“Content is social media’s oxygen.”

I said it about as simply in my book, “It’s The Customer, Stupid!”:  When it comes to communicating in the digital world, “content is king.”

Once the customer finds an organization’s website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter site, etc., you want him or her to return often so you can continue to build the relationship.  Therefore, content is critical.  If it stays the same with each visit the customer will get bored and stop coming.  Give the customers something fresh to see when they return.

Changing content will stimulate interest, as scientists have discovered.  As an example, they cite the placement of mobiles over babies’ cribs.  Few parents read the instructions for installing a mobile for their infant.  But if they did, they would note the direction to change the mobile’s position around the crib every few days.  This difference in positioning will stimulate the baby’s brain to process the change and consider it in a new way.  In the same manner, organizations have to keep their social media sites dynamic and current so that visitors don’t become conditioned to them and ignore the messaging.

New and interesting content also will help customers stick around.  That’s what online marketers call the site’s “stickiness,” - an actual measure of the duration of the visitor’s visit and, therefore, a way to judge the site’s effectiveness.  The longer visitors stay on your site, the more chance you have to earn their trust, build loyalty, or make a sale.

Customers are looking for advice or information to help them make informed decisions, not hard-selling advertising or PR fluff.  They expect the organization to be a reliable source.  Quality content is a company’s entrée into the consumer’s world.  This content driven relationship is needed because most consumers today trust their friends more than they trust companies or marketers.  Trusted content enables the company to establish credibility and build stronger, longer-lasting relationships.

Of course, it goes without saying that the content must be truthful. Today’s customer is very smart.  Any attempt to mislead or obfuscate by the organization will lead to mistrust or disqualification.  Even more damaging, some very mainstream companies have been hit with multimillion dollar settlements for false claims on their social media.

For online content to build brand loyalty, move customers to action, and bring them back for more, it must be easy to understand and easy to access.  In a sense, online you must act more like a journalist than a marketer, supplying interesting, well-written and believable content.  You must supply the oxygen to keep your social media alive.

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However, there is a lesson for marketing pros in this tragedy.  That is―be prepared for a PR crisis before it occurs.  Penn State leadership could have handled the situation much better if its crisis management plan had been properly prepared and used–especially since it appears these leaders had advance warning of the pending charges.

For instance, the crisis management team could have informed the university’s constituents―from the faculty, to students, to parents―earlier on its website, rather than most of these groups hearing about the allegations and actions in the media.  It could have found a better way to fire a demigod like Joe Paterno than with a phone call; and it could have crafted a less insensitive and apparently shoot-from-the-hip statement from the university’s president.

Therein lies the lesson.  Make sure those you advise have a crisis management program in place.  Penn State may not have foreseen such a reputation crisis, but it undoubtedly could have been better prepared when the crisis occurred.

I suggest clients start with “issues management,” which means anticipating and identifying issues and attempting to resolve them before they reach crisis levels.  By managing your response, issues can be kept from erupting into crises and, if a crisis does ensue, its adverse effects can be minimized.  An “issue” is defined as a matter in dispute.  For example, a patient doesn’t like a particular hospital’s treatment and is threatening a law suit.  These activities, either directly or indirectly, can generate media attention.  And media attention can turn an issue into a crisis.

To deal with issues management, the organization must first establish a permanent issues management team, which could consist of key staff members and/or outside advisors, such as an attorney.  The team would be tasked to work out details of an issues management plan, which should include:

 ·    An early warning system―a method for monitoring issues before they become crises.

 ·    A list of the constituencies affected by the issues.

 ·    Ready reference documents―media lists, etc. ―and an issues management manual or Intranet site.

 ·    Who on the team will do what?  Who is the spokesperson?  Who will prepare and approve statements, releases, online information?  Who will field constituent phone calls and press inquiries?

 ·    A message platform that can be customized based on the issue.

 ·    What constitutes an issue or crisis that requires assembling the team other than for regular meetings?

Such a systematic approach to crisis management allows the organization to respond quickly to urgent situations, to mitigate risk, to calm key audiences, and to build credibility.

Hopefully, your company or client will never have to face a crisis like the one at Penn State.  But you can bet you’ll face a crisis of some sort if you’re in the reputation management business.  So, as the Boy Scout motto says, “Be Prepared.”

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I was reminded of Churchill’s quote when reading a blog from the Council of Public Relations firms, in which Charlene Li, in a posting titled “The Art of Admitting Failure,” is quoted, i.e.:

“When it comes to business, we are incredibly unaccepting and fearful of making mistakes.  And forget about admitting to our mistakes, as that may be a sign of weakness.”  She advises that companies embrace a “culture of sharing failure as well as success.”

The example used to prove her point is Domino’s Pizza, which famously advertised that some people thought its pizza “sucked” and promoted what it had done to improve quality.  The advertising plus customer promotions increased Domino’s sales 14% over the previous year.

That’s turning lemons into lemonade through marketing.

There’s an even more famous example of learning from your mistakes.  In 1985, after much surveying in the face of Pepsi’s competitive growth, Coca-Cola introduced “New” Coke.

Despite New Coke’s acceptance by the majority of Coca-Cola drinkers, a vocal minority damned the change.  Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters began receiving angry calls and letters – some 400,000 of them.  Newspaper columnists and comedians condemned or made light of the switch.  Ads for New Coke were booed when they appeared on the scoreboard at the Houston Astrodome.  Even Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a longtime Coke drinker, criticized New Coke as a sign of American Capitalist decadence.

Within three months of New Coke’s introduction, Coca-Cola announced a return to the original formula and renamed it “Coca-Cola Classic,” which later again became just “Coke.”

Coca-Cola executives concluded that their mistake had been underestimating the impact on its customer base, part of which had been alienated by the switch.

The whole episode, especially the switch back to the old Coke formula, had a dramatic marketing effect.  It repositioned the brand in such a distinctive way that a Coke renaissance ensued.  What had been perceived as a mistake, ultimately was a boon to sales.

While New Coke is most frequently mentioned as a cautionary tale against tampering with a well-established brand, it also presents some positive marketing lessons.  In his book, The End of Marketing As We Know It, former Coke marketing executive Sergio Zyman says the mistakes made in developing New Coke “turned out to be a roaring success for Coca-Cola, because it rekindled the relationship between the American public and Classic Coke.”

“But,” he adds, “the only reason it wasn’t a disaster is that we were willing to learn from the experience and to change our minds.”

As you can see, even the most successful businesses make mistakes.  The key, as Mr. Churchill said, is to have the wisdom to learn from them.

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The “social” in “social media” refers to the social interaction of communicators using web-based and mobile technologies. Social media has taken on many forms, e.g., email; blogs; podcasts; search engines such as Google and YouTube; the network sites Facebook and Twitter, to mention the two giants; and the smart phone as mobile marketer.

The “social” in “social marketing” refers to the welfare of human beings as members of society.

Social marketing uses commercial marketing principles and techniques to influence people’s behavior to improve their personal welfare or to promote society’s well-being as a whole. For example, getting people to stop smoking, to refrain from moving firewood that contains tree-killing insects, or to consider organ donation. The main areas for behavioral action are public health, safety, the environment, and communities.

I use the examples above because social marketing is one of my agency’s best practices, and we have helped clients change people’s behavior in those areas, among others.

These examples are where social media supports social marketing to improve the reach of communications campaigns.

For our local county health department, for example, Crosby Marketing has been working on a teen tobacco prevention and cessation program called “Smoking Stinks” for nearly 20 years, using an integrated mix of traditional media and guerilla marketing techniques targeted to teens. With the advent of the Internet and social media, we added these amazing arrows to our marketing quiver, starting with a website.

The Smoking Stinks” website has grown to include a series of interactive games and activities, e-cards, facts presented in “teen speak” and interactive/downloadable kits to help teens quit the nasty habit. The program’s online/digital presence now includes social media platforms such as Facebook and a quit-smoking mobile app.

When we started the Smoking Stinks campaign, nearly 30% of the county’s teens were using tobacco products. As of 2010, that number had fallen to just 12%.

We’ve gotten great results for other social marketing campaigns, such as the “Stop the Beetle” campaign against moving firewood that could contain the Emerald Ash Borer that has destroyed millions of ash trees and our campaign for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to promote organ donation. Both these programs used a variety of social media to get the message across. (To view case histories with graphics of the Stop the Beetle and Organ Donor campaigns, go to our website www.crosbymarketing.com.)

So, social media is not social marketing, but it sure does help. Whether your marketing is commercial or social, you need social media in your communications mix.

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More recently, John Wren, president/CEO of the Omnicom Group, predicted:

“Two years from now, don’t expect distinctions between traditional and digital…. I can’t think of a single major campaign that isn’t driving consumers to Facebook or the web.”

At my agency, Crosby Marketing, that has become a premise of our marketing approach, the integration of new media and traditional media to broaden the reach of all media, from one channel to another, from person to person.

At Crosby, we used to structure our agency in silos, even calling them “departments,” e.g., the creative department, the media department, the production department and the interactive department, the latter of which housed our web and digital specialists. Today, you’ll find these specialists integrated throughout the agency. 

For example, when we look at a media campaign for a client, we might be assessing everything from billboards to TV and Facebook ads to social media marketing. An example of this is our work with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service where we created a public education campaign to combat the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle. The program was designed to educate the general public on the devastation the beetle causes to America’s forests and to rally outdoor enthusiasts “not to move firewood,” as moving firewood is the primary way of spreading the beetle.

Crosby’s connection planners purchased billboard placements, online display banner advertising and mobile advertising. A digital media buying specialist purchased social media advertising and worked with one of our public relations people on Facebook and Twitter postings. Integrated into this were the account and creative folks who developed and distributed TV and radio PSAs. They all worked together to develop the campaign website.

Did it work, this integration of traditional media with new media and the specialists to implement it? If the proof is in the proverbial pudding, we sure produced a lot of pudding. This campaign generated one billion media impressions; $4.2 million in donated earned media; 162,000 people visiting the website; and an increase of Facebook fans from less than 300 to almost 20,000.

As this campaign shows, the distinctions between traditional media and digital media are fast disappearing. The result is integrated marketing communications of a new kind — one that can produce exceptional results.

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My question, “What’s the Word of The Week?” is an example of shorthand developed to make texting and tweeting easier.  The answer, “Unfriend,” is an example of how much impact the Internet has had on language.  In 2009, the Oxford New American Dictionary added as its word of the year “UNFRIEND,” a verb meaning to remove someone as a “friend” on a social network site such as Facebook.

The question is, what’s the impact of this “language” revolution on communications and, therefore, marketing.

Lynne Truss, in her British bestseller on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, sees both sides of the issue.  She wrote:

“What to call the language generated by this new form of communication?  Netspeak?  Weblish? Whatever you call it, linguists are generally excited by it.  Naomi Baron has called Netspeak an ‘emerging language centaur – part speech, part writing’ and David Crystal says computer-mediated language is a genuine ‘third medium’.  But I don’t know.  Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac:  ‘That’s not writing, it’s typing’?  I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing…”

Pardon the digression, but speaking of punctuation, computers with their spell-checking programs, can impact writing as well.

There’s a long poem that for years has playfully cautioned against relying on spelling checkers.  The first two stanzas of the original “spell checker poem” make the point:

I have a spelling checker

It came with my PC

It highlights for my review

Mistakes I cannot sea.

I ran this poem thru it

I’m sure your pleased to no

Its letter perfect in it’s weigh

My checker told me sew.

But “netspeak’s” impact on marketing can be much greater than spelling errors.  If your reader/customer has to translate your language to understand it, you may create a barrier to your brand.  The use of this shorthand can be difficult to comprehend if you’re not used to it.  You might figure out that *$ stands for Starbucks and “121” means “one-to-one.”  But how many of the uninitiated would understand that “GAFYK” means “get away from your keyboard” or “GI” stands for “Google it” not the soldier of World War II?

Your readers/customers may find such communication very “unfriend”ly, and, because of that, might remove you from their friendly “shopping list.”  So, keep your online language reader-friendly.  Understanding your customers’ language and making sure they understand yours is necessary for you to connect with them on the Internet.

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On the negative side, because of social media, the Internet has become a huge complaint box.  As many a company has learned, agitated customers can turn mistakes and misunderstandings, real and imagined, into viral criticism, damaging your reputation.

In a recent article in Adweek, Robert Klara pointed out that such criticism can be a nightmare.  He had numbers to prove his point:

“According to research from GroupM, 58 percent of consumers begin their purchasing journeys with a Web search, and nearly a third of them report that what they hear about a brand on social media is enough to make them eliminate it from consideration.  A separate study conducted by Oxford Metrica found that 90 percent of consumers trust what others have to say about a brand, and that 83 percent of brands will face some kind of image crisis in the next five years.”

To avoid an image crisis, you must monitor social media, listening to what people have to say about you, your products or services.  Monitoring social media conversations provides an early warning system for reputation management.  You can react quickly to rebut erroneous information or fix a problem before it becomes a crisis.

Some companies are paying serious money for online monitoring services, but you can do it economically, using a variety of free monitoring resources.  For example, you can scan Facebook for mentions of your company, brand names, products, etc. on http://www.openbook.org.  To scan Twitter tweets, you can use http://www.monitter.com.

There are a number of free tracking sites that scan multiple online sources, including http://www.socialmention.org; http://www.whostalkin.com; http://addictomatic.com.  Additionally, you can use “Google Alerts,” http://alerts.google.com, to get mentions emailed to you in real time with a link to the original post.

By allowing you to see what’s being said about you online, these sites not only can give you early warnings of problems, they protect you against those seeking to harm your reputation — an unhappy customer, a disgruntled former employee and, yes, even a competitor.

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The key for today’s marketer is to really “listen” to your customers and respond accordingly, i.e., “hear and obey.”  Every professional marketer knows you must gather information to understand your customers, their wants and needs, and what they expect from the marketer’s brand.  Gathering the information requires basic marketing research, and any good marketer can do it.  However, really hearing what the customers say and obeying is another question.

The Council of Public Relations Firms agrees.  As a recent Council blog declared:  “Today, customer feedback is easier than ever to come by, and experts and observers have encouraged companies to engage in real dialog with customers instead of just talking customers’ ears off.  But are we really listening?”

With the feedback and analytics afforded by the Internet, it is easier than ever to track what customers are saying, but that doesn’t mean companies are really listening.  For example, the Council reports, “one survey found that 70% of travel companies don’t track customer behavior or subscriber preferences to serve more useful marketing.”

A prime example of wise listening to customers is Walmart.  The giant retailer polls hundreds of thousands of its customers monthly by directing them to its website from its stores. This is part of Walmart’s effort to put marketing “at the forefront of championing the customer internally.”  As Walmart executives explain, “Every store actually gets a significant number of customers to respond about their experience, and therefore, the data we capture is valid store by store, and it is actionable, because precisely customers are telling us how they feel about their individual store.”  If, like Walmart, you take action (i.e., obey) on what you hear, the results can be very rewarding.

Listening gives you actionable information that:

·         Helps build an ongoing relationship with customers.

·         Allows you to discover problem areas or mistakes you have been making.

·         Creates sales opportunities.

·         Overall, builds customer loyalty.

Therefore, for the wise marketer, listening is critical to communications programs.

As Supreme Court Justice John Marshall once said, “to listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.”

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The lesson bell that rang for me was the simple but often forgotten marketing concept:  Go where your customers are.

For example, when we developed an anti-cancer campaign, called “Learn To Live,” for the local health department many years ago, the extremely varied targets we wanted to reach called for a “go where they are” strategy.

So, to reach kids with anti-smoking messages we went to schools, youth clubs, cigarette-selling convenience stores, etc.  To send healthy eating messages, we went to grocery stores.  To increase mammograms, we went to women’s clubs and physician offices – and so on.  Thus, we delivered successful messages to our target audiences in places they frequented regularly, at the right time with the right message, and helped change their behavior.

Today, going where your customers are has an added dimension, because your customers are most likely on the Internet.

The growth of social media – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. – has intensified online participation of the customer in an organization’s communications and public relations.  The number of worldwide Internet users visiting social networks exceeds a billion, and adults average about four hours a day online.

So, for marketers, social networking allows them to join customers’ conversations in a space the customer already occupies.  With targeted social media strategies, you can talk to customers, listen to them, teach them, learn from them.  You can even have them selling for you.  All good reasons for going where your customers are.

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So, why is e-mail usage slipping?  According to Patricio Robles, writing for Econsultancy:

• “New communications channels have given individuals the ability to communicate more efficiently.  Thanks to SMS, Facebook, Twitter, et. al., internet users don’t’ have to send an e-mail when another channel is better-suited to deliver a particular kind of message.  In other words, e-mail doesn’t have a monopoly on digital communications.  Needless to say, that’s a good thing.
• “New communications channels have created more opportunities for communication.  Messages that may not have been sent previously are now being sent because the right kinds of tools exist.  Take status updates, for instance.  Chances are the vast majority of status updates sent via Facebook and Twitter never would have been sent via e-mail.

“Both of these are actually good for e-mail.  Instead of treating digital communications like a nail for which the hammer is the only tool worth using, e-mail is now just one tool that can be used where appropriate.  That means a lot less noise, and a lot more focus.”

This echoes a point I’ve been making for awhile:  The most successful marketing now uses multiple channels of media to create a variety of touch points with the customer.  And e-mail is a very useful channel.

Besides being pervasive and easy to use, e-mail marketing provides the following benefits:

• It’s inexpensive, allowing you to distribute information to a broad audience at a relatively low cost.
• The back and forth potential of e-mail can improve one-to-one relationships with customers, the essence of brand-building.
• You can market anywhere because e-mail works worldwide.
• Delivery time is short, measured in seconds or minutes.
• E-mail results can be tracked easily through a number of tracking devices available both free and for a fee.
• E-mail users check their mail boxes constantly, ensuring your message gets through.
• You can rapidly conduct and tabulate audience surveys, using e-mail questionnaires.
• It allows you to distribute time-sensitive information, e.g., about new products or sales promotions.
• You can distribute key information to a variety of audiences – employees, stockholders, reporters, members, etc.

Of course, e-mail has its drawbacks, mainly the proliferation of SPAM, those unsolicited e-mails that clog your inbox.  But in the long run, for the marketer, the benefits of e-mail far outweigh the negatives.  So e-mail remains alive and well as a marketing tool.

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