birddog

Safeguarding your brand in the social media space

Social Media is here to stay, for now anyway.  The adoption of Social Media into the mainstream has been prolific.  Consumers have been quick to engage with and adopt social channels into their day to day lives. According to Nielsen, the total minutes spent on Facebook alone increased nearly 700% year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.

But what about brands?  How can brands use Social Channels effectively?  In the new world order, instead of pushing our message at an audience, we are expected to allow the audience to make up their own minds, be selective about what information they choose to adopt and trust that they will spread our message within their own network of peers. What about the loss of control over subject and message?  For some brands, the thought of effectively handing the majority of their PR to their customers – you and I, has been, and still is a daunting prospect.  What if they say the wrong thing, what if they damage the brand?

The web today, Web 2.0, the social web, or whatever else you want to call it is different.  It’s no longer a channel controlled by website owners – as it was way, way back in the dark ages of 1999. It’s now a two way medium, with site owners providing us, the audience, with the tools by which to connect, share, and voice our thoughts and opinions.  The success of these sites is largely driven not just by the functionality they offer the users, but by the PR they achieve. But the PR coverage no longer comes exclusively from press releases and magazine adverts. It comes from us, the audience using them, becoming their advocates, singing their praises (or not) both online, and in day-to-day conversation.

Building a successful brand online, and then protecting it and your brand values isn’t just a case of having a nice shiny website with four gazillion RSS feeds, a Facebook page, or a Twitter alias. It’s a combination of all of these things, the appropriate use of the channels and relevant context.

Things you [as a brand] should think about before embarking on a Social Media strategy:

1. What are you looking to use Social Media for?  If you’re looking to use it as a direct sales tool, forget it (we’ll see why later)
2. Have you got the skills in-house to develop, launch and manage these channels?  If not, consider appointing outside expertise.
3. Are any of your competitors using social channels, and what are they using them for?  What can you learn from them?
4. Social Media isn’t ‘free’ (just like PR isn’t free).  Yes, setting up a simple Facebook or Twitter account costs nothing more than a few minutes of your time, but it’s how you then develop these channels in terms of functionality, management and marketing (seeding, incentives, fan engagement) which takes time and costs money – sometimes a considerable investment.
5. Are you comfortable with your employees engaging with whatever social channels you choose to launch and advocate?  There are varying levels of anonymity to most areas of social media, providing people with a means by which to have a gripe without giving away their true identity.
6. Are your internal PR team, or your PR agency social media savvy?  Do they know how to react correctly to whatever is said on any of the social channels?
7. Are you committed to your social strategy, as a long-term investment, not a quick thing you can pick up and put down as you see fit?

Creating presences in relevant platforms

When you can answer the questions above (and probably a few more questions along the way) the next step is to choose your channels.  Sounds simple right?  Well, not really.  This is the most important part of your strategy.  Using the appropriate channels for your brand will make or break your strategy so it’s vital to choose the right ones.  Relevancy is key – think about your audience, your customers, where are they in the digital space?  If you’re not sure, ask them!

Do this right and you’ll reap the rewards.  Get it wrong and you’ll either waste a whole load of time and money, or end up upsetting your audience.  Or a combination of the two.  Now that would be bad.

Let’s talk about Dell for a minute. Dell is a well-known brand that has been using social media effectively for some time now. Dell launched www.ideastorm.com on February 16, 2007, and continues to use it to gather feedback on existing products.  It’s also a place where you and I can make suggestions for new products, features or functionality.  Other people then vote on these suggestions.  Suggestions with the most votes get reviewed and potentially implemented by Dell.  The point of this site is not merely for Dell to gather consumer feedback on their products, it’s also a great PR tool – who can say Dell don’t listen?

Dell also has a Facebook page – Social Media for Small Business.  Search on Facebook for it and check it out.  It’s a great resource for SME’s and SOHO’s, that gives plain English introductions and whitepapers all about Social Media.

You’ll also notice Dell include social bookmarking icons on the majority of their online properties, empowering their users to easily save and share Dell content.

Relevancy.  Dell are using multiple social channels, but in ways that are relevant to the audiences of those properties.

What to include?

Of course, it’s important to ensure your messaging is consistent – after all, it’s your brand, but it’s also important to ensue that your tone of voice is relevant to the channel.  Come across too corporate on certain channels and you’ll discourage people from engaging with you.

By using social media as a means to engage with your audience, you can build a relationship with them, a good rapport. It’s a small step to turn customer conversation into customer advocacy of your brand.  Whether you’re engaging with your audience through social channels or not, people will be talking about you.  It’s better to be engaged and influencing the conversation than not at all.

Understanding the landscape and conversations – Social Media in a B2B context

Social Media as a tool in B2B can be broken into three core areas:

1. Conversation -  Channels such as Twitter fall under the conversation category. These channels are a continual stream of real-time chatter that you can dip in and out of as you wish.  Conversation channels are fast becoming the first source of information for people seeking up-to-the-minute information on anything current.
2. Community – Facebook is the best example here.  Whilst Facebook is a ‘social utility’, to most users, their space in Facebook is their own online community, made up of friends, relatives and associates.  Online communities are built through trust and relationships, and provide both users and advertisers with powerful communication tools.
3. Networking – Networking sites provide users with the ability to do exactly that, network. LinkedIn is a great example of a networking site, giving its users the ability to get introduced to people they want to know, through utilising existing relationships.  Networking sites are a powerful tool in today’s business world.

Of course there are other ways of using social media, however, understanding the above will ensure that you use social channels effectively and in a way that is relevant.

What to say?

The main thing to remember with all social media is that the conversation is continuous.  Just because you log off at 5:30pm, doesn’t mean the conversation ends until 9am the following morning when you log back on.

The web is 24/7.  As we’re going home in the UK, people in the US are going in to work.  Conversations that have been created by a predominantly UK audience will continue through the night with people around the world, so it’s important as a brand to understand how these conversations can develop, and the repercussions if something were to go awry.

So what can you as a brand do to ensure you’re saying the right thing?

1. Listen.  See what people are saying about your brand, where they’re saying it and to whom.
2. Get involved – join Facebook groups, follow conversations on Twitter, slowly begin to engage with these groups and conversations.
3. Be responsive.  If people are asking questions, be prepared to answer them, help them and guide them in the right direction.
4. Don’t try the hard sell approach on social channels.  Ever.  People won’t like you for it.  They will probably also tell you they don’t like it.  And their 100+ followers/friends.

When it all goes wrong!

There is a flipside to the good and wonder that is Social Media.  It can also severely damage a brand.  As a brand, you can no-longer control what others say online. How you react to what has been said online will therefore determine a good or bad final outcome. Here are a couple of examples of how to, and how not to do it:

How not to do it – United Breaks Guitars

United breaks guitars” is a powerful example of how social media empowers consumers and can tarnish the image of a big company.  In spring, 2008, Dave Carroll of the Sons of Maxwell band claimed United Airlines baggage handlers broke his $3,500 Taylor guitar on a flight stop-over in Chicago while travelling from Halifax to Nebraska. Ladies and Gentlemen – presenting Dave Carroll: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, a Forrester Research analyst covering customer experience/service and social media says “If you spend millions on advertising your brand and someone spend five cents on a YouTube video, you’ve just wasted a lot of advertising dollars. There’s a consensus around the frustration customers feel with companies that act like monolithic monsters”.

But the guitar wasn’t the only thing damaged.  In just four days from the launch of the song online, millions of viewers had watched the video on YouTube and United Airlines stock plummeted 10%, costing shareholders $180M at the time. ‘This could have bought Dave over 51,000 replacement guitars” reported Chris Ayres of the Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/chris_ayres/article6722407.ece

United’s lack of willing to engage with the consumer cost them dearly, and no amount of crisis management could rectify the situation. The damage had been done.

How to do it – Domino’s Pizza

The now infamous Domino’s food prank, where a couple of employees decided it would be funny to upload a video on to YouTube showing them doing various unsavoury (excuse the pun) things to food that was about to be cooked and delivered to customers: http://www.dailymotion.pl/video/x8zunc_dominospizzaemployedegoutant_fun

“By Wednesday (April 15) afternoon, the video had been viewed more than a million times on YouTube,” reported Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times. “References on it were in five of the 12 results on the first page of Google search for ‘Domino’s,’ and discussions about Domino’s had spread throughout Twitter. This goes to show how social media has the reach and speed to turn tiny incidents into marketing crises.”

However this situation was different.  Rather than ignore the matter, by Wednesday (April 15) afternoon, Domino’s had created a Twitter account, @dpzinfo, to address the comments as well as their CEO, Patrick Doyle making a personal address via YouTube, apologising and re-assuring people that the matter was being dealt with, and that it was an isolated incident, watch it for yourself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l6AJ49xNSQ

Making such a quick response within the social networks proved extremely helpful in efforts to re-establish trust and credibility with consumers while rebuilding their customers’ desire to purchase their products.

Things to remember with social media

1. You can’t control what people say about you online, but you can ensure you’re engaging with these people, and have the tools and knowledge to best to engage with them.
2. There is no room for spin with social media, if you try and manipulate the truth; chances are you will get found out.  Transparency is key.
3. It’s not all about you.  A big part of your success lies in how much and how well you interact and share with others in the social space.  This can range from quoting and referencing other brands’ articles, linking to useful resources (other than your own), or commenting in a positive manner to something someone has written.
4. The majority of social media engagement takes time and effort. It’s not something that can simply be bought [such as banner advertising].  It’s all about creating awareness, creating your unique space and building your reputation.
5. Just because a channel exists, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for your brand.
6. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action Advocacy.  That’s the thing to remember with social media, it’s not a direct sales tool. You don’t necessarily want your audience to perform an action.  You do however want them to become your advocates.

The day the Internet nearly died [Michael Jackson and the power of Wiki’s]

A Wiki is a website that runs the Wiki back end.  It is a content management system that enables collaborative contribution to the content of the site by the users.  Wikipedia is the best-known example, it was founded by Jimmy Wales in January 2001 and now has over 10 Million articles.

On the 26^th June 2009, it wasn’t just Michael Jackson who tragically died. People rushed to report the chain of events as they happened, with news spreading around the Internet at such a rapid rate that the load put on many websites was too much for them to handle, causing a large percentage of the web to almost grind to a halt.

People on Twitter were updating every minute, fuelling blogs and news sites.  But it wasn’t just Twitter, Facebook or blogs that were serving the news.  People were racing to Wikipedia to update Michael Jackson’s page, and all other pages that were in some way affiliated with the artist. Wikipedia saw close to 500 edits made to Jackson’s entry in less than 24 hours following his death.

So even before news sites, papers or television could get the news to the masses, social media had the scoop. Wikipedia is now one of the largest sources of news related information – and has even been credited with publishing news reports before the police know an incident has taken place!

Wiki’s – best practice

If you’re an established brand, it’s likely that there’s a Wikipedia page about you.  The first thing to remember about Wikipedia is that it’s not a sales tool. It’s designed to be unbiased and factual, so don’t approach the creation of a Wikipedia page with the idea that you can simply stick all of your well crafted PR on a page and that it will be accepted. It won’t.

1. Before creating an entry for your product or service, be sure the entry meets the notability requirement.
2. Remember, the page isn’t yours, other users can add or contribute to it – as long as what they write is factual.
3. Because anyone can create or modify a Wikipedia entry means that your entry could be modified by an unhappy customer, or worse, a competitor.  As a result you should regularly monitor your entries for any misleading or inaccurate information, and promptly make corrections.
4. The management of your Wikipedia page should become part of the management of all of your online channels such as your website and Facebook page.
5. Google loves Wikipedia.  If you’re number one on Google for your brand term, you may well find that in time, the Wikipedia page about your brand may overtake you into the number one spot.
6. The majority of people trust Wikipedia, so look upon having a presence on there in a positive light.
7. Every edit made to a Wikipedia page is archived and catalogued for future reference, so don’t do anything to a page that you might regret in the future.
8. Make sure your internal comms and PR team are fully aware and up-to speed with your Wikipedia page, and how to edit it.  Despite a large approvals team, the occasional slanderous or factually incorrect comment can appear on Wikipedia pages – make sure your team(s) know how to edit the page.

Finally

Social media isn’t merely something you can do as and when it suits you.  Even if you’re not engaged with it and in it on a regular basis you will fail. So spread the load. Consider you corporate social media policy and allow others to establish, join or maintain the conversation. This can range from your employees and customers to your competitors.  Ensuring your brand is as well protected as possible is about being aware of the conversations happening – even if you’re merely listening. But the best protection will come from the network itself. Brand advocates will do the protection and the promotion. Look after them.

Oliver Budworth

Digital Director

Mobile Parking

I am deeply, deeply cross about the car parking charges at my local train station. There isn’t a bus I can take to the station, I can’t be dropped off every day and I have no friends. I have to drive to the station. And park. They put up the price of parking every year – I can’t understand why, it’s hardly a high maintenance facility. I’m so cross about the parking that, despite the operator’s attempts to make me pay for parking using a mobile phone, I have resolutely refused. I want them to have the inconvenience of counting the coins that I so religiously pump into the machine every day. It’s not easy, let me tell you. I stagger around most of the week, bow-legged under the weight of silver coinage collected to feed the ‘No Change Given’ monster. It ruins my svelte trouser line.

The other day, however, I was caught short. Being able to muster only £4.50 of the requisite £5.50, I was forced to concede and call the parking hotline. Imagine my surprise when I completed the entire registration and parking transaction in less than two minutes – entirely without defaulting to ‘operator assistance’. RingGo has the best voice recognition system and user experience I have ever encountered on a phone. I was so impressed, I did it again a few days later from a different station and I audibly squeaked with excitement when the automated voice recognised me, my car and my new location using geo-positioning on my mobile. I simply confirmed and was on my way, barely breaking stride.

I assumed that every mobile transaction would be as simple – or at least when I parked my car. Oh no. Why on earth would life be that simple? Having been lured into mobile voice transactions, I returned to my normal car park and decided I should embrace the change that mobile transactions could enable. But this was a different system. It didn’t have voice recognition, it wasn’t a seamless, intuitive process and it didn’t work. It wasn’t RingGo. I had to punch out every letter of my number plate, and my credit card, and my address. The menu system was appalling and just as I neared the end of the registration torture I was kicked out of the system. 12 times. Oh, how I laughed…

If there had been a mobile internet application, the whole transaction could have been so much easier. With a quick click and a couple of swipes the job would have been done. But of course, mobile internet ‘app culture’ has just arrived, or, more accurately, is just arriving. Which means there’s an opportunity, and a danger, for brands engaging in the mobile space.

The opportunity is to get it right. I didn’t just buy a ticket the first time I used my phone to pay for parking, I bought a mobile experience. It was one that worked initially, and then I discovered I had to be selective about the brands that I trusted for mobile engagement. If it says RingGo on the parking sign, I can trust it. RingGo is good, their competitors are shit. Had I tried the crap system first, I would have stuck to coins. The same is true of any other mobile experience. It will be important to make sure that the online brand experience we have created for our audiences actually works on mobile.

How, for example, does your glorious new corporate website perform and engage your audience on a three inch mobile phone screen? Mmmm. That part’s easily fixed, but beyond WAP enablement and iPhone apps, there’s a world of mobile that everyone’s using, except the B2B marketing community. As we increasingly migrate our business communications to mobile devices, it’s going to be important to distinguish between the brands that can migrate seamlessly, and those left standing around in the car park jiggling the loose change in their pockets. Let’s hope it’s loose change at least.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

Crowdsourcing for B2B Marketing

I’ve been talking to people (anyone who’ll listen actually) about ‘crowdsourcing.’ They’ve listened to me, mostly, and then looked at me like I’m a twat. So I started to doubt my own visionary forward thinking brilliance and thought maybe I’d best just shut up and sit down. But then again, I’ve never been one to run from a stupidity contest so I thought I’d persevere. In years to come you can all look back and say, “That McKee bloke – genius.” Or, alternatively, “twat.”

Crowdsourcing is a term first attributed to Jeff Howe in 2006, a tech writer for the US magazine Wired. It broadly means using the power of many to solve problems. Rather than rely on a single person within an organisation or even an entire department, whole companies their clients and people you don’t even know can contribute to solving a particular corporate challenge. It’s all served up on the interweb via your website or chosen flavour of electronica (intranet/extranet/landing page/microsite/social media/forum…) and the corporate entity gathers opinion and content from far and wide. Think of the principal of opensource applications and you’re on the right lines. If thousands of developers around the world can freely contribute a little bit of code in their spare time, it doesn’t take long to produce an entirely open/free platform to challenge the likes of even Microsoft. The same principal can be applied to any challenge where many hands can make light work. It’s a bit of a big deal. One that the B2B marketing community has thus far almost wholly ignored.

I’m surprised at the limited adoption in the B2B space because I do believe I’m in love with the whole concept. Brand strategy formulation is all about gathering opinion and establishing a cohesive, compelling story that the audience will believe in. Brands aren’t about guidelines or products or services, they’re about feelings – how people feel about your brand. Rather than being restricted to the views of a few key stakeholders in a workshop and a couple of focus groups, what if you could open up the brand discussion to the people who really matter – the prospective customers – and have the whole world tell you how they feel? Well, actually, you can. How cool is that? And yet, when I offer the service to companies that I understand are seeking that very customer insight, I’m still being given the ‘twat’ look…

There are many fairly dull examples of crowdsourcing I could offer you, but that wouldn’t really inspire or excite. But by relaxing the definition slightly, I can perhaps demonstrate the power of Social Media to shape how companies can affect or be affected by how people ‘feel’ about their brand.

‘United Breaks Guitars’ started as a music video protest by Dave Carroll, a musician who had his guitar broken by United Airlines baggage handlers. United refused to pay for the broken guitar so Carroll wrote a song, produced a video and posted it to YouTube. Google it and enjoy the video. Then think about the Mashable report that the video was viewed three million times in its first ten days of release and almost doubled again ten days later. In the first 10 day period it generated 14,000 viewer comments. Not many of them were very complimentary about United. You can now download the song on iTunes. Dave Carroll was crowdsourcing – using a wider audience to gather opinion and influence brands (his and United’s).

Best Buy, the large U.S. retailer has been using internal crowdsourcing for over a year. Their ‘Company as Wiki’ YouTube video clearly articulates the benefit of empowering staff to contribute to management thinking and processes to improve the brand. A new idea for a store can be conceived by any staff member, posted to the Best Buy site for comment and discussion by other members of staff. The good ideas rise to the top and management are able to fund the best projects immediately. Best Buy is currently considering how to use crowdsourcing for its external audience.

So. I’m ready. Who wants to play? Genius or twat? Let the crowd decide…

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

B2B Marketing Entrepreneur?

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of anyone introducing themselves as an ‘Entrepreneur’. It’s one of those wank words I find impossible to say out loud. Women don’t seem to like the word ‘moist’, but for me, it’s ‘entrepreneur’. Eww. I’m less disturbed when the term’s used to describe someone else. It’s strictly the self-use of the word that bugs me. So, “Richard Branson is an entrepreneur”, is wholly acceptable. “Hello, I’m Bob. I’m an entrepreneur”, isn’t. See what I mean? Wanker.

So when I walked into a client meeting I was relatively relaxed as the introductions were made and the Marketing Director said, “…and this is Bob.” It was only when Bob himself then repeated, “I’m Bob – I’m an Entrepreneur”, that I knew we were all doomed.

I’d been asked to the meeting to discuss social media, something I’m increasingly integrating into on and offline marketing strategies so I was slightly perplexed as to why we might need an ‘entrepreneur’ in the room. Was it just in case a brilliantly creative idea sprang out of our conversation and someone needed to throw money at it? Or maybe if we had a good idea, but suddenly and mysteriously ran out of creativity, we might need Bob to step in and… ‘preneur’ over everyone? His role wasn’t clear. And I didn’t like him. Mainly because of his self-proclaimed title.

I let it go for all of about a minute and a half and then said, “So, Bob, what does an entrepreneur do then?”

There was a pause while he composed his best Dragon’s Den stare and he replied, “I seek the alternative.” I waited for the subject in his sentence, but it never came. That was it. Bob sought ‘the alternative’. I admired the brevity, but I wasn’t really any the wiser. “I suppose people ask you what ‘the alternative’ is quite a lot?” I enquired oh so casually. “No” he said.

Everyone shuffled their papers and cleared their throats so I kind of knew I was supposed to shut up. But that’s never stopped me before and I wanted to understand his purpose in life. “Well, are you entrepreneurial in the social media space?” “No”, he said, “I think social media’s a complete waste of money.”

Now that, I thought, was interesting – for someone who ‘seeks the alterative’. Social media is surely THE alternative at the moment. Markets have changed, audiences have moved, tools have improved, knowledge is being shared and the world is responding to new ‘social’ methods of communication for their brands – we’re all doing at least something in the social media marketing space now even if it’s just blowing the dust off our Linkedin accounts and trying to make sense of Twitter. Of course, some brands are doing considerably more in the social space – they’re using social tools to create very active, vibrant communities online, they’re harnessing customer opinion, influencing perceptions, engaging in conversation and debate, they’re even transforming sales methods, processes and revenues.

Those companies are re-capturing audiences that had been lost to the internet and are finding new audiences at the same time. In a commoditised marketplace, those companies are achieving elusive competitive advantage by staying a step ahead of the competition and finding their social voice. And they’re doing it in truly creative ways – using music, video, photographs, conversation. What’s ‘the alternative’ anyway – another brochure? Really? Is that really going to work this time around when it hasn’t worked for the last couple of years at least? The companies that will survive and accelerate through the recession are learning to balance traditional communications strategies with the social mandates of their audiences. If the customers want it – you’d better deliver it. New, inspired, thinking and brand development starts when digital and direct strategies are properly aligned and it’s the steps forward in social media that are truly… ehh… “entrepreneurial”. Oops.

Naturally, I regurgitated those thoughts in a demented stream of consciousness mad professor kind of way and only stopped to draw breath when spots started appearing in front of my eyes and I thought I was going to faint. Waste of money? My arse. In the last 12 months the current British Government has increased the Gross National Debt by more than the combined total of Governments over the last 300 years. Now THAT’s a waste of money. I dunno – somehow I expected an ‘entrepreneur’ to know the difference. Does that make me the real entrepreneur, the alternative… or the wanker?

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666
Twitter.com/scotmckee