Doing Social Media Right in 2009
What is Social Media?
Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos, and audio.
But that doesn’t quite do it…
It’s how people engage, participate, and share online…
… the experiences they leave behind
… and the shared meaning they create.
FROM HONEYMOON TO MARRIAGE
It’s…> 100,000,000 videos on YouTube4,000,000 articles on Wikipedia200 M blogs1 billion tweets on twitter> 200 M people on Facebook each month
Social Media By The Numbers
346,000,000number of people globally who read blogs
700,000,000number of photos added to Facebook monthly
273.1 minutes time on average spent watching online video each month
55% internet users who have uploaded and shared photos
57% internet users who have joined a social network
93% Americans online expect companies to have a social media presence
But It’s Not All Good News…
Recent Headlines:
• Social Media Fatigue. Too much out there?
• Blogging is Dead, According to Wired.com
• Forrester Says Consumers Don’t Trust Corporate
Blogs
• Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites
• P&G marketing chief questions value of Facebook
• Half of 'social media campaigns' will flop
The Honeymoon Is Over…
Social Media Challenge #1
Companies have to overcome their fear.
• How do you learn to “let go”• Give control back to the consumer• Lose the limits imposed by legal• Reinvent PR… PR 2.0• But is the risk work the reward?
Social Media Challenge #2
This is a different kind of marketing.
• Stop thinking “campaign”• Stop thinking “channel”• Beware of Business Week syndrome• Objectives need to come first• It’s so much more than “marketing”
COMMUNICATION
Social Media Challenge #3
It starts with the community inside.
• Bringing community to the business silos• Socializing success is the key to success• Watch out for company ADD• End users can tell if your “family” is
dysfunctional
Social Media Challenge #4
Social media advocates are over-zealous.
• It’s not just brands who are challenged• The world wide echo chamber• Don’t follow the “shiny object”• Bring brands in with baby steps• Prevent culture shock
Social Media Challenge #5
Consumers are suffering from fatigue.
• It’s a competition for consumer attention• They can afford to be picky• Human behavior is complex• But phony never flies
Who Is Doing It Right?
Reinventing Customer Service
The Unhappy Customer
Comcast’s New Nightmare
23,000 subscribers is how many TechCrunch's Michael Arrington told when his Comcast service was down
1.3 million viewersis how many saw the video a Comcast customer recorded when a service technician fell asleep in his house
The customer’s voice has become a powerful weapon…
The Happy Customer
Zappos.com / Powered by Service
Zappos.com doesn’t sell shoes, they deliver “WOW” through service. The primary sources of the company's rapid growth have been repeat customers and numerous word of mouth recommendations. Free shipping both ways, an always open call center, and 365 day return policy are part of what sets Zappos apart.
"Hopefully, 10 years from now, people won't even realize we started out selling shoes." Tony Hsieh (CEO)
How Do You Measure Success?
Active Participation: 438 Zappos employees are on Twitter
Instant Access to Your Customers: 47,104 Followers on of the top Twitter accounts
Extending Your Reach: Increased traffic and search volume
More Efficient, More Effective:Limit the amount of advertising by focusing on a customer experience that will generate natural word of mouth
Increasing the Bottomline:75% of Zappos sales come from repeat customers $840 million in 2007, $1 billion (projected) in 2008
Reinventing The Infomercial
Take A Look Around
Blendtec Before “Will It Blend”
• A faceless company with expensive product• New marketing director means a set of new eyes• A charismatic CEO with some interesting habits• “Extreme blending” as a regular occurrence
How Do You Measure Success?
Millions of Eyes and Ears: 65 million YouTube views, 120 million WillItBlend.com views
Dominate the Search Results: Turn search buzzwords (“Chuck Norris”, “iPhone”) into video traffic
More Efficient, More Effective: They’ve received national media coverage (TV appearances, awards) that is equivalent to millions of dollars in advertising
Increasing the Bottomline: Total Blender retail sales grew 700% in the past two years
Making the World a Better Place:Blendtec auctioned the blended iPhone on Ebay which sold for $1,000 and proceeds were donated to a children’s hospital
Reinventing Public Relations
Change The Conversation
The Trouble Ford Was In
• Consumers don’t trust corporations• Trust needs a face and a name• Enter the automotive crisis• Ford put into an interesting position• Can a bad situation be a brand defining moment?
How Do You Measure Success?
Get Your Content Out There: Traffic increased 100% in past 4 months to thefordstory.com“Ford Story” CEO YouTube video has received 53,354 views
A Strong Leading Man: Scott Monty has 14265 followers on Twitter and conducts almost daily interviews with blogs, news sites, and television
Be the Brand Everyone Is Talking About: #12 in AdAge’s most social brands of 2008, next to Disney, Sony, Dell and Apple
Owning Your Story, Before It Owns You:Ford effectively changed the conversation around the automotive bailout to position themselves in a different light than the others
What Are The Best Practices?
The Inconvenient Truth
There are no best practices.
• Every project is a custom fit.• You learn as you go. What are the best practices for a conversation? What about for a relationship?
You can read books, attend seminars, but it all comes back towho you are and who they are. There is one best practice to which there is no exception…
BE REAL
An Approach to Being Real
You need to understand
• Who they are• Who you are• What you can
handle
Understand Act Evolve
You need to act• Accordingly• Transparently• Honestly
To evolve, you must• Always be
learning• Always be
teaching• Always be
improving
How to UNDERSTAND
1. First and foremost, listen2. Define the problem3. Match the problem to project objectives4. Find the community inside your
company5. Understand the community outside
Understand Act Evolve
Are you ready to listen
Tools You Can Use
Social Media Buzz Monitoring 1. Free Alert Systems
2. Paid Analysis Dashboard
3. Full Service Insights Partners
Understand
What Ford Heard…
“I am boycotting all companies that
receive bailout money. Join me and ask
others. We can make taking bailout
money so painful others will not suck the
life’s blood out of our children and
grandchildren.”
“If we all bought American, where would the competition and innovation be? Have you seen the junk on wheels they sell? The Big 3 haven't been selling what people want, but the foreign car companies have.”
Why are American cars still so unreliable? Nobody buys American anymore!!
Six in 10 oppose auto bailout…
Understand
Hello?! I think we have a problem
Define the Problem
It all comes down to a problem in communication…• Our customer thinks of us as _____ instead of _____• People don’t know the facts about our brand• We don’t know what our customers think about us• Our marketing message isn’t resonating with our
customers
Ford’s big communication problem…• Big faceless corporation • American people against the bail out • Ford lumped in with misinformation and bad press
Understand
Determine Your Objectives
Social media project objectives must…• Directly solve your communication problems• Have a clear way to benchmark before and after
Ford’s objectives…• Put a face forward, humanize the brand• Combat misinformation• Tell your story, get others to tell it for you• Change opinion around the brand
Understand
What is your corporate culture
The Community Inside
Questions you need to ask…• What is (who owns) our corporate culture?• Who is allowed to talk on behalf of the brand now?• What assets are we or could we be creating?
– Events, content extras, internal superstars
How they did it…• Blendtec picked up on internal meme and decided to
share it with the world wide web• Zappos looked at their core values, commitment to
culture, and ways employees were already talking online
Understand
Reach out to your followers
The Community Outside
Questions you need to ask…• What the types of people exist out there already?• Should we build or join a community?• What does the community need?
– Should we support, energize, or embrace them?
How they did it…• Blendtec understood the tone people looking for and
embraced their requests for content• Zappos continues to find and actively follow people
that mention their brand
Understand
How to ACT
Understand Act Evolve
1. Create a pilot program with core influencers
2. Ignite conversation and engage your audience
3. Don’t forget to share results, content, and plans, be transparent and giving
4. Be a great party host by connecting community members together
Create A Pilot Program
• Start with creators and influencers. • Find renegades and evangelists. • Be interesting.
How they did it…• Microsoft put together Channel 9 to show behind-
the-scenes interviews with developers and even executives. On the first day, word of mouth had drawn 100,000 viewers. Half a year later, traffic was up to 1.2 million unique visitors a month.
Act
Find ways to ignite conversation
Engage Your Audience
• Ignite conversation. • Develop community activities. • Build a content calendar.• Be social.
How they did it…• Chrysler engages business units on a weekly basis
for discussion topics to put up for their Customer Advisory Board and finds executives to participate in online monthly chats.
Act
Don’t Forget to Share
• Be honest. Be giving. • Be transparent, esp. when you are wrong.• Let the community own the community.
How they did it…• When Cork’d was recently hacked, the very first thing
Gary Vaynerchuk did was post a video comment on TechCrunch to apologize and inform
• What not to do… When AMC first found out that fans were Twittering posed as characters from the hit show Mad Men, they asked that the accounts be shut down
Act
Remember to be a great party host
Connect the Community
• Be a great party host. • Encourage member interaction. • Drive exploration.
How they did it…• Mr. Tweet takes a look at which Twitter users you
should be following based on your personal interests• CCS, the College of Creative Studies, uses Facebook
to match potential students to counselors and current students who can answer important questions
Act
How to EVOLVE
Understand Act Evolve
1. Empower your advocates through reward and recognition
2. Cross-pollinate and extend into other programs
3. Measure, report, share, and improve4. Learn what works and what doesn’t
Empower Your Advocates
• Reward and recognize. • Give them the tools.
How they did it…• Yahoo! Answers gives users different privileges
based on how many questions they have answered • At Dell IdeaStorm, community members suggest and
vote on ideas for how Dell can improve their business.• Lego Factory allows users to create 3D lego bricks.
The community can vote on the best creations and some of the winning creations end up at local toy stores.
Evolve
Extend your reach beyond the web
Extend into Other Programs• Integrate. • Cross-pollinate. • Widgetize. • Meet up in the real world.
How they did it…• The Barnes and Noble community is a lively brand loyalty
community supported by the Lithium platform. Hot topic threads are featured on the e-commerce site.
• ArtShare is an application developed by the Brooklyn Museum to share the Museum's collection on Facebook. Rather than expect users to come to the website to learn about the collection, they engage people in their own social space.
Evolve
Measure, Measure, Measure
• Match metrics to your objectives.• Report, share, improve.
How they did it…• Many brands use buzz monitoring software such as
Radian6 or Sysomos to measure fluctuations in volume of conversation compared to competitors.
• CCS, the College of Creative Studies, uses the metrics provided by Facebook’s Insight tool to measure increased traffic, photo views, and wall posts.
Evolve
What Do We Want From Them?
Track, quantify, and analyze conversations around a brand, their competitors, and their industry through out the entire online space
Determine the spread and velocity (how far, how fast) of branded syndicated content (video, widget, article)
Qualify and analyze social interaction within a defined channel in order to determine community health, sentiment, and engagement levels
To talk about the brand BRAND MONITORING
To spread our content CONTENT TRACKING
To engage us directly COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT
Learn + Adapt
• Go with the flow. • Catalog what works and what doesn’t. • Rethink often.
How they did it…• Community platforms such as Lithium and SalesForce
(which runs Dell Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea) have implemented “idea management” features which help brands manage insights collected from the community and measure and learn from user engagement.
• Get Satisfaction is feedback widget that can get integrated into websites to provides real-time, dynamic customer support content that leverages the wisdom of crowds.
Evolve
This is HARD WORK
But it will get easier…
Introducing Web 3.0
The Information Portal
Web 1.0• information exclusivity, be the first to own the content• dividing the world wide web into usable directories• everyone has their personal own little corner in the
cyberspace
The web became STATIC + LONELY
It lacked: • community• interaction• scalability
The Social Platform
Web 2.0• focus on the power of the community to create and
validate• the power of a seemingly freer form of organization
(“tags”)• setting up “hooks” for future integration (RSS, API)
The web became NOISY + OVERWHELMING
It lacked: • personalization• true portability• meaning
We Broke Dunbar’s Number
Dunbar's number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships
There’s me
There’s myMyspace, Flickr, Yelp, YouTube, LinkedIn,Facebook, Last.fm…
And here are all my friends
And theirMyspace, Flickr, Yelp, YouTube, LinkedIn,Facebook, Last.fm…
And their friends with their content
Navigating the seas of the social web
Introducing Web 3.0
What does it mean?The 3rd decade of the Web (2010–2020), when simultaneous
andcomplementary technology trends will finally reach maturity:
• a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories creating more seamless interoperability between connected devices
• data anywhere anytime via broadband adoption, mobile Internet access, software-as-a-service, and cloud computing
• true data portability via open identity (OpenID), APIs and data formats
• a consistent web language via RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, etc.• intelligent agents, natural language processing, and machine
learning
Web 3.0 is The Relevant Web
Improving How We Listen
Social Monitoring 2.0• Monitoring based on keywords makes it hard to
distinguish brand conversation (“jaguar” the car vs “jaguar” the animal)
• Sentiment changes based on the context (ie “lemon”)• Too much reliance on manual adjustments and
interpretation
Social Monitoring 3.0• Smarter aggregation, mapping conversation trends
• Conversation tracking beyond keywords
Better Customer Acquisition
Online Advertising 2.0• Contextual ads can be inaccurate and unsafe for brands• Behavioral ads don’t account for multiple users• Consumers trust each other more than corporations,
brands, and their advertising messages.
Online Advertising 3.0• Deliver relevant ads to the right consumers
• Make content easier to discover by interested users
Better Community Management
Community Management 2.0• Shear number of social networks with disconnected
profiles makes it difficult to find the most valuable people to connect with
• Hard to distribute the conversation beyond your blog or community
• No relevant social information when you need it most
Community Management 3.0• Finding the influencers across the social web
• Extending the conversation beyond the networks
Improving How We Measure
Measuring Success 2.0• Limited amount that we can measure: reach, exposure,
volume of conversation• Social networks are “walled gardens” with inconsistent
metrics• No algorithms to measure that a community has been built
Measuring Success 3.0• Better sentiment analysis than “positive, neutral, negative”
• Social graph analysis, conversation connections
Thank You.
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