A social presidency?

Check out this article in the Financial Times. One of the consequences of what could be termed the world's first ever socially-wired election campaign is an expectation by the huge Obama network that they can continue to be involved. Um, that means actually have a say in how they are governed.

That's a fairly radical concept. Not since the Thing of the Norse cultures has there been such an idea (discounting small egalitarian communities and communes). If you think I'm kidding, check out Fix this, Barack or White House 2. Amazing! All with a sense of collegiality and a remarkable goodness-of-fit with Obama's own priorities.

Of course, the challenge for the BO White House is to figure out how to keep the magnificent constituency developed by the campaign connected and committed, in the raw light of day on Capitol Hill. The crushing immediacy of the issues faced by the incoming President will no doubt play havoc with his iPhone and Twitter teams. Analysing 5 days of public feedback received through the White House website is going to take some real heft. But what an opportunity to take back government!

Things (pun intended) are never going to be the same. Oh..., and some-one tell K. Rudd to get a look at this phenomenon - and change that crappy feedback page into something useful!

Thought for the Day: Social media offer the opportunity for people to seize back a say in government policies and priorities. Maybe it's time for politicians to listen.

Anti-Social - Sorry

It's been a while since I posted to this blog - I've been running around Tokyo in the hectic year-end season. Every night another function, hosted by one company or another. What's the point?

Actually, the point is pretty simple and it took a slow lunch with a friend on Sunday to bring it to my attention. Humans are social animals - we delight in the company of others and fret when we're alone. Those are evolutionary traits designed to promote the survival of the species. I hadn't seen this friend for some time, and he's a little down-in the-dumps because of the global financial crisis. Generationally, he's not a social media user so I wasn't aware.

The functions I've been going to are a good example of physical social networks - that's where I caught up with my friend, and then made some time to talk to him about his problems. Digital social networks are a metaphor for "network-ing" events, just not time- or location-limited.

Social networks - and I mean digital social networks - simply replicate existing behaviors. Sure, it's greatly enhanced by technology and we now reach many more people than ever before possible. But the underlying behaviour is identical. Uh-huh, but so what?

Well, if we want to be successful in building social media tools that engage and delight people we must build them around behaviors - not around technologies. More than ever before, successful marketing will depend on our ability to understand what makes people tick rather than what makes them click. For me, understanding the 3 components of an audience (demographics, psychographics, and technographics) and then building a set of personas is as important as ever ... maybe more important.

Thought for the Day: When some-one comes to you with a brilliant idea to utilize a technology, maybe you should ask what social behaviour it models. Otherwise, you'll just be playing with the latest shiny toy.

Occasional Series I - Objectives

The story so far: our company, WSG bank, is looking for a social media proposal around a segment we've identified as "Builders". We've built some personas. Now we're starting to look at objectives as the second step in the POST methodology.

Jeremiah Owyang maps objectives to functional units in the business. I find this useful, because it immediately highlights the right sort of aspirations and metrics that we should be thinking about.

Regardless of industry or maturity, there are 4 things that all companies should be focused on: customer acquisition, customer activation (generating an initial purchase action from a customer who has registered), customer productivity (better thought of as a component of LTV), and customer retention. Anything else can be described as a function of one of these. In our example, let's start with the first one - customer acquisition. Perhaps we'll return to the others down the road, but this is a good place to begin.

So our goal is straightfoward - attract x new customers to our bank from the Builder segment, which we'll measure by a simple count of new accounts via the social media execution. We can model the data we get from our clickstream to get a proxy for total new accounts over all channels (HINT: our demographics and technographics will help us build this algorithm). Which of the Groundswell objectives is going to be useful?

Most people lunge immediately for the "talking" objective - or marketing in the functional lexicon. Trouble is, our Builders are pretty cynical about banks - so in my book, it's odds-on that they're not going to click over to a blatant marketing site. In my view, this is an occasion to reach for "listening". After all, it's the first step in the relationship build phase.

Because this is an fictional case, I'm going to propose we build a "scratching post" for people to tell us what they think about banks. Let's call it allbanksarebastards.com - at least the headline is going to resonate with our target segment. Our goal is to generate a robust discussion around what we're doing that gets under peoples' skin. We're going to ask a simple question - what could we do better? Longer-term, we're going to leverage this by acting on some of the comments and suggestions.

In the next post, I'll get more granular around this idea and start to lay out some of our "strategies" in the POST methodology.

Making the case for Social Media

With considerable apologies to this Champion at Digital Ministry

Most social media people get deeply disappointed when their brilliant proposals don't get funded in the budget process. They're convinced that SM represents the chance to reach out to customers, give them a voice, and let loose the dogs of advocacy. But the CFO and other top team members rarely buy it. Why?

• Language:

Geeks love using jargon because it signifies membership of an elite group of those with the "knowledge", like London taxi drivers or members of some arcane gnostic sect. And social marketers are most often geeks (not technology geeks, but marketing geeks). The words "social media" are a challenge for most people, let alone "blog", "Twitter", "wiki", and "community".

Find other ways to explain yourself - and make maximum effort to do a Dr Dolittle by speaking in languages CEOs, COOs, and CFOs understand. Blogs are a "set of discussions and opinions" that allow customers to respond and present their point of view. A wiki lets "experts contribute information" that is available to all.

A little bit of effort goes a long way - I once explained to a CFO who was an enthusiastic DIY man that "information architecture is a bit like the peg board above your work bench with stencilled places for all your tools". He got it immediately.

• Extending existing functions:

Many people make the mistake of positioning SM as the latest and brightest toy. For decision-makers that's scary because they think that as a "new initiative" it will require steep learning curves and will be littered with mistakes. In reality, all SM does (for companies) is extend your current functional departments' capabilities. You need to position the idea in terms of how it will deliver efficiency [in, say, customer service]; effectiveness [in, say, brand awareness]; and engagement [via, say, purchase intention].

• Surveillance:

Armies and law enforcement agencies spend lots of time gathering intelligence. It is vitally important that you do the same. Use Google Alerts and Twitter Search over a month or so to map the buzz around your company, competitors, and industry. Lay out the results in an idiot-proof manner with both quant and qual metrics. For blogs, I use the terms "volume" (number of mentions), "tone" (positive, negative, neutral) and "noise" (competitor mentions). These terms make sense to anyone who has a home stereo system, and you can position your proposal with familiar metaphors.

• Objectives:

You will need to clearly lay out your goals and some metrics. Look at Jeremiah Owyang's objective mapping - he relates objectives to well-known functions in companies like this:

Listening = Research,

Talking = Marketing,

Energizing = Sales,

Supporting = Customer Support, and

Embracing = R&D (New product development)

If you're thinking the words in bold italics, then this secret decoder key tells you to use the functional descriptors. And once you start using familiar language, the metrics should be self-apparent. So use them.

• Recognize you're changing the culture:

SM requires companies to embrace two-way conversation instead of one-way messaging. That's a huge challenge for most firms, and runs against most corporate cultures. Understand this, and find ways to re-define the change in terms of the words above. You're not going to get full transparency first time around, so get over it.

• Point to Success:

There are long lists of who's doing what in the SM space, and plenty of big companies. Someone told me about Peter Kim's list - it's a great start. Search around for some case studies and press releases about some of these initiatives, and point out a few in your proposal. It's even better if you can find some stuff that your competitors are doing.

Thought for the Day: Your proposal won't get funded unless you figure out how to explain it to decision-makers. Think about that in as much depth as your brilliant idea.

Making sure people are in the forest ...

At a recent Internations event here in Tokyo, I was asked about ways that offline communities can connect online. The environmental group concerned has a lively and engaged constituency for its events, and wanted to take this online.

The group already uses Ning to power its communication out to its members, so my first observation was that it has a core group of permissioned users around which to build its online community. There is already a blog page, although it should be promoted more and needs a celebrity or authority blogger. There is a video links section, and a forum. It's probably a bit much for one person to handle, and the group should consider devolving responsibility for various sections to individuals - after all, the goal is to create social media which means "people".

My other observation was that the group tended to focus on CSR and corporate-level initiatives. Which is probably fine, but for me the creation of community requires a collection of galvanizing reasons-to-believe (RTB) so that people interact with a human voice.

The major "a-ha" moment for me was the potential power that a micro-blogging tool like Twitter could provide this group. See, Twitter is constructed around one very simple question - "what are you doing now?". One of the outcomes it generates is "buzz" - there are lots of small, easily digestible nuggets flying around the Twittersphere, and each tweet (a single post on Twitter) can act as the spur for a different direction for the community.

Imagine a bunch of people all providing each other with seemingly insignificant ideas to do something personal about the environmental crisis. You could end up with something as powerful as Earth Hour, where 50 million people turned off their lights for one hour all around the planet. What a powerful symbol!

Tokyo is apparently one of the most active Twitter spots in the planet, and given the growing convergence between computers and mobile platforms in this market one can imagine it could become very powerful. In this case, driving connections between members of the group could be one way to strengthen the ties that bind them.

Issues like the environment and sustainability require individuals to commit to both personal and group action. The events are providing the genesis of some group activities - but Twitter could provide a way for members to signal personal activities as well, or reach out for support.

Thought for the Day: Many people set up communities that end up being one-person soapboxes. Maybe Twitter is one way to open up the way for tens, hundreds, or thousands of people to participate in a true conversation.