Creative Concepts

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?)

Or, asked another way: to whom is your marketing directed?

On one hand, maybe you’re convinced that influencing the influencers is your best bet.  Rather than spending money to reach an audience that isn’t prepared to act on your message, you’d rather focus on the tastemakers, innovators and icons whose behaviors create culture.  And if a person whom that culture trusts is willing to vouch for your product or service, that person’s own audience is more likely to believe your message than if it came from you personally.

On the other hand, some people don’t believe influencers actually exist.  They advocate a more fluid approach, in which your message (or your very product) is released in multiple versions.  Then, by tracking your audience’s responses, you can continually zero in on the version(s) that work best.

Which approach is the right approach?  The one that works for you.

Certain brands perform exceedingly well simply by targeting the tastemakers in the markets they’d like to penetrate.  But those influencers (if they exist) are highly sought-after by all brands, which means you need to stand far above the pack before they’ll ever notice you.

Other companies are experts at casting a wide net and refining their message based on which of its aspects are most resonant.  Yet this approach requires rigorous reporting and analysis of incoming data in order to clarify your own understanding of the public’s perception, as well as a willingness among your team to repeatedly tinker with what they feel may already be working well enough.

Neither method is “right” or “wrong,” but one of them is probably a better fit for you at the moment.  But before you can decide on the direction of your marketing, you need to understand two key facets of your own company:

• Are you more interested in appealing to the tastemakers or the masses?
• Which methodology is your team best-equipped to process and execute?

Once you know who you are, you’re much better prepared to communicate your assets to the people who most need to appreciate them: your customers.

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.

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.

Last week, Amy Mengel brilliantly summarized 5 Reasons Corporations Fail at Social Media.  Those lessons (which she gleaned at the 2009 Inbound Marketing Summit) are entirely valid concerns for any company that’s navigating its way through the mostly uncharted waters of social media.  But, in our experience, there are five other equally dangerous pitfalls that can dash your company’s messaging and branding hopes before its ship even leaves the shore:

• You don’t really care what your customers think. Sure, you monitor what they’re saying about your brand, but not only do you not take action on their suggestions, you never had any intention of actually listening.  Your interest in “understanding your customers’ concerns” was just a shell game; your actual goal was merely to verify that people were already talking about you.  (And if they are, then your existing products and services must be working perfectly, right?)
• You confuse social media with a static advertisement. Instead of embracing the tools for what they are — real-time connections to the endlessly-changing sentiments of the consumer landscape — you establish profiles full of content borrowed from other media and then you stubbornly refuse to update, adapt or interact with your audience. By failing to engage with your customers in the manner they’ve come to expect, you prove that you cannot be bothered with their own interests because you’ve pre-determined your own.
• Your company is exclusively reactive. Rather than working to intuit your customers’ needs, you rely solely on consumer praise and complaints to inform your next plan of action. This ensures that you’ll never be able to use social media as anything more than a validation (or repudiation) of other people’s hunches, or as baseline damage control — so don’t be surprised when your company’s decision-makers come to view social media as a bellwether of mostly bad news.
• You refuse to be interesting. The concept of innovation is deemed (at best) too risky or (at worst) an unnecessary allocation of funds better spent on actions proven to produce results.  As such, the “information” you make available via social media channels is the same retreaded copy that consumers can already find on billboards, magazine ads and product labels.  In an age where audiences are increasingly interested in how products are made, who’s making them and why, your company has opted to remain as impersonal and inscrutable as possible — and your results have predictably flatlined.
• Your voice lacks passion. Maybe you have one employee dedicated to “evangelizing your brand.”  Maybe you have an entire agency.  Or maybe you have an in-house team, ready to pounce on audience feedback at a moment’s notice… except there’s never any pouncing taking place, because there’s never any passion in the message.  The individuals you’ve made responsible for ensuring that others care about your brand haven’t been sufficiently energized by your brand in the first place. Instead of projecting a personality that shows your customers how much you do care about their experience, your telegraphed disinterest provides them with an escape clause and a mandate to find another company whose values and attitude more closely resemble their own.

Social media “isn’t rocket surgery,” as Mengel’s article wryly notes.  The tools that comprise this medium are deceptively simple, and can be mastered by anyone who takes the time and effort to understand how (and why) they work.  But even a rowboat can be scuttled if everyone aboard isn’t working together.

Heidi Sullivan’s* recent blog post about “the Amp app” makes a valid point: “Don’t alienate your customers.”  She also gives credit to our client, Bigelow Tea, whom she cites as a positive example of a brand adapting its messaging after discovering its social media audience differs from the audience it expected to find.  This is the kind of advice and execution businesses tend to appreciate.

But there’s another side to the Amp issue — namely, PepsiCo’s willingness to alienate potential customers in exchange for the attendant publicity.  Since those presumed to be put off by the application are women, Amp — which is aimed at young, active males — is willing to offend half the planet’s population simply because its parent company has already written women off as unlikely purchasers of their product.

But Amp apparently didn’t count on men being offended by the app as well, or at least not men in their target demographic.  So now it’s conceivable that more than 50% of potential Amp consumers will have a negative opinion of the brand, which means Amp had better hope that it could remain profitable based solely on sales to those in its expected demographic (and that they didn’t also find Amp’s advertising objectionable).

Controversy may generate publicity, but why so starkly reduce the number of individuals who are likely to see your brand as an emblem of positive self-image?  Why market a product in a way that makes others doubt the values of those who buy it?

Social media isn’t just about the message — it’s about the people (or companies) who conceive of it, create it and share it.  And no bad idea gets a greenlight without someone thinking it’s a good idea.

Make sure your messages represent the values YOU want to be known for.

*  Our own Valorie Luther was thrilled to be joining Heidi on a Blog World Expo panel until a sprained ankle forced Valorie to cancel her role in the event.  We here at Creative Concepts still wish Valorie’s panel-mates a spirited and productive debate!

A recent survey from eMarketer outlines both the perceived benefits and the primary concerns that business executives have about social media.  Chief among their reservations: information security and employee productivity.

Considering that 51% of the survey’s non-social media-using respondents said they “don’t know enough about” social media, their concerns about security and productivity are understandable.  From the outside, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other tools might seem like a waste of time when compared to what executives already know works.  And without exposure to the way these tools are commonly used, it’s easy to presume that these mysterious new services can somehow derail your business if they’re used improperly.

To calm these fears, Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty, often cites an anecdote related to him by Tactical Transparency author Shel Holtz*:

“A friend sent me a PDF of an article from a business journal in which a company expressed reservations about this new technology over which everyone seemed to be abuzz. They decided that they would restrict employees’ use of it, because of the fear of corporate secrets getting out, of insider information making its way to Wall Street, and of employees wasting their time on it. For that reason, they set up the hardware on a single station in the middle of everyone’s desks so that everyone could see how people were using it.

“That PDF was an article from a 1930s business journal and the technology was the telephone.”

Concerns about information security and lost productivity are ultimately corporate fears about control (or lack thereof).  But employees’ actions within social media channels are nothing new.  People have already been talking about their jobs for generations; all these new tools do is make that discussion easier to join, share and track.  The fear of losing control is unfounded.

Or, as Monty himself likes to add: If you don’t trust your employees enough to not damage your brand with their online actions… why did you hire them in the first place?

* Incidentally, Monty has spoken at our biennial Business Smart Tools conferences; the next BST event will take place in 2011.