makuch on digital

(This post is also featured on the Euro RSCG Worldwide Social Media Site www.eurorscgsocial.com)

Social Media has enabled Brands to become more human than ever before. Community managers are facebooking and tweeting on behalf of the Brand, and the good ones embody the brand’s essential characteristics and tone the best.

Pretty cool stuff, and a real development in the history of Branding.

With the increase in marketing-focused social media, we need to have ways to measure how good a brand’s social media activity is. Since Brands are acting a whole lot more like, well, people, it seems worth while to look at how Social Intelligence is measured in us humans, and then see if that can be applied to brands.

Once of the pioneers in understanding Social Intelligence on a human level is Dr. Karl Albrecht.

His understanding of Social Intelligence includes 5 key dimensions:

Situational Radar: The ability to “read” situations, understand the social context that influences behavior, and choose behavioral strategies that are most likely to be successful.

Presence: Also known as “bearing,” presence is the external sense of one’s self that others perceive: confidence, self-respect and self-worth.

Authenticity: The opposite of being “phony,” authenticity is a way of behaving which engenders a perception that one is honest with one’s self as well as others.

Clarity: The ability to express one’s self clearly, use language effectively, explain concepts clearly and persuade with ideas.

Empathy: More than just an internal sense of relatedness or appreciation for the experiences of others, empathy in this context represents the ability to create a sense of connectedness with others; to get them on your wavelength and invite them to move with and toward you rather than away and against you.

All of these seem to apply quite readily to the digital social media space as a way to evaluate a Brand’s  social media activity.

Situational Radar: Are you aware of what’s going on – are you listening to the posts as well as the context of  those posts? Do you modify your actions in response?

Presence: Does your social media have a voice? Are there regular posts? Is it engaging and u- beat or has your social media personality lapsed into a wall-flower?

Authenticity: This is the big one. There have been far too many examples of brands getting busted for dishonesty through social media.

Clarity: This is almost a must have for today’s social media. 140 characters required clarity, one way or another!

Empathy: Creating connectedness is one of the critical things in social media – not just through tone and attitude, but though actions as well. Are you leveraging social media to promote your environmental or humanitarian activities and goals?

You get the sense that you could easily create a score-card out of these criteria to measure your social media, identify weak spots, and plan for improvement. It could be the starting point for surveys and research into a Brand’s social media efforts.

To me its very interesting and revealing how well Albrecht’s Social Intelligence  framework applies to social media. At the end of the day, we’re people, and , we want to be treated like people. Not only by our friends, families, and employers, but also by the brands and businesses that we engage with as well.

Every Marketer wants raving fans. The kind of customers that go out of the way to extol the benefits and values of their product. The ones who actively engage in social media and are driving forces of viral campaigns. When you look at the brands that have such a fanatical base of customers (think Apple, Honda, Nike…) its clear that these brands pay off their marketing message with a product that meets or even surpasses expectations.

Marketing will always fail when that brand promise presented in its marketing is not backed up in the product. Tiger Woods is giving us a real-time example of what happens when the seedy truth beneath a squeaky clean image comes out. The Tiger Woods brand has taken a massive drubbing in the last month. Suddenly what you see in the Nike, Tag Heuer, and GatorAid ads is not what these brands bargained for.

All marketers need to keep this in mind when making promises. The Rogers and Bell in Canada have recently been forced to stop making “most reliable” and ” fastest” network claims. No wonder the population cheered when Wind Mobile was allowed to enter the market. No one believed them anyway! Pharma marketers also need to remember this. Perhaps the worst culprits of the “say anything” approach to marketing has made them one of the least trusted of all industries.

Marketing is about your target – but you can’t forget about the product. You need to know what it is, and really understand how it benefits your target. Otherwise your marketing turns into hollow lip service, and the fact that your customers are all connected through social media means news of overblown, unsubstantiated marketing will spread rapidly. The negative feeling of a purchase decision where the product isn’t what you expected make for great status updates.

Know thy customer. Know thy product. And make sure the product pays off everything you’ve been saying.

Services Marketing was not a popular course when I was doing my business degree.  I can’t even remember why I decided to take it at the time, but I had a sense that it would be important somehow. It’s turning out to be incredibly relevant to Digital Marketing as companies engage in Social Media for promotion, loyalty and customer service initiatives.

3 New P’s: People, Physical Evidence, Process
The big thing about services marketing was the 7 – not 4 – the 7 P’s. To your regular product, place, promotion and price, Services Marketing added people, physical evidence, and process. While the focus of this thinking was applied to the delivery of physical services, it is absolutely relevant to any company now engaging in any kind of social media.

People.
The people managing your online communities, be they twitter accounts or Facebook pages, as well as corporate bloggers, are now direct representatives of your brand. Their style, attitude and demeanor are your brand’s style, attitude and demeanor. They need to understand your target market and what makes them tick. Whether or not you outsource this to an agency or keep it in house, these people are incredibly important to you. Because even if your brand isn’t a service brand, by opening a social media avenue for customer service or promotion, you are staking your brand’s reputation and equity on those people and how they carry themselves.

Physical Evidence.
It doesn’t take much to get a bad customer service experience posted on FAILBlog, where it can hang around for weeks, months or years. The physical evidence is now in the form of videos, screen shots and retweets.  On the flip side, those same systems are the very ones marketers hope their customers use to spread a recommendation about their brand. Its just so easy for consumers to share their interactions and experiences with your brand, both good and bad.

For example, check out Exhibit A: a tweet I sent today after @Starbucks replied to a tweet I sent on the weekend bemoaning a perpetually malfunctioning Starbucks card reader. I have to say I was tickled when they followed up. If it gets fixed, I’ll be one happy customer.

Process.
As everyone dives in, process becomes incredibly important. What authority to community managers have to make decisions? What is the chain of command for other decisions that need management authority, when time is of the essence. How tied in is your social media promotion to customer service in case a customer message comes through a promotional social media channel rather than customer service? What internal rules are their for corporate bloggers, tweeters, or Facebookers who in some way shape and form are out their representing your brand. If you’re not already, its essential to get organized!

Because Marketing is a Service.
You can actually start re-thinking all of your Marketing efforts as a set of services you provide to your customers so that they can engage with your brand through any brand touch-point at any time.

From your TV spots to Websites to Social Media to Customer Service, your marketing tactics should all be trying to do the same thing: make it as easy as possible for customers to connect with and choose your brand. A review of that old Services Marketing may well help you do it better. And the ones that do it best stand a much better chance to win.