Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum

Takeaways

• Companies need to have a clear sense of what they want to say and the content they need to say it if they want to be effective on social media. That starts with listening to and understanding your customers.
• Social media inherently cuts across traditional organizational boundaries, but you need a group with responsibility and accountability for driving the overall approach.
• The hype phase of social media is over. Companies need to move behind “likes” and “fans” to show how social drives impact.

Understand your customers so you can create the right content

Blackshaw: “I think websites are moving from destinations to distribution centers. When we think about content, we have to manage a broader content ecosystem. Twitter and Facebook are becoming important content hubs but the most important takeaway here in terms of figuring what content to develop lies in the conversation and in the data. We have to organize what these good old-fashioned consumers are telling us and then we have to put in place some test and learn principles. The good news is that social media brings a far more efficient business process for vetting ideas. There’s a massive amount of conversation that reflects unmet needs.” Arnott: “We started listening to what people were saying. This gave us some clues about what people were interested in and what sort of content we should create. We then established a presence on some of the big channels and started engaging with people. But you have to find a way to talk to people in a way that’s more human. So, we try to be a little more conversational. For example, when the Emmys were on TV, we did a little poll and asked, ‘If you were going to the Emmys, would you save money by renting or would you buy your gown?’ A lot of people just liked that we asked that question, and other people will actually vote on the poll. Of course we offer accounts but we’re not saying, ‘Get our checking account or our savings account.’” Horton: “You have to start with: where are the conversations happening? I’m in the decorative paints business, so you’d think that the conversations are happening in home decorating blogs. But what we found was most of the conversations around paint were actually happening in a whole bunch of other places. If you look at where most of the conversation happens in our business – paints – it’s all around inspiration. There are enough sources of inspiration out there. But how do you get customers to move from inspiration to consideration? And who is the best person or organization to carry the message? In some cases, it’s not you. You need to engage with the blogger community and influencers, and give them both the content and the tools to get your message out.”

Social cuts across organizational boundaries

Horton: “You can’t just find someone who’s under 30 and happens to spend time on Facebook, and make it part of their job description to administer your social media program. When it becomes somebody’s fifth thing to do on their to do list, it didn’t get done and we limped our way through that experience. You need to have somebody who is fundamentally responsible within your organization for your social media presence and site. You also need to have partners outside of the organization who know more about this space than you do. Nine times out of 10, it is not going to be your traditional advertising agency, because that’s not their sweet spot”. Arnott: “In our organisation we took a very centralised approach, creating my role and putting a few people against it. I and my team were a center of expertise. We assessed the needs of each business so that we could maintain consistency of experience and manage resources well. Now what we’re starting to do is infiltrate other units. For example, when we spot a real need with the online banking group, we provide them with a social media team or expert. Similarly in marketing, we’re seeing they need social amplification experts for their team. Customer service is the most important thing for the bank, so that was a great place for us to start answering people’s questions on social media. But we couldn’t do it with a team of me and four people. So we have just established a team of 20 people operating seven days a week, 6 am until 11 pm, and all they do is listen constantly and respond. Whether you tweet directly at us, or go on the blog, or make a comment on the Web page, we’ll pick that up and we’ll respond to you. So now you’re beyond marketing and PR; you’ve moved into the contact center and into the service center.” Blackshaw: “The most important question that companies are pondering is around the operations and the resourcing around social media. We have to nurture online relationships in a meaningful way, and this has real investment and resourcing implications. Importantly, we need to be sensitive about the potential for backlash if we mismanage consumer expectations. You want to nurture advocacy because that becomes an authentic advertising vehicle. Companies need to really figure out, for instance, how many community managers they need You have to put people against it. I’ve also found that social softens silos. For example, my job is interesting because I actually jointly report to the CMO and to the Head of Corporate Communications. We’re going to see a lot of experimentation like that. It will be very disruptive, a bit uncomfortable, but it must happen.”

Proving the impact of social media

Blackshaw: “We need to be able to monitor the conversation in such a way that we can start to credit it to certain business processes, groups, or types of advertising initiatives. We’re going to need a much better basis from which to say, for example, ‘Corporate communications, your trust initiative backfired or worked, and created the following kind of output in the social media airwaves. Therefore we think that we need to dial up or dial down investment.’ I really think there’s so much data out there that we can leverage.“ Horton: “I think that digital and social can disproportionately impact the success or failure of a launch. Early reviews creep into the purchase funnel really fast, and putting a good analytical meter on that is critical. A lot of purchase behavior is dictated by what people see in Google search results, especially around a new product, and trying to figure out what will credibly influence those outcomes is really important. Twice a year we measure our brand health, and we see the impact of social is how moving our brand health measures in a positive way. Do your own research, but intuitively it makes sense.“ Arnott: “I tell everyone that we’re still learning. I came from a public relations background. The holy grail of PR is ‘what’s the ROI?’ But can we stop talking about that? It’s more productive to just get some coverage. Right now, for where we are, it’s important to learn as much as you can, try things, get as many metrics as possible – but don’t let a lack of answers stop you from starting something.”

Q&A

Where’s the line between controlled and authentic in social media?

Arnott: “I passionately believe in authentic. We’re definitely investing in things like Facebook ads and consulting to make sure that we go the right way, but our voice is well defined. We present ourselves as humble and human, and that’s so much a part of how we interact on all of our channels. On our Facebook page recently, we said something about, ‘Is your car draining your gas tank? Use TD rewards’. Right away people said, Not so subtle.’ So, if you’re not true to the voice and brand, you’ll get slammed right away.”

When you think about organization, how do you decide what’s global, what’s regional, and what’s country?

Blackshaw: “One of my big statements of late is: all local is global. For example, with a 140-character limit on Twitter, no one ever qualifies where a message started. We generally manage the local, but there is so much cross-fertilization of messaging that it raises really interesting and complicated questions about differentiating product quality by region and degrees of customer service. Viral buzz can do amazing things, but most social media emanates from operations and business processes.”