Category Archives: Social Marketing

Social Media: Matching Maturity to the Right Business Model

socialmediaLast week, I talked about the maturity continuum of social media. This week, I’d like to recap and look at the business model implications of each phase

Phase One – It’s a Fad. Here, we use a new social media tool simply because it is new. This is a classic early adopter model. The business goal here is to drive adoption as fast and far as possible, hoping that acceptance will go viral. There is no revenue opportunity at this point, as you don’t want to do anything to slow adoption. It’s all about getting it into as many hands as possible.

Phase Two – It’s a statement. You use the tool because it says something about who you are. Revenue opportunities are still limited, but this is the time for cross-promotion with brands that make a similar statement. Messaging and branding become essential at this point. You have to carve a unique niche for yourself and hope that it resonates with segments of your market. The goal is to create an emotional connection with your audience to help shore up loyalty in the next phase. This is the time to start laying the foundations of an user community.

Phase Three – It’s a tool. You use it because it offers the best functionality for a particular task. Here, things have to get more practical. This is where user testing and new feature development has to move as quickly as possible. Revenue opportunities at this point are possible, depending on the usage profile of your app. If there’s high frequency of usage, advertising sponsorship is a possibility. But be aware that this will bring inevitable push back from your users, especially if there has been no advertising up to this point. This shakes the loyalty of the “Statement” users, as they feel you’re selling out. The functionality will have to be rock solid to prevent attrition of your user base during this phase. Essentially, it will have to be good enough to “lock out” the competition. But there’s another goal here as well. Introducing new functionality allows you to move beyond being a one-trick pony. This is where you have to start moving from being a tool to the next phase…

Phase Four – It’s a Platform. If you’ve successfully transitioned to being a social media platform, you should have the opportunity to finally turn a profit. The stability of the revenue model will be wholly dependent on how high you’ve been able to raise the cost of switching. The more “sticky” your platform is, the more stable your revenue will be. But, be aware that using advertising as your revenue channel is fraught with issues in the world of social media. Unlike search, where we are used to dealing with a crystal clear indication of consumer interest, social media usage seldom comes tied to clear buyer intent. You have to worry about modality and social norms, along with the erosion of your “cool” factor.

In the last two phases, the best revenue opportunities should be directly tied to functionality and intent. The closer you can align your advertising message to the intent of the users “in the moment” the more stable your revenue model will be. In fact, if you can introduce tools that are focused on users when they are in social modes where commercial messaging is appropriate, you will find revenue opportunities dropping into your lap. For example, if users use LinkedIn to crowdsource opinions on B2B purchases, you have a natural monetization opportunity. If they’re using your app to post pictures of their cat playing a xylophone, you’re going to find it much harder to make a buck. Not impossible, but pretty damned difficult.

So, Six Seconds is the Secret, Huh?

First published February 13, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

oreo-superbowl-blackout-adApparently, the new official time limit for customer engagement is 6 seconds, according to a recent post on Real Time Marketing. How did we come up with 6? Well, in the world of social media engagement it seemed like a good number and no one has called bull shit on it yet, so 6 it is

Marketers love to talk about time – just in time, real time, right time. At the root of all this “time talk” is the realization that customers really don’t have any time for us, so we have to somehow jam our messages into the tiny little cracks that may appear in the wall of willful ignorance they carefully build against marketing. The marketer’s goal is to erode their defenses by looking for any weakness that may appear.

Look at the supposed poster child for Real Time Marketing – the Oreo coup staged during the black out in the 2013 Super Bowl. Because the messaging was surprising and clever, and because, let’s face it, we weren’t doing much of anything else anyway, Oreo managed to gain a foothold in our collective consciousness for a few precious seconds. So, marketers being marketers, we all stumbled over ourselves to proclaim a new channel and launch a series of new micro-attacks on consumers. That’s where the 6 seconds came from. Apparently, that’s the secret to storming the walls. Five seconds and you’re golden. Seven seconds and you’re dead.

Oreo surprised us, and it wasn’t because the message was 6 seconds long. It was because we weren’t expecting a highly relevant, highly timely message. Humans are built to respond to things that don’t fit within our expected patterns. The whole approach of marketing is to constantly blanket us with untimely, irrelevant messages. Marketers, to be fair, try to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person, but it’s really hard to do that. So, we overcompensate by delivering lots of messages all the time to everyone, hoping to get lucky. Not to take anything away from the cleverness and nimbleness of the Oreo campaign, but they got lucky. We were surprised and we let our defenses down long enough to be amused and entertained. Real time marketing wasn’t a brilliant new channel; it was a shot in the dark – literally.

And there’s no six-second gold standard of engagement. If you can deliver the right message at the right time to the right person, you can spend hours talking to your prospective customer.  It’s only when you’re trying to interrupt someone with something irrelevant that you have to hopefully shoehorn it into their consciousness. Think of it like a Maslow’s hierarchy of advertising effectiveness.  At it’s best advertising should be useful. This sits at the top of the pyramid. After usefulness comes relevance – even if I don’t find the ad useful to me right now, at least you’re talking to the right person. After relevance comes entertainment – I’ll willingly give you a few seconds of my time if I find your message amusing or emotionally engaging.  I may not buy, but I’ll spend some time with you. After entertainment comes the category the majority of advertising falls into – a total waste of my time.  Not useful, irrelevant, not emotionally engaging. And making an ad that falls into this category 5 seconds long, no matter what channel it’s delivered through, won’t change that. You may fool me once, but next time, I’m still going to ignore you.

There was something important happening during the Oreo campaign at the 2013 Super Bowl, but it had nothing to do with some new magic formula, some recently discovered loophole in our cognitive defenses. It was a sign of what may, hopefully, emerge as trend in advertising – nimble, responsive marketing that establishes a true feedback loop with prospects. What may have happened when the lights went out in New Orleans is that we may have found a new, very potent way to make sense of our market and establish a truly interactive, responsive dialogue with them. If this is the case, we may have just found a way climb a rung or two on the Advertising Effectiveness Hierarchy.

The Tricky Intersection of Social and Search

First published September 20, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

People don’t trust search ads. At least, 64% of people don’t trust search ads.

Apparently, search is not unique. According to the same research, nobody trusts ads of any kind. That’s not really surprising, given that it’s advertising. Its entire purpose is to make us suddenly want crap we don’t need. Small wonder we don’t trust it.

But you know what we do trust? The opinions of our friends.

Nothing I should have said up to this point should come as a shock to anyone reading this column. The only thing I found mildly surprising here was that we had such a low level of trust in search ads. Typically, search advertising is better aligned with intent and less hyperbolic in nature. But, apparently, we marketers have bastardized even the purity of search to the point where it’s less trusted than TV ads (gasp!)

So, to recap, we don’t trust ads, we do trust friends. This seems to present a simple solution: combine the two so that pesky advertising can bask in the halo effect of social endorsement.  You’ve been hearing about this for many years now, including several Search Insider columns from my fellow pundits and myself.

So, given that we’ve been testing the waters for sometime, why haven’t we got this advertising/social thing locked down yet? Why are Facebook stockholders wailing over their deflated portfolios? Why are we still stumbling out of the starting gate in our efforts to marry the magic of social and search? This shouldn’t be rocket science.

In fact, it’s more complex than rocket science. It’s psychology; it’s sociology and at least a handful of other “ologies.” When we talk about combing search and social — or for that matter, any type of advertising and social — we’re talking about trying to understand what makes humans tick.

If we talk about the simplest integration of the two, where social acts as a type of reinforcing influence that is subordinate to the primary act of searching, it’s not hard to follow the train of thought. We search for something, and in the results, we see some type of social badge that indicates how our social connections feel about the options presented to us. In this case, intent is already engaged. Social just serves to grease the decision wheels, helping us differentiate between our options. This type of integration can easily be seen on Google (Plus integration) as well as vertical engines such as TripAdvisor or Yelp.

But that type of integration doesn’t really fire the imagination of marketers and get their market acquisition juices flowing. It’s just hedging your bets on a market that’s already pretty easy to identify and capture. It does nothing to open up new markets. And it’s there where things get muddy.

The problem is this niggling question of intent. Somehow, something needs to activate intent in the mind of the prospect. It’s here where we truly need to be persuaded, moving our mental mechanisms from disengaged to engaged.

To do this, you need to reverse the order of importance between the two channels. Social recommendation needs to be in the driver’s seat, hopefully engaging and moving prospects to the point where they initiate a search. And that’s a much bigger hurdle to get over. Once the order is reversed, the odds of success plummet precipitously.

Here are just a few of the hurdles that have to be cleared:

Trust – Whichever channel is chosen to deliver the social recommendation, it has to be received with trust. This factor can be affected by how the recommendation is presented, the social proof that accompanies it, the aesthetic value of the interface, and the recipient’s attitude towards the channel itself. There is no lack of nuanced detail to consider here.

Alignment of Interest – When the recommendation is delivered, it must be of interest to the recipient. This relies on an accurate assessment of context and intent. Whatever the targeting channel, there has to be a pretty good chance of delivering the right message at the right time.

Social Modality – So, let’s assume you’ve figured out how to get the first two things right – you are using a trusted channel and you’ve done a good job of targeting. You’re not home free yet. Here’s the thing – we don’t act the same way all the time. We adapt our behaviors to fit the social circumstances we are currently in. There are predetermined modes of behavior that we conform to. It’s why we act one way with our coworkers and another way with our children. It’s why it’s okay to tip a waiter in a restaurant, but not okay to tip your mother-in-law after Sunday dinner. This modality is carried over from the real world to the virtual world of social networks. And it’s very difficult to determine what mode a prospect may be in. But it can make all the difference in the success of a socially targeted advertising message.

The Fight for Attention – This is the big one. Even if you do everything else right, your odds for successfully capturing the attention of a prospect and holding it for long enough to generate actual consideration of your product are not nearly as good as you might hope. You’d probably do better at a Vegas craps table. It all depends on what the incumbent’s intent is. What brought her to the online destination where you managed to intercept her? How critical is it that she finish what she’s currently doing? How engaged is she in the task at hand?

With the first example of search/social integration (search first, social second), the odds for success are pretty high, because intent has already been established. You’re just using social endorsement to expedite a process that’s already in motion.

But in the second example (social first, search second), we’re talking about an entirely different ball game. You have to derail the incumbent intent and replace it with a new one. Think of it as the difference between pushing a car downhill that’s already started to roll, and pushing the same car from a standing start up the hill.

No wonder we’re having some difficulty getting things rolling.

Three Catalysts for Healthy Social Networks

First published August 2, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Look at any graphic representation of a social network, and you will see a somewhat globular cluster of nodes — and, at the center, you’ll find the subject or owner of the network. The density of the nodes will be greater near the center, but there will be small clusters of interconnected nodes that will appear throughout the map. This pattern, the visual interpretation of human connection, looks much the same now as it did for tribal humans 100,000 years ago. But there is one important difference. Then, you probably only had one network you belonged to, which was defined by geography. Today, you can belong to many networks, and they’re often defined by ideas.

Connecting the nodes in a typical social network map are small lines representing the glue, or ties, of the network. At the simplest level, a network can consist of just two nodes and one line, called a dyad. The line represents the relationship between the two nodes. But what is the raw material of that line? What causes it to exist in the first place? Sometimes, we can find clues in language. If that line represents a relationship, what causes two people to relate to each other? The word relation comes from the Latin noun relatio, which has two relevant meanings: carrying back and to narrate. Both meanings depend on communication. Communication, in turn, has its etymological roots in the latin comoenus, which means shared. From this, we see the structure of a network depends on both the sharing of a common concept (a value, goal or ideal) and communication. These are the raw materials of those little links in the diagram.

Those who analyze social network structure often look for reciprocity in those links: are they two-way links?  Reciprocity is hardwired into humans. Evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists have found that the most successful survival strategy is something called “tit for tat.” Even if you’re among the 46% of Americans who don’t believe in evolution, you still can’t ignore reciprocity. Every single religion has as one of its tenets its own variation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It all comes down to the same thing: it’s not beneficial to keep investing in a one-way relationship. If we keep inviting you for dinner and you never invite us, sooner or later the invitations will stop coming (offspring and certain relatives being the exception — and then there’s another whole evolutionary dynamic at play).

Here we have the three foundations for a stable social network: communication, sharing and reciprocity. Not exactly rocket science, just plain common sense. Yet it’s amazing how often we lose sight of these three things when we start applying them to our marketing efforts. Let’s take just one example. Look at any company’s social presence, whether it‘s their Facebook page, their Twitter feed or their Linked In profile, and see if there’s evidence of reciprocity. Is all the communication going out, or are people responding? Active user feedback is one of the primary signals we look for in a healthy social network.

Another signal is clear evidence of shared values. As I’ve said before, frequency of engagement (especially if it’s of the nonreciprocal variety) does not lead to brand loyalty, but shared values do. Are the values of an organization clearly evident in their social outposts? Are there active conversations based on those shared values?

Finally, we have communication. Marketers have to take every opportunity to facilitate communication. Often, commercial social networks are based on the sharing of required information. Companies (especially in the B2B space) have to become much better at sharing the wealth of information they have in their own particular industry. They have to start thinking like publishers. And they have to enable forums to allow for active feedback.

Get these three things right, and strong social networks will grow organically.

Brand Beliefs and the Facebook Factor

First published May 17, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I talked about the power of our beliefs to shape our view of the world around us. I also mentioned how our belief constructs impact our view of brands. As luck would have it, two separate pieces crossed my path this week, both of which provide excellent examples of how we may perceive brands, and how marketers often get it wrong when trying to shepherd a brand through the marketplace.

The first piece was “Does Branding Need to be Rebranded?” by Mediapost’s Matt Straz in Online Spin. In it, Matt mentioned the backlash against Sir James Dyson (he of the cool vacuums) when he dared to mention that he doesn’t believe in branding. Now, to clarify, Dyson doesn’t believe in branding the way it’s practiced by many companies, where through sheer force of advertising, their heavily controlled (and often contrived) brand story is theoretically imprinted in your brain.  This isn’t so much branding as brain-washing. Let’s call it “brand-washing.”

But let’s go back to how our beliefs define our view of brands. We use beliefs as a heuristic short cut allowing us to operate efficiently in our world. We form beliefs so we don’t have to endlessly think through every single decision. Beliefs form based on our own experience, but they are also formed based on what we’re exposed to. All this input gets synthesized into a reasonably coherent and remarkably resilient belief. Once in place, this belief guides our action.

So, from our perspective, a brand can be defined as what the buyer believes a brand to be.  In the ad community, there is much debate about the definition of a brand. But, in the final analysis, the only definition of brand that matters is the one that rests in the mind of the buyer. All else are simply inputs into that final mental model, which is created solely by the customer.

James Dyson believes the best of those paths is by producing great products and then letting them speak for themselves. If you create products that consistently exceed expectations, that is enough to build an authentic and enduring brand belief. It’s hard to argue with that logic, and, in fact, it’s what P&G called the Second Moment of Truth with consumers: their experience when your product is in their hands. In this definition, brand is intimately coupled with the product itself.

But, if Dyson is right, why is there an advertising industry at all? Even Dyson buys ads to sell vacuum cleaners. This brings us to the second piece that I saw in the past week. It was a report out of Forrester called the Facebook Factor. This is a bit of a tangential detour, so bear with me.

The report posits that we can now quantify the value of a Facebook “like.” The reasoning is fairly simple. If you add a few questions to a typical customer survey, you can start to quantify the correlation between someone liking you on Facebook and subsequent purchasing of your product. But, as Forrester points out in the report, there is a correlation/causation trap here that could lead to many marketers making the wrong conclusion.

If you try to equate people who felt motivated to “like” you on Facebook with likelihood to purchase, you run the risk of mistaking correlation for causation. People didn’t buy your product as a result of “liking” you on Facebook.  The Facebook “like” came as a result of a positive “belief” about your brand. It was an effect, not a cause. At best, the Facebook Factor should be considered as nothing more than a leading indicator of brand preference.

But many marketers will confuse cause and effect. They will believe that driving Facebook “likes” will drive higher brand loyalty.  This is where brand and product can potentially become decoupled. Here, once marketers start assigning a value to a Facebook “like” based on Forrester’s methodology, they will start regarding Facebook “likes” as the end goal, trusting in the mistaken belief that a Facebook “like” will always correlate positively to purchase behavior.

Once this decoupling happens, the value of the Facebook “like” starts to erode. The motivation for the “like” often has little to do with a positive brand experience. It’s driven by a promotion or campaign that has just one aim: to drive as many likes as possible. From the customer’s perspective, it’s easy to hit the “like” button. They have no skin in the game. There is no belief behind the action.

In the end, I believe Dyson’s definition of brand is the more authentic one. It goes back to the very roots of branding, which was a reassurance to buyers that they were buying what they believed they were buying.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174966/brand-beliefs-and-the-facebook-factor.html#ixzz2ik9IjRDB

Welders: Creating Sparks in the Social Space

First published March 22, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A few weeks ago, I was asked to keynote at an annual gathering of welding equipment manufacturers. The topic? Social media, which had emerged as the number one thing these industrial marketers wanted to learn more about during their previous conference.

Now, if that image introduces some cognitive dissonance, you’re not alone. Anyone I mentioned this to tended to raise an eyebrow and look at me with skepticism.  I quickly learned to counter with, “Did I mention that the conference was in Indian Wells, Calif., at a beautiful resort at the end of February?”

“Ohh,” they would respond, nodding knowingly, “Well, that makes sense, then.”

I wouldn’t press the issue, but I also knew something they didn’t know.  Don’t be too quick to judge welders, because they’re a different breed. I know this because life has surrounded me with welders. I have two brothers-in-law that are welders. I worked my way through college working summers on pipeline crews, doing the jobs welders didn’t want to do. I’ve had several years of observation of the welding community under my belt, and it didn’t surprise me in the least that social media would be something they would be interested in.

You see, welders are craftspeople. They have a pride in their work, their tools and their community that may seem strange to those from outside their inner circle. I have sat and listened to welders talk for hours about the challenges they encounter on a job site. They care about what they do.  In fact, in the hands of some, an arc welder and acetylene torch become tools of artistic expression. If you don’t believe me, check out the work of Craig Palm.

How did I find Craig? I found him on the official Facebook page of Lincoln Welders. And frankly, the authenticity and passion of the Lincoln community blows away 99% of what I’ve seen pass as social media marketing out there, from brands that one would assume are far more sophisticated when it comes to digital marketing. But Lincoln has something essential for creating online communities. At the heart of it, there’s something there: something welders care about. It’s not manufactured, spun or contrived. It’s real. It’s common. It’s engaging. It’s the stuff communities are made of.

And that was my message to the group. Social does not equal market, just as marriage does not equal stalking. Marketing is defined by terms like targeting, reach and effectiveness — all implying one party doing something to the other. Communities are defined by terms like belonging, engaged and members — all speaking of a two-way relationship, where both sides are partners. It’s a much different dynamic, one that eludes those who view social as just another channel to be employed to drive the bottom line.

Companies like Lincoln and Miller understood there was already a strong community of welders with common interests and passions. If welding were just a job, welding helmets wouldn’t come in dozens of different custom designs. But they do, because your helmet signals both that you belong to a community, while making a personal statement about you. You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t care.

Social isn’t for everyone. In fact, before you start pinning your hopes on social, ask yourself a tough question. Is there something there? Is there a reason to engage? Does your business elicit conversations that could happen over a beer and span an hour or two? If there’s nothing there, then your online community will be a ghost town.

I have to be honest. I went to the conference expecting to teach the welders something about social media, but I actually left getting just as much as I gave.

The Challenge of Social

First published December 1, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Every quarter, I fill out an online survey about digital marketing trends. One question always shows up: “Are you looking at social as a replacement for search in your online marketing strategy?” I always answer no, and to myself, comment that it’s a stupid question asked by someone who obviously doesn’t know much about online marketing. But now I wonder  — is it really such a stupid question? Aren’t many experienced marketers asking themselves exactly the same question?

The Social Graph (or Network, or whatever you want to call it) should be the single biggest opportunity in marketing history. But marketers are stubbing their toes by the millions in trying to step over the threshold into the golden glow of the online social party. It seems it’s incredibly difficult to figure out.

Search, on the other hand, was easily pigeonholed as a direct-marketing channel. Search was so easy to “get” for marketers that Google turned it into a self-serve model and became the fastest growing company in history as a result.

For marketers, I suspect, the very ease of search has caused it to be considered a limited opportunity. Social, on the other hand, seems virtually limitless. It expands into hundreds and thousands of fascinating, if somewhat cloudy, opportunities to connect with customers. As I said, in theory, social seems like a marketer’s dream come true. But in practice, it’s an unwieldy animal to wrestle to the ground.

Here’s just one example of the challenges inherent in mapping the online social landscape.  Pitney Bowes felt there was tremendous potential in social to foster deeper engagements with its customers, building long-term loyalty. But rather than jump headlong into it, Pitney Bowes decided to test its assumptions through a survey of those customers first. The result? Social may not be all it’s cracked up to be:

“These findings will give decision-makers pause for thought,” the report (from the survey) stated. “Businesses can be forgiven for getting swept away by the hype of surrounding social media and wanting to invest in such activity as soon as possible. … But results show that those businesses tempted to lead with such techniques will quickly find themselves out of step with customer thinking.”

So why is social so awkward to leverage effectively? I suspect it’s because the exact same things that make social so promising also make it incredibly unwieldy to manage.  It’s part of our lives, which means we’re engaged, but what we’re engaged with is rarely what an advertiser wants to talk to us about.

Marketers get caught up in the concept of participation rates and usage. Facebook has one of the highest reaches of any online property, second only to Google. Alexa estimates that almost half of the total Internet user population (about 49%) uses Google regularly. Facebook is just behind at 43%. But if we look at time spent on site, Facebook comes it an about 25 minutes a day, compared to 13 minutes a day for Google. If we were using engagement as an indicator of marketing potential, this would have us salivating like a St. Bernard over a fresh bowl of kibble.

But the reason I don’t trust engagement as a metric is that it doesn’t consider intent. And intent is the key difference between social and search. The reason search excels in marketing is that it’s all about intent, and what’s even better, it’s about identified intent, neatly labeled by the search query. In the history of marketing, it’s never been easier than this to intercept a motivated buyer.

I don’t mean to minimize the value of a well-managed search campaign, but compared to other channels, it’s pretty difficult to completely flop on a search campaign. The same is not true for social. To illustrate, let’s step back and look at this from another point of view, one that removes some of the hyperbole that surrounds online social.

Let’s say you’ve just decided to sell your 2007 Honda Civic. As you’re backing out of your driveway, your neighbor flags you down and asks you how you like your Honda, and if you know where she could buy a good used one? From your perspective, this aligning of the planets seems too good to be true, but it’s similar to what happens on a search engine millions of time every day. It’s the power of alignment with purchase intent.

But let’s take a different tack. Let’s imagine that as you drive down the street, you see that one of your neighbors is having a party. In front of their house, there are at least 12 cars parked, including four Hondas. “A-hah, “ you say, “a perfect gathering of potential Honda buyers, with at least 33% of them showing a preference for Hondas” (note: if this is what your internal dialogue actually sounds like, you should consider an extended leave from work). You ring the doorbell and begin to work the crowd. The only problem is, no one came to the party to buy a Honda. Not to mention the obvious question on everyone’s mind: “Who the hell invited you?”

If your goal is to unload your Honda, I know what scenario I’d be betting on. It almost seems ludicrous that we’re even considering Scenario B as a substitute for Scenario A. Yet, every three months, I get that survey asking me if I’m thinking about it.

I know — it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.

What’s Your Social Role: Are You a “Susan” or a “Michael?”

First published October 14, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I had actually written another column for today, but as I was putting the finishing touches on it, my friend Karl came into my office for a scheduled meeting and, in passing, dropped the following observation about a client (names have been changed to protect the innocent): “I was talking to Susan, the person who’s in charge of their social media, but I’m not exactly sure what she does.  One of their tech guys, Michael, is the person who actually set up their Facebook page and Twitter account.”

Pinning down Porridge

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with the corporate approach to social media. We’re trying to apply the same old corporate reasoning to something that defies reason. Not only does it defy it, it seeps past it, sprouts up in unexpected places and doesn’t tend to stay put when you try to jam it in a pigeonhole. Trying to contain social media within a corporate org chart is kind of like trying to pin porridge to a bulletin board.

Within every organization, there is a mix of personalities. There are those who make the rules, those who follow the rules and a few who break the rules. Similarly, there are those with something to say, those who are content to listen and those who will carefully consider what to say before they open their mouth. Most companies try to recruit a candidate from the last camp to act as a gatekeeper for social media. It’s safer — theoretically, anyway.

Don’t Control. Do!

But here’s the thing with social media. It’s not about controlling, it’s about doing. It’s about talking, listening and responding. It’s about rolling up your sleeves and getting in there. If you don’t do that, you’ll become “Susan,” a person who has a title but isn’t really in charge of anything, because it’s happening all around her, thanks to the “Michaels” of the world. Social media just happens, in spite of the best-laid plans of legal and corporate governance. Trying to control it is like trying to squelch a rumor or juicy gossip. Just ask Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods or Jesse James how well that worked out for them.

And if you think it’s difficult controlling this now, just wait until the fresh crop of millennials become fully entrenched in their jobs. For them, social media is mother’s milk. They don’t see it as something to be controlled or channeled. They regard it the same way a fish regards water – it’s just there. And they don’t have the same lines of delineation between their work lives and private lives that we do. There will be more and more “Michaels,” those who actively participate in social because it’s part of their world. And there will be fewer and fewer “Susans,” because sooner or later we’ll realize the futility of the role.

The Rise of Open Leadership

Charlene Li sees this as a breath of fresh air blowing through the stuffy halls of corporate America, forcing more transparency and authenticity and leading to “Open Leadership.” “Michaels” have a way of blowing the lid off of carefully spun corporate communications, exposing the unvarnished truth that lies beneath.

So, the question coming from the C-Suite is, “How do you control Michaels? How do you make sure they don’t say something stupid or, even worse, damaging?” Well, you can’t. It will happen. Just the same way that oil spills, product recalls and accounting scandals happen.

But here’s something to think about. If you’re scared to give your employees a voice, you don’t have a social media problem. Your problem is much, much bigger than that. And all the Susan’s in the world aren’t going to help you.

 

A Lesson in Social Media from Glee

My kids are hopeless Gleeks, and after watching last week’s episode, I might just be too.

Glee may just be the most perfectly designed social entertainment experiment of this year. I’m not sure if the producers of Fox’s runaway hit did this by intention or dumb luck, but they’re providing a textbook example of how old media can leverage new media.

Fans of Glee (Gleeks) are driving tons of traffic online, and the end of every road seems to be an opportunity for deeper engagement with the show, most with a small price tag attached. Let’s sum up the lessons Glee could teach us about how to leverage online.

Package for YouTube

Each episode of Glee contains at least 4 to 5 “minishows” that can be sliced and packaged to be the perfect “YouTube” length. Of course, there are the musical performances themselves, lasting anywhere for 2 to 5 minutes, but there are also sections obviously intended to go viral, for example, the “All the Single Ladies” football clip from Episode 4 (below). Tell me the director didn’t have Twitter and YouTube in mind when he set up this. The typical Glee episode feels like a series of YouTube clips, glued together with bridging dialogue and storylines. That sounds like a criticism, but it works extremely well with our digital attention spans.

“Glee” Football Team Dances To Single Ladies?!?!

Understand the Basics of Buzz

Boring doesn’t go viral. Something has to tweak our primary emotions in a big way for us to feel compelled to pass it along. According to Gerard Parrot, there are six basic emotions: love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear. If you move the needle far enough on any of those, you’ll create an irresistible urge to share with someone. If the goal is to entertain, your choices are somewhat limited – you probably want to steer clear of anger and sadness tends to make people draw within themselves in unexpected ways. Love is also a deeply personal emotion, so doesn’t have the same viral opportunities as some of the other emotions. That leaves joy, surprise and fear, which are more universal in nature. Glee, being a musical comedy, plays the joy and surprise cards regularly. Again, using the Single Ladies Football clip as an example, tell me that anyone can watch that without feeling a little bit happier. It surprises and delights.

Tap Into Emotions

We love talent shows. We love geeky underdogs. We love struggling romance, especially if it’s twisted into a triangle. We like strong and quirky characters. And we love music. Glee wraps this all into a seamless package, thanks to the natural intuitions of its writers. For example, in the last episode, we have Kurt, perhaps the most interesting character on Glee, demanding a Diva showdown between himself and Rachelle (played by Lea Michele) to see who will sing the song “Defying Gravity” in an upcoming show. Kurt insists there’s no reason why this song “has to be sung by a girl” and he sets out to prove it by hitting a falsetto High F. This, of course, pushes all the right emotional buttons, setting up an irresistible storyline. The idea came from Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt. It was lifted directly from his own high school experiences. The result, perhaps the most popular Glee song yet, currently #28 on iTunes most popular tracks.

Glee Cast – Defying Gravity

Leverage Your Digital Asset Portfolio

The real genius of Glee comes from how they’ve spread their online net, welcoming all Gleeks with opening arms. Glee is the perfect example of the new diversified nature of online presence. It’s not simply about a website anymore. Glee is all over Twitter (@glee onfox), YouTube, Facebook, iTunes and all the right blogs and forums. And, all the pieces dovetail together perfectly. Audio and video clips lead directly to iTunes purchase links, opportunities to purchase the full soundtrack or online versions of the full episodes on Fox’s website, complete with advertising. Glee is creating revenue tie ins that extend far beyond the traditional TV show. Glee’s not the first to do this. They borrowed a page from American Idol’s playbook, also masters of digital integration. But I think this is the first time I’ve seen it so effectively done in a scripted show.

Understand that Communities Take Time

Fox had an understanding of this right from the beginning. The pilot was aired on May 18, several months before the show’s fall debut. The long, slow release was to give momentum a chance to develop. It was all part of Fox’s marketing plan. “The way we’re looking at May 19 is, it’s the world’s largest grassroots screening,” said Joe Earley, the executive VP in charge of marketing for Fox. “The show sells itself better than any (campaign) can. Our goal is to turn the people who watched it into brand ambassadors, to use hackneyed marketing-speak. We believe that when you watch this show, you can’t help but get out the word.” Earley’s strategy has worked before for some of the most loved TV shows in history: Cheers, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, Seinfeld and The Office. We need to get comfortable with a new show and develop some empathy for the characters. Fox also leverage the Web well in helping this grassroots community to take hold. The “Glee” pilot followed Chris Anderson’s marketing strategy: it was free and ubiquitous. Fox pumped it out through every available online channel: Hulu, Fox, YouTube and other sites.

Plan Your Online Landscape

Glee understands the new dynamics of our digital society and has staked out prime real estate at each of the intersections. I think the entertainment industry is substantially ahead of the curve in keeping its finger on the pulse of online activity. The following charts from Google trends shows the typical activity following each airing.

gleegraph1

This shows trends for Google searches throughout 2009. As Fox intended, the pilot debut (the first peak) had a corresponding jump in search activity. This has been steadily building as the series has kicked into gear. Like all things online, Gleeks are connecting through search (one area where Fox could brush up, but I’ll get to that in a minute). Let’s zoom in for a closer look at the traffic in the last 30 days:

gleegraph30days

Here, we see peaks corresponding with the typical air dates. What’s interesting here is that no new episodes aired between October 21 and November 11, due to the World Series. Yet search traffic still spiked during what would have been the air dates.

Let’s now look at what’s happening on Twitter, thanks to Trendistic.com. Since the fall kick off, we’ve seen reliable peaks representing almost 1% of all Twitter traffic. That’s impressive. Notice the lack of traffic during the 2 week hiatus, from Oct 21 to November 11.

gleetwittergraph

Now, let’s look at the one thing Fox could do better – improve their search visibility (once a search marketer, always a search marketer). Although the official Fox site ranks #1 organically for Glee, the popularity of the show means that Fox should start considering expanding their search strategy. The three most popular characters: Lea Michele (who is going to be a major star), Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer are starting to generate some significant search volumes in Google.

gleecastgraph

Notice how Colfer and Michele took off after the November 11th episode which featuring their amazing duet of “Defying Gravity” (yes, I love show Broadway show tunes), which I’m sure led to a pile of iTune downloads. Yet, if you searched for any of these cast members, you would not find any official sites, but rather a motley collection of fan sites, forums as well as Wikipedia and IMDB entries. Fox is dropping the search ball here. As online communities build, you can provide warm, welcoming and well lit locations for them to visit. Fox has hugely popular content that would allow them to better leverage all this burgeoning search traffic.

Despite the rather mild criticism about Fox’s search strategy, Glee is doing almost everything right here. If you were looking for an example of how to integrate social into your strategy, you could do worse than becoming a Gleek.

Brand Religion: A Reading from the Book of Skittles

First published March 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s something about Tuesdays. Just when I’m starting to think about what my Thursday column is going to be about, something hits my inbox that seems freakishly timely. This time, it was David Berkowitz’s ode to Skittles.com. My intention was to write about brand religions playing out online, and here, in all its gory, real-time splendor, was a parable made to order. It would be unseemly, not to mention unfaithful, not to read the signs from above and pick up this story thread so graciously thrown in front of me.

Now, let’s get the Skittle Scuttlebutt out of the way, as more has transpired since the last time David spoke. As David said, Skittles.com is no longer a site, but a Flash navigation bar that hovers over live feeds from other Skittles-oriented online destinations. Originally, the home page was a live Twitter Feed, but the ignoble masses had the temerity to use the Skittles name in vain, so that idea was scuttled and the TweetFest was moved back to a section called “Chatter.” Now the home page is a feed of the Wikipedia entry (which has been updated to include the story, so it’s like a never-ending feedback loop). You can also visit the brand’s Facebook “Friends” page. There are some massive usability issues, but that aside, nobody can scoff at Skittles for a lack of courage.  It remains to be seen how successful this is, but the fact is, almost 600,000 fans have signed up on Facebook, and the brand has generated huge buzz.
So, what is a parable for, if not to learn from? And here are 10 commandments for every brand who fancies themselves a religion, if they have the courage to go where Skittles has gone:

1.    Thou Shalt Not Expect Everyone to Believe. As was shown in the Skittles case, if you choose to live by the Social Media Sword, understand you can also die by the Social Media Sword. Opening up the conversation to your believers also means you open the doors to the non-faithful, who will take every opportunity to express themselves.

2.    Thou Shalt Not Build Your Own Churches. Believers like to build their own churches and not have the brand build it for them. This is almost never successful. Skittles is trying to find middle ground by using their site as a shortcut to a few online destinations that help define the online image of Skittles. It’s an interesting move, but I believe it will ultimately be a short-lived one. For one thing, it’s confusing as hell.

3.    Thou Shalt Have No Illusions of Control. If a brand goes down this path, they have to accept (everyone, repeat after me — and that means you, Mr/Ms CEO) that by opening the door to the masses, they abdicate all control. If Skittles.com turns sour, all Skittles can do is pull the plug on their official endorsement. The buzz will outlive the campaign and take on a life of its own.

4.    Thou Shalt Understand the Web is a Fragmented Place. What is interesting about the Skittles experiment is that it’s a tentative acknowledgement that the sum total of a brand lives in many places online. The idea of defining the boundary within one Web site is long dead.

5.    Thou Shalt Honor Thy Product. You have to have a pretty damn popular product to take this step. There’s probably nothing more innocuous than Skittles (who could hate a little fruit candy?) and yet some still managed to spout bile all over this little social media stunt. The more beloved the product (and the company behind it), the more secure you can be in letting your fans be your spokesperson.

6.    Thou Shalt Accept What One is Given. If your brand builds a devout following, your customers will take it upon themselves to generously share more than you ever expected about what the brand is, what it isn’t and what it should be. You have opened up more than a dialogue; you have embarked on a weird and wonderful partnership with your customers. Embrace this or lose it. Consider the story of Timberland, who had no idea that they’d become the chosen footwear of hip-hop. At first they disbelieved it, then they ignored it, then they fought it — and finally, they embraced it. Today, you can customize your Timberlands in pink and purple with your own monogrammed tag and customized embroidery: a fully pimped pump.

7.    Thou Shalt Know Thy Flock. If you’re going to intersect your faithful where they live, you have to know something about them. David wondered if Twitter was really the best social media choice for the Skittles target market. If your brand has already established online places of worship, spend some time in stealth mode and get the lay of the land before you go public.

8.    Thou Shalt Listen. Online gives you thousands of listening posts to get the pulse of your brand. One example I saw this week: the iPhone app Dial Zero. It’s a nifty little assistant that gives you tips to avoid the dreaded voicemail dead zones for over 600 companies. A quick look up and you have tips to connect with an actual live person. But what’s even more interesting is that it shows real-time comments from people who’ve recently called.

9.    Thou Shalt Live Up to Your Flock’s Beliefs. With devotion comes responsibility. In return for their brand loyalty, they will hold you to a higher standard. They have emotionally invested in your brand, so if you disappoint them, it will leave a bigger scar than just a passing frustration. Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

10.    Thou Shalt Count Thy Blessings Every Day. Brand evangelism. Brand loyalty. The willingness to pay a premium. An unwavering devotion untouched by the millions in advertising spent by your competitors. A much lower cost of acquisition. And millions of pages of customer-generated content. All brands should be so lucky.