Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

A Social Media Mini-Manifesto for Marketers

In which Jill gives advice to well-meaning marketers to manage their messaging.

photo by Zingaro

In my last blog post, I admonished marketers not to abandon a solid, multi-channel marketing strategy in their frenzy to embrace social media. Savvy CMOs are just now coming to terms with the fact that social media isn’t an alternative but instead a supplement to a deliberate, customer-focused marketing plan.

Concentrating on social media often usurps other marketing tactics in terms of visibility. Follow Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com on Twitter? Sure! Remember the details Zappos’ last e-mail offer? (“Free shipping” reminders don’t count.) I didn’t think so. As awareness of social media grows it risks becoming the Web 2.0 version of “spray and pray.”

What’s a well-rounded marketer to do? Here’s a list of six rules that effective marketers are following now. Consider it a mini-manifesto of social marketing:

1. Stop saying “Hi!” While offering a quippy joke about your sandwich spread or the odor emanating from your dog as she reclines under your desk is hilarious the first time (and maybe even the second time if it’s Braunschweiger), best-practice marketers don’t just entertain, they inform. As much as people like a good chuckle, your customers and prospects are hanging around because of your product, not your witty repartee. Unless you’re Eddie Izzard, be sure that your on-line dialog offers value.


2. Get busy with BI. Every company wants to predict its customers’ wants and needs. To do that requires more than an on-line dialog with customers, it requires an understanding the customer’s profile and historic behaviors. If your company doesn’t have a robust and evolving business intelligence program, build one before investing heavily in a social media infrastructure. Social media analytics and measurement are arguably a subset of a complete BI strategy. If you’re launching a social media program ahead of BI, you’ll end up over-investing in both.


3. Differentiate your members. You have a loyalty program, right? What? You don’t?  Then logoff FriendFeed and launch one. Because understanding who your top-tier customers are is paramount to your company’s share of wallet. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies promise new ways to reach out to your “best” customers and differentiate them to keep them coming back. But first you need to know why they’re your best customers. (See Number 2.) Then, start treating them differently. Then that Facebook fan page might even be useful.


4. Know your influencers. There are customers and then there are “constituents,” those concentric circles around customers that might represent suppliers, employees, service partners, industry gadflies, and marketing analysts. If you’re web-visible, then you’re talking to them, too.


5. Maintain your brand. In the rush to start an on-line party with their customers, some companies forget what they’re selling. Worse, the personality of the blogger/tweeter/e-mailer trumps the voice of the brand. Want to let your followers in on the action while flossing? Get your own personal Twitter account. Want to let on-line customers in on the 20 percent off coupon code? Now you’re tweetin’.


6. Finish strong. Like many buzz-worthy business fads, social media efforts can launch big, then fizzle. Don’t let social media become another intellectual exercise. Have a plan for adopting and rolling out a variety of social media programs,using it as a vehicle for  a deliberately planned marketing strategy. Be sure to define what success looks like. Then measure early and often.

In the end, social media is another set of tools in the marketing toolbox. And, like any business enabler, it needs to pass the management “sniff test,” meaning that it needs to generate sustained revenues or offer savings or efficiencies that exceed its cost to deploy. Otherwise, success is just another word for fad.

Social Media Renders Your Marketing Strategy Obsolete. NOT!

In which Jill admonishes marketers to be deliberate about their strategies now, and tweet later.

photo by Matthew Oliphant

The evolution of social media has all my marketing and CRM buddies a-twitter. (Sorry). They understand that there is promise in using social media tools to strengthen their brand images, to share company news, and to connect with customers and prospects. It’s just that they can’t seem to tear executives away from their balance sheets long enough to enlighten them.

Indeed, faced with falling stock prices, budget cuts, and shareholder disaffection, your CFO is all for social media, as long as it’s free. Your CEO thinks Delicious is a porn site that should be blacklisted from corporate access. And forget about asking your CTO to start blogging. He’s hunkered down trying to figure out the next disruptive innovation, and pronto!

But your marketing department is intrigued, enough to form a social networking task force and send twenty seven staff members to BlogWorld Expo. And just when you think social media has saturated the marketing Zeitgeist, you overhear your CMO say the words, “Friend me” to a supplier. This exchange strikes you as obscene, not because of any sexual undertones but because what the hell is he doing on Facebook anyway, he has a marketing organization to run!

If you’re like me, you’ve noticed that the social media buzz is taking far more time and energy than the answer to the question, “How will sales and marketing support this year’s corporate objectives?” Many sales and marketing organizations have emphasized social media at the expense of their strategies. It’s as if strategy doesn’t matter anymore.

Newsflash: It does. Moreover, the past is prologue. Companies that emerged from the last recession did so by returning to fundamentals. They understood that technology—even the coolest let’s-get-naked-and-party, Sandhill Road-backed, WTF 2.0 software—was nevertheless still a means to an end. In 2001, writing in Harvard Business Review as the dot-com bubble spewed its detritus far and wide, Michael Porter said of the Internet:

“Two broad conclusions can be drawn. First, many businesses active on the Internet are artificial businesses competing by artificial means and propped up by capital that until recently had been readily available. Second, in periods of transition such as the one we have been going through, it often appears as if there are new rules of competition. But as market forces play out, as they are now, the old rules regain their currency. The creation of true economic value once again becomes the final arbiter of business success.”

If you substitute the Internet theme of Porter’s assertion with social media, the same truisms apply. Companies still have to articulate how they intend to compete in the market, serve their customers in differentiating ways, and innovate. Smart marketing, customer experience management, and CRM leaders will lift their heads from their Facebook 25 Things lists, craft a deliberate, multi-media plan that supports their firms’ unique value proposition, and then—only then—determine how social media will fit. Got that? Okay, now friend me.

Social Media and CRM

By Jill Dyché

In which Jill in gets a bad grade, but keeps a good client.

My client is a long-time, self-described “data geek” and we get together when I’m in the Bay Area for status updates and some gossip. So here we are sipping our lattes at the headquarters espresso lounge and we’re not talking about data models (yet), open source BI tools, or what new information Marketing needs for its campaigns. “Our CRM is Web two-oh,” he tells me as he bites a biscotti.

photo by filipe ferreira

This is a departure for him, and I’m not sure what to make of it. “Really?” I say, cursing my lack of creativity but at the same time not wanting to prematurely prescribe anything.

“Yeah,” he says as he chews. “We have a corporate LinkedIn profile, our sales reps are friending all our clients on Facebook, and we have a corporate commercial on YouTube. AND,” he adds, inserting a pregnant pause for effect, “I just convinced our CEO to do Twitter!”

“So how are you measuring success?” I ask him. It’s a genuine question, but his expression changes immediately, and I realize I just graded a C minus in my role as Trusted Advisor. My client explains that though they haven’t worked out measurement yet, the fact that they’ve embraced social media is in itself a major cultural leap, as well as a personal career coup for him.

But is it really? Anyone in a bowling league, a reading group, or yes, a corporation, can throw together a MySpace page or cultivate a tribe of tweeple on Twitter. The adoption of online tools doesn’t automatically propel a company forward into the new world of social media any more than partying at Social Hollywood makes you a hipster. The art isn’t in establishing a social media presence as much as it is closing the “talking-listening-acting” gap.

When social media pioneer Scott Monty joined Ford Motor Company last year he set about helping on-line content providers tell “richer stories” about the Ford brand, once engaging a web site owner that Ford’s legal department had considered suing in a positive partnership dialog. The point is that Monty and his team have their ear to the ground when it comes to the Ford brand. They regularly act on the information they access—from online tools and elsewhere—to refine that brand. And yes, a potential Ford Focus buyer can indeed use the website’s RSS feeder to get regular SNPRs (Social Media Press Releases) and other updates about the car pushed to her reader or e-mail account.

My client wants to talk to me about the virtues of Facebook over MySpace and how FriendFeed can help drive more engaged customer conversations. But I owe it to him to tell him that this isn’t the hard part. The hard part is establishing new business processes and job roles in order to use these and other emerging social media tools effectively. It’s establishing on-line personas that are legitimate and empowered to engage in sometimes-difficult conversations. It’s about more than listening to or even  celebrating customers. It’s about formalizing new ways to capture this data, use it to re-segment customers, measure your share-of-voice, and redefine customers’ experience with your products and your brand.

And if you make some friends in the bargain? Well, that’s kewl too. E-mail me your comments—or tweet me @jilldyche if you’re already there.