“So where do we start?” This is a good question to ask before jumping into social media. Many companies have already started without knowing it, and others are so paralyzed by the fear of exposure or lack of control that they never get out of the gates.

To get on the right track you first need to develop a strategic plan to control and participate in the ever-changing social media universe. Don’t start prematurely with fancy campaigns to build a Facebook fan base or begin production on a hit viral YouTube video. Hold on to those ideas for now and start with the basics: research, planning, and listening.

But before we even get to the good stuff,  we have to make sure that management is convinced that social media is the right thing to pursue—and sometimes that is easier said than done. We’ve observed that many C-level executives of large corporations were born before 1980 and quite frankly are not typical users of social media. Of course they feel the buzz, but often they don’t have firsthand knowledge of the medium, nor have they experienced their viral powers. So how do you build the business case for your unconvinced boss or client?

The first concern a CEO might have is about the audience: “I’m not certain our niche audience is using this stuff.” This is why you need to come prepared with the compelling facts:

• More than a third of the U.S. population is on Facebook
• Half the human race is under the age of 30, and they’ve never known life without the Internet
• One-third of women between the ages of 18 and 34 check Facebook before breakfast
• Half of all online time is used in social media accounts
• Communications within social media accounts have surpassed email

The stats go on and on, and the numbers keep growing.

If your CEO is still not convinced that her customers and potential customers are on Facebook, show her Facebook users by geographic region. You can easily find the number of  Facebook users in remote zip codes or tiny cities through Facebook’s targeted ad generator. Comparing your current customer numbers in a small city to Facebook users in that same city will show undeniable opportunity. Maybe you need a compelling quote:

Social media is the same today as it was yesterday. It’s just now reached such a critical mass, it’s too hard to ignore. You don’t want to be “that guy” or “that brand” who refuses to adapt to change and loses touch with reality.

—Julia Roy, Senior Manager, Coach, Inc.

If you’re still getting pushed to the back burner, show them what the other big boys are doing:

• 80% of the Global 100 companies are using at least one social media platform
• At least half are reaching audiences through Facebook (54%) and YouTube (50%); one-third maintain corporate blogs
• Global 100s have four or five Twitter accounts, two or three Facebook fan pages, one or two YouTube channels, and four or five corporate blogs
  
  ^{Source: Burson-Marsteller Evidence-Based Communications}

By this point, let’s hope you’ve quickly proven the need to start a strategy, but it’s possible that your company is still not seeing the potential benefit. You might be asked, “How is this going to improve sales or sell product?” This is the end game for all forms of marketing, but social media is a long-term commitment and not an event that brings in immediate returns. Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google, put it wisely:

Social media…is a way of thinking…it’s not about sales, or ads, or click-through rates. It’s about pursuing relationships and fostering communities of consumers. It’s about rethinking how you make plans when your customers are in the center and in control.

There are many dangers in not being involved that upper management should be made aware of, such as:

• Your employees are already doing it—yes, they are doing it for you, without guidance or brand continuity
• Discussions about your brand are taking place without you
• Incorrect statements about your company and products are living online without being challenged or corrected

Beyond promoting products and offers, there are many other key benefit areas, such as:

• Brand awareness
• Inbound marketing research (it’s an ongoing focus group)
• Community relations
• Customer support
• Recruiting and employee relations
• Investor relations
• Crisis management

Now that you’ve got the management team convinced that developing a social media strategy is the best place to start, you need to perform research, develop a plan, and do some listening. In my next post I’ll address these next steps and best practices.

A social media strategy is almost a requirement at this point for any commercial brand. For most, the common combination of a Twitter and Facebook account fed with frequent posts is usually enough. With every tweet your followers are reminded of your existence, and if you are lucky enough, they may even click through to any links you provide. But harnessing the power of social media in a carefully orchestrated campaign utilizing all the major platforms? That’s an entirely different proposition – and quite a feat if it can be pulled off. Despite the challenge, that’s exactly what the creative team behind Old Spice did.

During the week of July 12th, the incredible creatives at Wieden+Kennedy managed to harness the freakishly strong power of social media to create one of the most memorable ad campaigns the Internet has seen yet. Over the course of two days, the team fielded questions from all over the Internet, and responded by writing and filming 87 short YouTube videos.

The right material for the job

If your target market intersects with the user base of your choice of social media platforms, there’s a direct connection to the walls and feeds of millions of potential customers that is just waiting to be made.

In case you are not already familiar with the Old Spice ads staring Isaiah Mustafa, they originally aired during the 2010 Super Bowl and later during the Winter Olympics. The first commercial shot with its mix of quick shots, random imagery and deadpan delivery proved to have the right recipe for viral Internet success resulting in over 16 million views on YouTube. By mid-July the “Old Spice guy” was already something of a household name in the dysfunctional households of various Internet communities. As a result,  when a call was put out on Old Spice’s Twitter and Facebook pages for people to ask the Old Spice guy questions (you could basically ask him anything) word spread pretty fast, resulting in lots of submissions, giving the writers plenty of source material to riff on. Once received, the questions were sorted through and ranked for effectiveness, and a script was quickly written and filmed, resulting in a short and usually very funny YouTube clip.

The plan comes together

People soon realized what was going on – that there was a direct line to the Old Spice guy and that he might say your name and do something really weird in a widely viewed, personalized video. From there things really got rolling. Soon, such celebrities as Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan and George Stephanopoulos, bloggers, and other specialty websites (with decent-sized communities, of course, to keep the buzz going) like Perez Hilton, G4TV’s Kevin Pereira (embedded below), gadget blog Gizmodo and the Huffington Post started asking questions. The resulting video responses were linked on traffic driving sites such as Digg and Reddit. And having the Old Spice guy respond directly to a Reddit user and to Digg founder Kevin Rose didn’t hurt either in getting that to happen.

But the great thing was that the videos didn’t have to feature a celebrity to be funny. Seemingly random users provided material that was just as good. And, like anybody who takes a photo with a celebrity or gets an autograph, they want to share it with everybody. Famous or not, when people received personalized videos, they ran back to their community of choice and posted them, further spreading the word.

The payoff

So by targeting high profile Internet figures, individual websites and users known only deep within their respective communities, the Old Spice guy responded to the entire internet. And apparently the whole stunt has paid off. As noted in Adweek “According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent.”

Google CFO Patrick Pichette even weighed in on the campaign noting that “It just gives you a glimpse of where the world is going”. Well the world may be going in that direction but how long will it take until people learn to tune it out as they have banner ads and television commercials? Will people allow the occasional weaving of marketing with their entertainment, or will they smell a sales pitch a mile away? Too bad the Old Spice guy isn’t taking any more questions….

There seems to be another scammy trend brewing in email marketing. Recently I’ve been receiving email promotions from brands with subject lines apologizing for a mistake or retracting a misstatement. I like to forgive and forget as much as the next guy, but when the apology requested is nothing more than a trick to get me to open an email, I’m opting out.

Okay, I admit it, I’ve fallen for the trick a few times. Most such emails are from smaller companies hurting for revenue, but some are from brands that are well established and trusted. Just recently I received an email apology from TripAdvisor (a site I always use when planning a trip, by the way).

TripAdvisor’s subject line was: “Oops we had a glitch.” Inside was a copy of an email I had received the day before about its Travelers’ Choice 2010 Awards, which I had clicked through earlier without a glitch. The message said:

“Our Travelers’ Choice announcement was so popular this week, many readers couldn’t access the results. They’re available now.

Apologies and many thanks,
TripAdvisor.”

It’s hard to believe that TripAdvisor’s sophisticated servers crashed due to the high volume of visitors from this email campaign, but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the company really had a “glitch” and should apologize. Was there a better way to handle this?

My first recommendation would be to make the subject line less ambiguous–and, in fact, less intriguing. If it’s really an apology, save me time and let me know directly in the subject line that there was a problem with the Travelers’ Choice 2010 Awards. Brands should be honest and accountable for their mistakes—but if this is a tactic to improve open rates disguised as an apology, it will ultimately diminish the site’s credibility.

TripAdvisor could easily have promoted its awards within another value-added email promotion, by using search marketing, on its website, or through other avenues. Brand loyalty must be earned over time, but it can be destroyed quickly through overzealous marketing.

Customers form their opinions of you based on your value and how you treat them. Treat them with respect and they’ll be loyal forever.

When I was a creative director at HomePC magazine back in the early ’90s, there were lots of articles making predictions about the convergence of PCs, TV, and telecom. Along came WebTV in ’96, a big box with a wired keyboard that made your TV into a monitor for accessing the Internet. Microsoft bought WebTV, but it never took off; it was very clumsy, with a bad browser among other shortcomings (not surprising). Now here we are in 2010, and you can plug your ethernet cable or wi-fi into your TV. Presto, you’re on the Web—sort of.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the television/Internet space, but I can assure you that something’s very wrong with this picture. I’ve been doing a little research and I’ve looked closely at Web-enabled Sony, LG, and Panasonic TVs. These sets do not offer the big, open Internet we know and love; instead, they provide widgets and content channels chosen for us based on licensing deals between TV manufacturers and content providers such as Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Time Warner.

This may seem to be a huge improvement for consumers. We can get movies instantly from Netflix and YouTube and great content from some of the best media companies in the world. In return, the media companies expand their audience, which will help them weather the recession and diminish their advertising woes. This is great for Sony and Google. But it’s bad for us. As Dan Frommer from Business Insider puts it, “We want a TV with a real Web browser that offers full access to the entire Web via wi-fi/broadband—not some crippled gimmick.”

As a marketer and consumer I have serious concerns with the direction the new Web-enabled TV movement is taking. I’m reminded of the AOL days, with closed proprietary systems where content was pushed and interactivity was limited. The only true convergence happening here is the merging of services provided by ISPs, telecoms, and TV manufacturers.

My exploration into the world of Web-enabled TVs has renewed my appreciation for the current Web—the Web that is free, open, and innovative. We need to remind ourselves that we have a wonderful and fragile resource that needs to be fought for and defended. I hope we haven’t lost the battle when it comes to Web TV, and that it will evolve based on user demand and not on corporate enrichment. Content providers, telecoms, and manufacturers need to realize that with an open Web they’ll have their biggest audiences and happiest sponsors.

If you’re interested in the fight for the open Web and Internet neutrality, please visit these sites:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

http://www.freepress.net/

http://www.wearetheweb.org/

http://www.openinternetcoalition.com/

http://stopbigmedia.com/

Earlier this month I attended the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) conference in New York. The mission of SoDA is to advance the profession of digital marketing through education, discussions of best practices, and advocacy. The conference was billed as an “un”conference, which made the event conversational, collaborative—and at times a little too “un”structured. Still, it was a good experience.

We broke up into groups to discuss hot topics: Challenges of the Modern Agency, Metrics for Success, Engaging Social Media. I had hoped to gain insight into how large companies and agencies are managing their brands within their social-media initiatives. It’s clear that social media should be part of a brand’s marketing strategy, but how are companies controlling their brands’ voices? To my surprise, other attendees from top agencies and brands had similar questions—but few answers.

Some sound ideas popped up, such as the development of branding guidelines for social media, and the hiring of brand editors who can provide a checkpoint before tweets, blogs, and comments are published. These two methods can work fine for blogs themselves, but they can kill the spontaneity and immediacy of a tweet or a comment on a blog. Moreover, what do you do if your entire company is enthusiastic about speaking out and joining in on all the conversations?

If it’s your company’s policy to allow many social-media voices, it’s imperative to set up rules and guidelines and hold your employees accountable. Amber Naslund of the blog Altitude provides great examples of blogging policies from large corporations that can be used as an excellent starting point for developing your company’s guidelines.

If your social-media voice is monitored by a specifically designated department or by an outside agency, it’s easier to stay in control and keep your brand’s message inline. Your social-media captains should plan how they will uphold your brand’s promise in their conversations with customers, employees, and partners. They should meet weekly or monthly with the marketing or brand teams to ensure that all efforts are aligned with your brand’s strategy and corporate culture.

For a Twitter campaign for one of our clients, we create a monthly bag of “evergreen” tweets that are mixed in with spontaneous ones. That client is accustomed to having its copy and creative approved by its legal department and brand managers, which is not an ideal situation for quick tweets about what’s going on at the moment. To overcome this we develop 20 tweets that can be preapproved, and then mix those in with 10 spontaneous tweets that follow our defined social-media strategy. With this method and ongoing monitoring we’re able to lower the risks of tainting the brand, while still appearing spontaneous and continuing to build one-to-one relationships with the company’s customers.

This is new territory, and the best tactics have yet to be determined.  We encourage you to share your experiences and thoughts on how you manage brand continuity in social media for your company and your clients.

In a previous post, I talked about trimming the fat from content. But let’s face it: trimming the fat assumes you had good meat to start with. In a world where people have precious little time, if you’re thinking site redesign, content strategy has to be a main priority.

I’ve been working with a client recently on a large site redesign. Like many of my other site-redesign projects, this one was long overdue. Much of the content was outdated. It had been managed by a host of individuals, all from different countries, who each had their own way of doing things. The jargon was so product- and business-specific (filled with acronyms and marketing brand names) that it was hard for anyone outside the company to understand. Images (yes, images are content too) were old and poorly optimized, and they incorporated a myriad of photo styles, none of which went together. The client was going to implement a new content management system, which is very robust but needs a lot of management on the development side to institute roles and define content types. What was needed was a true content strategist.

A content strategist works with a client to understand what content will end up on a site, how that content will be organized, what processes will be in place to manage content of different types, and how various types of content relate to one another. Content strategists are part information architects and part copywriters, with a dash of user advocate thrown in. They create rules-based approaches for refining existing content, enhance search optimization of content through metatags and keywords, and develop new content.

While working with an information architect (IA) is necessary in nearly all web and application design projects, for large brochure and information-rich sites a content strategist on the team is also invaluable.

The benefits of working with a content strategist:

• Content strategists are more focused on the specific content of the site and not just the organization of that content as it relates to the overall architecture, as an IA would be.
• A content strategist can develop a matrix that defines content types and sets up relevance relationships to shape how content is linked throughout the site.
• Content strategists can set up keyword, data tag, and metatag information for content elements and pages.
• Content strategists can set up rules for content, such as whether a page title also becomes the menu title to navigate to that page, or whether images should have captions. These details are often too granular for an IA to be involved with.
• A content strategist can define data elements for individual page templates and help the IA structure the priority for those elements. This can be a way to organize existing content, or to help understand what important content elements might be missing.
• Content strategists can help define roles for those who edit content. In complex companies, multiple levels of access and workflow processes might be needed. This “behind the scenes” look into content creation is something information architects don’t often perform.

The history of branding goes back nearly 4,000 years; it was originally conceived to promote ownership. Branding today represents something far more complicated and even elusive for many companies. Today the concept of branding has much more to do with engagement than with ownership. And the act of branding has less to do with a product or service and more to do with the way a company engages an audience with that product or service.

Take a positive experience you’ve had with a brand. What about the experience made it enjoyable? Everything about that experience was an example of branding, from purchasing it to opening up the package (assuming it was a product) to using it for the first time and every time since. If you love that product then the company is doing a good job of branding.

Now think about how this translates online. Take, for example, large media sites like Google or Yahoo. For many people these destination sites have become their default homepage. It is because they are engaging with their users over and over again. In some cases a site you like may have only been a temporary stop for you, or as in the case of Google one you return to often. The point is that if you remember them and go back they are also doing a good job of branding.

If you’re looking for ways your company can do a better job of branding online, here are some suggestions:

1. Interact with your own site often.
It doesn’t matter if you have a social media, product brochure, news, or any other kind of site. You should know it backwards and forwards and should be able to tell what’s good about it and what’s not. You should consider this from both your and the typical user’s perspective. Think about where your site is presenting compelling information, where it’s asking users if they want to connect, and how those connections are nurtured and maintained. Make a list of things you’re doing well. Note where things can improve and what should get tossed altogether.

2. Make sure that the design and usability of your site match the intended position you want your brand to have.
Do you have a fashion product, a toy, a set of corporate services you’re selling? How is the design of your site reflecting that? Who are the audiences that come to your site? Are they the audiences you are trying to cultivate? Are you engaging with them in ways that are most comfortable for them? A brand audit can help you identify how users are connecting with your brand, and what their perceptions are.

3. Offer ways for your users to connect with you.
These can be in the form of a user’s forum, or a Twitter or Facebook page. The point of these is to be engaged. Talk to your customers and allow them to talk to each other. For many businesses this sounds like a dangerous proposition but more often than not, repeat business and referrals are the best ways to build brand loyalty. What’s also good about this is you can help frame the conversation and if something negative does come out of this interaction you can react to it before it snowballs out of control.

4. Talk to a professional.
Branding is complicated. In many cases it requires nuances that only a professional who’s been doing it for a while can provide. Understanding where your brand is today, how it got there, and where it’s headed is often very difficult for someone on the inside and too close to that brand. It often takes an outside perspective to get a full understanding and a new brand strategy.

The outrage has been amusing to say the least and the vehicles for protest are the usual suspects: blog postings, twitter updates – even petitions … no we’re not talking about health care… we’re talking about something much more serious – typefaces! Specifically, Ikea’s recent decision to switch from using Futura, a classic typeface that they have successfully used for 50 years, to Verdana, a font designed for Microsoft back in 1996.

While I understand the reaction and where it originates from (Verdana was originally designed for on screen viewing, improving readability at small sizes) for me, seeing Verdana in print is just… weird. It’s as if the real font wasn’t present when the catalog went to press and we wound up with a system default in its place.

What ultimately matters though isn’t designer opinions, but customer reaction and any changes in brand perception. Currently, the public’s perception of the Ikea brand is a half-empty, half-full kind of thing. Some see it as a refined brand that understands and values design. Others see it as cheap utilitarian furniture that you use to furnish a dorm room or first apartment. It’s this contradiction that contributes to Ikea’s wide appeal.

With this almost perfect balance of form and function, the choice of Verdana can be seen as tipping the scales too much into the utilitarian camp. The official word from Ikea spokeswoman Camilla Meiby seems to indicate that this was the reasoning behind the decision, “Verdana is a simple, cost-effective font which works well in all media and languages”. This is definitely understandable considering that the Ikea catalogue is produced in in 27 languages for 35 countries (55 editions total).

This will be interesting to watch as it unfolds. Will Ikea pull a Tropicana and revert to Futura or will they stick it out? One thing’s for certain, it will not be decided by designers, it’s all up to Ikea’s customers.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Worth recently redesigned their website. Back in my magazine publishing days, I was a big fan of Worth from a design and editorial point of view. They consistently produced provocative covers and nicely designed features, and used innovative illustration. The new online version is a bit of a disappointment, especially in the innovation department.

I would give the new site a passing grade for design and branding, but an Incomplete for its business model and user experience. Some minor issues, starting from the top: the global navigation labels are a bit cryptic. When it comes to global navigation, say it like it is. Section titles that have double meanings, like “Live” (“Live long and prosper” or “Live, it’s Saturday Night”) and “Make” (I won’t get into the ambiguous meanings of that one) are too conceptual and not descriptive enough. Your audience wants to navigate quickly, so don’t make your road signs confusing.

Another mystery is why designate so much prime real estate to a stock market ticker in the top right corner? This affluent community is checking their live market reports through other sources, so I would use this space more wisely.

My biggest question relates to the sustainability of this model in today’s online marketplace. If you are going through a redesign, you need to think far beyond advertising as your only revenue stream. Worth has a nice advisor section which could require paid listings but where’s the community aspect to this site? Worth needs to make users their partners in their online operations.

For example, there’s no way a user can comment on a story, contribute to a blog, subscribe to an RSS feed or even an email newsletter.  Are they not building a database?  Where are the plans for bringing this audience of high-worth individuals together with forums, groups and mobile? Once you’ve got them together you can start monetizing and building different revenue streams.  Perhaps charging for listings in a vendor marketplace; posting jobs; offering premium research (leads) or tools; charging for whitepapers and reports; building affiliate programs…the list goes on. There are many different revenue opportunities for a site like this that should be tested.  Without the community tools and infrastructure in place, there’s nowhere to start.

The community aspect might be in future plans and can always be integrated later — but at this point in time, I don’t think this redesign was really Worth it.

Welcome to our venue for getting personal.  This is where we’ll share our know-how and stay in touch with our professional community. It’s also a platform for others to speak out on trends, best practices and their own insights. It’s a space to open up about our experience and our experiences, and process our processes…and I’ll start off with our thinking about this very blog.

So how do we –or you– know if it’s right to launch a blog? Or the right time? When it seems like everyone’s already blogging, why should anyone start something new?

In our case, we’ve been recommending blogs and social media for clients for sometime now, as part of a robust integrated marketing strategy including other initiatives like email campaigns, search marketing, PR, speaking at conferences, etc. We set our own marketing priorities just as we would advise our clients. First we redesigned our website so that it effectively presents our experience, services and brand personality, and rigged it so it brings in leads and subscribers to our newsletter. Second, we swore to doing our monthly newsletter, Loewy’s Latest, with no excuses, once a month. Now is the blog, and next up is our Facebook Page, Twitter…all the social media we provide the strategy, design and technology for to our clients.

Basically, before starting to roll out social media for our own company, we spent time generating a sort of critical mass through other outlets: optimizing our website to build more traffic, creating a larger pool of contacts through our email newsletter. Now that we’ve achieved that critical mass, it’s time for us to take it further – expand our network and allow the conversations to become less one-way.

A blog is an appropriate choice for us because it’s a good fit with our brand: conversational, friendly, smart, and collaborative.  It’s also a good fit with our goals. We have a lot of experience to communicate but we’re also are always looking for ways to improve and stay on top of emerging trends. Our blog will let us do both.

So how’s your website doing? Does your online identity fit your branding strategy? Does your website’s overall experience match the quality of your products and services?  Are you getting leads, selling products, building awareness or even getting traffic?  If the answer is yes, then maybe you’re ready to do a blog – because you have an audience, a tone of voice and a network. You’re ready to be a thought leader in your industry or at least have an opinion. Of course you can have a blog without a corporate website, and you can even make money at it.   But if you’re like us, and most of our clients and peers, your website is critical for doing business online, disseminating information, and creating the first point of contact for all potential customers.

Let’s say you’ve got it all together and you’re ready get started.  Keep your blog focused, stay in tune with what you know and be relevant to your game.  Yes, there are many blogs in your industry, but any niche or network can use fresh thinking, so don’t be apprehensive. Like any tool, if it is available and right for you, then use it.  Make sure it doesn’t duplicate what your site is already doing for you and your audience – consider it an avenue for a different kind of messaging and communication.

For us, we understand that our audience is an intimate group of professionals looking to share best practices for doing business online. In upcoming posts we’ll be engaging our network and sharing our points of view on what we do best: providing the strategy, design and technology to companies that value the power of the internet. We’re kicking off the dialogue with several topics each month, coming from senior Loewy staffers with different areas of expertise.

Here’s to getting social. We’ve opened the floor, now we invite you to join the conversation…and if commenting is not your thing, just stop by and say Helloewy.