A Local Guy's Critique of Chris Brogan's Minnesota Visit (Plus Food for Thought On Why Social Media Isn't All Growed Up)

Yesterday afternoon at the Best Buy corporate headquarters, the local social media faithful arrived to hear from one of its titans, Chris Brogan. It was a lovefest. The robes were pressed, the members of the choir took their places, and Brogan, the choirmaster, took the baton for a somewhat rambling, often irreverant, and thoroughly Kool-Aid dripping two hours. What follows here are my musings, which I must stress has absolutely nothing to do with the gracious hosts of yesterday's event--the LaBreche agency (dear friends) and this magazine.

Let's be very straight about something: social media is having a hard time growing up. Its promises have, for many reasons, not penetrated company board rooms or the executive suites. While this is shameful because of the many opportunities social technologies and practices can have on an enterprise, the professional social media crowd has yet to make solid business arguments as an industry. There were few if any major company executives in the room yesterday. This is the non-existent elephant in the room. And is par for the course for these type of events.

I would like to posit several arguments here that may help rectify this problem.

Social Media Isn't Marketing - Social technologies are pervasive throughout organizations. Consumers too experience enterprises from myriad points - from call centers to sales organizations to retail channels to product developers. Really, any department of an organization is now a "customer-facing" entity. If you accept this premise, then why is social media typically a charge from marketing? I would suggest that the opportunities social technologies present are organizational challenges, not marketing ones, and (as I tweeted from the event) social media won't be anything special until it ceases to be marketing function and starts to be led as a enterprise function.

Social Intelligence Is More Valuable Than Social Talking - Business executives have a voracious appetite for intelligence into their marketplaces, their consumers, and the performance of their own companies. Billions of dollars are spent on all types of intelligence gathering that can inform incremental changes to a business that can have tremendous financial and quality improvement outcomes. This, to me, is where social media evangelism should begin. Too often we hear that we need to "listen" more to what's being said about us as brands. So true. However, listening is passive. ("Passive" doesn't sell well.) Intelligence is the outcome of listening, and while that statement may seem simplistic, I would suggest that until social media experts can deliver all of this listening as proper intelligence, the battle for social media will continue to be an uphill one. It is fact that consumers have lunged into social technologies with incredible speed and as such they are creating an equally incredible volume of first-hand content that must be listened to, filtered, analyzed, shared, and acted upon. When executives realize that social content is perhaps the very best source of real-time business intelligence, then social media grows up.

Social Behaviors ARE Measurable - I heard it again yesterday: social media isn't as accountable as other forms of communication. Really? There are absolutely wonderful tools out there to make all of this noise measurable. And, yes, the good ones cost money. Radian6 is a wonderful tool for quantifying and, increasingly, scoring the sentiment of what's being said about a brand. RapLeaf is a firm I've used recently to give my clients individual social profiles of their customers (What networks are they on? How do they use them? Are they well-connected?). From these sources, we can learn how best to engage with various customer segments, look at our customers differently from one another, and distinguish intelligent nuances in how they interact with brands. From a product development standpoint, we can use these tools to measure how we need to make incremental improvements to better satisfy customers. All of this is social media.

Did I mention Twitter? Did I mention Facebook? I did not (until now) because that's not what all of this is about. The changes that are taking place right now in the market are about using these tools to make us better companies and organizations and by using them intelligently and strategically.

What do you want social media to do? What do you want to learn? How can these wonderful tools make us better enterprises? Those are the strategic questions that should keep executives awake at night and us in the busines focused.

Thanks again to Beth LaBreche and Minnesota Business for putting on the event. I am certain it has triggered the right kinds of conversation to push us all ahead constructively.

Uff da, Mr. Brogan.

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Comments

A lovely bit of broccoli floating in a sea of saccharine

Submitted by Chris McLaren (not verified) on Tuesday, February 9.

An attempt to condense and build on Andrew's excellent ideas...

Simply put, social media is not getting used more and better by organizations because it scares them and they don't see clear benefits relative to percieved risks.
Social media scares orgs because it generally involves having an org's individuals have (unscripted!) regular involvement in (public!) online conversations about their brand, their market, their customers AND because the go-to "customer conversationalist" in orgs is marketing. Marketing folks have a hard enough time infrequently communicating carefully scripted, tightly controlled messages in the general direction of target audiences through one-way communication channels wherein ROI is more readily calculable than SM. Leaders think, but do not always say, "prove to me this is worth shifting resources away from other activities, because all I see is fad and PR risk and very little tangible reward."
Re: SM as a listening opportunity: Leaders should consider how much is spent on other forms of "listening" (aka Market Research, Brand Awareness, etc.) and why that spending is considered necessary. Can SM monitoring displace and/or add sufficent value to these activities to make an investment worthwhile? If you say yes, prove it. As the C-level devil's advocate, in this economy, with everything else I have to worry about, convince me I have to be doing this and help me frame the cost/benefit.

So... what to do?

I'd like to see pundits expound less on descriptions and potential and more on what they personally have achieved for businesses. Show us specific scenarios, goals, techniques and performance data to SMM. Teach us how to sell it. That's harder, but it's what we really need in order to become more relevant.
I'd like to see practioners get more critical and upfront about issues while also suggesting ways to address. The limitations and challenges of selling and executing Web 2.0 and SM-marketing will not be overcome efficiently unless we are more upfront in addressing them amongst each other and with our clients.
Practioners are not as good at speaking the language of their client-side business leaders as they could be, but business leaders could help by making it clear they are not interested in SM because it's the latest thing and the CEO wants you to show you're in it too (even if that's actually true :)). Leaders can help SM practioners frame up proposals in ways that they - and their bosses - can appreciate - ie., in the context of the other areas and ways the org is spending money and time.

social media

Submitted by Marc Meyer (not verified) on Friday, February 26.

Social Media doesn't need to grow up as much as companies need to evolve.

Growing Up

Submitted by Meghan Wilker (not verified) on Monday, February 8.

You make some very good points. Social media isn't [just] marketing and as such they represent the need for massive organizational shifts. It's been mistakenly adopted by marketing departments as another channel for their message, but until organizations begin to understand how to use social media effectively across the enterprise it's of limited use. Marketers are underwhelmed at social media's effectiveness when they use it as a bullhorn and those "failures" are interpreted as reasons to avoid wider adoption. So companies avoid it or wring their hands over what to do with it.

The point about listening vs. intelligence is excellent and right on; I also agree that some social behaviors are measurable, though I would also argue that some are not (or aren't as easily or accurately measurable). Many of those hard-to-measure activities or behaviors are valuable; it's just sometimes hard to quantify the value in the same data-rich way that everyone has grown accustomed to with other digital media. That doesn't make it useless, it just makes it less direct than, say, email marketing.

Here's where I take exception: it seems that you are equating "growing up" with "companies figuring it out" and I'm not sure I agree with that. Social media, and the people who use it, are doing just fine. It's the companies that haven't grown up.

What's frightening to companies about social media is that they are not missed and, in many cases, aren't necessary (I love the subtitle of Clay Shirky's book -- The Power of Organizing Without Organizations). While companies and agencies try to monetize and measure social media, ordinary people simply use them for what they are: utilities. They just keep on happily using the tools to organize and communicate with each other whether marketers are watching or listening or responding or...not. Perhaps they are intermittently delighted when a company responds to them in some fashion, or perhaps they get irritated at the companies who are bullhorning with it, but thankfully -- they can tune them out. You don't need to invest in a Tivo to unfollow, unfriend, or unfan.

I'd argue that social media doesn't need to grow up or change, organizations do.

Social Media Growing Pains

Submitted by Bob Brin (not verified) on Saturday, February 6.

Good stuff, Andrew! It's getting there. We recently had a group of board directors ask: How do we help the organizations we direct avoid a social media disaster? So it's often fear-based. And they're SO happy to hear that they don't have to worry about understanding Twitter, Facebook, etc. (yet). They just have to ensure that the organization is tuning in, is educating/activating across functions (not just marketing) and has a plan. And part of that is sending their new media zealots out to wonky, geeky events like that. Great event!

Good post, Andrew

Submitted by Karl Pearson-Cater (not verified) on Saturday, February 6.

I like your mid-post subtitle: "Social Intelligence Is More Valuable Than Social Talking". I'm going to marinate that a little. I think you're right.

Social media promises?

Submitted by Ivan E Nunez (not verified) on Friday, February 5.

Thank you Andrew.

I don't think social media has promised anything to company boards; marketers have.

Social technologies are an expression of a cultural transformation that have been developing since the early days of the Internet. We have seen a complete change in how we communicate and exchange knowledge. In the early days of the Web we were content simply having access to information; now, we want to easily create content. So, to me, social technologies are the logical next step of an online community that has always been hungry to learn about each other but never before been able to easily and widely talk to one another. Social media promises are not to company boards but to communities which in turn embrace social technologies as an opportunity to find voice.

As marketers and interactive professionals our attention should be directed not so heavily to the technologies, but to the cultural shift taking place. To your point, social media isn't marketing and the changes needed in corporations to succeed are not exclusive to their marketing approach. Company boards need to embrace a customer centric approach to business. For many organizations, this requires a major re-thinking of their business model. My point is, customer centric companies will find it natural, even essential, to use social technologies and any other tools that will bring them closer to their customers. So, it was shocking to see so few C-level executives at the presentation.

Here's another point: forget social technologies for a moment. Imagine they do not exist. Can we say most company boards, marketing departments, and executives get the importance of the Web? For how many of them the Web has lived to its promises? After 14 years in the business, I am surprised there are still occasions I walk into a board room to defend the need to invest on a corporate Web site. For many companies, there's still a disconnect between their business goals and the interactions they have with their customers online.

So, my final question is: how can interacting (on and off-line) with our customers and each other makes us better enterprises?