Why Social?

Social isn't just for kids or teenagers, or even millennials. Baby boomers use it heavily, as do the elderly (often to communicate with grandchildren). In short, everyone who has access to the Internet can use social. And most everybody does. Statistica projects 2.44 billion social media users worldwide by 2018.³ That is about one-third of the population of the planet.

As important, people take social seriously. According to the Pew Research organization, roughly two-thirds (64 percent) of U.S. adults use Facebook, and half of those get their news there—amounting to 30 percent of the general population (Figure 3.1).⁴ That's better reach than most TV news operations, even the big network nightly news broadcasts.

The social online phenomenon's popularity is ironic because it connects back to our most basic, atavistic human urges: the desire to connect with others as part of a community and the need to communicate. In that sense, you don't get much more basic than social media.

In his classic work, Walden, Henry David Thoreau championed the individual and the solitary life. What many people don't realize is how often Thoreau hosted visitors. He also walked the mile-and-a-half to see his mother regularly and called on friends during his 22-month experiment at Walden Pond. (To this day you can walk the same path that Thoreau took from his cottage to Ralph Waldo Emerson's House [see Figure 3.2].) The champion of asceticism and self-sufficiency couldn't escape this very human fact: we thrive best in a social society; we need human contact. And that is what social media brings us and why as business managers this is a gift we don't want to spurn. To the contrary, we want to take maximum advantage of social, and this chapter will show you how to do it.

The key human characteristics that social enhances are the need to communicate and the drive to understand one another. In the case of Vodafone, the company was shocked to realize it had clearly failed at meeting the expectations of customers and prospects. When it mended its ways and was able to meet those expectations, good things started to happen.

“Social Media: Creator or Destroyer?”

On February 3, 2016, Thomas Friedman wrote an op-ed entitled “Social Media: Destroyer or Creator?” In the article, Friedman extensively quotes Wael Ghonim, one of the social media architects behind the 2012 Egyptian revolution. Ghonim asserts that social media is filled with too many destroyers, those people who cannot or will not engage in civil discussion on message boards and comment sections, and that sustained revolutions (or even more moderate movements for change) are not currently possible. Ghonim thinks that current use of social media creates self-serving echo chambers and that that was the primary reason the Egyptian revolution didn't have long-lasting success.⁵

I both agree and disagree with the assertion that social encourages one-directional communication. It depends on the medium and its user community. Let's take a look at one of the most successful social and political movements in recent history, civil rights. This movement was years in the making, it was highly organized, and had identifiable leaders. And it wasn't just Dr. King; it was an entire dedicated, mobilized organization. Rosa Parks was one of three women considered to protest by not giving up her seat on the bus. The movement's leadership vetted all of them completely, deciding that Parks had the cleanest, most unobjectionable background, so that her strong, simple action couldn't be detracted from by skeletons in her past. These organizers were methodical, pragmatic, unrelenting, and bold. So yes, social media is a great facilitator of communication and comes with its own unique set of challenges, but successful movements can't be faceless. The Egyptian revolution's problem wasn't only that social media helped spread as much misinformation as truth, but that there was no centrality, no coalition, no leaders to whom those social media masses could look for guidance.

Looking at social media and the Internet as the ultimate solution (or problem) to the challenges facing revolution and true change is myopic. Internet discussion boards aren't only filled with angry trolls—there are already a number of sites that exist today that encourage deeper, more thoughtful debate and conversation. I appreciate the fact that Ghonim and his team are creating more opportunities for that, but to say that it doesn't already exist is misleading. There will always be detractors, misinformation, and outright lies that face these types of movements. This has been true since time immemorial, from graffiti, to public speeches, to pamphleteering and newspapers, to radio and television. We've simply expanded that field via the Internet, and while it's easier than ever to respond to antagonists or be one yourself, it's also easier to begin and sustain positive movements for change, provided that true organization and leadership is in place. There will still be push and pull over who should “be the leaders,” but without them to rally around, those movements are often doomed to failure (or the sometimes equally horrifying success of the masses and mob mentality, e.g. the French Revolution. Positive, perhaps, in the end result, but a terrifying and bloody era all the same.)

The same can be said for social media initiatives at the company level (albeit on a much smaller scale). Without broad guidance, clear goals, and community leaders, social media promotion and engagement, both internally and externally, won't be successful.

Social Can Change Everything

It certainly did here at Bluewolf. Seven years ago when I published Iterate or Die, social was barely on our radar screen. In the last few years, it has emerged as one of the mainstays of Bluewolf, a central part of our culture, and a key contributor to our growth and success.

We have made a huge investment in social and its gamification component via a customized program we call Prime, Bluewolf's internal engagement program designed to motivate and reward employees for participating in social activities that help enhance our brand at all levels, both internally and externally. In fact, last year we sent the top 50 gamification scorers, each with a personal guest, to Hawaii for a weeklong, all-expense-paid vacation. This trip, the culmination of our gamification initiative, generated huge enthusiasm among our global staff over the course of the year. In the effort to generate points toward the prize, our staff cranked out increased blog posts, tweets, and online comments; engaged in more sharing of ideas among and between client teams; participated in deeper levels of collaboration; and more. Even our customers commented on the great enthusiasm they sensed at Bluewolf.

Yes, it was costly to the company, but it more than paid for itself in myriad ways. Staff retention hit a record high. Employee morale, already high, grew even higher. Customer satisfaction rose substantially. Project volume and revenues increased. Our social gamification strategy proved such a success we're doing it again this year, drawing on internal feedback to improve the program and ensure we don't wind up in a rut.

Most important, our social strategy, through Prime, is inclusive of the entire company, regardless of the department where someone works. As an incentive program, it eclipses a typical “comp plan” that might be riddled with percentages or management by objectives (MBOs). Prime, as a social program, encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing at a level that breaks down the natural silos in our company, which is responsible for our positive metrics around retention and engagement.

Using Social

So, how do we use social besides gamification? We start with the use of Chatter, a Salesforce application. Chatter eliminates all the hassles of traditional e-mail and messaging and has changed the way we communicate. Gone are the mile-long message streams and blizzard of unrelated communications. Chatter enables our people to gather around initiatives and swarm around a customer to address one problem or another. It changes the way we function as an organization for the better.

But Chatter alone is not the end of our social story. Prime, noted earlier in regard to gamification, goes even further to facilitate collaboration and enhance our community environment. Rather than just extending our previous tool for marketing and brand awareness, Prime focuses on all aspects of working at Bluewolf. It aims to enhance the overall experience and provide opportunities for engagement for each employee, regardless of their role, all while keeping the customer as the center of attention.

Points are rewarded for a wide range of activities. These include social activities like blogging and social sharing as well as resource and client-focused activities like landing a new deal, creating a quality piece of content for our content library, teaching an internal Bluewolf class, or volunteering. Getting certified in Salesforce and partner technologies will generate even more points.

Probably the biggest part of Prime, however, is the recognition it allows for a job well done. We offer a series of badges that employees can award to each other to say thank you (see example in Figure 3.3). Sound trivial? Maybe so, but they work. The awards were designed to promote communication and expressions of gratitude for particularly helpful work or for contributing to the team in an unexpected way. In short, they were intended to enhance employee relationships and also assist in our employee review processes. During the self-assessment for performance reviews, employees can highlight the badges they have been awarded throughout the year to reinforce their assessment of the work they've completed. Employees have really embraced it; they make awards for each other, and those who receive the awards are genuinely appreciative. It actually does contribute to our high level of employee morale. And it simplifies and streamlines the annual employee review process, as well as contributes to increased employee retention. It also impacts customer relationships through more and better-engaged employees, which increases the customer's lifetime value at Bluewolf.

Social Payback

Here is how I approach social at Bluewolf, and I recommend you approach it in the same way. Basically, social is a way to turn every employee, partner, stakeholder, and customer (yes, every customer, too) into an evangelist for what you do, a highly engaged advocate for your business. They do so, especially customers, because social enables you to give them a great experience as you deliver highly informed solutions that solve their problems.

This is possible with social because it gives you the means to know your customers extremely well and build specifically meaningful relationships with them. That enables you to anticipate customer needs, identify opportunities for the customer even before they do, and come up with appropriate solutions optimized specifically for that customer.

This isn't difficult. Just think about it. Customers go onto Facebook or Twitter or any social website and tell you specifically what they like and, most important, what they dislike. In the past, companies have had to spend a fortune surveying people and running focus groups to get the kind of insight people post on social websites every day, all day long, for free. All you have to do is collect it, think about it, and apply your creativity to help them achieve what they like and fix what they don't like. You don't even have to be a genius or a mind reader. The visitors tell you exactly what they like and don't like, often in brutally blunt ways.

The upshot: social gives you great opportunity to get to know your prospects and customers in surprising detail. Sure, there is all the superficial stuff, like sending birthday greetings or congratulations when some minor personal milestone or another has been reached, but that's not the high-value information. If you pay attention to what people post, you will quickly be able to discern the important stuff. Obviously, you want to jump on the gripes or complaints, respond quickly, and get them fixed. But also pay attention to the things people like, and figure out how you can do more of that. It can help build your customer base by attracting more like-minded people.

Social for Customer Service

At Bluewolf, we treat social as much more than an alternative customer service channel, merely a way to bypass the call center. However, most organizations don't treat social that way, which is why I put this chapter prominently toward the front of the book. Early in 2015, Salesforce published some of its statistics on social for customer service. As I had hoped, Salesforce still makes a compelling case for social the way we use it here, which admittedly is not yet typical.

For example, in the United States, the cost of poor customer service amounts to $41 billion per year.⁶ Don't fool yourself; even one poor customer service experience can spread like wildfire on social and turn off a lot of prospective customers. The bulk of customer service calls, 68 percent according to Salesforce (Figure 3.4), still come through the corporate call center, but 59 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds—those are marketers' hottest, most sought-after demographic—report they will share poor customer experiences online in a flash (Figure 3.5).

Social still isn't the first choice for customer service, but it has emerged as an extremely popular platform when it comes to sharing a bad experience. When people have a gripe, customers or not, they take their issue to social media. That's one reason we advise clients to monitor what is being said about them, bad or good, on social media and respond appropriately. Just think of Vodafone.

Obviously, the call center isn't going away, given that it continues to handle the bulk of all customer communications. As difficult as it is to find and retain good call center operators, even Salesforce recommends that organizations not neglect the tried-and-true phone call. Rest assured; if you do neglect phone calls, the resulting fury will show up first on social.

“Why?” asks Salesforce. Simple: as far as customers are concerned, it's often much easier to pick up the phone and speak to someone than it is to track a brand down on social media, although that may be a generational thing. At Bluewolf, we are picking up plenty of evidence that millennials prefer to resolve customer service issues directly on Twitter or Facebook, online chat, messaging, or even e-mail rather than via the phone.

In any case, at Bluewolf customers should have no problem contacting us via any channel. Whatever their position, we train all of our people to create, nurture, and sustain the customer or prospect relationship via social. In fact, they should have identified concerns, even the most minor ones, long before someone felt the need to complain. If someone has an issue and feels compelled to call us, we consider that a failure. Somebody here should have known of the issue early and had it satisfactorily resolved long before it got to that point.

Compared to call centers, social handles just 3 percent of all customer communications, reports Salesforce. At Bluewolf we handle much more via social. Just check out our numbers in the next section. Although most companies put their brands on social media, Facebook and Twitter are not yet the first channels of choice for consumers. At the rate they are growing, however, they might be before you know it. Facebook, for instance, is reporting over 1 billion members. That's about one-seventh of the population of the entire planet!

Before the Internet, if you upset a customer, three or four of their friends might know about it. In the twenty-first century, an upset customer can easily reach thousands of people within minutes. Providing good customer service is as much about maintaining your brand image as it is about your customer relationships. An unhappy customer complaining publicly is always bad for your brand.

Following a negative customer experience, Salesforce reports, 58 percent of Americans say they would never use that company again (Figure 3.6). That means that every time you fail to resolve a customer's issue satisfactorily, there's a better than 50 percent chance you'll never hear from them again. By nurturing relationships through social, you can shift this reaction more to your favor and ensure that your existing customers keep coming back.

Salesforce turned up some other interesting data worth noting here. For instance, failure to respond via social channels can lead to a 15 percent increase in customer churn. Social media might not yet be the most popular channel of communication, but it can have a big impact on how customers and prospective customers see your brand and how loyal they are. Failing to respond to someone is perhaps the absolute worst thing you could do—your customer will not only feel underappreciated and ignored, but their request will be left hanging on social media for all to see.

On the positive side, however, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much, on average, as their first purchase, according to Salesforce. That's the lifetime value of a customer, and social is a good way to cultivate it. Most businesses get too wrapped up in acquiring new customers—probably trying to offset customer churn due to poor service—which causes existing customers to feel neglected. Use social to nurture those customers by building a productive relationship they look forward to and participate in. Provide posts with especially relevant content or a solution to a problem—anything they will appreciate. When you do that they certainly won't feel ignored.

Finally, 60 percent of customers favor a balance of price and service and will no longer accept poor service in exchange for a cheap deal. Yes, in the early days of e-commerce, many shopped online in search of low prices and still do. But online business has become more than just low price—customers demand high-quality service, too. It is not an either-or situation; they want both or you will hear about it, probably via social.

Bluewolf's Social Payback

So how does Bluewolf stack up, especially in light of Salesforce's data? Our latest metrics show social overall driving 8 percent of the traffic to our website, up from 3–4 percent previously, and better than what Salesforce reports on average. In terms of other metrics, we've experienced:

There also are some other gains we can attribute to social, including a notable increase in deal velocity and net new business leads, higher win rates, and more effective brand-building activities. When staff use social, for example, to collaborate around a customer opportunity, increasing customer satisfaction and producing a more effective solution faster, that's worth something, and it is measured through progress we see in shortened deal cycles, average revenue per sales rep, percentage of stalled projects, and amount of bad debt. Over time, this kind of problem solving leads to steady increases in the lifetime value of our customers' relationships with Bluewolf. When you come down to it, much of anything to do with an improved customer experience can be traced back to our use of social and the customer relationships that result.

Overall, we aim to take maximum advantage of social conversations to advance business goals. Social engagement boosts lifetime customer value, gives you an edge in intent-to-purchase conversations, and builds brand awareness and brand evangelists. Not only that, but it speeds deal velocity through highly responsive customer service and sustains and expands customer relationships, nurturing future sales.

So, in terms of social metrics, we have no serious complaints. Actually, more to the point, we are quite proud of what we have achieved with creating an ongoing social presence, proud enough to be willing to showcase how we do it in this chapter. That said, we're not so enamored with what we are doing as a company with social that we don't see room for improvement.

Building a Social Culture in Your Organization

I previously laid out how Bluewolf uses social with the idea that you could use it or parts of it as a blueprint for your own social initiative. Please feel welcome to borrow whatever you like.

I am tempted to say it is fun to build a social culture in your organization since we started with gamification, but that may be a bit deceptive. While many parts of it are fun, you have to include all the serious management best practices you would use for any strategic business initiative. And don't kid yourself; this is indeed strategic, or at least it should be.

These best practices include having a purpose as the clear focus. You will rally your people around the purpose. You'll also want to articulate your vision and have a clear strategy along with goals to measure your progress toward success. This part is MBA Management 101, so you don't need to hear it from me.

The challenge of rolling out such a social program to connect your company both internally and externally provides plenty of issues to consider. In some ways, it's like raising teenagers. You know you have to give them more freedom, but how much and when? How do you guide their actions to a productive, positive conclusion without stifling their initiative?⁷

As I have noted from the start, technology isn't the problem. Technology platforms are readily available, and not just Salesforce—the real trick is getting people engaged and moving in a way that produces the desired results. If the company is global, often the first and perhaps biggest challenge is simply getting people talking to each other. Remember, people don't just spontaneously cross departmental, cultural, and geographical lines and freely communicate—you've got to make it happen and model the desired behavior. If management is not on social and actively engaging customers, coworkers, and partners, don't expect your staff to, either.

Here are a few tips for designing and implementing a social collaboration program that will move your organization forward.

Make It Easy

Make it easier than “liking” a video of a cat falling into the toilet. To succeed, your people have to view this as fun, and the bar for that has been set pretty high on the consumer side (you've got people sharing epic fails, dogs doing tricks, and don't even get me started on the cat videos). Aside from offering an attractive platform, you must make it easy. How easy? Easy enough that someone who feels they don't have enough time to take a lunch break will think it an effortless task to share a piece of company content through a social channel. If you haven't read Steve Krug's book on website design, Don't Make Me Think, check it out. He describes exactly what I mean.

Using game dynamics to drive adoption can be a very effective tactic, but I caution you to make the game as effortless as possible—think Angry Birds, not Call of Duty. For example, if you're offering points for someone to post a company blog through a social channel, you should also consider implementing functionality that both feeds content to them that they're likely to find personally compelling and enables them to post to multiple accounts with one or two clicks.

Light the Way

Show them the light. Even employees who completely get the value of your program and have every intention of engaging with it may not know where to start. They may be totally fluent in social media, yet unsure how to engage on behalf of your company. For that matter, the idea of using social media for a concrete goal may be completely foreign. You have to train them by providing convenient, free training on the company's time, not their personal time.

Don't, however, make the mistake of sending your team to some off-site seminar on “how to be social.” One allure of social media is how it melds into other aspects of our lives—social media training should be no different. Research is beginning to show that the most effective learning is informal—that is, training that your team can take in bite-sized chunks while on the go, through a variety of platforms and delivery methods (videos, SlideRockets, Prezi presentations, and so on). In general, anything lasting more than five minutes is going to fall flat in this age of waning attention spans and constant interruption.

Iterate and Refine

Don't give up on the cat video devotees. Aim for 100 percent adoption, but don't make it your immediate goal. A few months in, gauge who is participating and who isn't, and iterate your plan to get stragglers on board.

For example, while you're going to see plenty of people engaged in the program that you fully anticipated would be early adopters, were there any surprises? Were there any team members who caught fire contrary to your expectations? If so, find out what did it for them, and try to leverage that success to get others on board. Better yet, recruit them as evangelists to the cause, even if you have to come up with more free pizza and beer. Conversely, is there someone you were sure would be your star evangelist who has so far failed to engage? Maybe someone who incessantly posts photos of their cat dressed up like Batman, yet hasn't retweeted a single company-related comment? If so, do your homework and find out why they're not engaged, and what would make it both fun and worthwhile for them.

Building an External Social Presence

If you've heard me speak at Dreamforce, you know I tend to focus on the high-level stuff. My technical team doesn't want me straying into the nitty-gritty details that I haven't done personally for years and might get wrong. And much of this chapter so far has been pretty high level, too.

But let's take a moment to drop down a little to discuss how you actually go about building an external social presence for your company. Creating an engaging, customer-facing social persona intended to attract hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of followers for your business can be quite a bit different than building an internal social culture. You can't exactly throw a pizza and beer party for all of the people you'd like to have follow your company on Twitter and LinkedIn. So, you will have to do something different. Specifically, the most effective way to engage customers on social is to do the following:

• Do your research and know your audience. Just like any other marketing campaign, you have to understand who you're trying to reach and what you'd like to achieve, be it more likes, retweets, or lead conversions.
• While you are setting goals for your business's social persona, be a little more ambitious. Shoot beyond likes. Try to get people to comment, pose appropriate and relevant questions to generate some answers, and post provocative (but not controversial) ideas people can comment on. The idea is to get a response or start a dialogue.
• Have a consistent message communicated through diverse content. Social is a huge opportunity to amplify your brand, but you need an interesting message, hopefully even a compelling one, to start. Then you need to stay on message while engaging your audience with useful, thoughtful content.
• Don't be afraid to engage people directly. Many companies fall into the trap of scheduling social posts to promote their business but don't respond to messages, mentions, and hashtags. They miss out on a prime opportunity to connect with their customers in a very real, very personal way.
• Organic growth on social is great, but don't neglect paid promotion, either. Use your customer knowledge to target the right audience and design ads and sponsored posts to draw them into your social engagement circle.
• Finally, and this is one that falls in line with an internal tactic, use self-interest to get your customers to promote you. Host giveaways and contests to boost your customers' interest and involvement with your brand.

None of this is difficult or expensive, but it does require time and thoughtful effort. No one can build a social media empire overnight—even Kim Kardashian didn't begin with a million followers. It is worth investing in a team member whose sole focus is managing and promoting your brand via social. Cultivate your best content creators to drive consistent and increased traffic and engagement with your brand. If you get visitors to come back to your social page, you've won! Now keep them coming back with useful news, thought leadership, and personal engagement.

Benefits of Building a Social Culture

Here are three big benefits that accrue to a company with an active and engaged social culture:

1. Engaged workers who are out evangelizing for the company and its brands
2. Satisfied, loyal customers who are happily engaged with the company and its staff
3. An enviable social presence that builds brand value and attracts more customers without being intrusive or off-putting

In the process of building up the first three benefits, you actually acquire a fourth benefit, which is equally valuable although it may be more ephemeral—positive social capital. In short, you have social goodwill that may help save your reputation if something bad happens, like a database hack that compromises personal data. Of course you will have to do everything possible to correct both the problem and mitigate the negative fallout, but your reservoir of social goodwill may soften the worst blowback and keep you in business.

Social Media ROI

There are so many ways an effective social program contributes a return on investment (ROI). Here are a few that immediately come to mind:

1. Saves time and speeds processes, especially customer-oriented processes
2. Reduces overhead—maybe this is the result of number one, but here it is nonetheless
3. Increases customer and employee retention
4. Increases sales efficiency—how much does it cost to acquire and keep a customer?
5. Expands customer relationships and increase lifetime value, including upsell and cross-sell
6. Drives organic growth—growth that you cultivate and nurture internally and externally
7. Fuels innovation—by making it easy to share ideas
8. Enables efficient collaboration—see #7
9. Enhances brand appeal, profitability, and efficiency

I can't tell you the specific ROI Bluewolf has achieved from its social initiatives, but I can tell you this: our marketing budget grows at a slower rate than our revenue. Why? Because our social programs have tapped into latent, and free, knowledge in our organization that would otherwise stay internal and need to be recreated through traditional marketing efforts. Social, through something like our Prime program, taps into deep organizational knowledge and exposes it to our customers. It minimizes the refraction that typically happens when a marketing or sales organization attempts to communicate the benefits of a product or service.

I once had a conversation with someone at a Nike store and asked them about a specific running shoe. That person spoke of the features of the shoe at a high level. It sounded like the pitch for any running shoe I have ever looked at. But then the sales rep walked me to a video console and clicked on a simple YouTube video. On it, this particular shoe's designer spoke of its merits while holding it in her hand. She went deeper than any well-trained sales rep could ever go. The video was a little raw. She held the shoe in her hand. She held up a drawing of the shoe's design. Most important, she spoke passionately about it. She truly believed this shoe was best suited for a 45-year-old man with creaky knees. I bought the shoe. That knowledge was free to Nike. And it created engagement beyond what any marketing department could ever recreate.

One last point: The hardest part of social business is sustaining it and keeping it fresh. This is a constant creative challenge, and one I lose a certain amount of sleep over. Social business and your visitors are changing constantly. You never want to allow your social culture to go stale.

This really means keeping your content—your posts and tweets and blogs and any other content—fresh, engaging, and above all, current. Like social itself, your customers and other stakeholders are changing all the time, and they expect you to keep up. You want your social audience to always find something new, something interesting. It doesn't have to be earthshaking, just different. At Bluewolf we probably refresh various content a dozen times a day, often little more than a few new tweets. People here earn gamification points for doing it, which motivates them to come up with new material periodically. The goals of the effort are to keep your audience coming back and to keep them excited about your company and what you are doing. Yes, it takes time and effort, but you don't need that much new material to keep your social experience fresh. The cost, actually, can be quite minimal, but the payback will be more than worth it.