Following is passive, listening is active

Had a great conversation via Twitter that was spawned by Christian Knapp from Keystone Mountain. He asked, “what do you think of reciprocating all followers or just following key industry opinion leaders?” My response was the philosophy we apply to the @vignettecorp account. We follow customers, media/analyst, bloggers and people who have interesting things to say about the market we serve. We find new followers who usually end up being existing customers based on listening for key search phrases relative to the markets we serve.

Mike Slone chimed in with a great point that customer centric brands should follow back because it does not send the right message back. He took it one step farther and said that customer centricity starts with understanding who your customers are and then demonstrating that you care.

Does reciprocating make you more customer centric?

For large brands who have tens of thousands of customers reciprocating is a gesture that you may be listening. Following alone does not imply you are listening. Listening means you are proactive by reaching out to those who make mention as well as reactive to complaints or questions. Following is passive, listening is active.

Take JetBlue for example, they are following 119k people. It is more than a full time job to monitor each and every tweet hoping something relevant for you to act on. Unless you are conducting research to gain insight from followers it is not an efficient use of time to read what would be 10’s of thousands tweets per day. This is where monitoring solutions like Radian6 come in.

You can set up search phrases to monitor several social networking and user generated content sites. These search phrases can be set to trigger alerts for follow up. In the case of a travel company you might want to know when someone has tweeted "On my way to Keystone". This would allow you to personalize their trip in real time and follow up with them after to make sure everything went well. The possibilities here are endless.

When deciding on who to follow it is important to go back to the purpose of the account and what business goals it supports. The other important consideration is the amount of time you can dedicate to taking action on the request that will come from Twitter.

We all agreed that no matter who you choose to follow, customers are a must.

Turn earned media into a managed asset

Earn, Aggregate and Re-Use
Earned media resides in dozens of formats ranging from tweets, comments, status updates and reviews. With emerging standards like Facebook connect and OpenId it is possible to aggregate and make these interactions available in many contexts.

This is not to say you completely turn your site over to social media like Skittles.com. Rather, think about the placement of earned media to support learning, buying or seeking help. This is how the corporate websites should evolve.The challenge in doing this is the number of places earned media exist. Each time you would want to re-purpose this content into a new experience like a display ad, micro site or email requires a small development effort.

Most companies already have invested in a content management system for the creating and publishing corporate content. These tools usually have the capability of consuming content from third party source via RSS and XML. If you are tagging favorite tweets or bookmarking earned media, why not hook this feed to your CMS.

Turning earned media into a managed asset allows you to re-use and re brand this content in many contexts. This is another benefit that can be claimed for dedicating resources to listening, learning and earning.

I am curious to know others are doing to repurpose earned media in different context. What are the best examples you have seen?

Make social media a capability not a campaign

This is a first pass at some ideas on creating a sustainable social media program. The premise is simple. If you can not replicate success then it is impossible to predict what kind of value can be achieved from your investments in social media. This inability to predict value is the challenge many companies face when developing a business case to formalize a social media program.
Make social media a capability not a campaign:

View more OpenOffice presentations from dirkshaw.

Can you replicate social media success?

It seems like everywhere you turn someone is talking about social media.

According to a recent study by Vignette and the Marketing Leadership forum only 12% of companies think they are successful in their social media efforts. This might be because 40% of the respondents cited they have no social media strategy in place.

The lack of a clear vision and a strategy is directly related to the feeling that social media efforts are not successful.

The velocity in which social media has been adopted and subsequent volume of user-generated content has left many companies scratching their heads.

The question is no longer should I participate in social media, rather companies are now asking how do we get started. Getting started requires more than simply setting up outpost on sites like Twitter Facebook or whatever is next. These are all tactics to achieve a set of goals.

To be successful companies need to shift their mindset and not simply look at social media metrics alone. According to Jeremiah Owyang “Social media metrics alone are meaningless”. That is until you can show which activities led to achieving business goals like lead generation, brand awareness or direct sales.

Predicting social media value implies you can repeat a past success.

Many companies are engaging in social media in an uncoordinated manner. This makes it hard to replicate success, which means predicting its future value is almost impossible. Experimentation and prototyping is an essential step to making anything repeatable. With that said, experimentation should have a basic hypothesis on what conclusions can be drawn by using social media.

Below are some steps to think about when developing a social media strategy. Taking a snapshot of how well you listen, learn, engage and replicate social media success can provide a baseline for creating a sustainable social media program.

Listening: Listening to the conversation is as important as participating.
The real time nature of the medium means these groups must be able to act as a system, almost like a school of fish. To achieve business goals this require several groups in the organization from R&D>Marketing>PR >Sales>Support to act in a synchronized manner. While social media has the opportunity to create a better customer experience it always has the opportunity to create an even more fragmented one. In order to be nimble several ears must be on the ground and be ready to act on certain indicators.

Learning: Turn insights into action
The challenge is acting on what you hear. In many cases this will require several people to get an answer, make a comment or add to idea pipeline. To streamline cross-functional collaboration Radian6 allows you to create workflows around most content types across the social web. This would allow you to be notified if a customer posted a tweet that mentioned "service down". This tweet could then be routed to a customer support person to follow up on. The customer service example is an obvious one.

Where the value comes is when you have formalized how you take the insights from these conversations and respond in a timely fashion. A great example of this happened to me when I had an issues with Disqus, a tools for moderating comments on my blog. I posted a tweet saying that an error was appearing on my blog, within an hour or so they replied with “@dirkmshaw We pushed a fix for that issue a couple minutes ago and all should be well. =) @giannii”. They were not only listening, but had their organization and products aligned to make corrections based on what they are hearing. This level of responsiveness made me a fan of their products and as a result I have recommended it to several others. They made me a net promoter.

Engaging: A participation strategy should be informed by what you learned from listening.
The number of tools and places that exist for companies to engage with customers can be overwhelming. Many companies simply skip the listening part and jump right into the conversation. In many cases this is not the right approach. Just jumping straight in to the conversation will result in spending time in places where your customers are not, leading to a lack of results. Poor results also gives the impression that social media is not right for companies.

Once you have identified places you plan on engaging with customers, it is important to define the role of each outpost and how it supports business goals and who will be responsible for ensuring timely responses are made.

The challenge with having several new points of interaction with customers is to create a cohesive experience across each one. This makes the role of you experience planners even more essential. Engaging social experiences are ones that integrate owned media like your public website with earned media such as positive reviews made about a product or service. It is important to not only define the roles of each outpost, but to understand how they can work together in a coordinated fashion to deliver the most engaging experience.

Replicate: Make your success repeatable. Start small, get it right and replicate.
Now that you have successfully accomplished goal, can you do it again.

When you think about innovative companies, they are not successful because they came up with a clever idea. Many companies like Apple, GE and Nike are a success because they know how to replicate success and refine things along the way. The ability to replicate allows you stop looking thru the rear view and get in front of the ship and chart a course for the future.

The same holds true with social media. Adoption in many organizations either starts in marketing or public relations, depending on where the early adopters are. The challenge is how can a social media success that was started in one department get replicated across the organization.

As you achieve success in accomplishing your goals document how you did it. Be sure to capture the metrics you were tracking, who was involved and how you would do it differently. These stories can be used as a social media playbook to enable others to repeat, refine and mature as the organization grows. Sharing success stories is a great way to get other groups excited and willing to dedicate time and money to social media.

Having a clear picture of where you want to go allows you successfully align social media to goals, people, processes and tools. This will ensure that you can successfully replicate success against the same goal and across your organization.

How well can you replicate social media success?

Measuring brand awareness & sentiment in social media

As we continue to see positive results in our investment in social media, we begin asking tougher questions. One of the goals we want to better quantify is how does social media "Increase Brand Awareness". The key metrics we will track are share of voice, brand mentions, sentiment and influencer's. These metrics will be filtered by the solutions we sell and the markets we serve.

We selected Radian 6 for social media monitoring. The ability to create multiple dashboards like spaces on the Mac is excellent. We have one dashboard set up per solution area, a dashboard to track the Opentext announcement to Vignette acquisition and will be adding the industries we focus on next. Configuring the dashboards is fairly intuitive, some wizards around frequent task would be nice but it is an overall good experience.

As I began the tedious task of manually classifying sentiment ranking it was interesting to see how far topics spread thru re-tweets, blogpost and "likes"on friend feed. What is missing or at least not obvious is to somehow tag the original as the "source" and all sentiment rankings applied to the master would be applied to all re-tweets, blogpost or friendfeed that matched the phrase.

Nonetheless, we now have the ability to understand what's happening in real time against our goal of increasing brand awareness thru social media. We can measure our share of the voice in the market, sentiment towards products in various context and know who the most influential people have been.

Just measuring alone is not enough, these will inform everything from marketing, media/blogger relations and product development. This supports a top level company goal of becoming a customer centric organization.

This exercise did make me ask myself. Does a retweet, or a "like" in Friendfreed carry count as a "brand mention" or is it just an impression. Are re-tweets and "likes" the real value?

7 Questions Some Brands Are Asking About Twitter: Vignette's Answers

Here are answers from Vignette's perspective on Jeremiah's recent post on 7 Questions Some Brands Are Asking About Twitter:

Should we create multiple accounts for different divisions? How should we name them? How should the content be different?

• Currently we use @vignettecorp as a tool to share relevant links about digital marketing, social media and web content management. We are working on bringing other division online (support, services). These accounts will provide different content as their goals are all unique.

Is it ok to just tweet out news on our main corporate account? Or should we be conversational?

• @vignettecorp tweets news, content from around the web and engages in conversation as much as possible. One tactic we used for humanizing the logo to encourage conversation, is to make it clear who is the person doing the tweeting. Here is a lesson i learned on this. "Who is the I and can you drop the logo"
  

How do we get our corporate reps (sales, product teams) to use this tool, and be conversational?

• As the person who has full responsibility for these channels I think of myself as the switchboard, when i see something relevant I write internal blog sharing insights from my monitoring activity. These post have ranged from customers who expressed dis-satisfaction to those with questions. There are also screencast with tutorials on how to get started to ease the learning curve. See this post "Using internal blogs to help teams learn social"
  

Should we follow folks? If so, what’s the protocol? Should we only follow folks that follow us? We don’t want to appear like ‘big brother’

• The criteria I use for following is. Are they a customer/partner/employee? Are they a industry blogger/analyst/media? Do they tweet useful information that can be share with the community?

What are the tools to use to manage multiple authors/tweeters?

• We have an account with Hootsuite for managing multiple accounts. We are not using it at the moment but I also hear great things about Cotweet.

How can we find other examples of B2B twitter examples?

• You can get started by searching around twibs.com for other companies using twitter to get an idea of who you think is using it well.
  

How should we brand our Twitter backgrounds images?

• We branded our background to match corporate brand standards and included references to other places people can connect with us online and offline.
  

Twitter, Its not just about lunch anymore.

Twitter is much more than people updating what they had for lunch. It is a real time discussion on the latest trends, a place to gain market insights and a place where word of mouth rules.

If you are not sold on whether Twitter is right for you, consider the cost of ignoring.

• $1million in sales for Dell (corporation).
• 200 copies of Steampotville sold in 15 hours securing a publishing deal (individual).
• New leads generated from a recent campaign ran by Vignette (medium sized business).

This shows size does not matter as much as participation does. A simple formula to evaluate using twitter might look something like this (opportunity cost – human resource cost) = Return on participation.

Opportunity Cost
As with any formula you have to assign a value to missed opportunities. The sum of these in both hard and soft cost will help you realize the possibilities. Like many people, it may be difficult to fully understand the opportunities that are being missed. Start by actively monitoring twitter streams on brand, product and competitive mentions to get an idea of who is talking and about what. What I was able to determine from monitoring on behalf of my company is people were either needing support, interested in more information or ranting. Do not fear those who are not saying nice this, see my post on "Addressing negative comments head on"

Human resource cost
Social media cannot be automated. Twitter is about building relationships by actively listening, learning and participating with the community. To do this effectively a person or team needs to be assigned. According to Jet Blue's CMO they started with a single full time person and a couple of who had part time responsibility but given their success they will expand the use of Twitter deeper in the support organization.

Return on participation
The returns or business outcomes vary based on defined business goals, see "Moving beyond social media metrics to business outcomes". To measure activity on Twitter several tools exist. Trackable url’s like bit.ly and Hootsuite provide insight to the number of links clicked, Tweetreach measures reach of tweets and using web analytic's you can determine how many referral's came via Twitter.

Twitter is relevant to almost all businesses. How much time you dedicate is based on what you think the value of the missed opportunities are. Before getting started define clear goals, listen before talking and be patient.

In the social media dugout

Growing up about the only sport that interested me was baseball and nothing was harder than sitting in the dugout watching the game.

Recently my company was acquired and the same feeling emerged watching streams of conversations take place and due to the quiet period don't really have much to share.

While sitting in the dug out I would try and make myself useful by observing every play of the game and providing commentary to others while chewing on sunflower seeds. This situation is very similar, instead of watching pitches it is tweets, instead of hits it is blog post and the stats we are tracking are #mentions, tone and perception.

The way you can make your self useful on the sidelines to make insights available to internal teams so they can hit the curveball's thrown out of the park.

Twitter Litter

Just got done chatting with someone who commented about how impressed they were that within 10 days a business had amassed over 2k followers. I had to explain why I am not impressed.

It is understandable when someone who has a huge off line presence is able to grow a following in a short period of time, using auto follower and other "get followers quickly" tools defeats the purpose of Twitter in my mind.

Quality over Quantity is my philosophy to twitter. Followers alone is a meaningless metric, especially if these people are looking for the same thing you are, more followers. If so, these people have very little interest in what you are in business to do and therefore produce no value. Instead take the time connect with people who are in the markets you serve, have mentioned similar interest or just post interesting stuff.

It does not matter how many followers your business has if you cannot engage with this community and show measurable results from your activity. The getting followers quickly schemes are like a fad diet, they will work in the short term but will yield marginal if any sustainable results.

Using internal blogs to help teams learn social

A recent post from Jeremiah on “How Brands Balance Their Diet With Social Media Supplements” referenced our use of internal blogs as a tool to educate cross-functional teams on social media.

Here is a little more about the use of an internal blog. “The garden of social media”, long story on the name but the idea is that we are planting seeds to grow a culture who is passionate using social media to solve customers problems.

The first step is creating an awareness of the social media landscape and how it can applied to business. My internal post range from insights learned from monitoring social media, how to videos on tools and recorded presentations on a variety of topics.

An example of monitoring, I discovered a thread from a person working at a large customer; he was asking questions about alternative solutions to one of our products. I wrote a post, the account team quickly jumped all over it and quickly found out this person was “just” a systems admin. A comment I got back was “We have executive sponsorship, so we are good.”

These comments were a good opportunity to educate that in the “New” world everyone is an influencer and we must think this way.

Crowd sourcing for feedback is another great use of internal blogs. Recently we engaged in a broad dialog and gained a collective opinion from across the organization in response the CMSmeme Day software created. This meme asked CMS vendors to answer a series of questions about their products, many of which I do would not be able to answer.

The internal post was a call to help shape the response; we received feedback from across the organization, which armed our product marketing manager @kirstenknipp with a tremendous amount of insight for her response. Vignette was the first of the enterprise class CMS vendors to respond. Using a blog to get feedback not only accelerated our response but made our answers more comprehensive.

There is also an ongoing series called “Social Media 101” to keep our teams up on what is happening. These post consist of external references, screen cast on using various tools and presentations on measuring social media.

Keeping up with an internal blog has become a great tool for sharing topics and having open discussions of what social means to our customers and products.