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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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?
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.
Sphere: Related Content
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?
You may have heard of social media. There’s been a bit of news about it recently. However, a lot of people making that news have created expectations and beliefs about social media that aren’t true.
1. Social Media is Inexpensive
False. As Charlene Li said recently, social media trades media cost for labor cost. Done correctly, social media - even a simple reputation monitoring program - is a time intensive proposition that requires daily vigilance.
2. Social Media is Fast
False. Social media is by definition slow. Done correctly, social media is about developing meaningful relationships with customers and prospective customers in their natural habitat. That’s not a “wave the magic wand” scenario. You have to create content, be part of many communities, and proceed incrementally. Many successful social media programs take months (or even more than a year) to really germinate.
3. Social Media is “Viral Marketing”
False, in the same way that a square is also a rectangle, but a rectangle isn’t a square. Can a social media program go viral? Absolutely. But if you’re engaged in a social media program in an effort to go “viral” you’re not really engaged in social media at all. You’re engaged in an advertising and marketing campaign that uses the Web as its distribution platform.
4. Social Media results can’t be measured
False. Especially in comparison to many other communication programs like traditional PR, TV advertising, outdoor advertising and others, social media actually offers pretty solid metrics. Many social media software packages (great ebook analysis of them here) can provide highly detailed reports on the impact of social media programs. Can those results be tied back directly to sales, and therefore ROI? Probably not yet, but other than search and email (and maybe banners) where CAN you do that?
5. Social Media is optional
It doesn’t matter what the demographics of your customers are. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Your customers and prospects are talking about you online. Your company needs to be part of that conversation. Today. Online is where many people do their talking, so that’s where you need to be. If barber shops were still driving consumer sentiment, I’d be writing this post about barber shop marketing. Be where your customers are.
6. Social media is hard
False. It’s not hard, it’s complicated. And that’s only because of the alphabet soup of social networks, lifestreams, sharing sites, etc. Social media is not about Facebook or MySpace or Flickr or Twitter or blogs or YouTube. It’s about having a strategy for making your company or organization more like a person and less like a machine. It’s about humanization.
If your customers and prospects feel like your company is more human and actually cares about them, they’ll want to be part of it. That’s the brand engagement holy grail that we’re all seeking. Too often, the humanization part gets overlooked in an effort to create a “user-generated video contest widget that we’ll launch on Facebook with support from Ustream.” Whatever. Use technology to be yourself, and don’t overthink it.
Sphere: Related Content
Because of its simplicity and immediacy, Twitter enables brands to win the 1:1 battle with customers and potential customers in ways that even other social media constructs cannot. The density of Eureka! moments on Twitter is quite high, and if brands use it right, it’s the ultimate weapon for turning lemons into lemonade.
Let’s examine two recent personal examples:
Recently, I was a speaker at the ExactTarget Connections conference in Indianapolis. Like all good digital marketing geeks, I was monitoring the Twitter conversation by setting up a search for “#ET08″ (the official conference hashtag) and “Exacttarget” on my Twitellator Pro iphone app. (this can also be done using http://search.twitter.com).
I come across the tweet below from Andrew Eklund, CEO of Ciceron, a Web marketing firm in Minneapolis.
Note that this conference had sold out at 1,200 attendees. A possibly soon to be disappointed Mr. Eklund was headed to the hotel from the airport. However, Dawn DeVirgilio runs the @ExactTarget Twitter account and was also monitoring conference tweets.
She rushed to the registration desk, signed up Mr. Eklund for the conference, and had a name badge and complete registration package ready and waiting by the time he made it to the hotel 15 minutes after his initial tweet.
That’s the power of Twitter-driven customer service.
Social media is all about timeliness. I have an RSS feed of any tweets that mention my name or company name. Apparently, folks at the National Hockey League are doing the same thing.
My recent post about the NHL’s new ad campaign and its missing social media and digital marketing ingredients was answered almost immediately by Mike DiLorenzo, the Director of Corporate Communications for the league:
I then had a very interesting series of email exchanges with Mr. DiLorenzo about the NHL and its future social media plans. Fantastic! Talk about listening and responding with an authentic voice. To think that an NHL executive found my post through Twitter, acknowledged its merit, and then talked to me about it within 18 hours is simply extraordinary.
I’ve spoken at a ton of conferences lately, and while I’ve been absolutely blessed with on-time airline travel, I’ve been bedeviled by a series of crappy hotel rooms. The nadir may have been the Westin in Indianapolis, where I must have had the worst room on the property. I sent out this missive via Twitter:
No response whatsoever from the hotel or Westin corporate. Given that nothing incites passion like travel, you’d think social media monitoring would be a MUST for a company like Westin. Evidently not.
I’m no Chris Brogan, Joseph Jaffe, or Jason Falls (yet), but I do have ~475 followers on Twitter (and a 92 on Twitter Grader). That’s 475 people (in theory) that saw me bitch about the Westin in Indianapolis (including at least 15 people who were staying at the same hotel). Can I determine the precise consequences for Westin as a result? No, but I don’t think it’ll help them. And I won’t be back.
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Sphere: Related ContentI just finished giving a speech at the western region meeting of the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations in Sedona, Arizona.
NCMPR is the association of community and technical college marketers. A really interesting group that needs to harness social media and work with prospective students on an individual, relevant, highly personal basis.
While this presentation was specifically for NCMPR, there is a lot of material that will be valuable to anyone looking to launch and maintain a social media and digital marketing program for a mid-sized business or organization.
Key points in this presentation:
- Media outlets have exploded, causing audience fragmentation
- You have to communicate to audiences individually, because they don’t herd together like the old days
- Using the power of audience segmentation
- Digital marketing is critical in this new hyper-targeted marketing world, because online users identify themselves through their search queries and site usage
- Ways to find prospective community college students (Twitter, Facebook, Blog search, Flickr)
- Web site is the key to translating awareness of your college (or any brand) to action
- Web content needs to be transparent, real, and multi-modal
- Lead acquisition is critical for colleges. Give users multiple call to action options.
- Secrets to good form design
- Web site testing and optimization basics
- Lead nurturing via personalized follow up and triggered communications
Comments are very much appreciated. Enjoy.
Sphere: Related Content
In a sign that the guys who control ad budgets are getting the value of interactive advertising faster than the agencies that place it, P&G announced recently that they are introducing their new Crest Weekly toothpaste almost entirely through the blogosphere.
Samples of Crest Weekly were sent to prominent bloggers (as well as 600,000 Moms) in an effort to trigger an underground viral effect. P&G marketing honchos say that Crest Weekly is an unconventional product. You use it weekly to augment your regular brushing - it has more grit in it to give you that “just back from the dentist, but not numbed or broke” feeling. Thus, it is difficult to explain on TV.
While that makes sense, I suspect the famous data hounds at P&G are also cooking up a little test to see if social media can really carry the water for a launch.
It appears - at least for now - that it cannot, but results are inconclusive.
My search for blog posts, Tweets and other signposts indicating that bloggers indeed used Crest Weekly and wrote about it turned up fairly low volume - although Ariana Huffington’s smile looks a little brighter these days.
I found 10 separate blog posts, on well-targeted sites (beauty, women’s, shopping). I also found just one Tweet (from one of the bloggers promoting her post).
My favorite among them was Tia Williams’ “Crest In Show” post that artfully wove in her background as the daughter of a dentist. Nice!
P&G has not said how many bloggers were given samples, but they did disclose that they began arriving in early August. The product launches in stores next week (mid-September).
There are two fundamental problems with the Crest Weekly approach.
1. They actually sent the product out too early. Blogging is a NOW thing, not a “we’re working on the December issue in August” thing. Sending out samples 6 weeks before the product launches when one use of the product will clearly communicate the benefits to the blogger is too long of a lead time.
It will be very interesting to see if blog posts about Crest Weekly intensify next week when the product launches. I suspect some bloggers are holding their posts until closer to launch. If you find some new ones on Google Blog Search or Technorati, please let me know.
2. The tactic overwhelmed the strategy. The notion that a major consumer goods manufacturer would launch a product via social media is so novel (for now) that the buzz around it became about the marketing approach rather than about the toothpaste. In fact, there are actually more blog posts (including one more once I click Publish) about the social media launch then about Crest Weekly and its magical teeth scouring properties.
Hopefully, P&G won’t interpret this to-date tepid response from the blogosphere as a sign that social media won’t work, and will instead adjust its tactical plan next time around for greater success.
In a related story, Kellogg announced today that the ROI on their digital marketing for Special K cereal (blogs, ads, microsite) is superior to the ROI for traditional advertising. While this isn’t shocking to yours truly - a well-targeted and well-executed digital program will almost always beat traditional in a pure ROI fight - for a company like Kellogg to put that information in print (Ad Week) is a quite the watershed.
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R&B star Jonelle Monae has burst on the scene recently, with guest spots in the Outkast movie Idlewyld and new tracks co-produced by Sean “Diddy” Combs, who says Monae may be the most important new artist signing of his career.
In addition to loads of raw talent, Monae (who has self-directed much of her career trajectory) completely understands and exploits the music industry circa 21st century.
She knows it’s not 1970s album rock anymore, and the PR business can learn 3 critical lessons from her.
The Monae Way
Recognizing that iTunes has essentially killed the album format, enabling music buyers to cherry-pick their favorite tracks and “shuffling” their music in a non-linear progression, Monae is eschewing albums in favor of quarterly 4 or 5 track EPs with heavy digital distribution.
The PR Way
Given the rise of social media and citizen journalism, there are fewer and fewer huge media hits available to PR practitioners. Outside of USA Today, Oprah and a small coven of others, the media outlets with truly water cooler reach number zero.
Consequently, savvy PR phenoms are rejecting the swing for the fences PR strategy of relentless pitching of big-time publications and broadcast outlets, and instead focusing on a broader strategy that relies on viral distribution with bloggers and cross-linking as catalysts. It’s a solid strategy. Instead of a scorecard that looks like 0-0-0-0-4-0-3-0 the new PR aims for results that are more consistent, client-satisfying, and enable one hit to build on another. Something like this: 0-1-1-2-2-3-3-4 Over the course of the campaign, the end results can be significantly greater, although possibly less showy.
The Monae Way
Unlike the string of female hip hop and R&B artists that have proceeded her (Missy Elliot, Lil Kim, et al) Monae has never trafficked in sex as her calling card, and has relied on her powerful vocals and throw-back musical sensibilities.
The PR Way
Modern PR successes are increasingly those that are noteworthy due to their unique nature rather than their reach. The amount of secondary and tertiary PR that Dell, Comcast, Jet Blue, Zappos, H&R Block and their brethren have received based on their proactive Twitter call and response routine is amazing and no doubt impactful.
Is it that difficult to monitor Twitter and be a good ambassador for your brand? Not really, once you actually empower staff or your agency to do so. But the fact that people don’t expect a company to interact with them on a human, personal level is what makes these programs memorable. The power of unexpectedness is even more acute for companies that are perceived to be unfeeling - like Comcast.
The Monae Way
Despite cutting against the grain with the nature of her art and the format of her releases, Monae built her reputation largely on a powerhouse live show. As proven by Ashley Simpson, it’s nearly impossible to fake a mind-blowing concert performance, and that level of craftsmanship and effort turns tag-alongs into casual fans, and turns casual fans into brand ambassadors.
The PR Way
The same is true for PR firms. PR professionals can pull the strings of the “media” using social tactics that were unthinkable even 4 years ago. As such, the tendency is to create your own Groundswell for your client using blogs, reviews, tweets, Flickr galleries and other content machinations. Whether clients are savvy enough to pay them for it per se, all modern and knowing PR folks want to facilitate net positive coverage of their clients online. Unfortunately, the temptation is to write your own reviews or encourage others to do so in ways that aren’t necessary organic.
The problem is the collective wisdom (and it definitely is collective) of online audiences defeats most attempts to “game” the social media PR system. The number of reviews, comments, tweets, posts, galleries and other content archetypes created by Mr. and Mrs. Consumer will overwhelm even the busiest of PR bees eventually. Further, ANY hint of falseness is put under a spotlight and defamed by the online community at-large (and rightfully so in most cases).
Consequently, the PR industry needs to stick to facilitating authentic conversations on behalf of clients, and stay away from the siren song of do-it-yourself social media coverage.
Other lessons? Leave a comment please.
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As appeared in bizAZ Magazine July/Aug 2008 edition
Unless you’re selling specialized rivets to the military industrial complex via no bid contracts, chances are your customers are talking about you online. And not just via email, in a “hey mom, I think your accountant totally messed up your taxes” way, but in a massively public forum, using social media.
Imagine you run a coffeehouse. Imagine your regular morning barista calls in sick due to a tragic tattooing mishap. Imagine the replacement guy is the Bill Bidwill of coffee pouring. Imagine a regular customer goes to Facebook and posts a message to the Arizona Coffee group about your inadequate beverages. Those people then repost to their friends. Within 10 minutes, hundreds of your customers and prospective customers are chipping away at your brand with every keystroke.
Welcome to the present, where every citizen is a journalist, and listening to online conversations is a requirement for every company.
The fact is people need to communicate. Along with inventing new and exotic flavor of Doritos, 
it’s what we do. The other fact is people don’t have much time (or gas money) to communicate face-to-face any longer. Been to many 2.5 hour business awards luncheons lately? Me neither. Technology has filled the vacuum of human connectivity, whether it’s social networking sites like Facebook, review sites like TripAdvisor, or group bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon.
American Idol drew an average of 29 million users this season, making it by far the largest show on television. In contrast, MySpace has more than 110 million users, and Facebook has more than 65 million, more than half of whom are older than 25. 
Take the number of people that read the New York Times online every day. Multiply them by 26. That’s the number of daily YouTube users.
Social media is big, and it’s not just for kids. How can you make it work for you?
First, you have to fundamentally embrace the concept that communication between your company and its customers must be a conversation, not a monologue. Consumers don’t want just the two paragraphs of boilerplate pabulum that your PR firm crafted. They want insight. They want humanity.
Are you going to be exposed to less than rosy perceptions of your company? Probably. But unless you currently inhabit the White House, isn’t the ability to know your weaknesses and do something about them superior to ignorance? If indeed your replacement barista sucks, that knowledge is useful. In many ways, social media and consumers’ conversations within it is the canary in the coal mine for your company’s operations and marketing.
Second, you have to decide whether you are in listen mode or proactive mode. Listen mode entails monitoring a wide variety of online sources to determine where and when your brand (as well as your competitors’ brands) are being discussed, and using the texture and tone of those comments to improve your company operations. Listening mode is sometimes called Online Reputation Management, and often includes a program whereby members of your staff (or your agency partner) will jump in to social media conversations to put out fires and provide assistance.
Proactive mode takes the program one step further, and involves the creation of social media content to facilitate (not just react to) conversations between consumers and your company. Creating videos, blogging, building a Wikipedia page, a Facebook application, encouraging consumer reviews. This type of envelope pushing is especially effective when deployed by brands that are not known for inciting customer passion. The less than sexy H&R Block has deployed a very broad and terrifically nuanced social media program for many months, and its customer base among social media users has soared.
Ultimately, if you don’t reach out and become part of the online conversation about your brand, the social media community will define the attributes of your brand without your input. And while that may work out just fine, a cursory review of what’s on YouTube these days makes me want a seat at the brand definition table pretty badly. So take your fingers out of your ears, and use what’s being said about you online as an opportunity, not an albatross.
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