Tag Archives: social media

Get ready for a Kloutsterf–k

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Oh WIRED, you went and did it didn’t you? You published a big ol’ sexy article on Klout that’s going to make an even bigger mess of the icky topic of ‘influence’ in social media. Reading the article does just what I feared it would, it makes it sound like by investing in your Klout score you’re on your way to VIP seats at the nightclub of the week, free hotel upgrades and first class air travel, hot warm towels and all. Given the geekery of your readership (and I mean that with love) you’re adding another wall to the echo chamber of social media. You know, the place where everyone who uses it obsessively believes that everyone uses it obsessively.

Worse, and maybe you weren’t even aware of this, you basically portrayed Klout as a platform to be gamed. By tweeting more, spamming often, and adding to the noise – and by trying to do this as far and wide as possible – we can all up our K’s and live the lux life of true digerati. Sign up now!

The trouble is, people will. It’s going to be a Kloutsterf–k of a mess when they do. Now all our friends will hammer harder, injecting more and more noise into the fray. They’ll try to be retweeted and to get our attention at any cost. They’ll go back to trying to gather as many followers as possible. You know who else does that? Advertisers. And most people find advertising somewhat annoying or at the very least actively try to tune it out.

Remember when Twitter went mass a few years ago and people thought getting as many followers as possible mattered most? People signed up with these slimey services that promised to get us all thousands of followers – quality be damned – if we added our username to the mix. That was gaming Twitter and it became popular for a while there until people realized that the number of followers didn’t matter as much as the quality of the relationship between follower and followee. They also got tired of the noise. Have you ever tried, really tried, to follow 500 people?

Klout is going to do the same thing if articles like the WIRED one find their way to the New York Times, People magazine and USA Today. Then it will be like a T-shirt gun at a baseball game. Everyone flailing about trying to increase their Klout score by whatever means necessary to get free swag. In the din, ‘klout’ will become as meaningless a word as ‘friend’ and ‘fan’ and ‘follower’ are now because of over- and miss use. We will realize (yet again) that many of the social tools we unleash are not most powerful when chasing quantitative measures but because of their ability to create meaningful exchanges between people (and brands) that are both transmitted and received.

We will be reminded that being influential isn’t measured by getting people to pass that simple, low, easily-hurdled barrier of clicking ‘follow’, but rather by being listened to and acted upon.

Until that day, and during the hurricane of white noise that’s coming, at least we can monitor the quality of our online brand standing through funny tools like Klouchebag.

Why social media is a monkey wrench in business models.

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Like many disruptive technologies, incorporating social media into a business model has proven challenging for both agencies and corporations. Social media seems to straddle at least two traditional functional groups within a business: marketing and customer service. And of course social media can be used in R&D, HR and operations as well depending on the business a company is in.

This post will deal with what I feel are the two most common implementations of social media technologies – as tools for marketing and as tool for customer service. In truth, these are the harder to work with, the others are internal only, which makes for a smoother integration process in some ways. With marketing and customer service though, the consumer plays a part, which is exactly the sticking point.

Let’s begin with marketing and communication. That social media has forever changed marketing few will argue against. In addition to providing more opportunities to engage, social media has allowed customers to do their own product research and review through peer opinions above and beyond what the marketer wants to communicate

A conflict of pace.
A business may choose to do its social media marketing internally or to include it in an agency relationship. Either way, the pace (and expectations) of social media are far more immediate than the traditional marketing process which includes development of concepts, revisions and review, legal approval and then publication. This creates inevitable conflict. Social media requires near-continual attention and sometimes instantaneous response (as with the case of customer inquiries on Facebook or Twitter). Community managers are not afforded the luxury of time by their customers, even as the company’s lawyers insist that all posts and replies be vetted through them. Without a high degree of trust and training in the community managers, a company will always be behind expectations in social media dialogues.

The devil is in the dialog.
Of course the lawyers have a whole additional set of worries with social media – what the company’s customers will say. These comments are often published on the company’s Facebook wall or directed to its Twitter account where they are searchable by hashtags. While the lawyer’s desire to review outbound postings does not jive with the pace of social media, the concern is understandable given how quickly a situation can escalate online. Though every company by now is used to hearing a certain degree of mild discontent from some consumers, the stakes can get quite high and be very, very public. Compliance issues around healthcare, finance or insurance make the free-wheeling world of social media even harder to work within. Again, community managers who are not well trained and therefore trusted represent a certain liability from the legal perspective.

Isn’t digital supposed to be cheap?
Lastly, there is the matter of ROI. With each new technology a business’ budgetary pie is cut into thinner and thinner slices. Money must continually be reallocated so that the company can be in all the important places it needs to be. As consumers come to expect customer service through social media, companies must invest in community managers online but cannot necessarily cut back on their call centers. Similarly, in addition to the budget for traditional media, and tradition digital media (banners and SEM) now budget must be made available to manage a Facebook presence (in addition to a company’s website), possibly a Twitter account (or several) and perhaps tinkering with other platforms like FourSquare, Tumblr, YouTube and the latest shiny object, Pinterest.

Yet for all the budgetary demands, the return on investment in social media remains stubbornly hard to quantify (at least in the way shareholders like to see it). There is the table stakes nature of it – meaning companies that aren’t on Facebook can look old fashioned to modern consumers. But the value of fans, cost of engaging them and ultimate tieback to sales are anecdotal most of the time. The customer service front may be more measurable in terms of the cost of running a Twitter service account vs. the number and length of calls at a call center, but continually monitoring these costs to determine if the Twitter account saves in costs at the call center itself costs money in the form of the salary for the analyst.

What’s ‘Trust’ worth?
Since its inception, digital has had the reputation of being cheap. Compared to other media it has always been cheaper from a marketing perspective. Costs have risen, naturally, but they’ve not come close to the costs of a TV campaign. Then again, they also don’t tend to have the reach of a TV campaign. Digital is a one to one medium in many ways which means its better at informing than building awareness because online everyone is spread out over a near infinite number of websites and apps.

Digital has also been portrayed as a young person’s game. Most social media community managers are late 20-somethings or early 30-somethings. As such their salaries have been cheaper comparatively. Which has been good for corporations because that ROI issue noted above has been harder to prove and most companies, absent hard ROI, will try to keep costs down on the ‘experimental stuff’ into which social media is often categorized.

The trouble is, a 28 year old making a low to mid five figures with about 5 years business experience under his belt is really probably not experienced enough to make the right calls to earn the trust of the lawyers and stakeholders in a corporation. This is not a failing of the community manager, just a reflection of their modest experience. Anyone who’s put 15 years into their career realizes in hindsight how much they didn’t know those first few years in business. Yet, these inexperienced employees are often put on the ‘front line’ of a businesses contact with customers. They are the people handling the customer service, responding to incendiary posts by frustrated customers and trying to make sense of the volumes or data and ever-changing “best practices” (a generous terms in a 5-year-old industry) in the area of social media. It is no wonder then that senior leadership and  the legal department want to have everything reviewed before it goes out the door.

Of course the price paid for this review process can be heavy if impatient customers are expecting a reply to their queries.

Trust is the ultimate quality senior leadership must have in its community managers. Yet the legacy of the digital space, and the groundless assumption that only young people – native to social media – can work in that space, mean most community managers, while likely very good, smart people, probably can’t entirely be trusted to respond properly because they simply do not have the experience to make the right judgements at crunch time.

Good, fast, cheap – pick two.
So this is where we find ourselves. Companies have new technologies they must adopt lest they look behind the times. They have legacy processes to review communication that are not compatible with the user expectations set by social media. They hire junior people because they ‘grew up with this stuff’ to serve on the frontline of social media with customers and prospects of the company. Yet senior leadership and the legal department, with some justification, do not trust these young people to necessarily represent the company properly without stringent oversight.

For customer service this can sometimes be handled the way call centers are, where responses are pre-approved and scripted and a troublesome situation can be ‘kicked up’ to a manager with more experience. This layering process, however, comes with a cost in employees which may undermine any savings gained by moving some customer service from the phone to Twitter.

The marketing side is all the more challenging. Using an agency rightly brings up legal concerns. Even the most experienced agencies cannot expect to be as aware of the regulations in complex industries like healthcare and finance. And clients in general have a hard time letting go of the review process and trusting the agency’s community manager to run their business. After all, this person is not a member of the company and most businesses, at the end of the day, realize that if something goes very wrong, the agency will not be as liable as the company itself.

For companies doing it inside, the trick is hiring the right person and building an internal process which meets the speed requirements of social media. This is usually no easier than when working with an agency, especially since the cost-conscious company that chooses to keep such things ‘in house’ is most likely to hire the 28-year-old thereby requiring the supervisory layers that slow things down.

As always, you get what you pay for.
There’s no easy answer. It you lock social media down to scripted responses so that legal doesn’t need to review every missive, the communication become stiff, unnatural and unsatisfying from the consumer perspective. If you let go and trust your agency or community manager without legal review, you run a big risk of missteps because those community managers are young and inexperienced.

The nearest solve I can see is to hire more senior for that community manager role. A veteran of communication on the customer service side or marketing side, with good industry knowledge is more likely to make good, smart decisions in a pinch. S/he is also more likely to ‘get’ customer service and understand the stakes of what s/he is doing on the frontline. While this won’t alleviate entirely the need for legal oversight, it will keep things moving along.

However, that means taking the jump and deciding to pay more to invest in a community manager. For companies who believe they need a ‘social media native’ that may mean waiting another five to ten years to find someone with “10 years of solid community management experience.” Personally, I think that’s the wrong direction. Rather, it seems more sensible to find a progressive, technologically-oriented executive with good people skills and solid business savvy. The mechanics of Facebook, Twitter and the rest can be taught relatively easily. Experience can’t be. Yet it is experience that allows senior management (and even the lawyers, sometimes) to trust the community manager. This in turn does the best job of addressing the conflicting needs of social media to be immediate but also to mitigate the risks associated with dealing with customers in real time.

Scarcity, Value & Social Media

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When everyone is doing it, its no longer a competitive advantage.

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

This passage came from an editorial piece in the Economist that I think is well worth reading. Coming on the heels of my ‘I was wrong’ post I’m going to stick my neck out and wonder if 2012 won’t be the year social media loses a little bit of its rock star status. Now, I’m in no way saying social media is going away or even that it’s going to decline in quality or importance. Only that like the telephone, television and Web it is becoming a simple fact of life, not a novelty, and that the conversations around social media are changing from ‘how do we get into it?’ to ‘now that we’re here, what do we do with it and what can we realistically expect to get from it?’

Here are some reasons I think social media will find itself facing many of the challenges of other communications media in the coming years.

1. The category is maturing.
Like prior media, at some point a shift will happen when we’ll talk less about the medium itself than about the content delivered through it. That’s starting to happen already. Just as few people outside of specialized industry circles discuss the nature of telephony, television or the Web, we’ve been moving away from social media’s dominant self-referential nature. Still, there are people tweeting such obvious thoughts as “This social media stuff is here to stay” (I literally saw this a few days ago, and by a credible social media guru type no less), which means we’ve not quite squeezed out all the juice from the novelty just yet.

2. Burnout.
There’s also the matter of fatigue. Even if you’re not a Tweeting, Tumblr-toting, Foursquare-checking, Instagram-shooting geek, many of us have dedicated quite a bit of our time to tinkering on Facebook et. al. over the last few years. We’ve delighted in the joys of reacquainting with old friends, meeting the occasional new person and voyeuristically peeking into the lives of people we’re connected to.

Operationally, though, these new technologies have a price for individuals, institutions and corporations. They further divide our time, resources, budgets and attention. And of course, as noted above, the fact that they are everywhere, in great quantity, applies downward pressure on their value – both in terms of the quality of any individual piece of content distributed and in the price points companies are willing to pay for services in the sector.

3. Higher consumer expectations.
Social technology has also successfully infiltrated other aspects of life – from seeking recommendations to validating facts to answering questions to making purchases. It can’t be overstated how much social technologies have fundamentally changed these tasks. By the same token, we humans get used to things pretty quick. Once we’re used to them, they become expectations not attractors. When they’re an expectation we don’t talk about them as much – unless they’re broken. Today including social technologies in consumer-facing business practices is becoming table stakes not a competitive advantage.

4. High expectations & Modest Results
Then there are the ridiculously high expectations of social media from an enterprise growth perspective. In addition to the starry-eyed and often nonsensical expectations of venture capitalists hungry to cash in quick; everyone from marketing agencies to operations teams have come to expect social media to be a sledgehammer against barriers to success. This is happening at exactly the same time our habits are settling in and social tools are becoming an expectation of daily life. Anything that is an everyday expectation is unlikely to be a barrier breaker for long.

Certainly businesses have seen some results, and up to now some of those results have outperformed other media by some (usually inherently favorable) measurements. It’s safe to say though that for most, social media has not been the ‘holy grail of marketing’ originally hoped for. Social is becoming but one more arrow in the marketer’s quiver with its strengths and weaknesses. Every company has learned that while they need to be using it, they can’t count on social media to replace all (or any, really) of the other stuff they’re doing. So budgets are divided yet again as the marketing ‘pie’ is sliced smaller and smaller each time popular culture latches onto the next Twitter or FourSquare or Pinterest.

In fact, its recently come to light that many of the problems marketers have always faced remain the same. As it turns out, 83% of a brand Facebook fans never see that brand’s missives - the same clutter issue facing all advertising media. We’re finding that the proportion of ‘fans’ to ‘talking about’ is also pretty modest for most brands – in the same neighborhood as email open rates and coupon redemptions. And whether you get their names from a business reply card, email signup or Facebook ‘like’ – the size of your list is only as useful as your plan to do something with it. The days of racking up 1MM ‘likes’ and claiming victory are over.

The hype cycle revisited
Anyone who lived through the dotcom boom knows that we’ve been here before. New technologies bring high expectations, lofty visions and sometimes crazy business models. Inevitably though, reality sets in. The Economist piece summarized the realization of that reality. A fundamental challenge for social media is the relation between scarcity and value. Social media works against scarcity and thereby against value creation in the traditional economic model sense.

That social media is now a fact of life means that in coming years it will have to work harder to prove itself and it will have to wrestle with the same challenges other media struggle with. Until now social media has enjoyed a near monopoly on the headlines in the media industry space. Moving forward though, share will be about more than just enabling the act of distributing content between friends. For social media it will mean maintaining share – of our time, our attention and our budgets – by proving its comparative value against other media.

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.