This post was co-authored by Jen Grant and Tac Anderson.
A new report from Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group has some interesting facts we thought you would find interesting.
Waggener Edstrom Worldwide’s Jen Grant was interviewed as part of the research. Watch a short video of Jen and Tac Anderson discussing the report.
Some things that came out of the research was that the average global brand has 178 distinct social media accounts. And that although 70% of those interviewed felt that their social media efforts were obtaining their objectives, only 43% of people said they had a documented social media strategy.
Developing a social media strategy is a great opportunity to step back and reassess your overall Marketing and Communication strategy. at Waggener Edstrom we’ve developed a system we call the Social Influence System (PDF). Jeremiah recommends five steps to follow if you want to really master your social media management:
- First prepare the company internally, and conduct audits to verify readiness.
- Determine which of the five social media management use cases, defined in this report, the company aligns to.
- Select vendors based on business needs, not marketing.
- Tap into services, support teams and outsourced community management services.
- Roll out internally in a systematic way that starts with education, training, mock workflows and thorough testing.
Altimeter also identified 5 main use cases for social media management.
The other thing that came out was that social media management systems are still lagging behind market needs. However, part of the problem is the proverbial cart-before-the-horse. SMMSs are developing products and solutions before the end user (brands and agencies) has fully articulated what it needs.
Our takeaway from this is that brands still need to focus on some of the fundamentals. Make sure you have a strategy. And just as important make sure you have the internal processes in place to effectively execute.
For us the report was a good reminder that we’re still in the early days and we need to make sure we take the time to work out the processes before we jump into worrying about the right tools. Attack it one step at a time. Don’t feel like you have to develop a plan to organize and manage all social media profiles in one shot. Step back and select 5-6 accounts to test your internal processes and strategies with first before you roll out with all of them.
Here’s the full report.
A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation
Tomorrow I get ready to present at WOMMA’s annual SUMMIT. My topic is PROVING THE VALUE OF EARNED AND OWNED MEDIA. I decided on this topic because, while many brands are engaging in influence across channels, most are not effectively proving impact or providing an integrated view of effectiveness that is connected to established business outcomes.
The C-suite measures performance against both financial and nonfinancial objectives, so proactively aligning marketing/communication efforts against clear goals and KPIs is a non-starter.
How you get there with the volume of data at our fingertips is a mix of the right process, right questions and connecting the right data to give a complete view of impact of influence against business outcomes.
Defining “influence” to the C-suite has also become critical, and ultimately, we are all in the business of influence. At its basic definition, influence is the action or process of producing effects on the actions, behaviors, opinions of another or others.
Looking forward to the session tomorrow! You can follow the summit at #WOMMA.
Being able to tell a story is the cornerstone of what we do here at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. Being able to tell that story as quickly and as efficiently as possible is what makes for a successful business. Having a strategy and the tactics necessary is only part of being able to tell a story in real time.
For those of you that came to my session at BlogWorld and New Media Expo recently, welcome. For those of you looking for a real-time content toolkit, thank you for stopping by. As I recently wrote, being able to tell a story in real time is a vital part of a successful integrated communications strategy. Being able to be nimble and agile enough to post content in real time has a number of positive effects, including SEO boosts, community engagement and thought leadership.
In order to get started, there are a few things necessary. The absolute first thing you need is a content management system. For multiple author blogs, I like Windows Live Writer (disclaimer: #client). Sorry Mac guys, us PCs get to have all the fun with this one. Manage multiple blogs, manage formatting offline and draft posts when you have spotty Internet coverage. From there, even though this is real-time content, having a content calendar to supplement social channels and content marketing will help you reach your audience. This editorial calendar features social networks as well as a content flow for a multi-author blog. There are even several macros built in to help you plan your content.
From there, you need to be able to monitor trends and analyze success. In order to do that simply, I recommend a couple of tools, including Simply Measured, the Twitter client of your choice and Twendz.
Creating content in real time is far less about the strategy and more about trusting yourself and your writing. By having the systems in place in advance, all you need to do is open you text editor, write and hit publish. Having your team of content guerrillas at the ready is essential as is having an exciting story to tell.
Of course, these tips, tricks and hints would be useless if I didn’t give you the methods to use them, right? Below is a huge list of some great apps and tools for monitoring various social networks, social sharing sites and even forums (yes, forums).
- Google Insights: Custom search trends.
- Rowfeeder: Monitor Twitter and Facebook conversations based on keywords. Import into a Google Spreadsheet.
- Social Mention: Pull out mentions and other metrics.
- Twitter widgets: Customizable Twitter widgets that can be embedded on any website.
- Friendorfollow: Establishes your followers/followees for mutual relationships.
- Klout: A standardized measure of a Twitter account’s influence.
- Wildfire: Manage contests and promotions. Can track the Facebook fan ID and allow you to follow up.
- Knowem: Username check across multiple social networks.
- Digg Alerter: Notifies you when you get votes or hit the Digg front page.
- di66.net: Digg stats.
- Big Boards: Monitor message boards and forums.
- OMGILI: Bulletin board and forum search engine.
I hope that you put these tools to use as you tell your story. And, if you’d like to learn more about how WE can help your company be the story it wants to tell, contact us and we’ll make some real-time magic happen.
As a communications professional, one of the best parts of my job is getting to tell a story. Being able to connect the information that our clients have with customers, media and analysts that are looking for the latest innovation or product announcement is why I log on every day.
In an age where everybody is an influencer, being able to tell a story well is essential. The adage “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it” has been redefined. The words you use are now as vital as the medium you use to convey the message. Gone are the days of issuing a press release and relying upon the nation’s media to tell your story for you. Instead, we can instantaneously shape the day’s news events simply by posting to Twitter or Facebook. Real-time communications is an essential part of the overall integrated communications landscape.
In a few weeks, I’ll have the honor of presenting an hour-long workshop at the upcoming BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Los Angeles. On Friday, Nov. 4, I will be presenting Real Time Content In No Time: How to create and manage a content strategy that is nearly real time to show that a content strategy does not have to be created three months in advance in order to be effective. By utilizing search trends, emerging social trends and analytics, it is possible to create a multichannel communications strategy that reaches your audience and influences it to act — regardless of the timeframe.
Here at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, we have the opportunity to work with innovative companies to tell great stories in the moment. But those stories, even though they were created in real time, couldn’t have happened without advance planning and strategy.
I’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to invite you to join me Nov. 3–5 at the Los Angeles Convention Center for BlogWorld. If you do want to register for the conference, you can use my special code: BWEVIP20 when you sign up to get 20% off of ANY pass (that means $300 off of the full access pass). So, go register now and I’ll see you in LA!
When we discuss influence, we immediately think about popular movie stars or athletes. But what if I said that in today’s society, each of us is an influencer?
I listen to a lot of people talk a lot about influence. The amazing thing is that they all have something different to say. Here at Waggener Edstrom, we of course have our own answers about how to define and measure influence. But this got me thinking. What is the future of influence, and what role do we as communications professionals have in that future?
What is influence?
A recent panel I listened in on had the stated mission of establishing just how we can define influence. But even after an hour of people talking, nobody had a clear definition. At the end of the session, I tweeted: you know who should be influential for your brand? Your brand.
And I stand by that.
As integrated digital communications professionals (see also: public relations), being able to influence your key audiences by creating content and telling a story is the key to establishing and maintaining influence. But first we really do need to establish just what influence is.
While at South by Southwest, I had an opportunity to interview Klout CEO Joe Fernandez about Klout, what factors are important to influence, and what the future is for scientific research of influence.
A research team at Yahoo! recently examinedthe various conversations that occur on Twitter and reported “a striking concentration of attention on Twitter roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users|where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories.” What’s that mean? It means that influence is as much created as it is earned, which has a definite impact on the future of public relations.
Be the story you want to tell
One of the tenants we profess at Waggener Edstrom is to be the story you want to tell. What we mean by that is when you have a message you want to convey, the best conduit for telling that story is to control how it is told. To influence how you are perceived through your own words and use the channels you build to influence the audience you want to reach the most.
So, how do we do that? To me it comes to three key strategies:
- your own corporate blog
- your own corporate website
- your customers.
Your own corporate blog
By creating a two-way communications channel, you are able to interact with potential customers, existing customers and anybody interested in learning about the business problem your company solves. Being able to create a community around a central content hub, you are able to create influence among your core audiences. Social media is important for engaging and building a community, but your corporate blog is where you get to tell your story.
Your own corporate website
As important as real-time and in the moment communications through a personable blog are, having static content that is informative, engaging and compelling is vital to the success of your products. At the end of the day, ROI is not measured in clicks, likes or followers. ROI is measured in revenue. By having a website that is designed to convert the traffic your digital storytelling drives, you will continue to realize benefits over the long term.
Your customers
Empowering your customers to tell your story is the most influential thing you can do for your brand. Creating content that your customers can share and evangelize is essential. Being able to tell your story in a meaningful manner that is compelling and actionable will help influence not only the purchasing decisions of people interacting with your content, but influencing the purchasing decisions of others through their social interactions.
Digital media is the great influence equalizer. Anybody can create influence, and there’s no reason why your brand shouldn’t be an influencer as well.
The definition of a “phone” is changing.
A few years ago my brother-in-law was reading “Goodnight Moon” to my 2-year-old niece. As they read, he asked her to point things out to him. It went something like this
“Where’s the kitty?” She points to the kitty.
“Where’s the moon?” She points to the moon.
“Where’s the bed?” She points to the bed.
“Where’s the phone?” She gives him a quizzical look and says, “No phone, Daddy.”
To her:
![Phone002[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3445/5708745896_33aa042351.jpg)
I recently attended the GSMI Mobile Marketing Strategies Summit in San Francisco. It was great to hear from so many smart people who are doing a lot of smart things with mobile.
Over the course of the three-day workshop it was obvious: If you are not incorporating mobile into your social media strategies, you are missing the mark.
Unsure about mobile? Have clients who are unsure? Here are a few reasons why you need to start thinking mobile – and including it in your social media efforts.
Mobile is everywhere
The growth of mobile is incredible, and mobile is quickly overtaking PCs.
- According to recent numbers from the Altimeter Group this year more smartphones and tablets will be sold than PCs. They estimate there will be just under 500,000 devices sold in 2011 and by 2013 that number will jump to over 700,000.
- Gartner claims by 2013 mobile phones will replaces PCs as the most common devices for Web access.
- Nielsen predicts smartphones will overtake feature phones in 2011 as the most common devices.
Everyone is using mobile, which means your customers and clients are using mobile too. They may not all be using the same type of mobile device (iPhone, Android, WP7, Smartphone, Feature Phone, etc.), but they are using a phone. With a bit of research and a solid understanding of your audience you can reach them on whatever platform they are using.
Mobile is personal
As marketers we attempt to reach people where they are and in relevant ways. There is no more relevant and prolific way than mobile.
Many people use their phone as their alarm clock in the morning and go to bed reading their RSS feeds on it at night. It is literally with them all waking hours. Recent research shows a growing number of people are more willing to leave the house without their wallet than without their phone.
The personal nature of mobile also makes it a tricky platform. We must make extra sure our campaigns and tactics are adding value to our audience and providing them with something they want to carry around with them. Mobile apps and content are more like fashion accessories than tools. Looking at what someone has on their phone is analogous to looking into someone’s purse or wallet.
Mobile offers a multitude of ways to engage
When people think mobile, many people think “smartphones using apps.” But the mobile market is much larger. There are many ways to engage with your audiences depending on who they are and what they want. Mobile offers marketers a multitude of touch points to engage with customers.
- Mobile apps
- Mobile sites
- Display ads
- Search ads
- Mobile payment
- Text messages (SMS & MMS)
Maybe your customers are not using smartphones and do not want a mobile app. Do they have a feature phone? If so, they can still receive short videos via MMS or updates and coupons via text message. For the youth market they would rather receive a text message than an email any day and spend way more time on their phone texting than they do checking email. Have you adjusted your email newsletter to factor this in?
It’s all about the strategy
At the end of the day it all comes down to being strategic about how you create and execute on a mobile marketing campaign. Mobile allows you to be with your customers throughout the entire purchasing cycle and beyond.
Jeremiah Owyang, with the Altimeter Group, talks about customer hourglass, instead of the traditional purchase funnel. It is similar to John Jantsch “7 Little Words that Sum up the Entire Marketing Machine” and goes something like this:
- Awareness – People become aware of your product. Apps like the North Face “Snow Report” help potential buyers become aware of how North Face is solving a problem for them – the mountain conditions.
Consideration – They need something and consider you. Tiffany’s engagement ring app is a prime example of being with the customer as they are considering the purchase.- Intent – They go to a store or Web site to buy. Target is providing shoppers a way to create their own shower registries on their mobile device and is a good example of getting customers when they show intent to purchase.
- Purchase – They actually buy. Can people make a purchase from you on their phone?
- Support – The customer gets help after the purchase. USAA is letting customers scan and deposit their checks all from the phone — no trip to the bank required. AAA allows roadside assistance via your phone.
- Loyalty – Programs that make them want to come back for more. Starbucks is a classic example of a retailer providing loyalty programs for customers.
- Advocacy – They like the product and tell their friends. When done right, this takes the customer, and their friends, back to the top of the hourglass and starts the cycle over again.
A smart man once told me companies need to adopt a “fast fail” mentality — meaning, they need to be okay with failure, learn from it quickly and adjust tactics for success. This is especially true with mobile. Mobile is a new frontier, things are changing quickly and not everything marketers try will work. Nevertheless, try something. With the right metrics in place to gauge success we can learn and adapt for success.
For mobile, this is just the beginning. Good night phone. Good morning mobile. It’s going to be a beautiful day.
Your Twitter handle needs to be fed. Your Facebook page needs to be fed. Your YouTube channel needs to be fed. Your blog needs to be fed.
Organizations using social media quickly realize that these digital properties are hungry beasts that demand to be fed often with content, or else they get stale and uninteresting. Without fresh, real-time content, social media properties lose their purpose as communications and engagement tools for customers, partners, employees, consumers, etc.
Social media is hungry for content.
Creating content for social media is often done by passionate, early adopters within an organization, usually working outside of the traditional communications departments. In many cases this has been a recipe for initial success (example: Ford’s Scott Monty) because traditional marketing, advertising and public relations haven’t been accustomed to, or adapted for, the real-time needs of social media.
Now that the benefits of leveraging social media are becoming clearer, as evidenced by this recent McKinsey Quarterly research illustrating the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies on the bottom line, more organizations are getting serious about their social media content.
But moving it from the responsibility of a few passionate, tech-savvy individuals to become part of an organization’s communications can be challenging.
Here are three tips for creating a real-time content engine that can feed the social media beasts:
Harness what you have. Whether your organization is a large, multinational, a small nonprofit or the dry cleaner on the corner, it has plenty of content that has been — and is being – published. That can include advertising, white papers, marketing and sales materials, press releases, emails and newsletters, internal communications, photos and videos, coupons; and the list goes on. While some of that content isn’t appropriate for external audiences or social media, most if it can be excerpted for a blog or Facebook post or turned into a tweet.
Employees or members should also be tapped for content. They have expertise and opinions that are relevant. They are also members of your community. A meeting or even a hallway conversation can be turned into something that your audience will find valuable.
To get started on harnessing what you have, do an audit of your existing content, people and content creation processes. Then jump to tip number 3.
Curate and engage with what you like. The content needed to power your social media doesn’t all have to come from you. If you are engaged in your community, the act of “liking” or retweeting can be enough to feed your social media outlets. This shows that you are paying attention and adding value to the topics and discussions relevant to your audience.
To get started on this, make sure you are following and listening to the content being created by your customers, partners, employees, etc. Then develop a process for amplifying the content that is most relevant to your organization.
Copy what the media is doing. I am biased because of my years as a journalist, but I think it’s fair to argue that traditional news media outlets have been leading in social media. Why? Because they develop a great deal of relevant, real-time content. They are harnessing social media by adding another outlet to their sophisticated publishing and curating processes. That might be as simple as hooking up a Twitter account to an existing RSS feed, or it might mean redeploying reporters and editors to listen to social media as a way to find out what news is happening. Social media presents an opportunity to publish your content on an existing platform that has an audience for free. But even if the publishing is free, someone needs to be making decisions about what gets published. Often, that is a trouble spot for organizations because there are either too many or too few people empowered to decide what gets published where. This is another place where media organizations can offer a template for success in social media. They have clear structures and responsibilities about who gets to publish content on their properties.
To get started, develop a newsroom structure in your organization, either by adding new roles or redeploying existing resources, to handle your social media publishing. This kind of structure can take much of the pain out of content creation and publishing, allowing content to come out of your organization that is credible, authentic and true to your brand.
Is your organization ready to take these steps to advance its business and communications goals?
Image courtesy possumgirl2 via Flickr.
The revolution rolls on ahead, incessantly causing the disruptions that influence our present. Consultants and strategists rush forward to take a peek at the future (and potentially influence its direction), and then hustle back with our analysis. Like carnival barkers, from our step-stool soapboxes we can see the new way forward. We work hard to lift our clients onto our shoulders just long enough for them to take a convincing glance, and for us, the strategists, to express the merits, the benefits, and the ample successes waiting for them down the road.
“But where’s the ROI?” They ask.
“What’s the ROI of a revolution?” I respond.
The ROI is to be there, at the front, in order to invent the ROI. It’s pre-ROI!
I want to define this space in front of the future as the “Leadership Value,” your “LV.” Before we can get to ROI we need to get your LV.
Envision the future as a speedboat racing through placid water. The boat rushes forward, propelled by the incessant weave of economic, social and cultural factors. In the still water before the boat is the clean slate, the tablet to write the future. Behind the boat is the churning wake, the activity that defines our here and now. We want to be in the still water in the front of the boat. We want our clients to be there with us. We want to see the water the boat is cutting into, to position our clients at the sweet spot.
When clients ask me, “Should we invest in mobile?” I want to answer, “Yes, mobile is important, but it’s driven by a future further ahead of us. To better answer your question we need to see clearly. Let’s get to the front, get your LV set, and the answer will be strongest.”
If we’ve done our job well, we’ve brought our clients to the front, and put them into a positively active position where they are maintaining a presence in the stillness. They are in the lead; they are creating the lead. From there they can see all vantages: the future, the movement of the revolution, the wake and the distant past.
We can then plan for the future while building products for the entire market: the early and late adopters. Our vision is clearest when we’re in the lead.
Build your LV, and the ROI will follow.
The WE Studio D team was recently asked, “How can I find interesting people to follow and engage with on Twitter?” The answer is a two-part recipe: What interests you + who’s active on Twitter = people to follow. Simple, right? Well…
There are as many ways to use this recipe as there are opinions about Twitter. Here are three different techniques I suggest, starting with the simplest and working our way toward complexity:
- The Springboard
- The Matrix
- The Pipe Organ
For this post let’s talk about the Springboard.
There are a handful of online tools that help you find people to follow. These tools offer general suggestions mainly through directory listings and searches. They are created to help you jump right into Twitter, thus the Springboard technique.
Within Twitter’s Web application are two “who to follow” services.
To belly-flop into the Twitter pool you can use its most basic option, to sort through the “top” Twitter users by categories of “Interest.” There are 20 categories to choose from such as “charity,” “fashion” and “technology.” It’s not a bad place to start, but like a belly-flop it’s not really a pinpoint process.
Then there’s the cannonball option. Not as messy as the belly-flop, but a little more direct, Twitter’s “Who to follow” is a bit of algorithmic magic.
Twitter seems to be triangulating your followers to see where the friend/follower lists overlap, and then offers these shared followers to you in a simple interface. Through this interface you can then peruse the options and select those you want to follow. Are these overlapped conclusions interesting? If you think friends of your friends are interesting then yes, maybe.
Also within Twitter are the search functions. Much more like diving into the pool, these options help you pinpoint specific users based on variables of your choice.
Using Twitter’s main search box right at the top of your Twitter home page you could enter a simple keyword such as “social media,” and follow the users who are using this keyword within their tweets.
NOTE: You don’t HAVE to follow everybody. You can test the people you’re interested in by creating lists. This way you can “hear” them without having them appear in your main stream. I’ll cover this option within another post.
Twitter also offers an advanced search feature. In the advanced search you can find people based on their location, through the content of their bios and by the keyword search mentioned above. These are still fairly general variables, but not a bad way to get started.
Outside of Twitter are many third-party tools to help you dive in. Here’s a list of some, compiled by my WE Studio D teammate Jessica Polley, with a brief description of what they offer:
Follower Wonk: Using just a keyword, Follower Wonk will scan Twitter users’ bios to pull relevant accounts. You can then sort results by relevance, follower count or friend count.
WeFollow: Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a user-generated directory that organizes people into categories by interest. Browse the site for new followers or add yourself to the mix by submitting your own #hashtags that best describe you.
Twellow: Pegged the Twitter Yellow Pages, Twellow is a directory of Twitter accounts that groups users into hundreds of categories by using bio info. Lumping people into specific categories can help narrow your searching into niches and help you find like-minded individuals.
Listorious: A search engine for Twitter lists, Listorious helps you discover lists by keyword. Looking for celebrities? Search “celebrities” and you’ll get a listing of celebrity Twitter users.
LocaFollow: Find users near your location with this Twitter tool so you can more efficiently engage with users in your same region.
Muck Rack: Looking specifically for journalists? Muck Rack makes it easy to find and track journalists from the top media outlets, such as CNN and the New York Times.
TweetDeck: If you’re a TweetDeck user, scan through the TweetDeck Recommends column on your dashboard, which highlights some of the most popular users on Twitter. If you’re a new user this column will show up by default.
Using the Springboard technique you can jump right into the flow of Twitter, with gusto, and without too much heavy lifting. The Springboard will help you, in a very general way, find potentially interesting people to follow and engage with. Next post…the Matrix, where we add a layer of analysis to help distinguish the diamonds from the coal PLUS touch on the ways you can optimize your account and Twitter usage to become findable.
The trick to taming a lion is to confuse it. Circus lion-tamers point the underside of chairs at their lions, giving them too many points to swipe at. Unable to decide on which leg to paw, the lion halts its attack. The trainer can then guide the lion to its happy place, typically by offering it a grand reward. Let’s call this approach “old school.”
The “new school” approach is to work WITH the lions instead of trying to tame them. The goal is to build lasting relationships with the lions. To be successful, the new-school lion “listener” needs to:
- Study the group and discern the leadership
- Live within the group to fully understand the nuances
- Offer safe havens where the group can visit, without prodding or corralling
The Gap has learned that the old school no longer works.
The new logo designed by Laird & Partners, which I actually liked, was not sabotaged by its poor reception, even though it appears that way through the data. At the time of my writing this, there are tons of digital conversations about the logo. We did a quick search using Sysomos and found:
- 1,457 blog post mentions
- 51,027 tweet mentions
- 364 traditional media mentions
Most of these mentions are negative, but show the fanatical support the Gap has for its brand. Looking at the Gap’s Facebook page there are over 1,000 more comments from eager brand fans seeking to add their voices to the dialogue. (Harness this power!)
The new Gap logo failed because it lacked a full “Social/Digital” plan to life-cycle the launch within the new-school frame. Our social era puts everything out in the open, transparently. These lions, the Gap’s audiences, are out in the open too. They looked at the old bait and saw past it, into the savannah, and knew there was better prey amidst the grasses. Instead of fully understanding this relationship the Gap initially panicked (which you don’t want to do around lions), and offered to “crowd-source” the logo. It’s impossible to tame lions in the wild, but taming lions is no longer the goal. That’s old school; it’s all new school now.
The Gap can still salvage this campaign, even flourish from the results. Social is a process, not a road marker; it’s evolving and is open to ongoing participation. Here are a few symptoms, solutions, and opportunities.
- Own your brand’s digital footprint. When the Gap chose to announce the new logo on HuffPo they relinquished the power of their brand to HuffPo. I still think it’s a good strategy to engage with bloggers and media outlets, but there were earlier opportunities to reach out to thought leaders and highly influential digital trailblazers who could have helped amplify the goals while keeping the Gap’s brand strong. I expect the Gap to have had a well-maintained blog in place, potentially a virtual newsroom where they can offer bloggers, fans and fanatics useful bits of digital gems to foster conversation. Sure, a Facebook landing page is a good idea, but what’s missing is the ongoing conversations with their audience. Another solution could be a Gap-branded digital “home,” a mini-site to land on, to linger at, a place to share ideas with each other. The Twitter account is also too broadcast-heavy with low engagement. Overall, the Gap needs to invest more time speaking WITH their audience in order to own their digital footprint.
- Ramp up slowly, in the open. The Gap could have integrated their audience into the new logo rollout. They could have made the process transparent, open to dialogue, and responsive to feedback. This is not “crowd-sourcing,” it’s engagement. Define the hierarchy of your audience, and pinpoint the strategy to include the grassroots leadership. Then allow the news to grow organically, monitor the response, and then remain in tune and agile enough to roll and react as needed. It’s hard to catch a big wave; start with a smaller wave and build up your response as the wave builds. It’s even harder to herd cats, especially big cats like lions. Instead, walk with them, see where they go, and build a course of action once you can define the trajectory. And above all, don’t surprise them.
I hope the Gap doesn’t batten down the hatches and go reclusive. I think they need to do the opposite, now, and with vigor. They need to be with the lions. They are ripe to harness the power of social.
