7 social business lessons from the fashion industry

My post today is over on the Tickr blog and quickly explains how fashion labels are using social media to earn attention, create relevance and drive sales. Or you can just look at the above infographic sans-commentary, but you’ll certainly be missing out.

Bonus: the piece briefly mentions the Democratic Republic of Catistan, but you’ll never know why unless you go read it.

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Don’t forget to pick up your copy of Social Media R.O.I.: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. The book is 300 pages of facts and proven best practices that cover many of the points I will be talking about in Austin. (Don’t take my word for it though: go to smroi.net to sample a free chapter first, just to make sure it’s worth the money.)

And if English isn’t your first language, you can even get it in Spanish, Japanese, German, Korean and Italian now, with more international editions on the way.

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

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Why it worked.

During the Superbowl on Sunday, there was a little glitch with the lights. They went out. We’re talking blackout. Within minutes, Oreo released the above image across several key social media channels. Not Duracell, not Energizer, not G.E…. Oreo.

Clever. And it paid off for the brand.

Why was this a win? Four interwoven reasons: Velocity, relevance, wit and execution.

Wit, relevance and execution, most ad agencies can handle. Velocity, on the the other hand (generating ad-quality content and publishing it as meme-like social content), not so much. That’s still rare.

I want you to think about obstacles vs. enablement.

I want you to think about culture and operational agility.

Something like this doesn’t happen by accident. You have to have the right people in place, the right presence on key channels, the right support from management, the right kind of relationship with your community, and an eye towards real-time community management and content creation.

How many levels of approvals and sign-off do you think that image had to go through before getting the okay? Judging by the speed with which it appeared on the interwebs when the lights at the Superdome went out, not many. How did Oreo pull that off?

1. At some point, Oreo decided it needed a nimble, agile, self-sufficient social media team.

2. At some point, Oreo decided to trust that team to do its job without having to micromanage it.

Easier said than done? Sure. But only by fine margins. Want to guess what separates Oreo from other companies that haven’t been able to do this yet? They hired the right people.

Instead of assigning social media duties to some intern or the cheapest content creation team they could find, they made sure that the people running that piece of their digital business were witty, capable, professional people who understand brand voice, who understand their fans, and who understand how memes and social marketing work.

This happened because the right people were hired and then allowed to do their job.

We can talk about tools, we can talk about processes, we can talk about platforms, but Oreo’s real genius can be traced straight back to having the right people in place.

If you want to celebrate brand management and superbowl advertising secret sauce today, the two words you should keep in mind are velocity and competence.

 Here’s how they did it. (via Buzzfeed)

Whether or not this ultimately translates to business growth, well played, Oreo. Well played.

Let’s close with two simple graphs:

1. Immediate impact on Twitter:

(Feel free to compare this graph with those of every Super Bowl advertiser.)

2. Impact of Twitter on conversations about the Super Bowl:

See that enormous horizontal blue line up there? That’s the volume of Twitter mentions against Facebook, Instagram, blogs and news for the same time frame. [source]

Long term, platforms like Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram are probably stronger bets for stickiness and reach, but in terms of real-time impact (especially during events), Twitter matters. It matters a lot.

PS: You’ll want to read this too. (Real-time marketing) by David Armano.

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If you’re interested in how to make something like that happen, then convert that attention into real sales, pick up a copy of Social Media R.O.I.: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. The book is 300 pages of facts and proven best practices that explain how to do what Oreo just did – and then some. (Go to smroi.net to sample a free chapter first, just to make sure it’s worth the money.)

And if English isn’t your first language, you can even get it in Spanish, Japanese, German, Korean and Italian now, with more international editions on the way.

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

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Social Business case studies: the proof is in the pudding.

You know how legitimate social business case studies are sometimes hard to come by? Well, Tickr (client) is looking to remedy that with a little contest for the next two months. And the deal only gets sweeter from here. In their own words:

The rules are simple: You sign up, we grant you access to Command Center for a little while, and you submit a cool little case study by March 15, 2013. Whoever comes up with the best case study in each of three categories listed below will win a year’s free access to Command Center, bragging rights, and maybe even a little extra swag. 

The three categories of entries are:

• For-profit
• Non-profit
• Journalism

The case study doesn’t have to be centered on Command Center, but it has to show how you used Command Center to do something. (Read more about that here.)

What’s in it for you?

1. Free Beta: You get to beta-test the pro version of Command Center for free. (Usually, the free trial version is a throttled-down version. Not this time. You get to use the real thing.)
2. Case Study Support: Tickr will help you build your case study. I’ve agreed to help out as much as possible, so if you need help with formatting, measurement, process, strategy, etc., it’s likely that I will be assisting you in some way. If you’ve ever wanted to work with me on something, it won’t be exactly like that, but it’ll be close. I only have so many available hours in my day, but I’ll do what I can to help.
3. Eyeballs, Eyeballs, Eyeballs: If you want to draw a lot of attention to a project, cause or campaign that you’re working on, this contest will be a good way to do that. Solid case studies collected as a result of this contest (whether they win anything or not) will get a lot of mileage out of this.
4. Street Cred: Impress the world with your social business savvy. Whether you are looking to impress your boss, your peers, your rivals or recruiters is up to you. Just give us your best, show us something real and valuable and clever, and you will be amazed how much you and your project will get out of the process.

Agencies, brands, small organization, big organization, journalism students, consultants, newbies, veterans: all are welcome. The more varied the contestants the better. You can create a completely new project/case study specifically for this contest or you can incorporate the contest into something you are already working on. It’s 100% up to you.

To read a little more about the contest, click here.

To register for the contest, click here.

Note: Once you register, Tickr will send you all the info you need to get started. No strings attached and no obligations. If half-way through the process, you decide you don’t want to submit a case study, no one will hold that against you. The folks at Tickr will do whatever they can to make sure you get all the support you need though, so I hope everyone will complete the process.

My advice: Simple is good. Simple is easy. Simple often wins. This doesn’t have to be a huge time-suck unless you want it to be. It is something you can easily incorporate into your daily routine. The case study submission process amounts to filling out a submission form at the end of the contest. You can do more if you want (videos, presentations, white-papers, etc.), but you don’t have to. The contest is supposed to be really easy. The idea is to make your job easier, not harder. Keep that in mind.

Okay, that’s it. Pass it on, have fun, and let me know what you think of the new Command Center. (Here’s a 1-minute tour, by the way.)

This is going to be pretty cool. I can’t wait to see what you all come up with.

Cheers,

Olivier

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Looking for straight answers to real questions about value, process, planning, measurement, management and reporting in the social business space? pick up a copy of Social Media R.O.I.: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. The book is 300 pages of facts and proven best practices. (Go to smroi.net to sample a free chapter first, just to make sure it’s worth the money.)

And if English isn’t your first language, you can even get it in Spanish, Japanese, German, Korean and Italian now, with more international editions on the way.

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

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Digital Crisis Management 101: The 5 phases of a crisis, best practices, and a very light illustrative case study.

Digital Crisis management is hard work. It’s complicated work. But it’s also not rocket science once you understand the mechanics of the process. Today, let’s break down crisis management into five simple components (or phases) and briefly explore the structure of each one. Understanding how to break down a digital crisis management model that way, looking at what types of tools to use and how,  and going through a few general observations in regards to best practices will hopefully arm you with helpful guidelines should your organization ever find itself having to deal with… an unfortunate circumstance involving a lot of very angry people.

To illustrate how this works, we will look at screen shots of what @KitchenAid’s recent PR crisis looked like on a basic Tickr dashboard. If you aren’t familiar with what happened and what the crisis was about, you can catch up here (just remember to come back). Hang on… before you go anywhere, let’s start at the beginning:

… (Continue reading).

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Oh, and while you’re here…

Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization was written specifically to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. It makes for a great desk reference.

(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Spanish.)

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

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How Digital Monitoring Tools are Changing Journalism

HBO’s “The Newsroom.” Image courtesy of Melissa Moseley/HBO.

Last night, I finally watched the first few episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” and something struck me about the first episode: All of the on-shift newsroom staffers are sitting around, working at their computers, and a story comes on the AP wire, which turns out to be the explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon well in the gulf of Mexico. The date is April 20, 2010. The rest, as they say, is history. What’s interesting though is that the camera gives us several closeup shots of the screen, and it basically looks a lot like an email inbox: each new story pops up on a vertically arranged list, probably arranged in chronological order. To make things easier or journalists, each story is tagged with a different color, yellow, orange and red indicating increasing levels of urgency and relevance. (Probably something along the lines of AP ENPS.) Now, don’t get me wrong: It’s a good system. It’s simple, it’s clear and it works. But being in the business of making things work better, something struck me about the limitations of that design: All it is is a whistle, a bell. Integrated into some basic productivity applications, sure, but my immediate reaction was to ask “what… that’s it? Where’s the rest of the info?”

The rest, of course, being something like this:

(Keep reading this story on the Tickr blog.)

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Oh, and while you’re here…

Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization was written specifically to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. It makes for a great desk reference.

(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

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How easily a poorly managed “study” can undermine social commerce.

Today’s post is over on the Tickr blog. You should go check it out.

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Oh, and while you’re here…

Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization was written specifically to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. It makes for a great desk reference.

(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

Read Full Post »

Engineering the Ideal Digital Mission Control Center: Specificity, Adaptive Aggregation, and Mutualism

So I published this over on the Tickr blog, but I thought it would be relevant for you guys as well.

2007 – 2011: Adapting to the new complexities of social business

Five years ago, when businesses – from the enterprise down to smallmom & pop retailers – started using social media to enhance their business processes, things were simpler than they are today. You had your blog. You had your Facebook page. Maybe you had your Youtube channel and your Flickr account. If you were really ahead of the curve, you were already using this new thing called Twitter.

Back then, it was already becoming obvious that social media might be a bit of a time-suck. Not only were you supposed to manage your business and take care of customers, now you had to be a multi-platform publisher as well. You had to write stuff. You had to take pictures of stuff. You had to make videos and edit them and put them on the web. If you were really ahead of the curve, you were spending parts of your evenings looking for forums and discussions, watching, listening, taking notes, maybe even participating.

Already, it became clear that managing a social media presence for your business – or rather, managing the digital aspects of your transformation from a traditional business to an increasingly social business – would soon become a full-time job. You can almost trace the early discussions of social media ROI to that point in social business’ early evolution. It wasn’t really the “should I be on social media” question that did it. It was the “should I pay someone to do this instead of what I know will help my business” question, because it quickly became obvious that social business could never be an after-thought or just a part-time thing.

But this isn’t a post about ROI or social business evolution. This is a post about complexity – specifically, social business complexity. Perhaps more to the point, this is a post about managing that complexity. From the very beginning of this shift to social business, one of the biggest problems business owners and department managers have had to deal with (independently of assigning resources to the task) was simply information overload. Over the course of a very short time frame, businesses went from being disconnected from market intelligence and consumer insights to being flooded with both. Where in the past, organizations could expect consulting and market research firms to act as a collection agent, filter and translator of data, they were now confronted with a volume of information they simply were not capable of managing on their own. Social media monitoring seemed like a great idea. It looked great on paper. In reality, it was a very difficult thing to execute on. Too many sources. Too many hours in the day. Too many platforms to track. And even if it was possible to make sense of it all, then what? What did you do with it? It was hard enough to come up with content and respond to comments and tweets. The entire web had to be monitored and managed as well? Operationally, the task seemed gargantuan. Worse yet, it didn’t scale. (No worries. Scale is a topic we will cover soon.)

While some companies dove into the process of figuring out how to do this all on their own, it wasn’t long before a chunk of the market threw up their hands and decided to outsource the process rather than taking care of it themselves. And for a while there, it was rough for everybody. But then, something cool began to happen.

Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention.

2011-2013: the rise of social monitoring ecosystems

After a few years of experimentation with various social media dashboards and monitoring tools, it became clear that managing a social media program was not an either/or equation when it came to hardware and software. The question began to shift from “what’s the best tool for social media management” to “what else should I be using.” It was clear that certain social media tools, when used side by side, could not only increase the overall effectiveness of an entire program, but also amplify the value of each individual tool. If the word popping into your head right now is symbiosis, you’re on the right track.

Symbiosis:

1. Biology A close, prolonged association between two or more different organisms of different species that may, but does not necessarily, benefit each member.

2. A relationship of mutual benefit or dependence.

Let’s geek-out a little and get a little more specific, because symbiotic relationships come in three types:

Commensalism: A symbiotic relationship in which one organism derives benefit while causing little or no harm to the other. (Good.)

Parasitism: A symbiotic relationship in which one organism (the parasite) benefits and the other (the host) is generally harmed. (Bad.)

Mutualism: A symbiotic relationship in which both organisms benefits from their relationship with the other. (Best.)

Needless to say, you don’t want parasitism. At worst, combining several social media management tools together falls into a commensalist symbiosis scenario – one where some of these tools (and associated) functions will benefit from the utility of other tools, while the utility of these stand-alone tools will not be affected. At best, combining several social media management tools together will create a mutualist symbiosisscenario – on in which every one of these tools will see their utility and value enhanced by the others.

Walk into any company’s digital  ”mission control” center today, and what you will find is an illustration of one or the other of these two ecosystems – and sometimes a combination of both.

Simplifying Digital Mission Control centers: too little vs. too much

So now that we are talking about digital mission control centers (a topic we will revisit often in the coming months), let’s look at them from the perspective of trying to minimize the complexity of social media management…

read more…

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Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization was written specifically to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. It makes for a great desk reference.

(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

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Lecture: “Beyond Social Media ROI: Engineering Social Media Wins”

2010 MIMA Summit: Featured Speaker – Olivier Blanchard from MIMA on Vimeo.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve released a video (well… one that doesn’t involve hanging out with an octopus or trying to crash my bike on mountain descents), so here’s one fished out of the vault by @KrisColvin that might come in handy. It hails back to the 2010 MIMA summit, but everything in the video is fairly straightforward and still applies to your social business programs today, so it’s well worth another pass.

If the embedded video at the top of the post doesn’t launch, watch it here.

Also, some news:

You know by now that I am generally pretty guarded about who my clients are, but my latest project calls for a little bit of transparency since I am giving them some visibility on Facebook and Twitter and helping manage some of their accounts. I have recently started working pretty closely with the folks at Tickr. They’re the folks behind the one-screen multi-channel aggregator you’ve probably seen in videos of social/digital control centers – like the one PepsiCo built for Gatorade. It’s kind of hard to run into a mission control center that doesn’t have a screen dedicated to Tickr now. Anyway, they’re launching a free version and a pay-as-you-go version to complement the enterprise version that big brands are already using, so they’ve asked me to help out for a few months. Check it out and tell me (or them) what you think.

Aside from the shameless plug, you may be interested to know that I’ll be blogging there as well as here for a bit, so if you are looking for more basic social media how to stuff than what I usually post here, news about the world of digital monitoring, digital brand management, and the rise of digital mission control centers, look for some of that there. The short list:

The blog

The Facebook page

The Twitter account (@TickrUS)

The website

You can start a free account and test drive Tickr in minutes, so give them a shot. It’s a pretty cool little app that works super well with the Radian6’s, Alterians and Spiral 16’s of the world.

Cheers. Let me know if you want more videos. There are more in the vault.

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Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization was written specifically to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. It makes for a great desk reference.

(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)

CEO-Read  –  Amazon.com  –  www.smroi.net  –  Barnes & Noble  –  Que

Read Full Post »