social media marketing

Trouble Harnessing Social Media? Relationships Can’t Be Automated

~ K. Quesenberry ~ 3 Comments

Today I can’t imagine recommending a brand not be on Facebook. It’s hard to ignore reaching one billion people. A recent survey of CMOs indicate they know this. In fact 82% said they plan to increase their use of social media over the next 3-5 years. But that same IBM study indicates marketers are struggling to harness their social media investment. They feel overwhelmed by the volume of customer data on websites like Facebook and consider themselves ill-equipped to leverage it.

The famous red eye of HAL 9000. File from the Wikimedia Commons.

IBM’s solution is more robust software. Marketing executive Marcel Holsheimer says, “Marketing is going to become much more an automated software play than it was in the past. This is why IBM is now making the investment in this space.” I agree that automation is key to collect and analyze social media information, and we need more robust software to manage big data. But we shouldn’t pretend that is the only part of the solution. In all the hype over big data let’s not forget the human at the end of the technology.

Social media has exploded because it connects real people. Humans by nature are social creatures. Relationships give meaning and purpose to our lives like no other activity or endeavor. Despite the attempts of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey you can’t have a relationship with automated software. Use all the social media dashboards you want, but there still has to be a human with that update, post and tweet investing time into the customer relationship.

How do you develop strong social relationships? Student health services at University of Indiana suggests the following as essential relationship skills:

  1. Listen to what the other person is saying.
  2. Develop solutions that suit both of your needs.
  3. Express your appreciation.
  4. Show empathy and genuine concern.

A similar list emphasizes these key interpersonal skills:

  1. Look
  2. Listen
  3. Ask
  4. Learn
  5. Understand
  6. Acknowledge
  7. Provide
  8. Commit
  9. Contribute
  10. Follow up

If your brand is on Facebook, good, you probably need to be there. But are you acting the right way? Go to your page, look at the activity and compare it to the two lists above. Then estimate your brand’s social skills score. How are you doing?

For those who have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey you know how HAL 9000’s personal interactions turn out for the Discovery spacecraft and crew. If you haven’t seen the movie, take a break from big data software automation to interact with an epic film filled with real human drama.

Savages Movie Written With Fragment Digital Media In Mind

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Oliver Stone’s latest movie Savages is based on an acclaimed novel about the drug war. Beyond the subject matter author Don Winslow’s goal in writing the book was to try and get at the fractured nature of the way we receive information today. Winslow says, “It’s constant and it’s in short, jagged bits. Even the way we talk to each other. … Any given moment, we’ll have the television on, but we’ll also have our computers on. Someone’s tweeting us, someone’s calling us, someone’s texting us, someone’s Skyping us. I just think that society these days gets its stories from multiple directions, in multiple ways at once, so I was trying to reflect some of that.”

As marketers that is the world we live in. Are you still living in the world were you buy reach through traditional media? If not, how big is your online and mobile presence? And a Facebook ad campaign is more of the same. Social media is about influencing the conversation through so much more than marketing. It requires change and corporation in departments across the corporation. Comcast Cares on Twitter and now Facebook is really a customer service function coming out of operations.

Another lesson we can draw from Winslow is that you don’t have to do drugs to write about them. His inside knowledge of the drug culture didn’t come from doing drugs – it came from research – formal research into books and reports, but also just listening. “A lot of it was a matter of talking to people,” says Winslow, “and that’s almost misstated; a lot of it was listening to people.”

Are you listening to your customers online – both the advocates and detractors? Do you know your Net Promoter Score? You might not like what you hear, but if it’s negative you have to fix what they are talking about even if it’s an operations issue. And at the same time you need to encourage the positive talk through engagement and reward.

One final point is about point of view. How many of us forget that we are not our target audience and that not everyone thinks and talks like us? Winslow discusses character development saying, “… then all of a sudden I’m typing from the point of view of a twenty-something Orange County woman, which I’m not, but I know a lot of them, I’ve hung out there a lot.”

How much time have you spent hanging out with your target audience lately? Physically hanging out with them would be great, but there’s also a lot of great social media listening tools these days such Google Analytics and Radian6 that make it easy. The insights you gather will be great, but so is the reminder of what your target really thinks.

You may still be getting used to losing control of your brand, but behind the savage environment of the social web, there can be a sophisticated marketer influencing the culture of your target and the conversation about your brand.