Creative Concepts

So, what happens when your company wants to use social media, but everybody’s worried about what’s “okay” for them to say?

It can be daunting (and expensive) to determine which employees should be allowed to engage the public, speak candidly or answer questions.  And explaining which kinds of employee behaviors and proprietary information are strictly off-limits can be downright awkward.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that helps ease the friction: PolicyTool.

Simply enter your company’s name and some relevant information, and PolicyTool will generate your very own customizable social media policy in twelve short clicks!

Although PolicyTool’s service is not intended as legal advice, the policy it generates does provide a good starting point for your company’s continued embellishment.  Your HR department, tech experts and legal team can add or revise sections as desired, or you can simply opt to implement the generated policy as-is.

Here at Creative Concepts, we instituted our own social media policy prior to the creation of PolicyTool.  But if we’d had a useful template to start from, it would have helped shape our own internal discussions about best practices.

And really, that’s the whole point: PolicyTool may not solve every problem, but if it gets your company talking about the best ways to govern and maximize your social media channels, it’s worth every penny.  (Oh, and it’s free.)

Image by Gregory James Walsh via Flickr.

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Considering the reluctance some companies have to adopting any form of social media, you’d think we’d celebrate any company who “dives in headfirst” and “learns as they go.”

Wrong.

As much as we love the idea of a client being willing to think on their feet and adapt on the fly, there are a number of steps we’d advise any company to invest in before they ever post a blog or send a tweet.

And you might be even more surprised to learn that most of these steps don’t involve a computer; they involve understanding goals, language and intentions.

8 Questions to Ask Before You “Dive Into” Social Media

1. What’s the end goal? Do you want to increase sales?  Improve public opinion?  Raise awareness?  Gauge customer sentiment?  Too many companies create social media outposts and then ask, “now what?”  Unless everyone involved in planning and executing your social media campaign is working toward the same goal(s), you’ll never be able to direct your efforts effectively.

2. How will success be measured? Are you focusing primarily on sales data?  Traffic?  Click-throughs?  Positive press?  Consumer mentions?  As with step #1, if you’re not all looking at the same metrics, you won’t all be able to agree on what’s working — or why.

3. Who needs approval? Will every blog post you write and every tweet you send require approval from multiple layers of management?  In the event of an emergency, is there a streamlined version of that chain of command that first responders can utilize to circumvent a red tape quagmire?

4.  What’s the official voice of our brand? Some companies thrive on being personal.  Others demand professionalism and objectivity in all forms.  Anyone who’s acting as “the voice of the company” needs to understand the range of that voice, in order to avoid statements and phrasing that feel “out of character” for the brand.

5.  How often will data be collected? If you don’t know how your efforts are being perceived and acted upon by the recipients of your messaging, you won’t know what’s working and what needs to be tweaked.  But if all you do is analyze data, you’ll slip into the strategy trap.  Agreeing on an acceptable frequency for data analysis helps keep everyone sane and focused.

6.  How often will we reconsider our process? Some of your ideas will work better than others.  Sometimes you’ll have lucky breaks; other times, you’ll be outshined by someone else’s better story.  Taking the “long view” in analyzing your goals and data will allow you to base your future adjustments on better-contextualized results, rather than your own knee-jerk reactions.

7.  How elastic is the budget? Social media is an ever-changing field.  What works today may not work tomorrow, and the tools you’ve invested in may become outclassed or obsolete.  Likewise, areas in which you’re minimally invested may turn out to bear more fruit than you initially expected.  How much elasticity and discretion will your team have to adapt your plan on the move, or are the decisions you’re making now expected to last until your next budget analysis?

8.  Where do we start? You can’t wake up tomorrow with a fully-functional presence on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, WordPress and Delicious.  Every channel you’re investing in takes time to establish, grow and curate.  Which tools are the most important for achieving your immediate goals, and in which order do you need to get them up to speed?  Because if you spread yourself too thin, nothing works.

Got all that?  Great; now you can start making plans.

Have questions?  Email us; we make our living providing answers.

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1. Let’s make this more effective.
2. Let’s make this more entertaining.
3. Let’s make this easier to understand.
4. Let’s solve someone’s problem.
5. Let’s eliminate our redundancies.
6. Let’s thank someone who deserves it.
7. Let’s learn more about our customers.
8. Let’s learn more about ourselves.
9. Let’s ask “why?”
10. Let’s listen.

Photo attribution:

Not every company feels compelled to use social media.  But those who haven’t at least moved to establish their own online presence may be in for a surprise: it’s incredibly easy for someone else to do it for you — and not always with the best of intentions.

Case in point: Michael Werch wondered how long it would take the average corporation to realize that someone was pretending to be them online.  To find out, he began masquerading as the HJ Heinz Corporation on Twitter, mostly as an experiment to test the reflexes of modern business.  The result? Heinz noticed — two weeks later — and Twitter renamed Werch’s account to divest it of any connection to the company.

Werch’s confession in Ad Age has generated an interesting array of (mostly predictable) responses, including:

• The obvious lesson: Businesses must control and protect their online images, even if it means squatting on their own company names across multiple platforms (so enterprising individuals don’t beat them to it).
• The obvious question: Why did Heinz squash Werch’s account, rather than taking it over (or collaborating with him) and building upon the brand goodwill he’d already launched on their behalf?
• The counterpoint: Heinz is the kind of industry leader that “doesn’t need to use Twitter” and other web tools because their perceived impact is so negligible that doing so would be a waste of Heinz’s marketing dollars.
• The counter-counterpoint: Heinz may not need to use Twitter, but imagine the PR headache they’d be facing now if Werch hadn’t been a fan of the brand, but a whistleblower intent on divulging company secrets, questioning their business practices, etc.

Does every company need to use social media?  Of course not.  But just because your company doesn’t use social media, that doesn’t prevent someone else from adopting your company’s name — and, potentially, from damaging your brand.

If your company still isn’t sure about its own intentions toward Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and beyond, here’s a tip: someone in your corporate office should register your company’s name (and all its common derivatives) on all currently-relevant platforms, just in case.  You never have to use them, but you might sleep a little easier knowing that no one else can, either.

(If that tip sounds familiar, it’s probably because someone was telling you the same thing 15 years ago, only the topic was websites, not Twitter accounts.  Same logic, different era, and that logic never stops making sense.)

And, of course, a caveat: if someone really doesn’t like your company, nothing’s stopping them from ranting about you online.  But that kind of vitriol should be spewing from something other than your company’s “official” web presence.  (Plus, if you’ve registered your official presence on Twitter, etc., but your company just hasn’t found a reason to make use of it, there’s nothing like a PR catastrophe to get the engines running — and you don’t want to lose time playing catch-up then, do you?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.