It’s Open – Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Here at ItsOpen we flag up the benefits for businesses in using social media as a means to enter into a dialogue with customers. But should a company develop a social media strategy?

This may seem like a silly question. Of course it needs to understand the medium and work to a set of principles in order to get the full benefits. But blogger Farshid Ketabchi argues that using social media is not in itself a marketing strategy, merely a means to implement it. He approves the senior marketing executive who has banned words like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from his planning and strategy meetings.

“The point is that while social media may serve as an effective method of promoting your business, it is only a set of tools and channels that you may use to execute against your business plan and strategy.  It is part of the tactical stuff that you do after you have figured out your strategy.”

It’s an interesting view, and Ketabchi cites articles that expand on this thinking. See his piece here, and follow the links.

According to Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times last weekend, David Cameron is insisting on vetting all Tory party tweets before they are published. He’s running scared that someone might tweet about something which would be off message and cause controversy.

If the story is true, I can understand Cameron’s concerns. However, it is disappointing that the political parties are not appearing to make more of an effort to engage with people through social media in order to discuss ideas.

I watched an interesting BBC programme over the weekend called The Virtual Revolution which looked at how social media is challenging repressive political regimes. Commentators suggested that new models of democracy could emerge through the use of social media tools. Access to new ideas through social media could act as a catalyst for political change, some suggested.

It is a shame that Cameron is not embracing social media in a more fundamental way to engage with people to discuss ideas about the kind of society we want to have and how it could best be governed, rather than focusing too much on a few potentially rogue Tory MPs and their tweets.

During its live online video coverage of the Iraq Inquiry the BBC has been incorporating real-time Twitter feeds on its web site of the conversations people are having on the proceedings.

This is yet another example of how news and information is being democratised.

During the cross examining of Tony Blair, it was interesting to see that Iain Dale, the well-known political blogger, was joining in the Twitter conversation and commenting on how it was going.

Dale is clearly a forward thinking political commentator but his use of social media tools shows how you can influence and participate effectively in democratic online conversations about matters of importance.

Bing, Microsoft’s search service, and Google have struck deals with Twitter that allow both companies to include tweets from Twiter’s database in their search results. This means that increasingly news and information will be influenced by people around the world who are using Twitter and less by professionally-paid elites of editors and producers.

The implications for organisations is that they need to connect with Twitter but more than simply broadcasting out messages. They need to be monitoring Twitter and joining in, having conversations and in this way they can gain influence over what is happening.

Briefings to journalists over the phone or privately will have no impact on streams of tweets so methods of organisational communications have to change if organisations are to successfully reach their customers in new ways and those that influence their customers.

Here’s a bold prediction. Gartner has decided that social media will start to replace email as the primary means of communication within as little as four years. Its research suggests that by then a fifth of organisations will be using it as their key communication medium, driven by greater security, the ability to create their own networks and greater tolerance of employees using personal accounts at work.

Gartner also predicts that in the next couple of years more than half of global businesses will be blogging in some form.

But it also sounds a warning about letting IT departments handle social media projects, many of which will fail. What’s needed is not an IT solution but a social solution that targets specific business value, which will mean developing a different set of skills.

More here.

In an interesting interview in yesterday’s FT, the CEO of Guardian Media Group Carolyn McCall addressed the issue of the moment for newspaper publishers – to charge or not to charge for online content.

Media analysts have questioned the Guardian’s strategy of building large online audiences and delivering content for free. However, the article points out that around 25 percent of the group’s advertising revenue now come from its online channels.

McCall doesn’t reject the ‘paywall’ idea favoured by Rupert Murdoch completely, suggesting that “certain areas of specialist content could be charged for”. A theory backed up by the success of FT.com, Economist.com and niche sites such as Breakingviews.com (prior to its sale to Thomson Reuters); sites that all charge for content in one form or other.

In my opinion, the most telling comment from McCall explores how charging for content fits with the culture of online media consumers in 2010. “It [a paywall] is not really the way that the web works” – a comment that rings true with organisations that are demonstrating successful online strategies. Why would you want to limit the number of people who link, share, comment on or bookmark your content?

The Guardian website’s army of ‘commenters and sharers’ are a far broader (and far larger) group than the newspaper’s readership ever was. Why make these online brand advocates pay to read and promote your online content?

I came across this essay by Eric Ehrmann on the Huffington Post, which takes a view about how social media fits with globalism. He calls social media the “enemy within”, seeking to flatten the entrepreneurial focus of the emerging digital economy into a playground of blogs, tribes and conversations that reduce business from being the driver of market and oligopoly capitalism into an experience of stories, feelings and the wisdom of online crowds.”

It’s a somewhat jaundiced view of social media as a chaotic and undisciplined adolescent, which is having trouble exhibiting adult behaviours associated with mainstream business values. “Social media is virtual and detached,” Ehrmann says. “From the viewpoint of behavioral psychology it behaves as an adaptive angry child, rather than as a stable, nurtured child because it is virtual and nobody nurtured it.”

A polemical view, and worth a look.

I’ve been spending the past few days talking to the marketing agencies that run ‘experiential’ campaigns for brands. These are events held in stores, festivals, etc., where companies can interact directly with consumers to showcase a new make of car, the latest game console or mobile phone or whatever.

Social media has been playing a big role in these campaigns. If you take a roadshow to, say, ten major cities, or take a stand at a couple of big music festivals, you can interact directly with thousands of consumers. Creating a campaign website has always been seen as a way to extend the reach of the campaign to reach other people.

But in the past year, agencies have been going further, filming people at these events and then posting the clips on the website and YouTube. They are also creating their own Facebook and Twitter pages and encouraging people to create and share their own content.

An example: Adidas created a campaign to drive awareness of the tie-up with UEFA Champions League, visiting five different locations in the UK and inviting 10-14 year olds to show off their football skills. On its own that was never going to reach a lot of people. But by encouraging the kids to share their experiences the total reach was over  800,000 consumers.

Another is VW, which avoided conventional advertising when promoting its new camper vans and instead started an online dialogue with the camping community via social media, using content generated at marketing events.

The agencies make the point that social media is different from other forms of marketing. It’s not about pushing your message out, it’s about getting consumers to interact with you, by providing engaging events, competitions and other stuff that they are likely to be interested in, and then encouraging them to share it.

Some companies do worry about not being able to control what goes out – it’s just not what they are used to. It’s important to be aware of the pitfalls. For instance food brands who tried to copy the famous Cadbury gorilla ad, and get the same sort of exposure on YouTube, were heavily criticised, as their efforts lacked the creativity and spontaneity of the original.

But done well, it really works, the agencies say. And where experiential marketing used to be seen as a low-cost add-on to conventional advertising, the use of social media has suddenly made it into a viable alternative – and at virtually no extra cost.

The Pope is encouraging priests to get in on social media.

He obviously gets it. He is telling priests not to bother just sticking up times of church services, but “to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelisation and catechesis.”

“The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts,” he goes on.

Good advice for any business, too.

Granted it is relatively easy to set up your own Twitter channel, YouTube page or Facebook presence, but a lot of companies are rushing in and not applying the usual disciplines that they would apply for other media. It is possible to build your own website for free on the web, but what serious company would do that?!  Companies appoint agencies to help them plan, deliver and maintain web sites. And serious companies should do the same for social media. It is simply too important to treat in an amateurish way.

There are different divisions of social media practitioners  in the world of business. Some are light years ahead of others because they have thought seriously about their social media strategies. They have not just dived in and set something up to demonstrate they are doing something.

Instead they have developed plans, resourced them properly and thought through what will work best. They have also listened to what is being said online and realised that social media requires companies to behave and act differently. Simply transferring existing corporate materials into the social media space is not going to work.

The other point that some companies fail to appreciate is that social media networks and platforms are in essence empty vessels. It is what you do with them that matters. How you use them is crucial. Of course you can channel anything through Twitter. But what is really going to appeal to your audience? You might want to start a blog, but is it appropriate? Will people bother to read it? Are you sure your audience will want to actually spend their valuable time reading it? Social media requires a more professional approach.

How does an organisation maintain control of its brand through social media? How can you protect your brand from the myriad of comments, videos, and tweets?

If you are absent from what is going on through social media then you are at the mercy of those people who are commenting on you.  You have in effect abdicated your role. You have surrendered the story to others.  To prosper in social media you need to be there telling your story. If you are not, others – including negative story tellers – will do the job for you.  So it is essential you participate.

Participation means listening, correcting and contributing and above all respecting the communities who are talking about you online.  You don’t have to respond to everything that is being said. You can be selective or address a group of comments through one post. But you have to be there.

Who would sit on their hands while the FT writes articles about you? No one.  So why should you sit on your hands when thousands and sometimes millions of people – your customers – are talking about you now through social media networks?