PR 101

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is both a building block and a goal of social media. I have seen many people embark on social media campaigns without building SEO into their efforts. While not including SEO won’t necessarily doom the campaign, it will make a whole harder to reach the desired goals.

What is SEO? It is a process where key words and links are used to ensure a website shows up on the first two pages of a search engine. Very few people look beyond those first two pages. It might look cool to see that Google found over million search results that matched your search. But so what. No one has the time or inclination to check more than two pages. So it is on those first two pages that you want to your website to appear.

SEO is especially important if you are small businessperson with a limited marketing budget. I don’t know of any marketplace that is not extremely competitive. SEO will help you stand out from your competition by getting your business on those first two pages of the search results.

SEO costs little, if any, money. Probably less than those billboards the farmer put up. There are many tools out there to help you determine which words should go into your copy to ensure better search results. Google has a free one and there are others.

There is also no need to pay for key words. The largest issue with doing that is once you stop paying, your ranking drops back to what it was. Whereas if you do it organically, your rankings will stay in place.

Injecting SEO into a business should start with your website’s design. When you hire a design firm, make sure they know what SEO is and how to incorporate into the website. You should do this anyway, but ask for the names of the some of the design firm’s client to find out how successful previous designs were.

Let me give you an anecdote I use when I speak on social media explaining why SEO is so important. It explains SEO very well. It goes like this:

There was vegetable farmer who had a very profitable business selling his produce from a stand at his farm. Because this farm was out in the country, the farmer placed billboards advertising the stand along the Interstate highway.

Sales were so good the farmer sent all his children to college. His oldest daughter earned both a B.A. and an M.B.A.

One summer the vegetable business dropped off. The farmer had to cut costs to stay profitable. He asked his MBA daughter what needed to be down.

She did an analysis. What made sense to her to cut were those billboards. The cost of maintaining them was dragging profits down. Why were they needed, she thought. People knew about the farm and would continue to come.

Within a month of taking the billboards down what had been downturn turned into a disaster. The customers stopped coming. So the farmer sent his daughter off to a city job and put the billboards back up. Business returned to normal.

Just think of SEO has an Internet billboard telling potential customers about your business.

My daughter Heather was married Sept. 5 to a wonderful guy, Jordan Goffin. The wedding was a kind of gathering of the clans, with guests coming from all over the United States. We had people from California, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Massachusetts and, of course, Wisconsin attend the nuptials.

(Note: that’s why there were no blogs last week.)

Because of the distances traveled, most of the guests flew into Milwaukee. What struck me is how no one said they had even a fair to middling experience on the airlines. I think there were at least four airlines involved in transporting people. I suspect if I had been doing a consumer survey, the highest grade any of those carriers would have received would be a “C-.”

There were major complaints – flights that were rescheduled two or three times, overcrowded planes, uncomfortable seats and surly employees. There were also the minor complaints, such as the “gourmet” pretzels my son-in-law was served on his flight. They were thumbnail-sized pretzels – there was nothing gourmet about them. Or another guest who said she was charged for a blanket she wanted for her sleeping four-year-old.

As bad as the major complaints were, I think it is the little things that really frost passengers. It is bad enough when you are crammed into a seat that would be considered a war crime under the terms of the Geneva Convention. However, when all you receive for sustenance is a dried-out bag of pretzels that often becomes the proverbial straw.

Of course the airlines can get away with this because there is often no alternative method of long-distance travel. You want to get to California or Florida in under a day; an airplane ride is often the way.

I put great store on good customer service. It is one of the most important kinds of marketing. One of the reasons I am an Apple aficionado is the fantastic service I receive at the Apple stores. I am willing to pay more for a good meal at a restaurant that has great waiters than I am for a great meal with a restaurant with bad service.

This is marketing at its most basic. Any company that knows what it is doing wants to have happy customers. Happy customers tell potential customers about how good the company is. That usually gets those potential customers to check out a retailer or a service provider.

Now I get that times are tough in the airline industry. Rising fuel prices, the depression caused by 9/11, and the current recession effects on leisure travel have combined to deal some hard hits. But as I have noted in other blogs, the companies that invest in their product and customer service during those times are the ones that dominate when times get better.

What particularly surprises me is that after the video United Breaks Guitars, airlines still haven’t learned. I have read estimates where that YouTube effort cost United Airlines $100 million in lost sales. If that is not a wake-up call, I am not sure what it will take. Unfortunately, airlines just don’t seem to be listening.

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.