If you are Generation X or older you have most likely spent most of your life in a schizophrenic[93] world. You took on a different role or character depending on where you were and whom you were with. Most of us had at least two personas: a work persona and a non-work persona. And many of us had several personas: social, work, family, coach, charity, and so on.
Your behavior at an event like Woodstock, Mardi Gras, or Burning Man was very different from your behavior at the office. "Al the Accountant" may only be known by his coworkers as "Meticulous Accountant Al"; while his bowling pals would know him only as "Al-Valanche," because you better get out of the way when he is partying, otherwise you could be the next victim of the "Al-Valanche."
Even if you believe that life with social media is worse, you cannot argue that social media has forever changed the way in which we live.
In 2008, North Carolina's All-American basketball player Tyler Hansbrough found himself in the middle of a media whirlwind. Hansbrough was a hard-nosed player and the poster child of all that is good about college basketball. Because of his intensity, he was nicknamed Psycho T.
One sunny day in Chapel Hill, Hansbrough was hanging out with some friends at a fraternity house off campus. With some encouragement, Hansbrough thought it would be a thrill to launch his 6′10″, 260-pound body into the fraternity swimming pool. The thrill part being that he was jumping off the roof of the three-story house. Now, this type of behavior has been going on for decades from college students. However, on this particular day, one of the observers captured a video of Hansbrough's skydiving act on his smartphone.
Once this video became known to the general media, North Carolina's head basketball coach (Roy Williams) had a difficult decision to make. Should he suspend Hansbrough or not? Because drinking wasn't involved and Hansbrough was a model student athlete, he made the tough decision not to suspend Hansbrough. Helping Hansbrough's cause was his modus operandi of being intense—after all, Psycho T was just being Psycho T. If this had taken place five years ago, Coach Williams and Hansbrough would not have found themselves in such a predicament. Boys would be boys, no one would have known about it, and life would have continued.
Psycho T being Psycho T is a good example of the new world not having as many casual schizophrenics. People are best off being comfortable in their own skin and not pretending to be anything that they aren't. Well-known author Marcus Buckingham's (Now Discover Your Strengths) philosophy of playing to your strengths is further reinforced in a social media world. Transparency demands it, and with so much information flow, it is extremely difficult for a person who is well rounded to stand out in this new world.
Without a doubt, it is somewhat daunting to always be on one's best behavior. It is mentally taxing to have fewer avenues to blow off steam or to always maintain a perfect persona. Perhaps Al the Accountant is more effective at work and dogmatic on the details because outside of work he can let it all go and doesn't have to burden himself with the details.
As a result of preventative and braggadocian behavior, extra-curricular activities like music, theatre, and organized sports will become even more popular and important because they provide mechanisms of release for people.
There seems to be a place for interactive and virtual worlds, while the names and popularity change over time (Second Life, Sims, Webkinz, FarmVille, etc.). These social games allow users to create fictional personas (often in the form of what is called an avatar—from which the James Cameron movie may have derived inspiration) in computerized virtual worlds.
Farmville is a good example of how quickly these things can sprout up (forgive the pun). At the writing of this book, Farmville had 85 million users.
Like many successes, it is simple in nature. You start with a plot of land and your goal is to grow a very successful farm. You meet other farmers (real people playing the game) who can help you on your mission. There is even currency in the game where you can acquire items and use real currency (hard earned dollars, euros, etc.). FarmVille is most likely not here to stay, but after it has its run, something similar will come along to replace it. People simply enjoy meeting and competing against others online through these easy-to-use gaming mechanisms.
On the other hand, these simulation games may experience a rapid decline because people may find it difficult to brag about playing a simulated game that replicates life instead of just leading their own lives. Also, these games may be too transparent. A high school teacher can't simply take on the persona of a hooker specializing in sadomasochism without realizing long-term ramifications when this eventually becomes known. In fact, schools have terminated several teachers for this type of social media behavior. After all, there is a high degree of probability that the teacher could run into one of his or her students within the virtual world as well.
A happy medium may be social video games, which are already wildly popular. If I'm going to spend 60 minutes on the bike at the gym, it's much more exciting if I'm competing against digital avatars of people I know and don't know at other gyms, and even more exciting if there is a celebrity rider like Lance Armstrong who also happens to be on a stationary bike in Austin, Texas, while I'm on one in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Social gaming on the social networks themselves is going to be massive business. In fact in China, most people join networks in order to game first and meet people second.
While there are downsides to such 24/7 personal openness, overall, it's easier to argue that appropriate transparency is a good thing for individuals and society. It is, without question, much cooler to say you are bungee jumping off a remote mountain pass overhang in New Mexico than to update your status with "I'm watching the latest adventure reality series." Imagine a world that reintroduces people to living their own realities, rather than watching someone else's. Maybe this is why simulation games like Second Life haven't been as wildly successful as many pundits predicted; perhaps people have come to the realization that in reality (pun intended), it is much cooler to lead their own lives. Or perhaps there will always be a place for these types of games and networks when you think about Farmville and Webkinz.
One of the more overt examples of the downside of not being yourself within social media is the tragic case of Lori Drew. Lori was concerned that her daughter's friend, a 13-year-old named Megan Meier, was mistreating her daughter, Sara. So, Lori decided to set up a MySpace account pretending to be an attractive teenage boy named Josh Evans. Josh flirted with Megan and eventually they became social media friends and developed an online relationship. Once the hook was set, the persona of Josh then started berating Megan through a series of unfriendly comments and nasty remarks. These remarks proved too much for Megan, who had a history of battling depression, and one day she decided to take her life. At the time, Lori Drew (a 49-year-old Missouri mom) faced three years in prison and a $300,000 fine for an online harassment campaign that resulted in the suicide of a teenage girl. More laws are being enacted to curtail cyberbullies like Lori Drew.
A University of Texas Longhorn offensive lineman found out the hard way the importance of preventative behavior in social media. The lineman posted a racist update on his Facebook profile just after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States: "all the hunters gather up, we have a #$%& in the whitehouse."[94]
Soon after that was posted, Coach Mack Brown kicked the lineman off the team. The lineman was unable to participate in Texas' 2009 bowl game. The lineman posted an apology to anyone his comment had offended, but the damage had already been done:
Clearly I have made a mistake and apologized for it and will pay for it. I received it as a text message from an acquaintance and immaturely put it up on Facebook in the light of the election. I'm not racist and apologize for offending you. I grew up on a ranch in a small town where that was a real thing and I need to grow up. I sincerely am sorry for being ignorant in thinking that it would be okay to write that publicly and apologize to you in particular. I have to be more mature than to put the reputation of my team at stake and to spread that kind of hate which I don't even believe in. Once again, I sincerely apologize.[95]
Meanwhile, on another football team, University of Colorado Head Coach Dan Hawkins instituted the following rule for his players:
If I request to see your page, you'd better let me in and let me see it. Everybody's kind of got their own standards. I tell them if your mom can see it, and neither you nor she is embarrassed, then it's okay. But if your mom can't look at it, then it's probably not right.[96]
Even the cheerleaders need to learn how to behave correctly in this newly opened society. A New England Patriots Professional Cheerleader was kicked off the cheer squad for inappropriate photo postings on her Facebook page. She and her friends went out on a wild drinking binge. When one of her friends passed out, they decided to write all over her half-naked body. They drew penises and other lewd symbols along with phrases like "I'm a Jew" and swastika symbols. They posted and shared these images of their crazy night with their friends.[97]
As a result of these examples and more, NFL teams started engaging in a controversial practice for the 2009 draft. Player personnel from respective NFL teams (Packers, Lions, etc.) started creating fake Facebook accounts. Most of these profiles were designed to look like they were those of young, energetic, and attractive females. The purpose was to become friends with potential draft picks so that the teams could conduct further research. Historically, NFL companies would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on background investigations prior to paying a young college kid millions of dollars. This progression into social media subterfuge only makes sense for them. Similar to regular employers, hiring agents are looking for anything that could be viewed as detrimental. In some instances, they have seen drug posts and gambling items on the college player's profile.
The ethical nature of these NFL football teams creating fake profiles to bait 20-year-old athletes can certainly be questioned, but the key message is don't put anything on social media that you don't want the whole world to know about, because eventually, one way or another, the world will know about it.
Just like athletic programs, governments around the world are struggling to determine how to handle some social media issues. Twenty-two-year-old Croatian Niksa Klecak was picked up by police and interrogated after starting a Facebook group critical of Prime Minister Ivo Sanader. The group was dubbed "I bet I can find 5,000 people who dislike Sanader."[98] The interrogation drew sharp criticism from Croatia's opposition Social Democrat Party and has inspired a host of copycat Facebook groups.
Just as companies have discovered, perhaps the best tactic is not censorship, but rather to address the problem and/or have enough good karma produced that it overwhelms and drowns out the negative. Obama's 2008 election campaign is a good example of an overwhelming amount of good social media vibes drowning out the negativity of the various opposition groups.
As previously discussed, the transparency and speed of information flow via social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. This is generally a positive result because maintaining different personas is stressful, exhausting, and disingenuous.
The same holds true for corporate behavior in social media. For corporations, trying to be too many things to too many people is costly. Historically, we have seen the "we are the best at everything" messaging come out of many marketing departments. The marketers always start off with high hopes of simply highlighting one message in a 30-second commercial; but by the end of production, they have flooded the spot with numerous messages. The original intent of an advertiser may be to convey the message: "We have been in the business for 45 years." However, the end product is often something similar to: "We have been in the business for 45 years, we have the lowest prices, and we have the largest selection. Our brand name Perfect is the most trusted, and you can find us at great retailers like Sam's, Costco, and BJ's."
In a 140-character world, if you want to have a chance at helping the consumer retain a key message and eventually pass it on, it is imperative that you focus on your strengths or particular niche. There is also a need for the continuous flow of information across the entire organization; in particular, it is mission critical for production and marketing to be feeding information back and forth. It's one thing for marketing to respond to consumer complaints; it's an entirely different thing to respond to the customer's complaint, look for trends in product deficiencies, and work closely with production to develop solutions.
The role of a marketer today, and even more so in the future, has less to do with creating 30-second television commercials and guessing what jingle will resonate with prospects, and more to do with having ongoing external conversations with the customer or prospects—while at the same time having internal conversations with operations, customer care, and product development.
In turn, production and development will be less about being behind closed doors in a laboratory and more to do with being connected with marketing; they, too, will have an ongoing dialogue with the customer. Two prime examples of production personnel in 2008 that have the dual role of product vision and being a public face to the organization are Dave Morin of Facebook and Matt Cutts of Google. At developer conferences, Dave and Matt are almost at the level of rock stars, and they have become the faces of their respective organizations in the development community. They aren't behind closed doors trying to figure out the next best thing for their target audience, they are in constant contact with their target audience, and a large part of their role is also marketing. These are two great examples of what marketers will look like in this Socialnomic era.
Companies that engage in brand marketing have always known it is best to keep the message simple and convey one salient point. Some companies were able to adhere to this principle, including 7UP's "Uncola" campaign or FedEx's "When it absolutely positively has to get there overnight" campaign. However, many companies have struggled with this concept. Most often, they get myopic—this product/service is so great we need to get it out there—or they get internal pressure from too many executives trying to get their particular interests across. Companies are lucky if the advertising they create gets remembered at all by the customer, let alone gets the key message across.
So, when a car company crams in that they have the best miles per gallon, horsepower, and stereo, and they list all the special promotional lease offers with an accompanying disclaimer and then add all the local dealer names at the end of a 30-second commercial, all they are doing is causing mass confusion for the viewing audience. Even when marketing teams know they are supposed to stick to one message, companies often fail to do so because of the pressure of all these different elements and parties involved; too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth.
The beauty and curse of a 140-character world is that there is no longer a choice. Tony Blair indicated at the 2008 World Business Forum in New York, "Because of the proliferation and speed of information, people and the press want everything in succinct and easy to digest packages. However, some very complex problems can't be put that way. It is quite an extraordinary challenge."[99] Whether we like it or not, right or wrong, we have to adapt to communication in succinct and salient sound bites.
From production and strategic positioning standpoints, the beauty is that it forces companies to improve. If your company or product can't definitively state what it stands for and how it differs from the competition in a few short words, then it is time to reevaluate exactly what you are doing. If you don't have a niche position in a marketplace that you are attempting to defend from your competition, and you are trying to be all things to all people, then you are doomed to failure.
This destructive behavior may have taken longer to figure out in the past because marketing mediums allowed advertisers to cram in many different benefits in the hope that so many great things would entice consumers to buy. This was also during a time when customers were more willing to be spoken to rather than have a conversation with. They may have bought your product based solely on the glitz and glamour of your marketing. This possibility is very limited now that we are living in a world with social media.
The good news is that in this new world order, once you have determined your initial messaging strategy you have the ability to reevaluate and tweak it for relevancy based on feedback from the marketplace. Because you will be engaging in a conversation with your customer, you will be able to identify and adapt to changing needs much quicker. That's why it's important to ensure your marketers and production teams are on the same page.
Past Marketer's Philosophy
It's all about the sex and sizzle of the message and brand imagery.
It's all about the message; good marketers can sell anything.
We know what is right for the customer—we are doing the customer a service because they really don't know what they want.
We develop products and messaging "inhouse" and then disperse them to the public.
Present/Future Marketer's Philosophy: It's important to listen and respond to customer needs.
It's all about the product; it's necessary to be in constant communication with all other departments.
We never know what is exactly right for the customer; that is why we are constantly asking and making adjustments, because we usually don't get it right the first time.
Take up the motto: Fail forward, fail fast, fail better.
Often our customers will market the product better than we can; if we can leverage one of their ideas, then it is beneficial to everyone.
If you were to ask chief marketing officers (CMOs) of varying businesses, ranging in size from Fortune 500 companies to small business owners, what their top performing channels or programs are, the majority would indicate that their referred customers are the most valuable. Top performers being defined in terms of return on investment (cost to acquire said customer) as well as the quality of the customer acquired.
The logical follow-up question for the CMOs—what is the greatest challenge you face? The response would again focus on referrals, only it would be fixated on the difficulty in obtaining mass volume from this lucrative channel—"how can we get more?"
For the first time, social media enables corporations and marketers to generate this desired mass scale from the existing customer base. It is truly Word of Mouth on Steroids. Or Word of Mouth goes to World of Mouth.
In the 1990s and continuing into the twenty-first century, Jeff Bezos and Amazon have done a stellar job of introducing the concept of affinity marketing to millions worldwide. For example, when you purchase a DVD or book from Amazon, Amazon gives real-time suggestions of what you might like based on your own prior purchases.
Millions have found this feature to be very helpful, and it has taken us into an appropriate progression in marketing. However, as many have also learned, there are a few pieces to this program that are suboptimal—such as, if you purchase a gift for your four-year-old niece under your own Amazon account. While your niece may enjoy suggestions to buy My Little Pony or American Doll, you as an adult aren't often in the market for such items.
Much more helpful and useful was Amazon's introduction of the ability to showcase to users: "People who purchased this book also purchased these other ones." Here's where social media comes in and takes this one giant step forward. In the Amazon model just described, you don't know the other people that are referenced. They are an aggregation of thousands of others who happen to have the same purchasing patterns. In other words, there is no personal connection between you and them. The only shared connection is that you might share similar buying habits.
In social media, you still have this same aggregate data made available to you by the Amazons and RedEnvelopes of the world: "Here's what the total universe enjoys." But, in social media, it goes significantly deeper to show: "Here's what your specific network enjoys." Within your network, you will begin to identify a handful of friends, possibly more, who seem to have similar tastes and opinions that you can trust. The circle you trust for recommending movies may be entirely different from the circle you trust for restaurant recommendations.
For example, when you see on your favorite social media tool that your friend Angie—who normally purchases and reads romance novels—purchased and begun reading a science-fiction novel (there are social media applications and widgets that do exactly this), you might scratch your head and think it quite odd that Angie would be reading such a thing. However, Angie's recommendation and write-up on the science-fiction book pops up a few days later on your updates, and you are quickly enlightened regarding this oddity:
For those who know me well, you may be surprised to see that I just completed a science-fiction piece. This was quite a diversion from my usual romance novel obsession—but let me tell you it was a refreshing one. Thanks goes to my husband who is an avid sci-fi fan; when he came across this book and read it, he thought I would like it too—and right he was! I loved it. I highly recommend this book and can say it's one of the best I've read in the past three years.
Now, as Angie's good friend who shares very similar tastes when it comes to reading, how likely is it that you are going to want to read this book? My guess is pretty likely. You are definitely more apt to give it a try than if you had seen the exact same write-up on Amazon.com by someone you didn't know; someone who you didn't identify with or trust immediately.
Then there is Angie; she has a reputation to uphold within her network. If it were a blind review process—like Amazon or Yahoo! movies, she would be less likely to put as much thought into it as she will for her own network. Spelling a word incorrectly isn't quite as taboo for Angie if it's not going to be knowingly shared with those who know her and are close to her. If users are debating between giving a particular movie three or four stars and the user has "identity immunity," studies have shown that he/she is more likely to give four stars. Conversely, if the user's review is going to their friends, they are more likely to be conservative and give it three stars. This is somewhat intuitive because you would never want to be the cause of a friend's bad evening at the show; instead, you would rather under promise and over deliver.
Of course, this concept of sharing and reviewing among friends isn't new—book clubs have been around for years. The difference is that book clubs meet once per month and will continue to do so. The need for book clubs doesn't go away. However, with social media, information is shared daily and is about much more than just the single book that was assigned. It also allows others to be involved who can't make it to traditional book clubs for a myriad of reasons, geographical limitations, family commitments, job demands, and so on.
So, what does this change mean for companies exactly? It means that many of their dreams have become realities—"If only we could get more referrals." Well, the referral floodgates have been opened, my friends. However, companies should be careful what they wish for. Great companies that already produce great content, products, or services welcome the frontier of Socialnomics with open arms. While they are not guaranteed continued success, they are certainly positioned for it. Meanwhile, those companies that have survived to date by being great at middleman games—whether distribution-related, direct mail, brand marketing, lobbying, public relations, or legal rights—will have a greater challenge in front of them. This challenge must be taken on immediately to secure survival.
Middlemen are becoming less important than they've been in the past, and the rise in power is shifting rapidly to the social graph. This was no more evident than in the 2008 race for the Democratic Party presidential candidate (more in Chapter 4) where a little-known senator from Illinois was able to defeat one of history's great political machines—Hillary Clinton. This type of historic victory would have been extremely difficult to architect without the Obama camp having the ability to understand and to leverage the power and advantage that Socialnomics brings. In this instance, the Clinton Political Machine was the item that had lost some of its power, and that power was transferred to the social graph.
Chapter Six Key Points
The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a work personality and a party personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
Being well rounded as a company or individual is less beneficial. It's more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition. You need to stand out in order to be outstanding.
Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic world. The social graph is the world's largest and most powerful referral program.
Marketers' jobs have changed from creating and pushing to one that requires listening, engaging, and reacting to potential and current customer needs.
Fail forward, fail fast, fail better.