Tag Archives: business

Social business: why you should add strategy to your content

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One aspect of social media in a business is something I’m just about starting to ‘get’. It’s not just social media. It’s how to get your message across to potential customers at all, now that social media are becoming part of the business habitat. Everyone is suddenly in marketing. And my discovery (tah-daah!) is that many of us suck at it.

Social media: knowing how it works is not the issue

I don’t mean we can’t do marketing no matter what you do for training. I mean that right now, even if we know our way around social media, we have not been trained yet in (the basics of):

  • Risk management
  • Content marketing
  • Social media for business purposes.

Add strategy to your content. Image: Thinker - ContentRambler avatar

Thinking up a content strategy [OCAL image with alterations]

This may result in (m)any of the following:

  1. Your colleague has been told that social media is all about personal. She does a meet-the-whole-family blog and discusses details of her private life you don’t want to know about – depending on your interests 😉
  2. Another colleague (I’m assuming you have many of them) uploads an 86-page presentation to SlideShare, assuming she’s done her sharing duty this way. Description: “this is a presentation I did two weeks ago, enjoy”.
  3. A third colleague likes to rant about telecom services, airlines and so on which he had bad experiences with. Unfortunately one of these companies is a customer of yours.

Since I’m confident that you can spot the issues in the first and last example at once no matter what your professional background is, I’ll move on with the second example. Why? Because this is at first sight the least damaging thing anyone can do. And for that reason, it probably happens more often than the other two.

How to handle professional content

From a risk perspective, I’d really like to know if there are things like customers’ names in that presentation. If there are, you’re in trouble.

Let’s assume that it’s ‘safe’ content though, meaning it’s not about private stuff, nor does any customer of yours look bad or have their information shared on the internet. What are the downsides?

  • Your colleague’s description doesn’t really tell anyone what those 86 pages are about… that’s a missed opportunity. Possibly half a dozen opportunities, depending on what is in that presentation. I’ll get back to this topic later.
  • Here’s the good part: if the title of the presentation is as nondescript as the description, no-one is going to read it. Unless your colleague is, say, Seth Godin.
  • The bad part is that no-one will read it. But at least you’ll have a chance to improve the way your content is presented before it’s been downloaded and possibly put to good use without you ever seeing a dime in return. Or getting a “thank you”, or a new contact with an invitation you might have used for a spot of networking.

Optimizing your content for different learning styles

Depending on the content of a single presentation you could get up to half a dozen blog posts out of it; make a couple of video interviews; do a web chat or two about the subject. And I don’t mean either-or: you could do all of them. Why?

Learning styles

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a colleague repeat the basics to me just yesterday. By typing pages full of words, I’m basically catering for a specific type of person. I’m probably writing for people who learn in a way that is similar to my own.

I used to have books for breakfast. When I got to read my first ‘grown-up’ book in English – Dune, by Frank Herbert – I didn’t do any homework for three weeks (goodbye Math results). If I woke up in the middle of the night I’d read in bed.

Adding examples, especially about people and situations you can relate to, makes a (long) text more digestible for people with a different learning style. The same goes for adding a picture – preferably one with a personal touch, or with warm colors. Pictures that reach out to the viewer.

Time pressure and content guzzling

Another colleague told me that, because he spends so much time in the car, he prefers to listen to podcasts of blogs – especially by those bloggers who are real storytellers. The fact that some professions have people on their feet and in their car at all times of the day gives you yet another reason for trying different media.

Your social business needs a content strategy

For your (future) business, being on social media without knowing how to market your content doesn’t make much sense.

Note that I’m hardly saying this as a die-hard, veteran, marketing blogger. Needless to say I know I’m missing a big portion of my ‘potential audience’ by not using every available medium but just writing what’s on my mind. If you’re blogging like me and you’re not getting the most from your writing right now, that’s fine – if you’re fine with it. If not, you have work to do.

I hope you enjoyed this post. I wrote it today, in two or three sittings (I have a job and a family!), which is about the fastest I’ve done so far for anything that isn’t actually a “Blogging impressions” post 🙂

If you’ll add your thoughts on the subject of social business, content strategy or anything related, I would appreciate it and I’ll reply to any (non-spammy) comment.

Social business process: tying your teams together

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When reading and hearing about social business, what is your image of what its ‘ambassadors’ want? My impression is that they want change before anything else. Unfortunately, ‘tearing down silos’ in large organizations like many innovative minds want isn’t popular with the people who will be doing the answering if things go wrong.

I agree with the ambassadors’ plea to get a good number of people involved in social media for business – and train them properly: in possibilities AND in risks. But how do you avoid getting yourself into a complete mess?

The case for a unified social media approach

I’ve talked before about the way marketing may well be up to the ‘social challenge’ but that it doesn’t help much if your customers get stuck elsewhere in your organization. Getting one team onto a level that shouts ‘social business!’ and neglecting the others can be worse than… Well I might say “doing nothing” but let’s settle for …starting quietly and watching what happens. Let me give you an example.

Social Business Process

Social business process: where do you lead your customer?

Andrew Grill recently had a dismal experience in the world of ‘4G’. In a post this week he gave the issue some thought in terms of social business. He refers to his earlier post “Mind the social media gap” in which Dave Evans tells us:

“Marketing sells the expectation, marketing creates demand, … Operations delivers.”

The social media gap is the gap between expectation and delivery. Any kind of gap between the two drives conversation. The good part is it works whenever you do better than you promised (unless you promised way too little). But the reverse is also true.

In the case Andrew describes, marketing was clearly so far ahead of the game in terms of social media that this led him to expect a great (social customer) experience on every level. But operations wasn’t half ‘social’ enough. Andrew lists all the things that went wrong in the ‘support’ phase, thus giving an excellent to-do for anyone who seriously wants to go social.*

It might have been less of a problem if Andrew had not been a social media ‘native’, or if support had been able to get hold of someone who could actually manage the support process via social media. The way things went, the whole company looked bad.

The conclusion has got to be that you can’t limit yourself to training just the marketing team.

Tying teams together: sales to support

Perhaps you don’t get many questions via social media right now, at least from customer services.** What you could do to get a clear picture of customer feedback is contact a few people from different teams:

  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • After sales
  • Customer service

Now I won’t go all ‘agile business’ on you – classic Prince II project management tells you to “manage transitions”. It’s your job to find out where valuable customer information falls into the cracks of your organization, and then seal the cracks. If the only viable way to seal the cracks is to redesign the whole process, fine, that’s your next step.

First you can check:

  1. If marketing or sales are actually taking care of part of customer feedback via social media – because they have established a presence there.
  2. Whether all feedback is addressed efficiently.
  3. If anything is referred from one team to the other.

The least you can expect is to get some idea of what everyone is doing, and whether or not different parts of your organization are showing the same ‘face’ to your customers.

Extending the ol’ sales funnel

Information from any customer-focused team should be accessible both ways: up and down the customer process. The ‘normal’ way would be for customers to get ‘handed down’ the process from marketing through sales to after sales. In case of issues, customers are then handed into the care of customer service.

But anything which comes in after sales should be added to the existing customer account, and any kind of feedback – positive or negative – on the sales process should travel back up and get serious attention and follow-up. Don’t let complaints just sit in your customer database – or worse, a separate customer service database. Check a number of complaints for clues that point toward underlying issues, and address those.

Working your way toward a social business process

What I would like you to consider is this:

  1. give teams a reason for working together,
  2. add a structure like regular meetings and calls to exchange information.
  3. enhance a starting cross-teams trend by providing any common support (unit) you can think of.

Even if you have a clear picture of where you want to go, you need to look for transitional stages that ‘work’ every step of the way.

One last addition: today’s interview with Frank Eliason of Citibank reminds us that customers don’t want “social services” – they want you to get things right the first time. If your cross-team session hints at problems, use that knowledge to make sure no customer will ever need your customer services.

Literature:

* Andrew Grill, Had EE Been a Social Business They Might Have Survived Launch Issues – Socialmediatoday, November 5.

** EMarketer, Social is still a small part of customer services. November 7

Further reading:

  • Amanda Nelson, 60 smart social media marketing tips, Radian6/Salesforce Marketing Cloud Blog, November 6. Amanda serves up a long list devided into aspects of social media marketing you need if you’re to call yourself a social business. One aspect is Workflow and Automation, where you’ll find some of the things I mention in this post.
  • In case you are a Microsoft/Yammer user: Yammer Announces Deeper Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration – Microsoft.com, October 29.

Feel free to share your thoughts about what a social business process could look like in your organization!

Social business people: a grass-roots movement

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In the past few years social media have become so commonplace you could say they’re boring if we didn’t find something of value in them: our networks. Our access to heaps of information and more friends, acquaintances and complete strangers on another continent than we ever had contact with before has had, and will continue to have, a profound effect on the way we view our lives and our jobs.*

A grassroots movement

This new perception is trickling into the fabric of every organization – through us – through all the individuals who show up for work every day. We’re oozing global networks from every pore. One side-effect may be that employees who’re not allowed to be on social media check their Facebook updates when they visit the bathroom, and get notably upset if they drop their smartphone into the toilet.

You don’t want that sort of thing. It’s bad for productivity, and it doesn’t smell pleasant either. By now, most businesses have a social media policy. The level of strictness varies widely.

How do people turn into social business people?

Social Business People
Social (Business) People [OCAL image]

Our present-day collective experiences don’t translate directly into employees being ambassadors for their own company. Not even the ones who are actually proud of working for or with you.

It didn’t work that way offline, and it doesn’t do so online.

So how can you help people adjust to a social business role that comes more or less naturally to them?

How to make social media ‘work’ for you

This may either sound completely silly, or so obvious you can’t believe I’m bothering to say it. I’ll risk it anyway. Have you considered:

  • taking inventory to see what types of people work for your organization;
  • thinking up ways to ‘market’ the uses of social media for business to each group? How would you approach someone from accounting, or in HR?

I’m talking classical market research and segmentation here. My next paragraph is for you if you lack time, resources, knowledge, or interest to get involved in ‘real’ market research.

Your people in the picture: cutting a few corners

Sit down with a few colleagues. List all your teams or departments. Then jot down every conceivable prejudice you could have about each team. I’ll help you get started with two unresearched examples 🙂

Accounting:

  1. maniacs for details. Never challenge them on details, unless you value emails longer than this post 😉
  2. cautious types: will always come up with rules we might be breaking. Share half a profile on social media – if they’re there.
  3. allergic to marketing talk which seems all promise and no accountability, unless they actually know responsible-sounding marketing people (what are the odds?)

Human Resources:

  1. will talk all day just for the sake of communicating.
  2. tech dummies. If a printer breaks down in HR the mechanic will find half a dozen people discussing how they have no idea what to do about it.
  3. allergic to technical explanations.

Don’t forget your own team, if only for the fun of it – or to avoid being unfair to others. Establish a rule of no rules and you should have an amusing and productive session 😉

Next up would be to find out what’s true of all the stuff you’ve collected, or you skip that step and work out an approach for every group. What characteristics and natural affinities in each group can you use? What issues do you need to address?**

Use your people’s strengths

Anyone who wants to turn a company into a social business by influencing the employees should assess people’s strengths and ambitions and build on those:

  • Support people who want to help others by making room for peer2peer support;
  • Train people who want to represent your company to guide online conversations.
  • Help people with a passion for reading and writing find subjects to write about, and train their writing skills.***

I’d like to conclude with a few tips for conversations in an advisory role:

  1. Make sure you know what you want from the conversation: are you checking your assumptions (or prejudices), or finding out what skills and ambitions people have that you could use in a future ‘social business’?
  2. Clarify what you want to achieve by asking questions, and why. Especially if you’re in a company that has prohibited social media use in the past, you had better come up with a good and honest reason.
  3. Practice serious listening.
  4. Don’t offer to fix anything – this tip is aimed at tool-selling specimens 🙂

Good luck, and let me know what else you’d like me to talk about!

Further reading:

* In case you missed the introduction to my ‘social business’ writing project, here’s my post from last Friday.

** There is any number of books about personality types and communication styles. One I’m familiar with is Management Drives (scroll down for the English text). Knowing a little about the subject may help you in conversations.

***Lou Hoffman wrote about writing skills, Experimentation in Content Marketing Offers Promise of Competitive Advantage, November 4, Business2community.

Please share this post if you found it interesting, or leave your thoughts about social business people and must-read articles in a comment below – I will reply to any (non-spammy) comment!

Social business organization: elements of change

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Since I started to write about social business and agile business, I’ve had some feedback (thank you Twitter) that said something on the line of “useful stuff – like to read more”. Lucky me – I’ve discovered I have a lot more to say. So much in fact that it’s never going to fit in one post.

In this post I’ll go into a bit of organization history and the present-day trends and I’ll tell you how I propose to deal with the topic of social business.

Business organization in theory

History is a wonderful thing so long as you don’t have to live it. If you don’t believe me, imagine life without toothpaste. But here’s the thing: we do live history. At least many of us do – we work in organizations that are too big for us. How’d that happen?

Social Business Organization - Elements of Change

What’s your view of change?

In any group of people it will soon be obvious that some people have different affinities and skills than others.

In larger-scale businesses (let’s say in the Industrial Age) it made perfect sense for successful, growing organizations to form teams and departments that could function relatively independently from each other.

In management literature the term ‘span of control’ is used for the number of people any manager (or whatever he/she is called) can manage effectively. Managers were given a group of people they could actually oversee, and the ‘managees’ didn’t have to deal with 200 colleagues every hour of the day – just people in their team, and their manager. In terms of organization theory that must have seemed very efficient.*

Unfortunately, these silos have some major drawbacks, like a lack of communication between teams and valuable information falling into a crack somewhere. We’ve learned over time to deal with the status quo by using work-arounds of every description and ignoring the bits we can’t solve.

But in our current, information-overloaded society these negative side-effects of the nature of our organizations are no longer something we can safely ignore. And we don’t have to.

Technology-driven changes and your business organization

Technology has reached a point where it can actually help overcome the age-old problem of working in an organization its ‘inhabitants’ and its customers can’t oversee. But these new ‘social’ solutions need a different mindset from all those involved. And at some point some CXO is going to have to decide to ditch some of the old structures, procedures and software to make way for the new social working method.

Most businesses stop short of that, settling instead for add-ons and plug-ins. The thing about plug-ins – as any self-hosted blogger will tell you – is that some of them make your blog run a whole lot slower…

My credentials as a social business or change management pro

Here goes:

  • Affinity with the subject: check
  • Any kind of topic-related study: started with an introduction on organization theory, been interested ever since.
  • Strategic role within a company: nope
  • Strategic change management experience: nope
  • IT implementation: yes, on the user side of the equation (functional requirements).

I basically know what doesn’t work, and I have some ideas about why something will or will not take off the way you’d like it to. Standard procedures for supporting or facilitating online collaboration on any level, of any description don’t lead to adoption by employees of its own accord. A lot of tech stuff has got so many handy options, giving it to your average employee is like handing a Swiss army knife to your granny and telling her to open the door with it. It won’t work in a hurry – unless your granny had an unusual career that is.

Elements of change: proposed subjects

There are many ways to start changing your business, and I’m sure every single one of them has its challenges. To increase my chances of writing sensible information about each aspect, and hopefully add some useful articles for further reading, I will deal with one view in each post:

  1. Bottom up – employees are changing. I’ve written a post that addresses some issues. How do you enhance and direct changes in your workforce?
  2. Top down – strategy talk. I’ll get into it when the time comes.
  3. Manager level – this is actually a part of larger organizations that should not be overlooked. It’s more interesting than it looks from the outside!
  4. Tying your teams together. Buzz has it that you should be tearing down the silos inside your organization. You’ve just read a paragraph or two in which I stated that those silos used to have a function. Like it or not, they’re hard to get rid of. The fact that most articles about social business are focused on marketing led to my writing my “Back to Front” post.

* Literature I’m loosely referring to in this post:

  • The organization classic: Mintzberg on Management
  • Steven van Belleghem: The Conversation Company (which I mentioned in an earlier post before reading it)
  • And there are any number of great titles out there that focus on the role of conversations within the confines of your organization, like Crucial Conversations and Conversations for Change.

The central issue I’d like to ponder is what it takes from all those involved to adapt to the changes which look set to turn your organization into a social business.

Do you have thoughts or must-read literature you’d like to share? How do you view your own organization – and your role in it – in light of the whole social business buzz?

Business dynamics: big data and social media are changing us

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A few days ago I found an article titled: “Being Agile Is the New Paradigm for Marketing”. It could have been a quote from Dilbert’s manager, but (alas) no.

I’d run into the term ‘agile marketing’ before. Since it sounded like a possible trend I decided to dig just a little bit. In this post you’ll find the results of my amateur archaeology.

Dig into the subject of agile business

Trend: BYOS

A few points from the ‘agile marketing’ article:

  • “Agile” is a method from software development which basically means you’re more flexible than in traditional project management. (I’d say that shouldn’t be too hard, especially in IT projects.)
  • Recent changes in social media make it necessary for us to develop an agile business model. I mentioned a few of those changes in an earlier post.
  • We should become more flexible since rapid changes in technology can impact business to the extent that it, too needs to change – if it’s to survive.
  • This calls for changes to the business model. Everything seems to hinge on technology here.

Marketers are supposed to be able to spot trends and write about them, so it’s no surprise to find oodles of articles about marketing trends.

Is it just marketing going all hoity-toity about discovering what will turn out to be the next management fad? Just a silly question maybe 🙂 but let’s see if there’s a glimmering of an answer out there.

A glance at Twitter shows talk about the #hrtecheurope event (October 25th): Josh Bersin gives his audience a tour of, yes, #agilebusiness – and what it means for HR.

A few disruptive changes seen in technology and society are:

  1. Social media
  2. Big data
  3. My personal favorite: people have changed (as a result of access to social media and huge amounts of information)

Organizations need to adapt by becoming highly flexible, which means quick decisions supported by technology to deal with ‘big data’.

What it also means is yet another force pushing the organization towards more transparency and employees acting more independently.

Why is it important to involve HR when you follow up on this trend?

Consider these aspects:

  • Recruiters notice people coming in with different mindsets and assumptions.
  • The technological changes affect employers’ careers.
  • You need HR for talent development.
  • HR is reportedly at the bottom of present-day contributors to ‘agile business’.

There are plenty of reasons to take a good look at different parts of the organization to get an idea of what it would mean (and take) to turn them around.

I recently wrote a post on the case for turning a company into a social business starting at the ‘back’ rather than in the marketing department. If you want things to change it’s worth noting the people who are not immediately eager to get in on every new trend, but who are experts in their own line of activity and who will understand what you’re talking about because they see it happening every day.

In the case of ‘social’ that may be the people who answer the phone for your company. Regarding ‘agile’… introducing an extreme measure of flexibility influences (organization) psychology as well as the actual structure of the organization.

It’s worth noting at this point that Beverly Macy has recently written an article about [social enterprise] trends for 2013 saying:

The true social enterprise is so far beyond marketing, it isn’t even funny.

If marketing is the only department buying into the changes affecting your business, you’re going to be in big *pause* trouble (head down ;)) sooner than you think.

How can you find out if ‘agile’ is a viable option for (parts of) your company?

  1. Read up using the reading list at the bottom of this post. I’ve included two blogs about Josh’ presentation.
  2. Look around you and talk to a few people, and I can’t stress this enough, in different parts of your organization. Leave the tool and tech talk out. Instead, ask about changes in behavior. What have people noticed about others, about themselves, about customers? Have preferences shifted lately? How do they respond to what they see is happening? What major issues are lurking beneath the surface of ‘business as usual’?
  3. While you do all this, focus on being a good advisor. Ask, shut up, listen, watch, think, ask again. I’m serious about the shutting up bit 😉

I hope I’ve given you food for thought. Please leave your thoughts in the comments. If you know of more ‘must-reads’ please add those too!

+If you found this post of interest, please share it.

Reading list

HR tech’s blog about Josh Bersin’s presentatio: Building an agile workforce;

Lumesse’s blog about Josh’ presentation;

And Janice Diner’s blog: Being Agile Is the New Paradigm for Marketing

Also worth thinking about: Beverly Macy, The Top Four Trends Shaping Social Enterprise in 2013 on Huffington Post.

Background: the classic by Jeremy Rifkin, The Age Of Access.

How to turn your business social: Back To Front

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If you’ve checked my “social business” Twitter account, you won’t be surprised to hear I’ve been reading quite a lot about social business, social media, content marketing and several other buzzwords.

At this point I’ve come to an important conclusion:

Many articles about content marketing and what it will mean for your company are full of marketing BS.

They are completely focused on marketing and what that team, or the organization as a whole should be doing to get social business right.

Road Narrows in your company?

Are there road narrows in your company?
[OCAL image]

Not a lot of help if your middle name isn’t marketing. Is it?

The main idea of most articles is that you’ll hire them to organize “social business workhops” or to take care of the actual transition. That’s obvious enough.

What I don’t read enough about is what happens if you succeed. Maybe they tell you that after you invite them to talk about your plans. I sure hope so.

The viral nightmare

Suppose you get everything right on the ‘marketing’ side of your business. You get your content sorted, your marketing team is social media savvy, and your campaigns are getting results. Actually it would help if things didn’t go quite thát fast…!

Because suddenly your marketers are up to their ears in questions and complaints coming in through social networks. Your sales people can’t handle demand. The phone at customer service is red-hot.

This is a really bad time to discover you should have trained your customer service team to handle social media for your business… three months ago!

If marketing and sales employees fail to keep up, anyone who is seriously displeased about a purchase is now also annoyed because their complaints via social networks don’t get an answer either… and if you’re really lucky they’ll end up on the phone with your call center.

How to prepare your business for success

You’ve done step 1: reading this article. And if you’ve read more on the subject, please add any must-read articles in the comments section!

Step 2: you need a plan.

  • Plan A: All-is-well if you have the time and resources to prepare thouroughly.
  • Plan B: “Oh… Beep” if you don’t.
  • Plan C (recommended): Combine A and B. You’ll see why.

Plan A: if you have enough time and resources to change your organization

A rough plan A could look like this:

  1. Train your call center/customer service staff for business social media.
  2. Get them onto social media accounts for your business. They are to handle any feedback, positive as well as negative.
  3. Get everyone else involved who will be in touch with customers at any given moment. Marketing – sales – after sales – customer service, the lot.
  4. How do customers get ‘handed down’ the organization? How would this work if you added ‘social’ to the picture?
  5. Get your CRM system hooked up to your social media accounts. It shouldn’t matter who talks to a customer or which channel they use.

Once you feel you’ve got every relevant part of your company connected to the expected information stream…

Time for a trial run.

You have three options to find out if you’re prepared for the big one:

  • A simulated campaign
  • A real campaign targeted at a very specific group. Mind you: it’s online, so if your campaign is in any way interesting to people outside the group you want, you may end up with a runaway (viral) campaign at a time when you don’t know if your business will be able to handle the consequences.
  • You don’t run campaigns. Business as usual, but social is now part of that business.

Plan B: the ‘what-if’ approach

Aim for a quick fix for any nasty side-effects of taking the plunge by asking yourself a few questions for hypothetical situations.

Examples of ‘what-if’ questions are:

What if: your campaign leads to so much demand you can’t possibly meet it? You can only say “No, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait… we’ll help you as soon as we can!” so many times before people get really annoyed.

  • Can you identify anyone up front who can pitch in if it’s urgent?
  • Can you give your customers any idea of how long it will be before they can expect their purchase?

What if: the social channels you set up are hijacked by complaining people? How or to which team or person will you refer complainers? Is that team available through social media?

What if: your intern gets hold of your business password and accidentally publishes a private update on your account? (Note: if you want to prevent this, I suggest you make it very clear to everyone they are never, ever to delegate their responsibility).

You’ll notice this is not a miracle cure – just risk management the quick-and-dirty way. Depending on the type of business you’re running, you’ll come up with your own set of major and minor risks.

A few thoughts on business change

All of the above isn’t just true for developments in social media. Every organization runs into challenges of scale. At such moments it’s either you lead the horse, or the horse leads you. Go on, you choose 😉

Social media may act as a katalyst and propel your business onto the next level backwards. Based on that observation I would have you consider to prepare your business for success – back to front.

+ If you found this article of interest, please share it.

What else can you do today to turn your business social?

Forget about ‘social media’: get on the conversation train!

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We all have products and brands we love. Whether it is the jeans we wear or the marmelade we eat. Experience may give us a good feeling about a brand because its products suit our taste, do what they’re supposed to do, and help make our lives run smoothly.

Engaging with a brand, on the other hand, is another matter. Engaging is something people do naturally, but companies seem to have a hard time understanding what is expected from them. They’re blaring their commercials into our ears in any place they can find, including every social network they can access. In several places, notably in “The Conversation Company” by Steven van Belleghem, you will find the notion that this has to do with companies’ view of social networks as another channel for their messages. Where we see networks, they see media.

If you’ve read “The Conversation Company” it’s entirely possible that the content of this post will not surprise you. As it happens, I’ve just started reading it (finally!). Before I really dig into this book – just in case it fundamentally alters my view – I would like to share where I stand now.

Put Your Heart In The Conversation

Put Your Heart Into The Conversation

Why is engagement a problem for businesses?

We may be “engaged in conversation” or in fact “engaged to be married”. This points to a mutual interest on a personal level. Businesses are primarily interested in customer engagement. Which sounds like: let them know you’ve got great stuff and discounts and your customers will be interested.

If your business decided in the past that only the marketing and communications people were allowed to talk to customers, that decision formed the basis of today’s problems with engagement on social networks. At some point, communication was restricted to the point where employees who wanted the rest of the company to know what their department was up to, had to send their text to the internal communications team for approval before it could be published on the intranet. A lot of companies are still at that stage.

Now picture companies where that mindset prevails on a social network… People in the marketing department are in over their heads the moment they start to engage on social networks. Much of their education has been focused on sending the right message to the right people. Personal contact – conversations – with potentially thousands of brand enthousiasts is not what they were trained for. Simply adding employees with the necessary skills will only lead to them doing all the work.

3 ways for marketing departments to get social media results with limited resources

One way to max your return-on-invested time and money is by finding people who are already talking about subjects that are relevant to you. You can, simply put, add to a couple of conversations to get people’s interest, start a few of your own, and upload the latest for an interested group of potential customers who have decided to follow your activities.

Or you can engage in conversation with a limited number of product enthousiasts. This may influence people when they are online looking for information about a product which you and your competitors sell.

A third option is complete or partial automation of your social network activities. Complete automation misses the point – see my earlier post in which I describe a few types of ‘fake’ accounts I’m sure you have come across too. The bottom line of complete automation is: you’re not at home, and that may have serious side-effects. You could end up with the ‘social’ equivalent of online ads for flying vacations next to an article about a plane crash.

If you use partial automation you need to consider which parts you will do yourself:

  • Like the robots in the factory, you need to supervise what your online tools actually do, and what they may be doing wrong.
  • And you need to make sure you do your bit.

You cannot afford to take human intelligence out of the equation and expect everything to run smoothly while you’re not watching.

Check your organisation for conversation artists

The main issue is that the people who were once hired to take care of ‘communication’ have part of what you need on social networks, but not everything you need.

  • Your marketing people are traditionally good at making plans and following up on them. Viewed from such a department, the dynamics involved with social networks probably look a lot like call center dynamics: they play havoc with any kind of schedule.
  • On the other hand, your customer service employees know how to talk with people who have a complaint. Unless they’re trained to stick to customer-unfriendly protocols to the point of forgetting any other way of working, they will jump at the chance to help customers with questions.
  • Do you know who else is good with conversations within your company? You’ll need good listeners.
  • Somewhere down the line you’ll get software in to help you deal with online communication in all forms in a structured way. Before that time, however, it’s important to take inventory of what you have so you’ll know what you need.

It is time we start looking for conversation talent within our businesses. I’m convinced we’ll find it everywhere!

Great content curation: How using your expertise adds value

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In my previous posts I have talked – a lot! – about social networks and sharing. I only briefly touched upon that which is being shared. Content. Loads of content.

This post is different. It’s shorter. And it can be summed up as follows:

Why content curation deserves your attention: a great way to add value using existing

If you hang around online long enough you’ll notice content is being reduced, re-used and yes, recycled endlessly.

I’ll be the first to admit that not everyone can blog full-time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t share your expertise. First, here is what you don’t do.

Definite don’ts in content curation

Here are some methods of re-using content you really should not consider:

  • Complete blog posts copied into a company website. Luckily I haven’t seen much of this, yet. “Text produced originally on blog X” – This had better be evergreen content because whatever it is, it’s not news. Stay well away from the murky waters of content theft.
  • Tweets that contain no reference to the author of the content it is linking to. This method suggests to casual observers that you’re rolling in home-made content. I’ve seen this a couple of times. How will anyone be able to tell quickly what your personal expertise is?
  • Blogs on company websites that contain image and some text from a different blog, add sauce “Well I think it’s a great contribution on subject X…” blah, blah. Actually I ran into one of these recently. Reading this particular blog left me feeling disappointed and guess what? I went to the original blog that was way better than the drivel I’d just read.

How to apply your expertise effectively

Great ways to use existing content without spending a lot of (extra) time can be swept into two heaps: social network updates, and the light version of blogging.

Updates are great if you don’t want to start blogging in any way:

  • Start by mentioning the original author’s name (Twitter handle for preference) in all your tweets, pins and updates.
  • Refashion the original title if necessary. Make sure your text reflects what you think makes this content worth reading or viewing.
  • Use keywords or hashtags depending on what your audience likes – only if they suit the content of course.

If this sounds like a lot of work in a tight space, you’re right. But it will cost you less time than drafting a full-length original blog post. The same goes for ‘light’ blogging:

  • Write a “Top 3” based on articles you’ve read on a subject in the past week. While you read, jot down what each article adds to your line of work. It doesn’t really matter where you do this: in Notepad, or directly into your planned blog post. Whatever works for you.
  • Or you can collect a few snippets of text and proceed in much the same way.
  • If you’re good at visual representations it’s faster and easier to (re-)visualize content than to write about it.

Your main aim should be to inject your expert opinion, however briefly.

The content curation methods I’ve just described will not lead you to eternal glory but they will allow you to show your expertise without risking your professional credibility or possibly even legal issues.

Do you curate existing content often? Did I miss any methods to curate successfully? If so, you’re welcome to add your comment to my list!

If you think this post was useful to you, please share it.

One-click engagement: the Like business

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Viewed from the surface, nothing could be simpler than a Like. But the more I read and think about online engagement, the trickier this aspect of online social behavior seems.

Viewed from a human perspective, engagement is simply about conversations and mutual commitment.

In that light, what is a ‘like’ on a social network worth?

Even if you don’t go around asking for likes you will probably attract likes from people who:

A thumbs-up for what? What does the liker like?

What does one particular like mean?

  1. Like you (person or company)
  2. Want to show their appreciation for your efforts
  3. Like your contribution
  4. Want to share the world of their peers and do so by liking what their peers like.
  5. Want to be a part of your world and will ‘like’ whatever you do (yes, I know).

In our real-life social interactions, we may ‘like’ something or someone for very different reasons.

Online social dynamics

If we move these social dynamics onto an online social network, we get a similar picture. But this time you’re left without the physical presence which may give you a hint of the participants’ motivation for ‘liking’ you.

Businesses on social networks: turning networks into ‘media’

If social dynamics didn’t blur the meaning of a ‘like’ enough, businesses have made the picture even fuzzier by adding their own types of rewards to the normal range of social rewards. Discounts, vouchers, receiving ‘inside’ information, and the like.

‘Like us’, in various forms depending on the network, is a major call-to-action made by businesses. You need to be visible in order to sell anything. But this practice has some drawbacks. See if you recognize any of these:

  • The race to increase reach by businesses has a side-effect in the fans & followers business which we’ve seen a lot of lately. Numbers of likes – and numbers of fans – have become a way some people measure your popularity in a social sense.
  • Buying clicks (likes) by offering discounts and prizes can turn out to be a great way of spending money, in stead of earning it. Also, if you start rewarding people for their activities you can’t tell afterwards what was more important to them: your brand, or the reward. This article on Itweb.co.za highlights the issue. You run the risk of showing your audience that likes are the only important thing for you – which turns clicks into a currency.
  • The penalty of finishing ‘last’ as a business may be that you’re not able to sell your products (to consumers at least). But even if you don’t own a business, the sense that likes matter may influence your behavior. I lately viewed some Twitter-related apps and ran into one which will allow you to lie about your current location.
  • Newsfeed over website visits: once someone has ‘liked’ you (your fanpage) they will rely on what they see in their newsfeed. This post by Mari Smith on Social Media Examiner dates from 2011 but the picture won’t have changed dramatically since then.

All this means you either join the race for likes – and keep your news coming; or you opt out altogether, or you just hope enough people will be interested in your business to ‘like’ you even if you don’t promise to reward them for it.

While it is nice to be ‘liked’ rather than ignored, the problem is that one simple click may mean one thing to you and something entirely different to your clicking visitor.

Building a relationship based on the first like

Beyond the first like: building social relationships

How to get beyond the first like

The main issue with any type of single-click engagement is that it is the start of readers and viewers engaging with the sharer. Apart from reading or viewing a text or an image, ‘liking’ is often the only form of engagement we show.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Accept that likes are the easiest way to stay informed. You’re likely to be just another item on someone’s supermarket shelf.
  • No matter what a like means to the ‘liker’, the fact remains that there is now a paperthin connection between the two of you. See if you can get off the shelf. Depending on the possibilities of the social network, your mission should be to establish a more sustainable kind of contact.
  • This article by Tracey Burrows points the way beyond that first like. I’m sure there is more to be found – if you want to add, you’re welcome to comment below this post.
  • The article by Mari Smith I mentioned earlier contains tips on how to use your Facebook metrics to your advantage.

I’ll go into the ways in which other social networks tackle ‘social’ actions in my next post. Meanwhile: how do you deal with likes? Feel free to leave your comment below!

Online engagement: how to get it, and how to prove you did

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Marketing people have been talking about engagement lately. I should know, I’m reading the stuff.

What is up with engagement?

Social Media Engagement - Are The Sparks Flying Yet?
Social Media Engagement:
Are The Sparks Flying Yet?

Businesses seem to be figuring out that just getting clicks isn’t getting their products sold.

Now this may seem obvious to any of us who have in fact clicked, faved, or liked, or been asked to do so. If you have a business, you need to get a number of people to develop a serious interest in what you have to offer.

How do you get people to engage?

After reading up on content marketing and engagement for a few weeks I must say I still haven’t seen anything which looks like a good answer to the central issue: getting customers’ permanent interest in a brand. No wedding bells on the horizon, unless they’ve been keeping it quiet like certain celebs try to do.

The only thing which seems interesting is agile engagement, but it sounds like a lot of work – and to be quite honest, the details look a lot like the things marketers have been doing all along, but under a different name.

This is a recent post  by Sarah Skerik (PR Newswire) which keeps it relatively simple. Check out the 6 tips in the lower half of the post to see if you’re doing any or all of those things.

A few tips of my own:

  • If you have started to build a presence on relevant social networks, the worst thing you can do is neglect it. You need to keep at it or risk ending up with an account that looks like an empty house. Read my earlier post for tips how to deal with accounts that have drifted from the center of your attention into the twilight zone.
  • Don’t just share the same content to multiple networks – offer extra visual stuff on Pinterest, make sure that your message works in the limited space of Twitter. If you share to a social network, you need to be relevant by the standards of people on that network.

The above should not come as a great surprise if you have a healthy amount of common sense.

How do you measure engagement?

In order to prove that the online budget is well spent – that your efforts are leading to results, you need to measure what we do, and how often. Which begs the question: what is a sure sign that we’re seriously interested?

Sure signs of attention are difficult to come by online. Ideally you would have to see a potential customer’s pupils dilate indicating their interest, but I’m pretty sure turning on the webcam for that purpose would run into serious privacy issues. There are plenty of activities or ‘engagement signals’ that allow you to use less invasive methods.

An interesting contribution was crafted by Econsultancy:

“35 social media KPIs to help measure engagement”

The post contains a list of things you might measure to get some idea of the quantity, as well as the nature, of engagement on your website, blog or fan page. While it is not a list of ways to get engagement, it does yield a few clues on current practices to measure what you’ve got.

A couple of groups of activities that businesses currently measure:

  • One-click engagement: likes, favorites
  • Conversational engagement: comments, questions
  • Sharing: reblogs, (re)tweets

In my next few posts I would like to explore some of the online activities that are currently measured. I will focus on questions like these:

  • What is the nature of the engagement you are actually measuring when you focus on a specific activity? -OR: What is our motivation for doing what we’re doing?
  • What are the limitations and downright problematic aspects of using these statistics?
  • And how can you (attempt to) work around those issues?

By focusing on one ‘group’ of online activities in each post I hope to come up with at least the glimmerings of an answer to questions like these:

What metrics measure what? How do you define your success on social networks? Do your metrics prove that success? Or are you wasting your time?

> Note: in the past week or so I’ve written quite a lot more about the whole ‘social media engagement’ or ‘online engagement’ subject. It is turning into a series all by itself. I’ll probably publish twice a week and hope that what is evolving right now will be useful to you. If you have any questions for me, let me know.