What if people say bad things about our brand?

People often think that creating social media channels for the brand will add fuel to the fire of criticism, but that really doesn’t make any sense. Almost all brands have detractors, and social media makes it easier than ever for those detractors to share their opinions online and there’s not a lot you can do to stop that.

By participating in social media itself, your brand can at least provide those detractors with the opportunity to come to you with their grievances so that they can be dealt with in a constructive manner. If people are going to say bad things about your company, wouldn’t it be better for them to say those things in a place which you can easily monitor and manage, rather than some other website where you have absolutely no control?

So in this instance, social media does not introduce risk, but enables businesses to manage risk which already exists.

What if our own people run out of control?

In most large organizations there’s a very good chance that employees are already talking about the company in social media in either a semi-official or completely unsanctioned manner. Maybe they’ve set up social media profiles for the brand under their own steam with the best of intentions but haven’t coordinated this activity with the comms department and are not following best practice.

Or maybe disgruntled are employees complaining about the company in channels like Twitter, blogs, Facebook and discussion forums. Perhaps others are trying to be helpful by responding to consumer comments online, but they’re sharing incorrect information or using the wrong messaging.

You manage all of this through robust policies and training.

First of all ensure that you have clear policies in place for how staff are allowed to discuss the company and their jobs in social media; publish guidelines that enable and encourage staff to participate in these channels, but make the boundaries clear and explain why those boundaries have to exist. It should go without saying but you need to make sure that all staff are aware of the guidelines, from the interns all the way up to the directors.

Within any organization there are going to be social champions – the kind of people who have a natural urge to go online and talk about the business and their work. Find out who these people are, because they are a powerful asset, and give them the training and encouragement they need to act as online brand ambassadors.

What if we get it wrong and end up with egg on our faces?

This fear is not completely without foundation. For all the talk of businesses needing to ‘take risks and experiment’ in social media, the industry loves to trumpet stories about big brands getting social media wrong. If experimentation and risk taking is to be encouraged, then perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to be a little more supportive when brands make mistakes in these channels.

The simple truth is that even with the best intentions, sometimes marketing campaigns and comms activities in social media can go awry in ways you hadn’t anticipated. This risk can be mitigated by careful planning and research; read case studies and learn from the experience of others to find out what’s worked well and what’s gone wrong in the past.

When you’ve planned out your activity, spend some time trying to pull it apart and pick holes in it. What could go wrong, how could people derail or hijack it, why might it fail? Obviously you can’t predict all potential outcomes, but at least if you’ve already thought about possibilities, no matter how improbable, you can be better prepared in case things don’t go as planned.

If possible, work with an agency which has plenty of experience in social media activity – but before you sign a contract, make sure you check their credentials to see if they’re really up to the task.

While there are certainly some risks involved in using social media as a communications platform for your business, they are far outweighed by the potential benefits. The biggest risk of social media is being left behind by your competitors if you fail to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the blog of the Social Media World Forum. Text100 UK are official sponsors of the Twitterwall at SMWF Europe taking place on the 27th – 28th March at the Olympia, London. To confirm you place and hear more from Lance please click here.

Text 100 has been short-listed in the following categories:

Best of Use Digital

Client – Cisco Consumer Products

Campaign – Flip Your Profile

Company – Text 100 Singapore

Technology Campaign of the Year

Client – IBM Australia

Campaign – Creating a Smarter Transport Agenda for Australia

Company – Text 100 Australia

PR Consultancy of the Year

Text 100 Australia

Mid-Size Network of the Year

Text 100 Asia Pacific

Fingers crossed for a successful awards ceremony on March 30!

In the middle, there many businesses that have made solid steps but run the risk of seeing their fledgling communities wither and die under the growing threat of recessionary cuts.

And in the distance, we have organizations that are well on their way to becoming social businesses. They have vibrant, self-supporting owned media communities while experts from many business functions act as ambassadors in earned media networks. Their customers and employees are actively engaged in digital discovery and collaborative service development, and all of this is wrapped up with measurable and meaningful ROI.

But let’s be frank. This is certainly the exception and not the rule. With this ideal in mind, it seems timely to look the trends that are likely to shape social business adoption in 2012 and beyond…

1. The year social grows up

The writing is on the digital (or is that Facebook?) ‘wall’… interactive marketing is here to stay. With analysts predicting spend hitting nearly US$80 billion by 2016, social media and digital are no longer the playthings of pajama-wearing bloggers and tweens. Beneath the headlines, though, there lies another story. Social media is hard. The streets aren’t paved with digital gold. For example, Reuters recently reported that financial advisors are seeing declining benefits from social media. In the same month, The New York Times told us Facebook visits were dropping.

Our client IBM’s Social CRM study highlighted the emerging gap between marketing perception and social consumer reality. It showed that while brand marketers felt consumers came to their social networks to feel brand love, the actually were more interested in receiving coupons, discounts and customer support.

In 2012, brands will increasingly be faced with a series of hard choices. I said in last year’s trends post, that a presence in the big four of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube was becoming a non-negotiable. The hard choices come as they realize that building a thriving community in each is time consuming and – without firm goals in place – possibly pointless.

There is a case for maintaining a minimal presence in one channel – perhaps using it as a bridge to another. For many brands, YouTube isn’t a strong community option – but is undeniably the video sharing leader. In this example, they should focus on other channels to build engagement while directing consumers to their videos – and then back to other, more appropriate channels for conversation or to purchase.

All of becomes more complex as brands need to maintain a watchful eye on emerging channels. Case in point is the much maligned Google+ which is tipped to hit 400 million users by the end of 2012. Are you there yet?

Maturing social consumers will also start modifying their behaviors. Social media overload will see them dropping away from social networks that don’t give them what they need. Those brands that have established social presences should start 2012 by asking their loyal, high-sharing social consumers what they want – and modify accordingly. This is especially important for those that have plateaued, are struggling to attract new followers or are seeing engagement levels dropping. The opportunity for brands in 2012 is for smarter, probably smaller, social networks that are built around tangible social customer needs of the vocal, high sharing minority and measurable business outcomes.

2. The age of social consumer relations management

The days of customers being happy with 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday support are coming to an end. Encouragingly, many brands have responded with social brand media monitoring programs and customer support staff in owned social media channels. While things are on the up,  2011 saw brands such as FedEx, Ocean Marketing and Qantas added to the pantheon of social media fail case studies.

Clearly, we’re not there yet. An October 2011 study from by Conversocial found many retailers failed to respond to complaints in social networks. Secondly from the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ school of customer support, issues have also blown up when attempts at online customer interaction have been judged inappropriate. And we’re also seeing backlash when brands have failed to anticipate the likely online reaction to their social media marketing attempts.

I predict 2012 will see the emergence of social consumer support functions. People with solid expertise in managing and predicting online customer behavior will play a much greater role in all facets of a brand’s online presence. The social media gold rush days are coming to an end. We need experts helping to plan and manage discussions. Surveys have told us people are looking for customer support in social channels, so get your customer support people there. This will force even deeper collaboration between business functions and with external agencies. It will also force jobs to be restructured as social consumer support – with its deeper customer understanding – taking a much more strategic role in business decisions. Begs a question – will PR become a social consumer relations function,

3. Drop the ‘social’ as social business becomes business

McKinsey reports that social technology use is increasingly correlated with operating margin improvements and market share leadership. Great news, especially for those of us who see social business becoming, simply, business in 2012, just as e-commerce became commerce before it.

In 2012, we’ll see a rapid adoption of social technologies changing all facets of business, whether they want to change or not.

At this year's #CampDigital, Jeremy discussed the social business evolution with Clelia Morales, Head of EU Social Media at eBay; Christophe Rocca, Regional Marketing Manager Southern Europe & Benelux at SanDisk and Jonathan Jiménez, Corporate Communications & Social Media at Vodafone.

The days of a marketing-led social media function are coming to a close. Smart companies are building centers of excellence that are supporting all business functions in a coordinated fashion. They’re also investing in training all employees, realizing that the core demands from social consumers are for subject matter expertise, not the size of someone’s Twitter following, Klout ranking or ability to text 100 words a minute. Text 100 has created an ambitious Digital Certification program where consultants, HR, IT, Finance staff and Office Managers are all tasked with improving their thought leadership, digital consulting skills, community management and training.

Like an increasing number of companies, we’ve realized our social consumers want to interact with us through social channels. In response we’re redesigning our client support, marketing, recruitment and internal communications channels to suit the requirements of our audiences.

The mission for 2012 is for marketers to let go of other business disciplines. Future success won’t be in their ability to interpret what their colleagues in customer service, human resources and so on do and deliver on their behalf. It will be in their ability to partner, coach and ultimately enable these functions.

4. Spokespeople evolved: Executives to experts

A recent GlobalWebIndex report found that B2B decision makers were highly socially engaged and rated conversations with brands on social networks as more influential than webinars, sales presentations, conferences or corporate entertainment. The more complex the decision, the greater the need to ask questions of experts in online communities.

Social consumers who make big decisions want to talk to the right people online. We’ve pushed C-level executives into the spotlight for more than a hundred years – and if they’re the right people to manage these complex online conversations then we need to arm them for the discussion.

We’re increasingly managing Digital Academy training for our clients. These programs help people from customer support, sales, marketing, human resources and so on use social networking channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn to support their business goals. The resulting programs see these experts blogging on corporate websites, managing communities in company discussion forums, and acting as ambassadors in external earned media communities.

Through 2012 and beyond we’ll see people from all business functions playing similar expanded roles in support of their own objectives. This is a logical next step for those companies that have developed owned media properties across Facebook, twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Based on our experience, it’s best to start with one business function, division or product and build a program around someone with a greater aptitude for social media. Measure their success – learn from the things that didn’t go well – and evolve the campaign around them.

5. Big data becomes business as usual

IDC’s “2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos” told us the world’s information is doubling every two years. Last year saw 1.8 zettabytes created and replicated. That’s a lot of info and while most PR people would run a mile before diving into the data, that’s one fear our profession is going to have to face.

In 2012, marketers will need to use hard metrics to gauge digital and social marketing ROI. We’re entering a tough economic environment where even harder questions are going to be asked of the PR tactics we propose. The time for social media experimentation is waning in the hunt for solid bottom-line results.

The answer increasingly lies in what’s being called ‘big data’. While the definitions are blurred, at its core big data means using a range of data sets including competitive information, online data such as social networking behaviors, offline data and customer information to enable a three dimensional approach to business decisions.

From a PR perspective the emergence of better, easier-to-use more targeted tools combined with geo-location technologies will mean data will play a meaningful role in PR activities. We’ll go beyond reach and “participation” measures such as likes and retweets and instead derive action-oriented insights from our metrics.

Big data will also help us understand the individuals we’re influencing so we can create more targeted strategies. And if this still makes you want to run a mile, 2012 will also see a rise in specialist data analysts who will increasingly play a role in shaping communications decisions.

We’ll put up part two of this post next week. As always, your thoughts are very welcome. To discuss directly with me, fire a note to jeremy.woolf@text100.com.hk.

Photos courtesy of flickr users Stuck in Customs, KY_Olsen, Text 100, and Koenvereeken, respectively.

A brand shouldn’t create a Facebook presence simply because it wants to be on Facebook.

Your social media and PR strategies alike should map to a broader goal, whether it’s increasing brand awareness for your company, products or service; building web traffic; or whatever other goals you may have. Also similar to PR, if social media engagement is not tackled with a plan, it can have an adverse affect. So how do you best ensure a positive outcome of your social media efforts?

Here are five tips for social media, which as you’ll see are very much the same rules for traditional PR.

• Know your audience – If you’re trying to reach semiconductor engineers or service providers, is Facebook really the best place to reach them? Maybe not. But on the other hand, if you’re Victoria’s Secret, a major Facebook campaign may make a lot of sense to reach your target consumer audience. Similar to pitching traditional media that your customers would read, you want to focus social media efforts on where your audience is spending time online. And know the type of content these people want to see – all before you actually engage.
• Know the platform – Don’t use up all 140 characters on Twitter with a URL because you forgot to use a URL shortener – avoid a social media #fail by ensuring you’re conversing and sharing information in the appropriate way for that platform. Similarly, when pitching Forbes, for example, you’ll research recent coverage topics and the section(s) in which your pitch would be appropriate.
• Develop relationships – People want to feel like they’re conversing with an individual, and see personality behind a company – this is no different with social media. A PR practitioner’s favorite spokesperson is one who hits on key messages, while adding in anecdotes and showing personality, and reporters want the strong personalities and uniqueness to come through as well. Developing and fostering relationships is a critical element of any form of communication, social or traditional. Social media etiquette will help you develop relationships – if someone RTs you, thank them. If someone asks you a question, respond. All this will help develop relationships with influencers.
• Transparency – Always be up front about your company affiliation. If commenting on a blog about a new Cisco router when you work for a competitor, its fine to comment about why your company’s router is better, but you must disclose who you work for. Remember when Facebook hired an agency to conduct an anti-Google campaign “on behalf of an unnamed client?” It received a ton of media backlash and criticism. It’s no different with social media than it is with PR – be ethical, honest and transparent.
• Consistency – When building your brand’s social media presence, you need to be consistent. For example, if you’re managing a company’s corporate blog, for example, you want to ensure there are posts every few days. Not only will this refresh the website with new content and keywords, which helps your SEO, but new content will keep your visitors coming back, and give them more to engage with.

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post on the PR Breakfast Club Blog.

1. Community-building

While it’s tempting to immediately open Outlook in the morning and become bogged down with the day’s emails, it’s a good habit to monitor social channels before checking email. I also recommend maintaining a separate email / Gmail account for social profiles which simplifies profile management and prioritizing responses. My first five minutes are spent checking for new Twitterfollowers, Facebook friends, Google+ circle additions and LinkedIn connections and group updates.

When I check the updates, I make a point of not automatically following everyone back or contributing to all discussions. Consider things such as the kind of content the person shares and their online influence – a Klout ranking search can help here.

2. Curating and commenting

Set up Google Alerts for interesting topics and spend 10 minutes reviewing your Google Reader for relevant news and blog posts. While reviewing, look for breaking trends or opportunities to comment or share. If you’re pressed for time, flag an article using a social bookmarking or a notation tool such as Delicious or Evernote and comment later. Also make sure you cull LinkedIn groups and blogs that are no longer relevant – this will save you time and keep you focused.

When commenting on blog posts, make sure you read all of the post, review other comments, comment early and link only where the link extends the discussion or reinforces your point.  Also consider the time of day you tweet. Tools like Tweriod will tell you when your followers are most active.

3. Sharing as You Go

The final tip is to share throughout your day. My logic is that if you find a blog post, news story or video of interest, your audience is likely to feel the same way. Remember, the focus should be less what you want to say but rather what your community wants to hear.

Twitter is a great channel for sharing your daily web ‘finds’ and Google+ is also growing in popularity.

You can also synch up your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts so content is shared across all three – this is a great time saver. To share selectively, use Google+’s Circles or Facebook’s Lists to post relevant information to different audiences.

Using this approach I’m able to keep on top of social media in less than 20 minutes a day. If you’d like more tips on social media management, I suggest subscribing to Text 100’s Digital Downloadnewsletter and HyperText blog.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared as part of the Focus Friday series on the Xerox Real Business Blog. Xerox is a Text 100 client.

The full article can be found at the link here, but in summary, while social media and digital comms has gone mainstream, we find many B2B companies are still grappling with how best to take advantage of the fact their all their key audiences are online and how to grow communities around their brands.  Which is somewhat ironic, as it within b2b that digital comms can actually have the greatest impact.

Around 18 months ago we hosted a discussion on this very topic with the PRCA and heard from some B2B trailblazers – the likes of Premier Farnell and element14, Sage and Legal & General. Since then there has been wider appreciation of the benefits, and roadblocks that related to concerns such as control are being overcome with less resistance.  It almost becomes more surprising now if a company doesn’t have a twitter handle, facebook page or linkedin group rather than those that do.

The reality is that while all eyes (and fingers) point to the comms and marketing teams as soon as social media gets mentioned, the benefits that can be realised are much wider and compelling.  Just a few examples are work that we are doing to help HR teams attract and retain the very best talent, sales teams we are helping to identify the next big opportunity and understand their prospects interests and needs better, and customer service teams who are looking to integrate digital comms into their business process.

Looking back, an awful lot has happened over the last 18 months, and it will be fascinating to see how things continue to shake out moving forward.  What we can guarantee is that digital comms certainly isn’t going anywhere, and the companies that spot the opportunities, move fastest and rethink their business around social are the ones that will reap the greatest benefit.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on the Text 100 UK blog.

Facebook timeline – key features

How is it different? Essentially your profile is now much more visually impactful – almost taking cues from the about.me platform using large graphics and simple sections. The biggest changes are the addition of a cover image on the top of the page to complement your profile picture, and the fact that all information you have ever shared since you joined Facebook is now scrollable (mine goes back to 2007, however one can actually add in information prior to this date including your own birth date – completely digitising your life story).

You and your friends can now find out about all of the major and minor moments of your life journey. Instead of just broadcasting a status update you can now broadcast a ‘life event’ such as your wedding or new job etc. Imagine when Gen Y and Z pass on – their grandchildren if curious will be able to look up the kinds of things they were up to when they themselves were born or what shenanigans you were up to in your twenties!

Additional new features include the ability to tag locations to your images and the ability to see all of your recent location check-ins from a Facebook maps perspective.

In summary we are excited about the new platform and are interested in seeing the kind of reaction it gets when it ever does finally fully role out. Is this a new and thought provoking way of recording and preserving the human experience or just another example of the internet eroding our privacy even further?

Facebook timeline – according to Facebook

Your cover: Fill this wide, open space with a unique image that represents you best. It’s the first thing people see when they visit your timeline.

Your stories: Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.

Your apps: The movies you quote. The songs you have on repeat. The activities you love. Now there’s a new class of social apps that let you express who you are through all the things you do.

Text 100 Sydney’s perspective –

Rachel Vidaic: “I don’t like it. It looks messy and there’s like way too much going on. I don’t like too much change”.

Bec Badcock: “I like it. It’s easy to see everything all at once!”

Simon Clark: “I love being able to discover things from the past that I’d forgotten about. I agree with Lisa Hope King quoted in a recent article on USA today regarding timeline that it will create further focus on digital grooming”.

Simon Fitz: “It’s like a virtual project/artifact which graphically and chronologically tells your Facebook life story…Lifebook perhaps?”

Messenger

As well as the timeline platform, Facebook also recently release their stand alone ‘Messenger’ app for Android, Blackberry and iPhone. The app builds on the success of similar tools such as ‘Whatsapp’ to send instant messages over the internet. The benefit of being linked to Facebook is that most people have a far greater wealth of personal contacts on Facebook than even their phonebook, making it extremely easy to contact almost anyone.

We recommend giving it a try!

Moving on…

Here’s the thing – companies are still really confused about how to use or why they should use social media. Who can blame them? It can get complicated pretty fast with the number of tools and techniques floating around out there. And then there’s that little thing called ROI.

Prior to beginning my career in PR with Text 100, I had the opportunity to work in the marketing department for a well-known Fortune 500 tech company – and social media was always the huge question mark that my colleagues in the marketing department couldn’t seem to wrap their arms around. The first question they would ask? “Well, what’s the ROI?” Since they couldn’t exactly measure the return, and it was so outside the conventional model, they abandoned the thought. They just didn’t see the value in the investment of time or budget. Sound familiar to you? If I had a penny for every time that a C-level business executive asked me what the ROI is of social media, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this post.

Several presenters addressed this very issue – citing some compelling examples of what can happen when your company doesn’t have a solid social media strategy in place. But it was Jason Falls, co-author of “No Bullshit Social Media,” (who should also seriously consider a career as a stand-up comic if you couldn’t already tell from the title of his book), who finally hit the nail on the head with the ROI issue. How many traditional marketing/PR business drivers actually have a tangible monetary result? Instead of asking – “What’s the ROI here,” Falls suggests a better, less-limiting question may be, “What do I get in return?” The answer: Higher search engine results, new product ideas and customer satisfaction scores, to name a few. An answer, by the way, that has been proven over and over by the successes of companies such as Walmart, Microsoft and Disney.

With the ever-present ROI question/hurdle out of the way (thanks, Jason), another recurring theme addressed in almost every presentation during the conference was creating compelling and useful social content – a linchpin in creating true social engagement and attracting new followers. Two of my favorite presentations that discussed this subject were, “Applying Content Creatively,” given by C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley and “Make Yourself Useful,” given by Laura Fitton.

Applying Content Creatively

As a creator of content (which is probably one of my favorite parts of my job), I find that sometimes, things can go a little stale in the ol’ noggin – which is why I thought C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley’s presentation was particularly useful (by the way, if you are interested, they also wrote a book – Content Rules, which I plan on picking up soon). Creating interesting, engaging content can be challenging, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of the same materials, topics and themes.

Chapman and Handley suggested a number of steps and techniques to produce compelling content which include:

• Embrace your role as the publisher – You have to think about how you’re going to integrate content with everything else you’re doing. Publishers put their audience before anything else – you want to create content that will meet the needs of the audience.
• Know your audience and speak their language – Insight into who your audience is and what they’re receptive to will inspire originality. Make sure you’re speaking their language – companies are not the best at describing things in the words of their customers. Speak in their language, and be human about it.
• Share or solve, don’t shill– Share resources with customers and solve problems for them don’t just talk about yourself.
• Reimagine, don’t recycle – Recycling content is a common practice in marketing and public relations. We want to get the most mileage out of collateral that we already have. But as Handley and Chapman point out, you need to think about content as a piece of a larger whole. Think through your content and see how you can reimagine it into something new and compelling.

Making Yourself Useful

Perhaps my most favorite presentation of the day was from Laura Fitton, and addressed a subject that  I don’t think gets enough attention. Fitton said it best when she stated, “The balance of power has shifted. The mere mortal now has power. It’s not about you anymore; instead, it’s about the value you provide.”

She’s 100 percent right. The web has shifted. Conversations are no longer one-sided and it’s not enough for companies to simply push their messages out to the masses anymore. We tend to forget that there are actual people on the other side of those blog comments, Twitter handles and Foursquare check-ins.

As organizations, we need to recognize the individual people that exist behind the handles and get to know them in order to understand what they need from us. The principle may sound simple enough, but it’s one that we, as companies and representatives to companies, can easily displace in the mix of meeting sales goals and objectives to drive results around specific products or initiatives that we care about.

In summary, my key takeaways from the day are:

• We as marketers and public relations professionals need to be useful to our customers and care – passionately – about things other than ourselves.
• We need to produce engaging content that our audience cares about and will share with others.
• Don’t listen to ‘social media purists’ – no technique is right or wrong, it’s about what works best for you and your audience.
• Bottom line: We need to approach social media in a human way.

What do you see as your biggest social media hurdle? What is your biggest success? Let us know in the comments!