PR 101

This is part two of social media firm DemingHill’s blog on why executives hate social media. For more information on DemingHill, click on their name.

It’s high time that a C-level individual engaged in social media, and – once and for all –created a high-level overview and synopsis, crystallizing all of the strategic benefits and critical value streams, and distilling them into a language that speaks to executives everywhere in our native tongue – bottom line stakeholder value. So here you go. I’ve done the work for you. What follows is an “Executive Summary” of my findings.

Social Media Value #1:  Unfiltered Feedback

As you already know, some of the scarcest (rarest) yet most valuable information a CEO can obtain is honest, unfiltered feedback. Think about it. You interact all day with managers, employees, and handlers working to keep the boss happy and therefore keep their job. Sure, being surrounded by “Yes men” can be more comfortable, but it can also insulate you from the stark realities of your business. If done correctly, social media enables CEO’s to hear raw, candid feedback from real people – people who aren’t afraid of being fired because they CAN’T be fired. The truth is, leaders with their ego in check are already fully aware that they work for the customer – the customer is his boss – so if the customer doesn’t like dropped calls on their iPhone or the sauce on their Domino’s pizza, it’s their job to make it better.

Now, every customer is not always right (or wrong), but if 850 out of 1000 user comments say tthe new Sketcher’s Sport shoe caused them to sprain their ankle, then something needs to be fixed – and fast! CoolCleveland’s Founder Thomas Mulready is a perfect example of a CEO with this customer orientation. After emailing out his weekly eMagazine for 7 years, he decided that it needed to be updated, and set about introducing a new format with much fanfare. In doing so, he also did something revolutionary – he asked all 90,000 of his readers for feedback on what they thought of the new style – and boy did they reply with scores of comments submitted over the span of a few days. But then he did something else revolutionary – he actually listened, modifying and improving the new site to reflect reader tastes and preferences. Yes, it takes humility (“Who are these people to give me feedback?  I invented this product! Don’t they know they can just click the links?) but the end result is an engaged audience who now feel genuinely empowered to provide even more feedback, emboldened by the knowledge that their comments actually impact (and can improve) the end product.

Social Media Value #2:  Authenticity

Hand-in-hand with the unfiltered feedback above is the ability to leverage social media to authentically communicate with your employees, partners, customers (and non-customers), investors, and media, directly engaging all of your brand ambassadors efficiently and economically. Rather than layers of staff, spokespeople, and sterile press releases, social media now offers an elegant and effective medium for disseminating information either “straight from the heart” or “straight from the horses’ mouth” depending on your preferred idiom. Dan Gilbert’s recent LeBron James “rant” would qualify as both, capturing the owners’ anger, frustration, and competitive resolve just moments after James’ announced his departure. As you’ve probably noticed, nobody can tell the company story and embody the company brand like the CEO (think Steve Jobs) and by offering the ability to immediately and directly engage stakeholders – whether on a typical day, during a product launch, and/or especially during a time of crisis – social media provides an invaluable medium for maximizing brand value and minimizing potential brand degradation. Social media helps firms “keep it real” but couches it in a positive brand-reinforcing context.

Social Media Value #3: Six Sigma (Low Cost)

In case you were wondering, executives LOVE things like Six Sigma because:

1. It reminds us of our Greek fraternity days in college.

2. The other soccer dad’s don’t understand Value Stream Mapping.

3. Six Sigma and lean processes are all about speed and cost sacvings, two of our favorite topics.

By its very architecture, social media is positioned to leverage firms’ Six Sigma orientation by expediting interactions, exchanges, customer service, feedback loops, product launches, marketing, and advertising, and enabling it at a fraction of the cost of traditional media, to a much more targeted audience, and in a far more nuanced and contextual value exchange. Social media options allow your message distribution format to evolve from shotgun to sniper, from billboard to message board, and from broadcast to narrowcast.  Plus, it takes your marketing posture from a one-way, blanketing, bullhorn approach to a more intimate, just-in-time interaction; offering the opportunity for a more detailed, valuable and more profitable conversation and connection with your audience (and you don’t need a Black Belt to do it).

Social Media Value #4:  Balancing Transparency AND Privacy

The only thing worse than not using social media tools is using them in the wrong way. Your firm could very easily invest time and money on social media, and then end up spending even more time and money doing damage control because you did it wrong the first time – talk about a lose-lose situation. With social media, there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do things – so if you’re going to do it, do it right. Remember, anywhere-anytime-anyone social media channels must be handled as the “nuclear options” that they are, with the capability to destroy your brand value in a single Twitter, email, or YouTube video that goes viral.

With great power comes great responsibility, and a healthy respect for the global reach and impact of social media must emanate directly from the CEO, who knows better than anyone that the same programs allowing firms to connect and influence the marketplace can also be turned against you to alienate them. And just as social media can provide the market with a transparent window into the soul of your company, it can also showcase you at your worst, doing more harm than good.  Let’s face it, your firm is already dabbling in social media as it is – so you might as well manage your risk and liability by codifying corporate expectations, establishing specific ground rules, and educating your stakeholders regarding proper use of these seemingly innocent yet powerful tools.

Social Media Value #5: Supporting Statistics

Executives rely on market research to support and substantiate any designated course of action, and devour facts, stats, and data-points like shrimp at a wedding reception. Summarized below are a few statistics buttressing the explosion of this social media trend, and detailing how Corporate America is leveraging it to realize significant revenue and market share growth going forward.

• In the last 7 years, Internet usage has increased 70 percent a year. Spending for digital advertising this year will be more than $25 billion and surpass print advertising spending (forever)

• Lenovo has experienced a 20 percent reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers
• Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• Naked Pizza set a one-day sales record using social media: 68 percent of their sales and 85 percent of their new customers came via Twitter.
• Software company Genius.com reports 24 percent of social media leads convert to sales opportunities,
• Dell has already made over $7 million in sales via Twitter.
• Thirty-seven percent of Generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media before its launch in the US and currently 25 percent of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media.
• Seventy-one percent of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40 percent.
• A recent Wetpaint/Altimeter Group study found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit.

(Sources for Statistics: meyersreport.com, lenovosocial.com, George Wright, Blendtec, Mashable.com, econsultancy.com, businessweek.com )

Getting Your Board On Board

Lest we forget, even the Boss has a Boss – they’re called the Board of Directors – and these are the people that recruit and hire CEO’s for the purpose of serving as a charismatic and visionary leader of their organization. And so I urge you, don’t disappoint them when it comes to leveraging social media within your organization. The “Bang for the Buck” value proposition is too compelling to ignore, and the fact is – your competitors are already entering this arena and establishing new service baseline norms and minimum threshold expectations – so standing still amounts to losing ground and therefore is not an option. What you need is a plan.

Do I still hate social media?  No, but I’m only going to embrace it on the “executive terms” that have served me so well to this point in my career and they are, “If you’re going to do something, go all in and do it right.”  From now on, all social media, social marketing, and social networking will be discussed in the context – not of a campaign (which starts and ends) – but as part of an ongoing, strategic, and systematic dialog with our stakeholders and marketplace.

Executives have the focus and vision to road map strategies playing out three, five, and 10 years into the future. But, we’re also “plodders” and are comfortable with short, measured, consistent steps – day in and day out – as long as we know that they are aligned with reaching a desired goal. When we discuss your social media strategy, the focus will be on consistency and sustainability over the long haul. Remember, executives don’t have the ego needs, risk profiles, or the time to be on the bleeding edge, or even the cutting edge. We just want it to work.

I can confidently predict that every month for the next 100 years there will be a new “Must Have” application, portal or community that one of your employees will discover, and then try to convince you that your company will implode if you don’t immediately join, link, or Retweet. In five years, all but three of these ideas will probably be forgotten.  During our meeting, we will discuss how to frame out an enterprise-wide social media strategy, predicated on the foundation of proven tools and that have stood the test of time and offer “Best-In-Class” results, so that you will be empowered to handle these conversations proactively in the context of a larger road map, rather than reacting to these weekly ambushes in a dismissive defensive way. Remember, our goal for social media is not a lark, but a lifestyle and work-shopping a strategy which builds on stable, scalable tools, yet also affords the flexibility to address unprecedented “Black Swan” technology developments, provides you with a welcome buffer from being whipsawed by a weekly website.  Between the two of us, we’ll finally take that reliable “80/20 Rule” and apply it to social media, and then spend time focusing on the 80 percent of stakeholder value that can be extracted with 20% of the effort (while knowingly and purposefully ignoring the remaining 20 percent of value which takes up 80 percent of the effort).

The Bottom Line

In the Forward of Geoffrey Moore’s bestseller “Crossing the Chasm” Regis McKenna writes:

“Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationships. Customers don’t like to be ‘owned’ if that implies lack of choice or freedom. But they do like to be ‘owned’ if what that means is a vendor taking ongoing responsibility for the success of their joint ventures.  Ownership in this sense means an abiding commitment and a strong sense of mutuality in the development of the marketplace. When customers encounter this kind of ownership, they tend to become fanatically loyal to their supplier, which in turns builds a stable economic base for profitability and growth.”

While there will always be a “me” in media – social media, social marketing, and social networking tools were designed to work best as a conduit for enabling information exchange, establishing a dialog, and creating a two-way conversation with your audience. At the end of the day, social media is simply about creating and maintaining relationships – and even and executive can do that.

I have been a writer since I was five-years-old. My first piece was entitled “The Eagle That Had Acrophobia.” It was the first writing assignment I was ever given. It came from my kindergarten teacher toward the end of the year. I think the assignment was given to us to test how much we knew about writing and reading. I am not sure the content mattered that much. At any rate, I got a gold star for using all of the words correctly.

That was my first lesson in writing. Always make sure every word is used and spelled properly. Now, I still have not attained that proper state of writing, although I get closer everyday. I am getting closer because I care deeply about excellent writing and I work hard at it.

Which brings me to the point of this screed – how much just plain lazy and incorrect writing I see everyday. Now, I am not talking about typos. To me that’s an honest mistake. The key to read reread so they can be detected and corrected.

No, what I am talking about is the incorrect use of words, run-on sentences, sloppy logic, and just plain bad writing.

Look, social media demands good writing. I am not saying you have to be a Mark Twain or an Ernest Hemingway. I am saying all of the writing posted has to make sense.

Tell me if you can think of a social media application where the use of language is not important. For instance, every study I have read says blogging is the most effective social media application. Well, a blog has to be written, doesn’t it? Twitter demands clear, concise writing if a  thought is going to be stated clearly in 140 characters. For a YouTube video to make sense, the person speaking has to do it such a way that viewers can understand.

Yet, everyday I hear people talking about “building a new building.” Who builds an old building? Or look at the “new baby.” Ever seen an old baby – in the literal sense? Or one of my favorites – “this door alarmed.” How can one tell if a door is upset?

The other night I was watching the local news in Milwaukee. The newscaster talked about the “tragic death of a five-year-old girl.” Have you ever known the death of a five-year-old not to be tragic? Or “the fire totally engulfed the house.” Look of the definition of the world engulfed – “totally” is not needed.

I did a web search and found sterling examples of bad writing, such as:

• PET OF THE WEEK: Nannouk is a 10-week-old Spitz mix female and will grow to be medium sized. She does well inside. Sterilization is mandatory for anyone wanting to take her.
• Operationally, teaching effectiveness is measured by assessing the levels of agreement between the perceptions of instructors and students on the rated ability of specific instructional behavior attributes which were employed during course instruction. Due to the fact that instructors come from diverse backgrounds and occupy different positions within a given university, both individual and organizational based factors may contribute to the variance in levels of agreement between perceptions.
• The man was eating a fish that still had its head on and was drinking red wine in great gulps. The fish’s eyes looked alive.

My thanks to the University of Minnesota-Duluth for the examples. There are a lot more on the university’s website.

I am not going to get into people who don’t know the difference between then and than. Or writers that don’t know when to use who and that. I could go on forever.

Yes, those examples are all funny, but they are also sad. Allegedly educated people who spoke English as their first language wrote those three examples. What the hell is wrong with them?

I just had to rant about this. I know I am fighting a losing battle, but it doesn’t mean I plan to stop.



Many major corporations around seem to be either scared of social media or want to pretend it doesn’t exist. Yet one of the largest and oldest companies on Earth – IBM – has embraced the new way of marketing. It has moved into the area with a lot of enthusiasm and success.

All of that effort would have gone nowhere if the people charged with integrating social media didn’t take the company’s culture into account, Tim Blair, IBM’s vice-president for Marketing and Communications said. Blair spoke at the PR + Social Media Summit held at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Marquette and a number of Wisconsin companies sponsored the summit.

I wanted to hear Blair speak because IBM has a reputation in the social media world of being one of the most open companies when it comes to social media.

What makes this particularly interesting is that IBM is almost a century old. This is a not a Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, or Zappos. Those companies are all fairly new. Their corporate cultures are still forming, so it would seem to me to be easier to incorporate social media.

IBM, on the other hand, used to be known for its rigid corporate culture. When my late brother worked there in the late 1960s, the standard uniform was a white shirt, subdued tie, and gray suit. You did not deviate from that.

For a company such as IBM to change its culture to allow its employees to act as individuals is a stretch. It impressed me that such an institution is willing adopt a new way of doing things. It reminds of how the U.S. is also willing to stretch its culture to allow its members to use social media. The company accomplished because people such as Blair understood what would it take to make the change.

“Social media needs to be derivative of business model and corporate culture,” Blair explained. “Culture always wins. You have to figure out to stretch the culture. Not changing the culture, but stretching it. Social media needs to be a derivative of the business and corporate culture.”

The first step in moving into social media is knowing where a company wants social media to take them. There has be a definition of the destination, Blair said.

“You need to know where are going or you will fail,” Blair said.

Stretching means working to ensure social media becomes a part of it. It is almost impossible to change a corporate culture, Blair said. If you try to do that, you will fail. What needs to be done is to demonstrate how social media will fit into what the company is already doing.

“Social media does fundamentally change how you manage communications,” Blair said. “When I arrived at IBM, communication was very linear. But social media has helped flatten that out.”

IBM now uses social media for internal and external communications, Blair said. It has three primary uses within the company: to flatten communication channels, to help employees learn and to influence the conversation going on among all of IBM’s stakeholders.

As example of internal use, Blair cited the company’s management training program. IBM used to fly all of its managers into its Armonk, N.Y. headquarters for training. It now trains them via the Internet. The training is as effective ever and it saved IBM money, he said.

A key to using social media is empowering employees, Blair said. IBM does not lock its employees out of the Internet. That would be counterproductive, he said.

“At the end of the day, we want to empower everybody, Blair said. “Our brand is experienced by the expertise our employees in the field have with customers. We have to trust those employees.”

Every IBM employee is seeped in the company’s values. That’s important because it ensures those employees will hew to those values when they use social media, Blair said.

In fact, the company’s social media policies – first created in 2005 – were created by the employees. There are now 17,000 blogs written by IBM employees, he said.

There was a learning curve for senior executives, Blair said. They had to shown why it was important to deal with bloggers whom they had never heard of before. It took them awhile to understand the influence bloggers could have, That doesn’t mean the company ignores traditional media, he added. Engaging with the traditional outlets is still important, he said.

As I said, it was impressive. I think a lot of companies can learn from the computer giant did.