If I were to start a social media blog today, I would call it simply “Stating The Obvious.” The types of topics we would cover would fall along the lines of:
1. “Social” is something you are, not something you do. If your company culture doesn’t focus on building relationships with your customers, then chances are that you won’t use social media to do it either. The “media” doesn’t dictate how social a company is or isn’t. It simply enhances its ability to be a social business – if in fact it is – or illustrates the extent to which it isn’t.
2. You cannot outsource customer relationships to an agency. Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency? Do you send your PR team to social events and parties when you have better things to do than attend? Social media isn’t any different. Why? Because it is “social media,” not “delegation media” or “pretend media”. Research and intelligence, sure. That can be outsourced. Creative? That too. Implementing technologies and helping you with strategy? You bet. Marketing, PR and advertising? Of course. But the relationship part: Shaking hands, being there when customers ask your for help, participating in conversations, making them feel at home when they do business with you, none of these can be outsourced.
3. A blog is just a blog. It isn’t a magical trust and influence publishing converter for the web. Publishing propaganda or marketing content is just that, regardless of the publishing platform. Just because you publish marketing content on a blog doesn’t mean it magically morphs into something “authentic” that “engaged customers” will spread through “word of mouth.”
4. Marketing on social media channels isn’t “social.” It is just marketing. Just as publishing marketing content on a blog doesn’t make marketing content any less manufactured and biased, publishing content on social media channels isn’t “social.” Every time I hear a company proudly state that they have a social media program when in fact, all they have is a marketing program that uses social media channels, I feel sorry for its stakeholders and customers. This is one of two things: Delusion or spin. And by “spin,” I mean a lie. If you are a professional in this space, either build a real social media program – one that is actually social – or get out of the way because those of us on a mission to do it right are coming in hot.
5. Transparency isn’t just a word. If you don’t intend to practice it, don’t preach it. Transparency isn’t a flag you get to wave around only when it is convenient. Disclosure also shouldn’t be something your legal department needs to brief you about. You already know what’s right. And by “right,” I don’t just mean “ethical” or what you can get away with. I mean “right.” Do that. Treat your customers with respect and treat your program on foundations of integrity and professional pride.
6. Change management, not social media tools and platforms, is at the crux of social media program development. Because social is something you are, not something you do, most organizations cannot succeed in the social space by changing what they do and not who they are. A Director of Social Media can only do so much. “Social” speaks at least as much to your company’s DNA as it does to its business practices. If you don’t really care about your customers, social media won’t magically transform you into someone who does. You have to want to become this type of individual, and for your organization as a whole to follow suit, in order for the socialization of your business to be successful.
7. People are more important than technology. Hire people who care about other people. If you hire and promote assholes, your company will be full of assholes. It doesn’t matter how much Twitter and Facebook you add to your company’s communications or how many awesome monitoring dashboards you buy if you are a company of assholes. Guess what: An asshole on social media is still an asshole. Start with your people, not your tools. They are what makes social either work or fail.
8. Social media should not be managed by Marketing anymore than your phones should be managed by Sales. 41% of social media directors are marketing professionals while only 1% are customer service professionals. Would you care to guess as to why it is that only 1% of social media programs seem to be yielding results while the rest are just making noise and turning anecdotal BS into “case studies?” (See item 9 for further insights into this.)
9. Shut up and listen. Everywhere I look, I see companies spending a good deal of their time (and budgets) focusing on producing content, blog posts, social media press releases, tweets, updates, events, and looking to “content strategy” to make sure it all fits smoothly together. That’s nice. Too bad they don’t spend at least as much time thinking about their listening strategy. Maybe they would actually get somewhere if they did. Listen to your customers. Listen to your competitors’ customers. Everything companies need to know is passing them by because they are too busy talking. Shut up, already. Nobody really cares what you have to say, and if they do, they don’t need to hear it all day long. Really. Just make great products, consistently create exceptional experiences for customers, and focus every bit of energy in making sure no customer of yours is ever disappointed, and you’ll be good to go. If your communications serve your marketing department more than they serve your customers, you are doing it wrong.
10. Any consultant, “thought leader,” agency or partner who doesn’t tell you these things isn’t fit to be consulted on the subject. Do big promises, miracle cures and fairy tales sound like reality to you? “If you buy X, your business will suddenly grow and improve?” Really? Does “we have the best secret formula” sound legitimate to you? It doesn’t matter where your new “advisors” have worked, who they have worked with or how many people follow them on Twitter. Of course they are all going to have great stories to tell. It’s called “marketing.” Ever heard of it?
Or maybe I would call that blog “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Alive and well in 2010.”
Brand Building and Online Marketing Blog 
I love it! “You cannot outsource relationships”. I met with a potential client who has outsourced their entire “social media” program; blogging, facebook, twitter, commenting and forum work to a PR company.
Explained it will be an obvious empty voice in no time, and the one thing you can’t buy back is a reputation…good luck with that!
Good post.
-Darren
The only thing you can’t buy back is a reputation? I love it! Thank you. I’ll be borrowing that.
Happy to help!
I like your point on change management actually. Seems to be the most underestimated one to me.
Also, I don’t want to state the obvious, but it seems there’s no “tweet this” button around. I gladly go the extra step of –>bit.ly –> twitter for posts like this but I’m not sure if that goes for everyone :).
I know. ;P
“Can you outsource your presence at Thanksgiving dinner to an agency?”
No, but you can outsource everything else. You can outsource all the cooking, you can outsource all the cooks and cleaners. You can have the turkey cooked and all the food prepared. You can outsource the drinks table, if the thanksgiving is a large affair. When it comes to scaling, can you do a thanksgiving dinner on your own if you plan to serve 100? 1000? If you plan to serve the homeless on Thanksgiving day? These question and answer sets are so pedantic they make me want to cry, Olivier, mate. When it comes to a simple thanksgiving dinner, you’re correct, but in the real world, do companies do all the work themselves when they host a holiday party? Even for their own employees? No! They either go to a restaurant where all of the ancillary services are supported by the staff, cooks, waiters, hosts, etc; or, they hire a party planner and make sure, like a wedding, all of the details are “taken care of.” Agencies — like mine, anyway — serve as the cast and crew to enable to host — you, the brand — to not have to spend all of his time in the kitchen and filling drinks but, rather, where you should be: at the head table raising glasses in toast or mingling around making sure your guests are having a good time. What people forget is that we agencies should not replace brands but should facilitate and enable brands. In other words, we’re wedding planners and you’re the bride, groom, and their parents. The more intimate the wedding, the more the family can pitch in; however, I daresay that the upcoming Royal wedding party will only make the most basic of decisions for the wedding ceremony as there will be hundreds of guests and instead of being sandbagged they wedding party needs to spend some time sharing themselves with the constant stream of guests and well-wishers. Does that make sense? Now I am going to cross post this to my blog! Love the convo, mate, and we need to meet one of these days, for sure!
Like I said, some things can be outsourced and others cannot.
Example: Does your agency handle your clients’ customer service? Probably not.
Here’s the thing: You can scale marketing. That’s fine. But you cannot scale relationships. As an organization, you have to decide: Do I want to pay an agency to respond to my customers, fans and detractors, or do I feel that this is important enough to staff up if my current team isn’t able to handle the load?
I’m all for hiring specialists to produce content and make sure it all fits together nicely, and even help coordinate internal teams. I like the idea of having specialists also listen, monitor and advise. You and I agree 100% on the need to partner with someone when it comes to presence management and reputation management. BUT no agency can do what Scott Monty does for Ford or Frank Eliason did for Comcast. If either of these guys had worked for BP, Toyota or Nestle, these companies’ social media problems and PR crises would have been far less of a problem this past year than they were.
Here’s the real meat of my response: Agencies can do a lot of great things, but they cannot build or leverage social capital for a client. It’s basic psychology, Chris. Some things can’t be outsourced. Scale has nothing to do with it.
Cheers. 🙂
Hum… As much as I like a good analogy, at some point it gets in the way. The point of the Thanksgiving dinner is not the turkey. It’s the conversation. Yes, you can hire a caterer or have it in a restaurant – that’s not the point. You’re not hiring an actor to have the conversation.
Now, is it scalable is the right question.
But I agree with Olivier. The choice is whether we want to manage relationships with consumers rather than talk at them – that part should not be outsourced. Or delegated to the intern. It’s not an easy choice though – most companies are struggling with this.
At the same time – there is still a role for broadcasted marketing. Most businesses and brands can’t just rely on conversation.
@tommoradpour
This has to be one of the most powerful posts I have read for a while. I thought abour every person I have connected with who talks to me about social media as the new paradigm for sales/business development. They just don’t seem to understand that they still have to deliver on the product or service and that Social Media is not going to change the day. This post could easily translate into a manifesto and if followed would make the whole process seem much less like a machine and more like a person. Thanks Olivier.
Julian
Thank you. 🙂
There’s a process to it as well. But yeah, ultimately, if the human element isn’t there, no matter how well built a social media program may be, it will amount to little. Kind of like building a beautiful temple nobody wants to visit.
Right on (write on) my friend. In five different conversations just last week, I told people, “Hey, be bold in stating the obvious—no body sees it.”
“Sometimes a blog is just a blog.” I have a feeling I’ll be repeating you quite a bit this week.
Definitely agree with you about the issue of “change.” You say it much better than I do. I have a long post that’s been in draft mode for 2 weeks on the topic: It seems humans are drawn to focus on tools and techniques FIRST (and maybe exclusively) to change BEHAVIOR. Yet psychology tells us over and over again that BELIEFS drive behavior. [I need to join your membership site so I can learn to write as fast as you do. Is it $47 a month?]
I’ll keep saying it as I have been, but I think people are going to hear you first. I’m eager to hear the business world start using and exploring words like metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics (not the trendy “ethics,” but the “ethics” that Plato and Aristotle would have explored). [I know, I know. You’ll shoot me down for using those words, BUT mark my word, there WILL come a time when business will be FORCED to grapple with those issues even if they don’t use the academic terms for them.]
Have you ever seen me type? I use my left index finger for the left side of the keyboard, and my right index and middle fingers for the right side of the keyboard. Sometimes, I use my right thumb to do an ALT-Prt Sc, but that’s about it. 😀
As for the rest, yes: Your world view, your belief system is at the core of everything you do. The difference between a sales culture and a marketing culture has nothing to do with an industry or a vertical. It has everything to do with the belief system of the CEO and people he surrounds himself with. When I was at T&S Brass, the reason why we failed to adopt some of the new products we designed (and tested well in the market) was the result of the CEO’s belief system and nothing else. Had he wanted his company to be known for continuing innovation, had he felt that green products were important to the company’s image, had he wanted to be seen as a maverick, the really cool stuff we designed would have been released instead of sidelined.
Apple is Apple because of Steve Jobs’ belief system. BMW is the same way. Starbucks as well. For better or for worse, THAT is what either drives companies forward or leaves them anchored in brackish waters.
Glad to have you back doing what you do best…
I love all of them, but #1 speaks to me. We have, what, 80 years of Mad men-like talking at people and not remembering that there is a real live human (with feelings) on the other side?
It will be a long slog to deprogram most orgs….
Besides, it’s difficult to goal or reward people on their “social” performance. Operationally, it takes a leap of faith. It isn’t as simple as “150 leads per month.” Know what I mean? That’s why so many businesses still look at things like “net new followers per week” as a key performance metric.
Which is sad, because when you look at companies that do this well, what do you see? Guys like Scott Monty and Frank Eliason just being there, mingling with the crowd showing they actually care enough about what they do to come out from behind the curtain and… well, be “social.” It really is that simple.
Love!
Minor point of contention on Number 9. As a customer? I talk. Yes I want the company to listen. NO I don’t want them to shut up. A conversation goes 2 ways. We both talk and listen. Otherwise it’s still a lopsided equation. I know you are being emphatic for a reason – but can we please quit telling Brands & companies to shut up & listen at the same time we are telling them to be social? It sends a mixed message.
-L
Maybe this will help frame the point better: Think of a social environment that is not twitter of Facebook. Think of a party or social gathering. Now picture in your mind a group of folks having a conversation about a company. Your company.
Response A: Hearing your company name mentioned, you walk towards them, note their name tags, interrupt their conversation to introduce yourself, give them a sales pitch, tell them about your 20% off event next week, hand them your business card, collect theirs, and run back to your office to send them all a promotional email reminding them to follow you on Facebook and Twitter.
Response B: Hearing your company name mentioned, you walk towards them, note their name tags, wait for a pause in the conversation to introduce yourself as a company rep, and invite them to continue their discussion so you can learn something. If the conversation doesn’t naturally answer questions you might have about a topic, you ask them and listen to their answers.
Response A is “talking.” It’s social media marketing. It is as rude and dumb online as it is offline. Response B is “listening,” and it is proper behavior both offline and online.
And there it is, isn’t it?
This is what really pisses me off about “social media” anything these days.
It’s conversation and interpersonal relationships.
That’s all it is. Why this is such a hard concept for so many to grasp is frustrating, bordering on terror. Are we really to believe there are so many people in our hyperconnected, modern world who need to hire consultants or agencies to handle the most basic of human skills?
Social media in one sentence: Act as though you were face-to-face with the people on the other end of the wire. That’s really all there is to it, imo.
Glad to see a new post over here.
Loved this post… most especially #9: Shut Up and LISTEN! That sure takes the pressure off in terms of trying to figure out what content (and how much I need to create).
Thanks!
Yep. You don’t have to guess at what your content should be if you are in tune with your customers and market.
I posted this to Chris Abrahams blog as well. I agree with you, that companies should not be outsourcing your voice. The only benefit of this is the agency in question who now has more control over your brand. Now that being said, I believe agencies play an integral part to an overall strategy and it is key to partner with them in building your social media presence. I have seen some agencies do well, and my concern is not that. It is the authenticity, as well as the long term ramifications if the agency is not doing the proper job in education the business and helping them take control of their social evolution.
Love the conversation and the analogies!
Frank Eliason
Thanks, Frank! Did you see Altimeter’s report on Corporate SM Strategists? (Strategists = SM Directors, really.) 41% are marketing. 1% are customer service. More and more SM is being outsourced to agencies – mostly “digital” departments and increasingly PR. And we wonder why so few companies do this right. As if SM were mostly a marketing channel. Scary to see so many businesses moving in this direction.
Some things can and should be done with the help of partners like agencies and PR firms. Others can’t be delegated, as you well know.
Preach it! Honestly made me think of executives who outsource picking a birthday gift for their Mom or wife. Fail!
Great analogy. I think I should outsource my corporate portrait as well. Can I get a Brad Pitt lookalike for my profile photo?
I thought that was Brad Pitt!
What is worse — having your admin send flowers or cards or not sending flowers or cards at all or — even worse — choosing a vacuum cleaner instead of jewelry? You might consider an executive to be a douche based on these behaviors but I am that guy and to be honest if I weren’t I would always be in a doghouse and I would never have time to ever play here with you kids. Or have a life or see my friends or check out cool restaurants. And my mom thinks I am pretty darn authentic — though surely a douchebag.
Fantastic. Just awesome. I love it.
Thank you sir.
These are amazing points. I especially like #2. Its extremely important that your day-to-day social media efforts are done in house.
Yes. It’s pretty key. Companies that focus on marketing rather than customer development don’t do very well in SM.
Phenomenal! Bravo!
🙂
“A Director of Social Media can only do so much.”
Amen, brother. Learning this the hard way.
Yah. I know. Keep pushing. 🙂
Shh, Olivier, you’re telling secrets! Jasper’s right: your point about change management is one I think most people will miss, or the one about which they’ll be in absolute, full-on denial.
If you think marketers are ill-suited to social media programs, they’re even more ill-suited to change management. In addition to a deep understanding of how organizations work, both strategically and operationally, effectively managing change means understanding people on both the macro and micro levels. It means understanding people both as individuals, and as part of a larger system (not just as potential targets), and understanding how to manage motivations on both levels–not just marketing campaigns.
At the same time, most change management folks are woefully lacking in communication (and communication planning) skills — they know what needs to happen but often lack the ability to communicate it in a way that moves people to action.
That means, I think, that the future is in the hands of those rare birds who combine both, or in savvy alliances. But where to find them? And where to start?
Bingo. I think you just started something right here, actually. 😉
Great post, Olivier, thanks!
In my experience working with small(er) businesses, most people think that social media tools are a shortcut to cost savings. “I’ll just start using Twitter and we can eliminate all that expensive advertising.” We didn’t stop using print when the radio was invented, nor did we stop using radio when TV was invented – social media is another channel (tool) to add to the mix, and like all tools, it’s only as effective as the person(s) wielding it.
The reason why people are so interested in tools is because they’re sorely under-staffed in 2010. The hiring really hasn’t begun yet so people are leaning on Radian6, et all, and the auto-tweeting tools and the cheats is only because there are just not enough people on the tasks. People would really prefer to throw people at tasks but until boards loosen up with hiring plans, they’re outsourcing a lot of their punch-lists to agencies like mine.
What we love as social media operations staffing and specialists is having a rock star face or on-site point of contact there who is attending meetings, grabbing coffee, communicating, and an everyday voice of the company.
Even in our best case, though, that person is a contractor who really isn’t an “authentic” employee but an outside service, on site.
Well said man. As always.
Merci.
I had AHA-moment after AHA-moment reading your post. I want to take about 20 quotes from it, run around and tell them to everybody I know, so they can share my excitement. Do you know the feeling of peace when someone finds exactly the right words for something you yourself can’t even grasp? You did that for me today. Thank you!
Kewl. 🙂
Olivier, I have to say, I respect the fearless way you write your posts — I’m not sure I have the stomach to do that in my own writing (yet, at least).
All too often, companies expect “social media” to be something that quickly and easily fixes all their problems. They think a “social media strategy” is just a widget that plugs into their website/newsletter/whatever that allows people to share/tweet/Digg/delicious-ize their content (content they often pay someone in the Phillipines $1.00 to write and then wonder why it doesn’t resonate with readers).
Obviously the tools of social media are important — but they’re just tools. Those tools are to be used to build and facilitate relationships. If you’re not doing that, then why bother.
Thanks for the great post!
Be fearless, man. What’s the worse that will happen? The blog police will write you a ticket for going over the speed limit? 😉
Companies often fall for what their agencies, consultants and marketing partners sell them – which can as easily be bad advice as good advice. But yeah. It’s a shame.
Once again I am reminded why I love this blog. Great work Olivier and very thought provoking.
Thank you.
Great entry Olivier
Thanks, man.
Great post Olivier. I know what you are talking about with the outsourcing of social media tasks. We actually started out as a business that would build your Twitter site, and Facebook site and keep up the conversation. However, it is difficult to stay in the loop with what different businesses were doing, and most importantly the conversations we were engaging in were disingenuous. It was really difficult for our clients to understand why they needed to commit to blogging, Tweeting, and posting on Facebook on their own. However, we handed all the sites over to the businesses after giving some teaching and what do you think they did? They either let their Twitter and Facebook accounts go stale, or they hired someone else to Tweet on Twitter, and post on Facebook! Crazy huh? Now we have a screening process, and make it clear from the beginning that the client must commit to using social media to listen, engage, and participate in the conversation from the start. Seems to be working well so far.
Helping clients adapt and transition to this curation role is a pretty solid direction for agencies, I think. Helping clients coordinate and plan activities with the agency, man certain stations… It’s a good model.
Glad to hear that you’ve experienced the limitations of trying to be everything SM for a client first-hand and knew the difference between what can be done and what can’t be done from the outside. 😉
Props.
WOW! You write so much better when you have your grumpy pants on.
What I love about your work and your writing Olivier is, you are a direct communicator, like me, I like to go from point “A” to point “B” the shortest distance. It’s like running up the gut, Up the middle, no end runs, no deception, just straight ahead.
Call things as you see them, say what they really are, and then lets deal with it. So many people want to hear a warm fuzzy before hearing what the real issue is.
It is a blessing to be able to quote you and read your work.
Thank you!
It’s a blessing to have guys like you read my posts and give them purpose, Owen. 🙂
I am empowered by your post.
I am the 1%…the customer service oriented person, the psych major, health activist, the person who loves social media for what it can do for relationships and people. I see where business can be (and sometimes is) built by merging people together and nurturing real communication and relationships by way of the ingenious use of social media.
Reading, as you state the obvious, I am refreshed and pleased. As I am not a business “marketing” person, my biggest beef with the social media “social world” is that there is little room for people and relationships. If you’re not talking the “talk of marketing” you’re left out of the conversation. I am often wondering… What about connecting? What about touching someone’s heart? What about earning business by establishing real relationships?
I’m interested in culminating relationships and showing people how they can do that by way of social media, which translates in business to customer service. Who becomes your best customer, someone who loves your ad or someone who loves your service? Why would someone love your service? Because you show you care. Use social media to show people that you care.
Thanks for helping me to solidify my own personal vision and goals. Thanks for bringing humanity to an industry that often seems to be a bit lacking in that department.
You’re in the right 1%, Amy. Just because most “social media people” are doing it one way doesn’t mean they are doing it right. Most of what I see in this space is nonsense. The metrics are short-sighted, the assumptions incorrect, and the impact on loyalty, on revenue, on conversions, on brand elevation minimal at best.
We are talking about a social medium, not just marketing channels. Marketing isn’t social. Ever.
Can you use social media channels for marketing purposes? Yes. But without the social element – hanging out with customers, listening to them, discussing topics with them, getting to know them better and letting them know you better, that marketing goes nowhere. 100,000 followers on twitter is a meaningless number on its own.
You’re on the right track. 😉
Seems like a fine line between marketing and marketing socially. Too many companies are a shuffle away from greatness, but they still think the solution to the rubiks cube of social is to swap the stickers and not sweat it out.
This post mentally resonates for me like much like the dramatic lean back equivalent one did in 2007.
Aka ‘bring the love back’
Yep. No matter how often we take them to the water’s edge, some horses just won’t drink.
Bravo Olivier! Well said. I’m expecting to see a surge of B2Bs and SMBs launching Social Media in 2011. Unfortunately, many will approach Social Media using the opposite of what your post suggests. Then others will follow them because of perceived success (short term).
I’m launching a Social Media Certificate program through Louisiana State University hoping to help companies understand the tools and appropriate strategies for their use.
I like your style.
Victor
Victor, you’re right. Everyone is so busy looking at social media channels in terms of breadth and “reach” that instead of using it as a depth channel, they will simply push out marketing as if Facebook and Twitter were free radio stations. It’s sad, but that’s what the majority of businesses (and “experts”) do.
Which is actually fine by me, since my clients won’t have to worry about their competitors much. 😉
Cheers.
Sometimes the obvious has to be stated because as much as we presume that people know what appears to be obvious, they really don’t. Many social media people in corporate America are ill prepared. They may be a customer who happened onto the job because they know The Twitter or The Facebook or the 20-something intern-cum-Social Media Manager who is always using That Twitter Thing. Whomever it is, the majority don’t understand marketing/sales.
I think #7 is the biggest problem for most companies. Companies don’t often pride themselves on the quality of their people. CEOs don’t want pansies and yes-people. They want strategic thinkers and drivers who can bulldoze anyone in their space. Or so they chose these type of people and then want them to be all unicorn and rainbows to get Likes and Friends and Followers and Tweets, etc.
Companies say they want to hire nice people who build consensus. But those are not the people who get hired because they’re seen as weak or spineless. And that is very sad, because without people willing to do the hard work to engage in authentic ways, customers will just think you’re a bunch of douche-bags. And friends don’t let friends buy stuff from douche-bags.
11. “Friends don’t let friends buy stuff from douche-bags.”
I love it. 🙂
Hello Oliver, this is what I love too.
I along started a PR agency and thought to do the marketing stuff around the web. But fortunately my listening skills worked out & after listening well it revealed to me that SM is to listen & enagege with people (about their concerns with your business & their needs).
SM is great tool to add humanity into business, not to sell stuff. Build great product, be there to listen and then to help. Be Human! 😉
Thank you!
“Be human” is a pretty good place to start. Anyone can buy followers and make digital metrics look good.
In the end, it isn’t about the social media metrics du jour. It is about creating loyal customers.
Great post, Olivier. I like your tell-it-like-it-is style. How come I can’t get away with that?
There’s a lot of really disengaged social media out there, Twitterfeed streams with nobody behind them. (Right now, some kid in Brazil has been begging @AnimalPlanet– in English!– to follow him back for a few days. Is anyone home?)
I’ve experienced a client that wanted to “do social” but wasn’t really interested in taking the time to be social. I felt like I did a pretty good job of holographically projecting them into the party crowd, but wondered what was the point. I don’t think you can look at social the same way businesses used to look at the Yellow Pages: you have to be there because everyone else is. Great,a whole party populated by cardboard cutouts w/ speakers. This is a big mistake and a slap down like the one you delivered is in order.
I’ve got clients now that are willing to engage, but as others who work with smaller and entrepreneurial clients have observed, they don’t have the time it takes to engage, and to do it well: to learn the ropes, learn the tools, keep up with the almost daily developments in how the space is used, and time to get to know individual people each social universe. Or the budget to hire someone good enough to do it well.
So I think the relationship works for both me and the clients. I’m able to build a really good social media representation of their brand and engage on the brand’s behalf, with support and engagement from the client when needed/possible. One client I am teaching to copilot with me. That’s cool! Another lets me do it all, but I have been a partner in helping build the brand since the product was just an idea. Another client, well I used to work there. A fourth client, I plan to build the apparatus and teach him how to fly it. I think it all works because there is a high level in investment on both sides and these are, or show signs of being, strong ongoing relationships. Kind of like an employee of the company.
Now I sound like I’m siding with Chris Abraham, and I plan to comment on his great post, too, to ask at least one pointed question 🙂
Loved your comment: “…yeah, ultimately, if the human element isn’t there, no matter how well built a social media program may be, it will amount to little. Kind of like building a beautiful temple nobody wants to visit.”
This is 99% true, but I would say that @oldspice built a beautiful temple that everybody wanted to visit (there was no engagement from P&G personnel, just scripted engagement from spokeswonder Isiah Mustafa.) But most companies are better off being real, because there’s only one Taj Mahal (or Isaiah Mustafa), but real people are infinitely fascinating.
Really enjoyed the whole debate today, thanks for sparking it.
I get away with it because I don’t have a boss. I work for myself.
Old Spice was an example of a perfectly executed social media campaign. It is also an example of the limitations of campaigns vs programs. Like you said: No engagement. Scripts. It was brilliant, but still limited by the old agency/campaign mentality. It fails to answer the “now what” question.
Thanks for the comment. 🙂
Hey Olivier,
Thanks for firing up so much valuable discussion – both here, and over on Chris Abraham’s blog. Thank you for all your comments there – let me reciprocate with some of what I wrote there in response to your comments:
The long and the short of it is that, actually, a company can successfully outsource the handling of client relationships in social media. We’ve got years of results and clear facts that show it. I know it offends your theory pretty directly, but the facts are facts, and it simply works – often better, and at lower cost than companies trying to handle the social media work in-house.
It’s good to draw up guidelines to help companies find their way in this new landscape, but when reality runs counter to the rules you make up, you have to adjust them accordingly. The fact is that the real world results show your rule #2 to be incorrect. so you should adjust that.
Here’s just one example of many I can provide – from a client who called us in originally because they were getting steamrolled with negativity in social media and needed to turn things around before it killed the public’s and their investors’ perceptions of them:
Here are some of the first year’s results:
• From an average of 5-10 strictly negative daily mentions on Twitter to 20-50 positive daily mentions and retweets reaching an average of over 122,000 people and making over 270,000 impressions a week
• More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers
• From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined
• Over 45,000 Facebook Likes (starting from 0) and over 37,000 active users. From an average of 5-10 daily interactions on Facebook to over 175 daily interactions, and over 55,000 impressions a day (and all of this growing on a hockey-stick curve)
• Tripled blogosphere mentions in 10 months time
And ROI?
• Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
• Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million
This is just one of our clients for whom we handle social media efforts – and not even the most impressive example, just the one I happened to have all the stats on hand for right this instant.
Yes, some companies should consider doing their social media in-house. They should consider doing the search and hiring process, finding the techies, communications people, creatives, project managers, researchers, division executives, and perhaps foreign-language specialists to do the all the work. They should consider what it will take to train up all these folks and build out the infrastructure to support them. They should consider the timeline for all this to take place before they have a complete, coherent, effectively-functioning team in place, and the budget that build will take. They should consider the opportunity cost of the opps they are missing while they are pulling themselves together, and the risk that even with all this budget and effort, they don’t really know if the team they assemble is actually going to be knocking it out of the park when they finally get to work.
And, as an alternative, they should consider simply hiring an agency like ours for probably less than the cost of the one top exec they’re going to hire to spend all this budget to build up a new team. Then they know they have a team with a well-proven track record.
And… when it’s outsourced to an agency like ours, the risk is vastly lower. You know you have an effective team from the first day, and if one day the company decides they want to bring it in-house, they can call up and say, “Hey, it’s been great… we’re not re-upping the contract.” and they are free.
It is important to create theories, and guidelines, and rules, but they have to reflect real-life results. The real-life results show that you can very successfully outsource your social media work and get the best possible ROI at much lower costs and lower risk than doing it in-house.
Your item #2 is not obvious. In fact – and in the face of the facts, it’s simply wrong. (And, obviously, #10 by extension is also wrong…)
Most of the other stuff though, is both obvious, and like most of what you write, right! 😉
Thanks for the pitch, Mark, but I am not sure why you feel the need to prove to me that your firm gets results. I didn’t attack you guys or imply that you don’t provide valuable services to your clients.
1. Relationships cannot be outsourced.
The data that you shared in this comment has nothing to do with that. You talk about followers, mentions, visitors and other metrics that, while important, don’t touch on loyalty, preference or changes in transactional behaviors.
2. One of the bullets in your lengthy explanation is this: “More than 20,000% growth of Twitter followership: from 498 to over 100,000 followers.”
What does that mean, and how is this relevant to anything discussed in this post?
What is the value of these 100,000 followers to your client? Are you converting them into customers? If some already are customers, are you helping them transact more often? Spend more with each transaction? Evangelize your client’s products? What are your conversion rates? What are your retention rates? How are you measuring these changes and how are you measuring the impact of your activities on these metrics before and after your involvement?
You add “From 3rd most followed company in their sector to 1st, with more Twitter followers than all of their competitors combined.” Again, how is this relevant?
Does your client gage its success on its number of followers? How long do you think you can keep this up, Mark, before they start asking you for real results?
I see you increasing their reach. I see that. And for the sake of argument, I will pretend to assume that none of these are bots, clones, inactives or dummy accounts. How are you helping this client meet their business objectives? You are inflating their database with random names and sending more people to their website. Then what?
You aren’t getting it, Mark. We can all sell followers and empty numbers. What will you do a year from now, when your clients realize none of it amounted to anything?
“Tripled mentions in the blogosphere in 10 months.” Are you kidding me?
This is what you’re selling? THIS is what you think outsourced social media services should look like?
Wow. That’s sad.
Hey Olivier –
Did you miss the “ROI” part – right after the SM metrics I quoted?
“And ROI?
• Unique Monthly Visitors for the client’s site went from 50 MM/month to 129 MM/month
• Client’s membership base grew from 500,000 to over 2 million”
THAT’s what increasing their Twitter followership by 20,000% did for the client, THAT’s the dollars-on-the-table value tripling their blogsphere coverage got them, THAT’s why our getting them 37,000 active fans on Facebook is relevant.
Quadrupling the size of a client’s customer base is absolutely the “helping this client meet their business objectives”. Lordy, Olivier, what more could you want as evidence that outsourcing social media to experienced pros is indeed often a really, really good business decision?
And my aim in this discussion is not to prove that my firm gets results – our clients, and much of the business world know that. My aim is to move this conversation towards real-world facts and away from un-backed theorizing, arbitrary rule-inventing, and finger-wagging fire-and-brimstone preaching. That is what irritates and alienates the business world and undermines the credibility of our industry in their eyes.
The fact is, your Obvious Thing #2 – that you supposedly can’t outsource the management of your customer relationships in social media – is just clearly, provable, undeniably wrong, and stating such untruths as gospel and “obvious” hurts our entire industry. There are so many people out there in the business world who’ve come to rolling their eyes at “social media experts” because there is so much unfounded BS and from-whole-cloth blowharding going on in our industry.
Repeating faith-based untruths will never make them true, any more than it made WMD’s in Iraq true. All it does is undermine the credibility of the social media industry.
You are one of the voices out there who speaks very little BS, and I want to help the authority of your voice to remain intact by pointing out when you are preaching an untruth, so you can correct it and not lose the power your words have in promoting our industry in the broader business world.
Please, for the sake of the credibility of your voice, revise your pronouncements to align with facts and real-world results. Otherwise, your valuable voice will slowly erode to being one of those you warn about in your Obvious Thing #10: one not “fit to be consulted on the subject”, and that will not be good for any of us in social media.
No, I didn’t miss that part. I read it – as I read this comment – but didn’t actually find any R.O.I.
I will address your last three paragraphs at the end of this reply. First, this:
Mark… You still aren’t talking about relationship management. Your membership and follower deltas are nice, but… you are collecting people, not building relationships with them for your client. What part of that simple point isn’t clear? You do understand the difference between getting a bunch of people into a room and becoming fast friends with them, right? You are getting them into the room. I get it. Now tell me how you are becoming fast friends with them as an agent of your client?
As for your R.O.I. argument… How can I explain this… (and why do I still have to explain this in November of 2010?) The number of visitors to a website isn’t R.O.I. It’s web traffic. Membership base isn’t R.O.I. It’s reach.
R.O.I. is a business metric, Mark. It is media-agnostic. It has its own little equation that every business major in the world learns in their first year of college. Google it. And buddy, it isn’t calculated in website visitors, memberships, hugs, smiles, tweets, fans, followers, mentions or impressions. It is calculated in currency. If the investment was in dollars, R.O.I. is calculated in dollars. Dollars for dollars. Euros for Euros. Yen for Yen.
The “return,” Mark, is based on the investment. That is why it is called “return on investment.” Money in, money out. Just like stocks. You invest a dollar, and your stock yields two dollars. When Microsoft invests $100 into a program, it expects to see $1,000 in return. That’s R.O.I. As a company, if I invest $100,000 in social media activity, salaries, tools and services and ask you about R.O.I., I expect to know what kind of yield my $100,000 investment is going to generate. I don’t care about followers, visitors and retweets unless they all CONVERT to transactions or cut some of my costs.
Example of R.O.I. #1: Reducing head count in my customer service dept by shifting 20% of service “tickets” from my call center to Twitter. If I can handle the same load of customer complaints with less people by using Social Media, I can calculate R.O.I.
Example of R.O.I. #2: Acquiring 1,000 new transacting customers in H2-2010 through activity on social media channels. Cost of program in H2: $100,000. Revenue generated by net new customers in H2: $750,000. Calculate.
Example of R.O.I. #3: Increasing frequency (buy rate) of H2 transactions from existing customers through social media activity: $250,000. Cost of program in H2: $100,000. Calculate.
Example of R.O.I. #4: Increasing yield of transactions (average transaction amount) in H2 from existing customers using social media channels: $300,000. Cost of program in H2: $100,000. Calculate.
And if your social media program focused on all of the above, calculate it all as a matrix.
THAT, Mark, is R.O.I. in every country, every vertical and for every business model since the dawn of time. I can calculate it and present it to a CEO, COO, CFO and a Sales VP, and they will know that I am not full of shit. What blows my mind, mark, is that we already covered this 2 years ago. How is it that you are still operating under misconceptions that were all but shredded back when twitter was still at under 100M users? I am kind of blown away by this whole exchange, to tell you the truth. You had a good thing going with online reputation management. Stick to that! It is sorely needed, and R.O.I. has nothing to do with it so you don’t even need to understand it.
As for “helping the authority of my voice remain intact,” and the risk of seeing the “erosion” of my “valuable” voice unless I agree with your ridiculous assertions… Thanks for your concern. Something tells me I will be okay.
Hi Olivier –
Thanks for keeping this discussion going so vigorously here and over on our blogs. It’s proving very valuable.
I would have preferred to reply to your last post in this thread, but the reply option is not available – just a head’s up in case that is a bug and not on purpose.
To ROI: of course we’re very familiar with this for both ourselves running a global business and for our clients who we serve. It’s central to every campaign we do, and the first thing we ask a client going into one is, “what business objective are you trying to achieve?” Our commercial, political, NGO, press, and governmental clients have very different business objectives – sometimes it is money, sometimes mass movement, sometimes mind-space, sometimes behavior change. Social media is then just our tool for getting them there.
In the example we’ve been discussing: Increasing the clients members from 50MM to 200MM and their UMV’s from 50MM to 200MM; the end objective has indeed been money. And in this particular case, the UMV’s and members count are direct ROI in dollars since the client’s site is 100% behind a login and the _only_ reason someone becomes a member and visits the site is to buy things from our client.
Thus, every one of those 200MM members is someone who was specifically invited by a current member and went through a sign-up process. And every one of those 200MM visits every month are people shopping in our client’s online store, and they leave lots and lots of money in their coffers.
It’s a privately-held company, and their financial are confidential, but suffice it to say, their revenues have grown commensurate to their membership and UMV growth; an their growth numbers have attracted tens of millions in investment and sent their valuation skyrocketing.
This client has been with us for over a year, as have a number of our clients, and they have certainly seen what lies behind the thousands upon thousands of real, active, human twitter followers, Facebook fans, and blog posts we develop for them: Behind those numbers lie dollars. Lots and lots of dollars (and Euros and Reals and Rupees…) and that’s what effective social media business is.
We understand very well what ROI is – it’s the money we make for our clients and the myriad other business objective we achieve for them day in and day out. I’ll do a post on ROI in social media and loop you in on it. I think that’s another valuable contribution we can make to our community!
“Transparency isn’t just a word. If you don’t intend to practice it, don’t preach it.”
Same goes for “social,” “green” and “corporate social responsibility.” Many other things as well, especially now in the age of blogs, Twitter, etc. If you don’t practice what you preach you will be called to account by your customers and it will be worse than if you had not preached it.
Of course, if you DO practice what you preach, your audience (customers etc.) will notice that, too. So be very, very careful what you preach.
I would be a fan of you if u were a writer…
very well written…<3 🙂 😀
Social media is really big power, but not all company looks seariosly for the potential. And classic companies don’t like to go to public and communicate with peoples. Especially the company is family company like my working company. I coudn’t accept to go social the them. Anyway…
Olivier, you know as well as I do that this space is not a one size fits all community. With that being said, a blog allows us the platform to state our opinions and POV’s no matter how differring they might be.
But… it’s not like you really went out on a limb. It’s just that we’ve had these convos for the better part of 3 years, and yet we still feel the need to state the obvious for a reason. The “obvious” here in your post, is like common sense, if it is supposed to be so common, how come it isn’t…?
With that said, while I think this is a continuum, or is it a great starter, primer, manifesto of sorts? I don’t think you ever said these were must do’s, though I would have to go back and read it. I also don’t think you said people were doomed if they didn’t “do” these things. It’s merely food for thought.
Which leads me to this:
@Mark- For someone who comes from an “Agency”, I’m surprised you felt the need to defend or justify, and pitch, what you do. I almost felt like we ere being spammed, so I had to check who actually wrote it and who they worked for. Wow, again, talk about being surprised. Or maybe I shouldn’t be…
If we’re to push the envelope of what it possible in social media we need to demystify the art of tying a shoe.
1. Those aren’t set in stone. Every company is different. SM, relationships, brand development, customer experience design… all of these things vary from organization to organization. But these ten items tend to be true in most instances. (Emphasis on most.)
2. I was surprised as well.
Hi Olivier,
I hope you had a good Thanksgiving weekend!
I had actually wanted to reply to our longer-format thread above, but the reply option seems to be blocked for me on your last post there – is that a glitch, or by design? I’ll reply to the ROI discussion above where there’s still a “reply” option available to me.
In any case, thank you for evolving your position as a result of this discussion and opening to the idea that there are indeed times when outsourcing your SM does make the best sense. In general, absolutist “rules” are great for being provocative and firing up conversation, but by nature of their rigidity, they stand on shaky ground and are prone to being revealed as flawed by the exceptions our diverse world makes inevitable. I think we’ve seen that in our discussion around your rules #2 and #10, and around other commenters’ taking exception to your rule #9. Much more useful are guidelines to inform intelligent businesspeople’s independent decision-making, and I think you’ve said a much here in saying your Statements of the Obvious are “not set in stone”.
So in the pursuit of useful guidelines for decision-makers, I’m going to draft up “Guidelines on when to Consider Outsourcing your Social Media”. I’ll post on our blogs and link back to this conversation. It would be super valuable if you’d post a similar “Guidelines on when to Consider Keeping your Social Media In-House”. I’m pleased to continue this public conversation and suspect it will serve our field well.
I look forward to this ongoing discussion – indeed, this is what our entire industry is about!
Stating the obvious. One would think that would be easy; however, it seems though our society doesn’t go for obvious. It seems the absurd rules and how things can be made more complex.
That’s because of idiots who look for convoluted ways of monetizing something like this in the wrong way instead of understanding it and monetizing it properly. 😉
Very smart! A big part of social media (and yes this is obvious) is the world social! There is a humanity to these relationships that simply cannot be replaced or faked. When it comes to social media, authenticity is key; anything less than the real you is not enough. Great article.
Thanks, Zach.
Great Title! Stating the Obvious!
I come from a culture where people do as much as possible to sugar coat everything. It gets to the point where they do business with people they put nicknames on (not even their real names) to make it look like they are family. The strange part is that they use these superficial methods to hide the obvious. Normally in these situations the underperform but they have made the client believe that they are someone to trust.
Once this people grab the trust of these individuals then they proceed with making them think that they can outsource even that companies core business to them.
I think it comes down to evaluating why would you want to outsource something as core as a relationship when in most occassions the service provider makes more income by creating more problems than by solving them.
I agree with you Olivier many things cannot be outsourced. The companies that keep their core areas internally are the ones that grow in a healthy way.
I think like you established in your post it is about the People not the tools. You need to empower your organization from within to make it succeed!
Yup.
Don’t hire assholes; easier said than done. Most companies are facing an even harder problem, getting rid of the one’s they’ve already hired. The post, as always informative, interesting, and to the point.
Thanks for sharing.
That’s a problem too. What’s weird to me is that in the last two years of purging, a lot of these assholes managed to miraculously keep their jobs while non-assholes lost theirs. No big surprise there, but talk about a wasted window of opportunity!
Have read this post 4x. Each time I resonate further. You could take the whole concept and apply not what you “Do” but what you “are” to motherhood, fatherhood, educator, health pracitioner, philanthropist, and on and on.
What you’re addressing here is so much deeper than this social media sphere. You’re nudging all to be. To be. Human …To be thoroughly human. Full on. Fully. Walk the talk. Not just talk it or talk at the subject. Imagine if teachers in highschool and college did this? Imagine if moms and dads did this (many do) imagine tho if more of us put the emphasis on BE rather than DO as if it’s a new costume/role/etc. I’ll leave it at that. Value this post hugely. Congrats on the finishing the 2 chapters. Eager to read the book. 🙂 Hope u had a great holiday. Tre ~
Bingo to the bingo, Tresha. You got it. 🙂
Spot on, couldn’t have wrote a better article if I tried. This was well written. Your message speaks to the core of what good business relations should look like, obvious indeed.
I just got introduced to this post from my friend Judy Gombita, but as a social media consultant (explanation coming below) I feel that you really hit the nail on the head with this brilliant post. Before you ask me what value a social media consultant is to an organization in respect to your article, I wanted to point out that, first of all, I agree with ALL of your points. I also think that you brilliantly weaved a lot of touch points that are important to understand about social media together, so kudos on a classic blog post that is sure to be referenced into the future by many.
I am NOT a social media agency and tell my clients that I do not “do” social media for them. Of course not, as you pointed out. And, as you pointed out, implementing a true social media strategy goes beyond just “marketing” as social media will envelop every part of an organization. At the end, it does require a culture change, and because so many people have so many different opinions about social media within any given company, this is a difficult task to achieve. This is especially true because the higher up you go, the more resistance I find.
When everything that you wrote about seems “obvious” to you and not to others, it means that you are way ahead of the curve. Most people that have full-time jobs just don’t have time to learn and experiment with social media as self-employed professionals or those of us in the social media industry do. And, as an agent of change, hiring a consultant (assuming they really are a “true” social media consultant with vast business experience, preferably in a variety of disciplines and leadership positions…because social media consulting requires dealing with executives throughout the organization this is mandatory) to help foster the change and educate and guide the company is the role that I’ve been in that I think has tremendous value to companies. At least my clients have told me so 😉
I do believe, referencing point 10, that we are already seeing an increase of big companies only working with big agencies, who will start “doing” social media for their clients as part of their business, and smaller businesses getting more critical about hiring so-called “consultants” after being burned by now. This means that, the way I see it, it will be smaller more aggressive businesses (Zappos, for instance) who will be at the forefront of the cultural change that social media brings and that larger companies will still lag behind and continue to give agencies an incredible amount of $$$. This assumes, of course, that SMBs find the right internal resources or hire the right consultant for the task… I am hoping that social media will help foster a new renaissance for smaller businesses just like the Internet spawned the likes of Amazon, et. al. in the ’90s.
At the end of the day, social media flattens the relationship between corporations and the public, and that should also mean the demise of businesses that operate to stand between the two of them. As you have pointed out in the comments, there is a role for outsourcing and for agencies. But instead of blindly throwing money at agencies, it should be a reverse role where companies are telling (and managing) agencies on what they should be implementing upon their behalf, and this is a new paradigm. The writing is on the wall. But when will enterprises wake up? I think the role of the social media consultant will be around as long as the role of the “SEO expert” has been…
Sorry for my rambling, but your post has inspired me to do so 😉 Just thought I’d give you my two cents…spiritually I believe that we are aligned, but if not do let me know!
Great comment. Thanks for taking the time to write all that. 🙂
Thank You Man.
Thank you for this fantastic post, Olivier! I love the conciseness and detail-oriented nature of each item. The epitome of “news we can use”! Definitely a post to bookmark and read again!
Peter
Thanks! 🙂
I comment when I like a post on a site or if I have something to add to the discussion.
It’s triggered by the sincerness communicated in the post I browsed. And after this article Stating the obvious: The BrandBuilder Blog. I was moved enough to post a thought 🙂 I actually do have a couple of questions for you if it’s okay.
Could it be simply me or do some of these comments look like
coming from brain dead visitors? 😛 And, if you are posting
at additional online social sites, I’d like to follow everything new you have to post. Would you list every one of all your community sites like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?