Social Media - Servant of Chaos

SAP and Social Media Brand Engagement

There is no doubt that there is a profound interest in the social web. On the consumer side, social applications allow us to connect with friends, acquaintances, celebrities, politicians and anyone else we find “interesting”. It can help us organise our lives, share our knowledge or expertise and, if we are lucky, find a life partner. The opportunities are endless.

Marketers can often see that these loosely formed, often organic, communities represent a great opportunity – for sales, marketing, brand building, customer service, market research and so on. Some may even see that the opportunity extends well beyond these categories – to other areas of their business. But it can really be a struggle to place a VALUE on this – partly because the plethora of what can be described as “social media channels”, from YouTube to blogs and beyond each have different engagement characteristics and therefore represent different value propositions.

This report by Altimeter and WetPaint attempts to define and measure the impact that social media has on some of the world’s leading brands. It takes BusinessWeek’s top 100 brands and analyses their position in terms of social media engagement, providing scores, relative positions and explanations. The report showcases the efforts of Starbucks, Toyota, Dell and SAP (where I work).

One of the most exciting parts of this report is the finding that high levels of social media engagement correlates with stronger financial performance:

Back to the million-dollar question: Why do social media? We finally have a good answer: Because it pays off. While no one yet has the data to determine direct cause and effect, what we do find is a financial correlation between those who are deeply engaged and those who outperform their peers.

It is well worth reading the report in full to learn what some of the world’s leading companies are doing right, where the best practices lie, and understand how these are impacting the business across key indicators.

And, of course, the question remains … what are YOU and your business doing in social media? What’s your strategy? And how are you finding and measuring value in the process?

Commitment Means Context

Digital Strategy, Social Media

UPDATE: Read Charles Frith's excellent thinking on context first.

The idea of social media holds great fascination for many marketers. But the reality often does not live up to the hype. Take Facebook for example. How many marketing efforts have you seen run in Facebook, and how many would you consider successful? Same with MySpace.

As Paul Chaney suggests, “social media advertising, when introduced to sites like Facebook, has not demonstrated satisfactory ROI”. Paul goes on to suggest that the missing piece in all this is CONTEXT. When we go to sites like Facebook or MySpace, the context in which we find advertising (in most instances) is the context which we have helped create (our own social experiences and interests). So advertising into this space is, in the main, out of sync with the experience that we expect.

But rather than seeing this as yet another social space which brands can seek to interrupt with advertising (and yes, we could easily claim that our lounge rooms are social spaces), we should rethink our approach to establishing and creating context. Reality TV does this well – bringing interactive voting into the home – which serves to connect the content of the show with the context in which viewers can participate. But again, this needs to go further – and the same applies to Facebook and other social media efforts. Using continuous digital strategy as a framework, we can see clues as to where we can go next.

We have a footprint that (should) connect audiences with your content – and with each other. You have produced content which helps create a shared experience that will allow the Auchterlonie effect to take hold. You have seen conversations begin to rise, fall and spread – and then you are into the hard part of the cycle – commitment.

The real gold of the cycle is your commitment to evolving the context in which these conversations and interactions can take place. This means injecting your own personality into the situations (as appropriate). It is about guiding the conversations in directions (and to spaces) which is most conducive to the type, style and manner of the conversation. For example, if a discussion about a TV commercial kicks off on Facebook, then it may be worthwhile pointing out links on YouTube or Vimeo.

In some instances, it may also mean thinking about how you can best aggregate these conversations. How do you make it easier to find out what is going on? How do you bring information from OUTSIDE YOUR BRAND into the mix? The only way to know this is to participate – to listen, act and react – and to turn this all into something of value to those who are involved.

And this is what is meant by commitment – to understand the emergent needs of the people who participate in your brand conversations and to provide them a service that they can find nowhere else. It sounds obvious, but it is hard to do. Good luck!

Action Aid’s Project Toto – Social Media to Change the World

Good Works, Social Media

Sometimes we need to see something out of context before we can understand a situation. And sometimes a new context has to be imagined before a solution to an entrenched problem can be found.

In an ambitious effort to raise the Australian public’s awareness of the causes of poverty, Action Aid has launched Project Toto (The Overseas Training Operation). During this two week project, Australian blogger Stilgherrian is in Tanzania to provide some insight to the plight of villagers living in Kilimani. But he is also there to educate – to bring the technology, processes and an understanding of blogging to the locals who very much see education as a way out of poverty.

But as Archie Law, CEO of Action Aid, explains, the risks and consequences of blogging in a country like Tanzania go far beyond a few snarky comments:

In spite of the challenges in training people to use technology it’s far more complex to explain the implicit threat in the use of the technology and how bloggers engage with that risk. For example a blogger could be posting some confronting views on the activities of mining companies in Tanzania and then face severe backlash from Government if that is seen as opposing economic development.

If a blogger understood the risk and is prepared to take it that’s one thing… if a blogger is unaware of the risk and stumbles in to a situation where he or she places themselves, colleagues and communities at risk, we potentially have a disaster on our hands.

It is perhaps, in communities like this, that the greatest potential exists for social media to transform lives. For not only does it change an individual’s capacity to reach, inform and educate others, it also opens us all to the powerful, first hand stories that are so easily drowned out by the noise of mainstream media.

But like anything, success needs more than just a blog here and there – and this is where the training kicks in. If this is done right, Stilgherrian will leave behind in Tanzania a group of people armed with the technology (thanks to some generous sponsors) and the skills to begin using the “social” media platforms that we have taken for granted. It will be fascinating to see where this goes (update: minutes after posting, Stilgherrian advises that the first blog posts are live!).

Oh, and Action Aid are looking for their next outreach blogger. You can nominate yourself or make a donation here.

Social Media is Not Sexy

Enterprise Social, Social Media

While Web 2.0 and social media tools provide great opportunities for businesses from a branding and marketing point of view, there are also a raft of other opportunities which are easily overlooked. The very same benefits that can be achieved through your social media efforts can also be applied across your enterprise – from employees to partners, vendors and even shareholders. Sounds great, right?

But let me tell you a little secret. This sort of social media (and almost every aspect of social media) is just not sexy. It doesn’t have the glitz and glamour or even the spotlights of advertising; and there’s not the breathtaking scale of large format outdoor advertising. But if you can get past this, you will find that your social media efforts really will transform your business.

But where do you start?

I always start with people and with their behaviour. What sort of relationship does you business have with them? The thing about Web 2.0 or social media is that it is participatory – and many, if not most, businesses and brands base their stakeholder relationships around transactions. In fact, we have built our entire businesses around this – just look at the success of that once new-fangled concept of “ebusiness” or “ecommerce” – and now think about whether you would ever open a bank account that didn’t have an online banking option. Even my mother uses online banking. To me, that makes it ubiquitous. It makes it mainstream.

From a business perspective, the transactional relationship works. You know what you want out of the relationship (ie money) and it is easy to measure (volume). But to enable a transactional relationship with a large audience requires technology – and with that comes complexity, long timeframes for implementation and a whole lot of work on your internal business processes. And because of the scale, complexity and cost, it comes from the top down – it is driven by your business executives.

Web 2.0, on the other hand, is simple to implement. Sometimes you can get extensive functionality for little or no up-front cost – you can use open source software, free or cheap web hosting or you can choose a hosted (software as a service) model. Once you decide to go down this path, you can implement your ideas very quickly. Within minutes you can have a blog setup and working, a wiki ready for team collaboration and Google Analytics ready to measure your traffic, goals and conversion rates. And did I mention that ANYONE can make this happen. All you need is a web connection. From the CEO right down the new intern, anyone in your business has access to the tools that can transform the relationships that you have with your stakeholders. That’s right – it is bottom-up transformation.

But there is a problem. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. And just because it’s available, doesn’t mean it will be ADOPTED. The challenge for brands and businesses who want to shift the needle on their business relationships is to move from transaction to participation – to create an engagement layer that bridges the transactional parts of the business with the newly emergent participatory elements.

Those clever folks over at McKinsey’s have published Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work (registration is free) which points out some of the challenges (and approaches) which can can use. But for my money, it is that middle layer of Engagement that builds success. It is the messy, unsexy aspect of business (and marketing):

Communications: Keeping your stakeholders up-to-date with improvements, road blocks, outcomes and risks is an essential element. This can also flow over to other aspects of marketing/advertising.
Change management: There is always a pre-existing way of “getting things done”. Helping people adopt new behaviours and new technologies means managing and measuring that change.
Framework establishment: Many of your stakeholders will have had some exposure to Web 2.0 tools in their personal lives. You will need to provide frameworks which provide the context within which they can most effectively use them at work.
Informal leadership: Nothing says “move ahead” like the CEO and leadership team informally adopting the Web 2.0 tools.

But while this is unsexy – with the right strategy, it actually delivers on the promise of Web 2.0. And that is good news for businesses and for brands. Hands up for some unsexy marketing?

Who Gives a Hoot About Twitter?

Digital Strategy, Social Media

One of the challenges of marketing and branding in the online space is that change is a constant – just when you feel like you are coming to grips with the plethora of tools, platforms and approaches, along comes something new that may (or may not) provide you with yet another way to reach, entertain, engage and delight your customers. Or it could just be a waste of time.

The challenge is knowing where to invest your time and effort … and this is where Twitter comes in handy for me. My network of friends, acquaintances and followers helps me filter the large volume of knowledge that is available online. Explaining this to someone new to Twitter is difficult for a number of reasons:

Neighbourhoods are hard to find: When you are new it is hard to find people that you are interested in – and the conversations appear closed or the etiquette unclear
Scaling is difficult: Once you find some people with whom you find an affinity, it can be overwhelming to consider engaging with ever larger numbers of people
Sweating the details: New participants are turned off by the minutiae of some interactions. It is easy to become annoyed or frustrated at the “over sharing” that takes place online.
The only rule: There is only one rule on Twitter and that is – if you don’t like what you hear, un-follow.

As I have explained previously, there are three stages to Twitter commitment, and those who don’t make the effort to FIND value in their newly forming networks will often ask “who gives a hoot about Twitter?”. But for brands (and individuals) there are some significant opportunities.

In his talk to the National Library of Congress, Professor Michael Wesch described the four elements of social media as user generated content, distribution, commentary and filtering. However, I feel that it is “context” rather than commentary that is important in understanding social media. After all, value is created when we each create a lens through which the people in our networks can more readily make sense of the torrent of information, knowledge and emergent behaviour displayed online.

It is the VALUE exchange which is important – and Twitter plays a role in each of the four elements of social media. It can be used to create content, to filter and distribute it, and via hash tags and groupings, it can create context. Those who have more deeply engaged with Twitter find value in each of these areas … and appear to do so intuitively.

But how does this play out statistically? How should this fit within a continuous digital strategy?

Here are some graphs from my own usage of Twitter. I started using Hootsuite to track the click throughs from my Twitter messages (tweets) in February 2009 and in three months I had generated 15,581 click throughs. This is 15,000 site visits that would never have happened had I NOT tweeted.

Interestingly, only one of the top 10 destination sites was my own – so clearly those in my network are more interested in what I say about others than what I say about myself. And, of course, there are many re-tweets in amongst these figures (where others re-post your message) – meaning that the original message is spread further (or virally) into weakly-linked, adjacent networks.

Is this important for individuals and brands? I believe so. The ease with which Twitter can be used across the four elements of social media, and its capacity to AMPLIFY your other social media efforts and activities, makes it (at this moment) a uniquely useful part of your marketing mix. You just have to make the effort to create value before you think you can extract it – and if you are smart you will find they are one and the same thing.

Making Influence Valuable

Influence, Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media

I have written previously about the strength of social media’s weak ties, but I would like to also broaden this discussion into a conversation about the particulars of personal influence, about social judgement and about the way in which the nature of influence and trust is transforming the way that we interact and engage with brands and the people behind them.

Clearly we are all comfortable working with convenient fictions – we regularly invent stories and work within “roles” to allow us to behave as if the world we live in is anything other than chaos. Think about the roles that we take on as parents, lovers, soccer players, good girls, bad boys (and thousands of others). Think about the way these overlap and how we switch between them on-demand. But we are not made up of these roles – they do not define us.

Now, think for a moment about our roles as marketers. We:

Superimpose definitions on the “audience”
Harangue these audience “members” with questions about their intentions, preferences or past choices
Interrogate the resulting sea of half-mumbled data for insight
Transform this insight into something resembling strategy

The problem is, that the further we get away from the initial impulse – that is, to understand the complex way that we humans behave – the weaker the signal becomes. We subject this weak signal to repeated bouts of interpretation and analysis. We box it and strain it through frameworks and end up, somewhere down the line with a profile which we are comfortable to work with.

Now, before you fire up the Bunsen burner, I must hold up my hand to these very same crimes. But there is a deeper, more fundamental error that lies at the heart of this problem – and that is that we have convinced ourselves that we need to think big. We need to think on a mass scale. And we need a BIG idea to match.

My view is that this is also a convenient fiction, for all we need is to understand the nature of influence and tailor our marketing efforts accordingly. How does this work?

Seth Godin suggests that marketers are either scientists or artists, and that we change hats according to the situation. It is this shifting that we must become comfortable with – we need to analytically identify those people whose behaviours match the profile of our products or services and then creatively engage these folks with a range of communications and experiences that generate the type of behaviour that, for us, constitutes success.

Notice the words “range of communications and experiences”.

As Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg explain in the MITsloan article How to Have Influence:

If you want to confront persistent problem behavior, you need to combine multiple influences into an overwhelming strategy. In management and in their personal lives, influencers succeed where others fail because they “overdetermine” success.1 Instead of looking for the minimum it will take to accomplish a change, they combine a critical mass of different kinds of influence strategies.

Our challenge is to influence the influencers. This is where the FOOTPRINT part of your digital strategy comes into play. After all, we are not always on the same online networks at the same time. And we don’t all listen to, or interact with, the same people, sites or networks. Furthermore, we also play different roles in different spaces. One person might have a substantial network on LinkedIn, yet have only a small number of followers on Twitter. Another may have thousands of blog subscribers but only half a dozen Facebook friends.

It is only by understanding the granularity of influence in this way that you can craft the different kinds of influence strategies that will deliver your outcomes. And this means throwing out the convenient fictions and embracing complexity and chaos. But it also means focusing in on real people. Find a way to make their influence valuable and you will create the type of win-win situations that social media has always promised.