Guillaume Bouchard's conference (PubCon2012) on the risks of social media proliferation without proper education and strategy. The talk aims to dispel the “hype” around social media—it’s a tool, not a miracle—by devaluing buzzwords, showcasing social media nightmares, and suggesting necessary precautions when integrating social media marketing into your company.
1. Social Media, Press Relations, & Brand
Management
October 17th presented by Guillaume Bouchard
2. The Nitty Gritty
• Social Media is still in its infancy
• The Trifecta of Social Media to drive results
• Never forget the basics
• Social Media ―Hype‖ cycle
• Quick Case Studies
• The Good
• The Bad
• The Ugly
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3. Social Media is still in its infancy
Reality: agencies and clients do TACTICS
Everyone has experience delivering several social media projects (read: TACTICS)
• Infographics
• Content Strategy
• Digg / Reddit / StumbleUpon pushes
• Social Media Audits
• Facebook contests
• LinkedIn advertising
• Twitter – earned and paid
• Pinterest
• Bloggers outreach
• Offline Event / Community Engagement
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4. Usual plan of action
Agencies get contacted to
only take care and optimize
one or a few pre-determined
tactics by the client.
We are stuck at the tactical
level 95% of the time…
BIG MISTAKE!!!!
5. Desired Plan of action
Ideally, we would get asked to
get involved in the bigger
picture of social media. That
implies that we understand
the general business model of
the client and that we propose
a social strategy based on
KPIs. The plan proposed
different tactics deployed on
several channels. It also
requires ongoing monitoring
and optimizing.
6. The Trifecta of Social Media
Audience monitoring
• To help a brand modify and enact plans of action based on severity & type of feedback.
• Main KPIs: # of mentions & feedback for any keywords, brand names, direct or indirect competitors
and phrases that could create threats or opportunities for your brand.
Audience engagement
• Investing in and fostering a meaningful relationship with your audience can effectively lead to a
conversion.
• Brand loyal customers and influencers will mention your brand favorably via word of mouth.
• Main KPIs for this tactic: # Likes, # subscriptions to a contest, activity of the user base
Social signals
• Value driven social signals and consistent interaction with your community builds social currency for
your brand.
• Main KPI: rankings
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7. The Trifecta deliverables…
• Deliverables divided into 2 phases
The Social Plan • 80% Social Audit
• 20 % Recommendations with budget, tactics and KPIs
Social Monitoring • Tools selection, ongoing reporting and consulting
Social Engagement • Contests, Events, Bloggers outreach, Social Ads
Content creation: Infographics, Social article.
Social Signals Content Promotion: Bloggers outreach, Social news promotion,
Social Ads
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8. Never forget the basics
10 things not to ever forget before you get started
1. Define the business objectives (MarCom? Sales? HR? PR?)
2. Define higher-level purposes (ex: Reinforce brand positioning)
3. Narrow what you want to accomplish (Align with higher-level purposes)
4. Develop measurable KPIs (ex: generate more CVs applications)
5. Decide which social channel(s) works best for these goals
6. Develop a brand persona (and live & die by it)
7. Coordinate any effort with other departments (let them know!)
8. Be consistent in what you write and how you write it (the world is watching)
9. Always remember what you are trying to communicate
10. Find what works and do more of it!
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9. Social Media « Hype » cycle
Hopes and dreams
• Opportunity for outreach
• Opportunity for driving engagement
• Opportunity for raising brand awareness
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10. Social Media « Hype » cycle
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda
• Assess what you could / would / should be doing online
• Plan carefully: going into social media blindly can hurt
• Prepare for coordination challenges within your company
• Be smart: do not get overburdened with maintaining online presence
• Be consistent: avoid giving off disparate customer experiences
• Most importantly: don’t let tough situations overwhelm you; ask for help
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11. Social Media ―Hype‖ Cycle
Visualizing excitement
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12. Social Media ―Hype‖ Cycle
Bouncing back from the Trough of disillusionment
• Take some altitude & look at things from another perspective
• Accept that you will become great at this – but that you aren’t now!
• Understand your mistakes – and do not repeat them
• Attend a social media marketing conference to get fresh ideas
• Build a clear plan to bounce back quickly
• Get some external help from an agency
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14. Something Good
Home Depot
• Founded the How-To Community
• Engaged existing employees
• Half of their time in store, half online
• Now contributing to The Apron blog
• Acting as on-call experts for the Garden Club
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15. … Or Something Bad
GoDaddy.com
• SOPA fiasco mismanagement
• Video of CEO shooting an elephant
• Poor customer service
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16. Worse, Something Ugly
United Airlines
• Even ―flying high‖—things can take a turn for the worse
• Ignored bad press, aimed to cover up rather than apologize
• Finally apologized once deemed critical – could have done it right away
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Montréal QC H2W 2R2
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Guillaume Bouchard presents on the risks of social media proliferation without proper education and strategy. The talk aims to dispel the “hype” around social media—it’s a tool, not a miracle—by devaluing buzzwords, showcasing social media nightmares, and suggesting necessary precautions when integrating social media marketing into your company.
This is howwedeliveritSocial strategy: Ongoing strategy not 1 document, sesasonality, PR, contests, ad, giveaways, infographicstrategySocial promotion: promoting the content, getting social signals, viralization
This slide introduces the widely understood (and mostly mythological) aspects of social media marketing: what amateurs think of when they jump into social media. There is, unfortunately, still a lot of buzz around these platforms, in part because of the very nature of social media itself—while it’s easy to deploy, it’s also incredibly difficult to perform on. Yes, there is the opportunity for outreach, to drive engagement, to raise brand awareness. The thing is, to make your ROI worthwhile and to do these things successfully, there’s a lot more to social media than throwing around empty promises.
Going into social media blind can leave your company confused. Beyond coordination challenges, there are issues with maintaining online presence once it’s been established. There’s also risk of giving disparate customer experiences—real risks. Ones that can lead to legal or brand-perception risks, hurting your company more than you thought possible. With the uses of social media as varied as there are channels themselves, businesses need to first assess what they should be doing online—before getting carried away with what they can and will do. Seems easy enough, but the hype around social media can allow your excitement to get the better of you.
Let’s use The “Hype” Cycle to help us visualize the aches and pains of moving beyond the hype. Let’s imagine we’re starting our social media campaign. We put up a Facebook page, open a Twitter account—we look and feel ready to go. We start reaching out, engaging, creating awareness about our brand. But after awhile, the magic disappears. We’re starting to realize that nothing’s actually working—or if it is, we don’t know why or how or with who. Maybe worse, we’ve fudged up and damaged the brand. On The “Hype” Cycle, that puts us at the bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment—which really just means disappointed and upset with ourselves. We’ve hit rock bottom. So we take some time off, we look at our mistakes and we learn from them. We lick our wounds, regroup, attend a marketing conference or two. We’re in that Slope of Enlightenment phase, really getting to understand our failures by comparing them to our own little victories, or maybe similar brands that are really doing things right. And after all that, maybe we do something really cool. Here’s hoping. But what if we could skip all the growing pains? Start midway through this graph—how can we avoid being disappointed, upset, and possibly in the red?
So we take some time off, we look at our mistakes and we learn from them. We lick our wounds, regroup, attend a marketing conference or two. We’re in that Slope of Enlightenment phase, really getting to understand our failures by comparing them to our own little victories, or maybe similar brands that are really doing things right. And after all that, maybe we do something really cool. Here’s hoping. But what if we could skip all the growing pains? Start midway through this graph—how can we avoid being disappointed, upset, and possibly in the red?
Let’s backtrack a little before getting into the thick of things. Social media marketing can mean a whole lot of goodness if done correctly—don’t get me wrong. But once you realize you’re online, you have to realize you’re in the public eye like you’ve never been before. You’re in the spotlight and now isn’t the time to do or say the wrong thing. It can be truly disastrous. Across organizations, there’s an average of ten noteworthy social media crises a year. Thankfully, it seems that about ¾ of them could be diminished or averted entirely. So how do we do that? Let’s take a look at some brands to get a better understanding.
Home Depot, a hardware store company, decided to take a “grassroots” approach to social media. Social media moguls were handpicked from the existing floor staff, arming them with video cameras and giving them training sessions on brand guidelines and online etiquette. Working half the week in the store, half the week online, these employees founded the “How-To Community”—a blog where employees like 21-year old home associates “LawnRanger” solve issues that customers might have with home projects. The community was so successful—the contributors creating an ideal environment—they were invited to start writing for The Apron, a direct extension of the Home Depot brand—a blog that simply gives unsolicited décor and home improvement tips and tricks. Further, they’ve leveraged this kind of “trust” between their expertise and the curiosity of their clientele to other departments—including an online staff to provide gardening advice for the Garden Club.
With great power comes great responsibility, and the bigger you are, the harder you’ll fall. Clichés aside, big brands need to be especially careful of how they conduct themselves, as once you’re on the Internet’s bad side, even temporarily, a lot of damage can be done to how people perceive your brand. When GoDaddy took a stance against SOPA, the masses reeled. Although SOPA is a heavily politicized issue, we can still look at the repercussions of what drawing “negative” attention to your brand can do. The SOPA fiasco effectually opened the floodgates. It gave people a chance to recall a previous scandal—the GoDaddy CEO posted a video of himself shooting elephants in Africa—as well as allowed for dissatisfied customers to speak out about GoDaddy’s poor costumer service. First-person accounts surfaced that detailed accounts suspended without due cause, awful support and blocking domain name transfers. Eventually GoDaddy “listened” to their clientele and retracted their support for the SOPA legislation, but not before tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of domains were lost.This is but just one example of how a misstep can lead to more than you bargained for—it’s impossible to censor the masses. If they are celebrating your brand, then all’s good. If you fall under scrutiny, things can get ugly—and quick.
During the 2012 Olympics the UA public relations team had a prize-winning strategy to capitalize on the celebratory cheer that goes along with the festivities. They were quizzing Facebook fans on their knowledge of the Olympics and were instructed to share their scores with their friends and followers across social platforms.Somewhere in the middle of this, a blogger wrote an article about the airlines misplacing his daughter while she was connecting flights on her way to summer camp. The post started to gain notoriety, and as it did, people started expressing their disappointment and anger on UA’s Facebook page. Rather than addressing the issue directly, posts were allegedly being deleted from the page by UA’s PR team.Worse, they were still pushing their Olympics advertising campaign. Soon, their entire page became flooded with angry comments and even their quizzes became venues for expressing frustration with the company. Two days later they issued a public apology, which while not ideal, seemed to quell the storm.While it can be hard to receive and maintain attention from followers—battling for engagement—once the ball gets rolling the other way, it can be near impossible to stop.