How does a Company Dip its Toes in the Conversation?

Start with the proper attitude. There is a bit more to that, as it turns out.

There have been a lot of discussions about chief bloggers, social media experts and where blogging and social media fits inside an organization.

While establishing roles and responsibilities is important, there are a number of things an organization can do to start dipping its toes in - to use an already oft-invoked term - the conversation.

My friend Scott Monty started a new job last week. He is leading the social media efforts at Ford. A marketer by experience and trade, Scott has worked both in B2B and B2C environments.

He is my kind of professional, someone who thinks that the convergence of marketing, advertising and PR on the Web has implications - for marketers, agencies, the enterprise and the individual. Start with that thought.

Marketers, communicators, public relations professionals may all be suited to lead efforts in a new direction online (and off line), if they have the support of the leadership team or whoever runs the business. The right individuals:

(1) understand what business the company is (or should be) in - conversation is a vehicle for the exchange of information and meaning, not an end in and of itself. Underlying every piece of information that is crafted should be a robust value proposition as in why customers buy what you make and do.

(2) connect the dots for your customers and for the organization - the most critical communication role in an organization is becoming that of the diplomat with a touch of storyteller. What are all the pieces you need? How do they fit together to convey meaning and transmit value? This means having the ability to cut through the organization horizontally. It also means having the ability to edit down, simplify, translate into human speak, made concrete with examples and facts.

(3) know who your content experts are - these are the engineers, the individuals in operations, the service delivery teams, the product or service development people. All those who have expertise in what your company's core business is and a stake in crafting its future. The closer to the customers, the better understanding of the issues, the hot buttons, the learnings.

How do you get started?

While you monitor coverage of your company, begin adding listening to the conversation to it. Truly paying attention to the sentiments, issues, opinions, and kind of talk that goes on out there about your company or your industry. Get comfortable with hearing what is being said. If people are not talking about you, it may mean a number of things. They may not know about you, they may associate you with a brand or a story that does not meet their needs in perception, etc.

As you learn about the types of topics the marketplace is interested in start doing a sanity check on what you are producing. Here's a suggestion that alone will save you a lot of time, effort, and budgets. Stop writing marketing fluff. Refrain from recycling the usual, tired speak. You know which words I am talking about - thought-leader, cutting-edge, premier, expert, etc. It's not about you.

By far the most important, actually vital, part of the effort is internal. Teaching the organization to collaborate across disciplines and titles will be probably your greatest challenge. That will be followed closely by that of getting people to understand the importance of committing to the conversation. The best way to overcome the first part is to help people overcome division for collaboration. Did I mention you need to be a diplomat?

Read this First!

I've shared with many who have joined live conversations with me that not every company is ready to join. Your customers may not want this kind of opportunity. You may already be doing a good job with the tools at hand - customer service works well, people are happy, your products are the envy of the industry and you already have fans galore.

It would also be nice if things were always that way. Companies get in trouble when they take their success for granted, as theirs alone - we have a formula and we can keep doing things this way. Why? Because the market changes and new companies come in to challenge older players often with little to lose and a positive attitude to boot. They take that attitude and apply it to underserved needs.

There are some cases in which your company can't join, as Peter Kim says. The organization is not ready. It may be an issue of culture, it may be an issue of clarity and organizational identity. Social media is not a new channel for the old tired marketing fluff or talk at from the company to its audiences. Seen as another way to just ask a bunch of people to write up stuff, edit, and post it online misses the point. If you have no desire to experiment, stay the course, and learn, if you expect the same scale as in mass marketing (especially initially), this is not for you. 

Some toe dipping for the rest of us

Still reading? Ready to try a few things? In no special order, some of them will look very simple:

• hire great people and get out of their way - if you're not ready to listen to your colleagues, what makes you think you're ready to listen to your customers? Start exercising your listening muscles.
  

• learn to celebrate the right things - a product or service launch is just the beginning, not a destination. If you've done your work well, this will be requested in the marketplace. Good. Now how about staying the course? Let's not leave marketing and sales to hold the candle. How about the whole organization standing behind a product and service? Begin to appreciate accountability at every step of the way.

• read that press release as a reporter would - do you care? What clear benefits are there to users, customers, in some cases the industry at large? If a press release is the wrong medium, how else can you get the word out on an important enhancement, improvement of the customer experience, etc? Learn to think content first, then medium. This about your story. Lauren Vargas has a few ideas about that.

• join a conversation already happening to contribute - tell, don't sell. Take the opportunity to evaluate something on its merits. Share your informed opinion, give before you ask back.

• think humans first, technology second - it's a challenge with so many new tools available. Before you go ahead to make a software recommendation, for example, have you done your homework? How about a business needs analysis? Tools serve business strategy.

• be prepared to address questions, in some cases fast - challenging questions are symptoms, but they can become causes when not addressed. You want to know when you fail and frustrate so you can improve. You want to have the ability to explain why you need to say no. Your voice missing is a silence that will be filled. Why fast? Because the people who speak first are those who really care and want to give you a chance. 

• give customers ways to receive the information how they want it - this can be a blank slate if you have bandwidth. If you don't, how about trying a few things online that are not the usual brochure or sell sheet and see how it goes? That will save a tree or two and keep dead inventory to a minimum. Success will give you momentum to create new ways of having conversations around needs.

• give your customers ways to vote on your upcoming promotion - what would happen if you gave customers and prospects the heads up on your new campaign? Hint: if they'd hit the unsubscribe button before you're out of the gate, you might want to take another look at what you're offering. This option is valid if you know who your customers are.

• get to know your customers - if you don't. Sometimes there is mis-alignment between who the company thinks their customers are, and who is buying its services. This can be a problem in marketing communications, service delivery, new product development, the whole business model. Get out of the office and start joining your customers.

• start with beliefs - mission, vision, even values statements run the risk of being a mere exercise in "what" and not become a living and breathing actionable of "why". 
  

• tell stories that transmit your beliefs - share stories about your exceptional employees, community leaders, customers, even competitors when warranted.

• surprise customers (in a good way) - do something unexpected, not so much to delight, as much as a way to show appreciation for their business.

You may have noticed that I have not talked about blogging, or social networks, or wikis. These ideas are applicable to everything you do. Do you have more ideas? Add them to the comments and I will insert them in the post as an update. To which generation do your current and future customers belong? That will give you a sense of urgency on why and where.

Related posts:

Permission Marketing Revisited
The People Formerly Known as Your Customers
Taking the Measure of Marketing Conversations
100 Thing Challenge
Evolution of Business

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[KatFrench]

Great post. In particular, I like the point that not every company is ready to jump into the conversation. If the best you can do is cut and paste your marketing copy--then you aren't ready to carry on a conversation.

It's like a dating relationship, really. If you need Cyrano de Bergerac there to feed you lines, then who is the person you're wooing falling for?

[Lauren Vargas]

You should really bold your statement, "It's not about you." Stop the silos and act on integrating communications into overall business planning and strategy. A great checklist for anyone to use! Thank you for the mention!

[Web Success Diva]

This is excellent information for solopreneurs, all the way up to large companies. The importance of entering the conversation is much more urgent than it used to be. You've provided great tips to get started.

Maria Reyes-McDavis
Marketing Masters Guide

[Anne Libby]

Great post. If I may add one more suggestion: "Don't do it if you're scared."

I've had several interesting interactions on company blogs. One magazine for the spirituality/wellness community had posted my critical (but polite) comment to what I thought was an incendiary and inappropriate post by their corporate blogger. Later, they took my comment down (but left their blogger's inflammatory post up). I went back the the firm's communications director to ask where my comment went...she told me I'd get a response, and I didn't. I went back, same thing...

Needless to say, I haven't gone back: conversation over.

Another small firm in the financial sphere posted my comment as "anonymous" with no link to my blog. Again, game over...

If you have to have fear in the workplace (and I tend to think that destructive emotions rarely have a beneficial outcome, but I digress), better to fear the people who aren't talking with you. They are still in the conversation, but it's offline, where you can't see it.

[Sarah Wurrey]

Great post! The question of how to get started comes up at almost every conference/event I attend, and rarely are the answers are well thought out as this! Nicely done. :)

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Kat - I love the image of Cyrano in the background! It reminded me of the movie with Gerard Depardieu.

@Lauren - what amazes me is that we can get so much more done across the organization, in teams, than in silos... many have what to do lists, I tried to include a how to be with it.

@Maria - thank you for joining in. The business size in this case does not really matter. If anything it is a bit easier to coordinate in a small business or free agent setting.

@Anne - interesting, I had not seen it put that way before. Scared is difficult to deal with. I had a similar experience with the European blog of a global organization. Their corporate blogger responded to me by email only to tell me what an "antisocial" person I was. When I probed as to why my comment had been deleted, the response was that she was just a corporate blogger and couldn't have the kind of discussion I initiated on the blog. Conversation over indeed! Some companies buy software that has blogging out of the box but requires registrations for users to sign up at a cost. Is it possible that the small financial services firm had one of those?

@Sarah - thank you. I tried to answer it from the inside, dealing with the questions and challenges of the organization itself.

[Anne Libby]

Valeria, wow, I can't believe a corporate blogger responded to *anyone* like that. It kind of smells as though they might have assigned a very junior, young person to the blogging job (maybe because "they" thought, "the young people understand technology", when social media is really about social skills!)

On the small firm snafu, I thought and wondered whether a technical difficulty had created the conversation-ending (in my mind) event. Totally possible. In the end, I decided that it was a functional equivalent to bad behavior, and didn't go back.

On a similar note, oddly, there are some blogs at the WSJ that have moderated comments, and some that don't. At one blog that didn't moderate comments, I watched comments on one topic devolve to a flame war. And then I made the same decision.

Unforgiving? Not exactly. I forgive them all, but choose to spend my most valuable currency -- my attention -- elsewhere.