CHAPTER 4
THE SOCIAL MEDIA EVANGELIST
When most people think of social media at big brands, let’s face it: the social media evangelist is usually who comes to mind. The work of Richard Binhammer and Lionel Menchaca at Dell, Paula Berg’s work at Southwest Airlines, Scott Monty’s at Ford, and Frank Eliason’s at Comcast are often what comes to mind whenever people think of “social media at big brands.” (Maybe, if I’m lucky, you even thought of me and my work at GM and IBM. Since you’re reading my book, I kind of hope so!)
It can seem like a glamorous position. Those who represent a big brand within the social Web get to be the “human face” of a large organization to millions of people online. Their Twitter responses are much coveted, thousands (or tens or even hundreds of thousands) of people read their blogs, and they are invited to speak at social media conferences around the world.
I’ll admit that the flashier elements of being a company’s social media lead are pretty exciting. But the exciting stuff is not even half of the job—and sometimes, the job isn’t very fun at all. If you’re the social media lead at a company that does something unpopular with the public, online audiences will turn to you, whether you had anything to do with the activity or not. (In fact, your role is sometimes to publicly defend an action or decision that you specifically advised against in the behind-the-scenes meetings.) And the public part of the job is only a small piece of the role of social media leader; you’ll spend more time in meeting rooms than on conference floors, talk more frequently to your in-house colleagues than to online influencers, and have your greatest victories and defeats inside the walls of the company where none of the social media in-crowd and no marketing publications will ever see or know much about what you accomplished. Still think it sounds glamorous?
Big brands, too, suffer from organizational misperceptions when it comes to the role and job of a social media leader. It’s not quite as simple as hiring someone to write a few blog entries on the company website or putting a customer service agent on Facebook. It’s not even as simple as finding someone to create great videos or content and push it into social networks. You can’t just put any old marketing or communications person into the social Web and think it’s going to make your brand a leader in the space. There’s a unique set of skills that goes into being a great social media leader within a big brand, a combination of business savvy, a common touch, marketing sense, common sense, and a little bit of geek—ideally all in the same package and absent an overdeveloped ego.
A successful social media leader inside a big organization is much, much more than just a community manager. It’s more than having a quick wit, displaying a magnetic personality, and being more fun than people expected for someone who works for a big company—though personality is critical to success, because the social media leader’s role is still significantly about evangelizing. To audiences outside the company, the evangelist is winning converts to your brand—in an environment and through channels that can be hostile to the presence of brands in general and most definitely do not want to be marketed or sold to (at least in traditional ways).
To audiences inside the company, the evangelist wins converts to the idea that these channels matter, that they should be taken seriously, that a positive hit in Mashable can sometimes be as valuable as one in the Wall Street Journal, and that the organization should invest as much time in winning over an Indiana mom with a blog as a reporter for the local paper, or spend as much money in reaching an audience of “Internet geeks” as it spends reaching television viewers or magazine readers. Make no mistake: the most important job of a social media leader is sales—the selling of new ideas and new ways of perceiving a brand or its products or services. That’s why it’s still safe to call this person an “evangelist” inside your organization, even if a social media presence has long since been established there.
All the same, it’s important for everyone to remember that the evangelist and her personality are not in and of themselves a brand’s presence in social media—at least they shouldn’t be. The brand—and the evangelist herself—must maintain proper perspective on that person, her job, and the role the brand needs her to play. Having a “social media rock star” on board might well be a great start if the person’s a fit for the brand. But she should not be the beginning, middle, and end of what the brand does in social.
Employing someone who’s very good at social media is not the same as having a very good social media program. This is an important distinction that too often is missed by brands and organizations until it’s too late—when they watch most of their relationships and social media equity walk away when their rock star takes a new job with another brand. You’re not looking for a social media rock star as much as a business leader who is equally adroit inside your walls as outside—someone with the brand not just to represent it online but also to build social media into a business practice within that company. If that person happens to become well known and well respected in the industry as a result of her work, that’s OK—but it’s the work and not the renown that is most important.
That said, the person charged with being a brand’s social media evangelist is going to be the most important person in its program. She’s likely going to be the person most associated with the brand within social networks, the person whom influencers within the social Web reach out to with opportunities for the brand, and the one most often representing the brand at social media conferences and events. Most important, however, she will be the person helping the company or organization effectively blend the social Web into its marketing, communications, and customer service strategies. She will be the one setting the direction from behind the curtain, teaching the rest of the organization how to do social media well and ensuring that its efforts make both social media sense and sense for the business.
We’ll spend the rest of this chapter going through some of the characteristics a good social media leader or evangelist needs to possess and the roles or responsibilities she should have or be given if she is to make your brand successful. You might recognize yourself in this description if you aspire to represent a big brand; you might recognize someone in your organization if you’re thinking you need to hire one. Or, you might see someone you’re interviewing or hoping to interview. If you’re applying to be a brand’s social media lead, you should know what your prospective employers should be looking for from you. If you’re hiring, this section will give you a better sense of what characteristics distinguish a strong candidate from weaker ones.
The Great Lead Is Actively Involved in Networks
That active involvement in networks is necessary might sound obvious. After all, you wouldn’t put someone in charge of your broadcast strategy who doesn’t even own a TV, right? But you’d be surprised how many companies look at social media as simply another channel to market in and turn the keys of their program over to marketers or PR people who barely use their Facebook page, have a protected Twitter account (if they have one at all), and wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to start a blog. If a company’s social media leader isn’t active in online communities, the company will never understand the community dynamics so vital to social media success. How do you know what online audiences want from your brand if you’re not talking with them regularly? How do you know if people didn’t like something you did if you’re not in the networks listening to them? How can you expect to have credibility with online audiences if the person calling the shots isn’t even active online? How will your social media evangelist have a sense of what’s coming “next” and what your brand should be exploring and experimenting with—would you rather have her hearing it from conversations she has with influencers and members of the online community who know her or hearing it second-, third-, or fourthhand from an agency or underling?
There’s another reason having your social lead active in the networks is so important: accountability. Hopefully, your efforts in social media will be well received and appreciated by the communities you reach out to. But on the occasions when you do something that the online audience doesn’t like, they’re going to let you know about it—and the people responsible for the idea ought to be the ones to hear the feedback. As David Puner puts it, “If you did it, you have to be the one out there to take the heat for it.”1
It’s not fair to put a community manager out there to bear the brunt of a community’s frustration or disapproval with something conceived by someone else. More important, online audiences expect that kind of accountability from brands. It’s a basic issue of credibility to have the person or people formulating your social media strategy involved in these networks and interacting frequently with the communities they’re attempting to reach.
But a social media leader needs other skills too—so your brand’s evangelist doesn’t always have to come from the social media world in order to be effective. It’s entirely possible for someone in the corporate or organizational house to build a winning program— if he is willing to take some chances, listen to audiences, and adjust his thinking where necessary. At the end of the day, organizational success in social media is about skills and instincts, not whether you came to the table as an outsider or an insider.
There are people who just “get” people, who understand how to relate to others—not as “an audience” or “a consumer group” to be pandered to, talked down to, or sold to but as fellow human beings deserving of respect and as peers within a conversation. These people are the ones being sought out at conferences, being paid handsomely by organizations to consult with them, who acquire followings on Twitter and within Facebook, and whose blogs and books are read by hundreds of thousands (or even millions). But they don’t have some alchemist’s formula for turning pixels into gold or possess a mystical secret knowledge that turns them into prophets or maharishis. They just have a skill set that has become the most critical in today’s environment and a talent for sharing what comes naturally to them.
Many of the people with these skills can be found within large companies, corporations, and organizations, often somewhere in the communications and marketing departments. They went into these professions because they’re extroverts, they enjoy interactions with people, and they could be rewarded for their ability to be persuasive. They’re not called “social media experts,” because they don’t present themselves as such or ply their trade as a free agent working for whoever is willing to pay for what they know. But they possess the same talents and have the same ability to transform an organization if given the chance.
Take Lindsay Lebresco’s situation at Graco. Lindsay built up a strong following within the online parenting community and earned a great deal of customer loyalty and affinity for Graco during her two-year stint as its social media leader. But she didn’t come into Graco from the outside as a rebel determined to shake up the corporate culture; she already worked for Graco when the company launched its social program.
In the summer of 2007, Graco started making plans for the upcoming year. Lindsay was the public relations manager at the time. She recalls, “Who would manage ‘social media’ was up in the air, being tossed between myself and a woman working on the e-marketing team. Some believed it should be handled within the online marketing department because after all, this thing that was being called ‘social media’ was done online. But I fought for the position truly believing that this was a communications initiative versus an online marketing initiative—after all, this job would entail speaking on behalf of the company directly to our consumers. Who was best trained to do that job, and who could best connect to consumers?”2
At Dell, Richard Binhammer was working in the public affairs department when he got the call to help lead Dell’s emerging social media program—much to his surprise. “This was not a job I asked for,” he remembers. “I had to go to Wikipedia to look up what social media even was.”3 Five years later, Dell’s program is commonly cited among the best brand social media programs going, and Richard is in high demand as a speaker on his company’s experiences and perspective.
Age and Wisdom > Youth and Inexperience
I’m assuming that if you’re reading this book, no matter where you sit in your company—or if you work at an agency supporting a client inside a big organization, how high up the chain your client sits—your organization takes social media seriously enough to want to do it right. So why, why, why would you put an intern or junior employee in the lead of the program or as the primary online presence? When the organization built its other significant practices and functions—marketing, communications, HR, legal, finance—did you put an intern in charge? Would you have a rookie with a few weeks’ experience calling the New York Times to pitch a story about your CEO? Both those scenarios seem so ridiculous that you probably dismissed them as exaggerations—but hundreds of organizations still act as if social media is either a “young person’s thing” or not serious business, and they make the Facebook page or Twitter account an intern’s summer project.
But think about how visible that role is and how quickly word can spread when a mistake is made online. (I’ll talk more about that in Chapter 12 when we discuss Kenneth Cole and other notable social media screwups.) Do you really want to put an intern or someone junior whose professional judgment is still developing into a role in which a bad decision, uninformed comment, or flippant response could have seriously negative ramifications for your brand?
Social media, and particularly community management, is not a job to just dismissively pawn off to the “kids” in the office. It’s true that many very good brand representatives in the social space are, relatively speaking, junior in their organizations and in the early stages of their careers. But that doesn’t mean that every program should automatically be turned over to the Gen Y-er in the cube down the hall. Your online representative is going to have a significant impact on how your brand is perceived and respected by sizable portions of your audience and potentially millions of your customers. Recognize the importance of that role when you’re choosing to assign it, or your choice will come back to bite you.
But an organization’s social media evangelist is not just its community manager. The role of the social media evangelist is much more than just representing the brand or organization online. In fact, in many ways, the public part of the job is the less important aspect of the evangelist’s role.
Having a Business Outlook Is Critical
I emphasize having a business outlook. That doesn’t always mean having a business background, though having some experience in business obviously contributes to someone’s ability to see things through a business prism. But whether she comes from the social world or from business, the person setting a brand’s social media strategy has to act as a businessperson utilizing social media rather than a social media person using social tactics first and retrofitting the business part. An evangelist needs to set goals for the program that reflect the goals of the business, beyond the nebulous metrics of creating “buzz,” acquiring Facebook fans, and generating Twitter followers. That means developing social programs with more in mind than the social media buzzwords of “engaging” and “joining the conversation” and thinking more about what happens after you’ve gotten engaged and what you want from the conversations you’re having.
Social media should not be about fluffy, feel-good, high-minded talk about how we can all connect to one another and how we can humanize our brands. That’s a table-setter, yes—humanizing your brand is one of the main goals of a social engagement program. But the whole point of doing so is to build better relationships with customers or potential customers. Businesses hope that through this engagement, people come to feel better about being their customers—so the evangelist is still ultimately there to drive sales.
In the real world, if a guy gets engaged but never follows through with an actual marriage, the girl is going to get tired of waiting and will give him his ring back and go find someone else. Never forget that the purpose of having a business in the social Web is to go beyond engagement to an actual marriage of some sort—positive buzz is nice, but ultimately buzz doesn’t pay the bills.
Aren’t you looking to see a purchase (or a donation or specific action if you’re a nonprofit) made by someone after either seeing you or talking with you online or by someone who read something written by an influencer you’ve built a relationship with? How does the buzz a company generates translate to business results? A brand evangelist must have some sort of an eye toward those goals and must be able to set up metrics of success that measure both online buzz and any impact on sales or actions resulting from that buzz. Get engaged, but do so with that eventual marriage in mind.
An evangelist will need to be able to make decisions based on what makes sense for the business as opposed to just what makes sense in social media. For example, there are dozens of social media–related conferences and online community gatherings that happen every year—and once word gets out that an organization is actively involved in the social space, it will likely be peppered with requests for support, to sponsor individuals to attend conferences, for its products at the event, and even to sponsor conferences or events themselves.
In itself, this isn’t bad—smart involvement in events and with bloggers helps get word out within social communities about a company’s program and begins to establish the brand among the leaders in the social space. But in the wrong hands or without business strategies in mind, it’s easy to fall into the trap of getting involved with social media events, conferences, or influencers for the sake of generating social media buzz or attention, accumulating follower counts, and ratcheting up your Klout score rather than driving your business goals. It’s true that a smart, well-executed PR or marketing activation or program at a social media event can get a brand and its products coverage in Mashable or might even make the brand a trending topic on Twitter. But unless you’ve reached the target market for your product or brand and somehow affected their attitudes or behavior, online buzz is just buzz. If you haven’t got a map for what that buzz will get you or how you’re going to build on it with your core audience, it’s a wasted opportunity—and the impact of the program won’t be nearly as strong as it might look on the surface thanks to all those impressive-sounding numbers.
It’s better to say no to a few good conferences or bloggers in favor or focusing on the events that best fit your target demographic and the audience for your product. This might mean a handful fewer speaking opportunities for your evangelist or fewer mentions online of your brand as a superstar brand within social media circles. But when weighing the costs of social engagement, what’s worse: a couple of small potential opportunities missed because you were trying to be deliberate in your social involvement or exhausting your limited social media resources on misaligned opportunities of debatable benefit to your brand and running low on budget or product when something really solid comes along? A good social media brand evangelist will have the strategic mindset, foresight, and fortitude to recognize that success isn’t just about saying yes. It’s also about saying no at the right times.
Business savvy doesn’t just come into play when you’re considering external efforts, however. Ideally, the social media evangelist will demonstrate enough communications or marketing expertise to be seen as a legitimate counsel for non-social media efforts as well. Whether sitting in communications or marketing, the social media evangelist should be respected as a knowing and able practitioner whose instincts are as solid in traditional communications or marketing work as in the newer social networks. The head of communications, marketing, customer service, or any other function must have confidence in the social evangelist’s instincts—and the evangelist can earn this by providing solid advice or input into broader discussions. (Admittedly, this assumes the evangelist was given the chance to provide such advice or input.)
Showing Some Online Skin
I’m of course not suggesting that the way to be an effective brand representative online is to literally show skin. But a successful brand evangelist in social media will need to be comfortable revealing some personal details about herself. This involves talking to online audiences about subjects of mutual interest, sharing experiences that make her relatable to real people, and winning people within social networks over by being more than just a brand rep but a friendly figure with whom they have something in common. The really good brand representatives aren’t just “comfortable” with expressing some personality while doing their jobs—they thrive on it.
Lindsay Lebresco, reminiscing about her time at Graco, recalls that “part of the reason I loved my job so much was that I could simply be myself—a new mom with two children under two years old. I talked about being a mom, I connected with Graco’s consumers over talks about our sleepless nights, breast-feeding discussions, teething questions—and oh yeah, product discussions. Because I used them too—I needed a swing to soothe my fussy baby just like they did.”4 Lindsay was certainly an effective representative for her brand—no one was unaware of whom she represented or that she was joining communities as Graco’s social media person. But she earned that effectiveness by not just talking about her products or company but by being relatable and being herself, and talking about the things her intended audience was also interested in.
This openness and the dropping of the professional “shield” can make some employers nervous. There’s still a mind-set out there that “professionalism” dictates that there are things you don’t talk about with customers. You’re going to have to get over that if you want your organization to have an effective presence in social networks. Frankly, audiences can get commercials and straight-up brand messaging in lots of other channels. They’re in social networks specifically for the personal aspect. A skilled evangelist will be able to artfully blend those brand messages into her online conversations without losing that personal touch—but it’s that personal touch that usually ends up helping the brand!
Of course, it’s not just employers who can get uncomfortable with employees sharing personal stories or details of their personalities; many people prefer to keep some distance between their “real” lives and professional acquaintances. That’s fine for most professional roles—but not for a social media brand evangelist. The reality and demands of this kind of a position require a comfort level with sharing pieces of yourself with total strangers online—for the benefit of the brand that’s employing you. Anyone uncomfortable with that is not in the right line of business.
Walking the Line
All that said, there is a boundary—not necessarily for what gets shared, but for how much personal ownership can be claimed of a brand’s presence online. A brand social media evangelist and strategist is by definition in a very odd and challenging position. On one hand, they are asked to use their personality as a selling tool for the brand—to put themselves online and into social networks and communities as the face of the brand, helping to humanize the company to customers and potential customers. On the other, while their most valuable asset is their own personality, evangelists can never forget that they are in these networks for the benefit of the brand, not for their own personal reputation. This means having to understand and walk an undefined line between revealing enough of themselves and their personality to be effective but keeping in mind that their goal is still to promote the brand. In other words, you need someone in this position who’s not susceptible to being overcome by her own ego and who isn’t likely to start reading too much of her own press.
Zena Weist of H&R Block defines it nicely. “The most important characteristic of the brand’s social media leader is to think like a renter,” she says. “Do not have any ownership issues. Do not try to build a social media empire that you claim yourself emperor of. It will fail. Realize that what is being built is for the brand, its customers, and all stakeholders. If you try to own social media, the empire will come a-tumbling down … on you, poof!”5
Despite building the brand’s presence in social networks in part on her own personality, the evangelist does not define the brand online. Forgetting this can doom your evangelist’s effectiveness for your brand. One of the tricks to choosing a great social brand evangelist is finding an individual who is willing to use her personality to win fans for your brands but is also able to do so without investing so much of her own ego into it that she begins to see the effort as hers instead of the brand’s. If you have aspirations of being in one of those corporate social evangelist jobs, you have to accept that when the program goes well, the brand should get the credit—but if things go south, it’s on you and not the brand. Still think it’s a glamorous job?
Willingness to Place Equal Focus on the Internal Part of the Role
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, being the social media lead for a big brand is more than being a good community manager. In many ways, the most important elements of the job happen internally. Many brands haven’t really fully embraced social media with much fervor yet. As much work as an evangelist has on the outside of the company in social networks trying to win hearts and minds for a brand, she has just as much to do inside the organization. She must persuade employees—not to mention managers, executives, and even the CEO—not only to get involved in social media but also to do it the right way.
In some organizations, there may still be resistance to engaging in social media. That’s certainly the popular conception, anyway—the intrepid social media visionary forging ahead against internal resistance in order to make things happen or trying to talk reluctant leadership into embracing the new world. Some of that is still around, and even when leadership hires an evangelist and empowers that person to start doing social media well, there will still be pockets of the organization that don’t want to acknowledge the importance of online influencers.
But these skeptics are increasingly an endangered species. These days, all but the most hardened disbelievers have been forced to acknowledge social media’s staying power and influence. As we discussed in the last chapter, the greater challenge is that now that social media has achieved greater acceptance in the business world, multiple people inside multiple functions will think they know how to do it. And that’s where the social evangelist’s job inside the company becomes critical—she serves as a linchpin, keeping consistency, maintaining order, and herding the cats. A successful social media evangelist is adept at convincing marketing and communications peers that the evangelist’s vision is strong, addresses the needs of the business, and will work when given the chance.
Knows How—and Is Willing—to Delegate
A social media evangelist has to be a little bit of a manager as well, because no matter how good a person might be, no one person can go it alone or be up 24 hours a day. To successfully lead a social media initiative at a big brand, a social media lead needs to be comfortable turning over at least some of the community management to others. It might be tough for some to do, but a social media evangelist needs to accept that her value to her organization comes as much from her administrative ability as her creativity.
I’ll be the first one to confess that I’ve occasionally struggled with that reality. As is true of most people who’ve achieved some success in social media, being out in the middle of all the action—out in the communities we’re trying to reach, interacting with real people, unleashing some creativity, and rolling our sleeves up to execute a program and get stuff done—is what I like best about having a social media job. That, after all, is the most fun part of social media and of being a brand’s social media evangelist. It’s the glamorous part that most people think of when they think of someone serving as a brand’s human face within the online world.
But anyone spending all her time with external communities is neglecting the very real responsibilities of actually building a program. If, as a social media lead, you want to be seen as more than a community manager by your superiors and fellow employees, you need to do more than just manage your brand’s presence in online communities. If you expect to actually win support for social media initiatives and get them adequately resourced to execute them to their fullest potential, you cannot overlook the processes and organizational politics that are needed behind the scenes—where no one is watching and that no one writes articles or blog posts about.
The bulk of the work of a social media leader within an organization will be spent in conference rooms and on conference calls. This isn’t really unique to social media, especially at a large organization. Your head of communications delegates much of the media relations activities to the rest of the communications team and spends much of her time working with senior leadership and setting the communications strategy for the organization, and your head of marketing doesn’t spend most of his days writing the creative for a new campaign—he has a team of people developing it for his approval after giving them a sense of the direction he wants it to go. A good deal of a business leader’s time is also spent administering the function, grooming underlings for future promotion and success, ensuring that each part of the business is on board and informed as to the strategic direction the leader has set, and mediating any disputes or disagreements that arise.
So it’s only natural that, as social media matures as a legitimate business function and profession, its top people will spend increasing amounts of time off-line. Social media purists might decry this as a bastardization of the original promise of social, but I disagree. It’s actually a sign of the maturity of social that leading it requires someone equally adept at administration and mastering internal politics as interacting online or building relationships with people in social networks. Think about spending all that time in meetings with the brand marketing teams to identify brand target audiences, reviewing core messaging, meeting with legal to discuss proposed changes to the social media policy, persuading reluctant leadership to sign off on an idea that makes them uncomfortable and that they find too risky … or even trying to flesh out such an idea with a cadre of collaborators. It may not sound as exciting or fun as being online and interacting with people on Twitter, going to conferences to speak on behalf of your brand, or running a program at a major social media conference, but it’s an increasingly vital part of social media leadership. All those core characteristics of other marketing and communications leaders are needed in social media leaders, too. If social is to be treated seriously as a practice within your organization, its leader must behave as other leaders do: focusing as much on internal structures as external, as much on paperwork and process as on interacting with the outside world.
(Please note that this emphatically does not mean that a brand’s social media leaders can remove themselves—or be removed—from external networks altogether. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, it’s critically important that they retain regular touch points and interaction with online communities. It just can’t be the whole of their job—nor really even the majority of it as the program matures.)
Ultimately, the person placed as the leading social media voice in any organization is the most critical element of all when determining whether its social initiatives will succeed or fail and whether they will be considered innovative or mediocre. She’ll be the most visible online face a brand has—and the most visible in-house representative of social media it has as well. If the person selected is someone who has too much of a focus on external communities, the brand risks building a social media program centered too much on one personality and one person’s presence. Its social program will be little more than community management. Choose someone who has too great a focus on internal process and procedures and syncing too closely to traditional marketing or communications, and the company risks building a social media program that is little more than an extension of its traditional marketing or communications—a program that is not truly social, only digital. Social implies two-way interaction and relationship building; digital is simply taking content and putting it online or into social networks in an effort to “get your message out.”
But if the brand chooses wisely, hiring someone with the right mix of social and business savvy—someone who can charm and wow a crowd at a social event, disarm an online critic with wit and empathy, teach others inside the organization, and elevate both the company’s and her own visibility online while remaining a smart business strategist who always keeps business goals and the bottom line in mind—it’ll have a winner.
It might sound like a tall order, but the right people are out there. If you’re the business, finding one is the most important decision you’ll make as your program develops. If you’re the evangelist, your job is to be that person and find the right balance between social and digital, external and internal, strategy and tactics, relationships and business goals. If you’re successful, you’ll win converts—external converts to your brand and internal converts to your vision for social media success.
Can I get an Amen?