It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

CSR is one of the areas which lends itself well to social media. Start small and be prepared to experiment is the conventional wisdom. But clearly CSR can make use of the space online to be creative and to enter into conversations directly with stakeholders. Brochures and traditional means of communications have their place, but the shift to online consumption of news and information is becoming so integral to our lives that CSR programmes have to be actively involved, in order to be relevant and to share the work they are doing efficiently and effectively.

Here are some interesting examples with some feedback from the companies involved.

There are a lot of companies dipping their toes in the waters of social media, but the profound changes that it is ushering in means that a more profound organisational approach is required.

Companies need to be monitoring what is being said through social media as a start, and they need to train people so they can respond online in particular subject areas. Companies need to also understand the particular culture of social media and how other companies are handling it. At the moment, it seems that it is largely technology companies who are taking the lead.

Simply not participating will not work because it is a threat to your reputation. With more and more consumption of news and information taking place online, there are plenty of good opportunities to build close relationships with key stakeholders.

There also needs to be agreement across a company on how you want to use social media. How do you want to be seen by users of social media? How are you going to handle negative comments? Which platforms are you going to use and why? How are you going to develop products through social media? How are you going to build your company reputation through social media? How will you recruit through social media?

Individual departments are making strides forward, which is good, and tactical activities are fine, up to a point. In fact tactical work can help to advance the introduction of more wide ranging strategies. But companies need a joined-up approach. There needs to be a consistent strategic approach which enables flexibility in terms of how it is interpreted locally or by individual departments.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has raised eyebrows with his claim that times have changed and that people now no longer value privacy in the way they once did.

In an interview at the Crunchie Awards in San Francisco Zuckerberg argued that privacy was no longer a “social norm”. People are now much more comfortable sharing information openly online, a radical change of attitudes that has happened in just a few years.

Last year Facebook caused a storm by tweaking its privacy settings so that status updates are automatically made public, which means users who care about their privacy have to be much more proactive and vigilant. This latest comment by Zuckerberg is clearly intended to justify that. If he could go back in time and build Facebook again he would make all information public by default, he added.

This is a big claim, and some people think Zuckerberg is getting a little bit too big for his boots. Blogger have been scathing. Chris Matyszczyk remarks: “Gosh, it’s hard to keep up with these pesky social norms. They change so very, very quickly. Two years ago, Zuckerberg told ReadWriteWeb that privacy controls were “the vector around which Facebook operates.”

On Huffington Post Craig Kanalley writes him an open letter: “Behind all those numbers, and behind the dollar signs that may be in the back of your mind, there are people. Real people. Human beings. With lives. And friends. And family. And employers. And they’re all connected on Facebook. And if the wrong piece of information gets to the wrong person, or if a private detail gets to a marketing company, or if criminals or stalkers find info they need to attack people, you will ruin people’s lives.

I wouldn’t say Zuckerberg is entirely wrong. Social norms really are changing at dizzying speed. There was a shocking piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times about the changing sexual mores of young girls, for whom, it’s claimed, promiscuity is now the norm and romantic love as the basis for relationships is seen as hopelessly old-fashioned (a young man who wanted his girlfriend to sleep only with him was derided by her as a hopeless loser).

That’s clearly a social trend, but it seems to contradict a fundamental biological impulse in women, the need for emotional intimacy and security. What we may be seeing is a form of mass experimentation. Hey, we’ve done monogamy and privacy, now let’s try something else. It will last only until the perceived advantages are seen to be outweighed by the problems, and then Nature will reassert itself.

On the other hand, in this particular context, there’s a strong view that Zuckerberg is overstating his case for the sake of his commercial ambitions. Businesses should certainly not be fooled by it. The big lesson for marketers in the past decade is that consumers hate being taken for granted. Just because they are talking to each other on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean that they welcome commercial approaches. It doesn’t mean that they might not, but as with every other marketing channel, social media is an area where businesses need to tread carefully.

In reply to Rob’s comments about Facebook earlier this week (Online Suicide, Jan 5), I think Facebook should relax about people wishing to remove specific friends. It would be misguided to think that they can control people who are on Facebook. The whole point of social networking is that it should be open and accessible. Facebook is essentially a platform and it should enable its community to network and develop how it wants to, in my view.

I can imagine that investors are jumping up and down with fear at the prospect of applications tempting people away from Facebook as the market is highly competitive. It is easy to move from one social network to the other.

Take Google: despite its supremacy, rivals are only a click away. It’s not that much effort to move to another online service.

There is plenty of chat in the media (normally traditional) about the decline of social media or people using it less often. I think this is largely motivated by people who fear the rise of social networking, they are outside of the culture and feel threatened by it. But there is no way that social networking is going to go; it is simply too embedded within our culture, our phones, our TVs, our blackberries, web sites, our bookmarks etc etc.

Also within certain groups, social networking is indispensable. For teenagers Facebook is an essential part of life. It provides freedom from the stultifying conformist tendencies of parents and teachers and is a chance to enjoy a taste of freedom and organise time with friends and reach out to people from different continents.

There are also house bound people who can enjoy great comfort through social networking and who can express themselves creatively in ways which are not possible in their jobs or daily lives. Just look at how social networking brings together old friends and families. Social networking meets and fulfils deep human needs: a need to belong; express yourself and be recognised.

Despite the fact that giants like Facebook and Twitter have emerged quickly in recent years from nowhere there is no guarantee they are permanent residents of this new realm. They could go but they will, I imagine, only be replaced by other services performing similar roles.

The latest buzzword creeping in is ‘Augmented Reality’. Basically it means that you will be able to point your mobile device at people and places and gain information about them as you walk along. So you could be walking down the street and be able to pick up reviews of the restaurant you might be thinking of visiting. Or else you might get information on a house for sale, or directions on how to get out of the tube, or pick up a shared presentation about a particular company.

There are a couple of videos here which will bring the concept to life. It is probably worth watching them so you know where mobile technology is heading.

It’s being billed as a defining moment in the changing world of communications. Pepsi, after 23 years, is not taking a Superbowl TV ad but instead is investing in social media.

Rather than broadcasting messages out, it is going to be looking at ways to engage with its stakeholders using social networks and platforms.

Traditional TV advertising is now being questioned. It is interesting to read some of the responses this has generated.

Is Facebook wrong to discourage people from abandoning their online lives? It has blocked users from taking advantage of Web2.0 Suicide Machine, a Dutch website that provides the means to ‘unfriend’ people. Since December the site says more than 56,000 friends have been unfriended, 200,000 tweets have been removed and 850 people have removed all traces of their activity.

It’s understandable that Facebook should react in this way, as it needs to keep its numbers up in order to maintain momentum and make a successful transfer to public ownership. I guess it calculates that this reverse process could turn into a trend, and wants to stop it before it gets out of hand. But it’s not really in anyone else’s interests for it to do this. There needs to be a mechanism for people to get out of social media if they decide that it’s not for them, or that it’s taking up too much of their lives.

The important thing is that an activity should only engage people who benefit from it. This used to be a huge issue for direct marketers. Many thought that the more people they could reach the better, but the savvier ones realised that actually they only really needed the ones who had an interest in their products and services. The rest just got hacked off with constant irrelevant approaches, which ended up damaging brands.

Direct marketers learned the hard way, as consumers took steps to make their personal data unavailable. I wonder if a similar sort of conflict is going to start developing in the social media space, where as a result of commercial pressures force people find themselves exposed in a way they would rather not be.

Facebook is surely courting unpopularity with this decision, which could end up having negative consequences for its future development. It can’t all be about size and numbers, there has to be integrity as well.

Here’s a stab at what I think is likely to happen in corporate social networking this year:

1)    Most companies will develop social networking policies

2)    There will be YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Blogging crises for companies who do not have social networking policies or do not understand how best to engage with social networks

3)    More companies will start blogs and begin to build relationships with bloggers

4)    Corporate responsibility programmes will emerge as key users of social networks

5)    Spend on social networking will be less incremental and companies will start to retain specialists to support and assist them with their strategies and programmes

6)    Companies will start to explore more how they can use social networking to learn from their customers and deal with customer concerns and issues

7)    Social networking content produced by corporates will become more creative and less traditionally corporate in tone and subject matter

8)    More companies will create applications fuelled by the take up of the iPhone which is joining new networks this year.  But many will fail to get any pick up, only outstanding ones or highly useful ones or brilliantly funny ones will survive and be adopted

9)    Companies will start to approach social networking in a more integrated way: but there will be plenty of internal warfare over who controls it

10)    As traditional media wanes in influence,  resourcing of traditional media PR will be reviewed in light of the significant migration to online social networks

With 2009 having been such a bumper year for social networking sites it’s no surprise that there’s talk of some going public this year.

Top of the list is Facebook, which reached 350 million users last month and has overtaken all its former rivals in revenues from advertising. In 2010 the site is expected to rake in $605 million from brands, compared with $385 million on MySpace. The recent decision of founder Mark Zuckerberg to create a dual-class stock structure, with most of the voting rights being maintained by him and other existing shareholders, is a pretty good indication that he plans soon to go for an initial public offering.

If that goes well we can expect to see similar moves by Linked In, whose co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman has let it known that a speedy IPO is his preferred exit strategy, and perhaps also Twitter, whose ability to demonstrate revenues, for instance in its $25 million deal with Google, is whetting appetites.

It will be interesting to see how well all the hype translates into hard cash. If dotcom history is a reliable guide, there will be no shortage of takers for social media share offerings, but whether buyers see longterm results, only time will tell.

Despite gloomy forecasts this Christmas seems to have been good for retailers, and their grasp of social media is thought to have  something to do with that. No stats, but in the US especially analysts agree that businesses have been using it as a means to reach out to their customers, and at the same time save money on conventional advertising.  Some say just about every retailer now has a social media presence.

For instance Domino’s made Facebook, Twitter and other social media a cornerstone of its campaign to promote a revamped pizza pie. A spokesman says that the change to the product largely came about from listening to what customers said about it on social media sites, so it made sense to use the same channel as a means to promote it.

A much talked-about campaign has been Walmart’s use of both Facebook and Twitter to promote bargains, as well as developing relationships with bloggers and posting videos on YouTube. Other US examples that are being cited right now are tech goods company Best Buy, which offers a customer service channel on Twitter; Kodak, whose Facebook page enables customers to create albums and share pictures; and general retailer Target, which promotes daily deals on Twitter and Facebook and has a dedicated page on YouTube.

There’s also plenty of anecdotal evidence about the way that some consumers are benefiting from a retailer’s social media presence to learn about offers and availability. Read more here.