The last month of US box office has been dominated by Inception, the latest thriller from director Christopher Nolan. Despite Nolan’s pedigree (Memento, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), Inception is still a huge box office surprise for one big reason: late summer is normally a cinematic dead zone.
With heat waves, family vacations and a general pre-autumn malaise ruling the day, this is the notorious timeframe when Hollywood dumps the films it doesn’t expect to be winners. And yet, here we have a complicated movie without blockbuster stars, and it’s earned over $200 million.
As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously said, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” And while that’s an oversimplified (and somewhat cynical) statement, it’s not entirely untrue.
The more people are willing to talk about you on their own, the less you have to convince them that you’re conversation-worthy. When people are voluntarily talking about your product, it allows you to invest more time and resources on creating those products that delight your customers, rather than creating noteworthy (but temporary) illusions of interest.
Ultimately, a great ad campaign can make a good product sound interesting, but a great product starts conversations all by itself.
You should start a conversation with us on Twitter or Facebook!
Even if you’re not a non-profit, there’s still at least one core value in Ad Age’s article that applies to your business:
Make sure your program has a way to prove to this group that their involvement made a difference. Sixty-four percent of young adults say they would get involved with a marketer’s program if they believed the involvement was large enough to make a difference.
That’s great news for non-profits, but how does this need for actionable results translate to a for-profit business?
Actually, for the consumer, the payoff is the same. But one message feels better than the other.
Help Me Help You
For a charity to succeed in social media, its messaging must convince recipients that their actions will have a demonstrable positive effect on the cause at hand — which, by association, improves the recipient’s own life.
For a business to succeed in social media, its messaging must convince recipients that their actions will have a demonstrable positive effect directly on their own lives.
So, in both cases, the message’s recipient ultimately has to make a choice, which can directly (or indirectly) improve her own life.
The difference?
Charities seek to motivate individuals to help others. That’s a positive feeling we can all appreciate.
Meanwhile, businesses encourage individuals to help themselves. That feeling is sometimes harder to justify.
Doing Business Without the Guilt?
Whom do your products help?
How is someone’s life improved by purchasing your services?
Are you saving someone time? Are you helping someone get better at what they love?
Is your company investing in the future through education, ecology or other social good?
These are the kinds of proactive messages that can help people feel better about business — yours, in particular — and may help mitigate the guilt reflex associated with purchases.
Remember: social media is people. And when you help people feel better about themselves, you’ve erased one more barrier between you and them.
Business means sales. Without sales, you have no business. We get that.
As its root, social media is just another spoke on the sales wheel, driving revenue alongside everything else your business does. It’s not sexy, but it’s true. In business, everything is supplemental to sales.
But here’s a question.
Let’s say you never had to worry about sales again.
Let’s say your company was guaranteed to grow profitably for a century.
In that hypothetical universe, what else would you use social media for?
Maybe you’d focus on customer service.
Maybe you’d focus on shared knowledge.
Maybe you’d focus on efficiency.
No matter what you decide, your options would all have one thing in common: they’d be customer-centric.
Once you no longer need to obsess over sales, you’re free to make your customer’s (and your employees’) lives easier. Because the more your customers and your employees appreciate you, the more loyal they’ll become, and the more they’ll share your brand with the people they value.
Tony Hsieh believed so strongly in the proactive culture he’d built at Zappos that he realized the only way to save his company from the quick trigger finger of his recession-strapped investors was to sell it to Amazon — a move that enabled him to keep his customer-centric culture intact.
He was concerned that his employees would jump ship after the announcement. Instead, they rejoiced, because they knew their livelihoods and their values would be preserved. And, in the aftermath of the sale, Zappos remains just as profitable as it’s always been.
You don’t delight customers by obsessing over sales. But sometimes you do get sales by obsessing over your customers.
So… how is your company making your customers’ lives better?
Posting blog entries, updating Facebook, tagging photos, streaming videos, digging, stumbling, tweeting… and we haven’t even mentioned tracking feedback, gauging sentiment, following fans and solving problems.
Who has time for all this?
Well, we do, but that’s what we do every day. And even we wouldn’t have time for everything we do if we didn’t have a few tools at hand that made everything a bit easier and kept us all a bit more sane.
If you’re trying to wrap your head around scaling your own social media solutions, here are 4 tips that might make everything more manageable.
1. Social Media Platform Management — The moment you’re managing more than one social media channel at a time, your room for error — or for old-fashioned information overload — multiplies exponentially. Jamie Beckland compiled a great comparison chart of social media management tools like HootSuite, CoTweet and SocialOomph, so you can find a solution that suits your needs without breaking your budget.
2. Converge Your Channels — Does your Flickr account link to your blog? Do you tweet links to your YouTube videos? Do your employees’ LinkedIn profiles all point back to your company’s website and its Facebook page? If boosting traffic is part of your social media strategy, make sure your channels are working together, not in isolation.
3. Get Ahead and Stay Ahead — Not everything in social media happens in real time. Yes, you need to engage your audience and answer their questions as they happen, but those promotional tweets you need to send about next week’s big sale can be scheduled a week in advance. And any evergreen content on your website or blog can be referred to regularly, which means you don’t need to lay awake every night worrying about having something new to say tomorrow.
4. Streamline Your Efforts — As important as it is to be everywhere online, it’s even more important to be where your audience is most active. They may find you on Flickr, but they might interact with you most beneficially on Twitter or Facebook. If time is of the essence — and it always is — figure out which of your channels yields the highest return on your investment. Then, limit your efforts on the ancillary channels strictly to maintenance (unless circumstances change), and pour the bulk of your resources into what’s working.
And if it all still sounds like too much work, start with one simple question:
It may be time to re-evaluate your brand’s attitude.
See, now that businesses and consumers can use social media to interact publicly, it’s changed the way people judge the brands they’ve spoken with. Customers notice how often they’re being listened to, and what kind of value is being created for them by the interactions they have with brands.
In other words, now that you can talk to your customers in the same channels where they’re already chatting with their friends, they’re judging your company as a friend.
And, depending on how your brand conducts itself, this may or may not be a good thing.
Are You a Good Friend?
Are you polite?
Are you reliable?
Are you a good listener?
Do you help others learn to help themselves?
Can you tell the difference between “someone who needs advice” and “someone who’s just venting?”
When the chips are down, are you the one your friends can rely on for coming through in the clutch?
Congratulations: you’re someone that the people around you are probably very happy to know.
On the Other Hand…
Are you perpetually late?
Do you always know best?
Are you always talking about yourself?
Do you have an excuse for every mistake you’ve made?
Do you resent the flaws you see in others, and wonder why they can’t be more like you?
When in doubt, do the people who know you realize that they’ll need to look elsewhere for help?
If so, you’re not a very good friend. In fact, you’re probably the kind of acquaintance most people avoid, and tolerate only when they have to.
That’s not a recipe for endearing yourself to the people you live with. And when you’re a brand, the people you live with are your employees and your customers.
If you’re a brand that people want to know, they’ll be happy to introduce you to their friends. They’ll want you to succeed, because they want what’s best for the people (and brands) they respect.
But if you’re a brand that people avoid and ignore, then convincing others of your merit will forever be an uphill climb. And since you’ll probably complain about that climb, and hold grudges against the people who don’t help you along the way, it’s bound to be lonely at the top… if you ever get there.
Given that disparity, why not be the kind of person — or brand — that people want to help succeed?
And if you need some statistics to help us prove that point, check out what Dan Zarrella discovered about the power of negative tweeting. (Hint: it’s not good.)
Is social media a sales driver and a marketing aid? Absolutely.
But we also encourage our clients to think outside the box, and find innovative ways to surprise and delight their customers by using these tools in unconventional ways. One way we do this is by studying how other sectors use these same tools in non-marketing ways, and then innovating in reverse.
Study geography. Use a combination of Twitter and Google Earth to help teach geography-based lessons. This teacher used his network of Twitter followers to create an interactive lesson for his young students. Use her idea to spark your creativity for ways to use these two resources.
Connect with other classrooms. Collaborate with another classroom, no matter where they are in the world, to expand learning opportunities.
Window to daily life at school. Create a website like the one at University of Chicago Law School. that allows visitors to hear from students and professors about their daily life at law school.
Which made us wonder… if these approaches work in the classroom, how might they also work in the boardroom? Or in R&D? Or sales?
Such as…
Get a global snapshot of your customers’ realities. Twitter makes it easy to follow users from around the world and receive their updates in real time. By following your customers in different markets / time zones / continents, you’ll have a constant stream of incoming data that describes their lives and their needs. And when they share breaking news in their region, your company has the opportunity to act on immediate information and stay ahead of the news cycle.
Connect with brand evangelists. If consumers love your brand, they’ll want to know about new products and services ASAP. You could send your top 100 customers the same email blast that you send to your other 99,000 customers… or you could invite those loyalists to take part in Twitter conversations, Facebook discussions and even Skype conferences. Reward their support by offering them increased access and they’ll reward you with feedback, leads and sales, not because they have to, because your personalized outreach has made them a partner in your company’s growth.
Provide a window on your company’s culture. To the consumer, every brand is a nameless, faceless corporation by default. The more personalized and transparent a company becomes, the more a casual customer comes to think of that company as being familiar, rather than generic. Find the best internal observers of what makes your company tick, and empower those employees to post descriptive, informative or witty updates about your day-to-day operations on Twitter and Facebook. Catching a daily glimpse of life in your office helps your customers feel like they’re in the cubicles and manufacturing lines with you — and it gives them another reason to care about your success.
How else can you innovate with the same tools everyone else is using?
By using them to demonstrate your commitment to your customers, you’ll really give your audience something to talk about.
In Walter Kiechel’s recent Harvard Business Review post, he exposes a popular marketing myth: the death of strategy.
Declaring strategy to be a sad casualty of our current trend toward “real-time metrics” is suddenly fashionable, but it doesn’t make sense. And yet plenty of marketers are fooling themselves into believing that an active Facebook page or Twitter presence is more important than a long-term strategy for growth, relevance and customer fulfillment.
“But we’ll adapt on the fly,” they say. And that mindset is perfectly reasonable — even necessary — to have when dealing with live media… as long as you’re still adhering to your larger goals.
Social media is a tool, not a replacement for strategy.
The growth of your business is always your end goal. How you get from here to there is your strategy.
If someone’s advising you to adapt your strategy — whether to utilize new tools, new tactics or simply to streamline a cumbersome process — it means they’re keeping your big picture in mind.
But if someone’s advising you to abandon strategy altogether, it means they have no idea how to strategize.
Instead, they’re hoping you’ll be distracted by the mountains of information they can deliver… but that data won’t mean anything to them or you in the long run.
A Carpenter Isn’t a Hammer; A Carpenter USES a Hammer
Your strategy might involve certain tools, or it may prove those tools to be ineffective in helping you achieve your larger goal. If so, decide which elements are working, and then change the ones that aren’t.
You might need new tools. You might need new personnel. If you’re really adrift, you might need a new strategy altogether — or even a new goal.
Retrenching is nothing new. Successful companies do it as a matter of survival. In fact, Kiechel mentions several novel ways a company can alter its strategies to better align with its goals.
And while it’s true that implementing a new strategy can be difficult, it’s much easier than operating without one.
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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!
Ever wonder if your messaging sticks with your audience? Just ask your kids.
When we joined Cindi Bigelow on a trip to her alma mater (Boston College), we were blown away by just how many college students drink tea (we figured college was a serious coffee haven). But even more surprising than the students’ taste for tea was how they developed their tea-drinking habits: it came from their families.
If you had told us beforehand that we’d find a random wave of passersby (none of the students were pre-selected) and almost all of them would have had a love of tea instilled in them by their parents, we would have said you were crazy. Why? Because of sterotypical preconceptions, like:
Kids don’t listen to their parents
Kids rebel
Kids define their own personalities in opposition to family tradition
College students have horrible eating habits
College students live off caffeine
And so on.
Yet, if college students are willing to admit that their parents’ love of tea has rubbed off on them, what other bits of wisdom (or, conversely, what other bad habits) have you passed on to your kids?
Thanksgiving is right around the corner. If you have students returning home from college — or if it’s you who’s heading home for the holidays — take a moment and find out which elements of your (or your parents’) messaging have survived the gap between the backyard and the dorm. You may be surprised.
And you may learn a thing or two about the kinds of messages that last.
