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A radical thought on brand ambassadors (prompted by @coryedwards and Social Media Today)

Here is a thought to end the week.  There is a view out there that a good way to use social media is to find  and cultivate a group of people who can become brand ambassadors – representatives of a brand within the consumer community.  I don’t support this approach.  I think a much better approach is to use social media to establish consumer ambassadors within your brand.

The key to this is understanding the difference between a super-fan and a brand ambassador.  A super-fan is someone who, for whatever reason, has a particular passion or interest in your brand.  There will not be many of them (almost always significantly less than one per cent of your consumer base).  These are also the same people that might appear to qualify as brand ambassadors.  However, these people rarely want to talk to the rest of your consumers, they would much prefer to talk to other people like them, or to the brand itself.  Even if they did want to represent your brand, you would have to question their suitability – because, by definition, they will not be representative of your consumers.  They may even come across as rather strange to the 99.9 per cent who don’t share their particular passion.

So – to use these people effectively, you need to go with their flow.  You need to motivate the behaviours that they are already inclined towards, and this generally means involving them in your business, rather than promoting your business.

I was prompted to write this having tuned in to the #allthingscustomer  webinar yesterday organised by Social Media Today.  Not sure if this will be podcasted – but if it is, it is well worth checking out (watch this space).  @coryedwards from Dell was talking about how Dell had identified “ranters and ravers” from their social media monitoring.  Rather than try and convert the ranters and encourage the ravers to go and rave some more (i.e. become brand ambassadors), what Dell did was bring these people together, offline, with the people from Dell who were seen as activators – i.e. the key Dell people who needed to hear what these people had to say and were empowered to go and do something with this information.  Basically Dell was creating customer ambassadors within the organisation.  Dell originally held two of these session and this year they are holding 20 – from which we can assume that this idea is working.  I wonder if any brands have set up a Customer Embassy within their organisations.  Might be an interesting idea.

(This is really a build on a previous post about digital influence http://richardstacy.com/2012/05/15/are-digital-influencers-actually-that-important/)

 

Social media and engagement: some places left

I am one of the speakers at an event organised by CIMTIG (Chartered Institute of Marketing Travel Industry Group) at an evening event on 15th November in London.  CIM have told me that there are some spaces still available – so if you fancy hearing more about my perspective on using social media to create engagement (as well as my views on how not to use social media to create engagement), please come along.  Details here.

It is an event focused on the travel sector, but the learnings are relevant across the board.  I am simply going to be using examples from travel to illustrate the points I make.  Travel is also an interesting sector to watch, because quite a lot of social media disasters have happened in this space and, of course, it is one of the sectors where social is having a real impact on purchase decision – via the likes of Trip Advisor.  There are lessons here for all brands.

So what is a social media content strategy?

I often get asked to help an organisation come up with a content strategy for social media.  The implicit assumption in most of these requests is that the strategy will be defined in terms of defining the output – a bit like a conventional editorial schedule.

However, this is a bit like asking the editor of a nightly TV news programme to define their content strategy in terms of output.  The editor would probably turn around and say “well, I don’t even know for sure what’s going to be leading tonight’s bulletin, let alone what our content is going to be tomorrow or next week”.  You can’t answer the question from an output perspective, you can only answer it from a process perspective: the same editor would be able to tell you in great detail about the process he or she has put in place in order to be able to produce relevant content for tonight or next week.

To a very large extent it is the same with a social media content strategy – you can’t define it from an output perspective, only from a process perspective.  You can’t plan the content in advance, but you can have plan a process that ensures the the content you do produce is appropriate, based upon what your monitoring is telling you your consumers or customers are talking about, or want to talk to you about.  Again – it comes back to the fact that social media has to be defined by process, not by output.

Interestingly, the failure to grasp this is being played out, very visibly, across many brand Facebook pages.  The new Timeline format makes it easy to see, on the left hand side the ‘content’ the brand wants to talk about and on the right you can see the Recent Posts By Others – i.e. what consumers actually want to talk about.  There is usually next to no correlation between the two.  In fact, what this usually reveals is that consumers don’t want ‘engaging content’ as we are all encouraged to believe, what they want is relevant, specific information and answers to questions.  This is why I am also keen to banish the word ‘content’ from social media altogether, and replace it with the word ‘information’.

The three stages of social media

I read this recently from Nathan McDonald called The three stages of social media maturity.  I sort of agree with it, but it is not the way I put things.  I do it this way.

Stage 1: false engagement

This is the stage where everyone rushes around trying to make social media work like traditional media so that they can drag their current marketing strategies into the new social digital space.  As with traditional media it is seen as a numbers game and while people sort of realise that just being ‘in Facebook’ doesn’t get you in front of all (or any) Facebook users, the solution to this is seen as adding scale (numbers) to your social media presence.  This creates the obsession with generating Likes and Followers.  Critically, social media is still seen as a channel and message problem – finding the best channels to put a message in front of all of your consumers.  Measurement, metrics and objectives get locked into a spiral or irrationality where the social media objective becomes simply increased usage of social media, thus making increased Facebook interaction a valid, measurable objective (irrespective of what this actually delivers to the business).

Stage 2: the arrival of intelligence

This is usually triggered by the arrival of the finance department asking awkward questions about what all this activity is actually creating that is of measurable value.  The inability to answer this question, or the realisation that very little  value is actually being  created will trigger a crisis. Organisations will emerge from out of this crisis in two ways.  Some will conclude that social media is a failure and abandon attempts to use it.  Others will conclude that social media is different and any attempts to use it must be rooted in, or adapted to, what it is that makes it different. In a nutshell, rather than try and turn their Facebook page into a website and attempt to drive consumers to it, they ask themselves ‘how might our consumers want to talk to us using Facebook, and how should we respond’.

Stage 3: productive engagement

This occurs when an organisation realises that social media is not channel and message identification challenge, it is a behaviour identification and response challenge.  The output of any strategy is therefore not bits of communication or content, but behaviours and processes.  Rather than try to speak to everyone, the organisation understands how to create value by engaging with only small groups or individuals.  Doing this effectively involves seeing social media as a business process.  This is so far removed from the competencies associated with traditional marketing, that the organisation takes responsibility for social media away from marketing and creates a new function devoted to embedding social media as a business process across all departments.

Everyone lives happily ever after (except the marketing director, the digital agency and Facebook)

 

Nice to be part of a Social@Scale ‘dream team’

Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Joseph Jaffe, David Meerman Scott, David Armano, Rohit Bhargava, Mitch Joel, Peter Shankman, Mack Collier, Michael Brito, Jay Baer, Edward Boches, Ann Handley, Nilofer Merchant, Ted Coine, David Weinberger, Shelly Palmer, Mark Earls, Renee Blodget, Augie Ray, Brett Petersel, Ted Rubin, Sarah Evans, Jeff Bullas, Jay Baer, Amy Vernon, Matt Dickman, Thomas Baekdal, Venkatesh Rao, Richard Stacy, Hugh MacLeod and Doc Searls.

The above represents a list of those who have contributed to Sprinklr’s Social@Scale ebook – launched today.  It also represents a pretty good list of the great and the good of social media experts (including two out of the four authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto).  So take a look at who sneaks in there three from the end, just in front of Hugh Macleod and Doc Searls.  I think this is only time I am likely to sneak in ahead of Hugh Macleod and Doc Searls.

So thanks to Jeremy Epstein, of Sprinklr, for including me in such exalted company.

 

 

 

The great thing about advertising is that no-one takes it personally

The great thing about advertising is that no-one takes it personally.  This is not a criticism or prelude to a lament about how advertising is now redundant – it is not.  The very greatest advertising, like any performance or show, creates a sense of audience participation: the viewers experience a sense of collective engagement with the ad and (usually but not always) the brand that lies behind it.  Critically, they also receive assurance that the brand is popular and successful and that, as a consumer, they are not alone.  An audience is a necessary part of the performance that is advertising.  It is a bit like a rock concert.  If you are a Coldplay fan you want to see the band perform and be together with your fellow devotees watching Chris Martin in all his pomp whilst holding aloft your electronic gizmo thingy that apparently now come supplied as alternatives to cigarette lighters at all Coldplay gigs.  If you were the only person standing in the arena it wouldn’t be the same thing.  In fact you would probably be tempted to tell Chris to give it a rest and jump down off the stage and have a beer and a chat.

And herein lies the problem for advertising and social media, especially any social media platform whose revenue model is dependent on advertising.  The great promise that social media dangles in front of advertising is targeting, but the issue with targeting is that after a while, you narrow things down to the point where you stop having a group large enough to constitute an audience and end up with a group of individuals. The sense of participation is gone.  In effect you cross over a form of social digital divide beyond which people don’t want to be part of a crowd, they want to take things personally.  And by definition, advertising or any other form of one-to-many mass communication is not going to work on this side of the divide.  You are in a place where people want information (or conversation), not performance.

This doesn’t herald the end of advertising or other forms of one-to-many marketing campaigns.  People will still want brands to perform and find ways of reassuring consumers that they are not alone.  In fact, it is probably this latter function, the reassurance of statute and success, that will become the primary function of advertising and marketing campaigns in the future – a return to the days of the “as seen on TV” reassurance.  The only problem for ad agencies is that this is now not the only thing brands need to do, thus the only thing that is failing is the business model that currently lies behind the supply of advertising, not the form itself.  In many ways, social media could be the saviour of advertising.  It will liberate creatives to deliver what it is that advertising does best – a brand show freed from extraneous information baggage.  It is just that they can’t expect to earn quite so much money doing it.

 

Forget Facebook: a new way of looking at social media for the public sector

I am running an workshop in Manchester (UK) on November 14 called Forget Facebook: a new way of looking at social media for the public sector.   It is designed to help public sector bodies get measurable benefits from social media, rather than seeing using the tools and ‘being in or on’ Facebook and Twitter as being the objective.

This is the story.  A few months back I did a workshop with Preston City Council at the invitation of the Council’s senior information officer, Carl Holloway.   Carl’s issue was that he had set up the mandatory Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube and Flickr channels but becoming increasingly aware that this was not ‘the answer’ or really constituted an effective, or measurable, social media strategy.

He asked me to come and help because we had met a few months earlier when we had both been presenting at a Big Brussels Bash (EuroPCom 2011) organised by the European Committee of the Regions to discuss communications in local and regional government.  The thrust of my presentation had been on abandoning the obsession with using the tools (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) and instead to see social media first and foremost as a business process that starts with the definition of specific operational (not communications) objectives.  The selection and usage of the tools only takes place once you have defined these objectives and designed the process.  This approach seemed to the logical next step for Preston City Council.

The workshop was run with members of Carl’s communications team but also with representatives from operating units like leisure centres, customer contact, community engagement and critically, performance and policy.  It allowed us to really focus on which areas of the Council’s activities social media could support and start to map-out an action plan for each of these. The session went well and Carl is now embarking on supporting the roll-out of those plans.

As we chewed things over, it became apparent that many other Councils and public bodies were in a similar position – looking to get measurable benefits from the use of social media, rather than just seeing usage of the tools as the end objective.  Therefore we decided to set up a workshop and invite people to come and be introduced to this approach, using the experience from Preston as illustration.  The result – Forget Facebook: a new way of looking at social media for the public sector, taking place at the Hilton Deansgate in Manchester on November 14.  This will be a full day session, with a limited number of participants so that it is a proper workshop, rather than just a ‘sit and listen seminar’.  Cost is at the standard local government rate of £245 or £199 if you book before October with lunch and coffees included in the price.

The outline for the day is here.

It is obviously designed for the public sector, but the process we outline would be equally relevant for third sector organisations, especially those involved in the delivery of government-funded programmes.

If you want to come along, please sign-up.  Or if you know anyone who might be interested, please pass on the Eventbrite link, re-blog this post, RT on #FFbook12 etc. etc.

Sidebark: one to watch

Keep an eye on Sidebark.  I think founder, David Cho’s, insight is spot on: privacy is about to become a Big Thing as Facebook, Google and pre-IPO Twitter become more aggressive in selling our data in order to justify sky-high valuations and consumers start to wake up to the consequences of allowing their data to be mined.  He is also right also right to assert that privacy should be the default feature for any social network.  Sidebark is currently only for videos and images, but there is no reason why a similar approach to broader social networking should not emerge, which will have enormous implications for the business model of Facebook et al.

Social media is failing so lets forget it

I have noticed an increasing trend of late for articles and comment to emerge declaring that social media is failing.  This example from The Telegraph is a case in point.  These are not #socialmediafail pieces – i.e. examples of silly things organisations have done in social media, rather they are declaring the failure of the whole medium or more precisely the failure of the medium as a space for marketing activity.

The question we have to ask, of course, is what is it that is actually failing here.  Is it a failure of social media, or is it a failure of marketing to adapt itself to work within social media.  In my view it is the later.  As I never tire of saying, social media is a completely different space with a new set of rules.  You cannot drag traditional one-to-many mass marketing approaches into social media and expect that they will work.  Cue favourite analogy: if tradition media / marketing is the land then social media is the sea.  It is perfectly possible to operate in both environments provided you understand the difference. You can make a car that floats, as Top Gear are fond of showing us, but it is never going to be as effective in the water as a boat.

I think we can expect to see much more of the ‘social media doesn’t work’ sentiment going forwards.  It is simply more evidence of the fact that the adoption of social media is tracking the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology (see left).  It demonstrates that we are entering into the Disillusionment phase.

Some have reacted to this by taking the extreme view, which is to declare marketing dead (as per this Harvard Business Review article).  This is as misguided as the idea that social media is failing.  Traditional marketing is simply become less effective as other alternatives emerge.  It is not going to die, rather we are starting to understand the boundaries of its competence.  Traditional marketing is actually a channel and message identification challenge defined by the ability to place single, concise messages in front of large numbers of people.  Within the social space, the challenge is defined by identification of behaviours (not messages and channels) – i.e. the ability to reach exactly the right people, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right response – based upon what those people are doing, rather than who they are, or within which channels they sit.  Both are valid approaches – you only get into trouble if you try and crunch the two together.  The trick is work out how to use both approaches in a complementary, rather than supplementary, way.  And it also means we are right to question whether social media should actually fall within the realm of marketing at all – a conclusion that this article in Forbes is edging towards.  It is only when we fundamentally understand the difference between social and traditional media and develop a process (and probably department) that is adapted to work in the social digital space, that we will start to head up the Slope of Enlightenment.

 

People trust strangers more than they trust friends?

Take a look at this article by Erin Mulligan Nelson published a few days ago in AdAge.  Essentially it deals with trust and the so-called Millennial age group – i.e. those people who have most comfort and familiarity in using social media tools.  I am uncomfortable with Erin’s assertion that brands need to host a “killer party that (millennials) won’t want to miss” – partly because I am not quite sure what that party would look like – indeed if it would even look like a party.  But I do endorse the activities that she recommends, especially the idea that brands need to “offer ways for them (millennials) to share their opinions on your brand; and make it easy for them to find “expert” opinions on your products.”  The reason for this is that research that her company, Bazaarvoice, has produced, shows that when it comes to purchase decisions, millennials trust strangers more than they trust friends – provided they can have an assurance that these strangers have relevant knowledge. (Summary of that research here, full report here.)

My take on this is not that they are trusting strangers over friends, which appears counter-intuitive.  Rather, they are trusting a process which allows them to determine that the views or opinions of a stranger are relevant and credible and it highlights what I think is one of the defining shifts of the social media revolution – the shift of trust from institutions to processes.  It is like Wikipedia – you trust an article based on how much trust you place on the process that has produced that article.  You don’t trust the institution of Wikipedia per se, because as an institution it doesn’t really exist – it is community of millions of people all tied together via a process.  Wikipedia is not an institution, it is a process and you trust it on that basis.

Adapting to the world where trust is not institutionalised based on who or what you are (a brand , a friend, a government) but is based on process (making what you do visible and open to critique) is one of the key challenges for any brand.  It is about the importance of understanding the concept of communities of interrogation – the places or spaces that people go to ask questions. These are the spaces within which brands have to live – not on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter