Clive Simpkins

Your company may *have* to use social media

In or out? This is a question many organisations have to face. It's about whether they put a toe into the Social Media pool or dive in at the deep end. Both approaches can be disastrous. The crux of the issue though is – there's little option but to engage. It's not a question of 'if' – but 'when, where and how?'

When socmedia (you can live with that in the interests of brevity?) got even halfway mainstream some corporates via their opportunistic ad agencies thought it was a low-cost advertising medium. There were naïve attempts to peddle their snake oil under the guise of consumer comment or happy customer endorsement. What they discovered, as have many others more recently, is that social media is rigorous in outing dishonesty in any shape or form.

What's delightful and terrifying at the same time about socmedia is the utterly uncontrolled, immediacy of it. Nhlanhla Nene (then Director General in the ministry of finance, now deputy minister and an extremely capable man) featured on SABC Morning Live TV and his chair collapsed. He became an international celebrity within the hour. He temporarily lost his sense of humour, regained it and earned our admiration. Here's the link: http://youtu.be/XnHIeXQCfog

Nestlé adopted a very haughty stance when Greenpeace queried the origins of the palm oil it used in the production of Kit Kat chocolate products. So Greenpeace crafted a really smart TV commercial. Here it is: http://youtu.be/VaJjPRwExO8 In case you haven't seen it and didn't want to go to the link (I can deal with the depression J) it featured a bored man shredding documents, reaching for a Kit Kat, breaking off a finger and crunching it. But it wasn't a chocolate finger. It was an Orangutan finger. The Nestlé palm oil was being sourced from Indonesia and endangered species jungle habitat was being destroyed. Global negative response was phenomenal. The Nestlé CEO landed up contritely apologizing on international TV and promising that they'd in future verify origins of all raw materials. Given that toxic Melamine was found in some of their baby formula (also due to iffy origin) not too long before the Kit Kat debacle, one hopes Nestlé have learned something.

Tiger Woods took stick on socmedia by dithering for four months before making a half-baked and appallingly contrived 'apology' with a hand-picked, non-media audience. He suffered a flood of derisive jokes and comments as a result.

Tony Hayward, the BP CEO had his worst nightmare when viral footage of the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe (no, it wasn't a 'spill' – you do that with a glass of milk) had people around the planet in uproar. Link here: http://youtu.be/O-rJH9xB7fk He suffered from serious foot-in-mouth disease and BP replaced him as media spokesperson with their Chairman. The man is a Scandinavian and instead of saying they had not communicated well with stakeholders, he referred to us as 'the little people'. That phrase was made notorious by one Leona Helmsley of Hotel heiress fame - busted for stealing from the corporate cookie jar. See story here: http://bit.ly/bHCiae

What's the point of all of this? Marshall McLuhan http://bit.ly/c7jf4 legendary media guru said that the medium is the message and predicted we'd be working in a global village. We are. The time to global market is immediate via socmedia and the Internet. The concept of corporate media management has gone out of the door. You can't control it but you can learn to be proactive. Plus respect the vital need for candour and transparency when things go wrong in your organization or with your service.

The biggest paradox is that South African giants like the mobile phone networks have done poorly in their attempts to engage and keep in touch with customers. Vodacom and Cell C admit they don't monitor twitter over weekends. Ah, so they have a part-time socmedia strategy of engagement? Not advisable, not sustainable. The worst 3G outage in years took place on Sunday 19^th September but Vodacom were not monitoring the cries for information from their stranded wireless Internet users. We languished in cyber hell without connectivity. Outcome for me? Tipping point finally reached. I shall have ADSL installed at my home office and downgrade my Vodacom 3G to the bare minimum for when I'm not near a WiFi hotspot.

The lesson for corporates is this: You can't experiment with socmedia. You'd better have a real strategy for using it. Have people who understand it managing it for you. Make sure they're passionate about it. All companies can and should learn from FNB's helpful, ever-present and responsive @rbjacobs on twitter. You can't hide away in your plush offices and hope that angry tweets or facebook posts will evaporate into cyberspace. They won't. They'll just go viral. Think about it.

This post was first published in Memeburn

 

 

 

 

Comms trends and your business

The MD of a large communications company I work with takes pride in having a secretary print out his e-mails because he can't or won't use a computer. No, he's not seventy years of age – he's just a touch over forty. So what does he hope to accomplish by rejecting or resisting the advance of technology I wonder? As banks improve security on credit cards, using smart chips, and biometric identification devices (iris recognition, fingerprint scans, voice algorhythms etc.) proliferate, so technophobes (people who are afraid of technology) are going to find themselves a seriously disadvantaged minority.

Technology is doing for your business today what we couldn't, in our wildest dreams have imagined, even five years ago. If you lift static or electronic Billboards, outdoor or lamp post ads, point of sale (POS), magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, promotions and PR – and then push the Internet in underneath them – that's our communications foundation and media world of today. So the Internet acts as a superb technology platform on which everything else can function a whole lot more efficiently. The media-type becomes less important because the delivery mechanism is the same.

The best part of this shift is that you no longer need to waste energy, effort or money on mass communications in a shotgun fashion into the marketplace. You can do the old rifle trick of more accurately identifying a select and narrower target audience. Because of the Internet, you're can also direct highly-focused communication messages at that audience. The best part of all is of course, the extraordinary ease of access to and cost-effectiveness of using the Internet.

What does this mean for your business or practice today? Just one hugely important benefit: you can probably stop producing printed brochures. They're out of date almost the moment they come off the press. They're expensive and also generic – meaning they're not custom-crafted to the specific interests or needs of the individual to whom you give them. When you make the shift to an electronic template designed and loaded on your computer system, you can edit, custom-craft, drop in the logo of the prospect and tailor the information to address their unique needs.

The 'customer of one' and 'individuation' are presently two of the most important global business trends. As an example, when you go into a Seattle or other coffee shop, you're able to order a Cappuccino any of about a dozen different ways. Coffee shops identified the desire of the customer to choose the permutations and details themselves, way before bigger business started to recognise the trend. Use that same approach in your business. When you're designing and creating things specially for a client or customer, it's less likely that they'll walk away from your focused-on-them business, to a mass-market competitor. This is what gives you some degree of exclusivity and the much talked-about USP (unique selling proposition) – the 'something' that makes you stand out among the competitive clutter and gives you the edge of difference.

Get to understand social media and the role it can play in networking and marketing your business. Your website should move from being a static, useless electronic brochure into being a Blog (interactive weblog or website) in which you can engage your clients. If you look at a well-designed Blog today, it looks no different from a conventional website. Its advantage though is that you can update it as frequently as you wish. You can engage clients or customers in a forum or discussion. So you start what is the single-most important communications device in business today – a conversation. That's the basis of modern communications. Dialogue, two-way engagement. You talking with them and not at them.

Final thought: Doing just one or two big-bang customer relationship marketing exercises a year is not going to produce a sustainable result. Go for more frequent but shorter contacts, without becoming invasive or irritating. So you stay top of mind. An e-newsletter is a good option but it must be news- and not a history of your business or anything which is not of value to the customer. They must also not be able to read that same news elsewhere. Start thinking about this – it may be the kick start of a whole new era for you.

 

Should you be using Social Media?

This question gets asked more and more by organisation PR people and those involved in reputation management. Like all technological developments, there's a barrier to entry. Example: You've never played a video game. You're simply not going to be able to co-ordinate the buttons, steering wheel and pedals to prevent yourself having a crashing good time on screen. This is where the so-called 'thumbs generation' does well. They approach every newly emerging widget in a spirit of enquiry, adventure and with entertainment and connectivity in mind. We need to do the same.

Not all of the Social Media mix will be for you or deliver on your communication needs. But I've blogged for a long time and that blog has become an influential and controversial part of my personal media mix. Organisations have learned painfully that you can't start a blog punting your products or services as if it's genuinely being written by an outsider. When you get busted trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, the backlash is pretty fierce.

Podcasts are serving the needs of many tech-savvy organisations across the spectrum. They're little audio files that people can click on and download or listen to there and then. The advantage is that if you miss a radio interview, these days that interview will be available a short while later on the network's website as a podcast. It's a great way of communicating short and relevant bits of audio information to your client base. I regularly get interviewed for other people's podcasts on a variety of topics. So they're using external sources with 'cred' to add to the lustre of their media mix.

Have I gone LinkedIn, MyGenius and Twitter? No - for a variety of reasons. I really can't think of anything more mind-numbing than spending time putting up my activities in 140 characters or less, as Tweets for people to 'follow' me. The tweets of some people I know are a banal embarrassment. If you're a high profile celeb or politician, heck, you'd be brain-damaged not to use it. Barack Obama did during the US Presidential primaries, to great effect.

Enter facebook I resisted the idea of using it until a conspiracy of friends swamped me with e-mails and SMSs bullying me on to it. (I'm a pushover). Now I regularly use it. It keeps me in touch with my dear ex pharmacist in Oregon in the USA and connected to all sorts of people with whom I simply don't have the time to make regular personal contact. Ditto for them I'm sure. It's even produced some unexpected work for me. As people for whom I'd done consulting work years ago take up the threads again. It's become a way of keeping in touch with all sorts of micro trends of interest to me in the work I do and also to share on many fronts with other people. That's the essence of networking. It's great to use in sometimes unproductive airport or between-meetings moments. And it needn't be just messing around. You can make it work for you.

My recommendation? Get involved with some of the Social Media at least. It can pay dividends for you and your organisation. Health warning though: It can be very addictive and time consuming if you don't use it intelligently and judiciously. But that's not a good enough reason not to use it! Finally, a confession: I've started using Twitter as well (blush).