Katy Lindemann

Posted on: January 6, 2010

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Slides: Demystifying Social Media

Transcript:

Obviously, everyone’s all here.  You know, you think there’s a hell of
a lot of buzz around social media.  You can’t get away from it.  And
usually, when we think about social, people mean blogs, they mean
twitter, they mean wikis, they mean social publishing platforms.  But,
actually, I think it’s, kind of, time to confront the elephant in the room.

There’s actually no such thing as social media.  It’s actually a meaningless
term, which I know is a bit controversial, because we’re here at a
conference called Social Media 09.

What that suggests, it suggest that the media, the places are social, it
makes it all about the where.  And, actually, it’s not the media that’s
social, it’s the ideas and the behavior.  It’s the what, and the how, that’s
social.  At the heart of it, social ideas are not anything new.  Social
ideas are ideas that get people talking, that spark conversation, ideas that
get shared and passed on.  And most importantly, I think, is the dynamic
of social behavior.  And I think it going to be important to, kind of, unpick
what we mean by social behavior in a bit more detail..

But, essentially, it’s about two-way behavior.  It’s about interaction and
it’s about dialogue.  Social ideas are nothing new.  Brand communication
has always been about social ideas.  The ultimate goal has always been
to create a product, a service, or a piece of communication that gets
talked about positively.  And that’s what social ideas are about, they’re
about being talked about.  And lots of great advertising has been really
good at creating buzz.  Lots of brands are good at creating social ideas,
but just getting talked about isn’t enough to be social.  Social behavior is
about joining in.  And it’s an important distinction.  Brands like Apple are
brilliant at creating buzz.  They create new product, and the advertising
they do gets buzz going.  But in terms of their behavior, they’re very
anti-social.  They are not interested in having a dialogue with anyone.
They are not interested in, you know, engaging in any kind of two-way
conversation.  And that’s really what the fuss about social is.  It’s about
interaction, participation, and dialogue.

So, really, I think that social media is not really a very helpful way of
thinking about things.  Let’s stop thinking about social media and think
about being social.  Social isn’t about what you do on Facebook or
Twitter, it’s about how you behave, it’s not about where you do it.  So
I think it’s more helpful to think about social behavior and what does it
actually mean to be social.

First thing, conversation.  Traditional communication was always about
brands talking to people and people listening.  So, one-way broadcast.
But  conversation is two-way.  We all know this.  You don’t have a very
successful conversation with someone if they’re not listening to you.  So
it’s about listening as well as talking.  And it’s about being human and
authentic.  People don’t want to be communicated to, they want to be
listened to.  We much prefer to engage in conversations about the things
that actually matter to us.  We want to be acknowledged.  We’d like to
have our questions answered.  We like to exchange information and ideas
and values.  And being social means participating in all of the above in
equal measure.  And I think the most important thing is be interested as
well as interesting.

Sharing.  People share stuff.  You know, part of being social is we share
stuff we like with other people.  We share things for a number of reasons.
Sometimes it’s simply because we want other people to enjoy something
amazing that we’ve found.  Sometimes it’s because something is really
important to us and we want other people to know about it.  Quite a lot
of the time it’s about status.  You know, we’ve found something and we
want to look good, because we want other people to know that we’ve
found something.  And we want to reflect in the glory of us being the ones
to have found it and passed it on.  But whatever the motive for sharing
stuff, at the heart, it’s about sharing great stuff.  Generosity in sharing and
feeling good about passing it on.

Connecting.  Obviously, connecting is at the heart of being social.  People
connecting with their family, their friends, acquaintances, like-minded people,
who share common interests and values.  For brands, it’s not about trying
to connect with as many people as possible.  It’s not about trying to get
a million followers on Twitter or get as many Facebook fans as you can.
It’s about meaningful connections.  So it might be about finding common
interests and values with your customers and trying to forge a connection
in the places they’re already spending time.  It might be about facilitating
connections with like-minded people.  But, ultimately, really, what it’s
about, it’s about remembering that relationships are based on reciprocal
give and take.

A really important part of being social is collaborating.  The social web
has enabled massive amounts of collaboration.  Of like-minded people
to get together and collaborate to achieve shared goals.  We can self-
organize in more ways than we were ever able to before, come together
more rapidly, co-create more easily, and what we achieve can spread
more rapidly than ever before.  For brands, it might be about how can
you help people collaborate together to achieve their goal.  It might be
about opening up your brand and inviting people to collaborate and
develop a new business and rewarding them for doing so.  The key thing
about collaboration, again, it’s about working together for mutual benefit.
You’re all in it together.

And actually, being social isn’t just about marketing.  If you truly put the
customer at the heart of your business, then social principles shouldn’t
just be confined to your marketing department.  Some of the most social
brands are using social communications to deliver exceptional customer
service.  Now, it should go without saying, that you should be delivering
exceptional customer service to every touch point.  But, if someone has a
bad experience, it used to be that if they told someone, that’s not a good
thing, but now, if they tell someone, they can spread it to many more
people more rapidly than ever before.  And the real-time social web offers
an amazing opportunity to resolve people’s queries, be there to help,
answer their questions, go out and proactively help people.  Everything
you do as a brand communicates, and what you do is so much more
important than what you say, and acceptable customer service is some of
the best marketing that money can’t really buy.

Product development.  People have a pretty good idea what they want
from a brand or a business.  So, why don’t you ask them?  It could be
about a product or a service innovation.  It could be about business
practices or simply a small change to the way that you do something you
already do.  The social web enables open dialogue and communication.
So, use this to your advantage.  Whether it’s knowing, like Starbucks did,
that, actually, customers said, we’re really miffed that you stopped making
them drizzle cake, and they brought it back in store.  Whether it’s about
development of new products like Dell have done, or like finding out
what do your people want you to focus on, like Barrack Obama did.
The possibilities of how social can transform your business are pretty
immense.

And, finally, I guess, relationship building.  I mean, that’s what, ultimately,
we’re all trying to do.  Being social isn’t about saying something and
running away.  It’s not just about collecting followers that you can sell to.
It’s about building relationships, having an ongoing dialogue.  It’s about
rewarding people and ultimately giving them a reason to want to spend
time with you.

I guess, finally, one really important thing that is, kind of, sometimes
overlooked is, it might be that your organization is such that you might
not be, you know, a lot of these things might not be right for you right
now.  If legal has to sign off everything you do, and it take forty-eight
hours to sign something off, actively providing, you know, a conversation
on Twitter might not be the right thing for you right now.  You might not
be set up yet to join the conversation.  You hope you’ll get there eventually,
but if you’re not, you know, it’s about recognizing that.  But, you can
listen.  Listen to what people are saying, thinking, feeling.  Understand
your customer.  Understand what they want.  What they think about your
brand, because these conversations are going on, they’re being very vocal
it.  Understanding what you’re doing well and what you could be doing
better.  Listening to the conversation taking place shouldn’t be a
substitute for traditional research, but if you’re not really doing it, you’re
kind of missing out.  And, just, finally, being social is something that you
do with people and not to people.  It should be blooming obvious, but it
can’t be stressed enough.  It’s not about the platforms you use.  It’s not
about how many followers you have, how many views you get.  It’s about
how you behave.  And if you can get that bit right, then you’re well on
your way.

Thank you very much.

Q & A:

Was the Naked Australia ‘girl in the jacket’ fake SM campaign ‘authentic and transparent’?

I’m not totally up to speed on the full details of the campaign, but as far as I know, I believe it was intended to be a straightforward tease and reveal – but that in hindsight, using social techniques for tease and reveal introduces issues around transparency that don’t arise in traditional media, and they’d almost certainly do it differently if they were to do it again.

‘MASH’ Is this definition of social relevant at a global level, taking different cultures into consideration?

At a macro level, yes, I believe that social ideas and social behaviour are absolutely fundamental to what makes us human, we’re social animals and this is true the world over.  At a micro level, there are specifics which change depending on different cultures, so the way in which brands choose to be social may well differ across markets, but broadly as a definition I believe it’s globally relevant.

‘its not what u say its what u do’ but does PR have a roll in saying what you do to everyone?

Purists would argue that if what you do is good enough, it’ll spread of its own accord and won’t need external amplification. Whilst I think that’s quite an idealistic point of view, it’s still not a bad ideal to come back to – focusing our efforts in doing great stuff is always going to be more effective than trying to amplify awareness of something mediocre.   And I think that doing great stuff can be a part of what PR is all about – brand activation can be about doing rather than just saying. But assuming you’re walking the talk, then yes, PR can definitely play a role in bringing the great stuff you’re doing to a greater audience – but it’s not enough to just talk, without having the goods to back it up.