Campaign planning is the easy part!
The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.
It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.
Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)
The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.
Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?
Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.
In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.
I’ve been listening to technology pundits predict each new year to be the year of mobile for many years now. Some have written so many annual opinion pieces heralding “The Year Of Mobile” that it almost defies belief that they can still write about it with the same conviction. I might be forgiven for filtering this year’s predictions with a little skepticism, but also for pointing out that actually we have been moving ahead, year after year, with the adoption of mobile platforms and the increasing capability of those platforms and the networks that serve them. So, is it “The Year Of Mobile”? Or not?
Jared Reitzin, CEO, mobileStorm Inc., blogging on Mobile Marketing Watch, believes that it is now safe to say 2010 is the official year.
Blogger, ex-Forrester Research analyst and managing director of Dachis Group Peter Kim too blogs “2010: The Year of Mobile”.
Joe Marchese, president of socialvibe, says in his Mediapost.com “2010, The Year Of Mobile — Finally” saying in his piece that “2010 will be the year mobile marketing begins to realise the promise marketers have imagined for so long”.
Even The Times seems to concur that 2010 is “The Year Of The Mobile’ and quotes from December’s Morgan Stanley mobile Internet report, which says that “the mobile Internet is ramping faster than the desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices rather than desktop PCs within 5 years”.
Peter Kim credits better mobile phone functionality, growing choice of applications and increasing access via 3G and Wi-Fi hotspots with helping to boost the value that consumers get out of their mobile platforms (and new opportunities for marketers). We happen to agree over here at Spot On. We’ve seen social media adoption ramp up in direct relation to the availability of broadband Internet and a decrease in cost of broadband services. And so it stands to reason that an upswing in mobile broadband and Wi-Fi access has got to be good for mobile Internet adoption and mobile marketing.
It’s no secret that the arrival of Apple’s iPhone two and half years ago really stirred up the smart phone market and, among other things, showed device manufacturers, developers and carriers how to make networked mobile applications appealing. Today, Apple, Google, Nokia, RIM and others are all focused on helping to create easier-to-use, more content rich mobile services platforms that have mass consumer appeal. Innovations like Google’s voice search for mobile, new applications based on location based services and m-commerce consumers services using barcodes all point to mobile phones playing an increasing pivotal role in our day-to-day lives.
There’s arguably no “Year Of Mobile”, but an ongoing trend that is changing the communication game. However, if 2010 is the year when we will come to recognise the need to bring that platform into our thinking as marketers, then perhaps it could be, at last, the year! As Peter Kim says, mobile is fast becoming another check box for integrated marketing. As with social media platforms, mobile is going be become increasingly important to marketing and the only decision that marketer’s need to make is when the time is right to go mobile. We’ve already decided and so you may already be reading this blog post on our mobile site http://m.spotonpr.com
Some interesting links
2010: The Year of Mobile (Being Peter Kim)
2010, The Year Of Mobile — Finally (Mediapost)
2010 IS The Year of Mobile (Mobile Marketing Watch)
2010: the year of the mobile (The Times)
@SMEXbeirut asked recently if we’d written an article on why Spot On PR uses Twitter and what we get out of it, so now is probably as good a time as any. Those that have been following our social media efforts will know that we embraced Twitter almost as soon as it was unblocked in the UAE mid-2008. We already knew that Twitter could be a great connector of people and that it was another key piece of the social media puzzle. One and a half years on, and even with Twitter’s growth flat-lining (see Mashable story from 11 January), we still believe it offers great value to communicators.
As a communications, PR and marketing agency Spot On is committed to Twitter for 5 key reasons.
1. Twitter helps MENA’s web community join up the dots.
The Middle East and North Africa is becoming increasingly web-friendly with online ventures, web developers, application developers, bloggers and social media power-users growing in numbers across the region. However, despite the Internet’s ability to make location irrelevant, a great deal of talent and knowledge is local and focused on national opportunities and knowledge sharing and collaboration across borders has lagged a bit. Twitter allows web-friendly people across the region stay in touch daily and brings them closer together. Using Twitter, Spot On is able to swap notes and follow the news from these audiences across the region, on a daily basis and at no charge.
2. Content producers, aggregators and distributors love Twitter.
In last year’s Spot On MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey we found that 65% of those surveyed were bloggers. Furthermore, nearly 80% of those surveyed interacted frequently with bloggers via Twitter. The Middle East and North Africa Twitter community remains a relatively small one, but it’s an influencial crowd and this is because many of those using Twitter in the region are involved in the creation, distribution or sharing of content as bloggers, social-media power users, journalists or communications professionals (some 35% of those in our survey worked in public relations, media or marketing). Twitter helps us keep up-to-date with new blog posts, breaking media stories and content recommendations.
3. Twitter provides a useful media relations tool.
Spot On follows more than 150 journalists from across the Middle East and North Africa and has added them to its private Twitter Lists in order to have the ability to browse all their tweets in one screen. Like most PR agencies, we deal with hundreds of journalists and we simply don’t have the time to talk to many of them as often as we would like and listen to what’s on their minds. Twitter helps us keep up-to-date with journalists news and latest stories. We also quite often receive client-related enquiries from journalists via Twitter.
4. Twitter helps you discover the unexpected.
Twitter is great discovery tool. It can introduce you to new information, news stories and people every day. However, we often find that people we wouldn’t normally think of, or deal with very much, share some of our interests and we have rather more to talk about than we expected. Discovering unexpected interests and synergies is a huge Twitter benefit and its helped us strike up conversations with some very interesting people and organisations. It’s also, of course, introduced us to new blogs, bloggers, journalists, communications and marketing professionals and other interesting Tweeple.
5. Twitter can be a window allowing others to see more of your company.
I suppose that business development is what pays for our time to do all the other good stuff on Twitter and other social media. Twitter gives us another platform to share information on Spot On, what we’re doing, what we’re thinking and what we’re interested in, which is a great way for potential clients to get to know us a bit better before getting in direct contact. It’s like opening a little window that lets people see more of what’s inside the company and tune in a little bit better to what we’re thinking. It’s also a useful platform to promote our blog and other social media activities. Twitter has introduced us to a number of new clients and new potential clients, that we probably wouldn’t be talking to if we weren’t on Twitter.
If you’re not already following us, you can follow Spot On Public Relations on Twitter here: @spotonpr
Losing the battle for control?
A man goes into a shop to look for a new electronic product. He’s already been researching his new purchase online via the manufacturer’s website as well as news sites, product review sites, blogs and by asking his online and offline friends about which brand and products they know and recommend. Armed with this store knowledge he knows exactly what to look for when he goes into the shop and is, in fact, much better prepared on the subject than the sales representative he’s just about to ask for help. Some of the customers calling the retailer’s help line for support are similarly empowered with the latest information and frustrated when the customer service reps don’t know what they’re talking about. A journalist calling the marketing department for an interview already knows about a product recall that has so far not even been communicated to the shop floor. However, some of the company’s staff have already found out about the recall via Internet chat and so have started to post jokes about it on Facebook. Meanwhile, it comes as a surprise to the customer service team that a disgruntled customer has aired his colourful views on the company’s service via his blog and that this has attracted a wide audience and much agreement from dissatisfied customers.
The company management takes a long hard look at its communications and concludes that an increasing number of communications about the company, its services and its products are completely out of its control. The more difficult reality to come to grips with is this is perfectly normal and will, in fact, become increasingly the case.
Social media is bringing changes at every level of organisational communications. And this is not simply online communication either. Increased consumer access to information and opinion means that customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders engage with organisations with the benefit of knowledge gained from a wide range of other sources. Organisations now have much less control over what their customers see, read and hear about them. Customers, on the other hand, have an almost infinite choice of information sources. More and more consumers decide when and how they access news and information, and then access it via their preferred media platform. They also become conduits for information, creating their own content channels: filtering, sharing and recommending content to their own contacts, forums and audiences.
In the past organisations have focused a great deal on putting out what they want to say and far less on what their audiences want to hear. In the age of social media, where people have an overwhelming choice of content, every organisation needs to be in the content business – and that means carefully considering the content consumption habits and needs of its stakeholders. Those that fail to meet the content challenge may see third party content, well informed or not, fill the vacuum.
The consequence of this shift in communications is that many organisations are likely to find that focusing on information or messaging control as a core strategy is going to become less and less effective as time goes on. Some will simply find that the battle for control is simply not worth fighting, since the Internet provides so many ways for content to be created, copied, edited, shared and commented on that are outside the possible purview of corporate control. The new challenge for organisations is to ensure that their own content is the most compelling, most easily accessible content available and therefore the most appealing for their stakeholders. Ensure that your own content is the most copied, shared and commented on by your key audiences and suddenly the ubiquity of content channels becomes an enormous strength.
Over the weekend, I was lost in the dark rainy Al Quoz area trying to get to a gallery where 8 short plays were being staged by Dubai Drama Group in celebration of its 25th anniversary. While driving in circles looking for a lit up sign that says The JamJar, my mind wandered to a different place away from the big warehouses and big machinery and I thought: how would my weekend have been without Twitter?
On Thursday night, I got a tweet from @shelo9 and @mich1mich saying they’re heading to @wildpeeta (of course!) – amazing shawarma, hunger, and the need to be around smart and interesting people drove me there. And that was my Thursday night; all about good conversations, good tweets and definitely a nice shawarma for dinner!
On Friday morning, I was trying to set up a router for my wireless network. Of course, the last thing you expect a Luddite like me to do on her Friday. I was tweeting to people via my mobile (those who were awake then) to help out and it was a step-by-step process, or rather a tweet-by-tweet process, until I got my wireless in place and my thanks went back to all who were helping from my new wireless network! Hurray!
Saturday was the most interesting of all, I finally made it to The JamJar gallery and managed to catch the last 10 minutes of the play written by @Hajer13, sadly missing @PurpleNano’s part. However, I was happy to watch the next play where @Hajer13 was the leading actress (and she rocked by the way!). After that, I headed to MOE where DIFF is taking place. I would never have had the chance to watch the long anticipated movie Amreeka if @mich1mich hadn’t mentioned that she had an extra ticket. So, Saturday night ended with a great movie with great tweeps that I met (to name few: @nagham, @esperanca, @tomgara and @mita56 – shame she couldn’t make it in!)
So, if I had to rewrite the above taking out the Twitter factor I’d be left with ermm… probably nothing! This blog post also reminds me that I have to admit to @PKGulati that he was right and I was wrong! We had a conversation about the objective of Twitter a few months ago at the Irish Village. As he said, the aim of Twitter is not to have virtual acquaintances but to build connections on a professional, and why not, on a personal level too!
My life without Twitter? I wouldn’t even dare to imagine! In a town like Dubai, formerly known as one of the loneliest places in the world to be single, people are meeting like minded people, talking in new ways and opening up dialogue that otherwise would never have happened. And yes, I’m a Twitter addict and you all know it.
Spot On’s Alexander McNabb is taking part in a panel session on PR measurement in social media at News Group’s PR Measurement Summit in Dubai today. So, as the region’s public relations practitioners meet to discuss the region’s demand for monitoring, research and measurement methodologies, it’s probably as good a time as any take a quick look at measurement for social media.
I’m not going to delve deep into specific metrics and tools here. In fact, one could argue that all social media metrics either measure influence or engagement, or both and there are a growing number of tools to help marketers define and monitor such metrics. Instead I’d like to take a moment to tackle the broader problem that so often stands in the way of effective social media measurement. The crucial starting point for all social media communications campaigns. And this vital first step will come as no surprise to experienced communications and marketing professionals, because it is simply good objective setting. Without clear objectives social media is likely to be a waste of time, budget and resources for any organisation and the larger the organisation, the uglier it can get. Unless you can step back and take a strategic look at why you’re engaging social media and what results your organisation would like to acheive, all the social media monitoring and measurement tools in the world can’t help you become more effective. A simple enough propostion, but it’s still sadly a lesson that many corporate users of social media have yet to learn.
If you’re ‘different’, why copycat?
One of the first things to recognise is that your organisation’s social media objectives are going to be different to others. Everyone has their own core proposition. Everyone has their own target customers. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. You’ll want to plan your own social media campaign to get your own messages across to your own target audiences: in a way that suits your organisation. So, bear in mind that whilst other social media marketers maybe a great source of inspiration, it’s not always wise to copy everything that they do and join every social media platform they use, just because their social media campaign is successful. Their social media audiences may behave in different ways and be engaged by different online content to your target social media audience.
Here are some broad objectives that you might consider, elaborate on and prioritise for your social media campaign:
- Generate brand awareness
- Build brand engagement
- Build a following
- Run product/service marketing campaigns
- Generate sales leads
- Establish / reinforce leadership
- Create a new communications channel
- Enhance customer relationship management (CRM)
- Test new concepts
- Drive visit to your website or blog
- Monitor opinions & feedback
Likely, you’ll find that several of these objectives figure in your planning and that prioritisation is the key. It’s through defining and prioritising obectives like these that you will be able decide what constitutes success for your social media program and identify the right metrics to monitor and review your campaign’s success moving forwards. As with other forms of communications, there are a range of methodical and anecdotal ways to track success and there are some quite sophisticated tools now available to track success metrics for online campaigns. Many companies will find that their online social media campaign is actually an extension of their offline activity and that one feeds the other, and so a combination of online and offline metrics will make sense for measurement. Many companies starting out in social media for the first time may also question the wisdom of investing in a state-of-the-art social media business intelligence system and instead opt for free-to-use online tools and existing offline monitoring methods. Note that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for measuring social media campaigns.
As you spend more and more time running and monitoring online campaigns — and the clicks, links, visits, friends, fans, followers, subscribers, keywords, comments, replies, references, referrals, opinions and perceptions that are relevant to them — you’ll realise that social media is almost infinitely measureable. The trick is to know what you’re measuring and why you’re measuring it.
Useful links
Social media analytics systems: Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Radian6, Sysomos, TNSCymfony
Chris Brogan: Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts
Mashable: ViralHeat: Sophisticated Social Media Tracking on the Cheap
Mashable: HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics
The idea that social media is a new way of running marketing communications on the cheap is a beguiling one and, sadly, totally incorrect. It is also a piece of thinking that is increasingly common. In fact, using social media for marketing is time consuming, expensive and dangerous. The Internet is filled with examples of companies that have tried to ‘go viral’ with campaigns and been held up to public contempt as their lame efforts are pilloried and it is quickly filling with companies that have ‘gone social’ and suffered a similar fate.
It is easy to get social media wrong, particularly easy if you approach it in the same way as you would an advertising campaign. In fact, the thought processes and attitudes that underpin social media are precisely the opposite of those behind ‘traditional’ one-way marcoms, replacing one-way asymmetric communication with a two-way symmetric model. In other words, you have to listen to people and talk to them using social media, not view them as a passive consumer of your message.
Once you get going, actually listening to and talking to people takes quite a bit of time. You’re no longer looking at getting a message out to millions with a simple payment for airtime or space – you’re looking at actually creating engagements. Even worse, you are confronted, probably for the first time, with some uncomfortable facts, such as the fact that nobody other than you cares two hoots about your products for something like 99.9% of their lives. In fact, we are remarkably dispassionate about a large number of things, which is why we had advertising in the first place. To put them in our heads and create preference for one product over another.
Social media additionally gives you the problem of communicating with people who don’t necessarily talk product – and who don’t want to talk to a brand so much as a person who represents a brand. Companies using social media now really do have to live up to their brand values in every way, not just tack them up on a mission statement and forget about them. The organisational challenges can be significant – and expensive.
This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.
Phil used to typeset my work. I’d send him my copy, marked up by hand and he’d send me back galleys, long strips of single columns of type which the graphic artist would then ‘lay out’ onto boards, creating pages of book and magazine out of strips of type glued down with ‘SprayMount’, a highly egregious sprayable glue. We’d size pictures manually, then attach them to the artwork (a box was drawn to give the printers a ‘keyline’ to place the image in) ready for sending to film.
Then along came Digital Research’s GUI, or graphical user interface, GEM and with it Ventura Publisher, a black and white piece of software that let you ‘lay out’ pages onscreen. I had a chat to Phil about the new software and how he needed to invest in it so that he could run my pages.
‘Rubbish! That’ll never take off! You can’t match the quality of compositors’ work, proper typesetting, with that amateur junk!’ said Phil.
Within the year Phil had gone bust because his customers were all running out their pages from packages such as Ventura as one single layout, all ready for the printers. I didn’t need a graphic artist anymore, either – I did my own layouts onscreen. They might not have followed Caxton’s rules of typography, but then we were redefining what you could do with type anyway – for a few halcyon years, drop caps and huge lettering ruled magazine layouts all over the UK.
Ever since then, I have heard people talking about quality as the reason why technology, the Internet in particular, won’t disintermediate them. But the amazing fact is that we don’t actually care about quality. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are some of the crappiest pieces of filming. I play my music in my car, ripped from my ultra-high quality CDs and converted to lo-fi MP3s, using an iTrip radio transmitter thingy. The quality of what I am listening to is probably less than that of a chrome cassette.
When technology improves access, quality becomes secondary. And quality is the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated.
This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.
Spot On PR's Group Account Director Alexander McNabb
The MEPRA Awards shortlisted nominations and submissions are out today, which include 10 best practice categories and two individual awards categories, being Young Professional of the Year and Communicator of the Year. Having decided as an agency not to enter into the MEPRA Awards best practice categories this year, we had no expectation of seeing ourselves entered for any award. So, imagine our surprise on reading the official MEPRA Awards 2009 press release today when we saw Spot On’s own Alexander McNabb nominated for the Communicator of the Year Award! McNabb himself very nearly choked on his morning coffee as the news broke in the office!
MEPRA’s Communicator of the Year Award was created to recognise a communicator in the Middle East region that has demonstrated outstanding communication success in reaching stakeholder audiences in 2008-2009. Honest, open communications is something of a mantra for us and Alexander has certainly championed the need for organisations to communicate openly and honestly with their publics during the past year via a variety of media including print, radio, television, conference platforms and social media. Alexander is one of five nominees for the award and the winner will be announced at the MEPRA Awards 2009 gala dinner on Tuesday, November 24th.
You can read more of what Alexander has to say on the Spot On blog, his own FakePlasticSouqs blog or follow him on Twitter. And, by the way, he’ll be talking about public relations and the MEPRA Awards 2009 on Dubai Eye’s Dubai Today program tomorrow (Monday) between 9am and 12 noon.
I have always been terribly fond of the image of a small urchin throwing a stone to knock the top-hat off the fat, pompous businessman. I’ve even run campaigns based around the concept in the past, where we’ve been working against an incumbent telco on behalf of the challenger. Taking the role of the urchin, the ‘sha2iy’, against the established player was a highly successful strategy – the incumbent is aways monopolistic, slow to react and entrenched in its ways. As the market entrant, you’re always faster, slicker and, if you’re witty about it, can actually lead the positioning game from an early stage.
The great thing about being an urchin is that people are generally sympathetic to you in your acts of defiance against pomp and arrogance. Few of us have a taste for big business when it’s a monopoly or when we’re its customers and it’s not listening to us. And that has never been so true as it is now, with the fast flows of information, particularly consumer opinion and comment, that the Internet and the many consumer generated media outlets that it has opened up.
Businesses that have in the past ignored consumer opinion can, of course, continue to do so – particularly if they’re monopolies. But being a monopoly and behaving like a monopoly aren’t the same thing – and changing an organisation’s interactions with its customers can either come now at the pace and convenience of the company’s choosing or later at the pace chosen by a competitor working with the support of consumers who are grateful for the change being offered.
Of course, there are those that serve us badly and have no prospect of having to endure the rigours of competition. In an environment when today’s more empowered consumers are able to give voice, share information and opinion and reach out to each other, the pressure for change is suddenly a factor of significance. Although the monopoly itself may not change, the people within it that think that consumers are of no consequence may just find that competition doesn’t have to come from outside and that they are moved aside to make way from more urchin-friendly people.
This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine
2009 Spot On Public Relations