Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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Facebook Timeline for Brands: Curation and Palpitation

12.03.08

Lots of attention has been put on the new Facebook Pages layout since fMC, with people displaying differing perspectives. The usual suspects have already released their pieces on how to prepare for Facebook Timelines. My friend Jay Baer says it betrays small businesses. We, meanwhile, see it as giving brands a new way to tell their story as communications becomes more and more focused on exactly that.

We started preparing for the inevitable rollout of Timelines months ago when it was launched for developers’ personal pages back in October. At the time we’d pulled together our own five-step prescription for preparing your timeline:

  1. Review company marketing/communication materials and history:
  2. Plot out the story you want to tell and the milestones for it
  3. Identify appropriate engagements to feature
  4. Identify approach to contentious issues
  5. Determine appropriate cover image

One aspect of the new system – the potential for issues – doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention. Here’s what we didn’t realize back in October:

The Timeline you see on a brand page is personalized by your friends’ actions.

See that circled post? That’s from Liam Lahey – a friend of mine, who posted a link that mentioned Obama in the descriptor text. The previous time I went to the page, it showed a link from Tara Hunt – another friend who had posted something mentioning Obama.

So, while curation is absolutely important, and companies should think about the story they need to tell, they also need to recognize that brands don’t control everything that people see on their Timelines.  That means, even though you’ve curated your timeline carefully anything that someone has posted about your brand could show up, and what does show up changes dynamically.

While this could be a positive thing, it’s also going to give brands migraines:

  1. It could point a renewed spotlight at issues that you wish would go away.
  2. It provides the potential for new issues to get greater attention due to the greater visibility given to Timeline posts.

What does that mean for you as a communicator?

From my perspective, it means that your community management, monitoring and measurement folks are now your best friend.

Community management, because as a brand you need to be watching the activity on your page and watching for spikes in attention.

Monitoring, because conversations could easily shift from your Facebook page to other online channels (blogs, forums, Twitter, etc).

Measurement, because you should be watching for spikes in traffic to old content (especially issues/crisis-focused content) and the resulting patterns that emerge.

In short, the launch of Facebook Timelines for your brand means you need to integrate. More thinking coming on that soon.

Posted in: facebook, social media

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Where does content fit in Facebook’s new marketing model?

12.03.05

While marketers everywhere seem to be focused on Facebook Timelines for brands, the latest changes to Facebook’s advertising model represent just as significant a change for brands – if not even more so.

How so, you ask? Let’s start by

A marketer’s journey on Facebook: from engagement to advertising

Facebook has a saying that, “this journey is 1% finished.” Following that mantra, if you look at the changes Facebook has made over the last year as a continuum, the company has significantly tilted the scales away from engaging content – from brands creating communities with their customers – and towards paid advertising.

There’s nothing new in the fact that the vast majority of user/brand interactions come through the news feed.  The fact is that few people actually visit your page on an ongoing basis – even those who do visit once, rarely do again. For that reason, capturing peoples’ “likes” at that time has been critical for a while, so companies can continue to interact with people in their newsfeeds. This, on its own, means that anything Facebook does that affects content is hugely significant for marketers.

Mid-way through 2011, the company changed its approach to determining what people saw in their newsfeeds, with the result that the number of people seeing posts from brands dropped significantly – by up to 75%, in fact. While many marketers may be focused on the nice shiny number of total “likes” they have, the reality is that brands’ posts are only seen by a small minority of their fans.

Sound crazy? While impressions/reach aren’t publicly visible numbers, Fangager put out an analysis of the “100 most engaging brands on Facebook” late last year, showing that even the engaging brands generally had between 0.3% and 2% “active fans”. Here’s the top ten:

Disclosure: several of these brands are Edelman clients

The average percentage of ‘active fans’ in the top ten most engaging brands is 1.5%. If you go by the maxim that 1% of people create content; 9% comment and 90% lurk, those numbers multiply up to roughly 16% of people seeing these brands’ content (consistent with the numbers that Facebook discussed at their fMC event last week..

I’ll say that again – even if you’re on the high end of the scale, only one in five fans of your Page will see your content.

Enter Facebook’s new advertising products. Distilled down to two points, the latest advertising announcements from Facebook are:

Simply put, Facebook first degraded brand content over the last year, and has now released a advertising products to let companies pay to offset the changes they’ve made.

Let’s think about this in terms of customer touchpoints. Before the latest round of changes, if you set aside the Open Graph there were four primary ways to proactively reach your company’s fans on Facebook:

  1. Content (proactive and engagement-focused)
  2. Paid advertising
  3. Creative assets (via tabs)
  4. Apps

While agencies made money from all of the above, Facebook only made money off one of those. Combined with the new Timeline for brands, Facebook in one fell swoop has both expanded the overlap of advertising with content, and has reduced the impact of other creative assets (for example, you can no longer direct people to a default tab other than your wall) in one fell swoop.

Implications of Facebook’s advertising changes

I’m not saying these changes from Facebook are a bad thing. Regardless, we can’t exactly blame Facebook for making them – Facebook is a business and, as much as users may like it, engaging content on its own doesn’t generate revenue for the business.

Still, companies (and community managers) do need to pay attention. Here’s what I think we’re likely to see:

  1. Staffing – community managers/analysts: Companies will need to apply new rigor to their content to optimize its performance in Facebook’s new ad products. While the more socially-advanced companies with significant investments are already doing this, this will become important for all companies with paid investments in Facebook. For those with smaller social media teams, that means community managers will find that stats and analysis are even more important skillsets, and that partnership with measurement teams is critical.
  2. Processes – integration and an “and, not or” approach: Success in this new Facebook will depend on even tighter integration between community managers, content teams and paid media in order to find the right balance of engagement, business results-driven content and advertising.
  3. Users – seeing more push-focused content:Yes, companies could promote engagement-focused content, but given that brands will be measuring the effectiveness of their advertising in driving business results, and weighing the opportunity cost of increased Facebook investment against other paid media, users are likely to see more push-focused posts with a clear call to action being published by brands for this purpose.
  4. Lazy – some companies go the paid route: Some companies will choose to take the easy route out. Rather than optimizing their content to increase engagement in order to drive reach, they’ll simply choose to go the paid route, investing in reach generator and the new premium ads to increase the visibility of their content. Whether this will be cost-effective remains to be seen.

Posted in: facebook, marketing, social media

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Seven Social Media Insights on CES

12.01.18

By now you’ve probably had more than your fill of analysis from the many, many products and announcements revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Now that I’ve had a few days to decompress, I thought I’d do something slightly different and provide a few insights from a social perspective.

CES is not a social media conference (duh)

CES is, first and foremost, an electronics show. It attracts a very different audience compared to conferences like SXSW or BlogWorld. While those social-focused conferences are fertile ground when it comes to social media programs, CES is full of salespeople and executives who, generally speaking, are less socially-savvy than conferences in the social media bubble.

I spoke to a rep at one booth who was giving away high-value prizes to followers who showed up at the booth and showed them promotion-related tweets on their phone; they said it took an hour for the first person to approach them the last time they ran their promotion.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for social media, though – far from it.

Raise awareness ahead of the event

If your company is attending CES, take the opportunity to create awareness of where you’ll be and what you have to offer ahead of time, both through public channels (e.g. your blog, Twitter, Facebook etc) but also by mining your databases for people and companies that you want to connect with at the event and seeting-up meetings with them ahead of time.

Create and amplify content for non-attendees

CES is full of cutting-edge new technology. If your company is there showcasing their products or announcements, take advantage of that to create content for non-attendees:

  • Go behind the scenes on your booth
  • Go in-depth on your products
  • Get reactions from show attendees on camera
  • Get interviews with partners

CES can be a content goldmine if you approach it correctly.

Remember that other people are creating content, too

You’re not the only one thinking about content generation at CES. The world’s tech media, from traditional to hybrid to social, gather in Vegas for this event. There’s content being generated constantly. That means you need to be on your game – you need to treat everyone you speak to as though they’re a journalist (because they could be), and you need to watch your words because you never know who could be walking by.

Listen and learn

With the amount of content generation – and subsequent online discussion – that goes on, social media monitoring can be a goldmine of insights (and issues management). Makes sure you pay close attention to the conversation surrounding your brand and its competitors – not from a superficial “ooh there’s a pretty chart” perspective but from one of driving and optimizing your content calendar throughout and beyond the event, and from one of bringing product-focused insights back to the business.

Plan your visit using social media

With over 3,100 exhibitors and over 153,000 attendees in 2012, planning your schedule at CES can be overwhelming. Take some of the stress out of it by leveraging social media tools to help plan your visit:

  • Use tools like TripIt and Plancast to see which of your contacts/leads/key vendors will be in town for the event
  • Use LinkedIn to identify key people from the companies you want to connect with, and reach out to them ahead of the show
  • Use Foursquare to see where your connections are during the event (although, as mentioned, this can be less effective than at events like SXSW where Foursquare becomes central to staying on top of what’s going on

Create meetups to connect with influencers

While you may find that throwing a fan event at CES is tougher than at other events, the top tier of tech influencers is in town. Tailor your approach to throwing events to this audience – give them a reason to come along (exclusive access to company insiders, or exclusive information, for example) and differentiate your event from the masses. Remember, most people will be triple-booked most nights so you need to stand out (and not just by throwing the biggest party).

Social media can (and clearly does) have a very important place at events like CES, but it’s very different from social media-focused events like SXSW – you need to think differently, and you need to execute differently.

What do you think?

Posted in: event planning, social media

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Should you let social media conversations direct your business?

11.11.22

Here’s a question for you: Should you let conversations in social media direct your business?

If you’ve worked in the social media space, that seems like a pretty straightforward “yes”, right? I mean, we’re always talking about how listening and responding is critical.

What if we ask the question a couple of other ways:

Should you always let conversations in social media direct your business?

Should you let individual conversations in social media direct your business?

The answer isn’t quite as simple now, is it? All of a sudden, we’re facing potential (hypothetical) situations where, every time someone doesn’t like something, you change things around to make them happy, or where a single outspoken voice gets priority over a potential majority who could want something else.

All of this goes to say that while listening is central to social business, you need to frame the decisions you make based on that listening appropriately.

Let’s take two examples:

Customer Support

I’m of the general mindset that you should try to help every customer who needs support (you don’t tell your call centre not to answer calls from certain customers, do you?). But what about when a customer asks for something that, if applied to everyone who asked, just wouldn’t be feasible? Do you change your company’s approach based on one person’s request?

If you’re a B2B company with only a few major customers, then perhaps you do.

If you’re a B2C company with hundreds, thousands or millions of customers, though, then probably not – you’d end up bankrupting your company.

Product and Service Insights

Let’s say you’ve got your listening program set up. Do you listen to each individual opinion that is out there on the web?

Of course not. You’d end up constantly in reactive mode, responding to customer “insights” with no overarching strategy and no ability to plan for the future.

Approach Insights Strategically

I think the time where large companies will begin to take a more strategic approach to leveraging social media for insights is fast approaching. Note: I’m not talking about losing the human touch when it comes to interacting with people, and I’m not talking about removing flexibility from front-line social media staff, but more in how companies approach distilling social media conversations into useable takeaways.

Take Insights in Aggregate

When my team tells me that “there’s a lot of conversation online” about topic X, my first response nowadays is “how much”? If the answer is just a few mentions, then my response is to keep monitoring, see if things escalate and begin to prepare in case they do. If the answer is “hundreds” or “thousands” of conversations, then we know we need to react immediately.

The same applies to mining for insights. Taking individual pieces of feedback can be useful for illustrative purposes, but unless you’re just looking for ideas to inspire (or to pass the hours and hours of free time you clearly have), you need to step up a level and identify the key trends.

Test Your Assumptions

Tom Webster gave a great presentation at BlogWorld recently where he talked about the need to “do your own work.” In this context, it means not just assuming that something you’ve gleaned from other people is correct – you need to test it for your business.

Tom also made the great point that social media are themselves a biased source of data, so to be sure of your insights, you need to test them outside social media.

What does this mean? It means that you need to move from shift from reacting to customer feedback to testing to ensure that the reaction to those reactions would benefit your business. Of course, once you implement changes subsequently, you should be monitoring for the reaction to those changes, developing more insights, testing… and so on.

My hope is that the time of the “let’s all sit around a campfire and pretend that businesses need to respond to every single piece of feedback” people is coming to an end, and that the time for strategic insights is upon us. Some social media practitioners are ready for this; others aren’t.

Ask yourself: where do you sit?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

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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

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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).
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
What do you think?

Posted in: social media

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4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Content Strategy

11.09.07

Lots of people spend lots of time nowadays thinking about how to build up channels/audiences/communities (choose your buzzword as appropriate) through social channels. Relatively few, however, seem to apply similar rigor to the process of communicating with those people after the fact.

With a few degrees of variation, most people will suggest you look at around a 90/10 ratio of engagement to static content on social channels. That means, if you post 20 tweets (for example) per day, you have roughly two opportunities to insert your own POV into the stream.

Are you making the most of the static content you post on your channels? Are you using each piece as an opportunity to move towards achieving an objective, or are you just throwing words out there for the sake of posting something?

Here are four ways to begin to improve your social media content strategy.

Set Goals

Launching a new social channel, or campaign on a channel, isn’t the end of the planning process. You should know, clearly, what you’re trying to achieve through your social media activity, and bear that in mind at all times. Sometimes high-level business goals may be a bit abstract, so distill down from those:

Business objectives –> communication objectives –> social media objectives

Tweak these depending on where social “sits” in your organization, but make sure these ladder up, and make sure the content you’re posting does the same.

Optimize

Are you optimizing your content based on previous results? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Content creation doesn’t just mean throwing out posts randomly. Just as media buyers analyze which versions of ads convert better than others, you should take the opportunity to look at the types of content that:

  • Generate more engagement
  • Lead to more click-throughs
  • Lead to more conversions
What type of content works best? Is it UGC-focused content? Links to third-party sites? Opinion pieces? What time of day works best? (Visibli and RowFeeder are two great tools for helping with this)

Think “Search”

What are you doing to ensure you “own” the first page of search results when you make an announcement? Think beyond your marketing terms, and towards what people are searching for. Create useful, interesting content that targets those terms, and publish it at the right time.
Why does timing matter for search? Because in today’s fast-moving environment, if other influential online sites get out of the gate with their content ahead of you, they’ll become the go-to source and they’ll claim your spot in the search results.
If you’re currently losing this battle, take a look at what the other sites are doing better than you.
Remember – you have the advantage – you know what’s coming down the pipe, and you know when it’s coming. That means you should *always* be able to beat them to the punch.

Use Multimedia

Multimedia is such a 90′s term… everywhere except search. Universal search is meaning that different forms of content are being displayed next to each other in search results. That means you’re not just competing for the top-ranked text; you’re competing for the top-ranked image too, and the top-ranked video. Not everyone has cottoned-on to that yet – take advantage of it and think beyond text when you’re planning-out your content.
There you have it – four tips for optimizing content. What other tips would you add?

Posted in: social media, uncategorized

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Eight Tips for Scaling Social Customer Support

11.07.18

David Armano noted in a recent Harvard Business Review post on social business that listening to conversations is a valuable step but only the beginning:

“The true opportunity lies in scaling and operationalizing “social”.”


Online customer support is one of the key trends confronting companies as they embrace social business and look to interact with their consumers online. The growth of social customer support is being driven by three key factors: increased uptake of social media broadly; highly visible success stories from other companies and an expectation of two-way interaction in social channels.

As social support grows in reach and popularity, companies are facing the conundrum of how to successfully scale. How do you deal with an environment where an unlimited number of people may look to you for swift, helpful service?

Here are eight pointers for scaling your customer support:

1. Shift from reactive to proactive + reactive

Listening and reacting isn’t enough. Edelman’s Trust Barometer shows that search engines are the #1 source of information about companies for informed consumers. So, win the search battle. Mine your support records for the most common support requests (through both online and traditional channels) and create searchable resources to address those queries.

These resources could be blog posts, knowledge base articles, videos, graphics, whatever (more on that later in this post) — just make sure they’re in the language of your customers, not in business jargon, and that people can link directly to them.

2. Triage

My apologies to the purists out there who think everyone should be treated equally, but if one person could cause a major issue for your company while another is lower-profile, I’m going to prioritize accordingly. Is that ideal? No. Is that completely egalitarian? No. Is it practical and realistic? You bet.

This means setting out your criteria for triage ahead of time. If you have tiered support in other channels you may already have some of this. Consider:

  • Relative influence
  • Severity of issue
  • Spread of issue
  • …etc.

3. Respond publicly when possible

The natural inclination for many companies is to take negative chatter offline ASAP. There are a couple of pitfalls to this approach:

  1. The Internet doesn’t forget — others will be able to see the complaint, but no resolution
  2. Other people with the same problem won’t benefit from the solution

There are many cases where you will have to take a conversation offline due to privacy needs around personal information, or due to legal regulations. Where those things aren’t the case, though, responding to concerns publicly accomplishes two things:

  1. Allows anyone watching to see your company being responsive to an issue (improves your reputation)
  2. The one:many nature of the Internet means that other people with that same issue can see the solution (scales your response)

4. Help customers to help customers

Companies like AT&T (rated highly for social support by Forrester) and BlackBerry (disclosure: client) have been successful at developing highly active support forums where customers interact with and help each other. While the company can step in and address unanswered questions, this solution means that many queries are addressed without any involvement from the company.

5. Build an army of advocates

Your social media activities will naturally let you identify your most active users and your biggest fans. Don’t ignore this potential; create programs to cultivate and build relationships with these people, empower them to become your ambassadors and reward them for doing so.

6. Know your customer

Different people have different preferences for how to receive service; this leads both to tailored interactions with people and to the development of different support mechanisms to suit their needs. People who are pressed for time and just want to get the answer with no frills may prefer quick step-by-step how-tos, for example, while others look for more social interaction and conversation. If you can, take the time (and/or money) to do the research to identify those needs.

Social CRM is a buzz term right now, but even if you’re not ready to go to that extent, there are plenty of tools that let you view your past interactions with people online and begin to move in that direction.

7. Structure for scale

While you may have a core group of support agents conducting support online, look to train and prepare a broader group of employees to step in during critical situations. Few companies are going to be able to take the Zappos approach to empowering employees, but by training outside your team you can be prepared for spikes in activity.

8. Plan strategically

Businesses don’t usually experience flat demand throughout the year. You’ll have seasonality; you’ll have spikes driven by announcements and launches; you’ll have marketing promotions. By knowing when those are, you can plan your resources accordingly – both in terms of staffing and in terms of proactive asset creation (see #1  above).

Scaling support remains a pressing problem for organizations. These approaches can help you to help more people, and in doing so raise satisfaction rates, reduce customer churn and improve your organization’s  reputation.

What tips would you add to the list?

Posted in: customer service, social media

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Startups: No, You Don’t Need To Hire A Social Media Expert

11.06.16

My eye was caught this weekend by a post from Francis Tan, asking whether startups need to hire social media experts. His key points:

  1. First things first: Agreeing with Peter Shankman that startups should focus on generating revenue
  2. Customer satisfaction: Startups need to ensure customer satisfaction when people interact with your company, whether through social media or other means
  3. Align around goals: If you do outsource your social media, make sure they are aligned with your goals
  4. Trade-offs: Ask yourself: do you have time to establish relationships with customers online? On the flip side, are you willing to entrust that task to a third party?
  5. People, not robots: If you do engage online, ensure that you have real people out there rather than automating everything
  6. His conclusion: While it’s not entirely a bad idea to outsource social media, companies might be better off focusing on their product first.

As for what I think, my take is that it’s a little easier than Tan makes it seem although I agree with his conclusion.

Let’s face it – the startup stage isn’t the time in a company lifecycle when resources are flush. You’re not likely to be walking around with a large marketing team; you don’t have big operating budget.

In that context, each dollar needs to deliver maximum return. Why hire someone at a premium when you can bring someone in-house with multiple skill sets – who can drive customer support and handle online support too? Who can handle your PR or marketing and integrate that strategy with your online activities? Hell, you might not even be at the point of investing in outside marketing help yet – why would you consider an even narrower function?

Ok, let’s cut to it. Here’s my take:

  1. Focus on your product/service: Get your product and experience right, first and foremost. If you invest in marketing before your offering is nailed, you’ll just accelerate your failure as more people find out that you suck.
  2. Democratize your social media: My colleague Steve Rubel says social media shouldn’t be 100% of one person’s job; it should be 1% of 100 peoples’ jobs. Democratize the responsibility throughout your team.
  3. Hire broad: If you do decide that the time is right to bring in a social media skill set into the team, make it part of a broader role – communications, marketing, support or similar. Specialization comes with scale — don’t pigeon-hole people into one narrow role when you need everyone to lend a hand broadly.
  4. The exception: online startups? Companies based online (or in social media), by their nature, on aggregate are going to focus more on online interactions than other companies. Still, I suspect that they will still get more mileage from investing in in-house experience, at least at a startup stage.
  5. Don’t fall for snake oil: For the love of all things holy, if you do decide to outsource your efforts then pay attention to who you work with. This is where I agree with Shankman – hire communicators or marketers who understand how social media fits into a broader approach. Don’t hire people who tell you Twitter will solve all your problems. They’re wrong, and whether it’s a deliberate lie or a lack of knowledge really doesn’t matter.
  6. Know agencies’ strengths: Agencies bring numerous several key strengths — a broad array of skills, ideas and experience; an ability to scale up and down  rapidly; existing relationships in the industry;(potentially, depending on the agency) geographic reach and so on. Play to those strengths and use them when you need them, but not before. Need a little bit of time, but not a full-time role? Need something executed in the short-term? That’s your time for outside help; not the start-up day-to-day.

There you have it. From my perspective, while you may want to engage online, I think hiring or outsourcing a “social media expert” in a startup is the wrong way to go — you’re better off focusing on your product/service, democratizing your digital efforts and hiring broad communications skills when the time is right.

I’m not a startup guy though, so my take is just an (un?)informed guess. If you come from the startup side, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

(Image: Flickr, via Peter Shankman)

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Cartoon: Corporate Twitter

11.06.14

This made me chuckle. Recognize this picture?

(via the brilliant tomfishburne.com)

Posted in: social media

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