John McCrory

In working with clients I’m often introducing them to the importance of engaging their customers or constituents through social media and other channels. We discuss examples of engagement, but when it comes to planning how they are going to engage, I find it helpful to focus our initial creative brainstorming with a clear definition.

What are we talking about when we say “engagement,” “engaging a community” and planning an “engagement campaign”?

Below is what I’ve come up with so far. What do you think? Is this right? Wrong? What am I missing or forgetting about? At the very least, I hope it is helpful to share what I mean when I use these terms.

Engagement
Prompting, listening, mirroring and acting in answer to what is heard

Example: You walk into a clothing store and here’s what happens:

1. Salesperson approaches, asks what you are looking for today (prompts).
2. You tell him you are looking for a red sweater (salesperson listens).
3. Salesperson repeats “A red sweater. Were you thinking of a cardigan or a pullover?” (mirrors, prompts)
4. You say “Pullover” (salesperson listens)
5. Sales person shows you to a display of pullover sweaters, saying “We have some nice red pullovers here,” picks out a red one for you to consider. (mirrors and acts to answer your specific desire)

Community Engagement
Engagement in a group setting in which roles of prompter, listener and mirrorer, and answering actor rotate among the members of the group. A facilitator prompts individuals in the group to take on one or another of these roles to advance the conversation and keep the roles moving. The facilitator also moves the overall discussion through the stages of engagement with appropriate prompts that signal to participants a new frame for the discussion.

Engagement Campaign
For each engagement campaign, we want to consider:

• When does the campaign begin and end?
• Who are the campaign’s participants?
• Which engagement channels will be used?
• What engagement collateral needs to be created?
• What is the “story arc” for the engagement and what are the change points that divide it into stages?
• Which objectives and goals of the company, organization or project does this campaign advance?

Really? How do you know? I’ve heard this line many times and it’s one of the most common reasons people in small business give for why social media isn’t a good fit for them.

What about advertising? Direct mail? How many of your customers are you reaching through those channels? A lot of the small business owners I’ve met aren’t sure they are getting any value out of ads and mailings. “Truth is,” they say, “I get most of my customers through word of mouth.”

Guess what? If word of mouth is your top marketing channel, you had better rethink your attitude about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest. Social media makes word of mouth visible. Because of that, I happen to think that social media are more relevant marketing tools for small and medium sized businesses than they are for big national brands.

If you integrate online and social media into your advertising and direct mail with something as simple as promo codes, you can even make the formerly invisible effects of your traditional marketing visible. But don’t take my word for it. Measure it.

Consider the case study of a retailer cited by Olivier Blanchard in his talk on measuring word of mouth the other day at the Word of Mouth Supergenius in Chicago: Though 90% of their marketing spend was on newspaper ads, E-mail, Facebook, and the retailer’s blog all brought in significantly more customers than print.

• 4% came from print ad codes
• 69% came from email
• 17% came from facebook
• 10% came from the blog

Not to trash print ads, but too often they are the default for many small businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions. In my experience, most small businesses never measure the ROI of different marketing tactics and channels, and proceed with advertising largely on faith. (Businesses based on direct-mail sales being a prominent exception.)

Alas, according to a recent survey, small business owners still have a long way to go in online and social media marketing. But the real problem is not knowing what works, and the solution is to measure and find out. I’ll choose evidence-based marketing over faith-based marketing any day. So before you say “My customers don’t use social media” again, ask whether that’s just your impression, or if you have real data to back that up.

Want more? If you still aren’t convinced, say, because “my customers don’t use Twitter,” Laura Fitton provides 5 great reasons why businesses should be on Twitter even if they think their customers aren’t.

Based on the example by @jaybaer, who wordled @juntajoe’s great roundup of predictions for social media content marketing, I gathered the text of a dozen other posts from many sources about what’s coming in the next year more generally for social media, then used Wordle to make the resulting word cloud. For this exercise I removed common words, including social, media, internet, and web.

Twitter beats Facebook. Like beats make. People beats content. People beats technology. Networks beat companies and organizations. Marketing beats enterprise.

My opinion? I think 2010 will be about mobile, location, and communities. And there will be some spectacular major brand name social media bungles. Authenticity will be important, too, but I’m saving that for 2011.

You’ve heard social networking is the next big thing for businesses. It’s the future of communications, PR and marketing. If you don’t want to fall behind, experts say, you better get on Twitter, set up a Facebook fan page, create a YouTube channel. You gotta start pumping out updates, funny videos, and podcasts to get your message out to your customers. Content is king, baby.

I have three words for you: Shut up and listen.

This brave new world of social networking, social media, web 2.0 and all this great internet stuff is transforming everything about how businesses, nonprofits, schools, and governments communicate with the public, but stop — go back to that word transforming. This change in communication is not just a new technology for doing what you’ve always done. It is not just the new tube through which to send your message. So put your megaphone down…

What? You can’t put your megaphone down because it’s missing? You lost your megaphone?! Oh, wait—I see it. Look out there. See it? See all those people? No, not the public but your customers, your members, your students and their parents, your employees, your constituents and citizens—all of them have the megaphone now. It’s not as big and loud as it used to be, but — ssh! Listen! They’re talking to each other. What are they talking about?

They’re talking about their favorite movies. Some song lyric they misheard. They’re talking about Afghanistan, President Obama, their cousin who was at Falluja. They’re talking about their favorite whiskey. They’re talking about their children and the funny things they said today. They’re talking about their grandmother who just died and their best friend who just lost to cancer at the young age of 37. They’re talking about how they beat cancer. They’re talking about Lady Gaga’s latest video and Susan Boyle’s new CD. They’re talking about Tiger Woods and and the future of journalism. They’re talking about what they had for lunch and how delicious it was and if you’re lucky it was at your restaurant. Woo Hoo! Social Media FTW!

Yes, sometimes they are talking about you. Are you ears burning? You better hope it’s good, because they could also be talking about how your service was terrible, how they got food poisoning from your blue plate special… and they’re talking about it with their friends (who trust them) and through the megaphone they’re also talking about it with a lot of your other customers.

So what are you going to do about it? Put out a press release? Here’s what to do: Go direct to them. But be careful.

It is tempting to jump right in and mix it up with them, but look at all the other stuff they are talking about. Do you really want to be in their face when they’re still mourning their best friend? When you go direct, you’d better be respectful. The world is watching.

So, apologize for the bad service (what does that cost you, really?). Then, do something about it. Back up the apology with action. Remember that if they care enough to complain about you, they care about you. So be grateful for the feedback. Who needs to hire mystery shoppers when you have real customers with megaphones 24/7/365?

That’s better. You can now go do your home work—read and follow Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Mitch Joel, Kristina Halvorson, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Dan Zarella and that’s just for starters.

But before you go, and this is very important, keep in mind that:

Social Media is not an add-on

If you are exploring the world of social media and web 2.0 and thinking you just need to add some of these new channels to your bag of tricks, stop now and go back to what you were doing. Social media won’t help you.

Don’t get me wrong, the only way to understand how social media work is to learn by doing. As Jay Rosen says, “You gotta grok it before you can rock it.” So, you can start tweeting, create Facebook page and a LinkedIn group and start watching your follower, fan, and member counts rack up. It might make you feel better about yourself, and you will start catching on to how it all works. Just, don’t expect any of it to matter much.

Social media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 are far more than new communications channels. A collection of internet-based software tools and platforms that enable people to share and collaboratively manipulate information with each other, these technologies are part of the Internet’s ongoing disruption of the information ecosystem, a transformation now more than 20 years old.

I point this out not to sound like some kind of internet triumphalist, but to put social media in a proper context. Social media is not only transforming the transmission of information from point A to point B, it is transforming how we work with information.

The changes to the news business, marketing, buying and selling are just the tip of the iceberg. For organizations who are trying to figure out how or whether to use social media, this means the relevance of social media extends beyond the marketing department. Social media will be transforming every function within your organization, from facilities and maintenance to accounting, customer service, HR, and on and on. No one in the organization will be unaffected.

Playing with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like can be a lot of fun, and it can be a timesink. That’s okay — for a little while (see paragraph 2). We marketing and PR types have tended to be the early adopters of social media, but we have to look at social media as more than just marketing tools we can add to our existing programs.

The implications are significant for folks “inside the firewall” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Brito) who make the stategy, budget, and staffing decisions.

Are you willing to shred your budget? Kill sacred cows and start from scratch? Print thinner brochures and magazines. Send out direct mail fewer times a year. Stop advertising. You’ll have to find the money somewhere. A lot of social media are free in that they don’t cost money to use. But they do cost time and attention to do well. If you want to really make a dent in this new world, you’ll need to blow up your budget and start over.

This is not about new media destroying old media. Nor is it about social media replacing so-called traditional media. What’s emerging is an information ecosystem which is a hybrid of old and new. But, you can’t work effectively in that new ecosystem if you are organized to produce for the old one.

As new marketing strategies and plans are drawn up, the structure of the marketing department is going to have to change to execute those plans. You will need to upend your marketing communications staff. If you are going to succeed in the new world, you will need to reinvent your production process. The production requirements have changed. You will need to manage a different kind of media, on a different schedule, and that is going to require a completely new set of skills than your marcom department currently possesses.

It’s going to be painful. I know capable, wonderful people who have built up twenty or more years of experience and are still years from retirement whose strongest skills are just not relevant to the new needs marketing directors are going to have. Some are adapting, but many are not.

The InDesign expert who puts together your printed materials in-house may not be as valuable to the new campaign as the multimedia producer who can make podcasts and videos and zip them onto the internet. The new positions you’ll need to create on your staff will involve skillsets that current staff can’t easily be retrained for.

My point is that if you are, like most people in business, just dipping your toe in social media, or like some early adopters, have been working with it for two or four years or longer—at some point in the near future, you’re going to have to commit to some radical changes in staffing and budget. I think most of these changes will be a huge net positive, though not without some hurt. Are you up for it? Excited by it? Prepared to fight for it?

A lot of us talk up organizational change as a kind of tonic for business, but inertia is a powerful force in the workplace. A lot of the wariness of social media is in fact a result of the frustration of how hard it has been to foster cultural acceptance and embrace of earlier generations of promising technologies in the workplace. We’re very good at changing technology. We’re not very good at changing culture.

I hope this round of change will be different from the last. It will take a lot of commitment to fundamentally reorganize ourselves to actually get the most out of social media. You know who’ll show you how to do it? Your customers!

Olivier Blanchard (The Brand Builder) began a very interesting and lively discussion on his blog Friday when he called into question the legitimacy of the “International Social Media Association” and, in particular, it’s $3,000 professional certification program. His main objection was that this organization was marketing itself with a misleading identity as some sort of international accrediting body.

Boiled down, it seems that two individuals are trying to launch an international industry association largely on their own. Perhaps such an association would be a welcome presence, but when the association seems primarily to be a positioning tactic for marketing a not-inexpensive training course, it isn’t surprising that the initiative might not smell right to a few people.

Read through the discussion and decide what you think about ISMA. A few defenders of ISMA and its founders have chimed in over the weekend. Fundamental to the topic, I think, is the issue raised by Kristi Colvin, Amber Naslund and Aliza Sherman of whether certification in social media is even a good idea.

I don’t think certification makes sense for social media, and here’s why:

Social media is not a distinct discipline, industry, or product platform. It’s an evolving set of software tools and practices in the internetworked world that are used by people in many different disciplines and industries. Though marketers and PR professionals are social media’s most prominent early adopters, people in many other industries/displines are using social media to conduct business. Colleges, hospitals, software firms, news organizations, and many others are leveraging social media in ways having nothing to do with marketing or PR in their organization’s core activities.

The potential uses and users of social media are just too broad in scope to be considered a discipline with a standardized body of knowledge and skills.

Many of the tools used in social networking are evolving so quickly that no standardized body of knowledge can be identified. What you need to know today will be obsolete tomorrow.

The tools are also going to become generic, in the sense that they will become ubiquitous applications used in many different kinds of work, much like word processors and spreadsheets are today. In the job descriptions of the future, say ten year from now, facility with social media will become a standard requirement that everyone will need to possess.

Added 12/7/2009 at 9:58 pm:

Tanya Roberts comment on the original post reminded me of another reason certification is unnecessary: an international accrediting body assumes the role of a central authority, yet such structures are antithetical to the distributed nature of authority in the internet age. Authority to validate or “certify” a social media professional would more naturally come from the crowd. Or, as I said in my first comment, “your validators will be your network.”

Those are my answers, what are yours?

Are your customers selling your product for you? If they aren’t, you are missing out on the chance to build a sales force that exclusively possesses the most powerful marketing tools out there — social proof and word of mouth — and who will work for you virtually for free.

When you design a marketing or communications strategy, it need not end with the sale (however that is defined). To get the most out of your program, your strategy has to extend to the customer’s experience of the purchase and the product. If you get it right, they can become loyal, repeat customers and advocates for your brand.

I think of this process in terms of the customer escalator — a seven-step process for building a free sales force out of your customers, clients, or members. This process is like the escalator in a department store, and you need to do something to convince your customers at each step to go up to the next level. What are you doing to bring your customers up the escalators through the steps of their purchasing decision?

Whether the purchasing decision is a simple one like buying a book or a complex one like buying a car or selecting a college, I have found that the basic steps are the same. You can apply them to all kinds of marketing challenges.

Level 1: Awareness
You’ve run ads, sent direct mail, gotten earned media, or your product has been seen in the hand of a celebrity. If you are lucky, the customer has noticed. A tiny minority of people who’ve encountered your message have actually paid attention to it and are now aware of you. In the best-case-scenario, someone who likes your product has made a referral or recommendation. This is the easy part, yet how much of your time and budget are spent on tactics to build awareness? Too frequently, building awareness dominates the marketing effort, even though it is just one of many elements in a successful campaign.

Level 2: The 2nd Click
Now that the customer is aware of you, how do you get them to make “the 2nd click”? On many web sites, it is not unusual for more than half of the visitors to leave the site without making a second click. How many even make a third click? 10% is not uncommon. How do you get the customer into the showroom? Your strategy should envision ways of getting potential customers to stay and take a look around. You need to convince them that you have what they are looking for. If they are leaving in droves, you need to understand why. Simply measuring visitors is pointless, since most are window shopping. There are three reasons why customers won’t make The 2nd Click:

1. You aren’t targeting well and are pulling in lots of non-customers rather than potential customers;
2. You aren’t showing the customer the product they were initially looking for fast enough; or
3. You aren’t intriguing or surprising the customer in ways that delight them enough to keep looking around.

Level 3: Capture
Once you’ve got the customer to make that 2nd Click and delve more deeply, how are you capturing them? Capture can take many forms, and it is often largely in the mind of the customer: they are here to stay. If you are selling on the web, you now have a customer who will click through 10 or more pages. If you are selling offline, you now have a customer who is convinced they might buy from you. If you are selling something that involves a more complex purchasing process, this is the point when you will want to offer some kind of free and easy way to “capture” the customer’s identity so you can continue to engage with them. It could be a signup for alerts about specials, a signup that enables them to use your site or service for free — or anything that creates a direct channel between you and the customer.

Level 4: Engagement
Once the direct channel to the customer is established — which could be a face-to-face conversation, a signup that gives you the individual’s e-mail address, or a follow on Twitter — then you are able to engage with your customer. In many cases, you have the opportunity to engage personally, one-on-one. Are you prepared for that? It’s easier to have the customer just sign up for a mass e-mail, but that’s not going to deliver them much value, and it isn’t going to do much for you, the seller, either, since it doesn’t take advantage of the personalized communication that is possibly once you have captured them. Your customer has connected to you as an individual. Is your sales process designed for individual interaction or do you treat your customers as a mass group (or a set of segmented groups)? Make the most of that. You may need to radically change how you interact with customers to make the most out of the engagement level. You may need to change how you staff the sales function to support this kind of interaction. On the other hand, engagement may be as simple as the customer adding items to a shopping cart: they’ve decided to try to buy, but they haven’t given you their credit card yet.

Level 5: Transaction
If you’ve succeeded in capturing and engaging the customer, you now bring them to the checkout. How are you making this an easy, delightful experience? How are you making it a step they will be motivated to complete? How are you making it a step they will want to tell others about and how are you encouraging them to tell others about it? What are you doing to make the transaction experience itself a part of your brand? Abandoned shopping carts are a good online measure of whether you are making the transaction step work. But how are you measuring what comes afterward? With online social media integration, I suspect this step is going to provide new opportunities for Level 6, Advocacy, as the process of making a purchase can automatically populate the customer’s social status on Facebook or Twitter — and if they do that from within your site, you can measure it well.

Level 6: Advocacy
If you don’t care about repeat customers or word of mouth, you can stop at Level 5: you’ve made the sale, shipped the product–you’re done! But you’re leaving a lot on the table. You’ve spent a lot to acquire the customer and make the sale — abandoning the customer now means you’re wasting a lot of your investment in that customer.

If you want to turn your customers into advocates for your product, service, or organization, then you need to include encouraging advocacy into your strategy. Follow up with customers who have made the purchase. Are they happy and satisfied? Encourage them to share their experience and make recommendations. In this Internet Age, remember that all your customers are also potentially publishers: they may have blogs, they may be on Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace and post updates for friends — they are sharing their life with other people, and if their experience with you is positive, you want them to share that. Provide tools and encouragement to make positive references and recommendations easy.

You should use follow-up to identify customers who aren’t satisfied and see if there is any way to reasonably satisfy them; sometimes an unsatisfied customer can be turned into an advocate through good customer service. The risk of not following up is that dissatisfied customers will complain. Remember, all your customers are publishers. They have blogs. They have Facebook accounts. They have Twitter. The megaphone is in their hands, not yours. Their complaints can reach a lot of people and and have a lot of influence.

Level 7: Recognition
Monitoring your brand online includes monitoring customer feedback, and when you see customers who have become advocates, you can recognize them in ways that will help ensure they become loyal, repeat customers and continuing advocates — your unpaid sales force. You could recognize them as a “Top Reviewer” as Amazon does, for example. You might deputize them in some way as a brand ambassador, giving them virtual or real badges with which to spread positive feeling about your brand. Happy customers have always helped generate new sales through word of mouth. On the internet, social media provide fantastic new tools that can grease the wheels of word of mouth. How does your strategy take advantage of the opportunities happy customers present for re-selling your brand?

If you do this right, your customers become your sales force, and help build awareness among other potential customers, and that leads new people into the escalator on Level 1, and the cycle starts again.

If you build your marketing strategy with these 7 steps in mind, you will create a marketing circle out of your customers that leverages social proof and word of mouth to build your brand and sustain sales over the long term.

SocialMediaToday has a great post from David Mullen this afternoon on “What the Phoenix Suns Can Teach Your Brand About Using Twitter” including the video below in which the Suns’ VP of Digital Jeramie McPeek talks about how the team is using Twitter to engage with its fan base.

When people ask me about using social media for marketing, three of the most important elements I emphasize are the need to fit your strategy to your brand, engage your customers, and to blend your social media initiatives with the rest of your marketing and communications efforts. The Suns are a great example of getting all three of these things right. Watch:

Here’s two short audio blogs about my thesis that social media succeed when they encourage or require onymity — that is, you represent yourself publicly using your true identity, rather than a fictionalized persona.

Part Two:

Thanks to the great work of people like Kristina Halvorson, Rachel Lovinger and others, content strategy has emerged as a key element of marketing today. For many businesses and organizations the focus on content brings a new and unfamiliar challenge: to think like a publisher. Experts may advise you to create a blog, an e-mail newsletter, videos, audio podcasts, presentations, or white papers.

Wait a minute, you might be saying, I work for a travel agency—or a candy shop, a library, a dry cleaning company, a day care center; (insert your business here). We’re too busy to be a publisher, we have a business to run.

There are different kinds of publishers. I think the correct model for thinking like a publisher is book publishing, rather than, say, newspapers. In the 1990s I worked for Simon & Schuster, the world’s largest book publisher at the time. It was an immense company that published tens of thousands of books each year. The company didn’t employ a single writer. Writers were contractors. No benefits. No retirement plan.

The company’s employees were editors, designers, production staff, copyeditors, marketers, a sales force—in other words, all the people required to support the company’s core competency: manufacturing and distributing books. The books themselves, however—that is, the content—were created by the authors.

So when you are told to think like a publisher, that doesn’t mean you are supposed create all the content yourself. Does that seem less daunting? I hope so. Your role is to be the editor-in-chief and distributor of the content.

That’s where the analogy ends. Remember, you are only thinking like a publisher, and in this role you are more of a curator than a producer.

In an upcoming post, I’ll extend this description of what it really means to think like a publisher by looking at how the publisher produces content. I’ll look at four types of content you’ll want to manage:

1. internally-generated content
2. user-generated content
3. found content
4. commissioned content