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Posts Tagged ‘Decision Makers’

In the past two weeks, I’ve been asked a version of the same question about four times. The questions came from decision-makers at three companies/brands and one advertising agency. The question was generally this one:

Why on Earth would we allow our employees to openly represent us online?

Yes, all you social media purists out there, there are still non-Kool-aid drinkers amongst us. In fact, 90 percent of the world is still old school about marketing and communications. Keep on Kumbaya-ing with your “l love your blog” crowd. The rest of us will do the hard work.

While the answer to that question varies by client, environment and more, I generally answer it with, “If you are afraid of what your employees will say about you online, then your problem is not your employees, it’s you. Hire smarter.” There are nuances, though. Employees don’t have to be “official” spokespeople and so on. But, generally speaking, people with the “can’t do that” attitude are afraid of their hires, not the principal.

To give you an example of what empowering your employees might look like, I need only show you this chalk board from Java Brewing Company in downtown Louisville. Jamie, Ashley, Suemi, Arielle and Laura work for the company. As patrons enter, they are introduced to their baristas.

If you ask any of them a hard question, they’ll answer, “Let me check with my manager.” If you complain about the quality of your coffee, they apologize and give you a new cup or extend an offer for you to talk to the manager. If you ask them something they don’t know, they even say, “I don’t know.”

My guess is that if they are asked those same questions on Facebook, they’ll say the same things.

Jamie, Ashley, Suemi, Arielle and Laura aren’t just baristas. They are community managers. Just without computers.

More importantly, though, Java Brewing Company proactively introduces them to you, tells you a few things they like and what their favorite drink is. This gives you suggestions on what to order, but also comfortable topics to use in conversation with the baristas as you get to know them.

I want to ask Jamie how she got to Louisville from Spartanburg, S.C., and how she likes being a Duke fan in a state that appreciates Duke as much as it does Kim Jong Il. It’s an ice-breaker, and entree to further conversation. And immediately makes me think I’m doing business with someone I know, not just some company that takes my money.

This humanizes Java Brewing Company.

So think about how you would react to buying coffee from such a place if you “knew” the staff, had talking points to strike up conversations (Not even about their company, just random, life-fulfilling conversations.) and saw it as more than just a store where you spend money for a cup-a-joe.

Then tell me about your company’s baristas.

You may have noticed we’ve been running a Crowdscience survey on the blog for a while now. I hope you’ve taken the time to answer the surveys – the results are quite impressive. Here are some highlights:

• 62.5% of readers are college graduates, 21.9% have graduate degrees
• 51.6% of readers are employed full-time, 32.3% are self-employed.
• The majority of readers are decision makers or have influence:
  
  
  
• Readers come from companies of all sizes:
  
  
  
• The majority of readers are senior executives or leaders of their companies.
• The majority of readers are in the 34 to 44 age range.
• 56.3% of readers have a somewhat negative outlook on the economy.
• The majority of readers make over $75k, with many upwards of $150k.
• The majority of readers use the Internet over 24 hours per week, with one-third over 36 hours per week.

Perhaps most interesting were some attitudes towards entrepreneurialism – over half the readers said they were interested in starting their own business and/or changing jobs and occupations. As a serial entrepreneur (aka – a guy that loves to bounce from one challenge to the next), this was fascinating to me. Over time, it would suggest that I’m attracting like-minded readers to the blog.

These demographics are exactly where I’d like the blog to be as a matter of influence and usefulness!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

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A social media policy is a company’s first line of defense against risk in social media marketing. Shockingly, only one in three companies has a social media policy in place. While I’m sure that the majority of marketing managers and decision-makers who read Social Media Explorer are ahead of the curve, there’s a good chance your company doesn’t have a written policy.

*UPDATE* – eMarketer published a story and research on companies without social networking policies just hours after we went live with this post. 69% of American companies do not have social networking policies for employees.

Part of the problem is that a social media policy is a misnomer. Your company should have social media policies. It’s not just making rules for who can blog and say they work for you. It’s more than just telling employees what they can and cannot do on company computers. Here’s a list of some social media policies you should consider:

• Employee Code of Conduct for Online Communications
• Employee Code of Conduct for Company Representation in Online Communications
• Employee Blogging Disclosure Policy
• Employee Facebook Usage Policy
• Employee Personal Blog Policy
• Employee Personal Social Network Policy
• Employee Personal Twitter Policy
• Employee LinkedIn Policy
• Corporate Blogging Policy
• Corporate Blog Use Policy
• Corporate Blog Post Approval Process
• Corporate Blog Commenting Policy
• Corporate Facebook Brand Page Usage Policy
• Corporate Facebook Public Comment/Messaging Policy
• Corporate Twitter Account Policy
• Corporate YouTube Policy
• Corporate YouTube Public Comment Policy
• Company Password Policy

While it may seem frivolous to spell out policies for every social network, that’s not quite the point. Different networks have different implications for different companies. YouTube, for instance, is a fertile ground for anonymous commentors and lets-see-if-I-can-say-the-eff-word fodder. If your company or employees have reason to be on YouTube, it might be best to have a policy to prevent any future embarrassment if they’re outed as an employee while behaving like the crowds.

By having written policies for your employees in personal and company use, your customers or audience in their behavior in interacting with your company and processes in place for handling social media content production and user-generated content handling, you mitigate risk and keep your lawyers happy. In my experience, when policies are in place, the “no”s you are used to hearing from legal and compliance suddenly become “yes”es.

While there are several excellent pieces of advice from around the web on what you should include in a policy or how to write your own (see below), I was recently asked to review a product called the Social Media Policies Toolkit offered by Toolkit Cafe. The Toolkit features templates for many of above types of policies. With them, you can either plug your company name in and go, or use as a basis for your policy creation.

Frankly, I was so impressed by the templates, I asked the Toolkit Cafe folks if I could not only recommend their product, but use it and even participate in any affiliate program they might have. You may have noticed their advertisement in my sidebar recently. I do recommend this product and will use it as a basis of policy creation for clients in the future. As always, I recommend the policies be customized and catered to each specific client’s needs, but the bases and best practices are covered with these templates. The kit is available for $149.00.

And yes, I do profit if you purchase after clicking on the ad or the links above. If you wish me to not profit from the recommendation, you can visit http://toolkitcafe.com and purchase free of the affiliation. Regardless, if you’re working on or planning to work on policies for your organization or clients, you should have this tool in your arsenal.

The Toolkit Cafe products (they also offer similar kits for Six Sigma, Budget & Finance, Telecommuting, Windows 7 and IT Governance) are geared toward Information Technology managers and directors, but are wholly useful to other disciplines.

And, as if snooping around my brain to land in this post, Seyfarth Shaw Attorneys emailed me last night to let me know of a webinar they are producing tomorrow, Feb. 4, at 1 p.m. ET, called “Untangling Web 2.0: Understanding The Implications of Social Media In The Workplace.” The webinar is free for the firm’s clients and $100 for non-clients. I plan on attending to see what Seyfarth Shaw labor and employment attorney Devjani Mishra has to say about risk and social media. The webinar is scheduled to include tips for implementing an effective social media policy, best practices for the use of social media to attract and screen job applicants and special consideration for employer-sponsored social media activity.

While I know little about Mrs. Mishra or Seyfarth Shaw and cannot endorse the information they’ll present (I’ve not seen it), the legal perspective will be good to hear. I promise to report back … likely live on Twitter.

Does your company have a written policy? Does it include all or part of the above listing? What challenges did you find writing it? If you haven’t written one yet, what specific company challenges are you concerned about. Share if you can and let’s discuss in the comments.

Related articles by Jason Falls and Zemanta

• Social Media Policies Needn’t Be Draconian. But You Do Need One (Shel Holtz)
• Businesses Need To Formalize Their Social Media Policies (ReadWriteWeb)
• The Need For Corporate Social Media Policies (Sysomos Blog)
• The Other Side Of Social Media Policies: Employees Rights (Mizz Information)
• The Right Way For Media Companies To Create Social Media Policies (MediaShift)
• 3 Great Social Media Policies To Steal From (Mashable)

One of the most powerful business objectives social media can deliver is consumer engagement. At least that’s what all the social media advocates tell you, right. But what exactly is “engagement,” how do you measure it and why is it all of a sudden the holy grail of marketing?

Frankly, engagement is just a bullshit term made up to apply to making people do something in the online (or offline) space. Sixty years ago engaging a customer meant you said, “Hi. Wanna buy some stuff?” They said, “Sure, whatya got?” Then they bought something.

Successful engagement.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. We invented specialized professions based around skill sets that most people didn’t want to spend time figuring out. Namely public relations. You could throw today’s umbrella term of “marketing,” customer service and now social media on the list, too. Sans the Internet, all of these “soft” marketing disciplines fell under “sales” in 1950.

Now, the people in charge of these specialties are smart. They had to find ways to justify their existence. So they invented measures and indicators of how successful they were being relating to the public and such. As a result, we have several generations of decision-makers who think things like “impressions” “advertising equivalency” “mind share” and now “engagement” are important indicators of … wait for it … how much stuff you’ll sell.

It’s always about the bottom line to the people who sign the checks.

(I know, I sound like I’m ridiculing PR for throwing out BS to justify its existence. I’m really not. Or at least, as a PR guy by trade, I’m not going to say that I believe the measures do not have merit. They do, but largely only to us. The CEOs have PR because they don’t know who will deal with those annoying journalists if they cut the department. That and PR folks are good at spinning … even many CEOs think impressions are meaningful.)

But … digressing a bit … engagement is being sold left and right as the benefit-du-jour of the social media set. As we saw last week, Business.com’s Social Media Best Practices report on question and answer forums reported that 57 percent of companies involved with social media judge success of their programs based on, “Engagement with prospects.” Another 50 percent determine success based on, “Engagement with customers.”

Amber Naslund, a friend and Radian6’s defacto engagement director in her role of Director of Community, tossed this in the comments over the weekend:

“It’s one thing to talk about social media driving engagement with prospects. Or to say that it has a positive impact on lead quality. We can probably have a good discussion about how and why these things are true, theoretically.

“The tactical trouble I see is that companies don’t know how to measure engagement with prospects. In other words, what are the indicators that you can tangibly, regularly track that point to increased or decreased engagement? How do you establish criteria for a “quality lead”, baseline that, and continue measuring it moving forward?

“It’s a discussion that’s going to keep coming up, I think, because companies aren’t operationally equipped to do the actual measurement required to show movement and performance, one way or the other, toward these metrics. Time to start diving into the details?”

Why yes … yes it is. Thanks for the thought-starter, Amber.

So, what, pray tell, is engagement?

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist, has a rather mathematical view of the world and websites. He (nicely) stuck it do the PR folks way back in October of 2007 saying:

Engagement is not a metric that anyone understands and even when used it rarely drives the action / improvement on the website.

Why?

Because it is not really a metric, it is an excuse.

That’s a hard metric advocate’s view of engagement.

Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing and perhaps the finest SEO-centric public relations professional on the planet had this to say:

“Linking, bookmarking, blogging, referring, clicking, friending, connecting, subscribing, submitting inquiry forms and buying are all engagement measures at various points in the customer relationship.”

Mark Story, digital media guru for the Securities and Exchange Commission and veteran public relations and social media pro offered that engagement depends on your target audience and can equate to time spent on site (for website engagement), active conversations in comments sections (for blog engagement), successful point-of-view covered in the media or on a blog (for PR outreach engagement) and more.

Katie Paine, perhaps the authority on social media and public relations measurement, responded with this pithy tome:

As always it depends on the audience and the goals. If the audience is employees and you want employees to be engaged — we measure it by the percentage of employees that contribute to Yammer, the degree to which people read and comment on our internal blog, the increase in internal referrals, reduced turnover rate, etc.

If you are Georgia Pacific and you want people to be engaged in the Quilted Nortern brand, its both the percentage of items/tweets etc., that recommend the brand — as in “wiping your butt with Quilted Northern is like wiping your butt with a cloud”– and the number of times consumers defend it — as in “I don’t care if its made out of the foreskin of an endangered species, I want the best for my baby.”

The common thread in the responses from those and others I asked was that engagement depends. Whether or not an audience is engaged depends on who they are, who you are in relation to them, what medium or tool the communication is occurring in or on and a whole bunch of other factors that would make this post infinitely more lengthy than it already is.

What successful engagement means to me is this:

Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better?

That can mean profits. You sold stuff = Successful engagement.

That can mean ideas. You got feedback on your product or service you can use = Successful engagement.

That can mean referrals and recommendations. You got customers to tell other people you’re cool = Successful engagement.

That can mean digital merit badges. You got people to link to you, follow you, Re-Tweet you = Successful engagement.

How do you define and measure engagement for your brand? Prescribe that definition in your goals and objectives when planning what you want to achieve with your social media programs. If you don’t do it there, you’ll be spitting and shitting all the same drivel the echo chamber does … “we have 10,000 Facebook Fans … we had 120 comments on the last blog post …”

Good for you. But do those 10,000 Facebook fans do anything or seldom even look at your brand page like most “fans?” Do the 120 comments give you valuable insights on a potential new product feature or did four people get caught up in a flame war over who has the best collection of your refrigerator magnets? That’s what matters.

Do you need to keep stats like a coach’s kid on all that other stuff? Sure. Someone will ask at some point. But the stat sheet only gives you a glimpse of the team. The fans see the all-star point guard scores 25 points per game. The coach sees he favors his right side and is confused by the match-up zone.

Are you looking at the game or the stat sheet?

With that in mind, how do you define engagement? Is there more merit to the specifics than I portray? The comments, as always, are yours.

Related articles by Jason Falls with Zemanta

• Toward A Definition Of Engagement (Katie Paine)
• Measuring Extreme Brand Engagement (Katie Paine)
• Lead Generation For Sales Using Social Media (Dean Holmes)
• Engaging With Engagement (Cory Treffiletti on MediaPost)

The return on investment for social media marketing is not an easy thing to determine. It’s not easy to measure. It’s not easy to argue. It’s not easy to prove.

I’ll pause while the Kool-Aid drinkers curse at the screen and jump to the comments to call me names before reading the rest of the post.

For more on my thoughts, please revisit this post and conversation with Katie Payne from PRSA International last year.

What is easier to determine, measure, argue and prove (or at least so we think) is the investment in traditional media. This is why we evangelists have such a hard time with the subject matter of ROI. The irony is that traditional media is impossible to accurately measure while social media is less so.

But brand managers and C-level executives won’t accept the less than two percent return rate on the average paid search or email marketing campaign because folks like Nielsen and Arbitron have been telling them for years they’ve been getting 25-30 percent return on million dollar TV buys or radio campaigns. Throw in soft dollar metrics we can advocate for social media (impressions/unique visitors, subscribers, comments, followers, friends, online sentiment and tone, net promoter score and the like) and executives laugh social media out of legitimate conversations.

Decision-makers want to know, “If I spend X amount of dollars on social media, what does it get me?” And Twitter followers doesn’t impress them. You can build a business case for building a community of engaged consumers, noting that the lifetime value of a consumer is worth more than one-off sales of your product. But to truly build a vast community of loyal customers that can impact your bottom line in “good ROI” ways takes an investment of both time and resources.

That’s right. Resources. Social media is not free. (The Kool-Aid drinkers left can now fast forward to the name-calling.)

Let’s look at the reality of the mediums at this point. (I do think this is changing, but not fast enough for us social media evangelists to win this argument.) Spend $100,000 on social media and, let’s say, you wind up with some content, engagement with your audience and online buzz and the foundation for cultivating relationships with a few thousand, even optimistically 100,000, interested fans moving forward. You see a slight up-tick in sales, but nothing that moves the needle any more than the weather does, and forecasts are strong. That’s a pretty strong ROI in my opinion.

Spend $1,000,000 on a television commercial/campaign with strong creative and targeted media placement and show a six percent increase in sales, better brand recognition and so on.

(I made up the numbers. I know national TV can’t be done for $1MM. Oh wait. The Kool-Aid peckerheads aren’t reading anymore anyway. Never mind.)

Daniel Wiggins of Bouvier Kelly asked me recently what I thought about spending money on traditional versus social media. I’m sure he’ll blog some of my answers soon. One thing I told him, though, stood out as I re-read the email:

“As much as we love social media, the audience there is opt in. Mass media isn’t. Even though the messages are force fed to consumers they still have better reach. We need to build communities of consumers through social media to the point mass media becomes less effective in driving people where we want them to go. Until then, we should use the traditional to help populate the non.”

This isn’t the state of the world and end of the story. It’s just where we are now. I’m hoping we can continue this discussion both now in the comments and six months from now at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. The brilliant Keith Burtis has put together a panel discussion called, “Prove it! Exploring Social Media ROI for Business.” He’s asked me to be on the panel along with this impressive list of social media and business thinkers: Amber Naslund of Radian6; Sue Murphy of Jester Creative; Alan Isfan, CEO of Favequest; Jay Berkowitz, CEO of 10 Golden Rules and Justin Levy of New Marketing Labs. In order for that panel to happen, we need some help with the voting. If you’d like to see that panel happen, click here to vote for it.

These folks are going to blog about this panel, too, in the coming days. I encourage you to subscribe to their blogs, hear what they have to say on the issue and comment. Add to our collective thoughts on this so the panel can be better informed and we can all begin to inch closer to better answers when people ask us how to measure the ROI of social media.

In the meantime, leap-frog through the Kool-Aid kids below and fire off some thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think.

Related articles by Jason Falls with Zemanta

• Social Media Planning & Measurement (SlideShare.net presentation from Beth Harte)
• Why Social Media Is More Measurable Than Traditional Media (Jacob Morgan)
• Social Media ROI: What do you measure? (Ruth White-Cabbell on the Cisco blog)
• On Demonstrating ROI (Gary Vaynerchuck on Radian6Video)
• Social Media ROI (Ann Handley on Radian6Video)