Digital Influence Mapping Project

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. 

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."

The Pay Scale of the Community Manager Just Went Up

Many of us participated in Facebook’s Marketing Summit last week. We shared some of our early view of the implications here. One of the byproducts of the integration of the new set of advertising offerings with page management is a more complex job and set of skills for the person managing that page. Chances are, you are not paying them enough.

History of Community Management

At the risk of sounding like the doddering old man, I remember when community managers lived on message boards. They got to know the members – the outspoken few and the culture of the many. Their “job” – sometimes a volunteer position – was to steward the community. They helped maintain a healthy environment but in many ways, their job was to stay out of the way of those drawn there to talk about their shared interests and affinities.

We’re talking AOL forums, the WELL or, in my case, the forums we had on Discovery.com back when we rediscovered the wreck of the Titanic.

It’s Just Conversation, Right?

With the dawn of the social network era, we began to launch a new wave of brand and affinity communities on Facebook, MySpace (wait for the comeback), Orkut and more. Forums still mattered. We debated whether services like Twitter and YouTube really represented communities. For branded Facebook pages, we saw the challenge differently than stewarding a community brought together based upon their love for crafting, snowboarding or Lykke Li because people were “joining” brand pages.

They wanted something from the brand not just interactions with others publishing on the page. We even called it “conversation management” to try and distinguish from the seemingly old-school images of message board mavens asking members to be more civil as they debated the merits of different quilting techniques. Managing a Facebook page seemed so simple. If anything, you needed to hire someone who “got it” (i.e. think “young person”) and was willing to talk back and forth with the vocal minority. I even heard of brands delegating the job to the interns.

Protecting Your Investment

Fast forward to last week. As more and more brands invest in social media and in their Facebook commitments alone, the job of Community Manager becomes increasingly important. We are starting to see the benefits to business from community and ‘social relationship management.’ Cultivating millions of addressable customers on a Facebook page and letting them know that a new flavor just launched or that they and they alone could get a special deal became very appealing from a business perspective. The ‘measurability’ of all this remains a work in progress. But only the most stick-in-the-mud, ROI-first stalwart question the likelihood that this would significantly change business. If you are going to invest conservatively 10’s of millions of dollars in Facebook advertising as many big consumer brands are doing (I would guess that today’s FMCGs are ‘playing’ with budgets for Facebook alone that are 2-4% of total marcom spend), then you ought not leave the hub of that experience in the hands of anyone less than a race car driver.

Community Business Director

The community manager needs to be able to control the content of ads and the deployment of the units. In Facebook terms, they are emphasizing “story” over “ads” and suggesting that all ads be some form of valuable and relevant content. It is not just a semantic distinction. As ads can now be delivered to the Facebook wall vs. just the ad “gutter,’ it is critical that this content live up the same demands we put on our best Facebook wall content. It must genuinely earn people’s attention and action. You can browse through Facebook’s new ad “Offers” here and it will paint a clear picture.

“Community Manager” is a title that comes with too much baggage. The job is important enough that we ought to at least amp it up to “Community Business Director.” Here are the key responsibilities and skills:

• Define a strategy that connects business objectives to community and business outcomes
• Create content of all sorts from hands-on responsibilities to the capacity to direct a network of content specialists (e.g. spec the right video by the right production company)
• Plan, create and deploy advertising as part of a paid, owned, earned strategy
• Manage customer, fan, stakeholder dialogue
• Connect across the business with experts who can answer community members and solve issues
• Have strong technical and tools expertise (get the most out of systems like Buddy Media, SpredFast and more)
• Analyze data to find insight and define business performance
• Apply an understanding of key public affairs issues and legal positions to sensitive conversations online

The job requires new skills. Just adding the advertising or media planning and buying integration requires a new set of skills that used to be outsourced to a media planning function. Add on top of that the business maturity to get the most out of the community investment and you have a more important job.

It may require more than tuning up the right individual. It will likely require an organizational solution like a “director” who directs the activities of many managers towards a business outcome. I feel lucky in that our organization already has these skills integrated. What will happen to the PR firms out there who have no integrated media planning function or the small social media boutiques who cannot leverage buying power or are missing some other critical element.

No doubt that the image of the community manager spawned from Facebook’s announcement may be a bit aspirational. Still, we are heading to a much more sophisticated model and the time to put that person or team in place is now. We have.

 

(thanks to insites consulting for the image of their great cake)

Welcome to Social@Ogilvy!

(this post is also found in s similar form on our new Social@Ogilvy site)

The Social Imperative

Brands will spend between 17-18% of their total marcom spend on social media within 4 years. They will spend more on social business solutions. They are seeing value and expecting more every year. 

The key reason? 90% of us look to friends and family for the most trusted recommendations on products, service and issues. 70% of us count on consumer opinions online above traditional media. And it’s only going to grow. Millennials are three times more likely than Boomers to look for a social opinion on choices they make. 

The future is brand advocacy. And it cannot be faked, gamed, or outright ‘bought.’

There are only three ways to connect with and build a strong relationship with customers and stakeholders these days. 

1. Deliver highly relevant content or service. This could be advertising, media relations or what we call ‘owned’ content (including valuable services). Now it’s all highly targeted and tailored. No more 360 degree ‘onslaughts’ of interruptive advertising. Now our messages must be deemed highly relevant to our targets to earn their attention. Lets use the ‘10 degrees’ that matter. Useful content to run a sustainable business from DuPont. Better ways to use member ‘points’ from American Express. 
2. Be discoverable in search. When people search Google, Baidu or Yandex, brands need to be there for all the topics that intersect between a person’s intent and where the brand can add some value. Ford on fuel efficiency. Hellmann’s on Real Food recipes. 
3. Earn our way into their ‘social graph.’  To succeed in social media, we must become genuinely valuable to the people we serve and earn their attention, their advocacy and their business.   Inviting people as VIPs into the launch of the new Ford Explorer in Facebook. Sparking a social conversation about the dreams of the next generation of Chinese from Johnnie Walker. Helping Hong Kong parents celebrate their baby pictures in a much bigger way from Huggies.

How we form opinions about products, services and issues is constantly changing. It’s imperative that we make social a new way we do everything.

What is Social@Ogilvy? 

Social@Ogilvy is the global, cross-discipline team of social experts from across all of Ogilvy’s businesses delivering social solutions to all parts of our clients’ business. This is new. This is bigger than before. We have been designing and executing social media marketing and communications programs for 7+ years as 360 Digital Influence – a specialty practice born out of Ogilvy Public Relations. We quickly grew to deliver social solutions for all sorts of marketing and communications clients. 

Now we have grown into Social@Ogilvy. We are a true global network with a common approach. 

Integrated Social Media Matters More 

The whole PR vs. marketing battle is moot. Social media will inform every discipline and deliver business value for the foreseeable future. Social media as a standalone specialty doesn’t make sense. All the power and potential in social based solutions comes to life when you integrate it into marcom and other functions. 

We design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like crm, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behavior.  We plan around owned, earned and paid media working together for a compound effect and at its heart our work is ‘social by design’ – phrase used now by Facebook but that captures what we do quite well. 

A Global Shift

We do believe there’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and our behaviors. How we buy, vote, and form opinions has changed. We tap into our 130 friends (the Facebook average) to discover, consider, compare, decide and rave about products, services and issues.

This shift is happening in one way or another all over the world. Growth markets like China, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey will define the next episode of social media use. They are all growing their social network use and outpacing western markets including the US. That’s why we have grown the world’s largest global team delivering solutions relevant in each local market.  

And it’s more than just marketing, we design social business solutions that use the collaboration and advocacy strengths of social media to drive value internally and in customer relationships while at the same time managing risk. 

 

Join Us

We will be participating or hosting 23 events in and outside of Social Media Week this week in NYC, London and Hong Kong not to mention a dozen other markets. Join us as we launch this new ambitious business. It's been a wild ride to get to this point and we would love to see you. You can find out more at our new Social@Ogilvy site.

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #4 Social Selling as a Service

Sales force-driven organizations are wising up to using social media to build relationships with customers. Businesses are investing in sales enablement software like Salesforce.com, iCentera and Jive that have social-related functions internally to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing and some even have ways to manage social contacts.

Sales as Content 

Sales organizations are all a-twitter about content marketing, certain the answer to closing sales is in a steady flow of just the right white papers or video talking heads. All that is right-minded in my book. The sales process, especially in B2B, starts earlier and earlier with business leaders investigating their problem online before they may have even formed the words to describe the problem exactly. Companies like IBM with their Expert Network and use of LinkedIn  are building presence and thought leadership online that tries to anticipate the business leader’s pain before it’s diagnosed. 

Sales as Service 

Thinking about content as sales “bait” is one thing (and a little insulting to the customer, I might add). Thinking about sales as a continuing service to customers and prospects is different. Instead of simply ramping up on valuable content, sales organizations who want to get into the sales cycle earlier and even build strong relationships with prospects well before closing would do better to think like IDEO. 

One of the most well-known product design firms in the world, IDEO is expert at getting to the root of customer problems whether they be rooted in usability, service, or some anthropological insight. They’re good at making life easier for customers. True, their solutions tend to be in the product and experiential like designing the Community Pharmacy for Walgreens. Beneath the actual solutions lie a relentless curiosity about behavior and behavior change, “We identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering latent needs, behaviors, and desires.”

If a sales organization spent their energy on understanding their customer’s actual experience and behavior and then sought to deliver services that made their lives a little easier, they might end up with a great strategy for building enduring relationships. Inevitably it would actually point to creating content that is helpful to customers/prospects/influencers. So, right back to that content marketing model we are all working on just within the context of delivering service.  

It might also cause the sales organization to create tools and applications that make it easier to make a smart business decision. Pull out your iPhone. Mine is full of consumer-facing examples of new customer services from my airlines, Delta; my aspirational travel agent, Jetsetter; even my car insurance provider, Geico. IDEO would think holistically (design thinking) about the buyer’s experience and how we might overcome barriers, friction points, and emotional moats.  That is a refreshing way to state the goals of social selling. 

Do: I am all for quick hits and big solutions. I would suggest committing to a content strategy based upon delivering the most useful content possible to your customer’s decision-making process. What reports, white papers, customer testimonials would help them make a good decision? Simply putting on the buyer’s hat vs. your own seller’s hat can drive you to create more useful content. Meanwhile, try a process where you think more creatively about delivering useful services to help the selling/buying process. You can hire a consultant. You can interview customers. You can trigger some effective brainstorming to explore new service territories. 

Resources:

• IDEO Method Cards – this pack of cards introduces you to a variety of ways to apply a design approach to business problems. Flip through. Find 3 that sound promising and just try them.
• Patterns - a useful blog from IDEO on design thinking and application 

Timing: By 2nd Q it will be key to be executing on a content marketing strategy that embeds social components. By 4thQ, it would be terrific to have a utility or buyer service in place being used and tested.

(thanks to madupiyadasa for the pic)

Actionable Social Business Predictions: #2 Social Insights over Social Data

We have long been fascinated by the wealth of data we could collect, analyze and put to use via digital media.  It’s taken us years to get beyond the intention and excitement of doing that to actually using data in constructive ways.

Now along comes all this social data spread between platforms like Facebook and Twitter and conversation search tools like Radian6 and Sysomos. The promise of knowing what your fans and detractors are saying about your brand is irresistible. The chance to put these social "signals" to use cannot be passed up.  

Well, as more brands finally commit to infrastructure to collect social data, the pressure is on in 2012 to lead with social insights derived from this data vs. data for data’s sake. To many first-time efforts in social listening end with phone book-sized reports with pages of pie charts and bar graphs that portray data in an academic way. That means it’s not functional and at best information for information’s sake (just as useless in the here-today as raw data)

We Need Marketing Scientists (on the lookout for insights)

Some marketers emphasize the need for “marketing scientists” to sort through “Big Data” to find meaning. That is spot-on and certainly where we at Ogilvy see the present never mind the future.

McKinsey summarized the challenge, 

“The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus…Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.”

So while big brains wrestle with big data in 2012, most business leaders must convert their ambiguous desire for more data and the irresistible hunger to add social data to the mix into daily efforts to derive actionable insights from whatever data they have today. There is a big difference between data and the actionable output of that data.

Kara Martens calls out social data as big area for growth n 2012 on the Shoutlet blog. She may very well assume that data and insights go hand-in-hand but it takes special effort to actually boil insights. Doug Palmer, Vikram Mahidhar and Dan Elbert on the Deloitte Review identify the challenge:

“Simply put, with so much data available, especially on social networks, the ability to know the people you sell to and to monetize that knowledge has never been greater….That said, most companies are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with social data. Many are still operating in the pre-social media age, simply trying to make sense of the data they have—rather than the variety of sources that exist.”

Demand Social Network Insights

 Many big brands are doing big deals with Facebook. One of the payouts of that type of deal is insights from the platform and Facebook team. More than what any social media strategist can wring from the DIY Facebook Insights screens, the promise of this deal is that Facebook – keeper of more social data than the gods – will share relevant insights with their best, paying customers. That’s likely a good deal. And it’s the type of deal point that LinkedIn, Google and others should deliver on as well. Next time you consider a big deal with the social networks, make sure you are getting a good slice of insights (not just data and not just what anyone can derive from the platform). 

Listening Tech Only Part of the Answer

Too many social listening efforts focus on the technology. Firms like Radian6, Visible Technologies, and Sysomos provide a tech layer to search and sort. What they don’t do is provide any true capacity to seed those engines with the right queries or dig into and discover insights that and help business decision makers today. We need people with aptitude and experience to do that. Analysts who understand the business and the customer and who know the difference between usable insights and info porn. 

Do:It’s not enough to hire out a bunch of great researchers. We need to build capacity within the organization to understand and recognize good insights. That means training, identifying best and worst practices, and building a system that rewards insights. 

• Find a “bright spot” in your organization. This is some group who has gotten good at extracting and applying useful insightsMake their work the archetype for others to follow.
• If useful, draft a playbook or other instructional for how to actually do listening well.
• Train marketers to recognize insights. Even if they are likely to delegate or outsource to a research team, they are stronger if they can quickly recognize great insights (and imposters)
• Create an award for “top insights.” C’mon, we all have internal award systems. Time to elevate great insights that drive business and in the process tell everyone that leadership cares about them. 

Resources:

McKinsey Global Initiative Report on Big Data – a good read that takes the macro approach to putting big data to work

Deloitte Making Sense of Social Data: Digital exhaust and the next frontier in social data analytics – also more on the macro side of things but a sober, business view of social data and how it can drive business advantage  

Timeline: This one’s overdue. More and more companies are embracing a operational approach to social listening (doing deals with technology and insisting/recommending that brand managers use social listening).  Any effort to do this without insisting on distributing actionable insight and information throughout the enterprise is wasting time and money.  

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #1 Comprehensive Content Strategy

Timing is everything in business. Business leaders want to embrace innovations the moment before they become profitable business strategy or execution. That goes for most social media-based business solutions.

Most annual social media predictions are loose stabs at what may happen and often range from the obvious, “20-whatever is the year of mobile,” to the interesting, “2012 will/won’t be the year of Google+.”  

With hard-to-read economic indicators, business leaders don’t need broad meditations on what might happen but rather ways of more precisely anticipating change and what they might do to take advantage of that change.  For teh next few posts, I aim to deliver practical predictions complete with my suggestions on what brands ought to do. I have also narrowed my focus to quarters to help with understanding timing.  

The first in the series is a potentially big shift in marketing and communications. 

Comprehensive content marketing finds its value

With more than 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month and the steady increase in Google searches, people are hungrily sharing content they find relevant. Still most major marketers do not have a big, grand approach to content marketing. Bright spot exceptions include American Express’ Small Business site, Open; Intel’s Free Press and General Mill’s Tablespoon.  

Many marketers predict that “content strategy” will eclipse or become the driver for advertising strategy. As the pressure continues to build on advertisers to deliver more and more relevant advertising (i.e. content) and marketers look to engage customers and stakeholders directly via social networks (i.e. content sharing platforms), we will see two efforts lead to the same result – brands adopting more sophisticated content strategies and practices to serve their customers.

There are two barriers in the way: a simple way to understand the business value of content marketing and organizational inertia. We just don’t have an easy formula to evaluate the business impact (sales + preference + brand/reputation + customer value) of great content programs. Yet everyday, we are learning about what content our customers value on Facebook. We post content. They post content. They like/comment/share on piece of content more than another and that tells what is valuable.

 

Combine the network effect of the average Facebook user (and their 130 friends) passing along content links with the “google-juice” of a great content reservoir like Open or the reach partnerships available with media companies like Vice Media (see The Creator's Project, their partnership with Intel here).

2012 will bring major marketers more usable value metrics to understand why they might shift spend from traditional marketing activities (e.g. traditional ad creative vs. new ad-as-content creative).

 

Do:The penalty for not aggressively developing a comprehensive content strategy that drives interactions with customers no matter where you meet them won’t be felt immediately. This is an innovators game and those marketers who want to rely on the reliable won’t lose their job over this one. For the marketing innovators, start by finding those topics that naturally intersect with your customers/stakeholders and the brand.

American Express helps its small business customers with content about running small business (not just how to leverage card services). General Mills goes beyond the benefits of Betty Crocker foods to offer a collection of highly shareable ‘quick recipes.’ What is that natural intersection between what customers need and the benefits of your brand or the solutions it makes possible? 

• Research what terms people use when they search for related topics
• Build content for your website, blog and social media calendar around those topics
• Connect these topics with your communications departments “message platform” so they are reinforced in their public relations efforts
• Feed the topics to the advertising team to either use in supporting copy or, gasp, to actually drive the creative concept

 

Resources:

• Content Marketing Institute - from the strategic to the mind-numbingly tactical, this content source has great suggestions for applying content marketing to business 
• Chief Content Officer group on LinkedIn – clearly a bunch of marketers have gotten the message for how important content’s role in business will be 

 

Timing: This is a marathon but one to get started in 1stQ 2012. There is a little of a first-mover advantage at stake here. I could easily argue that American Express did not own the attention of small businessmen/women, but their persistence with Open may have changed that. 

 

Social Business Solutions from Social Business Teams

We at Ogilvy have been delivering what we call social business solutions for the past few years. We have a staff mix of social media strategists who themselves come from marketing, digital and communications backgrounds and management consultants. Each brings something valuable to understanding business problems. The consultants have strengths that really surface in the solution design part of an engagement while those with marcom backgrounds also get implementation in a way that most management consultants envy. 

What is social business?

Social media can deliver value to businesses far beyond the narrow application to marketing and communications goals. It can help a workforce be more efficient and productive. It can inform product design and service delivery. It can fuel innovation. It can enable better recruiting and talent management.

We use the term social business to describe the value businesses derive from social media technology and behaviors across the enterprise. Often it implies some type of change or transformation but rarely do businesses come to us expressly asking for change management.That usually comes later once it’s clear that enabling a workforce to become brand advocates, as an example, has all sorts of implications on governance, legal and human resource policies. Even then, we are focused on solving a business problem using social media-related solutions or thinking.   We see social business solutions falling into four categories: 

Why diverse teams?

Jay Baer had an interesting post that questioned whether media and marketing specialists make the best social business solution providers. I believe they are indispensible but I also believe they are just half of the solution. Good management consultants are the other half. These guys and gals understand how to evaluate a business problem, interrogate people, process and organization and then design a solution that is equal parts good design and real politik of implementation. Most marketing experts focus on solving a marketing program completely divorced from the intricacies of an organization. They know how to design and implement great marcom solutions but with no entrée to change an organization to be more successful at marketing, their assessment of internal politics is done somewhat superficially.  

Strengths of management consultants

• Recognizing business problems and opportunities for change
• Stakeholder interviews and investigation
• Designing programs aligned with organizational realities and complexity
• Defining and delivering against business value

Strengths of marcom specialists/social media strategists

• Understanding the technology and behaviors of social media
• Designing solutions based upon behavioral economics
• Implementing programs (not just designing them)
• Fast, agile execution 

Jay asks, “If you’re a major corporation that’s convinced you need to make some serious changes to prosper in a rapidly shifting future, do you turn to your PR firm, do you turn to a legacy management consulting firm (Bain, Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, et al), or do you turn to one of the new breed of specialist firms (Altimeter, Dachis, et al)?”

I say they should turn to those who can deliver integrated social solutions and scale them across the enterprise. Experience, cases, methods that combine the best of disciplines – these are ingredients for a results-oriented business solutions firm. Firms like IBM understand the business potential of social media – enabling collaboration between employees, connecting a far flung network of experts more directly with customers. They not only embrace social business solutions but have offered to deliver same to their own clients. They are an exception.  

Right now, most businesses that need social business solutions are discovering that need in the course of more ordinary work, much of it in marketing or employee relations. We work to share best practice social media marketing and communications across 30 markets and end up in a marketing transformation project. So, management firms like McKinsey are not the default right answer. Nor are the pure PR firms with lots of Facebook programs under their belt. This territory remains wide open. Clearly, I am biased to the team we have deployed. That’s why we did it. Time will tell who earns the reputation as the top social business providers. 

 

10 Learnings from Operationalizing Social Media within the Enterprise

At this year’s WOMMA Summit, I hosted a session with Christine Cea, Head of Marketing Communications at Unilever US and Ekaterina Walters, Social Media Strategist at Intel, to dive into their experiences scaling social media within their organizations. I asked each to share 2-3 insights or learnings from their experience that went beyond the pale. What surprised them? What took more time and attention than expected? What would they pass along to a colleague to help them tread this same path? 

But we called the session “10" Learnings… So, I turned the same question to the crowd to come up with the balance and between us all developed a helpful list. The slides from the session are available at WOMMA. (time for you to become a member?)

Here is our list from the session:

Governance is not a ‘one and done’ – the process of expanding the use of social media and getting all the right parties involved in all the right regions of the world reveals a steady stream of governance issues that need ot be decided upon and communicated. Brace yourself to solve many governance issues and to never quite be done. You haven’t lived until you draft the social media-specific version of employee CAN SPAM rules (look it up). 

Remember, the Internet and our businesses are global – Christine began by creating the Unilever Social Engagement Playbook for the US market. It was soon discovered by global executives and supported as a worldwide resource. I have seen this again and again at our multi-national clients. Regions or even local markets develop their own tools for educating their teams or enabling them to leverage Facebook well or the broader social media palette. Soon, overlapping initiatives spring up just like the first uses of social networks within big brands. It takes executive leadership to spot these and globalize the best work. 

Expect your effort to grow via the “Glom-on factor” – once you start something like an enterprise-level playbook or similar guidance, the need for new “chapters” will appear. Did you cover usage of LinkedIn? How about Google+ experiments?  If you are describing the value of an “owned, paid, earned’ model, shouldn’t you include the most recent guidance from global marcom leadership on the company’s marketing mix? It’s more than social but hugely impactful. 

Go back to basics: know your strategy and your story – This is one of those things that Pete Blackshaw at Nestle would call “back to boring.” Social media doesn’t change the laws of physics. Nor does it call for a separate strategy or story. Your ambition in social may change your marcom strategy but still stick with a holistic strategy and story. And know what it is before you go too far in terms of  implementing programs across social. 

Build it and they will come – Ekaterina shared her experience creating infrastructure and tools for local markets across the globe. I have sweated a bit recently on global programs where we needed to incent local markets to put resources around managing Facebook pages.We really had to go out of our way to make it an easy decision and even then we needed to showcase some success stories to motivate some folks. Her experience was different.  If you provide the right infrastructure and training, the markets will jump on board. She gave a great anecdote about a team in India who were dragging their feet. Given infrastructure, they energized their use of Facebook to become a top page in the Intel family. 

Be prepared because you have two to three days to maximize opportunities – if you don’t have a process for acting quickly, you’ll miss the opportunity. When a local market launched Museum of Me at Intel, it quickly became a hit and relevant to more markets. For Intel’s social media teams, part of the job means remaining nimble. Without the ability to help other markets cash in on the Museum of Me social experience (and expand server infrastructure) they could not have take full advantage of such a great program. 

Interns are not community managers - Do not hire an intern to be the voice of your company. It is too easy to belittle the job of publishing content and interacting with customers. After all, don’t the interns “get” social media? Whether you have 60,000 or 6 million fans, the job of engaging them is an important one. Train your community managers. Define the social voice of your brand. Outline responsible response scenarios.   

Create a centralized measurement model  - This is a keystone issue. Having a common measurement model makes so many other things fall into place. Crafting that measurement model is also hard and should not be left to local markets figure out on their own. Once you establish how to understand performance and value, efforts around the world can benchmark programs and understand what is successful and what out to be discontinued. 

Scaling is all about continuous internal training, pilot programs and agency help – The book on effective social media and word of mouth marketing is just being written. No room for smug “gurus” here. Everyone seemed to agree that we all need to be ina constant state of learning. This is a program none of us will likely graduate from.  Our own global training program at Ogilvy is a great example. We have been delivering training globally on all things ‘social’ for the past 7 years and will be expanding our program this year. No questions asked. We are committed. 

Create a gateway to unlock social media access and resources – When markets and team do want to jump on board and launch their own Facebook pages or Twitter handles, it is key to evaluate if they are really ready to take on the commitment. You can make training mandatory. You can also establish a minimum staff commitment to make sure they are ready for the moderation responsibilities. Also, who does translations? If you create a global conversation calendar, does the global center translate or the local market? Who has the budget? Establish criteria by which you can confirm that a market is ready to succeed. 

Look at where the tech teams within your organization for direction - See where they are going as they are at the forefront of what needs to be done – One story emerged early in social media at big companies. Entrepreneurial spirits who wanted to do cool things in social circumvented their IT departments. You had to in order to get anything done. The restrictive governance and procedure governing Web site development and network resources just didn’t apply well to social media. Now, it’s time to re-engage with the tech teams you have internally as they are more in touch with where platforms are heading today than perhaps 5 years ago. 

Make legal your friend – there  are so many bright legal minds thinking about enabling use of social media within brands. Getting your legal department permanently to the table can really strengthen your work and avoid problems. Your lawyers are your friends. 

That was our list. There was some talk about an “11th” and some reference to SpinalTap.