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 recently joined foursquare. I thought it would be a good way to find out new places to go in Milwaukee. In the last decade, the Beer City has become a real foodie town. The restaurant offerings range from German to Japanese to Turkish to Ethiopian. There are so many restaurants opening foursquare seemed like a logical way to keep up with new places.

After all, one of social media strength’s is peer review. I like to see what other people say about a restaurant my wife and I haven’t yet checked out. I like to know what’s good, what’s bad and how well the servers handle things.

Foursquare also gives me a chance to tell others about places I like. Jody and I have pretty eclectic tastes in food, so we hit a lot of different places. As my future son-in-law has noted, I am Milwaukee’s unofficial ambassador.

Something odd has been happening on foursquare. I am getting requests to friend people from places including the Netherlands; New Zealand; India; and Germany. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to friending people who live in other countries. It is one of the things I like about social media. I have Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter contacts around the globe.

But I wonder why someone in India wants to know about the nightlife in Milwaukee? Are they planning a trip here? That would be nice. Milwaukee is a great city to visit. We have a lot to offer.

Still, I cannot help but wonder if I am being friended by people who really have no intention of ever coming to Wisconsin. Instead, are these people just trying to build up huge friend lists? It is some kind of high school thing where the person who has the most friends wins?

Before I go any further, I should note I have more than 8,000 Twitter followers, more than 7,000 LinkedIn connections and I just crossed the 1,000 mark on Facebook. However, most of that is for professional reasons. I follow people who have similar interests. Plus, I use my lists for as outreach for my clients.  I have to note having more 16,000 social media contacts is an incentive for people to hire me.

I don’t follow just anybody. As I have said, the minute you tell me what you had for breakfast, what cute thing your dog did, or you are going to have your nails done, I will unfollow you. I will also not follow anyone who promises to make me rich or plays games. I don’t believe the former and I think the later is silly.

The people I follow are marketers, flacks, and social media people like myself. I learn from them and I hope they learn from me. I will not follow people who do not meet my criteria. For me it is a matter of quality versus quantity.

I make somewhat of an exception for Facebook because I have family members and friends who I stay in touch with through the platform.

I have not amassed a large numbers of followers because I think it makes me cool. That is not the purpose of social media.

Yet, I think there are a lot of people out there who build lists indiscriminately. Why I am not sure. As I have said time and time again, the one with the most friends does not win.

So, I get a request from a frustrated marketing guy at a medium-sized company for some information on how to integrate social media into a campaign. I call the guy and we talk for bit. After getting the introductions out of the way, he fills me in on his company’s situation. I start to discuss some possibilities for social media marketing.

He stops me before I get wound up. His frustration comes from his superiors – he just cannot convince them that social media is the company’s best option. He wants my input on how to perhaps change their minds, although he is not hopeful.

Oh, for those of you who are wondering, my practice is to provide one free call or meeting on social media, marketing or public relations. After that I charge. Hey, I gotta eat too.

I tell the guy that my first rule with a client who has never done social media before is you have to crawl and then walk before you can run. What that means in plain talk is doing two apps before trying to do four or five. Trying to do everything at once is a formula for frustration and failure. I want my clients to succeed.

So, after hearing what the company does and its goals, I suggest starting a blog and creating a YouTube channel. Those two efforts would jive nicely with the company already does. Every study I have read say blogs are the most effective way to establish a brand’s identity. YouTube is a good way to demonstrate a product.

I am deliberately not providing any detail on the company’s location or products. I do not want this guy to get in trouble with his bosses. If you are boss who thinks it was one of your people who called, it probably wasn’t. Besides, my land line covers all of North America and I am adept user of Skype.

So, maybe if he eases them into social media, it will accepted, I tell him. Not going to work he says. He says  there was no way his company would agree to doing even those two applications. They wanted to stick with conventional marketing methods. I am still pondering this dilemma.

However, it is a common one. Despite that the fact that companies from IBM to Mom and Pop restaurants use social media constantly and effectively, many executives still don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know why, but I have some hypothesis.

They are:

• The herd instinct. None of their competitors are doing it, so they don’t want to be first.
• The fear instinct. They are afraid they might not do it right or it might not work, so they don’t try
• The laziness quotient. Social media demands more time than conventional marketing. Many in the C-Suite don’t want to take the time to write a blog or tweet. They would rather an agency do their work.
• The ignorance problem. They don’t know who effective social media can be and don’t want to bother to learn.

I am sure these people have what they think are other valid reasons. They are not, and that’s just sad.