A Process View on Social Media

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

An Insider’s View on Social Media
Guest was Ric Dragon

Related Podcast:
Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Copyright Business901

CEO and co-founder of DragonSearch, Ric Dragon has more than
20 years of extensive experience in
graphic design, information architecture,
web development and digital marketing.
He is a sought-after speaker, having
spoken at numerous marketing and
technology conferences. Ric is also a
regular guest columnist for Marketing
Land, and Social Media Monthly.

Ric has unique insights grounded in
marketing, process methodologies (such as Lean), Social Media
and traditional web know-how. This is a process that is
repeatable, improvable and documented in his new book, Social
Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get
Customers to Stay Forever. Ric also has another eBook
published: The DragonSearch Online Marketing
Manual.
DragonSearch is one of the best boutique SMM
(social media marketing) and SEO agencies in
New York. They help companies use existing
internal resources to monetize their investment
in social and have extensive resources if you
wish to outsource certain activities.
DragonSearch provides real teams that stay on
top of the latest changes in an ever and quickly
changing industry, providing an integrated
holistic approach to online marketing to
maximize your investment and to provide measurable results.


Transcription of Podcast
Joe Dager: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business901 podcast. With me today is Ric Dragon. He has
more than 16 years of experience in online marketing, and
software development. He is the
co-founder and CEO of Dragon Sponsored by
Search, where he has led social
media strategy for Stuban, The
Grammy Foundation, and many
others.
Ric, I would like to welcome you
and congratulate you on your
new book, "Social Marketology,"
and for the fact that you wrote
a book on social media and got
past content is king.
Ric Dragon: Thank you. Thank you, delighted to be here.

Joe: One of the things that set you apart, and maybe this is why
we did not get into that content is king issues, is that you are a
social media guru, but you're schooled in fundamentals like SMO
and SEO. Why is that important?
Ric: All the three-letter acronyms for sure. I guess one thing
that's fundamentally different about our approach to social
media. Here is that my background, in that Web development
and application development world, very, very early on, we
looked at it, and we said, "Wow, all these projects fail all around
us." Everybody doing large software projects, the failure rate was
so high, and we really got very passionate about discovering
ways of overcoming the failure rate of those types of projects.
We looked around. I don't know if you remember a company
called James and Martin Co.

James Martin, an Australian fellow, had developed the process
library that was eventually acquired by Computer Associates and
formed their process libraries for Web development, and today is
still a lot of the fundamental basis of a site called Ganthead.
Which Ganthead is every project manager's playground on the
Web, so, a lot of good processes. That started us off in the whole
process improvement methodologies school if you will.
Then as we're digging around in that world, we discovered
Capability Maturity Model for software coming out of the Carnegie
Mellon Institute.
Of course, that was developed particularly on bequest of the...I
think it was Department of Defense who was experiencing a lot of
failure rates with software projects, and trying to figure out why
and how we can overcome this.
That was fundamentally about creating documentation and an
improvement cycle, if you will. Of course, this leads you into
every other software or process improvement methodology out
there in the world that we've played with, Six Sigma, Lean, and
whatnot. So, I have a very strong grounding in that world.

When social media came to be something, about five years ago
was when it really started becoming a viable use in marketing,
we're like, "Well, how do we bring a process to this?" That was
our first impulse.

We started developing processes or process framework for social
media very early on, which is where my entire tangent in the
book comes from.
Joe: That's what your book's about. It's not about software
development. I want to mention that it's an easy read that you
can read it even if you're not a process methodology guy, or if


you're not a technical software developer. It's the middle ground
of taking messages and making sense to the common guy.

Ric: Sure, sure. What's interesting, and it's the same with a lot
of process improvement methodologies, you see something like
the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act. It's so simple. If
anything, as we were working through a lot of it, some of the
things seemed so painfully obvious and simple. The first step in
social marketology framework is desired outcomes, really
stopping and identifying what you want to come out of things. It
sounds so utterly simple, and yet it's something that so many
marketing and digital marketing projects fail to do.
Joe: Hardly, anybody does that. I mean, I don't want to say that
and, I've got to watch myself in tongue and cheek. But the
desired outcomes, they may say, "We want this," or, "We want
that," but it's kind of that message of how does a company start
becoming social? "We created a Facebook page."
Ric: Right, right, which is terribly butt backwards.

Joe: Yes, yes. Then there's nothing on it, and nobody is being
social. Then all of a sudden someone writes something on it, that
is maybe not so social, and, "Social media has all these people on
it, and blah, blah, blah," and then they sour on it quickly.
Ric: Right. Well, the other thing that emerged from our work
was, there was a discovery in a way to sort of understand as we
dove into this in trying to develop a framework that we could
share with other marketers, was when you say a social media
marketing project, you could be talking about one of at least five
different types of projects. Not all projects are the same. That's
really a core, fundamental element that needs to be understood.

If I am going to be doing brand management for an organization
through social media, and doing community management, that's
succinctly different than the type of social media project where

we might be doing influence or outreach, for instance, or
community development, totally different types of projects.

Joe: In your book, do you cover each?
Ric: Yes, it covers at least five of those.
Joe: Is there more?
Ric: Probably.

Joe: But you got the majority, right? You've got that 80 percent?
Ric: I don't know. This is so exciting to me and part of what was
so exciting to me about writing this book was; we touch on so
many different aspects of humanity. We get into psychology, the
psychology of influence, for instance, and all that goes into
marketing and psychographics and whatnot. We get into the
history of marketing. We get into group formation and group
dynamics. There are so many different elements of what's
interesting about people that go into social media. So, there's no
end to it.

I think as we go along with social media, certain things are
emerging that still surprise some of us. I don't think any of us in
social media marketing saw Pinterest coming.
There's going to be a whole new platform that's very image based
where people can curate images. That's just going to take off like
wildfire. It happened. It was amazing. There's something about it
that appealed people. We don't know what. I have no doubt that
more such things are going to emerge.
Joe: Does everyone need to jump on the bandwagon and get
social?
Ric: Yes, they do. They do because it represents a fundamental
revolution in business communications. It's turned the world


upside down. We haven't seen this type of revolution in business
communication since the invention of the printing press. That
completely transformed the political structure and the religious
structure of Europe.
Social media is such a huge change that organizations;
businesses need to adapt, they need to get involved with it. If
they don't, the risk is that their competitors will gain hegemony in
their space that they won't be able to overcome.
Joe: One of the problems that I struggle within explaining social
media, and we talk about collaboration, open innovation,
co-partnering, and all these different things now, if your company
is built on the typical hierarchy structure, it's pretty difficult to,
then suddenly be social outside your company isn't it?
Ric: Yes, it is. That traditional hierarchical structure in itself is
interesting. I think a lot of organizations that I look that still have
that traditional structure also have other cross-role structures
underneath. I think when you really look at organizations, they're
not just about one structure versus another, they often have
many different structures working together.
Joe: There are self-directed directed teams or self-forming
forming teams underneath that regular structure.
Ric: Certainly, certainly. Now, of course, there're some
organizations that still, "Oh, we have to have this reporting
structure." But that reporting structure might just be for one
particular role. It might be for HR accountability. When it comes
to projects, for instance, it has to be a matrix formation.
Joe: I want to get past this question because this is one that
bothers me, all right? I see every social media guru out there
saying you've got to get social; all our companies have to do
that, there's no choice. One of the major hurdles affecting
businesses in becoming social is the internal IT function. When

you hear the gurus spouting off, they're not the ones that have to
support that business networking function.

Ric: Sure.
Joe: OK? What's a happy medium?
Ric: Well, I do want to back up for a second because even the
phrase, "social media guru," is something that I think we have to
eschew. I think anybody who takes on that mantle and says well
I'm a social media guru, or I am an expert as opposed to gee,
I've got expertise in this, should possibly be avoided, to some
extent. This is such a nascent field is so revolutionary that all of
us are students and need to be autodidactic.
We have to constantly be teaching ourselves and learning about
this. At the same time, though, when we look at the landscape of
people out there talking about social, there are people who've
taken on the role of being evangelists for social.

For those of us in the field sometimes it gets a little old.
Somebody's coming to the table and saying, "Gee guys, you've
got to get social."

Cluetrain Manifesto was written 13 years ago, and it was
exhorting businesses, "Hey, you need to tear down these old
structures, and let communication flow freely between the
organization and the world." Yet, there is still an amazing amount
of organizations out there that have not adopted that attitude.
The evangelical role in social media is important. There are still a
lot of C-suite folks out there who need to be convinced or taught
about the importance and value of social.
With that said, let's go back to the other part of your question,
the fact that it's getting owned by IT. Wow, there're so many
parts of that I wouldn't know where to start with the danger of
that.

In other organizations, I see it being owned by marketing; I see it
being owned by PR and communications, sometimes I see it
owned by IT.
Ultimately, I think social media, people who are talking about
social business is the model that we're going to ultimately need to
adopt. Where the entire organization is social, and it's not just
owned by one department versus another. Now, we're far from
that.
My book talks about social media marketing, in particular; That's
where we do assume that role. IT owning it? No.
Joe: But, how do they keep it running? Let's face it. My site,
from my home had a DDoS attack this weekend and that's
becoming, it seems to me, more common.

Ric: But, how is that social media's sort of department, if you
will?

Joe: I wouldn't say it's social media, but as we allow more
freedom on the net, and more freedom within our internal LAN
networks isn't that going to cause some problems of keeping the
network running?
Ric: Well, I think that good IT people can create structures
where you can be using Twitter on your desk. I have seen a lot of
organizations that are so locked down that people in the
organization cannot be on Facebook or Twitter. That is a problem.
Basically, leadership needs to say, "This is important. Let's
overcome these problems." They can be overcome. Plenty of
high-level organizations have overcome those problems. They can
be. They need to be.

But to simply say, "Sorry, we can't let you on there because you
might tweet a link to something," no, that's training. That's a
danger even with email.


Joe: So, you're saying that there just needs to be a process, in
effect, and some guideline given, but that you can allow these
new social media networks and the new interest. "Oh, this
Pinterest just came out. Let me try this." That can still happen
within a work environment.
Ric: Certainly. I would even go so far as to say it needs to. The
value that it can bring to an organization, when it's backed by
good structure and good process is immeasurable.
Joe: Is there anything that you would say maybe would
forewarn someone to say, "Don't take this plunge without
knowing this," or something?
Ric: Well, there are some fundamentals that I think every
organization, whether they feel they're totally ready for social
media; they need to do no matter what. One of them is that they
need to go out there and take ownership of their name space.
They need to own profiles in their name. We saw the instance of
Netflix creating a new product, or a whole new business line with
a different name, and somebody owned the Twitter handle. They
should have made sure that they owned their real estate first. So,
that's very important. That's just good brand management.
The second thing, you need to be monitoring. You need to be
listening. There're a lot of good social media monitoring tools that
allow you to manage or monitor your own brand name, to
monitor your competitors, to monitor your product space or your
service space.

Good monitoring needs to happen. That could be a function of PR
and communications, or whoever owns marketing. That needs to
happen.

The third thing that definitely needs to happen in every single
organization, is they need to have policy in place. Because even if
the organization isn't ready to have their own Facebook presence,

for instance, that doesn't mean that Joe down in sales hasn't
already started it. So, let's have policy and training.

Joe: You bring up a good point, one that leads into my next
question. Can you be just as effective on other people's sites
versus just always creating your own and trying to take
ownership of a platform?

Ric: There's so much value by having your own home base. We
can even take that concept further to the concept of the blog. By
having a very strong blog that becomes the hub for all your other
social media activities. Each of those social media presences
become a hub for your communication with people on those
platforms.
Joe: You feel blogging is still important.

Ric: Blogging is central.
Joe: That's interesting because blogging is kind of the granddad,
isn't it, to social media?
Ric: It is. In fact, what's interesting is on all the research I've
done, is the whole concept, and the social-media ethos of
authenticity and transparency really came from the blogging
world. It wasn't really in social media. The first social media
platforms were all about people pretending to be other people. If
you remember that famous cartoon on the Internet, nobody
really knows you're a dog. It was so prevalent for people to be
pretending to be something other than what they were.
When blogging came along, and it started to compete with real
journalism, the ethic of being transparent was very, very
important.
Joe: We just ran across some people putting up fake LinkedIn
profiles, and fake Twitter accounts, and professing to be someone


they're not and not being very transparent. How do we know
that's not happening?

Ric: It definitely is happening. But the risk to an organization to
participate in those types of tactics is far too great. If you
remember the BP oil spill and the folks at BP did something that
30 years ago would have been considered fairly innocuous. There
were some photographs, or video footage of their control center
where they had all of these monitors and video monitors showing
pictures of the ocean floor.
The reality was they only had a few video monitors live. In order
to make it look like the control room was more active they photo-
shopped in some other screens. That became discovered.
Somebody said, "Hey, in fact, it's bad Photoshop work."
The blow to their credibility was so great that it was utterly
ludicrous for them to even try to do such a thing. The same thing
is true if Chick-Fil-A was in fact, guilty of creating fake Facebook
accounts in order to counter their critics. The blow to their
credibility is too great.
So, it's extremely important to maintain a very high standard of
ethics in social media.
Joe: You lay out a platform on how to go about this. You're a
process guy, from reading your things and following you. Can you
briefly describe the platform that you outline in the book?

Ric: Sure. The framework is fairly simple. We start with having a
very clear understanding of our desired outcomes, as I mentioned
before. Doing that piece of work is the very first part of the
project. It's interviewing stakeholders. It’s understanding an
organization's bigger purpose, their vision, their values, their
culture, documenting these things and talking about the goals,
objectives and particular metrics that represents that success.


I just picked up the book, recently, "What Sticks," which I think
came out a few years ago.

The author of "What Sticks," in fact, the very first fundamental
element that they speak about is the need for marketers to really
have a better understanding of what the goals and objectives, or
desired outcomes are of their programs.

They identified that as being one of the leading causes of failure
in marketing. So, that's the first element in social marketology.
We need to understand that and document it. Then we're able to
share that with whoever's doing social media on behalf of the
team.
The second element is having a better understanding of your
brand voice and personality. This we take on as a real task of
understanding that, again, interviewing stakeholders,
understanding the bigger organization.
The idea that a brand can have personality is a concept that came
out in Madison Avenue in the '60s, and it's pretty well proven that
people do project personality onto brands.
So how do we take the reins of that and use it better so that, as
the entity of the brand is talking one on one with people, that the
voice is clear and clearly articulated?
Joe: What you're saying is that we really have to understand
who we are.
Ric: Exactly. This is beautiful, we go from desired outcomes, we
go to understanding who we are. Then we look outwards, and
who is our audience? We do a piece of work that we call
"micro-segmentation." Now, micro-segmentation, we're not just
looking at the old fashioned segments of yesterday's marketing.
"Gee, soccer moms in Westchester who have a master's degree."
We're going even deeper than that.


If we look at people, for instance, who like animals, perhaps I'm
selling animal figurines. I'll go into the world of people who like
wild animals, African animals, people who support elephant
preserves. We go into domestic animals, and all the different
types. We get into dogs, and we can get into breeds.
Finally, we reach a point of granularity that we're talking about
the Airedale Terrier Kennel Club of greater Duluth, Minnesota,
that type of granularity.
This piece of work is brainstorming. It results in an indented
document which becomes a framework for all of our social media
work because we can iterate through these various
micro-segments to find out where we can start to get
engagement within their communities.
We can then research our micro-segments to find out where their
communities are, and in fact, research those communities doing
what we might call "on-line ethnography," or it's been termed
"net-nography," analyzing and studying on-line communities.

Joe: And this is not rocket science to do, is it?
Ric: Absolutely not. Of course, as we study these communities,
we start to see what these people are talking about. We can start
to engage that community or become part of that community,
perhaps even becoming influential in that community. That's the
whole community stage of the process framework. After the
community stage, we've done the study, we can identify who's
influential within these communities or outside of these
communities. Then we can focus on the influencer piece of work,
where we identify let's say a set portfolio of influencers.
We really work hard to engage those people. We follow their
blogs. We comment on their blogs. We do what we call the
"influencer project," where we can really get involved with those
people.

For some organizations, particularly in B to B, you might totally
put all of your social media energy into that type of influence or
project.
Because, let's say if you sell antibiotics for poultry. Well, there're
only five people in the world that you really need to talk to, or
maybe 10 or 20. It's a pretty small audience. So you can really
find out whose influential in that world and try to speak with
them directly.
After you've gone through this process, you've looked at your
desired outcomes, you've done your brand voice and personality,
you've done the micro-segmentation, you've studied the
communities, and you’ve studied the influencers. At that point,
you can put together an action plan.
Your action plan can be based on a lot of different elements of
what your marketing objectives are, different types of plans that
you can put together. Then, of course, measure, study, reiterate,
and come back around and do it again.

Joe: I can get rid of a real lot of waste in the process because
I'm not marketing to this huge, wide-open funnel. I'm marketing
to a cylinder, just about.
Ric: Exactly, exactly. The other beauty of it, and you can bring
in some of the Scrum tactics, for instance, that we use internally,
where we're creating stories around our users. It is extremely
user-centric, and trying to add value to the people out there in
their communities.
Joe: I think that's a key thing that I enjoy is, I think, where you
find your marketing voice and where you find your niche, is
through user stories, if you really pay attention to them. User
stories are neat anymore, because they're not just writing a user
story. You can record them and gain so much richness out of a
user story.

Ric: Because we've done all that work in really looking at our
communities, and being able to pull that information from the
social stream, it's so much easier and richer than it would have
been let's say 30 years ago.
Joe: What I like about this, more than anything, Ric, is the fact
that it's common sense. You can explain it in audio. It's not that
difficult to understand. I'm sure there's a lot more, using one of
your terms, granular work in place to do that with. But I walk
away from that saying, "I already know that."
Ric: Thank you, Joe. I think it is fundamentally simple. I don't
think it's rocket science or rocket surgery. Details, the difficulty of
anything, are in juggling all the different parts, and making sure
that you keep an eye on the bigger picture. I think what can
happen for all of us at times, particularly in doing these types of
projects, is we get so focused on the miniscule and the
micro-picture, and we've stopped looking at the bigger picture.
Joe: Should I expect immediate results? How do I sustain this
effort? Because, if I don't see a return on it, if I don't see
anything, what's some good signs that say that I'm moving
forward?
Ric: Well, this is one of the very interesting challenges of social
media marketing in general. There's a tremendous amount of
dialogue around the idea that, what is the ROI of social media
marketing? A lot of people are very, very focused on the
transaction. How much has my social media marketing efforts led
to a particular transaction, so that I can say, "Well? We made this
amount of money from it"?
The challenge in that, actually, I think goes back to a lot of the
fabulous thinking that we saw coming out of the '90s with more
complex ROI or ROM-I models that emerged from let's say
marketing models, or even books like, "What Sticks." It wasn't so
simple.

Social media contributes to so many different aspects of the
customer relationship. Now, in a world where we see on
most-traded stocks, about 80 percent of companies' value is in
brand equity, 80 percent.
So, if we look at the value of marketing in that mix, any
marketing, not just social media marketing, how much is
marketing contributing to that overall value, not just in
transactions?
There're also elements where these marketing efforts can
contribute to advocacy, and we have to measure back, well; how
much does advocacy contribute to our bottom line? How much
does awareness contribute to our bottom line? There's each of
these aspects.
So, the models for understanding the value or the ROI of social
and other marketing can be pretty complex.
Now, the reality is, if we're having the across-the-lunch-table
discussion, a couple of beers, and you're going, "OK, Come on,
Ric. How quickly is this stuff going to bring value to the
company?" It is not overnight. It's not a quick fix.

Social media marketing, to really start seeing returns, typically I
see projects of six to nine months, to even 12 months, before you
start seeing real tangible changes.
Sometimes we can see it more quickly. It depends on the
budgets. But typically it's a longer-haul thing. We look to other
means of digital marketing for those quick fixes.
Joe: It is something that it is not overly expensive to do. It's
resource-consuming, though, isn't it?
Ric: It depends on the size of the organization. If you have an
organization that's spending $10 million a year on marketing, to
spend $500,000 on social media marketing would be a pretty

healthy budget, but not that much of the bigger spend. The
interesting thing is that the majority of consumers are now
spending a preponderance of their time in social media, and yet
we're still not shifting more of that budget over into social.
Joe: I think also that goes to the fact that people don't really
understand social, because when they shift the budget, they shift
the thought process of advertising, and sending things out, and
how many links they send out, or how many Twitter messages
they send out with that. Though some of that's accepted, there
just has to be a balance.
Ric: Exactly. I think the word "balance" is beautiful, because I
think what organizations and the C-suite need to adopt is a
balanced scorecard approach to marketing that we don't want to
put our entire marketing budget into promotions for the
immediate future. If we're putting our entire budget into
transactional sales in the next six months, we're not building the
brand equity or awareness aspect of things.
If, on the other hand, we put too much of our budget into brand
awareness and brand-equity work, we're not covering our sales
increases for the next six months.
I think the wonderful, beautiful job of a marketing strategist is
trying to devise ways and create a balanced approach to the
whole thing, where each of these components is contributing to
the other component.

Joe: Is there something that you would like to add that maybe I
didn't ask?
Ric: You got me on surprise there, Joe. There're so many things
to add to this conversation, there're so many different parts of
this conversation that's rich. I think when you start diving into
social media as an endeavor; social media marketing, in
particular, the amount of richness is never-ending. When we first

started the conversation earlier today, you said, "How are
things?" I'm just like, "Wow; it's so busy." There's so much
interesting work to be doing and new approaches to things.
One of the things we didn't talk about that I think is important for
marketers to understand is we need to try to understand social
media in terms of the patterns of what's really happening.

We have to try to get past the immediate frenzy of, "Oh, well it's
Facebook," or "It's Twitter," or "It's Pinterest," and try to see the
patterns of behavior that people are engaging in.
When we start to look at social media platforms and these
various behaviors, things like micro-gifting emerge. Things like
curation occur. Things like the sharing process.
How can we then approach social media to enrich our activities
from this viewpoint, as opposed to getting so bogged down in the
constant and never-ending change of these various platforms?

Joe: You bring up a great point there, Rick. I'm just going to ask
you a quick question here. Should I go into this easily, and only
look at one platform at a time, or should I jump into the middle
of everything and start with three or four?
Ric: Well, it's going to change with different organizations, and
what your desired outcomes are. It's very typical for us to, as
we're creating a social media marketing plan, to see things in
terms of where we're going to get our largest immediate gain. So
let's just say we're in a B to C environment, and we know that
the majority of our audience and our communities are taking
place on Facebook. We're probably going to put 75, 80 percent of
our effort in the next three months in Facebook.

Then we'll start migrating into Twitter or Pinterest, depending on
the types of products we sell, wherever we're going to get the
most leverage.


We also want to look at ways that we can create trans-media
storytelling bridging these various platforms. But yes, it's true,
we're going to probably focus on one of those big four.
Joe: I would like to thank you very much. Tell me where we can
get your book, and is there a book website, and where can
someone get a hold of you? I'll throw like three questions in
there.
Ric: Well, thank you and all of them can be solved with going to
dragonsearchmarketing.com. At dragonsearchmarketing.com we
have a page for the book. You can contact me. You can read our
blog at our organization. We've got a lot of wonderful bloggers
here at DragonSearch contributing to the blog, and a lot of
interesting conversations there.
You can also find me; I think I own the top 50 to 100 results if
you search on ricdragon without a "k" just R-I-C dragon on
Google that I come up.

Joe: Well thank you very much. This podcast will be available on
the Business901 blog site and Business901 iTunes store, so,
thanks again, Ric.



Joseph T. Dager
Business901
Phone: 260-918-0438
Skype: Biz901
Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Website: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in
bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty
years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies
it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and
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A Process View on Social Media

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