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

Love that companies like Zappos are incorporating Twitter into their social media plan. Even the evil Comcast has a sad little messenger taking heaps of insults from the twitterati. And, since I live nr the Motor City, just a little frustrated that the car companies are like deer caught in the proverbial headlights. It’s a conversation — just start talking. Eventually someone will respond, even if to tell you to ‘shut up’.

Which led me to thinking about why companies are experimenting with social media at all. For some, like Zappos, it will result in sales. Their corporate ethos is that they are a service company who happen to sell shoes, so their Twitter strategy makes perfect sense.

If the same logic were to apply to Comcast (e.g. “We’re a service company who happen to ‘sell’ access to communication), I’d wonder why they were on Twitter. Pls note that Comcast and I have been in an exclusive relationship for 8 years and my bitterness is born from all the times Comcast stood me up for our dates, never calling to apologize but instead, prompting me to call and to reschedule my life…again. Comcast likes to think its dependability is a strength, but more often than not I’m disappointed by its inability to perform. And Comcast is EXPENSIVE — more than a car payment every month!  Because I have Comcast in every room with at least 7 screens.  If I could file for divorce, believe me, I would.

Car companies have the opportunity to be manufacturers of the American dream, who happen to make cars. Yet, every single car brand’s message is so splintered and disingenuous, adding another ‘channel’ like Twitter, is just another line on the media plan’s excel spreadsheet. Which is ironic, given that the bulk of Madison Ave media money is donated by the automotive industry.  And we all know that the big media business model is broken.  More channels means less money for the dominant players in an industry dependent on scarcity for survival.

The first car company to truly embrace — I mean from the C-level throughout the entire global business — that all they need to do is support the passionate relationship that often already exists between their owners and their brand — and let THAT core belief dominate messaging, will reap the rewards.  This isn’t about the democratizing of business.  It’s about responding to what customers want because they ultimately hold the future of (your) business in their hands.  In order to understand how brands ARE communities, social media channels should be utilized to listen and learn.  And then join the conversation.  Find neighborhoods online where are conversations are already happening and start sharing, listening to feedback AND communicating frequently.

Yes, the brave new media is much harder but the payoff is much greater in terms of loyalty.  And the money that has been wasted for decades on media can be reworked into the economy through contracting work from millions of stay-at-home moms, students, wounded heroes — Americans, in other words, who would love to be paid for being online and doing what they love to do.  It takes courage to lead companies in a new direction, but the payoff is there for those souls brave enough to take on the challenge.

P.S. Reason #704 why I love Twitter…in an exchange yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Sr Analyst and über blogger on the topic of social media + corporate institutions posted a link to this wiki listing companies with a presence on Twitter. For the most part, follow them and they will follow you.  You can keep track of their activities and, if you get tired of their barrage of press releases, you can unfollow them after a while.  By the way, the password to access the wiki is on the Home page so you can edit pages and add your company name + twitter account.

In the past week, I was intrigued by the latest experiments of what I will call a next generation agency: Coudal Partners.

Coudal Partners, simply put, are trailblazers. They were one of the first agencies/design firms to recognize the value of their creative talent and harnass it through their erudite blog. They don’t ‘limit’ their creative executions to :30 or print ads. Every visit to their site is truly inspiring with fresh content served constantly from around the world in several languages.

Now Coudal has extended (and one would assume monetize) their audience of intelligent, creative types through some new business exentsions. Clusterflock is a virtual water fountain for their rapidly expanding community. It is part-blog, part-social network and increasing in popularity. Check out the hockeystick stats on their audience:

Ffffound! is another recent Coudal extension business serving their creative community. It is one of the best image collections of graphic design and illustration — so good that it seems to be curated; however, it probably is not and just speaks to the quality of the community arising around this innovative firm.

Love the idea behind Swapmeat. Check out the spot they did that explains this rather extraordinary concept.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they have The Deck, which is a media/advertising network aimed at creative and design professionals. The content includes sites such as A List Apart, 37 Signals and List Apart’s co-founder, Jeffrey Zeldman that are in every digital creative’s bookmarks as well as some that probably aren’t but probably will be once they check out the links.

Coudal should be applauded for their enthusiasm and bravery to push the boundaries. They are developing a viable financial model for creating an inspiring creative community. And perhaps most importantly for prospective clients, they are truly walking the walk as a leader.

Ok, so it’s not enough that you’ve connected with everyone you’ve ever met in your entire life thanks to sites like Facebook or viewed about a thousand how to videos on YouTube so you know the best way to fold a tee-shirt. Now <drum roll> comes Friendfeed.

Friendfeed allows you to aggregate all of your web 2.0 subscriptions in one place: Digg, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, your own blog feed — there are 28 services currently enrolled. You can see what all your friends are doing…who they are following, what pictures they are sharing, what videos they are viewing and who else in your network they know…it’s simultaneously creepy and voyeuristic. Here’s a high-level tour courtesy of demogirl.