g n i t e k r a M l a t i g i D 1 f 1 o 0 s 2 e c r r e o p F a g P n i s v i d r n D e n r T Te l a t i g i D 3 3 A
Author: Drew Benvie, Managing Director, 33 Digital
Introduction If 2010 in social media was the year that brands sat up and started listening, then 2011 will be remembered as the year that exposes brand reputations for their social media frailties. The switched-on brand has come to a place where it can see and begin to deal with tomorrow’s consumer online. As we explored in last year’s trends paper, the consumer has tuned out of traditional media and this has shifted the power balance for the brand. Brands are now listening, engaging and building communities of fans. But covering the basics quickly becomes too little too late as consumers start demanding more, and organisations realise they are ill-equipped to deal with the data deluge. Expectation from the consumer paints a grim picture for the brand that is not equipped to deal with the action that is now needed to keep today’s consumer happy. A tweet saying an engine is on fire, that a car’s brakes do not work, or that a pushchair has injured a baby, not only reaches the audience directly– it dictates the tone for the media headlines too. Never before has the online swarm held such sway over the corporate reputation. We have now come to expect access to all, all of the time, and as a result any issue must be answered instantly. Any grievance should be dealt with effectively. Doing so at all times is really not as simple as giving a nod in the direction of open and social. The brand is now under siege. No longer is participation enough to conquer the social economy. All organisations will truly need to foster best of breed communications systems in order to be seen as the hero in their market. What this means for the 10 guiding factors in the 12 months ahead is an emphasis on foreseeing the crisis, understanding privacy concerns, and embracing new trends such as photo sharing, short messaging and regulatory compliance. And above all else, grabbing hold of the vanishing consumer before it’s too late.
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Whitewalling and the vanishing consumer Nothing like a good crisis Wisdom of the crowd Location nation Regulation Privacy Five sentences, 140 characters A picture speaks a thousand words Social media mission control Community managers rule- the rise of the community manager as the essential member of the modern marketing team
Whitewalling and the vanishing consumer If you’ve not heard of the term ‘whitewalling’ it is probably because its symptoms are only visible by their absence. The person you’re trying to reach, listen to and win custom from is starting to disappear. A way of using Facebook is emerging amongst teens and it is showing all the signs of spreading beyond the one social network across to a broader way of using the social web, in a way that shows signs of fears over information privacy and security. The impact on the brand is huge – if the consumer deletes everything including their very identity from the social web, how can we reach them? How can we research for consumer trends? This could spark a colossal shift in the way brands understand online communications. Whitewalling is the practice of deleting content from Facebook to ensure there is no trail of information. Whitewalling is embraced when users are concerned about the content posted on to the web about them without their control. With whitewalling, the user deletes all messages, wall posts and comments once they have been read. There is literally no trace of them. Many whitewallers actually delete their entire Facebook account when logging off and then reactivate it when logging on next. This is also known as ‘super logoff’. What does whitewalling achieve: • Personal reputation is always under control. Users cannot even be found when not online. When all your contacts are on Facebook – friends, enemies, family and teachers this is a big issue and well worth the extra time taken to curate the social network • No history of activity, so nothing to see when looking up discussions, activity, photos and chatter • Total control and reassurance that nothing nasty will appear online. For people who live their lives online, this is key
The impact for brands goes in two directions
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First, engaging a consumer that does • Start logging all conversations not want to create a lasting trace of by reporting live on social media buzz. themselves on a social network is Relying on the web having an archive is no going to mean that communications planners will need to think about new longer sustainable directions that their campaigns need • Consider what impact the “delete everything” to go in. Not only for the teens that approach will have on managed comms. How are embracing whitewalling now, can you make your message into something that but for the future that might see this should be cherished, not forgotten activity becoming the norm. • Get into the mindset of a whitewaller and The second issue for the brand is how see the world from their point of view. to understand the consumer when there Only then can you see how you need is little to no evidence of their existence. to behave by their measures Whereas now listening and acting upon consumer sentiment from social networks is pretty advanced, what would happen when the swarm deletes its discussions in real time as they are taking place? We can throw any notion of understanding and control out of the window.
Nothing like a good crisis “Just emergency-landed... Engine two blew up at take-off and ripped through wings. Damn.” This was the tweet from a passenger on board Qantas flight QA32 which emergency landed when one of its Rolls Royce engines exploded in mid-air in November. It was also the quote that was used to lead the analysis of the crisis for Qantas and Rolls Royce in the Sunday Times’ full-page writeup in the business section the week after the event. Social media mainstreaming has meant that more crises have been played out online than ever before, and this poses new challenges to brands. Even brands that think social media should never affect them are coming under the spotlight. A crisis will hit every brand sooner or later, and burying their head in the sand when it comes to social media is rapidly proving as ineffective as it might seem. Whilst the issue for Rolls Royce was technical, word of mouth spread unmanaged at light speed and affected the brands involved and their reputations uncontrollably. For example, pictures taken of what was thought to have been smoke coming from flames at the windows of the plane were not rebutted in any way, even though after they hit the headlines, it turned out they were in fact fire extinguisher smoke. The key issue for brands is that negative word of mouth buzz spreads far beyond the traditional media’s audience. Sometimes this is before the crisis hits the Tip: mainstream, sometimes during and sometimes after. It reaches a wider Whether the crisis you’re expecting audience, and it reaches people is one that can be fixed or not, what do whose only interaction with you need to do as a brand? current affairs is through their • Understand where discussions are gathering social graph. To not control it is pace, and how to engage to make a pure negligence, one could say. difference • Have a credible voice that can rebut and feed information that can have an impact • Have the ability to react with the speed and the timing needed to generate a positive impact
All brands will hit a crisis one day. The problem for them now is that they have to manage the information flow across the social web, and it travels at a different speed, changes in nature more often, and requires an understanding of the medium, not only the message. In crisis mode, all too often, the brand becomes tied up in knots. It is too preoccupied with the message, when with social media, the medium and manning of the controls is just as important a job. When the comms mechanism is not fit for purpose, this will create a more than necessary amount of negative online sentiment. This will then dominate the headlines, hit the stock price, and stick for a long time in people’s consciousness.
Wisdom of the crowd There was once a time when, if you wanted some information and an opinion on the best place to go, you would do a search for it. A search engine would bring up press reviews, the official website, some blog posts, some review sites and maybe some forums. But the focus on search has switched. Search engines have cottoned on to the release of social search functionality, but the new way to find an answer to a question is no longer to look into the past or to see what strangers might have to say. It’s to ask the crowd – your own social network. When experimenting in this area earlier in the year, I found it refreshing how insightful, accurate and valuable the information can be when instead of ‘Googling it’ you take some time to think about what people might tell you if you were to ask them instead. I spent one week asking my social network whenever I had the urge to enter a query into a search engine. I then took it one step further. I spent one week using my social network whenever I had to make a decision. Not only was my social graph of use to me in recommending places to eat, drink and be merry, but it taught me all sorts of interesting things. It persuaded me to exercise more, showed me the benefits of trying new things, and even how I should travel. Crowdsurfing isn’t new, at a corporate level. What is not so common is for this to be a personal trend. And this will begin shaping consumer trends more and more. So for the brand to understand how to engage and make it through the noise, they need to think past the listing on TripAdvisor, and think how they could become the one recommended when a group is asked live online to recommend one thing.
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Tip: Begin asking your online communities more openended questions. Give people the opportunity to participate and make decisions for you and your brand. Use hashtags on Twitter and comments on Facebook to group the content and make it easier to follow for those taking part.
Location nation The growth of Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla in 2010 has inspired a whole raft of location-based social media services, and their spiralling popularity has catapulted location-based social networking to the front of the marketer’s must-have items. Foursquare’s users now number over 5 million, and with Facebook Places rumoured to be releasing voucher loyalty functionality in the near future, this could bring a new era of social commerce. With these services launching in the UK at the earliest in late 2009, and then throughout 2010, this has been the year of experimentation. The next 12 months will be a period of land grabbing and taking ownership of the brand’s social media real-estate in the location-based game. People always have different experiences from using location based social networks like Foursquare and Facebook Places, which is part of their appeal.
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Here are five ways brands will harness the check-in throughout 2011: 1. Local reviews: When you check in anywhere, you can receive tips from places nearby from your friends. This means you get to find user reviews based on where you are, of places to eat, shows to see, watering holes, and so on. This element of social media led discovery is very appealing to the user and mixes word of mouth with brand-led engagement. 2. Friend finder: When friends of yours check into places you are in yourself, you get an alert. On Foursquare you can surf venues and see where is trending in your area, showing you where your friends are hanging out. On Facebook you can tag your friends with you in any location. On a personal level, this adds a new dimension to organisation and messaging. On a professional level the check-in is the digital ice breaker. 3. Loyalty reward: Businesses that sign up to Foursquare can offer customers a reward for loyalty. Dominos offers free Pizza to its most loyal customers, Debenhams free coffee, and the Financial Times free premium subscriptions. Whilst Facebook Places does not have this functionality built in yet, some brands are using the mechanism in a similar way to Foursquare already, watching the system manually for people who earn rewards: Premier Inn offers free breakfasts to guests for check-ins on Facebook. So for many consumers, check-ins are worth using just for the rewards. 4. Attention grabber: Companies using location-based services in interesting ways tend to get noticed. In a media market where cutting through the noise is critical, this could be the killer punch. For example, a small coffee shop in London called Dose Espresso was one of the first businesses in the UK to offer a loyalty deal on Foursquare, and has been featured in countless mainstream media from Time Out to New Media Age since as a result. Using Foursquare and Facebook Places in new ways simply gets you noticed. 5. Buzz tracker: Brands should track what’s going on at their places online. You can see if people love or hate your products, you can see when people are flocking (or swarming, as Foursquare calls it) and you can learn something in the process. This is how Dose Espresso learnt about its customers’ habits and it tailored the rewards accordingly.
Regulation Earlier in 2010 the news came out that social media campaigns in the UK will need to adhere to an extension of paid advertising regulatory frameworks from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). A set of new rules to govern what goes on in social media marketing is now seen as crucial to bringing the sector to a place where it is more accountable and transparent than it has been in the past. So what does this mean for the social media sphere? High profile mistakes from social media campaigns of the past are welldocumented. But normally it has been the role of the community which has brought brands to account. Whether this has been unclear bribery towards bloggers in return for positive reviews, fake social media buzz posted by staff, or spam-inducing competitions, the need for change has come about because there has been simply too much wrong and not enough right. When a social media campaign has a heritage in public relations, reputation management and earned media, campaigns naturally lean on the whiter than white side of the transparency, honesty and sensibility balance. It’s all about managing reputations However regulatory frameworks are now clear, and they focus on issues such as clarity around incentives going to social media influencers in return for reviews, and clarity of when a review of a product or service has come from a paid staffer rather than from the crowd. The responsible brands must begin now looking at how the laws of this new land affect their campaigns and use them to their advantage.
Privacy One of the most common question marks over the future of social media is that of privacy; many say that it is too much an invasion of privacy to share personal information online. In 2010, privacy took a twist with the launch of FourTrace and the now defunct PleaseRobMe.com, sites that collect information about where people are, and therefore where they are not, all from their social stream, and then tell the rest of the world. The impact is that brands must follow closely in 2011 public sentiment toward services as large as Facebook and Twitter, and as new as Foursquare and Path.com, to understand the security and privacy impact on online behaviour. The issue at the centre of this is simple. Why would you as a social network user share private things such as your whereabouts with the whole world online? One solution for users has been to focus on the secure social networks, such as Facebook and Path.com. But privacy settings are not always clear, and simply running a search in Facebook for the phrase ‘heading out’ shows dozens of users every hour posting status updates openly, without the knowledge that strangers can see. The end result is a level of uncertainty amongst many, ignorance amongst most, and for some - mostly the digital natives - the knowledge that social networking is compulsory for those that do not want to endure social exclusion and privacy settings will catch up in time.
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Look at the last thing you said on Facebook, then search for it on a search engine or inside Facebook search from another user’s account to see how open your privacy settings really are.
PR and marketing practitioners know their social networks, and they know their privacy controls. They see beyond the ‘rob me’ danger signs and see a customer that chooses to use places like Foursquare and Twitter instead of something older. The brand knows that the choice is between engaging or not. The privacy issue is one for the user, but the brand must take heed.
Five Sentences, 140 Characters Communicators know what it takes to get a message across in the social media economy. The age of 140 characters, txt spk and continuous partial attention, have changed things somewhat. The demand for ‘less is more’ has never been greater. Indeed, over the next 12 months, a marked trend will be that of the email message that looks like a tweet – a universal way of electronic messaging that is short enough that it works on any system – email, instant messaging, status update or tweet. Communications professionals have all experienced at one time or another skimming through email messages so fast that only the first few lines sink in, before making the decision to file or delete. For some it’s an everyday reality in a business that has become reliant on “fire and forget” messaging via email. Although many are forced now to skim read emails, others work the system and filter them, colour them, miss them, and some try to kill them. But a movement based partly on technology and partly on user trends is to retrain the system and retrain the user. A recent 33 Digital survey of communications professionals found that 38 per cent would use an out of office automatic email reply to tell people that they are busy and may not respond quickly to email, even when in work and able to read emails. The majority, 62 per cent, said they would only use out of offices when not in work and not able to read and respond to incoming messages. The trend however is clear, email as a system isn’t working as well as it used to. In 2012, we will see the launch of Facebook’s new integrated messaging system, dubbed the email killer. Part instant messaging, part email, part comment, it will bring a jolt to the email market.
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The trend to use Twitter as a messaging system will also gather pace, as users embrace private, direct messages, known as DMs, as they succeed in banishing spam from the inbox as well as giving users the luxury of only short messages being allowed, saving time for all. And for email, a new movement called Five Sentences, promoted by the website http://five.sentenc.es calls for email users to embrace a shorter form of emailing, encouraging users to post a message in their email signature that promotes the five sentence limit to email length. Whether email will begin to die out or simply be retrained, the impact of social services on the email generation will be considerable in 2010, and a prudent move would be to embrace new systems that do a better job of the basic principle of all of this – getting the message across.
Tip: Look for trends amongst the contacts in your address book – who uses Twitter DMs more, who prefers instant messaging, and look to embrace ways of managing relationships outside of just email. For email alone, try using http://five.sentenc.es to create a more efficient information flow.
A picture speaks a thousand words Throughout 2010 we saw a new breed of picture-based social networks emerge that have quickly created an audience that was yearning for more than they were getting from alternatives such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites come in various different shapes and sizes. Some private, some totally public. Some feed from the camera phone in everyone’s pocket, others from the webcam on the laptop or PC. The unifying theme though which this is clear is that the user is sharing more photography than ever before and through the next 12 months this visual element of the social media economy will present new opportunities and challenges for the brand. The challenge will be that the brand is on public display in a visual way more than ever before. Experiences in-store, glimpses of coverage from a TV screen, or even just a shared photo of a proud new purchase or a faulty good; any customer interaction will not only have the potential to generate an angry tweet or fan page ‘like’, but a much richer stream of feedback from the consumer through shared photography.
What kind of social networks will be shaping this change? DailyBooth is a social network that encourages its users to post photos of themselves every day in front of their webcam or phone camera. Replies to posts also contain a photo. So this site is almost the anti-twitter.
Rather than leading with a message then attaching a photo, it is the other way around. The text plays second fiddle. And DailyBooth is very open. What’s important to see from DailyBooth’s users is that they are mainly teens, mainly in the UK and Europe, but with a large global footprint too. Phone apps such as Instagram and Path enable users to share photos straight from their phone, edit them, control privacy settings, and associate photos with people, places and things through tagging. While Instagram lets users share to Facebook, Twitter and other sites too, Path keeps the photos private. So while Instagram is showing users a new way to share photos on social networks, Path is creating a new way to share photos privately, asking users to create a new social network altogether.
The impact on brands Look for advocates and embrace them. A picture speaks a thousand words, and an ecstatic customer clutching your product, sharing their favourite moment or promoting your brand becomes priceless. Engage in order to understand and manage negativity. Turning a blind eye to new social media sites is not a viable long term option, and the new breed of picture sharing sites provide fertile ground for angry customers to vent, and be listened to.
Social Media Mission Control Social media monitoring’s rise in importance in the organisation has done several things for the switched-on brand throughout 2010. It has joined up the way departments operate in ways never seen before. Mixing media monitoring with customer care, product planning, PR, marketing, advertising and CRM has meant that the focus on listening to social media buzz from the consumer has never been greater. Whilst many organisations are now beginning to experiment with the use of centralised teams operating specialist social media monitoring dashboards, the most sophisticated are already running highly evolved monitoring and reporting systems. Brands in 2011 will seek to embrace a social media mission control, and the impact will be seen on a micro and also a macro level.
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The aim is to convert to happy customers at all times. The impact is not only increased sales, but also word of mouth and individual customer experiences – negatives can be dealt with on a case by case basis and fed through customer care.
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Listening to key trends is allowing organisations to better manage corporate reputation. This can range from spotting the next news issue as it first leaks on the web to understanding how to control it before it begins to control the brand. Listening also enables a communications planning function to operate more effectively taking into account the real picture of influence on the brand in the media eye. Perhaps the most melodramatic case study shared openly by a brand in 2010 was Pepsico’s Gatorade brand and its “Social Media Mission Control”. Six plasma screens line the walls in front of duty staff, busy analysing buzz about the brand, its ambassadors and feedback from customers.
Although not every organisation will feel the need to invest to such a degree that a control room is the new must-have, it will be in evidence on the computer screens of the communications teams who will be operating the same set-up, albeit virtually. The result: the crisis, the new social network, the life of the community manager, the ability to deal with privacy and regulation, all these aspects will become infinitely more manageable with the proper structures put in place to do so.
Tip: Start using more free and paid social media monitoring tools and upskill colleagues and agency teams so that they become experts. Begin asking customer care, planning and advertising teams how they would change things if they could see the information you start collecting.
Community Managers Rule The brand is the new content owner, creator and publisher of the modern era. The big, successful brands using social media boast audiences far greater than many traditional media outlet. These audiences are opt-in. They are hungry for content, and as a community, need to be managed as carefully as a traditional media outlet manages its readership. If you were to take a look just at Facebook’s biggest brand pages you would see the challenges facing many brands to manage at size and scale. Texas Hold ‘Em Poker has 28 million fans on Facebook that receive daily updates. Coca-Cola has 19 million, Starbucks 18 million, Oreos 14 million. Twitter is dominated in terms of the largest accounts by celebrities, but brands such as Whole Foods and Zappos both have just under 2 million followers. But not just for the big brand is the management of the online community a delicate operation. In 2011 we will see the role of the community manager become intrinsic to the success of the brand’s ability to engage that community. Even now in 2010, it is noticeable just how important the role of community management is. Skills are scarce, sometimes the function is performed by an agency, sometimes a team, sometimes a single person. The balancing of content creation, planning, storytelling, event organisation and linking into other communication departments is complex. ‘Who’s your community manager’ will be the phrase doing the rounds in marketing and PR departments throughout 2011.
Tip: If you don’t already, begin thinking about your social media channels more like CRM systems. Plan integrated content calendars that create and maximise community engagement. Think about timing, variety and calls to action. And make the most out of all social networks at your disposal across all platforms and media types.
About 33 Digital & Hotwire 33 Digital is an international agency spanning the PR and digital industries. The agency’s sole purpose is to help brands communicate effectively to digital communities. 33 Digital is sister agency to Hotwire and was set up to offer specialist digital and social media PR and marketing services. 33 Digital goes a step beyond online media relations. The team is experienced in community building, web development and SEO while retaining a strong understanding of PR and comms strategy development and the kind of messaging that builds editorial media headlines. All this with an international outlook, equipped to cope with campaigns of different levels of complexity across geographies. All of 33 Digital’s team are experienced communications professionals, as deeply entrenched in digital media as the audiences they reach out to. 33 Digital’s expertise comes from a heritage as PR and marketing consultants, with experience working on campaigns in consumer, b2b and technical industries. It means the team sees the opportunity and navigates the pitfalls while others are still learning the way.
www.33-digital.com Over the last ten years, Hotwire has become one of the world’s leading PR agencies due to a number of clear differentiators. One differentiator is industry insight; through a practice based structure specific teams address selected industries and verticals. And, only by being as transparent and measureable as possible can Hotwire give clients the value and clarity they need to manage their PR and reputation. This has led to an approach where Hotwire looks at output/ROI, outcome and business outcome for every programme we run. Hotwire’s international footprint is also of significance. Hotwire has offices in the major European markets and sister agencies and affiliates throughout the world including 33 Digital and Skywrite PR. Last but not least is creativity. Creativity runs through all programmes and Hotwire’s approach to ‘practical creativity’ has led to a number of award wins.
www.hotwirepr.com
About the authors Drew Benvie is managing director of 33 Digital. With a background in corporate, online, technology and social media PR, he has worked agency and client side for ten years. His early adoption of blogging in PR has led to a longer than average exposure to social media in a PR context. He wrote the page on social media on Wikipedia when it didn’t exist, and now advises global organisations and start-ups alike on digital PR and marketing.