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Jul 27

Social Media Strategy–Who’s in Charge?

July 27, 2010 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I spoke with Tom Parish yesterday about social media strategy and large companies. Be authentic. Check. Be transparent. Check. Be…organized?

Wha? The social media strategy guy at the conference didn’t preach that on stage when he was waving his book around.

Tom pointed out that in the 90s, every division of a big company wanted control over their presence on the website. There can be a lot of pride of ownership issues, with each division thinking their message and agenda is the most important. You can’t really blame each division for wanting to use the site to become more effective at their jobs, but giving each division control over the layout, voice and functionality of their website would not make for a very cohesive experience to the customer. It would also make it difficult to decide what sections to prioritize.

Social media right now has a bit of the element of the Wild Wild West. Some people go full throttle in with no strategy and get nothing but fool’s gold. Some companies are too scared to venture in such uncharted territory, refusing to let people actually talk back. What seems very common is that the top often doesn’t know or doesn’t care what the underlings are doing with it until an innocent blogger wanders into hostile territory and gets shot up by some Native Americans who didn’t exactly welcome their preaching the virtues of their company with spam.

Like a website, a social media presence can communicate a lot of things. It can reduce tech support costs (see Deirdre Walsh’s thoughts on connecting the National Instruments users to help each other). It can help you get new recruits from the people who know your products best–the users. It’s not just a leadgen tool. This is why I stress that it is not merely a function of marketing, and if you view it as such, you aren’t wrong–you just aren’t using it to its max potential.

What do you see as the best strategies for keeping a company’s social media presence in check?

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Jul 21

It’s Time to Take a Holistic Approach to Social Media

July 21, 2010 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I’m going to beat this drum. Again. Social media is a communication tool, like a cell phone. If you view it purely as a marketing tool, you are missing all the many ways it can cut costs and make your customers happy, who then want to make sure you both grow and never go out of business.

I like seeing patterns. I often see the pattern that big companies are really struggling with this stuff. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that social media is well, a communication tool. In a small company, it’s easy to wrangle down the number of blogs, Twitter accounts, etc and overall strategy to be more cohesive, especially if you started your company after they came out. In a large company where the customer care team doesn’t know the marketing team from a hole in the ground, this is much more difficult. They both want to use the tools to solve problems, and they do. What they may or may not realize is that to the end user of these accounts, they aren’t divisions. They are just a product or service they use.

It’s like having a phone system where there is no operator. There is no prompt getting you to the right division. If you’ve ever been on the phone with a company where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, this is infuriating. It’s not the hands’ fault. The brain isn’t connecting them to each other.

I believe companies must make every effort to assess where they stand with their customers and how they can better leverage social media to improve this standing BEFORE dumping money into big social media efforts. What do customers like about us? What don’t they like? What causes them to come and how can we improve to get them to stay? It’s one thing to do spin things that get people talking about your spin. It’s another thing entirely to pinpoint what you need to say or do to get them to say, “Holy crap, those guys are awesome and more importantly, they make me awesome.” Maybe I’ve seen too many superhero flicks, but I’d choose the latter any day.

What do you think, all? How can big companies wrangle down their multiple divisions to not just generate buzz, but to actually make their customers better?

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Jul 16

A Blending of Old Media and New: Why the Old Spice Campaign Worked

July 16, 2010 • View Comments • Online Marketing

When people call me a “Social Media Consultant”, it makes me cringe. Rather than focus on the medium, I’ve always preferred to focus on the audience, how a product benefits that audience, and then finding what mediums will get that message to that audience. If it’s on social networks, then that’s the medium to pursue.

Some people thought this campaign was silly. Personally, I found it amusing, but that’s not what struck me the most about it. The Old Spice Man was both on TV and in viral videos. The company obviously spent calculated efforts using both new and old media. This gives me hope.

I’ve often felt that new media fanatics write off old media as dead. I don’t know. As a business owner, if someone offered me a free TV commercial during “Dancing with the Stars”, I’d take it. The sheer numbers alone would drive traffic and hopefully my website could field people who might not be worth my time.

People involved in old media describe new media as a “fad”. They see it as a lesser medium, not worthy of the time and money often reserved for old media. They don’t see that it’s leaner but more segmented, and just requires more of a sniper vs. cannon approach.

The Old Spice campaign used both the cannon and the sniper. It drove mass awareness by using TV commercials and then engaged those masses with a clever YouTube and Twitter campaign.

I must send props to the people at Old Spice and their agency Wieden + Kennedy for recognizing that these mediums are not mutually exclusive and can actually work best when used together, depending on the scope of your product and the demographic you are pursuing. I’ve worked in places that considered old media dead already and other places that felt new media was a novelty you set up just to say you have it. I’ve worked in places where the new media people seemed to have to compete with the old media people. At the end of the day, all people care about is that you are delivering a message that is useful in some way to them. The medium is irrelevant.

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Jul 13

REI and the Impact of Company Culture

July 13, 2010 • View Comments • Marketing and Labor

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
–Albert Einstein

REI is a cool store. From the moment I walk in, I feel the former athlete in me clamoring that I just don’t get outside enough.

The employees are fit. They all do outdoorsy stuff. From the wood walls to the visually blech-but-oh-so-snuggly NorthFace jacket, REI is all about getting that inner kid in you back outdoors. They have “Family Adventure Programs”. Oh, and you aren’t a customer of REI–you are a member.

I can just see the out-of-touch bean counting accountant going, “Wait, we are paying for our employees to go to the Muir Woods? Jigga wha?”

To the average bean counter, none of these things make sense. It does not make sense for REI to be a co-op instead of a corporation and hire people based on their kayaking skills versus last years’ quota figures. What it does do is promote loyal customers. There is no measurable ROI you get when a loyal customer buys a cool new bike from REI, shows it off to his friends, and then says, “You have to talk to Jorge about your next bike. He is the BEST.” REI’s ridiculously lenient return policy for members is a bean counter’s nightmare but does ensure that customers always start their search for outdoor goods there.

Apparently REI’s model makes sense because they have stores in 28 states and have been in business 72 years. Who knew?

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Jul 07

Do You Think the Fast Company “Influence Project” Actually Influenced Anything?

July 7, 2010 • View Comments • Online Marketing

Technology is cool. I love seeing marketing campaigns like Fast Company’s “Influence Project” use it creatively. What I don’t like seeing is a campaign that takes a cool idea and misses the mark in terms of understanding the fundamentals of human motivation and drive. I do not agree with Rohit Bhargava’s assessment that this is a “brilliantly conceived marketing campaign”.

Essentially, you get a link and the more times people click on the link, the bigger your photo shows up in their influence graph. Now, the graph looks pretty cool, but let’s break down this concept for the end user (the clicker):

1.) I click link.
2.) I make your picture bigger for other Fast Company readers to see.

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As someone who loves using technology to make marketing campaigns more interesting, I am not quite sure what the end goal is here. Do people really think true influencers will actually value having their photo show up bigger on Fast Company? Is the Dalai Lama keen on showing you that he has more clout than you? Can you see Alan Greenspan hovering over his computer, furiously spreading his link around to ensure that Bill Clinton does not beat him on the influence graph?

Influence is something we earn by gaining expertise and by executing on it. It’s also something we can waste if we get too carried away in our own egos. I don’t question that influential people could certainly “win” this contest, I am just not quite sure they would actually care to. It is self-promotion for self-promotion’s sake and reminds me of those weird programs where at-risk kids go door to door and practice their speaking skills for money. Couldn’t they just spend that time selling something? Raising money for charity? Anything?

So I have to agree with Amber Naslund’s assessment. The graph is a cool idea, but I wish Fast Company appealed to my desire to be helpful rather than my desire to be known.

*pic from http://www.rohitbhargava.com

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Jul 06

Read ASCAP’s Letter Attacking CopyLeft and Creative Commons

July 6, 2010 • View Comments • Politics and Current Events

4751889273_d8bc6d563d_mThis photo was taken by Trey Ratcliff at stuckincustoms.com and is protected by a Creative Commons license. His stuff is pretty awesome which is why people decide to buy his prints and books, attend his workshops, and buy the stuff he says is cool. He is an artist who makes money taking pictures and letting geeks like me reference them to make points and well, spread happiness to other people.

An organization called ASCAP, an organization created to “protect” artists and composers, apparently thinks Trey’s business model doesn’t work and will hurt artists and “dry up” the work they produce. They launched a campaign to lobby against Creative Commons and the EFF. I hope I don’t get sued for re syndicating this Twitpic from @mikerugnetta, but in a letter to their members, they say,

“At the moment, we are facing our biggest challenge ever. Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and technology companies with deep pockets are fighting to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our “Copyright”. They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is that these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. They spread the word that our music should be free.

This is why your help is vital. We fear that our opponents are influencing Congress against the interests of music creators. If their views are allowed to gain strength, music creators will find it harder and harder to make a living as music shifts to online and wireless services. We all know what will happen next: the music will dry up, and the ultimate loser will be the music consumer.”

Music makers have rarely made much money with albums. Record labels are the big winners with albums. Artists make the vast majority of their fortunes touring, with shwag, and by selling the commercial rights to their music. It has always been this way. Releasing albums with a Creative Commons license only feeds these methods of making money. They aren’t the boogie men here–they are the good guys.

This concept doesn’t just apply to music though. It applies to literature, art, science and culture as we know it. The medium that is the internet feeds the distribution of information. It does not prevent us from selling goods or services–it just fuels it.

I’m a little late to add to Joi Ito’s big push, but you can still help Creative Commons educate the public as well as lobby Congress by making a donation now.

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