My first video blog. Apologies for the audio quality. I’ll work on that for next time. Comments most welcomed on this first effort. Thanks as always,
j
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Many companies are reluctant to fully dive in to social media, either because they are afraid of losing control, or because they believe their customers aren’t using social media. The latter is especially prevalent among B2B companies, and when viewed from a purely numerical perspective they may be right. (photo by The Dana Files)
An agency client of mine - Bliss PR - works with many large financial services companies whose customers are established CFOs. Are there 50-something CFOs using social media? Of course. Do most of them congregate in typical social media outposts? Probably not.
Consequently, my advice in these circumstances is to abandon an outpost strategy in favor of a humanization strategy. Find a thought leader in the organization, and make them the star, instead of the company itself. Chris Brogan calls these folks Trust Agents, and cites Frank Eliason from Comcast, Scott Monty from Ford and others as examples.
Related: Twitter interview of Scott Monty about social media at Ford.
I mostly concur, and I think for many brands it’s smart marketing (even beyond the huge potential customer service benefits).
For agencies, your role in a humanization campaign is almost like a publicist. Find ways to make the designated star a thought leader:
By making a real person in a company the social media outreach vehicle, you can at times bypass potentially thorny legal and corporate confidence hurdles, and give the organization plausible deniability if it for some reason goes horribly wrong. “He went rogue!” they can cry.
Simultaneously, you get almost all of the benefits of a corporate-branded social media program. Honesty. Transparency. Engagement with customers.
Forrester is the king of this strategy. When was the last time you went to the Forrester Web site? Contrast that with the last time you went to Jeremiah Owyang’s site (or Peter Kim or Charlene Li before they left). See what I mean?
Featuring Jason Falls, the head of social media at branding agency Doe-Anderson, author of the Social Media Explorer blog, and all-around social media nice guy genius. Jason submitted himself to the rigors of the Twitter 20 interview (20 questions live on Twitter) on November 14, 2008. Excellent questions and comments from viewers throughout, too. Thanks to everyone who participated.
(photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)
1. @jaybaer: How do you describe your role at Doe-Anderson (branding agency in Louisville)?
2. @jaybaer: How does your social media department intersect and interact with other parts of the agency?
3. @jaybaer: You’ve expanded the team over time. What do you look for in a social media professional? Conversation ability? Tech skills?
4. @jaybaer:(? from @geekmommy) Louisville doesn’t leap to mind re: social media/tech hotbeds. Easier or harder doing in from there?
5. @jaybaer: What type of reporting and metrics do you focus on with your social media programs? Do you sync with interactive analytics?
6. @jaybaer: Lots of discussion around where social media belongs. PR, marketing, customer service, etc. What’s your opinion?
7. @jaybaer: Some say “listening” is an agency function, but “engaging” needs to be done by the client. Can the agency be the voice in SM?
8. @jaybaer: What do you say to clients that are afraid of really communicating via SM, and ONLY want to listen? How do you conquer fear?
9. @jaybaer: What’s missing then from most corporate social media programs you see today? What makes you say d’oh!
10. @jaybaer: I hear you there re: lack of strategy. Conversely, what’s the most overrated aspect of SM today?
11. @jaybaer: Do you advocate distinctly different outreach methodologies for bloggers and traditional journalists?
12. @jaybaer: Very interesting. You’re saying treat journalists like bloggers, not the other way around? Relevant, focused pitching, etc.?
13. @jaybaer: Best examples of programs you’re really proud of? http://www.thestuffinside.com is legendary work. Others?
14. @jaybaer: Were you a bourbon guy before coming to Doe-Anderson and Kentucky, or is that just an occupationally-acquired taste?
15. @jaybaer: A toast to you, sir. How did you gravitate from sports communications to PR and social media at an agency?
16. @jaybaer: How does the agency world compare to client side marketing (or university side in your case)? Resources? Pace? Juggling?
17. @jaybaer: You did a lot of work in the education arena previously. What do you see from .edu in SM? How can they do it right?
18. @jaybaer: You mentioned your kids (2 for me as well). Social media take a ton of time - often unpaid. How do you balance it all?
19. @jaybaer: Can you tell us a bit about http://www.twit2fit.com your social media wellness community?
20. @jaybaer: Last one. What’s your summary 140 character advice for social media success?
I saw my mom the other day. She’s a pretty hip lady for 64. She was a high school teacher for about 30 years, and was always a student fave. Stylish. Knew the music. Knew the scene. Thought Patrick Swayze was hot.
Now, in her semi-retirement, she’s the editor for an online-only newspaper. She takes digital photos, uses a content management system, writes a little SEO copy.
She was asking about Convince & Convert and how it was going. I told her it was coming along nicely, that subscriptions to the blog were way up, and that people like Chris Brogan were saying favorable things about it.
“Chris Brogan? Who’s that? Doesn’t he play for the Coyotes?” she asked.
While I was surprised at how imposing a character Brogan is when I met him recently at Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, I’m pretty sure that he in fact does not play hockey in the NHL. (photo by Brian Solis)
And there’s the lesson.
Social media makes it simple to get wrapped up in our world. Reading blogs, tracking tweets, doing consulting. It’s easy to overlook that none of this passes the Mom test.
SEO passes the Mom test. Email passes. Tivo passes. iPhone passes (at least conceptually). Of course there are elements of social media that pass (MySpace, and increasingly Facebook). But as a discipline, social media and its practitioners absolutely do not pass. Not even Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk.
I find conferences exacerbate this effect. I was at PodCampAZ recently (hat tip to Brogan and Chris Penn for starting it all, and high five to Evo Terra and Brent Spore for a great job on this year’s AZ version). I probably shouldn’t have been, but I was flat out astonished at the number of content creators in the audience. Watching a live stream of a room that I was in, and having that stream coming from the laptop of the guy sitting next to me was Matrix-esque.
The fact that in 550 years we’ve gone from the invention of the printing press to a world where every kid with a cell phone is a potential real-time broadcaster is exhilarating. But it doesn’t pass the Mom test. The recent Forrester technographics study update backs me up. Only 21 percent of Internet users are classified as content creators. 25+ percent of people are unlikely to create online content any time soon.
It’s easy to become frustrated with brands that don’t get it. Marketing directors that refuse to engage in social media. Twitter spammers. Bad pitches from PR folks that have never read your blog. (nice case study from Dave Fleet) And on and on.
But what we can’t forget as an industry (if it can even be called that) is that we are at the very tip of the spear. We’re where SEO was 10 years ago. Where television was 50 years ago.
We can’t expect a business community that has been fundamentally operating under the same marketing principles since the invention of the newspaper to immediately embrace this new opportunity en masse, regardless of how obvious the benefits of doing so may appear to us.
As my Mom used to tell me, “Be Patient. Your Time Will Come.” And when she knows Brogan, we’ll know it has indeed arrived.
As discussed recently in “Why Are We So Scared of Our Customers?” and “Presto, How Social Media Makes Bad News Good” I’m seeing the fear of negativity preventing more companies from embracing social media.
The typical social media objection is that if the company has a conversation with consumers in a public forum, the company will be forced to respond to inadequacies, and doing so will just make it worse. Consequently, many large brands are now engaged in social media “listening” campaigns, but not engaging with consumers directly.
Of course, listening is better than ignoring, but actually getting involved with your customers online doesn’t 
give you less control, it gives you MORE control. If you give customers a legitimate, easy-to-use mechanism for interacting with you and amongst themselves, a large component of the feedback about you is likely to end up within that mechanism. And then you can do something about it.
Consider Comcast. What is a better circumstance for the company, listening but not engaging while customers post videos like this (which you’ve probably seen since the original has been viewed 1.35 million+ times on YouTube), or engaging and actually encouraging customer feedback and complaint via Twitter (@comcastcares)? (read bottom up for killer customer service on Twitter from Frank Eliason at Comcast)
Dell has a Project RED application on Facebook. Within the forums, there are several consumer complaints about Project RED and how much it actually helps Africa, versus being a craven marketing ploy. While Dell itself doesn’t appear to be engaging in the dialog, it is facilitating the conversation (with other consumers defending Dell vociferously).
And because all of this is happening on an official Dell production, they have MORE control over it than if it was happening on a blog or some other Facebook page. They could comment officially. They could take down the forums. They could reach out privately to negative commenters.
If this conversation was taking place on some other blog, Dell’s options would be greatly curtailed.
Creating a mechanism for customer feedback using social media is the post-modern equivalent of the suggestion box. Brands that don’t do it because they don’t want to loose control don’t understand that facilitation provides control, it doesn’t eliminate it.
This recession is looking worse than Sylvester Stallone all roided up for that recent Rambo 14 (Rambo goes to the buffet for the Early Bird Special with some pals) movie.
It’s going to be bad. But for social media, it just might be the best possible circumstance. Here’s why:
Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. We’re not exactly rushing to the nearest mall to make discretionary purchases. But because money is tight, we’ll want to make sure we make the best possible purchase when we do make them.
Enter social media.
Traffic is of course up for sites like Yelp, Amazon, Trip Advisor, DPreview.com and other review sites because of the impending holiday season. However, I believe sites that enable consumers to benefit from the experiences of prior customers to continue skyrocketing long after the holidays are over.
If we’re going to part with decreasing dollars, we’re going to make sure it’s a good product first.
This recession is the first piece of long-lasting major bad news that has occurred in the social media era. Certainly the Iraq war qualifies as bad news, but it’s day-to-day impact on Americans has been mostly negligible, except of course for those served and their families. (Thank you for enabling me to live in a country where I can make a living writing blog posts and telling people how to do social media and send good email)
The ins and outs and ups and downs of this recession and its impact, duration, and cause are going to be a major topic of conversation in this country for two to five years.
Enter social media.
You can Tweet using the #recession hashtag, or send a friend a bowl of soup via a Facebook app. Seriously, we’re going to use social media to discuss and micro-analyze our deteriorating economic condition because it’s faster, more customizable, and in many cases more honest than real media.
I can talk to real people at a local restaurant about the recession, but then I’m only getting the local perspective. On Twitter, I can get the perspective of most of the country. That’s why social media will be the recession’s barber shop.
First the gas crunch. Then, the “if you want oxygen on your flight, it’s $20″ routine. Now, the recession.
Companies are going to cut back on travel considerably.
Enter social media.
The conferences and symposiums of the roaring 00s are going to be replaced by Webinars, Webcasts, UStreams, SlideShare and other forms of digital information exchange that will dominate the bummer 10s.
If I owned a conference company, I’d be working like crazy right now to figure out a virtual delivery component, because given the quality of freely available content online, it’s getting tougher and tougher to justify an in-person experience.
Many companies and even agencies are reluctant to engage in social media because they are afraid that some sort of consumer backlash will occur, doing damage to the brand.
Certainly, there are a few noteworthy examples of social media missteps from brands like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola et al. But in most cases, those shortcomings were due to overreaching “let’s make something like Facebook, but all about Coke” and no lasting brand damage has occurred.
What I see is that most companies know they have some sort of operational or customer satisfaction skeletons in the closet, and fear a customer that has had a genuinely inadequate experience pointing out those shortcomings to an audience that is far larger than one.
But isn’t it possible that those same customers will shine the light on truly excellent facets of the company? Now that they have their social media program rolling, does Comcast fear feedback from it’s customers? No, because that feedback is an opportunity to improve.
In the spirit of not assuming the worst case scenario, I’m sharing the story below which is both seasonal and a shining example of how fear can seem so reasonable, but be so wrong. I hope you enjoy it.
My wife woke me late at night in mid-October. “Did you hear that noise?” “What noise?” I answered groggily. But then I heard it too. Perhaps best described as a mild ruckus, it sounded like muffled conversation mixed with opening and closing of cabinets.
I listened attentively, now very much awake and with the building sense of unease and dread that makes our fingertips tingle. I scanned the room for a weapon. Seeing none other than a clock radio, I quietly opened our bedroom door and crept out onto the second floor landing. The noises were definitely coming from below, on the first floor living area.
Not really sure what to do next, I shouted out “Hey, who is that? What’s going on?” in a tone that attempted to be menacing but came out warbly and meek. The noise stopped. Uh oh.
I darted back inside the bedroom, and grabbed the phone. “I’m calling 911,” I said to my wife. “We’re being robbed.” A flash of panic across her face as she ran quietly down the hall to the kids’ bedrooms, scooping them up and returning to our room, trying to keep them quiet and unpanicked.
I explained to the 911 operator that we had a home intruder. She said that the police were on the way, and asked if I could see the street. From the landing, I could see out of a high second floor window and watched as the police vehicles approached. My heart was beating so hard it felt like my sternum was breaking, but I’d never been happier to live in the house on the corner – right by the main road.
I lost sight of the police when they turned into our development, and the phone was unsettlingly quiet for a long time when the operator said “please stay on the line and I’ll relay instructions to you from the officers outside.”
A minute went by. Then five. What was going on? Was there a driveway altercation? A foot chase? My mind was filled with Tasered bad guys lying sobbing and unremorseful in my plants.
Then finally, the operator spoke. “Sir, the officers are unable to come to the front door.” “Oh my God. Why not?” I said, reaching a crescendo of paranoia. “Your house is surrounded by a pack of javelinas,” she said.
(Note: Javelinas are wild pigs with tusks that live in the desert southwest. Also known as peccaries, they run in packs and can be quite unpleasant. However, they are not typically thieves)
Five or six moments of confusion later, the whole family was gathered at the front door, looking outside as the police engaged in a vehicular roundup of approximately 15 javelinas who had ventured down from the mountains near our house to absolutely annihilate our pumpkins that we had preciously placed near the front door. It looked like grenades had been detonated inside the pumpkins, as our entire yard was covered with fleshy, orange debris.
Evidently, it had been quite a party for the javelinas, who had snorted and moaned and bumped against our front doors, sounding like a band of smash and grab burglars looting and pillaging.
After hanging up with the operator and resuming a mostly normal pulse, the doorbell rang. I opened the door and the police officer said “We’re happy to look around inside, but we’re pretty sure it was those pigs.”
Smart ass.
That night actually began a reign of javelina terror, as they visited our neighborhood many times in the next few weeks. A dead one was found by the neighbors. Plants were eaten. Roses destroyed. Meetings conducted. Eventually, they moved on. Many local residents were visited by the javelinas, although I was the only one that called the cops.
In corporate conference rooms, a major complaint about social media is that it forces companies to get involved with dissatisfied customers in a public forum.
The historic imperative has been to ignore complaints publicly, and deal with them privately via form letters and an occasional telephone call from a customer service representative.
The rule of thumb has been that you never engage directly with a brand critic, because it adds credibility and weight to their arguments if the company acknowledges them.
If You Don’t Put Your Head in the Sand, You’ll Never Get Any in Your EyesThis ostrich tactic is absolutely the wrong way to handle criticism in a wired world. Ignoring the problem just makes it worse, as citizen bloggers will ramp up the outrage if their concerns aren’t addressed.
Instead of looking at social media as being forced to “handle” a “negative”, brands should view it as an opportunity to improve, grow and thrive. It’s the ultimate canary in the coal mine. If your company has legitimate problems with its operations (and most customer complaints have at least a kernel (and usually a cob) of truth), social media is the greatest opportunity of all time.
By listening, you not only learn what those problems are (with no focus group expense, by the way) but by responding to issues authentically and sympathetically (Zappos, Dell, Comcast et al), you can actually gain more customers than are lost because of the original problem.
And this isn’t just a big company scenario. If you run a restaurant and your weekday lunch-time chef is much worse than your weekend dinner-time chef, it’s entirely possible that a blogger or podcaster (like me via Hottie & The Fatso) will complain about it eventually. As a restaurant owner, wouldn’t you want to know that? You not only learn a critical piece of information about your own organization, but it gives you the chance to set your restaurant apart. A simple blog comment like this would do the trick:
“Wow. Really interesting to hear your perspective on our lunch vs. dinner quality differences. We of course strive for consistently great experiences at all times, and I’ll be auditing our lunch and dinner service immediately to get us back on track. Many thanks for your observation. We hope you’ll join us again for lunch soon and give us another chance.”
It’s about listening to your customers and humanizing your company. And once you commit to it, every piece of “bad news” you discover through social media gives you a chance to make it good.
A long-standing “success metric” in email marketing is the unsubscribe ratio. Like telling children that their pet fish is “just sleeping” the “unsubscribe ratio” is a euphemism.
Your unsubscribe ratio is the percentage of people who receive your email that have gotten so tired or frustrated with your program that they simply can’t take it any more. They’re fed up with your lack of relevancy, your frequency or some other shortcoming, and they’ve taken the extraordinary measure of actually clicking links and buttons to make you go away.
Unsubscribe rates have actually declined in many cases, but don’t get all cocky. It’s not because email programs have become more relevant to consumers, they’re just clicking the “spam” button, instead of using the “unsubscribe” link.
When you think about the frustration level required to actually unsubscribe, it’s disheartening that unsubscribe rates of 1 customer in 200 are often considered acceptable. If a similar number of customers walked out of a retail store yelling “I can’t take this anymore. I’ll NEVER come back,” a lot of attention would be paid to it.
Hiding unsubscribes on a spreadsheet diminishes what it actually means for your brand. A few bright ideas to shine a light on unsubscribes:
1. For e-commerce companies, instead of tracking unsubscribes as a raw number, track the total value of all prior purchases made by unsubscribers, and put that dollar amount on the spreadsheet.
2. Each time a customer unsubscribes, send an email to the the CEO or CMO.
3. In addition to providing a CAN-SPAM mandated unsubscribe link, offer your customers an unsubscribe phone number where they can call or text message, and an unsubscribe Twitter account. Once unsubscribers start creating content instead of just hash marks in Excel, your organization will start paying attention to the cause, not the ratio.
Effective immediately, I’m going to pay more attention to unsubscribes myself. At the recent Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, Gary Vaynerchuk said he is investing major resources into having team members telephone unsubscribers. I can’t go that route because I don’t have phone number for my subscribers, but wherever I can I’ll be emailing people that drop me on Twitter or via RSS.
And it’s already proving interesting. I emailed a gentleman from Norfolk who unfollowed me on Twitter (you can get unfollow notifications by using Qwitter). The text of my email is below.
Keith -
Hi there. I received a notification that you’ve unfollowed me on Twitter.
I want to do everything possible to serve my readers and my community. It would be fantastic if you could give me a sense of what you didn’t like about my tweets, or what you would have liked to see more of in them.
Thanks in advance for your feedback. It’s truly appreciated, and I hope to win you back someday.
Very best regards,
(@jaybaer)
JASON BAER
Convince & Convert
Social Media & Email Consulting
——————————————–
Blog: www.convinceandconvert.com
Twitter: @jaybaer
Ear: (602) 616-1895
Within 5 minutes I received his reply:
You were removed during a clean up of folks that did not follow me back. Twitter stills shows that you are not following me.
A perfectly reasonable explanation, and one I preferred to “your content sucks.” And now, we’re both following one another. It’s a success story.
As you build your email list and your social media currency, it’s easy to view individual audience members as less than critical, because another subscriber could be just minutes away. Don’t fall for it. You don’t have to be the very best to succeed in a wired world. You just have to care the most. And I’m going to try to out-care my competition. How about you?
Scott Monty, the head of social media for Ford, participated in a Twitter 20 interview on October 23 and answered a wide range of questions about social media at big companies, and his ideas for the future of conversation marketing.
Scott and myself and 248 other lucky folks were in Scottsdale for the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer.
1. @jaybaer: How do you describe your role at Ford?
2. @jaybaer: This is a new role within Ford? How did they handle social media before you arrived?
3. @jaybaer: A lot of talk at this #mpdm conference about setting social media objectives. Do you have one for Ford, or several?
4. @jaybaer: Auto is a many layered business. How do dealers view your work? Are they aware? Can and do they do their own social media?
5. @jaybaer: Interesting point about CRM. Do you feel social media is more an acquisition tactic or retention and brand loyalty tactic?
6. @jaybaer: Ford is of course a large company. How does that help or hinder your social media efforts? It sounds like they’ve given you a lot of rope
Good news: I’m the sole appointed expert. Bad news: I’m only one person and I’m in constant demand.7. @jaybaer: The company has a lot of agencies and other marketing programs. Do you actively coordinate the social media efforts with them?
8. @jaybaer: You were at Crayon, a social media strategy firm previously. Differences in the in-house and out-of-house SM process?
9. @jaybaer: What social media programs/plans are you rolling out for Ford that have you excited (other than free Ford Flex rides at #mpdm)?
Wide-reaching Twitter strategy; http://www.the2010mustang.com; bloggers at Media Drive Day10. @jaybaer: In terms of your Twitter strategy, is it de-centralized? Several people, several accounts? How do you staff it?
11. @jaybaer: There’s talk about companies cutting SM budgets because it’s “experimental”. How do you balance SM and today’s auto climate?
12. @jaybaer: Some say (including here at #mpdm) “Sure he can do it, he’s at Ford. I’m a small biz, I don’t even know the 1st step.” What is step 1?
13. @jaybaer: In today’s #mpdm luncheon @garyvee talked a lot about passion. Why are you passionate about social media?
14. @jaybaer: I agree that SM is the future of marketing, but when will that future arrive? Still people not online, much less Soc Media.
15. @jaybaer: Are you more of a Ford Flex guy or a 2010 Mustang guy? What else do you have coming out?
16. @jaybaer: Your travel schedule is onerous. Is that helping or hurting your social media outreach efforts? Wi-Fi in the new Mustang!
17. @jaybaer: You apparently have a Sherlock Holmes blog?http://bakerstreetblog.com Can you elaborate on that please?
18. @jaybaer: It’s Elementary. You also have a co-blog with@cc_chapman on diners and dives (@diners). Recommended diners or go-to items?
19. @jaybaer: I imagine it’s been a bit of a whirlwind since you started at Ford (3+ months). What’s been most gratifying to-date?
20. @jaybaer: The rules are still being written. What bugs you? If you could outlaw one component of social media, what would it be?
