Digital Influence Mapping Project

3 Places to Get Smart About Content Marketing

More brands are considering how to put content at the center of their marketing. Coca-Cola has put a stake in the ground with “liquid and linked.” Ford is doing it with their Content Factory. Intel is committed.

Driven by the direct relationships brands now have through their social media platforms with customers, we are all seeing the value in not just using content more effectively but to operationalize it – get a bigger bang for a lesser buck.

It’s easy to believe this is a significant shift for marketers that will affect how budgets are organized, which positions are hired, how success is measured. It’s another thing to have the answers as to how all that will align for business as different as a global FMCG, a B2B tech company or a regional retailer.

Now is the time to get sharp, smart, educated, and generally collect a few different POVs. Here are three that I have found helpful:

 

Get wise about the various tech partners offering innovative services.

Jeremiah Owyang and the gang at Altimeter have shifted their sights on the content marketing space. I expect great insight from them over the next few months. It starts with a pretty good list of content marketing tech companies like Percolate,Visual.ly, Stipple and more. 

 

Start thinking about how to better organize your company to work across internal teams.

Rebecca Lieb and team at Altimeter drafted a great starting point for brands organizing around content. From the Executive Editorial Board to the Center of Excellence (this time for content vs. ‘social’), they cover some reasonable choices. There are more options out there, yet this paper does a good job of dispelling the idea that you are a mere brand journalist away from becoming an effective content marketing enterprise.

 

Keep reading and talking with the ‘community of practice’ around content marketing.

As you would expect, there’s tons of content out there about…content. I have found the Content Marketing Institute routinely valuable with their nuts and bolts articles about how others are doing this out there. This article on the 3 building blocks is a good example of foundational and smart stuff.

(Thanks to Just Jared Jr for the horrific image)

Related articles

Getting Internal Experts to Create Content

Organizing Your Department for Content Marketing: Strategic Requirements

How to Build a Content Marketing Machine Part II

Ocean Liners and Pirate Ships: Can Agencies Win the War for Talent?

Agencies are the Ocean Liners. Sleek, steady vessels following their routes. Start-ups are the Pirate Ships. Oblivious to custom, rough around the edges and ready to change course as it suits them.

I work at a large, global agency. We put a premium on creativity. We sell ideas and other things (like execution and actual business results). Today, those ideas are expressed in digital technologies and behaviors. That’s the way the world will increasingly head. There is a war for talented people who know how to creatively engage people via digital and social experiences.

We must embrace a new era of “creativity”

Insights and lots of diverse POVs lead to disruptive, valuable ideas. Really interesting and creative ideas sprout from putting different types of curious people in a room with the right coach. It’s not always about what’s on people’s business card that qualifies them in the room.

Certainly, the expertise they bring is valuable. That expertise might be in storytelling or architecture or shopper marketing or behavior change. It might also be in advertising. But assuming that ‘creativity’ is the rarified domain of the creative director and his tribe of writers and designers is just plain wrong.

Creativity comes from creating an atmosphere, a culture that values “creativity” in everyone, not “creatives.” That comes from a guy whose last job was as a Creative Director. Building a culture of creativity allows all types of people, with all types of time on the job to contribute.   It works when we take the process of developing and cultivating creative ideas seriously. That means no more “magical thinking” about creativity. Oh, those guys on the 14^th floor do that.

 Agencies vs. Start-ups

Agencies have to change. And since agencies are largely a reflection of the brands they work for, I would argue that most businesses who value creativity (or innovation) need to consider change. Younger talent may be deselecting the agency world. If they cannot contribute because of hierarchical barriers, if they are not invited to be creative, then they will go somewhere where they can. Here’s how Jack Armstrong put it in Digiday:

“At startups, you start off being treated with respect and as an equal. The attitude is more “We’re all in this together” and less “Get used to it, kid.” There are no ropes to be shown, because startups are making up the rules as they go along. Startups are more receptive to the idea that you might be able to teach something, instead of learning what the old-timers already know. Life at startups just generally seems nicer than at agencies. At the end of the day, you can do the same work for people that actually appreciate you.”

I grew professionally in leaps and bounds in the three start-ups I worked in. There was a prevailing sense of “we are all figuring this out together” and people were judged more by their willingness, hard work and ability to get great stuff done.

Agencies sell experts. Or do we sell ideas? Technically, most charge clients for people’s time.  Presumably that time is deemed valuable by the output of people’s efforts which very often ought to be remarkable ideas rendered in a way that can accelerate business. That means people within an agency must cultivate valuable and distinctive identities. If there is a group of people called ‘creatives,’ they naturally want to defend their distinct expertise at creative stuff.

It is time to let go of that. We need now what Miles Young Global CEO of Ogilvy & Mather calls “pervasive creativity.” (He didn’t call it “pervasive creatives”).

 

3 Ways to Help

Invest in Creative Collaboration

At Social@Ogilvy, some very smart people in our Hong Kong team led by Stephanie Chevalierand Jenna Boller, developed a collaborative workshop called Socialab. Originally, it was designed to help a diverse team that often included the client gain strength in thinking “socially.”

Socialab now describes how we collaborate routinely. It’s how we bring diverse expertise to a table to articulate a social brand character, a social strategy and the big social idea which we call the social experience. It’s also how we introduce people to the principles of social design – those behavioral triggers that drive people to share some form of word of mouth. 

We invite social strategists, creative, brand experts, clients, tech and platform partners and more. Diversity is key.

Steve Simpson, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather North America, has begun  new habit of holding his own form of creative “hackathons.” These are purposely named after the tech startup community practice of creating collaborative work sessions that treat everyone equal and create a climate that helps individuals contribute.

Hire New Disciplines and Don’t Tell Them The Rules

No mystery that the last two people we hired came from editorial and content backgrounds with the BBC and Gannett. The two before that from tech start-ups. And so on.

We need different brands to develop creative ideas that can actually come to life in today’s fragmented world. We need to make room for them once they are on board. I suggest we hire some of them without overdoing the on-boarding process. I would rather encourage these new souls to disregard how things get done and the ruts of our routines and see what happens.

Form Start-ups and Take Hostages

Social@Ogilvy was a start-up inside Ogilvy. So is Ogilvy Change (behavior change). No one asked us to create this business. We did it. We hijacked some people and resources and proved pretty quickly we were on to something. Had we embarrassed ourselves and failed in any significant way, I am certain we would have been duly punished.

Start-ups inside big, operational companies have to be a bit more ruthless. You will not find a “Fail Faster” motto anywhere on the walls of these companies. But forming your own thing can work.   

Pretty soon, you find people inside the mothership intrigued by what you are doing and wanting to come on board.

 

There you have three practical ways we can change and put a little pirate ship in the ocean liners. 

Our Observations at SXSW 2013

The following are the POVs our team created over this year's SXSW2103. I spent a very productive week+ leading up to and into the SXSW Interactive event(s). I summarized that in the Day 2 summary below:

 

Day 1 Reflection at #SXSW 2013 -- #SXSWOgilvy from Social@Ogilvy

 

Day 2 Reflection at #SXSW 2013 -- #SXSWOgilvy from Social@Ogilvy

 

Day 3 Reflection at #SXSW 2013 -- #SXSWOgilvy from Social@Ogilvy

 

Day 4 Reflection at #SXSW 2013 -- #SXSWOgilvy from Social@Ogilvy

 

Final Reflection - 9 Key Takeaways at #SXSW 2013 -- #SXSWOgilvy from Social@Ogilvy

 

You can get our complete Slideshare POVs here. 

How SoMoVa puts Mobile at the Center of Marketing

We are not mobile enough. Brands are under investing in meeting customers at all of the mobile touch points just as they are under investing in social media. But business leaders want to lead and do more in mobile.

THIS WEEK

Media companies, brands, technologists, carriers and Ogilvy will flock to Barcelona to the Mobile World Congress 2013 to not just pace the trade floor for promising mobile solutions beyond the obvious, but they will also attend insightful keynotes like the panel on Vertical Disruption featuring GM, American Heart Association and Qualcomm and the panel on Mobile Innovation 2023 offering a near-future vision.

We will publish throughout the event and distill what we learn into useful takeaways just as we did for CES. Our own Martin Lange will be leading the charge and you can follow his team’s Tumblr here. Start off with their ‘5 Trends to Watch For…’

 

Mobile in the Middle of SoMoVa

Marketers need a “stimulus package” for mobile. They need an artificial way to motivate their marketers to commit to making mobile a core expertise and a primary way they engage customers. Someday, mobile will just be how we engage people from smartphones to the tablet-of-the-future to the ‘internet of things.’

But until that future arrives, and to ensure it does, we need ways to spark the imagination of marketers to put mobile first now - to make it routine and consistent. Clearly, mobile usage broadly defines varies market-by-market and consumer context-by-context. Still, you would be hard pressed to examine a market anywhere in the world and not be able to identify ways in which mobile is changing the customer journey.

Many would say that mobile (and social) don’t fundamentally change how marketing works. Maybe. To help ace marketers focus on mobile and social behaviors, I would suggest a simple rubric with checklists to help us all put these considerations front of mind.

 

Social + Mobile + Value = Successful Marketing

 

Okay, okay, that’s not all that goes into “successful marketing.” These ingredients are now essential, however.

 

Social

 Brands can increase the social qualities of their marketing and communications by designing programs around the “Principles of Social Design.” These are the lessons we have learned that explain why people share all types of word of mouth (i.e. “earned media”). The more they do this and learn their own context-specific principles the more they will meet consumer’s needs.

 

Mobile

Likewise, brands can increase the mobile accessibility and utility by designing programs for the customer across the heterogeneous experiences of mobile. That means understanding the context in which we reach for our tablets at home on the couch or press on our smartphones standing in the aisle.  Google’s Multiscreen Study continues to be a great reference that starts to articulate useful context.

We need the equivalent “principles of mobile design” to serve as a checklist to inform creative and strategic work from all marketers not just the token mobile experts. At the very least, our checklists include “…the inherent advantages found in the mobile world: location sensing, cameras and instant access to social networks.”

 

Value

Every marketer thinks about the additional value they are delivering to customers whether in the form of complimentary recipes posted on Facebook or via a mobile app or something much bigger like a Nike Fuel where a whole new business model is inspired by technology and mobility. What is the core value we are trying to dial up? How is that being enabled or amplified via our mobile and social-first design?

 If brand marketers and their teams had this simple rubric and the questionnaires for each axis in front of them as they designed marketing and communications programs, it might serve as a stimulus package to making SoMoVa central to how we serve our consumers/customers today.

A Simple Way to Think About ‘Social Business’ in 2013

Last week, I published a ‘white paper’ capturing what I feel is a useful executive-level way to think about making a business or organization more social. My main point is that few executives really care abut the abstract idea of making an enterprise ‘social.’ They care about business health and profitability.

I do not think of myself as a ‘social media expert.’ I am a marketing and communications professional experienced at changing how we market and communicate for better results. It just so happens that digital and social media are big parts of my toolbox.

The more we frame up what digital and social can do to achieve valuable business results or conditions, the more executive adoption we will see.

Check out Page 7: Building Belief

It’s about building belief in how social and digital practices and technologies can improve valuable business outcomes – outcomes that any business leader would say, “yeah, I gotta get me some of that…”

Check out Page 9: Where to Start

This is a place any business can start with our without an outside consultant who has experience. Beware the complex frameworks and exploratory consulting gigs. Consultants can help but lets not convert this into a laborious planning model divorced from action. 

Time to Trade Up to A Social Business Strategy from Social@Ogilvy

Three Social Business Mega-trends for Brand Marketers in 2013

There are some big, significant changes happening at some of the biggest consumer and b2b marketers. We are all seeing them and participating in making them happen. There are four that may be slow-moving but unmistakable in their path forward.

 

All hail the Content Factory

Marketers like Intel, IBM, Coca Cola, Nissan and Ford are all aggressively expanding their capacity to create, distribute and optimize content as an integral part of their marketing and communications programs. We have all been talking about it for a while. But the complexity comes in the doing it. Some will call it a content factory some may approach it slightly differently and call it a brand newsroom. Strangely, I often hear marketers calling it a ‘newsroom’ as if they have just discovered applying editorial principles to marketing (I think most communications departments walk in with this understanding).

Intel has their IQ model (see comments on their model). Ford, Nissan (see Nissan's Content Factory) and Coca Cola (see Coke's Content Factory) have something called a “content factory.” Common elements often include:

• Conscious story planning against brand and sales goals
• True multimedia content creation from videos to images to infographics
• Hiring brand journalists to mine for stories within the organization
• Inventing a data-driven approach
• Thoughtful publishing of content to drive up engagement scores in social platforms like Facebook and Twitter

In 2013, we will see more brands declaring a content factory approach and those that have been doing it for a while we start to codify the measureable advantage. That means they will prove out the investment in dollars and cents and in the process start winning awards. Once the associations and award organizations adopt and elevate “content marketing” awards a virtuous cycle sets in and more marketers will jump on board.

 

The Community Manager as a Business Leader

We talk about the next generation of Community Managers (CM 3.0) having responsibility for Facebook ad spend. That is just one responsibility that is coming. But just that one elevates the role significantly as the premium offerings in Facebook and Twitter are increasingly becoming a hybrid of art and science (see my thoughts on the CM payscale). At the end of the day, these ad platforms are about delivering valuable content to more people. The CM 3.0, responsible for story content in social channels, will want to control that.

At the same time, brands are struggling with the tension of wanting a consistent voice and behavior in their Facebook wall or Twitter handle and the need to map the type of interactions back to the way they are organized. We see brands distinguishing between “lightweight” content created by the Community Manager, higher-investment content (“heavyweight”) created by agencies and brand marketers and service-oriented interactions managed by customer service.

If the value of a brand community is measured by engagement and brand preference (favorability) wins times reach (acquired fans or social advertising) divided by service dissatisfaction, then perhaps the resources to optimize all of that ought to be in the hands of one responsible party. That doesn’t mean that multiple parties don’t publish into a Facebook page. It does mean that we put the business responsibility of the community into one CM 3.0.

Facebook Studio already gives out awards and ‘nods’ to brands using the platform well. We see a rising trend in the distinction of quality interaction and content in social networks versus just being active. This will put a premium on strong community management. (see this post on 'best and worst' in CM job descriptions)

 

Common elements of this trend include:

• Formal community management training (we see this in our own training curriculum and in associations like WOMMA’s community managers training program)
• Social Playbooks and eLearning programs to scale best practices and compliance
• Clearer RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) mapping around community management
• Discretionary Facebook ad budgets in the hands of the CM
• Increased investments in infrastructure technology from Spredfast to Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud
• Establishing the CM “community of practice” to develop defensible expertise (if Unilever, Coke and Nestle all have defensible IP around brand building – e.g. Brand Building the Nestle Way – how soon before they add chapters on community building that reflect their learnings and best practices bespoke to their brand(s)?)

 

More Social Data & Community Regional Centers

Building on the publicity behind the Dell and Gatorade “Command Center/Mission Control” of the past couple of years, more consumer brands will establish regional  centers responsible for listening and responding to communities and multiple responsibilities around converting digital  and social data into actionable insights.

The reason the examples already in the marketplace have not triggered a flood of brands establishing these centers yet is the complexity of organizations. Social listening and data analysis serves several established departments from marketing, communications, customer service and product development. That means multiple budget holders and business “owners” of the resource. Without a leadership mandate from above or a particularly charismatic leader in one discipline, it’s tough to get these centers off the ground.

But as business interest shifts from the desire to listen and learn from customers to driving advantage from “big data”, business leaders will find a renewed interest in making these social centers work.

Brands are struggling with formalizing the best way to get insights out of listening. After investing in technology like Radian6 and Sysomos, they discovered that turning data into useful information and/or insights remained elusive. The other big challenge is figuring out the division of labor on community engagement (see previous business megatrend).

 

Common elements of this trend include:

• Building out physical listening “studios” in key markets across the world
• Investing in training to develop aptitude to analyze digital and social data
• Partnering with benchmarking partners like Socialbakers, Unmetric and SimplyMeasured
• Visualizing data to make it "yummier" for executives

 

Related articles

Community Manager Job Roundup: Nov 26

Social Media Success Needs Evidence-based Testing

Behavioral economics plays out everyday in social media. We see clear expressions of the lessons that drive human behavior made popular by Cialdini, the Heaths and Dan Ariely in the use of social networks by major marketers like Ford, Unilever, Nestlé and others.

We have taken learnings like how reciprocity, authority and scarcity can drive persuasion and action (Cialdini concepts) and how “finding the bright spots,” “shrinking the change,” and “pointing to the destination” (Heath Bros. concepts) and built them into a sensible way to plan predictably great social programs.

And we learn more each time we deploy a program. We see many brands gaining experience in using social media well. But as marketers get more and more focused on driving behaviors versus hard-to-appreciate attitudes and intentions, there’s just not enough testing and reporting of what works best. We all think we are internalizing these lessons through shared case studies, the sharing that happens in the few great communities of interest inside companies (think social/digital “center for excellence”), and the “test and learn” habits of individual experts. It’s still not enough.

Richard Thaler told the story of collaborating with the British Behavioral Insights Team led by David Halpern in the New York Times. Richard Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. The Behavioral Insights Team is all about trying to drive behaviors by applying behavioral economics to public policy issues.

 He simplifies the most important tenants of their work into 2 things:

1. If you want to encourage some activity, make it easy
2. You can’t make evidence-based policy decisions without evidence  

We get the “make it easy” part although even that is a lesson routinely overlooked by many an ambitious marketer. As for evidence-based policy decisions, well, we are trying to do that every day in marketing. We are just not as aggressive about formally testing our theories and accruing formal lessons.

The Difference Between 

Whose got tougher demands for accountability – a public policy leader or a CMO? Having worked with both, I think these two groups have so much to learn from each other but have suffered from ‘terminal uniqueness’ that keeps them believing each has special circumstance the other cannot possibly appreciate. But their worlds are coming together. Just look at the recent “red paper” from Ogilvy’s behavioral econ team, From Cause to Change. The main hypothesis of this team’s work states that the rigor of behavior change as practiced in “Social Marketing” (do not confuse with social media marketing) is highly relevant to business not simply governments.

There are differences. Crafting health behavior change is usually led by scientists accountable to public servants. This makes them insanely tied to science and unequivocal proof. Most CMOs want short term evidence that will ultimately be revealed as effective in sales or stock price.

More Evidence

The British Behavioral Insights Team has published a white paper, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials. Okay, it’s a bit intense for consumer marketing. It lays out a discipline of constant testing and learning. That’s the lesson.

Many brands are increasingly active in social media. There’s some high quality work that wins out in the WOMMY Awards and the Effies and Cannes Lions. But how great are these organizations with formal test and learn exercises to more precisely understand what is working and what is not. And how good are they all, we all, at capturing and sharing best practices, lessons learned?

Facebook Building a Learning Culture

The media gave Facebook a hard time in the wake of their IPO. How could they justify the huge valuation? And weren’t the stumbles in the early stock price the inevitable calling out of the ‘emperor’s new clothes?’

Meanwhile, Facebook has been publishing case studies on Facebook Studio, a series of white papers that summarize lessons-learned and launching a training program to make marketers smarter about succeeding on Facebook. They continue to share their ‘try and learn’ culture which is more accepting of failure than any CMO I know can ever afford to be (Implicit in the ‘fail fast’ credo is that failing fast gets you to even bigger successes faster, too).

For all the complaining about Facebook, they are finding the evidence and sharing it out of benign self-interest. They have built a community of marketers in their Facebook marketing group and the Product Council that I sit on, committed to documenting the evidence of what works.

There is a terrifc article in Technology Review that talks about their Data Science Team and how they are trying to use the petabytes of data at Facebook to understand what drives behavior. 

As brands deepen their commitment to using social media, they ought to prioritize knowledge-sharing and real test-and-learn experiments meant to prove the efficacy of different strategies. We need to understand how we can nudge, inspire, and be a part of new consumer behaviors through digital and other expereinces. It's not enough to try and find some grand ad-equivalency in all this new digital and social media. 

(thanks to Peter Keusch, University of Regensburg for the great picture)

Can Austerity Drive Social Media Growth in Business?

It’s easy to pay attention to the fast growth markets for social media – the Philippines, Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, China and a few more.  Its like being in that growth company that keeps opening stores. Let's just focus on the markets that are going great guns. Let's "open stores" where it is easiest. What about the established markets where people are already connected and where Facebook is 'old hat?' 

Coming back from Portugal and Brussels – both trudging along in their own ways under the weight of “austerity” – plenty of business people were asking whether social media has relevance in a time of stress and crisis. Often in times of crisis, business pulls back on marketing and relies generally on accepted practices.  You know, the stuff you were always told that works and won't get you fired.

4 reasons social matters in a tight economy like Europe

Here are four reasons why I think social media will grow in Europe even now when the region struggles to gain the financial stability it needs.

 

1. Some of the big social success stories were born out of crisis

Dell, Ford, and BP each committed to using social media at a time of crisis not when things were going great. Ford, specifically, faced a global financial crisis that suppressed car sales pretty much everywhere. In 2008/9.  Each of these brands could have pulled their head into the shell waiting for the smoke to clear. They didn’t. The got busy. They knew they needed a new way of doing things.  

 

2. Integrated social media is more efficient

Just look at the Integrated Social Media Sales Impact Study we did last year. Combining social media to the marcom mix can drive up consumption and sales for categories like quick service restaurants (QSRs).  If you are a C-suite leader for a company doing business in Europe, I would think you would be deeply concerned with getting more out of the budgets you do have as you work to drive sales back up.

 

3. People’s behavior is changing

About 70% of Portugal is connected to the internet. Of those north of 90% are active on social media. Mobile penetration exceeds 100%. Belgium is similar. Almost 82% of the populaion is online. Almost half the population is on Facebook.  People are changing how they form opinions and purchase decisions and it won't go back to the way it was before the financial crisis. If business wants to build enduring, profitable relationships with customers, they are going to have to shift to socially-enabled customer service, customer advocacy programs and building more value for customers through digital channels.  What Forrester calls the “always connected customer” has become the new reality and we must understand what that means not hide from it.

 

4. The competition is weightlifting during the crisis

Not everyone’s business is down. I spoke to one of the biggest food companies in Brussels, mobile service providers in both Brussels and Portugal, and several banks. Sales were up. Usage was growing. Innovation was introducing new competition. During any crisis – even a large financial one – not everyone is hurt the same way. Some businesses continue or flourish. The pressure of innovating in the face of competition never really recedes. The smart money is on those companies who know they are playing the long game and know they have to work just as hard now as in flush times to engage, satisfy and delight their customers.

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.