Explore, Evaluate and Engage

We’ve already talked about first making sure social media is an appropriate tactic to support your marketing, communications and branding strategies.  Creating a Twitter or Facebook page because it makes you look young and cool is hardly a strategic decision.  As Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0 notes, “the single biggest mistake people make is that they either brand themselves just for the sake of doing it or that they fail to invest time in learning about what’s in their best interests.”  First, you’ll want to explore what people are saying about your brand in the social space, evaluate how open your company is to criticism and whether you have the resources to manage the page, then engage with people in a way that’s transparent and adds value to others.

Consistent Communication

Consistency is king in social media.  Everything from your “About” or “Bio” section to what messages you post should be consistent with other communication, and you should engage on a regular basis (without posting too often).  Multiple personalities from one source don’t work well in social media.  Creating a “social media voice” that provides consistency in style and tone will allow your brand to communicate consistently across various platforms.  It’s important to consult multiple departments of your business (not just marketing) to help create it, too.  The voice should be consistent with your corporate culture, within the legal guidelines of your company and the social media space, and appropriate for the audience you’re trying to reach.

Give a Little, Get a Lot

Don’t just allow fans, friends and followers to talk to you online.  Engage with them in two-way dialogue and allow them to help shape your brand.  If you’re going to be on multiple social media platforms, give people unique content on each.  Once you have a presence, you’ll want to decide how you’ll measure success.  How do you do that?  That we’ll save for another post …

Toyota is curiously sitting at no. 7 in Millward Brown’s top-10 list of most trusted brands as Congress spent the better half of the week giving Toyota a tongue-lashing for its handling and mishandling of the automaker’s quality control crisis.

The study’s authors readily point out that the data was collected over the course of 2009 and doesn’t reflect Toyota’s current dilemma as it unfurled at the beginning of this year.  The authors also note the automaker could learn from Tylenol, which in 1982 recalled 31 million bottles of pills after seven people were killed in the tampering scare.  That brand, which was forced to recall children’s liquid medicine last year, sits at no. 6 in the study.

Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson has a history of effectively managing crisis situations, though the FDA earlier this year ridiculed the company for being slow to respond in its most recent crisis.  What this goes to show you, however, is a history of doing the right thing and acting aggressively in a crisis situation can maintain and build trust among stakeholders, consumers in particular.  Trust is fragile, and how you respond in a crisis situation can build and maintain trust, the authors state.

Toyota started off this week with public apologies before Congress.  How it fixes its problems, communicates with stakeholders and develops systems to prevent further lapses will determine if the automaker regains or builds trust, and where it will stand in next year’s report.

Yours truly sans suit, The Donald and my client, John Sawyer

So, more than a year ago, we sat in the lobby of the W hotel in Manhattan, surrounded by lawyers and producers for the 2009 season of Celebrity Apprentice.  Less than 72 hours prior, they had recruited Chicken of the Sea to be on the show – for that matter, a two-hour episode directly leading up to the finale.

A number of ideas swirled about with regard to what the marketing challenge would be and how to tie the brand and its products in the show.  For the record, the lawyers and producers were some of the coolest folks.  They had their minds set on some ideas, but fortunately open and respectful that we (all two of us – yours truly and my client – out-numbered 3 to 1) were passionate about the brand and the story it had to tell.

For two years leading up to that fateful call from Celebrity Apprentice, Chicken of the Sea had been engaging consumers in conversations about health, nutrition and convenience through online and offline mediums.  We learned there is a powerful story to tell not just about the brand and its products, but also in how consumers view and use Chicken of the Sea – what it means to them.  We saw an opportunity to replicate that with the likes of Clint Black, Joan “Cluck Cluck Splash” Rivers et al on Celebrity Apprentice.

With agreement from the lawyers and producers, we laid out a challenge for the celebrities to tell the Chicken of the Sea story in the form of a jingle and a 30-second radio spot.  Moreover, it wasn’t as simple as that.  The celebs and their respective teams needed to invest the time in learning about Chicken of the Sea and its loyal consumers.  They weren’t going to be judged solely on how catchy their tunes would be, but more on telling the story about the consumers behind the brand.

What that led to, in addition to the drama and debate of creating a jingle and radio spot, is two hours worth of unscripted conversations about Chicken of the Sea – precisely what we were shooting for and attempting to replicate, and there was hardly any discussion about getting video footage of the products in the celebs’ hands or on a table near where they sat.  Sacrilege to some, but again it was about the conversations.

So when The New York Times published the iTVX data on the most effective product placement in television for 2009, most would think the initial reaction of Chicken of the Sea being at the top was met with excitement.  But it told us much more.  Real conversations are powerful, more powerful than arranging to have your product sit statically in front of a celebrity, and product integration must reflect the character of the brand.  Alongside that is being a champion for your client, its brand and what it represents.

I just wish I were smart enough to wear a better suit on the show, and, for what it’s worth, my mother hasn’t forgiven me for contributing to Clint’s firing.

Driving any highway or back road, you can barely miss a Toyota.  The brand is an automaker’s version of the six degrees of separation.  Wherever you turn, you see one, or you know someone who has one or know someone who knows someone who drives a Toyota.  Quality was the axis of its brand.  I had a Camry a few years ago; loved it and wish I got another after wrapping my front end around the rear of an F-150 (even the best-made car won’t hold up to a monster truck).

Expectations were high when word got out that Toyota had a problem. Surely, a company that built a brand and a massive following of consumers into the world-leading automaker would do the right thing: Aggressively address the issue head-on, right its wrong, profess mea culpa and produce a solution.

And that’s precisely what Toyota did this week.  Problem is, Toyota’s crisis began to unfold last fall, and when the automaker unfurled its media-mix campaign this week, including plopping U.S. honcho Jim Lentz in network studios, critics attacked – and rightly so.

Toyota succumbed to the growing media and governmental pressure too late.  The automaker, and this isn’t backseat driving, knew well enough and long ago it had a problem that would only get worse.  Instead of being proactive, Toyota chose to stick its head in the sand.  That right there can tarnish any brand.

The very premise of issue and crisis management is prevention – not just stopping the headlines or social media storm, but anticipating internal and external threats or vulnerabilities and shoring up those gaps at the operational level.  It’s spending painstaking hours in the C-level suite agonizing over what gives the CEO insomnia and working with the senior management team on systems and protocols, and collaborating with industry, academia, vendors, suppliers and any other party in the supply chain.  It’s putting procedures in place to minimize the likelihood of disruption in business.

The automaker had to have had a crisis plan in someone’s filing cabinet.  Instead, millions of Toyotas are sitting idle in sales lots; even more consumers are now questioning the company’s mettle.

The first two substantial Twitter updates of the year – the Local Trends feature and updated Suggested Users List – may help make your experience on Twitter a little more personal.  Let’s take a look…

The new Local Trends feature allows you to see what conversational trends are popular near you.  As of last week, however, there are currently 15 cities available for users to select.  Dallas, Houston, San Antonio… Three cities from Texas, but no San Diego?  I’m sure America’s Finest City will be one of the next cities added – they can’t ignore our TwitPower for long – but in the meantime, let’s move on to Twitter’s other big change.

Two weeks ago, the Suggested Users List on Twitter was overhauled to recommend tweeters based on categories of interest, instead of just their perceived popularity.  This is a departure from just having a standard list of people users are encouraged to follow, most of whom are talkative celebrities.  Those lucky few celebrities and others on the list got to appear on every new users screen, and most saw astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their tweets (The Guardian went from having 4,000 followers to 66,000 followers in the one month after being put on the list, according to Twitter Counter.)  Needless to say, folks like Scobleizer and myself were surprised we were not on the list, and began to have feelings of jealousy, anger and self-loathing.  After all, Twitter was giving those tweeters an unfair advantage – free advertising – while we were working hard to build a solid base of followers.

For the most part, that’s changed now, although the feature still has room for improvement.  When I looked through the music category, for instance, I still saw an assortment of artists whom I have no interest in following.  Perhaps my eclectic taste in music messed with Twitter’s complex algorithms.  Perhaps I don’t follow enough people.  Either way, the change does make things more organized, which is good news – especially for new users.  Maybe coupling the two new features together, once they’re launched to everyone, will give me local artists, politicians and sports stars I’ll be interested in following.

For marketers, knowing where people are and what they’re interested in can be very helpful, so do these changes signify Twitter getting more marketing-friendly?  I’d say it’s two small steps for the Twitterverse, not a giant leap.

The annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows modest gains among three-quarters of the industries monitored, and findings point to these institutions doing the right thing and a level of increased transparency amidst a perilous global economy.  What’s more interesting, however, is an expectation that governments and companies will revert back to old habits.  That only tells us these gains are fragile and there’s a likelihood for future Barometer reports to highlight declining trust and expectations.

What better time is there to further build relationships and credibility than when trust is climbing?  Smart institutions will invest emotionally and intellectually by working with their stakeholders in identifying what stakes in the ground their trust is rooted in, tap into those beliefs and build upon them.  Doing so, these institutions could emerge from this recession not only stronger, but also with a competitive advantage – stakeholders in their camps.

The report also lays out a suggested path in building trust – a mosaic.  In short, it’s actively involving and engaging a network of stakeholders, including NGOs, to affect change within your organization and industry.  The concept isn’t so new.  Conceptually, it’s much like the coalition building model many of us toy with, yet primarily in issue and crisis management situations.  What the report is suggesting, and it makes perfect sense, is deploying this model as an everyday, long-term business principal, not for short-term objectives and means.

The report also seems to paint a picture of traditional media being left out of the loop in this mosaic.  Traditional media, unsurprisingly, continues to witness declines in trust, giving organizations more reason to question traditional media’s necessity.  Smart traditional media companies, however, would be wise to heed to the report’s call to get closer to stakeholders.  Even smarter ones will make drastic changes in their business model – and that’s not figuring whether a paywall for online content makes sense.  It’s about delivering upon expectations.  Right now, according to the report, that isn’t much.

I was at a holiday party last weekend talking to a group of strangers in bad turtleneck sweaters about college football and a festive Christmas loaf, when somebody asked what I did for a living.  After explaining that I work in public relations, a slightly intoxicated rube of a man exclaimed, “Traditional PR is dying before our eyes!”

Nearly spitting out my eggnog, I launched into a spirited 30-minute dialogue with the outspoken salesman – discussing public relations, social media and customer service, and how each relate to consumer brand management.  My new holiday friend’s chili was burning white hot over his belief that traditional PR, “for all consumer brands,” is being quickly supplanted by social media and direct-to-consumer engagement and customer service.

My retort was sharp-edged and concise – if PR hasn’t always supported a brand through consumer engagement and customer service, then it was bad PR to begin with.  And, social media – albeit a crucial PR tool – is still just one tool in the PR toolbox.

As we refilled our nog and moved into the kitchen, the conversation locked on the relationship between social media and customer service, and the role or “lack of” for public relations professionals in reputation management for consumer brands.  I agreed that social media is unquestionably changing the way consumers and brands interact in real time, however, if there was ever a time and a platform for PR to fulfill its mandate to improve brand RELATIONS with the PUBLIC…this is it.  I grunted with mild disdain that PR will not be devalued by social media efforts in customer service, but rather act as a planner, facilitator, counselor and tactician across social media efforts in customer service.

As my new friend stuffed his pie hole with meat and cheese from a holiday sausage sampler pack, I did my dandiest to explain that although I understand the excitement and appreciate the fervor associated with the social media Groundswell, it’s a gargantuan misstep to disregard the importance of public relations and a well-rounded communications strategy for consumer brands.   PR is about building and managing relationships among target audiences, and for consumer brands there are a diversity of relevant tools used to do this – social media, experiential marketing, grassroots community outreach, traditional media relations, crisis communication, etc.  All play a critical role in building and managing relationships and reputation.

Yes, I had a bit of bourbon in my nog and probably needed to be knocked off my PR soapbox at this particular holiday soiree.  However, this encounter with the misinformed salesman adversary reinforced my firm belief that all of us working in public relations need to do a better job of educating our employers, co-workers, clients and brand managers that PR and strategic communication means far more than landing a story in the local paper or trade magazine for a job well done.  Word.

SHP December: Them Crooked Vultures

Next up in the Tiger Woods pandemonium is the privacy debate.  Did a man in the public eye get stripped of his privacy by being forced to reveal his “transgressions?”

Let others take chip shots at that.  Instead, Tiger Woods the brand lost any privacy when he carved an image that personified high family and moral values.  Since his junior golf days, he, his family and his handlers meticulously crafted a brand of integrity, dignity, determination, competitive fire and loyalty.  His charitable endeavors and commercial endorsements further exemplified the Tiger Woods brand.

Successful brands reflect character – who you are and what you stand for, and clarifying that character is paramount.  It’s the centerpiece of an authentic and transparent brand proposition.  The Tiger Woods brand consistently delivered on its expectations on and off the golf course.  The brand experience was highly attractive to be repeated by fans, endorsers, news media and even his competitive foes, all telling of great stories and experiences with anything Tiger Woods.  Like any great brand, it’s more about what people say after you’ve left the room than what you say about yourself, and the Tiger Woods brand was molded perfectly to suit that.

But then the mold began to crack around Thanksgiving. It happens.  No brand will last without error, especially one that is human.  The smart brands, or at least those with smart handlers, realize that and are equipped to address any fissure in the brand – quickly. That’s where the crack in the Tiger Woods brand began to widen.  Rather than address any issues head on – the late, great golf teacher Harvey Penick always extolled “take dead aim” – the Tiger Woods brand went into bunker mode.  Control of the brand was lost – others filled the void while the brand was mum – and it was exacerbated by a refusal to talk with cops on three different occasions and apparent denials about extra-marital affairs.

And then the skeletons started coming out of the closet.  Instead of a New York City nightclub promoter, and we may hear more on that down the road, we’re hearing about hook-ups with a reality TV star and a Las Vegas nightclub marketing manager.

A brand is also your every action and deed, including inaction in a crisis situation.  The Tiger Woods brand ceded control; it can be regained, but it will be the longest tee shot in the man’s career.

The social media fervor is pushing people, brands, government and hosts of others on a frenetic pace to build cult-like followings.  The risk here is witnessing the failure of these purported stakeholder relationships when these followers look behind the curtain and find Oz is a crusty old man spewing nothing but false promises.

History is littered with companies failing to adapt quick enough as consumers and markets change, and not engaging with stakeholders in social media is the next black hole.  Social media, however, is but one means – albeit increasingly powerful and important – of building relationships with your audiences.  It’s another tool in your communication arsenal, and long before you even think of dipping your toe into the pool, re-examining your brand and how it plays out both offline and online is the second most crucial step.

The first is accepting that consumers are in charge and they’re expectations are on the rise.  They demand more choices – in products and services, where they shop and eat, and where they get their information. They engage in conversations about products and issues – hardly paying any attention to the old school, one-way message marketing tactics – and more often than not, those discussions don’t directly include you, me or any other brand.

Couple the power of consumer control with the realization of the dynamics of a changing marketplace with intense global competition, and brand strategies should become a more frequent priority for any company.  But, please, for the love of whomever you pray to, a brand is so much more than a logo or tagline.  A brand is your competitive advantage that differentiates you from your competition.  News flash: It’s how others perceive you, and you can leave it to them to shape your brand or proactively do it yourself.

Think of this about your brand well in advance of spending 30 seconds to create your Twitter account (what’s more, long before executing any marketing tactic, including the news release):

•    A brand must consistently deliver on expectations
•    At the core of a meaningful brand relationship is a compelling story and a memorable product experience that is attractive enough to repeat
•    A brand is more about what people say after you’ve left the room than what you say about yourself

Successful brands reflect character – who you are and what you stand for, and clarifying that character is paramount.  It’s the centerpiece of an authentic and transparent brand proposition.  Following that, look at your vision for success, scrutinize your markets and competitors; then identify your points of differentiation and build your brand proposition that is strategic and salient, authentic, transparent, and credible.

Ready?  Not quite.  Have you taken the time to listen to how your stakeholders perceive your brand now and how, or if, they’ll engage with you in the future?  When you’re ready to get this far, listen to them and, here’s the catch, fix your vulnerabilities – from operations to marketing – dip your toe into the pool and deliver value.

Related posts:

San Diego Social Media Symposium: It’s About Genuine Consumer Experiences

Social Media is About Staying Relevant

Message to Brands: Be Quiet and Listen

Jumping Into Social Media Without Strategy is Preparing for Doom

Social Media 101: Customer Satisfaction is Key

Take Action: 5 Reasons to Provide Customer Service Via Social Media

Considering a Blog? Some Favorite Quotes and an NST White Paper

Why Public Relations Should Drive Social Media

Approximately 25 million Tweets are posted every day and more than 5 billion have been created since Twitter’s launch.  That’s a lot of 140-character sound bytes! And, if you’re following everyone from Justin Timberlake to the local news networks and NBA athletes, how do you dig through the clutter? Twitter founder, Biz Stone, says that the best way to get real value out of Twitter is to follow a small number of people; it was never his intention for people to follow more than 150 to 200 people.

Twitter recently launched a new feature to organize the people you’re following on Twitter by subject or to declare your favorite tweeps. Twitter Lists offer a way for you to bunch together Twitter users into “groups” so that you can follow their latest Tweet streams – from personal groupings of co-workers or family members to industries or interests, like San Diego restaurants or PR specialists.  It’s a great way to find the subject-specific information you’re looking for quickly, without having to weed through pages of irrelevant tweets.

By creating a public list of Twitter users, you’ll enable everyone to visit that list and follow the people on it.  It’s a great outlet to find groups of users who all tweet on the same topic.  This can also cause users to develop a case of “Twitter envy” of users who are more “popular” on Twitter, hence listed more often.  If you don’t want someone to know that you’re following them or simply want to keep the list to yourself, you can create a private list, which only you can view (sneaky!).

News organizations have already jumped on the Twitter Lists bandwagon, realizing it’s a great resource for gathering the news. They are creating staff directories of journalists and listing particular users by subject, such as politics and entertainment.

So, what does this mean for brands and businesses? Many brands have multiple accounts for various divisions, regional locations or products. Twitter Lists allow brands to create one master list, such as @brand/salesstaff and @brand/ourproducts.  Brands can also more closely monitor their competitors through the private list function.  On the reverse, they can create a public list of customers or critics who mention their brand or company often, or a list of industry news resources.  Companies can also promote their branded lists elsewhere, such as on their Web site, blog, marketing materials and e-mail signature. The most useful and followed lists are the ones that are the most specific, so brands should keep this in mind.

Each list is currently limited to 500 people, users may create a maximum of 20 lists and list names can be up to 25 characters.  Social media is always evolving, so these restrictions probably won’t stay in play too long.

For more information on creating Twitter Lists, public vs. private lists and ideas on naming your lists, refer to Mashable’s How-To Guide.