Sales force-driven organizations are wising up to using social media to build relationships with customers. Businesses are investing in sales enablement software like Salesforce.com, iCentera and Jive that have social-related functions internally to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing and some even have ways to manage social contacts.

Sales as Content 

Sales organizations are all a-twitter about content marketing, certain the answer to closing sales is in a steady flow of just the right white papers or video talking heads. All that is right-minded in my book. The sales process, especially in B2B, starts earlier and earlier with business leaders investigating their problem online before they may have even formed the words to describe the problem exactly. Companies like IBM with their Expert Network and use of LinkedIn  are building presence and thought leadership online that tries to anticipate the business leader’s pain before it’s diagnosed. 

Sales as Service 

Thinking about content as sales “bait” is one thing (and a little insulting to the customer, I might add). Thinking about sales as a continuing service to customers and prospects is different. Instead of simply ramping up on valuable content, sales organizations who want to get into the sales cycle earlier and even build strong relationships with prospects well before closing would do better to think like IDEO. 

One of the most well-known product design firms in the world, IDEO is expert at getting to the root of customer problems whether they be rooted in usability, service, or some anthropological insight. They’re good at making life easier for customers. True, their solutions tend to be in the product and experiential like designing the Community Pharmacy for Walgreens. Beneath the actual solutions lie a relentless curiosity about behavior and behavior change, “We identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering latent needs, behaviors, and desires.”

If a sales organization spent their energy on understanding their customer’s actual experience and behavior and then sought to deliver services that made their lives a little easier, they might end up with a great strategy for building enduring relationships. Inevitably it would actually point to creating content that is helpful to customers/prospects/influencers. So, right back to that content marketing model we are all working on just within the context of delivering service.  

It might also cause the sales organization to create tools and applications that make it easier to make a smart business decision. Pull out your iPhone. Mine is full of consumer-facing examples of new customer services from my airlines, Delta; my aspirational travel agent, Jetsetter; even my car insurance provider, Geico. IDEO would think holistically (design thinking) about the buyer’s experience and how we might overcome barriers, friction points, and emotional moats.  That is a refreshing way to state the goals of social selling. 

Do: I am all for quick hits and big solutions. I would suggest committing to a content strategy based upon delivering the most useful content possible to your customer’s decision-making process. What reports, white papers, customer testimonials would help them make a good decision? Simply putting on the buyer’s hat vs. your own seller’s hat can drive you to create more useful content. Meanwhile, try a process where you think more creatively about delivering useful services to help the selling/buying process. You can hire a consultant. You can interview customers. You can trigger some effective brainstorming to explore new service territories. 

Resources:

• IDEO Method Cards – this pack of cards introduces you to a variety of ways to apply a design approach to business problems. Flip through. Find 3 that sound promising and just try them.
• Patterns - a useful blog from IDEO on design thinking and application 

Timing: By 2nd Q it will be key to be executing on a content marketing strategy that embeds social components. By 4thQ, it would be terrific to have a utility or buyer service in place being used and tested.

(thanks to madupiyadasa for the pic)

No, it’s really not about gaming. It’s about good old behavioral economics using game mechanics. PFSK recently ran a series profiling how different organizations were using points, leaderboards and social proof to drive behavior change. They have sunk a fair amount of energy into reviewing the use of game mechanics in groups like RecycleBank, LetGive, Stickk and SuMo . They have also produced a report that is worth previewing and grabbing called The Future of Gaming.

The world of ‘gamification’ is certainly buzzy if not frothy. Loads of marketers are talking about it. Many startups are employing it as if it were the magic sauce that could overcome anything even a bad business plan. Still, there is wisdom underneath it all and gamification as a sometime appropriate feature to stimulate behavior change is here to stay. 

The background of this recent surge of game mechanics applied to everything from brand advocacy (our own Insider Circle platform or Crowdtap) to environmental or health behaviors to fundraising is all over the Web in sites like Gabe Zichermann’s  Gamification Blog and even the Wharton School of Business. My own quick summary of gamification’s role in behavioral economics is here. 

Too Much Hype? 

The hype feels too much. Ian Bogost,  a professor at Georgia Tech, calls it in his blog:

“More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway….Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid.

The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business…Gamification is reassuring.

It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they're doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding "a games strategy" to their existing products, slathering on "gaminess" like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant's indulgent sales lunch.”

Using game mechanics has been over-hyped even before many mainstream brands have tried of applied it. That doesn’t mean there is no there-there. As a tactic to strengthen and support behaviors for which there is already a strong engagement value (a reason to care enough to pay attention and consider action), game mechanics can help reinforce actual habit. Like a lot of good ideas, it has its place in moderation. As the new social wonder drug, it will likely disappoint. 

Do:The application of relevant behavioral economics research in marketing is overdue. We have built our own planning model in social media marcom on some of the most rigorous and proven models to drive behavior change. So, the ‘do” here is to make sure at least your social media strategy team if not your overall planning team are incorporating relevant behavioral economics concepts to make programs more predictably successful.  As for the subset of tactics known commonly as game mechanics of gamification, find a program – either to enable employees or some type of advocates – and build a pilot program to gain experience in this valuable tool set. Choose a behavior a bit more complex than simply buying another box of product. 

Resources:

• The Gamification Blog – a steady stream of examples of game mechanics applied 
• The Gamification Summit Spring 2012 in SF – also put on by Gabe and his crew and last year’s looked great
• PFSK – a generally great source for trending topics and most recently gamification

Timeline: Make a behavioral model a priority in 1st Q. Run a specific game mechanics- based pilot  by 2ndQ.

Now along comes all this social data spread between platforms like Facebook and Twitter and conversation search tools like Radian6 and Sysomos. The promise of knowing what your fans and detractors are saying about your brand is irresistible. The chance to put these social "signals" to use cannot be passed up.  

Well, as more brands finally commit to infrastructure to collect social data, the pressure is on in 2012 to lead with social insights derived from this data vs. data for data’s sake. To many first-time efforts in social listening end with phone book-sized reports with pages of pie charts and bar graphs that portray data in an academic way. That means it’s not functional and at best information for information’s sake (just as useless in the here-today as raw data)

We Need Marketing Scientists (on the lookout for insights)

Some marketers emphasize the need for “marketing scientists” to sort through “Big Data” to find meaning. That is spot-on and certainly where we at Ogilvy see the present never mind the future.

McKinsey summarized the challenge, 

“The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus…Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.”

So while big brains wrestle with big data in 2012, most business leaders must convert their ambiguous desire for more data and the irresistible hunger to add social data to the mix into daily efforts to derive actionable insights from whatever data they have today. There is a big difference between data and the actionable output of that data.

Kara Martens calls out social data as big area for growth n 2012 on the Shoutlet blog. She may very well assume that data and insights go hand-in-hand but it takes special effort to actually boil insights. Doug Palmer, Vikram Mahidhar and Dan Elbert on the Deloitte Review identify the challenge:

“Simply put, with so much data available, especially on social networks, the ability to know the people you sell to and to monetize that knowledge has never been greater….That said, most companies are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with social data. Many are still operating in the pre-social media age, simply trying to make sense of the data they have—rather than the variety of sources that exist.”

Demand Social Network Insights

 Many big brands are doing big deals with Facebook. One of the payouts of that type of deal is insights from the platform and Facebook team. More than what any social media strategist can wring from the DIY Facebook Insights screens, the promise of this deal is that Facebook – keeper of more social data than the gods – will share relevant insights with their best, paying customers. That’s likely a good deal. And it’s the type of deal point that LinkedIn, Google and others should deliver on as well. Next time you consider a big deal with the social networks, make sure you are getting a good slice of insights (not just data and not just what anyone can derive from the platform). 

Listening Tech Only Part of the Answer

Too many social listening efforts focus on the technology. Firms like Radian6, Visible Technologies, and Sysomos provide a tech layer to search and sort. What they don’t do is provide any true capacity to seed those engines with the right queries or dig into and discover insights that and help business decision makers today. We need people with aptitude and experience to do that. Analysts who understand the business and the customer and who know the difference between usable insights and info porn. 

Do:It’s not enough to hire out a bunch of great researchers. We need to build capacity within the organization to understand and recognize good insights. That means training, identifying best and worst practices, and building a system that rewards insights. 

• Find a “bright spot” in your organization. This is some group who has gotten good at extracting and applying useful insightsMake their work the archetype for others to follow.
• If useful, draft a playbook or other instructional for how to actually do listening well.
• Train marketers to recognize insights. Even if they are likely to delegate or outsource to a research team, they are stronger if they can quickly recognize great insights (and imposters)
• Create an award for “top insights.” C’mon, we all have internal award systems. Time to elevate great insights that drive business and in the process tell everyone that leadership cares about them. 

Resources:

McKinsey Global Initiative Report on Big Data – a good read that takes the macro approach to putting big data to work

Deloitte Making Sense of Social Data: Digital exhaust and the next frontier in social data analytics – also more on the macro side of things but a sober, business view of social data and how it can drive business advantage  

Timeline: This one’s overdue. More and more companies are embracing a operational approach to social listening (doing deals with technology and insisting/recommending that brand managers use social listening).  Any effort to do this without insisting on distributing actionable insight and information throughout the enterprise is wasting time and money.  

Most annual social media predictions are loose stabs at what may happen and often range from the obvious, “20-whatever is the year of mobile,” to the interesting, “2012 will/won’t be the year of Google+.”  

With hard-to-read economic indicators, business leaders don’t need broad meditations on what might happen but rather ways of more precisely anticipating change and what they might do to take advantage of that change.  For teh next few posts, I aim to deliver practical predictions complete with my suggestions on what brands ought to do. I have also narrowed my focus to quarters to help with understanding timing.  

The first in the series is a potentially big shift in marketing and communications. 

Comprehensive content marketing finds its value

With more than 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month and the steady increase in Google searches, people are hungrily sharing content they find relevant. Still most major marketers do not have a big, grand approach to content marketing. Bright spot exceptions include American Express’ Small Business site, Open; Intel’s Free Press and General Mill’s Tablespoon.  

Many marketers predict that “content strategy” will eclipse or become the driver for advertising strategy. As the pressure continues to build on advertisers to deliver more and more relevant advertising (i.e. content) and marketers look to engage customers and stakeholders directly via social networks (i.e. content sharing platforms), we will see two efforts lead to the same result – brands adopting more sophisticated content strategies and practices to serve their customers.

There are two barriers in the way: a simple way to understand the business value of content marketing and organizational inertia. We just don’t have an easy formula to evaluate the business impact (sales + preference + brand/reputation + customer value) of great content programs. Yet everyday, we are learning about what content our customers value on Facebook. We post content. They post content. They like/comment/share on piece of content more than another and that tells what is valuable.

Combine the network effect of the average Facebook user (and their 130 friends) passing along content links with the “google-juice” of a great content reservoir like Open or the reach partnerships available with media companies like Vice Media (see The Creator's Project, their partnership with Intel here).

2012 will bring major marketers more usable value metrics to understand why they might shift spend from traditional marketing activities (e.g. traditional ad creative vs. new ad-as-content creative).

Do:The penalty for not aggressively developing a comprehensive content strategy that drives interactions with customers no matter where you meet them won’t be felt immediately. This is an innovators game and those marketers who want to rely on the reliable won’t lose their job over this one. For the marketing innovators, start by finding those topics that naturally intersect with your customers/stakeholders and the brand.

American Express helps its small business customers with content about running small business (not just how to leverage card services). General Mills goes beyond the benefits of Betty Crocker foods to offer a collection of highly shareable ‘quick recipes.’ What is that natural intersection between what customers need and the benefits of your brand or the solutions it makes possible? 

• Research what terms people use when they search for related topics
• Build content for your website, blog and social media calendar around those topics
• Connect these topics with your communications departments “message platform” so they are reinforced in their public relations efforts
• Feed the topics to the advertising team to either use in supporting copy or, gasp, to actually drive the creative concept

Resources:

• Content Marketing Institute - from the strategic to the mind-numbingly tactical, this content source has great suggestions for applying content marketing to business 
• Chief Content Officer group on LinkedIn – clearly a bunch of marketers have gotten the message for how important content’s role in business will be 

Timing: This is a marathon but one to get started in 1stQ 2012. There is a little of a first-mover advantage at stake here. I could easily argue that American Express did not own the attention of small businessmen/women, but their persistence with Open may have changed that. 

The quote from George Colony read, “We believe social is running out of hours. Forrester believes we are reaching the limit of hours that people can give to social.” 

I am certain he is onto something. Even the Global Web Index report on US social media behavior reveals that social users are lightening up on the content creation,

“One consequence of real-time social is a move from creating content to sharing other peoples content. We call this the rise of the “transmitter ecosystem”….We also see that there is a continual fall in most activities and forms of contribution on social networks. This indicates a growing passivity and a realization that social networks will not become the one stop shop for the total internet experience that they have often been hyped as delivering.”

Narrow definitions are confusing

Will people commit more time to the social distractions of reading and updating Facebook-like social networks? Probably not. Time is our premium resource. But that’s a narrow definition of “social.” Most digital experiences will be social in one way or another whether they be utilities like my Jetsetter iPad app, information tools like my new Flipboard iPhone app or entertainment experiences like some of the best YouTube videos (I love the Criminal Minds cast video “Wheels Up”). People will continue to shift time to those things that deliver perceived value.

While I would assume that some media buckets like TV watching are here to stay and are unlikely to be completely cannibalized by new digital activities, the fact that my son watches most of the little TV he likes on his PC may deliver bigger behavior changes down the road than even Forrester can predict. 

For brands considering how much to commit to social media as a platform for customer engagement, I would just say two things:

• Most brands are woefully behind the behaviors of their customers in digital and social. While some behaviors may be topping out or slowing growth are you using social media at the same level and with the same time commitment as your customer? Probably plenty of room for growth there. 
• If anything, the Forrester POV and The Global Web Index findings tell a story of consumer fatigue on those things that don’t provide enough value. The pressure is on every brand to work hard to deliver content and experiences to their customers that they would find valuable. Relevance will get harder going into 2012. 

What is social business?

Social media can deliver value to businesses far beyond the narrow application to marketing and communications goals. It can help a workforce be more efficient and productive. It can inform product design and service delivery. It can fuel innovation. It can enable better recruiting and talent management.

We use the term social business to describe the value businesses derive from social media technology and behaviors across the enterprise. Often it implies some type of change or transformation but rarely do businesses come to us expressly asking for change management.That usually comes later once it’s clear that enabling a workforce to become brand advocates, as an example, has all sorts of implications on governance, legal and human resource policies. Even then, we are focused on solving a business problem using social media-related solutions or thinking.   We see social business solutions falling into four categories: 

Why diverse teams?

Jay Baer had an interesting post that questioned whether media and marketing specialists make the best social business solution providers. I believe they are indispensible but I also believe they are just half of the solution. Good management consultants are the other half. These guys and gals understand how to evaluate a business problem, interrogate people, process and organization and then design a solution that is equal parts good design and real politik of implementation. Most marketing experts focus on solving a marketing program completely divorced from the intricacies of an organization. They know how to design and implement great marcom solutions but with no entrée to change an organization to be more successful at marketing, their assessment of internal politics is done somewhat superficially.  

Strengths of management consultants

• Recognizing business problems and opportunities for change
• Stakeholder interviews and investigation
• Designing programs aligned with organizational realities and complexity
• Defining and delivering against business value

Strengths of marcom specialists/social media strategists

• Understanding the technology and behaviors of social media
• Designing solutions based upon behavioral economics
• Implementing programs (not just designing them)
• Fast, agile execution 

Jay asks, “If you’re a major corporation that’s convinced you need to make some serious changes to prosper in a rapidly shifting future, do you turn to your PR firm, do you turn to a legacy management consulting firm (Bain, Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, et al), or do you turn to one of the new breed of specialist firms (Altimeter, Dachis, et al)?”

I say they should turn to those who can deliver integrated social solutions and scale them across the enterprise. Experience, cases, methods that combine the best of disciplines – these are ingredients for a results-oriented business solutions firm. Firms like IBM understand the business potential of social media – enabling collaboration between employees, connecting a far flung network of experts more directly with customers. They not only embrace social business solutions but have offered to deliver same to their own clients. They are an exception.  

Right now, most businesses that need social business solutions are discovering that need in the course of more ordinary work, much of it in marketing or employee relations. We work to share best practice social media marketing and communications across 30 markets and end up in a marketing transformation project. So, management firms like McKinsey are not the default right answer. Nor are the pure PR firms with lots of Facebook programs under their belt. This territory remains wide open. Clearly, I am biased to the team we have deployed. That’s why we did it. Time will tell who earns the reputation as the top social business providers. 

Saturation and the Importance of Content

Twitter and blog publishing seems to be staying flat and niche. The complexion of Twitter users, while niche, do represent influencers from journalists to marketers. Expecting to significantly expand consumer conversations (beyond customer service triage) may not be realistic. Brands will get more by providing content worth sharing via Twitter. GWI  puts it, “Future engagement on micro-blogging will be less about conversations and more about content”  

As for Facebook, membership in the US seems to be reaching saturation point, and people are dropping some of their more involved behaviors like creating content in favor of sharing existing content

“Social Networking is saturated in the US and behaviour is shifting into a more passive usage. Visitation remains high, but users are doing less”

The big exceptions seem to be an increase in posting images and even video to profiles. Historically creating and publishing video even in the era of Flip Video camera (sadly, the era continues without that particular camera) has been a niche activity with a high barrier to entry. Is that changing?

Even a year ago, 30 billion pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) were shared on Facebook per month. With people less likely to create all of that, they are on the lookout for great stuff to pass along.

“One consequence of real-time social is a move from creating content to sharing other peoples content. We call this the rise of the “transmitter ecosystem””

The opportunity for brands as creators of remarkable and relevant content will grow. How many brands will embrace a content marketing strategy as their way to engage customers and stakeholders? 

Creating a Segmented Strategy

Age, income, region, interests and more are showing up as differentiators in terms of how people are using social media. US social network users lag behind the globe in terms of using Facebook to express themselves or networking for work. My Space continues to serve a predominantly less educated audience with less income. And Twitter grew the greatest amongst a younger user base – 16-24 year olds during this last period while still catering to a smaller influencer crowd. 

Combine these distinctions with what people seem to be doing on platforms and differences per country and it is more important than ever to create a social strategy that is segmented and informed by this research.  Looking to use Facebook globally and with a single approach across 30 or 50 markets as a new, “one-strategy,” channel may not be realistic. Marketers will have to pay close attention as they roll out acquisition and engagement programs in diverse markets like the US, South Africa, Indonesia or Mexico. 

My team at Ogilvy is holding a training summit in Paris concurrent with LeWeb 2011. And while the event has long been on my radar, this will be my first time attending. With about 3000 attendees and a flood of 20 minute sessions over 3 days, I am expecting a barrage of information. Oh, and I don't thrive in crowds. 

The agenda has a great mix of digital delebrities - Brian Chesky, CEO of AirBnB; Jeff Clavier, founder of SofTech VC; Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram and Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify. There are startups there competing for attention, recognition and dollars. The big  guns are there  Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter. And some great brands from Nestle, Orange, Dell and Dominoes. 

In-Betweens that Matter

With such a packed agenda, I suspect it will be the hallway conversations in-between that matter just as much. The 20-minute limit on sessions is a great intention so long as the presenters are led to edit to TED-like quality (succinct and with a POV). My expectations are modest there. 

I am looking forward to meeting people planned and unplanned. I pray that people will help me curate relevant connections as I am know we must all have a keen eye for self-preservation over such a busy conference.  

On Friday, there is a specific section focused on the Social Enterprise. I hope to see you there. 

There are two barriers that I see keeping us from living the dream. 

Multi-agency friction

The way that brands task their multi-agency rosters with bits and bobs of particular programs works against integration. Big organizations have diverse business owners each contributing to revenue outcomes like increased sales of products and services. Many of them hire specialist firms to extend their team’s ability to design strategy or execute marcom programs. There’s a certain belief that brand marketers need to pick “best-of-breed” specialists and constantly pit them against each other to leverage the best commitment or price. It’s all quite logical in a way. It also produces far too much friction to really overcome some of the barriers to truly getting all of your disciplines working in a complimentary fashion. The best that most brands ever achieve is a campaign success where 2-3 disciplines (out of 5-6) are aligned enough for a time to produce remarkable results for a short period of time(think Old Spice).

Big teams vs. small teams 

Brand + Agency teams have become large. Whenever something isn't quite going right, the answer is to add someone new to the team. It's crazy. The type of innovation we are looking for (“imagine a program where all disciplines were aligned to inspire as much sustained positive word of mouth for a new product – all measured by a common, focused dashboard…”) comes easiest from small, tight teams with common motivations. Either brand managers need to become the team leader of these small teams featuring a few members of different tribes and agencies or brands are going to have to take a chance on a single agency/partner who has enough of the right disciplines within their camp to pull it off.  

4 Ways to Get Integrated Social Media Programs to Work

• Behavior-driving Planning Model

It is so hard within a multi-agency team to have a single planning methodology prevail. I am a fan of Ogilvy’s Fusion model not because it’s ours but because it’s designed around driving behavior. Rather than have every discipline chasing its own planning approach measured by impressions, click-to-actions, GRP’s or whatever, focus on a collaborative planning approach that is designed to get people to take an action or actually change behavior. Do you want people to try a new product? Buy more at one time? Exercise every day?  And just where are they on the proverbial customer journey? A behavior-driving model can take advantage of the most useful research in behavioral economics. It's a more sympathetic approach to our customer and more effective.  

The planning model should also tell the team what they find important. As more brands use contests and promotions to lure consumers to interact on Facebook, some marketers are swearing off contest incentives preferring to generate engagement and word of mouth through "ideas." This is an example of a belief that ought to be shared by the core planning team (I am neither endorsing this particular notion or bashing it - merely using it as an example).  

• Unified Story and Content Strategy

Different brand organizations use different tools to align work across their marketing and communications. “Brand Keys,” “Brand Creative Ideas,” “Brand Platforms,” are all models for distilling what a brand stands for and what the most contemporary messages are during a particular season. But few brands develop a holistic approach to content no matter whether delivered via the Facebook wall, television or online display advertising, or in the stories pitched to traditional media. Customers, consumers , people-like-us are losing track of what they ought to expect from different channels. They just want relevant content – if they actually want anything at all beyond a good product that delivers on a promise. Marketers can make better use of the mix of touchpoints with customers if they take care to form clear story(ies) and then manage content cohesively across the different ways and places customers make use of it. 

• A Blended Measurement Framework

Instead of having a different metric for each discipline, have a limited number of KPIs - each of which reflects desired behavior and is shared by all efforts. Perhaps, brand marketers feel like they already have this or that sales data is the bottom line. What I see again and again is teams tracking and reporting 10-20 data points and often becoming lost as to which are most important. They count Facebook fans, comments on wall posts, wall postings, individual ‘likes,’ tab interactions, retweets in Twitter, Twitter follower acquisition, blog mentions, “impressions,” and so much more. Some are trying to roll up all types of interactions like commenting and ‘likes’ into a single engagement metric. That certainly helps marketers get focused back on driving engagement (e.g. time-spent or interactions believed to be steps along the way to persuasion and product-related behavior change).  Like our planning model – what do we want people to actually do? Let’s count that.

If we need proxy metrics to help optimize an effort, let’s make the effort to confirm that they are the ones indicative of behavior change. 

• Prioritize Key Operational Changes 

We have to do things differently to expect different results. Brand marketers are used to commissioning one of the agency partners to come up with the creative big idea that all other disciplines will interpret. It's time to evolve beyond the creative idea as the only binding principle. Now we need a small team who will work together to optimize the relationship the brand has with the customer and make certain it delivers great value to both brand and customer.  

Since marketing has become more ‘always-on’ and less purely campaign-focused, it makes sense to designate a small strategy team that guides all disciplines through their ongoing and iterative execution. A small team can look at the overall effort and make a call that the paid advertising online is not leading to the level of active fan acquisition, for example, or that the volume of peer recommended trial is not all that was hoped and that 2-3 disciplines might work together to incent more customer sharing and trial. Designating this small strategic team at the helm would be a big shift from the large group model so often put in place. 

What other operational changes: 

• Run brand program reviews like editorial meetings - look at the data and decide what is working and what is not. Make changes on the fly and try that
• Embrace the pilot - in the race to get immediate results, some brands avoid pilots as they seem like lengthy trials with little business impact beyond learning. As Facebook says, "Fail fast." We can get better results quicker by conditioning ourselves to run quick pilots that can easily be scaled. 
• Let the word of mouth guys run the core strategy team - as more brands embrace the importance of brand advocacy and word of mouth, it makes sense that the experts at driving valuable word of mouth be at the front of the bus

At this year’s WOMMA Summit, I hosted a session with Christine Cea, Head of Marketing Communications at Unilever US and Ekaterina Walters, Social Media Strategist at Intel, to dive into their experiences scaling social media within their organizations. I asked each to share 2-3 insights or learnings from their experience that went beyond the pale. What surprised them? What took more time and attention than expected? What would they pass along to a colleague to help them tread this same path? 

But we called the session “10" Learnings… So, I turned the same question to the crowd to come up with the balance and between us all developed a helpful list. The slides from the session are available at WOMMA. (time for you to become a member?)

Here is our list from the session:

Governance is not a ‘one and done’ – the process of expanding the use of social media and getting all the right parties involved in all the right regions of the world reveals a steady stream of governance issues that need ot be decided upon and communicated. Brace yourself to solve many governance issues and to never quite be done. You haven’t lived until you draft the social media-specific version of employee CAN SPAM rules (look it up). 

Remember, the Internet and our businesses are global – Christine began by creating the Unilever Social Engagement Playbook for the US market. It was soon discovered by global executives and supported as a worldwide resource. I have seen this again and again at our multi-national clients. Regions or even local markets develop their own tools for educating their teams or enabling them to leverage Facebook well or the broader social media palette. Soon, overlapping initiatives spring up just like the first uses of social networks within big brands. It takes executive leadership to spot these and globalize the best work. 

Expect your effort to grow via the “Glom-on factor” – once you start something like an enterprise-level playbook or similar guidance, the need for new “chapters” will appear. Did you cover usage of LinkedIn? How about Google+ experiments?  If you are describing the value of an “owned, paid, earned’ model, shouldn’t you include the most recent guidance from global marcom leadership on the company’s marketing mix? It’s more than social but hugely impactful. 

Go back to basics: know your strategy and your story – This is one of those things that Pete Blackshaw at Nestle would call “back to boring.” Social media doesn’t change the laws of physics. Nor does it call for a separate strategy or story. Your ambition in social may change your marcom strategy but still stick with a holistic strategy and story. And know what it is before you go too far in terms of  implementing programs across social. 

Build it and they will come – Ekaterina shared her experience creating infrastructure and tools for local markets across the globe. I have sweated a bit recently on global programs where we needed to incent local markets to put resources around managing Facebook pages.We really had to go out of our way to make it an easy decision and even then we needed to showcase some success stories to motivate some folks. Her experience was different.  If you provide the right infrastructure and training, the markets will jump on board. She gave a great anecdote about a team in India who were dragging their feet. Given infrastructure, they energized their use of Facebook to become a top page in the Intel family. 

Be prepared because you have two to three days to maximize opportunities – if you don’t have a process for acting quickly, you’ll miss the opportunity. When a local market launched Museum of Me at Intel, it quickly became a hit and relevant to more markets. For Intel’s social media teams, part of the job means remaining nimble. Without the ability to help other markets cash in on the Museum of Me social experience (and expand server infrastructure) they could not have take full advantage of such a great program. 

Interns are not community managers - Do not hire an intern to be the voice of your company. It is too easy to belittle the job of publishing content and interacting with customers. After all, don’t the interns “get” social media? Whether you have 60,000 or 6 million fans, the job of engaging them is an important one. Train your community managers. Define the social voice of your brand. Outline responsible response scenarios.   

Create a centralized measurement model  - This is a keystone issue. Having a common measurement model makes so many other things fall into place. Crafting that measurement model is also hard and should not be left to local markets figure out on their own. Once you establish how to understand performance and value, efforts around the world can benchmark programs and understand what is successful and what out to be discontinued. 

Scaling is all about continuous internal training, pilot programs and agency help – The book on effective social media and word of mouth marketing is just being written. No room for smug “gurus” here. Everyone seemed to agree that we all need to be ina constant state of learning. This is a program none of us will likely graduate from.  Our own global training program at Ogilvy is a great example. We have been delivering training globally on all things ‘social’ for the past 7 years and will be expanding our program this year. No questions asked. We are committed. 

Create a gateway to unlock social media access and resources – When markets and team do want to jump on board and launch their own Facebook pages or Twitter handles, it is key to evaluate if they are really ready to take on the commitment. You can make training mandatory. You can also establish a minimum staff commitment to make sure they are ready for the moderation responsibilities. Also, who does translations? If you create a global conversation calendar, does the global center translate or the local market? Who has the budget? Establish criteria by which you can confirm that a market is ready to succeed. 

Look at where the tech teams within your organization for direction - See where they are going as they are at the forefront of what needs to be done – One story emerged early in social media at big companies. Entrepreneurial spirits who wanted to do cool things in social circumvented their IT departments. You had to in order to get anything done. The restrictive governance and procedure governing Web site development and network resources just didn’t apply well to social media. Now, it’s time to re-engage with the tech teams you have internally as they are more in touch with where platforms are heading today than perhaps 5 years ago. 

Make legal your friend – there  are so many bright legal minds thinking about enabling use of social media within brands. Getting your legal department permanently to the table can really strengthen your work and avoid problems. Your lawyers are your friends. 

That was our list. There was some talk about an “11th” and some reference to SpinalTap.