SXSWi: Social Strategy for Revolutionaries
Panelist: Charlene Li of Forrester
Examples of the power of social networks:
rudd-o.com was a site with the code number posted for HD-DVD processing key. It spread on Digg, but was eventually asked to be taken off the site.
The TV show Jericho was taken off the air by CBS. In response, a strong following of online fans sent 20 tons of peanuts to the CBS office. This was further fueled by a radio talk show host, Shaun Daley. Jericho came back and aired 4 or 5 more episodes, but lost momentum when competing against democratic campaign.
Charlene talked about the idea of a Groundswell, which is also the name of her book. It’s a social trend in which people use technology to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. This has been happening for a while, and corporations are just now starting to get it – they get that they need to be involved, they just don’t know how.
Charlene talked about radicals and revolutionaries.
Will you be a radical like Thomas Paine? He wrote Common Sense, started the American Revolution, joined the French revolution and eventually came back to the U.S. But he had become too radical, and people stopped listening. He had a vision but couldn’t deliver.
On the other hand, will you be a revolutionary like Thomas Jefferson? During the Dog Days of 1776 in Philadelphia, he made the Constitution happen and pulled people together.
THEME: Making a revolution stick will require frameworks and process
What process can be used to create and social strategy? POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology)
P – People: Assess your customers’ social activities
• Ladder of participation: Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors (organizing content that’s on the web), Critics and Creators
• Youth are high in all categories except Collectors
• Adults are high in Critics and in lower ladder rungs, but not creators or collectors
O – Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish; Ask why
• Role of Research → Listening (Groundswell Objective)
• Role of Marketing → Shouting/Talking
• Role of Sales → Energizing, getting customers to sell products for you
• Role of Support → Supporting, giving them ways to support themselves
• Role of Development → Embracing, pull customers into the process
S – Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers will change
T – Technology: Decide which social technologies you should use
How are revolutionaries using social strategy?
Blendtec – (Will it Blend – iPod) $400 blenders that can blend just about anything; George Wright, VP of Marketing, put videos online to demonstrate the power of their blenders. What would their blended product be? People started posting their own Youtube videos.
Dan Black, Director of Campus Recruiting for Ernst & Young. Used Facebook to recruit college students. Saw that students asked questions about working or applying to work at E&Y; Black personally answered questions even though he is the national recruiter. No one else is doing this! No other companies put a human face and have personal conversations with their audience.
Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy. Blue Shirt Nation is a community to let salespeople on the floor interact with each other. Originally it was for marketing purposes to get insights from salespeople, but ended up being a great support tool. It gave them a voice. It let them work directly with corporate to fix problems easily. Koelling and Bendt also gave salespeople an email address to be able to personally relate with customers.
Josh Bancroft, Intel Technology Evangelist and Geek Blogger, created an internal Wiki using a spare server. He just got it done without waiting around for someone to find time, and usage caught on.
Steve Fisher, VP of Platform for Salesforce.com, wanted to get feedback from users on how to improve customer experience. By soliciting feedback, he had the confidence to get the internal team to take saw banners down that he always found distracting.
Key messages and next steps
o Find the people most passionate about developing relationships with the groundswell → Must be most in touch with the customers
o Educate your executives
o Put someone important in charge → Hold that person accountable
o Define “the box” with policies and process → often times, legal needs to be involved
o Make it safe-r to fail (small failures are inevitable)
• Groundswell is very forgiving if you’re transparent and honest
Final words of advice
o Making revolutionaries stick will require frameworks and process
o Start small, but think big – takes many failures before figuring out what works, but is in constant flux as always needing to improve
o Make social strategy the responsibility of every single employee
• Always bring information back in
• Monitor the blog
• Help contribute, comment
o Be patient – cultural change takes time
Companies need to really, truly feel comfortable talking to their customers whether it’s their own or an external site
- Posted by Terri
