Seth Godin’s post today speaks to some of the same issues at the heart of our recent Zombie Trilogy, though he approaches it from a somewhat different angle. Godin is worried that “the endless search for wow further coarsens our culture at the same time it encourages marketers to get ever more shallow.”
H
e’s particularly concerned that we’ve become focused on increases in traffic versus affecting change and emphasizes that if you want to make an impact, you should focus on your target audience and ignore the masses. Although that’s basically obvious to us, I think the following questions are ever-present in our work:
“What works to change mindsets, to spread important ideas and to create an audience for work that matters? What’s worth your effort and investment as a marketer or creator?”
Especially as marketers are asked to do more with less, how do you scale influence while maintaining meaning and impact for key individuals? Answering this question is easier said than done, but there are a few key points to remember:
- It’s not just about targeting the right people. A successful strategy needs to also target those points in the decision-making process where consumers most want to be influenced and utilize the particular communication strategy that best suits that consumer at that point in time. How do you identify these opportunities for each key audience? Through rigorous research to understand consumer trends as well as measurement of the effectiveness of efforts already in the marketplace.
- An integrated social media strategy isn’t just about integration across channels in the digital space. It needs to be a part of a truly holistic multichannel effort that impacts customers throughout the consumer decision journey. If your message in a consumer’s experience with your widget doesn’t live up to the information they discovered that prompted them to buy the widget, they aren’t going to become the active loyalist that you need them to be in order to make your social media integration worthwhile.
- It’s not just about what you say but how well you listen. You have to monitor your social media outlets and align this information with the results of research insights gained through other channels. This information then must be transformed into action in order to capitalize on and maintain the relationship.
This work is hard, but it can also be fun, and when done right, the reward can be huge: Yearly revenue growth can be 100 basis points higher for companies that execute a multichannel strategy well versus those that do not.
Image by davidking
What is zombie media? Tactic-only social media.
What does zombie media look like? Empty, vacuous Facebook pages and Twitter accounts devoid of conversation. [Warning] Zombie accounts often have lots of content flowing through them, but no one is there. It’s brainless.
Is zombie media the same as social media spam? No. Unlike most social media marketing, social media spam has a deliberate strategy and better ROI.
Where does zombie media come from?Sadly most zombie media comes from well-intentioned marketing efforts. Marketers launch a Twitter account or Facebook page or blog but don’t have the resources, systems and process aligned to sustain the effort.
What is the cure for zombie media?Influence is the cure. You achieve influence through building trusted relationships and engagement with other influencers.
Marketing has always worked because of influence. Take away influence and your marketing sucks. It used to be that you achieved this by working with a handful of influencers or influential media sources. Today the influencers can number in the thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions.Your existing processes won’t scale to meet that need.
But influence is not a switch that can be turned on or off. Influence is something that you build over time and work to maintain. To scale the effects of influence you need processes and systems we’ve never had in place before.
You need to rethink everything.
Marketers are all being asked to do more with less, but no one has given them the tools to do that.
If you put systems in place to integrate social media with your marketing/PR efforts, you will do more with less and achieve better results that you can measure. I know this because I’ve seen it done.
To follow up on yesterday’s post I wanted to try my best to help those people who will refuse to heed my advice. Here is a recommended list of Zombie Media books. Conversely, if you don’t want to end up with zombie media, I highly recommend the non-zombie versions of these books.
- Naked Conversations About Zombies – How zombies are changing the way businesses talk with customers.
- The Zombie Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by zombie technologies.
- Zombies Engage – The complete guide for zombies to build, cultivate and measure success on the Web. Foreword by Zombie Kutcher.
- The Purple Zombie – Transform your business by being a zombie.
- Zombieville – How businesses can thrive in the new zombie neighborhoods.
- Zombie Agents – Using zombies to build influence, improve reputation and earn trust.
- Z 2.0 – New collaborative tools for your organization’s toughest zombies.
- Creating Zombie Evangelists – How zombie evangelists become a voluntary sales force.
- Here Come the Zombies
- Twitter Marketing for Zombies
- Use Twitter to communicate with your zombies
- Use zombies to maximize your presence on Twitter
- Build and use your network to spread the zombie virus
- Measure the success of your zombies
Do you have a favorite zombie media book?
Bonus points if you can name all the real books and their authors.
I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the coming wave of zombie media.
Now that companies are starting to show results with social media, the rest of the early majority and late majority adopters are going to continue to pile on. They’re going to try and strap on social media to their existing efforts and realize that they can’t sustain these efforts. Worse yet, they’ll launch these efforts with no thought to what to do with their new fans, friends and followers (assuming they get any to begin with).
We will continue to see a plague of abandoned Twitter accounts, outdated blogs and neglected Facebook pages. These are the social media equivalent of zombies.
Unsupported, non-strategic, tactically driven efforts have no ROI and accrue to no larger business objective.
What are the signs of the coming wave of zombie media? They’re everywhere if you look.
Screenshot: timeinc.net
To get a better understanding of where we are today we often need to look to the past. In a recent MediaShift blog post Craig Silverman shares insight about what was happening (or more accurately what wasn’t) in Turino, Italy, during the 20th Winter Olympics in 2006.
Graeme Menzies (formerly worked for Microsoft), now director of online communications, publications and editorial services for the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) noticed how much buzz YouTube was getting, yet it was not being utilized at the Turino games.
The social media landscape in 2006 wasn’t what it is today.
“The website is the mother ship,” Menzies said. 60 million site visitors over the period of the Games and somewhere near a 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion page views — and humbly admits they can’t possibly create it all and engagement with audience is a large focus.
Each medium has its place. The fans own the Facebook conversation. He Compares Twitter to a telegram and reminds us after a few minutes content may not be relevant. YouTube continues to be a huge draw.
They’ve also released a free mobile app, provides as much content as the Online Spectators Guide, Cultural Olympiad, news and up-to-date images from the web-site.
“We’re done at end of March, so our goal is to be in the moment…being ahead of the pack is just as bad as being behind. We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge or behind the times. We want to be in the moment.” Of course this will change by 2012 for the next round of Olympics…..
This is a great example (imho) of learning from the past, moving forward with a strategic media plan (which includes traditional mediums not discussed in depth here) and using current digital media tools to reach specific audiences and engaging with different demographics in campaign with a short time span.
Yes, the action is right in our backyard but the passion surrounding this Winter Olympics seems to be at crazed level this round, eh? How are you following the 2010 Winter Olympics events? What do you think we’ll see change as we move forward in 2012? Sadly, I know I just have a few more days “to be in the moment.”
Posted on February 23, 2010 by jevans — 1 Comment
ROI. Is it measured by dollars or impact?
At a recent Social Media Breakfast (SMB) Seattle event, @tacanderson (Waggener Edstrom Studio D) and @neilbeam (AT&T) discussed Social Media Measurement and ROI: Making the Connection from Monitoring to the Bottom Line.
Both Anderson and Beam made the case that ROI is often defined by increase or decrease in sales. It is, however, important to identify your objective before defining ROI. Considerations include loyalty, quality, reach, efficacy and engagement. ROI outliers include brand reputation, SEO and capturing the unexpected.
Calls to Action:
• Measure EVERYTHING.
• Think about establishing values to human activities such as the following:
o view
o review
o kudos/vote up
• Know your audience. For example, Anderson explained:
o IT purchasers are single most users of social media.
o The future of social media is with individual influencers.
Resources:
• Event video
• Event slide deck
• Event photos
• Social Media Vocab Resource
On Wednesday, a client asked what they should do with a current program if their funding ran out.
The first answer is, don’t let your funding run out. Manage the project against agreed-upon metrics, and if it’s not meeting the metrics, pull the plug or redesign the campaign. But what the client really was getting at with the question was that they didn’t have an exit strategy or retirement plan for the program.
Many people start a project by defining success, but few think about what should happen if it’s not successful, or has run its course after a period of time. As you’re engaging in a new project, one of the first things to formulate is an exit strategy. What if the project fails? What if funding runs out; what if the business shifts dramatically and the campaign is irrelvant? In the Web design world this means broken links, but in the social media or applications world, this means abandoned users, lost engagements, terminated conversations and bad SEO.
Go into each project with a defined plan of how you gracefully end the project. The plan should include:
- Comunications to key stakeholders
- An audit of referring links, properties that might be consuming your content, and related dependent sites and services
- Migration details to redirect URLs and RSS feeds
- A clear path to service existing users and visitors with a viable alternative
In addition to the above, consider the following:
- Never name anything with a date. For example, if you create a Twitter account for a special event and include 2010 in the account name, you won’t be able to use that feed next year and you’ll have to rebuild your audience.
- Use a platform that makes it easy to set up redirects to alternative properties.
- Track your pingbacks and referrals so you can go back to them and let them know you have a new site or community they should link to.
Last week one of the biggest stories related to social media was the Twitterfeud between Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines around an unfortunate experience he endured on a Burbank-bound flight. If you haven’t read the tweet stream or one of the dozens of articles over the past days, basically Kevin got pulled off a flight after checking in, boarding and settling in for being, um, “plus-sized.” Now Kevin is a big dude, but not Mr. Creosote big, and had, in turn, flown Southwest incident-free on multiple occasions, so upon being bounced from the flight, took out his anger toward the airline via his very well-read Twitter feed. I won’t go into the details or debate whether this was a publicity stunt for Smith’s new movie, or whether Southwest’s policy is unreasonable. I want to focus for a second on Southwest’s response (it gave him an apology and a $100 voucher) and social CRM as a whole.
Some have questioned whether Smith would have gotten a response back from Southwest if he hadn’t been a famous movie producer with a big influential following. I think the answer here is a resounding “no” (see below), but it also got me thinking about something a little bigger — that this actually might be the golden age of consumer-friendly social CRM. Follow me here for a second. Companies know that they need to be monitoring social media for customer delight issues and occasions where the brand promise has been broken. Brands want to look like they are progressive problem solvers “doing social right” and using it to address customer satisfaction issues. This is great. This is commendable. This really does act as a balm to fix some brand equity issues on a 1:1 level.
Unfortunately it’s not sustainable or scalable. We are at an interesting crossroads — most companies’ appetites for using social CRM to fix brand problems via personalized service is actionable right now — but only right now, so enjoy it while you can! As social media continues to grow in volume and influence I think we’ll see this personalized service — social media as concierge — turn more into social media as the evolution of the call center. Some companies are already too big to make that 1:1 connection with every issue; they can direct traffic and collect trends, but that individualized attention (unfortunately) can’t be matched every time. At this point in the companies’ social media maturity they rightfully evolve to focus on influence — finding the social influentials that in turn help drive the conversation.
True story: Last week I stayed in the lovely Kimpton-run Hotel Monaco in San Francisco, a city that I lived in for years, know well and look forward to visiting. It’s a special place that has a unique look and vibe, and one thing I love to do when I stay there is throw open my hotel curtains and just take in the view to see how the city changes throughout the day. This trip, unfortunately, I had a view of the dumpster depot where all the garbage cans go to sleep at night awaiting the morning garbage trucks. Kind of gross — and at the risk of sounding like a snobby whiner I tweeted about it. Later that day I got a call from the hotel manager who had seen my tweet and offered to move me to another room. I declined (all they had left were internal rooms with no window), and that seemed a little claustrophobic. But I thanked him for listening, commended the hotel for its customer relations and hung up the phone feeling really great about Kimpton. Moments later a bellhop showed up at my door with a bottle of wine and a cheese plate, compliments of the hotel. Totally unnecessary but very thoughtful, and I tweeted back out about how delighted I was with how this worked out for everyone: they get a delighted customer willing to tweet about his experience, I get the satisfaction of knowing a brand I respect is listening to me, and — bonus! — I get to drink wine while I do work from the hotel (which is something I usually don’t get to do in my cube (unless it is Terry Neubauer Power Hour-ha!).
Too bad it’s not sustainable or scalable. Next time it just might be extra pillow mints!
Last week I attended two panels on healthcare and social media – BDI’s Healthcare Social Communications Leadership Forum and a NY Social Media Week panel, Navigating Social Media & New Technology in Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Industries. Much of the discussion – in both panels – had to do with the need for community among patients, and the role pharma brands can play in helping to facilitate this; the nuances of content (tone and tenor; separating gems from garbage; processes to distribute from internal out); as well as a visceral chafing among those that are already embracing social media against any references to a campaign mindset.
The latter came up in discussions of both channels and ROI: The dominant POV among the BDI panel was that social media should be embraced at a fundamental level and insisting upon ROI as you would a traditional marketing campaign misses the point. That said, Marc Monseau of Johnson & Johnson did emphasize the point that he couldn’t have achieved any of what he’s implemented at J&J without strong executive support. Which is to say, the most exemplary social media leaders in the healthcare space are focusing their education and evangelizing efforts on hitting the right nuance, versus justifying the fundamental value.
Some of the key themes in more detail:
Social media requires processes. Marc Monseau of Johnson & Johnson spoke at length about this – internal evangelizing, gaining executive support and creating clear protocols around who and what can go out via social media. Social media is low cost of entry, but highly resource-intensive. However, many companies likely already have mechanisms in place (both traditional PR spokesperson processes as well as content development), in which case it’s just a matter of refocusing them. Michael Fleming of GlaxoSmithKline also touched on the need to transform internal processes: if you can’t fluidly share information internally, you’re disadvantaged against individuals outside the organization who operate at a different pace.
Social media is a mindset, not a campaign. When asked to define social media, the overall consensus of the panel was that social media is not about the technology or the tools, but a mindset of engagement and interaction. Many argued that the persistent question of ROI missed the point – that social media should be seen as a fundamental part of business operations, like a call center, versus a campaign.
Content is context. Content is king, but it’s the context within which it’s delivered that is paramount in this space. Patients aren’t suffering for lack of content – when they search for information online the problem isn’t that they can’t find it, the problem is not knowing what they can trust. Separating the “gems from the garbage,” as one of the panelists put it. (Along those lines, an interesting tool that came up in discussion is Pixels & Pills’ Health Tweeder – a visualization tool to give a perspective of the health-related issues on Twitter that most concern people.)
One big opportunity for pharma brands is to help by facilitating relationships between patients, creating structures for patient communities. The other opportunity gets back to processes; as Fleming pointed out, pharma brands have a tremendous depth of knowledge and relationships, but currently don’t have mechanisms in place to distribute that knowledge to the external world – not proprietary info, but info that would help patients make decisions toward living better lives. Given the changing landscape in which traditional marketing messages aren’t resonating, this is a huge opportunity for pharma to shift into a new role. Again, it means shifting out of a campaign mentality, and treating social media as more of a fundamental business operation.
Think physicians and HCPs aren’t interested in digital tools? Think again. Some stats: 60% of physicians either are currently using social media or want to be; 65% of physicians have smartphones; 9 out of 10 physicians say the Internet is a critical tool to their practice. Lance Hill of Within3 pointed out that, contrary to the perception that physicians don’t have time for social networking, physicians are very heavy offline networkers. So the social media platforms that are most successful at engaging physicians tend to be those that marry offline with online and include task-based tools.
UX design and cost are key barriers to adoption of digitized healthcare. Beyond social networking is the broader issue of digitizing healthcare practices – and the extent to which the currently available tools are help or hindrance to the practice of medicine. Under a provision of the stimulus bill signed into law last year, physicians must adopt use of electronic health records (EHR) and comply with standards of “meaningful use” (which have yet to be defined). Jay Parkinson, MD and founder of healthcare-focused design firm The Future Well, noted that the barriers to adoption of these tools are twofold: cost and usability. The existing tools require physicians to make an upfront investment of $45,000 for a system with a clunky interface that works like Windows 95; this is not an incentive when the competition is paper – which is in fact very efficient. The current systems are designed to capture volumes of data for courts and billing systems. Which is to say, not designed for the user – physicians, who have no interest in mining data. Doctors are not slow adopters; they will do anything that has potential to make them more money. But the current electronic systems don’t make them more money, they cost them money.
So Google’s decided to turn Gmail into a social network, and call it Buzz? And there I was wondering why Facebook had decided to update its interface today.
The slightly low-key launch represents a massive shift in the fight for social networking mindshare. After years of the social networks infringing on e-mail’s space via private inboxes and direct messaging, e-mail has woken up and fought back.
And via pre-built friend lists (thanks to contacts) and a familiar interface (nearly 200 million people use Gmail every month) Buzz could catch on very, very quickly.
Or it could spectacularly fail, like Google Wave arguably has. Let’s look at the evidence.
- Like Wave, Google Buzz has a confusing how-to video that points out some fiddly usage quirks. Can we be bothered to learn the new techniques?
- Not everyone uses Gmail. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that normal people are more likely to use Hotmail or Yahoo. (My Mum’s on Facebook. She isn’t on Gmail.)
- It’s a copycat move, designed to mimic Twitter and Facebook. Both have been around a while and do this stuff well. Do we really need another option?
- Google Contacts is rubbish. I desperately want it to be my personal answer to a CRM tool, but in reality it’s just a list of everyone who has ever spammed me.
- I don’t have it in my Gmail box yet. I haven’t felt this alienated since I paid for my Wave invite on eBay.
What do you think? Bye bye, Facebook, or big Buzz about nothing?
