Going Social

Here’s a news flash: some people—including marketing people—don’t get social media.

By Scott Gerschwer

According to the just-released 2009 Workplace and Ethics Survey report by Deloitte, nearly one-third (30 percent) of executives said social networking is a part of their business and operations strategy. Yet more than half of the executives said that they have no official policy for social networking. Twenty-two percent sad they would like to use social networks but don’t know how.

Perhaps more startling is that 75 percent of employees surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed that social networking could damage a company’s reputation, according to the report.

Social networking—using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the rest—has moved beyond the early adopter phase and is now a very mainstream thing to do. And it can’t be under-estimated as a marketing tool for one very important reason: social networking facilitates Word of Mouth (WOM). How important is WOM? Some 61 percent of cellphone purchases were made after the buyer looked at user comments.

The trick is to know how to use social networking as part of your marketing mix and how not to break the rules. We’ll assume that by now employees are hip to the fact that they can’t post embarrassing material on their pages that would be detrimental to themselves and the organizations that they represent. But too many companies are using overly aggressive tactics online that don’t do them much good and may in fact alienate the very people that they are trying to reach.

Social networking has been the subject of many metaphors—it is the new water cooler, the new coffee klatsche, the neighborhood bar…heck, it’s our Woodstock. It is a place where people gather to converse with like-minded people. I haven’t looked but I’m sure there are groups for Second Amendment activists, for Anabaptists, for shark fishermen. Just as the magazine industry fragmented into thousands of special interest publications (Guns and Ammo, Lake Fisherman, et al), social networks have grown up around thousands of categories and sub-categories. My friend and former colleague, Bernie Gracy, suggested in a recent blog post that marketing has become a small bet game of roulette where you spread your chips around the table rather than putting them all on one number. A very interesting and apt comparison.

I avoided Facebook for a long time before finally deciding to open two pages—a personal page and one for Topstone, my marketing consulting business. I began—less than a week ago—with my own personal page. Now I have my theater friends, my high school friends, my college friends…guys I play basketball with, girls I once romanced, people that I barely know or want to know. It’s an uncomfortable mix--like George Costanza’s “worlds collide” rant on Seinfeld. And it’s just plain weird. By my senior year in high school I had four friends. None of them are on Facebook but the rest of my graduating class is and they all seem to want to be friends after all these years. I was so shocked by how old some of them look I decided to post a photo of my puppy instead of myself.

On the plus side, I’ve re-connected with a lot of the theater people I worked with in the 1990s, and I have begun to circulate some of the new plays I’ve written since we last worked together.

And if I may, your company likely has the same kind of mix. The vogue statement is that customers are meeting and chatting with you or without you so you may as well mix in—and, I presume, try to steer it in your favor. And I’m sure you have your current users, former users, current and former employees, raving fans and arch-enemies. You have people who recommend your products and/or services, people who have a bone to pick with you, those that wish you luck and those that wish you bodily harm. You can’t control it but you can monitor it. Word of Mouth is now the most important single factor in making your company successful: Sam Decker, chief marketing officer of Bazaarvoice, a company that analyzes and utilizes social networking for clients, reports that “78 percent of international consumers said they trusted direct recommendations from other consumers most when making product purchase decisions.” The power of a customer recommendation can not be over-looked.

Social networks facilitate WOM.

And here is the most important advice I can give: be as helpful as you can be.

Back in the day, I was part of a very successful Analyst Relations program. We received the highest grades from the industry analysts in one report after another. The way we did it was to build strong relationships with various analysts—a pleasure in most cases, I should add—and by always being a source for them when they needed content in order to write their reports. I was lucky to have a responsive, flexible and very sharp team of experts around me who would drop what they were doing and get on the phone for a few minutes to answer some questions, give some opinions and clarify some strategies. I took care of the relationship building and they provided the expertise. And it worked. That’s what you can do with social networking. It is a conduit to relationship building and being useful to colleagues in the business. Build relationships, be useful, don’t push the sell button.

Likewise, when you join a group on LinkedIn, for example, read the discussions, learn what you can and if you have something to add, by all means chime in. That act alone—providing useful content—will be a good use of your social networking time and expense. Without trying to sell—and social networkers are as fanatical as hippies about not selling out—be of use, provide good content, make yourself available.

Does Size Matter?

One of my “friends” on Facebook announced that I was his 500^th “friend”---which almost made me “de-friend” him but someone beat me to it; there’s no harm I guess in being 499. But it got me to thinking: does the size of your network matter? (will “de-friend” beat out “bi-curious” for the post-modern word coinage of the decade?).

This has become something of an obsession of late, especially with regard to Twitter, where a big part of the game is to amass “followers.” Barry Judge, CMO of Best Buy, leads the CMO pack (Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak, is fifth and admits that he keeps track). Twitter etiquette suggests that you follow everyone who follows you, so it can get messy in a hurry (I currently have three Twitter followers @scottgersch). But I can barely manage the 45 friends I have on Facebook and am determined to ignore at least two-thirds of them (I’ve gotten more selective with my acceptance of new friends).

But it says here that while the size of your follower base does matter, the quality of your tweets matters even more. I’m more or less auditing Twitter right now, dipping my toe in before trying to make a big splash. My gut instinct tells me this is a wise policy. I look at Twitter as more off an internal communication vehicle, kind of a pep talk like the Monday morning Executive voice mail that is—or should be—designed to get the workforce pumped up and motivated for the week ahead.

For marketers, Twitter is best used as an ice-breaker and a 140 character lead paragraph that continues somewhere else (your website? Your blog?) Tweet when you have something to tweet about---same as the forgotten and largely ignored rule for issuing press releases. Control the message---designate tweeters and monitor them closely. Use the search function on Twitter to seek out tweets about you and your competitors, just as you would use Google news alerts. Respond accordingly.

More than ever, marketing is about lead generation and helping the sales team convert those leads to revenue. Social media is a big part of the mix because it allows you to dialogue effectively and efficiently, it has caught on with mainstream society, and it is a great tactic for communicating your message. Other channels still matter but social networking is too important to ignore.