Servant of Chaos

The Social Business Comes First

In the coming months and years we will hear a lot more about “social business” and what it means for your organisation. There will be infographics, presentations, blog posts, tips, tricks and links galore. Those who have been working in social media – say, as consultants – will begin to transform themselves into social business practitioners, just like many of us from the “dot com” boom transitioned from web to marketing.

Over time we will also wrestle with the “place” for social media. Each line of business will claim ownership – as will your advertising, media, PR and creative agencies. But like all things business, ultimate responsibility lies within your organisation – and arm’s length social media will become more difficult to manage as it scales beyond your borders.

David Armano has been at the forefront of social media’s integration with business over the last five or six years. And as EVP of Global Innovation and Integration with Edelman Digital, he has access to big brands with big challenges. This deck on Social Business Planning is a great starting point – especially as a credentials deck for Edelman Digital.

Social Business Planning

View more presentations from Edelman Insights

But there is still a lot of focus on the marketing/branding side of business. That is understandable given both Edelman’s history and the strong adoption of social media pioneered by marketers the world over - but as I have suggested many times – social brands follow the lead of the social business. And in most cases the heavy lifting of the social-focused innovator – what I call the digital flaneur – is (or should be) focused internally. On enablement. Transformation. Getting. Shit. Done.

Your job is to drive that innovation. Enable it in your teams. Encourage it in your management. Take a critical eye to the slides in this deck and apply it to your business. Use your business nous. Use what you know about the workings, machinations, politics, processes and directions of your organisation and build a small plan. Own it. Change what you can. Discover collaborators. Find the way to make it work.

All the rest is just window dressing.

How to Become a Social Business

While recently presenting at the SocialMediaPlus conference, I had the opportunity to spend some time with my colleague and fellow blogger, Michael Brenner. It was great to hear, first hand, the work that he has been pioneering with a large global organisation such as SAP – but it was equally interesting to learn of how this is changing his own thinking and professional approaches.

Michael constantly spoke about personal innovation – about the way he was making business personal – and also more social. He is constantly connecting with people all around the world, opening conversations around what it means to be a “social business” and then working to turn this into an operational reality. It is, he explained, a constant process of showing, tracking, engaging, educating and involving people at all levels – from executives and decision makers down to the newest of interns. And at the heart of this is conversation.

But what does it mean in reality? Michael suggests that you’ve got to first turn your lens onto your own marketing efforts. “The fact is, most marketing sucks”. And as he points out in this presentation, it’s not really a question of how to integrate social media into your marketing mix – it’s about transforming the way you do business. And a hint: it comes down to DOING.

How to Become a Social Business

View more presentations from Michael Brenner

How Well Do You Listen and Engage With Your Customers?

Increasingly, businesses are turning to social media as part of their marketing mix. There is a smattering of Facebook, a Twitter account – and maybe even a YouTube channel. Some will have a social media monitoring solution in place, others a bunch of Google Alerts bombarding their inbox with messages and updates. But there is often a gulf between the listening and doing – between the monitoring and engaging.

And perhaps, more alarmingly, there are precious few businesses who have done the work to put social media into a framework or business context. That’s why I advocate continuous digital strategy. It’s why I think a social business maturity model is important – so that you can actively work to transform your business relationships, systems and processes in such a way as they deliver sustaining value over time.

Social Business Maturity Model

View more presentations from Gavin Heaton

Unfortunately, many of us only take on transformative challenges when we are forced to – often because our competitors beat us to the punch.

Wouldn’t it be nice to lead and set the agenda instead?

The Dell Social Listening questionnaire gives you valuable information from seven relatively simple questions. Based on Forrester industry data, it allows you to model your own business (or your competitors’ business) and have it visualised as an infographic. Here is one I did for a medium sized tech company. Makes for interesting reading … but it can also be a useful way of laying out your strategic challenges – especially if you are also working in a medium sized tech company.

How do you compare? Where are the gaps? And what are you going to do to close them?

You see, it is important to listen to and engage with your customers. But that’s not the end result. It’s the start. Get to it!

My Kingdom for a Horse

A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!

I have always loved Shakespeare’s Richard III. It’s an epic experience – no matter whether you see it live in performance or whether you let those words loose in great emptiness of your cognitive surplus. The line comes at the point in the play where Richard – the evil and arrogant king – is about to meet his doom.

Like many of Shakespeare’s best lines, it has found its way into our everyday speech. Accordingly, we use it in a variety of situations – where we are exasperated, challenged or just down right desperate.

But there is more to it. Increasingly I am hearing this in the world of business.

When dealing with strategy and the challenges of social media, many CEOs, CMOs and their compatriots on the agency side are heard uttering these same words. But they are not asking for a horse. They are asking – nay demanding – that you pay attention not to their words, but to the source of their problem.

Any Tom, Dick or Harry can show up with a fistful of Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts. But the true strategist will look beyond the words to the insight – seeking to understand the root cause, understand the behaviour driving the need and develop an approach which will solve the problem. Sometimes it will indeed be a horse.

Rob Campbell suggests that many agencies have been trapped by a form of creativity-by-the-numbers. Rob places the responsibility on the shoulders of the creative and media agencies:

… because clients tend to judge their effectiveness by the level of media exposure they’ve achieved [R&F] – rather than by specific business goals – media agencies are basically being encouraged to push for creative work that can be placed in measurable media channels because it help ensure they get their fees.

But I think clients – the CEOs, the CMOs and all their direct reports also carry some of this responsibility. You may think it is a horse that you need, but that’s applying logic to the problem. What you want is creativity.

If someone had delivered Richard a cannon perhaps history would have had a very different shape. Next time someone calls for a horse, don’t give them what they ask for. Give them what they need.

Ditch Your Fans and Find Your Lovers

UPDATED: Almost any article about social media that you read will focus on “likes”, “fans” and “friends”. At first glance, “social” media appears to have equated positive relationship terminology with relationship.

But when you look at the motivation behind “liking” a brand on Facebook – it’s decidedly transactional. There is a focus on discount and promotion, exclusive content and so on. Now, while a strategy addressing these desires will build your “fan base”, I’m increasingly sceptical that it will build you anything more than a glorified mailing list. In fact, researcher Dan Zarella has shown "The amount of 'conversation' that happens on your Facebook posts has nothing to do with the number of people who will see it" - suggesting Facebook Conversations Don't Achieve The Marketing Boost You Desire.

For those brands that want a little more from the investment they are making in social media, you need to dig a little deeper.  You need to look for those whose pupils dilate at the mention of your name.

It’s time to ditch your fans and find your lovers.

This is no easy task. You need to listen. Monitor. Pay attention. Dig. Analyse. Engage. Converse. Respond. And measure. You need to rinse and repeat. What I call continuous digital strategy.

But thanks to Sean Howard, you can now follow a step-by-step guide to using social media monitoring to find the people who already love your brand. The approach uses live data to help you truly understand who your real brand advocates are – and as is almost always the case (as is shown in the Nikon case study) – your most powerful advocates are rarely those with high klout scores or large follower bases. They are the people who consistently generate content and comment around your brand properties and digital assets.

I know this will make you cry – we all love the large numbers and the occasional mention from a social media superstar. But if you want to build lasting social media value for your digital properties, it’s time to ditch your addiction to “fans” – because when it comes to social media, it’s all about the love. Baby.

Social Media Monitoring - Finding Relationships

View more presentations from Eric Portelance

What Makes People Follow a Brand?

When I first really became interested in social media, I was working for a marketing and promotions agency as head of their interactive division. This gave our work a particular skew – we were always looking at the performance metrics of our efforts – how could we drive trial, influence people to consider and love our clients’ products – and how do we measure and improve on this over time. And since that time, it has been clear to me that social media really is about promotion – in that industry sense.

And now the GetSatisfaction team have put out an infographic that confirms at least part of this theory – the largest proportion of people surveyed follow brands so they can learn of special offers and deals (36.9% on Facebook and MySpace, 43.5% on Twitter). So if your online strategy doesn’t have a promotional component you’re going to be disappointing much of your audience.

How Data Creates Collective Action

If you have not subscribed to Mike Arauz’s blog, then remedy this quick smart! Dig back through his writing and plunder his brilliant ideas and analysis. I am sure you will find more than one or two things you can use to dazzle your boss or your clients.

But while you are doing this plundering, put your headphones on and listen in on Mike’s great presentation from the Next Conference. It’s the perfect way to round out your week!

Beyond TV - ‘Go Back’ is a Must-Have Experience From SBS

As a rule I don’t watch a lot of television. It’s often not challenging enough or emotionally engaging. But last night as I was prepping for a little writing after an already long day, I spotted a number of tweets about a show that sounded compelling.

SBS’ Go Back to Where You Came From takes six ordinary Australians on a reality TV style adventure – living like refugees for 25 days. In this first episode (with two others to run over consecutive nights), the scene is set, participants are eased into the process, hearing the personal, confronting stories of former refugees now living in Australia. Spending three nights living with these families begins the long process of cracking the hard core of prejudice that many of us blithely live with. But how confronting will this get for the participants – and for us the audience?

In true reality TV fashion, events are orchestrated to emotionally and physically test the participants. We often say that truth is stranger than fiction – and it is clear from this first episode that the reality of being a refugee contains more drama, fear, risk and challenge than many of us, cocooned in the comfort of our armchairs, could have imagined. Just when you think that the participants have been pushed to the limit, they are plunged to a deeper level of discomfort.

And while the show itself is brilliant, there’s also some seriously good social media integration around it. You can view the show online (which was perfect for me as I missed the first few minutes). There’s no waiting 24 hours etc. I think there is a problem with viewing via iPad, but the immediate availability of the show allows late-comers to still engage. Brilliant work from SBS.

Then there is the Asylum: Exit Australia simulation, an interactive quiz, interactive school resources, teachers packs and feedback forums.

It’s not just must-see TV – it’s a model for the future of what content publishing should be.

Every 60 Seconds on the Internet

Now, this is a great way to get your company known. Go-Globe.com – a web design and application development company have produced an infographic that shows what happens on the web every 60 seconds. Take a look. Think about what this means on a practical level. Think about the scale. Then think that everyone of these items is an opportunity for a conversation. That’s what I call the real time web.

How Much Does Social Media Cost?

There are plenty of articles around that talk about what it takes to get started with social media. Heck, I’ve probably even written a few myself. After all, anyone – with the exception perhaps of Gerry Harvey – knows that the barriers to entry to social media are very low. You need a computer and a connection to the internet. Oh, and maybe an hour or so.

In that hour you will be able to create a blog, a number of profiles, fan pages, accounts and maybe even link them together. But then what?

Well, normally I’d say:

 

STOP

 

right

 

there

Do your research, think through and align your strategy and then proceed. But presuming you’ve jumped in feet first …

That’s when you either start spending some time (and yes, time is money) or you hire a consultant or an agency to help you out. But what are the ballpark figures you need to budget for? Think about:

• The profile of your business customers – where they shop (yes, online), where they get their information, how they qualify their decisions and where they rate, compare and review products. In short, what is their digital footprint
• What resources/time/people do you have in-house that can “own” your social media project
• Decide your level of commitment -are you testing the waters, piloting a concept, building on previous efforts, building a platform for business growth
• Write down your top three objectives

Once you have this basic information, Mack Collier has written an excellent article disclosing the type of prices charged for various social media related services. I have summarised the prices here, but added in my view of what you are likely to see here in Australia. These prices are not LARGE AGENCY prices – and are more likely to be found amongst the boutique agencies and individual consultants. Also, the quality and amount of creative design will impact these costs – good design costs good money.

Remember, you get what you pay for (generally) – and be sure to ask for details or references regarding the last three social media projects your consultant/agency has worked on. Be sure to go through and read Mack’s whole article and subscribe to his excellent blog.

Blogging	Range	My view
Full service - launch, content creation, comment moderation management and response	1000-12,000	10,000-25,000
Launch - content creation and launch	1000-8000	5000-10,000
Ghost writing (per article)	$50-$500	$100-$500
Twitter
Full service - launch, content creation and customer interaction	1000-7500	2500-5000
Facebook
Full service - launch, content creation and customer interaction	2000-9000	5000-10,000
Strategy
Comprehensive strategy and content creation	3000-20,000	10,000-30,000
Social media strategy audit of existing approach	2000-10,000	10,000-25,000
Consulting (hourly)	50-500	50-500
Training
1-2 hours	500-5000	500-5000
4 hours	1000-10000	1000-10000
Full day	2000-50,000	2000-50,000