Social media: Marketing gets its party crashed - and what marketers can do about it

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If the business world were a neighborhood, marketers would be the ones with the nice house and a manicured garden. They would be social, but in a well-dressed, somewhat formal kind of way. Marketers are, on the whole, somewhat reserved. Their job is to show the good sides of a company, and control the "messaging" associated with the company. The public face.

It was pretty easy to control that message back in the stone age of traditional one-way marketing, before the web. It was even pretty easy to control that message after the web and email marketing settled in. If marketing was a party, the party was still dignified and respectable.

Then along came social media. Whoops. Enter the marketing party crashers. Nose rings. Skateboards. Tattoos. Very, very vocal, messy, and demanding.

"Hey. We heard you were having a party. We heard there was good food. Whoa! You call this good food? This food is lame!" Tweet, tweet, tweet. Now everyone in the neighborhood knows that your food is lame.

Welcome to the marketer's nightmare.

With social media, everyone can say anything to anyone, anytime. Sally stuck in a slow line at a FastFoodFranchise? Out comes the Blackberry. Sally tweets 1,609 tweeple, and those tweeple retweet to their tweeple, and pretty soon thousands of people know that Sally was stuck in line at FastFoodFranchise.

Meanwhile, back at FastFoodFranchise, Inc., the marketer and CEO are meeting about their social media strategy. They have no idea that, as they are sitting there, their reputation is being trashed.

What's a marketer to do? Here's what I recommend:

1) Your reputation has gone public. Deal with it. My take on branding sums it up: Branding is the promise that you make. Your brand is the promise that you actually keep.

Before the age of instant and ubiquitous communication, your company could make branding promises, then break them with your actual corporate behavior - and get away with it. Those days are over. Now, if you break your promise, everyone is going to know about it, sooner rather than later.

Social media requires that every CEO understands just how public commerce has become. New standards of CEO-to-customer communication are being set by CEOs such as Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who personally tweets, every couple of days, and who is becoming a Twitter legend in his own time. He's got 1,311,763 followers.

Each company will need to find its appropriate level of social media activity. A company selling shoes to the masses will be much more suited to the rapid-tweeting environment of Twitter than a company selling million-dollar manufacturing systems, for example. And the customers buying those big-buck systems will be less likely to tweet about their experiences. On the other hand, those customers may choose to use another social media vehicle to express their views, to the community of people in similar business positions.

No matter what you are selling, your customers are now communicating with each other. What you do with one customer will become known to others. We have all become players in our own reality shows now.

The age of one-way communication is completely and totally dead.

2) If your brand is really the promise that you keep, then you must keep your promises. This is hard, hard work. If you tell your customers that "your phone call is very important to us," then you can't send them to voicemail hell or leave them on hold for ages. (I prefer the method where you have a receptionist, even if she/he is offsite, to direct calls.) If you promise that your products are high quality, your manufacturing and quality control systems and processes need to be ironclad.

3) Marketing is job one for everyone in the company. I'm not the only marketing pundit to point out that CEOs have lost trust in their marketers. And I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of angry response to this. But it's simply the truth. It's what I see out there every day, and it's one of the reasons I get hired. CEOs do not consider their marketers strategic, and they worry that their marketing efforts are simply not moving the revenue needle. This is only going to get worse as social media is increasingly used by customers to stay current and to conduct their buying research.

CEOs see these trends, and they know they must ride them. They want their marketers to lead the way. Granted, it's tough (some would say impossible) to meet all the deadlines, manage all the projects, and keep up with the ever-changing marketing technology landscape. Especially when a marketing technology is going through its hockey-stick phase. And CEOs are often quite unrealistic about the amount of resources needed to cover all the bases that need covering.

I would argue, however, that marketers get into this mess because they take a company- and project-oriented view of their jobs, rather than a customer- and programmatic view of their jobs.

What I'd do if I were a marketer inside a company

If I were a marketer working inside a company right now, I'd interview some key customers and ask them how they're using social media, and how they think we could use social media to help them. Once I had talked to enough people (usually about 10 of any given type) to be sure of a consensus, I'd then build a social media strategy and pitch it to the CEO. Instead of guessing, or using methods that wouldn't work for our customers, I would know what to do, and I'd be confident about our direction.

I'd use outside vendors at first, to take advantage of what those vendors had learned servicing their other clients. I would also set up tools to monitor social media for our company, product, industry, and competition. I'd assign someone - or hire someone - to watch and report on that activity, and to start responding.

For example, if someone tweeted their displeasure to their SoMe friends, I'd send them a personal message right away, expressing my willingness to try to solve their problem or make it right somehow.

Here are some examples of corporate reactions to a complaint that surfaced in a social media venue.

From AT&T: Terrible response. Too "commercial," and more of an excuse. The "blogger guy" never actually apologizes. He's obviously reading. Plus, it's all about how difficult it is for AT&T to keep its promises. This is not the customer's problem. (Hat tip to Church of the Customer.)

A Domino's corporate apology: Well-stated. But he should have looked at the camera.

Domino's again: This time the operator of six Domino's Pizza franchises in Chicago, apologizing to "Interactive Amy," who apparently twittered about her less-than-stellar service from a local franchise. (Hat tips to Church of the Customer and to @InteractiveAmy.)

Since SoMe is about two-way communication, part of my SoMe plan would be "listening and responding." The CEO would have to know that the actions of listening and responding requires resources - someone needs to listen, respond, and report to management.

I would assume that we would have to tweak our SoMe strategy, as our own customers became more familiar with SoMe tools and found new ways to network with others in their own community. I would also continue to interview 2 customers a week, to make sure that I was staying in sync with them.

If you are the marketer, doing these things would keep you from adopting a SoMe strategy that was doomed to fail with your customer base. It would allow you to focus your efforts on the activities that will work for your company, with your customers. It would help you earn (or re-earn) the trust of your CEO, who would see that you had built a logical, customer-centric SoMe strategy, and that you were staying on top of the new trends - not only the SoMe marketing trends, but the shifts in customer needs and desires (which will be communicated to you in your ongoing customer interviews and via social networks). Your SoMe strategy would help you quickly respond to those who were dissatisfied, and set things right before your brand was tarnished.

To use one more analogy, marketing used to be something where smart people said clever things on a pretty stage, and buyers paid attention. Now no one pays attention to corporate messages anymore. Too many promises have been made, and too many broken. Now customers have come up onto the stage from the audience, and taken over the microphone.

Your best bet is to be gracious - they are your customers, after all. Accept their new power. You don't have any choice, really. Find ways to work with them, and they'll work with you.