My Brother Zach (@zachhurst) wrote another blog entry I agree with 100% so I am sharing it with you. All credit goes to Zach though. I will not lie, I may or may not have taught him some of this
——–> Begin Zach’s Post:
In a service business, sometimes you have to identify who your client should really be. I used to say in the web design world that I would rather have one client at $40,000 then try and manage eight different projects with eight different clients for $5,000 a piece. It’s a whole lot less work for me, less people to deal with and more of my time can be dedicated to making the one client happy. It also seems to be easier to deal with someone with a realistic budget because the clients you try to service as a “favor” tend to be the pickiest. Typically, because the project could be a large financial commitment in their eyes – even at $5,000 – the smaller clients want to make sure every penny is spent wisely, and the project can easily become micromanaged. Needless to say, there are multiple benefits when servicing the larger clients.
However, with larger clients come larger responsibilities.
In social media, the larger the company is, the more tedious the implementation strategy is going to be. In Charlene Li’s book “Open Leadership,” she describes the social media manager from the American Red Cross, Wendy Harman.
One of the key things I took from this excerpt was the sheer size of the endeavor she recaps. A few months ago I was meeting with Nissan, and they were talking about writing the rules for social media engagement. When Wendy joined the Red Cross it was a matter of first educating the company on the benefits of social media, and then outlining the proper policies, procedures and guidelines. Much like Nissan was describing to me, the important thing is making sure when you enter the market, you do it right the first time.
When Harry Winsor, an 8-year-old from Boulder, Colorado, mailed Boeing a hand drawn sketch of what he thought an airplane should look like, Boeing didn’t handle it’s first response well at all. Instead of sending back a “child friendly” response that thanked or encouraged the child for his creativity, Harry’s father received a legal form letter stating, “we do not accept unsolicited ideas.” In the age of social media, Harry’s father was able to vent his disappointment in the company, and ultimately impact Boeing’s reputation pretty quickly by entering the blogosphere. By blogging about the incident, and voicing his opinions on Twitter, the story of how Boeing treated his son was instantly out in the open for public consumption and opinion!
Todd Blecher, a spokesman who oversees Boeing’s Twitter account, Tweeted back at Harry’s father, “We’re expert at airplanes but novices in social media. We’re learning as we go.” The situation was readily resolved, and now Boeing is working on a better way of handling submissions from children. But this story is one of thousands that have been surfacing lately, and the key point to remember here is that it’s not just highly influential people that can affect a brand’s reputation anymore.
Southwest airlines learned this lesson the hard way as well when Kevin Smith tweeted to 1.5 million followers that he was getting kicked off a plane for being “too fat.” In a matter of minutes, Southwest woke up to a public relations nightmare that they never even saw coming! And because Kevin Smith is a Hollywood filmmaker of some note, media outlets of every kind covered the story, making the situation even more damaging, and Southwest’s response even more critical.
So the question really is: How do companies prepare themselves for these kinds of events, and how in the world do they monitor and manage their social customers?
There are tools for that and they are called social CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Imagine an interface that collects all of the social mentions (i.e. Tweets, Facebook status updates, blog entries and FourSquare check-ins) that reference your brand. Then imagine the ability not only manage who you’ve responded to, but assign tasks to members of your social media team to essentially engage and manage the damage that a guy like Harry’s father could be creating to your public image.
Let’s take it a step further: Now think about creating keyword expressions based around other relevant conversations that are going on so you can keep tabs on those as well. Wouldn’t it be powerful to have the ability to add a line or two to the conversations taking place all around you that can and will actually impact the public perception of your company and/or your products and services?
The final thing is aggregating all this new data into your existing customer file, and then mapping out all of the profiles about each of your customers across the web. Can you imagine being able to know so much, so quickly about your customers? These types of systems do exist, and big companies use them.
As you can probably already tell, social media is much more involved than simply creating a Facebook page and Twitter profile for the brand. There is a public relations component to it in managing the online conversations, and there is a practicality in leveraging the data to build smarter internal CRM systems. Additionally, there is an ability to create tie-ins to the marketing strategy in which campaigns are developed to drive exposure, leads and product sales.
The marketing strategy is always interesting because, believe it or not, companies are still interested in metrics that prove a return on investment. They like fancy spreadsheets where they can analyze where the money went in, and how much more money came back out. The bottom line, after all, is still the bottom line.
Well boys and girls, social media is a whole different animal. It doesn’t encompass strictly monetized product sales or lead generation. We have to remember that social media is also responsible for engagement, branding, participation, user trust and building brand ambassadors – all things that can be difficult to monetize. But consider the fact that Dell can track that their global reach as of February 2010 on Twitter produced over $6.5 million in revenue because that data is measureable. They have a link in their Tweet that drives customers into a shopping cart. But when a company invests in social media, they also have to invest in influence, peer recommendation and potential viral effect the campaigns may take on. This is a new space with new risks, some of which can be measured, and some not. But if the brand is interested in numbers, they are available, and these numbers don’t lie.
• The average person spends close to an hour per day on Facebook.
• There are over 400 million Facebook users.
• Over 25% of those users also access Facebook on the go from a mobile device.
• In the music industry, studies report that 1 in 5 individuals state that they purchased music based on peer recommendations, and has searched a social network to find new music to purchase.
• There are over 75 million people on Twitter and you can measure who the Twitter user is, what their interests and likes are, what percentage of their followers re-tweet the things they post, and how effective their strength and reach is as an influencer.
• FourSquare is reporting over half a million check-ins per day, and location based tools are being adopted at unprecedented rates.
• There are 42 million women online and nearly 50% of them visit blogs to get advice and recommendations.
All these profiles can be connected to mine user data, which is data that can be equated into value.
The world has changed dramatically over the past few years. People are more willing to share personal data and information than ever before. Crowd-sourcing has become a major contributor to focus groups and product development. Sentiment analysis of online consumer conversations can provide brands with near real-time reporting on how the things they do and the products they make are viewed in the eyes of their consumers.
As you can see, social media on a large scale is more complex then it initially appears. It requires a vast knowledge of social networking applications, blogs, recommendation engines, social bookmarking sites, user-generated media sites, and how all of these platforms are leveraged to create tangible value for the brand. It requires specific knowledge on how to implement the strategies and track the results. It also requires competence in integrating the new technologies and applications with the current systems that are in place to increase profitability, efficiency and knowledge.
When I tell people I do social media it is commonly misinterpreted as if I am just a guy that builds a profile on a social networking site, but nothing could be further from the truth. When you look to hire a social media marketing team for your brand, the most important thing to consider is proficiency and a broad understanding of how the entire spectrum of available data can be leveraged for your benefit.
***Diagram credit to Jacob Morgan of chessmediagroup.com***
