Social Media - Servant of Chaos

When Finance Brands Go Wild

Branding, Innovation, Social Media, Story of the Week

After MyFutureBank’s a well publicised “experiment” and withdrawal from social media and the surreal and poorly contextualised Truthpod (courtesy of Westpac), it would be easy to suggest that finance marketers had had their fill of the social media space. Or perhaps, had bitten off more than they could chew.

Yet it seems this is not the case.

Clearly, with Forrester research indicating that 75% of Australians participating in some form of social media, consumer brands have LITTLE CHOICE other than begin to engage with their customers in this way. After all, it is where we are CHOOSING to spend our time and precious attention.

But what happens when a finance brand escapes into the wild? What happens when a business truly asks for the input of its community? Companion Credit Union decided to find out. The Financial Brand blog has some great coverage of this rebranding campaign here.

With a new theme of “We’re Listening”, Companion put their brand on the line and asked their members to vote on a new logo. As the CEO, Ray O’Brien said, “The credit union is really owned by the members and therefore we decided we should invite them to actively participate in helping us decide”.

Over 1000 votes were received (from a member base of about 12,000) … and a new blog has been setup to help the credit union really “get back to it’s roots”. They are even supporting Movember. So what does a customer selected logo look like?

The real opportunities for brands and social media are for those looking to transform their relationships with their customers … so it is encouraging to see brands from a relatively conservative market capitalising on these opportunities. And in a tight market (well, really, in any market), a social media strategy can not only help you stand apart from your competitors, it can also drive value back to your community – which is a great fit for credit unions and other member-based businesses.

Companion is certainly one financial service brand to watch – and as their ongoing marketing and social media strategy evolves, I expect there will be some real insight and proof points around the way that brands can grow and extend their reach and engagement via the micro-interactions that we take for granted. And this is one of the core values of social media for brands – that the difference between what your customers INTEND and the way they BEHAVE disappears – and you are left with a sentiment that contributes to (or detracts from) your brand promise. More power to the community!

UPDATE: Companion Credit Union and Community CPS Australia have now become Beyond Bank – you can find their new site here. Let’s hope they continue the innovation!

The Fail First Strategy

Blogging, Digital Strategy, Influence, Innovation, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

There are many lessons that marketers can “borrow” from the IT industry. “Open source”, for example, has changed the way that many of us conceive of ideas – they are no longer considered the proprietary property of one company/business (or they aren’t in most cases) – after all, ideas are the easy part, execution where it gets difficult. (In fact, we can really wonder whether ideas EVER were owned or whether this was just a convenient illusion.)

Most recently, I have been pondering the concept of “failing fast” – see the wikipedia entry here. It is a systemic approach to programming that aims to identify and report on failures – or events that are likely to cause failures. The focus of the programmer is on passing the message “FAIL” up to a system that is built to respond. There are two important aspects (that I can see):

The program escalates the issue or failure to another level of responsibility
The program also halts before the failure replicates, spreads or becomes embedded in other systems

From a marketing point of view, there is much to learn from this. And in light of the debacles around Motrim Moms and MyFutureBank more locally, the lessons could and should be absorbed by marketers very quickly:

Listen. As Amber Naslund points out, there are plenty of free tools that can be used to begin monitoring what is being said about your brand, products and services. Start with Google alerts. But please, start.
Step-in. If you are not listening to the online conversations, the echo chamber tends to get louder and louder. As this escalates and draws more voices into the conversation, the absence of an “official voice” means that there is no way to diffuse the conversation. This leads, as Alan Wolk suggests, to overreaction. Once you are at that point, there is no return.
Participate. When you start actually participating you will make mistakes – you may need to slay some sacred cows. But that’s ok … it’s the way we learn. By building relationships you are also creating a community/network. These are the folks who will let you know if someone else it talking about your brand.
Learn. There is much to learn by following the first three steps. Take this information and share it with your product development and customer service teams. Use this to transform what you deliver to your markets and how you treat your customers.

Despite the benefits of the fail-fast approach, however, the brave brand manager may want to take a more tangible, proactive and accelerated path – to FAIL FIRST.

Under a fail first strategy, you already accept that there will be mis-steps. You acknowledge that issues will arise that you won’t be able to control. In fact, the approach means taking a POSITION that people can buy into or work against. It is drawing a line in the sand.

Then, once the controversy starts or the conversation begins, you work them both equally using the same four steps above. Those who like what you are doing will converse. Those who don’t will cause chaos. Engage with both and use them to cross-pollinate ideas. Learn from the nay-sayers how and where you can improve your products. Activate and empower your evangelists to tell their stories.

Now, I don’t advocate such a strategy for all brands. But there are some who could do it. And for those who can stand the heat, there are great benefits to flow from failing first and learning. But remember, you need to PLAN a fail first strategy. You need the systems and fall-back strategies in place that can help you overcome the failure. You need the management support to hold course.

The Motrim debacle could have been turned around. Many similar “crises” could. What would you do differently? Would you dare to fail first? What do you think it takes to create the most successful failure in marketing history?

Mainstreaming Social Media

Facts & Figures, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

While I normally don’t like using nouns as verbs (perhaps I am linguistically conservative?), I quite like the word “mainstreaming”. It implies that social media is in a state of transition where widespread acceptance and uptake is occurring with the general public.

Paul Chaney suggests that the rising popularity of social media, while strong, will still take some time to become fully integrated into marketing practices. Interestingly, the social technographics profiling from Forrester shows that consumer adoption levels are high, especially in the “spectator” category – but this reinforces the sense that innovation is being driven not by business but by consumers in their quest for creative interactivity and engagement.

In Australia, Forrester’s Steven Noble’s recent analysis indicates that only 24% of Australians DON’T use social media in some way.

Peter Kim has a great post over at MarketingProfs providing some excellent insight into what these figures mean for bloggers and/or social media consultants:

On the upside, it’s more likely now than before that:

You, your customers, your prospects, and your competitors are reading and writing blogs

Better tools to interact with the medium exist for reading, filtering, authoring, and tracking

You can say the word "blog" in conversation without feeling silly

On the downside, it’s more likely now than before that:

Spam related to your business interests lives in "splogs"

Traditional marketing approaches will find new ways to make consumers hate the medium

Your "regular" friends know what you mean but still think blogging is for geeks

For marketers still finalising their budgets for 2009, I would recommend setting aside a small experimental budget for social media. Hive off 5% or 10% of your MEDIA budget and contact EXPERIENCED agencies and consultants (email me if you need recommendations).

With pressure to perform in tough economic times, it’s time all marketers stop ignoring the spaces in which consumers are ALREADY playing. In this Age of Conversation, it’s time for brands to stop shouting and start participating. Welcome to the mainstream.

Mapping Your Digital Influence

Influence, Smart Bloggers, Social Media, Strategy

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has recently released the Influencer Handbook (hat tip to Stein Communications). It has sections covering:

Definition of an influencer and influencer marketing
Types of influencers
Methods to engage and thank influencers
Guidelines for influencer self-regulation
Bibliography of influencer communication research and practice

The guide is well timed as it provides me with a framework for thinking about influence. Over the last week I have done quite a bit of reading around this topic, absorbing the smart thinking of Mike Arauz, Dina Mehta, Allan Young and Julian Cole and even revisiting my bookshelves.

Years ago, I read Bob Cialdini’s, The Psychology of Influence. I remember being impressed from the very first lines where he states “I can admit it freely now. All my life I’ve been a patsy”. Ever since that first reading, I have been interested in the way in which influence can be created, managed and employed. It might even be argued that marketing is all about using the “weapons of influence” to achieve business outcomes.

However, in the Age of Conversation, such naked techniques are easily spotted and counteracted. As consumers it is easy to research and receive unmediated commentary from a business’ other customers, suppliers and even employees. We can ask questions, find answers and make decisions independently of a brand’s best marketing efforts. Interestingly, it is Cialdini’s concept of “social proof” – a technique used so effectively AS a marketing tool that is the undoing of this “old style” influence.

Social proof is where an expected behaviour is prompted and reinforced in the moment in which we experience it. An example is “canned laughter” in a sitcom – we hear the pre-recorded laugh track, realise it is fake, but engage in laughing anyway (and research shows that we laugh longer and more often with canned laughter). But in a networked world, we are connected to, and in some instances by, mob behaviour. The difference is, that in a social network, we actually CHOOSE to participate – to use what Mark Earls and and Alex Bentley call “directed copying” – enacting social proof while simultaneously demonstrating another person’s influence:

If we view the influentials phenomenon as a special case of directed copying, then usually it is we who decide to copy an individual, creating their perceived influence in the process.

Mark and Alex suggest that rather than focusing on HOW ideas spread, we should look at WHY (check out their excellent paper entitled “Forget influentials, herd-like copying is how brands spread”). By understanding the two types of copying (directed and random) we can produce content and strategies that are designed to facilitate the type of behaviour we want to see.

Furthermore, by understanding the dynamics of various social networks, it is possible to not only map the behaviours that you want to establish, you can also shape and amplify them – which is where marketing really becomes interesting.

All this, of course, leads back to the need for good planning, for focused insight, and strategy that takes into account the nuances of digital and social behaviour. Perhaps all this talk of influence really is overrated – and we should look at what I called the Promiscuous Idea and leave the tribes to sort it out amongst themselves!

Influence and Popularity in Social Media

Influence, Measurement, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

When I started writing this blog I sought out the experts. I looked for various posts on how to write a blog, how to make my posts interesting to my readers (all three of them) and how to increase traffic. I searched Technorati for marketing related blogs and topics, wrote comments across the web and tweaked my blog design. At some point I happened across Mack Collier’s list of the Top 25 Marketing Blogs and my jaw dropped. I could not understand how someone could possibly build such high Technorati authority rankings – it seemed a world away from where I was in my thinking.

This list became my essential reading list. I used each of those blogs to learn, and their authors generously engaged me in their discussion of topics. But as the number of blogs within the marketing or social media category has exploded, these lists have begun to be used as an indicator of not just popularity but influence. But measuring influence is quite difficult … after all, not all of our interactions are online. How do we measure the off-web commentaries and discussions that occur in agencies around the world? Or worse, how do we determine how far and wide our thinking (words and images) reaches beyond the ever expanding edges of the web? (For example, I am sure I have seen David Armano’s influence ripples in presentations given by people who have never even visited a blog!)

There is a very real difference between blogs that I would consider popular and those that I would consider influential. As Shel Israel points out, there is a significant difference:

Suppose I were a political blogger and I had an audience of just three followers. Those followers were very engaged because they read everything I posted. They commented often. They took what I said and quoted me to other people in other conversations. But there were only three of them. Therefore I would be ranked lower than chopped liver in all the ranking systems. The catch is that those three readers were the President of the US, and the heads of China and Russia.

Influence, in this example, requires an intimate understanding of your readership – after all, we don’t know WHO reads unless they admit it by commenting or sending an email. In thinking through the concept of influence, and what I have been calling the Democracy of Action, it seems to me that influence is built on twin axes of popularity and reputation (I am borrowing from Gartner’s magic quadrants slightly here). Where your blog’s popularity and reputation are both high, you have “social influence” – and the capacity to create contagion and instigate action on a large scale. However, where you have a popular blog but lower levels of reputation, your blog is likely to fall into the “hype” category.

Perhaps controversially, I am thinking that these distinctions refer directly to Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties”. Social influence and its impact on action is determined by a large number of “weak ties”. So those blogs which are built around an identity which is well-known to its audience (strong ties) is less likely to carry social influence. These quadrants would appear as shown below.

The “niche influence” and “awareness” categories I fairly self-explanatory. Lower levels of popularity but high levels of reputation indicate influence within niche audiences; while lower levels of both reputation and popularity indicate awareness is low and interaction is emergent.

How does this thinking play with your own understanding? Am I missing something? Is this too simple? Would love to know your thoughts!

UPDATE: Mike Arauz expands on his comments with a whole post, adding a z-axis to the diagram. And Dina Mehta weighs in, transforming the discussion to encompass the changing behaviours of both consumers and brands.

Institutions struggle

Innovation, Social Media

Understanding the aspirations and expectations of the emerging “millennial consumer” can no longer be considered a peripheral concern. The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States was accelerated by the tremendous energy and commitment of a new generation of voters. Exit polls indicate that Obama received 66% of the youth vote and 68% of the new voter vote.

And while the Obama campaign has successfully employed a wide range of communication devices and technologies, the political party machines are streets ahead of the majority of social institutions. Government departments across the world still largely struggle with technology and integration, businesses outlaw the use of social networks in the workplace and education institutions offer courses that are outdated by the knowledge and skills that students can obtain online.

This fascinating post by Alana Taylor, an NYU journalism student and blogger clearly demonstrates the gap and the sense of frustration:

What is so fascinating about the move from print to digital is the freedom to be your own publisher, editor, marketer, and brand. But, surprisingly, NYU does not offer the kinds of classes I want.

Where once innovation occurred mostly from within the walls of the enterprise, consumers are now iteratively experimenting with technologies and applying them to their real world problems. This means that businesses and brands are struggling to keep pace with the changes that are occurring within their marketplaces. It also means that there has been a role reversal in the dynamic in what marketers traditionally call “B2C”. The same applies to other “institutions” such as universities, colleges and government departments.

Despite the economic slowdown, it is clear that behavioural patterns have shifted. Institutions will continue to struggle in the face of this widespread change and the gaps will widen between brands, consumers and the “promise” that should bridge the two. There are very interesting times ahead of us all.