Imagine Your Reality

Recently Jeremiah Owyang did an interview with Greenpeace about their social media activism and how they had used social media to get companies to change their policies and activities, while also raising public awareness about what the companies are doing. As Jeremiah explains, activist groups such as Greenpeace have been using technology for a long time to aid in their activist work, and social media is no exception. In fact, I would suggest that businesses should study such activist groups and learn what they are doing right. Then businesses can co-opt what the activists are doing to develop closer relationships with the clients they serve.

I think businesses should study how other types of organizations are using social media to communicate with their constituents, donaters, supporters, or whatever you want to call the people that these organizations are communicating with. Its clear that some of these organizations get results in their activities, and its worth studying what they do, and then reverse engineering it. For example, what would have happened if Nestle had been transparent about their activities and actually solicited advice from their fans about what to do? They might’ve gotten the public support and been able to leverage it with Greenpeace. Instead Greenpeace leveraged their response against them and forced Nestle to pledge to make changes. Clearly Greenpeace understood the social psychology involved a lot better than Nestle did.

Ideological movements will trump corporate cultures in a public setting, because if everyone can learn about the effect that corporate policies are having, and those people start to care, corporate culture won’t be able to justify their continued actions or lack thereof. Consequently social media activism comes down to leveraging social influence…finding the opportunity and people who will take up the cause, raise public awareness and effect the bottom line of the company. And it’s very important to understand that its the bottom line that matters the most to a company, often to the detriment of that company because people can rightly accuse the company of only thinking about the money.

If a company were to re-orient themselves in terms of thinking not only about the bottom line, but also the social implications of the activities they use to feed the bottom line, that company might find that the long term cost of focusing just on the bottom line would be a lot more expensive than the short term gain justifies. And this is why if companies study how organizations such as Greenpeace are using social media to raise awareness, they can start asking some tough critical questions about their own practices and how they can be socially transparent with their clientele. The result is that they can then leverage that social influence to get client support for the changes they are making. It’s a different approach, but if companies were to employ social media activism to themselves, there’d be a lot less upset, because they’d be using what the activists were trying to use to promote socially responsible change.

What do you think? How should companies learn from Greenpeace and other organizations that are using social media to raise awareness and public outcry for change?

I’ve been writing a lot about the social aspects of social media and also thinking about what makes social so important and I’ve come to the conclusion its social context that interests people. What I mean by social context is context where the social relationship is established before the business relationship. Social context doesn’t just occur in social media, but in social media it needs to be more developed because many of the visual and verbal cues are missing from text.

People do business with people they trust and in part this means that people do business with someone who has established some social context that enables each person involved to feel like they know each other enough to feel comfortable doing business. In social media, to establish social context involves recognizing that the majority of it will be established through other mediums, but that some of it will also be established using social media. For example, initial impressions are essential for creating good social context. A well written invitation to connect can help a lot, but what also helps is demonstrating consistent social interactions on social media sites.

When I see that someone has decided to follow me on Twitter, I check out his/her account and usually can tell if the person is just trying to sell something or is actually engaging people socially by the amount of responses or lack thereof the person makes. This holds true for other social media sites as well. Looking at how people are using sites will tell you how interested they are in establishing a relationship as opposed to pushing a product.

Social context is important in every type of relationship a person has. We owe it to ourselves to consider how we can build social context in social media in order to open the door to more business and closer relationships. In the case of social media building social context means framing the conversation around learning more about a person while also appearing consistent in how you interact. If you do that, you can develop trust and from that create opportunities.

I was speaking with an acquaintance yesterday about social media and Return on Investment, and I made the point that one of the biggest issues businesses have is learning the social skills to make social media work for them enough to actually generate a return on investment. Typically, what I see with a business is a tendency to advertise what they do, with little to no engagement offered in their social media interactions. there’s very little incentive, consequently, for fans, followers, or friends to actually visit the businesses website, or physical location, and a lot more incentive to actually ignore or write off the business’s social interactions as advertisement.

Once a business learns to view social media through a social lens, their activity changes. Suddenly they become much more personable and open about what they are doing that isn’t business related. They comment on news that isn’t relevant to the business, but does illustrate personality. And the result is that people who are fans, followers, or friends start to interact more, show interest in the business and sometimes become converted to clients, or if they are existing clients, show more inclination to come back for further services. And the reason for this is simple. People wanted to be treated as people first and clients second.

Think of the last time you visited a business that you like frequenting. What about the business is it that makes you want to come back for more? I’ll use an example. I love visiting my local gamestop. The clerks know who I am, love talking games, but can talk about other things, and generally go out of their way to make me feel welcomed. Now take that feeling and apply it in a social media setting.

One of my clients is Saint Honore’s Bakery. If you go to their facebook page, something you’ll notice is that they make an effort to reply to comments customers make to the wall or to comments customers make to the status updates the bakery makes. Most importantly the bakery is focused on being social first and business second. They still post information about what they’re offering that day, but they also make it a point to engage people and interact with them. The result is more fan participation and more in store business, because people feel that the experience that they get online will translate into the store environment.

What it means to be social for business involves understanding that social media is a social environment, and that strategy for social media needs to keep that consideration in mind in order to be truly effective. Remember, people want to be treated like people first, and customers second.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree about the value of being social for businesses?

I’ve discussed social influence before, which is basically the influence a given person has on a social networking site. There aren’t too many tools or applications that allow you to measure the social influence of a given person, but of the applications that are out there, my favorite for measuring social influence on Twitter is Twitalyzer and recently they improved it to a whole new level.

Twitalyzer measures a number of different activities ranging from retweets you do and retweets other people do of your posts to the level of replies and generosity that is present within your tweets. The measurements are used to determine the level of social influence you have as well as offer you suggestions on how you can improve the level of social influence you have. Twitalyzer will tell you what kind of impact you have on your network as well as what kind of label fits your profile your interactions. In my case, I’m an influencer with a Group, which means I have some influence on a relatively small scale in the overall twitterverse (see picture below).

Twitalyzer also allows you to see key twitalyzer metrics such as influence, engagement, and clout and show whether its gone up or down See picture below). They’ll even provide an explanation of what each metric type means as well, so you can understand how it applies to your social influence.

One of the more invaluable features that you have access to is the ability to set goals to improve your twitter presence. Whenever you do a new report, twitalyzer will show you if you have met your goals. In the picture below, I’ve met some of my goals, but still have some work to do, to meet the other goals.

My favorite feature of Twitalyzer is the personality feature, where they graphically show you your social personality. I think it really provides you a good idea of how you are showing up, and what you can do to improve. You can compare yourself to other people in your industry to get an idea of what they are doing, vs what you are doing.

Twitalyzer also provides recommendations for what you can do to improve your twitter presence. While you don’t have to follow those recommendations they are handy to refer to, in terms of helping you get more out of your twitter presence.

Twitalyzer is free, but they also offer some benefits that you need to pay for. Personally I think Twitalyzer is worth paying for, plus I like supporting a small business that in turn can help me improve my social influence on Twitter.

I think what makes social media so compelling sometimes isn’t the numbers, but the stories. Specifically, it’s the stories people tell each other about their lives, about their interactions with companies, about everything else they do, and while many people will say that too much information gets passed around when it comes to cats, what’s being eaten etc., there is nonetheless something compelling about the details that are shared, and the desire to connect with people through even the most banal of details.

In general, stories are powerful. There’s a saying I heard recently: “Facts tell, stories sell.” And there’s some real truth to that. People like to read stories, like to watch them, etc., which is why the entertainment industry does so well, but it’s also how a business can grab people’s attention, because a business can tell a story as well about how it was founded, what the struggles were, how they help people. And they can use social media to do this, via blog, video, or social networking profiles.

And stories extend past that to situations where businesses helped clients. Recently, I saw a commercial for Les Schwab the tire company. The story in the commercial is of a client who saves some money, because Les Schwab finds a small rock between the calipers of her brakes and removes it for free. You can bet that story has helped boost some business, because people can identify with saving money and being taken care of by a business that wants to help its clients.

Let me tell you another story. Recently I joined Third Tribe Marketing. It’s a forum site focused on internet marketing. I’ve been slowly scaling my participation up, as I get used to the site, and what I’ve found really helpful is that it’s significantly changed my approach to internet marketing, because I’m learning what other people, many of them more successful than I, are doing with their own internet marketing. It’s actually helped me overcome some resistance I had to monetizing my blog, because I am learning how people can do it without being offensive about it, which was an initial concern I had. But I’m also learning more about the power of stories, because so many of these people use stories to create compelling interest in what they are doing, and in the services and products they offer.

Stories are important in social media, because with so much text, what will really stand out is not how much information you pout out, but how you make it interesting enough that people will read it.

Stories sell, facts tell. Are you using stories in your business? Are you using stories on your social media sites?

I recently came across the story of a disabled person’s recent customer service nightmare with United Airlines. While the initial experience was a nightmare, she was able to leverage social media and her network of connections to get a response from United Air. Since then it appears that United Air is talking with her about not only the bad customer service experience, but also what they can do to improve their disabled person’s policy. And what does this illustrate?

It illustrates that more than ever companies need to monitor social media so that they can act on situations such as the one I mentioned above and resolve it, while also taking time to listen to the customer so they can improve their services. At the same time, such an example also shows that companies need to improve customer service, specifically making it more oriented toward helping the customer and less about helping a business evade responsibility.

This example also illustrates that insensitivity to a person’s health status is something which can and will haunt companies, because people are much more likely to take the side of a person than a company. In fact, loyal customers can suddenly, on finding out such details, realize that they don’t want to be customers of a company. Now this isn’t to say every customer will leave, but certainly many will, if only because a person’s story resonates and speaks to how that person feels.

It’s good that United Air, once they were aware of the situation, made an effort to contact the person and handle this situation in as proactive a manner as they could. It shows an increased awareness of the need for sensitivity with customers and also will hopefully lead to better training of employees. Certainly the passenger who complained had every right to be unhappy with the level of service she received, and while a company can apologize and do their best to rectify a situation, it’s even better if they can train their employees to handle situations with an eye toward recognizing how their own actions can effect the company. People, after all, will remember one negative experience over ten positive experiences, so it becomes very important to think of that and be proactive from the beginning.

In my previous post, I’d discussed social media relationship rules and ended the post asking my readers what there rules are. For this post, I thought I would share my own rules, which I use to help me navigate my time on social media. The first rule is Know the minimum amount of time needed to be on a given site.

This is a relationship rule, because to some degree the relationships a person engages in is defined by how much time the person can toward other people. The same applies to social media sites. You determine the minimum time, and scale upward based on engagement with other people, since responses will justify further time spent on social media sites.

My second rule is define the purpose of each social media account. My twitter account is a business account, as is my Facebook fan page, but my personal Facebook profile is a personal account. Accordingly I can use this rule to help me define who I will follow and why. Since my twitter account is a business account, I’ll use it to follow influencers in my industry, current clients, and networking partners. With my personal Facebook account, I’ll follow family and friends.

My third rule is make an effort to engage people, instead of waiting for them to come to you. This means commenting on what people are saying and also making replies where appropriate. This rule does need to be factored into rule 1.

My fifth rule is know when to take a break. I don’t stay on social media all the time. I find that sometimes I need a break of a day or too from twitter, Facebook etc. I try not to make it longer than that, but I find it really helps me not to feel overwhelmed, if I give myself some time off. Remember that you can be an introvert and get some me time, even with social media

Those are my four basic rules. There’s a lot that’s actually factored into those rules, in terms of consistency and what could be commented on, etc., but boiling it down to the basics, these are the social media behavior rules I use.

I was reading a recent post that asked if social media relationship rules should be different from real life and the author argued that no they shouldn’t be different from real life. I agree with him and yet also find it interesting how there such rules have come about simply because we’ve all begun to spend so much time  in this social medium. And I think it’s worth spending some time exploring what the rules are, when it comes to social media.

For example, if someone follows you, should you follow that person back? I don’t think a person is obligated to follow someone back and in fact, its impossible to maintain a meaningful relationship with everyone who chooses to follow you, but let’s extend this further. If someone you know follows you, should you follow them back? I think answer gets a bit more iffy. If it’s a client, it’s a wise idea to follow the person back, but maybe its a friend and you already see that friend a lot. Then you have to decide what the primary focus of the account is. If it’s a business account, then you might point your friend to an account specifically for friends. This is something I see happen a lot on Facebook, where people will point certain acquaintances to Linkedin for professional purposes, and point other people to Facebook for personal purposes.

Another question to consider is should you respond to every single response? Realistically you only have so much time and attention to put toward social media and if it starts to feel like email, then you probably won’t spend as much time, so picking and choose who you’ll respond to becomes very important in order to optimize your time on social media and establish a sense of what you’ll be doing while you’re on a given site.

Social media relationships are like real world relationships. You can only have so many and can only sustain so much consistency. What are your rules for social media relationships. Are they different from real world relationships or the same?

It’s really easy to forget, in all the talk about social media for business or job hunting, or who knows what else, that we are still dealing with a social medium, where people actually want to get to know each other socially. So often the emphasis is on using social media for business that it can be easy to focus on the numbers instead of really developing the relationships.

So let’s put aside business strategy for a minute and let me ask you, “What’s your social strategy?

In other words, what are you doing to show other people on social media sites that you’re more than a logo or a business? Are you showing interest in what they have to say about themselves? How much time can you make to take a moment and comment on something that is happening to someone, without making it about your business?

And yes you still need to develop a strategy for this, because you need to think about what sites you’ll do this on, and also how much you can put toward just being social, but it’s worth actually thinking about, because while it’s important to use social media for your business, it’s also important to recognize that social media is social, and being social isn’t always about you or your business. Sometimes it’s about taking a few seconds to comment or make a reply, and let people know that you see them as people, and not just a client to get into your door. So what’s your social strategy?

My social strategy involves making a point to comment on both Facebook and Twitter on what other people are writing about, and to not comment on the same person each day, but try to vary who I comment to, so I’m letting a number of people know that I see them and what’s happening with them. I also occasionally comment on a Linkedin status update, when I feel it’s appropriate to do so. I also make it a point to comment on blogs that I find insightful.

And you? What is your social strategy?

I’ve discussed social influence before and how it can be used by customers as a lever against companies that have poor customer service. However, companies can also utilize social influence, to their own advantage, provided they understand how it works and also are transparent in utilizing it.

A company can use social influence if they are willing to engage customers with respect and interest in what those customers have to say. A company that doesn’t squash the customer’s freedom of expression can end up ultimately creating advocates who are willing to support the company, without being paid for it or being associated with the company, beyond liking the products or services of the company.

What companies need to recognize is that they need to put a face on who they are, show interest in their customers, and also have sense enough to let their customers speak/write or upload pictures or videos that aren’t necessarily company approved, but eloquently tell the story about the customer and the company. In fact, with social media, for the first time companies have an opportunity to rely on genuine buzz and interest, as opposed to paid actors doing advertisements for them.

At the same time companies need to recognize that social influence is tricky and that it can come back to haunt them, if they aren’t careful. For example, despite how South West airlines tried to respond to the Kevin smith crisis, it’s fairly clear that their approach to social influence is reactive and somewhat ineffective, judging by the comments to this post. As much as possible companies need to realize that they control the social conversation, and need to accept that how they respond publicly can be used against them. On the other hand, companies will find that by working on their own social influence with their customers, they can create advocates that support them, even during a crisis. Those advocates will speak up, if they feel they’ve been taken care, and will provide counter evidence, which can help a company show that it does take care of its customers.