People are connecting with one another in increasing numbers, thanks to blogs, social networking sites like MySpace and countless communities across the Web. Some companies are learning to turn this growing groundswell to their advantage.
Thanks to a variety of online social applications — including blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, user-generated content sites like YouTube and countless communities across the Web — people are increasingly connecting with and drawing power from one other. In fact, customers are now beginning to define their own perspective on companies and brands, a view that’s often at odds with the image a business wants to project.
But organizations need not be on the defensive. Indeed, some savvy executives have already been turning this groundswell of customer power to their advantage. To investigate how, the authors interviewed managers and employees at more than 100 companies that were rolling out social applications. From this research, they developed a strategic framework that businesses can use to implement social applications in a number of departments, including research and development, marketing, sales, customer support and operations.
The potential benefits are numerous: Social applications can generate research insights, extend the reach of marketing, energize sales efforts, cut support costs and stoke the innovation process. (And for companies that tap into employee groundswells, the result can be increased opportunities for collaboration across departments and geographical locations, as well as greater productivity and decreased inefficiencies.) But the greatest benefit might be cultural, because social applications help weave two-way customer communications into the fabric of an organization.
But anything that changes culture tends to face resistance, and this is especially true of social applications, because they require managers to embrace an unknown communications channel, one that responds poorly to attempts to control it. Based on an analysis of companies that succeeded or failed in deploying social applications, the authors have derived a number of key managerial recommendations for any organization attempting to harness the power of the groundswell.
5 Comments On: Harnessing the Power of the Oh-So-Social Web
One of the first social applications was an experiment by an Oklahoma cable operator in the 70s, which had to decide which football game to air. What started as a simple question took on a life of its own, as people called in to make the case for airing one team over another.
This didn’t go unnoticed – Warner executives at a little-known company called QUBE took community interactivity to another level a few years later with their vision of interactive TV. QUBE was a demand generation channel: you received a television event embedded with multiple opportunities to interact at different levels of involvement. Just about every television commercial today ends with a call-to-action; unheard of in the days of QUBE.
Twitter, not Facebook, is a purer implementation of a demand generation channel. Facebook does many things well, but Twitter is unique in its ability to be a vital part of the experience whether going to a conference, traveling, or listening to a song.
Mark my words: you will still need media to “interrupt” people out of their daily reverie, with the ability to “drill down” or “telescope” into other behaviors, as per Charlene’s POST methodology. What will change will be the economics of interruption, and this is where Twitter beats web-based social networks.
After all, the uber-precise targeting capabilities of Facebook are not an efficient use of a brand’s media budget: there are only so many ways to reach a mass audience even if there were proven, automatable targeting capabilities. In comparison, it’s easy to find and influence like-minded followers in Twitter as evidenced by retweeting, Twitter’s ability to rapidly coalesce and evangelize a meme.
As always, the marketer’s challenge is to find environments that are used by a sufficiently mass audience for daily activities, where advertising messages are a welcome part of the flow.
Social media is another marketing tool and should be treated as such. So, beyond what was talked about, the same type of strategic rigor and marketing planning that is applied to any communication program should be done so for social media to most effectively advance business.
Phill Barufkin is a strategist, planner and researcher who works with businesses to deploy integrated marketing programs.
It’s interesting to me to see how short social media falls in so many ways. Even if you go through the ever popular socialnomics video and find the sources, you’ll see how much of that was embellished.
Not to say social media doesn’t have it’s business uses. I use it constantly to stay in front of people I already know and to make new connections. It’s just not the magic bullet that it is often made out to be.
Social media is another marketing tool and should be treated as such. So, beyond what was talked about, the same type of strategic rigor and marketing planning that is applied to any communication program should be done so for social media to most effectively advance business.
Phill Barufkin is a strategist, planner and researcher who works with businesses to deploy integrated marketing programs.
- Posted By Phill Barufkin
While over two years have passed after this article was written, the overall direction of marketing remains the same: leveraging social media channels. Obviously some tools and granular tactics might have changed. However, when more and more companies get on to the social media bandwagon, this channel will also become crowded. And consumers have to be disrupted for marketing.
Take the case of Dell or Comcast. When blogs and twitter were new, someone at the top took notice and addressed the issues. Imaging millions of their customers hitting the blogs and twitter! If they cannot service a customer through a well equipped service center, they cannot service them through social media too. It is a matter of time before they get overwhelmed. In fact, already some companies have started fighting their unsatisfied customers when they publish unwanted comments on blogs!