14. This Is NOT a Sandbox. It’s a Business.
Eric Brown is a no-bullshit kinda guy.
“The bottom line for me is, was, and will always be, did we rent more apartments,” he told us. “Because if we didn’t, the practice of social media marketing is just a hobby.”
Like Eric Brown, you probably can’t afford to waste time, effort, and even money on something that isn’t going to move the needle for your business in some form or fashion. So listening to some social media consultants—those who have the hippie tree-hugger gene—can be frustrating.
Even social media’s poster boy, Chris Brogan, espouses the value of experimentation. His main consulting firm is even called New Marketing Labs. He uses any of several side projects to experiment with blogging, business models, monetization strategies, and more. He’s good at experimenting and passing learning on to others. But you’re not a highly paid marketing consultant who gets paid to break stuff and report back on what fell out. You’re trying to grow more checking accounts or subscriptions or get more people to buy policies, houses, or cars. You can spend all day, every day just selling your product or service and still not meet your quotas or goals.
Where in that world do you have time to exercise trial and error? Nowhere. That is why you need to be like Eric Brown.
You Know What It Can Do, Now Decide What You Want It to Do
In Part II of this book, “How Social Media Marketing Really Works,” we focused on the seven major outcomes social media marketing can produce for your business. If you don’t have them memorized by now, you should. This is the point in your own strategic planning process where you ask yourself, “Okay, what do I want social media to do for my company?”
Deciding your goals now will guide your decision-making for the near future and probably for the distant future as well. Even though it would be superhelpful of us to fill the rest of this chapter with answers to the question of what you want to do with social media, it wouldn’t be very useful because we can’t possibly know your business. Only you understand the challenges you face and the opportunities that might lie ahead.
But we can help your thinking to better answer the question, “What do I want social media to do for my business?”
• Write down the top five problems you’re facing in your business.
• Take each, one by one, and look at our seven outcomes. Will enhancing branding and awareness solve the problem? How about protecting reputation? Facilitating public relations? Building community? Improving customer service? Driving R&D? Increasing sales?
• Now look more specifically at the top five communications problems you’re having. Be sure to consider internal communications and vendor and partner communications alongside those with your customers.
• Do social channels like blogs, social networks, video sharing, collaboration platforms, or social media monitoring services help solve those?
You’ll start to see potential solutions emerge that will help you decide what social media marketing can do for your business. Write these down and focus on them as potential areas to focus on and solve business or communications problems using social media marketing.
Certainly, you’ll need to prioritize and, depending upon your comfort level using the tools and technologies available, you might be ready to dive headfirst into a full social media marketing program. But you might also still be rather unsure what you’re going to get out of your activity here, whether or not you can achieve your goal or goals, and what the unknowns you’ll encounter along the way are.
It’s easy for social media marketing consultants to recommend experimentation. It means they don’t have to think about the what-ifs. Remove contingency planning and the strategy process is simple: Just roll the dice. Our guess is that not many of the social media advice-givers out there were ever Boy Scouts, whose motto is “Be Prepared.” The sometimes prevalent attitude that social media is a sandbox and it’s okay for businesses to just play there until they figure it out is a polite way of telling you to potentially throw your business away. Although we’re all for starting a personal Facebook account, turning the security settings up as far as they’ll go, and learning the platform a little at a time, we don’t recommend launching a Facebook page for your business without knowing what you want to get out of the channel first.
“We have a Facebook page!” is often announced as a sort of social media success story by business owners and marketing managers. But ask them what they get out of it or what it’s for and they look at you as if you have three heads. After taking the knowledge in this book to heart, you should start your Facebook page with an understanding of the seven outcomes a business can see using social media marketing, decide which one fits your audience, your needs, and the environment of Facebook, and then launch the page with a purpose. If you do, you won’t say, “We have a Facebook page,” but rather, “We drive sales through our Facebook page.” Or perhaps, “We handle customer service issues on Facebook, which amplifies our support and responsiveness, thus growing our online audience and positive brand sentiment.”
The same will hold true for following the strategic planning process for other individual channels within social media or for your social media marketing efforts as a whole. The more social your brand becomes, the more time you’ll need to answer the question, “What does your business use social media marketing for?” because you’ll use it for many business objectives.
Done Is Better Than Perfect
Marketing guru and author Seth Godin talks about the need to “ship.”
“Real artists ship,” he says, echoing Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But artists aren’t the people who paint, write, sing, or perform. Artists are entrepreneurs and businesspeople who create new products and new ideas.
When you ship, you bring your new products or services to market. You put them out, not when they’re perfect, but when they’re done—sometimes even before they’re done. When it’s “good enough,” it’s good enough to ship.
But having your social media marketing efforts being good enough to ship shouldn’t be confused with them being scatterbrained and without direction. A Twitter stream with a purpose, even one that doesn’t quite have the right content to really attract the audience volume the company wants to have, is infinitely better than a Twitter stream with no defined reason for being.
Planning will take care of the distinction between immature and idiotic. You will grow into your social media marketing program. And growing indicates you will experiment with ideas and even make some mistakes along the way. But it doesn’t mean you’re playing. Remember what adding the word marketing to social media does: It makes it about business.
This is where social media’s genetic link to the technology world helps those of us in marketing and business. Technology startup companies and entrepreneurs are taught to iterate, to innovate—launch the product and see where the audience takes it, making improvements and adding features over time. This approach, rather than reaching a “final” point and then sending the product out for sale, gives your offering the capability to launch earlier, but also your product team the power to get actual customer feedback to make early improvements. The process typically strengthens the product in the long term and helps companies generate interest and revenue earlier in the life of the product or service than traditional launch sequences provide.
In social media marketing, this iterative process allows you to take your plan to the public—to launch—but remain poised to listen, respond, and adjust your execution accordingly. Although it is true that listening to your audience is the first step in being a strong social business, listening doesn’t end after step one. You must continue that listening, not just along each step of a campaign or execution, but always.
Listening to the conversations surrounding your product or service should become like breathing for your company. You should do it naturally.
This listening will help you take a product, service, or even campaign from good enough to ship to good enough for the customer to buy. But it won’t take a product, service, or campaign to that point if it doesn’t have a direction in the first place. Let the competitors play. You’re here to do a job. But that job takes more than a plan. You have to translate that plan into action. The best-laid plans only go awry because someone didn’t take the ball and run with it.
Turn Your Plan into Action
This section of the chapter might be the most important few paragraphs we can share with you. By our estimation, 90% or more of all social media marketing plans fail because people who write them don’t move the plans from being written on paper to actually being performed by human beings. Executing a social media marketing plan sometimes seems troubling because of the diversity of tools and the often-present fear of technology among those in the organization. Imagining what your organization can do is the easy part. The hard part comes when you actually have to roll up your sleeves and make that imagined view come to be.
Social media marketing is not a strange, magical place that has different rules and processes from other areas of business. If you know how to manage a project, you know how to manage a social media marketing project. The steps you’ll take to execute a strong social media marketing plan may include some activities your company has not performed before, like daily social media monitoring. But those activities are just tasks to be assigned to team members. Remember, this ain’t rocket surgery.
Actualizing a plan takes two primary steps: getting everyone on the same page and then assigning tasks with deadlines. Adding steps and layers to that process, as many managers do, only complicates things. Why add layers of to-dos when sometimes all it takes to execute an important part of a strategy is to just put tasks one through three on someone’s list? Both steps are necessary, but let’s not make this harder than it seems.
First, let’s get everyone on the same page. If you’ve read a lot of business books or understand how to write a business plan, you’ll recognize this as the crafting of the mission and values statements step. Although you’re not going to pound out a 56-page diatribe, complete with financial projections and spreadsheets, you do need a rallying of the troops and a constant reminder of what you’re trying to accomplish for each social media marketing effort your company puts forth.
When activating a customer service pilot project for a health-care company, Jason had a number of team meetings where the goal of the pilot project was shared and discussed, along with several if-then scenarios should the effort start out slow or even ramp up faster than expected. With every member of the pilot’s team present at these meetings, Jason was, in essence, sharing the mission and value statement for the project with the team, earning buy-in from them, and covering all the elements a strong business activation plan includes. When the project launched, there was little need to regroup and retool based on an initial slow start because the team anticipated it and plowed through ideas to compensate. Three months later, the pilot was elevated to a full customer service support feature for the company.
But it’s not just about meeting and talking. Activating social media is about clearly defining goals and expectations for each member of the team. The key to activating a plan is ensuring everyone from the CEO to the janitor understands the goal of the project, its audience and message, and their respective role in achieving the goal. When one person fails to keep their eyes on the prize, the effort suffers and the prize is harder to achieve.
In his 1999 book Implementing Your Strategic Plan, C. Davis Fogg discussed 18 key elements to moving a plan to action.1 Key 1 was developing an accountability system. Certainly, in complex organizations with silos, multiple departments, and sorted reporting, accountability can be confusing. But what accountability really boils down to is dividing up the tasks and responsibilities behind a certain effort and assigning them to someone to complete by a given deadline. Developing a strong accountability system for a social media marketing effort simply requires enumerating the tasks at hand, accounting for a few you might not see (contingency planning), charting them out on a timeline that ensures tasks are accomplished in an appropriate order, and then assigning the tasks to the right team members. The more complex the program, the more complex your accountability and scheduling will be. But shrugging off that action plan, calendaring, and assignments because they’re hard? You might as well go do something else for a living.
Keep in mind your accountability system should include some important facets:
• A clear delineation of the task
• A clear understanding of who will perform the task, in coordination with whom, and using what resources
• A specific deadline and explanation of subsequent tasks dependent upon the assignment given
• A reminder of the overall goal, and success metrics, of the project
Team members who buy into your system and purpose, who believe in why you are doing what you’re doing, will take those assignments, run with them and the project will move along as needed. As a manager, you should always install checks and balances, reporting, frequent interludes of motivation, and reminders of the goals of your projects. But with the above information and intentional team members, you won’t have to fret much about activating.
Fogg’s book goes into great detail on organizational management and outlines how to create plans within plans and build out complex activation structures for your strategies to see reality. We don’t think activation needs to be quite that complicated. Whether you enumerate the tasks required to accomplish your strategic plan, then route them to a project manager and insert them into a Gannt chart or dump them into a project management software like Basecamp, you assign the tasks to the right people in the right order and accomplish your plans.
Planning for the Unexpected
All this talk about planning, though, makes us a little nervous. It’s as if we’re saying you can script social media marketing. You can’t. Remember that success in the social media world does include participating in two-way (or multiple-way) conversations with consumers. It requires you to engage and be responsive to prospects, customers, the media, or even competitors. And sometimes it even requires you move with those audiences, changing your products, services, and communications along with their needs, moods, and direction. And those changes aren’t typically accounted for in a written plan.
This is the core reason you hear a chorus of social media evangelists constantly singing about changing your company’s culture. The scripted, predictable way of doing business—often directed or at least affected by a company’s legal department—is a thing of the past. By not being flexible, responsive, and even interesting in how you communicate with customers, you’re saying to them, “We stick to the script.” Unfortunately, empowered online consumers do not, and they resent it when you do. Worse, your company will look stupid when you’re sticking to the script and the customer has taken the conversation and their problems in a whole new direction.
Although we’ll discuss the culture of being social more in Chapter 15, “Being Social,” when it comes to your action plan, you need to ensure that those responsible for first-line customer interactions are empowered to act. They need to be able to respond quickly and decisively to customer needs and concerns, and they even need to be able to vary from the script sometimes to deliver the experience today’s consumer expects. This requires that those frontline employees have decision-making and diplomacy skills. They need to be able to differentiate between doing what’s right for the customer and knowing where the company has to draw the line to avoid being taken advantage of. Certainly, a system of management feedback can be incorporated into most situations that the social web will present, but real-time decision making is now a critical need when companies are hiring frontline employees.
You might find yourself in a situation like Scott Monty did on December 9, 2008, when the recently hired social media lead at Ford Motor Company awoke to find online message boards and blogs denouncing his company. In the midst of a highly scrutinized but impressive rise to the top of the marketing world as the first true director of social media at a Fortune 10 company, Monty had to stare down an angry public that morning.
A website called The Ranger Station2 reported Ford’s legal team had threatened it in a cease-and-desist letter and demanded its URL and $5,000 be turned over to the company. The reasons, as Monty would find out throughout the day, were not made clear to the audience and the issue raged out of control.
What Monty didn’t do that day was follow the script. He quickly investigated internally to find out what letter had been sent to The Ranger Station. He reassured the public through messages posted on Twitter that he was on it. He even called Jim Oakes, the owner of The Ranger Station, to hear his side of the issue and get a well-rounded perspective.
At the end of the day, Monty discovered that the site was allegedly selling counterfeit Ford products (stickers) and the legal team simply wanted them to stop. Oakes panicked, not wanting to give up his URL or $5,000 (which the legal team added as a “we’re serious” kind of threat), and turned to his readers to help defend against the big company coming down on a little website. Monty convinced the legal team to separate the counterfeit product issue and the URL/money threat, worked with Oakes to ensure he understood the reasons for the letter, and then posted a Ford response to the matter online, including a recording of the phone call with Oakes that assured everyone that the controversy was understood and addressed.3
None of the expert handling of a communications crisis situation would have happened if Monty was simply ticking off to-dos on the Ford social media strategy. To his credit, he spent a good deal of time that day continuing to nurture Ford’s vibrant online community with news, notes, and tidbits about lots of items other than The Ranger Station controversy, but Monty also went off script to tend to the real-time, real and live nature of Internet conversations and community reactions (see Figure 14.1).
Figure 14.1. Ford’s Scott Monty didn’t follow a strategic plan’s script in assessing, responding to, and mitigating public outcry around a cease-and-desist letter sent to The Ranger Station. He even responded to individual forum posts, like this one on SubaruForester.com, to clarify the situation.
Sometimes You Can’t Do It Alone
Ford Motor Company is an exception to the rule. A company that size has the resources and manpower to offer up case study after case study of doing social media marketing right. Not to discount Monty’s leadership or ingenuity, but most of us would trade budgets with him with confidence that we could rock social media marketing’s socks off, too.
Your company probably won’t have the same resources or opportunity. In fact, the vast majority of the people reading this likely work at businesses or for organizations that have zero dollars budgeted for social media this year and just as many people on board to run it all. Those factors, coupled with the fact that (this book notwithstanding) you may not have the requisite understanding and experience to lead a social media marketing effort, and you’ll find yourself coming to one conclusion: You need help.
We’re the first to admit that we often tell business owners that social media is relatively easy to use, the tools are often free, and volumes of both free and premium information are out there to help anyone figure out how to use the social web for business. The barrier to entry here is not high, in either cost or know-how. Although the tools and technologies might be easy to use, how you use them—and how often—can be downright difficult. Keeping up with the do’s and don’ts, the ins and outs, and the changes in technologies keeps us busy, almost 24/7, and it’s our jobs to stay informed. Even then we miss a lot of information and opportunity, so we can imagine how difficult it is for someone to manage all of this and do their regular job. So there are times that, despite all the books you and your staff are reading and the goals and measurements you’re setting and watching, that you need outside help. There are times that hiring a social media consultant or agency is going to be a good step for you.
We don’t see this any differently than the typical kinds of outsourced help you seek. Small businesses often outsource human resource functions, bookkeeping and accounting, and even a lot of their marketing efforts. Big businesses hire agencies and contractors to manage seasonal projects or fill temporary jobs. It makes sense to turn to people who have the expertise to help you navigate the social media landscape, define your goals, develop your strategies, and even execute the tasks to accomplish them.
But the explosion of social media marketing avenues, coupled with the economic recession the world has faced in recent years and the roster of social media agencies, consultants, and experts has exploded. For every one experienced marketer out there offering social media marketing as a service, there are 10 who haven’t a lick of marketing experience. They may well know social media, have built well-read blogs, or have accumulated tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but look beyond to their marketing and communications experience and the cupboard is as empty as their stares when you ask them about channel integration.
The Social Media Group, a Canadian agency headed by Maggie Fox, developed a useful tool to discern social media vendors called the Social Media Request for Proposal (SMRFP)4 in January 2010 (see Figure 14.2). Version 2.0 of the document was released a year later and includes the following questions or topics we think are pertinent to ask when looking for outside help with social media marketing:
• What social media services do you provide?
• Please outline your social media strategy process.
• Provide a case study of your strategy work that resulted in a social media initiative and the business results achieved.
• Please detail your methodology/workflow for handling online crises.
• Please provide two to three top-level campaign concepts for Company/Product/Service ABC that allow us to see your concept development and creative-thinking abilities.
• Please detail your creative process as it relates to social media campaigns.
• What methodology do you use for measuring the success of your social media programs for clients? Can you give us an example?
Although this list provided only a small sampling of the 100+ questions listed in the SMRFP template, as you can see, these are not questions easily answered by a random blogger who suddenly decided he is a marketing consultant. Why? Because social media marketing is about driving business. It is not a sandbox and not meant for folly or to be performed by people who don’t understand that when you spend resources, both human and otherwise, there’d better be something at the end of the equation that the business wants in return.
Figure 14.2. The Social Media Group’s Social Media RFP template includes suggested questions for a request-for-proposal document as well as in-person questions you can ask prospective consultants and agencies about their practices and methodology.
Gone are the days of writing off an agency or consultant’s inexperience because this thing called “social media” was something no one had heard of. Although it is true the industry and practice are still young, even in their respective infancies, that status provides no excuse for spending your organization’s time or dollars experimenting. If this book gives you anything, we hope that it is a clear understanding that social media marketing is a strategic exercise that your company can execute to accomplish one or more of the seven business outcomes we’ve explained. We hope you know now that social media for your company is less about Twittering, conversing, and engaging and more about setting goals, developing measurable objectives, and executing strategies and tactics to accomplish each.
Understanding this will help guide your decisions and ability to select and hire the appropriate consultants, agencies, or partners to help you. Whether you operate your social media marketing efforts with consultants or agencies or conduct your efforts with internal staffing, still greater questions remain unanswered about who does what and who owns responsibility. Those answers become clearer as you turn the page.
Endnotes
1. C. Davis Fogg, Implementing Your Strategic Plan, Amacom, 1999.
2. The Ranger Station, http://therangerstation.com/
3. Ron Amok, “Ford, Fansites and Firefighting,” RonAmok.com, Dec. 18, 2008. http://ronamok.com/2008/12/17/ford-fansites-and-firefighting/.
4. Social Media Group, Social Media RFP Template, 2010. http://socialmediagroup.com/social-media-rfp-template/.