Inspiring Social Media Stories from Nonprofits...

Yeah so I started this new gig 6 months ago, big one, overseeing account management and digital strategy at a 42-year-old agency named Meyer & Wallis. And I’ve had my hands too full to blog, except the occasional random posterous. So while I routinely preach to clients about the importance of posting regularly, here I am, six months later. And you know what? Sometimes, that’s just life. As I explained as my last post pre-hiatus, if it comes down to an hour to blog or an hour a day with my kid, there is no contest.

But now. I really have “the bug” to find a way to find the time. I gave a three-hour social media workshop last week for a bunch of folks from United Way chapters from 10 states. And the preparation for that gig, and the great stories I shared about social orgs like National Breast Cancer Foundation (who were kind enough to talk to me on the phone), Wildlife Direct (a-mazing story!), Girl Effect (a perennial favorite), and Charity Water (beautiful content production), really got me inspired again about the power of social. Here’s the preso. I welcome your comments either here or on slideshare.

What’s the most inspiring social story you’ve heard lately?

Zappos handles even astroturfing with style...

Yeah, I know. Like Zappos needs any more social love, right? But, I have to tell you how well they handled this whole astroturfing thing. This post could also be titled “three simple steps for how to handle a mistake flawlessly.”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about Zappos’ social storytelling and how sometimes, I think it goes too far. An employee at Zappos posted a comment on the blog about how great the service is, not disclosing that he or she is an employee, and then failed to respond to my three e-mail inquiries on the topic. So, I wrote this post about brands behaving badly and pretending to be happy customers, without disclosing that it was a Zappos thing, because I wanted to see how they handled it first.

After consulting with yet another person much smarter than I, @edwardboches, I decided to message @zappos about this, not really expecting much, given the less-than-rockstar ranking of my blog. But lo and behold, Tony Hsieh, the uber-CEO himself, responded within a day or two asking me to e-mail him the details, which I did. He looked into it right away and confirmed that the comment came from behind the Zappos firewall. He apologized, and promised to remind everyone that astroturfing is decidedly uncool. I was satisfied. Then day or two later, I got this comment on the blog:

Dear Sue,

My name is Rob Siefker and I’m the Sr. Manager for the Customer Loyalty Team (CLT) at Zappos. Thanks for writing your post, although I’m sorry someone from our team wouldn’t be transparent or forthcoming with their response to your original blog. I doubt the intent of our employee was to be misleading, but unfortunately it came across that way. I wouldn’t claim that we’re perfect, but it’s part of our culture to strive for customer service excellence. In this case, we didn’t put our best foot forward.

I’m thankful for your blog because it is a learning opportunity for us. We certainly don’t condone “astroturfing”. It’s the opposite of what we want to accomplish as a company. We’re going to remind everyone at Zappos about how important our interactions with people are to our service culture and brand. We’ll use this as an example, and hopefully it will resonate.

Thanks for your temperance and transparency. Your experience will help us be better in the future, and we appreciate that.

All the best,
Rob

This is instructive in many ways. 1) Rob says those magic little words: “I’m sorry.” right out of the gate, and admits that it was a mistake. 2) He tells us what corrective action he is going to take. 3) He comes across as very sincere, authentic, whatever you want to call it. He’s very human, not corporate. In my book, Rob could be the master of blogger relations with these three simple steps.

So, at this point, I am ultra-impressed, and ready to head to Zappos.com, even before two more very cool Zappos employees chimed in.

Nicely played, Zappos. I have come to believe that you really are “Powered by Service.”

Brand Behaving Badly: Stop Pretending To Be a Happ...

Recently I wrote a post about a social brand, and someone from corporate left a comment on the post trying to prove me wrong by pretending to be a happy customer of that brand, rather than an employee. For a brand that has spent a ton of time, energy and resources on building its brand and social cred, this is really, really, very, very bad, dirty brand behavior. In a word: Grrrrr.

If there’s anyone reading this that doesn’t understand why this is bad behavior, which I doubt, it is simply the antithesis of being a good social citizen. The opposite of transparent, a blatant misrepresentation. To a brand that goes to great lengths to differentiate on good brand behavior – how well it treats its customers – this is a very good way to very quickly kill trust. In all honesty, I was considering becoming a customer, and I don’t think I can do so now, even though I recognize this is one individual of many.

I have sent multiple e-mails to this individual, to no avail. I could out this person, possibly getting him reprimanded or fired, and possibly damaging the reputation of the brand. Thanks to a consultation with the more-cool-headed @augieray, and @danamlewis and @philgerb, I have opted to continue pursuing other channels of conversation to stop this behavior before trying to draw a lot of attention to this individual/brand.

Perhaps, if you add your voices to mine in the comments, I can send a link and a message to this individual and convince them to stop. Thanks for your help.

P.S. if you are wondering what the heck the photo is, that would be Astroturf. This poor practice is called Astroturfing, and I find it amusing that I didn’t even know that until it happened here. Ha. Sometimes I wonder what planet I live on.

P.P.S. a little tip for any astroturfers or would-be astroturfers out there. When you comment, we can see the IP address so we know that it came from your corporate .com

Dear Subaru storytelling campaign...

Saw this ad in Cooking Light yesterday and I dig that it is using customer stories to spread the love. I’m awaiting confirmation but I believe the campaign comes from Carmichael Lynch, an agency I was with for 5 years in the late 90s. Their philosophy was – and is – “Speak to the core and let others listen in.” Meaning they were enthusiast marketers before social enthusiast marketing was cool.

Whoever executed the campaign, I’ve got a few questions, though. Why is “Dear Subaru” buried in the corporate website, not promoted on the home page (say, in place of the Free Outback Detergent promo)? It’s great advertising IMHO, but why rely on that to get people there when you’ve probably got tons of prospects hitting your home page? Why isn’t the campaign integrated into your Facebook page? Your fans obviously love you, but what better place to capture more stories and/or refer them to “Dear Subaru”? Why, on the “Dear Subaru” page, can we only see the three stories that you have controlled for advertising purposes? Have there been other submissions? Are people participating? The page isn’t social/transparent for us users to really FEEL the love.

Awesome idea. And I think it’s pretty new, so maybe it will get there. But it feels like a digital campaign executed by an advertising agency.

A Realist’s Guide to Successful Social Strat...

Thank you to everyone who came to my presentation at the PRSA Social Media Summit at UW-Whitewater. It was a fun day with a lot of great speakers and attendees. I welcome your feedback on the presentation in the comments: What was most helpful? What could be better?

Social Storytelling: where is it all? And when doe...

I’ve been looking for examples of great storytelling in social media. There aren’t an abundance, it seems. I’ve asked some other, more prominent social media junkies, who haven’t been able to come up with much, either. I can point to Tom Martin’s excellent Mardi Gras Twitter experiment. And Danny Brown pointed me to this great story about Smith Family Farm. Personally, I think pure brand storytelling is one of the most underutilized social strategies.

It’s just one form of storytelling, but why don’t more brands share photos, videos, anecdotes, lifestreams, to give us an inside glimpse of what makes them tick, their cultures, their values? What better way to make a personal connection? Maybe because their cultures aren’t as engaging as they could be in the first place? : )

Zappos does a great job of this, generally. Their storytelling reflects one of their core values: create fun and a little weirdness.

When I first started on Twitter I saw a photo that @zapposCEO shared of the coffee machine in one of their buldings that has been rigged to look like Rosie on the Jetsons. It made an impression: “Fun, intelligent brand.”

Last week, in doing some research for a presentation, I also came across this more recent video of a prank that employees there were playing on each other, involving dropping a bunch of ping pong balls on other employees’ heads. Funny, sort of. But stupid funny. It, too, made an impression: “Are they paying any attention to my order?”

So I did more digging and learned from a great post from ReadWriteWeb that the Zappos site aggregates the tweets from all of the Zappos employees on Twitter. As the post pointed out, there are no tweets that say “drunk”; however, at the time I first viewed the aggregation, the first tweet in the stream was something about how too much Jagermeister was going to make for a bad morning the next day. This, I believe,  definitely falls in the “TMI” category. But I also understand that it’s an isolated tweet, and that overall the stream sends a positive message. It’s more “real” because of the imperfections and the fact that its not scrubbed corporate clean. They also aggregate non-employees’ tweets about Zappos – positive and negative – which takes serious guts and I applaud.

I’m a big fan of leaning towards more transparency. I’m not suggesting that employees should be heavily “censored” or edited. But even if you let the silly pranks fly, wouldn’t it be OK to simply ask employees to not tweet about drinking? As far as social media policies go, “Don’t tweet about getting wasted” seems pretty lenient. What is “fun” and what is “stupid fun” is highly subjective. Jagermeister is…Jagermeister. Don’t you want to be seen as fun AND professional and trustworthy?

My point? This type of transparent storytelling, while a great strategy, walks a fine line between “fun” and “too much fun, not enough business.” Quite honestly, I’m usually the first one saying that people take themselves too seriously; but I do think Zappos could create stories that better reinforce their brand of great customer service. There’s a difference between storytelling and strategic storytelling. I’m excited to see what Zappos will do next now that Mullen is their agency.

Have you seen any great social storytelling? When do you think social storytelling goes too far? Where’s the line?

Photo credits: Rosie from DYN on Flickr.

Why “Social Business” Matters...

Is the term “Social Business” relevant, or just more jargon? Geoff Livingston posed this question on Twitter recently and suggested I blog about it when evidently I was the only taker in favor of the term. I am a huge fan, and here’s why.

Social strategy can operate at different levels within an organization:

“Social media” strategy suggests that social plays a small, supporting role — just another media channel. This mentality is from whence where one-way “push” messaging and lame Twitter promotions are born.

“Social marketing” conveys that social has a more significant seat at the table — could impact product plans, pricing, distribution, not just promotion.

“Social business”, at the highest level, communicates “This is an organization that gives a damn. Social responsibility and social communication are at the heart of what we do.” This might not be exactly how others are defining it, but this is how I think it should be used.

Now, take three brands/companies, one functioning at each level. Which do you think is going to have the greatest success using social media channels? BINGO. The one that actually gives a damn.

Take Ben & Jerry’s as an example. Even though they are owned by Unilever, they have, in my opinion both as a consumer and as a marketer, retained their soul. Here’s a nice video interview of Walt Freese, the company’s Chief Euphoria officer, talking about how they have done so.

Instead of having one trite mission statement, the company has three – product, economic, and social – that ring true. This is their social mission: “To operate the company in a way that actively recognizes the central role that business plays in society by initiating innovative ways to improve the quality of life locally, nationally and internationally.”

So, when a true Social Business like Ben & Jerry’s launches a Social Marketing or Social Media effort – like changing the name of Chubby Hubby to Hubby Hubby in celebration of Vermont gay marriage (Mashable article on that here) what happens?

Magic. Because it’s strategic. It’s real. It’s talkable. It’s legitimately social, not faux or contrived social.

Best Buy’s Twelpforce is an example I have seen used to define “Social Business”. And while I think their Social Marketing programs like Blue Shirt Nation and Twelpforce are solid, I do not truly think of them as a Social Business. They are doing Social for Marketing purposes, not doing Business with a Social purpose. Likewise, Dell, Zappos, other organizations where social marketing runs through the veins and arteries of the organization, but social values don’t really lie at the heart of it.

The definition of social business – where the line is – is highly debatable. I’m still thinking that through for myself and would value your thoughts. But personally, I do not think whether or not Social Business matters is all that debatable.

Having fun and brand personality matter, too. Stop by Ben & Jerry’s website. There are an awful lot of brands out there that could learn a lot from this one, on many many levels.

Enough with the pointless Twitter promotions. Get ...

Sure, the #moonfruit promotion, in which anyone who tweeted #moonfruit got entered to win a Mac a day for 10 days, got plenty of play. And according to Marketing Vox, they claim their sales spiked. That’s fantastic, and I’m sure because of that, a lot of people will disagree with me. But, how many of the people who tweeted #moonfruit even know what it is? Much less anything specific about why it’s good, better, different? How much more might their sales have gone up in the short term or the long term if their promotion or content was actually…gasp…RELEVANT? What would the reported ROI look like if something had been shared regarding what the brand stands for, or at least what the product IS and some interesting feature of it? Something that I, the would-be consumer, would actually care to hear about?

Same goes for this new @MarriottHawaii “Tweet Yourself To Hawaii” promotion. You can enter to win a trip to Hawaii, or, if you send in a video, you might win a Hawaii tweetup for you and 11 friends. Yeah, yeah, I know we’re talking about it, so in their mind, or their agency’s mind, it’s probably a raging success right now. And general response to it from the Twitter community seems to be mostly positive. But in my opinion as a strategist, it’s a big “SO WHAT?” What do we know or feel about this brand that we didn’t know a few days ago? Absolutely nothing. Just that it exists.

Is it enough that people talk about you if all they are saying is that you EXIST? Really? Is “we exist…pass it on” a strategy? Mmm…NO. OK, it IS, but most of the time, I say we can do more. Isn’t there an intersection between branding and social media communication in which you can tell a story about your brand and still promote it – move the needle – at the same time? I believe there is.

Now, I’ve only been on Twitter for about nine months. But in that amount of time (during which I have been spending waaaay too much time on Twitter, mind you) I have encountered so little strategically relevant content that I am frankly a bit stunned. It seems awfully hard to brands to figure out what to do with this tool. The most notable exception is the Ford Fiesta Movement. I’m not saying that every strategic execution needs to be that elaborate, either. Just tell me something, anything, about what the heck you want me to take away about you.

Tom Martin proved in his experiment “How One Man, an iPhone and Twitter Changed Consumer Perception of Mardi Gras.” that twitter can be used to effectively reposition a brand. So I asked him to weigh in on this discussion. Tom, am I just a brand strategy geek that doesn’t get this, or what? Do you think this type of “tweet-to-win” promotion is a strategic, effective use of this tool? (I will post a link to Tom’s post here when he responds.)

How about the rest of you? What do you think? Is “we exist…pass it on” enough? Or is it time for brands do better? If you have seen other strategic exceptions, please share them; I actually hope to be proven wrong on this one. Maybe I am just missing all the good stuff.

Five Favorite Things About Social Marketing From S...

I am an in-#soso-mniac. Meaning I have just been too amped up by the great sharing that happened at Social South to sleep much the last few nights. So I’m sharing these things with you so you, too, can be an insomniac (but hopefully an inspired one). I should note that there were three or so sessions happening at any one time, so these are just nuggets from the ones I chose to attend. There were many more great sessions even than these, and content will be shared at www.socialsouth.org. Also I’m not sure what the final count was at the conference, but should note that this photo was taken at the very end of the conference, and there were 2-3 times this many people participating. Thanks to @jbagby25 for sharing the photo.

The first thing that has to be understood about this conference is the powerful and moving videoconference keynote from Esra’a al Shafei of www.mideastyouth.com (@mideast youth). Is your social strategy “Expose Injustice”? No. But theirs is. They have successfully changed discriminatory government policies, largely through use of social media channels. Check out their incredible videos here. I also recommend Jason Falls’ great post about this session.

Beth Harte, from MarketingProfs and The Harte of Marketing blog (see blogroll) brought a healthy dose of how to write and measure a strategic plan to the conference which I must say was quite refreshing. I find Beth to be quite the kindred spirit for anyone who wants to approach social marketing and media from a more strategic direction. You can check out Beth’s slides here. And follow her on Twitter, @BethHarte.

Mack Collier, from the Viral Garden blog (see blogroll) gave a well-crafted presentation on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass At Social Media. Not only does it contain strategies for fueling fans, but it is also a great example of how to tell a cohesive presentation story with powerful ideas, simple slides and great examples. I strongly recommend you check out the slides here and find a way to see Mack deliver it sometime.

@richardatdell and @lionelatdell, first of all, are two of the nicest guys you will ever meet in your life. Four lessons from their experience that I noted were: 1) Listen and learn. 2) Join other conversations and participate. 3) It’s a big world out there; go where the conversations are happening. and 4) Online and offline interact together (this last one was an important recurring theme that will warrant a post). For me, it was validating somehow to know that even Dell started with the basic blocking and tackling. This quote from Lionel: “Plan. But go where the conversation takes you.” and this one from Richard: “Strategy is one thing, but there is no substitute for action.” say so much in so few words.

Tom Martin presented How One Man, an iPhone, and Twitter Changed Consumer Perception of MardiGras. Tom is a true innovator and his case study, which he also wrote up in an Ad Age article, is one of the first to actually quantify the power of Twitter to change how a brand is perceived. In the name of full disclosure I suppose I should mention that Tom has been a friend for the past, oh, 18 years or so. And I didn’t see his entire session because there was a higher ed session that I needed to attend at the same time. That said, this is an awesome example of someone actually measuring what they accomplished in social media and how, specifically, it impacted a brand. If you find more of those, please share them, because I am not seeing them.

I feel so fortunate to have been a part of Social South, an inspiring, exciting community of crazy-nice, brilliant people. Any questions, or thoughts you’d like to add? If you engage with any of this stuff, I’d appreciate your feedback in the comments.

Social Media Strategy: This is where the true cand...

Now that most of us, at least in this tiny corner, seem in agreement that social media is not a strategy, but a channel, a medium, a toolset, let’s do some more thinking/talking about the process of actually articulating said strategy.