Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
Today I was part of a great Twitter chat #SOBcon. Lots of smart folks and a question came up that I found intriguing because of the dialogue it stirred in everyone.
“Where do you find your inspiration to blog or write”
The stir came when it was suggested that inspiration and having an editorial schedule could be polar opposites. Many agreed with this notion, some did not and sliced it down the middle.
The issue came down to this conundrum:
“That’s only the tip of the iceberg,” is what we say when we want our hearers to know the challenge, problem, or opportunity is deeper, more expansive, more significant than what we see. In human interaction, what we SEE—skin color, clothes, grooming, posture, and facial expression—are only the tip of the iceberg of who a person actually is.
Just like most of an iceberg is hidden, so a human being’s backstory is out-of-sight. If you wanted to see the rest of the iceberg, you’d have to do a deep dive underneath the water (which would be very cold, I presume). You’d have to do some research, get special gear, probably make more than one trip to berg, and in general, make a serious investment.
If you want to see a human’s backstory, you’ll have to make a serious investment, too. However, you can get started right away by making a determined choice to pause before you make those snap judgements about what you see in others. Instead, run what you think about what you see through the backstory filter by reminding yourself, “There’s more to this story.” Then, temper your words and actions with compassion.
For companies, it means valuing the backstory by making a commitment to listen, explore, and discover your customers’ backstories—asking where were they before the discovered you, understanding what fears, hopes, dreams, and goals are, discovering what fuels their imaginations and actions.
When you take the time to value another’s backstory, you gain insight into why people do what they do. You’ll be better prepared to actually help them do what they want to do.
What’s your customer’s backstory? What’s yours?
Trey Pennington
In 2010, facing the biggest public relations crisis in recent history, oil company BP turned to the one medium that could instantly address public concern: social media. Nearly six months after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill occurred, BP has nearly 48,000 Facebook fans, over 19,000 Twitter followers and more than three million YouTube channel views.
Social media updates describe cleanup efforts, research projects targeting impacts of the oil spill and calls for volunteers.
While the success of BP’s social media efforts is debatable, few people can argue the need to monitor and address online comments and feedback. As BP has shown, the biggest change may be the new challenges in reputation management. With these challenges also come new opportunities – opportunities to mitigate bad press, connect with customers and reach potential influencers in the media.
New Threats, New Opportunities
Reputation management isn’t just necessary for big corporations. Small businesses also benefit from monitoring social media chatter, whether or not they have social media profiles. Simple searches on Facebook and Twitter reveal valuable information about customer satisfaction, competitor weaknesses and new market opportunities.
It might be about the size of the screen and whether or not you’re standing up.
Start at the bottom. For the first five years of the Internet, the most used function was email. Email remains a bedrock of every device and system that’s been built on top of the internet, though sometimes it looks like a text message or a mobile check in. This is the layer for asynchronous person to person connection, over time.
Moving from left to right, we see how the way we use the thing we call the internet has evolved over time. We also see how devices and technology and bandwidth have changed the uses of the net and, interestingly, how a growth in mass has led to a growth in self-motivated behavior.
Over the years, I’ve written extensively about the need to extend opportunities in social media beyond marketing and customer service to set the stage for the social business. I believe that the impact lies beyond the socialization of business; it introduces us to a genre of an adaptive business, an entity that can earn relevance now and over time by listening, engaging, and learning.
In October 2009, I worked with JESS3 to visualize corporate transparency and authenticity for the release of Engage. In the process, I realized that those two words, transparent and authentic, didn’t carry tangible business value to leaders and decision makers.
Please, before you think about engaging in social media, I need you to do two things…be transparent and authentic in all you do.
Got it? Good.
You are not entitled to attention.
You are not entitled to a follow-back on Twitter simply because you follow someone. You are not entitled to blog subscribers or comments simply because you publish stuff. You are not entitled to clicks to your junk or signups for your newsletter or any thing of the sort.
In fact, you are not entitled to anything.
The web is not a democracy, nor is this an egalitarian society. Giving of attention when it’s such a precious commodity is not something to be done in some empty gesture of validation, and as the attention giver, I and only I will decide how I’ll approach my connections online. My reasons aren’t yours, nor should they be. You don’t decide the value in paying attention to you, I do. This black-white, good-bad, hard-and-fast-rules of engagement stuff is ridiculous at best, and pathetic at worst.
If you honestly need someone to follow you or friend you on a social network to find self worth or acceptance, it’s really time to re-evaluate your priorities.
Forget Aspiration in the years ahead… the new challenge is to give customers INSPIRATION for your brands and products.
I’m not suggesting we throw away our sales and marketing goals (aspirations), just that we give more value to the concept of INSPIRING our customers as a valid marketing tactic.
If your organization’s internal focus is on easily-measurable metrics, that’s the message that will leak out to your customers – that each customer is just another number toward your goals. If your focus is instead on INSPIRING your customers, they will feel that difference and want to engage with your brand and your products.
I state this as a challenge because it is not easy to inspire someone, especially when the digital atmosphere is overloaded with competing messages now that brands can so easily share their messages through social media. Your brand needs differentiators now more than ever, but if you can INSPIRE your customers, you will get – and keep – their attention.
I’ve just come out of the news:rewired conference about the future of journalism both buzzing and confused.
Why confused? Well, how many of these people in any way love what they do? From the tone and energy of most of the speakers you’d have thought the arctic chill had come early. Maybe they were going for ‘calm and authoritative’. It mostly came across as ‘bored to be here, bored to be talking about this and bored by you.’ Fair enough, if you’re trotting out generic stuff about two-way connections with readers. But some of the other stuff was actually quite interesting. It’s amazing how persistently unfashionable enthusiasm is in the UK.
Why buzzing? Well, partly thanks to Mary Beth Christie from FT.com who, on the topic of monetising online media, called for a ban on the term ‘paywall‘. Shopkeepers do not erect a paywall for us to buy milk. Bus drivers do not erect a paywall that we bang against before bleeping our Oysters. We pay for content, just like we pay for bread: we don’t demolish democracy to get there.
But mainly I’m buzzing thanks to freelance interactive producer Philip Trippenbach’s talk on stories vs interactivity. Stories have traditionally been the lifeblood of the media, but situations or issues that are complex, systemic, non personalised, and non localised are actually stifled by the distortion and personalisation of narrative – what they need is interactivity. Events need stories, systems need interactivity.
From Trippenbach’s blog summary of his speech
Class is one of the most influential systems in the world, and Trippenbach is currently producing Britain’s Real Class System for the BBC. This will take the form a nationwide interactive survey that then becomes interactive visualisation, so viewers can mashup, personalise – yes, create stories – from the rich wealth of data. This is definitely a man who loves what he does, and does it well.
I’m a story fetishist, and this transformed the way I see stories, interactivity, and the media. Dude.
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Fences make good neighbors — even in the social media world.
Too many brands assume that the most effective way to market in this digital age is to use social media to post and tweet as many marketing messages as possible to the widest range of potential consumers across the greatest number of social networks. Spread the word to anyone and everyone, and hope someone believes enough in your message to create a connection and become an advocate influencer for your brand.
In social strategy there is always something missing and something to improve. But there’s one area where I see a big gap.
First, the good news. Brands are starting to ‘listen’ to what people are saying. There are great listening and social media management platforms available, such as Spredfast (plug disclosure…I’m an advisor). However, it’s typically a few people inside the company that are paying attention to user generated content. There’s still a long way to go to make this listening penetrate the depths of an organization to achieve what I call “Customer Oxygen”.
Then, there’s the analytics. There are a lot of ways to analyze the data of what people are saying. Many solutions are out there. The gap here is in making the analysis actionable and operational.
But then, once the listening and analysis is going, brands have the biggest challenge with content. What do they say? How do they say it? They have difficulty finding their ‘social voice’, and figuring out what to say where.
This is the big content gap.