dachis group social business journal - issue 01

twitterplaybook

Letter from Jeff Dachis 4US CELLULAR's SHERRI MAXSON 8EVERYTHING IS A SERVICE 14SOCIAL BUSINESS BY DESIGN 30THE

SOCIALBUSINESSJOURNAL

THE TWITTER PLAYBOOK P.22Everything marketers should know about

launching, managing, and measuring brand efforts on Twitter. Your free chapter, “EARNED OPPORTUNITIES,” starts on...

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32 ISSUE 01 Q2 2012THE SOCIAL BUSINESS JOURNAL

SUPER BOWL OF BRANDSBy Erik Huddleston36SOCIAL BIZ

BY DESIGNA book excerpt30

THE TWITTER PLAYBOOKBy Brian Kotlyar22

MOVE YOUR SOCIAL STRATEGY

FORWARD8 MAR

AUSTIN21 JUN

LONDON26 JUL

SINGAPORE9 MAY

RIO DE JANEIRO12 SEP

NEW YORK23 MAY

BERLIN18 APR

SHANGHAI

JOIN US AT A 2012 DACHIS GROUP SOCIAL BUSINESS SUMMIT.The Summit brings together practitioners, thought leaders, and industry experts for a series of keynotes focusing on Performance Brand Marketing, Connected Company, and Social Business Intelligence. Our goal is for attendees to leave the Summit armed with tactical advice and empowered to move their social strategy forward.

Jeremiah OwyangALTIMETER GROUP

David ArmanoEDELMAN DIGITAL

Arnaud FradeTNS (APAC)

Sandy CarterIBM

Melissa Lavigne-DelvilleNBC UNIVERSAL

Donna LiRENREN INC.

Bonin BoughKRAFT FOODS

Adriana KnackfussTHE COCA-COLA COMPANY

Sam FlemmingCIC

Sherri MaxsonUS CELLULAR

Ted StantonIBM

Alistair RennieIBM

Tiffany LaBancaNEWS CORP.

Dave GrayDACHIS GROUP

Clara ShihHEARSAY SOCIAL

Dion HinchcliffeDACHIS GROUP

Sanjay MehtaSOCIAL WAVELENGTH

Erik HuddlestonDACHIS GROUP

Steve FurmanDISCOVER FINANCIAL SERVICES

Jeff DachisDACHIS GROUP

Lee BryantDACHIS GROUP

Peter KimDACHIS GROUP

SPEAKERS INCLUDE

The Social Business Summit is by invitation only.

Request an invitation at socialbusinesssummit.com

#SBS2012

PUBLISHERJeffrey Dachis

EDITOR IN CHIEFPeter Kim

MANAGING EDITORDave Gray

CREATIVE DIRECTORBill Keaggy

SENIOR ILLUSTRATORChris Roettger

OPERATIONS MANAGERLara Hendrickson

PRINT MANAGERLisa Vorst

PRINTERThe Composing RoomSt. Louis, Missouri USA

ISSN: 2166-3742

ISSUE HASHTAG: #SBJ01

CONTRIBUTORSKatherine BishJohn DeOliveraDion HinchcliffeErik HuddlestonLindsey KirkbrideBrian KotlyarSusanne LeBlancNoah MacMillanDavid MastronardiScott MatthewsCynthia PflaumRay RenteriaCarly RoyeZoë ScharfChristoph SchmaltzSusan ScrupskiJen van der MeerDavid VordtriedeBrian Williamson

COVER ILLUSTRATIONChris Roettger

MESSAGE FROM THE CEO By Jeffrey Dachis

ATTRIBUTES OF A SOCIAL BUSINESSA visual XPLANATiON

BLOGS & BOOKSA roundup of good reads

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR By Peter Kim

EVERYTHING IS A SERVICEBy Dave Gray

SOCIAL BIZ INSIDERBy Susan Scrupski

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DACHIS GROUP515 Congress AvenueSuite 2420Austin, Texas 78701USAAMERICAS: +1 512 275 7825EUROPE: +44 0 20 7357 7358www.dachisgroup.com [email protected]

The Social Business Journal is a free quarterly publication produced by Dachis Group. If you’d like to receive future issues, please contact us at [email protected].

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? We’d love to hear your feedback on the first issue of the SBJ. Visit dach.is/01-sbj to let us know what you think.

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©2012 Dachis Group

SHERRI MAXSONINTERVIEW Social at US Cellular8

THESOCIALBUSINESSJOURNAL


Dachis Group enters its fifth year this spring and along the way

we’ve experimented with a variety of channels to communicate and engage our ecosystem in social busi-ness discourse. When we launched our company website in October 2009, we created a stir by “work-ing out loud” and publishing our aggregated activity stream on the home page, showing when someone sent an email and to what domain, uploaded a file to Basecamp, posted a message to Yammer, published a blog post, and so on.

In 2010, we launched our Social Business Summit series, which will take us to seven cities this year: Austin, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, London, Singapore, and New York (for more information, visit socialbusinesssummit.com). We’ve also used the usual sus-

pects, including The Collaboratory (dachisgroup.com/blog), Twitter (@dachisgroup), and Facebook (facebook.com/dachisgroup).

But this year we’re launching a new communications vehicle that’s a bit of a throwback — a print collec-tion of thought leadership focused on social business. I see this as a reflection on the nature of social business — when done properly, it extends across channels, functions, and constituencies. So we’re adding

this new vehicle to our communica-tions mix as a complement to digital and physical interactions.

In each issue of the Social Busi-ness Journal, we’ll be drawing on our research in visual thinking, business advisory, and big data. We will also be highlighting the stories of profes-sionals who are “in the trenches” and making transformation a reality, as well as giving industry thought lead-ers a platform to share their insights.

I hope you enjoy this issue and thank you for reading. Your feedback is encouraged and appreciated. n

Best,

Peter [email protected]+1 512 275 7825

“Everything that can be social will be.”

Welcome to the Social Business JournalA vehicle for deliberate, intentional transformation

+ M E S S A G E F R O M T H E C E O : J E F F R E Y D A C H I S

I am thrilled that you have joined us in these pages to discuss Social

Business and the many inspiring ways companies are evolving by inte-grating the power of social technology into their DNA.

I firmly believe that we are at the crux of the largest shift in the com-munications landscape in the history of mankind. The digital revolution has democratized the tools of self-expression, creating a culture of sharing, connection, participation and engagement.

Social Business, and by proxy meaningful, authentic, and trans-parent engagement at scale creates exponential and never before seen op-portunities for businesses. Moreover,

this connection and engagement is trackable, traceable, and measurable.

There has never been a more valuable opportunity for businesses to interact with their key stakeholders, driving valuable insights that were once unavailable in traditional one-way marketing approaches. Organiza-tions that embrace social technology,

processes and engagement programs will exceed their strategic goals and drive superior financial performance.

I couldn’t be more excited for the Social Business Journal to chronicle companies making powerful social shifts in order to enhance their busi-nesses in ways that are more scalable and efficient than ever before.

Thank you in advance, I’d love to hear your thoughts @jeffdachis. n

Jeffrey DachisChief Executive Officer, Chairman and Founder, Dachis Group

Here’s another way to work out loudIn real life, online — and now in print

+ L E T T E R F R O M T H E E D I T O R : P E T E R K I M



The best of the Collaboratory

Deeper than fan counts: Social metrics CMOs love.

Responsive design: The future of content consumption.

We want you! To join the sketchnote revolution.

Insights across your entire social presence? Yes.

Use social tools and employee expertise to solve problems.

+ B L O G R O U N D U P : D A C H I S G R O U P. C O M / B L O G + W H A T W E ’ R E R E A D I N G : B O O K S , B L O G S , E T C .

By Erik HuddlestonChief Technology OfficerAustin@ehuddleston

By Lindsey KirkbrideUX DesignerPortland@lindseyk

By Bill KeaggyCreative DirectorSt. Louis@keaggy

By Jen van der MeerEVP Managing DirectorNew York@jenvandermeer

By Dion HinchcliffeEVP StrategyWashington D.C.@dhinchcliffe

Up till now, the tools available for companies to measure its social

performance have been limited to listen-ing programs and experience enhance-ment. Too many community managers think their primary focus should be on fan growth, but the number of fans a company has is hardly an accurate assessment of their social success. Jen van der Meer explains how DG’s social performance tools dig much deeper into a company’s social performance, measuring everything from brand love to brand awareness and advocacy. By tak-

ing a richer look into these different aspects of social, a company can maximize their outcomes and outper-form the competition.

The number of people using their mobile devices for web browsing is

growing at a remarkable rate, and it’s time for designers to catch up. Recently, it’s been a common practice to build an individual website for each different browsing device (desktop, mobile, tablet), but this often leads to unnecessary work and an inconsistent customer experience. Lindsey Kirkbride discusses responsive web design and mobile first thinking as the future for building websites. By build-ing the mobile site first and making small changes from there, companies will spend

far less time and money on design, and, in the process, will create a much more user-friendly experience for its customers.

Bill Keaggy wants you to join the sketchnote revolution. The DG

Creative Director shares his answer for freeing yourself from mind-numbing conference notes, by creating something that you’ll be proud to share, and eager to look back on. Instead of simply transcrib-ing words onto paper, visual note taking allows you to arrange things the way your mind naturally does, and builds a greater connection between you and the content. You don’t have to be an artist to do it either. Scribbled sketches can be just as effective as ingenious illustrations. Bill of-

fers some practical tips for getting started and shares some inspirational sketches of his own. Note taking never looked so beautiful.

Even the largest social businesses share a similar challenge of clearly under-

standing their social presence, and how successfully or unsuccessfully their social media accounts are performing. CTO Erik Huddleston explains how DG’s Social Portfolio Insight (SPI) tool is clearing a lot of that confusion by allowing compa-nies to easily examine and manage their multiple social accounts. With the SPI, businesses can analyze their social pres-ence with highly organized data, and gain insight into the overall sentiment of their customer base. By seeing the entire social

picture, a company can be more in tune with its cus-tomers and less consumed with sifting through the social weeds.

The 21st century has brought re-markable change to the world

of business, but perhaps none greater than the push towards systems of engagement. Dion Hinchcliffe explains that even though a business is rooted in outdated systems of record, it can still use new social tools to open up the conversation with customers, and use its employees’ expertise to best solve problems. The transition process can be intimidating, but when a company starts distancing itself from old transactional systems, it

can then connect to its customers and business partners in a more cost-effective and human way.

Read the entire blog post at dach.is/wHw1o9 Read the entire blog post at dach.is/t5toOm Read the entire blog post at dach.is/vdnACa Read the entire blog post at dach.is/oqIHok Read the entire blog post at dach.is/rwnlDL Read the entire blog post at dach.is/j7sLDb

4 key steps to being a connected company.

By Cristoph SchmaltzConsultantLondon@christoph

Being a genuine social business means more than having an online pres-

ence, but most companies don’t have the know-how to change. Christoph Schmaltz explains how businesses have slowly distanced themselves from their custom-ers and hindered their success in the process. He offers four key concepts to help clients easily understand the path to becoming a truly connected business. By getting rid of outdated company policies and conservative hierarchy structures, a company can use social media tools to connect to its client base, bond its

employees, and give its customers real people to talk to. Bottom line, people want to connect with other people, not companies.

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ILLUSTRATIONS by CHRIS ROETTGER

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“The Social Organization”By Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald

Maia GarauSenior Consultant Amsterdam

@garau

“Everything Is Obvious”By Duncan Watts

Anne Bartlett-BraggManaging Director Sydney

@AnneBB

“Beautiful Evidence”By Edward R. Tufte

Jacob HeberlieDesigner St. Louis

@hebchop


A SOCIAL BUSINESS JOURNEYAs the first Director of Digital Marketing and Social at US Cellular, Sherri Maxson is responsible for the $4.2 billion wireless services firm’s social business journey. Dachis Group’s Peter Kim, David Mastronardi, and Cynthia Pflaum sat down with her to discuss where she’s been and where she’s taking US Cellular.

+ S O C I A L B U S I N E S S P R O F I L E : S H E R R I M A X S O N

PHOTOGRAPHY by KATHERINE BISH


Social Business Journal: Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you make the decision to join US Cellular?

Sherri Maxson: Being in the Chi-cago area, I was familiar with U.S. Cellular’s strong product and award-winning customer service. I joined U. S. Cellular in December 2010 and was excited to be part a company that believed in a dynamic culture, where associates are em-powered to provide the best experi-ence to customers and prospects. Over the past four years through my personal experience and the rise of social, I’ve learned how critical it is to have the right culture in place for social business success.

How did your role come about at U.S. Cellular?

I filled a role that was new to the company, created to capitalize on emerging opportunities in digital and social media. Before I started, the company had gotten familiar with social media through a Facebook presence initially created as part of an integrated marketing cam-paign. When the page went live, the company engaged using a volunteer force of responders from across the organization, whose efforts went above and beyond their day jobs. This group, fully supported by execu-tive leadership, comprised about 55 associates. While the team’s efforts displayed plenty of passion, scal-ability continued to be a challenge. As new opportunities emerged, the company realized it didn’t have a

complete infrastructure in place to take full advantage of business op-portunities in social, which led to the creation of my position.

Scalability is certainly a key challenge as companies move towards social business. Where did you start solving this issue for U.S. Cellular?

One of the first building blocks we needed to put in place was a com-prehensive strategy, supported by policy. We had many points of view on social participation. Some people felt everyone should be participating instantly and generating brand love everywhere in social media, similar to Zappos. Others were focused on minimizing risk by limiting involve-ment to just my team. Somewhere in between, there was a belief that we should be deliberate and

thoughtful about how participation should work, activating specific business areas to engage on behalf of our brand. I worked with HR to create a policy that everyone could live with, with an agreement that we would iterate rapidly as needed.

Sounds like you had some good momentum. Where did you take it from there?

We needed to get executive buy-in for making social business a reality. So I created an internal “mini-roadshow” to meet with executives and explain how our policy and social business plan would enable scale. Our orga-nizational structure would centralize operations in marketing, with efforts coordinated by a cross-functional center of excellence. We would focus initially on sales and service, two business areas where we could show a tangible business impact.

So you had a plan in place. How did you turn that plan into reality?

We started by bringing in outside perspectives to help shape our pro-grams and fine-tune our initiatives. We then started putting more detail around requirements to operational-ize our inter-departmental programs, working with key business area stakeholders. As we progressed, we made sure that program spon-

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sors were bought-in to our progress. Communication and cross-depart-mental collaboration was critical to staying on track with the plan. In addition, U.S. Cellular takes the customer experience very seriously. We had to be sure to not disrupt existing processes that were already working for us, which required train-ing on how to use program-specific tools and engage on-brand.

One of the first programs we launched was a national sales pro-gram on Facebook and Twitter. We started listening for relevant men-tions of industry and brand topics, then engaged users proactively in conversation. At one point, we started a prospect conversation on Twitter with a person who voiced a complaint about her existing car-rier. After we started engaging, her current carrier joined the conversa-tion, asking her to stay. After some public back-and-forth on Twitter, we ended up winning the busi-ness. Our front line associates were well-prepared with the right tools and training, all we had to do was identify the opportunity and they were successful.

How did you measure your results?

We are measuring outcomes in a variety of ways. Some of the ones I can share publicly include the number of issues we are resolving through social channels. From our initial baseline, we have increased our average volume handled by 625%. Another metric we are tracking is social business perfor-mance as measured by the Social Business Index. We are also look-ing at the impact of taking formerly private conversations public and the amplification we are seeing in social channels. We believe that this is a perfect venue for getting our customer focus, one of our core strengths, displayed out in the open. The organization has been highly supportive of social business activities and we communicate wins regularly within the company.

What lessons stand out at this point in your journey?

When you are implementing enter-prise social business, there are so many things that need to be done. You need contracts in place, in-

frastructure needs to be built, and programs created. All of these must happen without disrupting exist-ing processes that already generate positive returns for the company. The key is how to make business as usual better by rearchitecting initia-tives back into the business.

Providing customer service in social channels creates outcomes tradi-tionally associated with marketing. These two organizations are now much more tightly coupled. All parts of the business need to collaborate and work towards shared business outcomes, which are amplified by social. Meanwhile, the connections between marketing and sales chan-nels start to impact everything and create new opportunities.

Looking forward, what’s next in social business at U.S. Cellular?

Now, it’s all about activating the so-cial business platform. We’ve called our programs “betas” so far to help get people into a test-and-learn mentality to encourage participa-tion and feedback. We’re ready to apply lessons learned within general operational channels, as well as marketing vehicles and channels.

This is the most rewarding thing I’ve done professionally, in perspective of watching the evolution of digital from 1995 to today. It’s not easy; a lot of experts talk about what’s pos-sible, but actually getting it done is the hard part. It’s fun, challenging, and important to the future of busi-ness. I’m fortunate to have found a culture at U.S. Cellular that lends itself naturally to being a social business, which helps connect the dots between the power of business and people. n

Peter Kim is Dachis Group’s Chief Strategy Officer and is based in Austin, where David Mastronardi is an Engagement Manager; Cynthia Pflaum is a Consultant in the New York office.

Customer service is the new marketing. All parts of the business need to collaborate and work towards shared business outcomes, which are amplified by social.

“

Maxson launched US Cellular’s social customer service initiative in September 2011. A month later the company’s Social Business Index score (socialbusinessindex.com) began rising, and so far has improved almost 400 spots. (The early dip likely is the result of multiple companies with better SBI rankings getting added to the Index, causing US Cellular’s rank to temporarily suffer.) GRAPHIC by ZOë SCHARF

Part of Team US Cellular, from left to right: Jessica Masterson, Social Media Manager; Sharif Renno, Manager, Social Media, Sherri Maxson, Director Digital Marketing & Social; and Sonny Gill, Social Media Manager. PHOTO BY KATHERINE BISH

S T A R T

SOCI A L

METRICS TRENDSFEEDBACK ALERTS

Better connected

Break down barriers

Manage cultural differencesEasy to find experts

Alignment & perspective

Become more dynamic

SALES

MKTGERP

R&D

CRM

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WE

The social business is alive with energy and big ideas — you might call it a Renaissance for the information age. After decades of mechanistic,

dehumanizing, process-oriented management

dogma, progressive organizations are waking up to the disturbing truth that they’ve squeezed all the creativity out of their business. When companies embrace organic, passionate, socially- savvy initiatives, they blossom. Who benefits? Everyone.

What’s different? Who benefits?

HELLOMY ROLE IS

“EMERGENEER”

ATTRIBUTES OF A SOCIALLY OPTIMIZED BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE & INSIGHTS VIA DASHBOARDS:

· Low employee engagement· Opaque and misaligned· Lack of creativity· Keep reinventing the wheel· Can’t be nimble· Can’t capitalize on resources· At competitive disadvantage· Slow to change· No perspective on future

CommunityManager

Collaborative Consultant

ChangeAgent

ContentEditor

Greater achievementHigher performance

Culture that’s more comfortable communicating, collaborating

Transparency & trust

Overall improvementin business practice

Shorter decision-making cycles

Authenticity is everywhere

Attitude change in individuals

creates long-term impact on culture

Democratizationof information

Team-oriented, much flatter: Exists beyond the org chart

Greater acceptance

of risk, failures

Comfortable withoutward-facingcommunication

Greater business visibility: Info flows

vertically and horizontally

Leaders and expertscan easily emerge

KEY DIFFERENCES VERSUSTRADITIONAL BUSINESS:

NEW BEHAVIORS IN INDIVIDUALS:

CONNECT MORE DOTS:

SOCIAL BUSINESS IS A MARATHON — NOT A SPRINT:

IMPACT ON THE GLOBALWORKFORCE:

MASSIVE SHIFT FROM “ME” TO “WE”:

DEFINING ATTRIBUTESOF THE SOCIALLY-EVOLVED BUSINESS:

Structured, not very useful ·Capture of information ·

Taxonomy of knowledge ·Top-down ·

· Gather 1st, organize 2nd· Capture of interaction· Folksonomy of knowledge· Community

PartnersMore connected and efficient, can be included in conversations

FinanceMore innovative and transparent, can allocate resources better, give the department a human face

Line ManagersProactive, have faster turnaround, work out loud, increase employee engagement

PAINS FELT BY ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE NOT SOCIALLY-EVOLVED:

KNOWLEDGEMANAGEMENT

SOCIALBUSINESS:VS

Blogs Wikis

Video&

IMMobile

EASILY ACCESSIBLETECHNOLOGIES:

NEW ROLES:

REAL-TIME CREATIVECOLLECTIVE

AUTHENTICENCOURAGING

OPEN

TRANSPARENT

COHESIVE

TRUSTED

COLLABORATIVECUSTOMER-CENTRIC

BUSINESS BENEFITS FOR:MarketingMore playful, faster, responsive, stream-lined and direct

SalesFluid and continuous relationships cultivated online

R&DMore agile, innovative with decreased dev cycles, increased opps for outsourcing

Customer ServiceMore caring, direct, accessible — embraces and deals with mistakes

CustomersHave a say and know it — they feel the authenticity

BUSINESS BENEFITS FOR:

· Thinkers can release thoughts· More questioning· Less risk-averse ·Things get done because

people want to versus are told to

· Enables all to ask questions and get answers

· More open to sharing· Introverts become extroverts

· Diverse audiences join together· Pride in being “the expert”

· People “work out loud”· Ideas are crowdsourced· Openness is rewarded

Clear guidelines allow everyone to speak openly on

behalf of company

+ X P L A N A T i O N : A T T R I B U T E S O F A S O C I A L L Y O P T I M I Z E D B U S I N E S S

XPLANATiON BY BILL KEAGGY & NOAH MACMILLAN

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THE GREAT BIG SHIFT-RESET.In The Power of Pull: How Small Moves,

Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, John Hagel and John Seely Brown observe that return on assets, the measure of how ef-ficiently a company can use its assets to gen-erate profits, has steadily dwindled to almost a quarter of what it was in 1965. They argue that ever-improving digital infrastructure and social networks are causing profound social change that increases competitive intensity. Since this turbulent environment shows no signs of stabilizing, they say, the only sus-tainable competitive advantage is the rate at which a company can learn.

+ S O C I A L B U S I N E S S F E A T U R E : T H E C O N N E C T E D C O M P A N Y

is a serviceThe emerging service economy will require business and society to do some fundamental restructuring. The organizations that got us to this point have been hyper-optimized into super-efficient production machines, capable of pushing out an abundance of material wealth. Unfortunately, there is no way to proceed without dismantling some of that precious infrastructure. The changes are already underway.

EVERYTHING

PHOTO courtesy THE U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ILLUSTRATIONS & CHARTS by DAVE GRAY

BY DAVE GRAY


In The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Work-ing Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, Richard Florida points to a shift from an economy based on making things to one that is increasingly powered by knowledge, creativity, and ideas:

“Great Resets are broad and fundamental transformations of the economic and social order and involve much more than strictly economic or financial events. A true Reset trans-forms not simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape.”

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, agrees.“This economic crisis doesn’t represent a cycle. It repre-

sents a reset. It’s an emotional, raw social, economic reset. People who understand that will prosper. Those who don’t will be left behind.”

The good news is that although resets are initiated by failures — sometimes catastrophic failures, like we have seen in the mortgage system — they also lead to new pe-riods of growth and innovation, built on new systems and infrastructure.

Whether you call it the Big Shift, the Great Reset, or the great big shift-reset, there’s little doubt that a fundamental economic restructuring is underway. There will be winners and there will be losers.

AN AGE OF ABUNDANCE.As we stand on the verge of a new era, it’s easy to disparage

the old-school industrial economy. But let’s not forget that the industrial economy gave us an abundance of material wealth we now take for granted, including many things that were unavail-able — and unimaginable — in previous centuries.

Economist J. Bradford DeLong points out that in the 1890s, even the richest of the rich could not go to the movies or watch football on TV, and traveling from New York to Italy took at least a week. In 1836, the richest man in the world, Nathan Roths-child, died of a common infection that would have been easily curable with modern antibiotics.

The material abundance we all enjoy was made possible by an industrial economy that focused primarily mass-producing material goods. The philosophy of mass production was based on Henry Ford’s big idea: If you could produce great volumes of a product at a low cost, the market for that product would be virtually unlimited. In the early days his idea held true, but eventually, every market gets

saturated and it gets more and more difficult to sell them more stuff. By 1960, 70% of families owned their own homes, 85% had a TV, and 75% had a car.

As markets became saturated with material goods, produc-ers found a new way to apply the principle of mass-production in mass-marketing. With a TV in nearly every house, producers had a direct line to customers. Customers became known as consumers, because their role in the economy was to consume everything that producers could make. Increasingly, this pro-ducer-consumer economy developed into a marketing-industrial complex dependent on consumer dissatisfaction and the mass-creation of desire for the next new thing.

New technologies of communication have splintered the channels of mass-communication into tiny fragments. It’s no longer possible for mass-marketers to reach out and touch all of their customers at once. The megaphone is gone. And with the rise of social networks and peer-to-peer communication chan-nels, every customer can have their own megaphone.

To many mass-marketers this feels like a chaotic cacophony of voices, and it’s hard to be heard in the crowd. But to most cus-tomers it’s an empowering feeling to have a voice, to be heard. Even if a company ignores your complaint, the world will hear, and if companies don’t respond they will eventually feel the pain, as customers find new places to go to get what they want.

The producer-driven economy is giving way to a new, cus-tomer-centered world, where companies will prosper by develop-ing relationships with customers by listening to them, adapting and responding to their wants and needs.

The problem is that the organizations that generated all this wealth were not designed for this. They were not de-signed to listen, adapt and respond. They were designed to create a ceaseless, one-way flow of material goods and information. Everything about them has been optimized for this one-directional arrow, and product-oriented habits are so deeply embedded in our organizational systems that it will be difficult to root them out.

It’s not only companies that need to change. Our entire society has been optimized for production and consumption on a massive scale. Our school systems are optimized to create good cogs for the corporate machine, not the creative think-ers and problem-solvers we will need in the 21st century. Our government is optimized for corporate customers, spending its money to bail out and protect the old infrastructure instead of investing in the new one. Our suburbs are optimized to in-crease consumption, with lots of space for products and plenty of nearby places where we can consume more stuff, including lots of fuel along the way.

While workers are being laid off in many industries, technol-ogy companies like Facebook and Google are suffering from criti-cal shortages, struggling to fill their ranks and depending heavily on talent imported from other countries that place a higher prior-ity on technical education.

“The whole approach of throwing trillions of public dollars at the old economy is shortsighted, aimed at restoring our collec-tive comfort level. Meaningful recovery will require a lot more than government bailouts, stimuli, and other patchwork mea-sures designed to resuscitate the old system or to create illusory, short-term upticks in the stock market, housing market, or car sales.” —Richard Florida

We no longer live in an industrial economy. We live in a ser-vice economy. And to succeed in a service economy we will need to develop new habits and behaviors. And we will need new organizational structures.

A SERVICE ECONOMY.Since 1960, services have dominated US employment. To-

day’s services sector makes up about 80% of the US economy. Services are integrated into everything we buy and use. Nine of every ten companies with fewer than 20 employees are in services. Companies like GE and IBM, who started in manufac-turing, have made the transition and now make the majority of their money in services.

What’s driving the move to services? Three things: Product saturation, information technology, and urbanization.

PRODUCT SATURATION. When people already have most of the material goods they need, they will tend to spend more of their disposable income on services. Increasingly the products that companies want to sell us are optional; they offer not func-tionality but intangible things like status, pride of ownership, the new color that’s in this year, and so on.

And products, we have found, can not only make life easier, they can be a burden. When you own a house, you have to spend money to fix the roof or the plumbing. Where’s the fun in that? And moving can be a big hassle when you have a truckload of stuff to lug along with you.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. In addition, another, post-industrial revolution is delivering a new kind of abundance — an abundance of information, along with networks and mobile devices for moving that information around, and much faster processing that allows us to do more interesting kinds of things with the information we have.

And while at first this shift was driven by the kinds of things we traditionally think of as information containers, like docu-ments and images, now it has exploded to include many things that were previously undocumented. Your network of friends and acquaintances, the efficiency of your car’s engine, the things you do, the places you go, the things you buy, what you think about them, and even your random throwaway thoughts are being cap-tured in Foursquare check-ins, tweets, status updates, photo and video uploads and other kinds of “data exhaust” that you may not even know you’re generating, simply by using your phone and other devices.

This digital revolution is ushering in all kinds of new ways to deliver, combine and mix up services, resulting in all kinds of enticing combinations: streaming music, following other people’s book highlights, renting strangers’ apartments or cars by the day, negotiating bargain prices at 4-star hotels and much more.

URBANIZATION. In addition, there is an increasing trend to-ward urbanization. Throughout the world, city populations are growing much faster than rural populations. We are becoming an urban society and living more urban lifestyles.

Fifty percent of the world’s population today lives on two per-cent of the earth’s crust. In 1950 that number was 30%, and by 2050 it is expected to be 70%.

Why are people moving to cities? Because cities are where the action is. There are more jobs, and more kinds of jobs, avail-able in cities, and even when the same job is available in the country and the city, the job in the city pays more. Urban work-ers make, on average, 23% more than rural workers. And the more highly skilled you are as a worker, the more you stand to gain financially by moving to a large city.

Also, if you happen to get laid off or your company goes out of business, as a worker it’s much easier to find a new job without having to pick up and move.

As work becomes more complex and more skills are required, cities become more attractive to companies too, because that’s where the skilled workers are. Cities pack a lot of people and businesses into a relatively small space, which is good for ser-vices companies in several ways.

SPACE: People living in small city apartments just don’t have a lot of room for products, and because they are making more money than their rural counterparts, they tend to spend more on services. Why take up space with a washer and dryer when there’s a laundry service right down the street?

DENSITY: Urban density makes it more attractive for compa-nies to provide a wide variety of services. For example, a cable company can wire a city apartment building and serve hundreds of households for a fraction of the cost to do the same thing in a suburb or rural area. Taxis find customers quickly in dense-ly-packed urban centers. One city block can support several specialty stores and a variety of restaurants. And in a reciprocal


A PRODUCT IS A SERVICE AVATAR.The first step to a service orientation is to change the way we

think about products. Instead of thinking about products as ends in themselves, we need to think of them as just one component in an overall service, the point of which is to deliver a stellar customer experience.

Today, we think of an avatar as the face or icon that repre-sents you in your Twitter stream, or on your Facebook page. But the original word avatar comes from ancient Sanscrit, based

on the root words ava (descent, coming down) and tatari (crossing over). The original mean-ing is the divine made flesh; an incarnation or physical manifestation of an idea or god. In

Hindu belief, Buddha was an avatar of the god Vishnu — a physical manifestation of the deity descended to earth. Energy transformed into matter.

In the same way, a product can be considered as a physical manifestation of a

service or set of services: a service avatar.Products come with knowledge and services embedded

within them. A car is the manifestation of years of learning, accumulated through research, crash testing, metallurgy, elec-trical engineering, design and a score of other disciplines, in-cluding good old trial and error. And as we have seen, a car itself provides the service of getting you comfortably from one place to another.

The ratio of knowledge to matter in any product increasingly favors knowledge. A modern car contains more computing pow-er than the system that guided Apollo astronauts to the moon. Consider the difference between a TV and a TiVo. The knowledge and services embedded in a product are what gives the product its value. Consider an iPhone. Its value comes from the services it provides you: You can talk to friends, send messages to them, and access a wide variety of applications, songs, books and even movies if you care to. Having an iPhone allows you to carry around a whole city’s worth of services in your pocket. The job of the iPhone is to provision you with services.

The words we use to describe products are a dead giveaway. Think about the number of product names that are essentially verbs or job descriptions:

PRODUCTS AS VERBS: You use an iron to iron things, a brush to brush things, and a bottle to bottle things. You ladle with a ladle and hose things down with a hose. You step on a step, drum a drum, handle a handle and grill with a grill. When you’re driving you brake with the brake, accelerate using the accelera-tor and steer with the steering wheel. You mail the mail, drink a drink, lock a lock and microwave things with the microwave. Cups cup things, nails nail things, and staples staple things. You tape things together with tape. A light gives light.

PRODUCTS AS JOB DESCRIPTIONS: A blender’s job is to blend things. A washer washes things and a dryer dries things. The lawn mower mows the lawn. The heater heats, the boiler boils and the air conditioner conditions the air. In your kitchen, the refrigerator refrigerates and the freezer freezes. At work, the copier copies, the scanner scans, the printer prints and the com-puter computes. The doorstop stops the door. Lipstick sticks to your lips and eye shadow shadows your eyes.

Products aren’t just things. They are servants.“The Kindle is not a device, it’s a service” said Jeff Bezos

in a recent interview. The Kindle is a physical manifestation and extension of the services Amazon provides to its cus-tomers; an avatar for Amazon services. On the Kindle, you can go to the store, browse for stuff, read reviews, and start reading a book, listening to music or watching a film in less than a minute. Kindle’s service aspect becomes even more clear when you use it with more than one device. Open a Kindle book on your iPad, and the service syncs to the last page you were on. It doesn’t matter what device you’re us-ing, Kindle follows you from device to device and always remembers your place.

SERVICES ARE CO-CREATED.In a product-dominant world, value is exchanged in trans-

actions between buyers and sellers. But in a service-dominant world, value is co-created by companies and customers work-ing together. This kind of exchange requires a relationship, and the product is only an intermediate step in the value-creation process.

Value is co-created: A company can’t create value. Value is only created through exchange. The customer must participate in defining and determining that value. That car, beautiful as it may be, has value, in an economic sense, only to the degree that a customer is willing to pay for it. The company can only create an offer, value proposition or proposal. The customer must accept in order to create value. The bus can make an of-fer, but the customer still must step onto the bus for the value to be delivered.

CO-CREATED VALUE REQUIRES A RELATIONSHIP: Products can play a role in relationships — even a key role — but products can’t have relationships. The relationship be-tween a company and its customers develops gradually, as customers build trust in the company and its ability to deliver on their promises over time.

loop, that wide variety of services makes cities even more attrac-tive places to live.

Consider the quintessential industrial-age product, the automobile: For many, a symbol of individuality, status, per-sonality and freedom. In suburban and sparsely-populated rural areas, a car provides you with unlimited mobility and choice. But in a densely-populated urban environment, a car quickly becomes more trouble than it’s worth. A permanent parking space in New York costs more than a house in many other areas.

Density creates demand for more services, like taxis, lim-ousine services, buses and subways. It also creates opportu-nities for new services. For example, Zipcar is a car-sharing service that gives customers shared access to a pool of cars located throughout their city. RelayRide and Whipcar are peer-to-peer services that allow car-owners to rent their car to neighbors by the hour or by the day. Uber connects a net-work of professional limo drivers with city dwellers, who can order a car by SMS or mobile phone app. Orders are routed to the nearest available driver, payments are automated and driver tips included, creating a simple, easy, seamless cus-tomer experience.

Cars themselves will increasingly become platforms for de-livering services. In 1995 GM created OnStar, an in-car sub-scription service that offers turn-by-turn directions, hands-free calling, and remote diagnostics. If your car is stolen, GM can track the vehicle, slow it down, or shut off the ignition remotely. But that’s just the beginning. Automakers will increasingly be integrating with digital services, and cars will become platforms for a broad array of apps and services that will help you lower your fuel costs, stream music, avoid collisions, find parking, notify you if friends are near, and a whole host of other things we can’t yet imagine. Ford announced recently that they are creating an open platform that will allow tinkerers and develop-ers to electronically “hot-rod” their cars. And Google is working on cars that will drive themselves. How’s that for a service?

If a car can be a service, anything can.The majority of business growth in the coming decades —

new jobs and new businesses — will come from services.Some people argue that the majority of services growth comes

from low-wage jobs without much potential for growth. But ac-cording to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth will be led by health care, followed by professional, scientific, and technical services, as well as education.

SERVICE-DOMINANT LOGIC.Most companies today are designed to produce high volumes of

consistent, standard outputs, with great efficiency and at low cost. Even many of today’s services industries still operate in an industrial fashion. Schools efficiently produce standardized students. Hospi-tals efficiently move the sick and injured through a diagnostic-and-prescriptive production line. Drive-through restaurants move drivers quickly and efficiently through an order-fulfillment pipeline.

But most of these services are not really services at all. They are factory-style processes that treat people as if they were prod-ucts, moving through a production line. Just think of the last time you called a company’s “customer service line” and ask yourself if you felt well-served.

Sure, many services require some level of production efficien-

cy, but services are not processes. They are experiences.Unlike products, services are often designed or modified as

they are delivered; they are co-created with customers; and ser-vice providers must often respond in real time to customer de-sires and preferences. Services are contextual — where, when and how they are delivered can make a big difference. They may require specialized knowledge or skills. The value of a service comes through the interactions: it’s not the end product that mat-ters, so much as the experience.

To this end, a company with a service orientation cannot be designed and organized around production processes; it must be designed and organized around customers and experiences. This is a complete inversion of the mass-production, mass-marketing paradigm that will be difficult for many companies to adopt.

In Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing, Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch describe a new paradigm they call service-dominant logic, a fundamental shift in worldview and orientation toward marketing as a social process, where products are not ends in themselves but means for provisioning services, the customer is seen as a co-producer, and knowledge is the source of competitive advantage.

In product-dominant logic, production is the core of the value-creation process, while customer service is a cost to be minimized. But in service-dominant logic, products are the cost centers, and services become the core value-creation processes.

Why such a fundamental shift?Products are costly and require large investments of capital in

R&D, factories, and manufacturing before money can be made.Products are anchors. Investments in manufacturing take

time to provide returns, and during this time period customer needs are likely to change. Investing in physical products “hard-ens” the offering and reduces the company’s ability to respond and adapt to changing customer preferences.

Investing in services “softens” the offering and increases the company’s flexibility. Since costs aren’t sunk into a single product, it’s easier to shift the offering and keep pace with their demands.

Like looking through a telescope the long way round, for many people who have become habituated to a product orienta-tion, this inversion will at first feel unnatural and uncomfortable.

The good news is that there is huge room for improve-ment, and companies that dedicate themselves to improving services stand to make significant gains in profitability and competitive advantage.

According to an Accenture survey, customer satisfaction is declining in every area they measure, and 64% of customers have switched companies in the past year due to poor service. Only one in four people say they trust the companies with which they do business.

Another survey by American Express found that two thirds of customers have not noticed improvements in customer ser-vice, and that fewer than one in ten customers think compa-nies are exceeding their expectations. An overwhelming ma-jority of customers are willing to spend more to get excellent service, and more than half of them will switch companies to get it. The same survey also found that while 40% of custom-ers are willing to tell their friends about good service experi-ences, even more of them — 60% — will tell their friends about poor service experiences.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that poor service will re-sult in lost sales, and good service will result in repeat business. And for most companies, the biggest growth opportunities in the coming years will come through services.


The product is an intermediate step, not an end in itself: Even after a customer buys a product, they must learn how to use it, maintain it, repair it, and enjoy it. If the company is lucky, they will like it enough to tell friends about it, educate others, promote it, buy additional services around it and so on.

A service-dominant world changes the game significantly. Service-orientation is a fundamental shift and creates oppor-tunities for new business strategies, new sources of competi-tive advantage, new ways of interacting with customers, and new ways of organizing work.

EVERYONE IS A SERVICE.In a service-oriented company, it makes sense to consider

every aspect of the company as a service. Managers provide a management service. Engineers provide an engineering ser-vice. Designers provide a design service. Marketers provide a marketing service.

We have developed a tendency to think of flows in terms of process, but services and processes are not the same. Pro-cesses are linked, linear chains of cause and effect that, when managed carefully, drive predictable, reliable results.

A service is different. Processes are designed to be con-sistent and uniform, while services are co-created with cus-tomers. This difference is not superficial but fundamental. A process has only one customer, the person who receives the final result. A process is rule-bound and tightly regulated. The quality of a process’s output can be judged by the customer at the end of the line.

A service is at its core a relationship between server and served. Service is work performed in support of another. At every point of interaction, the measure of success is not a product but the satisfaction, delight or disappointment of the customer.

SERVICE NETWORKS.As if change wasn’t already difficult enough, service orien-

tation for many companies will require a whole new approach to business partnerships.

Because services map to increasingly demanding customer preferences, companies must find ways to make them more granular, as well as easier to bundle with other services. Cus-tomers want services to be convenient for them, not for you.

Consider insurance. Even though insurance is a service,

in many ways it is sold like a product. A product-dominant mindset says “we sell life insurance, car insurance and home-owner’s insurance. Our customers come to us when they need insurance.” But if a company can find a way to offer business partners insurance as a configurable service, a lot more op-tions open up.

For example, Whipcar allows car owners to rent their car out when they are not using it. Part of the Whipcar service involves bundling car insurance along with the rental, which requires the “insurance service” be available on demand in in-crements as small as one hour. The more networked and link-able an insurance service, the more easily it can be blended and bundled with Whipcar’s other services.

PayPal is a super-granular payment service which is easy to plug in to any ordering system. Some of PayPal’s custom-ers are so happy with the service, and so loyal, that they will not buy from merchants who don’t offer PayPal payment service. After all, buying from another vendor is usually just one click away.

Service networks also thrive by making a set of comple-mentary services more easily available to customers. A restau-rant does better if it’s within a short walk of a movie theater and shopping. Customers tend to like convenient clusters of services. For example, it’s nice if you can go grocery shop-ping, drop off your laundry and get a coffee in a single stop or within a short distance.

MAKING CHANGE HAPPEN.The biggest impediment to service innovation is not a lack

of ideas. It’s the inability of companies to deliver them the way they are currently structured. Service designer Ben Reason notes that “coming up with innovative services is easy. What’s hard is getting companies to adapt.”

Industrial one-way mass-production logic must give way to the more reciprocal service logic before progress can be made. This is so exceedingly difficult that not many companies have successfully made the transition. It involves changing not only org structure but the company’s dominant culture and logic, a herculean task.

But change is possible.IBM and GE led the way, with major organizational trans-

formations in the 1980s and 1990s. IBM famously divested its last manufacturing operations in 2005 by selling its laptop division to Chinese company Lenovo, and more than half of GE’s profits come from services today.

Consider Cemex, a global cement company. What could be more industrial-age than cement? Cement is clearly a product, not a service. And perhaps the most obvious way for a cement company to compete is on price. But to customers, cement is only one aspect of a larger project. Customers don’t just care about cement, they want the right cement, in the right

amount, at the right place and the right time.Cemex wins customers with services like 24/7 deliv-

ery, ATM-like ordering systems, education and training for customers, and construction financing. Customers can or-der online and get text messages when cement is ready for delivery. Cemex will actively manage a customer’s cement inventory, to anticipate and respond to demand in real time. Cemex will provide pre-fabricated components like walls, ceilings and basements. And if a customer so desires, Ce-mex will carefully match the color and texture of older con-crete roads and paths.

WHERE TO START.This kind of change can feel overwhelming to contem-

plate. But help is at hand.In 1983, bank executive G. Lynn Shostack proposed a

design tool called the service blueprint as a tool for service design. The service blueprint connects customer activities and touchpoints with a company’s “front stage” where ser-vices are provided, as well as “backstage” operations that support and enable the front stage.

The Service Research and Innovation Institute, a non-profit organization initiated by IBM, was formed to lead and support organizations through the massive transformations that will be required.

The Consortium for Service Innovation is a non-profit al-liance of organizations focused primarily on facing the chal-lenges of customer support services.

On the practitioner side, the Service Design Network was formed in 2004 as an international network of service de-sign professionals, with the purpose of strengthening and developing service innovation practices. Their peer-reviewed publication, Touchpoint, is an excellent resource for service design thinking.

The Social Business Council is a peer-to-peer member-ship organization of business professionals that are directly involved in planning, leading and executing social business transformation initiatives.

Although the cogs and gears are still turning in many large companies, it is the result of momentum, not progress. The industrial economy is fueling new growth in some parts of the world, but it is leaving the US and Europe, and it’s not coming back. The time to change is not some day in the future, when you have reached a crisis of GM, Kodak, or Greek proportions. The time to change is now, while you still have the financial resources to change assertively and proactively. n

Dave Gray is Senior Vice President, Strategy at Dachis Group. His new book, The Connected Company, will be re-leased by O’Reilly later this year.

+ E V E N T S

Where will we be over the next few months?Everywhere. Dachis Group is involved in speaking, participating, or sponsoring events and conferences around the globe. For speaking inquiries, send an email to [email protected].

MAY 2012•9th: Dachis Group Social Business Summit in Rio de

Janeiro, Brazil. The Social Business Summit is by invita-tion only. If you’re interested in attending, email [email protected], and include your location preference, your name, company name, and job title. We’ll let you know when invitations become available.

•23rd: Dachis Group Social Business Summit in Berlin, Germany.

•31st: Dachis Group Social Business Strategy Summit in London, England. Dachis Group London Managing Director Lee Bryant will be speak. This event will bring together the most influential thought leaders and leading analysts from the world of social business. The aim is to help you discover how you can apply social media to all aspects of your enterprise to drive internal collaboration, engage in social CRM and support your social transition.

JUNE 2012•21st: Dachis Group Social Business Summit

in London, England.

JULY 2012•24th: KM Australia in Sydney. Topics will include social

media, communication & collaboration, change manage-ment, content & information management, organizational capability, eLearning and more. Dachis Group Senior Consultant James Dellow will present.

•26th: Dachis Group Social Business Summit in Singapore.

For more info and up-to-date lists visit dachisgroup.com/events and socialbusinesssummit.com.

Read the original blog post and ensuing conversation at dach.is/vWTu5d.

SINGAPORE

SYDNEYBERLIN

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AUSTINSHANGHAI

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21


THE

+ W H I T E P A P E R E X C E R P T : T H E T W I T T E R P L A Y B O O K

by Brian KotlyarILLUSTRATIONS by DAVID VORDTRIEDE with Noah Macmillan

CHAPTER 5: Earned opportunities

The vision for Twitter is to become “the best way to discover what’s new in your world” and Twitter’s mission is to “instantly connect people everywhere

to what’s most important to them.” When you think about what this means for a brand trying to maximize Twitter as a marketing platform some interesting questions are raised:

The Twitter Playbook for Marketers answers these questions and many more. Let’s get started.

TWITTER PLAYBOOKFOR MARKETERS

Here’s a free chapter.

This practical guidetells marketerseverything there is to knowabout launching, managing, and measuringyour efforts on Twitter.

· How can my company align itself with what is new and important to Twitter users in order to successfully achieve my marketing objectives?

· How will I organize to operate at the speed of Twitter?· What should my marketing objectives be in the context

of such a real-time and participatory medium? · How will I know if I have achieved them?


1. DEFINING YOUR PURPOSE

Every account needs a goal. You will need to choose from one of three primary Twitter use cases and then align your channel strategy accordingly. Your choices are: Communications, Commerce, or Service.

2. NAMING YOUR ACCOUNT2.1 Twitter handle

Starting your Twitter presence is a quick process and well out-lined in Twitter Help at support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/104-welcome-to-twitter-support/articles/100990-how-to-sign-up-on-twitter.

You will likely be challenged with the identity, brand-ing and corporate requirements about your new image and presence. Consider these elements when selecting your Twitter handle.

2.2 Start with the name of your companyIt is critical that you retain the name of your company

as your Twitter handle. If it is not already in your posses-sion, then attempt to register it. If it is taken, then follow the steps in the “Recovering your Twitter name” section below to gain control.

2.3 Evergreen or campaign focused?Evergreen Twitter handles are a superior choice to

campaign focused ones. Campaign channels are hard to maintain over time and often result in orphaned groups of followers split across accounts. If an audience is split among many accounts it can be difficult to reach the criti-cal mass necessary for effective use of Promoted Products. A more effective approach is to build campaign-oriented flexibility into the charter of an evergreen channel.

2.4 Length of handleHandle names also have constraints and are limited to

15 characters. Remember that the name of the handle has to be included in every subsequent conversation for the life of the account. It is critical that the name is recog-nizable, authoritative and short.

· @ACME is better than @American_Company_that_Makes_Everything

If multiple channels are in place, then it often helps to explain the function of the channel in the name.

· @ACMESupport is better than @ACMEHelpers

2.5 BrandingFrom a branding perspective the most important thing

is that the name be instantly associated with the brand or campaign for which it is chartered.

· Target is @Target· Dell deals is @DellDeals· Citi customer service is @AskCiti

2.6 ClaimingYour Twitter handle can be claimed by registering your

unique name and related email address and or mobile number. In a perfect world you will be able to claim your desired name(s) to suit the needs of your brand or com-pany. Although it is important to establish your name(s) early, you can change your account name at any time should you encounter any obstacles to your plans.

2.7 Verifying Verification is the only way that users know for sure

and without a doubt that a Twitter handle belongs to your brand. As such, it is critical that if you can get your channel verified you do so as quickly as possible. Verifi-cation of Twitter accounts occurs on a case-by-case ba-sis and is managed through your brand’s Twitter Account Representative. Contact your representative to place your verification request.

More information is available here: support.twitter.com/articles/119135-about-verified-accounts.

2.8 Recovering names It happens sometimes that a brand’s preferred Twitter

name has been taken by another Twitter user. Accounts that impersonate brands, famous people and fictional characters are launched on what seems like an hourly basis. Brands are limited in their options for handling false accounts without triggering significant consumer backlash. It is often best to simply monitor the existence of these phony channels without taking action. In the event that a channel gains a large following for a sus-tained period of time or begins to engage in truly slander-ous or brand-damaging behavior, then it may be time to trigger legal action. The safest course of action most of the time is simple: wait until they get bored. The excep-tion to this approach is around trademark enforcement and is discussed further below.

If it is absolutely necessary to reclaim a Twitter handle for reasons of brand risk or trademark infringement then there are a few options:

2.9 NegotiationIn scenarios where the impostor has a legitimate claim

to a Twitter handle the brand needs, then it can be effec-tive to request control of the handle from that user. Twitter prohibits the purchase and sale of Twitter handles, but it may be possible to negotiate for control of the name.

2.10 Trademarks Brands vigorously defend their trade-marks in all avenues and Twitter is no different. Most trademark infringement will become apparent as the brand’s so-phistication in listening increases.

Previous chapters covered brand conversations, sentiment, and influencers. Now it’s time to join the conversation and start to

participate. In this section we’ll discuss foundational elements essential to effective brand participation. These are: Defining your purpose, Naming your account, Favorites and Follows, Standing out from the noise, and Twitter for websites.

THE TWITTER PLAYBOOK

1.1 Communications Marketing your brand:Extend your brand voice in a consis-tent way that encourages valuable outcomes like message amplification, increased awareness or consideration.

1.2 Commerce Selling your products:Twitter offers direct access to your most influential customers to drive commerce actions either offline or in existing brand e-commerce spaces.

1.3 Service Customer service issues:Twitter enables you to engage existing or potential customers with direct communication to start the resolution process.

Most brands want to achieve all three, but not every brand’s existing Twitter audience will be appropriate for these kinds of activities. You will need to balance the needs of your brand with the interests of your Twitter customer base.

Once you have selected your areas of focus, start to consider what to name your Twitter account...

CHAPTER 5: EARNED OPPORTUNITIES


When trademark infringement is detected: first, con-tact your Legal stakeholders and review your options for resolution at support.twitter.com/articles/18367-trade-mark-policy. If you determine to proceed, then submit the following information to support.twitter.com/forms/trademark.

· Username of the reported account· Your company name · Your company Twitter account· Company website· Your trademarked word, symbol, etc. · Trademark registration number· Trademark registration office

2.11 Use of personal handles Many brands have gotten their start (particularly from

a service perspective) with a lone Twitter user re-purpos-ing a personal handle to suit their work. Your brand may have even started this way. While common, this approach to Twitter is not ideal for a brand’s primary channels and most companies have moved away from allowing employ-ees to use personal handles for company business except in very specific circumstances. The reasons against this approach are simple:

· It is possible to achieve an ‘authentic’ voice without using personal handles

· If an employee leaves the company do you really want them taking the brand’s Twitter following with them?

· Monitoring a large number of active personal Twitter accounts is extremely challenging and introduces an unacceptable level of risk for most brands

The exception to this rule is scenarios where brands have established a tiered approach to Twitter participa-tion. At the top of the pyramid are branded and owned Twitter accounts (i.e., @BestBuy) and through certifica-tion and governance a pyramid is created where addition-al branded employee accounts are safely enabled (i.e., @SteveatBestBuy) and ultimately just employee ac-counts (i.e, @Steve). The same individual (Steve) may be managing each of these accounts, however the role of the account in the Twitter strategy of the company varies.

3. MASTERING FOLLOWS & FAVORITES3.1 How to approach Follows and Favorites

Many brands struggle with Follow and Favorites, but there are significant earned media opportunities that you can influ-ence through the correct application of these Twitter features.

2.2 To follow or not to follow?Large brands have a tendency to either follow every

Twitter user they encounter or ignore anyone that isn’t clearly influential and ‘brand appropriate.’ This will some-times result in skewed follow counts. There are three rea-sons to worry about how many individuals follow your brand and how many users you follow back.

· Direct messaging (particularly in service scenarios) is a critical tool for customer relations that can be restrictive if there is not reciprocal following.

· Twitter users tend to appreciate when a brand fol-lows them back. This is most effective when that user has already followed or otherwise interacted with the brand. Unsolicited or ‘cold’ follows are not always as welcome.

· The ‘Who to Follow’ algorithm (discussed below) does not approve of accounts with highly asymmetrical follower ratios.

As a general rule, you will be rewarded for partici-pating in Twitter through following your engaged audi-ence. The reciprocal connection contributes to your organic appearance in the “Who to Follow” recom-mendations and will position your account as worthy of algorithmic promotion.

3.3 To favorite or not to favorite?Twitter’s “favorite” functionality is an under-utilized

tool for driving earned engagement. The primary benefits of “favoriting” a piece of user content are:

· The opportunity to make a customer or prospect feel recognized for a piece of content that the brand chooses to favorite.

· The opportunity to organically insert the brand into a user’s activity stream and thus gain free impressions and mindshare.

You should not hesitate to favorite content that pres-ents your brand in a positive light or is otherwise worthy of brand promotion. This will create a stronger connection to your engaged audience as well as offer more opportunities to position yourself organically in user feeds.

4. STANDING OUT FROM THE NOISETwitter has created tools to aid consumers in navi-

gating the huge flow of information across their net-work. These tools are a boon to consumers, but more importantly are a powerful source of earned media in the hands of social marketers. The tools (Top Tweets, Top Trends, Who to Follow, Twitter Lists) are explored further below.

4.1 Top TweetsDefinition: Top Tweets are algorithmically selected

Tweets from across the entire Twitter platform. The pri-mary driver of selection is resonance. Additional factors are inclusion of link, image or video. Top Tweets are very prominently displayed on the twitter.com search interface.

Marketing value: Top Tweets are a powerful tool for massively boosting impressions of a particular Tweet. The additional exposure drives traffic to any content linked in the Tweet and also helps accounts grow their follower base.

4.2 How to get “Top Tweeted”Top Tweets are determined by an algorithm that ag-

gregates and weights all user interactions (e.g. shares, Retweets, clicks etc.) with any given individual Tweet. This aggregated score is called “Velocity.” Velocity is a measure of the attention and interaction conferred on any given Tweet. When a Tweet exceeds the ‘expected velocity’ for a given user account, it enters the running to become featured as a Top Tweet.

In practice, this means a successful Tweet should succeed in drawing the interest of existing Twitter followers, but also maintain appeal as it moves across the network to individu-als who do not follow the brand account. If readers of the Tweet engage with it at an unusually high rate this indicates to the algorithm that the Tweet might be of broad interest at that moment and puts it into the Top Tweet category.

Typical Top Tweets are some combination of the fol-lowing: funny, touching, informative, surprising, outra-geous or shared by a really famous person.

4.3 Top Trends

Definition: Top Trends are algo-rithmically selected categories of Tweets grouped together by keyword or the “#” category (e.g. #justin-bieber, #rihanna, #sh*tmydadsays) and displayed prominently for all twitter.com and third party Twitter clients.

Marketing value: Top Trends are a powerful tool for bringing a topic of interest to a sub-culture of Twitter users into the consciousness of the broader Twitter user base. For example, an event with a broad but not ubiquitous cultural influence like MTV’s Video Music Awards or SXSW can dominate the Top Trends and thereby win mindshare and attention for the event with otherwise disengaged users.

4.4 How to get “Top Trended”

The key to becoming a Top Trend is to activate a signif-icant sub-culture within Twitter to rally around a particu-lar “#” topic rapidly and simultaneously in a geography during a fixed time period.

In practice, this means either establishing a timely con-versation with the potential to capture the imagination of a broad base of Twitter users or to tie into a real-world event or concept that has already done so.

It is also possible to take advantage of existing Top Trend conversations by identifying Top Trends relevant to the brand and participating actively in that topic. This places the brand’s Tweets in the midst of the conversation and wins attention from users that are following that trend. Al-though the potential novelty of this approach may be ac-ceptable in humorous trends, it also does have the potential to cause brand reputation issues. Capitalizing on breaking news or information driven trends is a particular challenge if the brand is not an established authority on the topic.

Top Trends can change rapidly and rarely are sustained for a full day.

Geographically, Top Trends start locally and have the potential to spread nationally or expand Worldwide.

4.5 Who to FollowDefinition: Who to Follow are a series of suggestions that a user sees when logged into twitter.com. These sugges-tions focus on accounts that the Twit-ter algorithm believes a particular user ought to follow and/or interact with.

The algorithm determines who they ought to follow based on who the user already follows and other factors. The most powerful aspect of this Twitter feature is a “Follow” call to action which can drive free follow acquisition or a variety of other secondary options for the user to engage with the brand.

These suggestions appear in a few different areas: twit-ter.com sometimes has a small sidebar of “Who to fol-low” in the left column.

An expanded Who to Follow area offers additional user referrals. In this area suggested accounts are divided into three areas of discovery: Suggestions, Topics and Friends.

· “Suggestions” offers an expanded list of accounts to follow.

· “Topics” filters accounts by a limited selection of topics primarily focused on sports, entertainment, news, business, charity, music and other lifestyle or information categories.

· “Find Friends” enables users to search contacts in other platforms to surface Twitter handles. Search is available in Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail/Messenger, AOL and LinkedIn.

Marketing value: Suggestions for You helps promote growth of a brand’s Twitter account by linking it to similar accounts and raising its profile among users interested in the subject area of that account.

4.6 How to get “Suggested”It is difficult to become a “Suggested” account on a broad

basis organically, however it is possible to align a Twitter ac-count’s behaviors with those of a more established account and encourage the algorithm to associate the two accounts.

To do this: select a model account. Follow users who


already follow the model account. At the same time entice users that follow the model account to follow you. Do so by following and conversing with the target users.

4.7 ListsDefinition: Lists are a tool that Twitter provides

which lets individuals curate different groups of Twitter users by self-defined categories (e.g., celebrities, NBA players or companies on Twitter).

Marketing value: Being listed is a mechanism for staying top of mind with a particular consumer and also a great method of becoming associated with other similar Twit-ter accounts. Each of these helps grow the influence of an account and also has the potential to increase the reach of an account’s messaging. All other Twitter users can view and subscribe to other users’ public lists. This means that some highly prominent lists can be a short-cut to reaching a very significant Twitter audience. Additionally, Lists offer an additional engagement point for your customers to engage with you to boost your resonance.

4.8 How to get ListedTwitter users will add accounts to lists as they dis-

cover them and choose to associate them with other similar accounts. It is possible to artificially spur this growth by contacting Twitter users that maintain pop-ular and/or pertinent lists and requesting to be added to the list.

5. OPTIMIZING WEBSITES & LANDING PAGES

Twitter provides a series of but-tons and accompanying APIs to enable easy creation and optimi-zation of digital assets for Twit-ter. These are designed to make it easier for marketers to grow their accounts using off-Twitter proper-ties as well as rapidly transmit content into and across Twitter.

There are three pieces of technology that Twitter provides for website and landing page optimization. These are: Tweet button, Follow button and Web intents. We will review these in brief below. There is a great deal of additional information and documentation available at: dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-for-websites.

Social customer service shatters the structured nature of call center opera-

tions. Complaints received at all hours. Product issues resolved in public. Reso-lution expected instantly. Service vol-umes unpredictable — at least initially. One customer criticism quickly spirals into ten, as other customers also take the opportunity to voice their dissatisfaction. The company is under fire — without any way to mend customer relationships and stop the discussion from advancing further. How should it respond?

We recently undertook a client engage-ment where we worked through these disruptions. The key to conquering these challenges? Recognizing the importance of serving customers where they demand service. Here are a few ways that helped us broker the transition from traditional to emerging channel support:

1. Develop a conversational approach to mirror phone support. The urge to ask a series of 10 questions, like typical phone support, is quickly thwarted by character limits and customer time con-straints. We urge service participants to focus on the critical details of a comment

and then direct the discussion based on the customer’s responses. While one of the most difficult concepts to master, public problem acknowledgement takes the pressure off the representative and comforts the customer.

2. Provide a consistent experience through enforcing workflow and service levels. A few years ago, companies assigned an expert to their Facebook pages to resolve distracting complaints. Today, we create sustainable operations — through process — that guide issue resolution regardless of social platform. Goals for the customer experience are

5 ways to take on social customer service

+ S I D E B A R : T H E C U S T O M E R

5.1 Tweet buttonHow it works: The Tweet button is a great way to

begin optimizing your website for Twitter. It is an off-the-shelf button that can be embedded in your website alongside content that users may want to share. When clicked, a new window appears with suggested Tweet copy (provided by the brand) which the user can cus-tomize and then share with their Twitter followers.

Marketing value: The purpose of the Tweet button is to increase content distribution and grow traffic ex-changed between your website and Twitter accounts. This is an ideal way to extract additional value from content and promotions you house within your website. For ex-ample, Quora.com receives roughly 30 clicks for every Tweet that comes from their site using the Tweet button.

5.2 Follow buttonHow it works: Like the Tweet button, the Follow but-

ton is where many brands begin their Twitter website optimization. The Follow button is an off-the-shelf com-ponent that can be embedded in a digital asset. When clicked the button will automatically add you to that user’s followed accounts.

Marketing value: The purpose of the Follow button is to help you build an audience for your Twitter account

rapidly and with a user effort. This is accomplished by positioning Twitter buttons in visible places on your most trafficked visible assets thereby driving organic growth of your Twitter accounts. Leading video sites have seen this work successfully. They report a 70% increase in Replies, 131% increase in Retweets and 150% increase in Favorites when the Follow button is deployed.

5.3 Web IntentsHow it works: Web Intents provide off platform access

to some of the most important actions that Twitter users can do on twitter.com. These actions are: Tweet, Reply, Retweet, Favorite and Follow.

Marketing value: With Web Intents you can make it possible for users to interact with Twitter content in the context of your site, without leaving the page or having to authorize a new app just for the interaction. This means you can build customized Twitter-like experiences with-in the confines of your digital assets. This means users can interact with Twitter while remaining inside of a fully branded site with calls to action and design treatments fully under your control. A typical example of what is pos-sible can be viewed on the HBO Game of Thrones website at: connect.hbo.com/vizualizer/game-thrones. n

Brian Kotlyar is a Consultant in the Austin office.

also set, creating enjoyable interactions and giving employees targets to strive for beyond skill growth. For example, defin-ing an initial response time goal ensures customers are treated equally regardless of the complaint they surface.

3. Accelerate skill building through coaching. Scaling the service process requires more than simply managing additional communications between the company and customer. Engagement and service content creation are long-term responsibilities. That’s why we grow the foundation of these skills through specific feedback and scheduled review sessions. These investments typically pay off in associate performance and allow people to take on additional service assignments

more quickly — providing even more service avenues for the customer.

4. Create personal and genuine interac-tions through brand voice. Regardless of the platform, tone and brand nuances factor into how customer recognizes and engages with service representatives. We empower representatives to use their own voice as long as it taps into brand style guidelines appropriately. These contribu-tions connect representatives directly to the program’s success and help maintain that connection as the social customer service strategy scales.

5. Establish dedicated program manage-ment to ensure scalable growth. To real-ize business impact from social customer

service efforts, your vision needs to extend past real-time support. People don’t scale on their own: How will you augment customer service’s expertise and successful one-on-one interactions with customers? Continuous program management plays a key role here: defining strategy, shepherding internal com-munications, aligning key resources, and ensuring service interactions don’t suffer a quality fail once the program expands.

No company launches social cus-tomer service with all of these pieces perfectly in place. You must start strong with a few capabilities, and build as you go. Until then, questions will continue to fill your Facebook and Twitter pres-ences; distracting prospects and custom-ers from your other social initiatives and threatening your brand’s reputation. n

Joe @Co. I need Help!!

Co. @Joe Yikes! what’s wrong?

2

1R3 4

5

by Cynthia PflaumILLUSTRATIONS by Noah MacMillan


POOR GRASPOF BIG DATA

STORED DATA ISPRIVATE & CLOSED

UNRESPONSIVEPRODUCT OFFERING

DISCONNECTED INTERNAL STRUCTURE

RIGIDSUPPLY CHAIN

SYSTEM IS SLOWOR UNABLE TO ADAPT

SOCIAL ENTERPRIsETHE SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

TRADITIONAL BUSINESS MODEL POTHOLES

CUSTOMER & PARTNER COMMUNITY

INSTITUTIONS

the GLOBAL MARKETPLACEthe COMMUNITY

Resource constraints

Value in relationships

Business flux

Industry transformation

Two-way markets

Information abundance

Resource abundance

Value in transactions

Business stability

Well-defined industries

One-way markets

Limited information

20TH CENTURY 21ST CENTURY

FACTORS DRIVING THEGLOBAL MARKETPLACE CHANGE

INFORMATIONNETWORKS

GLOBALINFORMATION

FLOWS

MARKETDISCONTINUITY

SOCIALCOMPUTING

HARNESSING BIGCOMMUNITY DATA

DYNAMICALLY ADAPT& RAPIDLY RESPOND

OPEN SUPPLY CHAINSARE BASE OF GROWTH

PEER PRODUCTIONDRIVES CREATION

SOCIAL STRUCTURESHELP SELF ORGANIZE

SELF-SERVICINGMARKET NICHES

Successful businesses will be those that

have the richest, most up-to-date data

sources & market dominance.

Cloud- and ecosystem-based

open supply chains are the basis of

growth and agility.

Consumers that interact with

their own product achieve the highest

economic scale.

Social internal structures are the

best means of governing and

building community-based relationships.

Peer feedback is the most efficient and valuable source for driving business

decisions.

Rapid, unpredictable communities require

the ability to dynamically adapt

and quickly respond to current needs.

MOVING the MARKETPLACE

Conversation is no longer in the past; it’s in the present and even the future. Companies can not only track what people have done,

but can ascertain what they will do.

MOVING the MARKETPLACE

+ B O O K E X C E R P T : ‘ S O C I A L B U S I N E S S B Y D E S I G N ’

‘Social Business By Design’ DROPS May 1, 2012 by Jossey-Bass. This excerpt is chapter 5: How will business make the transition?

You can learn more about the book and pre-order it here: dach.is/sbdbook.

by DION HINCHCLIFFE & PETER KIM · XPLANATiON by chris roettger & ZOË SCHARF

Social, cultural, and technological trends are transforming every business environment. Executives must understand how to create and capture val-ue from current changes in the market to foster competitive advantage and

solidify customer relationships. Getting started requires an understanding of the elements of social business and how they differ from legacy market approaches. The shift in control from institutions to communities is underway, driven by the availability of data, affordable technology, and more efficient operating models. Harnessing these trends and pivoting an enterprise is easier said than done, but examples of next-generation business have emerged to learn from.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Social Business By Design:

Transformative Social Media Strategies for the Connected Company by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim.

©2012 by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim. All rights reserved.

31


It’s far easier for small and medium-sized companies to change the way that they work.

The methods through which they interact and stay connected to the marketplace and their customers are easier to change when there are fewer constraints. In contrast, large companies are challenged when making the transition to social busi-ness, having to deal with change on a larger scale. People are the primary element of any successful business transformation and changing people is notoriously difficult. Thus the larger the business, the greater the difficulty encountered.

The ongoing and seemingly inexo-rable decline of a traditional industry

such as old media continues to be a canonical example of what hap-pens when the ground rules change in an industry fundamentally unable to adapt to new market conditions. In this chapter we’ll explore some of the more traditional limitations that virtually all organizations face, as they realize they have to literally “blow up” what are often hallowed processes, traditions, and internal institutions. The resulting so-called “new normal” has begun to seem more and more foreign than most

organizations are willing to accept. The shifts of control required by social business are challenging: how we communicate (from point-to-point to social), how we organize (hierarchies to communities), how we create (central output to peer output), and where value comes from (hierarchies to networks).

The old question about the in-novator’s dilemma has become more urgent as the new business landscape looks increasingly unfamiliar: we now live in an age where historically scarce resources are now abundantly available — at least on the network — in seemingly unlimited quantities (e.g. new ideas, existing knowledge, and productive capacity, and access to an organization’s customers and competitors). Conversely, what was formerly abundant is now scarce (e.g. broad demand for big ticket, high margin, low volume products and

services in the form of large adver-tisers, big corporate customers, and anything else.) Business has become increasingly fine-grained, scaled, and oriented around mass customization as opposed to traditional scaling of one-size-fits-all.

Businesses frequently remain very uncomfortable about explor-ing the future in such an uncertain and rapidly changing landscape. The feedback cycles of social media are relentlessly real-time, affecting every major business function, though

some certainly more than others, particularly marketing, customer care, and HR. One response that occurs frequently is serious discus-sion about “putting the genie back into the bottle” and reverting to old models for working, collabo-rating, and producing work. One of the most famous examples of this was when newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch decided to ignore new Internet business models and require that many of his news outlets charge for access to their websites, despite the fact that companies like Google were much more successful in monetizing in entirely new ways with advertising and other indirect fees.1 Those industry directly in the firing line of social media, including Hollywood and virtually all media are exposed to profound disruption, such as when Amazon decided in 2011 to directly connect authors with

its global online publishing network, cutting out publishers and editors altogether.2 Responses like these are near-desperate attempts from fading industries deeply impacted by chang-es in wrought by the digital revolu-tion. They are usually misguided and short-sighted while also insufficiently imaginative. These periodic debates also show us the future of social busi-ness and the need for effective vision and transformation.

Old media has been deeply impacted by social media, and the

software industry has been dra-matically affected by open source (software peer produced by global communities). Other industries are lining up for similar disruptions, including most industries involved in services and knowledge work that can be recast in social busi-ness terms. In the near term, these include financial services, educa-tion, information services, consult-ing, and most administration and government. Longer term, social business will transform most hu-man activity. Ultimately, everything that can be social will be social.

Next-generation business: Open, social, self-service

How then do businesses cross the divide between the traditional busi-ness era and the social business era? An example of how foreign yet novel these new ways of doing business

will be is the story of reCAPTCHA. This service puts brief, hard-to-read text snippets on forms in Web sites so that users can prove that they are really humans and not spammers or bots. The service was designed to process the several hundred million online verification forms that are filled out each day around the Web. The creators of the product soon realized they had unintentionally “created a system that was fritter-ing away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious

resource: human brain cycles.” 3 In response, they pivoted the reCAPT-CHA service to tap into a huge reservoir of highly cost-effective labor to tackle enormous problems. Turning individual work into collec-tive productivity, the system started using images from failed optical character recognition jobs in its human verification tests (the text displayed is actually scanned from a printed source).

reCAPTCHA subsequently went on to digitize over a century of newspaper and print archives from the New York Times and plans to accomplish far more going for-ward.4 Businesses that employ OCR correction staff and compete with this service are at primary risk for disruption if they don’t change their methods. This seemingly limit-less and free source of mental and physical effort (both recognition and keying) has been harnessed by reCAPTCHA at virtually no cost. The service taps into community output — the community of all Web users. ReCAPTCHA doesn’t actually control its own product; their partners that use their badge do, thereby contributing their users

and delivering shared benefit to all involved. This loosely shared coop-erative partnering via the network is a simple yet powerful example of the enormous scale and value possible with social business models.

In the social business era, suc-cessful organizations will be open to participation, tapping into far-flung communities and social networks to accomplish work in larger scales than they ever imagined before. This requires overcoming organizational, cultural, structural, legal, and regula-

tory barriers and rethinking how business gets done.

Traditional businesses must face off new social businesses

Emerging new institutions — social businesses — will look very different from the organizations we have today. They will derive power and value from deep integration into the lives of both the people and busi-nesses that they touch upon, not from a large centralized market presence. Think of reCAPTCHA as the 21st century organization: Deeply net-worked to millions of partners, highly participative by enlisting millions of participants, and both delivering and providing value in a very integrated and profoundly connected way.

What does Social Business consist of ?

A social business consists of three unique and critical aspects: 1) It creates and delivers most of its value over the network, usually indirectly (i.e. not centralized production, but via peer production), 2) it consists of a loosely coupled entity of partners comprised of — usually very large number of — customers and suppliers who have as much control over outcomes as any other part of the business, and 3) it has effective strategies to take advantage of the new balance of abundance and scarcity, along with greatly reduced dependencies on the old balance.

Social business models and operat-ing structures are tuned to operate smoothly using the post-Great Reces-sion resource-and-demand landscape.

Self-organizing peer production is the motive force, network effects are the new market share, and social power structures are what drive busi-nesses forward, becoming perpetuat-ing communities of self-interested, like-minded individuals.

Putting aside for now the le-gal, societal, and cultural impacts and challenges of all this (barriers explaining why the transformation to social business has taken so long, de-

You can pre-order Social Business by Design here: dach.is/sbdbook.

SOCIAL ENTERPRIsE

A vast legacy landscape of existing business models, customer needs, learned behaviors, and instilled culture must be overcome.


spite the Internet having existed for decades), let’s focus on the business side. The new business landscape will still take a half decade or more to arrive and these drivers explain how markets will get there:

The value drivers of social businesses1. Strategic control over peer-produced community data drives market dominance. The real, irre-placeable value of the social business economy is high-value information. It is the currency of the realm on the network, which will always route to the best source. Only the richest and most up-to-date data sources will have market dominance and they will have inordinate market power as well. 20th century companies greatly undervalue and under-exploit their vast data assets today. Social busi-nesses can’t and don’t. They relent-lessly use it to their advantage, as a high-value revenue stream, monetiz-ing it in ways their communities and their own organizations benefit from.2. Peer production as the most efficient and richest source of value creation. Centralized produc-tion is inefficient and less optimal compared to social business meth-ods. When you can tap into the vast capabilities of the global populace for mutual benefit, delivering it through a central production route is just non-competitive for most purposes. Networked resources on the network will almost always greatly outnumber whatever classical business processes can bring to bear. The traditional means of enlisting contribution (employment) won’t work, something new will be required.3. Social power structures as the means of self-organizing and governing. Organizational hierarchy remains in place to set business goals and objectives, but social models are leveraged therein as effective and efficient ways to run organizations. Work itself, however, takes place via community-based relationships that

drive forward business activities and objectives. The commercial and com-munity motivations that have made open source software so successful as a productive model based on social power structures serve as a powerful examples of how this is taking place. Many others are presented here in this book. With the adoption of social business, a full range of social business models will be involved, from internal social collaboration to customer care communities.4. Mass self-servicing of market niches achieves the highest eco-nomic scale. Social businesses will enable self-service as their primary means of interaction with the market, whether integrating with open data or letting customers and partners dis-tribute their functionality to the far corners of the world. Google’s indus-try leading AdWords service is a great example of this, offering incredibly detailed control of to a wide spectrum of customer types, all without human intervention on the customer-side. 5. Cloud and ecosystem-based open supply chains as the basis of growth and agility. The social business will literally be distributed along the edge of the network, be-coming both a volume supplier and a consumer of others best-of-breed services. Social business will build upon other best-of-class and trust-worthy social companies and non-commercial communities, building a vibrant and deeply meshed supply chain while carefully exposing and protecting strategic data. Ability to dynamically adapt and rapidly respond to the current needs of the cloud. Because of the self-organizing

aspect of social media, change will be more rapid and unpredictable since it will often be led on the community side. People in social business ecosys-tems will make decisions and change course, affecting businesses and cus-tomers much faster than traditional business models. Success requires designing for low levels of central control and enabling highly fluid evolution and development based on near real-time market feedback.6. This paints a high-level picture of how the business landscape is transforming in a generational way over the next decade or so. However, for some protected and highly regulated industries, it may take longer than expected. There are macro trends that also affect how social businesses will either emerge from the successful transformations of existing organizations, or grow as successful startups. These macro trends will have direct impact on how successful an existing organiza-tion will be as it tries to become a social business by design. 7. New resource constraints. Today’s economic baselines (e.g. the Great Recession, green business models, peer production) require organizations to find new ways of accomplishing goals using fewer resources. This includes identifying the means to capture opportunity and transform “in process” business activities using newer, more efficient models. Social businesses will need to effectively link IT and operations much more so than in the past to accomplish the movement to this new baseline. Note that only certain inputs, such as access to traditional

workforces or centralized business infrastructure, are constrained. On the output side, abundance is increasingly produced in such great quantities that it would overshadow shortcomings in the business side.8. Sustainable value moving from business transactions to relation-ships. This represents the growing re-alization that the traditional rote busi-ness transaction as the core source of organizational value is diminishing. Value now comes from relationship dynamics. As such, it’s more impor-tant to have community capacity to create on-demand that it is to actually have stocks of inventory or knowl-edge, which quickly age and become irrelevant. It’s the relationships and their ability to produce what’s needed in the moment that matter more in a fast-moving, real-time marketplace. This has many implications including using new management methods (ex-ample: from top down command-and-control to community curator and fa-cilitator), tapping into new reservoirs of innovation, adopting new ways of interacting with customers, or driving better tacit interactions. The tenets of social business will ultimately enable organizations to accumulate deep reservoirs of relationship capital.9. Industries in flux with new ones emerging. Previously stable industries, such as finance and media, are feeling the pinch the strongest, but most others will be disrupted as well. The Great Recession has created a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy businesses, while many industries are being unbundled

or transformed into new ones (for example, traditional software compa-nies moving to SaaS and cloud com-puting, or the rise of crowdsourcing competing with outsourcing at the low end.) Today’s dynamic Web-driv-en global knowledge flows and agile online models for computing and col-laboration — as well as economic and intellectual production — are now a significant change agent.10. Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm. The world is already seeing faster consumer behavior shifts, quicker pricing changes, more rapid product cycles, and faster media feedback loops. While this can also lead to more extreme market conditions, it also enables opportunities to be turned into bottom-line impact for organiza-tions that can adapt to market realities quickly enough. The network is the culprit (and solution) for much of this. We now have pervasive social media instantly transmitting and shaping cul-tural phenomenon and faster financial cause-and-effect in the markets, real-time online markets, and so on. In the 21st century, following a plan is increas-ingly less important than responding actively and effectively to change.11. A shift of control to the edge of organizations. This has been accurately predicted at least as far back as the Cluetrain Manifesto, which said that because of a direct result of the user-shaped Internet, “markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than companies”. 5 It’s not even really a shift, it’s more of an addition of a new dimension to how

business operates organizationally and is the hallmark of social business. This new addition changes the dy-namics of where useful information comes from, how decisions are made in an organization, and how more autonomy and self-determination will be needed — and tolerated — in modern organizations to meet more dynamic and changing global work-places comprised of communities instead of traditional employees.

Putting all of the concepts that have been presented here so far to-gether into a strategic plan to redesign an organization can seem a daunting task. There are multiple competing forces for change today and a vast legacy landscape of existing business models, customer needs, learned behaviors, and instilled culture that must be overcome. Fortunately, a large amount of the early transition to social business is not only incremental but naturally complements what most organizations are already doing today with their early forays into social media. Whether it’s social marketing, social CRM, social collaboration, or social product development, getting started is not the big challenge. The real challenge is acting strategically enough to matter.

Section 1 of the book presents a number of successful social business case studies that illuminate key strat-egies, as well as the proposition that organizations will ultimately have to change in order to transform in very meaningful ways how they engage the marketplace, produce output, generate revenue, and even define their very existence. In other chap-ters, we take a much more detailed look at the specific techniques of social business, how they are effec-tively used, and how to be successful at applying them with in a large orga-nization as part of a strategic change management process. n

Dion Hinchcliffe is based in Washington D.C. and is Executive Vice President of Strategy at Dachis Group. Peter Kim is Chief Strategy Officer in Austin.

Ultimately, everything that can be social will be social.

Footnotes1 Jarvis, J. “Rupert Murdoch’s pathetic paywall”. The Guardian. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/26/rupert-murdoch-pathetic-paywall] March 26, 2010.2 Gunn. A. “Amazon Cuts Publishers Out of the Mix, Makes Deals With Writers.” PCWorld. [http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/242095/amazon_cuts_publishers_ out_of_the_mix_makes_deals_with_writers.html] October 18th, 2011.3 Hutchinson, A. “Human Resources: The job you didn’t even know you had”. The Walrus. March 2009. p. 15-16.4 von Ahn, L. NOVA ScienceNow s04e01 (Television program). 2009. Quote occurs at 46:58.5 Levine R, Locke C., Searls D., & Weinberger D. The Cluetrain Manifesto. Perseus Books, 2000.


has long been the benchmark for brand marketers to measure the success of Super Bowl ads. But in 2012 and beyond, the world of brand measurement has changed, thanks to social and big data.

FOCUS GROUPS, CLIPBOARDS AND M&MsLike many old-school measures of brand success, the AdMeter relied on an in-person panel (focus group)

to measure success. Panels, surveys and polls have long been the “insight vehicle of choice” for brand market-ers due to the difficulty in scaling brand measurement across a market. As appealing as it seems, it’s always been unattainable for marketers to peer into the living rooms of television viewers and see if they are laughing, crying (or for that matter, watching at all), just as it’s been a stretch to get

visibility into the universe of coffee shop and water cooler conversations the day after the big game. And now that standalone Super Bowl ads have evolved into week-long, multichannel, pre-game campaigns, the measure-ment challenge has deepened.

THE PROMISE OF SOCIAL MEASUREMENT2012 represents a watershed mo-ment for brand marketing. Spe-cifically, the last few months have seen the rise of social media as the most promising channel for

brand marketing activities and the dominant vehicle for measurement of brand marketing success. Social has two characteristics not seen in other channels. First, social is now at scale. While this year’s Super Bowl broke viewership records to become the most-watch television show in US history (for the third straight year) with more than 111 million viewers, social represents a brand marketing vehicle that can potentially reach Super Bowl sized audiences the other 364 days of the year.

Second, while massive in audi-ence size, social data also offers the ability for incredibly deep analysis of customer interactions. This direct quantitative analysis of brand interac-tions cuts out the survey and poll-based methodologies of the past (and their associated cognitive biases).

RANKING THE SOCIAL BOWLRecognizing this shift, Dachis Group took a deep dive into the social analytics behind the Super Bowl ads and published two reports (leveraging

The USA Today AdMeter

+ T H E S O C I A L B U S I N E S S I N D E X : S U P E R B O W L B R A N D I N S I G H T S

by ERIK HUDDLESTON

ILLUSTRATION by SCOTT MATTHEWS

graphics by Bill keaggy & chris roettger

Let ’s ask social media.WON SUPER BOWL?Who really

thebrand


our in-house infographics gurus).The first report, published the

day after the game, ranks the social performance of the 45 Super Bowl ads against the brand marketing business outcomes they were aiming to achieve: Brand Awareness, Brand Love, and Mindshare.

The second report, released first

thing Wednesday after the game, compares the new world of social measurement against the historical panel approach of the USA Today AdMeter. This year, the USA Today recognized the potential power of so-cial as well by combining Facebook voting, but were unable to let go of the historical bias to measure with

in-person polls. We hope you enjoy the infographic — a side-by-side analysis of the AdMeter results to the Dachis Group approach. n

GigaOm has a deep dive into the role of big data and brand performance monitoring. How Social is Making Polling Obsolete: dach.is/yCjp3c.

METHODOLOGY

COKE IS A TOP PERFORMER

Despite what AdMeter says...

WHY THE DISCREPANCY?

AdMeter doesn’t do the Coke brand-marketing juggernaut justice.Coca-Cola rejected Super Bowl theatrics in favor of running three integrated advertisements focused on the company's traditional brand positioning. While this method may not have been designed to grab the spotlight, it was exceptionally powerful and in aggregate propelled Coca Cola’s combined brand metrics to number two overall — 13 spots higher than AdMeter indicates.

The most important element in this surge was the cumulative impact of the three commercials, further amplified by Coca-Cola’s passionate and massive social communities. In each case the company’s Brand Love scores set the bar for positivity and receptivity while Brand Awareness and Mindshare stood out from the competition. This manifested itself in an increase of more than 700,000 subscribers across Coca-Cola’s social accounts as well as more than half a million new views on the videos themselves.

AdMeter views each commercial as a discrete brand entry into the Super Bowl lottery. As a result neither the voting on Facebook nor the panel in a room in Virginia can accurately capture the cumulative impact of three commercials on the

health of the Coca-Cola brand. Dachis Group obtained a deeper view into the full impact of Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl participa-tion and gave credit accordingly by analyzing the combined data across all three advertisements.

A96

SBI RANK ADMETER RANK BRAND AWARENESS

BRAND LOVE

BRAND MINDSHARE

2 15

98

37.65%

What else did we learn?

SBI RANK ADMETER RANK

1 1A+98

AWARENESS LOVE MINDSHARE

96 35%


8 16A95


94 .62%


7 30A94


96 84%


13 43B84


96 29%

ADMETER RIGHT ON DORITOSThere is no doubt that Doritos had a hit on their hands this Super Bowl, but social data can explain why. Doritos garnered close to 1,000,000 new video views in the wake of their Super Bowl launch, enjoyed an uncharacteristic 29.6% lift in subscribers and elicited heavy positivity for its ads across the board. These had a predictably helpful impact on Doritos’ Brand Awareness and Brand Love attributes — exactly the kind of lift marketers pray the Super Bowl can deliver.

HONDA’S SNEAKPEEK WORKEDHonda extended their Super Bowl relevance by offering access to its ad long before it aired during the game. Nonetheless, the excitement and positivity of being re-introduced to Ferris Bueller proved to be an effective tactic for Honda. The company saw a 2,000,000 view increase in activity around its videos while its overall subscriber base grew by more than 5% in just two days. Brand Love around the video only increased over time as more and more people welcomed Ferris back with open arms.

H&M SEIZESTHE SPOTLIGHTH&M proved that even neophyte Super Bowl advertis-ers can make a huge impact with the big game as their launching point. The novelty of H&M’s presence was reflected in an abysmal rank of 30th in AdMeter, but social media tells a very different story. The reality is that with this one advertisement H&M took a modestly well-known brand and launched it into the center of the online conversation. Brand Awareness spiked in a huge way as the video and conversation surrounding it spread across H&M’s base of subscribers. This set up a perfect storm of peak interest and peak favorability with the Beckham Bodywear brand at the nexus.

BEST BUY SPARKSMAJOR POSITIVITYThe largest disparity between AdMeter and social media data arose for Best Buy. An initial glance might suggest that Best Buy’s innovation message missed the mark. Further examination indicates that this is not the case. Best Buy enjoyed a 10x increase in viewership over the period studied. This spike, combined with exceptionally favorable reactions to the message, resulted in a high degree of sharing of the ad and uniquely high Brand Love scores.

marketing business outcomes like Brand Love, Mindshare, and Brand Awareness.· Brand Awareness measures the mar-ket’s knowledge of the brand as a result of interacting with brand content and other

market participants on social channels. Brand Awareness measures factors like reach of a brand’s marketing message, growth in engaged audience, and the strength of brand-relevant conversation.

· Brand Love reflects the passion, satisfaction, and affection with which market participants react to, and engage with, brand content.· Mindshare is presented as a proportion of brand recognition within the brand’s industry. n

· Rankings were determined based on the same time frame as AdMeter using data from the Dachis Group Social Business Index, which benchmarks the social per-formance of 30,000 brands against brand

38 THE SOCIAL BUSINESS JOURNAL 39ISSUE 01 Q2 2012


Year after year brand marketers gather around televisions to see

the latest in the Super Bowl com-mercial arms race. Unfortunately, it has always been difficult to determine which ads really worked and which failed. This year, Dachis Group turned the lens of our big data Social Busi-ness Intelligence platform on the Su-per Bowl to determine which brands won Super Bowl Sunday based on hard data — not just opinion.

The Dachis Group approach focuses on the aggregation of millions of signals across brand social ac-counts to determine lift in key metrics that matter to marketers: Brand Awareness, Brand Love and Brand Mindshare. These signals are rooted in actual consumer actions and as a result our data is a powerful measure of how consumers behave. This dif-fers from other approaches in that it focuses on what people do, not what they say they will do.

This infographic shows our com-prehensive ranking of Super Bowl advertisers in the hours during and immediately following this year’s game. Another infographic compared ROI of Super Bowl time versus the Academy Awards. n

You can view the Super Bowl info-graphics at dach.is/wQJRsW and dach.is/y5EmG while the Oscars results can be seen at dach.is/wuDFA5.

Big data’s take on big events

SBI

Twitter

Blogs

Facebook

YouTube

Google+

Social sites

Forums

admeter

How can we be so sure?

See more detail on previous page

This tells us that...

1

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

55

RANK

INGS

50

THERE WERE STARK DIFFERENCES IN RANKINGS SBI RANK ADMETER RANK

TAXACT

UNIVERSALCHEVY CAMARO

PEPSI MAXCAREER BUILDER

SKECHERS GORUNCENTURY 21

PARAMOUNT

CHEVY SONICTELEFLORA

KIA OPTIMAOIKOS GREEK

HULUCADILLAC ATS

CHEVY VOLT*E-TRADE

BUD LIGHT PLATINUMPRICELINE NEGOTIATOR*

*No AdMeter ranking

SUZUKI KIZASHIA*

DORITOSCOCA-COLA

CHRYSLER

PEPSIAUDI

H&MHONDA CR-V

GALAXY NOTE

FIAT

ACURA NSX

VW BEETLEBEST BUY

GENERAL ELECTRICCHEVY SILVERADO

HYUNDAI VELOSTERBUD LIGHT

GO DADDYMETLIFE

LEXUS 2013 GS

“SWAMP PEOPLE”CARS.COM

TOYOTA CAMRY

BRIDGESTONEHYUNDAI GENESIS COUPE R

M&Ms

MARVEL FILMS BUDWEISER

Mines a brand’s entire social graphDachis Group believes that analyzing the conversations of a brand’s engaged market on social channels is the one area where a company can effectively review actual consumer response through tens of thousands of brand-specific interactions and compose them into a larger picture of that company’s relationship to its consumers. Brand Love, Brand Awareness, and Brand Mindshare are the measures that marketers have always cared about — why should social media change that? See more at socialbusinessindex.com

Artificial and too easily gamedUSA Today should be lauded for innovating around their existing effort. Nonetheless, the core assertion that people’s votes for what ad they most enjoyed correlates to a successful brand commercial does not stand up to scrutiny. Brands are not trying to win a film competition — they are trying to improve their brand positioning. Observed social media behavior is a purer data source for determining this than any popularity contest could ever be. See it at admeter.usatoday.com.

®

Super SocialCoke, Doritos and Audi see tremendous Brand Awareness and Brand Love from their Super Bowl ads.

he whole world has an opinion on which Super Bowl ads ‘worked’ and which didn’t, but for the companies that

invested $3.5 million dollars for 30 seconds at a time, the point wasn’t necessarily to entertain the masses. The advent of social media combined with cutting edge data processing techniques

lets us review hundreds of millions of consumer actions around the Super Bowl to determine which marketers got their money’s worth. This infographic definitively captures the two most important brand outcomes that marketers are searching for: Brand Love and Brand Awareness. The results are eye opening.

BRAND AWARENESS BRAND LOVE RANK OF BRAND BRANDBrand Awareness measures the market’s knowledge of the brand as a result of interacting with brand content and other market participants on social channels.

Brand Love reflects the passion with which market participants react to, and engage with, brand content.

Rankings were determined using data from the Dachis Group Social Business Intelligence Platform, which benchmarks the social performance of companies, brands and industries.

The specific brand promoted in a Super Bowl commercial, along with a representative still image and some insight into what worked and what didn’t.

®

What brands scored a touchdown — or fumbled the ball — on Super Sunday?

+ =

®® ®

®

A+95 89 4A-91 96 6

Acura NSXSeinfeld’s miffed he’s not first on the new Acura waiting list; spends the rest of the commercial trying to buy the #1 spot. Then Jay Leno swoops in at the last minute. Unique in its ability to spark engagement and reach fueled by a more limited base of initial positivity.

Pepsi

Veloster TurboHyundai goes for two near-death experiences and gets it right with a cheetah, but wrong with a pedantic boss — perhaps people would have preferred to see the old man croak?

93

147

A-91 98 3

AudiVampires and Echo & The Bunnymen. The most goth Super Bowl ad ever? Probably. It was a top performer with off the chart Love ratings and pretty broad Awareness. The hashtag trended worldwide on Twitter and made Audi stand out from the... coven? 61

A+97 98 1

CokeThe Coca-Cola social media juggernaut continues with the highest Love and Awareness scores of the evening. A highly engaged audience combined with the always-lovable polar bears proved to be a potent mix. 5

B+87 92 10 MetLife continues its tradition of

using the cast of “Peanuts”, but amplifies it with a host of other cartoon characters, including the Scooby Doo gang, He-Man, and Voltron. 682

A-91 87 7 Year after year Careerbuilder’s

monkey ads continue to perform. The Brand Love surrounding this ad was average, but where it really showed strength was Awareness. It got people talking, which may mean more banana peels and monkey jokes in 2013. 57

B84 97

General ElectricThemes of American innovation and rejuvenation sparked significant Love, but the lack of a Superbowl ‘hook’ like dogs, women or humor drags down Awareness. Use of a Twitter hashtag seems to have had little impact with the ads never trending worldwide on Twitter. 301MetLife

Career Builder

A-90 97 5 Alignment with pop culture,

famous faces, and inside jokiness helped pump up this ad as “No Pepsi for you!” caught the hearts of the audience with a very high Brand Love score, plus it quickly trended on Twitter to extend its moment in the sun. 19

9

A+98 92 2 Doritos did the impossible by

matching Coca-Cola from an Awareness perspective and lagging just behind on Brand Love. The user-generated humor approach to the Super Bowl has done it again. 19Doritos

SOCIAL RANKINGThis is the parent company’s rank on Dachis Group’s Social Business Index: socialbusinessindex.com. The platform analyzes trillions of permutations of social signals in the social business graph to measure the effectiveness of a brand’s social strategy.

B+87 97 8

ChryslerChrysler nailed the mood of the moment with its combination of Clint Eastwood and “Half-time for America”. The ad quickly trended on Twitter and received some of the highest overall marks for Brand Love of the night. This will have some longevity in coming weeks. 124

T

FOOD AND BEVERAGE MINDSHARE

FOOD AND BEVERAGE36.15%

ALL OTHER INDUSTRIES63.85%

COKE37.65%

DORITOS35.07%

PEPSI11.38%

PEPSI MAX 5.05BUD LIGHT 3.82

BUDWEISER 3.41BUD LIGHT PLATINUM 2.1

OIKOS .41M&MS 1.12

BRAND MINDSHARE

Mindshare is presented here as a comparative intra-market and cross-market measure of brand recognition. It is predictive of a consumer’s likelihood to name a particular brand when presented with an evoked set of brands. Recency and depth of social engagement correlate strongly with brand recognition and thus with Mindshare.

by Brian KotLyargraphics by Bill keaggy, Noah Macmillan, zoë scharf, & BRIAN WILLIAMSON

DOLLARS SPENT

SUB

SCR

IBER

S

ACADEMYAWARDSversus SUPER

BOWL

And the Oscar for best advertising opportunity goes to...

The two biggest live television events offerincredible opportunities for advertisers.

OUR MILLION MEMBER ACADEMY WAS TORN

The days of “must-see TV” are over. With the rise of DVRs and other on-demand options, the effectiveness of television commercials continues to decline. However, two massive live-broadcast opportunities remain, which combined captured over $275,600,000 in 2012 marketing dollars: the Academy Awards and Super Bowl. Brands are clearly willing to pay a premium to access a good old-fashioned real-time audience — but what’s still unclear is how that spend translates into brand impact.

Enter social media. To determine which event better amplified advertisers’ messages and created value beyond broadcast reach alone, we measured every piece of social content created around all of the advertisements during both the Super Bowl and The Oscars. As it turns out, what GRPs and TRPs won’t tell you, the social universe will. Insights into audience growth, conversation lift, and discussion sentiment are revealed by a look into the data. So, if you’re a brand advertiser looking for maximum impact, which event serves you better? Read on.

41.7MILLION Viewers

MILLION$1.7Price of a 30-second spot $3.5

Price of a 30-second spot

MILLION

117MILLION Viewers

A+96

AWARENESS LOVE

92

SUBSCRIBERS FLOCKTO DIET COKE COCA-COLA

ACADEMY AWARDSSUPER BOWL

A97

AWARENESS LOVE

98COCA-COLA INCREASESCONVERSATION AT SCALE

One of the only advertisers to make a specifically “Oscar-themed” ad, Diet Coke paid tribute to all the hard work behind the scenes of the movies with its 2012 Oscars campaign. The results, however, were hardly second billed. The brand enjoyed a major increase in subscribers (proportionately more than the Super Bowl) and also a 300%+ lift in conversation around Diet Coke. A classic case of the supporting actress stealing the show.

SBI RANK

1OUT OF 26

The $10,500,000+ Coca-Cola spent on Super Bowl advertising came with polar bear-sized expectations. Nonetheless, the brand lived up to its high standards and was a top performer absolutely and from a value perspective. Coca-Cola generated a 44% lift in conversation off an already massive audience at only 8% of the cost one would see for an average brand.

SBI RANK

1

Want to grow your audience? The Super Bowl has a larger audience than (and costs twice as much as) the Oscars, but every dollar a brand spends on the Oscars is twice as effective at engaging new audience members. If you’re looking to build a better social media subscription base, there’s no question that the Academy Awards wins in this category.

Want people talking about you?When it comes to sparking new conversa-tions the Super Bowl takes the trophy. A typical brand can expect 60% lift in conversation score from the Super Bowl — more than twice that of the Oscars. If you want to start a buzz about your brand (and can monetize it effectively), the Super Bowl is champion of triggering discussions in a mass audience.

Want people to like you?The Super Bowl scores a blowout win over the Oscars in driving sentiment change. On Super Bowl Sunday, the average conversation around a brand is 5 times more positive than on Oscar night. And while showing up for the Big Game costs brands more than appearing on the red carpet, brands get what they pay for: it costs almost 2.5 times as much to get a point of sentiment increase during the Oscars.

60%

The Oscars generate twice as many subscribers. Super Bowladvertisers receive

more conversations

Conversations are 5 times more positive for Super Bowl advertisers.

WHICH EVENT PERFORMED BETTER?

Handing out the hardware should be easy, but the fact is that it depends on the category.

5xpositivity

OUT OF 46


43ISSUE 01 Q2 2012

Do you have the guts, the heart, & the backbone to lead in Social Business?

+ S O C I A L B U S I N E S S I N S I D E R : S U S A N S C R U P S K I

At Dachis Group, we talk a lot about the massive transformative

currents underway in our world. Our CEO, Jeff Dachis, says repeatedly, “We are on the cusp of the largest shift in the communications land-scape in the history of mankind.” For those of us who’ve signed up to help organizations migrate to this new way of working and communicating, this journey comes with a gift basket of complexity and difficulty.

Our clients and members of the Social Business Council are embold-ened to take a tough stand for some-thing they believe in. Whether it’s the lone brand manager who’s will-ing to put her reputation and career on the line to stand resolutely behind an innovative social strategy, or the CIO who needs to sell the benefits of a socially savvy enterprise, these individuals are swimming upstream oftentimes without a paddle, a raft or even a compass in many instances. The course is still unfolding before them with rough rapids compound-ing dangerous twists and turns.

But they know in their hearts, in their gut, and with all the strength they can muster, it’s the right thing to do. They know that they’re not interested in being a passive par-ticipant in the mediocrity that has characterized business-as-usual for decades. They see that transparency, collaboration, trust, and authentic-

ity are opening up vast avenues for productivity, growth, innovation, and huge returns from the “humanization” of business.

Our Social Business champions are fighters. And they’re lovers too. They’re fighting against old world thinking, corporate power structures and politics, the fear of the masses to veer into a new way of engaging customers and colleagues. They’re fighting against complacency. Instead of a sword or hammer, they’re fight-ing with a deep-seated love and pas-sion for social business reinvention. Many admit this is the most difficult, yet most rewarding position they’ve ever had in their career histories.

With this mission comes some self-doubt, some indecision, some career risk. One of our SBC members once asked, “Who am I to change a culture?” To this we responded, “You... are that guy. You are the one who knows why the culture needs changing. You see the future and you’re not afraid to take a career risk

to make it come true. If even sowing the seeds of change, you are setting in motion a new ideology — a new vision of how things could be. Take inspiration from the early Impres-sionist painters who also took career risks to paint authentically, outside, with bright colors. These rogue artists broke with convention and rebelled against the prevailing power structure that thwarted their freedom of expression. Of course, they faced criticism, even mockery, but they prevailed. Because of their passion, energy, conviction, and talent, they changed the course of art history.

There is something very special about the people who are drawn to Social Business. The fact that you’re reading this publication identifies you as an independent thinker. You’re drawn to this calling and this history-changing moment because you believe there is some-thing greater beyond a paycheck in this work we’re doing. You can be a catalyst for change. Never doubt your ability or qualifications to suc-ceed with this important mission. You are the right person at the right time to introduce dramatic change into your organization.

Lean into the fear and resistance with us. We’re amassing an army of change agents that is laser focused on our collective success. It’s your turn to change the world. Join us. n

Robert Caldera, Senior Communications Manager, PwC

Join the Social Business Council, a community of Social Business enthusiasts. We all share a common enthusiasm for bringing a new way of communicating and working to our representative organizations. We’ve come together in this peer-to-peer knowledge sharing network to learn from one another.

Council membership is open to all business professionals personally involved in Social Business initiatives within a large business. If you want to share your experiences with your peers and learn from theirs, we invite you to submit your application for membership. socialbusinesscouncil.com @SocBizC

44 THE SOCIAL BUSINESS JOURNAL

ISSUE

01

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012

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CIA

L BUSIN

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OURNAL

+ C O N TA C T AMERICAS: +1 512 275 7825

EUROPE: +44 0 20 7357 7358

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We are Dachis Group

Dachis Group powers the design, development, management and measurement of Social Business solutions for the world’s leading companies. We have been fortunate enough to deliver social solutions, drive social brand engagement and deliver meaningful social insights for the world’s largest companies and most valuable brands.

As the leader in Social Business

Intelligence, Dachis Group

helps global organizations mea-

sure social performance, bench-

mark against their competitors

and industry peers, and directly

correlate to brand marketing

business outcomes to drive

a more effective and efficient

investment in social marketing.

+ Social Business Index

+ Social Portfolio Insight

+ Social Performance Monitor

MEASURE YOUR SOCIAL PERFORMANCE

Performance Brand Marketing

is Dachis Group’s brand engage-

ment solution for CMOs, brand

marketers, brand managers, and

line of business leaders wanting

a comprehensive set of perfor-

mance-oriented social solutions

for social engagement and social

insights across the entire social

engagement spectrum.

+ Social Apps & Experiences

+ Listening Programs

+ Social Brand Strategy

+ Community Management

+ Advocacy Programs

+ Social Media Buying

+ Influencer Outreach Programs

+ Youth Insights & Strategy

MANAGE YOUR SOCIAL BRAND

Are you a Connected Company?

The world of work is changing

and old organizational models

are under increasing pressure

from a more connected,

collaborative, participatory, and

engaged way of doing business.

Social Business.

+ Enterprise Social Technology

+ Workforce Collaboration

+ Change Programs

+ Learning & Training

+ Social CRM

CONNECT YOUR SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

+ M O R E Dachis Group created the

Social Business Index (SBI),

providing ongoing real-time

ranking, analysis, and bench-

marking of Social Business

adoption and performance.

We also operate and manage

the Social Business Council, the largest peer-to-peer

knowledge-sharing commu-

nity for active Social Business

practitioners. And we host

a series of Social Business Summits, exploring the

most current ideas in Social

Business thought leadership.

Learn more:

+ socialbusinessindex.com

+ socialbusinesscouncil.com

+ socialbusinesssummit.com

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