The Sky Is Falling! Trust Is Dead!!

February 3rd, 2010 by Justin — No Comments

Do you hear that panicked murmur rumbling up from the masses?  It’s worse than fear — it’s failure!  It’s catastrophe!  It’s the absolute Armageddon of social media business strategy!

According to Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey, no one trusts anyone!

(Which is ironic, considering Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents was a bestseller during the same year this survey was conducted.  But I digress…)

Here’s what happened:

Last year, 47 percent of respondents to the survey claimed to trust information from their peers (aka “people like me”), fueling the tendencies of social media gurus to target peers (and especially “influencers”) as a way to gain visibility for the brands they represent.  This year?  Only 27 percent made that same claim.

So much for social media, right?

Wrong.

According to Edelman, trust in TV is down 20 points as well.  Radio and newspapers also dropped.  Across the U.S., faith in media as a whole is in the basement.  Media and insurance were tied as the two least-trusted industries in America.

(Ironically, of the sources mentioned above, newspapers actually ranked highest in terms of respondents’ trust, at a scant 32 percent.  Surely that’ll make hundreds of downsized reporters feel better this winter…)

So… so much for media itself, right?

Still wrong.

Keep in mind that we’ve just survived one of the most tempestuous political years in American history, one in which our ruling parties have become ever more ideologically opposed.  Town halls and tea parties have proven that we’re increasingly incapable of having rational debates about even the most basic elements of our social fabric.  No wonder trust in “people like me” is down — trust in everyone, across all facets of the system, is down.  The only people we seem comfortable trusting anymore are ourselves.

And that explains why a book like Trust Agents can find an audience: because people are desperate to connect.  People want to trust each other, and they want to be able to trust the media that feeds them their information.  They’re just skeptical of everyone’s motives and transparencies, including that of their peers, whom (we’ve all finally realized) have access to the same unreliable media as everyone else.

Instead of seeing this report as a death blow to the legitimacy of the media empires, those same empires should be taking this study as an opportunity to refocus on what their audience actually wants: clear, unbiased, reliable information.

As for the social media campaigns of the world, congratulations: now you don’t have to worry about “going viral” or targeting those pesky influencers anymore.  Now you just have to appeal to every human being, one at a time, and treat them like valuable individuals.  Now you have to earn their trust.

And in that case, maybe there’s a silver lining to all this skepticism after all.

Using Social Media to Manage a PR Crisis

January 27th, 2010 by Justin — 1 comment

If there’s one recurring reason companies are reluctant to embrace social media, it’s that “something could go wrong.”  But when something else goes wrong in your company, are you prepared to use social media as a way to steady the ship?

Eileen O’Brien has an excellent summary of Johnson & Johnson’s recent use of social media to help manage the information flow surrounding their recall of Tylenol and other medications.  And while Twitter and blogs aren’t the only resources a company should turn to in times of crisis, savvy communicators realize that their customers sometimes rely on social media for real-time news.

Consider Wyclef Jean’s response to doubts about the financial clarity of his charity, YELE, after an article in The Smoking Gun called its accounting practices into question.  Instead of ignoring the mounting firestorm, Wyclef issued an official statement at a formal press conference (which may not necessarily have helped alleviate concerns).  But he also posted a video to YouTube regarding his feelings about the situation, which, at the time of this post, has been viewed over 300,00 times — and that’s not counting the numerous duplicates spread around the web.

The lesson?  People love to share information, and in times of crisis, you’d like that information to be coming from you.

These days, being able to deliver pertinent, accurate information to people when and where they expect to see it is safer than expecting them to be herded to a single focal point.  Twitter moves at the speed of misinformation, and the last thing your company needs during a potential crisis is to lose control of the facts due to rapidly spreading inaccuracies.  Better to have a contingency plan in place to mitigate misinformation in advance than to cobble together a response after the story’s already been told.

No business is immune to mistakes, because businesses are made of people, and human beings are notoriously imperfect.  Disasters strike.  Accidents happen.  But not being prepared for the unknown is no one’s idea of a smart business plan.

What You Can Learn from Bad Case Studies

January 20th, 2010 by Justin — No Comments

It’s no secret that people learn more from their mistakes than they do from their successes.  Maybe that’s why we’re all so reluctant to share stories about our failures: it’s not that we’re embarrassed about “doing it wrong,” but we’re afraid that someone else will learn from our mistakes before we do.  (As if succeeding wasn’t already hard enough without giving the competition a free education!)

But social media is public media, which means new successes and failures happen every day, out in the open, and anyone who’s paying attention can follow along in real time.  Lauren Litwinka has done such a thing, compiling an insightful (and acid-tongued) list of companies who are “doing it wrong” on Twitter.

In Lauren’s case, “wrong” means “not making conversation a two-way street.”  She believes social media provides companies with valuable access to their customers’ desires and opinions, and squandering that two-way invitation with one-way marketing will alienate the very people you’re trying to reach.

How did these companies lose their way?

  • Misunderstanding the way customers use these media channels.
  • Failing to discern what kinds of information people consider valuable.
  • Setting low or unreasonable expectations.
  • Ignoring customer feedback (or lack thereof).
  • Not implementing lessons to adjust their approach mid-stream.

But that doesn’t mean each of the companies Lauren cites are lost causes.  On the contrary, now that they’ve been told their execution could improve, they have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.  And that makes the time and effort they’ve invested up ’til now every bit as valuable as it would be if it had led them to automatic success — and maybe moreso, since they now know for certain what won’t work.

Remember: there’s always value in making mistakes.  Just make sure you’re learning from them (before your competition does).

The Spear vs. The Hook: Understanding the Difference Between Traditional and Social Marketing

January 13th, 2010 by Justin — No Comments

Hunting is about obtaining food.  Marketing is about obtaining sales.  Either way, you can’t eat unless you first understand how to use the proper tools.

A spear is a distance weapon.  You refine the tip until it’s razor sharp and guaranteed to cut through anything in its way.  Then you attach that point to a long, sturdy staff that’ll hold up under stress.

A spear is designed to be thrown.  It allows you to maintain a safe distance from your target, penetrate its defenses, and then drag your prized kill home to be devoured.

That’s traditional marketing.

A hook is an invitation.  It’s frequently adorned with something eye-catching, to help lure the attention of a passing target.  It can float in the current for a long time before it loses its edge.  And when a target does take an interest in the hook, then you’re able to reel it in.

That’s social marketing.

Both tools work.  Just make sure you know whether you’re hunting or fishing, because that spear might get lost in the river.

Letting Go in the New Year: What Is YOUR Company So Afraid Of?

January 6th, 2010 by Justin — 1 comment

The Buzz Bin’s Mike Mulvihill kicks off the new year with an excellent observation about social media: the way companies obsess over “controlling the message” is strangling the industry.  In Mulvihill’s own words (emphasis mine):

I’d love to see a survey of how many of the 91 percent of companies using social media are failing miserably because they still just don’t get the fact that every employee is an ambassador, whether at the supermarket, a cocktail party, the kids soccer match or when active on a social media site. They trust their salesmen to represent the company unsupervised, but can’t trust their employees to use social media responsibly. Seems like there’s still a lot of growing up to be done in 2010.

Social media agencies have lamented clients’ unrealistic focus on “controlling the message” for years now.  (We’ve even chimed in on the topic ourselves, including a quote from Scott Monty that puts it all in appropriately absurd perspective.)  But no matter how many times companies are told that a free-flowing discussion about their business is the best thing that could happen to them, they still seem more comfortable spending money on ad campaigns designed to plant specific messages in the audience’s mind, rather than allowing their customers (and employees) to speak freely.

But what are companies so afraid of?

What could possibly be divulged by your employees that could give the public a worse impression of your business than the knowledge that you refuse to grant your employees the freedom to discuss your company?

On the other hand, when the public sees that you, the employer, value your team’s insights and trust them to behave responsibly, you set a standard that consumers (and other companies) appreciate.  The world is comprised of people, not facades.  And people like doing business with people, not images.

This year, why not grant your customers — and your employees — the freedom to speak openly about your brand?  At worst, you’ll discover some flaws worth correcting.  At best, you’ll learn what you really are doing right — and where to build for the future.

AT&T vs. Verizon: Why Bad PR Is Still Good for You

December 23rd, 2009 by Justin — No Comments

In Andrew Cherwenka’s recent case study, he explains how AT&T used Facebook to defend themselves against Verizon’s claims of a better 3G network,  and how that plan backfired when the very customers AT&T expected to rally to their defense instead fell silent while the conversation was dominated by Verizon fans.  (At one point, 89% of the sentiment on the forum was pro-Verizon, prompting one poster to comment, “You’re basically maintaining a fan page for Verizon.”)

Whoops.

Yet while Cherwenka is correct in surmising that the 2-way nature of the web has eroded a company’s ability to control the messaging surrounding their brand, there is one positive that AT&T should be taking away from this experience:

Now they know what their biggest problems are.

Granted, those problems may be technological in nature (like spotty cell coverage) or they may be matters of negative consumer perception.  That’s up to AT&T to decide (or admit).  But because AT&T has a record of what the public really thinks about its service, they can now choose to fix those problems head-on, OR they can choose to ignore them and hope the public eventually loses interest, which often happens.

Regardless of what AT&T chooses to do, your company can embrace this same lesson.  Yes, your social efforts may occasionally backfire.  Yes, the public may sometimes provide you with opinions and suggestions you’d rather not have to hear.  But this feedback is actually the most important information that you could hope to receive, because this is what helps you understand what you need to improve in order to grow as a company.

The better your product actually is, the more loyalty and evangelism you’ll see from your customers — and the more money you’ll be able to save on advertising to convince people you really are that remarkable.

Facebook vs. AOL: Why the Information Superhighway Still Has a Dinosaur Lane

December 16th, 2009 by Justin — No Comments

As TechCrunch noted this week, Facebook has surpassed AOL as the fourth most-trafficked website on the planet.  And while that news may not seem particularly surprising to the millions of Facebook users, here’s the really astounding part:

AOL is still the fifth most-trafficked website on the planet.

Yes, the same AOL that most web-savvy surfers haven’t touched since pre-millennium bug days is still more popular than all but 4 other websites in existence.  That boggles the mind.

It also explodes the notion that online change happens at lightning speed.  Sure, sites like Facebook and Twitter have seen massive growth in recent years, but the numbers AOL enjoys are proof that not everyone is adapting to new web technologies at the same rate.  And if a dinosaur from the Internet’s formative years can still command such loyalty, it’s no wonder that so many businesses — and users — are slow to embrace “new” social media solutions.

So… what does this mean for your web marketing plan?

  • Don’t presume everyone can be reached through one access point.
  • Don’t abandon useful services the moment a shiny new alternative arrives.
  • Don’t expect meaningful change to happen overnight.
  • Don’t neglect the audience that’s slow to adapt.

Sometimes it seems like the entire Internet lives at the cutting edge.  And when you’re considering the potential of a new site, a new tool or a new way of doing things, it’s tempting to believe the whole world is right there with you.

Then you turn around and realize the dinosaurs aren’t as far behind as you imagined, and that rocketship you’ve been building has to be converted into a bridge so no one gets left behind.

3 Lessons We Learned from One Social Media Campaign

December 9th, 2009 by Justin — 2 comments

This past week, we wrapped up a short social media campaign we’d been involved with for a client, Bigelow Tea.  As is often the case, what didn’t work is just as valuable (if not more so) than what did work, and we thought you might be interested in some of our observations.

  1. Facebook and Twitter Are Not the Same Tribe. When Bigelow Tea was preparing to announce their new spokesperson*, together we spent a week dropping clues on Twitter, followed by a one-hour window in which participants could guess the spokesperson’s identity.  But fans of their Facebook page were upset that the contest wasn’t extended to Facebook as well, and some of them made it very clear that they didn’t (and wouldn’t) tweet.  Ever. Lesson: Don’t expect users of one platform to naturally migrate to another.
  2. Private Twitter Accounts Can Complicate Contests. In the same Bigelow contest, participants were provided with a hashtag — #GuessWhoBigelow — to include with their guesses.  But not all of the hashtagged responses showed up in a search for that hashtag.  Why not?  Because some guesses came from Twitter users whose accounts are set to “private” (AKA the ones whose tweets are preceded by a padlock icon), and “private” tweets don’t show up in general searches.  Lesson: When planning a public contest, take into account whether (and how) “private” people can easily participate.
  3. Your Interested Audience Is Not Always Your Target Audience. One respondent to the contest complained that “all these sports-related clues are pretty useless to some of us on the Internet,” which we found to be an interesting — and, in this case, unresolvable — objection.  Since Bigelow’s new spokesperson is a sports legend, the contest naturally leaned in that direction.  We therefore presumed anyone taking part in the contest would use their Googling skills to find the answer.  Unfortunately, non-sports fans felt left out of both the contest and any means of finding the answer.  Lesson: You can’t please everyone.

The knowledge we’ve absorbed from this campaign will pay off as we apply it to future projects.  And while social media may have a never-ending learning curve, it doesn’t mean we can’t all keep getting smarter, one lesson at a time.

* If you were wondering, the answer is Wayne Gretzky.

Teaching Marketing: What If No One Knows the Answers?

December 2nd, 2009 by Justin — No Comments

There’s a great conversation happening on Amber Naslund’s blog, where she asks: What does the next generation of marketing professionals need to know?  The answers from her readers are practical, including:

  • Critical thinking
  • Storytelling
  • Consumer behavior
  • How to engage with multiple (and quickly-changing) demographics
  • The difference between actual value and spam

All of which I agree with.  But Amber’s question stems from her observation that the field of marketing is changing dramatically thanks to the Internet — which means the rules you’re taught today may result in disaster tomorrow, when the tools you’re using (if not the entire playing field) changes.

So instead of tactics, marketers need to focus on strategies.

Tools always change.  Twitter, Facebook and Flickr were fictional* words a decade ago, and they may be cultural footnotes tomorrow.  Their rise and fall shouldn’t have anything to do with long-term consumer awareness of your brand, but what your brand stands for should.

Demographics always shift.  What the Baby Boomers wanted in the ’60s isn’t what they want today, and Facebook was a college hub before grandma sent you a friend request.  How people communicate may change rapidly, but what they value rarely does.

Make sure your brand is something consumers value, and the marketers will always have something to talk about — regardless of the tools.

* Yes, twitter has long been an actual word, but its meaning has most definitely changed since 2006.

Shopping With Purpose: Madison Avenue Gives Kids a Brighter Holiday

November 25th, 2009 by Justin — No Comments

On December 6, The Children’s Aid Society (our client) will have their biggest fundraiser of the year: Miracle on Madison.  Every year, stores up and down Madison Avenue donate a portion of that day’s proceeds to help provide health services and other crucial necessities to children in need.

We’re proud to be a part of this year’s Miracle on Madison, and we look forward to seeing hundreds of holiday shoppers chipping in to help those most in need of a happier holiday.

If you’re taking part in this year’s Miracle on Madison, use the hashtag #ShopMiracle on Twitter and Flickr, so The Children’s Aid Society in New York can find your photos and feedback!

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