Just Do It

As I'm speaking to people about our social media campaigns, a recurring question that I'm getting asked is...

How do you get buy-in to use social media for a large corporation (or any company)?

One of the easiest answers is to "Just Do It".  Instead of waiting around trying to figure out the best approach to venture into the realm of Web 2.0 or build consensus around the value of social media to get some of that elusive media budget coming your way - jump right in (the water really is warm). 

Where is the jumping off point?  How do you just dive into social media not giving marketing budgets another thought?  Start exposing the value of social media by using some of the free (but powerful) avenues of social media.  It all starts with listening to your customers.  Here are a few quick ways to get started.

Blog Monitoring
What are people saying about your company online?  Is it positive or are customers exposing areas where your product or service is failing them? By listening and responding you can reward an advocate with affirmation that you’ve heard them (or maybe even provide an extra goody like a special discount or company swag). If it’s negative, you can try to save the customer by repairing their bad experience. The moment of truth for a company is often how they treat their customers when something does go wrong. Beware: often a customer who is public about an issue has already been failed by the normal customer service channels – you need to be able to help the customer by resolving their issue or getting them to an escalation group. 

There are many companies who are putting together tools to help monitor your brand online.  But, if you are working without a budget scour the web by using Technorati, Google Blog Search or set up an alert on Google Alerts. Be sure to read what people write about your products on sites like Amazon or search some customer complaint sites such as My Three Cents or the Complaints Board.

Twitter
Although Twitter has had some technology challenges this past weekend, it is still a great listening tool.  Twitter is a micro-blogging system, but I like to think of it as a group instant messaging.  However, don’t go into Twitter thinking that you are going to broadcast your brand message far and wide.  That would be spammy. Create a brand profile on Twitter and join in the conversation. Think about how your brand is relevant for the community. For example, at H&R Block (@HRBlock) we provided some tax tips and advice throughout the tax season. We also started listening and helped Twitizens from resolving a customer service issue to how to find employment with H&R Block. The CEO of Zappos (@zappos) is constantly tweeting about his personal life and giving away things like tickets to the Van Halen show in Vegas or Zappos merchandise.  Even Comcast is using Twitter to monitor and resolve customer service issues (I guess they need to be very proactive after that video with the sleeping technician).

There are many different Twitter tools that you can use too.  Tweetscan is great.  Just enter your brand name and you can see who is talking about your company or product.  David Berkowitz has a wonderful blog on how to search for Tweets.

Yahoo! Answers
And the final mention of the day is Yahoo! Answers. Like the Blog Monitoring, you can perform a search and see what people are saying about your brand.  If the question is still open, you can offer some advice publicly. If the question is closed, you may be able to respond directly via IM or email. In addition to monitoring what people are saying about your brand, you can offer advice. Again, set up a brand profile in Yahoo! Answers. This will allow you to build credibility and recognition of your brand as a trusted adviser when answering questions and let people know that your brand cares when trying to resolve a customer issue.

The value of “Just Doing It” is many-fold.  First, you will get hands-on experience in the social media world that you can use to better evangelize the benefits internally.  Second, you begin to understand where and how your brand can play in social media and begin to establish your brand persona. And most importantly, you will begin to build a case-study to support your internal sales effort for social media.

Comments

[Dustin Jacobsen]

I think these are all great points.

One of the challenges we run into as a full service agency is ownership. Is it PR, Corporate Communications, Interactive, etc?

The reality is that everyone should be involved in different capacities.

Where things start to get sticky is creating policies around who can post, comment, reply, etc with enough freedom to be transparent yet stay out of legal trouble (the typical disclaimer about employee blogs being the opinion of the employee and not representing the views of the employer).

We have social media analysts on staff that work with our brands on tracking the conversations, which has been a great way to get brands on board.

Once we create an audit and quantify how much their brand is being talked about (with or without their involvement and in both positive and negative light), it helps to get them on board with participating in social media.

I'm sure the audience, including myself, would like to learn more about selling in social media like your conversation with Shel recently: http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/04/sap-global-surv.html.

[uggs.com]

this is definately a way to sustain your growth. Who doesn't need more clients? Give it away if you can, and keep traffic coming in!