2. The New Social Norms
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. [This is a] social norm that has evolved over time.”
—Mark Zuckerberg
The social Web is drastically changing how we communicate. Social norms are being invented about what, how frequently, and with whom we share even the smallest details of our lives. This, in turn, is having a tremendous impact on our sociology—including our expectations, behavior, and relationships, both with one another and with organizations and brands.
The pace at which social networking sites are growing and the fact that one in three American adults uses Facebook mean that these changes are rippling through society in profound ways that will only become more pronounced in the years ahead. This chapter explores how online identity and sharing have changed as a result of online social networks, explains the new etiquette and expectations about these sites, and introduces an important new concept of transitive trust in purchase decisions.
Identity, Sharing, and Influence on the Social Web
At the root of this sociological transformation is the social network profile (such as your Facebook profile), which has become the universal template for online identity and sharing. For most people, being on a social networking site today means sharing more about themselves than they ever have before (or ever thought they would) through their profiles and status updates.
Perhaps because Facebook, in particular, feels like a secure and trusted environment, we are sharing (in some cases) with people we barely know everything from our age, political views, job title, employment history, and academic pedigree to hobbies, interests, favorite books and movies, relationship status, and sexual orientation (see Figure 2.1). Even the profile picture with which we choose to portray ourselves says a lot about how we view ourselves and would like others to view us. Is it formal or casual? Are we alone or with friends? Is it a photo of our dog, our child, or ourselves as a child?
Figure 2.1
Thanks to the online identity template Facebook profiles provide, people are sharing more about themselves to more people than ever.
Before the Facebook Era, people didn’t share openly like this. People didn’t include their age, their kids’ names, or that they were Republican in an email signature. It might have taken months or even years to discover someone’s political views, religious preferences, and the breadth and depth of information that today is readily shared in a semipublic view on social networking sites. Most people today still do not have blogs, and those who do often keep highly personal information off the blog.
In addition to profiles, which are updated infrequently, real-time updates such as tweets and Facebook status messages help round out the picture of who someone is, through instantaneous snapshots of their thoughts, feelings, and interactions with others over time. On Facebook, a continuous stream of casual sharing is always happening in the background. But unlike the never-ending stream of news and content on the Internet, Facebook updates feel relevant and personal because they are from people we know and presumably like. (If not, you can use the option to unfriend or mute updates from someone.)
Figure 2.2
Facebook created a new social norm about sharing real-time updates (from top, status messages from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn).
Today not only is it socially acceptable to share aspects of our identity on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, but it has become expected that we do so. Before interviewing a job candidate or after meeting someone new, in addition to “Googling” them, we now look them up on social networking sites to find out more. In fact, people’s social network profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn often appear at the top of search results.
Facebook has become a sort of directory of everyone on the Internet, and although most people don’t publicly share all their personal information, the majority feel comfortable with Facebook’s default settings of sharing your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, list of friends, and Facebook Pages. Having this basic minimum profile is similar to declaring one’s existence on the social Web.
As more communications, photos, and event invitations move onto Facebook, to not be on Facebook altogether is to risk being left behind, similar to the people in the last decade who refused to get online or buy a cellphone. Certainly, if you don’t feel comfortable being on Facebook, you shouldn’t do it. But recognize the trade-offs. And even if as an individual you don’t want to share information on Facebook, you might still need to create and manage a Facebook presence for your business if that is where your customers and prospects are spending their time.
It’s also interesting to think about how these norms and communication preferences vary by age group. In the following guest expert sidebar, Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, provides a few tips on how to understand young people’s use of social networking sites such as Facebook.
Understanding Young People on Social Networking Sites
Danah Boyd, Ph.D.
The social Web is most useful when it fits into people’s lives and meshes with their needs, desires, goals, and mindset. The key to understanding what different demographics are doing with social media is to understand what’s going on in their lives. Even a tool as ubiquitous as Facebook is being used differently across demographics, highlighting cultural and life-stage differences.
Keep in mind these four points when thinking about younger users’use of social media:
1. Privacy is not dead. Younger users recognize that social media enables them to be public, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t care about privacy. It’s just that the equation has changed. It used to be private by default, public with effort; today it’s public by default, private with effort.
2. Not everyone wants to build an audience. Plenty of narcissists exist—young and old—but not everyone is trying to broadcast their lives for all people across all space and all time to get attention. This might be the way of corporations and politicians, but it’s not what most younger users are looking for. They primarily want intimacy with the folks they already know.
3. Adults approach technology with preexisting expectations about how things “should” be. Youth approach technology as though it’s a given and learn to engage with it as they’re learning to engage with the world around them. Their understandings of it reveal what makes sense for their life stage but without the baggage their parents have.
4. It’s made out of people. Social media is, first and foremost, social; people use social media to communicate and connect. Sharing is a desirable by-product, but social interactions trump everything, especially for youth.
The underlying practices of today’s youth are the same as in previous generations, but the technologies available to them today are different. As they grow older and change life stages, expect to see transitions in how they use technology. It might seem as if huge generational shifts are underway, but most of what is changing has to do with what happens when new technologies are available as people enter new life stages.
Danah Boyd (@zephoria) is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Personal Branding
On a personal level, social network profiles have become an important new form of personal branding. On a business level, tremendous new opportunities exist for building corporate and product brand identity and using profile data to target messages to the right audiences.
Given the role of social networking sites in conveying our identity, profiles and status messages have become the new underpinnings of personal branding. For those we don’t know very well, our profile is a quick introduction to who we are. For those we don’t get to talk to very often, our profile is a quick summary of what’s new.
Why does personal branding matter? Your personal brand is your reputation. Personal brand can shape how people treat you, how much they trust you, and, in our increasingly free-agent society, what jobs and opportunities you have access to.
It is a personal choice, of course, how much to share with whom—or even whether to be on social networking sites. That said, certain social norms are emerging about what most people seem comfortable with for themselves and expect of others on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Personal Norms on Social Networking Sites
What’s Expected: Semi-publicness
• Explanation: We see a growing tendency toward greater publicness. People don’t tend to share everything with everyone, but most are willing to share a subset of information publicly. This is especially true of younger cohorts of individuals who tend to have looser views on privacy.
• Example : Many people feel comfortable sharing a few pictures of their family, kids, and pets with coworkers. It enables them to be friendly without sharing too much or anything inappropriate.
What’s Expected: Authenticity
• Explanation : People expect social network (especially Facebook) profiles to feel personal and authentic. Without sharing more than you feel comfortable, you can still let your personality shine through. Least appealing are profiles that feel dry and buttoned-up like a résumé, fake, or overly self-promotional and “salesy.”
• Example : Even people with strict privacy settings can let their personality show without sharing any personal information by posting links to interesting articles or funny YouTube videos.
• Explanation : Think of a social network profile as your living online identity that you should keep up-to-date. Each time you update, your friends will see it in their news feed.
• Example : You don’t need to update your status message ten times a day, but your connections will appreciate periodic news, photos, and musings.
Personal branding in the Facebook Era encompasses not only what we say about ourselves, but also what others say and imply about us based on their interactions on our profile (such as Facebook Wall posts and tagged photos, LinkedIn recommendations, and Twitter @mentions). Some of it we can manage with privacy settings, but a lot of it is beyond our control. Social media can affect an individual’s personal brand just as it affects corporate brands (see Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3
Four different elements of personal branding and how they manifest on social networking sites such as Facebook
Popular blogger Dan Schawbel provides a few tips on effective personal branding on the social Web.
Five Tips for Personal Branding on Social Networking Sites
Dan Schawbel
Personal branding, the process by which people market themselves as brands, is about creating a unique identity for yourself for career advancement. Social technologies have forced everyone in the world to become a marketer of their own brand. Consider these five essential personal branding tips:
1. Discover your brand before you communicate it. The first step in the personal branding process is to “discover your brand,” because you need to identify what you want to stand for and your mission, values, brand attributes, and how you’re differentiated in your industry. It’s hard to reflect on what your strengths and long-term goals are, but without identifying them, you will end up rebranding yourself many times without a sense of purpose.
2. Protect your brand by reserving your full name everywhere. You need to own your digital property before someone else does. This includes your domain name (yourname.com) and your full name on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks that are relevant to your brand. For instance, if you’re a real estate agent, you should join Active Rain. Also, you can have more control over the Google search results for your name because all these networks rank high in Google.
3. Set up a system where you can manage your online reputation. To keep a pulse on your brand, you should set up a comprehensive Google alert (Google.com/alerts) for your name. This way, anytime your name is mentioned in a blog post or news article, you’re aware of it. You should also use BackType.com for blog comment mentions, Facebook search, and BoardTracker.com for discussion forum mentions. If you neglect observing and responding to brand mentions, you risk negative word-of-mouth, which can travel very fast online.
4. Choose a single picture, name, motto, and theme, and use it consistently. As with a corporate brand, your brand needs to be consistent, which means you should have the same presence everywhere online and offline. Take one professional headshot of yourself and use it as your avatar on social networks, on your blog or Web site, on your business card, and other places where your name is mentioned. If your name is Matthew but you want to be called Matt, then use that name everywhere and don’t change it. You can have a motto or tagline just like Nike or another brand, as long as you use it repeatedly. The same goes with your overall theme, including font, color, and style.
5. Publish content so people get a sense of your voice, not just a résumé. A résumé isn’t a differentiator anymore. Now you need an active voice online by publishing content. When you publish, it helps you to become more visible and credible and to connect with more people. Companies want people with fresh ideas and thinking, which is why participating online is so important these days.
Dan Schawbel (@danschawbel) is the founder of PersonalBrandingBlog.com and author of Me 2.0.
Chapter 10, “How To: Build and Manage Relationships on the Social Web,” talks in greater length about how to create an effective profile and manage privacy settings.
Corporate Branding
For too long, mass market brands have broadcast what their ad agencies thought audiences wanted to hear but never took the time to listen. Brands became these large, intangible entities that no one could actually relate to. So people stopped trusting.
But just as individuals can shape their personal brand on social networking sites, companies can also take advantage of the trusted environment to better convey corporate identity, values, and initiatives, and win back the hearts and minds of their audiences. Research from Edelman, Forrester, and Nielsen shows that, for consumers, the most trusted source of information is now “people like me.” The social Web takes this trust to the next level with “people I know.”
Because of the identity profile and relationships, social networking sites feel personal. And they are breathing new life into corporate brand identities. Here, too, social norms are emerging about how people expect to interact with companies.
Corporate Norms on Social Networking Sites
What’s Expected: Authenticity
• Explanation : Customers in the Facebook Era expect companies on social networking sites to feel personal and authentic. Many companies have achieved this by exposing the unedited voices and personalities of their customer-facing employees.
• Example : Dunkin’ Dave tweets on behalf of Dunkin’ Donuts and gives the company a human voice people can relate to. (See Chapter 6, “Marketing in the Facebook Era,” for details and more examples of persona marketing on Facebook and Twitter.)
What’s Expected: Transparency
• Explanation : Today’s companies are rewarded for openness and transparency about business practices, community involvement, and shortcomings. Customers want to know about not only your business operations, but also those of your entire supply chain, to make sure your vendors and suppliers are embracing environmentally friendly practices, honoring child labor laws, and so on.
• Example : Peet’s Coffee & Tea posts on its Facebook Page about community initiatives such as the San Francisco AIDS Walk, cycling competitions, holiday donation program, and updates on its Fair Trade Certified Coffee.
What’s Expected: Engagement
• Explanation : Customers expect to have a voice and expect that what they say matters in how products are built, how complaints are addressed, and even what community initiatives companies are investing in. Facilitating customer engagement not only enhances corporate image, but it also creates additional opportunities to expose audiences to your brand and products. (Chapter 11, “How To: Engage Customers with Facebook Pages and Twitter,” walks through how companies are using Twitter and Facebook Pages to provide audiences with plenty of opportunities to participate.)
• Example : Gap engages Facebook fans about style, seeding the conversation with tips from in-house style gurus and asking fans to suggest their own tips and favorite ensembles.
What’s Expected: Real-time response
• Explanation : With the tremendous popularity of iPhones and BlackBerrys, people today are “always on” and want companies to keep up. The seething remark or video that “goes viral” could happen after business hours. Depending on your business, it might make sense to invest in around-the-clock monitoring and response.
• Example : TweetBeep sends almost real-time alerts whenever something is said about your business on Twitter, and a growing number of small businesses are using it to track and quickly respond to customer questions, issues, and comments.
What’s Expected: Long-term view
• Explanation : Before the Facebook Era, many companies’ digital marketing efforts were campaign-centric, optimizing for a particular transaction. It was all about click-through rates and conversion. In the Facebook Era, companies are on the hook to optimize for a longer-term view about customer relationships. The goal is to win customer loyalty in the form of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and word-of-mouth instead of optimizing for click-through rates on a specific campaign.
• Example : Sears offers exclusive discounts to encourage people to “like” its Facebook Page. For Sears, the top goal is building a trusted customer relationship over the long haul instead of maximizing the profitability of a one-time transaction.
Mining Social Network Data
New norms about sharing personal information on social networking sites are also providing companies with a wealth of audience data. Businesses are using this data to get a pulse on what people are saying, identify problematic issues, and reach precise audience segments with targeted ads:
• Trending topics—Smart companies are using the rich abundance of profile and status message data on the social Web to keep a pulse on what people are talking about and what matters. On Twitter, you can see trending topics or search on any keyword, phrase, or brand and find specific mentions at http://search.twitter.com.
• Issues and complaints—Companies are also using this same Twitter search tool to identify any issues or complaints that might arise about their product or service, and hopefully address the problem before it spirals out of control. Chapter 5, “Customer Service in the Facebook Era,” elaborates on how social networking sites are changing the customer support process.
• Hypertargeting—Thanks to Facebook, people are sharing more about themselves online than ever. Everything individuals share about themselves on their profiles— including hometown, alma maters, jobs, and hobbies—can also be used by marketers and sales to “hypertarget” and personalize communications. Facebook and LinkedIn both have hypertargeting capabilities as part of their self-service advertising platforms that enable marketers to specify the profile attributes of people they want to view the ads being purchased. For example, if you are a manufacturer of golf clubs, you can choose to show your ads only to people who have specified on their social network profile that they like to golf. The idea is that as ads can become more tailored and relevant, conversion rates will go up. Chapter 6 goes into detail about how hypertargeting works.
The Importance of Being Customer-Centric
As a result of these new targeting possibilities and the ever-increasing amount of marketing messages to which each individual is exposed, buyers’ expectations are rising. It has become harder than ever for companies to earn audience trust. Customers want to feel as if they are the ones who decide how and when a sales cycle begins. And when it does begin, they expect personalized interactions tailored to their specific needs. The days of “spray and pray” generic sales pitches and marketing messages are over.
Before an email campaign drop or sales call, marketers and sales have to do their homework and truly become customer-centric in their approach, taking into account the prospect’s industry, geography, company, role, and circumstances. Moreover, customers expect this level of personalized service across every interaction with your organization, from your Web site and emails, to the salesperson, to customer service.
Yet the customers of today not only expect a personalized experience, but also demand opportunities to engage, collaborate, and have a say in the products and services they consume. They expect to be heard, and they expect a response. Companies have always claimed to be customer-centric (or put another way, no company would say that it is not customer-centric), but too often in the past it was just lip service. Companies were drawn to the concept of being customer-centric, but when it came to implementation, no budget, metrics, or ownership existed. In the worst case, customer-centricity was abused as an excuse to further internal political agendas that actually had nothing to do with what customers wanted.
Things have changed. By giving customers a voice, social media is forcing companies to actually become customer-centric. Companies are being forced not only to listen to customers, but also to act and react based on what they say. To succeed, today’s companies have to invest in rearchitecting their systems and processes around the customer. Internal agendas have to take a backseat to the customer experience.
The social Web is changing companies’ interactions with their customers in four ways:
1. Consistent experience—Customers don’t know or care about your organization’s functional divides. They view your company as a single entity and expect to have a seamless and consistent experience whether they are dealing with your sales department or your customer support staff. For companies, this means much better coordination across departments, messaging alignment, and integrated systems.
2. Ongoing feedback—In the past, companies periodically held focus groups and surveys to collect customer feedback. Companies decided when to request feedback and what questions were asked. Today feedback is continuous, public, and on the customers’ terms. Companies need to put in place new processes to listen on an ongoing basis and to come to terms with negative comments.
3. Action and response—Before, companies could do whatever they wanted with customer feedback and no one would know. Often they did nothing. In contrast, the public nature of the social Web pressures companies not only to respond, but also to respond quickly.
4. Measurement and accountability—External transparency has seemed to bring internal accountability. With the customer voice and companies’ responses out in the open, a growing number of businesses are realizing the importance of ownership and accountability for listening, responding to, and measuring customer feedback.
Perhaps the biggest underlying change is reorienting organizational culture around customer-centricity. Chapter 15, “Corporate Governance, Strategy, w,” talks about the practicalities and challenges behind culture change and other aspects of corporate governance and implementation.
Transitive Trust
Many prospects these days will refuse an unsolicited call or email, even with a perfectly tailored and customer-centric pitch. This is where the social Web can potentially help through something I call transitive trust. Consider this example of transitive trust: In trying to reach Graham, I discover that we both know Kelly. Because Kelly trusts me, and Graham trusts Kelly, Graham is more likely to “transitively” trust me if Kelly provides a warm introduction or I at least mention Kelly when reaching out to Graham. Not actually knowing me himself, Graham doesn’t trust me as much as he trusts Kelly, but as someone trying to hire Graham, sell him something, or whatever the goal might be, I don’t need him to trust me just yet. All I need is to get my foot in the door, and my product, service, or personality hopefully can do the rest. I just need a chance to be heard.
Transitive trust is not a new concept; in fact, it is how human beings have been making important decisions since the dawn of civilization. The challenge in the past was about discovery. I might have had to ask a lot of people before I found someone who knew Graham well enough to provide an introduction. Social networking sites bring transparency and efficiency to discovering mutual ties.
With a quick search on Facebook, I can immediately see all the friends Graham and I have in common and then use my best judgment to decide who to ask for an introduction— which will be a function of both how well I know the person and how well I think Graham knows the person (see Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4
Facebook profiles include a list of mutual friends you have with the person.
On LinkedIn, the social network mapping is even more robust. I can see the path of people linking me to Graham, up to three degrees away (see Figure 2.5). Even if Graham and I have no direct connections in common, I could still play on transitive trust to improve my chances of reaching him, albeit via a few more hops.
Figure 2.5
LinkedIn takes the transitive trust map of network connections out as far as three degrees and has built-in workflow for requesting introductions through mutual friends.
Transitive trust makes sense intuitively. Going through someone we know reduces risk on a rational level and feels more comfortable on an emotional one. For example, the Stanford University Alumni Association has found that, on average, alumni are more than four times as likely to donate when they are told that someone they know and like has also donated. Because of this remarkable return, Stanford has gone to great lengths to figure out how alumni are connected with one another. Transitive trust is also why direct employee referrals so often result in job candidate hires.
In Chapter 4, “Sales in the Facebook Era,” we explore in depth how transitive trust is applied to a sales cycle. Chapter 6 describes how transitive trust can also be abstracted beyond people introductions to the marketing of products and services, also known as word-of-mouth.
The popularity of Facebook, combined with the importance of profiles in the Facebook experience, means that, on average, people are sharing far more about themselves than ever before.
Real-time updates such as tweets and Facebook status messages provide additional instantaneous context into what people are thinking, feeling, and doing.
According to social media researcher Danah Boyd, generational differences in social network usage can be attributed to what technologies are available when people enter a new life stage.
New norms are also emerging about how people expect to interact with companies, including hypertargeting, real-time response, and personal, authentic interactions.
Transitive trust is the concept that describes the transferred trust across mutual friends. It enables an increased response and success rate when companies and individuals are reaching out to prospective customers, job candidates, and business partners.
> > > TIPS and TODO’s
Think about your personal brand and how you can reinforce it through a consistent name (such as a nickname), photo, bio, and voice on every social networking site where you have a presence.
Establish a system for monitoring and responding to “brand mentions,” both personally and of your company or product. Popular tools include Google Alerts, BackType, BoardTracker, and TweetBeep.
Develop a process for responding to customer feedback, both in real time and with your product development and business operations. In the Facebook Era, companies have no choice but to become customer-centric.
Use Facebook and LinkedIn search to find prospective customers, job candidates, and business partners—and tap into transitive trust from mutual connections to increase your response rate.
Look at the social Web techniques employed by companies such as Dunkin’ Donuts, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Gap, and Sears for examples of best practices in customer engagement.