Ryan Anderson dot ca

I talk to a fair number of people who want to pick my brain about their social media strategy.  These conversations are often cut short, after I ask them one question: “What do you want to accomplish?”

I seems like a fairly obvious question, but it’s one that stumps a lot of people.  The answer seems obvious as well – nobody ever asks why you’re advertising, or why you have a storefront.  Obviously it’s to “increase awareness” or “build profile.”

Social media is a venus flytrap for marketers.  From a distance, it’s perfect and beautiful – so many people are using it and it’s the ideal channel for promotion.  Once you’ve been enticed inside, it’s a much different view.  People don’t like messages, and advertising in social media channels is about as welcome as door-to-door salesmen, for the most part.  Social media is not the place to “build profile.”

Does that mean that blogging, micromedia and social networking can’t be powerful business tools?  Of course not – and many are using these tools brilliantly to build their business – but I’d wager that every single one of them could have answered that question instantly before they started.

So, what are the business goals you want to accomplish?  Do you want to network with like-minded people?  Provide better service than your competitors in a way that scales much more easily than a call centre?  Do you want to build a network that you can use in times of crisis?  Do you want to get product insights from your most vocal users?  Do you want to extend your reach as a personality or knowledge leader?  Do you want to understand your reputation better?

All of these things are possible, and some with very little expense, through social media, but they all require radically different approaches.  Those who have indeed built profile in social media did not start out with just that in mind – just as the most successful networker at an event doesn’t walk around with business card extended.

The reality is that you can’t even begin thinking about the route you’re going to take until you decide where you’re going.  Sure, road trips can be fun – but they’re not business.

Last Tuesday, I gave a presentation on Reputation 2.0 – reputation management in a social media environment.  I was asked by a few people to put my slides up online, but since they have no real context without me standing in front of them talking, I figured I would write this to accompany the disembodied Powerpoint.  So, as you read this, just imagine me standing in front of the slides saying it.  Then imagine me extremely charming and eloquent, rather than bleary and uncaffeinated from getting up at 5 to set things up.  Got it?  Perfect.

It seems like every week I read more stats about the state of the blogosphere, or new data about who’s using the internet.  These numbers are great for making a point, but they don’t really matter, and they often conflict with one another.  The real information lies in between all of these omnibus studies and online surveys that we cite in our presentations, and that is the fact that most people in North America use the internet, and most of those – especially among the younger and more affluent – are in some way involved in social media.

Reputation, and by extension, the protection of that reputation, has been around as long as self-awareness.  Likewise, as long as there have been companies and brands, there has been a need for companies to maintain their reputation.

Reputation management as a formal business function is relatively new, only surfacing in the early 1900s, but little has changed with regard to the basic principles.  At its core, reputation is the sum of actions, and the perception of those actions.  When media was much more scarce than it is now, most of reputation management centred around perception – it was much easier to spin your way out of a bad spot when there a lack of widely distributed media made it much harder for the public to see through a public statement or key message.

Now, however, media has advanced to the point where anyone has the ability to publish their thoughts to the world, whether they are the smaller percentage of creators – bloggers, podcasters and the like, or the much larger percentage of commenters – those who do not necessarily publish their own content, but add to public review sites like Yelp, ePinions or public forums that emerge around products and brands.

This democratization of production and distribution of product reviews has led to a mediascape that makes it exceptionally easy for consumers to see objective and community-edited opinions on products and companies, and makes it virtually impossible for companies to bamboozle its consumers.  For this reason, reputation 2.0 must focus more on changing a company’s actions than changing the perception of those actions.

Managing your reputation online requires three key elements: listening, analysis and influence.

Listen

The first element is one that every company needs to take to heart. Without actively monitoring the myriad public conversations that are happening every minute of every day in blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, public forums and review sites, managing reputation is impossible.  You can’t change what people are saying about you if you don’t even know what that is.

Start with a simple Google blog search, and find out what people are saying about your brand, about your products, about your company or about your employees.  Listening doesn’t have to be complicated right off the bat, and at the point where you require a more complex system, you can always switch to an enterprise solution like Radian6.

But keep in mind that it’s not only blogs you should be listening to.  As I’ve remarked before, many conversations are moving to Twitter or Friendfeed.  People are sharing photos of your brand on Flickr, videos about it on Youtube and possibly even creating Facebook groups – either for or against – and sharing them with their entire social graph.

Analyze

The second step of any monitoring effort is analysis.  What are people saying about your brand or your company?  Is it overwhelmingly positive or negative?  Is there one thing that many people are harping on?  Is it one segment that is talking about it the most?

These are the questions that should shape your analysis, and will eventually shape what you do to improve or maintain your online reputation.  Look for the good and the bad, and try to really understand what is being said, and especially how these conversations affect your business.  Are people being scared away by bad reviews?  Are they coming in droves because of positive buzz?

Secondly, ask yourself how these comments reflect your actual business?  Take a step back, and try to understand the comments in terms of customer experience.  One comment about customer service doesn’t mean you have a customer service problem, but 100 comments certainly suggests it.  The social web provides you with a persistent focus group – don’t ignore what it has to say.

Influence

The final step of effective online reputation management is influence.  Once we understand what is being said, how do we change it if it is negative, or leverage it if it is positive?

To really influence anything online, you first need to be there – the journey of 1000 miles begins with showing up.  This doesn’t mean you have to spend 30 hours a week blogging, but it does mean that you should be active on Twitter, in comments, and it wouldn’t kill you to have a blog to aggregate it all at one place.

Influence also requires participation – which means engaging with detractors or fans, and going beyond just listening to actively soliciting feedback.  Participation means creating content that places your side of the story in public record – hopefully before you have to react to the other sides negative comments.  Admitting mistakes before anyone else jumps on it can often sway the conversation in your favour, rather than requiring your apologies.  Participation is also about creating a network of sympathetic people who will go out of their way to understand you, and who will eventually help defend you against unwarranted attacks.

There’s a lot of talk about “joining the conversation,” and while that sentiment is 100% valid, there’s one aspect of being active in social media that is rarely talked about.  Dell is active in the blogosphere, and has many sites dedicated to listening and participating, but to suggest that they are there simply because they as an organization are passionate about social media would be silly.  By creating so much content, a search for Dell now requires an entire front page of their side of the story, which is obviously positive, rather than a page of someone else’s side of the story, which isn’t always.

Of course, if your reputation is under fire, you likely won’t be able to SEO your way out of it.  Just like spin doesn’t work as well online, it’s very difficult to suppress the truth through search results.  Google is smarter than that, and is objective in a way that human beings can’t be.  Dell improved its reputation by listening to the commentary about its brand, and changing.  It’s a popular sentiment that we’re no longer in control of our brand – the consumer is.  Of course, that’s not true – companies ultimately control their product, and the content that they produce, but the consumer certainly has a louder voice.  But it’s not because the voice is louder that we should be listening to it – it’s because they’re our customers.  This is not a social media revalation – this is a basic principle of business that was somehow forgotten along the way.

The bottom line to this whole presentation is that on the web, you’ll be seen for who you are and for what is said about you.  If you’re not part of that coversation, you’re not in control of your reputation, and that’s a dangerous thing.

A stage manager I worked with once in my theatre days was asked by a director why he was always so calm, when other stage manager spent so much time dealing with crises.  He replied “being able to put out fires is important, but I prefer to keep the candles away from the drapes.”

Take control of your online reputation, and figure out how to keep the candles away from the drapes.  It’s way easier than putting out fires.

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Though it’s often looked down on by consultant types, I’m a big proponent of planning, especially when it comes to web strategy and public relations.  In mathematical terms, execution without a plan results in a vector that’s all magnitude and no direction – in other words, it takes a lot of energy to go nowhere.  In many ways, marketing is part science, part creativity and a big of old-fashioned good luck.  So, while planning is important, with all these variables, the danger is to get stuck in a plan that ends up taking you in the wrong direction when the world changes around you.

This is especially important for startups, who have to focus as much on the here and now as they do on the long-term.  I recently had coffee with a friend who had recently started his own firm, and he told me about a concept that really resonated with me.  He told me that he didn’t have a marketing plan – he had a marketing hypothesis.

When I asked him what he meant, he told me that they had a marketing plan, and they stuck to it, and soon realized that it wasn’t getting them any results.  The predictions and assumptions they had made about what how their customers would use their product turned out to be wrong, so they changed what they were doing.  He said that from then on, they didn’t stick to a “plan” per se, but rather to constantly try to prove their hypothesis.

As much as marketing is part science, it’s important to remember that science  is, for the most part, about observation.  Because they are constantly observing and testing their hypothesis, they are able to change course quickly and improve results.

Especially when it comes to social media, if you’re marketing your product on the web, you’re operating in a sea of variables, not the least of which is human nature.  Plan where you want to go, but keep in mind that the roads aren’t paved yet, and subject to change without notice.  Work with a marketing hypothesis in mind means that you’re constantly measuring and readjusting, rather than sticking to an all-knowing plan.  If your plan doesn’t work, you’ll always find out.  The only question is whether you’ll find out soon enough to change direction.

Hugh MacLeod is fond of saying “all business models are wrong.”  If that’s the case, testing your marketing hypothesis is the best way to make sure you’re less wrong than your competitors.

For the past few months, I’ve been watching Dave Fleet develop his Strategic Communications Planning series with interest.  He recently finished the series, and with some goading from the Twittersphere, he’s now turned it into a free eBook.

The book takes you through the context of the strategy all the way through to budgets and evaluation, and Dave provides suggestions for best practices along the way.

If you’re new to strategic communications planning, this is a must-read.  The amount of information might be a bit overwhelming, but it’s an excellent framework for anyone who needs to write a detailed communications plan.

Thanks for a great resource, Dave!

Regardless of the field you work or live in, ignorance of what you do or the community you participate is maddening, depressing and disheartening.  It’s what causes rifts in organizations, and is why communicators don’t get along with lawyers, why creatives don’t get along with suits, and why engineers don’t get along with… well, anyone.

Even more infuriating than ignorance, however, is when that ignorance is coupled with opinion and backed up with insistence.  For some reason, I’ve been coming across this type of person more often recently.  Any rational argument I could respond to with examples or statistics, but the ignorant insister doesn’t deal in such sundry as data and proof.  This is the type of person whose line of argument is based on unsupported opinion and anecdote.

“Social media doesn’t work.”

This phrase is like nails on a blackboard to me, because it’s the first warning that I’m going to have to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about the thing that they want to argue about.

Usually, when I dig deeper as to the meaning behind this broad generalized statement, that lack of understanding comes out very quickly.  First of all, to say that social media “doesn’t work” shows that they’ve already missed the point, fully and completely.  Social media works by virtue of the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading it – that I’m connected with like-minded people on Twitter and that I make plans with friends on Facebook.  What they mean to say, of course, is that social media isn’t an effective way of creating value for a company, and once I can guide them to this much more rational thought, it’s much easier to point out why they’re wrong.

More often than not, their reasoning is based on one of two things.  Either a) they don’t use social media, and therefore believe that no one else does, or b) they’ve heard people complain about being spammed on Facebook or something of the like, and have extrapolated that to mean that everyone hates every kind of social media campaign through any technology.

As social media “early adopters,” it is, of course, our duty to educate others on community, technology and the culture that pervades it, but sometimes, when faced with a case like the ones I’m describing, it’s best just to walk away.  Sadly, I lack whatever gene it is that would allow me to walk away from a baseless argument, and it causes me to engage in more angering conversations than I care to admit.  Call it a character flaw.

In many way, these arguments are like someone who walked through Chinatown in the summer on garbage day and then spent the rest of his life convinced that the Chinese are “a smelly people.”  As human beings, it’s in our nature to make snap judgements based on little information.  If cro-magnon man spent too much time wondering if the sabre tooth tiger was an enemy or a friendly kitty we probably wouldn’t have made the cut for natural selection.

Of course, it goes both ways.  Assuming that a social approach is key for every business because of your own personal success or affinity for blogging is of equal ignorance.  The wise man knows what he does not know.  The people I have the most respect for are those who admit their lack of knowledge and approach social media from a neutral standpoint and a desire to learn.  They will be successful because they don’t come into something they don’t understand with preconceived notions, and can therefore be objective about how to integrate social media into their business practices, if they do at all.

Both obstinance and zealotry are dangerous traits, and both are derived from ignorance.  Be wary of both, in yourself and others, and you’ll have a better chance of arriving at “understanding” with whatever you do.

One of the core components of any strategic plan is the situation analysis.  It’s the calibration phase of the communications planning process, and forces a methodical documentation of what’s what, both within the company and in the environment it is operating in.  For a startup, the most important consideration is the state of its resources – without resources, the environment doesn’t even enter into the equation.

Of course, the word “resources” doesn’t always mean cold, hard cash.  It takes into consideration the people, the infrastructure, the intellectual property and everything else that it takes to run that business.  Much like a car needs gas, oil and fluids to run properly, a company needs to think of all of these resources.  Running out of one can lead to serious damage.  The problem is, with all of the fixation on sales and the bottom line, many young companies don’t even think of a key resource that is often one of the most important.  That resource is good will.

To an aggressively sales-driven organization, good will probably sounds like more hairy-fairy pseudo business strategy, but in some cases, good will is the sole reason for the success of a company.  Even the most well-funded companies and services can still fail if they run out of good will.

The most heartbreakingly obvious example of this is Twitter.  Here you have a company that has built a technology that, for all intents and purposes, does nothing – it’s merely a system that allows 140-character messages to be passed into a database and then redistributed.  The early popularity of the service caused a small group of passionate users to evangelize the platform, and a small group of passionate developers to create websites, tools and toys that utilized the Twitter API.  For the past month or so, Twitter has gasped under the pressure of its own popularity, causing many users, myself included, to wonder about the future of the service.

Twitter has reportedly closed close to $15 million in financing, and by all accounts, is strong financial shape.  But that’s not their problem.  Their constant downtime and lack of transparency about it has drained a lot of the good will that made it so popular.  If that wasn’t enough, they were also hit by a small firestorm when Ariel Waldman accused them of not upholding their TOS after receiving a number of hostile, threatening messages on Twitter and getting no resolution from the company, and another when they were accused of blaming their biggest users for the downtime.

Like any business on the web, Twitter faces a lot of competition and the reality that if a significant enough portion of its users migrates to another system, the rest will follow suit.  No amount of VC funding will fix that problem.

In a recent interview with Robert Scoble, one of the users that Twitter was thought to be blaming for its flaky service, founder Ev Williams said “The fact that people are frustrated is a sign that we built something people care about.”

People really do care about Twitter.  It has one of the strongest communities of any business I’ve seen, but throwing away that good will with constant unexplained downtime and unreliable service is as dumb as burning investment money to heat your office. To its credit, Twitter has recently started being more transparent with development issues and downtime, but to most of the community who have come to depend on Twitter as a communications channel, that’s of little consequence.

As of right now, the company has not yet depleated its resources of good will.  Many members of the community regard the downtime with good spirits, referring to the graphic above as the “FAIL WHALE,” or posting spoofs of Twitter’s all-too-familiar “something is technically wrong” images.  The reality is, however, that this good will will only last so long, and then, without warning, Twitter’s loyal and influential fan base will move on to something more reliable – Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk or any other number of ridiculously-named microblogging services that come out in the next couple of weeks.

The lesson here is not really about what Twitter should have done or could do, but their story certainly serves as a cautionary tale.  Small businesses depend on community.  If, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, you’re lucky enough to make one person care about who you are and what you have to say, you’ve been given a gift.  If you’re stupid enough to ignore that gift of goodwill and assume it will always be there, no amount of strategic planning is going to save your business.

I’ve got a lot of geeky friends. In fact, most of my friends are a geek in some way, shape or form. They’re programmers and designers, but they’re also music geeks, theatre geeks, language geeks, running geeks, media geeks and so on, and for the most part, it’s a big part of why I enjoy being around them. They go out of their way to make themselves into experts in something, whether it’s completely esoteric or utterly practical. It will come as no shock to anyone who has ever met me that I’m a geek too – and it makes me a much better PR guy.

Being good at PR or marketing requires a thirst for knowledge that I would consider above the average. It means more than just knowing how to do your job – it means knowing about technology, about history, about the media, about sociology and a million other tiny little pieces before you can really create anything that comes close to resembling a “strategy.”

Consider the game of chess. A very simple game, but one that requires an intimate knowledge of not only the rules, but the intricacies of the pieces. To be any good at chess means a lot more that just knowing that bishops move diagonally and pawns only move forward – it takes knowing how each of the pieces relates to one another, and how all of the individual pieces comes together to make something much stronger than they are individually.

It’s said quite often that public relations, marketing or advertising is “not about the tools.” That’s a fair statement, but at a much higher level, the profession requires such an intense mastery of the tools – especially when it comes to social media – that it’s not sufficient just to have a textbook understanding of the tools. In order to be a grandmaster, you have to experience them on a level that cannot be read or explained. That’s where being a geek comes in, and that thirst for knowledge and personal depth – no matter how obscure interacting on Twitter or maintaining a podcast may seem to friends outside the industry – becomes a point of differentiation between “practitioner” and “expert.”

For those who are new to the industry, or trying to break in – your best investment in yourself, and ultimately your future tax bracket, is to be a geek. Dedicate yourself to learning about the whole, but spend the extra time understanding each of those moving parts. Your friends might think you’re a bit odd, but the benefit you provide to a future employer will be well worth it.