Part 3: John Bell on getting the timing right to launch your social media strategy

When John Bell, head of the global 360° Digital Influence team – Ogilvy’s global social media marketing and communications practice, was in Sydney in June, Ogilvy PR’s Heather Jacobs caught up with him to talk about social media.

Following is the final post in a three-part series on how brands can get started in social media, measure its impact, how Australia compares to the rest of the world when it comes to social media and the challenge of finding social media experts who also understand marketing and communications.

Q: How do brands know they are ready to go to market with their social media program?

John Bell: In markets where social media hasn’t necessarily created a huge momentum, and Australia might be this way, the biggest challenge for communications and marketing professionals is timing. When do I get involved? When does it become essential that I do something?  When will my involvement and investment in social media be critical to my business compared to what I’m investing in now?

Those who have benefitted the most from social media are those who haven’t started too early, but early enough to get experience with it and start to understand inside their organisation how to manage their social network presence to be of the greatest benefit and create more two-way conversations between customers and stakeholders. It’s not like you can study up on it and then one day pull the trigger.

Research by The McKenzie Institute found that 20 per cent of brands using social media for marketing communication purposes across the enterprise are reaping 80 per cent of the benefit which leaves a lot of brands scratching their head and saying, “Does this do anything?”

I think that 20 per cent are the brands with the most experience and the most resources and commitment to social media. It’s the minority of brands right now who are applying social media to their business and feel confident and understand how it’s positively impacting them. I think this year in many markets, Australia included, we’re going to see brands that have been dabbling, start to get truly committed.

Question: How does Australia compare to some of the other markets you have experienced?

John Bell: The adoption curve has been tremendous with the growth in brands using social media for professional reasons skyrocketing. For a relatively small country of twenty million people, connectivity is fairly strong, there a lot of the conditions for marketplace readiness, including the growing use of smartphones, and strong levels of broadband connectivity, although I’ve heard there are some issues about the speed of the broadband. There’s a lot of experimentation occurring in Australia right now and I see a lot of companies hungry to move from experimentation to meaningful operationalizing. How can we get more out of it?

Question: This joke was doing the rounds on Twitter recently: “My boss found me asleep under my desk and was going to fire me, but I said I was planking so he made me vice president of social media”. Are jokes like this a reflection of the reputation that anyone can be an expert in social media?

John Bell: That’s probably happened all too often with companies investing some kind of key token staff hires for people who showed an aptitude in this space. They then realise they have no marketing communication skills, and can do nothing besides introducing them to Foursquare, etc.

Now a lot of brands are looking for people with the right blend of serious marketing communication skills and expertise in social media.

The next generation does come in with an advantage because of their intuitive personal knowledge of the space, but to expect them to go launch a multinational social media based marketing program a day after graduation is not realistic.

Part 1: John Bell: Moving beyond the experimentation phase of social media

When John Bell, head of the global 360° Digital Influence team – Ogilvy’s global social media marketing and communications practice, was in Sydney in June, Ogilvy PR’s Heather Jacobs caught up with him to talk about social media.

Based in Washington DC, Bell heads up the global team of Digital Influence Strategists integrating the power of social media – social networks, blogs, Web 2.0 applications – with digital marketing to produce measureable results. He’s developed strategy and executed award-winning programs for clients including Ford, Lenovo, Unilever, BP and American Express.

Following is a three-part series on how brands can get started in social media, measure its impact, how Australia compares to the rest of the world when it comes to social media and the challenge of finding social media experts who also understand marketing and communications.

Part 1: Moving beyond the experimentation phase

Question: You have a theory that brands are moving through what you call ‘the experimentation stage’ in social media? Can you explain this?

John Bell: The enterprise adoption curve shows there’s a path brands typically move along. It starts with phase zero, where people are nervous and full of anticipation, and shifts into the listening stage where brands want to know what people are saying about them online.

From there it moves onto the experimentation stage, where brands try things in social media – implement programs, encourage various regions around the world to try different things and allow entrepreneurial drive within the company to push forward experiments.

Pretty soon brands find that this approach doesn’t produce a significant business result so they want to get efficiencies or ‘operationalize’ their approach to social media.

This is largely trying to take all the experiments and align them with a business purpose, trying to manage the brand online so there’s isn’t 25 different Facebook pages. Instead, there’s one voice for the brand online that is purposeful, not simply whatever the person who did the feed decided on.

There’s a measurement model around everything that’s done so they can learn from their efforts, see what’s having a business impact, what’s creating customer value, what’s helping them build brand reputation and what’s helping them sell product through social media.

Beyond this is the promised land of full integration where social media becomes a part of everyone’s job delivering greater efficiency, greater customer value, and building good culture. I’m not sure if there are too many examples of that yet.

Q: Which companies are close to getting there?

John Bell: A company in the middle of operationalizing is Ogilvy client IBM, which has a long history of applying social media internally – and is an Ogilvy client. Unilever and Proctor & Gamble really started with social media as an external marketing communications discipline.

Q: Is there a sense that a company will think, ‘We’d better open a Twitter account and Facebook page to build up people to like them and once they get negative feedback or aren’t seeing immediate business results, they’ll think it’s not worth it.

John Bell: A lot of brands reactively get involved in social media and then realise, “Now what?” Along the way to getting reactively involved, they probably haven’t built the best foundation or put thought into their conversation calendar and the online space they are going to engage with people in.

They probably haven’t thought too hard about roles and responsibilities in the organisation and goals for those people.  They’ll wake up one morning after pulling the trigger on a Facebook program and blog program and say, “Is this all there is? Is this all I get?”

You would expect them to pull out, but hopefully in most cases, they then say there must be a better way.

We can’t leave social media. We all intuitively believe it has promise for our business – if nothing else a competitive colleague insists it’s the next big thing.

So brands try to find guidance from people who talk about social media as a business driven discipline as opposed to a fluffy “get in the conversation” type-way. Hopefully they find us. We’re trying to play that role for our clients because we understand social media has tremendous potential to drive sales and impact business. But only when you marry it with the best of marketing communications discipline do you get that.

People overestimate how social media has inverted the world. I think the impact is tremendous: it will transform us, make us better marketers, better product and service developers, but it hasn’t completely rewritten the old rules from marketing communications. They remain relevant today.

The obvious starting point is for brands to deliver some authentic value to their customers. We can’t just message people because we want them to understand something and then do it a dozen times to beat them over the head. We have to try and earn their attention and involvement by figuring out what they want from our brand.

Having Tweeties for Breakfast

The key, according to Ogilvy’s digital influence expert Brian Giesen, is this: If you want to use Twitter, the newest of the new media, for public relations or business then it is imperative that you follow the rules.

And just what are those rules? Well, it’s all pretty simple. After setting up a Twitter account (the essence here is to be completely transparent in identifying yourself or your brand) there are basically three steps to engaging with and through Twitter: 1) Follow, 2) Create and 3) Engage.

Giesen, speaking to a 100-strong crowd at a Frocomm breakfast conference held on Wednesday at Ogilvy House, said the first stage, follow, meant that a business searched Twitter to discover what people were saying about their brand or their market.

After a time, the business could then enter the create phase, Twittering interesting messages relevant to the conversation and gathering followers.

Only after going through those steps, Giesen stressed, should a company start engaging with other tweeters, responding to people who mention the brand, offering advice and assistance where necessary so that people who may have been critical before may now have the chance to be brand evangelists through the positive contact.

Twitter’s growth in Australia this year has been extraordinary. Traffic has surged more than sixfold, the fastest growth in the world, while there are almost 4 million registered users, rating us fifth behind the US, Japan, the UK and Canada.

Giesen said businesses could use Twitter to meet real business objectives in a number of ways: customer relations; product promotion and sales; crisis and reputation management; event coverage; issues advocacy; and, internal communications. All, however, utilise the three steps: follow, create and engage. And, he stressed, all must use the code of ethics for social media which includes being transparent, respecting other Twitterers by knowing when to participate and when to listen, thinking before messaging (will it be seen as helpful or intrusive), making sure your message is relevant, and providing value to your followers.

Another of the speakers, Strath Gordon, the Director of Public Affairs at NSW Police, related how he had to deal with a company which was Twittering under the name NSW Police. After trying unsuccessfully to contact the through Twitter Gordon was forced to go to the media. A prominent newspaper story and subsequent radio interviews soon had the company coming forward (It was a marketing company trying to build the NSW Police Twitter profile so they could go to the police and show what a powerful tool it was).

The police have now taken over the name, together with 2000 followers, and are using it to Twitter information. At times the responses from the public regarding matters such as speeding fines were ‘’in language not usually used’’ in communication with the police. Gordon said the police see Twitter, and other social media, as valuable tools to help report crime, issue general warnings and to inform people of the real level of crime.

Gordon also said that there was no doubt terrorists and criminals were using social media to communicate with each other, using codes words, and revealed the ‘’secret’’ parts of the force were developing ways to  counter that.

Giesen provided a list of do’s and dont’s for Twitter users.

Do:

• See what other businesses are doing on Twitter;
• Use Twitter search engines for keyword searches around brands, products and topics of interest;
• Follow Twitterers with similar interests to establish a brand presence;
• Use twitter to start a conversation;
• Be dedicated to Twitter, with more than one employee on Twitter to ensure an ongoing presence;
• Ask questions and get feedback from followers;
• Engage consumers in co-creation and get constructive insights for future products etc;
• Follow the blogger code of ethics;
• Spread the word about your participation by including your Twitter handle in your email signature.

Don’t:

• Push ads or brand messaging;
• Talk about your everyday tasks. Make your Tweets entertaining and/or valuable;
• Tweet anything about clients, co-workers friends etc that you would not want them to read.