The social media gap is growing into a full-blown chasm. On
one side, we have companies that are struggling to get on board, having stalled
at the twin road blocks of ROI justification and resourcing.
In the middle, there many businesses that have made solid
steps but run the risk of seeing their fledgling communities wither and die
under the growing threat of recessionary cuts.
And in the distance, we have organizations that are well on
their way to becoming social businesses. They have vibrant, self-supporting
owned media communities while experts from many business functions act as
ambassadors in earned media networks. Their customers and employees are
actively engaged in digital discovery and collaborative service development,
and all of this is wrapped up with measurable and meaningful ROI.
But let’s be frank. This is certainly the exception and not
the rule. With this ideal in mind, it seems timely to look the trends that are
likely to shape social business adoption in 2012 and beyond…
1. The year social grows up
The writing is on the digital (or is that Facebook?) ‘wall’…
interactive marketing is here to stay. With analysts predicting spend
hitting nearly US$80 billion by 2016, social media and digital are no longer
the playthings of pajama-wearing bloggers and tweens. Beneath the headlines,
though, there lies another story. Social media is hard. The streets aren’t
paved with digital gold. For example, Reuters recently reported that
financial advisors are seeing declining benefits from social media. In the same
month, The New York Times told
us Facebook visits were dropping.
My company's client IBM’s Social CRM study highlighted the
emerging gap between marketing perception and social consumer reality. It
showed that while brand marketers felt consumers came to their social networks
to feel brand love, the actually were more interested in receiving coupons,
discounts and customer support.
In 2012, brands will increasingly be faced with a series of
hard choices. I said in last year’s trends post,
that a presence in the big four of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube was
becoming a non-negotiable. The hard choices come as they realize that building
a thriving community in each is time consuming and – without firm goals in
place – possibly pointless.
There is a case for maintaining a minimal presence in one
channel – perhaps using it as a bridge to another. For many brands, YouTube
isn’t a strong community option – but is undeniably the video sharing leader.
In this example, they should focus on other channels to build engagement while
directing consumers to their videos – and then back to other, more appropriate
channels for conversation or to purchase.
All of becomes more complex as brands need to maintain a
watchful eye on emerging channels. Case in point is the much maligned Google+
which is tipped to
hit 400 million users by the end of 2012. Are you there yet?
Maturing social consumers will also start modifying their
behaviors. Social media overload will see them dropping away from social
networks that don’t give them what they need. Those brands that have
established social presences should start 2012 by asking their loyal,
high-sharing social consumers what they want – and modify accordingly. This is
especially important for those that have plateaued, are struggling to attract
new followers or are seeing engagement levels dropping. The opportunity for
brands in 2012 is for smarter, probably smaller, social networks that are built
around tangible social customer needs of the vocal, high sharing minority and
measurable business outcomes.
2. The age of social consumer relations management
The days of customers being happy with 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Monday through Friday support are coming to an end. Encouragingly, many brands
have responded with social brand media monitoring programs and customer support
staff in owned social media channels. While things are on the up, 2011
saw brands such as FedEx, Ocean
Marketingand Qantas added
to the pantheon of social media fail case studies.
Clearly, we’re not there yet. An October
2011 study from by Conversocial found many retailers failed to respond
to complaints in social networks. Secondly from the ‘damned if you do, damned
if you don’t’ school of customer support, issues have also blown up when
attempts at online customer interaction have been judged inappropriate. And
we’re also seeing backlash when brands have failed to anticipate the likely
online reaction to their social media marketing attempts.
I predict 2012 will see the emergence of social
consumer support functions. People with solid expertise in managing and predicting online customer
behavior will play a much greater role in all facets of a brand’s online
presence. The social media gold rush days are coming to an end. We need experts
helping to plan and manage discussions.
Surveys have told us people are looking
for customer support in social channels, so get your customer support people
there. This will force even deeper collaboration between business functions and
with external agencies. It will also force jobs to be restructured as social
consumer support – with its deeper customer understanding – taking a much more
strategic role in business decisions. Begs a question – will PR become a social
consumer relations function?
3. Drop the ‘social’ as social business becomes
business
 |
Me (left) discussing social
business evolution with Clelia Morales from eBay;
Christophe Rocca from SanDisk and Jonathan Jiménez from Vodafone during a Text 100 event in Madrid
|
McKinsey reports that
social technology use is increasingly correlated with operating margin
improvements and market share leadership. Great news, especially for those of
us who see social business becoming, simply, business in 2012, just as
e-commerce became commerce before it. This year, we’ll see a rapid adoption of social technologies
changing all facets of business, whether they want to change or not.
The days of a marketing-led social media function are coming
to a close. Smart companies are building centers of excellence that are
supporting all business functions in a coordinated fashion. They’re also
investing in training all employees, realizing that the core demands from
social consumers are for subject matter expertise, not the size of someone’s
Twitter following, Klout ranking or ability to text 100 words a minute.
Text
100 has created an ambitious Digital Certification program where consultants,
HR, IT, Finance staff and Office Managers are all tasked with improving their
thought leadership, digital consulting skills, community management and
training.
Like an increasing number of companies, we’ve realized our
social consumers want to interact with us through social channels. In response
we’re redesigning our client support, marketing, recruitment and internal
communications channels to suit the requirements of our audiences.
The mission for 2012 is for marketers to let go of other
business disciplines. Future success won’t be in their ability to interpret
what their colleagues in customer service, human resources and so on do and
deliver on their behalf. It will be in their ability to partner, coach and
ultimately enable these functions.
4. Spokespeople evolved: Executives to experts
A recent GlobalWebIndex report
found that B2B decision makers were highly socially engaged and rated
conversations with brands on social networks as more influential than webinars,
sales presentations, conferences or corporate entertainment. The more complex
the decision, the greater the need to ask questions of experts in online
communities.
Social consumers who make big decisions want to talk to the
right people online. We’ve pushed C-level executives into the spotlight for
more than a hundred years – and if they’re the right people to manage these
complex online conversations then we need to arm them for the discussion.
We’re increasingly managing Digital Academy training for our
clients. These programs help people from customer support, sales, marketing,
human resources and so on use social networking channels such as Twitter and
LinkedIn to support their business goals. The resulting programs see these
experts blogging on corporate websites, managing communities in company
discussion forums, and acting as ambassadors in external earned media
communities.
Through 2012 and beyond we’ll see people from all business
functions playing similar expanded roles in support of their own objectives.
This is a logical next step for those companies that have developed owned media
properties across Facebook, twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Based on our
experience, it’s best to start with one business function, division or product
and build a program around someone with a greater aptitude for social media.
Measure their success – learn from the things that didn’t go well – and evolve
the campaign around them.
5. Big data becomes business as usual
IDC’s “2011
Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos” told us the world’s
information is doubling every two years. Last year saw 1.8 zettabytes created
and replicated. That’s a lot of info and while most PR people would run a
mile before diving into the data, that’s one fear our profession is going to
have to face.
In 2012, marketers will need to use hard metrics to gauge
digital and social marketing ROI. We’re entering a tough economic environment
where even harder questions are going to be asked of the PR tactics we propose.
The time for social media experimentation is waning in the hunt for solid
bottom-line results.
The answer increasingly lies in what’s being called ‘big
data’. While the definitions are blurred, at its core
big data means using a range of data sets including competitive information,
online data such as social networking behaviors, offline data and customer
information to enable a three dimensional approach to business decisions.
From a PR perspective the emergence of better, easier-to-use
more targeted tools combined with geo-location technologies will mean data will
play a meaningful role in PR activities. We’ll go beyond reach and
“participation” measures such as likes and retweets and instead derive
action-oriented insights from our metrics.
Big data will also help us understand the individuals we’re
influencing so we can create more targeted strategies. And if this still makes
you want to run a mile, 2012 will also see a rise in specialist data
analysts who will increasingly play a role in shaping communications decisions.
I’ll put up part two of this post next week. As always, your thoughts
are very welcome. To discuss directly with me, fire a note to woolf.jeremy@gmail.com
The original version of this post first ran on
my company's blog, HyperText
