Socialize the Enterprise – Document Transcript
2. Socialize the Enterprise John Bell The Red Papers: Ogilvy & Mather
3. The Red Papers: February 2010, No. 2 Contents 5 Introduction 10 High octane global growth of word of mouth 18 Change within the enterprise 42 Social media strategy now 44 Key takeaways 46 References
4. Socialize the Enterprise Time for a comprehensive Introduction social media strategy After a year of experimentation in social media, the CMO of a global Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company realized that, once again, his team’s latest effort was not working. He was frustrated. This time, he thought, they had cracked it. From the outset, the team looked to existing agency partners and new social media gurus to help them tack the social media programs to their product campaigns. The media companies offered paid placements in social networks. The advertising creatives designed a clever Facebook application, and the public relations team suggested reaching out to some bloggers to spread word of mouth. The brand team felt they had the tactics to transform their traditional marketing campaign into a social media campaign. But, with no real way to measure the impact of blog posts, Tweets or the limited use of the Facebook application, it just seemed like a lot of work to generate modest word of mouth online. Where was the ROI in that? When the three-month campaign came to a close, the CMO was disappointed. He wanted something bigger, something that reminded him of mass media. The FMCG’s social media experiments had left behind a trash heap of expired initiatives, ignored sites and unattended accounts. All the work and all the money they had poured into social media had not produced much to brag about. In retrospect, their efforts seemed tentative, unconnected and perfunctory. That, the CMO decided, just wouldn’t do. Heading home on the Friday evening after his latest social buzz-kill, the CMO didn’t know what to do next. Part of him wanted to junk the whole social media world entirely. The results didn’t justify the effort and expense. After dinner that night, the CMO logged into Facebook, caught up with his friends and then started to head over to the Twitter feeds he was following, just like he did every night. He paused, his finger hovering over the mouse button, and realized that if social media was this much a part of his life, then he couldn’t ignore the impact it had on his customers. More- over, he had read the data; he knew that consumers’ trust and habits were shifting toward the social landscape. His younger colleagues on the brand teams were unrelenting boosters of social media, and, to be honest, he was an awfully big consumer of it too. Every time he opened 5
5. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Intro the trades, he read about how his competitors were knocking the cover Brand marketers feel like jilted dates at the high school dance, convinced off the ball with social media. He needed some of those positive headlines. that social media doesn’t work, that their brand is immune or, worse, that Then the CMO factored in his own boss. The CEO was no fool. He had their customers just don’t want to talk about them. Hundreds of brands lasered in on social media as a big opportunity — one they were not yet all across the globe have tested the waters of social media over the past making the most of — and the whole C-suite was buzzing about it. Nope. few years, lurching forward with disjointed social media feints that This was not something that could be abandoned. often end in failure. Peter Kim’s Master List, an online wiki filled with a few thousand examples of brands launching blogs, Twitter handles, But they couldn’t keep going the way they were. Sure, most of their social communities and more, is a monument to the futility of most of those media stabs seemed exciting when they launched, but as far as he could disjointed, tactical efforts. tell, they had not made the slightest business impact. Some of them, he thought ruefully, were outright failures. When they bombed, his brand Social media is not just a new channel or a few extra degrees in the 360° teams just retreated into buying more media. As he reviewed the past approach to marketing and communications. Social media represents a year and a half of frustration, the CMO realized that in many cases, he fundamental consumer behavioral shift requiring marketers to change and his team had simply ported traditional marketing over to a social how they market, how they are organized and how they measure success. platform. His marketing group was filled with smart people; he couldn’t To succeed via social media and to achieve real business impact, brands and have been the only one to see these problems. Yet teams from all over the organizations must adopt a comprehensive strategic approach to integrating vast enterprise were repeating the same mistakes. Obviously, there was no this new discipline. mechanism in place to accrue knowledge and then share best practices throughout the organization. Were our well-intentioned CMO to have approached social media with a strategic eye, he would never have tried pinning it to the back of a traditional If they were going to continue — and they were — they had to do better campaign. Instead, he and his brand team would have put “social” at the than just checking off the social media box on the corporate to-do list. heart of the entire marketing and communications effort. Pundits have Budget time wasn’t far off, and he knew he’d see plenty of line items for been evangelizing the power of social media for close to a decade. social media spending. How, he wondered, could he wrap that up into Consumers get it. The rate of marketplace adoption of social media and a budget he could stand behind? He did not have enough data to know word of mouth around the globe is faster than anyone could have predicted. what social efforts were going to work, what they would cost and what kind of revenue impact they could return. He needed a new approach — a Companies, by contrast, have lagged behind their customers, but they are way to adjust his organization to capitalize on social media while helping learning that embracing this platform is not optional. Whether you are a his brand managers bank some appreciable, measurable success, all without global FMCG, an automobile manufacturer, financial services company stomping on their entrepreneurial drive. or a B2B technology leader, no one can afford to hesitate. At the same time, tactical, unconnected experiments will not vault the brand forward. While this tale is apocryphal, the arc of the story will sound familiar to any Integrating social media into the marketing and communications functions brand executive. Tactical experimentation in social media blows up for implies a deep transformation not just of marketing but customer service, brands, leading to a spiral of disappointing campaigns and unrequited love. product development, and even the way the enterprise benchmarks success. 6 7
6. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Intro This strategic approach begins with learning to generate authentic, positive word of mouth via social media. Follow up with a focus on long-term gains rather than just short-term campaigns. Defining how to add scale leads to integration across the other marketing disciplines while common measurement models give the team the data to understand what is working and what is not, turning every tactical experiment into a strategic move forward. The main qualities of an enterprise-level social media strategy — more direct and open relationships with customers, faster marketplace response and increased efficiency around marketing, customer service and product development — have proven themselves invaluable to early adopter brands like Dell, Zappos, Ford, Starbucks and more. But the pace has quickened, and creating a social media brand strategy is a little like designing, building and driving a car simultaneously. Ultimately, what social media enables is a new form of word of mouth 8 9
7. THE RED PAPERS High octane global growth Both social media and the new, empowered consumer are here to stay regardless of whatever platform is popular today. Social media behaviors of word of mouth and platforms have enjoyed remarkable growth around the world, most notably in Brazil which has seen the fastest rate of Twitter adoption. While Facebook’s U.S. user base grows older — from twenty-six in 2008 to thirty-three in 2009 — Twitter’s grows younger. Eighteen- to twenty-four- year-olds account for thirty-seven percent of its users, up from nineteen percent just a year ago. As it spreads from the early adopters to a much broader base, social media behaviors and platforms are emerging in markets around the globe. This is a worldwide trend. Ultimately, what social media enables is a new form of word of mouth. Whether I blog about my love for the new Ford Taurus, become a fan of the Lance Armstrong Foundation on Facebook, Tweet a link to Amex tickets for the Rolling Stones concert or pass a video of Nick Cave reading from Bunny Munro to a friend, it’s all word of mouth. Word of mouth trumps most other forms of communication in its influence on purchase decisions and opinions. Three years ago, we began to see the erosion of trust in traditional marketing in favor of a digitally enabled type of word of mouth. This expanded form went beyond family and friends to a new group: strangers with expertise or strangers with experience. These are people who, like ourselves, express themselves online via blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook and regional social media platforms. They include other dads who have some experience raising a fifteen-year-old son and can teach me a thing or two, as well as self-made style mavens who know more than any magazine on the racks. When it began, we thought this trend was reserved for mature media markets where consumers had grown skeptical of advertising claims. It would take years for young media markets like China to follow suit. We were wrong. The Chinese consumer’s participation in social media has exploded. In 2006, there were an equal number of blog readers and writers — about fifty-eight percent of the online population — whereas today the number rockets to ninety percent for readers and eighty-one percent for writers. 10 11
8. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise For the Chinese online consumer, online word of mouth trumps traditional media in influencing brand perception and purchase decisions. As Thomas Crampton, who heads up Ogilvy’s 360° Digital Influence team across Asia, explains, “China’s levels of engagement in social media outstrip those of many nations. Distrust of the state sponsored media makes social High media based word of mouth campaigns that much more effective. octane A McKinsey study found that when asked what would lead someone to buy global a new moisturizer, sixty-six percent of all Chinese said recommendations growth of from friends and family was vital.” word of mouth Participation in Online Conversations in China is Growing Fast: Online Word of Mouth Influences Brand Perception and Purchase Growth of Social Media Use Amongst Online Population Decisions in China Global Web Index, Trendstream Limited 2009 Millward Brown ACSR, May 2009 Online comment Online by people comment I know by people Newspapers from the I don’t Online % participating 2006 2007 2008 2009 % agree / Magazines TV Internet know Search It will influence my 33 33 32 43 21 Blog readers 58 85 89 90 perception on the brand. It has the information 25 25 25 36 25 Blog writers 58 62 71 81 I want to know. It is the channel I use often. 24 25 24 40 33 Create social network profile 49 63 70 It is valuable. 24 22 28 37 22 Manage social network profile 64 72 I will recommend it to others. 21 19 25 29 15 It is convincing. 17 17 24 31 15 Visit a friend’s social network page 75 82 It is believable. 16 14 23 26 13 Video watchers 56 79 56 89 It will influence my final 15 17 23 31 18 purchase decision. 12 13
9. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise In Europe, we see a similar trend. When asked who consumers trusted U.S. Moms — that most-coveted gatekeeper of many purchases — clearly for the most accurate opinion on a product they were considering, values the online opinions of her peers well above the advertisements she “a good contact on a social network” came directly after “a close friend” may see in traditional media. and a family member at the top of the list, well before a journalist or TV news reader. High octane Europeans Trust Contacts on Social Networks More Than Traditional U.S. Moms Value Online Peer Communications Well Above Traditional global Global Web Index, Trendstream Limited 2009 Advertising or Media: Information Ranked by Percent of Moms Indicating growth of it was Very Valuable word of 2009 Women and Social Media Study, BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners mouth Person to person Info from articles Info from traditional ads A family member 70% A close friend 60% A good contact on a social network A neighbor 50% A store assistant 40% The author of a blog you read regularly A journalist for a national newspaper 30% A television news reader 20% The main contacts on your microblog A well-known celebrity 10% Your country’s leader / politicians 1.50 2.00 2.50 3.00 3.50 4.00 Friends Online Expert Online Online Magazine TV ads Magazine Newspaper Radio reviews reviews friends articles articles ads ads ads from online Average Trust — 5 equals very strong trust consumers like me 14 15
10. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise The growing importance of the opinion of peers — both those we know The growing importance of the opinion of peers and those with whom we identify — is a global phenomenon. Brands who have a lot at stake in emerging markets for growth can no longer shrug — both those we know and those with whom we off peer reviews as a “Western thing.” Consumers in China may favor identify — is a global phenomenon. forums and portals over blogs and Twitter, but the impact of word of High mouth online is growing unmistakably. While the state media control may octane be one explanation, national marketing crises around tainted milk, lead global in paint and other products, as well as a general mistrust from outlandish growth of marketing claims has likely accelerated the skepticism. word of mouth As marketers, our job now shifts from top-down message dissemination to peer group influencing. We must strive to help customers, enthusi- asts, fans and other “strangers with expertise” share their thoughts about our products and the topics and ideas that bring us together with them. Rather than trying to control the conversation, we want people to search in Google and find the endorsements of our advocates — third parties who say our products are as good as we say they are. Social media and word of mouth marketing has become a big part of our business. Marketers and investors are banking on the growing power of social media. As key hurdles from measurement to organizational to integration are overcome, this use and investment will skyrocket. A recent study sponsored by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association tracks marketers’ spend on word of mouth and social media marketing. It found that we spent almost two billion dollars last year alone, a number that will increase by fifty percent come 2013. A tremendous return on investment will accrue to those who spend strategically. 16 17
11. THE RED PAPERS Socialize the Enterprise Change within the enterprise Strategic use of social media takes effort and change at all levels of the organization. That takes time. Five to ten months will pass before a rigorous approach to social media shows big results. The company should begin by educating teams and adopting best-practice guardrails. Actual marketplace programs with results that everyone can evaluate and appreciate ought to follow soon after. Even the most aggressive marketer who wants a program in-market in thirty days needs to know that time — just like money — must be invested for a new approach to take hold. There is a lot of marketing muscle-memory to retrain. Our FMCG will face three big changes within the enterprise. They will need some silo-smashing collaboration across the whole organization. This goes way beyond 360° marketing and communications teams. Customer service, or at least corporate public relations, should get dragged into the mix. The product development team must get involved post-haste as advanced social media strategies lead to co-creation or collaboration with customers. That can impact the actual product or service for sale. The company needs to jettison campaign thinking. All of us have to engage with our customers in a sustained, ongoing effort that will likely transcend not just the life of the paid media buy but also the sparkly goodness of the latest big idea. Lastly, no marketing team can adopt any practice on faith for too long. To make a sound budget for ongoing social media activity, marketers must have a dependable measurement model buttressing their high-performance strategic approach. 18 19
12. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Collaborating across silos Beyond the campaign When American Express wanted to shake up their approach to marketing Brands across the Unilever, P&G, Campbell’s, Pepsi and Coca Cola at their customers with social media engagement, their first stop was portfolios have actively engaged in social media experiments over the past customer service. Before Amex could earn the right to use social media few years. Many learned that they need to push against built-in pressures to engage customers, they had to offer a social customer care solution. for short-term thinking and planning. How can you motivate a brand Had they not launched twitter.com/askamex to listen and respond to manager who has an average life expectancy on a particular brand of Cardmember questions and concerns, any other social media marketing eighteen months to think about developing a two-, three-, five- or even effort would have died under the weight of customer service traffic. They ten-year relationship with customers? needed to collaborate with customer service to deliver a marketing solution. Short-term campaigns often leave a disparate collection of Facebook Change When Dell launched IdeaStorm to solicit customer thoughts on product or YouTube pages out on the social web — many of them abandoned within the innovations, their first stop was product development. They needed once the campaign was over. These may have served some short-term enterprise to make sure that the product teams were ready to not just listen to goal (or not), but they create confusion and negative feelings amongst suggestions but take action on them. By inviting customers to make consumers who expect to see brands living up to their side of the social suggestions and have some of them be incorporated in products, they network contract. Generally, brand exploration in social media is a good turned these customers into invested advocates. Marketing could not thing. It builds confidence and expertise within the organization. But have accomplished this without breaking down operational barriers with without a strategic framework, it can lead to less than best-practice use product development teams. of social media. Companies must curtail the English-garden growth of social network beachheads in favor of strategically guided experiments. Social media will drag the whole enterprise into play. Resisting this It’s a business truism, but it’s worth repeating: the consumer must come pressure is futile. Finding ways to work together easily across business first — even before our ninety-day needs for launching product variation functions will improve the value of social media to the business, increasing X. Brands must apply some order to this chaos without squelching the collaboration and market responsiveness. Businesses can start by entrepreneurial drive that got them doing something in social media in establishing a federation of people from across all disciplines who want or the first place. need to apply social media to their discipline. Call it a working group, call it a committee, call it whatever is acceptable and meaningful, but make sure these people come together to establish best practice principles for using social media and that they share openly the lessons they’ve learned. It’s no big mystery that the best application of social media inside the enterprise starts with some basic social activity. 20 21
13. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Responsible budgeting Measurement of social media is changing how we measure business “What do we budget next year?” Think about this routine question. Brands cannot wait for the social media equivalent of the Gross Rating If the most effective use of social media is a sustained effort beyond any Point (GRP) to land in their laps. It is finally possible to measure the one campaign, involving more than the marketing and communications performance of social media programs, and the newest performance teams, then the current method of measuring success — campaign models will likely change how we all measure the impact of our marketing metrics — is insufficient. These measurements cannot assess the impact and communications and customer service efforts in the future. No, we of an ongoing social media effort and do nothing to calculate return on don’t have new standards in place yet. Any marketer who holds out until investment. Without those two key pieces of data, how can you have an that is delivered to them on a silver platter will find herself off the back of informed view of what to budget next year? An evolutionary approach the pack. Many major marketers today are exploring two new performance won’t get you there. Unlike media-driven campaigns where a marketer can metrics for social media while figuring out how to integrate them into their Change dial up or remix the spend to get different (hopefully better) results, a social brand dashboards: the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and value metrics for within the media program requires new metrics to move budgeting beyond guesswork. social key performance indicators. enterprise The NPS is a proprietary model for benchmarking the health of a business based upon some version of the simple question, “would you recommend us?” There are billions of brand mentions every day online and offline which can be classified, given some context, as positive, neutral or negative, but brand marketers want to activate and increase positive word of mouth about their product. The NPS measures that positive word of mouth. Brands that engage with social media will need to adopt some form of an NPS metric being as it indicates actual consumer sentiment. Rather than rely on inchoate “brand mentions,” measures like the NPS assess a behavior, and a highly desired behavior at that. What good are gross impressions compared to knowing who is recommending your product and how to reach them? What’s next? How about the value of a Facebook friend? The value of a word-of-mouth mention? Or the value of my social graph? Each of these metrics — which seem intuitively valuable — will find some form of simple and plausible measurement within the next two years. If you add to that the compound effect of owned, earned and paid media, then marketers will have a new way to assign value to their market-facing activities. 22 23
14. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Creating your social media strategy As our apocryphal CMO learned the hard (and expensive) way, experimentation in social media is not enough. It leads to a self-defeating series of disappointments as brands try to hit the jackpot of a runaway campaign or replicate the seductive power of a viral video. Only a company-wide strategic approach that puts social media at the center of brand strategy, accrues useful learning and applies meaningful new measurement tools will produce the kind of results marketers need and consumers want. A strategic social media approach will force change, to be sure, but it will also reorient the enterprise to face the most significant change in the selling environment that any of us will see in our lifetimes. Strategic focuses show brand teams the way to meet their short-term campaign needs while building an enduring connection with consumers. CMOs will get a program that directly and measurably affects sales targets and brand equity. CEOs will see that the organization is embracing change. And customers will see a brand that is committed to them for the long haul, not just selling that new flavor or formula. Brands must do three things to develop a comprehensive strategic approach to social media. Start by defining the social brand — just how can (and should) you participate in social media in a way that is authentic? Not every company should put their 1,666 blogging employees in an aggregator like Microsoft. Not every brand should enlist women to tell men how they can score like Axe does via Facebook. Beyond defining their social nature, brands must look inside and break down the silo walls that shelter one department from another, preparing team members for collaboration and learning. An enterprise change framework can speed adoption of best practices and organizational frameworks, and establishing an engagement playbook will ensure that brands get the biggest impact from their marketing and communications. 24 25
15. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Defining the social brand You spent millions defining your brand, and millions more communicating that to the world. You built complex marketing and communications programs that speak consistently across channels. You may have even aligned your call centers to that brand positioning. The 360° approach to brand stewardship is standard operating procedure these days. But what about the social identity of a brand? Is social just a few more clicks around the 360° wheel? Is it just another way to describe the big idea? Brands must choose the role they want to play in social media and what they will do there, not simply what they want to say. Defining the social brand means deciding how you will behave in the social web, what voice you will use and how deeply you will participate with your customers. Creating your There is more than one way to be social. Does every brand need to jump social media into a daily two-way conversation with people to demonstrate that they strategy get it and to serve their customers? What makes it okay for Starbucks to invite customers to co-create via My Starbucks Idea may not work for McDonald’s. Ford’s Fiesta Movement may be right for them but not for Louis Vuitton. Brands have long been described as personalities. Now that metaphor means more than ever. Brands must think and choose wisely about what is a natural personality to portray. 26 27
16. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Brands can choose to: Each of these is a legitimate way to act socially. Each can be an extension of the authentic brand personality. Some brands are enablers trying to help Humanize themselves through their people and their stories their customers achieve something. Some brands deliver fun. Some feel more exclusive. How should your brand behave in social media? Like the Demonstrate openness by inviting customer opinion, whether it be favorable relentless helper, Zappos, known for their friendly, even quirky, customer or unfavorable service? Or are you more like Campbell’s Soup, providing a virtual kitchen for women to share their recipes and experience with other women? Be of use to their customers in some new way Ford’s enduring brand position has always been the democratization Delight customers via innovative entertainment of technology. After all, they pioneered mass production, making the automobile available to many. The 2010 Ford Taurus embodies that same Steward customer communities for feedback and to trigger word of mouth spirit by placing technology once limited to the luxury brands into a car for the masses. As Ford dives deeper into social media, their democratic Extend customer care via social tools that are more immediate and answer heritage guides their choices. They embrace the voice and experience of questions publicly their customer by aggregating blog and Twitter mentions, images and videos from owners and prospective owners, projecting the mood of a Creating your Deliver relevant content via the social web to the places their customers are town hall rather than a corporate lobby. social media already congregating strategy Axe has little interest in democracy. Instead, it wants to give you a leg up. Axe is that wingman who will help you score with the ladies. That comes across in their advertising as well as the apps that fill their Facebook page. Axe has chosen to be the enabler who, with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face, has decided that your fun is his mission. 28 29
17. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise These brands rooted their social brand in their larger brand position. Building your enterprise change playbook While this connection makes sense, brands may also find that they have permission to behave a little differently in social media. Very often a Social media is not just for marketers or communications experts. Many brand’s social self can be more informal or even friendly, even if that is brands are finding that social media can inform or even change basic not key to the core brand personality. If you operate within a regulated business processes across the enterprise, from customer service to product industry like pharmaceuticals, financial or alcohol, you will need to address development. That’s a lot to take on at once, and a strategic approach will the requirements of those regulations as that may affect how your social start you in a few distinct places like training and organization. This will brand manifests itself. An alcoholic beverage company, for example, might introduce change at a level that impacts the business immediately. You need to embrace a social voice and message around the responsible use of don’t have to set out to transform your enterprise to gain advantages from the product, thereby earning the right to engage in deeper discussions. social media, but once you have enjoyed the rewards, you’ll look back and Hold a workshop with your brand and social media enthusiasts. Peter find yourself transformed. Friedman from the social media community company LiveWorld likes to call this the “socialization of the brand.” Ask yourself some simple questions: If you met your brand at a party, how would you describe it? Creating your What voice should your brand speak in? social media strategy From within your company, who would be a good archetype for that voice? Is your brand more likely to engage in conversation or help others do the same? If you could invite your customers over, what would you do together? What social causes do you care about? Some of these questions seem hokey. Give yourself and your team a little room to explore and the freedom to be corny. Suspend your disbelief and check the hierarchy at the door so that you and your team uncover the natural position for your brand. There is no one path to socializing your brand, and your discussions may show you that you are not ready to jump You don’t have to set out to transform your enterprise into direct conversations with your customers via social media, preferring instead to help them share amongst themselves. Perhaps it is not your to gain advantages from social media, but once you brand’s job to entertain your customers but rather to be useful to them in a new way (like an iPhone app, for instance). have enjoyed the rewards, you’ll look back and find yourself transformed. Once you have a definition for your brand’s social self, your strategic choices will become clearer. 30 31
18. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Social Enterprise Change Playbook — For large organizations to reap the Training: Social media cannot be outsourced — at least, not completely. full benefits of social media in their business, they need three efforts: Nor can it be learned through books. This is one discipline that requires hands-on experience and nonstop training. Ogilvy, for example, has developed a complete training program delivered both live and online. Our belt system allows marketing and communications staff to work their way up to black belt abilities in our social media dojo. Intel has adopted a Training different approach, using an accreditation program for their staff. A training program to build capacity from with the organization. Social media cannot be completely outsourced, and team members By taking digital university-level courses, staff can acquire knowledge across disciplines from marketing to customer care to legal need and status within the organization. To transform your current staff training. An accreditation program ensures true expertise, and a path you will need to develop a training program that fits your staff. Some of continuous learning keeps teams sharp on the next new thing. organizations such as the Word of Mouth Marketing Association offer basic training which is a critical starting point, and social media training is being introduced into marketing and communications programs at major universities. Nevertheless, brand organizations should expect to develop their own higher-level training that is mapped to what their marketers Organization really need. Creating your Organizational modeling tells us how to structure the organiza- social media tion — including jobs and responsibilities — as well as how to Whatever approach your organization adopts, active, ongoing education productively engage outside partners such as agencies. strategy is mandatory in a social media-focused organization. This world changes quickly, and the change is driven by your consumers. Being behind the curve shows them disrespect. Action Each discipline needs its own social media action program that tells them how they can apply “social” to their market-facing activity. Customer service This world changes quickly, and the change is Internal communications driven by your consumer. Being behind the curve shows them disrespect. Marketing and communications engagement 32 33
19. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Organization: Social media doesn’t belong to marketing, public relations calendar1 of your Facebook page and content publishing elsewhere in or customer relations. It doesn’t sit neatly within any of the existing your social web, you may find that you can centralize all of that with a discipline silos, and creating a new, distinct organization runs contrary to single, very busy person. But that is only one key platform. Just the live the integrated nature of social media. Instead, brands are creating centers coverage on Twitter alone can require two or three team members. The of excellence, pulling people from all disciplines to form an internal organizational task is to identify the least number of resources you need federation. Its mission: to define and socialize best practices, while sharing internally, augmenting those folks with your agency partners. Time will and integrating this knowledge throughout the organization. Intel, tell where and when you need to staff up. American Express and others have adopted this model, sidestepping the question of “who owns social media?” and creating a more responsive If you chose well, your agency has a lot of experience bringing social culture. The work coming from your social media center of excellence will media to bear for different brands. They can help you develop your social accelerate the integration of the communications and marketing teams brand position and assist with changing how you work. They can also and will spread from there. Even if your organization has competitive serve as a useful filter for the fire hose of new technologies and solutions marketing and communications silos today, they will all be one unit sitting springing up in the marketplace every day. shoulder-to-shoulder in the future. Once you’ve committed to building a center of excellence, you need to Creating your figure out whom to invite. It’s key to have most disciplines attending — social media marketing, communications, customer care and product development. strategy It’s just as important to identify the enthusiasts for social media and invite as many of them as makes sense. These folks may not be the most senior, but their natural interest and aptitude will propel the group forward. They can be productive word-of-mouth ambassadors for social media within the organization. Embrace them. Who will do the actual work within the brand, and how will you determine what must be done internally, with consultants or via your agency partners? How can you determine which key positions to hire before the actual revenue impact of those positions is revealed? In answer to those questions, most companies grossly underestimate or overestimate what they need to have an effective social media program, especially in the beginning. Many settle for hiring that one social media person and then wonder why their business is not magically transformed. Still others assume that industry leaders like Dell have a legion of social media-specific people and unless you get that legion, no progress can be made. The truth is somewhere in between. Managing customer care in the social web is resource-intensive. If you are trying to manage the conversation 1 “Conversation calendar” is a term used by Facebook sales reps to describe the daily and weekly rhythm of updates to your brand Facebook pages to keep your followers engaged. 34 35
20. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Action: the social media engagement framework Active Listening: Whether you are listening to gain insight or to rapidly respond to customers or stakeholders, every brand must keep its ears A changed enterprise is not enough. You need a model to plan your social pricked. Brands have begun putting in listening solutions that deliver media marketing and communications efforts more strategically. We live short, relevant reports on a daily or weekly basis, but nobody has come in a campaign-focused world. Our brand teams are trained to think of up with an excellent system. Some have limited their sift to Twitter and a discrete marketing assaults in the marketplace, and, while we want to move major forum (such as TripAdvisor). Others have tried the radio antenna to include a more long-term view, we do still need a planning framework approach, listening to the whole universe of comment. One way or for campaigns that deliver the most impactful results today and tomorrow. another, brands need to implement a good system for listening that is flexible enough to adapt to growing sophistication as it becomes available. Social Media Engagement Framework: Listening programs deliver value in at least five ways: marketing insight for campaign planning, rapid response opportunities, measurement benchmarking, media planning insight and influencer discovering. This is too rich a resource to pass over. Active listening Listening to CGM, sharing internally and responding Active listening doesn’t end with your ears. Now that companies have valuable information, they need to know what to do with the Creating your information. Do you have a commenting policy that will empower your social media communications staff to story correct? Will the insights from consumers strategy Owned Earned Paid make their way to the CMO and influence future marketing and product efforts? Every brand should have some listening solution and discipline. This is a fundamental step that every social media expert agrees on. Social content Social Engagement strategy IRM advertising Brand community Cultivating and interacting with a network of customers or advocates Active listening doesn’t end with your ears. Measurement Integrated performance and POI social media measurement 36 37
21. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Owned, Earned and Paid Media: A brand has the choice of how it will use To add scale to our efforts we need to use paid advertising in a new way. its own Web presence and content. While this owned media offers We can grow online word of mouth via the careful use of advertising. the ultimate in control, it lacks the benefits of two-way dialogue with A hallmark of large word-of-mouth activity is dispersion or the degree consumers. From your web site to your Twitter account, owned media to which a lot of people are talking rather than a vocal core group. can be used more conversationally than the press releases, white papers Advertising used well can drive more people into the conversation and get and videos you may have pumped out a few years ago. Today, owned them talking. Imagine advertising units that feature blog posts, Tweets media should be shareable and findable. Embed your owned media or other social content getting delivered through efficient ad channels. with web standards for distributing and bookmarking (e.g. Share This), Now the advertising progresses beyond traditional display as it helps and create all content with search results in mind. Search remains create a brand network for a relevant conversation. With new uses for paid embarrassingly underutilized for most brands. While conventional search advertising, we have added scale and not let our social media program engine optimization experts abound, search intent modeling — a process plod along unsupported. advanced by our SEO experts Global Strategies International — turns search into a powerful social tool. Search intent modeling allows us to Putting social at the center of a program drove millions of people to be listen to what consumers are talking about in relation to our brands while heard at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Ogilvy’s paying attention to how they are searching. Using the language that our Hopenhagen campaign, launched just three months before the start of the customers are using is the key to creating highly relevant owned media conference, aimed to galvanize a mass outpouring of public sentiment, Creating your that rises to the top in all types of search. a global and peaceful uprising demanding a serious effort to confront social media climate change. By aligning earned, owned and paid media, we delivered strategy The new earned media is word of mouth. When we engage a new set of a strategic plan for social media far bigger than any one tactic. We hosted influencers in a way that causes them to pass something along, comment a worldwide social media movement that became a beacon for the climate on or participate in some way, we have earned word of mouth — the change conversation. We built a social brand that mattered, earning highest value currency in the marketing world. When we pay attention to the focused attention of six million people, and we did it in 90 days. social media participants and understand what they value, we may gain Hopenhagen showed the world the power of social media. more than their attention; we may obtain their advocacy. There are billions of brand mentions every day via word of mouth, but that’s not the same Brand Communities: Every brand can support some type of community. as social attention. Often, people are willing to say relevant, honest things Every town has its own character as does every internet community. about your brand if you just ask them nicely. To succeed in earned media, Victoria’s Secret Pink, for example, has over two million fans on Facebook brands need to know how to earn that attention. who may find themselves interacting with each other and not just the brand. Social Influencer Relationship Management (Social IRM) is the process Every brand should know what its communities are or where the potential of managing social relationships well and encouraging people to be vocal for community lies. If Campbell’s Soup can foster community — and about a product, service, brand or topic. Unlike Customer Relationship they can — then many brands have the potential. You may find, as Management (CRM), Social IRM does not try to measure the value of Maker’s Mark did, that loyalists will take pride in their community and specific social behaviors. Yes, it’s nice to know how many emails it takes for membership in ambassador programs. As you engage influencers to someone to click through, but that is not the goal of Social IRM. Social share word of mouth, foster a place for vocal loyalists as well as a deeper IRM is personal, high-touch customer interaction that presumes you relationship among them and your brand. Brand communities serve as a value advocacy as much as you do customer revenue. In the near future, new form of CRM — one that is built and managed across the social web. Social IRM will connect influencer and customer databases to each other, managing them for maximum advocacy and revenue. 38 39
22. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Measurement: Going all in with strategic social media does not preclude Conversation Impact™: Measure Engagement > Action learning through experimentation and iteration. Anyone who portrays social media as a highly predictable universe with power laws like the average click-through rate on a display ad is just delusional. Brands will succeed by trying lots of things. You need a reliable measurement model Awareness Preference Action to know if you are winning or losing on any given day. Every brand can decide which key performance indicators they will follow today while we all wait for Facebook to get around to floating a value for Sentiment index of online a fan. Our approach, Conversation Impact™, is a simple model for brand Unique monthly visits — conversation marketers to report reach, brand preference and action based upon readily Sales owned and earned media (% positive — % negative), trackable metrics. There are other tools emerging, but no matter which you # / pts change choose, be sure it measures conversion metrics like click-throughs, email signups and fan acquisition as well as the volume of your positive word of mouth online. Whether you use Conversation Impact™ or some other model, use it consistently. Doing so allows your center of excellence to try Time on site, Share of positive Creating your different tactics knowing they will be able to gauge what is effective. Registration # / % change voice in category social media strategy Volume of online Relative net promoter WOM network conversation score (NPS) in category action Message Blog/Twitter-based pull-through action 40 41
23. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Social media strategy now Simon Clift, former CMO of Unilever, said of that company’s progress in social media, “We may be ahead of our competitors, but we’re most definitely behind consumers.” While many marketers are just trying to catch up to consumers, we must take action to meet our customers where they have already told us they want to go. Social media is not a fad. It is an enduring change, and it represents a new discipline for marketers to learn. Taking it seriously demands some crucial decisions. Enterprises must choose how to train best practices, organize themselves to adapt quickly and measure performance and ROI. Some marketers will continue to experiment tactically with no means for understanding real results, but the experimentation and evangelist-led tactics that got us this far will not be enough to reap the true benefits of a social world. Marketers who apply a strategic approach across the enterprise will not only create the most effective social media-based programs possible today, they will be setting up their organization to meet consumers where they want to go next. The ultimate promise of the social brand comes when a person openly speculates about a product or a service to buy and their peers lean forward to tell them enthusiastically about their experience. As brands change their approach to connecting with their customers, they will find that all of their communications and marketing efforts will be more effective. Instead of outspending their rivals and buying customers for their products, brands will earn people’s attention, their advocacy and, ultimately, their business. We may be ahead of our competitors, but we’re most definitely behind consumers. 42 43
24. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise Key takeaways • Social media represents a fundamental consumer behavioral shift that is here to stay • Success comes from creating an enterprise-level social media strategy • Brands will enjoy direct and open relationships with customers, faster marketplace response and increased marketing, customer service and product development efficiency • Social media is a new form of word of mouth which is growing remarkably quickly throughout the world • Enterprises must embrace internal change while setting up a new engagement strategy • Reorganizing for social media • Collaborate across silos • Think beyond the campaign • Rethink budgeting with new social media metrics • Creating a social media engagement strategy • Define the social brand • Build an enterprise change playbook • Training • Organization • Apply the social media engagement framework • Active listening • Owned, earned and paid media • Brand communities • Measurement • Set up the organization to progress in step with consumers, meeting them where they want to go next rather than playing catch-up 44 45
25. The Red Papers Socialize the Enterprise References • beingpeterkim.com • blog.ogilvypr.com/conversation-impact-social-media-measurement- model-by-ogilvy-360-digital-influence/ • community.campbellkitchen.com/category/Forums/400000001 • globalstrategies.com • Global Web Index, Trendstream Limited 2009 • makersmark.com • Millward Brown ACSR, May 2009 • netpromoter.com • pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-Status-Updating- Fall-2009.aspx?r=1 • sharethis.com • Simon Clift speaking at Ad Age’s Digital Conference April 2009 • The Word-of-Mouth Marketing Forecast 2009-2013, WOMMA 2009 • Women and Social Media Study, BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, 2009 • womma.org 46 47
26. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise About the author John Bell John’s job is to take the latest in digital innovations and apply it to our business and our clients’ business. Call it applied innovation. He heads up the global 360° Digital Influence team — Ogilvy’s global digital practice designed to manage brands in an era when anyone can be an influencer and we are all influenced in new ways. It connects our brand- building PR expertise with a word-of-mouth marketing discipline. This team of Digital Influence strategists integrates the power of social media — social networks, blogs and Web 2.0 applications — with digital marketing to produce measureable results. John has developed strategy and executed award-winning programs for clients including Ford. Lenovo, Unilever, Intel and American Express. The first wave of innovation was Interactive Television (iTV) in 1990. John headed up the Visual Design Studio at Downtown Digital — a joint venture between Viacom and AT&T to create the most futuristic vision of interactive television anyone could imagine. He created programming for kids and gamers, and fully interactive applications for Paramount Studios and Entertainment Tonight. This model of set-top-box-delivered interactivity remains a vision for all iTV innovation. John created the first interactive advertisement for American Express during that iTV trial. He went on to form Media Circus Interactive Advertising in New York during the 1990s, designing award-winning CD-ROMs including the first interactive advertisement on Launch, then a CD-ROM zine, for Sony. John also created the first I-Spy CD-ROM for Scholastic, extending the brand into the electronic space and pushing the limits of what an interactive experience could be. At the same time, the Internet was exploding. He designed and built complicated transaction sites for Gateway Computers and wild experiments like MTV’s Web service that connected “stringers” all across the country reporting on the music scene in their community. (Sound a bit like blogging? It should, and the year was 1995.) Discovery Channel was one of the first media properties to really experiment with the web. John was brought in to transform a single web site into a network of 14 web properties known as Discovery.com. 48 49
27. The Red Papers: Socialize the Enterprise They had live, online expeditions from the field. Reporters posted real-time stories, audio and video from Australia where they were in search of giant spiders, and from the bottom of the ocean where they explored the Titanic wreckage for the first time. John designed and built online experiences for TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Kids, Discovery Health and Travel Channel, not to mention a host of digital TV network and global sites. His experience creating an online adventure service for kids with Discovery Kids inspired him to join a startup called HiFusion committed to build- ing a unique school-to-home internet service for the K- community. But it was a pivotal year for internet-based business. HiFusion sold the company to Sylvan Ventures and moved on to the next adventure. For John, that next adventure was Ogilvy. John graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in European history and spent a lot of time at the Annenberg School About of Communications. the author John serves on the board as past president of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and is a professor at Johns Hopkins University where he teaches graduate courses in Digital Influence. His blog is The Digital Influence Mapping Project: johnbell.typepad.com His Twitter name is jbell. 50 51
28. The Red Papers Colophon Writer John Bell Editor Jeremy Katz Creative director Gabe Usadel Art director Alex Fuller Illustrator Allie Armstrong Typeface J Baskerville Design 485 Brand Design, Ogilvy Chicago February 2010 Issue 2 The Red Papers are published by Ogilvy & Mather No article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. Copyright © 2010 Ogilvy & Mather Edition 1: 5,350 52 53