If anyone can publish a blog, create a video or launch a meme, you’d think that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube would be the empires of the new, with the latest self-made stars forever in control of the cultural conversation.
And you’d be wrong.
A recent report from HP Labs confirms the exact opposite: the most popular sources of information on Twitter are actually traditional news media outlets like CNN, ESPN and (egad, a newspaper?) The New York Times.
Why? Because people like to share information that impacts wide audiences, and because traditional media still has information-gathering resources and robust distribution platforms that “new” media can’t live without.
In other words, no matter how easy social media makes it to talk to others, people still need something to talk about.
Is that “something” your business?
It could be, if your brand is worth the buzz. But even topical companies need more than just a social media hook to catch and hold an audience’s attention.
A tweet is gone in an instant. A Facebook update crawls off the page and out of sight. A YouTube video might be shared for weeks, months or years as new viewers continue to find it… but what’s driving them to it in the first place?
Periodic fame is always the cumulative result of widespread general awareness — and that includes mainstream publicity. Is your company poised to take long-term advantage of short-term PR success?
Ask yourself:
Is your social media team working hand-in-hand with your traditional PR and marketing teams? (Or, even better, are they fully integrated?)
Do you share your brand’s mainstream media mentions with your social media audiences?
Are you trumpeting your online successes in offline media? (Don’t forget: newspapers and magazines still write about the Internet.)
Does your media contact list include reporters from all branches of journalism?
Do your print ads include icons and URLs where interested customers can find you on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.?
Remember: whether it’s physical or digital, all ink is good ink, as long as it gets people talking about you.
Nothing makes a brand (or that brand’s agency) happier than seeing how much their customers love their products and services. And when that love is shared in public via social media, so much the better — especially because that love is so often eclipsed by the increasingly public habit of complaining about bad customer service.
By now, we’re all used to seeing our friends rant about their latest perceived “retail fail” on Twitter and Facebook. And the proactive approach that companies like Zappos and Comcast have taken to address these complaints publicly has created an expectation among casual customers that every complaint is valid and deserving of a swift response.
In our opinion, this is entirely understandable. Social media is all about now, and when someone’s upset, they’re justified in expecting a quick remedy from companies who claim to care. In fact, we at Creative Concepts advocate proactive customer service among all of our social media clients, and we strive to help them create and employ practices that will turn those potential negatives into ultimate positives once a customer’s concerns have been alleviated.
But that very practice is what makes seeing unabashed (and unprompted) exhibitions of brand love from our client’s customers that much more rewarding.
Last week, a customer at the Ouidad salon enjoyed her hair care experience so much, she live-tweeted her experience throughout the day, including passing along tips from her stylist. Needless to say, this made Ouidad’s day — and ours, since we were watching right alongside! ( In fact, it reminded us of a similarly enjoyable moment we observed last year, when a New York blogger shared her Ouidad hair model experience via Twitter and blog format.)
And here’s a helpful Twitter tip: if you really love a brand, make sure your tweets about them DON’T start with the @ symbol. Why? Because of the way Twitter categorizes conversations:
Tweets that begin with @Ouidad, for example, will only be seen by three kinds of people: Ouidad, the sender of the tweetm and anyone who’s following both the sender and Ouidad. (That’s probably a small cross-section of people who might see the tweet.)
Tweets that include @Ouidad but which start with any character other than the @ symbol will still be seen by Ouidad, but they’ll also be seen by everybody who follows the sender.
Therefore, if you REALLY want someone to know about your awesome brand experience, make sure your tweets aren’t addressed solely to the brand. That will give your praise the widest possible audience, and put an even bigger smile on the face of the employees who’ll be elated to see just how much you really love what they do.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the very first Ken doll, Mattel — the creators of Barbie, Ken and their vast plastic empire — launched a social media campaign to help Ken woo Barbie back. If you didn’t know, the iconic couple broke up a few years back — presumably to see other plastic people — but Mattel decided today was the right time to reunite the star-crossed lovers.
Normally, this would be a good thing… if the campaign was producing content worth discussing, or if it were actually taking the public’s opinion seriously.
But, since a happy ending was most likely in the works all along, any pretense of “letting the public vote” on the ultimate outcome strikes us as a sham for at least three reasons:
Do you seriously think Mattel would spend millions of dollars just to announce that Barbie and Ken weren’t reuniting on Valentine’s Day — especially after they broke up on Valentine’s Day in 2004?
The web is alive with trolls, and the likelihood that those digital misanthropes would hijack the voting process to ensure that Barbie and Ken would remain apart is quite high.
Millions of people already saw Barbie and Ken come together on the big screen in Toy Story 3. Creating an alternate, highly-commercialized “reunion” seems far less real — and less satisfying — than their Pixar rendezvous.
But maybe the largest problem of all with a social media campaign like this is…
Who cares?
Children and optimists will always vote for love. Cold-hearted cynics will always vote against it. And since cold-hearted cynics aren’t Barbie’s target audience, this entire campaign can be seen partly as “preaching to the choir” and partly as a public service reminder: “Hey, we’re still here.”
Ultimately, the entire campaign was really just a stunt meant to direct attention toward Ken’s 50th anniversary, in which the nearly 2 million Barbie fans on Facebook were used as leverage to catapult Ken into the mainstream news. However, with Compete.com only registering 12,000 unique visitors to the barbieandken.com website in January, its traffic would need a sharp jump in February to match likely expectations.
But now, according to the results of the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in “people like us” is plummeting while trust in experts is on the rise. Steve Rubel has a well-reasoned theory about why that might be happening, and he predicts a cyclical boom in the prominence of thought leaders and subject matter experts.
If people are once again in search of facts, figures and fountains of wisdom, what does that mean for your business?
Are You In the Business of Trust?
You don’t have to make a living in finance, health or politics to be a member of the trust economy. Companies of all sizes, and in all industries, live and die as customers’ perceptions of business ethics and reliability shift.
In short, if your company…
builds its brand image around claims of effectiveness
is in competition for customer loyalty
engages in philanthropy
relies on donations
solves a problem
… then you’re in the trust business. And once you’ve established trust among your customers, that trust is always worth promoting — and defending.
When a 2010 UK report baselessly accused our client Ecover of “greenwashing,” the burden of proof was shifted to Ecover. After all, the report had been issued by an “expert” in the ecological field and published in The Guardian. The problem was, the report was wrong, and Ecover wouldn’t let that kind of misrepresentation stand.
Ecover knew that their customers trusted them as experts in a crowded and competitive market, and they defended their reputation with 30 years’ worth of documented expertise.
Could your company do the same?
Do you have documented proof that verifies your claims and statements?
Do you make it easy for people to find the information they need?
Are your subject matter experts engaging the public?
Are your ethics and values visibly on display?
In this hyper-connected world, trust will continue to rise and fall as the public reacts to varying levels of white noise in their lives. But, in the end, everyone relies on information to make daily decisions they can feel good about.
Are you providing your customers with the information they need?
If you’ve ever hit balls at a driving range, swung a tennis racket or attempted a free throw, you’ve already learned one of the most basic tenets of sports: always follow through. A golf swing doesn’t end when you make contact with the ball; it ends when your body completes the action. Stopping short not only decreases the impact of your efforts, but it’s bad for your body.
Social media works the same way. Unfortunately, many social media practitioners don’t notice the resemblance. They see individual actions (a tweet, a Facebook message, a video, a campaign), but they don’t acknowledge that each action or engagement point is all part of a larger process.
Your social media efforts don’t end the moment you tweet about a new sale or reach 1,000 fans on Facebook. Like all marketing, the social side began before that tweet was sent, and it’ll continue long after that 1,000th fan has closed her browser and turned in for the night.
If you’re measuring your success by your actions, rather than by your process, you’re only seeing part of the picture.
David Murdico recently shared some excellent tongue-in-cheek “advice” in MediaPost, in which he offered five tips guaranteed to make sure no one will ever see your great new video. As amusing as his advice is, it’s frustrating to realize that hundreds of decision-makers could read that article tomorrow and pat themselves on the back because they’re already making these same mistakes every day.
Do you promote your sales and news across ALL your social media channels?
Let’s say that, until now, you’ve had one small team (or even one single person) be responsible for your company’s entire social media presence. And now that things are going well, you want to expand. Maybe that means involving more people. If so, consider this:
Your existing customers are used to what you’ve been doing. If they wake up tomorrow and find themselves talking to someone completely new — and if they can tell — you risk a disconnect that might jeopardize your customers’ trust and emotional investment in your brand.
Here at Creative Concepts, we have a variety of writers, researchers, content creators and account managers juggling dozens of different tasks every day. But no matter how many people are assisting our clients with their messaging, there’s one standard we must all adhere to:
We all have to be working from the same process, and toward the same goal.
That means we take steps to ensure that anyone who’s working on any aspect of a client’s communications is following the same rules, and staying apprised of the same topical developments, as everyone else. This includes…
Creating our own internal user manual for Twitter, with tips and suggestions for navigating various situations.
Tracking industry-specific client-related news that might need to be addressed in the future.
Assigning specific messaging tasks to the individuals best-suited for the nuances of each channel.
Multiple layers of editing, so every message is reviewed by as many eyes as possible.
Internal metric sharing, so each of us can analyze data and compare our individual conclusions.
etc.
Why do we do this?
Because it’s important that our clients be served by as many well-rounded service providers as possible. But it’s equally important to us that our clients’ customers feel as though their Twitter, blog, Facebook, YouTube and other branded social media experiences are all built with the same building blocks, rather than feeling like disparate voices are being smashed together around a common topic.
Whether your social media messaging is being piloted by 2 people or 200, consistency is key. No one trusts white noise.
How are you making sure the image of your brand is consistent in the minds of your customers?
Need some tips? You should follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
During the initial wave of social media adoption by businesses and brands, conversation was key. Brands were lauded not for using these tools to sell, but for using them to chat. To listen. To appear human.
But that mentality may be shifting.
Remember Seinfeld? It was one of the most popular TV shows of the ’90s, but it was also (in theory) “a show about nothing.” Each episode consisted of a tightly-wound series of in-jokes derived from absurdly pedestrian circumstances, which gave viewers a chance to relate. In short, it was the kind of show designed to be relived around the water cooler for not just the next morning but the next few months… or longer. (Personally, I have friends who still celebrate Festivus.)
Why did Seinfeld succeed? In part, it was because — at the time — no one else was talking about nothing. When everyone else has a plot, you can break the mold by only having subplots.
Social media works the same way. When everyone else is selling, it’s easy to stand out simply by offering customer service. But once everyone starts using social media to “join the conversation,” the conversation itself becomes diluted. That’s when people start needing something… else.
When we helped Bigelow Tea create their Twitter and Facebook channels, conversation was key. Just chatting with tea lovers was enough to help Bigelow gain traction with the social media users they connected with.
These days, every tea company with access to the web is on Twitter and Facebook, which means Bigelow needed to shift their focus away from mere conversation and back toward informational value like their content-rich blog. They’ve begun offering successful sweepstakes on Facebook and Twitter. And their Facebook page has become a conversation that’s heavy with links to their teas and gift sets.
The results? Facebook is now one of the primary drivers of Bigelow Tea’s online sales, with plans to expand their strategy even further in 2011.
What has this shift taught us? Yes, people still like to talk tea… but they haven’t stopped needing actual value from their brand interactions, either.
So… what’s your brand’s Seinfeld ratio? How much time do you spend talking about nothing?
When our client Ecover celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2010, we at Creative Concepts helped them develop a related 30 Under 30 contest to celebrate the innovative ecological ideas from young people across the country. During their celebration, they asked everyone a question:
“Where do you think sustainability will be thirty years from now?”
After all, for a company who designs every aspect of their cleaning products with the environment in mind — from their ingredients to their facilities to their packaging — the future really is their business.
This question may have initially been asked of some of the country’s top eco-bloggers and entrepreneurs, but that’s was just the tip of the iceberg. Who Ecover really wants to hear from is you.
(Yes, you.)
They’ve opened the discussion to everyone, because they believe everyone has a stake in our planet’s future. And Ecover is listening — on Twitter, on Facebook, and on their blog. They want to know what you think about sustainability, and what concerns or suggestions you might have.
Because reaching a business milestone is certainly something to celebrate, but if there’s one lesson Ecover has learned in their thirty years of creating eco-minded cleaning products, it’s that tomorrow is what really counts.
Part of it is the vast number of tools we have at our disposal. Since most of them (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are free, it’s easy to start using each of them… but that makes maintaining your ever-growing web of communications more difficult.
Part of it is the conflict between personal (customers, individuals, community) and business (corporations, marketing, sales). Social media tools are designed to facilitate the exchange of information between consenting parties, but the limitless kinds of information being exchanged further complicate our conversations.
And then there’s the ongoing debate about which social media metrics matter most. Is it the size of your audience, or the quality of your engagement? Is it inciting action or increasing awareness?
Our advice?
Shrink your focus.
First, re-examine your goals and your needs. (Maybe you need a new social media strategy?)
Then, instead of aiming too wide, narrow your attention to a handful of channels — maybe even one — and maximize the impact you can create there (or the feedback you can obtain). Then, once you have a true understanding of how your brand is perceived within that channel, start applying those lessons to other channels, if it makes sense for you.
There’s a presumption that companies have to be involved in social media. And while we here at Creative Concepts are sure that social media can benefit almost any company, charity or brand, we’d never advise anyone to bite off more than they can chew.
So don’t waste an opportunity to connect with your customers by spreading yourself too thin, or your valuable feedback will be reduced to a stream of white noise.
Need some help simplifying your social media efforts? Check out these tips from Mashable.
Before you dive headfirst into your lengthy list of New Year’s resolutions, we here at Creative Concepts would like to offer a word of advice about setting goals for this (or any) new year:
Focus on results, not on numbers.
With 52 weeks ahead of you, it can be tempting to set goals for yourself that involve all kinds of numerical feats, like…
Improving your web traffic
Boosting your search results
Increasing your inbound links, or your number of media mentions
Doubling your number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers
… and so on.
And while each of these occurrences would be a boost to both your business and your brand’s reputation, they’re also merely the measurable by-product of a more important goal: doing your job well.
