Smart Marketing on the Social Web

This post was written originally for Valeria Maltoni’s

excellent new ebook about marketing in 2010. It includes terrific, thoughtful insights from Shannon Paul, Olivier Blanchard, Danny Brown, Amber Naslund, Jackie Huba, Gavin Heaton, Mark Earls, Rachel Happe, Jonathan MacDonald, and of course Valeria herself. Download it for free right here.

Change Is At Hand

Marketing has changed a lot since an enterprising caveman promoted his arrow points as “superior in every way – mammoths don’t stand a chance.” But, the real-time Web will change marketing more in 24 months than in the proceeding 20,000 years.

That’s because the real-time Web and its social media gasoline fundamentally change the relationship between company and customer. Every marketing shift heretofore has been rooted in the company being able to reach its customer in a more impactful (TV) or more efficient (demographics and psychographics) fashion.

Now, however, the taxonomy of war that defined marketing (targeting, flight, impact) is an anachronism. Campaigns are eroding. In this real-time epoch, every interaction with a customer or prospect is a separate, fluid, and potentially critical marketing initiative.

The balance of power has moved, inexorably and forever, from the company to the customer. When a real-time meme can erode brand trust that has taken years or decades to establish, we as marketers are no longer in control of the asylum.

The good news is that many brands have chosen to embrace the real-time Web and social media as a groundbreaking way to foster customer kinship with the brand, rather than trying to ignore or squelch consumers’ newfound power.

And in 2010, we’re going to move from experimentation to methodology. It will be the year that the real-time Web and social media become operationalized. There are already plenty of companies clearing a path for everyone else, but this will be the year when we all start to get on the same page as to what’s “right” and what’s misguided. I see five key areas where this will occur.

1. What’s the Point?

There is a growing dichotomy between brands that use social media and the real-time Web as an outbound marketing tactic, and those that use similar tools and outposts as a customer service and CRM effort. (consider how Dell and Comcast use Twitter very differently, but successfully)

To date, companies have been able to seamlessly experiment with both approaches, using similar tools, venues, and personnel. This year, however, brands will pick one strategic use (either customer acquisition or customer retention) and flesh it out, or create bifurcated programs to address both – but in separate venues. (Twitter for promotion and a private brand community for feedback solicitation, for example)

We’re going to see best practices and conventional wisdom coalescing around what the best and highest use is for particular tools and platforms.

2. The Marketing-Centric Enterprise

The real-time Web makes everything marketing’s responsibility. It used to be that if you had a problem with a hotel, you’d call the front desk. Or if you really had an issue, you’d call the 800 number, or write a letter and your concerns would be addressed by the hotel’s operations or customer service department.

Now, you can send a tweet, update your Facebook status, write a blog post, or craft a review on Yelp, or TripAdvisor, or Google Sidewiki. Then it becomes the responsibility of the marketing department to locate, triage, and assuage your concern.

This puts marketing at the center of day-to-day corporate existence in a way it has never been historically. Operational shortcomings, customer service snafus, financial mishaps, R&D blunders, CEO peccadilloes. It all has the potential to bubble up in the real-time Web, and therefore it all impacts marketing.

Thus, we’ll see marketing as the binding agent that brings disparate corporate departments together to create cross-functional teams. The real-time Web forces collaboration, with marketing as the quarterback.

3. Staffing and Budget Clarity

Fortunately, the misguided notion that social media and conversation marketing are inexpensive is fading away. The expense is simply shifted from media and production, to personnel.

In 2010 we’ll see the emergence of best practices around real-time Web staffing. What types of employees are needed? Do you need round-the-clock monitoring? What’s the role of the agency, in comparison to the brand? All of these questions are being answered by brands via trial and error today.

While the issue of social media for customer acquisition vs. customer retention will impact staffing decisions somewhat, we’ll see the adoption of social media execution “field manuals” – similar to how corporate social media policies are achieving greater standardization in late 2009.

(Note that my friend Amber Naslund has done some excellent work on social media staffing patterns, and has an ebook about that subject).

In addition to increased clarity regarding personnel and roles, we’ll see social media become a budget line item for a majority of companies in 2010, even mid-sized and small businesses. The resources needed to harness the real-time Web now clearly transcend the “test and learn” method of skimming a few budget dollars from here and there.

4. Rules of Engagement

As Amber said recently in a MarketingProfs Webinar we did with Beth Harte and Ann

Handley, “one negative tweet doesn’t mean you have a brand crisis.” This is true. Except when it’s not.

(photo by freakapotimus)

Because the real-time Web puts all manner of customer communication through the bailiwick of marketing, we need to develop far more numerous, and nuanced mechanisms for engaging with customers, prospects, and critics.

In many companies today, the same people are responding to positive and negative customer comments, on an ad hoc basis, with very little in the way of predetermined messaging, or desired outcomes.

2010 will be the year that the real-time Web forces marketers to act more like call center managers. We’re going to need to create or codify rules of engagement for who and how and why and whether the brand responds to or interacts with consumers.

This will unavoidably remove some of the spontaneity and spunk from social media interactions, but the tradeoff of a more logical, assured communication program will be a worthy exchange.

5. Back to the Future – Social Media in Retrograde

Maybe we’ve gotten a little ahead of ourselves?

In our zeal for YouTube videos, and Facebook apps, and iphone wizardry, and augmented reality we’ve in many cases neglected the many ways we can socially enable the marketing we’ve been doing all along.

In 2010, we’ll retrofit our email marketing, search marketing, banner advertising, even print and TV, to include social components universally. I hope we’ll focus on getting the basics done well before we move forward with the cutting edge opportunities. Because that’s a long-term positive.

Sure, the real-time Web is disruptive and powerful, but it can’t do all the work all by itself. We need to treat social media as a marketing ingredient, not a marketing cure-all, and adding conversational frosting to our historical communication methodologies is the first step toward moving beyond hype and toward operationalizing.

Here’s hoping 2010 is the year that the real-time Web and social media become less special, not more. Eventually, every company will have a social component, and then it will just be the way marketing gets conducted in the modern age. Let’s start down that path together in the months ahead.

What is your #1 priority for operationalizing social media next year?

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This excellent article sums up very well, how attitudes in many companies towards social media will undergo change, as the activities carried out under that umbrella term will become more mainstream. This process will at the same time transform the role of marketing in general. The outcome should be an improved customer experience resulting in positive company results.

Listening to Chris Brogan here is 16 minutes well spent! The approach he takes to the social web is what it is all about. I especially like his concept of being there before the sale. All too often this is where so many efforts using the available tools fail and are then blamed when the ubiquitous question of ROI goes begging for an answer.

Excellent post and video with a number of convincing arguments for the effectiveness of social media and the need for a new set of ROI tools. Without the right mindset and culture it is not surprising when social media is considered ineffective and doesn’t produce expected results. It all starts with the right vision and strategy.

The reality is that there’s no business without a sale but it’s a matter of how you get that sale and there’s more ways than one. There is the “in your face” hard sell that doesn’t go down to well with many and there’s the process that involves the conversation but most likely leads to a better and longer term relationship to build on. This is where social media can play a valuable role. The latter has always been a more successful approach in many countries and cultures. Just ask the frustrated American who never got that sale in Japan for being too aggressive for his own good and didn’t follow the local rules.

Think about your organization and ask yourself these two questions:

• Are external social media sites restricted or blocked while at work?
• Is the use of social media in the workplace inhibited or frowned upon?

If you answered yes, then your organization is one of the majority of firms with over 100 employees that have yet to embrace the use of social media in the workplace for the average worker. In a study conducted by Robert Half Technology entitled “Whistle But Don’t Tweet At Work,” many organizations are struggling with how to integrate social media into the workplace.

However, there are a growing number of firms such as IBM, Toshiba, and Cerner Corporation that are becoming über-connected workplaces. Using social media tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs and corporate social networks, they are connecting employees globally, and are fostering mass collaboration. As a result, these companies are seeing improvements in communication, cross-functional collaboration and creative approaches to problem solving. More companies are discovering that an über-connected workplace is not just about implementing a new set of tools — it is also about embracing a cultural shift to create an open environment where employees are encouraged to share, innovate and collaborate virtually.

Recent research provides evidence that there are business benefits to becoming an über-connected organization:

• Access to social media improves productivity. According to Dr Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at University of Melbourne in Australia, workers who engage in “Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing” are more productive than those who don’t. “People who surf the Internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office — are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says. “Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”

• Millennials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media. Those born between 1977 and 1997 — the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers — are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate pervasive connectivity. An Accenture survey of Millennial preferences for various technologies at work found that they prefer to communicate via instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook and RSS feeds. What’s more, they are prepared to bypass corporate IT departments if these tools are blocked. One Millennial MBA, typical of those we meet, says, “I need to access my Facebook in order to do my job.” Has blocking Facebook today become the equivalent of denying an employee access to a phone at work 40 years ago or email 20 years ago?

• Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce. Take the case of Cerner Corporation, the health IT firm. In 2009, Cerner implemented uCern, a corporate social network. In 2010, it will extend this social network to its customers and suppliers. Why? Because uCern has demonstrated significant business benefits to Cerner such as allowing employees to have increased access to experts across the globe, reducing the cycle time from discovery of new products to launch of new products, and increasing employee engagement and satisfaction in the workplace.

As we scan the workplace of the future, we see that everything we know about work — where we work, how we work, what skills we need to stay employable, what technologies we use to connect with colleagues — is changing. And these changes will only continue to accelerate as we move toward 2020, as the Millennial Generation will comprise nearly half of the workforce by 2014.

Companies who want to attract and recruit the best talent will realize becoming über-connected will be a business imperative. The journey starts with asking yourself three questions:

1. What business benefits are you trying to solve? Will an increased ability to collaborate across the organization yield faster time to market, increased innovation, improved productivity, and increased collective intelligence as people are able to find knowledge and experts quickly? Will engaged employees reduce your turnover rate and subsequent expenses related to hiring new talent?
2. Who needs to be involved in the coalition to become über-connected? This is not an HR, IT or Learning initiative. Rather becoming über-connected is really a new way of working. Consider forming a coalition of executives from Human Resources, Corporate Learning, IT, Legal and Corporate Communications. These are the ones who will plan, monitor and agree to a set of social media guidelines to ensure responsible use.
3. What type of change management plan needs to be put into place? Recognize that the biggest hurdle is your culture and internal processes — not the technology behind the adoption of social media. Focus on finding ambassadors and influencers, then make it easy for them to share and participate in a social media pilot. Recognize that in the web community, status is built upon making meaningful contributions; so be sure to include recognition and incentives for participation early on.

Can your organization really hold on to policies that do not support the 24/7 hyper- connected lives employees are living outside of the workplace? Increasingly they are bringing digital expectations with them to the workplace. We do not think companies that compete for global talent want to continue with outdated policies. Do you?

Jeanne C Meister is an internationally recognized workplace-learning consultant dedicated to delivering competitive advantage, innovation and improved business results for organizations. Jeanne is the host of the blog, www.newlearningplaybook.com. Karie Willyerd is the Chief Learning Officer of Sun Microsystems and has been the Chief Talent Officer or head of executive development for three other Fortune 500 firms. At Sun Microsystems, she has led the organization to win over 20 awards for innovation excellence in learning. Jeanne and Karie are the authors of the book The 2020 Workplace (forthcoming in Spring 2010).

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This is an absolute must-read for any corporate naysayers left who think they have to block social media and social networking activity in their corporations. Once again, as with so many related issues, it starts with corporate culture. Is yours as open as it needs to be to compete in the changed, competitive marketplace of today?

Presentations is a topic I occasionally address. The author of this short and very useful guide Garr Reynolds has written a book called Presentation Zen that I consider the best on how to build effective presentations. No wonder Steve Jobs is a champion at this!

I share a lot of the visions presented here, not only about Twitter but people’s behavior in general. Around the 12:00 min. mark Loic talks about why companies need to get engaged with social media immediately or be left behind. He is totally correct at the end when he mentions that it’s about “you” or people not the tools. The tools are catalysts in how people behave and not the other way round. Even if Twitter would disappear, the changes it has already brought about will stay. Same with Facebook and other tools.