Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

Fear and Loathing in Content Creation

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

Content is moving through a maturity of sorts within the enterprise.  Talking with a few colleagues some noticed that companies were putting out more content, some noticed that some companies placed less of a focus on content and I have yet to notice any sizable advances in companies developing relevant content (content specific to me when I need it and on the device I where I want it).

 On the surface there seems to be a dichotomy in how companies are utilizing content.  It doesn’t seem possible that companies are actually producing less content today than before.  What we found was that companies were blogging less which made it seem like they were de-emphasizing content.  Not the case at all.  Let’s look at what is different today than when companies started to blog.

 Blogging is simply a tool that enables you to self publish content on the web.  A few years ago, blogging was the only way that marketers could actually publish on the web unless they went through IT to have it published using the corporate content management systems.

 Fast forward to today.  Now content takes form in long form through blogging and short form through updates on walls, tweets, Posterous.  Content also takes the shape of video, audio, powerpoints, documents (Scribd), etc.  Content is not only produced by the public relations team or marketing team, content is being distributed by any employee who posts an answer on Quora or LinkedIn or who tweets or updates pictures from the company picnic on their own Facebook page.  Content simply takes so many shapes today that it is impossible for companies to actually control all of it. 

Controls of information within companies have been in step decline for 2-3 years and it’s having profound affects throughout the enterprise.  IT’s perimeter is no longer the walls of the building, the perimeter has become every employee who carries a mobile device or logs into the network in an airport.  Marketers must train employees on tactics once only used on the few people who spoke to the press.  Today everyone can have that voice.  Employees communicate differently today internally.  So what does all this mean?  The only way to find out is to employ the services of Toby Bloomberg for an hour during this week’s chat.  Toby returns to host another chat this time focused on the maturing nature of content within companies and what it means.  The topic this week and questions will be:

Topic: Fear and Loathing in Content Creation

Q1:  Where is the sweet spot these days, in content creation or distribution?

Q2:  How is blogging/content development changing or maturing for companies?

Q3:  How do companies need to adapt around content?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, August 30 at noon ET.  Follow #sm125 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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Posted in Content | 1 Comment »

Is Twitter Massively Overrated?

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Now here’s an interesting question.  Is Twitter massively overrated?  If you immediately answered this question with either a yes or a no, you might be under-informed.  Just as the question itself is general in nature, a generalized ”Yes” or “No” is equally too broad.  Twitter is the media darling right now and gets all the hype whether it’s deserved or not.  All the major news channels promote their Twitter handles, celebrities use Twitter and many executives announce their plans to move on via Twitter.  At the same time, companies large and small have set up Twitter accounts and millions of normal people have also set up Twitter accounts…and never gone back.  It really depends what you are trying to accomplish with it both personally and professionally.

Let’s split out some representative ideas on where Twitter is overrated and where it is useful.

Where is Twitter over-rated:

  • Individuals trying to connect with their friends.  Really hard to organize friends when you have to type @JonSmith, @SuzieSmith, etc everytime to send out messages.  In addition, by the time you type all 7 friends in, there is no room for a message
  • Companies trying to use Twitter as a channel for Press Releases when they are written as normal press releases.  Unless you write for Twitter with catchy headlines and engaging messaging, most companies get very little attention this way.
  • Individuals or companies who come to Twitter without a purpose.  Twitter is a vast wasteland of brief content bits and URLs (both long and short).  It’s hard to find anything in particular unless you know what you are looking for.

Where is Twitter under-rated:

  • Anyone looking for information by Topic.  Twitter has proven itself time and time again in its ability to organize and inform people around a topic whether the fall of an entire country, crash landing of a plane or the latest on pop stars.
  • Individuals looking to quickly connect with a person.  Assuming that person or company has a Twitter account, it is much easier to connect directly with someone via Twitter and more immediate than other channels like email.  Have a problem with a product, airline or home service (cable) just send out a tweet and you may experience much faster and better service than simply calling the toll-free line.
  • The ability to re-imagine your business.  Ramon De Leon and Best Buy’s Twelpforce both figured out a way to better their business by re-imagining it via Twitter.

These are just a couple of quick examples but they speak directly to the topic of this discussion.  In order to understand if you should be on Twitter, whether you are an individual or a company, you first need to understand what you are trying to accomplish.  If Twitter seems like it might be viable, then you have to understand if your audience is here and then how the effort it takes to be effective on Twitter creates enough value to warrant it.  What are some other areas where Twitter is over or under rated?  To help us answer this question, we went to Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert.  OK, Jay actually brought us this topic which he wrote about yesterday that was one of his most engaged posts he’s ever done.  We wanted to continue this great dialogue to our weekly chat to make sure that we are not just following the Twitter hype machine but actually getting some value out of it.  Our topic and questions for this week’s chat are:

Topic:  Is Twitter Massively Overrated?

Q1:  Just 8% of the USA uses Twitter. Why is it such a big deal?

Q2:  In what circumstances is Twitter NOT a viable tactic for companies?

Q3:  How should companies decide where to participate in social media?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, April 19th at noon ET.  Follow #sm107 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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Posted in twitter | 1 Comment »

How To Plan a Global Social Media Initiative

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Putting together a social media plan in general, is not all that difficult for many companies.  This is not because setting up a social media plan is necessarily easy to do well, just that most companies have low expectations and therefore low levels of execution and most importantly integration.  The other part of this is there are really no right or wrong ways to build a social media plan.  Ultimately, if it delivers enough value back to the organization to off-set the costs of time and capital, then the company can/should claim success, right?  One difference is in the company’s tolerance for incremental success vs. transformative leadership.  Often, social media is a way to achieve both, depending on the ability of the enterprise to adapt and execute in new and different ways than are comfortable or proven in the past.

Whatever your reasons for deploying a social media plan, just makes sure it maps back to your corporate objectives.  A plan and executables without demonstrable value back to key objectives will not be well received, funded or supported for very long.

What is not discussed often enough is the difference of having a social media plan for a local geography vs. a social plan across the globe.  First there are simply more small to medium sized businesses who only need local or country specific penetration, next, social is just now becoming “socially acceptable” as a key differentiator in the c-suite.  This new focus and attention is sure to stretch even the most senior social planners at global companies.  While trailblazers like Dell’s Vice President of Social Media and Community Manish Mehta are paving the way for global practitioners, there are still very few and far between.  Why is it so hard?  Developing a plan and developing a plan at scale at two completely different animals.  A few key reasons are:

  • Sheer volume of potential conversations
  • Vendors with a lack of multi-language support
  • Having enough quality personnel
  • Too many point systems and platforms
  • Differing behaviours of social usage (online, mobile, short messaging, etc)
  • Lack of proven governance models (managing risk, escalation procedures, training)

There are not a lot of good examples in the market on how to tackle a global social media plan and pull it off.  As companies attempt this, it requires some know-how, a lot of creativity, perspiration and follow through.  There are not a lot of people who know that as well as Ken Burbary.  Ken is the Vice President Group Director, Strategy & Analysis at Digitas and will lead the discussion on this topic for #sm95.  The topic and questions are as follows:

Topic:  How to plan a global social media initiative

Q1 – How is social media consumer behavior evolving globally?

Q2 – What model should companies use to manage social media initiatives globally? (centralized, decentralized, hybrid)?

Q3 – How can companies understand consumer social media usage across different markets & countries?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 25 at noon ET.  Follow #sm95 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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Posted in corporate | 2 Comments »

Social Media and Commerce for Business

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

The holiday shopping season is behind us now and everyone can catch their breath.  A lot of companies tried out some new approaches to their traditional e-commerce strategies by adding in touches of social.  It is still too early to tell what worked and what did not for sure but it is time to start talking about real strategies for social commerce in 2011.

Based on your business there are a number of approaches to take with regard to social commerce.  Looking online, there are a lot of ways to drive new sales.  These would include setting up proper descriptions on review sites like Angies List, Yelp, Google Places, etc.  It might also include considering product ratings, comparisons and customer reviews on your own site.

Regarding walk-in or foot traffic, how does social come into play here.  Certainly there is the daily deals phenomenon that Groupon started and now hosts dozens of competitors including Wal-Mart.  Is Groupon the best avenue for your business?  Other offline successes have come through checkins and scavenger type of hunts that bring in gaming type of incentives.

What is the best approach for applying social to your 2011 e-commerce strategy? What’s working and what’s not?  We brought in the big dogs for this discussion.  One of Forrester’s leading analysts covering social media, Augie Ray will moderate today’s chat.  Augie brings an entire industry worth of research to help us discerne the right values and help spots some of the early trends.  Our topic and questions this week are:

Topic:  Social Media and Commerce for Business

Q1: How is social affecting online consumer purchases?

Q2: How is social affecting off-line/in-store purchases?

Q3: What are top 10 things to consider when setting up social commerce?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, January 4 at noon ET.  Follow #sm92 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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Posted in Commerce | Comments Off

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Stop Wasting Your Time!

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I enjoy hearing about companies having success with social media and I am certainly intrigued in understanding how they got there.  After researching dozens of case studies (as many as I have been able to get my hands on) one theme rings through.  Most of these companies have had success with little more than a tool, a concept and someone willing to figure it out through trial and error.  Noble for sure, not usually very sustainable or repeatable though. 

Then you hear about all the companies developing their social media strategies.  This becomes the plan behind a tool, a concept and someone willing to figure it out through trial and error.  Noble for sure, yet not very successful usually.  Why is this?  For one, the conversation usually starts with “We need a blog!”.  The boss needs to be able to cover their trail, so they require a strategy to go along with it.  The team creates a strategy full of love and happiness, the boss has no clue what it means and three (3) days later…violla!  The blog is in place.

The point of this (yes there is a point after all), is that no where in here did anyone tie a social strategy into a business objective.  You don’t hear much around “we created x number of new sales or x reduction in costs because of our social media strategy”.

Having a social policy or code of conduct for how employees should represent the company (both internally and externally) is needed.  Having some thought around governance and a crisis plan is certainly good measure.  However developing a social strategy that does not tie back to meeting some corporate objective is simply a waste of time.  Instead, create a business strategy that includes social media to help solve a problem faster, better, cheaper (assuming that it will). 

In the end, it really doesn’t matter what you want to call your efforts.  Call it a social media strategy, call it a business strategy or call it a Bazinga!  Whatever you call it, it has to tie back to some real value to the business.  To ensure that we do tie it back to the business, our host this week is B.L. Ochman.  B.L. is a 2nd time moderator for us (#sm45) and is recognized for her contributions to this industry.  For the chat she will cover the following topic and questions: 

Topic: Creating a Social Media Strategy? Stop Wasting Your Time!

Q1:  Should you create separate social media strategies or business strategies?

Q2:  How do you budget for social?

Q3:  Do you train staff for social or hire for it?

 

The chat will take place Tuesday 8/3/2010 at 12 noon eastern.  Follow along by monitoring #sm71 from your favorite Twitter client or simply goto our LIVE page (www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live).  The chat will begin at noon as B.L. tweets the first question and the conversation will start.  Then at 12:20, the next question is asked and 12:40 the final question.  The conversation is fast-paced and full of helpful insights from the people who are blazing the trails in this industry.

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Posted in corporate, ROI in Social Media, social media | Comments Off

Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media

Monday, June 7th, 2010

“We took a chance on bending the rules a bit on our experiemental deep water drilling platform and kinda got caught.  What’s the big deal? Give us an A for effort?  C’mon, everybody makes mistakes!”

These are the types of musings that  have been entertaining more than 137,000 people on Twitter and millions more on ABC News, CNN, USAToday, Wall Street Journal and more.  Using a fake account, the twitter handle of @BPGlobalPR has been tweeting over-the-top posts that poke fun at BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, his wife and other leutenants at BP as a way to bring attention to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

In contrast, the BP corporate twitter handle has 12,000+ followers and is following 51 people.  How did this happen? 

Why would an oil behemoth like BP think they would have to engage through social media in any meaningful way?  In fact why would an electric company, pharmaceutical company, semiconductor company, etc have to worry about developing a social strategy?  This event and @BPGlobalPR should be a wake up call to every company who produces anything.  Some event will happen at some point and your company will get overrun if you are not prepared. 

What should you do, you ask?  Well, that’s what we asked this week’s moderator Gavin Heaton to work through on this week’s chat.  Gavin gets my bid for two awards this week.  He wins for coolest handle: @ServantofChaos and moderates at the oddest local time yet (2am his local time in Australia).  Coolness aside, Gavin brings years of experience in digital marketing and strategy development and has proven to be a goto person for Brands of all types.  Our topic and questions this week will be:

Topic:  Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media

Q1:  How has @BPGlobalPR affected perception and should they have shut it down?

Q2:  How is BP using social media to address the situation and what should they do better?

Q3:  What can other companies learn from this about managing a crisis & the impact of social media?

The event will begin with Q1 at noon eastern followed every 20 minutes with the next questions.  To follow along and add your POV simply track #sm63 via any Twitter client or follow along via our LIVE page.

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Posted in Public Relations | 1 Comment »

The Importance of a Content and Engagement Strategy in Social Media

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

We understand that having a blog or forum alone is not being social, it’s simply a tool set.  If you are a little overzealous and implement the tools first, you quickly understand that it is going to take more…a lot more than just tools to live up to the expectations that everyone has around social media.  So you sit in the middle of your corporate blog or new customer service forum and wonder what’s next.  Try a content and / or engagement strategy.

Without engagement there is no social and without content there is no engagement.  From this, it becomes apparent that developing a strategy around content and engagement can be very useful.  So where to start?

Content without engagement is a traditional approach to marketing like television or radio.  The content goes one way or is “pushed” at the audience.  While we could take an editorial approach to content development, let’s look at it a bit differently.  Whether you produce the content, your agency produces it, whether your content is available on external sites or your own sites, there is still a premise that I come back to.  Consumers buy products because they believe in the product, they relate to it, the product description fulfills a need or some other reason that stems from the fact that something about the content was relevant enough to make me purchase whether its ingredients, description, a jingle, ad copy, whatever, there was some form of trust around that content.  This is the key, your content has to instill trust with your participants.

With all the aggregation tools out there, it is easy to take the lazy way out of creating content for your corporate social initiatives.  Like a Twitter account that only re-tweets or a blog run on yahoo pipes, that content can be found anywhere so there is no reason to trust your company as a resource for content.  Like your content, your company becomes irrelevant quickly too.  Create content that sets your company apart, create a perspective that participants can have passion with and always do it under the premise that no matter what the content, your participants have to be able to trust it.  The first time they find a hole or blatant lie in your content, you will lose that trust for a very long time.

On the other hand, engagement without content feels empty and does not last long.  Like any guy at a bar without a good pick-up line, he can smile, approach and may smell good but after standing there for a while, you’re going to have to get past the “Hi, I’m Joe/Jeff/Bob/Mike, what’s your name?”.  There are many reasons for engagement and while most strategists will focus on what your company has to do to get ready to be engaging, don’t forget to think about why anyone would want to participate with your company.  A good, initial litmus test is whether you can answer the “So What?” question.  You arm the interns with conversational research data, you’ve been listening for months, you have tons of ideas for content and the executives are behind it.  If you are selling toilet paper, my response is “so what?”, why would a consumer care to participate around the product?  In this case, create a passion much like General Mills did with their Box Tops campaign to raise money for k-8 schools.

Does engagement or content come first?  If I create content and no one is listening, is it worth my time?  On the other side, if your customers are passionate around your Brand and want to participate, you better get some content so they have a reason to come back.  I’m not sure there is a right answer for everyone.  The right answer depends on every company’s unique situation, resources, time, talent and ability to execute.  Our moderator this week knows a lot about these answers and we are excited to have John Cass leading the way.  John has literally written the book on corporate blogging and has a wealth of experience to share with us.  The topic this week will be:

Topic: The Importance of a Content and Engagement Strategy in Social Media

Q1: What’s first, content marketing and/or engagement marketing as the lead strategy?

Q2: How should you handle disclosure of content origination whether employees or agency?

Q3: Charlene Li’s engagement 2009 report staked out most engaged brands, what’s key to implement a successful SM engagement strategy?

Please join us on Tuesday March 16 at noon EST to share your point of view.  Follow along on #sm51 or from our LIVE page.

Image: www.cartoonstock.com

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Posted in Content | Comments Off

Should Businesses use Social Networks or Communities…What's the difference & Why should I care?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

First off – I want to acknowledge that we understand using a social network or a community is a tool approach and not a strategic approach to developing a complete internal social media strategy.What's the Difference?

With that said, suppose you are wanting to experiment and don’t have a huge budget, if any.  Say you have to prove out the medium before you can have access to real budget dollars. 

This week’s topic is a little granular but still very important.  Companies are eager to jump in and try out social tactics but often stop short of actually funding a project.  When employees at a tactical level “try out” new marketing approaches they are mostly one-off and not tied into a particular strategy whether at a campaign or a corporate level.  With little amount of thought tied to the actions, it’s no surprise that when the boss asks what the benefit was…the project usually ends there.  So what’s a person to do?  Well, for one thing – MAKE IT COUNT!

If anyone can make it count, it is this week’s moderator Rachel Happe.  From her vast experience in corporate product management to a highly touted analyst, she operates from a position of true hands-on-knowledge that is difficult to match.  This is why her insights are a perfect fit in helping companies determine not only why to participate but how to derive value from the experience. 

There are a lot of ways you could take this conversation and we still find that companies are still perplexed in what to do first.  Many times it’s as simple as having a real test bed for executives and employees alike to engage and interact and get their “hands dirty” a bit.  So here we go with the 3 questions for today:

1. What’s the difference between a social network and a community?

2. What should a business or company focus on…Developing a Community or developing a social network?

3. What are the success metrics to look for in each?

This week’s chat will be flying (you might want to stretch first) so join us early at noon est using #socialmedia.

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Posted in Content, social media | 1 Comment »