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. 

 

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?  

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?

Don’t Overreact to a Potential Social Media Crisis

We do a lot of crisis management and crisis training for clients. There are certain new “truths” about how crisis can unfold across digital and social media that can put business at risk. The irresponsible videos from rogue employees at Domino’s Pizza, the thoughtless tweets from Kenneth Cole, and Tesco's struggle with an angry customer all had an impact on business.

The truths or qualities of social-fueled crisis are unmistakable. In social media, they can flare faster. Messages in social media can jump into traditional media thus flaring a lot more social media. Brands are held accountable online for how they respond (was it fast enough, sincere enough, contrite enough). Hacktivists have mastered the art of the groundswell and can move more nimbly and aggressively that most multi-national corporations. And so on.

Speed does matter

Speed is the one attribute that comes appropriately to mind first. The pundits all agree, “when the crisis hits the social Web you had better act fast…”Be ready to act fast but keep a cool head

Speed does matter. But so does judgment.  Not every flare up in social media will accelerate to a full blown crisis. The trick is to, of course, be ready, but also to keep a cool head and really listen and understand what is going on.

When detractors hijacked McDonald’s hashtags #meetthefarmers (promoting the farmers in their supply chain) and #McStories, the brand did not overreact. As Jim Nichols Imedia Connection said, 

“To its great credit, McDonald's does not appear to have done the "big corporation flip-out" we've seen from many large companies. They ceased the programs, learned a lesson, and moved on to further experimentation.”

I recently wrestled with two crisis where marketing efforts for brands earned complaints from users online. Knowing how things can get out of hand quickly, the brands were contemplating some serious and costly steps. Both kept a cool head and in both cases the flare-up was addressed simply and honestly. The community calmed down. The negativity on the Facebook wall slipped into timeline obscurity (no brand will ever have a timeline that is white as snow). 

Motrin missed opportunity

The well known “Motrin Moms” case may be one where the impulse to act quickly resulted in over-reaction and a missed opportunity. Moms reacted to a brand produced video spot joking that some moms wore their child as a fashion accessory. Not only did sociail media light up but traditional media covered it on the trades (AdAge) all the way to USAToday.

Within about 48 hours of the flare up, J&J McNeill Labs pulled the video and sent an apology to at least one of the bloggers who, of course, published it. Could they have engaged their critics in a conversation about their complaints and the brand’s intention? Could they have even solicited those critics to define the next video that did more accurately express their concerns? Possibly. I don’t want to be revisionist here. It was 2008 which was early days in brands getting comfy with social network interaction.  

Today, the brand would likely have the option of keeping the video running while constructively talking with critics about how they might improve the videos. 

Listen, learn and grow a thick skin

Thorough training and plans for crisis in the social age are important. No one at a brand wants their Faceboook wall filled with negativity or venom. At the same time, it pays to carefully analyze the situation and not overreact.  It’s possible that the issue and the complaints center on a vocal few. If addressed early and responsibly, it may not be necessary to pull the social media fire alarm. Providing the complaints have not mucked up your search results and only haunt your Facebook page, you may just need to grow a thicker skin.    

 

5 Behaviors of our Social Business

I actually believe there are qualities or behaviors that are distinctly different from business-as-usual and that can help businesses extract value from social media behaviors and technology.  To me, they are what define a social business (and, yes, I do mean a business aligned with social media-based behaviors not necessarily a more socially responsible company. This latter definition is important just not my particular focus for now.)

We are a social business. That means we practice what we preach to our clients. There are 5 key behaviors of a social business that we focus on. I would love to hear what others think: 

Foster horizontal collaboration – hierarchies and departments matter less. The price of organizing around shared interests and needs has gone way down. Just look at the Middle East and the forces at work in the Arab Spring. That demonstration of power is unmistakable and it will change us. The departments inside many corporations were defined for efficiency back when manufacturing was at the heart of commerce. They become tribal and siloed. We need to formally push against these boundaries towards new collaborative relationships within our business. 

Story: As we formed Social@Ogilvy, we did it as a pirate ship sailing horizontally across P&L and tribal boundaries. We initially just asked all of the social media handraisers to come to the clubhouse one afternoon. We are the poster children for collaboration. 

 

Make clear commitments to innovation – We can’t innovate and optimize ROI at the same time. If we are not careful, we will let our natural impulses to define things like ROI dampen our spirit for innovation. Let’s face facts, we are designing while driving the car. We must make sure we have clear commitments to innovate.  We have a global R&D budget. It sits inside the staff all around the world who are eager to pool their expertise and time around a small set of important priorities to create the next planning model, the next community management training program, the next marketing app store. 

Story: 4 years ago or so, I attended a global CRM summit in Barcelona for a major CPG. I was there to share our view on social media as a marcom discipline. We had some great successes, activating Olympic athletes during the Beijing games and helping the federal government  prep the country for pandemic flu. At the end of our presentation, a CRM marketer raised his hand and announced, “If what you do doesn’t deliver a better ROI than my email program, I am not doing it.” No one is more focused on effectiveness than we are but don’t let the blind pursuit of ROI stunt our efforts to innovate and invent. 

 

Be adaptive and agile – become an athlete for change. Train on coping and harnessing never-ending change. Be adaptive to customers and circumstances. Move thoughtfully fast. You can always move again. We need to be pioneers in new ways to work and new team models that help us be quick. 

Story: Brands are looking to Silicon Valley to understand how to be much more agile. The pilgrimages to Facebook HQ by major brands are as much to expose their senior leaders to the posters on the wall that essentially encourage employees to ‘fail faster’ and 'move fast and break things' as an expression of their iterative ‘risk-positive’ culture as anything. 

 

Build Integrated customer relationships – the customer or buyer journey is more complex and starts earlier. It doesn’t follow the funnel but curves around, circling back on itself in a complex, context-specific path. People refer back out to their social graph at all points along the journey. It just doesn’t make sense to have a social media strategy that is separate from your overall marketing or CRM strategy. That goes for all of the disciplines that engage the same ecosystem of customers and stakeholders. They shouldn’t have separate, unconnected strategies. 

Story: When I started our social business 7 years ago, I saw what we were doing as offering the alternative way to engage customers – we were the antidote to marketing.   That doesn’t make sense. We need to be fully integrated in all aspects of the solutions Ogilvy & Mather Group delivers to clients. Along the way, we will invent some completely new solutions to deliver that go beyond how we build profitable relationships today. 

 

Master an endless flow of data- we have so much data at our fingertips. Analyzing it to actionable insights is really no easier now than it ever was. Each part of a company has data needs or opportunities. Making sense of social data – and converting it into valuable and actionable information – remains a top priority for marketing and communication leaders and the C-suite. We have our own need for data. Valuable research from all types of sources transforms ‘hunches’ into great strategy. The same listening and analytics we sell to clients tell us if Social@Ogilvy is reaching key business goals. Sales and revenue data tell us if all our efforts are moving the business forward.  

 

These behaviors may not each be new or unique but together, they do define a way of doing business and prioritizing effort that is fresh. What are you doing to seize opportunity and work differently? 

 

more views on social business behavior:

IBM Social Business Behavior - "A social business optimizes the workforce–enable the right talent and content to come together at the right time"

Forbes: 4 Blinks on What is A Social Business? - "It’s not about social media, it is about identifying business processes that you can render faster, cheaper, better"

Social Business News: Is Social Business Just Knowledge Management 2.0? - "Social Business is about encouraging people to share what they know, to feel good about doing so, establish relationships with others in the organization which span the organization tree and genuinely do something extraordinary."