Will Social Media continue to be a powerful communication channel in 2013?

During 2012 corporations and individuals, who have been in the social media market have discussed;

1. To find the tools to get the measurement right, so the accounting people can see the investment in Social Media pays off.
2. On the other side the communications people have been discussing context and content.
3. And least but not last a lot of private people has started a “battle” to keep their integrity intact and secure that their information belongs to them instead as they claim to the corporations.

Ad1. From a corporate perspective there will still be a battle in 2013 to find the right measurement tools or more correct the best measurement tool available for the specific social media task you as a corporation want to present to the market.

Ad2. In 2013 Marketing and communication people will continue the discussion of content and context. This discussion purpose is to be able to reach the consumers in a better and more direct way to create a dialog with them to make them purchase more products or services in the future

Ad3. In 2013 the integrity battle will continue and maybe even grow among consumers and corporations. The interest in this subject from a corporate perspective is to secure that possible costumers do not lose their trust with a service; they will go find a different one.

To help consumers to have more faith and trust in what is going on at the social media at least two important actions must be implemented:

1. We need to have a better privacy setting and an ethical default sharing options.
2. Search engines, social networks and other data storing Medias need to provide ways for users to easily remove hide or at least curate their personal data that has been cached or stored permanently.

The social media presence in 2013 will have the dimension to keep the consumer more secure and faithful of being part of the social media. Consumers must not feel that the power of their social media presence is controlled by search companies and the social media it self.

I want to whish all people reading my blocks a happy and prosperous social media new year 2013.

Social Media sustainability in an enterprise is part of the value creation!

An increasing part of the enterprise value creation model is how sustainable the social media are. Both enterprise management and other stakeholders have numerous opportunities and challenges with the value creation and herby sustainability. The enterprise organization has a challenging job in creating a safe and controlled environment for the sharing of ideas and collaboration among its stakeholders. The whole idea is to improve the social and financial performance of the enterprise and creating more value to the organization.

To create a social media sustainable environment for the stakeholders, the enterprise will need to act and behave in a certain way to convince both internal and external stakeholders that the social media effort is real, honest, open minded and not guided and controlled in a specific way to enforce the enterprise values directly on the stakeholders.

When an enterprise want to create value using Social media it has to consider how it approaches all their stakeholders. Stephan Burckhardt wrote (Social Media and sustainability: Seven key lessons, May 8 2012) that there are 7 key lessons for social media value creation:

      1. Listen, Listen, Listen

To create sustainable value with your Social Media is less about managing downside risk and more about listening to your key stakeholders. Your stakeholders will bring emergent thought to the surface and tell you their truth if they experience reel collaboration. Listening to your stakeholders will create sustainable value to the enterprise business and make you stay ahead of the market.

      2. Be authentic

In the emerging social ecosystem authenticity is the key for making reel collaboration.  Feeding the enterprise line either falls flat, or worse backfires. Let the content and the context speak for itself, and create an open and honest collaborative environment.  Being authentic will also engage your stakeholders to give you the understanding of what questions to answer. (Source: Editor Matthew McDermott – Treehugger; Business, Politics & Energy)

      3. Be humble, self critical and willing to adapt

One thing an enterprise should not do is making self promotion which will be taken by the stakeholders as a social death-knell. What the enterprise should do is to show its humble attitude towards the stakeholders, this is when the social media model with the push/push effect is in use, that is collaboration and that is when you have the dialog with the stakeholders. The stakeholder can go all the way from awareness to interest to desire to action all in the same medium at the same time. The popular way of expressing this new communication style is mentioned in the  figure below.

This is when you as an enterprise should be willing to adapt and be self critical to get the best out of collaboration.

      4. Be a real person

What is real important when the enterprise want to be social, is when it has to have a real person to do the collaboration. Anonymous corporate voice with lingo and the occasional enterprise CEO quote do not get any hits nor engagement with the stakeholders. Stakeholders want real people to collaborate with, they want “to feel and have the picture and name of whom you are going to collaborate with.” Stakeholders want to know the personality they are collaborating with.

      5. Engage over time and on multiple platforms

It is important for any enterprise to engage social media on multiple platforms, as all platforms seems to serve stakeholders engagement in their own unique way. Some enterprises use Twitter for quick internal ping-backs and dialog uses YouTube and a wiki for prospective employees. An others uses Linked In and even Face book for checking on prospective employees.

      6. Be relevant

Stakeholders want value, especially in the B2B market. As an enterprise you need to be able to deliver a valuable content in an engaged context. What that means is that stakeholders seek expertise and want their problems and suggestions taken seriously. On the other hand the enterprise managers want to be addressed by specialists who know what they are talking about and can help solve their specific problems. What is important when  enterprises are working the Social Media they have to remember that they are “telling each other” which mean the enterprises have a dialog with their stakeholders and they have to find out how they can relieve their pain.  You have to be able to take your own and your stakeholders pain seriously and are able to use both suggestions and problems to solve the pain to the mutual benefit for both parties – then you can grow into an industry leader.

      7. Be fearless

It is important for the enterprise to dare do collaborate with its stakeholders. In the “old days” when the enterprise used the model of “Tell us what you think of what we tell you” approach does not make you fearless as an enterprise. With this approach you stay in your comfort zone and do not dare to engage with your stakeholders. We all know that it is risky business to start a dialog where you can get some critic from your stakeholders even some dislike which can make the enterprise internal shiver. It is easy to say that we should collaborate with our stakeholders but it is hard to convince the internal powers that be. But those enterprises who dare will suddenly feel rewarded with increasing reach, and value creation more leads and attention all the way up the credibility chain.  As social media are not a direct sales tool you as an enterprise will indirectly see the value creation in the sales funnel.

  

Following these basic guidelines developed in the trenches will get you on the right social path to credibility and relevance in fulfilling the enterprise social and environmental responsibilities, and create sustainable value to your enterprise. 

Social Media demands leadership to create real value!

In my recent post “How valuable is Social Media for the corporate business” I described that getting real social the corporate company needed a cultural change. The cultural change which is demanded depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing and trust. This sort of culture is acquired to create value out of the social media investment. To create such a culture you need to have top management in the leading position of being social acting social and communicating social.

How does CEO participate in Social Media?

In IBM latest CEO study, 1709 CEO around the world was asked if they were participating in Social Media. The answer to this question was from my point of view quite embarrassing for the CEO´s - only 16% (274 of the CEO) was participating in Social Media. This number will eventually grow to 57% with in a 5 year period. This question in the IBM CEO study actually pinpoints clearly that Social engagement is not seen as an important value creator for top management at the moment. Further more, if it should take 5 years to have a new leadership in place in the corporate companies to start participating in the social collaboration, I doubt that these corporate companies will be present in their size and shape we know them today. There is no doubt that the success of Social engagement demands active top management participation, this participation will have a significant impact on the culture of the corporate social collaboration.

How can we quickly change the CEO social participating?

It is obvious from the IBM CEO study that the CEO do not recognize Social Media and the collaboration as an important value creator for the company. How can this be changed?

First thing which always counts for companies is the impact on bottom line figures – so if you want the CEO getting social quickly he/she has to be measured on the social collaboration engagement he/she does?

Second thing to do, are getting Social collaboration as a part of the annual report, just like environment responsibility and other societal values. When you are making social collaboration visible towards the shareholders and the board, the CEO will be accounted for this parameter as well.

Third thing you aught to do is to have a direct access from costumers to the CEO – collaboration is needed directly from the top. A good example of social collaboration on top level is the former prime minister of Denmark Anders Fog Rasmussen who used face book to communicate whit his voters.

Will these steps work to get the CEO participating in Social collaboration?

You can not guaranty anything but first secure measurement of Social Collaboration, secondly have social collaboration as a part of the annual report, this will give some kind of pressure on the CEO to start acting on social collaboration.

If non of these will get the CEO in action on Social collaboration he will be one of the ones who will wait for 5 years to interact in being social and use social media to communicate with the company costumers, and properly out of his business.

How valuable is Social Media for corporate business in 2012 and ahead?

During the last seven years the internet has changed from an interactive information tool where you as a costumer could tell the corporation about what they have told you. This was a one–to-many communication. The change which made all social and made the social media, was when the communication changed to many-to-many and went out as collaboration between costumer and corporation.

Corporate value creation from Social technologies

Corporate business is still not using the fully potential of the social technologies. An estimated 1.5 billion[1] people around the globe have a social network account. Corporations are not using this potential fully to collaborate with this huge amount of potential costumers. The reason for most corporations not fully using social media and networks is the lack of control towards the costumer – this is not only a one- way communication where the corporation informs the user of their products it is a new arena where you as a corporate business will get immediate feed-back on your product, and performance a collaboration will occur between corporation and costumer. It is here the value creation appears from social media and technologies – you get a feedback, which can generate new opportunities for your business.

Costumers part of the value creation due to social technologies

The costumers has created a new and more powerful role in the entire world of sale and marketing – today you must not expect that costumers just buy your product, information. Costumers starts putting questions about your product and services; they even create news and make regimes fall (the Egyptian spring 2011). The important question for a corporate business is how will social media create value for the corporation?

Thousand of corporate business has found that social media and communication can generate rich new forms of costumer insights – at a lower cost and faster than conventional methods. Products as perfume and services are being re-launched to costumers on YouTube and in blogs to cut cost and trying (with success) to engage costumers directly on the social platforms.  The value created is unfiltered feedback and behavioral data – do people like your tweet your YouTube video or even your brand. Corporate business are beginning to discover that social technology platforms, provides a much more efficient way of communication and collaborating. A further benefit is that on social platforms, communications become content – forming a searchable archive that can be continually enriched with comments from costumers, experts and other stakeholders. The latest example I have heard on this is by open up service platforms, where costumers are able to check service status on their own equipment on a social platform. This creates a much more efficiently and effectively use of the data opening up for the costumers to use the corporate business collected data. Further more opening up for data is creating value to both the costumer (Easy to access data) and time consuming for the corporate business not sending abstracts on email to costumers on data they can get by themselves.

Corporate value creation on social media demands openness.

Participation on social media using the technologies, in turn, depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing and trust. This sort of culture, that is acquired to create value out of the social media investment, is not established fully in many corporate organizations. This change of mindset in behaviors and in corporate cultures to get the value out of social media and technologies demands an openness and sharing which is a challenge to corporate organizations.

The award for the ones who really creates the conditions of openness and trust in the corporate organization and are able to let this openness and sharing reach the costumers in real collaboration, will find that the value and benefits from using social technologies and media, will make the corporation more adaptable to changes and crisis in their business and in the society. The ability to absorbing and acting on new ideas and possibilities and even threats is another value of this transforming from an information corporation to a collaboration corporation.  

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[1] According to Mckinsey latest research 2012

Social Media in big events – how should corporate react?

It is quite obvious that Corporate has an opinion on how and when members of an organization react during a big event. During the London 2012 Olympic Games Twitter, Face book personal blogs and other Social Media, are becoming a more important part of the promotion of the individual sport performer. The International Olympic Comities are trying to form rules of engagement for the individual performer to make sure that corporate (The Olympic concept) will be respected.

But can you make rules from Top management (IOC) and is it the proper way to control or try to control social media?

"The International Olympic Comity (IOC) objective is to secure that each of the athletes treat each other respectfully and live up to the Olympic ideals perceived as restrictive."

In my opinion there is no problem in advising your employees or Athletes in how corporate want to be presented in the public room.  If you are part of a corporation or an athlete in the Olympic Games you have to apply to the rules as long as these rules do not limit the individual’s freedom of speech and expression.  The rules made by IOC do not in my opinion limit the athlete’s right to express them self. All athletes are encouraged to use Social Media to tell their fanes about themselves and how they progress in the games. The rules/objective made by IOC; is do not use Social Media to express your feelings about other athletes and do not report directly from the competitions.

These simple rules will not destroy the power of Social Media but just prevent the media to be abused in the way to create hate towards officials and competitors. The idea with Social media is not to use it as a smearing media not in the Olympics nor in corporate context.  When a corporation or and individual uses social media it is important to take into consideration that you have the proper content in the right context. Social Media is about creating communication and interaction among the creator of an activity and the fans you have as an athlete. So every initiative you as an athlete or an employee create should, at a minimum, track three key social metrics:

• Activity is the amount of outbound activity you as an athlete or your company brand share, publish and communicate with online users.
• Reach serves as the measure of how large a community you as an athlete or an employee are reaching through your social media activity
• Engagement represents the overall interactions you as an athlete or an employee are experiencing in social channels.

If the athletes in the 2012 London Olympic Games look upon the IOC Social Media engagement rules it should be easy to aligned their own Social initiatives with the IOC objectives - that each of the athletes treat each other respectfully and live up to the Olympic ideals perceived – and herby secure that the athletes do not have any limitations in their ability to express themselves freely.

Will Social Media have any positive impact when acting in a financial crisis?

There is no doubt that the world is in a crisis, in Europe we have the Euro crisis, in US they have a debt crisis and even growth markets as china and India are declining in growth. Companies all over the world have to fight harder to get the attention of their costumers and make them want to purchase their products and services.

The question is; will Social Media have any impact on company’s ability to turn revenue and profit into positive figures?

Social Media has gained a new purpose at the same time as technology has become available to everybody, everywhere at anytime. This has shown in;

• The ability to reach new target groups
• The ability to use mobile devices

Reaching new target groups

As the technology has become cheaper the target groups for consumers has changed to even getting in contact with younger people. Further more you can now get in contact with people in rural areas which have not been an option in the past. Mobility has been a key word – the increasing number of smart phones and tablet computers has increased the availability and contact possibility to people all over the globe. The increasing use of medias as Face Book, Twitter, Google + , LinkedIn and  Orkut has changed the way companies do communicate with their costumers and even move marketing budget from traditional communication to Social Media communication.

Using mobile devices

The availability of mobile devices in rural areas and among people with minimum incomes has increased the use of Social Media. Another target group is the young people who use the social media on their mobile devices as more mature people uses the internet for mails and communication of messages. Companies can now reach new target groups in a much more direct way and either get credit for their social engagement or get punished if the product services do not get accepted the way it is communicated.  In other words the receiver of the social engagement decides if he/she like or dislike the engagement from the company – the power is at the consumer.

In my mind it is obvious that in a crisis the social media will be a very good tool to get your message out to a much broader target group. But one thing you as an enterprise must remember it is not possible just to go out there and save money on your marketing expenses if you can not provide a proper content in the right context.  On the other hand can you provide the consumer/costumer with a proper content in the right context, Social Media is a very powerful and direct tool which can give you direct contact to new and interesting costumers/consumers in a crisis situation.

Making sense of and understand Social Media better!

Communication on different levels are difficult and time consuming but a necessity for any enterprise company to send the proper messages to their costumers and partners who are the foundation of their business. Among the communication tools you as an enterprise can use is the Social Media platform. The Social Media platform gives you as an enterprise the opportunity to listen to the Word of Mouth from your costumers. The costumers will, if you are communicating the proper way – the collaborative/many-to-many communication – make you as an enterprise, create a forum which could give you numerous information of how your product and services affects your costumers and hear how costumers marketer and discuss your products among each other. 

The above model show how the interaction among costumers/consumers (red arrows) is leap forging the enterprise. This is why the enterprise should create a social room to be able to monitor the discussion, be able to respond to the discussion, be able to amplify the discussion and last lead the discussion by launching products which uses the discussion from the social media forum. (Source: Mikael Thorsen  2012)

What are the enterprises Social Challenges?

What an enterprise must learn is that the costumer has taken the control of the dialog! Costumers are learning from each other, getting to know the brand and its product and services and they are discussing it among each other, exchanging experiences – now the discussion is out of reach for the enterprise company. It is actually now the enterprise has the ability to show their costumers how passionate they are about their product and services. The opportunity and the social challenge for the enterprise are to interact in the word-of- mouth discussion NOT interfere the discussion. A starter is to have created the good story about your product and service – Nike has done that with the “running chip in the shoes” – another company who have created or reinvented their product is - Old Spice, they have created an universe of what men’s hygiene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE) purely made for Social Media. 

How can the enterprise get into the opportunities?

If the enterprise management should benefit from the Social Media trend, it is important for them not just use the entire marketing budget on Social Media ad once.  It is important to make a simple approach to Social Media starting creating a social discussion forum where employees also can participate and developed this start into having blogs, tweets and links on

Face book and linked-in.

Executives from enterprise companies understand that Social Media is important. But how do they realize the potential of Social Media, hand-to-measure, the costumer-controlled media and how to drive sales and strengthen brands?

Now getting the full advantage of the costumer discussion the enterprise must start going into action using the following means of getting knowledge and take part in the discussion. Enterprises must be able to react 24/7/365 on any kind of discussion good or bad with all the risks it includes. 

• The enterprise must monitor the discussion.
• The enterprise must respond to the discussion.
• The enterprise must amplify the discussion with relevant information.
• The enterprise must lead the discussion by launching products that have taken inspiration from the discussion.

This is not an easy task but the key word for the enterprise and the entire staff of employees is KISU – Keep It Simple Understandable for the employees and even more important for the costumers. Then the enterprise management will be able to experience how they can benefit from Social Media and understand the importance of the collaboration model it self.