Fortune 500 Lag in Social Media Adoption, To Their Great Cost

At the end of last month McKinsey published the results of their fifth annual survey on the ways organizations use social technologies.

For the most part, the results are a snooze: The adoption of social media tools, from Twitter to Quora, is steadily rising; measurable benefits are steadily if slowly increasing; and the sophistication in the way organizations use social media has seen significant gains. All good, although hardly ground-breaking news.

But wait. The McKinsey people aren’t anything if not thorough, so they also tried to show a correlation between adoption of social media and self-reported organizational performance (that is, market share gains, operating margin compared to competition, and being first in industry market share). To my surprise, on the latter measure – showing a link between market share leadership and adopting social tools – the correlations are mostly negative. This suggests that the adoption of social media is adversely associated with being a market leader, a counter-intuitive and strange result. If it were so, then the good people at McKinsey should be telling the titans of industry to flee Facebook, ban blogging, and terminate Twitter post-haste.

But wait. The researchers’ explanation of this is that “while market leaders may use social media technologies within the organization, they might be less inclined than market challengers to push for a full range of benefits [and use social media externally].” So, according to McKinsey, they suspect that market leaders as a group are actually under-utilizing social media.

This sounds plausible. Indeed, very detailed research by UMASS Dartmouth shows that for blogs, about 23 percent of the Fortune 500 (large, market-share leaders) have corporate blogs, compared to well over 50% if the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing companies compiled by Inc. magazine. There are similar results for corporate adoption of Facebook and Twitter – the Fortune 500 lag the rest of industry, especially the fastest-growing companies.

Put these two pieces of research together and we have strong data suggesting that large, market-share leaders – think companies like WalMart, Exxon-Mobil, Proctor and Gamble, Hewlett Packard, Boeing and Dow Chemical – are collectively failing to extract value from the social media revolution. These findings play into the stereotype of the lumbering, bureaucratic multinational that often enjoy a market-share lead but fail to take first-mover advantage of new innovations.

And the research clearly shows that the price of late adoption of social media is very high indeed.

Latest Update: A Definitive List of Social Media Measurment and Monitoring Tools

Way back in April 2010 I compiled what I boldly claimed was a definitive list of social media measurement and monitoring tools. Since then, I've updated the list a couple of times and critically reevaluated my 'definitive' claim: Most likely, I've missed a lot of solutions and have certainly struggled to keep pace with the constant changes in the evolving social media measurement market.

My latest update saw numerous changes, reflecting increasing competitive pressures in a very cluttered marketplace. A half-dozen companies have disappeared completely, and several others have moved on to provide different solutions only tangentially related to social media metrics. There's also been a small number of acquisitions, most notably Salesforce.com buying the market-leader Radian6 in March this year. The net result is that the total number of solutions has fallen, although the quality of the survivors is very high.

If you're looking to buy a social media measurement solution there's a few important takeaways from all these changes:

• It's a Buyers Market
  Despite the predicted consolidation, there's still an abundance of companies supplying solutions. Companies are eager to get your business and you should be able to cut a deal for the right solution.
• Buyer Beware!
  Expect the consolidation to accelerate over the coming year. Be cautious about companies that aren't able to demonstrate good market traction, supply a full list of references, or just seem too desperate; they may well be gone in a year or two.
• Understand Your Requirements
  There's a broad spectrum of solutions out there, and every day new features are being added. Make sure you have a strong understanding of what you need to do and how a tool will help you do it. Take a look at the guides from many industry analysts (mine is here).
• Recognize that the Market is Still Maturing
  There is no perfect solution out there. Sourcing data, avoiding spam, providing adequate filtering, integration to marketing automation systems, providing easy-to-configure dashboards and reporting, alerting for your customer services folks... these are just a handful of important issues that are still being worked out.
• The Giants are Coming
  Finally, we 're still waiting for the obvious market giants... Google, Microsoft, maybe Facebook... to really enter this market. There's been ongoing rumors that Google was going to release a full-blown media monitoring solution; if they ever do, it could upturn the market and put an end to many of the companies I list. Stay tuned...

Any Ideas What Public Relations Is?

When you’re in the business of managing the image of others it’s a little embarrassing to acknowledge you’re suffering from an identity crisis.

This week, the good people at the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) began an effort to better define what “public relations” is. This isn’t their first attempt: Two previous tries at a definition, in 2003 and 2007, ended in failure.

A perfectly reasonable question to ask is ‘why doesn't a working definition for public relations already exist?’ After all, the modern discipline of public relations was pioneered at the turn of the last century by Edward Bernays, Ivy Lee and others; the PRSA itself was formed in 1935.  Isn’t it fairly obvious what PR is about? And you don’t see physicists, lawyers, or dog trainers agonizing over what their chosen profession is all about, so why the debate with PR?

One answer is that PR and Corporate Communications are enduring monumental change. The economic collapse of conventional journalism has permanently altered the way news is created and shared. Opinions are formed and reputations altered through a labyrinth of social connections. Managing a public image has become more complicated, and the role of a PR pro less clear.

Another, less palatable reason is that most things in the world of marketing and communications are badly defined. If we were to take Voltaire at his word – “if you wish to converse with me, define your terms” – then a discussion with marketing pros would be very abbreviated indeed. As a profession, we bandy about overloaded terms like “brand”, “image”, and even “marketing” itself with only a fuzzy and shifting sense of what we mean.

So the PRSA, in an act of either abdication or inclusion, depending on your perspective, has asked for crowd-sourced inputs on what a definition should be. In my view, they’re asking the wrong question. We know full-well what PR is. The issue is how to make PR effective.

Bernays, the grandchild of Sigmund Freud, was very blunt in his assessment of what PR is about and its underlying intent, with his notion of “engineered consent” being rooted in ideas borrowed from propaganda. Ivy Lee was gentler:

"In brief, our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public…prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about." 

Modern PR hovers uneasily between the two truths offered by Bernays and Lee. Not much has changed at this level. The PRSA is thoroughly confused; we don’t need a new definition of what PR is, but rather we need to understand how to make PR more effective in a new communications landscape. The goals of PR are the same; the mechanisms for reaching those goals are changing and uncertain. The PRSA’s energies would be better spent on addressing these real challenges.

Marketing by the Numbers

One of the side-effects of our always online existence is that everything has become visible and measurable. As we all rummage around in the virtual world, we leave behind a trail of digital detritus that others can find, accumulate and sequence: What we do, where we go, who we are and what we think can all be discovered and refactored with unnerving ease. This has raised many alarms about privacy and security, but has also introduced opportunities for marketing professionals.

I’d argue that the new world of digital marketing is upending the whole marketing profession.

Marketing used to be a largely subjective, qualitative, artful enterprise. For sure, we could do research, conduct elaborate focus groups, and painstakingly gather data to inform decisions and discover the impact of our marketing activities, but all this was arduous and often ad-hoc. We’ve moved from an environment of information sparcity to information overload. Instead of ‘mining’ for data, we’re dealing with the avalanche.

Today, data-driven marketing is becoming the norm. Expectations of what marketing can achieve are changing. Most important, there’s a new level of expected accountability.

Some years back I got a Ph.D. and as a result accumulated more knowledge about statistics and research methods that I thought was healthy, or useful. Turns out, my old stats texts are the books I’m referring to most. I’ve been interviewing for a new job and a common ground for questioning is “how do you measure the effectiveness of what you do?” I’ve even seen job descriptions that single out the ability to conduct A/B and multivariate analysis of campaign data. Being able to read data – and to conduct marketing from a data-driven perspective – is a vital skill today.

Of course, data isn’t wisdom, as Wharton Professor George Day has pointed out. According to him, the amount of data a company faces is doubling every 18 months, while our ability to sift and assimilate the data is remaining pretty much static. Day and his colleagues advocate ‘adaptive marketing experimentation’, an approach to marketing that fosters data-driven decision-making by continually testing variations on different solutions – a fail-fast, discover-quickly methodology. Their views are informed by a recent IBM research report created from interviews with over 1,700 CMOs. The leading issues for these CMOs: data overload, social media, channel proliferation and shifting demographics.

Professor Day’s recent article is a great read. And after you’ve finished, see if you can find those old statistics textbooks in the attic.

Klout, Qwikster, and Mob Marketing

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Klout, a tool that attempts to measure an individual’s online social influence. As with all scales that try to quantify individual prowess – think IQ to SAT – there’s a healthy debate about the basic validity of what Klout purports to do: After all, what exactly is “influence”?

I’d hazard a guess that whether you’re a fan or a foe of Klout has a lot to do with how well you score on their 100-point scale, though I may be being overly cynical. But whatever you’re opinion of Klout I think we can agree that finding some way of articulating relative influence is a big marketing problem we need to solve. We desperately need a way to sort the wheat from the chaff, because in our noisy online world there’s an awful lot of chaff.

Personally, I don't see Klout as a permanent fixture of the social media landscape. Klout thinks it is selling a solution when they really only have a feature: Most social media monitoring tools of any worth have in them a way of determining salience, aka influence. Most search engines will get there soon too. This is where this "feature" belongs, in a context that has some value.

But there’s another problem, neatly exemplified by the well-publicized and stock-shrinking antics at Netflix. To recap, after doing a great deal of research with users, Netflix decided to split the company’s identity in two, and launched Qwikster so they can focus on their rapidly growing steaming media business. About the same time they also changed their fee structure. Within days the online hordes were screaming foul, droves left the service, and as of today the stock price is down about 70 percent from its high this year. A quasi- apology was made.

There are many complex financial and business issues at play here, and there's no question that Netflix management failed on many levels.  There's also a consensus that, from a strictly business standpoint, Netflix was making the right decisions. All that aside, my question is this: Given that Netflix did extensive research and consulted with their community of users before they made any changes, why was the subsequent reaction so profoundly negative?

One answer gets at the root of the real problem with Klout, which measures an individual’s influence. Often, this is the wrong unit of analysis. I’d argue that Netflix, like many brands before it, fell victim to a mob – a highly vocal minority that individually may have no clout at all, but collectively exert enormous influence. Worse, this vocal and passionate minority may not even represent the feelings of the silent majority of users, but they exert a disproportionate control.

Mass Marketing is passé. Welcome to Mob Marketing.

The communities that care about a particular brand or organization are diverse – they’ve always been so. What’s changed is the leveling effect of our online world: Everyone has equal voice, which means that amid all the babble it’s very hard to discern who matters individually and collectively. And it’s almost impossible to guard against a loose coalition of marginal naysayers once they’re mobilized.

What to do? Here's some suggestions:

• First, make sure you are engaged with all constituents of your brand. Listen widely, respond selectively. Make sure that your communities feel appreciated. This is the responsibility of everyone in your organization.
• Remember that all change attracts enemies. No matter what you do, it’s likely someone will take offense. Remain in control and have the courage of your convictions. Recognize that, despite what believers in crowd sourcing may say, giving over decision-making control to an unfiltered community may be unwise. Consult, inform and listen.
• Make sure you understand what the valuable – and often silent – majority want and do everything you can to get them involved. Activating your core base is critical: The weight of their collective opinion is the best defense against a marginal mob. Find ways to amplify their views and champion your brand.
• Finally, learn to recognize the marginal fanatics. Don’t overly invest in trying to change their hardened views – your energies are better spend cultivating and engaging your loyalists, and attracting new fans and supporters.

Brand America

In these fractious and partisan times it’s interesting how U.S. politicians of all stripes are eager to distance themselves from their chosen profession. Democrats and Republicans alike, no matter their actual tenure, are all suddenly Washington “outsiders.” Many have also developed a newly found appreciation for how businesses are run, and think government could learn a trick or two from corporate America. We don’t need a President, they seem to be saying, we need a CEO.

Government-as-business is an interesting concept, which got me thinking: Why not elect an American CMO, a kind of Marketer-in-Chief?

The question isn’t as facetious as it might seem. Lots of countries actually do elect or appoint someone – often a “president” with limited legislative clout – to represent their country without having any overt political baggage. Truth is, in Europe that’s what royalty’s for.

America desperately needs a Marketer-in-Chief. America the Brand isn’t so brave anymore. You don’t need to conduct an audit to see the signs of dwindling brand loyalty and a confused brand identity. A good CMO would have read the signals long ago: The latest Rasmussen Poll shows that only 16 percent of likely voters think their country is “heading in the right direction,” while only 35 percent think America’s best days are to come. This is Quickster bad. The truth is, behind all the Tea Party bluster and Take Wall Street theatrics, there’s a shared disquiet that the US has lost its way and compromised on some ideals.

Overseas, Brand America is being bashed as bad as tainted Tylenol or New Coke. A couple of foreign wars certainly don’t help, and a worldwide financial pandemic is also souring the mood. Interestingly, Obama’s reputation abroad remains strong – his personal brand is relatively unscathed.

But Brand America has dealt with crisis before and come through, so, what’s the problem now? I blame the politicians. As some famous American once said, “a house divided cannot stand,” and Brand America has some deep-sea-trench divisions on strategy and values. No self-respecting CMO would stand for this. It used to be that the country coalesced around a universally accepted brand promise: Liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness, etc. This was considered enough. Now, while we might agree on the brand promise, we dogmatically disagree on how to deliver on that promise. Even the role of government is being questioned. Meanwhile, as our fearless political leaders seem to encourage polarization, we flounder dealing with looming competitive threats from Brand China and the rest.

As any CMO knows, brand equity is a fragile commodity, hard to earn and too easily lost. However, in the case of Brand America, I think the gloomy prognosis is overstated.

A couple of months ago I was sworn-in as a US citizen, along with 260 others from over 30 different countries. It was a moving and sobering experience – I sat next to a Somali woman and a Nigerian man, both with harrowing stories of lost relatives and exile. An Indian man told me about the Pharma start-up he was creating – in the US. That same week, I listened to American scientists from the Kepler project describe discovering the first planets from other solar systems. And this year U.S. citizens netted seven Nobel prizes. On the global stage, America is still a place of invention and promise. The old cliché is true: American is a land of opportunity.

All we need is a Marketer-in-Chief to sell it better.

Is social media saturating – and what are the implications for marketing?

According to the latest data from Nielsen Research and Experian Simmons, the adoption of social media in the US has skyrocketed to 80 percent of those with online access, or over 40 percent of the overall population. Putting this in perspective, among those 35-and-younger, the adoption of social media is approaching that of US car ownership. Safe to say, it is clearly foolish to think of social media as something new or novel – it is an everyday part of most people’s lives.

Collectively, Americans now spend almost a billion hours a month exchanging news, information and gossip at social media sites. Last I checked there are still only 24 hours in a day: As you look at these stats, especially for the college-age set, the use of social media starts to look like borderline addiction. For many teens and tweens being connected online is an umbilical necessity for sustaining life. You wonder if Facebook and the rest shouldn’t carry warning labels, like cigarettes: Using Social Media Is Not A Substitute For Food, Sleep Or Reality.

More seriously, as social media adoption becomes mainstream, what are the consequences for marketing?

First, marketing pros should understand that media use overall is usually a zero-sum game: If we’re all spending more time online with social media, it usually means we’re doing less of some other media activity. There’s evidence to support this view, with online activities eating away at everything from watching television to reading. Second, we should anticipate that the use of social media is saturating. The amount of time we spend on social media is cresting, especially among those 35-and-younger.

This is a familiar scenario for marketing folks who have lived through other communications and marketing revolutions. I can remember when email marketing was a novelty, with response rates for well-targeted campaigns routinely reachig 3-5 percent (I’ve seen similarly impressive stats for the novelty-of-the-moment, QR codes). As social media saturates we should expect it to become harder and harder to create and sustain relationships between prospects and our brands. Saturation equates to clutter, attentions wane, and people become weary and guarded.

We should also remember that social media got that name for a reason – it’s a tool for staying in touch with friends and family, not primarily for finding your company, not matter how lovely it may be. Understand that social media is only one part of an integrated marketing program. Have realistic expectations - and make sure you communicate these to your management teams. As you work with social media, be true to yourself and your brand. The fundamentals of good marketing have not been re-invented: Be engaging, be credible, be trustworthy, and be unique.