Why should social media matter to a business or professional services firm? This is still not an easy question to answer, especially as most of the answers for most senior executives and partners are based on fear, whether of a reputational blunder, of lost time or of a legal liability.
Let us be clear. There are risks. And the costs of engagement with social media are high in time. Similarly, the most touted channels are still quite clunky and unfocused for business communications, while the ongoing privacy debate has made them far less likely to be useful for marketeers.
Even those qualities that make the public love them – especially the speed of direct engagement with the news – also help to turn these media into transient tools in which immense effort goes into the chance of one sight of a message that cannot easily be repeated by people who cannot be tracked easily.
At the end of the day, as with other traditional advertising media, we cannot know that our target was noticing our message while the format of social media encourages screening out and gives power to the consumer to edit out commercial messages and the people who promote them.
Claims of an ‘instant dialogue’ between company or firm and customer and client are too often theoretical ones. A company’s message will wash over the customer at the margins of perception in a way no different from newspaper or broadcast advertising and it remains the older blog tool where informed postings excite informed commentary. This is where the dialogue of the informed really takes place.
A first bit of advice to any professional or executive is to master the blogs and the online journals that matter to you and to think, with care for liability, how you can engage with your peers in a literate and informed manner.
If there is a gap in the blog information market, some areas in which your expertise can be presented to your public without giving away the intellectual property that sustains your business model, then consider filling it yourself.
Consider also that the entire social media system might be used as a huge free intelligence system in which some basic upfront investment can gain its return in a flow of news that is highly specific to your business needs – and to which you can react in the marketplace faster than your competitors.
This business intelligence value cuts both ways, of course. If you go to a business intelligence firm and ask them to investigate some rival or threat, they will undoubtedly charge you a high sum just to do what you could do by working through the internet – and that means dossiers can also be built up on you through your web footprint.
Managing your and your company’s identity on the internet, which means having effective guidelines for employees, is now a necessary part of defensive intelligence. No executive or partner should engage in this world without understanding privacy controls (and returning to them frequently) or understanding what sort of person is likely to be in the groups that they join or are behind the anonymous ‘follows’. If in doubt, don’t shout it out!
But, on the plus side, social media can be used both as a broadcasting tool (if you can attract the right listeners who connect regularly using tools like Tweetdeck or a mobile application) and as a listening tool – for example, using Twitter lists to build up news channels from specialist Followers.
During the Right2Link Campaign earlier this year, we used Twitter not only to communicate with our natural allies, with a feed to the web site, but we created channels that told us separately what was going on in the political lobby, what was going on amongst the industrial interests concerned, what the general political mood was as election fever mounted and what activists were saying.
What this meant was that we had a virtuous circle by which we pulled information out of the system and re-circulated it to add value to our supporters and then added our own news and action points within a context of being ‘useful’.
Supporters would then engage with us and were more likely to join our campaign and sign the official e-petition. This campaign was a relatively low cost late entry into a political process but, using and integrating multiple channels, it managed to get its core message – the defence of the public’s right to link – into the media, amongst key influencers and, with the support of public affairs associate Portcullis Public Affairs, into Parliament.
Social media are still in their early stage of development. We have been wary of the hype and the specialists because, in the unformed state of the market, a lot of companies are in danger of spending a great deal of time into being seduced by ‘experts’ into a nerdy monitoring operation driven by fear – a sort of neurotic worry about what is being said behind twitching net curtains.
Similarly, though there are stars of the internet with real reach who can turn your brand into fashion or disgrace in a moment, the reality for most businesses and professional services is that they are never going to be in this league. A few hours thought can save a few days blundering by concentrating on classic marketing issues.
- Who exactly do I want to reach? Adding followers for the sake of followers is absurd: engagement with social media has to be focused and, for most new entrants, this means serious research into a difficult problem – gathering together your market and getting it to subscribe to your channels. You will not get all your targets into one place at the time that you want so, unless you are highly specialist or important, you must expect to use social media alongside other tools (especially networking) rather than as a substitute for them.
- What do you expect to get from your actions? The problem with social media is that each channel has multiple uses – from broadcasting a brand through to gaining intelligence via attempts to get into dialogue for sales or alliance. This goes against all traditional thinking where command and control of message is central, where interactivity and questioning is discouraged except at point of sale and where the various uses of information (outwards in sales and marketing and inwards in research and business intelligence) are often compartmentalised internally. In this brave new world, the integration of the flow of information may require new management thinking with two separate trends competing – increased pressure to centralise information coming in and increased pressure to decentralise information going out.
- How do I manage risk? Risk is becoming salient and not merely in the historic sense of product liability or protection of intellectual property or market change. Two ‘risks’ compete for attention – the risk that a business or firm will be left behind if it fails to engage with these new media and the risk that engagement will create new reputational and even legal liabilities. Since successful use of the new social media relies on its freedom and its interactivity, some serious thinking is required on the balance of risk and it is probably the area on which we have become most engaged in recent months as consultants. We have already been involved in projects to find out how, legitimately, safe use of social media for marketing purposes can be managed within strict internal and even statutory compliance guidelines and it has led us to some innovative models already.
- Do I have something to say? This is perhaps most important of all because, if there is one thing we have learned from our own involvement in this area, it is that messages need repeating but the market is impatient of repetition – interest in you requires that you show respect for your audience by being useful. And to be useful means either passing on information that is genuinely adding value from other sources (even, if necessary, competitor content under the right conditions in order to develop debate) or creating your own high quality content which you need to launder through the social media system at high speed and without irritating your market by ‘shouting’.
Above all, we would argue against both an excess of fear and an excess of enthusiasm. As always, there is a happy balance to seek.
The ideal social media strategy for the larger B2B will be focused. It will loosen up the internal constraints on engagement but grant communications rights only to those who understand or can be trained in the risks and rules of the game. It will pre-research the channels and focus efforts only on those that pull in the information the company needs and that engages with people of use. Above all, content is king – there is no social media programme without high quality content that is of interest to the market.
In the end, as it develops into a system, social media will change aspects of corporate organisation. The flow of information from and to a corporation will never be the same again.
It is already having a revolutionary effect on private life. Those engaged in social media have become better informed (even if more vulnerable to ‘conspiracy theory’ or disinformation) and more able to develop an identity that suits them rather than one based on a few personal connections that are met intermittently. The best corporate users of social media will also be better informed and be in more control of their brand identity as the market changes – these will be the rewards of intelligent investment now.
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