Social Media PR Playbook: Thoughts

I've been gestating ideas for the past several days around ways to use social media for PR purposes that would exceed the normal use of social media tools to print and distribute PR messaging. It strikes me that PR agencies are well positioned to understand client needs and interests, brand and message, and also how best to craft and roll out story lines. That's a skill, and a valuable one, for the combination of care attendant to a client's image and reputation, and the means by which to caretake it, are not intrinsic to consumer audiences. But the agency's self interest in demonstrating success can result in demands on social media (such as the ongoing debate around ROI and how best to calculate it) that may hamper creativity and low-level risk taking.

To wit, a PR firm may tend to view social media as outreach tools, means of distributing a campaign across yet another medium. A PR firm may wish to translate traditional messaging to social media, and monitor results for signs up pick up. It may wish to influence influencers, as it does in its offline campaigns, and again count the results. To which end tools like Radian6 and Visible Technologies can be used to validate success.

These are the things we do when we're uncertain of the value of both our effort and of our methods. Which has me wondering aloud about crafting a "playbook" for social media marketing strategies. If we could take some confidence from our methods, perhaps we might ask less of the metrics and measurement we use to confirm results.

A playbook, not unlike the highly-guarded clipboard many coaches hold tight to their chests on the sidelines, would articulate options best suited for specified needs. Perhaps some for "offense" and some for "defense" (ok, and special teams). Plays for image branding, for event announcements and invitations, for appeals to area or domain experts, critics, and reviewers, plays for building up a campaign launch, and plays for carrying it through. And so on. These plays would, in theory at least, provide a measure of confidence (rather than a measure of results) and could help the PR firm in client pitches as well as in facilitating creative approaches to social media engagement.

The playbook I've been mulling over would of course start with a definition of goals and objectives, many of them, and define appropriate means of execution. Branding, visibility, news, crisis remedies, customer support, resident expertise and help desk operations, product tips, lifestyle branding, and much more might each be pursued according to different strategies and tactics. Street, buzz, and affinity marketing. Sales, incentives, and offers. Best of breed reviews and recommendations. Long tail associations and links. End user reviews, expert reviews.

Or more creatively, putting product in the hands of a good cause and lifestreaming results. Creating transparency between product and consumers through product co-creation and "crowd sourced" feature requests and changes. Sneak peaks at future product, service, or other kinds of release (tv shows, movies, music included!). Back stage passes and special invitations to participate or engage with insiders. Twitter-based narratives and story lines (I like Family Guy -- I'd follow Stewie on twitter if his posts were written in character and revealed upcoming plot elements. I like Charlie Rose -- I'd follow his posts, or his producer's, or even those of his interviewees....)

If the goals of a social media release or campaign are the same as those of any commercial use of media -- distribution -- then why not give audiences something to tweet about. Why just package the same old and then count "micro-blogging" mentions? (Because it's safe? Because we know how to do it? Because we're lazy?) There's an opportunity here for creative revitalization of social media marketing for those who can see that this is a new, direct, immediate, and multi-media channel of communication. Used for talking and sharing. Not just for repetition but for invention.

Old media maintain a separation between the brand and its audience. And all PR, marketing, and advertising seek to cross that gap by appealing to audiences' attention and interest. Well, social media break that "fourth wall" (theater metaphor, the fourth wall is what separates what's on stage from the audience, and sustains the "suspended disbelief" required to keep the audience believing what its seeing while unaware of its production.) Break the fourth wall, expose or provide access to means of production, and I'm certain bountiful mentions and audience interest will follow naturally. All brands have willing fans, all have great stories customer stories posted by the wall alongside the water-cooler. All have internal brand champions whose ideas for getting product to non-profits, causes, and other beneficiaries would make for great PR and audience re-tale-ing... Brands and their agencies of record should be engaging in new and note-worthy efforts, not just repeating brand-centric messages.

I'm working on the playbook. Truly, I think that if commercial interests want audiences (read: users) to follow social media campaigns, they have to give us something worth talking about.

Social media monitoring and packaged care: Pick UPS, Push UPS

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation by UPS's Debbie Curtis-Magley at Tuesday's Blogwell in San Jose. Her topic was social media monitoring, and her team's experiences watching conversational media for UPS-related traffic. Keen to learn what tools they used, and with what success, we were somewhat disappointed to learn that social media tracking is still a matter best left to humans -- tools not yet being able to capture conversations accurately and automatically. What eavesdropping tool would know, as she cited to pointed laughter, that push ups and sit ups bear no relation to pick UPS, the company's tagline?!

While UPS seemed to be tracking conversations as well as we consumers track UPS, conversational marketing and monitoring is still in its infancy. The great difficulty of tuning your tools to the tone of conversation (I like Radian6 and Visible Technologies), the challenge of reading the sentiment and gist from between lines kerned 140 characters wide (Twitter), not to mention spotting influencers and mapping their networks, all suggest that this is a job for specialists. Thankfully, the particular skill involved comes naturally to all of us: it's conversation.

According to Debbie, UPS tracks about four topics over time, with other short-term issues identified as they come up. Her company has established goals and objectives that include an interest in learning from its customers, identifying pain points, and reputation topics, all with the interest of refining corporate and brand messaging. Writ large, they are "using monitoring to learn about the topics that matter to the brand," and are tracking how their brand is being talked about, to "learn how to better provide information to customers."

Several things struck me about UPS. Clearly, the team gets the importance of listening. And in fact Debbie's collaboration with customer service resources was testament to that (all important) insight. UPS, too, is making creative use of internal "driver" blogs, and extending the relationship between its truck drivers and auto-racing drivers (UPS is a NASCAR sponsor, though I suspect their track vehicle of choice is not a van, and operates with its doors closed) with racy first-person narratives. So it has both an internal and public commitment to the medium. It clearly gets the value of watching conversations for customer complaints, and is engaged in ways of addressing and redressing, dare I say re-packaging, customer dissatisfaction.

What I liked the most about the UPS approach was that it emphasized the importance of listening. So much social media marketing still emphasizes the talking. Brands are used to packaging their messages, and deliver them to audiences at great expense. So no, it's not surprising that in social media monitoring they hope to track results. But by viewing the medium as yet another distribution network, they risk missing its greatest strengths.

Which is in part why I still firmly believe that this whole social media marketing thing is still in its infancy. Taking UPS as a springboard for some creative whiteboarding (!), then, here's what I would do if I were the guy with the marker.

Start from the customer's perspective -- it's his/her conversation, after all, and his/her social medium. Advertisers are not as of yet welcome at the table.

Listen to the customer -- what is s/he saying, about what, to whom, and why. Read between the lines, and stick with it. Tools cannot do this, but they can be essential to narrowing down the conversation space, identifying influencers, and mapping the terms and keywords, plus gestures, of the conversation itself.

Join the conversation -- it may be that there is a best person for this within a company, for in fact tone, style, personality and delivery rule here. Conversational talk is not at all like branding, brand messaging, or brand presentation.

Join the conversation, really -- many examples of social media marketing today more closely resemble "adjoining conversations," not joined conversations. That could be a catchphrase, in fact, if it weren't negative: "ad-joining conversational marketing." Be with, not alongside, your customers; let monitoring be a means of eavesdropping that serves the purpose of getting aligned, but don't stay on the sidelines.

Contribute -- social media marketing should be designed around talking, not marketing: talk addressed to people who are talking (new school), not messaging in front of audiences that are looking (old school).

Structure the conversation -- here's where it gets interesting, and where we're going to do some of that whiteboarding. Online conversations are highly unstructured, even informal. The media used tend to flatten out the tonality, sentiment, and delivery of messaging, and outside of social networking sites, the forms of speech users adopt are, well, relatively formless.

What do I mean by this? Well, there are many different kinds of linguistic claims, or statements. Questions, requests, instructions, promises, and so on -- we can recognize them without having to think about it. Social media help users reach audiences of unknown members, and thus users will flatten out statements to appeal to greater numbers of people, while upsetting the fewest number of people. The conversations are generally informal and unstructured: not easily used.

So how about this: design a conversational marketing program around themes, topics, and formats that are natural and familiar, but which you can use and extend. These become brand conversation containers. They will contain messaging points, marketing claims, calls to action (interaction too!), and so on. They can use familiar social media genres, or adapted mass media and cultural forms (invitations, birthdays, top tens, gifts, quizzes, etc).



Let's whiteboard an idea for UPS:

Care packages. The idea here leverages the brand messenger par excellance for UPS: quite literally, the brand driver. The goal is to get conversation going around the brand. The vehicle: use social media to solicit donations to Thanksgiving care packages. Use twitter to solicit Thanksgiving greetings and wishes. Users (customers) donate stuff, or sponsor stuff, to be delivered, with messages, to the elderly at the driver's discretion.

UPS demonstrates that it cares, and gets its customers involved by packaging *their* care. (Why not have customers vote on care package designs contributed by the public, and composed of the tweeted messages. Maybe even localize the messaging...) The brand shows that it cares that its customers care, and wants to be the vehicle of appreciation and concern. Drivers post gratitudes to a company blog. Comments are collected. Branding and service become a mutual win-win.

Gas Think Tank. This is totally off the top of my head, so here goes tapping the thinking cap for a gas tank meter. UPS gets transparent with its customers about the high cost of gas, and the company's role in climate change, by sharing gross gas expenditures and carbon output on a blog, let's call it "the UPS think tank." There, it solicits ideas and contributions from customers about how to reduce its carbon "tire mark," offering to fund investment in ways to green the brown van. These might include sponsored online causes, use of twitter hashtags, perhaps even sponsorship of a commuter or car-sharing site where UPS drivers offer to carshare to work if customers do the same.


Conversational marketing can be much more interesting than just watching the brief and fleeting messages posted to social media that directly reference your brand. We're really just at the tip of the iceberg. The brands that show success will be those that can shift from talking about themselves to talking to their customers. I honestly believe that if brands structure their efforts to create conversational brand extensions, there will be a flourishing of new and compelling creativity in social media campaigns. These can be cost-effective, engaging, and learning moments.

During times like these, we should all consider how to step up, save money, and do some good.


More from UPS Monitoring social media for big business: Guest Blogger - Debbie Curtis-Magley, UPS

More tips on social media and PR

Cisco Disco Very Video: Cisco Uses Vlogs.

I'm at blogwell in San Jose, listening to John Earnhardt Cisco Systems and Ken Kaplan from Intel discuss corporate blogging strategies. Cisco favors video, which is in keeping with its own telepresence efforts. Video has been more natural fit for Cisco because it is faster (to make), and more immediate and direct than writing. Drafts do not have to circulate before being published to a public-facing blog. According to Earnhardt, video is used by executives for corporate communication purposes and CEO John Chambers himself instituted regular video blogging in part to motivate his executive team (leading by example).

Video blogging does make sense for Cisco. Earnhardt called it "the future." Whether used for technology demos (he cited their ecofriendly Green Bus) or for executive interviews and statements, its directness offers a clear advantage over blogging. I think it's interesting that these companies have developed communities of practice internally -- achieving a comfort level and sharing accountability (brand managers, IT, legal, executives, marcomm) inside the company to build a public-facing practice.

I wonder whether or not a preference for writing or video might also be a matter of executive personality. And whether the preferred medium of communication might also be intrinsic to a brand's product or business. That doesn't come up much at events like these: we tend to look for global solutions, generalizable learnings and best practices. But if a company has a very visual business, or one in which personality is the brand's identity, it may wish to use video. By contrast, a company whose products require arguments, claims, or explanations for positioning may wish to use the advantages of written communication to develop public appeal. I don't know if there's a correlation between mode of media and the nature of what's being communicated. Worth thinking about.

Interestingly, I recently saw a short Cisco video "From Frisco to Cisco." (it's been renamed: Cisco to Launch a Car? Why not call it "Driving the Cisco Kid" or "Cisco: not kidding around" or .. ) In contrast to what I heard today, which focused on the authenticity of having the company CEO describe company efforts in his own words, without scripting, this video was scripted, acted, and staged. It was marginally funny, and did little over its 2 and half minutes other than to build up to a meeting with CEO John Chambers (an encounter lost on the PR/press person sent to speak with him).

I suppose the idea was to raise the entertainment value of the video. But if you're going to do that, and use your CEO, either your CEO has to have celebrity value (e.g. Steve Jobs) or your video has to be really good. Given the difficulty of pulling off something truly funny while staging it, and given that the CEO appears in his own vlogs already, I don't see how the strategy can work. It walks a fine line (being too corny; being disingenuous; bad or poor taste) -- and would seem to risk the investment Cisco has already made in transparency and straight-laced corporate integrity.

If I were Cisco I'd develop the cheesy narrative such that in the end it falls on the corporate chopping block, and is replaced with the original, genuine and authentic CEO chat. A sort of new coke, old coke thing. But those are just my 2 cents.

Utilizing Social Media for Marketing: Tips

In our never-ending quest to define social media -- whether for ourselves or for our clients -- there's one tendency that stands out, and I think it's the result of a simple semantic slip. We refer to social media as if it were a thing, an object or technology, in short, a noun. Well yes, social media applications are tools and technologies. But social media is also a verb: : experiences, practices, conversation, talk. We switch back and forth sometimes between describing social media and its industry applications: social media marketing, distributed conversations, social networking. But in general, and in part because we are hail from the technology industry, we stand by the noun.

I'd like to explore the verb.

There are four views of social media that organize most of the industry's conversation:

• The builder's view from the perspective of technology


• The startup's view from the perspective of adoption


• The user's view from the perspective of experiences


• The marketer's view from the perspective of distribution

While each of these is valid on its own terms, none is sufficient by itself to describe "social media." But there is one view that is privileged, and that is the user's view. If an application fails to deliver a compelling user experience, there will be no application worth speaking about. No application adopted, no business funded, no market reached.

Now, social media are not just used by users. They're used also by the companies built around them; used by the advertisers advertising within them; and used by the designers and architects who build them. Since not one of these groups "owns" social media, and since none takes the position of the end user, who knows best what a social media tool should be like, how it works (in practice), or for what it is used?

If there's one thing in the way of PR, marketing, and advertising professionals succeeding in their use of social media, it's that many of us are limited by the interests that govern our perspective. Thankfully, we can learn a lot by taking positions other than our own. The builder learns from the user. The founder, from the marketer. The marketer from the user.

I'd like to attempt the marketer's perspective. How might social media best and most successfully serve their purposes?

In conversations with marketing professionals I often hear of the need for real case studies and examples. SNCR has many to cite. Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang continue to dig up gems. But for all the tools out there, we suffer a shortage of best practices and success stories.

A marketer might easily conclude that social media are not ready for distribution. But I think the challenge for social media in the marketplace is not in their lack of utility. Rather, I think, they're simply being under-utilized. Under-utilized not because the technologies are incapable of meeting the marketer's needs: but that the creative and campaigns deployed misuse the media.

These are tools and applications built by the people for use by the people. They were not not intended as new distribution channels for commercial messaging. Therefore any successful social media marketer should pack away the commerce and converse with authenticity. Users are not there to receive the messages of marketers, but are there for their own purposes. There's a connecting line between the phone line and online, and that line is drawn between the commercial and the personal.

Social media serve highly local, personal, and episodic purposes. Conversations are fast, disjointed, and discontinuous. In other words, they have little in common with mass media and broadcasting. Talk starts with the user more than with published content. It unfolds in front of an audience on the medium, not outside of it. Commercial participation needs to come off the screen and embed itself.

Can it? I think yes, if the marketing perspective takes the position of the user.

We're talking about a shift in marketing from impression to expression, and from image to relationship. Messages will get recognition if they are meaningful. And they will get "distribution" if they are retaleable. On blogs, PR and marketing want to be contextual. On social networking sites, marketing and advertising wants to be actionable.

Social media and mass media have one thing in common: communication. So let's look at the communication needs of the industries most interested in reaching social media: PR, marketing, and advertising.

PR

• the content is news, the mode is the release, the form is a brief (narrative), the connections possible are to the company profiled, the news announced, the testimonials offered, the persons involved.
  

Marketing

• the content is image, mode is a branding campaign (image + message), the form can take multiple media, the connections possible are consumer interest, impressions, and associations with the message's connotations and thrust.
  

Advertising

• the content is an offer, mode is campaign with call to action (image + call to action), the form can take multiple media, the connections possible are the relevance and appeal of the offer, and means by which to act on it.
  

The above are descriptions of how commerce seeks to benefit from communications media, be they mass or social. But if we believe that users run social media according to their own interests, how do commercial concerns ply their craft in an industry that is user-centric? What do they do differently to participate in the language of social media users?

Let's take a look at three distinguishing aspects of social media: their transformation of how we talk, how that talk is distributed, and what kinds of relationships we maintain while talking.

Social media provide new forms of talk, using multiple media types, across many different platforms, in long and short form, in front of different kinds of audiences, and appearing of course in a diverse number of forms: from pages to "streams." Commercial interests need to learn these forms of talk, as they would need to learn any new mass media format. Because most campaigns still rely heavily on banner and display advertising, the opportunities ahead for embedded and conversational advertising are great.

We might consider, for example:

• New socially-interactive ad units


• New types of content, group, event, and conversation sponsorship


• New advertising units to take advantage of the medium's many kinds of talk: reviews, recommendations, invitations, questions and answers, tweets, feeds, and so on


• New types of social games with embedded and actionable (playable) ads


• New kinds of narrative, including branching and participatory stories


• Feed-based marketing that offers event tickets, time-sensitive discounts, and so on to friends


• Sponsored reviews and recommendations appealing to those who spot trends and share discoveries


• Question/Answer formats appealing to end user expertise

Social media provide new means of distribution, using many social platforms, on which different kinds of audiences are assembled, for talk that is fast or slow, structured or loose, categorized or streaming, and using all media types available (text, message, video, game, animation, audio). Commercial interests might implement campaigns in multiple media types and for different applications. Here again, interactive and online ad agencies are still using conventional web 1.0 approaches, so there are wins ahead for new creative efforts.

We might consider, for example:

• Feed-based marketing


• Feed-based and direct-action advertising offers


• Social applications built around popular online social activities


• Social ad networks


• Mobile promotions tied to location or social networks


• User interest-based and targeted promotions

Social media offer new types of relationship, including closed groups of affiliates, colleagues, co-workers, and friends, friend-networks, follower audiences, blog subscribers, and more. Commercial interests can appeal to the network as well as the individual, or to the audience and context in general. And again, many departments would rather run their campaigns from the sidelines, and opt out of directly engaging the social media conversation space. The opportunities for success here, I suspect, are a matter of the depth of engagement commercial interests are willing to test.

Here we might consider:

• Commercial marketing to and through influencers


• Event offers and promotions distributed through inviters


• Branding and advertising to the social graph through top recommenders and influencers


• Group sales and promotions to social networks and trust circles

I feel that I have only touched on what can yet be done. With the user's permission (and that is a big "if," I'll admit, but that said, we love brands and we identify through commodities, so...) there is room for a new kind of "adversation" or "convertising." Consumer interests in consumption and things consumed are real, and genuine -- the threat of spam or commercialization is a matter of how it is handled.

I began by claiming that social media were as much a verb as a noun. Well, so the contents of media are people. People are fragile. But they can be moved. Simply handle with care.

Social media and the job of PR

I have to admit that my gut reaction to PR on twitter is a sinking one. It makes me wonder if the party's over -- if the spamification of twitter is just around the corner, and it's time to migrate once again. Foolish thoughts, or not. All new media mainstream at some point during their lifecycle. And yes, early adopters and core users often flee in droves for smaller and as yet undiscovered niche services. But I digress.

Twitter would seem a perfect tool for Public Relations. It's a posting service. Links can be embedded, and tracked. It is conversational but it's not immersive like IM or chat. And it's essentially opt in, insofar as users elect to follow you.

But social media PR folks like to recommend to their clients that they adopt micro media and conversational tools. "Join the conversation!" was the refrain we heard most over the past year. So where does public relations then rest? With the PR firm or with the company itself?

Sabrina Horn, head of the Horn Group, is quoted in a piece by Tom Foremski on social media adoption:

""Eventually social media will replace a lot of traditional PR but there will still be room for both," says Ms. Horn. And companies need to understand the best combination for their business. She says some clients want to rush into "social media" without considering what it means and the commitment that has to be made."

Every company is a media company . . .

I've often spoken about how every company is now a media company and needs to master the new media technologies at our disposal, such as RSS, blogging, Twitter, social media, etc. But being a media company requires a commitment, it is not a "campaign" that runs for a few months and finishes--it is a long term commitment and not everyone understands this aspect and what that means."

True indeed, and I fully agree that social media use should be mutually-engaging. Company and customer. Reciprocity is essential for trust, and is a core value principle in social media generally speaking.

One of the key benefits of social media engagement, however, is supposed to be what can take place when companies embrace transparency and open-ness. Communication with customers is supposed to result in opportunities for co-collaboration (around products, services, customer service, and so on).

So my question for PR firms, then, is: who handles the social media campaign? PR or client? If the PR agency handles it, is it incented to be honest with its client about user feedback, commentary, and sentiment? If the client uses it, can it handle itself as well as the PR agency -- does the client risk damaging PR campaigns if it gets involved directly? Just who is the best person, and in which organization, to serve as "spokesperson" in social media?