Archive for November, 2010

Apply Your Social Media Experience In Government

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

The rush is on!  Go to any government conference or read many of the case studies that have been developed and you will see the industry (of the Government) congratulating agencies basically for “trying” social media.  Much like the private sector, government agencies have been diving into social simply by signing up for accounts.  According to a study just released by L2: over 80% of the Government agencies they studied had a presence on each of Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.  Even with all of those accounts, that same study rated 75% of those same agencies as having a below average or average at best digital IQ and if you try to find any meaningful case studies out of all that activity, you will be looking a long time for very little.

So it’s safe to say that activity does not equal progress when it comes to social media adoption and usefuleness whether you are in the public or private sector.  But before we call all Agencies on the rug, it is important to to recognize some glimmers of brilliance from the study:

  • NASA – is the clear leader of Agencies with innovations in social that include tweetups, the Buzzroom experiment, incorporating social into their websites that drive demonstrable traffic and innovation challenges that drive results.
  • Data.gov & Challenge.gov – both are cross-agency sites designed to aggreagate public sector needs with private sector innovation in an open and relatively transparent way.
  • Armed Forces – have taken to social media for recruiting purposes and have been doing a very good job at it.  Sites like the National Guard have teamed with private sector sites to crowdsource “cool factor” with their Show Us Your Guns campaign.

These glimmers of hope seem to be just that.  Right when it seems an agency is embracing social (TSA Blogs), they slide down the slippery slope into oblivion.  When you start to look at reasons for the lack of effectiveness, one recent survey from the National Assn. of Counties who surveyed their member counties reported that almost 80% said they had no social media policy in place.  While it is not the only reason, it certainly would contribute to a lack of effectiveness in using social media within government.

It seems that what is missing is simple execution.  Like anything new, the technology often gets adopted before the governance is in place which leads to a wide open door to a room full of risk, unlawful activity and plain mis-judgements that stem from an approach that is less about trial and more about error.  The good news from this is these challenges have already been addressed.  Many private sector companies were leaping into the social world led be interns and a rogue IT person and have learned many leassons about privacy, governance, systems integration, managing digital networks and more.  So the real question becomes how to transfer the tribal knowledge that is being accumulated in the private sector and use it to short-cut public sector initiatives.

It was exactly one year ago that we did our first event on how the digital world was impacting the Government.  Being one year later, we thought it would be interesting to see how far this conversation has come.  Who else is bring this conversation into the spotlight other than John Moore.  John brings an innovator’s mindset with the battlescars to prove his experience.  He has many accolades including founding and running The Lab for all things Gov2.0.   For this week’s event, the topic and questions are:

Topic:  Apply Your Social Media Experience In Government

Q1:  What is “Open Gov” or “Gov2.0”?

Q2:  How can business work with Local/State Gov in social?

Q3:  What do social businesses need to know to work with Government? 

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 30 at noon ET.  Follow #sm88 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Transform Your Marketing Department into a Publishing Department

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

One thing is clear, the function of marketing is rapidly transforming.  There are many things driving this change like technology, data / analytics and 100′s of new channels to market through.  Those are all very tactical and when something is new, everyone goes to the tactical solutions first.  Let’s get a blog up, install new analytics engine and buy some space in as many websites as we can.  That does not address the larger opportunity nor does it address the fundamental changes that need to happen.  The same skill sets of old are not the same skill sets that are needed today.  There’s training, new hiring rules, new organizational charts and new management techniques.  Technology and new digital advertising buys do not address the fundamental changes that are truly needed to transform your marketing department.

Another fundamental change is how you perceive yourself.  Companies have long been defined by their products.  That was it!  The new digital landscape and the consumer shift from mass needs to custom fit have created opportunities for those companies who can think differently.  Companies have an unprecedented opportunity to re-define themselves beyond their products.  For the first time, companies are becoming entertainers (youtube video channels), educators (blogs, wikis), and friends (social networking).  They are re-imagining the roles they are able to play with the broader market (who would have ever thought blenders would be cool?)

 To re-define your company, you must first re-define your marketing department.  Marketers have been built to reach audiences and influence purchase decisions.  In order to play in the digital space, content becomes the core of the activities.  Marketers need to re-organize their staff to meet the heavy content demands of this new approach.  One way to do it is to take a page from publishers.  Publishers have always relied on developing and distributing quality content.  Their approach to market is to connect with their audience rather than coerce them.  Marketers can learn a lot from what publishers have already figured out and the marketers who jump on this early will gain a significant advantage of the majority of companies who will continue to do things the way they have always done them.

To help marketers begin to work through this, we invited Joe Pulizzi , founder of Junta42 to moderate this week’s chat.  Joe is internationally known evangalist of content marketing and has been a long time advocate of how the effective use of content can re-define marketers.  To help us through this topic, Joe will use the following questions: 

Topic: Transform Your Marketing Department into a Publishing Department

Q1:  How does media and publishing relate to marketing and branding?

Q2:  What’s the difference between what a real publisher or media company does versus a brand?

Q3:  What’s the setup look like in a non-media company brand? 

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 23 at noon ET.  Follow #sm87 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live

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Enterprise Social Media: Working For Your Online Advocates

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Like hormone crazed teenagers day dreaming in class, Brands are very similar.  We fantasize about creating advocates, yet when we we get them, we’re not quite sure what to do with them.

Everyone has an opinion on brand advocates, how to get them, how to activate them, etc (all good stuff by the way).  Most of the discussion is about getting advocates to do things though.  Get them to write another product review, blog about us and retweet our promo.  If I was your brand advocate, I would need a vacation for sure.

So give them one.  I don’t mean airplane tickets, hotels and coconut drinks on the beach.  Just a simple vacation from doing all your work for you.  Figure out what to do for them.  What could you do for a “friend” of the company that you just do because you like them, not because you expect anything from them? 

Most companies build extensive sytems to manage brand messaging, create brand loyalty through rewards and messaging but you have to do something before you get the benefit.  What if I just got a promotion and started traveling.  I take four trips in four weeks and my typical pattern is four trips over the course of a year.  There should be triggers going off everywhere that are simply meant to create a great experience from my brand.  I may not be at the “Gold” level but if there is a suite that’s available for my stay, give it to me.  The good will business that comes from it is unmatched.  Advocates are created over time with brands that have a strong reputation with me.

A Brand’s reputation is shaped as a cumulative feeling across EVERY personal experience I have with that Brand whether receiving my bill, using the product, calling customer service or seeing an advertisement on TV.

If that’s true, a Brand manager simply needs to create more experiences faster than the customer will create for themselves on their own time.  Instead of sending over a coupon, send a box of your new product to their door to try out.  Leave a bottle of wine on their pillow when they were expecting the bottle of water that everyone else gets.  Instead of focusing on what you can get your advocates to do for you, try spending some time coming up with ideas of things you can do for your advocates…just because.

Brands spend a lot of creative talent on getting consumers to “Like” them yet once they do, companies are not set up to continue to manage the relationship.  With that, our event for this week being moderated for the first time by, what I would consider, an advocate of #socialmedia.  We met Chris Kieff as a regular contributor on our events and now he is moderating his own.  With a great perspective and tons of experience, we are excited to have Chris lead this next event.  The topic and questions will be:

Topic: Enterprise Social Media: Working For Your Online Advocates

Q1: What is the best way to find advocates in social media?

Q2: Now that we’ve identified advocates, how do you build relationships with them?

Q3: How do you enable them to carry your message virally? 

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 16 at noon ET.  Follow #sm86 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Bootstrapping Your Social Programs

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

So many companies today are paralyzed by indecision when it comes to social media planning and execution.  With all the scary things that could happen, companies who have an aversion to risk find it especially difficult to “try” anything out when the stakes of the trial are, potentially, so large.

One interesting note here is that the employees of these same companies are already doing social media trials every day.  With such promise, crafty employees are beginning to re-imagine their work in the social realm and are beginning to truly innovate with the results.  These actions typically are not sanctioned by IT or the marketing dept.  These actions are usually being enacted by representatives from the brand or people who feel they are simply not getting the support they need to perform their work.

Companies have a couple of choices.  They can fight the fight at every employee move or they can learn to embrace and enable these trials by providing a safer sandbox by which to test and learn.  To help us better understand these options, we have brought in Mack Collier to moderate this week’s chat.  One of our original #socialmedia chat moderators, we are excited to team up once again with Mack.  The topic and questions this week are:

Topic:  Bootstrapping Your Social Programs

Q1:  What are some methods that can be used?

Q2:  What are some tools that can be used?

Q3:  Provide some case studies in both large and small companies.

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 9 at noon ET.  Follow #sm85 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live

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The Social Customer…and What Brands Need To Know

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

You think marketer’s lives are rough, try being the customer.  So much is being thrown at the customer these days, its hard to keep up.

B2B Customers: You used to have a few vendors that competed for your dollars, the agencies were simply creatives and technology vendors simply did technology.  Without all the improvements in technology, manufacturing had many barriers to entry which reduced your choices.  You never heard about how vendors were treating your employees (good or bad) and you never cared how they were performing with other peers in related industries.  Marketing was marketing and technology was, well, technology and never did the two meet.  Decisions were made independently without concern to the ecosystems that are in place today.

B2C Customers: You were able to make purchase decisions simply based on how the product tasted, handled, or felt.  You did not worry about their greenhouse effects, the videos their employees were making behind the scenes or how much the same product cost at other stores within a 7 block radius.  Your friends may have mentioned cool products but you did not have to worry about your friends seeing every purchase you make (remember that Dixie Chicks album you really want) nor did you have to remember if you had ”like’d” the Brand in one of your networks.  You did not care what they were making next because if you did not want it, you would simply just not purchase it.  Forget writing letters to your friends to warn them that the “new & improved” product really wasn’t.

Fast forward to today.  Customers are more equipped through technology and network science to make purchase decisions than every before.  Interestingly enough though, the buying cycle is getting longer, not shorter.  Customer’s purchase paths have changed. No longer do they call you to see if something is in stock or what your hours of operation are. No longer do you get a chance to speak to prospects, they simply search online, visit the first few sites that come up, comparison shop through online and physical stores, review product ratings and comments.  If prospects can’t relate to the things they find in that process, those potential customer simply go away without you ever knowing they were actual prospects.

While purchase patterns have changed, so have expectations.  The expectation is that I, as a customer, can ask a question online to a company and get a response back either from other customer zealots or from the company itself.  The other expectations are that you are being a good corporate citizen (because I’ll find out if you are not) and that my vote counts.  I want to influence the direction of the next product, not as a shareholder, but as a product user and Lord help if my product breaks down before I think is reasonbly expected.

We know that customers are changing for both B2B and B2C and yes, even for B2B2C.  The challenge is that customers have not yet fully transitioned from customer-of-old to customer-of-new so they are still in motion.  They don’t know what they want in a Brand yet however the expectation is still there.  So how do you handle this?  We’ve brought in one of the best thought leaders in this space from one of the most renowned agencies in the forefront of this battle.  Please welcome Chris Carfi from Edelman.  Chris wrote the customer manifesto and has built his career helping companies managing the ongoing customer transition.  The topic and Questions for this week are:

Topic:  The Social Customer…and What Brands Need To Know

Q1:  How has the social customer changed since 2004?

Q2:  How does mobile affect the social customer?

Q3:  Where does the “brand” actually meet with the social customer online?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, November 2 at noon ET.  Follow #sm84 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live

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