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

 

By the rivers of Data, there we sat down…

By the rivers of Data, there we sat down

Yea we wept, when we remembered Nielsen.

(After @Psalm137, RT@TheMelodians, RT@BoneyM)

Times were indeed simpler not so long ago, when TGI and Nielsen were the main data tools within the box of the brand planner.  Now we have this thing that is being called Big Data.  (Check this recent post from Useful Social Media for a quick overview).

In recent years the rise of CRM has given us more exposure to the world of data, but the main channel here was mostly email or point-of-sale and the quantity of data was relatively containable and reasonably static.  Now, however, usage of social tools has caused an explosion.  What is more, the data has become dynamic.  It moves and changes over time – hence why people are starting to talk about flow and data streams, rivers or even floods.  The challenge of simply logging all this data now looks pretty horrendous let alone the challenge of converting it into some sort of actionable intelligence.

However, before we shed too many tears, it is worth remembering that there are two ways of looking at a river.  I studied fluvial geomorphology at university – so I know this.  The first way (the Big Data way) is to try process as much as the whole flow is possible – measuring speed and volume of flow, calculating turbidity, assessing cross-sectional areas, ‘wetted perimeters’ etc.  The other way is to stand on the bank, notebook in hand, and simply look at it.  This form of observation, rather than measurement, can actually give you a lot of intelligence about how the river is behaving, certainly to an experienced eye.  What is more, it is highly actionable intelligence – if you wanted to take a kayak down that river, the Big Data about that river is not very useful to you, whereas observation is critical.

I can’ t help thinking that there is a lesson here for social media and Big Data.  You have to start with looking at the overall shape of things, rather than try to process the specifics of every interaction.  This observation is something only a person can do, and the role of technology is simply to create visibility on the flow, rather than to process the flow. The problem at the moment, however, is that most of the approaches to Big Data are based on trying to swallow the whole flow rather than creating observational tools.

There is, of course, another problem, referred to in a previous post, which is securing permission to have access to the data in the first place – even at an observational level and certainly when it comes to taking actions as a result.  Individuals are happy to be observed when they are regarded as an anonymous individual within the flow.  But once you pull them out of the stream a whole different set of rules apply, where it not so much what you know, but how you got to know it that becomes important.

Update: Just read this from Stowe Boyd for another perspective on the Big Problems with Big Data.

So, consider it this way: Big data is unlikely to increase the certainty about what is going to happen in anything but the nearest of near futures — in weather, politics, and buying behavior — because uncertainty and volatility grow along with the interconnectedness of human activities and institutions across the world. Big data is itself a factor in the increased interconnectedness of the world: as companies, governments, and individuals take advantage of insights gleaned from big data, we are making the world more tightly interconnected, and as a result (perhaps unintuitively) less predictable.

Update 2014:  I wrote this before I realised that algorithms can swallow the entire river.  None-the-less, it doesn’t take away from the fundamental point about the role of observation versus analysis.

Media is not converging, it is diverging (convergence only leads to conflict)

Way back in 2006 the ever prescient Hugh MacLeod scribbled “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face”.  This truism illustrates the dangers of convergence.  ‘Converge’ a one-to-many approach with a personalised situation and you end up with a fight.  Why then is advertising deemed to be effective and not result in brands being punched in the face?  It works because advertising’s great strength is that no-one takes it personally.

In 2009, in an excellent Slideshare presentation, John Willshire proposed the analogy of fireworks and bonfires to differentiate between advertising and social media.  He concludes this analogy with the warning “putting fireworks on a bonfire is not a good idea”.  Again, the danger of convergence.

Yesterday Altimeter Group published a report called The Converged Media Imperative.  The basic thrust of this report was that media are converging and that brands need to recognise this and learn how to operate within a converged media space.  The types of media that Altimeter said were converging were the Blessed Trinity of Paid, Owned and Earned.

Hold on a moment here, it is time to reign in a few assumptions.

Assumption number one: Paid, Owned and Earned.  As I have previously posted, I don’t think this is a useful definition.  I think it is far better to see media as being on a scale that has participatory media at one end and non-participatory media at the other.   The approach a brand adopts depends on where on this scale they decide to sit.  You can’t be everywhere on this scale with a universal ‘converged’ approach.

Assumption number two: forms of media are converging.   The only people who are converging media are brand and media owners and agencies for whom this convergence is a convenience that allows them to appropriate social media and export traditional one-to-many mass marketing approaches into the social / participatory space.  Consumers are going the other way.  There is a huge divergence appearing between the way consumers are using social media and the ways in which brands would like them to use it.  That’s the issue brands have to deal with.

Assumption number three: Facebook is a form of media.  It is not.  Facebook, like most other forms of social media, is an infrastructure or even a form of behaviour.

It seems to me the challenge for brands is not how to manage the convergence of media, it is quite the opposite.  The challenge is how to manage divergence.  There are now two very distinct spaces opening up.  The first is the space where you talk to everyone and no-one takes it personally.  Then there is the space where you talk to individuals, where being personal is essential.  The rules of how you operate in these two spaces are completely different.  The spaces can hold hands, and they need to talk to each other but crunch them together and you get into difficulties – you either end up with a black eye or you end up wasting a lot of time and money.  The management challenge is therefore not so much about how get silos to talk to each other, it is about you keep traditional marketing contained within its appropriate silo while you develop a new set of approaches adapted to encouraging consumers to participate in your brand, rather than participate in your marketing.

How then to account for the case studies of successful media convergence that Altimeter highlight at the end of their report.  Well, you can use social tools to encourage consumers to participate in traditional campaigns, but you have to be conscious of two things.  First, this space where social and traditional can be said to converge is actually tiny – it is not going to become The Space as the ‘everything is headed towards converged media’ argument might suggest.  As referred to above, it will be a space that deals only with how you get consumers to participate in your marketing, rather than the much more important space that relates to how you get people to participate in your business.  Second, you have to be careful how you measure success in this space.  All too often, success is measured as though social media were traditional media – i.e. an increase in Twitter followers or growth of Facebook fan-base is seen as a useful objective in, and of, itself.  Or else vague exhortations are made about supposed increases in Amplification, Awareness or the ever popular Engagement.  The sad truth is that social hardly ever delivers scale in terms of reach – the numbers, from a reach perspective, rarely add-up compared to the reach you can achieve with traditional media.

When we look back on this, in a few years hence, I think we will see that this so-called ‘converged space’ was actually a side-show to the main event.  The brands that will emerge as the winners will be those that have learned how to manage divergent approaches and two very different spaces: one is the one-to-many space where you talk to everyone and no-one takes it personally and the other is the space where brands create the permission to talk to their consumers personally (hopefully without getting punched in the face).