Leaping Forward by Working Backwards

Outcome-Based Planning is a Critical Success Factor for Social Media Strategy

Brian Solis, Principal of Future Works, and author of one of the world’s leading social media online resources BrianSolis.com, points out in his Jan. 6, 2011 blog, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” In his book, Engage!, he also explains that, “you can’t fail in anything if success is never defined.”

In the April 2009 article The Power of KPI – the Only Measurement that Matters, Rodger Roeser, president of Eisen Management Group, one of the largest and highest rated investor and public relations firms in the United States, focuses on tying objectives to measurable business goals directly related to familiar outcomes: margin, volume, profitability.  His point is that any other measurements in business can be, well, pointless: if project performance cannot be measured relative to bottom line goals, then why would you do it?

Jeremiah Owyang, partner of Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group, and author of  Web Strategy, another one of the top analyst blogs of the social media and strategic planning industry, will relate things just a little differently, explaining that while “no single set of objectives can accommodate all business models or corporate initiatives…four objectives serve as a foundation for effectively measuring social marketing:  fostering dialog, promoting advocacy, facilitating support, spurring innovation.”  He will also tell you that “companies should step back and approach social business like any other business program: with a plan.” 

Erik Qualman, Global Vice President of Online Marketing of EF Education, author of the bestselling book, Socialnomics, and creator of Social Media Revolution, one of the most viral videos of 2010, advises social media strategists to “define what success looks like before you start.”  In his book he also names four objectives to set for your social media strategy: 1) listen, 2) interact, 3) react and 4) soft sell.

I could keep going with the Who’s Who list of social media experts, and every single one of them will tell you the same thing:  companies that enter into the social media arena without proper planning and intent for success, will fail.  The point is that you have to set goals.  Not only must you have an outcome-based strategy for social media, but it has to be framed within the overall strategic plan for your organization.

So, starting with the end in mind is critical. I once heard it referred to as “working backwards”, but its really working ahead.   Goals don’t mean much if you don’t know when you’ve accomplished them. How are you going to know when you are succeeding and when you are not?

In his discussion of this topic in Engage!, Brian Solis defers to the expertise of the “Queen of Measurement”, K.D. Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, and author of KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog.  She refers to her KBI Development System (not KPI - Key Performance Indicators, but KBI - Kick Butt Index).  She also created the Measurement Program Checklist, which is based on five basic steps:

1.    Define your measurement of success (outcomes, KPI, benchmarks)

2.    Select a listening/monitoring tool (based on channels and the qualitative and quantitative data you wish to collect).

3.    Select a web analytic or CRM tool.

4.    Select a survey tool.

5.    Analyze and report results.

Strategic Advisers LLC  tells its social media clients that once you’ve identified your overall strategy, your key performance indicators will be based on the objectives you’ve chosen:  they must be customer-centered, building upon the foundations of sound marketing and effective customer-relationship management (CRM).  Taking all these experts’ advice into consideration, and knowing that every client’s business and consequently social media strategy is unique, Strategic Advisers LLC suggests a common starting place for our clients.  These are key objectives for any successful social networking plan:

1. Dialogue – get people to talk to you and each other through your media channels.  This starts by listening to what they are saying.  Carefully.

2. Advocacy – get people to talk about you and recommend you to their friends.  This starts with interaction.  Be helpful.  Be client-focused.  People will spread the word about your good deeds!

3. Forum – open the box and welcome the comments; good or bad, make sure you are listening, you talk back, and you resolve any problems as soon as possible.  How you react, especially to the challenge of negative issues, is directly related to your credibility and therefore critical to your survival.

4. Innovation – ask customers what they want; surveys, contests, questions of the day.  This is the “soft sell” approach that will keep your channels customer-focused.

These objectives then determine your choice of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  KPIs must be well-defined, actionable (within a company’s ability to control) and simple measures that target realistic , attainable goals and help you set clear benchmarks for the ROI you need to justify the expense required by social media.  They are critical to your ability to measure outcomes, assess progress and make tactical adjustments.  KPIs can fall into many categories :

• Quantitative indicators present as a number; e.g., sales volume.
• Operational indicators characterize existing company processes; e.g., production line down time related to training.
• Directional indicators specify whether an organization is getting better or not; e.g., customer retention.
• Financial indicators relate performance to return and margin

In social media it can be very difficult to pinpoint ROI because of the nature of what is being accomplished: building relationships and social capital is difficult to directly quantify.  However, there are indicators of success that can be closely monitored.  First, using the four main objectives, choose data that can be gathered to make an assessment.

Dialogue:

·         Who is everyone talking about? (research the market for your product or service – who’s got the most mindshare?)

·         How often is it you? (your market share)

·         At what level are they engaged? (likes, comments, sharing, conversations…)

·         In what ways are you engaging with them? Do you have a response plan?

·         Are they positive or negative?

Advocacy:

·         Who’s talking?

·         Who are they talking to?

·         What are they talking about?

·         What impact is it having?

·         What recommendations are they giving?

Forum:

·         Process for monitoring and responding

·         Success rate

·         Response time: total resolution time

·         Follow-up satisfaction score

Innovation:

·         Topics

·         Trends

·         Interest level (response rate)

·         Impact/relevance on customers

After you have gathered that data, determine which business processes will be affected by changes in those numbers.  For example, in the case of the first objective of establishing dialogue, what will happen when more customers start talking about your product or service?  Here are some likely outcomes:

·         Increased customer support calls from existing customers.

·         Increased inquiries to the sales department.

·         More problems to resolve.

·         Increased sales!

In each case you can identify a likely consequence, look to see if it comes true, and then take it to the next level.  In many cases, new opportunities to use social media will arise as new processes unfold.  For example, if your customer support department complaint volume has increased, what is your resolution rate?  In what ways could you use social media to improve it?

A myriad of social-media analytical tools are available on the market. For most companies, standard tools offered by proprietary platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook are excellent ways to monitor progress and the effectiveness of your content; e.g., how many people are opening your emails, how many are following your blogs, how many times are they forwarding them on to friends? Both Blogger and Wordpress offer their own analytical tools to measure reach (how many people read your blogs), retention (how many people keep reading your blogs), engagement (how many people comment on your blogs), and advocacy  (how many people are sharing and recommending your blogs with others).  

These tools can be used at any time, and should be tracked as often as you post new content, which should be weekly at a minimum for some channels, and daily for others.  They also track changes over time, and by specific date, so you can identify which content creates the most interest, and also spot trends.

It is relevant here to remember these other important factors:

1. Channel Selection - The proper mix of social-media channels using the right content will leverage KPIs to their full potential.  For example, if one of your KPIs is increased posting of photos or videos by customers, facebook would obviously be a better choice than twitter or a blog, but you’re also going to want a YouTube Channel so you can collect them, along with your own, in a central location.
2.  Organizational Integration – every part of your organization should be engaged and have clear roles and responsibilities for social media and for marketing.  Traditionally, marketing plans focus mainly on sales, marketing and customer support departments. However, companies who understand that marketing must live and breathe “down in the trenches where the rubber meets the road” are bound for success.  Every department will be affected, so each one should have its own set of objectives, KPIs, measurement tools, and reports.
3. Social Media Policy – makes it crystal clear what you expect of your employees and contractors regarding engagement with customers and the general public as representatives of your company.  The rules must be clear so that your outcomes are not tainted by poor response variables, or carelessly worded responses.
4. Engagement – random posts and lack of response to constituent input is not enough.  Focusing on tools, technology and cool applications is not enough.  Talking about yourself is not enough.  Your customers must be engaged by your organization.  You must be willing to allow them to interact with you one-on-one and get to know you.  You have to build and then belong to your community, and then continue to nurture authentic relationships by focusing on your customers’ stories.

In summary, take some general advice from Strategic Advisers LLC:

1. Build a social-media plan strategically, one careful step at a time.
2. Start with the end in mind and work backwards: identify best methods for measurement, and align media channels and metrics with goals in mind.
3. Construct a diverse, interactive channel selection congruently over time in order to obtain the furthest reach. Leverage these assets to create a competitive advantage by helping differentiate your organization in the marketplace so it can be more flexible and responsive than its competitors. 
4.  A social media network built upon a solid foundation of email newsletters, in-person events, focused direct mail, and a central website hub will get the word out most effectively.
5. Measureable business objectives provide opportunities to learn about customers, their preferred interactions, their understanding of brand, and value received.
6. Finally, don’t try to reinvent the wheel.  Consult the experts. We consult with one another, so why shouldn’t you?

Riders on the (brain) storm to creativity

At Strategic Advisers, we do a lot of brainstorming with and for our clients to help them achieve their strategic objectives. One of our favorite exercises is to use "mind maps" to collect ideas and visually understand how these ideas are connected to one another.


One of the key elements of brainstorming is to let loose of your ideas -- no matter how crazy they may seem at the time -- and not judging those ideas during the brainstorming process. (That can be done much later in the process.)

An idea generated by one person during a brainstorming session may create sparks in the other brains around the table to suggest still other ideas, which can continue to build upon each other like an "idea" snowball rolling down a hill. When that snowball smashes into the tree at the bottom of the hill, upon close inspection, you often will see some very creative solutions lying around that you had never considered before. Each of us think differently and we bring, quite literally, different and uniquely wired brains to the brainstorming table.


During my studies in the Executive Leadership and Organization Change masters program at Northern Kentucky University's College of Business, I was fortunate to attend a presentation about creativity and innovation by Craig Wynett, the chief creative officer at Proctor and Gamble. Wynett takes what he calls a “science-based view of creativity.” In his presentation, he cited Edward Deming as saying: “Experience not backed by theory teaches us nothing.” By using innovation and creativity, Wynett suggests that companies can grow profits at twice the rate of sales (organic profit growth). In recent years, P&G and other innovative companies are proving that point.

An interesting concept discussed by Wynett was “cognition = categorization.” In other words, cognition (thinking) is all about categorization. Thinking is usually an act of comparison. When we think, we usually ask ourselves, “What existing mental category is this a member of?” or “What is that person/thing/situation most similar to of the things that I have experienced in my life.”

To prove this concept, Wynett showed our class a slide with a bottle of Coke sitting on a stack of paper. For many, it was just a bottle of Coke sitting on paper, but for others, using this comparison/analogy technique, they equated the Coke to a brick, and saw the soft drink as a paperweight instead.

Wynett also discussed the concept of “breakthrough thinking” -- which he says is an unforeseeable solution to a novel problem, an abrupt shift from nonsense to sense, from not knowing to knowing. Breakthrough thinking does not just happen, like seen in the movies.

Breakthrough thinking cannot be solved by routine knowledge, and is obvious only in retrospect, he said. Wynett said that our learning system is “expectation driven” and “the number one requirement for learning is ‘expectation failure’” – what you were expecting to happen did not happen.

What I learned from Wynett is that there is no idea whatsoever that is not already rooted in something we already know. An prime example of this is the Dyson vacuum, which came to British inventor James Dyson after he visited a lumberyard and saw a cyclone machine using centrifugal force to collect sawdust. Another example was the creation of Velcro, which came to its inventor after examining how a burr worked when it attached to clothing.

According to Wynett, analogy is the key to creativity. To be creative, one needs to see beyond surface features (actors, objects) to identify underlying roles/relationships (plot), find similarities between the situations despite differences that may separate them, and then synthesize new concepts by taking the old concepts and putting them together in new ways. 

Last month in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, in its 10th-anniversary special of "The Year in Ideas," David Segal wrote a great story titled, "In the Pursuit of [The Perfect Brainstorm]," about how companies are using brainstorming to spur creativity and innovation, which in turn makes them more competitive in the marketplace. I've included a link to this story here:


In Pursuit of [the Perfect Brainstorm]

How Videogames are Changing the Economy and Advancing Technology

A great column in today's Wall Street Journal about how the videogame entertainment industry has supplanted the government in terms of creating innovation in the area of technology. To read the column, click on the link below.


How Videogames Are Changing the Economy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203418804576040103609214400.html

After reading this column, I am happy to report that my 15-year-old son's addiction to Call of Duty, and now, Microsoft Kinect is helping our economy and moving technology forward.