Marketing Profs Summer Social Series: Charlene Li on the Art of Social Media

"Appeal to the Great Spirit" Statue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

In her kick-off to MarketingProfs’ Social Media Summer Series (an eight-part series of webinars which run through Sept.), Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, calls for online marketers to focus on relationships, not technologies. In contrast to the the impersonal, short-term relationships fostered by traditional media, Li explains that new media aims to build relationships that are ”passionate, constant, intimate, and loyal.” To be successful, Li advises setting goals, which in turn define your strategy and how various parts of your organization can start to engage.

As you define your strategy, Li recommends learning what is already being said about you or your company through real-time listening tools like Radian 6. She also advises focusing first on the watchers and sharers in the Engagement Pyramid, because if you reach them, you are more likely to reach the higher-level influencers, such as commenters, producers, and information curators. 

Throughout the recorded online seminar, Li provides examples which show how companies are using new media for dialog, help/support, and innovation:

• Dialog: Oracle, HP, Southwest, Coca Cola, and Dell Outlet
• Help/Support: comcastcares on Twitter
• Innovation: Starbucks

Li further offers these key steps for using social media to improve corporate engagement:

1. Get the right people on the bus. Have a plan to deal with different social media mindsets (fearful skeptic, cautious tester, realist optimist, and transparent evangelist).
2. Start small, and start now.
3. Measure the right things. Use the same metrics as your marketing goals.
4. Prepare for organizational change. Social networks pressure traditional organizations to change.
5. Prepare to fail. Identify the top 5-10 worst case scenarios. Develop mitigation and contingency plans. Prepare everyone for the inevitable failures.
6. Have the courage to give up control.

I found Li’s presentation particularly helpful, where she maps goals to strategies, with the ways traditional organizations must change to accommodate these objectives. 

• Task: Market research Strategy: Learn Changes • Monitor conversations. • All employees listen & learn.
• Task: Marketing/Sale Strategy: Dialog Changes • Any employee can converse. • Bridge the consideration gap.
• Task: Customer Support Strategy Help Changes • Proactively seek out problems. • Enable customers to help.
• Task: Product Development Strategy: Innovate Changes • Seek ideas from customers. • Broaden employees involved.

To me, the potential for social media to shape product development is very much in keeping with the agile methodology, which is so prevalent right now, especially in small to medium-size software development settings. Social networks can help refine software development, with frequent customer feedback, on various product iterations. I am especially interested in hearing successful cases where social media has helped innovate proucts in these types of settings. In particular, I am interested in hearing cases where Product Managers from agile software settings have successfully used these technologies.

Another key point from Li’s seminar are the higher order metrics, which she suggests can help get you started measuring your social media ROI:

Net Promoter Score: How likely are you to recommend this to someone you know?
Lifetime Value: Lifetime Revenue, Cost of Acquisition, Cost of Retention, Customer Referral Value (CRV).

At her recent keynote on day 3 of Search Engine Strategies San Jose, Li expands on many of these themes, showing how social networks and real-time results, are transforming the future of search, with engagement as the key to relevance. She foresees social networks in the future will be invisible like air, “with us all the time, when we’re shopping, when we’re traveling, and when we are searching.” “Reviews will be put through the filter of people you know and your search results will become more and more social,” she explains. These changes will mean new ways of creating hyper-targeted profiles, with search ads tailored to customers.   

In both the MarketingProfs seminar and the Search Engine Strategies keynote, Li underscores that relationships, not technologies, will determine future corporate success. For this reason, she encourages companies to let all their employees, not any specific discipline, directly engage with customers.

Photo credit,  Boston Public Library

Related Links

• Manifesto for Agile Software Development
• charlene@altimetergroup.com
• Charlene Li on Twitter: @charleneli