Evaluating Markets for Social Media Readiness

We are a multinational enterprise. Many of our clients are as well. We routinely plan and execute social media strategies in countries in all four regions of the world. This past year, some of our biggest clients began the process of applying governance and policies for use of social media globally and locally.

Unguided Growth

Once a bunch of local markets get really active, they can spawn an inconsistent use of social networks and a mixed bag of best practices that without a little stewardship can have a poor ROR (return on reputation). Essentially it is another form of sloppy brand management - not necessarily through any true fault of the local market. Most global companies are more decentralized than centralized, especially if they are B2C brands. That gives the local marketer tons of latitude around strategy and tactics. Before the Internet, there was less likelihood that incongruous local campaigns would come to anyone's attention outside that market. Now, whatever you do online is discoverable by almost anyone. Search Facebook for five of your favorite brands and chances are you will discover some official pages and some special purpose pages like the employee soccer league in an odd market.  It pays to put those social media guidelines in place asap to avoid the process of auditing the existing patchwork of Facebook pages, YouTube videos and Twitter handles. 

When you are in 80 markets like some of the worlds giant FMCG's or even in 20 markets, how do you decide when to begin using social media at the local level?

Evaluation Criteria

I would argue that there are three DIY Indices you can use to gauge timing.

1. Enterprise Readiness

I have already established that I am talking about what I would call "Phase 2" of a brand's use of social media. This is what comes after the uncontrolled experimentation phase. Here you are trying to build guardrails at the center that enable local markets to use social media wisely and in support of the brand. 

• Do you have a corporate social media "playbook" or guidelines in place? These should outline your overall social strategy - how you plan to use the major social networks, what is the relationship of these to your ".com's," how are they moderated, what is your risk and response approach, what is the escalation procedure if a problem arises and so forth. 
• Do you have some experience to call on? By now most brands have some social media experience either at the corporate or product brand level to refer to. It doesn't particularly matter how successful or big this effort was so long as there were learnings and those were socialized around the company. 
• Do you have some type of center for excellence to share best practices throughout the company? So much of our own knowledge in planning and using social media came from actual experience. It would be a shame to stimulate greater use of social media without capturing the learnings or sharing them with new markets. 
• Do you have an overarching social strategy that is integrated with your overall marcom stratgy? 

2. Local Marcom Team Readiness

• Have markets established the "digital basics?" It's hard to drive your team in India to dial up their use of social media marketing if they have yet to master basics of digital marketing like SEO and their owned content strategy. 
• Did the local team demonstrate the proper commitment? Social media marketing is neither free nor is it simple. If local marketers expect to be successful they need to confirm they have the staff to properly manage the effort, the budget to do it right (e.g. do you have ad dollars to boost your Facebook acquisition strategy?), and a reasonable evaluation model to help them know when they are winning or when they are losing. 

3. Market Conditions

Do customers and influencers use social media in sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile?  Despite the global steamroller known as Facebook, every market has different conditions. It helps if you know your willingness to get into something early. That helps you decide if an installed base of 30% of total population as internet users is good enough to get going (chances are this 30% have some type of influencer profile making it worthwhile anyhow). 

I look at:

• Installed internet connectivity - What portion are broadband
• How many people can access the mobile web
• Smartphone users 
• What are the top 3 social networks and how fast are they being adopted
• Specifically, how big is Facebook this year vs. last year
• Any type of quality usage data - If the installed base of broadband or mobile Web users is above 25% of overall population, I am keenly interested as those connected often serve as overall influencers to a larger population. In terms of what people actually do via social media in a particular market, I have found that there is only so much value in the larger syndicated research resources. I do look for custom studies from that market. 

How do you decide whether to ramp up social media marketing and communications in a particular market?  

Comments

[Nic Windley]

Some useful guidelines for assessing your markets social media readiness and for starting to build some social media guidelines / best practices.

It will be interesting to see just how far companies go though before their guidelines and best practise start to strangle the free social exchange and influence of people in their market.