Digital Influence Mapping Project

The Planning Logic of Social Paths

We are rolling out our 2012 Social Strategy and Engagement Training across our global network. This is the expert-level training for our Social@Ogilvy teams around the world and is in its 7^th year. I have just come back from delivering this training in our Singapore and Hong Kong offices.  They are doing some awesome work and my favorite part of this responsibility is learning from our experts in-market.

This year, we have doubled-down on our discipline to create insights from social and other data. Insights strengthen any strategy and ultimately answer why people should care to engage in a program or with a brand via social and digital media. If you want more effective social programs – better short and long term results – then having genuine insight into the behavior of customers, the business and culture are key to knowing how to be relevant.

 

Insights drive effectiveness

We discover insights by combining 2 or more data points or observations to reveal something new and useful. A clinical but accurate description of what is often an inspiring discovery. We get insights from listening data, persona profiles of how users actually use social and digital media, ethnographies and more. One place we discover insights and practical knowledge that help us know how and where to engage people, are social paths. These are a type of customer journey that use research to understand all the relevant moments people interact with digital and social content along a decision-making journey like what shoulder bag to buy or which vaccines to get for their children. Social Paths help us understand where we can be of-use to people by delivering valuable content, tools or an experience along their way.

 

The Real Customer Journey

We have a model inside Ogilvy for understanding what will drive people’s behavior through the purchase cycle. Developed and championed by our planning leads – Ben Richards and Colin Mitchell – the Customer Journey is part of our integrated planning model called Fusion. 

I love this tool and framework. It really helps understand how we can be of-use to people and to drive actual behavior (vs. attitude). By articulating the desired response we hope to get from people at various moments in the cycle, we can map the barriers and the drivers to that response. 

That’s the customer journey writ large and can help drive any big programmatic strategy and idea in marketing. 

Why I Like Social Paths

In Google’s ZMOT research they find “The number of sources used by any shopper for any average shopping occasion has almost doubled, from 5.2 to 10.4 sources.” How we move from initial discovery through consideration, evaluation, purchase and on through the product experience and potential advocacy has certainty gotten more complex. Our examination clearly reveals a pattern of people reaching out through their social graph repeatedly through all phases of this cycle. Looking at just their social and digital touchpoints such as posting an image on Facebook for friend feedback, Googling to find customer reviews or following a brand on Facebook to receive valuable updates, is a somewhat artificial act. Ideally, we would look at a more holistic ‘customer path.’ Ok, we do that, but we also take a deep dive to look specifically at the social and digital moments. 

Each of these moments represents an opportunity for insight and for actual execution. We learn how people are starting to use mobile access to consumer reviews while standing in front of a display counter in-store. Readers take photos of book covers in Barnes and Noble to collect readable books they will buy later in batches on Amazon. Who wants to carry around a heavy book?   

Social Paths have a practical and tactical purpose, as well. Our Social Shopping colleague, Matt Gierhart sees that these moments can all be disrupted by the brand. Not in a bad way. We can learn where we can place content and what type will be most helpful or entertaining. We can see where the brand might make getting a task done a little (or a lot) easier. 

Just as listening to social conversations helps us understand what people are really thinking about brands and issues, Social Paths help us understand the process we all step through towards a goal. We find this a particularly helpful view on the customer journey.

(image of The Census Project, a large-scale public art project created by artist Anita Glesta for the United States General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program)

 

The Quality of the Conversation on Facebook Matters

Last September Michael Scissons, president-CEO of Syncapse, used data to reveal that “Engagement on the Facebook walls of leading brands is down 22%.” He plotted engagement metrics on the top 300 brand pages. His hypothesis is that brands are not delivering long term value in favor of quick bumps from overuse of coupons and offers.

More recently the Facebook Timeline innovations seemed to improve overall engagement. According to Simply Measured, the change brought a 14% Increase in Fan Engagement. The format and the much industry-discussed launch called for lots more pictures and video content which saw a 65% increase in engagement (people interactive with multimedia content).

Are we good or are we in trouble? Are brands delivering the best quality interaction and value via their page content or is it all devolving? Are learning the hard lessons of the difference between a Facebook relationship and a broadcast channel?

Quality matters
My hypothesis is that many brands are not doing all they can to create a sustained and valuable relationship with their fans, followers, customers via these still new channels (facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc…). They too often fall into a habit of just broadcasting out content. Since the metrics say pictures and video do well, they try and create as much of that as possible. Sometimes they fly by the numbers alone without context. Rohit Bharagava has a new compelling book out now called Likenomics. It is not about Facebook. He makes a great point about marketers who steer completely by data without regard for context in the section, “Why Context Matters (And Your Sticky Website Actually Stinks.” He cites John Hayes from American Express with a thoughtful quote – “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot.”  I would add one word in there - “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure easily and undervalue the things we cannot.”

Marketers are looking at readily available data on what drives the most interactions. They are not always weighing the benefits of a varied and enduring relationship with fans. I hope everyone knows that a small number of fans in any fanbase routinely do most of the interacting with content. That is a standard quality of many communities. Keeping that loyal core involved is valuable and just good business. And, yes, when asked, consumers cite coupons or offers as the number one reason they follow a brand. Again, let’s not over simplify and make every interaction a “10% off coupon.” That flies in the face of everything we know about building valuable brands.

The data should guide us. Not rule us.

Relevance too

AdAge recently needlessly took a jab at the social media specialists who champion a more conversational approach to wall content.

“Among the weirdness Facebook's existence has loosed upon the world is the idea that it's OK, and perhaps even good business, for brands to sidle up and give you verbal balm for your case of the Mondays, ask for predictions on the big game and offer random thoughts on things that have not a whit to do with their product or service.

The touchy-feely strategy is meant to be conversational -- human, even. But new data from Facebook itself tell us that what looks good on the social-media guru's presentation deck isn't the best approach for making Facebook work for the brand.”

Their true point and the point of the Facebook study is that content that relates to the brand – the reason people liked the page in the first place – matters. Users engage more with content relevant to the page topic which just happens to be the brand.

Clearly, relevant content is key, yet a conversational tone true to the brand can help as well.

Create the right mix
Different wall content drives different fan action. Likes, Shares, Comments all have value but not equal value. Object Likes (liking a piece of content vs. a page, also called “fanning”) are often devalued by brands. I had a spirits client who dropped them from KPI metrics since he felt, rightly so, that it was too thoughtless a gesture and was not indicative of any serious engagement. ‘Shares’ show up in your wall and therefore take bigger advantage of the network effect available in Facebook.

As Matt Creamer put it in the recent AdAge article, “Facebook to Brands: You're Posting Stuff Wrong”,

“Another important finding was that asking people to like a post indeed yielded more likes, but it didn't do much for the other forms of engagement, including the all-important share action that sends a brand's post into a users' timelines for all of their followers to see. Compared with likes, shares represent a bigger investment from the consumer and occur less frequently. Thus, shares are often going to be more meaningful from a marketing perspective. After all, they suggest the brand is tapping into that friend-of-fan network that's central to Facebook's viral proposition.”

We have found 7 simple types of content that each drive different types of user engagement. (See 7 Types of Facebook posts here.) Our Community Managers use them creatively and responsively with communities to drive long term and immediate actions. We listen and respond. If we drove simply by the data without context or a long term commitment then we would simply post remarkable picture after remarkable video – multimedia driving the most ‘shares’ in the Facebook study.

Quality of the relationship matters. Quality of the content, too. Brands can embrace a more fine-tuned and, yes, conversational but not irrelevant, cadence to their communications. Just using the Facebook wall as a broadcast channel will never justify the huge valuation in the Facebook IPO nor  the substantial bets that brands have made in their multi-million dollar ‘partnerships’ with Facebook.

The Quality of the Conversation on Facebook Matters

Last September Michael Scissons, president-CEO of Syncapse, used data to reveal that “Engagement on the Facebook walls of leading brands is down 22%.” He plotted engagement metrics on the top 300 brand pages. His hypothesis is that brands are not delivering long term value in favor of quick bumps from overuse of coupons and offers.

More recently the Facebook Timeline innovations seemed to improve overall engagement. According to Simply Measured, the change brought a 14% Increase in Fan Engagement. The format and the much industry-discussed launch called for lots more pictures and video content which saw a 65% increase in engagement (people interactive with multimedia content).

Are we good or are we in trouble? Are brands delivering the best quality interaction and value via their page content or is it all devolving? Are learning the hard lessons of the difference between a Facebook relationship and a broadcast channel?

Quality matters
My hypothesis is that many brands are not doing all they can to create a sustained and valuable relationship with their fans, followers, customers via these still new channels (facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc…). They too often fall into a habit of just broadcasting out content. Since the metrics say pictures and video do well, they try and create as much of that as possible. Sometimes they fly by the numbers alone without context. Rohit Bharagava has a new compelling book out now called Likenomics. It is not about Facebook. He makes a great point about marketers who steer completely by data without regard for context in the section, “Why Context Matters (And Your Sticky Website Actually Stinks.” He cites John Hayes from American Express with a thoughtful quote – “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot.”  I would add one word in there - “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure easily and undervalue the things we cannot.”

Marketers are looking at readily available data on what drives the most interactions. They are not always weighing the benefits of a varied and enduring relationship with fans. I hope everyone knows that a small number of fans in any fanbase routinely do most of the interacting with content. That is a standard quality of many communities. Keeping that loyal core involved is valuable and just good business. And, yes, when asked, consumers cite coupons or offers as the number one reason they follow a brand. Again, let’s not over simplify and make every interaction a “10% off coupon.” That flies in the face of everything we know about building valuable brands.

The data should guide us. Not rule us.

Relevance too

AdAge recently needlessly took a jab at the social media specialists who champion a more conversational approach to wall content.

“Among the weirdness Facebook's existence has loosed upon the world is the idea that it's OK, and perhaps even good business, for brands to sidle up and give you verbal balm for your case of the Mondays, ask for predictions on the big game and offer random thoughts on things that have not a whit to do with their product or service.

The touchy-feely strategy is meant to be conversational -- human, even. But new data from Facebook itself tell us that what looks good on the social-media guru's presentation deck isn't the best approach for making Facebook work for the brand.”

Their true point and the point of the Facebook study is that content that relates to the brand – the reason people liked the page in the first place – matters. Users engage more with content relevant to the page topic which just happens to be the brand.

Clearly, relevant content is key, yet a conversational tone true to the brand can help as well.

Create the right mix
Different wall content drives different fan action. Likes, Shares, Comments all have value but not equal value. Object Likes (liking a piece of content vs. a page, also called “fanning”) are often devalued by brands. I had a spirits client who dropped them from KPI metrics since he felt, rightly so, that it was too thoughtless a gesture and was not indicative of any serious engagement. ‘Shares’ show up in your wall and therefore take bigger advantage of the network effect available in Facebook.

As Matt Creamer put it in the recent AdAge article, “Facebook to Brands: You're Posting Stuff Wrong”,

“Another important finding was that asking people to like a post indeed yielded more likes, but it didn't do much for the other forms of engagement, including the all-important share action that sends a brand's post into a users' timelines for all of their followers to see. Compared with likes, shares represent a bigger investment from the consumer and occur less frequently. Thus, shares are often going to be more meaningful from a marketing perspective. After all, they suggest the brand is tapping into that friend-of-fan network that's central to Facebook's viral proposition.”

We have found 7 simple types of content that each drive different types of user engagement. (See 7 Types of Facebook posts here.) Our Community Managers use them creatively and responsively with communities to drive long term and immediate actions. We listen and respond. If we drove simply by the data without context or a long term commitment then we would simply post remarkable picture after remarkable video – multimedia driving the most ‘shares’ in the Facebook study.

Quality of the relationship matters. Quality of the content, too. Brands can embrace a more fine-tuned and, yes, conversational but not irrelevant, cadence to their communications. Just using the Facebook wall as a broadcast channel will never justify the huge valuation in the Facebook IPO nor  the substantial bets that brands have made in their multi-million dollar ‘partnerships’ with Facebook.

Just-in-time or Too-little-too-late in Social in Mexico? - The Agency Side

Agencies have their own too-soon and too-late conundrum. Almost all marketing and communications firms are paid to deliver business results today. Maybe, maybe they are working towards a 2-3 year horizon on a brand project. Too few are independently investing in the future but rather look to client initiatives and projects to justify a new solution in mobile, community marketing, employee advocacy or any of the other innovations that stand to radically change how we market.

The rapid growth of new behaviors like those in Mexico will not likely change, meaning, we are all ‘settling in’ for a bumpy ride of non-stop change for the foreseeable future.

Agencies have to choose if it’s their role to lead clients towards change or simply be responsive when the client comes around to changing. There are advantages to each choice. My bias is to be the agency thinking ahead and thoughtfully advising clients how to lean forward and do things that will help them for years to come. 

I have heard too many agency marketers around the world say, “our clients aren’t ready to innovate via social media; they aren’t asking for it.” We need to be stronger business people clearly distinguishing between innovation with its benefits to the business and efficiency with its role to improving the bottom line today. 

 

Will you be Just-in-time or Too-little-too-late in Social in Mexico?

Marketers around the world are trying to figure out when to divert resources to use social media behaviors and technology in their marketing, communications and customer service. Too early and the best conceived plans on Facebook or customer communities will not produce enough results to survive the next budget season. Too late and an organization can find itself chasing after consumer behavior and losing reputation, if not business, to competitors. 

We have big multinational clients who are deploying Facebook community management as quickly as possible in 50+ markets. Many of these countries don’t come close to having even critical mass adoption of internet access never mind consumers flocking to engage with brands via social networks. Still, the brands have no question that the velocity of social media adoption around the world will be faster than we have all been used to. 

Mexico is a Real-Fast Growth Market

And there’s good reason for this. Just look at Global Web Index’s summary of the real growth markets in social network usage. Mexico outpaces the US and that isn’t just because the US is saturated. A lot of behaviors in Mexico outpace other markets. Smartphone (45%) and tablet (16%) adoption in Mexico also outpaces the US.  Habits are shifting now.

According to Forester, “Brazilian and Mexican (connected + urban) consumers spend more time online than they do watching TV.” Where people spend their time, what they are trying to accomplish and where they focus their attention should matter to marketers. 

As for internet usage, “By 2016, Forrester expects online adoption to increase in Brazil to 57% and in Mexico to 48% – vs. the current 47% and 38%.” Half the population online. 

The Biggest Change for Marketers

As people like you and I adopt apps, adapt to being always connected and discover new ways to combine communications and content, how we form opinions and make decisions (including purchase decisions) is getting more complex. When buying a new bed, I am likely to reach out to my social graph throughout the buyer journey to get recommendations, check my decision with friends and post-justify my purchase with celebratory image via Instagram. Sure, I will visit retailers and manufacturers Web sites and pay attention to targeted and even non-targeted advertising.  

But two things the customer journey is not is neat nor linear. Attribution is a beast. It is likely more important to gain an understating how social works in combination with other owned and paid media choices to help consumers towards their decision and willingness to advocate. 

The biggest change is learning how to use social media as part of a strategy to drive business not simply add it to the channel mix. As a channel, social disappoints. As a powerful, new set of consumer behaviors it will continue to change how we market for years to come. That new learning will take some time for big brands. We see this everyday as major global marketers try to scale the learnings in social from one market to many, embrace new digital measurement models and provoke “old dogs” in charge of marketing around the world to try out the new tricks. 

Innovation Not ROI

Brands in Mexico should be aggressively deploying social media strategies and increasing their spend. Consumers are changing fast and organizational change takes years. It is time to innovate and accrue an understanding of how a brand’s use of social media behaviors and platforms can drive customer advocacy, raise meaningful awareness and discovery and, yes, even drive sales. Set aside our well-intended focus on ROI for now. We will get there. Not its time to innovate.  

 

(image: thanks to Upper Playground for their image from the Mexico Contemprary Art Fair (MACO)

The Importance of Professional Conversations at WOMMA

In this past Sunday Review in the NYTimes, Shelly Turkle from M.I.T. offers a compelling case that our adopted digital behaviors may be satisfying our compulsion for 'always-on' connectivity while at the same time robbing us from the benefits of true conversation. 

This rings true to me. The effort needed to engage in a typical conversation is greater than that needed to constantly be referring back to email and IM. And the payout, the value to us as human beings of that conversation, is also greater, or, at the very least, is a critical value in and of itself. 

The value of professional conversations

Every time I attend a WOMMA event, I learn. More and more it happens in the side conversations in addition to the actual sessions I attend. The upcoming WOMMU event in Chicago from May 7-9 is a terrific chance to go beyond connections and actually have conversations with a diverse group of professionals. Each comes with their own lens and experience applying social media and word of mouth marketing to their businesses. 

I am sending a large group of our staff because I believe in the value of those conversations. Here's what I am looking forward to:

• Conversations with the other WOMMA past presidents which include Ed Keller, Paul Rand, Rod Brooks and others
• Talking to Ed Keller about his new book - due very soon
• Hearing Paul Adams from Facebook share his POV from his book, Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
• Hearing Susan Emerick, Social Business Enablement, IBM share about enabling employees
• Attending Geno Church's special session on surviving a zombie attack

And, of course, the deepest value will be in the conversations that happen throughout the three days. 

Find out more and join us at the event. 

What is your social value formula?

 Executives understand that social media has value for their business and a far greater potential then how they are using it today. Most of the multinational brands we work with are in their third year of committed effort introducing social to marketing, communications and customer service efforts. What were once unconnected experiments in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or blogs, are now efforts to enforce some interpretation of ‘best practice’ customer engagement across Facebook fans in 40 countries, for example. 

According to the new McKinsey paper, Making Sense of Social Media, from partners David Court, Roxane Divol, and David Edelman, 

“Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they want to increase that share to 5 percent.” 

And I would stick to the, now, three year goal of 18% of total marcom spend put forth in the Fuqua School of Business research from 2010. Either way, we need to expand our use of social media – especially in marketing, communications and customer service. 

Finding your value

A few years ago, a global financial services company was exploring how social media could further their goals or at the very least , how they might anticipate new threats from social media. Internal evangelists butted heads with “traditionals” who needed proof before endorsing any real investment in social media. One of those evangelists came up with a simple value formula. 

Since they were a service brand, they had already established a simple value for a public customer complaint. When someone declared a serious service complaint, it cost them “$X” in terms of referral or direct business. They then mined Twitter and a specific travel forum which featured a concentration of brand experience comments from customers. By tallying up the negatives and ranking them in severity, they were able to demonstrate that a month’s worth of unchecked negativity had put almost half a billion dollars of business at risk.  That became a motivating ‘social value formula’ for decision-making executives. 

The McKinsey paper cites another example:

“…to ensure that the company was doing a quality job designing and executing its social presence, it benchmarked its efforts against approaches used by other companies known to be successful in social media. It then advanced the following hypotheses:

• If all of these social-media activities improve general service perceptions about the brand, that improvement should be reflected in a higher volume of positive online posts.
• If social sharing is effective, added clicks and traffic should result in higher search placements.
• If both of these assumptions hold true, social-media activity should help drive sales—ideally, at a rate even higher than the company could achieve with its average gross rating point (GRP) of advertising expenditures.

The company then tested its options. At various times, it spent less money on conventional advertising, especially as social-media activity ramped up, and it modeled the rising positive sentiment and higher search positions just as it would using traditional metrics.

The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did. Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off. What’s more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media.”

Find your value

In the McKinsey example, I am struck by the simplicity of the brand shifting budget to prove their hypothesis valid. Too many brands are cautiously going at half-steam in social media hoping that the killer data point, the mythical social “GRP” or value of a fan, will reveal itself from some third party. The social value formula should be bespoke to your business. And, it’s available today if you are simply willing to prove it valid. What is your social value formula?  

Bald Barbie Not Invented Here

Why do brands find it hard to respond to community requests? Recently, a grassroots effort started by Jane Bingham and Rebecca Sypin, each who lost daughters to cancer, manifested in the Facebook Page, Beautiful and Bald Barbie. They have earned 158K fans to date all rallied around the idea of motivating Mattel to create a bald Barbie for girls struggling from hair loss associated from cancer treatments and other situations. 

Four months later, Mattel has signaled that they will create and give away “a bald friend” of Barbie in 2012. This is after the Bratz doll line announced they are delivering a series of bald dolls this June. 

Deborah Weinstein over at the SocialCMO summarized the “we were going to do this anyhow” tone response from Mattel when they finally pulled the trigger, 

“This week – some four months later – Mattel finally stepped up to the plate and announced the creation of a Bald Barbie Friend of Barbie for distribution to children’s hospitals and charities in 2013. Company spokesman Alan Hilowitz was quick to point out that Mattel did NOT create the doll in response to the Facebook page, but rather because “they helped us realize how important this was for us to do.”

Hard to Surrender to the Community

As much as I share Deb Weinstein’s POV that Mattel missed a bigger opportunity to acknowledge the community discussion immediately, respond and finally pull the trigger to meet the clear demand, the fact that they did at all is probably progress for a traditional business like Mattel.  When companies like Threadless have an entire business model around crowdsourced and voted-on t-shirts, why is it so much harder for the Mattel’s of the world to just say, “wow, you guys are bringing up an awesome idea and we really want to make this happen…?”

The problem of ownership

Can you say legal, intellectual property(IP), and post-war industrial enterprise? Threadless is different. They are soliciting designs under a clear terms of service that protects all parties. They also weren’t born out of the culture of the fifties.  As much as Mattel may have wanted to rush with a positive response, their whole infrastructure has been designed to protect IP. An idea from an outside source suddenly puts them at risk. Who would own the doll suggested by two moms behind a Facebook page? Should they manufacture and sell it, are they at risk for ownership? Does that risk dilute the protections on the golden goose core Barbie line? 

 

The problem of management

And then there is the curse of the industrial age, creative company. Toy companies are creative businesses who are designed to deliver valuable ideas. Agencies are the same way. If it wasn’t created at Mattel then what the heck are all those employees doing in the design department? I know it’s not logical and we really aren’t talking about a creative breakthrough here (just look at the photo mock-ups people have made of Barbie with no hair – pretty simple, right). Still post-war, industrial-scale companies are where management became king. And management is meant to control and manage. Creative is meant to create. The impulse to reject outside thinking is pretty strong because that’s the way they roll. 

 

The problem of dialogue

Some companies have a hard time talking to people in anything but that highly-protected tone of the PR department. If there is one lesson that social media has taught brands it must be that learning how to have a conversation like a human being actually does matter to customers. Barbie’s Facebook page is largely about the character’s voice. Mattel’s page, on the other hand, is about engaging and natural as the accountants who come out at every Oscar Awards show to explain the judging procedures. 

It’s also where you see a doozy of “protect the IP at all costs” statement in their Info tab:

“As the world’s largest toy company, we receive thousands of product suggestions every year. Given this volume, it’s likely yours is the same or substantially similar to concepts we’ve already received or developed. While we appreciate hearing from our consumers, we rely on our large staff of designers for product ideas. Therefore, it’s our policy to not review any unsolicited concepts and we cannot retain your submission. We don’t assume any obligation in connection with your unsolicited concept. If you’d like to learn more about how to get into the toy business, you may wish to contact the Toy Industry Association at http://www.Toy-Tia.org.”

Part of the problem with Mattel’s response was how long it took. Four months is about 3 months and 29 days too long. They needn’t have assented right away. A simple “we hear you” and “we appreciate what you are all going through with your children and your love for Barbie…” would have started the ball rolling in the right direction. Part of the problem is the established tone of voice.

Perhaps Mattel still believes there is only one way to protect their position - the cardboard statement. So many other brands have found ways to talk like human beings without losing their commercial advantage. Could Mattel have done better? Certainly. I only hope they examine this situation with enough candor to see what the true opportunities for change are. 

Removing the 9 Roadblocks to the Socially Engaged Business

More business leaders report that they believe in the power of social behaviors and technologies to add value to their business. A new study from the Economist Intelligence Unit and PulsePoint Group seems to confirm that business leaders are seeing the value while still be held up by barriers to expanding their use of social across the enterprise.

The survey of 329 US and Canadian executives painted a clear picture of the positive expectations and beliefs of executives. Social engagement can deliver big gains in growing market share, improved marketing and sales effectiveness, improved product and service quality and more. But something still gets in the way of actually executing at scale on this belief.

A particular set of data points from a 2009 McKinsey study starts to hint at the dynamic: 

Most of the companies reporting true results are those who are really thoroughly applying social solutions to their business. They are the ones who have gone deepest fastest. Dabblers are left scratching their head as to whether they are reaping a benefit. 

In the new study, we hear business executives citing of 9 key barriers:

I would group these in 4 categories that business leaders are working to overcome:

Defining Clear Value

Both “Inability to prove ROI” and “Lack of budget” speak to the need for defining clear value. ROI specifically demands the data to compare investments in social engagement with whatever businesses are doing today to meet business goals. Lack of budget is a smokescreen for “lack of clarity and confidence in the value delivered and, therefore, lack of willingness to allocate budget.”

Remove this roadblock: I know overcoming these barriers is not easy so don’t let my seemingly simple answers suggest otherwise. On the other hand, each is somewhat under our control as business leaders and I would encourage us all to take steps. 

Establish a 'pretty good' measurement model today. Many major brands have created evaluation models for their social media efforts in marketing and communications. A few of the big consumer package goods companies that we work with have created measurement frameworks that roll KPIs up under 3-4 measurement categories like relevant awareness, advocacy, engagement and action. Advocacy is the new kid on the block and is obviously a metric driven by the adoption of social media. We have started to log all of the performance data of marcom programs that we work on into a database. Other big brands are doing the same. With enough data we will be able to compare the efficacy of different programs and an understanding of ROI. It’s complex and takes a lot of work. But it’s the right way to go. 

Create BIG, meaningful goals. Some brands are setting big hairy audacious goals around the marketing mix. One of teh by products of brands embracing the "paid, owned and earned' concept is the desire to make marketing more effective and efficient. CMO's are declaring that they will reduce the paid component to 60% of teh mix (from 80%) or simply saying they want to reduce TV spend by $200 million and achieve the same or better results. These are motivational goals for an organization. 

Don't let ROI hunger kill innovation. ROI and budget are also a leadership issue.  While arriving at ROI measures are important to managing business, they are hard to do in a space where we are all still innovating and proving models valid. Leaders need to guide organizations to be responsible about value without being too ruthless on ROI in the near term lest they kill innovation.  

 

Reducing Organizational Friction 

Legal concerns, unclear strategy, complexity of organization, and poor collaboration are all indicative of organization friction. They arise out of the conflict of how we are organized and motivated today with the behaviors necessary to create value via social (see this outline of social business behaviors).

Remove this roadblock: Every business should have legal and/or regulatory concerns. The new behaviors implicit in social media can threaten IP protection, confidentiality and privacy, and customer protections.

Engage the legal team differently. The path forward is to aggressively educate the legal and regulatory team and charge them with guidance on how to use social in all areas of the business. That is a very different mandate than asking same group to protect us from social media. I have seen some top lawyers in brands really turn into social advocates. They are energized by the challenge. I am a big proponent of brands creating a social business strategy that thoughtfully articulates what they should and shouldn’t do.

Make collaboration a priority. The biggest challenge is the need for horizontal collaboration within the company to get this done. If no single department “owns” social business, then powerful leaders within the business have to voluntarily come together to define this strategy. This cannot be delegated to the token “social strategist(s).”  Leaders who have budget and staff authority and hard business metrics guiding them must work together. This type of cross-function collaboration is hard. Or at least it’s harder than just doing business the way we all learned over the past decade. We literally need to find new ways to work together. Form a working council of folks who lead marketing, communications, customer service, product development, HR, legal and more to create a social business strategy within 90 days. Get some outside help if necessary (just don’t fully delegate it outside lest the strategy be rejected by the organism).

Revitalize how you run meetings and especially brainstorms. Great moderation techniques matter even more as we bring disparate groups together. Just think about the new creative team in marketing anc communications. We are no longer talking about writing a creative brief and handing off ideation to a visual designer and a copywriter. We are talking about inviting a new team to the table to create strategy, a big idea (a platform idea?) and then actual ‘executions’.  

 

Mastering New Skills

There is a renaissance in training going on. Between new skills necessary to master digital and social media to new techniques to manipulate the flood of business data at our fingertips into something actionable, we need training and education. The myth that Gen Y employees walk in with an intuitive ability to use digital and social media is just that, a myth. Sure, they are native to Facebook, but applying all of these new platforms and behaviors to business outcomes is no more familiar to Gen Y as it is to the Boomers who dominate senior leadership.  

Remove this roadblock:

Establish a real, sustained training program. Create a clear set of learning objectives for different job functions. Determine what you want staff to be able to ‘do’ and what you want them to know to succeed. Develop a training program that you can sustain and one that can be scaled. That means embracing some type of e-learning to reach people across the workforce and across the world and to provide the fresh trainings as skills in the marketplace evolve (e.g. your community management training from last year probably didn’t include instructions for managing paid media in FB at any sophisticated level. That had been left to the media agency/entity. Well, this year the CM 3.0 needs that skill set to make the most out of the platform)

See: New Training for Marcom Teams 

 

Applying Effective Leadership

You can only get so far in promoting change within an organization without pressure from leadership above. It used to be that the C-suite would hear about digital and social media from media, peers in the board room or discover it in some other personal way. They would want to know more. We could deliver a 2-3 hour executive training about the 411 of digital and social media. Now business executives need to know a lot more about how to use digital and social media to increase revenue, profitability, operations and innovation gains and more. They also need to know how they can behave as digital leaders to promote change within their organization. 

See: The 6 Ways Digital and Social Media Changes the Game for Leadership

Remove this roadblock: it’s time for a new, more robust training for executives that goes beyond delivering informational knowledge about how Facebook or Google+ works. A proper digital and social training program for executives ties everything back to business outcomes. The hardest part is to balance the importance of hands-on exercises to make concepts and behavior real with the legitimate time pressures of today’s business leaders. Full day immersion programs are hard to schedule. Not everything can be neatly condensed into a 30 minute briefing. 

See: What will Social Business Training Look Like for Us in 2011?

See: Additional articles on changing the social enterprise

 

This year will see many business leaders taking on the hard tasks of driving change. That means training, setting big goals, paying attention to new behaviors like collaboartion and, generally, taking responsibilty to spark change. 

Does Facebook Timeline Drive Up Engagement?

According to Simply Measured the answer is a clear “yes”. Their report shows strong Engagement-per-post gains for fifteen of the first-movers since the new feature set launched. Pages like Toyota, Red Bull, Macy’s, Ben & Jerry’s were amongst the top 10 or so in their limited review that gained anywhere from 38% to 156%. A small number of first-movers did not show gains. 

Pinned Posts and Multimedia

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the two most impactful changes within the Timeline feature-set are pinned posts and the design demand for multimedia content. A third, the new ability for sponsored stories to appear in the wall (vs. the sidebar) will likely prove a big winner not just on acquisition but on engagement (people liking, commenting, clicking through to content). 

Pinned posts are great. They can keep more valuable content at the top of the page for those who visit. Facebook would like to increase the value of the brand page and the actual “visit.” This does a pretty good job. Community Managers can tell when a pinned post is starting to lose steam by the fall off of interactions.  Toyota kept their post on the Women in the World Summit sponsorship up for at least 10 days. That might be an easy choice on a corporate page where the CSR and CSR-like efforts of the company are one of the biggest draws (Toyota has model-specific brand pages which is the norm in that category). 

Clearly it is no news that pictures and video earn more attention and interaction. It took a “Timeline” design change that just begs for big pictures and embedded videos for brands to put the effort (and resources) behind it. 

Social Media Influence summarized the performance of multimedia: 

“Examining the figures in more detail, the study shows that, while engagement with status updates is down, Timeline has yielded a 65 percent increase in multimedia engagement (through videos and photos) and overall fan engagement is up by 14 percent.”

Timeline was a decent investment by the early-adopters. They had to pay for more images and video. They require expanded storytelling capabilities. Brands hungry to get the largest word of mouth impact (people sharing their content or “Talking about” in Facebook vernacular) will staff their pages with editors/community managers equipped to tell these more visual stories.   The Timeline changes are inevitable. That they actually seem to deliver some better levels of engagement when leveraged well, is encouraging. Brands are leaping in right and left and learning the level of investment necessary to make the most of these new features. You can get more here: 

The Hidden Implications of Facebook Timeline for Brands

Facebook Timeline Goes Live For All Brands — Are You Ready?