Business

Free Your Brand

My favourite quote of the day:

“…Old Spice parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.”

I love this quote because I think that is the future. Companies must start easing up on the tight controls they’ve historically had over their brand. If you need to control every word that is spoken and written about your brand – forcing writers to submit every word they write for scrutiny, you’re doomed. Not to say you should let writers run wild with your brand, but creativity is so quickly quashed when the pen can only write one of 12 “approved” words to describe a product.

Honest exchange, meaningful engagement and worthy interaction in social media comes when speed (aka: real time) is a part of the equation.

Picture this: someone poses a tough question on Twitter to a company (well, hopefully a *person* with a name and a head shot, representing that company). Two days pass and no one has responded. It’s not because the tweet wasn’t noticed. It’s because the person managing Twitter for that company needs to get approval on the response before they can post it. In the meantime, the person who posted the question has grown increasingly frustrated and is now bad-mouthing the company due to the lack of timely response. It even starts to appear that the company is trying to ignore or dodge the tough question.

It may be the most counter-intuitive to let up on brand control.. but the wild success of the Old Spice online campaign proves that if you’re brave enough, and trust enough, it can pay off in ways you never imagined.

If you disagree – let me hear it.

FYI: the quote came from here.

Erin.

Tags: brand management, branding, engagement, interaction, Social Media

5 Questions About Resourcing a Social Media Strategy

Resourcing Social Media

I’m attending the Canadian Public Relations Society conference in Regina.  Lots of great PR practitioners here, many of whom work for municipal and provincial government, and other large organizations.

A common question keeps popping up.  How does my organization resource an online social media strategy?

The question is understandable, given that many marketing and communications teams are working with reduced budgets and increased demands.  Here’s the thing, an online strategy is not a bucket to be filled.

Every online strategy should be designed to match the internal resources (e.g. the available time and skill set of your existing team) and/or external support (e.g. budget to hire content creators or strategists).  There is no point sketching out a comprehensive social media plan that will chew through content faster than you can create it.

Here are five questions to ask before designing your online strategy:

1)  Who is the person in-house, or a subcontractor, to lead the online initiative?  How much time do they have each day or each week to manage the project.
2) What is the skill set of the project lead?  Does the strategy need to allow time for training, either formal (training by an experienced strategy team, workshops) or informal (via free webinars, books, reading online).
3) Are there others who can contribute content? What time do they have available?
4) What are the objectives for the online campaign?  If the goals are too ambitious for the available resources, consider developing a multi-phase plan.  Appeal to management to gradually increase resources if realistic benchmarks are met along the way.
5) Is the person or team running the online strategy empowered to be responsive?  Are they authorized to answer questions and engage with target markets?  When a question is asked that requires information from another department, or a language translation, how fast can it be acquired?

With answers to these questions in hand you, or your strategy team, will be in a much better position to design a digital strategy that sets everyone up for success.

Good luck!
Moyra

Tags: resourcing social media strategy, Social Media, strategy

Are Online “Communities” Inspiring Real World Connections?

This past weekend, I indulged in lattes and newspapers.  Everywhere I looked, alongside articles about Twitter and Facebook, there were stories about people craving connections with one another in the real world —  the rise of community gardens, secret yoga gatherings, communal screenings of the “Lost” finale.  In an interview with the Globe & Mail, Christopher Hawkins, founder of www.sharingbackyards.com said it best, ”people are starting to see it’s not a big deal to be connecting with strangers.”

Feels like a tipping point. But why now?  Are we just coming out of our cocoons realizing that it’s sort of a drag there’s no church on Sundays, regretting that we traded the pub on Thursday night for a brisk walk on the sea wall?

A few years ago, Patrick West wrote a fascinating book called, Conspicuous Compassion.   West theorized that our public displays of emotion (wearing ribbons, joining rallies, laying flowers to mark the death of a celebrity) are an expression of our desire to connect. “We desperately seek a common identity and new social bonds to replace those that have withered in the post-war era.”

I have to wonder if the Internet, that frontier land of random connection, has allowed us to test drive these bonds, permitting us to reach out in an environment where the risk of rejection is mitigated by scale and anonymity. Might the world wide web have readied us to reach out to our real world neighbours?  Wouldn’t that be rich?

So much of what is happening in the social media sector is cloud shoveling.  Self declared thought leaders. “Benevolent” geeks building “safe” neighbourhoods that compromise our security and disrespect our very identify.

Might the greatest output of all that computing power, plastic and fibre wind up being the imperative it is creates in us to venture next door and invite our neighbour over for a cup of tea?

- Moyra

Tags: communities, Social Media, social networking, trends

Privacy Online: Possible?

This post was inspired by an article entitled Social Media Privacy is an Oxymoron. It sparked some thoughts for me around how one can achieve at least *some* privacy online; assuming this is important to you because for a surprising number of people, it isn’t.

First off – Facebook.  Many informative posts have been written about controlling your privacy or removing yourself from Facebook altogether.   Some high-profile Facebook users are taking a stand against recent changes on Facebook affecting privacy. And you may have heard by now that “Quit Facebook Day” is scheduled for May 31, 2010. Before you quit, you may want to first determine what amount of your private info on Facebook is exposed. This application, as well as this one can help you do that.

But while all the attention and heat is on Facebook, what about everything else? Among, what is undoubtedly, a myriad of vulnerabilities on the big old web, here are just a few ideas that may help you stay a little more private.

To prevent the tracking of my every click, I like to use CoolPreviews. This is a tool that allows me to see what’s behind a link without having to click on it. I like to use this a lot when logged into LinkedIn or Twitter, as the tracking of where and what you click can be scrutinized. For example, if you notice a tweet was posted via Hootsuite, and the link provided is an OWLY link, your click will be counted. Not a huge deal perhaps as your click, in this case anyway, is in no way connected to your account. (At least, not that I’m aware of.)  On LinkedIn however, if you are logged in and you check out someone’s profile, your “click” as it were, *is* linked to your profile. This enables this cool-but -creepy feature:

There is a long list of ways to add more privacy to your browsing habits. Many browsers like Safari and Firefox now offer ‘Private Browsing‘ ensuring you that no website you open will be kept on record. Anywhere. There are also many types of ’scramblers’ you can use that mask your IP address. These are called proxy servers. This can help prevent data collection on where you are in this universe, what browser you’re using, what kind of computer you’re using, among other things. Want to know what your IP reveals about you? Go here.

Google Analytics and Quantcast, as two examples, are now offering “opt out” options. Google Analytics, for one, is allowing people to opt out of being monitored for receiving targeted ads.
Quantcast, an American based service that measures audience statistics for websites, is offering something similar.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for ways of preserving privacy online. The questions I have are:

Is it too little too late?

Is it time to redefine what online privacy means?

Should we care this much? Everyone is up in arms over the privacy principle, but is the privacy practice (the way our private info is being used) really that offensive and/or scary?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Tags: advertising, facebook, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, opt out, privacy, proxy servers, Quantcast, Twitter

A Budding LinkedIn Love Affair

I have a crush on LinkedIn. I’m not sure if the feeling is mutual, but it’s getting pretty serious on my end.

I signed on a few years ago and, like a lot of people, didn’t use it that much at first. It actually struck me as a bit dry (versus the delicious options available through Facebook and Twitter). But now, I see the light. And I’m not the only one.

As you may know, LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. You “connect” with people you have worked with, would like to work with, or have similarities with, professionally speaking or otherwise.

LinkedIn is an incredible source of information for my work. For example, I can browse by keywords to find people or companies I may want to hire or work with. I can see who of my connections are already connected with these new folks and can get a review I can trust. The “Recommendations” feature also helps me understand what sets someone apart from the pack with real endorsements.

LinkedIn Groups also offers me the opportunity to join groups relevant to my line of work, further extending my network. The groups I join also display on my profile so others in my network can join too.

LinkedIn tracks and reveals (to some extent) who has looked at my profile and what other profiles on LinkedIn are looked at after or before mine. This helps me understand how people perceive me and/or the work I do.

Blog posts, book recommendations and Twitter feeds can now be integrated into LinkedIn profiles. But my favourite current feature is how I can build credibility by simply talking about what I know.

The Answers section of LinkedIn allows me to ask a question or answer one. When I answer one, it is recorded on my profile as part of my recent activity. So, once again, my network, or others checking out my profile, can join that conversation or just read the thread. But it gets better. Answers are also rated by other users – encouraging people to give the best answer they can, benefiting everyone. If an answer is picked as the best one, this also reflects on a profile – further helping build credibility. Last but not least, by engaging on LinkedIn, it helps SEO. One of my answers was picked up by Google within 24 hours.

What’s not to love? You can see why I’m smitten.

According to Wikipedia, as of April 2010 LinkedIn has more than 65-million users worldwide. Are you one of them?