Three Most Important (And Simple) Rules For Social Media

Yes, three simple rules, but first a bit of context.

I am asked regularly to speak on social media communications and management. They are seeking for me to help frame the role that the evolving social media world is having on brands, consumers, purchasing... Really, everything and everyone. In this ongoing work with clients, I have formed various guides and offered lots of advice. In this quest to offer solutions, I kept deleting slides and boiling the information down further and further. I finally arrived at one simple piece of advice with three rules. Thus far, I have yet to find someone who can break them.

It's true if it's on a t-shirt!

But first, a bit of an aside. I am NOT a Social Media expert. Do I work a lot within social media channels? Yes. Do I actively test and use the latest social media channels and tools? Absolutely. However, I still believe that anyone billing themselves as a "Social Media Expert" should be viewed with skepticism. I advise anyone looking to engage an expert in social media to ask them about their experience not in social media, but about their experience in public relations, communication, journalism, brand strategy and storytelling. The lack of the ability to convey a coherent idea and to contextualize situations is the biggest challenge, not finding the latest app.



Now, on to it...

The Three Most Important Rules in Social Media


1.   Be Responsive

Ensure that you not only have a process for monitoring social media, but be prepared to quickly engage when conversations do start. Many people still assume that their social media messages will go unanswered by companies. Prompt engagement, even bad news, will diffuse many problems before they grow. 

2.   Be Honest

This should go without saying, but it is the rule most broken. Follow the same rules you should follow in public relations. Clearly and simply explain what you are trying to convey. Brevity and simplicity is key, but distorting the truth is an absolute no no. Communication, even Tweets, live forever now. Lack of honesty will come back to get you.

3.   Be Authentic

Use your own life experiences as an example. Let's pick on the airlines for a minute. How many times have you heard the same pat corporate statement to address something bad? "Our policy clearly states..." This is usually followed by some very bad news and a hollow apology. Corporate policies have a place and are necessary at times. However, if you can deliver the news in human terms, use your name, apologize in a real way. This also goes for the terrible auto responses by companies. People are smart enough to know an auto-response. It is worth having a smart, educated (and if possible witty) person on the other end responding with real typed words.   

BONUS:  Anyone who attempts to validate their social media expertise by saying what their Klout Score is, or casually mentioning how many Twitter Followers they have deserves a quick, but powerful, kick in the ass.
Instead, look at what the person is communicating, how they are communicating it and what the response is.

Angry Birds Stealing My Wallet?

Angry Birds are Everywhere

The Atlantic recently published an article, Estimating the Damage to the U.S. Economy Caused by Angry Birds, that caused quite a stir.

In the article, Alexis Madrigal offers up how much American productivity is lost by employees playing Angry Birds at work. He uses a a variant of a calculation that a consulting firm has used to determine lost productivity from the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I am not here to question his math, just the basis of the assumption of "lost productivity." 

In my professional career thus far, I have been a lowly account coodinator at a huge advertising agency and the director of accounts, with large teams of employees. I have also been the president of a region of a company and an entrepreneur of a tiny startup. Through all of these career moves I can assure you of one thing. People at work don't need a specific smartphone game to lose productivity. They (myself included) are perfectly good at seeking out ways to distract themselves from work. Referencing the hot new game is simply a device that journalists use to get the readers attention. An article titled, "Various Means Employed by People to Lose Productivity" isn't nearly as exciting as picking the hot new game or industry.    

Courtesy of The Atlantic

If we look back through the archives of 'lost productivity" articles I assure you they list causes such as the personal computer, phone, water cooler, windows, air conditioning, co-ed working environment... and so on. Therefore, the lost productivity idea is a fallacy as it relates to specific new technology advances. What the advent of smartphones and social media has done, is make it easier to hide the actual activity from their boss. But banning Angry Birds and social media doesn't solve the problem. It only leads more secretive activity and alternative forms of lost productivity, such as people standing around talking about playing Angry Birds!

I am certain there are plenty of great Human Resources professionals that could chime in and offer a great deal of suggestions on how to increase productivity in the workplace. I am not going to attempt to tackle the complete productivity issue. I do feel that it all stems from proper supervision and pro-active management with a human understanding of how people work and live.

I do want to take a minute and address the Angry Birds and larger social media challenge that employers face. How to best solve it? 

Employers should stop directing their IT staff to block offending games and sites. They should stop issuing corporate policies designed to prevent game play and social media (specifically Facebook and Twitter) usage at work. Instead, they should look at their customers and understand that they are probably using the same channels of social media and games. Enterprising marketing officers should be challenging their company to see how they can turn their most avid game playing employees and heavy Facebook users into defacto developers, idea generators and online brand advocates. By engaging with employees about their online activity, a company can better understand changing trends. If employees as unafraid to talk openly about what they are doing, ideas can be shared. 

- Integrate social gaming into company team building.

- Offer incentives for employees that bring ideas on integrating company products into social gaming or online advertising

- Focus less on restricting activities of employees and more on accountability of delivering results.

- Offer at work education on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. 

- Conduct education on what information employees can share about the company and its products. 

- Let social sharing about your company occur naturally.

- If you have active social media marketing staff already, they should add monitoring and reporting of social media activity to their responsibilities. 

There is a great deal of potential in leveraging the ideas from social gaming and the actual reach of social media. If handled proactively and positively by a company, you will be creating a large innovation team and social media marketing team from your existing employees. 

Your Cure For Writer's Block

From time to time we all struggle with the dreaded writer's block. Those who write many column inches for a living struggle with it, and so do us branding and marketing types. For me it is concept creation and short form creative copy. My clients look to me for the next "big idea." They expect something that will stand out, fit their brand and be clever and creative. All of those things are what they should expect of course.

However, being creative and relevant to a brand in an on demand fashion can be taxing. Ideas don't work 9 to 5. That is why there is the handy Moleskine. One travels with me at all times, and one stays on my nightstand. They get filled with ideas. Some of those ideas eventually become workable solutions to a client challenge. Some become dreams for future work and some are simply terrible. The edible bike helmet "dream" for instance seemed great at 3am.

So, what do you do when the ideas are are clogged up somewhere in your head and just not flowing? How do you get those ideas going again? I have already mentioned that watching some TED talks gets me going. A little Spotify music helps. Taking a walk. Finding inspiring  work in unrelated fields, such as architecture and fine art. All help me to break the cycle of a creative block. But there is one other little secret that I would like to share and that is the New Yorker Magazine. Specifically, their cartoons.

You may not know this, but they have a weekly contest to write the headline to a published cartoon. It is a fun weekly challenge and blends a visual idea with short form copy. 

The Caption Contest is certainly a fun secret pleasure of mine. Though I have yet to win and have a caption of mine appear, it is a fun challenge to try and meet. Go give it a try and see if it works for helping to break your writer's block. 

I would love to hear what other ways people have for breaking their creative block.

I will update this post as people send me ideas.   

The Best 16:17 of Your Day: The Origins of Pleasure

This one is a bit esoteric, yet incredibly relevant to marketing, branding and communications professionals. In short Mr. Bloom hypothesizes that our knowledge of the origins of an object is critical to our emotional response to it. He uses art and forgery as his primary example, but this is critical in our lives with brands and products.

In short, if we perceive a brand as an original, a brand of quality. One we have had positive experiences with before, we will respond to it with pleasure and enjoy it more.

I will leave it at that, and let Mr. Bloom explain the psychology of it. If you are in the marketing and branding world however, listen to this talk with an eye toward how you reach consumers. Is your brand, your story, reinforcing originality and trust... pleasure?

It is critically important to realize that the experience and perceptions of a consumer will determine your brand's fate with them, even if your product is identical to one they love. Think about that next time you decide to skip brand planning and go for a crowd sourced logo. The next time you consider skipping a review of your retail experience, your staff training.

Once you lose originality and the consumer loses that pleasure in your brand, it is gone.


Paul Bloom: The Origins of Pleasure

 

Update: The Post Office Doesn't Like Radical Ideas

Last week I discussed some radical ideas that might save the U.S. Postal Service.

Five Radical Ideas for Saving the U.S. Postal Service

As it turns out, they seem to think that worse service is the answer to their ills. 

According to a recent Washington Business Journal article, they feel that closing processing facilities is the way to balance their budget. Given the decline in mail, closing some facilities may actually be needed. However, here is the problem. According to the Postmaster General this would result in much slower delivery of First Class Mail. Having worse service for more cost doesn't seem like a way toward solving their problems. 

Your new Post Office

On the bright side, they are actually implementing one of the Radical Ideas... Sort of. 

I proposed that the USPS sign a massive co-location deal with places such as McDonald's. They are not doing that, but they are moving forward with what they call "Village Post Offices." According to this CNN article, up to 3,700 mostly rural Post Offices could be converted to this type. Basically, small general stores will pay for the right to have Post Office services in their store. That way they can sell stamps with their Lotto tickets, beer and fishing lures. 

This isn't quite the massive transformation or positive brand relationships I would like to see, but I guess it is a start.  

 

Putting Relationship Back in PR

Original Building Plan Courtesy of Highwoods

I recently was interviewed in The Kansas City Star about a public relations disaster on the venerable Country Club Plaza shopping district. For those of you not from Kansas City, "The Plaza" is an historic and iconic luxury open-air shopping district just south of the urban core. So what was this disaster you say? In short, Highwoods, the North Carolina-based owner of the center announced haphazardly last August that they would build a new office building for a local law firm on the north edge of the Plaza. They released a preliminary sketch and told of "only needing to demolish a small section of shops and an apartment building." They released it as a simple business development story. But almost overnight, a development project that they assumed would be met with open arms in these tough economic times turned into a media disaster that eventually forced them to withdraw the plan. It spawned lawsuits, public outcry and a very vocal, if not reasonable, "Save OUR Plaza" group. It also harmed the reputation of the shopping center and further distanced the ownership from their customers. they burned a great deal of good will and equity. Good will that would have come in handy as they dealt with recent teen riots, tenant snafus and the lingering perception of being too corporate.

Here is what I had to say, as well as the article from Kevin Collison in it's entirety. 

Protest Group Sign

Anyone involved with commercial real estate needs to be continually engaged with the community, said Jon Stephens, the former manager of the Power & Light District, who now runs his own marketing firm. 

Whether it should or not, the perception is, everybody should have a say, and a company that doesn't understand that is clearly doomed for problems, he said. 

Had Highwoods properly vetted its Polsinelli plan, Stephens said, it would have found that razing the Balcony Building was a nonstarter.  I believe if they came out with the final plan as opposed to the first one wouldn't have been received nearly as negatively. 

Kansas City Star: Lessons from the Balcony Building Mess

The lesson in all of this, is it public relations is not about announcing projects. It is rather about continual community engagement, message management and understanding the customer, the community and the perceptions of your district. It is as much about being engaged in the community, working with your company executives to get involved in the community as it is planning an announcement.

I am not trying to vilify Highwoods. They are by all indications a good steward of their properties and for the most part have improved The Plaza and maintained a nice assortment of high-quality tenants in very tough times. However, they are miserable in their public relations and seem to make the same mistakes time and again. This has harmed them in several ways including people not giving them credit for the great tenants they do bring in.

So, what should they do going forward?

• Identify a few select employees locally that can serve as the day-to-day voice and face of their company.
• Train the Highwoods execs to be on message but also allow them to show some personality. Less corporate, more neighbor.
• Look to a communications professional to assist them in guiding how they engage the community. Create an ongoing plan for reputation management.
• Engage daily on issues big and small. Build communication pathways.
• Realize that the citizens of Kansas City hold the area as part of their "public trust" and speak in that way when discussing the Plaza. 
• Create a program for the 150+ tenants to give them the tools to be pro-Plaza advocates. 
• Identify your true neighborhood and customer brand advocates and offer them previews and perks.
• Push more regional and national media that will build pride in the community that they have a jewel in their own backyard. 
• When big changes are considered, look to a few trusted experts for advice before going public. 

This entire mess may not have been avoided even with all of the above. However; if they had initially launched (with the revised plan that saved the historic building), had already built some equity in the community, and had a known local exec speaking out in a way that people could relate to, they just might have avoided the fight and harm they have done to their reputation.