The Social Web levels the playing field, giving both businesses and everyday people access to powerful tools and services to share their voices, opinions, and experiences with their peers. It also enables them to shape perceptions and decisions, and build long-term relationships. In the new world of PR, communications professionals must listen to and observe (and sometimes engage) today’s world of new influencers. By new influencers, we’re referring to people just like you and me. They could be customers, peers, employees, partners, enthusiasts, influential bloggers, reporters, or analysts. This dynamic of listening to and engaging in everyday dialogue is often referred to as the conversation.
With new and meaningful conversations proliferating the blogosphere every day, an important question arises. We’re thinking seriously about this question because the answer affects the future of the PR industry. Who actually owns the conversations, and is it possible that ownership and responsibility belong to more than one person or department in an organization? Thought leaders are currently discussing who should own the responsibility of conversing with stakeholders. Some argue that PR, marcom, or advertising should take the lead because these areas in a company are the watchful eye and monitor the brand messages. In contrast, others are demonstrating that new hybrids of traditional customer service teams can manage the responsibility. With Social Media and the ability to publish an opinion almost instantly, traditional customer service might not be equipped to handle an extreme influx of inquiries, especially during a situation that requires immediate damage control. For example, when Apple launched its iPhone at a price point of $600 and then two months later significantly lowered the price, the blogosphere was filled with angry Apple customers blasting the company. The news spread via the Social Media highway with every new blog post, link, tweet, and podcast. This example tells us that the easy answer to the question is that every facet of a business is responsible for its channel of social monitoring and interaction. However, depending on the organization, the answer lies directly within each department.
Although Social Media is starting to attract the attention of business and marketing executives, much of the tactical execution associated with socialized marketing is still new and foreign to many. In addition, the task of socializing the existing infrastructure is daunting when viewed from ground zero. However, people within an organization can take on this role; we call them champions, and they can reside in one department and be the catalyst for change and evolution interdepartmentally (as well as organizationally). Either way, the socialization of the corporate marketing infrastructure isn’t a matter of if it should happen, but instead when it will happen. We realize this is always easier said than done. The larger the organization, the harder it is to change the organizational structure (often because of bureaucratic red tape and levels of management that would have to buy in to a change of this magnitude).
You’ve heard our humble opinions and the opinions of many Social Media thought leaders that brands don’t engage with people—people engage with people. The idea of empowering your customers or stakeholders so that they become an extension of your marketing isn’t new. Even in Web 1.0, you were using more interactive features on your Web sites and viral marketing to spread the word. Transforming people into an additional sales team is ideal for any service organization. However, the landscape has shifted in such a way that to excel in the marketplace, good customer service is no longer the minimum effort to stay in the game—you must do more to have a winning chance.
We mentioned previously that the Social Web is this great combination of Public Relations, marcom, advertising, and customer service. It’s crucial that all these areas work together to become a holistic inbound and outbound campaign, one of listening to and engaging with customers. We believe that this approach will rewrite the rules of the game, and escalate the corporate brand and loyalty in the process. We believe that these game-changing rules will advance our industry and make PR, once again, a crucial part of an organization. And most important, the lessons learned in the field will be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent, experienced, and real-world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, and advertising.
During the past two years, Social Media has intrigued and even inspired companies to engage in the communities in which their brands and products—and those of competitors—are actively discussed by the very people they want to reach (a.k.a. the new influencers). At this point, companies should not be questioning their participation—it’s no longer an option. Social Media isn’t a spectator sport. We cannot stress enough that these conversations are taking place with or without you, so ignoring them just eliminates you from the conversation and the radar screens of your customers. Companies should be inquiring about the best way to strategically plan their participation and what goals they want to reach by engaging in conversations.
Participation looks less like marketing and more like customer service, whether you’re in advertising, PR, or marcom. Marketing-savvy corporate executives are working with PR, advertising, and marcom teams to explore options and strategies on how to participate in relevant online conversations. This concept represents a shift in outbound marketing as it creates a direct channel between companies and customers, and ultimately people. For example, take a look at how Dell and Comcast are embracing Social Media.
Richard Binhammer, also known as @RichardatDell, is responsible for improving the Dell brand from being among the lowest-ranked service organizations to the opposite end of the spectrum, and improving the overall public perception of the company. Dell began an active campaign of listening and engagement. Binhammer and his team learn and discover opportunities to help people by listening first and then fixing problems, answering questions, and improving customer service. This process ultimately leads to future product development. Under Binhammer’s guidance, the company is actively monitoring conversations in blogs, in social networks, and also on Twitter—all in an effort to identify and solve problems, and cultivate a sense of community by genuinely and transparently participating in long-term relationships (a sincere investment).
Comcast, along with Dell, has not enjoyed the highest level of customer satisfaction in the past. Their customers have been extremely vocal through Social Media channels. As a result, Comcast has created a community-management team to begin the slow but genuine process of improving its service infrastructure. The company tasked Frank Eliason with creating and leading the new @ComcastCares program; the role was featured in the New York Times.
Similar to Dell, Eliason uses various social tools to listen to relevant online conversations (on blogs, Twitter, and discussions forums). He listens to people as they actively voice problems and challenges they experience with Comcast. Eliason identifies activities that require an immediate response from Comcast, which is then followed by a hands-on process of building relationships, one by one, to show that Comcast does listen and care. Since the start of the program, Eliason has successfully reached out to more than 1,000 customers online. His quote in the New York Times article said it all: “When you’re having a two-way conversation, you really get to clear the air.”
Many of us dreamed of the day that PR would be so important—an indispensable function that becomes the responsibility of the entire organization. Our dream has come true and then some. But it’s much bigger than just boxing it into the existing PR paradigm. As we alluded to earlier, Social Media impacts every department. In many cases, PR will eventually coalign with outbound customer service as a new form of unmarketing. The marketing hats come off, and your listening skills kick into gear. And because communities are, at the very least, opportunities to engage, these opportunities are presented as questions, complaints, observations, or general conversations. PR and customer service can work together to position the company as an industry resource.
Social Media is rooted in conversations between online peers, regardless of the technology that facilitates the conversation, and every day these conversations take place across blogs, networks, forums, micromedia, and online groups. And each day, with the creation of every new community and social tool that is introduced, brands, products, and services are actively discussed, supported, and sometimes disputed and disassembled. Some companies are listening, whereas many others aren’t even paying attention.
We want you to take away from this book the idea that you’re empowered to start the process of listening and observing. By doing so, you are actively pursuing New PR and your organization will reap the benefits. Don’t wait for someone to assign those tasks to you, another person in your department, or elsewhere within (or external to) the organization. You can be the champion, even if you have to monitor related discussions outside of work to demonstrate the pervasiveness and prominence of related dialogue. We work with many companies whose employees are so overloaded with expanded job responsibilities that they cannot pursue “lower-priority” or “noncritical” objectives for the company. We believe that you should make this one of your critical objectives, even if it’s on your own time.
Whether the online conversations are positive, neutral, or negative, the insight garnered from listening and observing will reveal opportunities not just for engagement, but also for gathering real-world intelligence—the type of information that is “ear to the street” and that you can feed back into your organization to improve the existing service, product, and management infrastructure. Then your organization will be able to effectively compete for the future.
Online customer-focused communities are playing host to conversations between prospects, decision makers, and customers regarding products and services. These communities include Ning, Yahoo! and Google Groups, and Facebook. Emerging services such as GetSatisfaction promote problem solving and relationship building between people and companies. ThisNext is also a place where people can get great product recommendations and rave about the products they like. And although they don’t invite marketing, they do seek helpful information, advice, feedback, and direction.
These discussions take the shape of any dialogue actively discoverable and potentially influential online. They populate forums; they’re driving and amplifying blog posts; and they inspire new podcasts, videos, articles, tweets, and micro comments (and thus extend the entire cycle of conversations). We also believe they are driving topics published by traditional media.
Social Media represents an entirely new way to reach customers and connect with them directly. It adds an outbound channel that complements inbound customer service, traditional PR, direct marketing, and advertising, placing companies and their customers on a level playing field to discuss topics as peers. At this point, you are wearing a different hat. Although your marketing hat is close by, you are, first and foremost, a peer—always listening and offering relevant information to help people make decisions. Most important, your new role transcends the process of just broadcasting messages and reactively answering questions to investing in and building a brand-centric community of enthusiasts and evangelists.
Years ago, it was logical to think that if customers were unhappy with a product or level of service, they would either make a telephone call or write a letter. Then the Internet enabled companies to receive customer service inquiries and complaints online, 24/7. Companies, for the most part, relied on these channels to hear when their customers had questions, comments, or concerns. And as customers become more Internet savvy, more companies are relying on a 24/7 inbound customer service approach. However, if a situation escalates today, the complaints will no longer just be inbound; those customers will quickly take their dissatisfaction to the Web to discuss their comments, concerns, and discontent in online communities.
Today you can bet that for every inbound customer inquiry, a significant number of existing and potential customers are actively discussing the same topic with the same (if not greater) level of conviction out in the open. When customers don’t get the response or immediate action they desire, they look elsewhere for guidance, feedback, acknowledgment, and information. These discussions usually transpire quickly and without company participation, leaving people to resolve issues and questions on their own.
Brands should not leave the door open for unknowledgeable individuals (or even worse, their competition) to jump into the conversation. Doing so presents an open invitation to steer away your once-loyal customers. Companies must engage; otherwise, they place themselves on the long road to inevitable obsolescence. Remember the old adage: Out of sight, out of mind. Quite simply, you must engage or die. A few mantras circulating among thought leaders were inspired by the corporate-culture-changing book that started it all, The Cluetrain Manifesto. You might have heard these mantras before. They are truly simple yet powerful in their meaning. Participation is marketing. We believe that if you are engaged and involved, the marketing is happening whether you are aware or not. Markets are conversations, meaning you no longer broadcast and talk to the market. The markets talk and you listen, and in doing so, you can earn the right to also participate.
Before we go too far down this path, we need to clarify the term marketing because we’re not referring to the traditional marketing that typically speaks at audiences through messages. If you recall in Chapter 6, “The Language of New PR,” the pitch is history and messages for audiences no longer exist in the traditional sense. In the social world, this is about dialogue—two-way discussions that bring people together to discover and share information. However, joining the conversation isn’t as simple as jumping in. Think of it this way: You would never jump into a body of water without knowing the temperature, how deep it is, or whether sharks are present. Not knowing simple, valuable information is very dangerous. If you apply our analogy to a Web community, we recommend the same thing: Companies must first listen to accurately analyze where, when, and how to participate.
Companies need to formalize outbound communications and community participation, creating a dedicated team to ensure that customers and influencers are not overlooked but are instead embraced and integrated into the entire service organization. Social Media forces companies to look outward to proactively find the conversations that are important to brand building and to monetize business relationships. And it’s not just the responsibility of PR or customer service. It requires the participation by multiple disciplines across the organization to genuinely provide meaningful support and information.
Again, we’re not talking about messaging or sales propositions. If you stop to think about it, we’re talking about fusing marketing, PR, community relations, product marketing, and customer service in an entirely new, socially aware role. We believe this is a natural role for the PR or communications professional, who, even in the days of traditional PR, was responsible for building strong relationships (after listening to and learning from the needs of customers).
You might already be seeing companies either dividing outbound responsibilities among existing teams or dedicating roles to full-time listening, participating, responding, and commenting across all forms of Social Media. But this isn’t limited to a select few businesses. This is a role that will become a recognized standard in companies around the globe—from small- and medium-size businesses to enterprise organizations—and will likely scale from one person to teams of people globally.
This is more than prioritizing enhanced customer service to bloggers or people who are familiar with social networking forums. You shouldn’t aim your fire hoses at fires that have only public attention. You need to focus on customers who take the time to contribute to and participate in social networks while just seeking information (even if it is delivered in the form of a rant). Nor can you just rely on inbound service. You must analyze inbound activity, tracking its numbers and severity, to find related conversations among those who decide to take the conversation outside of the traditional service process.
In addition to PR and marcom, these new roles are combining a variety of marketing disciplines (including communications, customer support, and product management), and are called several titles:
Connie Bensen, a highly regarded and renowned community manager, defined the role of a community manager this way:
A community manager is the voice of the company externally and the voice of the customers internally. The value lies in the community manager serving as a hub and having the ability to personally connect with the customers (humanize the company), and providing feedback to many departments internally (development, PR, marketing, customer service, tech support, etc).
Forrester social computing analyst Jeremiah Owyang shared his four tenets for budding community managers to embrace to be successful in their new roles.
The role of community manager, or whatever title your organization assigns, is invaluable and instrumental in bridging traditional corporate communications and outbound service with the overall act of listening, internalizing, and improving business infrastructures and methodologies. Perhaps most notably, it facilitates the act of investing in relationships that are priceless to today’s businesses.
Public Relations (and, to some extent, marketing and sales) has long suffered from the ramifications of a few bad apples (well, perhaps more than a few) who represent companies, products, and services without a deep understanding of the benefits and value proposition to the very people they are trying to compel to action. It’s the difference between earning a living, skating by, cashing in, and being a resource for your community.
Things have changed since the days of Web 1.0, and we believe it’s for the better. In the “old days” of Web 1.0 (circa the 90s), online community relations existed through topic-driven discussion groups, user forums, and other online communities such as DejaNews, Yahoo!, and Groups. During Web 1.0, it wasn’t about Social Media, and those participants didn’t try to BS the people who were seeking advice and answers. This is important because you need to recognize not only the details of your products, services, reputation, strengths, weaknesses, and benefits, but also how you compete in the market, where you stand against the competition, and how you’re different. You can do this only by truly listening and being proactive to market conversations.
Today in the world of Web 2.0, the venues for influential interaction span an extremely wide social canvas. In most cases, community management now requires the attention of more than one full-time person dedicated to monitoring, listening, observing, and then trafficking the necessary action to the appropriate teams. In fact, because the Social Media landscape is rapidly growing, this might require several internal people to listen and participate every day across blog posts, blog comments, forums, groups, social networks, micromedia, and so on. Companies are also investing in proprietary software that tracks the conversations in the blogosphere to reveal not only keywords, but also whether the dialogue is positive or negative (so that they can ultimately determine what action the brand needs to take).
Even as you read this book, the idea of listening and participating in the Social Web on behalf of a company is catching on in the business world. In fact, companies that are ready to experiment might encounter difficulty hiring for this role. It’s just a simple case of supply and demand. And with more opportunities arising than people learning the art of community management, a new category of contractors is emerging.
Contract community managers are commanding a premium, and they’re forming a new breed of consultancies and agencies dedicated to the outsourced process of listening, engaging, and routing the necessary action within the organizations they represent.
In some cases, the process of listening is outsourced to overseas companies—where the hourly rate is extremely low compared to in the United States, but the level of Web sophistication is on par with (if not superior to) the junior-level people who would be tasked with tracking conversations in the United States. However, we don’t believe that practice is sustainable. The positions are outsourced while companies rethink and rebuild their infrastructure to accommodate for the position of the community manager and community participants. We believe that contract Social Media experts and community managers are enjoying a small window of opportunity, similar to how Webmasters enjoyed incredible premiums in the days of Web 1.0 before many organizations brought Web-savvy programmers and designers in-house.
In some cases, community managers and Social Media experts are banding together to offer more robust services in addition to monitoring, participating in, and facilitating conversations. In many cases, they’re offering a series of social services such as online video shooting and uploading, comment marketing, event marketing, and blogger relations.
As an executive charged with building out a new outbound engagement strategy, you now have full-time and contract options to help you achieve your goals.
Although anarchy might appear to reign on the Social Web (perhaps because best practices and governing rules are only now starting to emerge), Social Media and community cultivation and relationship building are not a free-for-all and should not be taken lightly. Not just anyone can jump in and solve problems or become a resource for a community. Companies need to create an internal strategy that officially assigns specific, versed, and highly knowledgeable people to help customers—nothing less. Every company has a planned inbound customer service approach. The outbound customer service approach should be given the same level of importance.
The amount of listening you do in active communities will dictate your level of participation. The conversations and reactions stemming from your participation will reveal immediate metrics. Any company can rely on reactive community relations; that’s easy. But at that point, it’s a little too late because you’re embarking on a control-and-repair program instead of a proactive campaign of nurturing and empowerment. Companies must learn from listening to and talking with customers to create specific content that addresses the wants and needs of customers and distribute that content within their communities. Doing so will enable you to translate the lessons learned from one-on-one conversations for the greater good of the company (and of the masses).
Outbound customer and community relations are among the most important campaigns any company can integrate into its immediate and future initiatives. Doing so not only helps PR and customer service, but it also builds relationships, creates enthusiasts, and ultimately instills customer loyalty. Proactive, not reactive, people forge and cultivate relationships. People have choices. By actively investing in relevant and meaningful conversations, you can continually gain priceless insight and improve processes, products, and services. This also enables you to build active and enthusiastic communities, as well as inspire loyalty among them.