Dave Fleet | davefleet.com

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Six important shifts for social media in 2012

11.12.31

It’s hard to believe we’re about to tick over to another calendar year. So, as usual, I got to thinking about the shifts I think companies need to make in their social media activities in the next year.

These aren’t necessarily trends that are already happening (although I’d like to say they are), but they’re certainly where my head is at and hopefully where others are, too.

Here are six shifts I hope to see in social media use by business in 2012.

Better objective-setting

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a slow maturation in the way companies develop their objectives for social media. My hope is that this will continue in 2012. That means fewer companies treating fan or follower growth or video views as goals, fewer made-up numbers and more focusing on business outcomes – sales, cost savings, customer/employee retention etc.

More effective measurement

As companies get better at setting objectives for social media, they’re going to need to get better at measuring against those new objectives. That means shifting focus away from anecdotal evidence and simple outputs, and looking at indicators of the behaviour you’re looking to drive. It also means taking a closer look at the reporting of that measurement. See my recent post on five ways to improve your social media measurement for more on this.

This will be accompanied by increased realism over social media results. I’m currently reading a book that points to a multi-national company having 27,000 Twitter followers as an indication of social media success. Let’s face it, that’s unlikely to move the needle for lots of companies. As companies focus-in on reporting business objectives, we’ll see a continued shift away from high-fives over anecdotes and minor wins and a more hard-nosed focus on what really matters.

Improved Integration

Key to measuring more effectively, but with far, far broader effects, integration (and the breaking down of silos) will become even more key in 2012. The smart organizations have already figured out that social media works best when supported, and supporting, other forms of communications; look for more companies to mandate a silo-busting approach over the next year.

Strategic content planning

As organizations increasingly adopt the role of media companies in their online communications, watch for content strategy to receive greater focus in 2012. That means shifting from a “we have to fill these content slots” approach to one that carefully considers the objectives of each piece of proactive content and why it deserves its place in the content calendar. Sometimes it might be to drive community engagement; other times it might be to drive business conversion, and so on.

Increased search focus

An increased (and improved) search focus sits alongside more strategic planning of content. It means broadening the scope of how you target content, from point-in-time to point-in-lifecycle – thinking about what people are looking for at their stage in whatever process you’re targeting, and helping them through that and on to the next stage. That could be a stage of the purchase cycle, it could be a stage of the support process, or any number of others that you choose to focus on (thinking back to objectives).

Focusing on the less-shiny object

This is a big bucket of all sorts of increases, but my hope is that as companies move away from shiny-object snydrome in 2012 they start to take a more sophisticated approach to the less-shiny objects – policies, processes, listening, crisis plans etc – or, more formally put, to social business.

For me, this is an exciting time. I’m jazzed to see more mature use of social media help it to evolve into a more powerful tool for organizations – “life after likes“, as David Armano puts it. This is the cool stuff – the stuff that will move the needle and add real value for companies.

That makes the non-shiny objects the shiny ones for me.

Posted in: measurement, social media, strategy

21Comments

Search Engines Are A Conduit, Not A Source

11.12.21

Let’s get this out of the way: Search engines are a key part of communications nowadays. Take a look at your website analytics and it’ll be clear – there’s no avoiding it. Search engines usually drive a significant proportion – if not the majority – of traffic to companies’ websites.

However, I’m tired of seeing “studies” showing that “search engines” are a source of information for consumers.

Search engines are a conduit – a step along the path – not a source.

Think about it – when you look for information on something, you go to Google (or Bing, or Ask.com, or whoever…) and type in your query. The vast majority of the time, you don’t sit and look at the results page – you click through to a result. You do that because the results pages have the information, not the search engine.

Yes, there are exceptions – Google News, for example – and sometimes you’ll find the information you need in the title or description shown in the search results, but the majority of the time you pass straight through the search engine and on to your destination. Search engines understand this – Google optimizes its page to get you off its site as quickly as possible.

Why does this matter, and am I just being pedantic?

Because the nodding and agreement that comes from headlines about search engines as an information source interferes with the push to answer more important questions:

Do consumers in my market niche, rather than generic consumers, use search engines to research their products?
Once my consumers have searched (or not), where do they go?

Do they go to product review sites to check out other peoples’ reviews?
Do they go to corporate sites to read-up on specs and options?
Do they go to news sites to see what’s going on with the company or the product?
Do they go to blogs to check out discussions there?

This is the sort of information that’s useful. This is the sort of information that lets my team figure out where to prioritize its efforts in order to drive search engine optimization (driving consumer reviews; publishing product-focused content; driving earned media coverage, etc).

Also, there’s a big difference between customers of different industries - preferences along these lines are what we should be digging into (note: this is another report that cites “search results” as an influential channel). We need to be thinking more closely about that.

I get it. Search is important. Companies need to pay attention to search (and invest more in optimizing both organic results and the paid media around those results). Etc etc. And yes, some companies aren’t paying attention.

For the rest of us, though – those of us trying to do the best we can, and who really want to optimize based on useful insights – let’s move beyond the “search results are an important information source” nonsense and get down to the business of finding useful insights that can fuel our communication strategy.

Fair?

Posted in: communications, search

Tags: communications, search, Search Engine, SEM, SEO

2Comments

Five ways to improve your social media measurement

11.11.21

We’re past the point where a “get me one of those” approach to the latest social shiny object is a viable approach. As business use of social media continues to slowly mature, measurement is becoming more and more important to justify the investment in social activities.

Last week I spoke on a roundtable on Practical Social Media Goal Setting, Measurement and ROI, along with Janet Fouts, Steve Farnsworth and Brian Rice. One of the most interesting questions asked related to the mistakes that organizations make around measuring social media. Rather than focus on those mistakes, here are five ways to avoid them – five ways to improve your social media measurement and reporting.

1. Focus on outcomes over outputs

The number of Tweets you post, or replies you generate, may be interesting, but what value do they drive? Instead, focus on the outcomes of those activities – how many leads did you generate? How much money did you save? How many event registrations did you drive?

It can sometimes be hard to accomplish this – especially from the agency side – as you often need to work with many business functions to determine this (sales, IT, marketing etc). The more you can push in this direction, though, the better off you’ll be.

2. Set measurable objectives

Measurement factors into SMART goals in several ways.

Firstly, considering insights from previous activities (previous reporting periods or previous campaigns) to set appropriate expectations for the time-period set.

Secondly, ensuring that the objectives that are set are measurable so you can measure the ultimate success or failure of your program at the end.

3. Determine the purpose of your report

I’ve seen way too many reports that lay out the objectives of a program, then report on measurements that have nothing to do with those objectives.

If you’re looking to get ten thousand sign-ups to a new service, why would you report on the number of retweets of your content? Or the sentiment of coverage? Those numbers have value when you’re looking for ways to optimize your activities, but when it comes to measuring against your objectives, the connection there is weak at best.

Before you begin working on a measurement report, determine what the purpose of that report is. Is it to optimize content? Provide insights to fuel products, services, messaging, etc? Or to determine the success of a program? Determine the purpose of your measurement and tailor your approach to it.

The audience of your report is often tied closely to its purpose. Who are you writing for? The answer to that question – whether it’s community managers or senior executives – should determine the kind of insights you provide.

Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s great post on the social media ROI pyramid for a great way of thinking about this.

4. Focus on driving action

Number soup doesn’t help anyone. To make your reporting valuable, make sure you seek to drive insights and action with what you report. To quote Rob Clark, look not just at the “what”, but the “so what” and the “now what”.

5. Measure before, during and after

The measurement process doesn’t start at the end of a project; it starts at the beginning, with setting your objectives, and continues throughout the work. Measurement, done right, fuels your objectives, sets a baseline against which you can measure, enables course adjustments during the activities and measures against your objectives at the end.

Doing these things won’t make measuring your activities any easier, but it will make your measurement and reporting more effective, and will help you to improve your social media activities over the long run. That may not be shiny and glamorous, but it’s effective and valuable.

(Image credit: Jeremiah Owyang)

Posted in: measurement, social media

Tags: measurement, social media

11Comments

What Gets You Up In The Morning?

11.11.14

Every so often it’s helpful to reflect on why your job matters to you – why you put in all the effort, passion and commitment you do.

For me, one of those moments came last week when I read this post by my colleague Rob Clark (which I’m re-publishing here with his permission).

I’ve worked a number of jobs throughout my life. Every single one of them I’ve put everything I’ve got into it. That’s just how I’m wired. I can’t be at a place and not give it my loyalty, my dedication and the full extent of what I have to offer.

Most of these jobs have adequately compensated me though a few have undervalued my contributions and balked at fair payment. Some of the jobs were extremely rewarding – most often through the people I’ve worked with. Some of them were educational – though more often than not a hard lesson learned.

But I have to say that my job at Edelman is the first where I consistently feel that I’m getting more back than I put in. And lord knows I put in a lot.

What’s more – I know that this isn’t simply a momentary happenstance or aligning of events. The company is putting the effort into making this a culture. Making this the regular modus operandi. I greatly appreciate that effort because it tells me this is not just a fluke or temporary alignment of good people. This is the way things will be. Smart people, doing creative and challenging work, together as a team.

I couldn’t agree more, and couldn’t be prouder to have people like Rob with me on that team.

What about you?

Posted in: career, miscellaneous

13Comments

Book Review: The Social Customer

11.10.31

The Social Customer is one of the best books I’ve read on practical uses and implementations of social media marketing. Given that I’ve read a fair number of them over the last few years, that’s saying something.

The author, Adam Metz, takes the reader through a straightforward, easy-to-read summary of the concept and potential for social CRM, but that’s really only part of this book. While it covers social CRM at length, this is a solid 201-level tome on many aspects of social media, which means this is a useful read for anyone wanting to go beyond the intro level and commit to the social marketing arena.

Structure

The Social Customer is divided into three sections:

Section One takes the reader through an overview of the topic of social CRM.
Section Two walks through 23 use cases of social CRM (based on Altimeter’s 18 social CRM use cases, with a few extras thrown in), dividing them into six groups:

Social Marketing
Social Sales
Social Support
Social Innovation and Product Development
Collaboration
Seamless Customer Experience

Section Three looks at the implementation of social CRM within the organization.

Strengths

While unashamedly enthusiastic about the potential and desirability of social CRM implementations, Metz is honest throughout about his thoughts on the market-readiness of the various use cases that are put forward. You never get the feeling that he’s just preaching for the sake of it, but that there’s a considered opinion behind the assessments.

The book is extremely easy to read. A consistent energy and enthusiasm flow through it, and the personal anecdotes lend a human feel to the book throughout.

Lastly, he book draws frequently from other popular texts including the aforementioned Altimeter paper, Paul Greenberg’s CRM principles and the book Blue Ocean Strategy. In doing so, it creates a really solid overview of the topic that ultimately leaves you wanting more.

Weaknesses

The book isn’t without its issues, however.

The vendor-focused nature of much of the book means that it will be out-of-date before long – especially as it provides a point-in-time assessment of the market readiness of tools and use-case implementations.

The book offers a fairly immature definition of a socially-enabled business which, while fitting the topic of the book, ignores many of the other potential considerations in play.

The middle section of the book – the 23 use case – does drag and becomes repetitive as it progresses. This part of the book, while valuable, is a bit of a slog – you’re best either taking a break before diving into it, or just picking and choosing the chapters based on your own business objectives.

Still, these weaknesses don’t ultimately spoil what, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the best social-focused books I’ve read in a long time – if not the best.

Who should read this: People with a good knowledge of social media who are looking to begin to go more in-depth; people who want to explore the potential of social CRM at a basic level.

People who should avoid this: Anyone looking for an introduction to social media (this will be too advanced); people looking for an in-depth “how-to” on social CRM.

What you’ll learn:

Introduction to the concept of social CRM and the social customer
High-level introduction to 23 use cases for social CRM and their market readiness
Introduction to operational factors, including analytics, work flows, legal and ethical considerations

Posted in: books

Tags: books

13Comments

You’re Not a Strategist – You’re a Punk

11.10.20

I’m constantly astonished at how many people looking to get into agencies describe themselves as a “strategist” and think that by doing so, they can now avoid all of the work they don’t want to do. Whether it’s planning and budgeting, client project execution or measuring the outcomes, some people seem to think that by calling yourself something different, you can avoid learning about critical elements of a communications function.

Here’s the thing, though: it’s by doing that that you learn how good programs and strategies work.

I know I’m going to piss a lot of people off here, but in my opinion you can’t be an effective strategist until you’ve got some experience to rest behind it.

Mashable recently published a post that nicely explains my frustration. It’s entitled “What Does It Take To Be a Social Strategist?” Key points:

About a third of companies look for at least six years of experience when looking for a social strategist
92% of social strategists are manager-level or higher
Key success factors:

Rallying stakeholders across the organization
Leading multi-faceted, cross-departmental efforts
Having a long-term, customer-centric vision
Being multi-disciplinary and wearing “many hats”

Sounds pretty intense, right? So then why do I encounter so many inexperienced people giving themselves that title?

Here’s where I’m coming from: When I started working in communications, after doing a few internships during school I spent four years, analyzing quality assessments of communications plans in the public sector.

Sounds mind-bogglingly boring, right? On the contrary, I think that experience set me up fabulously to succeed later. I looked at poor plans and learned to spot the holes and what doesn’t work. I looked at good plans and learned how they effectively fit together. I did the same for tactical materials, too.

Later I moved jobs, began executing things myself, and learned from my mistakes. I organized a media event that I thought was near-perfect but that had ZERO media show up (sob!). I had drafts returned to me by editors with so much red ink on them, you could barely read the original draft.

On the flip side, I also wrote a release that got verbatim pick-up on the front page of tier-one media (I still have a copy of that paper!), and led programs that delivered great results for clients. In short: I learned.

You can’t just flip a switch and consider yourself a strategist without gaining experience in these other areas. You need to get in the trenches, get your head down and learn.

What’s more – sorry to say it – but there’s a lot more to strategy than just idea creation.

You might be great at putting the pieces together, and have a really great mind for integrating different elements to solve problems, but until you’ve gained enough experience to know (the majority of the time, at least – communications isn’t a science) what is likely to work and what isn’t, be quiet and continue to learn.

If you think you just flip a switch and become a master strategist overnight without gaining the experience needed first, you’re not a strategist. You’re just a punk.

(photo credit: Flickr)

Posted in: strategy

Tags: strategy

34Comments

Content Is King At BlogWorld

11.10.20

I’ll be speaking at BlogWorld LA in a couple of weeks, along with my good friend Jeremy Wright, on the topic of blogger relations – how to identify people, how to approach them and how to avoid the mistakes of others.

I had a chance recently to chat with DJ Waldow, who recorded this video about our session and about why I keep coming back to BlogWorld.

If you’re interested in attending BlogWorld LA, you can use the code BWEVIP20 to get 20% off the registration price.

Posted in: blogger relations, BlogWorld, events

13Comments

Return On Influence Can Return From Whence It Came

11.10.05

The Harvard Business Review recently published a post entitled “Return on Influence, the New ROI“. In it, the author suggested that marketers consider the use of “Return on Influence” as a metric for measuring social media activity.

What is this metric, you ask? To quote the post:

“Divide the total revenue generated via social efforts by the number of social media fans and followers, and you get a per-fan/follower value.”

There you have it – your “new” ROI – return on influence.
Really? Looks to me like that’s “Revenue Per Fan/Follower”.

Sorry, but this kind of black-hat math just doesn’t cut it. There are so many holes in the post, it’s hard to know where to begin (fortunately, Olivier Blanchard and Katie Paine did, in the comments). Still, I’ll take a stab, because I think it’s important that you, me and everyone in this space stop using BS metrics to justify social media activities and start to tie them back to business objectives.

I’ve written on this before (check out this post from two years ago) but here we go again…

1. Measuring a return requires that you compare outcomes to the input

How can you calculate a return on something without knowing what you put into it? My head hurts. This isn’t a true “return” metric; this is a poor attempt to calculate the value of a fan (without considering many of the factors in play even in that instance).

2. ROI is ROI, not Return on Imaginary Numbers

ROI has a formula. It goes like this:

(Gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment

This isn’t up for negotiation. It’s a business staple. Please – if you value your job – don’t walk into a boardroom and try to sell your CFO on your fan numbers. Don’t try to sell them on retweets, or replies, or anything like that (they’re useful, but not in that context or for that audience). Show them the return that you’re able to generate for the business.

It might be hard to tie social media activities directly back to ROI, as there’s rarely a direct, solid line to be drawn (it’s extremely hard to say what, beyond the final trigger, influenced a decision to purchase, for example, but it doesn’t mean those things weren’t worthwhile). However, solid business objectives do tie back.

Which leads me to the next point…

3. Return on Influence has nothing to do with business objectives

This is something I’ve been putting a lot of thought into recently – ensuring that the social media activities we plan tie back to business objectives for our clients. Sometimes that’s sales. Sometimes that’s reduced customer churn. Sometimes it’s lowered costs.

It’s never “increasing the revenue per follower” or the “return on influence”.

4. Measurement should be activity-specific

Imagine going pitching a metric like “return on PR”. The conversation might go something like:

You: “We calculate Return on PR by looking at the revenue generated from PR against the volume of releases we put out…”

Boss: “Get out.”

This idea is similarly ridiculous. Measure an activity, not a medium. You want to measure the ROI of a tweet? Fine. Figure out what it cost to draft/approve/publish it (time is money) and how much revenue it generated (assuming it was sales-focused). There you go – you can calculate the ROI of the tweet, and you haven’t broken a sweat yet.

Don’t try to measure the ROI of social media, or of “influence”… please.

5. Followers and fans don’t define influence

Every time someone uses reach metrics to try to define influence, a great hue and cry goes up. “It’s not reach, it’s context!” they cry. It’s true. Plus it’s a bunch of other things.

Folks like the team at Traackr have realized this, as have those at PeerIndex. Klout has cottoned-on, too, with its topic pages (although I’d still like to see them go much further down that road).

If you measure your results based on fans and followers, don’t expect senior leadership to buy into your plans for long.

6. Please – PLEASE – stop creating fake numbers

Like Ad Value Equivalency (AVE), this number tries to force a square peg through a round hole.

AVE aimed to show the value of media coverage if that same coverage had been a paid ad rather than earned media. It was bullshit, plain and simple, as it didn’t account for sentiment, credibility or any other measurement that fit around it.

There are plenty of other metrics thrown around that apply arbitrary (and, often, opaque) formulae to generate meaningless values for social media activities. I can’t stand them (plus, they violate the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, which the world’s biggest PR firms (ours included) have endorsed.

Please – let’s stop creating fake numbers and take a long, hard look instead at how we can tie our activities back to business objectives, and measure against that.

Fair?

Posted in: measurement, social media

21Comments

Three Ways To Wag The Long Tail Of Content

11.10.04

I was glancing at my blog traffic stats the other day, and noticed something that made me sit up and take notice – after three years, the most-viewed post on this site continues to be the opening post in my good communications planning series, with over 125,000 views.

What’s more, the traffic to this post is continuing to rise over time. Here’s a chart of the daily traffic to the post:

Doesn’t look much like the typical ‘long tail’ image of traffic over time, does it?

I got to wondering why this is happening. Here are my ideas:

1. Useful content

The 13-part series of posts I wrote on communications planning walk through the process of creating a communications plan, from start to finish. It (I hope) is useful stuff; content that people find applicable and helpful.

2. Evergreen content

These posts are as helpful today as they were when I wrote them. While best practices around plan development will, I’m sure, evolve over time, this series should remain helpful for a long time.

3. Optimize for search

As someone pointed out to me on Twitter, Google “good communications plan” and this post is the top result. “Communications plan” continues to be one of the top search terms used to reach this site. I thought-through the titles of the posts, and the cross-linking between them, when first writing them, and it worked well.

I’d love to hear your take – have you experienced this kind of effect before? What caused it then?

Posted in: social media, statistics

Tags: analytics

4Comments

7 Tips For Getting Legal Approval on Social Media Programs

11.09.27

I don’t think it matters which form of communications you work in; “legal” often seems to be a pain point. It’s not surprising — their job is to manage risk for the organization, and public-facing communications activities (especially two-way ones) naturally offer an element of uncertainty. There’s a natural tension between the two.

Last night I spoke on a panel for the American Marketing Association on the topic of “How to launch and implement a social media initiative.” One of the questions revolved around whether panelists had encountered problems with legal departments when introducing social media initiatives. I thought I’d share some tips I offered the audience there for working with your (or clients’) legal departments, to make the process smoother.

Here are seven tips for working with your legal team:

Tie back to organizational objectives: Show how the program you’re trying to implement ties-in to business objectives, and help to educate the legal team on the strategy behind your proposal.
Educate your legal team: Don’t just throw something new and uncertain like social media at them “cold”; walk them through what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and show them best practices that have been established.
Show them how you’re reducing risk: Walk the legal team through the ways you’re working to reduce risk on the project. If you’re looking to leverage user-generated content, show how you’re going to moderate it; if you’re empowering employees to engage online, show them the policy and guidelines you’ve created to frame it; etc.
Loop them in early: No-one likes to be blind-sided last minute. Loop your legal team in early, to ensure you’re aware of potential concerns and are able to manage around them (the same goes for IT, HR and any other stakeholders).
Give them case studies: The legal system revolves around precedents. Your lawyers are likely to respond well to examples of how other organizations have done similar things successfully (and trouble-free) in the past. If other people have blazed the trail ahead of you, show them.
Draw lines around roles: Clearly frame the role that stakeholders have in your program, ahead of time. Your legal team doesn’t need to be editing your text for style; they need to be working to minimize risk for the organization. Make sure everyone is aware of that role, and reinforce it if necessary.
Be their friend: This pointer came from Eliot Johnson – one of the other panelists: become friends with your legal team. Many people wrongly treat “legal” as the opposition, when they’re just trying to do their jobs. Work with them, not against them, and you’ll find that things go much more smoothly.