Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

Putting Social Media to Work

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Today I had the pleasure of presenting a talk of the same name as this post to the IFEC Institute.  IFEC is the International Foodservice Editorial Council and is a very influential and important organization of foodservice professionals.  It’s made up of many of the people that represent companies, products and brands in the foodservice space.  The Institute portion of the conference is part speeches and part hands-on workshops to educate its members on the important trends in media (and other aspects) to enable them to evaluate and implement those trends in their and their clients’ businesses.

The focus this year was on social media and how it integrates into an overall marketing and communications plan.  Steven Bava led off the day with a discussion about how digital advertising and media is changing the way consumers make decisions and in turn how brands and organizations need to change how and where they interact with consumers in order to win their business and loyalty.

It was a great prelude to the talk that I gave in concert with Jack Abbott, my former boss and now head of my marketing agency that I’ve retained to help me in my current role.  We really tried to drill down on how to put social media to work for marketing and public relations professionals in the space.  There are numerous amazing case studies in the foodservice space of wildly successful social media campaigns (Kogi BBQ, TGIF, Costa Vida, Naked Pizza, Joffery’s coffee, more) and we wanted to provide insight and takeaways from these case studies to give the audience actionable takeaways that they could take back and implement them for their clients and their businesses.

You can view the presentation here:

Putting Social Media To Work
View more documents from Morgan Brown.

This presentation is derived from a bunch of different sources, including the infamous WTF is Social Media presentation on SlideShare, the Socialnomics video, and other sources.  While many of the sources are cited as Socialnomics, there are primary sources for each of those, it was just late when I was adding them to the deck.

My big takeaways for the group were:

  • Don’t start with the tools – start with finding the right conversations. Find the white-hot center of the conversation and become an integral part of it.
  • Don’t worry about the size of the audience online.  Find the right 10, 100 or 1,000 people. They will help you spread the word.
  • Social media marketing is commitment marketing, it’s not hit and run. (commitment marketing coined by Rick Liebling
  • Use the Forrester POST framework to develop your social media plan and sell it into your organization
  • Find and activate the “magic middle” that David Sifry identified and Brian Solis has built on

A few things that I didn’t get to cover that I wanted to are:

  • The importance of mobile in foodservice (I hit it a bit in the Dairy Queen case study, but it was a passing glance)
  • The importance of building assets instead of renting eyeballs
  • The concept of finding your Tribe on the Web
  • The rising importance of game theory in marketing and communications

I have a video of the talk that I’ll chop up and post shortly as well.  It was a great experience and I really enjoyed interacting with an audience that was super-engaged and asked very savvy questions.  If you’d like me to speak at your conference view my speaking page for more information.

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Speed as a Social Media Strategy

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I just finished reading a great business book called “Rules of Thumb” by Alan Webber.  Webber founded Fast Company magazine and was also managing editor at Havard Business Review, among other things.  In “Rules of Thumb” he compiles 52 bite-sized pieces of wisdom he has collected over the past 40+ years in his distinguished career.  They’re all excellent.  I want to dive into some of them here – in part to share with you, in part to cement them into my mental firmament.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I did and I encourage you to pick up Rules of Thumb when you get a chance.

Speed as a Strategy

This is one of my favorite rules of thumb in the book.  Speed as a strategy.  Whether you’re talking about the first-mover advantage or simply being able to react and evolve in an ever-changing business environment, speed is a strategy all on its own. Too often you hear “we’re moving too fast” or “we need to make sure we’re not moving too fast,” from the planners and the folks in accounting and those who are uncomfortable with speed.  They want to slow things down, plod through detailed analyses and make the “perfect” decision.  Webber refutes this line of thinking as an evolutionary outmoded approach that is sure to leave your business in the dust and your team far from the leading edge of your industry.

The solution of course, is to become comfortable with speed and to use it as a competitive advantage and strategy.

Becoming comfortable with speed

If the answer is to become comfortable with speed, then how do you do it?  I believe you become comfortable with speed by developing a framework for evaluating situations and options and then a process of constant iteration and refinement of decisions through rapid and ongoing evaluation of the choices made.   Something like this:

  1. Evaluate current situation
  2. Determine course of action
  3. Implement change quickly
  4. Measure inputs/outputs of change
  5. Evaluate results
  6. Refine and adjust strategy on the fly
  7. Repeat

If you are able to implement this cycle then you have the tools and processes in place to manage rapid change then making quick decisions is not a short-sighted exercise that leaves you open to threats and missed opportunities; but rather is an ongoing, renewable business process that always ensures that you’re attuned to the environment and challenges your organization faces. All while staying out ahead of the pack through nimble, smart decisions.

Once you’ve developed this process to provide opportunities for constantly refining your strategy then you are able to embrace speed.  No longer is a decision all-or-nothing, but rather a series of incremental adjustments based on the results of the previous choice.  It makes everything much easier to manage in my opinion.

So, if that’s the high-level look at how speed can help an organization, what about in marketing?  Where this best comes into play is in online marketing.  Because print is built around big bets – long lead times, big RFPs, big campaigns, etc., it isn’t able to leverage the benefits of speed. Print and other old media need the plodding decision-making because for the most part, once you’re in, you’re in.  So you need to make that big bet count.  Online media, for the most part, behaves in a way that makes speed and incremental changes an essential part of success.

Speed as a strategy in social media marketing

More than any other online marketing effort, social media marketing demands speed.  In fact, it is organizations that can’t or won’t embrace speed who are the ones most damaged by the conversations in social media.  Those that wait to put together a pain-staking strategy, require lengthy legal involvement and rely on the old world media paradigm of creating perfect before shipping are all hurt by real-time conversations that wait for no one.  There are plenty of case studies about this phenomenon, and we don’t need to dive into them all here, but suffice to say that speed is the only strategy that works in social media.

Why is speed so important in social media?

Because people aren’t hierarchical organizations with command and control reporting. They speak their mind, share their opinions freely, and don’t need legal sign-off to present an argument or make a statement. That makes them infinitely faster than any organization.  But people also expect to deal with people, not brands, not organizations, not entities when engaging in a conversation online.  If a company wants to participate they need to let their people act like, well, people, and not corporate mouthpieces or brand ambassadors or any other non-human corporate cog.  This requires giving those people on the front lines of your organization engaging in social media the gift of speed. And your organization needs to be aligned to respond quickly to inputs that come through this new conversation channel.

Without speed your social media marketing strategy is dead on arrival.  It has a higher likelihood of doing harm rather than good, as the attention-spans, and patience online is reduced to near-zero by the customers and people you’re trying to engage. If your team is unable to answer a simple question in a timely fashion you’re hurting your brand.  If you can’t get a customer service request routed and addressed quickly, you’re hurting your brand.   The list goes on.  Without speed you’re brand will not thrive in the social space.

A few guidelines for speed in social media

Here are just a few (not comprehensive, please add more in the comments) thoughts on how to make sure you’re organization has the speed it needs to be successful in social media:

  • Have a corporate social media policy that encourages employees to embrace social media and clearly outlines the company’s guidelines and beliefs for using social media
  • Ensure that business division owners are ready to handle requests that come in through the social channel.  Is your customer service team ready to handle a complaint via Twitter?
  • For companies of any size over 30, implement some form of tracking of open issues and resolutions.  Can you track outstanding issues that have been posted to message boards about your product?  Can you communicate with those people and get back to them when things are resolved?
  • Give your front-line folks answers to questions ahead of time.  Do they have an extensive corporate knowledge? Do they have access to policies, warranties, press materials and other company facts that they can go straight to without needing to track down someone in product or PR to address?
  • Give your front-line folks freedom to talk like people.  Can you set guidelines about what will and won’t be answered immediately? If you have an intense legal component to your business what can you do to provide as much leeway to front-line folks while ensuring proper guidance and discretion on sensitive items?
  • Give your front-line folks the proper training in investor relations, media relations, customer service, public relations, etc. so that they understand the different types of inquiries they’ll receive and a framework with which to deal with them.
  • Make sure your front-line people are friendly, personable and genuinely interested in helping people. That spirit will shine as they interact with your customers and potential customers in the social sphere.

Speed wins – how fast are you?

To me it is clear that speed wins.  Especially in social media.  So how fast are you? How fast is your organization? And what can you do to make it or your department faster?  What am I missing?  I’d love your feedback in the comments.

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Compromises are easy to make, hard to live with

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Purple cows rarely come from compromise

Purple cows rarely come from compromise

Compromises are a part of work, a part of life.  We make them every day.  Whether with our coworkers, family members, partners, suppliers, children, or employers; we make compromises everywhere.  In fact, often the ability to do your job effectively means making compromise after compromise to meet the limitations and requirements of other stakeholders tied to a particular project.  But it is often times the people who don’t make compromises, who are difficult and dedicated to an idea (a vision really) that they want to see brought into being untarnished and uncompromised.  It is usually those ideas that are the real wow ideas.  So why do so many compromises get made?

Because they’re easy, of course.

I was recently working on a new marketing initiative for my company. It’s a complex, multi-tiered marketing effort spanning across a bunch of channels and executions.  To pull something like this off you need everything from executive sponsorship to product support to public relations to agency and vendors to help realize the vision.  And a project like this is a breeding ground for compromises.  Things that are hard and expensive get put on the chopping block or reduced in scope and function.  Things that are seen as a risk as dialed back to a test.  Creative that needs to really grab you in left at good enough for budget reasons.  And the list goes on.

The job of a good marketer, a leader, a visionary is to understand which compromises are worth making and which ones aren’t. It is your responsibility to understand what makes a difference and where to draw the line.  What compromises are being done for budget reasons?  If you spend that extra money will you get a much greater return?  What compromises are being done for convenience? Does an idea not fit a template or product? How much better would the campaign be if you spent the time and money to change it?  Which compromises are being done for time?  Can you do a phased launch to ship something that works with a commitment to improving it quickly? And finally, which compromises are you absolutely not willing to make?  And how do you deal with proposed compromises to your inviolate core?

Compromises are a part of life. They are easy to make and we make them everyday.  Evaluating which compromises are the right ones to make is the job of any successful marketer.  Because while compromises are easy to make they’re often very hard to live with.

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