Is the term “social media” hurting strategic communicators in the digital space?

Before you tell me I’m crazy, stop and think for a second.

Plenty of people have wondered about the term before (Google “social media term” and you’ll find a 2007 post from Jeremiah Owyang on the topic) but I’m thinking of this from a slightly different angle.

Is the term “social media” leading clients to take the wrong approach to their online activities?

How many companies have you encountered taking a scorched earth approach to their social media activities? I’m not naive enough to think that two words would lead us to a silver bullet situation, but do these two current words adversely affect some companies’ approaches to online interaction? I’m not suggesting we change the term – I think it’s here to stay in the short- to mid-term, at least. However, perhaps identifying challenges can help us on the agency side to address them.

Consider the term for a second.

Social media.

What image does that conjure up? Videos with comments enabled? Text with sharing features enabled? Tweets of links to stories about you? These might fall into a definition of social media, but they’re not really two-way – not truly. What’s more, they do seem to embody the approach taken to social media by many organizations – public and private alike.

Suppose for a moment we drop “social media” as a term and adopt a much more simplified “online networking.” We’d be using a term that, inherently, implies two important characteristics:

• Two-way interaction. Networking is, at its core, a two-way interaction. You need to speak and to listen. Networking doesn’t involve broadcasting.
• Long-term. Networking involves relationships. Relationships take time to nurture.

Nothing rocket-science based here, right? This is stuff that’s preached all the time. However, if it’s that easy, why are companies still engaging in marketing activities that essentially consist of one-shot, one-way fire-and-forget promotions that do nothing to shift the needle in the long term?

Back to “online networking.” What changes if we use that term?

• YouTube: “Videos with comments” becomes Engaging people in a story, or enabling other people to tell your story as they see it
• Blog: “Text with sharing” becomes a genuine conversation, where you solicit and respond to feedback from your stakeholders
• Twitter: “Tweets of links to stories about you” becomes an opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with people

Changing a term won’t solve a widespread problem, and there’s much more to the issue than just a simple term (inter-discipline differences, for one, are another huge gap). I’m not suggesting we drop “social media” for “online networking.” However, if shifting the way you think can help – even slightly – to put you in the shoes of the people you work with, and that can help you to identify problems and solutions, then surely it’s worth it.

What do you think?

“In too many cases, the “best practices” espoused by digital agencies are less about “serving the community” and more about driving a rush of new fans, without much thought re: how to keep those fans engaged on a LONG-TERM basis.” — Todd Defren

As corporate spending on social media-based communication continues to rise, I’m beginning to worry that many brands are inadvertently adopting a ’scorched earth’ approach to their online activities.

What do I mean by scorched earth?

When an army advances using a scorched earth approach, it destroys everything behind it as it advances. So, while it gains territory, little remains of the territory it captures. Similarly, many companies are at risk of this when they focus purely on customer acquisition while neglecting engaging their existing fans.

One-shot social media accounts and short-term campaigns-focused approaches may eventually build a fan-base, but unless that is paired with activities aimed at engaging those fans, you’ll lose them. Worse, you’ll not only lose them at the time but you’ll also have to work that much harder to win those people back next time.

This is understandable to an extent, especially in a campaign-focused setup – retention plans aren’t as “glamorous” as new customer-acquisitions. As a result, it’s tempting for marketers to focus their dollars on the latter. You’ve seen this approach – the Twitter account that’s shut down after a month; the big-bang launch that’s forgotten by the next week; the multiple campaign-focused Facebook pages that the company launches and shuts down every year.

Agencies (and savvy corporate communicators) need to resist the urge to take this approach. It can be particularly difficult for agencies, where the client brief may not extend to long-term engagement, but good agencies should give clients the advice they need to hear whether they expect that advice or not. Make sure you dedicate sufficient resources to retaining your fans.

So, next time you’re creating a social media plan, stop and think: are you creating social media scorched earth, or are you engaging for the long term?

Have you seen this pattern, in your organization or with clients?

(Image: Steve Lacy)

When approaching clients on objectives to begin social media, agencies focus on three overarching areas: consumer trust, brand engagement and transparency. Is this the approach of all agencies? No, but it can be a starting point to figure out specific end goals. Transparency can come in a few forms: the form of humanizing the brand; the form of understanding the consumer and responding; or the form of disclosing sensitive information.

But, what happens when you can’t be transparent?

The agency / client dynamic is one that varies, dependent on the brand. Agencies can be completely different than in-house PR. Some utilize their agency as a partner; while others utilize their agency as a tool. The difference lies in the fact that there is trust and disclosure with a partner, and often times, they are brought into high level discussions.

Think of your own Twitter stream. Think of what you do behind the scenes at work. Is that knowledge the same as the impression you relay on social mediums? Brands operate in the same way. There are instances and circumstances where their hands are tied. It’s not just public relations involved in social media, but the C-Suite, Legal team, customer service and more. All groups have opinions, regulations and people to answer to.

Those circumstances are never relayed, with only the facts conveyed. In crisis communications exercises in journalism school, we were taught to share only important and straight to the point facts with the public. Why, then, do we throw stones at companies and critique their responses? Should we further investigate the how of the situation, instead of jumping to the ‘Why’ so quickly?

Agencies have the double edge sword – they have pressure from their own higher-ups to execute the scenario correctly, while also answering to a client. In this world where consumers want brands to be as open as possible, it’s quite true that expectations can be set too high when an actual business comes into play. When an actual crisis happens, many tend to focus on one key area without exploring others.

Is there a point where you step back and realize the client has to make the decision, and go with it? Or do you continue to bridge your case? Is it fair to throw stones when we don’t know the situation?

Let’s discuss.

Photo credit: W Promote

This guest post was written by Lauren Fernandez, Agency Community Manager for Radian6. She blogs at LAF, is on Twitter @cubanalaf and has an insane love for the Green Bay Packers.

Over time I’ve found myself doing more and more foundational work for organizations looking to dip their toes into social media. One of the key elements of this work, in my opinion, is creating a social media policy that fits well with the organization’s goals, culture and risk tolerance.

But where to start?

As it happens, lots of organizations publish their social media guidelines online, ready for you to review and use yourself. Here are 57 61 great social media policy templates and resources to use when building your own. (thanks for the suggestions in the comments!)

Social Media Policies and Guidelines

Other Social Media Policy Resources

Too much has already been written about the recent Old Spice foray into social media. However, one aspect of the campaign has escaped most commentary – the firm – Wieden + Kennedy – is an ad agency. Not a PR agency, or a social media agency. An ad agency.

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting story on the growing interest of ad agencies in the social media space. As they put it,

“As more and more advertising dollars flow into social media, some Madison Avenue firms are seeking to grab a piece of the action.”

The story cites several examples of ad agencies who are making a move to grow this side of their business. As they do so, they are moving into direct competition with the PR firms and social media agencies who, until recently, they have partnered with on client projects.

Many public relations folks have harped on the idea that PR agencies are best placed to serve clients’ social media needs because of their focus on relationships and conversations as part of their core business. If nothing else, Isaiah Mustafah’s wonderful social media tour de force last week proved that ad agencies can get it right online, with a combination of creativity, comedy and captivating two-way interaction. Meanwhile, however, the pragmatists among us have been observing the blurring of the lines for quite some time. I’ve argued, for example, that PR agencies can learn a lot from ad agencies including:

1. How to better scale programs;
2. How to plan and execute more creatively;
3. That measurement is critical;
4. How to effectively target their key audiences;
5. How to better target messages.

Four challenges to PR firms from ad agencies

Public relations agencies – even those who have been working in the space for several years now – can’t ignore this evolution. The increasing attention of ad agencies raises several critical challenges from a PR and broader communications standpoint:

1. Advertising agencies typically command bigger budgets for programs. That’s nothing new and PR people have long gnashed their teeth about that fact. However, when social media is brought into the mix, the larger budgets mean that ad agencies have more visibility, more flexibility and the potential for more creativity than PR agencies may enjoy thanks, not to their credentials or ability (though I’m not slighting them), but due to the source of their funding.
2. Ad agencies have access to the marketing function, which often controls communications in general within organizations. That means that they will often have a shorter route to the top and, linked to the above point, may have greater influence with clients.
3. Ad agencies are built around strong creative teams. They have the creative chops that can rival those of any PR agency.
4. Control of the marketing side of communications means that advertising agencies have access to other assets that PR agencies may not have – graphics, logos, actors (once again, see Old Spice)

Risks if PR and ad agencies don’t work together

So, the stage is set for quite the tug of war. Trouble is, I suspect that no-one will win if a tug of war is what happens. In fact, a battle like this may hurt both sides as agencies wrestle over the grey area in client relationships. The risks of not learning from each other, and from not learning to place nicely together, are several:

1. Fragmented social media efforts: A lack of cooperation between advertising and PR agencies, or between marketing and corporate communications functions, can lead to each doing their own thing in social media. That leads to fragmented, siloed failures as organizations roll out poorly coordinated, ineffective campaigns. As Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran outlined in December 2009, the different forms of media each have their own pros and cons. I suggested earlier this year that organizations need to effectively coordinate the various media channels and their complementary characteristics to  make them work together and to obtain optimal results.
2. Sub-optimal results reduce future budgets: Siloed campaigns lead to sub-optimal results, as the weaknesses of each channel remain present without being offset by other channels. That leads to a reluctance from companies to invest in unproven technologies and techniques, leading to lower budgets for these programs in the future. Traditional approaches, which are losing efficacy over time, will continue to deliver similarly sub-optimal results in the long-term. Companies run a risk of a downward spiral with no end winner.
3. Short-term spikes less effective: Ad agencies excel at generating attention around ideas, but can sometimes struggle more with long-term efforts – this is where the PR agencies’ focus on long-term relationships comes in, as they can plug the gaps in the timelines with sustaining tactics. Old Spice’s re-branding effort, which even has my girlfriend suggesting I try the product, will fail if it simply stops now. If that happens no-one beyond award judges will remember it in a few months. To really entrench their efforts, the agencies involved need to support the initial spike in attention with tactics that will maintain that velocity over the long term.

Conclusion

Agencies need to agree to work together to integrate their communications approaches. It can be tough – the bottom line is that their business objectives often conflict with each other. However, neither is usually “the bad guy” and it can work. If that doesn’t happen, clients need to establish a framework that ensures agencies work with each other, rather than against each other, with cooperation established as a key criteria when evaluating agency performance. For that to happen, companies need to resolve their own internal conflicts between marketing and public relations. Good agencies can help clients make that happen.

What do you think? Have you experienced this blurring of the traditional lines between agencies? How well do you think agencies can hope to work together, given their conflicting objectives?

Yesterday afternoon at 1:41pm EDT, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake shook Quebec and Ontario and it looks like people ran to Twitter instead of diving for cover. Once again, social media beat traditional media to the punch (as if this is news nowadays), although mainstream outlets were quick to report the news shortly thereafter.

We did a little research on social media activity regarding the earthquake using Radian6. Some interesting stats:

• Prior to the earthquake, there were approximately 100-300 mentions of earthquakes on social networks per hour.
• There were over 31,000 mentions of earthquakes between 1 and 2pm today. That number doubled to almost 65,000 mentions in the hour following the earthquake (between 2 and 3pm).
• There have been roughly 170,000 mentions of the earthquake since the earthquake began.
• The first tweet was posted just seconds after the earthquake began at 1:41:41 EST.
• Users generally decided to tweet the news rather than update their Facebook statuses. While many Facebook updates are private, publicly available updates were outnumbered by tweets by about 8 to 1.

While a majority of the tweets and updates were tinged with surprise, it’s nice to know people hadn’t lost their sense of humour. A few of the funnier posts on Twitter included:

• “The earthquake triggered a tsunami at the G20 fake lake” – @AndrewFstewart
• “The earthquake in Toronto was just thousands of England fans jumping back on the bandwagon” – @mlse
• “That wasn’t an earthquake. It was just Quebec trying to separate.” – @stevepayne
• “Widespread disappointment across Toronto at news that it was not, in fact, the epicentre of the quake” – @ivortossell
• “So #earthquakes actually improve the TTC. Go figure. RT @680News: TTC fully operational.” – @josephdee

Erin Bury has a great post on some other funny tweets over at BlogTO.

This is another example of the power of social media in providing up-to-the second news in a way that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

Update: Interesting post from Joe Boughner on whether it really matters that social media beat the mainstream media to the punch. My take: I like Joe’s points, and Twitter certainly plays a different role to mainstream journalism – it’s not about substantial coverage in the same way. However, in a world where traffic (and ad dollars) flows to the first piece of substantial coverage on the event, being first does matter.

Social media ROI is a hot topic right now, as social media begins to (slowly) mature. The purists who insisted that the conversation alone was and end, rather than a means, are diminishing in volume and a more rational, approach is emerging balancing the revolutionary aspects of social media with those that are simply evolutionary from existing business practices.

One area in particular which is fast-evolving is social media monitoring (my ex-colleague Michael O’Connor Clarke quipped last week that there’s probably a micro-industry dedicated to watching it).

After several weeks of back and forth, and rescheduled meetings, I finally managed to get a demo of Sysomos Audience last week. I came away impressed.

Placing a Value on your Visitors

Sysomos Audience is an addition to the Heartbeat monitoring and engagement tool. At first glance it seems similar to Google Analytics in nature – in fact, I previously under the incorrect impression it simply connected social media traffic to web analytics. However, Audience really focuses in a different direction, providing tools that should pique the interest of your sales, marketing and community management folks alike.

Audience tracks visitors to your site alongside their previous web activity, and helps to determine whether each person is a real lead or is just browsing. It does so by examining peoples’ previous web activity, including competitors’ websites, blogs, social networks and so on. In doing so, it determines whether your visitors are qualified leads or just browsing. For example, people are much more likely to be serious sales leads if they’ve been researching other competitive products first than if they’ve just clicked through from a random site.

Critically, Audience also lets you assign a dollar value to visitors based on their visits to competitor sites, to help determine the ROI of your social media activities. It does so by letting you assign values for visits to different areas of your site (those key to your sales funnel might have a higher value, for example) and other factors. In doing so, you gain a relative value for each visitor to your site. This might seem familiar to web analytics (Google Analytics lets you assign goal values, for example) but this goes above and beyond by incorporating activities outside your own site, and by aggregating values per user.

This has implications for several functions within companies:

1. Sales
2. Community management
3. Public relations

Sales

Sales folks – wouldn’t you like to know who your most valuable leads are right at the beginning of the process, so you can prioritize them accordingly? While Audience generally only provides generic tracking information for most people, if you hook the system into any web forms you have, it can link their name and information into their activities (note: you’ll likely need to amend your privacy policy in order to do this). Right now, the system doesn’t hook into Salesforce but according to Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal, that functionality is on the way.

Community Management

Just as Audience lets you track your most valuable visitors, it also lets you identify the sites that are the source of the most valuable traffic to your website. In the demonstration I saw, for example, I saw that while TechCrunch drove a lot of traffic to Sysomos, the traffic from other sites on a per-user basis was actually worth more to them. For community managers, pulled in a thousand directions, this can be valuable information to help them prioritize their focus.

Public Relations

The idea of being able to place a value on the traffic from a piece of coverage is mouth-watering to me. For one, it gives a great answer to the “what’s the ROI of this pitch” question (which even traditional media relations hasn’t solved yet) but also it helps you to figure out who you need to build relationships with and on whom you should focus your pitching. Of course, it doesn’t remove the hands-on targeting and tailoring work that goes into each project, but this kind of data would still be immensely valuable.

Privacy Concerns?

The only question that worried me during the demo I received revolved around online privacy. How does Audience determine which sites people have visited recently? Every site I’ve seen reviewing Audience – from TechCrunch to ReadWriteWeb to Web Metrics Guru – have wondered but no answers are forthcoming. While Sysomos doesn’t currently pull user profiles in, it’s only a small step from there to linking a Twitter or Blogger profile into things and having a complete record of your visitors’ browsing habits. That’s hypothetical but a little concerning as I’m sure they’ll experience pressure to add that feature.

Sysomos’ Nilesh Bansal wouldn’t shed any light on the question when I spoke with him. He told me they don’t look at cookies, but that Audience uses a piece of JavaScript code which you embed on your site and correlates that with their social media monitoring database. So, how do they know people have been on a competitor’s site? It sounds a little dubious to me. As long as they don’t shed any insight into this, people will continue to wonder what’s going on.

Exciting Potential

Setting aside the privacy concerns for a moment, Audience really does have a lot of potential, especially if you’re already a Sysomos client. The product is still in closed beta testing for now and Sysomos hasn’t announced pricing but, like Radian6’s engagement console, this looks to be a differentiating addition to Sysomos’ portfolio of services. I do think they need to answer the privacy questions, though.

What’s your take?

Listen; engage; develop.

That’s the three-step approach we recommend companies take when it comes to approaching social media marketing activities for their organization. While you’ll hear nuances in terminology and small differences in approach, you’ll see thought leaders in our industry take a similar approach. Brian Solis, for example, talks about “listening, observing and learning” as the bedrock steps in organizational use of social media in his book “Engage” (which I’m currently reading).

You know what you don’t see anyone recommending? Build, promote, abandon.

However, we’re still seeing social media marketing campaigns built with this implicit process. A few tell-tale signs when we encounter them:

• A short-term focus, often manifested in a desire for “disposable properties” and a reluctance to sustain any kind of presence after the end of the campaign.
• The desire for campaign-based tactics with no existing presence of any kind.
• A one-way broadcasting focus, aiming to blast messages out to the target audience.

Granted, a campaign-based approach can work with specific influencer outreach, but it’s far more effective if the team doing it is able to reach out to those people consistently over a long period of time and hence is able to build a relationship with those people. In general though, the problems with this approach, and the reasons that you don’t hear anyone advocating for it, are four-fold:

1. It takes time or money to attract an audience

Social media tools don’t just let you flip a switch and reach thousands or millions of people. TV, radio and print advertising lets you do that; Facebook, Twitter and blogs don’t.

Social media lets you identify, create and tap into communities of like-minded people. However, this doesn’t happen organically overnight. So, any campaign that starts from scratch and aims for quick results needs to be supported by other forms of media in order to drive people to the social properties in the hope that people engage. This is often counter to the organizational goal of a campaign: driving to a single conversion point, requires resources to be diverted from the primary goal and in doing so reduces the ROI of the campaign.

2. You build an audience, only to throw it away at the end

As I just mentioned, it takes either time or money to build an audience through social media tools. By scrapping the properties you’ve developed at the end of the campaign, you’re throwing all of that investment down the drain. That’s like building an email list then deleting it as soon as you’re done building it.

A much better approach would be to drive people to a long-term property which you can adapt and tailor for short-term purposes, for example a long-term Facebook page or a corporate blog. That way you can foster and continue to engage your community over the long-term, with the benefit of increased loyalty, further conversions and improved perceptions of your brand. What’s more, next time you have an announcement or campaign, you’ll have a pre-established group of people there who have opted-in to receive your updates.

3. Social media is earned media, not paid media

Much of the problem stems from the mindset of the people who often drive the social media bus in corporations. If you think back to our social media marketing ecosystem and Forrester’s breakdown of media types, marketers are often most used to paid media – immediately scaleable and controllable.

Social media isn’t primarily paid media – it’s owned and earned media. Often these lines may blur – you may do interesting things with your owned properties (which are long-term relationship builders) while earning attention in other forms of media with your approach there.

Trying to fit a paid media approach to earned and owned media is akin to trying to saw a plank of wood with a hammer. You’re doing it wrong.

4. It’s one-way, not two-way

These campaign-based approaches still take the old one-way approach to engaging online – do something funny or interesting in the hope that it will “go viral” and reach thousands of people. There’s some value in doing that, but there’s so much more potential to social media that companies really only scratch the surface if they take a purely campaign-based approach to social media.

For example, where’s the potential for business process redesign, product enhancements or customer service improvements in a siloed promotional campaign? There’s very little – which means you’re missing the bigger picture. You can use these tools as one-shot promotional tactics, but you’re missing the forest for the trees if you do so.

Do you agree?

Simply put, campaign-based social media without the basic foundation of an ongoing presence to support it is, more often than not, doomed to fail.

What do you think?

Forrester analyst Augie Ray posted a list of seven things he recommends organizations do to avoid the recent problems of Nestle and United Airlines. The list makes for interesting reading:

1. You must be proactive: Nestle knew the palm oil/deforestation issue could blow up, but did nothing about it until it did
2. You must improve customer support: Poor customer service now has the potential to do widespread damage to your brand. As Ray puts it,  “Marketers must view their customer service organizations as a key component in brand-building efforts”
3. You must listen: It’s becoming more and more important for organizations to monitor online discussions to avoid escalating issues. There’s no risk – if you’re not listening to online conversations about your brand, you’re neglecting your brand
4. You must participate: You don’t lose control when you participate in online conversations; you gain the opportunity to be heard. What’s more, it’s easier to address an issue on a central property than in a fragmented environment, which you may have to do if you don’t have a place to engage
5. You must respond: As Ray writes, “how can you ignore damaging accusations that accumulate within your own Facebook group?  You can’t; inaction breeds frustration, annoyance and distrust”
6. You must move faster: Responding to an issue in days risks the accusation of moving slowly. Expectations have shifted, and people expect organizations to respond quickly
7. You must realize every employee is a marketer: Your employees can affect your brand messages just as much as broadcast messages in traditional media

I encourage you to head on over and check out the post in full.

How does your organization shape up? Are you encouraging your clients to move in this direction?

Warning – I’m about to talk about my dinner. Bear with me – there’s a point…

Ever had one of those experiences when you just thought that someone really nailed “it,” whatever “it” is? I had one of those yesterday.

I flew to Ottawa yesterday ahead of a presentation I’m giving at a Canadian Medical Association event this morning. After several hours of hermit-like work in my hotel room, I got to thinking about dinner. Rather than going to the Milestones I can see from my room, I threw out a tweet to see if people had any suggestions.

I got about a dozen or so responses with recommendations of nearby places. Among them were several from foodiePrints – an Ottawa-based food blog. One in particular caught my eye – the chef at a local restaurant – the Courtyard Restaurant – had responded to the question:

Impressed by the response (although a little worried about a “chronic” duck (turns out it’s a good thing), I decided to head over to the restaurant.

This was a win for the restaurant already – for the outlay of a couple of seconds of typing, they’d brought in a new customer. But it continued:

Simple but effective. I laughed when I saw that tweet (to the consternation of several couples nearby, who clearly thought I was a little crazy) and again when, a few minutes later, the most over-the-top dessert I’ve ever had emerged from the kitchen… and was delicious.

What’s my point here?

Communications is changing

Communications is changing. The way you can reach your customers and your potential customers is changing. Five years ago I would have gone to a chain restaurant; instead a local establishment was able to respond to my tweeted question and, with the investment of a few seconds (and a delicious dessert), won my business and my loyalty.

An ad or a newspaper story might work with some people, but there are an increasing number of people using these online tools to find recommendations through word-of-mouth. Not the traditional word-of-mouth, but a new, scaleable word-of-mouth that can reach people instantly and effectively.

Have you thought about how you can turn this to your advantage?

(Oh, and the duck at the Courtyard Restaurant was delicious; “chronic,” if you will. Thank you to Michael Hay and his staff for a great experience)