have to abandon the community because of bandwidth. One solution would be to hire dedicated “technical advisors” where their sole responsibility would be to engage online; or seek management support in adding in “social participation” related job responsibilities within various job roles across the organization (i.e. a network engineer would code 80% of the time; and blog/tweet/whatever for 20% of the time). It would be part of their job and they would be measured on it.

Global Social Media Programs

This was part of my responsibility at Intel and it’s not easy. What may work in the US, Canada and maybe the UK will not necessarily work in India. For global brands, this nut has yet to been cracked but there are some good learning and best practices that can help brands manage this.

At Intel, there was a team that launched and managed a “social media integration forum” conference call once a month. Marketing leads from across the world attended and shared a little about any past or present campaigns or promotions. The calls were excellent but the challenge was that they were rarely actionable.  It was more about sharing and less about planning.

Marketing departments must not only share what’s going on in their regions; but they should also work together on integration with these various programs.  It’s going to be a challenge because social media is culturally driven.  However, there are certain things that US teams can do to help other regions succeed in the social web like providing digital assets (videos, widgets) that can be translated in various languages. Also providing a tool set or framework that will help global teams to create blogs/communities; and then consistent sharing of best practices and key insights.

Your Turn…

Thanks again, Michael, for sharing your practical and tangible experience around internal social media! What do you say folks? What questions might you have for Michael, and what experiences have you had that might be similar or different? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments.

What The Next Generation Needs To Know

This morning, I spoke with a group from the Marketing Executives Networking Group here in Chicago. Their focus areas were all over the map, from financial services to education to CPG, tech, and public relations.

I was, of course, the heretic brought in to talk social media and discuss some of the shifts happening in the business world. But I had a conversation afterward with a gentleman named Don Drews, who heads up a marketing consultancy called Courageous Marketing. He shared with me that he’s going back to school to get his PhD, because he wants to teach marketing. Awesome, I said.

But his question: with all that’s changing, what am I going to teach about marketing?

He’s shining a light on something that we don’t talk about much. We talk about how businesses are evolving, and I even talked a bit about how to hire for social media roles in companies. But how are we preparing the new marketers, the new communicators, for entering the business world as we’re now building it?

This is a hard question for me to answer if we’re comparing it to “traditional” marketing curriculum, because I didn’t focus on communications in school (I majored in music).  So I’d be hard pressed to come up with comparisons that are relative.

I do think we need to teach marketers some tenets of social media culture and implementation, including:

• How the balance shift in consumer voice impacts corporate presence online
• Why paying attention and listening is fundamental to social media success, period
• The realities of culture shift, and how they need to be the starting place for many organizations
• The importance of not sticking social media in the marketing silo, but seeding it organization-wide
• Why good branding still matters, and which parts of brand presence you control

Of course, that includes talk about the tactics and execution, but later. After we’ve established a bit of a foundation for the role of social media in business as a whole, right?

But here’s where I need you. These are some of the questions we need to answer:

• What elements of traditional marketing and communications will and should endure along side social media?
• What’s obsolete about our teaching of marketing to date, and how do we evolve it?
• What should we be teaching marketers about social media, irrespective of the tools themselves?
• If you had new minds to shape about the landscape of communications in business as it will look five years from now, what would you want them to come away knowing, believing, and equipped to implement?

Let’s talk about this. This is the seed of some potentially big ideas. What say you?

image by James Sarmiento

Where Measurement Falls Short

There are so many discussions swirling around social media measurement these days, and the discussions I’ve had recently at conferences have reinforced the fact that as a whole, measurement of communication is incomplete at best. We’re not satisfied with what’s available to us in terms of proving the value of what we’re doing.

CAN we measure elements of social media impact, reach, and yield? You bet. There are lots of metrics, new and old, that contribute to building cases for attribution of purchase influence, customer and transaction values, and the like.

But the challenge of doing a good job measuring our communication, customer outreach, and marketing initiatives has always been a sticky one, for one specific set of reasons.

Influence Isn’t Cause.

Communication and relationship development have always – and will always – reside in the gray area of actions that influence and impact purchase and buying behaviors, but are not always the direct and only cause for same. We want desperately to have said that our advertising or our press release or that game of golf was solely responsible for a customer’s decision to buy from us.

But more than likely, the combination of several experience touchpoints directly with the company combined with external influences (opinions of friends and family, for instance) and things like context and timing (my purchase of a new dishwasher is driven by need, but my impression of a company based on other experiences might steer me their way) are what make up the bigger and complete picture of a sale.

Even in the world of direct marketing, where you can track the path from touchpoint to purchase with codes or links or whatever, you cannot say with absolute certainty that that marketing effort was the singular cause for the purchase. It might have been the catalyst or the impetus for the purchase at that time, but it’s likely not the only thing that guided someone’s decision to buy, yet we measure it as such.

Measurement has always been imperfect. It’s not just social media measurement.

Frankly, we as communicators and marketers and PR people have relied on a flawed set of measurements for a long time, and we’ve always been lousy at demonstrating the impact of our work. There’s a reason why CMO tenure is ridiculously short. And I’m not so much alarmed at the figures that say we’re bad at measuring social media because, honestly, we’re bad at measuring lots of things. We’ve just told ourselves otherwise, content to settle into the metrics we do have, even if they’re not really telling us anything of substance.

The gray area in measurement is in the combination of:

• Correlation: Sales go up while our marketing reach does, so the two must be related
• Attribution: Our press release was part of the overall promotion strategy, so must have had some impact on the whole
• Influence: Awareness of our company is reinforced by a recommendation or endorsement from a Trust Agent

All of these things matter. They all impact the likelihood of sales. But none of them is alone the cause, and that’s why folks flip out over ROI equations. Just how much of that revenue can you attribute directly to social media, or traditional marketing, or public relations, or the skills of your sales guy? Unless you’re only employing a single strategy, it’s more likely that your ROI equation is related to the whole.

How to improve it?

What we need to keep exploring in social media is conversation pathing. Online gives us the best shot at refining measurement that we’ve had, really. The notion that we can trace all of the digital breadcrumbs – conversation points, recommendations and commentary, discussions including a brand within a larger conversation, content marketing, reviews, capturing of offline experiences – and create a weaving, meandering path through the social space in order to move the needle from separate influence points to an overall sense of how the profile of the aggregate conversation drove the customer to the finish line.

It’s a headful, alright. And I love that I’m working with a company that’s pushing boundaries on this to try and connect the dots so much better. But we have got to get out of the mindset that all of the old metrics still apply, that new metrics don’t have a place because they don’t have precedent.

Our communication is evolving. Our business foundations are changing. Our measurement practices and the work we put into quantifying the value of what we do needs to change, too. It’s going to take work and elbow grease and lots of methodical, meticulous trial and tracking and refinement.

But if justification and proof is what we want, we’d better be willing to do the work it takes to get there.

So, I want to hear from you. Is correlation and impact enough? Can we ever really prove and demonstrate cause, or do we need to? And above all, where is the balance between granular measurement that distorts focus, and measurement that highlights the business insights we so desperately need?

The comments belong to you.

Are We Really Just “Students”?

When I was in corporate America, I didn’t take on a new skill – say, direct mail fundraising – and say I was a “student” of fundraising. I was learning, but I was a professional. I was a professional honing a new skill, which – if we’re doing it right – we’re doing all the time. Yes?

So, I’m a bit over the notion that we’re all “students” of social media. Are the tools new? Yes they are. But communication and building relationships with people and the idea of providing value in return for someone’s attention are the oldest concepts in the book. Are we all so new at that? And if we are, should we be proud of that?

So if you want to say you’re still learning how to navigate the tech, that’s great with me. If you’re still learning how the tech applies to your business, I can be cool with that too. Because there are plenty of tools at which I’m not a pro. For instance, I’m a novice at video and podcasting. But I can still articulate their value, even if I’m not a producer.  (I have lots of people I can call that know the ins and outs of that better than I do, and that’s just fine.) But that’s the nuts and bolts.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been in communications for years (over a decade, to be exact), of varying stripes. I’ve been in fundraising, client services, business development, and marketing. I am a professional, and I carry with me certain expertise. I am NOT a novice at social media strategies because, while we’re still monkeying around with how social integrates with traditional and which tech is best for what purpose, I  have been employing the ideas of good business relationships for my entire career. I’m just adding new tools to my arsenal that help me do all of those things even better, more quickly, and with exponential power.

Am I still learning about what makes a community strong? Yes and no. Some of it is revisiting old ideas and stripping away the BS. Some of it is just figuring out the implications of information overload, preferences in technology, the flattening of information and the more prevalent voice of the customer. Some of it indeed is understanding the behaviors of folks who are more heavily invested online than ever before. But I’m not new to the idea of community. Just the execution of it in a new environment.

Business people all over the place will tell you that of course relationships matter. Of course they see the value in getting to know people personally, establishing trust, finding ways to brand loyalty and customer retention. Business people worth their salt will never argue the importance of these things. They don’t need to be sold on the idea that people matter (and if they do, social will never save them anyway, so you might as well focus elsewhere).

But they need the translation of how individual relationships scale (or how we can try), how to execute these ideas efficiently and within a budget and a larger business plan, and why these strategies will be more effective at doing all the things we mentioned above than the ones they’ve always done. They need transition plans that move them, methodically and realistically, in the right direction and don’t use “being part of the conversation” as justification for the shift. That requires work. Action. Execution. Effort. Proof. Not some lofty idea of sitting in the classroom of social media.

I feel like taking a sledgehammer to this fishbowl of ours. I have a project cooking that is ALL about execution – from culture change to internal communication to nitty-gritty tactics. Because that’s what business cares about. Because that’s what we need to legitimize social’s place among an enterprise structure. Because those are the only things that will actually affect the change that we are all so desperately clamoring for and claiming social is capable of.

I spend a lot of time – a lot of time – talking to companies and their employees.  They need to know that they can rely on people who have a solid foothold in the foundations of social media with the realities of business entrenched firmly in their minds along the way. We can learn the tools as we go. Hell, those change anyway. But we’re doing ourselves, our industry, and the business world a disservice if we all sit in wonder and awe of our role as “students” instead of looking at this as an evolution in our professional skill set – and tearing into it with practical, applicable gusto accordingly.

So can we stop excusing our ignorance and our learning curve by calling ourselves “students”? Please, yes, learn. But learn by doing. Business doesn’t need students. They need professionals actively honing new skills and putting them into practice. See the difference?

image courtesy of Shutterstock