B2B’s biggest social media screw-ups

Nov 3rd

8 comments

While the case for social media as a marketing channel is compelling for consumer products companies, I’ve been particularly interested in how it is being used … or not … by mainstream industrials.  Earlier this year I assessed the social media presence of most of the major Fortune 500 B2B giants looking for case studies.

I found some great examples, but for fun, I’ve decided to start out with the WORST companies I found out there. With few exceptions, major industrial companies are not utilizing – and in many cases ignoring — social media as a stakeholder connection point. A few fun facts:

  • Number of Top 25 B2B companies with more Twitter followers than me (None)
  • Worst B2B corporate Twitter-er (by far) — DuPont. An example: “Back off weeds! 4 new herbicides are coming to get you …”
  • Most popular corporate social media platform: Facebook
  • Percent of companies with either Facebook or MySpace pages: 75%
  • Percentage with both: 25%
  • Most popular use of social media: A place to post press releases

With no further delay, let’s take a look at the Top Five biggest B2B social media screw-ups.

5. 3M Corporation – I love 3M. I’ve always cherished their heritage of innovation and product development. If any company in America could take advantage of the awesome power of global community it should be 3M. Where are you guys? We need you out here.

4. General Dynamics — There is a not-very-good techno rock band called General Dynamics who dominates the social media bandwidth. That’s a problem for a Fortune 100 company with the same name. This is the time for the company to flex some legal muscle and tell them they were there first! In the corporate world, this ID theft is tantamount to a porn starlet naming herself “Pepsi.” You have to take action on this, General Dynamics! Go kick some techno butt!

3. Oracle Corporation – You would expect an ego-laden company like Oracle to be sucking up the social media space, but not so. The Twitter account is exclusively a press release machine and their other sites are ill-attended placeholders. Larry, look at what SAP is doing with social media. Work it baby.

2. Johnson Controls — This Fortune 50 titan has had their name usurped on Facebook by a bunch of disgruntled employees. An example of social media gone very wrong when you’re asleep at the wheel.

1. Dow Chemical Company. The pinnacle of social media mayhem. The first search result for Dow on Twitter is called “spillspill” and the largest company-related Facebook page is called Fuck Chemical Valley and Fuck Dow (42 members). The MySpace presence has also been hijacked, complete with fake logos, fake employees and a mission statement that includes: “minimizing damage by angry citizens who have been affected by our pollution through legal suits and PR campaigns, making sure scientists who find our products to be dangerously toxic are not allowed to publish.” Dow has a proud history of PR fubars. The legacy continues.

Disclosure: My ex-wife had family ties to the chemical industry. While clinical tests have shown she is toxic to humans, she is not associated with the Fuck Dow campaign.

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How do I get my boss to understand social media?

Nov 2nd

5 comments

In my position as a teacher and a consultant, this is one of the most common questions I hear. So let’s get it out on the table and take on this big topic of SPONSORSHIP.

NEWS FLASH: If you are not being supported by your boss and you hope to pressure him/her into supporting your nascent social media initiative through a “grassroots” effort, it’s not going to work. Not in the long run. For effective, lasting organizational change to occur, it must be supported from the top. How do you gain that support when your boss doesn’t get it?

Who is the “sponsor” of your social media effort?

Let’s be clear about the term “sponsor.” The person who controls the budget and job assignments of the people working on social media is the “sponsor,” in our definition. This may not necessarily be your boss. It might be your boss’s boss or even the head of the company. When winning support for your project, be clear on who the real decision maker is!

Here are six ideas to get the boss on-board:

Conduct a “pilot” program. One of the most effective ways to get something started is to propose a temporary project. For example, go to your boss and tell her you want to try a new idea for 12 weeks (which sounds shorter than 3 months!). Explain that you will do this as an added, incremental effort that will not interfere with your normal job duties, you will measure and re-evaluate at the end of the period, and together you’ll decide whether to continue or not. Once the effort gets going and gains momentum, it’s going to be difficult to stop unless you completely blow it. So don’t blow it. : )

Money really does talk. Whatever you do, don’t go into a meeting with a company executive explaining that you want sponsorship to measure your company’s “quality of conversations.” If you are still buying into the “it’s all about the conversation” hype, read this (measurement and ROI) and this (focus on money). Of course the social web is about relationships, but everything measured in an organization SOMEHOW relates back to money, whether it’s profits, donors or funding. Social media is no different. Be prepared to explain how your initiative ties to the company’s objectives. If you can’t, you’re not ready for this discussion.

The 140-character classroom. Most professionals truly want to do the right thing for the company … if they understand it. So you need to patiently, relentlessly educate your sponsor on the truths of social media. Here’s a good way to do it: Pretend you’re on Twitter … all the time. Begin sending your sponsor timely, 140-character emails with a link to an article and an explanation of why the information is relevant. If you use this discipline, you will send information that actually gets read. Follow up. Discuss. Repeat as needed.
The small victory strategy. Here’s another simple idea that is remarkably effective: Plan your social media pilot program around easy “small victories” (SV). An example: “By week one, we want to have 100 followers, by week 2 we want to have 25 mentions, etc.” Notice how different this is compared to “we want to increase our customer satisfaction rate 28% by 2012.” SV’s allow you to announce lots of happy news when you need it most — at the BEGINNING! People will get behind a winner. Establish a culture of support and enthusiasm by building easy wins into the program and promoting those SV’s every week!

Preach fear in the morning and redemption in the afternoon. Scare ‘em. Seriously. Fear is a great motivator: Fear of what the competition is doing, fear of being left behind, fear of missing a trend, fear of making a wrong decision. Then, after your boss is shaking in his boots, explain what you can do to beat the competition, keep your company ahead, and make your boss look great … for absolutely no investment!

Plan for problems. When implementing change in an organization, it’s important to have a counter-measure for every obstacle you’re likely to face. Literally write down every possible argument and reason people will argue against your social media proposal and then formulate a reasonable counter measure to address them. And the hurdles aren’t just money and resources. It could be politics and competing priorities. Get your supporters to help you think-through effective answers to anything your boss can throw at you and be well-prepared.

If your boss is intelligent and well-meaning, eventually they should come around. If they are not intelligent and well meaning, getting them to understand social media is probably the least of your problems!
What problems are you having with sponsorship?
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Where’s your truckstop?

Oct 30th

3 comments

This begins a new series of five articles on getting more from your existing marketing program for little or no money.
My hometown of Knoxville seems to be the epicenter of the U.S. Interstate highway system and, most logically, mega-truckstops have sprung up at the intersection of major routes. These truckstops offer ACRES of every possible good, service and convenience for the trucker: clothes, food, showers, truck accessories, parts, repairs — anything you can imagine.
I’ve fantasized that being a marketing manager for a product aimed at truck drivers must be the greatest job in the world. Think about it — all you have to do is get your product on the store shelf and hundreds, maybe thousands, of customers drive to see you every day! Wow. What could be easier than that?
Marketing your business might not be THAT simple, but there is a lesson here. Where’s YOUR truckstop? Where do YOUR customers congregate?
If you can answer that question, it might lead to important insights that can make your marketing initiatives more effective, focused and inexpensive.
Where do your typical customers gather to get their news and information? Entertainment? Recreation?
Where do they shop, dine, exercise, worship?
What Internet sites would they most likely visit? What magazines do they read?
Are there businesses similar to yours where your customers buy goods and services?  Could those “truckstops” also offer YOUR products and services in a partnership?
There are several relatively inexpensive ways to conduct this simple research and it might lead to ways to create competitive advantage through your targeted marketing efforts.
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Warning: Social media may be hazardous to your health

Oct 29th

13 comments

A lot has been written about the “danger” social media poses to companies and brands, but what about the real threat it poses to us as individuals?

Immediate, transparent, global, free communication is one of the most breathtaking information advances since the telephone. But when there is an opportunity for human corruption, there probably WILL be human corruption. Here are the biggest threats posed by the advent of social media:

Risk to personal security. For fun, I follow a few celebrities on Twitter, the digital Post-it note. The other day, one of them tweeted: “Down at Gino’s having a pizza with my boys.” Earlier in the day he had established the city he was in. With this kind of shoot-from-the-hip public broadcasting, it’s only a matter of time before we see the first Twitter-related crimes. Even for non-celebrities, how safe is it to post to the world, “My husband and I are off to Boston for the Web 3.0 conference.” Not very … unless you want your next post to be “Our house got wiped out by crooks while we were away!”

Risk to public safety. People are easily duped and through social media, we are creating the most effective rumor mill in the history of mankind. We caught a small glimpse of the destructive power of viral misinformation when rumors of swine flu being caused by eating pork spread around the globe in a nanosecond. The innocent pork industry is still recovering. Numerous experiments have shown the ease of planting falsehoods that become reported as fact, even by legitimate news agencies. What happens when a sinister prank goes out of control and creates a panic far beyond a loss in pork sales? It will happen. What can prevent it? Nothing.

Risk to personal finances. Every time you register for a site, sign up for an app, or populate a social media profile, you are adding to a databank all about you. Strangers can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, e-mail addresses and much more. One blog writer recently quipped, “Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online.” Even more severe than identity theft and the obvious financial ramifications for an individual — we will begin to see online crimes being committed under the alias of another person.

Risk to personal reputation. Thankfully, nobody was holding a video camera in my face during my college years. But the lives of today’s youth are explicitly documented on You Tube, blogs, photo albums, and social media sites, creating a permanent online record. One corporate recruiter told me that a web search is more important to him than a resume. How will your Google-image affect your future job prospects, personal relationships, political aspirations? Did you read about the teen girls who took pictures of themselves in their bras at a sleepover, texted them to friends and then hours later ended up on porn sites? How do you erase something like that? Google never forgets.

Risk to data and information. A few weeks ago, a computer worm, using Twitter, infected tens of thousands of computers as it replicated itself across the Internet. The worm was created by a 17-year-old to “expose the vulnerabilities” in Twitter. The red-hot social networking/microblogging service has been scrambling to plug cross-site scripting and other Web site vulnerabilities to thwart worm attacks but, as one researcher points out, it’s much easier to misuse the Twitter API as a “weak link” to send worms squirming through Twitter.

Risk to personal health. Neurologists and doctors warn that obsessive immersion in screen technologies and social network sites will lead to short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, weight gain, and a tenuous sense of identity.

Risk to personal productivity. A friend recently told me that he needed to find a way to block himself from social media sites at work. “I’m hooked,” he said. “I can’t stop myself from getting online every minute that I can.” According to a U.K. study, British firms are losing $264 million A DAY on lost productivity due to undercover activities on Facebook. Businesses are starting to look for ways to deal with the social networking problem. Several companies in America already block social media sites.

So, where does this lead?
I’m a fan of social media. These new platforms have connected me to countless interesting people, opportunities and ideas. The purpose of this article is to serve as a counter-point to those who seem to be hypnotized by the hyperbole and beat the drum of social media while ignoring these certain consequences. There is virtually NO dialogue on the risks of the inevitable corruption that will result from having a free and pervasive window into YOUR life.

I’m hoping the dialogue will start now …

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