It seems so obvious that social media is a good way of performing marketing communications that it’s almost not worth saying. And yet so many people keep getting it wrong – or if that sounds too strident then perhaps we could agree there are people who manage their communications in a way that really can’t be deemed helpful.

Take the candidate at a social media seminar I hosted after the launch of my first book, who was herself an author. She had been excited to note that her publisher had gone onto Twitter for the first time, and imagined her name in lights, the publisher doing everything it could to make the most of the sales of her latest novel. She logged on to find the only entry said: ‘Muriel’s just eaten three Twix.’

And yet I wonder whether that’s really all that bad. Suppose, for example, the publisher had a reputation for being stuffy. Maybe it was one of those officious organizations that appears to lack a human face – in which case Muriel and her Twix (names and confectionery bars changed to protect the guilty) might have given the brand just the lift it needed. I mean, I doubt it, but it’s possible.

Other organizations with which I’ve worked and consulted have bigger issues than someone in the office posting something not all that interesting. There’s the issue of exactly who should handle the social media activities in an organization, for example. If there are ten of you then that’s fine, you can decide between you. If there are 10,000 spread across different countries and, crucially, different cultures, it’s a different question. There are issues about cross-culture communication; something that sounds a little self-deprecating and humorous to the British audience could sound wrong if it’s interpreted literally. In her excellent book Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of Business Behaviour Kate Fox points to the example of someone from Germany asking an English person what he or she does for a living. The English person starts ‘Oh, this and that’ and the German assumes it is literally true that the English person doesn’t do a lot; meanwhile the English person was expecting to be asked a bit more and then to confirm that they were doing staggeringly well.

This sort of issue crops up a lot on social media as well as in the ‘real world.’ And it is in this chapter that we will work through some of those issues as well as put forward some best practice. In this chapter you should:

• Learn to recognize your ‘digital shadow’ and understand the importance of this
• Start to build your brand using your digital profile
• Use your digital outputs for reputation management and damage control
• Consider the reputations you can’t control, and how to react to them
• Learn how not to be seen as manipulative by these outside people
• Learn to interact with bloggers as a subset of the above.

Your Digital Shadow

Digital marketing agency supremo Anthony Mayfield has written an excellent book called Me and my Web Shadow. He seeks to answer one question throughout (this is my emphasis, not his): what happens when someone enters your name into the Google search engine?

For ‘name’ you can read ‘company name’ as well. So, how often do you Google yourself? For a lot of people the answer is ‘not much.’ They consider – for good reason – that they, not some other commentator, are the expert on themselves and their company, so nobody else can or should advise them on what’s being said.

Hmm. True enough on the face of it. But what about a friend of a friend – true story and no it’s not me – who had a female employee declare she was going to take him to court for sexual harassment. He was bewildered as he considered himself innocent; she said he had made indecent advances and went to the press.

He did some digging. He found out that she had done this to a number of employers before and rather than be dragged through the courts they had caved in and settled for a few thousand pounds. He’d confronted her, she’d backed down of course and resigned. No actual harm done but a nasty taste in the mouth.

Oh, and the web stuff. As I mentioned, she’d been to the local press, which of course had reported – carefully – the fact that there was going to be a hearing of some sort. So every time someone entered my friend-of-a-friend’s name in Google, the allegation about sexual abuse came up. Of course the press ran a follow-up but due to the nature of search engine optimization it appeared on Google page 2.

So he ended up carrying a sheaf of cuttings around with him so anyone who’d Googled him would know beyond doubt that he’d been exonerated. I’m telling you this because there could be something out there about you that’s not true either – and you might not know about it. The following are genuine examples:

• In 1989 an accounting company called Multisoft was bought. A UK newspaper misreported this as Microsoft (before that was a household name).
• At the time of writing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is alive and well. Unless you believed Twitter reports in June 2011, which said he had died.
• On 25 June 2009 the singer Michael Jackson died, very prematurely. On the same day the social media were alive with rumours that tragically, actor Jeff Goldblum had also passed away. Goldblum, like Chavez, had done no such thing and I wish him continued good health.

My point isn’t that there’s a right load of nonsense on the Internet if you look hard enough. You knew that. My point is that if something inaccurate is said about you, you need to do something about it because unlike the press in the Multisoft example above, someone will have archived it somewhere online and it’s going to come up in a search.

This is what I mean by your digital shadow and what Mayfield calls your web shadow. We live online increasingly and we’re leaving traces. Just try Googling yourself or your company and see what you find if you’ve been around for a while. You might find any of the following:

• Old Tweets and emails
• Your Facebook or LinkedIn page
• Old/archived press releases
• Old presentations you made and forgot you’d shared with people online at the time.

Any of these can damage or enhance your business. There won’t be a lot you can do about them unless you’re still with the company, but you can certainly start planning for posterity now. A few basic rules should help:

• Don’t trash the competition
• Don’t make rash predictions
• Be corporate rather than individual when you’re writing about business
• If someone has put an awkward picture of you on Facebook, untag it.

The reasons are straightforward. Your prediction that the iPad will fall out of fashion and that we’ll go back to using slates might be right but if it’s wrong some journalist is going to ask you about it – or an awkward customer will reproduce it on your web page and there will be nothing you can do about it. Unless, of course, you’re still in charge of the site on which it appears. Trashing the competition is bad practice anyway, particularly if they may one day hire you or buy your company.

You get the idea. This stuff sticks. You need to take control or to have an answer as to why the truth (or your opinion of it) has changed. This is particularly important if you use an agency for your social media engagements; you can sign off all sorts of controversial stuff without meaning to if you’re not careful.

Before social media became widespread there was a managing director of a laptop computer company (in the days when these cost thousands). He was quoted in a press release as saying the desktop computer was dead. Inevitably he went to work for a desktop computer company, so I ran the quote past him. He said it was a good little jab, but he never said the desktop was dead.

I went back to the office and checked. He’d been quoted saying it in a press release, I had it in black and off-white. But I recognize he was probably right, he never actually said it. Best guess is that a PR company came up with what sounded like (and was) a lively quote so he signed it off. Before social media this was one thing; if he did something similar now the quote would be all around the globe, following him and being retweeted.

Be aware of your digital past. Be aware of misconceptions by all means, but be even more aware of the accurate stuff and have an answer for it!

Corporate Digital: Sage Advice

Software company Sage has been using social media for a couple of years. It has 800,000 customers in the UK, all of whom are businesses and they use the company for accounting, customer relationship management, health and safety advice, and a great deal more. Digital PR manager Cath Sheldon’s brief is to work across all of these divisions so she builds the brand throughout the organization.

Her role (she was an internal candidate) came about because of the way customers had started wanting to engage with the company. ‘The first stage was about sort of listening and learning,’ she explains. ‘It was about discovering what our competitors were doing, what our customers expected from us online outside of our own website and where we could really add value to that.’ This is of course standard stuff, as was the next stage, establishing which social networks to join. Twitter and YouTube were deemed the most obvious.

What’s noticeable about Sage, though, is the sheer size of the business. Its head office is in Newcastle where it employs about 1000 people; there are more through the country and indeed overseas. It became important very quickly to decide who could and who couldn’t take part in these social media. ‘It is very important to have a coordinated approach because you don’t want your customers to have a confusing experience online with your brand,’ says Sheldon. The first thing the company did was to put a central team and a central policy in place, so that people understood there were things they just couldn’t mention outside the company regardless of the medium. ‘Profits, for example. That we have a social media policy in place that I think is for kind of two reasons really. Firstly, it’s to protect our brand online and secondly it’s to protect our people, to help our people understand the implications of what they’re saying and what they’re doing,’ says Sheldon.

It’s worth clarifying at this stage that Sage is a publicly listed business, so offering hints about its financial performance would count as insider trading and be completely illegal. This isn’t some sort of corporate clampdown, then; it’s compliance with the law, and it’s as simple as that.

Something Sheldon is well aware of – although she doesn’t use this exact term – is the idea that your digital shadow will be around for a while. This needs planning. ‘You need to work out how it’s going to look in a year’s time, how you’re going to constantly add new content to it that’s going to be fresh, interesting.’ she says. Which clearly means bringing more people in.

Initially there was a lot of hand holding. An experienced copywriter, Sheldon was quite used to the myth that everyone can write and will do when left to their own devices. She quickly found, predictably, that she was surrounded by people who didn’t ‘get’ social media, who didn’t understand that their daily tasks could make an interesting blog entry for someone to read, or that they actually had anything that could be turned into useful content. ‘A lot of what we did was about educating them as to how, okay, now that you’ve done a great guide, how can we turn that into a blog post, how can we turn that into a Tweet.’

Measuring the Effect and Gaining Influence

All of which means not a great deal if there’s no way to measure how effective this marketing communication and brand extension has actually been. It’s worth stressing here that this chapter is about marketing communications and mind share rather than straight sales copy; although everything a business does is going to have to feed into the bottom line eventually, sales may not always be the initial objective.

There are ways of measuring influence in isolation, as it were, and there are many free or inexpensive tools to see how influential you are becoming. Here is a selection of some of the free things I’ve looked at in the research for this book and the last.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is, as you’ll have gathered, a measuring tool from Google. It’s a piece of code that you or your developer cut and paste onto your website. The customer doesn’t see it, but it generates reports you can see on the Google Analytics site itself. It tells you where they’ve come from (so you’ll know if your Twitter feed, Google itself, your Facebook page, or something else entirely is getting you the most traffic). It tells you where they go next – so if they go off to a competitor, for example, you know you need to sharpen your sales message or put more links in to other areas on your own site.

Of course it also tells you how many people are coming to the page on which you’ve put it, from which you can work out what proportion become customers.

Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Twhirl Etc.

Yes, I know, these aren’t strictly measuring tools. They are online or offline apps for uploading and downloading social media updates, and they work very well in that way. The thing is, you can also do a search on them for your company name. This way you have a live feed of what people are saying about your brand coming in the whole time.

How easy this is to set up will depend on the stage in your business at which you are reading this book. Mechanically it’s very easy: you set up a search column, enter your business name as the search string, and just watch – the messages will appear in real time. Easy. They will have a time on them so you’ll see how often you’re being talked about and what people are saying.

Unless of course your business is called ‘Smith,’ ‘Green,’ ‘Jones,’ ‘Patel,’ or something equally widespread. Author Graham Greene once wrote a novel in which the main characters were called Smith, Jones, and Green; critics said he had done a fine job of identifying with the common man, but he later admitted that his sole objective had been to avoid ambulance-chasing lawyers latching onto unusual surnames in novels and suing the authors for libel on behalf of similarly-named clients.

If your business’s name is something like that then you may find tracking down specific mentions of your business a little harder.

Peerindex

Peerindex (peerindex.net) is a straightforward, free website. You go to the site and enter your Twitter name, and it gives you a score out of 100 based on a number of factors including the size of your audience, your activity levels, and the authority with which you speak. It establishes authority no doubt by the amount of people who retweet what you say. More usefully it then tells you about the areas in which you are influential.

Klout

‘Everyone has Klout – discover yours!’ screeches the front page of the Klout.com website. Once again it takes your Twitter user name and also it will look at your Facebook profile, apply some metrics, and even tell you who you’re influencing. Perhaps more pertinently than Peerindex it tells you how many ‘effective’ followers you have; in other words how many of your thousands of followers are likely to pay you any attention. My figure there was about 40% which is quite high.

What it doesn’t do – and neither can Peerindex or any other ‘vanilla’ influence scoring systems like these – is to put this into any sort of context.

I’ll give you an example. Peerindex tells you about the stuff on which you’re influential, as does Klout. One of these measurement sites says I’m influential about social media, technology, business – as you might hope if you’d been an author of a social media book previously. Peerindex says I’m influential about suits.

Suits. Things you wear. OK, I have a men’s style blog, LifeOver35.com, and I do write about suits occasionally. On the blog there is a click-through to a tailor who offers loyalty points. Tracking this I can see that 24 people have made appointments through the site – this is worldwide, mind – and four people have bought suits. That’s my ‘influence’ – discuss …

Four people. I hope they’re enjoying their suits, I wish them all the best, but if I worked in the menswear department of a shop I’d consider influencing four people in a year to buy a suit a completely pathetic result. Anyone who’s met me will know just how convincing a fashion icon I make – but the metrics this site applies, including the amount of times I mention a subject, the number of people who retweet it, and so forth, suggest I’m influential in that area.

The reason is simple – none of these sites ever gets a proper question asked of them. ‘How influential am I?’ doesn’t mean anything until you’ve established who you want to influence and what you’d like them to do. There are thousands of possibilities; make new friends, gain more consultancy, sell more products or services, find a service – those are just the obvious ones. ‘Influence’ would mean a different thing when measured by each of these criteria.

Which is why, on balance, I still think there is only one effective measure of social media impact. Are you making more profit – is your time making you more money than it was before you started?

That’s what would matter to me. If you’re still inclined to use other tools to measure, let’s assume they’ll be different by the time this book comes out compared to what they are while I’m writing. Try to make sure of the following:

• They bear some relation to the task you’re trying to achieve
• They take account of more than one social network – the Twitter-only ones are too inflexible
• They break down your ‘influence’ into meaningful chunks
• Above all, they don’t compulsorily Tweet or Facebook your influence so everyone can see you’ve been checking up on yourself. Been there, done that …

Bloggers and Other Influencers

So far we’ve looked at how your digital ‘shadow’ forms and some strategies for a proactive marketing communications programme from Sage. But what happens when the digital impressions people get are completely beyond your control?

Blogging is still very important to the digital world. Engaging with bloggers is very different from engaging with journalists – and I speak as someone who does both things.

First let’s establish a few ground rules. When I say ‘bloggers’ I’m not talking about the people who do it as an extension of a full-time or freelance post in the national press or a magazine. I’m also not talking about people who are paid to blog for some of the daily news feeds which are around. I do a fair bit of that but the rules are basically the same as they are for journalists – send the press release, assume everything is on the record, and assume the writer is being paid for what they’re putting onto the screen so there is definitely some sort of comeback if something goes wrong.

No, I’m talking about the independent blogger, who may carry a little advertising but probably doesn’t. I’ve had some experiences with some of them which it may be instructive to share.

Getting Information to Them

The first thing you need to understand about the smaller (but possibly very influential) blogger is that he or she may not perceive themselves as a journalist. This can mean they’ll see themselves operating outside the usual means of getting information around. I’ll give you an example; just too late for inclusion in my first book, a blogger put a note on his Twitter feed asking PR people not to clog up his email with press releases.

His Twitter profile said he was a blogger and information junkie. I took this up with him and he informed me, firmly, that since he hadn’t put a note on his profile saying ‘please send press releases to my work account’ it was quite reasonable for him to object when people did so.

I still don’t agree; you describe yourself as wanting information and offer to publish – people will respond. There is really no point in complaining – but this is an attitude endemic among some bloggers. They don’t see themselves as part of the press machine and will resist the standard press entreaties.

They also don’t expect to get paid for their work so there is arguably less comeback when you feel an opinion is unfair or that there has been some sort of misrepresentation. A journalist, for example, should never write about you or your company without at least trying to get in touch so you can put your side of the story, unless they are offering a strict commentary on already established facts, the ‘opinion piece’ style of journalism. Bloggers are a lot like the personality columns in the newspapers so they may or may not engage with you before writing.

(Of course a lot will depend on what you actually do – if someone is a blogger reviewing a product it might not be appropriate for them to consult with the company that made it first.)

Ways of Engaging

Once you’ve identified a blog with which you’d like to make contact it’s worth being a little careful. Experience shows that some – not all – will react badly to an approach from someone who is avowedly and respectably a PR or marketing person. So, select the person to make the approach carefully.

It’s worth starting by commenting on the blog itself, without at any stage being pushy or too corporate. As with any social media, go out of your way to make yourself a useful member of the community and you’re likely to end up more trusted than others. As to what to do after the connection has been established, it’s a matter of learning what the blogger wants or doesn’t – see the box for things that have worked and things that have failed, and given the disparate bunch bloggers actually are, don’t be surprised at the contradictions!

Finally on bloggers, don’t be put off by the flannel that has appeared in the press about how bloggers are sad individuals hunched over their computers in damp cellars (a senior UK journalist actually said something like that in 2011). This is frequently written by journalists who are terrified of the effect blogging is having on their industry; to the reader the words are a lot more important than any prejudice against the reader.

Communicating with Different Audiences

In this chapter I’ve examined the digital ‘shadow’ a business and individual casts. I’ve had a look at the proactive stuff that’s within your control and being aware of the stuff other people will generate around you, and how, in a larger organization, it’s important to look at who is handling your social media and for what purpose.

I’ve also had a look at blogging and the expectations of the bloggers themselves – although I do stress there are no fixed rules or opinions shared by all bloggers.