By Peter Friedman, CEO, LiveWorld
When big brands successfully launch themselves in social media and begin the shift toward being more customer-centric, they almost immediately find themselves facing two daunting challenges. First, if the relationships developed through social are going to be meaningful, marketing needs to be able to collaborate with other functions of the organization so that customer ideas and issues translate directly into improved products and services.
Second, there’s the scale problem: How can they keep those conversations personal and dynamic when interacting with hundreds, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of customers? (Note: These are problems every company should be thrilled to have.)
By Peter Friedman, CEO, LiveWorld
When big brands successfully launch themselves in social media and begin the shift toward being more customer-centric, they almost immediately find themselves facing two daunting challenges. First, if the relationships developed through social are going to be meaningful, marketing needs to be able to collaborate with other functions of the organization so that customer ideas and issues translate directly into improved products and services.
Second, there’s the scale problem: How can they keep those conversations personal and dynamic when interacting with hundreds, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of customers? (Note: These are problems every company should be thrilled to have.)
Here’s a partial solution to both challenges: Bring employees outside of marketing under the social media tent! Every employee is a potential brand representative, which has incredible tangible and intangible benefits.
In social, your company isn’t just the product and brand itself. It’s all the people who collaborate in delivering that brand experience. That includes any aspect of marketing, sales, support, and of course the creation and delivery of your products or services themselves. The more opportunities you can find for the people behind the brand to participate, the easier it is to connect and build relationships in social, and in the long-term to personalize the brand in the eye of the customer.
Think about it: whom do you want to buy stuff from? A faceless corporation, or people who not only reach out to connect but also link you to a community? Otherwise put, people who are friends, or who you sense could be. Aside from that, getting employees involved in social helps make real-time marketing happen. As one of our clients has said, “[People on marketing our team] thought they knew everything about the customer, until we got into social. They’ve been able to increase their understanding around their market space and their customer.”
All of your employees, not just those in marketing, are terrific assets and can contribute to conversations and content. For example, during Teacher Appreciation Week, Dell one year shared pictures of employees holding posters that explained how their own teachers had inspired them, while encouraging similar stories from customers. How can you connect employees to the cares and concerns of your customers so that they can mix it up at the same party?
When you give employees opportunities to interact in social, their relationship to the customer changes, and with it, their understanding of the importance of social media. Suddenly they understand first-hand how important it is for conversations there to be taken seriously and implemented across the organization.
Challenges And Solutions
Consider the social success of Lego in recent years. It has more behind it than passionate fans, great campaigns, or strong agency partners. Top Lego social strategist Lars Silberbauer deployed an organizational strategy within Lego. He believed that for the company to succeed in the social era, senior managers across the company, not just in marketing, needed to have the experience of connecting to customers in social.
Silberbauer’s early social campaigns engaged fans immediately, and he took their feedback to corporate management to make the case that business could be transformed if that immediate connection to fans were to go deeper into the organization than the marketing department. As a result, the company integrated social media into its development program.
At Marketing Magazine’s Social Brands conference in London in 2013, Silberbauer explained that Lego’s senior managers are required to take a daylong training in social media. When the day is over, they have a written test and then a practical one: they have to post a status update to the company’s Facebook page. “You see the nervousness around the room when they see they need to communicate with customers,” said Silberbauer. “But when they get 500 ‘likes,’ that’s when they realize what social media’s all about.”
Trouble is, many senior leaders looking to engage employees in social face cultural and institutional hurdles. Companies have traditionally dealt with employees and information flow using a command and control model, with hard rules and low levels of trust and individual agency. Empowering employees to represent the brand in social means loosening the reins. Instead of imposing hard rules and compliance checks, leaders must build a strong company culture in which employees are mutually committed to a shared set of values and prerogatives. They must provide employees with guidelines and training, and offer opportunities to engage directly and spontaneously with customers. They also need to reward those employees who step up to the plate.
This is an adapted excerpt from The CMO’s Social Media Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide for Leading Marketing Teams in the Social Media World, by Peter Friedman, the CEO and Chairman of LiveWorld, a user content management company.
To read more, download a free PDF version, or buy the hardback or eBook via online booksellers. @PeterFriedman
