Originally posted on Crain’s Business Blog. An article in Business Week has been spinning in my brain: “B-School all A-Twitter Over Social Media.” It’s terrific to see a new skill set being taught to business school students, adding a layer of marketing, public relations and customer service into the quantitative minds of MBA seekers. I think this is a fascinating trend. Why?  We may very well see a shift in the expected skill sets of future Social Media Directors, compared to those folks who lead social media efforts within major corporations.

What does this mean for your business or the business you run for your clients? Simple. Metrics.

Today, a handful of people use social media tools to build communities and get the conversation flowing about any given product or service. What will change is the expected analytics behind these activities. MBA grads with social media training will be coming to the table with a different set of core principles for every project. Yes, understanding the flow of conversation and sentiment related to a company will be a major success metric, however, getting to some kind of conversion rate that moves the bottom line will be just as, if not more, important.

With this new set of professionals in the social media mix, I predict more testing, contingency planning and growth expectations according to the level of social media engagement. I’m not saying these are necessarily correct, however, this is the same type of metric shift I saw towardthe end of my stint at Orbitz. A bevy of MBA grads joined our team, and as I trained them on our systems, I realized there was a common thread. Questions were very linear. There was an expectation of cause and effect. X action should lead to Y results and adding an element of Z changed the mix by a set number of percentage points on the bell curve.

Today, amassing a large Twitter following is considered a huge win. The future? I predict a large Twitter following to be a requirement, with the addition of segmenting those followers as part of a larger marketing campaign.

Your move. Who are you going to hire to help you make this happen?

Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

An individual who aligns themselves with a larger organization and has established a reputation, let’s say in a niche is no longer representing themselves, they represent themselves, and the organization they work for. In other words, they become ambassadors for both.

Now here’s the challenge: being a visible ambassador which connects the internal with external means drawing attention to yourself—a role which has traditionally been limited to a select few, such as a CEO, or formal spokesperson. In either of these roles, visibility is expected and it’s part of the job.

Today’s corporate ambassadors can be anyone and the really good ones build bridges to multiple kinds of valued stakeholders (just like traditional ambassadors). But, despite becoming a more common role, corporate ambassadors face huge challenges. Colleagues will justifiably question the motives and contributions of ambassadors. In fact, less experienced ambassadors often make the mistake of either putting their wants and needs before the needs of their “embassy” (the organization). Even if this isn’t the case, often times the perception of self promotion can be difficult to manage. So how does one manage corporate ambassadorship in a networked economy? While I’m still growing here myself, I have a few thoughts:

Co-Brand

Be generous with your equity. If you’ve decided to work with a larger organization instead of being in business for yourself, be sure to send the message that you are proud to represent the organization and align it with your own identity.

Share

Ambassadors are often well connected, networked and plugged into a number of communities which may be valuable to the organization they align with. Like traditional ambassadors, they can establish trust and build equity by leveraging their networks to the benefit of the organization. In other words, connections = wealth and sharing that wealth creates value for all.

Work

Corporate ambassadors carry the weight of an interesting burden—they have to prove they are willing to put in hard work, just like everyone else. Be sure to get the basics of your job description done and done well, then pursue ambassador duties after business is taken care of (hint, I’m writing this on a Saturday evening).

Represent

Ambassadors are expected to represent and to do it well. When given the opportunities to engage in public in both digital and offline venues, be sure to balance individual personality with corporate responsibility. Be yourself, but be a representative because you’re both.

Engage

With power comes great responsibility and a really good corporate ambassador is willing to engage, to make themselves accessible both internally and externally. Ambassadors don’t live in ivory towers, they go out into the world and connect. They listen, and then engage in ways that are mutually beneficial.

If this post resonates with you, then it’s possible you’ve stepped into this role either purposefully or accidentally. Or perhaps you’ve lived it in the past before deciding to go off on your own. In either case, I’m fairly confident that it’s something that will become more norm than exception and above all a delicate balancing act to say the least.

Originally posted on Campaign Asia.

Edelman and Brandtology’s Digital Brand Index (DBI 10.3) offers insights into how brands are being discussed online in China, tracking over 518,000 conversations to identify the most active channels and the most interesting subject areas.

Here are the key findings:

Offline drives online. Online drives offline. The impact of product launches and the World Cup demonstrates the opportunity for brands to proactively engage and measure online buzz.

518,028 online conversations were tracked, with references to 89 large technology brands, which were contained within 736 influential channels from April to June 2010. This represents one major technology brand mentioned every 15 seconds, compared to one brand mention every 42 seconds found in the DBI 10.2.

The major consumer electronics brands in China, Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Cannon and Asus, continue to rank on the list of the top 10 most talked about technology brands amongst the online channels, as they expand their drive in the social media field.

Canon made DBI’s top 10 ‘buzziest’ channels list for the first time with 15,098 online conversations, and Google, which dominated previous DBI results, dropped to sixth place on the top 10 ‘buzziest’ channels list.

The volume of online buzz for technology brands increased sharply this quarter, partly due to technology brands’ online marketing campaigns around the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which helped drive a record amount of social media traffic. Both consumer electronics and telecommunication carriers including China Mobile and China Unicom launched new products and services around the World Cup through online news portals and video sharing channels.

Samsung worked with three major news portals including Sina, Sohu and Tom.com to launch social ads and initiate online competitions. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom partnered with phone makers on intensive online marketing of new phone models and services that enabled consumers to watch The World Cup on their mobile phones.

The social networking phenomenon continues.

Social networking websites, especially Sina, Weibo and Kaixin001, have become important channels for IT/ technology brands to effectively reach and engage consumers. So far, 56 percent of all the surveyed IT/ technology brands have launched their own local Sina Weibo brands.

While Twitter dominates in other regional markets in Asia Pacific, Sina Weibo is building a social media phenomenon in China which is reshaping the way technology brands contact and engage consumers. Sina Weibo not only provides a platform to directly listen to and engage consumers, it also dwarfed other channels at promoting events and generating conversations. Sina Weibo generated 31,019 tweets that mentioned Nokia, compared with a total of 16,760 online conversations generated by other channels.

BlackBerry’s official Sina Weibo account has gained more than 7,000 fans since its launch on 16 June this year.

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

Originally posted on Travis Murdock’s blog.

How much is an enthusiastic advocate of your brand worth to you? It turns out that it is 5X their lifetime value to you. For example, if they spend $500 buying dinner at your restaurant over a few years, then you can estimate their value at $2,500 according to a recent white paper from Zuberance. A simple definition of this powerful consumer is someone who is willing to recommend your brand their friends or advocate on your behalf.

I’ve found these people difficult to find, but once they are found they are even more difficult to engage. You’d think in this world of email and Facebook I could capture them in a database and message to them. The problem is that they don’t like that. According to a study by Deloitte, 53 percent of advocates (vs 33 percent for consumers) want to be recognized as an individual with individual needs. The second challenge is that brand advocates tend to believe they are busier than the average consumer, so convenience in use and access is important. The good news is that advocates tend to be more social and outgoing and are much more likely to share. Deloitte’s research also found that brand advocates are more likely to be perfectionists, and more likely to be the first to buy new products.

So this is where the campaign to build 15,000 advocates for your successful software start-up fails. Most marketing and PR departments simply don’t have the resources to interact with the large influx of advocates over a long term. You can find them with email surveys, but then what do you say back to them? Sure, you can send them a tin of mints (I just got some from one of my favorite brands), but what you really need is to help direct their efforts in a positive direction that they see as valuable. Just like a bunch of volunteers who show up with hammers to a Habitat for Humanity house building project, it is critical that you give each person a job that they see as meaningful so they will want to come back. Similarly, the energy emanating from your brand advocates needs to be focused like a laser to help them share that excitement with others. In the restaurant example, you can ask each of those advocates to share their honest reviews on Yelp. Or you could ask them to share your restaurant’s Facebook Fan page with their friends.

There are lots of simple ways to build that word-of-mouth, but I still see most of these efforts fail for some simple reasons. First, many advocates will find it too time consuming to go home, find your Yelp site and then write a meaningful review. You have to harness the enthusiasm when they are actually in a position to write something. Today that is likely to be in front of their computer. Second, they need a variety of places to advocate. Once they have posted on Yelp, they can’t post there again. You have to continue to present them with fresh opportunities to talk about you. Third, managing this stuff in spreadsheets and direct email systems simply won’t work. You never learn more about what the advocate does and it is impossible to measure. This all comes down to something I say often about advocacy building – It simply does not scale.

“It is what companies do with fans that create value, not merely that a brand has fans,” says Forrester’s Augie Ray in a blog post.

Zuberance has build a platform that helps companies identify advocates, direct them to places where they can contribute and then track the results. They are currently working with large consumer and tech brands on campaigns that would crash my spreadsheet and email methods of the past. These types of CRM systems for advocates are exactly what is needed to overcome the scale issue. Rob Fuggetta, Zuberance CEO, tells a story about how they recently responded to a crisis with a brand that was receiving lots of bad online reviews. Using unpaid advocates, they were able to settle down the issue by activating the advocates to balancing out the negative comments.

With the right systems to focus the efforts of your brand’s advocates’ enthusiasm you can unlock their 5X value and create a cost-effective word-of-mouth campaign.

Over the past year, Edelman Digital APAC and our partners at Brandtology have mined and analyzed 12 months of online conversation about major technology brands covering:

• 8 million posts,
• representing the perspectives of millions of netizens,
• talking about 350 technology brands,
• housed in 4,000 regional online channels,
• across eight Asian markets.

So what? Well apart from improving the insights; targeting and relevance to our client’s digital programs; and helping us to win some new clients; the DBI has answered many of the questions we had when we launched it. Further, the DBI has tracked and enabled us to better appreciate macro-trends in the social media landscape across Asia. For example:

1. Online chatter grows and grows: The first DBI (October 2009) tracked 800,000 mentions of survey brands in the quarter, while the fourth and most recent DBI (10.3, August 2010) tracked 2 million. This finding demonstrates that as more Asians come online, they are happy to build or join communities to discuss (technology) brands, pass verdict on products, and share content that catches their eye. The unprecedented rise in social network usage across the region has also not gone unnoticed in the DBI. For example, this quarter, the DBI (10.3) in China saw social networks finally overtaking bulletin boards in terms of total conversation about surveyed technology brands. We all knew people were talking – but the speed of increase has been startling!
2. The Twitter Phenomenon: Asia has been a major contributor to the 100+ percent increase in the platform’s usage over the past 12 months. In October last year, Twitter represented approximately 18 percent of the conversations found in the first DBI (ex-China). This has since grown to represent almost half of all posts tracked about technology brands surveyed in influential local channels monitored – with a high in India where microblogs account for a whopping 69 percent of all conversations! As Steve Rubel eloquently puts it
   – we are quickly moving from a Web of pages to a Web of streams, and one where tech brands need to be omnipresent and working in, and reacting, in real time.
3. Tech brands joining the conversation: The past 12 months has also seen technology brands expand their local blogger engagement outreach programs, with some running online competitions for advocate communities (Canon being a great example) to build their social presence on Facebook and Twitter in particular. In Singapore, seven of the 50 technology brands tracked now have a local Twitter presence, with others contributing to a regional or global Twitter ID. Facebook pages are also springing up, with tech brands taking a regional, local or product line approach towards building communities – with some building communities across all three at the same time! However, presence alone is not enough – more needs to be done to build engaged and active communities – but more on that another time.
4. Telcos and mobile chatter dominates: Local telcos are prominent in the Top 10 brands across all eight Asian markets where we run the DBI. Netizens either love or hate their telcos – there seems to be little middle-ground. When you consider the fact that telcos are often the access point to the hottest devices we have tracked – smart-phones – then local telcos have the best opportunity to lead and define successful online brand engagement. For example, Bakrie Telecom in Indonesia, a new entrant to the local list of Top 10 ‘Buzziest Brands’ had 90.9 percent of brand mentions take place on Twitter – mainly referring to its “Esia” product and service – and has done a good job at engagement. It will be especially interesting to track how such telco social engagement strategies and efforts evolve as people seek increasing amounts of information about popular smart-phone brands that we continue to track such as including BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.

As the DBI evolves, we see the opportunity to dig deeper into the hottest technology products, as well as into the specific content that brands are using and creating to engage with online communities. Further, we’ll be able to track specific branded Facebook pages to measure engagement on an ongoing basis.

However, that’s for the future. In the interim, you can read more about the fourth Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index (10.3) in the following documents – a personal favorite of mine is how World Cup initiatives helping drive buzz for consumer electronic brands in China.

Finally – I knew you’d ask, so below are the Top 10 most discussed technology brands we’ve tracked in the 12 months (ending June 2010) across our eight Asian markets:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Apple
4. Samsung
5. Intel
6. Nokia
7. Sony
8. Hewlett-Packard
9. Yahoo!
10. Research in Motion

We are keen to hear any feedback you may have on how we can take the DBI to the next level!

• Australia Digital Brand Index (10.3)
• China Digital Brand Index (10.3)
• Hong Kong Digital Brand Index (10.3)
• India Digital Brand Index (10.3)
• Indonesia Digital Brand Index (10.3)
• Malaysia Digital Brand Index (10.3)
• Singapore Digital Brand Index (10.3)

DBI Methodology

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

Originally posted on The Naked Pheasant.

A timely post perhaps – what with the week’s revelations about the war in Afghanistan. Without doubt the Wikileaks story marks a significant milestone in terms of the use of data and transparency and there are interesting debates to be had around the role of information, state security and the freedom of the press that more intelligent people than I will have.

I wanted to post about the bulging shelves of Wikipedia (like a wing of the Library of Babel) because while dancing around the South Bank on Sunday – I was struck by how the ‘trusted’ source of info has become far more ingrained in culture than any encyclopaedia before it.

On Sunday I participated as an audience member in Domini Public – presented in the UK by the Gate Theatre, but ‘staged’ outside the National. The concept of the ‘play’ is aces. The audience wear headphones, and are guided by an authoritative yet kindly voice, around the play space. At first the instructions are simple enough: “stand to the right if you were born North of the river”. As the play progresses, however, the audience is divided into three factions: police, prisoner, red cross. What follows is a simple, yet insightful, comment on civil unrest, law and order and the role of the individual within society – all delivered with a wry smile. Alas, Sunday was the last London performance – but should you ever come across the company behind this production do check it out.

So what does Wikipedia have to do with all this? Well, during the warm-up section the entire cast/audience were grouped at one side of the space. We then had to take four steps forward, if we could answer yes to the following questions:

• Have you finished a book in the last week?
• Have you seen a concert in the last seven days?
• Have you been to the cinema this week?
• Have you referenced Wikipedia this week?

Watching the 70 or so audience/cast members play out their answers to these questions, was really quite interesting. I wouldn’t go as far as saying we displayed a microcosm of society (it was the Southbank on a Sunday, not a census), but what followed was quite startling. I’d say the audience were aged between 16 and 60, though, so a good mix of ‘consumers’. I’ve put in brackets below the rough percentage of who in the audience/cast moved.

• Have you finished a book in the last week? (15 percent)
• Have you seen a concert in the last seven days? (10 percent)
• Have you been to the cinema this week? (20 percent)
• Have you referenced Wikipedia this week? (85 percent)

So why did this interest me? Well, it was a clear illustration that online media, entertainment and information are all now a central part of our once analogue culture. The immediacy, ease and (in many cases) low cost of social entertainment encourages us to use the internet as a more frequent source form of entertainment and information than traditional mediums. On Sunday, as a crowd of people, of mixed backgrounds and ages, surged forward four steps – broadcasting their association with Wikipedia – it made a profound statement about the place of Wikipedia, and the internet, within the future of our society. I’m not very good at math but if 15 percent of people are reading a book, but 85 are reading online – you can see how this is going to continue to snowball.

In case you’re interested, I took 12 steps…

Originally posted on Harvard Business Review.

Okay, maybe that’s going too far. I don’t really recommend firing your marketing manager. I do however believe that most companies will eventually need to hire or contract with a community manager, if they haven’t already. A recent BusinessWeek article called “Twitter Twitter Little Star,” describes social media as a booming industry which has caught the attention of corporations everywhere, and suggests the role of a “social media director” and what that person should do. I’d like to dig a bit deeper into why this core function is necessary to create what’s becoming known as social engagement. I’ll call the role the community manager.

A community manager actively monitors, participates in and engages others within online communities. These communities can be on Twitter, Facebook, message boards, intranets, wherever groups of people come together to converse and interact with each other. A traditional marketing manager is likely to have little experience with this function. Historically, community management developed outside marketing, in areas such as community organizing (politics) or in niche verticals such as the video game or software industry, which are no strangers to digital outposts such as message boards.

A community manager acts as an ambassador for your organization, whether that person is an employee or contracted to manage your social web presence. A good community manager gives a human form to the faceless corporation. On Facebook Whole Foods, for example, community managers have created a forum that impels customers to respond to its posts. They also often informally engage their customers in the process.

A community manager must be a good or great communicator. He or she of course needs to be social, and understand the social mores of the communities served, and have a strongly developed sense of ethics. He or she should know, for example, when deleting a member’s comment is wrong or justified and be prepared to explain why. Enthusiasm is also required. Finally, a good community manager will be well connected, forming relationships with the right people in your communities, the individuals and groups you want on your side.

No doubt companies are flocking toward non traditional job descriptions like community manager. If I were building my my all-star business team, I’d think about how community management works and why I might need a few good ones on my roster.

In a world where consumers expect instant answers, here are six companies dedicated to helping in 140 characters or less.

Comcast

Many have argued that Comcast was the company who pioneered real time responses to customer service issues. The transition of Comcast’s original Twitter agent, Frank Eliason, was part of the inspiration for this post. Frank quickly became a web celebrity of sorts, standing for a new service directive in a very sensitive corner of the industry. Well done, Frank, and good luck to your successor, Bill at ComcastCares.

Xbox

Microsoft’s Xbox brand, an Edelman client, was so confident in their service record that they went after a Guinness World Record- and won it! XboxSupport’s Elite Tweet Fleet are the first to hold the title of “Most Responsive Brand on Twitter.”

Zappos

Zappos_Service is a name known well among the Internet’s footwear fiends. The Twitter response team is generous with various perks like free shipping while the profile also acts as a collection zone for the comments of happy clients. Customers with service issues are quickly prompted to Direct Message the brand for faster, private order attention.

BT

BT, the UK communications group, updates the names of the agents manning BTCare on a daily basis. The team members on deck connect customers with service information while also directing them to relevant instruction materials for set-up.

Boingo

Boingo is a wireless provider (you may recognize the name from your last layover) that uses their Twitter profile both to address customer concerns as well as to broaden conversation around the brand. Boingo recognizes a Hotspot of the Day as well as links to daily “news of the weird.”

BlackBerry

BlackBerryHelp, also an Edelman client, puts a few faces to customer support. Brian, Scott. Thomas, Pavel, and Mike are a few RIM employees who actively engage customers looking for all types of BlackBerry related help opportunities. In addition, the team shares useful user tips and tags them with #bbtips so you can keep track and browse at your leisure.

Which companies have provided you with excellent customer service on Twitter?

Originally posted on The Naked Pheasant.

Zynga, the fast-growing maker of Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has been called by the New York Times “the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook.” This week, its CEO, Mark Pincus, is profiled in the story, the second in two weeks, highlighting the company’s recent success (though not without its fair share of controversy). Among other things, the article profiles Pincus as a fearless entrepreneur and visionary aiming to build an online entertainment empire as important to the internet “as Google is to search.”

While Zynga will cite profits and player numbers as success criteria, it is another recent trend Zynga is pioneering that has caught my attention; advertising through social gaming. Zynga came under fire recently for allowing advertisements into its games. Some ads, for example, signed up players for subscriptions to costly text-messaging services. This caused a PR headache for the company with TechCrunch, the technology blog, calling the practice “ScamVille,” after some users filed a class-action lawsuit.

But with 211 million players every month, according to AppData.com, Zynga is perhaps well on its way to making social gaming as important to the internet as anything else thanks to a new partnership with an American food manufacturer, (also covered in the New York Times recently). Cascadian Farm, an organic farm in the U.S. and subsidiary of General Mills, is using one of Zynga’s more popular games, FarmVille, to reach a growing customer segment through advertising. Instead of your standard click-through ads a la GoogleAd Words however, the Cascadian Farms content will be integrated into the gaming experience.

In FarmVille, you participate, create, build and manage your own farm. You gain experience points by visiting your friends’ farms and lending a virtual hand. From next week, players in the U.S. will be able to purchase (using farm bucks) and plant, an organic blueberry crop from Cascadian Farm. In doing so, FarmVille users will learn about organic farming and green living through standard game play, and at the same time, earn additional points to grow fruits and vegetables or raise animals on their virtual farms. Cascadian Farm executives said in a New York Times article that they hope that the company can expand its food niche and make itself better known by increasing awareness among FarmVille’s audience – that’s 221 million players a month. Users will also be able to access a $1 off coupon.

It will be curious to see just how successful Cascadian Farm is on FarmVille. Will the strategy work to attract and educate potential customers through participation and content or will it backfire? While integration in game play gives the user unique exposure to content in an experiential manner, will users see through the stunt and reject it as advertising or is this campaign just clever enough to work?

Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

While the current trend in all things social is demonstrating ROI (did Old Spice Increase sales etc?) There remains a lack of emphasis on actually executing well in social spaces with the assumption that this is simply where customers, consumers, employees etc. will go to seek information and interact. That’s why I think Altimeter’s recent report listing out 8 success criteria specific to marketing initiatives on Facebook is a breath of fresh air. I was fortunate to help inform the report as an ambassador for Edelman Digital, and was happy to see best practices featured from brands we work with such as AXE (client). That aside, the report is worth reviewing and digesting as it goes through the 8 criteria in depth backing it up with examples:

With the above criteria in place, Altimeter has drafted a simple framework for brands and organizations to keep in mind as they build out their digital embassies in the Facebook ecosystem. Using this criteria, Altimeter then selected a few brands to evaluate calling out specific best practices and areas for opportunity. Here’s how the brands fared when compared with each other:

At minimum the report offers a few choice insights and examples of brands to look at and learn from while you are developing your strategies and tactics for this space. Specifics such as being inconsistent or not addressing angry comments serve as early indicators to learn from as companies develop their rules of engagement for Facebook and other digital embassies. While other studies focus on devising formulas that assign dollar values to Facebook connections, reports such as this offer a few high level guidelines for how to best navigate through social systems such as Facebook. Have a read and chime in. What are your best practices?