Has this ever happened to you? When you're at a conference that offers many tracks, all of the really interesting sessions are at the same time. It happened a number of times to me during SXSW. Only I typically missed all of them, due to making personal connections and discussing topics of mutual interest with colleagues in the hallway.
The good news is that on my final day, I didn't have to make that decision. The first session of the morning was one that I was really looking forward to. Called "The Future of Corporate Blogging," it was a panel discussion between Lionel Menchaca, Mario Sundar and Kami Huyse, moderated by Mack Collier.
There's no question that this was a worthwhile session - with two living case studies of corporate blogs that really work, rich examples of how to do things well, and some of the very individuals who made it happen. Add in a consultant's view of measurement and tools, and an insightful moderator who operates in this field, and you've got a great mix. So, on with the summary!
An introduction from the experts
Lionel is the Chief Blogger at Dell's blog Direct2Dell and Mario is the Community Evangelist at LinkedIn - and these are two great examples of corporate blogs. Both were founded in response to a particular problem that needed to be solved; the prevailing thinking was not "we need a blog." Note that. The blogs were part of an overall communications strategy; blogging itself is not a strategy.
Kami is the principal at My PR Pro and is widely respected in the field of communications measurement. She rightly observed that if you want to figure out where to connect with your customers, you need to know something about them: namely how they communicate. How and where are they most likely engage with you? Do they use Facebook? Are they on Twitter? Do they read blogs? You should also find out what they need. When you meet needs in the place they're most likely to be, you'll find a wealth of engagement. Then you can decide what to measure.
A quick word about measurement
It seems like the holy grail of social media marketing is around measurement & metrics. I think it keeps coming up because there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Invariably, at the beginning of every campaign or project, you should be asking yourself "What would we consider a success?"
The panelists offered the following suggestions as a rough set of guidelines of measuring your blog or establishing a set of social media metrics for your efforts:
Kami actually put together a number of links on her del.icio.us page for reference:
http://del.icio.us/kamichat/sxsw2008
You've got a blog. So what?
Mack raised an excellent point: customers probably don't care that you have a blog. How do you make it relevant?
Dell makes it relevant by adhering to a social media framework:
Listening, analyzing, taking action. The first thing Dell realized is that there were lots of conversations going on about Dell on the Web. In fact, when the corporate blog started, about 50% of the comments that came in were negative. But, thanks to their openness and action, now 80% of the comments are positive.
Lionel noted that taking action is the most important step, and Dell has addressed this in a couple of ways. First, they've empowered every employee to apologize. Think about it. A huge corporate behemoth has stepped away from its usual scripted customer "service" language and allowed the company to become human for it a bit. That's a huge step right there.
Next, Dell established a way for customers to share product development ideas through IdeaStorm. A core team looks at new ideas that come in, assesses them, and then figures out a way to incorporate those into the business. Dell has received about 9,000 ideas from the community, with over 600,000 comments. An example of one idea is getting Dell to integrate Linux. To show you how effective it was, Dell put out a survey and in 8.5 days received 100,000 responses from customers. Now customers are aware that they can influence product development at Dell and it's resulted in the development of a community of loyalists.
LinkedIn wanted to help users better understand the site and the technology.
Mario noted that the company's vision was to establish conversations - a "playground of ideas" - on the site. The best way to teach customers how to use the site was to show them how to use the site, through demos. The next best way is to provide them with excellent customer support.
Overall, the panelists agreed that relevance lies in how easy you make it for your customers to interact with you. A surefire way is to create multiple touchpoints that meet the goal of reducing the amount of time between the identification of a problem and a solution. Sometimes you can find answers in unexpected areas. Despite our focus on the new shiny "2.0" things, forums are still a great place to mine for information, feedback and problems.
And in order for social media strategies to take root, the panelists noted, a company's culture needs to change. It's a step-wise process that can take years with layers of tools, technologies, and management that get more complex the longer you're in the game.
But not all is lost, even if you're in the most change-resistant environment. You don't need a fully-formed answer before you respond to concerns you identify by listening. Just be human and reach out - think of it as a conversation, where you add incremental value along the way and learn more about the person, the problem and the processes along the way.
And if there are any doubtful managers or executives in your company, sometimes seeing these conversations helps to dispel the myths/fears around negative comments. It's essential to demonstrate this on an ongoing basis, especially in a large organization, in order to show how direct communication with customers really matters.
New tools
Each of the panelists was asked about which new tools they'd recommend trying out.
Mario recommended trying Twitter as a customer service tool, for monitoring and response. He also had this cool idea: try setting up a livestream (video) as a response to users. He suggested that you use whatever tools you can find that allow you to answer problems or questions in the shortest amount of time.
Kami observed that blogs can be a platform for all of these tools. In some ways, she said that a blog could almost become a home page for the customer, where they're offered a more rich experience. The only caution she noted was that we should be aware that expectations are changing: as you give more, customers will expect more.
And Lionel reminded us that internal collaboration should not be ignored in this process. Piecing all of these activities together within the enterprise is essential, in order to capture all of the value. The best advice for this was "Get it off of email." If you establish a wiki, you'll be able to share more information with everyone within the organization.
Questions
The panel had time for a few questions from the audience.
1. How do you keep your personal brand separate from your corporate brand?
Mario referenced Hugh McLeod's post about the porous membrane - step out of the way and let users speak directly with product development, to keep each separate. That way, you can maintain your own brand and let the people at your company do what they do best.
2. How do you help employees understand the value of & support a corporate blog?
Dell established an internal blog (behind a firewall) at the same time they established Direct2Dell, with the same structure & setup, in order to capture value internally. LinkedIn encourages employees to read and contribute to the corporate blog.
3. What's behind the fear of blogging in the corporate world?
On the surface, there's the fear of getting flamed by negative comments and not knowing what to do. But you know what? It's happening anyway. It's better to capture these conversations and show how you can interact with your customers.
An example is when Dell launched its blog on July 5, 2006. About a week later, Lionel wrote a post about the now famous flaming laptop. He said that within minutes, got calls and visits to his cubicle with questions like, "What the hell are you doing?" He rightly observed that people were talking about it and it was all over the Internet already; he was acknowledging it and joining the conversation. It led to 1.3 million battery recalls, but more importantly, it also led to a documented process for interacting with customers.
As I noted at the beginning of the post, this was a great session and I'm really glad I had a chance to attend. If the conference organizers recorded it, I'll be sure to share that here.
Showing posts with label SXSW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SXSW. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Corporate Blogging - How the Pros Do It
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Creating Social Strategies
I'm sitting in on Charlene Li's session on Creating Social Strategies at SXSW. Here's a brief overview of her very thoughtful and comprehensive presentation.
Straight off, Charlene defined "groundswell" - the social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.
According to Charlene (and from my own experiences), most companies are aware of this, but don't truly understand - they just don't get it. So how to go about getting a social strategy planned, created and adopted within an organization?
A word about radicals/revolutionaries
Are you going to be a radical like Thomas Paine? He sparked the American revolution, then continued to foment revolution in France. He became so radical that no one respected him any more.
Or a revolutionary like Thomas Jefferson? A more respected leader, even though he was a staunch defender of Thomas Paine - he worked with others, put plans into place and brought ideas to life.
POST - the process to create a social strategy
- People - assess your customers' social activities
- Objectives - decide what you want to accomplish
- Strategy - plan for how relationships with customers will evolve
- Technology - decide which tools/technologies to use
The ladder of participation (see below) is made up of creators (18% adults/39% youths), critics (25%/43%), collectors (12%/14%), joiners (25%/58%), spectators (48%/66%), inactives (44%/26%)
Age is a major driver of adoption. For a more detailed breakout of these numbers and fuller descriptions of each category, see Charlene's original post.
Objectives
Traditional roles are changing under the groundswell, from more unidirectional to bidirectional. Some examples:
Research --> listening
Marketing --> Talking
Sales --> Energizing
Support --> Supporting
Development --> Embracing
How are revolutionaries doing it?
- BlendTec - used YouTube videos for the now famous Will It Blend series. George Wright, BlendTec's VP of Marketing spent $50 to get this started.
- Dan Black, director of recruiting for Ernst & Young used Facebook to connect with students. But he did so in a different way. Lots of questions were asked on E&Y's wall, and he wrote back in a very personal tone. Realized that this was one of the few channels to have a direct conversation with students.
- Gary Koelling & Steve Bendt at Best Buy decided to start BlueShirtNation for Best Buy employees. It turned out to be a great support system for employees.
- Josh Bancroft at Intel - created an internal wiki for employees: Intelpedia. He got it done quickly and without the usual corporate red tape. Demonstrated that people were already using it/contributing to it by the time management got back to him to discuss the idea.
How to get it done
Lionel Menchaca at Dell.com was a product tech guy, had been there for 17 years - he was knowledgeable and he was a connector. He realized that customer service + product development + blog = getting Dell out of hell. He got direct support from Michael Dell to keep going, personally address concerns & negative comments. Very quickly, the culture within Dell changed:
- In the course of 2 months, they took customer suggestions and launched a new product.
- DellShares - the Investor Relations team of Dell is now blogging.
Find & support your revolutionaries
- Find the people who are most passionate about developing relationships
- Educate your executives - teach them about the benefits, and actually get them involved in them
- Put someone in charge - someone who has authority
- Define the processes & policies - yes, the legal department may need to be involved, but it's best to outline it up front
- Make it safe to fail
Final thoughts:
- Make it stick with frameworks
- Start small, think big
- Make social strategy the responsibility of every employee
- Be patient - cultural change takes time
Update: If you'd like to see Charlene's slides, they're available on SlideShare.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
The Suxorz: Worst Social Media of 2007
I'm here at SXSWi - South by Southwest Interactive - in Austin, TX and I just sat in on a panel called "The Suxorz - the Worst of the Worst in Social Media Marketing for 2007."
The panelists included Charlotte Selles (brand perspective), Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca Lieb, Steve Hall, and the moderator was Henry Copeland. While this may not seem like a who's-who of the social media industry, they did come at it with a pretty broad perspective of advertisers & marketers using common sense. You'll see a number of selections that were based on poor opinions of creative execution, as well as those that don't follow good social media practice.
Here's how the session worked: each panelist nominated a campaign; after three rounds, the "winner" was selected.
Round 1
- Selles: Molson asked individuals to use Facebook to share pictures of themselves using the product; the winner would get a trip for 5 to Cancun.
- Lieb: Carlton Beer "big ad" video - it's just a bad ad. This is the type of ad where you remember the activity within the ad, but not the product. So much so that people didn't even get the name of the product right in some YouTube videos.
- Jarvis: HP PayPerPost - mom accepts $1000 to have her kids destroy a Fuji camera in favor of HP. Got moms to use their kids as shills to make a splog. Just. Plain. Evil.
- Hall: Wal-Marting Across America used a real journalist and real photographer, but set them up as simply Wal-Mart fans, traveling across America, parking their RV at Wal-Mart parking lots.
Round 2
- Selles: Rahodeb - Whole Foods CEO John Mackey uses an alias to ding detractors on forums
- Jarvis: Cisco's Human Network - wrote all Cisco-related Wikipedia entries; had vloggers try to write about the Human Network. Got themselves to #2 in Google organic search.
- Hall: Mentos/Diet Coke - the extension campaign that Coke undertook after the original video was not nearly as authentic and spontaneous as the first
- Lieb: Vespa's corporate advertising "blog"
Round 3
- Lieb: Agency.com going to work for Subway - "when we roll, we roll big". Made a laughingstock of.
- Hall: Target Rounders on Facebook - shhh! Don't tell anyone you're a Rounder, but be a Target fan.
- Selles: Sony PSP - all I want for Christmas is a PSP. 550+ negative posts on this blog that was created by their marketing agency, but professed to be a real fan blog.
- Jarvis: Giuliani campaign - he wasn't afraid of terrorists, but his MySpace page was closed to friend adds.
The winners of the three rounds were put against each other and the final winner was selected:
Hewlett Packard.
According the the panelists, some of the criteria they used in judging what qualified as a "bad" social media campaign:
- Advertisers acting like asses
- Out and out lying to customers
- Corrupting authentic voices
The bottom line, according to the panelists is: treat people as people, not as a mass. You'll be forgiven if you're honest with people.
What do you think? Do these campaigns represent the worst of the worst? Are there others that you might nominate? Do you think there are other criteria to consider or other lessons to be learned? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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