social media

How Social Media is Changing Public Relations

In 2010, facing the biggest public relations crisis in recent history, oil company BP turned to the one medium that could instantly address public concern: social media. Nearly six months after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill occurred, BP has nearly 48,000 Facebook fans, over 19,000 Twitter followers and more than three million YouTube channel views.

Social media updates describe cleanup efforts, research projects targeting impacts of the oil spill and calls for volunteers.

While the success of BP’s social media efforts is debatable, few people can argue the need to monitor and address online comments and feedback. As BP has shown, the biggest change may be the new challenges in reputation management. With these challenges also come new opportunities – opportunities to mitigate bad press, connect with customers and reach potential influencers in the media.

New Threats, New Opportunities

Reputation management isn’t just necessary for big corporations. Small businesses also benefit from monitoring social media chatter, whether or not they have social media profiles. Simple searches on Facebook and Twitter reveal valuable information about customer satisfaction, competitor weaknesses and new market opportunities.

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The Fallacy of Social Media Reciprocation

You are not entitled to attention.

You are not entitled to a follow-back on Twitter simply because you follow someone. You are not entitled to blog subscribers or comments simply because you publish stuff. You are not entitled to clicks to your junk or signups for your newsletter or any thing of the sort.

In fact, you are not entitled to anything.

The web is not a democracy, nor is this an egalitarian society. Giving of attention when it’s such a precious commodity is not something to be done in some empty gesture of validation, and as the attention giver, I and only I will decide how I’ll approach my connections online. My reasons aren’t yours, nor should they be. You don’t decide the value in paying attention to you, I do. This black-white, good-bad, hard-and-fast-rules of engagement stuff is ridiculous at best, and pathetic at worst.

If you honestly need someone to follow you or friend you on a social network to find self worth or acceptance, it’s really time to re-evaluate your priorities.

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Step aside, Aspiration… INSPIRATION is the way to go

Forget Aspiration in the years ahead… the new challenge is to give customers INSPIRATION for your brands and products.

I’m not suggesting we throw away our sales and marketing goals (aspirations), just that we give more value to the concept of INSPIRING our customers as a valid marketing tactic.

If your organization’s internal focus is on easily-measurable metrics, that’s the message that will leak out to your customers – that each customer is just another number toward your goals.  If your focus is instead on INSPIRING your customers, they will feel that difference and want to engage with your brand and your products.

I state this as a challenge because it is not easy to inspire someone, especially when the digital atmosphere is overloaded with competing messages now that brands can so easily share their messages through social media.  Your brand needs differentiators now more than ever, but if you can INSPIRE your customers, you will get – and keep – their attention.

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Fences make good neighbors

Fences make good neighbors — even in the social media world. 

 Too many brands assume that the most effective way to market in this digital age is to use social media to post and tweet as many marketing messages as possible to the widest range of potential consumers across the greatest number of social networks.  Spread the word to anyone and everyone, and hope someone believes enough in your message to create a connection and become an advocate influencer for your brand.  

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Does your product pass Social QC?

Advocates are a whole new type of quality control: social quality control.  

If your product is fantastic, when identified and energized, your Advocates will spread the word like wildfire. Social networks and traditional word-of-mouth will start buzzing with your product, and sales will reflect your Advocates’ delight.

But your advocates won’t try to get someone to buy your sub-par product, and they certainly won’t apologize for you or your product.  Don’t try to make your Advocates do that work for you, because they won’t…and they shouldn’t have to.

The sale starts with your product, not your Advocates; your Advocates are simply the reward you get for ensuring your product is and does everything you promised it would (if not more!).  Your strongest relationships are built on trust – trust that your brand is committed to producing quality products and services – and if you don’t deliver that top-notch product, that essential trust is quickly lost.  Along with the sale. 

You might be tempted to use social media to over-highlight the best parts of your product in the hopes that the disappointing parts won’t be noticed.  But even the best social media relationships can’t perform magic… they won’t make up for a less-than-great product.

However, the good news is that when your product is strong and does carry through on your brand promises, advocates, through their social media relationships, can skyrocket your product sales.  Advocates engage, word gets out, and sales happen.  As Seth Godin said in his recent blog post, (Consider the category of ‘without apology’) “People will go out of their way to buy and recommend products that don’t require an apology.”   They will go out of their way for you.  Because they want to… because your product is what it is supposed to be and has passed Social QC.

Don’t waste your time trying to hide your product flaws.  Invest your time in making a flawless product, and give your Advocates something to get excited about!

Ted Rubin

If your product is fantastic, when identified and energized your Advocates will spread the word like wildfire.

Social Media, Sleeping, and my Daughters

Social media truly never does sleep but what I find is that social media is very reactive. You have to put out to get back so at some point, usually late at night, you simply have to put a hard stop in place. That is hard for me since I am a content producer on Twitter and since I think in 140 characters naturally I am always spitting out content. Since I have come to realize that I can survive on 4 hours sleep for many nights in a row, but anything less than that does not work, I know I cannot carve anymore time out of the day, so 2am is usually my hard stop when I find myself going overboard.

Order and consistency is all in how you perceive what you are doing and how you maintain your connection to what is important. My personal brand, and who I am, is all about being responsive and creating trust and relationships. So I find the social media world, and all the connectivity it affords, a perfect medium for maintaining connection and consistency.

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Brand Survival for 2011: The socially-focused organization

It’s a whole new year – literally and figuratively.

Social media is quickly changing the way we need to think about our brands and marketing.  We can no longer expect to be successful if we just focus our marketing efforts on telling our target market how great our own brand is.  What we – the brand – say about ourselves is no longer what matters.  It’s what OTHER people say about our brand and their experience of our brand.

Brands have a challenge having effective external conversations with consumers and then truly activating them as Advocates unless they evolve internally into a socially-focused organization.

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What’s Here? Announcing Mass Relevance!

For the last couple years I’ve thought a lot about where user generated and social content are going. It’s valuable, but growing exponentially, more of it is real-time, and there’s a difficult-to-manage fragmention of customer experiences.

I’m excited to announce a company my co-founders and I have formed to go after a big market problem. Today we announced the launch and funding of my new company, Mass Relevance, co-founded with Brian Dainton and Eric Falcao. You can see early coverage at the Statesman, AustinStartup (more full story here) and TechCrunch. I foreshadowed this announcement with a market thesis post I just wrote, and the point that there’s a big content gap in the market.

Chloe Sladden on how Twitter and TV work well together
Also, there was a serendipitously-timed cover story in Fast Company on Twitter and TV that is at the bullseye of what Mass Relevance is doing, specifically serving entertainment and media. And you can see this blog post by Brian on how Twitter (and our product, TweetRiver) can help rescue live TV.

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2011 Social Marketing Predictions

I think 2011 is going to be a very interesting year in the social media world. Generally speaking I believe the marketing world is going to start understanding better the value of, and how better to assign value to, deep consumer relationships.

Right now everyone is trying to assign a dollar value to a Facebook fan or Twitter follower instead of addressing the fact that the engagement and interaction that takes place in these mediums are incredibly important to a brand.

Building a relationship with existing and future customers is the true value and strength of social media/marketing and what will and has allowed brands to survive and flourish for the long-term.

ROI (return on investment) is incredibly important whenever investing, but companies will start looking to ROR: Return on Relationship, when planning, strategizing and most importantly evaluating social marketing … especially smaller competitors who can more easily drive and control Relationship Marketing.

As far as specific predictions go I have a couple… Google will acquire Twitter, and pay whatever it takes to grab a valuable piece of the social marketing landscape. FourSquare, et al will disappear as geotargeting will become more of a proactive medium controlled by those who really know where you are and what you are doing… the credit card companies and others who you tell where you are and what you are doing simple by being there and not having to make a notification.

Ted Rubin

Rethinking Social Strategy

I really enjoyed this post by Brian Solis that articulates that social business and social strategy as we’ve been defining it are rooted in ideas that stretch beyond what we’re comfortable with today.

We’re eager for all-encompassing terms, and we have some in depth discussions about finding just the right monikers for the upheaval that we’re feeling and experiencing. By giving it a name, we can understand it better. Work through its characteristics and nature. Define it in a way that makes it clear for us.

But Brian’s post inspired me to comment on something that I’ve been chewing on for some time, especially as more and more information comes out about what, exactly, a “social strategist” does, or how we can articulate the nature of a truly social business.

Neither social strategy nor social business can be tucked into a singular definition or layer. They happen at every level of a business, and need to be considered in the appropriate context.

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