Overnight Success Stories Mature Rapidly

It’s impossible to talk about the Web today without talking about social media in general, and Facebook and Twitter in particular. In fact, that social media usage has eclipsed email usage in recent years shows that the rising generation of consumers think social media first and the Web second.

Of course, despite Facebook’s origins on college campuses, social media has gone way beyond a youthful trend. All ages and demographic segments have adopted Facebook while Twitter, Google+, FourSquare, Pinterest and the like have grown just as quickly. People are joining these networks in huge and rapidly growing numbers. Not long ago, it would have seemed like hype to say social media would profoundly change the way people and businesses all over the world connect and communicate. Today, it almost sounds like an understatement. These entities and tools have grown up quickly, as shown by LinkedIn’s IPO and Facebook’s pending IPO.

Obviously, connection and communication are essential activities for any organization that sells any type of product or service. But while social media’s impact has been huge, the immediate and longer-term impacts for business remain far from clear. Even as these sites and channels have matured, expert advice about whether and how brands and businesses should use social media and individual sites is still all over the place, even as the questions proliferate:

• Should we buy advertising or sponsor content?
• Should we use our Facebook presence primarily for HR and public relations purposes?
• Is Twitter mainly a customer service tool?
• What content is appropriate to share (either selling it or giving it away)?
• How can we drive purchases or traffic to our site?
• What is the right way to listen in or enter consumer conservations on social channels?
• How do we measure consumer engagement across channels?
• How do we track users as they move between our Web site and social channels?
• How much are friends, followers, fans and “likes” worth to our business?

Web pundits, gurus and analysts disagree on the right answers to many of these questions. Thus, executives can be forgiven for not knowing exactly what to do now or what to plan for next.

The good news: companies have a lot more power over their social media destinies than they think they do. If they take the right approach, they’ll have powerful new tools to find, engage and serve customers, and a strong platform for engaging a wide range of audiences – analysts and investors, shareholders, employees, suppliers, vendors, and business partners.

Not Your Teenager’s Internet  

Let’s be frank: lots of business executives think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ make about as much sense as body piercing. But social media’s not just for teens anymore. And that’s why businesses can’t afford to ignore it. In fact, Nielsen has calculated Americans spend 23% of their time of social networks.

That’s an astonishing figure. And it’s not a prediction, but rather what’s happening now. And it hardly seems necessary to point out that the number will only get bigger. Even the brief history of the Web offers an instructive lesson: when AOL brought the masses online, it was the social aspects that spurred its rapid growth.

Facebook alone has hundreds of millions of unique visitors and billions of total visits every month – that’s in only six years of being available to the general public. As of 2011, Facebook has over 500,000,000 active users, or approximately 1 in every 13 people on the planet – and half of them log in every day. What’s more, people aged 35 and older now represent 30% of its entire userbase.

CONSIDER A FEW ASTONISHING NUMBERS ABOUT TWITTER:

• 460,000 new accounts created daily
• 20.6 million American adults access Twitter monthly
• 177 million tweets sent daily
• 182% increase in mobile Twitter use since 2010
• 72% of US companies are on Twitter

If you think these things are only for the young, it’s time to think again. The people you do business with use Facebook and Twitter, and many of them are high-volume users.

Early Returns  

Early returns are nothing if not interesting. Take Coke’s experience. In 2008, two huge Coke fans unaffiliated with the company created a Facebook page that attracted 3.3 million fans within a few months. This was the second most popular page on all of Facebook, a clear and hugely visible expression of love for the “Real Thing.” And the company didn’t have anything to do with it.

When Facebook changed its policy to ensure branded Facebook pages are owned and managed by the brands themselves, Coke faced a conundrum. It could’ve taken over the site with the heavy hand of traditional marketing. It could’ve started suing for copyright violations. Instead, it “friended” the fans. After inviting them to headquarters for a brainstorming session, it allowed them to continue operating the page. We’ll see where the story goes from here, but Coke’s first moves were strategically perfect, given the environment.

Procter & Gamble is also in learning mode. It recently invited 40 executives of social media companies to its headquarters for an experiment – who could sell the most Tide t-shirts online in four hours. Proceeds went to charity, but the insight P&G gained about how to market to people who must invite you into their online worlds was invaluable. Any organization that deeply considers how social media fits their strategies and is willing to experiment and learn has a very good chance of succeeding in tomorrow’s, socially-networked online world. And that includes behemoths like P&G.

Obviously, consumer goods companies have a vested interest in keeping a close eye on general consumer and pop culture trends, but all sorts of firms, from automotives and banks to technology firms and wireless telcos have dipped their toes in the social media pool. Predictably, the results are mixed. IBM’s “wall” and group pages are little more than networks of current and former IBM employees. Though there is some cultural value to be realized, it’s hard to see how this will become a forum for substantive discussion of technology issues and trends. For a couple of telcos, their Facebook presence looks suspiciously like a complaint department – a scary prospect on the one hand, but also a chance to engage a demanding and fickle customer base. Stay tuned.

C-Level Twittering  

Over on Twitter, a number of prominent executives are tweeting away, and effectively so. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappo’s, the online shoe retailer, uses the messages to define and support his company’s unique culture, and express his own leadership style. He shares inspirational quotes, as well as comments and updates on his activities and company news – a visit to a company warehouse, a television interview, scheduled site downtime for maintenance.

It seems very much like a conversation, and an authentic, humanizing one. Take this recent tweet: “Started reading ‘In-n-Out Burger’ history book on plane. Was forced to stop upon realizing 4 hours left on flight with no food.” It may seem trivial, but consider how such messages give anybody – customers, shareholders, employees, the media – a real sense of who Hsieh is, what he’s reading, thinking and doing, and how he sees his company and his market.

Another interesting aspect of Twitter is how the platform allows message streams to be diverted and co-opted. As with the iPhone, developers are running with the platform, launching sites and tools that skim off relevant tweets and comments to track topics or create streams that contain specific terms. Some of these are for art’s or humor’s sake, but companies can set up feeds to follow what people are saying about their brands, competitors or partners. In fact, it’s not hard to see how this “market eavesdropping” might become a primary business use of Twitter.

Like Zappos, Cisco is also very pro-Twitter, maintaining a Twitter-centric blog on its corporate site and encouraging partners to use it for collaboration. CTO Padmasree Warrior Twitters regularly, and has 400,000 followers, and follows McKinsey, Al Gore, NASA and a few dozen others. Admittedly, some of her tweets read like excerpts from a press release, but others – like links to presentations she’s given – are worthwhile. More interestingly, a Cisco Security group posts information about emerging threats, new technology and other industry trends.

Twitter may be way high on the hype cycle, but Cisco’s experience shows it’s an easy, accessible platform for sharing useful information quickly with self-selecting interested parties. In this way, Twitter has supplanted blogs in terms of establishing an informal (or informal seeming), two-way communication channel. The problem with too many corporate blogs has been a simple failure to update them. Given Twitter’s ease of use and character limits, it seems much less vulnerable to this “bug.”

What’s Next  

Depending on whom you ask, social media sites are either:

• Already ruined by corporations misusing what were meant to be forums for interpersonal communications, or
• Being severely underutilized by marketers who misunderstand their inherent power to find, bond with and track all kinds of consumers.

The truth is, it’s impossible to gauge exactly how social media sites and tools will evolve in future years, especially as marketing platforms. Facebook’s senior leadership – which includes quite a few people of junior age – doesn’t appear in a great hurry to simply grab revenue by replicating traditional “push” marketing models. Their advertising products remain very much a work in progress. As recently as October 2008, founder Mark Zuckerberg said, “I don’t think social networks can be monetized in the same way as search … three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today.”

Maximize the Opportunity  

Early adopters and those who take a strategic and disciplined approach will help Facebook and other social media sites and tools define that optimum model, and will position themselves to reap the rewards. While there are few, if any, firm best practices for businesses to apply, a few guiding principles have emerged:

• Strategic alignment with core business goals – specifically, how social media helps achieve specific objectives in customer support, product and service development, sales promotions and special offers
• A real commitment to watch and understand the evolution of Web 2.0
• A willingness to test and learn with different tools and techniques, and
• An objective, data-driven approach to prioritizing, tracking and managing all online investments and initiatives.

Though many companies never fully harnessed the power of Web 1.0, social media provides a window of opportunity for making a quantum leap forward. Of course, unlike Twitter’s rise, it won’t happen overnight. But companies that adopt these principles will give themselves the best chance to find not just the most friends and followers online, but also the maximum business value.