Steve Robins led a great session on Social Media at ProductCamp this past Saturday in Cambridge, MA. I found it interesting to be in a crowd of product marketing folks from organizations of all sizes with the opportunity to see where they were with social media. Its fascinating to see social media programs start in "old school" organizations and that attitude of employees towards adopting change or hiding from it. Here are my notes from this session.
We all agreed that an effective social media program begins with your organization’s goals. But, when the group was asked what their goals were, there were a variety of answers that included:
- We want to gather market requirements
- We want to gather leads
- We want to make sure that we aren't getting burned "out there"
- We want to hear what people are saying about our competition
- We know people are doing their research online so we want to make sure our information is there
- We want more evangelists for our products
These are all good goals, but in a big organization (or even a mid-size one), chances are these goals fall under different departments and no one stepped up to say that they were coordinated across their organization with a company-wide social media strategy.
So where should an organization start? How about by listening before you start talking? Everyone agreed that "Frank" at Comcast Cares on Twitter was doing a great job at staying ahead of the pack on customer complaints online. Why? Because he asks "how can I help?" to diffuse the emotion and to change the conversation.
We also agreed that just because the world is on Twitter doesn't mean that your company belongs on Twitter. There's nothing worse that jumping into social media without a strategy so that when some sort of action occurs, you're not prepared to respond. An example that Joseline Manebrought up was with Sprint. Last spring, there new CEO ran ads with his e-mail address on it asking for customer response. When folks accepted his invitation and start writing in, they received an auto-response e-mail. Talk about a way to backfire your campaign!
In all, about a third of the crowd said that they were using social media in some fashion within their organizations. When asked how it was working, no one jumped up and said "Fantastic!" Instead, we heard that it takes a financial and resource commitment and until my company is ready to commit to that, we can't start a social media program. And, that social media is something that you need to measure so that you can demonstrate success to senior management for buy-in.
While I think that the ProductCamp crowd was conservative, I think their approach towards adopting social media is typical of many organizations today. They get that they need to be doing it and they want to learn more, but they are hoping that someone else will figure it out for them and tell them what to do.
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