Does Social Media Own You?

Posted on May 13, 2011 by marc meyer

Recently I was asked by a school administrator whether Facebook should be used as the platform for communication with another school in another part of the world. Great Idea but I can think of a better one and here’s why.

This morning I was reading an article by David Rogers about whether it was time to shut down your website and go social instead. He measures the benefits of having a social presence versus just a static web presence. Yet one of the points that he made and its one that I have maintained for a while now is this:

Social might be the cool new alternative to a static web presence but what If Facebook, Twitter and Youtube go away tomorrow? I know it seems farfetched, but the point is, what would you do? To Rogers point he states the following as a benefit to the old school web site. And it’s simple really. Own the data.

Social media platforms are owned by the companies that run them, and, as such, they are the only ones holding all the data on your customers and your interactions with them. On your own website, you own all the data.”

The point I made to the administrator was this. Facebook is cool but why not create a proprietary channel in which you own and control the data? Create a profile that is more indigenous of the classroom, the subject matter and the student instead of relying on a profile that reveals whether a student is in a relationship or not.

We need to take our lips off of the baby bottle that is the big 3 of Social Media(Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) and own the data and own the channel. We need to quit treating Facebook like a crack pipe that no one seems to be able to put down. Own the data and control the channel and the better you can control the platform.

The Voice of the Social Employee Inside the Firewall

Posted on May 10, 2011 by marc meyer

In doing some recent research and “listening” to the voice of the customer lately on behalf of clients, it dawned on me that we really don’t talk much about the “voice of the employee”. Sure we talk about employee empowerment and internal ideation at some cool sexy companies that are doing “that”, but for most, the employee doesn’t get the type of play that it deserves. Up to now, we really haven’t given it an official name. For now on, I’m going to call it Voice of the “social” Employee.

For some organizations they will stress how important the employee is and then do nothing about it-call it lip service, while others actually put their money where their mouth is. However, if companies were all about their employees, why would 84%% of all employees in the workforce be looking for a job right in 2011? Yes, part of that is attributed to an economy on the rebound but the other part of that equation has to be linked to factors such as genuine dissatisfaction.

For some of the dissatisfied, it just might not be a good fit and that happens, but what of the 84% who feel that the organization just doesn’t care about them? How do you change that as a C level executive? Does any amount of internal collaborative software or initiatives bolster the morale of a disenfranchised employee? Can an internal socially powered ideation platform or network empower and propel an employee into massive production and an upbeat morale?

Does social media offer the panacea to an employee who feels that he is not being paid what he is worth? Does social give a voice to the employee who isn’t happy? Does social soften the feelings of the employee who thinks that the company doesn’t care about them? Depends on whether they choose to voice that attitude in front of or behind the firewall. Right? In general, dissatisfaction voiced in front of the firewall results in a quick exit strategy-which is where most of today’s “social employees” reside.

Social media can do a lot of things especially in the worlds of awareness, HR, sales, marketing, PR and communication but it may not help when it comes to the employee who feels that they are not getting anywhere. Consider the following three very general examples:

Sure, it’s great for sourcing new ideas but what happens when Betty in accounting can’t stand Fred in the cubicle next to her and Fred stalks her in all of her social networks both internally and externally? Does Betty complain openly on Facebook?
How does social enable Juan in shipping who busts his ass and yet no one notices because he’s so quiet and chooses not to use that hot new internal platform? How can a company leverage that through an internal social platform?
Roger in sales has devised a great way to save the company money but it involves using social media and might eliminate some positions-should he do it?

The voice of the employee is 10 times different than the voice of the customer. It’s layered in nuance, context and politics. You can’t serve the voice of the customer until you address the voice of the employee first.

We want our employees to be more social internally and to create bonds and ties and networks-but employees need to see the value to them and not necessarily to the company. There is the intrinsic value of participation for participation sake and of course there is the mandate of participation-but aren’t those basically disingenuous? What type of quality of participation can we actually expect?

One could say that the best way to motivate would be to incentivize. And in a way Zynga struck a nerve when it realized that social network growth and app saturation could be wrapped around and tied to gaming-people like to be challenged, they like to be entertained and they like to be rewarded. Taken a step further if you were to look at Gowalla and Foursquare, and why they are/were successful-it’s based on the notion of a reward system-earning badges for “checking in”.

But I digress with this parting question. How can we empower, reward and engage our employees to higher levels using some of the basic success tenets of social media? We’re asking the backbone of our organizations to utilize social networks and tools to engage the customer and give the customer a voice but in the same breath we may be taking it away from our employees. We may be unknowingly muting and muzzling our employees for the sake of the customer and creating an opportunity for them to take “it” outside of the firewall.

The Silos are still there-How can you change that?

Posted on May 6, 2011 by marc meyer

Do silos ever come down? Over the past five plus years it’s been said an inordinate amount of times that-

“In order for social media to be effective internally within an organization, the silos have to come down“.

But do silos ever actually come down? Drive down any back road in any rural American town and tell me how many old silos you see. They’re still there. And they’re still being used in some cases. They’re built to last and withstand the elements.

You could spend the majority of your time within your company trying to get buy in and roll out a social media initiative and get nowhere because of “the silos”.

How do you break down silos? In a literal sense, you could take a wrecking ball to it. You could blow it up or you could start at the foundation and topple it. You could even start from within and dismantle it. Geez… The analogies are endless aren’t they? They all make perfect sense too from a descriptive, figurative sense of what you could do. But who really does that?

Most farmers or people who do not use silos anymore just leave them be and go in another direction. Silos either have outlived their use because the farmer has sold the farm or they build a bigger one, a stronger one. But they don’t come down.

The fact of the matter is that the larger the organization, the larger the silos are and the amount or number of silos. I see it everyday in organizations with employees that number in the tens of thousands.

Don’t focus on something that you can’t bring down. You can either go around them or last time I checked-there is an opening somewhere. What goes in must come out right? It’s up to you to devise a way to work with the immovable object.

What Twitter could learn from Facebook Deals

Posted on April 26, 2011 by marc meyer

I know that the comparisons between Facebook and Twitter are not justified. Facebook is really about developing deeper relationships with friends and family whereas Twitter is more about sharing and consuming information with people in a quick and easy fashion. There are other similarities but the fact is they are different. Their UI’s are pretty different.

But in 2012 you cannot mention social media without a reference to 1) Facebook and 2) Twitter. But if we’re to compare the adaptive growth of the two over the last few years, Twitter came out of the blocks fast and Facebook has been consistently building major momentum as of late.

Here’s the rub though…

Twitter has appeared to have stalled with it’s growth, it’s user adoption and new features, while Facebook continues to enhance it’s feature set at a rapid rate.

The latest case in point: Facebook Deals Facebook Deals has been designed to let the site’s 600 million plus users easily share their shopping experiences with one another. The deals may show up on a users’ news feed, or in ads on the dashboard on the left. Users can buy the deal with a credit card, or share it or like it.

The new service is Facebook’s latest attempt to tap into the multibillion-dollar market for daily deals online and additionally adds the element of commerce as well as further keeping their users “in network” on Facebook.

This latest addition to Facebook further amplifies Facebook’s proactive moves in regards to what it sees in the social media space. When Facebook sees what users “like and do” in social networks, they quickly incorporate those features into it’s own network. Remember when Facebook changed it’s wall into a virtual Twitter feed of your Friend’s activities? Why did Facebook create Places? To adress and fold in what Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others had accomplished. And now Facebook has created Deals…

What has Twitter done? Dialed down the API from third party developers, changed their UI and have added features that Facebook has. I realize that Twitter and Facebook are different but Twitter had had just as much of an opportunity to change the lanscape of social platforms and communications as Facebook has.

HeyTwitter, don’t you know the first tenet of social media is to listen and monitor your customers and competition and then turn that into actionable outcomes?

Is social media territorial? Should it be?

Posted on April 22, 2011 by marc meyer

I was walking the dog the other night and watched as he “marked” his territory and naturally I thought about the natural Tug-o-War that occurs with social. The desire for different departments wanting to own the “rights” to social media. Why do you think that is? Look at how strongly some people feel about the subject!

Danny Wong, the co-founder and Lead Evangelist for Blank Label says that PR should own social media because that department knows “what the appropriate messages are for the company’s followers.”

According to Chris Koch’s B2B Marketing Blog He just comes right out and states, It’s official: Marketing owns social media management, in which I agree with his next question, Now what?

Chris Kieff strongly believes, as usual, that it’s the bailiwick of the HR department and that HR should own social media; and if you don’t think there’s an opinion on that, look at the responses he got to his post

Lastly, Steve Radick thinks we all own social media. Wait cancel that, he thinks no one owns social media.

Now I’m confused.

But let’s think about this for a second. A dog marks his territory every day. The same territory every day. Why does he do that? Because another dog came along and marked the exact same territory as his own as well. This happens every day without fail. So the dog marking dance happens every day without fail. Sniff, then mark. Over and over and over again.

It’s simple really, it’s not about ownership, it’s about establishing that you as an organization, are consistently there every day, and making sure others know that you were there…every day, and that you are going to be there…every day. That’s all consumers want.

What Can P90X Teach Us About Social Digital Principles?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by marc meyer

In case you may be living under a rock and do not know what P90X is, it’s currently the media darling of the fitness world. It’s a fitness program encapsulated on DVD in which it stresses 3 simple core principles into it’s workout regime. The core principles are grounded in intensity, variety and consistency.

So I thought, can we make a correlation between P90X and social? Or marketing either online or offline?

The answer is absolutely. Let’s take a quick look.

First, I did a search on Intensity and pulled these colloquial terms:

All of them make sense, but when I think of intensity in digital/social media marketing, I think of focus.

Next up is Variety, which would seemingly fly in the face of focus, but not necessarily. To me, variety means keeping things fresh, not only from a marketing standpoint but also from the standpoint of giving you and your employees and your customers, a reason to come to work, do the work and buy the work. Variety is a two way street.

Lastly we have one of the four pillars of life in my opinion. Consistency. Do you want to succeed? Do you want to win? Do you want to overcome? It’s all about reps. Being consistent with your routine, with your messaging, with your offers, with your conversations, with your content, with your employees and most importantly with your customers. In sports, we marvel at how good it appears that some athletes are-we don’t realize how hard they practiced and worked in order to be consistent.

What principles guide you?

Should Companies Play it Safe in Social Media?

Posted on April 11, 2011 by marc meyer

What does that mean exactly, to play it safe? Is that creating a Facebook page just to satisfy the critics and the bashers? Is it creating a Twitter profile “in case” someone maybe be talking about you so that you can claim that you and your company are proactively listening to the conversation? Or is it a blog that has 3-4 posts over the span of 6 months? Maybe, possibly, and perhaps?

One of the easiest ways to opt out of the social media revolution is to do just enough to satisfy the hacks that may be looking at your social efforts who then may be writing, speaking or commenting about your stuff and trying to poke holes at it. To be honest, if I was a company who didn’t have money, resources, or time (weak excuse) to dip a toe into the waters of social, I might do the same thing. Of course doing the barest of minimums also sets you up for the hacks who love to point out the companies who…do the barest of minimums. Or…doing the barest of minimums sets you up for nothing.

So what’s happening here? Call it paralysis by analysis. Fear of talking, orRO-myopia. But the fact of the matter is that some organizations are so fixated on social but so unsure of what to do, or so obsessed with a wait and see mode, that they end up doing nothing or prefer to just sit back and do very little. Ironically they then claim that they are social, or that they’re doing nothing, because they’re waiting for things to sort themselves out.

Does either strategy ( I use the term lightly) work? Not really. Does it buy you time compared to your comptetitors? Maybe. You see, the easiset way that you could measure your efforts in social would be to first measure how you’re doing compared to the competition. When I coach basketball and baseball- I want to know who is the best and why. Amazing players aside, preparation can go a long way. Once my teams are suitably prepared, we measure where we are by competing. Then I know exactly where to focus my practices and future game plans.

You’re in business to make money and you’re in business to compete against others that do what you do and sell what you sell. Do you scout them? How do you compare to them? What are you doing to improve what you do, as it compares to what they do? What makes you better than them? What are they doing with social media that you are not?

Playing it safe in sports means playing for ties or not caring whether you win or lose. If that was what mattered, then we wouldn’t have to keep score or root for any teams. In business we keep score by making money and surviving. Social used the right way, could determine both.