“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….

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.