Elastic Thought

In the Social Media World, When Do We Get to Sleep With Each Other?

That's my question for the week.  Though I should probably explain it a bit before sending this out there to have everyone question my romanticism, dexterity, sanity, or hygiene.

Let's start at the beginning.  Who has heard that social media is like a cocktail party?  Who has heard that it is [like] a conversation?  Anyone?  Bueller?

By the way, it is a conversation, many, many of them happening at the same big cocktail party.  Really.  And the cocktail party analogy is more along the lines of not breaking into someone's conversation and immediately start talking about yourself.  Nothing with alcohol.  (Though I do get quite a few interesting libations on Facebook on a regular basis).  And probably not very much to do with "hooking up" with someone.  Let's just assume this is a professional networking cocktail party (not your company's holiday party).

OK, so here's where it gets interesting.  As everyone speaks at functions on social media and consults everyone to join the conversation, there are few asking of them: "why?"  The answer, of course, would be something along the lines of forming a relationship with your customers, target audience, general public, and/or those sympathetic with your cause.  Connect with them, share common values and bring value to the "relationship."  All well and good.  Really.  But here is the next question:

"Why?"   ... Why do you want to have a relationship with all of those people?  Why do you want to "connect" with them?

Let's jump back to the real world analogies.  In your personal life, why do you form relationships with those that you do?  It may be family, it may be to share common interests, it may be to start to form your own family, it may be to find someone to laugh with.  But a lot of people also have business relationships.  What do we want from those relationships?  At the work place, we aren't seeking out other companies to form relationships with to have a laugh in the middle of the day, or talk about our kids (though a lot of our meetings start that way, don't they?)  The relationships we form in business are there to help in some way.  A potential client, a networking connection to lean on for advice or a job, subcontractors that can help you get through the next project, etc.  In a sense, they are there for our own selfish needs at times.  Now, I'm not discounting all the hard work and hazing that goes into forming a business relationship.  Just that they are not there strictly for social or esoteric reasons.

But let's go back to dating.  The courtship of getting these relationships set up.  And let's go to a familiar question: "how many dates do you go on together before you decide it's time to sleep together?"  In a sense, when is it time to pull the trigger?

I responded to a comment earlier from Dennis Howlett talking about just this very thing.  In that exchange, I used the analogy of having a conversation with your boss to ask for a raise.  You are having a conversation, but your goal is to get a raise.  Hell, it's probably why you faked a relationship with him/her for this long anyway, right?  So there is a goal.

And so, too, do all these companies jumping into the social media space.  Sure, there is a good side-effect here in that these companies will listen more, adapt more, and form better relationships.  That's the good news.  But don't forget, they are in it for something.  It's not always more sales, but needless to say, it's something.  That something is what we consultants need to help define and then achieve for our clients.

So back to the original question.  Once the company has been involved in social media for a while, when is it appropriate to leverage those relationships for what the company's original goals were?  When is it appropriate for them to pull the trigger?

In other words, when is it "appropriate" for them to suggest we all go upstairs for a nightcap?

Let's discuss amongst ourselves...

Why Can't Marketers Accept Authenticity?

 

We've been at this social media stuff for a little while now and we've seen some changes over the past couple of years.  Companies have moved from a curiosity of the attention is has gathered, to a genuine wanting to learn, to now a tepid "dip the toe in" approach to trying it out.  And this is definitely a normal cycle to getting into something that is new and unfamiliar.

However, it still surprises me to see the marketing person in the room systematically dismiss the power of authenticity as a marketing tactic.  That is not to say that they are against social media, or utilizing any of the tools that are available to us in this space.  It's just that they are more comfortable to move the discussion around these programs as a "customer care" issue or a corporate communications issue.  As a legitimate marketing tool, the discussion begins to take an odd turn.

Our question is... why?

There is no doubt that these tools help with reputation and customer good will.  The difference is that those are marketing tools as well.  Marketing is a communication of value to the audience.  And in that vein, marketing can move beyond a communication of value to actually bringing value to that same audience.  In an article in Entrepreneur, they talk about something we have been educating in social media for a long time now: "People love being heard and feeling that someone cares."  Though their article is advocating for customer service as a marketing tactic, the lessons still apply to social media.  Engaging people in the brand and letting them know they are valuable brings a loyalty that other marketing messages can't match.

So back to the question of why...

Though there are a myriad of reasons (we're sure), one theory is the question of the return on investment (ROI).  Marketing has definitely worked out a great model for known tools such as direct mail, print advertising and the like.  However, social media doesn't present as simple of a model.  It reminds us of the question of ROI with regards to PR.  A lot of PR practitioners would avoid the ROI conversation at all costs stating why it goes beyond impressions, and why impressions don't have an intrinsic value.  Yet when P&G came out with their study that showed PR had a higher return than advertising, it suddenly was en vogue to discuss (even without the real details or statistical modeling behind it).

We believe that PR was more complicated because of brand PR, reputation management, grassroots, analyst relations, etc.  But there is a model--ask P&G.  And there is a model for social media as well.

Right now you can read/see/hear any number of reasons why you can't (and shouldn't) look to prove a return on investment.  Harvard Business School associate professor Andy McAfee says: "There is not enough ROI for figuring out ROI.  it is an intellectually bankrupt exercise."  Essentially saying that marketing is tough to measure in a vacuum.  It's financial outcomes come through a chain of cause and effect relationships.  Jason Falls says that "The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable."

But we definitely have been working on a model that can help.  As discussed in a previous post here we thought that validating social media measurement was important to getting the attention of the hard-core marketing research folks.  Perhaps this model can do just that.  And perhaps, that will get more marketers to engage in the authenticity conversation as a marketing tool and not a customer relations tactic.  Perhaps you can put a numeric quantity on human interaction.  The sales profession has had statistics that show the increase in likelihood of a sale based on how many times they "touch" a customer, the wine industry says a customer is 80% more likely to buy a bottle of wine once they've pulled it from the shelf.  Companies have monetized lead loss generation when negative postings hit the first page of Google, and so on.

So social media needs a model.  We can't continue to blog our way out of coming up with this model, and we have to respectfully disagree with  Andy McAfee.  We think that the person that comes up with a way to show real impact to the financial bottom line using social media (in this economy) is going to find that their time was well spent.  They just might have to look at all the points along the cause-effect relationships.

Now, does anyone have the formula for authenticity and trust?

(Photo Credit: Felix Heinen)

Social Media is NOT Time Consuming

But let's start with rocks.  Big rocks.  I'm sure a lot of you have heard a variation of the story relating to time management.  It goes something like this:

Take a large jar and put in some large rocks.  Is it full?  Can you put more rocks into the jar?  No?  Try some pebbles.  Do they fit?  They trickle down into the nooks and crannies left by the big rocks and generally fill it up.  Is it full?  Can you fit any more into it?  No?  Try some sand.  I think at this point you get the picture.  There is room left to fit activities into your day if you really try hard enough.  As a variation, Stephen Covey takes the empty jar and gives you sand, pebbles, and big rocks and asks you to fit them all into the jar.  Many people start with the pebbles or sand, and invariably aren't able to get all the materials into the jar.  His theory, and I tend to agree, is that most people focus on the little activities that waste the most time and neglect the big activities (the large rocks) that need to get done.

So, I'm sure you're starting to connect the dots, here.  The only thing I want to stress is that social media is not a bag of large rocks.  It's actually more like the pebbles.  You can fit the little things into your day and structure them around the larger tasks (call it your "day job") that you need to take care of in the day.  Then, after you get those done, you can fill the rest of the time with the bag of sand that is griping about the boss, or betting on who's going to be the next American Idol.

Just to put some real world examples to this, we were working with a client that has a call center as part of their operations.  In between calls, they would sit and read magazines, surf the internet, etc. until the next call came in.  We put a simple chart together that we hung up in each cube that laid out their rock strategy.  Big rocks first--answer the phone and take care of the caller.  Then, after that, log into these selected social media sites and look for topics that are of interest to the organization.  (We even put some examples of those in there).  Here is the login information and password.  Go engage in those conversations.  Pause when the phone rings, and then come back to it.  We increased productivity, and was able to "squeeze" in social media into the daily workings of a group that said they were "maxed out."  All with one pretty chart.

So, please, do not put off a social media component to the campaign because you feel that it is too time consuming, or that your work force is stretched so thin, they couldn't possibly handle another task.  They can.  And with the right guidance, you can put a strategic plan together that accomplishes your goals and gets more productivity out of any given campaign.

Social media is not time consuming.  And as the media landscape continues to change, those pebbles that you fit in and around your other larger activities just might become large rocks themselves.

More to come...