Mediameme

Just got back from a great summer road trip with my family. It was quick, memorable and fun. As we drove home, the parallels between planning an outstanding road trip and creating a successful social media program are very striking. Here’s an easy to remember approach:

Where Are We Headed?
Select a place that everyone is excited about and make sure everyone is on board.  If the social media program is designed for inspiring facebook fans of the brand, but it’s not a unanimous decision, keep talking. One dissenter can lead to indifference or worse, impatience, when things go wrong.

Take your Time
In addition to the major destination, plan lots of pit stops leveraging influential long-tail communities to pick up new fans and meet enthusiasts. The pit stops should be based on the insights derived from a listening platform but also peppered with opportunities to connect with brandividuals — brand influencers who are well-connected via social media. It’s also helpful to take bathroom breaks once in awhile and check your online research with people in real life at the rest stop.

Make sure your plan is flexible enough to accommodate new insights without torturing your team or brand fans.  A road trip and social media are both as much about the experience as getting to the destination. If your priority is getting there quickly, be prepared to spend lots of money.

Do Your Homework

Just as  your car needs to be serviced and running well, so does your social media team. If  your plan rests on a popular site, already be woven into their social community so when you reach out to their sales folks, you can focus on your destination instead of spray and pray (spray your messages all over the map and pray it all works).

Be sure to keep all the members of your team — not just those on the same payroll as you — on the same page via collaboration tools. Check in with the team regularly — at least daily.  Just like you would secure your home before the trip, have a scenario planning meeting or two with folks who are responsible for the product or service at the heart of your program. If you’re uncertain about what may happen when the program launches or some of the places you may find your content being posted, familiarize yourself with the horror stories, including how the brand or company recovered.

Pack Smart
Pack with your brain, and your heart. Most brand managers and marketers are tempted to throw everything ‘out there’, but that only creates more noise and confusion. Less is more.  Don’t force your brand fans to sit between a cooler and a tent — let them pack the proverbial car through content they love to create. Remember — you’re the driver and navigator.

Bring Music, Video, Games and More
Don’t forget the entertainment!  Stop ‘selling’ and start entertaining with games, video, and music. Let the community create a ‘road trip’ soundtrack or movie for your brand.

Road trips, like social media programs, are a lot of fun when they’re rockin’, but they are also a lot of detail-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves, “thinking and doing” kinds of hard work.With big payoffs for people and the companies they work for.  Instead of telling a travel agent (agency) to ‘book the flight and a car’, travelers do the heavy lifting themselves. The road trippers have to participate in social media communities to understand how they work and know what kinds of sites and tools are better for which kinds of tasks. There’s much more upfront planning time and people needed.

The payoff?

1. Social media programs cost a lot less hard cash in total (than paid media programs, for example, when a new product is launched),

2. The company gains access to and education from a variety of people with different skills and life experiences

3. Cross-functional employees get to know each other and customers a lot better.

4. Deeper loyalty from brandvocates

And just like a real road trip: those involved in the social media program share the memories and experience of the adventure together. Forever.

Flickr Credits: chartno3; Usonian; mahalie; Torri 479; eyetwist

We are in the early days of a revolution being played out in pixels across the digital landscape. A hundred years ago, social revolutions spawned global avant-garde art direction, namely Cubism, which in turn inspired many of the major art movements of the 20th Century: Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and others.

Today’s information architects, content strategists, designers, developers are the artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers of yesteryear. Historians will one day regard social media | web 2.0 as a pivot point in the evolution of our information society, much as Cubism emerged as a lynchpin between the classical aesthetic begun in the Renaissance era and the Modernism of the 20th Century. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

Dutch artist and professor Wil Uitgeest wrote in Aardschok – Bliksemflits, that the art movements of the 20th century were no longer about painting as a window to re-create a temporal reality but instead, these movements reflected macro changes in our collective consciousness as well as our actual, individual experience. Cubism, in particular, shifted perspective from the external to the internal, where artistic expression became individual self-identification viewed through a collective prism.

In web 1.0, the non-technical users were observers, visiting sites and slowly learning the vernacular of the digital medium. Gradually, the discipline of information architecture (I/A) emerged as a way of organizing web sites based on principles derived from library science, design and architecture. Like a Renaissance painter, the information architect wanted to make their ‘picture’ (web site) easily viewed by their community of relatively unsophisticated users who, in turn, could easily understand the content. As the medium matured, content strategy emerged as a compliment to the information architect so the I/A could focus on the structure and design of the more robust site experience, leaving the strategist to populate the framework with appropriate content for the user.

There is a strong parallel to be drawn between classical art forms pre-20th century and web 1.0. Just as Cubism played a critical role in the evolution of art history, I believe we can look to Cubism and its many progeny for cues on evolving the digital medium beyond the web site towards the promise of the semantic web. Instead of a single perspective (e.g. the ‘brand web site’) with limited demands, web 2.0 challenges the very definition of content strategy and information architecture to manage multiple, simultaneous perspectives against a human discourse in real-time.

With a robust content strategy distributed through disciplined and carefully constructed forms of I/A, like the Cubist painting: fractured yet cohesive, an individualized 2.0 experience can be developed and guided through rhetoric and content, freed from the framework limitations of a traditional web site.

Every week, I get asked some variation of the question, “HOW do I get started building a social media strategy”. So here is my recipe that I’m happy to share.

To get started, building a social media strategy requires focused thinking sustained over a few days. Not the multi-tasking mayhem that most managers find their daily lives to be, but the kind of focused thinking done in preparation for a major test or when writing a thesis.

Instead of looking for the proverbial silver bullet, block off a few hours for the entire week. Start on a Monday, spend 3 hours alone in a closed door conference room. Immerse yourself in facts and data. Study the market. 2 hours on Tuesday. Study your competitors. 3 hours on Wednesday. Study your customers — both loyal and one-hit wonders to see what might be the difference between them. 4 hours on Thursday to see where they are online and what conversations they are having. And invest 4 hours on Friday to focus your thinking and organize your buckets of findings into hypotheses.

Here is a list of 10 checkpoints to keep the social media strategy development process focused:

1. Keep your objectives tight and reasonable. Don’t try to solve overpopulation when all you need is to neuter your dog. Just talk with likely users and help them to understand how your product or service fits into their life. And DON’T talk to me about demographics. If you are truly embedded within a community (because that’s what social media is), I can guarantee you that the group has not organized around some arbitrary labeling (w:25-54) or income or geography. It’s more likely to be lifestyle-oriented or significant moments in life.

2. Make the social media strategy EASY (because you’ve done all the thinking work, remember). Sharp and succinct like a short story. One of my favorite (CEO) clients used to challenge me with the opening line: I’ve got a new 30 days. What can you help me do to make a difference to my business? That litmus test gets you to clarity very quickly. Same thing with social media strategy. One page, tops.

3. Create the perfect storm between prioritizing what your customers want with your product / service, picking the top 10 places where your customers socialize (check the incoming pages to your web site for some guidance as to where they might be found), and setting the metrics goals for communication.

4. Clearly state your business objective. What do you want customers to DO? Are you looking for prospects or for regular users to put one more item into their cart or make one more trip to your store. And don’t say both because the more you dilute your social media strategy, the less effective it will be. Singular focus and discipline will produce spectacular results.

5. Get engaged with your customers and target audience. Birds of a feather flock together. Learn from them what they want and build a better product or service.

6. Be trustworthy. Approach communities with honesty and respect. Underpromise and overdeliver rather 6han the other way round. Answer the eternal question: why should anyone believe you?

7. Go extreme. Being distinctive is more important than ever when you are engaging within social communities. Read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Pick out what is important to customers and make it unique.

8. Fail to plan = plan to fail. One of my favorite phrases of all time (it works better with 9 year old girls than 43 year old husbands, BTW). Be first, but more importantly, be the best. Socialmedialand is filled with ‘firsts’ who failed to plan and improve upon their initial business model. Friendster should have been Facebook. Yahoo is imploding while Google is cloud computing.

9. Don’t change your strategy. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Basically — let it ride. In any change bell-curve, people start off excited but then quickly get scared (especially if there is any kind of setback like lowered sales) and want to go back to ‘the old way’. Don’t do it. Declining sales have less to do with the fact you moved your media investment from traditional to social media and probably much more to do with a fickle audience or a new competitor.

10. Review, rinse, repeat. Socialize your product and strategy so frequently that people can lampoon you. The community will LOL with you (not at you) and as long as you can enjoy the fun, your company will benefit (as will your personal reputation).

Remember: strategy is only half the picture. Implementation is the other half which I will address in an upcoming post.