Mo Money Same Problems
(I had this post kicking around, I kind of dislike it but at the same time I think the point I am trying to make is a good one. So I figured I would throw it up on the blog because I don’t know if I ever will be happy with it.)
I have been consulting or working inhouse for companies dealing with social media for six years. Over that period of time I’ve worked with companies ranging from tiny non-profits to large Fortune 500 companies. In the last two years I have kept my feet in both spaces because I like the different types of creative solutions that they require
While the solutions for a large company versus a small company are usually pretty different because of the size, scope, and budget the one thing that routinely stays the same are the problems. When we talk about social media I think this point often gets lost in the discussion, people assume that because large companies have the resources to throw at solutions that they don’t have the same problems your small business does. That just isn’t true.
Here are three common issues I see in both small businesses and large companies:
1) Listening- Getting started, listening to what is being said about your company on the social web is the easy part. People will often will set up keyword searches on Twitter around their brand and will sign up to something like Google Alerts. When you get awoken to what is out there and you realize that you could be missing out on other possible conversations, this is when things get more complex
Companies of all sizes face problems from configuring their listening tools to figuring out how and when they are going to respond. Listening tools – whether a combination of free tools or paid enterprise tools – need significant testing and adjusting.
2) Content Creation - Who is going to do it? Where is going to come from? If we get our community involved, how is that content going to be moderated or presented? These questions are ones that I have been asked in the last year by two different companies – one had ten employees the other had ten thousand.
3) Being Efficient - If you don’t approach social media with some sort of strategy or vision, it can be a massive time suck. With all the great content, conversations, and sharing that is going on you could easily sit down and look up four hours later wondering what you have been doing. A combination of strategy, tools, and time management go a long way into making your participation in social media efficient.
So why write this post? Like I said above; while the solutions for these problems are usually vastly different, understanding them and seeing why they are important are universal. A lot of companies don’t pay attention to these three key points. Some want to skip ahead and just get involved with specific tools, some want to make a big splash and do something cool, others start participating but aren’t efficient with it and social media is viewed as a waste because it wasn’t used effectively for that company.
Big or small, these are common problems that need to be addressed. If they aren’t, you are going to have a pretty ineffective social media presence no how much money or manhours you throw at it.
Honestly, the entire reason I wanted to write this blog post was to reference a Notorious B.I.G. song.
Don’t Dilute Your Brand
In the last few months I have worked with a few clients that really took an aggressive stance with their social media strategy or their proposed social media strategy. They basically wanted to create social media outposts (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) for different products that their company provided and then with some of those, break them down even further and created outposts for sub products of the products.
At the heart of it they wanted to give people the ability to get the news and the information they wanted about specific items they produced. It is a legitimate idea and I think their intentions were pure. However, when you looked at their current social media usage you saw that they could barely manage their single outposts or the handful that they had. It was a struggle to create content and to get any traction. If they were to do this they would really dilute their brand by splitting things up that much.
Hey what happens if we split this up 75 times?
I’m not saying the idea of breaking up your social media presence by vertical or product is a bad idea. For example, if you are a Proctor and Gamble you need to do this because most people are more familiar with the individual brands than the company, you have way too many products and companies to just fold under that umbrella and you have marketing teams for each of them to produce good content.
Proctor and Gamble have the infrastructure, the need, and the people to pull it off. The companies I was talking to did not.
Before you begin to split up your social media you need to consider these things:
1) If it creates more work, do you have the ability to do it? If you are having problems creating content for one page, imagine creating it for six. Are you going to have the ability to keep the content flowing and make it interesting when you begin splitting up your outposts? If the answer is no or you see it being a struggle don’t even consider making the move because you will be spreading yourself thin and killing off your brand.
2) Sometimes it is a sign of other problems either workflow or control. A lot of the time when different divisions or locations want their own outposts it is a sign of a communication, workflow, or control issue. For example, if a resort in the Bahamas had people controlling their amenities and they felt the person updating their social media outposts weren’t posting things about those amenities they may want to create their own outpost. Soon when people would look for that resort they would find pages and profiles for each amenity. At that point they had to choose what they wanted to follow,watering down the brand and missing out on key information from the other places. Creating a social media workflow and improving internal communications could have stopped this problem.
3) What is the value of doing this? - Most of the time people answer this question by saying, “Well customer A only cares about product B, so we are just giving him the news they want.” That is fine, but when your company only puts out three tweets in a day and only one of those tweets are about product B only, I am sure customer A is fine with the other two tweets. If you feel strongly that people only want information about a single product, but don’t want to water down your brand, create custom feeds or other things that you can aggregate on the outpost. For example: If you have a Facebook page, create a tab with different feeds you have available by product or vertical. There you can blend together news from Twitter by a hashtag, posts from your blogs and other outposts. There are ways to give people options of just following one piece of news without watering down your brand.
A diluted presence means you have a diluted base of fans, friends, and followers. It is harder to activate them, it is harder to get good conversations going, and it is harder to hold their interest if everything is so watered down. You really need to think long and hard about splitting up your brand in social media, the last thing you want is for things to die slowly.
Product Review: Social Talk by Syncapse
SocialTalk from Syncapse
What is it: An enterprise level social media management tool that includes reporting around your social media efforts.
What Sites Does It Manage: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Movable Type (YouTube shortly)
What I Like About the Product: The real selling point of this product is the workflow it creates within an organization. For example let’s say that you need to have managerial or legal approval for every piece of content you generate. (Think highly regulated industries.) After the post is crafted it can be submitted for approval, after the posts gets approved it can then be submitted for publishing, throughout the entire process there is commenting and communication about the post.
In the past working with different industries such as wine and spirits, this would have been a lifesaver instead of 100 e-mails to a legal department.
Additionally you can categorize your posts into different campaigns which I think helps with the management and reporting angle to this product. Especially with companies that have multiple products or locations.
From an agency standpoint you can brand the tool around your agency or around the client’s company. (This feature is included at no additional cost.) Also they include a branded URL shortener that you can use in your content.
What I Don’t Like About the Product: The biggest issue I have with the product (and really this isn’t about the product as much as it is about the industry) is that so many enterprise companies don’t use the two blogging (WordPress and Movable Type) tools that are included in the product. (Even more so when they have communities built in.) Currently I am doing an evaluation of four specific tech companies for a client project and out of the 90 blogs that these companies have (employee and company branded) only a handful run on either platform.
(Don’t get me wrong I LOVE WordPress beyond belief and wish more of these companies were using it.)
This is the problem with a lot of enterprise software, which isn’t the fault of Syncapse. A lot of the white label community software doesn’t play nice with tools that make lives easier for people in the social media world. (Yet another selling point for WordPress.)
You are open 24/7 how come your social media isn’t?
Yesterday I received an e-mail from a friend asking my opinion about the hours a company should keep in regards to social media. If the company is a 24/7 company should their social media presence be up and running 24/7? The truth of the matter is that I have never thought about it. (Yet I have dedicated hours of my life debating that Aerosmith is the most overrated rock band in the last 30 years.)
I took to Twitter to see what people thought and the initial reaction was completely mixed.
My rule of thumb on this would be it depends on how they use these platforms. For example if it is mostly a marketing play (which I would hope it wouldn’t be) and a PR team mans the accounts then I wouldn’t expect them to be open 24/7. However if they do a lot of customer service from these platforms and their customer service function via phone or e-mail is available 24/7 I would have the same expectations of their social media.
With that being said I think it also depends on the company, the size, and the expectations they set using these tools. Just like when you go into a supermarket that is open 24/7 you know that you aren’t going to necessarily find the same services available that are available during the day. Companies need to establish how they are using these tools and what the customer can expect from them. (Obviously there is no hard and fast rule with this. )
When you use social media what are your expectations of business accounts and the hours that they keep?
Consider the Source
Last week when I was flying home from Portland my plane was delayed on the runway for a few minutes. After about 10 minutes of just sitting parked on the runway the Captain announced that there was some issues with weather around Chicago and we were going to be delayed about 30 minutes before we took off. About five minutes after that I received a text message from Orbitz saying that the average delay time going into Chicago was 90 minutes due to snowfall limiting the number of hourly landings.
Immediately I turned to the passenger sitting next to me, a middle-aged woman who was traveling with her husband and showed her the text, the couple wanted to know where it was from? I explained to them it was from the service where I booked my flight from and that when you book through them you could elect to receive alerts about your trip. The wife said, “Well how do you know that is right the Captain just said it would be only 30 minutes?”
That got me thinking. I had what was essentially a primary source just tell me information about my flight. (The captain.) And I decided to ignore that source and believe a secondary source that came in via text message. (Orbitz) Why did I do that? Was it the medium that it was delivered? Was it me being cynical? Did one give me the answer I wanted to hear?
The first reason I believed Orbitz over the Captain is based on past performance. I have flown a lot in my lifetime and every time I have been given an estimated delay time it was always off by at least 45 minutes. “We’ll be leaving in 30 minutes” has turned into hours on more than one occasion. This information was always taken directly from the airline. (I know these are “estimates” but on more than one occasion it seemed like the times were given more appeasement than anything.)
Orbitz has never given me wrong information.
I think that the second reason had to do with the medium. Automatically when I get a short burst of information electronically, with no opinion attached to it, I believe it because this is the medium I deal in most often. (I should know better.) Hearing a voice over a PA system no longer outranks straight data to me and I am not sure if that is good or bad.
Eventually we took off, 35 minutes after the Captain announced we would be on the runway for half an hour and 85 minutes earlier that what Orbitz said. I guess maybe I need to reconsider the value I place on each source of information.
Is your evaluation of information colored by past experience, the medium that delivers it, or other factors?
