Transparency: truth in social media

I consider social media to be talk technologies, and I've been suspecting of late that the debate around "transparency" is a debate about communication. I say this only because transparency is sometimes used to describe branding, advertising, PR, marketing, corporate behavior, and of course, use of social media. All of these activities can possibly benefit, or suffer, from transparency.

Think of transparency and you see clarity. You see through the foil, the "grand gestures" (Deb Shultz), and the clever tactics of corporate marketing and PR. Transparency then describes how a brand relates to its cusomtomers.

Transparency certainly involves a company's interactions with its customers. This impacts the customer's experience, and thus idea, of the brand. From the customer's perspective, you get what you see, and what you ask for, you sometimes get also. We sometimes call this authenticity, meaning that a company is sincere in its customer relationships and communication.

Company walls, too, become transparent &emdash; if not on the inside, then on the outside. Company disclosure is an element of transparency: companies that no longer try to conceal their inner workings, or which are "open" to sharing their activities with the outside world, are transparent. This kind of transparency involves the visibility of company actviities.

Then there is customer service. This, too, is a key feature in the new transparency. Here it generally means treating customers with respect, fairly and responsively (in a timely manner). This involves a kind of equality in relations, in the sense that, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. It's transparency because it puts the company in its right place: not above, but in the service of, the customer. This is the rightness, the justice, or fairness of relations.


To return to the beginning, then, I find these different accounts of transparency interesting because they all involve "truth." I deliberately avoid Colbert's infamous claim to "truthiness," because that is just the image of truth.

There are, in pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), three claims to truth made in all our communication:

• a claim to truth as fact (something is true about reality)


• a claim to truthfulness (somebody is sincere, means what s/he says)


• and a claim to authority (somebody is allowed to claim what s/he claims, e.g. has the social position or authority)

These aspects of truth in communication underlie the concept of transparency.

Transparency is:

• truth in brand communication and behavior: factual accuracy, full disclosure, no manipulation, denial, misrepresentation of the truth


• truthfulness in brand intent: authentic self-representation, genuine, sincere, and honest communication, behavior with integrity, respect, and understanding (including the listening part)


• truth as the right to speak and act: respect for laws and norms, codes of conduct, etiquette, shown by associating with the brand's own community, audience, and marketplace as an equal participant committed to a shared and common future, sustainably and compassionately

I suspected that transparency had something to do with communication when it became virtually interchangeable with authenticity. These are terms we use in describing people, and trust, especially. They apply to people because they involve intentions, actions, speech, behavior: human stuff, deeply social stuff.

We might in fact say that transparency is really about humanizing for-profit companies. That as professionals, and as consumers, we ask for transparency in corporate behavior because it is what we expect from state and government behavior: accountability. In other words, transparency is in the zeitgeist.

One final thought. For transparency is not all that it's cracked up to be, for all and at all times equally. As tax payers, it is a citizen's right to expect accountability in government actions.

Companies that sell products, and which use their brand reputation to do so, are paid by consumers for their products. There is no social contract, but an exchange of money. In other words, the brand that embraces transparency does so in its own self interest. I'm not saying that this invalidates corporate transparency, but that it complicates it. Social media may want to be used authentically. But companies and brands are unlikely to embrace full transparency.

SIM Scoring: Social Media Influence Metrics are an Art

Influence metrics are growing up. According to Adage, Razorfish is about to introduce "the SIM score, which stands for social influence marketing." The new score is covered by Abbey Klaassen in What's Your Brand's Social Score?. Social media marketers have long sought (relatively speaking) a standard measure of social media ROI. I don't know that this SIM score is it. Let's have a quick look.

The SIM score is apparently a social media version of the Net Promoter mode. Adage puts it like this: "How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?" (To get the score, subtract the "highly likelies," or promoters, from the "unlikelies," or detractors.)

And according to the article, the Razorfish SIM score seeks to capture the strength of social media as a medium for organically surfacing recommendations. Quoted in Adage, Shiv Singh, VP-global social media lead at Razorfish also recognizes what many social media marketers have long known: the conversation is out there (like it or not):

"Any mention of a brand, as long as it's not negative, serves a brand-awareness purpose on the web because once it's there, it stays there."

The score comprises of a net measure of sentiment as captured in social media mentions. Again, from Adage:
Razorfish worked with TNS/Cymfony to capture social media content and the net sentiment of a brand: the positive and neutral conversations minus negative ones, divided by total conversations about the brand.

As most folks in the social media analytics space know, as I'm sure is familiar at Razorfish and Cymfony, social media do not make it easy to obtain sentiment and semantic metrics. There are several reasons for this, some of which are specific to the medium and some of which are behavioral:

• The 140 character limit on tweets puts significant pressure on context. Context is often left out of tweets where it can be assumed by the reader. Crawlers of course have difficulty recognizing the implicit references and context of tweets, so some if not many tweets are simply missed.


• Expressions in twitter are colloquial, if not also abbreviated, shortened, and clipped. Again, expressions often don't explicitly reference topics and content (brands, industries, products included).


• People make recommendations in twitter shaped in part by who they follow and who's following them. One can't remove the act of recommending from the audience the recommendation is made to or in front of. People will often make recommendations not only to share their feelings about a product/brand, but also to publicly identify with that product or brand. References made in social media like twitter reflect on the twitterer. Tweets can show a person identifying with something or someone, attracting the attention of someone, showing gratitude to someone, showing affection for someone, and so on.


• In public social media like twitter, a recommendation may also serve the purpose of building a person's credibility or reputation as an expert, influencer, trusted authority, and so on. Consider the difference in recommendations made by @Scobleizer and @GuyKawasaki and @jowyang. Each of these heavy users and influencers has his own way of watching for, filtering, selecting and then tweeting or retweeting. @guykawasaki has influence as a newswire, more than @jowyang, whose influence rests more on his personal and professional authority.


• Recommendations can come as answers to solicited or unsolicited requests for help or information.


• Recommendations may be made as a means of introduction on twitter -- sometimes to get followed back, to get noticed, or simply to be helpful.

These are some of the ways in which recommendations might be distinguished in social media from recommendations made face to face or by other means (as measured by the Net Promoter method). In conversational media, the act of communicating is difficult to separate from the information communicated. Recommendations and the act of recommending can be measured differently, and have different meanings: the intention behind the act, the message or information provided, motives inferred by recipient to the act. (Person A tells person B to go see Harry Potter, hoping to get the question "Oh you saw it?! Was it good?" and instead Person B ignores Person A, wondering to herself "Why is A telling me to see Harry Potter? Don't they know it's not my kind of thing?")

There are also ways in which recommendations may elude attempts to simplify sentiment captured from social media. There are also ways in which social media provide information about a brand's "influence" that are not in what people say but in how they say it, to whom, and what happens when they do. Some of this is what we can call "envelope" information (tweet addressing: to whom, for whom, citing whom, or @name, @reply, RT).

The rest of it is in the distribution: reach, volume, velocity, acceleration. These are aspects of flow and are among the attributes captured by some social media analytics tools. In marketing speak:

• How quickly is brand retweeted?


• Who retweets?


• How deep down a social graph does the retweeting go?


• How far across a social network does the retweeting go?


• and so on

I know that these aspects of social media activity are difficult to track and measure. But it would be great if there were an industry-wide effort to define and codify some of the attributes of social networks, relationship-based communications, and common types of expression in order to better represent conversational activity in social media. The results would not only paint a more accurate picture of brand presence in social media, but would also match the real social mechanics and dynamcis of online conversations. It may take a while for algorithms and tools to emerge for this. In the meantime, I would supplement SIM scoring with insight from a good community manager.

Digesting public Facebook feeds: implications for brands

Your Facebook updates are going public. In what's being viewed as a response to twitter's success, and as a protective measure taken before a release of revamped Facebook search, user updates will soon come with privacy controls.

From the release:
Today, we're launching a beta version of an improved Publisher--the main place to add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. The new Publisher has been streamlined a bit, and its most significant improvement is the new Publisher Privacy Control that gives you the opportunity to answer the question, "Who do you want to tell?" as easily as you answer the question, "What's on your mind?"

There's been a lot written for and against Facebook's policy. So I'll refrain from adding to that conversation. But I do want to go down the trail of implications and consequences a bit, as they are interesting. Particularly from the brand's perspective.

Consider what brands might be able to do, if the analytics tools, campaign monitoring and management services, and campaign managers themselves had the resources to go micro:

• brands will need to develop policies for whether or not to read customer profiles ("profile" here broadly defined as profile, updates, activity feeds, etc)


• profiles may be collected over time


• profiles may be analyzed over time


• social graph information could be used to create social context for a customer: psycho-demographic, consumer interests, personal interests, type of social status, types of online behaviors, type of online personality


• profiles may be categorized, for a new kind of market segmentation


• profiles may be used for market research


• profiles may be used for search engine optimization enhancement


• profiles may be used for future advertising and marketing approaches (advertising into the feed, flow, stream, status update, etc)

This is not exhaustive. Semantic and sentiment analysis could be applied to profile content. Social network analysis could be applied to friend relationships. Conversational analysis to styles of online talk, and activity analysis to online use habits and behaviors.

But much of this is speculative. Most advertising agencies have yet to establish an ROI for micro-targeted ad campaigns. Most do not have the creative skills or resources (not to insult ad agencies -- you're brilliant!) to craft multi-faceted and multi-wave campaigns for proper targeting to audience sub segments. Imagine A/B testing multiple campaigns designed to reach friends of an influencer by means of the topics and interests in which the user has the most influence... But widespread use of this kind of approach is years down the road. On the road to (economic) recovery, perhaps.

Let's conjecture nonetheless. What would brands have to consider, if they were to make use of information provided by user profiles? Brands would need a

• policy of use on whether or not to act on information learned


• they will need a disclosure policy, informing (or not) customers that they use social networking profiles to learn about customers


• they will need a communication strategy for how to reveal to customers what they know


• they will need rules of engagement to articulate the ways in which personal information gleaned might be used in communication or service to the customer


• they ought to develop a code of conduct that would include recommendations for respect of privacy (when users inadvertently reveal or disclose their own, or friends' private activities, news, and so on)

Interesting, too, is who in a company sets these policies? What is the job title? And what does the job description look like? Customer privacy, profile reading, and relationship management would each seem to fall under separate roles today: legal, PR/Marcom, and marketing. Not to mention sales. But the information customers make available could be of substantial value to some brands (entertainment, lifestyle brands especially). Brands that make use of social networking profiles will be those that are capable of translating insights across departments, for a better understanding of who the customer is, how s/he relates to a brand, product, event, or service, and how to reach and communicate with him or her (and friends).

Mashable: Twitter Envy: Facebook Adds Public Content Sharing

Facebook's announcement: More Ways to Share in the Publisher

Tweeting with authenticity: genuine or strategic?

A rather new friend of mine recently launched a blog. I checked it out the other day and she had posted on authenticity. In the post she raised a point that would resonate with most of us (or so I hope): that we feel more connected to authentic people.

I asked her, and we have yet to discuss, whether this was a matter of feeling or a matter of fact. In other words does the "authentic" person have to reciprocate? Feel connected to us, in return? Or demonstrate and act on their authenticity in any way?

Or is it a matter of appearance, impression, and vibe?

You probably know where I'm going with this. It may be easier to impress authenticity on a person online. Impressions we make and take of people we don't know online can be far from the mark. Impressions are twice as likely to be off:

• The impression we make of a user reflects our own interpretations
  
• The other person's expression is not fully captured when it's online
  

In other words, the other person expresses less fully, and we fill in more. The impression we have of the other person, and their appearance to us, are informed more by our interpretations than by their intentions and expressions.

So is authenticity online something that we project onto the other person? Is it something that even if they intend, they can't fully express? Is a connection formed online a matter more of a connection we imagine and attach, and invest in -- or is it still a reality created by our communications and interactions with each other?

Regardless of how you feel about authenticity (we prefer it) and feeling connected (ok, some of the feeling is projected, but authenticity does seem to secure connections), there's no denying that it can be faked.

Since fake authenticity is a contradiction in terms, we need to distinguish between intention and appearance. Sincere intentions can appear insincere, and vice versa.

So if you're a brand using twitter, and you wish to reach your customers authentically and sincerely, how would you do it? How would you show it?

• Would you emphasize your actions -- make sure that you're being real and genuine in what you say, share, and do?
  
• Or would you consider how you appear, and instead create a sense of authenticity strategically and tactically -- recognizing that it's not ultimately in your hands and the other user's impression of you matters more than how genuine your feelings are?
  

I'm not just splitting hairs here. The people who post for brands that use twitter are real people. Every day they must choose to tweet as themselves, personally, and genuinely -- or post inauthentically and insincerely. In communication theory, this has been described as the difference between understanding and effect. Authenticity contributes to a shared understanding; strategy merely has to produce results; communication being simply effective.

As much as we want to see authenticity win, there's no logical reason why a brand wouldn't choose to communicate disingenuously, and for effect. Realizing that the "customer is always right," and that it's really the (other) user who makes the impression, strategies might be better if they are designed for effect. It is contrary in spirit to "conversational media," but it's more consistent with advertising/marketing. Seduction, deception, appeals to price, value, image, quality... impressions of brands need content!

The argument against this of course is built on time and repetition. None of us is fooled, over time, by the disingenuous behavior of a brand acting according to strategy and plan. Over time, and through ongoing or recurring interactions, we augment our impressions with experience. Trust grows. And with it, the risk of damage to the relationship.

The reason for authenticity then it not strictly in the impression you make, or in how you appear. Authenticity begins as an appearance but becomes experience over time. Brands that intend to keep using twitter, for example, might choose to communicate with greater effect now, frequently, with new followers -- or instead sustain relationships over time (at higher cost perhaps).

The former can be achieved with effective communication -- the latter demands consistent and genuine communication. Or so it would seem.



Riffed and inspired by a post on Lizasperling.com.

I Want Candy. Skittles embraces Twitter embraces Skittles

Last night, when campaign managers probably figured it was safe to soft launch quietly, and with the protection of nightfall, Skittles turned its home page into a twitter profile page. "Skittles" was soon the largest tag by far on an otherwise moribund Twitscoop Tweetdeck tagcloud (say those three times quickly) -- and the doors blew off in the twitterverse.

All the talk was skittles, and any talk of skittles, good or bad, intended for skittles or not, wound up on the home page of skittles.com. Skittles had hijacked talk about itself.

Now regardless of how you feel about this little sentimental snack, skittles being a kind of two-bit presence in the candysphere, runner-up to its chocolaty big brother M&Ms, you have to admit that the company had some, well, beans, to turn to twitter unfiltered.

For anything and everything was pretty much running on skittle's home page live last night -- no 7 second delay, no accounting for possible wardrobe or verbal malfunctions, just tweets mentioning skittles, no matter what their content.

It might be that the campaign managers thought they would just ask the customer: What do you think about skittles? Call it crowd sourcing, and invite the market to the brand. Or perhaps they wanted to pull off a different kind of home page takeover, and catch a wave before anybody else did. (It's up for debate whether anyone else can step into the same river without suffering a withering torrent of rot, detritus, and ill will.)

And truth be told, it was a co-branding effort, for twitter clearly lifted some technical limitations on its search engine for skittles. And it was featured, with brand, as a twitter home page look alike, on skittles.com.

I'll skip over what people had to say about skittles -- you can simply go there now, or better, post a tweet including the word skittles, and then watch it appear on skittles.com.

If the company thought they would get a better sense of what people think about them, they misunderstood twitter, and misconceived the whole campaign. Create a public timeline dedicated to a single thing, in this day and age, and it will become a public forum vulnerable to all the heckling, banner-waving, and hackery that a public forum attracts. (Even when it's about a small bag of multi-colored clumps of pressed processed corn starch. Yes, we have to this. The lowest common denominator, it turns out, is a movie-time snack.)

The fact that skittles has given its branding over to the public, and its homepage to its audience, is a gutsy gesture indeed. But people post out of novelty, curiosity, because it's abuzz, because they can see their tweet appear on skittles -- and not really to express their inner sweet tooth, preference for blue, or any other kind of personal skittle-chomping habit.

But regardless of what you make of it, the campaign offers a few social media morsels worth chewing on.

• This was a combined effort with twitter itself. Skittles.com looks like it's twitter.
  
• It's not really a twitter home page -- it's a search results page that pumps results to make it look like a twitter page.
  
• Which makes it kinda nifty. Imagine entering a search phrase in Google and seeing your query in the results. That's how this works.
  
• In some ways it's like advertising in reverse. Because instead of creating a message and then releasing it into the internets, this sucks in advertising from the internets. And we're doing the advertising.
• Talk about "disruptive" (tired and weary phrase for something new we don't know how to monetize yet). The skittles twitter campaign is a twist on aggregation. All your tweets are belong to us!
  
• Skittles has gotten us to endorse it, in a manner of speaking, with our own words. In fact, if there's ever been a better example of feed-based advertising, tell me what it is. This is post-Obama social media!
  
• It is also a form of feed-based product placement. Skittles smartly used the voyeurism, attraction to bright and shiny things, and latent narcissism of the twitterverse to hold a mirror up to twitter and flip the light switch. Twitterers let loose out of curiosity to catch themselves (many if not all) in the buzz of activity that gathers around a well-placed lamppost.
• It was based on trust, and a huge leap of faith. From me at least, hat's off to the brand's transparency.
• And talk about taking Marshall McLuhan at his word. The medium is indeed the message!
  

What the campaign doesn't achieve is affinity marketing -- we are not now a group of skittles fans, I'm sure few of us are following skittles, or following others who took part in this. It probably doesn't deliver on crowd-sourced messaging and branding research: most posts were pretty off the topic of "why do you like skittles?" (Though I spotted a few skittles-inspired 140 character ditties.)

In terms of sales generation, skittles could see offline benefits. In some ways the campaign operates like an above-board subliminal advertising campaign. For now, when we hit the corner store, there's a small chance we'll recall the time that skittles was us. And this is an interesting variation on subliminal. For we're not recalling what skittles said, or arranged into some sort of suggestive arrangement of candies... We're not going to recall even what others said. We're going to recall what we said. And that strikes me as an interesting move, to leverage our tendencies on twitter like that.

And the campaign certainly achieved reach -- for every tweet about skittles there were countless followers who read it.

I don't know if twitter is planning to work with other brands to do the same kind of home page takeover. Odds are that the novelty factor on this was pretty high and that it would wear thin quickly for all but the most hip brand names. Imitators will run the risk of being called out by twitterers for attempting to pull a skittles. As is happening with skittles, for I gather they weren't the first.

But either way, this will surely stand as a test-case, if not limit-case, in social media branding, and will be the buzz among social media experts for as long as it takes to digest it.

Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social Media Personality Types: Slideshow

This slideshow has been laying about for too many months now so I've decided to wrap it quickly and push it out there. It's a distillation of a much larger project I've been pursuing and which I hope to write up and post as a white paper this winter.

Having covered the screen and functionality of social media from a social interaction design perspective, the next piece in the puzzle had to be the social media user experience. These personality types are an attempt to distill out just some of the different user experiences had on social media into personality types..

The idea behind this slideshow was to make the claim that we must all have very different experiences of social media: in our sense of connectedness, visibility, popularity, in what we think it is for and why we use it. These differences ought to matter not only to any user experience or interaction designer, but to any business interested in commercializing or profiting from social media.

It has always seemed to me that the conventional market segmentation of user types (influencers etc.), while perhaps identifying broad categories of users, fails to account for the user experience. Surely, influencers do not relate to social media as influencers; followers as followers; and so on... These definitions aren't grounded in a framework of motive or intention, and therefore fall short of explaining behavior based on the user's competency as a social media participant.

This slideshow attempts to sketch a view of users based on personality differences that takes mediated communication and interaction into account (I don't know of any personality models that have been customized to non face to face interactions). This means adapting personality types for the unique ways in which social media represent us to ourselves, represent others, present and facilitated social activities, and so on. It means taking personality types and anticipating what, in social media, would engage them, motivate them, and compel them. As a sketch, it is incomplete and intended to kick off discussion.

Social Media Personality Types

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

Reflections on Social Media's Next Phase

While it may be tough times for many social media startups, there could be a silver lining in the industry's future. Interest in social media doesn't appear to be waning, and in fact this week there's been a growing realization in the mainstream media that social media played a significant role in Barack Obama's campaign success. If the history of technology innovation is any guide, the next phase of industry growth will come from the markets and industries that adopt social media for their own purposes. And the same can probably said of the media's evolutionary path, too. In fact mass media, which is an industry that observes events, news, and by necessity, itself, is practically destined to assimilate social media.

But added to historical tradition is another obvious but rarely noted reason for social media's ongoing durability. It's in social media's DNA: that social media collapse the distance between production and consumption.

Unlike traditional (mass) media and in contrast to past modes of production and manufacture, including information production, social media co-locate the means of production with means of consumption. Video is recorded, edited, posted, and viewed on the same platform. Opinions, news, and stories are told, shared, commented on the same platform. Music is made, distributed, branded, and listened to, on the same platform. This conflation of means of production with means of consumption not only presents a threat to mass media (and one which mass media will respond to by co-opting the social), it promises opportunities for those who can see them.

All commerce involves some amount of marketing, whether it's based on brand identity, "real" utility and value, pricing, or whatever else comprises a marketing message and campaign. Social media disrupt marketing by eliminating much of the distance between the marketing/sales/branding medium and its audience. In social media they are one and the same: the audience does the branding and marketing, through communication, and often without the brand's direct intervention or participation. Distribution by means of communication among friends and colleagues (social media users) is not only natural and organic (non-commercial), it reproduces itself without any help from commerce required. In other words, it's self-referential and non-commercial.

This might cause palpitations for those who make a living by imagining, imaging, wrapping, crafting, and distributing brand and marketing campaigns, but it shouldn't. Conventional branding requires that value be created away from an audience, to then be introduced to an audience, resulting in (hopefully) consumer interest, desire, and spending. The distance between the brand and audience not only allows those on the brand side to finesse their presentation, it allows them to control its release. Traditional means of course are print, television, radio, and outdoors advertising. Lifestyle, affiliative, demographic and other types of market segmentation and targeting serve the purposes of campaign management. The whole process relies on a separation of brand from its audience, and time during which to conduct, refine, and steer the campaign.

Social media disrupts all of this with the sheer immediacy and proximity provided by its tools -- tools that serve the needs of talking and communing. "Word of mouth marketing" is a fancy way of saying "we let it go and our fingers are crossed." Control over the marketing or brand message is but a residual inclination to stay one step ahead of the market, to use the distance between traditional media and their audiences to steer outcomes in a company's favor. But control is precisely what is sacrificed in a medium that conflates means of production and consumption; a medium we sometimes call an "echo chamber" because there's no telling where the noise is coming from.

Future and successful marketing campaigns that leverage social media will benefit the startup and social technology space by extending what's been designed for daily use into soft commercial use. The budgets, while trimmed, are there. It would behoove social media companies to consider the ways in which soft commerce may play along. Just as mass media should entertain new forms of conversational and social marketing, from new types of creative, to compelling serial "talkies": brand stories, interactives, games, and other new forms of what I'll call "participatory branding."

Social media are notorious for giving rise to unintended social practices, and those of us who design and build social applications should not for a minute think that we know everything that can be done with them. Any more than television manufacturers would be expected to develop the TV programs shown on them. Current market conditions make this a perfect time for creatives to get inventive, and for social media companies to reflect on where they will fit in.

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.