birddog

Social Media for Bloody Important Senior Executives

I know very little about the hotel and hospitality industry. That should never stand in the way of a good speaking opportunity though. Not ever. If anyone’s prepared to pay me good money to shout at them, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll say, “yes”.

So I found myself in Berlin as a speaker for the International Hotel Investment Forum (IHIF). It was a reasonably big conference with over 2000 global hotel investors, financiers and senior executives in attendance. It was certainly big enough to warrant a decent Wi-Fi connection. You’d have thought.

My research had indicated a certain degree of social media adoption by the hotel industry, limited predominantly to ‘customer services’ and running scared of TripAdvisor. The senior executives – the ‘C-Suite’ – however, were wholly disengaged. Social media wasn’t really on the agenda. They had more important matters to attend to. That proved sufficient inspiration for the title of my presentation – ‘Social Media for Bloody Important Senior Executives’.

My thinking has moved to the ‘Social Enterprise’ – a place were the entire business drives the social engagement of the organization. From the bottom of the enterprise to the very top, everyone is empowered, enabled, motivated and rewarded in its online endeavour to satisfy customers and prospects – including the senior executives. It’s only a matter of time. When the next generation of digital native middle management reach the boardroom, the enterprise will be social. Or at least it will have a chance. I don’t think it’s such a stretch. But it’s a very long way from Berlin and even further from the hotel industry.

I spent three days talking to delegates who, almost without exception, were clueless as to the opportunity or impact of social channels. In one of my presentations to over 100 people, only three of them had heard of Slideshare, none of them were using it. With over two thousand delegates attending the conference, I was anticipating a deluge of Twitter activity, but they could only manage a trickle of tweets. The general response was, “In the hotel industry we expect to do business face to face”. Well, yes, we all expected to do that years ago. We expected to travel by horse and cart a little while ago too, but the world has changed. So has business – whatever industry you’re in. The importance of direct contact in business is undeniable, but it’s not the only way of connecting with your audience.

As I stood at the front of the room giving my presentation, I couldn’t help but be slightly distracted by a man on the front row equipped with an SLR camera and strobe flash. Every time I changed the slides, he took a flash photograph of the projector screen. I had 60+ slides so you can imagine how it might get on your tits after the third slide. My presentation was about distributing social content, about helping your audience by sharing information. “It’s OK,” I said to the man, “you really don’t need to do that – this entire presentation will be available on Slideshare and YouTube just as soon as I have a Wi-Fi connection.” He carried on taking flash photographs of the screen regardless. What I should have said is, “Are you STUPID or just not LISTENING?” but based on President Kennedy’s Berlin experience, all he would have heard is, “I am a donut”.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scotmckee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/birddogb2b
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/BirddogB2B
Amazon: http://is.gd/mckeebooks

Building a B2B Customer Community

A client mentioned to me recently the pressing need to deliver, “strong results, quickly,” from the community engagement programme I was being asked to deliver. I’ve been asked for that before of course. Almost every time a client or prospect sticks their hand in the air it’s to ask for the required strong results in a timeframe that almost always equates to the specifics or generalities of, ‘quickly’.

So, once and for all, the desire to build and manage an online community of brand evangelists is admirable. Well done. That’s the right path. Customers have moved online and you want to communicate with them on their terms within their online environments. Good news. But. (You knew there was a ‘but’ coming, right?)

But, you can’t snap your fingers and build an engaged community. You can’t bitch and moan and delay and procrastinate and squeeze costs and when you finally take an incremental step forward (usually a small one) expect the miraculous creation of a venerated online citadel overnight. It doesn’t work that way – for all the reasons that you originally agreed to. It’s the customer’s community. Unless and until you prove otherwise, your brand is the guest. Whether your brand is a welcome guest, a tolerated one or a toothless, flatulent aunt who sups tea out of a saucer, depends in no small part on how ‘quickly’ you press for ‘strong results’. Rome wasn’t built in a day. No one in the history of the world has ever delivered a website on time. So why is there the expectation that social community building is a switch-on, switch-off commodity?

It’s the opposite. Online communities need beliefs and principals on which they can be built. They need nurturing and inspiring. Content needs to be created and crafted and curated and shared and distributed. Personalities need to be identified. Influencers and influences need to be moderated, adjusted, supported. There’s a whole world of pain you’re about to switch on and you are clueless because you’re still treating it like a mailing campaign from the late ‘80s.

There was a certain comfort in the tactical campaign delivery of yesteryear – design it, print it, mail it. Achieve a predictable response from a predictable channel and then do it all over again. But community engagement isn’t a tactical play. It’s strategic. Building online relationships requires a fundamental shift in marketing perspective. It’s not promotional, or lead generating, or conducted at arms length. It’s attitudinal. It’s behavioural – how an organization feels about customers and prospective customers – and it’s conducted up close and personal for the whole world to see and engage with. Or not.

Either way, on the subject of Community Engagement, you’re no longer allowed to ask me to ‘deliver strong results quickly’ – not unless you have the first clue about quickly delivering strong, integrated, digital, social and content strategies to sit alongside them. Quickly is the decision you should have made five years ago. Quickly is the speed at which news travels within your competitors’ established online communities. Quickly is how our meeting’s going to end.

The results may come quickly, or they may not. At which point, you have a choice – tactically try to put the genie back in the bottle, or, strategically, make a longer term investment in the needs of your customer instead of the short term needs of the quarter end figures. Whatever you decide, at least you know how to attach some urgency to the matter now. Move quickly? Yes. Deliver strong results? Absolutely. In the same sentence? Forget it. From now on, ah izz juss gonna take mah time…

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scotmckee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/birddogb2b
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/BirddogB2B
Amazon: http://is.gd/mckeebooks

The Definition of ‘Social ROI’ – The Pushmepullyou

I’m becoming a little tired of knobs using ‘socialisms’ – words and phrases that sound like English, but aren’t. They’re intended to make the user appear desperately clever and the recipient stupid. ‘Monetizatory’. ‘Accessibilitization’. ‘Engagementized’. And the rest. Knobs, the lot of them.

Social media requires a degree of initiative and a willingness to experiment. Not much else. Clients would like immediate ROI, but that’s incompatible with the social medium and making up words like ‘inter-engagementary’ is a poor alternative to just saying, “You can’t have immediate ROI”. Social media offers an opportunity for brands to engage with customers and prospects on the customer’s terms and you need to view ROI as a longer-term goal. It doesn’t need to be any more complex, we shouldn’t attempt to justify it any further and we certainly don’t need to make up wank-words.

Agencies pushing the agenda are using language to make the simple appear complex in the hope that it also becomes more believable or valuable. Clients remain unable to justify investment in something that has no logical or immediate value to the traditional marketing model.

I don’t actually care. What I care about is my Pushmepullyou from Prycie.

In a random conversation with @Prycie on Twitter, she asked me what my, “Fave animal,” was. I picked a Pushmepullyou from Dr. Doolittle. Obviously. Within a few minutes Prycie had sent me a left-handed drawing of a Pushmepullyou. She had cut a tendon on her right arm, so was using her left hand. She shared photos of the post-operative scars and the cast on her arm and we chatted about her other drawings too – the slow loris, the elephant…

That’s it. That’s all there is to this story. Prycie isn’t a client or a prospect. I’ve never met her. Our conversation could be measured as a quantifiable ‘engagement’ or ‘interaction’ or whatever the corporate machine is chasing as justification for the time invested, but I’m not going to. It just ‘was’. One small example of the shit that goes down in the social world thousands of times a minute every day.

The value of social media (beyond the immediate enjoyment of the conversation itself) isn’t going to be felt in engagements or interactions. Measure them by all means, but that’s just a score and the score doesn’t represent ‘value’. The value is derived from the on-going and cumulative influence of individual and/or brand personality within a growing online community.

I received an email from someone the following week that started, “I saw the Pushmepullyou picture last week and laughed. It started me thinking and I was wondering if you could help with my latest challenge…” That email was from a prospective client hiding in the shadows and listening somewhere from within my online community. I didn’t know that. I wasn’t expecting the email. I didn’t care about that either. But I care now – because in their own good time, the prospect has decided that I might be able to help.

That’s where the value is. We really don’t need big made-up words because it’s all pretty obvious. B2B brands are still trying to push ‘the sale’. In a social economy, brands should allow customers to buy when they’re ready. It’s all about the ‘Pullme’, not the ‘Pushyou’. It’s a different kind of animal.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Books: http://is.gd/mckeebooks

‘Social B2B Branding’ – Notes From a Hardass Motherfu*ker

I’ve always been impressed by those who study beyond the point of parental coercion. So when I was invited to guest-lecture to university MBA students, the irony wasn’t lost on me. A lifetime ago I spent my time at the back of the class, stoned. Now I was at the front with 100 students scribbling notes.

My lecture was, ‘Social B2B Branding – Notes from a Hardass Motherfu*ker’. A fair title I thought – assessing changes across the social marketing landscape from the frontline (as opposed to the back of the classroom).

Businesses are no longer in full control of their brands. In a social economy, the connected networks of followers, fans and advocates determine how, where and when a brand is communicated among its audience(s). Brands are no longer the sole voice of authority. The audience forms its own opinions and creates its own content, which it shares with wider connected networks. It’s a scary proposition for B2B brand leaders more comfortable where ‘The Word’ resides within a controlled corporate website environment.

The university was scared too. I arranged a video of the presentation along with the slide-deck (search Scot McKee on YouTube and/or Slideshare). The MBA course leader said I needed, “to remove all of the references” to the university, “immediately”. They decided, “not to locate our brand next to the deliberately provocative brand image you present.” I’ve presented the same image for 25 years. They might have considered their position before I invested my time and energy into preparing the lecture.

The location of the presentation was a point of fact, not an endorsement. The university was a venue, my gateway to a wider online and connected audience – including potential fee-paying MBA students.

I was told, “Some in the university think that this experience is evidence that we should avoid such problems by never allowing recordings.” Mmmm. They clearly hadn’t been paying attention in class because my evidence from the ‘Turdy Brown Trousers’ Keynote address at the B2B Marketing Conference 2011 demonstrated that while I presented to around 150 delegates on the day, the subsequent distributed content has (so far) engaged over 5,000 people and reached tens of thousands more.

Anyone can say pretty much anything about the university. Students, visitors, journalists, bloggers… we express our views in a social market. A search of the university on Twitter reveals just such opinions. Lots of them. The point is that the university (and every other B2B brand) is not in control of opinion. The crowd is. Brands need to be able to crowd-surf. That means creating, influencing and shaping content – counteracting the negative and leveraging the positive. To lockdown communications in the social world is futile and from a marketing perspective, counterproductive.

I considered naming the university, but my lecturers always told me to, ‘read around the subject’ – to learn. In the first 2 weeks since releasing the video and slide deck, over 500 people have engaged with the content. The reach runs into thousands. The content has been redistributed by 3 university MBA courses in the US (that I know of) and the real growth spike hasn’t even started. It could all have directed potential MBA candidates to the university brand. Instead, they’re all being directed to my brand – ‘deliberately and provocatively’.

We learn at our own pace. Some business brands will be quick learners and achieve competitive advancement. The majority will follow in their own time, but the advantage will be lost. And some will remain ignorant motherfu*kers.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 20 7323 6666
Twitter: @ScotMcKee
LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/scotmckee
Books: http://is.gd/mckeebooks

Photo Credit: http://is.gd/JJZmSq