Digital Influence Mapping Project

Practical Steps for Marketers to Use Social Media in This Recession

The recession will endure for some time. Global concerns about pandemic flu will not improve things.The recession is driving most of our clients to continue to innovate around social media and other new marketing and communications approaches. No one is shrinking back to the tried and true simply because the "tried and true" isn't so true any more. The effectiveness of traditional marketing and communications is shifting if not receding.

How can marketers innovate at a time when only the most effective marketing makes the budget cut? How can you expand use of social media when none of your colleagues agree on a measurement standard to judge the ROI of the effort?

I tried to put some simple ideas down in a little guidebook for marketers and communication pros. I wanted to offer practical tips and practices that marcom experts could use internally to succeed with a higher level of social media work. I basically told people what we do.

You can get Expanding the Impact of Communications Through Digital Influence on the Ogilvy On Recession site.

Here's the set up in the Guide:

"A Guide to Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing
Social media-driven word of mouth is a more efficient form of marketing producing both sales and advocacy with long term brand and reputation gains. Digital platforms have empowered the average consumer to both share and find opinion. They have also turbo-charged the phenomena of influencer marketing. Social media makes new influencers everyday and it amplifies and carries their voices farther than was ever possible before.

This recession will reveal the selling and brand-building strength of social media-driven word of mouth marketing programs. It will also positively transform marketing for the foreseeable future. The power and efficiency comes from three big truths:

• Influencer and network marketing targets more effectively than all mass marketing
• Word of mouth scales outward to reach more people with more relevance over time especially when fueled by engaging advertising
• The deeper engagement of most WOM programs builds brand affinity at the same time as driving action

A Useful Guide
One way to be engaging is to provide something people can use in their lives - to be of-use. This guide delivers not just a point of view on communications and marketing in a recession but concrete steps you can take today.
 
How can brands use social media-based word of mouth marketing effectively? What are the 12 things that every marketer can do today to start applying this innovation to their business? How will you measure performance?"

The Ogilvy on Recession site has some other great resources- relevant to the entire world -  meant to help marketing and communications professionals do some great work now. I want to thank my co-author, Christopher Graves - Presdient of Ogilvy PR in Asia. Chris wrote another great article specific to Asia that you can also find on the site - The New PR - Leveraging Digital Influence to Drive Sales and Reputation.

The First Step In Digital Crisis Management

It's almost a joke amongst communication pros. The first step isn't the YouTube video response. It isn't evaluating whether the Twitter uproar is gaining velocity or dying out. It isn't even pulling your comms team together for a crisis meeting internally to figure out what to do.

The first step is, of course, preparing for the crisis before it ever happens.

Now, that communications 101 gem was handed down to me from the true veterans of the the big sories from the last decades (think "Tylenol 1982"). In today's Web-accelerated environment, having a plan in place that clearly identifies procedures and roles is even more critical.

We had a client crisis within the past couple of years that really called for a response video. Now the client wasn't all that social Web-savvy. They had to learn fast. Still the 3 days it took to get everyone on-board with a video response from .... oh, that was another long discussion; that was 2 days too long. Planning for crisis response reveals these hurdles and gets executives and lawyers over them such that when a crisis hits you are not spending your energy convincing folks that your customers and those who influence them are all over YouTube or Facebook or Twitter.  

4 Ways to Prepare for Digital Crisis Management

1. Get a Listening post program in place imediately.
We and others have said so much about this over the past 5 years that I doubt more needs to be said. The short story is that if you are not listening to your publics across the entire Social Web - blogs, Twitter, Social networks, opinion and review sites - then you are at risk.

2. Get the C-suite smart about social media as a communications phenomena and channel.
Any significant crisis is going to bubble up to the CEO of President to make decisions. Sure, s/he will look for advice from the VP of Communications, legal teams and more but that CEO will want to make their own decision. If she doesn't understand the potential power of the social Web in the communications mix, then she may make a bad decison. With all the CEO's a-twittering it is an easy step to introduce the training necessary for the C-suite to "get it." before you bring that group to the brown bags where you discuss the significance of Facebook, do these three things:

 

• Create a training session specifically designed for the top executives. Part hands-on, part data and significance, this session will reveal the power of the Social Web (How many tweets were there in the first 24 hours of the Dominos video and what was the average number of followers for those tweeting....). It will also give them a chance to touch the tools themselves which is often revelatory. 
• Set up an RSS reader stocked with content for them. Give them The Daily Influence - our custom reader in partnership with Netvibes. Or make up your own on iGoogle or whatever you prefer. Go into their computer (with their permission, of course) and set it up as the first screen they see upon launching their prefered browser. If possible, walk them through the simple process of adding a feed so they feel empowered to modify the collection. Having their own reader will help them stay on top of what is going on via social media. Usually, we combine traditional media feeds with a collection of blogs relevant to the industry, social media guru blogs and RSS of search results in Twitter, Google blogs, YouTube, etc.. for the brand(s)
• Then invite them to the brown bags you have on usng Twitter for Business or the Facebook Bootcamp. They may not show up as they are busy execs but you might be surprised....

3. Build a list of likely scenarios
Chances are your coms team already does this. What if our product or service fails and injures people? What if we are 'attacked' in any way? What if an executive is caught in Vegas with a...? You get the picture.Now, you need to add social media fueled crisis. What if a video portraying some terrible act in our stores is published to YouTube? What if a growing collection of customer bloggers start talking about a customer service-nightmare together? What if detractors organize online and begin to use social media to attack (think Greenpeace and Apple)?

You can't imagine every secenario. But if you identify the most obvious ones including the platforms online where they could manifest you can start to imagine the responses necessary.  

4. Create your digital crisis management procedures and integrate into your larger playbook
Two simple ideas here: plan your use of social media to respond and make sure you integrate with your other means of response (e.g. traditional media, outreach to stakeholders, internal communications). Planning can cover the steps, the roles and the tasks necessary to get the right response out there faster than you may have ever done it before. You wil find all sorts of annoying details fall out of this process like:

• when should we post a response video on our site vs. YouTube or both?
• how do we use Twitter to share our POv if we don't already have a Twitter handle in place?
• who should be the "voice" of the crisis and are they up to being "personal" (e.g. shirt sleeves rolled-up, no obvious reading of scripts)
• How will we gauge who is influential out there and how best to engage them?

The last thing you want to do is scramble on how to do all this stuff once some knucklehead posts the video of himself pulling an "American Pie" on your product (never saw the film but the concept, while disgusting, is clear).

Anyhow, that is step one from my perspective. There have been many good posts on follow-on steps including these:

Jeff Woelker: Five Tips For When It All Goes to Hell

Edison Lee: Crisis Management lessons

BusinessWeek: Dominos Discovers Social Media

Bernstein Crisis Blog 

Nightline Covers Digital Crisis

This past Tuesday, I had the chance to be featured on Nightline in a segment motivated by the Dominos crisis the week before. The producers were trying to understand a bit more about how brands can respond well (Dominos did a pretty good job overall) and what kind of tools are available to "listen". They had a sense that there was some sort of CIA-like capability open to brands to monitor consumers.

The reality is that we have some pretty sophisticated tools and methods for paying attention to what customers are saying about the brands and issues they care about. They are talking across te social Web and almost always hope that people and brands are paying attention and respect their POV.  Our Listening Post tools powered by the best in the business (e.g. Radian6, Visible Tech and others) are a not just a source of intelligence for the brand but a sign of respect they have for customers and people in general.

You can check out the segment here. And no, that's not me taking a bath in the restaurant sink at the end.

Why Brands Love Twitter (and don't understand Facebook)

The love affair with Twitter just keeps growing and growing. The fundamental benefits of Twitter for brands has not changed much since we published our workshop, Twitter for Business. We have seen a lot more brands experimenting and, of course, celebrities jumping on board. Last week, when @Oprah jumped in, I coudl feel the collective groan as the servers coped with the onslaught. And, of course, there was Ashton Kushter's 'million-follower-goal.' (see his Tweedeck demo here)

Ogilvy PR 360 DI Twitter Webinar

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Four Winning  Qualities of Twitter

There are four qualities to Twitter that make it appealing to brands to adopt in their social media mix. these same three qualities continue to postion Twitter against other platforms including Facebook:

It's simple - while there are many ways you can apply Twitter to your business from customer service to listening intelligence to extending offers to drive conversion, it is all built upon a dead simple model of followers, following and 140 character messages. You deliver something of value and you accrue followers. Followers retweet and act on messages.

It's open - Anyone can read my tweets. You only have to register or login to post your own or interact. Not only that but it is very easy to pump your feed anywhere you want. Many brands are now including their Twitter feed(s) as part of their Social Web presence in their corporate or brand "home" pages (there's a concept - "homepage" - that has been blown up over the past coupel of years). Also, the API of twitter is fairly available and many are creating some interesting visualizations and aggregations of data.

It's got a good ear to the ground - many brands have discovered the value of putting their brand in Tweetscan or just seraching Twitter, itself to find a lot of surprising mentions. Some clients are now using Twitter as a kind of proxy listening post, using it as a barometer of likely overall issues. All of our clients have added Twitter to their cgm listening posts. I knwo one client who did their social media ROI plan simply based on Twitter mentions alone. 

It's free - One could argue that you don't have to pay to use Facebook either yet clearly the value of facebook is only realized with some crafty and stategic use of advertising around brand pages or applications to make your needle stand out in the haystack. (Conspiracy theory #1: Does Facebook resist improving inside-Facebook search to increase teh importance of paid advertising to discover anything in there?). Twitter won't always be free but I suspect that whatever business model they adopt will make it easy for brands to pay 'X' to use such a simple system.

So What About Facebook?

It's complex - from Brand pages to Facebook Connect to applications to social ads, there's a lot you can do with Facebook. This complexity is a hurdle to some brands while it also promises more power for those who do get involved in really using Facebook.You can see that power - hopefully simplified - in our recentFacebook Bootcamp preso here.

Facebook Bootcamp for PR

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It's not so open - exporting data from Facebook is pretty much not possible. They want to control that. Imagine crafting a cool visualization of the biggest brand communities by using the Facebook API. I just don't think it could happen.

It's hard to detect what people are saying inside Facebook. At 200m users, everyone wants to extend their Listening Post into Facebook (yes, in a a way that is not eavesdroppy). What do we get? Facebook Lexicon which is like BlogPulse was years ago. I hope that someone inside Facebook is making listening tools a priority. One of the benefits of the type of critical mass and reach they have is the ability to knwo what's going on in there.

It ain't really free - the most impactful cases of brands using Facebook involes paid ad campaigns within Facebook. That's how they earn their revenue but it's also how you boost awareness fo whatever it is that you are doing in there. Still, to create eficient ad programs, you need to plan in a more complex way - what is your engagement and conversion model; how will you target? what is the balance of paid vs. "earned" WOM inside Facebook. Early advertisers inside teh social networks may have approached it as a simple channel and been disappointed with the results. Truth is - advertising helps social media scale - IF IT IS DONE IN SERVICE OF THE COMMUNITY AND CONVERSATION.

I am guessing that the most sophisticated marketers will continue to leverage Twitter while at the same time dive deeper into their use of Facebook with all it's complexity.

3 Trends in Integrating Social Media

Brands are doing three important things to get ready for this change:  

• Demanding that their agencies - big and small - step in to train their internal marcom teams on thinking through the application of social media. Look at the number of "digital days" held at brands. We did an important one at Unilever in December on social media-based word of mouth marketing. P&G did their Digital Day, J&J had their Babycamp. We have at least 2 more coming up for various brands.

• Hiring evangelists from the early adopters or growing them from within. Ford has Scott Monty. Pepsi has Bonin Baugh. Dell has Liana Frey. Kraft has Andy Markowitz. These experts go through a useful and predicatble transormation. They start as "the social media guy/gal" that everyone tries to get in their meetings. Slowly but surely, they turn to training internally out of the need to scale their expertise across the organization (either that or they do it out of sheer self-preservation. Once you create the social media hunger inside an organization, the only way to feed it is clone yourself.

• Training internal marcom staff across disciplines in social media marketing integration. We are not talking about "social media 101", here. Brands see the discipline-busting effect of social media. They are training advertising-driven brand managers in public relations and social media marketing. Likewise, they are training the communications staff to apply the value of paid media to an overall program. This is the most emergent of trends and I expect it to grow ten fold this year. Brands need a new breed of marcom expert. The marketing and PR schools (including where I teach at Johns Hopkins) are just starting to train across disciplines and train in social media. It's up to brands to invest more in training than perhaps they did a few years ago. The good news is that training a great marketer in planning and using social media is easier than training a social media pundit to be a great marketer.

More changes on the way.....

Integrating Social Media into the Marcom Team

The only social media marketing efforts that matter for major brands are those that become integrated with marcom - both the marketing and communications programs (don't call them "campaigns") and integrated into the internal marcom teams, themselves. You can't outsource all of social media. And you cannot apply social media as an afterthought on top of an bigger marcom program. The multiplier effect of social media-based word of mouth programs integrated with traditional marcom is where it's at:

• many types of social media add credibility to all communications
• social media programs can improve the performace of advertising
• you combine the deeper engagement of social media and the reach of traditional media (paid and earned) for a bigger result
• marketing and communications teams gain valuable skills that need to reside within the organization via social media

This last point is worth some attention. Marcom teams are at the early stages of a tansformation like that of the newspaper business: radical scaling down towards a new business model. The big difference is whether marcom is on the brink of the big scale-down or just a shift in emphasis away from interuptive advertising and towards relationship building and digital.

Every year the advertising pundits comment on the limited spend overall in digital. They are only tracking paid media spend but still it remains a barometer of where marketers are comfortable working. Compared to consumer behavior, we are "underspending" in digital. There is some truth there but not even the experts can agree on just what role "digital" - however you define that - plays in the marketing mix. Trying to treat the many digital platforms out there as just more channels for messaging devalues the true potential. Part of the growth of digital and social media marketing hinges on understanding new complexity. The UK reports that digital budgets are about 1/5 of overall ad spend in that market.

Social Media Spend to Reach 15% of ALL Marcom?

What if that jumped to 40-50 percent in the UK and NA markets by 2010? More importantly, what if your competitor shifted there marketing investment thataways? And what if their non-paid digital spend went from 3-5% to 15%? (e.g. if the paid media spend overall was $20m per year, then the non-paid digial that was $600K is now $3m) Confidence, competence and capacity is growing to make that possible. That's what marketers need to focus on - transforming their marcom organizations to think, plan and execute digitally. 'Social media' is the biggest change to come along in marcom in the past few years. The measurement models are getting there. Our own Conversation Impact will surface at this year's ARF in June. We are developing models that apply some of the logic of managing customer relationships to managing influencer relationships (not to mention influencers who are customers).

These advances in acountablity will boost CMO's confidence in social media-based programs. It will support their decisions to do more with social media after the initial enthusiasm for "jumping in the conversation" gives way to the business need for demonstrable results.

Read Write Web covered a recent Forrester survey that concluded that marketers will spend more on social media. They made a key point about marketers who incrementally skooch up their token social media experimentation budget:

"Unfortunately though, marketers who still fund social media projects only as experiments may be putting future initiatives on shaky ground. Without concentrating on measurable objectives, it will be difficult to justify further investment in the future."  

Are you ready for the increased role of social media in the marcom mix?

Facebook Bootcamp for PR: This Wednesday

Nicole Landguth from our team and I are delivering a comprehensive look at using Facebook strategically for marcom. It's been billed by the good folks at Bulldog Reporter - our hosts - as a session that will do just about everything including send your kid to college. Our goal was a bit humbler - offer a thorough survey of Facebook's current features and how marketing and communications professionals are using the social network to meet their communications goals. It's meant as a "get real" session for marketers who need more than a "Facebook strategy" - they need results.

We won't get through all of the material in our session and the presentation should make a great reference guide to share within your organization. And while we did our homework - pulling from our own experiences and those of major brands, this will serve as a living guidebook - one that we will add to - of practical ways to apply Facebook today.

Join us this Wednesday at 1pm EST.

(and don't miss the smackdown between Facebook and MySpace at this May's WOMM U 2009 from WOMMA.

3 Compelling Twitter Visualizations

A lot of folks are mashing up Twitter to come up with interesting sub services and some neat visualizations.As more people join and more people are. And as more people spend more time on the service, it's becoming more and more useful for marketers to look for insight in what is said on just Twitter, itself.  You might expect marketers to discount the bias or inside-baseball quality of Twitter but not so. I know one marketer who made a very persuasive argument about revenue missed from just negative mentions on Twitter alone. New visualizations are springing up every day and offering intersting views of what people are talking about. Here's three:

TwitterThoughts is a cool interactive chart that not only plots topics over a period of time but will actually show you an animated timeline of keyword topics.

TweetVolume lets you input about 5 keywords to see overall volume of Tweet mentions. It's not clear over what period of time the data spans but it still is interesting in that simple Blogpulse kinda way.  

TwitterFountain mashes up tweets and Flickr images and is billed as a neat way to add dimension to event coverage. The next time you go to a conference - WOMM U 2009, let's say - participants upload and tag images and tweets are overlaid via hashtags.

Top Pharma Social Media Examples

Thanks toJonathan Richman (no, not that Jonathan Richman) there is a great list of examples of pharma using the social Web. In the spirit of his "wiki" - add any thing you know of that is not on his list. Great work from Jonathan and a great resource.

See Social Media Pharma examples here >

Pharma: Don't Wait For the FDA

The phramaceutical industry has long felt itself "unique" due to regulations that hold it back from full frontal social media activity. Adverse events reporting, fair practice and DTC rules were in place before twitter, before facebook and even before or oblivious to blogs. Still most pharmas feel they are uniquely ill-suited to listen to patients and spark conversations. Some use social media platforms as a way to distribute content. Some are getting over their terminal uniqueness and seeing that there are lessons to learn in all directions. Also, everyone knows the FDA will not blaze new trails here and will only act to respond to the worst of missteps. So everyone looks to their pharma brothers and sisters to innovate first.

Media Post covered an interview between EyeonFDA and well, the FDA, this past month. As you might expect, they are not passing judgement on anything:

"The upshot is that the FDA doesn't categorically prohibit pharmaceutical companies from engaging in social media. "It's not the medium, it's the message," explained Dr. Jean Ah Kang, special assistant to Tom Abrams at the FDA's Division for Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications, in charge of Web 2.0 policy development." 

"Even so, it's likely that big pharma will remain reticent about plunging into social media marketing, barring more explicit guidelines from the FDA."

Pharma Marketing Blog covered this interview and the keynote at the eMarketing Summit where Sanjay Koyani, Director of FDA Web Communications, gave a keynote.

"On both occasions pharma eMarketers had their ears perked up to hear what the agency had to say about regulation of pharmaceutical marketing on the Web and especially on social networking sites.

On both occasions, we were disappointed."

Don't Wait

Can pharma look to other markets for lessons? Is it all moot because of their unique situation? A few pharmaceutical companies have been experimenting with communities, corporate blogs, sponsored conversations around issues (not products), and content distribution via YouTube and Flickr. And considering some of the jam-ups in traditional marketing where a pharma here or there has taken it on the chin for mistakes, it would seem about time for some real trailblazing in social media. If there legal teams are allowing them to take risks with traditional advertising then surely they can push the envelope a bit in social media.

• Don't wait for the FDA

• Don't wait till your nearest competitor hits a homerun
• Don't wait until the economy recovers (long wait)
• Stop considering your situation unique
• Look to all sorts of businesses for lessons-learned and do the hard work of finding the application to your own situation
• Build the capacity to try pilot programs to accrue learning and data