Great corporate social-media efforts aren’t about technology. It can be fun to learn about the latest tools, but new gadgets aren’t what make companies great at engaging their customers — that has to come from sound strategic planning.
At a recent panel at BlogWorld Expo 2010, several leading voices in social media communications — including Ford social-media chief Scott Monty, former Kodak Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Hayzlett, Citibank’s Frank Eliason and Bonin Bough of Pepsico –got together to discuss the state of social media in the corporate space.
As the panel discussed where they saw corporate social-media strategy heading, three prominent trends emerged:
- Listening to your customers is great — but reaching out to them is better. Right now, most companies’ crisis-communications strategies are modeled on the 24-hour news cycle, said Eliason. Companies know a story can break at any moment and they need to be ready to respond. The problem with this plan is that no matter how fast a company’s reaction time is, they’re still waiting on customers to get angry before staffers get involved, and by that point, it may be too late to avoid an incident.
Great customer service is the best crisis-communications strategy, noted Eliason, because great service can keep uproars from happening. Firms should make staff available to answer questions and talk with customers before they become truly disgruntled, suggested Hayzlett, who noted that user forums are a great place to start doing this. - No one department can control social media. Who owns social media in your organization? Is it public relations? Marketing? Human resources? While plenty of companies are facing internal power struggles over the answer to this question, in the future it’ll be a nonissue, as social media becomes less of a coveted resource and more of a tool that all employees uses to do their jobs.
Mony said leading organizations may have a top-down approach now, but they’ll soon move to a hub-and-spoke model, in which which all departments are responsible for social communications in their areas of expertise. Soon, asking who controls all of an organization’s social media will be like asking who is in charge of all its writing, he added. - Listening doesn’t mean forgetting who’s in charge. One thing all the panelists seemed to agree on was that companies need to understand that their social-media fans are a subset of their customers — and not necessarily a representative sample. Much of the later part of the panel was devoted to handling packaging and logo mishaps — with Bough taking a fair amount of teasing from his fellow panelists over recent flaps regarding Pepsi’s Tropicana and SunChips brands. In both cases, Pepsi responded to customer complaints by pulling the offending packaging off of the shelves — but the panelists said they were far from convinced that doing so was always in a company’s best interest.
When the conversation turned to Gap’s recent logo debacle, the panelists unanimously said that if they had been in charge of Gap, they would not have responded to social-media complaints by taking the company back to its old logo. Whenever a company changes anything, there’s a good chance that some fans will object. Companies bear responsibility for making sure that complaints they respond to truly represent how the bulk of their customers feel — not just a vocal minority. “Feedback is not a substitute for judgment,” Hayzlett said.
How do you feel about these ideas? Where do you see corporate social-media strategy headed?
Image credit: topshotUK, via iStockPhoto
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I totally agree with the idea that there is not a single department that should be in charge of social media, whether that is engaging with customers or analyzing social media conversations. Reaching out to customers or incorporating analysis into a larger customer service pictures gives organization a much fuller and richer understanding of their customer.
I have two thoughts on this. (1) I think it's great when organizations have someone from each department contribute to social media efforts as long as it's organized and the members collaborate about the timing of messaging so that people do not become overwhelmed with information and (2) If the company does not have the man-power to have one person from each department contribute to social media efforts, then the Social Media Manager should be collaborating with other departments and working to weave the specific messaging in with other outgoing information.
The "Remember who's in charge" point is excellent. As marketers, we need to perform our due diligence before allowing a vocal minority to derail our plans and ojectives. Change always brings complaints. We must assess whether the complaints require action or are simply the latest efforts of chronic complainers. We should always be listening and responding, but that doesn't always mean taking action.
Totally agree with the first and second points. The third point — not so sure. That one takes a bit more analyzing, depending on how big the outcry is. Obviously, you don't want to back peddle on strategy if just a few disgruntled customers disagree. Can't please everybody. You really have to look at who is upset, why they are upset, and how many are upset. Get some quality feedback. This is where social media channels can be so effective in discovering this information quite fast and effectively. Besides, that new Gap logo was beyond lame.
Remember when Coca Cola tried this with "New Coke" back in the mid- to late 80s? When the customer outrage became so vocal (still a minority), the company returned to its original formula, repackaging it as Coke Classic. Some believe it was a clever marketing ploy to increase its marketshare. Can you imagine if they tried this today?
Social media marketing is (and should be) more of an open door than a closed loop system. While it shouldn't determine your entire marketing strategy and business goals, it does help define and enrich that plan in the modern world. Maybe companies weren't (really) as concerned what their customers had to say about products and services before, because there was a brick and mortar site to keep them at a distance from the public. These days, companies can't afford not to at least keep an ear open for what's being said online about what you're selling everywhere else.
Social Media? Isn't that just a new word for customer service in a new space? If it is, isn't it everybody's responsibility to engage in social media..
Great post.Thank You.
I think all three of these points are spot on, especially the last one.
A lot of companies these days are hearing a lot more from their customers thanks to social media avenues, but just because you’re hearing more from your customers doesn’t always mean that they are absolutely right. Companies have to find a way to do things that their customers like and agree with, but it’s important to remember that the company also has to do what is best and right for them. If companies bend to every customers whim there will be no room for these companies to make decisions on their own, which may actually work better for them.
It’s important to listen to what your public is saying about you and take what they’re saying into consideration, but that doesn’t mean that every suggestion they make is going to be right for the company.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
I think it's important that social media access is granted to those business units and/or depts that need to listen, promote and respond to conversations out on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Where we need to be careful is ensuring that the responses are compliant with corporate/brand policy. There needs to be a way of managing the conversation, setting permissions, etc. Without self-promoting, I'll mention that there are solutions, platforms and interactive marketing "hubs" that allow you to manage, control and optimize the conversation.
I agree that social media access should be granted to all and that contribution is needed by more than just the marketing group. I am interested, also, in thoughts regarding B2B insights regarding listening to customers. It is a different perpsective and slightly different conversation. Any thoughts?
I recently wrote a white paper that might address your question. It's called "Trickle-up Socialnomics: Leveraging Social Media in the BtoB Context" and can be accessed via http://tiny.cc/TUSpaper.
Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community
Social media is reinventing the way most people do business these days. There is not a perfect plan to deal with many new dilemmas, which many are involved in how companies (big or small) address and interact in social platforms. It could be a balancing act, as what it looks to me, to represent companies's rules and goals and address consumers/user's concerns. Like someone said above, customer service 2.0?
My recent post Huacachina it is
I totally agree with Alllison Nassour – if the company doesn't have the resources to have someone in every department contributing to social media efforts, then a social media manager must cooperate extremely closely with all departments across the board.
What of course needs to be in place before any of this can happen is a readiness from ALL departments and each individual employee to get involved in the company's social media strategy. The CEO and department heads need to encourage and motivate all employees in their efforts. One person in the company (the social media manager, or in my case – me (Online Communications Manager) trying to motivate and convince the whole company can be a slow and painful process. I often feel I'm banging my head against a brick wall.
My recent post RebeccaMaschke- @ThePaulSutton Haha glad you enjoyed it! -
Good points but the interesting point is the actions to be taken toembed your company into the main social networks
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Has anyone experienced a successful plan on gaining access to C-level executives in a BtoB environment using social media networking? The intent is to establish relationships–not to sell anything directly. This effort would ikely be a portion of the total marketing program.
Dave
Great post. There's a dangerous fallacy with social media and crowdsourcing which you address here — namely, assuming that social media gadflies are somehow representative of customers or any other public is probably a big mistake. Some see the Wisdom of the crowd, other that Madness of the masses.
For more on this, see http://ianbruce.blogspot.com/2010/03/whos-using-s…
My recent post Questions to ask your prospective social media listening- monitoring and measurement vendor
History has taught us that the voices of the vocal minority not always but often represent the views of the majority. Therefore, brands should closely examine if the demographic profile of the vocal few accurately represent the many. Additional consideration should be given to the vocal minority's level of influence. If only a few highly dedicated group of people focused on a common goal can change the world, a brand doesn't stand a chance.
http://www.aismedia.com
the 'remember who's in charge' comment reminded me of when I was a DJ. We'd get calls from listeners requesting songs, telling us what they felt, etc. Our program director would remind us that while what these listeners said is important, it's a very small but vocal minority. Maybe 1 in a 100, or 1 in 500 would actually call. Just because a small and loud group of your readers respond doesn't mean they're always right. Certainly that feedback is important to consider…but that's all it is: feedback. It's neither right or wrong. It just is. What you do with that depends on other factors.
[...] Of course you should listen. You should actively listen. You should continually listen. But, as one smart blogger put it, “Listening doesn’t mean forgetting who’s in [...]
[...] Of course you should listen. You should actively listen. You should continually listen. But, as one smart blogger put it, “Listening doesn’t mean forgetting who’s in [...]
great article. i agree on all 3 points
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oiling the sqeaky wheel is just fine, provided of course that both oil and the effort required to do the oiling is of minimal real cost.
but only an economist would posit that kind of premise
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I think that its important to realize that those publics who are using social media to vocalize opinions are the publics that corporations should take into consideration most. These are the most active publics and organizations should show that their opinions are salient. People dont like change. But its really based upon how you propose it to them. Its also very important to make consumers feel a part in the process, it seems like this is the move that many organizations are taking now.
[...] your community can backfire and suggest that listening does not mean forgetting who is in charge. Gap and also Pepsi have given in to social media community’s demands and have not much gained by doing [...]
Though it’s tough to argue with the points raised by these social media experts, it’s important to remember the perspective they offer in their comments is extremely limited. There is much more to social media than the public social networks, and the potential applications and implications of new digital technologies in organizations extend far beyond external applications like marketing and customer service.
For a fuller sense of what social media is and how it is likely to impact organizations (and individuals), I recommend reading Parts 1 and 2 of the SMinOrgs Social Media Primer (http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPrimer1 and http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPrimer2), which I recently updated (http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPrimer1and2update).
For a comprehensive model for approaching social media initiatives, either internally or externally, I recommend Part 7 of the Primer (http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPrimer7).
In spite of this article’s headline, too much of the current focus on social media is narrowly focused and tactical rather than broad and strategic. The social media landscape should grow and change significantly in 2011.
Professionals and leaders in all disciplines, not just marketing and customer service, would be well advised to start climbing their social media learning curves and understanding the impact on their departments, functions, and professions ASAP.
The Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community is a great place to start.
Courtney Hunt
Founder, SMinOrgs