I love the in-depth and ramblingly-long defense Evan has posted, about this new native retweet feature.

Yes, it has bugs and needs testing. But I admire the way it has been used, not as-is, and with an inherent purpose.

Right now, it is quite difficult to track retweets simply because its nothing but a messy, user-created syntax – not a feature. For it to be a feature, it needs to adhere to some rules. Such rules also need to account for some of the real-world messiness behind retweets – too many retweeter IDs, multiple comments, abbreviated words that sound like a 6 year old’s language and an acute lack of characters to say anything meaningful.

The current native retweet roll-out beautifully addresses all this, plus two more all-important factors – trackability and attribution.

If twitter needs to and wants to be seen as a serious enough platform for businesses to engage with their audiences, it needs to have a way to track retweets as a measure of popularity. The new native retweet system addresses that. Attribution is more obvious and Evan explains it rather well, with a simple illustration.

This feature addition is in no way similar to the UI updates that Facebook makes – that is a walled garden and that interface is everything for Facebook. Not so for twitter, which relies as much on its native UI as it does on countless 3rd party web and desktop apps. Almost all those apps already have a retweet feature, but no one thought of addressing the tracking and attribution problem – they simply went with so-called crowd-wisdom.

Twitter, thankfully, did not. Brilliant move!

Social media is simply a platform which allows normal people to talk and discuss about anything and nothing in particular. Its a simple realization for companies – that there are people available at one place now, instead of their own houses, restaurants, malls, roads…and that they are willing to talk.

The only thing missing is the evolution in the language of communication from corporates – they continue to use their legacy language, full of jargons, a lot of ego that they ARE the ‘company’ and an annoyed disregard for that single customer.

Now that the word ‘groundswell’ is truly possible in real life thanks to social media, its time to cut the BS in communication and talk straight and simple. How difficult is that?

Turns out that its indeed really very difficult. I was in a press interaction for a client which was bent on announcing something rather insignificant, on a grand scale. I felt completely helpless since it was beyond my mandate to change things – it was much bigger compared to my minor protest. So, I went with it.

It only made things worse – the media that arrived was mighty disappointed at the non-newsworthiness, at least for the time and effort to make it to the venue physically. I also got a mouthful that all the event required was just a well-drafted press release – and that was what I thought, in the first place.

It’s just so sad!

Coming to think of it, social media tools are perhaps overpowering the communication-change agenda itself. They are not worth the focus here – rather, it is the fact that companies/ brands need to start thinking differently when it comes to communicating anything with the outside world.

To put it in perspective and put the tools in their place, think about it this way – when mainstream media ruled the roost, there were ‘X’ voices. With social media, there are ‘X to the power of infinity’ voices. Time to listen, learn to talk like them and in a way that interests them.

Picture courtesy: Thomas Hawk via Flickr

As I grudgingly got up this morning to attend an orientation session at my son’s school, I never knew that I’d end up blogging about the experience…let alone drag social business design into it. The grudge was due to the incredibly beautiful Bangalore weather, by the way; drizzly, cloudy and chill!

The orientation was for parents of children who are moving from KG to standard 1 (called Prep 1, in this school). I was quite disappointed that they started explaining the difference in curriculum with a powerpoint presentation – after a week of doing tons of presentations on powerpoint, the last place I want to see one more was in my son’s school.

Thankfully, the presentation was very focused and explained the kind of teaching and curriculum our son would be exposed to in the next year. The only thing I can add to express how impressed I’m with the school is the fact that even I, as someone who has hated education in any regimental form all my life, would have loved studying in this school!

Presentation over…it was a free flowing discussion with the parents on various topics, including the touchy topic…fees! Here’s where the school completely differed from any other school I have personally studied/ interacted.

The session today was conducted by two teachers/ coordinators and not the headmisteress/ principal.

They had – seemed to have – all the authority to face and answer any kind of question from the parents. In fact, they took turns answering questions and it really looked like they were all adequately empowered to answer sensibly.

One of the parents (the dad) had a HUGE issue with a particular facet of the fee (it was about next year’s session, for which parents were asked to pay advance annual fee by the end of November, as a sign of acceptance of continuing in the same school). This particular dad was livid that the school treated them with an ‘ultimatum’ (to quote his own word) to show their loyalty, that too so early (8 months in advance!).

The teachers present handled the situation really well, even as the outraged father was speaking at the top of his voice, all excited and even arguing with other parents who did not seem as offended as him. He demanded that the principal be available in such meetings to answer queries, for which the teachers present confidently said that they have all the answers he required and if only he allowed them to respond, they’d be glad to address his concerns.

To be fair, the angry dad had a point – what if we pay the annual fee now and the family gets a transfer to another city/ locality (in office/ whatever) – would the school refund the annual fee? Seemed logical and the teachers offered to definitely look into it. That too, without consulting with the finance head or the principal – this was a decision taken by the teachers present and a representative from the admin division of the school.

In my son’s earlier school, I’ve seen the silent reverence with which parents pay the fee. Its usually a queue, and the money is collected by 2 school reperesentatives with a stern demenour and the only conversation is about operational details. No opinion or actual information is shared, ever, by anybody! As for the fee – it’s usually pay it, or move on to another school; no negotiation or discussion!

And here is a school that actually has an orientation session for parents to explain what their children will be learning, differently, in a higher class. A school which has empowered its teachers to confidently discuss this topic with a large group of parents – they discussed every dicey topic that is usually hushed under the carpet in other schools or discussed privately – student-teacher ratio in class, fee hike percentage each year, fee for the school bus, special teaching for children with special needs/ learning difficulties – you name it, they had an opinion and they shared it confidently.

Parents can get quite unruly in such meetings…emotions can go haywire when children and money are discussed in schools. It did, today too. But the teachers handled it gracefully and confidently – and publicly (at least in front of all the parents assembled today), the very essence of having conversations on twitter!

And the best part – some of the parents had got their kids along and a bunch of such kids were playing very happily in the adjacent room, causing a mild commotion. Not even once did the teachers ’shush’ them or even signed to them to keep quiet! I was tempted to because I was not able to focus on what they are saying – but the teachers merely continued to speak and speak louder. The only time a teacher did something towards this is go to the kids and spoke to them softly on why they should make less noise.

The kind of respect shown towards children is one of the most important reasons why we chose this school. This was the school that actually has parents vouching for it; most of them actually recommend it vocally!

Why does this happen? To me, its a simple matter of having multiple spokespersons who communicate and stand by the school’s vision. The teachers take so much ownership of not just their core job of teaching the children but also in interacting with so many parents and offering their viewpoints as the school would have.

This, to me, is social business design, for dummies.

I do understand that social business design is a lot more complex and amounts to an actual business transformation, but at the essence of it, sans any jargon, it is this. And the social media that we discuss excitedly these days, is merely a tool that enables some/ part of this transformation for different parts of an organization.

How many organizations do you know that have this level of empowerment? Most of them have specific departments to address very specific areas of operation (for good reason – size and scalability), but the social business design demands that employees (to begin with, not to ignore other constituents) be a lot more evolved and aware about how the business intends to grow and what it’d do to achieve that growth. And, most significantly, how the organization and its many constituents interact with the outside world, of which, potential customers are only a small subset.

I’d love to know how this school manages to create such evolved and empowered teachers (employees). But, to start with, I love the fact that my son is studying here!

After all the glowing praise, it’d be unfair on my part not to name the school, but let me also not make it look like a blatant plug for the school – so here’s the school’s website.

Picture courtesy: RealAbstract via Flickr.

Of course, its about twitter’s latest and greatest in massages – ego massage, that is – The Twitter List!

It’s a brilliantly sneaky ploy, since lists have been in existence for quite some time now – thanks to third-party apps. But the one critical ingredient that makes this list successful is – obviously – the tight integration. So, you can see who thinks highly of you and what they think of you; who’s in your league, in the opinion of an assorted group of people, besides basic details like how many people consider you worth something.

All this reminds me of a Seinfeld episode – for the detail-devils, the 154th episode, titled The Millennium. Besides a great joke involving Newman’s millennium party, to be called Newmanium, one of the sub-plots involved Seinfeld getting caught in a messy war between his girlfriend and her stepmother. The war is about who has Jerry’s number in a higher rank in their telephone speed dial. As you know, there are only 9 speed dial places in any phone, including your mobile phone, but Seinfeld is obsessed with his increasing ranking among the 2 women, in a very…well, Seinfeld’ish way. Eventually, the step mother takes him to a new high, by placing his number in one of the emergency speed dials, which is incidentally meant for poison control!

What happens as a result is best seen and not read in this blog, but the point is the glaring similarity between the way people may end up using twitter list and the way Seinfeld imagined the use of the telephone speed dial. There are quite a few blog posts already about innovative uses of twitter lists and I agree with the thought behind most of them – but at the bottom of it, it is a fantastic way to categorize people (if you’ve not done that already, in your mind!) and let those people and the rest of the world know about such categorization.

I’m in PR (I’ve also briefly dabbled in advertising) and a good part of my job involves selling social media programs to our PR clients. I also consider that PR has the best fit to sell and run social media outreach programs, compared to advertising agencies. Todd’s post nails the reason quite well – in essence, it is about sustaining the communication than planning a one-off burst.

But, think about it – what we do is ideally media relations and only now, with the social media scene, are we really getting to do ‘public’ relations. Our ‘relations’ are primarily with media folks and not with the ‘public’ – we use the media to reach the public, while advertising reaches the public, albeit as a paid spot.

Our language is completely dictated by the client’s corporate guidelines, our own idea of what the client may like us to say and our assumption of how best we can help the journalist in question. The advertising agency scores considerably better here – their language is intended to draw attention, from a group which they quite aptly call, target audience.

The world still complains about the jargon we throw at our press releases. Well, they are jargons that our clients own and our retainers will be in trouble if we try changing them. Advertising agencies seem to have a much better sway with the choice of words, since they demonstrate a much better grip on the client’s target audiences.

For a PR firm, the content we create rarely makes it to print as-is. It is either altered/ re-interpreted by journalists/ editors or is placed under the name of a client executive, in the case of contributory articles. Advertising folks get their words mostly as-is, since that is entire purpose!

So, there’s obviously a lot to learn from advertising agencies. The language and the tone of communication is critical in social media outreach programs – every Facebook update/ tweet/ message board comment has to be interesting enough, since it represents a brand and has a purpose, unlike our personal ‘cat rolled over’ messages. Advertising techniques come really handy here – if you think about it, we actually write creative copy in every tweet to attract readers.

Where we do score is in knowing how to sustain a relationship over a period of time. We had a smaller circle when it came to media relations. Now, with real ‘public’ relations, its a much larger group that we need to sustain relations. Naturally, PR agencies are learning to scale the level of sustained communications and our media relations experience is keeping us in good stead. Advertising agencies, however, as Todd notes, may not really enjoy handling the sustained communications.

There’s a lot of overlap between PR firms and advertising agencies, when it comes to learning the art of handling social media outreach – the relation part is our forte, even though we need to learn to scale it up. The creative content part is an advertising agency’s forte, even though they may not be keen to exercise it for a tweet, of all things…and to do it consistently.

And there’s enough work for both sides since we’re merely scratching the surface here. So, can we stop getting the koolaid to our heads and put those heads to do some better work?

This is particularly more pronounced for Indian operations of MNCs – the worldwide headquarters of these MNCs may have an established social media outreach program, but the Indian office remains largely clueless. We also found this to be true when we do the homework before pitching for conventional PR/ social media PR, for a new client.

The point is that this lone guy may not be doing it right, but he’s at least doing it. And that requires guidance and appreciation. It could be someone from the technical team, in an IT company. Or it could be someone from a support function in any other company – but the fact that this person went beyond his organizational tasks or his personal branding/ mandate on socia media, and thought of getting a presence for the company in social media is something that needs encouragement. For an organization, it is such people that really matter, to create a presence beyond what PR creates for the senior leaders/ designated spokespersons.

That’s actually the beauty of social media – anyone can start it, but only the ones who get the tone of their content right last. So, while the communications/ marketing team may appreciate this effort, it’d help to chart a path for that person and his/ her effort, so that it serves as a great example for employees helping an organization ramp up on social media.

This Chicago Tribune piece on how younger employees are helping older ones get on to social media serves as a valid proof point to what we see as a trend in some of our client (and prospective client) organizations.

Thinking about all this talk on privacy…what about privacy of organizations? It is usually the phrase transparency that is confused when it comes to organizational privacy. Now, why would an organization want privacy…online?

The reasons could be similar to that of an individual – privacy of employees (individual: employment), competitive information (individual: thoughts and opinion that are valuable), information pertaining to specific timelines and also information that could cause affect the brand image, with or without malicious intent on part of the organization. The ‘with malicious intent’ part is something that needs to be exposed but there’s no golden rule for doing so, by the organization or by anybody.

The point is, organizations do need privacy online too. And what we call transparency is nothing but carefully and thoughtfully filtered information; so in essence, it takes into account the privacy part.

Being an open organization with a web 2.0 (aargh, that phrase again!) outlook where you get your employees to tweet and share updates on a real-time website is perfectly fine, but organizations do need to work on effective filters which could help them save not just money (revenue loss), but also their face.

There’s an old rule of thumb for how to avoid embarrassment online, for individuals – never post anything online that you wouldn’t share with your priest or your mother. Would the equivalent constituents for organizations be employees and shareholders/ stakeholders? No, not from a with-holding information perspective, but from the fact that such information should not be made public and a closed, direct communication should be prioritized.

The other problem is with social media enabling hierarchical dissonance, in the view of the social public.

Just because a blogger has met the marketing head of a company or the CEO of another (in whatever context), it doesn’t mean he/ she can reach out to them for deals on their products. Marketing Heads (and obviously CEOs) have many other things to do – like managing the marketing activity (or running a company), to begin with. Every organization has many public fronts through which it interacts with its customers – current or prospective. Social media engagement does not replace those channels – it merely complements them. So, posing a question to the CEO you met, via the twitter profile of the company is nothing but intrusion of privacy.

Organizations have their limits – as regards bandwidth to handle queries/ comments on social media. Transparency and privacy should not be confused with a free-for-all organization where the entire team running the show becomes answerable and accountable to the social public, for whatever reason/ requirement. There are varying levels of escalation, just like individuals have varying levels of tolerance.

One of the critical requirements of a corporate communication team or a communication vendor handling social media communication is to set the boundaries of organizational privacy – without confusing transparency or compromising honesty.

Picture courtesy: bejealousofme via Flickr

Customers have long used an assortment of modes to sort issues with brands – one-to-one modes like calling the customer service, emailing the company or getting to the brand through someone we know, who knows someone from the brand organization. These interactions were only effective to some extent, depending on how efficient the target brands’ service structure was.

With twitter (for instance), this interaction just went public – every whine and complaint became public, for the whole world to read. Does that make the brand more responsible since its brand image is at stake now?

My views have changed considerably, recently – as someone who has seen both the sides – from the customer point of view, since I read a lot of tweets about terrible customer service (examples in India: Airtel, Sony etc.) and also occasionally complain about some brands (like Airtel!); and from the point of view of the organization/ brand, since at Text 100, we manage social media outreach for many of our clients, for very specific objectives – not just brand building.

As a customer of a product or service, I used to be and still am outraged about companies/ brands not treating their customers well. But, when I started looking at this from the other side, I’m quite surprised at the perspective change.

No, I’m not saying brands can take customers casually, when they complain for deficient service or an inferior product. But, a large organization, say a TV brand or a PC brand, is just way too large and involves way too many people in the product selling/ service organization. Many a times, the service depends on people on ground and the delay in responding to customers, however urgent, is still not top priority.

That does show how brands have not restructured their internal organizations (Owyang does call out this pressing need) towards customer service with the onslaught of public whining, but that is how it is. Does this mean brands which respond to customers’ online complaints will do better? Not necessarily – things are not so easy yet.

Let us look at how this behavior – whining/ complaining on twitter – really sounds in real life. In real life, whining on twitter will be akin to sitting on the road outside the company you bought a product/ service from, and shout at the top of your lungs (the more followers you have, the louder your shout, I presume). Asking for a RT of your whining? It’d be like calling a passerby, who you seem to know, to shout your complain to the next road/ street. Literally.

Whining on Facebook? It would be like calling some of your friends to a room and crib to them about how unhappy you’re with a brand. Your friends may listen, depending on how close you are with them!

On the other hand, writing a detailed blog post on your not-so-pleasant experience with a brand would be equivalent to taking time to write directly to the brand itself – just that it goes public. But, the effort makes all the difference in this case – there is a huge difference between a momentary, impulsive shout on Twitter or Facebook and a detailed, meaningful rant.

Suddenly, whining on social media doesn’t sound very appealing, huh? Yes, it is quite uncouth, if you think about the real life equivalent – just because you sit on the cyber road, doesn’t make it any more sophisticated. The point is – complain all you want, but also consider beyond the limited perspectives of ‘I’ve paid money for this service/ product’, ‘I demand better service’, ‘Oh that <brand> sucks’. If the brand doesn’t seem to be budging, it may have far less to do with ‘Ooh, this customer is complaining – we hate him/ her and we don’t feel like helping him’ and much more to do with, ‘Darn, we need to set our internal processes better, but Jeez, where do we start?’. Its easier said than done, given the size of services teams and the legacy attitude that plagues them.

So, if you don’t seem to be getting positive vibes from the brand that annoys you, complain all you want, but most importantly, move on. There will be brands that may bend over backwards to service you and make a good name online. But, a majority of them will pass this opportunity to build their brand and simply ignore you. It may not be worth your time to badger the company into a prolonged tweet war, into submission. You’ve made your point – now move on to another brand and forget this brand. That may well be the best lesson you’re teaching an errant brand.

Plus, you’d perhaps do better to exhaust private, one-on-one modes first before taking your acrimony public – since that shows solid intent that you want the issue sorted out first and making it a public drama is merely incidental to the first requirement going haywire.

One of the definitions with which Amber explains influence goes, ‘…encourage and compel others to listen and take action‘.

Staying on the ‘web’ related influence, I agree with her first part – ‘encourage and compel others to listen’. This is bang-on. I listen to people on my twitter stream, for example. But, I don’t listen to all of them – I’m selective, based on the supposed value gained from a choice few, in earlier tweets. This includes people with whom I have conversations.

But, do they compel/ encourage me to take action? I cannot answer that with a simple yes or no. Action, to me, is a much broader topic and has so many other criteria to work – ease of action, cost associated with the action, time required to fulfill action, to name just three.

For instance, if Ehsaan Noorani updates his Facebook status with a concert in Bangalore – I’m tempted to buy tickets quite immediately. The forces at work include, my liking Ehsaan’s (Shankar Ehsaan Loy) music, my having met him, my having occasional conversations with him. Not because he has a impressive set of followers or that he updates Facebook regularly.

It’s a personal thing really, but the point here, as Amber says, is a very human thing – influence is hardly a matter of number of followers, the number people writing about you/ referring to you, the number of connections you have made online or even the number of times you’ve got yourself in mainstream media with a quote or two. It is perhaps the number of people who’s state/ frame of mind you end up altering. (Of course, for argument’s sake one can say that a ‘follow’, a ‘referral’, a ‘connection made’ or a ‘quote gained in press’ are indeed someone’s state of mind altered! Righto!)

That could be something really, really simple – as simple as a retweet or as complex as a motivation to purchase a brand of a product. Could this be specifically measured? The simpler things (like the retweet – from what I’ve seen http://danzarrella.com/ + @danzarrella is THE man for this topic!) could be measured, but most of the larger influence metrics are either assumed or implied.

That was about the relationship between an influencer and his/ her audiences.

How about the relationship between a supposed influencer and a brand? I see a lot of messages online that ask a brand, among others, for things like, ‘I’m planning to buy 3 LCD televisions – <@brand_name> can you give me a great deal?‘ or ‘Give me a free headphones and I’ll become your fan on Facebook‘ or even, ‘Thanks for the information – could I get a twitter discount for the <product>?‘!

Should a brand pander – assuming other things, like budgets, are taken care of? Why should they and how should they? Because they make a sale with no/ minimal cost associated with the lead (assuming the case of a discount)? Because of a possibility to get another tweet/ blog post praising the brand? The former is a very sale/ marketing-driven decision and can justify the costs involved in the social media engagement for that brand. The latter, however, is based on a supposed-influence web that the brand might want to utilize. So, how do they find influence worthy enough of pandering? Back to follower count, conversations held in the past and retweets?

Let me take this topic beyond web, now. When I see Aamir Khan endorsing Titan or Toyota Innova, I view it very differently from the way Shah Rukh Khan endorses Sona Chandi chyavanprash or Dish TV. This is based on personal perceptions about those actors that I may have read, but that is the point – who they are, beyond that endorsement, matters more than how well the ad has been shot. Would Saif be influential enough to make me buy Airtel Digital’s new cock-and-bull MPEG XYZ technology? Personally no, despite that tantalizing, come-hither look that Kareena gives towards the end of the new promo.

Regardless of the medium, influence has to be gained, the hard way, quite like it is in real life – by being yourself, saying things of some value to others and doing both consistently. But thanks to social media, all this can be done demonstrably well, with a much larger set of people than what the physical, real-life enables.

PS: Amber’s post was titled, ‘Fleeting influence on the web’. I came up with a horrendous PJ with that – what do you call the act of someone who flogs the social web trying to increase his/ her alleged influence? Fleetulence! Nope, even I’m not amused!

Am I an authority to talk about this? Of course not – there are people who are significantly more qualified on this topic. But I do have some amount of hands-on experience ’selling’ social media outreach to my (our – Text 100’s) PR clients – either as a stand-alone offering or as an add-on to regular PR – about 70 odd opportunities to propose, to be precise, if you include all the direct and indirect ways that I’ve added my inputs.

From the time I started this activity – January 2008, if I recall accurately – things have changed, for the better. Back then, it was a hard sell, with significant effort in the background work. These days, with most clients having some background knowledge on other corporates/ brands’ efforts using social media for some purpose (thanks to mainstream media coverage), it is a lot easier, though budgets are still under scrutiny, as always.

The two critical attributes that continue to be important for the ’sell’ include,

1. The ‘door-opener’
Given the PR agency’s access to the corporate communication/ marketing communication teams within clients, the first door that opens is the communications team – not the marketing team. But, I have found, in almost all cases where I’ve been part of the sell, that the communications team ropes in appropriate people from the marketing team to sit in the pitch. And that’s a fabulous trend – it helps that the team that has the bigger purse is in the meeting!

I believe it is easier for an existing communications-related vendor (PR/ advertising) to get the right set of people within the client organization for the pitch, than a rank outsider – say, an exclusive social media agency. It is a solid ‘door-opener’, but yes, given a social media agency’s credentials, this could vary.

2. One sane, intelligent voice!
These are early days of selling social media engagement in India. From that perspective, it helps if the pitching team has at least one expert…nah, one sane voice that is able to articulate the idea intelligently. Personal records in terms of number of followers on twitter or friends in Facebook do not help. But, other small things like decent comments on your blog do. Of course, case studies of your social media engagement work for other clients – however small they are – really helps.

Interestingly, from my limited experience, ROI is not the main topic of contention! It is the need for a dummies-level proposal, created in as simple a language as possible, that would help the communications/ marketing team sell social media internally to the senior management.

Scalability too, is not a point of discussion, initially. That is actually an internal discussion, within the agency. And it continues to be a problem. Execution of social media engagement plans require a team that has a similar outlook on implementing a structured plan for clients. And this is quite removed from posting a few tweets everyday or creating blog posts on behalf of a client.

Even from the pitching point of view, it is far easier to be a blogger, a twitter or facebook user. And it is quite a drastically different thing to be able to sell social media to corporates (or existing clients of other communication services).

The former is merely personal branding. It may or may not translate into the latter, but the latter does require a vastly different mindset to make the sale.

If you’re from an exclusive social media agency in India, feel free to dispute/ argue on the points above. I’m sure your point of view would be different and would make for great learning to all.