Remember: a social media programme isn't just for Christmas!

I’ve been doing quite a lot of speaking at ‘online’ conference events and workshops recently (this will surprise nobody who knows me) and consequently meeting a lot of people who are experimenting with social media within their organisations. It’s something of a growing trend – typically, one person within an organisation has been using Facebook or Twitter, even blogging, and has come to realise that there is very real value to the organisation in ‘being there’. A lot of these people come from the communications department, although by no means all. At a recent event where I spoke to an audience of event managers, I found quite a lot of people who had responsibility for companies’ events were the drivers behind introducing social media to their organisations.

Something of a pattern has started to emerge. The enthusiast is given permission to open up a social media account because it seems harmless enough – the company’s management doesn’t ‘get’ social media and so doesn’t see any danger in letting the enthusiast play with it. The enthusiast starts out and quickly finds a ready audience of people responding, interacting and demanding information, access and insight. It all becomes hard to handle precisely because it has been successful – one person can’t keep up with the volume but has gained enough experience to see the potential for this new medium.

So they go back to their management and point out that the experiment has been a great success, customers are now talking to the company over this new medium and appreciating the new degrees of access it brings. Can we expand the programme now?

And many I talk to are right in the middle of that conversation, mired in ‘not just yet, there’s a recession on you know’ and ‘What’s the ROI?’ reactions from the management team that has allowed this thing to develop so far precisely because it has ascribed it no importance.

The trouble is that social media is a difficult habit to break. Having started engagement with customers, partners and other stakeholders online, you have set an expectation of accessibility that can only grow. These early steps are important and help to build experience and learning – but it can’t stop there. The very fact that these programmes now need additional resources and expansion shows that they’re doing something right. It’s odd, in fact, that management presented with something new that is actually working would balk at it.

Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product

In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued amusement (so I’m puerile, sue me) it stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.

However, this is about as interesting as technology gets these days. We’re no longer wowed by operating systems or ooh-aahed by CPUs (if many of us ever were). We tend to get excited about iPhone apps or new smartphones, but we don’t actually tend to spend hours poring over hardcore technology – we want it to do what it says on the box, simply and consistently. And beyond that, we don’t actually want to invest a huge amount of energy or emotional commitment into the technology we use – unless, say, we run data centres as a day job.

Alongside this change in consumer attitudes to technology comes a series of changes in the way in which people inform themselves of new things. That information flow, which used to take place across magazine pages or at exhibitions, now takes place online 24/7. The technology publishing market, once artificially inflated compared to the publishing seen in other vertical market sectors, has shrunk to virtually a handful of titles.

This commoditisation of technology is something of a challenge for the marketers tasked with trying to make it relevant to all of us. We don’t care about it most of the time and we’ll serve ourselves with the information we need from online resources when it comes to decision time. There are all too few publications that reach consumers – and broader business titles, say, tend not to buy technology stories.

What’s the solution?
Companies that are recognising that their technology isn’t perhaps the most important thing in the world to their customers are coming up trumps. In recognising this, they are able to take a realistic approach to what is important to customers and how they map to those priorities, provide content that is relevant to consumers and position themselves appropriately within that content. By maintaining an ongoing relationship that is based on providing content that customers actually want (as opposed to just saying whatever you’re doing is what customers want) and also by being ‘valued members’ of communities, these companies are standing in the wings when customers actually do say ‘I’m interested in you today.’ It’s a sea-change for marketers used to buying the right to access customers with dollars – increasingly they’re having to use a different currency.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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

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.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that social media is user-driven so you’re leading a conversation and, like all conversations, it will have ebbs and flows. You can’t expect relentless positivity but are aiming to have an overall dialogue that puts your position and proposition.

Another issue facing social media campaign managers is that of approvals. In the old paradigm, your agency made sure that every single communication was approved. It would never do, for instance, for the agency to be speaking in your place. And agencies, for their part, wanted to be indemnified from clients’ actions and liabilities. If you’re running a campaign that cuts across websites and interactive, ‘social’ media, someone needs to be posting, responding, commenting, Tweeting, filming and uploading content on your behalf. And that either means that you, as a campaign ‘manager’ need to be 100% engaged 24×7 in your campaign or you need to redefine the rules so that your agency has a wider scope of responsibility, empowerment and response-ability. That means you have to let your agency take more risks on your behalf, and therefore that your agency is sufficiently indemnified to take those risks. Dispensing with indemnity can be an expensive game for the hapless communicator.

Likewise, you need to be sure that you’re working with an agency that understands those risks, that gets where the pain points of social communication lie, but also that understands the issues of corporate governance in this changing environment as well as new expectations of corporate behaviour. It can be a complicated trade-off – ensuring that the company is answerable at every level and yet also responsive at every level, that it is transparent and yet decisive and that it communicates with its stakeholders appropriately, despite the immediacy and ubiquity of online ‘social’ access.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.