INTRODUCTION

If there’s one thing you can count on in life, it’s the bandwagon. You can see it everywhere, in almost every aspect of culture. On television, whenever one network finds a hit series, you can count the weeks until the other networks come out with something similar. (Witness the explosion of reality TV, for example.) In football, when a team wins the Super Bowl with a particular style of play, you can be assured that next season another team or two will be running similar offenses. Have you ever noticed how a team suddenly gets more fans when it starts to win? We all know people who discovered their “lifelong love” of the Boston Red Sox in 2004 or bought Miami Heat jerseys as soon as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh signed their contracts there.

When the bandwagon phenomenon extends into the business world, it usually results in a rush of companies trying to either (a) duplicate another’s success with a particular concept or process or (b) show themselves to be “innovative” by their use of the latest tools, technologies, or concepts. From Six Sigma to Total Quality Management to Knowledge Management, business history is full of concepts that spurred cottage industries, with squadrons of consultants lining up to help willing businesses adopt the latest concept, model, or practice.

Social media is no different. In the past five years, new communications platforms and networks have emerged whose adoption numbers dwarf those of the media that came before them—and the speed at which these platforms and networks emerge can scare the hell out of most marketing and communications departments. As Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Foursquare have attracted millions of users and boatloads of media attention, companies still struggling to adjust or react to the emergence of blogs now feel even more overwhelmed by the speed, size, and magnitude of the changes wrought by social media. It’s downright scary to many of us—especially when we realize that customers now expect us to be not only present within the social Web but also aware, responsive, and engaged.

The sense of imminent change, the reality of consumers taking control of branding and reputation, and the fear of being seen as behind the times have made “social media strategy” one of the hottest specialties in marketing and communications. And predictably, social media “experts” have popped up like mushrooms on a forest floor. Hundreds of agencies and consultants knock at the doors of companies and organizations around the world, proposing programs and emphasizing the urgency of developing a solid social media strategy.

Now, it should be said that there are a lot of very smart social media consultants out there. I’m a fan of Geoff Livingston, Valeria Maltoni, Jeremiah Owyang, David Meerman Scott, Mitch Joel, Olivier Blanchard, Shel Holtz, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, and Chris Brogan, among others, and consider many of them friends. I read their blogs often, and I’ve learned from them.

But telling a company from the outside what it should do is one thing; actually making it happen from the inside is quite another.

Over the past seven years, I’ve had the good fortune to lead social media efforts at General Motors and IBM. At IBM, we built a company-wide blogging and podcasting effort that came to include more than 3,000 employees by the time I left—at a time when Facebook was only for college students, when Twitter didn’t exist, and when most of the media and big businesses stereotyped the average blogger as “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”¹ At General Motors, I not only had the chance to build the company’s social media program from the ground up but also led GM’s presence in social networks through its tumultuous decline into, and eventually its successful emergence from, Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At both companies, the programs I led won industry awards and earned positive recognition from the PR, marketing, and business media as being among the best in business use of social media.

I know from that experience and from talking to friends and social media counterparts at other big companies that there can be a lot of frustration when social media “experts” talk about transparency and engagement without realizing some of the barriers a corporate client might face. There’s some exasperation out there about how frequently we’re pitched with social media strategies by people who don’t recognize the real costs of executing them or what a client may face when trying to win support for them within the company. If you’re in a position of trying to manage or build a social program at a big organization, this may sound familiar.

Unfortunately, the broad changes in both tactics and mindset necessary for social Web success are often crippled by institutional and cultural resistance. Legal compliance, policy changes, HR buy-in, and the traditionally contentious relationship between marketing and PR are all obstacles that must be overcome. And if you haven’t been inside a company or organization—if you don’t know corporate culture and bureaucracy, or have no experience navigating internal minefields—then you don’t know how to make social media work inside a company. It doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers you have, how many people read your blog, or how sound your ideas are.

Why This Book

There are two things I want to say to you if you have this book in your hands right now. The first is a simple “Thank you.” I’m a big believer in expressing gratitude, and I don’t think people hear it enough.

The second thing I want you to know is that I’m assuming that I know something about you, about why this book interested you among all the others that are out there regarding social media. (Or the “social Web.” Or the “real-time Web.” Or, God forbid, “Web 2.0.” There are as many names for this stuff as there are for carbonated sugar beverages.)

• You work in communications or marketing leadership for a large organization—maybe even a Fortune 500 company—and want to ramp up your organization’s social media presence and programs.

• You work in communications or marketing at one of these large organizations but in the rank and file; you’re one of the doers as well as one of the thinkers, and your leadership has started putting some pressure on you to develop a social media strategy for your company.

• You’re considering a job offer from a big organization to lead the development of its social media program or are about to be given that responsibility. You might know social media very well or be only vaguely familiar with anything beyond Facebook—but either way, you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to build this ark for your organization.

• You’re with a PR or marketing agency with big corporate or organizational clients. Maybe your agency has proposed social media campaigns for your client, only to have them rejected or resisted. Maybe your client is asking for big social media ideas. Or maybe you’re just reading the tea leaves and realizing that you’re going to need to start including social media ideas in your pitches. Whatever the case, you’re wondering what pitches your client may like or accept, why ideas that you think are surefire winners don’t seem to go anywhere with the client or die somewhere inside the client’s walls, and what you need to build into your pitches that will get you closer to winning client buy-in.

If you’re one of the people I just mentioned, the realities of your social media existence are different from the realities faced by an individual practitioner or consultant. For you, winning at social media isn’t just about being first to adopt the next big thing, or coming up with a killer idea, or even being transparent and human. Doing your job well means playing the Game of Internal Politics well enough to enable you to take advantage of those great lightbulb-over-your-head moments or the really creative ideas that some expert, consultant, or agency brings to you. For you, winning means playing the corporate game, gaining the right internal converts at the right time, and building the right infrastructure inside the organization. Your job requires that you recognize that demands and expectations of big companies—and even laws governing their behavior—are different from those for individuals or small shops.

My hope for this book is to help you navigate those demands and expectations—to help you understand the mechanics of corporate social media and help you develop a strategy that works for all the stakeholders present in a bigger organization. The experience I’ve had at two Fortune 20 companies can work for you and help you put the pieces in place for success before you start building. I’ve learned quite a bit in the past seven years, much of it through trial and error, about how to personally represent a big brand in the social Web; those lessons are here, too. What you’ll find in these pages isn’t theory or outside analysis or utopian proclamations of what should be; it’s the counsel of someone who’s been there—more than once—and who’s succeeded in the job you’re probably faced with if you’re reading this book.

I’m not going to spell out some magical genius foolproof formula for how to build a legendary social media campaign. Every campaign and every company is different. You could no more copy a social media strategy template from the automotive industry and apply it verbatim to your industry than you could take the formula for successfully launching a new car model and apply it to launching a new flavor of potato chips. There is no exact recipe for social media success any more than there is a one-size-fits-all formula for success with traditional marketing programs. In the immortal words of Westley from The Princess Bride, “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

In this new media environment, a new social network, platform, or technology seems to emerge pretty much every month. What seems like the most innovative strategy one day quickly becomes standard practice. Having a brand presence on Twitter in 2008 made you a leader; by 2009 if you didn’t have one, you were behind the curve. Using QR codes in 2010 was innovative; in 2011 everyone’s done them, and proudly boasting of your cutting-edge new campaign with QR codes will get you yawned at, laughed at, or both for the claim. If you want to lead in social media, you’ve got to get comfortable with constantly evolving your tactics and never having an “in stone” strategy or playbook.

But there are some general principles and steps you can take to increase your odds of success. I’ve been fortunate to get to know many of the people who’ve built leading social media programs at other companies—Richard Binhammer and Manish Mehta at Dell, Zena Weist at H&R Block, Ekaterina Walter at Intel, Scott Monty at Ford, Paula Berg (who built Southwest Airlines’ program), Michael Donnelly at Coca-Cola, and many others. Many of us talk to each other at conferences, via e-mail, or on Face-book, sharing the experiences, challenges, and rewards of leading a brand’s social presence—and a pattern has emerged from these collective experiences.

Lucky Seven: The Seven Elements to a Winning Social Media Program

A few years ago, when the first companies began to experiment in social media, there wasn’t a template or blueprint for putting together a winning presence in the social Web. People like Frank Eliason, then at Comcast, were able by virtue of their mere participation in conversations and networks to establish their company’s reputation as a social media leader—and their stories gave rise to the legend of the lone visionary, pounding away at his keyboard, posting comments on blogs, engaging with people on Twitter, joining discussion threads on Facebook, and single-handedly pushing his company into the twenty-first century of communications and marketing.

I’m not sure that the mythology of the lone visionary was ever entirely accurate, but if it was, that time has most certainly passed. The social Web has matured too far and grown too big—and companies’ presence alone is no longer enough of a surprise to win favor.

Organizational social media programs are no longer an experiment; they are a facet of every company’s go-to-market strategy. And for something that’s now as basic as media buys or a PR strategy, you can’t make it up on the fly. You’ve got to cover all the bases, get organized, and be strategic about how you build the capability inside your organization.

It’s been my experience that there are seven elements to a winning corporate or organizational social media program—elements vital to the development of a long-term, strategic initiative capable of not just a winning campaign but also sustained success over time:

• An executive champion inside the organization who, while perhaps not directly involved in executing social media programs, fully endorses the organization’s involvement in it and provides internal support for the program and its leader

• Understanding and consensus within the company as to which part of the organization (i.e., communications, marketing, Web development, etc.) will “own” social media and set the strategic direction for the company’s social media program

• A strong social media evangelist who leads the strategic and day-to-day execution of a company’s social media initiatives and who not only is a social media expert but also has the power and resources to develop and execute programs as well as build the overall strategy

• A well-articulated set of metrics that define a company’s expectations and objectives for its social media program and what success looks like as well as tangible measurements to track its progress and effectiveness

• A smooth partnership between the organization’s social media team and its legal department, a working relationship in which neither side sees the other as “the enemy” but rather one in which both work together on social media programs and meeting their objectives

• A well-articulated social media policy that is widely communicated to the organization’s employees and may even be made available to consumers and observers

• A comprehensive education program that trains the organization’s employees not just on the social media policy but also on the technologies and platforms of the social Web, on how to handle specific kinds of situations in social networks, and on the expectations that both audiences and the company have of them within those networks

In the next few chapters, I’m going to explore each of these in detail.

Every program is different, and much of your success depends on factors unique to your organization: the product you’re trying to sell, the brand you’re building awareness for, and the personalities of the people you have executing your program. But while there are many variables to social media success, these seven elements are the constants, the ones that underpin the most successful programs I’ve observed. Incorporate all of them, and you’ve got all the right ingredients in place for a successful social media program. Miss or underperform on any of them, and your program is flawed and wounded from the outset, either preventing it from living up to its fullest potential in a best-case scenario or setting you up for significant failure in a worst-case scenario.

In Chapters 10 through 13, I’ll identify some things you need to know—guidelines that should underlie every campaign or effort you undertake: how to work effectively with bloggers, how to drive social media success even if you don’t have a huge budget, and what to do when things go wrong. These are just as important to success as building the right infrastructure inside your organization.

Take the process of cooking a gourmet meal. You can be really gifted in the kitchen, but if you don’t have the right ingredients, you’re not going to be able to make beef Wellington. Likewise, if you don’t know sugar from salt, then having all the right ingredients won’t help you. You also have to understand the basic principles of cooking—which seasonings and spices work well together, which flavors amuse the palate and which will clash, and what to cook in which order to get the meal just right.

Your social media initiative is very much the same. In order to succeed, you’ll need both the right elements and enough gut sense to make a lot of things up on the fly. What we’re doing in this book is preparing you for your social media gourmet meal. The seven elements are your basic ingredients; without them, you won’t be cooking the dish you want. The guidelines are your principles; understanding them will help you improvise, create signature flavors for your program, and cope with disaster should it arise.

To keep with the cooking analogy, you need to be able to experiment confidently—but more important, you also need to be OK with having some of those experiments ending up tasting awful. It’s the only way you learn. It’s the only way I’ve learned. When I was leading social initiatives at IBM and General Motors, I didn’t have that confidence or knowledge going in to building the programs I’ve worked on. In fact, more than a few of the recommendations I’m including in this book are things we didn’t do at GM when I had the chance to build a program from the ground up. That’s how I learned that they’re things you should do!

Social media is not even a decade old. We’re all still learning and adding to the canon. No one, not even those of us who’ve been doing this for a few years, can claim to have it “nailed” so well that we can’t still learn to be even more effective.

But for now, every journey of a thousand miles begins with just a few steps. So it’s into the conference room we go—because your bosses are waiting, your customers are waiting, and you have miles to go before you sleep.