Social Media & Corporate Marketing/PR

In the latest Marketing Voices podcast, Jennifer Jones talks to Comrade's Thelton McMillian about How Social Media is Impacting the Corporate Marketing and PR Functions. (It's a quick listen, by the way, and I highly recommend it).

The discussion was based on research that Comrade recently conducted, the results of which are pretty interesting. For example, it indicates that companies that promote social media to a full line item (like PR, advertising, etc.) as opposed to lumping it under some other heading find the most success with their social media endeavours. (It's nice, isn't it, to get some empirical proof for what social media advocates have been saying for a while now?)

It's About Control

Another interesting characteristic of what I would call 'social media ready' organizations is that their control over the company's brand and marketing isn't concentrated in the brand manager's role but is distributed across the organizational structure. This means that, if a company wants to get ready for social media, its executives have to (a) know that they're giving up some control and (b) decide on how much control they're going to give up.

Good examples of companies that have done social media well are EMC, which has ten bloggers, and Google, which has craploads of blogs. Now that's distributing branding and marketing across the organizational structure!

Approaches to Social Media

Another key point that Jones and McMillian made was around how companies should approach social media. In their opinion (and in mine), what companies should do is first find where they are being talked about and then figure out how to approach the people who are doing the talking.

Instead, some companies take the build-it-and-they-will-come approach in which they first spend time and money building a social media infrastructure and then try to get people on to it. Often that's wasteful and it doesn't help their customers trust them any more or any better. To give you an example, read Jeremiah Owyang's analysis on Wal-Mart and Target's Facebook strategies. That's a case in which companies have gotten to the right place (i.e. Facebook and not MySpace) but are still going about things in the wrong way.

The one time an Australian company's own setup could have benefited from a bit of social media, McDonald's Australia didn't add any social media to its Make Up Your Own Mind campaign's website. The site itself is great (and the campaign was fine, too) but if you want people to make up their own mind, you have to let them speak their mind as well. You can't make up your mind if you can't ask questions or make comments. And thus make-up-your-own-mind became let-us-tell-you-our-side, instead.

(Briefly) In the Australian Context

Off the top of my head, I can only think of only a handful of Australian companies that effectively use social media to connect with their customers -- with the most notable ones being web, tech, and media companies. In fact, the companies I would have expected to see blazing the trail for social media in Australia -- the big retailers and telcos -- are nowhere to be seen! Like I've said before, this is both a problem and a massive opportunity. Here's hoping it's more of the latter!

[FYI: If you want to learn anything about any phone company or ISP in Australia you go to the Whirlpool forums.]

Components of a Successful Intranet

Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media has a couple of really good models on what it takes to have a successful intranet. Specifically:

You can read more about them in his article Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success. Great stuff -- and very close to home as well because, at MBS, we're in the middle of rolling out our new intranet portal. In fact, the first phase of our project is in the Implementation and Marketing stages of Ward's project methodology model. Exciting times, indeed.

4 Online Community Articles

Because I've been busy with exams and assignments for the the last couple of weeks, I haven't had the opportunity to comment on some of the interesting blog posts that I've read. I still don't have that much time so, instead, I'm just going to link to them here.

Interestingly, each of these posts addresses a different stage in a company's social media adoption process:

Excellent posts all of them.

Update: Make that 5 online community articles. I can't believe I forgot Chris Brogan's awesome article Social Media - Talk is Cheap for Businesses. Another must read, that is.

At Least the Numbers are Encouraging

According to the McKinsey Quarterly article How Businesses are Using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey:

Asked what might have been done differently to make the previous investments in Internet technologies more effective [forty-two] percent say they would have strengthened their companies’ internal capabilities to make the most of the market opportunity at hand.

That would mean hiring people like web strategists and community managers...w00t!

Also according to this survey, companies in the retail, high tech, and telecommunications industries had the most respondents say that they were planning to increase investment in social media over the next three years.

Oh, and they're using them as much for internal coordination as they are for customer interaction.

This bodes well, at least in theory. Now to put it into practice and get myself a job...(yes, I'm using blog posts like this as a motivation tool!)

Social Media Presentations

One of the (many) things I'm doing these days is exploring the social media space in a lot more detail.

I've actually been a part of numerous Internet-based communities over the years so I know a great about social media already [1]. I also keep up with the latest news, trends, and studies.

Still, if you're not working on something full-time, you miss out on a lot of stuff -- like when you read the news article or blog post about the study instead of the actual study itself. So these days I'm doing some more research.

Among the many cool things I've found is this bunch of presentations on social media on Slideshare.net.

There are some that give you an overview and lots of information about social media:

There are some presentations that talk about social media from a marketing and branding perspective:

There are some that give practical advice on using social media:

And then there are some that talk about social communities:

There are many more, of course -- just click on one of the tags to see more on that topic -- but these are the ones that I found most useful (so far).

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[1] When I sat down to think about it, I realized that I've been an active Internet community member for over 13 years! Here are some relevant milestones:

  • I got very active on Usenet back in 1995 when the Internet first became affordable to the general public in Pakistan (ah, the good old days of Windows 3.11, Winsock, Netscape 2.0, and 2400 baud modems!)
  • I started my first mailing list in 1996
  • Also in 1996, I became very active in network gaming, IRC, as well as many other mailing lists
  • My first stint as a server administrator, webmaster, and message board owner/moderator came in 1997
  • By 1999, I was training people on how to use the Internet and was giving presentations to the local ACM chapter on computer network security basics [94kB PPS file]
  • In 2004, I created my band's website and message board (which was a really fun community to grow, by the way)
  • Also in 2004, I started evangelising content management systems and other web-related technologies to the development sector; in fact, here's a presentation I gave on open source content management systems [503kB PPS file]
The next milestone is being played out now; that is, I started my first sustained blog in 2007 (after having gotten rid of my first, let's-see-what-blogging-is-all-about blog about 3 years ago!).

About Corporate Blogging

Earlier today, in our Strategic Management of Intellectual Property class at Melbourne Business School, we talked about Rick Frenkel of the Patent Troll Tracker blog fame. We were discussing non-practicing IP-holding entities (or, less politely, patent trolls) in reference to the case we were doing on Rambus (on which our professor Duncan Bucknell maintains an IP scorecard) which is why the issue came up.

CNET's Anne Broache recently covered the Frenkel story as well, but from the point of view of corporate blogging -- which, of course, is also my primary point of view. It's a good article that talks about corporate blogging policies which, as expected, most companies don't have (see also Jason Harris' open thread on Web Worker Daily: Does Your Company Have a Blogging Policy?).

I particularly like this bit in the Broache's article:

Any company that decides to adopt blogging policies should keep them short, clear, and to-the-point, said Howell, the online communications lawyer.

That point is sometimes so obvious that people forget it (which is why I've repeated it here).

Corporate Social Media

This discussion on the lack of blogging policies is a good follow up to my earlier post on marketers not 'getting' social media. It's a good follow up because corporations are having an even harder time with social media which is still in its very early adoption stage in the enterprise. That might seem like a generalization but compare the use of social media in the enterprise to the use of electronic communication tools like e-mail and instant messaging, which are now stock standard, and collaboration tools like intranet portals and document management systems, which are still relatively new.

Like marketers, corporations don't have a good handle on social media -- though both understand it's importance, particularly in the near future. Corporations, for example, know that social media will revolutionize things the way e-mail did so many years ago...they just don't quite know how (and they're really hoping it's not soon!).

The issue for them is of control. E-mails you can run through a corporate server, block, delete, monitor, save, use as legally binding, and, ultimately, make sense of very quickly. Social media is much less controllable, is scarily empowering for employees, and is very hard to get a handle on. 

Some of them are trying to get and/or embrace, though, and having a blogging policy -- or explicitly not having one -- is a good start.

[For completeness' sake: For marketers the issue is partly about control -- they're no longer the only ones talking -- and partly about the inability or the un-preparedness on their part to listen to consumers on the consumers' terms. More on that in a later blog post. For now, though, let me just say that marketers have a much better handle on social media than corporations do. That said, marketers' proficiency with social media is still low when compared to their proficiency in using the other marketing tools in their bag.]

Two Articles on Social Media and Marketing

Now that I'm getting more involved in the social media space (and not just from an informed user's perspective), I've found a couple of really interesting articles on this topic on the web.

Marketers Don't Have a Good Handle on Social Media

The first is one by Michael Bush in Advertising Age in which he reports on a panel discussion on "Making Social Media & Marketing Work" at the Ad Age Digital Marketing Conference.

The article's title summarizes it very nicely: Marketers Struggle to Get a Firm Grip on Social Media and it makes a good read:

If you just happen to be one of those people who think they have social media and marketing all figured out, don't tell Eric Plaskonos. He believes they're "fooling themselves."

Ad Age also has a primer on the challenges of social media for marketers.

Australian Marketers Lag Further Behind

The second one is by Jenni Beattie in Digital Ministry called Ad:Tech - Brand Marketers Still Looking for Digital Marketing Solutions [via Trevor Cook, via Lee Hopkins].

She writes:

Let's start with a few figures from the recent Ad Tech Conference in Sydney:

  • 68% of delegates in the Digital PR session said they didn't have a digital pr strategy
  • 59% of delegates in the Conversations session said they didn't have a dialogue with their brand customers.

It is clear from this that many brand marketers in Australia are still yet to dip their toes in the water of online engagement/social media and that they are looking to the industry for leadership.

This is both good and bad news. Bad that there's a lack of awareness for digital PR and for online engagement with customers in Australia. But also good in the sense that there's a huge opportunity here for a good social media marketer (PR person, brand manager, community manager, etc.).

In that respect, I disagree with Steve Rubel when he says that "hiring someone just to "manage" social media is a luxury that companies will integrate into broader marketing communication roles."  In Australia, at least, we don't seem to have reached that stage yet (and Jeremiah Owyang seems to think that this is true in the broader global context as well).

I suspect that Rubel is a little ahead of the curve on this one. Yes, eventually social media interaction will become a standard operating procedure for marketers and, in general, for companies -- much like e-mail has, for example -- but we still have a long way to go. And judging from Beattie's article, that's particularly true for Australia.

A Shift in Job Preferences

I've spent the last few months trying to pull together three things in order to get myself a good, fulfilling job:

  • An idea of the kind the job I want to do once I complete my MBA
  • A list of jobs that I can do; based on my education, experience, and abilities
  • A list of jobs that are available in the market, specifically in Melbourne

And the last few days -- the Easter break here in Australia -- have helped me get a better handle on things. Here's an overview of where I am right now.

What I Want to Do

Over the last few months, as I've learnt more about myself and have acquired industry knowledge, the set of jobs I want to do has changed. Well, technically, my job preference order has changed to:

  1. Marketing and communications -- either for a web-related project, product, or services company or for a company with a significant online presence (either internal or external)
  2. Consulting (internal or external) --  general technology consulting but preferably focused on web portals and intranets
  3. Business and project management -- focused on web-related projects, products, or services

Originally, my marketing and communications preference was at #3 -- with consulting at #1 and management at #2 -- so this is a pretty major shift.

What I Can Do

There are two reasons for this shift. First, I am in a reasonably unique position in the job market because I possess technical know-how, business know-how, and marketing know-how and, importantly, I have demonstrable experience and expertise in each. [I don't mean to blow my own horn here by talking about how great or unique I am, but the fact is that there aren't many people with this particular skill set in the market these days. My being where I am now is actually a case of carefully thought-out career moves and a bit of luck.]

Now this skill set is good because, except for the most narrowly-defined project management roles (for example), most senior-ish roles require you to be proficient in each of those three key areas. What this means is that I can quite easily aim beyond the regular business analyst (BA), project manager (PM), or consultant roles that I would have gone for had I, for example, done a MS in computer sciences instead of an MBA.

The second reason for this shift is that, basically, I realized that by looking at BA or regular PM and consulting roles, I was aiming too low. I came to this realization after looking at countless job ads and thinking to myself "sure, I can do that job quite easily...after all, I was doing the same thing two years ago." 

The only jobs that got me really excited were the ones with a bit of challenge: the ones that gave me an opportunity to learn and grow and to fully apply myself. And the thing is, with the exception of a few brilliant consulting/PM/BA roles, most of the jobs I found both fun and challenging came from the marketing and communications side.

Which actually makes a lot of sense.

Where I Want to Be

Loosely put, my medium-term career objective is to be someone in a senior management position who liaises effectively between the business, technology, and marketing sides of a company and strategically carries things forward by effectively leveraging each of those functions and departments. In plain English: I want to be the senior manager guy who speaks and understands tech, business, and marketing and can get the three departments to work together to kick some ass.

Now the thing is: I have experience in technology, business, and marketing but, increasingly, for web-related products or services the key skill for a senior manager to have is that of marketing; particularly marketing that involves social media and community-building.

See, no matter how good a project or service you have (the tech side) or how well thought out your strategy is (the business side) if you don't get your market positioning, integrated marketing communications, and community-building right (the marketing side) you don't get very far. And this is particularly true for web-related products and services. This is why forward-thinking companies are looking to hire people in two specific roles: the Social Media Strategist and the Community Manager (as explained by Forrester Reseach's Jeremiah Owyang). That, for me, is really where the challenge and opportunity lies.

It also helps that, while you can find plenty of people to work on the tech and business side (either that or you outsource development or hire a consultant), the talent pool for social media people is quite small.

But, there's a problem: the reason for that small talent pool and the reason I specifically said forward-thinking companies is because there aren't many of those jobs out there, especially ones based in Melbourne.

What Jobs are Available

A handful of social media jobs are, of course, advertised -- I mentioned the Community Liaison role at Lonely Planet early on in my job search and there was an ad for an Online Content Manager posted today -- but the good ones are few and far between and I presume a lot of them remain in the hidden job market. Also, in most companies, community management and social media strategy tasks are still not seen as separate job positions but as responsibilities assigned to a marketing manager.

Increasingly, then, I've found myself looking through the marketing and communications sections of various job sites because that's where these jobs are listed (often 'under internal communications' or 'marketing communications'). But, again, there just aren't that many out there.

The Upshot

What does all of this mean for me? Well, now that I've narrowed down what it is that I really want to do, two things come to mind: 

First, I need to be very watchful for good social media jobs -- even more so than I was for regular biz/tech jobs -- mainly because (a) they're not always advertised as social media jobs and (b) most specialist social media job sites don't cover Australia (not that any Australian companies post jobs on the ones that do). Fortunately, here we have people like Laurel Papworth who blogs about the jobs that she hears of. Let's hope she keeps doing that and that the other Aussie social media bloggers that I read follow suit!

Second, I need to start talking to Australian social media people about the kinds of jobs that are available here. They, more than anyone else, will know what is happening and where the industry is going. I guess this blog post is a first step in that direction. I also have to keep on top of all Australia-based social media events, networks, and meetings -- and there are plenty of those around.

The best part: I've finally found an area that greatly interests and excites me, and though I know it won't be easy to find and get the job I want, I suspect I'm going to have a lot of fun doing it anyway.

As ever, I'll keep posting updates on this blog.

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FYI: Connie Bensen, the Community Manager for ACDSee, maintains an excellent community / social media resource listing on her blog. If you want to know more about everything I've just talked about, take a look at that site. Also be sure to check out Jeremiah Owyang's web strategist blog.

The Community Manager

Following on from his post on how to hire for social computing and his search for a community manager (CM) for Forrester, Jeremiah Owyang has published what he learn about CMs from the 19 resumes he received.

As it happens, I fit the average CM persona quite nicely: I have 7 years of work experience, a technology background, plenty of marketing experience (especially in evangelising the use of technology and the Internet), and I have an MBA (well, I will in seven weeks). Oh, and even though this is a given: I believe in, and am very interested in working in, the social media space.

Unfortunately, I've only seen one real CM-type job advertised in the Australian market so far. Here's hoping I come across a few more over the next few weeks as well.

Staffing for Social Computing

More and more companies are starting to understand the benefits of social computing. If not the benefits, at least they're starting to understand the risks of not getting serious about social computing because, increasingly, their customers are demanding a two-way discussion with them (and the companies that do offer this two-way discussion stand out).

However, the companies that want to get into social computing/media/networking [1] don't always know how to go about doing that. From my personal experience I've noticed that when companies have gone in to "the whole social media thing" without any real experience, expectations, or strategy around social computing, they've often made a mess of things.

What Mess?

One typical outcome is that they start by not doing the research on what their consumers want, how their consumers want and prefer to communicate, and what kinds of communication the company itself can and wants to support. Because of this, they end up doing something inadequate like installing a message board on their website and, well, leaving it at that. Then they wonder why it's not working.

At this point they either fix things -- usually by doing some research and getting an idea of what is and isn't working in their industry -- or they give up.

Why Does This Happen?

In my opinion, this mess-up happens because they haven't really thought through their objectives of getting into social computing or even what the point of social computing is. A major factor in this lack of planning -- or, worse still, a lack of awareness -- is that they haven't hired the right marketing and communications people (ultimately, all of this is a marketing exercise) and this is where the Forrester Research report called 'How to Staff for Social Computing' comes in.

Two Crucial Roles

As Jeremy Owyang, the report's author, mentions in his blog, staffing for social computing boils down to two crucial roles: (1) the Social Media Strategist who pushes for social computing internally (convinces management, gets resources, etc.) and (2) the Community Manager who actually runs the community itself (which he wrote more about in an earlier post).

Of course, all of this sounds pretty simple when put like that -- you have to pay $279 or be a Forrester client to get the full-detail version -- but, at one level, it really is that simple. You need the right people -- who will do the right planning, the much-needed internal advocating, and the crucial open and honest external communications -- to get the job done properly.

I'm glad Forrester has published this report because something like this is much needed and will be really helpful to people like me who advocate the use of social computing in organizations and, often, simply end up banging their heads against a wall.

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[1] Or, if you want to use the unfortunate buzz word, "Web 2.0".

Digital Space Around Australia (BRW Report)

Ross Dawson, in his 'Trends in the Living Networks' blog, points to last week's BRW feature on the digital space in Australia and comments on how doing this kind of analytical journalism is cool in an industry that is typically hard to put down on paper:

Foad Fadaghi, the technology editor of BRW, has come to the media business from the research industry, having held senior analyst and director positions at Frost & Sullivan, Jupiter Research and IDC. This way of looking at the world results in the BRW Digital issue showing how journalism at its best is becoming a lot more like analysis, creating real value-add and insights that can’t be found elsewhere.

Why is the Web 2.0 space to difficult to analyse? Dawson answers (quoted from the article):

The costs involved in web 2.0 development are so low it has spawned a large number of small one and two-person companies that can be profitable with a small user base, Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says. This means web 2.0 development is unnoticed by venture capital and other investors.

Which makes articles like this doubly useful since there isn't much else out there in terms of hardcore research and analysis on this industry sector.

Melbourne Business School on Dopplr

I came across Dopplr in June last year via Web Worker Daily ('Social Networking Dopplr Connects You When You Travel' by Stephen Collins) and thought it was a great networking tool for people who travel a great deal:

How often have you thought to yourself, “I’m going to <insert random conference/city/event here> next week. I wonder who else I know is going.” At this point, there’s invariably a chain of ill-timed emails, inevitably missing someone who is actually going to be in the same place as you at the same time. Dopplr aims to resolve this issue through providing a way for those serendipitous moments to be under your control, rather than left to random chance.

After signing up for Dopplr, you enter your upcoming travels, building a list of your movements. As you add connections with people you know, Dopplr comes into its own, letting you, and your connections, know when you will be in the same place at the same time.

Yesterday, while searching for MBS-related blogs, I discovered that in November last year Dopplr opened up its then-in-beta website to business school travellers from a hundred global b-schools (called its 'MBA 100') and that Melbourne Business School was included in that list.

Dopplr's service has since been launched to the public and, from what I've heard, it's pretty good. I don't have much use for it myself -- I don't travel much, at least not yet...maybe I will once I get a job -- but I'm sure others will find it useful. And who knows, maybe our faculty and Alumni department already use it. I guess I'll ask.

For more on Dopplr, read this Webware.com post by Josh Lowensohn.

Media & Marketing: Old School vs. New School

Web 2.0 has changed the marketing landscape. However, not all people agree with that and one of the traditionalists that falls on this old school side is Simon Hammond. Laurel Papworth, meanwhile, teaches people about the power of social media and falls very clearly on the new school side.

Recently, Hammond was quoted in an article in AdNews written by Nina Lees:

Web 2.0 obsessive uptake of social interaction, user generated content control and unbridled interactivity has meant the lunatics are running the asylum. That's according to Melbourne adman Simon Hammond, chairman of Photon-owned communications agency Belong.

And Papworth...well, responded.

Closing vs. Disabling Your Facebook Account

The New York Times' Maria Aspan has written an article on how hard it is to really delete your Facebook account:

Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

[...]

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

And thus privacy and data ownership continue to be the most important debate 'n discussion topics in the evolving social media space.

Microsoft & Yahoo!

By now, everyone's heard of Microsoft's $44.6bn bid for Yahoo! and everyone's talked about it as well, though Yahoo! isn't saying much for the time being.

Here, in my opinion, are some of the most interesting articles currently published on this topic:

In fact, if you're only going to read one article on this topic, read Thurrott's. Though it would be good if you checked out the comparison table in Zheng's article as well.

Finally, in light of all this merger talk, check out Josh Lowensohn's article on Dot-com pioneers -- where are they now?. It makes and interesting read.