How the Army is Integrating Social Media
Integrating Social Media into your organization isn’t easy. Often times people rush off to start their company’s Facebook page only to see little to no lasting effect. You’ve got to have an implementation strategy. I spent 5 weeks on an internal marketing campaign that included sheet cakes, customized M&Ms, posters and more to get our staff and volunteers hyped up on the idea of new and social media. This was before we even rolled anything out to the public. Without good integration, you’ll lose steam.
Among the organizations that operate at large scales, deal with sensitive information and require high security, the US Army is definitely at the top. Yet they are not only embracing but leading the way in integrating social media at this level. On January 20, 2011, the U.S. Army released their new Social Media Handbook. They’re working hard to ensure that soldiers, personnel and families have an understanding of social media and some best practices to abide by. I suppose it could be very easy for the Army to take a very rigid stance on the issue and dismiss, downplay and otherwise ignore the prominence of Social Media but instead they are leveraging it. The opening statement of the document says it all:
Team-
You already know that communicating your organization‘s messages is important. Today, it takes more than press releases to successfully communicate. Being an effective Army communicator today relies on proactive planning, nesting messages, engaging audiences on a variety of plat- forms, monitoring what is being said both online and in traditional media, and taking a proactive role in telling the Army‘s story.
This new handbook provides tips, best practices and information on operations, security tips, branding information, regulations and FAQ’s. While there are a number of great things in this hand book to learn from, I pulled a few concepts that are helping them integrate this into their organization at the highest levels.
1. Be Prepared
It’s easy to ignore social media for your organization (even though most people use it personally on a daily basis). It’s also lazy to do so. Doing the research and hard work up front can prevent a disaster later. For the military, preparation precedes success. Remember the 5 P’s: Poor Planning Promotes Poor Performance!
2. Empower People
Your marketing and communications department just grew exponentially so equip them to lead the conversations. Lack of understanding and fear of the unknown naturally kills your ability to empower those people. Preparation enables the Army to empower potentially thousands of soldiers and their families to “manage” the Army brand. Given enough eyeballs, a situation can quickly and easily be diffused and capitalized on but only if you learn how to empower your people. Very powerful!
3. Trust Your Experts
It’s so easy for every CEO, Senior Pastor, Director and or manager to think because they use Facebook & Twitter that they can develop and manage the Social strategy for their organization. While they should help shape these policies, trusting your experts in this is key to sustainability. Don’t take this on alone. Trust and empower your experts to set this up properly and support them through the process. You’ll be glad you did. If you aren’t an expert, get some around you. Stephen Lanza, Major General, USA writes:
I advise you to embrace social media, read through the regulations at the back of this handbook and develop a strong fundamental knowledge of these tools. I asked the experts in my Online and Social Media Division to create this handbook to help you use these tools as effectively as possible.
Organizations open Facebook accounts everyday with little to no success but the Army is a great example of an organization that is taking the time and allocating the right resources to make sure they experience success.
Social TV: Facebook to create program guides based on what your friends are watching
In a June 30 article, D.M. Levine poses a new way for people to determine what they watch on TV. Rather than search through hundreds of channels to select a program, why not use social media, Facebook in particular, to decide what to watch. At the PromaxBDA conference attended by a crowd of media and branding “honchos,” Andy Mitchell, SVP of Strategic Partner Development at Facebook, gave his sales pitch on the ways that he believes his company can assist broadcast media to both enter and become part of the social world. By connecting with friends and accessing a “program guide” that shows what they are watching, the experience radically changes from a random search through five hundred channels to determine what to watch. This concept is not exclusive to Facebook; last week Comcast revealed their next generation of Xfinity TV will feature a program guide based on shows that are “trending among Facebook friends.”
Bottom line according to Mitchell:
- Social media (Facebook in particular) is in a position to change how we watch TV
- Content as well as how we connect with each other around that content will change
- Friends connecting over a program will create “recruiters” for that program
- Social media provides a new opportunity for programmers to “court new viewers”
I couldn’t find the video of Andy sharing this at the conference but here is one of him at the iBreakfast conference sharing on same topic. The quality is bad and the cam angle is not very exciting so be warned.
What are your thoughts on social TV? Does the TV industry need a refresh?
Is a Great Individual Better Than a Team?
If you had the choice to pick Superman or the X-men which one would it be? How about Macgyver or the A-team? Jeff Stibel, Chairman and CEO of Dun and Bradstreet Credibility Corp. posted a blog, which poses several interesting perspectives on the value of a “great” individual versus a “good” team. He doesn’t ask whether you would take one super hero over a group of them but he does ask whether you would take one great leader over a group of good ones. Controversial in nature, he shares insights that are difficult to overlook when building a team or developing an organization. The discussion originates with a comment by Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, that:
a great engineer is worth 100 average engineers.
Stibel launches his comments by saying that “plenty of people will argue that no one individual is worth the price of many. But interestingly, I have never heard it from a leader.” Stibel offers some key points to support this theory:
- Our brains work very well individually but tend to break down in groups. Business has individual decision makers Programmers are exponentially faster when coding as individuals (The guys from Designers do their best work alone Artists rarely collaborate and when they do, their work if often compromised
- To make better decisions, understand the dynamic of individual greatness
- “The value of a contributor decreases disproportionately with each additional person contributing to a single project, idea, or innovation.”
- Proper team building is powerful when combining members who bring expertise in different disciplines
- If an activity can be done well by one person with sufficient skills, group work should be avoided
- A great individual an far exceed the value of many mediocre minds
Stibel sites examples such as a team of two or three amateur chess players will not beat Bobby Fisher playing alone. An amateur sculptor would not “add” to Michelangelo’s David, but it would destroy his masterpiece
Stibel concludes with the goal of every leader (which I agree): find the best people and empower them to do great things. I’m holding back my thoughts on this because I really want to hear your thoughts on it. Friends of mine like Shawn, Brian, Alejandro, Dr John may have some great views to share on this. Let em rip!
Down the Rabbit Hole
What happens when you travel down the rabbit hole of your web site? Click the link on your main navigation. Where does it lead? Does it solve a problem or produce more noise. Noise is information that doesn’t solve a problem. Click another link. Where does it go? Keep clicking until you get to the end of the rabbit hole. Has the experience solved anything? If not, fix it. If so, how many clicks did it take to get to the solution? Can you make it better?
It’s important to do this frequently because over time we (I’m going through this process today actually) can drift from the discipline of posting information in a way that solves problems. People don’t need any more noise in their lives, they need answers. They need solutions.
Taco Bell’s Facebook Disaster
Today I watched a video with Jonathan Blum, VP of Marketing for Yum! Brands, talk about some of his experiences with social media. Maybe you don’t know of Yum! Brands but I’m positive you’ve heard of the restaurants they own. Yum! Brands own KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, A&W, Long John Silver and more. Their restaurants are truly global brands expanding into China, India and South America. Blum admitted that Taco Bell was still trying to figure out social media.
In one year Taco Bell’s facebook page went from 500,000 “likes” to 6 million (now over 7 million). Very impressive. But a large following does little in business if it doesn’t translate into something. Blum concluded that, even with 6 million followers, Taco Bell has been struggling to find the viability in social media and that it “didn’t get the cash registers ringing.” Not like TV ads at least. Taco Bell had been trying to bolster support after they were served with a lawsuit over their beef. In effort to make sure those newly found followers weren’t dissuaded to “unlike” the brand, Taco Bell decided to give away free tacos. In their words:
“We found it only fitting to reward these 5.4 million fans and a friend with a free taco, its our way of saying thanks for their loyalty and support.”
So how many people do you think took them up on the offer?
Out of 6 million people, roughly 3% of them took them up on it. That means almost 97% chose to pass on the FREE taco. This is a situation where people have already “liked” you. They are already a fan. You offer them something for FREE. Give them some steps to follow and they still don’t take your product? Blum was quoted as saying “We haven’t even been able to give away the food, never mind figure out how to sell it online.” So what gives?
3 Things that come to mind:
1. Add Value
What you offer has to have perceived value to your audience. The Taco is .99 at Taco Bell but perhaps not valuable enough for the masses to get up and go redeem it. Also, with a lawsuit lingering in regards to the beef, why would anyone rush to go get a taco that was filled with it. Free or not. I eat that, and I’ll pay one way or another.
2. Make it easy
The Free taco initiative had a caveat to it. You needed to print out a coupon and take it to a Taco Bell. So now I have to print something out and then drive to a nearby Taco Bell for a .99 taco? Maybe if they would have given out free 7 layer burritos that would have had a larger redemption rate. I get that those are more expensive but then offer a limited quantity but above all make it easy!
3. Keep trying
Listen we all get to learn from these cases but I give them credit for at least making an attempt to leverage Facebook. Social Media is a complex beast that is rarely predictable. You don’t control the conversation or many times the results. You do your very best, be humble, transparent and keep working at it. Taco Bell now has over 7 million likes on their Facebook page and will most likely bounce back.
Thoughts?
Article: A Logo Is Not a Brand
A Logo Is Not a Brand – Dan Pallotta – Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/06/a-logo-is-not-a-brand.html
Brand is much more than a name or a logo. Brand is everything, and everything is brand.
(via Instapaper)
Currently, at Bayside we are undergoing a brand audit. This process has been much needed and one that I have looked forward to for a long time. In a brand audit you review the perceptions people have by interviewing them and doing focus groups. You then see how all that stacks up with what you are trying to say. Lots of work then goes into making the necessary adjustments to reach that alignment. For some churches, it’s hard to begin thinking about a church as “brand” as it may feel awkward and irreverent or something. But remember, most people who are not church goers will rely more on the perceptions of the brand than they will anything else. While many look at a brand as their logo, website or just their sermons, those are individual elements of the brand but aren’t the brand. The brand is much larger. So what is it?
Here are a few things that jumped out to me in this article that I thought would be helpful.
Brand is your strategy.
If you’re a consumer brand, brand is your products and the story that those products tell together. Ikea’s kitchen chairs’ tendency to fall apart after two years is part of the company’s brand. If you’re a humanitarian organization, brand is your aspirations and the progress you are making toward them. Share Our Strength’s audacious goal to end child hunger in America in five years is its brand. The work the organization is doing to get governor after governor on board is its brand. Its seriousness is its brand. Back in 1969 NASA didn’t have the best logo. But man did it have a brand. It has a nicer logo now — but the brand no longer stands for anything. If you don’t know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, that’s your brand, no matter what fancy new name you come up with.
Brand is your calls to action.
If Martin Luther King had offered people free toasters if they marched on Washington, that would have been his brand. Are your calls to action brave and inspiring or tacky? Are they consistent with some strategy that makes sense? Getting more Facebook “likes” isn’t a strategy, in and of itself. If you’re a humanitarian organization, the things you ask your constituents to do are your brand.
Brand is your people.
Brand is your people and the way they represent you. Having a good team starts with good hiring and continues with strong and consistent training and development. No matter how well your employees adhere to your new brand style guide, if they couldn’t care less about the job they’re doing, that’s your brand
Brand is your logo and visuals, too.
A great brand deserves a great logo and great graphic design and visuals. It can make the difference when the customer is choosing between two great brands. But these alone cannot make your brand great.
Ultimately, brand is about caring about your business at every level and in every detail, from the big things like mission and vision, to your people, your customers, and every interaction anyone is ever going to have with you, no matter how small.
Whether you know it or not, whether you have a swanky logo or not, you do have a brand. The question is whether or not it’s the brand you really want.
Read the full article here.
Have you been considering your brand as a whole or focusing on individual elements?
Finding Creative People Is Easy (And Here’s How)
You don’t need to be retaught how to be creative, chances are you just need some support.
That’s the thought that resonated as I read this article via The Atlantic. I’ll highlight some of the things that jumped out but you can read the full article below. The author wrote it best when she said:
The theory seems to go that hiring creative people could bring much needed innovation, new thinking, and organizational revitalization. A recent study by IBM demonstrates CEOs’ belief that “creativity” is the key to success for their companies in the coming years—more than “rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision.
While I don’t think these CEOs are necessarily wrong about the need for creative people, I do think that a wave to hire “creative” people is unnecessary. That feels pretty knee jerk to me especially when there is probably an untapped resource of creativity in our own organizations. Again, I think people don’t need to be retaught how to be creative they just need some support.
Creativity in the workplace requires context. At work creativity is not a personality trait. It arises out of an ecosystem. Creative thinkers are not the rare commodities that we tend to make them out to be. If you are running a business and want the innovation, flexibility, and problem-solving power of creativity, you don’t necessarily have to hire creative people. You probably already employ them. I define a creative person as someone who has the ability to identify and deeply understand a problem, and then solve that problem by breaking the conventions of the status quo. By this definition, tortured artist or not, all of us can probably think of plenty of individuals we know who are creative.”
Here are some tips for finding the creative people who already work with you:
1. Creative people are empathic. In design we formalize this through design research, but in other fields you might find that the people who are always thinking of the human point of view (either of your customers or your other employees) are very creative.
2. Creative people ask for help. Creative problem-solving requires collaboration and the understanding that solutions will emerge while working with a team rather than alone in a cubicle. Creativity rarely thrives in an environment where colleagues are pitted against one another.
3. Creative people ask questions (and question the status quo). Some of the most creative folks you already employ could be the ones who have been pestering you about making a change in the way you are currently working. Listen to them.
4. They might be hiding. Remember that the creative people in your organization might not be the current top performers. If your culture doesn’t support them, they might be feeling stifled or under appreciated.
Read full story here.
So while this post focuses on how to find the people within your organization, I am writing a couple more posts on how to build an ecosystem of creativity. What good is it to can have all the creative people in the world under one roof if the culture doesn’t support them? It’s a waste.
As a creative, do you feel stifled at work? What are the things that keep you from sharing new and creative ideas?
